Apropos of my previous post, New Economic Perspectives has the article Is It Time for MMT To Become Mainstream to Save Us from the Second Global Financial Crisis of the Millennium? by L. Randall Wray.

In the New Economic Perspectives article, Wray is commenting on a Vox article Bernie Sanders opens a new front in the battle for the future of the Democratic Party by Dylan Matthews.

As Dylan says: “For years, the main disagreement between Democratic and Republican budget negotiators was about how to balance the budget — what to cut, what to tax, how fast to implement it — but not whether to balance it. Even most liberal economists agree that, in the medium-run, it’s better to have less government debt rather than more. Kelton denies that premise. She thinks that, in many cases, government surpluses are actively destructive and balancing the budget is very dangerous. For example, Kelton thinks the Clinton surpluses are nothing to brag about and they actually inflicted economic damage lasting over a decade.”

Yeah, Bernie Sanders.  Now if Bernie and Stephanie can turn Elizabeth Warren into an MMTer, we’ll know we are really making progress.  As a constituent of Warren’s, I have tried to use what little influence I have to get Warren thinking about MMT.

Naked Capitalism has the article New Findings Point to Private Credit “Perfect Storm” Brewing in Your Financial Future.

Macroeconomic stability will be more elusive and that will affect all of our lives: from the risks many will face in childhood, to the security of employment at working age, to the challenge of accumulating for retirement. More financial instability will introduce more uncertainty all down the line, and that will be a very different world than the one we would have lived in only a couple of decades ago. But that period of calm also tells us that such instability isn’t necessarily a fact of life, and addressing that is likely to be the policy challenge going forward.

As several comments point out, this is not exactly a new finding, but the graph they show may be new to some people.  Also keep in mind that this article is talking about private credit.  This is what people in the private sector have borrowed and must pay back.  This bears no relation to the federal “debt”.  The federal “debt” is to the federal government like bank account deposits are to banks.  To make this clearer, isn’t it obvious that people tend to buy U.S. Treasury securities because it is absolutely the safest place they can put their money and earn a little interest.  This safety factor is exactly why Treasuries pay a lower interest rate than private banks, and yet the Treasury has plenty of customers who are more than happy to accept the deal.

Takepart has the article Watch Elizabeth Warren School the Senate on the Keystone XL Pipeline: ‘It’s About Money and Power’.

The Massachusetts senator blasted colleagues for fast-tracking the controversial tar sands oil project on the first day of the new Congress.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., lit into Senate colleagues on Thursday for putting a bill to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline ahead of legislation that would do much more for American job growth and infrastructure.

This is what a fighting progressive Senator looks like. Why shouldn’t she get as much coverage telling the truth as the Boners and McConnels get telling their lies?

Thanks to Elizabeth Ann St John for posting this on Facebook.

The Fiscal Times has the article Why Elizabeth Warren Trumps Obama’s Economic Message. You all scoffed when I wrote all this on my blog over the past few months.  Will you continue to scoff?  I know the issue you have.  I have seen it over and over again in my career and not only for me.  People never believe the experts they know personally.  They can’t believe they actually know anybody personally who has a handle on what is going on or what to do.  So, in industry, you just hire a  consultant to tell your company the same thing  you have been telling them for years.  If the company pays the consultant enough money, then, and only then, does the message get through.

Well here are a few tiny snippets from the consultant that I “hired” to speak to you on this blog.  For the full message, you’ll have to read the full consultant’s report by clicking on the link above.

Things could be different next time depending on the presidential matchup. Yet even a candidate as formidable as former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton may have trouble breaking through the lethargy or indifference of disgruntled middle class Democrats who have lived with wage stagnation for years.
.
.
.
“This analysis suggests that a good message to the middle class could potentially yield you a lot of votes,” he added.

This is why I have been such a strong supporter of Elizabeth Warren and other politicians who deliver the same message with the same urgency.  This is also why I have been saying that Hillary Clinton would be a disastrous candidate.  What would be even worse would be if Hillary Clinton actually got elected to be President.

Personally financially, I would probably do OK if Hillary Clinton got elected.  The 90% of the population that has less financial wherewithal than I have would continue to get hammered.  If Elizabeth Warren or someone like her got elected, I might not do as well financially, but I would be able to sleep better at night by not having to worry about whether I will do well, or whether the stock market and the economy will crash instead.  I would be more than happy to trade a little chance for huge profits for the assurance that I won’t have to be eating dog food to make ends meet in  my retirement.

And then there is the other worry I have.  When the bottom 90% finally wake up to what has been done to them, and when they have so little left to lose that they decide to rebel, I will be lumped in with the crowd that they will come after with pitch forks.  I can see myself as they lead me to the guillotine, “But just read my blog.  You’ll see I have always been on your side and fighting for your welfare.”

Here is a little video to help you realize that Elizabeth Warren is not alone in her fight against the regressives.

I found this video in a Crooks and Liars article Hall Of Shame: 35 Dems Voted Yesterday To Roll Back Dodd-Frank Provisions

Among the names listed, I found the following: [see retraction below]

Elizabeth Esty (CT-05)

I have been receiving a lot of email from Elizabeth Esty in this recent election season and continuing right up to January 6, 2015. I have been ignoring these emails because I am not in her district.

I went back to my email trash and found an email where she was requesting me to vote on what were my priorities. Below is the email I sent her in response.

Subject:	Re: Your priorities
Date:	Fri, 09 Jan 2015 12:18:19 -0500
From:	Steven Greenberg <steve@ssgreenberg.name>
To:	administrator@elizabethesty.com

I have been ignoring these emails because I am not
in your district.

