Consortium News has the article A Blacklisted Film and the New Cold War.

Special Report: As Congress still swoons over the anti-Kremlin Magnitsky narrative, Western political and media leaders refuse to let their people view a documentary that debunks the fable, reports Robert Parry.

This seems like spy craft right out of the original cold war. It doesn’t matter if you believe either side is lying as long as you don’t believe either side is telling the truth. You also have to believe that your pure mind is being protected for you by prohibitions of seeing a film that your protectors claim is a lie. What’s the point of letting you decide for yourself. It’s not like your right to know is protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution or anything.

The more they try to suppress it, the more likely I am to think they are trying to hide something. The more they call out Russian propaganda, the more likely I am to be suspicious of corporate media propaganda sponsored by our government.

Chances are we will never know the truth, but I refuse to be led into war by deception again.

Perhaps through a groundswell of demand on social media we can insist that our representatives free us up to view this documentary. Do we need a special prosecutor to look into our corrupt Congress?

Medium has the Caitlin Johnstone story Seymour Hersh Owes The World An Explanation For His Seth Rich Comments.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has given two radically different accounts of how much he knows about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich last year, and he owes the whole world a full clarification.

This article is a nice assembly of all the pieces to the puzzle that are publicly available. If Seymour Hersh is afraid to clarify what he has been saying and then denying, this may be a sign we are all in big trouble.

Naked Capitalism has published the article What the US “Health Care Reform” Debate Did Not Address.

Despite some protestations to the contrary (e.g., here), the US health care system has been plagued by dysfunction. According to a recent Commonwealth Fund study, the US was ranked 11 out of 11 in health care quality, but 1 out of 11 in costs. Traditionally, health care reform has targeted ongoing problems in the cost, accessibility and quality of health care. The ACA notably seems to have improved access, but hardly addressed cost or quality.

Early on we noticed a number of factors that seemed enable increasing dysfunction, but were not much discussed. These factors notably distorted how medical and health care decisions were made, leading to overuse of excessively expensive tests and treatments that provided minimal or no benefits to outweight their harms.

When I try to think about why medical costs are so high in this country, I can only imagine some of the things pointed out in this article. Only an insider gets to see all these aspects.

The Fed lent and purchased worthless assets to the tune of $29 trillion in their efforts to save the economy from collapse in 2008/2009 and beyond. Yet the economy does not act as if $29 Trillion of aditional liquidity has been added to the economy. It seems to me the obvious question is why didn’t the economy react as one would expect?

I went to the New Economic Perspectives web site to see if they had the answer. I found the article Bernanke’s 29 Trillion Dollar Fog of Deceit from December 13, 2011.

As I reported over at Great Leap Forward, a new study by two UMKC PhD students, Nicola Matthews and James Felkerson, provides the most comprehensive examination yet of the Fed’s bail-out of Wall Street. They found that the true total cumulative amount lent and spent on asset purchases was $29 trillion. That is $29,000,000,000,000.

This does no answer my question. The answer may be somewhere else on the web site, so perhaps I missed it.

I don’t really care so much about who got the money initially as I want to know where it now sits. Where can $29 Trillion dollars have gone that has little impact on the economy, wages, or employment? Why has nobody researched this question, and told us why the economy has not responded? Since most U.S. money ends up in some account that the Fed keeps data on, surely the Fed knows where this money is – categorized by major sectors. It would be very educational to economists and government decision makers to see where the money went. Why would policy makers and academics want to opine on policy without knowing this vital information?

I’ll Google this next to see if there is an answer out there. Maybe, one of my astute readers can beat me to the punch and supply the answer.

YouTube has the video Health Care: U.S. vs. Canada.

The above is a slightly more complete and less artfully edited than the version posted on Facebook.

Here’s what happened when a Republican Senator tried to challenge a Canadian doctor on their single-payer healthcare system. Let’s just say, it didn’t end well…

Thanks to Bernie Sanders.

I’d just as soon you hear more of what was said than I would in trying to convince you of something by manipulating the truth. It still comes out in favor of the Canadian system, but you are less likely to get tripped up by claims of careful editing.

Bernie Sanders has posted an outline of his Medicare For All proposal. I’ll let you read the proposal to see the benefits. I will just make some comments here on a part that I take slight exception to.

The Plan Would Be Fully Paid For By:

• A 6.2 percent income-based health care premium paid by employers.
• A 2.2 percent income-based premium paid by households.
• Progressive income tax rates.
• Taxing capital gains and dividends the same as income from work.
• Limit tax deductions for rich.
• The Responsible Estate Tax.
• Savings from health tax expenditures.

These taxes may or may not be good policy, but they have nothing to do with “paying” for the healthcare benefits.

The idea that the Federal Government has to collect taxes to “pay” for this program is a tired myth that became irrelevant 55 years ago when Richard Nixon took the country off the gold standard. How much in taxes we collect, and how much the government spends depend on a lot of factors, but a country like the USA can never “run out of money”. I don’t care what the corporate Democrats or the Republicans say, the federal government via the Federal Reserve Bank creates US money at will. Federal Reserve Bank Chairmen from Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke have been telling this to Congress for years. (I don’t have an official quote from Janet Yellen of her saying the same thing, but I am sure she understands this.) When Alan Greenspan told this to Representative Ryan, Ryan’s ears were closed from taking in this unexpected answer to the question Ryan asked. (See the previous post Greenspan: “There is nothing to prevent the government from creating as much money as it wants.”)

It is a sad commentary on the state of the myth building in this country that Bernie Sanders has to cater to the false notion of how our money works in order to make his proposal sound plausible.

Counterpunch has the article “Please, Let’s Not Do It Again:” On NAFTA and Why Mexico’s Poor are Not to Blame.

Before 1994, the year NAFTA went into effect, Mexico was a country that produced and exported corn. It did not buy it. Corn had been the basic grain of the Indigenous food across Mesoamerica since before the Spanish Conquest.

Since NAFTA, Mexico has become a country that relies on foreign corn and foreign food.

The statistics we get are all about the increase in GDP. What it doesn’t tell you is that the increase is all concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people. This seeming increase in the size of the economy is a decrease for most people, and a huge increase for a small number of people. There is a reason why the numbers look great, but most people are being pinched. The poor and the malnourished have to tighten their belts, while the rich have to loosen theirs. More tax cuts for the wealthy.

This is one of many reasons why I refused to buy what Hillary Clinton was selling during the 2016 Presidential campaign. It is not a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. It is a matter of refusing to vote for a candidate who does not meet some minimal standards. If the Democratic Party wants me back, they will have to meet my minimal standards. If they cannot get above the low bar that I have set, they cannot get my support.