Submission to the Texas Legislature now considering Marijuana Legalization

I've been a lifelong user of marijuana and know many others.  I've always found it helps me be more creative and more patient in dealing with the world.  Sometimes it has been beneficial socially, but these opportunities have been sadly too limited.  I completed a very successful career in software development, becoming chief programmer on a world standard scientific program until my retirement in 2019.  No one I've known among many elite technical, scientific and cultural associates has believed that marijuana prohibition made any sense except as a tool for selective racist prosecution, and that the harm of marijuana laws themselves has been great to many.  Texas is now way behind other states, including my birth state California, where full marijuana legalization has been a great success.  Texas has the unique opportunity to be #1 in marijuana production.

A word from Minsky on Keynes and Socialism

https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/16/ 

Though I admire both deeply enough to consider myself a post-Keynesian in my political economic thinking, I am not fully on the same page as either Minsky or Keynes, and I wonder if Minsky's claims about Keynes in this brief note are fully true: that he believed once full employment was achieved, distribution problems would take care of themselves.  If so, it is a weakness in Keynes' thinking.  (But I suspect Keynes's actual thinking is not so neatly summarized.  I believe he was horrified by militarism.)

Of course, we haven't tested his hypothesis really...has truly "full" employment ever been achieved?

But the most important problem isn't even distribution as such.  It is what the hell are we working on.  Solve that, and the full employment problem, and we are much closer to having solved the distribution problem.

And the answer to that for the Soviet Union is that it was working on independence and self-preservation amidst continued economic and threatened military warfare from the western imperium.

I would blame any economic failures foremost on that what the hell, in this case endless war.

You could argue that similar mis-orientation was involved in USA (and still is).  But he USA had and still has enormous material and strategic advantages, so nothing important about the comparative viability of Socialism vs Capitalism is clear from this history, except that discrediting the ability of either to produce on any simple basis is without merit.

The real problem that hasn't been solved isn't exactly economics.  It is the problem of governance (which includes the governance of finance and baking and corporations).  How do we decide what the hell we are working on?

Markets are of only limited value here, and "free markets" and "democracy" have never existed (let alone being fully incompatible).  Wealth and power are everything and should be nothing.  That is the problem.

Momentary Physics Detour

In the EPR Paradox, Einstein believed the answer was there had to be hidden information.

Bell devised the mathematics to test this, and the tests done ever since have shown the no-hidden-information argument to be true.

What seems intuitive to me, then, is the opposite of hidden information.  Hidden lack-of-information.

Hidden lack-of-information, for example, is what you have in a lossy compressed image, as compared with a "real" one.

My first description of this, is that reality is constrained in certain hidden ways.  There are certain places it cannot go...and this extends also to our ability to test things.  We simply can't get to the experiments that would disprove entanglement, because we are similarly constrained.

Therefore, the world has less information that a world in which every possibility...was really possible.

And it seems to me to be impossible that the universe could have so impossibly much information as it might at first glance seem to have.  Some data reduction...just has to be there.

It's also consistent with the theory that "this universe" is actually a simulation.  A simulation done in a higher order universe lacking some of the constraints.  Perhaps they couldn't hide this aspect of the simulation, except by obfuscation.

Anyway, just something that occurred to me watching Nova tonight.   I'm not sure I like it actually.  It's so much nicer to think of a more infinite, but also infinitely entangled universe.  But they sound pretty similar actually...an "entangled" universe is also a constrained or information-compressed one.  It is as if the universe is being expanded from an MP3 file.

Debunking Reagan (and Milton Friedman)

 Today Paul Krugman wrote another excellent editorial debunking Republican claims about Reagan and the magic of Tax Cuts.

Republicans claim supremacy based on ignoring Reagan's first 2 years.  Sure, Reagan didn't deserve the blame for that, but he didn't deserve credit for the recovery either.  Both were caused by actions of the Federal Reserve as Krugman explains.  Tax cuts had little or nothing to do with it...and have been worse than useless ever since.

Krugman doesn't mention it here, but then-Fed-chair Volker appointed by Carter was a follower of Milton Friedman's "Monetarism" theory about controlling inflation, which provided a new cookbook for central bankers.  It was supposed to be able to control inflation while also maximizing GDP, but it didn't work that way (because the Fed doesn't actually "control" the money supply...as I have long discussed, the money supply is determined by private lending and saving* decisions which at best the Fed can slightly incentivize but not control).  So, after destroying the economy for several years, by 1982 Volker finally decided to abandon strict Monetarism and returned to traditional methods that anglo central banks have used for over a century, mostly using Keynesian formulas since the 1930's.  And then the economy snapped back to life--because the huge unnecessary interest rates following Monetarist prescriptions were reduced back to normal.  So Friedman should be debunked as much as Reagan.  Neither tax cuts nor "Monetarism" actually worked.

(*Lending creates money, paying off loans destroys it.)

We must learn to love the best kind of debt

I am grateful that the renowned economist Paul Krugman has just written an excellent editorial.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/opinion/biden-republicans-debt.html

Here here!  As far as he goes, I strongly agree with Paul Krugman here.  Given the choices available, proceeding with large deficit spending, such as for the Green New Deal, or even relief and readjustment from COVID-19 is the way to go now. 

Debt and Deficit fearmongering is one of the worst kinds, and I am grateful to have Krugman on my side, to help add some establishment credibility.

However, as a Communist, only let me add, that debt financing is not necessarily what I see as the only and best approach.

I see the best approach as, in whatever degree possible, taxing the capital oligarch class as much as they can be made to pay.  And even, when needed and warranted, simply seizing the means of production for the people.  I have zero moral qualms about this.  I believe Balzac was exactly correct when he said that behind every great fortune is a great crime.  The rich create far fewer and poorer jobs than their expropriated value would.  Self-described centrist economists, including Brad Delong, have cited and praised research showing that the tax rate that produces the maximum collection is 87%, and he proposed that is what should be applied to the largest incomes, which I would peg at over a 100 million dollars a year.  Is someone going to fail to get out of bed to work for a measely $13 million a year net after taxes?  Fine, we could probably do better without them.

Borrowing from the rich instead of taxing or confiscating is only third best.  It is only second best for one key reason.  Borrowing from the rich does little to create greater equity in society in and of itself, so for that reason taxing or confiscating would be better.  

However if the borrowing finances goods that are good for everyone, then those goods themselves may provide greater equity for all, despite also providing an additional benefit (and lack of additional sacrifice for)  the capitalist class which is also of some modest value to others (note 1).

But I'm willing to proceed full throttle with third best when the needs are great (they are) and taxing and/or confiscating is limited and/or politically impossible.

And it would also be best to end the current wasteful Military Keynesianism regime of vast unnecessary military spending, which does little or less for the average US citizen, is highly destructive in the rest of the world, wastes priceless human potentials and endless material resources.  Most of the benefits of US empire flow to the very wealthy who profit from US enabled commercial savagery in other countries.

In fact, to do the things we need, on the scale we need, we will need to vastly scale down our so called Defense establishment, simply to have the resources and human potentials needed.  That's in addition to the fact it does positive harm to us and our society, and even more to others.

The legitimate defense needs for a socialist USA could be about 1/10th of current defense spending.  That also means that 9/10ths of the human potentials and other resources could go to building the Green Society of fully renewable energy powered everything, and materially efficient and ubiquitous mass transportation.

The vast levels of US military spending, along with the vast scale of US military operations in the world, were not a thing prior to the buildup for World War II.  After the war, government planners correctly saw that it had been the vast government spending which had finally ended the Great Depression.  FDR's previous efforts at government spending had been too small, it needed to be far larger.  And they thought about whether that spending should be directed towards consumer needs, or continued military operations.  And they openly decided on primarily military spending, not merely because it was needed, but because it would not enable social democracy as would other kinds of government spending.  These decisions were made prior to the fingering of the Soviet Union as a (phony) existential threat to the USA which justified endless military spending, but the latter helped keep it going until replaced by the next (phony) existential threat.

