YouTube has the video An Ocean of Lies on Venezuela: Abby Martin & UN Rapporteur Expose Coup.

I have another thought experiment to propose to you. I realize that some people are incapable of thinking about anything that does not already exist, so they cannot do this thought experiment.

Suppose that for some reason the USA empire crumbles and we don’t get to write the history books. How will history remember the people of the USA as they allowed this Venezuelan war to be waged by the USA? Will history believe the USA people are not guilty because they didn’t know? Think of how history talks about the German people of WW II who allowed Hitler’s genocide because they claim they didn’t know? Maybe your parents and grandparents never passed on their understanding of the WW II era history.

Even the supposedly peaceful candidate, Bernie Sanders, feigns ignorance of what is going on in Venezuela. He does not mention that the humanitarian suffering that is plaguing Venezuels could be ended if the USA would lift its sanctions against Venezuela. It is not enough that our sanctions violate international law, but we have to pretend they aren’t crimes against humanity.

MIT Technology Review has the article Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked.

More and more security holes are appearing in cryptocurrency and smart contract platforms, and some are fundamental to the way they were built.

It had to happen. It is almost an irrefutable principle that anything designed by humans to be secure, can be broken into by some other devious human.

See the previous post The Lunacy of Cryptocurrency for comments on the economic reasons why cryptocurrencies have problems.

I know I am going to need this video every time somebody tries to smear Tulsi Gabbard over this issue.

American Affairs Journal has the L. Randall Wray article Does America Need Global Savings to Finance Its Fiscal and Trade Deficits?

Interesting article by L. Randall Wray. Lot’s of insights. Here is one.

To summarize, bond sales by either the central bank or the Treasury serve the functional purposes of removing reserves from the banks and offering a higher-interest-earning alternative to the central bank’s support rate. If, however, the central bank wants to push interest earnings down toward the support rate, it can engage in open market purchases—taking the bonds out of the system (à la “quantitative easing”).

In his usual style, the beginnings of his article start with a long description and justification for the conventional wisdom, and the latter half tells you why that is all wrong. You have to get a feel for where the switch happens.

YouTube has the video Trump: End socialism & Maduro’s reign in Venezuela.

As US politicians are putting rhetoric against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro into high gear, US President Donald Trump gave a speech in Miami calling for Maduro to step down and for an end to socialism in Latin America. RT America’s Manila Chan interviews political analyst Jim Kavanagh to discuss why he considers the Trump administration’s attacks on Maduro as nothing more than “overt imperialism.”

When Bernie Sanders decries the economic situation in Venezuela as if it were created by Socialism, remember this interview. Bernie Sanders cannot possibly be ignorant of this history. You have to wonder what Bernie Sanders is up to. What will he do for us, or to us, if he becomes President. Does Bernie want to lose the war of words with Trump this early in his campaign for 2020?

YourTube has the video Noam Chomsky​ Lecture with introduction by Bernie Sanders​.

“Deciphering Foreign Policy Jargon” (05/20/1985)

This fascinating and remarkably timely discussion comments not only on the historical state of our political system, but offers deep insights into the current state of our election processes.

At 5 minutes to midnight, I don’t have time to watch this all. I’ll have to do it later. In less than 7 minutes of watching, I am reminded of what Bernie Sanders knew about Nicaragua in 1985. That is what astounds me about what he now says about Venezuela.

YouTube has the video Michael Parenti on Bernie Sanders. Notice the date in the following quote.

Michael Parenti answers a question about Bernie Sanders, while Sanders’ presidential campaign was going on, in 2015.

YouTube has the video Bernie Sanders announces 2020 run: Extended interview.

I looked at the whole interview for the first time. Sanders’ reaction at 23 minutes and 43 seconds into the interview, is funny as all get out.

The only thing that Sanders said during the interview that really upset me were his remarks on Venezuela. He acted as if the USA had clean hands in the creation of the economic havoc in Venezuela. If somebody doesn’t manage to wake Bernie up on this issue, I am going to be very, very concerned.

What Sanders does not seem to get is that Chavez and Maduro were working against the very same type of oligarchy that Sanders wants to fight in the USA. He could take a lesson from Venezuela on what the oligarchy will do to fight him.

Maybe with Tulsi Gabbard as his Vice President, she will be able to knock some sense into him on this issue. We’ll have to watch his pick for Secretary of State very carefully. If he does what Obama did in picking Hillary Clinton, then we will know that all is lost.

Naked Capitalism has the article The Financial Crisis Was a Minsky Moment but We Live in Strange Times. I can’t find just the right excerpt to put here to do the article justice. Instead, I will quote one of the comments. The comment is a spoiler in that it gives away the joke of the title.

Susan Strange seems to have been a catalyst for a lot of what was at the time subversive economic thought. I would predict that as time goes along a lot of the economic ‘stars’ such as Milton Friedman will be revealed for the frauds that they were and that anybody who has won a (made up) Nobel Prize in Economics would also be suspect.