New Economic Perspectives has the article Thomas Friedman Wants A “Center-Left” Democratic Party Based on Austrian Economic Myths.

The dishonest aspect of all this is that Friedman advises Hillary to adopt these hard-right dogmas, which have repeatedly led to the epidemics of elite fraud that drove our last three financial crises, as a means to achieve rapid economic growth and financial stability. The hilarious aspect of this is that Friedman claims that Hillary’s embrace of ultra-right wing tropes would produce a “compassionate, center-left Web party for the 21st century.” Center-left?

You need to be armed with the information in this article (it’s ok if you already know this information) to guard against being duped by phony, right-wing theories. If you are going to explain to other people what is wrong with these theories and especially with Libertarians in general, you need to know what is in this article.

The Root has the article Marc Lamont Hill on Voting Green, Not Being Afraid of Trump: ‘We Can Afford to Lose an Election; We Can’t Afford to Lose Our Values’. The article talks about what the headline would imply. There is an included video of The Breakfast Club.

If you watch this video attached to the article, you probably won’t get what you came for until about 12 minutes in. However, if you watch the whole thing, you will get much more than what you came for.

Fascinating discussion, all of it.

YouTube has the segment Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Journalism (HBO).
At the end of the segment, he complains that we have all gotten used to getting our news for free online, and we will not change.

If I could only get him to read my previous post Monetizing Internet Content – A Working Example he could start promoting solutions instead of just complaining about problems.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Another Dimension.

If the private sector imports more than it exports, ignoring investment flows, it will run a financial deficit while the foreign sector runs a surplus and the economy will then slow down as money in the private sector becomes scarce.  Unless the trade deficit is reduced, the only way to keep the economy running is for the government to run large deficits, as is it is doing now.  While few people understand the sectoral view of the economy, many are aware of problems that this one-dimensional view does not explain.

(To understand the topic of sector balances, read my previous post When Will the White House and OMB Ever Learn About Sector Financial Balances?)

The article Another Dimention is an important contribution. The MMT explanations I have seen so far are good explanations for the subset of economic issues they address. The other issues have been brushed off with the statement that MMT does not address these issues. This article is a call to address those issues.

I have another issue with MMT that I have never seen addressed, although I have asked many times. The picture of the three pots ignores the factor of mark-to-market. Wealth in a single sector may act as if it is growing autonomously with no flows from other pots because we tend to value just about everything with a mark-to-market method. You can argue that this increase is just imaginary, but it is not real money, but for that matter fiat money isn’t any more real. No matter whether or not mark-to-market growth (and decline) is real money, economic actors act in many ways as if it were real. If we want to explain what really happens in an economy, we have to talk about how real people really behave.

YouTube is showing the Green Party Convention live stream.

I caught the tail end of the conference call with Julian Assange, founder of Wiki-leaks.
I never thought much about the threat that Google poses in the 21^st century until I heard Julian Assange explain what is in store for us victims.

As of this writing, the convention will reconvene at 2:30 PM ET.

I have found that the links do not work in Jill Stein’s emails that she sends to me. I did some debugging to find what the issue was. I have tried to send an email explanation to the Stein campaign, but if you have a reliable connection to the campaign, you might want to pass this information on.

Here is an example of the typical problematic HTML code in her email.

<a href="jill2016.com/live">Watch the livestream from your couch!</a>.

The short cut assumes that the link is to a file on the server.

For this link to work reliably in all situations, the correct code must include the transport mechanism http:// in the URL.

<a href="http://jill2016.com/live">Watch the livestream from your couch!</a>.

Including the transport protocol tells the browser or email reader that jill2016.com is the target web site and not the name of a file on an assumed website server.

If you read an email from Stein on an online email reader such as gmail, the link that is in the email probably will not work either. Leaving out the transport protocol is a shortcut that was introduced for reasons I won’t explain here. What most people would have no reason to know is that the shortcut does not work in an HTML page that does not come from a server that is the same one as the server of the linked item. If you save an online web page that uses the shortcut, and you save it to your local computer, the links probably will not work on your saved version.

