2012 Federal Issues 

Office of the President
    No Choice
Supreme Court
    DOJ
Congress
California "Top Two" primary
Electoral College
Others

The Democrats and Republicans have the same position about war, the economy, health care, justice, environment . . . .     Obama is a good case in point, he is out Bushing the prior president.

In the 2012 2nd district Congressional race there are a number of Democrats saying things that the people want to hear, and they may even believe it themselves, but once in office they must follow their party line.  Even if they got elected without much or any help from their party, if they don't follow the party line they will be replaced by their party at the next election.  This is called "Primarying" (Wiktionary).  Lawrence Lessig (see: Money  below) points out that the primary is where people with money select which candidates they want to see on the November ballot.  This is where attack ads get a candidate removed.

Those candidates who have accumulated many times the salary of a Congressman are trying to be a career politician and want to be reelected over and over so will follow their party line even if that means NOT following what they said in the campaign.

It's clear the people want single payer health care (and it's the only viable solution), yet the two front running Democrats are already saying they will support Obama Care rather than saying they will support Single Payer Health Care.  Many of the candidates say they will support Democrat or Republican Values and then mention Right to Choose or Gay Rights, i.e. their only "values" are these issues.  But as the two front runners have demonstrated they have no values when it comes to the big issues, they are good party members and will follow the party line.  This reminds me of the U.S.S.R in the 1960s.

The two parties vote on party lines, not because of PAC or SuperPAC money, but because of the higher dollar value support they get from their respective national committees.  This shows up in Congressional votes that block bills and nothing gets done.

Note that virtually all the money spent lobbying goes to the campaign committee for that Congressman, it does not go into his or her personal pocket.  The money is then used for TV spots, mailings, yard signs, etc. for the next election.  This means it will take a real grass roots movement (not the astro turf tea party) to make a real change.
2016 June 27 - this has changed.  In the old days it was a crime if someone who was in a official position accepted a bribe.  When I was working there were rules saying we could not give gifts to someone who we were trying to influence.  But the supreme court has ruled that money is free speech in McDonnell v. United States (SCOTUSblog, Wiki).  Now it's OK to give the bribe as long as no one can prove the receipt gave an "official act" in return.

For an independent to make a change it's not necessary to have a majority.  Instead only a few votes are required to give a whole new complexion to Congress.  A very small number of independent votes can make all the difference in getting a bill passed or blocked.  This forces both parties to come up with good bills and court the independent votes.

Constructing Public Opinion: How Politicians and the Media Misrepresent the Public a documentary by Media Education Fund (6 min YouTube, small format full length preview)
based on the book: Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like and Why We Seem to go Along With It by Justin Lewis (2001)

They also produced: Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire (Wiki) (2004 DVD)

This is a MUST watch video interview.
PBS - Bill Moyers Journal - WEB EXCLUSIVE: Glenn Greenwald - Transcript
Salon.com - Glenn Greenwald - With Liberty and Justice for Some (Book)

The Democrats and Republicans are now to the far right and so the party names no longer have meaning.

Lefties by Mark Foire	The Young Turks -  Bill Maher: Democrats Are the New Republicans
Rachel Maddow - Goofy gun conspiracy surfaces in Congressional action

21 May 2012 - there seems to be a rash of "Values" press releases.  For example: Obama coming out for Gay marriage.  This is an example of the Democrats and Republicans making an issue of the one thing they differ on.  The media is lapping it up and NOT reporting on how the agree on: the defense budget, the economy, health care, the environment, justice, etc.

It turns out that while the constitution does not setup the two party system, the electoral college (Wiki) system does.  Because of this it's virtually impossible for a third party candidate to become president.  This is why in the 2016 primary the two anti establishment candidates, Sanders & Trump, are running inside the two party system.  So the idea behind naming this web page End 2 Party Government is really not workable.  A more correct approach would be reform 2 parties.
FEC: The Electoral College by William C. Kimberling, Deputy Director FEC Office of Election Administration, May 1992 - a history explaining the concerns and their solution.  The idea of the winner not having a majority vote was done on purpose to result in a president more able to govern more states rather than a population center.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia by Matt Taibbi June 21, 2012 - bid rigging for municipal bonds.
Note: the insurance business is exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act (Wiki) and so it's legal for them to do this.

Over the past 30 years the Constitution has been subverted and is no longer operational on many levels.  This is the number one thing that needs to be fixed.  Without it all the rest will be meaningless.  I think a Constitutional amendment is needed to get away from the corruption that Lawrence Lessig talks about (see his talk: Congress), although there a chance that election finance reform can be done on a state by state basis.  A possible answer is if many states enact election finance reform that limits campaign contributions so that they can only come from voters registered to vote for them and with a dollar limit on each of those.  That would eliminate contributions for people who were not voters, i.e. eliminate a dependency that is not to the people who vote.

Irrationality

TEDxMileHighSalon - Michael Huemer - The Irrationality of Politics
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Office of the President

No Choice in elections

For a number of decades there really was not a president to vote FOR, rather there was the choice between the lesser of two evils.  It seems the party in power (not really the man who is president) does something to cause the country to change political parties.  The problem is that both parties agree on the big issues the economy & war) so changing parties does not bring about the change the voters want to see.
2016 - Both Democrats and Republicans are fed up with the establishment and there's strong popular support for Bernie and Donald.  Bernie is popular with college students (maybe because they have considered his positions) and Donald is popular with many Republicans that are also tired of the establishment politicians.

Year Wiki	Winner	Looser	Issue
1960	Kennedy (D)	Nixon (R)	Kennedy offered hope, poor prior (R) economy
1964	Johnson (D)	Goldwater (R)	Kennedy was popular, no party change, Goldwater was seen as a war monger
1968	Nixon (R)	Humphrey (D)	Johnson's Vietnam policies unpopular, change party & anti New Deal (Wiki), (R) Southern Strategy (Wiki)
1972	Nixon (R)	McGovern (D)	good economy, relations with China improved, no party change
1976	Carter (D)	Ford (R)	Watergate Nixon quits, change party
1980	Reagan (R)	Carter (D)	economy in big trouble, Reganomics (Wiki),stagflation (Wiki) change party
1984	Reagan (R)	Mondale (D)	economy OK, no party change
1988	GHW Bush (R)	Dukakis (D)	economy struggling, no party change, Willie Horton negative TV ad (Wiki) &start of tough on crime
1992	B Clinton (D)	GHW Bush (R)	problem economy & taxes, change party	Clinton adapted Republican Financial ideas because the Republicans got money from business and they got none.  So the Democrats now get money from Wall St. and Republicans from other businesses.
1996	B Clinton (D)	Dole (R)	economy doing well,  no party change	See Bad Laws above
2000	GW Bush (R)	Gore (D)	Clinton sex scandal (Wiki), Supreme Court decision on Florida vote count (Wiki)
2004	GW Bush (R)	Kerry (D)	Post 9/11 (Wiki) no change in party even though the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Wiki) had no basis
2008	Obama (D)	McCain (R)	Bush very unpopular, the (R) over reaction to 9/11 caused a change in party.  Obama offered "change", but did not deliver.
2012	Obama (D)	Romney (R)	hope continues, but Obama has not delivered on most of his promises. Obama & Romney agree on war in debate No. 3 (YouTube)
2016	Sanders or Clinton (D)?	Trump (R)	Sanders & Trump are both anti establishment & neither is endorsed by their political party.	Trump's win was a surprise. Key factors: Jobs (See below) & Clinton being an establishment candidate, while Trump was NOT a politician.

The Office of the President has much more power than the Constitution allows.  In some cases this has happened by presidential directive and in others (like war powers) was given away by the Congress.  The Department of Justice (Wiki: DOJ) has become a branch of the White House (index0811.html#SEC) and no longer enforces the law.

The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (Wiki) is just the latest example of the office of the president taking on powers that are in violation of the Constitution and international law.
Wiki: Hedges v. Obama - Challenge to the NDDA - YouTube interview with Chris Hedges - repeals the protection of the Posse Comitatus Act (Wiki)

Supreme Court

The Supreme Court (Wiki) has lost sight of fairness and needs to be over-ruled by Congress.  Note the U.S. Constitution (Wiki) defines the powers of the federal government: Congress (A1), the President (A2), the Courts (A3) and all powers not so defined are left to the States (A4).

Corporate Personhood

Voter Photo ID

Commerce Clause

Right to Privacy (Liberty)
Griswold v. Connecticut (Wiki) - establishes a right to privacy based on self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment, the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  It was cited in Roe v. Wade (Wiki).  Also see: Justice Stevens and the so-called right to privacy

Eugenics

Buck v. Bell (Wiki) - a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision was laroldely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics—the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool.
The Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Buck v. Bell.

The epistemology of science put forward by Karl Popper (Wiki) contains the idea that incremental improvements are the key to progress.  So there needs to be a mechanism to unambiguously renounce bad decisions such as the ones above.

DOJ

The Department of Justice (Wiki) and the U.S. Attorney General (Wiki) are supposed to prosecute criminals.  But this is not longer the case for the top 1% and businesses.
In 2007 Alberto Gonzales (Wiki) supported the Bush43 administration rather than the constitution and eventually resigned.
In 2007 (after two interim AGs) Michael Mukasey (Wiki) continues to support Bush43 instead of the constitution.
In 2009 under Obama Eric Holder (Wiki) not only supports the continuation of the Bush43 polices, but the "Holder Memo" (DOJ) is used as the basis of stopping prosecution of Wall St. criminals.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful 2012 by Glenn Greenwald - how the holder memo was used to protect Wall St, while people using small amounts of pot were sent to prison (not jail) for many years.
YouTube: Modern Money & Public Purpose 7: Financial Reform - about the criminal actions taken by Wall St. and how the DOJ stopped prosecutions.

Congress

There are two branches of Congress. 

The Senate where the members serve six year terms.  There are two Senators from each state.  The idea is to give each state an equal vote at the federal level. An interesting observation is that whenever I have contacted my Senators neither of them ever responded, except a recent answer from D. Feinstien saying she backed giving the NSA more power to spy on U.S. citizens.  Although she's clearly in the pocket of the people feeding her money, at least she is now aware that she can't continue to totally ignore those who can vote her out of office.

The House of Representatives was supposed to have one member for each 30,000 people, but when it grew to 435 members the Constitution was changed locking the number at 435.  Note:  If the population of the U.S. is about 300 million then we should have 10,000 Representative.  But as it is each Representative has about 700,000 voters in their district.  There's no way that they can represent such a large group of people.  Note:  Every 10 years when a new census comes out the 435 districts get redrawn.  In most states this is a chance for that state's legislature to gerrymander (Wiki) the boundaries so that the political party in power will get the most votes.

@Google: Lawrence Lessig: Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress

The Problem of Authoritarian Followers

Making Sex Normal: Debby Herbenick at TEDxBloomington

In the talk starting at 05:38 are U.S. maps showing Gonorrhea and HIV.  Notice that the authoritarian states have a much higher infection rate than other states.
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TED Toni Mac -The laws that sex workers really want - decriminalization, like has been done in New Zealand, is the best solution (Wiki).  The next step would be to use the employer of last resort by a sovereign government idea from MMT to offer a job to anyone who wanted one.

End War in all it's forms

Others

The Economy

The paragraph below on MMT came about after doing a lot of reading about the Global Minotaur which turns out to be a Greek myth (then and now).

Modern Monetary Theory (Wiki: MMT, Chartalism)

For about 200 generations of economists the monetary system they were studying had an artificial constraint in that the money was tied to either gold or silver.  There have only been 2 generations of economists looking at some economies (like the US, Japan, China) where that's no longer true.  So it's easy to see how they missed the underlying ideas of MMT.

Prior to 1971 there was "classical economics" but after 1971 everything changed, but most people are still working on the old rules.  If you don't know how something works then it's hard to make predictions or fix a problem.  It's like a mechanic trained on a gas engine car horse and buggy trying to work on an electric car.  The economic policies of political parties are grounded in the old system and they can not "flip-flop" so have not adopted MMT yet.  But the time is coming when the failure of the old ideas to work as predicted will be clearly seen and a change will then occur.  For example the idea that the FED can influence "stability (aka: Inflation) or jobs is false, but a lot of people still think it's true.  Also the national debt is a good thing now, but is now seen as a bad thing.  The idea that the federal government needs to raise money to fund their spending programs is false.

Money based on gold and/or silver ended in 1971. Prior to 1968 they could be changed for silver, after than only into a Federal Reserve Note. "Silver Certificate (Wiki)  this certifies that there is on deposit in the treasury of the United States of America One Dollar" Note the Series (year) 1957 B on this case is not the year printed but rather related to the year the design was first introduced.  The newest $1 silver certificate is this one. The replacement Federal Reserve Notes now used are not redeemable for anything.  But they say "This note is legal tender for all debts public and private"

Scope
This is an idea that came about post 1971 (Wiki: Nixon Shock), so does not agree with prior economic theories that go back thousands of years.  The benefits of MMT apply only to sovereign governments where there are no constraints on the money (for example not on the gold standard) and the government is the issuer of the money (not a user like the members of the EMU) .  But MMT can also be used to get insight into economies where the benefits do not apply, such as the EU.  The U.S. federal government operates using MMT rules but elected officials don't understand that.  MMT does not apply to the EU (Wiki), states, cities or households.  The key concept is that when MMT applies the government can always pay for what it wants, i.e. it's checks never bounce.  There's never a solvency issue.

I see MMT as a new framework or point of view in understanding how the US (and other countries) economy works.  It is not a policy.  That's so say how someone uses the ideas of MMT depends on them.  For example the quantity (G-T) government spending minus government taxes can be changed many ways.  Bill Clinton (Wiki) made (G-T) negative, i.e. he paid down the national debt, which MMT teaches us means he sucked money out of the private sector, not a good thing in a healthy economy.  So how you raise or lower spending and/or taxes is a policy decision.  MMT allows you to predict the impact based on (G-T).

Recognizing that MMT is the correct way of seeing the US government financial situation does not mean that there will be more money to spend but rather it makes much more clear how fiscal and monetary policy work.

The mood of society today (2016) seems pessimistic.  For example the movie Requiem For The American Dream (IMDB, Netflix) reinforces the pessimism.  While American manufacturing output is at an all time high in terms of dollars, employment in the private sector is down about 30% from 20 years ago.  That's to say there are a lot (tens of millions) of people out of work.  It's clear that the private sector has traded jobs for profits and they will not be the source of new jobs any time soon.  None of the presidential candidates has presented a concrete program for job creation.  But MMT offers a lot of hope for job creation.

Reality vs. Policy

I've heard from some people that they "don't like MMT" because if the government "adopts" MMT they will end up just printing a huge amount of money.  This mistakes the reality of how our economy works with a policy decision.  It's not that the government should adopt MMT, but rather MMT explains how a policy will impact the economy.  MMT is a description of how the economy currently works.  For example the FED currently has: " three key objectives for monetary policy in the Federal Reserve Act: maximizing employment, stabilizing prices, and moderating long-term interest rates. (Wiki)".  But after 1971 monetary policy has no effect on jobs, hence after all the Quantitative Easing (Wiki: QE) there has been no impact on jobs because the rules have changed.  In fact the only thing the Fed can do is control the overnight interest rate.  It does not have any tools that will do anything else.  There is talk of just folding it into the Dept. of the Treasury since what it does now is an automatic function.

If you don't know how something works and you try to fix or modify it the results may not be what you expect.  For example if you believe that when your car is going down the freeway it makes a lot of exhaust, so if you pipe the exhaust back into the engine the car will run better, it will not work the way you expect.  A good understanding of how things really work is necessary in order to make changes that will work the way you expect.  The economic ideas prior to 1971 were sort of OK for their time, but now no longer describe how the system really works.

Key Years
1776 - There were two revolutions, one summarized in the Declaration of Independence (Wiki) and the other in the book Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (Wiki), which is the basis of  capitalism.
1971 - Another major revolution happened, but very few people really understood the implications.  It wasn't until 1992 that Warren Mosler, the father of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) had an epiphany in relation to the bond market in Italy where he understood better than the Italian government that they could never default on their bond payments because they were at that time a sovereign government with a floating currency.  That meant that they could always pay their bills.
1998 - Forecast of 2008 Global Financial Crisis (Wiki): Goldilocks and the Three Bears - the 3 bears are: Asian debt deflation, belief that economy was strong 1996 - 1997, Clinton budget surplus
1999 - Forecast of 2008 Global Financial Crisis: Can Goldilocks Survive? - "Goldilocks is doomed"  forecast the Global Financial Crisis and cites the Clinton budget surplus as the cause
2001 - Forecast 2009 European Union debt crisis (Wiki):Rites of Passage financial problems would happen in the European Monetary Union (see EU below) in the exact way that they transpired.
           YouTube talk: Warren Mosler, The Euro: past, present and future. The Crossroads Workshop 1 in Zurich  
2003 - Iraq War:  taxes were not raised to pay for the war, the government just wrote checks to pay for it
2003 - Convergence Going In, Divergence Coming Out Default Risk Premiums and the Prospects for Stabilization in the Eurozone - "Until something is done to enable member states to avert these financial constraints (e.g. political union and the establishment of a federal (EU) budget or the establishment of a new lending institution, designed to aid member states in pursuing a broad set of policy objectives), the prospects for stabilization in the Eurozone appear grim."
2007 The Long and Short of It at Goldman Sachs (Ben Stein was very wrong) - Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sacs forecasts trouble with home mortgages based on Wynne Godley's Sectoral balances.  This is some years after the 1998 & 1999 papers making the same case.  I'm looking for the paper by Jan Hatzius.
2008 - Alan Greenspan when asked if taxpayer money was used to bail out the banks he said no, it was just keystrokes.

Key Idea
Governments operating under the MMT rules (see Scope above)  are the issuers of their currency.  They must spend money BEFORE then can collect it using taxes.  (see gold below for how it used to be) The current misconception that the federal government must tax in order to raise money so they can spend it on government programs was true prior to 1971, but that's no longer the case.  This is similar to a football stadium issuing tickets then collecting them, in both cases the issue comes before the collection.

Note that for a simple model of the economy where there is only the government sector and the private sector (i.e. assuming balanced imports and exports) any deficit in the government sector is balanced exactly to the penny with a private sector surplus.  This is an accounting identity, not a theory.  It's like looking at a transaction as if you are the government or the private sector.  So if the federal government balances the budget, or worse runs a surplus, the private sector is drained of money, that's not a good thing.  Since it's impossible for a government operating under the MMT scope to bounce a check there's no problem with a deficit.  In fact if the economy is healthy you would expect the federal deficit to grow.  That's to say the surplus in the private sector will grow.

Trade
After W.W.II the U.S. invested heavily in Germany and Japan rather than punishing them like Germany was punished after W.W.I.  Since W.W.II the US has imported many products from Germany and Japan, and more recently from China.  The countries whose products we import are getting paid in US dollars.  The reason we are importing these goods is because they appear to be a good deal to us and the sellers are happy to get US dollars in exchange.  There is some current worry about the amount of US bonds and Treasury bills held by China.  But China can not ask the US to cash in their bonds/bills in gold (see Scope above).  Their options are limited.  They can buy US products or exchange the US dollar denominated bonds/bills for some other currency at the existing exchange rate.  Note that a large currency exchange will have the effect of making the Chinese money stronger (which has been the desire of the US government for a long time) thus making Chinese imports more expensive and also making US exports to China, Germany and Japan more attractive to them.

Trade allows for world wide competition so a free market allows consumers to pay a lower price.  So economists say it's a good thing.  But, when US workers compete in a world wide market they loose their jobs.  So, while it's true that in an economic sense everyone is better off (in terms of being able to buy goods at lower prices) it comes at the expense of jobs that are permanently lost.

MMT offers a solution to the unemployment problem (see jobs below).  Classical economics offers no solution to unemployment.  That's to say classical economics has blood on it's hands in terms of human suffering.

I expect that in the future a larger percentage of the population will be permanently out of work.  The existing support structure for the unemployed is far from adequate and needs to be improved.

Tax Implications

Prior to 1971 the government did need to use federal taxes to fund their spending (see Gold below), but that's very different since 1971.

Since there is no need to collect taxes in order to spend, the policy of taxes can be seen in light of two ideas. 

First, if the federal government did not require anyone to pay them using US dollars then the currency probably would not have value.  So if somewhere the federal government requires a payment in US dollars then the US dollar has some value.  Because MMT is such a new idea no one has really determined what level of payments to the government are required, if any, to give the US dollar official value.  Prior to 1971 this was not an issue.

Second, taxes should be used for progressive purposes and to punish "evils" such as alcohol, tobacco or other things society wants to discourage.  So when the purpose of taxes is seen in this light, payroll taxes are a very bad idea.  They penalize employers, employees, drive jobs off shore and encourage replacing workers with automation.   So a very progressive income tax would stop the extreme compensation packages that C-suite executives now get.  Prior to 1980 the marginal rate was 80% now it's more like 15%.  In my opinion is should be 50.0%.  I choose half because if the rate goes over half then the taxpayer is encouraged to waste money on buying tax losses.  That's to say people do stupid things when they are dealing with losses rather than gains.

