RT has the story Facebook & Instagram experience massive outage across US & Europe.

Millions of Facebook and Instagram users have been forced to vent their frustration via Twitter after the social media networks experienced an unexplained outage across the US and Europe.

I figure that maybe it is Venezuela and Russia retaliating for USA sabotage of Venezuela’s electric power system. Do you suppose that if we stopped the sabotage, then Russia and Venezuela might let loose of Facebook?

Also, I ma glad I maintain this blog so I don’t have to depend on Facebook.

New Economic Perspectives has the L. Randall Wray article MMT Responds to Brad DeLong’s Challenge.

There isn’t just one excerpt that summarizes the whole article. I picked the following excerpt not quite at random.

So, MMT has always recommended abandoning any attempt to fine-tune the economy through central bank interest rate policy. We prefer a permanently fixed rate. Many MMTers prefer permanent ZIRP. I’m a bit of a fence-sitter. I’d like ZIRP but I’d also accept a policy of paying a higher rate on retirement savings—but that is easily handled through US savings bonds, with personal limits on accumulations receiving the favorable rates. This rate should not be discretionary and should not be used as an inflation-fighting tool, rather as a supplement to Social Security until we can reform that system to provide a decent retirement for all. For me it is the permanent fixing that really matters, and I like a low rate but do not insist on zero.

The article has quite few links that are probably worth mining when I have the time.

Angry Bear has the article MMT II.

I don’t know much about MMT, but I am going to write about it anyway.

There doesn’t seem to be a way make comments on that blog, so I wrote an email to the author Robert Waldmann.

Whether pure monetary policy is important depends on the circumstances and depends on who gets the money. If you pump money into an economy and give it all to the people you expect to invest it, and there are no investment opportunities because of low consumer demand, do you think it is reasonable to expect investors to use the money to build more production capacity when production capacity is already in excess of demand?

Either these investors give the money right back to the government by buying treasury securities, or they pump up asset prices including the stock market.

When there is full employment, but a lot of that employment is in the FIRE sector which detracts from the productive economy, couldn’t we have a better economy if that money got redirected into useful work? When people are fully employed in jobs that don’t pay a livable wage, is that a good economy?

Surely you know about all these subtleties, but somehow they do not make it into your article.

/Steve

Robert Waldman’s reply was

I don’t know much about MMT and you don’t know what “monetary policy” means. You are discussing fiscal policy. Monetary policy does not consist of giving money to people. It can consist of open market operations — the Fed buying treasury securities. It can consist of reserve requirements, and it can consist of changing the interest rate the Fed charges on loans (the discount rate) or that it pays on deponsits.

None has anything in particular to do with giving money to people. Giving people money is called fiscal policy.

It is not easy to have a useful discussion if people use technical terms with their own definitions. Just for fruitfiul communication, it is best to use the official definitions of official terms.

It is also not ideal to begin an unsolicited e-mail with a criticism bordering on an insult.

/Robert

To which, I replied

So QE was fiscal policy? Is that what you are saying?

/Steve

The final email in this series was his final reply.

QE consisted of purchases of treasuries not gift of anything to anyone. It was an open market operation and did not correspond to what you called monetary policy.

Do not e-mail me again.

I might just add that the purchase in QE (Quantitative Easing) by the Federal Reserve Bank of worthless private bank “assets” at full face value was certainly a gift to somebody. QE was not about the Fed buying Treasury securities in the open market as was the usual Fed activity before QE. I had no inkling of how little Waldmann really knew.

At the time QE was first practiced, I did read commentary that this was as close to fiscal policy as the Fed could come because they did not have legal authority to exercise fiscal policy. It was touted as close to fiscal policy, I suppose, because the federal government (The Fed) bought something from the private sector. I never thought that buying something worthless at full face value was anything like the fiscal policy of buying something from the private sector that both provided a service to the people and also put people to work. Maybe, I don’t understand neo-liberal economics.

YouTube has the video Revolution: a success story: Ray Raphael at TEDxEureka

Among Ray Raphael’s 17 books is The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord, which chronicles the 1774 Massachusetts Revolution featured in this talk. Raphael also authored A People’s History of the American Revolution (the first volume in Howard Zinn’s “People’s History” series), Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Founding Fathers and the Birth of Our Nation.

At the end of the video, what Ray Rafael explains fits so nicely with one of the messages that Bernie Sanders want us all to understand – revolutions are started by the people, not the “leaders”.

I first learned about this story when I got together with the “We Want Bernie – Worcester” people in the 2016 campaign. Chris Horton gave me a book to read. Now Stone Riley is trying to get Bernie Sanders to come to Worcester on the day Worcester celebrates this story. Thanks to Stone for providing the link to this talk.

VOX has the article A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance.

