The second guest post in this series comes from L Randall Wray, professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. If the first was a call to arms for role of the state as entrepreneur, this is another big idea: we need to rethink the role of money in order to recognise the true challenge for finance.The Financial Times — FT Alphaville
Why do libertarians like gold...? pic.twitter.com/Ad70XnRupW
— Libertarian Republic (@TheLibRepublic) July 20, 2014
International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” [Army Lt. Col. Matthew A.] Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.”
Groups like the Islamic State realize that sooner or later they are bound to clash with the United States and Western powers, and with that in mind are very likely preparing to attack or counterattack the U.S….
Ariel Cohen, a leading U.S. energy and geopolitics expert and the principal of International Market Analysis, said the Islamic State has an “ambitious agenda” to try and conquer large territories, setting up violent clashes with multiple armies, governments and civilian fighters. “We may be, for all intents and purposes, looking at a multi-century conflict,” he said.Hmm. Religious conflicts have been some of the worst historically. This as all the makings of one.
“There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the state, and the present capitalist system, in which the state is run by the big businesses. They are much nearer to each other than either is to my own ideal; of breaking up the big businesses into a multitude of small businesses.”Resilience
— G. K. Chesterton
Shortly after we first reported about the MH-17 tragedy, we said that the key variable would be proving who the shooter was, as the grand fingerpointing theater was about to begin. We also noted that the actual answer to "who did it" was irrelevant, for the great propaganda machine had already made up its mind and was on overdrive. It promptly led to such ridiculous comments from non other than the Pentagon which said that, on one hand:
and yet:
'STRAINS CREDULITY' SA-11 FIRED WITHOUT RUSSIAN AID: KIRBY
'WE JUST DON'T KNOW' WHO FIRED SA-11 MISSILE AT PLANE: KIRBY
So, "we don't know who did it" as long as Putin did it.…
As expected, the narrative that the jet was shot down over Ukraine by Putin promptly became the go to version of the western media, and in the absence of actual facts, the appeal to emotions took over and quickly hit a fever pitch. Below is a sampling of some UK newspaper front pages. Clearly, facts be damned, the media knows all already.
Once again the answer is simple: Western military intervention, this time in the conflict zone, under the guise of public anger against Putin, to reinforce the dwindling Ukraine army forces and to repel the separatists, in the process regaining the critical industrial regions of Ukraine which also are the location of vast natural gas deposits. Certainly showing to Gazprom just who was in charge of this key natural gas nexus wouldn't hurt either. After all the west has already invested so much in the current Ukraine government, it can't all be for nothing.
And we know that because a few hours ago, the biggest Dutch newspaper, Telegraaf, openly asked for military intervention by NATO to protect MH 17 and calls Putin a "KGB liar."
"Core issues in the Ukraine crisis remain unresolved," said Deustche Bank analysts Raj Hindocha and Marcos Arana in a presentation before the MH17 incident. "[T]he risk of escalation into a wider regional military conflict can't be ruled out."
Hindocha and Arana included this slide laying out three scenarios for the region.Business Insider
We need to focus our energy on one fight, going straight for the beating heart of the filthy rich.I heard a little about inequality at Netroots Nation, but there was a depressing sameness to it. Everyone wants to talk about income inequality. No one wants to talk about our horrifying wealth inequality and the enormous damage it does to our society.…
The plain fact is that these crackpot billionaires and all the millionaires who own or manage businesses are ruining the country, using their fabulous wealth to trample every decent impulse of decent people into the muck. There are probably 60,000 households in this country who can afford to buy a congressman or a senator or a crucial bureaucrat to support their pet issue by paying $300,000 into their campaigns or hiring their family or contributing to their favorite charity or putting a little something into their pockets on their way in or out of the revolving door into government service or paying them $200,000 for a meaningless speech and a meet and greet.…
We know that the Oligarchs have three principal goals:
1. Protecting and preserving wealth
2. Insuring the unrestricted use of wealth
3. Acquiring more wealth.…
The solution is obvious: we have to force these cheats and thugs to move back to goal 1, defending their wealth. Piketty has laid out the plan. We tax wealth world-wide. We raise marginal tax rates on the highest incomes. We increase the estate tax on huge estates. We enforce those rules through aggressive use of the records the financial sector maintains. He suggests imposing a small tax at first on wealth, so that we can know who actually owns it. I’d add that then we say that undisclosed and untaxed wealth escheats to the nation that finds it, with a reward to any individual who is directly or indirectly responsible for disclosure. As a side benefit, we get to learn about drug lords, arms runners and Ponzi Schemers.
