Monday, February 28, 2022

Has the U.S. been agressive?

 

The applicable wisdom here: "Why do you pick the mote from your neighbors eye and ignore the beam in your own?"

Has Nato Expansion Influenced Russia?

 

 

...and, as we know, NATO stands for "Needs America To Operate"

Friday, February 25, 2022

The Real Reason the Supply Chain is Interrupted

 

Some Ukraine Background

 Remember Kosovo! (The U.S. "invades" a breakaway Serbian/Yugoslavian area with its military). Russians are doing the same thing.

 
 
 
Here is the "loyal" opposition (from Mikethemadbiologist's blog):

We give you U.S. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville (boldface mine):

Tuberville discussed the escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine. He claims that a large part of Vladimir Putin’s desire for further annexation of Ukrainian land is due to the amount of farmland in Ukraine.

“He can’t feed his people,” Tuberville said. “It’s a communist country, so he can’t feed his people, so they need more farmland.”

If Alabama voters are this stupid, maybe, like happens in D.C., Congress should have to approve their budgets too.

Aside: Admittedly, the Substack Bois and the Anti-Antis have said stupid shit, but I think this takes the prize

 

More from Professor Mearscheimer (the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science):



Also: Highly recommended, a nuanced critique of Mearscheimer's stance in the videos above.



Jon Stewart Gets MMT-ized

 Modern Monetary Theory makes the big time... Jon Stewart's podcast:



Thursday, February 24, 2022

Detachment

 The Bhagavad Gita, which is surely the basic text on the practice of detachment, is wonderfully explicit on this point. Krishna tells Arjuna that acting with detachment means doing the right thing for its own sake, because it needs to be done, without worrying about success or failure. (T.S. Eliot paraphrased Krishna’s advice when he wrote, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”)

from here.

Friday, February 11, 2022

Time for a party yet?

Lately I've been debating whether to resume regular get-togethers for socializing, music, parties, etc. and wondered what kind of standard might apply, given the current state of the pandemic. What I came across was this (reported by NBC):

Data as of Feb. 8, 10:07 a.m. ET.

The CDC determines an area's level of virus transmissibility based on the average number of cases relative to a county's population and the Covid test positivity rate. If two indicators suggest different transmission levels, the higher level is selected.

  • Low transmission: fewer than 10 new cases per 100,000 and less than 5 percent positive test rate.

  • Moderate transmission: 10-49.99 new cases per 100,000, 5-7.99 percent positive test rate.

  • Substantial transmission: 50-100 new cases per 100,000, 8-9.99 percent positivity rate.

  • High transmission: 100 or more new cases per 100,000, 10 percent or higher positivity rate.

    Masks are recommended in areas with substantial or high transmission.

Where I'm located, in Sacramento County, daily cases are 61 per 100,000 residents, with a test positivity rate of 12.8%  (i.e. "high transmission," at least, if you are guided by the higher positivity test rate) . El Dorado County reports 41 cases per 100,000, with a test positivity rate of 12.1%. 

Update: Just FYI, there is a County Dashboard. Google for your location. As of 2/28/22, the case rate is down to 17.6. (moderate transmission)

So...at least by CDC standards, we're not out of the woods yet. The Sacramento Bee publishes the cases and positivity rate regularly for Sacramento and surrounding counties. FYI, the NY Times evaluates the CDC here and here.

For those of you interested in a bit of history about how we got to this point (and how bad the CDC has been), you can try Michael Lewis' Premonition book. One indicator of how inadequate the U.S. response has been: the U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 22% of the deaths--more casualties than in wars since, and including, World War I.

In any case, you now have at least one benchmark by which you can guide your own behavior. Unfortunately the phrase "follow the science" does not make science unambiguous, omniscient or always correct, but this information may be better than seat-of-the-pants guidance.






