The Daily Kos has the article Maffei ad hits back at attacks on where his baby was born.

Rep. Dan Maffei is out with a new ad hitting back at attacks by Republican John Katko that Maffei has abandoned his Syracuse district because his baby was born in the wrong place.

I love a demonstration of political jujitsu. Take the momentum of the attacker’s ad to flip him over your head and onto his back.

The Daily Kos has the article Chris Christie blows his top after angry constituent confronts him at press conference.

New Jersey’s biggest bully, Gov. Chris Christie turned up for a press conference yesterday and had a surprising spat with a New Jersey man who turned up to tell Christie he needs to do more for residents who are still displaced from their homes after Hurricane Sandy.

I am going to do a biased experiment here.  I am telling you what it is.  I am going to put the second Daily Kos video first to see what you think of the first Daily Kos video after you see their second one.

I think you will get more pleasure from seeing it in the order I present it. I can probably understand why The Daily Kos presented it the way they did, but I think it had unintended consequences.

The YouTube statistics on the first video they showed had 135,509 views, 180 thumbs up, 68 thumbs down. The second video that The Daily Kos showed had 2,666 views, 35 thumbs up, 1 thumb down.

Do you think the approximately 133,000 people who saw only the first video and not the second video got the same impact as the people who saw both videos? What about people who saw only the second video?

New Economic Perspectives has the article The New York Times Claims Democratic Leaders in Latin America are “Military Dictators” by William K. Black.

The NYT wrote an extraordinarily arrogant, insulting, dishonest, and hypocritical editorial attacking a series of Latin American democracies. The editorial manages to insult their democratically elected representatives and their electorates.

The editorial claims that it was prompted by the democratic reelection of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia. The editorial concedes that he was reelected in a well-deserved, democratic “landslide.”

“It is easy to see why many Bolivians would want to see Mr. Morales, the country’s first president with indigenous roots, remain at the helm. During his tenure, the economy of the country, one of the least developed in the hemisphere, grew at a healthy rate, the level of inequality shrank and the number of people living in poverty dropped significantly. He has also given the Andean nation, with its history of political turmoil, a long stretch of relative stability.”

I haven’t had a chance to read the whole article, but I am saving a link to it here. I just know that the NYT piece is going to be used as proof by some that the democratically elected leaders are military dictators. I can then come back to this post, read the whole article, and refute what is being said.

Naked Capitalism reprints the article Exploding Wealth Inequality in the United States by Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics, University of California Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman, Assistant Professor of Economics, London School of Economics. Originally published at VoxEU

I pull a few snippets to give you a hint of the article content.

In other words, family fortunes of $20 million or more grew much faster than those of only a few millions.

When you hear top 0.1% or top 1% or top 10%, it may be hard for you to figure out where you stand.  Putting a dollar amount on the net value of your family fortune gives you a handle on where you stand.  If your family fortune is less than $20 million, you aren’t rich enough to be able  to expect to get much richer.  So now you know which side is your side in the class war.

Since the housing and financial crises of the late 2000s there has been no recovery in the wealth of the middle class and the poor. The average wealth of the bottom 90% of families is equal to $80,000 in 2012 – the same level as in 1986. In contrast, the average wealth for the top 1% more than tripled between 1980 and 2012. In 2012, the wealth of the top 1% increased almost back to its peak level of 2007. The Great Recession looks only like a small bump along an upward trajectory.

So now you can understand why the view of how well the economy is recovering is quite different if you are a Charlie Baker from what you see if you are a Martha Coakley.

There were several interesting graphs, below is the caption to one of them.

Today, the top 1% families save about 35% of their income, while the bottom 90% families save about zero (Saez and Zucman 2014).

Oddly, the authors talk about incentives for increasing savings.  Here is paragraph from the conclusion:

There are a number of specific policy reforms needed to rebuild middle-class wealth. A combination of prudent financial regulation to rein in predatory lending, incentives to help people save – nudges have been shown to be very effective in the case of 401(k) pensions (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) – and more generally steps to boost the wages of the bottom 90% of workers are needed so that ordinary families can afford to save.

If you read between the lines, maybe the authors are recognizing that incentives for saving will only help people at the top of the bottom 90%.  The rest of the bottom 90% don’t save because they are unable to, not because they don’t have motivation that can be enhanced by incentives.

Now back to some things from the body of the article.

Ten or 20 years from now, all the gains in wealth democratisation achieved during the New Deal and the post-war decades could be lost. While the rich would be extremely rich, ordinary families would own next to nothing, with debts almost as high as their assets.

I hear talk that Elizabeth Warren should not run for president until after Hillary Clinton’s term is over.  Since Hillary has a very weak understanding of these issues compare to the strength of Warren’s understanding, waiting another 10 years ordinary families would already have next to nothing or be  very close to being in that situation.

Progressive estate and income taxation were the key tools that reduced the concentration of wealth after the Great Depression (Piketty and Saez 2003, Kopczuk and Saez 2004). The same proven tools are needed again today.

This is a lesson that some young, self-declared Democrats haven’t seemed to learn in their study of history.

The Daily Kos has a fundraising page to support GOTV (Get Out The Vote).  To be fair to The Daily Kos, I ought to urge you to follow the preceding link before (or after) you watch this amusing video below.

I tend to squirrel away snippets like this to use when someone challenges me to show a single instance where Faux Noise has ever lied. This is not to say that Faux Noise has a monopoly on shoddy journalism. I just can’t stand it when people try to tell me that Faux Noise is the most truthful news source the world has ever seen.

The Daily Kos article Colorado Station Busts Megyn Kelly for Outright Lying; FoxNews Offers No Correction adds the video below to the mix.

