The Federal Reserve Bank has posted an article Central Bank Digital Currency: A Literature Review.

Technological advances in recent years have led to a growing number of fast, electronic means of payment available to consumers for everyday transactions, raising questions for policymakers about the role of the public sector in providing a digital payment instrument for the modern economy.

I used to think about this more simply as the Federal Reserve providing accounts directly to consumers instead of through private banks. I thought of the Federal Reserve Bank a the wholesaler, and the private banks as the retailer. I think this article more or less confirms my view of it. I don’t think of central bank digital currency as inventing some kind of new currency. I think of it as just a change in the central bank’s business model.

YouTube has the video Killing Gaza: Documentary by Dan Cohen & Max Blumenthal shows life under Israel’s bombs and siege.

(To see the translations of the Arabic-language interviews, turn on the CC captions.) In the feature-length documentary film “Killing Gaza,” journalists Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal documented Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza.

YouTube may limit the viewing of this video to being on the YouTube page itself.

Notice Age-restricted video (based on Community Guidelines)

This movie is just too powerful to let people see this freely. It is going to be hard to face an Israeli Jew that supports this kind of behavior. I am glad that people I know who come closest to this description have already unfriended me.

The Grayzone web site has this under the headline Killing Gaza: Dan Cohen & Max Blumenthal’s documentary shows life under Israel’s bombs and siege. Even here they don’t provide a means of escaping YouTube’s restrictions.

Posted on YouTube is the recording of the a webinar Labor and the Jobs Guarantee Webinar 4/1

April 1, 2021 the first session of our Labor and Jobs Guarantee Webinar series with Fadhel Kaboub, Sandy Darity, Sydney Ghazarian, and Kari Thompson.

Since this video does not give you full access to the Zoom meeting with it’s chat room and Q & A, I am going to post a few items here that were mentioned in the video.

The Job Guarantee Resolution

The Living New Deal

There were just s few minutes near the beginning that I had trouble listening to. Since you have control of the video, you can skip the parts you don’t find interesting. Except for the few minutes around the beginning, I found the rest of the presentation very enjoyable.

There is an article in the UE Newsletter about the webinar What Is a “Jobs Guarantee,” and Why Should Labor Fight for It?

Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity – GISP on Twitter.

Labor and the Jobs Guarantee Session Two – 8 April 2021.

Images from the webinars on Google.

Labor Jobs Guarantee Session 3 Report Backs and Conclusion

YouTube has this segment from the show Rising, Author: How Financial Interests Influence News Making Decisions. (Skip the ads if you can).

Author, Ashely Rindsberg, discusses his book “The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History.”

Long ago, I coined the phrase “The Dreaded New York Times“. Perhaps this is a vindication of what I finally figured out for myself.

The Grayzone has a video Economist Michael Hudson on new cold war, Super Imperialism, China & Russia, dedollarization.

Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton of Moderate Rebels discuss with world-renowned economist Michael Hudson his concept of US “Super Imperialism,” the new cold war on China and Russia, and the potential end to the dollar as the global reserve currency.

Naked Capitalism includes this in their post Michael Hudson on American as Absentee Landlord on The Greyzone[sic]: Biden Administration, New Cold War, Super Imperialism, Dollar Weaponization. They have a slight dissent before the link to the video.

I commented on Naked Capitalism:

Grayzone with an “a”.

Max Keiser is so insistent on selling bitcoin, that I finally could not stand it anymore. I seldom watch the Keiser Report unless someone brings a particular episode to my attention.

What the video talked about China’s methodology at the end is what I have labelled “What Worksism”. I call myself a “what worksist”. If there is a niche in our society where a particular ism would work to make life better, I am for it. Industrial Capitalism in its proper place, Government Socialism in its proper place, and whatever other ism can be thought up.

What the Grayzone does not understand about Modern Money Theory could fill an ocean. Michael Hudson didn’t spend a lot of time trying to straighten them out. Modern Money Theory does not limit itself to governments with sovereign currency. It does explain the additional economic options that come with having a Sovereign currency and debts denominated in that currency. It is worth listening to Fadhel Kaboub talk about the range of sovereignty a country can have.

On Facebook I commented:

Great discussion. At the end they talk about my favorite ism “what worksism”, but they don’t use that term. What the Gray Zone does not understand about Modern Money Theory could fill an ocean, but Michael Hudson doesn’t waste too much time trying to correct them. Michael Hudson’s discussion about Max Keiser was very enlightening even if it went way over the heads of Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal.

Democracy at Work has the podcast LEFT OUT: David Harvey on Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason.

In this episode, we speak with David Harvey about his latest book, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, as well as what the Left must focus on to effectively organize for a better economy and society.

This may be the beginning of the next major step in my education. David Harvey has been been a big part of what the Democracy at Work internet presence has provided. I just did not realize until now what a valuable part of that offering was that is embodied in David Harvey.

The Tribune has the interview with David Harvey Why Marx Still Matters. This is from March 05, 2020.

On the second centenary of Karl Marx’s birth, global capitalism is stumbling from crisis to crisis. In the wake of the financial crash, interest in Marx’s ideas has blossomed once again. This should come as no surprise: they remain vital to understanding not only the dynamics of capitalism itself but the manner in which it structures our modern world.

I was glad I read this article. It gives me a better understanding of what I should seek to learn.

Before I read the article, I had these thoughts about people commenting on it. These thoughts are still valid, but there was so much more in the article than I imagined.

