JW Mason

A, and I am sorry to say that that person is not me.

It’s organized mass murder, that all. Not much nuance there.

Just guessing.

Because your work is not as useful as a plumber's.

When I look around our society and compare the value people seem to be producing vs the income they are getting, a plumber earning $200,000 a year does not stand out as a particular mismatch.

Seems fine to me. It's useful work.

There are reports of US/Israeli strikes on or near the homes of former Iranian pres, Ahmadinejad, former reformist presidential candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and various leftist activists. If the US/Israel really wanted the “people” to take back the country, they wouldn’t assassinate these folks

Syria really is the best example until up last night, in my opinion. The Syrians overthrow a dictatorship which altogether was not very friendly to Israel and in response the Israelis invaded, occupied, and have in some ways already de facto annexed more Syrian territory while bombing Damascus.

Israeli media reporting that the US and Israel have divided up the Iran attack thus: the US is targeting infrastructure, Israel is focussed on taking out Iran's leadership

It should go without saying that the aim here is to collapse Iran - a country of ninety million people - into ungovernable chaos and Mad Max-style warlord catastrophe, much as they have every other country from Libya to Afghanistan that they could not buy off.

Why is this necessary? Why does one have to immediately affirm that one Hates the Enemy?

igualmente?

the only fucking decent European leader, again!

apparently, the rest are back to happy vassals, cheering US and Israel into another war.

Keep teaching the world the same lesson: Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Iran didn't, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel did--US beats you up if you *don't* build nukes, not if you do.

It would have been much better for the world if Iran had acquired nuclear weapons. It’s hard to imagine what could stop the lawless violence from Washington and Tel Aviv except for a credible threat of retaliation from its victims.

I think the mistake of attributing the actions of states to the nature of the people they rule over is part of how we got here.

I wrote government, not regime. And I wrote capacity, not intention.

I don’t know about people, but this is certainly what the US state is.

I am horrified and appalled at the attacks on Iran by the murderous regimes of the United States and Israel. There's no future for humanity without dismantling the capacity for violence of states like these. I don't know what else there is to say here.

this was a grad student presentation of work that’s still in an early stage.

That‘s it for today. So far, I would say our first-ever political economy conference at John Jay could not have gone any better. There is another full day of panels tomorrow. Unfortunately I cannot be there for them, but you can see the program here: johnjayeconomics.org/wp-content/u...

Absolutely yes.

The layoff mania of the last few years in tech is, in large part, the non-technical leadership tier of these companies furiously screaming at tech workers to stop having opinions and demanding things.

They want to go back to, we pay big salaries but you STFU.

it seems like part of what helps US wannabe labourism keep doing its stupid thing is never once thinking about actually existing labourism anywhere else in the world. once again imho everyone should read Elizabeth Humphry's excellent book: www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1360-h...

Next up is Antonis Gounalakis with "Does (Further) Financialization Promote or Impede Affordability of Housing and Homeownership?" This is a comparative study of efforts to support homeownership in the United States and southern Europe (where homeownership rates are historically quite high.).

Marxist economics is alive and well, at least along the UMass-New School-Levy Institute-John Jay axis.

Now we have Hassan Mujtaba on "Sectoral Rate of Profit and Elite Dynamics: A Case of the United States (US)." Varoufakis' technofeudalism hypothesis investigated with firm-level data on profits from Compustat.

Vanguard of proletarian revolution, if they want to be

A map of psychological suffering.

Next is Taimoor Shaukat Malik on "Social Determinants of Mental Health: Comprehensive County-Level Panel Evidence from the United States, 2016-2025." The starting point here is that 60 million people - 1 in 5 adults - face some form of mental illness. Mental health accounts for 12% of ER visits.

The argument here is that "the proliferation of non-capitalist class process" - i.e. small-scale peasant agriculture and family businesses, in the Indian case - is an integral part of the development of capitalism, in part because of the inability to absorb sufficient labor into the formal economy.

Moving to the next session, we begin with Tathagat Singh's "An Overdetermined Marxian Model of Accumulation and Expanded Reproduction in a Capital-Noncapital Space." The topic is Indian agriculture and the origins of "the largest protest in the history of the world" in response to Modi's farm bills.