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I once saw a dog do this in Detroit, and barked at her pups to teach them. Animals can be smarter than you think.

Detroit hustles harder

Seriously, he's taking a shit on "purist liberals"?

Remind me again, who was speaking up loud and clear about the danger of running another corporatist against a right-wing populist? Who was that again? Was it the strategists and consultants of the DNC? Was it all the celebrities who were „with her“?

Or was it maybe those liberal idiots whose candidate is, I don't know, the most popular politician in the country? Sanders gets cheers from Trump voters at townhalls in red states, and you're putting the blame for Trump's election at the feet of purist liberals?

Honestly, mate. You want to know what a neoliberal disaster looks like? Look at at the White House. Neoliberal policies are the breeding ground of right-wing populists. You think someone like Trump gets elected because of his convincing policy proposals? Right-wing populists are the answers to „centrist“ policies that enrich the few at the cost of the many. Everyone knows the effects, from widescale poverty, historic inequality, the opioid epidemic, all the way to the two-tiered justice system with fraudsters and torturers running free while not being able to pay a parking tickets gets you jailed.

Too abstract for you, Bill? Then look at Detroit. Look at Cleveland. Is that enough of a visual representation of what a neoliberal disaster looks like?

In this situation, they decided to run a corporatist, with the message „America is already great“. How was that supposed to resonate with the working stiff, Bill? The people whose despair is the main driver behind the opioid epidemic, as Case-Deaton has shows us in such detail. Who had the glorious idea to run exclusively on identity politics and ignore the economic plight of the lower class?

Was that the purist liberals, Bill?

Did the purist liberals run a campaign whose own people, if „Shattered“ contains any truth at all, described it as nothing short of a disaster? Even Clinton's own people didn't seem to know why she was running, and were toying with the idea of just going with „it's her turn“. Seriously, the way they describe Clinton's paranoia and refusal to interact with her own staff makes it sound like her campaign was not much less of a clusterfuck than Trump's presidency, from an organizing point of view.

But yeah, go ahead and blame the purist liberals. And Comey, while you're at it. And Russia. And Jill Stein. And fake news. And WikiLeaks. And sexism. Anything but the DNC and their corporate candidate.

Let me know when you're done, maybe then we can have a proper post-mortem of how the Democrats managed to lose the White House, Congress, most state legislatures and Governorships. And we'll start from the top, because we have a saying in German: „der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her“. Maybe you can get an option to vote against Wall Street, against the war on drugs, against big pharma, against the MIC, and against the destruction of our biosphere. Because you sure as hell didn't have one this time.

I'm pretty much over the rivalry now too, but I sure do remember how much I hated those dirty Avs back then.
8 of the 9 years from 95 to 2003, the Cup winner was Detroit, Colorado, or Jersey. It also seemed like whoever won the Wings / Avs series in the playoffs was going to go on to win the Cup. Man that was a crazy rivalry.
Good luck to your Team on the rebuild too. I have a buddy who is an Avs fan and some of their moves in recent years have seemed puzzling to me like getting rid of Statsny and Reilly.

Downvote on point one, that feeling victimised is worse than being victimized. Just duh.
Acting the victim when you are not one, like Republicans and Christians do, is detrimental, acting the victim when you've been victimized is being rational. It's hilariously hypocritical to hear a conservative complain about victim mentality after the last 8 years of their whining and moaning about Obama victimizing them.

Out of wedlock birth doesn't mean dad's out of the picture, only that parents aren't married.

As stated above, cherry picked facts and ignoring history makes this ridiculous victim blaming. For instance, blaming Detroit's condition on liberal governance and ignoring the loss of the auto industry and other factors in it's decline is totally dishonest or just ignorant in the extreme, your choice.

Blame presumes guilt. There's no guilt in voting for your interests, even if others don't understand them.

Reasons for those voting decisions are interesting, but also very hard to get since the media ignores everything between the coasts, and even the diverse internet is so full of filter bubbles that you're basically funneled straight into echo chambers. At least on my end, the Silicon Valley/Hollywood culture is drowning out everything else -- and I'm a commie outsider who doesn't give a shit about celebrities or "save zones".

That said, the election is just the most recent culmination of an ongoing, decades-long development. But that's beyond the point, so...

Populism trumps business as usual if business as usual leads to Detroit, Cleveland and Camden. Or the rural areas on the coast of Louisiana, which were hit much harder than New Orleans and still look worse than Chernobyl, 11 years after the fact.

So the question is: did you a) fail to provide an alternative, b) fail to make a convincing case for that alternative, c) decide against trying to convince those that think differently, or d) not even realize that not everybody shares your perception of reality.

