UFTP has put together an update on the war in Ukraine as of March 2, 2022 - Updates on Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol, and Kherson.

We debunk Russia's claim of "De-Nazification" and dig deep into Putin's obsession with NATO. Is the US to blame for the whole thing? 

We broadly cover misinformation and the history leading up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We've dug up magazine interviews with Mikhail Gorbachev, the half-Ukrainian, half-Russian former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to get an historical perspective on NATO, Ukrainian independence, and Ukraine's relationship with Russia and the West. 

Mikhail Gorbachev was born 91 years ago today, March 2, 1931. He is still alive and is an advocate for peace and reconciliation between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe. 

UFTP was written and recorded between 2020 and 2021, and as we close in on 2022, I've looked back on all that was written, recorded, and that has since transpired in the world and have decided I was right all along. Go figure. 

At the heart of everything is animosity toward those with less. As we push for equitable shares of wealth and power, remember that a compromise of half measures is a win for those in power. It just kicks the can a little farther down the road. We can fight this by doing something every day. It doesn’t have to be a public display of protest, it doesn’t have to be attention grabbing or anything extreme. We can read, we can write, we can talk and support and organize, and we can back those who engage in the things we don’t. That’s free association. That’s autonomy.

Of course, you can and should protest, collectivize, and spread dangerous ideas like equality and anti-fascism. The important thing is to not just sit back and wait for others to get started. 

As the last chapter, this one is intense. 

Do we own ourselves? If we do, do we commit to the idea that ownership of the self translates to ownership of another? We examine economic beliefs around slavery and human rights and determine that freedom - real freedom - means freedom from ownership. 

Capitalism, Economics, Politics, and the Corporation are at this point all the same thing. Where you peer into the workings of one you find the imprint of another. This is not because we all at once decided to transform ourselves into a society of capitalists and consumers, but because these structures have successfully commodified the idea of the self. Homo economicus goes through life alone. She is told she is an individual, but she never deviates from the confines of her capital existence. Economics is a place that makes sense. If she is alone, you are alone and so am I. She cannot help us because it is not in her interest, and so we are not meant to help each other.

And that is where we wind up. We have to see each others' interests as our own, that the plight of the global poor is our own as well. We have to start working to unfuck the poor. 

To achieve true equilibrium as preached by economists would be the collapse of markets. The incentives to win, accumulate, consolidate, and profit would disappear if equity for all was achieved - equity is no goal of capitalism and therefore of no interest to the economist. We are more than individual competitors, but for capitalism to persist we must believe in the sanctity of self-interest. It is a delusion that the individual dies outside the capital structure - our individuality has been suppressed by allegiance to an unaccountable market.

In Chapter 12, we learn all about Milton Friedman's Consumer Spending Matrix, the Prisoner's Dilemma, why State control of resources is no better than private control of resources, and what "public" really means. 

Milton Friedman, arguably the most-influential and well-known economist of the late 20th Century, was a subprime asshole. By now you know what a neoliberal is, and that's like the least of Friedman's issues. Friedman fully believed in the holy power of the market economy - he believed truly free markets could outperform the state in all areas. From providing education to creating abundant wealth and health for every human on the planet. 

What's wild is that Friedman - basically the messiah of Republican economic policy - believed some absolutely non-Republican things. For instance: he thought there were too many laws and too many things that were illegal - recreational drugs, prostitution, and gambling. He was against corporations making political contributions, against government contractors relying on the nanny state (ahem, Military Industrial Complex and private prisons), and came to the defense of the Mexican poor when the IMF opened up Mexico to international financing. 

The thing with Friedman, though, is that he really believed the world naturally operated under market principles and that it was The State's interference in the market that prohibited us from achieving a higher level of existence as humans. The dark side to Friedman's seemingly liberal take on economics was that he was anti-union, anti-regulation, and pro-monopoly. These are the principles that conservatives latched onto and still push to this day. 

