The Daily Kos has the article I’m Sorry I Couldn’t Make Enough People Listen which was recommended to me by William Kilmer.

Last December I was knocking on doors in western Pennsylvania communities that I might characterize as the rust on the rust belt. As part of a “front porch focus group” I was tasked with talking to voters about the presidential election, finding out what issues they cared about and what they thought of candidates. A number of things became clear to me very quickly.

Voters were fed up. They saw both government and big business as part of a rigged game that was leaving them behind. They believed, quite rightly, that the majority of politicians don’t respond to the people when big donors tell them to do otherwise. They were desperate to smash that system and find a leader who would stand up for them. They no longer trusted “the system” and longed for someone outside of it to break through and make real, fundamental change.

The final paragraph of the article says the following:

But will the liberal elites listen? Will we be able to wrest control of our party and our progressive institutions away from Washington and Wall Street insiders who have destroyed our credibility with working class people across so much of the country? Will you help me make them listen this time?

This is a great, great article. I had similar frustrations talking to the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee of which I am no longer a member. I have long ago stopped reading the Daily Kos. Is this their attempt to make amends?

On the article on The Daily Kos, I made the following comment:

Is this article a sign that it is safe to read The Daily Kos again? I stopped reading the Daily Kos when they stopped allowing any dissent on Hillary Clinton. While this is a great article, I will not be a regular reader of Daily Kos again. The only reason for my seeing this article is that it was recommended to me by a friend whose judgment I trust.

Washington’s Blog has the article Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year by Michael Snyder. Here are the numbers that Jimmy Dore quoted from the article.

-38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.

-51 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year.

-62 percent of all American workers made less than $40,000 last year.

-71 percent of all American workers made less than $50,000 last year.

Being a stickler for not misusing statistics, I immediately saw the flaw in these numbers. The following sentences that Jimmy Dore did not quote may give you a hint at what I knew.

That first number is truly staggering. The federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, and yet almost 40 percent of all American workers do not even bring in $20,000 a year.

The first set of numbers are about what an individual worker makes. The poverty level number is for a family of five. There is no simple and straightforward translation between what a single worker makes and the total income of a family of five.

I made the following comment on this blog article:

Did you forget that most families these days have 2 workers, by necessity? Yes the numbers are bad for the USA, it is just unfortunate that you have to use numbers in a slightly misleading way to make your point.

Let us always try to stick to the unadorned truth as we make our arguments for how to make the country better. It may be easier to make a point when we embellish, but in the long run it hurts your credibility. Part of this country’s problem is that people have lost sight of the fact that there is a long run. Well, at least there always has been a long run. That may not be true of the future. However, it is best to base your behavior on the possibility that there will be a long run. If there isn’t one, then why worry?

One of the articles Jimmy Dore read in his critique of the election was How you lost the world by Sam Kriss.

I thought I saw through it all, the whole stupid charade, a coronation disguised as a battlefield. I was wrong. This was exactly what Hillary Clinton wanted people like me to think; she wanted to be an inevitability. And this is why Trump won: the presidency was Clinton’s to lose, from the moment she announced her candidacy, and she lost it. She was the only person who could. People don’t like taking part in someone else’s inevitability.

I am reading the article now. Based on what Jimmy Dore quoted, I expect to like it. Here is what Jimmy Dore read to us about Hillary Clinton’s running.

She knew that she was electoral poison, that vast swathes of the country hated her and for good reason, that she was compromised by a miserable record spotted with sleaze and criminality, that she alienated the left, inflamed the right, and appealed mostly to a small coterie of sexually repressed and pathologically centrist think-tank nerds, that her entire constituency was made of limp cardboard and backlogged semen, that her candidacy raised the serious possibility of a Republican victory when anyone else would have beaten that divided and frothing party into insignificance with one hand tied behind their back – but she ran anyway.

Finished the article. Jimmy Dore read most of it to us, but the parts he didn’t read are just as good as the parts he did read.

The Guardian has the article Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there by Thomas Frank.

Hillary Clinton was exactly the wrong candidate: a technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine

As a member of the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee, I have been fighting what Thomas Frank said in the article.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman.

This attitude is finally what drove me off the committee and out of the Democratic Party. The recent postings on Facebook of the Chairman of the SDTC has finally forced me to stop following him on Facebook. He thinks Clinton lost because America is not ready for a woman President.

YouTube has the video Donald Trump Defeats Hillary Clinton — Why She Lost & What’s Next?

Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. What does that mean? Why did it happen? How did she lose Michigan and Wisconsin?

Jimmy Dore breaks it down.

If you want to understand what just happened, this is the best analysis I have heard so far. I wish this clip had gone on to the parts about what’s next.

I am going to track down the articles he references and post them, too.

Here is an editorial I made for WCCA-TV, Worcester, Massachusetts cable station 194. Despite the grandiose title the station gave me, I am only the Volunteer Coordinator for Central Massachusetts for the Jill Stein Campaign.

Here is how NBC News covered the presidential candidates from other parties in the 2016 campaign. The video seems to be messed up, but the audio seems to match what I heard.

If NBC News seriously thought it had an obligation to inform the public, would they have produced a piece like this? They start with and devote significant time to narrowly focused candidates. They then minimally cover broadly focused candidates with serious platforms. They don’t even tell you a thing about what Jill Stein stands for. You know that NBC News cannot possibly think that a piece like this will help its audience understand the choices they have before them.

