Hiking Interest Rates Protects Financial Assets Of The 1% At Workers’ Expense

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

High inflation has returned after more than two decades of very low and stable inflation rates. While in the past, central banks were struggling to bring inflation up to a target of 2 percent, they are now confronted with the opposite task. Raising the interest rate is one way to combat inflation, which is why the Federal Reserve announced in mid-June its largest interest rate since 1994.

Will a hike in interest rates fix the real reason behind today’s inflation, which is now a global problem? What does the Fed rate hike mean for average workers and the poor? What other ways are there to combat surging inflation? And why do capitalist governments worry more about inflation than they do about unemployment or inequality? Progressive economist Gerald Epstein sheds light on these and other questions about today’s inflationary economy. Epstein is professor of economics and founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a leading authority in the areas of central banking and international finance. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Political Economy of Central Banking and What’s Wrong with Modern Money Theory? A Policy Critique.

C.J. Polychroniou: In an attempt to combat high inflation, which rose in the U.S. by 8.6 percent in May, the Fed hiked its interest rate by three-quarters of a point. This is the highest interest rate hike in decades, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the Fed took even more aggressive actions in the months ahead as part of its war against inflation. How much of an impact can higher interest rates expect to have on inflation?

Gerald Epstein: It partly depends on how high interest rates are jacked up and how long they are kept up. In general, moderate increases in interest rates — say, 1 or 2 or even 3 percentage point increases — cause only small reductions in the inflation rate, which is defined as the percentage rate of increase of the price of a market basket (collection) of goods and services over a period of time. There are many reasons for this. For one thing, in the first instance, as Wright Patman, the populist congressperson from Texas in the 1950s repeatedly pointed out, increases in interest rates actually increase prices! The reason is that interest costs are, among other things, a cost of doing business for companies that borrow money to fund their operations. So, like wages, or gas or other costs, increased interest costs are likely to be passed onto customers by businesses that rely heavily on credit.

As for the price reducing impacts of interest rate increases — these occur only indirectly. The main channels are by raising the cost of borrowing by families for houses (mortgages), or credit card purchases, and by raising the cost of borrowing by companies that are planning to build new factories or buy new capital equipment. These reduce the demand for goods and services — houses, appliances, cars, new factories and capital equipment — and the workers that produce them.

It is the next step where possible reductions in prices and the rate of inflation comes in. Companies and workers are very reluctant to lower prices, or even to reduce the rate of increase of their prices and wages. So, what happens next depends on the power that workers and capitalists have to keep their wages and prices up — to wait out the reduced demand for their products and services until demand goes back up.

Typically, firms have a lot of ability to wait out the cutbacks without greatly reducing their prices. This is especially true when firms have a lot of pricing power if they are monopolies or have a big share of the market, as mega corporations often do. Workers, much less so. So as demand for products go down and unemployment goes up, we typically begin to see wages either go down or stop going up. Perhaps housing prices begin to slide or soften. Over time the inflationary pressures might subside.

But this can take a substantial amount of time. Estimates by well-known Yale economist Ray Fair, for example, indicate that a 1-percentage point increase in short-term interest rates reduce the inflation rate by one-half percentage point, but only after 15 months. So, as estimated by macroeconomist Servaas Storm, it would take a 4-percentage point increase in the Fed’s interest rate to reduce the inflation rate by only 2.5 percentage points — say from 6 percent to 3.5 percent — far above the Fed’s target of 2 percent. And the price tag for this modest drop in inflation would be an increase in the unemployment rate by 1.5 percentage points and a significant fall of GDP.

Even these weak anti-inflation impacts are probably an overestimate of the impact of interest rate increases on current inflation. The reason is that so much of this inflation is due to production disruptions outside the U.S. that increases in U.S. interest rates will have, at best, weak effects.

The libertarian economist Milton Friedman famously said that inflation is caused by “too much money chasing too few goods.” He assumed that the culprit here was “too much money” — typically printed by the Central Bank (the Federal Reserve in the U.S. case).

