I got into a “discussion” on Facebook with someone who insisted that there is no GOP War on Women.

The video below shows the ad that MoveOn.org is showing.

The Washington Post has the story Senate passes scaled-down version of bill to ban insider trading by officials.

In a sweeping bipartisan vote, the Senate approved legislation Thursday that formally bans lawmakers and all senior federal workers from making financial trades based on inside information gleaned from their oversight work.
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On a 96-3 vote, the Senate approved legislation that was pared down from the version it approved in early February, voting for the House draft of the STOCK Act without any amendments so that the bill could get to the White House as soon as possible.

Of course, we will have to wait for some disinterested lawyer to pore over the wording of the actual bill to see if it actually matches the headline and story.

I just cannot resist taking this cheap shot by quoting the following part of the article:

On largely bipartisan votes, the Senate included a provision … to strengthen anti-corruption laws that the Supreme Court had ruled against as insufficiently vague.

Presumably the unfortunate wording of this is an editing error.  Or perhaps the the Congress actually made the bill sufficiently vague to satisfy the Supreme Court.  Doesn’t one always strengthen rules by making them more vague?

According to Robert Reich’s article, If You Took the Greed Out of Wall Street, All You’d Have Left is Pavement: Why Greg Smith’s Critique is Way Too Narrow, today’s Goldman Sachs greed is not an aberration.

It is not an aberration for Goldman Sachs and it is not an aberration for Wall Street.  Reich reminds us of past history of Goldman Sachs taking it clients to the cleaners time and again.

Perhaps even Reich doesn’t cast his net wide enough.  It is not an aberration for some humans in all periods of history.  To think that there does not need to be proper regulations of financial activities is to misunderstand human nature.

I have never liked political systems and theories that need to ignore human nature for them to work.  Thus extreme capitalism and extreme communism will never be satisfactory models for me.  Actually any “model” has its limits by its very nature.  A “model” is always something less complete than reality.  It is purposely simplified so that humans can understand some aspect of the system being modeled.  You have to always be cognizant of the fact that if you expect the “model” to predict reality outside of the bounds of the implicit and explicit assumptions, then you are bound to be disappointed.  It is not always easy to tell where those boundaries are.  Sometimes it is even difficult to pin down the assumptions that you have made in creating the model.

You might refer to my previous post, Financial Modelers’ Manifesto, to see how professionals in the financial modeling business try to deal with the limits of financial models.

You might remember the previous posts Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory and Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory – Update.

You might want to follow up by reading, Artist admits to shortcuts in show about Apple.

Here is the movie, narrated by Tom Hanks, that reminds us how far we have come from the disaster unfolding before President Obama took office to the current state of recovery. The current state could be better, but we know for sure that it could be a lot worse.

It would be such a shame to stop the policy of recovery and return to the policy of disaster that all the Republican Presidential candidates are prescribing.

If we need to go through another disaster for the American voters to really understand what the Republican policies are all about, the United States will not come out of it with anywhere near its current standing in the world.

Historically, all eras where one nation leads the world do eventually come to an end. Frequently the citizens of that nation bring about their own downfall. I really would not like that to happen in this country while I am still around.

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail by Matt Taibbi is another one for the records.

The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep bailing it out?

I admit to only having read the first 3 pages of this 5 page article.  How many pages of a career criminal’s rap sheet do you have to read to get the picture?

The first 3 pages were enough to get to the explanation of why bank regulation was introduced and why revoking it has led to exactly the abuses that the regulations were invented to prevent.

For a time, this ridiculous rivalry between two strutting Southern peacocks was restrained by the law – specifically, the McFadden-Pepper Act of 1927 and the Douglas Amendment to the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956. These two federal statutes, which made it illegal for a bank holding company to own and operate banks in more than one state, were effectively designed to prevent exactly the Too Big to Fail problem we now find ourselves faced with. The goal, as Sen. Paul Douglas explained at the time, was “to prevent an undue concentration of banking and financial power, and instead keep the private control of credit diffused as much as possible.”

