I just received an email from Common Cause.  I signed the petition immediately.

Did you see the headline? One of America’s biggest banks lost $2 billion in just a few weeks. Even now, Wall Street banks that got bailed out are still at it, gambling recklessly. This is Elizabeth Warren. I stood up to big banks. I took on their army of lobbyists and helped win the fight for a consumer protection agency. But there’s still more to do. Wall Street isn’t going to change its ways until Washington gets serious about strong oversight and real accountability. No special deals. We need a tough cop on the beat to make sure that nobody steals your purse on Main Street or your pension on Wall Street. Problem is, in Washington money talks — and Wall Street has plenty of money to spread around. So Wall Street gets all the special breaks while working families get hammered. That’s what I want to change.

I wonder why Scott Brown would rather talk about Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage than about Wall Street stealing your pension. Which issue is of more concern to you?

The actual title of the article on Truth Out is What Occupiers Learned From Obama – and What He Should Learn From Them.  However, I started thinking about what I could learn for use in Sturbridge.

Working together is a pleasure in itself – that’s been one of the tenets of Occupy’s reclamations of public space, that being with other people is in a way its own reward. And that, too, was something that people organizing for the first time with Obama learned. “Human beings were meant to work together,” Packard said. “[The Obama campaign] really brought people together, which is maybe why the hope crashed us so.”

Evry, too, noticed this, that giving people positive feedback on the campaign (including, ultimately, the victory) kept them coming back. “They start forming community, you start forming these relationships that go beyond the political,” she said.

As we organize around getting Elizabeth Warren elected as Senator, I have noted the above effect.

The Obama campaign was a strangely open place; anyone could walk into a campaign office, be handed a walk list or a phone list, given cursory training and put to work. Volunteers were given personal logins to the voter database, demonstrating an extreme amount of trust in people whose backgrounds had not been vetted at all. Given that sort of freedom and responsibility, many were dismayed when Organizing for America (OFA) turned out very differently.

Evry was active with OFA during the battle for health care reform, but was disappointed by the organization’s refusal to let activists pressure Democratic lawmakers who weren’t supporting the bill. So instead, she and her group did their own organizing to target local Democrats. “I would not have thought to do that four years ago,” she said.

I have been feeling this way at some of the inaction or slow action from the Warren campaign.  If they are not going to take actions that I think are necessary, then I can just do it myself.  I switched logos from “Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts” to “Elizabeth Warren for Senate” long before the campaign did.  They are still slowly making the transition.  The ads and some badges have transitioned, but the official web site logo and campaign email have not.  They are waiting for a rebranding campaign of some sort.  My attitude was “Why Wait?  Every day you stick with the old logo, you miss thousands of opportunities to change people’s minds.  The campaign only lives until the November election.  There is no time to waste.”

That’s what the Obama campaign empowered her to do, she noted, and it did so for a lot of young people, who immediately saw an outlet in Occupy for those skills they’d honed with the confidence they felt from winning.

Technology was an important part of the Obama campaign – tools like MyBarackObama.com gave activists experience in self-organizing, so putting together protests on Facebook became second nature.

This is some of what I am hoping to learn from our efforts. I was hoping that www.ElizabethWarren.com would be like MyBarackObama.com.  Unfortunately it is not. I have been using Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and this blog to try to do some of the things the campaign is not doing.  The campaign does not use the event scheduling feature of their Facebook page.  I have used that feature on the SturbridgeForElizabethWarren Facebook page.

I am still left wondering if our organizing in the Sturbridge area will make a difference, and what will our organization be able to do after the election is over.

The video outlines the challenges America faced as President Obama took office at the height of the worst recession in almost a century and details the progress that has been made reclaiming the security of the middle class and building an economy that’s meant to last, where hard work pays and responsibility is rewarded.

With Mitt Romney as President, stealing from the middle class pays, and hard work is punished by layoffs, and theft of pensions and benefits.

Imagine where we would be if we didn’t have all the Republicans saying Backwards to everything the President and the Democrats have tried to do.

Not only would Senator Elizabeth Warren not be rowing against the President, but she would also be spurring him on to do even better.

Do you really think Massachusetts’ sending Scott Brown back to the Senate will help things move forward?

No matter who gets elected to office, our job as citizens does not end. The powerful will not stop trying to reverse the results of the election. We have to be fighting them every day between elections. Their money may buy the press, but we can still outshout them. Long live the internet. Don’t let them take that away from you.

This in the introductory movie from the web site www.romneyeconomics.com

I cannot imagine that if people realized that this is what they would be getting with Romney Economics that they would still favor this over what President Obama has tried to do despite all Republican efforts to derail it.

I haven’t found the right words to explain this to people. Perhaps in this video, the explanation of how Bain Capital could get rich by ruining a company will finally start to penetrate people’s minds.

Maybe these numbers gathered from the website start to give you a picture.

