New Economic Perspectives has the article It is Impossible to Compete with Unintentional Self-Parody: Trump and Opioids.

The diversion and dealing of prescription opioids is a major part of the problem. In the U.S., three big pharma companies control the distribution of opioids. They have readily available data that allows them to identify quickly, cheaply, and reliably the primary sources of diversion and dealing because these drug stores and pain clinics purchase opioids in amounts that are nonsensical given the size of the local population and stores making the purchases. The first scandal, therefore, is that the big three distributors continue to sell to firms that they know are diverting and dealing opioids in ways that are illegal and murderous. We should not need laws or rules to prevent the distributors from profiting from sales to obvious diverters and dealers. The people who run big pharma are experts in what opioids do to humans. All of big pharma firms have senior officers who are doctors and chemists. They know the human misery and murder their sales to the diverters are certain to produce in staggering numbers. When elite doctors and chemists are willing to profit by selling to those they know to be dealers and diverters who will maim and murder their countrymen and women you know the rot lies deep in our elites.

How could we have ignored for so long the cause of the problem? The aftermath of the Savings and Loan crisis was the last time that these elite white collar criminals were held accountable for the damage they did. The aftermath of the collapse of the real-estate bubble may have been one of the seminal cases of rewarding the criminal predators for the damage they caused. The opioid crisis is just the latest example of the Republican’s (and Democrat’s) policy of being soft on crime.

Politico has the article The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist.

Cape Coral, Florida, was built on total lies. One big storm could wipe it off the map. Oh, and it’s also the fastest-growing city in the United States.

A few years ago we actually made an offer on a house in Cape Coral. Fortunately Sharon confessed to me that there was no way she could contemplate living in Cape Coral. We withdrew the offer before the owners could even think about it. Just proves that with all my sales resistance, I am still a sucker for a good story. It’s not that we were pulled in by a sales story, though. We had visited the area many years ago, and finally decided we might want to live there. I obviously didn’t do enough fact based research, but luckily Sharon’s intuition kept us from making a huge mistake.

Jimmy Dore has the episode Clinton Advisor Gives Tongue Bath To Wall Street-NYTimes Prints It.

If you are going to insist on reading the New York Times, you really need to let Jimmy Dore read it to you. When we talk about fake news, this op ed piece in the NYT is what we mean. Unfortunately, Trump has co-opted the fake news term.

Here is a link to The New York Time article Why Democrats Need Wall Street.

Now here is the bio of Douglas Schoen, the author of the piece. Would this have changed your opinion of his article had you known who he is? I’ve just given one excerpt from the bio below.

His political clients include New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, and his corporate clients include AOL Time Warner, Procter & Gamble and AT&T. Internationally, he has worked for the heads of states of over 15 countries, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and three Israeli Prime Ministers.
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He is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and various other newspaper and online publications. He is also a Fox News Contributor, making appearances on various news programs several times a week.

Common Dreams has the article Sent to Destroy Sanders’ Case for Democratic Socialism, Danish Right-Winger Bolsters It.

Fellow at Peterson Institute, a regressive-minded think tank, concedes the many benefits of a nation that provides universal access to pre-school, healthcare, and college

Here is one of the featured videos in the article. Despite what it says in the headline, this is only about a 20 minute segment of the debate.

Ted Cruz admits that paying lower taxes means much higher out of pocket expenses. Bernie asked if you’d rather pay a net $12,000 extra to lower your taxes. The brilliant mathematician that Ted Cruz is, he thinks you would rather pay $20,000 to lower your taxes by $8,000.

He also uses Cuba as an example of the faults of socialism. He didn’t ask the right question about people fleeing Cuba to get to the USA. He should have asked if it is preferable to live in a powerful country that makes the rules, or would you like to live in a small island country that has been under economic attack for over 50 years by its big domineering neighbor?

Ted Cruz extolled the history of his father who came from Cuba with only a few hundred dollars and became wealthy in the USA.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say.

Cruz’s father Rafael Bienvenido Cruz y Díaz is Cuban American, born in Cuba and growing up middle class there. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the U.S. after his four-year student visa expired, as the Cuban Revolution had changed the government. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2005. Eleanor and Rafael Cruz divorced in 1997

Do you think that we should compromise in every situation? How about the one above? Do you always take the middle of the road position? Do you have a 4 wheel drive vehicle?

The Real News Network has the interview On Iran, Trump Follows Iraq War Neocons.

In sabotaging the Iran nuclear deal, President Trump is listening to — and following the playbook of — the neocons behind the Iraq war, says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.

