Left Voice has the article Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Legitimize Regime Change in Venezuela.

While both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders would likely oppose a crude military invasion of Venezuela, each in their own way are legitimizing the opposition and remaining deadly silent on the threat of a coup. Neither are willing to truly examine the role of U.S. imperialism or envision a socialist Venezuela. The U.S. left must do better than that.

Hands off Venezuela!

While I can completly endorse this position, I have a few quibles with some of the following.

The second basic position of socialists in relating to the Venezuelan crisis must be a revolutionary, anti-capitalist perspective for resolving the crisis. This includes drawing a clear delimitation from Maduro’s government, which has become increasingly repressive. Against the idea that Venezuela’s failure is a sign of the failure of socialism, we assert quite the contrary. The reason of Venezuela’s crisis today is that Chávez’s regime did not really break with national or foreign capitalists, and did not end the dependent character of the country’s economy. Whatever gains were made by the Venezuelan masses under Hugo Chávez should be defended, and the working class must fight for real socialism and a workers government.

As I read Marxist economist Michael Hudson, I get the impression that he thinks that a mixed socialist/capitalist system is the most realistic. I tend to agree with all the reasons he explains why this is so. You don’t have to be anti-capitalist if you believe that Socialism has a rightful place in the USA. Each system has a rightful place, if we can figure out what the rightful place is for each of them. One way to think of it is that government should be the guarantor of life’s basic necessities. Private capitalism does not do a good job of guaranteeing those necessities.

I have no problem with workers trying experiments with socialism in the work place. In some situations it might work, and in others it might not. We won’t be able to tell unless we can try things out. We need to admit that the right mix may change with circumstances. Whatever mix we decide on, it should be continuously adjustable. When we get to the age where robots and automation can produce all the necessities of life without much human intervention, that will be a big change. We should at least start to think about what adaptations this will require so that we don’t have to make a huge adjustment suddenly.

All the rage of the oligarchs’ news media seems to be “How do we pay for the green new deal?” I have imagined the following conversation between a skeptic of the Green New Deal and a proponent of the Green New Deal.

Skeptic: How do we pay for the green new deal?
Proponent: How did we pay for World War II?

S: We sold war bonds to pay for WW II.
P: If you think that is how we financed the war, then where did people get the money to buy the war bonds?

S: A lot of the people worked in the defense industry and were paid good wages.
P: Where did the defense industry get the money to pay these good wages?

S: The defense industry had government contracts to build, planes, ships and other necessities of war.
P: Where did the government get the money to pay for these contracts?

S: The government sold war bonds to get the money to pay the contracts, so employers could pay salaries to workers, so workers would have the money to buy war bonds.

If this circular argument does not make sense to you, have you ever considered that the government created the money that started this process rolling? The circular process was created so that the government wouldn’t have to create even more money than they were already creating. Too much money for workers to use to buy consumer goods that we could not produce because we were fighting a war would have produced inflation. If we would have had inflation, no more consumer goods could have been produced. All the real resources were in use already for the war effort.

After the war was over, we needed to have money in the pockets of civilians so that they could buy consumer goods that could be manufactured by returning veterans who needed jobs. People redeemed their war bonds, and kept the economy rolling. How come USA politicians were so smart in and after the war, but they lost all their smarts since then?

Unlike World War II, with the Green New Deal we won’t be blowing up what we just built with great expense of personal energy, natural resources, and capital resources. The Green New Deal stuff we build will produce economic benefits for society, and we can use more money to build more stuff that produce economic benefits rather than replacing what we blew up. The economic benefits will include the ability to make more consumer goods to satisfy the demands of the people who now have more money that the government created to pay for the Green New Deal. That’s supply side economics to prevent inflation.

YouTube has the video Middle Class Loses, Plutocrats Win With Trump’s Tax Cuts.

I am used to hearing comedians like Jimmy Dore and Lee Camp talk about economics. Here we have an economist, William K. Black essentially doing a comedy routine.

The article they discuss in the video is Why Did Trump Choose to be Such an Unpopular President?

YouTube has the Jimmy Dore video Bernie Repeats CIA Talking Points On Venezuela.

Jimmy Dore is shouting at the top of his lungs trying to get people to understand. I take it as my mission to get the word out on this. The future of the wrold may depend on our ability to put a halt on USA imperialism and our methods of laying siege to anybody who doesn’t do things the way we want. Oil and Socialism seem to be the hot buttons for the USA. Having a certain amount of socialism in a mixed economy is necessary to keep the oligarchs from having total control. If we let the USA oligarchs, and oligarchs around the world, wipe out even the possibility of some socialism, we will return our civilization back to the days of feudal lords.

YouTube has the David Harvey video Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Does Socialism Affect Freedom?.

This is not an exact quote, but it is how I remember his point – Socialism is the idea of providing basic necessities through the public domain. This fits in quite nicely with my previous post – The Roles of Capitalism and Socialism in a Mixed Economy. In fact, you might learn more by looking at both posts. This one may explain some things in the other post, and the other post may explain some things in this post. It’s not a matter of which one you see first.

I have been saying that Bernie Sanders needs to look at what is going on in Venezuela as an object lesson in what the oligarchs in the USA will try to do to him when he becomes President. In Venezuela, the people against Maduro are the oligarchs of Venezuela. They are manufacturing undemocratic opposition to Maduro because their democratic opposition failed to unseat Maduro.

The USA has been fighting Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela for 20 years for two reasons. First and foremost our oil oligarchs want to take back control of Venezuela’s oil. Second, the USA has to prove that socialism is a failure as an economic system. The USA has done this in Cuba and Nicaragua, and now they are doing this in Venezuela.

