Dean Baker has an interesting book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.

There has been an enormous upward redistribution of income in the United States in the last four decades. In his most recent book, Baker shows that this upward redistribution was not the result of globalization and the natural workings of the market. Rather it was the result of conscious policies that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of ordinary workers while protecting and enhancing the incomes of those at the top. Baker explains how rules on trade, patents, copyrights, corporate governance, and macroeconomic policy were rigged to make income flow upward.

I just started to read this free book. I am up to page 7 so far. It looks like it is going to be a fascinating book if you find economics fascinating. I am one of those crazy people who do think the subject is fascinating.

Consortium News has the article Former US Envoy to Moscow Calls Intelligence Report on Alleged Russian Interference ‘Politically Motivated’,

Prominent journalists and politicians seized upon a shabby, politically motivated, “intelligence” report as proof of “Russian interference” in the U.S. election without the pretense of due diligence, argues Jack Matlock, a former U.S. ambassador in Moscow.

I have seen too many “progressives” lately seeming to jump on the anti-Russia propaganda bandwagon that is being promoted by the corporate media and the corporate Democrats. I wanted to have the link to this article handy as something to show to these people when they don’t seem to realize how they are being duped.

Naked Capitalism has The Real News Network has the interview Bill Black: Fed Lets Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Off Hook, Investors Profit Billions.

GREG WILPERT: So, first, what are the implications of the Fed allowing Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to pass their stress test? That is, to pay investors even though they technically failed those tests, and should have kept most of these billions as assets to back them up.

BILL BLACK: OK. They didn’t technically fail the test. They actually failed the test. And what the new Fed, as you say, Trump appointees, have said, well, a failure isn’t going to be treated as a failure if you’re a really massive financial institution like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Ok, if you want to hate on the Federal Reserve Bank, here might be a perfectly valid reason to do so. Forget the fake news that the Fed is a private bank.

Boing Boing has the article Private equity bosses took $200m out of Toys R Us and crashed the company, lifetime employees got $0 in severance,

Private equity’s favorite shell game is to take over profitable businesses, sell off their assets, con banks into loaning them hundreds of millions of dollars, cash out in the form of bonuses and dividends, then let the businesses fail and default on their debts.

This is why I started to use the term vulture capitalists to describe these private equity types. It is good to have an article like this that I can point to. This has some details that I can use to explain why I call them vulture capitalists. When these people say the government should be run like a business, this is exactly what they mean. Their plan for government is to strip the assets, pay the money to themselves, and leave the rest of us to pay for the bankruptcy.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Most Ignored and Most Far-Reaching Supreme Court Ruling Yet: Anti-Trust Law Hollowed Out.

A major Supreme Court ruling, Ohio vs American Express, was completely ignored by most media outlets, even though it will have potentially devastating repercussions for consumers in the so-called ‘platform economy’: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Facebook, etc. White collar criminologist Bill Black explains the consequences.

I have been postponing reading this for a day or so. Now that I finally got around to looking at this, I find that it about the most horrible economic thing that the Supreme Court could have done.

This is a legislative decision made by the Supreme Court that they have no right to be making. It will go a long way toward increasing income and wealth inequality.

Enforcement of anti-trust laws has been sadly lacking from the executive branch of the government. The solution to much of our income inequality is more stringent anti-trust enforcement. The Supreme Court has just banned this increased enforcement in a very large part of the economy.

Naked Capitalism has the article Anthony Kennedy and Our Delayed Constitutional Crisis.

With swing-vote status comes great responsibility, and in the most consequential — and wrongly decided — cases of this generation, O’Connor and Kennedy were the Court’s key enablers.

It’s enough to make you wonder if the Supreme Court was such a good idea from our founding ancestors. Many of you may not be old enough to remember how reviled the Warren Supreme Court was by the segregationists who were against the civil rights decisions. There are always going to be people who think the Supreme Court is horribly wrong. Enshrining them in black robes is not going to make them into wise and unbiased people that everyone can look up to in awed reverence..

In the end, it is always about politics and power.

I’ll say this for Trump. Without him we might have gone on for another 8 years thinking that Democratic President Hillary Clinton was going to solve our problems.

TruthDig has the article Nomi Prins on the Banks That Run the World (Audio and Transcript)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer talks with Nomi Prins about her latest and what Scheer calls her “most ambitious” book, “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World.”

None of this is news to me. I only hope that their explanation of what is going on is clear enough for many others to understand what happened and what will happen. A clear understanding as presented in this interview might be our only hope to get control of the situation.

It’s not the Rothschilds. It is people much closer to home than that. Sure, maybe the Rothschilds may have some hand in this, but if you concentrate on them, you are taking your eye off the ball.

YouTube has the video Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Talks to Glenn Greenwald About the Democratic Party and 2018 Midterms.

House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks to Glenn Greenwald about the need for Democratic Party reform, her views on immigration and criminal justice reform, her approach to “identity politics,” why she has taken such unusually blunt positions on Israel and Palestine, and the challenges of running against a machine boss politician.

A more in-depth discussion with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is always welcome.

Jimmy Dore had a segment MSNBC Admits They’re Clueless On Progressive Politics.

Joy Reid tweeted that apparently everybody in political journalism is taking a “crash course” on Ocasio-Cortez. Some of us have been aware for awhile now, Joy.

The earliest recorded post about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on this blog was May 30, 2018 in the post White Fear: As the GOP Veers Toward Fascism, Establishment Democrats Face a Grassroots Insurgency.

If you only get your news from the corporate press, you are woefully under-informed.

NPR has the interview Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez On Her Primary Victory.

I saw a posting of this interview that misunderstood what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said. Here is the whole snippet of what she actually said.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well, I think – I do think that we have to have a secure border. We need to make sure that people are, in fact, documented. But that doesn’t mean that we threaten people’s lives. It doesn’t mean that we kill them. It doesn’t mean that, you know, we have people sabotaging water supplies on our border. I don’t think that we respond by actively harming and potentially putting people’s lives in danger.

INSKEEP: Oh, you’re talking about the idea of, like, getting rid of water supplies so that it’s harder for migrants to move across, that sort of thing.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Right.

If you only look at Inskeep’s clarification question and her answer, you don’t realize that she is saying “right” to his clarification of what she is against. She is not proposing sabotaging water supplies. She is stating that she opposes sabotaging water supplies.

So knock this misstatement loudly and vociferously if you should happen to run across it. Keep a link to this blog post so that you will have the proper reference to use when you debunk the false meme.

On some other occasion, when she has more time, I hope she gets into the need for us to stop interfering in the governments of these people’s countries so that it drives them away from home and toward the safety of the USA.