Who will N.C. marriage amendment backers target next? is an excellent commentary from McClatchy News.

Besides the commentary itself, it quotes something that I always think about and now have an opportunity to post so that I can remember these beautifully written words.

Theologian Martin Niemoller predicted what will happen then when he wrote:

First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

As a Jew, I am one step down on the ladder from most of the rest of you.  Maybe that is why these thoughts speak to me so loudly.

The Warren campaign has just posted Elizabeth Warren | JPMorgan and Wall Street on YouTube.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out what there is about this that the average voter cannot understand.

One other thing to think about in the campaign for the U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts – can you think of another candidate who has the standing to be asked by all the major media to comment on the recent news about JPMorgan/Chase?

Would such a candidate, after becoming Senator, be able to muster a lot of publicity and public outcry for the type of regulation that she sees as necessary to protect us and our economy? Public demand is the only thing that will give the people in Congress the backbone to stand up to the moneyed interests that threaten to swamp their future campaigns with negative advertising.

Remember, they have the money, but we have the votes. We just need to keep shouting so that our elected officials know we are not asleep at the switch. Oh, and not easily bamboozled by the propaganda of the monied interests. As long as that propaganda seems to be working, the people in Congress feel safe to kowtow to the people with the money.

On the Sturbridge Political Watch blog, Thomas Creamer has written the article “Nightmare Budget”, Doomsday Scenarios, or a Reasoned, Rational Approach.

For the purposes of discussion, I have extracted the following from the Town of Sturbridge Finance Committee Report Fiscal Year 2013.

This proposed budget is an increase of $1,172,795, or 4.6%,over Fiscal Year 2012.

I am not privy to all the background material that, as a Town Selectman, Thomas Creamer is. However, I think I understand the point that the author is making. I have heard this type of discussion many times over in my 50 something years of adult life.  To emphasize the deleterious effects of not raising the budget, proponents of the new budget concentrate all the theoretical cuts needed by a level funded budget in the programs that the citizens want the most.  They do not go through the hard task of finding the programs the citizens need or want least in order to focus the cutting there.  Such an approach might lead to budget cuts that are hardly noticed.  Or at least that is the suspicion when you view the dire warnings.

On the one hand, the proponents of the increased budget will tell you that it is only 4.6%, and as a citizen you can surely afford that.  Yet a 4.6% cut from the proposed budget would bring dire consequences to the town.

Of course the proponents of the level funding are not above their own prediction of the dire consequences of raising spending. They might say that surely we can find 4.6% fat in the budget that should be easy to cut with no harm done.  On the other hand for the citizens of the town to have their taxes raised to cover the 4.6% would be so drastic that they would all find themselves in the poor house with nothing to eat and no roof over their head.

So I think that what Thomas Creamer is asking is for us to put aside the nonsense and try to come up with a reasoned approach about what to do.

For my part, I have no reason to doubt that the Finance Committee and the Selectmen (mostly women) have done their due diligence and put in the hard work of figuring out the best compromises between what we may want and what we can afford.  Unless someone can provide me with strong evidence that these two goups have fallen down on the job in some major way, I am inclined to go along with their recommendations.

If we have to come out in droves to attend the Town Meeting to fight for a rational approach, then that is what we should do.  I intend to do my part.  I am open to arguments to sway my vote one way or another. I just won’t participate in scare tactics for either side.  So I warn both sides, that scare tactics will not work on me.  I will bring along an ample supply of imaginary chill pills to let me hear all sides with calm rationality.

The Life of Julia is the Obama campaign’s  hypothetical example that looks at how President Obama’s policies help one woman over her lifetime – and how Mitt Romney would change her story.

According to a McClatchy opinion piece ‘Life of Julia’ is a life without ambition.  After reading this commentary, I rushed to the Obama site to see the item that this story parodies.

I commented on the McClatchy piece:

Where do you get “life without ambition”?  She starts a web design company, hires people, provides a decent wage for them.  They pay taxes, stay employed, and fund their own benefits and everyone else’s.

The web design company provides a service to their customers which helps their businesses succeed.  This is how a capitalist economy grows.

I don’t see how our economy remains competitive in the world, if Julia gets no education, starts no business, and makes a life out of an ambition to serve hamburgers at McDonald’s for the rest of her life.  How is she going to retire on that income?

Why we like Elizabeth Warren for Senate so much can all be expressed in 30 seconds.

People from across Massachusetts talk about how Elizabeth Warren will fight for working families.

Except for the people who watch old cowboy movies and root for the gunslingers who terrorize the citizens, the thought of a new sheriff in town makes people feel that it is about time.

The NRA members may feel that they can fend for themselves without the sheriff, but these days the biggest crooks don’t use guns. Today’s biggest crooks use their brains to figure out how to con people. That is why we need a smart sheriff to police them.

I thought Republicans and Conservatives prided themselves on being tough on crime. They sure haven’t acted tough on white collar crime.

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.