New Economic Perspectives has published the poem Modern Monetary Theory by Pavlina R. Tcherneva.  I quote just enough of the poem to whet your appetitie and to have something to discuss in this post.

Pondering here from my academic station
Why has never before such a simple observation
Caused more confusion and consternation
Amongst the general population

That the government is the currency-issuing monopolist
Is not a radical idea, nor a hypothesis
It is a simple, nay, elementary fact
That is often so fervently attacked

A previous post When Will the White House and OMB Ever Learn About Sector Financial Balances? discussed another incontrovertible fact about MMT that people have a hard time accepting.

Now here is a fact that I have trouble with.  We are currently living in an economic “system” where there is significant unemployment and underemployment, there is money sitting idly in the hands of the rich because they don’t want to invest it, we have resources going unused, we have factories that are shut down,  we have lots of work to do on societal needs, we  have people who would like to buy stuff, we have factories that could make the stuff people want to buy, we have people homeless on the streets, we have foreclosed houses sitting empty, and yet the “system” cannot manage to bring all these pieces together to boost the economy and our general standard of living.  Why is it that we love this “system” so, but cannot tolerate the thought of an explanation of how this can all be fixed?

Would the cognitive dissonance explode our minds if we admitted that there is a solution in front of us to solve a lot of our problems, but we just don’t want to accept it?  Have we fallen in love with our oppressive system that we  just can’t bear  to part with it no matter how much harm it does?  Sometimes we see this behavior in other people and call it either “battered wife syndrome”, or the “Stockholm syndrome”.

Battered Woman Syndrome

According to Walker’s The Battered Woman Syndrome (p. 95-97, 1984), there are four general characteristics of the syndrome:

1. The woman believes that the violence was or is her fault.
2. The woman has an inability to place responsibility for the violence elsewhere.
3. The woman fears for her life and/or her children’s lives.
4. The woman has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.

Stockholm syndrome

Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness. The FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 8% of victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.

The HuffPost Show has the terrific segment Senator Elizabeth Warren Interview.  Below is the blurb for the show on YouTube.

The HuffPost Show is an irreverent look at the week’s top news stories. Watch live every Friday night at 9PM ET on huffingtonpost.com

How anyone can watch this interview, compare Elizabeth Warren to Hillary Clinton, and still think they want Hillary Clinton, is just beyond what I can understand. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the Clinton fans have a phantasy about who Hillary Clinton is that is completely disconnected from her actual record. I know what the Clinton record is, and it is diametrically opposed to everything that Elizabeth Warren talked about in this interview.

The interview starts off with some of Warren’s life story.  If you are as big a fan of Elizabeth Warren as I am, you’ve probably heard this a million times.  Yet, she tells it so engagingly and with variations each time, that I never tire of hearing her tell it.  Of course the story ties in with the important issues that she goes on to discuss.  If you haven’t heard this, then you really need to watch this video.

By the end of the interview, Elizabeth Warren had the audience and me all fired up to fight for what we believe in.

In a previous post, Bill Black: HSBC Violates its Sweetheart Deal and Loretta Lynch Praises It, I wondered what Elizabeth Warren knew about this story and how she reacts to it.  She answered that question in spades in the interview.  She did not mention what she thinks of Loretta Lynch, though.

When she got to the discussion on Iran, it was the first time that I had some strong objection to her point of view. I made the following comment on the YouTube posting:

I am a huge fan of Elizabeth Warren, and I liked everything she had to say until she said that sanctions against Iran worked.  Even the President said that continuing with sanctions would only harden the Iranians’ position.  I have a blog post that puts the numbers to Obama’s assertion.

Netanyahu enters never-never land

We could have gotten an even better deal than we just got, and we could have gotten it years ago, if President Bush had accepted an Iranian proposal instead of rejecting it in favor of imposing sanctions.

See my previous post Liberals Bernie Sanders And Al Franken Stand With Obama In Support Of Iran Nuclear Deal. That post has a quote from the President mentioning a third alternative to the negotiated settlement.

Third, we could pull out of negotiations, try to get other countries to go along and continue sanctions that are currently in place or add additional ones, and hope for the best — knowing that every time we have done so, Iran has not capitulated but instead has advanced its program.

I hope that Elizabeth Warren will fix her understanding on Iran sanctions, and I hope she will start talking openly about the nomination of Loretta Lynch for Attorney General.

First Look has the article Passphrases That You Can Memorize — But That Even the NSA Can’t Guess.

I’ll quote just enough of the article to give you a hint at how secure it is and how different it is from what you may be thinking.

