The Boston Globe has the letter to the editor, Hillary Clinton’s e-mail practices raise nagging security concerns.

I am a retired federal employee with 35 years’ experience. It was always impressed upon us that it was chiefly for security reasons that we were only to use our government e-mail accounts for work-related communication.

This letter is a perfect example of the danger of drawing conclusions from the similarities of two dissimilar things. The mistake is comparing the personal email of an ordinary person to that of a very wealthy former President and then drawing conclusions from that comparison. The ordinary person might have a free gmail account supplied by a giant corporation on the giant corporation’s computers. Gmail stores email that the giant corporation reads to look for clues as to what they might be able to sell you.

The Clintons’ email was set up on a private computer server in their private home while Bill Clinton was President. The home and the server is protected by a Secret Service contingent dedicated to that one task. The State Department probably has inspected and vouched for Hillary Clinton’s private system as opposed to the ordinary person’s free email which we already know is read by the supplier of the system.

This same error is made when people draw conclusions from comparing a family budget to that of the federal government which has the sole power of creating the money supply in this country. I wonder if people think about what would happen if they tried to pay their bills with money they created themselves. Might there be a difference in how to operate the two vastly different systems?

Naked Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson on the IMF’s Tender Ministrations in Ukraine and Greece.

This RT interview with Michael Hudson focuses on the appalling state of the Ukraine economy and the role of the IMF, both in its policy-violating rescue package there and on a more general basis.

The section with Hudson starts at 13:45.

Yes, I know RT is a Russian production. Skeptics are going to say, “What do your expect a Russian show to say about the Ukraine?”

The other side of that skepticism is that our lame stream media is a production of the oligarchs. What can you expect them to be hiding?

Another way to look at this is to realize that these are the true views of Michael Hudson. I have heard him express them in other venues, some of which are discussed on this blog. There aren’t any mainstream outlets in the US that will let him express these views, so where else could he possibly go to say what he thinks?

There just don’t seem to be any objective facts anymore that everyone can believe, if there ever were any.

Here is a February 13, 2014 article in Workers World, U.S. officials caught in Ukraine plot.

On Feb. 6, Victoria Nuland, U.S. assistant secretary of state for European affairs, discovered that someone considered her recent phone discussion with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, too frank and pithy to remain in the archives.

First of all, their conversation showed Washington considered it perfectly normal and reasonable not only to have an opinion on who among the Ukrainian contenders should run the country, but to intervene to make sure a U.S. favorite won. In addition, it showed that the U.S. is contemptuous of the role of its EU partners, who are also imperialist rivals.

Why bring this up now?  I got into a discussion where I was challenged by my assertion that the U.S. was meddling in Ukrainian affairs before Russia started taking military action against the Ukraine.  I remembered the incident that helped form my opinion, but I wasn’t sure I could find the article on this blog to show it.  The key name that I did not remember was Victoria Nuland.  How could everyone, including me, forget this important name?

Although I did get a long list of articles when I searched the blog for the word “ukraine”, I didn’t have the time to read them all enough detail to pick out the reference to this incident.

Now that I know the name, I see that a search for “nuland” does bring up two of those articles.

This all fits in nicely with my previous post, The science of protecting people’s feelings: why we pretend all opinions are equal.  The incident of finding Victoria Nuland’s name is a perfect demonstration of why I have this blog.  I get so frustrated when I know the “facts” support me, but people put an equal weight on the opinions of others who just don’t know what they are talking about.  Marden Seavey is always calling me out for my believing I am always right.  The purpose of the blog is to archive the material to prove I am always right.  (Come on folks, can’t you see the self-deprecating humor in what I have just written?)  You might notice I also like to hear myself blather on.

The Washington Post has the article The science of protecting people’s feelings: why we pretend all opinions are equal.

I’ll give you one of the conclusions in the article.  You’ll have to read the article to find out why the author offers this opinion.

Still, I think it’s pretty obvious that human groups (especially in the United States) err much more in the direction of giving everybody a say than in the direction of deferring too much to experts. And that’s quite obviously harmful on any number of issues, especially in science, where what experts know really matters and lives or the world depend on it — like vaccinations or climate change.

I think this explains why so many people (Jacquelyn Wells) think it more important to get a middle of the road consensus than it is to have people fighting for what they believe is essential for success of the society, political system, economic system.  It isn’t necessarily found in the middle of the road where there is probably a lot of road kill (to mix metaphors a little).

Thanks to Sarah Clark for posting this on her Facebook page.

As I said to Sarah and I will remind Marden Seavy, this is why I get so frustrated when people cannot see that I am always right 🙂

The Boston Globe does it yet again in the piece Opinion: How to fix the T.

