The New York Times has the story What’s in a Name Change? Politics, Some at George Mason University Fear.

Those foundations have given more than $50 million over the past decade, most of it funneled to pet initiatives affiliated with the university, like the Mercatus Center, an economic think tank that churns out libertarian policy research, and the Institute for Humane Studies, which promotes libertarian philosophy. Mr. Koch sits on the boards of both.
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The Charles Koch Foundation usually insists on some say in how its money is used, going as far as asking for the right to have a committee it appointed sign off on hires to a new economics program it funded in 2011 at Florida State University.

This is what I fear is going on at The David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. When MIT announced this project, my alma mater and I parted company.  I no longer give any money to MIT, which <sarcasm>I am sure they sorely miss</sarcasm>.  I didn’t dare go to my 50th reunion for fear that the speakers extolling the contribution for David Koch might make me sick to my stomach.

Naked Capitalism has the article Watch Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and Phil Gramm Have a Love Fest Over Repeal of Glass Steagall.

This clip is a reminder of the ideology that got us into our current mess: rising inequality and debt levels, a global meltdown that led to the greatest looting of the public purse in history, followed by stagnation and deflation that is too widely blamed on the march of technology and not on poor policies and overt corruption. And this thinking is very much alive.

I read the article, but I couldn’t stomach watching the video. I’ll save it here on my blog in case I ever need a good emetic.

The Real News Network has the video discussion Black Voters and the NY Primary.

Historian Gerald Horne tells Paul Jay that the fear of the racist right drives black voters to support Hillary Clinton.

There were many other factors that were discussed other than the one emphasized here.  The in-depth discussion of this idea was saved to the last.  As the discussion of the other ideas went on, I kept wondering how this idea got to be the one that was emphasized.  As it turns out, there was much more to this emphasized idea than I had imagined.  It was quite enlightening.

This wasn’t  so much an interview, or an argument, as it was a discussion by two people of an important subject that got further developed as the two participants could feed off of each others ideas.

When The Real News Network does something really well, this is one of the usual ways they do it.

The Guardian has a mostly terrific article Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems.

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

The history this article provides may be eye opening to those who didn’t live through neoliberalism’s ascendancy or didn’t understand its flaws.

The article does go seriously off the rails when it talks about the failures of John Maynard Keynes’ “general theory of employment interest and money.”

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream.
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Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

The trouble of the 1970s was not a failure of Keynesian policies, it was a failure to realize what Keynes’ theories demanded in the situation.  At the time, people were saying that you cannot have a policy of “guns and butter” or it would cause inflation according to Keynes.  This proved to be exactly right, as the “guns and butter” policy of fighting the Vietnam War and trying to fight a war on poverty at the same time proved to be impossible.  With the rise of the oil cartel, OPEC, it became impossible to get inflation back under control.  In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan applied Keynesian theory to stop inflation.  He brought on a huge recession, people cut way back on purchases of petroleum based products, and the power of OPEC was broken.

I don’t know what flaws in Keynesianism were exposed in the 1970s.  It seemed to me to work perfectly well.  Even Richard Nixon helped free up the application of Keynesian theory by taking us off the gold standard around 1972.  Some theorists are only now trying to explain the policy options that Nixon (perhaps unknowingly) opened up to us.  Neoliberalism does not want us to use those options if it means fairly distributing wealth.

Keynesian Theory explains how the economic cycle works, and explains the causes and cures for the ups and downs of the cycle.  With problems of global warming we now know that we have to be careful about the consequences of economic growth.  As we learn how to fairly distribute the fruits of economic growth to all the people of the world, Keynesian Theory will still tell  us how to control that growth.  Other theories will need to be developed to figure out how to channel that growth onto environmentally non-destructive paths, but Keynesian theory will still tell us how to control economic cycles.

Naked Capitalism has the post Towards a Theory of Shadow Money.

The bigger task that follows from our analysis, is to define the social contract between the three key institutions involved in shadow money: the state as base collateral issuer, the central bank, and private finance.

I would call this a Donald Rumsfeld moment for me.  I have suddenly been introduced to the knowledge of what I didn’t know that I didn’t know.  Now at least I know that I don’t know this.

Armed with this, I can learn more about it to turn it into something I do know.  You can do the same, if you didn’t know that you didn’t know this.

The Guardian has the article The sugar conspiracy.

In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar – and not fat – was the greatest danger to our health. But his findings were ridiculed and his reputation ruined. How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?

For probably 25 years after my 1989 heart attack, I followed a low fat diet. If you go low fat, the only think g left to eat is carbs. When I heard of a friend’s surgeon wife following an Atkins diet, I told him all I knew about low fat diets and essentially called his wife crazy. A year or so ago, I finally decided to heed my doctor’s complaint that my blood sugar was too high, nearing a worrisome level. I stumbled on a book that talked about lowering your blood sugar level. To my surprise, the book was about minimizing your carbs. I gave those ideas a try. The next time I had occasion to have my blood sugar measured, it was so low that I was told I could afford to eat more carbs. In the meantime, I had lost an additional 15 pounds beyond where my low-fat diet had gotten me. (It may not have been the low-fat diet that had helped me gain and then lose 40 pounds. That loss may have come from contracting noro-virus on a cruise. The thought of eating at the company cafeteria after returning from the cruise, turned me into bringing my own food to work.)