In other words, if an attacker knows that you are using a seven-word Diceware passphrase, and they pick seven random words from the Diceware word list to guess, there is a one in 1,719,070,799,748,422,591,028,658,176 chance that they’ll pick your passphrase each try.

At one trillion guesses per second — per Edward Snowden’s January 2013 warning — it would take an average of 27 million years to guess this passphrase.

Not too bad for a passphrase like “bolt vat frisky fob land hazy rigid,” which is entirely possible for most people to memorize. Compare that to “d07;oj7MgLz’%v,” a random password that contains slightly less entropy than the seven-word Diceware passphrase but is significantly more difficult to memorize.

I am thinking about using this technique myself.  Just remember, if you use the exact pass phrase quoted above, it will not be secure at all.  You have to use the technique to generate your own random pass phrase.

Naked Capitalism has the article Bill Black: HSBC Violates its Sweetheart Deal and Loretta Lynch Praises It.

There can be no more incriminating indictment of the Nation’s leading federal prosecutors than the fact that even the sycophantic DealBook admits that on Holder and Lynch’s watch a “pattern” of recurrent frauds by our most elite CEOs has emerged – and those frauds commonly involve profiting from the banks aiding the funding of mass murderers. The administration has managed to turn into reality all those bad novels they sell in airport book stores that describe networks of criminal elite bankers financing terrorists, drug gangs, and venal and brutal kleptocrats with impunity from the laws.

What is it going to take to make progressive Senators wake up to the fact that Loretta Lynch is an awful choice to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General?  The Republicans are dong us a favor by not allowing a vote on her nomination.  Of course, it would be a big favor if it weren’t for the fact that Holder stays in office as long as Lynch is not confirmed.

I would expect that at least Elizabeth Warren would be sounding the alarm bells.  She seems strangely silent about an issue that is in her area of expertise.

Politicus USA has the article Liberals Bernie Sanders And Al Franken Stand With Obama In Support Of Iran Nuclear Deal.

President Obama laid out the options for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program during his statement today:

For the fact is, we only have three options for addressing Iran’s nuclear program. First, we can reach a robust and verifiable deal — like this one — and peacefully prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

The second option is we can bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, thereby starting another war in the Middle East, and setting back Iran’s program by a few years — in other words, setting it back by a fraction of the time that this deal will set it back. Meanwhile, we’d ensure that Iran would race ahead to try and build a bomb.

Third, we could pull out of negotiations, try to get other countries to go along and continue sanctions that are currently in place or add additional ones, and hope for the best — knowing that every time we have done so, Iran has not capitulated but instead has advanced its program.

For some numbers to back up what the President said in the last paragraph above, see my previous post Netanyahu enters never-never land.

For those of you that think that working out a deal with Iran is anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, I suggest you do a little research into the backgrounds of these two “liberals” who are supporting the President. You may be shocked.

WND has the article Mayor takes stand against Muslim Shariah courts.

The media frenzy was touched off by reports that an Islamic tribunal was being set up in the Dallas, Texas, area. A group of imams from surrounding mosques would sit on what they call a “mediation panel,” as defacto judges, and mediate disputes between Muslims who voluntarily submit to its edicts. They denied this was a Shariah court, saying the panel would mete out nonbinding decisions in business disputes, divorces and other family matters “in full accordance with the law.”

Normally, I wouldn’t even bother with a story from a source like this, but this stuff is seeping into the real world.  It is time for me to speak up.

Their are other religions in this country that have similar setups. People who don’t know about them live their lives happily in their ignorance. Ignorance is not bliss anymore when people start to think that only Islam has such practices.

A quick Google search gives one example, Jewish Divorce 101.

The entire get procedure is performed in front of a beth din (rabbinical court consisting of three rabbis). Though technically only the presence of the husband, wife, and two witnesses is required to effect the divorce, practically, the get process is so complex that it cannot be done correctly unless done in the presence of experts in the field. In fact, rabbinic law automatically invalidates any get which was not written and transmitted in front of experts.

I am certainly no expert on Judaism, so it isn’t hard to believe that I don’t know the details for other religions in this country.  However, if any of you want to look up quasi-judicial processes in Christian religions practiced in this country, it shouldn’t come as a shock if you find similar things.  I won’t name any names myself.

It’s time we all rebelled against media frenzies.

Naked Capitalism has the article Ilargi: Warren Buffett is Everything That’s Wrong With America.

The introduction to the article emphasizes some points that interest me lately.

