It is about time to remind people of my previous post The S Word: A Short History Of An American Tradition … Socialism.

In a discussion on Nancy Weinberg’s Facebook post, Mary Ellen Palermo and I went round and round on rationalizations for having settled on Hillary Clinton as a preferred candidate. I think we finally got to the issue.

Democratic Socialist is what he calls himself. There is no party of this name that I am aware of in the United States. Even if there were some obscure party of that name, I don’t think you can connect Bernie Sanders to it. But we are making progress, since you now have identified what ticks you off about Sanders. Rather than cower from a label and try to pretend he goes by a label that fits your preconceived notions of what labels are acceptable, he is going to educate you on what his label means.

You can do some of that work yourself by reading “The S Word ” book. I am pretty sure you will be surprised to read some of the historical facts that have been purposely hidden from you.

This may be the first time you will be confronted by the power of the forces against which progressives have been fighting, even when they didn’t realize the exact nature of these forces.

The irony of the use of the word socialist, and the irony of so many Americans having been propagandized into thinking this is a dirty word is the large majorities of people who agree with the political positions that Bernie takes as a result of his being a socialist.

June 13, 2015

I got unlazy and did the research I should have. Here is the Democratic Socialists of America web site.

We are a political and activist organization, not a party;

The Daily Kos has the Cartoon: Attack of the 14 year old black girl.

Coming soon from McKinney Texas Police Productions, it’s the next summer horror science fiction cop flick, Attack of the 14 Year Old Black Girl! A frightening teen girl in a bikini terrorizes the police force of a small Texas suburb, making them respond with excessive force and brutality reserved only for the worst of America’s swimming thugs! Who will protect our nation’s pool parties from this monster? Rated R for Racist! Featuring Emma Stone as the Asian Neighbor.

The Wall Street Journal blog has the post De Blasio to Skip Clinton Rally, Praises Rival Sanders.

In April, Mr. de Blasio said in an interview on NBC that he wouldn’t endorse her “until I see an actual vision of where they want to go.”

“She’s a tremendous public servant,” he told NBC. “I think she is one of the most qualified people to ever run for this office. And by the way, thoroughly vetted, we can say that. But we need to see the substance.”

Much if not most of what Hillary Clinton says is laudable. The issue is all about what she refuses to say or to talk about.

Thanks for Nacy Weinberg for posting this on her Facebook timeline.

John Oliver did a fantastic routine in the video Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Infrastructure (HBO).

America’s crumbling infrastructure: It’s not a sexy problem, but it is a scary one.

The one mistake that John Oliver makes along with other politicians is to think that the rebuilding of infrastructure needs tax funding. The building, rebuilding, and maintenance of our infrastructure requires physical and human assets to accomplish. The creation of the money to fund this requires a few keystrokes on a computer by someone at The Federal Reserve bank.

As long as the real assets are freely available to be bought with U.S. currency, then there is nothing stopping us but politicians and a misinformed public.

Naked Capitalism has the article Why the Consensus Process Has a Poor Track Record in Activist Movements.

If the forty-year persistence of consensus has been a matter of faith, surely the time has now come for apostasy. Piety and habit are bad reasons to keep using a process whose benefits are more notional than real. Outside of small-group settings, consensus process is unwieldy, off-putting, tiresome, and ineffective. Many inclusive, accountable alternative methods are available for making decisions democratically. If we want to change the world, let’s pick ones that work.

The article is short on listing the techniques that work, but we shouldn’t fault the article for that. It is valuable to be able to see a problem that others have not seen so well, end explain its origins and symptoms. Coming up with definitive and workable solutions to these problems is a much rarer talent than is the already rare talent of identifying a problem few others can see. In other words it is too much to expect that everyone who can articulate a problem can also find a solution to it.

Naked Capitalism has the article People and Power – The Technology Threat featuring an Al Jazeera documentary. If me telling you the source of the documentary puts you off, then it is your loss, not theirs. It is time to wake up about the huge amount of intelligence that resides in the Arab world and the media organizations that they control.

When the talk of what historic waves of technology innovation did to jobs before, everybody in this documentary leaves out one very important piece of history. The benefits of more jobs at better wages did not happen automatically in any of the previous industrial revolutions. The people, unions, and governments all took actions to make sure that the gains from these revolutions were not concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few. We need to be thinking of how this problem is going to be solved this time around. Did anyone think of asking Watson for a suggestion on how to fix the problem?

I’d hate to see people come to the conclusion that we must shut technology down to save the world. The real point is that we must learn what social/political actions we must take so that the most people get the most benefits out of this great new technology. We can’t leave it to the markets to solve the distribution problem. Any politician who does not actively address this issue is not one that we need to elect in the next few decades.

We need to test each politician to see if that person has the vision to see the problem and to imagine ways to begin to address the problem. Another test might be that any politician who claims to have all the answers we need about this problem is not one who is either telling the truth or one who understands the depth and breadth of the problem.

I don’t think I can remind you enough of one of the quotes on my quotes page.

Scott Santense – posted here June 3, 2015 – source

If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”

The New York Times has the article What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? by Gary Taubes Published: July 7, 2002. Note that this was published 13 years before the article in a previous post Four Decades of the Wrong Dietary Advice Has Paved the Way for the Diabetes Epidemic: Time to Change Course.

As I was reading The New York Times article I was wondering if they cribbed their material from the article of my previous post, and then I reminded myself which article came first.

After 20 years steeped in a low-fat paradigm, I find it hard to see the nutritional world any other way. I have learned that low-fat diets fail in clinical trials and in real life, and they certainly have failed in my life. I have read the papers suggesting that 20 years of low-fat recommendations have not managed to lower the incidence of heart disease in this country, and may have led instead to the steep increase in obesity and Type 2 diabetes. I have interviewed researchers whose computer models have calculated that cutting back on the saturated fats in my diet to the levels recommended by the American Heart Association would not add more than a few months to my life, if that. I have even lost considerable weight with relative ease by giving up carbohydrates on my test diet, and yet I can look down at my eggs and sausage and still imagine the imminent onset of heart disease and obesity, the latter assuredly to be caused by some bizarre rebound phenomena the likes of which science has not yet begun to describe. The fact that Atkins himself has had heart trouble recently does not ease my anxiety, despite his assurance that it is not diet-related.

This perfectly describes my ambivalence at trying out the low-carb diet. Our reason for trying it was mainly about blood sugar test results that showed our blood sugars to be higher than what our Doctor wanted to see. The diet seems to have immediately brought our blood sugar levels down to an acceptable range. The fact that we also lost weight was not our primary motive, but had also been suggested by our Doctor.

I will be getting a dietary consultation to see what a dietician thinks about this issue some 13 years after The New York Times article was written.

Thanks to Mary and Andy A. for sending me the link to the NYT article.

Medium has the article Dear America: Meet Bernie Sanders. Properly, this time by Emil Mella. This one is too good for me to just post it on the Sturbridge For Bernie Sanders Facebook page.

In the race to decide the next President of your arguably great nation, there is one candidate who has been drawing the largest crowds of any candidate visiting the key primary state of Iowa (including the Republican primary candidates, who probably estimate about 1% of the American population at this point). A candidate who out-fundraised Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul in any of their first 24 hours as candidates. A candidate whose policies align with the majority of Americans on everything from income inequality to money’s role in politics to the minimum wage to federally financed political campaigning to abortion to overturning Citizens United to global warming and government taking action to combat it to the affordability of a college degree to gun control to government surveillance to passing a law legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states. A candidate who was one of the thousands of Americans who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in his historic March on Washington in 1963. A candidate who has served as a mayor (being one of the earliest proponents of a lot of the policies that are nowadays commonplace in municipal government), a congressman and a senator, with deep knowledge of the American political system and equally deep, authentic convictions that he has held onto for his entire political career.

This explains that the media is doing a lousy job.

It is not the media’s job to decide what the American people can and cannot hear. That is dishonesty, that is lying. It is the media’s job to keep the American people informed. That’s what it’s there for, and doing anything else is simply abusing the trust millions and millions of Americans have for the current news media system.

Mella goes on to explain why the media is doing such a lousy job, but it’s not hard to figure it out for yourself.

Naked Capitalism has the article Ilargi: QE Breeds Instability.

This is the logic behind the actual “liquidity trap” presented by Keynes in his general theory. Specifically, Chapter 15 entitled “The Psychological and Business Incentives To Liquidity.” Here he argues that every fall in the interest rate relative to what is commonly believed to be a “safe” rate increases the “risk of illiquidity”. The the “risk of illiquidity” is the risk of holding an asset not easily convertible into money at “book” value (this also means an asset is more or less “liquid” based on the relative easiness to convert into money “book” value). Further, rather then seeing interest as a return to “waiting”, Keynes argues that it is “a sort of insurance premium to offset the risk of loss on capital account”.
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….if the interest rate rises too fast those “middle-class people” will take much larger losses on the value of many of their assets than they will get back in interest….That is without even taking into account the higher borrowing costs that many would most likely face. Remember also that at such low interests rates “too fast” is actually a very small increase. To go back to Keynes:

If, however, the rate of interest is already as low as 2 per cent., the running yield will only offset a rise in it of as little as 0.04 per cent. per annum. This, indeed, is perhaps the chief obstacle to a fall in the rate of interest to a very low level. Unless reasons are believed to exist why future experience will be very different from past experience, a long-term rate of interest of (say) 2 per cent. leaves more to fear than to hope, and offers, at the same time, a running yield which is only sufficient to offset a very small measure of fear.

If you own bonds for “safety”, you’d better understand what is being said here. I cannot understanding why one invests in a commodity that is at its absolute tippity top in price, has nowhere to go but down, and does not pay you enough interest to cover the risk. How anyone can think this is safe, just defies logic to me?

Remember that this investment advice is worth every penny you paid for it, and not a cent more. So ignore it if that is what you think best.