The Campaign For America’s Future has a video of Elizabeth Warren speaking at The New Populism Conference last Thursday. The title of the email and web page was “Me? I’m fighting back.”

You can count on the fingers of two fingers the number of people who could run for President in 2016 who speak about these issues the way Elizabeth Warren does.

The person I count on the other finger is Bernie Sanders. In my judgment he is pretty passionate, but not as passionate as Elizabeth Warren and perhaps does not have as much first hand experience fighting the forces of evil that Elizabeth Warren has.

Has any other recent, progressive politician told you so eloquently about the importance of having this fight out in the open? It is not enough to fight with the opposition in secret to eke out some meager compromise. Win or lose, it is more important to get these issues in front of the public so that they can put their strength into the fight.

There is a certain other Democratic woman who seems to be all the rage for the 2016 Presidential campaign. She doesn’t hold a candle to Elizabeth Warren in this fight. (HC doesn’t even hold a matchstick to Elizabeth Warren.) Can you even imagine HC talking this way about accountability for the powerful that Elizabeth Warren talks about in this video?

Does HC really have a clue about how the middle-class has been pounded into submission as Elizabeth Warren so eloquently describes? She is married to the guy that did some of the pounding. “The end of welfare as we know it”, indeed. It was easy to see how this might work in a booming economy if we didn’t look too closely. When the inevitable crash came partially as a result of BC overturning the Glass-Steagall Act, it was obvious back then what would happen with “The end of welfare as we know it.”

Should we give the Clinton Dynasty another chance just as we did for the Bush Dynasty? If we had no one else to run, we could give it a try and hope for the best. In this case we have a far superior alternative. Why would we settle for a little less disaster, when there is a possibility of success?

Thanks to Mark Evangelisto for posting this on his Facebook page.

Elite Daily has the article If You Need Any Convincing That Solar Roadways Are The Future, This Video Will Help.

All Brusaw’s need is a little cash and we can kiss economic woes, pollution and a whole lot of car accidents goodbye forever.

Skeptical though I may be, if nothing else, the concept is a great one.  It would solve a lot of problems if it were feasible.

Here is the link to www.solarroadways.com to learn more.

Facebook also provided me with a link to the National Report article Solar Panels Drain the Sun’s Energy, Experts Say. After reading the article, the comments, and looking around the web site, I still cannot figure out if it is a web site for conservative wing nuts or a satire site.

Much thanks to Rick Merrill for bringing this to my attention.

In 1961, I was struggling with a freshman computer seminar at MIT. I just couldn’t figure out a key step to writing my first program. My father thought he could help me by taking me on a visit to a friend of his who worked at the IRS in Andover, MA. This friend showed me an IBM 1401 and its flashing lights. I don’t recall that the friend had any knowledge of programming, nor was he of any help in answering my question.

Eventually, I realized that I had all the knowledge that I needed. I just had to do it.

That first experience with computers was so traumatic, that I didn’t take another course using computers until my senior year. And the rest is history.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Forget Taxes for Redistribution: What to do about Inequality.

And, as we know, Uncle Sam doesn’t need any stinking taxes to “pay for” jobs and income and healthcare and decent retirements for the poor. If you have unemployed resources, free lunches abound! Just put the resources to work, and you’ve got Bernstein’s wish list filled.

Forget taxes for redistribution. It will not work. It is a bad meme—especially in America. Once you let the greedy rich get their riches, trying to take them away is harder than prying guns out of the “cold dead hands” of NRA members.

Every time a progressive proposes a tax hike on the rich to pay for welfare, the Koch brothers giggle in gleeful delight. It is the surest way to prevent any policies that would help the poor. Tying tax hikes to sensible policy plays right into the greedy hands of the Conservatives and Regressives.

Did you ever hear a One-Percenter ask for a tax hike to bail out Wall Street? Come on, they are not that stupid.

What I’ve long argued is that we need “predistribution”, not “redistribution”.

This article is a continuation of a series that I first posted about in Randy Wray: What are Taxes For? The MMT Approach. Reading the article referred to in the previous post gives you more context and nuance than appears in the current article.  In this article, Wray goes to such an extreme to make his point, that you may not think about other aspects of his recommended policy mentioned in that previous article.

Wray says more about pre-distribution in a subsequent article Pre-distribution or redistribution? The Piketty moment, the Democrats, and the oncoming elections (Guest Post).  Again, Wray’s rant might cloud what he is saying.

Senator Bernie Sanders has the article Flashback: Republicans Block VA Benefits on his web site.

Republicans in February blocked important legislation from Sen. Bernie Sanders to improve veterans’ access to health care among other things. Only two Republicans, Sens. Dean Heller and Jerry Moran, voted for the veterans benefits bill, which was endorsed by every major veterans organization.

A country like ours that can make its own currency at the drop of a few computer key strokes always has enough money to pay for whatever it wants. It may not have the actual resources, but it has the money. In our case, with high unemployment, unused factory capacity, and excess natural resources, there is absolutely no reason to not fund the VA bill.

