Steve's Politics Blog

Naked Capitalism has the article Concrete Material Benefits: “Better Deal” vs. “People’s Platform”.

If you wonder what could have been proposed that is better than what the Democratic Party “leaders” proposed, then this article puts forth many ideas. I’ll cut to the chase, and go right to the conclusion.

For myself, I believe that a platform that delivers universal concrete material benefits, especially to the working class, is the way forward for a Democratic Party, or whatever party succeeds it, if Democrats go in another direction. Considerations of justice and electoral politics aside, a key form of collective brain damage inflicted over the last forty years by neoliberals of both parties is the belief that government can’t deliver benefits effectively. (Granted, neoliberals went out of their way to sabotage government’s ability to do just that, so the belief has a basis in reality.) I believe the remedy for that brain damage is, unsurprisingly, government that delivers benefits effectively (which is why #MedicareForAll is an important wedge issue, but adopting the simplest and most rugged form of single payer is also important, as opposed to some Swiss Watch-like program with lots of complications and dials and moon phases and such). A government that delivers benefits effectively is also a prerequisite for many other policies, chief among them dealing with climate change.

No more neoliberal shit for me.

WikiLeaks has an important article by Julian Assange – Google Is Not What It Seems.

If the future of the internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even in Europe—for whom the internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.71

A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.

The details in this article provide what was for me an astounding revelation of how widespread and invasive are the tentacles of Google.

Google’s political bias had already become apparent to me, but I had had no idea of these details.

YouTube has the video Ray McGovern Explains How The DNC Hack Was Used To Cover-Up The Election Stolen From Bernie Sanders.

I will agree with most of this analysis. I am well acquainted with Ray McGovern’s history of analyzing these issues.

However, just to add a little balance, I will say that the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity‘s claim that it was not physically possible for the data to be copied over the internet does not stand up to my analysis. See my blog post Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence.

However, there are other analyses of the data that tend to corroborate what Ray McGovern is saying. See my blog post Election Hack Report FAQ: What You Need to Know.

Alternet has the article There’s a Pernicious Economic Theory Creeping into the Heart of the Democratic Party.

Much of the Democratic Party’s rhetoric has been ‘Uberized’ by a creeping free-market ideology that treats workers as lone competitors in a survival-of-the-toughest economy.

The time has come to reject this language as well as the thinking behind it. The notion that people must compete with each for low-paying jobs undermines worker solidarity and weakens our sense of national community.
.
.
.
Rather than asking workers to “compete” with each other, the new leaders of the American left should ask them to collaborate – in labor negotiations, in new forms of public service, in acts of selfless devotion to one another and the nation as a whole.

This article is close to the right idea, but there is a little something in the tone that doesn’t seem quite right to me.

I think what troubles me is that it is too nationalistic. People all over the world deserve a fair share the fruits of their efforts. There is no natural law that says that people in the USA deserve a higher standard of living in perpetuity. If we realize that the world ought to be organized so that it tends to give every one a fair chance, then I think we will be closer to the way things ought to be.

When the article talks about collaboration, it feels a little closer to the tone I would like to see than when it is talking against competition. Although, “selfless devotion to one another and the nation as a whole” goes a little too far for my liking.

Naked Capitalism has the article Wolf Richter: How Banks Hurt the Real Economy – FDIC’s Hoenig to Senate.

The largest bank on his list, JPMorgan Chase, earned $26 billion over the four quarters. But it plowed $27.6 billion – or 106% of its income – into share-buybacks and dividends. If it had retained that income, it would have raised its capital by that amount, and it would have been enough to make an additional $250 billion of loans under current capital rules.

In total, the 10 largest banks combined, on an annualized basis, will plow 99% of their earnings into share-buybacks and dividends. Share-buybacks alone amount to $83 billion (not counting dividends). Under existing capital rules, if the banks were to retain this capital instead of buying their own shares with it, they could have increased commercial and consumer loans by $741 billion.

What this article fails to even mention is that the banks aren’t making more commercial and consumer loans because the economy is stagnant. There are not enough customers demanding goods and services to make it wise for corporations to expand capacity. Corporations already have more capacity than they need in order to supply existing demand. As long as we keep concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the economy needs less and less capacity to satisfy demand.

