Matt Stoller has a guest author who wrote the article Closing Down the Billionaire Factory.

In a memoir with the cringeworthy title “What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence”, Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder of Blackstone explains how his private equity giant came to control money from the nation’s largest public pension funds.

I have known some of this before, but this is worse than I thought.

Stepahine Kelton has the post Can We Still Afford Social Security and Medicare?.

As promised, today’s post is a rejoinder. With the political fight over entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare heating up—and, yes, they are entitlements because people are entitled to coverage under the law as long as they meet program eligibility requirements—it’s important to bring some clarity to the debate.

I am not sure that this brings clarity for most people. I understand what she is trying to say, and I think I can say it more clearly.

The USA Government’s Federal Reserve Bank creates all USA money (except for the small part created by the mint or the paper currency). That ability to create money means that the USA Government can always create the money to satisfy all future Social Security obligations.

Where the problem could arise is when the retirees use that money to buy things. The issue is whether or not the economy can produce all the things the retirees have the money to buy. If we don’t invest enough in expanding our economy in the future, then the productive part of the economy may be too small to produce what the retirees have the money to buy.

The non-productive part of the economy includes the part of the economy that collects debt interest payments from the people. Paying interest on debt makes banks richer, but it does not increase the economy’s ability to produce what people want to buy.

YouTube has the video Retired US Army Colonel on Ukraine, Taiwan & the state of the US Empire.

If the title had said Larry Wilkerson, I would have jumped to watch this much faster. I didn’t recognize him from this very old picture.

Even this interviewer had a certain perception of the Ukraine War, but Wilkerson would not let him get away with echoing USA propaganda. If Larry Wilkerson, Scott Ritter, and Michael Hudson all seem to agree on certain fundamentals, I feel even more confident in those fundamentals.

Michael Hudson posted an interview he did recently – The Big Context.

I have noticed a change in Michael Hudson’s interviews. He isn’t mincing words anymore. He is openly airing his full pessimism. Here is the shortest excerpt that I could come up with that gives a hint as to his current thinking.

The US economy cannot recover its industrial power. Its debt is too high, its cost of medical care, 18% of GDP is too high, it’s the rent is so high, 48% of income. There’s no way in which the United States can grow again. Every business recovery since 1945 has started from a higher and higher and higher level of debt, and now it’s reached the limit. A year ago the Federal Reserve said that half of Americans could not raise 400 dollars in a crisis. The recent increase in interest rates have raised credit card rates and debt service by about 450 dollars per average American. So here are people who couldn’t raise it.

All of a sudden they are shifting their consumption patterns to downsizeable. The dollar stores’ spam is now in short supply because people are moving from expensive meat on to that. So Americans are going downhill. So what is it that Russia and China and India represent? They’re countries that are industrializing and moving forward. The American economy and American society is run by the financial sector; they’ve shifted planning away from government to the financial sector which lives in the short run, and essentially the growth of the one percent is shrinking the ninety-nine percent.

Money On The Left has an interview The ECASH Act with Rohan Grey (New Transcript!).

This conversation happened on March 28, 2022. I am not sure I posted this exact interview, but I have posted before about this idea. I think now is a good time to bring it up again.

But I think one of the things that defines cash is that there is no third party involved. There’s no permission you need to ask once the cash gets issued. We’re not talking about a private cryptocurrency, where the issuance itself is based on some pseudo gold standard, mining logic. We’re talking about a publicly issued dollar, where the amount and who it gets issued to is still a matter of collective governance. But once the money is out there, once it’s issued, it has its own locus of gravity.

One of the things I don’t like with the crypto-currency craze as it now works is the idea that there has to be a fee attached to each transaction. With government issued cash, there is no transaction fee.

Another problem with private crypto-currency is that it has no mechanism like government issued money to give it value. What has driven the value of government issued money for many thousands of years, is the government’s power to levy a tax and to insist that government issued money is the only way to pay that tax. It is not to say that there can’t be a new way to give value to a new form of money. It is just that proponents of crypto-currency need to recognize that this has not passed the test of time, yet. Only the passage of time will prove that this can work over the long term, or it fails in a human life time.

Naked Capitalism has reposted the article Yanis Varoufakis: Inflation as a Political Power Play Gone Wrong.

