President Obama’s weekly address to the nation is very good this week.

A speech like this makes me feel that President Obama does really still care. It makes me wonder if this is the same President who refuses to hold Wall Street accountable for the damage they have done? Is this the same President Obama who will tell CIA lies to get a war started in the Ukraine to satisfy the demands of wealthy capitalists? Is this the same President who listens to the self-interest of Wall Street to learn his economics? Is this the same President who caved to the health insurance industry and to big pharma to give them a health “reform” act that shovels more money their way? Is this the same President who sees that support for public universities has dropped from 3/4 to 1/4 of college costs, but says nothing about it?

All the while that students have accumulated $1.2 trillion of debt to make up for what government has stopped doing, Obama is still concerned about cutting the deficit. The observation of this debt build up seems to be one more piece of evidence that Modern Monetary Theory is right. When the government cuts its spending, it comes out of the hides of the people in the private sector of the economy.

I wonder who else beside Elizabeth Warren understands that putting this kind of debt load on the young (and not so young parents of these students) prevents them from buying homes, setting up households, and the other things that keep the economy humming. Does Hillary Clinton get this? Is she shouting about this from the rooftops? All I hear from Hillary these days is that she wants more sanctions on Russia because they refuse to knuckle under to our aggression against them.

The Daily Kos has the post So this is how Net Neutrality dies, under a Democratic President.

3:57 PM PT: Another argument I am often seeing is the whole “Well Netflix and Youtube use so much bandwidth, it is only fair they pay more!” This is the exact argument the ISPs fall back on when people challenge them on wanting to destroy Net Neutrality.

Don’t buy that for a second. Yes, Netflix and other streaming services use loads of ISP bandwidth. They also have customers who PAY THESE ISPs for cable access in large part to use their services.
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Also compare to other countries:

Average internet speeds in South Korea and Japan are many times faster than ours, and cost far less, and also use plenty of streaming services. In Tokyo for example, you can get 2 gigabit internet speeds (TWICE google Fiber) for $50 a month. The only reason we can’t have that here is because ISPs are greedy and don’t want to establish faster networks if they can charge you more per month and give you 1% what someone in Tokyo can get. World’s fastest Internet arrives in Tokyo: 2Gbps for $50/mo.

There is a White House Petition to sign.

Maintain true net neutrality to protect the freedom of information in the United States.

True net neutrality means the free exchange of information between people and organizations. Information is key to a society’s well being. One of the most effective tactics of an invading military is to inhibit the flow of information in a population; this includes which information is shared and by who. Today we see this war being waged on American citizens. Recently the FCC has moved to redefine “net neutrality” to mean that corporations and organizations can pay to have their information heard, or worse, the message of their competitors silenced. We as a nation must settle for nothing less than complete neutrality in our communication channels. This is not a request, but a demand by the citizens of this nation. No bandwidth modifications of information based on content or its source.

You have to wonder if President Obama gives a damn anymore.

Moon of Alabama has the article Kerry Lies, Repeats Debunked State Department Claim.

Yesterday the New York Times Public Editor criticized the paper’s handling of the story:

It all feels rather familiar – the rushed publication of something exciting, often based on an executive branch leak. And then, afterward, with a kind of “morning after” feeling, here comes a more sober, less prominently displayed followup story, to deal with objections while not clarifying much of anything.

The pictures from the coup government in Ukraine distributed through the U.S. State Department are obviously fakery and purely anti-Russian propaganda. The story of Russian “special operations personnel” in east-Ukraine is a lie. It has been debunked as such in several U.S. publications. Despite that Kerry yesterday repeated it proving himself to be exactly what Putin had claimed, a liar.

I have read and viewed many of the sources mentioned in this blog post by Moon of Alabama. Moon of Alabama has assembled these pieces in a well constructed way that is worth featuring on my blog.

For those who think they know what Russia is up to because they have bought into the lies that the US is telling, I refer back to my Mark Twain quote, “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.”

I also find it gratifying that The New York Times Public Editor is as skeptical as I am about the (mis)information that the newspaper so often publishes.

Wired has the article New Quantum Theory Could Explain the Flow of Time.

Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”
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“What’s really going on is things are becoming more correlated with each other,” Lloyd recalls realizing. “The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations.”

