MoveOn.Org is giving members a sneak peak at some videos in a series they are calling the Big Picture. The first one is 10 Ideas to Save the Economy: Fight For $15.

The speaker is Robert Reich.

In an interview by George Stephanopolous, Bernie Sanders said that he would consider Robert Reich for Treasury Secretary. See the interview at my previous post at about 5 minutes and 50 seconds in.

Stephanopolous: Name a couple of people you would consider for treasury secretary.

Sanders: Robert Reich is somebody I would … was in fact the Secretary of Labor. I think he has been a strong progressive and understands that what we need are economic policies that benefit working families, not the big money.

Elizabeth Warren has a blog post I have serious concerns about ISDS. She included a list of actual cases brought under previous trade policies to show that her concern is not merely hypothetical.

ISDS isn’t a one-time, hypothetical problem – we’ve seen it in past trade agreements. Just in the past few years:

• A French company sued Egypt after Egypt raised its minimum wage.
• A Swedish company sued Germany because Germany wanted to phase out nuclear power for safety reasons.
• A Dutch company sued the Czech Republic because the Czech Republic didn’t bail out a bank that the Dutch company partially owned.
• Philip Morris is using ISDS right now to try to stop countries like Australia and Uruguay from implementing new rules that are intended to cut smoking rates – because the new laws might eat into the tobacco giant’s profits.

The Obama Administration has said that they have fixed all the problems, and nothing like that will happen here. They just won’t show you how.

The Obama administration will not show you how by simply showing you the clauses in the TPP that fix these problems. Even worse, they make no attempt to explain how they have fixed it even if they won’t show you the agreement itself. You have to wonder why President Obama is making it so difficult to believe what he says. Perhaps he feeling such intense pressure to negotiate the deal, that he hasn’t got the strength to resist. He may be hoping the American public will be incensed enough to stop it.

Politicus USA has the article Bernie Sanders Drops A Liberal Bomb On CNN’s Republican Talking Points. The article focuses on this CNN interview with Bernie Sanders.

The transcript that Politicus USA provides is invaluable.

CUOMO: Because when you say things about expanding entitlements and giving more to the have nots, that’s unpopular. It sounds like it’s expensive. And the people who vote may not like it.

SANDERS: I disagree with you, Chris. First of all, it is not expensive in the sense that if you say to people all over this country, should large profitable multinational corporations, who today are not paying a nickel in federal taxes because they’re stashing their money in Cayman Islands and other tax havens, start paying their fair share? The American people, across the political spectrum, say, yes, they should.

We’re losing well over $100 billion every single year because of those taxes. I’ve introduced legislation that would end that. Talk to Warren Buffett, one of the richest guys in the world. He says, you know, it’s absurd. My effective tax rate is lower than my secretaries. The American people understand that. So what we have got to do is spend money intelligently.

We have got to make college affordable for our young people if we’re going to compete in the global economy. I’ll tell you what else we need to do. Real unemployment in this country is not 5.5 percent, it’s 11 percent. We need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. And when we do that, in terms of roads, bridges, water systems, rail, airports, we can put some 13 million people back to work. And that’s the kind of agenda that I’m going to be fighting for.

Also note his comment:

I am running for working families and the middle class, not against Hillary Clinton.

A very good way to tell you what he is running for, rather than what he is running against. If he can stay out of the gutter from where the siren call of the pundits is emanating, he could change the face of politics.

This is another episode in the ongoing series Bernie Sanders Tames the Pundits.

The CBC has the video interview “The Price We Pay” | Harold Crooks Documentary.

On Facebook The Other 98% shared CBC News: The National’s video.

The jobs may be going to China, but the money is going to the Cayman Islands. That’s what off-shoring really means. As long as we are allowing the 1% to shield their money from taxes, they would be fools not to take advantage. We would be (are) fools to let them buy our elected representatives who pass the laws that make this all possible. There is probably no higher return on investment than buying a politician.

Naked Capitalism has the article Wolf Richter: “Smart Money” Prepares to Profit from Bond Market Rout. The article finishes with the following:

And bondholders carry all the known and unknown risks of those four decades in return for what is still a minuscule amount of yield. That’s why the ultimate smart money is selling them at a record pace to still eager bond-fund managers that will stuff them, and all the associated risks and potential losses, without compunction into retirement nest eggs. Thank you hallelujah central banks for this deal of a “lifetime.”

From this article, I next read the Marketwatch article Why stocks may find it tough to wiggle out of the bond-market mess. THis article starts with the following:

“The latter part of 2014 and the dawn of 2015 will probably represent one of those episodes in financial history when the fixed-income markets were gripped by a confluence of factors that is unlikely to be repeated over the next hundred years,” said Jefferies’s chief equity strategist, Sean Darby.

There’s fodder for your future tales of battles past this morning, as Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen’s assets-are-bubbly comments continue to rattle global markets, which have already been duly freaked out by plummeting global bonds. She’s hit us at a tough time.

You know my financial advice is worth every penny you pay for it, but these articles just confirm for me why I wouldn’t buy bonds at the current historically high prices for them. At least with stocks there is the possibility that a company can grow into the inflated price of its stock. With a bond, there is not even this chance to justify the current high prices.

In these days of computerized trading, you don’t even get paper to cover your walls when you find the bonds to be worthless to sell.