I read somewhere that, prior to the Protestant Reformation, there were over 50 feast days in England on which people did no labor (these were in addition to Sundays). If you do the math, it adds up to over seven weeks of vacation per year. The Reformation abolished all but […]
Month: November 2022
How The Super-Rich Control The U.S. Government
The U.S. Government tries to hide how obscenely top-end the nation’s wealth-distribution is; but one remarkably clear presentation of it (the U.S. private-wealth distribution) was the web-page from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System that presented an “Overview” of “Distribution of Wealth” starting in “1989:Q3” and extending […]
A Biden-Putin Meeting In Bali Cannot Be Ruled Out
The Russian-American summit meetings have a history of calibrated foreplay. As the G20 summit in Bali on November 15-16 draws closer, the big question is still hanging in the air: Will there be a meeting between the US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on the sidelines […]
Rishi Sunak: A Thatcherite In Downing Street
They are falling like ninepins, and the Tories have now given the weary people of Britain yet another prime minister. And what a catch: stupendously wealthy, youthful – the youngest in two centuries – and a lawbreaker. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government of Boris Johnson, he was […]
Who’s Afraid Of US Troops In Ukraine?
Very innocuously, the Biden Administration has ‘sensitised’ the world opinion that American troops are indeed present on Ukrainian soil in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood. Washington made a “soft landing” with an unnamed senior Pentagon official making the disclosure to the Associated Press and the Washington Post. The official gave an ingenious […]
Lula Never Left Brazil’s Centre Stage
The former president of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula, has won the country’s presidential election by an incredibly narrow margin of 50.90% of the vote against his right-wing rival and incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro’s 49.10%. When Lula stepped down as president in 2010, he was […]
The Bond Vigilantes Get Busy
While the levels of schadenfreude will be going through the roof given the unfolding farce in British politics, the resignation of Liz Truss as UK Prime Minister was troubling in one vital respect. True, her juvenile salad understanding of economics, which involved spending billions on tax cuts and energy subsidies, […]
Israeli-Lebanese Agreement For The Exploitation Of Mediterranean Gas
Three quarters of a century after the creation of the State of Israel, its borders are still not defined. So the agreement signed through the United Nations to fix the borders between its maritime domain and that of Lebanon is historic. The discovery of gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean […]
Camelot’s Slurs: The Libelling Of Adlai Stevenson
How do you bury responsibility for a decision inspired by a pilfered idea? Blame someone else, especially if that person came up with the idea to begin with. This tried method of distraction was used with invidious gusto by US President John F. Kennedy, who recast his role in reaching […]
The Foundations Of The European Union Are Bursting At The Seams
According to the German newspaper Die Welt, contradictions are growing in Europe: relations between the two largest eurozone countries, Germany and France, are “at rock bottom”. In an attempt to negotiate and to come to at least some mutually beneficial compromise, Emmanuel Macron organized a meeting with Chancellor Scholz at […]
The Message From China’s Party Congress
The highlight of the recent 20th National Congress of the Communist Party (CPC) of China has been the re-election of Xi Jinping as the General Secretary for another five-year term. The tradition set by Deng Xiaoping in the post-Mao Zedong era has been set aside. This was not unexpected, and […]
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