It's payback time, folks

There are moments when I simply cannot muster the energy to be a "good sport." Whenever I think about how this country just wasted 2+ years playing an ultra-corny version of spy vs. spy,  I literally want to see heads roll. It was not just the non-stop lying, it's that the lies were so stupidly unbelievable. And for extra fun, these lies were retailed by some of the writers I have read over the years on sites I once visited regularly—The Guardian, Smirking Chimp, Crooks and Liars...

Karma can be a bitch. Smirking Chimp is having trouble paying the bills. The Guardian will have serious problems recovering from Luke Harding's crazed book Collusion. Ms. Russiagate hoaxer, Rachael Madcow has taken a serious hit to her ratings.

I could be talked out of demanding the return of the guillotine, I guess, if we could all agree to stop listening to these partially developed minds stuck in their "tell me a story" phase of intellectual development. Personally, I am stunned that in a country of 315 million souls we cannot come up with the few thousand functioning adults necessary to organize a government.

Bob Mueller is 74. He probably won't be with us much longer. Writing his epitaph won't be easy. It difficult to say nice things about someone who knew his "investigation" was utter BS yet wasted the lives of the nation for years while he tried to come up with a reason to not tell us he had no case.

Robert Mueller Is in Serious Legal Trouble - Here's Why

James Howard Kunstler, 5/10/19

For the Progressive Democratic “Resistance” (PDR), post-Modernism is in full flower. They have ruled objective reality inadmissible. There are only stories — his story, her story, they’s story, zhe’s story, and you must believe them because they come out of lived experience — for instance the lived experience of having lost a sure-thing presidential election to a cartoon character with zero political experience, and then having lost the grand inquisition to oust him. For the PDRs, the metaphysical concept of reality refers to some land of dark make-believe over a distant horizon where numbers supposedly add up (ha!) and the actions of persons are said to entail a strange cosmic condition known as consequence.

Now that the Mueller Investigation has concluded empty of charges — despite two-plus-years of sedulous effort by fiercely dedicated antagonists of its target — everything about it, including the sacred Mueller Report, begins to emit odious vapors like unto a rump roast that has laid uncovered in a pantry for three weeks, attracting the attention of flies. The PDRs might think twice about a closer examination of all that festering material. What they’re liable to find is evidence of how slovenly and dishonest it was and how the revered legal maestro in charge of composing it may well be subject to charges himself of obstructing justice and malicious prosecution.

Information emerged over the weeks since the Mueller Report’s release that Mr. Mueller and his team knew unequivocally that the Special Counsel’s mission and the FBI operations that preceded it were based on concocted political bullshit supplied by Mrs. Clinton and her network of flunkies and fixers, ranging throughout the permanent DC bureacuracy (a.k.a. the Swamp), to outposts in foreign intel services and the political kitty-litter box known as Ukraine. Mr. Mueller must have suspected this from the outset, but knew for sure by the summer of 2017, and omitted to advise the American public that he had uncovered a fraud. Rather, he rode on the back of that fraud for two years, as if touring a political landfill on a donkey, leaving the public to stew in anxious hallucinations.

What else did Mr. Mueller do, or omit to do? He never engaged US government forensic computer analysts to examine the DNC servers at the heart of RussiaGate story. Rather, he allowed the conclusions to stand of a company called CrowdStrike, hired by the DNC itself to supposedly investigate the theft of emails, especially those of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (See Craig Murray’s commentary on all this.) Mr. Mueller never bothered to interview the one person who might have known exactly who supplied the purloined emails to Wikileaks, namely Julian Assange. Mr. Mueller also did not bother to interview several dozen retired Intel Community computer experts, led by William Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA, who determined that the hack was accomplished by direct download by an insider onto a flash drive.

What could possibly be the explanation for these blunders. Well, we’re going to find out in the months ahead. The DPR chairs of various House committees have threatened to ask Mr. Mueller to testify. Bring it on, I say. He sure has some ‘splainin’ to do, if not in those venues, then in a more than a few grand juries that will be convened to assess the actions of his confederates-at-law from every hummock and gator pool in the Swamp. These various parties may also seek to understand why Mr. Mueller omitted to mention the now reeking Steele Dossier in his 444-page report, and why in his 20-plus page recounting of the oh-so-crucial Trump Tower meeting he never disclosed that the two Russians present were on the payroll of Hillary contractor FusionGPS, and met with its principal, Glenn Simpson before and after the meeting. It does give off a scent of “colluding with Russians,” except obviously the odor came from the wrong direction.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared yesterday that we are in a constitutional crisis. You’re darn tootin’ we are, but it’s not coming from the flaccid threats of legal imbecile Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who wants to prosecute the Attorney General, Mr. Barr, for refusing to make public grand jury records in the Mueller report — since the law requires Mr. Barr to not disclose the material. The crisis she mis-identifies is the coming indictment of so many supposedly untouchable and hallowed public figures, up to and including the former president, Mr. Obama, and the former heads of CIA, Mr. Brennan, and Director of National Security, Mr. Clapper, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the sainted Mr. Mueller, a whole posse of former Intel Community subalterns, and an unholy host of creeping, crawling, and flying swamp creatures from Glenn Simpson to the shyster lawyers at DNC law firm Perkins Coie, to the errand boys at the Cable News Networks, Wash-Po and The New York Times who trafficked in leaked perfidious documents — that the cumulative institutional damage will destroy public confidence in constitutional government per se.  more

