Harpers has the important and fascinating article How the Anti-Populists Stopped Bernie Sanders.

And so we come to understand the real task before us today: to rescue from the enormous condescension of the comfortable the one political tradition that has a chance of reversing our decades-long turn to the right.

This article is far deeper and broader than I imagined it woulld be judging from its title. I had no idea I had fallen so deeply under the influence of the propaganda against William Jennings Bryant that I have heard, read, and seen in movies over my entire lifetime.

Here is an excerpt that happens to touch on the long history of The Dreaded New York Times being dreaded.

In September of that year, as the contentious presidential campaign unfolded, the New York Times announced the alarming discovery: William Jennings Bryan appeared to be clinically insane. It began with a letter to the paper from an anonymous “alienist,” or psychologist, who examined Bryan’s heredity, his heretofore mediocre career, and his behavior on the campaign trail, and concluded “without any bias” that “Mr. Bryan presents in his speech and action striking and alarming evidence of a mind not entirely sound.” Proof: the candidate was “an apostle of an economic theory without ever having a training in economics.”

New Economic Perspectives has the post Standard Money Theory and the Coronavirus.

It might seem, as we observe the U.S. government “instantly” generating $2 trillion new dollars for direct payments and grants to people and businesses, that the coronavirus pandemic has shed a new light on the authenticity (and necessity) of modern money theory (MMT)

Maybe this explanation will hit home for those who have had trouble accepting the reality that Modern Money Theory describes.

As a multi-degree holding electrical engineer, I have learned quite a bit of physics that my non-science friends and relatives just cannot mentally accept. So I am used to people not being able to accept what is physically true. No matter how obvious the concept seems to me to be, it is so frustrating that people I know are just unable to accept some ideas that are so simple to describe. That inability to comprehend is one of the facts I have learned to accept no matter how hard it is for me to accept. So I get it when the shoe is on my foot.

Here are two examples.

I once tried to explain some of Newton’s laws of motion to my sister.

An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

In her experience everything stopped eventually because of friction. I said, imagine a situation where there was no friction. She could not imagine it.

I once tried to explain to my father how the sound of the crack of a whip was produced.

The crack a whip makes is produced when a section of the whip moves faster than the speed of sound creating a small sonic boom.

My father could not conceive of breaking the sound barrier unless you were flying. I pointed out that the speed of sound in air was about 767 miles per hour. Rocket sleds on rails were capable of moving faster than that. To my father, that made no difference. You could not break the sound barrier while still connected to the earth.

N ick Hannauer and David Goldstein have an interesting eoisone of Pitchfork Economics with the innocuous title AMA: COVID-19 and the Economy.

They have quite a discussion on stock buybacks as opposed to why companies don’t use their profits to set up a rainy day fund.

The pitchfork economists left out one very important factor in the discussion. If a company were to save for a rainy day, a corporate raider like Mitt Romney would take over the company and pocket the rainy day fund. That is exactly how Romney got rich. If we don’t change the rules to protect companies who want to do the right thing, then we will have our current situation. There are no companies left who are able to do the right thing and avoid getting raided.

Is anybody asking why it is that a government would create the laws for corporations to form? The laws protect the founders of the corporation (and the shareholders) from many legal liabilities. In exchange, you would think there must be something for the country to gain by protecting corporations. What should a country get for its efforts to give special shielding to corporations? We ought to ponder that question, and put these expectations into the laws that set the rules for people forming corporations. That way, the courts are not free to come up with their own justifications for corporations. Corporations are not people who have the special privilege of using their money to bribe the government.

Business Innsider has the article Bernie Sanders aims ‘to prevent the collapse of the economy’ with new coronavirus spending priorities.

“So to prevent the collapse of the economy is far more humane and cost effective than rebuilding the economy after it collapses,” Sanders said on MSNBC Friday afternoon.

Bernie was right about a lot of things before the pandemic. Ironically, some of his ideas that were good before the pandemic might have problems during the pandemic. What he seems to be failing to take into account is that the capacity of the economy to produce goods and services is severely limited when so many people are not allowed to go to work. Bernie is planning to give people enough money to spend like they used to, but the economy is not able to produce like it used to. He has to recognize and address this obvious problem.

Maybe he and his experts can come up with something better, but the only things I have come up with so far is rationing, price controls, and a steep profiteering tax. These ideas are going to be very hard to sell to the public, but somebody has to start getting people to face reality.

Naked Capitalism has the article The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Opened the Curtains on the World’s Next Economic Model.

This pandemic continues to unfold, but it will serve as the D-Day equivalent of a new predominating economic model for the world, and which in many ways was beginning to take shape before COVID-19. At its core, developed and mixed market economies will factor in the health risk and growing military cost of sustaining international supply chains against investing in high-tech production closer to their markets, and increasingly export their goods to the rest of the world.

The pandemic is the black swan event that shows us the flaw in the current implementation of globalization.

YouTube has the video You Need To Listen To This Leading COVID-19 Expert From South Korea | ASIAN BOSS.

We want to thank Professor Kim Woo-joo from Korea University Guro Hospital for taking his valuable time to inform our subscribers.

It took me a while to figure out how to turn off YouTube’s closed captioning that obscured the open captioning that was embedded in the video. Look for the “CC” under the video.

YouTube has the video Debt And Power – With Michael Hudson.

