The Real News Network has the interview with Larry Wilkerson, Karzai Justified In Refusal of Bilateral Security Agreement.

DESVARIEUX: So, Larry, let’s talk about the role of the Taliban, ’cause you have a spokesperson for Karzai actually saying that they’ve been in negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. What do you foresee their role being?

WILKERSON: Well, everybody’s been in negotiations with the Taliban. That’s an amorphous term. As I said, there is an extreme there. On the one extreme, you’ve got a farmer who’s angry that we stepped on his opium crop, poppy crop, and so forth. He’s a Taliban. He’s fighting. He shoots at U.S. soldiers. On the other extreme, you’ve got the people like Mullah Omar and so forth who are dedicated Taliban. In between lies a wide range of people.

They are going to have to be a part of any political solution in Afghanistan. So all these negotiations, whether it’s the Pakistanis, whether it’s the Afghans themselves or ISAF or NATO or the United States, all looking at the Taliban, they’re going to have to incorporate a body of that group that we call Taliban into whatever political solution occurs. And I don’t see that as being that–difficult, but not being impossible.

One of my interlocutors in Afghanistan has told me that there’s no way the Afghan people are going to allow the Taliban version that we associate with the word Taliban, hat is to say, the people who brought about the kind of coercion and oppression on Afghanistan during their reign, though they might have eliminated drugs to a certain extent and so forth. They’re not coming back. Those people are not coming back and going to control Afghanistan.

I think he’s probably right about that. But there are a lot of people, as I suggested, in that title, Taliban. And since there are a lot of people, some of them are going ta have to be incorporated somehow in the political solution.

Is it just possible that everyone, including us, would be better off if we just got out of Afghanistan the way we finally got out of Iraq?

Should we take the chance that Wilkerson is right that the Taliban as we think we know them would not come back to power in the form that they were in when we threw them out? If they don’t, then haven’t we already accomplished our mission in Afghanistan? Why can’t we accept our success, and just get out?

The more we try to make absolutely sure the Taliban won’t return in their previous form, the longer it will take for us to find out if we have already succeeded. The risk may be bigger if we stay there than if we leave.

The New York Times has Paul Krugman’s article  Barons of Broadband.

Last week’s big business news was the announcement that Comcast, a gigantic provider of cable TV and high-speed Internet service, has reached a deal to acquire Time Warner Cable, which is merely huge. If regulators approve the deal, Comcast will be an overwhelmingly dominant player in the business, with around 30 million subscribers.

So let me ask two questions about the proposed deal. First, why would we even think about letting it go through? Second, when and why did we stop worrying about monopoly power?

I was tempted to put in a subtitle, “Krugman finally wakes up.”  Compare his new found concern, at least in print,  over monopoly power to some of the posts I have featured on this blog.

• Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism – April 18th, 2011
• Joseph E. Stiglitz | The Price of Inequality – April 18th, 2011
• Dean Baker: Why Didn’t We Make These Guys Run Around Naked With Their Underpants Over Their Heads? – September 14th, 2011
• Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back – September 13th, 2010
• GOP Wrecks Economy To Win Votes – August 6th, 2010

I do have to thank Krugman for answering one question that bothered me a little.  That is the issue of how do you call it an increase in  monopoly when the territories of the two companies do not overlap?

Comcast’s chief executive says not to worry: “It will not reduce competition in any relevant market because our companies do not overlap or compete with each other. In fact, we do not operate in any of the same ZIP codes.” This is, however, transparently disingenuous. The big concern about making Comcast even bigger isn’t reduced competition for customers in local markets — for one thing, there’s hardly any effective competition at that level anyway. It is that Comcast would have even more power than it already does to dictate terms to the providers of content for its digital pipes — and that its ability to drive tough deals upstream would make it even harder for potential downstream rivals to challenge its local monopolies.

How could I have overlooked the power of monopoly over your suppliers?  One of the reasons why I don’t shop Walmart is because of what they do with their monopoly powers over their suppliers.  Walmart makes the suppliers cut corners, they make them treat their own employees badly, and they lower the quality of all the products that are offered to us.

Naked Capitalism has the article Matt Stoller: Greta Krippner’s “Capitalizing on Crisis” Describes Real Origins of Financial Deregulation.  Here are some excerpts from what Stoller wrote.

