As was the case with last week's post, this post will consist largely of reading recommendations: recent articles available on the Internet that resonate with the themes we've been exploring here at Political Economy Watch since we started in March 2023. In each section below we'll provide a link to our own past articles on these topics. Provide your thoughts in the Comments section below or by sending email to politicaleconomywatch at gmail dot com.
Modern Money Theory
Richard Murphy is a British public intellectual who has been a chartered public accountant, university professor, political economist and now is a prolific blogger, video creator and columnist for The National newspaper in Scotland. He was an early advocate for country-by-country tax reporting and was among the first people in the U.K. to talk about the need for a Green New Deal. He encountered MMT a dozen or so years ago and wove it into his explanation of taxation in his 2015 book, The Joy of Tax: How a Fair Tax System Can Create a Better Society (London, Corgi Books). He blogs prolifically every day at Funding the Future and video casts multiple times weekly here. Most of his political commentary is on British politics, but he periodically writes "explainers" that refresh his readership's understanding of MMT. If you're not in the U.K., that will require a bit of work on your part, but it is well worth the effort. (I wish there were someone in the U.S. who could provide daily political economic commentary with an MMT flavor as well as Murphy does for the U.K.)
Here are three posts from this month which I would assign to students if I were teaching MMT.
• Why it matters that government spending comes before tax", Richard Murphy, Aug 09 2025
• "Why the household analogy in economics is wrong", Richard Murphy, Aug 11 2025
• "Challenging the Overton Window", Richard Murphy, Aug 11 2025
Bill Mitchell is an Australian macroeconomist who has never forgotten his working-class background. He is one of the original contributors to what has become known as MMT, particularly with respect to a federal Job Guarantee's function as a "buffer stock" of employable workers. (Richard Murphy, in contrast, does not talk much about the Job Guarantee.) Mitchell's blog has, from the mid-2000s onward, been a major location for disseminating understanding of MMT. While he tends to be prolix, he still manages to discredit the myths about current capitalist economies disseminated in the mainstream media. Here's a blog post from this month:
• "What does it mean for a nation to become bankrupt?" Bill Mitchell, Aug 11 2025
• Political Economy Watch: past posts on Modern Money Theory, a.k.a. Modern Monetary Theory, a.k.a. MMT
Israel and Palestine
• "A FUTURE GAZA WITHOUT GAZANS" Seymour Hersh, Jul 24 2025. At 88 years of age, Seymour Hersh, the guy who broke the news of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, is still at it. Still mining his contacts in the Pentagon, the "intelligence community" and government bureaucracies around the world. Only the medium of publication has changed. He started at the Chicago City News Bureau and the UPI; now he's on Substack. This article discusses how the Israeli hard right-wing aims to completely depopulate Gaza of Palestinians much as the Nazis aimed to depopulate Poland of Jews during World War II.
Breaking News: Next week at the Venice Film Festival, Cover-Up, the new documentary on Seymour Hersh and his career in investigative journalism by the filmmakers Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, will make its world premiere. Screenings will follow this autumn at the Toronto Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. The film will continue to play festivals this fall and will appear in US theaters over the winter.
• Israel's DARK SECRET Genocide Economy EXPOSED, Francesca Albanese, July 2025. Albanese, an Italian legal scholar, is a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestine territories. Disclosure: I'm much more of a blog reader than a video watcher, so I haven't made it all the way through this video yet, even though it's under 14 minutes long.
• Political Economy Watch: past posts on Israel and Palestine
The Politics of Immigration in the United States
We gave several reading recommendations on this topic in Summer Reading, Part 1. Here's a Paul Krugman post from this past week that explains how Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) is now functioning as
"... a huge secret police force — because what are we supposed to call an organization whose masked agents, bearing no identification, simply grab people off the street? Who shoot at a family fleeing in their truck, after agents refused to identify themselves and smashed the car window, claiming – apparently falsely according to video footage – that the driver tried to harm them?"
• "ICEing the U.S. Economy", Paul Krugman, Aug 20 2025