Naked Capitalism has the article Elizabeth Warren Throws Down Gauntlet, Calls for Genuine Financial Reform.

At the Levy Conference, Elizabeth Warren launched a new campaign for tough-minded, effective financial regulation. This ought to be a straightforward call for restoring banking to its traditional role of facilitating real economy activity. Instead, in this era of “cream for the banks, crumbs for everyone else,” common-sense reforms to make banks deal fairly with customers and remove their outsized subsidies will no doubt be depicted by pampered financiers as an unfair plot to target a successful industry. But as we’ve stressed, Big Finance gets more government support than any line of business, even military contractors. They are utilities and should be regulated as such. Thus even Warren’s bold call to action falls short of the degree to which the financial service industry need to be curbed.

If you don’t watch this video, you won’t have a clue as to what is going on in the financial world that absolutely must come to a halt. You won’t have a clue as to how weak the Obama administration has been in enforcing the laws against the big banks. You also won’t have a clue as to what steps need to be taken to fix the problems. If it is ok by you to be choosing Presidential candidates while remaining in the dark about these key issues, then you aren’t living up to your civic responsibilities.

I give you permission to skip about the first 50 seconds of the video where people are just waiting for the introduction to Elizabeth Warren.

Bernie Sanders has a poster on his Facebook wall.

What Bernie Sanders says here is on the edge of what I can support. For years, I have been saying other people in the world deserve to have good jobs, too. We have no right to tell other people what is an acceptable level of pay for them.  They should have the right to decide that for themselves.  We also have no right to a standard of living that is far higher than what exists in developing countries.  For historical reasons, we do have a higher standard of living, but in a fair world, this cannot go on forever.  We should be working for a solution that raises other peoples’ standards of living to come up to our level rather than trying to depress our standard of living to match theirs.

American exceptionalism has given us in the USA an exaggerated concept of the right to the exceptional standard of living we enjoy. If people in other countries are willing to work for lower wages and yet do a good job, then there is justice in the work flowing to them. The key is their “willingness”. The only thing we should be negotiating in trade agreements is a certain standard of human rights. Beyond that, we have no right to complain about the other people willing to do our jobs as well or better than we can, and at a lower wage. We may not like it, but the world does not owe us the higher standard of living that we enjoy.

In the adjustment of our standard of living that seems inevitable to me, we don’t have to choose a method that puts all the pain on the backs of American working people. Letting the value of our dollar weaken as it should do, will let all the people in the USA, the wealthy included, share in the pain of the adjustment. If we don’t compare ourselves to other countries, the relative adjustment could be almost unnoticeable to us. In other words the rise in standard of living in other countries could be much larger than the fall here. If we were really lucky there would not have to be any fall here, just a huge rise elsewhere.

The people who call for maintaining the strength of the dollar, are asking for the most painful way to have the adjustment to occur.  Well, painful for us average folk, but good for the richest among us.

Talking Points Memo has the article N.J. Deli Forced To Shut Down After Posting ‘White History Month’ Sign.

A Flemington, N.J. deli was forced to close its doors after the owner placed a “White History Month” sign in the window of the establishment, the Hunterdon County Democrat reported on Thursday.

This story caught my eye because we lived in Flemington for a couple of  years in the mid-1970s.  Should I have a sense of pride for having lived there?  Maybe this incident redeems New Jersey’s reputation for having been a southern like state when it came to civil rights.

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Media Fall for Hillary Clinton’s Gensler Gambit by William K. Black. While he does praise Gensler’s work during the Obama administration, he comes to the following conclusion:

Ignore the media crush on Gensler’s appointment.  As campaign CFO for H. Clinton his job is the care and feeding of the DLC’s financial base – the finance industry.  H. Clinton’s Gensler gambit is smart politics, but if you think it means she is seeking progressive advice you are being played – successfully.

You’ll have to read the article to find the details behind this conclusion.

Looking at my previous post Clinton to name former financial regulator as CFO -Bloomberg, you will see that I was almost played successfully.  However, I did show some skepticism about the appointment.  In fact, I said that I was waiting to see what William K. Black had to say about this.

Reuters “reporting” on a Bloomberg story has the article Clinton to name former financial regulator as CFO -Bloomberg.

Bloomberg cited in its report an unnamed Democrat familiar with the decision. Gensler, whose five-year term as the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ended in January 2014, came to embody President Barack Obama’s push for Wall Street reforms in the trillion-dollar derivatives market.

A one-time Goldman Sachs swaps trader, he transformed the watchdog from a relatively sleepy agriculture-focused regulator to a powerful overseer of Wall Street.

He proved a polarizing figure with his aggressive interpretation of swaps reforms after the financial crisis, irritating both Wall Street and international counterparts.

Despite, or maybe because of, his Wall Street background, he does seem to have been an effective regulator.

