The Intercept has Glenn Greenwald’s article The New Yorker’s Big Cover Story Reveals Five Uncomfortable Truths About U.S. and Russia.

To stay within the bounds of fair use, I am only going to give you two paragraphs from the article. You really need to read the rest of it, by clicking on the link and giving the web site the traffic it deserves.

Constantly ratcheting up aggressive rhetoric and tension between Washington and Moscow is not a game. And yet it’s one that establishment Democrats – and their new allies in the war-loving wing of the GOP – are playing with reckless abandon, and with little to no apparent concern about the risks. They have re-created a climate in the U.S. where a desire for better relations with Russia triggers suspicions about one’s loyalties.
.
.
.
There are, as usual, numerous highly influential factions in Washington that would stand to benefit enormously from the resurrection of the Cold War. They’re the same groups that benefitted so much the first time around: weapons manufacturers, the think tanks they fund, the public/private axis of the Pentagon and intelligence community, etc. And the people who exert the greatest influence over U.S. discourse continue to be the spokespeople for those very interests. When all of that is combined with the Democratic Party’s massive self-interest in inflating the Russia threat – it gives them a way to explain away their crushing 2016 defeat – it is completely unsurprising that the orthodoxy on Russia has become hawkish and pro-confrontation.

For the American voter it really comes down to a question of whether or not we want to take the chance of having a nuclear war. Iran is not the threat. We are the threat.

There is the YouTube video Stephanie Kelton -The Angry Birds Approach to Understanding Deficits in the Modern Economy. If you go to the YouTube post of the video, there are a dozen or so suggested followup links if you want to follow up on what you learned from the video.

If you pass up this opportunity to get a painless lesson on this subject, then you are unlikely to be much help in getting this country turned in the right direction. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for you to know the information in this video.

A recent video from Real Progressives, RealProgressives LIVE w/ Ellis Winningham – The Federal Jobs Guarantee, cast aspersions on DSGE.

I decided to look up the topic that went with the acronym which landed me at this Wikipedia article Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. I think the criticism made in the video is the one mentioned in this excerpt from the Wikipedia article.

Robert Solow blasted DSGE models currently in use:

‘I do not think that the currently popular DSGE models pass the smell test. They take it for granted that the whole economy can be thought about as if it were a single, consistent person or dynasty carrying out a rationally designed, long-term plan, occasionally disturbed by unexpected shocks, but adapting to them in a rational, consistent way… The protagonists of this idea make a claim to respectability by asserting that it is founded on what we know about microeconomic behavior, but I think that this claim is generally phony. The advocates no doubt believe what they say, but they seem to have stopped sniffing or to have lost their sense of smell altogether

Even after reading this article, I still don’t know enough yet to form a judgment. This post is the beginning of my education on this subject. I am sure more will follow.

Naked Capitalism has reprinted the article How Russia Is Using Oil Deals To Secure Its Influence In The Middle East.

Here is but one example mentioned in the article.

By taking over part of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s distribution burden, Russia is helping the semi-autonomous zone bypass potential hurdles with Baghdad, which controls the flow of oil through crucial pipelines. Disagreements between the Iraqi capital and Erbil regarding oil export contracts have caused pipeline closures in the past. With a new ally in Russia, the KRG can devise new ways to get their oil products out without having to negotiate with the Iraqi government, buttressed by the U.S.

<sarcasm>I’ll bet you are shocked to find out that geo-political game we are playing with Russia is all about oil. Of course the real reason we are now enemies with Russia is because they took the Crimea back. That in itself proves they hacked the DNC email to tell us the truth about the DNC.</sarcasm>

Mosler Economics has an article explaining the inflation of the 1970s in the article My story of the Thatcher era.

So back to the 70’s, and continuous oil price hikes by a foreign monopolist. All nations experienced pretty much the same inflation.

The point being that inflation was caused by the sudden increase in the cost of oil imposed by OPEC. It was not caused by the government creating too much money. (This leaves out the inflationary pressure of guns and butter policy of LBJ which was a case of the government creating more money than the economy could produce things to buy with that money. In fact this inflation may be what drove OPEC to the drastic action that they took. Of course, it didn’t help that we sent 500,000 people to fight a war in Vietnam when they could have been at home producing goods for the civilian economy. Also much of the goods that our economy was producing were being blown up in Vietnam.)

At the time of the inflation I thought that the “solution” would have been to raise taxes on gasoline. That would have forced the transition to fuel economy much faster and might have concentrated the inflation in the energy sector and away from general inflation. Others were saying that petroleum products were already too expensive and we didn’t need to make the situation worse.

Mosler does not address my “solution” to the problem.

By the way, the price of oil didn’t just happen to drop. Reagan threw us into a near depression, and that’s what suddenly cut the demand for OPEC petroleum. I think my way of cutting demand for OPEC’s product would have been less painful.

Thanks to Kristjan Andre for the link to this article. I requested such a link because I had never heard a leading light of the Modern Monetary Theory crowd address the inflation of the 1970s in any depth. This story is exactly what I wanted to hear from one of those leading lights such as Warren Mosler. I didn’t want MMT proponents to keep saying that WW II was the last time we faced inflationary pressures.

Popular Resistance has the article Be Wary Of The Democratic Wing Of The Protest Movement.

