This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Neoliberalism: Political Success, Economic Failure — Robert Kuttner in the American Prospect: As the great political historian Karl Polanyi warned, when markets overwhelm society, ordinary people often turn to tyrants. In regimes that border on neofascist, klepto-capitalists get along just fine with dictators, undermining the neoliberal premise of capitalism and democracy as complements. Several authoritarian thugs, playing on tribal nationalism as the antidote to capitalist cosmopolitanism, are surprisingly popular. It's also important to appreciate that neoliberalism is not laissez-faire. Classically, the premise of a “free market” is that government simply gets out of the way. This is nonsensical, since all markets are creatures of rules, most fundamentally rules defining property, but also rules defining credit, debt, and bankruptcy; rules defining patents, trademarks, and copyrights; rules defining terms of labor; and so on. Even deregulation requires rules. In Polanyi's words, “laissez-faire was planned.” The political question is who gets to make the rules, and for whose benefit.
• The Green New Deal must wipe out precarious work and underemployment — Bill Mitchell: I keep reading so-called Green New Deal proposals that put the Job Guarantee at the centre of the employment considerations of the concept. I think that is unfortunate. We must understand that the Job Guarantee is a very specific approach to maintaining loose full employment and price stability. At its heart it is a buffer stock mechanism rather than a job creation structure. Sure enough, it creates jobs on demand by workers who want to work but cannot find work elsewhere. In normal times, it might not create or sustain many jobs at all. And, importantly, it might not be part of a fiscal ‘stimulus’ program. […] As carbon-intensive sectors are closed down by regulation, the affected communities will transit into new activities and new employment opportunities. Underpinning it all will be the Job Guarantee safety net for those workers with a need for a minimum wage job. But the scale of the investment and skill development required will see massive shifts in workers between industries, occupations and sectors (public and private). The Job Guarantee will only be a small part of those shifts and should not be seen as the employment solution to the disruption that the Green New Deal will generate.
• #1067; The Post-Game Interview — Wondermark by David Malki !:
  
• The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons — Matto Mildenberger in Scientific American: Thirty years ago, a different future was available. Gradual climate policies could have slowly steered our economy towards gently declining carbon pollution levels. The costs to most Americans would have been imperceptible. But that future was stolen from us. It was stolen by powerful, carbon-polluting interests who blocked policy reforms at every turn to preserve their short-term profits. They locked each of us into an economy where fossil fuel consumption continues to be a necessity, not a choice. This is what makes attacks on individual behavior so counterproductive. Yes, it’s great to drive an electric vehicle (if you can afford it) and purchase solar panels (if powerful utilities in your state haven’t conspired to make renewable energy more expensive). But the point is that interest groups have structured the choices available to us today. Individuals don’t have the agency to steer our economic ship from the passenger deck. As Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes reminds us, “[abolitionists] wore clothes made of cotton picked by slaves. But that did not make them hypocrites … it just meant that they were also part of the slave economy, and they knew it. That is why they acted to change the system, not just their clothes.”
• Calvin and Hobbes — by Bill Waterson:
  
• Why I Hate Houses — Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism: There are bona fide reasons to have problems with this way of living, namely the environmental cost. Free-standing buildings take more energy to heat and cool than multi-unit structures. Car ownership is pretty much unavoidable, since even in those few suburbs with decent public transport, it’s designed for going in and of the city center (as in for commuting), not for provisioning, transporting kids, or running other errands. And if you decide to fit in, as a recent post pointed out, “Lawns, in general, are pretty much the enemy for healthy insect habitats.” And don’t get me started on leaf blowers. Now I could pretend to not like houses out of reasons of conscience, or a preference for living in high-density areas (which I do have). But my big reason for not liking houses is the inefficiency and time sink of maintaining them.
• The Tragic Story of Jimmy Aldaoud, Deported From the Streets of Detroit to His Death in Iraq — Chris Gelardi, the Intercept: Before he was deported, Jimmy Aldaoud had never stepped foot in Iraq. Born in Greece to Iraqi refugee parents, he immigrated to the United States with his family via a refugee resettlement program 40 years ago, when he was just 15 months old. He considered himself American and knew hardly anything of Iraqi society. Still, on the afternoon of June 4, he found himself wandering the arrivals terminal of Al Najaf International Airport, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, with around $50, some insulin for his diabetes, and the clothes on his back. […] Aldaoud spoke no Arabic, had no known family in Iraq, and nobody knew he was there. Disembarking in Najaf, he was “scared,” “confused,” and acting panicked, according to an Iraqi immigration officer he encountered. And 63 days later — this past Tuesday — he was dead.
• The ideology of postmodernism is to present all existing injustice as an effect of discrimination; Robert Pfaller tells ILNA — Iranian Labour News Agency: The general ideological task of postmodernism is to present all existing injustice as an effect of discrimination. This is, of course, funny again: Since every discrimination presupposes an already established class structure of inequality. If you do not have unequal places, you cannot distribute individuals in a discriminating way, even if you want to do so. Thus progressive neoliberalism massively increases social inequality, while distributing all minority groups in an "equal" way over the unequal places.
• We are approaching a period of fiscal [policy] dominance — Bill Mitchell: The dissonance in mainstream economics and the political debate about policy settings is getting deeper and more public. We now have examples of central bankers ‘throwing their hands up in the air’ and nearly begging governments to abandon their obsession with fiscal surpluses, and, instead, use fiscal policy to stimulate waning economic growth. What I think is happening is that we are entering a period of fiscal dominance, which will represent a categorical rejection of the mainstream macroeconomics consensus that has dominated policy making since the 1980s – the neoliberal era. In turn, this shift will ratify the main precepts of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We are observing paradigm shift occurring as the dominant neoliberal paradigm fails at every turn. There is a long way to go though before the practitioners acknowledge that such a shift has occurred. But there is progress.
• How Richard Vague Discovered Gravity: An Interview + Book Review of A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises — John Siman in Naked Capitalism: Richard Vague: […] A couple of years ago, I was lamenting the fact that the U.S. did not have an industrial policy of the sort China now has and the U.S. itself has had in the past in efforts like the construction of railroads and canals. I was lamenting the lack of significantly stepped up government support for areas like 5G, high tech manufacturing, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence, and expressed fear that China would surpass us in those areas as Japan had in automobiles in the 1980s. A friend quickly corrected me, saying that the U.S. most definitely had an industrial policy, even though it was largely unstated: namely, support for the financial and real estate sectors. That support is manifested in tax laws, regulation, and a host of other ways. A light bulb went off, since his statement was in lockstep with what I had been finding in my research. Bit by bit, by hook and by crook, there has been a disproportionate accumulation of policy support for these two industries—the very two industries I had come to view as the “swing sectors” in the economy, the most frequent source of booms and busts. And they are wed together—it is increased leverage that directly results in increased asset values. And orthodox economics, both by commission and omission, has facilitated this.