As Bernie Sanders proudly declares that he is a Democratic Socialist, the USA oligarchs see Venezuela as the perfect political tool to prove that Socialism does not work. If they have to lay siege to Venezuela to make that point, they have no hesitation.

As I have been saying for quite a while, a true political leader changes what is politically possible. Bernie Sanders did a wonderful job of that with his 2016 campaign and subsequent initiatives. Venezuela is how the oligarchs fight back to close off the possibilities that Sanders has been working so hard to open up.

My previous post The Roles of Capitalism and Socialism in a Mixed Economy is all about how the oligarchs have been twisting economic theory for over 50 years to hide the fact that capitalism without socialism is how the oligarchs take control of all wealth and income.

How can Bernie Sanders not see any of this? Why would he ignore the chance to make an issue of what we have been doing to Venezuela for 20 years? When he talks about Venezuela, he never mentions what the USA has been doing to sink their experiment with Socialism. He wants to offer humanitarian aid to Venezuela without saying that lifting our siege on that country would be the greatest humanitarian aid we could possibly give. As with any ism like capitalism or socialism, you can do it right, or you can do it wrong. Bernie does not have to defend the way that Chavez and Maduro have done the job. All he has to do is defend their right to find out how to make socialism work in their country. Whether they succeed or fail in a fair test of their ideas, we can learn something. If their experiment is sabotaged by the USA, we will learn nothing except how to sabotage another country’s efforts to govern themselves. The USA has had plenty of practice doing that.

Here is the very disappointing response that I received.

YouTube has the video FBI’s McCabe Accidentally Tells Truth About Venezuela.

Pay attention to the brief part where Jimmy Dore explains why I think Bernie Sanders’ repeating lies about Venezuela is so dangerous.

The Environmental Law Institute has the article The Ecological Impacts of a Border Wall.

Often lost in discussions of efficacy and payment relating to the proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall is what would happen to the environment if a concrete divider were placed across a nearly-2,000 mile swath of habitat. While wall-like barriers already stand on hundreds of miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, expanding to a full-border wall would constitute a massive transformation of the rest of the United States’ southern borderlands, posing substantial threats to the wildlife that roam the area.

In the book J is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception by Michael Hudson, there is a section that has a relatively simple explanation of the value of having a mixed economy that includes socialism and capitalism. (I have taken the liberty to change the punctuation of lists to match the style I find most readable. I have also fixed a minor typographical error. I hope I haven’t introduced any errors of my own.)

How many participants in today’s economy understand this way the economy ought to work to be “efficient”? How many people really understand what “free” means in the term “free market”?

Intrinsic cost-value vs. value-free rentier price theory

Factories and farms that produce commodities are different from rent-extractors who set up monopolies as legal tollbooths to charge for access to land, water, and other natural resources, or for credit, roads, and other infrastructure, or drug company patents and information technology. The costs of tangible capital investment in industry and agriculture ultimately can be resolved into the expense of labor to make products, the machinery that produces them, and the raw materials, or other inputs needed for their production. But land rent, natural resource rent, monopoly rent, interest, and financial fees have no intrinsic cost, except that of paying lawyers and lobbying politicians for favors and privileges. The resulting technologically unnecessary charges add to the prices without reflecting real value based on cost of producing the “service” being provided.

That is why socialist economies can adopt technology and operate with lower costs of living and doing business, They are free from having to bear a rentier overhead. This is the kind of free market that classical economists wanted. It is industrial capitalism at its most efficient. It can only exist in a mixed economy,which is now vilified as socialist – which was not a bad word in the 19^th century. The question was, into what kind of socialism was capitalism evolving? Into a mixed economy of state socialism, Christian socialism, a utopian plan such as the Fourier communities, or labor socialism?

Whatever the answer, certain common denominators spanned the reform spectrum on classical moral philosophy that viewed economic rent as socially coercive and unfair as well as unnecessary for applying the new industrial technologies.

Landlords, monopolists, and other vested interests defended their privilege to charge what “the market” will bear by denying that there is any such thing as unearned income. High prices that included heavy economic rents were viewed as reflecting consumer “utility” – otherwise, users of monopolies and renters simply would not pay the prices being charged (assuming that they have a “choice” not to eat or live in a dwelling).

The proverbial “idle rich” and other recipients of economic rent applaud economists who depict them as productive and even necessary for society to function. Rentier income and wealth is supposed to “reward” its beneficiaries in proportion to what they are assumed to contribute to the economy’s output. This is the economic theory of John Bates Clark and his followers. It assumes that everyone earns whatever income and wealth they manage to obtain, regardless of how they do this.

The resulting orthodoxy depicts finance, insurance, and real estate as part of the GDP, not as a subtrahend or transfer payment from the economy to rent takers. This practice rejects any distinction between intrinsic value and market price, or between productive labor and credit compared to “zero-sum transactions.”

To cap matters, any transaction is said to be a voluntary exercise in choice by definition – even borrowing to avoid starvation, or sleeping under a bridge. Accepting at face value whatever “the market” obliges consumers and investors to pay for a house, education, or food in a famine sidesteps the classical focus on the extent to which an economy can minimize prices for its services, housing, and other goods or assets. The key for classical economists was to change the tax laws and regulate monopoly prices to bring them into line with “real” costs of production, and indeed to provide goods and services at public subsidy. Today’s economic mainstream has rejected the analytic framework and even the ideology necessary to do this. “Value-free” theory lacks any criterion for regulation. For deregulators, that is its political virtue.