Elizabeth Warren has a post that features an appearance of hers at a banking committee hearing.  Accompanying the video, she says:

We now have two decades of evidence that when corporations and their investors thrive, the profits no longer trickle down for working families to thrive too. Yesterday I asked a panel of income inequality experts: If we can’t count on CEOs to reinvest at least some of their profits in their workers, what steps can the government take to fill that void?

On the YouTube posting of the video below is the explanation:

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Q&A at a September 17, 2014 Banking Subcommittee on Economic Policy hearing entitled, “Who is the Economy Working For? The Impact of Rising Inequality on the American Economy.”

The witnesses included: Ms. Heather McGhee, President, Demos; Dr. Amir Sufi, Professor of Finance, University of Chicago; and Ms. Claudia Viek, CEO, California Association for Micro Enterprise Opportunity (CAMEO), and Dr. Adam Hersh, Senior Economist, Center for American Progress.

Pay particular attention to the remarks of the final panelist, Dr. Adam Hersh. He finally speaks to the issue of this economy that I refer to as “What part of no freakin’ customers do you not understand?”

And I think there is a very simple answer to your question of if the private sector is not willing to invest even though the corporate sector is holding more than $2 trillion in cash reserves even though they can borrow billions at essentially zero interest rates right now and are sitting on this cash rather than doing something productive with it. If they are not willing to invest, then the public sector has the role to step up and invest. There is no shortage of public goods and public services investments that will increase the productive capacity of the US economy and create jobs that will lead to rising incomes and aggregate demand that will then crowd in investment from businesses. When they see a growing market, the investment will come to serve that market. And while we are in this time of high unemployment and high excess capacity in the productive economy this is the rwally the way that we are going to get out this spot.

My point is that if there are not enough customers for what companies can already produce, then why are you so surprised that they are not investing in making more stuff? Geepers, people, wake up.

This is the kind of discussion that would have prevented the Tuesday night massacre had Obama and his administration been focusing on these ideas for the last 6 years.

The Washington Post has the article What really went wrong for Democrats.  This covers a tiny subset of the issues mentioned in the subject article of my previous post Midterms 2014: The Red Wedding for Democrats.  However, this article gives me a  chance to re-emphasize some points I have been making on this blog.   The key excerpt from the current article is:

Ultimately, stressing individual issues such as the minimum wage hike and pay equity wasn’t enough to get past that — even if they are quite popular — because these voters want to hear a more comprehensive message about how Democrats would move the economy forward. Pollster Celinda Lake, who polled on multiple races, says the broader failure to articulate this — from the President on down — led these voters to opt instead for vague promises of a change in direction.

The issue I want to emphasize is the Democrats’ mistaken notion that around election time you can rouse the voters by lots of phone calls and door knocking.   If you can’t keep the voters aroused during non-election years, then it is far too late to try to get them involved when the election rolls around.  The Republicans seem to get the concept very well.  They are in permanent campaign mode.  They make sure that they are in the news pushing their erroneous ideas at least several times a day in the off years.  The Democrats think that in a few months of campaigning that they can correct the impression that the Republicans have planted.

The eye opener from the previous post is that if you look at the actual impact on the economy, the Democrats have managed to exacerbate the very trends in income inequality that they say they are against and the Republicans are actually for.  To those of us who have been critics of Obama’s economic policies, enforcement policies, and trade policies, it should have been no surprise that the situation has only gotten worse under Obama.  However, it was somewhat of a surprise to me because I have been so busy wishing that some of the good that Obama has done would outweigh what he has  failed to do.  Also I have been hoping away the bad stuff he has actively promoted.

At least I have been stating rather vociferously that Hillary Clinton is not the answer to what ails us.  In fact, she is a huge part of the problem.  I am coming to the conclusion that I may have to leave the Democratic Party if that is what it takes to fight against a Clinton presidential candidacy.

Naked Capitalism has the article Midterms 2014: The Red Wedding for Democrats.  Here is the best analysis of the 2014 elections that I have seen.  I knew a lot of this stuff already, and yet the article was still rather eye opening.

The midterms were not a “wave election” for Republicans, and in fact left policies were adopted by voters. The Democrats did not lose because of technical factors like the electoral map, structural issues with their “coalition,” or even for the reasons put forward by emo-dems. Rather, the midterms were a protest against neo-liberal principles and policy outcomes successfully achieved by Obama and the dominant factions of the Democratic Party: An active protest against Obama’s redistribution of income to the rich, and a sullen refusal to take ObamaCare as the positive good that the political class, refusing to look out the windows as they talk on their cellphones on the Acela, are sure that it is. Finally, Republicans are no less despised than Democrats, and in 2016 it may well be their turn to be subject to the cycle of massacre. Only a cat of a different coat….

This analysis explains why there are so many people who are Ready For Warren.  They are also Ready For Warren on Facebook.  How anybody could read this analysis and still be for Clinton in 2016 is just beyond my imagination.

This is a wake up call for progressives.  We need to understand that we may be backing the wrong horse, and the rest of the country is way ahead of us understanding this.  The right horse is not the Republicans and neither are many of the Democrats.  This is the message that we have not digested yet.

Since most of you won’t click through to the article, I guess I’ll have to put one of the charts from the article here.

The blue bars are the bottom 90% of the population by income; the red bars are the top 10%.

Are you surprised that the bottom 90% might not have appreciated what Obama did for them in the economic “expansion”? I don’t think a lot of the people I know are in the bottom 90%, so we don’t feel it quite the same way as they do.

You can squawk that Bush was the cause of the poor performance during the Obama administration, but politicians who blithely assume that everyone should feel great about the recovery is setting himself up for a big surprise.

Obama should have spent the last 6 years hammering on this issue rather than trying to fool people into congratulating him on a job well done. He should have explained exactly what needed to be done to fix the problem. Leaving the crooked financial executives free from jail to enjoy their ill gotten gains from the bank bailouts was not very convincing. By the way, corporations are not people, so jailing the bank executives is not the same as harming the banks or the financial system. In fact jailing the control fraudsters would have done more to fix the banking system than the Dodd-Frank bill did. Can you think of a politician (hint: her initials are EW) who has been hammering on this issue?

If you just saw the Boston Globe editorial cartoon, before seeing the figure above, you could feel pretty smug about the turkeys.

However, having seen the first image, you might wonder if the bottom 90% of the people figured one hatchet wielding pilgrim is as good as another.