But, historically, most really serious inflations are caused by “too few goods,” not too much money: that is, serious disruptions in the supply of goods. Typically, these are associated with wars, droughts and political instability. And this is largely true with our current inflation. Read more

Noam Chomsky: The “Historic” NATO Summit In Madrid Shored Up US Militarism

Noam Chomsky

On June 28-30, 2022, NATO leaders gathered in Madrid, Spain, to discuss the major issues and challenges facing the alliance. The summit ended with far-reaching decisions that will have a dire impact on global peace and security. Hailed as “historic,” the summit was indeed transformative: NATO produced a new Strategic Concept and identified what it says are the key threats to western security, interests, and values — none other than Russia and China.

“The empire doesn’t rest,” quips Noam Chomsky, a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, in his assessment of NATO’s “historic” summit in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows. Chomsky is one of the most widely cited scholars in modern history. He is institute professor emeritus at MIT and currently laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, and has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, as was expected, the war in Ukraine dominated the recent NATO summit in Madrid and produced some extraordinary decisions which will lead to the “NATO-ization of Europe,” as Russia was declared “the most significant and direct threat” to its members’ peace and security. Turkey dropped its objections to Finland and Sweden joining the alliance after it managed to extract major concessions, NATO’s eastern flank will receive massive reinforcement, additional defense systems will be stationed in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, and the U.S. will boost its military presence all across European soil. Given all of this, is it Russia that represents a threat to Europe, or NATO to Russia? And what does the “NATO-ization” of Europe mean for global peace and security? Is it a prelude to World War III?

We can dismiss the obligatory boilerplate about high principles and noble goals, and the rank hypocrisy: for example, the lament about the fate of the arms control regime because of Russian-Chinese disruption, with no mention of the fact it is the U.S. that has torn it to shreds under W. Bush and particularly Trump. All of that is to be expected in “historic” pronouncements of a new Strategic Concept for NATO.

The Ukraine war did indeed provide the backdrop for the meeting of NATO powers — with bitter irony, just after the conclusion of the first meeting of the states that signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which passed unnoticed.

The NATO summit was expanded for the first time to include the Asian “sentinel states” that the U.S. has established and provided with advanced high-precision weapons to “encircle” China. Accordingly, the North Atlantic was officially expanded to include the newly created Indo-Pacific region, a vast area where security concerns for the Atlanticist powers of NATO are held to arise. The imperial implications should be clear enough. There’s a good deal more to say about this. I will return to it.

U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Russia was strongly affirmed in the Strategic Concept: no negotiations, only war to “weaken Russia.”

This has been steady policy since George W. Bush’s 2008 invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, vetoed by France and Germany, who agreed with high-level U.S. diplomats for the past 30 years that no Russian government could tolerate that, for reasons too obvious to review. The offer remained on the agenda in deference to U.S. power.

After the Maidan uprising in 2014, the U.S. began openly to move to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command, policies extended under Biden, accompanied by official acknowledgment after the invasion that Russian security concerns, meaning NATO membership, had not been taken into consideration. The plans have not been concealed. The goals are to ensure full compatibility of the Ukrainian military with NATO forces in order to “integrate Ukraine into NATO de facto.”

Zelensky’s efforts to implement a diplomatic settlement were ignored, including his proposals last March to accept Austrian-style neutralization for the indefinite future. The proposals, which had indications of Russian support, were termed a “real breakthrough” by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, but never pursued.

The official Russian stance at the time (March 2022) was that its military operations would end if Ukraine too were to “cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognize the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.”

There was a considerable gap between the Ukrainian and Russian positions on a diplomatic settlement, but they might have been narrowed in negotiations. Even after the invasion, it appears that there may have remained some space for a way to end the horrors.

France and Germany continued to make overtures toward diplomatic settlement. These are completely dropped in the recent Strategic Concept, which simply “reaffirms” all plans to move toward incorporating Ukraine (and Georgia) into NATO, formally dismissing Russian concerns.

The shifts in the European stance reflect Europe’s increasing subordination to the U.S. The shift was accelerated by Putin’s choice of aggression after refusing to consider European initiatives that might have averted the crime and possibly even opened a path toward Europe-Russia accommodation that would be highly beneficial to all — and highly beneficial to the world, which may not survive great power confrontation.