Keynes himself would be outraged by the term Military Keynesianism.  He wanted military spending minimized.  He envisioned an entirely different kind of post-war world, in which increasing productivity meant people had to work less and less, ultimately creating a leisure society for all, with more time for the arts and education.  And this could have been made possible by avoiding military spending as much as possible.

Instead, we got the world where people have to work longer than ever, as hard or harder than ever in some cases, and be surrounded by excess militarism and inequality.  Keynes would be horrified.

Though often painted as a socialist by some economic sects, he preferred to be identified as someone who wanted to make capitalism work better.  Keynes was explicit in his denunciation of Communism and he was a believer in free enterprise and markets, but markets guided (not centrally planned as such) towards the common good.  And the common good included full employment, healthcare and leisure for all.  If one must be a socialist to believe in those things...how can anyone not be a socialist?

Krugman describes imself as a Keynesian economist, and not as a socialist.  He is the leading economic column writer at the very establishment New York Times, a large capitalist enterprise within a gigantic nexus of capitalist enterprises.  A newspaper which regularly denounces self-described Socialists like Bernie Sanders and anyone to his left.  By no manner of thinking can Krugman be understood as far left, though often hysterically described by conservatives as such.

I must say in partial defense of Krugman to my friends that while he portrayed Bernie Sanders as extremist, and Medicare for All as politically unrealistic, he has nevertheless always said Medicare for All would be the way to go if we could only get there.  As very centrist economists have done back to Kenneth Arrow--one of the first Nobelists, who wrote a paper in 1956 that efficient markets in Healthcare were impossible.  

Krugman often finds much good in northern European social democracies like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and recommends a more complete welfare state in the USA.   

But when it comes to endorsing political candidates, he sticks to the centrists, like the newspaper he publishes in.  

So perhaps it is no surprise that Krugman doesn't even mention, at least in this short essay, the alternatives of tax increases and military cutbacks.  He has discussed those before, and would follow in direction I propose but not as far.  He probably doesn't discuss them as much as government deficit spending.

We the people of the USA would probably need to borrow anyway to build the vast changes we need today, but the tax hikes and military cutbacks would enable an even greater scale, closer to the the one actually needed.

Hopefully as we begin to go down this road, people will see the benefits of doing things this way.  And people in the useless fat of the military and finance industries might see the personal benefit in switching their occupation to something socially useful.  The Capitalist Establishment don't want good working examples of socialism.  When they exist, they must be dismantled and privatized, to create more business opportunities and ultimately fuel ever vaster wealth inequality.

With things like the Green New Deal, we're talking about saving the world here.  Some say we have ten years, many are hoping for more, but the sooner we can get started in the biggest way, the better.

*****

I've already tried to place Krugman closer to the Center than the Left, as I define it.  But there's also another apparent spectrum here.  The hard to soft money spectrum.  Doug Henwood, an avowed Marxist, might even be harder-money than Krugman.  Henwood always mentions and prefers the alternatives I've mentioned to government borrowing.  I would argue that Krugman is roughly at the center of this spectrum as well, but it's informative to show the range of views.

On the full on Hard Money side, we have the Goldbugs and followers of Mises and Hayek, two very very conservative economists.  They preferred the preservation of value of money, and of great wealth itself for that matter.  They strongly disliked Communism and even Socialism, and had a tendency to disparage anything that didn't emphasize foremost the preservation of the wealth of the wealthy as Socialism! which portended to loss of everything good in civilization.  So Hayek wrote a cult book Road to Serfdom which purported to show how social democratic programs such as national healthcare were a quick road to totalitarian hell.  This book should not be taken seriously by anyone anymore, but enjoyed a certain celebrity for awhile and still rings true to unthinking rightists.

But within what you could call mainstream economics, itself having left, right, and center theorists, the followers of Mises in particular, and to a lesser degree Hayek (whose philosophy so appealed to the conservative Bank of Sweden who decides these things, won the first economic Nobel) are considered far out.

The very conservative Milton Friedman himself denounced the gold standard, and blamed too tight monetary policy (stemming from gold-standard-like ideas) at the core of the Great Depression.  And you can bet the Gold Standard has enjoyed any greater support in the more centrist and lefter sectors either.

Since long before the Great Depression the need for flexible monetary system made sense to many serious economists.  Why should Gold, itself a commodity, subject to its own supply and demand considerations, be central to determining the liquidity of society?  A serious chunk of 18th century US history was devoted to the struggle between supporters of the always-in-short-supply Gold as a monetary standard and endorsed the far more plentiful Silver to allow the western continent to keep up with the already high growth rate avoid endless boom-bust cycles.  Conservative and Leftists decry the Federal Reserve, but it was created for a reason (though there might be better alternatives, such as a non-independent government banking system).

Managing paper currency systems had already gone past science to engineering in British banking before Keynes came around.  Keynes promoted the idea of government spending to end the great depression.  He promoted the idea of deficit spending so much he made the economic offices of the FDR administration, which included John Kenneth Galbraith, uncomfortable.  But in fact the FDR administration turned out to be far too conservative in it's attempts to end the great depression through government works programs.  It was only the far vaster and less deficit-obsessed spending on World War II which ultimately did.  Keynes was right, and it was FDR who was too conservative.

But far to the softer money side of the soft money spectrum are the followers of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).  MMT has a cult-like following not entirely unlike that of Mises and Hayek followers, only on the soft money side.  MMT'ers are not necessarily leftists.  Most are strongly pro capitalist, and some go so far as to completely oppose taxation completely for that reason.

It is within the soft money spectrum of MMT to include some who would completely oppose taxation.  They would say we can manage money without the trouble of having a debt intermediary (such as the Fed, as it exists now).  The government doesn't have to borrow money, it can simply print money.  (I'll describe why this works later.  Many people think the government already just prints money in the process of deficit spending, but the actual process is far more complicated.  The government borrows money from the Fed, a private bank which then packages government debt as a security.  The Fed arranges for Reserves, which are deposits owned by commercial banks at the Fed (i.e., the Fed's debt), and then a government agency literally prints the paper currency which is distributed to member banks--but the latter portion is not what people generally mean by printing money--they mean deficit spending.

Other MMT'ers would disagree, but only because taxation is a lever to minimize inequality, to keep the rich from getting richer than everyone else endlessly.  For this reason, there should be taxes that are either highly progressive or that only the very wealthy pay.

How can this possibly work?  Spending without taxing?  Well there are many reasons why this works, the government is only one actor in the economy, money is not actually created so much by the government, whose spending and deficit spending is a tiny part, but by private borrowing, and money is ultimately retired by savings and/or loans being paid off.  If the economy generally keeps growing, as it has for the last 250 years, there is more wealth, and thus more basis for more loans, and thus, more money.  That's the nutshell version of money in MMT, and it is correct, and bypasses both folk and even recent mainstream liberal economists understanding of how money really works.  But each of these sentences deserves it's own chapter, if not it's own book.

I would put my own views on the hard-soft money spectrum somewhere between centrist Krugman and the soft money MMT'ers.  I believe much of the MMT theory is fundamentally sound, but I also believe in the precautionary principle.

As I said, MMT's are not necessarily leftists, nor even generally leftists.  Some are bankers or economists associated with central banking.  Their basic ideas are not kooky...they are actually more real than the ideas most people have.

The MMT concept of how money is created (at the point of borrowing, and not before) is consistent with that of most post-Keynesian and/or Heterodox economists, who have also seen the light.

How Is Money Created

When I was applying for a job at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in 1997, I passed through and examined a display showing How Money Is Created.  It left me with nagging questions at the time.  I now know it was wrong, but many economists and other knowledgeable people have believed it before and still.

First, someone makes a deposit in a bank, said the display.  Then, the bank can loan $1 to another bank, which can loan it to another bank, and so on, until the total added to the banking system is determined by the reserve ratio, so if the reserve ratio is 10 than $1 invested becomes $10 added to the economy.

