The US government is planting what is probably a phony story about Russia trying to hack our election computers. They quote numbers of hack attempts against certain computers without giving you context. They don’t tell you that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of computers all over the world probing every computer they can find on the internet to see if they can break in. My own irrelevant web site is probably attacked thousands of times a day. I have protection for that web site that tells me about it if I should ask. Otherwise it just keeps itself occupied in fending off these probes.

What shocks the US, purportedly, is that Russia would interfere in our politics, as if the US is not doing that all over the world itself.

Doesn’t anybody remember Victoria Nuland?

From Consortium News we have the article The Mess that Nuland Made.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s “regime change” in early 2014 without weighing the likely chaos and consequences. Now, as neo-Nazis turn their guns on the government, it’s hard to see how anyone can clean up the mess that Nuland made, writes Robert Parry.

Now you may wonder what Victoria Nuland has to do with Hillary Clinton. Well Consortium News has the article The War Risk of Hillary Clinton.

The outstanding example is Victoria Nuland – Clinton’s spokesperson at State and now Assistant Secretary of State for Europe – who has aggressively spearheaded the anti-Russian crusade. Previously, she had been principal deputy foreign policy advisor for Vice President Dick Cheney.

OK, so maybe the average citizen doesn’t have time to read and remember all these events. Surely yjr corporate news media that has covered these stories must have some memory of what they have reported. Why do they never think the back story is relevant? How can they report with a straight face the war propaganda and distraction from real problems that the administration and Hillary Clinton are engaged in?

Jacobin Magazine has the article Four Futures.

A society that has both labor-replacing technology and abundant resources can overcome scarcity in a thoroughgoing way that a society with only the first element cannot. The second question is political: what kind of society will we be? One in which all people are treated as free and equal beings, with an equal right to share in society’s wealth? Or a hierarchical order in which an elite dominates and controls the masses and their access to social resources?

There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism.

This is the kind of research, thinking, and discussion that I was looking for in my previous posts Gift Economy and The Most Important Political Question That Nobody is Asking.

My previous post, The Most Important Political Question That Nobody is Asking, got me to thinking about societies that are not based on competing for resources. The revelations about how Christopher Columbus committed genocide when he came across such a society was, no doubt, part of what got me thinking along these lines.

I started to wonder if anthropologists have studied these societies with a mind to exactly this difference, competing for resources and not having to compete for resources.

A Google search on anthropology charitable societies brought me to the Wikipedia article Gift economy.

The nature of gift economies forms the subject of a foundational debate in anthropology. Anthropological research into gift economies began with Bronisław Malinowski’s description of the Kula ring in the Trobriand Islands during World War I. The Kula trade appeared to be gift-like since Trobrianders would travel great distances over dangerous seas to give what were considered valuable objects without any guarantee of a return. Malinowski’s debate with the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss quickly established the complexity of “gift exchange” and introduced a series of technical terms such as reciprocity, inalienable possessions, and prestation to distinguish between the different forms of exchange.

I don’t have time right now to do further research or even read the Wikipedia article, but I think I am on to something. We could learn how to adapt to the situation that is creeping up on us. That situation is the time when automation allows all of society’s needs for good and services to be fulfilled without the need for anybody’s labor.

I think I looked for the wrong entry point in my research. The Wikipedia article Post-scarcity economy is more of what I want to research.

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economy in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.

The idea for this post came from a three-year old article that HannahD just sent me, What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

“Well, that’s what my new book’s about. It’s called The Fate of Power and the Future of Dignity, and it doesn’t focus as much on free music files as it does on the world of finance—but what it suggests is that a file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there’s this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. [Meanwhile], it’s shrinking the overall economy. I think it’s the mistake of our age.”

The mistake of our age? That’s a bold statement (as someone put it in Pulp Fiction). “I think it’s the reason why the rise of networking has coincided with the loss of the middle class, instead of an expansion in general wealth, which is what should happen. But if you say we’re creating the information economy, except that we’re making information free, then what we’re saying is we’re destroying the economy.”

I originally wrote the following as a reply to Hannah.

There is some truth in the computer’s responsibility for the diminishing middle-class, but I think the real problem is society’s not realizing that it needs to adapt to the new reality.

I have a thought experiment I like to propose. I am amazed at how many people are simply unable to carry it out, but I found it embodied in a quote that I have retained on my blog.

Scott Santense – posted here June 3, 2015 – source of quote

If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?

My thought experiment is to imagine the day when the production of everything is automated. All society’s needs can be produced without any human thought or labor. Does all the wealth get concentrated into the hands of a very few, or is it spread out so that everybody can have a decent life?

The ultimate vision of my thought experiment won’t happen suddenly if it happens at all. However, we are creeping up on it, so it is a serious question. By imagining the distant end point it can focus our thinking on the problem that we need to solve. How does society rearrange itself to this new reality so that we all have a decent life?

Most Democrats and Republicans, certainly the leaders, don’t seem to have thought about this. I believe Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein know the issue very well. I don’t even think that Elizabeth Warren has the imagination to conceive of this issue.

I don’t have answers, but I have the question. The way we get to the answers is to experiment with different ways of addressing the problem and find out by experience which ones work and which ones don’t. Each experiment can stimulate us to new thinking about solutions we haven’t dreamed of yet. The job guarantee and the income guarantee are two ideas that people are giving serious thought to.

