The New York Times has an article Recall Election Tests Strategies for November.

The combination of the squeeze on state budgets, high rates of unemployment and the conservative movement’s revived energy provided an opening for Republican efforts, often business-backed, to promote tough-on-labor legislation in key states. Those efforts have succeeded in rolling back gains made by unions over decades, prompting vows from labor to fight back with newly engaged members shaken from self-described complacency.

Ah, so this explains the Massachusetts Postal Worker’s rumored support of Scott Brown over Elizabeth Warren.  Maybe you have to be a masochist to work for the post office.

Or is it the amazing technique perfected by the Republicans of facing you with a smile while reaching behind you to stab you in the back.  You feel the pain, but you just don’t know who is inflicting it on you.  If there is a Democrat behind you, then you think the Democrats are the cause.

“Republican war on women?  What Republican war on women?  How dare you bring this up when we are keeping college loan interest rates low by taking money from women’s health care.  Give me a break.” – rough translation of Speaker Boehner’s rebuttal of Nancy Pelosi.

The article, Postal rescue faces uncertain future after Senate OK’s bill tells part of the story about the “rescue” of the post office.

The legislation, co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I –Conn., Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine, Sen. Tom Carper, D- Del., and Sen. Scott Brown, R- Mass., would use an $11 billion refund from Federal Employee Retirement system to pay for buyouts of up to $25,000 to postal workers. If 100,000 of the Postal Service workforce of 557,000 employees were to retire, the agency would save $8 billion a year.

Sounds like Scott Brown ought to be the candidate favored by the postal worker’s unions, but wait.

A leading postal workers union, the National Association of Letter Carriers, opposes the Senate bill.

“Relentless downsizing is not a strategy for success, yet the legislation adopted by the Senate targets more than 100,000 jobs and will force the Postal Service to slash services in order to pay unaffordable mandates to fund future retiree health benefits that no other agency or firm in the country faces,” said union president Fredric Rolando after the Senate vote. “This fight is far from over; the nation’s letter carriers will work tirelessly to build a Postal Service that can thrive in the Internet age while serving the country we love.”

The $11 billion dollars that Scott Brown wants so graciously to use to help downsize the Postal Service, comes from an onerous burden that the Republicans have put on the Postal Service.  Whereas the best private pension plans are funded just well enough to keep up with future pension costs and the worst of these plans are highly underfunded, the Republicans forced through a bill to make the postal Service prepay for its pension plan.  In other words, the Postal Service is not just required to fund pension liabilities as they accrue, they are required to pay for all future liabilities even before they accrue.  No private company with which the Postal Service competes is required to carry such a burden.

Apparently the postal workers in Massachusetts seem completely oblivious to how hard the Republicans have tried to shut down the postal service and get rid of their jobs.  Rumor has it that the Massachusetts postal workers favor Scott Brown and won’t even listen to Elizabeth Warren.  Perhaps it is a case of Stockholm syndrome where after a long enough time the hostages start to believe that their captors are their saviors.

I found the article House Passes Student Loan Bill That Would Cut Preventive Health Programs on the Truthdig web site.

“Make no mistake … our Republican colleagues haven’t changed their minds about this, they’ve changed their tactics,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. “If they really wanted to stop student loans from increasing, they wouldn’t seek to cover the cost by cutting funds for cervical cancer screening, by cutting funds for breast cancer screening, by cutting other women’s health care measures. They wouldn’t push a measure the president has already said he will veto.”

If you want to hear sounds like the bleating of a stuck pig, read the article for the Republicans’ disclaimer about what they are trying to do.  I won’t bother to sully this blog by posting them here.

I may have to start a category on this blog, Republican War On Women, so you can find the numerous articles more easily.

I’ll let you make the connection between this story and the need to elect Elizabeth Warren to the U.S. Senate.  I won’t metnion it myself.  Oops, I just did.

Ten Reasons the JOBS Act Is an Insane Race to the Bottom is by William K Black, the author of  The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One.

