I just attended a Webinar about the Wolf PAC organization. More about that later. Below is the video of Cenk Uygur making an announcement about the existence and purpose of the Wolf PAC.

For those of you that are looking for actions rather than words as an outgrowth of the Occupy movement, then perhaps Wolf PAC is for you.

If you think the Occupy movement is ineffective, then there is something the major corporations know that you do not.

See the news story Lobbying firm’s memo spells out plan to undermine Occupy Wall Street.

Here is the video version of that news story.

If the Occupy movement were ineffective, do you think that consulting firms would be asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts to fight them? What have you done that would elicit this kind of response from the 1%?

Occupy Boston posted a video of what happened when Newt Gingrich appeared at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on November 18, 2011.

I have remixed it to reduce it to its essence.

It helps to understand what a mic check is if you have attended an Occupy movement event. The mic check is used to wake up the audience to the fact that the people’s mic is about to be used. The people’s mic is used to make sure a large audience hears the speaker even though the actual sound system may be weak or non-existent. The speaker talks in sound bites with pauses in between so that those who can hear what the speaker said can repeat it loudly and in unison so that everybody will hear what was said. It is very effective at a large gathering outdoors.

In the use shown here, it is quite effective to overpower someone who has a real sound system.

I have created a Google+ page for Sturbridge For Elizabeth Warren.

I will try to get everything on there that is on the Facebook page for Sturbridge For Elizabeth Warren.

To add a data point to your understanding of the Occupy movement, it is worthwhile to read Rev. Jeremy D. Nickel’s blog post Why I was arrested at Occupy Oakland.

I quote a small part of what he had to say.

And that is what the Occupy movement truly is, a conversation, and that is why I was willing to offer my body to be arrested. I strongly believe that this conversation must happen and that the public square of every city, town and village of this country and planet needs to be involved. And this is no small thing, this conversation, that is, unless you are happy with the status quo. This conversation represents our best hope of change, because once we are united, we are unstoppable.

The symbol of this movement is the tent, but let us not get our symbols confused with our strategy and intentions. This movement is at its essence an idea. And that idea is that we are only powerless so long as we are disconnected. But as we gather and share our stories before the media has a chance to shape and re-shape them, we recognize our common humanity and let go of our fears. Connected, we are powerful and can move mountains.

I first found this item posted on Dave Rich’s Google+ page.

The article Millionaires ask Congress to raise their taxes starts off with the following:

A group of two dozen millionaires stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday, demanding lawmakers raise their taxes.

“We want to pay more taxes,” said California millionaire Doug Edwards, a former marketing director for Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). “If you’re fortunate, and you make more than a million dollars a year, you ought to pay more taxes.”

The millionaires want Congress to allow the tax cuts passed during the George W. Bush administration to expire. Some want higher taxes generally.

I don’t think that CNN quite understands that if you make over a million dollars a year in income, you are almost certainly far more than just a millionaire. I would judge being a millionaire as anybody with a net worth of over a million dollars. It does not take an income anywhere near a million dollars a year to be a millionaire under that definition. Anybody who has made $100,000 a year for a substantial number of years ought to be a millionaire, and then some.

So CNN is being disingenuous if not purposely deceptive to imply that people with only a net worth of $1 million are being considered for tax increases.

One person commented on the post:

daustin97222, 37 minutes ago
“”The tax burden must be shifted from the lower income earners to the rich right across the board!””

Somebody wrote that here. The bottom 50% of earners pay 2.25% of the federal income taxes paid, and the top 50% of earners pay 97.75% of the federal income taxes paid (source: IRS – document upon demand). So I’m not sure how you are going “shift” the load, at least for income taxes.

My response to this post was:

ssg13565, 2 minutes ago in reply to daustin97222
I don’t think you understand the use of statistics very well. The numbers you quote, if true, should not make you wonder how to shift the load.

As an extreme example, to make it easy to see my point, consider the following. Suppose there are only two tax payers. One earns $10,000 a year and pays no income taxes, but does pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. Suppose the other tax payer earns $1 billion a year and pays $5,000 in income taxes along with Social Security and Medicare.

Does it make sense to cut the Social Security and Medicare benefits of the poor person because the rich person pays 100% of the income taxes and you can’t figure out how to shift the burden of cuts for the poor into taxes for the rich?

I am sorry to have to post this, but it is harder and harder to disagree with what Cenk Uygur says in the video below. This is why I am hoping that the Deficit Reduction Super Committee fails to come to an agreement.

How Household Debt Contributes to Unemployment: Mian and Sufi describes their research efforts to pinpoint the cause of the high level of unemployment.

The weakness in household balance sheets and the associated pullback in spending are directly responsible for the lion’s share of employment losses in the U.S. economy. This deficiency remains the most significant impediment to a robust recovery.

Our research suggests that 65 percent of the job losses from 2007 to 2009 came from the drop in household spending induced by the collapse in home prices and its effect on a highly levered household sector.

So much for uncertainty in regulation being the cause of the problem.

The authors used some innovative techniques to use county by county comparisons to tease out their conclusion from the available statistics.

As in any statistical study, we have to await peer review of their methods to make sure that there is no flaw in how they interpret the data.

The one weakness I could detect, if it is a weakness, is the clever separation of jobs into the tradable and non-tradable categories.  There may be second order effects in this categorization that they did not correct for.

The Calculated Risk blog has an article Research: How Household Debt Contributes to Unemployment that provides more references that I have not yet checked.

Paul Krugman in his article Demand, Demand, Demand does endorse the results I have quoted.

Here is a partial list of books authored or co-authored by Elizabeth Warren.

Chapter 11: Reorganizing American Businesses (Essentials) by Elizabeth Warren (Oct 30, 2008)

All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi (Jan 9, 2006)

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi (Aug 17, 2004)

The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt by Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren and Jay Westbrook (Sep 1, 2001)

As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America by Teresa A. Sullivan, Jay Lawrence Westbrook and Elizabeth Warren (Jan 1, 1999)

I have created a Facebook page for people in Sturbridge Massachusetts to gather to discuss ways to support Elizabeth Warren in her campaign for United States Senator.

Help me spread the word to all the residents of Sturbridge and beyond.