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.

Jacobin Magazine has the article We Can Do Way Better Than These Guys.

Here is another great article that will change no minds. I’ll pick out a zinger for each target.

First Beto O’Rourke

Drawing on a familiar arsenal of political clichés and performing a painfully contrived rendering of what professional-class Gen-Xers think young people find cool, O’Rourke’s campaign thus far has been like an extended meditation on the true meaning of emptiness — with few policy positions to speak of and little of substance to say about what its leading man actually believes or where he intends to take the country.

Next the article tackles Pete Buttigieg.

Boasting an impeccable resume, boyishly unctuous grin, and no discernible agenda or program to speak of, the mayor of South Bend Indiana was suddenly everywhere.

And lastly, Joe Biden.

His Washington is one of elite camaraderie and locker room fraternity far exceeding anything ever dreamt up by Aaron Sorkin: an ancien régime to be nurtured and preserved by way of endless handshakes and magnanimous compromises between fundamentally decent people, be they milquetoast liberals, militant conservatives, or literal former segregationists. As far as the official narrative is concerned, Biden boasts strong appeal with the real America of hard-working, blue-collar Joes — the sort who toil in the mines and factories by day and toast bipartisanship with Comcast executives at gold-plated fundraisers by night.

Bloomberg has the article How Much Money Do You Need to Be Wealthy in America?.

The exact amount can depend on how old you are.

Rich is relative.

You might be amused by comparing your own situation with these numbers.

I found this self-contradictory statement particularly amusing and typical of the oligarch’s’ news media such as Bloomberg.

While a strong economy and low unemployment are helping consumers stay current on their debt payments, the largest U.S. banks are seeing losses on credit cards outpace those of auto and home loans at a rate not seen in at least 10 years.

Consumers are staying current with their debt, except for credit cards? So what could possibly go wrong with people falling behind in their debts that are charging 20% to 25% or more in interest, and that’s before we even get into the late payment penalty fees?

The Real News Network has the interview Can Biden ‘Make America Moral Again?’.

Biden is countering Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan with “Make America Moral Again.” But bipartisan deals with Strom Thurmond, the crime bill, Anita Hill, and more, shows he lacks the moral high ground. Jacqueline Luqman and Adolph Reed discuss Biden’s record.

Sad to say, these facts probably do not matter to people whose minds have been made up. How do we communicate our own experiences and motivations about this subject without resorting to trying to convince people with facts?

I say this with reference to one of the Sanders campaign volunteer principles.

We don’t argue or debate.

Research has shown that when two people enter an argument or debate, both parties usually come out more committed to their prior beliefs than before. In other words, rational debate is not an effective tool for persuasion. That’s why instead of arguing, we always come back to sharing our own stories and motivations.

We connect by sharing our stories.

We share what motivates us as individuals to vote and volunteer for Bernie Sanders’ campaign. This opens the door for others to resonate with our motivations. Sharing familiar and relatable parts of your own story is key. Talking about your own struggle with student debt or with the healthcare system is much more powerful than an abstract policy argument.

Elephant Journal has the article Gaslighting: The Mind Game Everyone should Know About.

Overall, the main reason for gaslighting is to create a dynamic where the abuser has complete control over their victim so that they are so weak that they are very easy to manipulate.

I took a quick survey around my home office. I found that half of us did not know what gaslighting was.

For those who have not seen the 1944 movie Gaslight, here is a synopsis from Google.

After the death of her famous opera-singing aunt, Paula (Ingrid Bergman) is sent to study in Italy to become a great opera singer as well. While there, she falls in love with the charming Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer). The two return to London, and Paula begins to notice strange goings-on: missing pictures, strange footsteps in the night and gaslights that dim without being touched. As she fights to retain her sanity, her new husband’s intentions come into question.