🚨SPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT We are delighted to announce Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, economist Stephanie Kelton and author Gabor Maté will join our founder Jeremy Corbyn at our first annual conference. 🎟️Join us in London on 20 & 21 September 2025 for #PJPconf25: bit.ly/PJPconf25

@mmtpodcast.bsky.social your intro to MMT at the start of the latest episode was excellent. Such a good distillation. 👏

Serious Q: what should ultra-rich donors who want to shift the Overton window to the left* do with their money instead of giving it to the Democrats?

In this News Brief, "Media Continues Painting Musk's Far Right Coup as Good Faith 'Cost-Cutting Effort,'" we detail how NYT, WaPo, CNN and others continue to treat Musk's 'DOGE' committee as an aw shucks effort to "reduce waste" and "find savings" in our government.

Take out a paid subscription to support my ongoing coverage of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025. www.crisesnotes.com#/portal/signup

ICYMI I covered Marko Elez's strange sojourn out of, & back into, government & why the 19 state Attorney General lawsuit lowers the stakes of Elez's movements (at least as far as we can tell right now). Speaking of, the lawsuit cites Notes on the Crises! www.crisesnotes.com/day-eleven-o...

The reality is MAGA and Musk are now Too Big To Fail. Certainly a Nazi cannot be this close to power, but he also did a clear-as-day Nazi salute on live tv so the defense is going for manslaughter. “Ok fine he is a Nazi but only as a gag” becomes the compromise take to manage cognitive dissonance

A marker of our uniquely cowardly times, the rise of Placebo Populism. a responsibility-evasion tactic popular with everyone from Joe Scarborough to Mark Zuckerberg to justify MAGA-lite. No one wants to own the evil shit they support so they launder their position as the alleged Voice of The People

House votes 263-156 to pass the Laken Riley Act—which will enable Trump’s ICE to put migrants in detention without due process & empower states to block visa programs & federal immigration policy. 46 Democrats voted with Republicans. 12 Senate Democrats did the same. Will be first bill Trump signs.

Are people allowed to use their brains and connect dots or is it important everyone write each media story like they just woke up in a new scene in Memento and the overt Nazi guy is just worried about “finding savings” in govt spending

Pardoning Jan 6 rioters was key because now when the courts invariably throw out 70% of Trump’s power grabs and he tweets an angry rant naming the judge there’s open season to enact extrajudicial violence on said judge and, for all intents and purposes, no mechanism to curb this intimidation regime

Now that the Trump admin has tried to gut the bulk of the liberal state in under 48 hours and Musk did a sieg heil on live TV can our media stop acting like DOGE is concerned with “cutting govt waste” and insisting Dems should try and “work with Elon”. idk maybe we can start using some context clues

A very accessible paper, by a who's who of ecological economics. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

You read this and it’s clear, on a basic editorial level, NYT doesn’t consider Palestinians fully human. Every Palestinian is presumed a cartoon terrorist, every Israeli a smol civilian. If you’re Arab, show trials by occupying armies and “admin detention” magically turn a hostage into a “prisoner”

When you’re doing “populism”

wait you’re telling me rightwing populism is a contradiction in terms??

Oh man he’s on the brink of a revelation

“Why would Musk do a Nazi salute?” Well aside from the fact he agrees with a lot of Nazi ideology he’s a heartless troll who knows he can get away with it then giggle about it with his gamer friends later. Because he knows he’s Too Big To Fail. Because he knows the ADL, media, etc will brush it off.

this is why I’m not a fan of the “bend the knee,” “obey in advance” framing. In a subtle, but dangerous way it separates Trump from the 1%, it implies they are compelled to team up with him for survival or minor venal rewards. It flattens class, when all of this is very much about class solidarity

From the archives.

The next 4 years are going to be a rollercoaster. I’ll share most of my running commentary and analysis via my newsletter. Sign up if you’d like to follow along. stephaniekelton.substack.com

when the abolitionist movement was gaining steam in Britain in the late 1780s, one of the pro-slavery lobby’s very first responses was trying to change the word “slave” to “assistant planters”.

We have been blessed with support from a variety of individuals and institutions - most recently, I am pleased to say, the International Society for Ecological Economics. www.isecoeco.org/category/gra...

My institute @ucl-iipp.bsky.social is running an in-person open evening on 5th February when you can learn about our MPA programs. These now include pathways in Economic Policy and Political Economy as as well public administration and Digital Transforamation. www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/pub...

I'll be giving an online public lecture on my new report on the financialisation of UK housing, commissioned by the previous government, next tuesday 21st Jan at 12.45h. Chaired by the I-paper's housing correspondent Victoria Spratt. You can register here: www.ucl.ac.uk/events/event...

One of the few things that neoclassical economists are good at is "gatekeeping." They have methodological gatekeeping: our method, or your research is not scientific/economics. Some feminist economists see this phenomenon from the lens of feminism From Tejani, 2019

If you generally like @greenparty.org.uk policies - but struggle with one issue. Join the Greens and lobby for change - The Green party is actually democratic and encourages local democracy (unlike current Lab). join.greenparty.org.uk

The horrific Los Angeles fires prove to be another missed opportunity for our media to put a human face to the reality of spiraling climate change: by @ahjohnson.bsky.social

“Powell’s interest rate hikes, launched in March 2022, had no perceptible effect on growth or employment, hence no plausible role in bringing the inflation rate down. Monetary policy has become an empty set of rituals.” ~James Galbraith www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives...

I want every “anti authoritarian” expert to answer two questions before I listen to them: (1) are the US and Israel currently committing genocide in Gaza? and (2) do you think genocide is authoritarian?

Columnist who once defended sharing a post advocating feeding Palestinian children to sharks is helping us “counter the authoritarian threat”. Cool, glad words mean things

“Savings”! The govt is, of course, not a business. The human stakes of these “savings”, their impact on the poor, workers, minorities, women, children and seniors is ignored entirely. All just abstract, faceless “costs” on the govt ledger these heroic patriotic billionaires will unburden us from

Absolutely criminal coverage from NYT. The idea DOGE is motivated by “slashing govt costs” and “efficiency”—rather than a far right attack on the liberal state—is taken for granted. The one (1) nominally critical quote is from corporate hack Mark Penn who only “downplays the total potential savings”