Sunday, June 23, 2019

Forget Bernie Vs. Warren: Focus

Forget Bernie vs. Warren. Focus on Growing the Progressive Base and Defeating Biden.
Naomi Klein
We often read Klein in our seminar. Here she is July, 2019. 

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Dealing with the over valued dollar

Elizabeth Warren released an “American jobs” plan recently. It includes several trade and manufacturing policies intended to benefit American workers and companies. Wall Street responded with righteous indignation, which suggests she may have hit a nerve.
One element of her plan most likely explains Wall Street’s angry reaction: a call to tackle America’s overvalued dollar.
The novel idea that the United States could achieve greater domestic prosperity by revaluing the dollar sounds obscure and a little risky. Who would want to tinker with our currency?
The reality is that China and about 20 other nations are already doing so. By using public capital to purchase huge quantities of United States government securities over the past two decades, they have driven up the value of the dollar to make their own exports supercompetitive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/opinion/elizabeth-warren-dollar.html

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Poor People's Moral Budget

Poor People's Moral Budget:
Everybody Has the Right To Live
Today we’re releasing a new report, the Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody Has the Right to Live.
In April 2018, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival released a Moral Agenda and Declaration of Fundamental Rights. The demands contained within that document present a comprehensive response to the systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism, and war economy plaguing our country today. This Poor People’s Moral Budget asks, given the resources of our society, whether these demands are possible. Our answer is a resounding yes.
Click here to see the report, as well as graphics and sample social media posts to help spread the word. This afternoon, the Poor People’s Campaign is holding a presidential candidate forumwhere PPC organizers will confront politicians with what we know are our real national emergencies. At 1:30 PM ET today you can tune into the MSNBC livestream here.
In the seven sections of the Moral Budget, we look at policies and investments for seven critical areas of the Poor People’s Moral Agenda:
  1. democracy and equal protection under the law;
  2. domestic tranquility; 
  3. peace and the common defense; 
  4. life and health; 
  5. the planet; 
  6. our future; and
  7. an equitable economy. 
In each case, we’ve found that our nation has abundant resources to meet the demands of the poor, and to address the widespread and systemic injustices we face. This report identifies:

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Public Banks in California ?

Or, a state bank?
When a ballot measure that would’ve allowed Los Angeles to start its own public bank was rejected by the city’s voters last year, even proponents of the idea acknowledged that it was a little far out
Get one of the nation’s largest cities to take the billions of dollars it deposits in big commercial banks and instead park that money in a financial institution that would invest it back into things like affordable housing? It sounded like a progressive pipe dream. 
But, as supporters have said, the seed was planted. And now, amid rising anger at the state’s gaping economic inequality, the idea has gotten new momentum with an assembly bill that’s making its way through the State Legislature. 
The bill, A.B. 857, would create a process for local governments to start their own public banks, if they choose to. 
“Currently California cities turn over hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to our country’s largest Wall Street banks, who invest our money in industries antithetical to our state’s values and policies,” Assemblyman David Chiu, one of the bill’s authors, told me. “This is an idea driven by millions of consumers who in recent years have experienced predatory lending, foreclosures, student loan debt, lack of access to small business capital and having millions of fake bank accounts opened in their names.”

Thursday, June 6, 2019

The Climate Crisis is Our Third World War. It Needs a Bold Response Joseph Stiglitz

The Climate Crisis is Our Third World War. It Needs a Bold Response
Joseph Stiglitz 
June 4, 2019
The Guardian  
•          
•          
Critics of the Green New Deal ask if we can afford it. But we can’t afford not to: our civilization is at stake

https://portside.org/2019-06-05/climate-crisis-our-third-world-war-it-needs-bold-response

Nobel Prize winning economist. 

Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Elizabeth Warren Gets Serious- and Accurate- About Trade

Elizabeth Warrenbuilt her brand for the  2020 presidential primary on wonkery. From childcare to housing to higher ed, Warren has leveraged decades of economic policy expertise and a network of liberal intellectuals ― many of them former students in Warren’s law school classes ― to propose ambitious, meticulously detailed reforms.
The trade platform Warren unveiled Tuesday in Detroit is a little different. It retains Warren’s wonk-flair with a proposal to reorganize the disparate trade regulators currently scattered throughout the Washington bureaucracy inside a single, consolidated agency. But the heart of her proposal is ideological rather than technical. Warren is making a crystal-clear statement of principles, and an equally plain break with the past 30 years of American trade policy ― up to and including the presidency of Donald Trump.
 “America chose to pursue a trade policy that prioritized the interests of capital over the interests of American workers,” Warren told a crowd in Detroit Tuesday. “We have encouraged companies to invest abroad, ship jobs overseas, and keep wages low. All in the interest of serving multinational companies and international capital with no particular loyalty to the United States.”
What matters in Warren’s vision is not the specifics of any particular trade tool or enforcement tactic. Warren isn’t pro-tariff or anti-tariff, for instance. It depends on the tariff. She’s in favor of international rules that are designed to achieve actual policy goals other than corporate profit. What we call “free trade,” she emphasizes, isn’t really a system where governments get out of the way. The rules of international commerce determine its outcomes ― and there is no such thing as a trade regime without rules. When governments agreed to grant 20-year monopolies on life-saving medicines under WTO treaties, for instance, they were not simply allowing nature to take its course — they were setting up a system.




Saturday, June 1, 2019

Trump's Trade War Changes the current global economic processes.

Trump's Trade War Changes the current global economic processes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/business/trade-war-trump.html?module=inline

Trump’s Two-Front Trade War

Donald Trump’s two-front trade war just took a turn for the worse. ThinkProgress: “The Trump administration escalated its trade war with Beijing on Saturday as it began collecting higher tariffs on many Chinese goods arriving at U.S. ports, amid warnings from domestic manufacturers and retailers that the resulting higher prices will be pass directly to American consumers. U.S. officials began collecting 25% tariffs on many Chinese goods arriving in the U.S. on Saturday morning, the latest round in a series of tit-for-tat trade skirmishes between the world’s two largest economies. Trump announced last month that tariffs on $200 billion of goods arriving from China would rise from 10% to 25% and pledged to put levies on another $325 billion of Chinese imports at some point in the future. Meanwhile, the administration this week began threatening Mexico with tariffs, in an unusual gambit using international trade as a bargaining chip to force greater cooperation with the president’s stalled immigration policies. The double whammy of tariffs on China and Mexico raised the ire of investors, who expressed fears that Trump’s fiscal policies risk plunging the country into a downturn. Stocks finished down Friday after Trump’s announced threat on Thursday against Mexican goods shook Wall Street trading. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 335 points, or 1.4%, ending the day and week at 24,815.”