At one time, this was felt to be so obviously true, that another intellectual edifice of even more shaky provinance was added.  Milton Friedman's Monetarism (his actual set of Economic theories and principles, not his popular books like Free to Choose).

Friedman blamed the Great Depression on a central banking failure: failure to keep the money supply slightly growing.  Instead, the great depression was triggered by a monetary contraction.

There are errors even in that work that render the ideas expressed wrong and useless.  The monetary contraction occurred after mass unemployment occurred.  And other things,  it has been debunked.

Anyway, the rest of the Monetarist theory was taken very seriously by Paul Volker, a student of Friedman (appointed by that centrist President--wrongly believed by some to be far left--Jimmy Carter).

It was Volker's limit pushing contraction of the monetary supply that caused the massive economic failures which led to--the election of Ronald Reagan.  Anyway, the pernicious INFLATION of the 1970's, which was fairly historic (but probably due to other factors) was finally tamed, along with a mass unemployment which helped cause a mass collapse of labor unions in the USA.  Which Reagan managed to disguise by forcing Japanese automakers to have US based manufacturing operations.

But on a technical level, the prescriptions of Friedman simply did not work in practice.  It was impossible to so simply control the money supply, the rate of inflation, or unemployment so simply as "controlling the money supply" by moving the policy levers of the Federal Reserve.  It was never tried again.  Instead, they reverted to a peculiar banking version of something very much like (and including) Keynesian formulas and concepts.  That is what actually works.  Meanwhile, listening to conservatives especially, anything Keynesian is pure fantasy and wrong as well as being the basest and most dangerous evil.

Meanwhile, just one of the reasons Friedman's elegant formulas didn't work, is because his understanding of how money is created was fundamentally wrong.

MMT'ers and Post-Keynesians have examined the data very clearly, and thought very deeply about the processes involved, and concluded the mainstream view of how money was created was fundamentally wrong.  Money is not created by deposits.  Money is created by  loans.

It is loans that originate and drive the entire process (and always have).  When a loan is created, a bank simultaneously creates a deposit of that same amount.  They then get reserves for that.  But before that, they have no need to.

You don't have to think about it too hard to realize this is exactly how it should work, as well as exactly how it does work.  Loans are created to create new economic activities, and it is the quantity of economic activity that determines how much money is needed.  So if there is going to be new economic activity, money for it it is best created at the time the loan is made.  Likewise when a loan is paid off, the money is no longer needed, no more deposits anywhere, and poof--the money supply contracts.

This is fairly transparent to a certain kind of financial analyst.  Debts and financial assets are two sides of the same coin.  So, a piece of currency is a Federal Reserve Note, that is to say, a debt owed by the US Federal Reserve, a private bank.

Surely this has to end somewhere.  And surely it does.  Not everything is a financial asset.  Some things are real commodities, real homes, and real people.  And some of these can be used as collateral for new loans.  In a real growing economy, there are always more homes, etc, to borrow money on, so the money supply generally keeps growing.  And even in a non growing but at least developing economy, there would be higher quality physical objects and networks to borrow money on.

Money doesn't have to be saved first.  People have to exist, things have to be made or at least claimed, such as a claimed territory, to be claimed as collateral for loans.

Why should a government just be able to create money?  Because it owns a great deal of collateral, and can organize vast economic activity, and tax a portion of that activity back.  Because it never goes away or becomes stranded from the ability to tax the wealth it has created.

When a business creates a factory, it can rake in profits from the enterprise in operation.  Similarly, when the government creates an industry, it can rake in taxes from the economic activity generated.

How much money there is, is not at all a measure of how wealthy society is.  The wealth is determined by the real things, the people, the homes, as well as how well educated and good they are.  The money may partly determine how liquid a society is, and that can be valuable, if it wants to organize new economic activity.

It is too important to be left to something arbitrary, such as the excess supply of gold and/or silver.  It is something best determined by a central authority in the interests of maintaining the highest level of productive economic activity.  A central authority, responsible to the goal of maintaining full employment and highest quality employment ought to set the parameters that incentivize the making of loans.  And that's sort of what the US has in the Federal Reserve, at least on paper, the Fed is supposed to support a dual mandate of fullest possible employment and low inflation.

Myths useful to Oligarchs

1.  The country is just like a person or family and must spend within its means whenever possible.  Debt should be avoided and payed back as quickly as possible.

The country is not just like a person for many reasons.  A person has a relatively short life compared to a country.  A country consists of many people at different phases of their lives.  Some people are at early phases where borrowing to spend on education or a permanent residence make more sense than not borrowing (and trying to get by without education) or renting (and not accumulating equity).  Others are at the point where saving (for retirement) makes sense.  This diversity is useful.

In order for people to have income, others must spend, for one person's spending is another person's income.  If everyone stops spending at once the economy collapses.  If everyone even slows spending a bit, a depression results.  This is the paradox of thrift and it is a key illustration of how a country, or an economy, differs from a single person.

But even for a single person, this prescription is not helpful.  What does it mean to avoid debt?  Sometimes, as in buying a house or business, or an education (which should have been free) it makes better sense to borrow than to miss the opportunity to build into the future.  Other times, such as when gambling, or spending on unnecessary luxuries, or poorly made goods, it is not sensible to borrow if it can be avoided without bad things happening.

Finally, a developing country (and every good country is always Developing (or even just Changing--even if not necessarily Growing) need never, and in fact should never, pay off all it's debt.  Because it's debt is the money supply.  When the government pays back all the debt, there are no more guaranteed assets in the form of government currency or government bonds.

MMT'ers state categorically that not only does a Government not ever have to pay off all it's debt, it should never do so--as it is very destructive.  This may well be true in a world anything like the human civilization we have now.  

However I'm trying to imagine a world beyond unsustainable growth fueled by fossil fuels.  This is way beyond the politics and economics of which almost anyone is familiar.  The End of Growth may be arriving in the next century or less (or, perhaps more likely, the Collapse of Human Civilization).  Suppose we could actually end Growth before the Collapse overtakes us?  Shouldn't all debt be paid off by then???

Probably not.  Even a shrinking country is changing, re-developing in a sort of way.  During change, old things are worth less, and new things--which need to be built--are worth more.  Therefore, credit, money and debt are still needed.  I will discuss later the optimal means by which this may all be accomplished.

Private debt is something altogether different from public debt.  A person can lose their disposable wealth to Bankruptcy, if not moral shame, if they cannot meet their debt payments.  But it gets worse.  A society with a high degree of private debt can be slowed down to a permanent recession, as has happened in Japan.  The permanent recession in Japan has nothing to do with their government debt.

2.  The hard working person saves their money.  Government spending is diluting the shares of the people's interest, cheating their spending power by causing inflation.  Govermment spending rewards the lazy and crooked while penalizing the industrious and thrifty.

(Paraphrasing Mises, Hayek, Hitler, and many before and after)

There are so many myths here, it's hard to know where to begin unpacking them.  Basically it purports to represent the interest of working people, in favor of their masters, but in truth does the exact opposite.

