I was quite skeptical of the Gruber video that was out of  context, highly edited, had skips and jumps, and cut off Gruber’s words at strategic moments.  The video was more intent on making its own point than telling you what Gruber thought.

Reader WayneP sent a link to The Washington Post article Who is Jonathan Gruber? This article tries to put in a little context.

I have found the MSNBC article The mess Jonathan Gruber created.

Part of the problem with the Jonathan Gruber “stupid” story is that it’s a shiny object for the political world to stare at for a while. It offers more heat than light. It’s a bouncing ball for political insiders to chase after, despite its relative insignificance.

But since it’s likely to soon be the subject of congressional hearings, and since your crazy uncle who watches Fox News all day will be talking about nothing else at Thanksgiving, let’s grudgingly tackle this week’s Most Important Story Of All Time As Agreed Upon By Republicans And The Beltway Media.
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What about the notion that a “lack of transparency” created a “huge political advantage”? At face value, that doesn’t even make any sense – the entirety of the ACA process couldn’t have been much more transparent. There were countless open hearings, debates, meetings, and reports, all played out under the spotlight over the course of a year. Congressional Republicans have worked in secret, behind closed doors, on an ACA alternative for five years, but the process of creating “Obamacare” was the polar opposite.

So the question is, are you really prepared for Thanksgiving this year?

Well, chalk up another one  for a professor from my alma mater.  Do you think this might lower the value of consulting gigs for MIT professors?

The Daily Kos has published a Cartoon: The people* have spoken!. Follow the previous link to read and join the conversation about the cartoon.

Can you hear me now?

Robert Reich has posted a video on his Facebook page The choice ahead for the Democrats, and what we must do to help them make the right choice..

Reich has put together all the pieces that you have found scattered about many of my recent posts.

When I first read the headline, I read it as I have put it in the subject of this blog post.  I was going to say to readers in Massachusetts that I bet you think this is about Charlie Baker and Chris Christie.

After reading the story, and  then went back to reread the Naked Capitalism headline which is State Street, Governor Elect Rauner Both Implicated in Pay-to-Play Scandals.

Rauner’s aides tried dismissing the revelation arguing that these firms were already feeding at the public fund management trough. That argument doesn’t cut it from a legal or common sense standpoints, as Sirota explains:

But legal experts, former SEC officials and campaign finance lawyers interviewed by IBTimes said the [SEC] rule applies over the entire life of a pension fund investment because those investments can be terminated, sold off or extended at any time. The point is to prevent political contributions from influencing not just the original decision to invest, but the ongoing choice to continue or terminate the investment.

David Melton of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform said pension “contracts come up for renewal periodically,” and that it’s therefore “inconsistent with the spirit and purpose of the law” to rely on the argument that the donations are acceptable because they were made after the original investment decision.

In the case involving Baker and Christie, bake was the fund manager at the time and Christie was the governor of New Jersey.  This case has been under investigation, but the results are being withheld from the public until well after the election is in the past.

Naked Capitalism has yet another article to add to the pile – Why Democrats Lost: It’s Not All About Millennials by Joe Firestone.

In this case, I am going to talk about what I like in this article and what needs a better presentation to be plausible.

But why in heavens name, should I contribute to any candidate who won’t tell me what they’ve done, and what they plan to do down to the level of specific commitments? Why in heavens name should I move to buy a pig-in-a-poke?
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In short, this year’s Democratic Campaign handling of e-mail was incompetent. It could not have been better designed to generate anger and contempt from Democratic Party-inclined supporters. It was a series of no-reply harangues intermixed by messages about “your supporter record shows . . . “ (which were like dunning messages from debt collectors), and whining pleas for money from seemingly idiot candidates who, apparently, could not even say who they were and what they stood for. They had absolutely nothing to run on, a condition I predicted would result as far back as 2010 when they chained themselves to PPACA. No wonder they got blown out by the worst gaggle of Republicans ever assembled for a political campaign.

Joe has finally put into words what I felt subconsciously when I got all those fund-raising emails.

At a conscious level, I kept wondering why the party of the middle and lower classes was expecting us to have enough money to match what the wealthy top 1% could spend.

A party that truly understood their constituency might have tried to put together a better plan than raising money from people who don’t have it. Had they thought really hard, they might have come up with a plan such as build a policy record that would show these people which side we are really on.

So, third, here’s what the Democrats could have run on, on the condition that the voters delivered both Houses of Congress to them, with the Republican constituencies that likely would have been impacted.

[Admirable list of 11 proposed benefits and increases in benefits. and some paragraphs about other proposals.]

In the political debate that might have ensued over them, the main Republican counters would have been funding problems, the prospect of inflation, and the debt, apart from their usual calls for self-discipline and condemnation of lazy people and moral degenerates (unlike them and their Wall Street and big bank allies of course) who won’t stand on their own two feet and want, instead to rely on big Government. There are of course MMT answers explaining why all these supposed problems are faux problems, or can be easily be managed.

This is where Joe needs to come up with specifics on how this would be paid  for. If he recognizes that Democrats’ problem was that they  failed to come up with specifics about what solutions they have, then he shouldn’t make the same mistake himself.  He does provide links which would supposedly answer these questions, but that isn’t enough.  He needs to say something more specific about this in the same article where he makes his costly proposals.

