Open Thread

bernie wouldn’t even bring up biden’s sex assault issues . nope. just throw in the towel and let all the followers down. knew from the start he wasn’t a political fighter. of course, obama had a free ticket for 8 years to inflict progressive policies and he could not get up off his knees in the temples of holly & wally. times i wish good ole ralph nader still had some fuel in his tank.

yah, zack, and he didn’t even try….nope. in fact, he couldn’t try. wasn’t in him. (and, no, not good…letting his followers down after two…two!!…lame attempts.) not gonna be vilified like good ole ralph. psycho plays. (and, obtw, dear sainted one, lots of folks…trial by air…disagree with your take on sexy joe.)

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

I was looking for information about Sweden’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic when I found this site.
After ranking the countries by deaths/per million population, a person begins to get a feel for the countries who did things right, and those who didn’t. (Sweden is one of those nations which made bad choices)

Consider France and Spain – both of these nations were supposed to have superb health care systems. What went wrong? On the other end of the chart, what are the nations with low death rates doing right?
Despite all the propaganda and the US sanctions, Iran is doing better than the US. And what about Cuba? Grinding poverty, US sanctions again, but they’re down towards the bottom with an extremely low death rate from the virus.

One thing about Cuba – a passing remark on another blog got me looking for information of US biowar operations against that nation. This seems to have been going on ever since the Communists took over power. Putting two and two together, might not that be the reason Cuba has 8 physicians/1000 people – the highest ratio in the world? This could be a defense put in place by the Cuban government on account of all those reported attacks.

Zachary S. wrote: “Despite all the propaganda and the US sanctions, Iran is doing better than the US. And what about Cuba? Grinding poverty, US sanctions again, but they’re down towards the bottom with an extremely low death rate from the virus.”

In Cuba’s case, they’ve arguably had a better healthcare system than the U.S. for a while, based on their average lifespan being slightly ahead at 78.66 years as opposed to 78.54 year for the U.S., and having a ratio of the ratio of 67 doctors to 10,000 population as compared with 43 in the Russian Federation and 24 in the United States.

(And if you’re curious, healthcare in Russia is free to all residents through a compulsory state health insurance program.)

To further put Cuba’s superior healthcare outcomes in perspective, of course, it’s achieving them with a GDP per capita of $9600 as opposed to the U.S. GDP per capita of $67,426.84, which is almost seven times higher.

As for Iran, I wouldn’t accept any of the figures coming out of there currently. (And this would be true of pretty much everywhere right now, both because there’s so much we don’t yet understand about the COV19 pandemic yet and because there’s so much governments don’t want understood).

Zachary S. wrote: “Consider France and Spain – both of these nations were supposed to have superb health care systems. What went wrong? ”

France certainly does have a superb healthcare system; I know less about Spain.

What went wrong is that something extraordinary hit them — not a real black swan event, I agree, in that plenty of folks have been predicting and modeling some kind of global outbreak like this for a while. Nevertheless, when it actually does happens, it’s a bit like an asteroid hitting; maybe it shouldn’t be, but it is.

MMT — My Neo take is the pretty much the same as Me Anderson’s from the other thread–pretty much any theory of money can work with the right people in charge, and pretty much no operating theory will work with sufficiently awful people running things.

I shall also repeat something I once said on Naked Capitalism (which blog I really like and recommend only don’t inhabit now because I don’t have the time; this is my last blog standing, so to speak)–I be seen intelligent, sincere people I respect both pro and cons on MMT, I shall most likely never, ever do the work to decide conclusively which side, if any, I agree with, parts of it are counterintuitive to me and so I remain agnostic. Haven’t studied the arguments in a long time, probably never will again unless I manage to get in charge of policy, which is extremely unlikely.

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Arts — Inspired by Aqua Lung, do most of you prefer darker stories in dark times?

I confess, when it comes to reading, especially novels, perhaps because it’s such an immersive experience, the more stressful and bleak things appear, the more my tastes insist on some sort of redemption or victory for the people and points of view I can sympathize with.

Or at least, a thorough loss for the people/types of society I hate. Coz, “everybody dies” and “the Red Death held Dominion over all” is NOT an uplifting ending, yet it sort of was.