I want apologies from the Russia-bashers

In 1972, I went to Leningrad. This was the age of Brezhnev—scary, dark, humorless USSR. Just getting off the boat was about all I could muster. To make matters worse, the Israeli Olympic team was taken hostage the morning we were scheduled to go on our very first Intourist guided tour. I spent the morning going from fretful to scared shitless. Once the bus got underway, I began to notice things I thoroughly disapproved of. The trucks were ugly and belched thick black smoke. Consumer goods were an insult to the Instinct of Workmanship. Construction sites were a disaster. But beneath the seediness of 70s Leningrad was an undeniable reality—this was the Imperial Capital of Peter the Great. This is one of the most beautiful cities on earth—a city where over one million died of starvation during the Siege rather than surrender it to the Nazis.

It took most of the day, but I came to the conclusion that if they had better political and economic systems, this would easily be the richest country on earth. Considering USSR had to be built twice (Stalin's industrialization and then post WW II reconstruction) they weren't doing so badly even in 1972. Then came the Harvard boys to teach the Russians neoliberal "capitalism." Caused nearly as much damage as the Nazis.

Here's the mess the son of Leningrad / St. Petersburg Vladimir Putin inherited from Yeltsin in 1999:

    ▪    The country was deeply in debt to the scum like IMF and World Bank?
    ▪    The Harvard boys had created such an economic catastrophe that life expectancy was falling, whole industries lay in ruins, the former Russian middle class was reduced to selling heirlooms in the winter cold, their savings had been wiped out, the best and brightest had emigrated. (For what Jeffrey Sachs inflicted on Russia makes him a walking advertisement for bringing back crucifixions.)
    ▪    The oligarchs who had seized the best Russia had to steal escaped with their loot—mostly to London where they triggered a bubble the real estate speculators love so much.

Add to this list of great headaches, he has had to deal with: NATO encirclement, international slander, the Banderite-fascist coup in Ukraine. Of course he had to move on Crimea. The Red Army lost around a half-million folks trying to defend and then retake Sevastopol during WW II. Crimea is REALLY important for Russia and so he had to remake economic and foreign policy to deal with the fallout of keeping Crimea Russian.

In the meantime, Russian aerospace is back on its feet. The military fights with pride and professionalism. The things Russia has been good at, they are good at again—figure skating, ballet, etc. Putin is still wildly popular. He has rebuilt relationships with China. He has opened elite schools so Russian education is again world-class. Russia became the world's leading exporter of grains last year—all GMO-free.

The list is nearly endless. And why not. He has at least 40 IQ points on any politician we have in USA and was given one of those elite educations that the commies could do so well. He is so fluent in German he holds press conferences in Germany in German. He holds 3 hour press conferences for the international media without notes. He has done something that anyone examining the wreckage of 1999 would not have predicted—he has restored pride in a people who not long ago were just drinking themselves to death.

What I find so amazing is his willingness to brush off some of the most ridiculous slanders and provocations. I was raised around pacifists so am pretty conversant with the dilemmas and contradictions of this practice. I would give Putin a solid B+. Turns out it is pretty easy to be a pacifist when armed with nukes ;-) Or maybe it really is the Orthodox church. I don't know much about those folk beyond the fact they have incredibly ornate churches and their male glee clubs have amazing basses. Reportedly Putin's mother was very devout and baptized him as a baby. Whatever. It's just that under Putin, most of the damage those barbaric Bolsheviks inflicted on this element of Russian culture has been repaired or rebuilt—reportedly over 40,000 churches have been rehabbed since the end of Bolshevism.

I have not been thrilled by the mindless Russia-bashing we have had to endure these last 2.5 years. Most of it unbelievable lies. And while I detest the liars who have reintroduced the unholy practice of red-baiting, I am even more distressed by the endless stream of self-identified "progressives" who bought into the Russiagate hoax. Robert LaFollette was a real Progressive—was the party's presidential candidate in 1924. He tried to keep USA out of the insanity of WW I thereby ruining his career as a Senator. So no, anyone who was cheerleading a restart of the Cold War and McCarthyism is most certainly NOT a progressive.

The Leisure Class amuses itself

The following is from the Caucus99percent site. This is where all the good writers from Daily Kos went after it became abundantly clear in 2016 that Kos had no tolerance for the Progressive / Populist / New Deal wing of the Democratic Party and went out of his way to annoy the Bernie Sanders supporters.

The Russia Hoax sickens me. I have precious little tolerance for these sorts of maneuvers but this is worse than even the 1950-60s. My problem is that I have seen Russia, read her literature, listened to her music, and marveled at her playwrights.

And Ice Hockey—it's damn easy to follow the game in Minnesota and watched when Herb Brooks spent six seasons at the University of Minnesota reverse-engineering the hockey theories of Anatoly Tarasov—the supreme genius of Russian hockey. His efforts were rewarded when he coached a bunch of college kids to a Gold Medal in 1980 beating the top ranked teams in the world to do it—vs Czechoslovakia 7-3, USSR 4-3, Finland 4-2. Their only blemish was a 2-2 tie against Sweden who had the utterly awesome Pelle Lindbergh in net. Tarasov himself, who through bureaucratic Soviet stupidity was no longer the coach of the Big Red Machine, recognized that Brooks was his peer. How can such a relationship NOT be a good thing? And yet 39 years later we are being told that our diplomats are criminals if they even talk with their peers in Russia—thanks for nothing Russia bashers.

