Tag "Ramin Mazaheri"
By Ramin Mazaheri and cross posted with PressTV So it took a pandemic-plus-lockdown for some in the West to realize that classic economic liberalism on a global scale – i.e. the narrow hyper-specialization of Adam Smith’s division of labor and David Ricardo’s caste-forging theory of competitive advantage – makes a nation economically vulnerable? This epiphany is not novel for those countries which imperialists forced to precariously rely on a single
By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog Paris has been a terrible place to live for over five years now – even tourists can tell. The Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015 (because they just had to draw pornographic pictures of Prophet Mohammad) kicked off a fear-based culture which has culminated in the world’s most over-policed coronavirus lockdown, with over 800,000 citations issued. But it’s been an endless climb of
by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog With all this Great Lockdown time off it’s easy to use it poorly, but I did make one good decision: to not write a multi-part series critiquing the nonsense which is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. It’s nonsense not because de Tocqueville was a segregationist, rabid anti-socialist and even recognised by his peers as the quintessential fake-leftist of his era, but because
by Gary Littlejohn for The Saker Blog Implications of Recent Changes in US Monetary Policy Ramzin Mazaheri’s excellent article of 16th April attracted some very interesting comments: https://10.16.86.131/no-the-Dollar-will-only-strengthen-post-corona-as-usual-its-a-crisis-after-all/ This supportive response aims to provide recent relevant evidence that many of the likely changes Mazaheri describes are already happening very quickly. Over the past few months since December, it has become clear that the US Federal Reserve (the Fed, which has
by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog US bankers caused the Great Recession, and thus the US was the first to suffer economic turmoil. The coronavirus is a novel malady: we now know that it only severely attacks infirm and unstable bodies – it’s not overly facile to graft this idea onto the global economy. Therefore, among Western nations and their client states it is the Eurozone (the weakest link
by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog There is a lot of chatter about how the coronavirus economic overreaction and subsequent US bailouts will end the dollar’s reign as the global reserve currency – such wishful thinking is shortsighted and ignores even recent Western capitalist history. Last November, in a then-boring but now-prescient 10-part series (I socialistically re-interpreted ex-Wall Streeter Nomi Prins’ book Collusion, which chronologically detailed the QE-spreading collusion
by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker blog I’m only three years from being a Millennial myself but, wow! They sure have had a much rougher go of it: Most of them were teenagers when the “victory” of the “leader of the free world” came crashing down on 9/11. Jingoistic hysteria against (fictitious, always Pentagon-supported) Islamic radicalism was followed by the Great Recession. The alleged “economic recovery” was always limited to
By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog High-finance-dissident site ZeroHedge retweeted this: “Everything that is wrong with America, in one image.” Indeed, but it’s old news: not adding strings to Quantitative Easing totally untethered Western stocks from market fundamentals. That certainly shouldn’t be old news to The New York Times, who addressed this same issue with Everything Is Awful. So Why Is the Stock Market Booming? They incredibly concluded their
By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog In just 24 hours the UK saw nearly a half-million people volunteer to deliver food and medicine to the nation’s 1.5 million elderly and vulnerable people. Nearly 750,000 signed up, so many that they had to turn people away. In the US the situation is the opposite: there are no shortage of stories such as NPR’s, Coronavirus Drives Away Volunteers Just As They’re
by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog I found out today We’re going wrong. – Cream – We’re Going Wrong – 1967 album Disraeli Gears Shortly after reading about the latest 7 million Americans who made unemployment claims this week that song shuffled on my iPod. It’s a haunting and even frightening song, and while that makes it sound like some lame emo band we must remember that it’s being
by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog Why do people not grasp that economic math is as relentless as epidemiology math? Of course the US doesn’t have a curve but just a line going straight up: they are obese, have terrible health care, weakened resistance capabilities due to constant terror over physical/judicial/fiscal/employer harm, etc. These are things which needed to be fixed prior to the coronavirus but weren’t – however,
By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog It’s an unusual prediction, but the coronavirus may kill the “neoliberal Trotskyist” projects of the Eurozone and the European Union because the pan-European project has, sadly, always cared more for itself than for the well-being of its constituents. Briefly: the major theoretical contribution of “Daddy Stalin” (to quote Che) to socialism was to insist that nations can indeed go their own way and
By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog It’s the film which captures what 2020’s zeitgeist should become, given that the rabidly anti-socialist West has chosen to economically self-implode Everything Bubble 2 into a possible Great Depression 2 over the coronavirus. It’s based on a great idea: what if Superman’s spaceship had not crashed in rural Kansas but in the rural USSR? His catchphrase would have surely changed to, “Truth, justice
By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog While the concept of class warfare is verboten and greeted with expressions of bewilderment and fear in the West, at least now everyone is familiar with the 99% versus the 1%. However, this is really too facile an analysis. It would be more accurate to talk of the “not-so-talented, toadying” 10% versus the 90%. But while this can prove quite accurate for neo-imperial
By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog Germany and their moral poses… a century of Europe cries, “Enough!” It’s hard for those living outside of Europe to understand the resentment towards Germany; Germans themselves often seem totally oblivious – the “German professor” only ever sees bad, unruly students, after all. When I first moved to Paris in 2009 I remarked how all the Germans I met were so very nice.
by Ramin Mazaheri exclusive for The Saker Blog So when did you become an epidemiologist? You seem quite willing to shame anyone not sterilising every square inch of every square inch. And when did you become an economist? “The economy is not important now” must have been a pretty unusual PhD thesis. We have likely all heard of “internet tough guys” – people who make bold claims or threats online,
By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog The Chicago Tribune – seemingly the only major newspaper which did not endorse Hillary Clinton in 2016 (they endorsed Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson) – has reported that price gouging in Chicago has skyrocketed a spectacular 9,000% since March 1. What’s worse, that figure only includes complaints to the city’s Business Affairs and Consumer Protection Department from March 1, excluding the first two
by Ramin Mazaheri exclusive for The Saker Blog So there I was again on the “Job Creator’s Red-Eye” (NYC to Silicon Valley) – the typical route for us bigwig CEOs – and I got to wondering: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? I’m not prepared for something like this. But after the stock market crashed – the fastest 30% sell-off ever – and I survived my suicide attempt, I decided
by Ramin Mazaheri exclusive for the Saker Blog In any sane, modern nation a financial crisis combined with a (due to sub-standard) health care crisis would almost certainly produce election victories for progressive, big-government candidates. Few call the US sane, and many say it’s not even modern. Iranian relatives of mine visit they US and say: that place is a falling-down dump – and it’s not like the TV show
by Ramin Mazaheri, exclusive for the Saker Blog In the UK an average of just 600 people die from influenza every year, a testament to the major socialist concept the incredibly rich island has tolerated – the National Health Service. In the US, where the biggest socialist concept they have tolerated is Social Security – to prevent mass elder-class starvation – the lack of health care annually kills 11 times
