YouTube has the video The Zeitgeist of this Moment: Marianne Williamson with author Peter Joseph The transcript of the conversation is on Transform with Marianne Williamson in the article The Zeitgeist of This Moment.

Americans are very good with a to-do list. We like to say, “Okay, just tell us what to do and we can do it.” We’ve proven many times over that we have tremendous capacity for action once we know what it is we need to do.

But this is not a moment where it’s as simple as saying, “Let’s do this, and everything will be okay.” Our challenges are too complicated, too large, and too numerous to be amenable to anyone’s simple to-do list.

It’s not more data that we need; it’s more understanding that we need. It’s not more power that we need; it’s more wisdom that we need. It’s not more technology that we need; it’s more compassion that we need.

Here is the beginnings of a very deep conversation. I doubt that I am in 100% agreement with either of these two. Richard Wolff’s idea of democracy at work may have a lot to do with the necessary change. I also don’t agree with Richard Wolff 100%, but there can be a synthesis that is going on that might eventually lead to solutions (if time does not run out).

I like to try a thought experiment about imagining the possibilities. Here is the description by Peter Joseph of what I have in mind.

The idea was simple. You increase efficiency. People realize a sustainable standard of living based on scientific principles. You start to reduce the work week. You increase wages, you lower costs, all in direct proportion to itself based on the kind of technological – which is true – economic efficiency and then suddenly you wake up one day and families have a unified form. No one’s struggling to survive. No one’s in debt. They have everything they need. They work a little bit a week and suddenly balance emerges. Beautiful.

The purpose of my thought experiment is to imagine this goal, and then get to work trying to figure out how we make a transition to that world.

Peter’s Book: The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

Here is the August delivery meeting for Panquake. It still has to raise a little over $10,000 to be able to open up a beta test for 5,000 users. I hope to be one of those beta users.

Institute for New Economic Thinking has the interview posted on their Facebook page – How China Escaped Shock Therapy.

Isabella Weber, assistant professor of economics at UMass Amherst, discusses her new book on how China managed its transition from central planning to markets

You can view it below as it appears on YouTube.

I think the upshot of this is the application of my economic/social policy. I claim to be a “what worksist”. I am very much in favor of trying various approaches, and then adopting/adapting those that work, and downplaying the things that do not work. I am strongly opposed to deciding on ideological grounds what is acceptable policy and what is not without seeing if the resultant policies actually work. That translates into seeing what works, and then adopting it as opposed to deciding what “ism” to adopt and sticking to it whether or not it works.

A recent interview with Richard Wolff has eased my mind about the changes he is proposing – see the previous post Conversations with Marianne: Economist Richard Wolff. In this interview he explains that he thinks that “democracy at Work”, as he defines, it should be enabled, and then let people decide how much of that type of organization they want to be promoted in the USA. Previously I worried that he had wanted to convert the whole economy to his new model without even seeing if such an idea would scale up to the full economy and the full society.

August 31, 2021

The book’s title is How China Escaped Shock Therapy.

September 2, 2021

George Soros goes off the rails as explained by Michael Hudson in the article Soros’ Dream: To Turn China Into a Neoliberal Grabitization Opportunity. This seems to show that George Soros missed the interview with Isabella Weber

Stephanie Klton’s Substack, The Lens, has the post What Every American Needs to Know About the Congressional “Pay-For” Game (Part 3).

It’s time to stop asking lawmakers, “How will you pay for it?” And it’s time for members of Congress to stop responding to the question with a laundry list of so-called “pay-fors.”

Why?

Because it obscures what the budgeting game is really about and because it traps us in the lexicon of the neoliberal household metaphor. It’s bad economics masquerading as “sound finance” that constrains public policy by forcing members of Congress to act as if they need to budget like a household.

If you want to understand the Modern Monetary Theory explanation of how the federal government budget works, there is no better way to learn than from an expert in the topic. Trying to learn it from people who don’t even understand it themselves is not a good way to learn.

Here are the two previous parts, What Every American Needs to Know About the Congressional “Pay-For” Game (Part 1) and What Every American Needs to Know About the Congressional “Pay-For” Game (Part 2).

The Transform Podcast has the episode Conversations with Marianne: Economist Richard Wolff.

Economist and Professor Richard Wolff analyzes the deficiencies of modern capitalism, articulating the benefits of a socialist system and the road to a more equitable society. He promotes not a radical shift in economic system, but a gradual transformation involving a shift in consciousness from profits before people to people above all else.

This may be the most intelligent interview of Richard Wolff that I have yet heard. Marianne Williamson got him to explain things that answer many of my questions about what Richard Wolff has been proposing since I have been listening to him.

Public Seminar has the article China’s Return to Global Dominance.

