YouTube has the video Evaluating Modi: Interview with Mohandas Pai.

Here is something you will never hear in the USA oligarchs’ news media. Not being a follower of Indian politics myself, I had no answer when I heard criticisms of Modi. Now I know just a tad more. At least I know there is another side to the story.

I have read a significatn part of the book Being Different : An Indian Challenge To Western Universalism by Rajiv Malhotra.

One of the ideas in the book that was eyeopening was his explanation of the difference between tolarance and mutual respect. Here is a YouTube video of his explanation Rajiv Malhotra: Difference Between Tolerance and Mutual Respect

There is a Rajiv Malhotra Official YouTube page. There is a video Explaining Who We Are.

The Real News Network has the 4 part Modern Monetary Theory – A Debate Between Randall Wray and Gerald Epstein.

Randall Wray, one of the founders of the economic theory known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) lays out some of its main arguments. Paul Jay hosts.

Gerald Epstein outlines his criticisms of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Paul Jay hosts

These four episodes are a very valuable service that The Real News Network is providing. Instead of two or three sides talking past each other, it is important for these various sides to discuss these ideas in a more interactive way. As Paul Jay says, these 4 episodes are just the beginning.

MIT Technology Review has the article Congress wants to protect you from biased algorithms, deepfakes, and other bad AI.

There will likely soon be another bill to address the spread of disinformation, including deepfakes, as a threat to national security, she says. Another bill introduced on Tuesday would ban manipulative design practices that tech giants sometimes use to get consumers to give up their data.

Maybe this isn’t the most important thing in this article, but I think it shows a worrisome naivete.

I looked up Edward Bernays in Google, and found an article. Maybe it has taken the threat of AI to awaken people to what has been going on since at least as far back as WW I. I found the article Propaganda by Edward Bernays (1928).

The TED video Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy makes some excellent points, but also seems to lack any knowledge of Edward Bernays, and what he stood for. (I wrote the previous sentence after having been handed the last 6 minutes of this video. As I pasted the video here, and started to watch it again, I found out what I was was missing in the extremely important first 9 minutes.)

YouTube has the video …and forgive them their debts.

If you want to understand what the 2020 Presidential election is all about, watch at least the first 30 minutes of this video Where Michael Hudson gives you an excellent summary of his book. The rest of the 2 hours is well worth watching. It is equally eye opening, but I know that many people may just not have the time to devote.

Join Dr. Michael Hudson, New Testament Scholar Dr. Aliou Niang and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Biblical Scholar and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, for a discussion on the history of debt and what it means for our context today. Moderated by Shailly Gupta Barnes and the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice.

Debt plays a central role in upholding the economic and social order of the day. In the US, mounting debt and the crippling financialization of our lives is taken as fact. Our political leaders see no real problem and offer no serious solution. This was not always the case. Throughout antiquity, widespread debt-cancellation was understood as a moral and practical necessity. In a significant new book, …and Forgive Them Their Debts, economist Michael Hudson traces the biblical demand against debt and the long history of economic jubilees. Counter to dominant history and theology, Hudson reveals how the Bible itself is concerned most with the moral failure of economic systems, rather than personal sin.

Naked Capitalism also featured this video in their article Empire and Economics: The Long History of Debt Cancellation from Antiquity to Today

April 20, 2019

Toward the end of the first hour (at about 54 minutes) Dr. Aliou Niang talked about the “Parable of the Talents”, in Matthew 25:14–30. He mentioned the book “Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed” by William R. Herzog II. I would like to obtain the book to see how the parable is explained the way Niang interpreted it.

Common Dreams has the article ‘We Can Be Whatever We Have the Courage to See’: New Video From AOC Envisions a #GreenNewDeal Future.

The article includes the video A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a film narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and illustrated by Molly Crabapple.

A political movement without a vision won’t go far. It is wonderful to see movements making the effort to share the vision.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies has the Facebook post A very detailed walkthrough of Modern Monetary Theory, the big new left economic idea.

This leads to a Vox article Modern Monetary Theory, explained.

Modern Monetary Theory is having a moment.

The theory, in brief, argues that countries that issue their own currencies can never “run out of money” the way people or businesses can. But what was once an obscure “heterodox” branch of economics has now become a major topic of debate among Democrats and economists with astonishing speed.

