....While the US government is busy driving up its "sovereign" debt and the interest owed on it, Japan has been canceling its debt at the rate of $720 billion (¥80 trillion) per year. How? By selling the debt to its own central bank, which returns the interest to the government. While most central banks have ended their quantitative easing programs and are planning to sell their federal securities, the Bank of Japan continues to aggressively buy its government's debt. An interest-free debt owed to oneself that is rolled over from year to year is effectively void - a debt "jubilee." As noted by fund manager Eric Lonergan in a February 2017 article:

If the Federal Reserve followed the same policy and bought 40% of the US national debt, the Fed would be holding $8 trillion in federal securities, three times its current holdings from its quantitative easing programs.

Eight trillion dollars in money created on a computer screen! Monetarists would be aghast. Surely that would trigger runaway hyperinflation!

But if Japan’s experience is any indication, it wouldn’t. Japan has a record low inflation rate of .02 percent. That’s not 2 percent, the Fed’s target inflation rate, but 1/100^th of 2 percent – almost zero. Japan also has an unemployment rate that is at a 22-year low of 2.8%, and the yen was up nearly 6% for the year against the dollar as of April 2017.

Selling the government’s debt to its own central bank has not succeeded in driving up Japanese prices, even though that was the BoJ’s expressed intent. Meanwhile, the economy is doing well. In a February 2017 article in Mother Jones titled “The Enduring Mystery of Japan’s Economy,” Kevin Drum notes that over the past two decades, Japan’s gross domestic product per capita has grown steadily and is up by 20 percent.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett expressed support for adopting a single-payer health care system on Monday, arguing that it would likely do a better job of controlling runaway costs.

In an interview on“PBS NewsHour,” host Judy Woodruff asked Buffett, a longtime Democratic donor, how the United States should address the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

Buffett qualified his comments by claiming that health care policy was“way outside [his] circle of competence.” “With my limited knowledge, I think that [single payer] probably is the best system,” Buffett said.

Buffett’s support for a single-payer health care system, in which one government insurer covers the entire country, was based on the current system’s failure to keep rising health care costs in check. He noted that health care costs have risen exponentially as a share of the economy in the past four decades, holding back the competitiveness of U.S. businesses far more than taxes have.

“In almost every field of American business, it pays to bring down costs,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of people involved in the medical, the whole — just the way the ecosystem works — that there is now no incentive to bring down costs.”

A single-payer system would likely “be more effective” at reducing those costs, he concluded.

There is abundant evidence to back up Buffett’s argument. Medicare, a single-payer system for America’s seniors and disabled workers, has a far better record of containing costs than do private insurers. Among other reasons, that’s because Medicare does not need a fund a marketing budget or compensate shareholders and executives.

The United States, virtually alone among developed nations without a universal single-payer system, has by far the world’s highest per-person health care costs — and based on many key criteria, it nonetheless has worse outcomes.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is calling on Democrats to embrace a single-payer healthcare system in order to win back Congress and the White House in upcoming elections.

Warren argued that simply blocking the Republican rollback of the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, is not enough to distinguish Democrats from their GOP counterparts in the minds of voters.

"President Obama tried to move us forward with health-care coverage," Warren said, "by using a conservative model that came from one of the conservative think tanks that had been advanced by a Republican governor in Massachusetts. Now it's time for the next step. And the next step is single payer."

While putting pressure on her Democratic colleagues, Warren is also traveling this week to communities that supported Trump in the last election—connecting with working- and middle-class voters as the president's party attempts to push through the new Senate healthcare bill which would end health coverage for 22 million Americans by 2026. Speaking to a crowd of about 500—including some who traveled from New Hampshire—in the economically distressed city of Lowell, Massachusetts, Warren said,

The Senate Republicans’ “Better Care Reconciliation Act,” which would repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), would slash resources needed for Medicaid to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy. The homecare workforce, one of the country’s fastest-growing, would be extremely hard hit by the plan. The passage of this bill would not only kill homecare jobs, but make homecare workers sicker, while permanently destabilizing the homecare industry.

The number of homecare workers in the country is conservatively estimated to be two million, and it has been growing by about 7 percent per year. Every day, these workers, who are primarily women, provide critical care for seniors, people who are sick, and persons living with disabilities. Homecare workers meet the needs of seniors who want to stay at home as they get older and people of all ages who have disabilities and want to live independently. The daily assistance of homecare workers makes it possible for millions of people across the country to live in their communities.

Yet instead of investing in this critical industry, the new Senate bill spells disaster for those who provide care and those who need it most. Priscilla Smith, from Fayetteville, North Carolina, has been a homecare worker for seven years. She says she’s most concerned that the people in the facility where she works won’t get the care they need. “Medicaid is what pays for workers like me to provide care,” Smith said. “And many elderly people can’t afford private insurance.”

The bill ends Medicaid expansion and introduces per capita caps and block grants. Combined, these changes spell the end of Medicaid in its current status as a successful, responsive program. For decades, Medicaid has allowed seniors and adults and children living with disabilities to get the homecare they need to live at home and in their communities.