Sputnik News has the article Moscow and Ankara Will Cooperate to End Bloodshed in Syria.

One of the large-scale projects is the implementation of a large international energy hub in Turkey, as one of the ways of normalizing the relations. The project just moved one step closer with signing of the agreement by the two leaders regarding the Turkish Stream pipeline.

I congratulate them for pushing for peace, but in the end it seems to be all about oil. That’s our main concern, too. With Jill Stein’s Green New Deal, we could remove oil as the driving force for all international behavior.

The Nobel Prize Committee has announced the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2016.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2016 to

Oliver Hart
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

and

Bengt Holmström
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

“for their contributions to contract theory”

I’ll excerpt just a little about their statement about one of the recipients, Bengt Holmström.

In the late 1970s, Bengt Holmström demonstrated how a principal (e.g., a company’s shareholders) should design an optimal contract for an agent (the company’s CEO), whose action is partly unobserved by the principal. Holmström’s informativeness principle stated precisely how this contract should link the agent’s pay to performance-relevant information.

Given the sorry state of affairs of the idea of pay for performance in the major robber corporations of this country, do you suppose that the Nobel Prize in Economics has gone to another pair of dud economists? There seems to be a pattern of awards for the committee.

What exaclty is The Riksbank for which the prize is named?

The Riksbank is Sweden’s central bank and an authority under the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament. The Riksbank is responsible for monetary policy with the objective to maintain price stability. The bank has also been given the task to promote a safe and efficient payment system.

Does this give you more, or does it give you less faith in the motives behind the reward?

You might call it Trump’s emancipation proclamation, and he isn’t even President.

Here is an email I received. If Donald Trump really is toast, which I doubt, then all the Berners can feel free to vote for Jill.

Use #OccupyTheDebates to make your voice heard and take part in the tweets.

The Nation has the article The United States and NATO Are Preparing for a Major War With Russia.

Massive military exercises and a troop buildup on NATO’s eastern flank reflect a dangerous new strategy.

Given this beginning of the article, I hardly expected to see the following:

It’s hard to know where to begin when commenting on all this, given the atmosphere of Cold War hysteria. There is, first of all, the question of proportionality: are US and NATO moves on the eastern flank in keeping with the magnitude of the threat posed by Russia? Russian intervention in Crimea and eastern Ukraine is certainly provocative and repugnant, but cannot unequivocally be deemed a direct threat to NATO.

Russia was only acting at the provocation of our overthrowing the government of Ukraine, but everybody is spouting the propaganda that it is Russia’s fault. Who will save us from the two majoe party presidential contenders and from the complicit corporate media? Only a very large vote for Jill Stein/Ajamu Baraka – People, Planet, Peace – can save us from almost certain war started by either one of the two major party candidates.

Sung to the tune of “Oops there goes the rubber tree plant” (High Hopes).

What I learned from modeling the real world is that you always have to realize that a model is a simplification. If it were the real world, it wouldn’t be called a simplification. So, a simplification means you have left something out. If you left something out, and that something you left out becomes important, then you can expect your model to fail. So, you always have to ask yourself, what have I left out. When you have a good idea what you left out, you can always check it to see when it becomes important enough to invalidate your model.

When you have a balance between something worth investing and the amount of money available to invest (from the Fed), you can control the economy by changing either side of the balance a little and get large changes. When you have more money than there are things to invest in, then making more money is not going to help. You have to make more stuff worth investing. Or as Keynesians would put it, if there is not enough demand, you have to increase the demand. Or when you have a theory that works when there are two large forces roughly in balance, then you might not be surprised that the theory does not work so well when the forces are hugely unbalanced. This might be called a non-linear system like the ones that I spent 20 to 40 years modeling (depends on how you classify systems).

I have recently heard an explanation of the hyper inflation of the Weimar Republic that we are usually never told. If we use the very simple definition of too much money chasing too few goods, then what happened in the Weimar Republic was that the WWI reparations decimated industry so that it could not supply enough goods to match the supply of money.

You have to wonder what brilliant economist says that if there is too much money for the amount of goods we have, then the solution must be to make more money.

Sort of like the brilliant monetarists now who say that if there is nothing to invest in, then we have to make more money that has no place to be invested.

If it weren’t for the opportunities to outsource work to low wage countries, then there might have been inflation in wages. This is the inflation that the Fed is desperately trying to create, but cannot figure out why it is so tough to create. Of course, we did have huge real estate inflation for a while, but we know what happened to that.

The inflation in the stock market has been enough to suck up every bit of liquidity that the Fed has pumped into the system. However, putting money into stocks as the only possible investment does not employ enough people to create consumer demand. So, the only logical thing for the rich to do is to invest in more stock. Stock is the only thing that seems to make money.

We know how this movie turns out. We just don’t know what it is going to take to burst this bubble. Because of mark-to-market, so much wealth will be destroyed that I don’t know what is going to happen to all that liquidity the Fed has been wildly pumping into the system. That’s something I will have to spend a lot of time thinking about or researching to figure out what the MMT model says will happen.

The words “MMT Model” triggers the wisdom that a model is a simplification. It therefore must leave something out. When that something becomes important, then the model is likely to fail. What I think MMT leaves out is the effect of mark-to-market. OOPS!!!!