According to Krippner, deregulation wasn’t a nefarious set of choices by Reagan and his Republican banking cronies, it was a response by a policymakers (a Democratic Congress and Democratic President) to the failures of the liberal state. After it was put in place, Reagan of course was a key player in setting its direction. Along with Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, Reagan took financialization in unexpected directions, but the basic contours were clear before Reagan came to power.
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Sociologists at their best are detail-oriented scholars of technocracy, people who can play in the sandbox that economists set up but explicitly choose to recognize modern economics as the giant power-ignorant witch-doctor con that it is. Krippner is polite about this, but she’s also clear that politics and not efficiency was the motivating factor behind the rise of finance in America (and the global) political architecture since the 1970s. But for all her superb work, which includes reading every single public meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee and it seems like every single hearing in Congress in the 1960s and 1970s, I found myself unconvinced on two fronts.

One, as Jeff Madrick noted in The Age of Greed, the era of financial deregulation started with National City’s development of the CD in the 1950s, and the Eurodollar market at roughly the same time. The regulators allowed these ‘innovations’, but they didn’t have to let these first cracks in the dam to remain un-repaired. Similarly, one could note the same thing about the explosion of bank cards in the 1960s, which the bank regulators ardently defended throughout the era. It’s obvious they wanted a national credit market, and they wanted their banks to control it.

And two, Krippner argues that the shift to finance as dominant was an inadvertent response by policymakers to a difficult set of circumstances. Surely, pushing inflation into the financial architecture of the 1960s and 1970s caused massive problems, and created the preconditions for inevitable reform. But she doesn’t prove that financialization was inadvertent.

The whole article is enough to make my head spin.  He and the book raise some history that makes me a tad queasy about my new learning about MMT.  Then at the end of the article he seems to reverse himself a bit.

It is not that I have much doubt about the history that was cited.  It does not disagree with how I remember it given my limited ability to know all that was going on at the time.

I haven’t deeply digested the article yet, but I think it may be valuable as something to take in and let your subconscious work on it for a while.  At least that is my style for learning.

2014-02-18 later

Well, my subconscious got to work and it resolved my issues with this article and MMT. Part of MMT separates the accounting of financial instruments, money things, from accounting for real assets. What you can afford in terms of money things is often not well correlated to what you can afford in real assets. What MMT says is that a country that is sovereign in its own currency can always afford anything in terms of its own money things. Depending on the usage or idleness of real assets, resources, workers, and factories, determines whether or not the economy can afford to do more than it is currently doing in the real asset accounting world.

During the latter half of the Johnson years (late 60s) and up to the advent of Ronald Reagan, there was no spare capacity in real assets. So, because President Johnson wanted to fight a huge war that tied up lots of real assets, also wanted to fight a war on poverty, and wanted to keep the civilian population from bearing any extra burden, he did not want to raise taxes.

In MMT terms, or any terms, there were plenty of money things to call forth for the greater use of real assets, but there weren’t any idle real assets to be deployed in response to the call of the money things. That is what led us into an inflation that lasted almost 15 years. Johnson could have raised taxes from the beginning to prevent the money things from outstripping the available real assets and thus have kept inflation in check. Ronald Reagan took a different approach. He put us into the steepest recession up till that time since the great depression. This made money things disappear in a flash and made many real assets go idle. Simple solution except for the real pain it caused for many people.

There are a number of good candidates running for Governor of Massachusetts. I have been trying to figure out what I could ask a candidate that would help me decide which one to support and vote for in the Democratic State Convention in Worcester, should Sharon and I become delegates.

In differentiating someone who would be a good Governor to carry on in the direction Governor Patrick has set from one that would go beyond these efforts, I have decided that focusing on specific solutions to “income inequality” might be a good differentiator.

I have extracted a number of ideas for “democratizing wealth” from Gar Alperovitz’s book What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution.

If you want to know if a candidate has creative ideas for fixing the income inequality problem, you might find out what they think about the following items.  I leave it up to you to figure out if a direct strategy is the best way to find out, or if an indirect strategy would be better.  Asking the candidate what they think about a specific idea would be a direct strategy.  Asking a candidate what ideas she or he has about actions to take to fix income inequality, would be an indirect strategy.  With the indirect strategy, you see if the candidate has ever thought about any of the ideas I have extracted, or any other ideas that sound plausible.  Either strategy has its pluses and minuses.

Now for the extracted ideas.