Going back to Nihil’s request for film recommendations last week, let me very strongly recommend The Masque of Red Death to everyone here. Yes, it was one of the Roger Corman Poe adaptions starring Vincent Price, and most of those fell into the “just have fun and enjoy the show” category, (which category I totally support! Having fun is important, and, if you insist on things being useful, having fun is useful in the recharge your batteries sense; no fun ever, and performance will suffer across the board tho wow I hope no one actually needs to fall back on that to enjoy themselves; I mean, without fun/love/happiness/appreciation of things for their own sake, what’s the point?), but at least twice, in the midst of low budget quickie brain candy, Corman accidentally or on purpose made something profound. One was Death Race, which probably by accident made as biting and predictive a critique on modern society and where it was going as Network.

And then there was The Masque of Red Death. Perfect for our pandemic times. Can’t believe I forgot this last week. In which the richest of the rich invites all his friends to shelter in his castle whilst the plague rages outside. The non-aristocrats are there purely to be exploited and abuse. Truly worth watching even if horror/dark fantasy isn’t normally your thing. It’s about class more than it’s about disease, and, well, I think nearly everyone who appreciates this blog will appreciate this film.

Side note: I can handle bleak in movies or even series way easier than I can in literature. Love lots of series and films that have non-happy endings. But written stuff? I can handle individual short stories, but whole collections of bleak stuff, or depressing novels? I have avoided them for many years. Didn’t mind them so much when I was younger. Have my theories, but not sure why. Anyone else like this?

Lastly: further novel recs I feel ashamed for having forgotten last week:

The Plague Dogs, Richard Adams (two dogs subject to torturous experiments escape a research lab, are relentlessly hunted by humans terrified that the escapees might have traversed through and picked up something from the bioweapon part of the facility on their way out)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson. Please don’t let the well meaning but failed film adaption put you off. This is absolutely brilliant.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac. Fallen out of favor in recent decades, but captures love of life for both the better and worse in all its searing intensity as well as anything ever (if you want something more structured that does the same, see my last week rec of Foxfire, which has amazing prose, and The Vampire Lestat is probably the best thing Anne Rice ever wrote)

The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. Also unjustly fallen out of critical favor, but not only one of the best books ever about being an outsider, and about race relations. Also some of the best prose you will ever read.

The Women’s Room — never in favor except among feminists, which is just wrong, as definitely among the finest American novels (or novels, period) ever written, and one of the truest and most incisive critiques of modern society.

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Re: perspectives

It’s interesting seeing the different perspectives of people to different things. This week, look at the various lens thru which people view MMT.

Last week, I noticed that while Nihil and I both loved Les Miz, we viewed it through very different perspectives. (iirc & understood correctly, aside from shared agreement on the class struggle part, he saw it as an indictment of the very structure of law and private property, with other issues secondary, whereas I saw it as an indictment primarily of the way us humans treat each other irrespective of systems, and an indictment of those who forget the law is created by us to serve thosr who live and to enhance our lives; we are not here to serve and enhance the law (also an indictment both of bad laws and those ignoring the spirit in favor of the letter). Anyway, we agree it’s anti-oppression, but come to that agreement through very different lenses. Sorta like a lit version of the old query of whether we both see the same thing when we say “orange” or “green”.

Oh, also re Les Miz, the characters are frequently amazing, the story is amazing, the prose is amazing, and if none of those things were true, I would still love it simply for being the first literary work to flat out state “the beautiful is as useful as the useful. Sometimes more so.”

Zachary S. wrote: “Assuming the numbers continue in this range, it seems to me we have to try to find out what is causing such differences. Crazy local politics? Crappy current government structure/people?”

You’ve answered your own question(s), obviously. As you doubtless also have figured out, a more specific answer is neoliberal ideology and practice.

Two ideologies have filtered out of Austria to become globally significant over the last century: nazism and neoliberalism. At this stage, it’s a toss-up as to which has done more damage and killed more people.

Somehow, Mark Pontin, I don’t think you read my comment in the last thread. Fiat money creation does not equal MMT. Why drag in MMT with all its baggage into the discussion at all?

