Democracy At Work has the episode Cities After… Post-Pandemic Urbanization: Spectacles, Speculation & Tourism – Pt 2.

In today’s podcast, Prof. Robles-Duran will continue to discuss Post-pandemic urbanization trends by taking a deep dive in the speculative global rent markets and their exacerbating social ills. For help with this, he is joined by Dr. Jaime Palomera from Barcelona’s radical research cooperative La Hidra who will help focus a conversation on a striking report that they published two months ago titled “The Social Impacts of the Rental Market”, done in collaboration with the Public Health Agency of Barcelona and the Institute of Government and Public Policy at the University of Barcelona.

This episode has changed my attitude about rent control considerably. There are still foreseeable problems with rent control, but there are also considerable problems without it.

Here is the episode list for Cities After…

Part 1 helps to contextualize Part 2 above Cities After… Post-Pandemic Urbanization: Spectacles, Speculation & Tourism – Pt. 1.

This podcast will be the first of four episodes where, together with future guests, Prof. Robles-Duran will slowly adopt the city of Barcelona as a sample to think through some of the tendencies of a post-pandemic neoliberal urbanization. He will do so by looking at three trending development drivers, the production of urban spectacle, the burdens of rental housing, and the limitless expansion of mass tourism.

Democracy at Work has a list of Economic Updates. The one I want to focus on today is on YouTube with the title Economic Update: The Rational & Irrational in Anti-Vaxxers.

Richard D. Wolff breaks down why so many in the United States distrust government mandates and the long history of private, medical capitalism influencing our public health. While the suspicion is well-founded, he answers what we must do to protect ourselves from COVID-19 and build a better society in the future.

I came to this episode by seeing a snippet of it just about the first topic about vaccines. When the snippet seemed to end abruptly, I felt sure that they had edited out the finish to that topic. So I looked up this video of the entire episode of Economic Update.

On many of the topics covered today, Prof. Wolff leaves us hanging. He tells us about problems and how we got to have these problems, but he doesn’t offer any alternative. If you can find someone to blame for a problem, getting rid of that cause may not lead to its solution. What is the solution that follows getting rid of today’s causes?

One of the things he fails to mention is that the rules and the enforcement of those rules in the USA economy has made it more profitable to ship manufacturing jobs to other countries while turning to extracting economic rent as a way to make money. The cost of labor in the USA is high because our workers have all this “rent” to pay. If we changed the rules so that manufacturing was more profitable than rent extraction, businesses would go back to focusing on manufacturing. If we cut out the rent seeking, our cost of labor could be more competitive.

Here is just the Thomad Frank part of the 2019/09/09 episode of Breaking Points. I am not so thrilled with the rest of the show as I used to be.

YouTube has the video The Zeitgeist of this Moment: Marianne Williamson with author Peter Joseph The transcript of the conversation is on Transform with Marianne Williamson in the article The Zeitgeist of This Moment.

Americans are very good with a to-do list. We like to say, “Okay, just tell us what to do and we can do it.” We’ve proven many times over that we have tremendous capacity for action once we know what it is we need to do.

But this is not a moment where it’s as simple as saying, “Let’s do this, and everything will be okay.” Our challenges are too complicated, too large, and too numerous to be amenable to anyone’s simple to-do list.

It’s not more data that we need; it’s more understanding that we need. It’s not more power that we need; it’s more wisdom that we need. It’s not more technology that we need; it’s more compassion that we need.

Here is the beginnings of a very deep conversation. I doubt that I am in 100% agreement with either of these two. Richard Wolff’s idea of democracy at work may have a lot to do with the necessary change. I also don’t agree with Richard Wolff 100%, but there can be a synthesis that is going on that might eventually lead to solutions (if time does not run out).

I like to try a thought experiment about imagining the possibilities. Here is the description by Peter Joseph of what I have in mind.

The idea was simple. You increase efficiency. People realize a sustainable standard of living based on scientific principles. You start to reduce the work week. You increase wages, you lower costs, all in direct proportion to itself based on the kind of technological – which is true – economic efficiency and then suddenly you wake up one day and families have a unified form. No one’s struggling to survive. No one’s in debt. They have everything they need. They work a little bit a week and suddenly balance emerges. Beautiful.

The purpose of my thought experiment is to imagine this goal, and then get to work trying to figure out how we make a transition to that world.

Peter’s Book: The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

Here is the August delivery meeting for Panquake. It still has to raise a little over $10,000 to be able to open up a beta test for 5,000 users. I hope to be one of those beta users.

Institute for New Economic Thinking has the interview posted on their Facebook page – How China Escaped Shock Therapy.

Isabella Weber, assistant professor of economics at UMass Amherst, discusses her new book on how China managed its transition from central planning to markets

You can view it below as it appears on YouTube.

