I just got an email from Elizabeth Warren.  Please follow up with Harry Reid as Elizabeth Warren has suggested.

On 12/12/2012 6:22 PM, Elizabeth Warren for
Daily Kos wrote:

 

Steven, Just moments ago, I received a call from Sen. Harry Reid’s office, confirming my position on the Senate Banking Committee in January. I appreciate the faith that Leader Reid has put in me to take this assignment, and I am looking so forward to playing a role in Congressional oversight over big banks on Wall Street and the banking agencies in Washington. Middle class families need more watchdogs in Washington that will try to hold the big guys accountable and to stop bad deals for the American people. I’m ready to help. Please join me in thanking Leader Harry Reid for this incredible opportunity. Over the years, your faith in my work has strengthened me. You donated to my election campaign, you made phone calls to help identify volunteers and get out the vote in Massachusetts, and you pushed hard again and again to put wind in my sails in every way imaginable so that I could take on the big guys. Against the odds, you helped give me a real shot at winning. You’ve been there for me since the beginning, and I’m so grateful. This is how real change happens – we do it together. Of course, fighting for the middle class means more than talk or strongly worded emails. It means across-the-board, consistent accountability for anyone who breaks the law — no matter where they work or who their friends are. And that’s what we’re going to work hard to accomplish. But before we get started, please join me in thanking Leader Reid for his giving me this incredible opportunity. I’ve taken on Wall Street banks and other powerful interests for years, and, with your help, I’ll continue to do so for many years to come. Thank you for being a part of this, and keep fighting! Elizabeth

CNN has the story Angry with Obama, GOP threatens political war next year.

Conservative Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, promised the newly re-elected Obama “one hell of a fight” next year if the president forces through his plan for high-income earners to pay more taxes without agreeing to substantive steps to reduce the nation’s chronic federal deficits and debt.

“But there will come a time in February and March where we have to raise the debt ceiling,” Graham said Tuesday on “Piers Morgan Tonight” on CNN.

“I will not raise the debt ceiling ever again until we get significant entitlement reforms, because if we don’t reform entitlements, we’re going to become Greece,” adding that the situation presented a chance for Obama to lead. “But if he doesn’t lead, there’s going to be one hell of a fight over raising the debt ceiling.”

Do you need any more proof that we need to reform the filibuster rule in the Senate in order to disarm the Republicans who want to wage war against the country?

To take action see my previous post Reform The Filibuster – Don’t Just Stand There, Do Something. If the Republicans see the growth in signatures on this position every time they threaten the country, maybe they will get the message.  In any case, this reform needs to happen.  If the Republicans claim to be conservative and long for the good old days, then they should all be in favor of putting the filibuster rules back to their traditional status.  It was the recent change that made it too easy to stop the Senate with a mere threat of a filibuster that has brought this country to the sorry deadlock in which it finds itself.

ABC News has the story Oregon Mall Shooting Hero Gets Mom to Safety, Evacuated Others.

A store employee at the Clackamas Town Center mall used his knowledge of the shopping complex to hustle his mother out of the building during Tuesday’s shooting rampage and then twice went back inside to guide other shoppers to exits and safety.

This is particularly scary to us.  We used to frequent the Clackamas Town Center when we lived in Oregon.  We often ate at the Food Court, too.

The Boston Globe had a good article  Elizabeth Warren is prepared to pick her spots.

Since we were going to Kate Donahue’s annual Christmas party in Westbooro where Elizabeth Warren was scheduled to appear, we decided to print out the article and get her autograph on it.

The Real News Network has the interview State Subsidies to Attract Corporate Investment Should be Banned.

EPSTEIN: Well, they do set up this bidding process, and it’s a race to the bottom, and it’s become—as the New York Times series makes clear, it’s become part of the normal culture of doing business now.

How do you stop it? Well, one way you stop it is you take a proposal from a couple of the economists and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis about 15 years ago, who said that there ought to be a federal law outlawing this kind of tax competition. Everybody would be better off, and even the states realize that. It’s like an arms race. When you get into an arms race, you know that everybody’s worse off. So you ought to have a law against it.

