Steve's Politics Blog

YouTube has the video OAN Investigation Finds No Evidence of Chemical Weapon Attack in Syria.

You can watch the above video, and decide for yourself whether this puts even the slightest doubt in your mind about the story you have been getting from the corporate media. Some of us can admit that we don’t know for absolutely sure what happened, but some people seem to need to think that they do know for sure.

Given how the Russians have reacted, I think that the USA and Russia have agreed to play a game. The Russians know that for political reasons our government has to have a reason to go to war with Syria. As long as we don’t screw up Syria’s war with rebels/terrorists, then the Russians will let us get away with whatever fabrications our political system requires.

WikiPedia has an article on One America News Network. This is just to give you some background information for you to decide how much credence you want to give to this report. This network may be better known to many others than it was known to me.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Framing the Progressive Platform. The following phrase is repeated several times:

This monetary system—which has been willfully misunderstood, but operational now for over half a century—pays Americans first, then collects taxes second.

Of course the author is referring to Modern Money Theory (MMT).

I have been a proponent of MMT for quite a while now, but I find it disturbing that most proponents of MMT do not notice (or do not address) the holes in MMT theory that are big enough to drive a truck through.

The main accounting identity that drives MMT is the sector balance. What MMT ignores is that accounting is a static snapshot of accounts, but the real economy is a dynamic system. Even quasi static analyses are inadequate. When a bank gives a borrower money to buy things now, but also enters a debt that must be repaid over the next 30 years, these two things perfectly cancel each other out in a static sense. Dynamically, buying now and paying later has significant economic impact.

Then there is mark-to-market. When we want to calculate our net-worth including our stock holdings, we value each share we own at the price of the last stock market transaction in that stock. For small, individual holders, you can sell out your stock position at very close to the market price snapshot. Large holders of stock, and the economy as a whole cannot liquidate their entire positions at the snapshot market price. We see the falsity every day of mark-to-market. As the market indices rise and fall every day, there are billions, if not trillions, of dollars created or destroyed by the end of every day.

Steve Keen (see the post Oliver Green in conversation with Steve Keen, Contrarian Economist and Author) seems to be one of the few that understands the essential dynamism of the economy that must be included in any model that wants to be accurate over a wide range of conditions.

If you want to sell the public on your model of how money works, you’d better have a darn good model that passes the tests of a few simple observations like the ones I have made above.

Steemit has the article Huge Information Drop on Deep State Propaganda Arm: Fact Checking Outfit Snopes Rolls Out The Atlantic Councils Pro-War Armchair Propagandists To Cover For Mass Media And Government Lies About Latest White Helmets False Flag in Syria

On April 12, 2018 Facebook’s ‘Fact-Checking’ outlet “Snopes”, which has previously been exposed as employing partying drunks and prostitutes (link below), rolled out another publicly presented obfuscation piece on the White Helmets who are terrorists posing as rescuers of small children in Syria.

I have been warned before about Snopes. I have also found an article or two on Snopes that don’t pass the smell test, but I felt that Snopes could be trusted on some things. Now, I am pretty confused.

If nothing else, both sides will successfully destroy each other’s credibility.

CBS News has the story New tax scam targeting preparers tricks clients with fraudulent returns.

The criminals get their hands on returns from previous years, then use that information to file new fraudulent returns on unsuspecting victims.
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IRS agents showed us where criminals buy those tax returns on the dark web.

It’s too bad that the reporter was not adequately prepared to ask the IRS why they let a copy of your previous filing be enough to file a fraudulent filing for the current year.

When your employer sends you your W-2 form, they send a copy to the IRS too. Your bank, your mortgage lender, your stock broker, and other sources also send duplicate forms to the IRS. This information changes from year to year, so that a previous year’s return will not have this year’s numbers for the con artists to copy.