I cited Wray and his kooky ideas on taxing the rich (too hard) and corporations (they earned their profits, amirite?) because my making fun of said ideas is what got me shown the door at NC.

I would point out again that fiat money creation was actually put into operation during the American Civil War (where we get the expression greenbacks, as in backed by the color of the ink, not gold). And that factoid came from Warren Mosler the godfather to MMT. And it led to my citation of the 14th Amendment which, not taxing, establishes the Constitutional basis for the value of money. The deeper foundation is that we the people assert the value of money by our willingness to use it, not for one specialized use: paying tax, but throughout the rest of our lives.

You are correct that Wray’s position on taxing the rich undercuts the MMT argument that taxing is necessary to establish the value of money. But think about it. The poor don’t pay taxes to the sovereign (federal government). So I guess they don’t believe in the value of money either. What you end up with is MMT backing a long con by the rich against the working and middle classes. That is the rich who shouldn’t be taxed benefit from the value of money forced on these classes through the taxing of them.

And the reality which is so often the case lies somewhere else. Even though the rich can dodge taxes, pay lower rates, and hide their wealth, they still pay about 75% of the income taxes the federal government collects. That is not because of anything to do with MMT. It is because they have virtually all the money and so whatever rate they do bother to pay dwarfs what all the rest of us pay. If you want to have a real and useful function for taxing, then it would be what nihil obstet pointed to and what Wray decries, and that is in extinguishing extortionate and unproductive accumulations of wealth and generally keeping the society more equitable.

But that Wray’s position should be so blatantly neoliberal should surprise no one. For those who have dealt periodically with MMTers, they can be broken down into two groups: the economist/theorists and the defender/popularizers. The first group contains mostly heterodox economists. These are people who reject some of the paradigms of the dominant neoclassical economists. But importantly and what often gets overlooked by the second group of MMTers is that they still accept many of those paradigms as with their view of markets über alles. What the defenders/popularizers are left to plaster over is that the theorists are still at heart a fairly neoliberal lot. And its not just markets, but the jobs guarantee, the rich, etc. What the MMT theorists are saying is not what their defenders are hearing.

My bottomline take on MMT is that it is a mishmash of false, trivial, and neoliberal ideas put together by intellectual lightweights. To call it a theory is laughable. About the only good thing that came out of it was renewed attention on the concept of fiat money and, inadvertently, to the banking and financial system we actually have. Beyond that it is pretty much a dead loss. And as nihil obstet notes, selling it to most Americans is a non-starter. Even if you lopped off all the deliberately obscurantist, counter-intuitive blather, its inconsistencies and contradictions would sink it. I think there are ways of presenting economic issues so that Americans, or really anyone, can see past their preconceived ideas and really understand them but MMT is the last vehicle I would use for such a purpose.

The argument that it’s the very power of the sovereign state to compel its citizens to pay taxes in its own national currency which gives that state’s currency its value …. well, that seems to me to be MMT’s central axiomatic truth, from which derives whatever other logic it possesses.

I can’t see how government coercion regarding currency necessarily comes only from taxation power. Any enforced property relation would appear to do the same. For example, if a tree on my property line that you have warned me about falls on your house, you can sue me for damages. The court will require that the damages be paid in currency. The whole “tort reform” argument is about the government ordering that fines be paid. Money is a social construct, but only in the case of the relatively modern administrative state do all citizens pay taxes to the government.

I’d be somewhat interested in thinking about the whole government budgeting and accounting process, and whether the tracking of debits and credits really makes any sense.

I hated Blood Meridian. It is violence pornography IMO, violence just for the sake of describing it in some parts. The story is saturated with it and though the book’s plot is considerably more sophisticated obviously, it’s somewhat like the Friday the 13th movies where the whole story lines of those movies are driven by creative ways to kill people. Again, the book is much more than that though and McCarthy is a great writing talent, though difficult to read.

The moral to Blood Meridian’s amorality IMO is that you can’t dance with the devil and not go home with him at the end of the night.

