I might as well start with a May 25, 2011 broadcast of Jeff Santos interviewing Marisa DeFranco on his radio show. Click on the play button below to hear the interview.
If you have not been paying attention to this candidate, then this is a good beginning.
I first found this video on The Real News. This interview starts with Naomi Klein explaining some of the things that the Occupy movement has already accomplished.
There is much, much more in this video than the initial topic of the interview.
This is about Colorado, but you could probably put any state name in here.
When I talk about a politician’s duty to educate the electorate, this is the type of thing that one might do. This one is not done by a policitian, but by ProgressNowColorado.org.
To see what other states have a ProgressNow organization, go to the web site www.progressnow.org.
I have realized since the October 4, 2011 Democratic Senatorial debate in Lowell, that Marisa DeFranco knows how to stand up and defend her principles. It was not actually a debate, because it had unreasonable time limits on the length of response, and the surprise and often off-the-wall questions that were posed. I remarked about the debate and posted a link to the video of the debate in the previous post Warren shines in debate debut where I expressed my disagreement with the headline. I expressed praise for the way Marisa DeFranco performed.
I have decided that the lackluster performance of Warren was not a one-time failing, but possibly a deliberate campaign tactic. I have also come to realize that the Warren campaign does not feel the necessity to change how the message is presented or what issues she backs away from.
So why resist anymore volunteering for Marisa DeFranco who seems to be more of the person I thought I was getting when I first discovered Elizabeth Warren way before she ran for Senate? That old Elizabeth Warren is not running in this race. If anything, the old Elizabeth Warren has been reincarnated in the DeFranco campaign.
You can access the DeFranco web site at www.marisadefranco.com and her Facebook page at www.facebook.com/DeFrancoForSenate. You can also follow her on twitter at twitter.com/#!/marisadefranco.
Here is a political button from the DeFranco Facebook website that captures my feelings.
Here is my version of the button.
The story is actually titled, In Alaska, becoming the militants next door. In describing the convicted person’s transition from disliking Muslims for the 9/11 attack to a level of understanding of the reasons, the article states:
Rockwood said he also felt he was beginning to understand what had driven the Sept. 11 hijackers. “These people felt that they had been under attack,” he said. “They kind of saw it as a self-defense response. It was like you’d be impressed if an American soldier jumps on a grenade to save his buddies – it takes a lot of courage to give up your life like that.”
There is much more to the story than this beginning. However, the police did enticed Rockwood into committing acts that they could use to convict him. The police effort may have been initiated by reports to the police that Rockwood was beginning to understand the hijackers motivations. He might never have gone anywhere near as far as he did, and it is arguable about how far he went, had not the police officer befriended him, encouraged him, got him riled up, and enticed him. The police even paid Rockwood money that he desperately needed to move his pregnant wife and himself from from Alaska to her native England for multiple medical reasons.
Given the new powers that Congress gave to, or thrust upon, President Obama, Rockwood could have been indefinitely detained without trial rather than getting the 8 years in federal prison that he got on a plea deal he was coerced into signing.
The Boston Globe published the letter to the editor Warren And Brown Are Two Sides Of Same Tarnished Coin.
RE “A safe distance from Occupy: Warren claimed to have influenced the movement, then backed off’’ (Op-ed, Dec. 18): Our country is in big trouble, and it’s not the kind of trouble that’s going to be fixed by trading Democrat Elizabeth Warren for Republican Senator Scott Brown. Winning the political game isn’t going to do it. The beliefs and minds of a lot of people are going to have to be changed, and that’s going to require someone willing to shout out the unvarnished, untriangulated truth, no matter what. I had hoped that Warren might be that fearless truth-teller. I’m afraid that my hopes, like those of columnist Joan Vennochi, are fading fast.
Randy Slaughter
Cambridge
The statement that “The beliefs and minds of a lot of people are going to have to be changed, and that’s going to require someone willing to shout out the unvarnished, untriangulated truth, no matter what.” echoes something that I have been saying in a number of different ways. Most recently I said something related to Obama along the same lines in the post President Obama Rallies His Domestic Troops – What $40 Mean. Part of what I said in that post was:
I hope this is a sign that the President has come to realize that his most important job is to educate voters so that they know what is at stake. Rallying people around the legislation he wants to pass, is effective as shown by this incident.
In an even earlier post on December 6, Strong Medicine For Elizabeth Warren, I directly addressed the issue of her initial comments about OWS and then her unwillingness to stand by those remarks.
My response to that comment was:
I am so glad someone asked about the intellectual foundation that Elizabeth Warren provided to the Occupy movement.
Elizabeth Warren wrote a book, “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class”
If you really wanted an answer to the question, you would devote the time to listen to her invited lecture on what is the lesson from the book.
I do not understand why the campaign doesn’t use this strong message to shoot down the Karl Rove meme. I suggested Warren acknowledge the OWS movement. The proviso was that there was going to be blowback, and you had to be prepared for it. Now that you have taken the bold step, you cannot retreat. You must use the blow back as a teachable moment.
