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.
.
.
.
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.
.
.
.
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.
.
.
.
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.

Vimeo has the video Panquake Delivery FUNDED!! Public Delivery Meeting #20 feat. Suzie, Taylor, John, Sean, Sheree and Vivian Kubrick.

Yes – Panquake is now FUNDED!! This delivery meeting – Panquake’s 20th – is one for the history books. Join Founder Suzie Dawson, Journalist Taylor Hudak, Brand Ambassador John Kiriakou, Chief Security Advisor Sean O’Brien, Chief Marketing Advisor Sheree Ip and special guest, filmmaker Vivian Kubrick to talk about what this means for the project – and for the world!

Panquake Delivery FUNDED!! Public Delivery Meeting #20 feat. Suzie, Taylor, John, Sean, Sheree and Vivian Kubrick from Panquake – Talk Liberation on Vimeo.

I am truly, pleasantly surprised by this announcement.

I have been receiving frequent emails from gogetfunding about the progress Panquake was making in raising funds. I just looked at the October 5th email which showed a total of only about $185,300.00. I never figured Panquake would ever get to the $500,000 goal. Panquake must be raising money by some other means besides gogetfunding. I am so glad Panquake has reached the Beta goal.

GogetFunding never told me in emails about the $1.022.499.00 raised offline.

I had no idea what Vivian Kubrick was talking about at the end of the video. She was talking in the context of Kabbalah which is described by this Wikipedia article. Kabbalah. Here is an article from ReformJudaism.org Kabbalah, Tarot, and Delving into Mystical Judaism.

Michael Hudson has published the article The Euro Without German Industry.

But unless other countries work together to create an alternative to the IMF, World Bank, International Court, World Trade Organization and the numerous UN agencies now biased toward the U.S/NATO by U.S. diplomats and their proxies, the coming decades will see the U.S. economic strategy of financial and military dominance unfold along the lines that Washington has planned. The question is whether these countries can develop an alternative new economic order to protect themselves from a fate like that which Europe this year has imposed upon itself for the next decade.

This is what Michael Hudson has been predicting for years. At some point his predictions will come true, or we will see what he has been missing for the last 50 years. I am not ready to bet against him yet.

YouTube has a series of videos whose introduction I show below, Criminality of US empire and deep state with historian Aaron Good.

Multipolarista host Ben Norton speaks with historian Aaron Good about his book “American Exception: Empire and the Deep State,” detailing the breakdown of democracy, the criminality that lies at the heart of US government policy, and the corporate interests driving it.

This series drives home the part of this process that I had not fully come to grips with in my prior readings from Michael Hudson, Fadhel Kaboub, and the rest of the MMT crowd. Much of it was there in those sources, but I didn’t recognize the full weight of what they were saying.

Aaron Good has the website American Exception.

Starting on October 6, I will add links here to the episodes as I watch them. There are a couple that I watched before today.

Origins of the US empire and deep state (with historian Aaron Good). Jul 18, 2022

A discussion of the origins of the US empire and deep state, why US foreign policy remain unchanged across administrations, and why democracy has declined with the rise of the US global dominance.

This is PART 1 of the Empire and the Deep State series Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton is co-hosting with historian Aaron Good and producer Seamus McGuinness of the American Exception podcast.

History of the US empire and deep state pre-WWII (with historian Aaron Good). Aug 1, 2022

A discussion of deep politics and the history of the US empire up until World War Two.

This is PART 2 of the Empire and the Deep State series Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton is co-hosting with historian Aaron Good and producer Seamus McGuinness of the American Exception podcast.

Birth of the US national security state (with historian Aaron Good). August 11, 2022

A discussion of the creation of Washington’s national security state and the rise of US exceptionism.

This is PART 3 of the Empire and the Deep State series Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton is co-hosting with historian Aaron Good and producer Seamus McGuinness of the American Exception podcast.

October 7, 2022

What is imperialism? Exploring theories of hegemony (with historian Aaron Good). Aug 19, 2022

A discussion of different theoretical concepts of imperialism and hegemony and how they relate to the United States empire.

This is PART 4 of the Empire and the Deep State series Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton is co-hosting with historian Aaron Good and producer Seamus McGuinness of the American Exception podcast.

Jeffrey Sommers has the article on CunterPunch How Mikhail Gorbachev Became the Most Reviled Man in Russia.

Mikhail Gorbachev presented a figure of Greek tragedy proportions. Possessing good intentions and intellectual curiosity, Gorbachev nonetheless became the most reviled man in Russia, following the USSR’s demise. Yet, with Gorbachev, his worst qualities were connected to his best. Gorbachev was the wrong man at the wrong time to resolve the contradictions created by the Stalinist and then Brezhnev bureaucratic model of really-existing socialism in the Soviet Union. Increasingly hated at home, Gorbachev was beloved by world leaders in the “West” as the man who peacefully (at least by the comparative metrics of collapsing empires) unwound the USSR, even if trying to save its all-union character. Meanwhile, for China, Gorbachev delivered lessons in what not to do when reforming a sclerotic post-Stalinist system requiring economic reforms, if not transformation.

I haven’t had the chance to read the article yet, so I will take you through the interviews I have seen that finally led me to the article he discussed in the interviews.

Paul Jay has conducted a very interesting interview, and has published the first part “Why the Soviet Union Imploded – Jeffrey Sommers (pt 1)”.

“Terror and tyranny in the USSR arose more from war and the demands of state security services required to survive, and the paranoid politics it enabled, rather than any “inevitable” path from the socialist path taken,” writes Jeffery Sommers. He joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news to discuss the end of the Soviet Union.

I then found a CounterPunch podcast Jeffrey Sommers.

This week Eric welcomes back political economist and author Jeffrey Sommers to discuss the political and historical legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev in the wake of his recent death. Jeffrey examines how Gorbachev rose to power, the forces with which he had to contend while in power, and his ultimate failure to change the course of the Soviet Union. The conversation explores everything from the dismantling of the USSR and rise of the oligarchs to the ways in which the Gorbachev period paved the way for the Putin era. So much ground covered in this conversation with one of our favorite CounterPunchers.

And finally I found the article that they all were all talking about. The link to that article is at the beginning of this post.

Stephanie Kelton has written a Substack article UNCTAD Warns of Too Much Tightening.

To steer the global economy away from this looming catastrophe, the report calls on governments in advanced economies to “avoid austerity,” both for their individual sake and for the sake of the global economy as a whole. It also urges “central banks in developed economies to revert course and avoid the temptation to try to bring down prices by relying on ever higher interest rates.”

The UNCTAD report is Trade and Development Report 2022 – Development prospects in a fractured world.

UNCTAD projects that world economic growth will slow to 2.5% in 2022 and drop to 2.2% in 2023. The global slowdown would leave real GDP still below its pre-pandemic trend, costing the world more than $17 trillion – close to 20% of the world’s income.

This means that something like $17 trillion of economic growth will not happen. This growth in the productive economy is necessary to forestall inflation. In some ways, the only tools that central banks have available to them are not suitable for fighting the current inflation. The central banks should stop applying the wrong solution, but the central governments need to apply the right solution instead. Getting the central governments to do the right thing may be harder than stopping the central baks from doing the wrong thing.

What the central banks have to tell their respective central governments is that the central banks will not bail out the central governments that refuse to do their duty to rescue the economy. The blame will have to be shifted onto the shoulders of the ones who are failing to do their duty. The central banks are not going to take the rap for the central governments’ failures.