The idea, presented in his 1988 doctoral thesis, fell on deaf ears. When he submitted it to a journal, he was told that there was “no physics in this paper.” Quantum information theory “was profoundly unpopular” at the time, Lloyd said, and questions about time’s arrow “were for crackpots and Nobel laureates who have gone soft in the head.” he remembers one physicist telling him.

“I was darn close to driving a taxicab,” Lloyd said.

I have read books about quantum entanglement, and I still struggle with some aspects of the idea. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I did drive a taxicab for a week while I was suffering from Sophomore slump during my MIT career.

Elizabeth Warren’s new book is A Fighting Chance. She made a book tour stop at Worcester State University today.

The room was overflowing even after accounting for the standing room only crowd.

The crowd gave her a beginning and ending standing ovation. There was quite a bit of applause at many of the things she had to say.

She didn’t have the time to answer all the questions, so it was no surprise that she didn’t get to either of my two questions.  The questions she did answer were great questions as were her answers.  Sorry I didn’t take notes for this blog.

Contrary to  what The Boston Globe wrote today, I think that when she is finished with this tour, her national reputation will be greatly enhanced.  I don’t know what she may be running for, but I would vote for her in a heartbeat.

At the very least, she is calling us to action to turn this country around.  She showed us what this country used to be and how it has deteriorated from that singular  time after WWII and up to 1980.  We made this country prosper for most of its citizens before, and we can do it again.

Oh, by the way, why are public colleges so expensive?  The state used to pay 3/4 of the cost, but now it pays 1/4 of the cost.  Conversely, tuition used to cover 1/4 of the cost, but now must cover 3/4 of the cost.  This last factoid I derived from her first one, so it may not be exact.  However, it does explain why the cost has risen so fast.  It is not from high salaries for professors.  It is from tax cuts for the wealthy which depleted state resources for supporting our public colleges.  In fact, the increased use of adjunct professors at very low pay has kept the costs from rising even faster.  Everyone is taking it in the shorts but the wealthy.

And, as a final “oh by the way”, if you had been reading this blog you could have been among the few people to raise their hands when Elizabeth Warren asked the audience who had read the Piketty book. See my previous posts Corrupting Piketty in the 21st Century and Philip Pilkington: Misdirection – Galbraith on Thomas Piketty’s New Book on Capital. It gives me added confidence in Elizabeth Warren to know that she knows the book so soon after it has been published. If she had taken on one of my questions, she could have given further proof that she really understands some important economic principles.

Naked Capitalism has the article The Stealthy, Ugly Growth of Corporatized Medicine.

Yves here. We’ve written a great deal about Obamacare, since it epitomizes so much about what is wrong with contemporary America: the use of complexity to mask looting, the creation of two-tier systems, the crapification of the underlying service, which in this case is vitally important to society as a whole.

But Obamacare also needs to be recognized as a big step forward …

As I started to read this, I thought that at last this progressive web site would finally admit that the ACA wasn’t as bad as they had been complaining.  Then I finished reading the paragraph.

in a process that was already well underway, which is to convert the practice of medicine from a patient-oriented to a profit-driven exercise. This is perverse because medicine is so highly valued that medical practitioners almost always enjoy high status and at least decent incomes in most societies. And in societies undergoing breakdown, being a doctor is about the safest place to be, provided you can manage to avoid becoming aligned with the wrong warring faction.

The article does go on to describe many of the ills of the current system in some detail that I had not been completely aware of.  I commented on the article as follows:

I am glad to see this article.  Until reading this, I could not understand why a progressive set of contributors had such dim view of the ACA.  I still think it is a case of somewhat displaced anger.  The issues that so anger you, existed before ACA.  I am not sure that blocking ACA and remaining with the old situation would have addressed any of the issues that you rightfully complain about.

It does not hurt to cover the aspects of what is wrong with the system so that we don’t get lulled into a sense of complacency.

After a while, though, I’d like the conversation to move on to the topic of fixing the broken system.  I know that this is entangled in the larger problem of wealth, income, and power inequality.  We all know that we aren’t going to fix this overnight.  Can anybody even think of small steps that we could take to start to turn the tide?

Maybe with the understanding this article provides about how badly the system has deteriorated, the voice of Don Berwick, candidate for Massachusetts Governor would resonate with the voters more. Although, from the tone of this article, I am not sure that “Medicare for All” is exactly what the author is looking for.

Bernie Sanders’s web page features the video The Koch Brothers and the Puppets They Control.

