Nassim Nicholas Taleb has the article What do I mean by Skin in the Game? My Own Version.

Skin in the game –as a filter –is the central pillar for the organic functioning of systems, whether humans or natural. Unless consequential decisions are taken by people who pay for the consequences, the world would vulnerable to total systemic collapse. And if you wonder why there is a current riot against a certain class of self-congratulatory “experts”, skin the game will provide a clear answer: the public has viscerally detected that some “educated” but cosmetic experts have no skin in the game and will never learn from their mistakes, whether individually or, more dangerously, collectively.

From his comments on his home page it is not clear to me if “Skin In The Game” is, or is not the title of a book that he has written.

The book was not submitted to any reviewer. There was no U.S. book tour, no promotion, no advance copies, just a single lecture in NYC. Yet it mysteriously opened at #2 on the NYT bestsellers list.

Maybe this is explained in the article Putting Skin in the Game into the Reviewers of Skin in the Game.

(Skin in the Game was embargoed (meaning no copy was sent to reviewers), as the book explains the agency problem of reviewers. Three UK journos got hold of it and hurriedly wrote revenge reviews, perhaps too hurriedly. This note exposing their errors of reading comprehension made them accountable, and led to no further journalist reviewing the book: only end users and specialists. Note that, something I wasn’t seeking, the book still made the top of the bestseller list in both countries, meaning neither nasty attacks (UK) nor silence (US) seems to affect it).

Naked Capitalism has the article Landmark Kentucky Pension Case Against KKR, Blackstone, and PAAMCO to Move to Trial?

We’ve posted before on Mayberry v. KKR, a potentially trail-blazing case in which beneficiaries of the destitute Kentucky Retirement System are suing three major fund managers, KKR, Blackstone, and PAAMCO, over dedicated hedge funds they created that promised high returns at low risk only to perform worse than cash. As we will discuss shortly, the parties to the litigation had a hearing yesterday over the defendants’ motions to dismiss. The judge is expected to rule in two weeks. Former Kentucky Retirement Systems trustee Chris Tobe attended the hearing and based on that and his knowledge of the case, thought it was likely to proceed.

Imagine if people like Mitt Romney were required to pay back the money they stripped from their victims. Imagine if they were unable to convince the government to bail them out. Well, that would be enough managing for one day, or maybe for one year.

Naked Capitalism has the article Wolf Richter: Here Comes the Second Wave of Big Money in the “Buy-to-Rent” Scheme.

The first wave came during the housing bust when large private-equity firms acquired tens of thousands of single-family homes out of foreclosure for cents on the dollar. The biggest players have since been sold off to the public as REITs, such as Blackstone’s Invitation Homes which owns about 48,000 rental houses.

Blackstone was the trailblazer in financializing rents. It issued the first rent-backed structured securities in November 2013. This has become a common funding mechanism. And shortly before the Invitation Homes IPO, it obtained Fannie Mae guarantees for $1 billion in rental-home mortgage-backed securities.

This second wave is different. PE firms are paying prices at the peak of the market, amid ceaseless complaints that there isn’t enough inventory of homes for sale, for folks who actually want to live in the homes they buy.

I knew the capitalists would figure out some way to “save” the real-estate market.

All those foreclosed homes and evicted people needing homes. There had to be some way for capitalism to put that supply to use to satisfy the demand. Financializing rent payments was the only logical thing to do in the current heyday of rentier capitalists.

AP has the story Big oil asks government to protect it from climate change. Notice that this comes from AP, not The Onion.

Big oil makes the disaster, and then the small taxpayer pays to protect them from their disaster. It worked for Wall Street in 2008/2009, so why wouldn’t big oil think they should get the same kind of rescue?

YouTube has the video Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks at The National Press Club.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) gave a major policy speech on ending corruption in Washington at a National Press Club Headliners Newsmaker on August 21, 2018.

You deserve to hear the full speech and Q & A session to get the full context of her remarks. Snippets taken out of context, can sometimes leave the wrong impression.

Counterpunch has the article Uri Avnery: One of My Few Heroes in the Middle East by Robert Fisk.

The article has this quote from Uri Avnery:

“I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering. But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism. Herzog [the Israeli president at the time] was speaking at the site of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen but he spoke only about the Jews. How could he not mention that others – many others – had suffered there? Sick people, when they are in pain, cannot speak about anyone but themselves. And when such monstrous things have happened to your people, you feel nothing can be compared to it. You get a moral ‘power of attorney’, a permit to do anything you want – because nothing can compare to what has happened to us. This is a moral immunity which is very clearly felt in Israel. Everyone is convinced that the IDF is more humane than any other army. ‘Purity of arms’ was the slogan of the Haganah army in ’48. But it never was true at all.”

This fits very nicely with my observations of life about two kinds of people who experience something bad. One type of person learns from their bad experience that they want to make sure that nobody else has to suffer from what they suffered. The other kind decides that if the powers that be were able to inflict this bad experience on powerless people like himself (or herself) that when he or she gets some power, he will pay the bad experience forward by inflicting it on the next poor sucker. I try to be the person with the first kind of reaction. When I see bad behavior, I try to take that as a lesson in what not to do, not as a lesson on what to do.

The Ralph Nader Radio Hour has this fabulous interview with Chris Hedges the author of the book “America: The Farewell Tour”

Ralph spends the whole hour with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, Chris Hedges, discussing his book “America: The Farewell Tour.”

If this doesn’t get you to want to read the book, I don’t know what will.

Make Change has the the interview Stephanie Kelton Wants You to Ask: ‘What Does a Good Economy Look Like?’

This particular excerpt addresses my complaint about the MMT (Modern Money Thory) proponents who insist on focusing on one meme that they picj up from other MMT proponents.