Yves here. I’m sure readers can add to this antidote to the pervasive Warren Buffett hagiography in American media. For instance, Buffett lavishes praise on the executives of Wells Fargo, when Wells engages in abusive servicing (see here and here for examples). So Buffett is part of the cohort that has held bank leaders as competent and deserving of their leadership roles, which serves to hide the fact that a big chunk of industry profits rests on predatory behavior, like gotcha terms in checking accounts and credit cards.

The article itself focuses on another recent foible of Warren Buffet.

Last week, Buffett announced a plan to merge a number of ‘food’ companies in a deal he set up with Brazilian 3G Capital. For some reason, they all have German names (I’m not sure why that is or what it means, if anything): Heinz, Kraft, Oscar Mayer.
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Buffett, the supposed genius, can only do these deals because nobody demands anybody to pay for the externalities that arise as a result of Warren pushing crap posing as food upon the American people. And then when he’s done getting even richer off of poisoning your kids, he’ll donate billions to their well-being.

The article makes very good points that are more general than just the food issue. You’ll have to read it yourself to get the full benefit.

As I started to read, I thought that Warren Buffet isn’t all bad. I put the explanation for that thought into the following comment:

There is this feeling, partly myth and partly real, that Warren Buffet has a unique management style that lets companies that he buys continue to excel. He picks companies with good managers, and he lets them continue to do their thing. He only offers advice and direction moderately when asked.

Some or all of that may be true, but there is the other side of Warren Buffet which Ilargi highlights in this article. He is ruthless at times. The bargains he gets can only be achieved because his wealth is what gives him great power to drive hard bargains.

I admire Warren Buffet for the part of the myth that may be true, but that doesn’t stop me from seeing the negative side. When I used to watch Nightly Business Report on PBS, it used to drive me batty to see how Suzy Gharib would fawn all over Warren Buffet. You know you aren’t getting straight news when you see behavior like that.

MSNBC has the article and video Leaders agree on key parameters for Iran nuclear deal.

In Lausanne, Switzerland, the EU’s Federica Mogherini and Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif announce the framework for the “decisive steps” they have taken in moving closer to a solution for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program.

It is nice to see that there are alternatives to belligerence and intimidation to get agreements among countries. We could have reached this point years ago had not Bush insisted that we needed more sanctions against Iran to get to this point.

See my previous post Netanyahu enters never-never land for the evidence of what I just said about George W. Bush.

Thanks to Jacquelyn Wells for sharing on Facebook msnbc’s video.

Collective Evolution has the article NASA Has Released The Largest Picture Ever Taken. It Will Rock Your Universe.

On January 5th 2015, NASA let out an image of the Andromeda galaxy, which is the closest galaxy to us. They captured the image using the NASA/ESA Hubble Telescope once again, but this time it’s taken to a whole new level. They took 411 images and put them together to create the largest image ever taken. It’s a whopping 1.5 billion pixels and requires about 4.3 GB of disk space!

Here is a video view of that image that tries to visually convey the magnitude of what NASA has done.

Whenever I contemplate some of the wonders that science produces it makes me think of the people who have little knowledge or interest in modern day science.

And to think some people take their view of the world from ancient texts, written thousands of years ago. Compared with what we know today, why would I think that people thousands of years ago had a better understanding than we do today?

I am glad that I saw this article on Matson Haug’s Facebook page.

New Economic Perspectives has the article We Send Teachers to Prison for Rigging the Numbers, Why Not Bankers? The article is by William K. Black

Any reader familiar with my work should be running over in their mind Citigroup’s vastly larger cheating frauds that senior managers produced by using exactly the same tactics to produce hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud.

How did people become suspicious and decide to conduct a real investigation?  They realized that the reported results were too good to be true.  That too is directly parallel to Citi, where massive purchases of “liar’s” loans known to be 90% fraudulent supposedly led to massive profits.

I was thrilled to see this article. Yesterday I made the connection, in the post Net neutrality emails raise suspicions, between the teachers’ conviction and the fraud perpetrated by Koch’s organizations to defraud Congress.  The Koch’s groups’ fraud used a flood of phoney emails on net neutrality to try to convince Congress people that the public is against net neutrality.  It is about time the elite were held to the same standards of honesty that the rest of us must adhere to.

Notice also the tendency of the media to hold public employees to much higher standards than private employees, all the while saying that we need to run government more like a business.  In his article, William K. Black pointed out the irony of this position favoring the techniques of private enterprise.  That is exactly how we got into this mess with the  teachers.