Democracy At Work has the episode Economic Update: Fascism.

On this week’s show, Prof. Wolff talks about the US’ 2021 trade deficit and its implications, the FED’s inflation policy dilemma, and the political economy of the Baltimore and Bronx fires. In the second half of the show, Wolff uses the actual history of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain to analyze the positions and prospects of fascism in the US today.

My comment to Prof. Wolff was:

If only you understood MMT. The interest rate we pay on Treasury securities is close to zero. If we didn’t pay interest, what would China do with its excess dollars?

Eventually China will de-dollarize its international trade. However, that won’t happen quickly unless we threaten them with economic sanctions. You didn’t mention that before I gave up watching this episode in disgust.

Consortium News has posted the article US Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine.

But the U.S. and NATO’s interest in Ukraine is not really about resolving its regional differences, but about something else altogether. The U.S. coup was calculated to put Russia in an impossible position. If Russia did nothing, post-coup Ukraine would sooner or later join NATO, as NATO members already agreed to in principle in 2008. NATO forces would advance right up to Russia’s border and Russia’s important naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea would fall under NATO control.

On the other hand, if Russia had responded to the coup by invading Ukraine, there would have been no turning back from a disastrous new Cold War with the West. To Washington’s frustration, Russia found a middle path out of this dilemma, by accepting the result of Crimea’s referendum to rejoin Russia, but only giving covert support to the separatists in the East.

In 2021, with Nuland once again installed in a corner office at the State Department, the Biden administration quickly cooked up a plan to put Russia in a new pickle. The United States had already given Ukraine $2 billion in military aid since 2014, and Biden has added another $650 million to that, along with deployments of U.S. and NATO military trainers.

Ukraine has still not implemented the constitutional changes called for in the Minsk agreements, and the unconditional military support the United States and NATO have provided has encouraged Ukraine’s leaders to effectively abandon the Minsk-Normandy process and simply reassert sovereignty over all of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea.

In practice, Ukraine could only recover those territories by a major escalation of the civil war, and that was exactly what Ukraine and its NATO backers appeared to be preparing for in March 2021. But that prompted Russia to begin moving troops and conducting military exercises, within its own territory (including Crimea), but close enough to Ukraine to deter a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces.

This part of the story has been wiped from the minds of most people in the USA. I have the nasty habit of remembering things I am supposed to forget. That is one of my purposes for recording these things on this blog.

The Institute For New Economic Thinking has featured the video Resource Limits to American Capitalism & The Predator State Today.

James K. Galbraith discusses the shift of US capitalism from an industrial state to what he calls a predator state: a finance-led, military-centered corporate republic that continues to prevail. To overcome it, he lays out what is needed to focus on employment, stability and adjustments to rising resource costs. Lynn Fries interviews Galbraith on GPEnewsdocs.

Let’s get one bit of silliness out of the way. The interviewer is trying to differentiate between the work of the interviewee from the work of his father. She concentrates on the fact that the father included his middle name of Kenneth in his legal name and the son uses his own middle initial K. She doesn’t seem to notice that the father was John and the son is James.

What I find so enlightening about James K. Galbraith is that he is a progressive Economist, but does not talk like the Modern Money Theory progressive economists, nor of the Marxist/Co-Operative economist Richard Wolff. Galbraith has mentioned that he has advised the Chinese government. Another progressive economist, Michael Hudson, has also been an advisor to the Chinese Government. There are similarities and differences among these people on how they talk about the policy decisions we have to make. I find it interesting to try to synthesize all that I know about what these people are saying so that I can formulate what makes the most sense to me.

YouTube has a video Modern Money Doughnuts Episode 2.

Modern Money Doughnuts – an international show about modern monetary theory and ecological economics.

What have doughnuts to do with modern money? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Gabrielle Bond and Steven Hail explore the relationship between The Deficit Myth and Doughnut Economics, and explain why their show is named Modern Money Doughnuts.