I have been thinking for a long time that the only way to stop this race to the bottom inside the country is to prevent it on a national level. I am glad to see this idea is getting some publicity.

With the constitutional mandate that only the Federal Government can regulate interstate commerce, I would think such a law would be a natural.

If we can do it within a country, there is no reason we couldn’t have international negotiations for nations to take back power from corporations.

I think The New York Times series referenced in the video begins with As Companies Seek Tax Deals, Governments Pay High Price. This article is the first in three part series. I had already posted a link to the second part in the series in my previous post Lines Blur as Texas Gives Industries a Bonanza. The third part is the article Michigan Town Woos Hollywood, but Ends Up With a Bit Part.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Paying for Lunch – MMT Style, MMT being Modern Monetary Theory, and the paying for lunch has to do with the common aphorism, “There is no free lunch.” The article starts of with some criticisms of MMT before it gets to the definition below:

Many of the key ideas of Modern Monetary Theory go back to the years during and immediately following the Great Depression and the Second World War, when great thinkers and public servants applied bold, creative thinking and practical problem solving to the daunting economic and organizational challenges of their times, and helped their societies overcome systemic failure, triumph over threats and adversity, and achieve renewed optimism and growing prosperity. One of those thinkers was Abba Lerner, who developed the concept of functional finance, which he described this way in his paper “Functional Finance and the Federal Debt”:

The central idea is that government fiscal policy, its spending and taxing, its borrowing and repayment of loans, its issue of new money and withdrawal of money, shall be undertaken with an eye only to the results of these actions on the economy and not to any established traditional doctrine what is sound and what is unsound.

Lerner then articulated two “laws of functional finance”, which I think still very well capture the spirit of the MMT approach to economic policy.  The two laws are given as follows:

The first financial responsibility of the government (since nobody else can undertake that responsibility) is to keep the total rate of spending in the country on goods and services neither greater nor less than that rate which at the current prices would buy all the goods that it is possible to produce.

…

The second law of functional finance is that the government should borrow money only if it is desirable that the public should have less money and more government bonds, for these are the effects of government borrowing.

Read the rest of the article to get the full impact. It might blow your mind.

The Real News Network has an interview with Lawrence Wilkerson: Senate Pushes Obama Towards War and Susan Rice a Bad Choice.

When the discussion of Susan Rice starts, the video cuts to a 2008 interview of Rice by Paul Jay.

JAY: You talk to anyone who knows the situation, they know more troops in Afghanistan is—unless there’s hundreds of thousands of troops in Afghanistan for years to come, it’s not going to significantly change the situation without dealing with warlords and dealing with reconstruction.

SUSAN RICE, SENIOR FOREIGN POLICY ADVISER TO SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Not by itself. I mean, I mentioned very—I said, coupled with the economic and political steps.

JAY: So what would be concrete steps?

RICE: Well, we have underinvested in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but particularly Afghanistan, with respect to the counterterrorism effort. We haven’t done the socio and economic investments in infrastructure and education in alternatives to poppy.

Later in the interview with Wilkerson, he refers back to the snippet of the Rice interview that he had just chosen to show us and remarks:

JAY: When I interviewed her in New Hampshire, I was primarily focused on candidate Obama’s position on the Afghan War, essentially to expand it, and I asked her, well, doesn’t there—if you’re going to expand, don’t you really have to expand solving problems facing the Afghan people in a serious way? A lot of rhetoric’s been thrown around about doing something to win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan, the Afghans, but very little in terms of real money and real on-the-ground action. She kind of said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, and kind of dismissed it. Her main argument was about increasing troop levels.

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t hear Rice say what Paul Jay says that she said. If he wanted to make this point, couldn’t he have chosen a better snippet from the interview? I presume that since he did the choosing of the snippet, that a better snippet to make his point could not be found.

I have a perverse conspiracy theory for you. The Republicans actually want Susann Rice as Secretary of State. They are making the silly charges about her remarks on Libya so as to back Obama into a corner where he has to stick by Rice in order to not look like a weakling. If they really didn’t want Rice, they would focus on the issues raised by Jay and Wilkerson in this interview.

