JHUS Staging

Tag: macroeconomics

  • What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 2)

    The Gold Standard

    In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.

    We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.

    I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?

    Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“

    Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.

    You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up

    They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)

    The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.

    What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.

    The Eurozone

    A Different Feather Of Fish

    The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)

    “Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.

    The Guardrails

    Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

    For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

    Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).

    Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.

    Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.

    That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.

    The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.

    It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.

    This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.

    All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.

    It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.

    That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”

    In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!

  • What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 1 – What Is Debt?)

    A recent social media conversation brought forth the question, “what is the ‘national debt,’ really?”

    This came by way of one person’s well-intended insistence that the national debt isn’t “debt” at all, really…which, is almost right, but also so hugely wrong that deconstructing it in a useful way that wasn’t dismissive or confrontational required a good deal more than a simple comment.

    More to the point, when I realized the comment was approaching 700 words and not nearly done, I thought it would make a better blog post here…

    Exhibit “A” – we’re going to ignore the questionable assertion that bankers and investors no longer “control the money supply.” Pretty sure the governors of the federal reserve are still “bankers.” There’s a lot wrong here, and the problem is how much if it is based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting useful and factual information.

    So let’s talk about what’s wrong about our friend’s assessment, then why, then why it matters, and hopefully we’ll all walk away having learned something useful, and we’ll be better empowered to make well-reasoned decisions at the voting booth!

    We began with a comment I saw in my feed that said “the only debt the US has is treasury bonds” or something to that effect, to which I replied “not quite true; 78% of the national debt is the money in circulation.”

    This is a great place to note I was a bit wrong there. In a bit of synchronicity that number turns up in the current data, but the actual information I was communicating was something else and my communication was based on outdated data; the actual number is 76.6%. The information below is compiled from the most recent “Monthly Statement Of The Public Debt,” issued by the US Treasury Department.

    • 22% of the “national debt” is debt held by various departments of the government against other departments of the government. This amounts to money deliveries and exchanges that haven’t yet been completed for one reason or another.
    • Of the 78% (there’s that number) that remains – called “Debt Held By the Public” or “DHBP,” – 30% is held by foreign entities.
    • 78 * .3 = 23.4. 100-23.4 = 76.6% of the national debt is, one way or the other, money we owe only to ourselves.
    • That other 23.4% is the number on which our friend and I agree as being “debt.”
    • In the sense that it is not the same as a e.g. a household, personal, or business debt, the original poster is right, however it is debt, and it’s important to understand how and why that is, in order to understand more completely “how money works.”

    So with all of that said, it’s understandable that our correspondent insists that it’s “not debt.” That’s probably more correct than the general perception that this debt represents something that must be paid from some finite store of resources. Indeed, this debt will never be “paid off” or “balanced,” nor would you want it to be?

    Why? Because even though there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means, and those misunderstandings are very much leveraged maliciously against those who subscribe to them (and the vast majority of the rest of us), in the end from a standpoint of economics a dollar bill is a debt instrument, it’s a token representing a legally binding agreement that someone owes someone for something, and unraveling that is much more important than simply engaging in some grand “pulling back the curtain AHA YOU SEE? NOTHING!” gesture. Plus the gesture’s wrong. There’s definitely something there, and it matters. Just not how you probably think…and it all adds up to the simple reality that if the national debt were “paid off,” that would mean there are no more US dollars.

    There are only two ways that’s going to happen: if the US unilaterally defines and adopts a successor currency (which it sort of already did, see notes further on in this series about the “gold standard”), or the US collapses entirely and ceases to exist as an operating entity.

    What your money’s really worth. Don’t get any bright ideas; destroying coinage is a more serious federal crime than you think.

    A “debt” is something that is owed; a “fiat” or “token” is something that holds the place of the debt in a way that’s generally accepted as valid and enforceable by the general public. All paper currency (and most coinage now) is “fiat” currency. Currency’s not valuable in and of itself, it’s just paper (well, cloth) and ink, but it’s still valuable because we all agree to let it represent value under certain conditions and for certain purposes. (Coinage may have intrinsic value depending on the composition of the coin, but as far as I know there is currently no nation producing coins whose metal content is equal to the face value of the coin. US pennies, for instance, cost about $1.07 per dollar’s worth at current (2:18pm 15-May-23) commodity prices.)

