Democracy Now has the article Sen. Bernie Sanders: From Greece to Puerto Rico, the Financial Rules Are Rigged to Favor the 1%.

And let us not forget a little bit about history. Let us not forget what happened after World War I, when the Allies imposed oppressive austerity on Germany—on Germany—as part of the Versailles Treaty. And I think all of you who know anything about history understand what happened. And that is, the Germany economy collapsed, unemployed skyrocketed, people were pushing their money around in wheelbarrows to buy a loaf of bread. And the result of all of that massive discontent was that —– —— and the —- Party won an election and took power. And you all know the results of that.

I have omitted the words from the quote that no one dare speak. It tends to shut off the conversation before it can even begin. That is a shame, because sometimes those words are appropriate.

The Laura Flanders Show has this great interview Cornel West on Bernie Sanders, Michael Eric Dyson, Trans Rights, and B.B. King | #GRITtv.

In an exclusive new interview on The Laura Flanders Show, author, activist and public intellectual Dr. Cornel West responds to criticism from MSNBC host Michael Eric Dyson and discusses Bernie Sanders, Palestine, Black Lives Matter, B.B. King, and the LGBT movement. Dr. Cornel West has written or edited dozens of books, including classics like Race Matters, and Democracy Matters. His most recent is Black Prophetic Fire, written in conversation with Christa Buschendorf. He has also been an outspoken supporter of the causes others won’t touch. and an equally outspoken critic of President Barack Obama. He was the civil rights elder most warmly embraced by Black Lives Matter activists on the ground in Ferguson and Baltimore.

CBS News has the article Space elevator could lift people 12 miles into the air.

A Canadian space company was recently awarded a patent for a space elevator that would reach about 12 miles (20 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface.

For the really curious, here is what the articles are leaving out – US Patent 9085897 “Space Elevator”. Here is the patent on the US Patent Office web site.

I was just looking for this article that I posted on the Sturbridge For Bernie Sanders page. I had trouble finding it there, and I can’t seem to find it here, so I am going to post it now and never lose it again.

Here is the excerpt I posted from The Seattle Times article Not first disruptive tactic for activist who shut down Bernie Sanders’ speech.

Finally found an article that presents some, perhaps, verifiable information about the lead protester.

“Johnson, listed on a Facebook page as the contact person for the Westlake Park protest, told black radio station TWiB Monday night that she is a devout evangelical Christian who had supported Sarah Palin in high school. She added that her views are now far to the left.”

The contact info she lists on the Facebook page mentioned in the article is the following:

MEDIA CONTACTS: Marissa Johnson (360)840-6234 blacklivesmatterseattle@gmail.com

New Economic Perspectives has the article Why Bernie Sanders Should Add a Job Guarantee to His Policy Agenda.

Discussions of the ‘politically possible’ always remind me of a favorite quote: “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.”

Bernie Sanders’ issues page reads like a list of everything we’ve been told is not politically possible. And yet he’s getting record breaking support, precisely because people are tired of being told that something cannot be done–that it is impossible to get money out of politics, or that tackling inequality and racial injustice is unrealistic, or that securing a living wage is a political nonstarter.

Bernie has unapologetically rejected sclerotic visions of what is ‘politically possible’. And now he should add the Job Guarantee (JG) to his list of issues. Indeed, he already has the key ingredients—a bold proposal to eliminate unemployment by creating 13 million decent-paying jobs, a living wage, and a federally-funded youth job guarantee, which Sandy Darity correctly called a stepping stone (a pilot program) to a blanket job guarantee for all.

As a first step to gently letting people in on the secret of why we don’t need to raise taxes to “pay” for Sanders’ proposals, he might start by telling people that we need to raise taxes to take back the $29 trillion that the fed gave to the oligarchs to bail out the banks, and start using the money for programs that will help all the people. Clearly giving all that money to the oligarchs did not work. Let’s put the money to work where it should have been put in the first place. Putting new money to work without taking back the misplaced money would be inflationary. The inflation is already in the stock market. We can’t let the inflation spread to the average consumer.

If we can make the above explanation go viral, the idea of how to explain tax increases on the wealthy might even reach the ears of the Sanders’ campaign itself.

I have been struggling with trying to figure out a way to get Bernie Sanders to stop propagating the myth that “we need to raise taxes to pay for government programs”. It finally occurred to me (see above) that explaining what the taxes are really for is the obvious solution. No need to even mention the silly ideas of what taxes are for. Why give airing to and waste time on the silly ideas, when you can just talk about the good ideas?

