Dandelion Salad has the article China’s Secret Source For Funding Infrastructure by Ellen Brown.

China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, issues money for infrastructure in an even more direct way. It has turned to an innovative form of quantitative easing in which liquidity is directed not at propping up the biggest banks but at “surgical strikes” into the most productive sectors of the economy.

Those of us who understand Modern Money Theory (MMT) can see that what China seems to be doing is applying MMT in their system. I could never understand why some MMT experts outside China harp on China’s debt problem. China’s situation sounds exactly like our Federal deficits that are not a problem at all to the USA according to these same MMT experts.

In a December 2017 article in the Financial Times called “Stop Worrying about Chinese Debt, a Crisis Is Not Brewing”, Zhao expanded on these concepts, writing:

“[S]o-called credit risk in China is, in fact, sovereign risk. The Chinese government often relies on bank credit to finance government stimulus programmes…. China’s sovereign risk is extremely low. Importantly, the balance sheets of the Chinese state-owned banks, the government and the People’s Bank of China are all interconnected. Under these circumstances, a debt crisis in China is almost impossible.”

This last excerpt seems to confirm to me that all the worries about China’s debt level being too high is nonsense from MMT experts who ought to know better.

NBC News has the report U.S. intel: Russia compromised seven states prior to 2016 election.

All state and federal officials who spoke to NBC News agree that no votes were changed and no voters were taken off the rolls.

<sarcasm>Oh, horrors. We must stage a nuclear retaliation for an attack that had no consequences</sarcasm>.

If this were just a practice run for future attacks, then the Russians have certainly given up the element of surprise, and they have revealed their methods of attack.

At least our intelligence agencies are finally responding to to the 15 years of warning about electronic voting system vulnerabilities that our domestic experts have been warniog about

Bev Harris has even written about her work in the 2004 book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century.

When I heard this NBC report, there seemed to be a lot of discussion about how the need to keep intelligence secrets was getting in the way of protecting our next election.

Top election officials from all 50 states met in Washington this month for a National Association of Secretaries of State conference and received temporary security clearances for a classified threat briefing from intelligence officials.

I cannot fathom how telling states what they must do to harden their computers would compromise our intelligence sources or methods. Certainly our security experts could tell states what they must guard against, and perhaps even tell them how to do it. They don’t have to tell the states how they discovered the attacks, nor give away any information about who told them.

If it is a danger that the Russians find out how we are guarding our computers, then the methods are not very robust. If these methods need to be kept that secret, then it is unlikely that we will be able to keep them that secret.

You might be interested in the VOX article Report: Russia probed at least 7 states’ voter systems before the 2016 election that discusses the NBC report among others.

The dreaded New York Times has the article Fed Chair Powell Indicates He’ll Keep Bolstering Growth in Public Debut. Below is an excerpt with emphasis added by me.

Randal K. Quarles, the Fed’s vice chairman for supervision, said Monday that the tax cuts could increase the country’s economic capacity, allowing faster growth without faster inflation.

This is complete economic nonsense. Tax cuts do not of themselves increase economic capacity. They increase buying power. If some of that buying power goes into industrial investment to increase economic capacity to produce consumer goods, then our capacity to satisfy consumer demand increases. If the tax cuts are used primarily to increase attempts at extra consumption, they could very well let loose the forces of inflation. If the increase in consumption occurs too fast for increased capacity to keep up with consumption, then that is the definition of inflationary pressure.

If the tax cuts are “invested” in extra military capacity, then the wages paid to military/industrial complex workers will increase consumer demand, without any concomitant increase in capacity to satisfy that consumer demand. So how our government decides to spend its budget and how our private investors decide to spend the tax cuts will have a huge impact on whether or not we get inflation.

People who have so little grasp of economics ought not be in charge at the Federal Reserve. The people in the rest of the executive branch who are spending and in Congress who are deciding what to spend it on, need to have a deep understanding of the economics because they have so much concentrated spending power to impact the economy.

Fortune Magazine has the article Warren Buffett: Here’s How I Would Solve the Trade Problem dateline April 29, 2016.

Buffet starts with a story about two mythological islands, and transitions to some facts about the USA trade deficit. I’ll start with an excerpt that gets to his proposed solution toward getting a trade balance.