That is not a throw-away line. It is reality. The great powers will either find a way to cooperate, to work together in confronting imminent global threats, or the future will be too grim to contemplate. These elementary facts should be kept firmly in mind while discussing particular issues.

We should also be clear about the import of the new Strategic Concept. Reaffirming the U.S. program of de facto incorporation of Ukraine within NATO is also reaffirming, unambiguously, the refusal to contemplate a diplomatic settlement. It is reaffirming the Ramstein declarations a few weeks ago that the war in Ukraine must be fought to weaken Russia, in fact to weaken it more severely than the Versailles treaty weakened Germany, if we assume that U.S. officials mean what they say — and we can expect that adversaries take them at their words.

The Ramstein declarations were accompanied by assurances that Ukraine would drive Russia out of all Ukrainian territory. In assessing the credibility of these assurances, we may recall that they come from the sources that confidently predicted that the U.S.-created Iraqi and Afghan armies would resist ISIS [also known as Daesh] and the Taliban, instead of collapsing immediately, as they did; and that the Russian invasion would conquer Kyiv and occupy Ukraine in three days.

The message to Russia is: You have no escape. Either surrender, or continue your slow and brutal advance, or, in the event that defeat threatens, go for broke and destroy Ukraine, as of course you can.

The logic is quite clear. So is the import beyond Ukraine itself. Millions will face starvation, the world will continue to march toward environmental destruction, the likelihood of nuclear war will increase. Read more

NATO’s Expansion And New Strategic Concept Broaden The Prospect Of Armageddon

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

CJ Polychroniou

A bleak future lies ahead.

The 2022 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) summit, which was held in Madrid, Spain, from June 28-30, has produced a new strategic concept for an alliance which only a few years ago was declared “brain-dead” by French President Emmanuel Macron that will define its future for the next ten years.

Indeed, thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the world’s largest military alliance has made a comeback, and with a vengeance. Russia has once again become its main target. The new strategic concept names it as the “most significant and direct threat to the security of allies and to the peace and stability of the Euro-Atlantic area.”

Countries with a long history of neutrality, such as Finland and Sweden, will soon be joining NATO after Turkey dropped its opposition. NATO will add 1300 kilometers more of border with Russia. Since 2016, NATO also has an “enhanced forward presence” in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

The western encirclement of Russia, which loomed large both before and after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and has continued with the same zeal even after communism had collapsed, is now virtually complete.

This is a development with staggering implications for international peace and security. NATO was of course a source of instability and a threat to international peace and security throughout the Cold War as it was a central instrument to the US imperial project. With its eastward expansion following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO’s role in restoring America’s unipolar world hegemony sowed the seeds of mistrust between Russia and the western powers and set the stage for the renewal of a protracted conflict, reminiscent of the Cold War.

The U.S.-led and western-centric alliance bears a great deal of responsibility for the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine. Many top foreign relations experts had predicted that NATO’s eastward expansion was a move that would eventually provoke a hostile Russian reaction. Russia had been warning the west about NATO expansion for decades.

In September 1993 Boris Yeltsin send a letter to Bill Clinton in which he warned that an enlargement of NATO might be interpreted by Russia as a national security threat.

“We believe that the eastward expansion of NATO is a mistake and a serious one at that,” Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president, told reporters at a 1997 news conference with US President Bill Clinton in Helsinki, where the two signed a statement on arms control.

At the Madrid summit, NATO leaders agreed to a new strategic concept for the alliance that will make the world even more dangerous than it is now. But before we delve into what NATO’s new strategy means for world order, let’s briefly recall the history of the U.S.-led military alliance.

NATO was created in 1949 by the United States and 11 other western nations with the stated objective of acting as a deterrent to an invasion of western Europe by the Soviet Union.

Of course, there was no Soviet military threat. Stalin had no intention of invading western Europe. He was a ruthless tyrant in charge of a police state that he had built, almost single-handedly, but his approach to foreign policy was not driven by ideology but rather by the dictates of Realpolitik. He was an ultra-realist, having no desire for a military confrontation with the Americans and the British on the continent.

“I can deal with Stalin. He is honest—but smart as hell,” Harry Truman wrote in his diary entry dated July 17, 1945, the first day of the Potsdam Conference in Germany.

