The Real News Network has the article Paying for a Green New Deal with Modern Monetary Theory.

Dean Baker is being awfully disingenuous. In the big picture he is right, but what he loses in the details is terrible.

This was quite effectively demonstrated in the recovery from the Great Recession, in which the United States, the eurozone, and Japan have all struggled to increase their rates of inflation. In all three cases, the large-scale printing of money had a modest impact, at best, in raising the rate of inflation.

You cannot cite this experience without raising the question of the conditions under which this experience occurred, and what might happen under different conditions. The answer to what happened in the recent near economic collapse was that consumer demand was very low. Corporations were cutting capacity to shrink to the size of consumer demand. The infusion of money did not cause consumer price inflation because the infused money was not invested in hiring people to increase production capacity which was already too high relative to the level of consumer demand. Instead, the infusion of money was used to raise stock prices and some other asset prices. Much of the money was used to buy Treasury securities which essentially gave the money back to the Government for safe keeping. If for some other reason, consumer demand came back, all that excess money put into the economy by the central banks might come out of hiding to overstimulate the economy and create inflation.

The upshot of this analysis is that governments need the proper mix between creating money and raising taxes. The proper mix changes with the circumstances.

Applying Modern Money Theory (MMT) is no better than applying neo-liberal economics if you do it without a deeper understanding than a few of the standard buzz words. I am surprised that Dean Baker could mess this up so badly.

The Real News Network has the episode Venezuela and Socialism – Mailbag with Paul Jay.

PAUL JAY: Not quite. Socialism, the way I see it, and as sort of the classical view, like Marx and Engels, and others, socialism isn’t some theory. Oh, let’s now have socialism. And so somehow either you have a revolution, or you elect somebody, and oh, now we’re gonna have socialism. It’s not how socialism develops. Socialism develops within the womb of capitalism. It happens spontaneously. Because it just makes sense when the economy itself is so socialized. So what does that mean?
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The issue here is socialism develops spontaneously. And people become conscious that social solutions just makes sense. And people develop that. Now, the people that own, the ownership class, they don’t like this, because it starts to threaten.

This little episode frames the issue in ways that we all ought to think about.

I found this link as a result of a conversation with Richard Clinton Maenpaa at last night’s We Want Bernie – Worcester meeting. There is no date on the video, but it is probably around 10 years old. This is on Linktv.

The Dreaded New York Times has the article Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras.

Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

The Dreaded NYT has answered one of the first questions that came to my mind about the crashes. I wondered why the engineers who designed the plane never thought that the MCAS system should warn the pilots when it decided to intervene and countermand the pilot’s inputs through their handling of the cockpit controls.

So the designers could and did foresee what could actually go wrong, but management decided that they could squeeze more profit by making these safety features optional if you paid extra for them.

Naked Capitalism has the article The #MMT Case for Progressive Taxes

If recent decades’ inflation rates are any indication, the U.S. is nowhere close to the point where spending exceeds the capacity of our real resources (mostly people) to produce, “supply” more stuff — the point where inflation starts to bite.

MMTers (like myself) should ask themselves why it is that all that deficit spending has not caused consumer price inflation? A little Keynesian economics explains this quite well. In the absence of enough consumer demand caused by the growing wealth and income inequality, there is absolutely no reason for the rich to invest in more production capacity. What they do “invest” in is financial derivatives, stock buy backs, and general vulture capitalism. Stock and some asset prices do get inflated. The Fed has injected way too much liquidity in the private economy exactly because injecting this liquidity is a weak monetary tool when strong fiscal tools are called for. If, by some strange chance, there is call to invest that liquidity hangover in the real economy, there could be high inflation. I hope the Fed and the government have a plan to suck that excess out of the economy fast enough. I don’t see what they could do that would be politically feasible.

Naked Capitalism has the post China’s Belt and Road Initiative vs Washington Consensus.

The situation is more promising in East Asia due to China’s diminished but sustained growth, and its almost unique rising labour share of national income.

If Chinese labor is really getting a rising share of national income, then there is a chance that Chinese hegemony will be quite different from USA hegemony.

Democracy At Work has the video and audio of Global Capitalism: US and China – 1 Global Economy, 2 Giants [March 2019].

