The Washington Post has the story Clinton calls out CEOs for making too much money.

For Clinton, executive compensation is a safe target. You can find plenty of economists with no interest in soaking the rich who agree that our system for negotiating CEO salaries is inefficient and wasteful. The question is to what degree talking about executive compensation will mollify Clinton’s critics on the left.

At least it is a start in the right direction. She still has a lot of catching up to do. Will we see her evolve to the positions that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have established over decades of their careers?  Or will we see a video of her telling the wealthy CEOs why they don’t really have to worry about her rhetoric?

When I discuss my dislike of the idea of Hillary Clinton as  our next President, some people who have my same distaste say to me something like, “If she is the Democratic candidate in the election, of course you will vote for her because of her power to appoint Supreme Court Justices.”

I keep forgetting the answer that Michael Kinnucan posted on Facebook. Since I live in Massachusetts, it is unlikely that if I don’t vote for Hillary Clinton that it will make much difference on the outcome of the election.  If she can’t win Massachusetts without my vote, then she and Martha Coakley ought to get together and commiserate.  (Democrat Martha Coakley actually got my vote both times she ran for statewide office and lost.  One of those times gave us Senator Scott Brown, and the other time gave us Governor Charlie Baker.)

So, as a Massachusetts resident, I am free to vote my conscience.  If I had to cast my vote tomorrow, my conscience tells me to vote for Bernie Sanders.

Democracy Now has the video Debate: Hillary Clinton Sounds Populist Tone, But Are Progressives Ready to Back Her in 2016?

Former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Clinton has formally entered the 2016 race for the White House in a second bid to become the first woman U.S. president. We host a roundtable discussion with four guests: Joe Conason, editor-in-chief of The National Memo, co-editor of The Investigative Fund, and author of “The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton”; Michelle Goldberg, senior contributing writer at The Nation; longtime journalist Robert Scheer, editor of TruthDig.com and author of many books; and Kshama Sawant, a Socialist city councilmember in Seattle and member of Socialist Alternative, a nationwide organization of so

The part of the show with the debate starts at 12 minutes and 6 seonds (12:06) into the video

I have only had a chance to watch the first third of the discussion so far, essentially the opening remarks, but I think this is going to be an interesting discussion. I don’t know if Hillary’s candidacy will survive the “debate”.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Capitalism’s Defender Unknowingly Indicts the Banksters by William K. Blank.  If you need a refresher course in what I mean when I talk about bank fraud by the CEOs of major banks, this article might do.  I know you need a refresher course, because you are not paying any attention to my claim of the crookedness of Hillary Clinton.  These are her BFFs in the financial world, and she would rather you pay no attention to their criminal acts.  Since they are funding her campaign for the Presidency, she isn’t about to promise you that she will call for prosecution of their ongoing fraudulent behavior when she gets into office.

I know, she talks like a Democrat so you like to pretend that her craven acceptance of bribery isn’t as bad as the craven acceptance of bribery among the Republicans.  She throws you a few bones about issues like LGBT rights, women’s right, equal pay, environmental concerns, the Supreme Court as a way to keep you pacified.  If you buy that line, then you are also accepting craven bribery.

It is hard to figure out who is the greater threat to this country, the politicians who accept craven bribery or the voters who accept their own share of such bribery.  Perhaps the real moral failure of this country is the acceptance of bribery on all sides.  We can’t expect more from the politicians when the voters who elect them are just as bad.

I received the following email about drafting Alan Grayson for Senate in Florida.  From what I know of him, have read about him, and have heard him say, I think he would be a game changing addition to the Senate on a par with having Elizabeth Warren in the Senate.

The website mentioned in the video is congressmanwithguts.com

Naked Capitalism has the article “Getting Started”: Questions for Hillary Clinton as She Begins Her Campaign in Iowa.  You may or may not be interested in the analysis of Clinton’s first TV ad.  What I found to be particularly valuable was the set of questions for Hillary that Lambert Strether posed at the end of the article.  He introduced that section with the following comment:

So, readers — and especially Iowa readers, if any — let’s get started ourselves, and try to imagine some questions we might ask Clinton on her listening tour, should we be lucky enough to be invited to. Here are a few. But the rule is, you have to be Iowa nice! (That is, nicer than you would be in the rough and tumble of the Naked Capitalism comments section.)

