New Economic Perspectives has the article Is Progressivism in the Eye of the Beholder? by Joe Firestone. He is critiquing a post by Thomas Palley. He quotes Palley as follows:

In Clintonworld, it seems that playing a central role in catastrophic policy failure or peddling bad economics doesn’t disqualify you from future influence. If anything, a record of being disastrously wrong on economic policy seems to be a required credential.

This is something that even I forget when Clinton tries to put on the charm to pretend that she gets the idea of what being a progressive is. Joe Firestone gives a good account of what would be necessary for us to believe Clinton has really reformed. However, he comes to the following conclusion:

Perhaps Sanders is that authentic candidate. But Hillary Clinton, I’m afraid, can never play that role!

Naked Capitalsim has the article The Fed’s Dereliction of Duty and False Capital Flows Morality.

Yves here. As a result of the US’s push over decades to make the world safe for America’s investment bankers, capital flows across borders easily, and some top experts contend, too easily. Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, in their work on 800 years of financial crises, found that high levels of international capital flows were strongly correlated with more frequent and severe financial crises. In 2011, Claudio Borio and Piti Disyatat published an extremely important analysis of the crisis which shredded the Bernanke “global savings glut” thesis. It instead found that the culprit was excessive financial elasticity, which basically means deregulation and the resulting high level of cross-border capital flows.

While I have been focusing of late on the uselessness of monetary policy easing when fiscal stimulus is what is needed (just as explained by John Maynard Keynes), I have been ignoring the international impacts. The above article is a good resource for getting my attention back on these important issues.

What is truly galling about the situation is summed up in the closing comments.

Moreover, this tale of financial volatility may have a different moral than the usual one: bad things can happen even to those who follow the rules.

So even if you don’t want to participate in this risky game, there is little you can do to protect yourself except try to have enough of a cushion to survive the inevitable trauma.

Naked Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: Ukraine’s “Operation Vulture” and Labor Protests.

Emptying out Ukrainian business bank accounts will leave empty shells. With Ukraine’s economy broken, the only buyers with serious money are European and American. Selling to foreigners is thus the only way for managers and owners to get a meaningful return – paid in foreign currency safely in offshore accounts, outside of future Ukrainian clawback fines. Privatization and capital flight go together.

So does short-changing labor. The new buyers will reorganize the assets they buy, declare the old firms bankrupt and erase their wage arrears, along with anyother bills that are owed. The restructured companies will claim that bankruptcy has wiped out whatever the former firms (or public enterprises) owed to workers. It is much like what corporate raiders do in the United States to wipe out pension obligations and other debts. They will claim to have to “saved” Ukrainian economy and “made it competitive.”

Who could have predicted this would be the result of the Ukraine taking the West’s deal instead of the deal Putin offered? Well, just about everyone whom I quote on this blog, and they did predict exactly this. But seriously, who could have predicted this?

Here is the YouTube from the original author of IS RACISM OVER YET?

Thanks to my Facebook friend Tangelia Sinclair-Moore for sharing this with her Facebook post.

Being privileged myself, I know that I have not lived this, but I did live through the history. I was able to observe, as a bystander, many of the things that Laci Green mentions that are just history to people her age. None of this is a surprise to people of my age who had their eyes and ears open at the time it was happening. The more recent events are available to anyone over the age of, say, 6 if they have an open mind.

The Daily Kos has the tirade In Regards to Conservatives Fierce Defense of Child Rape.

Here is the gist of the story, which you must have heard about by now.

Conservatives heard about Josh Duggar raping at least 5 of his very young sisters. They heard about how his parents knew, tried to cover it all up, and sickeningly allowed it to continue for an entire year after they learned about it.

The tirade in the Daily Kos is more than merited by the facts of this case, and cases like it.

This is the type of thing that made Sharon and me more than happy to leave the state of Texas. I know this sort of stuff goes on all over the world, but the situation in Texas was finally more than we could take. Child molesters can seem like some of the nicest people in the world except to their victims.

Speakeasy with John Harwood has the transcript and video for 10 questions with Bernie Sanders. It is easy to hide the taming of the pundit if you can edit the video after the fact. At least they had the decency to publish the entire transcript. Below is just one excerpt.

HARWOOD: After the revolution, what does it look like? What do you see happening to the 1 percent?