A really simple solution would be to eliminate all payroll taxes and provide all citizens Social Security (medical then retirement) benefits and eliminate all the current payroll taxes and record keeping and replace that with an annual W2 statement of taxable income that would determine the retirement benefit amount.  Note "medicare for all" greatly simplifies the current record keeping both for the government and for the vendor (doctor, hospital, employer...).  I expect this simple idea would save billions if not trillions of dollars in record keeping costs alone.  Currently every medical facility in the country has a staff of people whose only job is to match up the different insurance payment rules with the procedure the doctor recorded.  In a similar way employers have record keeping expenses that really are not needed if this simple idea was adopted.



National Debt
The interest on the national debt is seen as a problem, but again a government operating under the MMT Scope there's no need to raise money by borrowing (or taxing) in order to be able to spend it.  So no borrowing is needed "to fund the debt" the government just makes the payments it desires.

Fallacy of the Money Multiplier
When a bank makes a loan thus creating money (see Money based on debt below), contrary to the current idea that they are somehow restricted by the reserve requirement, in fact the bank borrows whatever reserve it needs during the next week's bank clearing cycle.  The problem of the bank lending only the principal amount (they do not lend the money needed to pay the interest) is solved because the other source of money is US government spending.  The idea of a money multiplier (Wiki) is not valid because the reserve ratio (percent of loans covered by reserves) is a false concept if the bank does not restrict loans based on reserves.  That's to say changing the reserve requirement does not change the multiplier.

Introduction

April 2016 -  read The Seven Frauds book (Ref) and have a bunch of MMT books on order.
Here's an introduction to the idea:
YouTube: L. Randall Wray -- MODERN MONEY: the way a sovereign currency "works" & there are a number of others by The Modern Money Network (YouTube).
Here are the pop quiz questions asked in the beginning of the video:
1. Just like a household, the government has to finance its spending out of its income or through borrowing. [ ]True  [ ]False
2. The role of taxes is to provide finance for government spending. [ ]True  [ ]False
3. The National Government borrows money from the private sector to finance the budget deficit. [ ]True  [ ]False
4. By running budget surpluses the government takes pressure off interest rates because more funds are then available for private sector investment projects. [ ]True  [ ]False
5. Persistent budget deficits will burden future generations with inflation and higher taxes.  [ ]True  [ ]False
6. Running budget surpluses now will help build up the funds necessary to cope with the aging population in the future. [ ]True  [ ]False
See answers below.

When the US left the gold standard (see Gold below) a profound change occurred.  Maybe because of the way Nixon made the change most people did not recognize the HUGE  implications.  It may be more accurate to say that after 1971 how the economy really works was made clear.  It's not that the economy worked in a new and different way after 1971, but instead it was easier to see how it had always worked.

Keynes recommends deficit government spending (Wiki: Fiscal Policy) when there's a recession as does MMT.  But a faster way would be to reduce taxes, for example have the U.S. Treasury (Wiki) pay both employer and employee FICA (Wiki) taxes.  The idea is that if the FICA taxes were eliminated the determination of Social Security benefits would be difficult, but with the Treasury paying the records would be as they are now.  Note that there's no problem funding Social Security (Wiki) since the U.S. is a sovereign country and our money is not constrained to gold or the euro.  Note that employment taxes hurt the economy, not what you what any tax to do, by penalizing employers, employees and drives jobs off shore and encourage automation.

But the idea that lowering interest rates (Wiki: Monetary Policy, Quantitative easing) will stimulate the economy is wrong "you can not push a string" (Wiki).  If a business has no customers they don't care what the interest rate is.  Getting out of a depression or recession requires fiscal policy adjustments.

A sovereign government (U.S., Japan, Turkey, &Etc. but not EU) puts money into circulation by spending.  Banks can also generate money but that's a small fraction of the total money.  The money has value because it's what's needed to pay taxes and other government fees.

The purpose of taxation is not to raise money but rather to control the economy.  The government funds whatever it wants to do directly.  For example to pay for a war the government just writes checks to it's suppliers.  There was not a tax increase to pay for the recent wars.  The old idea that taxes are needed to pay for government programs is just flat out wrong.

The government buys some goods and services and what's left the private sector can buy.  In a hot economy, where the government competes with the private sector for goods and services inflation results.

The standard of living for U.S. citizens depends on the sum total of goods and services provided in the U.S. plus what is imported less what is exported.  Imports improve the standard of living for those getting them.  When China (or anyone) exports to the U.S. they are paid in U.S. denominated currency (dollars).  They can use those dollars to by treasury bonds which is many believe is funding the U.S. deficit, but that's not the case.  Suppose they get mad at us what can they do: buy stuff in the U.S., get U.S. paper money to take back to China, exchange U.S. dollars into some other currency.  If the later that would cause the exchange rate between China and the U.S. to change making the dollar weaker and Chinese goods more expensive.  But the U.S. has been trying to get China to increase the value of their money for many years and if they changed their dollars to something else it would have that effect, i.e. making Chinese imports more expensive and U.S. products less expensive.

EU

MMT predicted the problem with the EU in 2001, see Key Years above.
When the EU (Wiki) was setup the European Central Bank (Wiki) was setup to maintain price stability.  But in times of recession the central bank needs to pump money into the economy, but the ECB does not have this power (limited to 3% of GDP) and the member countries in the EU do not have that power.  The problems will continue until there's a way to deficit spend money into circulation.  The IMF (Wiki) was founded at the Bretton Woods conference and was intended to work along side a gold standard, the Marshall Plan and other economics of the 1945 time frame, not the post 1971 non gold standard times.  It appears that the IMF is causing much more harm than good and needs to be shut down or totally revamped to take into account MMT.

Note the ECB only has monetary policy tools (Wiki), it does not have fiscal policy tools.  MMT (or Keynes) tells us that fiscal policy is needed it time of a debt crisis (Wiki) but the EMU has no fiscal policy tools.

The Stability Growth Pacts (Wiki) limit the debt of an EU member government so they can not use fiscal policy to recover from a recession.  The 2005 reform still kept the ceilings of 3% for budget deficit and 60% for public debt were maintained.

MMT References (and those who seem to be in line, but not promoting MMT)

Warren Mosler (Wiki, Mosler Economics, YouTube: Modern Money Network, Amazon, Facebook)

Soft Currency Economics II: The Origin of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT - Modern Monetary Theory) (Volume 1) 2013 by Warren Mosler - on order

The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy 2010 by Warren Mosler (free pdf version, Video) He's the father of MMT.

Is the Ryan Budget the Next Bachmann Budget? 2012 by Warren Mosler -

The Certainty of Debt and Taxes - The Fiscal Cliff Burden of Proof 2012 by Warren Mosler -

Demand Leakages: The 800lb Economist in the Room 2012 by Warren Mosler -

YouTube: Warren Mosler, Issuers vs Users of a Currency 2012 by Warren Mosler (5:28) - with inserted video clips of Bernanke and Greenspan (Recommended short video)

Italy Then and Now.pdf 2012 by Warren Mosler - how joining the EMU caused a lot of problems for them. "The euro zone is in 'Ponzi' until the ECB writes the check"

Rites of Passage 2001 by Warren Mosler predicting the problems now facing the Euro - "The market’s arrows will inflict an initially narrow liquidity crisis, which will immediately infect and rapidly arrest the entire euro payments system."

Modern Monetary Theory.pdf - a Primer on the Operational Realities of the Monetary System by Scott Fullwiler (posted on Warren's web page) -

L. Randall Wray (Wiki, Amazon, UofKS, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Vimeo)

Understanding Modern Money:The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability 2006 by L. Randall Wray (free KindleUnlimited version)

MMT, The Euro and The Greatest Prediction of the Last 20 Years (free html) based on a 1992 article by L. Randall Wray - predictions of MMT

Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems 2^nd Ed - 2012, 2015, L. Randall Wray, Palgrave MacMillian, ISBN 978-1-137-53990-8  (see on line as MMT Primer, including responses to readers comments)

pg 131; "A government that operates with a nonsovereign currency, using a foreign currency or a domestic currency convertible to foreign currency (or to precious metal at a fixed exchange rate) faces solvency risk.  However, a government that spends using its own floating and nonconvertible currency cannot be forced into default. ...  This is why a country like Japan can run government debt-to-GDP ratios that are more than twice as high as the "high debt" Euro nations (the "PIIGS": Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) while still enjoying extremely low interest rates on sovereign debt."

pg 141: "Ideally, it is best if tax revenue moves counter cyclically - increasing in expansion and falling in recession.  That helps to make government's net contribution to the economy counter-cyclical, which helps to stabilize demand."

Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist – November 3, 2015, by L. Randall Wray - looks good on the free Amazon preview - goes into why classical economists did not see the GFC coming, but Minsky did. Cites The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (Commission) listing the causes (see Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 bad laws above).

"...Minsky argued that the internal dynamics of our modern economy are not equilibrium-seeking.  There's no invisible hand operating that way.  Furthermore, if we ever did achieve the mainstream's beloved "equilibrium," those internal dynamics would push us away - the system is not stable."

"...- offered an alternative to the Kennedy-Johnson orthodox Keynesian-based War on Poverty.  From the beginning, Minsky argued that this "war" would fail because it did not contain a job creation component.  For Minsky, the solution to most poverty is to eliminate involuntary unemployment. . . . Minsky believed that maintenance of full employment and reduction of poverty and inequality were essential to promoting financial and economic stability."

"The stagflation of the late 1970s ended the great debate between "Keynesians" and "monetarists" in favor of Milton Friedman's rules.  This is because the Keynesians had no answer to a problem of high inflation and high unemployment at the same time - policy should stimulate demand to fight unemployment but should slow demand to fight inflation.  They had no answer to stagflation (Wiki).  Policy adapted the monetarist recommendation of focusing on controlling money growth by sticking to a rule.

Yet, monetarism itself suffered a defeat in the early 1980s when the Fed under Charmian Volcker tried to hit money growth targets (in line with Friedman's prescription) but repeatedly failed to hit them.  So not only did "Keynesian" theory and policy fall out of favor, but monetarism also lost sway.

This then set the stage for the rise of a succession of increasingly radical theories rooted in the pre-Keynesian thought - most notably the rational expectations-new classical economics of Robert Lucas (Wiki) and the real business cycle theory of Charles Plosser (Wiki) and others."

Labor and the War Against Poverty by Hyman Minsky April 19-20, 1965 (before the Nixon Shock) - The Johnson-Kennedy plan will fail because there's no provision for job creation.  In the section titled "Cross of Gold" (pg 11) he points out the problem of the interest rate being set to maintain the fixed exchange rate translates into unemployment.

"There is nothing wrong with a 6 per cent interest rate, at a 1-1/2 per cent unemployment rate.  There is something wrong with high interest rates at a 5 per cent unemployment rate.  We want an economy with so much steam in it that you have to hold it back by tight money, but you don't want to hold back an economy with a lot of slack in it.  That is what we've been doing."

"The elimination of the barrier to expanding aggregate demand due to the international monetary system is simple: get rid of the gold standard."

Securitization by Hyman P. Minsky 1987 with Preface & afterword by L. Randall Wray -

Vimeo - 2016 - The Radical Imagination: Imagining Economics in an Age of Stein, Clinton, Trump or Johnson -
              2015 Lyons Lecture: What is Wrong With the Euro? - MMT has long argued that the EMU was designed to fail.  This is not a Greek problem.  It is not an Irish problem.  It is not an Italian problem.  It is a Euro problem - and the inevitable crisis could have been foreseen (indeed was foreseen) even before the launch of the new currency.  
Barter story (no evidence)- Goldsmith-Bank story (no evidence).  Alternate idea historical artifacts that appear to be stones, bones,  with scratches, then tokens that can be pressed into clay tablets (invention of writing) used for monetary contracts. Money came before writing.  Money invented to keep accounts not for exchange.  Crown spending and tax collection used up to 1830, it was not gold coins.  Because of the existence of writing for the past 4,000 years we know that the barter story is not true.  "Can not have a European Fiscal Union, only a Monetary Union because of mistrust, but both are needed, like in the U.S." (about 1:10:00)

YouTube: L. Randall Wray - Modern Money Theory: Intellectual Origins and Policy Implications - summary below:

Theoretical basis of MMT:
Georg Friedrich Knapp (Wiki) - The State Theory of Money 1905 - money must have no intrinsic value and strictly be used as governmentally-issued token, i.e., fiat money.
Abba P. Lerner (Wiki) - Functional Finance 1943 (Wiki) - government should finance itself to meet explicit goals, such as taming the business cycle, achieving full employment, ensuring growth, and low inflation.
Beardsley Ruml (Wiki) - Taxes for revenue are obsolete (free pdf)  1946 - We learned from W.W. II that taxes do not fund spending.
Hyman Minsky (Wiki) - Financial Instability Hypothesis (Wiki) - "Stability is destabilizing". 3 types of borrowers: hedge borrowers, speculative borrowers & Ponzi borrowers.  People are momentum investors by nature, not value investors.
Alan Greenspan (Wiki) - the Greenspan put (Wiki):supposedly eliminated risk in the financial markets, but, according to Minsky, that increased risk.  "Matt Taibbi described the Greenspan put and its bad consequences saying: "every time the banks blew up a speculative bubble, they could go back to the Fed and borrow money at zero or one or two percent, and then start the game all over", thereby making it "almost impossible" for the banks to lose money. He also called Greenspan a "classic con man" who, through political savvy, "flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and...jacked himself off to the attention of Wall Street for 20 consecutive years".
Ben Bernanke (Wiki) - The Great Moderation (Wiki) aided by the Taylor Principle (Wiki) - The pronouncement of a new stability caused instability.
Employer of last resort (Wiki) - the government offers jobs to anyone who wants one

On Taxes (goal is to drive the money, change behavior and be progressive):
Duping Dopes will not work - BitCoin will not succeed since that's their model
Taxing work is bad idea (Wiki: Payroll Tax, FICA) - regressive, discourages work, discourages employing people, favors moving jobs outside America, favors replacing people with robots
Taxing corporations is a bad tax: drives them out of America, encourages cutting deals
The Income tax: he's neutral
Likes taxing bads: alcohol, tobacco, pollution, financial transactions,
A Hut tax based on cubic feet of your house (eco friendly).
Inheritance tax to stop family fortunes he likes.

Movie: Boom Bust Boom (IMDB, Netflix, Trailer) - Randall Wray is one of the people interviewed & and some attention to Hyman Minsky (Wiki).

Levy Institute

The War On Poverty after 40 years, A Minskyuan Assessment, No. 78, 2004 (pdf) - "the real flaw in the WOP was that it lacked job-creation initiatives of the type developed by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression."..."Instead of providing th impoverished with an opportunity to work, it provided them with the opportunity to learn how to work."...“policy weapons which are sufficient to move aneconomy from slack to full employment are not sufficient to sustain full employment” ...
"Minsky’s fundamental argument is simple:
(1) poverty is largely an employment problem;
(2) tight full employment improves income at the bottom of the wage spectrum; and
(3) a program of direct job creation is necessary to sustain tight full employment. Thus, he argued that a program of direct job creation was “a necessary ingredient of any war against poverty” (Minsky 1965, p. 175).
As Minsky put it: “The New Deal, with its WPA, NYA, and CCC, took workers as they were and generated jobs for them....The resurrection ofWPA and allied projects should be a major weapon of the War on Poverty” (1965, p. 195).


Improving Governance of the Government Safety Net in Financial Crisis, 2012(pdf)  -

Chapter 2. Summary of the Causes of the Global Financial Crisis: A Minskyan View - ZZZZZ

Frank Newman (Wiki, Amazon, )

Six Myths that Hold Back America: And What America Can Learn from the Growth of China's Economy 2011 by Frank Newman - on order

Freedom from National Debt – May 2, 2013 by Frank Newman - on order

 Vimeo (2012, Suny Global Center): “Six Myths That Hold Back America- and What America Can Learn From the Growth of China’s Economy” - (1:20:26) Frank Newman (Title is book title)
The six myths:
1. Asian nations are bankrolling the U.S.
2. Treasuries "crowd out" financing for the private sector.
3. If everyone tries to save more, the nation will save more, and Investment, GDP, and employment will increase.
4. If the deficit is reduced, then national Saving and Investment will increase.
5. Deficits create great burdens of repayment and taxes for our children.
6. If the U.S. does not get its fiscal deficit reduced soon, U.S. Treasuries will face the same problems as bonds of Greece and Ireland.

Mathew Forstater (Wiki, UMKC Pubs)

Little Book of Big Ideas: Economics 2007 by Mathew Forstater - 2 pages for each about 5 dozen economists
Functional Finance and Full Employment: Lessons from Lerner for Today.pdf , 1999 (while not a prediction of the GFC it talks about problems with the classical view)

Wynne Godley  (Wiki, Amazon, ) - WIki: Sectoral balances - Federal Reserve Economic Database (Wiki: FRED: MBST, ) -

Predicted the Global Financial Crisis

The Observer Aug 31, 1997: Curried Emu - the meal that fails to nourish by Wynne Goodley -

London Review: Maastricht and All That Oct 1992 by Wynne Godley - "The central idea of the Maastricht Treaty (1991 Wiki) is that the EC countries should move towards an economic and monetary union, with a single currency managed by an independent central bank. But how is the rest of economic policy to be run?"

 Sectoral balances (Wiki) simplified version:  [Public/Government] + [Private] + [Foreign] = 0
This means when the US government runs a deficit then there is a surplus in the private and foreign sectors.
"According to the sectoral balances approach, austerity can be counterproductive in a downturn due to a significant private-sector financial surplus, in which consumer savings is not fully invested by businesses."

Michael Hudson (Wiki, Amazon, YouTube,

Predicted the Global Financial Crisis

  Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire by Michael Hudson 1972 - may be the first book to describe American Dollar Hegemony (Wiki: Dollar hegemony)

Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy by Michael Hudson (Wiki: )2015 - looks very interesting

The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis

 Episode #91.2 // Michael Hudson on Killing the Host - 1 hour audio interview based on the book
Government Debt and Deficits Are Not the Problem. Private Debt Is. - 2013 paper
The Economic Crisis & Crisis Theory II 2014 - includes a video Alan Freeman Consumption, Profit and Finance: why can't the left get it right? (0:00 to 21:45), Andrew Kliman Were Corporations--or Corporate Executives--Really Hogging a Bigger Share of the Income Workers Produce? No. (23:00 to 45:35), Michael Hudson The New Austerity: Feeding the FIRE sector overhead (46:45 to 1:50:00), Q&A (1:50:30 to end)
Banks through out history, even when Marx was writing, only lent money to already existing products, not to industry or business.
Michael Hudson, Financial Parasites, Left Forum 2014 Excerpts- Parasite different than Vampire Squid - an excellent 30 minute explanation of his idea
Michael Hudson: Money & Debt 2012 - historical overview and how canceling debts makes sense.
MMT vs. Austrian School Debate 2013 - Warren Mosler (Wiki, Amazon, home page) for MMT (Wiki) - The Austrian ideas work with fixed exchange rates, but not when rates float, so after 1971 no longer works.  In today's floating rate world MMT describes how things work.

Bill Mitchell (Wiki, Amazon, YouTube, Web Page, Newcastle, blog)

Excellent Intro to MMT: YouTube - Bill Mitchell: Demystifying Modern Monetary Theory - Bill coined the name MMT.  Weimar Republic (Wiki) and Zimbabwe (Wiki) inflation explained, employer of last resort background

YouTube: Reframing the Debate: Economics for a Progressive Politics Q&A, London - Merge central bank with treasury, (0:17:59) do away with debt management agencies "Public debt is just corporate welfare".

There's a problem with merging the central bank into Treasury in that the treasury is controlled by politicians and without a well functioning government (which we don't have in the US) there will be runaway spending.

YouTube - Professor Bill Mitchell - The Government Chooses the Unemployment Rate -
YouTube - Professor Bill Mitchell - The need for full employment -
YouTube - Professor William Mitchell - Fiscal Myths -
Billy Blog: Modern monetary theory and inflation – Part 1 -
Billy Blog: The dreaded NAIRU is still about! - Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (Wiki) is a false idea.
Billy Blog: The Great Moderation myth - (Wiki) - Bernanke should quit or be sacked -

Scott Fullwiler (Wiki, Wartburg College, YouTube, Amazon)

New Economic Perspectives - papers - Modern Money Theory: A Response to Critics - 

Stephanie Kelton (her home page, New Economic Perspectives, Wiki, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, YouTube)

Forbes: Watch Out, MMT's About, As Bernie Sanders Hires Stephanie Kelton - Jan 2015: Bernie Sanders has appointed Stephanie as chief economic adviser for the Senate Budget committee's Democratic minority (Wiki).

