The Real News Network has the video House Anti-BDS Resolution Reveals the Power and Limits of the Israeli Lobby.

The defense of Palestinian rights has become more acceptable and accusations of anti-Semitism have become more sparing in the mainstream media, despite the House’s recent resolution against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, says IPS’s Phyllis Bennis

Bennis enumerates some of the lies in the House Resolution. The presence of these lies is why I believe Tulsi Gabbard should not have voted for this resolution no matter what her opinion of BDS or Palestinian rights. If the House is going to vote for a resolution, the least we should require is that it presents the issues honestly.

It occurs to me that the BDS movement could say “In light of the fact that Israeli actions have made the two state solution impossible, the only way we can accept a one state solution is for the Palestinians to have the right of return to their lands that were illegally confiscated.”

Israel would then be faced with the choices of reversing what it has done to make the two state solution impossible, or accepting true democracy for all people in Israel, and risk being voted out of existence as an exclusively Jewish state.

Counter Punch has the Michael Hudson article The Coming Savings Writedowns.

Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. That point inevitably arrives on the liabilities side of the economy’s balance sheet.

But what of the asset side? One person’s debt is a creditor’s claim for payment. This is defined as “savings,” even though banks simply create credit endogenously on their own computers without needing any prior savings. When debts can’t be paid and debtors default, what happens to these creditors?

I am a follower of Michael Hudson. I have read part of his book “… and forgive them their debts“. This might be from the part I haven’t read yet. I understood the write-down of debts, but somehow the write-down of savings as a necessity had escaped me.

The windows in my house are just not suitable for a window air conditioner. Several years ago, I bought a roll-around air conditioner shown in the picture below.

If you have one of these, you know that it vents the hot air out through a duct that goes from the back of the unit to a nearby window. One problem with this arrangement is that the duct gets fairly hot. I have always felt that the air conditioner can barely keep up with the heat it is generating itself and putting into the room because of the hot duct.

After about 5 years of ownership of this unit, I finally had a bright idea. Today is the first day it has been hot enough outside to see if my idea works. It does.

This gives away the surprise of the air conditioning solution

The duct measured 5 ½ inches in diameter. I bought duct insulation for a 6 inch duct. Now the duct is room temperature, and the air conditioner does not have to fight itself. The insulation cost me all of about $8. The insulation is too bulky for the air conditioner manufacturer to have packaged this cheap solution with the unit. They could at least have mentioned it in the user manual. It has made me go from a rather unhappy owner of such a unit, to a completely satisfied one. I may just buy another unit like this one for upstairs now that I know how to make it work.

C-SPAN has the video Peace Be upon You.

Zachary Karabell talked about his book Peace Be upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence, published by Knopf. Mr. Karabell traces the historical instances of peaceful coexistence between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish people. The author contended that throughout the past fourteen centuries the different faiths have found common ground; from peaceful debate amongst scholars in the courts of the caliphs in Baghdad to medieval Spain where Jewish sages, Muslim philosophers, and Christian monks translated the meaning of God together. The author argued that the current state of religious tensions are solvable if one studies the past. Mr. Karabell responded to questions from the audience.

I just posted about this video in the previous post Why Some ‘Fauxgressives’ Are Against the Palestinian BDS Movement, but this book and this C-SPAN video are so important that I felt this deserved a separate post. It will be easier for me to find this in the future if I have a post with the full title of the book.

YouTube has the video Why Some ‘Fauxgressives’ Are Against the Palestinian BDS Movement with Kim Iverson.

Watch the video before you read my comments. Form your own opinion.

She discusses various arguments that one might use to counter the point of view she is presenting in this video. When she makes the comparison to South Africa, I think I finally see what is driving her opinion.

Kim’s argument boils down to Palestinians are Muslims. Because of that, they don’t have democratic rights that Jews and Christians have. She doesn’t really have a grasp of history before 1948 either. A lot of her assumptions about Muslims are just wrong.

