This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Bank lending, quick macro recap — Warren Mosler: Unsold output = rising inventories = cutbacks output = reduced income = reduced sales = reduced income = reduced sales = pro cyclical downward spiral, etc. as income reductions in one sector ‘spread’ to cuts into reduced sales in the rest. And it reverses only after deficit spending- public or private- gets large enough to offset desires to ‘save’/not spend income.
• Freedom and Intellectual Life — Zena Hitz in First Things (via Eric Schliesser): It is removal of intellectual life from the world that accounts for its true inwardness—an inwardness distinct from the narcissistic inner tracking of one's social standing. It is the withdrawn person's independence from contests over wealth or status that provides or reveals a dignity that can't be ranked or traded. This dignity, along with the universality of the objects of the intellect—that is, that they are available to everyone—is what opens up space for real communion.
• We’re All Free Riders. Get over It! — Nicholas Gruen in Evonomics: In addition to the free rider problem, which we should solve as best we can, there’s a free rider opportunity. And while we whine about the problem, the opportunity has always been far larger and its value grows with every passing day. […] We’re not paying royalties to the estates of Matthew Bolton and James Watt for their refinements to the piston engine. But we’re still free riding on their work. In other words, free-riding made us what we are today.
• Stop this cynical attack: Corbyn, anti-semitism and the right — the Jewish Socialists' Group, reposted in Counterfire: The attack is coming from four main sources, who share agendas: to undermine Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Labour; to defend Israeli government policy from attack, however unjust, racist and harmful towards the Palestinian people; and to discredit those who make legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy or Zionism as a political ideology. As anti-racist and anti-fascist Jews who are also campaigning for peace with justice between Israelis and Palestinians, we entirely reject these cynical agendas that are being expressed by: • The Conservative Party • Conservative-supporting media in Britain and pro-Zionist Israeli media sources • Right-wing and pro-Zionist elements claiming to speak on behalf of the Jewish community • Opponents of Jeremy Corbyn within the Labour party.
• Ed Balls — Britney Summit-Gil muses on the significance of #EdBallsDay in Cyborgology: Something that has struck me throughout this election season is the work that Bernie Sanders supporters have done digging up old video clips and transcripts to write narratives that are lacking in major news outlets. The fact that no millennial remembers a speech Sanders made before the Senate in 1992 does not preclude their ability to find it, watch it, and use it to make a political argument. This becomes all the more important when these narratives are lacking from other vehicles of mediated memory. In other words, if mainstream news sources are failing to remember important historical moments and contexts, the affordances of digital media offer an alternative.
• Leaked 2015 Memo Told Dems: 'Don't Offer Support' For Black Lives Matter Policy Positions — Julia Craven at the HuffPo: “Presidential candidates have struggled to respond to tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement,” reads the memo, sent by a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee staffer in November. “While there has been little engagement with House candidates, candidates and campaign staff should be prepared. This document should not be emailed or handed to anyone outside of the building. Please only give campaign staff these best practices in meetings or over the phone.”
• The national economic implications of a taco truck on every corner — Philip Bump at the Washington Post: "My culture is a very dominant culture, and it's imposing — and it's causing problems," Marco Gutierrez of Latinos for Trump told Joy Ann Reid. "If you don't do something about it, you're going to have taco trucks on every corner." […] If you assume that three people work in each truck, that's 9.6 million new jobs created. The labor force in August was 159.4 million, with 144.6 million employed. Adding 9.6 million taco truck workers would help America reach nearly full employment — and that's just the staffing in the trucks. Think about all of the ancillary job creation: mechanics, gas station workers, Mexican food truck management executives. We'd likely need to increase immigration levels just to meet the demand. [Personally, I'd prefer kebabs, though I suppose for Trumpists that would be even worse.]
• Billionaire Nike Co-Founder Confuses His Net Worth with U.S. Economic Growth — Jon Schwarz, the Intercept : For the GDP to triple in size in 22 years would require an average annual growth rate of over 5 percent — but the U.S. economy didn’t grow that fast, year over year, even once from 1994 to 2016. So how has Knight latched onto this blatantly wrong factoid? Possibly because there is something that’s tripled in size in the past 20 years: Knight’s own net worth. According to Forbes, Knight’s net worth in 1996 was, adjusted for inflation, about $8 billion; today it’s $25 billion. You can understand why he’d be convinced the economy is in great shape.
• The problems with Bitcoin — Richard Murphy delivers a devastating chartalist smackdown to the techno-utopian gold standard: A blockchain where the extraction of value (the credit transactions) is not identified but where it is said that the supply of debits is finite (as the Bitcoin algorithm must imply) has at least three important economic characteristics that pose difficulties. One is that it attempts to mirror the operations of the gold standard, which proved to be little short of an economic disaster during its period of use in the twentieth century. Secondly, because of its opacity, the system is at best inherently risky. And third, it would appear that the arrangement could, because of its opacity, be exploited. I am not saying it is: I am saying that based on my initial review I have that concern.
• The American Jewish scholar behind Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ scandal breaks his silence — Jamie Stern-Weiner interviews Norm Finklestein on openDemocracy: Compare the American scene. Our Corbyn is Bernie Sanders. In all the primaries in the US, Bernie has been sweeping the Arab and Muslim vote. It’s been a wondrous moment: the first Jewish presidential candidate in American history has forged a principled alliance with Arabs and Muslims. Meanwhile, what are the Blairite-Israel lobby creeps up to in the UK? They’re fanning the embers of hate and creating new discord between Jews and Muslims by going after Naz Shah, a Muslim woman who has attained public office. […] It’s time to put a stop to this periodic charade, because it ends up besmirching the victims of the Nazi holocaust, diverting from the real suffering of the Palestinian people, and poisoning relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities.