Naked Capitalism has the article The Augean Stables – How Corruption Has Amended the Constitution. The article is a discussion of Gary Hart’s Time Magazine essay Gary Hart: America’s Founding Principles Are in Danger of Corruption and his new book The Republic of Conscience.

Here are some excerpts of quotes from Hart’s book.

[T]he largest [lobbying “predator” (his term)] by far is WPP (originally called Wire and Plastic Products; is there a metaphor here?), which has its headquarters in London and more than 150,000 employees in 2,500 offices spread around 107 countries.
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According to Mr. Edsall, WPP had billings last year of $72.3 billion, larger than the budgets of quite a number of countries.

This reveals the magnitude and concentration of lobbying on a scale that I could never have imagined. The fact that it is not centralized to one particular country is also shocking. The way this has changed the form of our government, if not shocking, may be more profound than I had imagined.

Mother Jones has the article Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad.

Last March, the US Department of Education reported that 92,000 students were subject to school-related arrests in the 2011-2012 academic year, the first time the agency collected and published such data. Black students comprised 16 percent of the total students enrolled but accounted for 31 percent of arrests. And a quarter of the total arrested were students with disabilities, despite that they comprised only 12 percent of the student population.

Let’s just hope that when Tantasqua Regional High School gets its school resource officer that he or she is well trained to not be one of the problems added to whatever ones the school already has.

Campaign For America’s Future has an excellent article Hillary Clinton’s Economic Story: Stuff Happens. Normally, I don’t like to quote too extensively from an article because I would rather you read the original to give the authors the clicks that they deserve. In this case, the message is so important, that I cannot take the chance you won’t read the original. There is still more to be read in the original than I am quoting here, as the ellipses indicate.

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A framing speech can’t and shouldn’t go into policy details, and Clinton pledged a series of speeches would fill in the missing text. But a framing speech should tell a clear story: about how we got in the hole we are in, who drove us there, how do we get out, and what leaders and movements will lead the way.

Here, Clinton’s speech was disappointing. The problem, she argued, is most Americans see “an economy that still isn’t delivering for them… It still seems, to most Americans that I have spoken with, that it is stacked for those at the top.” The “basic bargain” – work hard and get ahead – “has been eroded.” Note the passive voice.
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We have been victimized by inexorable economic forces – technology, global trade. Better ideas and policy can fix it. Completely absent from the frame is any sense of the systematic war waged by corporations and the right wing to win the battle of ideas, flood money into our politics and rig the rules of the economy to their benefit. They rigged monetary policy and fiscal policy, global trade rules, labor and wage laws, government investment, deregulation, privatization, global policing – all reinforcing the effort to weaken workers, drive down wages, and capture more of the profits at the top. And then they invested a minute portion of those profits to buy both parties and corrupt our democracy.
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Omitting the reality that our policies have been systematically and purposefully rigged to favor the few – and that our politics have been corrupted in that pursuit – both misleads Americans, and weakens that agenda’s appeal.
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Progressives are winning the economic argument among Democrats. As Clinton shows, the era of small government is over. Every Democratic candidate summons us to a new era of activist government. But the question of this populist moment is who will speak truth not to power, but to the American people. Clinton is calling people to a policy discussion. Sanders is rousing them for a political revolution. She’s one of the best qualified candidates in the history of the Republic and an overwhelming favorite to win the nomination. But he is telling a far clearer story of why working people are struggling in this wealthy country and what they must do to take it back.

This article does a much better job of explaining exactly what is missing from Clinton’s speech than my previous post about the article Clinton’s Speech on “The Economy”: Where’s the Beef?. The two articles identify many of the same issues. The current article has more details where they are needed and fewer details where they are not needed.

Naked Capitalism has the article Clinton’s Speech on “The Economy”: Where’s the Beef? For me, it was more analysis than I had the patience to read. Feel free to read as much as you have the time and patience for. I single out two issues from the article that I find most striking.

Democrats must abandon the view that balanced budgets and surpluses are a sign of virtue; they are not. And until they do, they will be in the policy straitjacket that they helpfully donned after people like the Peterson Institute helpfully held it for them; always a grand bargain of one sort or another; always “pay for.” How did FDR help win World War II, after all? By cutting domestic spending? With a balanced budget? Fiscal policy matters only for the effects it produces in the real economy.
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Also pervasive is lack of agency: There is a “crisis.” Why? For whom? But it “recedes.” Why? For everybody?

The first point is one that I often make on this blog. That’s not a coincidence as Naked Capitalism frequently makes this point. New Economic Perspectives also makes this point frequently. Both Naked Capitalism and I read the New Economic Perspectives blog.

The lack of agency issue is a trick that many Democrats and Neoliberals (meaning not liberals at all) use to hide the fact that someone must have done these awful things. They didn’t just happen. There is someone who has to be held accountable for the outcome of their evil actions. Could the deregulation king himself, Bill Clinton, be blamed for any of these problems?