Chapter 11 is a re-imagining of what we cherish the most - do we really value safety, or do we value depriving humans of their dignity? A serious question worth considering the next time you see a homeless camp.

With incarceration rates far surpassing those of any other nation on the planet, the United States should be the safest place in the history of humanity. Right? All the bad guys are locked up, our police forces are armed to the teeth with military surplus, and our harsh sentences for misdemeanors act as a deterrent for would-be criminals...right? 

If we don't feel safe in a heavily policed state but insist that the system works, do we really understand what safety is? Increasingly, the American judicial system punishes no- to low-income citizens most heavily. Crime bills are constantly being written that criminalize homelessness - which must again and again be argued in federal court is in direct opposition to the Constitution. You may be wondering what this has to do with economics. Let's look at it another way. What do you get in exchange for the local taxes you pay? Access to public utilities, public school, waste disposal, parks, and law enforcement. 

One part of the population assumes that when you have an emergency the police will come and make things better. And one part of the population assumes that involving the police will make things worse. Whose safety is granted by the payment of property taxes? If not all of ours equally, do we as a result fund anyone’s safety? From rape-kit backlogs to extrajudicial killing, the failings of local law enforcement reflect their true purpose: not to protect and serve people, but to protect and serve the properties that generate tax revenue. In a land where "possession is nine-tenths of the law", do we really understand the distinction between possession and ownership? 

What does all this complaining about money and power mean, anyway? This chapter really turns the screws on economics' existential purpose. 

Robert Skidelsky asserts in his book What’s Wrong With Economics? A Primer for the Perplexed that “the only defensible purpose of economics is to lift humanity out of poverty.” It follows that the aggressively widening disparities between rich and poor through postwar policies is an indefensible outcome. In other words, what we have done, what the Dollar has done, is wrong – if not morally then practically – and there exists no internal fix for those wrongs. 

In this more philosophical chapter, we explore the socio-political externalities of economics - from the correlation between minimum wage, birth rate, and childhood health outcomes, to entrenched racism and extremist partisan politics. We seek a path for economic change through non-traditional means - what can we do now?

Do you know where "illegal" immigrants go when they are deported from the US? No, they aren't flown back home. In many cases, they are deported to industrialized cities where the only option for survival is to hopefully get a job at a factory where they will make or assemble products for sale in...the US. Doesn't that sound fucked? 

Do you know how we justify this behavior? We dehumanize minorities. Trigger warning: this episode contains racist quotes from American politicians. 

"Fuck the Shah!" - Jimmy Carter, 1979

From the fall of the Shah and the subsequent fall of Iran (things turned out to be a hot mess), to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the attention drawn to the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN) and beyond, international trade from 1979 through the end of the 20th century can only be described as chaotic. The mass liberalization of international finance found Central America swimming in debt, causing a crisis known as The Lost Decade and an influx of immigrants to the United States. What did we do? We turned the victims into villains. 

Ah, crap. Did we dive into the global economy without first defining the trade economy itself? Yep. Let's take a huge step back and learn about moving stuff back and forth on ships, let's learn about the mythical origins of barter and money (hint: it's not what you think), and let's figure out how things get priced in the first place. 

We cover a lot of ground in this chapter - we have to look at the coup d'etat of democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh and how, 25 years later, international oil trade transformed the global economy into a neoliberal fever dream of mass financialization and substituting one set of evil-doers for another, and then another, and another, etc. Wherever the US has enemies, someone is bound to make a lot of money. Take, for instance, Mexico. In the face of the Zapatista uprising, a memo from Chase Manhattan Bank was leaked, revealing how the financial backers of developing nations expect those nations to protect their investment: fix elections, murder dissenters. 

In this episode, we'll learn all about: equilibrium pricing, numeraires, relative value, comparative advantage, exchange rate, pegging, trade balance, trade surplus, trade deficit, and capacity utilization!