EpicLivestresm.com has an explanation of the live stream to save net neutrality.

One year ago, Big Cable’s dream came true: they killed net neutrality, giving ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T control over what we see and do online. Millions of people demanded that Congress restore net neutrality. In response, the House of Representatives passed the landmark Save the Internet Act. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — who has taken over $1 million in campaign donations from Big Cable — is refusing to allow his branch of Congress to vote on this popular bill. So on June 11th, net neutrality supporters in the Senate will try to force a vote using a procedure called “Unanimous Consent.”

The frame below will be the livestream (so I am told) on June 11,2019.

Naked Capitalism has the article Richard Murphy: For MMT (Long and Wonkish). While it is a mostly good article, it does say something that always irks the heck out of me.

The state will not enfeeble the private sector. That’s already feeble. What it will do is provide it with the contracts and work it needs to survive because it can’t think of what to do for itself.

Doesn’t anybody remember John Maynard Keynes? It is not that the private sector cannot think of what to do. It is that the private sector is behaving perfectly rationally in the face of low demand and high risk. Few individuals in the private sector can afford to take the risk of using their free cash to manufacture stuff that people can’t afford to buy. An individual could bankrupt herself or himself by tying up all their money in producing goods that it might take years for the economy to recover enough to buy.

Only a government that is sovereign in its own currency, etc. and can never go bankrupt has the deep enough pockets to fund the economy into recovery.

It is so simple, so logical, and so true, that I cannot understand how economists can fail to understand this or to remember this. How come all those people in the FDR administration could be so smart, and now people cannot even look back in history to read their explanation of what they did and why it worked?

You might wonder why the rich oligarchs’ don’t want us to remember how the government can help get us out of a recession or depression. When the economy tanks, the oligarchs are the ones with enough money that they can scoop up the nation’s assets at fire sale prices. It is much more profitable to use their money to gain control than it is to risk their money in the messy process of creating more production capacity than there is a current need for. In other words, the rich withhold their money from the economy until it is so starved that people will sell off their assets cheaply. There is a price that is low enough that there is not much risk in paying it, if you have the money. That’s called “buy low, and sell high.”

The Real News Network has the article D-Day: How the US Supported Hitler’s Rise to Power.

On June 6, 1944, Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, opening a second front against German fascism. The largest contingents of fighters were British, American, and Canadian. This battle has been depicted in movies and books as the decisive turning point of World War II, a ferocious struggle against a superior enemy. But as The Real News Network’s Paul Jay and author Peter Kuznick discuss, D-Day was also the moment where the United States’ opposition to communism could no longer outweigh its tacit acceptance of Nazism, and the U.S. industrialists who helped rearm Germany after World War I could no longer profit from Hitler’s Germany.

Is there anything that we know about the history of the USA that is even remotely true? If there is a lesson here, it may be that whatever the USA military/industrial/elitist complex wants, it must be bad for people.

The anti-communist fixation that our capitalists have had over the years has caused continued disaster for the USA and countries all over the world. We need to seek immediate psychiatric help.

In a message to the members of the Massachusetts House and Senate, Rep. Connolly introduces “Housing For All” legislative agenda

Our Commonwealth is facing an ongoing emergency in the shortage of affordable housing, extreme rent burden, foreclosure, and homelessness.

While we can all be proud of the work we did last session to enact the $1.8 billion Housing Bond Bill, and while there are many promising pieces of legislation on the table this session, as a lifelong tenant and as someone who grew up in public housing that was built by the Commonwealth, I believe we must broaden our ambitions and work toward a program of guaranteed Housing For All.

All of these bills deserve close scrutiny as to their workability, but they all deserve to be recognized as creative proposals worth discussing.

It does not make sense to let “the market” be totally responsible for providing some basic human needs when meeting those needs cannot make a profit. The public can pay the private sector to provide some of these needs, but ownership needs to be in public hands. Contracts with private companies to provide service must be relatively short term – no more than 1 year. Before there can be a contract renewal, the previous contract performance must be evaluated, and it must meet at least some minimum standards spelled out in the contract.

The Atlantic has the article What Democratic Contenders Are Missing in the Race to Revive Antitrust. There is not enough emphasis in the article of this excerpt.

By the 2000s, the ideas of the conservative Chicago School had become mainstream in antitrust circles. Robinson-Patman, a law intended to protect small businesses, was an easy target for Chicago School critics narrowly focused on efficiency and low consumer prices. Their attacks found a receptive audience in the federal judiciary. Among insiders, Robinson-Patman is now known as “zombie law.” It remains on the books, but regulators no longer bother trying to enforce it.

The naivete of this view of ant-trust is just astounding. The trusts and monopolies can get away with whatever they want if consumer prices are not raised. Corporations have figured out that if they hammer on suppliers and employees from their position of power, the courts won’t blink an eye. Never mind that monoply practice has always been to drive competitors out by lowering prices, only to raise them after they have driven all the competitors out. Big pharma is using that tactic today in obviously obscene ways. Where are the courts if they still belioeve that raising consumer prices is the one harm worthwhile stopping?

Roots Action handed out a flyer at the recent California Democratic State Convention. Joe Biden: “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble.”

