Steve's Politics Blog

Sometimes I get so frustrated at Cracker Barrel Restaurant when I can’t solve the little puzzle they have on each table. I have solved it a few times, but I cannot seem to remember how I did it. I decided to figure out how and write down the solution. Here is an animation of that solution.

If this is hard to view on your puny smart phone, then I suggest you get a real computer. 🙂

Naked Capitalism has this great article Easy Money is Dangerous Without Activist Fiscal Policy.

Yves Smith provides this introduction.

A layperson-friendy explanation of why the Fed’s and ECB’s policies are sorely misguided.

Time and time again, I have written about many of these issues on this blog. Perhaps this explanation can do a better job than I have.

I’ll give you the reasons that the article states, but you are going to have to spend a few minutes reading the explanation yourself. Also, please be advised that if easy money is a bad policy, just changing to tight money is a worse policy. I hope that this comes across to you as you read the article.

Here is the excerpt. If you have an inkling of understanding of any one of the following issues, then read the article.

Low interest rates plainly can’t stimulate the economy – and can actually be dangerous — without activist fiscal policy, for seven main reasons:

1) Households are forced save more to reach their retirement wealth targets.

2) Lower interest rates force employers to increase funding contributions to pay for defined pension plans

3) Lower returns on assets lowers household wealth.

4) Low interest rates immediately suppress the buying power of seniors.

5) Portfolio managers are tempted to take greater risks to reach their investment targets, which in turn creates asset inflation

6) Low borrowing rates changes the relative price of capital over labor.

7) The banking community is organizing to point out that a low interest rate destroys the business model for banks.

After you read and understand as much of this as you can, you should be able to see that Jill Stein, of all the presidential candidates, has the only platform and economic understanding to solve this economic problem. Kind of odd for a Green/Socialist candidate to understand this better than all the capitalists in all the other parties.

Today, I recorded an editorial to be cablecast on WCCA channel 194 in Worcester.

Jill Stein 5 minute editorial on Worcester’s Public Access channel wccatv.com

Middle or end of show

The video has to be edited before I can post it, but I can post the script that I used.

This is Steve Greenberg, Central Mass volunteer coordinator for the Jill Stein Campaign.

Jill Stein is running nationwide for President of The United States as the Green Party candidate. In Massachusetts the party is called the Green Rainbow Party. In at least 48 states, people will be able to vote for Jill Stein.

Her candidacy is the only one with wide ballot access that is not corrupted by lobbyist’s money, corporate money, or by super PACS. She is the one candidate who can stand up for what the American people are craving.

Her platform includes a call for a jobs program to create 2o million new jobs to reverse the crisis of climate change. It calls for cancelling the debt incurred by people for getting a higher education. She also has a plan to work for peace in the world instead of fighting unnecessary wars. There is much more, but let’s just concentrate on these three items.

Most of us are not benefiting from the so-called economic recovery because there are not enough living wage jobs. Living wage jobs for all gives people enough purchasing power to keep the economy fully employed. Now we are stuck with a situation where companies have no reason to invest and hire. People do not have the money to buy what companies are already able to produce. When this happens, only the national government has the resources to get the economy rolling again toward a self-sustaining recovery. Tax cuts for the “job creators” will not encourage a sane capitalist to invest in a factory when they are now closing factories. People cannot afford to buy what the economy can already produce. In this situation, the national government has to be the consumer of last resort by buying infrastructure improvements and making other investment purchases that the country needs. Jill Stein is the only candidate that seems to understand this.

Our country depends on the younger generations to provide the new ideas that can drive us to a better future. With the current generations trapped in student debt and no good jobs available to make it easy to pay off that debt, they will be unable to provide the innovation that drives the society forward. Innovation is what past generations have always provided. It is in all of our interests to free up the creativity of the younger generations. We know we had the resources to bail out the banks to stop the economic crash of 2008/2009. It will be much cheaper to bail out the people who are mired in student debt.

To work for peace in the world, we have to recognize that our own continued attempts to dominate the world is what is causing most of the attacks against us. The unrest that we are causing creates a refugee crisis that forces immigrants to try to seek asylum in our country. We must cooperate with other countries to achieve the peaceful goals that almost all people in the world want. Jill Stein knows that we won’t get there if we insist on doing everything our own way. We should not keep refusing to listen to what other people want. The peace dividend, if we cooperate, is that we won’t have to spend huge amounts of money on weapons anymore. We won’t have to build any walls to keep people out of our country.

