Naked Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: He Died for Our Debt, Not Our Sins.

As many people turn towards their Christian and Jewish faiths this Christmas and Hanukkah in an attempt to make sense of the year that was, at least one economist says we have been reading the bible in an anachronistic way.


In fact he has written an entire book on the topic. In And Forgive them their Debts: Credit and Redemption (available this spring on Amazon), Professor Michael Hudson makes the argument that far from being about sex, the bible is actually about economics, and debt in particular.

When I first read this article and then posted it on Facebook, I remarked that this may be a bit much for some people to take. I have no opinion on him myself. I then stumbled across another interview with Michael Hudson, The history of debt forgiveness, that I almost didn’t watch because it just would have been repetitive. I didn’t realize how much it would enlighten me about the book in ways that I had not yet understood.

Truth Dig has the article Banishing Truth. When Pam Wall shared this story on Facebook, she used the following excerpt from the article:

The later part of Hersh’s career is the most distressing. He was writing for The New Yorker when Barack Obama was elected president. David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, socialized with Obama and was apparently wary of offending the president. When Hersh exposed the fictitious narrative spun out by the Obama administration about the killing of Bin Laden, the magazine killed the story, running instead a report about the raid, provided by the administration, from the point of view of one of the SEALs who was on the mission. Hersh resigned. He published the account of the raid in the London Review of Books, the beginning of his current exile to foreign publications. When we most urgently need Hersh and good investigative reporters like him, they have largely disappeared. A democracy, at best, tolerates them. A failed democracy, like ours, banishes them, and when it does, it kills its press.”

This is why I feel justified in always referring to the newspaper as “The dreaded New York Times”. Much as I dislike Trump, I realize he did manage to echo some of the real disappointments of the USA people when he campaigned. One of those disappointments was in fake news, although he doesn’t always understand what news is the fake news.

The Real News Network has the interview Cold War Radar System a Trillion Dollar Fraud – Lester Ernest on RAI (1/4).

Profit and deception drove cold-war militarization, says Lester Ernest, founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford; Ernest says the anti-nuclear bomber SAGE radar system never worked and carried on for 25 years – Lester Ernest on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay

Having grown up in Massachusetts and having gone to MIT in the early 1960s, all these names and places are very familiar to me. I never worked on any of the projects or companies mentioned in the interview.

December 26, 2018

The second part is called Military-Industrial-Congressional Frauds – Lester Earnest on RAI (2/4).

Corporations bribed politicians—it’s legal, it’s called campaign contributions—and they funded projects the Defense Department contracted out, giving the crooks a lot of money; that’s still going strong today – says Lester Earnest, founder of the AI Lab at Stanford

December 28, 2018

The third part is called DOD Criterion for Success: Spend all Your Money by Year End – Lester Earnest on RAI (3/4).

After working on the MIT SAGE radar system and at the Joint Chiefs, Earnest concluded “it’s basically a money making system, that’s what it’s about and has nothing to do with real defense” – Lester Earnest on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay

January 4, 2019

The fourth part is called Billionaires Shouldn’t Control Artificial Intelligence – Lester Earnest on RAI (4/5).

“Patents block progress” – says Lester Earnest, founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford, on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay

This may be the most valuable part of the series.

January 4, 2019

The fifth part is called AI Should Improve Quality of Life, Not Make Capitalists Rich – Lester Earnest on RAI (5/5)

Artificial Intelligence can make the world better or be a tool for war – says Lester Earnest, founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford, on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay

Najed Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: The Vocabulary of Economic Deception.

For a long time, I have suspected that rising GDP was no longer a measure of a growing economy. Somehow, the non-productive income being “earned” by the financial sector was getting added to the accounting of GDP. This article is the first time that I have seen an expert confirm my suspicions.

