New Economic Perspectives has the post An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton about Pragmatism in 2016.

Here is a woman that presents a great understanding of what ails the country and the world, but is so dedicated to Hillary Clinton that she cannot see the Clinton’s roll in all of this. She is also blind to the facts that Bernie Sanders (and Jill Stein) do see the issues in the same terms that she does.

And in spite of the fact that I have supported Hillary for the last thirty years (since I was thrilled to discover that someone who had worked for the Children’s Defense Fund was running for Yale Alumni Trustee) and went out of my way to stick up for her over Bernie Sanders in the Minnesota caucuses, I still have no idea whether she sees the issues – the defining issues of our day – in the same terms that I do.

Here is one example of Carbone’s understanding of the issues.

While Hillary gets most of this right, she still pays lip service to the importance of balancing the federal budget.  In fact, as Paul Krugman points out at least once a weak (sic) that conviction is in the same league with denying the reality that humans are causing climate change.  Democrats once embraced the notion that a principal purpose of monetary and fiscal policy ought to be a full employment economy and that infrastructure spending and, yes, deficits, are necessary to that end.

Here is an example of Carbone’s blindness.

I have more optimism that Hillary fully gets the third piece – the need for a political realignment in the United States and the defeat of what she termed the “vast right wing conspiracy” that has plagued her for her entire public career.

Perhaps the right wing conspiracy has plagued Hillary Clinton, but Clinton is still a corporatist who has made over 100 million dollars from the very forces that she needs to rein in.   I wish I could be plagued to the tune of millions of dollars in speaking fees.

The Berkshire Eagle has an op-ed Rinaldo Del Gallo, III: The race’s true progressive Also posted one Facebook.

I think it is a great explanation of his campaign, but I find a troubling theme that runs through it. Here is an example of what bothers me.

Many do not know that higher education at state schools was once quite affordable because government had the revenue to pay most of the tab.

It is kind of complicated, but if you talk about this in terms of revenue, then people are led to many false assumptions. In the 50’s and 60’s the idea of revenue might have been more appropriate because we were still on the gold standard back then. Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1972.

The real reason to have higher taxes is to stop inflation. Since the FED creates money at will, there is no such thing as “we don’t have the money”. However, if there is too much money so that the private sector can employ a large percentage of the economy’s capacity, and the government sector also tries to employ some of this capacity, then there will be inflation. For the government to use the part of the economy’s capacity for investment in the country, then we have to make sure the private sector only has the funds to use the available part of the economy’s capacity that is left.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Thomas Friedman Wants A “Center-Left” Democratic Party Based on Austrian Economic Myths.

The dishonest aspect of all this is that Friedman advises Hillary to adopt these hard-right dogmas, which have repeatedly led to the epidemics of elite fraud that drove our last three financial crises, as a means to achieve rapid economic growth and financial stability. The hilarious aspect of this is that Friedman claims that Hillary’s embrace of ultra-right wing tropes would produce a “compassionate, center-left Web party for the 21st century.” Center-left?

You need to be armed with the information in this article (it’s ok if you already know this information) to guard against being duped by phony, right-wing theories. If you are going to explain to other people what is wrong with these theories and especially with Libertarians in general, you need to know what is in this article.

The Root has the article Marc Lamont Hill on Voting Green, Not Being Afraid of Trump: ‘We Can Afford to Lose an Election; We Can’t Afford to Lose Our Values’. The article talks about what the headline would imply. There is an included video of The Breakfast Club.

If you watch this video attached to the article, you probably won’t get what you came for until about 12 minutes in. However, if you watch the whole thing, you will get much more than what you came for.

Fascinating discussion, all of it.

YouTube has the segment Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Journalism (HBO).
At the end of the segment, he complains that we have all gotten used to getting our news for free online, and we will not change.

If I could only get him to read my previous post Monetizing Internet Content – A Working Example he could start promoting solutions instead of just complaining about problems.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Another Dimension.

If the private sector imports more than it exports, ignoring investment flows, it will run a financial deficit while the foreign sector runs a surplus and the economy will then slow down as money in the private sector becomes scarce.  Unless the trade deficit is reduced, the only way to keep the economy running is for the government to run large deficits, as is it is doing now.  While few people understand the sectoral view of the economy, many are aware of problems that this one-dimensional view does not explain.

(To understand the topic of sector balances, read my previous post When Will the White House and OMB Ever Learn About Sector Financial Balances?)

The article Another Dimention is an important contribution. The MMT explanations I have seen so far are good explanations for the subset of economic issues they address. The other issues have been brushed off with the statement that MMT does not address these issues. This article is a call to address those issues.

I have another issue with MMT that I have never seen addressed, although I have asked many times. The picture of the three pots ignores the factor of mark-to-market. Wealth in a single sector may act as if it is growing autonomously with no flows from other pots because we tend to value just about everything with a mark-to-market method. You can argue that this increase is just imaginary, but it is not real money, but for that matter fiat money isn’t any more real. No matter whether or not mark-to-market growth (and decline) is real money, economic actors act in many ways as if it were real. If we want to explain what really happens in an economy, we have to talk about how real people really behave.

YouTube is showing the Green Party Convention live stream.

I caught the tail end of the conference call with Julian Assange, founder of Wiki-leaks.
I never thought much about the threat that Google poses in the 21^st century until I heard Julian Assange explain what is in store for us victims.

As of this writing, the convention will reconvene at 2:30 PM ET.

I have found that the links do not work in Jill Stein’s emails that she sends to me. I did some debugging to find what the issue was. I have tried to send an email explanation to the Stein campaign, but if you have a reliable connection to the campaign, you might want to pass this information on.

Here is an example of the typical problematic HTML code in her email.

<a href="jill2016.com/live">Watch the livestream from your couch!</a>.

The short cut assumes that the link is to a file on the server.

For this link to work reliably in all situations, the correct code must include the transport mechanism http:// in the URL.

<a href="http://jill2016.com/live">Watch the livestream from your couch!</a>.

Including the transport protocol tells the browser or email reader that jill2016.com is the target web site and not the name of a file on an assumed website server.

If you read an email from Stein on an online email reader such as gmail, the link that is in the email probably will not work either. Leaving out the transport protocol is a shortcut that was introduced for reasons I won’t explain here. What most people would have no reason to know is that the shortcut does not work in an HTML page that does not come from a server that is the same one as the server of the linked item. If you save an online web page that uses the shortcut, and you save it to your local computer, the links probably will not work on your saved version.

In creating a web page or an email, if you are not an HTML expert or if you use a tool to generate your web pages or email, you would have no reason to know about this issue. All you would know is that the link works for some people and not others.

There is a YouTube video On Contact: Into the Political Wilderness with Jill Stein.

Now that the two major political parties have officially selected their nominees for president, Chris Hedges sits down with Green Party candidate for president, Dr. Jill Stein, to discuss an alternative way forward. Bernie Sanders might be out of the race, but Stein says the Green Party is leading the revolutionary charge. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at third parties that have renewed the political vibrancy of American society.

You just have to see this. This is a great “interview” where Jill Stein gets to do most of the talking, and Chris Hedges just feeds her the topics.

Jill Stein even gets to say what are the magic words for me – William K. Black. Black is a former S&L regulator who wrote the book, “The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One”