YouTube: Stephanie Kelton -The Angry Birds Approach to Understanding Deficits in the Modern Economy - 2014 - video clips saying the national debt is a problem (including Cenk and Bernie).
"Capitalism Runs on Sales - Spending creates Income - income creates sales - sales create jobs"
Republicans say, We have a spending problem!"; Democrats say, "We have a revenue problem!" - both lead to fewer jobs
Calming Fact: "As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government cannever become insolvent, i.e. unable to pay its bills.  In this sense, the government is not dependent of credit markets to remain operational.  Moreover, there will always be a market for U.S. government debt at home because the U.S. government has the only means of creating risk-free dollar-denominated assets." St. Louis Federal Reserve.
"[A] government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.  A fiat money system, like the ones we have today, can produce such claims without limit". Alan Greenspan 1997 congressional testimony

(50:33) "Every single time that the federal government's deficit gets too small, which here gets to be below it's average of 3.1%, we've had a recession.  Every single time."

YouTube:
 Stephanie Kelton -The Economic Movement of Bernie Sanders - she was Bernie's economic advisor for his campaign
 But Can We Afford It? Economic Priorities for the Next Administration, Jan 11, 2017 - Trump elected, but not yet inaugurated.
National Deficits, Debts and Dodo Politics by Dr Stephanie Kelton MMT, May 3, 2017 - similar to the above

Bernie Sanders & reform of the Federal Reserve
October 20, 2011: Top Economists to Advise Sanders on Fed Reform - Joseph Stiglitz (Wiki, Amazon), Jeffrey Sachs (Wiki, Amazon), Robert Reich (Wiki, Amazon, TPP), James K. Galbraith (Wiki, Amazon), Lawrence Mishel (Wiki, Amazon),  William K. Black (Wiki, Amazon), Nomi Prins (Wiki, Amazon), William Greider (Wiki, Amazon), Jane D'Arista (Wiki, Amazon), Tim Canova (Wiki, Amazon), Robert Johnson (Wiki, Amazon), Dean Baker (Wiki, Amazon, TPP@13:25), Gerald Epstein (Wiki, Amazon), Robert D. Auerbach (Wiki, Amazon), Roger Hickey (Wiki, Amazon), Robert L. Borosage (Wiki, Amazon), Robert Pollin (Wiki, Amazon), L. Randall Wray (see above), Stephanie Kelton (see above).

YouTube: Minsky, Inequality, and the Monetary:Fiscal Policy Outlook, S4, April 2016 (Slides as pdf, Scott's slides.pdf) - about her time in Washington DC, CBO,
YouTube: Steve Keen: Private Debt - Keen's solution People's  
Steve Keen (Kingston University, Wiki, YouTube, Steve Keen's Debtwatch)

Predicted the Global Financial Crisis

 
Has a few areas that interest me.
1. new thinking about how the economy works, for example including energy in addition to labor and capital: "a worker without energy is a corpse, a machine without power is a sculpture".  Also the importance of private sector debt in relation to growth and GDP.

2. In college Louis O. Kelso was promoting Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality where the example I remember was two house moving companies.  One based on the use of a horse and buggy, the other on the use of a modern moving van.  At the end of a year's operation the two questions are: Who worked harder (ans. the horse and buggy company), and Who made more money (ans. the moving van company).
Kelso attributed the higher income of the moving van company to the higher amount of capital used to acquire the moving van.  But . . . Keen probably would say another difference was the difference in energy.  i.e. One horsepower (literally) vs. maybe 500 horsepower.  Thinking about this example a year or two ago I saw the idea that energy impacts not only a business, but also our day to day life, since there are many motors in pretty much every house.  746 Watts of electricity is equivalent to one horsepower.  A trained cyclist can produce about 400 Watts.  So each 400 Watts of electricity consumed for an hour is about the same as having a servant working for that hour.

3. modeling using the "Minsky" software.  But this appears to me like a first grader working with SPICE (Wiki, example)modeling that's very basic and he makes no validation to real world data.
   Note that when tube based electronics were at their peak there were no computers or SPICE modeling and so plots and equations were used to analyze tube circuits.  Early on the grid was treated as independent from the other electrodes, then Miller (Wiki) saw that there was capacitance between the grid and plate which explained tube operation much better than the old way.  The feeling I get watching the "Minsky" related videos is that they are far from discovering the economic equivalent to the Miller effect and so the models today do not have much value, maybe in a few decades they will.

Debtwatch Paradoy: CERN Discovers New Particle Called The FERIR -

"Now that economists have explained the persistence of the ZLB, they can now turn their attention to understanding its perverse effects. The real problem of the ZLB for economists has been that it inverts the status and behaviour of all other sub-economic particles. In particular:

• Growth, which was high, is now low;
• Inflation, which was bad & everywhere, is now good & nowhere;
• CBs (“Central Banks”) which prevent inflation, now try to cause it; and
• HMDs (“Helicopter Money Drops”) which were mad, are now sane

These inversions are causing real problems for economists, who find themselves arguing for policies they used to oppose. Professor Summers hopes that knowledge of the existence of the FERIR will make it easier for economists to argue that night is day and rainbows are grey, as they provide policy advice in these troubled times."

Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences by Steve Keen, 2001 - Talks about the problem with the EMU before it happened.  Dec 2016, reading.  Highly recommended.
This book shows that microeconomics (Wiki) is based on a number of false beliefs.  The first few chapters are devoted to supply and demand curves and the numerous false underlying assumptions.
For example that a factory making a commodity will first improve it's profitability after hiring more workers will increase, but at some point hiring more workers will decrease profitability.
The book does not mention that there are very few commodity being manufactured anymore.  I've heard a rumor that there is a local hardware store that sells nails from a bin.  The hardware stores near me all sell nails packaged in boxes with brand labels.  Propane is a commodity, but is delivered in trucks from different suppliers and there is a huge difference in the price depending on the supplier so, at least here, propane is not a commodity.
This book debunks microeconomics. 

The book: Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us, May 6, 2012, by John Quiggin debunks some key ideas of macroeconomics. Highly recommended.

Abba P. Lerner  (Wiki)

Father of Functional Finance (Wiki).
See the paper Functional Finance and Full Employment: Lessons from Lerner for Today, 1999 (above)

The following copied from Wiki:
The principal ideas behind functional finance can be summarized as:^[1]

• Governments have to intervene in the national and global economy; they are not self-regulating.
• The principal economic objective of the state should be to ensure a prosperous economy.
• Money is a creature of the state; it has to be managed.
• Fiscal policy should be directed in light of its impact on the economy, and the budget should be managed accordingly, that is, 'balancing revenue and spending' is not important; prosperity is important.
• The amount and pace of government spending should be set in light of the desired level of activity, and taxes should be levied for their economic impact, rather than to raise revenue.
• Principles of 'sound finance' apply to individuals. They make sense for individuals, households, businesses, and non-sovereign governments (such as cities and individual US states) but do not apply to the governments of sovereign states, capable of issuing money.

Paul Romer (Wiki,  paulromer.net, NYU Stern, World Bank, Aplia)

Known for Basic Income (Wiki) and Endogenous growth theory (Wiki) 

The Trouble With Macroeconomics 14 Sep 2016 - the source for some of Steve Keen's papers.
Trouble with Macroeconomics, Update, 21 Sep 2016 -
YouTube: Short-Run Shocks; Long-Run Pessimism Sep 19, 2016 related to the paper - the book mentioned is "Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich (Wiki)

Mark Blyth (Wiki, Amazon, Brown University, Personal web page, YouTube: Watson Institute & Mark, 

Mark Blyth: The AthensLive Interview (Jun 26, 2016) -
YouTube: Blyth Devastates Congress' Approach to Budget; Mark Blyth ─ Global Trumpism (Sept 29 2016) -
Points out that "Greed" has been a constant over time and so can not be used to explain the GFC.

John Quiggin (Wiki, Univ of Queensland, Home page, YouTube (8 years old), 

Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, 2010 - Points out logical fallacies and examples where the idea is shown to fail in a big way, yet it is still believed.  Debunks key macroeconomic ideas.
Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences by Steve Keen, 2001 - Debunks the core ideas in microeconomics.

A chapter is devoted to each of these:

• the Great Moderation (Wiki) - Wiki has a paragraph "Possible_end" indicating the zombie nature of the idea
  
• Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH)(Wiki) - Wiki has a paragraphs titled: Criticism and behavioral finance, Economic bubbles and irrational exuberance, Behavioral psychology, View of some economists (mentioned Quiggin, citing Bitcoin as a pure bubble), Late 2000s financial crisis where they all are critical of the idea, but the top paragraph presents the idea as valid.
  

  "Since Bitcoins do not generate any actual earnings, they must appreciate in value to ensure that people are willing to hold them. But an endless appreciation, with no flow of earnings or liquidation value, is precisely the kind of bubble the EMH says can’t happen."

• Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (Wiki) - Wiki has a paragraph titled: Controversy - but it's framed as a debate so still a zombie.
  
• Trickle-down economics (Wiki) - If you read the Criticisms paragraph there is no question that this is a dead idea, yet the introductory paragraph calls it a political term and links to Trickle-down effect (Wiki) talking about fashion
  In 1890 the term was "horse and sparrow theory" - 'If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.'. 
  
• Privatization (Wiki) - A sub-paragraph of "Opinion" is Opposition, but the overall view of Wiki is that the idea is still debatable, so a zombie.  Quiggin says there are a few cases where it makes sense, for example GM was privatized after being taken over, but the notable failures are: RailTrack in the UK, London Underground, Natioinal Broadband Network in Australia,  Edison Schools in the US, Crown Health Enterprises in New Zealand, police, prisons & mercenary military forces (Wiki). The 2017 US Dept of Education head supports privatization of the public schools.

YouTube: Boom Bust: [87] John Quiggin on zombie economics & Steve Keen talks reality of endogenous money Mar 25, 2014 -

Money for nothing? - Oct 18, 2011 - Why MMT can not provide unlimited money + many comments

Dean Baker (Wiki, DeanBaker.net, Center for Economic and Policy Research,

Predicted the Global Financial Crisis The Nation:  Bush’s House of Cards - As bad as Bush's economic record is, it would appear far worse if not for the housing bubble, Aug 9, 2004

Getting-Back-Full-Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People, 2013 - debunks NAIRU,
False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, 2010 - they are: Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke,
Social Security: The Phony Crisis, 1999 - Ironically, the only real threat to Social Security comes not from any fiscal or demographic constraints but from the political assaults on the program by would-be "reformers".
The United States Since 1980, 2007
Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy, 2009, 2010 (Written Oct 2008)- Ch 2 The Clinton Era and the Origins of the Stock Bubble, Ch4 The Beginning of the Housing Bubble (In the late 1990s.."But in most areas around the country at that time, there was a close relationship between the cost of renting and owning comparable units",

CEPR - Getting Rid of the Budget Deficit the Clinton/Gingrich Way - "...we did not actually move from large deficits to surpluses by tax increases and/or spending cuts, we did it through a strong economy a..."

Robert Shiller (Wiki, Yale

Predicted the Global Financial Crisis

Nouriel Roubini (Wiki, Stern School of Business NYU,

Predicted the Global Financial Crisis Econo Monitor: The Rising Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: The Twelve Steps to Financial Disaster,  February 5th, 2008 Econo Monitor: Bob Shiller is Sharply Shrill…and the Risks of a Housing-Led Systemic Financial Crisis, Aug 30, 2006

Ann Pettifor (Wiki,

Predicted the Global Financial Crisis Book: The Coming First World Debt Crisis, 2006 (Amazon) on order Started reading:  She mentions the UK  "Competition and Credit Control" in Sept 1971 as a turning point rather than "Nixon Shock".  I wonder if they are related? She agrees with Michael Hudson that bankers need to be removed from their current parasitic position and go back to serving the productive economy.  That's to say that making money using money is not productive. As of 2017 it appears that we are still in a bubble economy where prices are inflated by the very low interest rates.  But raising rates will burst the bubble. See Effect of Interest Rates on Home Values

YouTube: Ann Pettifor - How Society Can Break The Despotic Power of Finance - Warwick Economics Summit 2014 - If an airplane crashes because of how it's designed it would be an outrage to blame the crash on human error, but in the case of the recent financial crisis, economists blamed it on human error (greed) rather than on their policies.  Hyack, Friedman & Eugene Fama (2013 Nobel prize winner) are to blame.  Savings are not needed to fund investment.  There is no such thing as Fractional Reserve Banking since 1694.  Commercial banks do NOT lend the deposits of savers, they do not need deposits in order to lend. BitCoin is based on mistrust Ponzi).

YouTube: Austerity: Ann Pettifor - Debunking the myths - "Sovereign governments can not go bankrupt",

YouTube: TEDxUtrechtUniversity - Ann Pettifor - Decarbonising the economy: How we can finance it. - How banking really works, credit is not subject to the laws of supply and demand, Limits on money creation:
too much credit->Inflation, not enough credit->unemployment & deflation,  credit at interest rates too high to pay back-> defaults, ecological cost to to much credit
She says the Fed deregulated credit in 1971 causing inflation.  Household consumption rises dramatically starting in 1971 because of credit cards.
Need turn banks from being masters of the economy to servants of the economy.
Although she uses the year 1971 in many places, "Nixon Shock" is not mentioned, but rather the UK the adoption of "Competition and Credit Control" in Sept 1971 (Wiki) which used reserve asset ratios (a false concept according to MMT) instead of lending ceilings. 


Raghuram Rajan (Wiki, YouTube,

Predicted the Global Financial Crisis NBER: Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?, 2005, (pdf)

He is NOT a proponent of MMT, but favors austerity.  That's to say he does not see the need for sovereign governments to directly create jobs.  In my opinion, his proposal to train displaced workers will only allow the more trained worked to displace a less trained worker, i.e. it will not create a new job.  It's also not clear if he made the prediction or if it was someone on his staff.

Thomas Frank (Wiki, home page, )
YouTube: Thomas Frank: What's the Matter with the Democrats? Mar 30, 2016 - Promoting book: Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
YouTube: How The Democratic Party BETRAYED Workers & Its Base - THOMAS FRANK Interview by Jimmy Dore Part 1 (of 4)
YouTube Thomas Frank "What's the Matter With Kansas? - promoting that book
Thomas does not understand the importance of the Clinton surplus in MMT terms, but does get the damage done by Clinton. (See Clinton in bad laws above)

Predicted the Global Financial Crisis

None of these people mention MMT, but some of them are using ideas that are a fundamental part of MMT and are not part of historical schools of economics.

From:  http://www.investorhome.com/predicted.htm No one saw this coming. Understanding financial crisis through accounting models - "his paper presents evidence that accounting (or flow-of-fund) macroeconomic models helped anticipate the credit crisis and economic recession. Equilibrium models ubiquitous in mainstream policy and research did not." see: Zombie Economics The Bezemer 12 are Dean Baker Wynne Godley Fred Harrison (UK) (Wiki) -  believes in not taxing jobs and corporations (MMT idea based on Minsly) Michael Hudson Eric Janszen (Wiki) - (2006). America's Bubble Economy: Profit When It Pops Steve Keen (Australia) Jakob Madsen (Wiki, )& Jens Kjaer Sørensen (Denmark) - When doomsday economist was right -  "The macroeconomic reality is generally difficult to be explained within the dominant neoclassical equilibrium model." see: Zombie Economics  Kurt Richebächer (Wiki) - Nouriel Roubini (Wiki) - does not understand MMT and so have made what I (BC) feel are predictions that will fail Peter Schiff (Wiki) - he does not understand MMT and has policies that are counter to MMT Robert Shiller (Wiki) - preface to 3 editions of his book Irrational Exuberance offer predictions of bubble - not so much MMT Bezemer applied four selection criteria. Some account on how they arrived at their conclusions. Including an analytical account linking a real estate crisis to real-sector recessionary implications (eliminating John Talbott). Prediction in the public domain, and The prediction had to have some timing attached to it (eliminating Raghuram Rajan and Claudio Borio)

Other MMT References

American Affairs Jan 1946 V VIII, No. 1 - Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete (pdf), Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - The experience of W.W.II showed that the U.S. could pay for the war without raising the needed revenue from taxes.

"Taxation is one of the limitations placed by government on the power of business to do what it pleases.  There is nothing reprehensible about this procedure.  The business that is taxes is not a creature of flesh and blood , it is not a citizen."
"The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government.  Two changes of the greatest consequence have occurred in the last twenty -five years (since 1921) which have substantially altered the position of the national state with respect to the financing of its current requirements.  The first of these changes is the gaining of vast new experience n the management of central banks.  The second change is the elimination, for domestic purposes, of the convertibility of the currency into gold."
Purposes of taxation:
1. instrument of fiscal policy, i.e. price stability (goal: stable purchasing power)
2. public policy, i.e. progressive income and estate taxes (goal: wealth & income equality)
3. public policy, i.e. subsidizing or penalizing industries or economic groups
4. isolate and asses directly the costs of certain national benefits, such as highways ande social security
Taxing corporations is a Bad Tax.

Journal of Finance Aug 1946: Tax policies for Prosperity (pdf) by Beardsley Ruml - behind a pay wall

"Briefly the idea behind out tax policy should be this:  that our taxes should be high enough to protect the stability of our currency, and no higher...Now it follows from this principle that our tax rates can and should be lowered to the point where the federal budget will be balanced at what we would consider a satisfactory level of high employment."

Since countries differ in their export/import balance the above gets modified by MMT to be:
(from the MMT primer by Wray) "Tax rates should be set so that the government's budgetary outcome (whether in deficit, balanced, or in surplus) is consistent with full employment.

Reuters: Japan's government could run out of cash by October 2012 - can not happen according to MMT and did not happen.

Levy Economics Institute - MM Papers - Working paper 778 Modern Money Theory 101: A Reply to Critics 2013 (free pdf)

High Powered Money (Wiki) is mentioned in the paper and I didn't recognize the term and the Wiki page was less than helpful.  Warren Mosler has this to say:
"That's just cash plus dollars held by member banks in the reserve accounts at the Fed.  It was called high powered money because it was convertible into gold before 1934.  Randy (Wray) still uses it because his professor's initials were HPM (Hyman P. Minsky)."

Regarding the large upturn in HPM since 2007 (Wiki plot) L. Randall Wray says:

In any case what happened was that the Fed got confused and thought that QE would stimulate something. Exactly what, we do not know.
Fed also started paying interest on reserves--which makes them equivalent to bills. So think of the $4T of reserves as bills paying low interest.
That was the kink in the curve you saw. You could just as well exchange the reserves for bills and then the kink goes away.

Three UMKC Professors Among The Nine Who Predicted Eurozone Crisis -  and confirm that there was no profit recycling mechanism as Yanis says.

New Economic Perspectives -

Center for Full Employment and Price Stability -

Centre of Full Employment and Equity -

email sent to Dan Kedmey 7/20/2016 about a TED ideas article related to Yanis and a Time magazine article about the possible US default and China.

Hi Dan Kedmey:: I saw your article http://ideas.ted.com/what-should-the-future-of-capitalism-look-like/ And want to point out that Yanis describes what happened to the economy after 1971 as "The Global Minotaur".   He is a very charismatic speaker and so I read his book, then a book on Volcker including communicating with the author and can not find any plan by Volcker for American hegemony.  My research into The Global Minotaur is at: http://www.end2partygovernment.com/2012Issues.html#Global_Minotaur I then discovered Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) which offers a good explanation of what happened after 1971.  I believe that Yanis used Greek mythology because he didn't really understand what happened. I see you have written a Time article: http://world.time.com/2013/10/09/china-to-united-states-dont-default-for-our-sake/?iid=sr-link8 That's about a possible default by the U.S.  According to MMT this can not happen because the U.S. is a sovereign country with a floating currency exchange rate so can never bounce a check.  See the books by Frank Newman for more on the  U.S. dollar and China. For me the fact that MMT predicted the problems with the Euro in exactly the way they have happened and also predicted the Global Financial Crisis (one of the key factors was the problem created by the Clinton budget surplus) makes me a believer in MMT.  Here's some research on MMT you may want to study: http://www.end2partygovernment.com/2012Issues.html#MMT Please let me know you received this. PS Most thinking on the economy is based on how it worked up until 1971.  So there's about 4,000 years of thought than no longer is applicable.  This may explain why so many people keep thinking the old way.  If  you don't know how something works it pretty much impossible to predict it's behavior or make make "improvements" to it's operation. Have Fun, Brooke Clarke brooke@..........

Andrew Flowers

Not an MMT person but wrote an extensive article examining what might be called a bubble up economy.

FiveThirty Eight - What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?  Apr 25, 2016  -

Effect of Interest Rates on Home Values

[2017 - This paragraph added after I started reading the 2006 (pre Crisis) book The Coming First World Debt Crisis]

A home buyer approaches the housing market and the first calculation is "What can I afford".  This is determined by what monthly payment they can make based on the type of loan and downpayment.
Here is an example of the effect of the interest rate on affordability.

Payments do not include title, morrgatge insurance, taxes or property insurance, maintance, just principle and interest.
Rather than run the calculation for the loan amount it's being run assuming $1,000/month is available to buy a house, i.e. what can you afford.