1. Co-ops
   

   In western Massachusetts, the Alliance to Develop Power has created an $80 million community economy of housing co-ops and other cooperatively controlled businesses.7 And in Austin, Texas, thousands of beer drinkers own the Black Star Co-op pub and microbrewery.8

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 841-844). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

   8.Black Star Co-op, Black Star Co-op 2011 Annual Report (Austin, TX: Black Star Co-op, 2011), accessed September 20, 2012, www.blackstar.coop. 9.As of November 2012, more than $500 million

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 3452-3454). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

2. Land Trusts
   

   Still another form of democratized ownership involves growing numbers of land trusts-essentially nonprofit corporations that own housing and other property in ways that prevent gentrification and turn development profits into support of low- and moderate-income housing. One of the best known is the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont, which traces its modest beginnings to the early 1980s and now provides accommodation for more than two thousand households.17

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 889-892). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

   Like other democratized forms of ownership, today’s land trusts are also the benefactors of early experiments that planted innovative seeds-the heart of any long-term evolutionary reconstruction process. Some of the first serious modern efforts, for instance, were begun in the 1960s and 1970s in western Massachusetts (by Robert Swann)

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 893-895). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

   17.Champlain Housing Trust, Annual Report 2011 (Burlington, VT: CHT, 2011), www.champlainhousingtrust.org/_literature_118080/Annual_Report_2011.

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 3497-3499). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

   The use of public and quasi-public land trusts (both for housing and also for commercial development) to capture development profits for community use and to prevent gentrification

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1489-1491). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

3. B Corporations
   

   For companies that want to pursue what has often been called the triple bottom line (emphasizing people and planet in addition to profit), the traditional legal structure thus poses challenges-a reality that led private-equity expert Andrew Kassoy to join with two others to found B Lab and invent the B Corporation, a corporate structure that facilitates the use of business profits for social purposes. In a B Corp (also known as a benefit corporation) people who invest know from the outset that the goal is both to make profits and to use some part of them for social purposes. Laws permitting companies to charter themselves as B Corporations have been enacted in twelve states-California, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia.

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 915-921). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

   Also, a traditional non-B-Corp company must legally accept the highest price offered in buyout situations, even if the board of directors believes a buyer offering a lower price is likely to do a better job of maintaining the corporation’s social values. This was the complaint of Ben & Jerry’s owners, who would have preferred to sell their company to a competing, more socially minded bidder than Unilever, but legally had to sell to the highest bidder-a development that helped lead to the B Corp movement. One of the most innovative B Corps is King Arthur Flour, a highly successful Vermont-based 100 percent employee-owned company that is quite explicit in stating that making money in itself is not our highest priority. Another is Patagonia, the Ventura, California-based outdoor apparel and sporting-equipment retailer that prides itself on the utility, simplicity, and sustainability of its products. See: B Lab, ,q>King Arthur Flour Company, Certified B Corporation, 2012, accessed December 7, 2012, www.bcorporation.net/community/directory/kingarthurflour; B Lab, Patagonia, Inc., Certified B Corporation, 2012, accessed December 7, 2012, www.bcorporation.net/community/directory/patagonia.

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 941-951). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

4. Worker Owned Companies
   

   By the way, and finally (for the moment), there are also many, many worker-owned companies structured in ways different from traditional co-ops-indeed, around eleven thousand of them, involving 10.3 million people, in virtually every sector, some very large and sophisticated.1 Technically, these companies are called ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans), and in fact three million more individuals are involved in worker-owned companies of this kind than are members of unions in the private sector.2

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 954-958). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

5. Harnessing Government Purchasing Power
   

   The use of city, school, hospital, university, and other purchasing power to help stabilize jobs in a manner that both is anchored and democratized in terms of ownership and also benefits (and improves the economy of) low-income neighborhoods and local small- and medium-sized businesses. Precedents include the kinds of things now happening or being explored in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Washington DC, and many other cities-and especially the use of public and quasi-public (nonprofit hospital and university) contracts to add leverage to the effort.

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1485-1489). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

6. Community Benefit Srategies
   

   The use of community benefit strategies-and community organizing, backed also by labor unions-not just to achieve traditional development but also, where possible, to move new efforts forward that democratize the economy (thereby also helping stabilize the tax base that supports public services).

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1496-1498). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

   From Wikipedia on Community Benefit Agreement

   A Community Benefits Agreement (“CBA”) in the USA is a contract signed by community groups and a real estate developer that requires the developer to provide specific amenities and/or mitigations to the local community or neighborhood. In exchange, the community groups agree to publicly support the project, or at least not oppose it. Often, negotiating a CBA relies heavily upon the formation of a multi-issue, broad based community coalition including community, environmental, faith-based and labor organizations.

