The CBC has the video interview “The Price We Pay” | Harold Crooks Documentary.

On Facebook The Other 98% shared CBC News: The National’s video.

The jobs may be going to China, but the money is going to the Cayman Islands. That’s what off-shoring really means. As long as we are allowing the 1% to shield their money from taxes, they would be fools not to take advantage. We would be (are) fools to let them buy our elected representatives who pass the laws that make this all possible. There is probably no higher return on investment than buying a politician.

Naked Capitalism has the article Wolf Richter: “Smart Money” Prepares to Profit from Bond Market Rout. The article finishes with the following:

And bondholders carry all the known and unknown risks of those four decades in return for what is still a minuscule amount of yield. That’s why the ultimate smart money is selling them at a record pace to still eager bond-fund managers that will stuff them, and all the associated risks and potential losses, without compunction into retirement nest eggs. Thank you hallelujah central banks for this deal of a “lifetime.”

From this article, I next read the Marketwatch article Why stocks may find it tough to wiggle out of the bond-market mess. THis article starts with the following:

“The latter part of 2014 and the dawn of 2015 will probably represent one of those episodes in financial history when the fixed-income markets were gripped by a confluence of factors that is unlikely to be repeated over the next hundred years,” said Jefferies’s chief equity strategist, Sean Darby.

There’s fodder for your future tales of battles past this morning, as Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen’s assets-are-bubbly comments continue to rattle global markets, which have already been duly freaked out by plummeting global bonds. She’s hit us at a tough time.

You know my financial advice is worth every penny you pay for it, but these articles just confirm for me why I wouldn’t buy bonds at the current historically high prices for them. At least with stocks there is the possibility that a company can grow into the inflated price of its stock. With a bond, there is not even this chance to justify the current high prices.

In these days of computerized trading, you don’t even get paper to cover your walls when you find the bonds to be worthless to sell.

CNN has the article First on CNN: Clinton, Democratic presidential opponents to debate six times.

First the good news:

Democrats will announce Tuesday six presidential primary debates, giving long shots a potential opportunity to share the debate stage with frontrunner Hillary Clinton, CNN has learned.

Then the bad news that could be enough to drive me out of the Democratic Party:

The DNC will set the criteria for debate inclusion and any candidate who participates in a separate debate outside of the sanctioning process will be barred from future DNC debates, a Democratic official told CNN.

It is this kind of attitude and the desire to lose at all costs, that has me wondering if the days of the Democratic Party are numbered in pretty small numbers.

The nerve of them to try to prevent more debates. I had a feeling that the DNC has bot been looking out for my interests for a long time. That’s why I have cut off all donations to committees of national Democrats. I will only make contributions to individual candidates.

If they think that I will vote for Hillary if she is the nominee, then they have another think coming.

To start the conversation, watch this video from Larry Wilmore.

You don’t have to go so far as to even think about hate speech. All you have to do is to remember the phrase “fighting words” as explained by WikiPedia.

In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. It held that “insulting or ‘fighting words,’ those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are among the “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of [which] … have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem.”
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There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting words” those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

— Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942

So, was Pamela Geller protecting free speech or was she guilty of the crime of inciting disorder by using fighting words?

May 6, 2015

Reader RichardH has pointed out to me, that I should have read about the Post-Chaplinsky decisions in that Wikipedia article Fighting Words. You would have to be a lawyer to figure out what is prohibited, and what is not.

After I wrote the original post, I started to wonder how the American Nazi Party was allowed to hold a march in Skokie, Illinois where there was a large population of WWII Nazi Holocaust survivors. Conveniently, Wikipedia has the article National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie.

Thanks to RichardH for keeping me honest.

Naked Capitalism has the article At INET Conference, Warren Adds Two Pieces to Her Financial Reform Framework.  The article and the speech have important things to say about a number of politico/economic topics.  I’ll select a minute few to comment on here.

From the article comes the following excerpt:

Could a President use a trade deal to override financial rules? Well, it’s been a part of trade agreements since the late 1980s, including the WTO. In fact, WTO rules prevent firewalls like Glass-Steagall: when the U.S. negotiated it in 1997, they added an intent to repeal it, which of course happened two years later, in time for the WTO’s implementation. (Size caps on financial institutions are actually also banned by WTO rules.)

Financial services deregulation is more of an issue for the TTIP, the proposed U.S.-European agreement. European negotiators, if anything more embedded with their banks, have insisted on including a financial regulation chapter, which the U.S. has thus far rejected. By the time TTIP gets locked in, another President could be in office who wouldn’t be so rigid on that point.