Some of my opinions have been enlightened by reading the book “Peace Be upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence” The link takes you to a C-Span video with the author of the book. I had not watched the video yet when I wrote this sentence, but I had read the book.

Zachary Karabell talked about his book Peace Be upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence, published by Knopf. Mr. Karabell traces the historical instances of peaceful coexistence between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish people. The author contended that throughout the past fourteen centuries the different faiths have found common ground; from peaceful debate amongst scholars in the courts of the caliphs in Baghdad to medieval Spain where Jewish sages, Muslim philosophers, and Christian monks translated the meaning of God together. The author argued that the current state of religious tensions are solvable if one studies the past. Mr. Karabell responded to questions from the audience.

I just finished watching the video related to the book. It would be wonderful if people like Kim Iverson could contemplate what was discussed. The author, Zachary Karabell, is not talking about utopia. He is just talking about what can happen in propitious moments in history, and perhaps how we can lessen the deviations from those propitious moments. He is not talking about changing the under lying basis of human nature. He is talking about promoting the the basis of human nature where people just want to go about their daily lives in relative peace and calm.

When people do not feel threatened, they find it easier to peacefully co-exist. This is exactly why Donald Trump’s use of threats, coercion, and sanctions is just so antithetical to achieving a modicum of peace in the world.

The ultimate question for people who want to opine on the BDS movement, the idea of BDS as a tactic, or Congressional resolutions on the topic, ask your self if what you have to say will enhance the possibilities of peaceful co-existence or not.

Mint Press News has a several part piece by Whitney Webb on some sordid history that I did not know about. The first part, which I have only partially read so far is Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case.

Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the U.S. government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime.

The second part, which is where I started, is Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era.

Appalling for both the villainous abuse of children itself and the chilling implications of government by blackmail, this tangled web of unsavory alliances casts a lurid light on the political history of the U.S. from the Prohibition Era right up through the Age of Trump.

My initial reaction on reading this second part was “If 1% of this is true, one might wonder why bother anymore?”

I have mixed reaction to the prominent place that the Bronfman family plays in this story. Once, when I was growing up I remember my father mentioning some family. He claimed that our family name might originally have been something garbled which I remember as the sound “brnfmn” I never made much out of that until somehow it came up in conversation many decades later with a cousin of mine. He mentioned that what I was remembering was actually Bronfman. My grandmother had reportedly been the source of the story that there might be a family connection. My father and grandmother had long since passed away before I had this conversation, so I couldn’t check the original sources.

All I knew about the Bronfman’s was their tie to the brand name Seagrams. I used to laughingly talk about this connection after I learned about it. Now I am not so sure I should ever mention it again.

CounterPunch has the article 71 Years Later, Zionist Terrorism Is Alive and Well.

Seventy-one years to the day Jewish terrorists in Palestine committed a heinous crime for which they continue to go unpunished.

The April 9, 1948 massacre of 107 Palestinians in the Christian Village of Deir Yassin (monastery of Yassin) has been whitewashed by Israel, the U.N., the media, and the so-called law-abiding civilized Western World – a world that lectures us on morality, the rule of law, and democracy – and a Western World that has sown the pestilence of wars, misery, and chaos – from as far as Libya to the west, and as far as Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Bangladesh to the east.

That is a part of the history that I only vaguely knew. The part that I vaguely knew was from “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel” by Ari Shavit . Shavit is a grandson of one of the founders of Zionism. He describes some of what is in the CounterPunch article, but not all of it.

Here is another part of the CounterPunch article that hit home.

To cover their dastardly deeds, Israeli leaders, with the help of Jews in diaspora, planted pine forests in each of the 530+ locations of what used to be Palestinian villages.

As a child growing up in the 1950s USA, I contributed coins to help plant a tree in Israel to reforest “the desert”. I had visions of going to Israel one day to visit the tree that would have my name on it. I had no inkling of the history behind why trees needed to be planted. I doubt my parents knew either. As I grew into teen age years, I remember somebody saying “Do you really believe that there is a tree with your name on it?” I thought that was destroying my innocence. Imagine that here I am at 75 years old getting the rest of my innocence destroyed.