1. It presumes the hardest working people are even being paid in money, which is not always true.  Mothers, slaves, and saviors have generally not been paid in money for the important work they do.  Their "investment" is not in a savings account, but in a common good.  Therefore it is not merely the welfare of savers that needs be maximized by our philosophy, but the welfare of all people.
2. It presumes anyone working hard enough can save money.  Most poor people can barely survive on what they are paid.  The minimum wage is a less-than-starvation wage that forces people to pool their resources or never leave home.
3. It presumes that paid work is just there.  More often, each new paid job requires either government spending or private borrowing to even exist...in one way or another the money supply needs to be expanded for someone new to be paid, unless someone else is going to be paid less.  Economies without credit or government spending grow or develop very slowly 
4. It presumes that all can get paid work on an equal basis.
5. It presumes that work is paid according to the contribution to how hard one works, or how valuable the work is to society, when neither are true.  The poorest often do the hardest work AND the work that is most essential to society.
6. It presumes the major interest of the class of working people is in protecting the value of savings, above and beyond the general welfare (including many who have no savings), people looking for new work (which requires the money supply to grow), or people seeking education or spending on other future-serving purposes.
7. It presumes that the capitalist master do not own the majority of savings and other wealth, and therefore are not the greater beneficiary of policies benefitting savers.  In fact the capitalist masters do own the majority of savings and other wealth, as well as highly disproportionately.
8. It presumes that inflation affects only the cost of the goods that a working person would buy, and not the wages the the working person would henceforth be paid, or equities either might own.  General inflation affects wages, prices, AND values.  The working person cynically believes that they will not see their share of any inflation and that might be individually true, it is less true of the entire class of laborers, or considering the entire quantity of wages being paid--because more people are called to work in an money expansionary milleau than otherwise, generally raising the required wage for newcomers as well as established workers having bargaining power.  However even beyond the employment killing Gold Standard, which insanely ties the quantity of money to the surplus of a rare commodity of fluctuating value, modern conservative central banks who attempt mainly to suppress Inflation get most concern and take serious steps when labor pressure looks like it might begin to cause wages to increase.
9. While the uninformed and/or stupid may believe that zero inflation would be a desirable, it is in fact the signature of an economic collapse.  From a century of examined experience, even the most conservative central bankers understand a modest degree of inflation, between 2 and 4 percent, is essentially to keep an economy developing in a positive way (usually called growth but it could also be development--where things are increasing in quality if not quantity).  Without inflation, spending and borrowing are reduced.  Intuitively, a small inflation keeps you buying things "before the price goes up."  That appears to be boost a capitalist economy needs to keep from falling over from it's own contradictions.
10. Nobody should be saving currency in a mattress.  They should either be spending on useful things, or saving through a savings or investment institution, where they are generally protected from inflation, most often in the past staying well ahead of it, but under any circumstances, as well as can be done in the prevailing money market, or with some chosen risk.  So therefore inflation may not affect savers at all, or less than others.
11. What the class of working people should desire is not zero inflation either, and not merely for technical reasons, but instead the maximum possible price for labor power (the very thing central banks work most to tamp down, calling it Inflation!) relative to price pressure.  They should prefer to see wages generally going up as much as possible relative to everything else.  This is not represented well by General Inflation
12. Whether or not working people prefer or even care about the price of long lasting things, like homes, most likely depends on whether they already own one.  What they'd like to see is their wages worth more against the things they need to buy.  But this includes many things, such as healthcare or education, which by rights ought to be free, and are in many social democratic states--a vast majority of the world's wealthy countries.  Healthcare and Education are the two things, which are bound to experience inflation faster than everything else.  So if working people were freed from those particular kinds of expenses, which they should not be bearing in the first place, they would be doing best of all.
13. Working people should therefore desire to see modest inflation--especially inflation in the value of their wages or other things they are interested in selling, but at least within the 2-4% range at which modern economies do their best, support the creating of the best jobs possible for people seeking jobs, and supporting a democratic socialist state that provides free healthcare and education among other things.
14. People should understand that if they are going to be getting more money, either the money supply needs to expand or someone else is going to have to get less.

Morally, we should most respect the dignity and rights of people who have no savings or equity foremost.   And that would be by keeping wages inflating as fast as possible, or at least as desirable, without creating such instability that it would be bad for all.

Meanwhile the possessors of any kind of wealth, have responsibility, in proportion to their degree of wealth and power, over past investments and decisions, that may have been poorly adapted to future needs.  Such as a society that has invested heavily in fossil fuel infrastructure.  When the society needs to re-adapt to renewable energy, who should see the losses from previous bad investment?   It is the possessors of wealth, to whatever degree their wealth or power was responsible for that poor investment.

Our society, and every other, suffers no so much from laziness as from poor past investments and choices by the wealthy and powerful.  Therefore, the richest oligarchs out to be first to walk the plank of expropriation.  They are most responsible for the mess we're in, and the biggest obstacle to changing it.  There's no reason why anyone should be a Billionaire in the first place, any that appears should be knocked back down as quickly as possible, and no good or honest work makes a person that wealthy, but always collaboration with evil.  It's their bad investments which need to be dumped, that is to say, debts owed to them need be forgiven.

The ultimate issuer of a Currency needs to be a sovereign, as close as possible to speaking with authority for the people and territory it represents.  This is the best as well as the most socially useful system.  Such a system allows for end cases including inflation.  Hyper inflation doesn't arrive on a slippery slope from inflation, but from special sets of events, including under-production or availability.  If wages and prices increase relatively in tandem, even hyperinflation is less a serious problem to working people than mass unemployment.

Notes

1.  The wealthy person might ask, what good does government borrowing do me?  I may receive less interest from my government debt than the inflation rate.  But the benefit is obviously there...as the bonds are always sold and usually not below face value.  The benefit is protection, full faith and credit and all that.  It is a service only the government, invested in all of the people, can provide.  That people are endlessly willing to pay for it, proves it has value to them.

[This is a work in progress intended for initial presentation on Sunday December 6, and final completion at the end of January 2021.]

Another Terrorist Assassination

It was known to anyone that knows anything that Iran hasn't had a nuclear weapons program since at least 2003.

Iran is run by religious zealots, and their Fatwa against nuclear weapons is above any other laws, and they aren't kidding.

They have a "uranium enrichment" program, which the nuclear non-proliferation and other treaties allow them to have.

Nevertheless, the media keeps up blaming them of what they don't have, usually implicitly (then other articles show it isn't true, as documented below).  So the newest victim is always claimed to be some big figure in a "nuclear weapons program" that doesn't exist and perhaps never has.

Even the allegations of an Iranian nuclear weapons program in 2003 have been shown to be fraudulent (discussed below).

Iran's general military posture is defensive, to defend themselves and their Shiite brothers.  They are not interested in taking over new territory, they are barely holding on to what they already have, already under constant threat.  Meanwhile US is busy destroying any country that doesn't submit to US will (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran), and Israel is leading that edge by punishing anyone who desires self-defense.  The actual fear of US/Israel is the Iranian conventional missile development--they might be able to defend themselves.  But there are no laws against that, so they endlessly hype a non-existant nuclear weapons program as a way of justifying ongoing assassinations and bombings.

Clearly in this case, the assassination was about preventing future peace with Iran, including resumption of JPCOA under Biden.

You may recall Solemani was assassinated while holding peace talks.  What was Fakhrizadeh doing recently?

Working on Iran's responses to Covid-19, including vaccination.

Skripal

No 60 minutes interview, but a story verified by a niece (both who no doubt work for western intelligence...as does Skripal himself?)

And she says that he is no longer affected by "the poisoning" but has other health problems.

Those incredibly deadly Russian nerve agents seem never to actually kill any former Russian agents.

They disappear to some island somewhere, in the comfort and care of Western Intelligence.

Where no one is actually able to talk to them anymore.

Brings to mind a TV series.

Proportional Selection of Electors is EVEN LESS DEMOCRATIC than winner-take-all

Some liberals and leftists falsely believe that Proportional Assignment of State Electors within the Electoral College System would create more fair elections then the current Winner-Take-All approach in most states.

In fact, the opposite is true.  If Electors were assigned proportionally in every state, there would be even more elections in which the popular vote winner lost the election.  And in many recent elections, the numbers of electors would be so close that the race would be sent to a special session in which each state gets one vote (1992, 1996, 2000, 2016), which is even worse than the Electoral College, and Republicans would win that nearly every time.

I've previously argued that the winner-take-all assignment of electors actually undoes some of the anti-democratic bias in the electoral college, and this analysis proves it.

What we need instead is the Interstate Compact for a National Popular Vote.  That is an interstate agreement which effectively negates the Electoral College and replaces it with a popular vote.  Fifteen States have already signed on to the idea, and they just need a few more.  (But it may be hard to get more states as long as they are controlled by Republicans--who consistently benefit from the Electoral College--as they did in 2000 and 2016 winning the Electoral College but not the Popular vote.  Still, every other way of ending the Electoral College faces the same challenge of getting a few more states to flip, but the interstate compact permits the change with the least amount of flipping and other constitutional hurdles.)