APR %	Loan Amount $	Total $ Payments	Total $ Interest	Interest/Loan
10	113,951	360,000	246050	2.15
8	136,283	360,000	223717	1.64
6	166,792	360,000	193208	1.16
4	209,461	360,000	150539	0.72
2	270,549	360,000	89451	0.33

One way to view getting a lower rate loan is to allow you to buy a more expensive house. But when the mortgage is bought by investment banks in order to "financialize" it the low interest rate does not go to getting a "better" house but rather only goes to make the price of the house higher.  This can easily be seen by considering what a change of interest rate has on the price of a home you can afford.  For example a house that sold some years ago for $166,792 with a 6% loan, sells today for $209549 with a 4% loan (all other variables constant), so there's an increase in the price of the house of 26% soley because of the lower interest rate.

This same effect applies to anything were borrowed money is involved, such as the stock market.  This was origionally named the Greenspan Put (Wiki), but was renamed the Bernanke Put in 2007 and today might be called the Yellen Put since there has been no change in keeping the interest rates very low to promote higher capital asset "values".  LOw interest rates support various "bubbles" (Wiki) (but do not cause them).

In the above table note the ratio of Interest/Loan.  I see a problem here relating to the lack of money to pay off the loan.  Note when you borrow money the bank only loans you the principle amount.  For example if you borrow $166,792 from the bank they "print money" in that they just make bookkeeping entries, one in your checking account and one in their asset account for the same $166,792 amout.  But the bank expects you to pay back $360,000 over the life of the loan.  The bank is creating new money in this process.  They are NOT loaning you money that someone has deposited in their bank. 

As of 2017 there are only two places the money used to pay the interest can come from.  Either someone else has to go bankrupt or the Federal government has to supply that money.  Note that the amount of interest is about the same as the loan amount for a 30 year fixed mortgate near 5% so is a considerable amount of money.

If the economy has inflation then as the mortgate advances in years the money used to pay it back is inflated, making the true interest rate lower than the number shown on the loan documents.  But if there's deflation then the effective loan rate increases causing a deflationary spiral (Wiki).

Gold Standard (Wiki)

Definitions

Wiki has three definitions for "Gold Standard": specie (money is only gold coins), bullion (government will sell gold bars at fixed price), exchange (paper money in one country can be exchanged with paper money in another country at fixed rate).

Before and for some years after the Declaration of Independence and Constitution the US colonies (Wiki) used British Pounds (Wiki) as well as Spanish dollars (Wiki). 
"By far the leading specie coin circulating in America was the Spanish silver dollar, defined as consisting of 387 grains of pure silver. The dollar was divided into "pieces of eight," or "bits," each consisting of one-eighth of a dollar. Spanish dollars came into the North American colonies through lucrative trade with the West Indies. The Spanish silver dollar had been the world's outstanding coin since the early 16th century, and was spread partially by dint of the vast silver output of the Spanish colonies in Latin America. More important, however, was that the Spanish dollar, from the 16th to the 19th century, was relatively the most stable and least debased coin in the Western world^"
 
Coinage Act of 1792 (Wiki) - An act establishing a mint, and regulating the Coins of the United States.  The coins contained either gold ($10, $5, $2.50) silver ($1, 50¢, 25¢, 10¢, 5¢) or copper (1¢, half¢) of a specified purity and weight (Wiki).
There were a number of following Coinage acts, but this one tied gold and silver to money.

Executive order 6102 (Wiki, Text)  (March 9,  1933) required everyone to turn in all gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates in excess of $100 per person (at $20.67 per ounce, the then going rate) to a Federal Reserve Bank on or before May 1, 1933.  This was done using registered mail where special locks were used on the mail bags, not to stop theft, but as tamper indicators.

The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 (Wiki) Took the US off the specie  gold standard and fixed the price of gold at $35/oz.  "...outlawed most private possession of gold.  The act also changed the nominal price of gold from $20.67 (price paid to people turning in gold) per troy ounce to $35 (the dollar is pegged to gold, not floating). This price change incentivized foreign investors to export their gold to the United States, while simultaneously devaluing the U.S. dollar in an attempt to spark inflation. The increase in gold reserves due to the price change as well as the confiscation clause resulted in a large accumulation of gold in the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury. The increase in the money supply lowered real interest rates which increased investment in durable goods."  This removed the "gold standard" and left the value of gold at $35 per ounce which was maintained until the Nixon Shock of 1971.

For about 200 years (1792 to 1971) U.S. currency was tied to gold and/or silver.  Before 1971 the folding money in my wallet said Silver Certificate (Wiki) on the front (see photo above).  I could take it to the mint in San Fransisco (or any other US Mint) and get either silver dollars or silver ingots in exchange.  Prior to 1971 the measures of the money supply like M0, M1, M2 &Etc (Wiki) were important because the amount of money was limited by the gold and/or silver reserves held by the US government.  If the government ran a large deficit while the dollar was pegged to gold/silver there might be a problem if everyone turned in their currency and asked for silver.  So, back then, the government needed to use taxes to raise money in order to fund government programs because they could not just print more money.  So governments at all levels (federal, state and local) used taxes to raise money to fund their programs.  Prior to 1971 this was the correct way to think about government funding of programs, but not after 1971.

[side bar:  in 1946 Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York wrote a couple of articles pointing out that the US had paid for W.W.II without raising the money by taxation, see link above).]

The Federal Reserve System (Wiki) was created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (Wiki) (Public Law 63-43, 63^rd Congress, HR 7837) section 14(a). Open Market Operations: "To deal in gold coin and bullion at home or abroad, to make loans thereon, exchange Federal reserve notes for gold, gold coin, or gold certificates, and to contract for loans of gold coin or bullion, giving therefor, when necessary, acceptable security, including the hypothecation of United States bonds or other securities which Federal reserve banks are authorized to hold:  (b)..."  The current version of has the same paragraph 14a. BUT. . .  in 1971 gold was decoupled from our currency so the Fed no longer can do anything with gold (see Nixon Shock implemented policies below).

Nixon Shock

1971 (Wiki: Nixon Shock):  264 - Address to the Nation Outlining a New Economic Policy: "The Challenge of Peace." August 15, 1971 9 pm - Implemented:

1. repeal excise tax on automobiles,
2. speed up the personal income tax exemptions,
3. a $4.7 billion cut in Federal spending,
4. Tax cuts to stimulate employment must be matched by spending cuts to restrain inflation. To check the rise in the cost of Government, I have ordered a postponement of pay raises and a 5 percent cut in Government personnel,
5. a 10 percent cut in foreign economic aid,
6. Investment tax credit,
7. a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States
8. suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets (Doublespeak (Wiki):the word "temporarily" in this case means "forever")
   

I remember this.  The big thing was the freeze on wages and prices.  The company were I worked (Aertech) liked the investment tax credit.  The other things like the "temporary" suspension of convertibility of the dollar for gold was, as Nixon said, "very technical--what does it mean for you? " and had little impact on anyone except for Bob B. who panned gold on his vacations and prior to 1971 was not allowed to smelt  (Wiki) the gold dust into solid gold.  Now he and everyone else could hold gold as a metal.

I doubt that neither Nixon nor his financial advisers understood the impact of decoupling the dollar from gold/silver and allowing the currency to float.  For example:
Item 3 & 4 he is cutting taxes (T) and cutting spending (G) so G and T both go down.  MMT tells us that to create jobs G-T needs to go up, so the tax cut was a good thing but the spending cut was wrong.  Note it would have been correct with a fixed price of gold because all levels of government needed to raise money for spending by collecting taxes.  Nixon used the pre 1971 rules for the period after 1971 because no one understood the implications of the change.

Note that everything about this announcement seems designed to obfuscate its true meaning.  By making the decoupling of the dollar and gold the last of a bunch of items and using the word "temporarily" he did about everything possible to not draw attention to this change that would have implications for the world and also to discourage economists from figuring out the implications.   What's the point of doing a lot of theoretical work when the suspension is "temporary"?

The Bretton Woods System (Wiki) that tied the currency exchange rates of 40 countries to the U.S. dollar which was in turn fixed to gold at $35 per ounce.  When Nixon closed the Fed's gold window it impacted all of those 40 countries and especially the oil producing countries represented by OPEC (Wiki).  Since Nixon shock amounted to a devaluation of the dollar and they priced oil using $ per barrel.  This dollar devaluation and the Yom Kippur War (Wiki) resulted in the 1973 Oil Crisis (Wiki).

The Oil Crisis resulted in the OPEC countries holding a lot of dollars which needed to be invested.  Here is a plot of the US government bond interest rates from 1950 to 2017:

source: tradingeconomics.com
Note the with the U.S. paying high rates of interest the OPEC countries sent the dollars back to investment banks in the U.S..  But this places a burden on the investment banks because they needed to make money on the deposits.  This started the idea of making loans to third world countries.  As part of the Bretton Woods System (Wiki) trade was encouraged and the only capital flows allowed were those to clear trade balances.  Global investment capital flows were not allowed.  So in order for the investment banks to make these loans the laws regarding global capital flows needs to be liberalized.  The people at Bretton Woods realized that there is a conflict between global trade and global capital flows and wanted global trade as it would improve everyone's life while global capital flows would hurt people.  When the third world countries went into competition with each other they ended up not being able to pay off those high interest rate loans.  The IMF (Wiki) which was founded as part of the Bretton Woods System and under the fixed exchange rates tied to the U.S. dollar which was in turn tied to gold imposed austerity on these delinquent countries, but that policy no longer was applicable because the rules had changed in 1971.  Austerity means cutting spending which in turn hurts economic output decreasing the money available to pay off their loan.

Here is a plot of the U.S. Import-Export trade balance aka Current Account (Wiki) for the same 1950 - 2017 year range:

source: tradingeconomics.com

Note that the Import-Export balance was zero until 1971.  This is because when the Bretton Woods System was in effect there was a built-in mechanism coupling money and trade balance.  For example if a country was a net importer, like the U.S. prior to 1971, then we would need to export gold to pay for those products.  That causes the prices of imports to rise slowing down the imports.  This is the capital "Recycling" that Yanis is talking about.  The problem was that by 1971 the U.S. owed France literally a boat load of gold and Nixon was not about to give it to them.
 
From the late 1800s on schools have been teaching economics based on a gold/silver backed dollar.  Even though that changed in 1971 they continue to teach the outdated ideas.  So even today the school economics curriculum pretty much everywhere is still teaching the same outdated ideas.   Also micro economics is based solely on industrial age manufacturing, i.e. before computers and automation, and so has fundamental problems.  Macro economics is also based on false ideas. see books above.

Global Capital Flows

2017 - I've been reading about how no bankers were invited to the Bretton Woods Conference (Wiki) because of the damage they did in the Great Depression (Wiki).  One of the key provisions was to limit capital flows between countries, i.e. to allow for the prevention of Globalization. 
States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) Hardcover – June, 1994, Eric Helleiner (Wiki) -
Deutsche Bank, Markets Research: Dark matter: the hidden capital flows the drive G10 exchange rates -

Global Finance

One of the books cited by Ann Pettifor, and others who predicted the Global Financial Crisis of 2008,  a number of times is  "States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s" by Eric Helleiner, 1994 - Note this was written after 1971 and before the 2007/2008 crisis, but the author did not know about the ideas of MMT, but nevertheless talks a lot about how the Bretton Woods agreement spent a lot of time looking at the need for controls on global finance while at the same time liberalizing international trade.  They recognized then that global finance leads to destabilizing the global economy and restricting economic options and is not compatible with global trading which they promoted.  Helleiner gives a number of reasons why global finance was allowed while global trade is still regulated and it boils down to controlling global finance requires global cooperation and so can be defeated by a single country (like the policies of the U.S.).  Since global finance does not directly effect jobs, like global trade does, there is not much political will to restrict it.  Multinational corporations, oligarchs (Wiki) and people involved in money laundering (Wiki) are in favor of no global financial regulations so that they can move money to avoid rules they do not like.  Note that money laundering is a federal crime inside the U.S. In my opinion it is commonly practiced by IBFs (Wiki) even though they are not supposed to.  This recently (March 2017) was in the news in relation to Russian oligarchs making "wash transactions" in two different markets where they purchased using Russian money and sold in markets where the proceeds were in US$, thus moving their money out of Russia, i.e. a global financial transaction.

The Global Minotaur (This is NOT the real problem instead it looks like not understanding MMT: see MMT above, i.e. the Minotaur is a myth.)

But the idea that there's no longer democracy in the EU is a correct assessment.  This is because economic policy decisions are made in Germany for all of the EU and the people in the EU have no say in those decisions.

TED talk: Yanis Varoufakis capitalism will eat democracy unless we speak up - how the recycling systems used since W.W.II that used profits to reduce debts has now failed and currently we are accumulating both debt and cash with no mechanism for them to get together.

Feb 2016 - If, as Yanis Varoufakis (Wiki) says, Greece is the canary in the coal mine (Wiki) then we need to really understand what's going on.  He says there are two indications of the problem.
1. A growing mountain of debt caused by borrowing.
2. A growing mountain of cash caused by it not being used productively to reduce the mountain of debt.

Is Finance Fit To Purpose? 14 April 2016 - A quick overview of Yanis idea.

Profit Recycling by Gold Standard
If a country maintained it's money supply based on it's gold reserves then the exchange rate between countries would change if either of them changed it's money supply.  Suppose that, like after W.W. II the U.S. starts to buy more from Japan than it exports to Japan (a negative trade balance).  The U.S. ships gold to Japan in exchange for cameras, cars, TVs &Etc.  Then the exchange rate will change making those things more expensive and making U.S. goods look cheaper to the Japanese.  This happened and Japan went on a buying spree in the U.S. acquiring a lot of real estate among other things.  This also happened with Europe and Germany in particular.  The U.S. bought a lot of Volkswagen and Merecedes Benz cars, Hasselblad cameras, machine tools, &Etc.  By 1971 Europe was expecting the U.S. to ship billions of dollars worth of gold to them and Nixon turned off the gold standard.

Marshal Plan
During (and for some time after) W.W.II the U.S. accumulated a lot of gold as a result of a trade surplus.  At the Bretton Woods Conference (Wiki) in April 1944 the Marshal Plan (Wiki) was a way that the U.S. recycled it's trade surplus to strengthen Japan and Germany (the offer made to the U.S.S.R. was rejected).  This essentially sent U.S. dollars to Germany and Japan and allowed them to buy U.S. products.  So from the end of W.W.II until 1971 when the U.S. left the gold standard (Wiki: Gold Standard, Nixon Shock) the U.S. sent it's excess trade balance to other countries.  This allowed them to buy U.S. products.  PS The CIA actions in South American politics (1944 to 1971) is related to the U.S. Global Plan for Japan in protecting it's raw material suppliers.

Paul Volcker (Wiki) & American hegemony i.e. the Global Minotaur
When the Gold Standard ended so did the Bretton Woods System (Wiki) since the gold standard was part of it's construction and the U.S. was no longer running a trade surplus (we were buying a lot of products from Germany and Japan), but those countries (and most other countries) sent their money to Wall Street (the U.S. dollar was the strongest currency in the world).  So between 1971 and 2008 what Yanis Varoufakis calls the Global Minotaur served the same purpose as the Marshal Plan except instead of recycling a U.S. trade surplus it recycled the trade surplus of other countries.  In an attempt to reign in Wall Street congress passed Dodd-Frank (see good laws above) which included the Volcker Rule, but as of 2016 Wall Street is fighting it tooth and nail and it's not yet been implemented.
YouTube - Ron Paul Questions Paul Volcker During Joint Economic Committee 02 26 200 - Since 1971 (the end of Bretton Woods the stability of fiat currency (Wiki) needs to be better
On order: Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence Hardcover – 2012 by William L. Silber 
Noam Chomsky portrays hegemony (Wiki) as a bad thing, but that was not always the U.S. goal.  Recently the U.S. has lost sight of the good it could do.
YouTube - Is the Human Species Doomed? Noam Chomsky on Hegemony or Survival  2004 talk promoting his book

But as the post 1929 financial crash laws were repealed between 1965 and 2007 (see: Bad Laws) the banks were allowed to gamble with depositors money.  For example the wide use of Collateralized debt obligations (Wiki: CDO) in association with liar home mortgage loans (Wiki) along with false AAA credit ratings (Wiki) resulted in the financial crash of 2008 (Wiki). This killed the Global Minotaur and has allowed a lot of debit to accumulate in some places and a lot of cash to accumulate in other places instead of allowing the cash to be invested in places where there's debt to allow both accumulations to get reduced.  The 4  handmaidens of the Global Minotaur - Chapter 5 (1.Wall Street, 2. Walmart, 3. the ideology and politics of 'trickle-down' and 4. toxic economic theory)  These are discussed in Chapter 5 The Beast's handmaidens. Note the 2008 crash has killed the Global Minotaur but the handmaidens are still around and out of control, sort of like the Sorcerer's Apprentice (Wiki)

Note: Walmart pays more than the minimum wage, but virtually all of it's employees are below the poverty line which means they qualify for food stamps and other government aid.  So the government is subsidizing Walmart, i.e. privatize the profits and socialize the losses.  Walmart is a socialist business.  I'm not saying it's a bad idea, rather I'm saying it's not fair to allow corporations to work in a socialized economy yet not allow people to do it.

A related idea is the "part time worker" (Wiki) and/or "independent contractor" (Wiki) - these are both ways that employers get around the requirement to provide benefits to their employees that they otherwise would be required by labor laws to provide.

What's needed is a way to recycle excess debt or cash so neither accumulates.

The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy by Yanis Varoufakis 2015 (with new Chapter 9 A world without the Minotaur) - highly recommended (free 2011 edition.pdf)
http://www.ted.com/talks/yanis_varoufakis_capitalism_will_eat_democracy_unless_we_speak_up (YouTube)
http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/
DiEM25.org - DiEM25 is in the air – a preliminary Q&A (31 Jan 2016) - it would be a mistake if the U.S. did not join this discussion.
 Vicious Disequilibrium by Yanis Varoufakis 2014 - easy to understand
A world without the Global Minotaur: Why is the world economy failing to recover? by Yanis Varoufakis 2012
The Global Minotaur: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis 2012 - Q&A
Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World 2011 - expensive textbook, but a lot is free on Amazon in Look Inside!

In the first chapter there's reference to a Monthly Review Volume 55, Number 3 (July-August 2003) paper: The Global Minotaur by Joseph Halevi & Yanis Varoufakis (it's behind a pay wall but here's a free version pdf)
Here's a 2015 YouTube talk by Joseph Halevi:
Joseph Halevi - Farewell Lecture - the '29 crash was because of oligopoly (Wiki) not monopoly (Wiki). Also there are two distinct pricing structures one for raw goods (cost of extraction) and one for industrial goods (labor?).

Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World 2011 by Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi, Nicholas J. Theocarakis - pricey so haven't read the book, but have read the free Amazon part pg 338 Kissinger & Volcker's plan mentioned. 
Volcker - Quarterly Review of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (The political Economy of the Dollar (FRBNY.pdf Quarterly Review winter 1-12) and the Fred Hirsch (Wiki) Lecture at Warwick University, Coventry November 1978:
"It is tempting to look at the market as an impartial arbiter ... but balancing the requirements of a stable international system against the desirability of retaining freedom of action for national policy, a number of countries, including the US opted for the latter...'
and quoting Fred Hirsh:
"[A] controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980s."

22 May 2013 - Jared Huffman has his first telephone Town Hall meeting.  I was No. 6 to ask a question "What was he doing to bring back Glass-Steagall?" but after over a dozen answers he didn't get to my question.  At the beginning he said he would answer everyone's questions off line if not on line, but as of 13 Oct 2014 he has not answered this one.  See the TED talk above Capitalism will eat democracy for an explanation of how politicians no longer can control the financial markets.

He also responded to a direct question where I was in disagreement with the idea of taxing internet transactions.  It turns he is a sponsor of "H.R. 684, the Marketplace Fairness Act".
So here's the federal government making a law about sales tax that will very substantially increase record keeping and customer disclosure requirements.  The idea that people will buy on line instead of locally to save paying the sales tax ignores the reality that the shipping costs are typically much higher than the sales tax.  The definition of a "small business" that's exempt from the proposed law is sales below one million dollars, but that's far different than the definition of a small business in other branches of government where it's 20 or 30 million dollars in annual sales.

5 May 2016 - Huffman has changed his position as a super delegate from supporting Hillary to supporting whoever gets the most votes nationwide.  He will not vote based on how the district 2 vote goes.  So, in my opinion, he's still an establishment politician, not part of Bernie's camp.

