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.

Politico has the story Net neutrality emails raise suspicions.

The flood of traffic seemed to raise some lawmakers’ eyebrows, including Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier of California, whose office soon determined some of the messages had come from constituents who didn’t recall sending them. Her aides pointed to a memo sent to members’ staff last week by Lockheed Martin, which manages the technology behind some lawmakers’ “contact me” Web pages. Lockheed initially said it had “some concerns regarding the messages,” including the fact that “a vast majority of the emails do not appear to have a valid in-district address.” In some cases, Lockheed also questioned the “legitimacy of the email address contact associated with the incoming message[s].”

“The idea that an outside group could use consumer data to impersonate constituents suggests an attempt to hijack the important feedback members of Congress need to truly represent their districts,” Speier said in a statement, without naming a culprit.
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“This is identity theft, but instead of impersonating for financial gain, the originators of this theft are striking at the heart of our representative democracy,” Speier said.

My ass, it’s not for financial gain.  There is tremendous financial gain to be made by stopping the FCC from regulating internet companies as utilities.  If those gainers succeed, then the rest of us lose.

If this isn’t a violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act as it is now being applied, then I can’t imagine what is. The law is even being applied to teachers who help their students cheat on tests when the cheating is organized.  See The LA Times article Atlanta schools cheating scandal: 11 educators convicted of racketeering.

One of the largest school cheating trials in U.S. history drew to a dramatic close Wednesday with a jury finding 11 Atlanta elementary school teachers and administrators guilty of taking part in a racketeering conspiracy to illegally boost students’ test scores. Some of the educators face up to 35 years in prison.

Doesn’t 35 years seem a bit excessive for teachers, especially when the Koch brothers associated organizations can defraud Congress and get away with it?

The Rachel Maddow show has the video Religious right puts GOP at odds with public opinion.

Rachel Maddow shows how conservative politics can often put Republican politicians at odds with public opinion while trying to satisfy the religious right. Tom Lobianco of the Indianapolis Star Tribune joins to discuss Indiana’s new discrimination law.

Rachel Maddow sure can go on and on without ever seemingly getting to the point. As much of this as you can bear to watch, she does make a point. I don’t want to spoil her punchline by commenting further in the open.

The Rachel Maddow show had a great interview with Elizabeth Warren, Senator Elizabeth Warren pushes Democrats to compete on issues.

Senator Elizabeth Warren talks with Rachel Maddow about the differences between Democrats and Republicans on popular issues like student loans and the minimum wage, and why she thinks emphasizing those distinctions is key to Democratic political success.

Besides what is summarized above by MSNBC, Warren also made important comments about the powers of a Senator besides just creating legislation. She also described what she says Democrats can do to demonstrate their faith in the democratic process.

New Economic Perspectives has the article When Will the White House and OMB Ever Learn About Sector Financial Balances? by Joe Firestone.

The Sector Financial Balances (SFB) model is an accounting identity, and these are always true by definition alone. The SFB model says:

Domestic Private Balance + Domestic Government Balance + Foreign Balance = 0.
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However, the “accidental deficits” produced will not be big enough, nor targeted well enough to prevent continuing stagnation. In my next post, I’ll look at the Congressional (CPC) budget and see if the CPC has yet learned the lesson that projections that don’t take sectoral financial balances into account project private sector results that are far from consistent with what is necessary for a robust and just economy.

For those of you who don’t cotton to equations, I have prepared a picture for a blog post I will be publishing one of these days. [For a deeper discussion with even more pictures, see my previous post Diagrams and Dollars: Modern Money Illustrated (Part 1 & 2)]

Each  arrow in the above picture represents a flow from one pot to another. A flow into a pot is positive for that pot, and a flow out of a pot is negative for that pot.  If all four arrows at the mouth of any pot sum to a negative number, then you have a deficit for that pot. If greater than zero,  the pot has a surplus.  What is a deficit for a pair of arrows at one end of the pair is a surplus at the other end of that pair.

