[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 42 points 1 month ago

Good to see inflammatory speech getting an inflammatory response

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 43 points 2 months ago

Once again, MMT is only a description of how money works, in the same way that hydrodynamics is a description of how water works. Hydrodynamics can tell you how to build a pump for a well, but not whether you would be violating someone's water rights. MMT can tell you how to utilize money to organize social activity, including the most relevant thing to us, building industrial capital, but it doesn't tell you whether bond markets or anyone else would allow you to.

In fact, half of Hudson's Killing the Host is about exactly how US institutions are completely beholden to finance capital, and would never allow the use of monetary policy to increase industrial production! Hudson uses the MMT framework to explain how the Federal Reserve prints staggering amounts of money to inflate the price of financial instruments (including stocks and bonds) for the benefit of financial capitalists, instead of printing money to inflate the prices of goods and labor which would lead to the formation of a productive economy.

The whole point of MMT is that money is just an organizational tool, like writing or calendars - as a technology it was invented (in the 'western' world at least) in ancient Mesopotamia and has persisted through multiple system of political economy. But in every case, its basic features are the same: it exists only as an IOU issued by a government, which can later be used to pay taxes, and a government with currency sovereignty can issue money at will to order people subject to its taxation (or who, for whatever other reason, need to obtain money denominated in that currency, such as, for instance, repaying IMF loans or making international trades) to hand over goods or perform services for the government.

Whereas this person is saying that the behavior of money depends on "the consensus of the monetary system's stakeholders", and the fact that the federal reserve didn't take action to slow rising treasury yields (i.e. falling global demand for dollar holdings) is proof that you "can't consolidate the central bank and treasury". They seem to go on a lot about "constitutional consensus" as a reason MMT doesn't work, as if the behavior of money in general through all of history is dependent on the specific provisions of a specific state's constitution. They say "it is a constant theme of their literature that the foreign sector can be treated as a non entity that does impose constraints on policy space" when that is literally the opposite of true, and Super Imperialism is primarily about how US interference in other countries' monetary policy prevents them from being able to use their currency sovereignty to develop their own economies.

It's true that by the logic of MMT, a country with all of the resources it needs within its own borders (== within the boundaries of its monopoly on violence == within the region it can enact taxes on) can print however much money it needs to mobilize fallow resources (or until 100% employment is reached) while ignoring the effects on its currency's exchange rate, precisely because it doesn't need to obtain resources through trade - exactly as was seen in the USSR under Stalin and, as a shadow of that, Russia after 2022. The sanctions applied to Russia "should" have collapsed it, because most other countries in the world would have collapsed under this sanctions regime, but unlike those countries Russia is capable of producing all its own food, fuel and raw materials. Indeed, freezing a bunch of the oligarch's money and preventing capital flight from Russia meant rubles had to be invested in productive industries, on top of the state increasing spending on war production, which combined to give a massive boost to Russia's productive economy! However, the Russian central bank did everything in its power to prevent and undo this, because it's controlled by neoliberals, so printing money to develop the economy "doesn't work" because at every turn, neoliberals will sabotage it!

To go poking around their other tweets, here they complain about insider trading:

They say "sure would be cool if we had an agency in the government in charge of investigating insider trading", but using their logic the fact that insider trading wasn't investigated proves that it can't be - and in our currently existing political economy, they would be right! Investigating insider trading is specifically against the financial interests of the groups that hold political power over this economy, so it is impossible to investigate insider trading in the same way it's impossible to implement the recommendations of MMT for building a productive economy. But that doesn't mean that 'investigating insider trading' as an activity can never occur, the same way it doesn't mean that MMT is incorrect.

They also have a tweet that seems to be implying an MMT researcher is racist because they refer to "yellow dollars" in the context of Chinese dollar holdings...

...rather than understanding that "green dollars" - the kind of money you keep in your pocket in real life - and "yellow dollars" - US treasury bills - are called that because of the color of the paper they're printed on?? That seems like a pretty important feature of the dollar economy to be completely unaware of!

