Steve's Politics Blog

Bernie Sanders has posted an outline of his Medicare For All proposal. I’ll let you read the proposal to see the benefits. I will just make some comments here on a part that I take slight exception to.

The Plan Would Be Fully Paid For By:

• A 6.2 percent income-based health care premium paid by employers.
• A 2.2 percent income-based premium paid by households.
• Progressive income tax rates.
• Taxing capital gains and dividends the same as income from work.
• Limit tax deductions for rich.
• The Responsible Estate Tax.
• Savings from health tax expenditures.

These taxes may or may not be good policy, but they have nothing to do with “paying” for the healthcare benefits.

The idea that the Federal Government has to collect taxes to “pay” for this program is a tired myth that became irrelevant 55 years ago when Richard Nixon took the country off the gold standard. How much in taxes we collect, and how much the government spends depend on a lot of factors, but a country like the USA can never “run out of money”. I don’t care what the corporate Democrats or the Republicans say, the federal government via the Federal Reserve Bank creates US money at will. Federal Reserve Bank Chairmen from Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke have been telling this to Congress for years. (I don’t have an official quote from Janet Yellen of her saying the same thing, but I am sure she understands this.) When Alan Greenspan told this to Representative Ryan, Ryan’s ears were closed from taking in this unexpected answer to the question Ryan asked. (See the previous post Greenspan: “There is nothing to prevent the government from creating as much money as it wants.”)

It is a sad commentary on the state of the myth building in this country that Bernie Sanders has to cater to the false notion of how our money works in order to make his proposal sound plausible.

Counterpunch has the article “Please, Let’s Not Do It Again:” On NAFTA and Why Mexico’s Poor are Not to Blame.

Before 1994, the year NAFTA went into effect, Mexico was a country that produced and exported corn. It did not buy it. Corn had been the basic grain of the Indigenous food across Mesoamerica since before the Spanish Conquest.

Since NAFTA, Mexico has become a country that relies on foreign corn and foreign food.

The statistics we get are all about the increase in GDP. What it doesn’t tell you is that the increase is all concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people. This seeming increase in the size of the economy is a decrease for most people, and a huge increase for a small number of people. There is a reason why the numbers look great, but most people are being pinched. The poor and the malnourished have to tighten their belts, while the rich have to loosen theirs. More tax cuts for the wealthy.

This is one of many reasons why I refused to buy what Hillary Clinton was selling during the 2016 Presidential campaign. It is not a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. It is a matter of refusing to vote for a candidate who does not meet some minimal standards. If the Democratic Party wants me back, they will have to meet my minimal standards. If they cannot get above the low bar that I have set, they cannot get my support.

New Economics Perspectives has the article Where Did the Federal Reserve Get All that Money? Economist Stephanie Kelton posted this in 2012 to publicize the remarks of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke.

The Federal Reserve, like any bank, can acquire an asset simply by crediting a bank account. In other words, the bank pays by creating money. As Alan Greenspan explained, the Fed has an unlimited capacity to spend in US dollars. It can pay trillions of dollars with a single keystroke.

A friend just posted this on Facebook. Although it is 5 years old, it could stand to be reposted every day until enough people understand this.

Naked Capitalism has the article Are the Latest Russia Sanctions Really About Forcing US LNG on Europe?

Brussels has stepped up its diplomatic offensive against the US moves, warning that several oil and gas projects involving Shell, Eni and BP are at risk. On Tuesday, officials said Brussels was “activating all diplomatic channels” in an effort to persuade lawmakers to dilute the bill’s impact on European companies and the continent’s energy security.

Were you naive enough to think that the sanctions on Russia had something to do with their alleged interference in our elections?

It’s always about oil and gas. This time it may have negative repercussions with our “allies”. Is there no limit to our imperialism?

YouTube has the video TULSI GABBARD FULL ONE-ON-ONE EXPLOSIVE INTERVIEW WITH TUCKER CARLSON (7/24/2017)

Actually, Tulsi Gabbard just talks rationally in an interview on Faux Noise.

What Tulsi Gabbard says is not so explosive. That she has to go to Faux Noise to say it is what is explosive.

It is very disturbing that Faux Noise seems to be the only corporate news medium to talk sense about Syria.

Cnet has the article Flash loses final appeal: Adobe sentences its web tech to death.

Countless nails have been hammered in Flash’s coffin in recent years, most notably by Apple’s Steve Jobs and also by Adobe itself. Now, though, there’s a date for the funeral: Dec. 31, 2020.

