Counter Punch has the story Scrutiny into Biden’s Record Should Include Obama Era Foreign Policies.

Greater scrutiny, however, should be placed on Biden’s role in supporting dubious foreign policies during his tenure as Vice-President under Barack Obama.

In Iraq, for example, where he took the lead on foreign policy initiatives, Biden curried favor with the corrupt Nouri al-Maliki whom locals considered to be a “Shia Saddam.” After Arab-Spring style protests erupted, Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry quietly worked to help install Haidar al-Abadi who was committed to privatizing Iraq’s economy in line with the original goals of the 2003 U.S. military invasion.

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Biden’s foreign policy roll during the Obama administration. It is good to have a reminder of yet another reason why I would never vote for Joe Biden.

Pitchfork Economics has a podcast What is Modern Monetary Theory? (with Stephanie Kelton),

Nick Hanauer struggles to figure out what Prof. Kelton is explaining, but he has built-in resistance to her ideas that hinders him. He comes close to getting it. He just needs to keep thinking about it. When he has a doubt about what MMT means, he needs to talk about his doubts with an expert. Frequently, when newcomers, like I once was, have doubts, the old ideas are sneaking back in. Since I have learned about and believed Keynesian economics since the early 1960’s, I have had less trouble than some people in accepting MMT.

Even some professional economists who had taught about Keynesian economics started suffering from brain rot introduced by Milton Friedman in the 1970s. I was too busy working, and disliked Friedman’s ideas, I guess I was immune to the brain rot.

CNBC has the video Bernie Sanders’ 2016 economic advisor Stephanie Kelton on Modern Monetary Theory and the 2020 race. This is even a better explanation of Modern Money Theory (MMT) than what Pitchfork Economics gleans in their podcast.

In the discussion of cost-push inflation at the end of this, even I learned a nuance that I hadn’t quite understood.

The Real News Network has a two part interview What Can Warren Change?.

The first part is Sen. Warren Wants to Jail Those Who Caused 2008’s Meltdown.

BIll Black examines the historical context of Warren’s bills for easier prosecution of banks and corporate leaders

The second part is If Current Laws Prosecuting Bankers Aren’t Used, What Can Warren Change?.

Bill Black demolishes the notion that we can’t prosecute banksters with the laws we now have in place

All of this is so simple as Bill Black explains, you have to question why even Elizabeth Warren makes it look so difficult.

Politico has this great article Inside Biden and Warren’s Yearslong Feud.

“For a decade, Orrin Hatch, Joe Biden, Jim Sensenbrenner, and dozens of others in Congress decried the state of bankruptcy laws that permitted people to take advantage of financial institutions,” Warren wrote in a 2008 post on Credit Slips, a bankruptcy law blog, after Tim Russert asked Clinton and Edwards about their votes for the bill during a Democratic presidential debate. “With a recession bearing down, the language of bankruptcy has shifted from ‘abusers’ who ‘take advantage of lenders’ to language of concern over the growing stress on hard-working families.” While voting for the bill had won senators the gratitude of lobbyists who write campaign checks, “that door swings both ways,” Warren went on. “Those who wanted to snuzzle with the lobbyists leave themselves vulnerable to counterattacks.”

Funny Elizabeth Warren didn’t mention this in 2016 when she tried to sell us on what a great President that Hillary Clinton would make. Maybe she had forgotten what she had written 8 years earlier, but I still remembered it.

Every time this Politico article seems to be softening the case against Biden, it comes back with a rebuttal that makes Biden look worse.

Salon has the article Reporter Sharmine Narwani on the secret history of America’s defeat in Syria.

I want to have a record of this article on my blog for use when I run into believers in the USA propaganda about Bashir Al Assad and Syria. Even Tulsi Gabbard shows no signs of understanding this.

As I hinted a moment ago, your reporting is very distinctive for its granular detail. In Syria you’re more or less in a class by yourself in this respect. One of your sources especially intrigued me, Father Frans van der Lugt, the Dutch priest who lived many years in Homs. Tell us about him. I should mention for readers’ sake, he was killed in Homs in the spring of 2014.

I never interviewed Father Frans, though I did go to his church gravesite during a visit to Homs shortly after he was killed. Through his writings, this Dutch priest gave us some rare, objective insights into what took place in the early days of the crisis — events he witnessed first-hand.

In September 2011 he wrote: “From the start there has been the problem of the armed groups, which are also part of the opposition… The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order then to blame the government.”

And then in January 2012 he expanded: “From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”

The 75-year-old Father Frans was shot at point-blank range by a gunman while sitting in a church garden in the rebel-occupied part of Homs….

How do I know that I don’t have a confirmation bias in sharing this story? I don’t know. However, since you get so much of the same crap from our oligarchs’ news media, I figure that knowing that there is another side to the story is a valuable service. I have to wonder how the USA public has the hubris to support going into somebody else’s country without being able to know who is telling the truth. What amazes me is our need to do something, anything, without caring if it is the right thing or the wrong thing just as long as it is something.

April 25, 2019

When I mentioned the item about term limits to a few friends at lunch, they asked why Bahar al-Assad was still in office. So I looked it up.

First is the Wikipedia article President of Syria

According to article 88 of the Syrian constitution, the president runs for a 7-year term after he is elected, and can only be reelected for one more term.

Next is the Wikipedia article Bashar al-Assad

On 10 July 2000, Assad was elected as President, succeeding his father, who died in office a month prior. In the 2000 and subsequent 2007 election, he received 99.7% and 97.6% support, respectively, in uncontested referendums on his leadership.

On 16 July 2014, Assad was sworn in for another seven-year term after receiving 88.7% of votes in the first contested presidential election in Ba’athist Syria’s history.

There seems to be a slight oopsie in here. Bashar al-Assad was first elected in 2000. He can only hold office for a maximum of 14 years. It is 2019, and he is still in office. Could someone explain?

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.