However, the state’s anti-privatization Pacheco Law, passed in 1993, has rendered it very difficult to pursue further savings by contracting out.

To which, I responded in a comment:

The Boston Globe is pretty adamant that they will try to ignore the rhinoceros in the room no matter how strongly its readers are pointing to it.  Despite twice posting a link to the article “The Boston Globe Covers Up for Wall Street, Ignores Swaps Losses in Coverage of MBTA Turmoil” as comments on two letters yesterday, The Globe still likes to pretend that there was no Wall Street rip-off.  Instead they blame the employees, the pensions, and the Pacheco Law.  Is the Wall Street rip-off an example of what we could achieve if we could only do some more privatization?  I didn’t realize that John Henry’s purchase of The Boston Globe would turn long-time Globe columnists into shills for Wall Street.

Here is a reflection of the above article posted on my blog: http://ssgreenberg.name/PoliticsBlog/2015/02/16/the-boston-globe-covers-up-for-wall-street-ignores-swaps-losses-in-coverage-of-mbta-turmoil/

In that previous post, I quote the underlying article as saying.

Particularly if you are in Massachusetts, please call or e-mail the Globe’s managing editor for news, Christine Chinlund and tell her the Globe is showing bias by ignoring the role of Big Finance in the MBTA’s tsuris.

Chinlund’s e-mail is: chinlund@globe.com and her phone is 617 929-3134.

I finally listened to the advice I had published for others to take, and sent Chinlund an email.

I thought I had this covered by yesterday’s post, Boston Globe Ignores Its Own Culpability In Misleading About the MBTA.  Apparently it is going to take a more concerted effort to get The Boston Globe to take an ethical stand and print the information it would rather cover up.

The YouTube video is titled Robin Hood In Reverse.

I am disappointed that Bernie Sanders still talks as if reducing the debt and deficit were necessary for any rational reason. His Chief Economic Adviser, Stephanie Kelton, knows full well what baloney this is. Perhaps the two of them have gotten together and decided that the heads of the Republican Senators would explode if they were exposed to the truth.

See my previous post The Peterson Foundation Sings the Same Old Song. Here is one of the excerpts that I showed in that post.

So, the lower deficit Peterson approves of is close to or past putting the private sector into an aggregate annual loss position. And, in advocating for further deficit reduction, what Peterson is doing is advocating for placing the private sector into a much deeper and unsustainable loss position over a period of years. Doesn’t Peterson know that government deficits add to private sector aggregate net financial assets? Doesn’t he know that budgetary austerity will cause the private sector to lose financial wealth? Doesn’t he know that the deficit doesn’t harm the government’s capability to spend, but that cutting it does harm the private sector’s capability to spend by destroying private sector wealth over time?

Are any of my readers paying any attention?

File charges against the 47 U.S. Senators in violation of The Logan Act in attempting to undermine a nuclear agreement is the Whitehouse petition that is gathering the signatures. It has over 260,000 as I write this post.  It only needed 100,000 signatures within 30 days to cross the second threshold and require a response.  April 8 is the deadline.

The concluding sentence:

This is a clear violation of federal law. In attempting to undermine our own nation, these 47 senators have committed treason.

may be a little overdone, but  if you want your signature to really count, then I think this is the petition to sign.

There were several letters to the editor published in The Boston Globe today.

Problems lie with MBTA’s labor costs and Time for the ultimate overhaul both show that readers don’t have a complete understanding of why the MBTA faces some of the financial problems that it does.

Even the letter favorable to the MBTA, Mass. leaders should embrace transit excellence, not austerity, could probably benefit from knowing the part of the story that is missing.

This part of the story was covered in my previous post The Boston Globe Covers Up for Wall Street, Ignores Swaps Losses in Coverage of MBTA Turmoil.

The Boston Globe may be unaware of the issues that are getting swept under the rug.  They certainly haven’t owned up to the part they have played in furthering the misperceptions about the MBTA.

My response to these letters is a perfect example of one of the reasons why I write this blog.  In this case, I was able to easily find the article that shows what The Boston Globe is hiding, because I could look it up on my own blog.  Somehow, I knew that I would want to reference that article some day.

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Peterson Foundation Sings the Same Old Song.

I post about this article here to try to help disabuse you of the idea that the Peterson Foundation has even a shred of credibility which even some Democrats think it has.

I also post a much larger selection of excerpts than I normally would, because it is really important for you to read this material.  I know many people don’t follow the link to the underlying article in my blog posts.  If I am lucky they do read what I put directly into the post.

