Naked Capitalism has the article Gaius Publius: Sanders Raises $3 Million in Four Days; Will He Split the Party?

Yves here. While I’m loath to take the site too much in the direction of politics (as opposed to finance, economics, and political economy), Bernie Sanders’ choice of Stephanie Kelton as economist to the Senate Finance Committee, his firm opposition to toxic trade deals, and his long-standing support of social safety nets and pro-middle class policies means his campaign is focused substantially on issues of economic justice. Moreover, I was bothered to see readers take up what I regard as a misguided post by the normally excellent Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report attacking Sanders as a what amounts to a progressive stooge for the Democratic party.

I am glad to see this article mention the BAR article. I had read it before and thought that it was a silly argument. If Bernie Sanders can’t win a Democratic primary, then it is pretty certain he can’t win a general election. Other people may want him to run just to send a message. If he refuses to run a campaign that even he is sure has no hope, refusing that option puts further credence to his claim to be in it to win it.

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.

CNN has the article First on CNN: Clinton, Democratic presidential opponents to debate six times.

First the good news:

Democrats will announce Tuesday six presidential primary debates, giving long shots a potential opportunity to share the debate stage with frontrunner Hillary Clinton, CNN has learned.

Then the bad news that could be enough to drive me out of the Democratic Party:

The DNC will set the criteria for debate inclusion and any candidate who participates in a separate debate outside of the sanctioning process will be barred from future DNC debates, a Democratic official told CNN.

It is this kind of attitude and the desire to lose at all costs, that has me wondering if the days of the Democratic Party are numbered in pretty small numbers.

The nerve of them to try to prevent more debates. I had a feeling that the DNC has bot been looking out for my interests for a long time. That’s why I have cut off all donations to committees of national Democrats. I will only make contributions to individual candidates.

If they think that I will vote for Hillary if she is the nominee, then they have another think coming.

To start the conversation, watch this video from Larry Wilmore.

You don’t have to go so far as to even think about hate speech. All you have to do is to remember the phrase “fighting words” as explained by WikiPedia.

In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. It held that “insulting or ‘fighting words,’ those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are among the “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of [which] … have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem.”
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There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting words” those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

— Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942

So, was Pamela Geller protecting free speech or was she guilty of the crime of inciting disorder by using fighting words?

May 6, 2015

Reader RichardH has pointed out to me, that I should have read about the Post-Chaplinsky decisions in that Wikipedia article Fighting Words. You would have to be a lawyer to figure out what is prohibited, and what is not.

After I wrote the original post, I started to wonder how the American Nazi Party was allowed to hold a march in Skokie, Illinois where there was a large population of WWII Nazi Holocaust survivors. Conveniently, Wikipedia has the article National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie.

Thanks to RichardH for keeping me honest.

Naked Capitalism has the article At INET Conference, Warren Adds Two Pieces to Her Financial Reform Framework.  The article and the speech have important things to say about a number of politico/economic topics.  I’ll select a minute few to comment on here.

From the article comes the following excerpt:

Could a President use a trade deal to override financial rules? Well, it’s been a part of trade agreements since the late 1980s, including the WTO. In fact, WTO rules prevent firewalls like Glass-Steagall: when the U.S. negotiated it in 1997, they added an intent to repeal it, which of course happened two years later, in time for the WTO’s implementation. (Size caps on financial institutions are actually also banned by WTO rules.)

Financial services deregulation is more of an issue for the TTIP, the proposed U.S.-European agreement. European negotiators, if anything more embedded with their banks, have insisted on including a financial regulation chapter, which the U.S. has thus far rejected. By the time TTIP gets locked in, another President could be in office who wouldn’t be so rigid on that point.

Here is the YouTube video. Elizabeth Warren’s remarks start at the 12:00 minute mark.

I found one comment on YouTube particularly uninformed.

youdodat2

If you’re not talking about taking the power of money creation away from these private bankers psychopaths, then you’re just talking bullshit. Debt based money has to end.

In my response, I think I have finally figured just what is so wrong about this comment and almost everything that Ron and Rand Paul have to say about the subject.

Steve Greenberg

+youdodat2, You’ve been listening to the idiotic Paul family for too long. You are fooling yourselves if you think that it is only the banks that create private money. The stock market itself creates money with far less regulation than the banks. Anytime you have an asset that the accounting rules say you must put a value on, the frequently used technique of mark-to-market has the effect of creating money.

The Paul family is far too naive in their understanding of money. You might even go so far as to say that they haven’t a clue about what they claim to be expert in.

It is about time to stop equating what knowledgeable people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have to say about banks, banking, and money with what ignorant people like Ron and Rand Paul have to say. If you are going to listen to “experts”, you need to make sure that the person you are listening to really is an expert.