Yves here. Bill Black is back! The website New Economic Perspectives, where Bill and many MMT luminaries held forth, has gone quiet. But Bill was also a regular at Paul Jay’s The Real News Network, and Black has come for a long-form discussion at Jay’s new initiative, TheAnalysis.news. Bill uses the title of his book to review and update financial fraud, American style, which means driven primarily by bank executives. He starts with a review of the S&L crisis, where he not only had a ringside seat but also successfully pursued some of the perps. This is one of the reason Bill has little sympathy for the failure to prosecute bankers: he’s shown it can be done.
Melinda and Bill Gates in 2016
(Shannon Stapleton / Reuters) On Bill and Melinda Gates, Vladimir Putin, George F. Will, Jack Fowler, and more
As you have read, Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a divorce. This is personal a matter for the couple and their family but I can’t help thinking it’s a blow to society, too. Bill and Melinda Gates have been such an important couple. They have set a standard in philanthropy not just in the
how much but in the
how.
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Divorce is a contagion. Everybody wants to get in on the act. It is an underrated evil, as I see it. (This is not to say that divorce is not sometimes, or often, called for. Think of cases of abuse.)
The Lost Hegemon: Whom the Gods Would Destroy
Opium Wars, bin Laden, and Mujahideen
“When the operation started in 1979, this region grew opium only for regional markets and produced no heroin. Within two years, however, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer. . . . CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax.” Alfred McCoy, author, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
A Soviet “Vietnam”
By far the most influential voice in the US Administration of President Jimmy Carter was his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski’s influence drew largely from the fact that he had one of the most influential patrons in the United States at the time. David Rockefeller, then chairman of the family’s Chase Manhattan Bank, one of the most influential banks internationally, had taken Brzezins
Samia Suluhu Hassan, president of the United Republic of Tanzania
Thursday April 01 2021
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Tanzania last week respectfully buried former President John Magufuli in a national outpouring of grief. A spectacularly large country, the nation welcomed with little ado the ascension to power of Ms Samia Suluhu Hassan, vice president for a little over five years to serve the remainder of Magufuli’s term.
The optics of the surviving former presidents, Mwinyi and Kikwete on hand at their successor’s funeral were telling. Ali Hassan Mwinyi is 96, still strong, Jakaya Kikwete is fairly young he is just 65, a former army colonel, protégé of Mwinyi whose even faster rise was stopped by Julius Nyerere who retired in 1985 but held on to the chairmanship of Chama cha Mapinduzi for years after.