Politico has this great article Inside Biden and Warren’s Yearslong Feud.

“For a decade, Orrin Hatch, Joe Biden, Jim Sensenbrenner, and dozens of others in Congress decried the state of bankruptcy laws that permitted people to take advantage of financial institutions,” Warren wrote in a 2008 post on Credit Slips, a bankruptcy law blog, after Tim Russert asked Clinton and Edwards about their votes for the bill during a Democratic presidential debate. “With a recession bearing down, the language of bankruptcy has shifted from ‘abusers’ who ‘take advantage of lenders’ to language of concern over the growing stress on hard-working families.” While voting for the bill had won senators the gratitude of lobbyists who write campaign checks, “that door swings both ways,” Warren went on. “Those who wanted to snuzzle with the lobbyists leave themselves vulnerable to counterattacks.”

Funny Elizabeth Warren didn’t mention this in 2016 when she tried to sell us on what a great President that Hillary Clinton would make. Maybe she had forgotten what she had written 8 years earlier, but I still remembered it.

Every time this Politico article seems to be softening the case against Biden, it comes back with a rebuttal that makes Biden look worse.

Salon has the article Reporter Sharmine Narwani on the secret history of America’s defeat in Syria.

I want to have a record of this article on my blog for use when I run into believers in the USA propaganda about Bashir Al Assad and Syria. Even Tulsi Gabbard shows no signs of understanding this.

As I hinted a moment ago, your reporting is very distinctive for its granular detail. In Syria you’re more or less in a class by yourself in this respect. One of your sources especially intrigued me, Father Frans van der Lugt, the Dutch priest who lived many years in Homs. Tell us about him. I should mention for readers’ sake, he was killed in Homs in the spring of 2014.

I never interviewed Father Frans, though I did go to his church gravesite during a visit to Homs shortly after he was killed. Through his writings, this Dutch priest gave us some rare, objective insights into what took place in the early days of the crisis — events he witnessed first-hand.

In September 2011 he wrote: “From the start there has been the problem of the armed groups, which are also part of the opposition… The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order then to blame the government.”

And then in January 2012 he expanded: “From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”

The 75-year-old Father Frans was shot at point-blank range by a gunman while sitting in a church garden in the rebel-occupied part of Homs….

How do I know that I don’t have a confirmation bias in sharing this story? I don’t know. However, since you get so much of the same crap from our oligarchs’ news media, I figure that knowing that there is another side to the story is a valuable service. I have to wonder how the USA public has the hubris to support going into somebody else’s country without being able to know who is telling the truth. What amazes me is our need to do something, anything, without caring if it is the right thing or the wrong thing just as long as it is something.

April 25, 2019

When I mentioned the item about term limits to a few friends at lunch, they asked why Bahar al-Assad was still in office. So I looked it up.

First is the Wikipedia article President of Syria

According to article 88 of the Syrian constitution, the president runs for a 7-year term after he is elected, and can only be reelected for one more term.

Next is the Wikipedia article Bashar al-Assad

On 10 July 2000, Assad was elected as President, succeeding his father, who died in office a month prior. In the 2000 and subsequent 2007 election, he received 99.7% and 97.6% support, respectively, in uncontested referendums on his leadership.

On 16 July 2014, Assad was sworn in for another seven-year term after receiving 88.7% of votes in the first contested presidential election in Ba’athist Syria’s history.

There seems to be a slight oopsie in here. Bashar al-Assad was first elected in 2000. He can only hold office for a maximum of 14 years. It is 2019, and he is still in office. Could someone explain?

YouTube has the video Evaluating Modi: Interview with Mohandas Pai.

Here is something you will never hear in the USA oligarchs’ news media. Not being a follower of Indian politics myself, I had no answer when I heard criticisms of Modi. Now I know just a tad more. At least I know there is another side to the story.

I have read a significatn part of the book Being Different : An Indian Challenge To Western Universalism by Rajiv Malhotra.

One of the ideas in the book that was eyeopening was his explanation of the difference between tolarance and mutual respect. Here is a YouTube video of his explanation Rajiv Malhotra: Difference Between Tolerance and Mutual Respect

There is a Rajiv Malhotra Official YouTube page. There is a video Explaining Who We Are.

The Real News Network has the 4 part Modern Monetary Theory – A Debate Between Randall Wray and Gerald Epstein.

Randall Wray, one of the founders of the economic theory known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) lays out some of its main arguments. Paul Jay hosts.

Gerald Epstein outlines his criticisms of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Paul Jay hosts

These four episodes are a very valuable service that The Real News Network is providing. Instead of two or three sides talking past each other, it is important for these various sides to discuss these ideas in a more interactive way. As Paul Jay says, these 4 episodes are just the beginning.

MIT Technology Review has the article Congress wants to protect you from biased algorithms, deepfakes, and other bad AI.

There will likely soon be another bill to address the spread of disinformation, including deepfakes, as a threat to national security, she says. Another bill introduced on Tuesday would ban manipulative design practices that tech giants sometimes use to get consumers to give up their data.

