Common Dreams has the article Despite Anti-American ‘Baiting’ by NYT, Sanders Makes ‘No Apologies’ for Opposing Reagan-Backed Death Squads.

“Journalist” Sydney Ember’s remarks are in bold in the extract below.

My point was I wanted to know if you had heard that.

I don’t remember, no. Of course there was anti-American sentiment there. This was a war being funded by the United States against the people of Nicaragua. People were being killed in that war.

Do you think if you had heard that directly, you would have stayed at the rally?

I think Sydney, with all due respect, you don’t understand a word that I’m saying.

Do you believe you had an accurate view of President Ortega at the time? I’m wondering if you’re——

This was not about Ortega. Do you understand? I don’t know if you do or not. Do you know that the United States overthrew the government of Chile way back? Do you happen to know that? Do you? I’m asking you a simple question.

This is the perfect example of why I refer to this newspaper as The Dreaded New York Times. They are waging another propaganda campaign to sell a regime change war. Somebody has to stand up to them. This has gone beyond the point where being patient and polite is the correct response.

Seeing a little more of the dreaded NYT article quoted gives me a better understanding than what I picked up from more abbreviated accounts of this. It also clarifies for me how Bernie Sanders sees the current situation in Venezuela in relation to what he observed of what was going on in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

The Real News Network has a two part series starting with the video Why Socialism? With Bhaskar Sunkara.

Most people know capitalism is unjust. Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara says he wrote The Socialist Manifesto to lay out an alternative.

The second video is What Would US Socialism Look Like? with Bhaskar Sunkara.

Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto, explains what socialism could actually look like in the United States

What excites me about these interviews is the chance to learn more about socialism than I currently know. The book The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality seems like it would start me out at the beginning of a conversation. Professor Richard Wolff talks about this subject in his videos and on his web site Democracy At Work, but I feel like I am joining in the middle of the conversation. I have the same problem with Bhaskar Sunkara’s Jacobin Magazine. The book should help me understand these other two sources more fully.

Market Watch has the article Bitcoin’s tumble ‘has caused a lot of technical damage’, says analyst.

Bitcoin hit an intraday low of $6,688.78 at 11 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, plunging from a 24-hour peak a $7,947.84, a roughly 16% drop, according to research and data site CoinDesk.

Some so-called experts call Bitcoin a superior store of value to the USA dollar. What kind of store of value behaves like this?

YouTube has the video Bernie Admits He’ll Vote For Biden In 2020!!.

What I find remarkable is that the same people who will politically unilaterally disarm call the Trump voters stupid.

The Real News Network has the story Why Many Venezuelans Are Still Chavistas.

Despite the dramatic economic crisis and the constant political conflict in Venezuela, there still is a significant proportion of the population that consider themselves to be “Chavistas.” Ed Augustin examined some of the reasons for this in Caracas

Perhaps this is more even handed than we are used to hearing from either side. That doesn’t mean it is any more or any less truthful.

The New York magazine has the article Jared Diamond: There’s a 49 Percent Chance the World As We Know It Will End by 2050.

Jared Diamond’s new book, Upheaval, addresses itself to a world very obviously in crisis, and tries to lift some lessons for what do about it from the distant past. In that way, it’s not so different from all the other books that have made the UCLA geographer a sort of don of “big think” history and a perennial favorite of people like Steven Pinker and Bill Gates.

So as not to leave you with a completely pessimistic view, I’ll quote one the final Q & A.

If there’s hardly a nation in the world that seems to be a good model, a thriving example for other nations of the world to follow behind, how much faith does that give you that we can find our way to a kind of sustainable, prosperous, and fulfilling future?

That’s an interesting question. If I had stopped the book on the chapter about the world without writing the last six pages, it would have been a pessimistic chapter, because at that point I thought the world does not have a track record of solving difficult problems. The U.N., well bless it, but the U.N. isn’t sufficiently powerful, and therefore I feel pessimistic about our chances of solving big world problems.

But then, fortunately, I learned by talking with friends that the world does have a successful track record in the last 40 years about solving really complex, thorny problems. For example, the coastal economics. So many countries have overlapping coastal economic zones. What a horrible challenge that was to get all the countries in the world to agree with delineating their coastal economic zones. But it worked. They’re delineated.

Or smallpox. To eliminate smallpox it had to be eliminated in every country. That included eliminating it in Ethiopia and Somalia. Boy, was it difficult to eliminate smallpox in Somalia, but it was eliminated.

YouTube has this Tulsi Gabbard video The US must NOT go to war with Iran.

Tulsi reminds us of the few sensible things Donald Trump said in the campaign. We weren’t naive enough to think he really meant it, but he held out a little hope that there was some sense rattling around in his head.

New Economic Perspectives has the article HOW TO PAY FOR THE WAR by L. Randall Wray.

I’m going to talk about war, not peace, in relation to our work on the Green New Deal—which I argue is the big MEOW—moral equivalent of war—and how we are going to pay for it. So I’m going to focus on Keynes’s 1940 book— How To Pay for the War—the war that followed the Economic Consequences of the Peace.

To many of us, all that L. Randall Wray says has been obvious for a long time. However, we MMT proponents have needed to explain to the skeptics that we have really thought this through. We have not just ignored the possibility of inflation, but we have plans of how to control it. There were a variety of things that were done in WW II that worked. It is no big mystery of what to do.

I presume that the idea of deferred consumption and forced saving has a lot to do with war bonds. It might be worth mentioning that in a sentence somewhere in the article. There are many people who will have no idea what deferred consumption/compensation means in practical terms.

The Real News Network has the video The MMT Debate With Dean Baker & Randall Wray.

Is Paul Jay being purposely dense? Some of the things that MMT does not talk about, are left out of the conversation because they would seem so obvious to thinking people that they would not need to be mentioned. If people are going to be as dense as Paul Jay, then MMT proponents will explain them. I heard no mention of freeing up the tremendous amount of resources we spend on counter-productive wars. Imagine paying people to make things that are useful to the economy instead of paying them for making things that we blow up. Dean Baker wasn’t too bad, but I expected him to be more reasonable given what he has previously written and spoken about.

Then there was the “debate” over what would happen if we tried to spend billions of dollars on new things and we did it overnight. What adult would think you could shift spending of hundreds of billions of dollars from one thing to another overnight? It is another case of being purposely dense to think that L. Randall Wray has given no consideration of how long it would take to phase in the shift from one thing to another. First, you have to figure out how you can afford something. After you figure out that you can afford something, then you have to figure out how you are going to do what you propose to do with all that money. Are we having a conversation among adults, or are we talking to children?

YouTube has the video Joe Rogan Experience #1295 – Tulsi Gabbard.

I have only had time to watch 30 or so minutes of this, but it seems to be much more in depth than you are likely to see anywhere else. I don’t agree with every minute of what I have seen, but it has been extremely valuable to hear it so far. I am stopping now, or I will be up until 1AM listening to this. I’ll pick up listening to this tomorrow.

May 14, 2019

As I continued to watch this video it seemed to devolve into silly talk. They were discussing the negative impacts of social media as if these problems hadn’t existed in radio, TV, and newspapers before the age of the computer. They decried the internet focus on controversy and evil social influences, as if before the computer age the newspapers were full of reports of all the people that nothing happened to. The history books are not filled with the stories of the billions of people who ever existed to which nothing remarkable ever happened.

To fault people for talking mostly about the unusual is a silly misunderstanding of human nature and of reality. On the other hand, do they notice all the social media threads about what people just ate or what they just cooked?

There may be nuggets of value in the rest of this video, but I am not going to spend my time looking for them.