I wish the campaign would make it easier to turn these emails into something postable. I think I have massaged the email well enough to post it here.

I just started reading the book Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank.

I found this excerpt in the introduction which perfectly explains an issue I have been telling people for years. I probably got this idea from Elizabeth Warren or perhaps I figured it out on my own.

Trying to answer this conundrum is what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are all about.

The Daily News has the transcript and audio headlined TRANSCRIPT: Bernie Sanders meets with the Daily News Editorial Board, April 1, 2016.

I must admit that Bernie did not do as well in this interview as he might have. So far I have only listened to about 15 minutes of the 52 minute interview. Here is one example that I think is indicative.

Daily News: Okay. You would then leave it to JPMorgan Chase or the others to figure out how to break it, themselves up. I’m not quite…

Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.

Or maybe these quotes are more indicative.

Daily News: Okay. Staying with Wall Street, you’ve pointed out, that “not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy.” Why was that? Why did that happen? Why was there no prosecution?

Sanders: I would suspect that the answer that some would give you is that while what they did was horrific, and greedy and had a huge impact on our economy, that some suggest that…that those activities were not illegal. I disagree. And I think an aggressive attorney general would have found illegal activity.

Daily News: So do you think that President Obama’s Justice Department essentially was either in the tank or not as…

Sanders: No, I wouldn’t say they were in the tank. I’m saying, a Sanders administration would have a much more aggressive attorney general looking at all of the legal implications. All I can tell you is that if you have Goldman Sachs paying a settlement fee of $5 billion, other banks paying a larger fee, I think most Americans think, “Well, why do they pay $5 billion?” Not because they’re heck of a nice guys who want to pay $5 billion. Something was wrong there. And if something was wrong, I think they were illegal activities.

Daily News: Okay. But do you have a sense that there is a particular statute or statutes that a prosecutor could have or should have invoked to bring indictments?

Sanders: I suspect that there are. Yes.

Daily News: You believe that? But do you know?

Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don’t. But if I would…yeah, that’s what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that’s illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives.

Daily News: I’m only pressing because you’ve made it such a central part of your campaign. And I wanted to know what the mechanism would be to accomplish it.

If only Bernie Sanders had the time to be a regular reader of this blog, he would have had all the ammunition he needed. This blog is frequently discussing and pointing to articles written by William K. Black. He is the former top regulator during the S & L crisis. He wrote the book about his experiences The Best Way To Rob A bank Is To Own One. As President, Sanders doesn’t do the investigation of banks and take the perpetrators to court. That is why he has the FBI, the regulatory agencies, and the experts in the Justice Department. He already has hired Stephanie Kelton as the economic advisor to the minority on the Senate Budget Committee. She is a colleague of William K. Black. She could probably talk him into advising the Sanders administration.

If Bernie Sanders had only had Stephanie Kelton with him in the interview, she could have set them all straight. Do you suppose Elizabeth Warren could have answered the technical details? As a manager, you don’t have to have all the answers. However, you do need to have the big picture and you have to know how to hire the right experts. Obama and Clinton don’t have the big picture. They have also shown that they know how to hire all the wrong experts – Eric Holder being a case in point. He developed his wrong headed ideas of not prosecuting individual banking crooks while he was in the Clinton administration, and then he had the chance to make it the policy of the whole department when Obama chose him for attorney general.

All Bernie needed to do was to point to historical examples of breaking up monopolies. He could then say, if experts could figure out how to do it back then, I am confident I could find qualified experts to figure out how to do it now. Hillary, Bill, and Barack seem to have been quite able to find the unqualified experts who didn’t have a clue. I wouldn’t rest until I found an expert with the relevant track record of success in these matter. William K. Black and his colleagues (who Bill Clinton forced out of their jobs) brought thousands of criminal referrals, and most of those cases were successfully prosecuted.

YouTube has the video Senator Elizabeth Warren at Banking Hearing on Consumer Finance Regulations.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Q&A at an April 5, 2016 Senate Banking Committee hearing titled, “Assessing the Effects of Consumer Finance Regulations.”

This one has to be here on my blog where it can be enshrined with a permanency that I can refer back to time, and time again.

This is the kind of massive corruption that we need to fight along with Senator Elizabeth Warren. I bet, if you hadn’t seen this video, you wouldn’t have believed that this kind of perfidy could go on in our US Senate. So Hillary wants us to believe that with a few new rules, that our regulators will protect us from the big banks on Wall Street. How much evidence do you need that there will be no regulation where it is needed most if another Clinton gets to be President?

How many times are you going to take a licking, and keep on ticking in the same way we have been for almost 40 years now?