I have extracted the text into one file that may be easier to print if you want to hand this out yourself. Click on the border to view the flyer in its own window.

New Economic Perspectives has an article that answers the question JAPAN DOES MMT? Whether you are for MMT or against it, the answer might surprise you.

Not that the size of the deficit—by itself—is important. What is important is whether government budget policy helps in the pursuit of the public and private interests. The deficit will always adjust to be “just the right size” to balance the other two sectoral balances. But that equality can be consistent with any growth rate—including a rate that is too low (deflationary) or too high (inflationary).

You’ll have to read the article to see the answer to the original question.

Peoples Policy Project has the article Social Wealth Fund for America.

In this paper, I propose that the US government tackle the problem of wealth inequality by creating a social wealth fund (swf) and issuing one share of ownership in the fund to every American. After the fund is created, the government will gradually accumulate assets for the fund to manage, such as stocks, bonds, and real estate. As the assets under management increase, the value of the shares held by the citizen-owners will increase, causing wealth inequality to fall. Although the citizen-owners will not be permitted to sell their shares, they will be paid a universal basic dividend (ubd) each year from the investment income earned by the fund.

This sounds a lot like a recent Sanders proposal as explained in VOX Bernie Sanders’s most socialist idea yet, explained

Bernie Sanders wants to help workers own a portion of the companies at which they are employed.

Per a report from the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein, Sanders is preparing a plan that would mandate corporations “regularly contribute a portion of their stocks to a fund controlled by employees, which would pay out a regular dividend to the workers.”

It is worth understanding the Government Pension Fund of Norway as an example of what some countries invest in with their “social security” equivalents. Here is an excerpt from the WikiPedia article to give you the gist of what is in the article.

Norway has experienced economic surpluses since the development of its hydrocarbon resources in the 70s. This reality, coupled with the desire to mitigate volatility stemming from fluctuating oil prices, motivated the creation of Norway’s Oil Fund, now the Government Pension Fund-Global (GPF-G).^[3] The instability of oil prices has been of constant concern for oil-dependent countries since the start of the oil boom, but especially so in the decades following the first oil shocks in the 1970s.^[4] As the real GDP of oil-exporting states is linked with the price of oil, it has been a goal of these exporters to stabilize oil consumption patterns, and a host of these exporting states singled out sovereign wealth funds as an effective policy tool for achieving this outcome.^[4] The adoption of the GPF-G has been in line global economic trends, especially investment patterns. International investment has increased at a significantly higher pace than either global GDP or global trade of goods and services, increasing by 175% over a period at which the former two metrics increased by 53% and 93% respectively.^[5]

For the purposes of this post, we can get some idea of Karl Marx’s labor theory of value by looking at the internet for a few sources.

The WikiPedia article Surplus value gives me this excerpt.

According to Marx’s theory, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.

Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme I took this excerpt.

“Starting from these basic principles, the German workers’ party strives by all legal means for the free state—and—socialist society: that abolition of the wage system together with the iron law of wages — and—exploitation in every form; the elimination of all social and political inequality.”

From an English translation of Karl Marx’s book Capital – Chapter Eight: Constant Capital and Variable Capital i took this excerpt.

The labourer adds fresh value to the subject of his labour by expending upon it a given amount of additional labour, no matter what the specific character and utility of that labour may be. On the other hand, the values of the means of production used up in the process are preserved, and present themselves afresh as constituent parts of the value of the product; the values of the cotton and the spindle, for instance, re-appear again in the value of the yarn. The value of the means of production is therefore preserved, by being transferred to the product. This transfer takes place during the conversion of those means into a product, or in other words, during the labour-process. It is brought about by labour; but how?

I take my own understanding of the stock market to shed some light on the fallacy of talking about value as a fixed quantity that can be calculated or even estimated.

In a fair stock market transaction, you have a seller that is willing to sell a stock at a price and a buyer who is willing to buy that stock at that price. There are many reasons why one person is willing to sell the stock and the buyer is willing to buy the stock at an agreed upon price. One reason may be a difference of opinion on what the future holds for that stock. Even if there is no difference of opinion on the future, the buyer and seller have different goals they are trying to achieve. In the case of a younger buyer with a long investment horizon and no need for the cash immediately, the goal may be total return on the investment. For an older, retired investor who wants to use the money from the stock as income, the immediate dividend payments during the retiree’s lifetime may be of more concern than the possible total returns. So the buyers and the sellers can agree on one price that is a good value for buyer to buy the stock, and the other sees that price as a good value to sell the stock.

Both can come away from the transaction completely satisfied with the result of the trade of stock for money. Neither one of them has to feel exploited by the transaction.

Extending this to the wages, the worker can put a value on her or his labor that she or he is selling it for, and the employer can come to an agreement to pay that wage as a good value to buy the labor. Neither one is necessarily being exploited.

None of this says that a buy/sell situation cannot be exploitation of one side or the other, or even both sides. However, calculating a “value” is not independent from whose side of the transaction is doing the calculating. In real life, it is not so easy to figure out what the “value” of anything is. Any system that depends on being able to make such a calculation is not something that can be automated by a robot with no idea of the human part of the equation.