Chris Hedges and Cornel West in Conversation – Wages of Rebellion | The New School

YouTube has the video Chris Hedges and Cornel West in Conversation – Wages of Rebellion | The New School.

Sponsored by The Nation Institute and The New School (http://www.newschool.edu), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and acclaimed author Chris Hedges sits down for a one-to-one interview with public intellectual, academic and activist Cornel West.

We are riding the crest of a revolutionary epic: from the historic referendum against austerity in Greece to #BlackLivesMatter and the Fight for $15. In his new book, Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges—who has long chronicled the malaise of a society in moral decline — investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance. In what will be a timely and thought-provoking conversation, Cornel West will engage Hedges’ on his message that popular uprisings in the United States and around the world are inevitable in the face of environmental destruction and wealth polarization and together discuss the moral imperative of revolt. 



One of the most profound 90 minutes I have spent.  If you want to understand why we would support a person who hasn’t much chance of “winning” the election, I think this is the deepest answer you are likely to get.


    

    
                                    

                                
                                                            
                                                                    

                                        
    

              

          
The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet – Where Cybercrime Goes to Hide
        

        
Norton has posted this video on YouTube.


Norton explores the secret world of bulletproof hosting that’s hidden deep in underground bunkers, isolated at sea, and spread across the Web. Uncover the threats that lie within these services, such as botnets, malware, ransomware, and the black market, and learn how to protect yourself in “The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet – Where Cybercrime Goes to Hide”


 



    





I found this documentary to be very entertaining, but I am not sure what value this information is to me.  It doesn’t hurt to be aware.


    

    
                                    

                                
                                                            
                                                                    

                                        
    

              

          
Central Banks Pushing on Strings Again
        

        
Naked Capitalism has the article Central Banks Pushing on Strings Again.


This month has seen the antipodean central banks both cut rates, with almost no flow through to mortgages to relieve consumer debt and an appreciation in their respective currencies, in perfect opposition to their stated goals.


This is not a new trend – far from it. What’s supposed to happen when the local economy slows is you pull the lever, Kronk, lower interest rates stimulate consumer spending, reducing savings rate as a deluge of money floods the economy, inflation goes up, wages go up, more spending and whoosh, in come the accolades from the captured business media elites.


Now levers are pulled left right and centre and nothing seems to happen, further hindered by a lack of communication from both monetary and fiscal authorities into the truth of the matter at hand – that a lack of confidence in the direction of the economy is what is holding back consumer spending, not lower rates.


I’d like to throw out the following challenge to conventional economic theory.


Does even a fiscal stimulus of a budget deficit always stimulate the economy?


I have been thinking that with our current system, the federal government finances deficits by selling bonds. So whatever liquidity they push into the system is offset by taking it right back out in the form of bonds sold.


What deficits really do to stimulate the economy is to redistribute a fixed amount of liquidity in the private sector. When this entails taking money from the wealthy who do not recirculate it, and putting it in the hands of working people who do circulate it, then we get stimulus.


When deficits don’t stimulate the economy is when the deficit is the result of tax cuts that leave the liquidity in the hands of the wealthy. Taking liquidity from the hands of the workers when we shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the workers is the opposite of stimulus.


I’d love to see some research done on this idea and some article published.


    

    
                                    

                                
                                                            
                                                                    

                                        
    

              

          
Jill Stein Pins
        

        
When I ordered these, I had no idea how large they were.


Jill Stein Pin


I got some polite suggestions of where else I could put the pins.


Several Jill Stein Pins


Save


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June Carbone: An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton about Pragmatism in 2016
        

        
New Economic Perspectives has the post An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton about Pragmatism in 2016.


Here is a woman that presents a great understanding of what ails the country and the world, but is so dedicated to Hillary Clinton that she cannot see the Clinton’s roll in all of this. She is also blind to the facts that Bernie Sanders (and Jill Stein) do see the issues in the same terms that she does.


And in spite of the fact that I have supported Hillary for the last thirty years (since I was thrilled to discover that someone who had worked for the Children’s Defense Fund was running for Yale Alumni Trustee) and went out of my way to stick up for her over Bernie Sanders in the Minnesota caucuses, I still have no idea whether she sees the issues – the defining issues of our day – in the same terms that I do.


Here is one example of Carbone’s understanding of the issues.


While Hillary gets most of this right, she still pays lip service to the importance of balancing the federal budget.  In fact, as Paul Krugman points out at least once a weak (sic) that conviction is in the same league with denying the reality that humans are causing climate change.  Democrats once embraced the notion that a principal purpose of monetary and fiscal policy ought to be a full employment economy and that infrastructure spending and, yes, deficits, are necessary to that end.