For me, the Russians are fellow people of winter and I find it exceeding difficult to watch politicians and news media defame these people for some cheap political advantage. They have suffered through great hardships over the last 150 years, and I find it disgusting to watch an ignorant weasel like Adam Schiff look into the camera and tell us easily refutable lies about one of the great cultures in history.

Moreover, the world is facing a climate calamity. Time is running out quickly. Our tax money should be spent of remediation, NOT on some exercise of "who can tell the biggest whopper and get away with it."

If You Have Been Playing "THE RUSSIA HOAX" at Home, along with Our Studio Audience, You'll Want to Grab this Clue!

Oil bites back

Well, the laws of oilfield "gravity" are finally kicking back in. They are:

1. In spite of small motor-efficiency gains, the demand for oil continues to soar. Those people in China and India who finally got a nice car are not about to park it in the front yard and look at it.
2. It has been a long time since the discovery of a major oil field. At some point, maybe soon, demand will significantly outstrip supplies. The scramble will be on.
3. Fracking was a diversion. It cannot succeed because the energy gathered through fracking barely exceeds the energy it takes to frack. It's not easy to rearrange underground rock formations.
4. The sanctions on Iran may prove a significant boost to their national prospects. Keep it in the ground. By the time sanctions are lifted, the price of oil may have doubled or more. In real economic terms, the price of oil can only go up.

The position of USA is very precarious. For over a generation, this nation has waged war on the middle-east oil nations. Spilled a LOT of blood in the process. Mostly to prove that oil was forever. Well, it's NOT. And the people who can control the global production of oil come from places where people seethe with anger at the very mention of our name. No one owes us any favors. And even with fracking, we are still net importers of petroleum products.

Now IF we had put this problem—one that was already well-defined by 1973—on a WWII footing as Jimmy Carter suggested when when he called the energy problem "the Moral Equivalent Of War," the coming events would be so much easier to manage. Instead, official Washington took to calling his quite reasonable suggestion MEOW. Oh Jimmuh! you were such a pussy. Carter discovered that rational argumentation just wasn't butch enough.

What happens with the new round of sanctions aimed at Russia

Regular readers already know the party line around here is that sanctions have proved very beneficial to the Russian economy because they cut off the country from the worst of the neoliberal economic advice that shows up with integration into the global Washington Consensus institutions. The economics of self-sufficiency has again produced superior results.

One of the details about Russia I learned in 1972 on a tour of Leningrad was that she had within her borders commercial supplies of every element on the periodic table. When I heard that, the thought crossed my mind "if this country could get rid of their economic crackpots, it would be easily the richest country on earth."

Alexander Mercouris presents an informed argument for why Russia is well-prepared for another round of USA sanctions.

Julian Assange to testify before Congress?

Well certainly not in person unless there is an immunity deal.

Assange is to the internet what Luther was to the printing press. These are folks who grasp the implications of spreading the light and are willing to risk some serious privation to do it. Not many of those folks in history.

If congress wants to know the role Assange played in the 2016 US election, a few minutes on YouTube should give plenty information of his position on this question. (It's not like no one has thought to ask him about this before.)

Hudson on the current economy

Watching the business news these days is truly to look into advanced irrationality. Apple worth a $1 Trillion? I have been a reasonably loyal Apple customer since 1985 and think some of their offerings a have redefined genius but even I believe this is absurd. Elon Musk should be having songs written about him for the accomplishment of making electric cars cool and desirable but a car company that is still not profitable should probably not be valued in the same territory as GM.

On the other hand, the tattered remnants of the once robust USA middle class is hanging on by their fingernails. They cannot afford houses, they are still paying off student loans in their 40s, energy prices are up, they are a small medical step away from bankruptcy, agriculture hasn't seen a profit in four years, etc. And the businesses that would otherwise rely on their spending are wondering where their customers went.

Meanwhile, the financial sector has abandoned any pretense of honesty or responsibility. You can hardly blame them—with the real economy staggering along, there is hardly any reason to even try honest banking. So they don't. And so economic conditions seem even more hazardous than they were in 2007. Why would anything else be true? After all, none of the problems of 2007 were meaningfully addressed.

So here we have Michael Hudson, who seems to have the stomach to look at the bankster community, explaining where we stand.

The “Next” Financial Crisis

THE HUDSON REPORT, AUGUST 3, 2018

In this episode of The Hudson Report, we speak with Michael Hudson about the implications of the flattening yield curve, the possibility of another global financial crisis, and public banking as an alternative to the current system.

‘The Hudson Report’ is a Left Out weekly series with the legendary economist Michael Hudson. Every week, we look at an economic issue that is either being ignored—or hotly debated—in the press that week.

Paul Sliker: Michael Hudson welcome back to another episode of The Hudson Report.

Michael Hudson:It’s good to be here again.

