Monthly Archives: August 2018

The New Yorker Profiles Glenn Greenwald

In the post-Brexit/post-Trump world, Glenn Greenwald’s voice comes across as one of the sanest. You’d expect resistance to Trump as progressive but in reality it is quite different. The resistance has joined hands with neoconservatives and one hysterical story which occupies public debates is the supposed Russia involvement in US elections. The New Yorker has an excellent profile of Glenn Greenwald who has ridiculed these stories.

Because Trump is bad, neocons have exploited the Trump presidency to whitewash themselves. I loved these lines:

… He said, “The people who hate Trump the most are the people who have been running Washington for decades. It’s not so much that they’re bothered by his corruption—they’re bothered by his inability to prettify and mask it.” …

To Greenwald, an agonized response to Trump carries with it the delusional proposition that previous Presidents were upstanding.

The Democrats have used the Russia story to suffocate the debate on why they lost. Things such as free trade, globalisation and how Trump exploited these using his demagogy.

The article is long, but you can use the audio in the link and it’s not an automated voice.

Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!

Jeremy Corbyn is a great leader and perhaps one of the few leaders speaking for fiscal expansion. You could say some others too, but what I have realised is that politicians say nice things just to look good and them saying nice things about fiscal policy doesn’t mean much. But Jeremy Corbyn is different. He is pushing aggressively against austerity.

Here’s a great video posted by him on social media. It is really nice and captures the important elements of Keynesianism. It’s something that not even most economists understand and yet we have Labour, which has got it right!

click to view the video on Twitter.

A problem of our times is that even the left has abandoned Keynesianism. Jeremy Corbyn stresses to European parties regularly that if left ideas are to survive, they ought to oppose austerity.