As I have, said in my previous post Senator Elizabeth Warren Interview, Elizabeth Warren is under the misapprehension that sanctions were effective in getting Iran to negotiate with us on their nuclear program. Misapprehensions are fine if they don’t leave you with the wrong lesson that you wrongly apply in some future situation. This is why I harp on them.

Perhaps Warren thinks that Obama made a fair offer to Iran earlier in his Presidency, they rejected it, and we had to go to sanctions.

Well, in November 2013, I wrote a blog post about How France Sank the Iran-Nuke Deal. I quoted an article from Consortium News.

Now the Obama administration will face a decision whether to press Iran to go along with those changes or to go back to the original compromise when political directors of the six powers and Iran reconvene Nov. 20. That choice will provide the key indicator of how strongly committed Obama is to reaching an agreement with Iran.

At the time, I commented about the article,

The United States has a long history of making offers to Iran such that the public face of the offer seems eminently reasonable, but hidden actions by the U.S. are slaps in the face of Iran.  I wonder why the U.S. press does not educate the U.S. public about this history.

Well, nobody has mended their ways since I wrote that.  I knew it was too much to expect.  There seems to be something hidden from us that is riding on the need for this deception.  Too bad we will find out what it is only when we are deeper into the hole we are digging for ourselves.

Bernie Sanders posted the image below on his Facebook page.

I then shared it on my Facebook page.

To me, it sounds like Bernie Sanders has positions that I can support on a wide range of issues. I am not sure Elizabeth Warren has arrived at this level of broad understanding that Sanders has. For instance, I think she is very naive about the role that sanctions played in getting negotiations going with the Iranians. She doesn’t seem to have seen the evidence that the Iranians offered a much better deal to the US when President Bush was in office, but he rejected it in favor of sanctions. Maybe the lack of effectiveness of the sanctions is what finally convinced us to start talking to the Iranians, In that case, Warren has got the story quite backwards. I am hoping that she will come around after I sent her the explanation and a link to the backup data. However, Bernie Sanders is already at that kind of sophistication.

Because of Roger’s comment below that seems to disbelieve my claim to have backup data, I’ll put the link to some of that right here

If you have access to Facebook, you might enjoy or abhor the conversations there.

Informed Comment has the article Iran: What did Khamenei really say about the Lausanne Agreement, and Why? by Juan Cole.

Hard liners are jumping up and down mad about what Rouhani & Zarif are alleged to have given away to the West, and my suspicion is that Khamenei’s demand for immediate end of sanctions is a way of tossing them a bone for the moment. If you read the whole speech he comes back and is still supportive of the process at the end, saying he is not for or against the deal since there really is no deal yet, just a framework agreement for negotiating the deal. But then that means he did not, contrary to the headlines, come out against the deal today.

Juan Cole is telling you what he thinks is going on.  In using the phrase “my suspicion is”, he gives you fair warning that he does not have inside knowledge into Khamenei’s brain.  I just think that, given the one-sided presentation of the negotiations by our new media, it is valuable to consider other possible interpretations that are driven by different agendas.  I have not researched what Juan Cole’s agenda is, but I assume he must have one.

Appointing Loretta Lynch as Attorney General will just further the aims of Wall Street to avoid prosecution.  We need an Attorney General who sides with the ordinary people, not the crooked CEOs on Wall Street.

I just got email from Senator Patrick Lahey, asking me to sign a petition for Loretta Lynch’s nomination for Attorney General.  I told him that he should be ashamed of himself for pushing the nomination of another Wall Street lackey in the mold of Eric Holder.

See my previous post Bill Black: HSBC Violates its Sweetheart Deal and Loretta Lynch Praises It.

Market Watch has the article Move over oil. Strong dollar now choking off U.S. inflation.

Yet the strong dollar also makes U.S. goods and services more expensive for foreigners to buy, reducing demand for American-made exports. That’s cutting into corporate profits and could even cost American jobs, potentially slowing the nation’s pace of growth.

If the dollar remains strong, inflation is unlikely to rise much in the near future as the Fed has been hoping. The central bank for months had stuck to a prediction that the decline in inflation was a temporary phenomenon that would soon be reversed.

I wonder how this news fits in with Rand Paul’s brilliant analysis of how Fed policy of creating too much money out of thin air combined with our deficit spending are going to bring on the ravages of inflation.  The Fed just seems to debasing our collapsing dollar that nobody in the world will want anymore.

