The Real News Network has the episode Clinton Democrats Hate the Left – RAI with Thomas Frank (4/6).

Paul Jay: The unions had more clout. There was a mass movement. Frankly, whatever the Soviet Union actually was, there actually was an alternative system, at least in people’s minds. There’s a lot of things going on in the world that made this dynamic between the professional class, the elites, and the system different back then as now. But it is what it is now, which is a Clinton-esque party now.

I picked this quote because that is exactly what I thought about the balancing force that the Soviet Union provided. It forced the capitalist system to put on a human face. Without that balancing force capitalism was able to deteriorate to its current situation. I don’t believe that any one “ism” is able to provide everything that a society needs. There has to be a balance of forces to get the best for a society.

When the socialistic tendencies take the ascendancy as they probably will some day, if I am still around, I will be arguing for more capitalism to balance the system. Right now, I am on the side of needing more socialism to balance raw capitalism (well at least the perverted version of capitalism we have right now.)

The Philadelphia Inquirer has the article Should Philly screw over its schoolkids to make world’s 2nd richest man even richer?

Having said all that, I’m not against Philadelphia wooing Amazon — but on our terms. Go for the one thing that might still appeal to a gazillionaire like Bezos who has everything: His legacy and his desire to be a remembered as a great American. Philadelphia offers Amazon many of the things it wants in a headquarters but also a unique opportunity to use the tech company’s wealth and remarkable know-how for a philanthropic crusade to re-invent the city where America was founded. That would mean a partnership between the city and Amazon toward actually making the schools better — through both money and donated expertise — rather than sucking them dry, and working together on real affordable-housing solutions.

Such races to the bottom to compete for companies to locate should be legislated out of existence. It can only be done at the national level. The Constitution only allows the Federal Government to regulate interstate commerce. I wonder if the Supreme Court could be convinced that the competition among states and localities for national businesses is an attempt to illegally regulate interstate commerce.

The Real News Network has the video Liberal Elite Doesn’t Care Much About Inequality – RAI with Thomas Frank. RAI is the acronym for Reality Asserts Itself – a style of interview that The Real News Network often does with prominent people.

Bill Clinton accomplished a Republican agenda and Obama allowed the Tea Party to steal the economic populist moment, says Thomas Frank on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay; Frank is the author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas” and “Listen, Liberal”

I learned my economics before Milton Friedman took over that world, so I was inoculated from much of the crap that the Clintons did.

The Washington Post has the article Trump is making Americans see the U.S. the way the rest of the world already did.

Trump has looked out of place as a world leader because he is a television personality, not a politician. He is also the crudest manifestation of some very American traits: recklessness, nationalism, contempt for history, an inability (if not utter disinclination) to inhabit a foreigner’s experience. Never before has it been so clear that Americans’ identities — their confidence and happiness — are tied to the supposedly exalted status of their nation, and of the man or woman who leads it. Trump may contradict everything many of us believe about ourselves, but the first question we might ask is whether what we believe is true.

I was trying to figure out why I am not surprised by anything that is in this article. The article talked about how our educational system has changed since 1990.

This may be particularly true of those Americans who came of age in the 1990s as the United States triumphed over the Soviets, its status as a benevolent superpower somehow confirmed. The ugliness of the Cold War was largely forgotten.

Since I grew up during the cold war, and was educated way before 1990, this explains some of the reasons I was aware of some of the history in the article (but not all of it). The other thing I can attribute my awareness to is a college roommate that I had in 1961. He used to tell me about our country’s foreign interference. It was most annoying to hear what he had to say because it contradicted what I thought knew. However, his source of knowledge was hard to argue against, although argue I did.

By 1969, I was aware enough to want to see the movie Z  about what was happening in Greece.

Following the murder of a prominent leftist, an investigator tries to uncover the truth while government officials attempt to cover up their roles.

YouTube has the video Vicente Fox is Running for President of the United States – NSFW.

Vicente Fox is the president America needs.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the article Exclusive: First look at paper-ballot machines that Georgia is testing.

“Every vote that’s been cast there is a hard-copy paper record that each voter validated before it was inserted, scanned and tabulated,” said Jeb S. Cameron with Election Systems and Software, a Nebraska-based voting software and election management company that will help Georgia pilot a new paper-ballot voting system in November.