This idea isn’t about some supposed need to raise revenues to fund the budget, because we know there is no need to do that. Taxes For Revenue is Obsolete, as we learned from by Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in 1946. Taxes serve a number of purposes, including limiting political power of the rich. Raising revenue isn’t one of them, as Ruml demonstrates. The point is to engage directly on the issue of the undeserved and unwarranted political influence of the rich, not to suggest that we lack the resources to live in a decent society. We focus our energy on one fight, going straight for the beating heart of the filthy rich.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published its long-term deficit and national debt projections last week. These are the projections most widely cited in policy discussions about long-term “sustainability” of the national debt and entitlement programs. In this post I focus on a small but very important part of the report—the CBO’s discussion of the “Consequences of a Large and Growing Debt,” which can be found on pages 13-15. This section can be found in past reports going back several years, and hasn’t change much if it has changed at all during this time. It is also consistent with the thinking of most economists on these issues. As readers of this blog will recognize, the CBO’s analysis is “out of paradigm” in that it is inapplicable to a sovereign, currency-currency issuing government operating under flexible exchange rates such as the US, Japan, Canada, UK, Australia, etc.I would not call it "out of paradigm" as much as being just wrong due to ignorance.
Speaking to RT, Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov has criticized Western countries for jumping to conclusions just “24 hours after the crash” while there is no evidence.It's called shaping the narrative.“They try to show to the whole world that we are responsible for the crash. It is very strange that without any evidence my colleagues from western media would like to find somebody who is responsible for the crash,” Antonov said. “It seems to me that this is part of information warfare which has been started against the Russian Federation and armed forces.”
Paper: Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production. By Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill. Computers and Society (cs.CY); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Report number: ci-2014/96
AbstractHow the Iron Law of Oligarchy Extends to Peer ProductionMichel Bauwens
“Peer production projects like Wikipedia have inspired voluntary associations, collectives, social movements, and scholars to embrace open online collaboration as a model of democratic organization. However, many peer production projects exhibit entrenched leadership and deep inequalities, suggesting that they may not fulfill democratic ideals. Instead, peer production projects may conform to Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,” which proposes that democratic membership organizations become increasingly oligarchic as they grow. Using exhaustive data of internal processes from a sample of 683 wikis, we construct empirical measures of participation and test for increases in oligarchy associated with growth. In contrast to previous studies, we find support for Michels’ iron law and conclude that peer production entails oligarchic organizational forms.P2P Foundation
George Monbiot had an article in the Guardian on Monday about bastardised libertarianism and its inability to understand the real freedoms being fought for by environmentalists and social justice advocates. However, Monbiot’s treatment of environmentalism’s threat to libertarianism was a bit sloppy. He got sucked into the negative freedom and positive freedom debate, and although he worked his way to the correct conclusion ultimately, I felt like the clarity was lacking.
So I want to explain more clearly just how much environmentalists stick in the side of libertarian ideology. First, consider what libertarians of the sort Monbiot criticizes are really about philosophically: they favor a procedural justice account of the world based heavily on property rights. This is the newest face of libertarianism. Gone is the appeal to utility and desert. The modern libertarians try to prop up their political ideas almost solely through a rigid formalism of property rights.
I have written before about the problem with the procedural accounts of property rights, but here I want to just accept the libertarian property rights premise. Somehow individuals can grab up pieces of the world and exclude those pieces from everyone else forever. Once those individuals become owners of their respective property, nobody else can touch that property or do anything whatsoever to that property without their consent. Coming onto my property without my consent is a form of trespass under this picture. Doing anything to my property — whether it be painting it, dumping stuff on it, or causing some other harm to it — is totally off limits.
So environmentalists point out that carbon emissions are warming the planet, one consequence of which is that harm will be done to the property of others. Most environmentalists — being the leftists that they generally are — do not make too much of the property rights issues, but one certainly could. Coal plants release particulates into the air which land on other people’s property. But no permission is ever granted for that. Coal plants do not contract with every nearby property owner to allow for them to deposit small amounts of particulate matter on their neighbors’ land. They are guilty of a form of property trespass.
Beyond that, all sorts of industrial processes have environmental externalities that put things into the air or the water that ultimately make their way into the bodies of others. This is a rights-infringing activity under the procedure-focused libertarian account. The act of some industry is causing pieces of matter to land on me and enter into my body. But I never contracted with them to allow them to do so.…
The short of is that environmentalists totally smash open the idea that property rights theories can really account for who is permitted to do what with the land that they own. Almost all uses of land will entail some infringement on some other piece of land that is owned by someone else. So how can that ever be permitted? No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others. Those actions ultimately cause damage to surrounding property and people without getting any consent from those affected. They are the ethical equivalent — for honest libertarians — of punching someone in the face or breaking someone else’s window.…
Admitting that someone’s use of their own property almost certainly entails an infringement on someone else’s property makes the whole libertarian position basically impossible to act out in the real world.