Charlotte Cowles
It’s not really your job to explain economic theory to the public. But how can other people—say, politicians—explain the concepts of MMT to voters who many not necessarily even want to listen?

Stephanie Kelton
You’re right, it’s not necessarily my job to persuade average people. But I feel like it’s my responsibility, because when policymakers make decisions that are grounded in a bad understanding of the way government budgets operate, it affects us all. For politicians, the challenge is really on them. Some of them ask me for specific advice on how to talk about debt and deficits, and my first answer is, ‘Don’t.’ The broad public reaction to those words tends to be negative, so my first rule of thumb is don’t bring it up. Do no harm. If somebody poses a question to you, and they inevitably will—‘Oh, what about the debt?’—then you’ve got to find ways to deal with it. I don’t think there’s a cookie-cutter response.

Charlotte Cowles
When you get that question, how do you respond?

Stephanie Kelton
I say, ‘Look, the purpose of the government’s budget ought to be to balance broad conditions in our economy.’ We are so obsessed with balancing the federal budget, but that’s not the right policy goal; the right policy goal is to achieve a good economy. So, what does a good economy look like? It’s not imbalanced like the economy we have today. It’s not an economy where the concentration of wealth is rivaling where we were in the 1920s, where the top tenth of the top 1 percent owns the same share of wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined. It’s not an economy where the median worker hasn’t seen a wage increase in real terms for more than a generation.

It all comes down to this: What kind of a world do we want to create for ourselves? We could eliminate poverty. We could manage our impact on the climate. And if we use the government’s budget to achieve those goals and there’s no inflation problem, who cares if the deficit is 4.5 or 2.1 percent of gross domestic product? That number is irrelevant.

NBC’s Nightly News was pretty parsimonious with the explanation of what is going on between Turkey and the USA. I decided to look on the internet to see what my “friends” in the USA corporate news media aren’t telling me. Here is the first article I found.

‘We are not going to take it sitting down’: Trump on detention of US pastor in Turkey.

The US president’s remarks followed a ruling by a Turkish court, which rejected an appeal for the release of US Pastor Andrew Brunson.

The man has been detained by Turkish authorities for nearly two years. Brunson is accused of being linked to Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric who Ankara has said was the mastermind behind the botched coup attempt in July 2016. Brunson faces up to 35 years in Turkish jail over a number of charges, which include espionage and acting “on behalf of terror groups.”

I found this BBC story Turkey coup: What is Gulen movement and what does it want?

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen for last week’s bloody attempted coup.

Then I found this story from France – Gulen admits meeting key figure in Turkey coup plot, dismisses Erdogan’s ‘senseless’ claims.

In an exclusive interview with FRANCE 24, Fethullah Gulen admitted meeting a key figure in Turkey’s July 2016 attempted coup. But the Turkish cleric said that a mere visit from one of his followers isn’t proof he orchestrated the failed coup.

Finally I came to this Global Research story The CIA, Fetullah Gülen and Turkey’s Failed July 2016 Coup.

On December 1, Turkish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Graham E. Fuller, former head of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council and former CIA head of Middle East and East Asia operations. The warrant claims Fuller was in the vicinity of Istanbul the night of the coup attempt at a meeting with another top “former” CIA person, Henri Barkey. It claims both CIA veterans were meeting at the five-star Splendid Hotel on the island of Büyükada some 20 minutes boat ride from Istanbul.
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Fuller goes on to admit he formally backed granting Gülen special US visa status in 2006:

“Full disclosure: It is on public record that I wrote a letter as a private citizen in connection with Gülen’s US green card application in 2006 stating that I did not believe that Gülen constituted a security threat to the US…”

Fuller’s “full disclosure” then however omits the fact that it was not merely a casual letter of recommendation to a man Fuller claimed he had met only once. Fuller’s endorsement of Gülen’s Green Card application was so influential that he managed to override the no votes of the FBI, of attorneys for the US State Department and Homeland Security. In the Gülen hearings, State Department attorneys stated,

“Because of the large amount of money that Gülen’s movement uses to finance his projects, there are claims that he has secret agreements with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkic governments. There are suspicions that the CIA is a co-payer in financing these projects.”

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Whatever the outcome of the Turkish charges against Graham Fuller and his close former CIA associate, Henri Barkey, for their alleged involvement in the failed July 15, 2016 Turkish coup d’etat, it clearly throws a major spotlight of world attention on the relation between the CIA and the Fetullah Gülen organization. To open that can of worms could help fumigate more than thirty years of covert Central Asia and other CIA operations with Osama bin Laden, opium trade, Kosovo drug mafia, Turkish dirty CIA operations and far more. Little wonder Graham Fuller writes a blog with the pathetic title, “Why did Turkey Issue an Arrest Warrant Against Me?”

You would think this would be enough circumstantial evidence to get a special prosecutor if this were Russia instead of Turkey.

Spoiler alert, here are the 10 ways the book, Killing The Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy, suggests to stop the parasites from killing the host.

1. Write down debts with a Clean Slate, or at least in keeping with the ability to pay

2. Tax economic rent to save it from being capitalized into interest payments

3. Revoke the tax deductibility of interest, to stop subsidizing debt leveraging

4. Create a public banking option

5. Fund government deficits by central banks, not by taxes to pay bondholders

6. Pay Social Security and Medicare out of the general budget

7. Keep natural monopolies in the public domain to prevent rent extraction

8. Tax capital gains at the higher rates levied on earned income

9. Deter irresponsible lending with a Fraudulent Conveyance principle

10. Revive classical value and rent theory (and its statistical categories)

Read the book to understand the reasons for these proposals.