In creating a web page or an email, if you are not an HTML expert or if you use a tool to generate your web pages or email, you would have no reason to know about this issue. All you would know is that the link works for some people and not others.

There is a YouTube video On Contact: Into the Political Wilderness with Jill Stein.

Now that the two major political parties have officially selected their nominees for president, Chris Hedges sits down with Green Party candidate for president, Dr. Jill Stein, to discuss an alternative way forward. Bernie Sanders might be out of the race, but Stein says the Green Party is leading the revolutionary charge. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at third parties that have renewed the political vibrancy of American society.

You just have to see this. This is a great “interview” where Jill Stein gets to do most of the talking, and Chris Hedges just feeds her the topics.

Jill Stein even gets to say what are the magic words for me – William K. Black. Black is a former S&L regulator who wrote the book, “The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One”

On April 4, 1986, The New York Times published an opinion piece SEND ‘EM A MESSAGE? HE SURE DID.

People keep asking me why I would vote for someone who can’t win. Much as I don’t like the example, what George Wallace did is a very good explanation. It worked for Southern racists, why not put the lesson to good use instead?

Here are the facts in The New York Times story.

In 1968, Mr. Wallace ran on his own American Independent Party ticket. It was an extremely close two-way result, with Richard Nixon’s 43.4 percent beating Hubert Humphrey’s 42.7 percent. But George Wallace won an amazing 14 percent.

Not only did Richard Nixon win the election of 1968, but by 1972 he had come up with a Southern strategy based on the lesson from George Wallace. That lesson was that he could pander to the racist inclinations of southern voters and politicians to win the south away from the Democrats and to the Republican party. Almost 45 years later, we are still suffering from the “lesson” George Wallace taught the nation.

So, a vote for Jill Stein could set in motion a wave that makes the ideas of Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders dominant for the next 50 years. That could happen without either of them actually winning this race. What political race did Martin Luther King, Jr. ever win? Yet, his impact on this country and the world is undeniable.

YouTube has this excellent video The Crisis of Credit Visualized.

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis — The Full Version

By Jonathan Jarvis.

Crisisofcredit.com

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated.

This is the original, full version.

There is still a lot of misinformation being spread about how the 2008/2009 crash happened and who is to blame. This 11 minute video makes it crystal clear how and why it happened. If you insist on blaming people like Barney Frank, at least get the right reason – lack of regulation. He did not promote the bad loans, he failed to stop them.

Robert Reich has posted an analysis of an article.  The Bloomberg article is at Trump Says He’ll Spend More Than $500 Billion on Infrastructure.

Unbelievable. Trump has actually come up with a sensible economic proposal. He said today he’d “at least double” the size of Clinton’s proposed $275 billion to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure – putting people back to work repairing America’s crumbling roads, bridges, public transportation, water and sewage systems.

Trump was vague about how he’d pay for it, but sounds as if he intends to have the government borrow the money.

Let’s see if I have the mechanics of this right.  The FED creates money which it feeds to the rich people of the country (quantitative easing is one example.  Buying worthless private paper with official money), then another arm of the government, the Treasury, borrows the money back with interest, and spends it on the infrastructure.  How is that different in economic effect from the FED creates the money, gives it to the Treasury, and the Treasury spends it on the infrastructure? No debt, no gift to the rich.  (There are some economic differences which would be a healthy exercise for you to contemplate.)

When Reich asks what do I think, I gave him this response.

Well, I think you are being disingenuous by talking about the need to pay for this, when you know full well that the US Government is the only entity that has the legal right and responsibility to create fiat money for the USA.

You can also try to tell us that Hillary Clinton, whom you have known for 50 years, is qualified to be President, when you know in fact that she hasn’t a clue about economics, and has the most incompetent, Wall Street friendly economic advisors that it is possible to find?

When are you going to start leveling with your readers?

Even some of the economists who purport to be on our side are not willing to tell the whole truth. What’s with that?