Are you ready to start the fight to get people talking about the good ideas and leave the silly ones out of the conversation?

When the pundits ask Bernie Sanders about some silly idea or other, he usually goes almost straight to his pitch for the good ideas. He comes close, but not maddeningly close to ignoring the whole silly question. That is one of the things that I admire Sanders for. He can get the conversation onto the important topics without angering the interviewer.

Robert Reich has the Facebook post When the rollout of Obamacare was screwed up, conservatives blamed the government.

When the rollout of Obamacare was screwed up, conservatives blamed the government; when the NSA’s software didn’t work, it was supposedly government’s fault. Now, it seems, there’s a major problem with air-traffic control — and you can bet the right will blame the government.

The reality is that these glitches were the work of for-profit contractors and sub-contractors. A large and growing portion of government is contracted out to the private sector, which doesn’t always do the job as promised. The real questions are: Should the government do as much contracting out as it’s doing? And how can government do a better job monitoring what those contractors are up to?

What’s your view?

With 40 years of computer software engineering experience in the private sector, it just so happens that I do have an opinion.

With all the contracting out, there apparently are not enough people in the government who know how a software project should be managed. Therefore, they do not know when a private sector company is mismanaging a software contract.

As for the screw up in the ACA rollout, you cannot develop a software system that has lots of pieces that depend on each other and not test the system with all the pieces together until the last moments before going public.

In what is called a “top down design and implementation”, you design and implement each part starting at the top, the interface between that part and the rest of the world. With that kind of implementation strategy, you are able to do system tests with all parts working together almost from the very beginning of the project. The most tested part of the project is then the interfaces between the parts of the system.

If you wait until the end to put all the parts together and see how they work, you are going to wind up with massive surprises that are very difficult to fix. Do it the other way around, and the problems in the interfaces are found early when they are easy to fix.

If you don’t understand this as a manager or a contract overseer, you cannot detect a massive screw-up at the very beginning of a project when you can fire the contractors if you need to.

When I retired in 2006, there were still an awful lot of people in the software industry that hadn’t gotten the message about top down implementation. Our government seems to hire them all. Low-ball estimates are de riguer in private industry, just like they are in government contracting.

Many times when presenting a proposed project to managament, I wanted to start by asking, “Do you want to hear the estimates that will sell you on the project, or do you want to hear the truth?” After all, I had to compete with other presenters who wanted the corporate funding for their proposals. Sometimes the other person would win, and eventually I would be called in to rescue the other person’s project.

Almost everyone in the business has seen software projects that take on too much risk, go horribly wrong, but are rescued by herculean efforts of the project team. We used to call this “A diving catch”. The people who managed to rescue their own failing projects were richly rewarded for those diving catches. The people who ran projects smoothly from beginning to end were not so appreciated. If their project was so smooth, it must have been an easy one.

We project leaders who liked to manage risk to minimize it, often thought of putting in a few bugs so we could make what looked like a diving catch. Our sense of self-actualization never let us actually do it. We took our satisfaction from accomplishing one more project well done.

Sometimes I even worked for a manager who appreciated what my team and I had achieved. I seldom had problems of appreciation among the users of our products. That is in large part what made it all worth it.

YouTube has a video The Economy: Does More Government Help or Hurt – Stephanie Kelton only.

I am so glad that Bernie Sanders has seen fit to appoint Stephanie Kelton as Chief Democratic Economist on the Senate Budget Committee. I am just waiting for more of her ideas to come out in the national conversation, and even in the Presidential campaign.

Here is a video where she presents some of her ideas. It starts with a whole bunch of ideas that she is going to knock down in the second half of the presentation. Don’t look at just the first part and think you know what she advocates.

Be sure to look for the mention of $29 Trillion.

Has anyone asked about the government paying back the $29 Trillion the government created to buy the “troubled” assets from the banks? To whom would they pay it back? The banks don’t owe it because they sold “assets” to the government to get the money. The government doesn’t owe it, because they didn’t borrow it from anyone.

The government isn’t going to get all the money back, because most of the “troubled” “assets” aren’t worth the paper they were printed on. That’s why the banks needed to be rescued.

Imagine applying this sort of logic of creating money to buy things such as rebuilding our infrastructure or paying the tuition for higher education. In this case the government would “get it’s money back” because what they were paying for is actually worth what they are paying for it, and then some. It’s called return on investment which you would think capitalists would understand. So why do we need Socialists to explain this to the Capitalists?

