The Intercept has the article Elizabeth Warren Plan Would Allow the Government to Manufacture Its Own Generic Drugs.

Warren introduced legislation on Tuesday with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., that would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing within the Department of Health and Human Services. That office would have the authority to manufacture generic versions of any drug for which the U.S. government has licensed a patent, whenever there is little or no competition, critical shortages, or exorbitant prices that restrict patient access.

I don’t get it. Drugs become generic when the patent runs out. This used to be the brake on rising drug prices until the industry figured out they could get away with violating the laws by fixing prices. If we just enforced the laws we already have, life would get back to normal when we used to have a Department of Justice that was not blind to white collar crime at the highest levels.

The concept of “restraint of trade” seems to have let the public conversation, so I looked it up to see if I was dreaming that such a concept ever existed. WikiPedia has a long article on Restraint of Trade. Here is part of what it said with respect to the concept in the USA.

In the US, the first significant discussion occurred in the Sixth Circuit’s opinion by Chief Judge (later US President and still later Supreme Court Chief Justice) William Howard Taft in United States v. Addyston Pipe & Steel Co.[9] Judge Taft explained the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890[10] as a statutory codification of the English common-law doctrine of restraint of trade, as explicated in such cases as Mitchel v Reynolds.[11] The court distinguished between naked restraints of trade and those ancillary to the legitimate main purpose of a lawful contract and reasonably necessary to effectuation of that purpose.[12] An example of the latter would be a non-competition clause associated with the lease or sale of a bakeshop, as in the Mitchel case. Such a contract should be tested by a “rule of reason,” meaning that it should be deemed legitimate if “necessary and ancillary.” An example of the naked type of restraint would be the price-fixing and bid-allocation agreements involved in the Addyston case. Taft said that “we do not think there is any question of reasonableness open to the courts to such a contract.” The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment. During the following century, the Addyston Pipe opinion of Judge Taft has remained foundational in antitrust analysis

There is an entire YouTube channel dedicated to explaining Modern Money Theory.

Modern Monetary Theory is partly a description of how our modern fiat, floating exchange rate currencies actually work, and partly a prescription of what we ought to do with this knowledge. MMT realizes that many of the constraints we place on our money system today as well as many of our models for understanding it are actually holdovers from the era of gold-standards and fixed exchange rates that don’t apply at all today.

Here is the first video in the series.

The Real News Network has the story US Consumer Board Conceals how Wells Fargo Fleeces Students.

The Consumer Financial Protection Board kept a detailed report about how Wells Fargo has long been involved in charging students up to three times more for financial services than other banks do. Why did the CFPB not reveal this? Bill Black explains.

Elizabeth Warren had a good idea with the CFPB, but perhaps she didn’t think of what a President like Trump could do with such an agency. I wonder what she thought Hillary Clinton would do. Bill Clinton was infamous for reducing regulation of the Savings and Loan Banks that were collapsing around his ears.

Word Press has come out with a new editor called Gutenberg. I don’t know to whom it is aimed, but it doesn’t do anything for me, and it takes away the Classic Editor that I used with great ease. In fact I never used the GUI option of the editor. I always used the text editor. The Gutenberg editor also has a text editor (called the code editor) which it completely messes up compared to the old one. The old text editor had a few buttons that gave me the only kind of GUI help that was valuable to me in a text editor.

I constructed this post with the add on that brings back the classic editor. The button that I used was the one that assists in creating links. I used that button to create the link above to the Classic Editor add-on. All that button does is to place the link template around the text you want to turn into a link. Now, I can perfectly well type that template myself, but it is handy to have one button that inserts it. That is my idea of a language sensitive editor, where the language in this case is HTML. In other contexts, I have my own LSE for HTML, C, C++, PERL, Fortran, and perhaps a few other languages that slip my mind at the moment.

Bill Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory blog has the article When two original MMT developers get together to discuss their work.

Last week, Warren Mosler and I had one of our regular catchups and we discussed at length the state of play in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We are quite protective of it. We mused about how we started out on this Project and where it has gone. As old stagers do when they get together. We also reflected and compared notes on what the state of MMT is now, given the increasing visibility of the ideas in the mainstream media all around the world and the proliferation of social media activists who have chosen to identify and promote our ideas. There were aspects of that development that we identified as being of concern for us and other aspects which we considered to be a cause for optimism (celebration is too strong a word). We thought it would be a good idea to take a breath and document what we considered to be the essence of MMT – as a sort of checklist for people who want a fairly precise account of the body of work. I agreed to write this document after input from Warren. So, this is what we mean by MMT. What follows is my account of our conversation expanded to add meaning where required.

This article clarifies the actual meaning of Moden Money Theory. I haven’t read it all yet.

Evonomics has the article How Bronze Age Rulers Simply Canceled Debts.

A nice summary by Michael Hudson of his book “…and Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year” In the article, he talks about how these ideas might apply in modern times.

My book “And forgive them their debts”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year  is about the origins of economic organization and enterprise in the Bronze Age, and how it shaped the Bible. It’s not about modern economies. But the problem is – as the reviewer mentioned – that the Bronze Age and early Western civilization was shaped so differently from what we think of as logical and normal, that one almost has to rewire one’s brain to see how differently the archaic view of economic survival and enterprise was.

Now This News has posted this video Bernie Sanders LIVE Town Hall – Solving Our Climate Crisis | NowThis.

If we don’t spread news of this Town Hall ourselves, the corporate media will succeed in pretending this has never happened.

YouTube has a video segment from the Bernie Sanders’ Town Hall. The title that the poster put on the video segment was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Stuns Crowd With Speech.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is ready to tackle climate change.

I can’t believe that I got so entangled in straightening out some computer issues that I missed the Monday Town Hall – Solving Our Climate Crisis: A National Town Hall. In looking for some video to fill me in on what I missed, I saw this posted.

If we don’t spread these videos on social media ourselves, you know you won’t hear a peep about this from the corporate media.

YouTube has the video Launching Progressive International w/ Bernie Sanders at the Sanders Institute Gathering.

This is a video of the entire International Roundtable session on Friday, November 30, 2018.

I have recognized for a long time that the giant international corporations play one country off against another to get what they want. There is no single country, not even the USA, that can control these international players. There must be concerted joint efforts of countries around the world.

At the very end, the announced the launching of the Progressive International organization, but they left out a character when they mentioned the URL. Here is the correct URL progressive-international.org.

Here is the first ad for the organization.

Progressive International from MEANS OF PRODUCTION on Vimeo.

Here is the link to The Sanders Institute Gathering where this panel session occurred.

Yahoo! is carrying the Bloomberg story A Company Few Americans Know Is About to Dethrone Intel.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. founder Jerry Sanders. “Real men have fabs,” he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories.
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Sanders’ current successor at AMD, Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su, doesn’t have to worry about this because the company sold its factories and lets TSMC handle the complex production.

“That’s one of the best decisions we’ve made,” said Su. “It allows us to manage risk and focus on the things that make the product great.”

Having worked for Digital Equipment Corporation and then having moved on before Digital had to sell itself to Compaq which in turn sold itself to Intel, I do maintain a residual interest in all of this. I have been wondering how AMD has stayed competitive with Intel. I didn’t realize that AMD gave up its own manufacturing. Trying to keep up its own manufacturing is a large part of what did Digital in. I am glad I got out of Digital when the time was right.

As a former owner of some Intel stock, I am not ready to count Intel out, but this is the kind of story to know about if I ever consider buying back into Intel stock.