theAnalysis.news has the article Bill Black: Cities Face Catastrophe; Finance a Cancer on Real Economy.

As part of its management of the current economic crisis, the Federal Reserve will spend approximately 750 billion dollars to prop up the corporate bond market. It’s also buying junk bonds, exchange traded funds and even directly buying into the stock market.

Who’s managing all this for the Fed? BlackRock, of course, the massive asset manager to know more about the extent of BlackRock power and the tremendous concentration of ownership that’s taken place, read my article on the Analysis.news site titled, Three Investment Banks Control More Wealth than the GDP of China, and Threaten our Existence.

None of this is in the center of popular discussion. This is going to be the biggest disaster we have seen in hundreds of years. Long after this people will wonder why we couldn’t have seen this coming. The answer is that we don’t want to hear about this or see it. It is too horrible to contemplate. There are things we can do to prevent this disaster, but it is easier to pretend it isn’t going to happen.

By the way, I am glad to see that Paul Jay is back at it after the coup at The Real News Network. Paul Jay took with him the Real out of the Real News Network when they threw him out.

Along with the above article there is a podcast Paul Jay on Law and Disorder. This concerns the deeper issues behind out current problems.

This embedded recording stops at a little over 18 minutes.

This link goes out to about 22 minutes, but neither of them are the whole interview.

The whole 27 minute interview is in the article Sacrificing Workers Lives is Back to Work Plan – Paul Jay

YouTube has a video clip The Mondragon Cooperatives.

This is a socialist idea I am learning about, but a 2 minute 40 second clip does not answer all my questions about how to make this work. When I see the movie, I will learn more, but it is going to take more than one movie to answer many of my questions.

The movie has a web page Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work

I have no idea whether or not anything in this video is true or not. If there is a concerted effort to suppress this video, it would seem awfully suspicious. If this video is wrong, then people should challenge it with evidence.

Some notes I took as I watched the video.

Vitamin C, D, and zinc.  

Hydroxychloroquine and AZT.   

This is hard to convey in words as I have tried to do recently. Maybe this picture will help. It stretches the credulity of most ordinary people. Maybe this is why they think they cannot understand Modern Money Theory. It is not MMT’s fault. This is the way it really works.

Here is the way money creation happens in the USA. 0ne of the purposes of Modern Money Theory is to explain this process that current USA laws require for the USA federal government to spend deficit money. MMT does not create this situation. MMT just explains it. If the USA federal legislature chose to do so, it could change the rules to reduce this to only require the first transaction, and eliminate the other four.

The Intercept has the article Screen New Deal: Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia.

Democracy Now has the interview Screen New Deal: Naomi Klein on How Companies Like Google Plan to Profit in High-Tech COVID Dystopia.

In her new report for The Intercept on the “Screen New Deal,” Naomi Klein looks at how the coronavirus pandemic is more high-tech than previous disasters — and how the future we’re being rushed into could transform our lives into a “living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.” She joins us to discuss what she found, and says, “I think we’re going to see very incomplete so-called solutions … that massively benefit private tech interests.”

About the hysteria that China is getting ahead of us in AI, let me remind you that in 1982 Japan embarked on what it called Fifth Generation computing. It turned into a blind alley. AI did not evolve in the direction that Japan bet the farm on.

At Digital Equipment Corporation, my group was dabbling in massively parallel computing. I even have a patent with Gabriel Bischoff in parallel computing that was not massive. Method and apparatus for circuit simulation using parallel processors including memory arrangements and matrix decomposition synchronization.

MasPar was a spinoff of the hardware development of a massively parallel computer at Digital Equipment Corporation. Gabriel Bischoff, in my group, worked on software development of an application on this computer while the hardware development was still at Digital. Gabriel and I worked several levels down the hierarchy from Jeff Kalb.

Do the people of Sturbridge understand that they have the power to remove from the House Ways and Means Committee the biggest roadblock in the country for Medicare for all? It frustrates me that there are Progressive voters who are scouring the country to find a candidate to promote, and they don’t even know about Alex Morse in our own CD1 here in Massachusetts. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Richard Neal has been taking funding from the private health insurance industry to block any efforts to get Medicare For All.

