There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s winning. _______Warren Buffett

The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans the cover to continue the pillage. _______ Chris Hedges

Socialism never took root in American because the poor there see themselves not as exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. ________ John Steinbeck

“The devil’s greatest trick is convincing us that he does not exist”. US Elites continue to strive to convince us that if they do exist, they earned it fair and square. Moreover, there is nothing to stop us from joining them…

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or evade truth, not reveal it _________John Kenneth Galbraith

Dear Madame Secretary:

I am fairly certain that you do not recall us meeting several years back when Ed Epstein brought me by your office and you were gracious enough to give me more than a bit of your time to discuss my research on the regulatory reform vs. relief. Don’t worry, I am not looking for a job. I’ve witnessed firsthand the horror of policy “like sausage” being made…

Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all, regardless of station, race, or creed. _____Franklin D. Roosevelt

When I set out on my career, in the 1970s, I was pretty much a “run-of-the-mill” (Kuhn’s “normal science”) resource economist, with a bit of an eco-systems bent. Many of us were…

We cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking that we used when we created them. ________ Albert Einstein

A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. ________ Lysander Spooner

The US dodged a bullet in the recent election, well actually it was lodged in its tattered body armor, just over the heart. Plus, it remains to be seen how long Trump can keep his jackboot on that very spot. It cannot be overstated how lucky we all were that Trump was such an extremely…

I am worried that our technology is helping to bring the long, postwar consensus against fascism to an end. ____ David Bodanis

I first began studying the Silicon Valley as a policy phenomenon back in the early 1980s, when state and local governments across the globe were trying to replicate this engine of economic development. Remember, when everyone was touting their own Silicon Beach, Forest, Mountain, Desert, and Dog-Patch? At Trinity University in Dublin, with buildings commissioned by Elizabeth 1st and holding the Book of Kells (the magnificent 8th century illuminated bible), they had a tiny engineering cottage tucked away…

People worry that computers will get too smart and will take over the world. But the real problem is that they are too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world

____ Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm

The development of computer programs that attempt to replicate human intelligence have exploded in recent years due to huge stores of behavioral data extracted and processed by the mammoth monopoly platforms (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc. as well as their Chinese counterparts). Fears of AI (artificial intelligence) abound, however, the science fiction version where computers become sentient, and realize we are planetary parasites, deserving…

PANDERING TO PLUTOCRATS and Catering to Kleptocrats

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage…. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich. ____ John Kenneth Galbraith

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity and already-tight national budgets, crowding out important investments. …

The Misplaced Political Economy of Karl Polanyi

Gregory A. Daneke

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination. Fredric Jameson

The Pernicious Paradigm That’s Eaten the Planet

TINA (“there is no alternative”) was Margaret Thatcher’s battle cry, when she and Ronald Reagan were installing neoliberalism as a permanent fixture in the official halls of power and policy. This toxic brew of finance, feudalism, and fascism had been in the works for most of…