    In the case of your dollar bill (or its electronic representation in a bank computer somewhere), what it represents – what it is – is a token legally validating that “The United States” is owned, to the tune of 1/x where x= total $ in circulation, by the holder (or “owner”) of that dollar bill, whose ownership stake has not yet been converted to real property or services.

    Ergo, “The United States” owes that person or entity one dollar’s worth of real property or services, which they have not yet claimed. (Note to self: stretch this into a separate short piece about the international bond market…) Unavoidably, by definition, every dollar “in circulation” is a dollar of debt.

    NB: In this case ‘in circulation’ simply means it’s not in the government’s hands, nor is it in the hands of a governmental unit who is using it for trade, and includes ALL money, not just that which physically exists. About 95% of it doesn’t – around a trillion and a half of that debt is circulating currency and coinage, the rest is electronically recorded and doesn’t “really exist” at all. This is often used as a cheap-shot, elementary school rebuttal to the observation that the “national debt” is in point of fact the collected dollar savings of the United States, to the penny.

    Savings accounts, the values of stocks, commercial lending, are all dollars “in circulation” in this sense, and they all represent a debt, usually on multiple levels. But getting back to dollars, the only exceptions are those which make their way into the hands of those who collect coins or currency as a hobby, or trades in those items as collectibles as a business. Then they become a “real resource” rather than a representation thereof. Even at that, the US government will happily cash in your silver and gold certificates and coinage at face value, just take it to any bank and they will replace your old worn-out five dollar bill or twenty dollar gold coin with a nice crisp new Federal Reserve Note in the amount of your bill or coin!

    That is why a dollar bill is a debt, not because of some archaic and nefarious witch-doctoring by those mysterious bankers and businessmen. It’s literally a legally binding note saying the United States as a collective political entity owes you real property or services in the amount of that note, and there are very good reasons for that arrangement which are entirely without ideological or political cant; neither capitalism nor communism required.

    In Part 2, we’ll take on the question of The Gold Standard, why we’re not on it, and why we definitely don’t want to be. Later we’ll talk about how you get “real value” out of your pile of notes and those ‘very good reasons’ I mentioned. See you soon!

  • We Are Not “Back Where We Started” With Coronavirus

    Screenshot of CBSNews.Com Headline "Gottlieb says U.S. 'right back where we were' at earlier peak of coronavirus outbreak
    Screenshot of CBSNews.Com headline. Courtesy CBS News.

    One of the headlines I’m seeing quite a bit this morning is former FDA director Scott Gottleib saying we’re “right back where we were.”

    That’s not true.  We’re far worse off.  If we were back where we were, we wouldn’t still be setting new infection records.  But we are.  It’s not like we’re back where we were; where we were was doing something to keep this mess in check.  We were staying home, we were distancing, we were masked.

    Now it’s like we didn’t even do any of that, because of these selfish, obnoxious fools who can’t get it through their heads that it’s not “democratic Governors” closing things down, it’s A DEADLY PANDEMIC VIRUS.  It is real, it is happening, it is killing people, and our president and his supporters are so completely off the rails they think as long as they stomp their feet and insist this isn’t all happening, it won’t be.

    Yes, I said fools. The time for being polite about this has passed.

    Worse Than That

    We’re not “right back where we were,” because where we were was starting to do things right, and we’re not doing that anymore.  Consequently we’re worse off than we were, by far.  We’re seeing record numbers of new infections, the death numbers are rising in correlation.  And when you take out the places that got hit hard early and clamped down much harder, it’s even worse than it looks.

    Image from John Hopkins University showing graphs of coronavirus cases reported daily over time for individual states. You can see an early peak with a dropoff into a long tail, in some cases with a recent slight rise, in states that were hit early and adapted properly. A few experienced a lower early peak. Some troubling cases like Nevada, Florida, and others show a much higher case rate now than at any prior peak.
    States like NY and MI peaked early and even if they have a recent increase it’s not too terrible. States that refused to close entirely in the first place and then re-opened far too soon are setting new records daily.  Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University.

    The simple reality is that we need a relief package NOW. Not a “throw money at them to stop them from rioting” relief package, a comprehensive regular payment to ensure people aren’t dying and losing their homes.