Modern Money Theory says that a country like ours is not limited by having enough money, but it is limited by real resources. Given this real limitation, I would think his long list of benefits would have to be accompanied by an explanation of what shifting real resources to all these people with suddenly more money would do to the economy. At some point real resources and unemployed people would be in short supply. Then inflation would be an issue. MMT proponents can’t expect people to believe that nobody else would have to adjust so that inflation could be controlled. MMT proponents always must show explicitly that they take the problem seriously.

Elizabeth Warren posted Elizabeth Warren’s reaction to what happened in the midterm elections on her facebook page.

Last night I talked with Late Night with Seth Meyers about what happened in last week’s elections. Take a look.

I think it is really instructive to listen to what she said that drew applause and what she said that met with dead silence from the audience. There is also what she did not say. She did not lay any blame for the failure to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street at the feet of the DOJ.

She really did not own up to any of the mistakes people in her own party made that might have driven potential supporters to stay home rather than vote. I think that is why their was dead silence from the audience for much of what she said.

In my estimation this was not one of her best performances.

Naked Capitalism has the article Joe Firestone: Elizabeth Warren – Better, But Not There Yet. I agree with almost everything Joe Firestone said.  Although I strongly promote Elizabeth Warren for President, I do realize she is not perfect.  I’ll quote one sample of what Firestone had to say, but if you really want to understand the good and the bad of Warren’s positions, you will really have to read the article yourself.

That’s what happened in 2009 – 2010. Democrats structured legislation in a vain search for bipartisanship, and in doing so produced:

— an inadequate stimulus bill that lowered unemployment only very slowly,

— a Credit card Reform Bill that did not limit credit card interest rates to non-usurious levels,

— a FINREG bill that still allows Systemically Dangerous Institutions (SDIs) to thrive and threaten the financial system, and that still allows trading in derivatives, and finally:

— a “health care reform” bill that, four and a half years after its passage in early 2010, covers only 10 of the 45 – 55 million people without insurance, leaves us with 35,000 to 45,000 annual fatalities due to the absence of medical care, and still leaves millions of people who have insurance in danger of bankruptcy, due to overwhelming medical bills.

So, Warren is dead-on about this. We don’t need compromise for its own sake, and legislation that creates the short-lived illusion that Congress is finally “doing something” about our problems. What we need, and have needed since the election of 2008 is that Congress actually legislate solutions to those problems, and end the kabuki theatre.

I posted my reaction to the article on the Naked Capitalism site.

My only quibble is that it is unrealistic to demand promises about specific legislation. No President has free rein to get exactly the legislation that she wants. We all know that. So a promise to get the Congress to enact specific legislation is a promise that no one can believe.

We need to think about what kind of promises we should expect that are within the power of the President to keep. The President can certainly promote certain legislation, fight for certain legislation, take executive actions that are within her power, rally the people to put pressure on Congress, etc. We need to think about what else we should demand that is realistic.

We don’t need more arguments about unrealistic promises not kept.

Politicus USA has the article Bernie Sanders Takes A Big Step Towards Challenging Clinton for 2016 Democratic Nomination.  They cite a number of quotes from The Washington Post article Tad Devine signs on to work with Bernie Sanders on potential 2016 run.  First the good news.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has spent months fishing for a strategist to guide his potential 2016 presidential campaign. On Monday, he hooked a big one: Tad Devine, one of the Democratic Party’s leading consultants…

They also quote a description on what are the issues for Sanders.

Over breakfast on Saturday in Los Angeles, Sanders said that he would center a possible campaign on the “collapse of the middle class” and “income and wealth inequality,” which he calls a “huge issue from a moral sense and a political sense.”

Of course, I would think these are important issues.  Whether or not they are winning issues for any near term political campaign or candidate is even less important than getting the public to focus on these issues.  Well, the voters are already focused on these issues, but they need some indication that someone has some ideas on what to do about it.

Well, I couldn’t make any blog post without criticizing something, so here is the end of the first quote above.

… and a former high-level campaign aide to Al Gore, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis.

if the campaign aide positions were on all of their Presidential campaigns, this does not bode well.  Perhaps he worked on the successful Senatorial and Gubernatorial campaigns for these politicians.

New Economic Perspectives has the article CEO Compensation: “Cheaters Prosper”.

While the scandal of not prosecuting any of the senior officers who were enriched by leading the three epidemics of accounting control fraud that drove the financial crisis for those frauds is well known, the public does not understand that the fraudulent senior bankers have also been able to keep virtually all of the fraud proceeds they received through leading the accounting control frauds.

This excerpt may help to justify my constant harping on the Obama administration’s failure to criminally prosecute cases of accounting control fraud.  Eric Holder’s chosen head of the effort to prosecute criminal conduct in the financial meltdown pretty clearly stated that he had no clue as to what accounting control fraud was.  How can you be in charge of law enforcement in an area that is rife with a crime you gladly profess you don’t even know exists or what it is?

The above excerpt barely scratches the surface of what you would learn if you actually read the article at the above link.  It is so frustrating for me to know what is in these articles, and to also know that even the people reading my blog are mostly unaware of the content of these articles.  Short of plagiarizing these articles, or copyright infringement by publishing them on this blog, I don’t know what else I could do.  Any suggestions?