The JOBS Act is insane on many levels. It creates an extraordinarily criminogenic environment in which securities fraud will become even more out of control. One of the forms of insanity is the belief that one can “win” a regulatory “race to the bottom.” The only winning move is not to play in a regulatory race to the bottom. The primary rationale for the JOBS Act is the claim that we must win a regulatory race to the bottom with the City of London by adopting even weaker protections for investors from securities fraud than does the United Kingdom (UK).

Perhaps the only way to start to restore sanity to Washington is to elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate.  She seems to understands this issue of bank and financial fraud on a level that equals William Black.  Of course, she would only be one voice, but it is a start.  We have to start somewhere.  Why not start by electing Elizabeth Warren?

In this video, Elizabeth Warren thanks her supporters and talks about the ways the supporters can help even with no money involved.

One way to do it locally around Sturbridge and Southbridge is to spread the word about Elizabeth Warren To Visit Southbridge on May 12.

Even before the event on May 12, you can Join the Event on Facebook. You will show the world how many people will be there to support her. You will also receive notices of any changes to the event that might occur.

Elizabeth Warren will be in Southbridge on May 12, 2012.

At 4:00PM she will be at the Fins  & Tales Restaurant, 858 Main Street, Southbridge, MA. Telephone  (508) 764-3349.

Let us show the state how much support Elizabeth Warren has in Southbridge, Sturbridge, Charlton, Brimfield The Brookfields, Spencer, Wales, Warren, and Dudley.  There is ample parking behind the restaurant.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could get a big enough crowd that we flow outside the restaurant itself and fill up the parking lot with supporters?

In order for this to happen, we need to spread the word to everyone we know.  There are several groups in the area that will be making phone calls to let everyone know that Elizabeth is coming to town.  If you want to help make some of these phone calls, send me an email at WarrenVisit@ssgreenberg.name.

Join the Event on Facebook, and you will receive notices of any changes to the event that might occur. If there are changes, I will surely post them on this blog, but the Facebook signup will notify you directly and you won’t have to remember to look here.

Here are some signs that might be good for any rally with or for Elizabeth Warren. She might even profit from adopting some of these phrases or ideas.

You will have to go to Facebook Sturbridge For Elizabeth Warren to see them. Facebook doesn’t work to show them directly here.

You Do Not Need A Facebook Account To See These Signs.

Henry Blodget’s piece on Yahoo! Finance, IT’S OFFICIAL: Keynes Was Right, is the almost perfect antidote to Mort Zuckerman’s nonsense that I highlighted in my previous post Mort Zuckerman: President Obama’s Economic Programs Have Failed.

This morning brings news that Europe may finally be beginning to soften on the “austerity” philosophy that has brought it nothing but misery over the past several years.

The “austerity” idea, you’ll remember, was that the continent’s huge debt and deficit problem had ushered in a “crisis of confidence” and that, once business-people saw that governments were serious about debt reduction, they’d get confident and start spending again.

That hasn’t worked.

Instead, spending cuts have led to cuts in GDP which has led to greater deficits and the need for more spending cuts. And so on.

I said almost perfect except for the following:

And, by the way, I don’t think this “stimulus” necessarily needs to come from just the government. Our corporations are as profitable now as they have ever been. So I’d like to see a lot of them voluntarily decide to invest more and pay their low-wage employees more and hire more employees. They can afford it, and “cash flow” isn’t the sole objective or reward of running a business.

Perhaps Blodget should have saved the following statement till just before the quote above:

Now, I’m not an economist, and I’m not born of a particular economic school that I’ve bet my life’s work on, so I have observed the global economic events of the past five years with a fairly open mind.

Now, I am no economist either, but I do know enough about Keynes’ theories, and can see the logic of saying that the death spiral that Blodget talks about is almost impossible to stop except by government action.  Any business that is considering taking actions on its own is faced with several problems.  First, no single business is large enough to make a significant impact with the resources it has at hand.  So the money it spent to solve the problem would be largely ineffective and would put the company at risk in the continuing down turn by using up its cash reserves.  Second, in a financial crisis it is the fiduciary duty of officers of the company to concentrate on ensuring the survival of the company and protecting the stock holders’ assets.