Here is an example of Carbone’s blindness.


I have more optimism that Hillary fully gets the third piece – the need for a political realignment in the United States and the defeat of what she termed the “vast right wing conspiracy” that has plagued her for her entire public career.


Perhaps the right wing conspiracy has plagued Hillary Clinton, but Clinton is still a corporatist who has made over 100 million dollars from the very forces that she needs to rein in.   I wish I could be plagued to the tune of millions of dollars in speaking fees.


    

    
                                    

                                
                                                            
                                                                    

                                        
    

              

          
Rinaldo Del Gallo, III: The race’s true progressive
        

        
The Berkshire Eagle has an op-ed  Rinaldo Del Gallo, III: The race’s true progressive Also posted one Facebook.  


I think it is a great explanation of his campaign, but I find a troubling theme that runs through it. Here is an example of what bothers me.



Many do not know that higher education at state schools was once quite affordable because government had the revenue to pay most of the tab.



It is kind of complicated, but if you talk about this in terms of revenue, then people are led to many false assumptions. In the 50’s and 60’s the idea of revenue might have been more appropriate because we were still on the gold standard back then. Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1972.


The real reason to have higher taxes is to stop inflation. Since the FED creates money at will, there is no such thing as “we don’t have the money”. However, if there is too much money so that the private sector can employ a large percentage of the economy’s capacity, and the government sector also tries to employ some of this capacity, then there will be inflation. For the government to use the part of the economy’s capacity for investment in the country, then we have to make sure the private sector only has the funds to use the available part of the economy’s capacity that is left.


    

    
                                    

                                
                                                            
                                                                    

                                        
    

              

          
Thomas Friedman Wants A “Center-Left” Democratic Party Based on Austrian Economic Myths
        

        
New Economic Perspectives has the article Thomas Friedman Wants A “Center-Left” Democratic Party Based on Austrian Economic Myths.



The dishonest aspect of all this is that Friedman advises Hillary to adopt these hard-right dogmas, which have repeatedly led to the epidemics of elite fraud that drove our last three financial crises, as a means to achieve rapid economic growth and financial stability.  The hilarious aspect of this is that Friedman claims that Hillary’s embrace of ultra-right wing tropes would produce a “compassionate, center-left Web party for the 21st century.”  Center-left?



You need to be armed with the information in this article (it’s ok if you already know this information) to guard against being duped by phony, right-wing theories.  If you are going to explain to other people what is wrong with these theories and especially with Libertarians in general, you need to know what is in this article.


    

    
                                    

                                
                                                            
                                                                    

                                        
    

              

          
Marc Lamont Hill Interview With The Breakfast Club (8-3-16)
        

        
The Root has the article Marc Lamont Hill on Voting Green, Not Being Afraid of Trump: ‘We Can Afford to Lose an Election; We Can’t Afford to Lose Our Values’.  The article talks about what the headline would imply.  There is an included video of The Breakfast Club.



    





If you watch this video attached to the article, you probably won’t get what you came for until about 12 minutes in. However, if you watch the whole thing, you will get much more than what you came for.


Fascinating discussion, all of it.


    

    
                                    

                                
                                                            
                                                                    
                                
                                                            
                                                                    

                                        
    

              

          
Another Economic Dimension
        

        
New Economic Perspectives has the article Another Dimension.


If the private sector imports more than it exports, ignoring investment flows, it will run a financial deficit while the foreign sector runs a surplus and the economy will then slow down as money in the private sector becomes scarce.  Unless the trade deficit is reduced, the only way to keep the economy running is for the government to run large deficits, as is it is doing now.  While few people understand the sectoral view of the economy, many are aware of problems that this one-dimensional view does not explain.


(To understand the topic of sector balances, read my previous post When Will the White House and OMB Ever Learn About Sector Financial Balances?)


The article Another Dimention is an important contribution. The MMT explanations I have seen so far are good explanations for the subset of economic issues they address. The other issues have been brushed off with the statement that MMT does not address these issues. This article is a call to address those issues.


I have another issue with MMT that I have never seen addressed, although I have asked many times. The picture of the three pots ignores the factor of mark-to-market. Wealth in a single sector may act as if it is growing autonomously with no flows from other pots because we tend to value just about everything with a mark-to-market method. You can argue that this increase is just imaginary, but it is not real money, but for that matter fiat money isn’t any more real. No matter whether or not mark-to-market growth (and decline) is real money, economic actors act in many ways as if it were real. If we want to explain what really happens in an economy, we have to talk about how real people really behave.