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/shortcoming-proportional-method-awarding-electoral-votes

Sadly, Republicans are much better organized

Republicans are much better organized, and Democrats and like minded people are often foolish.  That's why Republicans are successful, despite being a minority and their success is really the success of an even tinier minority of oligarchs, who manage to pull the wool over the eyes of their base with religions and lifestyles they invented and steer for that purpose.  It's the old way, goes back to dawn of civilization.  Democratic Party surrounds a more liberal set of oligarchs, somewhat to the better.  The Republican Party had started as such reformers, but over time evolved backwards.  We still live in the sad era of Reagan, whose new movement conservatism vowed to end unions and the new deal, much to the public loss.  Even Democratic Presidents have existed within that envelope, only Bernie could have started a new era, if he had punched all the way through fear and conservatism.

Republicans and pseudo lefty intellectuals (like Glen Greenwald and Matt Taibbi) believe that the Trumpian Republican party represents the "working class,"  the people who work harder, and the Democratic Party represents the relatively elitist "middle class."

Except that the middle class also represents working people (not so much capitalists) and also Republicans represent a majority of richer people, and a minority of poorer people.

You can just look at the Republican policies.  They want to destroy unions (which created better paying jobs with benefits) and cut taxes primarily on wealthy people.  All around their policies emphasize making the rich richer, and somehow this is supposed to benefit us all, which it never does.

I believe when Biden uses the term middle class he does not use it in distinction from working class.  He follows the textbook path and refers to middle in the context of low, middle, and high.  Certainly we should enlarge the middle class and make the lower class smaller.   All jobs should be decent paying jobs, aka middle class jobs, pushing everyone up to the middle class, and it should be easier to make unions.  Biden has called for that sort of change, with some specifics (like $15/hr minimum wage).  We need to hold him accountable to these promises.

Greenwald and Taibbi partly follow the infamous example of David Brooks in judging people by their cargo and dividing working people into two groups to hate one of them.  In the other part, their observations are anecdotes, not unbiased surveys.  The actually poor people don't go to political rallies at all.  

Leading up to the election Biden was keeping everyone safe with only small fundraising events, not money-draining super-spreader rallies.  That doesn't mean the attendees at the small fundraising events are representative of those who identify with or vote for Democrats.  Biden managed to win in spite of such a plan that required little organization.  There were lots of independent progressive organizations pushing for Biden, not funded by Biden donors, and the independents were probably more effective.

The better organization of the Republican Party and their allies also should put rest to any fear that shady Democrat (sic) Operatives could have interfered with the vote.  Regardless of their percentage in the local population, Republicans turn out like robots, spurred by their religious or cultural organizations, to every place votes are counted, to win every way possible.  The insist on examining everything, and look for the tiniest excuse to throw out Democratic  ballots.  I'm sad to say I let one Republican vote counting goon overwhelm me for a few votes until I discovered I could call the elcction judge, who could call another election judge, until it all got sorted out.  In my opinion, the intent of the voter should be recorded if at all unambiguous, but different states have different standards, and it may also depend on the technologies involved.  Nowadays, nearly everything is processed by machine.

I have to believe that vote counting operations in battleground states were very serious operations.  They knew how important their job was, how much it would be scrutinized, etc.  They did everything to the T.  No doubt, Republicans where there en masse, complaining about everything as they always do, if majority Democratic votes are being counted.  But the job got done to a high degree of conformity to prevailing standards.  Jerrymandering and otherwise rigging vote suppression are primarily things Republican state government officials do.  Democrats want to see every vote counted.

Still, I see lots of speculation about the possible success of Trumpian legal challenges.  We must pay attention to all of this in real time.  The much better organized Republican Party also has more judges, and of course Supreme Court Justices as well.  If there is a case, they are certain to exploit it, and the possibility exists they may do so unjustly to favor Republicans.

I remain sure that part of the solution, long term (the only way it can be solved without enormous luck) is to build the left secular social institutions serving the central social function that churches do for Christians, and comparable religious institutions for other religions.  There has to be a track where kids could grow up and meet like minded partners and friends, and likewise older people.  Fragmentary expriences such as those offered by bars, restaurants, and typical activist organizations are insufficient to build the social trust that a high degree of organization requires.

A much better society is achieved if all people are automatically part of a sectoral labor union, as in Germany.

Labor organizations are among the best mass organizations.  I'd also like to see coffee houses where you can smoke marijuana but not tobacco, and just hang out.

Don't Laugh Till It's Over

I wouldn't laugh until it's over.  Remember that Gore lost when the US Supreme Court decided to stop the recounts in Florida.  Later work proved that if the recounts had used the same standard across the state, Gore would have won.  Gore had only asked for selective recounts, which was later proven to be a defective strategy.  But the Florida Supreme Court either had or was about to impose state-wide standards in a state-wide recount, which would have clinched it for Gore.  Then overnight the US Supreme Court ruled and blocked the Florida Supreme Court.

Trump dreams of similar achievement.  This was a huge incentive to get the Supreme Court filled with the last of his 3 appointments.

This is how developer/con-man/mobster trump has always worked.  Pull every lever, including lawyers guns and money, until desired result achieved.  I wouldn't be surprised if Trump has spent more time in the company of lawyers than any other profession.

We hope it won't work this time.  But hope is not a plan.  My plan is to participate in a demonstration on Saturday.

I've been thinking this is the inevitable result of an anti-democratic system like the Electoral College.  One party works out a superior strategy to take advantage of the anti-democratic features, and can therefore win with smaller and smaller minority (and therefore less need to satisfy actual voters).  (Original strategy: appeal to slaveholders.  Current strategy: appeal to racists and bigots.)  This lets them win with smaller and smaller national minorities instead of majorities.  But success breeds ideology as well.  Soon, nothing matters, but winning.  Republicans don't care if black votes are counted, etc.  The system makes them feel more and more like blacks, gays, liberals, aren't even human, as rationalization for a system that marginalizes their votes.  Thus, the anti-democratic system was created by thugs and proceeds to reproduce thuggery.

This is not to say that all people in Red States, or even members of Republican Party, are thugs.  Most are merely sheep following their local thugs, in principle not different from Democrats, where sheep also follow thugs.  However, there is an extra advantage gained among those leading thugs on the Republican side (which used to be the Democratic side before 1948, but the parties switched roles 1948-1968 in these regards...because principled Democrats like Hubert Humphrey kicked the racists out) through racism and bigotry, so when it is even tolerated, it becomes crucial to reproduction of their continued success.  It is not so much tolerated in cities, which explains the nationwide red/blue division, which is really urban/rural, not even large/small states...but the admixture of urbanity differs among those categories, and therefore the racist-bigot-edge emerges from them.  Once again, it has nothing to do with small-stateness, or rural-ness per se, but that is where leading racist thugs and bigots can best get away with their thuggery and yet still be followed by masses, because other masses don't so much appear on their doorstep to stop it.  In short: people based organization is more difficult where there is lower density of people.  And where there is organization fallure, or democratic failure, rationalizing ideologies emerge from them.

The establishment itself is divided between resource-wealth owners, like Kochs, who want to keep the oil fracking no matter what, and process-wealth-exploiters, like Silicon Valley and Wall Street, who would be happy to have carbon tax, etc.  Trump has been making US more and more a pariah state, which is not good for Silicon Valley or much of Wall Street.

Sadly there is little division within the establishment in many areas like empire.  Changes there cannot be made merely by voting for President (they don't make it that easy), though having a reactionary President makes improvement all but impossible (only through total collapse, which could destroy the world, but many believe in this path anyway).

Sadly many in the "left-wing" see this as meaning the parties are the identical, therefore no point in voting for either.  This includes a lot of people I used to respect and a few I still do with some reservations.

Here are some examples:

Glenn Greenwald since leaving The Intercept last week has been furiously writing how horrible the Democrats are.  Rarely mentions Trump.

