YouTube has a discussion of the midterm elections LIVE: The Midterms in REAL Terms
Join host Marc Steiner with Paul Jay, Danny Glover, Abby Martin, Thomas Frank, Khalilah Harris, Robert Scheer, Eugene Puryear, Howie Klein, Phyllis Bennis, and more on election night from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM (EST)
They are talking in language that I feel for.
I have been wondering why I am almost the only person in the world to notice this. When it takes, on average, two jobs per adult worker to make a living in the USA, does it make sense to call it full employment when each working adult has, on average, one job?
In the days when it only required one paid job per family to survive, it made sense to measure how many people were totally without work to understand how the economy was doing for the average person. Nowadays, every person could have one job, and we would have 0% unemployment by traditional measures but 50% underemployment when measuring how many people had enough work to make a living.
When was the last time you heard a news report on what percentage of the people did not have enough work to make a living?
Nobody wanted to tell people that creating 100s of thousands of low wage jobs per month during Obama’s term was not really a good record. Just shows that when you tell lies when you are in power, your opponents are given free reign to tell the same lies during their term. I always opposed the neo-liberals like Clinton and Obama when they used deception to brag about what they were doing. There is a reason why my parents always told me that honesty is the best policy.
The Atlantic has the article
My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery: His career as an eminent physicist was derailed by an obsession. Was he a genius or a crackpot?
In essence, what he thought he’d found was a way in which probabilities arose naturally, a way in which they could be derived from the basic laws of the physical world rather than deduced from experiments. And he thought this should apply in the quantum world as well. It was both as simple, and as grandiose, as that. All the other papers, down through the years, involve elaborations of this main idea.
This paragraph is as tantalizing close as the author gets to explaining the idea.
This makes me think some more about a tantalizing paradox that physicists are talking about these days. That is called quantum entanglement. Two particles are entangled in such a way that the two have opposite values of a physical quantity. You don’t know (can’t know) the value that either particle has until you measure one particle. As soon as you know the value one particle has, you know the value that the other particle must have. If you don’t make the measurement until the two particles are separated by large distances, it leads to the question of how the remote particle can instantly take on a known value when you make a mearuremment on the particle you have close access to. The special theory of relativity tells you that no particle, and no information, can travel faster than the speed of light. Quantum mechanics tells you that the answer to what value each particle has doesn’t even exist when the particles were separated and sent on their different paths. It does not seem possible that both of these physical laws can both be right, and yet the entangled particles have been shown by experiment to behave the way I described. It seems obvious that something we can’t explain is exactly what is happening. I have no idea what the answer is, but it is just interesting to think of what has to happen for someone to figure it out.
Maybe Francis Perey had the kind of insight that will be needed.
Common Dreams has the article Sanders and Varoufakis Announce Alliance to Craft ‘Common Blueprint for an International New Deal’.
The pair hopes to promote a “progressive, ecological, feminist, humanist, rational program” for not only Europe, but the entire world.
If the oligarchs can get together to create international trade agreements that benefit them and screw the rest of us, it is about time people woke up to the fact that we need progressive international agreements to protect the 99% of the people in the world.
The rallying cry started by Marx and Engels was “Workers of the World Unite“. The oligarchs certainly understood the power of the rich to unite around the world. It is about time that workers woke up to what is necessary.
The only way we can fight the trade agreements created by the rich to make workers compete for jobs by offering to work for the least amount of money is to unite world-wide to get trade agreements that protect workers from the oligarchs.
I have been waiting for some USA politician to realize that we have to get progressive political leaders from around the world to unite to protect the workers. I am not surprised that Bernie Sanders would be the first one with national standing to promote this idea.
For those who would like to know more about Yanis Varoufakis, start with this search on The Real News Network,
I often think of this quote that finally I found in a YouTube video clip, Bridge of spies – “Would it help?” quote.
YouTube has the video A Discussion with Michael Hudson, Ellen Brown, & Walt McRee about the public banking option.
Before you swallow this discussion hook, line, and sinker, you might want to look at my dissent below,
On Thursday April 6, 2017 two world-renowned economic thinkers came to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA to discuss how a public banking option can affect governmental effectiveness.
This discussion focused on the key differences between government’s unquestioned reliance on private capital markets and how an entirely new, more productive arrangement could be devised.
