YouTube has the video Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks at The National Press Club.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) gave a major policy speech on ending corruption in Washington at a National Press Club Headliners Newsmaker on August 21, 2018.

You deserve to hear the full speech and Q & A session to get the full context of her remarks. Snippets taken out of context, can sometimes leave the wrong impression.

Counterpunch has the article Uri Avnery: One of My Few Heroes in the Middle East by Robert Fisk.

The article has this quote from Uri Avnery:

“I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering. But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism. Herzog [the Israeli president at the time] was speaking at the site of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen but he spoke only about the Jews. How could he not mention that others – many others – had suffered there? Sick people, when they are in pain, cannot speak about anyone but themselves. And when such monstrous things have happened to your people, you feel nothing can be compared to it. You get a moral ‘power of attorney’, a permit to do anything you want – because nothing can compare to what has happened to us. This is a moral immunity which is very clearly felt in Israel. Everyone is convinced that the IDF is more humane than any other army. ‘Purity of arms’ was the slogan of the Haganah army in ’48. But it never was true at all.”

This fits very nicely with my observations of life about two kinds of people who experience something bad. One type of person learns from their bad experience that they want to make sure that nobody else has to suffer from what they suffered. The other kind decides that if the powers that be were able to inflict this bad experience on powerless people like himself (or herself) that when he or she gets some power, he will pay the bad experience forward by inflicting it on the next poor sucker. I try to be the person with the first kind of reaction. When I see bad behavior, I try to take that as a lesson in what not to do, not as a lesson on what to do.

The Ralph Nader Radio Hour has this fabulous interview with Chris Hedges the author of the book “America: The Farewell Tour”

Ralph spends the whole hour with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, Chris Hedges, discussing his book “America: The Farewell Tour.”

If this doesn’t get you to want to read the book, I don’t know what will.

Make Change has the the interview Stephanie Kelton Wants You to Ask: ‘What Does a Good Economy Look Like?’

This particular excerpt addresses my complaint about the MMT (Modern Money Thory) proponents who insist on focusing on one meme that they picj up from other MMT proponents.

Charlotte Cowles
It’s not really your job to explain economic theory to the public. But how can other people—say, politicians—explain the concepts of MMT to voters who many not necessarily even want to listen?

Stephanie Kelton
You’re right, it’s not necessarily my job to persuade average people. But I feel like it’s my responsibility, because when policymakers make decisions that are grounded in a bad understanding of the way government budgets operate, it affects us all. For politicians, the challenge is really on them. Some of them ask me for specific advice on how to talk about debt and deficits, and my first answer is, ‘Don’t.’ The broad public reaction to those words tends to be negative, so my first rule of thumb is don’t bring it up. Do no harm. If somebody poses a question to you, and they inevitably will—‘Oh, what about the debt?’—then you’ve got to find ways to deal with it. I don’t think there’s a cookie-cutter response.

Charlotte Cowles
When you get that question, how do you respond?

Stephanie Kelton
I say, ‘Look, the purpose of the government’s budget ought to be to balance broad conditions in our economy.’ We are so obsessed with balancing the federal budget, but that’s not the right policy goal; the right policy goal is to achieve a good economy. So, what does a good economy look like? It’s not imbalanced like the economy we have today. It’s not an economy where the concentration of wealth is rivaling where we were in the 1920s, where the top tenth of the top 1 percent owns the same share of wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined. It’s not an economy where the median worker hasn’t seen a wage increase in real terms for more than a generation.

It all comes down to this: What kind of a world do we want to create for ourselves? We could eliminate poverty. We could manage our impact on the climate. And if we use the government’s budget to achieve those goals and there’s no inflation problem, who cares if the deficit is 4.5 or 2.1 percent of gross domestic product? That number is irrelevant.

NBC’s Nightly News was pretty parsimonious with the explanation of what is going on between Turkey and the USA. I decided to look on the internet to see what my “friends” in the USA corporate news media aren’t telling me. Here is the first article I found.

‘We are not going to take it sitting down’: Trump on detention of US pastor in Turkey.

The US president’s remarks followed a ruling by a Turkish court, which rejected an appeal for the release of US Pastor Andrew Brunson.

The man has been detained by Turkish authorities for nearly two years. Brunson is accused of being linked to Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric who Ankara has said was the mastermind behind the botched coup attempt in July 2016. Brunson faces up to 35 years in Turkish jail over a number of charges, which include espionage and acting “on behalf of terror groups.”

I found this BBC story Turkey coup: What is Gulen movement and what does it want?

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen for last week’s bloody attempted coup.

Then I found this story from France – Gulen admits meeting key figure in Turkey coup plot, dismisses Erdogan’s ‘senseless’ claims.

In an exclusive interview with FRANCE 24, Fethullah Gulen admitted meeting a key figure in Turkey’s July 2016 attempted coup. But the Turkish cleric said that a mere visit from one of his followers isn’t proof he orchestrated the failed coup.

Finally I came to this Global Research story The CIA, Fetullah Gülen and Turkey’s Failed July 2016 Coup.

