YouTube has the video Bernie Sanders announces 2020 run: Extended interview.

I looked at the whole interview for the first time. Sanders’ reaction at 23 minutes and 43 seconds into the interview, is funny as all get out.

The only thing that Sanders said during the interview that really upset me were his remarks on Venezuela. He acted as if the USA had clean hands in the creation of the economic havoc in Venezuela. If somebody doesn’t manage to wake Bernie up on this issue, I am going to be very, very concerned.

What Sanders does not seem to get is that Chavez and Maduro were working against the very same type of oligarchy that Sanders wants to fight in the USA. He could take a lesson from Venezuela on what the oligarchy will do to fight him.

Maybe with Tulsi Gabbard as his Vice President, she will be able to knock some sense into him on this issue. We’ll have to watch his pick for Secretary of State very carefully. If he does what Obama did in picking Hillary Clinton, then we will know that all is lost.

Naked Capitalism has the article The Financial Crisis Was a Minsky Moment but We Live in Strange Times. I can’t find just the right excerpt to put here to do the article justice. Instead, I will quote one of the comments. The comment is a spoiler in that it gives away the joke of the title.

Susan Strange seems to have been a catalyst for a lot of what was at the time subversive economic thought. I would predict that as time goes along a lot of the economic ‘stars’ such as Milton Friedman will be revealed for the frauds that they were and that anybody who has won a (made up) Nobel Prize in Economics would also be suspect.

New Economic Perspectives has the William K. Black article Modern Monetary Theory is On the March. Here is an excerpt Black quotes from a Wall Street Journal article.

In theory, high debt levels should cause interest rates to rise. That’s because investors will demand higher returns to compensate for the risk they take on when the government borrows at unsustainable levels or because they worry that so much debt could trigger inflation. The need to finance such high levels of debt also makes less money available for other investments.

In practice, investors are happy to keep lending to the U.S. in good times and bad, regardless of how much it borrows. In 2009, for instance, when the Obama administration’s stimulus efforts sent federal deficits rising to almost 10% of GDP, the highest since World War II, the interest on 10-year Treasury securities remained below where it had been before the recession.

Something that a colleague where I used to work would frequently say:

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they are not.

He denies coining that aphorism, but I like it no matter who coined it. Some people have to learn that when theory does not match practice, they have to give up on the theory, not the practice.

YouTube has the video Leonard Cohen – Anthem.

YouTube has the video I’m Running For President.

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he is running for president of the United States and called on Americans from all over the nation to join him in building a massive grassroots movement to win the Democratic primary, defeat Donald Trump, and enact an agenda that serves all people, not just the wealthy few.

Here is a 13 minute interview and article on Vermont Public Radio – He’s In For 2020: Bernie Sanders Is Running For President Again .

Unfortunately there is nothing in the printed article that I find worthy of excerpting here. The audio of the interview is much better.

Wired has the article Hacker Lexicon: What Is Credential Stuffing?

The strategy is pretty straightforward. Attackers take a massive trove of usernames and passwords (often from a corporate megabreach) and try to “stuff” those credentials into the login page of other digital services. Because people often reuse the same username and password across multiple sites, attackers can often use one piece of credential info to unlock multiple accounts.

The article has some suggestions on how to protect yourself. Never using the same password for two different applications is one suggestion I have been doing for years. I have not been taking advantage of two-factor authentication, which I will have to incorporate into my procedures. I also do not change my passwords on a regular basis. That one is going to be harder to figure out.

One thing I have seen lately is blackmail emails about having discovered one of my passwords. The blackmailer has discovered a password that I have used. I checked my password manager to find any accounts that used that password. Any such accounts that had that password were changed to a unique strong password, different for each account. The blackmailer keeps threatening to make use of that password, but since I no longer use it, I have not given the blackmailer any indication that I have read the blackmail emails.

Market Watch has the article Berkshire’s Charlie Munger has a very blunt response to those ‘driving rich people away’ as Amazon scraps HQ2.

Driving the rich people out is pretty dumb if you are a state or a city.
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The idea that beautiful real estate in Connecticut, down 50% in value, They’ve driven out all the rich people.

The second part of the excerpt helps us understand what Munger means.

In his book J is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception, Michael Hudson is frequently decrying “asset-price inflation” such as real-estate. I can’t find a succinct quote that explains what he is talking about, so I will try with the following excerpt. I’ll see if I can briefly explain the importance of this.

The Distortions of today’s statistical categories

These statistics do not reflect the major way in which the largest sectors – real estate, mining and fuel, banking and finance – take their economic returns. They seem to operate without reporting a profit, but their capital gains are not traced. Despite the fact that real estate and stock-market prices gains have become the way in which most homeowners, investors, and the One Percent have built up their wealth, this distinguishing financial phenomenon of the present era – asset-price inflation – does not appear in NIPA [National Income and Product Accounts] or anywhere else. “Capital” gains are excluded as being “external” to the post-classical model of how the economy works. There is nothing akin to Mill’s concept of landlords or other rentiers making land-price gains “in their sleep”.
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Instead of viewing the economy as multi-layered, the NIPA group “households”, from wage earners to rentiers, from the One Percent to the 99 Percent. Increased income for anyone is supposed [to] make everyone else better off, because “the market” or GDP expands, and all other variables are plugged into it – as if it does not seem to matter for whom this wealth accrues, or whether they get it by rent extraction, financial gains, wages[,] or profits on new direct investments. There is no recognition that economies may collapse from enriching financial or other rentier elites at the majority’s expense.

As Hudson points out in many places in his book, the increased asset prices just require the 99% to get larger mortgages. The financial sector reaps higher interest payments from these larger mortgages instead of landlords getting economically justifiable rents at lower asset prices for properties that are rented out rather than owner occupied. These capital gains from rising asset-price inflation can be illusory as the crash of 2008/2009 showed. If you borrowed 95% of the value with a mortgage, you had a good chance of defaulting on that mortgage and losing all of your “capital gains”. You also lost whatever other equity you had in the real-estate.

The drop in value in that Connecticut real-estate that so upset Munger, was like a return to real value that had previously been inflated by having all those rich people living there. I have been tempted to look at real-estate in Connecticut as it seems much cheaper than the real-estate over the border here in Massachusetts. The super-rich just do not understand the 99% the way that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does.

The Real News Network has the two part interview How Haiti’s Spontaneous Uprising is Connected to Venezuelan Solidarity (1/2).

Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté unravels how the new Haitian revolt entangles Duvalier style corruption of money stolen from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe program and subtle US intervention

How Haiti’s Spontaneous Uprising is Connected to Venezuelan Solidarity (2/2).

This lays out how the evil Clintons are up to their necks in this. This also explains why we are so against Venezuela. Since Hillary Clinton was Obama’s Secretary of State, surely he must have known what she was doing in Haiti. This really makes me wonder what Obama was all about.