Steve's Politics Blog

Paste Magazine has the article The Destruction of Matt Taibbi.

“These claims that Matt would do this stuff are ridiculous,” she said. “I left The eXile because we started dating, and Matt was worried about impropriety. He didn’t even ask me out at work! Matt is a fundamentally decent and kind person.”

I never knew that this had been done to Matt Taibbi. I was wondering why he seemed to have disappeared.

The right has found a new weapon that seems to have been first wielded by Democrats. When I first listened to the Trump tape, I was reminded of some of the stories guys would tell to boost their images. One never knew if any of it was true. In Taibbi’s case all the indentifiable women involved say that it was not true and was never meant to be taken as true.

This is why I have taken to using <sarcasm></sarcasm> or <satire></satire> flags around everything that I write that might not be recognized for what it is by some readers. It sort of spoils the joke to label it that flagrantly, but better to be safe than sorry.

Pragmatic Capitalism has the article IDGAF > FOMO.

We’re now entering silly season in the markets. People are buying cryptocurrencies that no one understands and have very little actual utility. People are chasing stocks higher on a daily basis. Emerging market stocks, tech stocks and all the other riskiest parts of the stock markets are the biggest winners of the year. And a large part of this is due to FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out. After 8 years of straight up stock market gains, rising home prices and now a crypto boom like the world has never seen, there is a palpable feeling of irrational exuberance overtaking the markets.

This is the thinking that kept me safe while others were going crazy over the tech bubble of the 1990s and the real estate bubble of the 2000s. I am trying like heck to keep myself safe in the current bubble. Only time will tell if I will succeed. Another name for what I try to do is called value investing.

Pragmatic Capitalism has the article Elasticity of Money is a Feature, not a Bug.

…this idea that a fixed money supply is good is not consistent with the history of money or even the basic facts about how modern money works. Worse, it constrains our economy in ways that make us worse off in the long-run.

Here is yet another way to explain what seems to me ought to be obvious.

It’s not that an artificially fixed money supply could not work. Deflation could offset the problem of a currency that does not grow with the economy. The trouble is that deflation is so far removed from our everyday experience of money that it would require major adaptations. Whereas inflation favors borrowers over lenders, deflation does the exact opposite. This has economic consequences that hinder the growth possibilities of an economy. They don’t prevent growth, but they do make it harder rather than easier.

Verified Politics has the article Billionaire Michael Bloomberg Just Exposed Trump’s Evil Secret Behind His Tax Heist.

Bloomberg criticizes Trump and Congress for not really listening to CEO’s, economists and others who could have told them that well tax reform is needed to solve major problems, the approach they are taking is completely the wrong way to go.

To this article and Bloomberg’s critiques, I say, “You are foolish to believe that the tax cuts were based on economic facts. The rich backers of these politicians wanted tax cuts, and they paid to get them. They know darn well that this will only help the rich. There are no facts you can expose that will change this one fact, the rich are getting what they paid for.”

The Foreign Policy Journal has the article Walking into Armageddon

A few days ago former US Secretary of Defense William J. Perry added his voice to mine and to those of the few who understand the danger. Perry said:

When the Cold War ended, I believed that we no longer had to take that risk [nuclear annihilation] so I put all my energy into efforts to dismantle the deadly nuclear legacy of the Cold War. During my period as the Secretary of Defense in the 90s, I oversaw the dismantlement of 8,000 nuclear weapons evenly divided between the United States and the former Soviet Union. And I thought then that we were well on our way to putting behind us this deadly existential threat, but that was not to be.

Today, inexplicably to me, we’re recreating the geopolitical hostility of the Cold War, and we’re rebuilding the nuclear dangers. … We are doing this without any serious public discussion or any real understanding of the consequences of these actions. We are sleepwalking into a new Cold War, and there’s very real danger that we will blunder into a nuclear war. If we are to prevent this catastrophe, the public must understand what is happening.

My previous post Undoing the New Deal: Truman’s Cold War Buries Wallace and the Left, demonstrates our long, sad history of getting talked into wars with Russia.

The Real News Network has the story Undoing the New Deal: Truman’s Cold War Buries Wallace and the Left.

Historian Peter Kuznick says Truman bought into the Republican’s post-WWII campaign against Russia and used the hysteria to purge the Democratic Party and defeat former VP Henry Wallace in the ’48 Presidential election; with host Paul Jay.

When I watched this video, I found it to be very disturbing. I got too lazy to blog it, but it became so relevant today, that I decided to go back, find the story, and post it here for future reference.

I have blogged about the article that has made this so obviously relevant. The subsequent blog post is Walking into Armageddon.

I have watched 3 of the 6 hours of WWII Confidential on AHC TV. The story of the workings of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin during WW II are much more complicated than what was covered by The Real News Network. It is hard for me to completely reconcile the two views. The parts I watched only went up to the Yalta meeting and a little beyond. If it covered the ascension of Harry Truman to the Presidency, I did not watch the episodes that may have covered that.

Glenn Greenwald has published the article The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened.

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

I want to have a record of this story here on my blog. I’ll be able to refer to it when people brag about the veracity of our corporate press or disparage propaganda from other presumably less reliable sources. We have to remain skeptical of everything, including this Glenn Greenwald article. We will probably never know the truth behind many of the things we have grown to believe.

Michael Hudson has the article Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.

Writing down debts reduces the overall economy’s financial costs. Keeping debts on the books retains these costs. So when the financial sector (or the 1%) insists on maintaining the debts that have been run up – and supporting the debt-leveraged price of real estate pledged as collateral – securing its past “savings” gains are incompatible with maintaining a viable economy. The debt overhead becomes an expense that must be shed if the economy is not to shrink – and if it does shrink, more debts will go bad and a deteriorating spiral will set in.

Perception of this long-term macroeconomic dynamic is what has led the past few centuries of legal trends and political ideology to favor indebted labor and industry, and indebted governments as well. It explains why debtors’ prisons have been closed, and bankruptcy laws become increasingly humanitarian to enable debtors to make a fresh start. This idea of clean slates is only recently being extended to the economy-wide scale, starting with government debts to global creditors.

Today’s financial trend threatens to reverse this pro-debtor reform tendency.

I had been looking for the origins of the phrase that is the title of this article, and this is one of the items that I came across. I don’t think this phrase was originated by Michael Hudson, but the article is a good treatise on the subject.

YouTube has the video Bernie Exposes Weaselly GOP Plan To Cut Medicare & Social Security.

He does play the video of Bernie’s debate on the Senate floor. However, if you need Bernie Sanders explained to you, this guy does a good job. There was one subtlety that he explains that did get by me at first. That was the one about Rubio and his mother. (Rubio will make sure he doesn’t upset his mother who receives Social Security, but the younger people will get screwed.)

Remember that Social Security and Medicare are an earned benefit. They are not entitlements. If the workers got their fair share of the benefits of productivity improvements in the economy, there would be no problem paying for the benefits they earned.

YouTube has the video Nomiki On Her Donna Brazile Interview.

TYT Politics Reporter Nomiki Konst gives her thoughts on her interview with Donna Brazile and the reaction to it.

After you look at this discussion you might want to go back and see the interview that this is all about. I have already blogged about the interview. In case you missed it, the post is Donna Brazile on The Young Turks with Nomiki Konst.