We would achieve this balance by issuing what I will call Import Certificates (ICs) to all U.S. exporters in an amount equal to the dollar value of their exports. Each exporter would, in turn, sell the ICs to parties–either exporters abroad or importers here–wanting to get goods into the U.S. To import $1 million of goods, for example, an importer would need ICs that were the byproduct of $1 million of exports. The inevitable result: trade balance.

A lot of this makes sense on the surface. Let me end with an excerpt from the conclusion.

But I believe that in the trade deficit we also have a problem that is going to test all of our abilities to find a solution. A gently declining dollar will not provide the answer. True, it would reduce our trade deficit to a degree, but not by enough to halt the outflow of our country’s net worth and the resulting growth in our investment-income deficit.

Perhaps there are other solutions that make more sense than mine. However, wishful thinking–and its usual companion, thumb sucking–is not among them. From what I now see, action to halt the rapid outflow of our national wealth is called for, and ICs seem the least painful and most certain way to get the job done. Just keep remembering that this is not a small problem: For example, at the rate at which the rest of the world is now making net investments in the U.S., it could annually buy and sock away nearly 4% of our publicly traded stocks.

Giving his ideas about as much time as it has taken me to start writing this article, I have a few doubts about his proposal. I am not sure how he comes to the conclusion that a declining dollar would not be enough to halt the outflow of our country’s net worth. Perhaps the key is in his use of the adjective “gently” in talking about the decline in the dollar’s value. Maybe it would take a rapid decline.

Perhaps he is thinking that the IC’s would preserve the value of the dollar investments that people have in domestic stocks. That might be good for people holding such stocks, including foreign investors. However, it would place all the burden of the cost of more expensive imports on people who do not own domestic stocks. In other words, using ICs instead of a declining value in the dollar would make the domestic wealth inequality go up.

Letting the dollar decline in value might make people of all wealth categories share the burden a tad more equally.

Of course the devil is in the details and in the unpredictable way that people all over the world would respond to either of the two policies for solving out trade deficit. It might well begoove us to have academics and practical experts explore the alternatives in more depth and detail.

Naked Capitalism has the article Beat the Right Wing Framing: How to Make the Case for a Better, Fairer Economy.

We believed the public endorsed a right wing story about the economy because progressives had failed to come up with an alternative. There weren’t that many progressive spokespeople on current affairs programmes, and when they were it was like they didn’t know what to say. So four organisations came together to understand how British people understood the economy and what new story could be told to persuade them to share our ideas. The four organisations that led the project were NEF (New Economics Foundation), NEON (New Economy Organisers Network), PIRC (Public Interest Research Centre) and the Frameworks Institute.

As I have seen it for a long time, during and after the depression with all of FDR’s programs in place, people understood the purpose of the programs because they had endured the problems they were meant to fix. As time went on, the experience of the problems and their solutions faded into memories of those who had lived through the era, and were not in the memories of people born after the era. Progressives failed to explain the history while conservatives worked hard to explain their version of history. Without correcting this disparity in narratives, progressives were at an extreme disadvantage.

This article interested me because I see the need. I am not convinced, yet, that these people have the answer.

I had never heard of zero hour contracts until reading this article. That problem was easy to fix with a Google search of the internet which came up with the article Q&A: What are zero-hours contracts?

Zero-hours contracts, or casual contracts, allow employers to hire staff with no guarantee of work.

They mean employees work only when they are needed by employers, often at short notice. Their pay depends on how many hours they work.

Some zero-hours contracts require workers to take the shifts they are offered, while others do not.

Sick pay is often not included, although holiday pay should be, in line with working time regulations.

The other problem with the original article is that the stories it suggests are just too childlike. The article itself suggests that you read the report behind the article before trying to deploy any of the stories they have developed. I can certainly see that the article itself does not arm you with what you need to tell the progressive side of the story.

YouTube has the video Mindblowing Corruption At FBI – NSA Whistleblower Reveals.

I don’t know how long the “Just Us” department will let Jimmy Dore roam free. It is possible, although unlikely, that the whole house of cards could collapse. There are so many times in this video that the revelations have Jimmy Dore speechless.

TED Talks has this short video Bhu Srinivasan: Capitalism isn’t an ideology — it’s an operating system.

Bhu Srinivasan researches the intersection of capitalism and technological progress. Instead of thinking about capitalism as a firm, unchanging ideology, he suggests that we should think of it as an operating system — one that needs upgrades to keep up with innovation, like the impending take-off of drone delivery services. Learn more about the past and future of the free market (and a potential coming identity crisis for the United States’ version of capitalism) with this quick, forward-thinking talk.