The rise of the Democratic left, personified by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), has raised a serious question: Should Democrats lean away from market-friendly stances and get comfortable with big government again? Should they embrace an ambitious 2020 candidate like Sanders and policies like the Green New Deal, or stick with incrementalists like former Vice President Joe Biden and more market-oriented ideas like Obamacare?

One of the most interesting takes I’ve seen on this debate came from Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley. DeLong, who served as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration, who is one of the market-friendly, “neoliberal” Democrats who have dominated the party for the last 20 years. The term he uses for himself is “Rubin Democrat” — referring to followers of finance industry-friendly Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Yet DeLong believes that the time of people like him running the Democratic Party has passed. “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,” DeLong wrote. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.”

From this article, I found a pointer to Brad Longs’ 28 Tweets. Twitter has such a wonderful litterary platform that he had to break it up into 28 pieces. I still can’t figure out why people like Twitter so much.

I think it is fair to say that the already-broken American political public sphere has become significantly more broken since November 8, 2018.

On the center and to the left, those like me in what used to proudly call itself the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party—so-called 1/

I first found out about this from the piece on Naked Capitalism – Bill Black Analyzes Brad DeLong’s Stunning Concession: Neoliberals Should Pass the Baton and Let the Left Lead.

Jerri-Lynn here. The times they are a’changin. In this Real News network interview, Bill Black analyzes Brad DeLong’s stunning concession that neoliberals should get out of the way and let the left lead since their coalition with Republicans did not work.

Here is The Real News Network video Clinton-Era Official Says Left Should Lead Following Center-Right Failures.

YouTube has the video Prof. Richard Wolff: Capitalism and the Family.

This might shake your whole day. You might not want to think about it. Some of these ideas have flit through my brain on occasion, but I try to find a way to suppress them.

Naked Capitalism has the article Power Failure and Blackout: An Update on the Situation in Venezuela.

Venezuela shut schools and suspended working hours on Friday after the capital Caracas and other major cities awoke without electricity for a second day due to a problem that struck the South American country’s main hydroelectric plant [, the Guri Dam]… “This is a severe problem. It is not just any blackout,” said Luis Martinez, a 53-year-old walking to work in eastern Caracas.

“A problem that struck.” Note lack of agency.

There are many teachable moments in this article.

There is an example of inflation that people see reported on the oligarchs’ news media that most people may not associate with what goes on in a country like Venezuela.

The example I am thinking of is what happens to prices when a natural weather incident disrupts normal life for a brief period of time. In New England we see this happen when a blizzard strikes. When the warnings of a blizzard are broadcast, people rush out to stock up on groceries and on snow fighting equipment. Some grocery stores run out of milk and bread. Hardware stores run out of salt to melt the ice, shovels to clear the snow, and flashlights in case the power goes out.

Some stores take advantage of the scarcity by raising the prices. This is a mini-example of inflation. Let us examine what has happened to allow inflation to start up. The government did not suddenly start printing money and pumping it in just to the locations that were threatened by a storm. These locations suddenly faced a shortage of goods that were needed in the storm. The amount of money stayed the same, but the supply of goods fell short of the demand. Parts of the country that were not threatened by the storm saw no rise in prices.

Now think what happens to a country that is sanctioned, embargoed, and otherwise laid siege to by the USA and its allies. Those countries don’t need to increase the supply of currency one bit to experience inflation. The goods that would have been bought at normal prices are suddenly removed from the economy. The price of the remaining goods increases because the existing money is chasing fewer goods than it used to.

A simple definition of inflation is “too much money chasing too few goods”. There are two factors here, the amount of money, and the amount of goods. A sudden change in either factor will have a serious impact on the relation between the two factors.

YouTube has the video Max Blumenthal: Report From the Real Venezuela.

Here’s some useful reporting from the ground in Venezuela — notably lacking in the mainstream press! — from Max Blumenthal, interviewed by the redoubtable R.J. Eskow:

This may be the most profoundly educational video you can see today. This is the kind of thing you used to see on USA public broadcasting.

Here is a lesson that I seem to relearn every 5 years or so. Windows Search Service is a resource hog, and needs to be turned off. My Thunderbird email reader was getting to the point of being almost unusable. It was going into periods of non-response for reasons I could not fathom. I could not imagine what it was doing in the periods where it would not respond. The Windows resource monitor did not display any significant usage of any computer resources, yet Thunderbird was too busy to respond to me.

Since I turned off Windows Search on two computers that I believe were both indexing files on my Network Attached Storage, the performance of my computers has taken a giant leap forward.

The reason why I have to keep learning this lesson might be the time lapse between when I buy new computers. By the time I buy a new computer, I forget that I had shut off Windows Search Service on the old computers. It takes a few years of suffering poor performance before I am reminded of the cause.