We trust readers will enjoy and link to our new site, PropOrNot.org: Your Friendly Guide to Better Propaganda. Its aim is to combat serious deterioration of the standards of American propaganda, with the ultimate goal of restoring the US to its standing of a propaganda export powerhouse....Humor is often the best weapon.
As the lawyers like to say, res ipsa loquitur. Please tweet and circulate this letter widely. You will notice that our attorney Jim Moody is a seasoned litigator who has won cases before the Supreme Court. He has considerable experience in First Amendment and defamation actions. Past high profile representations include Westomoreland v. CBS and defending Linda Tripp.
I also hope, particularly for those of you who don’t regularly visit Naked Capitalism, that you’ll check out our related pieces that give more color to how the fact the Washington Post was taken for a ride by inept propagandists, particularly our introduction to our spoof PropOrNot.org site, which uses the PropOrNot project as an example of sorely deficient propaganda and shows where it went wrong, or the humor site itself. Be sure not to miss its FAQ.
We have another post today that describes how the few things that are verifiable on the PropOrNot site don’t pan out, as in the organization is not simply a group of inept propagandists but also appears to deal solely in fabrications. If the site is flagrantly false with respect to things that can be checked, why pray tell did the Washington Post and its fellow useful idiots in the mainstream media validate and amplify its message? Strong claims demand strong proofs, yet the Post appeared content to give a megaphone to people who make stuff up with abandon. No wonder the members of PropOrNot hide as much as they can about what they are up to; more transparency would expose their work to be a tissue of lies.
Yves Smith – who runs the respected liberal website Naked Capitalism – has retained a top gun lawyer to sue the Washington Post for defamation unless it retracts its smear piece calling alternative media sites “Russian propaganda.”
Smith has also launched PropOrNot.org … a satirical site complaining about the lack of first-rate propaganda by the powers-that-be.Ha ha. They crossed the wrong woman. I'm sure we will be hearing a lot more about this.
I find it somewhat depressing that an informed economics blogger like Yves Smith could be in this case so deeply uninformed about Piketty’s fundamental conceptual framework, to the extent that she thinks Piketty must be some kind of bungling duffer who has flunked basic accounting algebra. But her claims here can easily be shown to be false. Piketty’s framework is simple, elegant and coherent, and working within that framework one can easily see how the typical values Piketty finds for r and g can be sustained indefinitely without capital overwhelming the economy and without capital income devouring all other income.Rugged Egalitarianism
The man who jailed a thousand bankers [Bill Black] tells us how to do it; Twice the size of the US economy exposed offshore; and Wall Street circles the nation's last assets. Seek truth from facts with former senior financial regulator Bill Black, The Price of Offshore Revisited author James Henry, former Wall Street executive Richard Eskow, Econned author Yves Smith, economists Stephanie Kelton and Dean Baker, and chief vampire squid Lloyd Blankfein.
This past Wednesday I attended The Atlantic’s Second Annual Economy Summit featuring many previously high ranking government officials (e.g. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, and FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair). Though these former public officials and many others remained focus on the issue of public debt and deficits, the conference was actually promoted on the basis of turning the focus to private debt. Since my understanding of economics suggests concerns over private debt should be the main focus of current policy, I was personally excited to hear from Steve Keen, Michael Hudson and Yves Smith.Bubbles and Busts
Read it at AlterNet
In his latest 1% apologia, Davidson hails the capitalist lottery system for workers. Yves Smith explains the idiocy of this idea
Read it at Naked Capitalism
In the “wonders never cease” category, the Washington Post, which is normally firmly in the camp of orthodox economic thinking and budget hawkery, ran a very well researched and complementary article by Dylan Matthews on Modern Monetary Theory. This may be a sign of MMT moving out of being regarded in policy circles as fringe (some might say lunatic fringe) to a useful part of an economist’s toolkit.
Here are some of the reasons to oppose a settlement:1. There have been virtually no investigations, and the Administration has engaged in cover-ups rather than trying to get to the bottom of the mortgage mess
2. The big argument made in favor of the deal, that it will help borrowers, is patently false. Remember, Countrywide entered into a deal with attorney generals just like this, where they agreed to do mods in return for a settlement on abuses. Guess what? They didn’t do the mods.To add insult to injury, they actually abused homeowners who should have gotten mods. Nevada AG is suing Countrywide now over its failure to comply with the terms of its settlement. And even if some mods miraculously did get done, the settlement is designed to have banks hit a dollar amount. That means they will focus on the biggest loans, which means any relief will go to a comparatively small number of people in (originally) big ticket houses.
3. The Administration has only one chance to get this right. Now you might argue that Team Obama has no intention of getting the mortgage mess right, but the tectonic plates suddenly seem to be moving in elite circles. The Fed realizes that housing is a BIG problem and has even started making noise about it. Yet Obama is moving forward with a plan cooked up in late 2010 that is completely out of whack with the urgency and severity of the problem. Note that this settlement will NOT stop private actions, such as borrowers fighting foreclosures. And we will continue to banks refuse to take losses and drag out foreclosures to maximize fees. That will lead to continued pressure on housing prices in many markets as buyers stay on the sidelines, fearful of buying before a large shadow inventory clears.
End result: SOPA 2.0 contains a crazy scary clause that’s going to make it crazy easy to cut off websites with no recourse whatsoever. And this part isn’t just limited to payment providers/ad networks — but to service providers, search engines and domain registrars/registries as well. Yes. Search engines. So you can send a notice to a search engine, and if they want to keep their immunity, they have to take the actions in either Section 102(c)(2) or 103(c)(2), which are basically all of the “cut ‘em off, block ‘em” remedies. That’s crazy. This basically encourages search engines to disappear sites upon a single notice. It encourages domain registries to kill domains based on notices. With no recourse at all, because the providers have broad immunity.
Oh no, this isn’t crazy at all, it’s authoritarian. Imagine how long Goldman666 or Matt Taibbi or Karl Denninger or yours truly would be around with this rule. Wikileaks demonstrates that even Swedish domiciled sites are not safe.
In yet another example of finance double-speak, major financial players have moved into that netherworld of the functional equivalent of loansharking known as payday lending.While in theory short-term loans can be a boon to cash-strapped individuals, in practice, the usurious interest of payday loans result in many borrowers falling into a debt treadmill. The Pentagon was so concerned about the way that payday lending could wreak havoc with the lives of combat personnel that it restricted the rates that could be charged to military personnel to 36%. The industry howled that rules would drive payday lenders out of the business of serving the armed forces (they had previously been targeting bases). I suspect that result was a feature, not a bug....