The book Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott (Wiki) 2011 - Both Keynes and Hayek started by looking into the causes of the Great Depression (Wiki) from, two very different points of view.  Hayek (Wiki) based his Microeconomic (Wiki) ideas which looks at the actions of individuals whereas Keynes took a top down Macroeconomic (Wiki) view.  That had never been done before.  In my opinion Microeconomics is a failed idea because humans (and other primates) do not behave rationally (Wiki) when making decisions involving loss (Wiki). During depressions everyone throws out Hayek and adopts the Keynes idea that government should borrow and stimulate the economy.  From the end of W.W.II to the election of Ronald Reagan (Wiki) Keynesian economics (Wiki) were popular.  Reagan had a foot in both camps, he cut taxes in line with Hayek and he radically increased spending by borrowing in line with Keynes.  But beginning in the 1980 some the ideas of Hayek became popular.  From pg 219:

"Hayek's utopianism often spilled over into religiosity.  As his disciple Ralph Harris described it, "once . . . you understand there is no other way to preserve the substance of individual freedom except through dispersed property ownership, . . .  you can say it's almost like a religious belief . . . I have said - and it's offended some of my other Christian friends; they have said this is awful, sacrilege- . . .  that the market is almost god-ordained"²¹ In Hayek's vision, government would be left to manage only those elements of society that could be run by no one else, such as defense.  Among the services Hayek believed should be privatized were "all those from education to transport and communications, including post, telegraph, telephone and broadcasting services, all the so-called 'public utilities,' the various 'social' insurances and, above all, the issue of money."²² Tellingly, and perhaps surprisingly for those who subscribe to Hayek's general aims today, he advocated mandatory universal health care and unemployment insurance, enforced, if not directly provided, by the state, and he believed there should be free movement of labor across national borders."

21. Interview of Ralph Harris (Wiki), July 17, 2000 Commanding Heights, PBS
22. F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, VOl 3: The Political Order of a Free People, Univ of Chicago Press 1979, pg. 147

This included steps to privatize the U.S. Postal Service, deregulation of the banking system &Etc.

The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper 2013 (First published in 1945 as 2 volumes, this book combines them and adds some new information) - on order


Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844, by Berman, Morris 1978 - on order

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges 2007 (Wiki: Links, Amazon) - on order because of Donald Trump (Wiki)

Ancient Economic History

Mercantilism (Wiki) was the economic system from the 1500s to 1800s replaced by Adam Smith's Capitalism.  "Most of the European economists who wrote between 1500 and 1750 are today generally considered mercantilists."  "In modern economic theory, trade is not a zero-sum game of cutthroat competition because both sides can benefit."

The Wealth of Nations (Wiki) laid out what's called classical economics including the concept of the Invisible Hand (Wiki). I think the Invisible Hand sort of worked in Adam Smith's time (i.e. before the Industrial Revolution (Wiki) and large corporations), if there was a retail mom and pop store that was doing something underhanded you could easily open a shop that was fair and be successful, but that no longer is the case with large corporations.

There was a change in focus from the King's wealth to the wealth of the population. 
PS. I think neoclassical economics (Wiki) is a waste of time because humans do not make good decisions under negative conditions i.e. they do NOT act as rational persons.  There are a number of TED Talks on the topic of how humans and chimps make the wrong choice when loss is involved.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Wealth Gap -

Monetary Theory

In all these pre 1971 monetary theories the money always was tied to gold in one way or another.

Homo economicus (Wiki)

Money based on debt (Wiki)

When a bank makes a loan they just make two entries in their books. One puts the principal amount into your checking account (as a bank liability) and the other puts the principal amount into their collection of assets.

Example:
You borrow $100,000 for 30 years at 6%.  The amount of money created is $100,000.  Your checking account entry is a liability for the bank and your loan is an asset for the bank.
But, you need to pay back close to $216,000.
This is a big problem because the money to pay back the interest was NOT created.  There is no provision to create money for the interest.  Where is it going to come from?
Either the economy keeps on growing putting new money in the system, some of which is used to pay off old loans or there are bankruptcies that cancel loans.
A possible way around this is to eliminate interest from the system.
Islamic banking and finance (Wiki) does not allow interest and while the religious components don't make sense, the basic idea seems valid.
One way of doing this would be to make banks a utility operated by government paid employees where no interest is charged and the bank partners with the borrower.

Standard & Poor's: Repeat After Me: Banks Cannot And Do Not "Lend Out" Reserves (pdf) Aug 2013 - since banks have never been constrained in making loans based on reserves (the reserve requirement is met AFTER the loan is made) there is no "money multiplier" (Wiki) effect caused by the excess reserves generated by QE.

2016 Update - See MMT above for how the government puts money into the economy in addition to the bank's creation of money out of thin air.

IMF (Wiki: IMF)

The International Monetary Fund was created as part of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 (Wiki). This was a time before MMT (see MMT above) when there were fixed exchange rates and a gold standard.  That changed in 1971 with the end of the gold standard, but the magnitude of the impact (the start of MMT) just started to be understood by a very few people in 1992.  The result is that the IMF is basing it's demands on no longer valid theories.

IMF groupthink and sociopaths by Bill Mitchell (See above) - The IMF report IMF Performance in the Run-Up to the Financial and Economic Crisis: IMF Surveillance in 2004-07 mentioned in the article can be found at (IEO part of the IMF).
re: Global Financial Crisis - "As the private debt was building up and the shonky (and criminal) bankers were increasingly defying responsible and ethical business practice, the IMF was part of the cheer squad – urging, no, bullying governments to deregulate further and undermine the working conditions further and to reduce the scope and quality of public services."

It's time to disband the IMF and probably the World Bank.

Capitalism- It's OK if Regulated but can be so much more -> Capitalism 2.0

The year 1776 is notable for (1) the Declaration of Independence and (2) the publication of the Wealth of Nations (Wiki) by Adam Smith, the basis of Capitalism.  Prior to this there was Feudalism (Wiki).  At the time products were made by craftsmen one at a time, and there was no manufacturing, electricity, plumbing, etc.  A high technology business was making cast iron cookware.  So the philosophy of doing what’s in your own self interest (greed) and an invisible hand (Wiki) will guide you for the good of society might have worked then.  But greed is no longer working and we need to move on to a better idea.

Note: in the book Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (2012) Morris Berman makes the case that the United States was founded on the idea of the swindle.  He bases this on the group of people who founded the U.S. being driven by the idea of getting away with something.  Note the founding fathers were all: white men who owned slaves.

The Constitution was ratified over a dozen years after the Declaration of Independence was signed and so our economic system of greed and the "invisible hand" was built into it not only in terms of the economic system but things like the legal system.

Joseph Stiglitz: Smith's "Invisible Hand" a Myth? (00:02:35)

 
90 years later in 1867 Carl Marx published Das Kapital (Wiki) and said Capitalism could not work and socialism was the answer.  The U.S.S.R. tried socialism and it failed in 1989.

John F. Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for his theory of Governing Dynamics.  In the movie A Beautiful Mind the bar scene is an example of his two part idea that starts with Adam Smith’s Capitalism and adds a second idea:  “doing what is in the best interest of the group”.
http://www.end2partygovernment.com/2012Issues.html#ASvJN <- the 3 minute bar scene
We need to move to Capitalism version 2.0.

Wiki: List of countries by income equality - The U.S. is in the group of third world countries.

Fractional Reserve Banking (Wiki, Criticism)

Has built in the idea of a growing economy and that's not sustainable.  This needs to be changed.
YouTube - Money As Debt-Full Length Documentary - the only item they may have wrong is the idea that spending on infrastructure promotes the economy.  I think R&D on sustainable projects would be a much better way for the government to spend money.
ContagionEx by by Mark Foire(00:01:32)

The Laffer Curve & Voodoo Economics

2017 - This is an idea from the primary where Ronald Reagan was running against Bush Sr.  It was an answer to the wrong wrong question.
The question was what marginal tax rate will maximize the amount of income taxes collected?
The reason it's wrong is that the rules changed in 1971, see Gold Standard.

The Laffer Curve (Wiki) says that if the tax rate is either zero or 100% the amount of tax revenue will be small and somewhere in between more will be collected.  At that time the marginal tax rate was 80% and so it seemed reasonable that lowering that rate would cause more money to be collected.

David Stockman (Wiki: part of the Reagan OMB) coined the term "trickle down" to promote what's called supply side economics (Wiki) which the book Zoombie Economics says is a false concept.  A good analogy is that a business with few people coming through the door is not going to expand if the loan rate goes lower, it takes more customers to cause the expansion, i.e. demand-side economics (Wiki).

Trofire: Inventor Of Trickle Down Economics Says Trump’s Tax Plan Is “Dead on Arrival” - "...David Stockman finally came out and he said, “I was wrong. I was wrong about trickle down economics. It is a theory that will never, ever, ever possibly, under any circumstances, work in practice.”

Nick Hanauer - 2012 TED Talk (pulled by TED) March Long Beach
Are the rich America's job creators?
at The Last Word, at YouTube1, Who are the job creators? by Nick Hanauer (Wiki, TED controversy)
A newer 2014 version: http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming - March 2016 he's got it correct.
"Saving American Capitalism" with Nick Hanauer -

When Reagan cut the marginal tax rate G.W. Bush used terms like "voodoo economics".  The reason was that what Reagan said was that by cutting the marginal tax rate the government would take in more money.  This is a counter intuitive idea, you would think that raising the marginal tax rate would increase income and the cutting it would lower government income.  But that simple thinking does not take into account what's called elasticity of tax rates or the Laffer Curve (Wiki).

The Laffer curve says that if the effective tax rate is zero then the government will collect a very small amount of money by means of charitable contributions.  If the effective tax rate is 100 percent then the government will collect a very small amount of money from those who volunteer to work for free.  Somewhere between 0 and 100 percent there's an optimal tax rate that will bring in the most money.  If the current effective tax rate is higher than the optimum rate then lowering the tax rate will result in bringing in more money.  And that's where we were in 1980.  So when the marginal rate was lowered there was a huge influx of money. The tax cut part of what Reagan did worked well.  The thing he did wrong was the massive increase in war spending.  Instead of a peace dividend (Wiki) we got massive military expansion at a time when the U.S.S.R. had disintegrated. (Wiki: Peace Through Strength).  Some critics of tax cuts cite the increased national debt when Reagan left office as proof of it's failure, but that ignores the military spending.


Today (2012) we are at the other end of the Laffer curve, i.e.the marginal tax rate is about 15% (Huffington Post: Marginal Tax Rate Chart).  So raising the marginal rate will bring in a lot more money into the government.

Note that the Laffer Curve is not Trickle-down economics (Wiki). This is a very false idea.
Modern Monetary Theory (see MMT) says that the purpose of taxes are to punish things we want to discourage, so studying the effect of marginal tax rates on tax income is only of secondary interest.  Much better to do a zero base study of the overall tax system.

Adam Smith vs. John Nash -> Capitalism 2.0

Adam Smith (Wiki) is commonly credited with formulating the idea of Capitalism or free markets.  He published The Wealth of Nations (Wiki) in 1776 this is at the start of mass production and before the problems caused by large corporations were known. Smith thought that when everyone works for their own best interest an "invisible hand" guides them to also do what's best for society.  There was no electric or phone service and plumbing was yet to come to homes.  All businesses were family run.   Free market "hands off" capitalism failed in the early 1900s with the advent of big business and big banking.  This led to government regulation of business and banking.

After W.W. I Russia was in a very bad way economically, and medically (Wiki) which allowed Lenin to stage the October Revolution (Wiki) and install the Communist party in Russia which used the ideas of Karl Marx for their economic system.  This economic system did not work and the U.S.S.R. fell apart in the late 1980s.

Capitalism can work when applied to a competitive market, for example things sold in grocery and hardware stores.  But it's not so good when applied to monopolistic cases like utilities.

John Nash (Wiki) won the Nobel prize for his idea that there are two factors that determine the best outcome (1) what's best for the individual and (2) what's best for the group he is in.     This has implications for both national and world wide economic theory.

See the bar scene from A Beautiful Mind (a bio on Nash) for a practical explanation of his idea.

Bar Scene from A Beautiful Mind: Governing Dynamics by John F. Nash  "Adam Smith was Wrong" (00:03:16)


This means that the Republican Party ideas about economics are based on a false idea "free market capitalism" and a false idea "voodoo economics" about tax cuts.  It turns out that the Democrats were the root cause of the 2008 financial crisis because of the Clinton budget surplus.  See Key Years for the Goldilocks papers predicting the crisis.

Using Nash's idea we will get the best outcome if we do what's best for the Earth and what's best for us individually.  It may be a good idea to call this Nashism rather than keep using the word Capitalism.  This has a profound impact on economic thinking.

Brooke on Capitalism 2.0

Alexis de Tocqueville
  (Wiki: Democracy in America) -  “self-interest properly understood.” looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

"Tocqueville warned that "modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny, because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and to the selfishness of individualism. In such conditions "we lose interest in the future of our descendents...and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one." Tocqueville worried that if despotism (Wiki) were to take root in a modern democracy, it would be a much more dangerous version than the oppression under the Roman emperors or tyrants of the past who could only exert a pernicious influence on a small group of people at a time. In contrast, a despotism under a democracy could see "a multitude of men," uniformly alike, equal, "constantly circling for petty pleasures," unaware of fellow citizens, and subject to the will of a powerful state which exerted an "immense protective power". Tocqueville compared a potentially despotic democratic government to a protective parent who wants to keep its citizens (children) as "perpetual children," and which doesn't break men's wills but rather guides it, and presides over people in the same way as a shepherd looking after a "flock of timid animals."

Privatization (Wiki)

It turns out that the Bush43 administration has put a poison pill into the Postal Accountability Act of 2006 (Wiki) (truth-out). This was part of a larger move to privatize everything. 
In Eat the Rich by O'Rourke (Wiki, Amazon) the chapter on Russia during the cold war has information on how poorly the factories worked.  The description fits most cases in the U.S. where a government monopoly is privtized.  What happens in both cases is that the business operates strictly to the letter of their contract and they find loopholes that allow them to optimize some other parameter (minimizing material requirements for the USSR and maximizing profits for the U.S.).

Jobs

While US manufacturing output has continued to grow it did this by productivity improvement rather than by adding jobs.  This is a worldwide problem.

MIT - Manufacturing Jobs Aren’t Coming Back Mark Muro Nov 18, 2016 - references the Oxford paper
FiveThirty Eight - What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?  Apr 25, 2016  - references the Oxford paper
Oxford: The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization? Frey & Osborne 2013 - answer:  47% of the 702 US jobs studied.
UNCTAD: Robots and Industrialization in Developing Countries, Oct 2016 - "According to some estimates, for developing countries as a group, the “share of occupations that could experience significant automation is actually higher in developing countries than in more advanced ones, where many of these jobs have already disappeared”, and this concerns about two thirds of all jobs."

US Population Data
Between 1980 and 2016 the population of the U.S. has grown from 227 million to 324 million (World Meters), a 42% increase. 
Note that the population includes everybody from newborns to retired people.

BLS Data
Start at this BLS web page: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001
Then set the starting year to 1980 and press "GO".
The number of employees goes from 90 million to 140 million.  So the percent of the population goes from 90/227 = 40% to 140/324 = 43%.  So things are getting better. 
But the number of people out of work is also growing in terms of absolute numbers: 1980 unemployed (227 - 90) 137 to 2016 (324 - 140) 184 million.
The BLS data titled "Charting the labor market: Data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), Sep 2, 2016" is misleading.  For example "Chart 1. Civilian labor force, Seasonally adjusted, 1990-2016" on page 4 and "Civilian employment, Seasonally adjusted, 1990-2016" on page 6 are very different.  Chart 1 shows the people the BLS considers the "labor force" those who are either working or looking for work and so understates the unemployment.  (does not account for those who have given up looking for a job).

Chart 4. Employment-Population ratio, Seasonally adjusted 1990-2016, page 7 shows that between 58 and 65% of the population work, i.e. a little over half the population is working.  This is an indication that social benefits like health care should not be tied to working since over a hundred million people do not work.

I think that manufacturing jobs are declining in the U.S. because of trade deals that permanently send those jobs overseas.  These jobs typically included benefits.  But most service sector jobs today are part time or "independent contractor" (Wiki) and have no benefits.  Also many main St. jobs are part time rather than full time, which is done mainly to avoid paying benefits, the key one being medical coverage.  So the percentage of available work force who have jobs with benefits is much less than the BLS data indicates.

The US government could start a "jobs for all" program offering an entry level job to anyone who wants one based on MMT.  This would be in parallel with the existing safety net programs now in place.  People in this program would find it much easier to get a better job in the private sector since they would have a current track record of being a good worker.  In all probability most if not all of the current safety net programs would be reduced since these would be full time jobs.  Note the pay rate needs to be below Walmart or McDonald's so that it does not compete with the private sector.

The Philips curve (Wiki) has been shown to be wrong, so full employment does not automatically lead to inflation.  The curve may of had some value pre 1971.  So, under MMT, it's probable that a zero rate of unemployment is not inflationary.  One MMT adage is that the key indicator for limiting government spending is the length of the unemployment line.  When it is at zero length further spending will cause inflation.  This is because at that point the government is in competition with the private sector.

It appears that an Employer of Last Resort (Wiki)(CFEPS) or jobs guarantee (Wiki) can be done without an impact on inflation.  The idea of a  Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (Wiki :NAIRU) is false.  According to MMT, government policy now sets the unemployment rate as a result of trying to control inflation.  Unemployment can be near zero if that's what the government wants without unacceptable inflation.  Also note that although the Federal Reserve Act says that Fed should control "price stability" (ie. inflation) and jobs, according to MMT it can do neither.

As a general rule, mild inflation seems to be desirable.  "Economists generally believe that deflation (Wiki) is a problem in a modern economy because it increases the real value of debt, and may aggravate recessions and lead to a deflationary spiral".  Note:  all the Wiki deflation examples are post 1971, so this idea may be in line with MMT?

Note that the productivity of the job is not part of it's MMT economic value.  For a silly example if  you hire someone to dig a hole then fill it there's a tremendous benefit to the economy.  That's because the worker will spend pretty much all the money he earns and so will help create other jobs where he spends.  But the jobs can be much better for society such as when the job includes training for needed jobs to maintain infrastructure and to build new infrastructure such as a nation wide fiber optic network in a similar manner to the interstate highway system.  Infrastructure maintenance is an on going requirement and is not being done at any level of government.  So a key target for the jobs program would be to maintain it not only at the federal level, but also at the state and local levels.

The jobs went overseas because of trade agreements we made that allowed corporations to do that. But the benefit of these deals is positive for both sides.  It's just that on the negative side jobs are permanently lost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA#U.S._deindustrialization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA%27s_effect_on_United_States_employment 

Note: caution is needed when looking at exports and imports after NAFTA because we then started exporting a lot of sub assemblies to Mexico and Canada that came back to us a final products.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GATT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_World_Trade_Organization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Standards_in_the_World_Trade_Organisation#Problems_with_the_Current_Approach

From what I've read the TPP (Wiki) is not in the best interests of U.S. people, but is going to be good for business profits. I expect, if passed, it would also result in taking away many more jobs.  Part of the population will be able to buy more imported goods at low prices, but at the same time there will be jobs permanently lost increasing the unemployment.

I can think of different types of programs:

• Helicopter Money (Wiki) - This is being tried out (2016) by Y Combiner (Moving Forward on Basic Income) giving 100 people in Oakland free money.  Note this is pretty much helicopter money, not a job.  This has a huge advantage over a jobs program in that there is a much lower administrative cost than a federal jobs program.
• Jobs through state, county or city governments where the wages are paid for by the federal government.  This would result in improvements in infrastructure, but also could help in other ways since there's a broad spectrum of job skills available.  Again this has the advantage of simpler federal administrative costs.
  
• The U.S. needs a fiber optic backbone system so everyone in the U.S. has "broadband" internet access. As is is now there's a large part of the U.S. without broadband internet, but it's now a requirement for everyone, especially students doing homework (at home not at school).  What good does it do to supply students with a laptop if when they get home they cannot connect it to broadband and that's required for them to do their homework?  The FCC decision to include the internet under Title II (as a utility) and the confirmation of that by the district court decision (FCC).  So a federal jobs program to install a fiber network in a way similar to the TVA project to electrify rural America is now needed.  This would be more costly from an administrative aspect, but is very much needed.

Mark Blyth says that in the not too distant future 10% of the world's population can manufacture all the products for the other 90%.  This scale of change has already happened in agriculture and it's in the process of happening for manufacturing, white collar and some blue collar jobs. 
This means a new type of economic system will be needed.  Maybe something like AmeriCorps but with a more expanded list of jobs, higher pay and a more inclusive age range.  This would not in itself provide the answer but is an example of a way to provide jobs to replace those that are being permanently being eliminated.

Productivity

When new factories are built they include more and more automation.  The decreases the number of jobs.

When I was working as an engineer a number of times I proposed building an automatic microwave test system.  The bean counters wanted a proposal showing that the all up cost of the system would be less than the labor savings over the life of the system.  The first few times I did that the system was not built.  But eventually we built a system.  That was when we made a startling discovery.  There were intangible benefits that were orders of magnitude higher than the labor savings.  That's to say a company gets financial benefits far in excess of the labor saving when they automate.  This is why modern factories are using as much automation as they can get.  It's also the reason that you will not see factories removing automated equipment.

