MMT, campaigns and unions

MMT Takes Center Stage – and Orthodox Economists Freak by William Black

Warren is the MMT campaign and Sanders is the dem socialist one (even though Sanders hired Kelton for 2016. She's no longer advising Sanders).

If neoliberals want to define as “socialism” an effective government that produces markets in which honest people prosper and we imprison or at least drive from the markets the elite cheaters, then we are all socialists. An economic system without an effective rule of law and with massive negative externalities such as global climate change is a suicidal kleptocracy. If neoliberals want to define that as “capitalism,” they should get used to the public rejecting it as an ideology that is as economically illiterate as it is inhumane and unethical. Kleptocracy and plutocracy invariably corrupt and ruin democracy. The truth is that honest markets and governments are complements and that the most effective economies are ‘mixed-economies.’ Using ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ as swear words is a pointless waste.

MMT doesn't sound like socialism to me.

We did not design this branch of our work, which began in 1984, to help any candidate. It is remarkable that Warren has not yet used this strand of MMT research to bolster her central policy positions.

Warren says she's a capitalist and believes in capitalism. She started as a Republican but her program (wealth tax, break up tech giants, housing, childcare, M4A, Green New Deal (vague)) is better than what we saw from Obama or Clinton.

She gave a bad answer on abolishing billionaires.

How is MMT on unions and the labor movement?

People's Republic of Walmart

bought the book today by authors Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski. 

The People's Republic of Walmart: how late-stage capitalism gives way to early-stage fully automated luxury communism by Cory Doctorow

Could Walmart Be a Model for a Socialist Future? by Peter Frase

We already live in a planned economy – we just need to take the steering wheel by
Laurie Macfarlane

MMT & foreign exchange markets

(more random thoughts sorry)

which reminds me of Mosler’s earlier comment above on ISLM – i.e. that it applies to a fixed exchange rate model)

Fixed exchange rate means what? Central bank will buy and sell to maintain rate of exchange.

Sterilize important concept. Central bank would "sterilize" gold inflows to maintain value of money relative to gold. 

Bond vigilantes. Chinese selling Treasury bonds which they bought to maintain exchange rates. Krugman and Baker regularly point out if they sell, makes currency cheaper, exports more competitive. Increases jobs and income and demand. Greece couldn't adjust b/c of euro.

inflation

(random thoughts sorry)

In reference to price-gouging, Bernie Sanders say drug companies raise price to "what the market will bear."

At a certain point, people will stop paying higher prices and other priorities for spending are put ahead of the new high price. Sanders want to move drug prices down to what people can afford.

Inflation as it relates to demand, businesses will raise price if they can or if they must. If there is more demand at a certain income, business will supply good and services at prices that the consumer will pay and business can survive on.

In the 50s and 60s teens had more money so they could spend on music or comics and this allowed artists to have careers.

cost push demand pull

childcare: Warren's plan and Family Fun Pack

Family Fun Pack by Matt Bruenig

Notes on Elizabeth Warren’s Child Care Proposal by Matt Bruenig

The Glaring Hole in Elizabeth Warren’s Childcare Plan by Bryce Covert

The inescapable problem with Elizabeth Warren's child-care plan by Ryan Cooper

Democrats for Family Values by Paul Krugman

Midnight City & socialism

Amazon pulls out of Queens

In reality it looked like Queens was going to renege on the original deal and Amazon decided it was all or nothing.

NYTimes reported on Feb. 5:

Mr. Gianaris has consistently rejected that characterization, adding that the letter said nothing about state subsidies. But he also said on Tuesday that, given Amazon officials’ recent comments that they would oppose unionization, he would not sign that letter again today. 

In response to arguments that the subsidies would be more than made up by the jobs that Amazon would create, Mr. Gianaris said only that previous state economic development projects have been “littered with overpromising and underdelivering.”

And from Feb. 10 in Financial Times:

Soon it was revealed that Amazon was having second thoughts about Queens. Executives have been riled by the local hostility they have encountered, which they had not anticipated and is in sharp contrast to the loving embrace they have received in Virginia, the location they selected for another satellite headquarters. 

They are particularly concerned, according to a person briefed on Amazon’s deliberations, about demands to allow its New York workers to unionise — something the company has refused elsewhere. 