The self-labeled Progressive Movement that has arisen over the past decade is primarily one big propaganda campaign serving the political interests of the the Democratic Party’s richest one-percent who created it. The funders and owners of the Progressive Movement get richer and richer off Wall Street and the corporate system. But they happen to be Democrats, cultural and social liberals who can’t stomach Republican policies, and so after bruising electoral defeats a decade ago they decided to buy a movement, one just like the Republicans, a copy.

And we laughed at how the Tea Party followers were had by the Koch brothers. Some of us even entertained the possibility that it could happen to us, but I, for one, dismissed it.

I have since stopped supporting MoveOn.org, OFA, and Van Jones without even realizing the information in this article. I could recognize that these organizations no longer had interests that aligned with mine, but until I read this article, I didn’t quite understand the full reason for the divergence of interests. I even knew that George Soros was a backer of Hillary Clinton, but I still didn’t fully get it.

Thanks to Helicia Forest-Ussach for pointing me to this article via her Facebook posts.

The corporate media thinks they are facing a crisis with 45, and they need us to come to their defense in their hour of need. We cannot let this opportunity to extract some payback if they want our help now.

Where were they when they gave all the coverage to 45 and none to Bernie Sanders? Where were they when they ridiculed Sanders’ programs and policies by only seeking the comment of the “experts” who disagreed with Sanders. There were plenty of “experts” who could have told you Sander’s plans were better than Clinton’s plans.

Where were they when we needed to hear the truth about Syria instead of just giving us the Clinton war mongering.

What is the chance that they will show you the YouTube video US Rep Tulsi Gabbard’s visit to Aleppo | January 2017. You may have seen some of the very beginning of this video, but I don’t think you saw, in the corporate press, the full remarks of the Catholic Priest in Aleppo.

Don’t give a free handout to the anti-liberal corporate press by running to their rescue. Make them pay for your help by demanding a promise of fair coverage in the future. Stop shiolling for the “intelligence” community by shamelessly repeating their discredited claims about Russian interference in our elections. Tell them to stop beating the drums of war before you will consider comeing to their rescue on issues of the free press. How free is that press when all they want to do is give you the propaganda of the oligarchs?

Some people, particularly conservatives, are very concerned (or pretend to be concerned) with the threat of inflation in our economy.

Those of us with even a rudimentary understanding of economics explain that under the current circumstances inflation is not a threat. Those circumstances being idle productive capacity in the country, unemployed and underemployed people, people so deeply in debt that they cannot buy much more than the basic necessities, and finally the money that is being put into the economy by the Federal Government is not being put to use buying things. The money that is not being put to use buying what the economy produces is either being given back to the Federal Government for safe keeping through purchases of government securities, or it is being put to use buying stocks in the stock market and inflating stock prices.

The above explanation wouldn’t be sufficient for me if I were one of those worried about inflation. I would ask, “So when the conditions change, and inflation threatens, what are we going to do?”

The first thing to do is obvious. If the economy doesn’t need any more money to facilitate the buying and selling of the existing goods, then the Federal Reserve Bank will stop creating more money to finance the budget deficits that will have disappeared. There is a lot of detail behind what that means that I won’t go into here. The other thing the government could do is to raise taxes (and/or cut spending) to suck excess money out of the economy. That is a politically hard thing to do because the official inflation worriers always want to cut taxes at the exact moment when they should be raised.

With our trade deficit, it has just occurred to me that the Federal Reserve Bank’s tool box is more powerful than it used to be. One of the reasons why the Federal Government has to keep pumping more money into the economy is that money is being drained from the domestic economy by the money we pay to other countries because of our trade deficit. So if just stopping putting more money into the economy might not have been powerful enough tool to use when we had a trade surplus, it is a much more powerful tool when we have a trade deficit.

William K. Black wrote the article Kenneth Arrow’s (Ignored) Impossibility Theorem in New Economic Perspectives. The motivating event for the article was the death of economist Kenneth Arrow.

The author of the obit stressed the impossibility of such systems being optimal. Contrast that emphasis with the author’s treatment of Arrow’s work on “general equilibrium.”

Professor Arrow proved that their system of equations mathematically cohere: Prices exist that bring all markets into simultaneous equilibrium (whereby every item produced at the equilibrium price would be voluntarily purchased). And market competition puts society’s resources to good use: Competitive markets are efficient, in the language of economists.

Professor Arrow’s theorems set out the precise conditions under which Adam Smith’s famous conjecture in “The Wealth of Nations” holds true: that the “invisible hand” of market competition among self-serving individuals serves society well.

That is one way to phrase it, but a more accurate, parallel way to phrase Arrow’s work on general equilibrium would be as an “impossibility theorem.” Arrow actually proved that it was impossible for general equilibrium to occur. The “precise conditions” in which economists can guarantee that a market transaction “serves society well” is the null set. There is no market that meets those “precise conditions” because they are impossible to meet.

This article introduces me to a field of study that I had not known before. I can see that I am going to have to do more reading about this area.

To further quote from the article, Black’s concludes the followin:

The ultimate failure of economics as a field is to:

1. worship an economic model that is criminogenic,
2. hide that disaster from the public by assuming “silently” an “ADM God” that contradicts the model’s express assumption,
3. continue to worship and proselytize that model when its silent assumption of an “ADM God” repeatedly produces criminogenic policies and epic predictive failures, and
4. praise your models as “rigorous,” “scientific,” and “transparent,” and
5. define critics as anti-scientific and demand that their critiques be excluded as heresy.

/ol>

In other words, free markets only work when a godlike superior force sets strict rules to guard against criminogenic behavior. Free markets only work when they are not free.