New Economic Perspectives has the article The Urgent Need to Save Orthodox Economists from their Crippling Myths by William K. Black.

The failure to understand the role of epidemics of accounting control fraud in driving each of our three modern financial crises is not a small failure of orthodoxy, it should be viewed as a crisis that endangers the global economy. We should all be working together urgently to repair that failure, which will require a multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological effort. Some of us have been trying to do this for decades. We hope the blogger will join us in that ongoing effort. Your fears that you need to learn a newly invented, secret and “occult” methodology in order to practice effective economics are baseless. Reading Akerlof and Romer (available free on line) and some of our hundreds of freely available articles is a good start.

This article explains why the orthodox economists, like the ones who criticize Bernie Sanders’ economic proposals, keeps them from being able to predict the behavior of the modern economy. I think that their inability to believe that people commit fraud, is similar to what prevents them from believing what John Maynard Keynes explained in the 1930s and 1940s. A simple Keynesian explanation is so obvious an explanation for the current economic stagnation, that I just cannot fathom why these so-called liberal economists refuse to accept it. Perhaps these economists just refuse to believe that Milton Friedman practiced academic fraud when he “disproved” Keynes’ explanation. I learned my economics before Milton Friedman came on the scene to spout his malicious clap-trap. Maybe that is why I was not fooled by it, even though the author of the book from which I learned my economics, Paul Samuelson, had to admit that he mistakenly changed the book after I read it because of being duped by Milton Friedman.

Naked Capitalism has this very interesting article Why the Oregon Refuge Occupiers Had a Legitimate Grievance…..Just Not the One They Went After.

I had no ideas of the complex shenanigans that big business and the Republicans were playing to set this whole process in motion. It is all part of the play that Bernie Sanders is trying to stop. Bernie Sanders has a good grasp on the big picture that I know about. I wonder if he has a grasp on some details that this story tells, and that I had not thought about in the big picture. Although, I must say, I was aware of how Walmart drives its suppliers to lower prices below all reasonable levels. Somebody ends up paying the consequences of this pressure from Walmart, and it sure isn’t the Walton family.

What President Obama Tried To Do to Help Small Ranchers

After his election in 2008, President Obama took up the cause of independent farmers and ranchers against the excesses of meat packers. Starting with a series of 5 meetings with various farm groups representing cattle, hog and chicken farmers, the USDA who was charged with rewriting regulations and President Obama found themselves blocked by a Republican controlled House. While the Senate supported appropriations for the overall meat industry, the House went full out blocking food stamp and food safety programs. No one wanted to place the poor at risk. In December 2011, the USDA published 4 watered down regulations of which the only full strength regulation eliminated arbitration. In May 2012, the DOJ followed through with a report on the five 2010 meetings detailing a lack of competition. The DOJ went to state:

“It could not act to address these wrongs because, no matter how outrageous the conduct of the processing companies, their actions did not amount to “harm to competition” as defined by the current antitrust framework” which was skewed to protect consumers. Obstructionist Republicans in the House not only blocked any reform efforts but also any change to the law or USDA regulations and threatened budget cuts to the Department of Agriculture. It would be interesting to discover which Republicans blocked the reform efforts of Obama and the DOJ and came out in support of grazing rights for ranchers.

If you think about why this information has not come out before, you can realize why the corporate media and the Republicans want to keep the public in the dark. That makes me wonder who knew about this, and should have brought this to the public’s attention, but didn’t. The answer was staring me right in the face. The Obama administration who was fighting this fight and being blocked at every turn are the ones who should have blown the whistle.

This is the perfect example of the failure of the Obama administration to engage the grass roots political organizations to rally to the cause. President Obama acts like he has to fight these battles by himself. When he is defeated, he just swallows the defeat, rather than turning that defeat into one more brick in the case he should be building against his opponents. He simply fails to realize the power he has to build the case example by example of what the Republicans and corporate Democrats are doing to this country.

This case against the oligarchs is the one that Bernie Sanders is trying to build, and the one that Hillary Clinton wants to keep buried. Whether or not Bernie Sanders is going to be the one to finally wake up the ire of the voting public enough to have them take back their power, remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, he has certainly added fuel to the coming revolution. If only more people, like President Obama, were helping him build the pressure, he wouldn’t have to do this all by himself.