Naked Capitalism has the post Michael Hudson: U.S. Economic Warfare and Likely Foreign Defenses.

The American promise is that the victory of neoliberalism is the End of History, offering prosperity to the entire world. But beneath the rhetoric of free choice and free markets is the reality of corruption, subversion, coercion, debt peonage and neofeudalism. The reality is the creation and subsidy of polarized economies bifurcated between a privileged rentier class and its clients, their debtors and renters. America is to be permitted to monopolize trade in oil and food grains, and high-technology rent-yielding monopolies, living off its dependent customers. Unlike medieval serfdom, people subject to this End of History scenario can choose to live wherever they want. But wherever they live, they must take on a lifetime of debt to obtain access to a home of their own, and rely on U.S.-sponsored control of their basic needs, money and credit by adhering to U.S. financial planning of their economies. This dystopian scenario confirms Rosa Luxemburg’s recognition that the ultimate choice facing nations in today’s world is between socialism and barbarism.

I have skimmed the article, but I’ll have to go back and read it more carefully.

RT has the episode Orange coin good, orange man bad (E1412).

Bitcoin is gold.

It’s fun to watch Max Keiser going nuts over bitcoin.

Several hundred years ago you could have said “tulip bulbs are gold”. For a while it seemed to be true. Even saying “gold is gold” is hardly more meaningful. People have been searching for thousands of years for something that is a “store of value”. As Richard Wolff has said, many people have theories of value including Karl Marx, but nobody can connect a theory of value with a theory of prices.

This is not to say that some of the things that Max Keiser is predicting won’t actually happen. Where I think he is wrong is in thinking that Bitcoin isn’t subject to all the same problems. Bitcoin is only a store of value as long as enough people think it is a store of value. I have no way of knowing how long that will be, and neither does Max Keiser.

I wonder if people like Max Keiser are thinking that bitcoin is different because there is a theoretical limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be found. When the idea of fractional reserve banking meets bitcoin and the world of financial derivatives meets the world of bitcoin, the idea that bitcoin is a stable store of value will go up in smoke with all the other things that were thought to be stable stores of value.

Labor Theory of Value — Richard Wolff.

The Conversation has the article Neoliberalism has tricked us into believing a fairytale about where money comes from.

There is nothing natural about money. There is no link to some scarce essential form of money that sets a limit to its creation. It can be composed of base metal, paper or electronic data – none of which is in short supply. Similarly – despite what you may have heard about the need for austerity and a lack of certain cash-generating trees – there is no “natural” level of public expenditure. The size and reach of the public sector is a matter of political choice.
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The question then becomes: if the state as represented by the central bank can create money out of thin air to save the banks – why can’t it create money to save the people?

For people who misunderstand money, or think they don’t understand money, here it is in a relatively short form. If you don’t know if you misunderstand money, read this, and compare it to what you think.

Market Watch has the article The eviction crisis is starting to look a lot like the subprime mortgage crisis.

“Now, a new study shows that not all evictions are created equal. Scholars at Georgia State University, in conjunction with a ProPublica journalist, examined “serial” eviction filings, or those done repeatedly by a landlord against a tenant. By comparing serial evictions to ordinary ones, the researchers found patterns of landlord behavior and intentions, some of which are reminiscent of the worst of the housing crisis a decade ago.

This might be a warning about the source of the next crash. The housing shortage is pushing up rents and prices, but doesn’t seem to be spurring increased construction. What are the chances that real estate will be the cause of two crashes in a row? If we didn’t fix the problem that caused the last crisis, there is no reason why we shouldn’t expect a rerun.

Compare this to what happened in the 1930s. There were many laws and changes in regulations that were meant to prevent a repeat. Those changes were successful until they atarted being repealed in the 1980s.

The Real News Network has the interview Jewish Activists of ‘Never Again’ Action Oppose Immigrant Detention Centers.

Molly Amster of Jews United for Justice explains why the concentration camp analogy is more than just rhetoric when it comes to Trump’s detention camps and policies.

This is a real eye opener. I went through some of the educational experiences that Molly Amster describes. I took the same lessons from those experiences. Of my four grandparents, only one, George Greenberg, was actually born in the USA. The other three were immigrants. Ida (Baker) Greenberg came here as a baby. My other two grandparents, Louis Kaplan and Pauline (Sokolov) Kaplan came as teenagers.

As I have been thinking of this immigration situation unfolding, an image came to mind. This was an image of a sinking ship, maybe the Titanic. There were all these people desperately trying to flee that sinking ship. Imagine if they had been confronted by people who wanted to see their papers before they could get on rescue boats. If they didn’t have the papers, imagine the “rescuers” telling them they had to go back to where they came from, the sinking ship.

Now think of the humane reaction to this sinking ship scenario. You strain to save everyone you can. You stretch your resources as far as they will go, and then stretch them some more. You don’t say, “Well I didn’t run their ship into an iceberg, why I should I be made to pay for their folly?”

