plinky

This debt reached crisis proportions in the 2010s with the spending spree of the Dési Bouterse administration. Private lenders and international financial institutions queued up to make loans, often at high interest, amid the deep crash of global commodity prices. Although Bouterse is currently on the run from a twenty-year sentence for murdering political opponents, the Surinamese people still remain liable for the debts and at the mercy of anyone willing to lend money.

Even worse, the bondholders have laid claim to Suriname’s future oil revenues through a value-recovery instrument. If all goes according to plan, this will line their pockets with a staggering windfall of 30 percent of future oil revenues, up to a total of £689 million. Meanwhile, Suriname will continue to spend 27 percent of its government revenues on external debt payments over the next five years.

https://xcancel.com/NaqiyNY/status/1857562303228448998#m <-good thread with other cities as well

My presentation was based on joint work with Guglielmo Carchedi on the underlying causes of inflation. We argue that the mainstream monetarist, Keynesian cost push and the psychological ‘expectations’ theories are false. Instead, we offer a value theory of inflation. This argues that, as in Marxist theory aggregate values equal prices of production and money is a representation of that value, so ceteris paribus,if value grows, money supply will rise to match that value growth and so there will be no inflation in prices. However, new value growth (which we measure in hours of labour worked by the whole labour force in an economy) tends to slow relative to increased output of commodities. So prices per unit of output should tend to fall as less labour time is involved in the production of output.

Seems very confusingly explained part in bold, would be easier to say that for equal m2 the prices should drop, because its very far reaching statement otherwise

https://www.behance.net/gallery/33931090/Redesign-of-Serbian-Dinar

I think I correctly found the artist. Milos Zlatanovic, 2016

archived linky

It could have been called romantically "bonds of blood between brothers", but still

More inexplicable than the nature of the war has been its causes. In its immediate aftermath, official accounts of the conflagration, backed up by the Versailles treaty, laid blame firmly at the feet of Germany. But in the century since, a vast literature has emerged offering highly heterogeneous analyses of the conflict. Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War is Perry Anderson’s intervention in this debate, which he sees as represented most perceptively by six historians, each from one of the belligerent nations — France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Australia, and the United States. The panoptic essay, taking on a writer’s biography, entire body of work, and its reception, is a specialty of Anderson, who has for sixty years been one of the Anglophone world’s preeminent Marxists.

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To synthesize narrative and causality Anderson turns to the historian with whom he has the strongest affinity: Schroeder, a figure he calls “the greatest American historian of his generation.” Schroeder, a paleoconservative who served as a Lutheran pastor before turning historian, would ostensibly seem an odd figure for a Marxist to shower with praise. But both men share a sensibility skeptical of the grand ambitions of liberalism, as well as hostility to American Empire and the strong turn to foreign intervention under the Bush administration. Along with these antipathies, Schroeder and Anderson have in common a similar regard for the virtues of wide-ranging structural history.

For Schroeder, the war was inevitable. His work concerned itself with the structural forces underlying the European political system, an approach he developed most rigorously in his 1994 book, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848. By the late nineteenth century, the continuing breakdown of the post-Napoleonic Concert of Powers assured that a war was on the horizon, according to Schroeder. This was a view shared by socialists and other critics of imperialism at the time. For Friedrich Engels, the war was also an inevitability. By late 1887 he could write, in an introduction to a pamphlet criticizing the German military, that “the only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined.” Even in his apocalyptic predictions, he underestimated the scale of what would become World War I.

libgen my love 🙏

linky

In stunning reveal, hexbear moderator team announced franchise transfer of the reviled website to the fakene,ws owners. According to rumors, the cost of the deal was 20 dollars and a rat named Johnny. New owners are reportedly happy to keep their local franchise community c/fakenews, but plan to wind down c/news operations: "We think addition of hexbear non-drama prone community to our fakene,ws operation will allow us to reach new audiences across lemmyverse. We don't want to create confusion with yet existing fake fakenews comm (c/news), and thus plan to close it immediately"

In terms of the American experience, the Harris campaign seemed to aspire to something like Nixon’s 1972 project for a ‘new majority’. To be sure, today’s Democrats lack Tricky Dick’s swagger and agility. But, like him, they imagined building a coalition that spanned the AFL-CIO, the Business Roundtable and the neoconservative movement (nascent in 1972, senescent in 2024).

The things about him which are supposed to be deal breakers – racism, xenophobia, misogyny – can only be seen as outside the American mainstream by someone with the mental equipment of an earnest child. The slogan Make America Great Again is borrowed from Ronald Reagan, an American hero who mocked the poor for being hungry, compared African diplomats to monkeys and (on the advice of Pat Buchanan) proclaimed the Waffen SS to be ‘victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps’. The idea that Trump could be banished to the margins by getting Reagan appointees to endorse Harris never made sense to anyone not already opposed to Trump.

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But it is simply not serious to claim that workers who rejected Harris were ignoring objective economic reality. As Biden’s own outgoing Council of Economic Advisers observed last month, ‘workers’ share of national income took a hit during the pandemic inflation’, with the result that the labor share – ‘an important indicator of how the economic pie is divided’ – was lower in 2024 than it had been under Trump. Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything. The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle.

This same top decile, according to a study by Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm, captured 59% of the overall increase in household wealth created since 2019. In turn, this wealth explosion set the pattern for a highly inegalitarian consumption boom, with the top 10% of US households accounting for 36.6% of the overall increase in consumption between 2020 and 2023. If you add in the next richest decile, the top 20% of households accounted for over half of the increase.

I'm more of quintile type guy but

Wall Street’s euphoric response to the election suggests that ‘the market’ doesn’t think Trump is serious about mass deportations and punitive tariffs. But even if he doesn’t go as far as he promises, any serious steps in the direction of economic nationalism will have differential effects on business which could turn into political fractures. The same may develop with regards to the budget deficit, particularly if inflation returns for whatever reason.

feel like hosts are not cynical enough over fp (or i am in complete doomer mode)