The Week End Economists Face the Music. Apr 23-24, 2016.

[Hugin]

You're kidding right? A WEE for this weekend?

I had three choices...

1) Go with my planned topic, Earth Day. *crickets*

2) Go with yet another tribute to PRINCE. (Believe me, there are others out there already underway, which are far better equipped to do the topic with the depth it deserves.)

3) Hunker down with our record collection.

So, I picked #3.

Oh, and one more once only thing for the WEE... Some advice, buy or sell something PURPLE! Soon! Time's a' wastin'.

*sigh* I may as well turn this into a poll.

6 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	You should have gone with number 1.
	1 (17%)
	You should have gone with number 2.
	0 (0%)
	You should have gone with number 3.
	2 (33%)
	You should have posted a video of "Purple Rain".
	0 (0%)
	I like purple.
	0 (0%)
	I like pie.
	1 (17%)
	I like purple pie.
	2 (33%)
	0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
Show usernames Disclaimer: This is an Internet poll

[Fuddnik]

1. I was at the Harley dealer yesterday.

They had a Purple Low Rider on the showroom floor. It was gawd awful ugly.

Another color and it might have followed me home. At least it saved me the cost of a divorce lawyer.

[Hugin]

2. I've wanted this exact car since I was pushing Hot Wheels.

So, it really predates Prince by a couple of decades. However, he may have just made it easier for me to get one like it. I thank him for that.

[Hotler]

4. Car needs more gauges.

In 1970 my mom wanted a new car and my step dad asked what she wanted. Here two choices were the Pontiac GTO and the Oldsmobile 442. After test driving both and smoking the tires on both during test drives she picked the 442. Damn I miss my mom.

[Hugin]

5. Oh, yeaah! 442!

I did have one of those and a Plymouth Satellite (hemi )

Your Mom sounds like she was a treasure. I would've liked going car shopping with her.

[Hotler]

14. Okay here is a story about mom and the GTO.

It was my mom, my step dad the car salesman and me in the GTO for a test drive. Mom was driving, the salesman in the passenger seat and my step dad and I in the back and we head out to a 4-lane stretch of road that back then lead to a canyon where it ended at Martin Merietta's rocket factory in Littleton Colorado. There was little to no traffic on the road and without warning mom comes to a dead stop in the road, drops the GTO down in first gear and just smokes the tires and when shifting to second the tries chirped and everyone's head was just snapped back and the torque push us back in the seats. The look on the salesman's face was priceless. I was 15yrs. old at the time. I was not along when mom test drove the 442. A couple of days later when I came home from school the Olds 442 was in the driveway. My mom loved smoking Pal-Mal reds and drinking Manhattans, driving and fishing and reading tarot cards. She was real good at reading regular playing vards, so good it was spooky. She had red hair and looked a lot like Maureen O'Hara. We would go fishing at Lake John which was outside of Walden Colorado just shy of the Wyoming border about 200-miles one way from the house. Mom always kept her fishing gear in the trunk of the 442 and would make two thermoses of Manhattans grab a carton of smokes and off we would go. There was many a Sunday night coming home I would be half a sleep in the back of the Olds and once and awhile I would hear the tires sign as mom rounded the curves. I sure do miss her.

[Hugin]

3. BREAKING: Yet another potential topic for the WEE just went down; Harriet Tubman on the money.

Thanks to Margaret Cho for the stolen image. Much obliged.

I'm really wondering if the Google servers can stand the strain.

She's lit up like a purple Christmas tree, Capt'n.

[Gungnir]

6. Honor or Insult?: A Debate on the Significance of Harriet Tubman on the New $20 Bill

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/22/honor_or_insult_a_debate_on

On Wednesday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has announced that new $20 bills will feature Harriet Tubman on the front, replacing former president and slave owner Andrew Jackson. The move comes after more than a half a million people voted for Tubman to replace Jackson. But in fact, Jackson will not be removed entirely, simply moved to the back of the bill. Some have criticized the idea that Harriet Tubman should represent U.S. currency at all. In a 2015 essay that went viral again yesterday, writer Feminista Jones wrote: "If having Harriet Tubman’s face on the $20 bill was going to improve women’s access to said bill, I’d be all for it. But instead, it only promises to distort Tubman’s legacy ... [which] is rooted in resisting the foundation of American capitalism." For more, we speak with Steven Thrasher, a weekly columnist for the Guardian US, where he wrote a piece headlined "To put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill would be an insult to her legacy." And we speak also with Winston Grady-Willis, professor and chair of Africana Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

[Gungnir]

7. Harriet Tubman and the Monetization of Black History

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35739-harriet-tubman-and-the-monetization-of-black-history

There's a strange irony in printing the image of someone who spent her life on the run because she was worth money onto money itself, as a supposed honor. This hasn't stopped the US Treasury Department from announcing a change replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the face of the $20 bill. While many people see the change as progressive and indicative of respect, others have taken issue with the contradictions therein. Capitalism, bolstered by slave labor and steadily craving more chattel, showed the US Bill of Rights and the Constitution to be fictional documents.

Now, as Tubman is chosen to grace US currency, we see the latest chapter of a never-ending saga of consumption. Black people were and still are for sale; Black history is for sale; and Black culture, too, is always for sale.
...
Now, in the case of Harriet Tubman, she is being made into money. Her face will be placed among men who would have sold her, killed her and committed other egregious acts of violence against her if they would have had the chance. She was a Black woman whose strength seemed endless. She is not being honored by being placed on a weakening dollar.