But the rentier classes have taken over the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) to depict their takings as actual production of a service, not as overhead or a transfer payment, that is, not as parasitic extraction of other peoples’ earnings.
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Classical economists would have subtracted this financial rake-off from output, counting it as overhead. After all, it simply adds to the cost of living and doing business. Instead, the most recent statisticians have added this financial income to the Gross National Product instead of subtracting it, as the classical economists would have doneit or simply not counted it, as was the case a generation ago.
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Today’s ‘reformed’ GDP format pretends that the economy has been going up since 2008. A more realistic description would show that it is shrinking for 95 percent of the population, being eaten away by the wealthiest 5% extracting more rentier income and imposing austerity.

As for federal government deficits, Michael Hudson posed the question this way:

The great question is, what is the government going to spend money on, and how can it spend money into the economy in a way that helps growth? Imagine if this trillion dollars a year that’s spent on arms and military – in California and the districts of the key congressmen on the budget committee – were spent on building roads, schools, transportation and subsidizing medical care. The country could become a utopia. Instead, the rentier classes have hijacked the government, taking over its money creation and taxing power to spend on themselves, not to help the economy at large produce more or raise living standards. Special interests have captured the regulatory agencies to make them serve rent extractors, not protect the economy from them.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies has the article Post-Growth and MMT.

In an age of endless consumption which keeps the economic wheels turning it is no surprise that our leaders have failed dismally to address adequately the very real and long-term global issues of climate collapse and it has been left for too long on the political backburner. This week GIMMS extends a very warm welcome to Andrea Grainger, our guest MMT Lens author. Andrea takes a look at how modern monetary reality sheds a vital light on how to address the challenges we face to avoid global environmental catastrophe and extinction whilst still meeting human needs and keeping within the resource limitations of our life-giving planet.

If this article is talking about ideas that are farther into the future than you can tolerate, it is OK if you skip over this article. For those of us who like to contemplate what the future might look like after we handle the issues that are troubling us today, this opens up an interesting perspective.

The Kaiser Report broadcast on RT has the episode Canceling debt to avoid economic crisis (E1320).

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss David Graeber’s thought piece about the #GiletsJaunes and how the fact that intellectuals have failed to understand it proves we are living in revolutionary times. Graeber notes, as Keiser Report had only last month, that Cantillon effect has created the mass disparity in wealth against which those who must pay for this disparity are rising up. In the second half, Max interviews Dr. Michael Hudson, the author of the new book “… and forgive them their debts”, about the history of debt forgiveness. Hudson explains that the rulers of Byzantium wiped out the savings of rich people by forgiving debts because canceling debts does not cause economic crises but prevents them.

Have our oligarchs convinced you that Russia is evil yet? This episode of the Kaiser report is the most dangerous you can hear. Even RT says they may not agree with it. You may not follow the first half of the report if you haven’t done your own research on the topic. The second half with Michael Hudson lays it out as plainly as you may ever hear it.

December 20, 2018

This episode, Market sell-offs: Fake news or bots to blame? (E1321) includes the second half of the Michael Hudson interview. The interview occurs right after the utterly wacky “commercial” break.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Countering Chinese Accounting Control Fraud and Predation Against U.S. Investors.

What the China Hustle accounting control fraud schemes and the predation schemes described have in common is that neither would be possible if the SEC and either the Bush, Obama, or Trump administration were not so utterly spineless for at least 15 years as to allow the fraud and predation schemes to persist. The Chinese context should have been the easiest context for the U.S. to deny the ability of Chinese corporations to list on the U.S. markets unless the SEC had the power to prevent fraud and contract provisions in the U.S. that China agreed in a binding fashion were enforceable in China. The SEC has not required such a grant of power as a condition of approving Chinese stock listings in the U.S. and has not insisted on enforceable contract terms to prevent predation. The SEC is not even asking for such powers, warning Americans not to invest in Chinese stocks, or seeking to ban such listings.

I commented on the post as follows:

Thanks for the warning. I might have finally decided to invest in Chinese stocks if I hadn’t read this article. What frightens me though, is that I have no assurance that these shenanigans aren’t going on in the highly rated USA companies where I do most of my investing. I try to look at measures to assure myself that I am not investing in companies that are going deep into debt to buy back their own shares to boost the per share earnings and dividends. I’ll only know if I have succeeded when I don’t go broke in the coming market decline.

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.