The Real News Network has the panel discussion Attempted Coup in Venezuela with Abby Martin, Greg Wilpert, Paul Jay.

They don’t call this The Real News Network for nothing. You wonder how much the oligarchs’ media mouthpieces know they are lying to us, as opposed to being incredibly naive. I have no respect for Andrea Mitchell, but I used to think that Lester Holt had a smidgen of integrity.

Associated Press, for example, had an article that just came out today talking about how the Trump administration has been meeting with governments all over the country, all over the Latin American region, basically trying to get them to be on the same page. Juan Guaido himself snuck out of Venezuela and traveled throughout Latin America to make sure that everybody’s on the same page. This was an agreement, I mean, to do this. And actually it’s kind of surprising in a way that they managed to get away with it, because the Maduro government seemed to have been taken by surprise by all of this. But this was really planned in the long term.

I also wonder if the government shutdown in the USA was a distraction from the planning of this Venezuelan coup d’état.

The Real News Network has the video Is the US Orchestrating a coup in Venezuela?

Lucas Koerner in Venezuela analyzes the current developments with TRNN’s Sharmini Peries and Greg Wilpert

In the first few seconds of this video the lies of the USA oligarchs’ news media are exposed. I had been wondering how the USA intelligence agencies managed to get those huge crowds of opposition into the streets. These pictures that the USA oligarchs’ media have presenting were not at all what they pretended they were.

The report that I heard on the oligarchs’ NBC outlet never mentioned that the Venezuelan economic distress is being caused by USA sanctions that are strangling the economy. I shouted “bullshit” at the TV when they reported in this mendacious way.

Deficit Owls has posted the video from England called Money for Nothing.

We made this video essay as a pseudo Q&A to explain how the UK monetary system works. It’s based on 10 years of factual research. We explain money creation, tax, deficit, banks, fraud and debt.

Just be aware that the narrator has the pedagogical style of making firm statements in the beginning, and then later taking back some of the assumptions you might have inferred by what he said. I don’t particularly like that style, but he does say some things a little differently from the way you have heard it explained by USA proponents of MMT. Perhaps his style might suit your learning style better.

At first, I got hung up on his claim that the Government has to sell bonds to make up the difference between what it collects in taxes and what it spends. According to my understanding of MMT, this is completely false, unless Great Britain has a law like the USA does that says the central bank cannot give money directly to the treasury. If that is true, then it is only the law that requires the Government to sell bonds. There is no reason why this law has to exist, if the government didn’t want this law. This video initially and incorrectly leaves open the possibility that there is some law of economics that requires bond sales.

This is the impression I got from the first half of the video. Half way through the video, just after I stopped to write my above comment, he essentially did say that the need to sell bonds to make up the deficit is just a policy decision. This essentially negated (or clarified) what he had said earlier about the need to sell bonds. I don’t particularly like the pedagogic style of explaining something and then partially negating it later.

He did it again on another topic. I think his explanation of money creation by private banks is a little flawed. What he left out is what happens when a borrower takes the loan money out of the bank to spend it with someone who uses a different bank. This is when the lending bank has to be concerned about whether it has the money to cover the withdrawal because the recipient of the borrower’s payment is not going to put that money back into the same bank. He says nothing about the help (a loan) that the bank might need from the central bank to cover any shortfall.

The way I look at it, one of the businesses private banks are in his getting money wholesale, and lending it at retail. If the money that gets lent stays within the community of one bank’s customers, then it is really inexpensive for that bank to make a profit. When the lending bank does not have to pay anything for the money it created when it made the loan, then the interest it charges the borrower is almost all profit.

ZD Net has the article Ubuntu Core doubles down on Internet of Things which also includes the video below.

Canonical’s Ubuntu is best known for its Linux desktop, but the company really makes it money from the cloud. And, founder Mark Shuttleworth has said, the Internet of Things (IoT). So, it comes as no surprise that Ubuntu Core is bringing Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) codebase to embedded devices.

As of this writing of this post, ZD Net inserts the wrong video. Here is the direct link to the ccorrect video The Role of Regulation in IoT Security

New Economic Perspectives has the article #AOC and MMT Spook the AEI.

William K Black expends the effort to write the critique of an article that I read, ‘Modern Monetary Theory’ Is a Joke That’s Not Funny. I was unwilling to spend my time criticizing the article. If I had Black’s skill, I might have said what was in Black’s article.

I’ll just give you an excerpt of the final summary that I have also been noticing.

There is only one reason that emerges from Strain’s text. His first sentence stresses that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supports MMT. The only other MMT proponent he identifies is Stephanie Kelton. The far right is obsessed with #AOC – and with her looks. Stephanie Kelton receives large numbers of comments, even in student course ratings, that focus on her looks rather than her prowess as an economist and teacher. This pattern is a common manifestation of misogyny, particularly against female economists. The variant of the Medusa myth that Strain explicitly uses emphasizes Medusa’s “beaut[y].” Strain’s variant of the Medusa myth is the one that combines female beauty and female rage into a ‘monster’ that destroys men. Strain’s Medusa metaphor and myth is another sad example of the far right’s obsession with #AOC in particular and strong women in general.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies posted the video Week 2 lecture – Stephanie Kelton: Rethinking fiscal policy.

Stephanie Kelton presenting a lecture at UCL as part of the Rethinking Capitalism series for the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

Covering deficits and the national debt she explains how the money system works and answers the question how will we pay for a progressive political agenda.

Not to miss!

Every time Stephanie Kelton gives this lecture, she improves it. I bet that she uses the questions she gets after the lecture as an indication of what she failed to convey, so she improves the lecture to convey more and do it better. I still learn more every time I listen to a new version of this lecture. All you need to do is to listen to one of these posts to get 90% of the benefit.