Paul Sliker: So, Michael, over the past few months the IMF has been sending warning signals about the state of the global economy. There are a bunch of different macroeconomic developments that signal we could be entering into another crisis or recession in the near future. One of those elements is the yield curve, which shows the difference between short-term and long-term borrowing rates. Investors and financial pundits of all sorts are concerned about this, because since 1950 every time the yield curve has flattened, the economy has tanked shortly thereafter.

Lots of folks dare call it treason

Trump really laid a turd in the punch bowl when he announced to the world that he trusted the word of Vladimir Putin over his own "intelligence" experts on Russiagate. The defenders of the conventional wisdom will be shaking with rage over that one for a long time—with "Progressives" leading the charge. Robert LaFollette (one of the founders of the Progressive movement) had his political career destroyed because he voted in the Senate against the USA entry into WW I. Pretty sure he would not have approved of the current war-mongering lynch mob.

For a guy with a reputation for lying, this was as close to the unvarnished truth as we have heard from a USA president since at least Carter. The Empire runs on lies—can't let any honesty creep into the conversation. And I am not sure what came over Trump but I'll chalk it up to Finland—the Nordics are notoriously honest and uncorrupt so maybe the air helped.

Because there is absolutely no hard evidence to back up the Russiagate claims, I always assumed that the backers of the narrative would eventually see the light and sheepishly re-enter a world where evidence still means something. But it hasn't happened yet and the unfounded accusations have been going on for almost two years.

Flat earth believers

Tony sent me this link. He probably thought I needed help getting going. He understands the "value" I put on folks who spread pure nonsense. Actually, the flat earth crowd doesn't even enter my radar because unless they are employed setting airline routes, it hardly matters what folks believe about the shape of the earth.

However, the sort of "thinking" that goes into this quite-common behavior is downright dangerous. And it is sadly not confined to the lunatic fringe. As pointed out below, this sort of thinking is quite common in the social sciences—Michel Foucault claimed that what the author wrote was nearly irrelevant compared to the power relationships that impacted his writing. Pontius Pilate had a French philosopher asking "what is truth?" I went through a period where the ability to quote Foucault was a sign of intellectual seriousness.

Because I had formulated my facts-as-building-blocks approach to epistemology before I had ever heard of Foucault, I pretty much dismissed him as another typical Leisure Class thinker. If you live in a world where being right or wrong is not terribly important, you tend to skip over learning the skills an aero engineer must learn to design something that punches a 550 mph hole in the air and the biggest problems for the passengers are crying babies and bad food. Anyway, Michel, there are many writers who are scrupulously concerned about being absolutely accurate—some even go so far as to provide illustrations.

This is just another way to avoid doing homework.  IF you know the science or other important facts, coming to a conclusion about the accuracy of another's testimony is routine. If you do not have the background to evaluate the information, you must fall back on judging the speakers based on his or her dress, hairdo, necktie, sexual history, political party, etc. Or the power arrangements.

That's the problem with climate science. The folks collecting data on the front lines have no doubts about whether climate change is real. The rest of us must either evaluate the data from second-hand sources with the required scientific (high school chemistry) background or else from random decisions based on sociology, rumor, or slander. In this way, the climate doubters have managed to stalemate an incredibly important public debate even though the facts are overwhelmingly against them.

Protectionism flickers to life

There are times when the conventional disgust with "protectionism" rises to the level of the outrage over pedophilia. Which is strange when you think about it. From Ben Franklin to Abe Lincoln to H. Ross Perot, there have been strong supporters of many of the ideas that the high tariff folks believed in so strongly. When a country is developing a sophisticated manufacturing base, the protectionists usually triumph. It is only when a country gets rich and imperial do the "free" traders win the day. The traders are a fraction of overall economic activity but when the dominant economic strategy favor traders over manufacturing, they get to write the rules in their favor.

Hudson is pretty good on trade issues. He's a ways from Lincoln but he's way better than your typical cable business talking head. So I thought he might celebrate the fact that Trump has at least moved the needle away from the free trade extremism as practiced since the late 1970s. Well, I was wrong. Hudson instead faults Trump for not having a coherent trade policy to back his Twitter outbursts on trade. Fair enough.

Me, I am happy that someone is reopening the Free Trade debate—which has been pretty dormant since the Battle for Seattle in 1999. Free trade has been such an unmitigated disaster there is barely time to count the ways. As someone who comes from the Naomi Klein wing of the DFL when it comes to trade issues, I find it a bit odd to hear some of our best arguments come from the mouth of Trump. I only hope he understands that by even questioning the free trade establishment, he has committed an unspeakable heresy and the the race is on among those who author papers glorifying the conventional economic wisdom to see who can denounce this sin with the greatest fervor.

Peak Fracking

Kunstler has a habit of speculation about the future with at best, partial information. But on this subject, he is spot on! Shale oil is a mirage. It is a secondary recover scheme that only works when there is plenty of money financing this crazy difficult / expensive scheme. In many cases, shale exploration does not even cover the investment in purely energy terms so eventually, even the hot money boys will find something else to do.

Of course, none of this is especially new. I knew folks in 1960s oil patch North Dakota who could have predicted that the long-term outcome for such scheme was non-producing wells.

Enjoy Kunstler at his most informative.

