The Week has an article titled Bernie Sanders and the rise of American social democracy.

Let me start with a bit of history. Social democracy developed out of a turn-of-the-century split from traditional Marxists, who had long thought a political revolution would be necessary to replace capitalism. Social democrats, by contrast, thought the same egalitarian objectives could be evolved over time through parliamentary democracy and without suddenly overturning bourgeois institutions of private property. (These definitions tend to fray at the edges, but that’s a fair gloss.)

This is a good explanation of how things work in the Nordic countries that have highly productive economies and great social programs.

Let’s not get too hung up on labels or examples, though. Whatever Bernie may label himself as, look at the programs and policies he supports. Decide for yourself if these are things you want for the USA. If they are, support Bernie Sanders because he supports what you want.

Don’t get hung up on some program in some other country that you assume Bernie supports because the labels in the two countries seem similar. Bernie is quite happy to tell you what he supports and what he doesn’t. That is what is important. If you are not sure about Bernie’s attitude on some policy, try to find out what he says and does about it. Don’t think you can read his mind because of a label.

NBC News has the typical story about this incident, Education or espionage? A Chinese student takes his homework home to China.

Ruopeng Liu believes his work at a Duke lab was simply “fundamental research” that he brought back to China. His former professor thinks otherwise.

In the latest news is a story about how a Chinese graduate student came to the U.S. to steal intellectual property and take it back to China. This is just the latest example of a bill of goods our oligarchs want us to swallow. Most of the push to protect “intellectual property’ in our trade agreements is to protect the rentier class’s rents they extract from patents, copyrights, and “intellectual property”. We need to be less gullible about the idea that “intellectual property” is something the whole world should agree to protect in the way that the USA says it should.

I wonder if we are supposed to think that graduate students come here to have fun, and not to learn anything they can use as the basis for a career. Of course students come here to learn “intellectual property”. Isn’t the whole purpose of a university to impart “intellectual property”?

YouTube has the video Days of Revolt: How We Got to Junk Economics,

In this episode of teleSUR’s Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges interviews economist Michael Hudson on the history of classical economics and explores Marx’s interpretation of capitalism as exploitation.

This is a discussion of Michael Hudson’s book “Killing The Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy”. I am finally getting a more complete picture of what I have been slowly piecing together from my study of Modern Money Theory. It is not Karl Marx that had crazy economic theories. It is the capitalist economic theories that I have been learning since the 1960s that is the crazy theory. (To be more accurate, the mixed economy is sensible, but the unregulated capitalism is what is crazy.)

Here is the second part of the interview Days of Revolt w/Hedges & Michael Hudson Junk Economics and the Future | Part 2

The Real News Network has a two part interview that I hope can put a stop to some of the Trump Derangement Syndrome that is driving us to war with Russia.

The first part is The Russia “National Security Crisis” is a U.S. Creation.

President Trump’s warm words for Vladimir Putin and his failure to endorse U.S. intelligence community claims about alleged Russian meddling have been called “treasonous” and the cause of a “national security crisis.” There is a crisis, says Prof. Stephen F. Cohen, but one of our own making.

The second part of the interview is Debunking the Putin Panic with Stephen F. Cohen

There is much to criticize the Russian president for, says Professor Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton and NYU, but many US political and media claims about Putin are false – and reckless.

The Real News Network has a very interesting 12 partseries Growing Up in the USSR – RAI with A. Buzgalin (1/12).

Prof. Alexander Buzgalin joins Paul Jay on Reality Asserts Itself; born two years after the death of Stalin, he talks about growing up in the Soviet Union.

This series gives me a much netter understanding of Russia and the Soviet Union from the point of view of a Russian scholar. I find this discussion to be very revealing.

I came to this series at a later segment, and found it so interesting, I went back to the beginning. I have listened to the first 3 segments so far, and intend to watch the rest of the series as time permits.

The initial link in this post leads to a collection of links to all 12 parts.

July 23, 2018

At this point, only 9 of the 12 segments have been published, and I have seen them all. I am getting a somewhat different picture of Russia than I had before. Some of what I thought before has been confirmed, but there are more than nuances and subtleties that are different.

The 10^th segment is now available Why Does the West Hate Putin? – RAI with A. Buzgalin (10/12).

July 27, 2018

The next segment has been published – Many Russians Think Climate Change is Propaganda to Weaken Their Economy – RAI with A. Buzgalin (11/12)

Senator Elizabeth Warren has posted some prepared remarks Senator Discusses Ways Congress Can Improve U.S. Business Bankruptcy System.

It is an interesting discussion about structuring bankruptcy laws. There is one slightly sour note in those remarks.