New Economic Perspectives has the article MMT’s Opening. It is a mish-mash of insights and blindness. I’ll pick just one blind spot that I have thought a lot about.

What makes the treasury bond even more magical, however, is that if, say, a big opportunity comes along to invest real sovereign fiat dollars in a killer profit-making venture—no problema! The secondary market for U.S. treasury bonds—other folks who can’t imagine, right now, what to do with their private commerce profits—provides instantaneous liquidity: the treasury bond can be traded for the real sovereign fiat dollars needed to make the killer investment.

Given this transparent and virtually seamless interchangeability between U.S. fiat dollars and U.S. treasury bonds, it is clear the treasury bond represents something fundamentally different than the government’s “borrowing” of dollars from private commerce. The fiat dollars supposedly “borrowed” are, in fact, replaced with another kind of fiat dollar represented by the treasury bond.

When the treasury bond is sold early to the market, the seller takes a loss over what he or she would get if held to maturity. The loss is either bigger or smaller depending on how the current interest compares to the interest rate on the bond. Depending on the size of the killer profit making venture, the bond holder may decide that the loss on the sale is worth taking to free up really, immediately spendable cash. There is no such loss occurring when converting really spendable cash into really spendable cash. In the author’s mind, the bond may be another kind of fiat dollar, but the two kinds have a significant difference as I just described.

Sometimes, some MMT proponents have an annoying habit of glossing over differences that are essential parts of how the economy works. They should not try to correct misunderstandings by injecting their own misunderstandings.

Truthdig has the article Richard Wolff: The Next Economic Crisis Is Coming.

Every time I sit down with economist Richard Wolff, he demonstrates why the field of economics is so necessary in the cultural critique of our American empire. In my recent interview with him, we discussed why the thriving economy touted by President Donald Trump hasn’t translated into real gains for the majority of Americans. We also went over what is hidden by the economic indicators that allow the financial industry to celebrate while so many Americans are still suffering.

There is a lot of great explanation in this video, 99% of which I agree with. However, lest you go away with some misinformation, I am going to comment on the mistake Wolff made.

We have paid an enormous price in hobbling the generation of people who would have otherwise lifted this economy and made us more productive. It is a disastrous mistake historically, and if you face that, and if you add to it the increased debt of our businesses, and the increased debt of our government, you see an economy that is held up by a monstrous increase in debt, not in underlying productivity, not in more jobs that really produce anything, but in debt.

That should frighten us because it was the debt bubble that burst in 2008 and brought us the crash. It is as if we cannot learn in our system to do other than we’ve always done and that’s taking us into another crash coming now.

The bubble that burst in 2008 was private sector debt, not Federal Government “debt”.

Wolff conflates the two, when actually Federal Government “debt” is private sector surplus. The Federal Government creates the money, and the private sector uses that money to conduct business. This difference between creator and user of money means our notions of debt among money users is just about the opposite of the meaning with the money creator.

I know that Wolff knows about Modern Money Theory. I am surprised he would make such a mistake. I am pretty sure he has not spent as much time as he should have in understanding MMT.

If you want to get some understanding of the economics I am talking about, watch what the Deficit Owls have to say.

Sorry, I am so pedantic, but I can’t help but note that one of the bullet points from the Deficit Owls should say “Deficits can be too big or too small.”

Vanity Fair has the article Hope vs. Change: Why Some Democrats Are Turning on Obama’s Legacy.

You could say Obama spent eight years deferring a radical disruption. His tragedy is that he could have led it.

Add Elizabeth Warren to the list of people who were given the opportunity to go down in history as major agents of change for the better, but they declined. Obama has left the stage, but Warren wants another chance with no indication that she understands the previous opportunity that she muffed.

The following quote is a grievous misunderstanding.

In the eyes of the radicals, our financial sector was an out-of-control predator built on a rotten edifice that was finally about to crumble. Its collapse wasn’t the threat; it was the cure.

Many of us were not recommending a collapse as the cure. I was recommending nationalization of the financial sector. I was not looking for a vacuum in the financial sector. I was looking for a rescue of the sector from the hands of the crooks. Make the sector perform its necessary function, but do it honestly

YouTube has the video Richard Wolff Interview: Capitalism Con Job, MMT, “Booming” Economy.

Worth every second to watch this video.

Of course being an engineer, I tend to focus on the exceptions.

As for reform solving our problems, I don’t think the problem in trying to reform was such a failure. It succeeded pretty well from after the war to about mid 1970s as Wolff said. The trouble was that people who were moderately happy with those reforms did not see the massive effort that was going on to undermine those reforms. Moreover, as the older generation goes away, and the younger generation takes over, they weren’t steeped in the reasons why the reforms were necessary. They were easy targets for the propagandists who explained to them the horrors of the reforms. The liberal/progressives failed in counter-education to the people who hadn’t lived through it. By the time we got to Obama, he was too young to know this himself.

As for MMT, Wolfe is partly right, but partly ignorant of what the MMT proponents see as their whole program. Sometimes I even chide the MMT people for thinking that it is all about monetary policy perhaps because the name ot the theory has the word money or monetary in it. Keynes, back in the 30s, explained why monetary policy is like pushing on a string when you are trying to fix economic recession or depression. You need a very strong fiscal policy with direct purchases of goods and services by the government. MMT people see it is there, but they don’t give fiscal policy enough emphasis. MMT people see the Job Guarantee as an integral part of MMT, which is in part Fiscal policy. MMT is what opens the policy choices for far more fiscal stimulus. Anything to do with fiddling with taxes is mostly monetary policy. Government direct investment in expanding the economic capacity of the country is the fiscal policy that needs more emphasis.

All of the other reforms that Wolfe mentions are also part of fixing our problems. MMT is only part of the solution. I know that, and I think even the MMT bigwigs know that.