When future historians look back on our discordant times, they will surely report an epochal shift of global importance: a transition from failed attempts to restore America’s greatness to China’s return, after two centuries of subjugation, to world pre-eminence. The writing is already on the wall, but strange prejudices, bitter disputes and conflicting predictions currently obscure the implications of such a transformation.

This article is perhaps the most well balanced analysis of China I have ever read. Every time he seemed to be bordering on going off the deep end in one direction or another, he rescued his analysis by talking about the possibilities of things working out better than the naysayers were predicting. He addressed the concerns of the naysayers without dismissing their concerns. The biggest advantage of the analysis is to admit what is unknown about the future.

YouTube has the Lucas Kunce Interview. This is only the first half of the interview.

Krystal and Saagar are joined by former Marine Lucas Kunce to go through all of the lies told about the war in Afghanistan and more.

I am going to embed the full uncut episode. I am probably not supposed to do this, but since nobody reads this blog, it is probably a safe thing for me to do. The link below the embedded video will take you directly to the interview which starts at 1:18:48 in the embedded video.

Here is a link to go to just the Lucas Kunce Extended Interview: 1:18:48 – 1:52:46.

Lucas Kunce is connected to the America Economic Liberties Project. On the page about the problem there is a section discussing the solution.

Securing economic liberty for everyone in America means empowering consumers, workers, and communities and freeing them from discrimination, extortion, and abuse from unchecked monopolies and predatory finance. It means ensuring entrepreneurs and businesses are able to succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work. And it means broadly distributing wealth and market power to promote equitable political power and safeguard American democracy.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution or single bill to pass to guarantee economic liberty for all. Instead, our democratic institutions must aggressively and vigilantly wield a suite of powerful policy tools — like aggressive corporate oversight, antitrust enforcement, anti-corruption measures, financial regulation, international trade arrangements, and a reinvigorated administrative state — to challenge monopolies’ dominance over our economy and democracy. It is up to us — as consumers, workers, business people, and citizens — to make sure that they do.

Michael Hudson Lecture series Global Financial Empire. Watch this before it gets censored out of existence.

The Political Economy of Globalization

As of this posting, only three parts of the lecture series have been released.

Global Financial Empire 1

Global Financial Empire 2

Global Financial Empire 3

The 3rd in a 10 part lecture series for the Global University for Sustainability, Hong Kong.

Michael Hudson has published the article Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover.

Abstract

Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear away the legacy of feudalism—the landlords, bankers, and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. However, that reform movement failed. Today, the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector has regained control of government, creating neo-rentier economies.

The aim of this postindustrial finance capitalism is the opposite of industrial capitalism as known to nineteenth-century economists: it seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent, not industrial capital formation.

Tax favoritism for real estate, privatization of oil and mineral extraction, and banking and infrastructure monopolies add to the cost of living and doing business. Labor is increasingly exploited by bank debt, student debt, and credit card debt while housing and other prices are inflated on credit, leaving less income to spend on goods and services as economies suffer debt deflation.

Today’s new Cold War is a fight to internationalize this rentier capitalism by globally privatizing and financializing transportation, education, health care, prisons and policing, the post office and communications, and other sectors that formerly were kept in the public domain. In Western economies, such privatizations have reversed the drive of industrial capitalism. In addition to monopoly prices for privatized services, financial managers are cannibalizing industry by leveraging debt and high-dividend payouts to increase stock prices.

This article explains so much of what we and our politicians need to understand to govern the USA.

Here are a couple of excerpts that hint at all that is in the article.

The economy as a whole has suffered. Debt-fueled housing costs in the United States are so high that if all Americans were given their physical consumer goods for free — their food, clothing and so forth — they still could not compete with workers in China or most other countries. That factor is a major reason why the US economy is deindustrializing. Thus, this policy of creating wealth by financialization undercuts the logic of industrial capitalism.
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Another reason for deindustrialization is the rising cost of living stemming from conversion of public infrastructure into privatized monopolies. As the United States and Germany overtook British industrial capitalism, a major key to industrial advantage was recognized to be public investment in roads, railroads, and other transportation; education; public health; communications; and other basic infrastructure.

The last paragraph from above explains why the policy of privatizing old infrastructure to “pay for” new infrastructure is so insane. We seem to have no understanding of why we built the old infrastructure, and why we need to add more.

This article is from the first chapter of the upcoming book ^«Cold War 2.0. The Geopolitical Economics of Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial Capitalism^»

YouTube has the video The Obscene Obstacles to Global Vaccine Distribution.

Lori Wallach, of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, and Jayati Ghosh, economics professor at UMass Amherst, discuss how first world countries are protecting pharma companies’ exorbitant profits, at the expense of vaccinating people living in the Global South and thereby also endangering everyone in the world.

This issue could be the death knell for the USA empire.