Steve's Politics Blog

Here are a couple of pictures of us in the latest political fashions.

Politicus USA has the article Bernie Sanders Flexes His Muscles By Introducing Bill To Create 13 Million New Jobs.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is using his new position as the top Democratic caucus member on the Senate Budget Committee to push a new bill that he will introduce to the new Congress that will create 13 million jobs by rebuilding the nation’s bridges and roads.

If Bernie Sanders can introduce a bill to create 13 million jobs from his minority position on the Senate Budget Committee, one has to wonder why no Democrat on that committee could have introduced such a bill when the Democrats were in the majority.

Ready for Warren has featured the poster below on their Facebook pages.

This is the message that Democrats should be promoting instead of just patting themselves on the back for the great advances in the stock market and corporate profits.

The post gives credit to Occupy Posters for the image. There are other interesting posters there that I might consider.

Naked Capitalism has the article The Real Cause Of Low Oil Prices: Interview With Arthur Berman. Naked Capitalism introduces the article with the following comment:

Yves here. This is a terrific interview that you need to read pronto if you have any interest in the outlook for oil prices, understanding fracking economics, and the real reason for the push for Keystone XL pipeline. Berman is colorful, direct, and provides lots of granular detail.

It’s enough to make me wonder whether or not I should keep my oil investments. Maybe I am hedged enough because of my utilities.

My better judgment tells me not to post this.  All I can say is “The devil made me do it.”

Naked Capitalism has the post Michael Hudson: The War on Pensions – The US Budget Anti-Pension Law. He uses the Teamster’s Pension Fund as an example of  how the recently passed US  budget attacks pension funds.

But let’s look more closely at the alleged source of the problem. It’s not just that there are so many fewer employees per retiree. The Teamsters Central States Fund is a prime example of Wall Street mismanagement. Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust and other firms make the decisions, not the Fund’s own board. A recent report has found that “Roughly a third of the pension system’s shortfalls — or almost $9 billion – can be traced to investment losses accrued during the financial industry’s 2008 collapse. These losses were in addition to more than $250 million in fees paid by the plan to financial firms in just the last 5 years.”

To my friends who think that what this country needs is more political compromise, I say this is what political compromise looks like.  If you are wiling to give up your retirement security to pay for the financial benefit of the ultra-wealthy, then you should be pleased that President Obama did not veto this compromise.

You may have noticed a pretty drastic change to the look of the blog.  After 7 years or so with one theme, I finally decided to move to a more modern one that unlike the old one is a responsive design and one that can take advantage of all of the new features of the latest WordPress software.

If you look closely, you might see some similarities with the Friends of the Joshua Hyde Public library web site.  I am using the same theme here as I use on the Friends site. A major difference is that the Friends web site is a general web site, not a blog.  That shows the flexibility of WordPress and this theme, which I did not appreciate until recently.

Let me know what you think about the new look and feel.  Tell me if there is any feature of the previous theme that I may have forgotten to transition to the new theme.  It is easiest if you comment on the Facebook link to this post.

Naked Capitalism has the article Bill Mitchell: Demystifying Modern Monetary Theory which presents the video below.

This talk is wide-ranging, and starts by pointing out that in key ways, Modern Monetary Theory incorporates basic concepts that have perversely omitted from mainstream macroeconomics, largely for ideological reasons. This conversation does not get much into central bank operations, which is the basis for MMT’s claim that it is a much more accurate representation of how monetary operations work for a fiat currency issuer like the US than textbook or popular press accounts that are based on outdated “gold standard” notions.

I can speculate on why other people have such a hard time accepting such simple explanations of how to fix the economy and what is wrong with our tightly held mythical beliefs about the economy, but I’d rather hear from readers who still cannot accept what has now become obvious to me.

Please comment on why you think what Bill Mitchell says cannot possibly be true.

Thanks to elizabeth Warren for posting this on Facebook.

An in-depth (but still brief) look at which members of Congress stood with Senator Elizabeth Warren in challenging the awful provisions written into this year’s spending bill. Courtesy of Because Finance Is Boring.

The more voters who see this story, the more likely they will remember who their friends in Congress are. When election time comes they ought to vote for the people who are on their side. Of course that presupposes that the Republicans will not succeed in purging the voting rolls of all the people who oppose them. (See my previous post The Secret Lists that Swiped the Senate.)