The politico-economic system of our supposed democracy is, in reality, a defense-in-depth of elite privilege. Layer upon layer of rhetorical cant and mathematical jargon shred any attack upon the fortress of money. Only by challenging the basic premises of conventional economics can we pull out the roots of the pernicious neoliberal dogma that is handing America over to a handful of billionaires and their global megacorporations.

As part of my trying to bridge a greater understanding about those who proclaim themselves as conservatives, I have begun following a couple of You Tubers recently. I am of the firm belief that most people have far more in common than we have differences. As is often the case, our solutions may vary, but we first must agree on the problems. And I am finding that there is much for us to agree upon as far as the problems we face today.

I missed the furious debate in the comments of last week's essay by gjohnsit, The Free Trade Lie Is Exposed. Ironically, I missed joining in because of an effect of free trade: the crappification of everything. My laptop appeared to have finally blown its power supply.

When the Trump administration announced last week that it was imposing tariffs on solar cell panels mostly coming from South Korea and China, it appears that the progressive blogosphere was almost unanimous in condemning the action as an attack on solar energy.

Cross-posted from Real Economics.

In Colorado, an electric utility's request for proposals to build new generating capacity resulted in stunning evidence that renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels--even with storage capacity included for when solar and wind are "down."

Cross posted from Real Economics.

I think most people here are already familiar with Mark Blyth, author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (available online as a large pdf file), and Chris Hedges, the New York Times reporter who covered the revolutions in East Europe, and was forced out of the Times because of his opposition to the Gulf War.

I decided to name this "economic equality" instead of just economics because it is a more specific and accurate label for what I shall consider here.

This is the third edition of this post. I first wrote most it when Obama thought he had achieved the golden unicorn of a bipartisan tax reform deal that included big cuts in the deferred earned benefits programs of Social Security and Medicare. I posted it again in January of this year when it was rolled out as Trump's tax cuts accompanied by a "big" infrastructure spending program.