Here is the YouTube video. Elizabeth Warren’s remarks start at the 12:00 minute mark.

I found one comment on YouTube particularly uninformed.

youdodat2

If you’re not talking about taking the power of money creation away from these private bankers psychopaths, then you’re just talking bullshit. Debt based money has to end.

In my response, I think I have finally figured just what is so wrong about this comment and almost everything that Ron and Rand Paul have to say about the subject.

Steve Greenberg

+youdodat2, You’ve been listening to the idiotic Paul family for too long. You are fooling yourselves if you think that it is only the banks that create private money. The stock market itself creates money with far less regulation than the banks. Anytime you have an asset that the accounting rules say you must put a value on, the frequently used technique of mark-to-market has the effect of creating money.

The Paul family is far too naive in their understanding of money. You might even go so far as to say that they haven’t a clue about what they claim to be expert in.

It is about time to stop equating what knowledgeable people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have to say about banks, banking, and money with what ignorant people like Ron and Rand Paul have to say. If you are going to listen to “experts”, you need to make sure that the person you are listening to really is an expert.

Democracy for America has a petition for you to sign Tell President Obama: Prosecute Wall Street Criminals.

Here is a key part of the explanation that you will see at the above link:

Wall Street banks have gotten away with way too much already. As long as they know that breaking the law will never result in anything more than a slap on the wrist, they’ll keep taking the kinds of risks that led to the last economic collapse — and would almost certainly create another crisis for working families in the future.

Who would have thought that we would have to explain this to President Obama? Next time, we need to elect someone who understands this and promises to prosecute white collar crime as vigorously as other kinds of crime. White collar crimes like the ones that some the Wall Street executives perpetrate cause more physical harm to more people than an armed robber causes when he or she displays a gun, but does not use it.

Making a promise of vigorous prosecution of white collar crime be a litmus test for the next President, is not too much to ask. It shouldn’t even be a promise that we should have to ask a Presidential candidate to make. The extremely bad precedent that Obama has set, is what makes it necessary to ask for this promise from now on.

Talking Points Memo has the article Jon Stewart Ridicules ‘Dallas Dipsh*ts’ Fearing ‘Texas Takeover’ (VIDEO)

“The United States government already controls Texas, since like the 1840s, and then left and then came back — just borrow a textbook from a neighboring state, it’s all in there,” he added.

Here is the video.

A certain person sitting next to me while watching this video said, “You know, I have to stop telling people I come from Texas.”

Salon magazine has the article Bernie Sanders wants to lead “a political revolution” to make America more Scandinavian.

The article has a video of Sanders being interviewed bu George Stephanopolous. Salon chose to quote these words from Bernie Sanders in part of the interview.

“In countries like Denmark, Norway, Sweden — very democratic countries — voter turnout is a lot higher than it is in the United States,” he said.

“In those countries, health care is the right of all people,” Sanders added. “College education and graduate school is free. Retirement benefits [and] child care are stronger than the United States of America. In those countries, by and large, government works for ordinary people and the middle class, rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class.”

ABC News also has an article, Sen. Bernie Sanders Says America Needs ‘Political Revolution’ in 2016, about this interview. There is something about what the ABC News article decided to talk about that strikes me as a little less substantive and a bit more about political soap opera. And that gives you a hint as to why George Stephanopolous needed to be tamed.

Sturbridge for Bernie Sanders also mentioned this article.

The article contains a video interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC television. You could label this interview as Bernie Sanders stands up to George Stephanopolous and wins. He was very civil and emphasized the positive reasons for wanting to run. By trying to stay positive, he diverted leading questions that were meant to elicit negative comments about his political rivals.

If nothing else, we finally have a candidate that resists being dragged into the mud by the media pundits, and he does it in a very civil way.

MoveOn.org has posted How to Take Back Our Economy and Democracy From the 1% on their Facebook page.

It sounds like a good list of bullet items. There is one of them that I must comment on.

I suppose it might be too complex in the poster to explain why you don’t need to raise taxes on the rich to “pay for better schools and rebuild the nation’s infrastructure”. After all the FED arm of the government creates money from computer key strokes. You don’t need taxes to get the money for the government to pay for something. You need to tax the rich to prevent them from using their huge stashes of cash to compete for resources with the government that is using its money to “pay for better schools and rebuild the nation’s infrastructure”.

It may sound like a distinction without a difference to quibble about the reason for an agreed upon tax increase. However, people do derive other policy plans from what they think taxes are for. Seeming to promote the false belief of the purpose of taxes here might encourage other people to extrapolate that false belief to programs that do not make sense.