Pacific Standard  – The Science of Society has the article We Are All Confident Idiots.  Turns out that the article is much more interesting than the off putting title and accompanying graphic would make you believe. It would be a shame if people are turned away from reading the article by the very teaser meant to attract them. One might even call that ironic, given the actual content of the article.

As I read the article, I copied down a few snippets that I found intriguing.

Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you.

This reminded me that we should not be smug about how other people fall into this trap.  The title of the article did say that it applied to all of us.

In the classroom, some of best techniques for disarming misconceptions are essentially variations on the Socratic method. To eliminate the most common misbeliefs, the instructor can open a lesson with them—and then show students the explanatory gaps those misbeliefs leave yawning or the implausible conclusions they lead to.

Given my own feelings of the inadequacy of the Socratic method, I was almost ready to dismiss the article.  However, the quote does give a hint that the very implausible conclusions that the Socratic method leads to would insulate you from falling victim to the method.  My first and second impressions were both wrong.  In the end, this issue of the Socratic method is probably only a red flag for me.

For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls “considering the opposite.” To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions.

This is probably the best lesson you can learn from the article.  Which is not to say that reading the whole article to see how we get to this conclusion isn’t also very worthwhile.

Thanks to João Geada for posting this on his Facebook page.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Halfway There.  It discusses the implications of a NASA study and a WWF study.

If you graph this wildlife population loss, it looks uncannily similar to the graph-line of “Nature” in the HANDY Model: a point is reached where, suddenly, after a steady rise, or a gradual equilibrium, the graph-line of “Nature’s” population changes direction and begins to plummet. What is startling about the HANDY Model is that when this happens, the human populations of “Elites” and “Commoners” continue to rise, crossing the falling graph-line of “Nature.” This is called “overshoot”—the point where the human population begins consuming “Nature’s” resources faster than “Nature” can replenish them. The human population, after some period of “overshoot,” begins (of necessity) to collapse as well. The population of “Commoners” collapses first because the “Elites” are able, for a period of time, to thrive on their “Wealth.” In some iterations of the model, “Nature” recovers after the “Elite” population finally base-lines; in other iterations “Nature” fails to recover at all—the world becomes simply a wasteland, like one of those planets we keep investigating to see if it ever supported life.

This is a food for thought kind of article.  I am not claiming that these studies proved anything, or that we should jump right on it and change our behavior immediately as per the prescriptions in the article. The discussion of no-tillage farming and of a new kind of prosperity were very interesting.

The American Prospect has the article Warren’s Challenge to Clinton: A more insurgent campaign, like the one Elizabeth Warren waged for the Senate, could make Hillary Clinton a stronger candidate by Robert Kuttner. This is an updated version of an article they have previously published (and maybe something I already blogged about).

There is a good analysis of Warren’s possible moves.  Although it does leave out any consideration for what may happen if the Republican’s take over the Senate in 2016.   The ramifications of this possibility were brought up in an article I blogged about in my previous post 6 reasons Elizabeth Warren should run for president.

One of the things that struck me in Kuttner’s piece was the following quote:

Populism is damned in some quarters as demagogic, but there is a progressive brand of populism epitomized by Franklin Roosevelt that mobilizes the frustration of regular Americans against elites, in an entirely salutary form of class warfare. Progressive populism has been in short supply lately.

In my tirades on “the class war” that you will see from time to time on this blog, I am aiming for “an entirely salutary form of class warfare”.  Hence the need to bring this up explicitly.

Not all people in the top 1% are waging class warfare against us.  However, the people who are not waging the war present no significant obstacle to the ones that are waging it.  If we should be so fortunate as to win a couple of battles in this war and start to turn the tide, let us not go off the deep end.  This is not even a war against the oligarchic people.  It is a war against what they are doing to us.  If we  can build in enough protections against the bad behavior like this country did in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, then there would be no need for further punishment of the oligarchs.

In a casual retelling of the aftermath of World War I, we tried stringent punishment to hold Germany down so that they would not repeat what happened.  That effort totally backfired.  We must not dehumanize our enemies as they would dehumanize us.

Al Jazeera has the Empire episode War on Terror, War on Muslims?

Thanks to Andre Nasr for posting this on his Facebook page. I am still not sure how to take his reaction to this video. You may agree with him or this video or you may disagree (for all I know, they could be the same thing or different things), but at least it is a worthwhile attempt to hear what other people think, if you can hear.

Please keep in mind that criticizing the bad acts of some people in your own country has nothing to do with condoning the bad acts of other people in other countries. I’d like to dispense with the argument, “But look at what they do. Doing it back to them is thus justified.”

Thanks for Carol Goodwin for bringing this to my attention. Martha Coakley’s campaign has the web page Senator Warren asks, who is on your side?

“While Martha was out there, doing the work on behalf of people across this Commonwealth, well what Charlie was doing, largely, was firing people and outsourcing jobs.” -Senator Elizabeth Warren

On the YouTube post, it says:

While Charlie Baker outsourced jobs, Martha Coakley helped save 30,000 homes in Massachusetts. Together, we can set the record straight, on which candidate for governor will spend every day fighting for you and your family. Watch this video and share.

Most people are in denial about the class war that the oligarchs of the world are waging against the rest of us. For those few who are even aware that such a war is going on, some of them don’t seem to know which side is their own side.

For those in the 99% who think they are high enough up that they can afford to ally themselves with the top 1%, they just don’t seem to get how happy the 1% would be to go after the wealth of the 90% to 99%, after they suck all the wealth out of the 0% to 89%. Who do they think is going to stand with them when the top 1% comes after their money?