I’d say there is a fair amount of hogwash in this presentation. If you really understand the relation between Federal Reserve Bank and private banks you can supply enough of your own knowledge to justify some of the words that are being said, but if you don’t, I think you might be bamboozled by what Ellen Brown in particular has to say. I watched about 20 minutes of this, and expected Michael Hudson to correct what Brown said, but he did not. I have read Hudson’s book “Killing the Host”, and the truth is more subtle than they are making out here.
I think a good way to understand private banks is that they get money wholesale and lend it at retail. They get the wholesale money from many places including depositors, investors, and the Federal Reserve Bank. I haven’t been able to find a reference that explains the percentages that the many wholesale suppliers are responsible for. To pretend or give the impression that private banks only have one source of wholesale money is to give you a very distorted picture.
Fractional reserve banking allows banks to lend more money than they have, but if they run into trouble, they have the Federal Reserve Bank to provide them whatever money they need (at a cost of course).
Investopedia has the article Wholesale Money that gives a hint at what I mean by wholesale money. I do not know what Fraction of the wholesale money comes from the Fed at any particular moment in history, but when the system runs short, only the Fed has an infinite supply (in the USA) to fill in whatever is needed. The excerpt from Investopedia talks about a situation in England that has close parallels to what would happen in the USA with the Fed instead of the Bank of England.
A defining moment of the subprime crisis happened in 2007, when Northern Rock, a British bank which had relied on wholesale markets for most of its finance, was no longer able to fund its lending activities and had to ask the Bank of England for emergency funding.
I have now watched the entire video beyond the initial 20 minutes that aggravated me so. There is lots of good information and ideas buried in this manure pile.
I do think that Ellen Brown is close to an idiot in understanding all the issues. Poo-pooing the need to watch out for fraud in a public bank is too naive to believe she could actually believe that. Michael Hudson was correct that their need to be stiff penalties including jail time for cheaters. There will always be cheaters and attempts at corruption. Read William K Black’s book, “The Best Way o Rob a Bank Is To Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry”
Her introduction of the idea of using block chain for the Federal Reserve to serve the banking needs of the public is a complete red herring. Block chain is merely a computer security method which has nothing to do with the fundamentals of running a bank. None of the large and small financial institutions that serve the people at the retail level, use block chain to deal with USA money.
YouTube has the video How Democratic Establishment Is Squeezing Andrew Gillum.
Andrew Gillum ran as a Bernie endorsed-Med4All-Progressive and now is being squeezed by the Party to prop up the enemies of progressives like Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
I have been wondering why I have started to become disappointed with Andrew Gillum and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lately. This explains what is going on. Voting Blue just won’t do.
YouTube has the segment from The Jimmy Dore Show DNC Fraud Lawsuit Suffers Suspicious Judge Recusal.
I should have been paying more attention to this. Jimmy Dore does get to the heart of the matter pretty quickly with Niko House.
EcoWatch has the article It’s Official: Injection of Fracking Wastewater Caused Kansas’ Biggest Earthquake,
The largest earthquake ever recorded in Kansas—a 4.9 magnitude temblor that struck northeast of Milan on Nov. 12, 2014—has been officially linked to wastewater injection into deep underground wells, according to new research from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
This should be no surprise to “experts”. Back in the late 1960s, I followed this story in the news. Maybe it caught my attention because I was in the Army, although in Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia, not Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Denver.
Wstword has the article Denver earthquakes 40 years ago were caused by Uncle Sam, not Mother Nature published in Auguast 2011.
Despite yesterday’s earthquake that hit the Trinidad region, “Colorado is considered a region of minor earthquake activity,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey. But forty years ago, a series of quakes rocked the Denver area — quakes caused not by Mother Nature, but by Uncle Sam.
How? The Army was dumping dangerous chemicals into a deep injection well out at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
I wonder if modern day “experts” are too young to remember this or have not been taught about this in their engineering schools.
The Intercept has a three part series beginning with A Giant Pile of Money: How Wall Street Drove Public Pensions Into Crisis and Pocketed Billions in Fees.
Public pensions across the country now squander tens of billions of dollars each year on risky, often poor-performing alternative investments — money public pensions can ill afford to waste.
If you think that privatizing Social Security is a good idea, you’d better have a plan to protect the unsophisticated individual investor from these vulture capitalists who can dupe and corrupt people chosen to oversee public pension funds. Turns out that Franco Modigliani and Arun Muralidhar had such a plan, but it was nothing like what the Republicans propose. Also, just search this blog for either Franco Modigliani or Arun Muralidhar.