At the same time, the bill includes multiple tax breaks for the wealthy, including retroactive tax breaks for high-income households.

The exact number of people who would lose Medicaid is not yet known due to the furtive and hasty way in which the bill was created, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has announced that by the year 2026, 22 million people would lose insurance under the bill and cuts to Medicaid would reach $772 billion. The CBO also predicts that few people who lose their Medicaid eligibility would be able to purchase insurance “because of the expense for premiums and the high deductibles” for individual market plans.

....The Ossoff loss isn’t the clearest illustration of the Democrats’ addiction to centrism and neoliberalism—one could argue his brand of politics, like it or not, was a close fit for the center-right district. Still, what happened in Georgia is yet another blaring signal of the party’s endemic refusal to embrace progressive populism. It’s not that the Democratic Party can’t “wake up” to Americans’ surging support for a bold challenge to the corporate stranglehold over our economy and politics. It’s that it won’t.

The Democratic Party leadership remains hopelessly bound to corporate power and profits. This fatal yet indefatigable marriage goes beyond the most obvious layer of corporate PACs and lobbyists—it spans the neoliberal agenda itself.

To become a true “party of the people” that stands courageously and consistently for workers, unions, low-income communities of all colors, and our ecological future, the Democratic Party must divorce itself not only from corporate cash, but from its deeper enmeshment with corporate power.

The dynamics that propelled the Trump nightmare and that plague a Democratic Party revival are deep-seated. When Trump stumbled his way into the White House, many commentators pronounced the death of neoliberalism and the corporate centrism that defined Hillary Clinton. Yet under Trump, corporate interests and the evisceration of the public sector are of course powering on full-throttle, deepening the alienated anger and dispossession—and the racism, immigrant-scapegoating and xenophobia—that helped enable Trump.

As Cornel West assessed shortly after the November 8 election, “This lethal fusion of economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating brought neoliberalism to its knees. In short, the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of U.S. democracy.”

From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, the Democrats have helped pave the path for their own demise by failing to challenge the corporate power interests. These interests, along with Republican corporate allegiances, preclude the kind of change that workers, low-income people, immigrants and communities of color urgently need.

....There are promising signs of a resurgent democratic socialism, particularly among millennials. Groups like the Democratic Socialists of America have soared in the months since the election. And the array of anti-Trump efforts, even if scattered, at least evidences a sizable mass of people ready to fight, and keep fighting.

It goes far beyond Donald Trump. He's just simple-mindedly exacerbating a trend. Clear signs of deterioration have been building in our nation, some of them old and some more recent, all of them related to arrogance and greed at the highest levels.

....There is an obvious way to reverse the deadly demise of our nation. While tolerating (but regulating!) capitalism, add a healthy share of socialism to care for children, the elderly, the disabled, the health-impaired, the jobless, the underemployed. Choose a compromise between capitalism and socialism. Accept the fact that 40 years of "winner-take-all" philosophy only works for the advantaged few, and that a working society needs cooperation among its members. Poverty and crime won't be resolved with more policing. Job opportunities are needed. A well-supported public education system is needed. An end to tax subsidies for the rich is needed.

But this will happen only if progressives can convince their fellow Americans that they have been cheated by neoliberalism....and that 'social' is not a dirty word.

A Congressional Budget Office score that projected 22 million fewer Americans would have insurance under the plan sent some members fleeing Monday and left the bill in jeopardy of failing to have enough votes to even be called to the Senate floor this week.

But Republicans in the White House and in Congress were pleasantly surprised that the bill included more savings than they expected — and are trying to figure out if they can dole it out for votes.

The Senate has about $188 billion to play with.

Among the possible changes: More spending for health savings accounts [which are totally unhelpful to the poor] to appease conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee, according to three people familiar with the matter, and some additional Medicaid and opioid spending for moderates.

"We are still working with leadership to change the base bill," a Lee aide said.

Lee, Cruz and others on the right have been looking to wipe out as much of Obamacare as possible and replace it with health savings accounts, group plans and selling insurance across state lines, among other ideas. It’s not clear whether the Senate parliamentarian would allow all of those proposals through under strict reconciliation rules. And Lee will likely require far more dramatic changes to be won over.

The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to dismantle the federal clean water rule, which protects waterways that provide drinking water for about a third of the US population.

The EPA, with the US army, has proposed scrapping the rule in order to conduct a “substantive re-evaluation” of which rivers, streams, wetlands and other bodies of water should be protected by the federal government.

“We are taking significant action to return power to the states and provide regulatory certainty to our nation’s farmers and businesses,” said Scott Pruitt, administrator of the EPA.

Pruitt said the EPA would swiftly redefine clean water regulations in a “thoughtful, transparent and collaborative” way with other agencies and the public.

Green groups, however, said the move pandered to fossil fuel and farming interests and was part of an agenda to weaken clean water protections.

“Once again, the Trump administration has agreed to do the bidding of the worst polluters in our country, and once again it’s putting the health of American families and communities at risk,” said Michael Brune, executive director of Sierra Club. “We will fight this and every other attempt by polluters and the Trump administration to destroy our water resources.”

