Dissent magazine has the article Can DSA Go the Distance?

In a matter of years, DSA has turned from a musty debate club for retired social democrats into an electoral powerhouse of young, ecumenical radicals. What’s next?

I didn’t have the stamina to read all of this article, but I think DSA is the wrong organization to hang your hat on. I call myself a “what worksist”, so I do not marry myself to a single “ism” like socialism. I also have the same caution about capitalism. These two “isms” and others have some parts of society where they work well, and other parts where they do not work so well. I care more about what works, than what label you give it. When you get too tied to a single “ism” or a single program, people tend to be blind to the problems of the “ism” or program they favor. For the “isms” they don’t favor, all they can see is its problems, but they cannot admit that it has any parts that would work well to solve certain kinds of problems. No matter which side of the dichotomy you fall on, you tend to lose sight of the fundamental question “Does it work?” In other words, “does it work to make the lives of most people better?” Since the world changes, I don’t believe there is a static collection of programs that will always be the best in all changing situations. Choosing the balance of solutions must be a dynamic process that adjusts to the conditions that exist at the time.

Whatever you think about what is going on in China (or what you have been told is going on in China), I think they come close to my idea of being a “what worksist”. They are willing to have some capitalism and some socialism in their society’s mix. They recognize that there are problems, but they aren’t tied to fixed ideas on how to solve the problems. They try various things, and measure whether or not these things are leading to the goal that they envision. They are also willing to admit that what is good for today’s China is not necessarily good for other countries facing different circumstances.

Staying true to “what worksism”, I am not suggesting that the USA should do exactly what China does. However, it would be good for us to look at what China does to see if there is anything we can learn from their successes and failures. They have certainly invested time in this analysis of what the USA does and what other societies around the world and throughout time have done under the changing circumstances those other societies have lived through.

The Institute For New Economic Thinking has a series called The Laws Of Capitalism.

In this series, Katharina Pistor breaks down the history, process, institutions, and participants involved in the legal coding of capital. She shows us how private actors have harnessed social resources to accumulate wealth, generating not only economic inequality, but inequality in law. Enabling them to opt out of jurisdictions, restrict governmental policy, and erode democracy.

Episode 1 is Coding Land & Ideas.

Films For Action has the article Why Propaganda Works & The Great Question of Our Time | Noam Chomsky

Professor Noam Chomsky explains why propaganda works so well in our modern society and raises one of the most important questions of our time. It’s a clip from the classic documentary Manufacturing Consent. Watch the full film here.

In Part 2, another variation of this clip is used, with additional footage added regarding the successful campaign by the Bush Administration to manipulate public consciousness to build support for war, setting up Iraq and Iran as phantom enemies of the U.S., when our true motivations remain obscured by patriotic and fear-based illusions.

The two clips in this article are good teasers for the documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)

Here is the documentary directly from YouTube.

Manufacturing Consent explores the political life and ideas of world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist Noam Chomsky. Through a collage of biography, archival material and various graphics and illustrations, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick’s 22-award-winning documentary highlights Chomsky’s probing analysis of mass media and his critique of the forces at work behind the daily news.

Watching the full documentary may seem like a daunting task, but if you have watched or considered watching an episode of Joe Rogan, you can certainly devote the time to watching this documentary. You will probably get more value watching this documentary than you will get from watching Joe Rogan.

The Cradle has the Pepe Escobar article ‘Peaceful modernization’: China’s offering to the Global South.

Xi Jinping just offered the Global South a stark alternative to decades of western diktats, war, and economic duress. ‘Peaceful modernization’ will establish sovereignty, economy, and independence for the world’s struggling states.

There are so many useful items in this article that I cannot resist quoting a few of them.

In a nutshell, the CPC master plan is twofold: finalize “socialist modernization” from 2020 to 2035; and build China – via peaceful modernization – as a modern socialist country that is “prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious” all the way to 2049, signaling the centenary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The central concept in the work report is peaceful modernization – and how to accomplish it. As Xi summarized, “It contains elements that are common to the modernization processes of all countries, but it is more characterized by features that are unique to the Chinese context.”

You can believe whom you want, but it doesn’t hurt to hear what each side is saying.

Which side do you think would be more attractive to the global south? Would they want the USA’s offer of war, austerity, and exploitation. Or would they prefer peaceful modernization? Put aside which promise is more likely to be kept, but just consider the message. Is the USA foolish to not even offer a competing message?

Martin Jacques, until recently a senior fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University, and author of arguably the best book in English on China’s development, is impressed by how China’s modernization happened in a context dominated by the west: “This was the key role of the CPC. It had to be planned. We can see how extraordinarily successful it has been.”

The implication is that by breaking the west-centric TINA model, Beijing has accumulated the tools to be able to assist Global South nations with their own models.

Who in the USA seems to have the best understanding of China? Micheael Hudson comes to mind. Fadhel Kaboub comes to mind as the person most focused on the needs of the global south.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, is even more upbeat: “China will become a leader of innovation. I very much hope and count on China becoming a leader for innovation in sustainability.” That will contrast with a ‘dysfunctional’ American model turning protectionist even in business and investment.

I guess I have to give Jeffrey Sachs credit for what he is saying now if I can wipe from my mind the damage he did advising Russia in the early 1990s.

