The Real News Network in the post Is This The Dumbest Talking Point Ever? has highlighted the video below.

Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and other Republicans are calling the extension of unemployment benefits a game of politics by Democrats, who actually want to distract from the rocky rollout of Obamacare. Politicians playing politics? The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

The Real News Network could not improve on the TYT headline, and neither can I.

The Real News Network has the story Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets: ‘The Greatest Heist You’ve Never Heard Of’. The video is actually from The New York Times and its story Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows.

One night in 1971, files were stolen from an F.B.I. office near Philadelphia. They proved that the bureau was spying on thousands of Americans. The case was unsolved, until now.

It is amazing how angry the FBI became when ordinary citizens used the same techniques as the FBI did to get their information.

The Naked Capitalism post Diagrams and Dollars: Modern Money Illustrated (Part 1) by Yves Smith  highlights the article published on New Economics Perspectives by J. D. Alt.

Quoting from Yves Smith’s introduction:

Yves here. I continue to get requests to explain Modern Monetary Theory. It isn’t easily done in a few words, but fortunately, the academics and writers associated with the New Economics Perspectives blog keep publishing primers of various sorts. This one takes a different approach in using visuals to help illustrate the difference between how most people believe the money system operates versus how it really works.

WARNING: The diagrams start out by illustrating the faulty perception of money as understood in the halls of Congress, by the main stream media, and, by infection, most of the public.

If you are going to read this article, do not stop at the explanation of the first diagram, and think that you have learned something.  You have to read further to understand what is wrong with the first 7 or so diagrams.

There is also a part 2 of the story – DIAGRAMS & DOLLARS: modern money illustrated (Part 2). Your goal should be to understand the final diagram. It is very well explained in the article.

If I have any quibble at all with the presentation toward the end it would be about the following statements in the article:

If Congress runs a “budget surplus” for long, the Private Sector will either have to diminish its economic activity in general (go into recession)—or plunge hopelessly into debt (borrowing bank money it can’t repay, possibly causing a banking crisis)—or both.

This sentence could be enhanced by admitting to the possibility of deflation as another alternative. In fact, the problem is that deflation alone won’t occur for reasons that can be discussed. Deflation will happen in concert with recession and borrowing. If we could create deflation without the other two, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for the PS pot as a whole.

We might have to talk about the PS pot in terms of the sectors within the PS pot and the transfers among them that is implied by any particular set of government policies. Deflation transfers wealth from borrowers to savers. Inflation transfers wealth from savers to borrowers.

The Wire has the story Lessons from the Obamacare ‘Horror Stories’.

At the root of every debunked, cancelled plan, Obamacare “horror story” is usually a person who isn’t as informed as he or she would like to believe. Usually that person is a journalist. Last week Maggie Mahar at HealthInsurance.org debunked yet another horror story, but she didn’t blame the misguided former policy holders so much as the journalist who wrote the story. “It appeared that no one at the Star-Telegram even attempted to run a background check on the sources, or fact check their stories,” Mahar wrote. “I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘Why?'”

The article goes on to detail some of the stories that may have started out as horror stories, but ended up actually being successes for Obamacare.

The Daily Kos reference to the above article in its post Obamacare horror story, chose the following quote:

What makes it a horror story is that when the Star Telegram learned that Johnson actually was able to get coverage, they did nothing to change their original report, even though it was at best incomplete. As Maggie Mahar, who wrote the post linked above, puts it:

This major daily’s nearly 200,000 daily readers saw the story that would lead them to believe that Americans who received cancellation notices were “left in limbo.” Most, it concluded, would wind up uninsured – or paying more than they could afford.  As I’ve pointed out many times – and as more and more coverage is revealing – the opposite is true.

You probably have to do your own research to see if the original story is right, the debunker is right, or there is some other choice I can’t imagine.

