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?

New Economic Perspectives has this great post White-Collar Criminologists Answer the call of Conventional Macroeconomists: An Open Letter to Dr. Kartik Athreya, Research Director of the Richmond Fed.

My colleagues who are macroeconomists can then make orthodox macroeconomics far tougher by injecting a realistic understanding of money, accounting identities, budget, and real resource constraints in nations such as the United States that maintain sovereign currencies. Once more, my colleagues’ work demonstrates that “modern macro” (DSGE) is not “tough” – it is impossible. It incorporates fictions (in the guise of “discipline”) and excludes reality in a manner that makes it impossible to model economic crises and superior means of recovery. Incorporating these two sources of revolutionary analytical changes from real world micro and macro would create a real revolution in economic theory and allow a truly modern macroeconomics with predictive ability to arise, but neither source of change will make macroeconomics “easy.” It will, however, be a considerable advance to cease making macro impossible.

It is just amazing how Nobel Prize winning economists like Paul Krugman are so resistant to putting some realism in economics theory. They are already being swept away into the dust bin of history. The realists like William Black and his colleagues could burst through the barrier if we dump Hillary Clinton who depends on economists like Paul Krugman, and vote in Bernie Sanders who depends on economists like Bill Black’s colleague Stephanie Kelton.

Niko House has published on YouTube the video Proof Clinton PAC Is Paying Bernie Staffer.

The intent of this post is to link the spoken words in his videos to the contents of the links that he provides as proof. My purpose is not to approve or disapprove of what he says. I only want to make it easier for you to see the parts, do your own research, and form your own opinion.

From his link FEC Filing Pg 59. Shows 7,500 paid to Ashmead in January. REPORT OF RECEIPTS AND DISBURSEMENTS For Other Than An Authorized Committee. Priorities USA Action. This is the January 13, 2016 payment to The Ashmead Group.

Here is the February 4, 2016 payment to The Ashmead Group.

The images above are reports of the Priorities USA Action PAC payment to The Ashmead Group. Payments made to the third party by the Ashmead Group would not appear in these FEC reports. That is the whole point of using The Ashmead Group as an intermediary. It keeps the name of the ultimate recipient out of any federally mandated reports.

Diana Rogalle, President of The Ashmead group, is the one who could attest to who received payment from these disbursements to The Ashmead Group.

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Anybody who wants corroboration fo what Niko House reports in the video would merely have to go to Diana Rogalle, and ask her if she told Niko that these payments went to Ryan Hughes in the Bernie Sanders campaign. So what I am saying here is that what Niko has reported is merely his report. If you want to verify his report, he has provided all the information you need. I have no idea what would happen if you followed the trail he has given you. You, or someone else, will have to follow the trail and report back on what they found for this to be corroboration. Niko has provided all that is reasonable to ask of him for proving his assertions. All I can hope for my post here is that I added just a smidgen of clarity to what Niko said.

Here a the web page of Priorities USA.

We support Hillary Clinton for President because she will always stand strong for us when it comes to strengthening the middle class and their families so they can get ahead and stay ahead.

The Forward has the article The Key to Bernie Sanders’s Appeal Isn’t Socialism. It’s Yiddish Socialism.

In this brief moment, Sanders illustrated the central tenets of Yiddish Socialism, the dominant political and cultural current among the working-class Jews of Brooklyn where Sanders was born at the end of the Great Depression. In New York and elsewhere, Yiddish Socialists in the early 20th century founded and invigorated fraternal societies, newspapers, schools, athletic leagues, summer camps, theaters and, especially, unions. The immigrant generation were inspired by their experiences in the revolutionary movements in Russia, where intellectuals and militants from up to 100 ethnic groups learned to respect their own and one another’s cultures to be able to speak with and rally ordinary peasants and workers to fight the oppression of the Czarist State.

This article explains why my sensibilities and Bernie Sanders sensibilities line up so well.

In response to William Kilmer’s post, Jeffrey Robert Broido said “As an ethnic though non-observant, not believing Jew, I certainly agree.” I am in the same category as Jeffrey Robert Broido.

My grandfather came from Russia, read the Daily Forward in Yiddish, and was a socialist of the kind mentioned in the article. I didn’t come anywhere near understanding the socialism part of him as I was growing up, but I find myself coming nearer and nearer to his beliefs as I mature. The Jewish sensibility that is described in this article is the sensibility I grew up with and the sensibility that grows stronger as I better understand how the world works.

I have come a long way since the days when I voted for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Most of the Democratic Party leaders have not been coming with me except for Bernie Sanders, Alan Grayson, and Elizabeth Warren. Even Barnie Frank has clung to the old neo-liberal ways. I used to have such respect for Barney. I think Father Robert Drinan, Barney Frank’s predecessor as US Representative, would be with Bernie and not Barney if he were still around today.

USA Watchdog has the interview Fraud Key Profit Center for Wall Street-William Black.

Dr. Black, who is also a professor of both economics and law at UMKC, says, “Obviously, it is the worst possible thing to do in terms of stability. The way you rig these things doesn’t just make you wealthy, it creates asset bubbles, massive asset bubbles, the biggest in history, and it’s not just in the United States. . . . The biggest asset bubble right now has to be in China. . . . The estimated loss for the United States over the course for ‘The Great Recession’ (or 2008 meltdown) is $24.3 trillion. . . . This has been a catastrophe for much of the world.”

If you don’t know the information in this video, then you haven’t a clue about how massive is the fraud from the likes of Wall Street and their political enablers.

If you don’t know this, then you don’t know that most of Hillary Clinton’s campaign funds are donated from the proceeds of massive financial fraud.

If you don’t know this information, then you do not understand why Bernie Sanders puts fixing the rigging of the system as his most important issue in the campaign.

If you think there are more important issues than the rigged system, then you haven’t a clue as to how badly the system is rigged.

It is all laid out here in this video from a very reliable and expert source. No conspiracy nuts nor wacky conspiracy theories are here.

PC World has the article Here’s a look Inside Dell’s strategy for Linux PCs.

Dell wants more Mac and Windows users to move to Linux with its Project Sputnik effort.

This is just to remind me of what I might need to buy when Microsoft gets really insistent on me upgrading to Windows-10 before I have the time to do the upgrade some time after the election in November.

The Daily Kos has the article FBI releases video from inside of LaVoy Finicum’s truck of his fatal confrontation with the law.

This is the video featured in the article.

I think a psychiatrist would think of this as a Rorschach test. It is not so much about what is actually in the video as it is about what you see in it.

Salon Magazine has the article Bill Clinton’s odious presidency: Thomas Frank on the real history of the ’90s. It explains why I will never vote for a Clinton again.

When you take Clintonism all together, it makes sense, and the sense it makes has to do with social class. What the poor get is discipline; what the professionals get is endless indulgence.

At the time of the Clinton presidency, I knew some of what he was doing was horrible, but I drank some of the Kool-Aid on others.

Since then, I have matured and learned facts to male me realize how insidious were some of the things that I thought at the time were OK.