Steve's Politics Blog

Ed Earle has posted a reply on Facebook to the lying ads against Question 1.

4) ER wait times will increase and ambulances will have to “hold the wall.”

The TRUTH California has 47% shorter wait times than Massachusetts, a big improvement since they placed their staffing law. Massachusetts rates 48th of the 50 states for wait times… As for “holding the wall,” most California nurses don’t even know what this means. It does occasionally happen for short times, moreso in LA. It is important to note that Los Angeles County has 2+ million more residents than the entire state of Massachusetts, so they are servicing a ridiculously larger population and sound so 47% quicker

I chose this excerpt to quote because I had been thinking of researching this topic ever since I saw the ad that brought this up. I had a strong suspicion that this was a phony issue.

For reference purposes here is an article from the Massachusetts Nurses Association, Registered Nurses Unite for Question 1: Safe Patient Limits.

Don’t let hospital management fool you into thinking that having fewer nurses is going to be better for your health. It is going to be better for the managers’ and investors’ wallets, but not for your health. These interests might as well be telling you to put a noose around your neck and pull it tight for a better fit.

The Dreaded New York Times has the opinion piece What the Left Misses About Nationalism.

In the United States, Mr. Trump’s nationalist policies have not been without merit. Where his predecessors have feared alienating China, he has boldly challenged its transfer of technology, cybertheft and hidden trade subsidies and barriers. He has also spoken up for American manufacturing industries and their workers, and chided footloose companies like Nabisco, Ford and Carrier.

It is not globalism, per se, that has caused the backlash, but globalism in the interests of the oligarchs. Workers of the world unite is the kind of globalism that would make nationalism pale in comparison. Nowhere in the recent globalism has the interest of the workers been even considered. If workers had been considered, then the focus of world trade agreements would not be on protecting the “intellectual property” of the oligarchs to the exclusion of almost everything else.

It is the focus on protecting “intellectual property” that has given the pharmaceutical companies cover to raise their prices by a factor of 5.

It is not surprising that the piece on The Dreaded New York Times would miss the point entirely.

YouTube has the segment of the Jimmy Dore Show Pelosi’s “Big Idea” Trashed By Bernie’s Economist Stephanie Kelton.

In this part of the interview Stephanie Kelton says things that I have never heard her say before. They don’t surprise me, and I am glad to hear them, but it is news that she finally opened up about some of these topics.

In the first part of the interview, What Is MMT And How It Works w/Stephanie Kelton, she says what I expected her to say about MMT. It is very worth listening to if you don’t know Modern Money Theory.

Naked Capitalism has the article The Effectiveness of Large-Scale Asset Purchases.

I think the case is strong that these Fed announcements contain at least some information that is important as a signal about economic fundamentals rather than a pure signal about monetary policy. To the extent that is true, it suggests that the effect of the LSAP programme itself on interest rates is likely smaller than many previous estimates.

Chris Herbert made the comment:

A more important metric, I would think, is what effect QE might have had on productive investment. The rationale for QE was that it would boost investment and thus employment and real goods. A study conducted in Britain on the effects of QE there concluded that it had minimal positive impact on productive investment. My view is that QE was always intended to restore the value of the savings of the wealthy elite. It had nothing to do with boosting employment or investment in the real economy.

This finally prompted this comment from me.

One begins to wonder if John Maynard Keynes is just a figment of my imagination. What part of “No freakin’ customers” do we not understand when monetary easing does not stimulate productive investment to produce more of what there are no customers for?

I guess it took a Milton Friedman to convince us that sane capitalists would invest in more production if we just gave them more money even though there was nobody to buy what they could produce in their existing factories. Capitalists were closing factories and accumulating massive amounts of cash, but Friedman’s teachings insisted that they would reopen those factories if we just gave them more of what they already had plenty of.

And for this, Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in economics. If I were an economist with a Nobel Prize, I’d try to keep that a secret. Seems like a lot of Nobel Prizes have been awarded for junk economics.

Common Dreams has the article Facebook Accused of ‘Full-Frontal Suppression of Dissent’ After Independent Media Swept Up in Mass Purge.

While it is reasonable to assume that some of the more than 800 total pages and accounts shut down by Facebook were engaged in overtly fraudulent behavior—such as the use of fake accounts and bots to generate ad revenue—numerous independent media outlets that cover a wide array of issues say they were swept up in the massive purge despite never using such tactics.

Our major hope for unlatching the grasp of the oligarchs on our government and on our news media was to use the internet and social media as a more democratic way to speak to each other. Getting rid of net neutrality was one way for the oligarchy to shut down the people’s voices. Since Facebook, Twitter, and other social media monopolies are part of the oligarchy, I didn’t think their seeming passivity could last forever. How long did we think the oligarchy would let us speak freely?