Indeed, Stalin’s geostrategic approach was not geared towards the export of a revolutionary ideology. “The export of a revolution is nonsense,” he pointed out in a 1936 interview given to Roy Howard, president of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers. Stalin’s primary concern was the security of the Soviet Union. His interest in having Eastern Europe under his thumb was for the purpose of creating a buffer zone between the West and the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union lost as many as 27 million lives during the Second World War, half of her industry, and thousands of villages, towns, and cities were destroyed. That’s the price that it paid for saving the world from Nazi Germany. To be sure, it would be good to remind western readers that “four-fifths of the fighting in Europe took place on the Eastern front, and that’s where Germans suffered virtually all of its casualties,” as Rodric Braithwaite, former British Ambassador to the Soviet Union/Russian Federation accurately stated during the course of a lecture that he delivered on June 13, 2005, at Kennan Institute.

For all the above reasons, the mere suggestion that Stalin might have any intention of embarking on wild military adventures to conquer Paris or London should have been rejected as utterly ridiculous by any rational policymaker at the time, but obviously that wasn’t the case. Take, for instance, the attitude of an anticommunist reactionary like Winston Churchill. His pathological hatred toward the Soviet Union was so intense that even with Operation Barbarossa well under way, and the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse, it was communist Russia, not Nazi Germany, that he considered as the barbaric antithesis of western civilization. “It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe” he wrote to Anthony Eden in late 1942.

As stated earlier, NATO’s explicit purpose was to “deter Soviet aggression.” But the creation of NATO had another goal, though it was never mentioned either by NATO leaders or foreign policy experts and commentators. The goal was to cement western Europe’s position in the capitalist world economy with the U.S. at the helm. A year earlier, the Marshall Plan had been introduced, whose purpose was to prevent the spread of communism in western Europe, stabilize the international economic order, and provide markets for U.S. goods. By integrating European countries into NATO, the U.S. was seeking to safeguard its investments in the European economies. In other words, NATO was also seen as a bulwark against radical political change inside different European countries. It was a way to ensure that their future is tied to the capitalist world order. Read more

Chomsky: Overturn Of “Roe” Shows How Extreme An Outlier The US Has Become

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Noam Chomsky

An NPR/Ipsos poll released in January revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” What the poll does not disclose, of course, is the anomalous situation of the United States in comparison to other democracies. For starters, the U.S. is a very conservative and militaristic country, with a two-party system and a political culture that overwhelmingly favors powerful private interests over the common good. Indeed, in many respects, it operates more like a reactionary plutocracy than a democracy. For instance, the U.S. is the only wealthy country without a universal health care system. It spends more on health care than any other high-income country but has the lowest life expectancy. The U.S. is also a global outlier in terms of gun ownership, gun violence and public mass shootings. Income and wealth inequality is also higher in the U.S. than in almost any other industrialized country, and the U.S. also has the distinction of spending lesson children than almost any other wealthy country. Moreover, as evidenced by the recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court acts for the most part as an agent of reaction.

Indeed, the U.S. is a “highly unusual society, in many ways,” as Noam Chomsky states in the following interview about the economic and political organization of the U.S. polity and the shockingly reactionary rulings of the Supreme Court on guns and abortion.

Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics, a leading dissident and social critic, and one of the world’s most cited intellectuals. His work has influenced a variety of fields, including cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, computer science, mathematics, childhood education and anthropology. He has received numerous awards, including the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal and the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. He is the recipient of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from some of the world’s most prestigious universities, and is the author of more than 150 books.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, as gun massacres continue to plague U.S. society, the question that naturally pops into mind is this: Why is the U.S. government so uniquely bad among developed countries at tackling issues in general that affects people’s lives? Indeed, it is not just gun violence that makes the U.S. an outlier. It is also a big outlier when it comes to health, income inequality and the environment. In fact, the U.S in an outlier with regard to its overall mode of economic, political and social organization.

Noam Chomsky: We can begin by taking note of an important date in U.S. history: June 23, 2022. On that date, the senior Justice of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, issued a decision solemnly pronouncing his country completely unhinged, a threat to itself and the world.

