Steve's Politics Blog

YouTube has the RT video Democratic Party ‘responsible for Trump’ – activist.

How will progressives make their voices heard in 2020? It may not be through the Democratic Party, after the fallout from the 2016 primary. Nick Brana, founder of Movement for a People’s Party, blames the DNC for President Donald Trump’s election. He tells RT they not only intentionally boosted Trump, but also abandoned the middle class.

View this video now before YouTube decides or is forced to take this down. Our current fearless leaders are afraid to touch the Second Amendment, but they are starting to attack the First Amendment. Because this interview took place on RT, they don’t think you are qualified to judge it yourself.

Politico has the Bernie Sanders article How to Fix the Democratic Party.

Independent voters are critical to general election victories. Locking them out of primaries is a pathway to failure.

What was infuriating during the primaries was that so many Democrats thought that they could win with a candidate that Democratic Party insiders loved, but the general public hated. They didn’t seem to understand that in the general election, all people get to vote, not just Democrats as in the Democratic Primaries.

The Atlantic has the article What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

We may be humbled to one day find ourselves joined, across the distance of stars, to a more ancient web of minds, fellow travelers in the long journey of time. We may receive from them an education in the real history of civilizations, young, old, and extinct. We may be introduced to galactic-scale artworks, borne of million-year traditions. We may be asked to participate in scientific observations that can be carried out only by multiple civilizations, separated by hundreds of light-years. Observations of this scope may disclose aspects of nature that we cannot now fathom. We may come to know a new metaphysics. If we’re lucky, we will come to know a new ethics. We’ll emerge from our existential shock feeling newly alive to our shared humanity. The first light to reach us in this dark forest may illuminate our home world too.

I would consider the headline to be a pretty trivial aspect of what is discussed in this article. This is science/fiction that I find fascinating enough to look deeper into.

YouTube has the RT interview video ‘Zero evidence’ for claims Russia hacked DNC – NSA whistleblower.

Previously, I had posted about this analysis and had criticized one aspect of it. My previous posts were A Leak or a Hack? A Forum on the VIPS Memo and Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence.

In this video William Binney gives out some information that I had not heard before. In my critiques I said that the calculations VIPS made about the theoretically possible speed were not definitive. This interview is the first time I have heard that they made actual tests to see what speed could be achieved. Before that, all I had heard was theoretical calculations as to what would be possible. My calculations showed that the speeds were theoretically possible. I did not say that I knew those speeds could be achieved in practice. All I meant to say was that the calculations did not prove that those speeds were impossible theoretically. Experiments don’t prove that the data couldn’t have been downloaded off site in this amount of time if the original downloaders might have had some technology that the VIPS didn’t have. However, I will grant that it is less likely that there was some secret technology that could have been used to carry out the speedy download. The speed of the original transfer also depends on the speed of the DNC server and the speed of its connection to the internet. All of these speeds are probably unknown to the VIPS, but it is at least likely that VIPS were able to use fairly high speed technology on both ends of their experiments. There are also other factors that might limit the speed one can achieve in practice, but I am not about to write a technical book on the matter in this blog.

April 28, 2018

The VIPS experiments involved transfers of data from this side of the Atlantic to the other side of the Atlantic. There is no telling how many hops it required to make the trip. On the other hand, if the downloaders of the data used a receiving computer that was close to the DNC’s computer, then the number of hops could have been minimized. Thus the transfer speed could have been higher than the transfer speed from a computer on this side of the Atlantic to some place in Europe that the VIPS experimented with.

July 10, 2019

In my subsequent post Mueller Repeatedly Contradicts Himself & Undermines Russiagate, Robert Mueller seems to have thought of the same hole in Binney’s “proof” that I found.

In order to get a corporation to locate a new facility in a given location, it has become the habit of major corporations to extort tax breaks from those localities. It is a no-win situation for the localities who either have to forego taxes that they cannot afford to forego, or they have to forego the chance for economic development.

This competition between localities in different states would seem to me to be a definition if interstate commerce.

There is the commerce clause in The USA Consitution.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 3:[3]

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

This gives me an idea for a new federal tax on corporations. If a corporation negotiates a tax break by pitting localities in one state against localities in other states, the new federal tax should equal the size of the tax break that the corporation received from the winning locality. The amount of the tax collected could be distributed to all the states whose localities did not win the competition. Usually much of the tax break comes from real-estate taxes that will not be collected over some extended period of time. The sum of all taxes foregone by the “winning” locality over this extended period of time should be collected immediately by the federal government and redistributed to the “losers”.

Since the Federal government can only regulate interstate commerce, I suppose that any corporation that limits the competition to a single state might be legally able to avoid the federal tax. It would be up to each state to enact a tax for competitions that occur solely in its state.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Wouldn’t it be great if America had a fiat-money system?

Think of how many of our seemingly intractable local and national problems could be solved if only America had its own sovereign fiat-money system! Unfortunately, most Americans can’t even think about that question because they’ve never heard a proper explanation of what “fiat-money” actually is. Here, then, is quick solution to that problem:

Just click the above link to see the solution. Warning, you must have a modicum of imagination to understand this.

The Guardian has the article Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of the world elite’s hidden wealth.

The world’s biggest businesses, heads of state and global figures in politics, entertainment and sport who have sheltered their wealth in secretive tax havens are being revealed this week in a major new investigation into Britain’s offshore empires.

This article introduces a series of articles that can be found at Paradise papers: special investigation.

The Paradise Papers is a special investigation by the Guardian and 95 media partners worldwide into a leak of 13.4m files from two offshore service providers and 19 tax havens’ company registries

The first topic article I have read is Russia funded Facebook and Twitter investments through Kushner associate.

If you think you know what is going on in the world and who are puppeteers controlling our marionette strings, this article ought to be enlightening and confusing at the same time.

U.s. Senator Bernie Sanders has posted on Facebook the video What It’s Like Living On Low Wages.

When you have massive income and wealth inequality, the very rich becoming much richer, it is not a radical idea to say that in America we should make sure our workers are paid a living wage.

This is what I feel the problem is for well-off Democrats. Some of them that I speak to don’t seem to be able to understand this. I don’t live this poor life either, but I realize I have limitations on what I can imagine. I think I know and talk to some people who are living close to this life so that I can at least know what it is I do not know. I think some of my well-off Democratic friends also know such people, but somehow these well-off friends seem to be blocking out the understanding part.

Read the comments on this video on Senator Sanders’ Facebook page if you want to see a confirmation of what I am saying about some people who are well off, but cannot imagine the struggles some people go through.

The Washington Post has the article Donna Brazile: I considered replacing Clinton with Biden as 2016 Democratic nominee.

Brazile writes that she was haunted by the still-unsolved murder of DNC data staffer Seth Rich and feared for her own life, shutting the blinds to her office window so snipers could not see her and installing surveillance cameras at her home. She wonders whether Russians had placed a listening device in plants in the DNC executive suite.

I don’t trust The Washington Post in the slightest, but at least they have been willing to attach their name to this claim of what is in her book. When the book is released on Tuesday, we will be able to check for ourselves. A New York Times story claims that The Washington Post has an advanced copy of the book which The New York Times does not have.

YouTube has the Jimmy Dore video Tulsi Gabbard Rips The DNC – Demands Change.

I am a big fan of Tulsi Gabbard, but I am afraid that Jimmy Dore is right in his analysis of her chances of success in reforming the Democratic Party.