videotroph

A still from a classic cartoon shows Wile E. Coyote mid-air, having just leaped from the edge of a desert cliff towards Road Runner. The blue and purple Road Runner, on the left, is perched on the rocky ledge, sticking his tongue out playfully at the coyote. A large cloud of white dust and small rocks bellows from where Wile E. Coyote pushed off, obscuring the ground beneath him. The coyote has a wide-eyed, surprised expression with his front paws outstretched. The background is a simple, light yellow sky with a few faint clouds. The animation style is traditional hand-drawn.

Not to kink shame, but most economists are gravity pervs who disavow their own desire for the playful Looney Tunes pics they love to post in order to justify austerity. Unfortunately, this cuts across left & right orientations. Do better.

So is @moneyontheleft.bsky.social’s.

I agree Murphy seems completely out to lunch, but to use his vulgar MMT 101 stuff in order to steer the conversation back to orthodoxy rather than think about how these insights about public finance could be more creatively incorporated is short-sighted. Imo.

I’m sure many people would be eager to respond to any actual arguments you make besides these appeals to the instincts of imaginary voters who take all their cues from what neoclassical economists think is sensible.

But in the meantime I’ll just say you sound like a conservative.

We have our own version of Keynes's invisibly operative "academic scribblers of a few years back."

Still, I also wonder if such seemingly untranslatable language games--to cite, ya know, a previous moment--don't simultaneously rest on a deeper layer of theoretical discourses & rhetorical maneuvers that, while frequently not cited, still provide shared structures of intelligibility & conviction.

How about tax billionaires because they destroy democracy? Not because seizing their yachts creates material capacity for healthcare, which would be the material corollary of taxes ENABLING spending as a causal matter.

If you say everyone crowds out someone else, that’s a right wing premise.

4/

And yes, the Corbyn etc. rejoinder is that it’s at the expense of billionaires. But there are so many reasons tax billionaires out of existence that don’t cede all of this zero sum social framing to the far right.

3/

To repurpose Foucault (Postmodern Monetary Theory?) it’s an “incitement to discourse.”

Saying that something is “fully costed” doesn’t close the question—it opens up “costing” as a discursive field where certain subjects are summoned to account for themselves at the expense of others.

2/

Thumbnail image of UK Labour Shadow paymaster general Jonathan Ashworth reassuring right wing dipshits that Labour won’t raise taxes.

The problem with center-left and even leftist parties touting that their platforms are “fully costed” in money terms is it frames every public expenditure as a cost to some other public expenditure.

1/

The appearance of economic gravity is achieved through austerity—not the other way around.

More Heat than Light Cambridge Core - Economic Thought, Philosophy and Methodology - More Heat than Light

Because political economy is not fucking physics.

Economic Gravity Simply Does Not Exist 🌈

Thought-provoking critique

"All is lost" narratives are popular because people generally do not want to take action. Taking action is tiring so if all is lost, you are off the hook. Nothing is more seductive than not having to do anything.

California revokes 17,000 commercial driver's licenses for immigrants The announcement follows harsh criticism from the Trump administration about California and other states granting licenses to people in the country illegally.

So ... buckle up for a mass shortage of truckers?

😂

The major pillars of the economy should be democratized and made into govt financed/owned public goods.

Florida education commissioner booed at Tampa school board conference District leaders erupted when Anastasios Kamoutsas floated the notion that school districts “could be shut down.”

boo, indeed

UNL professors march through campus in New Orleans-style 'funeral' to protest proposed budget cuts Students, alumni, faculty and community members came together to protest the $27.5 million in budget cuts.

art is for everybody, language is for everybody, ideas are for everybody, including nebraskans

www.klkntv.com/unl-professo...

So true. I'd just add: the ascent in influence—from the lowest rung on the proverbial ladder of engagement to the many of the most powerful organizational roles in the city—is much flatter than many tend to assume. But the catch, and the key, is to engage consistently and as part of an organization.

No. It is not surprising.

Loving season 2 so much, unsurprisingly

The New Postcolonial Economics with Fadhel Kaboub (New Art & Transcript!) Money on the Left is proud to publish a remastered version of our third episode with Fadhel Kaboub, now with a new transcript and art. Kaboub is associate professor of economics at Denison and Pres…

The New Postcolonial Economics with Fadhel Kaboub (New Art & Transcript!)

I admit to not having read this yet, but I agree with the sentiment.

The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination by Will Beaman & Scott Ferguson Note: David Graeber leaves behind a rich and complex body of work that remains influential for leftist thought and practice. Since his passing in 2020, however, …

"The convergence of the Debt Collective, Jacobin, and Dissent around debt, limits, and back-end jubilees can be read ... as a symptomatic recoil: an aversion to considering governance as a present-tense reality within a framework that tends to defer real politics to refusal and rupture."

ICYMI: In the last few weeks, Trump & Vought have ILLEGALLY:

Continued to starve the CFPB of funds
Declared its funding illegal
Warned money will run out soon
Sent all enforcement cases to DOJ
Invented a humility pledge for supervisors
Declared the union contract illegal

New York City’s Forgotten Public Bank Plan In 1975, Wall Street declared war on New York, sending the city into a fiscal crisis. A forgotten public banking proposal in the state assembly could have stopped it — and put both the city and the co...

Wonderful that Jacobin is supporting the public banking movement. Know, however, that we can go further. Let's push to renew the national Public Banking Act. Let's also create legal conditions for Public Grant-Making Banks, which avoid trapping necessary social programs in loans. See below👇

The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis - Roosevelt Institute Bilal Baydoun, Shahrzad Shams, and Victor Pickard trace the roots of the US media crisis to decades of deregulation and commercial capture, outlining how consolidation, news deserts, and platform domi...

Thrilled to announce the publication of our @rooseveltinstitute.org report that uncovers the policy roots of the current crises facing our news, information & communication systems. We argue that media reform must become central to a US pro-democracy movement. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...