Truth Out has the article Where Is Elizabeth Warren’s Fire in the Realm of Foreign Policy?

Like on economic policy, the two candidates both want to see a more left-wing approach to foreign policy, but they differ in their degree of radicalism. But by looking at their voting record, their staffing and their public leadership, it is clear that Sanders is offering a deeper critique of the US foreign policy order, whereas Warren has a far less radical vision that hews closer to the Democratic Party’s traditional liberal norms.

Zaid Jilani is right about what he says in this article. But even Bernie is getting weaker in his old age.

I always knew that Warren was weak on foreign policy, but I had hopes she would learn. She has learned a little, but she is way too slow.

Bernie has been right for most of the last 40 years, but he seems to be forgetting some things he used to know. Bernie isn’t quite as strong on anti-imperialism as he used to be, unfortunately. Tulsi Gabbard is good on a lot of foreign policy issues, but even she isn’t perfect.

So far, I can still support Bernie. Elizabeth Warren has a lot to make up for before I could consider supporting her again.

Jeff Bezos’ newspaper The Washington Post has the article A record 7 million Americans are 3 months behind on their car payments, a red flag for the economy.

A record 7 million Americans are 90 days or more behind on their auto loan payments, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported Tuesday, even more than during the wake of the financial crisis.

Isn’t it odd how statistics can be made to lie. All the traditional measures of the economy are booming because they are not affected by this negative information. It is clever the way the oligarchs and the finance, insurance, and real-estate sectors can hide the bad news where the corporate news media won’t report it with big headlines. Sure people are employed, but they are going broke working.

The Real News Network has the segment Cryptocurrency Firms Regularly Lose Codes and Money.

Recent developments in the cryptocurrency world highlight the dangers of trading in this type of “coin.” But how important is cryptocurrency to the financial world and why should we care? We discuss the issue with white collar criminologist Bill Black.

I’ll add a couple of observations that Bill Black did not mention.

If you don’t study these things you might only stumble onto the knowledge that the USA has a sovereign, fiat currency. Being a fiat currency, its value is not tied to anything that backs up the currency. This is all explained by MMT (Modern Money Theory) which is mentioned all over this blog.

So why can’t you invent a cryptocurrency that is backed by nothing? MMT explains that what gives sovereign, fiat currency its value is that the sovereign insists that the only way you can pay the taxes the sovereign imposes is to use the fiat currency. If you want to pay your taxes to stay out of jail and prevent your property being seized for payment of back taxes, you need to get some of that sovereign currency. There is no such mechanism to a non-sovereign crypto-currency. Non-sovereign crypto-currency’s value in dollars is whatever the fad of the moment says it is worth. This is subject to manipulation in operations called “pump and dump”. The pumper makes a public announcement touting the great potential of the currency, people rush out to buy it, and the pumper then dumps the whatever he or she has “invested” in the crypto-currency.

The other thing that touters of crypto-currency seem to have no foresight about is privacy. People use crypto-currecncy because the government cannot keep track of your crypto-currency transactions. One of the key technologies behind this crypto-currency is the distributed nature of the ledger of transactions. The complete copy of the ledger of all transactions is available on a large number of computers around the world. Anybody can read the ledger, but the tie between a person and his or her transactions is hidden by an unbreakable encryption. There is something called data-mining which is very popular topic in comp0uters these days. Data mining works on massive stores of information like what Google and Facebook have (and out government has, too). Computers can sift through this data and make connections that most humans cannot imagine. If any government wants to apply data mining to the public ledger of crypto-currency transactions, I would be willing to bet they can figure out who made what transactions. The secrecy of crypto-currency transactions has been put in the minds of the users by the pumpers and dumpers.

The Real News Network has the video Support for Israel Divides Democrats, A Division Fomented by Republicans.

Yes, this is a very divisive and sensitive issue, but I agree with the point of view of Israeli-American journalist Mairav Zonszein that it is a discussion that we must have. I find it very difficult if not impossible to hold to progressive ideals and support how Israel treats people in Israel. Yes, most of the people that Israel mistreats are Palestinians, but first we have to recognize that they are people.

I have somewhat distant relatives in the Israeli military. Fortunately they are distant enough that I don’t have to confront them with the question of how they feel about shooting down unarmed civilians.

YouTube has the video CNN’s Jake Tapper crushed by Tulsi Gabbard, ‘Why is US supporting Al Qaeda?

When you see someone trying to cast Tulsi Gabbard in a negative light because she spoke to Bashar al-Assad in Syria, ask them how they react to this video.

YouTube has the video Bernanke: “The Fed will do whatever Congress tells us to do.”

My previous post Who owns the Federal Reserve? discusses and links to the Federal Reserve Bank’s answer to this question.

Yet, there are still people who refuse to believe it. Here is one rebuttal that makes my point, but the people who posted it didn’t hear what Alan Greenspan said in this video. The posters gave this the title The Federal Reserve is Above the Law.

