YouTube has the video Bernie Sanders on what the U.S. can learn from Canadian health care.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders discusses ‘what the U.S. can learn from Canadian health care’ in speech at the University of Toronto.

This video of his entire speech is only 33 minutes long and well worth the viewing. Only a concerted effort by the people of the USA will get us Medicare for All. People like Bernie Sanders can only remind us of what is at stake, but we must be the ones demanding change. If our politicians realize that their careers are at stake over this issue, then the tide will slowly begin to change.

Forbes has the article Nobel Prize Winning Technique Discovers Reason Behind Battery Fires.

A technique known as cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) won the 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry and has been used by scientists at Stanford University to capture the first atomic-level images of growths in batteries, which have been one of the largest limitations to developing better batteries.

This research could lead to the type of breakthrough that is predicted to lead to electric vehicles surpassing gasoline powered vehicles in range and refueling times.

Evonomics has the article How to Use Fiscal and Monetary Policy to Make Us Rich Again – The easiest way to return to Golden Age tranquility and equality is to empower fiscal policy.

The timing suggests Ronald Reagan had something to do stagnating wages. That makes sense. Reagan cut taxes on the rich, deregulated the economy, eviscerated the labor unions and created the neoliberal order that still rules today. But perhaps an even more significant change is the tiny, technical and tedious shift from fiscal to monetary policy.
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Fiscal policy, by increasing government spending, creates jobs and so raises wages even in the private sector. Monetary policy works mostly through the wealth effect. Lower interest rates almost automatically raise the value of stocks, bonds, and other real assets. Fiscal policy makes workers richer, monetary policy makes rich people richer. This, I suspect, explains better than anything else why monetary policy, even extreme monetary policy remains more respectable than even conventional monetary policy.

These observations strongly match what I have observed since Lyndon Johnson’s infamous guns and butter policies, followed by the period where monetary policy tried to stimulate the economy at the same time fiscal policy was working to contract the economy. I have often thought that our economy and sopciety would be much stronger if monetary and fiscal policy were working toward the same end instead of fighting each other.

Naked Capitalism has republished the article If You Look Behind Neoliberal Economists, You’ll Discover the Rich: How Economic Theories Serve Big Business. Below is the paragraph they chose to introduce the artilce.

But this leads to the main paradox of neoliberalism. Its economic system needs a strong state, even at the expense of constraining democracy, to guarantee property rights and the working of the free market, while actively maintaining the rule of neoliberal social philosophy. At the same time some of its proponents tend to dismiss strong states (Mirowski, 2013). In fact, laissez faire was the last thing neoliberals wanted to achieve. This paradoxical stance towards the state led Milton Friedman, the policy entrepreneur to become an advisor of the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet to transform Chile into a policy playground.

I found the article to be a very enlightening explanation of how our economic theories got corrupted in the 1970s. I got my economics education in the 1960s, so that must be what saved me from some of the corrupting influences.

The Guardian has the story World’s witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires’ wealth swells to $6tn.

Josef Stadler, the lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients were concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

There worry about the strike back is well founded, I hope. Excuses like the following won’t cut it.

He added that 98% of billionaires’ wealth found its way back into wider society and said the world’s super-rich employed 27.7 million people – not far behind the number of people in the UK workforce.

First one has to ask if those 27.7 million employed people are getting a living wage out of their employment.

Second, we have to think about the following information from the article:

Billionaires’ fortunes increased by 17% on average last year due to the strong performance of their companies and investments, particularly in technology and commodities. The billionaires’ average return was double that achieved by the world’s stock markets and far more than the average interest rates of just 0.35% offered by UK instant-access high street bank accounts.

To me, this out performing the stock market tells me that the billionaires are using their wealth as a catalyst to taking an even greater share of the wealth than they already have. If their average take is more than double the rest of the stock market, that means that there is a flood of money flowing from the rest of the markets into the hands of the billionaires. What are they going to do when they have it all?

The Real News Network has an excellent segment Trump’s Opioid Response Ignores Real Solutions.

President Trump has declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, but his ‘Just Say No’-like approach ignores the roots of addiction and proven ways to address it, says best-selling author Johann Hari.

This talks about some solutions that have a history or working. It is nothing like what I have been touting lately about jailing the pushers in the executive suites of the big pharmaceutical companies. In fact the interviewee mentions why my idea is not the solution.

People’s World has the article AFL-CIO calls for a break with “lesser of two evils” politics.

“For decades the political system has failed working people,” Weingarten said. “Acting on behalf of corporations and the rich and powerful, the political system has been taking away, one after another, the pillars that support working people’s right to good jobs and secure benefits.”

I am glad to see that the labor unions are waking up to the fact that something has to change in the way we do politics if workers are ever to get a fair chance again.

The article has some discussion about the idea of a Labor Party, and some of the problems of getting such a party established.

YouTube has the Jimmy Dore video Bombshell: 2016 Stolen- But NOT By Russia!

I first got pointed to this video from what seems to me to be an organized attack against Greg Palast and Jimmy Dore. What fools the attackers are. This video will be long remembered and appreciated long after the attackers are exposed.

On this issue, I think Palast is spot on, and Jimmy Dore knows an important story when he hears it. The oligarchs must really be so worried about Palast, that they would pay for trolls to attack him. I think this just makes the case he presents here all the stronger.

The Washington Post has the article and the video ‘I will not be complicit.’ Jeff Flake’s retirement speech, annotated

When we remain silent and fail to act when we know that that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do – because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseum – when we succumb to those considerations in spite of what should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of the institutions of our liberty, then we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. Those things are far more important than politics.

An honest address by a Republican.

The Real News Network has the interview Trump’s Would-Be Drug Czar Helped the Drug Profiteers.

Rep. Tom Marino has withdrawn his nomination as President Trump’s new drug czar after revelations he pushed through a measure that worsened the U.S. opioid epidemic. White-collar criminologist Bill Black says Marino and other lawmakers have been bought off by pharmaceutical companies he says have acted as “illicit, criminal, drug dealers”

This is essentially the video version of my previous post It is Impossible to Compete with Unintentional Self-Parody: Trump and Opioids.

This has implications from Obama and his Department of Justice, Donald Trump, and on through the two chambers of Congress. These people are as corrupt as the Mexican politicians who are bought off by their drug dealers.