SANDERS: What is my dream? My dream is, do we live in a country where 70 percent, 80 percent, 90 percent of the people vote? Where we have serious discourse on media rather than political gossip, by the way? Where we’re debating trade policy, we’re debating foreign policy, we’re debating economic policy, where the American people actually know what’s going on in Congress? Ninety-nine percent of all new income generated today goes to the top 1 percent. Top one-tenth of 1 percent owns as much as wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Does anybody think that that is the kind of economy this country should have? Do we think it’s moral? So to my mind, if you have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent, you know what, we’ve got to transfer that back if we’re going to have a vibrant middle class. And you do that in a lot of ways. Certainly one way is tax policy.

HARWOOD: Have you seen some of the quotations from people on Wall Street, people in business? Some have even likened the progressive Democratic crusade to Hitler’s Germany hunting down the Jews.

SANDERS: It’s sick. And I think these people are so greedy, they’re so out of touch with reality, that they can come up and say that. They think they own the world.

What a disgusting remark. I’m sorry to have to tell them, they live in the United States, they benefit from the United States, we have kids who are hungry in this country. We have people who are working two, three, four jobs, who can’t send their kids to college. You know what? Sorry, you’re all going to have to pay your fair share of taxes. If my memory is correct, when radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the highest marginal tax rate was something like 90 percent.

You shouldn’t even bother to watch the video. If you read the transcript, you get the idea of how the editing of the video manages to cut out most of the heart of what Bernie Sanders had to say. The transcript is quite good, tough. You will really enjoy reading it.

I love this never ending series of Bernie Sanders Tames …

Here he is taming Wolf Blitzer. I promise you the video will get there shortly. You have to see the prelude to fully understand the taming.

If all Bernie Sanders did was to handle the media pundits the way he handled Blitzer, this would be a huge gift to society all by itself. Luckily, this skill might get him all the way to the Whitehouse.

The video of the speech has finally made it to YouTube.

Seeing the video along with hearing the audio adds a lot to the experience. This is starting to look like the kinds of crowds that came out to support President Obama when he first ran.

Vermont Public Radio has coverage of Bernie Sanders Kicks Off His Campaign In Burlington.

The article has the following link:
Full audio of Senator Bernie Sanders speaking at the event to kick off his campaign for President, in Burlington, Vt.

I don’t know of any candidate running this year or in the past 4 decades who holds out a greater possibility of getting this country back on track as does this candidacy of Bernie Sanders. It would be a tragic mistake if the voters of this country didn’t get to hear this message, and decide for themselves where they want this country to go.

Why limit this to The United States? There are probably billions of people around the world that would like to have a person like Bernie Sanders leading their country.

Bloomberg News has the article ‘Political Revolution’: Bernie Sanders Officially Launches Democratic Presidential Bid. It has some video clips to go along with the audio above.

I know this is horse race coverage which we should not promote, but what fan of Bernie Sanders could resist taking heart from this excerpt.

Sanders, one of the most avowedly left-wing members of Congress, has risen steadily in polling since hinting at a bid. A November 2014 Bloomberg/Saint Anselm poll put his support in New Hampshire at just 6 percent to the 62 percent enjoyed by Hillary Clinton. At the start of May, Sanders had risen to 18 percent, benefiting from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s repeated insistence that she would not run for president.

Paul Krugman has the opinion piece in The New York Times, The Big Meh.

In other words, at this point, the whole digital era, spanning more than four decades, is looking like a disappointment. New technologies have yielded great headlines, but modest economic results. Why?
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One possibility is that the numbers are missing the reality,
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Another possibility is that new technologies are more fun than fundamental.
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So what do I think is going on with technology? The answer is that I don’t know — but neither does anyone else.

The feigned ignorance that Krugman displays in articles like this is getting way more than a bit tiresome. He seems capable of thinking up two possibilities, and then seems to give up. He fails to note that over the more than four decades he cites, there has been a decimation of the government’s incentives for industry and the oligarchs to share the benefits of increased productivity with the workers. In past periods of increased productivity and economic growth, the sharing of the benefits with the workers has spurred enough job creation to make up for the jobs wiped out by increased productivity.

For a self-declared liberal with a conscience, Krugman’s inability to imagine this as a third possible explanation makes one wonder what has happened to that conscience. As John Oliver of the Last Week Tonight show might wonder in reference to Paul Krugman’s articles in the lame stream media, How Is This Still a Thing?