Given the tone of the reactions, the collective damnation of Trump voters as (insert any insult in the book), I'm thinking that d) is a much bigger issue than anyone is willing to admit.

In short, I blame George R. R. Martin. If he had published The Winds of Winter by now, all would be well.

The Democratic Party having control of both the executive and legislative branches does not mean Congress will go along with whatever the president says. Do you remember Obamacare at all? Was Obamacare what Obama wanted? No. It was a center left compromise to keep Democrats in the fold to vote for it. The Democratic Party still has a significant number of moderates within it.

Do you honestly think Obama got whatever he wanted his first two years in office with control of the house and a supermajority in the Senate? Absolutely not.

In fact, because of filibusters and polarization of the electorate, you can't get much of anything done anymore without control of the house and a supermajority in the Senate.

And the Shultz thing is hilarious to me. Clinton hired a high up skilled Democratic Party political operative for her campaign, and that means she's corrupt? Because Schultz favored a candidate who has always been a strong party candidate over another candidate who only caucused with the Democrats, and wasn't actually a Democrat himself? Yeah, she shouldn't have done what she did. Dennis Rodman shouldn't have done what he did to Scottie Pippen in the playoffs, too, when he was with Detroit. And who thought Rodman should have been brought in to help the Bulls? Pippen. Clinton is trying to win an election. If that's the kind of thing you consider as proof of actual corruption, I don't know what to tell you.

I am not voting against Trump. I am voting for the most competent, experienced candidate who I think will do the best job out of this lot of candidates. She is the only candidate who is extremely qualified.

Is she perfect? Hell, no. She isn't particularly inspiring. She's not very good as a politician at persuading people to her side. She panders too much. Sometimes she plays political games too much, like with the email fiasco.


But you can do a lot worse than Clinton. You don't have to go back far to find an inept president.

So i watched a lot more PoPo Running Man challenge vids and these are a few that were fun to watch.

New Zealand PoPo https://youtu.be/8HOtvWsR_VQ
Miami PoPo https://youtu.be/BusmB726_tU
Detroit PoPo https://youtu.be/_gkbfBpcAtg
Scotland PoPo https://youtu.be/EweqJWCya4M
Samoa PoPo https://youtu.be/bgLrejHDJI8
Bloomington, Minnesota PoPo https://youtu.be/HYLcioudtwQ
North Charleston, South Carolina PoPo https://youtu.be/VTM7amVcBsA

"[the] world is actually healthier, wealthier, better educated, more tolerant, less violent than it has ever been."

Not in places like Afghanistan, Libya, Jemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, downtown Chicago, Detroit or Cleveland. Not in Greece. And I'm not entirely sure it's a better place for the hundreds of millions of Chinese who left their rural areas to become work nomads. Also not sure about the all the millions of people in Africa whose livelihood gets crushed by subsidised produce/corn from the West. Not sure about all the Indian farmers who are driven into suicide by the monopoly powers of seed suppliers. Not sure about India as a whole, now suffering from the third year in a row of a belated monsoon and horrific drought.

"Democracy means you don't everything you want, when you want it, all the time" ... "and occasionally comprise, and stay principled, but recognise that it's a long march towards progress"

He talks the talk, but even for a center-right guy, he doesn't walk the walk. Principles went out the window in Gitmo. Principles went out the window when the drivers behind the illegal war of aggression in Iraq were not prosecuted in accordance with the Nuremberg Principles. Principles went out the window when carpet surveillance pissed all over the Constitution. Principles went out the window when US military forces aid Al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria just because they oppose Assad. Even mentioning principles in the face of the gruesome, drone-driven terror campaigns in at least half a dozen countries makes me want to vomit.

And don't get me started on compromise. If you ban single-payer and drop the public option before negotiations begin, that's not compromise. That's theatre meant to mislead us plebs while you add an additional layer of "market" to an already dysfunctional market, which ends up profiting the insurance companies yet again.

remember these guys?
http://videosift.com/video/death-politicians-in-my-eyes-rare-70s-detroit-punk

FYI Toronto is not technically in Canada.

It's a suburb of Detroit that you guys left lying around so we snatched it while you were over in Korea.

We are TOTALLY Ok if you take it back.

Well, cheers for sticking with it anyway, I really appreciate it.

It's a one hour talk on the deficit in particular, and most of what she says is based on MMT principles that would add another 5 hours to her talk if she were to explain them. With neoclassical economics, you can sort of jump right in, given how they are taught at schools and regurgitated by talking heads and politicians, day in and day out. MMT runs contrary to many pieces of "common sense" and since you can't really give 10 hour talks everytime, this is what you end up with – bits and pieces that require previous knowledge.