The planned rollback follows an executive order penned by Donald Trump in February which called for a review of the regulation, also known as the waters of the United States rule, that was introduced by the Obama administration in 2015.

The rule was meant to end years of confusion over which waterways were federally protected from pollution, with the clean water rule simply designating “navigable” waters for safeguards. The Obama administration widened this definition to include the drinking water of about 117 million Americans.

....Fierce partisan divisions have done a job on our democracy. Most voters — at least 85 percent of them — are now locked into a congressional district that’s so safe for one party or the other that you can predict the winner two years out by looking at partisan data alone.

Some people blame gerrymandering, while others cite geography or rage against dark money. All are corrupting factors. All act as accelerants on the underlying issue: Our winner-take-all system of districting that gives all the seats to the side with 50 percent plus one vote and no representation to the other 49.9 percent. We could end gerrymandering tomorrow and it wouldn’t help the unrepresented Republicans in Connecticut, or Democrats in Kansas, feel like they had a voice in Congress.

A Virginia congressman wants to change this. Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat, introduced something called the Fair Representation Act this week. Beyer aims to wipe out today’s map of safe red and blue seats and replace them with larger, multimember districts (drawn by nonpartisan commissions) of three, four or five representatives. Smaller states would elect all members at large. All members would then be elected with ranked-choice voting. That would ensure that as many voters as possible elect a candidate of their choice: In a multimember district with five seats, for example, a candidate could potentially win with one-sixth of the vote.

This is how you fix democracy. The larger districts would help slay the gerrymander. A ranked-choice system would eliminate our zero-sum, winner-take-all politics. Leadership of the House would belong to the side with the most votes — unlike in 2012, for example, when Democratic House candidates received 1.4 million more votes than Republicans, but the GOP maintained a 33-seat majority. No wasted votes and no spoilers, bridge builders in Congress, and (at least in theory) less negative campaigning as politicians vied to be someone’s second choice if not their first. There’s a lot to like here.

Beyer knows it’s a heavy lift and that comprehensive reform like this could take time and make some people uncomfortable at first. But he is eager to start a national conversation about reforms that could help vacuum the toxicity and dysfunction from our politics. It’s a conversation well worth having. We spoke last week by phone while he was in Washington:

The Earth is rapidly losing its forests at a rate much faster than humans can replant. Exact figures vary, but according to Scientific American, “most analysts attribute upwards of 15 percent [of global carbon emissions] to deforestation.” This means that by clearing or burning the Earth’s forests, we are directly contributing to the rapidly increasing rate of climate change.

One Australian engineer is enlisting technology to fight the battle against deforestation. Dr. Susan Graham has helped develop a pair of drones that can help mitigate some of the damage by planting trees at a rate that far outpaces what is possible to do by hand.

The first drone scans an area of land, searching for an ideal plot to plant. This drone helps to make a 3D map of the area and then special algorithms are employed to find the best places to plant. The second drone then takes that map and its payload of up to 150 seed pods and gets to work shooting the seeds into the ground. Lauren Fletcher, the CEO of BioCarbon Engineering, said: “We’re firing at one a second, which means a pair of operators will be able to plant nearly 100,000 trees per day — 60 teams like this will get us to a billion trees a year.”

China has seen incredible economic and social changes over the past few decades. But could the impact of artificial intelligence take the country by surprise?

I recently spent a few weeks in the country, talking to researchers and entrepreneurs developing cutting-edge AI technologies and products.

What stuck with me—beyond the growing ambition of China’s researchers and the overall vibrancy of its tech scene—is how much people are starting to talk about the potential for AI to eliminate jobs across the country. Just a few years ago this seemed like much less of a concern. Now the issue of jobs comes up regularly during Q&A sessions and panel discussions at industry conferences.

This is perhaps partly a reflection of the country’s economic slowdown after years of spectacular rise. But I think it also reflects a growing realization among some of the world’s smartest entrepreneurs and innovators that the economic and social impact of AI is likely to be profound.

The sentiment can certainly be detected among some of China’s most prominent and influential technologists...

Our economy is increasingly ruled by a few dominant firms. We see them everywhere, from established giants Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Walmart to fast-growing newcomers like Airbnb, Tesla, and Uber. There have always been large companies and outright monopolies, but there’s something distinctive about this new generation of what some economists call superstar companies. They appear across a broad range of business sectors and have gained their power at least in part by adeptly anticipating and using digital technologies that foster conditions where a few winners essentially take all.

Our annual list of the 50 Smartest Companies includes many of these firms, but it’s not merely a list of today’s biggest or most profitable players. It highlights technologically innovative companies whose business models allow them to exploit these advances. The list is our best guess as to which firms will be the dominant companies of the future. Amazon and Facebook and Google are on it, but so are plenty of newcomers. Though they might be unfamiliar to you today, we believe they have an inside track to take advantage of the technologies, such as artificial intelligence, that will define business in the coming years. Being smart about innovation won’t guarantee that these firms become superstars. But it does, at least, give them the potential to create and dominate new markets in an increasingly competitive business environment.