I have said that I am a “what worksist”, but now maybe I can talk in terms of operating system. The way I would talk about China versus the USA is that China has a much more flexible operating system than we do. I wouldn’t necessarily subscribe to the details that he thinks are indicative of the Chinese system versus ours.

The Root has the article 2nd Amendment Passed to Protect Slavery? No!.

Recently Thom Hartmann published an essay on Truthout titled “The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery.” Hartmann, who is described on the Internet as a radio host, author, former psychotherapist and entrepreneur and a progressive political commentator, said the amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended, in part, to protect slave-patrol militias.
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Still, however committed one may be to a political outcome, it serves no purpose to make historical arguments that are demonstrably wrong, misleading and inconsistent with what happened. Hartmann does not serve his cause well by purporting to write history when his version of history is mostly wrong, and very misleading.

I saw a post making the claim that this article claims to debunk. Not having been around at the time, I have no knowledge that would allow me to say whether Thom Hartmann had the story right, or this author has the story right. The Root where this article was published seems to be oriented toward meeting the needs of a black audience, so I have no reason to think they would want to debunk Hartmann’s story unless they thought the facts supported the debinking. Unless someone else can introduce another independent source, we’ll each have to use our own smell test to see which side we think is more likely to have the story more right. In the mean time we have at least two versions of the story to consider.

Popular Resistance blog has the article Mueller Indictment: ‘Russian Influence’ Is Commercial Marketing Scheme.

Note: When Coleen Rowley shared this article she wrote” “What’s easier to indict than a ham sandwich? 13 Russians.” If the German writer of “Moon of Alabama” has this right, his analysis of the Mueller indictment is devastating. It makes a mockery of Russiagate and the media, Democrats and neocons caught up in it. – KZ

This certainly explains a lot of what this was really about. Any good criminal lawyer and even honest police will tell you never volunteer information to the police. The most innocent activities can be couched as having a sinister purpose in a courtroom. That is why lawyers advise their clients never to speak to the police without having a lawyer present (besides the fact that it makes money for the lawyer).

I have a 2011 post about this, Don’t Talk To The Police. I’ll save you the effort of looking at that 2011 post by posting the video right here.

Here is a downloadable version of the 37 page Mueller indictment.

The World Bank has published the study INEQUALITY AND VIOLENT CRIME.

Abstract

We investigate the robustness and causality of the link between income inequality and violent crime across countries. First, we study the correlation between the Gini index and homicide and robbery rates within and between countries. Second, we examine the partial correlation by considering other crime determinants. Third, we control for the endogeneity of inequality by isolating its exogenous impact on these crime rates. Fourth, we control for measurement error in crime rates by modeling it as both unobserved country effects and random noise. Finally, we examine the robustness of this partial correlation to alternative measures of inequality. The panel data consist of nonoverlapping 5-year averages for 39 countries during 1965–95 for homicides and 37 countries during 1970–94 for robberies. Crime rates and inequality are positively correlated within countries and, particularly, between countries, and this correlation reflects causation from inequality to crime rates, even after controlling for other crime determinants.

The terms exogenous and endogenous appear throughout the paper. The Statistics How To web site has an explanation of the terms.

An exogenous variable is a variable that is not affected by other variables in the system. For example, take a simple causal system like farming. Variables like weather, farmer skill, pests, and availability of seed are all exogenous to crop production. Exogenous comes from the Greek Exo, meaning “outside” and gignomai, meaning “to produce.” In contrast, an endogenous variable is one that is influenced by other factors in the system. In this example, flower growth is affected by sunlight and is therefore endogenous.

In the conclusion to the World Bank paper, they provide a cautionary note to keep in mind about the results.

The first shortcoming of the paper leads to the second, which is that we have not identified the mechanisms through which more pronounced inequality leads to more crime. Uncertainty about these mechanisms raises a variety of questions with important policy implications. For instance, should police and justice protection be redirected to the poorest segments of society? How important for crime prevention are income-transfer programs in times of economic recession? To what extent should public authorities be concerned with income and ethnic polarization? Do policies that promote the participation in communal organizations and help develop “social capital” among the poor also reduce crime? Hopefully, this paper will help stir an interest in these and related questions on the prevention of crime and violence.