NBC is effectively satirizing its own news show.

Sometimes I get so frustrated at Cracker Barrel Restaurant when I can’t solve the little puzzle they have on each table. I have solved it a few times, but I cannot seem to remember how I did it. I decided to figure out how and write down the solution. Here is an animation of that solution.

If this is hard to view on your puny smart phone, then I suggest you get a real computer. 🙂

Naked Capitalism has this great article Easy Money is Dangerous Without Activist Fiscal Policy.

Yves Smith provides this introduction.

A layperson-friendy explanation of why the Fed’s and ECB’s policies are sorely misguided.

Time and time again, I have written about many of these issues on this blog. Perhaps this explanation can do a better job than I have.

I’ll give you the reasons that the article states, but you are going to have to spend a few minutes reading the explanation yourself. Also, please be advised that if easy money is a bad policy, just changing to tight money is a worse policy. I hope that this comes across to you as you read the article.

Here is the excerpt. If you have an inkling of understanding of any one of the following issues, then read the article.

Low interest rates plainly can’t stimulate the economy – and can actually be dangerous — without activist fiscal policy, for seven main reasons:

1) Households are forced save more to reach their retirement wealth targets.

2) Lower interest rates force employers to increase funding contributions to pay for defined pension plans

3) Lower returns on assets lowers household wealth.

4) Low interest rates immediately suppress the buying power of seniors.

5) Portfolio managers are tempted to take greater risks to reach their investment targets, which in turn creates asset inflation

6) Low borrowing rates changes the relative price of capital over labor.

7) The banking community is organizing to point out that a low interest rate destroys the business model for banks.

After you read and understand as much of this as you can, you should be able to see that Jill Stein, of all the presidential candidates, has the only platform and economic understanding to solve this economic problem. Kind of odd for a Green/Socialist candidate to understand this better than all the capitalists in all the other parties.

Today, I recorded an editorial to be cablecast on WCCA channel 194 in Worcester.

Jill Stein 5 minute editorial on Worcester’s Public Access channel wccatv.com

Middle or end of show

The video has to be edited before I can post it, but I can post the script that I used.

This is Steve Greenberg, Central Mass volunteer coordinator for the Jill Stein Campaign.

Jill Stein is running nationwide for President of The United States as the Green Party candidate. In Massachusetts the party is called the Green Rainbow Party. In at least 48 states, people will be able to vote for Jill Stein.

Her candidacy is the only one with wide ballot access that is not corrupted by lobbyist’s money, corporate money, or by super PACS. She is the one candidate who can stand up for what the American people are craving.

Her platform includes a call for a jobs program to create 2o million new jobs to reverse the crisis of climate change. It calls for cancelling the debt incurred by people for getting a higher education. She also has a plan to work for peace in the world instead of fighting unnecessary wars. There is much more, but let’s just concentrate on these three items.

Most of us are not benefiting from the so-called economic recovery because there are not enough living wage jobs. Living wage jobs for all gives people enough purchasing power to keep the economy fully employed. Now we are stuck with a situation where companies have no reason to invest and hire. People do not have the money to buy what companies are already able to produce. When this happens, only the national government has the resources to get the economy rolling again toward a self-sustaining recovery. Tax cuts for the “job creators” will not encourage a sane capitalist to invest in a factory when they are now closing factories. People cannot afford to buy what the economy can already produce. In this situation, the national government has to be the consumer of last resort by buying infrastructure improvements and making other investment purchases that the country needs. Jill Stein is the only candidate that seems to understand this.

Our country depends on the younger generations to provide the new ideas that can drive us to a better future. With the current generations trapped in student debt and no good jobs available to make it easy to pay off that debt, they will be unable to provide the innovation that drives the society forward. Innovation is what past generations have always provided. It is in all of our interests to free up the creativity of the younger generations. We know we had the resources to bail out the banks to stop the economic crash of 2008/2009. It will be much cheaper to bail out the people who are mired in student debt.

To work for peace in the world, we have to recognize that our own continued attempts to dominate the world is what is causing most of the attacks against us. The unrest that we are causing creates a refugee crisis that forces immigrants to try to seek asylum in our country. We must cooperate with other countries to achieve the peaceful goals that almost all people in the world want. Jill Stein knows that we won’t get there if we insist on doing everything our own way. We should not keep refusing to listen to what other people want. The peace dividend, if we cooperate, is that we won’t have to spend huge amounts of money on weapons anymore. We won’t have to build any walls to keep people out of our country.

If we don’t work to reverse the ravages of climate change in the near future we will not even have a habitable world in which to live. All of the pieces of Jill Stein’s strategy for our country fit together to create a livable future for us and our descendants.

Even if she may not have a chance of being elected in 2016, it is important to think about how to build toward this kind of world. This year the campaign spent a lot of energy and money to get ballot access in as many states as it could. Jill Stein only has to reach the level of 5% of the votes in this election so that the Green Party will not be required to fight for ballot access again. Moreover, the party will be eligible for millions of dollars in matching federal funds in the next election. This will allow Jill Stein or whoever the next candidate might be to get her message out to more people. Many people think that the two major corporate political parties and their candidates are their only choices. Let’s not let this situation continue any longer.

It is time that enough of us started investing our votes in the future of this country and the world.

To find out more about Jill Stein and her running mate Ajamu Baraka, go to their web site at Jill2016.com