Thursday, February 10, 2022

The Absence of the Left in U.S. Politics

For convenience, we often think of politics in terms of "right" and "left"--a classification that stems from the position of legislators in the chambers of the French legislature when the right were royalists and the left were not. For our purposes here, though, it's probably more accurate to call the left the party of labor, while the right is the party of business or capital. 

Complaints about the predominance of the right (capital) over the left (labor), elicit protests from those capital has convinced. And the spending on marketing to convince the public that capital (the right) is a persecuted minority virtually no limit. The Kochs, the epitome of the political right, spent a reported $889 million on politics in 2016, for just one example.

The Kochs are extremists, too. Their father, Fred Koch, patented the processes by which we still refine crude oil into useful products. As the CEO of Koch Industries, Fred built refineries all over the world, including for Hitler and Stalin. He reportedly hated the Russians, but loved the Germans. He even hired a German nanny to raise his sons. That nanny was a Nazi--no, not a stern disciplinarian, a member of Hitler's party. 

So raised-by-a-Nazi Kochs are pretty hard right, and helped found numerous right-wing think tanks, including Cato (libertarian), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Heritage, Manhattan, Mercator, etc. They also were founding members of the John Birch Society--an organization that called Dwight Eisenhower a commie (or commie dupe). For a little perspective, I'd say Attilla the Hun would be slightly to the left of the Kochs. 

Complain about the dominance of right-wing propaganda, and you'll hear "What about George Soros?"...the "lefty" who supposedly balance this right-wing bias. But Soros' political spending in 2016 was reportedly only $27 million--a lot of money, but Kochs spent more than 30 times more in that election. Soros is also no friend of labor. He made his bones speculating in currency, and is a capitalists' capitalist. 

An actual lefty would be someone like Bernie Sanders, a New Deal Democrat who understand that monopolies in particular are best run by the state. This is evident in the Sacramento region where a  publicly-owned utility (SMUD) supplies power. Privately-owned PG&E supplies the nearby areas with electricity. SMUD is 35% cheaper, and its executives are not consulting with criminal attorneys about their lack of maintenance leading to negligent homicides as their power lines spark forest fires. Lest you think Sacramento is just getting what it's paid for, SMUD's chief executive is paid far less than PG&E's CEO too.

Single payer healthcare--something that Sanders and a majority of the American population support--would also be cheaper and better. It's not at all controversial that Canadians have longer life spans and pay roughly half what the U.S. spends, per-capita, on health care.

The "progressive" ideas discussed or supported by Biden--from protecting the climate to providing child care, from better health care to fairer taxation, from gun control to voting rights--are all supported by two thirds or more of Americans. 

Yet pundits typically complain about anything resembling labor-friendly or socialism-based as though it would be more costly, or more bureaucratic, or just plain bad. Even the word ("socialism") is enough to turn most people off. The preponderance of news simply ignores the possibility.

When are we going to stop the propaganda about national 'debt'?

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

Everyone knows national 'debt' is bad. Why...all debt is bad! It reduces your economic freedom! You are in a kind of quasi-slavery to creditors if your household has debt. And you must always pay your debts, too!

Except none of that is true. If a bank lends me money because I have a hot tip on the fourth race at Santa Anita, does anyone really believe the public sector's courts and sheriffs have a duty to enforce payment of that debt? There's even law that predates the American Revolutionary War that says loans designed to default and give the lender title to the security in foreclosure are not legal. The sub-prime/derivatives scandal is the most recent reminder that impossible-to-pay-back loans are not fair, never mind legal.

There's also an enormous amount of propaganda designed to make the public believe currency creators are just like households... but what household can pay its mortgage with what it prints in the back bedroom?

Popular opinion thinks "tax and spend" describes the fiscal operation of the federal government--the monopoly creator of legal currency. But...where do people get the dollars to pay those taxes if government doesn't spend the dollars first?

The real-world sequence of fiscal actions must be "spend first, then retrieve some dollars in taxes." That's how the real world actually works. Taxes remain important because they create the demand for the otherwise useless pieces of paper we call "dollars," but spending must precede the receipt of tax revenue, so taxes do not and cannot provision federal programs. 

