A Clinton Presidency has been/would be a disaster for Black and Brown Communities. Here’s Why.

Posted on February 24, 2016 by | 12 comments

Linwood F Tauheed
February 23, 2016

Bill and Hillary Clinton used a pragmatic, practical, realistic, racist ‘southern strategy’ to win the White House in 1992.  Hillary Clinton tried unsuccessfully to use the same strategy in 2008 against Barack Obama.  This is history, what’s changed?

Hillary Clinton’s pragmatic, practical, ‘realistic’ mantra about how she would operate as president can be boiled down to: ‘Take what you can get’.  In today’s political climate this means the same thing it meant in the political climate of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it means: ‘Take what Republicans give’.

The Clinton’s have made a religion of being ‘pragmatic’, a virtue of taking what Republicans give; of embracing Republican positions and making them their own.

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Dismissing Bernie’s Supporters as “a Mob” and the Great Recession as No Big Deal

Posted on February 24, 2016 by | 10 comments

William K. Black
February 23, 2016     Bloomington, MN

In an unintentionally hilarious piece evincing exceptional moral blindness, Mr. Womack, a journalist, writes to Bernie.

Senator, you are forming a mob of angry, misinformed people and then turning it on the likely Democratic nominee. That, Senator, is a dangerous and destructive game. Does your campaign honestly wonder why it has become synonymous with nasty online invective?

Gosh, I would have thought that “nasty online invective” might call tens of millions of Americans “a mob of angry, misinformed people” who were “dangerous” because they were backing a candidate for the nomination who is not “the likely Democratic nominee.”  The idea that in an electoral nomination contest one is not allowed to criticize the current leader in delegates is, to be gentle, novel.  It is certainly not the approach that either then Senator Sanders or then Senator Clinton took when they trailed each other at various points eight years ago.

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Krugman Triples Down on His Smear of Friedman and Bernie

Posted on February 22, 2016 by | 18 comments

William K. Black
February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Paul Krugman is plumbing new depths of moral obtuseness, arrogance, and intellectual dishonesty in what is now his third smear of the well-respected economist Gerald Friedman in two days.  My prior column discussed Krugman’s two columns on February 17, 2016.  Here is Krugman’s lead in his column dated February 19.

On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three who served under Barack Obama, one who served under Bill Clinton — released a stinging open letter to Bernie Sanders and Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts professor who has been a major source of the Sanders campaign’s numbers. The economists called out the campaign for citing “extreme claims” by Mr. Friedman that “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans” and could “undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda.”

That’s harsh. But it’s harsh for a reason.

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Wall Street’s Message to Young Adults: “You are Clueless”

Posted on February 22, 2016 by | 4 comments

William K. Black
February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Wall Street CEOs are very upset with young adults.  They believe you are “clueless” and “voting against [your] own interests” when you support Bernie Sanders.  A Wall Street CEO took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to decry the fact that “Millennials are flocking to Sanders.”  It would be cruel to note that one has to be clueless to believe that writing an op ed in the WSJ was a good way to reach millennials supporting Bernie.  But at least we can gain an insight into Wall Street’s theory of why Bernie is bad for young adults.  It turns out that Wall Street is worried that Bernie is pushing Hillary Clinton to take inequality seriously because younger Americans take inequality seriously.  Wall Street, of course, loves and exists to produce staggering inequality.

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Krugman and the Gang of 4 Need to Apologize for Smearing Gerald Friedman

Posted on February 21, 2016 by | 15 comments

William K. Black
February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN

If you depend for your news on the New York Times you have been subjected to a drumbeat of article attacking Bernie Sanders – and the conclusion of everyone “serious” that his economics are daft.  In particular, you would “know” that four prior Chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) (the Gang of 4) have signed an open letter to Bernie that delivered a death blow to his proposals.  Further, you would know that anyone who dared to disagree with these four illustrious economists was so deranged that he or she was acting like a Republican in denial of global climate change.  The open letter set its sights on a far less famous economist, Gerald Friedman, of U. Mass at Amherst.  It unleashed a personalized dismissal of his competence and integrity.  Four of the Nation’s top economists against one non-famous economists – at a school that studies heterodox economics.  That sounds like a fight that the referee should stop in the first round before Friedman is pummeled to death.  But why did Paul Krugman need to “tag in” to try to save the Gang of 4 from being routed?