CNN has the article America’s real problem: Too much bipartisanship.  I like the article for what it has to say about bipartisanship, but most of all, I want to save the following paragraph from the article:

ious War on Poverty that aimed to provide tools for the poor to become self-sufficient. For over a decade, the program — which Johnson broadly defined to include all of his programs to help the poor — had a powerful effect. The poverty rate fell from 19% in 1964 to 11.2% in 1974. New government services, such as Head Start and Medicaid, have remained integral to those without economic means.

Keep this in mind the next time you see a cutesy bumper sticker that says “We fought the war on poverty, and we lost.”  By the numbers above, we seemed to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in that war.

As for too much bipartisanship, that is not a new idea to my blog, here is a small sample of my posts on the subject.

Former Sen. Olympia Snowe: It’s Time for Voters to ‘Reward’ Bipartisanship, The Last Bipartisan, JOBS Act: The Dumbest “Bipartisan” Move Since Repealing Glass-Steagall, The Bipartisan Political Alliance That Will Turn The Fight Over Medicare On Its Head, and Target Fixation At The Fork In The Road.

Naked Capitalism has the post The Three Card Monte of Generational Warfare by Yves Smith.

Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
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We have two events happening that may simply be coincident in time in their genesis, but they are working synchronistically in a nasty way. And the driver of one is unquestionably class, not generational. I can’t get over the way young people are falling hook, line and sinker for the efforts to divert attention from the real perps, which are overwhelmingly the top wealthy and their allies and operatives, such as CEOs and C-level executives at large companies, and the large cohort of neoliberal pundits. (Not all are on board; for instance, I know a private equity firm head who loves annoying people in his industry by telling them they need to pay a ton more in taxes and donates generously to “progressive” candidates, but people like him are few in number).

The first is that a small group of audacious, visionary, committed, radical conservatives set in motion a plan in 1971 to undo the New Deal and cut social safety nets back. They did this via a concerted effort to change values and deeply inculcate pro-business thinking, to give economic “freedom” primacy over democracy, and to train lawyers to think like economists (which is at odds with foundational legal concepts like equity) and over time, pack the courts with corporate-friendly judges. The key figures of this movement and its intellectual leaders were all born well before or during the Depression: former Nixon Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, Henry Manne (founder of the law and economics movement), and of course, Milton Friedman. Its major funders included Birchers like the Coors family (which provided a large donation to help found the Heritage Foundation in 1973) and the Koch family.

You may find a number of familiar names in the list of people in that last paragraph.  I thought I would make my blog post so I can have a permanent link to the Yves Smith post.  It might come in handy some day.

Naked Capitalism has featured the article Death By A Thousand Cuts: The Silent Assassination Of European Democracy By Don Quijones.

As is gradually dawning on more and more people across the old continent, the European Union is riddled with fatal flaws and defects. Chief among them is the single currency which, rather than serving as the Union’s springboard to global dominance, could well be its ultimate undoing.

Another huge problem with the EU is its acute lack of transparency. Staggering as it may seem, in the last 20 years the Union has not passed a single audit. Indeed, so opaque is the state of its finances that in 2002 Marta Andreasen, the first ever professional accountant to serve as the Commission’s Chief Accountant, refused to sign off the organization’s 2001 accounts, citing concerns that the EU’s accounting system was “open to fraud.” After taking her concerns public, Andreasen was suspended and then later sacked by the Commission.

However, by far the EU’s greatest — and certainly most dangerous — structural flaw is its gaping democratic deficit. To paraphrase Nigel Farage, the stridently anti-EU British MEP, not only is the EU undemocratic, it is fundamentally anti-democratic.
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The inevitable result is that decisions that viscerally affect the lives of 500 million voters are now taken by anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than politicians responsible to their voters. As Obourne points out, “by a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.”

How much of the 1930s/1940s experience are we going to repeat?  If we have a second dip recession, will WW III follow?

Interestingly, this topic did not appear in the 155 answers to the question 2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

TruthOut has the article The New Financial Scam Driving Workers Deep Into Debt.