In this post we discuss debt in the current context, and consider where the very high levels of debt will take us. And as importantly, who wins and who loses.

If you really wanted to know what the 2020 Presidential contest is all about and the stakes involved, you would watch this interview. The trouble is that most people think interviews like this are too tough sledding to make it through. I started listening to talks like this over 5 years ago, and I am still learning. I am a slow learner, but given the opportunity, I persist.

We’ll probably have to have our 30% unemployment before people have enough spare time to learn enough about this stuff. I am trying to do my best. Any suggestions for doing better would be much appreciated.

I am trying to track down the source of an audio on advice for protecting yourself from the worst effects of COVID-19. I posted the first article on Facebook, but Facebook would’t let me post the link to the second article.

Here I am going to post all I can find.

From news.com.au comes the March 5 article Chinese doctors say coronavirus ‘like a combination of SARS and AIDS’, can cause irreversible lung damage.

Veterans Today has an article Facebook would not let me share China publishes coronavirus patients autopsy results, infection sources determined from March 7.

Here is the audio/video that started me on this search. Its source was obscure when I first received it in a Facebook message.

YouTube has How to kill / prevent corona virus ( from new Chinese autopsies ). I don’t know the traceable source of all this.

This is the new information found from autopsies done in china, you must listen please.

Here is all that the USA Centers for Disease Control and Protection will tell you How to Protect Yourself

Thanks to Mary Depew, here is a BBC article to debunk part of what was in the video, No, drinking water doesn’t kill coronavirus

Here is an article Micosoft News published from the South China Morning News First coronavirus autopsy highlights how illness targets lungs published February 28.

Here is an article that will be published tomorrow Sunday, March 22, 2020 in the Telangana Today newspaper, How coronavirus affects lungs of infected patients decoded.

Patients’ lungs exhibited edema, liquid proteinaceous secretions, fibrous connective tissue lesions with patchy inflammation, and multinucleated giant cells
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Despite comprehensive treatment, assisted oxygenation, and other supportive care, the researchers said her condition deteriorated, and she died. Subsequent clinical information confirmed that she was exposed to another patient in the same room who was found to be infected with COVID-19.

YouTube has the video An Economic Hit Man Confesses and Calls to Action | John Perkins | TEDxTraverseCity.

John Perkins describes the methods he used to bribe and threaten the heads of state of countries on four continents in order to create a global empire and he reveals how the leaders who did not “play the game” were assassinated or overthrown. He brings us up to date about the way the economic hit man system has spread from developing countries to the US, Europe, and the rest of the world and offers a strategy for turning this around. “Each of us,” he says, “can participate in this exciting revolution. We can transform a system that is consuming itself into extinction into one that is sustainable and regenerative.”

You have to understand this topic if you want to understand how we have to reform our country and our corporations.

YouTube also has a shortened, animated version John Perkins – Economic Hitman.

YouTube has the video from 2016 Loans Create Deposits: Inside vs Outside Money.

Warren Mosler talking about the difference between bank-created money and government created money.

In our floating exchange rate system, the textbook explanation of the money multiplier does not apply. Instead, loans create deposits, and the Central Bank must supply any necessary reserves after the fact in order to be able to hit their interest rate target.

Warren Mosler’s explanation would be much more intuitive if he said that the bank creates a promise to give you high powered money when it makes you a loan. In exchange, you promise to pay it back. So far, no high powered money is involved. If the seller of the house uses the same bank where you got the loan, the bank just moves its promise of high powered money to the account of the seller when you pay for the house. No high powered money is involved., just the promise of that money is involved. If the seller of the house decides to take some of the money out of that bank, then, and only then does the bank have to fulfill its promise of high powered money. As long as the flows of high powered money into the bank and out of the bank are balanced, there is no need for the bank to get some high powered money to fulfill its promises. If there is an imbalance in those flows, and there are no real reserves at the bank because it already has an overdraft at the Fed, then it needs to get some high powered money from somewhere. Isn’t that part of what the repo market is all about. The Federal Reserve Bank also lends money to banks at very low interest rates, zero at the moment.

I have been told that MMT people don’t like the idea of promises of money. I have yet to hear an MMT authority address this terminology. Can someone point to an article or video where an MMT authority disparages the description of “promises of money”? It seems to me that when the financial system freezes up, it is often because the banks don’t trust each other over their promises of money.

March 29, 2020

I have corresponded with Warren Mosler. He is not too thrilled with my explanation to say the least. He has told me that my explanation is inaccurate, but I have not pressed him to tell me what is inaccurate about it. I can believe that my presentation could stand a lot of polish, but I don’t think corresponding with Warren Mosler will get me anywhere closer to a polished presentation.

Warren thinks his presentation is simpler than mine. Since he has owned a bank, I am sure his explanation is simpler for him. I don’t think he understands the minds of people who have not owned a bank. When he uses certain words, he has a deep understanding of what those words mean to him. Not everyone is privy to his deep thoughts.

As I wrote this comment on the video, I noticed a three year old comment from The Deficit Owls in response to another question.

Correct. Bank money is an asset of the holder (you) and a liability of the bank. You’re not actually using government money, you’re using the bank’s IOU for government money.

Many of the people responsible for The Deficit Owls web page and Facebook page are colleagues of Warren Mosler. The seem to be saying the same thing I am.