Paul Krugman’s latest column in The New York Times is Fiscal Fever Breaks.

… in fact, we’d probably be close to full employment now but for the unprecedented fiscal austerity of the past three years.
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Still, does any of this matter? You could argue that it doesn’t — that fiscal scolds may have lost control of the conversation, but that we’re still doing terrible things like cutting off benefits to the long-term unemployed. But while policy remains terrible, we’re finally starting to talk about real issues like inequality, not a fake fiscal crisis. And that has to be a move in the right direction.

If we truly are shifting the terms of the debate, now is the time to keep up the pressure.  Let us not rest on our laurels.  We need to start implementing the next stage while we think several stages ahead.

If he hadn’t been so specific, I might have added the following to my list of favorite quotes:

As the old saying goes, they used Reinhart-Rogoff the way a drunk uses a lamppost — for support, not illumination.

According to my extensive research on Google, the “original quote” is:

Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

or

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts — for support rather than illumination.

The first version is attributed to Vin Scully by brainyquote.com.  The second version is connected to Andrew Lang (March 31 1844 – July 20 1912), but wikiquote.com really claims the original author has not been identified

Alternet has the story The P.U.-Litzers: Here Are the Stinkiest Media Moments of 2013. I wonder if this prize will rise to the level of the Ig® Nobel Prize.

I’ll give you one sample of The P.U.-Litzers.

–The Sponsors Speak Award: PBS

The January 23 episode of PBS series Nova was a mostly upbeat report on drones and surveillance. What viewers may not have known about “Rise of the Drones” was that it was funded in part by Lockheed Martin–the giant aerospace corporation that just happens to be a major drone manufacturer.

As a recent purchaser of Lockheed Martin stock, I found this particularly interesting.  Also as a reformed watcher of NOVA, this selection is interesting.  And to think that NOVA’s funding by the Koch brothers could ever have any influence on their editorial content; how absurd.

Ralph Nader has the blog post The Wild and Cruel Gap Between Debtors and Creditors.

In his fine new book Debtors’ Prison, Robert Kuttner recounts the history of debt, including the centuries when under Anglo-American law debtors were imprisoned or executed. He also describes how large corporate debtors today get bailed out or go through bankruptcy proceedings that save the company under a sweetheart rebirth process, complete with allowing executive compensations past and present.

The individual debtors, however, are driven deeper into debt with fiendishly high interest rates (as high as 30% on unpaid credit card balances to over 400% on rolled over payday loans and rent-to-own rackets). Then there are the hundreds of different fees, penalties and costly fine-print impositions that ravage consumer borrowers.

I am surprised at how few people seem to understand all that is going on.  The people who don’t seem to understand include Joe Biden who pushed the draconian tightening of bankruptcy laws for individuals, but not corporations.

This just proves that the Supreme Court was wrong in proclaiming that corporations are people.  In fact, corporations are better than people according to our laws.  We need an addition to the Bill of Rights that would say that all people will be accorded all the same privileges that are accorded to corporations.  Or would it be better to say that no corporation can be given a privilege that individual people do not get?

Who remembers this from the 14th Amendment “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Does abridgment include giving someone a right not given to others?  What about immunity from punishment because of childhood affluenza?

Naked Capitalism highlighted the Bill Mitchell – billy blog article I fell off the left-right continuum today.

Second, Bill Keller says that in relation to “entitlement”:

The left-left seems to believe that government investments — roads and bridges, clean energy, education, etc. — and more-generous safety-net benefits can all be had by milking the rich and cutting military spending. Most centrists would raise taxes some and cut defense spending some, but they say that unless we also curb the growth of entitlements, the stampede of baby boomers into Social Security and Medicare will crowd out everything else.

The crowding out will only come if the US runs out of real resources that can be deployed to service the needs of the older citizens.