This new loan scheme is being promoted as a “service” by unscrupulous employers working in cahoots with predatory lenders. The employee can ask for an “advance” and the loan is included right in the paycheck. These loans are great for the lender because payments come straight out of the employee’s paycheck. The loans are terrible for the employee because payments come straight out of the employee’s paycheck.

Workplace loans have very high interest rates, as much as 165% per year, and are repaid directly out of wages. So far only about 100,000 workers are being offered these scams by their companies, but at least half a dozen companies are marketing this “service” to employers.

This article goes into much more detail about why these practices are so harmful.  However, I know of cases where friends who have above average educations in things financial are so desperate, that they go looking for loans for people with bad credit.  I even checked to make sure he understood what a bad idea it was.

It is so very tempting to offer help in such a situation.  However, I have also learned how you can get dragged down into situations you avoid by people who do not have the means to avoid them.

When I was a youngster, my parents actually explained to me what this song was all about. I guess I took it seriously.

The Rachel Maddow Show segment is labelled  The right presses on for welfare drug tests.

It is quite an interesting segment even though it has a lot of logical flaws. Let me point out a few that I can remember.

She probably spends more time touting what she says is starting to look like a success of Obamacare enrollments after a slow start than she does on the headline issue. She also compares the Obamacare enrollment record to that of Massachusetts’ experience with its law at start up. Massachusetts’ startup was even slower in its first three months. Part of the implication is that a measurement at three months is barely starting to show the possibilities.

When she finally gets to Florida’s experience with its drug testing law, she makes a big deal of its failure even while explaining that a court decision ended the implementation of the law after three months. No irony here.

She also makes the case for Florida’s failure that they have found that welfare recipients were found to be using drugs at one quarter the rate of the general population. I am at a little bit of a loss as to why this figure is so significant logically. Let’s say that someone thought that the general population were using drugs at a rate that was 1,000 times too great. Would it be a failure of common sense to want to stop part of the population that was “only” using it at a rate 250 times too great, when that was the population that you might have the most influence over? (1,000 and 250 were just numbers I picked to make a point. I make no claim that they represent any real situation.)

Perhaps I picked those numbers because of my experience buying low salt products in the grocery store. Most regular soups give you on the order of 900 mg of salt per serving. That is more than ⅓ of your total daily recommendation in one serving of a component of one meal. Low or reduced salt versions of these soups have as much as 600 mg of salt. That way you only get ¼ of your daily recommended amount from one component of one third of your meals. I think low salt is about 50 mg of salt per serving. So the store’s low salt is over 10 times as much salt as I consider low.

Rachel Maddow’s segment is a bit long. Perhaps she could have left out the easily attacked leaps in logic to make a more compact and more powerful indictment of the people she was ridiculing.

This may also be an example of why such “left wing” shows are not as popular among the “left” as the “right wing” shows seem to be among the “right”. Some of us on the “left” don’t really like defenses of our principles that are logically flawed, when in fact logically sound arguments could be made, and were made by Rachel Maddow.

The New York Times story US economy comparatively strong, study asserts begins with the following paragraph:

Academic heavyweights have been debating whether the United States economy is so sluggish because of too much government stimulus, …

I am confused about which New York Times published this article.  Was it the one in New York City, The United States of America, The Earth?

I don’t think it is my planet where “Academic heavyweights have been debating whether the United States economy is so sluggish because of too much government stimulus,…”

I’d love to see a list of those academic heavy weights.  I  bet I can come up with a far longer list who think the economy is sluggish because of far too little government stimulus of the right kind.

Comparing this crisis to recoveries from similar crises may prove that we have done fewer idiotic things in response to this crisis than in previous ones.  It doesn’t necessarily show that we have done as many smart things as we could have.  Had we had less stimulus than we did, we might have followed more closely the paths after similar crises in which there was a double dip.The loss to the economy is not measured by how less badly we did than in the past.  The measure is how far below crisisless trend we are.  Where would we be if we had been able to avoid the crisis with proper government regulation, less insane deregulation, less political cow-towing to the ultra-wealthy, and less concerted efforts to suppress labor unions?