YouTube has the video #06: How the American People (could not possibly have) Financed World War Two!.

We hear about the glorious job the American people did in financing World War Two. Only thing is, that story isn’t quite right. They did something that was glorious, all right, but it was not financing the war–it was holding inflation in check.

Maybe hearing this from a good old cowboy will make it more palatable.

The Atlantic has the article The Stock-Buyback Swindle.

To ward off hostile takeovers, boards started firing CEOs who didn’t deliver near-term stock-price gains. The rolling of a few big heads—including General Motors’ Robert Stempel in 1992 and IBM’s John Akers in 1993—drove home the point to CEOs: They had better start thinking about shareholder value.

If their conversion to the enemy faith was at first grudging, CEOs soon found a reason to love it. One of the main tenets of shareholder value is that managers’ interests should be aligned with shareholders’ interests. To accomplish this goal, boards began granting CEOs large blocks of company stock and stock options.

The shift in compensation was intended to encourage CEOs to maximize returns for shareholders. In practice, something else happened. The rise of stock incentives coincided with a loosening of SEC rules governing stock buybacks. Three times before (in 1967, ’70, and ’73), the agency had considered such a rule change, and each time it had deemed the dangers of insider “market manipulation” too great. It relented just before CEOs began acquiring ever greater portfolios of their own corporate stock, making such manipulation that much more tantalizing.

Excellent article that explains how rules changes are just reinforcing this pernicious trend. These changes to rules make it impossible for a CEO not to use stock buy backs if she or he wants to keep her or his job.

If you are interested to learn how your money and wealth are being stolen, reading this article will go a long way in furthering your educationi.

Naked Capitalism has the article Incentivizing an Ethical Economics.

Ethical economics, in which welfare is reconceptualised as a growth promoter, is not only important to restore our economic health. It is also fundamental to a genuine democracy – one in which everyone shares in economic success because they acquire the skills and support to do so. It may sound too good to be true, but the good news is that we’ve already achieved this mix twice in Britain’s history, each time with remarkably positive economic outcomes.

Also skimmed and set aside for future reading.

Naked Capitalism has the post Michael Hudson: U.S. Economic Warfare and Likely Foreign Defenses.

The American promise is that the victory of neoliberalism is the End of History, offering prosperity to the entire world. But beneath the rhetoric of free choice and free markets is the reality of corruption, subversion, coercion, debt peonage and neofeudalism. The reality is the creation and subsidy of polarized economies bifurcated between a privileged rentier class and its clients, their debtors and renters. America is to be permitted to monopolize trade in oil and food grains, and high-technology rent-yielding monopolies, living off its dependent customers. Unlike medieval serfdom, people subject to this End of History scenario can choose to live wherever they want. But wherever they live, they must take on a lifetime of debt to obtain access to a home of their own, and rely on U.S.-sponsored control of their basic needs, money and credit by adhering to U.S. financial planning of their economies. This dystopian scenario confirms Rosa Luxemburg’s recognition that the ultimate choice facing nations in today’s world is between socialism and barbarism.

I have skimmed the article, but I’ll have to go back and read it more carefully.

RT has the episode Orange coin good, orange man bad (E1412).

Bitcoin is gold.

It’s fun to watch Max Keiser going nuts over bitcoin.

Several hundred years ago you could have said “tulip bulbs are gold”. For a while it seemed to be true. Even saying “gold is gold” is hardly more meaningful. People have been searching for thousands of years for something that is a “store of value”. As Richard Wolff has said, many people have theories of value including Karl Marx, but nobody can connect a theory of value with a theory of prices.

This is not to say that some of the things that Max Keiser is predicting won’t actually happen. Where I think he is wrong is in thinking that Bitcoin isn’t subject to all the same problems. Bitcoin is only a store of value as long as enough people think it is a store of value. I have no way of knowing how long that will be, and neither does Max Keiser.

I wonder if people like Max Keiser are thinking that bitcoin is different because there is a theoretical limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be found. When the idea of fractional reserve banking meets bitcoin and the world of financial derivatives meets the world of bitcoin, the idea that bitcoin is a stable store of value will go up in smoke with all the other things that were thought to be stable stores of value.

Labor Theory of Value — Richard Wolff.

The Conversation has the article Neoliberalism has tricked us into believing a fairytale about where money comes from.