The Communist Manifesto is not the great economic criticism that gets people to study what Karl Marx said. Read Das Kapital, and tell me what you think.

It is hard enough to identify and describe what is wrong with a system. It is much, much harder to figure out how to fix what is wrong. I have learned to forgive people who accomplish the first task, but fail at the second.

I admire people who concentrate on the successful part of someone’s work, and then try to do a better job on the part that was not successful.

I think I am a victim of what the interviewee had to say about Marx’s three volumes.

Dan Denvir: You differ with other Marx scholars in that you pay a lot of attention to volumes two and three, in addition to volume one. Why is that?

David Harvey: It’s clear that in Marx’s mind, he had an idea of the totality of the circulation of capital. His plan was to break it down into these three component parts in the three volumes. So I just follow what Marx says he’s doing. Now, the problem of course, is that volumes two and three were never completed, and they aren’t as satisfactory as volume one, which is a literary masterpiece. So I can understand why, if people want to read Marx with a certain sense of joy and fun, that they would stick with volume one. But I’m saying, ‘No, if you really want to understand what his conception of capital is, then you can’t understand it as just being about production. It’s about circulation. It’s about getting it to market and selling it, then it’s about distributing the profits.’

This is certainly something I didn’t know. My initial remarks to the comments on the post on Facebook about not having solutions might have been moderated a little.

YouTube has the video Common Good Economics – What Biden’s Big Spending Plan Means for the Economy

Economics Professor Fadhel Kaboub joins us to talk about what $6 TRILLION in federal spending would mean for the economy.

Fadhel never disappoints. I have been saying for years that the MMT proponents need to explain things the way Fadhel Kaboub does. It frustrates the heck out of me that other MMT folk just do not explain things as well as Fadhel does. For years I have been urging MMT people to talk about the inflation of the 1970s as Fadhel Kaboub does here. I have been so insistent about this one issue that I have been banned from a few MMT web sites and Facebook pages.

If you are a proponent of MMT, but you cannot explain the inflation of the 1970s, then you don’t understand MMT as well as you claim you do. Steve Grumbine attacked me personally on social media because I kept saying this. When I complain about this, I am not attacking the ideas of MMT. I am attacking the proponents of MMT who won’t explain what is so easy to explain in terms of MMT.

Some MMT proponents are their own worst enemies. Warren Mosler sticks to his way of not explaining even though he could explain in ways that more people would understand. It is not for lack of me understanding that I complain. I complain of the adamant refusal to reach more people with easy to understand simple explanations.

One thing I remember about the oil embargo by OPEC in the 1970s was that inflation was already happening. The OPEC countries were getting about $2.50 per barrel of oil. They came to realize that with inflation of the dollar running rampant, $2.50 was not near enough to pay for the valuable commodity they were selling. Sure, their conflict with Israel ws part of the issue, but there was a pure economic issue, too.

YouTube has the video American DEBUNKS All Major Western Propaganda on Uyghurs and Xinjiang!

We have done it… We have broken down each bit of major Western propaganda on the Uyghur and Xinjiang situation in order to debunk the lies and reveal the truth. For over an hour, Bay takes on a series of propaganda ranging from Adrian Zenz to inconsistent witness testimony to debunking sterilization claims and all major propaganda promoted surrounding this incredibly manufactured issue.

I was hoping for an independent analysis to back up what The Gray Zone has been reporting. Unfortunately for that purpose, this uses Gray Zone reporting for some of what he says. That does not make it any more or less true, but it isn’t the completely independent source that I thought this might be. As I got further into the video, it does seem to bring in many other sources. He makes a very convincing case for what he is saying, but that just raises my doubts. I know when I am getting the hard sell.

Of course each side is going to say that the other side’s witnesses are being coerced. I don’t know how viewers and readers of these reports can know which side, if any, is telling the truth. If I am forced to say that I no longer know what is true, then one side’s propaganda is working. In the high tech industry where I worked for 40 or so years, campaigns to disparage a competitor’s product would use fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) if our own product could not win on its own merits.

I tried to discourage the use of FUD behavior, but my influence was minimal in most cases. I did have a situation where our marketing people wanted to suppress a customer’s effort to build a product similar to what my team had built. I told them that the customer could get all the technical information he needed from the same university published work where I got my information. Our company’s failure was to not understand the market for the product, and I did not do enough inside the company to educate the marketeers. Another customer we tried to sell the product to, told us what other things we needed to do to get him to buy the product. When we failed to listen, he eventually joined a company that made the product the way he wanted. My company eventually bought his company.

May 3, 2021

Here is the list of sources that go with the video. There are over 71 items in the list.

The source that I first checked out was Demystifying Xinjiang and the Uighers with Carl Zha. This was number 2 in the list of sources.

Common Dreams has the article Dingell and Markey Introduce $10 Trillion THRIVE Act to Tackle ‘Our Biggest Emergencies’.

The bill aims to ensure “an intersectional response” to the climate crisis, coronavirus pandemic, economic inequity, and racial injustice “that is proportionate to the scope of the problems we face.”

If you want to read the 65 pages of the act, read this PDF file This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Transform, Heal, and 4Renew by Investing in a Vibrant Economy Act’’ or the ‘‘THRIVE Act’’

Now we have some people talking about a plan that is of a scope that matches the problems we face. Makes Biden’s plans look rather puny – too little, too late.