The Daily Beast has the article Michael Tomasky on the Media’s Foolish Elizabeth Warren Witch Hunt.

The appearance Thursday morning of this Suffolk University poll (linked to above) made me think: Well, this story line is about to wrap up. If more than two-thirds of voters don’t care, then that’s that. But no—still going strong! And now it’s not the loopy, right-wing, and pro-Brown Herald, which pushed the story first, but the Globe trying to play catch up. Yes, yes, it’s all in the public interest. What, you say, the public says it isn’t interested? Well, we’ll teach them what’s in their interest!

Not being a subscriber of “the loopy, right-wing, and pro-Brown Herald, which pushed the story first”, I had no idea that The Boston Globe was pushing this story so hard because it was “trying to play catch up.”

Thanks to reader RichardH for pointing me to The Daily Beast article that completes my education on this story.

The New Economics Perspectives web site has this very interesting article, Are There Spending Constraints On Governments Sovereign in Their Currencies?.

The discussion is about “Governments sovereign in their own currency.”  In other words a government that borrows in terms of its own currency and only accepts payments in terms of its own currency.

The counter-narrative of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is that such a currency issuer can never involuntarily run out of money, though it can default voluntarily from an excess of stupidity. And because such nations can’t run out of money and can buy anything for sale in their own borders, including all labor resources, that means that their governments can spend what they need to spend to help solve the problems they encounter. They can afford job guarantees for anyone wanting full-time work at a living wage with a full package of fringe benefits, universal single-payer health insurance for all, a first class educational system, re-inventing their energy foundations, cleaning up their environments, re-creating their infrastructure, and doing anything else necessary to create good, democratic societies. For Governments sovereign in their own currencies, running out of money is never an issue. The real issues are resource constraints, political constraints, and constraints of poor decision making. But they are not fiscal in nature.

The fact that “such nations can’t run out of money and can buy anything for sale in their own borders” will be hard to accept for a lot of people.  The reason they cannot accept it amounts, “well, it just can’t be true.”

If you follow the link to the article, you will see lot’s of explanations of why it can be true, but if you just firmly believe that it can’t, then what more is there to be said?

Such discussions remind me of one I had with my father shortly after I started studying physics at MIT.  I told him that the crack of the whip is the sound of the tip breaking the sound barrier.  He refused to believe that.  His explanation was that nothing that is on the ground can break the sound barrier.  Only things that can fly can break the sound barrier.

Under some prescribed circumstances, the speed of sound is 768 mph.  If you can go faster than that, you break the sound barrier.  It doesn’t make any difference whether or not you gain the speed because of friction against the ground or you are using one of Newton’s laws of motion in air.

My father could never accept that, because, well just because it was so obvious.

The New York Times, parent paper of The Boston Globe, has the article Bank Regulators Under Scrutiny in JPMorgan Loss. I found the article at Truth-Out.org.

Some politicians — including Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts — argue that Mr. Dimon’s position at the New York Fed further compromises regulatory oversight. “Mr. Dimon should not be in a position to have such influence on a major regulator,” Ms. Warren said. When asked on PBS’s “NewsHour” last week about JPMorgan, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said that regulators needed to “be above any political influence.” He did not say Mr. Dimon should resign from the Fed, but he acknowledged that the perception of a conflict was “a problem.”

I wonder if the junior Senator from Massachusetts has a position on this issue?  Maybe he is too busy doing genealogy on Elizabeth Warren.  That is certainly easier than understanding banking at the level that Warren does.

You and I know why The New York Times has not published Scott Brown’s opinion on JPMorgan.  Come to think of it, The Boston Globe hasn’t said much about his opinion either.  The Globe seem to have its own fish to fry, and it does not relate to the major concerns of its readers.

This is from the pit bull of a newspaper The Boston Globe, Menino criticizes Brown’s focus.  The subhead is, “Says Warren’s heritage is not important issue”

On a day when Senator Scott Brown sought to fan further questions about Elizabeth Warren’s professed Native American heritage, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who has not been shy about praising Brown, made clear he is fed up with the issue.

“I think she has come clean but nobody has let her off the hook,” Menino said. “It’s not relevant at all in the campaign. Let’s talk about the real issues: education, housing, crime. Those are the real issues we should be talking about. This is one of the issues that you [use to] try to divert as a candidate because you can’t deal with the real issues.”

At a time when JPMorgan is making losing bets with taxpayers money to the tune of perhaps $5 billion and might pose an existential threat to the world financial system, Elizabeth Warren focuses on trying to restrain JPMorgan and Scott Brown focuses on Native American heritage.

I think this must be a sign that Brown’s got nothing to run on.  If I were JPMorgan, I’d pour money into Brown’s campaign and perhaps even hire some private investigators to dig up dirt on Warren if they can find any.  It is clear to the big banks that Elizabeth Warren is a person who must be stopped from gaining any power.

You also have to wonder at the resources The Boston Globe is devoting to this story.  When was the last time they did any investigative reporting that turned up anything of importance on an issue of importance?  I realize that when you devote this much energy on investigating this story, that a newspaper has to get some return on it investment.  They have to try to turn this into a story with legs, or else admit that they have wasted their time and yours.  However, even if they can’t face the facts, their readers can.

If it weren’t for the funnies, I might give up my subscription to The Boston Globe.  Although maybe they are trying to feed my prime motive for subscribing by just extending the funny pages to their news section.