I received the following email.

	Steve, Sign the petition–Draft Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts Senate in 2012. If Democrats are going to win in 2012, we need to do a better job connecting with the millions of Americans who are suffering real economic hardship. This requires a populist economic message that separates us from both Republicans and Wall Street, and also a record that backs up that message with results. That’s why at Daily Kos we think Elizabeth Warren would be an excellent Democratic nominee to challenge Republican Scott Brown in the 2012 Massachusetts Senate election. We’re starting a campaign to draft her into the race. Join that campaign by signing our petition in support of Warren now. We’ll deliver the petition to Warren in person, along with your supportive comments. Virtually no one has done more than Professor Warren to fight against the bloodthirsty excesses of today’s financial sector. She exposed corruption in the Wall Street bailout, and basically created the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on her own. She picks fights, wins them, and packs a populist punch in the process. Click here to read her bio on Wikipedia. Right now, Warren is working to set up the CFPB as a special Assistant to the President. However, it’s extremely unlikely she’ll ever be confirmed to formally lead the new CFPB. That means she’ll need a new fight in a few months, and this one just seems perfect: Sign the petition now–Draft Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts Senate. Last week, we polled our Massachusetts members to see what they thought about the idea of drafting Elizabeth Warren. The response was overwhelming: 89% supported a campaign to draft her into the race. With Massachusetts as one of the few good Senate pickup chances for Democrats in 2012, we can’t squander the opportunity by nominating an unenergetic, milquetoast candidate. We need a standard bearer who will deliver the populist economic message and grassroots excitement that will make Ted Kennedy’s seat blue again. Elizabeth Warren, who was 2009 Bostonian of the Year, is that candidate. Please, take 30 seconds of your time, and sign the petition to draft Elizabeth Warren for Senate. Keep fighting, Chris Bowers Campaign Director, Daily Kos
Tip Jar Daily Kos Twitter Facebook Privacy

Truth-out has published a transcript of  Bill Moyers’ speech;

History Makers is an organization of broadcasters and producers from around the world concerned with the challenges and opportunities faced by factual broadcasting. Bill Moyers was the keynote speaker at the 2011 convention on January 27, 2011, in New York City.

It is always depressing to learn from Bill Moyers exactly how bad is the state of telling the truth in the United States today.

Bob Herbert wrote the column When Democracy Weakens in The New York Times. My friend MardyS brought this to my attention by posting it on his Facebook wall.

A few brief parts of paragraphs from the article follow:

As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.

and

It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

As I have watched the revolution in Egypt unfold, I have heard the journalists tell about the leaders of other Middle Eastern countries and how worried they are that this sort of thing would spread to their countries.

I have been wondering how nervous the leaders of the USA might be.

Maybe the Tea Party members will revolt against the raw deal that the rich people in this country are getting.  The rest of us might revolt against the raw deal the rich people in this country are giving to the rest of us.

Hosni Mubarak Resigns As President on Al Jazeera has video and text.

At the top of the story they say:

Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, has resigned from his post, handing over power to the armed forces.

Omar Suleiman, the vice-president, announced in a televised address that the president was “waiving” his office, and had handed over authority to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

Suleiman’s short statement was received with a roar of approval and by celebratory chanting and flag-waving from a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, as well by pro-democracy campaigners who attended protests across the country on Friday.

At the bottom of the story they say:

In a statement read out on state television at midday on Friday, the military announced that it would lift a 30-year-old emergency law but only “as soon as the current circumstances end”.

The military said it would also guarantee changes to the constitution as well as a free and fair election, and it called for normal business activity to resume.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Tahrir Square said people there were hugely disappointed with that army statement, and had vowed to take the protests to “a last and final stage”.

The article Magician James Randi, Skeptics Launch Attack On Makers Of Homeopathic ‘Drugs’ in the Los Angeles Times begins with:

Magician James Randi, who has devoted the latter part of his career to exposing fraud, scams and charlatans, and a network of skeptics known as the 10:23 Campaign launched a major campaign Saturday against the manufacturers of so-called homeopathic drugs, charging that the companies that sell the drugs are packaging worthless products that are cheating customers out of their money.

The article includes a pointer to the following video:

In the video, James Randi mentions a web site 10²³ HOMEOPATHY THERE’S NOTHING IN IT

The 10:23 Challenge is a follow-up to the ‘overdose’ protest staged by the 10:23 Campaign in 2010. International protesters from more than 10 countries, and more than 23 cities will gather for over the weekend of February 5-6 2011, to make the simple statement: Homeopathy – There’s Nothing In It.

The article For the US in Egypt, Blowback Is a Bitch by Michael Winship is just another nail in the coffin of the Change (In Foreign Policy) That We Can Believe In.

For good measure, you can read The Arab World Is on Fire, a very mild piece by Noam Chomsky standards.

I’d like to think that the missteps in foreign policy are coming from Hillary Clinton.  Her pronouncements make my skin crawl worse than anything that President Obama says.  However, he appointed her, he keeps her in office, and he seems to follow her advice.  As Michael Dukakis once so elegantly put it, the fish rots from the head.