If we don’t work to reverse the ravages of climate change in the near future we will not even have a habitable world in which to live. All of the pieces of Jill Stein’s strategy for our country fit together to create a livable future for us and our descendants.

Even if she may not have a chance of being elected in 2016, it is important to think about how to build toward this kind of world. This year the campaign spent a lot of energy and money to get ballot access in as many states as it could. Jill Stein only has to reach the level of 5% of the votes in this election so that the Green Party will not be required to fight for ballot access again. Moreover, the party will be eligible for millions of dollars in matching federal funds in the next election. This will allow Jill Stein or whoever the next candidate might be to get her message out to more people. Many people think that the two major corporate political parties and their candidates are their only choices. Let’s not let this situation continue any longer.

It is time that enough of us started investing our votes in the future of this country and the world.

To find out more about Jill Stein and her running mate Ajamu Baraka, go to their web site at Jill2016.com

It is nice when I can find another expert to support what I have been saying on this blog for years. Market Watch has the article Opinion: It’s time for the Federal Reserve to help Americans reduce debt.

To truly ignite the economy, millennials must feel less poor and seniors must feel richer. A good place to start would be by reducing the burden of student debt. University of Michigan Professor Susan Dynarski summed it up well when she wrote: “Americans owe $1.3 trillion in student loans. More than seven million borrowers are in default, and millions more are behind on their payments.”

Fixing that problem could mean the government refinances student debt so they accumulate less in interest, paying down part of existing debts, or setting a new amortization schedule to boost consumer spending. Similarly, we would need an innovative policy to help seniors feel more secure that they can live from their savings.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. As the Fed readies to embark on ending the age of near-zero interest rates, it’s time to admit we need a new approach.

It is also nice to find expert opinion supports Jill Stein’s policy and debunks John Oliver’s criticism of that policy.

Found this article UN Peace Council: The US media is lying to the American people. The war in Syria is not a civil war, it’s a proxy invasion by the United States.

A long video, but worth watching if you care to know the truth about what is going on in Syria and how Obama has been lying to us… again.

I’ll excerpt just a piece of the video that gets to the main point pretty quickly.

On October 30, 2016, we attended a Jill Stein Rally at the Old South Cathedral, 645 Boylston Street, Boston, MA. We stood out holding signs and handing out literature from 1:00PM to about 3:00PM, then went inside the church to hear music, speakers, and finally Jill Stein, herself until about 4:30PM.

I have a photo album of the event.

The Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) used something called Quantitative Easing to rescue the banks during the crash of 2008/2009. WikiPedia provides a convenient explanation of what Quantitative Easing is.

Quantitative easing (QE) is a monetary policy used by central banks to stimulate the economy. It is usually used when standard monetary policy has become ineffective. A central bank implements quantitative easing by buying financial assets from commercial banks and other financial institutions, thus raising the prices of those financial assets and lowering their yield, while simultaneously increasing the money supply.

This rescued the banks from having assets (loans) that were not collectible by having the government buy the loans. It did not rescue the economy because the borrowers still had debt that they could not repay hanging over them. It still depressed the real estate market, emptied out homes that were in foreclosure, made many people homeless, and kept the still paying borrowers from being able to buy anything else.

Imagine if the Fed had used the same amount of money to make the monthly payments on the mortgages for the borrowers. There would have been no foreclosures, many fewer homeless people, consumers able to buy other things, and banks still rescued, and a thriving economy full of jobs.

I believe this did not happen because the Fed lacked the imagination to do this, the politicians lacked the imagination to explain this to the public, and the public lacked the imagination to demand this of their government.

Jill Stein is proposing for student debt what the Fed should have done for mortgage debt (and could still do). The powers that be are busy trying to tell you that this is a crazy idea. My imagination isn’t powerful enough to figure out what is in it for the oligarchs to prevent this sensible policy from being implemented.

I can imagine your questions, though. I can also imagine the answers, but I want you to think about this for yourself for a while before I provide those answers.