Trump Election Upset

Nov 10 2016

I think Trump won because:

• of unemployment (but he blamed trade deals, but I think increased productivity (often automation) is as big if not a bigger factor)
  
• Clinton is an establishment politician whereas Trump is not a politician (when I ran for the House of Representatives I did not wear a suit and tie to help make it clear I'm not a politician).  Trump did many things that would disqualify him if he were a politician , but were forgiven by his supporters since he's not a politician.  It may be that he did these things to emphasize that he is not a politician and at he same time to attack the Republican party for their Southern Strategy (Wiki).  

The New York Times published "How Trump Reshaped the Election Map" showing changes (mostly Democrat to Republican) in the mid North East (aka: the rust belt).  There's a lesson from car sales that a disgruntled customer will tell 10 friends, but that was before the internet (think YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, &Etc) where millions of people will view a video in a matter of days.  So, for everyone who looses their job permanently because of a plant closing the number of people who know about it is much more than just immediate friends and family.

After Trump won the election there are articles saying Trump's solution is higher import tariffs, but they are wrong.  The loss of domestic jobs is only partially caused by exporting jobs the larger factor is increase in productivity.  Not only does this result in fewer jobs, but because of the post Ronald Reagan tax cuts it also results in obscene C-suite annual paychecks.  I think the marginal income tax rate needs to be about 50% to discourage that.  Note that stores like Walmart, Harbor Freight, Dollar Stores and many "Main St" shops are selling imported products for much less than a domestic product would sell for.  These low cost products are the benefit side of trade deals, the lost jobs and closed businesses are the cost of trade deals.

Productivity increases have been and will continue to eliminate jobs on a large scale.  Note this will effect not only blue collar jobs but also white collar jobs.  This means that basing the economics of families on wage earners is no a viable thing to do.

UN Conference on Trade and Development - Robots threaten up to two thirds of developing country jobs, but could be an opportunity too - 8 Nov 2016

FiveThirtyEight - What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money? Apr 25, 2016 - While mostly about the Swiss Universal Basic Income plan that was considered at the national level, it's making the same point as the above UN article, namely: "In a much-written-about 2013 paper, two Oxford economists estimated that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs were at risk of computerization. Increasingly, technologists envision basic income as a “hack,” or fix, to the system — it offers a way of coping with an economic future dominated by automation, a fallback plan for when most human labor isn’t valued or needed."

NYT - Trump Rides a Wave of Fury That May Damage Global Prosperity By Peter S. Goodman, Nov. 9, 2016
NYT - More Wealth, More Jobs, but Not for Everyone: What Fuels the Backlash on Trade By Peter S. Goodman, Sept. 28, 2016
Note that even China has this problem with modern factories highly automated creating unemployment.
Universal Basic Income for everyone potentially could cause inflation if it drives up wages for the remaining jobs.  If you don't like your job and are willing to live at the basic income level you can quit your job and do anything you like. 
The great thing about a basic income is that it will be spent making business very happy because they have buyers.  It's a win-win (Wiki) situation.

Bill Clinton was the first Democrat to adopt the Republican strategy of getting large corporate donations.  Clinton choose Wall St. as the source of these donations and in that process the Democrats quit being the party of working men.  The 2016 election say working men leave the Democratic party.  The mistake they made is that now neither parts represents them.  The Republican party gets their big donations from business, not working people.

Russian (Iran, Turkey & Guiana) Connection

I'm interested in this topic since it mirrors my comments above about how the U.S. today looks like Russia in the 1960s, i.e. a third world country, banana republic, &Etc.  This has nothing to do with why H.R. Clinton lost the 2016 election.  The reason for that is the same as for brexit (Wiki) and Emmanuel Macron (Wiki, a man with no political experience, just like Trump).  These results were a vote against the establishment.  You might say a brick through the window.  That's to say the people who made these votes knew full well that the result will be breaking the current government, but they are willing to pay that price in the hope of changing it (an idea Obama used to win his election and which he failed in a big way to deliver on).  See: Democrats the same as Republicans on the big issues above.

There were a number of Russian incidents related to Trump.