Money this country owes in terms of its own currency that it creates, will never be a burden for future generations to pay off unless we keep strangling this country with phony economics that strangles the productive capacity of the nation.

Every felon probably knows the phrase, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” For our country, we need to remember, “If you can’t afford the war, don’t start one.” It doesn’t rhyme, but it is just as applicable.

We all knew that George W. Bush and the Republicans would do this to our veterans when they started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is just one of the reasons we should have been adamantly opposed to both wars, and especially to the one in Iraq. If we cannot afford to support our troops, we should stop meddling in world affairs.

The Washington Post has the story Sen. Sanders to propose bills addressing VA issues.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced Friday that he will introduce a bill to hold top officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs accountable for performance problems and re-introduce comprehensive VA legislation that failed in February.

If we have to elect Bernie Sanders as President in 2016 to get fair treatment of our veterans, then let’s do it.

Truth Out has the article Behind the Koch Brothers: New Book Spills the Secrets of Nation’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty on the Democracy Now interview below.

Charles and David Koch have funneled millions of dollars to conservative candidates and causes over the last four decades while working tirelessly to open the floodgates for money in politics. The Koch brothers’ net worth tops $100 billion, currently tying for fourth on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. Their rise to becoming two of the nation’s most powerful political figures is explored in the new book, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. The story is based on hundreds of interviews with Koch family and friends, as well as thousands of pages of legal documents. We are joined by the book’s author, Daniel Schulman, a senior editor at Mother Jones magazine.

I get the sense that the author and the book are more nuanced than the interviewers let on. However, I think the Koch brothers are still worth fearing.

Talking Points Memo has the story Scaring The Crap Out of People Oddly Not Winning Fans.

Open Carry Texas and a group of other aggressive gun rights groups have issued a joint statement telling their members, Dudes, let’s stop taking our guns to restaurants. It’s freaking people out and making them hate us.

I suspected that not all gun enthusiasts were batshit crazy. It’s nice to find out that what I suspected is actually true.

Naked Capitalism has the post Financial Times Finds “Many” Errors in Piketty Analysis, Argues They Undermine His Thesis by Yves Smith.

The Financial Times story had more of a “gotcha” tone that one expects to see in the mainstream media, and compared the mistakes to the famous spreadsheet errors in Carmen Reinhart’s and Kenneth Rogoff’s work on debt to GDP ratios. But at least so far, there is a key difference: only one other study had found results similar to the those claimed by Reinhart and Rogoff. By contrast, Piketty is far from alone in finding rising concentrations of wealth at the very top; Demos points out that a new study published by Garbriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez paints a post-war picture similar to Piketty’s. Thus the FT’s assertion that their corrections of Piketty’s data show no increase in wealth concentration is an awfully bold claim, and will likely be scrutinized as much as the errors and possible methodological shortcomings that Giles found.
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With Piketty’s book having gotten so much attention over the last few weeks, it’s a given that there will be a lot of eyes on the Giles findings and considerable debate over how much of an impact they have on Piketty’s conclusions. So hold tight and see how this shakes out.

While Naked Capitalism has its own reasons for disagreeing with some of Piketty’s conclusions, they at least have the humility to admit that the final answer is not in yet.  As I was reading about the claims made by The Financial Times story, I was wondering how The Financial Times could conclude that there was no evidence of increasing concentrations of wealth at the top 1%.  I was happy to see that Yves Smith made note of this hard to believe conclusion.

The Washington Post has the story Iran hangs key figure in banking scandal.

Iran’s state media is reporting that a key player in the country’s biggest-ever banking scandal was executed here on Saturday.
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But fighting financial corruption, which was rampant during Ahmadinejad’s two terms, was a promise made by Hassan Rouhani when he assumed office last August.

Now that’s what I call keeping a campaign promise.

Some economists believe that we could fix the income inequality in this country by taxing the rich more.  I bet a few hangings would convince many of the rich to stop accumulating wealth by nefarious means in the first place.

Let it be noted that I am not in favor of capital punishment.  It is just too tempting to use.

Crooks and Liars has the story Why Alan Grayson Was Kept Off Benghazi Committee.

When we look at who makes up the Dems, we notice that there was nobody selected from House Committee on Foreign Affairs, which seemed very odd to me, as well as to others that have also mentioned this.
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So why was he included on the committee now? I’ve been checking around since the announcement was made and a source who wishes to remain anonymous said Rep. Steny Hoyer was afraid that Grayson would be too rambunctious for his taste, and so used his power to keep him off the committee — despite the fact that Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs committee, had already handpicked Rep. Grayson and gave his selection to Nancy Pelosi. Steny Hoyer went crying (to who, we don’t know) and Nancy Pelosi then pulled Grayson from the panel.

I do not think Nancy Pelosi’s pleas for support for Democrats in the House will get any favorable support from me ever again. I don’t know how many times we Democrats can be stabbed in the back by our own leaders and yet be expected to continue to support them.