I have no idea what the personal consumption expenditure price index is, but the Fed seems to be having a devil of a time getting it anywhere near a 2% target rate. It did seem to rise rapidly when we had some economic stimulus coming from our fiscal policy, but now that Obama is lowering the deficit, the inflation rate is dropping back near the recession level.

As for Rand Paul and his father Ron Paul, what do they call medical experts who prescribe large doses of the wrong medicine at exactly the most inopportune times?

The Boston Globe has the article Clinton taps Harvard professor’s ideas on social mobility.  I am not a subscriber anymore, but I just had to follow the link to see who this Harvard Professor could be. Much to my chagrin, he wasn’t among the wacky ones I know about (Martin Feldstein).

Chetty’s emphasis on upward mobility offers a less divisive way to address middle class economic issues than the rhetoric of income inequality that progressives in the Democratic Party like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and her followers are pushing. It’s also more palatable to large corporations and wealthy donors who have funded her previous campaigns.

Hillary wouldn’t want to offend anyone in her social circle, or should I say criminal enterprise.

She’s taken series shots at Senate Republicans for stalling the nomination of Loretta Lynch for attorney general via her Twitter feed.

I can’t figure out what the interest in Loretta Lynch is.  She is no less a product of Wall Street than the current Attorney General, Eric Holder.  Lynch might even be more culpable than Holder in the failure of the Department of Justice to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street.  After all, the crimes were/are committed in Lynch’s U.S. Attorney district

The research Chetty and his team have done shows that children who grow up in parts of the country with less segregation, less income inequality, stronger schools, more social capital, and stable families are more likely to improve their social standing as adults. He and his colleagues are preparing to release policy prescriptions in coming months.

Quelle suprise!  Of course, it is always good to have the data to show that what seems to be obvious is actually true. i don’t know what kind of policy presecriptions these people will come up with, but I can imagine.  My response to Hillary’s promotion of these prescriptions will probably be along the lines, “My God, woman.  You want to fix what’s wrong with the poor, while your rich pals are robbing us blind?  What kind of fools do you take us for?”

He also spoke at last year’s Clinton Global Initiative meeting, where he mentioned his signature eye-popping statistic: “Chances of achieving the ‘American Dream’ are almost two times higher in Canada than the United States,” he said, showing slide with data to back up the claim.

Darn those Canadians.  They live on the same continent that we do, and they are better than we are at Democracy and Capitalism.  It must be something about living north of us.  I am pretty sure they look down upon us as we do to people from Mexico.  Or northerners in this country look upon southerners in this country.  Maybe the cold is good for the brain.

Other researchers on his project said that people from different political backgrounds tend to seize on different parts of the work. “When you look at the data it is a political Rorschach test,” said Nathaniel Hendren, an assistant professor at Harvard.

How am I doing on that Rorschach test?

One of the commenters on the Globe article gave the URL to Raj Chetty’s work, www.rajchetty.com.  With just a few moments of poking around, I came across the working paper, IS THE UNITED STATES STILL A LAND OF OPPORTUNITY? RECENT TRENDS IN INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY.  The excerpt below comes from the abstract.

Based on all of these measures, we find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s. However, because inequality has risen, the consequences of the “birth lottery” – the parents to whom a child is born – are larger today than in the past.

Let’s see if I have this right – two plus two equals five.  Social mobility has not changed in over 40 years yet inequality has risen.  How did the inequality grow without any change in social mobility?  It must be the birthrate of the lower classes.  The rich are too busy grabbing all the money to have children.

By the way, some of the comments on the Globe article are really classic.

Democracy For America has the petition Stand with Bernie Sanders: Tell the Senate to reject Fast Track authority for the TPP.

Bernie Sanders is taking a bold stand against the the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A bill to give the president Fast Track authority, designed to push through the TPP with little public debate, is about to be introduced in the Senate.

The TPP is a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy. It will also negatively impact some of the poorest people in the world.

Stand with Bernie Sanders: Tell the Senate to vote NO on Fast Track for the TPP!

Many people wonder how even Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren can possibly beat the people with all the money and power.  Well, as they both have explained, this is where you come in.  We don’t have wealth and power, but we  do have votes and voices.  If we don’t step in and back Sanders and Warren when they are fighting our fights, then there is little likelihood that the powerful will feel the need to even care what you think.

People keep asking, what’s it going to take to turn this country around.  Well here is the beginning of the answer.  It is going to take enough people to stand-up to these bullies, before anything will ever change.  You can be part of history, or you can take a pass on it.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Hillary Remains Clueless About Regulation on the 28th Anniversary of the Keating Five Meeting by William K Black.

