The Digger

Posted on   July 12, 2019   by  Yves Smith https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/michael-hudson-de-dollarizing-the-american-financial-empire.html Yves here. Another meaty Michael Hudson interview on Guns and Butter. However, I have to vehemently disagree with the claim made by Bonnie Faulkner at the top of the discussion. No one holds guns to other countries’ heads to make them hold dollars. The reason the dollar is the reserve currency is the US is willing to export jobs via running persistent trade deficits.  The US moved away from  having rising worker wages as the key metric of sound economic policy in the 1970s, when labor was blamed for stagflation (too powerful unions supposedly hobbling US manufactures, when the performance of Toyota at the famed NUMMI joint venture showed that to be false; formal or informal cost of living adjustments to pay credited with institutionalizing inflation). Recall also that the Democrats had started to abandon labor...

World Socialist Web Site 9 July 2019 In the interests of honesty, “Race-fixated upper middle class continues its campaign for positions and money” ought to have been the headline of an opinion piece published July 5 by the  New York Times . Instead, the article—by Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang—was entitled, “The Dominance of the White Male Critic.” The phenomenon that immediately drove Méndez Berry and Yang into print was the apparent dissatisfaction of various African American artists featured at this year’s Whitney Biennial in New York City with their reception at the hands of a number of prominent critics. The Biennial is a prestigious exhibition of contemporary art, often featuring younger or lesser known artists, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The July 5 column complains that while the “curators were a black woman and a white woman, and a majority of the artists they featured were people of color,” with half of them women and many young, “in m...

July 11, 2019 Great Britain has joined the U.S. pressure and provocation campaign against Iran. It is creating incidents to put Iran into a defensive position and to provoke into a violent reaction. Early today 'two U.S. officials' spread a scare story about Iran which lead to this  CNN  headline:  Iranian boats attempted to seize a British tanker in the Strait of Hormuz Armed Iranian boats unsuccessfully tried to seize a British oil tanker in the Persian Gulf Wednesday, according to two US officials with direct knowledge of the incident. The British Heritage tanker was sailing out of the Persian Gulf and was crossing into the Strait of Hormuz area when it was approached by boats from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Iranians ordered the tanker to change course and stop in nearby Iranian territorial waters, according to the officials. The same 'two U.S. officials'  briefed   ABCNews : A British warship prevented an apparent at...

July 12, 2019 Millions of kids today are on meds for conduct disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, mixed manias, social phobia and, of course, ADHD. But according to data from IMS health in a  Wall Street Journal  article, just as many kids are being treated for non-psychiatric conditions that were often considered “adult diseases.” In fact, 25 percent of children and 30 percent of adolescents now take at least one prescription for a chronic condition  said Medco, a pharmacy benefit manager, making the kid prescription market four times as strong as the adult in 2009. Between 2001 and 2009, high blood pressure meds for kids rose 17 percent, respiratory meds 42 percent, diabetes meds 150 percent and heartburn/GERD meds  147 percent. In one study, 18.6 million children’s doctor visits for sleep problems,  resulted  in sleeping med prescriptions 81 percent of the...