There are several dangers to the USA that are mentioned in this interview. One that I have been harping on lately is that if we continue to use economic sanctions as a weapon, the role of the dollar as a world reserve currency will eventually go away. The rest of the world will find ways to conduct commerce without relying on the US dollar. Our domestic policy choices depend on the status of our fiat currency. If there start to become things that we cannot buy with the US dollar, then our freedom to deficit spend without limit will go away.

Getting in bed with Saudi Arabian terrorists so we can get rid of regimes we don’t like should be frightening enough to everybody that I shouldn’t need to say anymore.

The Hill has the article FBI uncovered Russian bribery plot before Obama administration approved controversial nuclear deal with Moscow.

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

I find this story to be both credible and incredible. That the Clinton’s and Obama could be this corrupt is just human nature. That the Democrats should be so hell bent on blaming and investigating the Russians with the likelihood of exposing their own corrupt involvement is the incredible part.

YouTube has the video Left Forum hosts Dr Paul Cockshott on Cybersocialism. This video was suggested to me when I complained that I had never heard an explanation on the idea of a Resource Based Economy that I could fully understand. The part that always got me confused was the idea of getting rid of money and replacing it with a resource basis. I just could not figure out what such a replacement would be that was not money.

I have watched most of the video by Cockshott on Cybersocialism. The only part I didn’t finish was the Q & A section. There are some very interesting ideas presented here, but there is a certain amount of naivete, inconsistency, and pure factual errors here. I don’t mean to say that you have to throw out everything he said, but I am saying you cannot accept everything he said.

In the beginning of the talk he took pains to explain that you could not measure an entire economy based on a single factor like labor. He then proposes a system that is based only on labor hours worked. (In other words labor backed money instead of money backed by something else such as gold.)

By the way, my background includes 40 years of computer software engineering. I am well familiar with linear programming as he mentioned.

I was pleased to see the electronic voting system he proposed has fundamental similarities to my proposal that I published on my blog in 2012, Making Electronic Voting Transparent.

Thanks to Lorant Szabo on Facebook for pointing me to this 2014 video on YouTube, Socialism Betrayed – Roger Keeran & Thomas Kenny.

Very interesting video. While I might quibble with a few of the assumptions, it does present some novel viewpoints worth considering. The views are probably most novel to those of us who have grown up with the western media dominating our view of the world.

Being the skeptic (realist) that I am, I don’t believe than any ism, capitalism nor socialism, has all the answers. I think that was readily admitted by the two speakers in the video. So the question is how do we navigate in the real world to put together a society that works best in the real world. I don’t think the two speakers would disagree with that being the overriding question.

I won’t try to reproduce the conversation that ensued on Facebook, but I will mention a clarification about the comment on what I thought the authors would agree to.

The authors suggest that worker motivation is an inherent problem of Socialism that has to be addressed. Their discussion about Cuba and its jobs guarantee has interesting implications for proponents of the job guarantee in this country. I am not saying the job guarantee is without merit. I am just saying that it has to be implemented with eyes wide open to the problems that might arise, and would need to be solved.

Bloomberg has the article Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists.

The IMF economists also predict that global financial integration should help alleviate the pressure on labor in poor countries. If American, European, Japanese and Taiwanese companies are able to invest in a developing country like China, the inflow of foreign money will boost incomes for local workers and compete down the profits of local capital owners.

What utter hogwash. You might expect the IMF to come to this conclusion. They are the organization that suggests that austerity is the way for a country to overcome economic decline.

The issue about labor losing power in the target countries of USA offshoring has an explanation. Some of the worst capitalistic tendencies that exist in the USA follow the offshoring to these target countries. There are now billionaires in China. With so much supposed government control of the economy in China, how did it come to pass that there are now billionaires with private fortunes in China? Russia faces the same problem.

A lot has to do with the tilting of the rules and regulations and tax policy to favor the accumulation and concentration of great wealth. In Russia, a lot of the government enterprises were sold off at fire-sale prices to people who took these properties and squeezed billions of dollars of profits out of them

What would have happened if these properties had not been given away, but had remained in state ownership, but competed in world markets with an eye toward being competitive? What if the profits from these operations had been spread among all citizens of the country instead of being concentrated in the hands of a few? Are there any studies being done to ask this sort of question? Are there any studies on what was changed to enable the concentration of wealth? How about studies on what needs to be changed to prevent over concentrations of wealth? The concentration of wealth was reined in in the middle part of the 20th century and undermined in the latter half of the 20th century and ongoing in the 21st. Maybe we need some effort to adapt these changes to the current situation.