The comments introducing the article are wrong. I agree with the original author.

Using what happened in 2008 to explain what is going on now is the mistake by Yves Smith.

Below is what Yanis Varoutakis wrote that I agree with.

Then came the pandemic, which changed one big thing: Western governments were forced to channel some of the new rivers of central-bank money to the locked-down masses within economies that, over the decades, had depleted their capacity to produce stuff and were now facing busted supply chains to boot. As the locked-down multitudes spent some of their furlough money on scarce imports, prices began to rise. Corporations with great paper wealth responded by exploiting their immense market power (yielded by their shrunken productive capacity) to push prices through the roof.

After two decades of a central-bank-supported bonanza of soaring asset prices and rising corporate debt, a little price inflation was all it took to end the power game that shaped the post-2008 world in the image of a revived ruling class.

Naked Capitalism has republished the article Michael Hudson: American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama. The original, American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama, is on his web site.

Confronted with China’s industrial prosperity based on self-financed public investment in socialized markets, U.S. officials acknowledge that resolving this fight will take a number of decades to play out. Arming a proxy Ukrainian regime is merely an opening move in turning Cold War 2 (and potentially/or indeed World War III) into a fight to divide the world into allies and enemies with regard to whether governments or the financial sector will plan the world economy and society.

What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education. The alternative is what President Biden calls autocracy, a hostile label for governments strong enough to block a global rent-seeking oligarchy from taking control. China is deemed autocratic for providing basic needs at subsidized prices instead of charging whatever the market can bear. Making its mixed economy lower-cost is called “market manipulation,” as if that is a bad thing that was not done by the United States, Germany and every other industrial nation during their economic takeoff in the 19th and early 20th century.

Back in 2009, CNET had the article Micropayments: The business model that never was.

Micropayments are a worse fit with today’s Web environment than during their first boomlet in the dot-com era. Part of this is simply that people have gotten used to free news and other content on the Web. There are also more sources of news than ever–albeit much of it duplicative and often relying on major news organizations for source material. However, more broadly, linking and search have become such fundamental drivers of traffic that anything behind a pay-wall (as subscription-only content inevitably is) will take a huge traffic hit. This makes such content less relevant; it also hurts ad revenue.

I agree with those arguing that micropayments are again raising their head not because changes in technology or consumer behavior now make them viable.

I am not sure it was right back then and less sure that it is correct now. The economic war that is being fought against independent news may be a sufficient to bring back the idea.

Democracy At Work has the episode Economic Update: The Great Replacement Theory.

In this week’s show, Prof Wolff discusses the replacement theory’s grain of truth amidst its mostly ideological function: to save capitalism from criticism. He analyzes why US capitalists deprived so many white, male, Christian workers of their jobs, incomes, and social standing over recent decades and why that analysis was largely silenced by Cold War taboos since 1945. Were a new US left-labor alliance now to offer that critical-of-capitalism alternative, replacement theory’s notion of a great conspiracy (largely by Democrats) to replace white, male, Christians with “others” would be far less socially influential.

In the second half, Richard Wolff comes very close to proposing a solution.

I left a comment to try to push them onto the target he came close to seeing.

The solution for getting the story out there is right in front of you, but content creators just don’t seem to see it. Content creators need to form a cooperative that will provide the means to get the word out and support the livelihoods of the content creators. This cooperative would provide a subscription service that gives access to the content-creators and provide them micropayments from the paid subscriptions. The micro payments would be given out in proportion to the subscribers’ consumption of content creators’ product. As a proponent of everything Co-op, you should have the knowledge of how to do this. Why don’t you do this?

Bernie Sanders has written an opinion piece in The Guardian – Let’s rebuild the US microchip industry – not give it a $50bn-plus check.

If private companies are going to benefit from taxpayer subsidies, the financial gains made by these companies must be shared with the American people

To me, this makes a lot more sense than a blanket refusal to support vital USA companies. Perhaps the USA government could get some voting stock shares of the company in return for its investment. These shares could be put into the Social Security Trust fund for safe keeping and management. I think shares would be better than putting in short-sighted and overly specific requirements in return for the investment. What seems like wise behavior today, might not be suitable in the future.