Since the 1980s we have decided that “undue concentration of banking and financial power” was now due.  It shouldn’t be a surprise that stealing money is easier than earning it, especially if you own the police force.

The propaganda machine rolls on, making people more afraid of the people protesting the robbery than they are afraid of the robbers.

People seem to be saying, “Go ahead and steal my money.  Anything is better than being a socialist.”

I just couldn’t resist, so I read The New York Times piece Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs by Greg Smith.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

I have no pithy nor even snide comments to make.  I have nothing to add, either.  I really don’t even have a reason to think this might be memorable and so worth recording on my blog.

I found the article  VIDEO: Elizabeth Warren Visits North Andover posted on the North Andover Patch.

Check out this clip in which Warren discusses her campaign, how she plans to appeal to the towns (and the region’s) politically diverse population, and what she would do, if elected, to confront the region’s housing and foreclosure crisis.

Here is a transcription of an email that I received about a proposed bill that makes a lot of sense to me.

The main points  described in a brief summary of the bill are:

• Make student loan repayment both simple and fair
• Jumpstart the economy and create jobs
• Send a lifeline to student borrowers who have fallen on difficult times
• Promote financial responsibility in higher education

For all the details, you can read the actual bill.

There are also answers to some Frequently Asked Questions.

Please sign the petition in favor of H.R. 4170 by clicking on the following link: http://signon.org/sign/support-the-student-loan

This seems like a needed first step to reinstating support for higher education, economic prosperity, and social mobility that has started to wane in this country.

In the hurly-burly of an election campaign, our memory of why we like Elizabeth Warren so much may grow dim, until we see a video like this one. This video shows us reasons for appreciating Warren that we weren’t even aware of.

At almost every moment in this video there is another jaw dropping revelation. If there were a video of me watching this video, you would see how literally I mean this.

This video makes it very readily apparent that Warren knows so such more than is visible from her current political campaign.

Why doesn’t the Warren campaign want you to see this video?

Of course, I am only guessing here. I am sure the the Warren Troll can come up with a good many other reasons.

• Mario Savio – Free Speech Movement.
• This video is the answer to the Warren Facebook Troll

I lost track of the political activist Mario Savio right after the Berkeley riots of the 1960s were over. It is news to me that he established a career that is worthy of remembrance as indicated in this video. I have not followed up and visited the web site yet.

We all know what the Republicans will make of this connection, if they find out about this video. At the end, I will mention how I found it, but you can bet the Republicans will find it too, especially after I blog about it.

My advice to the campaign, which they never follow, is to stop pretending the inevitable might not happen. Get out in front of the inevitable and turn it toward your advantage before the opposition tries to turn it to your disadvantage.

Ironically, in this video Elizabeth Warren talks about how a campaign could use technology to run a better campaign. Her campaign is most decidedly not taking instructions from the version of Elizabeth Warren who appears in this video.

Elizabeth Warren talks about crowd sourcing in this video. In a campaign context, I first heard the idea in an email from Scott Brown. Where is the Warren campaign?

Many of the things that Warren talks about in the use of technology for making the CFPB agency a strong one are exactly the ideas that her campaign needs to use, but the troll stands in the way of doing these exact things. He has a thousand reasons to turn down any suggestion that comes into the campaign via the Facebook page. (And to disparage the suggester in the bargain)

How to get the DVDs

So here is how I stumbled across this lecture. I was doing research on how one might acquire the rights to rebroadcast the lecture in my previous post, The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class. By the way, these two videos are wonderful companion pieces.

I found that you can purchase DVDs of these lectures from The University Of California TV.

The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class: Higher Risks, Lower Rewards, and a Shrinking Safety Net $24.95.

Before I had scrolled down to find the above video, I happened to notice this one.

Main Street First: Fixing Broken Markets and Rebuilding the Middle Class with Elizabeth Warren.

It appears from the UCTV web site that it will be easy to get permission to rebroadcast these DVDs in a non-profit situation.