I think the upshot of this is the application of my economic/social policy. I claim to be a “what worksist”. I am very much in favor of trying various approaches, and then adopting/adapting those that work, and downplaying the things that do not work. I am strongly opposed to deciding on ideological grounds what is acceptable policy and what is not without seeing if the resultant policies actually work. That translates into seeing what works, and then adopting it as opposed to deciding what “ism” to adopt and sticking to it whether or not it works.

A recent interview with Richard Wolff has eased my mind about the changes he is proposing – see the previous post Conversations with Marianne: Economist Richard Wolff. In this interview he explains that he thinks that “democracy at Work”, as he defines, it should be enabled, and then let people decide how much of that type of organization they want to be promoted in the USA. Previously I worried that he had wanted to convert the whole economy to his new model without even seeing if such an idea would scale up to the full economy and the full society.

August 31, 2021

The book’s title is How China Escaped Shock Therapy.

September 2, 2021

George Soros goes off the rails as explained by Michael Hudson in the article Soros’ Dream: To Turn China Into a Neoliberal Grabitization Opportunity. This seems to show that George Soros missed the interview with Isabella Weber

Stephanie Klton’s Substack, The Lens, has the post What Every American Needs to Know About the Congressional “Pay-For” Game (Part 3).

It’s time to stop asking lawmakers, “How will you pay for it?” And it’s time for members of Congress to stop responding to the question with a laundry list of so-called “pay-fors.”

Why?

Because it obscures what the budgeting game is really about and because it traps us in the lexicon of the neoliberal household metaphor. It’s bad economics masquerading as “sound finance” that constrains public policy by forcing members of Congress to act as if they need to budget like a household.

If you want to understand the Modern Monetary Theory explanation of how the federal government budget works, there is no better way to learn than from an expert in the topic. Trying to learn it from people who don’t even understand it themselves is not a good way to learn.

Here are the two previous parts, What Every American Needs to Know About the Congressional “Pay-For” Game (Part 1) and What Every American Needs to Know About the Congressional “Pay-For” Game (Part 2).

The Transform Podcast has the episode Conversations with Marianne: Economist Richard Wolff.

Economist and Professor Richard Wolff analyzes the deficiencies of modern capitalism, articulating the benefits of a socialist system and the road to a more equitable society. He promotes not a radical shift in economic system, but a gradual transformation involving a shift in consciousness from profits before people to people above all else.

This may be the most intelligent interview of Richard Wolff that I have yet heard. Marianne Williamson got him to explain things that answer many of my questions about what Richard Wolff has been proposing since I have been listening to him.

Public Seminar has the article China’s Return to Global Dominance.

When future historians look back on our discordant times, they will surely report an epochal shift of global importance: a transition from failed attempts to restore America’s greatness to China’s return, after two centuries of subjugation, to world pre-eminence. The writing is already on the wall, but strange prejudices, bitter disputes and conflicting predictions currently obscure the implications of such a transformation.

This article is perhaps the most well balanced analysis of China I have ever read. Every time he seemed to be bordering on going off the deep end in one direction or another, he rescued his analysis by talking about the possibilities of things working out better than the naysayers were predicting. He addressed the concerns of the naysayers without dismissing their concerns. The biggest advantage of the analysis is to admit what is unknown about the future.

YouTube has the Lucas Kunce Interview. This is only the first half of the interview.

Krystal and Saagar are joined by former Marine Lucas Kunce to go through all of the lies told about the war in Afghanistan and more.

I am going to embed the full uncut episode. I am probably not supposed to do this, but since nobody reads this blog, it is probably a safe thing for me to do. The link below the embedded video will take you directly to the interview which starts at 1:18:48 in the embedded video.

Here is a link to go to just the Lucas Kunce Extended Interview: 1:18:48 – 1:52:46.

Lucas Kunce is connected to the America Economic Liberties Project. On the page about the problem there is a section discussing the solution.

Securing economic liberty for everyone in America means empowering consumers, workers, and communities and freeing them from discrimination, extortion, and abuse from unchecked monopolies and predatory finance. It means ensuring entrepreneurs and businesses are able to succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work. And it means broadly distributing wealth and market power to promote equitable political power and safeguard American democracy.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution or single bill to pass to guarantee economic liberty for all. Instead, our democratic institutions must aggressively and vigilantly wield a suite of powerful policy tools — like aggressive corporate oversight, antitrust enforcement, anti-corruption measures, financial regulation, international trade arrangements, and a reinvigorated administrative state — to challenge monopolies’ dominance over our economy and democracy. It is up to us — as consumers, workers, business people, and citizens — to make sure that they do.