Salon has the 2015 article Joe Biden’s greatest betrayal: The one Senate vote that makes it hard to support a Biden run.

As a Senator in Delaware, Biden shepherded to passage a law that decimated bankruptcy protection for milllions.

I want to record a link to this article on my blog so that the next time someone suggests Biden ought to run for the Presidency, I will have quick access to this reminder.

Bloomberg has the article Pete Peterson, Lehman Exile, Blackstone Billionaire, Dies at 91.

He attended the August 1971 meeting at Camp David that resulted in Nixon ending the gold standard as part of his so-called New Economic Policy.

No hint in the article of the damage Perterson did to the world with his faulty ideas about deficits and debts of countries that were sovereign in their own fiat currencies. I guess, he could just not grasp how everything changed in 1971 when Nixon ended the gold standard for the USA. To this day, most politicians pretend that they don’t understand the potential impact of what happened in 1971. They are afraid of what the public would demand if they let on what they knew of the change in 1971.

Bernie Sanders is one of the few politicians who tacitly admits that he understands the true impact of the policy freedom that we now have since we are not on the gold standard. The proff is in Bernie’s hiring of Stephanie Kelton to be the economist for the minority on the Senate Budget Committee. See my previous 2015 post Watch Out, MMT’s About, As Bernie Sanders Hires Stephanie Kelton. Be sure to pay attention to my comment on that post.

Here is a rather shallow analysis, but I think the differences are stark enough to make the point.

A Tale of Two Economies: Russia and the US.

According to 2016 first-quarter figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. GDP is around $18.1 trillion. Russia’s economy is roughly a tenth the size of the U.S.’ (the World Bank stated that Russia’s GDP in 2015 was $1.3 trillion.) According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, U.S. military expenditures in 2015 were 3.3 percent of GDP, and Russia’s were 5 percent of its GDP. That still puts Russia among the top five military spenders in the world, but in absolute terms it means Russia’s military expenditures add up to roughly 10 percent of U.S. military spending.

The world’s top economy: the US vs China in five charts.

Both the IMF and the World Bank now rate China as the world’s largest economy based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), a measure that adjusts countries’ GDPs for differences in prices. In simple terms, this means that because your money stretches further in China than it would in the US, China’s GDP is adjusted upwards.

And it won’t be too long before China’s economy surpasses the US’s by other measures, too. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) predicts it will happen in 2029.

Trade in Goods with Russia.

Trade in Goods with China.

Never let it be said that we don’t pick our adversaries well. We wouldn’t try so hard to pick a fight with a country that is large enough to really challenge us. Much smarter to pick on the comparative little guys. Especially when our trade dependency with this little guy is so much smaller.

British Prime Minister Theresa May addresses Parliament and says, “It is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal.”

Let us imagine another scenario whose probability might be as high as the scenario painted by May.

With the oligarchs of the world itching to start a war with Russia, suppose they hatch a plot to arouse the common people to insist on a war.

In Salisbury, England there is former British-Russian spy Sergei Skripal. After having been sent to prison in Russia for his spying, he is living in England because he was swapped in a British spy trade with Russia.

It’s been five years since he came to England, and about 20 years since he spied for the British. His daughter has returned to Russia to live there peacefully with no reprisals from the Russian government. The British have no use for him anymore. He is just an expense that they have to pay to keep him happy.

The plotters enlist the help of the British spy agency MI6 to poison Sergei Skripal, but pin the blame on Vladimir Putin, the head of the Russian Federation. They come up with a scheme where Skripal will be poisoned in his new home town, but there will be no signs of a poisoner anywhere near the scene of the crime.

The plot starts at the Detection Laboratory at the UK’s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down where the plotters get the nerve agent Novichoks, reputedly to have been developed by the Russians in the 1970s.

The plotters know that although Sergei Skripal is leading a comfortable life in Salisbury, he still misses Russia. They find that his daughter, Yulia, is planning to visit her father in Salisbury. They get a box of Russian chocolates and insert the nerve agent into the pieces of candy.

The plotters find a person in Russia who Yulia trusts, and get the box of chocolates to that person. He gives the box of chocloates to Yulia to share with her father as a nostalgic reminder of Russia.

Yulia brings the box of chocolates to England in her luggage. Yulia and Sergei go out for a night on the town. After a nice meal at a restaurant, Yulia pulls out the nice surprise she has for her father. They both eat a piece of Russian made chocolates. Need I say any more?

CNN has the article Former Soviet chemist shares details of the nerve agent Novichok.

One of the many outstanding questions about the Skripal incident is how Novichok could have been administered and what form it came in. “An attacker should be very well educated and a trained person,” Mirzayanov said, adding the nerve agent could be “produced before the attacks, a couple of minutes before. After that it is ready to use” and could come in a spray form.

