Not Surprised...

I can't say I'm all that surprised about the revelations Jeffery Sachs and Matt Taibbi have brought forward about the US's interest and involvement in the ending of Communist Russia and the development of whatever Russia is now. I will admit to be depressed by such revelations, because it just confirms how idiotic our leaders are.

Remember the fall of the Soviet Union? Everything was going to be hunky dory, supposedly, and every country, including Russia, was going to turn to capitalism and prosper - or so we were told. And TPTB sent people, like Sachs, to do that for countries like Poland. But Russia? Naw. It seems that TPTB always wanted Russia, the former Soviet Union, to fail, to remain our enemy. Our military industrial complex needs it. And so TPTB set that up to happen. Sachs details some of that in his article 'A True Shock? Economist Jeffrey Sachs Reveals Secret at Heart of U.S.-Russian Relations'. The sub-title of the article says it all: 'The U.S. was advised toward a "Marshall Plan" to help rebuild post-Soviet Russia as a democracy, but a key witness says the Cold War never ended, because we didn't want it to'.

Taibbi and Sachs discussed all this recently on Counter Points - 'Jeffrey Sachs, Taibbi: How The West DESTROYED Russia' (the discussion is 50 or so minutes long):

I don't want to be a chicken little, but there are a few economic indicators which should be very concerning to everyone.

Interest on the debt is greater than our military budget. This has signaled the end of every empire in world history.

Unemployment recently ticked up .3% above its cyclical average. This has preceded the last 12 recessions and as an indicator of recessions it has only been wrong once.

Shrink and Skimp!

I've been thinking about the economy recently. How it's not that good for the 'little' people, and how we small people have been really experiencing it, no matter what the officials and their numbers about the economy say (Here's an article from Big about this - Strikes and Bidenomics, it was republished as a shorter, but mostly the same, article on the Lever - The Missing Inflation Data). One of the things I've encountered a lot of is shrinkflation.

Shinkflation is something I think we've all seen (recent BBC article on it). The package of a product we want, say a breakfast cereal, gets smaller but the price stays the same. So we are actually paying more for the product, by weight or quantity measurement, but we supposedly don't 'see' that because the overall price is the same.

My favorite kind of ice cream... Now in a smaller package! Image from
reddit.

Economic Gloom:

I was just browsing my emails the other day and came across an article in an email from Alternet. The title of the article interested me, because it seemed as though economist Robert Reich had turned... well, inside out, kinda, blaming Americans for not being more enthusiastic about our supposedly recovering economy. I'm not saying Reich's all that wonderful, but he's often better than almost all other well-known American economists...

Since the 1980’s, part of the Conservative creed has been the belief that greater good would arise from giving our wealthiest even more wealth. The assumption was that it would eventually “trickle down,” to everyone’s benefit. But there’s evidence that the belief was wrong and the creed was harmful.

Just stumbled on this Mark Blyth interview on Radio Open Source titled "Blame the Boomers". It is a really enjoyable 50 minute conversation covering a long list of topics.

It had to happen sometime. After all, no one has ever eliminated the business cycle, and this one is long in the tooth.

In the space of a week the economy got a double-dose of bad news.