New Economic Perspectives has the article Larry Summers Got a Bad Rap on Stimulus: Obama is the Problem by William K. Black. The article begins as follows:

I am a strong supporter of Janet Yellen and believe her support for the fiscal and monetary policies best designed to produce a stronger, prompter recovery from the Great Recession makes her the superior replacement for Ben Bernanke.  The criticism of Larry Summers’ position on fiscal stimulus, however, was generally inaccurate.  Within the Obama/Biden administration, the best known economists (Summers, Christina Romer, and Jared Bernstein) proved dramatically better economists than did the non-economists who eventually came to dominate Obama’s economic policies (Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, and William Daley).  Summers, Romer, and Bernstein were strong voices in favor of fiscal stimulus.  Summers deserves some additional praise because he had to break from his mentor’s (Bob Rubin’s) pro-austerity dogmas to reach his anti-austerian position.

I wasn’t sure if it were Summers or someone else that was giving bad advice to President Obama on the stimulus.  If William Black wants to defend Summers on this aspect of his economics advice, then I am willing to listen.  There are some links that I am going to have to follow to see if there is an explanation of just where Summers stood compared to Romer.  He might have stood correctly in opposition to Geithner, Lew, and Daley, but still be more tepid about stimulus than Romer.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Home Page has a link to the video Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman discusses Antifragility at NYPL.

I always find it easy to understand the concept and the value of what he is promoting. I also have a devil of a time figuring out how to achieve the concept and its value.

This talk is no exception. However, there is a hint that the how to is discussed more in his new book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, than in his previous books.

Even understanding the difference between anti-fragile and robust took a fair amount of perseverance as I watched the video. In the end, I am very glad that I did not quit. Had I seen the full title of the book beforehand, it might have helped a little.

Talking Points Memo has the story Obama Blasts GOP ‘Extortion’ And Threat Of ‘Apocalypse’ Over Debt Limit.

Obama is determined not to repeat the mistake he made by letting Republicans use the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip. He likened the GOP’s position to a hypothetical Democratic Congress demanding that a Republican president agree to tax hikes in exchange for lifting the borrowing limit. Earlier this year, when the debt limit deadline was coming up, Obama refused to negotiate, and as a result, Republicans caved and raised it.

The point is that refusing to negotiate with the House Republicans is the correct strategy.  It worked before, and it will work again.  If the Republicans were to carry out their threat, the impact would be that enough voters would vote to turn the House back to a Democratic majority.  Its a heads Obama wins, tails the Republicans lose situation.

McClatchy has the story U.N. calculations of poison rockets’ paths implicate Syrian guard unit.

“If the U.N. inspectors correctly calculated the trajectories, it certainly seems to indicate that the chemically armed rockets were fired from government-controlled land,” said Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director and weapons expert. “It’s clear and convincing evidence.”
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Austin Long, a security and weapons expert at Columbia University, said his back-of-an-envelope tabulations since the U.N. report came out indicated that the Republican Guard, which is thought to control the chemical stockpiles, very likely moved one rocket system to a secure location near the base and launched.

I have given you links to the biographies of the experts quoted in the article.  Perhaps this will help you to figure out if these are trustworthy experts.  In this house of  cards it is hard to figure out whom to believe.

The Daily Show has an interview with Robert Reich ion two parts.

Exclusive – Robert Reich Extended Interview Pt. 1

Exclusive – Robert Reich Extended Interview Pt. 2

In a previous post, Inequality for All: Robert Reich Warns Record Income Gap Is Undermining Our Democracy, you got to hear Robert Reich interviewed by a “serious” journalist. Comparing the two interviews you will see that both interviews were very good at eliciting different pieces of information. Each interview added to our store of knowledge.

I would have loved to have heard Robert Reich explain to Jon Stewart not only what was done to solve similar problems in the past, but explicitly how it was done then. What happened that allowed a political force to gain enough power to rein in the previous robber baron’s? Let us talk about that history.

Some of the alternative news sources are really getting pathetic with their begging and pleading for support.  I tried to send the following message to one such source, but they are not accepting responses to their pleas.

Seriously, people, you just do not know how to monetize your content in the digital age. You just can’t seem to figure out why your readers are unwilling to make even the smallest monthly payment for a subscription.

Some people choose from hundreds of sources over a month. If they had to pay $1, $3, or $10 for a monthly subscription to each one, that would be anywhere from $100 to $1,000 per month.

I have a blog post  Monetizing Internet Content that explains how to solve the problem while recognizing what the real roadblock is.

Basically, all you alternate media folk, The Daily Kos, The Real News Network, Reader Supported News, Consortium News, Truth-Out, etc. need to get together and create a clearing house that will take in a monthly subscription and provide the subscriber with access to thousands of news sites.

The clearing house distributes micro-payments to all news sources in their service for each article that a subscriber reads.

This distributes the subscriber’s payment in a way that represents the value that the subscriber actually gets from the articles that she or he reads.

Hundreds of times more readers would be willing to pay a substantial monthly fee to get access to an unlimited number of sources than would be willing to pay a very small fee to get access to only one source.

I offer this idea to you, gratis. I want nothing more out of this than a way for me to fairly pay for the value you provide.