I can’t believe he left out this one that I added.

What kind  of fraudulent banking behavior do you think merits criminal prosecution of the executives who are responsible?

Just the thought process involved in coming up with questions you would like to ask is a great way to focus your mind on what is really important.  Take note of how few of these questions will be asked by the professional pundits in our “news” media.

As I have, said in my previous post Senator Elizabeth Warren Interview, Elizabeth Warren is under the misapprehension that sanctions were effective in getting Iran to negotiate with us on their nuclear program. Misapprehensions are fine if they don’t leave you with the wrong lesson that you wrongly apply in some future situation. This is why I harp on them.

Perhaps Warren thinks that Obama made a fair offer to Iran earlier in his Presidency, they rejected it, and we had to go to sanctions.

Well, in November 2013, I wrote a blog post about How France Sank the Iran-Nuke Deal. I quoted an article from Consortium News.

Now the Obama administration will face a decision whether to press Iran to go along with those changes or to go back to the original compromise when political directors of the six powers and Iran reconvene Nov. 20. That choice will provide the key indicator of how strongly committed Obama is to reaching an agreement with Iran.

At the time, I commented about the article,

The United States has a long history of making offers to Iran such that the public face of the offer seems eminently reasonable, but hidden actions by the U.S. are slaps in the face of Iran.  I wonder why the U.S. press does not educate the U.S. public about this history.

Well, nobody has mended their ways since I wrote that.  I knew it was too much to expect.  There seems to be something hidden from us that is riding on the need for this deception.  Too bad we will find out what it is only when we are deeper into the hole we are digging for ourselves.

Bernie Sanders posted the image below on his Facebook page.

I then shared it on my Facebook page.

To me, it sounds like Bernie Sanders has positions that I can support on a wide range of issues. I am not sure Elizabeth Warren has arrived at this level of broad understanding that Sanders has. For instance, I think she is very naive about the role that sanctions played in getting negotiations going with the Iranians. She doesn’t seem to have seen the evidence that the Iranians offered a much better deal to the US when President Bush was in office, but he rejected it in favor of sanctions. Maybe the lack of effectiveness of the sanctions is what finally convinced us to start talking to the Iranians, In that case, Warren has got the story quite backwards. I am hoping that she will come around after I sent her the explanation and a link to the backup data. However, Bernie Sanders is already at that kind of sophistication.

Because of Roger’s comment below that seems to disbelieve my claim to have backup data, I’ll put the link to some of that right here

If you have access to Facebook, you might enjoy or abhor the conversations there.

Informed Comment has the article Iran: What did Khamenei really say about the Lausanne Agreement, and Why? by Juan Cole.

Hard liners are jumping up and down mad about what Rouhani & Zarif are alleged to have given away to the West, and my suspicion is that Khamenei’s demand for immediate end of sanctions is a way of tossing them a bone for the moment. If you read the whole speech he comes back and is still supportive of the process at the end, saying he is not for or against the deal since there really is no deal yet, just a framework agreement for negotiating the deal. But then that means he did not, contrary to the headlines, come out against the deal today.

Juan Cole is telling you what he thinks is going on.  In using the phrase “my suspicion is”, he gives you fair warning that he does not have inside knowledge into Khamenei’s brain.  I just think that, given the one-sided presentation of the negotiations by our new media, it is valuable to consider other possible interpretations that are driven by different agendas.  I have not researched what Juan Cole’s agenda is, but I assume he must have one.

Appointing Loretta Lynch as Attorney General will just further the aims of Wall Street to avoid prosecution.  We need an Attorney General who sides with the ordinary people, not the crooked CEOs on Wall Street.

I just got email from Senator Patrick Lahey, asking me to sign a petition for Loretta Lynch’s nomination for Attorney General.  I told him that he should be ashamed of himself for pushing the nomination of another Wall Street lackey in the mold of Eric Holder.

See my previous post Bill Black: HSBC Violates its Sweetheart Deal and Loretta Lynch Praises It.