When we have drug safety laws that end up killing people there must be something unconstitutional about that. In particular, I am thinking about the laws that prevent re-importation of drugs from countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. This is brought to mind by the article Concerned About Getting Rx Drugs from Canada? Here’s What to Know.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently sent a warning letter to a Canadian company selling prescription drugs online to Americans.

The agency has pointed out that where you buy medications outside of the United States can make the difference between taking a pill that improves your health and getting one that doesn’t help. It may even harm you.

I think about the recent steep rises in drug prices like insulin that has people dying from trying to ration how much insulin they use because of the limits on what they can afford. Whatever safety problems arise from shipping drugs to Canada and then re-importing them to the USA can’t possibly be as bad as not being able to get the drug at all. If this isn’t denying people life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I’d like to see how the Supreme Court can explain this if the case comes before them. If the Supreme Court can think that corporations are people, surely they can see that people are people.

The Real News Network has published partner provided content Economic Update: Capitalism vs. Socialism.

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff does something a little different. He dives deep into the 200+ year old debate and struggle between capitalism and socialism and looks into how it has become both confused and confusing. The different definitions of these systems make honest, balanced discussions and evaluations of them increasingly more difficult. Now that socialism is rising yet again to challenge capitalism, the debate demands a closer examination of the terms and their numerous, new and different meanings.

Richard Wolff is ready to go on to a different debate than we have engaged in about state capitalism versus private capitalism. Some people may not be ready to move on yet. I am not sure if I am, but I will entertain the thought.

As a “what worksist”, if somebody can explain to me how it would actually work practically to make society better and how we could make the transition, then it would be something we should try. I think there is a lot in the existing debate that could lead to better results while we also debate Professor Wolff’s ideas.

The Deductible has the article Rep Jayapal and Sen Sanders Have Introduced Medicare For All Bills: One Is a Lot Better Than the Other.

The cost-containment section in Representative Jayapal’s bill will cut health care costs substantially without slashing the incomes of doctors and hospitals. Senator Sanders’ bill cannot do that.

Now that you know the punchline, read the article for the explanation.

New Economic Perspectives has posted the article How Far Can We Push This Thing? Some Optimistic Reflections on the Potential For Economic Experimentation.

I argue that, based on a new framework I’ve developed for measuring the likelihood of sustained, runaway inflation that I call the Worker Bargaining Index (WBI), it is highly unlikely that a sustained inflation will result.

I believe that Modern Money Theory is the correct explanation of how money works, but I am sometimes skeptical about the lack of deeper thinking on some important issues. This article is the type of thing that worries me.

Does the new calculation take into account that we don’t have inflation from the trillions of dollars injected by the Fed because the people who got the money were not consumers? They had nothing productive worth investing in, so they bought Treasury bonds, inflated the stock market, and promoted corporate stock buybacks.

Does this new calculation contemplate what would have happened, and might happen in the future when the trillions of dollars flows into the economy because it looks like the economy is starting to grow?

It is not enough to say that the $29Trillion of liquidity injected by the Fed has not created inflation. You have to look deeply into why it didn’t cause inflation. When you can answer the why question, you might get a clue as to what might unleash that inflation.

A Worker Bargaining Index is one measure of what typically causes inflation, but it doesn’t seem to be worrying about the trillions of dollars sloshing around in the hands of the oligarchs who have kept it out of the productive part of the private sector because there is nothing worth investing there until we start getting some real economic growth.

Counter Punch has the story Scrutiny into Biden’s Record Should Include Obama Era Foreign Policies.

Greater scrutiny, however, should be placed on Biden’s role in supporting dubious foreign policies during his tenure as Vice-President under Barack Obama.

In Iraq, for example, where he took the lead on foreign policy initiatives, Biden curried favor with the corrupt Nouri al-Maliki whom locals considered to be a “Shia Saddam.” After Arab-Spring style protests erupted, Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry quietly worked to help install Haidar al-Abadi who was committed to privatizing Iraq’s economy in line with the original goals of the 2003 U.S. military invasion.

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Biden’s foreign policy roll during the Obama administration. It is good to have a reminder of yet another reason why I would never vote for Joe Biden.

Pitchfork Economics has a podcast What is Modern Monetary Theory? (with Stephanie Kelton),

Nick Hanauer struggles to figure out what Prof. Kelton is explaining, but he has built-in resistance to her ideas that hinders him. He comes close to getting it. He just needs to keep thinking about it. When he has a doubt about what MMT means, he needs to talk about his doubts with an expert. Frequently, when newcomers, like I once was, have doubts, the old ideas are sneaking back in. Since I have learned about and believed Keynesian economics since the early 1960’s, I have had less trouble than some people in accepting MMT.

