Bernie, Gravity, and the Democratic Party

This article is one of the most read pieces I have ever written. I wrote it on August 1, 2016. I've changed blogs many times since then, and it will be lost to history, if I don't bring it to the forefront.

Below the asterisks is the article as it was originally written on August 1, 2016
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Bernie Sanders almost did what everyone thought was nearly impossible just a year ago. He almost became the Presidential nominee for a party to which he does not belong. His independence from the party allows him to be progressive on the occasions that he disagrees with the platform of the Democratic Party, but it also means to the Democratic Party that he is outside of their clique.

Population Math, Gravity, and the Political Revolution

I was born in 1958. The world's population hit three billion people in 1960. The world's population is over 7.5 billion today. Based only on those numbers, we can determine that roughly seventy percent of the world's population must be younger than me.

However, every person who was alive when I was born who has since died, which is likely two-thirds or more of the three billion people alive back then, has been replaced by someone who is also younger than me. That means that I am among the oldest one billion people in the world.

I Like Elizabeth Warren, but . . .

I don't know exactly when I first learned about Elizabeth Warren, but it was sometime back in the 1980s when I worked in consumer finance. She was one of the bankruptcy experts whose writings on the topic helped me devise the strategies we used to deal with people who declared bankruptcy. Her slant on it was from the angle of consumer protection; we worked with the debtors' attorneys to give their clients and our members fresh starts with the credit union as the primary financial resource. 

Fast forward three decades, and Elizabeth Warren is a senator from Massachusetts who is running for president. She holds the seat that Ted Kennedy once held, but she had to wrest it away from the Republican who won the special election after Senator Kennedy died. She wasn't a politician before that, nor is she a life-long Democrat. She is, however, the most knowledgeable person in Congress about the banking, securities, and insurance industries. Only Representative Katie Porter in the House comes close to her knowledge on how all these things work, and Porter is a freshman.