The Maura Healy campaign asked me to share this with you.

I am a sucker for this kind of politician who wants the people to participate and knows how to use modern technology to make it happen.

Then of course there are all those good things her interns say about her.

The Examiner has the story Report: Kennedy family urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president.

The family seems split because Warren is the one who most resembles the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, a staunch liberal, who stands apart from Clinton, who often appears too close to Wall Street and the Washington establishment.

“Joe thinks Hillary has too many ties with Wall Street,” this source added. “He loves Liz because she’s a full-throated liberal like his Uncle Ted. She has Ted’s voice — loud and angry and triumphant.”

Thanks to Rebecca Deans-Rowe for posting this on her Facebook page.

See my previous post Run, Warren, Run! Draft Elizabeth Warren for President in 2016 for a link to the petition you might want to sign.

Naked Capitalism has the article Krugman v. Morgenson on Too Big to Fail by David Dayen.

The bottom line is that this exhibits pure party-based tribalism. Take whatever half-truth you can turn into a talking point and parade it. And because it comes from an anointed spokesman of the Left in the mainstream circles, the hedged conclusions get spun into iron laws. The Reuters daily roundup Counterparties puts Krugman atop a summary they call “Farewell to Too Big to Fail.” (On the other hand, I was glad to see Bob Kuttner call Krugman out for this, however gently.)

If Krugman wants to become the President’s mouthpiece in the second term, that’s his business. But doing so by fudging the data is pretty weak.

This is the first I have read about this topic.  I have a feeling that when I read more news, I am going to hear about Krugman and the GAO report in highly favorable terms.  I thought I would post this article on my blog so I would have a record of it as a counterpoint to what is in the MSM.

Democracy Now has a two part interview that begins with Henry Siegman, Leading Voice of U.S. Jewry, on Gaza: “A Slaughter of Innocents”

I previously blogged about a book that is mentioned in this interview – The State of Israel ‘My Promised Land,’ by Ari Shavit.

The second part of the interview is U.S. Jewish Leader Henry Siegman to Israel: Stop Killing Palestinians and End the Occupation.

The segment ends with an exchange that I was hoping someone would state.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, I wanted to ask you about media coverage of the conflict right now in Gaza. In a comment to close the CBS show Face the Nation on Sunday, the host, Bob Schieffer, suggested Hamas forces Israel to kill Palestinian children.

BOB SCHIEFFER: In the Middle East, the Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that is embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its cause—a strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters. Last week I found a quote of many years ago by Golda Meir, one of Israel’s early leaders, which might have been said yesterday: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children,” she said, “but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

AMY GOODMAN: That was the host, the journalist Bob Schieffer, on Face the Nation. You knew Prime Minister Golda Meir.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes, I did. I wasn’t a friend of hers, but I knew her, and I heard her when she made that statement. And I thought then, and think now, that it is an embarrassingly hypocritical statement. This statement was made by a woman who also said “Palestinians? There are no Palestinians! I am a Palestinian.” If you don’t want to kill Palestinians, if that’s what pains you so much, you don’t have to kill them. You can give them their rights, and you can end the occupation. And to put the blame for the occupation and for the killing of innocents that we are seeing in Gaza now on the Palestinians—why? Because they want a state of their own? They want what Jews wanted and achieved? I find that, to put it mildly, less than admirable. There is something deeply hypocritical about that original statement and about repeating it on the air over here as a great moral insight.

I am sick and tired of hearing this quote from Golda Meir as if it were a piece of wisdom.

The Real News Network has published the final epsisde Capitalism Will Hit the Wall Again, Hard – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI (5/5).

FLASSBECK: Yeah, but public ownership is politically blocked. And even public spending is blocked politically. So the capitalism are blocking themselves. They’re blocking themselves by blocking everything. They’re not investing themselves. They’re blocking the government from being the big spender and taking on government debt. They’re not giving income to the workers. So the whole system comes to an end. It hits the wall at a certain point.

So what I expect is a bigger crisis than we have seen.

And then again comes the question: do we find the politicians who are able to learn the lesson from this bigger crisis, maybe the big depression or however you may call it, to find a way out into a new system? Which, in my opinion, should not be a totally planned system or a socialist system or something like that, but again a mixed system, where we have a strong government that is regulating the most crucial things. The most crucial things are the financial markets and the labor market. This has to be regulated by the government. Otherwise it cannot work

Paul Jay is looking for the one easy solution, but Flassbeck refuses to buy what Jay is suggesting. If Paul Jay ever finds that easy solution, he would deserve at least a Nobel Prize.

