New Economic Perspectives has the article MODERN MONEY THEORY: THE BASICS by L. Randall Wray.  This is not a reprint of any earlier article, but a retelling of the story.  When I need to learn something complicated, I find that the more times I read about it, the better I understand it, even if the reading goes over much of the material I have read before.  Given this style of learning, I do not fret too much about reading the first article I read on a subject and trying to study it in such depth that I understand it all.  That is not the way depth of understanding comes to me.  Of course your style of learning is almost certainly different from mine in some aspect.  We all learn in different ways.

Here are some quotes to whet your appetite.

The problem is not the “thin air” nature of the creation, but rather the quantities of “money” created and the purposes for which it was created. Government spending for the public purpose is beneficial, at least up to the point of full employment of the nation’s resources. Bank lending for public and private purposes that are beneficial publicly and privately is also generally desirable.
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While our governments are large, they are not big enough to provide all the monetary IOUs we need for the scale of economic activity we desire. And we—at least we Americans—are skeptical of putting all monetized economic activity in the hands of a much bigger government. I cannot see any possibility of running a modern, monetized, capitalist economy without private financial institutions that create the monetary IOUs needed to initiate economic activity.

Apparently, even Paul Krugman is having trouble digesting this, and he already has his Nobel Prize in Economics.  I am lucky enough to know that my understanding is limited, so I do not insist that new ideas conform to everything I think I already know.

Now here is a commercial worth watching.

Verizon is working with Makers.com and the Verizon Foundation to #InspireHerMind and encourage more girls to get involved with high-tech STEM fields.

Here is the direct view of the album.

New Economic Perspectives has published the amazing article Keeping It Real: Law, Coercion, & The Frontiers of Public Finance by Raúl Carrillo.

When we recognize that federal taxation and borrowing are functionally separate from expenditure, the moral landscape changes. We can go deeper and deeper. If the federal government has excess funds and there is no threat of inflation, what is the compelling argument against a right to the minimum level of purchasing power necessary to ensure a secure livelihood? If the federal government doesn’t need the money to fund other programs, what is the compelling justification for why working people should suffer from regressive taxes like the payroll tax? At the very least, Modern Money breathes new life into legal arguments against socioeconomic discrimination.
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There is no doubt that many wealthy individuals need to be taxed and disciplined in the interest of democracy, but we need not make social spending dependent on those taxes. It’s functionally unnecessary. To quote Johnson again, “the sheer amount of new federal money provided to states under the stimulus, and the conditions attached to some of these federal funds, raise questions about the federal government’s expanding power to shape, through spending, a broad set of institutional arrangements at the state and local levels.” Considering it’s all new federal money, that statement is even more important than Johnson seems to indicate. The scope of our discussion about public finance needs to be magnified.

For example, although at the end of the day, poverty is relative, there is now much we can do to end absolute indignities, given sufficient knowledge of the legal-financial matrix. As Emma Coleman Jordan has stated, what passes as rational conversation about economic policy choices these days is “devoid of all understanding and empathy for the choices of people who have no choice.” I’d add it is also devoid of institutional perspective and accuracy regarding modern money, functional finance, and national accounting. In the words of a recently deceased human rights activist, Yuri Kochiyama, consciousness is power, and with a revamped economic education, social justice advocates can build tomorrow’s world.

But these are my normative opinions. The chief point is that we need to have an honest conversation based on a shared mechanical understanding of the nuts and bolts of the economy, as well as its legal framework. Having subscribed to that, we can debate about what we want. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once protested in another era of rampant inequality and mythmaking, the 14th Amendment did not enact Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics. The Constitution shouldn’t be read as reliant upon an outdated and unsound doctrine of public finance either. We need to plug into reality, and then we can discuss what we want to do to change it, if anything. Beyond the myths about money, beyond the intellectually impotent and incoherent conceptions of government intervention, deregulation, and redistribution, we can have that real talk about who gets what, when, where, how, and why.

There will be those who protest this article simply because they just know that what is said here just cannot be.  If you are willing to ask yourself why exactly it is that you know this cannot be, then you are ready to think deep thoughts.

Just remember this quote from my quotes page.

Mark Twain

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

New Economic Perspectives has the article Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA by William K. Black. Naked Capitalism has an edited version that they claim is more readable titled Bill Black: Obama’s Latest Betrayal in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA.

The first paradox is that Obama, who cannot claim that he does not know better given the unanimous findings of his own FCIC appointees who investigated the causes of the crisis, is trying to recreate those causes, spur a race to the bottom among financial regulators, and make the causes of the past crisis global (rather than primarily limited to the U.S. and the EU). Obama, in the TISA draft, proposes to do everything that his own FCIC experts, white-collar criminologists, the top economists on the subject of criminogenic environments, and effective regulators with a track record of success have been telling Obama not to do for his entire term in office.
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The demand for classified treatment makes it inescapable that the bankers and government officials involved in drafting TISA are trying to hide something they believe would outrage the public. The paradox is that the bankers’ and politicians’ rabid fear of disclosure to the public and Congress of TISA’s assault on regulation confirms beyond any reasonable doubt that subparagraph 2 of Article 17 and Article 20 combine to make TISA a grave threat to the global economy, workers, and honest bankers by making the financial world even more criminogenic.