Read The Road, which I liked more, and enjoyed All The Pretty Horses, one of his more upbeat books I hear, but I’m not a huge fan of McCarthy.

Just started reading Warlock, by Oakley Hall, a western set back in the 1880s, whose forward was written by Robert Stone, whom I’ve never read, but will now. Less than a 100 pages through its 500 page length, but the book looks to be an underrated gem. That west and Larry McMurtry’s is more my cup of literary tea than McCarthy’s.

Z

According to the NY Times anything that happened bad between 1980 and 2016 was all Ronald Reagan’s fault and everything bad since then is all Trump’s. Bush Sr. wasn’t around long enough to blame, and besides he was polite and had good table manners. Bush Jr. gets a pass for his disastrous reign because he did good by Israel in invading Iraq. The Clinton and Obama years were pure Camelot.

Z

Mark Cuban is “keeping the door open” on a third-party presidential bid.

I’d vote for him.

Z

@Mark — yah, point. The Grifters is the same way and I loved that. But I read it back in the early 90’s. I used to not have a problem w/bleakness in art, back when I was more optimistic about real world outcomes.

I loved The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, but again, early 90’s.

OTOH, more recently, even tho his characters are likable and his tone is generally light (at least until the end), Charles Stross’ stuff tends toward the sort of outcome (or to hint at the sort of eventual outcome) I was describing.

Nonetheless . . .

In the last decade, failed to make it more than a quarter through a book of (very good) horror stories by Joyce Carol Oates because they were having a cumulative depressing effect on me, and bailed early on a novel by Chuck Pahlianuk (I am too lazy to look up correct spelling, the guy who wrote Fight Club) about a bunch of people involved in a bizarro contest locked in a theater for an extended period of time, both because I either didn’t like them, found their individual stories depressing, and because I was pretty sure where it was headed and I didn’t want to go there. (If anyone knows which novel I’m talking about, please let me know if everybody dies and they resort to cannibalism at the end and the last surviving eaters of their fellows starves anyway, because I would put money on something similar to that being the ending)(for those yelling “spoiler alert!”, I didn’t make it more than a third of the way through, at most, it just looked like it was heading that way from the beginning, and the further I got it the more sure I was, and also the more sure I was that I didn’t want to spend too much more time with these people in this setting)

Weirdly enough, I had never read the getaway and had no idea that the films were inspired by a Thompson story, because I saw two movie versions of it and they were so not-Thompson I had to look it up after you said that to make sure it was really based on something by him.

The lead couple in the movies (both versions) is quite likable (I do not equate “criminal” to “bad” or “evil”, ymmv).

Okay, I will abandon my theory.

Tho, seriously speaking, the more of a struggle life is, or the more I despair for the future of the world, the more I want to see stuff like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXbFP2V_zSA

and the less I want to watch or read something like Smithereens or Requiem for a Dream (tho I loved both of those back in the day, both book and film in Requiem’s case).

Not saying this impulse is universal; obviously it isn’t, and clearly even in my case quality will out, but still . . .

I avoid things that I think will depress me, and things where I think I will hate all the characters (perhaps I *should* have disliked the leads in The Grifters, but I truthfully felt a lot of sympathy for them, even when I reminded myself how devastating it would have been to be a victim of one of their cons; maybe coz I saw the movie first and the actors did a great job making them sympathetic?). From everything I’ve heard of McCarthy, I suspect I will not be happier after reading him than before. Or, maybe not. Clearly dude is a good writer.

I wish I could unsee Requiem for a Dream. Just the memory of any scene makes me crushingly miserable.

Mojave Wolf, you may have been saying something that you thought was outrageous here:actually, maybe, randomly pulling names out of a hat every four years would be better? could it be much worse?. But I think a very good case can be made that leadership roles should be filled by lottery. Its very real drawbacks in developing expertise through experience may be more than offset by its advantages in eliminating the development of a self-aggrandizing oligarchy.

Again, I’m only 100 pages into it and it is about 500 total, but I can see how Warlock would be a novel that writers have a particular affinity and respect for.

One of the interesting aspects of the writing is it is written in a mix of first person point of view, via a diary of one character, and third person point of view for the rest of the cast.

Z