On December 1, Turkish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Graham E. Fuller, former head of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council and former CIA head of Middle East and East Asia operations. The warrant claims Fuller was in the vicinity of Istanbul the night of the coup attempt at a meeting with another top “former” CIA person, Henri Barkey. It claims both CIA veterans were meeting at the five-star Splendid Hotel on the island of Büyükada some 20 minutes boat ride from Istanbul.
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Fuller goes on to admit he formally backed granting Gülen special US visa status in 2006:

“Full disclosure: It is on public record that I wrote a letter as a private citizen in connection with Gülen’s US green card application in 2006 stating that I did not believe that Gülen constituted a security threat to the US…”

Fuller’s “full disclosure” then however omits the fact that it was not merely a casual letter of recommendation to a man Fuller claimed he had met only once. Fuller’s endorsement of Gülen’s Green Card application was so influential that he managed to override the no votes of the FBI, of attorneys for the US State Department and Homeland Security. In the Gülen hearings, State Department attorneys stated,

“Because of the large amount of money that Gülen’s movement uses to finance his projects, there are claims that he has secret agreements with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkic governments. There are suspicions that the CIA is a co-payer in financing these projects.”

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Whatever the outcome of the Turkish charges against Graham Fuller and his close former CIA associate, Henri Barkey, for their alleged involvement in the failed July 15, 2016 Turkish coup d’etat, it clearly throws a major spotlight of world attention on the relation between the CIA and the Fetullah Gülen organization. To open that can of worms could help fumigate more than thirty years of covert Central Asia and other CIA operations with Osama bin Laden, opium trade, Kosovo drug mafia, Turkish dirty CIA operations and far more. Little wonder Graham Fuller writes a blog with the pathetic title, “Why did Turkey Issue an Arrest Warrant Against Me?”

You would think this would be enough circumstantial evidence to get a special prosecutor if this were Russia instead of Turkey.

Spoiler alert, here are the 10 ways the book, Killing The Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy, suggests to stop the parasites from killing the host.

1. Write down debts with a Clean Slate, or at least in keeping with the ability to pay

2. Tax economic rent to save it from being capitalized into interest payments

3. Revoke the tax deductibility of interest, to stop subsidizing debt leveraging

4. Create a public banking option

5. Fund government deficits by central banks, not by taxes to pay bondholders

6. Pay Social Security and Medicare out of the general budget

7. Keep natural monopolies in the public domain to prevent rent extraction

8. Tax capital gains at the higher rates levied on earned income

9. Deter irresponsible lending with a Fraudulent Conveyance principle

10. Revive classical value and rent theory (and its statistical categories)

Read the book to understand the reasons for these proposals.

YouTube has the audio How Nicaragua defeated a right-wing US-backed coup: A report from Managua (Ep. 22).

Max Blumenthal reports from on the ground in Nicaragua’s capital Managua. He reveals how the violent right-wing opposition attempted to overthrow the elected Sandinista government, with help from US-funded organizations and think tanks.

Nils McCune recalls how Nicaragua’s “April 19 movement” operated: violent insurgents occupied universities, burnt down government buildings and pro-government activists’ homes, besieged police headquarters, and tortured and even killed Sandinistas. The Catholic Church helped.

Meanwhile Western corporate media outlets and human rights organizations outlandishly portrayed the democratically elected government of President Daniel Ortega as a murderous oppressor killing moderate peaceful protesters.

All you people who are standing up to declare that our corporate media is not our enemy, please listen to this report. It might just change your mind about taking sides between #45 and the corporate media. They are both evil. There is no lesser evil between the two of them.

Naked Capitalism has the article Why Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act Will Be Good for Shareholders.

Efforts to pursue shareholder value fail. Companies will do better not just for other constituencies but also for shareholders by pursuing a broader set of interests.

Here is the part of the article that speaks to me. A good part of my career had to do with nonlinear optimization.

Or as reader Ruben said in 2017:

Congrats, you have highlighted a trade secret held by experts in nonlinear optimization. The saying is: you can’t go there from here. So whenever optimization (such as profit maximization) has to happen over an irregular landscape (often multidimensional, not just 3D as Earth landscapes) the process is multi-step (cannot go in straight-line, 2 steps) and so it happens that often times you take steps that move you in the opposite direction (less profit) of your final destination (maximum profit), but that was a necessary step to avoid a salient non-linearity (an obstacle)….

Here is a picture to help you understand the nonlinear optimization issue. This is from the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA article Nonlinear Programming.

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Imagine that you are looking for the global minimum of this function, and have found the local minimum at point Q. To find the global minimum at point P you would have to go up hill from the local minimum at point Q to get to the global minimum at point P.

It is easy to see this in a two dimensional plot, but not so easy to see in a 100 dimensions. There is no plot for a computer program or a system to see. Even in this simple case, there is no plot for a computer program to see. It has to try points away from the local minimum to see if there is a point that is lower.

Don’t be confused because I used a minimization example. Turn the plot upside-down in your mind, and you have a maximization problem.

Vox has the article Elizabeth Warren has a plan to save capitalism.

Instead of advocating for expensive new social programs like free college or health care, she’s introducing a bill Wednesday, the Accountable Capitalism Act, that would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class — without costing a dime.

You can comment about her idea on my Facebook post. I don’t want to prejudice you with stating my opinion.

YouTube has the audio Joy Marie Mann – Savage Joy, live with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, candidate for Congress NY CD14.

For those of us who are economics nerds, this gives a tad more depth on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s knowledge. It pays to be interviewed by someone who understands economics too.