Politicus USA has the article Bernie Sanders Terrifies Wall Street By Vowing To Keep Them Out Of His Cabinet. Quoting from an interview with Jake Tapper, the article had the following:

Sanders: Unlike many other presidents, they — my Cabinet would not be dominated by representatives of Wall Street. I think Wall Street has played a horrendous role in recent years in negatively impacting our economy and in making the rich richer.

There are a lot of great public servants out there, great economists who for years have been standing up for the middle class and the working families of this country who know that it is an international embarrassment that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth.

However, even the liberal Politicus USA has to throw in a comment that shows how little about Bernie Sanders they comprehend.

If Sanders were to be somehow elected, it would be Wall Street’s biggest nightmare come true. The problem that he would have in governing is the same that President Obama currently faces. If Republicans still control all or any part of Congress after the 2016 election, the Sanders agenda would go nowhere.

In response to this, I replied with the following:

I will add my voice to all the others to point out that even Politicus USA doesn’t get Bernie Sanders. You have a question for him, and he has the answer, but you don’t ask it of him.

Bernie Sanders sent an email to his followers explaining the great mistake that Obama made when he took office. The email promises that Sanders will not make the same mistake.

To paraphrase the email, when Obama took office, he essentially told the huge political organization that he had built to win the race, “You can go home now. I’ll take it from here. I’ll just negotiate on my own with Boner and McConnell.” Many of us tried to catch his attention to tell him what a big mistake he was making. After many years in office, Obama never did figure it out.

Not only has Sanders remarked on this great blunder, but thousands if not millions of Obama supporters noted it too. How can Obama be so blind, given his level of intelligence?

Any comparison of Bernie Sanders to our current President and worst negotiator the world has ever seen is a gross “misunderestimation” of Bernie Sanders.

Now that I have your attention (the “for dummies” phrase seems to be very successful for selling books), I am going to use the simplest example that I can think of to make this point.

Supposing someone asks you, or you ask yourself, how much do I have in the stock market? If you own 1,000 shares (just to use a round number) of various stocks, that’s about the only thing you can say for sure about what you “have” in the stock market. But supposing your questioner is more persistent, and wants to know how much money you have. The logical thing to do would be to look up the stock prices of each company, multiply each price by the number of stocks you own in that company, and then total it up. That is called marking your portfolio to market.

If the average price were $10, you would say, I have $10,000 in the stock market. If you are a small investor, and the stock market is not very volatile, you could probably sell your 1,000 shares right at the moment and realize your $10,000 (minus stock trading fees and taxes).

Now, suppose the extreme case where everybody decided to sell all their shares at the same time, and the only person willing to buy them would only pay $0.01 per share. You’d be lucky to clear anywhere near $10.00.

Where did the other $9,990.00 go? You can’t even say that it went up in smoke, because there is not even the slightest physical trace of that money. So did that money ever really exist?

As you try to tell me that the FED cannot create money out of nothing whenever it decides to, compare that to what mark-to-market did. Mark-to-market is only a concept. It is not even an actual thing with any physical embodiment. No building, no people, and no equipment make up something called mark-to-market. You might say it’s all in our minds. Now you understand what money is worth and how it is valued.

Oh, and what is that $10,000 you could have realized? If you go to the store, you might be able to buy 10,000 candy bars. Or if inflation is running rampant, maybe you can’t. So the people who rail against fractional reserve banking because it let’s banks “create money”, so what else is new? Why don’t you outlaw mark-to-market from creating any money? Can you put mark-to-market in jail if it won’t comply?

Observer News has the article Berniemania! Why Is Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders So Popular?

A very interesting article. One bit of insanity on the Observer’s part in an otherwise very sane article was the following which shows that even some experts don’t really understand the money system.

Some of his proposals, like making all public colleges free, may have unintended consequences.

“You put a lot of stress on the public system, to say you’re going to take away the tuition base. You can’t ensure government funding to make up for it,” said Sharyn O’Halloran, an economist at Columbia University’s School of Public Affairs. “If I’m sitting here trying to allocate scarce resources to benefit society, the economy, I have to allocate them in the most efficient way … if I give a rich kid a free education, I haven’t improved social welfare.”

She just does not understand what scarce resources she needs to be allocating. The colleges and universities are already there. The professors are already there. When we create our own money, this is not a scarce resource. Even if you don’t believe that, perhaps the FED could take back some of the trillions of dollars it created to give to the wealthy, and instead spend it where it will do some good. The stock market bubble the FED has created is temporary. An education is much more permanent.