Let me tell you what I heard, and you can listen to the video to see if you heard the same thing. I will emphasize certain words which I think are key.

The Federal Reserve is an independent entity, and that means basically there is no other agency in government which can overrule actions that we take.

Is Alan Greenspan telling you that the Federal Reserve Bank is another agency of the government? Sure sounds like that to me.

So long as that is in place and there is no evidence that the administration or the Congress or anybody else is requesting that we do things other than what we think is the appropriate thing, then what the relationships are don’t frankly matter.

Is Alan Greenspan telling you that the administration or Congress could request that the Fed do things other than what it thinks is appropriate? He must have had some reason to start the sentence with a qualifying clause. Colloquially speaking, these are called weasel words.

These videos are examples of two different former chairmen of the Federal Reserve Bank telling you the same thing I have been telling you all over this blog. You might also wonder why Barney Frank thinks Congress changed some of the rules that Congress set for the Fed.

Here is an interesting paper that matches and expands on what I have come to learn about complex systems – Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet.

It is no surprise, then, that we often find ourselves tinkering with complex systems without understanding the system — how the key parts of the system are interconnected, or how the interactions of all the parts produce the often puzzling or confounding behavior of the system. Consider, for example, road-building programs that are meant to reduce congestion but that end up increasing traffic, delays, and pollution. Or pesticides that are meant to kill crop-damaging insects but that also kill the “good” insects that are controlling the population of “bad bugs.”

Here is the description of Milton Friedman in the book J is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception by Michael Hudson.

In the excerpt below, I took the liberty of adding the second comma in lists of three, so that they would be more readable.

Friedman, Milton (1912-2006): The most prominent Chicago School advocate of financial and fiscal austerity, Friedman popularized the monetarist theory that changes in the money supply are reflected in proportional changes in consumer prices, commodity prices, and wages.His failure to understand that bank money is spent mainly to buy real estate, stocks, and bonds blocked him from understanding asset-price inflation or its sequel, debt deflation. He was awarded the 1976 Nobel Economics Prize for his neoliberal depiction of government as pure overhead and “interference” while distracting public attention from the asset-price gains resulting from bank credit (See “As If” Argument, Junk Economics, and TINSTAAFL.)

While I am at it, I might as well include the following excerpt:

Chicago School: Named after the University of Chicago’s Business School where Milton Friedman and other monetarists established a beachhead. The University was founded by John D. Rockefeller, prompting Upton Sinclair to call it the University of Standard Oil (The Goose Step, 1923). The essence of their ideology is that government has no positive roll, but is only a deadweight burden. Euphemizing their doctrine as “free market”, they advocate deregulation, claiming that “rational markets” will steer the economy. They also support a tax shift off property onto labor, while denying that their policy create a free lunch for rentiers. The result is to centralize planning in the financial centers – short-term planning that finds debt pyramiding and asset stripping the most lucrative activity. (See Market Fundamentalism and TINSTAAFL.)

Naked Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: The Shape of the Venezuelan Economy, from Chavez to Maduro and Beyond.

There is no way that’s Chavez and Maduro could have pursued a pro-Venezuelan policy aimed at achieving economic independence without inciting fury, subversion and sanctions from the United States. American foreign policy remains as focused on oil as it was when it invaded Iraq under Dick Cheney’s regime. U.S. policy is to treat Venezuela as an extension of the U.S. economy, running a trade surplus in oil to spend in the United States or transfer its savings to U.S. banks.

Wow, this connects the dots you didn’t even know were there. Is Trump about to end the dominance of the USA in the world by causing an uprising of other countries?

The U.S. has overplayed its hand in destroying the foundation of the dollar-centered global financial order. That order has enabled the United States to be “the exceptional nation” able to run balance-of-payments deficits and foreign debt that it has no intention (or ability) to pay, claiming that the dollars thrown off by its foreign military spending “supply” other countries with their central bank reserves (held in the form of loans to the U.S. Treasury – Treasury bonds and bills – to finance the U.S. budget deficit and its military spending, as well as the largely military U.S. balance-of-payments deficit.

Knowing how much of a devotee of Modern Money Theory that Michael Hudson is, it is hard to digest his talk of how our military and deficit spending is financed by other countries holding Treasury securities. There is a parenthesis missing in the above quote which would have clarified some of what he meant. The parenthesis is missing from the original publication on Michael Hudson’s web sit in the article Venezuela as the pivot for New Internationalism?

The only thing I can think of is that MMT does seem to depend on the continued acceptance of the USA dollar as a world reserve currency. If that stopped being true, there would certainly be major ramifications on the economic policy options we have.

Whenever I read about the policy options MMT says that the USA has, I do think that we had better hurry up and take advantage of those options before we fritter away those possibilities. By destroying the status that the USA dollar enjoys in the rest of the world, we could no longer depend on getting the rest of the world to supply us with cheap imports in exchange for our dollars.

I have been looking for this cartoon for years. I just stumbled across the Google magic search terms that brought it right up. “cartoon machine gun rejection”.