It is so frustrating to have the solution to a problem, but no means to get the sufferers of the problem to hear about the solution.  If any of you readers know how to tell internet content providers how to solve their funding problem, I would be really grateful to you for passing this idea along.

The Daily Kos has the article Watch this ex-congressman leave everyone speechless on Meet The Press featuring the video below.

One of the panelists was described by The Daily Kos as CNBC mouthpiece and apologist Maria Bartiromo. That is probably nicer than the words I would have chosen.

Some of the rebuttal that The Daily Kos provided is quoted below.

Most of the segment was the standard blabber of nonsensical statements on the economy.
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Secondly, of all the jobs that are being created or that would be created, the wages are normalized because of policies that allow outsourcing and because of the decline of the power of unions. In other words, the American worker is working for less and with little recourse or representation. This increases profits for the titans of capital which adds to income and wealth disparity even further. The American worker has not benefitted from their increased productivity. It has almost entirely gone to the top 1 percent.

You have to wait to see the final zinger by the ex-congressman, who I have not named in order to leave you in suspense until you see it.

As it turns out, I just heard a report on NPR’s Marketplace that said the banks were not lending because they were keeping excess reserves at the Fed. Excess meaning reserves not required by law in contradiction to what David Gregory, the bankers he spoke to, and Maria Bartiromo said. So much for getting actual facts from the Sunday “news” shows.

Perhaps the bankers were saying the poppycock that they did to David Gregory because they figured that he knew so little about what is going on in the financial world that he would not be smart enough to object to what they said. Of course, if you are a reporter who only talks to the self-interested bankers, you aren’t going to learn a darn thing. Thus, you do not even have to feel guilty about unknowingly spreading your ignorance to your audience.

Inequality For All is a movie that will be playing in Kendall Square, Cambridge (search for “inequality” on the page) starting September 27, 2013.

Democracy Now has an interview Inequality for All: Robert Reich Warns Record Income Gap Is Undermining Our Democracy.

The video covers a number of topics. Here are just a couple of excerpts to whet your appetite.

ROBERT REICH: Let me just be clear. In the late 1990s,1999, Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, others in the administration, did agree to support Republican bills to get rid of the Glass-Steagall act, which as I said, had separated investment from commercial banking. They also opposed the move a by the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation to regulate derivatives. That is what got us into trouble, the lack of oversight from derivative trading. These are bets on bets. Wall Street was making a fortune on them, certainly by 2007. And those bets were out of control. So, let’s just put it this way. Bob Rubin is also a friend, but I spent a lot of time in the administration battling Bob Rubin because, Bob, again I like him, his view of the economy is through the eyes of Wall Street. Those eyes — the Wall Street’s view of America, is not where most people live. It is just not — it doesn’t take account of the problems, the challenges, the realities faced by most people. It views the economy as sort of a bunch of assets to be moved around wherever they can get the highest use and best use. And people are not simply assets.
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ROBERT REICH: It is very interesting to examine who the great economic criminals are. It is interesting you mentioned the Pinochet coup because two years after that, Milton Friedman came down to Chile to meet with Pinochet to urge economic reforms that were basically quite brutal and brutalized a great number of people. Milton Friedman was not necessarily a supporter of Pinochet, but certainly hated Allende, was very supportive of what Kissinger and Nixon had both done and that is helped Pinochet take over eventually

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, this week, Kerry met with Kissinger to get advice on Syria, on September 11th.

ROBERT REICH: On September 11th. There are these unfortunate parallels. So in defining an economic criminal, I think it would be interesting to see the interactions between economics and politics. The criminal actions to me, around the world, particularly in the United States, are the underminings of democracy. That is, if we cannot have a democracy that controls, that limits the excesses of capitalism, the brutality of capitalism, then we don’t have any hope of a just economy. And the people who are making it difficult for our democracy or any democracy to function—again, very poignantly reflected in this Fortieth anniversary of the coup in Chile—are those people who could very well be defined as economic criminals.

The Real News Network has a replay of the video Pepe Escobar on Pipeline Politics and what was really behind the U.S. wanting to bomb Syria?

You may need a program to figure out who’s who in this program. I also do not know who the players are and what their reputations and ulterior motives may be. Sometimes I just have a need to hear the same story told to me over and over by different people before I can really get a grasp on it.

See my previous post Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concern for my first installment.

The Wall Street Journal has the story Summers Withdraws Name for Fed Chairmanship.

First the good news.

Lawrence Summers pulled out of the contest to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve after weeks of public excoriation, forcing President Barack Obama to move further down the list of contenders to head the central bank.

Then the bad news.

One leading candidate is Janet Yellen, the Fed’s current vice chairwoman, who has garnered substantial support among Democrats in Congress and among economists. But the public lobbying on her behalf appears to have annoyed the president, say administration insiders, and may lead him to look elsewhere.

Then the ugly news.

Administration insiders say Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury secretary, also is a possibility,

and perhaps a sigh of relief.

though a person close to him reaffirmed Sunday night that he doesn’t want the job.

It almost gives me a sense of power to read:

after weeks of public excoriation, forcing President Barack Obama to move

Perhaps all my itching and moaning did some good.

If President Obama does appoint someone like Geithner, I will start to think that the President doesn’t like us anymore.