The Supreme Court made a huge mistake when it decided that Corporations are the same as the Persons or People mentioned in our Constitution.

Natural persons or people have a conscience. The corporation is a creation of the government. The modern (but erroneous) interpretation of how corporations should be run is that they are supposed to make money for their owners, but they are not supposed to have a conscience except for what is mandated by law.

Our founding ancestors, in their infinite wisdom, wrote into the constitution that our government is to be run by natural person with a conscience. They knew that was the only way we would ever keep our democracy going. It was the collective conscience of the people that would keep us safe. Therefore, only natural people, should have a say in the running of the country. The creations of the government that do not have a conscience should not be deciding how the country is to be run.

People who have no understanding of this basic premise do not belong in any of the three branches of our government, executive, legislative, nor judicial.

Econintersect has the article The President Thinks We Need To Pay More.

This is a good article with one tremendous flaw.

And if weak demand at home is keeping unemployment too high or wages too low, the appropriate policy response is fiscal relaxation- either a tax cut or spending increase- and not to tax or otherwise drive up the cost of imports, even if that results in a higher public debt.

Cutting taxes allows people to spend the money on whatever they want including creating a bubble in the stock market.

There are some things that are for the good of society collectively including business interests that are not a profitable investment for individuals nor corporations. These are the things we depend on our government to buy for the collective good.

When you put tax cuts on a completely equal footing as investment spending for the common good, you are leaving out a very important part of the picture.

When you hear that tired old saw complaint by the Republicans that “you know how to spend your money better than the government does”, remember what I said above. You will be able to retort, “There are some things I want my government to spend on because the country and the economy needs them, but it makes no sense for individuals to pay for them only voluntarily”.

YouTube has the video Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders Address at Puerto Cabezas Sister City Program.

Burlington established a sister city relation with Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua in 1984. Over 35 years ago Bernie Sanders was railing against the USA behavior that seems to have come to a head right now.

Here is an excerpt from my previous post How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s mass migration.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in particular, sent conflicting messages, and worked to ensure that Zelaya did not return to power. This was contrary to the wishes of the Organization of American States, the leading hemispheric political forum composed of the 35 member-countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean. Several months after the coup, Clinton supported a highly questionable election aimed at legitimating the post-coup government.

Compare the foreign policy expereince of Bernie Sanders in 1984 with what Hillary Clinton displayed in 2009. Now do you understand why I would not vote for Hillary Clinton? If people understaood what Hillary Clinton was and is, I don’t think they would have voted for her either.

The Conversation has the story How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s mass migration.

U.S. military presence in Honduras and the roots of Honduran migration to the United States are closely linked. It began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first became active there. As historian Walter LaFeber writes in “Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America,” American companies “built railroads, established their own banking systems, and bribed government officials at a dizzying pace.” As a result, the Caribbean coast “became a foreign-controlled enclave that systematically swung the whole of Honduras into a one-crop economy whose wealth was carried off to New Orleans, New York, and later Boston.”

By 1914, U.S. banana interests owned almost 1 million acres of Honduras’ best land.

As you read more of the story, it just gets worse.

The Reagan administration also played a big role in restructuring the Honduran economy. It did so by strongly pushing for internal economic reforms, with a focus on exporting manufactured goods. It also helped deregulate and destabilize the global coffee trade, upon which Honduras heavily depended. These changes made Honduras more amenable to the interests of global capital. They disrupted traditional forms of agriculture and undermined an already weak social safety net.

These decades of U.S. involvement in Honduras set the stage for Honduran emigration to the United States, which began to markedly increase in the 1990s.

What our oligarchs did in Honduras was just a rehearsal for what they are now trying to do in the USA. Unless you want to live a life like the majority of Hondurans do, we need to wrest control of our government from the big money interests.

Nightly Business Report has the story China has a limited number of weapons to use in a trade war with the US.

China is limited somewhat in the amount of retaliatory tariffs it can apply, simply because it doesn’t import nearly as much in American goods compared with what the U.S. takes of Chinese products. China imported just $129.9 billion from the U.S. in 2017, compared with $505.5 billion in exports, according to the Census Bureau.

I did a little Google search to find the WikiPedia article Foreign-exchange reserves of China.