When the IRS matches the forms it receives with the numbers on your filing, they will see the discrepancies. If the IRS knows about the practice of fraudulent filings, then the IRS should have insisted that the originator of the forms should put a random number on every form. When you enter the random number of each form in your tax filing, and it does not match the IRS’s copy, they should insist on a correction before accepting the form and issuing a refund.

We should all be asking our Senators and Representatives why the IRS does not take simple steps to protect us from fraud. The IRS has, or should have, the computer power to make these safety checks.

Consortium News has the article Liars Lying About Nearly Everything.

As the latest British account of the location of the alleged poison places it on the door handle of the Skripals’ residence, the timetable element is also unconvincing. That means that the two would have spent three hours, including a stop at a pub and lunch, before succumbing on a park bench. Military grade nerve agents kill instantly and this one is said to be 8 times more powerful than VX.

There is even more damaging information in the article than this excerpt I have chosen here.

I hadn’t even read this article when I published my previous post Skripals poisoned from front door of Salisbury home, police say. I hadn’t even thought about the above issue when I made that post.

YouTube has the video ‘Assad had no reason to launch chem attack, unlike those who want US involvement’ – Ron Paul.

Washington and the US media seem to have no doubts about the Syrian government’s complicity in the Douma incident despite the fact that those who want America to stay in Syria have far more solid motives, Ron Paul told RT.

There isn’t much that Ron Paul and I can agree on, but this is one area where we do agree. Notice that even Ed Schultz buys into the idea that an actual gas attack occurred. I am beginning to wonder if he isn’t too naive.

Zero Hedge has the article “There Wasn’t A Single Corpse”: Russia Claims ‘White Helmets’ Staged Syria Chemical Attack.

Russia claims that the reported chemical attack in Syria last Sunday was staged by the “white helmets,” a US-funded NGO lauded by mainstream media for their humanitarian work, while long-suspected of performing less-than humanitarian deeds behind the curtain.

The article includes this video.

Notice how the interviewer assumes on faith that the videos he has been shown are true, even when CBS News admits they cannot verify them.

This is the first mention of “White Helmets” that I have seen. If the corporate media had mentioned “White Helmets” in the beginning then I would have been positively sure it was a false flag operation. That is probably why the corporate media tried to keep “white helmets” out of their reports. Maybe the corporate media isn’t just naively accepting the deep state’s take on this issue. Maybe they are very consciously and purposely lying.

YouTube has the video Canadian journalist totally crushes MSM reporter on what’s actually happening in Syria.

I don’t know for sure whom to believe, but I certainly am not going to unconditionally believe the anti-Asad, regime change people.

The Guardian has the article Skripals poisoned from front door of Salisbury home, police say .

Detectives investigating the attempted murders of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal have said they believe the pair were poisoned with a nerve agent at the front door of his Salisbury home.

Specialists investigating the poisoning of the the Skripals have found the highest concentration of the nerve agent on the front door at the address, police said.

If you were a reporter/editor with the most meager qualifications for your job, this story would raise a lot of questions that you would pose in this incredulous article.

How would the would be assassin know that the Skirpal’s would be using their front door? As an owner of a home with an attached garage, I seldom use the front door because I usually enter and exit my house through the garage.

How could the would be assassin know that there wouldn’t be many others dropping dead from the poison? Do they not have door-to-door sales people, religious proselytizers, mail and package deliverers, newspaper deliverers, nor household staff in England? Any of these people would have been similarly poisoned and dropping like flies.

Do the British authorities think their story is so credible, that nobody is going to scoff at this naive explanation?

I just read and posted about the article Liars Lying About Nearly Everything.

As the latest British account of the location of the alleged poison places it on the door handle of the Skripals’ residence, the timetable element is also unconvincing. That means that the two would have spent three hours, including a stop at a pub and lunch, before succumbing on a park bench. Military grade nerve agents kill instantly and this one is said to be 8 times more powerful than VX.

I hadn’t even thought about this issue when I first posted this post.