New Economic Perspectives has this great article Debt Derangement Syndrome: Saving Our Grandkids from Wall Street by William K. Black.

The article is loaded with facts instead of ideology. It may be too much to read for people who are not that interested in how the macro-economy of a country like the USA works.

There is one point that Black makes that I feel is not emphasized enough. When written in normal text, people tend to pass over the small words that are so important. So I will attempt to quote it, but add some typographical emphasis to make the point.

Austerity, when inflation is already too low, when many millions have dropped out of the labor markets, when there are no real resource constraints to stimulus, and interest rates are often negative is a dogmatic act of economic malpractice.

This statement about austerity is true only when the conditions that Black specifies are true, all of them, even the ones I didn’t emphasize. You cannot logically refute what he says about austerity by using his words and leave out the conditions to show that austerity under completely different circumstances is good. Not only would you not be proving anything by applying his words when the specified conditions do not hold, but that act would equally be economic malpractice.

So let us state the contrapositive to Black’s prescription.

Not to use austerity, when inflation is already too high, when many millions in the labor markets are already working enormous amounts of overtime, when there are real resource constraints to stimulus, and interest rates are often high is a dogmatic act of economic malpractice.

The above is exactly what the Republicans and corporate Democrats are doing when they say during an overheated economy that we must stimulate it even more. When resources are in short supply (during an oil shortage), or when inflation is high, or when labor is in short supply, then tax cuts, and other economic stimulus is exactly the wrong medicine.

I don’t want to hear any more proposals to use the wrong economic medicine at exactly the time when it will do the most harm. Jill Stein understands this, Bernie Sanders sort of understood this. Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton nor Gary Johnson want to admit to having a clue about this.

I thought this example might give a little perspective on web site hacking. On a different website from this one, my security software gave me this report on its recent activity.

Two attacks are from the Ukraine (or Denmark) and seven from France. This is on a website that is fairly inactive.

One attack computer has even been given a name

If you Google this domain name, one of the responses is the following:

The spam comes from a serial spammer in Turkey, Turk Telecom (who ignore reports), but the domains are hosted by poneytelecom.eu which in turn is a client of Proxad.net, and Tiscali.fr (a fake domain).Jan 10, 2014

If you Google the other one with IP address 193.201.224.177, you find that it is in Denmark.

You can even see what street it is on, if you want to visit.

These kinds of attacks occur millions of times a day on the internet. For the specific attacks on my website, I do not suspect the Ukraine (or Danish) nor the French governments for these attacks. The computers from which these attacks originate are in the Ukraine (or Denmark) and in France, but the person or persons instigating the attacks can be anywhere in the world.

Harvard Business Review published this famous article Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November–December 1974 issue of HBR and has been one of the publication’s two best-selling reprints ever.

I remember reading this, perhaps as far back as 1974. I was struggling with the duties of being a very low level “manager”. In a conversation I just had, this article provided the perfect rejoinder. That prompted me to search for the article. I was quite surprised at how easy it was to find.

Here is the gist of what it is about.

Let us imagine that a manager is walking down the hall and that he notices one of his subordinates, Jones, coming his way. When the two meet, Jones greets the manager with, “Good morning. By the way, we’ve got a problem. You see….” As Jones continues, the manager recognizes in this problem the two characteristics common to all the problems his subordinates gratuitously bring to his attention. Namely, the manager knows (a) enough to get involved, but (b) not enough to make the on-the-spot decision expected of him. Eventually, the manager says, “So glad you brought this up. I’m in a rush right now. Meanwhile, let me think about it, and I’ll let you know.” Then he and Jones part company.

Let us analyze what just happened. Before the two of them met, on whose back was the “monkey”? The subordinate’s. After they parted, on whose back was it? The manager’s.

For those who haven’t the time to read this interesting article, I don’t want you to walk away with the wrong lesson. This is what the article taught me, as a manager, to say:

“At no time while I am helping you with this or any other problem will your problem become my problem. The instant your problem becomes mine, you no longer have a problem. I cannot help a person who hasn’t got a problem.

“When this meeting is over, the problem will leave this office exactly the way it came in—on your back. You may ask my help at any appointed time, and we will make a joint determination of what the next move will be and which of us will make it.”