You’d never see a video like the following on a major American television channel.

If the American public is kept ignorant of what is happening in the rest of the world we can safely avoid following the good examples of others and nothing will prevent us from following their bad examples either.

The article After Claiming Government ‘Doesn’t Create Any Jobs,’ Perry Brags: ‘I Helped Create A Million Jobs’ points out that:

Perry’s state does, however, lead the nation by having the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs. And when it comes to government jobs, Texas is in no short supply, as between 2007 and 2010, 47 percent of all government jobs were created in Texas. In fact, under Perry’s watchful eye, government jobs grew twice as much as private sector jobs.

But any way its sliced, Perry is now taking credit for creating jobs, when just a few months ago he thought he had no power to create jobs.

Why shouldn’t a politician claim to believe  two opposite points of view?  Each one may gain some votes that the other one won’t.  Is that what they call smart politics in Texas?  It worked for the Bush’s.

The article Brilliant Strategist Behind Ron Paul’s Online Tactics Died Broke And Uninsured, Friends Couldn’t Raise Enough Donations says

But as Abramovitch notes, Snyder, a volunteer strategist who eventually became a campaign manager for Paul’s presidential bid, fell ill of pneumonia during the campaign. Snyder did not have health insurance, like the hypothetical example given by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, and stacked up $400,000 in medical bills. On June 26, 2008, exactly two weeks after Paul ended his bid for the presidency, Synder passed away due to complications from his pneumonia. Synder’s family could not pay the bills left by Snyder, so friends set up an online campaign to raise the money for Synder’s procedures.

The article did not say whether Ron Paul learned his idea of letting the uninsured depend on charity from this experience with his campaign manager or if he has held this opinion for a long time and the experience didn’t change him.

I guess we know there are no leaks in Ron Paul’s heart from which he is bleeding.  At least Ron Paul can hold onto his convictions no matter what.

For those who can’t get enough of Elizabeth Warren, you can follow her YouTube channel.

The video below is of her appearance at a Framingham diner on the day she announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

Since I have cousins who live in Framingham, I am anxious to hear from any of them if they were present at the time.

I mentioned the book by Dean Baker, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, in a previous post.

Here is the excerpt that exemplifies what the book is about and what so agrees with the points I have tried to make on this blog.

For the most part, progressives accept the right’s framing of economic debates. They accept the notions that the right is devoted to the unfettered workings of the market and, by contrast, that liberals and progressives are the ones who want the government to intervene to protect the interests of the poor and disadvantaged.

But this view is utterly wrong as a description of the economy and competing policy approaches. And it makes for horrible politics. It creates a scenario in which progressives are portrayed as wanting to tax the winners in society in order to reward the losers. The right gets to be portrayed as the champions of hard work and innovation, while progressives are seen as the champions of the slothful and incompetent. It should not be surprising who has been winning this game.

In reality, the vast majority of the right does not give a damn about free markets; it just wants to redistribute income upward. Progressives have been useful to the right in helping it to conceal this agenda. Progressives help to ratify the actions of conservatives by accusing them of allegiance to a free-market ideology instead of attacking them for pushing the agenda of the rich.

For the last three decades the right has been busily restructuring the economy in ways that ensure that income flows upward. The rules governing markets, written by the rich and powerful, ensure that this gravity-defying outcome prevails. The right then presents the imposition of rules that it likes as the natural result of unfettered market forces.

Whenever you are in a position of defending progressive economic policy, remember the above description.  Do not fall into the trap that President Obama so often does of justifying his policies on the basis of making the income and wealth distribution more fair because it is more moral.  In truth, we need this change in distribution because it makes the economy work better. Instead, you can talk about how the current situation is such a perversion of the principles of free markets.  You can talk about how the current rules are so detrimental to the workings of the economy that the Republicans claim that they are such experts on making run efficiently.

When the Republicans say they want to encourage job creation by loosening regulation and lowering taxes, remind the audience how this makes no sense in the Republicans’ own terms of how a smart investor should invest.  They are saying that if we only make it less difficult for entrepreneurs to produce more goods that are already in over supply compared to what people have the money to buy, these entrepreneurs will gladly invest in producing goods for which there are no customers.  Somehow, the Republicans must expect us to believe that these entrepreneurs are going to make money by putting the output of their factories into warehouses.  Maybe they think that the profits from building warehouses will more than make up for the loss in producing goods that can’t be sold.  This is almost a twist on the famous idea from the book Catch-22, where one of the protagonists lost money on every transaction, but he made it up in volume.