Protectionism in the age of solar cells

The Trump administration has annouced its intention to slap some tariffs on products mostly coming from S. Korea and China. In certain corners of the economic world, this is a major story—mostly because it flies in the face of neoliberalism's first commandment—Thou shall not condone protectionism!

As two guys who are serious students of industrialization in general and USA industrialization in particular, Tony and I are pretty supportive of some sort of economic protectionism. Tony's approach is very straight-forward—he looks at the historical record and sees that every nation that successfully industrialized did it behind tariff walls.

My take is that because the financial markets are hopelessly corrupt, shortsighted, and technologically illiterate, they are unable to properly value the infrastructure of industrialization. When financialization first started, there were a few protests at the ability of real scoundrels to seize and then cash in on assets they rarely understood, who in the process of their plunder, squandered a system of wealth creation that had taken decades to create. They pissed away USA's industrial crown jewels for a tiny fraction of what they were worth with their get-rich-quick schemes. These protests probably crested with Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street—an effort so excellent, I suspect Stone didn't even know how good it was.

Along with the plunder came the justifications for why this did not matter. Around here, these loony economic expressions for how the world should work, but doesn't, are lumped under the garbage pile we call neoliberalism. And in the world of the neoliberals, there is no greater sin than "protectionism." Yet here we are with a president who believes that tariffs and such are probably a good thing. He's about 30 years too late, but he seems to think USA industry should be protected. One other thing, the Asians have been about as brazen in their theft of intellectual property as anyone—including USA from GB. The Chinese were caught red-handed dumping solar panels. The party injured by this was actually Germany but a couple of USA manufacturers won some settlement with the Chinese. Ironically, both USA victims are foreign-owned—one German, one Chinese.

I have included four essays on this subject after the break:

1. The Asians seem to think this is a major shift in USA trade policy. My guess is that they will figure out ways to adjust to new market realities.
2. Lindorff seems to think these tough new trade rules are a manifestation of an unhappy empire that wants to slap around China and Korea for the crime of wanting a different foreign policy than the folks from Foggy Bottom.
3. Reuters, which always believes protectionism is a bad thing, argues that tariffs on solar panels will most hurt the solar panel installers.
4. The folks at Rolling Stone just assume this is Trump's way of throwing some roadblocks in the way of new green technologies.

All of these folks have a point. And we will probably hear a lot more on this subject. This is a protectionist proposal in a neoliberal world—a world with thousand of economists well-trained and motivated towards shooting this thing down. As someone who participated in the debate over NAFTA, I am very interested to see how this debate will differ.

The decline and fall of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party

If you are snow-bound in USA today, and want something to read, I highly recommend Ryan Cooper's excellent short summary of USA political and economic history since the New Deal, posted last week, The decline and fall of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party

Nations took various roads out of the Great Depression. Every one involved ditching liberal orthodoxy — deficit spending and the abandonment of the gold standard being the key two policies in most instances, which had to overcome resistance from business. In Germany, fascism removed "capitalist objections to full employment," wrote economist Michal Kalecki, by routing all deficit spending into rearmament and by keeping labor quiescent with political repression and permanent dictatorship. 

In the United States, the replacement ideology was the New Deal. After some initial failed experimentation with planning, New Dealers settled on a framework of stimulus, regulation, unionization, progressive taxation, and anti-trust, heavily influenced by Louis Brandeis (to be covered in the next article in this series). To get people back to work and prime the economic pump, vast new public works were built, and millions were directly employed by the state. Business — especially finance — was regulated, above all to prevent concentration. Unions were protected under a new legal regime created by the National Labor Relations Act. Taxes on the rich were sharply increased, both to raise revenue and to deliberately prevent the accumulation of vast fortunes. Finally, world trade was managed under the Bretton-Woods system.

These two paragraphs are an excellent summary of what the New Deal was -- and what was dismantled in a joint project of conservatives, libertarians, and neoliberals. This dismantling is why neoliberals are as much to blame for the rise of neofascism around the world. While conservatives, libertarians and the Republican Party, the past half century, constantly stoked bigotry by "feeding meat to their base," neoliberals joined them in destroying the "welfare state" policies that were enacted after World War Two to ensure that never again would fascism be incubated in a cauldron of economic misery and inequality. 

Cooper includes all the most important points of this history, with the exception of the race to the bottom initiated by NAFTA and free trade. Also, Cooper does not fully grasp that the prosperity of the tech boom under Clinton was mostly the result of the phase shift in the national economy resulting from the 1950s through 1980s build-out of the new technology of computers, which -- like all phase shifts in the economy -- began with government support and promotion of new technologies (in this case, computers are developed in military research programs during World War for ballistics calculations, fire control, aircraft simulation, radar, code breaking, and physics calculation for the Manhattan Project, as covered in my chronology HAWB 1940s-1950s Timeline of computer development shows crucial role of government.)

Cooper's article is the first of a four-part series examining the four major factions in the Democratic Party and American left today. This first part considers the neoliberals, which of course is the faction which currently dominates the Democratic Party leadership, though it is in a dwindling minority. It dominates because it has money, but not votes. 

The second part is The Return of the Trust Busters, the faction around Elizabeth Warren, which Cooper brilliantly traces back to Louis Brandeis. 

The third article is Bernie Sanders and the Rise of American Social Democracy.

