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washparkhorn

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Posts posted by washparkhorn

  1. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
     

    With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

    He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

    Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

    — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'

    — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?

    Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

    Emerson. 
     

    free your mind bc - you do make a difference in the minds of many, including my own. 
     

    cheers

    • Like 1
  2. Warren and Sanders supporters are extremely compatible in terms of policy. We should remember that as the Republican-lite candidates step up their attacks on progressive policy ideas.
     

    Once the conservatives are cleared out, we can work out differences in timing.  

  3. So what role does evidence play for you in a discussion on neoliberal economic policy and MMT?  

    Do you care about austerity for the 99.9% and subsidies for the top.001%?

    What have those subsidies and backstops for the top .001% shown you about the nature of monetary policy?  

    Anything? Or has that light gone out for you?

    The world is a vampire - regardless of whether or not we are paying attention. And there is certainly enough media to overwhelm even the most curious among us. But there are still people out there paying attention. Perhaps we should listen to them about the nature of monetary policy and its ability to raise all boats, not just the super-yachts of the top .001%. Not intended as an insult bc, the mind is obviously still there but perhaps the spirit may exhausted, which is understandable. Cheers.

  4. 8 minutes ago, 6th Street said:

    So his solution for poor black voter turnout in Michigan is Bernie Sanders lol. 

    Not really. 

    He was talking about the 90,000 black voters in Michigan who voted straight Democratic Party, but left the top spot open - refusing to vote for another Republican-lite Democratic Nominee. 

  5. Michael Moore on how to guarantee Trump wins in 2020 - nominate another Republican-lite Democratic Party nominee - just like they did in 2016.

    Quote

    What happened was, is that the Democratic Party didn’t stand up in the way that they should have for what the youth wanted, for what people of color needed.

    And there were 90,000 people in Michigan, almost 90,000, who went to the polls, mostly Democrats, in very large numbers of them, in Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Saginaw — these are all black cities, majority black. They stood in line in the cold for two to three hours to vote. They went in there, and they voted for state rep, state Senate, county commission. We don’t have dog catcher. We have drain commissioner, the person in charge of the sewage. That’s the lowest name on the ballot. They stood there. 90,000 voted for the Democrats all down ballot and left the top box blank. She only lost Michigan by 10,000, 11,000 votes. Ninety thousand wanted to send a message to the Democratic Party: “You forgot us a long time ago out here, and we will not put up with this anymore. We’re not going to vote for Trump, but we’re not going to tolerate you sending us another Republican-lite Democrat.”

    If we go that route — if we go that route, it’s guaranteed we will lose the Electoral College.

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/12/26/michael_moore_predicts_2020_trump_victory_trumps_level_of_support_has_not_gone_down_one_inch.html

     

  6. A plus for Trump - extending Obama's rule that federally funded research must be free to the public. 

    I doubt he will go through with it, since the major publishers don't like it and his promises hinge on support by the wealthy.

    The Trump White House is rumored to be working on a beefed-up open access mandate.

    The potential executive order would require all scientific papers that are based on federally funded research to be made available online free of charge as soon as they are published. That would supersede a 2013 rule issued by the Obama White House that required federally funded papers to become freely available one year after publication.

    . . . Supporters of the open access model question how much value traditional scientific publishers actually add. The peer-review process is typically carried out by working scientists on a volunteer basis. Meanwhile, you'd expect the Internet to reduce the costs of distributing scientific journals. Instead, the cost of subscribing to scientific journals has been rising much faster than inflation in recent years. . . .

    "Research funded by taxpayers should not be locked behind a paywall," one long-time ACM member tweeted.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/publishers-blast-rumored-ban-on-paywalls-for-federally-funded-research/

     

  7. The positive evolution of America since 2008. There are signs America is waking up to the new economy:

    Spoiler

    Members of the new class of Democrats in Congress have made particularly effective use of populist, anti–Wall Street politics. Some routinely demand big bank heads answer for themselves and for the two-tiered justice system that enables them. “I represent kids that go to jail for jumping a turnstile because they can’t afford a Metrocard,” New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez informed JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, perhaps the top Occupy enemy, up there with Bloomberg and the NYPD, earlier this year. “Do you think that more folks should have gone to jail for their role in a financial crisis that led to 7.8 million foreclosures in the 10 years between 2007 and 2016?” When Dimon criticized Warren, saying she “vilifies successful people,” Ocasio-Cortez remarked, “Y’all, the billionaires are asking for a safe space—you know, in addition to the entire U.S. economy and political lobbying industry.”

    As the Democratic primary for the 2020 election wears on, it’s clear that the class-war politics some thought would vanish with the Occupy encampments has, instead, become commonplace. Public debate over now–presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax has been spun as an attack on billionaires themselves. Bloomberg, the ninth-richest person in America, is running for president, but in a climate in which wealth is increasingly a liability rather than an advantage.

    Mayor Pete Buttigieg, after Warren said he should open his fundraisers to the press, released a list of his top bundlers—supporters who have raised $25,000 or more for his campaign—but omitted more than 20 people from the worlds of Hollywood and finance. He is thought to have the third most billionaire donors of any candidate still in the race and is now protested at those fundraisers with chants of “#WallStreetPete!”