The other side of this odd conspiracy may be that the Obama side has realized that they cannot get Rice approved for Secretary of State and therefore feel the need to save face by pointing out her flaws as justification for dumping her.

This political business can get so convoluted it makes you dizzy.

The Nation of Change has published the Pepe Escobar article Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall.

Let’s start with the obvious but important: on entering the Oval Office in January 2009, President Obama inherited a seemingly impregnable three-decade-long “Wall of Mistrust” in Iran-U.S. relations. To his credit, that March he directly addressed all Iranians in a message for Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, calling for an “engagement that is honed and grounded in mutual respect.” He even quoted the thirteenth century Persian poet Sa’adi: “The children of Adam are limbs of one body, which God created from one essence.”

And yet, from the start he was crippled by a set of Washington misconceptions as old as that wall, and by a bipartisan consensus for an aggressive strategy toward Iran that emerged in the George W. Bush years when Congress ponied up $400 million for a set of “covert operations” meant to destabilize that country, including cross-border operations by special forces teams. All of this was already based on the dangers of “the Iranian bomb.”

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With an Obama 2.0 administration soon to be in place, the time to solve the immensely complex Iranian nuclear drama is now. But as Columbia University’s Gary Sick, a key White House adviser on Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979-1981, has suggested, nothing will be accomplished if Washington does not start thinking beyond its ever-toughening sanctions program, now practically set in stone as “politically untouchable.”

Reading this full article might get you thinking outside the box in which the administration seems to be locked.

Many of you will probably react with anger over the mild suggestions in this article, possibly due to the propaganda you have been fed by our own mefdia and politicians.

I am not naive enough to think that Pepe Escobar may not have his own agenda. Yet, long before I read this article, I have been thinking that the U.S. position on Iran has been unnecessarily and unproductively  bellicose. This article just explains the reasons why I have felt the way that I have.

I do not want you to think I am hiding anything here, so I will feed you some information that may reinforce your biases.  But remember that what is being reinforced for you may be a bias.

According to TomDispatch.com, where I think this article may have first been published:

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, an analyst for al-Jazeera and the Russian network RT, and a TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

The Nation of Change has the Joe Conason article Arithmetic For Republicans: Why Boehner’s ‘Offer’ Just Doesn’t Add Up.

Summing it all up, Conason ends with the following:

Unless and until the Republicans start talking about real numbers that can actually add up, there is nothing to be gained from pretending to negotiate. Nor should the president start negotiating with himself, as he has sometimes done in the past. Instead, he ought to make sure that the opposition understands what will happen when they fail to act responsibly. After Jan. 1, he will bring them an offer they cannot refuse to restore cuts for the 98 percent — and they will be held accountable for any consequences caused in the meantime by their stalling.

The preceding points in the article give some details of the failure of Republican arithmetic.  The Republican proposals actually hide more than they reveal about what they really want to do to us.

The Nation Of Change has published Robert Reich’s article – Cliff Notes on the Three Real Perils Ahead.  The executive summary is:

Yes, America does face a cliff — not a fiscal cliff but a set of precipices we’ll tumble over because the GOP’s obsession over government’s size and spending has obscured them.

The three cliffs are:

The child poverty cliff.

The baby-boomer healthcare cliff.

Healthcare costs are already 18% of GDP. Between now and 2030, when 76 million boomers join the ranks of the elderly,those costs will soar. This is the principal reason why the federal budget deficit is projected to grow.

The Affordable Care Act offers a start but it isn’t nearly adequate to limit these rising costs. The President and the Democrats have to lead the way in using Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over providers to get lower costs and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system of healthcare.

But we can’t avoid the fact we have the most expensive and least effective system of health care in the world that’s spending 30 percent more on paperwork and administration than on keeping people healthy. The real healthcare cliff can only be avoided if we adopt a single-payer healthcare system.

The environmental cliff.

For people obsessed with the deficit, read the section on The baby-boomer healthcare cliff. It is a good explanation of what the real problem is, what Obama has tried to do to solve it, and what more needs to be done. All the rest of the malarkey coming from the Republicans is just noise.