    Unfortunately, it is precisely these people who refuse to cooperate that will eventually cause more draconian measures to be taken to enforce masks, social distancing, and the stay-home orders that I’m quite sure are upcoming again.  This isn’t going to go away because of political arguments; it’s here until a vaccine is found.  I’ve been saying that since day one.  It’s not going away just because we want it to.  Until a vaccine is found be prepared to stay home.

    But The Economy…

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    I frankly don’t care much about landlords and mortgage holders at this point. The stock market doesn’t mean anything to me, nor to most of us.  That’s low-speed money, it doesn’t really do anything but sit around and be shuffled back and forth between service institutions with no value add. We need money going in to the economy, that currently isn’t, to keep goods and services moving. When they stop they tend to be tough to start up again.  We can let the landlords and mortgage holders wait for the moment; that money isn’t going anywhere fast anyway.  Right now people need money in their hands, they need to be able to stay the hell home unless they’re essential, if they’re out they need to be covered, protected and protecting.  We can work funding for maintenance technicians at rental properties and private property later, it’ll hold for a couple of weeks.  Right now, people need money in their hands.

    Ignoring this or pretending it’s not really as bad as it seems is killing innocent people.  We have played enough games with this nonsense. Your anxiety is just one more reason you should be staying home.  If you’re not capable of working in a mask, don’t work.  That’s exactly why the unemployment extensions and modifications are in place. 

    We are at high and growing risk with this virus, and it kills. If you’re not worried about that, that’s on you. But as long as the consequences you reap from that attitude are also mine to bear, you simply don’t have the right to impose that on me and therefore you must either voluntarily stop doing so or be regulated by the government into stopping.

    You WILL stop putting other people’s lives at risk.  It’s not a question anymore.

    The virus doesn’t care if we like it. Doesn’t care that we’re uncomfortable, doesn’t care that we blah blah blah doesn’t care.  Doesn’t care about our pretense that we don’t “believe” it.  What we believe is not relevant to the decision-making process anymore.  Nor is what we “like” or that we’re not “comfortable” with.

    Dying now.

    Dying.

    We don’t argue anymore.  We shut up and do what we need to do to stop the dying, while we do our best to improve the science so we can understand how to properly get things rolling again long-term in the worst case scenario, that being that this simply does not go away until we achieve herd immunity.  At present understanding of the numbers, this entails a minimum of a few million dead just in the US, and the only real question is how long will it take.  This is the current reality.

    Sidebar:  How To Get Herd Immunity

    The idea that speeding up infection rates will somehow provide a solution as we magically get to herd immunity without losing a substantial part of the population is nuts.  The way you get to herd immunity is when some majority percentage of the population has been exposed to the virus, and it has run its course in them.  In the current best case scenario that calculates to about 2 and a quarter million Americans dead in the next fairly short period – year to two years.  It means permanent regulation about social distancing, masking, etc.  It means nobody will ever be safe and every year a few thousand or hundred thousand people will die of this until a vaccine is developed, people who would not have died otherwise.

    That is what people who keep talking about “herd immunity” and “only one percent” and so forth are saying. They are literally saying out loud that they’re willing for a few million people to die for no reason beyond their personal comfort and convenience.  Over a period of decades the death rate will slow, but there’s not enough data to predict reliably by how much until, literally, everyone who is not immune to this disease has caught it and either lived or died….and at this point scientists aren’t even certain that immunity is permanent, as there have been multiple reports of reinfection but unfortunately few with any great reliability.  One prominent and respected immunologist, Danny Altmann of Imperial College, London, recently characterized immunity to Covid-19 as “fragile” and “short-lived.”  So it may well be that there is no vaccine, or that any vaccine would have to be administered on an ongoing basis, probably with more frequency than the flu vaccine.

    Do keep in mind that for those who are effected by coronavirus-related disease, “lived” is a somewhat relative statement.  This disease does some pretty horrible things to the body, the full scope of which is not yet known, but we have seen what appear to be permanent and debilitating injuries to the lungs and heart, in addition to neurological disorders that may or may not be transient.

    Those relying on “herd immunity” arguments are basically saying let’s hurry up and have all those people die so we can be done with this, and we don’t even know if being “done with this” is a thing yet.  The argument is sociopathic insanity and absolutely represents a callous disregard for other human lives.