Matt Taibbi has long been doing what Greenwald is now doing.  (Greenwald's editors at The Intercept were able to edit him to look lefty, but in reality Greenwald is libertarian.  We can only guess about Taibbi.)

Moon-of-Alabama (Bernard H., a German citizen) admits he is somewhat on the pro-Trump side because he believes the Democratic Party is more efficient at running empire, and he wants empire to collapse.  One of his recent articles blasted the slow vote counting.  I tried to counter his remarks in a level headed reply and was tempted to end my monthly donation.

On the good side, I've started supporting the new media operation of David Sirota, former Bernie manager.  He split from Bernie after Bernie quit the race, and like me doesn't like a lot of things about many Democrats, but still votes Democratic and strongly hopes for a Biden win. Sirota wrote a great article on all the methods Republicans used to weaken democracy in the now "battleground" states.

Florida might have gone for Biden as well, if it were not for a appeals court decision on September 11 2020 that upheld the authority of the state to require ex-felons to pay off all fines and charges before getting their right to vote back.  A lower court had ruled that this requirement amounted to a poll tax (it does, IMO, in no other case can your vote be taken away, regardless of unpaid fines etc).  Bloomberg and others have famously been trying to pay off those fines, but facing fierce opposition (and possibly lawsuits) from Republicans.  At most, Bloomberg paid off costs for 30,000 ex-felons (and possibly only 10,000), but there are 775,000 ex-felons in Florida.  It was, at most, a tip of the iceberg.

A country which elected it's Chief Executive and Head of State through a more democratic means would become a better country.  A country which had a more democratic legislature (e.g., no highly undemocratic Senate) would also become a better country.  A country whose leader doesn't succeed primarily by exploiting these anti-democratic features to stoke further division can become a better country.  It may be constitutional, and I may never see it change in my lifetime, but it is not good when Presidents are elected with a minority popular vote because of the Electoral College.  It means a system to prevent democracy is working to its fullest extent.

When the vote is fully counted everywhere, with no exceptions, the anti-democratic effect of the Electoral College is minimized.  That is because in the reverse situation, where some votes aren't counted, is the one where the Electoral College system is most pathological.  We saw a perfect illustration of this in 2000, where the failure to count Florida's vote accurately, a minute percentage error in the Florida count meant that the Electoral College decision differed from a large popular majority, whereas with no error in Florida they would have been the same.  A national majoritarian system could give the correct result with far less precision.  If all we needed to know was whether Biden or Trump had the largest plurality of the popular vote, that could have been fairly well established on Tuesday Night, then with increasing precision afterwards.  There has never been much doubt where it would go either,, Trump would never have been elected in the first place under such a system, his whole sexist-racist-bigot-billionaire-thug schtick only works because of it.  He isn't popular in the city he comes from, and nearly any other big city, where those antics have grown stale.  He succeeded only because of alienation and division.

People who live in small states should want to have the Electoral College system replaced, because of its corrupting influences.  Undemocratic power corrupts undemocratically.  They are also the ones who are going to need to oppose the system before it can be changed.  But I'm not holding my breath until then.  There are other big problems possibly more amenable to change.  Including the full counting of every election.

Sean Connery and James Bond

Sean Connery has died.

Sean Connery was an acting genius, activist for Scottish nationalism, charmer, and tough (too often having been cheated) business partner.  I respect him.  I haven't seen many of his movies, but I've seen endless clips of him on TV.

I have complicated feelings about James Bond.  The movie Thunderball came out when I was 9, and I saw it on my birthday and it somehow failed to impress much and I was more impressed a few years later by James Coburn's Flint--which recently I've started re-viewing without disappointment...as I grew up I felt Bond was the inferior other-peoples-icon...I had similar feelings about Johnny Carson who I thought the inferior lowbrow version of Dick Cavett).

Subsequent to the 60's, Sean Connery's bond became legendary.  And perhaps even in part because times had moved on, but the character not so much.  Though no doubt, Connery was a genius at this role.  As he admitted later in life, all his roles represented much of his core as a person.  I would call it rogue.  He's the slick operator, who instead of sneaking from behind to pick your wallet or steal your heart, walks right out in front and distracts you with his casually brilliant hamming.  And you would tend to hope, he wouldn't take your wallet or heart unless you needed it taken.

But the character Bond was cast in a fake cold war drama.  In which the cunning and evil were opposed to us ("the free world"--aka western empire), the slow thinking but honorable people.  But we had Bond, who had just enough bad boy to turn the tables on the evil and cunning enemy.

Not exactly an inversion of the truth, but certainly a simplification.  It was indeed our bad boys vs theirs.

Nevertheless, Bond, and especially Connery's Bond, became a cult, a legend, and much more.  Seeing endless comparison clips, it was obvious how much cooler Connery's Bond was than all the replacements. Few seemed to ask other questions.

I was very looking forward to seeing Bond's Goldfinger at a special screening organized by Texas Public Radio at a major cinemaplex 15 years ago.  I was beginning to think my animus toward Bond series as a whole was that I was the unlucky kid who never got to see Goldfinger.  I had seen Thunderball, but that wasn't the real magic one.  Having been left behind, I worshipped an alternate.

As I drove up the theater (cutting a bit of work time to go see the movie) a thunderbolt hit the transformer near the cinemaplex, which blew up, and the theaters and the entire surrounding area went dark.  I could see all this happen, and headed home.  It seemed like fate had spoken, and a second time.  I was not supposed to see this movie, it seemed.

So then I bought a copy of DVD of Goldfinger.  I was almost afraid to.  JaAfter sitting around for 10 years, about 5 years ago I finally got around to watching the movie.

I was shocked.  I could hardly bear it.  Even by my forgiving standards, the sexism was over the top.  And that was just the start.  The us-vs-them Imperialism and good-guy-vs-bad-guy simplfication was glaring.  I had to take several sessions to watch the entire move.  But then I should admit, this is true of most movies when I watch them by myself.  I greatly prefer watching movies with other people, who can carry me along emotionally just by sharing the experience.

I intend to have another look again, my standards and tolerances and expectations keep evolving.  I'd long ago started wondering about Dick Cavett too.  But I think it's obvious that Goldfinger is a Cold Warrior Movie, and the whole enterprise is warrior-justification, an in-principle evil.

But that's true of virtually everything, including many other things I like to much to give up, so I don't know.  But my theory now is Connery played Bond when Bond was the most cool, but as society moved on, the character didn't so much, and so it's no wonder that no other actor has been able to do it well either.

But Connery was uniquely gifted in his roguishly charming ways too.  So perhaps making a treat for some to watch his act even if you considered the whole enterprise consummate evil.  This possibility is why I'm still looking forward to re-viewing Goldfinger again someday.

How Obama era CIA bought the Narrative

Stories like this landmark report which truly brings it all together is why I continue to support MoonOfAlabama despite his recurring abominable opinions and often knee-jerk predictions.  However, I admit, it took me awhile to decide to support him.

 

Alternative Media Exposed?

Mainstream media, such as the New York Times, and even, mostly, The Intercept, have been exposed as manufacturing consent shills for the endless promotion of the evidence free Russiagate conspiracy theory.

Now, strangely, a reverse thing is happening.  Long time self-proclaimed antiwar journalists may be exposing themselves as a different kind of manufacturing consent shills for the endless promotion of the relatively trivial Hunter Biden allegations.  This includes MoonOfAlabama, Glenn Greenwald, Caitlin Johnstone, and many others.

This is ultimately about Garden Variety corruption, in which by one means or another Hunter picks up $50,000 or whatever here or there.  I frankly don't care about such things.  I have never spent more than a minute watching Rachel Maddow or others on MSNBC talk about Trumps infinite dealings here or there either, even when there might have been some facts to back them up (which is possible on topics other than the fact-free Russiagate).  I wish journalists would stop obsessing about such things, but they do because they can get a lot of attention, ("dirty laundry") and steer it what every way they want, because of course the entire establishment, even capitalism itself, is based on corruption.  So all you have to do is look exclusively to one side or another to use corruption to steer your audience away from one side and towards another.   The corruption is everywhere, that's not an issue in this election, or any other, or of much importance to making progress vs regress to society in general.  Corrupt societies might well advance more than less corrupt societies following stupidly antisocial policies (such as neoliberalism), corruption is a relatively independent factor, compared with degrees of public support and investment and general social policies.