Rather than looking for the one easy solution, it might be easier to come up with a number of things we definitely should not do.

The one thing that comes readily to my mind as something we should not do is to anoint Hillary Clinton as our next President in 2016. She may be the least likely Democrat to understand the issue and really want to take steps to fix it. People who have an inkling of a clue are Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Alan Grayson, and I am sure others of whom I am unaware.

In the Massachusetts Governor’s race, I am thinking that in order of awareness it might be Don Berwick, Martha Coakley, and sad to say Steve Grossman in last place. I was a fan of Steve Grossman until his recent turn toward Super PAC funded negative advertising over invented issues.

News.mic has the article The Supreme Court’s Baffling Science Illiteracy Is Becoming a Big Problem for America by Erin Brodwin  July 1, 2014

On Monday, the Supreme Court in their controversial Hobby Lobby ruling equated contraception to abortion. The problem with their decision is this: There’s absolutely zero science to back it up.

“The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

Of the four methods Christian company Hobby Lobby claims cause abortion (Plan B, ella, and two IUDs), exactly zero prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. All four methods work by stopping fertilization from happening in the first place.

This illiteracy has bothered me for a long time.  What are the chances for long term success of a system that has 9 people without a clue making life altering decisions for 350,000,000 people?

David Sirota has written the piece Clinton Isn’t Warren, No Matter What Her Allies Say.

He cites a number of issues with Hillary Clinton that also trouble me a lot.  However, his introduction captures the spirit of my concerns:

Clinton last week filled in for George W. Bush at an Ameriprise conference, continuing a speaking tour that is raking in big money from Wall Street.

How anyone can like both Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton is difficult for me to understand.  They are polar opposites on many issues.  In my case, the few points of agreement that they have are not issues on which I agree with either one of them.

The Daily Currant has the story Elizabeth Warren Punches Banking Lobbyist in the Face.

“They were arguing over the role of derivatives in causing the global financial crisis,” explains an anonymous Warren staffer, “and things started to get heated. They were both standing up wagging their fingers at each other while screaming at the top of their lungs.

“And then suddenly she just popped him in the face. Out of nowhere, just one really hard jab with her fist. He collapsed to the floor and started bleeding from his nose. I mean it wasn’t a lot of blood, but there was definitely some.

I can picture it now, this frail woman who probably weighs less than 100 lbs decks this lobbyist with one blow.  Is this why we elected her?

In case I have to spell it out for you, here is a quote from The Daily Currant’s About page.

The Daily Currant is an English language online satirical newspaper that covers global politics, business, technology, entertainment, science, health and media. It is accessible from over 190 countries worldwide – now including South Sudan.

I can hardly wait to hear how Faux Noise covers this “story”.  If anyone has the fortitude to be able to watch that other satirical medium, please report back here if they cover it.

The Real News Network has an interview that starts with this first segment Reaganism and Thatcherism were Intellectually Dishonest – Heiner Flassbeck on Reality Asserts Itself (1/5).

This should prove to be an interesting series. In the first one there is a good discussion of what happened in the 1970s with the oil driven inflation.

JAY: And why do you think these ideas became dominant? And what changed? You talked about this moment after World War II that was kind of desperate, and so, you know, the elites around the world bought into this Bretton Woods idea. What changed?

FLASSBECK: I think the main thing were the oil price explosion, what is called the oil price explosions in the middle of the ’70s and the end of the ’70s, where we had hikes in inflation all around the world, in the industrialized world, in the United States and Europe, everywhere. Inflation went up because wages were on the rise. There was full employment everywhere. So the unions were strong about pushing for higher wages–.

JAY: But inflation also went up because oil prices went way through the roof.

FLASSBECK: Yeah, yeah, but in–the second round was–this is really what economists call a second-round effect. And they were right at that point of time that wages were creating a second-round effect for inflation, and this was a lasting effect on inflation. And then monetary policy stepped in, and monetary policy harshly broke, so to say, this circle of rising wages and rising inflation.

JAY: By raising interest rates through the roof.

FLASSBECK: And then raising interest rates through the roof, and then by creating unemployment. This was the time when unemployment, so to say, entered the Western world. This was the first time.

And this conflict between inflation and unemployment was taken by the monetarists, by the neoclassical economists, to say, you see? Keynesianism is wrong because Keynesianism always produces inflation; in the end they produced inflation. It was good with high employment for a time, but then it overshoots. So we need more objective steering of monetary policy. We should not allow these bouts of inflation, and we should stop it early on, and this can only be done by an independent central bank. And then–so monetarism took over. And academically they were also quite successful at convincing, so to say, most economists that only a neoclassical theory, a neoliberal theory, would be a scientific approach to economics.

