This is part 4, the final part, of the interview with James K. Galbraith. Previously I posted Inequality and Instability, Inequality and Instability – Part 2, and Inequality and Instability – Part 3.

This is a conclusion that is much less disappointing than most. Usually, I read strong books like this one that are full of surprising and valuable insights, and the last chapter about what to do with these insights falls completely flat.

This conclusion strongly stated the lessons learned and what needs to be done. Sadly, the final statement that we need to reclaim one of the parties from the grips of the financial sector is still missing a “how to” that we can implement.

In Massachusetts, the election of Elizabeth Warren to the Senate instead of returning Scott Brown to the Senate is the best chance that we have to start the process of getting control of the situation. Elizabeth Warren has studied the damage the financial sector has done, and has actually had a role in trying to bring the financial sector to heel. Scott Brown is not even aware of the issue.

This is part 3 of the interview with James K. Galbraith. Previously I posted Inequality and Instability and Inequality and Instability – Part 2.

I will post Part 4 when it becomes available. You may find part 4 before I do if you go to The Real News web page that provides a link to all the pieces of the multipart Inequality and Instability interview.

At the conclusion of this part of the interview we find out why the Democratic party is so ineffective at changing these policies. Even more sadly we find out why the labor unions are not contending for power in the current system.

Here is the second part of the interview with Jame K Gakbraith.  The first part is in the post Inequality and Instability.  There will be at least two more parts to follow the current one.

There is a trememndous amount of clarification in these interviews about the role that Equality did or did not play in the difference in economic growth and unemployment between Europe and The United States. The actual relation is quite different from what you have been lead to believe. Again, an indication that what seems like a logically consistent theory in books and academic papers can be turned on its head when you look at the data in a realistic way. The data is where you find the factors that you forgot to include in the theoretical analsysis.

In the article, The Republican Brain on the Republican Brain, author Chris Mooney discusses the reaction to his book The Republican Brain.  The following quote gives you a hint as to the material in the book:

… I further argue, you realize that there are some psychological traits that tend to accompany conservatism – especially in its current form in the United States – that naturally conflict with the nuanced, uncertainty-laden thinking style of scientists and liberals alike (members of the “reality based community”). These traits include authoritarianism – seeing the world in black and white, intolerant of uncertainty – but also a lack of openness to experience (a personality trait), a higher need for closure and so on.
.
.
.
In fact, all the researchers I interviewed for the book stressed that conservative psychology is perfectly normal and has many advantages to it (although also, of course, some disadvantages). The conservative critics either seemed not to have actually read the research in question, or were, for some other reason, unable to take such a nuanced view of it.

At the end of the article, the author describes an experiment which was intended to measure the extent to which the book’s thesis could be proven scientifically.  One surprising outcome for the researchers is described as:

The conservatives in the study were spending a lot less time reading our essays than liberals.

The author advises caution in interpreting these results until it is replicated by other experiments. I see another reason to be cautious about jumping to conclusions as to what this observation proves.  Perhaps conservatives are faster readers than liberals.  Maybe they are all graduates of Evelyn Woods’ Speed Reading classes.  (Of course they could be faster readers because they skip over nuance in what they are reading.  This is one of the main ideas of the book.  The psychologists need to devise an experiment where they see which explanation is more likely to be the main one.)

You can contribute to this ongoing research by adding your comments about your reaction to this story.

Elizabeth Warren was interviewed on The Morning Joe television show on MSNBC.

She talked about the huge issue of the contraction of opportunities for middle-class people. People have been forced to take on huge debt to get a
college education that was supposed to be a ticket to open the doors to opportunity. Instead, after graduation, they cannot get a job and they are saddled with this huge debt without the means to pay it off, let alone get ahead.

You can also see the video below on Warren’s web page, Call on Congress Not to Double Student Loan Rates, but more importantly you can see she puts her efforts behind solving the big problems..

After the interview, you can stick around for the interview with Scott Brown. He talked all about the value of his bipartisanship and solving small problems. It was as if he were completely unaware of the huge problems in this country that his small problem attitude is just not enough to fix. If you add on his support for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and already successful while cutting back on the opportunities for the middle-class, that the few problems he solves pale in comparison to the huge problems he helps cause.

Scott Brown struggled in his young life to get a college education. Is he even aware of how much more difficult it is now then when he went through the process? No mention of this issue in this interview. I guess it’s just not on his radar screen. Would he have had an answer if the interviewers had just asked?

Truth-Out has this wonderful short excerpt of an early Fall 2011 interview with Bill Ayers on the Coming Revolution.

I am starting to be a believer that electoral politics is only a small part of what it will take to turn this country around. My involvement with the Elizabeth Warren campaign is only reinforcing this view. I am encouraging people in this area to get involved in this campaign to make it the kind of campaign we want despite what the officials in the campaign may do to screw it up. I hope we can remain active long after the campaign is over.

This interview with Rachel Maddow explains why we need the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Elizabeth Warren explains that this is also part of a bigger picture.

You may want to catch one of the showings of the video

Elizabeth Warren at MNW Alliance 01/02/2012

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Candidate for U.S. Senate, speaking to several hundred people at a meeting of the Middlesex, Norfolk, and Worcester Democratic Alliance on January 2, 2012, in Franklin, MA.

The program will be shown tomorrow (Thursday, April 19) at 10:05am, 2:06pm and 8:05pm.  I believe that it will be on Channel 12, the channel for public programming, public bulletin board (non-profit only) and all non-government community information.

Please spread the word.

If you cannot see one of these screenings or ones that may occur in the future, there is a three part video on YouTube that covers the same event.

• Elizabeth Warren at MNW Alliance 01/02/2012 On Grassroots Government
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3

The Washington Post has the article Lawmakers consider changing tax breaks on retirement savings.

On Tuesday, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) scheduled a hearing on “tax-favored retirement accounts” that he said was intended to begin “framing the debate” in preparation for tax reform. Aides said Camp also is planning a first-ever examination of about $30 billion worth of expired tax breaks for individuals and corporations that Congress routinely extends, an idea that is also gaining traction in the Senate.

Whenever the Republicans want to frame a debate why is it that they want to smash that frame over the heads of the middle-class?

I may have to coin a new Greenberg’s Law of Closing Tax Loopholes, “When you ask the congress to eliminate tax loopholes, they always give the voters asked for  by eliminating any tax breaks that the those voters might enjoy and leaving the rest of the loopholes alone.”  I think this is their way of teaching us not to ask for closure of tax loopholes, even though they know pretty clearly which loopholes we want closed.  It is not the ones they focus on.

In The Real News article Inequality and Instability, “James K. Galbraith presents his study of the world economy just before the great crisis ”

From the transcript:

GALBRAITH: The book is built on a new body of information or a body of information from which we were able to measure the movement of inequality in the United States and broadly around the world over a period of about 40 years. And by doing that, we were able to make a much closer, I think, more careful comparison than had previously been possible between economic inequality as we measure it and the other things that are known to go on in the economy.

And the most basic finding, which is the one you already mentioned, is that the movement of inequality has been very closely associated in the U.S. and everywhere else with the financialization of the world’s economies and with the rising share of income in the financial sector and in sectors favored by the financial sector, that is to say, in sectors financed by venture capital and credit flows. And so what you see is a phenomenon where inequality becomes a measure of the dependence of economic growth on finance, and therefore on the instability of finance.

I have not been able to find part two of this interview yet. Perhaps it will be posted within the next few days.