Robert Reich’s session on Facebook has the worst investment advice I may have ever heard.

Here is a guy I generally admire, but don’t take your investing advice from him.

He starts with a chart that shows you why investing in the stock market has been a bad idea over the last 20 years.

What a pile of hogwash. Few people are unlucky enough, if they have any brains, to invest only at the peaks. I thought he was an economist that knew economics. Or is investing not part of what an economist knows anything about? Maybe John Maynard Keynes was an exceptional economist.

Does Reich know about dollar cost averaging, even if he doesn’t know about Keynes/Graham/Buffet investing? If I had listened to Reich’s kind of advice over the last 20 years, I would be a lot poorer than I am now, and I mean a lot.

Of course, if I had bought only at the valleys and sold at the peaks, I would have been a lot richer, but nobody knows how to do that.

If you fall for what Reich is selling in this video, then maybe he is right, you shouldn’t be investing in the stock market.

First let me give you the ad.

Hillary Clinton decries this as a negative ad. Her name never comes up in the ad. So what does Hillary think is negative?

Is she saying the following excerpt refers to her?

There are two democratic visions for regulating Wall Street. One says it’s okay to take millions from big banks and then tell them what to do.

Wouldn’t she have to be telling us that she is the one taking millions from big banks to claim this ad is about her? Is that the message she wants to give us? Is this campaign starting to drive her around the bend?

Next is an excerpt from the expert’s letter.

In our view, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plan for comprehensive financial reform is critical for avoiding another “too-big-to-fail” financial crisis. The Senator is correct that the biggest banks must be broken up and that a new 21^st Century Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment from commercial banking, must be enacted.

You can use the following link to read the letter that the experts wrote.

Ever since Hillary made the claim that her proposal was better, I have been waiting for exactly this rebuttal from Bernie. I have been posting on my blog this explanation of why his plan is far superior to the Clinton plan. In the debate, he could have asked her if the experts who told her that her plan was better were the same ones that were such a disaster in her husband’s and in the Obama administrations.

YouTube has this great video Clinton to Obama: ‘Shame on you’ which I have renamed with the title of this post, 2008 Hillary Clinton Attacks 2016 Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton attacks Hillary Clinton for using shameful tactics against Bernie Sanders. Maybe she just doesn’t remember what she thought of this the last time she ran for President. Or maybe she does remember, and figures if it worked for Obama, it might work for her. Don’t you just love the sincerity and high moral standards? How are her fans going to make excuses for this?

For additional perspective, you might want to read the article Hillary Clinton’s dirty attack on Bernie Sanders.

Whatever weakness she mischaracterizes in Bernie’s plan can be traced back to the plans she and her husband have supported for years. Is this what stands for principles in Hillary’s book?

This should just about finish off Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party.

The Washington Post has the article The transcript of President Obama’s final State of the Union: What he said, and what it meant. The “what it meant” part is in the yellow high-lighted words which are links to their interpretation of background material.

I link to the article, not so much for their interpretation so much as a source for the original words for me to interpret. I probably want to pick apart more of the speech, but the following is a good place to start me off right away.

Food Stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did.

A large part of the State of the Union Address was great. This is one of the statements that stood out from what was not so great. For many of the problems that the President addressed, there was no agency in how he spoke of them. People feel insecure, wages aren’t high enough, there is instability in the world, the economic system is rigged because they just happened with no agent responsible for causing the problem? In this one sentence he finally made mention of the fact that there are people who cause some of these problems.

Obama was eloquent on many of the things we have to do to solve our problems, but occasionally he would slip in a good word about some of his policies that are responsible for our problems. The Trans Pacific Partnership that he touted is the antithesis of what he claimed it was. Trade policies like the TPP are exactly the kind of tools that the rich use to rig the system in their favor. I refuse to believe that he doesn’t know this. So his touting of this pact is one of the things that ruined the speech for me.

In my 71 years I have grown to know some of the times when I am being lied to. I don’t like it no matter who is doing it.

You would expect an attack on Bernie’s plan from a Presidential candidate who represented the oligarchs and the 0.1% of people who are the wealthiest in this country. Well, here is the proof of what you would be getting if you voted for the attacker. Not only have I received the following email from the Sanders campaign, but I have also seen the news headlines about the attack. Even the Clinton’s daughter has been enlisted in making this false attack. Motherjones has the article Chelsea Clinton Accuses Sanders of Trying to “Dismantle Obamacare”.

You shouldn’t need any further proof that Hillary Clinton wants to be president no matter what it costs our country for her to rise to power. If she would stoop so low as to try to set back universal healthcare for a generation just so she could defeat Bernie Sanders, then what else is she capable of?