By the way, if you don’t believe that US money is not a scarce resource in the US, then how do you account for the objective fact that the FED created trillions of dollars to prop up the banks and the rich? All this money, didn’t even create any inflation with the possible exception of stock market prices. I don’t hear rich people complaining about that kind of inflation, do you? (Although I do worry about that kind of inflation, and so should you.)

The FED never should have pumped that liquidity into the economy this way when it has been known for over 75 years that this strategy is not one that stimulates the economy under the then current conditions. When there is no industrial expansion worth investing in because industry is already too big for the shrinking customer base, inserting that much money into the hands of the rich does not expand industry. It does expand stock prices, though. Where else are rich people going to put their money? They either do believe in the greater fool theory, or they think they can get out before the other fools bring the market crashing down.

In case you are wondering, government buying stuff does stimulate the economy. Someone has to produce the actual goods that the government is buying. The government makes up for the shrinking customer base in the private sector. It can do that because we know from the lesson the FED gave us, that US money cannot be in short supply in the US if the FED is willing to do its job.

Naked Capitalism has the article Obama in Retreat Thanks to Elizabeth Warren-Led Opposition to Plan to Appoint Another Corporate Stooge as SEC Commissioner. The article’s opening remarks set the stage for praising what Elizabeth Warren and allies are doing to thwart the Presiden’t plans to weaken regulation.

As readers may know, Obama’s plan to keep the already weak SEC in its role as a rubber stamp to Big Finance is going pear-shaped. Via some unexpected good fortune (Obama owing a favor to Rhode Island senator Jack Reed and Senate conventions that nominations of Senate staffers get approved) the SEC wound up with a new commissioner, Kara Stein, who actually knows a thing or two about banking and has been willing to declare war on a chairman from her own party, Mary Jo White. Stein has been more effective than someone in her spot would normally be by virtue of White being so badly conflicted as to be required to sit out many commission votes, and Stein allying regularly with fellow Democrat commissioner Luis Aguilar to block unduly Wall-Street-friendly measures.

But Obama appeared ready to restore status quo ante by virtue of having Aguilar’s term expire this year. That would allow him to install a more business-toadying replacement.

If you ever needed proof about how dangerous another Obama like President would be, this is another red flag waving in front of you.

We now have one Presidential candidate who recognizes the danger of the excessive power that Wall Street and the big banks have, and how they use it to flaunt the law. His opponent as President might do wonderful, showy things to keep your attention away from the hidden goodies she gives away to the big money interests. People noted that only a strongly anti-communist Republican like Nixon could open the doors to diplomatic relations with China. In the same vein, only a purported Democrat will be able to get away with massive gifts to the big money interests.

Slate has an article quoting from a translation of a German magazine article. Thomas Piketty Explains Why the Germans Are Being Massive Hypocrites About Greece’s Debt.

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

If they can publish this in Germany, why can’t our lame stream media pick this up and give it the same amount of play they are giving to their false stories about this? What a silly question.

Thanks to Margaret Darling for posting this on Facebook.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Greece Proves Again Why Democracy is the Criminal Classes’ Great Fear by William Black.

So, the new Greek government was right on both of its key policies – as even the troika’s historic “deficit hawk” (the IMF) now admits it has known for years. That means that the troika has knowingly insisted on economically illiterate and self-destructive policies and caused immense human misery for no (desirable) reason. What is going on? The answer is the troika’s oxymoronic definition of “reforms.” When the troika uses the word the “reforms” it means three anti-reforms – reduced wages and rights for workers, destroying the safety net, and selling public assets to private buyers. The troika is deliberately, with the aid of the major media, generating a “race to the bottom” throughout the EU. The New York Times provided a reprehensible example of how the media aids and abets this assault on workers and those who need the safety net in a June 29, 2015 article entitled “Greece’s Troubles Attract Little Sympathy From Poorer Neighbors.”

“We are much poorer than the Greeks, but we have performed reforms,” Rosen Plevneliev, the president of Bulgaria, a northern neighbor of Greece, said in an interview.

