Here is the entry point the online course Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey. This is where you will get to the table of contents for the course.

A close reading of the text of Karl Marx’s Capital Volume I in 13 video lectures by Professor David Harvey.

I don’t quite know what to put here to explain why I think this course might have such great value. I’ll list the two podcasts that gave me the hint, in case you are interested. It is not necessary to listen to either one of them if you are already interested in diving into the course. Social Media and the Internet as a Powerful Organizing Tool – Part 1 and Social Media and the Internet as a Powerful Organizing Tool – Part 2. I actually listened to Part 2 before I listened to Part 1.

The Getting Started web page for the course will tell you how to get the version of the book that has the same page numbers as discussed in the lecture. This link is also in the table of contents mentioned at the top of this post.

Naked Capitalism has the article Fed Official: Climate Change is an ‘International Market Failure’.

Since Congress has yet to take sufficient action, Rudebusch says that the Fed could, in theory, take matters into its own hands by encouraging a shift away from fossil fuels. The problem is, the Fed’s only official job is to keep inflation tame and unemployment low. And its tools are limited to buying and selling government debt to tweak interest rates.

What was the Fed buying in the various phases of quantitative easing? Quantitative Easing Explained.

The bank buys securities from its member banks to add liquidity to capital markets.

So, there already seems to be a little stretchiness in the definition of what the Fed can buy. Still, the stretchiness that already exists might not be enough to cover what Rudebusch thinks is necessary.

Business Insider has the article Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a fan of a geeky economic theory called MMT: Here’s a plain-English guide to what it is and why it’s interesting.

The theory is geeky because you have to understand it enough to make rational budget decisions for the federal government. If you are a Senator or Representative, and do not understand how the federal budget impacts the national economy, one wonders what you are doing holding such an office.

In explaining what traditional economists had to say about MMT, the article says:

Not one agreed that governments able to print their own currencies should forget about federal deficits or be free to spend what they like.

That’s fine by us MMT proponents. MMT has never said that we should forget about federal deficits. It says we have to put the deficits in context of what the economy needs. If the economy needs the government to run a deficit of a certain size, then the government should run a deficit of that size. Anything that is much more or much less than the deficit needed by the economy is what causes problems.

I guess that Business Insider does not really understand the subject of the article. However, they do a good enough job of presenting the facts of MMT as explained by the MMT experts. They go off the rails when they pay obeisance to the economic “experts” who explain that the way the USA has been run since 1776 cannot possibly work.

Current Affairs has the article All About Pete by Nathan J. Robinson.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is being hyped as the “Democratic celebrity” of the moment.

I’ll offer two excerpts that may convey the story this article is trying to tell.

Buttigieg himself is quite explicit about pitching himself this way. Asked about why anyone should vote for him over other candidates, he did not cite a superior governing agenda. Instead he said:

You have a handful of candidates from the middle of the country, but very few of them are young. You have a handful of young candidates, but very few of them are executives. We have a handful of executives but none of them are veterans, and so it’s a question of: What alignment of attributes do you want to have?

Alignment of attributes? Are we building a Sims character? This is McKinsey-speak: optimizing candidate attribute matrix for maximal cross-national vote share. Unfortunately, many in the political press still find this meaningful. Have a read through the profiles and see how much time is spent thinking about Buttigieg’s Attribute Alignment versus asking him to name a single thing he plans to do to help working people.

To sum up, we have this excerpt.

Mayor Pete does not have an entirely different story than any other politician in our lifetime. He has the same story they all have. David Axelrod has gushed: “his story is in incredible story.” Is it? The son of two professors at an elite university goes on to several different elite universities, serves an uneventful seven-month tour of duty in the Navy, and then becomes the technocratic mayor of the city his parents’ university is in? Ilhan Omar has an entirely different story than any other politician. So does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This man is the story of the American elite.

If you were fooled by Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, but don’t quite know why you fell for their sales pitch, this article may open your eyes.

Economic Outlook has the article The effectiveness and primacy of fiscal policy – Part 1.

A firm will not invest, no matter how low the funding costs go, if they do not think they can sell the extra output that the increased productive capacity would produce.

When people ask me why pumping more liquidity into the economy via low interest rates does not stimulate investment, I have a quaint way to explain this. I ask “What part of no freakin’ customers do you not understand?”

Here is a partial list of posts where I have expressed my quaint aphorism

1. The Effectiveness of Large-Scale Asset Purchases
2. MODERN MONEY THEORY: How I came to MMT and what I include in MMT
3. Robert Reich destroys Right Wing economist attempt to sell GOP tax cuts (VIDEO)
4. Fed keeps U.S. rates steady, to start portfolio drawdown in October
5. The Global Corporate Saving Glut
6. Cutting Company Taxes is a Race to the Bottom
7. The ECB’s Original Sin and Franco Modigliani’s Long View
8. The Washington Consensus and Long-Term Austerity in Latin America
9. Hillary Clinton Roundtable in New Hampshire
10. Banking Hearing on Income Inequality
11. 20 U.S. companies that paid 0% in taxes
12. Central bankers issue strong warning on asset bubbles
13. Turn That (Deficit) Frown Upside Down
14. Corporations Are Generating So Much Cash It Is Sloshing Around

I have been yearning for an article like this one from an MMT expert. This is the first time I have heard one of these experts give a definitive and detailed explanation of why fiscal policy is a stronger tool than monetary policy to stimulate an economy. In fact, I thought I once heard L. Randall Wray say the opposite.

April 2, 2019

I have links to all three parts of the series in a subsequent post The effectiveness and primacy of fiscal policy.

Patreon has the audio Interview with Tulsi Gabbard.

