Brave New Films has a series called Over Criminalized.

I have seen two of the episodes on YouTube. Here is the first episode, Why Are We Using Prisons to Treat Mental Illness?

It’s simple. Diversion programs work better than incarceration – for everyone. In cities like Seattle, San Antonio, and Salt Lake City, we see that successful solutions are a viable option to help end serious social problems. These services alter the course of people’s lives in a positive way and save taxpayers huge amounts of money. We cannot continue to isolate and imprison people who suffer from mental illness, substance abuse, or homelessness. We must treat them with compassion and care to better serve our communities and our pocketbooks.

When Charlie Baker first saw the horrible conditions in the underfunded Massachusetts state mental hospitals, I wonder if programs like the one in the above video existed. Had he known about these, would he have “fixed” Massachusetts’ problem the way he did? He closed the state mental hospitals, relegated the residents to underfunded to non-existent community based programs, and called it a success.

This is the kind of “successful” management skills that the people of Massachusetts just chose to put in the Governor’s office. Would the people of Massachusetts have been so eager to have Charlie Baker if someone like Don Berwick had explained that there is a more humane way to treat mentally ill people that costs even less than the Baker plan? Martha Coakley, who made mental health treatment a major component of her campaign, should have used this video to explain to the voters what she meant. I am sad to say that I came across this video three days after she lost the election.

The Colbert Report has this segment The Republicans’ Inspiring Message on Climate Change.

Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe gears up to chair the Senate Environmental Committee despite literally writing the book on global warming denial.

I rue the day my parents allowed me to attend MIT. Now I cannot ever become an influential politician on matters of science because I can’t claim to be a pure “not a scientist.”

Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Scientists.

Here is a thought experiment.  Imagine Bernie Madoff getting the Obama/Holder treatment. In case you have forgotten, the WikiPedia article on Bernie Madoff starts out with this introduction.

Bernard Lawrence “Bernie” Madoff (/ˈmeɪdɒf/; born April 29, 1938) is an American convicted of fraud and a former stockbroker, investment advisor, and financier. He is the former non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of a Ponzi scheme that is considered to be the largest financial fraud in U.S. history.

If only Bernie had incorporated and had stolen more money, the results might have been quite different.

The Obama administration, fearing the damage to the economy from a collapse of the Ponzi scheme, decides to pour in enough bailout money to make the investors whole.  Not knowing how to unravel the mess after pouring in the money to cover up the disaster, they decide to pay Madoff huge bonuses in the hopes that he can figure out how to fix it.  After all, corporations are so diffuse that you can’t figure out who is responsible for the corporate acts of the corporate person, so you must protect people from the  damage that would come from too big to fail actually failing.

Moreover, you  cannot imagine how a corporation could possibly succeed by making no investments with the investors’ money, let alone bad investments.  So there is obviously no criminality or fraud to be found in the corporation.  If there is fraud to be found it must be in the investors putting money into a corporation that promised unbelievable financial gains.  The fact that Madoff had successfully invested people’s money for 20 or 30 years is no excuse for the investors not to realize that this couldn’t go on.  Why were they stupid enough to think that past performance was indicative of  future results?  Maybe these investors had criminal intent for trying to take advantage of offers that clearly could not be fulfilled.

Bringing some investors to trial for their criminal activities ends up in a big flop when some former regulator comes in and explains to the jury that Madoff’s plan was what we call a Ponzi scheme.  He is the real criminal, not the investors.  (See previous post Sacramento Residents Found Not Guilty of Mortgage Fraud)

In the meantime there are all sorts of witnesses from inside the corporation who have evidence that Madoff was warned time and time again that his scheme was fraudulent and could not continue.  Of course he fired those people if he couldn’t intimidate them into silence, and you cannot depend on people with an axe to grind.  Nevertheless, these people might testify in a courtroom, convince a jury, and upset the bailout.  So you string them along by pretending you care about their testimony.  All the while you are plotting with Madoff about some fig leaves you can use to cover up the real fraud, and pretend that things have changed so that it cannot happen again.

If you read the article in my previous post, The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare,  with the Madoff thought experience in mind, you might find it easier to understand.  (By the way, the link to the article in the previous post has been fixed.)

