YouTube has the video Missing or murdered? Erdogan dares Saudi Arabia to produce Jamal Khashoggi.

The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss the case of the missing or murdered Jamal Khashoggi, and what this means for an already tense relationship between Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

New Economic Perspectives has the excellent article Change The Subject.

Hard as it might be to bite their collective tongues, what the Democrats ought to do if they take the House this November is to dramatically and forcefully CHANGE THE SUBJECT. Strategically, leading up to the 2020 elections, this would be, by far, the most intelligent and effective course to take. Should the Democrats continue throwing gasoline and flaming matches on the emotional blood-feud which has come to dominate our politics and news cycles, they will be playing directly into the game-plan Donald Trump has imposed on the Republican party—and American politics in general.

The posted the following comment on the article.

Excellent suggestions. When I am thinking rationally, I have repeatedly told anyone in the Democratic Party that will listen, “You can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t win by what you are against. You must establish a vision of what you are for.”

Yes, we are both naive to think that the Democrats will listen or that they really want to win back power with a progressive platform. They really just want to win back power to better serve their corporate paymasters.

New Economic Perspectives has this marvelous article MODERN MONEY THEORY: How I came to MMT and what I include in MMT by L. Randall Wray.

Of all the wonderful wisdom in the article, here is one quote that hits my hot button of agreement.

Monetary policy is weak and its impact is at best uncertain – it might even be mistaking the brake pedal for the gas pedal.

It is remarkable that an expert on the subject of MMT (sometimes mislabeled as Modern Monetary Theory) should emphasize this truth.

I think it is very important to understand that. From the Keynesian economics I learned from Samuelson’s book in 1he 1960s, the explanation is pretty clear. In other words, you can put on the brakes by taking money out of the economy – people cannot spend what isn’t there. Flooding the economy with money won’t make people spend it if there is not enough worthwhile things (investments) to spend that money on. Or as I say, “what part of no freakin’ customer do you not understand”? Hark back to the old analogy that you can drag something by pulling on its string, but you cannot push an object by pushing on its string. I just cannot fathom how Milton Friedman couldn’t get that simple concept. How could all the economists who were fooled by Friedman forget that basic truth?

In the current economic conditions, there is no additional productive capacity that is worth investing the trillions of dollars flowing into the hands of the rich from tax cuts and and Federal Reserve Bank “stimulative” monetary policy. A lot of that excess money is going into inflating the prices of stocks in the stock market. Companies are using what cash they can get their hands on to buy back stock. In essence the fewer and fewer shares there are, the higher their prices. It is also easier to raise dividends per share when shrinking the actual productive capacity of a company if there are fewer shares that get that dividend. People who own keep their shares in a company rather than selling them back to the company are getting a bigger and bigger piece of a smaller and smaller company. They think they are getting rich, but when the stock market finally crashes back to earth, they will find that they are not so rich after all.

Evonomics has republished the article How Hedge Fund Activists Prey on Companies: When corporate raiders coopted “shareholder democracy” for their own ends.

In combination, these regulatory changes increased the incidence of predatory value extraction in the U.S. economy. For more than a decade, major public corporations have routinely disbursed to shareholders nearly all of their profits, and often sums equivalent to more than their profits, in the form of stock buybacks, dividends, and deferred taxes while investing less for the future and undertaking restructuring simply for the sake of reducing costs.

This article was an education and a half for me. How many of you can attach a family name to the USA President in the 1990s when much of this got started?

Naked Capitalism has the article Steve Keen: How Economics Became a Cult.

Steve Keen of Kingston University, London gives an important high-level talk on the considerable shortcomings of mainstream economics. Keen argues that a major objective of the discipline is to justify the virtues of markets, which in turn leads them to adopt a strongly ideological posture along with highly simplified models and narrow mathematical approaches to reach conclusions that they find acceptable.

Sometimes (frequently) Steve Keen talks faster than my mind can comprehend, so I take what I can from his talks, and let the rest percolate for a while.

My career experience is also in scientific/engineering software design and support, so I have a little bit of an advantage understanding Keen.

Disobedient Media has the article The Critical Difference Between Tim Canova And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

While Tim Canova is independently facing off against one of the most corrupt career politicians in the country, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been busy endorsing them. Cortez has come to represent an example of why and how a supposed progressive cannot survive within the DNC framework with their integrity intact.
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Like Sanders, Cortez illustrates that even a supposed “insurgency” within the Democratic Party ultimately transforms those who pursue it into apologists for the same establishment they claim to fight – by design or accident, the result is the same.