Maybe this isn’t the most important thing in this article, but I think it shows a worrisome naivete.

I looked up Edward Bernays in Google, and found an article. Maybe it has taken the threat of AI to awaken people to what has been going on since at least as far back as WW I. I found the article Propaganda by Edward Bernays (1928).

The TED video Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy makes some excellent points, but also seems to lack any knowledge of Edward Bernays, and what he stood for. (I wrote the previous sentence after having been handed the last 6 minutes of this video. As I pasted the video here, and started to watch it again, I found out what I was was missing in the extremely important first 9 minutes.)

YouTube has the video …and forgive them their debts.

If you want to understand what the 2020 Presidential election is all about, watch at least the first 30 minutes of this video Where Michael Hudson gives you an excellent summary of his book. The rest of the 2 hours is well worth watching. It is equally eye opening, but I know that many people may just not have the time to devote.

Join Dr. Michael Hudson, New Testament Scholar Dr. Aliou Niang and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Biblical Scholar and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, for a discussion on the history of debt and what it means for our context today. Moderated by Shailly Gupta Barnes and the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice.

Debt plays a central role in upholding the economic and social order of the day. In the US, mounting debt and the crippling financialization of our lives is taken as fact. Our political leaders see no real problem and offer no serious solution. This was not always the case. Throughout antiquity, widespread debt-cancellation was understood as a moral and practical necessity. In a significant new book, …and Forgive Them Their Debts, economist Michael Hudson traces the biblical demand against debt and the long history of economic jubilees. Counter to dominant history and theology, Hudson reveals how the Bible itself is concerned most with the moral failure of economic systems, rather than personal sin.

Naked Capitalism also featured this video in their article Empire and Economics: The Long History of Debt Cancellation from Antiquity to Today

April 20, 2019

Toward the end of the first hour (at about 54 minutes) Dr. Aliou Niang talked about the “Parable of the Talents”, in Matthew 25:14–30. He mentioned the book “Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed” by William R. Herzog II. I would like to obtain the book to see how the parable is explained the way Niang interpreted it.

Common Dreams has the article ‘We Can Be Whatever We Have the Courage to See’: New Video From AOC Envisions a #GreenNewDeal Future.

The article includes the video A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a film narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and illustrated by Molly Crabapple.

A political movement without a vision won’t go far. It is wonderful to see movements making the effort to share the vision.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies has the Facebook post A very detailed walkthrough of Modern Monetary Theory, the big new left economic idea.

This leads to a Vox article Modern Monetary Theory, explained.

Modern Monetary Theory is having a moment.

The theory, in brief, argues that countries that issue their own currencies can never “run out of money” the way people or businesses can. But what was once an obscure “heterodox” branch of economics has now become a major topic of debate among Democrats and economists with astonishing speed.

This article is an OK explanation, but it does not show a really deep understanding. What disturbs me in particular are the frequent statements that “this is not a problem now” without a word about exactly why it is not a problem now, but what would be the circumstance in which it would be a problem.

Here is one example of what I don’t like.

In the discussion of hyperinflation, there is no real mention of the cause of many past hyperinflations. In most of those cases, if not all of them, there was a sudden drop in the supply of goods relative to an existing supply of money. If the definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, that situation can occur because of a change in the supply of goods as well as a change in the supply of money. People have been conditioned to always think only of the supply of money. The government reaction to the drop in supply and resultant inflation, might have been to print more money, but that was certainly a misbegotten strategy that made matters worse.

There is a reason why William Mitchell, L. Randall Wray, and Martin Watts wrote the book Macroeconomics to explain all this, as the article mentions. Attempts to write a short explanation inevitably lead to their own failures. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that having read a brief introduction equips you to be a consultant on or a teacher of the subject. I am no consultant or teacher, but even I see the failings of the brief explanation.

I make this post to starkly highlight something that has been bothering me about the propaganda we are being fed about starving children. I have not chosen images to be “fair and balanced”.

The USA government is helping Saudi Arabia to fight a war in Yemen. See the next picture from and article in The Irish Times, More than one million children starve as Yemen war rages.

This is a war we refuse to stop supporting.

Now let’s move on to a war the USA wants to start to protect the starving children in Venezuela. Here is a Huffington Post article Hundreds Of Children In Venezuela Are Starving To Death, Says New York Times Report.

I suppose it is worth pointing out that a lot of whatever starving is going on in Venezuela is caused by the 20 years of economic war that the USA has fought against Venezuela.

If government of the USA refuses to back out of a war that is causing starvation in Yemen, but wants to start a military war in Venezuela because of lesser dire starvation in Venezuela, what is the logic or consistency of our attitude toward the two situations?

Let me make it clear. I am not saying that there is no need for concern about the children in Venezuela. Exactly the opposite. If the USA starts a war in Venezuela, the condition of the children in Venezuela will start looking more like the starving children of Yemen.