Here is the Thanks Obamacare web site.

I just found a poster that I had hanging in my office since the 1970s.  I can’t even remember where I got it.

I should have explained to people the purpose of the poster. If they ever heard me saying one of these lines, they were supposed to slap me.

Having read newsletters and other publications from Senator Scott Brown and the literature from and about Elizabeth Warren, I see one vast difference that Elizabeth Warren can use to explain why we should vote for her instead of Scott Brown.

In Senator Scott Browns writings, he has shown a good imagination for the positive consequences of his Republican positions and a good imagination for the negative consequences of the Democratic positions.

On the other hand, Elizabeth Warren has made a career of studying what are the actual consequences of both types of policies.  If what Scott Brown imagined were actually to be what happens, he would be perfectly justified in taking the policy positions that he does.  Elizabeth Warren has discovered by looking at the evidence that Scott Brown’s imaginings are not what really happens.

With the evidence of her research behind her, Elizabeth Warren can explain to Brown and the voters how certain policies actually work out in practice.

I read an article today in a newspaper that is behind a paywall, so I won’t bother to give you the citation or the link.  The article was describing the academic proponents of what is called “law and economics.”

Proponents of law and economics argue that laws should be evaluated in terms of the incentives they create. A law making it too easy for debtors to get bailed out and be given a second chance, as they see it, will encourage reckless behavior; by the same token, an orderly bankruptcy process in which creditors can expect as much of their money back as possible will lead to lower interest rates and more ready lending.

I think that Scott Brown would find himself in favor of what the “law and economics” proponents imagine.

According to this brief summary of the “law and economics” view of the world, the proponents only imagine the possible negative incentives for making bankruptcy filing easy and only the positive incentives for making bankruptcy filing difficult.

Elizabeth Warren’s research, and now obvious public exposure of the actual incentives, paints a quite different picture of what has happened since the laws of bankruptcy have been made more strict in recent years.  This rewrite of the law was paid for by lender’s intense lobbying efforts and the bribes (oh, sorry, campaign contributions) paid to legislators.

The fact that lenders know that it will be very difficult for borrowers to get out of the legal obligation to repay a loan have resorted to reckless lending practices.  They thought that being able to take all the assets of a defaulting borrower including their homes would protect the lender in case of default.  They also thought that they could fob off any risk onto investors by packaging up mortgages into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), that were falsely rated as safe.  The packagers of the loans  bought the safe ratings from ratings agencies that pretended to be objective.

Based on historical rates of mortgage defaults, these safety assumptions were true.  However, by breaking all the rules that have historically applied to mortgage lending, the lenders created a situation in which that past history became a poor predictor of actual results.  The lenders also concealed the fact that they were breaking all the rules by adding fraudulent information to mortgage applications filled out by the unsuspecting borrowers.  They added lies about the borrowers’ income.  They bought phony appraisals that justified larger loans with zero or negative equity as collateral.  No conservative banker of prior years would ever have engaged in such practices.

The proponents of “law and economics”  supposedly never dreamed of these negative incentives.  Was it just a lack of imagination brought on by a severe case of knowing the answers before looking at the data?  Or was it peer pressure to ignore the facts?

Occupy Protest Finds a Home On the Vineyard tells of the movement on Martha’s Vineyard.

As demonstrators in cities and countries around the world take to the streets in the name of Occupy Wall Street, not one but two Occupy movements are taking shape here on the Island, one virtual and one decidedly not.

It’s nice to know that Ellen and Michael aren’t deprived by living on an island.

Here is a refreshing take on what is going on in Europe.  It answers the quetion that Sharon and I have been asking since the story broke, “Why can’t they tax the rich people in Greece instead of taking it out on the rest of the citizens?”

Here is another gem from Robert Reich, The Austerity Death Trap. I am hoping that if we all repeat this story enough times, it might drown out the fiction from the other side.

I’ll single out just one paragraph from the article because it is right on target for one of the things I keep focusing on. While I am at it, I’ll throw in the next paragraph  from the article after my focus paragraph.  That second paragraph explains Reich’s answer for how to get out of the death trap.

Can we just put ideology aside for a moment and be clear about the facts? Consumer spending (70 percent of the economy) is flat or dropping because consumers are losing their jobs and wages, and don’t have the dough. And businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t have enough customers.

The only way out of this vicious cycle is for the government – the spender of last resort – to boost the economy. The regressives are all calling for the opposite.

The comment I posted on the Truth Out web page for this article was as follows:

What I can never understand is that when Nightly Business Report asks CEO’s about their most important need to start investing again, they never mention “We need more customers.” Maybe they think it is so obvious, it is not worth mentioning. Just once, I’d like NBR to ask a CEO, “Would having more customers get you to start investing again?”

For a business program, you’d think one or two of their reporters might understand the importance of customers to a business.

I have suggested to NBR that the question about customers seems so obvious to me, I cannot figure out why they won’t ask it.

Peter Kim read my blog and emailed this poster to me.

You can control the size of the image below by changing the width of your browser window. In other words, just use your mouse (if you have one) to drag one side of your browser to make it smaller or larger, or you can just click on the icon that enlarges your browser to full screen or shrinks it to an adjustable size.

Created by: Online MBA Programs

The book Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It has the following explanation for political apathy:

The old and tired oscillations between “liberals” and “conservatives,” between Democrats and Republicans, remain the basis of mainstream US politics. Pendulum swings work now for Republicans, now for Democrats. What the swings leave unchallenged and unchanged is the class structure of the country – the capitalist arrangements of production that divide people and products into workers versus capitalists and wages versus profits. No significant political force connects this capitalist system of production to social problems. No such force advocates changing the class structure as part of a solution to those problems.

When class structures neither change nor even seem open to change, the endless political oscillations eventually convey their superficiality to the public. Politics then loses all contact with basic questions of choosing among alternative social structures and among alternative goals and strategies for social change. At best, politics interests specific sub-groups only if, when, and so long as some specific issue of immediate personal concern is at stake (abortion, gun control, gay marriage, oil prices, etc.). At worst – and the worst is what we increasingly experience – politics pits irrelevant tweedledums against tweediedees, cynically advertised candidate #1 vs public-relations-driven #2. People then turn away first from political activism, then from participation and information, and finally even from the passivity of mere voting. A mass alienation from politics altogether deepens, immune to the vapid exhortations to civic duty. Politics descends into a special branch of business where politicians make money and advance careers by mutually profitable relations with other businesses. This alienation – and the caricature politics it both reflects and enables – will remain unless and until a class-based politics emerges to contest for power.

In this video, Robert Reich explains how the OWS movement has already succeeded.

The very fact that I am reading Capitalism Hits The Fan and The “S” Word is a direct result of hearing about these things from OWS.

The video below was interesting enough.

I found one comment on the post to be eye-opening about a previously unrecognized by me valuable impact of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

gypski, Wouldn’t you like to know!!!

Well now the academics are coming out with the truth and an honest assessment of what happened. The banks and financial institutions are the cause and should be facing criminal charges. Shake the tree, fruit is bound to fall out.

NJOsprey Collapse

Not as long as Tim Geithner is Treasury Secretary.

Citibank just paid a $280 million fine to the SEC. One junior employee is under further investigation. No executives are under investigation. OWS is having an effect. The comment above was made by Charles Osgood on WCBS, a New York news station.

Slowly, the mainstream media is starting to talk about the Wall Street scandals. Its like the coverage of the Vietnam war; slowly the media was forced to see it for what it was in response to all the demonstrations and calls for withdrawal.

Like the Vietnam “anti-war,” this will take years to correct. Hang in there and we will be able to “hang” the banksters.