Black people have been through incredibly distressing times, and if we know anything, it's that we cannot always depend on money. When times have gotten rough for Black people, we've always depended on our self-determination for our freedom. It's this realization that leads me to ask: Why put a value on a people, a history and a culture that's absolutely priceless?

[Gungnir]

8. Harriet Tubman Was a Republican!

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/04/harriet-tubman-was-republican

Conservatives have finally found something to like about the Obama administration:

Perhaps some of the voices calling for Tubman on the $20 just wanted any prominent African-American woman to replace one of the white males on our currency. If it was political correctness that drove this decision, who cares? The Obama administration has inadvertently given Tubman fans of all political stripes an opportunity to tell the story of a deeply-religious, gun-toting Republican who fought for freedom in defiance of the laws of a government that refused to recognize her rights.

Yeah. That's the ticket. All those folks in the Obama administration had no idea who Harriet Tubman really was. They were all like, check this out, Jack: black, female, helped slaves, done. Boxes checked. Identity politics satisfied. Put her on the twenty.

The poor fools. She was religious! She carried a gun while helping slaves escape! She was a Republican! She fought for freedom against a tyrannical government! If you think about it, she's basically the poster child of the modern-day Tea Party. And none of those idiots in the White House had a clue.

Seriously. That seems to be what they think. Next they're going to remind us that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican too.

[Gungnir]

9. 4 Ways Harriet Tubman Totally Kicked Ass From a Libertarian POV

http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/21/4-ways-harriet-tubman-totally-kicked-ass

So Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) is going to be the new face of the $20 bill. Great choice, yes. The only downside, really, is that the bills won't be released until 2026 or later, by which point they'll be worth, what, about $10 in today's fiat currency? And Andrew Jackson, who in many ways incarnates everything that is awful about America (racist, jingoistic, power-mad, genocidal, and more), will still be on the back of the bill.

Here are four ways that Tubman isn't just a great choice in general but a great choice from a specifically libertarian perspective.

She chose to live free or die and articulated that message for all to understand. "I had reasoned this out in my mind," she said, recalling the death of her master and the necessity of escape. "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me."

more

[Gungnir]

10. Psyched About the Harriet Tubman $20? Prepare to Wait

http://www.wired.com/2016/04/harriet-tubman-20/

In an exciting, and overdue, bit of news, the US Treasury announced it is putting a woman’s face on paper currency. After months of deliberation, the government chose Harriet Tubman, the Civil War-era abolitionist and suffragist. She’ll grace the $20 bill, replacing Andrew Jackson.

Exactly when this happens remains to be seen. The government moves at a glacial pace, especially when redesigning currency. In an open letter posted on Medium, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is hard at work creating new looks for $20, $10, and $5 notes, which it will unveil in 2020. That’s five years spent remaking some very small pieces of paper.

more

[snot]

12. Maybe they're thinking the forces seeking to eliminate paper money will prevail before 2020,

and they can save a few virtual bucks.

[antigop]

11. New musical about Wall Street on Broadway: "American Psycho"

http://www.playbill.com/article/the-lone-wolf-of-wall-street-bloodies-broadway-on-opening-night

"Making a killing on Wall Street” is taken to extravagant and literal extremes in American Psycho, the Broadway musical that Duncan Sheik and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa made of Brett Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel and Mary Harron’s 2000 movie. It arrived April 21 at the Schoenfeld Theatre, helmed by Rupert Goold, who originally directed the show’s sold-out premiere two years ago at his Almeida Theatre in London.

Benjamin Walker, the former Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer—though decidedly un-Presidential here—is dead-on in the title role, one Patrick Bateman, a New York investment banking exec working in mergers and acquisitions (or—as he puts it—“murders and executions”).

Arriving center stage in his Ralph Lauren underwear, he begins putting on his designer armor for another hard day of stock-market trading—almost ritualistically, like a matador preparing for a little death in the afternoon—guiding us through his narcissistic toilette, tossing out chic brand-names and success tips essential to being Top Dog in the dog-eat-dog world of high finance on Wall Street of the 1980s.

As corporate climbers go, Robert Morse’s window-cleaner on the rise in How To Success in Business Without Really Trying seems positively quaint now, getting ahead with just guile, charm and chicanery. Bateman is in the advanced class of Interoffice Backstabbing, leveling the field with a little decapitation and chainsaw-massacring.

[Gungnir]

13. NakedCapitalism: Reader Query: Seeking Recommendations on Economics Primers

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/reader-query-seeking-recommendations-on-economics-primers.html

From reader FC:

I love reading your work, and the articles you link, but I need more education as there’s lots I don’t understand. So I am doing some reading in undergraduate economics, and trying to get my head around introductory monetary policy theory. Is there any chance you have a few good texts you could recommend for the basics? There a lot of jargon for which I can’t really find decent explanations.

Suggestions?

For financial economics, Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)Behavior of Markets is very good and written for laypeople, and has the added advantage of explaining what is wrong about conventional theories. But what about macro and (ugh) micro? The problem is a book like Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics assumes the reader already has the basic foundations.

What FC may need is more like a primer or series of primers rather than a textbook. Any suggestions very much appreciated.