Thanks to reader MardyS for posting a link to the article What we can Learn From FDR by Harvey J. Kaye.

This is a long  article which I hesitated to read.  When I finally did read it, I was extremely glad I did.  Kaye points out how much of our history we have forgotten around WWII that involved the politics of that time.  Kaye explains a lot of that history to justify his claim as excerpted below.

Consider that in their otherwise moving works, the Greatest Generation’s tribunes, Ambrose, Brokaw, Bradley, Spielberg and Burns, make no mention of FDR’s pronouncement of the Four Freedoms. They utterly ignore how a president and people articulated anew the nation’s historic promise in “Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear,” and went “All Out!” in their name not only to defend American democratic life, but also to enhance it. And they utterly ignore how a president and people not only saved the United States from economic destruction and political tyranny and proceeded to turn it into the strongest and most prosperous country on earth, but did so by harnessing the powers of democratic government and making America freer, more equal and more democratic than ever before in the process.

This is why we, in this generation, need to fight so hard to undo the erasure and distortion of our history.  The people who lived that history may remember the reasons they fought for what they did.  However, the people who were born decades after that history was over have no way of understanding it unless we keep on telling the story.  This is what Harvey Kaye and I believe is the great failing of the Liberals.

Some Liberals seem to act as if  everyone should just know why the Liberals fight for the things that they do fight for.  You can see that in Obama (no liberal himself) trying to fight an inside battle with Congress without realizing the importance of first reminding people why it is so important to fight for these things.  He negotiated with himself before confronting Congress, and completely forgot that carrying on the fight in public was more important than whatever minimal goals he could get Congress to agree to by bending over backwards to appease them.

It is not only about what you can achieve today, but it is also about setting the stage for what you hope to achieve tomorrow.  By that measure, President Obama has been a severe disappointment.  In my estimation, Hillary Clinton would be even a worse disaster.

The people who understand the need to fight very hard in public are Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton to name two who might be on the next slate for President and Vice President.  It’s also not only that they fight publicly for these things, but I believe they really understand what the fight is about and they really mean what they say.  At the very least, they have not provided us with massive evidence that they really don’t have a clue.

Even as an inveterate skeptic, I’d rather vote for someone who might mean what they say than to vote for someone who has proven that they do not mean what they say.

Perhaps Obama and Clinton are so far to the right because their parents and grandparents did not realize at the time how important it was to pass on the history of what they had fought for.  Or perhaps it is a rebellion thing.  No generation can take at face value what the previous generation tells them.  This accounts for how easy it is to wipe history from our collective minds.  When we are more than two generations from that history, remembrance of it is completely gone.  With rebellion of one generation from the previous one, it is the grandparents who become responsible for passing the heritage on.  I cannot say I am doing a good job.

Do you suppose this is the kind of science that figured out how to put gigabytes of memory on a very small piece of silicon?

Are such devices a malicious hoax or a pernicious lie? I certainly don’t have any such device in the computer on which I am typing this. There are at least 3 scientists that say you can’t get that many transistors in one place.

The Nation has the story Why Is a Florida Man Facing Life in Prison For Lending a Friend His Car and Going to Sleep? by Charles Grodin.

Ryan Holle, who has no prior record, is currently serving his eleventh year of a life sentence.

Several years ago I read a piece in The New York Times by Adam Liptak about Ryan Holle. Ryan, who had no prior record, is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole in Florida. He was convicted of pre-meditated murder, even though no one, including the prosecutor, disputes that Ryan was asleep in his bed at home at the time of the crime.

Why not give us a link to The New York Times article Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers?

Mr. Holle, who had given the police a series of statements in which he seemed to admit knowing about the burglary, was convicted of first-degree murder.

Not having heard what the jury in this case heard, I have no way to interpret what “seemed to admit” means.

Right from the start in reading Grodin’s article, I knew that he was not telling us the whole story.  Since he has no smell test for his own writing, it’s no wonder that he had no sense of smell when he read The New York Times story.

I do not know if the accused is guilty or not, but I  have a strong suspicion that the “news” media are leaving out a lot of things.  It is obvious what the media want us to believe, but they are going to have to work harder to get me to believe it.

The Nation story was reprinted on Alternet as How Lending A Friend Your Car, Then Going to Bed Can Land You a Life Prison Sentence.