I thank Samantha Lachman for her April 9, 2015 column entitled “As Clinton Tries To Win Over Progressives, She Might Want To Distance Herself From This Economic Adviser.”
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Lachman’s column explains that Hillary Clinton chose Robert Hormats as one of her most prominent economic advisors.
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Lachman is correct about the content of Hormats’ policy positions. But here are the key factors I would urge readers (and potential campaign supporters and voters) to consider that arise from these positions.

1. The problem with Hormats is not that he will upset “progressives.” The problem is that he is incompetent, dishonest, and supports policies that have devastated and will continue to devastate our Nation and the people of the world. Hormats has been wrong on every important economic issue – for decades. That should upset everyone regardless of their politics.

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1. The real problem is the Clintons.

If I can get you to read this article and understand 10% of it, I cannot fathom how you could possibly want to vote for Hillary Clinton even for dog catcher, let alone for President.

I left the following comment on Black’s article.

Devastating.  As a fan of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I have already decided that Hillary Clinton is not a person I can vote for.  I knew in a general way that Clinton just did not understand.  This article gives me the specifics that I did not know.

Mark Twain is reputed to have said

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Whether or not Mark Twain said this doesn’t matter.  It is the takeoff point of this post.

I am going to give you the rhyme pattern, and I’d like you comment on the places in history where you can detect that pattern or even some significant parts of the pattern.

• A less powerful societal entity (A) demands that a more powerful entity (B) stops committing a perceived offense against the the less powerful entity (A).
• The more powerful entity (B) refuses to talk to the less powerful one (A) about their demands.
• The less powerful entity (A) commits an escalating series of stealthy violent acts against the powerful one (B) until they get some attention to their grievance.
• Eventually, the more powerful entity (B) decides that the pain is great enough that it would just be better to resolve (A)’s grievance against (B).
• (A) gets their grievance resolved, and they become powerful themselves.
• (A) looks back at how they achieved their goals and resolves never to allow a lesser power to  use the technique against them that they used against (B).
• Along comes an entity (C) that is less powerful than (A) and has a grievance against (A).
• (C) starts to use the tactic against (A) that (A) used successfully against (B).
• With (A)’s resolve based on its historic memory it is  even more intransigent against (C) than (B) was against (A).  They even tell (C) that there is nothing (C) can do to get them to change their mind.
• (C) takes this as a challenge for themselves to find something so horrible to do against (A), that (A) will finally agree to address the grievance.
• An escalating series of violent acts are performed by (A) on (C) in retaliation for the escalating attacks of (C) on (A).

There are only a few inevitable outcomes from this battle.

1. (A) finally gives in and tries to resolve its issues with (C).
2. (A) annihilates (C)
3. (C) annihilates (A)
4. (A) and (C) mutually destruct.

Let the contest begin.  The winner is me, if I can get enough of you to participate to build a long enough list.  At some point we might be able to measure which outcome produces the most happy people, the fewest deaths, and the fewest guilty consciences.  If you have other measures of success, I would be glad to hear them.  Even in scenarios 2 and 3, one side is silenced and the other side is left with a blot on their history that will haunt them (or at least their descendants) forever.

Oh, another winner would be the powerful entity that sees the rhyme emerging, and decides to cut to the resolution phase, and skip the pain of delaying the inevitable.

NPR has the article Transcript: President Obama’s Full NPR Interview On Iran Nuclear Deal. You’ll have to want to find out what the President said, and watch the video, because I am not going to give you any snappy excerpts from the video that let’s you go away thinking you have actually learned something.

NPR’s interview with President Obama focuses on the pact the U.S. and allied nations recently negotiated with Iran. The framework requires the nation to reduce its nuclear capacity in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions.

Below is a window in which YouTube will display the video.  The video is not coming from me or this blog.

I did find the interviewer as annoying as all media people are these days. I won’t give you the exact words that annoy me, because then you might think you actually learned something without having seen the video. I’ll paraphrase the type of dialogue that annoyed me. The interviewer asks a question. The President answers in detail with a quite reasonable answer. Then the interviewer has a followup question where he asks the President if he really meant to say the stupid thought that is stuck in the interviewer’s brain. The President then has to say that no that isn’t at all what he just said. The President then repeats what he actually said and what he actually meant. This happens a number of times throughout the interview. In fact there are probably few questions that don’t lead to this back and forth.

If you want to hear the soundbite that The Daily Kos trivially focused on, then go read their article. If you need a sound bite to entice you to see the whole interview, then less power to you.