Those were not of course Justice Thomas’s words, speaking for the usual 6-3 majority of the reactionary Roberts Court, but they capture their import: In the United States, people may carry a concealed weapon for “self-defense,” with no further justification. In no functioning society have people been living in such terror of their fellow citizens that they need guns for self-defense if they’re taking a walk with their dogs or going to pick up their children at their (properly barricaded) nursery school.

A true sign of the famous American exceptionalism.

Even apart from the lunacy proclaimed from on high on that historic date, the United States is a highly unusual society, in many ways. The most important are the most general. In your words, “its overall mode of economic, political, and social organization.” That merits a few comments.

The basic nature of the modern state capitalist world, including every more or less developed society, was well enough described 250 years ago by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations and in the Madisonian framework of the Constitution of what was soon to become the most powerful state in world history.

In Smith’s words, the “masters of mankind” are those with economic power — in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England. They are the “principal architects” of government policy, which they shape to ensure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended to,” however “grievous” the effects on others, including the people of England but more severely those subject to its “savage injustice” abroad. To the extent that they can, in every age they pursue their “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves, nothing for other people.”

In the Madisonian constitutional framework, power was to be in the hands of “the wealth of the nation,” men (women were property, not persons) who recognize the rights of property owners and the need to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The basic principle was captured succinctly by the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” His current successors understand that very well, to an unusual extent.

Madison’s doctrine differed from Smith’s description of the world in some important respects. In his book The Sacred Fire of Liberty, Madison scholar Lance Banning writes that Madison “was — to depths that we today are barely able to imagine — an eighteenth-century gentleman of honor.” He expected that those granted power would act as an “enlightened Statesman” and “benevolent philosopher,” “pure and noble,” “men of intelligence, patriotism, property and independent circumstances … whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

His illusions were soon shattered.

In very recent years, the reigning doctrine in the courts has been a variety of “originalism” that would have judges view the world from the perspective of a group of wealthy white male slaveowners, who were indeed reasonably enlightened — by the standards of the 18th century.

A more rational version of “originalism” was ridiculed 70 years ago by Justice Robert Jackson: “Just what our forefathers did envision, or would have envisioned had they foreseen modern conditions, must be divined from materials almost as enigmatic as the dreams Joseph was called upon to interpret for Pharaoh.” That is a saner version than the Bork-Scalia-Alito et al. current version because of the highlighted phrase.

The contortions about “originalism” are of no slight interest. There’s no space to go into it here, but there are a few matters that deserve attention, just keeping to the most dedicated adherents to the doctrine — not the saner version ridiculed by Justice Jackson, but the very recent and now prevailing doctrine, which Jackson presumably would have regarded as too absurd even to discuss.

One issue has to do with the role of historical tradition. In Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, he stresses the importance of relying on historical tradition in determining whether rights are implied in the Constitution (and Amendments). He points out, correctly, that the treatment of women historically gives little basis for according them rights.

In plain words, the history in law and practice is grotesque.

Read more

The War In Ukraine Pushes The World Closer To The Edge Of A Climate Precipice

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Putin’s war in Ukraine, which could last for years, is in fact an absolute godsent to the most destructive forces on the planet, namely the arms industry and the fossil fuel companies.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes a crime of aggression under international law. Putin’s regime launched an attack on a sovereign country that posed no direct threat to the Russian Federation. Russian forces have pounded cities into submission, thousands of civilians have been killed, and millions have fled as refugees.

The war on Ukraine has also fueled a food crisis in developing countries across the world and added to the widespread inflation in food prices. Russia and Ukraine export more than a quarter of the world’s wheat. But blockades and sanctions are causing wheat shortages in many Middle East and African countries.

However, the business of war is profitable. Putin’s war in Ukraine, which could last for years, is in fact an absolute godsent to the most destructive forces on the planet, namely the arms industry and the fossil fuel companies.