This article is an OK explanation, but it does not show a really deep understanding. What disturbs me in particular are the frequent statements that “this is not a problem now” without a word about exactly why it is not a problem now, but what would be the circumstance in which it would be a problem.

Here is one example of what I don’t like.

In the discussion of hyperinflation, there is no real mention of the cause of many past hyperinflations. In most of those cases, if not all of them, there was a sudden drop in the supply of goods relative to an existing supply of money. If the definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, that situation can occur because of a change in the supply of goods as well as a change in the supply of money. People have been conditioned to always think only of the supply of money. The government reaction to the drop in supply and resultant inflation, might have been to print more money, but that was certainly a misbegotten strategy that made matters worse.

There is a reason why William Mitchell, L. Randall Wray, and Martin Watts wrote the book Macroeconomics to explain all this, as the article mentions. Attempts to write a short explanation inevitably lead to their own failures. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that having read a brief introduction equips you to be a consultant on or a teacher of the subject. I am no consultant or teacher, but even I see the failings of the brief explanation.

I make this post to starkly highlight something that has been bothering me about the propaganda we are being fed about starving children. I have not chosen images to be “fair and balanced”.

The USA government is helping Saudi Arabia to fight a war in Yemen. See the next picture from and article in The Irish Times, More than one million children starve as Yemen war rages.

This is a war we refuse to stop supporting.

Now let’s move on to a war the USA wants to start to protect the starving children in Venezuela. Here is a Huffington Post article Hundreds Of Children In Venezuela Are Starving To Death, Says New York Times Report.

I suppose it is worth pointing out that a lot of whatever starving is going on in Venezuela is caused by the 20 years of economic war that the USA has fought against Venezuela.

If government of the USA refuses to back out of a war that is causing starvation in Yemen, but wants to start a military war in Venezuela because of lesser dire starvation in Venezuela, what is the logic or consistency of our attitude toward the two situations?

Let me make it clear. I am not saying that there is no need for concern about the children in Venezuela. Exactly the opposite. If the USA starts a war in Venezuela, the condition of the children in Venezuela will start looking more like the starving children of Yemen.

The Gower Initiative For Modern Money Studies posted the story on Facebook, Functional​ finance — how to cope with inflation.

The post consisted of the following quote on Lars P. Syll’s blog:

Less well worked out is a technique of dealing with the other responsibility of the creator of money – the responsibility for maintaining its value. The key points here are not in the direct supply of money, or even in the regulation of the level of spending. The key points are in the determination​ of wage rates​ and in​ the determination of rates of markup of selling prices over costs … Higher wages relatively to prices are necessary for long-run prosperity but​ raising wages will do no good because they​ will only lead​ to higher prices and inflation.

The dilemma can be resolved only by the government going to work on both money wage determination and on markup rates. Both are problems of monopoly and as such are inevitably destructive of a free economy. Markup rates must be reduced​ by antimonopoly measures … The most important help to the government in this will be the policy of maintaining​ full employment which will make it profitable for business to work with smaller markups.

The origin of the quote is Abba P. Lerner The American Economic Review Vol. 37, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Fifty-ninth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May, 1947), pp. 312-317.

That is a pretty modern insight considering that Modern Money Theory (MMT) covers the theory of money of the last 6,000 years.

Coincidentally, I saw the Now This video Lawmakers on Both Sides Grilled Insulin Producers on High Prices.

I cannot embed the Now This video. You will have to view it at the above link.

The inflation in insulin prices are probably the result of illegal collusion to fix prices between the different manufacturers of insulin. That’s not quite a monopoly by the standard definition, but they are exercising monopoly like power that is prohibited by our Anti-Trust laws.

YouTube has the video What Ilhan Omar Actually Said About 9/11 w/ Abby Martin.

Jimmy Dore finally shows the context of Ilhan Omar’s remarks that have been edited out of almost every new report I have seen. I have heard comments about the lack of context, but those people have never provided the context they knew was missing (I have a vague recollection of seeing that context somewhere, but that was before I realized its significance.)

Try to remember the location of this video for rebutting the next attempt to smear Ilhan Omar that you run across.