    Then there’s the senator from Vermont who championed Occupy from the start. “They are focusing attention on the most powerful entity in our country, which is Wall Street, which is also the most secretive, and also the most dangerous,” Bernie Sanders said in a video at Occupy’s height. “The protesters are now forcing a debate and a discussion in this country on the huge issue of income and wealth inequality… the floor of the senate is 100 feet away from us, and I got to tell you, there are very few people who talk about that issue.” He closed with something that has become one of his campaign signatures: “We have to ask whether it is morally and economically important that 400 people own more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people”—an enormous divide that has deepened.

    A decade on, Occupy has helped mainstream that which they were ridiculed for at the outset: illustrating, in the streets and elsewhere, how economic inequality is poisonous to democracy. Critically, Occupy named the people who currently benefit from this destructive order. They also took steps to hold them to account and bring others into the fight. Despite having little appetite for electoral politics, they gained some congressional allies, including those whose runs for the White House may have been unimaginable without them. In that regard, Occupy has already set the terms for the decade to come: demanding not just accountability from the financial industry but also that, in the face of political corruption and financial villainy, the people divorce their worth from the rule of billionaires.

    https://newrepublic.com/article/155989/democratic-party-learned-wage-class-warfare

     

    • Like 1
  8. 32 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Uh, no. Once again you’re peddling nonsense and I won’t insult you by suggesting you believe it.

    Let's stick with this decade for now. And, please, answer this question - which Republican is leaning on MMT, as you suggested?  

    I don't know of any. 

    Thanks!

     

    ps - and if you need to catch up on MMT and partisan politics, here you go. We should be talking about facts rather than gut feelings.

    https://theintercept.com/2018/10/02/modern-monetary-theory-conference/

    Quote

    WHEN DONALD TRUMP signed a huge corporate and upper-income tax cut into law in December, it seemed like there was one small bright spot. With the GOP-backed bill projected to increase the national deficit by $1.9 trillion over the first decade, at the very least the Democrats could finally quit saying that an increase to the national debt — the vice that trapped so much progressive legislation — was per se political suicide. 

    In fact, as many Democrats reckoned at the time, if they reclaimed power, they could then repeal those Republican tax cuts and redirect the revenue to new social programs.

    But this month, despite the sky decidedly not falling from the Trump tax cuts, Nancy Pelosi confirmed her intent to bringing back the “pay-go” rule, which requires all new spending to be offset with budget cuts or tax hikes. Pelosi first instituted the rule in 2007, effectively barring Congress from taking up progressive legislation that would increase the national debt.

    This stark contrast between Republicans and Democrats was front-and-center at the second annual Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) conference, held last weekend at the New School in New York City. The MMT movement, started in the 1990s by a few heterodox economists, has since grown into a vocal and eclectic mix of academics and activists, trying to change the way we think about government spending.

    In a nutshell: MMT proponents believe that the government can safely spend far more money than it currently does, and increasing the federal deficit is not a bad thing in and of itself — a public deficit is also a private-sector surplus, after all. 

    While typically we hear rhetoric that our political leaders must first “find” money through new taxes or budget cuts in order to pay for new programs, MMT proponents say that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works. In so-called fiat currency systems (meaning societies in which money isn’t backed by physically valuable commodities like gold or silver) governments literally create the money and tax it later to control for inflation and keep it in demand. 

    Inflation is still a risk, MMT advocates say, but it’s a much more remote risk than mainstream economists let on, and it’s one that can be addressed down the line if it arises, without so much pre-emptive austerity.

    The first MMT conference was held a year ago at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where Stephanie Kelton, one of the movement’s top economists, then worked. Kelton most famously served as the chief economic adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, and before that as the chief economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, which was Sanders’s domain. (She now teaches at Stony Brook University in New York.) 

    About 250 people registered for that first conference, compared to this year’s more than 430. The attendees, while hailing from diverse disciplines, were overwhelmingly white and male — something Lua Kamal Yuille, a law professor and one of the few African-American conference speakers, pointedly criticized during her panel remarks.

    On Friday, Kelton gave a presentation titled “Mainstreaming MMT,” assessing how effective the movement has been in getting its ideas out to the public.

    By many measures, they’re doing quite a good job. Just last week, NPR’s Planet Money featured a podcast episode on MMT, and Bloomberg ran a story titled: “Trillion-Dollar Deficit? Whatever, Says New Consensus.” Kelton recently appeared on Jon Favreau’s popular liberal podcast, The Wilderness, and in the past year-and-a half, there’s been other deep dives into MMT in The Nation, the Huffington Post, and VICE.

    “First they don’t want to hear you,” said Kelton to her rapturous audience. “Then they ridicule you, then they attack you, and then you win.”

    While Kelton acknowledged the growing attention she and her colleagues have been receiving from mainstream outlets, she spent much of her public remarks focused on how their ideas are still unfairly cast by policymakers and the media. Paul Krugman, the New York Times economist, was a top target of Kelton’s frustration. In 2011, he blogged several critical posts about MMT, including to say that its adherents believe “deficits never matter.”