What Joe Firestone called an “accounting identity”, I explained in the following words:

There is no other flow of money. None rains in from the sky. None falls on the floor.

What the zero on the right hand side of Joe’s equation, (Domestic Private Balance + Domestic Government Balance + Foreign Balance = 0), is the equivalent of what I said above.  The zero accounts for all the other flows.  There aren’t any.

If you can think of a flow of money that is not in one of these sectors, please do enlighten us.  I’d be willing to bet that whatever you come up with is actually in one of the above mentioned sectors (pots).

Oh, and the point is what?  The Republican budgets, the White House OMB budgets, and even Democratic budgets are based on the premise that the equation is not true, or the fact that these three pots are not the only ones.  If you cannot believe what is obvious to me and to Joe Firestone, and the whole world of Modern Money Theorists, then I challenge you to come up with some other explanation.

Please read my subsequent post What Is Missing In Modern Money Theory (MMT)? It casts a little shadow on the certainty of this post. It shows that the other pots can create money that sure economically acts a lot more like USA money than MMT imagines.

Michael Hudson’s book Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy, made me see the key difference between Fed money and private bank money. Essentially, it is all about the interest charges. MMT says that, but the significance didn’t quite strike me until I read the book.

Recently, I have come up with words that better explain the difference between what private banks create and what The Federal Reserve Banks create. MMT calls what the Fed creates “high powered money”. What private banks create are promises of money. Briefly, private bank accounts and loans provide you with a promise of “high powered money”. Private banks only have to fulfill their promise when you try to use that promise outside the bank. If a person deposits your check into his or her account in the same bank, the bank only has to transfer their promise of money from your account to the payee’s account. Given the inflow and outflow of “high powered money”, the bank only has to worry about the net difference between the two flows. Banks know that under normal circumstances, that difference is very small compared to the promises they have made. It is only when that difference is much larger than usual that anybody would even have an inkling that there is a difference between “high powered money” and a private bank’s promise of money.

Here is a recent post that compares my explanation with an old video of the official MMT explanation – Loans Create Deposits: Inside vs Outside Money – March 19, 2020

New Economic Perspectives has the article Entrevista a Randall Wray.

The full interview with NEP’s Randy Wray by EKO de Público TV in Spain. This is the complete interview. Questions from the interviewer are in spanish. Randy’s responses are subtitled in spanish.

If you don’t understand Spanish, you won’t understand the questions, but the answers are very understandable. Even if you know Modern Money Theory as much as I do (and that is not saying how much I do), you can learn a lot more from hearing this interview.

I have to imagine that the interviewer is asking very intelligent questions based on the responses the questions elicit. I cannot imagine any interviewer in the USA being able to ask these sorts of questions, let alone actually asking them.

It does help to know that the current account balance means the foreign trade balance. This is the amount a country earns from foreign trade minus how much it spends in foreign trade. In this country we talk about our trade deficit, because our current account balance is negative. Being negative means that we earn less from foreign countries than we spend with them. (We buy more from them than they buy from us.)

According to the WikiPedia article Bo (parsha).

This article is about Judaism’s weekly Torah portion on the parashah of “Bo”
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Fifth reading — Exodus 12:21–28

In the short fifth reading (עליה, aliyah), Moses instructed the elders of Israel to kill their Passover lambs, paint their doorways with the lamb’s blood, and remain inside their houses until the morning. For God would smite the Egyptians, but when God saw the blood on the lintel, God would pass over the house and not allow “the Destroyer” to come into that house. The Israelites were to observe the Passover service for all time, and when their children would ask what the service means, they were to say that it commemorated the time when God passed over the Israelites’ houses when God smote the Egyptians. ‘ And the people bowed the head and worshipped. And the Israelites did as God commanded Moses and Aaron. The fifth reading (עליה, aliyah) and a closed portion (סתומה, setumah) end here.

As a reader of modern history and current events, I got to thinking of how one might interpret this passage. I leave it up to you to do your own thinking on this subject.