There is a very interesting article The Wrong Friends: The Uncomfortable Lesson Of The Uprisings In The Middle East in The Boston Globe. The author is David Mednicoff.

But one thing is undeniable: In a region full of monarchies and other unelected regimes, the government that fell — the one government unable to maintain enough hold on the public to weather a crisis — was the most secular one.

Mednicoff is referring to Tunisia in this quote, but the rest of the article goes on to consider many other countries in the Middle East.

When Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama start making pronouncements on what the government of Egypt should and shouldn’t do in the face of the current crisis, I get a very queasy feeling.  How would they know what Egypt ought to do?  Obama and Clinton have their hands full figuring out what the U.S.A. ought to do.

Author David Mednicoff puts some meat on the bones of my queasy feeling. We in the United States think that there should be a separation between church and state. That is a form of government we have chosen for ourselves.  It works pretty well for us, a heterogeneous country of people of many religions.  Where is it written, that all countries must adopt this system and all peoples yearn for this type of government?  We already know that there are many people in this country who think this country ought to be a Christian nation.  We do not have such a system because we decided to adopt a Constitution that prohibits it.  Do we have the right to impose this system on everyone else in the world?  Why should we even be promoting such a system in other people’s countries?  Why can’t we, in all humility, let those people decide what kind of a system they want?

In the face of our knee-jerk reaction to those that want Sharia law in their countries, I have had my doubts on how tenable a Jewish state is in Israel.  Now I realize why it is not up to me to make this value judgment.

Perhaps we still have a leg to stand on when we think that the people in a country ought to have a voice in the choice of the form of their own government.  To the extent that a certain form is foisted upon them without their consent, perhaps we can still rightly decry the situation.

The Democrats believe the roots of the crash were laid by the private sector’s derivatives trading and housing bubble that was facilitated by deregulation and lax enforcement of the remaining regulations.

The Republicans believe the crash was caused by the US Government encouraging home ownership and the expansion of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  (Of course you have to get time to run backward to support this theory.)

However, there may be another theory that I bet you never considered.

In found the article US Military Spending and the National Debt: Roots of the 2008 “Crash” of the Global Capitalist Financial System by Hassan Ali El-Najjar, Ph.D. “…presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, on August 15, 2010, in the regular session of the Political Economy of the World System.” Below is a taste of the presentation to whet you appetite.

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the roots of the 2008 perceived “crash” of the global capitalist financial system, in its center, the United States.

I argue that the so-called “crash” was nothing more than a necessary measure to end the financially chaotic period of the Bush administration (2001-2008). The chaos was caused by the cash-saturated financial markets as a result of about $4.3 trillion dollars issued by Congress to finance the so-called “War on Terror.”

I don’t want to color your perception of this paper, so I will make no further comment.

Robert Reich’s blog post The President Ignored the Elephant in the Room, discusses the State Of The Union address of  two nights ago.

But the President’s failure to address the decoupling of American corporate profits from American jobs, and explain specifically what he’ll do to get jobs back, not only risks making his grand plans for reviving the nation’s competitiveness seem somewhat beside the point but also cedes to Republicans the dominant narrative.

This may be the elephant to Reich, but I think there is a pink elephant that even Robert Reich seems to have missed.

To me, the talk of regaining competitiveness by having education as good as our competitors and innovation as good as our competitors doesn’t sound like enough.  If their education and innovation is as good or better than ours and they work for less money, I just don’t see how we are going to get the jobs back.

When I say their education is as good or better than ours, I am reminded that about 60% of the technical PhD degrees granted by our own universities have been going to citizens of these competitor nations.  This has been going on for more than 30, dare I say 40, years.  Add the number of PhDs from the schools in the competitor countries that I can guarantee aren’t giving 60% of their degrees to Americans, and you see the problem even more clearly.

It seems to me that we will have to come close to matching the competitor countries’ salary levels before we can really compete.  Will all the wealth of the U.S. be subject to this adjustment through lowering the value of the dollar relative to the competitor nations?  Or will only the wealth of the working class be lowered by lowering wages in fixed value (gold standard) dollars.  In the second scenario, the wages of the workers decline but their debts remain fixed.  So the wealthy get to collect the full amount that they lent. The wealthy can preserve their wealth and only the workers have to adjust.

The only saving grace that I can think of is to understand how Germany is managing to do so well with highly paid workers in the face of the same competition against which we are losing.  Germany has higher taxes and a more robust government safety net than even we do.  It looks like it would behoove us to find out what their secret is.

Perhaps the German secret will turn out to be the closer ties between German corporate profits and the success of their workers.  In that case, Robert Reich will have identified the correct elephant.  He ought to spell it out more clearly if that is what he is getting at.  There is no better way to make your point for a change in policy than to point to a successful example of the use of that policy.  If there is an example, we don’t only have to look at the abstract concept of tying corporate profits to worker success, but we can look at actual tactics for realizing the concept.