In October 2016 China’s foreign exchange reserves totaled US$3.12 trillion, the lowest total since 2011, but remained higher than the foreign exchange reserves of any other nation.

The Chinese really need to be able to sell us the exports they send to the USA considering they are selling this stuff at a loss, and taking in our money that they have no use for.

One lesson here is don’t count on Nightly Business Report for information about investing, money, finance, or international trade.

Naked Capitalism has the article Missing in Action: The Poor in America.

Imagine this: every year during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 there were nearly four million home foreclosures. In that period, with job losses mounting, nearly 15% of American households were categorized as “food insecure.” To many of those who weren’t foreclosed upon, who didn’t lose their jobs, who weren’t “food insecure,” to the pundits writing about that disaster and the politicians dealing with it, these were undoubtedly distant events. But not to me. For me, it was all up close and personal.

I did not experience this as I was growing up, but I did have friends who were lower down on the socio-economic ladder than my family was. As I grew into being an older teen, I do remember the worries I had of how I was ever going to keep myself in the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed.

I was never sure how my father managed to pay the medical bills for my mother and send two kids to college. As an adult, if I weren’t able to get and keep a good job, I feared what would happen to me.

CNBC has the article Why China ‘holds all the aces’ in a full-blown US-China trade war.

Here is something that is news to me.

The current $370 billion deficit estimate does not account for value-added. When looking at the value-added content of Chinese exports, the U.S. deficit with China is actually only half of what it seems. And if we then add back the U.S. surplus in “invisibles” and how much money the United States brings back from investments in China, the U.S.–China deficit shrinks from 2 percent of U.S. GDP to 0.8 percent, a report from Oxford Economics revealed.

Here is the bottom line.

Above all else, the Trump–Xi trade shenanigans seem to underscore the different agendas at play here: one oriented toward political posturing and “winning” against a dubious scorecard, and the other focused on economic realities and a long-term development strategy. While the United States will undoubtedly declare victory, China seems to hold all the aces.

It seems like China is the adult in this game, and Trump is the childlike novice. For a country that claims to be a capitalist country, we don’t seem to really know how to play the capitalist game very well.

Evonomics has the article Capital’s Share of Income Is Way Higher than You Think. To save you the agony of reading what it isn’t, I’ll entice you with the excerpt that tells you what it is.

But over any longer period, household capital gains are very, very real income indeed. They deliver very real assets and net worth — wealth — onto household balance sheets, which individuals can easily swap for “cash” when they want to spend, in our liquid financial system. That’s what retirees with nest eggs do — swap their various assets for cash, and “spend down their assets.”

I have been waiting for a long time to read an analysis like this. As a retiree, living off the income from my investments, I have suspected that counting unrealized capital gains would change the picture just as thiss author has pointed out. From what I remember of the statistics I have read, there are are very few 10 year periods in the history of the USA stock market where you would have lost money in the market. I think the other statistic is that there are no periods of 20 years or more where you would have lost money. I presume this is talking about index type of investing, not speculation. In other words, if you have the staying power, you are almost guaranteed to make money in the stock market over a lifetime. Yes, past history is no guarantee of future performance. However the odds are in your favor unless this country does something unprecedentedly foolish. Some day it could happen. We seem to be on our way there lately.

YouTube has the video Maddow’s Crazy Conspiracy Theory About Peace In N. Korea.

Rachel Maddow somehow managed to tie Russia into the North Korean talks and once again attack Trump from the right.

You almost have to laugh to keep from going insane.

YouTube has the video Paul Jay on Trump’s Iran War Agenda and Liberals’ Korea Peace Panic.

Paul Jay, Senior Editor of the The Real News, says that Trump’s North Korea diplomacy overshadows both his administration’s war-mongering on Iran and Koreans’ decisive efforts to make peace. Jay also discusses the partisan liberal angst over the prospect of reducing the U.S. military presence on the Korean peninsula

Paul Jay describes a complicated web, but one that is decidedly believable. We people play a dangerous game when we focus Liberal panic on North Korea, while ignoring the real objectives of the Trump camp. The people who still think that Rachel Maddow is not a tool of the military/industrial complex may be the most easily duped.