There is nothing natural about money. There is no link to some scarce essential form of money that sets a limit to its creation. It can be composed of base metal, paper or electronic data – none of which is in short supply. Similarly – despite what you may have heard about the need for austerity and a lack of certain cash-generating trees – there is no “natural” level of public expenditure. The size and reach of the public sector is a matter of political choice.
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The question then becomes: if the state as represented by the central bank can create money out of thin air to save the banks – why can’t it create money to save the people?

For people who misunderstand money, or think they don’t understand money, here it is in a relatively short form. If you don’t know if you misunderstand money, read this, and compare it to what you think.

Market Watch has the article The eviction crisis is starting to look a lot like the subprime mortgage crisis.

“Now, a new study shows that not all evictions are created equal. Scholars at Georgia State University, in conjunction with a ProPublica journalist, examined “serial” eviction filings, or those done repeatedly by a landlord against a tenant. By comparing serial evictions to ordinary ones, the researchers found patterns of landlord behavior and intentions, some of which are reminiscent of the worst of the housing crisis a decade ago.

This might be a warning about the source of the next crash. The housing shortage is pushing up rents and prices, but doesn’t seem to be spurring increased construction. What are the chances that real estate will be the cause of two crashes in a row? If we didn’t fix the problem that caused the last crisis, there is no reason why we shouldn’t expect a rerun.

Compare this to what happened in the 1930s. There were many laws and changes in regulations that were meant to prevent a repeat. Those changes were successful until they atarted being repealed in the 1980s.

The Real News Network has the interview Jewish Activists of ‘Never Again’ Action Oppose Immigrant Detention Centers.

Molly Amster of Jews United for Justice explains why the concentration camp analogy is more than just rhetoric when it comes to Trump’s detention camps and policies.

This is a real eye opener. I went through some of the educational experiences that Molly Amster describes. I took the same lessons from those experiences. Of my four grandparents, only one, George Greenberg, was actually born in the USA. The other three were immigrants. Ida (Baker) Greenberg came here as a baby. My other two grandparents, Louis Kaplan and Pauline (Sokolov) Kaplan came as teenagers.

As I have been thinking of this immigration situation unfolding, an image came to mind. This was an image of a sinking ship, maybe the Titanic. There were all these people desperately trying to flee that sinking ship. Imagine if they had been confronted by people who wanted to see their papers before they could get on rescue boats. If they didn’t have the papers, imagine the “rescuers” telling them they had to go back to where they came from, the sinking ship.

Now think of the humane reaction to this sinking ship scenario. You strain to save everyone you can. You stretch your resources as far as they will go, and then stretch them some more. You don’t say, “Well I didn’t run their ship into an iceberg, why I should I be made to pay for their folly?”

This is a test for our country and how we react. We are not looking very good. That’s not taking into account that our country did really run their ship into an iceberg, so to speak.

Politifact has the article Donald Trump twists Ilhan Omar’s comments about al-Qaida.

Omar criticized Al-Shabab for terrorizing communities, but she questioned why Somalis are expected to condemn an attack that they were not a part of.

Further on in the article was this item.

At one point in her remarks, Omar said that “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” according to the YouTube video of the event.

I do remember that whenever these remarks by Ilhan Omar are discussed, that they are being totally misunderstood. I have a harder time remembering exactly what she said, and how twisted are the interpretations. For that reason I am posting this on my blog so that I can easily look it up.

One of the main reasons why I write this blog is so that I will have reference material with which to rebut the comments that I know are going to arise over and over again in the future.

I just noticed on Facebook that in October 2018 someone had sent me a link to the article How The Bush Family Made Its Fortune From The Nazis by John Loftus.

John Loftus, is a former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection.

For the Bush family, it is a lingering nightmare. For their Nazi clients, the Dutch connection was the mother of all money laundering schemes. From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine-talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team.

Here is another excerpt naming another famous name.

If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank’s lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles’ client as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles’s other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles’ cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously.

It is a pretty disgusting story, if true. At first, I wasn’t sure if I should believe this or post it on my blog. I did a little google searching on “Bush and Fritz Thyssen” to see if there was any corroboration. Among other links, I found a Global Research article from March 2016 Bush Family Links to Nazi Germany: “A Famous American Family” Made its Fortune from the Nazis. I also found The Guardian article from 2004 How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power