1977 April 7 -  Ivana Zelníčková (Wiki) marries Donald Trump - she was born in Czechoslovakia (Wiki)
2005 January 22 -  Melanija Knavs (Wiki) marries Donald Trump - she was born in Slovenia (Wiki)
2005 June - AP March 22, 2017 Exclusive: Before Trump job, Manafort worked to aid Putin - pitched to Oleg Deripaska (Wiki) and was paid from 2006 to at least 2009
2006 November 1 - Alexander Litvinenko falls sick  and on November 22, 2006 he dies from polonium-210 poisoning.   The ²¹⁰Po was discovered by Dr Matthew Puncher who worked for the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment (Wiki).  See 2016 November 24 for Dr. Punchers death.
2008 Trump sells mansion de L'Amitié at 515 N. County Road, Tampa Bay, FL to Dmitry Rybolovlev (Wiki) for $100 million (he paid 40 Million). "The Florida house, with its 475 feet of frontage on the Atlantic Ocean, was in “unlivable” condition when Donald Trump sold it, Ms. Bersheda said. (NYT) "  Dmitry also bought a property from the wife of a Citigroup CEO for a record price (money laundering?).
2009 November 16 - Sergei Magnitsky (Wiki) "dies" in Russian prison (Wiki)
2010 August 16 Gareth Williams (Wiki) dies under suspicious circumstances (see: 2017 June 20 - BuzzFeed) (also see: KGB defector: Russia killed the British spy found in a duffel bag 2015 September 28) Boris Karpichkov (Wiki) was the source of the article
2011 September - Obama promotes Flynn Lieutenant General (Wiki) and assigns him to the Office of the Driector of National Intelligence (Wiki)
2012 April 17 - Obama nominates Flynn (Wiki) to be director of the  DIA (Wiki)
2012 November 10 - Alexander Perepilichny (Wiki) murdered (see BuzzFeed 2017 June 12) - Russian whistle blower relating to $230 million that was taken from the Russian Treasury.
2012 Nov/Dec - Magnitsky Act (Wiki) passed congress - to punish Russian officials responsible for the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky - effects 18 Russians (Wiki) & it repealed the Jackson–Vanik amendment (Wiki) to the Trade Act of 1974.
2013 - "The adviser, Carter Page, met with a Russian intelligence operative named Victor Podobnyy, who was later charged by the US government alongside two others for acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government. (Buzzfeed 2017 April 3)
2013 February 27 - Wikileaks: Re: [OS] US/CT- Unregistered Foreign Agent Cases - covering 2007 to 2009 (Wiki - Stratfor)
2014 April 30 - Obama administration asked Flynn to leave as head of the military (and Defense Intelligence Agency) (Wiki) and he did in August.
2014 August 7 - Michael Flynn retires from military and is no longer head of the DIA.
2014 October 8 - DIA sends letter to recently retired general Michael Flynn explaining his responsibility regarding accepting foreign money. 18USC207(a)(1) Lifetime Ban, 18USC207(a)(2) 2-year ban, 18USC207(c) 1-year cooling off, 18USC207(b) 1-year ban on aiding or advising, 18USC207(f) 1-year ban on assistance to foreign governments, 6. Foreign Compensation Requires Advance Approval (per Constitution A1, S9, C8 (emoluments)
2015 February 27 - Boris Nemtsov (Wiki) assassinated in Moscow (Wiki) - anit-Putin activist
2015 late summer - Michael Flynn meets Trump (WaPo 2016 Aug 15)
2015 Yahoo News: Moscow paid $45,000 for Flynn’s 2015 talk, documents show - Documents -
2016 January - Michael Flynn "...applies to renew his security clearance - using a Form SF-86" (SF86-10.pdf) ^{Note 1}  (The Hill 4/28/17) a month after he traveled to Moscow
2016 January 10 - Seth Rich murdered near his residence in Washington DC (Wiki) - possible link to leaked DNC email? or right wing conspiracy theory.
2016 March - FBI investigation moved back to March (see April 7, 2017 - Pyotr Levashov)
2016 March 15 - Russian Agents hacked Yahoo (NYT) Alexsey Belan,  Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, Karim Baratov - (Indictment)
2016 March 16 - Wikileaks: Hillary Clinton Email Archive - goes on line - her private email server
2016 March - Podesta's emails hacked (Wiki) - Wikileaks: The Podesta Emails -
2016 April - Michael Flynn (it took 3 months to process the January application) has clearance renewed. (NBC)
2016 April - NBCnews 2017 May 8:  Flynn Never Told DIA That Russians Paid Him -
2016 April - DNC emails hacked by Russia and DNC calls in Crowdstrike (Wiki) to investigate
2016 April 11 Briefing by James Clapper: UNLOCKING THE SECRETS: How to Use the Intelligence Community - 102 pages of slides, election stuff starts @ pg 12, but most of the pages after that are redacted.
2016 April 18- S.284  - Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act  (Wiki) because of Russian killing of Magnitsky while he was trying to expose financial fraud
2016 April 27 - Trump Speech at The National Interest Mayflower Hotel - "The Center for the National Interest invited Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and several other ambassadors to the speech." attended by Sessions and Kushner, among other Trump aides.  Looks like there were no real conversations here.  Trump quote from speech: “I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia — from a position of strength only — is possible, absolutely possible,”
2016 May - Aug - RNC pays Hamilton Trading Group $34,100 for Russian connections of HRC (Politico) - Gennady Vasilenko, Jack Platt, Ben Wickham
2016 May 9 - Chris Christie named to be head of Trump Transition team (CNN)
2016 May 18 - LA Times: U.S. intelligence official says foreign spy services are trying to hack presidential campaign networks - James Clapper (see: 2016 April 11): "We’ll probably have more” cyberattacks on the campaign trail"
2016 May 16 - "In May 2016, a Russian military intelligence officer bragged to a colleague that his organization, known as the GRU, was getting ready to pay Clinton back for what President Vladimir Putin believed was an influence operation she had run against him five years earlier as Secretary of State. The GRU, he said, was going to cause chaos in the upcoming U.S. election." (Time 2017 May 18: Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America)
2016 June  - Corey Lewandowski (Wiki) resigns as Trump campaign manager
2016 June -  Jeff Sessions (Wiki) meets with Sergey Kislyak (Wiki) at Heritage Foundation (Wiki) on sidelines of the RNC convention
2016 June -  Podesta's emails go public and Fusion GPS (Wiki) hires Orbis Business Intelligence (Wiki) to investigate (Christopher Steel is Orbis).
2016 June 3 - Rob Goldstone (Wiki) emails Donald Trump Jr. (Wiki) offering "damaging information about Hillary Clinton. (see: 2017 July 10 - NYT) Aras (Wiki) & Emin Agalorov (Wiki) were the references used in the email.  Aras Agalorov was mentioned in the Trump Steele Dossier pg 27 (Wiki, see: 2017 January 10 BuzzFeed).
2016 June 7 - Donald Trump gives speech where he promises a major speech about Hilary Clinton's crimes on 13 June. (YouTube: Donald Trump Primary Night Speech 6/7/2016)
2016 June 9 - (Wiki: Trump campaign–Russian meeting) ) (1) Donald Trump Jr., (2) Jared Kushner & (3) Paul J. Manafort meet with (4) Natalia Veselnitskaya (Wiki) and a (5) translator at Trump Tower. She flew to the U.S. just for this meeting. (See: 2017 July 10 NYT, 2016 June 7 Trump Speech). Maybe 8 people in meeting. 2017 July 15: CNN: Trump Tower Russia meeting: At least eight people in the room) (6) Rinat Akhmetshin (Wiki) involved in hacking email, (7) Rob Goldstone (Wiki) - meeting setup as behest of his client Emin Agalarov (Wiki), son of Aras Agalarov (Wiki), plus at least one more (8) Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze (Wiki) (NYT 2017 July 18: Guest List at Donald Trump Jr.’s Meeting With Russian Expands Again)
2016 June 15 - “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher (Wiki) and Trump,” .."No really"  McCarthy (Wiki, R-Calif.) said,.." (WP: 2017 May 17)
2016 July 6 - Politico: Trump urges Russia to hack Clinton's email -
2016 July 7 or 8 - Carter Page gives speech to Higher Economic School in Moscow (Trump Steele Dossier pg 30)
2016 July  - Christopher Steel (Wiki) supplies dossier (Wiki) to FBI agent in Rome.
2016 July  - FBI starts investigation into Russia helping Trump campaign.
2016 July 22 - Wikileaks publishes DNC email database (source: Guccifer 2.0 (Wiki, DNC email leak) - this is DNC staffer email, not the Podesta emails of 2016 March).
2016 July 25? - Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Wiki) is asked to resign by Obama after the DNC email leak (See: 2016 July 22)
2016 July 25 - Lawfareblog: What Does the US Government Know About Russia and the DNC Hack? -
2016 July 26 - NYT: Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked D.N.C. - DNC emails posted at Wikileaks by "Guccifer 2.0"
2016 July 27 - "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you'll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said, speaking about Hillary Clinton's deleted emails from her private email account from her time as secretary of state. "I think you'll probably be rewarded mightily by our press." (NPR 2016 December 12)
2016 July 31 - NYT:  How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump -
2016 August  & end of September - Trump's server has DNS look up pings from Russian Alpha Bank B and Spectrum Health (tied to DeVos  Prince)
2016 August ?? - The Intercept: Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election - NSA Report: "Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate.." i.e. not private hackers in Russia, but the Russian Government.
2016 August 8 - NYT:  50 G.O.P. Officials Warn Donald Trump Would Put Nation’s Security ‘at Risk’ - Letter -
2016 August 9 - "..Flynn and the Flynn Intel Group (Wiki) signed a contract with Inovo BV (Muckety) for $600,000 over 90 days to run an influence campaign aimed at discrediting Fethullah Gulen (Wiki), an reclusive cleric who lives in Pennsylvania and whom Mr. Erdogan (Wiki) has accused of orchestrating a failed coup in Turkey last summer."
2016 August 14 NYT: Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief - ledger shows Paul Manafort listed for a total of 12.7 million dollars. Viktor F. Yanukovych (Wiki)
2016 August 16 WaPo - Trump adviser Michael T. Flynn on his dinner with Putin and why Russia Today is just like CNN - interview with Michael Flynn
2016 August 18 - NBC:  Donald Trump Aide Paul Manafort Scrutinized for Russian Business Ties - "In 2008, according to court records, senior Trump aide Paul Manafort's firm was involved with a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmytro Firtash (Wiki) in a plan to redevelop a famous New York hotel, the Drake. The total value of the project was $850 million. Firtash's company planned to invest over $100 million, the records say."
2016 August 19 -  Paul Manafort (Wiki) resigned as Trump campaign manager (Russian connections), March 2016 he replaced Corey Lewandowski (Wiki) as Trump's campaign manager.
2016 August 19 -  Paul Manafort creates a shell company and it received millions of dollars (NYT April 12, 2017, 377 Union St)
2016 August 21 - Trump adviser Roger Stone (Wiki, see 2017 May 17 Netflix) repeatedly claimed to know of forthcoming WikiLeaks dumps (CNN: 2017 March 2017) Roger Stone tweets "it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel." - see: 2016 October 3 and October 7 - 5pm
2016 Gardian: British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia - "..GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan (Wiki), passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan (Wiki)." (See August 25, 2016 below)
2016 August 25 - CIA starts classified briefings of a few Congressmen (Wiki: Gang of 8) (NYT 4/7/2017), starting with Harry Reid (Wiki) that Russia is working to get Trump elected (not just trying to break down democracy).  Reid writes to James B. Comey (Wiki) about it, but the FBI had already started an investigation in July 2016.
2016 September 5 - WaPo: U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt November elections  - "...to sow public distrust..." Coordinated by James R. Clapper Jr.
2016 September 8 - Jeff Sessions (Wiki) meets with Sergey Kislyak (Wiki) in Sessions office
2016 September 19 - meeting at Essex House hotel in Manhattan: Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Cavusoglu (Wiki), Berat Albayrak (Wiki, WikiLeaks) the energy minister for Erdogan, president of Turkey (Wiki), former CIA director James Woolsey (Wiki) - Ref WSJ March 24, 2017 -
2016 September 26 - Carter Page resigns as Trump foreign policy advisor
2016 October 3 - Twitter: Roger Stone: "I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp"
2016 October 4 - Brian McCauley receives $5,000 from Michael T. Flynn (see FARA2 below pdf pg 12)
2016 October 7 - 4pm WaPo: Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005 (Access Hollywood tape) -
2016 October 7 - 5pm Wikileaks starts publishing Podesta emails (Wiki, Politifact Dec 18, 2016) one hour after release of Access Hollywood tape.
2016 October 7 - WaPo: U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections - Trump knew the timing of this article's release
2016 October 13 - Brian McCauley receives $3,000 from Michael T. Flynn (see FARA2 below pdf pg 12)
2016 October - see 2017 June 25 WaPo article: Kushner firm’s $285 million Deutsche Bank loan came just before Election Day
2016 October (mid) - FISA court gives permission for the Department of Justice to investigate two banks suspected of being part of the Kremlin’s undercover influence operation (Guardian April 13, 2017) & to investigate Carter Page (WAPO April 11, 2017)
2016 October 17 - a critical date in the Trump-Steele dossier. Probably because of the 7 October official government charge of interference.
2016 October 18 - Brian McCauley admits leaking info on HRC (but not that he received money) (New York Times:  Ex-F.B.I. Official Acknowledges Role in New Clinton Email Controversy)
2016 October 31 - Mother Jones: A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump - the first story about the dossier
2016 October 31 - Slate: Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? - Alfa Bank
2016 November 8 - article in The Hill by Michael Flynn: Our ally Turkey is in crisis and needs our support -
2016 November 8 - (election day) Sergei Krivov (Wiki, assassination) died in Russian Consulate in New York - Mike Pence is running the transition
2016 November 10 - at Oval Office Meeting Obama warrns Trump not to hire Michael Flynn.
2016 November 11 - abcnews: Donald Trump Replaces Chris Christie With Mike Pence as Head of Transition Team -
2016 November 11 - Daily Caller: Trump’s Top Military Adviser Is Lobbying For Obscure Company With Ties To Turkish Government - Mike Flynn
2016 November 17 - Yahoo News: Michael Flynn, Trump’s reported pick for national security adviser, sat in on intel briefings — while advising foreign clients - (see: 2016 November 18 Letter)
2016 November 18 - Letter from Elijah Cummings Ranking Member of House Oversight committee warning about retierd Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
2016 December 1 or 2 - Sergey Kislyak, Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner met at Trump Tower to see if they could use Russian secure communications to talk to people in Russia (WaPo 2017 May 26)
2016 November 24 - (BuzzFeed 2017 June 19 - The Man Who Knew Too Much) - Dr Matthew Puncher died of multiple stab wounds, deemed a "Suicide". "Russian assassins are being allowed to operate in Britain with impunity, 17 current and former high-ranking intelligence officials on both sides of the Atlantic told BuzzFeed News."
2016 December 5 - Brian McCauley receives $15,000 from Michael T. Flynn (see FARA2 below pdf pg 12)
2016 December 9 - John McCain (Wiki) passes a copy of the dossier to James Comey (Wiki)
2016 December (mid) - Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (Wiki: MBZ) visited New York (without telling the Obama administration) and met with Michael T. Flynn,  Steve Bannon & Jared Kushner (Wiki).  This is before the meeting on 2017 January 11 & 12.
2016 December 19 - Andrei Karlov was shot in Turkey (Wiki)
2016 December 20 - Petr Polshikov was shot in Moscow (Evening Standard UK)
2016 December 26 - Oleg Erovinkin died (Wiki) - unnamed information source in the Donald Trump–Russia dossier, an aide to former deputy prime minister Igor Sechin (Wiki)
2016 December - Sergei Mikhailov (FSB) bagged and taken from meeting (USA Today)
2016 December - Michael T. Flynn meets with Heinz-Christian Strache (Wiki), leader of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, at Trump Tower in New York.[62]
2016 December - Ruslan Stoyanov (top manager for Russia's largest cybersecurity firm) bagged and taken from meeting (USA Today)
2016 December (early) - "In early December, Kushner met in New York with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, and he later sent a deputy to meet with Kislyak. Flynn was also present at the early-December meeting, and later that month, Flynn held a call with Kislyak to discuss U.S.-imposed sanctions against Russia. Flynn initially mischaracterized the conversation, even to Vice President Pence — ultimately prompting his ouster from the White House.  Kushner also met in December with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, which has been the subject of U.S. sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine." (WaPo 2017 May 25)
2016 December 29 - Obama Sancations Imposed on Russia for Russian involvement with election (Wiki: Russian Interference with 2016 election) including expelling 35 people and taking over Russian compounds in New York City and Maryland's Eastern Shore.
2016 December 29 - Michael T. Flynn 5 phone calls with Sergey Kislyak (Wiki) Russia's ambassador to the US (call recorded because Kislyak was being watched)
2016 January 4 - Donald F. McGahn II (Wiki), Trump transition lawyer, was informed that Mike Flynn was under investigation by the FBI (see 2017 May 17 NYT)
2017 January 5 - James Woolsey (see Sep 19 2016) quits Trump campaign (why the long time from 19 Sep?)
2017 January 6 - Office of the Director of National Intelligence releases report on Russian involvement in 2016 election (Wiki, ODNI) Russia was involved in election and helped Trump
2017 January 6 - James Comey and other IC leaders give classified briefing to Donald Trump at Trump Tower on the IC assessment concerning Russian efforts to interfere in the election released the same day. (Comey's 7 page written statement)
2017 January 9 - Andrei Malanin found dead in Greece (BBC)
2017 January 10 - Buzzfeed published the uncomfirmed "dossier "These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia" (Wiki: Trump Dossier) dossier written by Christopher Steele, former MI6 agent (Wiki)
2017 January 11 & 12 - meeting at Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean:  Victor Podobnyy, Male1 (Carter Page) meet Erik Prince (founder of Blackwater (Wiki) & brother of Betsy DeVos - sec of Ed) - hosted by Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (Wiki: MBZ) see 2017 April 4 Buzzfeed article.
2017 January ? Michael Flynn blocked a military action against ISIS because Turkey did not want it and has paying him (see 2017 May 17 Miami Herald)
2017 January 20 - Trump Inauguration (Friday)
2017 January 24 - Michael Flynn (Tuesday) tells FBI that he did not talk to Russia about sanctions.  They discussed his "underlying conduct" which was problematic.
2017 Jan 25 - NYT: Top Russian Cybercrimes Agent Arrested (in Moscow) on Charges of Treason - Sergei Mikhailov (a senior officer of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B. which is implicated in US election hacking) bagged and arrested.
2017 Jan 16 - USA Today: Reports: Arrested Russian intel officer allegedly spied for U.S. - In addition to Sergei Mikhailov two others were arrested in the same case: Major Dmitry Dokuchaev (an FDSB officer) and  Ruslan Stoyanov (a computer incidents investigation team leader at Kaspersky Lab (Wiki)),  "Russian media says the FSB believes Mikhailov tipped U.S. intelligence about Vladimir Fomenko and his server rental company "King Servers."
2017 January 26 - Sally Yates goes to White House (Thursday) and tells Don McGahn (Wiki) to warn them that Michael Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail because of lying about sanction talk with Russians.  This is before the agents could write up their 302 reports (Wiki, Rachael Maddow).
2017 January 26 - Alexander Kadakin (Wiki) - died in India 26 Jan 2017
2017 January 27 - Sally Yates (Wiki) goes to White (Friday) House and aswers questions from Don McGahn about why there's a problem with Michael Flynn.
2017 January 27 - Trump invites James Comey to a dinner in the Green Room at 6:30 pm by a phone call around noon the same day. (Comey's 7 page written statement)
2017 January 30 - Sally Yates orders DOJ (Wiki) to defend the Trump's Muslim Ban executive order (Wiki).
2017 January 30 - Trump fires Sally Yates (Monday), says because of her position on Muslim Ban.  But Michael Flynn continued on as National Security Adviser (Wiki) and sat in on classified meetings.
2017 February - Trump asks James B. Comey to shut down investigation of Michael T. Flynn (see 2017 May 16)
2017 February 8 - WaPo asks Michael Flynn if he talked to Russia about sanctions, he answers: no.
2017 February 13 - Michael T. Flynn resigned as National Security Advisor (Wiki).  It appears as if he stayed on in spite of the problems and was only fired after the WaPo broke the story.
22017 February 14 - Trump asks James B. Comey in oval office meeting to shut down investigation of Michael T. Flynn See 2017 May 16 below)
22017 February 14 - Trump when asked about Flynn and Russia says he will look into it.
2017 February 14 Michael T. Flynn DIA suspends access to classified information.
2017 February 14 NYT Feb 14, 1017: Trump Campaign Aids Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence  - Paul Manafort mentioned as was the ongoing FBI investigation. 2017 June 8: Comey says this article has many factual errors.  NYT Response 2017 June 8.
2017 February 14 - After an oval office meeting Trump asks everyone to leave the room except James Comey (Jeff Sessions left the room) and asks Comey to let the Flynn matter go. (Comey's 7 page written statement)
2017 February 15 - Andrew McCabe (Wiki), deputy director of the FBI after 7:30 AM meeting at White House was pulled aside and had a 5 minute one-on-one meeting with the White House Chief of Staff Reince Pribus (Wiki) about the NYT story yesterday (Feb 14).  McCabe (FBI) told Priebus (WH), ‘I want you to know story in NYT is BS," (Time, Feb 24 2017).  Why did he say that? This is improper as it suggests that the executive branch is trying to meddle in Judaical matter om violation of the separation of power part of the Constitution.
2017 February 16 - Wikileaks: CIA espionage orders for the last (2012) French presidential election -
2017 February 16 - WSJ: Spies Keep Intelligence From Donald Trump on Leak Concerns  -
2017February 17 - CNN: Harward says no to national security adviser role - "A friend of Harward's said he was reluctant to take the job because the White House seems so chaotic. Harward called the offer a "s*** sandwich," the friend said.  A Republican official told CNN that Harward made it a condition of taking the job that he could form his own team. In the end, he didn't feel that was the case."
2017 February 18 Reuters: U.S. inquiries into Russian election hacking include three FBI probes - Pittsburgh field office: identify the people behind breaches of the DNC, San Francisco: ID “Guccifer 2”, counterintelligence Washington: informants and foreign communications intercepts
2017 February 20 - Vitaly Churkin died (Wiki)
2017 Feb 21 - Forbes: Vladimir Fomenko, The Only Russian With Known Links To U.S. Political Hacking, Speaks Out -
2017 February 24 WaPo: Trump administration sought to enlist intelligence officials, key lawmakers to counter Russia stories - Sen. Richard Burr (Wiki) and Rep. Devin Nunes (Wiki) made calls to the press.
2017 March 2 - Jeff Sessions recuses himself from any investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign, which would include any Russian interference in the electoral process. (WaPo)
2017 March 4 - Buzzfeed - A Former Trump Adviser Met With A Russian Spy -  Male1 (Carter Page) meet Erik Prince (founder of Blackwater (Wiki))
2017 March 4 - WaPo: Despite early denials, growing list of Trump camp contacts with Russians haunts White House -
2017 March 4 - Wilileaks: Hillary Clinton Email Archive - updated today
2017 March 5 - Steve Bannon (Wiki) removed from National Security Council
2017 March 7 - Michael T. Flynn files under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) + Supplemental Attachment (FARA2).
2017 March 7 -  TRMS:  More Pieces Of Donald Trump Russia Dossier Check Out - (see 2017 January 10 - Buzzfeed) - Mikhail Kalugin (pg 22: misspelled Kulagin in dossier)
2017 March 9 - Buzzfeed: Nigel Farage Just Visited The Ecuadorian Embassy in London - where Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks,  is staying
2017 March 9 - (CBSnews, Fox &Etc) Mike Pence and Sean Spicer say the first they knew Michael Flynn was lobbing for Turkey was from his FARA filing (a lie, see 2016 Nov 8 & 2016 Nov 11 + there's many more)
2017 March 10 - The Hill: Sessions asks 46 Obama-era US attorneys to resign -
2017 March 10 - Monica Crowley (Wiki) had problems getting into Trunmp's NSC because of Plagiarism today filed as agent (FARA) for Victor Pinchuk (Wiki)
2017 March 11 - NYT: U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara Says He Was Fired After Refusing to Quit - US Attorney in SDNY where international money laundering and financial crimes are tried.
2017 March 13 - National Law Journal: Ex-DOJ Insider on Trump's Prosecutor Purge and Life After Government - Matthew Axelrod (Wiki) - "The transition team recommended to the incoming administration that they not get rid of the U.S. attorneys all at one time, and that recommendation was adopted.  It's not clear what changed and led the administration to get rid of everyone all at once." 
2017 March 20 - House Intelligence Committee open hearings (Wiki) testimony by James Comey and NSA director Michael S. Rogers (Wiki) testify
2017 March 22 - AP Exclusive: Before Trump job, Manafort worked to aid Putin - Oleg Deripaska (Wiki) -
2017 March 22 - Mr. Gorokhov lawyer for Sergei Magnitsky "fell" out a window in his apartment building. He was to appear in court on 29 March 2017 & in New York in May on money laundering.   See S.284 & Nov 16, 2009 above
2017 March 22 - House Oversight Committee (Wiki) asks the director of the FBI (James Comey) for "..Flynn’s communications with and payments from Russian, Turkish, or other foreign sources, including the Kremlin-backed media outlet RT, between the time of his retirement in 2014 to the present." (2017-03-22.Chaffetz-EEC-to-Comey-FBI-re-Flynn.pdf)
2017 March 28 - House Intelligence Committee open hearing cancelled by Devin Nunes (Wiki) & he was removed from the committee - so Sally Yates testimony was not heard then.
2017 March 30 - Trump phones Comey in the morning and complains that the Russia investigation as “a cloud”. He asked what we could do to “lift the cloud.” (Comey's 7 page written statement)
2017 March 31 - WaPo: Flynn offers to cooperate with congressional probe in exchange for immunity -
2017 April 2 Financial Times: FBI plans to create special unit to co-ordinate Russia probe - "central manager" - maybe the resources needed (see: 2017 May 5?) were for this?
2017 April 3 - WaPo: Blackwater founder held secret Seychelles meeting to establish Trump-Putin back channel - see 2017 11 Jan for meeting.
2017 April 4 - Buzzfeed:
2017 April 5 - CBS: U.S. deports Russian spy who posed as bank employee - convicted spy Evgeny Buryakov - Victor Podobnyy,  Carter Page
2017 April 7 - Pyotr Levashov/ joint US-Spanish arrest in Spain, hacker: mainly a criminal, but also supplied Russian government with data on specific individuals (WAPO) "...linked to America’s 2016 election hacking..." Kelihos botnet (Wiki) & Waledac botnet (Wiki, Rachael Maddow)
2017 April 11 - Trump calls Comey  and asked what I had done about his request that I “get out” (Comey's 7 page written statement)
2017 April 12 - AP Exclusive: Manafort firm received Ukraine ledger payout - This means that Paul Manafort not only was listed on the ledger (see: 2016 August 14) but actually received the payments.
2017 April 12 - WAPO story that Paul Manafort will register as a foreign agent, but as of : 4/13/17, 4/14/17, 4/25/17, 5/10/17, 5/11/17, 5/12/17, 5/18.17 only the Kelly listing appears on the FARA web page, only a 1986 registration for Kelly, Scruggs & Heales alias Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly Public Affairs Company.
2017 April 13 - The Sun, UK -MOSCOW MONEY Ex-MI6 chief accuses Donald Trump of secretly borrowing from Russia to keep his property empire afloat during the financial crisis-
2017 April 20 - Jason Chaffetz (Wiki) abruptly quits his position as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee (he signed the 21 April 2017 letter to the white house).
2017 April 21 - House Oversight Committee requests documents from White House (Oversight Committee Requests Documents on Trump Organization’s Treatment of Foreign Government Payments)
2017 April 17 - DIA sends letter to General Flynn in 2014 at time of his retirement re: Constitution does not allow him to accept foreign money (Reuters)
2017 April 25 - Trump refuses House Oversight Committee request for Flynn documents. (The Hill)
2017 April 26 - NYT: Bribe Cases, a Jared Kushner Partner and Potential Conflicts - There's a case currently in New York courts relating to bribery in Guinea (Wiki) because a New York bank was involved.  Beny Steinmetz (Wiki), the owner of the company doing the bribes has been making real estate loans to Jared Kushner (Wiki).  This might be a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (Wiki).  This has been know since the Nov 7, 2012issue of the Financial Times article: Guinea - What Lies Beneath.
2017 April 28 - TRMS on Michael Flynn video - [See 2016 Nov 8 The Hill, 2016 Nov 11 Daily Caller, 2017 March 9] Jeff Sessions spinning story - "Why are they lying?"
2017 April 30 - Trump interview with CBS - Transcript -re. General Flynn:  "PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Excuse me. I didn't realize this, when he went to Russia, it was 2015 and he was on the Obama clearance. When General Flynn came to us, as you now know, he already had the highest clearance you can have. I think the same clearance as the president of the United States would have. He had this really high clearance. And, by the way, they're so devastated because this only came up two days ago. "
2017 April 2 - Time: President Trump and Vladimir Putin Had a 'Very Good' Phone Call  - Putin asks Trump to meet with Laslatov and Kislack in the oval office.
2017 May 5? - (NYT  2017 May 10) "Days before he was fired as F.B.I. director, James B. Comey asked the Justice Department for more prosecutors and other personnel to accelerate the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election."  Comey made this request to "...Rod J. Rosenstein (Wiki), the deputy attorney general, whose memo was used to justify Mr. Comey’s abrupt dismissal on Tuesday."
2017 May 8 - private meeting between James Comey, Richard Burr (Wiki) and Mark Warner (Wiki), see TRMS 2017 May 25) - it may be a rumor that Comey asked for more resources prior to being fired.
2017 May 8 - In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee says that "..the underlying conduct that general Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself." She would not go into details because it's classified.  This is much more than Flynn lying.  James Clapper (Wiki) testified that when said that there was no investigation he was speaking from ignorance (he was not aware of the FBI investigation).  Dianne Feinstein (Wiki) asked both Yates and Clapper "..over the spring of 2016 multiple European allies passed on additional information to the United States about contacts between the Trump Campaign and Russians.  Is this accurate"?  (confirming the 2017 February 14 NYT story) Sally Yates: I can't answer that. James Clapper: "Yes it is and it's also quite sensitive". "The specifics are quite sensitive".  Mr. Lindsey Graham (Wiki): "General Clapper, during your investigation of all things Russia, did you ever find a situation where a Trump business interest in Russia gave you concern?  Clapper: "Not in the course of the preparation of the intelligence community assessment (see: 2017 January 6).  Graham: "Since"? Clapper: I can't comment on that, because that impacts ... .investigation".
2017 May 8 - (Monday) shortly after James Clapper and Sally Yates testify before Senate, White House has news release: WaPo - U.S. poised to expand military effort against Taliban in Afghanistan - see the movie "Wag the Dog" (Wiki, IMBD).
2017 May 9 - Rod J. Rosenstein (Wiki) writes memo to Jeff Sessions making the dast to fire Comey.  This is the same day Trump tells Rosenstein and Sessions that he will fire Comey.
2017 May 9 - Jeff Sessions fires James Comey (Wiki, Rachael Maddow, CNN:Jeffrey Toobin (Wiki)).  Jeff Sessions has already recused himself (see 2017 March 2) from anything to do with the investigation of Trump (and related to the Clinton campaign), so how can be fire Comey?
2017 May 10 - Russians Sergei Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak meet with Rex Tillerson (Wiki) at the State Dept. and with Trump in the Oval Office.
2017 May 10 - Senate Intelligence Committee (Wiki) has sent a request to the Financial Crimes Unit (Wiki: FinCEN) of the Treasury Department (Wiki) about information they may have about Trump or his associates. (TRMS: Donald Trump Fires James Comey As Investigations Into Russia Ties Heat Up)
2017 May 10 - Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenas "...records of any emails, phone calls, meetings and financial dealings with Russians." from Michael T. Flynn. (NYT)
2017 May 10 - TRMS:  New FBI Director Andrew McCabe Compromised By Serious Conflict - see: 2017 February 15
2017 May 11 - NYT: In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred. - (TRMS 2017 Jun 8))
2017 May 11 WaPo: Senate Democrats demand answers from Rod Rosenstein about involvement in Comey firing - Letter from Committee on Appropriations (Patrick Leahay & Jeanne Shaheen) to Rod Rosenstien asking about the increase of resources asked for by Comey for the Russian investigation.
2017 May 11 TRMS: DOJ Won't Say If Jeff Sessions Is Recused On Paul Manafort - Paul Manafort has not registered with FARA (see 2017 April 12 above), so Rachael has been asking the DOJ if Jeff Sessions has recused himself from dealing with Paul Manafort and the DOJ has not answered.  Note that Sessions fired Comey even though he was recused from anything related to the Trump campaign or Clinton campaign which should include Manafort.  Nixon was impeached for interfering with an investigation and Manafort may be the key witness against Trump.
2017 May 11 - Vanity Fair:  Inside Trump's comming war with the FBI - "Another F.B.I. insider points out that while the media has focused on the investigation of possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign, there are actually multiple inquiries in progress. “There’s also a cyber investigation, about the hacking and whether crimes were committed,” he says. “And then there’s the business side: Was there money laundering going on? Money from these Russian plutocrats that’s been washed through Trump’s real estate and businesses? That’s gotten overlooked, but Preet Bharara and the Southern District were supposedly looking into that.” They were until April anyway, when Trump and Sessions canned Bharara along with 45 other U.S. attorneys.
2017 May 11 - WaPo: Here’s how the Russians might have snuck a recording device into the Oval Office - the day after he fired Comey, Trump had a meeting with Sergey Lavrov, Sergey Kislyak and a photographer from Tass where all U.S. reporters were excluded.  The visit to the oval office was at the request of Vladimir Putin (Politico).
2017 May 12 - Letter from four senators to Michael E. Horowitz (Wiki), Inspector General of the DOJ asking for investigation into Comey's firing
2017 May 12 - NYT:  Letter From Tax Firm on Russian Connections in Trump's Tax Returns - Russian money directly to Trump: 2013 Miss Universe $12.2 million, 2008 Florida Property profit of $54 million (95 - 41) &  misc money.
2017 May 12 - WSJ: Financial-Crimes Monitor to Share Records in Trump-Russia Probe - TRMS - "One person said that without them, though, the committee wouldn't be able to reach a conclusion on whether there was collusion between Trump associates and Russia during last year's campaign."
2017 May 12 - WSJ: Former Trump Advisor Paul Manafort's Bank Records Sought in Probe - Citizens Financial Group Inc. made the loan of $2.7M. . . " . .has spent and borrowed tens of millions of dollars in connection with property across the U.S. over the past decade,.."
2017 May 15 - WaPo: Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador - “This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”  Thomas P. Bossert (Wiki) notified CIA & NSA.
2017 May 15 - TRMS: Donald Trump Shares Highly Classified Info With Russian Officials, part 2 - See: 2017 April 3 WaPo and 2017 January 11 & 12 (part 2) WSJ: Shane Harris (Wiki),  David Priess (Amazon: President's Book of Secrets), Ned Price (Wiki)
2017 May 15 - Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (Wiki: MBZ) met with Trump at the White House.
2017 May 16 - NYT: Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation - 2017 Feb 14  in Oval office.  Obstruction of Justice (Wiki).  Comey's friend leaked his unclassified memo of the meeting (Comey's 7 page written statement)
2017 May 16 - Steth Meyers: A Closer Look - Trump campaign clips of Trump on classified information.  "The only thing he got wrong was the president's name."
2017 May 16 - NBC: Manafort Got $3.5M Mystry Mortage, Paid No Tax - Feds Subpoena Records for $3.5M Mystery Mortgage on Manafort’s Home - "Manafort's name and signature do not appear on any of the loan documents that are publicly available."  Funding from Spruce Capital (official web page) a co-founder is Joshua Crane (S3 bio) Note_2 who has done real estate deals with Trump and funded by Alexander Rovt (Wiki) who over donated to the trump campaign and had the balance refunded.  See: 2016 August 19
2017 May 17 - WP:  Deputy attorney general appoints special counsel to oversee probe of Russian interference in election - Robert Mueller (Wiki)
2017 May 17 - NYT: Trump Team Knew Flynn Was Under Investigation Before He Came to White House -
2017 May 17 - Miami Herald: Report: Flynn blocked military move Turkey opposed - "Days before President Donald Trump took office, incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn blocked a military plan against the Islamic State group that was opposed by Turkey, a country he had been paid more than $500,000 to advocate for, the McClatchy news service reported." Treason (Wiki)?
2017 May 17 - Baily Beast: Donald Trump Talked Michael Flynn Into White House Job - and Wants Him Back in the Administration - Trump liked Flynn's book "The Field of Fight" (Amazon)
2017 May 17 - Netflix streaming movie: Get Me Roger Stone (IMDB) - includes Paul Manafort (Wiki: Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly) - the founders of "dirty tricks"
2017 May 17 - NYT: Trump Team Knew Flynn Was Under Investigation Before He Came to White House - "Michael T. Flynn told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation..."
2017 May 18 - Reuters: Exclusive: Trump campaign had at least 18 undisclosed contacts with Russians: sources -  6 calls between Sergei Kislyak and Trump advisers, Viktor Medvedchuck (Wiki) is the only other Russian name mentioned.
2017 May 18 - Politico: Pence stands by claim he didn't know about Flynn lobbying investigation - (TRMS 2017 May 19)
2017 May 18 - NBC: Pence Creates PAC Ahead of 2018, 2020 Elections - "The Great America Committee" FEC Form 1 Filing, Cabell Hobbs (USA Today), Leadership PACs can accept individual donations of up to $5,000. Nick Ayers (Wiki) & Marty Obst to run the PAC.
2017 May 19 - WaPo: Russia probe reaches current White House official, people familiar with the case say - "...a current White House official as a significant person of interest,..." rumored to be Jared Kushner (see: 2016 December ?? above)
2017 May 19 - NYT: Trump Told Russians That Firing ‘Nut Job’ Comey Eased Pressure From Investigation - This will be the basis of an obstruction of justice (Wiki) criminal investigation.
2017 May 19 - NYT: F.B.I. Once Warned G.O.P. Congressman That Russian Spies Were Recruiting Him - Dana Rohrabacher of California
2017 May 20 - NYT:  House Inquiry Turns Attention to Trump Campaign Worker With Russia Ties - Michael Caputo  linked to Trump campaign, Gazprom Media, Roger Stone
2017 May 22 - Michael Flynn refuses in writing to provide documents after  Senate Intelligence committee subpoena citing Fifth Amendment privilege for documents.
2017 May 22 - WaPo:  Can Michael Flynn refuse to turn over documents to Congress? Yes — but he risks jail. -
2017 May 22 -  Daily Mail: White House chief of staff Reince Preibus and top aide Steve Bannon desert Middle East trip and return to D.C. -
2017 May 22 - WaPo: Trump asked intelligence chiefs to push back against FBI collusion probe after Comey revealed its existence - "during the 2016 election"
2017 May 23 - Politico: FEC member urges escalated Trump-Russia inquiry - "...whether Russian agents paid for Facebook ads to spread damaging stories about Hillary Clinton..."
2017 May 24 - abc: Classified Senate briefing expands to include Russian cyber firm under FBI scrutiny - "..Kaspersky Lab executives with previous ties to Russian intelligence and military agencies.."
2017 May 25 - TRMS: Senate Intel Briefed On Cyber Firm With Odd Donald Trump-Russia Ties -
2017 May 25 - WaPo: Jared Kushner now a focus in Russia investigation - "Kushner, who held meetings in December with the Russian ambassador and a banker from Moscow..." Sergey Kislyak, Sergey Gorkov ( head of Vnesheconombank)
2017 May 31 - WaPo: Trump administration moves to return Russian compounds in Maryland and New York - see 2016 Dec 29
2017 June 1 - Yahoo: How the Trump administration’s secret efforts to ease Russia sanctions fell short - (TRMS) - Trump tried to lift sanctions as soon as he took office, but State Dept. staffers got Congress to start the process to pass a law to stop that from happening, then Flynn was fired and that took the heat off.
2017 June 2 - Guardian:  Nigel Farage is 'person of interest' in FBI investigation into Trump and Russia -
2017 June 7 - Senate hearing (NPR starts about 19 minutes in): Dan Coats (Wiki), Mike Rodgers (Wiki), FBI Dir Andrew McCabe (Wiki) & Rod Rosenstein (Wiki) all refused to answer questions about their conversations with Trump.  This in my opinion seemed to confuse Rachael Maddow (Trump Officials Refuse To Answer Senate Questions, Jun 7, 2017) where they can site no legal basis for refusing to answer questions from the Senate committee who's job it is to provide oversight of the intelligence community (neither classification nor the 5th amendment were cites as legal justifications for not answering).  But if Bob Mueller (Wiki) had issued a gag order because of his criminal investigation the result would be what happened here.
2017 June 8 - Senate hearing with Comey (C-Span)  - Comey's 7 page written statement - (00:15:04) Comey said in his opening,  (00:17:13)"...The administration then choose to defame me and more importantly the FBI, by saying the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in it's leader.  (emotionally) Those were lies, plain and simple." - (00:25:52) Burr: "WHEN YOU READ THE DOSSIER, WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION GIVEN THAT IT WAS 100% DIRECTED AT THE PRESIDENT ELECT?  Comey:  "NOT A QUESTION I CAN ANSWER IN AN OPEN SETTING, MR. CHAIRMAN."
2017 June 12 - BuzzFeeed: Poison in the System - Alexander Perepilichny (Wiki) - "murder was sanctioned by Putin"