JAY: But weren’t they right in terms of the levels of inflation? Weren’t they right?

FLASSBECK: No, no, for the moment they were right. For a moment it was right. If you take Europe or Germany or the United States, it was right at that moment of time: it was not correct and it was not reasonable to increase wages in response to the higher inflation that came from oil price explosion. This is, so to say, a supply-side effect, this is really a supply-side effect where inflation rises, and this cannot be taken from the companies at home, because we have to give that income, so to say, to the producers of oil. We have to send it over to Saudi Arabia. So it was no longer there. And then to fight for something that is no longer there, that’s not very reasonable. That leads to inflation. But that was only the first round. In the second round, the second oil price explosion, wage increases were much lower, much lower. But nevertheless, monetary policy–.

JAY: But the wages had to go up to keep up with the inflation from the oil prices.

FLASSBECK: Yeah, but that’s a very open question. There I’m not of that opinion, because what happens if–what you should get always: you should have wages following, so to say, a normal inflation rate. But if the inflation rate, for external reasons that you cannot influence (something like the oil price hike), increase, then the internal fight doesn’t make sense, because it’s gone. This income is gone. The inflation, the higher rate of inflation shows that income has gone elsewhere.

As is typical of Paul Jay, he fails to get the point, but if you have an open mind you do not have to suffer the same fate. What I get from this whole interview (not just the excerpt above) is an explanation of how the inflation problem was correctly although painfully solved by Reagan/Thatcherite policies (which were really German policies). Also that the correctness of those policies was limited to the situation of an exogenous driver of inflation. What we are experiencing in the world economy today is nothing like the issue in the 1970s, so supply side solutions are totally inappropriate to the current situation.

Actually, supply side economics might seem to be a good idea when there is more demand than supply. However, it fails to take into account that when there is already full employment, there is no more supply to be had. When there is not enough demand to use what could be supplied, then there is no sense in increasing supply which is already too big for the demand. The only insight during the period of the 1970s and 80s was that when demand exceeds supply under full employment, you have to cut demand. The Reaganites never admitted that was what had to happen. That is what they did, but they pretended it was something else.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is what has lead to the ensuing decades of doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.

I suspect that all these issues will be treated in more depth in the later segments, if only Paul Jay will stop interrupting the interviewee.

Naked Capitalism has the article Hillary Clinton and Trade Deals: That “Giant Sucking Sound”.

Oopsie. I guess “the little time-out” was over when the Korea deal rolled around. And Clinton at State must have “evaluated” the “proposed agreement” and exercised her “judgment” and given the deal the big thumbs up, or it would not have have passed. And guess what! We — and by “we,” I mean American workers, not the political class — “learned the hard way” again, as 40,000 jobs were lost. Granted, the Korean dealmakers aren’t in NAFTA’s league, where almost 700,000 jobs were lost, but they’re in there punching all the same. Kudos..
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NOTE I know Warren says a lot, and good for her, but leftish Democrats have an unfortunate tendency to think that performative utterances are a large subset of speech acts, when in fact they are an extremely small one. “I do” is a performative utterance; it changes a real social relation. A speech on the rubber chicken circuit, or on YouTube, or even at Netroots Nation, no matter how fervent, is not. I am seeing speeches from Warren. I’m not seeing hearings. I’m not seeing investigations. I’m not seeing bills. I’m not seeing things done that legislators do.

The article quotes from Clinton’s new book:

It’s safe to say that the TPP won’t be perfect — no deal negotiated among a dozen countries ever will be — but its higher standards, if implemented and enforced, should benefit American businesses and workers.

This stance sound reasonable until you realize that there is no proof that these secret negotiations include “higher standards” that relate to improving working conditions.  I have only heard about the secret parts that would undermine individual national attempts to improve working conditions.  Is Clinton mouthing platitudes that have no basis in fact?

This is why I think Hillary Clinton is the problem and Elizabeth Warren may be the solution. Note the emphasis on “may”.  I’ll have to follow Elizabeth Warren’s activities in this arena before I can be more sure.

When trade between nations becomes problematic, nations get together to make treaties.  Well, workers’ issues are now problematic, we need to see nations getting together on treaties to solve these problems.

One of the above links is to the article Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, which lays out the case even more starkly.