The blowback will continue until you answer it forcefully. If some professional political advisor is holding Elizabeth back from making her case, that person ought to be fired.
If she is a bold person, and we like boldness, then you can’t retreat and be a wimp. Go for broke, or go home.
I am afraid I have to reference the article Obama Challenges Provisions in Budget Bill from The New York Times. The only other link I found on Google that was not just to a blog was to Faux Noise. It is a sad commentary when those are the only two choices.
When President Obama signed a budget bill on Friday, he issued a signing statement claiming a right to bypass dozens of provisions that placed requirements or restrictions on the executive branch, saying he had “well-founded constitutional objections” to the new statutes.
Among them, he singled out two sections barring the use of money to transfer prisoners from the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, into the United States and limiting the ability of the government to transfer them to the custody or control of foreign countries. Mr. Obama said he would apply them in a way that avoided infringing on his powers, without any specific explanation of what that meant.
I am going to have to think long and hard about whether this action by President Obama gets him off the hook with me on my stated inability to ever vote for him again if he failed to veto this bill. Even if Obama refuses to use the powers that the bill tries to grant to him, some future president is sure to use them.
As I have said before, we need to prevent the loss of our civil rights in a time when the loss probably won’t be implemented. When the time comes that a president wants to use these powers, it will be too late for us to try to claw them back. That time might be sooner than we think, if this president decides to change his mind after he gets re-elected.
Thanks to Hassan Moradi for +1ing this on Google+.
Those of us in southern New England in the northeast corner of the U.S.A. can appreciate this evidence. We may be looking out for camels tonight instead of reindeer.
Nation of Change has the article Europe’s Debt Crisis Deepens.
Talking about “the markets” who are pushing austerity programs on governments that are in debt, Wolff says:
The chief influences among those creditors are the major banks that represent and/or advise all or most of the rest of them. The major European banks were and are the chief recipients of the costly bailouts by those European governments since 2008. Indeed, those bailouts sharply increased the indebtedness of European governments because the latter paid for those bailouts by borrowing.
As far as I can tell, unless I just missed it, Wolff does not suggest any solutions to the problem.
If the indebtedness of European governments’ was sharply increased by the bailouts of the banks, does that not imply that the banks owe these governments the money that the governments are in debt? Would you not think that the governments have some pressure they could exert back on the banks?
Two comments on the story suggest that nationalization of banks might be a solution. You would think that even the threat of nationalization might drive banks to the negotiating table. If you don’t like nationalization, how about the governments demand their money back from the banks so that the government could go into competition with the banks as sources for liquidity in the “free” market? Then the private banks could disappear into oblivion and nobody would care (except for the bank executives and the bank investors.) The people who caused the problem would suffer the consequences, and the rest of us could just go about our business.
I wonder why Richard D. Wolff didn’t delve into or even hint at these questions and possible answers?
The Economist has an interesting article, Lessons of the 1930s: There could be trouble ahead.
In 2008 the world dodged a second Depression by avoiding the mistakes that led to the first. But there are further lessons to be learned for both Europe and America.
The article talks about opposing theories about the history and lessons learned. Unlike stories in many U.S. media outlets, this one does give some hints as to which theories have been debunked and which seem to stand up. The article is worth the read for the specific lessons learned.
That said, I am going to go off on a tangent about methodological lessons learned.
Reading this article had me thinking about a lesson I think I learned from the book Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks.
There is quite a difference between having a premise and seeking data to support it and having some data and trying to figure out what you can learn from it.
In the first case it is almost always possible to find data to support a theory if you look hard enough, massage it, and squint at it if you must, and ignore any data that casts doubt on your premise. In the second case you gather data in an unbiased way and see where it leads you.
I think you can see examples of both types of theories discussed in The Economist article.
If you think about the two situations more you see that it is very easy to fall into the trap of premise first and data next. You might start out in the unbiased way, and develop a theory. Then it is very easy to fall into the trap of just searching for more data to confirm your theory. This is called confirmation bias.
I can think of one way to search for more data while controlling the bias problem. When you set up your search or your experiment, always consider ways to disprove your theory as well as ways to prove it. Consciously think of data to look for or experiments to conduct that will disprove your theory. If the data you find or experiment you perform in an effort to disprove your theory fails to disprove it and your other searches and experiments tend to confirm it, then you are more likely to have found a theory that is closest to the truth.
Another problem arises when you get into a discussion (argument) with someone who disagrees with your theory. That is exactly when you are caught in the trap of trying to prove you are right. If the opposition presents some opposing data, your natural tendency is to look for flaws in that data. There is nothing wrong with that as long as you are also looking at the possibility that the opposition is right and their data do disprove your theory.
I write this blog entry as much as a reminder to myself as it is a lesson to anyone else.