The description below is not completely accurate.

These programs begin with 30 minutes of short updates on important economic events of the last month, then Prof. Wolff analyzes several major economic issues. For March 2019, these issues will include:

1. The record US gov’t budget deficit in 2018: causes and effects
2. The record US trade deficit in 2018: causes and effects
3. Unions reviving? Strikes, organizing and the looming strategic decision they face about socialism in the US

Interesting, entertaining, and educational. Richard Wolff is not a student of MMT, so what he says about debts and deficits is not MMT, but it has a certain truth to it if you know how to interpret it.

The way I interpret it is that what he describes as borrowing money to finance the deficits is true, but only because this is the way the USA laws have been written to require this scheme. As a country that is sovereign in our own currency and only borrows our own currency, we could finance the deficits without borrowing. For various reasons, good and bad, we choose not to do so.

Mint Press has the article “I Was The Terrorist”: Israeli Army Vet Gives Explosive Tell-All Interview to Abby Martin.

In a rare, candid conversation, Abby Martin interviews a former Israeli Army combat soldier who served as an occupier in Palestine’s Hebron City.

Eran Efrati spent years as a sergeant and combat soldier in the Israeli military, but has since become an outspoken critic of the occupation of Palestine and Israeli apartheid.

Efrati gives explosive testimony on the reality of his service and explains how war crimes are institutionalized, as well as how systematic the oppression against Palestinians really is in a war of conquest that will no-doubt be accelerated under the Trump Administration.

As one who entered the USA military in 1967, I can attest to the training that your enemy is both sub-human and super-human. This is what basic training tried to teach us about the North Vietnamese soldiers and people. This is what makes Eran Efrati’s testimony so believable to me.

Let me explain my first sentence. In Army training, we were constantly taught that the North Vietnamese soldiers had super-human capacity to kill us. We had to be very afraid of what their soldiers could do to us. On the other hand, they were sub-human in that they deserved no normal humanitarian concern from us.

There was a scene in the movie “Apocalypse Now” that demonstrated this for me too clearly. It involved a young Vietnamese girl on her boat. Her puppy had crawled into a covered basket. Suddenly, she was confronted by a USA soldier who was searching her boat for possible weapons. As he approached the girl and the basket, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew the soldier was extremely apprehensive of the situation because of the training (and experience) that any Vietnamese person could be a threat. When he opened the basket, I knew that the puppy would surprise him. I knew what his reaction would have to be because of his training. I also knew what the young girl’s reaction would have to be toward her pet. The outcome was absolutely inevitable. I doubt that other people in the audience that did not have military training could view this scene quite the way I did.

New Economic Perspectives has the article A Conspiracy Against MMT? Chicago Booth’s Polling and Trolling.

I am glad to see L. Randall Wray step into this fight, and not leave it all up to William K. Black.

The task ahead of us is bigger. The stakes are bigger. The future of humanity lies in the balance. Half measures will not do. It will take all of our available resources—and then some—to win this battle. The experts (and I’m not one of them) say we’ve got most of the technology we need. We’ve got unused resources to put to use. We can shift others from destructive uses to be engaged in constructive endeavors. We can mobilize the population for greater effort with the promise of greater equality and a shared but sustainable prosperity.

I just have to include the following excerpt:

In reality, OPEC caused both of our high inflation periods (early and late 1970s), and the adoption of austerity to fight oil price hikes slowed growth and led to unemployment.

I have been arguing for years for a Modern Money Theory (MMT) authority to say this. I have been shunned by Steve Grumbine of Real Progressives for even mentioning this. Somehow, I feel vindicated.

Now that I think about it, I have been saying this about the inflation of the 1970s and the ending of the inflation in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan’s putting us into a near depression since about the time that Ronald Reagan did this almost 40 years ago. This is long before I even heard about MMT. Possibly before MMT was even invented.

YouTube has the video Bernie Sanders Discusses Reparations On The Breakfast Club.

This is actually an analysis by Niko House of the conversation that occurred in an episode of The Breakfast Club. For white people like myself who had doubts about the idea of reparations, this goes into issues we may not have fully considered or understood. If nothing else, I hope these ideas start to percolate in your mind. I know that hearing this has helped me to further my understanding of the issues.