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Jamie Galbraith’s Letter to Former CEA Chairs

Posted on February 21, 2016 by | 5 comments

Jamie Galbraith has written an excellent letter to the four former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton and Obama regarding their letter to Professor Gerald Friedman and Senator Bernie Sanders. The full text is below.

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President Obama Sides with U.S. Corporate Tax Cheats

Posted on February 17, 2016 by | 4 comments

William K. Black
February 16, 2016     Bloomington, MN

I have been planning to respond to a January 26, 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Washington’s Corporate Purge” that begins with the claim that “Bernie and Hillary compete to drive more U.S. companies overseas.”  My title was going to be:  “WSJ Shills for Tax Cheats and Cheers Race to the Bottom.”  The context was a typical WSJ claim that it was “moral” to do a tax inversion deal with Ireland to cut a U.S. company’s corporate tax rate dramatically.  Murdoch’s minions’ explanation of this “moral” concept is as follows:  “A CEO obliged to act in the best interests of shareholders cannot ignore this competitive reality.”  The idea that CEOs “act in the best interests of shareholders” as opposed to the best interests of the CEO is contrary to economic logic and reality, but let’s focus on the claim that as soon as any competitor engages in the race to the bottom on taxes all U.S. CEOs have a “moral” duty to race to the bottom by avoiding paying U.S. taxes.  If that is true, then it is essential to either impose a new form of taxation that corporations cannot evade through such inversion scams ( a point that Donald Trump, of all  people, made in the most recent debate) or for governments to cooperate to prohibit such a race to the bottom.

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The Whistleblowers’ Weekly Lemons Award Goes to Dr. Ben Carson

Posted on February 16, 2016 by | 4 comments

William K. Black
February 15, 2016     Bloomington, MN

The Bank Whistleblowers United announce an early winner of our second Financial Fraud Lemons of the Week award, and it relates to our inaugural winner, the Department of Justice (DOJ) for its lies about the latest humiliating settlement with Morgan Stanley.  If DOJ had actually prosecuted the elite Morgan Stanley bankers that led its mortgage fraud epidemic the new winner of our lemons award could not have said what he did about that settlement with a straight face.

Our second financial fraud lemons of the week award goes to Dr. Ben Carson, candidate for the Republican nomination for President in the latest GOP debate.  The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel asked the following questions of Carson and received this wondrous response.

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DEBT-FREE MONEY PART 4: AMERICAN COLONIAL CURRENCY

Posted on February 15, 2016 by | 16 comments

By L. Randall Wray

In Part Three I argued that the government issues currency as its liability and imposes tax liabilities on its subjects/citizens that can be paid in that currency. When taxes are paid, both the government and its taxpayers are “redeemed”. I cited Innes’s argument that the universal law of credit is that the issuer of a debt must take it back. This is the fundamental notion behind redemption of debts.

To be sure, debt is much older than money. No human has ever escaped debt. At birth, you are indebted to your parents, your kin, and your gods. You spend your lifetime incurring new debts and repaying old debts and accumulating credits that are the debts of others. If you earn enough credits, you join the Redeemer and make it to the Promised Land after death; if you don’t you join Satan—the original tax collector–in hell.

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Money and Banking – Part 6: Treasury and Central Bank Interactions

Posted on February 14, 2016 by | 8 comments

Treasury and Central Bank Interactions

This post concludes our study of central banking matters (there would be a lot more to cover…maybe another time). The post studies how the Fed is involved in fiscal operations and how the U.S. Treasury is involved in monetary-policy operations. The extensive interaction between these two branches of the U.S. government is necessary for fiscal and monetary policies to work properly.

Once again the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve provides a simple starting point. The Treasury holds an account (called Treasury’ General Account, TGA) at the Fed, which is part of L3. To simplify, this post assumes that the Fed still follows the monetary-policy procedures that it followed prior to the 2008 crisis.

tb1

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