For a long time, I have been wondering what makes Obama do some of the things he does. He is so far from the candidate that I voted for twice, that I refuse to give his causes any more financial support. Sometimes, I don’t even want to hear what he has to say.

The Berkshire Eagle has the story Gubernatorial Candidate Donald M. Berwick would implement single-payer health care

I think Don Berwick might have the management skills to make this work. If he had been in more control of the web site development, he might have managed it much better.

If he works to build a consensus around single-payer, it could be enacted without all the opposition that tried their best to ruin ACA (just so that they could prove to you that government doesn’t work). For all ACA’s faults, the privately run system wasn’t working any better.

As the son of a pharmacist who ran his business with many welfare customers, I know that if the single payer system is not adequately funded, it will be the small business people in the health care field that will bear the burden of slow payments and tons of paper-work. When I was around to watch my father’s business, this was before the days of the dominance of the huge private insurance companies trying to control their costs. I don’t know if working with them was any better than the days of working with the city run welfare system

We need to go into this with eyes wide open to make sure we do it right. We as citizens need to understand the pitfalls to make sure our legislators don’t cow-tow to the special interests making the system work well only for them.

The Daily show has the video Mess O’Potamia – Sad Dick Cheney Is Sad.

Michael Che reports on Dick Cheney mournfully lamenting his role in the Iraq War.

These revelations are almost too good to be true. Oh wait, they are!

The Sturbridge Villager published my letter to the editor. See page 10 at the previous link.

To the Editor:

Thank you for printing the valuable letter by James P. Ehrhard.

What Ehrhard does not seem to realize is that people he describes out here for whom “guns are a central part of the lives of these citizens” are the ones that scare the living daylights out of me.

The fright comes exactly because I have some of these people in my own family. That is how I know that there are life-long hunters who are unaware that you are not allowed to hunt on Sunday.

I wouldn’t dare walk very deeply into the woods in any part of Sturbridge because I know these people are out there. I can hear their guns from my house.

I am glad that Ehrhard made it perfectly clear what type of a person he is before I go to the voting booth in November.

Steven
Greenberg
Fiskdale

Not all of us out here have a lot of faith that there isn’t at least one gun nut among all the sane gun owners. Maybe that’s why we favor a school resource officer in our schools. See my previous post Armed School Resource Officers May Have Prevented a Mass Shooting at Oregon High School.

The Daily Kos has the story Study links autism to pesticides, I’d like to know if Monsanto funds the antivaxxers now.

The Daily Kos bases a lot of their story on the report from The Fresno Bee UC Davis study links autism to pesticides.

A new study released today suggests pregnant women who live near agricultural fields where pesticides are sprayed are at increased risk of having a child with autism.

The UC Davis MIND Institute published the article UC Davis MIND Institute study finds association between maternal exposure to agricultural pesticides, autism in offspring.

The Daily Kos article adds some information about organophosphate from the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice, whatever that is, from the article What Are Organophosphates? (And Why Are They So Deadly?).

Organophosphates kill because they interfere with the nervous system of both insects and humans. They inhibit an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase. Under normal conditions, acetylcholinesterase sends chemical signals to halt nerve impulses at appropriate times. When the acetylcholinesterase enzyme is disturbed, neurological overstimulation occurs, leading to nervous system dysfunction, causing seizures and death.

Acute exposure can be observed through symptoms of nausea, twitching, headaches and trembling. Most people die because of an inability to breathe. The diaphragm goes into paralysis, convulsions overtake and death ensues.

Long term exposure to these insecticides produces developmental effects including behavioral problems and receding cognitive function, most notably attention deficit.

Not only do organophosphates disrupt the neurons in the body, but they also wreak havoc on the endocrine system. In time, exposure to these chemicals reduces testosterone levels, eliciting femininity in males. Male fertility may be destroyed altogether.

People who have read some of my posts before may start shouting, “Correlation does not mean causation.” Ture, but this is how a scientific study may try to get a handle on that problem.

The risk of autism decreased the farther the pregnant women lived from where pesticides were sprayed, the report said.

If you read the various articles at the links above, there is discussion of the limits to the research and the need for further study. However, I see evidence of enough scientific rigor here to believe that these people are doing a serious scientific study. They seem to be really trying to understand the causes. They don’t seem to be merely pursuing a political agenda. Since I do not know the source of funding for this research, there is always the chance that I will be proven wrong about the impartiality of the research.

The Daily Kos has the article Bill Maher on how we cannot change Iraq.

Quoting Bill Maher, they have:

And finally, New Rule: Now that Iraq is falling apart again, someone needs to drill it into the American psyche that broken nations are a lot like broken people — you can’t fix them.

You can skip the first 3½ minutes of this almost 8 minute video, but that last part is worth its weight in gold.