The fourth and final installment is The Dawn of American Socialism, which focused on the faction led by the Democratic Socialists of America.

There is no consideration of the historically crucial role of the American School of political economy, which helps explain why Cooper does not include the disastrous "race to the bottom" initiated by NAFTA and free trade.

I also highly recommend Cooper's How to Crush Trump from December 27, 2017, especially this paragraph:

Then in 2020, Trump must be crushed at the ballot box. His corrupt administration must be thoroughly investigated, and any criminal acts punished. More importantly, the economic base of Republican plutocracy — Wall Street, monopolist corporations, and idle rich heirs and heiresses — must also be crushed. Monopolies must be broken up, taxes on the rich and corporations dramatically increased, and the size, profitability, and power of Wall Street sharply reduced with cricket bat regulations.

None of Obama's "don't look back, only forward," pursuit of bipartisan unicorns. Criminal activity must be ruthlessly targeted and vigorously prosecuted, ESPECIALLY by our political enemies.

Student Debt Slavery

My little town is home to two liberal arts colleges that cost over $60,000 / year to attend. Both have stellar reputations for what they do. One is more of a music conservatory with solid departments in math and science. The other is a place where high achievers like National Merit Scholars go to see what its like to be in rooms full of high school valedictorians. But $60,000??

In one of the college's student center, I got into an interesting conversation with a 19-year-old who was reading Kerouac and wondering why his professor had assigned the thing. Now I have a bit of sympathy for the professor who probably, like me, read Kerouac on his own initiative back in the day. I read On the Road and was amazed that Kerouac was able to describe anything at all considering the serious drug and booze haze he was in most of the time. Looking back, this book is mostly a tribute to the casual rootlessness that was possible owing to the general prosperity of the times and $0.26 per gallon gasoline. There was so much prosperity that whole subgroups of people like the hippies could survive on the what fell from prosperity's table. There is probably nothing wrong with having the young read Kerouac if only to discover what their grandparents found cool. But $60,000???

Anther encounter with a product of a quarter-million dollar's worth of enlightenment was amazing in another way. This sparkling-sharp young man had gotten his degree in video production who when faced with the task of how to use the sun to light his scene, got completely befuddled because, I am pretty sure, he had never noticed the different times and positions of the setting sun based on the calendar so could not predict where his subjects should be placed if he wanted to shoot them in golden-hour light. Think of that—this guy did not learn something that humans have known about for at least 6000 years, something that was of practical value if he wanted to be a good cinematographer, and he had just spent a $quarter-million on an "elite" education. $250,000! For that sum of money, he could have traveled the world for a couple of years so he wouldn't have that typical "Merikun parochialism, equipped himself with professional-grade cameras and audio gear, and still have plenty left over to fund his video ventures for a couple of years while starting up. $250,000 is a LOT of money.

I have neighbors who have tenure—which these days is an amazing accomplishment. There's probably at least 50 highly qualified PhD s for every tenured position available. And because being a professor is a pretty cushy job, a lot of them don't retire at 65 and open up the job for someone younger. One neighbor finally got tenure at 50. Hard to find fault with them as people. On the other hand, they are part of a system that consigns children into a lifetime of debt peonage / slavery.

Nasty business.

The infuriating irony of libertarians' wet dream, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency

I suspect that most people do not understand bitcoin and cryptocurrencies because they also do not understand how money is "created." The reality that money can be created out of nothing is so ludicrously simple that most people simply cannot believe it. John Kenneth Galbraith observed that "The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."

I am going to go out on a limb and assert that if you do not understand the creation of money, you cannot be truly progressive on economic issues. You can support progressive positions on economic issues, but until you understand how money is created, you will always be vulnerable to being herded into a veal pen for slaughter by financial oligarchs.

If you want an explanation of money creation, in January 2015 I posted Creating money out of thin air on DailyKos. If you want examples of so-called progressives freaking out because they refuse to believe money is created out of nothing, read the comments. The hostility and arrogance of certain imbeciles is part of what pushed me away from DailyKos.

Cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin is now the best known example, with the highest market capitalization -- $217.8 billion the minute I write this -- are nothing more than computer programs creating their own units of money. Libertarians love it, because it is money that is NOT being created by governments. No small number of libertarians also hate the big banks almost as much as they hate government. So, I think cryptocurrencies are going to be more than a passing speculative fad simply because they are a libertarians wet dream. Nothing will happen to knock cryptocurrencies that libertarians won't shake off as they cling to their anti-government, anti-"crony capitalism" ideology. 

The infuriating irony is that one of the things libertarians hate most about governments and central banks (which are often quasi-government entities controlled by the very financial oligarchs who control the big banks of Wall Street and the City of London) is that governments and central banks issue fiat currency that is backed by nothing. Libertarians insist on a return to the gold standard, so that government-issued money has "value." What about cryptocurrencies, though? I have yet to hear any libertarian denounce Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency because it is not backed by gold, or backed by anything else of "value."

So, while the speculative frenzy of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is bad, the one good thing is that it is teaching people that money can be created out of nothing. I suspect that's why Dimon of JP Morgan hates Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies so much. Either that, or Dimon is just talking them down to manipulate the price.