Increasing benefits to the poor might put a strain on real resources in the future (although I doubt it) which means that other cohorts will have to be deprived. But this has nothing to do with the capacity of the US government to purchase what real resources are available.
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Most of this dispute in US democratic politics spreads more widely. It also is based on the fact that the “centre-left” is nothing like a reasonable depiction of centrist positions. They represent positions that the right-wing used to advance especially in economic matters.

They perpetuate the neo-liberal myths about government financial capacity and then demonise positions that used to be centrist. Further, the new left still refuse to embrace a truly progressive view of the monetary system.

They remain locked into believing that currency-issuing governments have financial constraints. Until they jettison that mythology they will remain populist but ineffective.

I am a firm believer that it is the “real resources” that matter as indicated in the first Mitchell paragraph above.  You can use debts and deficits as a convenient way to measure things, but if those measures contradict what looking at real resources tells you, then something is wrong with your interpretation of the meaning of the convenient measurement quantities.

I have used that concept throughout my career developing computer simulation programs.  If the simulation goes against your intuition of how the real system should behave, then you need to look at the discrepancy very carefully.  It could be that your intuition is wrong, or it could be that the simulation is wrong.  In either case, you need to pin down what is happening.  Either you find a bug in the software, or you find a new insight into how the real system works.

In economics, when the economic theory diverges from your intuition about how the real economy operates, then you shouldn’t just blindly pick the theory or your intuition as being correct.  You need to dig more deeply to see if you can find other ways to resolve the divergence until you know which one, theory or intuition, is closer to reality.

Well, I took Ralph Nader’s advice and went over to his website.  The first article that caught my attention was Two Challengers – Both One of a Kind.

Two distinctly different Americans with distinctly similar, independent thinking and progressive values passed away last week. The great accounting professor Abraham Briloff (age 96) who relentlessly and brilliantly took apart the failures of his profession to insist on honest and ethical corporate accounting, and Tom Laughlin (age 82), the jolting producer and star of the ‘Billy Jack’ films who broke the Hollywood industry’s rules with sagas of fighting for justice. Although they never knew each other, they both championed fair play and courage to face the grim realities of the day.

Of course, I had never heard of Briloff, but I do remember Tom Laughlin and his ‘Billy Jack’ films. Unfortunately, I never appreciated what ‘Billy Jack’ was all about.  Or maybe, I’d had enough of that genre in the Walking Tall movies with Joe Don Baker.

Based on the life of Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser whom (sic) almost single-handily cleaned up his small town of crime and corruption, but at a personal cost of his family life and nearly his own life.

There is only so much fighting a losing battle for truth and justice that one can take.  Your threshold may be much different from mine.

The Real News Network has part 3 of the Nader series – On Florida in 2000 and What to Do Next – Ralph Nader on Reality Asserts Itself (3/3).

NADER: You see, here’s the point, Paul. We’ve got to get over this. We’ve got to basically say everyone’s got a right to run. Everybody’s going to try to get votes from one another. Therefore, everyone’s either a spoiler of one another or none of them are spoilers of one another. They called me a spoiler in 2000 after Bush stole the election all the way to the Supreme Court. I mean, I would think he’s a mega spoiler of the Democratic Party. But no, they basically have a political bigotry that don’t you dare challenge the Democratic Party, no matter how corporatized and indentured it is, from the left in the electoral arena. Well, you can write editorials for The Nation, you know, you can pick at the White House, but don’t get real serious.

In 2000, I was definitely one of those liberals who shunned Ralph Nader. You can see in this video interview how hard it is for Paul Jay to come to terms with what Nader is saying even now. So, lately since about 2004, I have come at least as far as what Ralph Nader said in part 2 of this series – At least we can go after the Democrats in the primaries.

I am experiencing my own min-Nader situation trying to convince fellow “progressives” that it is good policy to hold a Democratic politician’s feet to the fire in a primary. Don’t announce before they even run that despite all the bad things you know about their policies that you are going to support them no matter what. Didn’t your parents (or someone) ever teach you how to negotiate?