Here is the announcement UMKC’s Stephanie Kelton is named chief Democratic economist on the Senate Budget Committee.

Truthout has the article Our United States of Indebtedness. This is an extremely eyeopening article even for me. As I read the beginning, I was afraid that the article would not make the important distinction between private debt and government “debt”.

To guard against that problem, I will take some quotes from the middle of the article, and put them up top.

Of course, debt in the abstract is not necessarily a problem. Collateralized debt (meaning it is tied to a hard asset like a house) has long been a reliable path to the American dream. Governments can use debt to build socioeconomic “goods” like roads, schools and power grids that contribute to economic productivity and growth. And debt is crucial to businesses quickly scaling up production or expanding into new markets.

However, household debt, which has skyrocketed over the last three-plus decades, is mostly non-collateralized or “unsecured” debt. A vast amount of the debt load carried by US households – including credit cards, medical bills and student loans – is not tied to a hard asset.

By the way, don’t make the mistake of thinking that a collateralized debt is the same thing as a collateralized debt obligation. I knew the difference, but paid dearly for being lied into owning some CDOs in my portfolio. The dearly part was losing 90% of the current value of that investment (after having collected and not reinvested some hefty dividends). The wisdom of diversification meant that the particular investment was less than 5% of my portfolio,

Then there are just some good lines worth quoting

And that’s the maelstrom that transformed the United States into a “trickle-up” economy. No, this economy is not a drip system. It is a percolator.

Here is part of the explanation of how things percolate.

As bubbles rise and pop, this recurring action presents profitable opportunities to those with either the liquidity or the leverage to exploit the crash. Each new boom-and-bust cycle compounds this effect as financial elites concentrate more wealth into their coffers as it drains out of the middle and working classes. When bubbles pop and assets drop in value – stocks, real estate, whole companies and industries – those armed with cash or easy, exclusive access to politically greased financial leverage (like a taxpayer-funded bailout or the perpetually low Fed lending rate) simply hoard those assets for pennies on the dollar.

I am sorry for the people who don’t understand this or have been unable to squirrel away enough liquidity to take advantage of this. Somewhere along my lifeline, I came to realize that being a wage earner was no way to take control of your life. Being an owner was the only way. That’s why I started to take more and more of my wage earnings and investing them in ownership.

I may still not be insulated enough from this crazy system, but I am hoping to at least be among the last to go down.

The article is long, but almost every paragraph reveals a valuable insight. If you have not managed to get yourself out of the rat race as I have, you really need to read this article, and start planning a strategy to get out.

Getting Bernie Sanders to be President might be your rescue, but I wouldn’t bet my life (savings) on being able to get him elected. You need a plan in case he doesn’t get elected.

YouTube has the video Ex-Baltimore Cop Michael Wood Exposes Police Culture Of Corruption & Abuse (Interview w/ Cenk Uygur).

Former U.S. Marine and Baltimore police officer Michael A. Wood, Jr. made headlines when he Tweeted about the abuses he witnessed fellow Baltimore police officers perpetrating. In this interview with The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur Wood reveals the truth behind the “us vs. them” siege mentality pervading urban police forces that leads to a culture of corruption, racism and abuse, and what can be done to bring change for the better to policing in the United States.

This is such a powerful video, that I could not just post this on Sturbridge For Bernie Sanders and my own Facebook page.

The introduction I wrote in those two places was the following:

If I hadn’t had an epiphany like this 50 years ago, this interview might have really done it. For those of you who have not had your epiphany yet, this interview might do it.

In a post Cultural Deprivation, I have written about my epiphany.

I have posted on this blog about the study of “cultural deprivation” as a sophomore in college as being my epiphany about what Ayn Rand didn’t tell me, and what was wrong about her philosophy. This was back around 1963.

Speaking about epiphanies, I had another epiphany of sorts when I saw the Video Shows Texas Police Officer Pulling Gun On Teens At Pool Party back in June 07, 2015. The epiphany came about when I read a comment about what happened at about 3 minutes and 10 seconds into this video.

You see the police trying to smash this cute teenager’s face against a concrete side-walk. They weren’t just trying to get control over the situation. They were purposely trying to disfigure this girl. It’s as if they detected something that she might value and decided to take it away from her for life just to humble her. (See the use of the word “humble” in the interview with Michael Wood Jr.) As a crime goes, I suppose murder is worse than torture, but torture says more about the character of the perpetrator of torture than murder says about the character of the murderer.