Steve's Politics Blog

Rokfin has the video Extremist Politics in Israel and Ukraine – Alastair Crooke, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen.

An amazing, and thought provoking exchange of ideas. I have been waiting for this to be posted ever since Alexander Mercouris hinted at it.

Early in the conversation the class of people they referred to was “Ashkenazi Liberal Left”. I suppose that’s what I am. I thought my whole extended family was that, too. I think we were all propagandized during our youth, to forget what that means. Somehow we were taken in by the idea of Zionism, and many are still suffering from that upbringing.

Michael has posted the article A BRICS+ Bank: How would it really function?

At Thursday’s Valdai Club meeting in Sochi, Russia’s President Putin explained how he viewed the needed restructuring. Contrary to much discussion in the West, what is planned is not a “BRICS currency,” but something much more limited: a means of settling payments imbalances along quite different lines from those that have led to today’s crisis.

This is from someone who I believe has the credentials to opine on this topic. The credentials are not from his degrees, which he has, but from the logic of his claims, and the history that he understands.

Open Culture has Robert Reich’s UC Berkeley Course on Wealth & Poverty Is Free Online.

Once the Secretary of Labor under the Clinton Administration, Robert Reich spent 17 years teaching at UC Berkeley. This past spring, he taught his final course there, and it’s now available online. Above, you can stream 14 lectures from “Wealth and Poverty,” a course “designed to provide students with a deeper understanding of both the organization of the political economy in the United States and of other advanced economies, and why the distribution of earnings, wealth, and opportunity have been diverging in the United States and in other nations.” Usually attended by 750 Berkeley undergraduates, the course is also “intended to provide insights into the political and public-policy debates that have arisen in light of this divergence, as well as possible means of reversing it.”

Here is the first class with links to the other 13 classes.

YouTube has the video The Selfish Ledger.

This internal video from 2016 (leaked to the Verge) by Nick Foster shows a Google concept for how total data collection could reshape society.

YouTube has the video How Google Shifted 6 MILLION Votes To Joe Biden! w/ Dr. Robert Epstein.

Former Harvard psychology professor and current director of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT) Dr. Robert Epstein joined The Jimmy Dore Show to discuss his investigations into electoral manipulation by Google and other tech giants. He claims that Google’s underhanded machinations directed 6 million extra votes to Joe Biden in 2000

Jimmy, along with guests Craig “Pasta” Jardula and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger, talk to Dr. Epstein about his remarkable research and just how much duplicity is coming out of the company that long ago abandoned the “Don’t be evil” motto.

Do you believe this? I am going to look at some of the websites mentioned in this interview. Of course they are going to support Dr. Epstein, so I have to guard my skepticism.

The institute for New Economic Thinking has a very important video The Lehman Disaster and Why It Matters Today

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers, a giant investment bank with a storied history, filed for bankruptcy. The shock was profound; world markets melted down.

Most people have no idea of the seriousness of the situation unless they listen to this podcast. My problem is that I lived through these events and I cannot forget them.

The west is dead set against letting the BRICS (and China and Russia) from fixing this disease in the west. (More pointedly the west does not want an alternative system that could exist and prosper as the west collapses.)

Michael Hudson has posted the article High Finance & Investment Colonialism that includes the Geopolitical Economy Hour.

Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson explain how imperialism is a product not only of the struggle between classes but also nations, and how the framework of geopolitical economy helps us understand the international relations of the capitalist world system.

It is not until the wrap-up phase that they make the necessary point that a mixed economy is the one that works best.

Rahdika Desai kept pressing the point that planning was important to make any economy work. She never talked about the harm that too much centralized planning can cause.

I believe that the emphasis on central planning is what eventually limited the communist system of the Soviet Union.

Of the two major communist powers, I think that China was the first to understand the need for some capitalist competition to complement the central planning part of socialism. Only later, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and its brief castastrophic dalliance with USA style privatization that Russia too learned the lesson that China had learned.

Iran’s presstv.ir has the article Iran’s induction into BRICS group a masterstroke of diplomacy: Expert.

Pepe Escobar, speaking to the Press TV website, said Iran has been increasingly working in sync with the Russia-China strategic partnership, as evidenced by its inclusion in the Shanghai Security Organization (SCO), and this strategic relationship helped prepare the ground for its BRICS membership.
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“For Iran, this is a masterstroke. This was done thanks to excellent diplomatic work by the Iranian foreign ministry,” he noted in conversation with the Press TV website.

The Institute For New Economic Thinking has published the article The Scourge of Corporate Financialization: Income Inequity, Employment Instability, Productive Fragility.

My just-published book, Investing in Innovation: Confronting Predatory Value Extraction in the U.S. Corporation (currently available for free pdf download)

There is a good explanation of how Intel lost its technical world leadership in semiconductors.

Pepe Escobar has published the article Welcome to the BRICS 11 in The Cradle.

In the end, History was made. Surpassing even the greatest of expectations, the BRICS nations performed a giant step for multipolarity by expanding the group to BRICS 11.

I don’t claim that this is an even handed report, but it is Pepe Escobar’s view of events.