It’s Our Economy has the post A Healthy Economy Cannot Rest on Financialization.

Given this data, a reasonable person might conclude that the financial sector is two to four time too large. Therefore, we could either dramatically reduce the financial sector to one quarter to one half its current size, or cut its profits, salaries and bonuses by 50 to 75 percent without harming the economy.

This also means that progressives need to be more radical in our demands if we truly wish to tame financialism.

To paraphrase Grover Norquist, our goal should be “to shrink [Wall Street] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

What the Republicans call the job creators are in fact the job killers.  This article presents the evidence.  As soon as more people figure this out, the Republican’s political power will be gone.

The Boston Globe has an excellent OpEd article Vladimir Putin’s enemies aren’t all good guys.

One of the biggest mistakes of US Cold War policy from Latin America to Central Asia was the use of broad labels that allowed little room for complexity. Everyone who opposed the Soviet Union — be they freedom fighters, dictators, or, as in Afghanistan, future members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban — was America’s friend, and anyone who disagreed with those friends was a Communist.

This paradigm, while convenient, ignored the fact that most nations do not split cleanly into teams of good guys and bad guys. It also sowed the seeds of future conflicts. If we want to avoid repeating the mistakes of history, a good place to start would be dispensing with sweeping Cold War assumptions — and being careful in Ukraine.

Excellent article that presents some nuance about the situation that is rarely seen in any of the US media.

Ironically there is a small piece of the article that falls prey to this very nasty media habit of suppressing some information in order to make a point.

“Yet when Hillary Clinton likens Vladimir Putin to Hitler, as she did in a March 4 speech, she makes all those eastern Ukrainians appear to be Nazi sympathizers.”

I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but that does not mean that I want to accept lies about her.  If you hear more of her remarks than the conveniently edited audio that the Globe published in its article about her remarks, then you find what she said was not as odious as they represent it.

The more complete audio can be found at http://bcove.me/ugo8sgvm and in my previous post
Hillary Clinton Compares – Examining the Similarities and the Differences. In fact, I will insert that audio below because it is so important to the issue.

She did not liken Vladimir Putin to Hitler.  What she did was compare some of his actions to some of Hitler’s actions.  In this context “compare” means she didn’t only talk about the similarities, but she also highlighted the differences.  From the tone of her voice, you also understand that she was explaining the part of the comparison that has other people all upset, but not what is upsetting to her.

I know that once this Clinton meme is firmly implanted in peoples’ minds, no amount of correcting the record will erase the idea.  That is what is so dangerous about the propaganda machine that our main stream press has become.

I had no intention of voting for Hillary Clinton as the candidate of my party for President in 2016 before this incident, but I do not want her rejected for spurious reasons.  There are enough valid reasons not to want her, that we don’t have to make stuff up.  And we don’t want to prevent people from speaking sensibly for fear that their remarks will be distorted.

By the way, I agree with one of the comments on The Boston Globe web site.

Mila Kunis is the Ukraine’s greatest export ever.

The Daily Kos has the story from 2014/03/01, Sarah Palin, Wall Street Journal rewrite history of Russia-Georgia war.

After 9/11, however, President Bush changed the policy toward Georgia, introducing two elements that developed into serious strategic disadvantages. Mr. Bush not only made Georgia into a partner in the “war on terror,” but he promoted Mr. Saakashvili and Georgia into a centerpiece of his “promotion of democracy.” In Tbilisi in 2005, Mr. Bush proclaimed Mr. Saakashvili’s Georgia “a beacon of liberty.”

Even as President Bush became increasingly aware that he needed the Kremlin’s help in Iran and for other American interests, he was kept a prisoner by this exaggeration of Georgia’s importance for U.S. foreign policy.

Senior officials of the Bush administration claim they warned Mr. Saakashvili against using force against Russia. But having invested so much ideological importance in the Georgian president, Mr. Bush couldn’t warn him publicly — or, as it turned out, stop him. Having become so dependent on Mr. Saakashvili’s success, the United States lost the political influence to stop him.