Also, keep in mind that the Chief Economist for the minority on the Senate Budget Committee, Stephanie Kelton, used to be the editor of New Economic Perspectives until she became the Chief Economist.  I have high hopes that she and Senator Bernie Sanders, who appointed her, can start to educate the public and other politicians to the reality of how sovereign currency works, and the policy opportunities it unlocks.

Now for the excerpts from the article The Peterson Foundation Sings the Same Old Song.

He thinks the debt is a long-term problem that we have to start to solve now. I think there is, literally, no public finance-related debt problem for a fiat sovereign like the U.S., and that the problem that exists is not a debt problem, but a political problem created by Peterson and his allies across the political spectrum who have propagandized the view that there is a debt crisis since the mid-1970s, with increasing success since the 1990s.
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But apart from CBO’s efforts at science fiction, this sentence clearly implies that higher deficits are a bad thing, that the lower deficits we’ve been having currently are an improvement over what we had before, and that our fiscal situation will be getting worse again soon in the precise sense that we will be running higher deficits. So, this one sentence shows that The Peterson Foundation has no idea what the government deficit really is.
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So, the lower deficit Peterson approves of is close to or past putting the private sector into an aggregate annual loss position. And, in advocating for further deficit reduction, what Peterson is doing is advocating for placing the private sector into a much deeper and unsustainable loss position over a period of years. Doesn’t Peterson know that government deficits add to private sector aggregate net financial assets? Doesn’t he know that budgetary austerity will cause the private sector to lose financial wealth? Doesn’t he know that the deficit doesn’t harm the government’s capability to spend, but that cutting it does harm the private sector’s capability to spend by destroying private sector wealth over time?
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They would take money from us, our children and our grandchildren today, preventing us from investing in that future, because they say that the Government is like a household and has to run small deficits or surpluses to safeguard its future capacity to spend. But the federal government is the monopoly issuer of the currency, and when it uses that power to deficit spend it generally contributes net financial assets to the private sector and makes it stronger, while when it runs surpluses it doesn’t increase its capacity spend, but only decreases the private sector’s ability to generate economic activity and new investments.
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These very views are today largely responsible for the disasters we see in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and increasingly in Italy. It is long past time to end their fiscal reign of terror, by giving them no further credence.

We can do that in the United States, by making everyone understand that there is nothing to the gospel of deficit reductions, surplus budgets, and fiscal austerity except human misery, and making them understand also that the time is long passed to embrace a doctrine of real fiscal responsibility that tells us to evaluate fiscal policy proposals in fiat sovereign nations by their likely real world results without regard to their implications for the public interest-bearing debt.

In comments on a previous post, 47 Traitors! Biden, Others Rip GOP Senators Over Iran Letter, Marden Seavy introduced the following video clip of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

As Stewart really lays into the Republicans at the beginning of the video, I thought that Mardy had really found the clip to put the nail in the coffin of the Republicans. Unfortunately, I watched the clip to the end. In a seemingly even-handed way, Stewart points out the history of Democrats speaking to foreign leaders at which Republicans and Republican Presidents were annoyed. Jon Stewart has the nasty habit of pointing out the foibles of both sides.

I decided to research one such incident. This was the visit by Nancy Pelosi to Bashar al-Assad of Syria. President Bush was trying to isolate al-Assad at the time.

Of course the devil is in the details of the comparison. The New York Times had an article at the time, Pelosi Meets With Syrian Leader. The article points out the negatives and some possible positives of the trip from various points of view. You’ll really have to read it yourself, and make your own judgment.

I have been reading about the Logan Act of 1799, last amended in 1994. It is not clear if the words WikiPedia gives us are the original act or the act as amended.

The paper Conducting Foreign Relations Without Authority: The Logan Act by the Congressional Research Service settles the matter.

As amended, the Act states:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects

Was Nancy Pelosi trying to defeat some measures of the United States in the same way that the Republicans were? Or is there an actual difference. Now it is up to you to decide if there really is a moral equivalence with what Nancy Pelosi did and what the 47 Republican Senators did.

By the way, the WikiPedia article says:

Despite the apparent success of Logan’s mission, his activities aroused the opposition of the Federalist Party in Congress, who were resentful of the praise showered on Logan by oppositional Democratic-Republican newspapers. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, also of Pennsylvania, responded by suggesting that Congress “act to curb the temerity and impudence of individuals affecting to interfere in public affairs between France and the United States.”

So I come to the conclusion that if you want to do seemingly outrageous things, you can certainly take the risk of doing them (as in starting a war with Iraq under false premises). If you turn out to be right in what you did, you will be deemed a hero. By the same token, if you turn out to be wrong, you will be the goat, and deservedly so. If you end up being the goat, you have no one to blame but yourself.