    We now return you to your regularly scheduled article.

    Back To The Economy

    Congress are going to have to find what little remains of their souls and get a relief package through that MEANS SOMETHING. Canada’s model appears to be pretty successful, and other nations are doing well under similar arrangements. Essentially a UBI will be put in place for the duration. My friend Ellis, who teaches macroeconomics, has been saying for years that we would be heading that direction soon regardless. He didn’t necessarily know it would be due to Covid, but he knew we were going to end up in a UBI situation regardless of whether we tried to or wanted to or not.  The pandemic just pushes us a great deal harder in that direction and makes the solutions more clear and clearly necessary.

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    The pandemic creates a special circumstance window where you can get away with UBI and no job guarantee for a period – a year or so – but that’s not a sustainable model; you have to have one for other to work. We shouldn’t do it at all but we don’t have time to wait for the job guarantee foot-draggers to catch up before we start handing UBI payments.  It’s really no exception to the rules or anything, it’s just that we can agree to take on a bit of a long-term hit to keep ourselves alive in the short term.

    However, that also means we need to be much more ethical and focused on what that long-term hit will look like, because it won’t be us paying for it.  It’ll be our kids and theirs.

    You will note that this is the end of this ridiculous “social Darwinism” / “work ethic” approach to questions of employment, compensation, and so forth; this outrageous notion that a human being must do more than simply be human before they “deserve” the benefits of their humanity. Even our best politicians continue to fall for that, if for no other reason than that they know they’re playing to the working poor, who resent the non-working poor oftentimes more than the wealthy do.

    (This is a key reason that the Powers That Be, the ownership class, are dragging their feet; we’re going to realize soon that we could have been doing all of this a long time ago, and the only reason we didn’t is that someone wanted to make a dollar on it first.)

    The people making the dollars from it definitely don’t want us to notice that, and you’re absolutely right to be angry about it.

    But we’re so wrapped up in old-style thinking, even proto-populist Sanders plays these linguistic games, right? “No working American should have to choose between rent and food.”

    Excuse me, no, that’s the old way.  The new way is no HUMAN BEING should have to make that choice, who cares if they’re “working” or “American?” Why does NOT being either one or both of those things disqualify a human being from having their basic needs met? That’s just wrong, stupid, and insane.

    We have the capacity to do it.

    So why aren’t we?

    Universal Morality Strikes Again

    Well, we’re not doing it so we can feel like we’re better than someone, that’s why. So we can continue to maintain a permanent slave class in the so-called “third world” to provide us with enough cheap electronics to stay anesthetized to our own participation in the oppression of others.

    Isn’t that gross?

    Isn’t it time we stopped doing sick things like that to each other and started working on making sure everyone’s got a fair shot at life?  Isn’t now the time to stop thinking of other human beings as expendable?

    I think it is, and so do a whole bunch of other folks, and that’s the way we’re going to go whether the oligarchs and their lackeys like it or not.  Any other direction violates the universal morality.  So that is the direction we will go.  We can get there the easy way, or the hard way.  Right now the oligarchy is still trying to make it the hard way – so hard that we give up.

    But we don’t give up and we won’t give up because survival and propagation of the species is the only universal morality, and when we find we are violating that morality, we will, even unconsciously, act to end that violation as quickly and effectively as possible.

    Solutions We Can’t Avoid

    The reality that we’re being directed away from is simply this:  capitalism as it is practiced in the United States and some other nations is not merely unsustainable; it is incompatible with the universal ethic.  It ensures a permanent underclass just like any other top-down economic system; after all, if there is a top there must also be a bottom.  As long as that “underclass,” that “bottom,” is beneath the level of not mere survival but dignity and opportunity, it is too low for the species to survive and propagate.  Therefore it violates the universal ethic.

    Thus, the human task before us is to ensure the bottom is high enough that any person who can be capable of it has every possible chance to be their best at whatever they choose to do with their lives.

    Screenshot from SlaveryFootprint.Org showing my results (I own twenty slaves) along with some top-level suggestions on how to reduce that number through consumer pressure.
    Screenshot of my results from SlaveryFootprint.Org.

    That is the only real solution to any of this.  We have to live up to our rhetoric, and we have to start right this minute, and everyone has to participate.