As Wikileaks revealed in December 2010, the U.S. position was made worse by the fact that the Bush administration–and its allies like John McCain–gullibly believed everything Saakashvili told them. The leaked cables from Tblisi, the New York Times explained, “display some of the perils of a close relationship”:

A 2008 batch of American cables from another country once in the cold war’s grip — Georgia — showed a much different sort of access. In Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, American officials had all but constant contact and an open door to President Mikheil Saakashvili and his young and militarily inexperienced advisers, who hoped the United States would help Georgia shake off its Soviet past and stand up to Russia’s regional influence…

The cables show that for several years, as Georgia entered an escalating contest with the Kremlin for the future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway enclaves out of Georgian control that received Russian support, Washington relied heavily on the Saakashvili government’s accounts of its own behavior. In neighboring countries, American diplomats often maintained their professional distance, and privately detailed their misgivings of their host governments. In Georgia, diplomats appeared to set aside skepticism and embrace Georgian versions of important and disputed events.

By 2008, as the region slipped toward war, sources outside the Georgian government were played down or not included in important cables. Official Georgian versions of events were passed to Washington largely unchallenged.

The last cables before the eruption of the brief Russian-Georgian war showed an embassy relaying statements that would with time be proved wrong.

Proved wrong, that is, just like John McCain and Sarah Palin.

The connection between the incident in Georgia and the Ukraine seems to be the common thread of former member countries of the USSR trying to entice the USA into supporting them in their disagreements with Russia. Our problem seems to be our belief that we must solve all problems in the world, even ones that are so complicated it is hard to judge who is more right and who is more wrong. Of course, when oil and US political ideology get mixed in, it is hard to figure out what our own motives are.

When we get involved, we seem to encourage foolish actions on the part of our allies that they would not have the courage to undertake if we weren’t there.

Truth Out has the article Richard D. Wolff | Obama’s Economic Significance.

President Obama’s proven reliability as outsider president extraordinaire – putting a disarming smiley face on capitalism’s depredations – is his administration’s economic significance.

It is time to face facts.  The other sad fact to face is that Hillary Clinton’s political philosophy is to the right of Obama’s.

So many people ask, what might a more palatable candidate look like?  TINA – there is no  alternative, they say.  So stop laughing when I feature posts like Bernie Sanders: “I Am Prepared To Run for President of the United States”.  As the Occupy Wall Street movement used to shout, “This is what democracy looks like.”  It does not look like Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton’s political ideas.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Peterson Thinks We Need Austerity While He Lives It Up!

In case you didn’t know, Pete Peterson has spent gobs of money on his private think tank which has been trying to confuse the public about money and economics for decades.  One thing they produce is commentaries like the one that this article rails against.

Here are some excerpts from the New Economic Perspectives article by Joe Firestone.

Here are quotations from the report and my explanations of why they are ridiculous deficit/debt terrorist nonsense.

While today’s deficits are much lower than those during the financial crisis and recession, over the next ten years debt will remain at historically high levels under the policies outlined in the President’s budget. Over the long term, our debt is on a rising and unsustainable path that harms our economy and threatens our future standard of living.

First, Government deficits that don’t exceed the sum of private sector savings and trade deficits are not bad for the private economy. They are good because they contribute directly to private sector savings and the aggregate demand and subsequent economic growth it can create. It would be nicer for all of us if Mr. Peterson learned that lesson before his propaganda turn the US into a third world banana republic; unless, of course, that’s what he’s about.
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As a share of the economy, our national debt is already higher than at any time since 1950, shortly after the end of World War II. This level of debt leaves our nation poorly prepared to enter an era in which demographic changes pose enormous budgetary challenges for the federal government. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s Fiscal Confidence Index recently found that a significant majority of voters — 83 percent — agree that policymakers should spend more time addressing the nation’s debt.

Again, the level of debt and/or the level of the debt to GDP ratio have no effect on our Government’s capability to deficit spend. The Government can afford to do whatever it needs to accommodate demographic changes just as it could afford whatever needed to be done during World War II and after 1950.

I commented on the New Economic Perspectives article as shown below.

You forget to mention that if the debt was so high in 1950, how did it get reduced and yet we had a growing economy, we were bailing out Europe and Japan at the same time, building the interstate highway system, sending people to the moon, fighting a war in Viet Nam, developing Nuclear bombs and ICBMs, supporting higher education and schools, adding Medicare and Medicaid, and reducing the level of poverty.