While the media cannot refer to Greece’s government without the label “left-wing,” an ultra-right wing politician and vitriolic opponent of the Greek government is simply referred to as “the president of Bulgaria.” (The NYT article above promptly referred to “The left-leaning Syriza Party.”) Given Plevneliev’s anti-worker ideology, he was delighted to inflict “reforms” harming labor. His fear is that Greece will not be destroyed by the troika and that Bulgarian labor will rise up in political opposition to his party. He is, of course, a virulent opponent of the Greek government.

More signs the revolution is coming.

Yahoo News podcast this – Bernie Sanders Speaks With Katie Couric – Full Interview. The previous link will take you to YouTube where you will find a list of the topics covered, and links directly into the segment where the issue is discussed.

This is a great interview in large part because Bernie Sanders knows how to handle questions. Katie Couric deserves a lot of credit, but she did have her moments when she kept pursuing an issue in a way that was meant to get Bernie Sanders to do negative campaigning. He steadfastly refused to take the bait, but he explained why he wouldn’t, and he did it in a way that was not offensive to Katie Couric.

This is an interview that you will want to keep track of because you may want to refer others to it. You can use a browser bookmark or some other means to avoid losing the link to this interview.

On Facebook, Jared Paquette is trying to introduce me to the Venus Project.

The Venus Project is an organization that proposes a feasible plan of action for social change, one that works towards a peaceful and sustainable global civilization. It outlines an alternative to strive toward where human rights are no longer paper proclamations but a way of life.

I have been resistant to looking into it, for reasons I won’t prejudice you with. Finally, Jared introduced a video Jacque Fresco’s Self Search on Human Behavior -… that convinced me not to be so hasty in my judgment. He introduced this video to help me overcome the idea that Jacque Fresco of The Venus Project was too naive about human nature.

Jared has finally cast enough doubt in my mind about my preconceived notions about this project, that I now think it is worth learning more about. That’s why I have posted these links on my blog. When I have the time to do further reading, I’ll have the links handy right here.

One of my contentions to Jared had been that Jacque is focusing on the monetary system as a key problem,, unnecessarily. Here is an excerpt from The Venus Project about page that might confirm my concern.

Throughout history, change has been slow. Successive groups of incompetent leaders have replaced those that preceded them, but the underlying social and economic problems remain because the basic value systems have gone unaltered. The problems we are faced with today cannot be solved politically or financially because they are highly technical in nature. There may not even be enough money available to pay for the required changes, but there are more than enough resources. This is why The Venus Project advocates the transition from a monetary-based society to the eventual realization of a resource-based global economy.

We realize to make the transition from our present culture, which is politically incompetent, scarcity-oriented and obsolete, to this new, more humane society will require a quantum leap in both thought and action.

The issue is whether our monetary system has enough money to finance this effort even though there may be enough resources. If you understand how, at least for the USA, our “money” is created by the Federal Reserve System, then this may not be such an issue after all. The FED creates more money by saying an entity’s account with the Federal Reserve has more money in it, and they use a few computer key strokes to credit that account with more money. That’s all it takes. So there is no shortage of money that could be created. In fact, the only limit on money creation should be what actual resources are available, and not being productively used because of a momentary shortage of “money”. If enough people understood this, then the monetary system we have (not the Euro used by a bunch of countries not sovereign in their own currency) may not be the problem.

We may have to adopt our system for the entire world, though. Of course that may be, sort of what the invention of the Euro was intended to do, but how it was done was very ill conceived. They didn’t seem to understand how important the sovereignty issue was. While the sovereignty issue may be devilishly complex to figure out how to fix, it is no harder than what The Venus Project proposes.

At this point, I don’t really know enough about The Venus Project to know all that they have said and all that they understand. It could be hogwash, or it could be the real deal. It will take much more investigation to know, but it is intriguing enough to warrant some time on my part on that investigation.

Yes, I have already thought of the idea killing things that can be said about the above video, but I will resist the temptation to spout them until I become more educated on all that the Venus Project has done and said already.

I think the best I can say about The Venus Project, not having learned too much more about it, is that it goes off in a direction that I don’t find worthwhile for me to pursue. I much prefer the actions of the speaker in my previous post of the video of Andrew Mcafee’s TED talk What will future jobs look like?.

The Nation of Change has the story Greece – What You are not Being Told by the Media.

According to mainstream media, the current economic crisis in Greece is due to the government spending too much money on its people that it went broke. This claim however, is a lie. It was the banks that wrecked the country so oligarchs and international corporations could benefit.

The value of this article is the description of how austerity is class warfare.

Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

Except that it is a big fat lie … not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.

Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek government and deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery.

If you are a fan of mafia movies, you know how the mafia would take over a popular restaurant. First, they would do something to disrupt the business – stage a murder at the restaurant or start a fire. When the business starts to suffer, the Godfather would generously offer some money as a token of friendship. In return, Greasy Thumb takes over the restaurant’s accounting, Big Joey is put in charge of procurement, and so on. Needless to say, it’s a journey down a spiral of misery for the owner who will soon be broke and, if lucky, alive.

Now, let’s map the mafia story to international finance in four stages.

Stage 1: The first and foremost reason that Greece got into trouble was the “Great Financial Crisis” of 2008 that was the brainchild of Wall Street and international bankers.
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Stage 2 is when the financial time bombs exploded. Commercial and investment banks around the world started collapsing in a matter of weeks. Governments at local and regional level saw their investments and assets evaporate. Chaos everywhere!
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Stage 3 is when the banks force the government to accept massive debts.
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Stage 4: Now, the rape and humiliation of a nation begin under the name of “austerity” or “structural reforms.”
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Earlier today, The New York Times had the story Greeks Reject Bailout Terms in Rebuff to European Leaders.

Who is going to be hurt more by this turn of events, the debtor nation that supposedly owes the money or the creditor nations who insist on getting the last ounce of blood from the victim?

Politicus USA has the article President Obama Kills Scott Walker’s White House Dream By Exposing His Record Of Failure. Here is an Obama quote they featured from the video below.

But understand, I’m saying this — Wisconsin is this extraordinary state filled with extraordinary people. But if you end up having policies that cut education, help folks at the top, aren’t expanding opportunity, then it’s not going to work. We need better policies — because the bottom line is top-down economics doesn’t work. Middle-class economics works. It works. It works.

President Obama went to La Crosse WIsconsin, touted the economic successes of his administration even as he detailed the failed policies of Scott Walker and trickle down economics. He used adjacent state Minnesota as comparison.

There are a few flies in the beautiful ointment that Obama describes. They just serve to prove his point, though. These flies were put their by Republican behavior.

The stock market has doubled

While it may seem good for people’s 401Ks and other retirement plans, this market level is probably indicative of a bubble. The bubble which could burst is a result of the FED trying massive liquidity injection into the economy to keep it afloat, when the federal government should have been spending more to stimulate the economy. There was no second stimulus because the Republicans wouldn’t allow it. Fiscal stimulus is a powerful tool to get the economy running, whereas monetary stimulus is a weak to totally ineffective tool under the current circumstances.

Unemployment is down

The President even alluded to this fly in the ointment. The jobs that people are getting aren’t at the high wage level where they should be. Some of the factors keeping wages down are the war against unions, very badly designed trade agreements, and the rigging of the system to keep all the benefits of automation in the hands of the very few.

More people are going to college than ever before

The exceedingly high debt level that people are forced to take on to get this education will hamper their economic achievement for a lifetime. This wet blanket on the economy keeps its growth well below where it would cause wages to increase back toward equality.

16 million more people now have health insurance

There are still in the neighborhood of 30 million or more people who still don’t have health care coverage. For something that was supposed to bring on universal coverage, this seems to be a fairly big fly. With the Republican intransigence when the law was being written and continuing intransigence during the implementation phase, I suppose such a gap in achievement was unavoidable.

We cut the deficit by two-thirds

This cut in the deficit is one of the main reasons why the economy didn’t grow even faster. It is the main reason why the FED thought that it had to inflate the money supply, even though all that did was to create a stock market bubble. This inflated stock market makes it look like the economy is growing faster than it is as far as anything that the middle-class can benefit from. If the economy comes roaring back despite Republican efforts to prevent it, there will be hell to pay for all that excess liquidity that the FED pumped in to the economy.

And finally, there is the fly that President Obama insists in putting into the ointment. If middle-class economics works so much better than trickle-down economics, why is the President so adamant about pushing the ultimate trickle-down economic ideas embodied in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “trade” agreement? Why is he so sure he is right about this secret deal, and the Democrats who oppose it are all wrong? Doesn’t he get just a little suspicious that his strongest supporters for this deal are almost all Republicans? How he can go to Wisconsin and make these remarks, and then go back to Washinton to foist this TPP on us is still a mystery to me. I can only guess at what his motives could be.