How is this kind of reporting any better than what you might get on Faux Noise?  I want the media that I read to have a higher set of standards than the media I refuse to read because of its low standards. Why would a news outlet that had pretensions of standards want to publish dreck like this? Do they realize how badly this damages their reputations? Are we to think that the editors have no sense of smell?

April 12, 2014 – 8:15 PM

I must apologize to The New York Times. Apparently I did not read the whole story.

I wanted to respond to Roger’s comment that I did make my feelings known in a comment on Alternet.

I noticed that in a comment about my comment there were some words about the trial that I had not read. These words were from The New York Times story. This is about comments from the defendant.

“All he did was go say, ‘Use the car,’ ” Mr. Allen said of Mr. Holle in a pretrial deposition. “I mean, nobody really knew that girl was going to get killed. It was not in the plans to go kill somebody, you know.”

But Mr. Holle did testify that he had been told it might be necessary to “knock out” Jessica Snyder. Mr. Holle is 25 now, a tall, lean and lively man with a rueful sense of humor, alert brown eyes and an unusually deep voice. In a spare office at the prison here, he said that he had not taken the talk of a burglary seriously.

“I honestly thought they were going to get food,” he said of the men who used his car, all of whom had attended the nightlong party at Mr. Holle’s house, as had Jessica Snyder.

“When they actually mentioned what was going on, I thought it was a joke,” Mr. Holle added, referring to the plan to steal the Snyders’ safe. “I thought they were just playing around. I was just very naïve. Plus from being drinking that night, I just didn’t understand what was going on.”

PBS is starting to mention MMT.  See the article The good you do for the dollar when you pay your taxes.

Have you ever wondered why the U.S. dollar has value?

It is not because of the gold in Fort Knox. There used to be gold behind the dollar, but not now. President Richard Nixon cut the last ties in 1971, effectively ending the foundation of the Bretton Woods international monetary system.

Rather, the ultimate reason that the U.S. dollar has value, at least in the opinion of some economists, and in my own, is that no one likes being in jail. And dollars are a get-out-of-jail-free card.

April 15, when Uncle Sam collects taxes on our incomes, is right around the corner. We must pay those taxes in dollars, and there are penalties for not paying them, which can include time in prison.

As a proponent of MMT, myself, I should be overjoyed at this.  Ironically, PBS picks the one part of MMT that I think is overplayed.  It is not that there isn’t some truth in this part of MMT. It may be true that this use of money gives it its initial value.  However, once this value is well established, I think it quite likely that there are other factors that help maintain and boost its value.  I think this is important because if the U.S. dollar is ever to lose its pre-eminent position in the world it, will be due to other factors than our use of the dollar as a mechanism for paying taxes.  That said, it will probably be possible to connect the decline in prominence to some aspect of taxation.  It’s all a matter of degree, but that does have policy implications.

The PBS article links to a Washington Post article Modern Monetary Theory, an unconventional take on economic strategy by Dylan Matthews.

Talking about economist James Galbraith, Matthews said the following:

But if Galbraith stood out on the panel, it was because of his offbeat message. Most viewed the budget surplus as opportune: a chance to pay down the national debt, cut taxes, shore up entitlements or pursue new spending programs.

He viewed it as a danger: If the government is running a surplus, money is accruing in government coffers rather than in the hands of ordinary people and companies, where it might be spent and help the economy.

“I said economists used to understand that the running of a surplus was fiscal (economic) drag,” he said, “and with 250 economists, they giggled.”

The article goes on to discuss competing theories of economics.  However, the author of the article, Dylan Matthews, never really shows a deep understanding of the topic being covered.

In discussing the arguments against MMT, Matthews never seems to understand the full significance of what Galbraith said about the fiscal drag.  In some situations, recognized by MMT proponents, the economy needs some  fiscal drag.  By recognizing that a surplus is a fiscal drag, the MMT proponents have identified exactly the tool to use when drag is what is needed.  This identifying of the proper tool to use is the opposite of saying MMT policy prescriptions will cause hyperinflation that will have no remedy.  Matthews never seems to figure this out.

In picking quotes from MMT theorists to rebut the MMT critics, Matthews chooses the least effective arguments that MMTers use.