(A note on why the speculative frenzy is bad. Because it is a misuse and misapplication of society's talents and resources at a time when the only frenzy should be building the Tesla and electric car recharging stations, wind turbines, solar energy arrays, geothermal generating plants, urban mass transit systems, and upgrading and replacing every man-made structure on the planet to, to transition as quickly as possible away from burning fossil fuels and worsening climate change.)

The sun STILL never sets on the British Empire

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I have been openly questioning, in sundry forums around the pixelsphere, why Rupert Murdoch and Fox News have never been treated the same way RT is being treated now--forced to register as a Russian agent of influence because of a flood of suspicions regarding to what extent RT is controlled by Russian intelligence, or even Putin personally. Why have Rupert Murdoch and Fox News never been even considered as British agents of influence? I should have seen it coming, but I did not, yet come it did, on--where else?--DailyKos. Someone informed me that I was wrong: Murdoch is not British, but Australian.

Well, OK, I should try to be more understanding that Americans have not really had first hand experience with the strict social and political hierarchy of Britain and the countries of the British commonwealth, and probably do not understand that Australia, when push comes to shove, is still under the thumb of the British monarch. The same is true for Canada and a bunch of other countries. The British monarch is head of state of 16 countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, The Bahamas, Tuvalu and the United Kingdom. Note how many of these are hot money centers.

The head of government, usually the Prime Minister of the country, can be dismissed by the British monarch, usually acting through the monarch’s representative, the Governor-General. This happened in Australia in November 1975, after Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labor Party (ALP); began to prepare to break from the financial stranglehold of the City of London by reaching out to the Saudis and other oil states for financing. Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam as Australian PM, and made the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party, the new Prime Minister. This is still a really big deal in Australia. It created a constitutional crisis that is called "The Dismissal". A series of movies have been made about it, and a number of books published. In the national memory of Australians, it is comparable to Watergate for Americans.

When I started searching the internet to verify a few details (for example, I had forgotten the names of Whitlam and Kerr), I found controversy over The Dismissal has been rekindled in Australia by a court fight to force Queen Elizabeth to release to the public her private files regarding The Dismissal. The court case apparently was initiated by a scholar after she found a handful of extracts from Kerr's letters to the Queen's private secretary in Kerr's journals. According to an Australian Broadcasting Company posting:

A handful of extracts from Kerr's letters to the Palace quoted in his own journal show that from as early as September 1975, the Governor-General had raised the prospect of him sacking of the Government, and of his own dismissal by Whitlam. "The moment he set that out to the Queen she was already involved because the Queen from that point had options that she could take," Professor Hocking said. "One of the options was to alert the prime minister Gough Whitlam to the fact that the Governor-General was speaking about these very extreme possibilities ... Now, from all accounts she chose not to do that."

This past November, ABC posted an article on the anniversary of The Dismissal: The facts of the Whitlam dismissal are more important than ever.

Can the American Left Be Resurrected?

The reputation of Garrison Keillor is beyond my power to attack or defend. Around here in Minnesota among a certain age group, he has been the culturally dominant figure of our lives. This is certainly true for me. I started listening to him back on the early 1970s and was immediately intrigued because of our shared backgrounds. We both went to the University of Minnesota as impoverished students. We both came from small towns. And we both had WAY too much religion in our childhoods. And these themes informed his worldview. Like a lot of smart kids from small towns, the surprise that never exhausted itself was that citizens of big cities were not automatically smarter or better-read or harder-working than we were. In fact, it was usually the opposite. And there are so many of us that we kept his show alive and well and his books on the best-seller lists for decades.

And yet, within the past few days, Keillor has been written out of our culture by some suits at Minnesota Public Radio for the "crime" of making a clumsy pass many years ago. They have pulled down his extensive catalog of shows from their website. Seriously? Political correctness has come to this?

Part of the problem is the Minnesota Inferiority Complex. (Minneapolis went through a stage where some marketing genius wanted to call their fair city the "Minne-Apple" like a junior version of New York—the Big Apple, get it? I am still embarrassed by how lame that was!) In this case, the state that never voted for Ronald Reagan still wants to be considered the cutting edge of Progressive thought. Politically, that impulse ended when Paul Wellstone died. We now have two doctrinaire neoliberal Senators (although who knows how the Al Franken fiasco will end.) So since Democratic Party activists have decided they won't contest the neoliberal agenda in economics or foreign policy, they will go all in on political correctness to the point where the mark of a gold-star liberal is to redefine a clumsy pass into harassment / rape.

For those poor souls lost in the wilderness of political correctness it is probably time to remind them of the basics of sound government.

1) Governments exist to organize collective action. There are projects that are too complex and expensive for even rich people to afford. From highways and bridges to interstate banking, some things just need collective action. If the people organizing this collective action understand that the goal is to enrich the whole and not some small group of backers, the first big step towards good government has been taken.

2) Honesty. This one is easy. It impossible to do great things with liars and corner-cutters making important decisions. This is ESPECIALLY true if we are ever to escape the energy trap that has caused the climate to change

3) Competence. In spite of what we may believe these days, political correctness is NOT a substitute for knowing what you are doing. It is impossible to make wise decisions on transit policy or land use or pollution control without a fundamental historical and technological literacy. I seriously believe we should have qualification tests in these areas before anyone is allowed close to a collective decision—and this applies to private real estate developers and charter schools as well as elected officials.