Only a large federal government has the staying power, confidence, and resources to make the investments in stimulating the economy.  It is only sensible for individuals and individual companies to try to protect themselves from the impending disaster.  That was the paradox that Keynes uncovered.  Only the government, whose responsibility is the entire country, can take the chance to save the whole economy.

If you want to see how little Republicans pretend to know about business and economics, read Mort Zuckerman: President Obama’s Economic Programs Have Failed.

What can we do to get out of this? How can we regenerate the high-paying jobs in service industries with sophisticated intellectual content such as entertainment, digital media, education, and financial services?

Perhaps Mort Zuckerman doesn’t know that the huge increase in the share of GDP that is now in the Financial Services industry and is unprecedented in US history is the proximate cause of our current woes. We need to cut the size of the Financial Services industry back down to a reasonable size. Is he aware that there is so little purchasing power left in middle-class consumers’ hands that the Financial Services industry has taken to speculating in the essential commodities futures markets in the hopes of wringing out what little money is left for them to grab? Making consumers pay for essential commodities allows the banks to make their profits in the commodities and lets them ease their way out of investing in what’s left of the messy and jobs producing businesses that actually make something useful.

Perhaps if the Republicans had not prevented a federal stimulus package from supporting state budgets in this time of crisis, the massive layoff of teachers could have been avoided, and we would still have those jobs with “sophisticated intellectual content such as … education…”

1. Push students to a higher level of education, if necessary by mandating at least a year of higher education or vocational training at the public’s expense.

With college student loan debt at over $1 trillion, how do we encorage these students to take on more debt to get a higher level of education when there are no jobs for them to earn an income to pay off this debt? Oh, sorry, he wants to pay for this extra year at public expense. Is he going to tax away more money from the middle class to pay for this? Or is he finally going to allow us to raise taxes on the ultra-rich? Don’t tell me he would allow us to increase the deficit to pay for this.

2. Increase the number of H-1B visas for foreign graduate students in the hard sciences. Crazily, we reduced them from 195,000 in 2003 to 65,000 today. This intellectual firepower is critical to growing industries that focus on the world of high tech.

In the good old Republican world of supply and demand, bringing in more workers when we have massive unemployment will put people back to work and raise wages. I’d like to see the supply/demand curves that will make this dream come true.

3. Revise the tax system to encourage growth, not hamper job creation.

Does he mean he wants the Republicans to stop blocking the elimination of business tax breaks that encourage outsourcing?

4. Create financial incentives for businesses to invest in America, rather than provoking American companies to reap greater rewards by laying off U.S. workers and outsourcing production to foreign countries that have lower environmental standards.

The only incentives to create jobs that businesses need is to have customers. If a business has closed a factory and or laid off employees because they don’t have enough work for them, then lowering taxes won’t encourage them to invest some of the trillions of dollars they already hold in cash and use it to produce more goods for which there are no customers.

5. Focus on the problems of infrastructure and industrial policy.

Does Zuckerman want the Republicans to stop blocking these efforts that President Obama has called for? I mean the ones that they threaten to filibuster because they might require raising taxes on the ultra-rich 1% who own 80% of the wealth in this country.

Why does Mort Zuckerman pretend that he doesn’t know this?

How does Mort Zuckerman expect us to believe these ideas which are silly on their face?

Does he care if he writes ridiculous editorial pieces? Does he care about his own reputation?

My response to the video was, “Elizabeth Warren For Senate, Yeah!!! The campaign listens. It’s about time the logo started telling people what office she is running for.”

As Deadline Looms for Student Loan Increase, Warren says America needs to invest in “Kids Like Me” is the press release announcing this video.

The press release has the transcript of the video:

I grew up in a family hanging on by our fingertips to a place in the middle class.

But back then, America invested in kids like me. We had lots of opportunities.

Today, Washington lets big corporations like GE pay nothing — zero — in taxes, while kids are left drowning in debt to get an education. This isn’t about economics. It’s about our values.

I’m Elizabeth Warren. I approve this message because Washington has to get its priorities straight.