IMPERIAL WHORES

STEVE GOWANS—Mankiw’s analysis [as befits that of all academic whores—Ed] is risibly superficial. The idea that taxation undermines incentives to work rests on the notion that effort is proportional to its return. Taxes reduce the return on effort and therefore discourage work. If this is true, the opposite is also true: the greater the return, the greater the effort. By this logic, Mankiw ought to advocate a robust increase in the minimum wage, reasoning that the more money people are able to make, the more likely they are to want to work. But he’s not. Instead, Mankiw’s prescriptions invariably favor employers over workers

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—You can always count on the less reality-anchored pundits to say out loud what the rest are thinking in private. Support for internet censorship is now a mainstream position among the so-called “moderates” of the warmongering corporatist Democratic Party, not just for people to their right but for people to their left as well. If it were up to these freaks the entire internet would just be a bunch of Wall Street liberals agreeing with each other that Trump is bad and Jen Psaki is a strong yet sensual warrior princess.

The Emma Vigeland tweet that Dore was riffing on in the clip was more hand-wringing about a “red-brown alliance” that all grown adults should realize by now was never anything other than a narrative management campaign to keep leftists from moving too far from the establishment-authorized Overton window of acceptable opinion.

Mondoweiss reminds us that the Trump mafia was pushing for an attack on Iran even in the waning days of the administration, but the mainstream journos simply ignored the story. The hostility toward Iran, however, is fully bipartisan. The New Yorker just reported that Trump nearly attacked Iran after he lost the election. But the threat was obvious, why wasn’t it reported back then?

BILL VAN AUKEN—Moïse was shot dead at 1 a.m. by a commando squad armed with military-grade assault rifles. His wife, severely wounded, was flown via air ambulance to a trauma center in Florida. According to witnesses and an audio recording of the raid, the members of the death squad spoke English and Spanish.

Sustained gunfire was preceded by one of the members of the squad shouting out in American southern-accented English, “DEA operation! Everybody back up, stand down!”, an apparent ruse aimed at identifying the gunmen as members of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

The US State Department issued a denial that the assassins were American agents.

RON RIDENOUR—These so-called “social democrats”, who are usually referred to as “socialists” by the likes of wishy washy Bernie Sanders, even “communists” by the likes of Donald Trump and other Republicans, are the most endearing Danish politician lap dogs, even more so than the more honest bourgeois politician hawks, who openly swear never-ending loyalty to the United States no matter what.

Another irony is that Denmark’s media, both DR and daily newspapers, did not even cover the extradition trial of Julian Assange in England—nor do they support him. Apparently, Danish media is afraid to back up an active publisher who reveals how the U.S. spies upon any and all, as well as conducting aggressive wars for self-interest profiteering. Yet DR has published a Danish whistleblower’s expose of its own government spying for Big Daddy.