Found this poster on the Occupy Democrats’ Facebook page.

They posed an interesting thought in the remarks about the poster.

The takeaway from this election is that if we want progressive reforms, popular ballots might be the most effective electoral strategy. Let’s up and down vote on the most important social, economic, and environmental justice questions of our time. It’s time we bypass the two-party system corrupted by corporate money. Who’s ready for direct democracy? What are your thoughts?

During the civil rights era, progressives found the way to get things done was to use the Supreme Court.  Now that regressives have managed to block that avenue, we just need to find another avenue.  Perhaps this is it.

The Boston Globe has the useless article Obama to nominate Loretta Lynch for attorney general.  There was a particular piece of information that I had read about before, and wanted to quote here.  The New York Times article Loretta Lynch, Federal Prosecutor, Will Be Nominated for Attorney General comes close enough.

After graduating from law school in 1984, she spent six years as an associate at the New York law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel before becoming a federal prosecutor. She became the chief assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York in 1998 and was nominated a year later to lead the office for the rest of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Before returning in 2010, she was a partner at Hogan & Hartson, now known as Hogan Lovells.

Oh, Lord no, here we go again.  From the interview in my previous post, Democrats, This Is Why You Lost, I pick up some dialog that I did not put in the previous post.

Juan Cole: How would you judge the tenure of Eric Holder and now that obviously he is going to be leaving in terms of his particular role in going after these banks and this whole idea of bankers being able to call directly to the Justice Department to negotiate their deals and stop prosecutions at the lower levels.

Matt Taibbi: Well, it’s funny.  For years now I have been covering a lot of this stuff, and I have spoken to a lot of people in law enforcement, and there are really two types of people that I talk to who are prosecutors. One is the kind of old school law enforcement type, they want to get the bad guy at all costs and the are really career civil servants who just want to do their jobs and want to see justice happen. And then there is this new kind of person who is appearing in government now who comes out of the corporate defense sector. These are people who grew up as corporate lawyers defending companies like Chase and Bank of America and that’s who Eric Holder is very pointedly. He spent a long time at a company being called Covington and Burling, and this type of lawyer, this type of law enforcement official is much more interested in coming up with the settlement that everybody feels  good about when they walk out of the room as opposed to the old school kind of justice where the bad guy gets his or her comeuppance in the end and I think his tenure was very representative of a big sea change in the way we  do white collar  crime in this country.

Should I have expected Obama to learn a damn thing about the Democrats’ losses last Tuesday?  I  would have been pretty naive, wouldn’t I?  These kinds of appointments and governance do not happen by accident.  These people know exactly what they are doing.  I am beginning to think that if any party is going to have this type of corrupt administration on their record, perhaps i would prefer it to be a Republican administration.  I’ll be thinking very strongly about this in 2016.

In answer to a question a little before the closing Q & A above, there are some remarks about whether or not the whistle blower case in this interview will be fully prosecuted at last.  This may reinforce what Taibbi said above.

Matt Taibbi: The is an important distinction, too. It’s often not the line investigators who are the problem. The people who actually work these cases, the career prosecutors who are doing this digging. Often times they are very talented and aggressive lawyers who really know what they are doing. The problem is the political wing of the Justice Department can take those cases and do whatever they want with them. So in Alayne’s case and in many other cases that they take these excellent investigations and they turn them into these slap on the wrist settlements, and that’s what she is worried about, I think.

So this is why we lost so big last Tuesday.

On Facebook I was warned:

Norman Hobson Better look at her record before you spout off Steve

Oh my, could I have jumped to conclusions too soon?  A Google search pointed me to the ABC News item The 5 Most Interesting Cases of Attorney General Nominee Loretta Lynch’s Career.  I can breathe a sigh of relief.  No executives of giant corporations in that list.

Naked Capitalism has the article Matt Taibbi and Alayne Fleischmann Discuss JP Morgan Mortgage Fraud, Eric Holder CoverUp on Democracy Now.

The article features this video from Democracy Now:

There are so many quotes from this video that I jotted down, that I’ll probably put some of them in the addendum to this post. Here is the one, I have chosen to feature.

Juan Cole: And Matt Taibi, The reality that despite all the claims of the Obama administration that they pursued all these civil cases that they never really went after the people who practically wrecked the world economy and how that relates to this election result that we just had. We obviously, Americans across the board from Democrats to Republicans to Independents are still furious about their economic situation and the failure of holding these people accountable

Matt Taibbi: It’s hard not to make a connection between the total lack of enthusiasm we saw for the Democratic Party this past week. For instance their behavior in pushing investigations of the financial services community. We saw it with the Occupy protests. I talk to people on Wall Street all the time. All my sources come from Wall Street, and they all say the same thing taht Barack Obama had an incredible opportunity in late 2008 just after he took office with his communication skill he could have gotten in front of the American people and explained to them exactly what happened and said this is why the economy is bad, this is why you are losing your job, there was massive criminal activity, it’s not just an accident, and then he could have gone and a few people in jail, and really put some teeth behind those words. The they swept it all under the rug and people, even if they don’t completely understand what happened they sense that nothing was done. I think it is important to understand that.

If you are a Democrat searching for a reason why the Democrats suffered big losses this past Tuesday, then look no further from this discussion. If you cannot see how this behavior of the Obama administration has soured the public on Obama, then you must be unwilling to face the truth.

If you cannot see why Hillary Clinton must not be the 2016 Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party and someone like Elizabeth Warren must be the nominee, then you are doing your party and your country a terrible disservice.

Here is another quote. Amy Goodman had played a video clip of Obama’s press conference announcing Holder’s resignation. Obama offered high praise for the fines Holder extracted from the financial industry. Amy Goodman asked for Matt Taibbi’s reaction.

Matt Taibbi: The first thing I would say is, ok, they brought a bunch of settlements, collected a bunch of money, but there isn’t a single individual in this entire tableau who is actually individually paying any kind of penalty for any of these misdeeds. All of that money came out of the pockets of shareholders. No executives had to pay a fine. No executives had to do a single day in jail. There were not even charges filed against any individuals.

As I reread this quote as I place it here, I realize how much it reinforces the points I made above the line.