This is a test for our country and how we react. We are not looking very good. That’s not taking into account that our country did really run their ship into an iceberg, so to speak.

Politifact has the article Donald Trump twists Ilhan Omar’s comments about al-Qaida.

Omar criticized Al-Shabab for terrorizing communities, but she questioned why Somalis are expected to condemn an attack that they were not a part of.

Further on in the article was this item.

At one point in her remarks, Omar said that “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” according to the YouTube video of the event.

I do remember that whenever these remarks by Ilhan Omar are discussed, that they are being totally misunderstood. I have a harder time remembering exactly what she said, and how twisted are the interpretations. For that reason I am posting this on my blog so that I can easily look it up.

One of the main reasons why I write this blog is so that I will have reference material with which to rebut the comments that I know are going to arise over and over again in the future.

I just noticed on Facebook that in October 2018 someone had sent me a link to the article How The Bush Family Made Its Fortune From The Nazis by John Loftus.

John Loftus, is a former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection.

For the Bush family, it is a lingering nightmare. For their Nazi clients, the Dutch connection was the mother of all money laundering schemes. From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine-talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team.

Here is another excerpt naming another famous name.

If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank’s lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles’ client as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles’s other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles’ cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously.

It is a pretty disgusting story, if true. At first, I wasn’t sure if I should believe this or post it on my blog. I did a little google searching on “Bush and Fritz Thyssen” to see if there was any corroboration. Among other links, I found a Global Research article from March 2016 Bush Family Links to Nazi Germany: “A Famous American Family” Made its Fortune from the Nazis. I also found The Guardian article from 2004 How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power

Democracy Now! has the episode Ousted Honduran President Zelaya: The 2009 U.S.-Backed Coup Helped Cause Today’s Migrant Crisis.

Since the 2009 U.S.-backed military coup in Honduras, extreme poverty and violence has skyrocketed in the country, forcing tens of thousands of Hondurans to flee to the U.S. with the hope of receiving political asylum. We speak with ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in the capital of Tegucigalpa about the 10th anniversary of the coup in Honduras, U.S. intervention in Central America and its link to today’s migration crisis.

Sorry if this video does not play. Democracy Now’s server seems to be on the blink. The link to the article at the beginning seems to still be working.

This excerpt from the translated transcript is almost an aside from the main discussion, but it makes a point I want to emphasize.

MANUEL ZELAYA: [translated] Well, there were some statements recently made by a U.S. senator that triumph in socialism was seen that it could set a bad example for the United States, because it could even impact domestic politics in the United States. They could not allow socialism, modern socialism, I would say, because this is a socialism that is different than the socialism one found in Europe during the Cold War. This is a socialism that accepts capital—not capitalism, but capital. It accepts private enterprise, not control by capitalism of the state, because we understand the concept of popular sovereignty, where sovereignty resides in the people. Power does not reside in a military or economic elite as under the neoliberal model.

This is a more sophisticated view of socialism than what you will hear from any USA politician including Bernie Sanders. This is a view that Democratic Socialists need to take to heart if they do not already do so.In some respects “capitalism of the state” could be the result of government taking back the functions that have been privatized over recent years in the USA. If the government takes these functions over and runs them “like a business”, then we just have “capitalism of the state”. We must never forget that the government took back these privatized functions because we realize that the functions need to be provided to the residents as a human right and for the good of society. The purpose of taking control back did not include making a profit for the state. We need to have a better measure than profit to know if the job is being done right or needs correction and improvement.

Jacobin Magazine has the article Meet Sydney Ember, the New York Times’ Senior Anti-Bernie Correspondent.

Big surprise: the New York Times reporter covering Bernie Sanders has a long record of unfairly attacking Sanders — while neglecting to mention that the sources she quotes are corporate lobbyists.

Every now and then it is nice to see a piece that explains why I call it The Dreaded New York Times. I don’t know about the latest crap that The Dreaded New York Times writes because I cannot stand to read anything that is written there anymore. To think I wasted a year or two of my college education because I used to read The Dreaded New York Times instead of doing my college work. I had to make up for that waste by staying in college for just about the amount of extra time that I had frittered away reading that “news” paper.

I still slavishly subscribed to and read The Dreaded New York Times for years after college until I finally grew up and could see it for what it wasn’t.

The Next Platform has the article New Approach Could Sink Floating Point Computation.

In this case, something better is posits, his third iteration of his “universal numbers” research. Posits, he says, will solve the most pressing problems of IEEE 754, while delivering better performance and accuracy, and doing it with fewer bits. Better yet, he claims the new format is a “drop-in replacement” for standard floats, with no changes needed to an application’s source code.
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Gustafson told us that a 32-bit posit can replace a 64-bit float in almost all cases, which would have profound implications for scientific computing.

This would have quite an impact on the software that I worked with for many years. I’d be interested to hear what Raj Vedam has to say about this.