I am sure that there is a counter-narrative to the story the CounterPunch article told. I haven’t seen it, nor have I looked for it. As a result of this post, it will probably float to the surface.

Elizabeth Warren wrote the article The Coming Economic Crash — And How to Stop It on Medium.

The administration may breach the debt ceiling in September, leading to economic turmoil that top economists say would be “more catastrophic” than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

Elizabeth, Elizabeth, this is how you destroy your credibility. The rest of what you say has some merit, but this part shows that you either have no clue, or you are willing to say anything. As long as we have a federal government deficit, breacing the debt ceiling is a predictable event that is far from catastrophic. The Congress always lifts the debt ceiling. Congress would be fools not to.

With the foreign trade deficit we are running, what would be catastrophic would be to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. The federal budget deficit is how we put the money back into the domestic economy that is drained away by our foreign trade deficit. On average, our federal budget deficit needs to be at least as big as our trade deficit if we want to avoid an economic contraction.

I then noticed that in her essay, she had a link to the expert who she quoted. In her essay they link was at the word “say” as I reproduced above. Here is that that link led to Failure to raise debt ceiling would be ‘more catastrophic’ than Lehman collapse, S&P says.

Failure to raise the debt ceiling could have worse consequences than the collapse of Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis, S&P economist Beth Ann Bovino said.

Lapses like this are exactly what make me think that Elizabeth Warren doesn’t know much about economics. She may know banking and bankruptcy, but not enough economics to be any better President than Barack Obama was.

Something I read made me look into the article Chinese Money in the U.S. Dries Up as Trade War Drags On in The Dreaded New York Times.

Growing distrust between the United States and China has slowed the once steady flow of Chinese cash into America, with Chinese investment plummeting by nearly 90 percent since President Trump took office.

This is a very complicated economic and political balance to be weighed about China’s investing in the USA. I don’t have the expertise to conclude what is the best policy. It looks like we will see as this mindless experiment plays out. Perhaps some experts with a broader point of view than the Trump administration will study this issue and come up with some suggestions. After all Trump won’t be in office forever.

Maybe the proper approach to take is for the governments of China and the USA to work together to come up with the proper balance of policies that will be best for the workers in both countries. Instead of a trade war, or a trade agreement that only considers the interests of the oligarchs, we could have trade agreements that are mutually beneificial for all citizens of both countries. What a wonderful world it could be.

One of the things that makes our workers not competitive with workers in other countries is the high cost of living overhead we impose on our workers. The overhead I am thinking about is the cost of debt service in the private sector from the financialization of our economy for the benefit of entities that make money from lending money. We think rising real-estate prices are good because home owners can enhance their stagnant wages with capital gains on their real-estate. Actually it is the mortgage lenders that make money by granting larger and larger mortgages to cover the risi8ng cost of real-estate.

If we removed the high cost of financing our lives (including student debt, credit card debt, mortgage debt, and automobile loan debt) and removed the high cost of health care, our own workers could compete on a more even playing field with the rest of the world.

The Real News Network published the Richard Wolff video Economic Update: Socialism & Worker Co-Ops.

20th century socialism is now behind us. Socialists continued to evaluate both its achievements and failures via extensive self-criticism. A changed socialism has emerged, focused on a transition of workplaces from top-down hierarchical capitalist structures into democratic worker cooperatives. The powerful appeal of worker co-ops as grounding a new 21st century socialism is presented.

Richard Wolff has his own sense of humor sometimes, but he doesn’t use it much during these talks. He is not pretending to be the cowboy economist. Still, you can’t learn everything from a comedian. The more from him that I hear, the more I understand (also true of the cowboy economist).

The talk of how a new political party could grow is a new subject for me to hear from Richard Wolff. It is very intriguing. I hope I will hear more and more of this in the future.