7. Land ownership efforts
   

   The exploration of further ways for cities to make money and thereby offset costs and taxpayer burdens. Examples of this approach can be seen in many land ownership efforts; the nearly seven hundred projects in cities and counties that capture methane from garbage, turning it into jobs, revenue, and electricity; public ownership; and other new ownership ideas and practices now emerging in many cities.

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1499-1501). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

8. Municipal Utilites
   

   Taking over and municipalizing electric utilities to improve services, reduce costs (in line with the experience of the roughly two thousand existing public utilities), and secure added revenues for the city. Check out the recent hard-fought struggle to municipalize the electricity in Boulder, Colorado, and successful efforts over the last decade in a number of cities.

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1503-1506). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

9. Municipal Internet and Cable
   

   Improving the local economy through the development of local municipalized Internet and cable services.

   Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1506-1507). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

10. Participatory Leases
    

    Expanding participatory lease arrangements that make money for the city through ownership of other forms of property and in ways other than taxation. (In such efforts developers pay the public landlord a yearly agreed rent and an additional amount pegged to project performance, based on criteria like private profits or gross income.)

    Alperovitz, Gar (2013-05-01). What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1507-1510). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The Daily Kos has the article Noam Chomsky Breaks Down the Zombie Apocalypse. If you have trouble hearing the audio, then you will appreciate the transcript provided by the Daily Kos article.

The article specifically is about a question that was asked of Naom Chomsky and his thoughtful reply.

“This might sound kind of random, but I would really like to ask  your opinion on why you think there’s this preoccupation with the apocalypse and with zombies right now in our culture.”

At its core, it’s an internalization of the belief that payback is most definitely a bitch:

“I think it’s, much of it is kind of just a recognition, at some level of the psyche, that if you’ve got your boot on somebody’s neck, there’s something wrong.  And that the people you’re oppressing may rise up and defend themselves, and then you’re in trouble.”

One example where I had thought about what Chomsky says, and which he does not mention here, is the apartheid regime in South Africa. In essence their justification is that we have to continue controlling the natives with brutality, because our previous brutal treatment of them will inevitably cause them to wreak brutal justice on us if they ever get control. For a long while, this circular logic resonated with the rest of the world. Finally people came to think, “Well you made your own bed, now lie in it.” Amazingly, the worst fears did not materialize after the fall of the regime. Actually, what happened was probably beyond the best hopes that could have been imagined.

Of course there is hardly a guarantee that the positive outcome will happen every time people are freed, let alone one time. Although the reaction of the former slaves in the U.S. is a pretty happy ending not including the reaction of the former oppressors.

The Daily Kos has the article Is Hillary Clinton the president we need at this time?.

Americans are becoming aware that they have been had by the plutocracy. At some point in time they will stop voting against their interest. Senator Elizabeth Warren or someone like her who has the ability to connect the opportunity of free enterprise with civic duty and responsibility is what America needs at this time.

If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, as a Democrat it would be better than any Republican getting elected. Given Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street baggage however, the triangulation used by the Clintons against the Republicans in the past may just be used against them in 2016. A populist Republican with limited Wall Street ties, with a fairly liberal social stance on marijuana, marriage equality, immigration reform, incarceration (mandatory minimums), and women’s rights is out there waiting. Anyone following the news can see that Republican in the making.

If the Republicans actually came up with such a candidate, I might even vote for her or him.

The Daily Kos article had links which eventually led to the following video:

And I really, really believe this commentator’s birth name is Krystal Ball.

Daily Kos in its article Cartoon: The one rich guy features the following cartoon by Tom Tomorrow.

Do you really think you have to worry about protecting the one rich guy in case you ever become that person? If so, I imagine you might think your avid playing of the lottery is going to get you there.

Rather than the more common belief that you can get rich quickly by using some scheme or other, I have always believed in the investment philosophy of getting rich slowly by trying to get the laws of probability and compound interest to work for me instead of against me.

On second thought, I can’t say I always believed in getting rich slowly. I have had a lapse or two in my life, but they always turned out to be learning experiences about the problems of getting rich quickly.

Naked Capitalism has the article Consumer Reports Shills for ObamaCare, Pooh-Poohs Medicaid Clawbacks on Bizarre Assumption They’ll be Waived.