It was up to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin to clarify where BRI is heading:

“BRI transcends the outdated mentality of geopolitical games, and created a new model of international cooperation. It is not an exclusive group that excludes other participants but an open and inclusive cooperation platform. It is not just China’s solo effort, but a symphony performed by all participating countries.”

Sounds much too progressive and “what worksist” for me to hope for.

The most important question to ask “Would it help?”

Bridge of spies – “Would it help?” quote

Scheerpost has published this second part of Jonathan Cook’s work How Spooks and Establishment Journalists are Circling the Wagons. This is actually too long for me to read it all, but I think it is a good antidote to the idea that USA corporate media are reliable sources.

It would be foolish to imagine that, in this more complex information age, the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services’ influence over journalists has diminished. Both Carole Cadwalladr and Paul Mason’s cases illustrate how intimate those ties still are.
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None of the British journalists now barred from Russia raised their voices in protest at the banning of the English-language broadcasts and the websites of RT and Sputnik.
In popular imagination, cultivated jointly by Western establishment media and Western intelligence agencies, both outlets are staffed by Russian spooks strong-arming a few impressionable Westerners with Stalinist tendencies. The reality is very different. RT wants to have influence in the West, and the only way to achieve that is by recruiting credible Western journalists who have trenchant criticisms of the Western national-security state and its war industries but cannot – for that very reason – find a platform in the establishment media at home. RT might not be the best place to get a neutral view of what Russia is up to, but it had attracted a growing audience in the West by providing an outlet for disillusioned Western journalists who are ready to paint a realistic picture of the failings of their own states.

It gets worse the more of this article that you read.

The first part was published by Mint Press News British “Watchdog” Journalists Unmasked as Lap Dogs for the Security State.

Clearing the Fog from PopularReistance.org has the podcast ‘Ridiculous Things Are Happening’: NATO Begins Exercises That Risk Nuclear War.

The proxy war between NATO and Russia being waged in Ukraine has taken a dangerous turn and the risk of nuclear annihilation is growing as a result.

Scott Ritter comes on at about 15 minutes into this podcast. As I was listening to this, I began to feel that Scott Ritter was explaining his wishful thinking of events. This is OK,as long as we realize what this is. Events have a good chance of not working out as he describes because people have a habit of doing unexpected things.

Realizing that we are not in complete control is not an excuse to behave irrationally against our better judgment. Perhaps there is an actual reverse Murphy’s law. That would be that no matter how we try to make things go wrong, nothing that can go wrong will go wrong. I wouldn’t want to bet on that strategy.

When I was training in the USA army in the late 1960s, there was the story going around, that the Army never sent training graduates where they wanted to go. This poor sap thought he would outsmart the Army by taking advantage of this rumored tendency. So, he said he wanted to go to Vietnam. That’s exactly where the Army sent him. So much for the reverse version of Murphy’s Law.

I have just started reading this December 2021 paper Inflationary Pressures in the Time of Covid-19: MMT as a Theory of Inflation.

Abstract: According to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the only constraint on public spending for a currency issuing authority like the United States government is inflation. This paper develops an alternative understanding and analysis of economic inflation through the lens of MMT in the aftermath of the Covid-19 public health crisis and consequential economic shutdown and reopening. It argues that conventional explanations of inflation remain ideologically constricted to an outdated social theory and conceptual framing. As such, public policy responses to contemporary price increases are limited in scope and incapable of neither effectively stabilizing prices nor avoiding the worsening of social inequities and harm. The paper will first develop MMT’s insights about inflationary pressures as a theory of qualitatively determined resource use, costs, and political coordination, as opposed to a collapse in the value of money from excessive public spending. An analysis of price pressures throughout 2021 is then provided by examining supply chains, industry specific shocks, and market power. Lastly, inflation is explored in the context of an ongoing planetary climate and environmental crisis with deep implications about the future of sustainability, economic development, and price stability.

Here are some snippets I have gleaned from the first 10 page out of 40. There is so much more already in the first 10 pages.

MMT describes how monetary economies work and prescribes how to best apply public policy and investment based on productive capacity, available resources, and price stability.
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Currently, the political process of price setting is overwhelmed by neoliberal disinvestment, corporate greed, and monopolization, but it does not have to be this way.
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The “crypto” agenda often comes in the form of appeals to the ideological superiority of “hard money”, meaning finite and scarce, but other times has a more ambitious objective to replace public fiat altogether with private actors such as Facebook’s Diem. 36 This is especially pernicious when it takes the form of new developments in monetary imperialism as is the case with El Salvador further privatizing its economy over to fintech 37 or billionaire vultures 38 seeking to take over Puerto Rico’s energy grid with crypto after Hurricane Maria.

When public money is reduced to the constrained function of taxing and spending it represses it true world-building capacity and lends itself to the exploits of powerful private interests. By contrast, MMT sees money as an instrument of generative production and reproduction with many more positive-sum and qualitatively unique results than the mainstream orthodoxy allows us to see.

Stephanie Kelton posted the article Think About Minsky for a Moment.

A sure path to a financial meltdown is via a combination of further aggressive tightening by the Fed and disappointing corporate earnings.

YouTube has the video Crash Course on Hyman Minsky, L. Randall Wray.

L. Randall Wray, professor at UMKC, talks about Hyman Minsky, an American economist who, even in the relative stability of the 1950s, predicted financial collapse because of “speculative euphoria.” Interviewed by Peter Leyden at King’s College, April 2010.

Since the crisis has been brewing since 1951, this 2010 video is still quite relevant.