Some of my friends do take these kinds of corruption things seriously.  I don't speak for them, but I suspect they could claim what is likely true...that Trump and his family have been proven to be involved in far more and/or more serious cases of corruption.  Mainstream media will generally reach for doubt rather than context.

By huffing and puffing about these trivial allegations against Hunter Biden, many of my favorite  alternative media reporters are enhancing continued war with China by two means:

1) Possibly helping the Trump administration retain power, by weakening the resolve of many to vote effectively against Trump by voting for Biden, his leading and only relevant rival.  Trump has had China in his sights from day one, hiring an endless series of anti-China (and anti-Iran) hawks.

2) If people like me manage to get Biden elected (which may require aiding the many groups which are trying to do so, rather than merely Biden and the DNC themselves) the continued huffing and puffing about Hunter Biden could in fact help stall peace with China.

Sadly, I have to say, all these fine journalists who I deeply respect as journalists (but not as analysts--that's my job of course) are following in this self-defeating and self-discrediting track.  I'm still giving them the benefit of the doubt as not having been GOP (and/or Russian) shills all along, as I'm sure many long have, but it is clear they don't care if Trump is reelected, Moon has listed that as his slight preference (and prediction), whereas Caitlin and Glenn simply say it doesn't matter.  This is a mark against them all in my book, though I'd say at this point Moon is not replaceable, because he's currently the best journalist I know of (as well as an often crappy analyst and forecaster and anarcho-Trumper).  Caitlin is brilliant occasionally, but highly variable (which led me to quit my patronage) and Glenn is like that too though I think he's more professional and less variable--when edited.  I should have also mentioned Taibbi, he's in this bunch too,  very good writer, but too long winded in his huffing and puffing for me to take much of.

I'll be looking for replacements who are clear anti-Trumpers.  I believe David Sirota and Aaron Mate are in that category.  I would have believed the late Robert Parry to be, though many of the writers at Consortium News, such as Patrick Lawrence, are not.  When edited for Consortium News, generally Trumpism is restrained if not completely hidden.

Note:  I don't think Russia's or Putin's effect on the 2016 or any other US election has been or will be significant.  There is not evidence that it has been, and Putin clearly would not want to appear to be the meddler he well knows the US to be (unlike most Americans, who seem unaware of how much US hac sontrolled Russia and other countries).  However, this is not necessarily to say Putin wouldn't have any preference.  I would believe he has a soft preference for Trump, and China the reverse.  So could Russians be key sources for people I've mentioned here?  Quite possibly, yes.  Do I care about that?  No, I care about the importance, accuracy, relative fairness, and contextuality of the reporting and opinions expressed or implied, not where the facts came from.  But it may require highly professional standards to prevent sources from becoming leans.  We know that's a problem in the mainstream media.

Not all stories that may originate or pass through the hands of Russians are disinformation or the result of unethical operations.  Russians--including Putin--may have a lot of truths to tell, and if some journalist can distill these truths into journalistic reports, even lacking combination with others, that's an asset of some kind.  However full contextualization is important, and that is in principle why a organization of journalists and editors is useful.

There can be a fine line between advocacy and reporting.  To some degree, all reporting is advocacy by selection, merely deciding which stories to tell.  Excessive reporting on unimportant stories is clear advocacy.

Advocacy is fine...for advocates.  Self-proclaimed objective or non-partisan should not be involved in advocacy--even on their own time--because it reduces their appearance and ability to maintain objectivity.  This used to be well understood.  Now it's violated by all, including otherwise exemplary journalists in alternative media.

Taibbi wrote the book on Hate Media.  Now he seems to relish becoming a part of it himself.

I will see if I can add Greenwald and/or Taibbi to my pile of subscriptions I already don't have time for, when they start reporting important stories that need to be reported in their depth.

The truth behind Russiagate was one of those stories, precisely because it was never just about Trump corruption, it was about an alleged justification for endless war with Russia, and a new McCarthyism that painted any skeptics as tools of Moscow.  I could tell from the very beginning that Trump would never be removed, only controlled, as if he needed some such controlling (and not mere insider pressure) to maintain the cold war with Russia.  The National Security State was taking no chances.  Trump might be too big to be pressured (an idea which has been proven false in many cases).

Russiagate was also about destroying the left.  It started as a distraction from the important confirmation that the DNC was strongly working against Sanders.  That real news was immediately drowned out by the fake story that Russia had been behind obtaining that real news, which was essentially irrelevant to the first story even if it was true.  And it would be the illegal activities that Russia engaged in, as opposed to merely assisting a journalistic operation, which would be of some limited interest.  The US has of course engaged in such illegal activities in other countries on a vast scale for decades.  Failing to include that context was also a fault in nearly all Russiagate reporting from the outset.

Biden does deserve calling out whenever he (or anyone else) continues to peddle Russiagate stories, as he has done from time to time.  Trump in some cases rightfully dismisses them.  Fortunately this does not appear to be a big obsession with Biden.  But this kind of thing is so ordinary, it is not big news.  Trump is far more full of fake stories.  I pretty much ignore those too.

Thoughts about ET

Isn't The Earth a fairly desireable chunk of Real Estate for the possibly recently-become-homeless escapees of a cosmic event?

IF there are Extraterrestrial Intelligent Beings, carbon based too (which is likely), and like therefore like us (due to various limits, etc).

That might be the biggest question.

IF there are, then there have to be, at any given time, some displaced and looking for a new nice place (as we might be someday).

AND IF they are reasonable close to us, and capable of traveling near light speed.

THEN they would be looking for a place just like this.

AND what to do about the pesky existing inhabitants... Well that depends a lot on what you consider the fundamental "nature" of such beings, which may be hard to contemplate.

THEY could mix in, unknown to us.  (Possibly the most likely scenario, I think, maybe therefore already could have already have happened a few times--except that they may not be many such possibilities in the past few million years.  In fact, considering this possibility...it could be that's what "homo sapiens" as we know it now is.  A hybrid of ET's that blended in to establish themselves here.)

THEY could take over, blam.

OR they could try to arrange things, so we did ourselves in, saving them the trouble and cleanup.  But in a fairly benign way.  I don't think they'd like the Nuclear Winter option.  Social collapse from excess growth might be fast enough, once again it's hard to know their fundamental nature.  They could be operating from sone distance mostly, out of view, and not in a huge hurry to take the big prize, knowing they have some time before the next such ET.

So that option would entail giving us just the right knowledge.  Knowing too much of some things and too little of others.

I suppose that point is equally likely even without ET orchestration.

Losing leads to More Losing

There's a fundamental problem with trying to make the political system better by not choosing to vote effectively for one of the two potentially winning candidates.  And that is that the winners make the new rules.  So if the "lesser evil" party doesn't win, that alone give it neither capability nor incentive to "reform" by lessening the evil.  The greater evil will further bend the process towards greater evil, and that sets up the next starting points.

"Winning" can also lead to losing, but by a longer term process.  "Stability breeds instability" as Minsky rightly theorized.  But that takes awhile, it takes long enough for the previous instability to be forgotten.

In between, there is some feedback outside the electoral system itself.  Out there in the real world, where, for example, the "winning party" President may find that he has failed to deal effectively with a pandemic.

Neither duopoly party has won enough elections since 1952 to be in the "stability breeds instability" category.  That *might* have been true for 20 years here or there, such as the 20 years from 1932 to 1952, when the Democrats won the Presidency and had solid majorities in Congress

If anything, it's the Republican party which has had "winning stabiiity" since 1968 or so, winning a substantial majority of the Presidential elections since then, in substantial part helped by the institutional anti-progressivism of the Electoral College and Senate.  They have pulled this off despite having lower numbers of voters and activists nationwide, partly with greater assistance from wealth and the deep state, such as Allen Dulles who was instrumental in getting Nixon and Eisenhower elected, as well as JFK removed.