Alex Morse has broader goals than just Medicare For All, but if he accomplished nothing more than to retire Richard Neal, he would have done the country a huge service. Do people in Sturbridge have any idea what a golden opportunity has been placed within their reach?

It would be a shame for us to lose this opportunity because we didn’t know. Knowing is so simple if you just follow this link to the web page for Alex Morse for Congress.

I hear talk about how we need to scare the powers that be who are blocking Medicare For All in Congress. I can think of no better scare tactic than voting them out of office. In Massachusetts, we have a golden opportunity to knock one of those very powerful miscreants out of office. That miscreant is Richard Neal, the Chairman of the House Ways And Means Committee. Some of you in the Worcester area are actually in CD 1, but even if you aren’t, what’s holding you back? People in Worcester were willing to drive to New Hampshire to help Bernie Sanders. Western Massachusetts is not that far away. In the days of Covid-19, you don’t even have to leave your house to volunteer for Alex Morse.

Hello, somebody.

YouTube has the video How an MMT understanding informs fiscal stimulus design – Professor William Mitchell.

In this presentation, Professor William Mitchell will develop a set of criteria for assessing the likely effectiveness of a fiscal policy initiative. This particular crisis is unusual in that it combines supply and demand elements and government-enforced closures. In that sense, the design of the fiscal policy intervention is particularly difficult.

The presentation will go through a number of desirable fiscal options to match the specific situation using this framework.

We will also discuss why we should not worry about the size of the fiscal deficits that are required to overcome the medical and socio-economic problems created by the coronavirus crisis.

This talk answers a lot of practical questions about policy implementation through the lens of MMT. I like the way he explains what MMT tells you, and what your value system says you can do with that knowledge. MMT itself does not dictate policy. MMT tells you what you can do. Your value system tells you what you want to do. Rational people try to tailor there choices of what they want to do to fit what is possible to do.

More information:

1. http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog
2. http://www.billmitchell.org
3. http://www.mmted.org
4. http://www.fullemployment.net
5. https://modernmoneyaustralia.org/

YouTube has the video The Genesis of the 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic.

Michael Worobey, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, The University of Arizona

The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 was the most intense outbreak of disease in human history. It killed upwards of 50 million people (most in a six-week period) casting a long shadow of fear and mystery: nearly a century later, scientists have been unable to explain why, unlike all other influenza outbreaks, it killed young adults in huge numbers. I will describe how analyses of large numbers of influenza virus genomes are revealing the pathway traveled by the genes of this virus before it exploded in 1918. What emerges is a surprising tale with many players and plot lines, in which echoes of prior pandemics, imprinted in the immune responses of those alive in 1918, set the stage for the catastrophe. I will also discuss how resolving the mysteries of 1918 could help to prevent future pandemics and to control seasonal influenza, which quietly kills millions more every decade.

This is from 2014, so it does not discuss the current Covid-19 pandemic. However, it is an introduction into how scientists can investigate the origins of a pandemic. I only hope this science is being applied to the current situation.

YouTube has the video The Radical Imagination | Imagining How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Are Destroying Us.

Host Jim Vrettos interviews Michael Hudson, Economic Historian who offers his views in regards the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic is having in the US economy.

Naked Capitalism has the transcript in the article Finance Capitalism vs Industrial Capitalism: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Are Destroying Us

Michael Hudson lays it out as plainly as you are going to hear it.

Naked Capitalism has posted an extensive transcript titled Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton With Michael Hudson: US Coronavirus “Bailout” Is a $6 Trillion Scam.

MICHAEL HUDSON: No, the Federal Reserve was given special powers to create 10 times as many loans or swaps as others. The Federal Reserve represents the commercial banks and commercial investors.

Now here’s the problem: a lot of companies were issuing junk bonds. They were going way down in price, especially junk bonds for the fracking industry. The Federal Reserve says, “We’re going to be backed up by the Treasury. We can just create — as you know, Modern Monetary Theory — we can just create money on a computer, and swap. So we will, say, ‘Give us your poor.’ It’s like the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give us your poor, your oppressed,’ or Aladdin’s old lamps for new: Give us your junk bonds, and we will give you a bona fide Federal Reserve deposit.”

Here are the audio/video/transcript source from the original Transcript – US coronavirus ‘bailout’ scam is $6 trillion giveaway to Wall St – Economist Michael Hudson explains.