Source: Reason
by Veronique de Rugy

“Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s independence have grown following repeated attacks by President Donald Trump, including this week’s decision to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook based on questionable allegations. But this debate is too narrowly focused on the president’s political pressure, ignoring a growing danger in our system. It is true that since the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord of 1951, the Fed has had operational independence — the ability to set interest rates day to day — without any obligation to make government borrowing cheap. But it never had true economic independence because the bank’s monetary policy cannot be insulated from the effect of fiscal policy, and vice versa.” (08/28/25)

https://reason.com/2025/08/28/the-real-threat-to-fed-independence-isnt-trump-its-congress-debt-addiction/

Source: TomDispatch
by Norman Solomon

“Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, ‘Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.’ Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.” (08/28/25)

https://tomdispatch.com/from-guernica-to-gaza/

Source: Niskanen Center
by Steven Teles

“The nomination of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York suddenly has people talking about ‘Left Abundance.’ Where earlier this year it looked as though the movement to create a more effective, problem-solving state and unlock the supply of crucial goods might end up fitting best with political moderation, it suddenly seems to have an avatar cut from a different cloth, arguing that we need to clear away roadblocks obstructing housing and … publicly owned supermarkets. Mamdani’s election raises the question of whether abundance will actually become a project of ‘Red Plenty,’ one in which we deregulate the public sector in the name of more effective central planning and state provision.” (08/28/25)

https://www.niskanencenter.org/abundance-varieties/