This may be the only good news I have been able to blog about in a long time. I have banished Flash from all my computer based hardware for a few years now. I instituted the ban after the first big security failure that Flash suffered. I have had to give up looking at some web sites that insisted on using Flash, but they have become fewer and fewer. By the end of 2020, I won’t be missing anything by refusing to allow Flash on my computers.

As I was listening to Carmen on SiriusXM, I got to wonder if the actual words to The Toreador Song could actually be what I learned as a kid.

Here is how I learned it.

Toreador-ah
Don’t spit on the floor-ah
Use the cuspidor-ah
That’s what it’s for-ah

Well, according to WikiPedia in the article Toreador Song, those are not the actual words.

Naked Capitalism has published the article The Mega Rich Are Getting Mega Richer: A Former CEO Exposes the Corruption Behind Their Obscene Paychecks.

… between 1980 and 2014 the average real income of the Mega Rich has nearly quadrupled, increasing by 381 percent. Over the same period, the Merely Rich doubled their income while the bottom 90 percent lost ground, suffering a 3 percent decline.

This statistic is well known. One of the great features of this article is the answer to the Laffer curve that the mega rich use to convince people that their prescriptions for tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the economy. I am too lazy to reproduce the graph and the explanation here. You’ll just have to read the article if you want to know how to counter the Laffer curve. (I always thought this was misspelled. It should be the laugher curve.)

New Economic Perspectives has the article Jamie Dimon: You Make Us Embarrassed to be Americans by Bill Black.

The best economic estimate of the lost U.S. GDP over the course of the Great Recession is $24.3 trillion. Elite U.S. Bank CEOs led the three most destructive fraud epidemics in world history that hyper-inflated the housing bubble and drove the financial crisis that drove the Great Recession and caused this massive loss of economic growth. It is as if the arsonist that caused the firestorm that led to the largest forest fire in U.S. history that destroyed most of the forests of twelve states then held an expletive-laden rant denouncing the slow growth of the U.S. timber industry.

Apparently Jamie Dimon is the Wall Street Journal’s idol despite what Bill Black says about him.

Dimon is enraged that plaintiffs sued JPMorgan so often and so successfully for so many of the elite frauds that caused the financial crisis that drove the Great Recession and caused the massive loss of U.S. growth. It is not enough for Dimon that the federal prosecutors that Jesse Eisinger has portrayed as members of “The Chickenshit Club” in his newly published book refused to prosecute the millions of crimes for which JPM is criminally liable. It is not enough for Dimon that no prosecutor ever charged the JPM senior officers who led and covered up the frauds that drove the crisis. It is not enough for Dimon that the federal non-prosecutors did not require the resignation of any senior JPM officer for leading those frauds. It is not enough for Dimon that the federal non-prosecutors (and JPM’s board of directors) failed to “claw back” the bonuses that thousands of JPM officers received as those frauds’ proceeds. It is not enough that Dimon not only kept his job and his bonuses – he received huge raises for leading America’s largest criminal enterprise and (often) losing money for the shareholders.

If The WSJ has their way, and Dimon runs and wins the USA Presidency in 2020, he will do far more damage than Donald Trump could even imagine.

Consortium News has the story Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence. To show one example of the depth of this investigation and the hard evidence that was uncovered, here is a small excerpt.

The Key Event

July 5, 2016: In the early evening, Eastern Daylight Time, someone working in the EDT time zone with a computer directly connected to the DNC server or DNC Local Area Network, copied 1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage device. That speed is many times faster than what is physically possible with a hack.

Compare this kind of analysis to the suppositions and assumptions of the official “intelligence” agency analysis to see how little credibility the original analysis had. That lack of credibility was obvious to any technical person who read the original report, but this anaylsis just puts the hard evidence right in front of your non-technical eyes.

2017/07/24 1905

I thought I would do a little calculation of my own based on the numbers given in the article.

1,978 MegaBytes / 87 seconds = 23 Megabytes / second = 181 Megabits / second.

Verizon has a page on its FIOS service Find the right Fios Internet speed for your home. On that page they offer a service of up to 500 Megabits / second. So the speed of the upload quoted by the Consortium News article is well within the bounds of what is possible over FIOS. I don’t know if the DNC had connectivity at anywhere near that speed.

For comparison I looked up what a USB 3.0 drive could achieve. PC World has the article USB 3.0 speed: real and imagined from Jun 26, 2014. Speaking about the USB 3.0 specification, they said the following:

the newer USB 3.0, which can handle up to 5gbps (640MBps)

That is 5,000 Megabits / second. However the technology at the time the article was written could only handle 329 Megabits per second.

In a subsequent post, I talk about more information has come to light on the VIPS memo. This puts to rest my critique of the memo that I have made here.

Evidence shows DNC emails downloaded locally – NSA whistleblower