“Amazon is a non-union company and did not realise this would have to change in New York,” this person said.

Green New Deal and corporate globalization

Free trade as idealized by those who successfully pushed in recent decades is a very good thing. It binds nations together making us all better off and less likely to go to war. It raises productivity as nations do what they are good etc. etc. etc. But even those who pushed free trade like Bill Clinton and Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong have admitted that it create losers. Academic and corporate pundits admitted there were downsides but little was done about it.

And so Trump could run against bad trade deals and demagogue immigrants and foreigners. Corporate free trade did not lead to rising living standards and a better world. It is here where the usual liberals blame Republicans and whitewash the actual arguments.

In order to work a Green New Deal will need to raise the living standards of everyone and make economic justice a reality. That's what the "New Deal" part is. That's what globalized trade didn't have. It was paired with reducing the welfare state and labor rights. If you want the Green New Deal to work and to evolve to a sustainable economy that will allow human civilization to survive that means no doing what was done with free trade. It means creating a new kind of economy that works for everyone while weening us from fossil fuels and stopping climate change.

This means government will have a large role to play.

Ready to Start

multiverse and Hope Punk / sci-fi

Jamie Peck tweets:

Books I recommended today: The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin and the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. At its best, sci-fi helps us envision what revolution and post-capitalist society might actually look like. Plus: more fun than Marx!

How the “golden straitjacket” led to “yellow vests”:

The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative by Matt Taibbi

Yemen, farm bill, Planned Parenthood

Bad news about Yemen, but surprisingly good news about the Farm bill and Planned Parenthood. Senate Democrats kept Republicans from cutting SNAP from the Farm bill and prevented them from attaching work requirements. The Supreme Court (really Roberts and Kavanaugh) decided to let a lower court ruling stand that would allow Planned Parenthood to receive Medicaid funds.

"Lawmakers in Louisiana and Kansas had sought to defund the group. Planned Parenthood then brought suit to overturn state laws in an effort to preserve its Medicaid services."

multiverse a third time

Another post about the multiverse. I found a new podcast (for me) by Chalie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz - both writers whose writing I've enjoyed before - called Our Opinions are Correct.

Here's an episode titled "We're in the wrong timeline."

non-evangelical white working class

The foundation of Trump's coalition is cracking 

by Ronald Brownstein, CNN

(CNN) -- Cracks have emerged in Donald Trump's hold on his core constituency of white working class voters, new data from the 2018 election reveal. 

Though Republican candidates almost everywhere registered large margins among white voters without a college degree, Democrats ran much more competitively among the roughly half of that group who are not evangelical Christians, according to previously unpublished results from the 2018 exit poll conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool, a consortium of media organizations including CNN. 

Democrats, the analysis found, ran particularly well this year among white working-class women who are not evangelicals, a group that also displayed substantial disenchantment in the exit poll with Trump's performance. Those women could be a key constituency for Democrats in 2020 in pivotal Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where relatively fewer blue-collar whites are also evangelical Christians. 

Nationwide, nearly three-fifths of blue-collar white women who are not evangelicals voted Democratic in last month's House races, while an equal number said they disapproved of Trump's performance in office, the analysis of exit poll results found. That was well over double the Democratic share of the vote among non-college white women who are evangelical Christians. And while Republicans last month still carried a majority among working-class white men who are not evangelicals, Democrats attracted about twice as much support from them as they did among the equivalent men who are evangelicals. 

"It's another overlay to the conclusion that there are some parts of the white non-college population that are open to Democrats and can be moved a few points in your direction," says Ruy Teixeira, a long-time Democratic analyst of voting trends who now serves as a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. 

Though these distinctions sound like fodder for a cocktail hour argument at a political science faculty lounge, they actually inform a backstage debate simmering among Democratic strategists about 2020. This debate has clear implications for the message the party develops over the next two years and the kind of nominee it chooses against Trump in the next presidential election. 

...

The Irish backstop

The Irish backstop

multiverse again

In October I had a post about the Multiverse and it's growing use in popular culture.

Counterpart is beginning its second season on Starz tonight and it's another show in which there is more than one universe. On Counterpart, there are two parallel universes which are in a state of Cold War and have diplomatic relations. The second Earth is different in various ways, but similar in many.