PC Magazine has the WebCast What You Need to Know About Backdoor Encryption.

FBI Director James Comey wants a backdoor into every encrypted communication in America, but most security experts think that is a really bad idea. PCMag’s Editor-in-Chief Dan Costa talk to Security Analyst Fahmida Rashid about the logical, ethical, and technical problems with creating back doors in security products.

What’s New Now is PCMag’s daily report where we cover the most talked about technology story of the day. Check back every day as we suggest why the story is important to you and provide expert analysis and opinion on the topic.

The two most damaging arguments against the back door are that the bad guys will eventually get the keys, and that other countries will want the keys or they will insist on their own back doors. Some countries might ban back doors. What happens to international trade when some countries insist on something while others forbid it? If you exempt international communications, then that is a back door for avoiding our back door. Supposedly the international communications are the ones the FBI most wants to read.

The Daily Kos has the post Why I’m Leaving the South. Before I get any questions, let me make it clear that this is not my post, so the “I” in the headline does not refer to “me”, Steve Greenberg. Sharon and I have already decided that we cannot move to Florida, even if the climate is appealing in the winter.

Anyway, back to a quote from the post.

I have a master’s degree in counseling, and I’m particularly good with teenagers. For ten years I had a decent career, although counselors aren’t paid much. Then the economy tanked and social services were cut. I lost my job. Then another job. Nobody was hiring counselors; I got an hourly wage job. Lost my health insurance, lost my car, lost everything. I went into default on my student loans.

Things began to pick up for counselors, but there was a new question on applications: are you in default on your student loans? South Carolina and a few other red states passed a law saying that such persons cannot be hired by any agency receiving state funding, which for me and my degree, is nearly all the jobs here. Getting out of default would be feasible if I had a professional job, but on $8 an hour? No way. As a single person with no family, meager survival is nearly possible on that low of a wage.

I can just imagine the response from the legislators who thought that punishing people for defaulting on their loans would get them to pay up. As we always used to say in the Army when caught doing something stupid and being asked why we did it, usually by a sergeant, “Gee, Sarge, it sounded like a good idea at the time.”

The Huffington Post has the story Hillary Clinton Focuses On Middle-Class Wages In Sweeping Economic Policy Speech.

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton focused on the problem of stagnant middle-class wages on Monday in the first major economic policy speech of her presidential campaign.

In sweeping remarks at the progressive New School in New York City, the Democratic candidate said that higher wages are driven by strong, fair and long-term growth, offering policy proposals that fit into each of those three categories. Clinton praised the policies pursued by President Barack Obama, but suggested that more needs to be done to help middle-class families. Her message echoed themes espoused by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has made her mark on the Democratic Party by arguing that the economy is rigged against the middle class.

I don’t like Hillary’s message as much as I like Warren’s message, but if Hillary is able to sell it better than her rival candidates, then less power to her. It would be a shame if she were able to convince us that her husband’s policies weren’t a big part of the problem.

If only she felt that she could be completely honest about the whole story, she might be a candidate that I could eventually support. The fact that she has to gloss over certain facts (some would call it lying), makes me suspicious that she would be able to do all that needs to be done if she were ever to become President.

You can tell in the paragraphs above how my take on Clinton’s remarks changed even as I wrote the words.

Thanks go to Wesley Chrabasz for posting this on his Facebook page.

Americans Against the Tea Party has the article If You Love Bernie Sanders, You’ll Love Him Even More After Seeing This!

No matter how much you love Bernie Sanders, you will love him even more after hearing this!

During an appearance on The Thom Hartmann Show earlier, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) went on a rant against the Koch brothers and a recent video they produced which makes the asinine claim that the American middle class is just fine and, in fact, anyone making over $34,000 is wealthy. Charles Koch also said in an interview on Tuesday with The Wichita Eagle that we should abolish the minimum wage because it would help poor people.

I guess we’re not the only ones who feel ill when billionaires pedal this kind of condescending claptrap.

Sharon registered her dissent over the headline. She noted that Sanders didn’t answer the caller’s question. That just drives her wild when politicians do that. Elizabeth Warren had the habit of going into her standard spiel no matter what the question, and I sometimes did get annoyed at that. However, I have also noted that this is one of Sanders’ campaign and interview strengths. This caller’s question was a good one, but in circumstances where pundits and interviewers try to side-track Sanders, it doesn’t take him long to get back onto his talking points.

Let’s get back to this caller’s question. One of the answers to this question is that what the oligarchs and the rich have done throughout history is to push things so far that it leads to revolutions which overthrow their class. Still it is not absolutely crazy of them to behave that way, even given the history. After all, any particular oligarch or rich person might get through his or her own life without experiencing any of the eventual turmoil. Let the descendants worry about the consequences.