The trouble with this system is that the voter does not get to keep a copy of the vote. If the voter got to keep a copy, then that copy could be used to check the online record of the vote to make sure that what gets counted is what the voter voted for. The vote printout would have a numeric code on it that the voter would use to check their specific vote online. Nobody but the voter would know the numeric code that corresponds to their vote. If the voter detects a discrepancy between the online record and their receipt, they could bring their receipt to voting authorities and lodge a protest.

See my previous post Making Electronic Voting Transparent for a description of how I think such a system should be built.

Naked Capitalism has the article North Korea: How Obama Regime Change Policy Created the Crisis Trump Has Inherited.

The agreement, which froze North Korea’s nuclear program for 12 years, held for several years. But in 2002, the Bush administration accused the DPRK—falsely it turned out—of building a secret uranium program as a second route to a bomb and tore up the framework.

Well, I am not sure how false the accusation was. Compare this to the interview in a previous post on this blog, Larry Wilkerson: North Korea is Not an Existential Threat – But Many People Benefit by Saying It Is. Wilkerson claims that when the North Koreans were presented CIA evidence of their renewed nuclear efforts, they readily admitted it. However, what they were doing was not a violation of the agreement made with the Clinton administration.

Whichever one of these stories you choose to believe, the rest of this current article I am discussing provides lots of details I was not aware of.

It’s difficult to overstate how reactionary Obama’s policies became. In contrast to Bush, and even Trump, Obama flatly rejected the idea of negotiating with the North without a prior commitment to denuclearization. He also expressed no interest in the DPRK’s offer to sign a peace agreement. More disturbingly, he was the first president in history to refer to the Korean War, which has been universally recognized as a bloody stalemate, as a “victory.” In doing so, Obama revived a right-wing trope that was first used in the 1950s and resurrected during the Bush years by David Frum and other neocons. So from the onset, Obama caused America’s policy toward Korea to take a sharp right turn.

Given conflicting reports of what is going on, it is hard to know whom to believe, and how much of what they say can be believed.

With all the excitement of supposed Russian attacks on the DNC computers to steal email, I get the feeling that most people don’t understand how common attacks on web sites are.

I just got an email about an unusual number of attacks on this blog.

The Firewall has blocked 126 attacks over the last 10 minutes. Below is a sample of these recent attacks:

September 7, 2017 1:06pm 173.212.193.32 (Germany) Blocked

I have edited the messages a tad to remove information that might help the attacker. However, the point is that these attacks can come from anywhere. The location of the computer that is doing the attacking is not an indication that the government of that country is doing the attacking. It is not even an indication of the location of the person who initiated the attack.

Just to prove the point, I know that the computer that is hosting this blog is in the western part of the USA, while I am sitting in Massachusetts creating this post.

New Economic Perspectives has the post LOW EARTH ORBIT—A Preview. For years, I have been trying to get people to imagine this scenario, but most people just cannot wrap their minds around it. Perhaps this author has put the proper words together to reach people’s imaginations.

“Digital Labor,” it had come to pass, could produce—with enormous profitability—virtually everything the world’s consumers might want or need to buy. In the end, however, the consumers who were supposed to be doing the buying were not just out of work—they were unable to earn the money they needed to buy the products and services so “profitably” produced.

I have recorded the essential question embodied on this web site’s quote page.

Scott Santense – posted here June 3, 2015 – source
If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?

It is up to societies through their governments to reorganize the rules so that all “men” eat. When are we going to start? Not during the Trump administration will the rules change, but we can build the pressure for that change so that it begins to happen in 2020, maybe even in 2018. One thing that I can guarantee is that neither Hillary Clinton nor the DNC has the vision to even imagine this, let alone work for the necessary changes.

The Real News Network has the video Larry Wilkerson: North Korea is Not an Existential Threat – But Many People Benefit by Saying It Is.

Col. Wilkerson and TRNN’s Paul Jay discuss the underlying forces driving the U.S./North Korea confrontation

This video starts off with a more complete description of the deal with North Korea initiated by Bill Clinton in 1994. In the post False Allegations Get False Clarifications On NBC Nightly News I published a description that was less detailed. The less detailed article did not go into how badly we reneged on our part of the agreement.