Discussing the following questions, with our guest, Professor Fadhel Kaboub
What is inflation, what causes it, what doesn’t cause it and why has the inflation rate spiked in the USA and some other countries (not all – much less so in Australia and virtually not at all in Japan)? What are the best ways of managing inflation pressure points? What links the present inflation scare to the barriers to a Green New Deal and the problem of building a distributive and regenerative economy

Fadhel needs to reread “Super Imperialism” and he also needs to go back in history to the late 1960s instead of the 1970s to see the source of what started us on the path of inflation. Certainly OPEC exacerbated the existing inflation, but they were reacting to the inflation that had already started.

Fadhel does a disservice to his argument when he fails to mention why consumer demand outstripped consumer supply in the late 60s and 70s. The Vietnam war took away workers and sent many of them to Vietnam. The military spending build up detracted from consumer supply investment. When you pay workers (who are also consumers) to build military equipment that supplies no consumer needs, then you are setting up a system where consumer demand exceeds consumer supply (inflation).

Michael Hudson has posted what he calls The Blueprint to the US Empire.

On YouTube it can be found under the title How and Why the US Cannot Recover: Is It a Failed State?”.

Michael Hudson’s many books include “Super Imperialism,” “Killing the Host,” “… And Forgive Them Their Debts,” “The Bubble and Beyond,” and “Global Fracture.” This provocative title invites genuine discussion about the state of the US economy, its failures and what this might portend for the future of the US dollar as global reserve currency, the problem of the US balance of payments, and the role of military production in the US economy. Prof. Hudson is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and lectures at the University for Sustainability in Hong Kong. His frequent trips to China give him a unique understanding of long-term economic trends.

Naked Capitalism has the post Michael Hudson: America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies.

The success of China’s industrial policy with a mixed economy and state control of the monetary and credit system has led U.S. strategists to fear that Western European and Asian economies may find their advantage to lie in integrating more closely with China and Russia. The U.S. seems to have no response to such a global rapprochement with China and Russia leverage except economic sanctions and military belligerence. That New Cold War stance is expensive, and other countries are balking at bearing the cost of a conflict that has no benefit for themselves and indeed, threatens to destabilize their own economic growth and political independence.

Cutting back that spending, and indeed recovering industrial self-reliance and competitive economic power, would require a transformation of American politics. Such a change seems unlikely, but without it, how long can America’s post-industrial rentier economy manage to force other countries to provide it with the economic affluence (literally a flowing-in) that it is no longer producing at home?

Finally, an explanation of the USA and Russian motivations.

YouTube has the podcast #125 Sam Levey: Monopoly, Monopsony, And What To Do About Them.

Patricia and Christian talk to economics scholar, teacher and writer Sam Levey about real existing economic conditions (containing monopoly, monopsony, and oligopolistic price-setting power), the inadequate models used by economists to interpret these conditions, and a better way forward.

Interesting podcast. I think it is better if you already have some understanding of the topic to form your own judgment on some of what is being said.

Krystall and Saagar have posted this YouTube video – Matt Stoller: EXPOSING The Amazon Prime Scam | Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar.

Krystal and Saagar launch their collaborative series with anti monopoly expert and substack writer Matt Stoller featuring in depth explanations of the business models behind our largest corporations such as Amazon.

This is why I have never believed in Amazon from its inception. How could Amazon possibly sell you things so cheaply, and deliver it right to your door? At first, I bet the investors in Amazon were subsidizing the prices. This video shows you how Amazon does it now. There really is no free lunch.

YouTube has this Jimmy Dore segment- Video: Journalist Hammers State Department Spokesman Over Russian Lies.

In a testy exchange that’s garnered a great deal of attention, State Department spokesman Ned Price was confronted by reporter Matt Lee over Price’s repeated repetition of allegations of planned misdeeds on the part of Vladimir Putin’s Russia in possible preparation for an invasion of Ukraine but without providing any evidence to back up his dubious claims.

As if this video will make any impact on my friends who call themselves progressives, yet believe every lie about Russia that Rachel Maddow has told them. Thank goodness that Rachel Maddow has tired of what she has been doing, and is cancelling her show.

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