New Eastern Outlook has the article Will EU Block China Economic Silk Road?.

Here is an excerpt that makes on narrow point of all that is covered in the whole article.

China’s Maritime Silk Road envisions directing state investment into key sectors such as acquisition of port management agreements, investment in modernized container ports and related infrastructure in select EU states.

At present the most developed example is the Greek port of Piraeus, operated under an agreement with the Chinese state company, COSCO, as port operator. Modernization and more than €1.5 billion investment from China has dramatically increased the port’s importance. In 2016 Piraeus’s container traffic grew by over 14 percent and COSCO plans to turn Piraeus into the fifth largest European port for container traffic. Before COSCO, it was not even in the EU top 15 in 2007. In 2016 COSCO bought 51% of Piraeus Port Authority for €280 million, and now owns 66%. Last year Piraeus Port, COSCO and Shanghai Port Authority, China’s largest container port, signed a joint agreement to further boost trade and efficiency at Piraeus. Greek Deputy Economy Minister Stergios Pitsiorlas said at the time, “The agreement means that huge quantities of goods will be transported to Piraeus from Shanghai.”

The narrow point that I see here is that, if the western vulture capitalists are going to punish countries like Greece, countries like Greece will find a way out by allying with a more helpful China. Reading the rest of the article, I see the possibility that as the western capitalists try to convince us that unfettered capitalism is the only solution, China will foil this by proving their economic model is better for all of us.

Looks like I was right about a previous post along these lines, China’s trillion dollar plan to dominate global trade. Our reaction is essentially “We don’t need no stinkin’ infrastructure. Besides if China’s infrastructure starts to annoy us, we can just blow it up.”

The Institute For New Economic Thinking has the article The Forgotten Vision of Market Socialism.

200 years after Marx’s birth, a look at how two economists sought to reconcile his idea of common ownership with market mechanisms

I have thought that if the Social Security Trust Fund were able to invest in stocks rather than special government bonds, this ownership could lead to some of what is described in this article. It might be instructive to put these two ideas together.

The idea about Social Security was described in a previous post Saving Capitalism For The Many, Not The Few. Also see the previous post Adapting Society To The Age Of Robots. Or just look through my previous posts that mention Franco Modigliani,

YouTube has the video China’s trillion dollar plan to dominate global trade.

I can just imagine Trump’s reaction to this.

We don’t need no stinkin’ infrastructure. Besides which, if China’s infrastructure starts to annoy us, we can just blow it up.

Seriously, if you think about the building of the railroads in the history of the USA, the railroad tycoons built huge fortunes based on the profits they made on the railroads. It is foolish to think that China has to worry about countries paying back the loans to build these facilities. There will be enough profit here to repay China many times over. We already have our infrastructure that we are milking like a cash cow. I guess we don’t need any more.

Bernie Sanders has produced the video Toys “R” Us Workers Losing Their Jobs.

30,000 Toys “R” Us workers across the country are losing their jobs. This is what happens when you have a system that allows private equity firms to destroy profitable businesses and throw workers out on the streets with no severance.

I have not found the video free standing from Facebook, so you’ll have to follow the link above to see the video.

I believe that this is the real story, not the propaganda that Amazon is driving these companies out of business. This disaster has been brought to you by people like Mitt Romney and his company Bain Capital.

Imagine what would have happened if Romney had become President and started running things like one of his businesses. Well, now we have Trump, so you don’t have to use your imagination.

For those of us who used to be supporters of Barack Obama and of Deval Patrick the USA Today article Obama friend Deval Patrick joins Bain Capital, founded by Romney is like a kick in the teeth.

Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is joining Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney that was disparaged by President Obama and Democrats in the 2012 presidential election.

The Jimmy Dore show has posted this in three video segments.

1. Marxist Economic Theory Easily Explained w/Richard Wolff

They don’t go into a lot of depth here, but I still think it is quite thought provoking,

I have heard Richard Wolff talk about Worker Co-Ops before, but somehow this video answers some of the questions I have had about scalability of the idea. I actually think I have heard him talk about the Spanish co-op Corporation before. I don’t know why that example didn’t stick with like I am thinking it might now,

Every now and then, I listen to some video from Richard Wolff. This is a good one. This is the part I listened to first.

IWB (Investment Watch Blog) has the article Proof that DNC manufactured the Russian controversy in June 2016.

Democrats manufactured the Russian interference story as a disinformation campaign all the way back in June 2016.

And this post will prove this beyond reasonable doubt with evidence. Not just that, but there is great circumstantial evidence of illegal activity going all the way up to the Obama administration, and provides new motive for why Seth Rich was murdered.