Oh goody—another dirty climate conference

Someday soon, humanity must make organizing and attending climate conferences a capital crime. These things are worse than useless but they grind on because the folks who like these sorts of things are convention planners. It's what they do. This year's climate extravaganza is being held in Bonn Germany. No one knows why or what they hope to accomplish. An estimated 23,000 people are descending on a tiny little backwater that is obvious ill-equipped to handle them—belching thousands of tons of CO2 on their sacred journeys of self-importance.

If anyone suggests that anything important could be accomplished with video-conferencing, the face-to-face crowd reacts in horror. According to them, those who would eliminate these conferences are the worms of humanity—the introverts. Since the only legitimate way to call these conferences a success would be the ability to point at falling CO2 levels, and that clearly has not happened after 23 years of conferencing, a sane person would try something else. But these folks cannot even progress to video conferencing. And since few or none of them seem willing to grapple with the problems of progressing from legislating outcomes to funding outcomes, we can assure ourselves that no meaningful progress will happen anytime soon.

Climate change is a Producer Class problem that will only respond to Producer Class solutions. Climate conferences are extreme manifestations of Leisure Class behavior. Pretty much explains why they are useless. After all, useless is the primary goal, the heaven, of the Leisure Class.

The end of Wolfgang Schäuble's evil madness?

Wolfgang Schäuble does not have a fan club around here because he is such a perfect neoliberal. (The list of my criticisms can be found here) But he has been accepted / praised in Germany because he has been the enthusiastic face of the German financial establishment. And what an ugly face that has been. Even by German standards, he is especially homely. If someone was casting a play and needed a devil to scare little children, he would be perfect. And I am pretty certain the Greeks whose lives he was destroying had no problem thinking of him as evil personified.

But the neoliberalism he was pitching was certain to be harming the German economy as well because it is an economic philosophy that causes a great deal of collateral damage. So it is with some pleasure I note that one of the more enlightened of the German economists, Heiner Flassbeck, has produced a stunningly accurate critique of Schäuble's crackpot mismanagement. Unfortunately for the Germans, the neoliberal bench is very deep. There are probably thousands of economists spread over all the political parties ready to make Schäuble look like a kindly old man. But the fact that he has been eased out as the FM may mean that there are corners of the German economic establishment who at least have questions about the "wisdom" of neoliberalism. It is 25 years too late but a turnaround must start somewhere.

Ken Burns tries to explain Vietnam

It turns out there IS something worse than being historically illiterate and that is being historically misinformed. Ken Burns is a master of historical misinformation and his latest effort on Vietnam is truly ghastly. What a tragedy! I often claim that this country's failure to come to terms with that horrible and expensive adventure in late-stage colonialism pretty much explains the decline of this once pretty-interesting nation.

Take, for example, the horror that was Agent Orange. Some "genius" came to the conclusion that because the Viet Cong were so good at hiding out in their native jungles, the "solution" was to remove the jungles. And so 21+ MILLION gallons of the most toxic herbicide ever invented was sprayed on that poor nation killing wide areas of native foliage. Agent Orange was so dangerous that the folks who merely loaded it onto the airplanes used for spraying suffered long-term health effects including having children with birth defects.

Of course, compared to the suffering inflicted on those poor people on the receiving end of all that spraying, the damage to the USA troops was trivial. There are areas of Vietnam where serious birth defects are almost "normal." That does not make the pain suffered by the young mothers who must cope with these cruel reminders of some genius's chemical warfare any easier.

There was a small burst of interest in the problems caused by Agent Orange when they began to surface in the affected veterans. But seriously, the subject has not even begun to be treated on anything but the most superficial level. For me, any serious thinking on Agent Orange would include a comprehensive examination of the wasted genius that led to this horrible war crime. In order for Operation Ranch Hand (the cutesy name for the largest deliberate environmental catastrophe in recorded history) to succeed, thousands of engineering hours were spent designing and building a fleet of aircraft that could haul large loads of heavy liquid poison, designing a herbicide so lethal it could kill jungles, figuring out how to manufacture 21+ million gallons of the stuff, and delivering this massive load of poison to the other side of the planet. It took a lot of people who studied very hard to learn difficult and complex subjects to pull off this feat—people who otherwise looked and acted like regular middle-class citizens who would do things like coach Little League baseball.

Think about this for awhile. Star students are taught the most brilliant scientific facts Enlightenment thinking can produce and then are put to work designing and executing an ethical and environmental disaster. You tell me how this cannot seriously degrade a culture. When I discovered how involved my university was with such ventures, I just wanted to run away from the academic world. My epiphany came the day I discovered that my "favorite" PolSci professor had a big contract to help design the Phoenix Program—a nasty little operation of torture and assassination targeting the rural males of Vietnam for the "crime" of being educated.

I sort of understand why Ken Burns is so diligent about telling small stories while ignoring the big ones. Most probably it is because his worldview cannot even comprehend the big stories. And that goes double for the tote-bag crowd that watches PBS. Plus he gets paid large sums of money to create a kiddie version of history. The problem I have with little Kenny's kinderspiel is that people who are historically curious wind up being more ignorant for watching his efforts.