According to the CNN article, the British police seem to be worried that the sites where the incident took place might still be contaminated. I take that to mean that the above mentioned method of application does not preclude the preparation of the nerve agent in Russia and being carried to England in something like a box of chocolates.

If the agent had been sprayed, I would have thought that there would have been witnesses. Also, I would think that a spray attack would bring about collateral damage. I would also think the attacker would have to be well and obviously protected against the collateral damage. If all this is so obvious, why didn’t CNN ask about other methods of attack.

I found this talk by Raj Vedam on YouTube Indian civilization: The Untold Story- A Talk by Raj Vedam.

What if the history of India that we learn in our textbooks tells only part of the story, and worse, tells the story incorrectly? What if there are significant periods missing in the narration on Indian history that is not being told today? In this talk he critiques present-day narratives, examines the evidence from a variety of scientific disciplines, and presents a unique, strong and compelling case for an untold prehistory of India.

There is a very good follow-on video Q&A: Indian Civilization-The Untold Story:- A Talk By Raj Vedam.

I don’t often get an opportunity to name drop, so please indulge me in the following remarks.

I worked with Raj Vedam when I was in Oregon from 1994 to 2006. We had some deep conversations about the world, but I still had no idea of this level of research. When I worked with him, as far as I knew he was doing research in mathematics and computer science. I had enough of my own expertise to understand maybe half of what he tried to explain to me. However, I saw the evidence in the software that he produced to realize that he really knew what he was talking about.

I was just watching the NBC Nightly News story Songwriter behind Toys R Us jingle, one of the catchiest of all time.

I was wondering why NBC chose to do this story instead of commenting on the Bloomberg story Toys ‘R’ Us Shutting U.S. Stores After Failed Turnaround. Listen to the mention of private equity owners Bain Capital and KKR not allowing needed investment in the stores.

I was wondering if NBC chose this softball story because they had any connection to Bain or KKR. A little Google search surfaced two articles immediately.

The New York Times has the story Weather Channel Is Sold to NBC and Equity Firms.

Though the parties did not disclose the price, the buyers, NBC and the private equity firms Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group, will pay just under $3.5 billion, people briefed on the matter said.

Business Wire has the story FanDuel Announces Series E Financing of $275 Million from KKR, Google Capital and Time Warner.

Existing investors Shamrock Capital, NBC Sports Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Pentech Ventures and Piton Capital also participated.

I just report. You decide.

Craig Murray, whistle blower extraordinaire, has the post Of A Type Developed By Liars.

I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation “of a type developed by Russia” after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation.
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Porton Down is still not certain it is the Russians who have apparently synthesised a “Novichok”. Hence “Of a type developed by Russia”. Note developed, not made, produced or manufactured.

It is very carefully worded propaganda. Of a type developed by liars.

I post stuff like this on my blog for one important reason. When I tell information like this to friends and relatives, I often get the response, “Where on earth do you get this stuff?” Rather than making the weak claim that I read it somewhere, I like to be able to point them to my blog to show them where I get this stuff.

They can still deny this because it only comes from a whistle blower with inside knowlegde, but for at least a few, it will plant the seed of doubt.

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is,
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The Real News Network has the interview Is Another World Possible? – Leo Panitch on RAI (4/4).

On Reality Asserts Itself, Prof. Leo Panitch says it’s a dilemma that the gradualism of European social-democracy and attempts at a more radical transformation have so far both failed; Panitch says a first step towards democratizing the economy is to make finance a public utility – with host Paul Jay

This is a great interview, not because it provides all the answers. It is great because it asks some very intriguing questions. Making finance a public utility is a suggestion that is a rather puny part of what makes this interview so good. This is the first discussion that I have heard in a long time that doesn’t just rehash the standard arguments about socialism and capitalism.

Craig Murray has posted the article The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam.

As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK’s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.

In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, ‘Novichoks’ (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the ‘Foliant’ programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)

To further attest to Craig Murray’s bona fides, he wrote the following:

And finally – Mirzayanov is an Uzbek name and the novichok programme, assuming it existed, was in the Soviet Union but far away from modern Russia, at Nukus in modern Uzbekistan. I have visited the Nukus chemical weapons site myself. It was dismantled and made safe and all the stocks destroyed and the equipment removed by the American government, as I recall finishing while I was Ambassador there. There has in fact never been any evidence that any “novichok” ever existed in Russia itself.

Read the Wikipedia article on Craig Murray for verification.

Evonomics has the article How to Construct a New Invisible Hand: A Conversation with Peter Barnes.

A middle path between laissez faire and centralized planning.

When I say I believe in ‘what worksism”, another way to say it is a middle path. Don’t interpret middle path too literally. If it works and it is not an amalgam of two existing paths, I’d take that, too.

PB: Yes. I don’t think markets, at least as currently constituted, can self-regulate for the common good, nor do I think governments can plan, much less administer, a vast dyna­mic economy. So we need something in the middle.