Steve's Politics Blog

The Intercept has the article Bernie Sanders, in Puerto Rico, Calls for Nullification of Whitefish Contract.

“From everything that I have seen, I think it’s an outrage,” Sanders said after a press conference in San Juan. “I think the idea that the government or the appropriate authority did not look for mutual aid and call up utility companies in the United States, which is what is normally done, surprises me.”

This is another one of those “radical” ideas from Bernie Sanders that is not even the slightest bit radical if you can listen to what he says with an open mind. The article has more quotes that seem to be so sensible that they are hard to argue against.

Medium has the Caitlin Johnstone article The Problem With The Clinton-Russia Collusion Narrative.

I am aware that Trump’s base is only trying to engage the Democrats on their Russia hypocrisy and not intentionally helping the deep state manufacture the tensions with Russia it’s been seeking in order to secure geopolitical hegemony… but I do see a very real risk of that happening.
.
.
.
Can you understand why this is making me nervous? It’s impossible to use Russian collusion as an attack against your opponent without making Russia into a big scary boogieman, and we’re now looking at the possibility of both of America’s huge mainstream factions fighting one another over who hates Russia more and who’s the bigger Putin puppet. Any remaining inertia on aggressive sanctions, NATO expansionism, proxy wars and nuclear brinkmanship may be wiped out if each side becomes eager to prove that they’re toughest on Russia, a game of chicken that can only end in a mushroom cloud.

Caitlin Johnstone has put her finger on exactly what bothers me about the current hysteria over Russia that is coming from all sides of the political spectrum. Whenever, I raise this issue I get accused of being a troll for whichever side the reader disagrees with.

The Nation has the article What Killed the Democratic Party?

In essence, this is the core accusation leveled in “Autopsy”: that the Democratic Party neglected its most loyal voters. It not only forgot to ask for their votes; it ignored the general distress of working people (white, black, and brown). Furthermore, the party didn’t have much to offer those folks in the form of concrete proposals to improve their lives.

Here is the report discussed in the article AUTOPSY The Democratic Party in Crisis. (The website of the report’s authors is Democratic Autopsy.)

I keep trying to tell people that you cannot win an election by just being against your opponent. You have to present your own positive vision of the future. The Democratic Party hasn’t presented such a vision since Barack Obama pretended to have a vision in 2008.

Before that, John Kerry’s positive vision amounted to the fact that he was in the Vietnam War. At that time I tried to warn the campaign that a resume is nice, but you can’t win a campaign on that alone.

YouTube has the video Bernie Sanders on what the U.S. can learn from Canadian health care.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders discusses ‘what the U.S. can learn from Canadian health care’ in speech at the University of Toronto.

This video of his entire speech is only 33 minutes long and well worth the viewing. Only a concerted effort by the people of the USA will get us Medicare for All. People like Bernie Sanders can only remind us of what is at stake, but we must be the ones demanding change. If our politicians realize that their careers are at stake over this issue, then the tide will slowly begin to change.

Forbes has the article Nobel Prize Winning Technique Discovers Reason Behind Battery Fires.

A technique known as cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) won the 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry and has been used by scientists at Stanford University to capture the first atomic-level images of growths in batteries, which have been one of the largest limitations to developing better batteries.

This research could lead to the type of breakthrough that is predicted to lead to electric vehicles surpassing gasoline powered vehicles in range and refueling times.

Evonomics has the article How to Use Fiscal and Monetary Policy to Make Us Rich Again – The easiest way to return to Golden Age tranquility and equality is to empower fiscal policy.

The timing suggests Ronald Reagan had something to do stagnating wages. That makes sense. Reagan cut taxes on the rich, deregulated the economy, eviscerated the labor unions and created the neoliberal order that still rules today. But perhaps an even more significant change is the tiny, technical and tedious shift from fiscal to monetary policy.
.
.
.
Fiscal policy, by increasing government spending, creates jobs and so raises wages even in the private sector. Monetary policy works mostly through the wealth effect. Lower interest rates almost automatically raise the value of stocks, bonds, and other real assets. Fiscal policy makes workers richer, monetary policy makes rich people richer. This, I suspect, explains better than anything else why monetary policy, even extreme monetary policy remains more respectable than even conventional monetary policy.

These observations strongly match what I have observed since Lyndon Johnson’s infamous guns and butter policies, followed by the period where monetary policy tried to stimulate the economy at the same time fiscal policy was working to contract the economy. I have often thought that our economy and sopciety would be much stronger if monetary and fiscal policy were working toward the same end instead of fighting each other.

Naked Capitalism has republished the article If You Look Behind Neoliberal Economists, You’ll Discover the Rich: How Economic Theories Serve Big Business. Below is the paragraph they chose to introduce the artilce.

But this leads to the main paradox of neoliberalism. Its economic system needs a strong state, even at the expense of constraining democracy, to guarantee property rights and the working of the free market, while actively maintaining the rule of neoliberal social philosophy. At the same time some of its proponents tend to dismiss strong states (Mirowski, 2013). In fact, laissez faire was the last thing neoliberals wanted to achieve. This paradoxical stance towards the state led Milton Friedman, the policy entrepreneur to become an advisor of the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet to transform Chile into a policy playground.

I found the article to be a very enlightening explanation of how our economic theories got corrupted in the 1970s. I got my economics education in the 1960s, so that must be what saved me from some of the corrupting influences.

The Guardian has the story World’s witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires’ wealth swells to $6tn.

Josef Stadler, the lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients were concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

There worry about the strike back is well founded, I hope. Excuses like the following won’t cut it.

He added that 98% of billionaires’ wealth found its way back into wider society and said the world’s super-rich employed 27.7 million people – not far behind the number of people in the UK workforce.

First one has to ask if those 27.7 million employed people are getting a living wage out of their employment.

Second, we have to think about the following information from the article:

Billionaires’ fortunes increased by 17% on average last year due to the strong performance of their companies and investments, particularly in technology and commodities. The billionaires’ average return was double that achieved by the world’s stock markets and far more than the average interest rates of just 0.35% offered by UK instant-access high street bank accounts.

To me, this out performing the stock market tells me that the billionaires are using their wealth as a catalyst to taking an even greater share of the wealth than they already have. If their average take is more than double the rest of the stock market, that means that there is a flood of money flowing from the rest of the markets into the hands of the billionaires. What are they going to do when they have it all?

The Real News Network has an excellent segment Trump’s Opioid Response Ignores Real Solutions.

President Trump has declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, but his ‘Just Say No’-like approach ignores the roots of addiction and proven ways to address it, says best-selling author Johann Hari.

This talks about some solutions that have a history or working. It is nothing like what I have been touting lately about jailing the pushers in the executive suites of the big pharmaceutical companies. In fact the interviewee mentions why my idea is not the solution.

People’s World has the article AFL-CIO calls for a break with “lesser of two evils” politics.

“For decades the political system has failed working people,” Weingarten said. “Acting on behalf of corporations and the rich and powerful, the political system has been taking away, one after another, the pillars that support working people’s right to good jobs and secure benefits.”

I am glad to see that the labor unions are waking up to the fact that something has to change in the way we do politics if workers are ever to get a fair chance again.

The article has some discussion about the idea of a Labor Party, and some of the problems of getting such a party established.