Even some professional economists who had taught about Keynesian economics started suffering from brain rot introduced by Milton Friedman in the 1970s. I was too busy working, and disliked Friedman’s ideas, I guess I was immune to the brain rot.

CNBC has the video Bernie Sanders’ 2016 economic advisor Stephanie Kelton on Modern Monetary Theory and the 2020 race. This is even a better explanation of Modern Money Theory (MMT) than what Pitchfork Economics gleans in their podcast.

In the discussion of cost-push inflation at the end of this, even I learned a nuance that I hadn’t quite understood.

The Real News Network has a two part interview What Can Warren Change?.

The first part is Sen. Warren Wants to Jail Those Who Caused 2008’s Meltdown.

BIll Black examines the historical context of Warren’s bills for easier prosecution of banks and corporate leaders

The second part is If Current Laws Prosecuting Bankers Aren’t Used, What Can Warren Change?.

Bill Black demolishes the notion that we can’t prosecute banksters with the laws we now have in place

All of this is so simple as Bill Black explains, you have to question why even Elizabeth Warren makes it look so difficult.

Politico has this great article Inside Biden and Warren’s Yearslong Feud.

“For a decade, Orrin Hatch, Joe Biden, Jim Sensenbrenner, and dozens of others in Congress decried the state of bankruptcy laws that permitted people to take advantage of financial institutions,” Warren wrote in a 2008 post on Credit Slips, a bankruptcy law blog, after Tim Russert asked Clinton and Edwards about their votes for the bill during a Democratic presidential debate. “With a recession bearing down, the language of bankruptcy has shifted from ‘abusers’ who ‘take advantage of lenders’ to language of concern over the growing stress on hard-working families.” While voting for the bill had won senators the gratitude of lobbyists who write campaign checks, “that door swings both ways,” Warren went on. “Those who wanted to snuzzle with the lobbyists leave themselves vulnerable to counterattacks.”

Funny Elizabeth Warren didn’t mention this in 2016 when she tried to sell us on what a great President that Hillary Clinton would make. Maybe she had forgotten what she had written 8 years earlier, but I still remembered it.

Every time this Politico article seems to be softening the case against Biden, it comes back with a rebuttal that makes Biden look worse.

Salon has the article Reporter Sharmine Narwani on the secret history of America’s defeat in Syria.

I want to have a record of this article on my blog for use when I run into believers in the USA propaganda about Bashir Al Assad and Syria. Even Tulsi Gabbard shows no signs of understanding this.

As I hinted a moment ago, your reporting is very distinctive for its granular detail. In Syria you’re more or less in a class by yourself in this respect. One of your sources especially intrigued me, Father Frans van der Lugt, the Dutch priest who lived many years in Homs. Tell us about him. I should mention for readers’ sake, he was killed in Homs in the spring of 2014.

I never interviewed Father Frans, though I did go to his church gravesite during a visit to Homs shortly after he was killed. Through his writings, this Dutch priest gave us some rare, objective insights into what took place in the early days of the crisis — events he witnessed first-hand.

In September 2011 he wrote: “From the start there has been the problem of the armed groups, which are also part of the opposition… The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order then to blame the government.”

And then in January 2012 he expanded: “From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”

The 75-year-old Father Frans was shot at point-blank range by a gunman while sitting in a church garden in the rebel-occupied part of Homs….

How do I know that I don’t have a confirmation bias in sharing this story? I don’t know. However, since you get so much of the same crap from our oligarchs’ news media, I figure that knowing that there is another side to the story is a valuable service. I have to wonder how the USA public has the hubris to support going into somebody else’s country without being able to know who is telling the truth. What amazes me is our need to do something, anything, without caring if it is the right thing or the wrong thing just as long as it is something.

April 25, 2019

When I mentioned the item about term limits to a few friends at lunch, they asked why Bahar al-Assad was still in office. So I looked it up.

First is the Wikipedia article President of Syria

According to article 88 of the Syrian constitution, the president runs for a 7-year term after he is elected, and can only be reelected for one more term.

Next is the Wikipedia article Bashar al-Assad

On 10 July 2000, Assad was elected as President, succeeding his father, who died in office a month prior. In the 2000 and subsequent 2007 election, he received 99.7% and 97.6% support, respectively, in uncontested referendums on his leadership.

On 16 July 2014, Assad was sworn in for another seven-year term after receiving 88.7% of votes in the first contested presidential election in Ba’athist Syria’s history.

There seems to be a slight oopsie in here. Bashar al-Assad was first elected in 2000. He can only hold office for a maximum of 14 years. It is 2019, and he is still in office. Could someone explain?