2017 June 19 - HuffPost: Michael Flynn Worked With Foreign Cyberweapons Group That Sold Spyware Used Against Political Dissidents - " It’s also unusual for former U.S. intelligence officials to work with foreign cybersecurity outfits."
2017 June 20 - BuzzFeed: The Secrets Of The Spy In The Bag - Gareth Williams (Wiki) died 2010 August 16- "... helping the NSA trace international money-laundering routes that are used by organised crime groups including Moscow-based mafia cells."
2017 June 25 - WaPo: Kushner firm’s $285 million Deutsche Bank loan came just before Election Day -
2017 June 27 DMP International, LLC, wholly owned by Paul Manafort registered with FARA.
He could have filed just one form, but used many forms instead.

Date Stamped	View Document	Registration #	Registrant Name	Document Type	Brooke's Comment
06/27/2017	Registration Statement	6440	DMP International, LLC	Registration Statement	6 pgs,  REg No. 6440 Date and place of organization: June 29, 2011, Delaware employee: Richard W. Gates III Principal: Ukrainian Party of Regions
06/27/2017	Supplemental Statement	6440	DMP International, LLC	Supplemental Statement	11 pgs, "8/24/12    2500.00   Vernon Parker - Arizona State Office" 14a Receipts: Date 2012 Foreign Principal  Purpose Amount Jan Party of Regions  Services Rendered $225,000.00 Feb " " $1,950,000.00 March " " $700,000.00 April " " $1,350,000.00 May " " $535,000.00 June " " $650,000.00 - Aug " " $620,000.00 Sep " " $1,280,000.00 Oct " " $400,000.00 Nov " " $4,399,500.00 Total $12,109,500
06/27/2017	Supplemental Statement	6440	DMP International, LLC	Supplemental Statement	11 pgs "Provided strategic counsel and advice to members of the Party of Regions regarding their interactions with U.S. government officials and other Western influential persons to advance the goal of greater political and economic integration between the Ukraine and the West.  Provided advice to the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, which was also working for the same purpose. " "10/30/12 Email to Ambassador John Tefft regarding U.S. statement on Ukrainian elections. " "8/24/12 $2500.00   Vernon Parker - Arizona State Office"
06/27/2017	Supplemental Statement	6440	DMP International, LLC	Supplemental Statement	11pgs "1/20/2014   Party of Regions    Services Rendered   $500,000.00"
06/27/2017	Supplemental Statement	6440	DMP International, LLC	Supplemental Statement	11 pgs Jan - June 2012 14a Receipts-Monies: "see attached" 15a Disbursements-Monies: "see attached" 15a Disbursements: First 6 months of 2012 Date Contractor  Purpose  Amount 5/16/2012 Fabrizio Ward Associates LLC Polling and surveys $35,000.00 6/27/2012 Rabin Strasburg LLC  (no internet presence) Media consulting services $91,693.00 Last 6 months of 2012 Date Contractor  Purpose  Amount 7/31/2012 Rabin Strasburg LLC Consulting services and expenses  $65,631.00 8/28/2012 Steven J. Brown Political and media outreach $20,000.00 8/31/2012 Rabin Strasburg LLC Consulting services and expenses  $74,265.00 9/4/2012 Fabrizio Ward Associates LLC Polling and surveys $73,500.00 10/1/2012 Rabin Strasburg LLC Consulting services and expenses  $53,899.00 10/1/2012 Steven J. Brown  Political and media outreach $5,000.00 10/5/2012 Christopher Spence Election data analysis $10,000.00 10/5/2012 Clear Dialogue LLC Election integrity consulting services $10,500.00 10/31/2012 Clear Dialogue LLC Election integrity consulting services $10,500.00 10/31/2012 Rabin Strasburg LLC Consulting services and expenses  $83,832.00 11/7/2012 Fabrizio Ward Associates LLC Polling and surveys $35,000.00 11/7/2012 Fabrizio Ward Associates LLC Polling and surveys $35,000.00 11/19/2012 Clear Dialogue LLC Election integrity consulting services $12,000.00 11/19/2012 Clear Dialogue LLC  (Ejaz Khan, director) Election integrity consulting services $6,935.44 11/29/2012 Fabrizio Ward Associates LLC Polling and surveys $35,000.00 11/29/2012 Steven J. Brown  Political and media outreach $5,000.00 12/28/2012 Steven J. Brown  Political and media outreach $5,000.00 Total for the year 632,755.44 Travel: 648,840.83 + 769928.53 = 1,418,769.36 for 2012 Meals/Living Exp: 88404.45 + 99812.72 = 188,217.17 for 2012 Total Travel & Meals/Living = 1,606,986.53 Grand Total all expenses:  2,239741.97
06/27/2017	Ukrainian Party of Regions	6440	DMP International, LLC	Exhibit AB	4pgs. "Provided strategic counsel and advice to members of the Party of Regions regarding certain interactions with U.S. government officials and other Western influential persons to advance the goal of greater political and economic integration between the Ukraine and the West.  "
06/27/2017	Gates III, Richard W.	6440	DMP International, LLC	Short-Form	3pgs, Rick Gates  "see attached"
06/27/2017	Supplemental Statement	6440	DMP International, LLC	Supplemental Statement	12 pgs, Jan to June 2013   Reg No. 6440 Disbursements in 2013, (my summary) Contractor  Purpose Amount Fabrizio Ward Associates LLC Polling and surveys $65,000 Steven J. Brown  (IMDB) Political and media outreach $5,000 Konstantin Kilimnik  (Politico 2017 Mar 8) Professional services and administrative overhead for Kiev operations $455,500 Total for 2013 $525,500 Travel & Meals/Living Exp total for 2013: $870,194.05
06/27/2017	Manafort, Paul J.	6440	DMP International, LLC	Short-Form	3 pgs, 11: "Focused on electing Party of Regions' candidates at the national and regional levels in the Ukraine by implementing pro-democratic campaign activities, engaging in party building activities, developing a party platform and political agenda, and implementing election planning, election integrity, and international election monitoring programs.  Provided strategic counsel and advice to members of the Party of Regions regarding their interactions with U.S. government officials and other Western influential persons to advance the goal of greater political and economic integration between the Ukraine and the West.  Communicated with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev regarding developing events in the Ukraine. " 12: Provided strategic counsel and advice to members of the Party of Regions regarding their interactions with U.S. government officials and other Western influential persons to advance the goal of greater political and economic integration between the Ukraine and the West.
06/27/2017	Exhibit C	6440	DMP International, LLC	Exhibit C	DMP International LLC Operating Agreement written 1 Sep 2011. Class A Members: Paul J. Manafort & Richard W. Gates. Membership Interest:  Paul J. Manafort 100%

2017 June 29 - WSJ:  GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn - If they could get the emails from Clinton's private server (they did not) then they would get them to Flynn and/or his son.
2017 July 6 - Trump meets with Putin at G20.
2017 July 7 - TRMS: Vladimir Putin Regime Marked By Graft And Corruption Part 1 of 4 - (see BuzzFeed 2017 June 12 above), Boris Nemtsov (Wiki) testified before the US Foreign Relations Subcommittee (SD-419) regarding the  Magnitsky Act (see: 2012 Nov/Dec).
2017 July 10 - NYT:  Russian government sought to aid Trump’s candidacy, according to email seeking meeting - See 2016 June 9 above.
2107 July 12 - McClatchy: Trump-Russia investigators probe Jared Kushner-run digital operation - looking for US help in what to do with Russian bots
2017 July 12 - NYT: Trump Campaign Is Sued Over Leaked Emails Linked to Russians - 46 page Invasion of Privacy filing papers - item 12. is related to Donald Jrs. "If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer." response.
2017 July 12 - WSJ: Russian Officials Overheard Discussing Trump Associates Before Campaign Began -
2017 July 12 - McClatchy: Trump-Russia investigators probe Jared Kushner-run digital operation -
2017 July 14 - TRMS: Donald Trump Jr Russian Meeting Story Unpacking Like A Nesting Doll - Pussy Riot song Chaika (Wiki) - based on Yury Chaika; Prosecutor General of Russia - i.e. the gun mentioned in the Trump Jr. email as the Crown Prosecutor of Russia.  See 2017 July 14 WSJ article connecting 
2017 July 14 - WSJ: Russian Lawyer Whom Trump Jr. Met Says She Was in Contact With Top Russian Prosecutor  - Natalia Veselnitskaya acknowledges meeting with Yury Chaika.
2017 July 14 - Bloomberg: Russia Probe Delayed After Radio Tirade - Roger Stone upset because of a delay, Michael R. Caputo (Wiki) to testify in closed House hearing today (July 14)
2017 July 19 - NYT: Big German Bank, Key to Trump’s Finances, Faces New Scrutiny - Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit
2017 July 26 - TRMS: Donald Trump DoJ Pick Recently Represented Putin-Aligned Russian Bank - references the below stories:

2017 July 19 - NYT: Manafort Was in Debt to Pro-Russia Interests, Cyprus Records Show -
2017 July 10 - Politico: NYT rejects Manafort's retraction request (about 2017 July 19 article above)
2017 July 25 - NYT: Prosecutors: Some Bribes in Oligarch Case Earmarked for US -
2017 July 26 - NBC: DOJ: Ex-Manafort Associate Firtash Is Top-Tier Comrade of Russian Mobsters -
The above stories make the following look very bad:
2017 July 24 - NYT: Justice Dept. Nominee Says He Once Represented Russian Bank - (out of chronological order)

2017 August 28 - NYT: Trump Associate Boasted That Moscow Business Deal ‘Will Get Donald Elected’ - Putin controlls VTB Bank which was lined up to finance Trump Tower Moscow.
2017 August 28 - TRMS: Donald Trump Sought Moscow Business Deal While Campaigning For President -

----------------------------------------------------- Notes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. To get some idea of where Michael T. Flynn may have gone wrong I looked at the SF-86-10 form.
The SF-86 is a 127 page pdf document.  The first half is about who you are, where you have been employed, &Etc. 
Section 19 is Foreign Contacts. 
Section 20 is Foreign Activities.
page 75, Question 20B.5 Have you in the past seven (7) years attended or participated in any conference, trade show, seminars, or meetings outside the U.S.? (the boxes do not include payments, only contacts at the time and afterword).
"One official said there is no specific question on the relevant form that covers payments for speeches by foreign entities (true), but another said Flynn was told that any payments in connection with the trip were to be disclosed." (NBC) (who knows)  I expect there will shortly be a revision of the form.

2. Joshua Crane (S3 bio): . . . "Joshua Crane is a co-founder and principal of Spruce Capital. He is responsible for sourcing and executing on all aspects of the business.  Previously he was a partner at Irongate where they developed the Trump International Hotel & Tower at Waikiki Beach Walk, a 750,000 square foot condo-hotel that was the highest priced, fastest selling residential real estate project in Oahu’s history.

Infrastructure

The TED Talk: Yasheng Huang: Does democracy stifle economic growth? makes the case that infrastructure follows the economy, it does not lead it.  That's to say making a big investment in infrastructure in the hope of stimulating the economy may not be a good idea.
The reason to invest in infrastructure now (2012) is because in a poor economy you can get more done for each dollar spent. 
But for the long term it's much better to spend on R&D.  But not for things like a Mach-20 replacement for the current Predator drone (TED: Regina Dugan: From mach-20 glider to humming bird drone) , but things to help society.

Wiki: List of countries by number of broadband Internet subscriptions - the U.S. is No. 27 (28%) when ranked by percent of the population with broadband connections.  Liechtenstein has 64%.  This is an area were the U.S. government could do a lot of good, like when Eisenhower built the U.S. Interstate Highway system (Wiki) or Rural Electrification (Wiki).  Getting a lot of our population connected by broadband internet would greatly increase our ability to communicate not only with each other but with the world.  2014 Google may be doing a lot to increase internet connectivity, but it may be just a way to sell advertizing space, i.e. they are doing it to make money.

Broadband is similar to electricity, telephone and roads, that's to say a necessity for everyone, not just for people who live in urban areas.  It allows all of the people to contribute.

Health Care

The Lancet, Future life expectancy in 35 industrialised countries: projections with a Bayesian model ensemble, 21 February 2017 -
"So why have figures from the US been conspicuously absent so far? Unfortunately, the researchers point out that Americans born in 2030 are predicted to have the lowest life expectancy among developed countries – 83.3 years for women and 79.5 for men. A lack of universal healthcare poses a problem, as does unusually high rates of child and maternal mortality, homicide and obesity."

Also see Diet and Nutrition

The PBS Frontline "Obama's Deal" goes into how he campaigned against the politicians who made the Medicare Part D midnight deal to prevent the SSA from negotiating prices of medicine, but when he wanted to pass his Obama Care medical package made a deal with the big pharmaceutical companies right after he made a deal with the insurance companies to take single payer (Medicare for all) off the bargaining table.  His health plan was written by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.  The big problem it has is profiting from peoples medical problems and the government forces everyone to pay those profits.  It's way too expensive and if implemented the costs will go up astronomically.  (I wrote this around 2010).  See H.R. 3590

Jan 2014 - So far there has been a lack of enrollment by young people since they will be paying premiums that will be going to benefits for older people.  By April 2014 we'll know if the system will require a massive federal subsidy to the insurance companies.  That's to say taxpayer money going to the profits of the insurance business.

The PBS Frontline special Five Capitalist Democracies & How They Do It (Watch on line) looked at: United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland.  In no country was there any business making profits on peoples first order medical problems and there were no people going into bankruptcy because of medical expenses.  When private insurance companies were providing medical insurance they were not allowed to make profits on that business.

I've personally seen the Taiwan system first hand and think it's great.  For many people it would make sense to buy a round trip first class plane ticket, go to Taiwan (or other county) and have the treatment done off shore and return to the U.S.  The savings will more than pay for the plane ticket and expenses.  For many procedures it makes sense to fly to Canada or Mexico and pay their going rate which are a tiny fraction of the U.S. rates for the same procedure.

An interesting fact is that Japan set the price for various imaging procedures (spiral CAT, MRI, etc.) at a very low level.  Japan is one of the key sources of high technology imaging equipment and the manufacturers developed newer lower cost machines to comply with Japan's low cost target.  It turns out that my hospital has the spiral CAT scanner that was developed because of the Japanese medical system.  So I'm seeing a benefit from their health care system.  The implication is that if the U.S. does a similar thing a benefit may show up in other places in the world.  This is consistent with John Nash's Governing Dynamics.

YouTube: Health Care: Cuba vs. U.S. - (0:01:15) Apr 8, 2016 -

Sustainability

This means the existing federal drug schedule is based on politics rather than on scientific facts and needs to reposition these drugs into their proper place in the
Controlled Substances Act (Wiki).

H.R. 689 Rescheduling Marijuana - introduced 14 Feb 2013 - Huffman is cosponser.

The Young Turks Jun 21, 2012 - DEA Head's Absurd Marijuana Testimony

A Cruel and Unusual Record By Jimmy Carter June 24, 2012 NYT Op Ed
UN - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights - has 30 articles and the U.S. is now (2012) breaking 10 of them.
Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will By Jo Becker and Scott Shane NYT May 29, 2012

http://en.wikipedia.org - this is my starting place and highly recommended  Google is not good for political ideas because there's a lot of crack pots out there.

http://snopes.com/ - a good way to check up on forwarded emails.  Many, but not all, of these contain some type of misinformation that tries to paint someone or something in a bad light. 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics -  an excellent source for political news and Matt Taibbi has excellent coverage of Wall Street.

http://politics.salon.com/ - Glenn Greenwald (See above)

Supreme Court Of The United States blog http://www.scotusblog.com/ - for anything related to the Supremes.

http://www.ted.com/ - Technology, Education & Design

In the book Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (2012) Morris Berman makes the case that the United States has already failed and we're now, like Rome, in our decline.  He cites the failure of all branches of government, the economy, &etc.  He mentions that the U.S. has a strong soviet component, not for the people but rather the corporations, that's to say the socialist policy of the government protecting business from failure. Berman, a U.S. citizen has moved to Mexico permanently because he's given up on the U.S.  Other names mentioned on this page are also U.S. citizens who have moved out of the country.  It turns out upon reading the book that he thinks technology, like say the telescope, are bad for society and likes the culture of the South around the time of the Civil war (excepting the slavery), but it was the culture that saw slavery as a good thing and it was the culture that formed lynch mobs, i.e. high authoritarian behavior.

Movie: Ethos (IMDB, Netflix) - touches on many topics and they seem to have all of them correct (except maybe the hint of 9/11 domestic conspiracy).

U.S. House of Representatives Roll Call Votes, 112^th Congress - 2^nd Session (2012) - Prior years -

U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 112^th Congress - 2^nd Session (2012) - Prior years -