Is Jon Stewart still stuck in that crazy world where our politicians are expected to make sense?

I particularly liked one of the comments on The Daily Show web site.

The audience at these debates is way scarier than the idiots on stage (even though one of those cretins could end up president…).

There is also something to be said for the comment by RajV on The New York Times blog.

The attitude of the audience and that of the speakers barring CNN’s Wolfe was utterly shameful, and clearly shows why these jokers should not be allowed within 100 feet of the White House, at the risk of destroying everything that this country stands for.

The moderator may want to ask Rick Perry his views on the breathtakingly ignorant, fundamentally-inspired revisions of science and social studies textbooks in Texas, thanks to his political appointees, and if he plans to promote such colossal classroom ignorance on the national stage. His fundamentalist past is a liability to the Republican party. He and Bachmann should be soundly rejected as a lesson to the Christian Taliban in this country.

There is an interview on Truth Out,  Dean Baker: Why Didn’t We Make These Guys Run Around Naked With Their Underpants Over Their Heads?

Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy (CEPR) in Washington, DC. In his most recent book, “The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive,” Baker argues that the market is politically structured to ensure that income flows upward. He provides a range of strategies to reframe economic debates and offers proposals to reshape the economy to serve the interests of the majority of the population instead of a small elite. The book is available to be downloaded for free at CEPR’s web site.

This wide ranging interview gives some indications of where economists on the right and the left have gone wrong.  His discussion of what is wrong with the idea of “Loser Liberalism” economics is particularly in sync with my complaint about how progressive politicians justify their economic policies.

This is not to say that Dean Baker is without his own weaknesses.  At one point he talks about his discovery about Microsoft where he says:

I’m an economist down in D.C. and I didn’t know that Bill Gates was using every slimy hook and crook in the world to build an illegal monopoly – not a clue.

He is referring to his earlier discussion of what a reporter told him:

… Gates had been signing agreements with Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, the major computer companies at the time, where they would agree to pay him for every computer they shipped, whether or not it used DOS, the precursor to Windows. When I taught antitrust to undergraduates, the classic example was how John D. Rockefeller had the railroads pay him for every barrel of a competitor’s oil that they shipped. People dispute whether it’s true, but this was basically the same story: I was told that Bill Gates was having Compaq pay him for each computer that they shipped that had one of his competitors’ software systems.

Certainly almost all of us in the high tech electronics industry knew that Microsoft was doing this. It astounds me as much as it astounds him how he could have been so clueless.

This is an admitted weakness of understanding that Baker had that eventually corrected itself.  There are a few other weaknesses in his theories in this story that I don’t think he sees yet.

To point out one minor bone of contention, he says:

At the very least, that point where inflation rises is not stable, because we got the unemployment to 4% with little acceleration of inflation. There eventually was an uptick in inflation in 2000, but it was due to commodity prices in world markets; this had little to do with the unemployment rate in the US

There is nothing wrong with the facts of what he is pointing out.  My complaint is that he gives short shrift to understanding the factors that make the relation between inflation and unemployment shift.  On the up side of inflation, he does recognize the pressure from commodities, although some could argue that this was caused by high levels of consumption from high levels of employment.  What he doesn’t spend enough time on are the causes of keeping wage inflation in check even with relatively high employment.  There were societal shifts such as the great outsourcing of jobs that he could have mentioned.

At the beginning of the article, Baker started talking about the fallacy some economists fall into when they apply historical data to current situations.  When applying such data, it is the economist’s duty to think about whether or not there have been changes in the factors that produced the historical results.  I am just point out a case where Baker fails to apply that lesson to his own explanations.

I am not really faulting the interview, I guess.  What I am pointing out is that the reader should bring into play her or his own insights when reading anything.  Sometimes those insights can enhance what you are getting from the material you are reading.

I have downloaded the book “The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive,”. It starts with the following paragraph:

Money does not fall up. Yet the United States has experienced a massive upward redistribution of income over the last three decades, leaving the bulk of the workforce with little to show from the economic growth since 1980. This upward redistribution was not the result of the natural workings of the market. Rather, it was the result of deliberate policy, most of which had the support of the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

The version below is enhanced. It has supporting material displayed along side the video of the President giving his speech.

This morning, Elizabeth Warren announced her run for U.S. Senate from Massachusetts.  She sent the video below.

The Elizabeth Warren Web Site is now live with more content on it.