Hayek therefore seems to have conceded the need for monetarist or Keynesian interventions to prevent deflationary depressions: he renounced his earlier liquidationism.
But to return to the more interesting point: if Hayek’s ABCT never claimed to explain anything but “the upper turning point of the typical nineteenth-century business cycle,” then why did Hayek apply it to 20th century business cycles and the Great Depression?
Pushing Ukraine to the Brink Counterpunch (bwilli123). Fun read from July 9. Because it would be irresponsible not to speculate:Anyone who didn't think of this before reading the Counterpunch article either wasn't paying attention or is not much of an analyst, especially based on the history of Washington and London's black ops stretching back at least to the overthrow of democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh and install at of the domestically repressive but US compliant regime of the Shah in the Iranian coup of 1953 — to which the CIA has recently admitted (Operation Ajax) and the overthrow and murder of democratically elected Salvador Allende and his replacement by US compliant dictator Augusto Pinochet. Only fools would not suspect another false flag operation to accomplish the same "dirty tricks" in the Ukraine, given that Washington and the US intelligence service were involved in the overthrow of democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. Anyone see a pattern of thuggery here?
[A]ll Putin has to do is sit-tight and he wins, mainly because the EU needs Moscow’s gas. If energy supplies are terminated or drastically reduced, prices will rise, the EU will slide back into recession, and Washington will take the blame. So Washington has a very small window to draw Putin into the fray, which is why we should expect another false flag incident on a much larger scale than the fire in Odessa. Washington is going to have to do something really big and make it look like it was Moscow’s doing. Otherwise, their pivot plan is going to hit a brick wall.Then again, we could be looking at opportunists taking advantage of a happy accident! That said, it does make one wonder whether the Dutch being self-sufficient in gas could have formed part of the realpolitik….
Even after all the reforms President Obama has announced, some intelligence practices remain so secret, even from members of Congress, that there is no opportunity for our democracy to change them….The Washington Post
John Napier Tye served as section chief for Internet freedom in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from January 2011 to April 2014. He is now a legal director of Avaaz, a global advocacy organization.
Western media coverage of these developments has been mostly dismissive, but that primarily reflects the concerns of Washington and its allies. They have had unchallenged sway over the decision-making institutions of global financial governance for 70 years, and the last thing they want to see is competition. But competition is exactly what the world needs here.…
The BRICS’ new CRA has the potential to break the pattern not only of U.S.-EU global dominance but also of the harmful conditions typically attached to balance of payments support. It could prove very important in the next few years: A lot of money has poured into emerging market government bonds since the Fed set short-term interest rates at zero more than five years ago. A lot of it could up and leave when the Fed decides to raise interest rates here. Such rate hikes were a major cause of the Mexican peso crisis in 1995 and hit other countries such as Brazil and Argentina a few years later. The BRICS countries have indicated that they are open to having other countries join. China has about $4 trillion in reserves, so it has the potential to contribute vastly more and probably still come out ahead, as most of its reserves will likely be losing money in U.S. Treasury bonds. There’s no telling how soon this new fund will be up and running or how big or inclusive it will grow to be. But the upside potential for the world economy is very big.Power belongs to those who can organize. It's no accident that empires form around superior organizational ability and management skill that characterizes the power elites of history. The question now is whether the BRICS and Global South can compete organizationally with the US and Global North. This will determine whether the bulk of the 21st century is dominated by neoliberalism, neo-imperialism and neocolonialism.
Carlos Slim, the world’s second-richest man finally said the one thing we’ve all been waiting for a self-made billionaire to say: work less. Way less.
At a business conference in Paraguay, the telecommunications magnate said it was time for a “radical overhaul” in the way people work, the Financial Timesreports: people should only work three days a week.…
But there’s a catch: in exchange for working fewer days a week, we should work for more of our lives. Instead of retiring at 50 or 60, workers should work until the age of 70 or 75, the 74-year-old Slim said.Time
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed for an international investigation into the downing of a Malaysian plane over Ukraine, and for rapid access to the crash site, Berlin said on Saturday.
A Kremlin statement on the same phone call said that "both sides stressed the importance of a thorough and objective investigation of all circumstances relating to what has happened."
The two leaders, who spoke on the telephone, "agreed that an international, independent commission under the direction of ICAO (UN's International Civil Aviation Organization) should quickly have access to the site of the accident... to shed light on the circumstances of the crash and move the victims," said a German government statement.Rushing to get out front with no evidence:
Following the shooting down of Malaysian flight MH17, Hillary Clinton has hit out at Russia saying "Putin has gone too far."This woman is dangerous.