YouTube has the video Black America Will be Hit Hard by Tax Reform Changes.

Attorney Antonio Moore and Political Commentator Yvette Carnell explain the tax reform bill, and what its particularly devastating impact will be on Black America. The two use a combination of data, and opinion to explain the ways the policy change will affect black families across the nation. From deduction change, to budget cuts to programs this reform is all encompassing, and takes further than even Reaganomics.

This is a great video to help “white” people understand some aspects of the tax scam as it affects Black America in ways you might not have imagined. Some of the penalties are indirect, but perhaps even more substantial than the direct penalties.

NPR has the fascinating story Episode 489: The Invisible Plumbing Of Our Economy.

We just need Amazon’s bank to send money electronically to a checking account at Chase bank. It’s just information traveling over wires. How long could it take: A minute? An hour?

It took five days.

On today’s show: Why the invisible pipes that move money around America are so slow. (And why the ones in England are so much faster.)

Naked Capitalism has the article The Web Began Dying in 2014 – Here’s How.

Because of this market demand, ISPs will likely provide cheap plans with access to GOOG-FB-AMZN, while offering more expensive plans with full internet access. It is already a reality in Portugal.

In the days of AOL dominance, I stayed away from AOL because I didn’t want their interference with my access to the rest of the internet. In the future, I may have to pay dearly to get the kind of access that I have now.

YouTube has the video MEME Theory: How Donald Trump used Memes to Become President.

Politicians HATE Him! Find out how this guy became President of the United States using this One Weird Trick!

This explains it all better than any expert explanation that I have seen. No professional politician, except for perhaps Bernie Sanders, gets this.

If there were more substance to it, I might become a Meme Theory devotee as much as I am a Modern Money Theory (MMT) devotee.

The American Conservative has published the Gareth Porter article Translated Doc Debunks Narrative of Al Qaeda-Iran ‘Alliance’.

What it shows is that the Al Qaeda operatives were led to believe Iran was friendly to their cause and were quite taken by surprise when their people were arrested in two waves in late 2002. It suggests that Iran had played them, gaining the fighters’ trust while maximizing intelligence regarding Al Qaeda’s presence in Iran.

Although this was published by The American Conservative, the author, Gareth Porter, is often featured in progressive media as well. Actually, having this published by a conservative medium might give it added credibility. You can’t blame it on the liberal apologists who dislike American foreign policy.

As you know, the current FCC net neutrality rules do not allow for high speed internet lanes and lower speed internet lanes.

In my location my independent service provider (ISP) Charter Spectrum internet offers Internet Plus at 60 mbps for $54.99/month and Internet Ultra 100 mbps for $94.99/month.

What will change when the FCC does away with net neutrality so that ISP’s can charge different rates for different speeds?

aim4truth has the article Absolute Proof: Obama Rigged Elections. I certainly can’t vouch for anything in this article, but there was a YouTube video that I found interesting – Introducing the U.S. Digital Service. White House, Aug. 20, 2014.

I said at the time that the healthcare.gov fiasco was a management problem more than anything else. Reading, at the time, about how it was managed and comparing it to my own experience in the software engineering business, I never would have allowed this process to occur in any project that I managed. Mikey Dickerson, Administrator, U.S. Digital Service confirms my thinking by briefly mentioning how he came in to rescue the failure of healthcare.gov.

How Mikey Dickerson fits in with the main story of the original article is interesting to contemplate.

Forbes has the article Dear President Trump: Your Tax Plan Needs Bigger Deficits!

What I want to highlight here is this: the private sector needs government deficit spending if it is going to recover properly from both the heart attack of the Financial Crisis and the decades of disease brought on by income redistribution and rising debt levels. This is so because government deficits are private-sector surpluses.

I just have two nits to pick with this article. In talking about the possibility of inflation, the author stated,

yes, it can be inflationary. But a) we are a long way from that point right now and b) it’s only happened once in recent history: World War Two.

I am disappointed in the statement that the last time we had inflation was WW II. Why do Modern Money Theorists always pretend that the inflation of the 1970s never happened? I know it would just complicate matters to discuss the 1970s. However, leaving out the 1970s makes people who remember that time doubt the rest of the story you are trying to tell.

In fact, the inflation of the 1970s was a mini version of what happened in WW II. Lyndon Johnson wanted to fight a war in Vietnam at the same time that he wanted to stimulate the domestic economy. Add the oil shortage imposed on us by OPEC, and it is easy to see that the inflation of the 1970s is easily explained in MMT terms.

The second nit is just a typographical error. The hypothetical $400 trillion deficit mentioned at the end of the article should have said $400 billion.

YouTube has the video How Bitcoin Works Under the Hood.

As discussion of cryptocurrencies are happening more often on the internet, it will be helpful to be able to refer to this explanation to refresh my own memory and to explain it to others.

Boing Boing has the article Candid Wall Street barons worry that GOP tax plan will lead to literal euthanasia of the rentier.

Executives know there’s no mechanism in the G.O.P. tax plan to reward them for passing those savings along to their employees, who Paul Ryan has estimated would get an average $4,000 raise (over a decade) as a result of corporate largesse. The labor market has tightened considerably—the unemployment rate is at a 15-year low—and the stock market is starting to level off. The word on the street, though, isn’t that higher corporate profits will lead to higher wages; rather, it’s all about buybacks: Goldman says stock buybacks will hit $590 billion in 2018, while Merrill Lynch predicts half of all repatriated cash would go to buybacks or acquisitions. It’s a sugar high that might extend the market rally temporarily, but will deepen the rot in our economic cavity.

The analysis of the stock market that I subscribe to is that the stock market is currently in bubble territory. That does not mean we know when the bubble will burst, but it does mean we know it will burst. The Republican tax plan will inflate the bubble some more. If it passes, we still won’t know when it will burst, but it does seem rather foolish to add to the risk that already seems pretty high. Of course, there is always the possibility that the oligarchs will come to their senses, and adopt policies that will deflate the bubble slowly.