This really is something to be very worried about. When this happens to both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, it starts to look like a dangerous pattern.

Let me start with a quote that Sep Ebrahimzadeh posted. This is from the History As Weapon web site article “You Have to Fight for Freedom” (1973)

When i was maybe ten years old, i changed schools. On the way to school, i had to go through a park that was for white people only. We could walk through the park but we couldn’t stop at all, just pass through it. There were swings in this park and, oh, I so much wanted sometimes to just stop and swing a little while, but we couldn’t because we were black. I would walk through this park to my school where there weren’t any swings.

Every morning all the kids would line up according to classrooms and we would have prayers and sing the Star Spangled Banner and then we’d march to our respective groups after this business.

I decided I wasn’t going to sing the Star Spangled Banner. I just stood there every morning and I didn’t sing it. One morning, one of the teachers noticed that I wasn’t doing it. So she very quietly called me over and asked me why didn’t I sing the Star Spangled Banner. I said I just didn’t feel like singing it. So she said, “Well then you have to go in to the principal and explain that to him. All of the children in the school take part and you’ve got to do it too.” OK, I went in to the principal and he asked me why I wasn’t singing the Star Spangled Banner….

Finally I told him. “Because it says ‘The land of the free and the home of the brave’ and this is not the land of the free. I don’t know who’s brave but I’m not going to sing it any more.” Then he said, “Why you’ve been singing it all the time haven’t you? How come you want to stop now?” And I told him about coming through the park and if I could not swing in those swings in the park, and I couldn’t sit in the park, and I could only walk in Shakespeare Park, then it couldn’t be the land of the free. “Who’s free?” He didn’t say anything.

Then he said, “Well, you could pledge allegiance to your flag.” I said, “It’s not my flag. The flag is with freedom. If the land is free and the flag is mine, then how come I can’t do like the white kids?”….

You can watch a reading of the above quote on Vimeo.

Now here us the CBS News article Texas AG backs school that expelled student over Pledge of Allegiance.

Texas state law prohibits students from sitting during the Pledge of Allegiance unless they have written consent from a parent or guardian, KHOU reports.

India Landry filed a lawsuit after she was kicked out of school last year when she was a senior at Windfern High School, in Harris County. She and her mother claimed the principal made an arbitrary decision to punish her given that Landry sat down for the Pledge of Allegiance in hundreds of previous cases.

“I don’t believe the flag is for what it says it’s for,” Landry said last year, KHOU reported. “For liberty and justice and all that.”

Naked Capitalism has the article The Bank of International Settlement’s Claudio Borio, Who Warned About the Crisis, Says the World Economy Is About to Get Very Sick.

In addition to the inefficiencies brought about by growing inequality, fiscal policy has tended to be biased toward “trickle-down economics” in which the benefits of government spending/taxation decisions “trickle down” to the population as a means of stimulating employment and income gains, as opposed to focusing directly on programs that cover “labor gaps” through direct employment programs such as the Job Guarantee(JG). The virtue of the JG, as the economist Hyman Minsky argued, is that “instead of the demand for low wage workers trickling down from the demand for the high wage workers, [policy orientation] should result in increments of demand for present high wage workers ‘bubbling up’ from the demand for low wage workers.” This can be better achieved via the JG, than, say, tax cuts.

Monetary policy is the wrong tool to use when consumer demand is insufficient. John Maynard Keynes explained that all to the world in the 1930s. It is still true, no matter what monetarists try to fool you with. Tax-cuts and zero (or negative) interest rates are all tools from the monetary toolbox. Fiscal stimulus by government requires spending by government. Collecting less taxes is not the same as fiscal stimulus just as pushing on a string is not as effective as pulling on a string.

It is amazing that NPR has the story Episode 866: Modern Monetary Theory.

Some ideas seem too good to be true. Like this one. It comes from a 13-year-old listener named Amy. She says she knows the government has trouble finding enough money to pay for stuff like schools and hospitals. And she wondered if it has considered just printing more money. She asked us: Can the government do that? Just make more money to pay for stuff?

NPR has made this a little too entertaining, but they do eventually cover most of the important points. It doesn’t hurt to hear this explanation and others like it until you can digest what’s being explained to you.