Martha Coakley, a candidate for Governor of Massachusetts, will be coming to Sturbridge on January 26th, 2014.  The house party (not at my house) begins at 7:30PM. This will be a great opportunity to speak to her in person.  This is an opportunity to find out what kind of a person she is without the filter of the media between you and her.   If you are already a Coakley supporter, I am sure  you would not want to miss this event.  If you are not sure if you want to be a supporter, this is an excellent chance to find out what she is  really like.

Another thing to consider, if you live in the area, is our attempt to get candidates to pay attention to us. When we finally manage to get candidates to visit, if they are greeted by a large turnout, then they and the other candidates are more likely to pay continued attention to Sturbridge and the surrounding area.

Since there will be limited space, I want to extend an invitation to you “in person”.  So contact me by email by clicking on the previous link, and I will call you back on the phone with the details of the visit.

If you want to find out more about Martha Coakley before you come to the house party, visit the Coakley campaign website.

Naked Capitalism has an article David Dayen: Elizabeth Warren, Tom Coburn Introduce “Naked Capitalism Was Right About the Corruption of Financial Regulators Act” (Not Actually Called That) that discusses the Truth in Settlements Act sponsored by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tom Coburn.

I particularly liked David Dayen’s postscript.

P.S. I asked Warren on the call about something I was tipped to in the Justice Department’s year-end IG report. It appears that after announcing these fines, the MO of the Justice Department is to “take in stride” the fact that they go unpaid:

But securing a financial judgment is not enough. The Department must also use all available tools to recover money owed to it, and it must ensure that the recovered money is wisely spent. In FY 2012, the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices (USAO) collected $13.2 billion in criminal and civil actions, more than double the amount collected in FY 2011. However, at the end of FY 2012, an additional $23 billion was owed to the United States, including $18 billion in criminal fines and $5 billion in civil debts.

So I said to Sen. Warren, does your bill include something on the timeliness of payment? Her answer: “This one is about the disclosure. You have identified another problem, and one that’s worth talking about… we’ll see what kind of effect we get from sunlight.”

State Senator Stephen M. Brewer represents my town in the Senate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  He is Chair of the Senate committee on Ways and Means.  As such, he has been a counterweight to some of the investments that our Governor Deval Patrick has wanted to make in transportation infrastructure in our state.  I sent him a note about a “very difficult decision” he is going to be making about his political future.

I sent the note using Senator Brewer’s contact web page.

I understand that you are making a “very difficult decision” about politics in the next month.  If it has to do with running for reelection, then I must ask you to please consider how strongly you can back Progressive Democratic principles in your next term.

The next Democratic governor is going to need strong support from the Democratic legislative leaders of the state.  If you feel that you must be a counterweight to the initiatives of our next governor, then I strongly urge you to consider retirement.

It is time to turn the reins of power to someone looking toward the future of this state, not its past.

Feel free to communicate your thoughts to Senator Brewer, no matter what they may be.

The Think Progress article Democratic Members Of Congress Slam Obama For Massive Cave To Republicans On Judges starts off with the following:

Last November, Senate Democrats invoked a procedural maneuver that allowed them to confirm judicial nominees by a simple majority vote, thus cutting off the GOP’s ability to maintain control over a key federal appeals court by simply refusing to permit anyone to be confirmed. So it’s a bit odd that, just over a month after Senate Republicans effectively lost their ability to veto nominees from the minority. President Obama decided to outsource selecting nominees to most of the open judicial seats in Georgia to two Republican senators.

Read the article to find out why the Republicans want President Obama to talk to them more often.  I’ll give you a hint. Whenever he does talk to them, he sells the rest of us down the river.  On the other hand, maybe this is the kind of deal that made Harry Reid decide he needed to use the “nuclear option” to stop our President from doing his style of bi-partisan negotiation.

The Real News Network in the post Is This The Dumbest Talking Point Ever? has highlighted the video below.

Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and other Republicans are calling the extension of unemployment benefits a game of politics by Democrats, who actually want to distract from the rocky rollout of Obamacare. Politicians playing politics? The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

The Real News Network could not improve on the TYT headline, and neither can I.

The Real News Network has the story Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets: ‘The Greatest Heist You’ve Never Heard Of’. The video is actually from The New York Times and its story Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows.

One night in 1971, files were stolen from an F.B.I. office near Philadelphia. They proved that the bureau was spying on thousands of Americans. The case was unsolved, until now.

It is amazing how angry the FBI became when ordinary citizens used the same techniques as the FBI did to get their information.

The Naked Capitalism post Diagrams and Dollars: Modern Money Illustrated (Part 1) by Yves Smith  highlights the article published on New Economics Perspectives by J. D. Alt.

Quoting from Yves Smith’s introduction:

Yves here. I continue to get requests to explain Modern Monetary Theory. It isn’t easily done in a few words, but fortunately, the academics and writers associated with the New Economics Perspectives blog keep publishing primers of various sorts. This one takes a different approach in using visuals to help illustrate the difference between how most people believe the money system operates versus how it really works.