Military expenditure, which reached an all-time high of $2.1 trillion in 2021, will surely rise much further as several European countries have already made plans to beef up their armed forces in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a historic vote, the German parliament voted for a constitutional amendment to create a $100 billion euro ($112 billion) fund to modernize the country’s armed forces. The bulk of the money will go toward the purchase of American-made F-35 fighter jets. German chancellor Olaf Scholtz also promised that Germany would spend more than 2 percent of its gross national product on the military.  In real terms, Germany’s annual defense spending would increase by 50 percent in 2022 alone,” according to Alexandra Marksteiner, researcher at the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program. “This would catapult Germany towards the top of the list of the world’s largest military spenders. All else being equal, Germany would rank third—up from seventh in 2020—behind the United States and China and ahead of India and Russia.”

Belgium, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Sweden have also announced a boost to their defense spendings. Indeed, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has managed to revive a “brain-dead” NATO. Even Nordic states with a long history of neutrality are now eager to join the transatlantic alliance.

In the US, where annual increases to the defense budget are routine, the war in Ukraine has created strong bipartisan support for more military spending. The Senate Armed Services Committee on June 16 voted 23-3 to boost funding for military spending by $45 billion over the Biden administration’s budget request. If accepted, the bill would raise the defense budget for the fiscal year 2023 to over $817 billion.

The war in Ukraine has also reinvigorated the fossil fuel industry and put climate action and clean energy on the back burner. With gas prices going through the roof, the Biden administration is doing everything possible to boost domestic oil production, which includes issuing drilling permits on federal lands and ordering an unprecedented release of oil from US reserves.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden had also urged OPEC and its allies to boost oil output in an effort to curb soaring gasoline prices. Biden’s plea fell on deaf ears, but his plan to visit the Middle East next month seems to have produced a change of heart for OPEC as it has just announced a hike in oil production.

Europe’s response to the energy impacts of the war in Ukraine is also shortsighted. Instead of boosting investments on clean energy as part of its goal to break free from Russian fossil fuels, the European Union simply opted to pursue new energy arrangements such as increasing imports of gas from Norway, importing liquified natural gas (LNG) from places like Australia, Qatar, and the United States, and building more LNG terminals. Natural gas may be producing less greenhouse gases than oil and coal, but it is not environmentally friendly.

Worse still, Europe has decided to turn to coal for power generation after Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom decided to curb gas supplies to several European Union countries, including Germany.

It is probably still not too late to rescue the planet. But time is surely running out, and no one should expect politicians and bureaucrats to do what must be done to save humanity from climate doom. We can still rescue this planet from global warming through the power that citizens united can have in forcing change.

At this historic juncture, and while we need to end the brutal war in Ukraine without any further delay, concerned citizens worldwide must embrace wholeheartedly the Global Green New Deal project. There is no other viable alternative for a sustainable future.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).

Frank Bovenkerk & Jan Rath – Lodewijk Brunt ~ Flaneur in toga

Er is al een tijdje niks verschenen op de blog van onze vader Lo die in 2020 uit ons leven verdween. Dat vinden wij soms zonde van zo’n omvangrijk en divers document. Lodewijk’s oude studievriend en collega Frank Bovenkerk heeft samen met Jan Rath (opvolger van Lodewijk als professor stadsstudies) een uitvoerig en mooi resumé geschreven over het werkzame leven van Lo. Wij willen dat graag plaatsen als aanvulling op al het overige. Beide heren zijn grondig te werk gegaan en hebben zich ook verdiept in de periode nadat Frank en Lo elkaar een beetje uit het oog zijn verloren. Wij, als zoons van Lo, kunnen ons helemaal vinden in de feiten en hoe Frank en Jan het hebben opgeschreven. Vooral het nogal onvoorspelbare karakter van onze vader wordt raak beschreven en iedereen die hem goed kende herkent deze kant van hem wel. Ook de gedrevenheid in zijn wetenschap en vooral zijn grote passie, de stad (en dan vooral Amsterdam), komen in het stuk heel mooi naar voren. Na het lezen van het stuk hebben we toch weer opnieuw bewondering voor hem gekregen en we missen hem nog iedere dag. Papa Lo was trots geweest op dit in memoriam. Wij hopen dat de bezoekers die dit stuk lezen dat met evenveel genoegen doen als ondergetekenden.

Tibor & Omar Brunt

Zie: http://www.lodewijkbrunt.nl/Lodewijk_Brunt_flaneur_in_toga_2022.pdf