I'd offer talks by other MMT proponents such as William Mitchell (UNSW), Randy Wray (UMKC) or Michael Hudson (UMKC), but they are even less comprehensible. Sorry. Eric Tymoigne provided a wonderful primer on banking over at NEP, but it's long and dry.

Since I'm significantly worse at explaining the basics of MMT, I'm not even going to try to "weave a narrative" and instead I'll just work my way through it, point by point.

@notarobot

"Let's address inequality by taking on debt to increase spending to help transfer money to large private corporations."

You don't have to take on debt. The US as the sole legal issuer of the Dollar can always "print more". That's what the short Greenspan clip was all about. Of course, you don't actually print Federal Reserve Notes to pay for federal expenses. It's the digital age, after all.

If the federal government were to acquire, say, ten more KC-46 from Boeing, some minion at the Treasury would give some minion at the Fed a call and say "We need $2 billion, could you arrange the transfer?" The Fed minion then proceeds to debit $2B from the Treasury's account at the Fed (Treasury General Account, TGA) and credits $2B to Boeing's account at Bank X. Plain accounting.

If TGA runs negative, there are two options. The Treasury could sell bonds, take on new debt. Or it could monetise debt by selling those bonds straight to the Fed – think Overt Monetary Financing.

The second option is the interesting one: a swap of public debt for account credits. Any interest on this debt would be transfered straight back in the TGA. It's all left pocket, right pocket, really. Both the Fed and the Treasury are part of the consolidated government.

However, running a deficit amounts to a new injection of reserves. This puts a downward pressure on the overnight interest rate (Fed Funds Rate in the US, FFR) unless it is offset by an increase in outstanding debt by the Treasury (or a draw-down of the TT&Ls, but that's minor in this case). So the sale of t-bonds is not a neccessity, it's how the Treasury supports the Fed's monetary policy by raising the FFR. If the target FFR is 0%, there's no need for the Treasury to drain reserves by selling bonds.

Additionally, you might want to sell t-bonds to provide the private sector with the ability to earn interest on a safe asset (pension funds, etc). Treasury bonds are as solid as it gets, unlike municipal bonds of Detroit or stocks of Deutsche Bank.

To quote Randy Wray: "And, indeed, treasury securities really are nothing more than a saving account at the Fed that pay more interest than do reserve deposits (bank “checking accounts”) at the Fed."

Point is: for a government that uses its own sovereign, free-floating currency, it is a political decision to take on debt to finance its deficit, not an economic neccessity.

"Weimar Republic"

I'm rather glad that you went with Weimar Germany and not Zimbabwe, because I know a lot more about the former than the latter. The very, very short version: the economy of 1920's Germany was in ruins and its vastly reduced supply capacity couldn't match the increase in nominal spending. In an economy at maximum capacity, spending increases are a bad idea, especially if meant to pay reparations.

Let's try a longer version. Your point, I assume, is that an increase in the money supply leads to (hyper-)inflation. That's Quantity Theory of Monetary 101, MV=PY. Amount of money in circulation times velocity of circulation equals average prices times real output. However, QTM works on two assumptions that are quite... questionable.

First, it assumes full employment (max output, Y is constant). Or in other terms, an economy running at full capacity. Does anyone know any economy today that is running at full capacity? I don't. In fact, I was born in '83 and in my lifetime, we haven't had full employment in any major country. Some people refer to 3% unemployment as "full employment", even though 3% unemployment in the '60s would have been referred to as "mass unemployment".

Second, it assumes a constant velocity of circulation (V is constant). That's how many times a Dollar has been "used" over a year. However, velocity was proven to be rather volatile by countless studies.

If both Y and V are constant, any increase in the money supply M would mean an increase in prices P. The only way for an economy at full capacity to compensate for increased spending would be a rationing of said spending through higher prices. Inflation goes up when demand outpaces supply, right?

But like I said, neither Y nor V are constant, so the application of this theory in this form is misleading to say the least. There's a lot of slack in every economy in the world, especially the US economy. Any increase in purchases will be met by corporations with excess capacity. They will, generally speaking, increase their market share rather than hike prices. Monopolies might not, but that's a different issue altogether.

Again, the short version: additional spending leads to increased inflation only if it cannot be met with unused capacity. Only in an economy at or near full capacity will it lead to significant inflation. And even then, excess private demand can easily be curbed: taxation.

As for the Angry Birds analogy: yeah, I'm not a fan either. But all the other talks on this topic are even worse, unfortunatly. There's only a handful of MMT economists doing these kinds of public talks and I haven't yet spotted a Neil deGrasse Tyson among them, if you know what I mean.