The WikiPedia article on Gary Gensler, has pretty high praise for him.   I checked one of the sources referred to in the article which did not expose any holes in the WikiPedia write-up.  You can tell that I am skeptical of Clinton’s appointees, so I will wait to hear what William Black has to say.  Except for just fining Barclay’s bank over the Libor scandal instead of jailing the offenders according to The New York Times article Libor Case Energizes a Wall Street Watchdog, I can’t find anything else that Elizabeth Warren would complain about.  That is a pretty big exception, and one of my major knocks against Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. I just don’t know what Elizabeth Warren or William K. Black will say about his record.  At least there is a possibility that he is really as good a guy as some people make him out to be.

Time Magazine has the article Martin O’Malley Criticizes Hillary Clinton for Flip-Flopping. I haven’t been following Martin O’Malley, and this article isn’t much to go on, but he looks promising.

“Leadership is about making the right decision, and the best decision before sometimes it becomes entirely popular,” he continued.

Clinton has adopted a more populist tone than she has in the past during her recent tour this week to Iowa, where she made her first stops on the 2016 campaign trail.

Since this is a democracy, leadership is more than just about making the right decision.  It is also an effort to make that decision popular by explaining it to people.  You may not succeed  in making it popular, but the effort to do so is important whether you succeed or not.

What I realized from this article is that Clinton may finally be coming around to my positions, but I would love to have a President that was in the vanguard of progressive ideas, not reluctantly trailing behind.  Of course, reluctantly training behind is probably better than refusing to keep up or going in the other direction.

Reuters has the article Clinton endorses Elizabeth Warren for Time magazine. Now there is a headline that I bet you never expected to see.  While it is not true, as some Clinton supporters have said, that Warren endorses Clinton, the endorsement in the other direction may be true.  Though, Warren isn’t running for any position at Time magazine.

From the Reuters article:

“She never hesitates to hold powerful people’s feet to the fire: bankers, lobbyists, senior government officials and, yes, even presidential aspirants,” Clinton, the clear front-runner to win the Democratic nomination for president, wrote in an apparent wink to herself.

The article further goes on to say:

Warren has a relatively small but vocal and politically active group of supporters, and her speeches denouncing Wall Street recklessness have sometimes been swapped enthusiastically on social media websites.

In this vein, I can imagine a Reuters story about the subject of my previous post Einstein’s Universe Turns 100.

That Einstein fellow is remembered for a few good scientific ideas that he had.

That’s Reuters for you, masters of understatement.

Ok, here’s another whopper from the Reuters article:

It was not immediately clear on Thursday how Clinton came to write the blurb for Time about Warren.

Maybe if Reuters had given you the link to the Time Magazine article, The 100 Most Influential People, you might have had an inkling of how this blurb came to be.  Although Reuters did say the following:

“Elizabeth Warren never lets us forget that the work of taming Wall Street’s irresponsible risk taking and reforming our financial system is far from finished,” Clinton wrote in Time after the magazine named Warren, a former Harvard law professor and a senator for Massachusetts, one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

So why is Reuters so surprised at how Clinton came to write this?  Is it because they never thought to ask Clinton about her opinion of Warren as Time Magazine apparently did?

NPR has the article Einstein’s Universe Turns 100. I do not know how to better convey the gravity of the situation other than to quote the starting words of the article.

One hundred years ago, a 36-year-old Albert Einstein presented the complete formulation of the General Theory of Relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Across the world, events and conferences will be celebrating what is considered, without hyperbole, the most beautiful of physical theories, marrying mathematics with physical concepts in deeply meaningful and elegant ways. Some consider it the highest intellectual achievement in history.

You can probably get a grasp on the theory if you don’t think about it too deeply. Once I start thinking about what the typical illustration of the theory really shows you, that’s when I lose my understanding, somewhat.

I really have to wonder at this illustration I chose at random from a Google search. I don’t think that ridge at the rim of the canyon belongs there. Terry Steiner, can you explain this to me?

The US edition of The Guardian has the story Hillary Clinton: an empire of progressives strikes back.

Leftwingers hold back their endorsements for Hillary Clinton until she presents a clearer campaign ‘vision’ as the only Democrat in the running so far
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“I was not particularly impressed with it,” said Zephyr Teachout, a New York Democrat who ran for governor in 2014, warning on Twitter it was “surprisingly free of content, lacking autobiography, policy [and] vision”.

Teachout said she had not given up on the chance of more progressive candidates entering the race – or of Clinton taking a more populist approach on issues such as free trade and banking reform, on which Democratic leadership has tended to be more economically liberal in the past.
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De Blasio, who ran Clinton’s 2000 campaign, echoed the view that such pressure may help shape a bolder Clinton agenda, even without the formal entry of more radical opponents like Warren.

“Clearly what’s happening in the progressive [wing] of the Democratic party is a demand for our candidates to come forward with a vision,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That’s creating some of the same positive pressure you see in the primary process.”

I am proud to be a part of the effort to put positive pressure on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  You wimpy progressives who immediately fell in line without making any demands can thank me later for making sure our values get represented by the Democratic nominee.