    If we were doing that, this pandemic wouldn’t be hitting us so much harder than it is the rest of the world, we wouldn’t have these egregious abuses of power that drive people into the streets in protest, we wouldn’t be building statues to traitors, rapists, and murderers.  We wouldn’t have a nation of maleducated sociopaths ready to be open fascists, walking around exerting offensive violence when there’s no reasoned or moral basis for their demands to be met.

    Then those same fascists turn around and claim that those who exert defensive violence are doing the same thing, because they’re gaslighting manipulative sociopaths and they think everyone else is stupid enough to fall for that deliberate, willful, and ultimately artificial stupidity.

    For far too long, they’ve been right.

    This cycle has to end, and it has to end today.  If it doesn’t end today then it has to end every today until it ends for tomorrow too.

    None of us are free until all of us are free.

  • The John Henry Show S1E021 – Free-For-All Friday #4

    Usually on FFAF I try to stay away from the political and social stuff and stick to more personal, light-hearted, and not-the-news stuff, but this week there’s just no avoiding the discussion.  I’m afraid I got a little passionate on this one, so there’s more NSFW language than usual; I’ve taken the step of self-censoring to avoid dropping any f-bombs on you if you’re listening with the kids around.  Video archive at https://youtu.be/R4rYgAJNW0Y

     

  • The John Henry Show – S1E007 – Free-For-All Friday #1

    The Friday evening show is going to be the weekly open-topic “free for all.”  This week it was so free I didn’t bother doing it until Saturday!  That won’t be the case every time 🙂 We’re discussing a range of things today including propaganda, socialism, an interesting look inside the administration of a large Facebook page and how you can see them choking traffic over time if you refuse to buy advertising (it’s not about the political cant, it’s about the MONEY), integrity in matters of both public and private life, and JH’s sense of where we’re at as an evolving species and where he thinks we may be headed if all goes well.

    As always if you’d rather watch than listen you can check out the stream archive on YouTube at https://youtu.be/_ECTZQHlBvk

    A note about this particular show – there’s about twenty minutes cut out in which I’m discussing various aspects of the video production side of things, and an experiment intended to demonstrate some issues failed 🙁  Since there’s no point in an audio track of visual effects, I trimmed it out.

  • The John Henry Show – S1E006 – Democratic Debate Post-Mortem

    In today’s show I’m examining last night’s Democratic Party debate in Las Vegas, talking who won, who lost, and why.  Do people even care in general?  Did anything change?  Also some conversation with a long-time fan about one of the big pages I administrated on Facebook and much more.  Don’t forget you can also find video livestream archived on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJi-GAxkbU and of course as always please like, share, subscribe, comment.  This is as independent as independent media gets, and you are the fuel that keeps John Henry’s hammer swinging.

  • The John Henry Show S1E005 – History of Presidential Debates

    Who runs and controls Presidential Debates?  Why?  What regulates them, who makes the rules, and why?  Who benefits, and how?  JH digs deep into the history of the Presidential Debates to help you understand why they work the way they do, who’s in control, the pros and cons of the current system  We also touch on why we have a “two-party” system and what the real options are to get out of it.

  • The John Henry Show S1E004 – What Is Liberalism?

    In today’s John Henry Show we discuss what “liberal” and “liberalism” really mean to folks who use those words professionally, why it’s important to understand that meaning and how it differs from the popular usage, and much more including JH stumbling repeatedly to try and formulate an aphorism that never did quite come out right…

  • The John Henry Show S1E003 – Social Media Fakes (Archive)

    Today’s show got kinda rambly and off-topic, but the focus is still social media fakes in the context of political and other discussion where there’s a high rate of disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation. We discuss some common tactics they use, and some ways you can push back against them, along with a bunch of rambling about some other stuff because frankly I was out of spoons about 9am today so I really wasn’t at my best.  I’m going to do this topic again in a more organized, informative, and concise way, but it’s still worth a listen.

  • The John Henry Show Podcast S1E002 – Fairness Doctrine (Archive)

    In today’s podcast we’re talking about doublethink, how we fool ourselves, how we can trip over our own words without even realizing it, starting with an example from a prominent political page on FB where they invoked 1984, doublethink, and “Fairness Doctrine” all at once without ever realizing that in so doing, they were simultaneously warning against and advocating for government control of the media.