Economic Roundtable Discussion: L. Randall Wray, Michael Hudson, and William K. Black

This is a radio show with the formidable title, 'Post Keynesian Economics' that is a very interesting discussion amongst Randy Wray, Mike Hudson, and Bill Black of the University of Kansas City, a bright light of thought in the economics profession.

Find out why the dynamics of private sector are essential to understanding the economy. Plus, we’ll discuss government transparency and accountability. If you're just little rusty on your economic theory and policy, join us at the table for the perfect refresher course.

The moderator, Jabulani Leffall, does a remarkably good job keeping the discussion on track, and managing the flow of questions from callers in to the radio show. I was astonished at how informative and listern friendly it was.

It discusses many current issues in the economy without getting too preoccupied with the economic school of thought and models beauty contests that seem to occupy so much economic discussion, turning them into snoratoriums for non-specialists.

It is a little wonkish at the beginning, but it broadens out quickly to a practical discussion of real, current things. I credit the moderator for this, as well as the three professors who are known as 'economic mavericks,' e.g. not on the corporate financial payrolls, which is a problem with other economic departments as illustrated in the documentary Inside Job.

Economics Roundtable - Post Keynesian Economics

You don't see these three economists on the mainstream media very often, which is a shame. But they aren't representing any corporate interests, so that is probably why they are not so popular on the corporate controlled media.

I enjoyed listening to it over a cup of coffee. It was remarkably pertinent to the real world, which is refreshing amongst economic discussions amongst three professors of economics.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts

As you have probably read the effort to impose position limits on the markets was struck down by a court in Washington DC.

I continue to suspect that meaningful market reform in the near term is a fantasy, given the realities of the credibility trap and corruption that maintains a hold on the financial and political systems in the US and the UK.

There will be some watershed event first, if there is to be any serious reform. What that might be, I do not know.  But I am certain that it is coming, and change is coming with it.

The thought that these manipulated speculative markets in the US are effectively setting the world prices for critical commodities like food and energy is almost incomprehensible, especially if you understand what is really going on.  It makes the LIBOR scandal seem like an uncontrolled burp at a Sunday school picnic, and LIBOR was a conspiracy of the first order. 

The abusive rigging of LIBOR was known and tolerated by the regulators and the governments of the US and the UK, and was therefore an outrageous breach of trust that exemplifies the corrosive power of the credibility trap on the integrity of the entire system.  And as I said at the time, LIBOR is the tip of the iceberg.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts

Largely another nothing day as the markets hold their ground ahead of the bigger events of the latter part of the week.

I have posted an intraday comment on the symmetrical triangle pattern on the SP 500 which is certainly worth a look.

King World News has a couple of charts from The Sentiment Trader that shows that the commercial hedgers are rather net short the stock indices.    I do not know that I find them particularly 'frightening' but they do seem to have a rather bearish bent to them.  Timing is everything.

I do think that if Obama is elected in the US there will be selling pressure into year end as some rush to take profits in order to hedge any potential changes in the tax structure in 2013.  I am not sure if advantageous buying will not come back in at some point, because there are many ways to take a profit for taxes without going net short or flat amongst the sophisticates. 

But they could provoke the specs, which seems to be a favored game. 

I am much more concerned about the madness in Europe and England, and the nutty ideas floating around the US than I am of these couple of charts.  The stock market is a joke.  But it is still overly important. 

Aktion T4 - In the Garden of Beasts

"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.

The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and children's hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps.

The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small."

Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin

Most people are unaware or simply overlook the actions of the German government that began in 1939, in which the State, with the active cooperation of the medical and legal professions, began the systematic murder of people who were physically and mentally inferior, at least according to the judgement of the State.

It was this decision, and its willing acceptance by the thought leaders and intellectuals of the day, in defining who had the right to live based on their ability to serve the State according to its own needs, that laid the groundwork for the death of compassion, and the murder of over ten million people in the name of unnatural selection.

Once the State has the power to say who is a worthwhile human being and who is not, no one is safe.

We do not often hear about Aktion T4, the euthanasia program, because the weakest have little or no constituency, and are sometimes overlooked because others think that their own causes, or their own pain, is more significant.

What good is it to fight for the right of a child to be born, and then to promote a policy of social Darwinism, a survival of the fittest as if people were animals, forcing them to compete with slave labor in foreign lands in the name of The Market?   Or to embrace a healthcare system that holds parents hostage, as they bankrupt themselves while frantically trying to care for their sick child or their loved one, in the name of The Market?

Despite a lucky few inhuman policies and a system of privilege virtually condemn the unfortunate child to a lifetime of desperation and poverty, to be caught in the infamous 47% of the country that struggles to live and to merely survive, and to raise their children, often from hand to mouth. 

These are the working poor, the elderly, the disabled, who are sanctimoniously condemned and caricatured for not being able to outwit the abuses of the law and resist the perversions of the powerful that allow the select few to cheat and rob them at every step of the way. This is no deep economic mystery; it is a crime.

It was the professional class, the doctors and the lawyers, who willingly sanctioned the murder of the innocents in Germany. And for that great crime against God and Man, which almost no one protested against, the country was brought low and laid to ruin.  

And it is a terrible trap to think that we today are so different, so exceptional, that we are not capable of permitting the same thing to happen all over again.  After all, we are only doing what is necessary, what is required, because The Market says.

In their desire to escape the pain and complexity of being human, men can make themselves into beasts, one step at a time. And then there is hell on earth.

Aktion T4 was the name used for Germany's "Euthanasia programme" during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination".

The programme officially ran from September 1939 until August 1941, but continued unofficially until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.

During the official stage of Action T4, 70,273 people were killed, but the Nuremberg Trials found evidence that German and Austrian physicians continued the murder of patients after October 1941 and that about 275,000 people were killed under T4.

More recent research based on files recovered after 1990 gives a figure of at least 200,000 physically or mentally handicapped people killed by medication, starvation, or in the gas chambers between 1939 and 1945.

The name T4 was an abbreviation of "Tiergartenstraße 4", the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, bearing the euphemistic name literally translating into English as Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care.

This body operated under the direction of Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's private chancellery, and Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician. This villa no longer exists, but a plaque set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location.

"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.

What is called 'fellow traveling' (collaboration) was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."

Theodor Adorno


“Then shall He say also unto them on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the eternal desolation prepared for Satan and his angels. For I hungered, and ye gave Me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Me not in; naked, and ye clothed Me not; sick and in prison, and ye visited Me not.’

Then shall they also answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see Thee hungering or thirsting or a stranger, or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister unto Thee?’ Then shall He answer them, saying, ‘Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me.’

Look in the mirror, Narcissus, and see what you are becoming.