The business world is littered with companies that were thought to be invincible — right up until the killer moment: Worldcom and accounting fraud, Blockbuster and disruptive new companies; PanAm and terrorism. Toys ‘R’ Us, Payless Shoes, Radio Shack and Gymboree were all once bright stars-stars that all fell in 2017.

She misses an opportunity to single out special cases like Toys ‘R’ Us. This bankruptcy did not occur because the original company had a bad business plan. The only disaster that befell the company was the attack by vulture capitalists who took the company private. These vulture capitalists used other people’s money (money from investors in their vulture capital business) to take Toys ‘R’ Us private. They then stripped the assets out of the company to pay huge salaries and fees to themselves. They also loaded up the company in debt to pay themselves even more salaries and fees. When the company ran out of assets to keep itself in business, they abandoned the company to bankruptcy court. The businesses that were owed money by Toys ‘R’ Us, the people who lent money to Toys ‘R’ Us, and the people whose pensions, jobs, and health insurance depended on Toys ‘R’ Us, were all left holding an empty bag. The vulture capitalists walked away fat and happy. Elizabeth Warren makes no mention of holding the vulture capitalists accountable for what they did.

Global Times has the article Washington’s risky calculation of currency war.

A depreciating yuan would be favorable to China’s exports, but also put pressure on China’s capital flight, stimulate inflation and affect the market’s expectation of the country’s economic outlook. Why would China manipulate toward such a mixed blessing?

The renminbi’s recent fast depreciation is obviously a result of multiple market factors. And among them, the trade war launched by the US is a major driving force.

Here is a point of view I don’t expect that you will read in the USA’s corporate media. I wonder if #45 thought about this possibility when he started the trade war.

New Economic Perspectives has the interview Bill Black: Trump Sees Europe as a “Foe” Because of Key Misinformed Advisor.

As I started to listen to this I was thinking that one of my favorite economists was going to say something that I didn’t like, but it turns out he was right on point for things after we got past the introduction.

If I had read the introduction below before I started watching the video, maybe I wouldn’t have been so nervous.

President Trump’s belief that the European Union’s trade policies are more unfair towards the United States than just about any other trading partner is woefully misinformed and the result of his reliance “nutcase” trade advisor Peter Navarro, says NEP’s Bill Black.

With my new insight that suddenly dawned on me as to what the VIPS analysisi of the DNC “hacks” is all about, I decided to do a Google search. This is what I came up with.

Here is the YouTube video “Russian Hack an Inside Job?” Ray McGovern / VIPS Interview published on Jul 29, 2017.

As I was watching this, I kept wondering how I could have missed seeing this until now. Only about 8,600 people have seen this YouTube video. How could that be?

I cupied the YouTube intro text and pasted it into my editor without really looking at it. It was then that I looked at an icon showing who published this, and then read the txt of what I had copied and pasted.

Ray McGovern of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) joins LaRouchePAC to discuss a very important document released this week by the VIPS that debunks any idea that the DNC server was hacked by Putin and the Russians.

OMG! If I had realized who this came from before, maybe I wouldn’t have looked at it. Now that I have looked at it, I can’t very well keep it a secret.

OMG!, OMG!, as I published this post and went to where I could see the video that I had embedded, I wonder how I could have missed the banner that was down the side of the video.

OMG!, OMG!, OMG! In publishing this on Facebook, I just noticed that the left side banner is not displayed while the video is playing.

Time has this interesting article I’m Bill Browder. Here’s the Biggest Mistake Putin Made When Trying to Get Access to Me Through Trump.

Browder is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005. Since 2009 when his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in prison after uncovering a $230 million fraud committed by Russian government officials, Browder has been leading a campaign to expose Russia’s endemic corruption and human rights abuses.

It is hard to know who is lying here, as if only one person could be lying. At least I know who this guy is now. After reading how the Russian economy was almost sunk by the corrupt Harvard University consultants until Putin stepped in to set it straight, I have always had the feeling that the oligarchs Putin was going after were the ones who tried to take Russia down. Despite that feeling, I have never assumed I actually knew if I was right or not.

Perhaps if this is out in the open, we will finally find out what’s what. Of course, it could always turn into more Russia hysteria, or maybe I might even be convinced that Putin is really as evil as some people want me to believe. The third possibility is that I will never be able to figure it out. There are some things in life that we will never know the truth about.

July 18, 2018

Jared Paquette put me on to this video. Fire up your “You know” filters and listen to this video. I’ll cut to the chase to tell you that Bill Browder is the grandson of Earl Browder. Who was Earl Browder? What is Browderism?.