These concerns are why I did not discontinue my personal political blog when Facebook became so popular. I pay good (well, it’s not that good) money to have my blog hosted rather than depend on the good graces of Facebook.

Have we lost the means of getting a revolution going in the 21st century? We will have to find a crowd funded and staffed social media mechanism.

YouTube has the video THE PURGE IS HERE: Hundreds of political social media pages deleted without warning.

Carey Wedler
Published on Oct 11, 2018
My page of over two million followers (Anti-Media) was unpublished from Facebook today, and I was also suspended from Twitter for no specific reason (Anti-Media was also suspended from Twitter).

RT (Russia Today) has the article ‘Land of censorship & home of the fake’: Alternative voices on Facebook and Twitter’s crackdown.

Alternative voices online are incensed after Facebook and Twitter closed down hundreds of political media pages ahead of November’s crucial midterm elections. Facebook says they broke its spam rules, they say it’s censorship.

The Dreaded New York Times has the Stephanie Kelton Op-Ed How We Think About the Deficit Is Mostly Wrong.

Are the proposed tax cuts a huge giveaway to the rich? Most definitely. Will they, as advertised, create a booming economy with benefits that trickle down to everyone else? I don’t think so. Mr. Trump’s plan will widen the country’s already dangerous wealth and income gaps, and because the gains go mostly to those at the very top, the tax cuts won’t do much to promote broad-based consumer spending or overall job growth.

That’s enough to reject the plan. But it would be unwise to oppose tax cuts, or any other federal legislation, simply because they add to the deficit.

I couldn’t count the number of times I have said that using a faulty argument in support of a good cause is a huge mistake. In this Op-Ed, Stephanie Kelton offers another explanation of why you shouldn’t do it.

YouTube has the video Missing or murdered? Erdogan dares Saudi Arabia to produce Jamal Khashoggi.

The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss the case of the missing or murdered Jamal Khashoggi, and what this means for an already tense relationship between Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

New Economic Perspectives has the excellent article Change The Subject.

Hard as it might be to bite their collective tongues, what the Democrats ought to do if they take the House this November is to dramatically and forcefully CHANGE THE SUBJECT. Strategically, leading up to the 2020 elections, this would be, by far, the most intelligent and effective course to take. Should the Democrats continue throwing gasoline and flaming matches on the emotional blood-feud which has come to dominate our politics and news cycles, they will be playing directly into the game-plan Donald Trump has imposed on the Republican party—and American politics in general.

The posted the following comment on the article.

Excellent suggestions. When I am thinking rationally, I have repeatedly told anyone in the Democratic Party that will listen, “You can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t win by what you are against. You must establish a vision of what you are for.”

Yes, we are both naive to think that the Democrats will listen or that they really want to win back power with a progressive platform. They really just want to win back power to better serve their corporate paymasters.

New Economic Perspectives has this marvelous article MODERN MONEY THEORY: How I came to MMT and what I include in MMT by L. Randall Wray.

Of all the wonderful wisdom in the article, here is one quote that hits my hot button of agreement.

Monetary policy is weak and its impact is at best uncertain – it might even be mistaking the brake pedal for the gas pedal.

It is remarkable that an expert on the subject of MMT (sometimes mislabeled as Modern Monetary Theory) should emphasize this truth.

I think it is very important to understand that. From the Keynesian economics I learned from Samuelson’s book in 1he 1960s, the explanation is pretty clear. In other words, you can put on the brakes by taking money out of the economy – people cannot spend what isn’t there. Flooding the economy with money won’t make people spend it if there is not enough worthwhile things (investments) to spend that money on. Or as I say, “what part of no freakin’ customer do you not understand”? Hark back to the old analogy that you can drag something by pulling on its string, but you cannot push an object by pushing on its string. I just cannot fathom how Milton Friedman couldn’t get that simple concept. How could all the economists who were fooled by Friedman forget that basic truth?

In the current economic conditions, there is no additional productive capacity that is worth investing the trillions of dollars flowing into the hands of the rich from tax cuts and and Federal Reserve Bank “stimulative” monetary policy. A lot of that excess money is going into inflating the prices of stocks in the stock market. Companies are using what cash they can get their hands on to buy back stock. In essence the fewer and fewer shares there are, the higher their prices. It is also easier to raise dividends per share when shrinking the actual productive capacity of a company if there are fewer shares that get that dividend. People who own keep their shares in a company rather than selling them back to the company are getting a bigger and bigger piece of a smaller and smaller company. They think they are getting rich, but when the stock market finally crashes back to earth, they will find that they are not so rich after all.