So if anything it is the Republican party which has become lax about how well things are actually going, and instead pushing their fantasies to the extreme, as Trump represents.

But it should not be surprising that there is wealth and power on both sides.  That is the way democracy works, and always has, since the Greeks coined the term.  Power cannot be ignored, it runs the show, always has, always will, and without a plebiscite would do so even more wantonly.  The best that can ever be done to power is to lean on it, divide it, and so on.  When possible, replace one power with a lesser evil one.  But the presence of differential power controlling society is a basic fact which cannot be eliminated--it is in the fundamental nature of things.  And its reduction requires greater equality in wealth and other forms of power.  True democracy is not possible without equality.  The fight for equality must be primary.

Wow! The real (lack of ) appeal of the Third Reich

Social revisionists like Richard Seymour ar engaged in an attempt to make racism seem like the natural state of things.  In such line of thinking, the NAZI regime was enormously popular because of its racist appeals.

The truth is rather different, as Tony Greenstein clarifies: the NAZIs were forced down the throat of the German working class by Industrialists.  In the last 1933 election, the Nazi's popularity was declining, and that of the SPD Socialists and KPD Kommunists was rising.  The terrible problem was that the Kommunists were stupidly following Stalin's orders, and Stalin wanted Hitler to be successful in destroying the West.  So, the local Kommunists and Socialists didn't combine their forces to stop Hitler.  Meanwhile, throughout the regime, the racist crap it was producing had very little traction outside those middle class and above whose incomes were rising.  Workers incomes were not rising, and they were doing more work.

Why the Left hate each other more

 David Graeber knew the feeling well.  So started one of the longest and most interesting tweet threads about this topic.

Comment on David Graeber's Excellent Essay "Despair Fatigue" from 2016

There are endless things to like about this long article by David Graeber in 2016 titled "Despair Fatigue."  He nails so many complex things that are misunderstood almost everywhere else.

What I like best is vivid portrait of Austerity Thinking in Britain and the pervasive mind control media which makes it a lock, when professional Economists, the IMF, and even the Bank of England disagree with austerity, how-much-austerity remains the only thinkable thing in the media, from the Daily Telegraph to the BBC.  (The IMF gave UK a warning to cut out the Austerity thing in 2012.  This never made it through British Media.)

What I like second best is how Graeber reinforces the post-Keynesian view of money creation.  Post-Keynesians have proven than money is created by private banks when they make loans.  Money is therefore created out of debt.  Graeber excellently references this finding, but not well enough that it would convince my goldbug friends.

QUOTE

The divorce between consensus and reality has grown so extreme and unworkable that even the technocrats charged with running the system have started to cry foul. In 2014 the Bank of England—its economists apparently exhausted by having to carry out economic policy in a made-up, topsy-turvy world designed only to benefit the rich—issued a statement on “Money Creation in the Modern Economy” that effectively destroyed the entire theoretical basis for austerity. Money, they noted, is not created by governments, or even central bankers, who must be careful not to make too much of it lest they spark inflation; it’s actually created by private banks making loans. Without debt there would be no money. The post-Keynesian heterodox economists, regularly denounced as a lunatic fringe by those commentators willing to acknowledge their existence, were right.

UNQUOTE

But there's more, way more.  Graeber explains how (in several ways) the British economy actually operates.  In the end, Britain sells out its subservient working class to the global elite.  Which currently means the US global elite.  They know they can have good townhouses and butlers in London, with not even the slightest chance of proletarian revolution. 

Graeber captured the hopeful moment at the beginning of Corbynism when new things seemed possible, and people were thinking out of the box for the first time in generations.  But he also suspected that the likely downfall of Corbyn would be sabotage by the Blairites, though he didn't predict how it would happen (false and endless accusations of anti-semitism).

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber

Plurality Voting

Plurality Voting is the word I was looking for.  Wikipedia has an excellent introduction.

Also called First-past-the-post voting (FPTP), which has a separate, but very similar, Wikipedia page.

I have always found the etimology of FPTP baffling, because there is no fixed post.  There is no requirement that the winner have an absolute majority or more than 50% of the actual votes, let alone 50% of the votes of the eligible voters.  All that is needed to win is a plurality of the votes actually cast, that is, more votes than anyone else.  (I believe FPTP is a racing metaphor, but it still eludes me.)

I liked the term Winner Take All, but that appears to be reserved for when there is more than one person being elected (so there is an all to take and not just a one), such as a district with more than one seat.  I am unfamiliar with any so strictly defined winner take all districts.

Technically correct synonyms for plurality voting include single-choice voting, simple plurality, relative majority, and   simple majority.

Plurality Voting systems can only be changed by changing the laws which enact them.  This is possible (and has sometimes been done) in US States.  Meanwhile, the voting system for the US President cannot be so easily changed (it would require a constitutional ammendment in which numerous smaller states give up their present advantages for the greater good--and as long as nearly all smaller states don't give up their present advantages, agreements among other states don't do any good either).  But note that the Presidential election is not a strictly defined plurality system either--that's only what many fair minded people would like it to be (compared with the current small-state-biased Electoral College, which was a compromise made at the US Constitutional Convention, primarily to satisfy the fears of Slave States).

Given a single choice, there is no reasonable and reasoned approach to voting other than Tactical Voting--which means compromising your vote by not necessarily voting for the candidate you like most, but voting for one of the two candidates most likely to win.  The Wikipedia pages above describe the considerations involved.

Though this might not always be the case, in the US, in the 2020 Presidential Election (and all other US elections I am aware of) there is no serious question as to which are the two candidates most likely to win.  They are the Democratic and Republican candidates.

Even if we could abolish the Electoral College and replace it with the direct popular election of the US President (as James Madison himself preferred) we would still not eliminate the fact that it is a single choice for which tactical voting considerations apply.  The only way to eliminate the need for tactical considerations on the part of individual voters would be to make the selection of the Chief Executive a job for the legislative assembly--the so-called Parliamentary System.  But that does not eliminate the tactical considerations either, it simply moves them upwards to another body of voters--the members of Parliament (who might have themselves been selected by FPTP means).

The ultimate system for permitting pure choice voting (and not tactical) would seem to be the combination of Proportional Representation for electing legislators combined with the Parliamentary System for selecting the chief executive by the legislative body.  This is in fact the combination which exists in Israel and New Zealand, and it has as many critics as defenders.  It typically results in many small uncompromising parties (reflecting their uncompromising voters) where small parties often appear to have impact far exceeding their voter base.  It often results in dysfunctional coalition governments where parties combine at the executive level because no single party can win, and at the same time, they have no incentive to compromise either.

A longstanding criticism of proportional representation I have heard is that it leads to people being entirely polarized and uncompromising.  Strangely, the US system has also led to a frightening degree of polarization as well, but without the "benefits" of being able to vote for your ideal.

How all these low level political design features relate to the high level corruption of all existing systems, which use mind controlling media and intellectual development systems would require a much longer and deeper essay.  But I don't think it changes the essence of all political systems--compromise.  It only means that given your lack of relative power and wealth, you will have to compromise even more, or get even less.

Many ultra-left voters, defined as those who refuse to vote for the largest "center-left" party, propose that the establishment duopoly is the root of all evil.  Under present circumstances, perhaps it is, but minimizing the requirements for advancement of small political parties is also a leading factor in the rise of the ultra-right, i.e., fascists.  Meanwhile, the parties responsible for the rise of Social Democracy in the 20th century were entirely majoritarian center left parties, not fringe parties at all.  Even Communist governments were not empowered by far left movements, but from majoritarian popular movements.  Trotskyism and the ultra-left generally have no history of success anywhere.  All the better, perhaps, in the eyes of their advocates who do not have to distance themselves from any unpleasant histories, except the singular history of having accomplished nothing.