Alone in the economy, the federal government is fiscally unconstrained. Remember that the next time you hear the "Eeek! We're running out of money!" talk. We will never run out of money. We might run out of resources, goods and services, but the symbols of wealth are never ending.

Incidentally, for the inflationistas ("If you just print lots of money, you'll get [gasp!]...[hyper-] inflation!"): According to our central bank's own audit--required by the congressional mandate--it issued $16 - $29 trillion in credit in 2007-8 to the same financial sector whose frauds crashed the economy. Where was the inflation? (And where was the tax rise?)

What do we call the money spent, but not retrieved in taxes--the dollars with which people conduct their business? First, we call them the dollar financial assets of the population. But, just as accurately, we call them the national 'debt.' That's not exotic economics, it's double-entry bookkeeping.

In a way, it's analogous to your bank account. That's your asset, just as it is the bank's liability. The "deficit hawks" are adamant in advising people, in effect, to march down to their bank and demand it have less debt. An honest bank officer would say "But that would shrink your accounts, too!" The American public is supposed to say "We don't care! We just hate the word 'debt'!"

I'm moved to write these words because, once again, propagandist George Will has written a column decrying federal 'debt.'  Will is a pundit whose ethics were flexible enough that in the run up to the 1980 election, he stole President Carter's debate briefing book and handed it to the Reagan campaign. Nevertheless, Mr. Will he feels he has enough ethical standing to to critique "profligate Democrats and delusional Republicans."

One economist, Stephanie Kelton, answered the current 'debt' panic on her blog (and with her book The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy). The truth, says Dr. Kelton: "government deficits supply the non-government sector with net financial assets—i.e. the government’s red ink is our collective black ink."

"But what about Greece?" True, Greece had a relatively high national debt, and as a consequence was at one time paying 35% interest to sell the debt. But Greece is a European Union member, and uses the euro. It's not a monetary sovereign, like the U.S. and Japan. It can't print drachmas any more, but the U.S. and Japan can issue dollars and yen literally without limit. That critical distinction escapes the press and the likes of George Will.

One might think Mr. Will, or any of the other promoters of 'debt' panic would appreciate the distinction between household debt and national 'debt,' or between those who print their own money and have to get others to do that... but no. Will apparently has difficulty distinguishing between theft and legitimate reporting, too. 

Meanwhile (from Mona Ali): "Just this week, COVAX, the WHO program created to deliver vaccines to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, revealed that it is fresh out of cash. It needs $5.2 billion to continue vaccine rollout in low-income countries that have received fewer total vaccine doses than richer economies’ residents have total booster jabs. Our crisis-prone system breeds instability whose effects fall unevenly. Unless our disordered world economy is reoriented toward protecting the interests of the majority, it may not withstand this catastrophe—let alone the next one."


COVID-19: The Illusion of Herd Immunity

 

Saturday, February 5, 2022

These tweets say it all... Democrats: gotta love 'em

 



Friday, February 4, 2022

History, as the winners see it

 From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Graeber and Wengrow (from its footnotes)

In a brilliant and under-appreciated book called Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), James Scott makes the point that whenever one group has overwhelming power over another, as when a community is divided between lords and serfs, masters and slaves, high-caste and untouchable, both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will always be an 'official version' of reality--say, that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only have the best interest of their slaves at heart--which no one, neither masters nor slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insists subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event. In a way, this is the purest expression of power: the ability to force the dominated to pretend, effectively, that two plus two is five. Or that the pharaoh is a god. As a result, the version of reality that tends to be preserved for history and posterity is precisely that 'official transcript.'

The Davis Vanguard Wants to Sacramentorment Davis Housing

(c) by Mark Dempsey Editor David Greenwald's recent Davis Vanguard commentary " Housing Production Continues to Fall Well Short &qu...