Summarizing the Medicaid clawback issue, Paul Craig Roberts has a new post that explains what can happen to your estate if you’re over 55 and ObamaCare forces you into Medicaid because your income is under 138% of the Federal poverty level:

In violation of moral philosopher John Rawls’ second principle of justice [q.v.], some of the poorest Americans will pay the highest cost of health care as they, and they alone, are subject to having the family home and any other assets they might possess confiscated by the state in order to reimburse Obamacare for the cost of their medical expenses….

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[B] Estate recovery was not an unintended consequence of Obamacare. The House Ways & Means Committee and The House Energy & Commerce Committee share jurisdiction over health care, including Medicare and Medicaid, and both worked extensively on Obamacare. So, don’t bother thinking that the members of these committees didn’t know that estate recovery would impact millions of Americans who would be tossed into Medicaid. The asset test was dropped and the age limit was increased explicitly in order to expand Medicaid. Yet, did We the People hear any concern about estate recovery? Certainly not in the many floor speeches given by Democrats as well as Republicans or from the media.

Apparently the public outcry that this author is trying to stir up is getting the attention of the politicians and the advocacy groups. Keep your eyes open for your opportunity to get this issue addressed.

See my previous post How Obamacare Raids the Assets of Low-Income Older Americans that links to the previous article on this subject by this author, Lambert Strether.

Naked Capitalism has the article Yanis Varoufakis: BITCOIN: A Flawed Currency Blueprint with a Potentially Useful Application for the Eurozone.

Bitcoin is a hard-core version of the Gold Standard, in that the money supply is algorithmically fixed to grow at a pre-determined rate and, eventually, to reach a maximum quantity of Bitcoins that remains fixed forever.

Actually I like this article for its explanations of several things.  It has a good explanation of problems that deflation presents.  It has the above explanation of one feature of Bitcoin like currencies. Lastly, it has a good discussion of the economic issues in the Eurozone.

I follow and understand most of the explanations, but dealing with money and economics in situations that are outside our normal experience takes a little more mental effort than I am used to.

The article answers a question about why poorer people are not helped by deflation.

In a recent debate, I was confronted with the argument that deflation is a godsend. “Poorer people crave lower prices”, I was told, “and they cannot understand why ‘elitists’, like yourself, oppose them”. Of course people, especially those who struggle to make ends meet, prefer lower to higher prices other things being equal. But under the heavy shadow of deflation other things are not equal . Deflation is indiscriminatory. Once it sets it, all prices subside, including the price for labour. In fact, wages tend to fall faster than prices of other goods during deflationary times, leaving the weak poorer. Worse still, deflation reduces investment which, in turn, raises unemployment.

However, there is another part of the answer that it leaves out.

Another important point about deflation is its effect on borrowers. As we have seen, when you have a mortgage on your house and the house price drops precipitously, it can wipe out all your wealth, and still leave you owing money. Same is true for any borrower for other things – cars, home appliances, payday loans, college loans.

I also had my problems wrapping my head around a few ideas in the article – not saying the article is wrong, though.  I probably just need to think about it some more.

I see where deflation hurts a manufacturer who buys her raw materials at a high price, but has to sell at a deflated price. You’d think then that inflation would allow a manufacturer to buy raw materials at a lower price, but sell at a higher price. I haven’t quite been able to figure out why this is not good for a manufacturer. It seems the manufacturer is squeezed in both directions. Of course the worker is also squeezed in both directions. Although borrowing on the inflated value of real estate in an inflationary period seemed to be heaven sent for a while.

My other problem is understanding why a Bitcoin like deflationary FT-coin is a solution in times of deflation. The FT-coin would have to deflate faster than the Euro to make people want to hold it.

The Crooks and Liars web site has the article Shocking Interview With Michael Dunn’s Neighbor: ‘He Always Wanted To Shoot Somebody’ that contains the video below.

Here is the YouTube description that goes with the video.

Charles Hendrix, Michael Dunn’s former next-door neighbor, describes violent behavior, lies, insurance fraud, cocaine use, bragging about putting a hit out on someone, and a first wife who said he’d held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her. He says Dunn bragged that he was smarter than everyone else and could outthink them.

I am not a lawyer, but I have seen one on television. I suppose none of what was said in this video interview would have been acceptable in court. It would prejudice the jury, I suppose. I guess the idea is to keep the jury focused on the facts of the case, and not let them be swayed by personalities. I get the reasoning, but sometimes I don’t think it serves justice. Perhaps the judge will be able to consider this information in the sentencing phase.