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 43 points 5 months ago

Whoa, that's crazy! I thought changing borders by military force was the absolute worst, most indefensible crime it was ever possible to commit! I thought it got you sanctioned and ejected from the international community, got your bank accounts frozen and your citizens shunned unless they disavow their home nation, got your leaders accused of megalomania, psychopathy, dementia, having brain cancer, etc. etc.

::: spoiler But I guess you're just allowed to do it after all! hypersus hypersus hypersus hypersus hypersus

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 42 points 7 months ago

Hmm, after administering poison the patient appears pale and feverish. Recommend administering more poison.

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 43 points 1 year ago

say-the-line-bart-1 speech-r say-the-line-bart-2

In 2014 a bunch of Ukrainian nazis couped the democratically elected government and started ethnically cleansing the Russian population in the Donbas. Some sections of the Ukrainian military rebelled and formed militia units to protect the population from being murdered by nazis, leading to a low level civil war stretching on for years. Ukrainian nazi paramilitaries continued persecuting ethnic Russian Ukrainians civilians as well as shelling Donetsk and Lugansk

During this time Russia tried repeatedly to conduct diplomacy with the nazis western handlers, the US and the UK, as well as interested third parties such as Germany and France. However, it was pointless as the US never intended to back down and continuously goaded the Ukrainian nazis into attacks on the Donbas, all the while supplying them with money and weapons. When the war seemed to be escalating to the point NATO forces might join in, Russia - understanding that any actual direct combat between Russian and NATO soldiers would lead to a global nuclear holocaust - jumped in with its troops first... after spending three days voting to formally recognize the independence of the DPR and LPR, of course, because Putin is a bureaucrat to the core and these things must be done properly.

And now, the people of Donetsk and Luhansk can live quietly without fear of nazi missiles blowing up their city centers for no reason.

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 42 points 1 year ago

spirit-bomb Russia, take my energy!

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 42 points 1 year ago

Israel is the live-fire testing range of all the Empire's tools of opression. They have a thousand startups throwing shit at the wall, and the 1% that sticks gets deployed everywhere else. Those can range from facial recognition cameras and AI SIGINT filtering to new brutal policing and anti-riot tactics and techniques.

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 43 points 1 year ago

That and presumably retaliation for the suicidally idiotic bear-poking the Ukrainians have been doing by attacking Belgorod, the oil refineries and those vote trucks.

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 42 points 1 year ago

Ansarallah, you are above even the Air Boss... I hereby award you the title of BIG Air Boss

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 44 points 1 year ago

Navalny was the West's chosen comprador, in the vanishingly unlikely event a Western coup was pulled off and he was installed to power he would have enthusiastically opened Russia's veins the way Yeltsin did. And if that caused conditions to fall back to the level they were at in the 90s, he would have been responsible for literally millions of premature deaths, as well as completely destroying a crucial actor in the emerging multipolar world. All of this on top of his FAR more vocal hatred for (and calls to exterminate) minorities. Putin is a cold-blooded bureaucrat, he doesn't deal in inflammatory racist rhetoric because it's destabilizing.

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 42 points 2 years ago

The version of history where the Spartacists win, there are no Nazis or WW2, no fascist Spain etc. and all the German Jewish nuclear physicists never flee to the US so nukes are never invented, or better yet only the socialists have them... no I don't dream about this timeline daily sicko-wistful

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 43 points 2 years ago

If you want to know what the smartest guy in the US military thinks, read this

(Assuming, of course, that you don't consider the Marine Corps Gazette to be Russian propaganda)


Ukraine is on its fourth army, which has been badly mauled in a counterattack lasting two months with gains measured in single digit miles and casualties in the tens of thousands.


This is who they were sending to the front in APRIL LAST YEAR

Old men and boys


But at least Russia's out of missiles!

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CascadeOfLight

joined 2 years ago