Do you suppose that the Massachusetts Democratic Party will wake up to the fact that if a candidate does not excite people in one election, then trying the same ideas and candidate again may not be the best bet?  Of course the counter argument is who the Republicans managed to get into office.  However, in this case when both parties try the same old, same old, then one of them is bound to win.  In this election, the results showed that the majority of people could not agree on which one of the two major party candidates they wanted.  We had to leave it up to a plurality of 48% of the voters to choose Baker.

Do we want to place the same bet in the 2016 Presidential election?  Do we  want to  depend on the Republicans to put up Mitt Romney against Hillary Clinton?

My reading of the election results is that when you tell people that the current direction of the ruling party’s policy are making their lives better, but they feel in their gut that it isn’t true, then they are not coming out in droves to keep you in office.  If the people who are supposed to be on my side, don’t even know how bad it is for me, how can I possibly get their attention?  Or more likely, if these people won’t listen to me, why bother?

Giving the people the same old same old, which they have already rejected, won’t get them excited.  The Democrats need turn out to overcome the resources that the Republicans  have to throw at the elections.  If Martha Coakley was outspent 10:1 or 11:1, should she have been surprised, or should she have had a plan?

I know that sending pleading emails and phone calls asking for 10 times more money from a constituency that doesn’t have any money is not a plan.

I can also imagine that starting the planning for the 2016 Presidential campaign is something that should already be well underway.  If a Democrat is going to win, then a winning message needs to be delivered yesterday, today, and every day thereafter, until the election.  That winning message can’t be based on pushing ideas that your potential voters know are not true.  If you show by your actions that you care more about transferring wealth to the already wealthy, then any protestations that you are for the other 90% will be completely ignored.

The Republicans seem to have hot button issues that drive their supporters into a frenzy of activity and  voting.  The Democrats only issue that could possibly excite a large number of people to compensate for the ardor of the smaller base of Republicans, is the economics one – equality and justice.  Equality being not giving breaks to the wealthy that the non-wealthy don’t get.  Justice being to bring criminal charges against the biggest criminals imaginable, rather than doing everything you can to help them cover up  their crimes.  (See my previous post  The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare.)

The losers in an election like to think the voters are stupid.  May it is the losers just not being very smart.  The losers were given an issue on a silver platter, but they let their leaders fritter it away.  If we only have two versions of a Republican Party in this country, maybe it is time to recognize the fact that we need to bend one of those two parties in a new direction – or start another party.

The Ready For Warren facebook page highlights this Rolling Stone article The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare.

And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”
.
.
.
Because after all this activity, all these court actions, all these penalties (both real and abortive), even after a fair amount of noise in the press, the target companies remain more ascendant than ever. The people who stole all those billions are still in place. And the bank is more untouchable than ever – former Debevoise & Plimpton hotshots Mary Jo White and Andrew Ceresny, who represented Chase for some of this case, have since been named to the two top jobs at the SEC. As for the bank itself, its stock price has gone up since the settlement and flirts weekly with five-year highs. They may lose the odd battle, but the markets clearly believe the banks won the war. Truth is one thing, and if the right people fight hard enough, you might get to hear it from time to time. But justice is different, and still far enough away.

So the Democrats are wondering why there was no enthusiasm for Democrats in the recent election.  Even if most people have no inkling of the details in the above article, at least 90% of the people know that things are not as  rosy as the Democrats pretended they were.  If the Democratic administration cannot perform any better than it has with respect to the massive transfer of wealth upwards, then why bother?  Elizabeth Warren is the only plausible answer to why bother.

CBS News has the story Four reasons Elizabeth Warren should run for president in 2016.  I’ll just give you the four reasons, you’ll have to read the article itself if you want to know more.

1. She fits the national mood

2. Clinton’s current standing in the polls won’t last

3. Someone has to do it

4. She has little to lose and a lot to gain

While these ideas aren’t all that original to CBS, it is significant that a major lame stream press news outlet would start talking about it.

I have been Ready for Warren for quite some time.

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.

I hope I don’t need to remind you that there is a statewide election in Massachusetts November 4, 2014.

Polling Hours: 7am until 8pm

Find out where to vote.

2014 Statewide Ballot Questions.

If I could, I’d drive you to the polling stations and hold your hand while you voted. How much simpler than this can it get?