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.

Naked Capitalism has published The Real News Network video The Free Market Threat to Democracy.

From Naked Capitalism we have the introduction:

This Real News Network interview with professor emeritus John Weeks discussed how economic ideology has weakened or eliminated public accountability of institutions like the Fed and promote neoliberal policies that undermine democracy.

There are many good points here in the interview, but at one point I think it goes seriously off the rails.

Second of all, probably most of your viewers will not remember the days when we had fixed exchange rates. We had a world of fixed exchange rates in those days that represented the policy, which government could use to affect its trade and also affect its domestic policy. There have been deregulation of that. We now have floating exchange rates. That takes away a tool, an instrument of economic policy. And in fiscal policy, there the, here it’s more ideology than laws, though there are also laws. There’s a law requiring that the government balance its budget, but more important than that, the introduction into the public consciousness, I’d say grinding into the public consciousness, the idea that deficits are a bad thing, government debt is a bad thing, and that’s a completely neoliberal ideology.

This makes absolutely no sense, and seems to have the case exactly backward. Our federal government has no rule that the budget must be balanced. Fixed exchange rates were not a tool that could be used to affect trade and domestic policy in a good way.

The US Department of Homeland Security has issued the statement DHS Statement On NBC News Coverage Of Election Hacking.

“Recent NBC reporting has misrepresented facts and confused the public with regard to Department of Homeland Security and state and local government efforts to combat election hacking. First off, let me be clear: we have no evidence – old or new – that any votes in the 2016 elections were manipulated by Russian hackers.

I look at the URL, and I cannot see how this item can be anything but authentic. I never expected to see an admission like this from DHS.

So, when I say that the government has not provided any evidence that Russian computer attacks have changed any votes, perhaps people won’t think I am crazy.

Consortium News has republished the article Donald Trump v. the Spooks.

This excerpt explains the context.

From the Archive: Just before Trump took office last year, ex-British intelligence officer Annie Machon wrote about the battle he was facing with U.S. intelligence agencies. As Russia-gate morphs into Intel-gate, we re-publish her prescient article today.

The author dislikes Trump’s domestic, economic, and most foreign policy positions, but does find merit in his fight against the spooks. I have similar likes and dislikes about Trump.

This match has already gone into the middle rounds with Trump still bouncing around on his toes and still relishing the fight. It would be ironic if out of this nasty prize fight came greater world peace and safely for us all.

Having lived through this fight over the last year, it seems like the spooks are winning the battle to keep us in perpetual war.