    “This became the way that many people, probably a million or more, were introduced to MMT for the first time,” said Kelton. She also pointed toVICE’s recent headline, “The Radical Theory That the Government Has Unlimited Money” as an example of being misrepresented as more extremist than they are.

    Still, MMT advocates struggled to decide just how they would frame their own movement. Were they radical or mainstream? Fringe or conventional? Rohan Grey, the conference’s head convener and president of the student-driven Modern Money Network, told The Intercept that they worked hard to “make sure there were different disciplines represented at the conference, so this isn’t seen as just a bunch of heterodox economists.”  

     

     

     

  9. The Cult, She Sells Sanctuary (1985)

    Lyrics:

    Spoiler

    Oh, the heads that turn Make my back burn And that heads that turn Make my back, make my back burn The sparkle in your eyes Keeps me alive And the sparkle in your eyes Keeps me alive, keeps me alive The world And the world turns around The world and the world yeah The world drags me down Oh, the heads that turn Make my back burn And that's heads that turn Make my back, make my back burn, yeah Hey yeah hey, yeah hey The fire in your eyes keeps me alive And the fire in your eyes keeps me alive Inside her you'll find sanctuary Inside her you'll find sanctuary And the world the world turns around And the world and the world the world drags me down And the world and the world the world turns around And the world and the world and the world and the world And the world drags me down Ah, hey yeah, hey yeah And the world and the world turns around And the world and the world Yeah, the world drags me down And the world Yeah, the world turns around And the world and the world the world drags me down Hey yeah, hey yeah Sanctuary, hey Sanctuary, hey

     

  10. 5 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    I disagree. Democratic economic policy positions represent a pretty tight continuum of mainstream ideas, even out to Warren, who is pretty much a normal 1960’s labor Democrat.

     

    The GOP “economic policy,” if you can even call it that, is sheer quackery. It’s essentially MMT with a bunch of loony think tank magic beans for grins. It doesn’t have anything to do with a set of voters. It’s just bullshit. So I can’t say that it’s the “opposite” of anything because there’s no strategic thesis beyond value extraction.

     

    No offense but a tad bit off the mark. 
     

    MMT is agnostic to parties and the left-right continuum. So is neoliberal monetarism. 
     

    MMT has ONLY been embraced by progressive Democrats this cycle. 
     

    neoliberalism is the calling card of Trump, Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Steyer, Booker, . . . Everyone other than Sanders and Warren (although her economic team are neoliberals who understand there may be a better way). 
     

    neoliberalism brought us the massive debt, trickle down, tax breaks for the wealthy, and asset inflation. And the massive and growing wealth gap with its negative externalities. 
     

    MMT explains why that massive debt has not led to dangerous inflation. 

    I hope that helps. Cheers. 

    • Like 1
  11. 5 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

    You're missing about 31%, though.

    They will go to whomever the nominee is. 

    The Biden chair is just waiting for someone to fill it. That chair will win SC, but lose IA and NH. 

    IA is the big barometer and key to the region that swung to Trump and gave him the win. NH shows the enthusiasm level for the progressive v. neoliberal wings. SC is a red state that has no bearing on the general for the Dems. 

  12. And it should be remembered the actual bomber confessed to the crime after eluding authorities for years.

    While the FBI and the media focused on the wrong person, the actual bomber planted at least three more bombs.

    The real bomber is in prison at Florence ADMAX USP and will be imprisoned for the rest of his life. 

     

  13. 2 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

    the issue here is adding a fictional element where an actual historical person (who is now dead) slept with sources for a story

    I saw her as more of a composite representation, but I understand the concern. The media was rabid to fry an innocent man was the point.

    The media was sued by Jewell and he came away with settlements. 

    Olivia Wilde was terrific in the role  - and her character is rehabilitated in the film. 

     

     

  14. Jan Blomqvist - The Space In-Between, 2017

    Lyrics:

    Spoiler
    Can't figure out how we got here,
    living on decay.
    The seven words left on paper
    will disconnect the day.
     
    and you want
    a new want
    and you want
    anything that's clear
     
    And it's all around us
    as ghosted machines.
    Would the real be just silent
    if there's a hole in the key?
    At the bar in the basement
    for an hour-glass of tea.
    Our love is a violent
    constant space in between.
     
    And the taste has got a texture,
    smoke has not a sound.
    The fabric that was fixed here
    inherent in the ground.
     
    And it's all around us
    as ghosted machines.
    Would the real be just silent
    if there's a hole in the key?
    At the bar in the basement
    for an hour-glass of tea.
    Our love is a violent
    space in between.
     
    And as much as I'd like to
    believe there's a truth
    about our illusion, well
    I've come to conclude:
    There's just nothing beyond it
    the mind can perceive
    except for the pictures
    in the space in between

     

     

    • Like 1
  15. On 12/23/2019 at 11:19 AM, NWBuck said:

    I'm glad she's got that on her Radar.

    And she frames the media problem correctly - it is an antitrust issue. Too little competition breeds a lack of diverse viewpoints - right, left and center. 

    • Like 1
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