WARNING: The diagrams start out by illustrating the faulty perception of money as understood in the halls of Congress, by the main stream media, and, by infection, most of the public.

If you are going to read this article, do not stop at the explanation of the first diagram, and think that you have learned something.  You have to read further to understand what is wrong with the first 7 or so diagrams.

There is also a part 2 of the story – DIAGRAMS & DOLLARS: modern money illustrated (Part 2). Your goal should be to understand the final diagram. It is very well explained in the article.

If I have any quibble at all with the presentation toward the end it would be about the following statements in the article:

If Congress runs a “budget surplus” for long, the Private Sector will either have to diminish its economic activity in general (go into recession)—or plunge hopelessly into debt (borrowing bank money it can’t repay, possibly causing a banking crisis)—or both.

This sentence could be enhanced by admitting to the possibility of deflation as another alternative. In fact, the problem is that deflation alone won’t occur for reasons that can be discussed. Deflation will happen in concert with recession and borrowing. If we could create deflation without the other two, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for the PS pot as a whole.

We might have to talk about the PS pot in terms of the sectors within the PS pot and the transfers among them that is implied by any particular set of government policies. Deflation transfers wealth from borrowers to savers. Inflation transfers wealth from savers to borrowers.

The Wire has the story Lessons from the Obamacare ‘Horror Stories’.

At the root of every debunked, cancelled plan, Obamacare “horror story” is usually a person who isn’t as informed as he or she would like to believe. Usually that person is a journalist. Last week Maggie Mahar at HealthInsurance.org debunked yet another horror story, but she didn’t blame the misguided former policy holders so much as the journalist who wrote the story. “It appeared that no one at the Star-Telegram even attempted to run a background check on the sources, or fact check their stories,” Mahar wrote. “I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘Why?'”

The article goes on to detail some of the stories that may have started out as horror stories, but ended up actually being successes for Obamacare.

The Daily Kos reference to the above article in its post Obamacare horror story, chose the following quote:

What makes it a horror story is that when the Star Telegram learned that Johnson actually was able to get coverage, they did nothing to change their original report, even though it was at best incomplete. As Maggie Mahar, who wrote the post linked above, puts it:

This major daily’s nearly 200,000 daily readers saw the story that would lead them to believe that Americans who received cancellation notices were “left in limbo.” Most, it concluded, would wind up uninsured – or paying more than they could afford.  As I’ve pointed out many times – and as more and more coverage is revealing – the opposite is true.

You probably have to do your own research to see if the original story is right, the debunker is right, or there is some other choice I can’t imagine.

CNN has the article America’s real problem: Too much bipartisanship.  I like the article for what it has to say about bipartisanship, but most of all, I want to save the following paragraph from the article:

ious War on Poverty that aimed to provide tools for the poor to become self-sufficient. For over a decade, the program — which Johnson broadly defined to include all of his programs to help the poor — had a powerful effect. The poverty rate fell from 19% in 1964 to 11.2% in 1974. New government services, such as Head Start and Medicaid, have remained integral to those without economic means.

Keep this in mind the next time you see a cutesy bumper sticker that says “We fought the war on poverty, and we lost.”  By the numbers above, we seemed to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in that war.

As for too much bipartisanship, that is not a new idea to my blog, here is a small sample of my posts on the subject.

Former Sen. Olympia Snowe: It’s Time for Voters to ‘Reward’ Bipartisanship, The Last Bipartisan, JOBS Act: The Dumbest “Bipartisan” Move Since Repealing Glass-Steagall, The Bipartisan Political Alliance That Will Turn The Fight Over Medicare On Its Head, and Target Fixation At The Fork In The Road.

Naked Capitalism has the post The Three Card Monte of Generational Warfare by Yves Smith.

Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
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We have two events happening that may simply be coincident in time in their genesis, but they are working synchronistically in a nasty way. And the driver of one is unquestionably class, not generational. I can’t get over the way young people are falling hook, line and sinker for the efforts to divert attention from the real perps, which are overwhelmingly the top wealthy and their allies and operatives, such as CEOs and C-level executives at large companies, and the large cohort of neoliberal pundits. (Not all are on board; for instance, I know a private equity firm head who loves annoying people in his industry by telling them they need to pay a ton more in taxes and donates generously to “progressive” candidates, but people like him are few in number).

The first is that a small group of audacious, visionary, committed, radical conservatives set in motion a plan in 1971 to undo the New Deal and cut social safety nets back. They did this via a concerted effort to change values and deeply inculcate pro-business thinking, to give economic “freedom” primacy over democracy, and to train lawyers to think like economists (which is at odds with foundational legal concepts like equity) and over time, pack the courts with corporate-friendly judges. The key figures of this movement and its intellectual leaders were all born well before or during the Depression: former Nixon Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, Henry Manne (founder of the law and economics movement), and of course, Milton Friedman. Its major funders included Birchers like the Coors family (which provided a large donation to help found the Heritage Foundation in 1973) and the Koch family.

You may find a number of familiar names in the list of people in that last paragraph.  I thought I would make my blog post so I can have a permanent link to the Yves Smith post.  It might come in handy some day.