Left Voice has the article Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Legitimize Regime Change in Venezuela.

While both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders would likely oppose a crude military invasion of Venezuela, each in their own way are legitimizing the opposition and remaining deadly silent on the threat of a coup. Neither are willing to truly examine the role of U.S. imperialism or envision a socialist Venezuela. The U.S. left must do better than that.

Hands off Venezuela!

While I can completly endorse this position, I have a few quibles with some of the following.

The second basic position of socialists in relating to the Venezuelan crisis must be a revolutionary, anti-capitalist perspective for resolving the crisis. This includes drawing a clear delimitation from Maduro’s government, which has become increasingly repressive. Against the idea that Venezuela’s failure is a sign of the failure of socialism, we assert quite the contrary. The reason of Venezuela’s crisis today is that Chávez’s regime did not really break with national or foreign capitalists, and did not end the dependent character of the country’s economy. Whatever gains were made by the Venezuelan masses under Hugo Chávez should be defended, and the working class must fight for real socialism and a workers government.

As I read Marxist economist Michael Hudson, I get the impression that he thinks that a mixed socialist/capitalist system is the most realistic. I tend to agree with all the reasons he explains why this is so. You don’t have to be anti-capitalist if you believe that Socialism has a rightful place in the USA. Each system has a rightful place, if we can figure out what the rightful place is for each of them. One way to think of it is that government should be the guarantor of life’s basic necessities. Private capitalism does not do a good job of guaranteeing those necessities.

I have no problem with workers trying experiments with socialism in the work place. In some situations it might work, and in others it might not. We won’t be able to tell unless we can try things out. We need to admit that the right mix may change with circumstances. Whatever mix we decide on, it should be continuously adjustable. When we get to the age where robots and automation can produce all the necessities of life without much human intervention, that will be a big change. We should at least start to think about what adaptations this will require so that we don’t have to make a huge adjustment suddenly.

All the rage of the oligarchs’ news media seems to be “How do we pay for the green new deal?” I have imagined the following conversation between a skeptic of the Green New Deal and a proponent of the Green New Deal.

Skeptic: How do we pay for the green new deal?
Proponent: How did we pay for World War II?

S: We sold war bonds to pay for WW II.
P: If you think that is how we financed the war, then where did people get the money to buy the war bonds?

S: A lot of the people worked in the defense industry and were paid good wages.
P: Where did the defense industry get the money to pay these good wages?

S: The defense industry had government contracts to build, planes, ships and other necessities of war.
P: Where did the government get the money to pay for these contracts?

S: The government sold war bonds to get the money to pay the contracts, so employers could pay salaries to workers, so workers would have the money to buy war bonds.

If this circular argument does not make sense to you, have you ever considered that the government created the money that started this process rolling? The circular process was created so that the government wouldn’t have to create even more money than they were already creating. Too much money for workers to use to buy consumer goods that we could not produce because we were fighting a war would have produced inflation. If we would have had inflation, no more consumer goods could have been produced. All the real resources were in use already for the war effort.

After the war was over, we needed to have money in the pockets of civilians so that they could buy consumer goods that could be manufactured by returning veterans who needed jobs. People redeemed their war bonds, and kept the economy rolling. How come USA politicians were so smart in and after the war, but they lost all their smarts since then?

Unlike World War II, with the Green New Deal we won’t be blowing up what we just built with great expense of personal energy, natural resources, and capital resources. The Green New Deal stuff we build will produce economic benefits for society, and we can use more money to build more stuff that produce economic benefits rather than replacing what we blew up. The economic benefits will include the ability to make more consumer goods to satisfy the demands of the people who now have more money that the government created to pay for the Green New Deal. That’s supply side economics to prevent inflation.

YouTube has the video Middle Class Loses, Plutocrats Win With Trump’s Tax Cuts.

I am used to hearing comedians like Jimmy Dore and Lee Camp talk about economics. Here we have an economist, William K. Black essentially doing a comedy routine.

The article they discuss in the video is Why Did Trump Choose to be Such an Unpopular President?