See the previous parts of this interview at my blog posts –

McCarthyism Made Us Veer Away From a Systemic Doctrine for Change – Ralph Nader on RAI (1/3)

and

Are Nader-Like Reforms Still Possible? – Ralph Nader on Reality Asserts Itself (2/3).

The Real News Network has the second part of the series with Ralph Nader – Are Nader-Like Reforms Still Possible? – Ralph Nader on Reality Asserts Itself (2/3).

JAY: So one of the things that’s blocking that from happening is that, you know, every two years is an election, and every two years it is, if you don’t support Democratic Party candidates, you’re going to elect Republicans, and people get caught up and paralyzed by this.

NADER: Well, that’s where you go into–

JAY: And ’cause there is some truth to that.

NADER: –you go into the primaries.

JAY: There’s some truth to it.

NADER: Yeah, because you’ve got gerrymandered districts. So you’ve got most of the districts are dominated Republican/Democrat. Where they’re insecure is not in November; they’re insecure in their primary. So you attack them in their primary with progressive candidates. That’s–.

JAY: Within the Democratic Party.

NADER: Yeah, even the Republican Party. Listen, we had Republican senators and representatives–the auto safety bill, the first federal regulation of the powerful auto industry for pollution control and safety, passed unanimously in the House of Representatives.

When you hear Nader talk the way he does in this interview it is almost enough to get you to believe. I can hardly wait to listen to part 3 and blog about it hear.

A good question for my local readers – Do you think this would be enough to rejuvenate the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee?

See the other parts of this interview at my blog posts –

McCarthyism Made Us Veer Away From a Systemic Doctrine for Change – Ralph Nader on RAI (1/3)

and

On Florida in 2000 and What to Do Next – Ralph Nader on Reality Asserts Itself (3/3)

Alternet has the article by Dean Baker – Massive Inequality Didn’t Just Happen—It Was Engineered by Conservative Government Policies.

The problem is that President Obama wants the public to believe that inequality is something that just happened. It turns out that the forces of technology, globalization, and whatever else simply made some people very rich and left others working for low wages or out of work altogether. The president and other like-minded people feel a moral compulsion to reverse the resulting inequality. This story is 180 degrees at odds with the reality. Inequality did not just happen, it was deliberately engineered through a whole range of policies intended to redistribute income upward.
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But the key point is that inequality didn’t just happen; it was the result of government policy. That is why people who actually want to see inequality reduced, and for poor and middle class to share in the benefits from growth, are not likely to be very happy about President Obama’s speech on the topic. His comment about the government being a bystander ignores the real source of the problem. Therefore it is not likely that he will come up with much by way of real solutions.

Those government policies that engineered this problem can be reversed.  Then we can try to engineer a policy that does not result in massive inequality.  Remember that life and economics are not binary systems.  It is not a choice between massive inequality and no inequality.  There are an infinite number of possible outcomes between these two extremes.  If we had any sense, we would stop pushing for less inequality before we got to the point of making life worse for everybody just so we could get more equality.  The goal is not equality for equality’s sake.  The goal is to have as decent a living standard for all as is possible.  The focus on the current massive inequality is just to show an obvious indicator that we are far from where we ought to be.

In the current situation, massive inequality is a good measure of our not making the economy work to provide at least a decent standard of living for all.  Making the economy work for all is the real goal. When inequality is not as massive as it is today, inequality will stop being  a good measure of how well we are doing in achieving our primary goal.

The Real News Network has the video Kansas Board of Regents Undermine Academic Freedom at State Universities.

Draconian measure enacted by Kansas Board of Regents that effectively ends tenure and limits academic freedom could be replicated at colleges nationwide

In my 4 day old blog post The Kansas Regents (Casually) End Academic Freedom, you had to read what William Black had to say. In this post you can sit back and watch the video about him discussing the same topic. Maybe seeing is believing.