Now that the midterm elections are over and the Law is closing in on our President - Federal prosecutors allege that he committed a number of felonies - people of a more liberal or progressive temperament may feel that the universe is righting itself again.

Macron raised taxes on fuel and sparked the yellow vest movement which rioted and burned cars. Macron backed down.

Leftist AMLO is now President of Mexico. 

Still, scientists and most on the Left are very worried about impending climate disaster. Only a Green New Deal can save us. So politics has become very serious and very depressing.

One good way in which we seemed to have slipped into a different universe is the way socialists are mainstreaming. After I graduated college in the early nineties, I identified as and became a socialist or leftist as I believe the Democrats and Bill Clinton were too rightwing. I wanted America to be more like Europe and the Scandinavian countries. I agreed with prominent leftists of the time like Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Christopher Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, etc. (many of whom are still around.)

So it's weird to see democratic socialists being elected to Congress and to state legislatures and funny to watch the corporate media report on it. With Trump's victory, it's apparent things aren't working. Then there's Brexit, etc. Here's NBC reporting from the above link:

"We're working under the ideology of what’s best for the working class. What’s the most human. We organize for social democratic reform," she continued. "We're organizing for reform — we want to transform the status quo, because what we know of the status quo isn't working." 

Members, who self-identify as everything from communists to liberals to Marxists to socialists, vote on a platform during the organization's biennial national convention. At the most recent convention in Houston in 2016, members pushed for a focus on Medicare For All and strengthening unions — and also emphasized gaining more elected representation.

The DSA saw membership surge after Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., beat longtime incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in June, Cohn said. It was 44,000 members strong prior to her victory, and 4,000 more people joined within a week of her win. Now, the organization has 55,000 members, Cohn said.

Back to the Multiverse. The CW's DC world uses it a lot. Flash, Supergirl, Green Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow. (Guilty pleasures.) Tonight three of them have a crossover event in which they travel to another different universe.

It would be nice to see more alternate universes where things are a little better. I guess that's what many TV shows actually present in order to entertain and distract. They hide the really bad stuff. The unsaid painful truths.

Still, seems like many shows are set in worse universes. The Handmaid's Tail. In SyFy's Nightflyers, Earth's civilization is headed for collapse and our only hope is a Hail Mary-pass space mission to try to catch the attention of a passing alien ship which has so far ignored all communications.

The National Geographic channel has a dramatization of the colonization and exploration of Mars. It's pretty realistic as there are competing corporate-commercial and scientific interests.

Ready Player One was on cable and set its story in a dystopian future where people spend most of their time in a virtual reality. The plot involves a corporation's attempt to gain control of it.

As Theresa May's government falls apart in the UK over Brexit, there's a good chance a real socialist - Jeremy Corbyn - may come to power in an advanced nation for the first time in the Neoliberal Age. And it looks like Bernie may run again in 2020.

If either or both win, it would be very weird, like we were in a different universe. Of course many of us glum leftists expect Capital won't sit back gracefully - like we saw with Syriza in Greece. Still it would be a glorious victory a Corbyn win could embolden America's Left even more.

I wonder if the growing interest in the multiverse and alternate realities is - along with the need for more storylines for TV - a result with the growing acknowledgement that luck has a lot to do with where people end up in life. Our elite and conservatives, as Chris Dillow points out, seem blissfully unaware of this fact.

Better or worse luck may change things enormously for someone.

Hope Punk on NPR

While Trump's use of the ancient forces of fear and greed to win the Republican primary and beat Hillary was scary and blew a lot of minds, the reaction in the midterms was good to see as well. People got politically active and supposedly it was the largest turnout since World War I. Also the way the way the alt right has been deplatformed and pushed back by antifa, etc has been good to see. Although we should work to prevent the condition conducive to the rise of the populist right from occurring in the first place.

immigration

Mass Immigration Creates Problems For the Left. Tighter Borders Can’t Be the Solution. by Eric Levitz

(h/t Interfluidity)

Child allowance

Just Write Families Checks by Bryce Covert

Hungary and Poland go rightwing after austerity

When left-leaning parties support austerity, their voters start to embrace the far right

recession calls

Bruce Bartlett

Third, it is beginning to look almost certain that there will be a recession before 2020.