The Koch brothers – the second wealthiest family in America worth at least $80 billion – for decades operated in the shadows of American public life while pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into front groups promoting what Bernie has called the “billionaire agenda.” It is not well known, but David Koch was the 1980 Libertarian Party candidate for vice president and helped fund that party. He campaigned on a platform that called for ending all limitations on campaign spending, abolishing taxes on the wealthy and profitable corporations, shutting down Medicare and Medicaid, repealing Social Security, terminating the Postal Service and doing away with the minimum wage. “They want to repeal every major piece of legislation over the past 80 years that protects the middle class, the elderly, the children, the sick and the most vulnerable in our country,” Bernie said.

Which potential female running mate for Bernie Sanders’ seems to get the issue and talk as animatedly about this? Which one is good at compromising with people like the Koch’s?

Which one is the darling of Wall Street and which one is so feared by Wall Street that they have fought her tooth and nail? Am I asking hard questions here?

Huffington Post has the article Hillary Clinton Calls For More Sanctions On Russia.

Speaking at a University of Connecticut issues forum, the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state said she believes the sanctions against the Russian government must be “tightened and widened” to prevent the crisis from escalating.

If this statement does not disqualify Hillary Clinton from being President of The United States, then I don’t know how much more evidence you would need.  This is tantamount to saying “We must escalate to prevent the crisis from escalating.”

The behavior of Russia and the United States is like the teenage game of chicken.  Two cars drive at high speed toward each other that would ultimately lead to a fatal head-on collision.  If one side doesn’t veer away, then they both win the game of not being a chicken.  They are also both dead.  Here we have Hillary Clinton saying, let’s step on the gas, surely the other side will flinch first, if only we can frighten them enough.  Does Vladimir Putin look like the kind of person who could be intimidated?  Russia is no Grenada, despite what President Obama seems to think.

In my previous post Foreign policy and the definition of ‘manhood’, I think I just about predicted Hillary Clinton would take this position.

Also refer to my previous post “We Are Not Beginning a New Cold War, We are Well into It”: Stephen Cohen on Russia-Ukraine Crisis. I had the following quote from Stephen Cohen:

As a contemporary observer, it certainly began in November 2013 when the European Union issued an ultimatum, really, to the then-president, elected president, of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, that “Sign an agreement with us, but you can’t have one with Russia, too.” In my mind, that precipitated this crisis, because why give a country that has been profoundly divided for centuries, and certainly in recent decades, an ultimatum—an elected president: “Choose, and divide your country further”? So when we say today Putin initiated this chaos, this danger of war, this confrontation, the answer is, no, that narrative is wrong from the beginning. It was triggered by the European Union’s unwise ultimatum.

Do certian people in Sturbridge actually read anything I post?

Naked Capitalism has an excellent review and discussion in the article Corrupting Piketty in the 21st Century.

The media attention surrounding French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the 21st Century is growing ever more fervent. Here are my two cents.

To me three things are clear to be about this book. First, it is a timely reminder that distribution of resources within society matters. This is especially important for an economics profession who has often ignored the issue and whose core analytical framework is a completely inappropriate tool for its analysis.

Second, and this is quite a surprise, the mainstream economics profession seems to be rather accepting of the book, which, when I read it, seemed to make the claim that most of their scholarly methods are flawed and that the economics profession knows very little about the more important elements of social organisation. While on the surface this appears to be a mature response by the profession to valid criticisms, I fear that the profession will corrupt the message of the book and will unfortunately not have the impact on improving economic scholarship that it seems intended to have.

Third, and this is my one personal gripe, the book fails to acknowledge the many social processes studied by sociologists and even ecologists that have been used to explain unequal outcomes in a wide variety of settings. For example, the process of preferential attachment is fundamental to producing the unequal distribution of the success of artists, musicians and even, ironically, authors. Such a process can not only explain the broader inequalities in terms of access to resources (income and wealth), but also the inequality of book success, where Piketty finds himself in the top 1% of economics authors (and there really is no shortage of books covering similar topics recently, for example here, here, here and here).

There are many links to follow in the article and in the ensuing discussion that I want to follow. One in particular, preferential attachment, has me very curious.

I am still undecided as to whether or not I want to read Piketty’s book.

Warning: Emotionally Hard To Watch

The Angry Eye – Brown Eye-Blue Eye Experiment – part 1

“The Angry Eye” | part 2 | Brown Eye-Blue Eye Experiment