The evidence is presented in this post.

I can’t attest to the truth of this article. I haven’t followed the claims to inspect the documents as the article describes them. However, it the article adds some interesting speculations that are just as believable as various other sides have speculated.

In every such article there seems to be a point where the author goes overboard in inflating the certainty of the evidence. Here is the quote from this article that I find crosses the line.

The pertinent point is that: the metadata forensic proof is irrefutable that Warren Flood, or someone who owned a copy of Word registered to Warren Flood, shoehorned in obvious “Russian” fingerprints all over the documents. Guccifer 2.0 is none other than a botched DNC creation to create a false flag for Russia.

It might have been that the person doctoring the document knew who Warren Flood was, and wanted the evidence to show his hand in the conspiracy. I would hardly call that irrefutable, as I just refuted it.

You might want to refer to my previous post The Disinformation Playbook to ponder over what techniques mentioned there might have been put into play in the subject of the current blog post.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has the web site The Disinformation Playbook.

How Business Interests Deceive, Misinform, and Buy Influence at the Expense of Public Health and Safety
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There are many things we can do to keep the Disinformation Playbook from sidelining science and disabling democracy. It’s a team effort: scientists, science supporters, public officials, journalists, and companies themselves all have a role to play. Find out more on our Stopping the Playbook page.

Here is a video on one of the 5 techniques described on the web site.

I have read the home page of this site, but there are many links that I have yet to follow. I’ll be looking at these links as time permits.

Source Forge has a downloadable version of “Minsky,” a Macroeconomic Modeling Software Platform.

Free open-source computer program for building and simulating dynamic, monetary economic models, models without equilibrium and with a financial sector. A vital tool for a new approach to economics.

Read the rest of this post before you go running off to download the software. First of all, I have lost my faith that Source Forge will deliver you a clean version of software that is free of viruses, bloatware, and other annoying crap unrelated to the main point of what you think you are downloading. I posted the link mainly for the explanation of that the software is. I mentioned this software in the previous post Cenk and Young Turks Team: Your Deficit Hawkery is Unrealistic and Stands in the Way of Progressive Change.

Second, I want to say a few words about the designer of this software, Steve Keen. He uses this software to develop his understanding of the dynamics of an economy described in the blurb above. I have tried to listen to many of his lectures where he uses the software to demonstrate his conclusions. Every time he does it, he seems to fumble around, and he gets us so lost in the weeds that I have a hard time understanding his point or how the software proves it. His explanations are so full of hand-waving that I am never sure he has actually proved what he claims to have shown you.

Finally, I came to am interview where he didn’t have access to a computer to go down his usual confusing path. He explained everything just using words. From this interview, I got a much better understanding of his point of view, and he even confirmed my suspicions about some flaws in the explanation of Modern Money Theory (MMT). There is a link to the interview in my previous post Oliver Green in conversation with Steve Keen, Contrarian Economist and Author. Please forgive Oliver Green for trying and failing to get Steve Keen to confirm Green’s misunderstandings of some of the ideas that Keen is presenting.

New Economic Perspectives has the article in the form of an open letter Cenk and Young Turks Team: Your Deficit Hawkery is Unrealistic and Stands in the Way of Progressive Change.

There is one area, however, where your coverage of news and economics is quite misleading and creates a trap for the progressive movement that you are elsewhere seeking mightily to foster and strengthen. You have uncritically brought into your coverage some mainstream Democratic and “moderate” Republican economic ideas about federal deficits, federal debt and tax cuts. You might feel you are representing a “solid” position because this locates the Young Turks firmly in the Establishment echo chamber about debt and deficits, as well as seems to put you in a good position to lambaste hypocritical Republicans and Trump.

This whole letter starts off in a very promising way. I feel that when it descends into the weeds to justify the first part, it defeats itself with what I have come to realize is a flaw in the way MMT is explained.

Here is the critique that I posted.

When are MMT proponents going to wake up to the fact that sector balance argument depends on a static accounting balance of assets and liabilities? This static accounting has a loan which issues money right away to the borrower balanced exactly by a debt that must be paid back many years in the future. These two items do balance each other eventually, but in anything shorter than the life of the loan, there is economic activity resulting from the time difference.

The private sector is perfectly able to generate enough liquidity to keep the economy humming along during a boom. The private sector is completely incapable to generate this liquidity in a crash. This is so obvious that it tends to wipe out your argument about sector static balances in an instant. You think you are talking about flows without recognizing the static underpinnings of your argument.

Unless you are working with a dynamic model like Steve Keen’s Minsky computer program, you are deluding yourselves in how a dynamic economy really works.