In the table below, Bain is Mitt Romney’s company that bought up these companies with mostly borrowed money that they never paid back.

I don’t know how anyone could conclude that Romney did not become rich by stealing the wealth away from the workers and creditors of the companies that he managed. In a just system, Romney would be in jail, not running for President.

Here is an email that I received from Elizabeth Warren via the Progressive Change Campaign Committee BoldProgressives.org.

Steven,

We’ve seen all the headlines: JP Morgan Chase took risky bets and lost two billion dollars in a matter of weeks.

CEO Jamie Dimon called the bets “poorly reviewed” and even “sloppy.” He added, “We will learn from it, we will fix it, and we will move on.”  

Frankly, I don’t think we should just trust Wall Street banks to regulate themselves. Because as we learned during the 2008 financial crisis, they are not just taking risks with their own money — they are taking risks with the whole economy.

That’s why today, with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, I’m calling on Congress to put Wall Street reform back on the agenda and to begin by passing a new Glass-Steagall Act. This was the law that stopped investment banks from gambling away people’s life savings for decades — until Wall Street successfully lobbied to have it repealed in 1999.

Will you join us in calling on Congress to hold Wall Street accountable and pass a new Glass-Steagall Act? Click here to stand with us!

A new Glass-Steagall would separate high-risk investment banks from more traditional banking. It would allow Wall Street to take risks, but not by dipping into the life savings and retirement accounts of regular people.

And by making banks smaller, a new Glass-Steagall could also help put an end to banks that are “too big to fail” — further avoiding costly taxpayer bailouts. 

Wall Street’s risky bets nearly brought the economy to its knees in 2008. But instead of taking responsibility, Wall Street lobbied to water down the Dodd-Frank financial reforms of 2010 and fought to weaken the reforms Congress passed.

It has become clear over time — and made even clearer this past week — that additional Wall Street reforms are needed. 

Please join us in urging Congress to put Wall Street reform back on the table — and pass a new Glass-Steagall Act today.

Thousands of Progressive Change Campaign Committee members have stood with me in my campaign for the Senate — and many were with me before that when I was fighting for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

If I’m elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, I promise this difference from my Republican opponent Scott Brown: I will be a reliable and strong champion for commonsense Wall Street reform. But we don’t have a moment to waste.

Together, we must urge Congress to act now.

Thank you,
Elizabeth Warren

 

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Sharon and I stumbled across an interview on C-SPAN with E. O. Wilson in which he talked about his new book The Social Conquest Of Earth. On The e.o.wilson Biodiversity Foundation web site, I found this precis of the book.

Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? In a generational work of clarity and passion, one of our greatest living scientists directly addresses these three fundamental questions of religion, philosophy, and science while “overturning the famous theory that evolution naturally encourages creatures to put family first” (Discover magazine). Refashioning the story of human evolution in a work that is certain to generate headlines, Wilson draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behavior to show that group selection, not kin selection, is the primary driving force of human evolution. He proves that history makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology. Demonstrating that the sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts are fundamentally biological in nature, Wilson presents us with the clearest explanation ever produced as to the origin of the human condition and why it resulted in our domination of the Earth’s biosphere. 90 illustrations.

There were some really big “Aha” moments in the interview.  For instance, I came to understand the roles of Democrats(Liberals) and Republicans(Conservative) in society.  He explains why we need them both and yet how we need to balance both. The “Aha” moment is more profound than even the above book summary indicates.

When I read The New York Times article, Capitalists and Other Psychopaths, I was able to appreciate it  at a much higher level because of what I had learned from E. O. Wilson.

The New York Times has the article Capitalists and Other Psychopaths by William Deresiewicz. He starts with the following paragraph:

There is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

By a stroke of luck, I happened to stumble across an interview on C-SPAN of E. O. Wilson in which he talked about his recent book The Social Conquest Of Earth. This book explains why the article above is true. The interview was quite a revelation to me.

As promised, Elizabeth Warren visited Southbridge on May 12, 2012.  She faced an enthusiastic crowd at the Fins & Tales Restaurant.

Click on the border below to see the photo album in a separate browser window.

The statement Elizabeth Warren Calls on JP Morgan Chief to Resign from NY Federal Reserve Bank Board is posted on Elizabeth Warren’s web site.

“Wall Street banks continue to have fundamental problems, and tough oversight and accountability are urgently needed. Jamie Dimon deserves credit for taking public responsibility for $2 billion in losses based on a trading strategy he called ‘poorly reviewed,’ ‘poorly monitored,’ and even ‘sloppy.’ But Dimon is not only the CEO of JP Morgan, he is also a member of the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, where he advises the Federal Reserve on the oversight of the financial industry,” Warren said.

Credit where credit is due, and consequences where consequences are due.  Unless Dimon is willing to make up the $2 billion from his own pocket, he should be fired.  He should feel grateful for living in the United States.  In China, such sloppy management has been known to result in criminal conviction and the death penalty.