“True, old-school mercantilists wrongly believed national wealth came from stockpiling gold and silver, so requiring promotion of export surpluses. Their intellectual heirs today tend to fixate on a country’s overall trade deficit with the rest of the world, usually arguing that a large and persistent deficit can sometimes reflect unhealthy imbalances in global saving and investment flows. Yet the logic of Trump’s thinking is much less coherent than even these positions. He doesn’t just worry about America’s overall trade deficit; he demands balanced trade with each and every individual country. Worse, his focus on goods trade means he completely ignores America’s large and growing trade surplus in services – giving a highly distorted assessment of America’s overall trade position.” (04/07/25)
“President Donald Trump is set to repeat one of the worst mistakes of his first administration: fighting an unwinnable war in Yemen. This time, it could be far worse as Trump has sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Red Sea, meaning Americans will be doing the fighting, not the Saudis. While the Yemeni people will bear most of the suffering from Trump’s escalation, the needless war will further bleed the American treasury and deplete our arms depots. If there is one thing that Americans should have learned about Yemen over the past decade is that there are no easy solutions.” (04/07/25)
“For years, some of us have written about the Biden family’s multimillion-dollar influence-peddling operation and the Justice Department’s refusal to charge Hunter Biden with being an unregistered foreign agent. Now, years later, The New York Times has found evidence suggesting that the former president’s son was acting as a foreign agent as early as the Obama administration, when his father was vice president. Last August, the New York Times ran a story about Hunter Biden seeking help from the government for his client, the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. A recent follow-up story had damaging new details. … That is precisely what many of us have been writing about in asking why Hunter Biden was not charged with being an unregistered foreign agent, as Paul Manafort, Bob Menendez and others were under similar circumstances.” (04/06/25)
“A note of caution going into today’s subject: let us try to bite our tongues; no expressions of schadenfreude; no sarcastic ‘Boo-hoos’ or the like. The IRS has been grossly inefficient for a very long time, as now uncovered in a Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] investigation. Courtesy of Laura Ingraham, we learn that the Internal Revenue Service is ’35 years behind’ in its scheduled upgrades, and ‘already $15 billion over budget.'” (04/07/25)
“Recall that in 2001 the Pentagon announced that the F-35 program would cost $200 billion and would enter service in 2008. Almost a quarter century later, acquisition costs have doubled, the total program price is nudging $2 trillion, and engineers are still struggling to make the thing work properly. Thus, succeeding chapters of the F-47’s history will likely have to cover the galloping cost overruns, unfulfilled technological promises, ever-lengthening schedule shortfalls, and ultimate production cancellation when only a portion of the force had been built. There seems little risk in predicting the F-47 — ‘a beautiful number,’ said the 47th president — will follow the same dollar-strewn path. As Trump truthfully remarked, ‘we can’t tell you the price.'” (04/07/25)
“The anger and frustration Americans are feeling toward the Democratic Party reached a boiling point earlier this month, after ten Senate Democrats joined the Republicans in voting for a federal funding bill that slashes everything from disaster relief to school meals for our kids. Presented with an opportunity to stand up for working people, Senate Democrats immediately tossed in the towel. But the Democratic leadership crisis isn’t limited to the U.S. Capitol. In states where Democrats hold the majority, the reasons they’re losing working people become painfully clear. Over the first two months of the new administration, we’ve seen states with Democratic trifectas and supermajorities duck for cover. Instead of exercising their power to make life better for working people and respond to the devastating actions at the federal level, they’ve kowtowed to corporate lobbyists and wealthy donors.” (04/07/25)
“We in the West, and Americans in particular, have fallen into a very serious trap: a trap we’ve known so long and so well that we accept it as a fact of life. To make this as clear as I can, I’ll state this problem in several ways. I’m quite sure you’ll recognize at least one of them: * We require continual doses of bad news. * We require outrages to react to. * Too long without some new evil to oppose and we become deeply uncomfortable. * Condemning bad things makes us feel righteous. The bottom line is that we’ve become unable to feel righteous, except in contrast to evil. That is simply the model nearly all of us have matured within.” (04/07/25)
Source: Chris Matthew Sciabarra
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
“I was lucky to see The Ten Commandments for the first time at the Ziegfeld Theatre in all its big-screen glory, when it was re-released in 1972. ABC later bought the rights to show the film annually, and has done so around this time of year, nearly every year since 1973. (ABC will be showing the film this Saturday night!) Some critics have argued that movies like The Ten Commandments and those often dismissed as ‘sword and sandal’ spectacles don’t truly rise to the level of art; their popularity is due to their ‘simplicity’ and entertainment value. … While it’s always important never to separate the text from its context, the film from its times, something I will surely explore, it is also important to recognize that there is no necessary dichotomy between art and entertainment.” (04/07/25)
“It’s a debate that has been raging between left and right libertarians for Kali knows how long; that age old question of just how libertarian are borders? Naturally, being a Situationist-cum-Agorist, the answer seems pretty fucking obvious to me, and it can be best delivered by another question. What the fuck does chucking people in jail for crossing invisible lines have to do with liberty? … it is also becoming increasingly obvious to me that leaning on empathy towards the ‘other’ as a debate tactic isn’t working very well and it may not have too either. That’s because, in the age of Trump, it doesn’t take a bleeding heart to realize that a strong border means weaker civil liberties for everyone. In fact, in the long run, American citizens may even stand to have as much to lose as the undocumented.” (04/06/25)
