the consistent effort by conservative, corporate dems to try and tarnish progressive

[JDPriestly]

44. Worshipers is accurate.

The critiques are intended to assist Obama's better angels.

He denounces the economic inequality in his State of the Union speech. But what he does not do is really fight that inequality where it starts -- the board rooms of his friends like Jamie Dimon and the companies behind the TPP negotiations.

That economic inequality is the major problem in America today. It is the cause of the entire housing bubble. The ordinary people on the borrowing end in that bubble did not have the income to pay their mortgages. Yet the wealthy on the lending end of that bubble still lent the money.

Talking to a banker a few years ago I said the obvious: that the bankers who lent the money during that bubble overlooked the fact of the bubble very simply because the bankers did not realize that while housing prices were rising at an astronomically fast pace, wages were stagnant. The banker stared at me with a look of shock. That had never apparently occurred to him. Why was he so surprised? Probably because his pay, since he was at the top of the heap in his company, had increased during the Bush years. He did not realize, he had not noticed, it was of no concern to him that the wages of middle class working people and the incomes of the poor were stagnant and in some cases declining.

Dodd-Frank is an improvement in some respects but it still permits banks to take risks that they shouldn't take with money that is not theirs. It was not strong enough although it is better than nothing.

The core problem is the disparity in wealth. The trade agreements and the failure of our tax system to deal fairly with the economic advantage that those agreements have given to the investor class and to imports is a major cause of our disparity in wealth. Our continued dependence on oil and gas is also a cause of the disparity in wealth. A really solid investment in solar energy including rooftop solar would help to ease that disparity. Thus far, the support for solar energy in the Obama administration has not been enough. Here in Southern California we could replace much of the gas, coal and oil that we use with solar if the federal government really supported an effort to subsidize solar panels on roofs to the extent that they subsidize oil, gas and coal. (And we see in West Virginia's disastrous spill by a now bankrupt company how oil and gas externalize the costs of their products while grabbing the profits.) If those environmental costs were included when comparing the costs of solar to those of gas, coal and oil, solar would be the cheapest energy source. Obama could change the dialogue on this issue and increase economic equality in the process, but I do not expect him to have the courage to do that. He would have had to have started years ago to change the public perception were he to succeed in working on economic inequality in a meaningful way.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were aware of the primary importance of dealing with economic inequality long before Obama was. I think that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are serious about the issue. And that is why I support Elizabeth Warren for the Democratic nomination in 2016. Because economic inequality is the primary problem in the US today. Obama's agenda did not recognize the link between the housing bubble and economic inequality. I think Elizabeth Warren gets it. So does Bernie Sanders.