However, I noticed your name in the Crooks and Liars
"Hall Of Shame: 35 Dems Voted Yesterday To Roll Back
Dodd-Frank Provisions"

So don't think that these things go unnoticed.  I will
work for your defeat in the next election.

/Steve

January 15, 2015

In the FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 37, Esty is recorded as voting No.

I have posted an apology on Esty’s Facebook page.

Talking Points Memo has the article Progressives Seek Control Of The Democratic Party.

Progressive advocates see the next two years through the prism of the coming 2016 race. They want Democrats to use their minority to lay down a sweeping populist agenda for the country ahead of the election, which could include breaking up the big banks, a major clean energy jobs bill or investments in education to let college students graduate debt free.

This is almost enough to make me think that change is possible.  Who would have thought that the constant promotion of progressive values by the likes of Elizabeth Warren could make so much change in the Democratic Party in such a short time?  I would have, that’s who.  I have been urging Democrats to promote progressive ideas as hard as the Republicans push their regressive ideas.  In fact I have been saying that to get the truth through the barrage of false attacks, the truth must be spoken at least twice as often as the lies.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Je Suis Oncle Bernard by William Black.

it is my sad responsibility to note the murder of Bernard Maris, a prominent French economist and opponent of financial terrorism via austerity, in the terror attack on Charlie Hebdo.

I doubt the attackers even cared that they killed an economist who probably was one of the few  who spoke up for the needs of the middle and lower classes in France and Europe.  Of course, I don’t know what kind of satire Maris wrote, so I cannot vouch for that part of his public life.  As if someone needed vouching for as a precondition for not being murdered.

There are several ways to beat the cold.

1. Wait for the temperature to warm up from -9 to -4.
2. Dress like a skier
3. Dress like a motorcycle rider

Naked Capitalism has the article Democracy and the Threat of Revolution: New Evidence.

Some theories suggest that the threat of revolution plays a pivotal role in democratisation. This column provides new evidence in support of this hypothesis. The authors use democratic transitions from Europe in the 19th century, Africa at the turn at the 20th century, and the Great Reform Act of 1832 in Great Britain. They find that credible threats of revolution have systematically triggered pre-emptive democratic reforms throughout history.

I guess we are going to have to come up with something more credible than the Occupy Movement.

The article mentions one effect that I have always felt was important.

There are many reasons why droughts might lead to riots; for instance, the temporary reduction in income lowers the opportunity cost of contesting power,

In other words, if people have sufficient opportunities to prosper without revolution, then they will not rebel.  However, when the oligarchs remove every avenue to prosperity for enough people, then they have nothing left to lose if they rebel.

Janis Joplin, that great philosopher, had it right.

This speech is the one I referred to in my previous post Elizabeth Warren Delivers Scathing Speech On Trickle-Down Economics.  When I made that post, I did not have access to the video below that has just been posted on YouTube.  There are sound problems here and there in the video, but most of it is very easily understood.

Elizabeth Warren has the transcript Senator Warren’s Remarks at AFL-CIO National Summit on Raising Wages on her Senate web site.  The AFL-CIO has a web site about the AFL-CIO National Summit on Raising Wages,

Jeebus criminy, people, what part of her talk are you having trouble understanding? She has been saying many of these things since before she started running for office. However, she now talks about the most current data, and the most current political situation. You can’t possibly want to vote for the wing of the Democratic Party that she identifies as equally at fault as the Republicans, can you? If so, please tell me why you are still hanging on to the myth of the third way?

She talks about how the economy is only working for the top 10% of income earners. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the readers of my blog fall into that category. Well, here is some shocking news I have to tell you based on my 40 year career in industry. There is nothing magical about being in the top 10%. The people who are benefiting from the rise in the economy might soon be limited to the top 5%, or 2%, or 1%, or 0.1%, or 0.01%.

Here is where my working experience comes into play. when I first started to work, industry was just starting to outsource some manufacturing to Asia. At Digital Equipment Corporation, the manufacture of magnetic core memory was being done in Hong Kong, if I remember correctly. The engineers with whom I worked thought nothing of it. They were engineers. They weren’t hunched over a bench stringing core memory bits onto wires. Also at that time, the best educated people from those low wage countries were getting their educations in the USA and staying to work here and earn American wages. Outsourcing was for other people to worry about.

By the time I was about to leave DEC, we had a contingent of engineers working in Japan, and communicating over high speed internet connections with engineers in Massachusetts. Because of timezones around the world we pretty much had engineering going on 24 hours a day.

When I went to work at Gateway Design Automation, they had a small contingent of about 30 engineers working in India. I was much more involved with the foreign operation than I had been at DEC. We learned that Texas Instruments already had a mach larger contingent of engineers working in India. TI had a high speed internet connection to their workers, while we had a 9600 baud connection shared by our 30 engineers in India.

By the time Cadence Design Systems bought out Gateway and as I continued to work for Cadence, the number of engineers in India and the infrastructure to communicate with them greatly improved. As I moved on to Analogy, Inc. Synopsys Design Systems, and Mentor Graphics, more of the engineering work was going on all around the world. Many of the best of the engineers in India and China were staying in their homelands. They were getting great educations there, they had high quality work to do, they had great technology to work with, and they commanded much lower salaries. I even started to hear about American engineering students having to go to India to get some experience that was no longer available over here.

However, it was not only engineers that were in India and China. Soon there was a migration of a small amount of middle management there, too.

The lesson is that there is an alligator eating off the lower rungs of the economic ladder, and there is absolutely nothing to stop that alligator from eating more and more rungs off that ladder. It’s not that these other countries don’t deserve the progress they are making. The point is that we can no longer just assume that our life style is safe if we don’t invest in our future. Not investing has has worked for the last 30 or so years for the top 10%. We are in effect eating our seed corn. The days of this working are running out for people higher and higher up on the ladder.