YouTube has a video Health Care: Sanders vs Paul. I don’t want to bias you in any way, but I must say that I have always considered Ron and Rand Paul to be complete fools. I think I have finally found the evidence to prove it to even the most biased person.

Rand Paul’s argument is so fallacious, I don’t know how anybody could fall for it. Health care as a right does not mean you have a right to demand that a specific doctor should provide you with health care. It means that the health care system should find access to health care for you no matter what your financial means are. Paul even agrees that the system does do that to a large extent without enslaving doctors. Medicare for all would be Bernie Sanders’ better way of providing the health care you have a right to.

If Rand Paul applied his logic to diagnosing your illnesses where he cannot even figure out what one thing does and does not imply about another thing he would be a very poor doctor.

I see that Rand Paul does not only use faulty logic about fractional reserve banking. Here he applies it to health care, too. What else is he using faulty logic for?

Alternet has the article Dabs, the Latest Pot Trend Police and Media Are Needlessly Freaking Out About:

A potent form of marijuana has arrived on the East Coast, and some media outlets seem to have gotten a contact high.

I post this only as an educational service. Not being interested in marijuana except as a political issue, I knew nothing about this.

It is generally vaped, rather than smoked.

I have seen the term “vape” in print, but I didn’t know what it meant. From reading this article, I am guessing that this is something that will be turned into a media storm. This is probably one more thing that we should guard against being sent into an unnecessary tizzy by news people who pretend to know less about this than we do.

I am just so sick and tired of people being fans of Ron and Rand Paul because of their explanations of the evils of fractional reserve banking. People think what the Pauls say about banking and the FED is brilliant, when in fact it is idiotic.

Here is the YouTube comment by slowpoke692 that finally got me to post this.

I mean does it realy take Bernie Sanders to tell you who is ripping you off! Anything you do or say is a waste of breath until something is done about fractional reserve banking and the federal reserve!

Fractional reserve banking was invented thousands of years ago. The apocryphal story you read in economics text books and the one that Ron Paul says he heard from an Economics Professor is that some people had a business of storing other people’s fungible valuables (gold) for safe keeping. Soon one of these businesses realized that most of the gold sat in the warehouse, and only a small fraction was ever requested at any one time by the depositors. So the business realized that they could actually charge for lending out some of the gold in the warehouse, and the owners of that gold would never be inconvenienced by the fact that not every ounce of their gold was all sitting in the warehouse. Not only would the customers never be inconvenienced by this way of doing business, but owners could even get a share of the money earned from the loans. In his own writings, Ron Paul says that when he heard this, he realized it was a massive fraud that needed to be stopped when modern day banks do it with their depositors’ money (and pay interest on the deposits). I don’t think he ever learned another thing about economics after this revelation stopped him in his tracks.

What Ron and Rand Paul and their adherents don’t seem to recognize is that this fractional reserve business is done in everyday transactions by individuals who have nothing to do with banking.

When you buy something from a company and hand your money over before they deliver the product, how do you know that the product is actually sitting in a warehouse at the time you make the purchase? If it isn’t, then that is just like borrowing money from a bank that isn’t actually sitting in the bank when you borrow it. Who is going to insist, check up on, and enforce a requirement that what the store just sold you is actually in the warehouse at the time they sold it to you? The cost of goods would be higher if businesses had to pay for the warehouse space to store a product before it could be sold. The whole concept of just-in-time delivery rather than storing inventory for future use in manufacturing is one of the Japanese innovations that let them build high quality cars more cheaply than the inferior product made in Detroit at the time.

The Pauls never tell you that doing away with fractional reserve banking would also do away with bank accounts that paid the depositor interest. The banks would actually have to charge you for the service of keeping your money safe.

So, do you still think that the Pauls are brilliant economists? Or do you realize what idiots or snake oil salesmen they are?

By the way, if you have ever held an interest bearing account in a bank, or ever received a “free” toaster for opening up an account, what does it say about your intelligence if you never stopped to even wonder how the banks could afford to do this?

The Real News Network has the story Bernie Sanders Decries Lack of Wall Street Prosecutions.

Former financial regulator Bill Black says it’s important to reimplement the Glass-Steagall Act – but it’s not enough to prevent another financial crisis.

Bernie Sanders will also provide the missing part when he becomes President.

I am not just blowing smoke when I say that breaking up the big banks is a better solution than just regulating them. Listen to this interview with William K. Black, an expert on prosecuting white-collar criminal fraud at banks.

I received an email from Elizabeth Warren that I think all of you should see.