If there were good opportunities for banks to lend to (and make money) they would certainly find a way to do it within existing regulations (as this article makes clear). The Fed put out $29 trillion in liquidity to bail out the banks. Where is that money sitting? It is not being circulated in the real economy.

Consortium News has the article A Blacklisted Film and the New Cold War.

Special Report: As Congress still swoons over the anti-Kremlin Magnitsky narrative, Western political and media leaders refuse to let their people view a documentary that debunks the fable, reports Robert Parry.

This seems like spy craft right out of the original cold war. It doesn’t matter if you believe either side is lying as long as you don’t believe either side is telling the truth. You also have to believe that your pure mind is being protected for you by prohibitions of seeing a film that your protectors claim is a lie. What’s the point of letting you decide for yourself. It’s not like your right to know is protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution or anything.

The more they try to suppress it, the more likely I am to think they are trying to hide something. The more they call out Russian propaganda, the more likely I am to be suspicious of corporate media propaganda sponsored by our government.

Chances are we will never know the truth, but I refuse to be led into war by deception again.

Perhaps through a groundswell of demand on social media we can insist that our representatives free us up to view this documentary. Do we need a special prosecutor to look into our corrupt Congress?

Medium has the Caitlin Johnstone story Seymour Hersh Owes The World An Explanation For His Seth Rich Comments.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has given two radically different accounts of how much he knows about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich last year, and he owes the whole world a full clarification.

This article is a nice assembly of all the pieces to the puzzle that are publicly available. If Seymour Hersh is afraid to clarify what he has been saying and then denying, this may be a sign we are all in big trouble.

Naked Capitalism has published the article What the US “Health Care Reform” Debate Did Not Address.

Despite some protestations to the contrary (e.g., here), the US health care system has been plagued by dysfunction. According to a recent Commonwealth Fund study, the US was ranked 11 out of 11 in health care quality, but 1 out of 11 in costs. Traditionally, health care reform has targeted ongoing problems in the cost, accessibility and quality of health care. The ACA notably seems to have improved access, but hardly addressed cost or quality.

Early on we noticed a number of factors that seemed enable increasing dysfunction, but were not much discussed. These factors notably distorted how medical and health care decisions were made, leading to overuse of excessively expensive tests and treatments that provided minimal or no benefits to outweight their harms.

When I try to think about why medical costs are so high in this country, I can only imagine some of the things pointed out in this article. Only an insider gets to see all these aspects.

The Fed lent and purchased worthless assets to the tune of $29 trillion in their efforts to save the economy from collapse in 2008/2009 and beyond. Yet the economy does not act as if $29 Trillion of aditional liquidity has been added to the economy. It seems to me the obvious question is why didn’t the economy react as one would expect?

I went to the New Economic Perspectives web site to see if they had the answer. I found the article Bernanke’s 29 Trillion Dollar Fog of Deceit from December 13, 2011.

As I reported over at Great Leap Forward, a new study by two UMKC PhD students, Nicola Matthews and James Felkerson, provides the most comprehensive examination yet of the Fed’s bail-out of Wall Street. They found that the true total cumulative amount lent and spent on asset purchases was $29 trillion. That is $29,000,000,000,000.

This does no answer my question. The answer may be somewhere else on the web site, so perhaps I missed it.

I don’t really care so much about who got the money initially as I want to know where it now sits. Where can $29 Trillion dollars have gone that has little impact on the economy, wages, or employment? Why has nobody researched this question, and told us why the economy has not responded? Since most U.S. money ends up in some account that the Fed keeps data on, surely the Fed knows where this money is – categorized by major sectors. It would be very educational to economists and government decision makers to see where the money went. Why would policy makers and academics want to opine on policy without knowing this vital information?

I’ll Google this next to see if there is an answer out there. Maybe, one of my astute readers can beat me to the punch and supply the answer.

YouTube has the video Health Care: U.S. vs. Canada.

The above is a slightly more complete and less artfully edited than the version posted on Facebook.

Here’s what happened when a Republican Senator tried to challenge a Canadian doctor on their single-payer healthcare system. Let’s just say, it didn’t end well…

Thanks to Bernie Sanders.

I’d just as soon you hear more of what was said than I would in trying to convince you of something by manipulating the truth. It still comes out in favor of the Canadian system, but you are less likely to get tripped up by claims of careful editing.