Shouldn’t Peterson be studying all those things we accomplished with a smaller economy than we have today? If we did it once before, why can’t we do it again?

The article does mention that we did a lot of things during the 1950s, but it does not emphasize the fact that there is a logical paradox when Peterson’s own commentary said “our national debt is already higher than at any time since 1950, shortly after the end of World War II.”  This implies that our debt must have been reduced after 1950 if it is only now getting back to those levels.  Why doesn’t anyone ask Peterson to explain that?

The BBC has the article Ukraine crisis ‘created artificially’ – Russia’s Lavrov.  Under the audio clip of some of Lavrov’s words they have the caption –

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: “This crisis was not created by us”

Further quotes from the Foreign minister appeared in the rest of the article –

The Russian foreign minister said the interim government in Kiev was “not independent because it depends to a great extent on the radical nationalists who seized power by force of arms”.

This is more coverage of the Russian side than you get from the US media, but I still had some questions.

And did he say who was financing and organizing these radicals?  Did he mention the USA and countries in Europe?  If he even hinted at this, wouldn’t this have been an important part of the story to report?

Why is it only important to give details on what Russia has done, but no details on what the other side has done?

I am not prejudging that the Russians are blameless and as pure as the driven snow, but I’d like to be able to make my own judgment after hearing the whole story.  I don’t need the media to give me the part of the story that they have prejudged as being relevant because they have a point of view they want me to believe.

Truthout has the article from The Nation Bernie Sanders: “I Am Prepared To Run for President of the United States”.

In some senses, Sanders is the unlikeliest of prospects: an independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate but has never joined the party, a democratic socialist in a country where many politicians fear the label “liberal,” an outspoken critic of the economic, environmental and social status quo who rips “the ruling class” and calls out the Koch brothers by name. Yet, he has served as the mayor of his state’s largest city, beaten a Republican incumbent for the US House, won and held a historically Republican Senate seat and served longer as an independent member of Congress than anyone else. And he says his political instincts tell him America is ready for a “political revolution.”

And they laughed when I said that Bernie Sanders could be the President to rein in the NSA. Reining in the NSA is probably the least significant positive change that a Sanders/Warren or Warren/Sanders administration would accomplish.

Thanks for MardyS for posting this on his Facebook page.  These are two video segments from The Daily Show titled No Money for Bold Men – The Shame-O-Meter.  Here is the summary of the two videos.

The Twitterverse blasts John Travolta after an Oscars gaffe, but the real national shame belongs to the Senate as Republicans reject a bill expanding veteran benefits.

Senators attempt to attach Iran sanctions to a veteran benefits expansion bill and military sexual assault debates, making the national shame-o-meter go to 11

I’ll include both segments below, less you miss the fact that this doesn’t just end with the first one.

Republicans starve government agencies of the necessary funds to do their jobs, and then refuse to give them any more because they couldn’t work on a starvation diet. It isn’t even legal to treat prisoners of war like this. Do the Republican Senators think the Veterans Administration is an illegal enemy combatant that isn’t even due the protections of the Geneva Convention?

The Motley Fool has the article 10 Reasons Why Russia Invaded Ukraine.

The article is by the author of the slide show below.

This slide show provides some graphics for some of the things I have already posted about this issue.

The Press-Telegram has the article Hillary Clinton compares Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine to Adolf Hitler’s in Nazi Germany. What actually happened does not seem to be nearly as lurid as the headline might indicate. The article does use the word compare in its proper way. She looks at how what is happening is similar to some actions of Hitler’s, but she also remarks on how it is different. Even with the article’s attempt to temper the reports, you really have to hear Hillary’s tone of voice to see how reasonable her remarks may have been. Here is an excerpt of what she said.

“So everybody is hoping that there will be a negotiation but a negotiation that respects Ukraine and doesn’t ratify a reoccupation by Russia of Crimea,” she said. “So it’s a real nail-biter, right now, but nobody wants to up the rhetoric. Everybody wants to cool it in order to find a diplomatic solution and that’s what we should be trying to do.”

This post is an attempt to correct the impression left by my previous post Putin vs Hitler vs Hillary.