Hey everyone. Here’s my first podcast episode; it’s an extended interview with Tulsi Gabbard. We touch on lots of different subjects, such as the collapse of the Trump/Russia narrative, identity politics, Israel, her relationship with Bernie, and much more. Hope you find it illuminating!

I have no idea who Michael Tracey is, but he conducts one heck of an interview. There are a number of issues he talks about with Tulsi Gabbard that a fan like myself did not know. I found out that Tulsi is not a supporter of Indian nationalism in India.

I also found out that her perception of Hinduism is that it is monotheistic. In her view, the perception that it is polytheistic is misleading. I have read about that view, but I didn’t know how many Hindus shared that view.

See Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism by Rajiv Malhotra.

India is more than a nation state. It is also a unique civilization with philosophies and cosmologies that are markedly distinct from the dominant culture of our times – the West. India’s spiritual traditions spring from dharma which has no exact equivalent in Western frameworks.

Truthdig has the Chris Hedges piece Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press.

It is not only Trump who has obliterated the line between fact and fiction. It is the press. It hyped and reported allegations it never investigated or confirmed. And by doing this, repeating failures of the kind that appeared in its coverage of the invasion of Iraq, it has committed suicide. A nation that lacks a functioning press becomes a tyranny. This is not Trump’s fault, but our own.

Little did the writers of our First Amendment think that we would have to protect the freedom of the press from the owners of the press.

YouTube has the video Full Recorded Speech, Taxation for Revenue Is Obsolete, Beardsley Ruml.

In 1945, Ruml made a famous speech to the ABA, asserting that since the end of the gold standard, “Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete”. The real purposes of taxes were: to “stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar”, to “express public policy in the distribution of wealth and of income”, “in subsidizing or in penalizing various industries and economic groups” and to “isolate and assess directly the costs of certain national benefits, such as highways and social security”. This is seen as a forerunner of functional finance or chartalism.

You can take the parts you like and dismiss the parts you don’t, but this negates the value of the supposed expert who is saying these things. The headline touts the opinion that taxation for revenue is obsolete. The headline ignores the part that says corporate taxes are bad.

If you are going to accept one premise, but challenge the other, we are right back to each reader forming their own opinions on the matter. The true value of the “expert” is in raising issues for discussion. The value is not in the making of pronouncements that can go without challenge. If you accept challenging the part you don’t like, then you have to accept the possibility that someone else will challenge the part you do like.

The speech was over at about 36 minutes into the video, so I stopped listening there.

Note: The first part of the video seems to include a speech about hiring the handicapped which to me seems to be unrelated to the second speech (or part of the speech). Maybe they are different parts of the same speech, which explains why the first part is included in what purports to be the “Full Recorded Speech”.

There was a Facebook comment

Taxes are still never revenue for the federal government….not corporate or citizens……There are economic reasons for not wanting to tax corporations, but, tax they did (pigouvian taxes) ,investments were made, instead of having to pay 70 to 90% on profits…with a corrupt Congress not reining these corporate pirates in, we all lose.

I made the following response:

I don’t mean to imply that the part about taxes not being needed for revenue (but being needed for other purposes) is in any way wrong. Much of what he said about corporate taxes had a lot of merit, too, but he said a few things I could challenge.

I stopped listening at a little past 32 minutes, so he may have redeemed himself in the final half hour.

The part that got me on the corporate tax discussion was in the double taxation part. Yes, there is the potential at double taxation, but the not rich person will not pay the same rate of taxes as the rich person if the dividends are subjected to the progressive income tax. Of course that would lead to a discussion of the income tax rate cap on dividends. Then there is the discussion of how many corporations manage to pay no income tax, so the dividends only get taxed when individuals receive them – once not twice.

Rules and laws applied to people are not like the laws of physics because people do change their behavior based on their knowledge of the tax laws. Inanimate objects don’t change their behavior based on what is written about them.

Another Facebook comment posted a link to the TAXES FOR REVENUE ARE OBSOLETE article written by Beardsley Ruml.

Mr. Ruml read this paper before the American Bar Association during the last year of the war [World War II].

In the latter part of the article, Ruml said the following:

The corporation income tax cannot be abolished until some method is found to keep the corporate form from being used as a refuge from the individual income tax and as a means of accumulating unneeded, uninvested surpluses. Some way must be devised whereby the corporation earnings, which inure to the individual stockholders, are adequately taxed as income of these individuals.

I don’t know if there was any thought given to making dividends deductible from corporate income while keeping the corporate income tax. That might not have satisfied Ruml’s desire to get rid of the corporate income tax altogether.

USA Today has the opinion piece Mueller report: Collusion by the news media, not Donald Trump, but don’t expect apologies.

The irony, of course, is that while purporting to worry about Russian interference in American politics, by advancing this story the press was actually doing the work of President Vladimir Putin, sowing division and confusion through the American polity.
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We might someday need a press we can trust. But I hope not, because we certainly don’t have one.

So what’s next? Well, there may not have been Russian collusion, but there certainly was collusion between FBI agents and journalists, with agents leaking information and journalists paying them off with “tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events,” according to the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice.

At least one organ of the oligarchs’ new media is publishing a piece that might be an attempt to redeem its credibility. They have a lot of work to do to wipe out this blot on their reputation.

Democracy Now has the article As Mueller Finds No Collusion, Did Press Overhype Russiagate? Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston.

I am with Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman on this issue. David Cay Johnston does not seem to understand the damage he has done to his own credibility.

In this discussion you see David Cay Johnston demonizing Russia. His whole premise about Russia should be challenged. Maybe that would get to the motives of the oligarch’s news media for distracting us for over two years on their phony story. One might even ask why Johnston has taken up that anti-Russian position.

Glenn Greenwald did talk about the danger of this anti-Russian fever, but he never challenged Johnston directly on it.