I might as well put on my own blog some of the things I have been posting on Elizabeth Warren’s Facebook Page.

With regard to the hit piece broadcast on NPR, Mass. Senate Race A Battle Over Who’s More Populist : NPR, I commented as follows:

What can you expect of NPR? To get their money from Congress they have been moving rightward for years.

What bothers me about the Warren campaign is that they are trying to fight Brown on his turf of hard luck. She made that pitch, and now she should move on.

The two videos I posted are her best arguments for why she should be our Senator, not Scott Brown, yet the campaign refuses to use them. I even told Elizabeth Warren at a party in Westborough that she should highlight these videos on her website. She said she would speak to her staff about the idea which sounded good to her.

I gave up waiting, and posted the videos myself.

I think Warren’s professional political advisers are not serving her well.

As I mentioned in one of the comments about the videos, she actually predicted in 2004 how the economy would collapse. Even most of her fervent admirers are unaware of her foresight. And yet, her campaign won’t use this potent information.

I cannot blame NPR for that. She has evidence to disprove everything they say, but she won’t use it.

It is up to her supporters to insist that she play her best game. The one she knows in her gut she needs to play, but bad advice is stopping her from doing it. Do we have to Occupy Elizabeth Warren Campaign to change this?

When I posted the video of The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class, I added the comment:

Do you suppose that Scott Brown has a clue as to what Elizabeth Warren is talking about in this video?

When I posted the video of Elizabeth Warren – The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, I added the comment:

If you watch the video, you can see Warren in 2004 predict the collapse of the economy. Did Scott Brown have the foresight to predict this while Bush was still in office? Does Elizabeth Warren therefor have a better chance of knowing how to fix what is wrong than Scott Brown?

Another post I made was:

Some middle class people are willing to give up their lives for their country to fight wars in Iran and Afghanistan.

If a rich person taking in $90,000 a month in income won’t consent to paying an extra $200 a month to support our country’s needs, what does that say about the patriotism of the rich? This is what the House Republican Tea Party is fighting over.

At least Scott Brown finally has the guts to recognize the injustice of one thing his party is fighting for. Even he is urging the House to come to its collective senses.

Another post was:

One of the things that most politicians, at least progressive ones, seem to forget is that the most important job of a politician is to educate the voters on the crucial matters that the country faces.

If through this education process, they have a large majority of the voters backing the solutions that they want to implement, then the electorate will be inoculated against the crazy propaganda that will be used to stop their efforts to solve the country’s problems in ways the 1% don’t like.

Obama has failed miserably in this. He has gone into the fight with the Republicans, but has left all his troops at home.

With Elizabeth Warren’s background and all the research, book writing, and lecturing she has done on the economic ills of this country, I figured shoe was perfectly equipped to do the job most progressive politicians fail to do. This is why I was in favor of her run for Senate even before she knew she wanted to do it.

It is frustrating for me to watch her at a gathering where people are anxiously trying to explain to her the economic problems they face when she knows far more about what has been done to them to cause their problems than even they know.

So when Elizabeth Warrren fails to use this information that she has been talking about for years, I am completely dumbfounded.

She must remember that not only does she have to win this election, but she has to be an effective Senator when she wins. Educating the public is part of the job she must do in order to be able to help govern effectively.

Somehow the professional political advisers know all about winning elections, but seem to know nothing about laying the intellectual foundations for governing effectively.

Why else would they have prevented her from explaining what intellectual foundation she laid so that the OWS would know what they needed to fight against.

One of the things I have not posted yet is the wish that she would use a polished version of the following sound bite:

It is not because I am a Harvard Professor that I understand the economic forces working against the middle class. It is because I have researched, written, and lectured about the economic forces working against the middle class, that I am qualified to be a Harvard Professor.

Well, I just posted it.

This is an excerpt that tries to give you the heart of the 1 hour interview presented in my previous post Elizabeth Warren – The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.

If you don’t think you have the time to watch the full hour interview, you will at least get something out of this less than 3 minute excerpt.

After watching this excerpt, you may suddenly discover that you can find somewhere in your schedule the hour to devote to listening to the full interview.

Here is the description that goes along with the YouTube video below:

Elizabeth Warren discusses how the dreams of the middle class american family are being depleted by the dramatic increase in bankruptcies and foreclosures. Warren discusses the role that credit card companies and ballooning interests rates have played in rapidly increasing mortgage rates as well as the how the over consumption myth is clouding our understanding of the average middle class family, who is in fact experiencing a lower standard of living than their parents and still finding themselves one payment away from losing their home.

Remember the interview occurred in 2004. The prescience of some of the things that Warren predicts is just amazing.

I have previously posted a lecture Elizabeth Warren gave about another of her books, The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class. As I listened to this interview, I recognized a lot of the same material. However, because of the interview nature instead of lecture there are aspects that come out that are new ans surprising.

Whenever I think I know all of the good things about Elizabeth Warren that make me want her as my Senator, I stumble across something new that makes her even better.

This is an hour interview, although you can skip the commercials, but please stay for the final anecdote that she tells about Hillary Clinton and her. It is amusing, shocking, and perhaps terribly foreboding about the future.

The Talking Points Memo article Watch GOPer Literally Walk Out On Dem Attempt To Push Payroll Tax Cut has some context and a partial transcript for the video below.

You don’t suppose that this video clip will appear in some Democratic campaign ad, do you?

I really appreciate the Republicans’ giving us this photo op and at the same time saving us from having to accept the Keystone-XL pipeline deal.

It is not often the Republicans give us two good outcomes from one stupid behavior.

The article Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us by Jonah Lehrer was brought to my attention by reader RichardH. The take away from the article is:

And yet, we must never forget that our causal beliefs are defined by their limitations. For too long, we’ve pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.

I find the title of the article to be way overblown, but the story the article tells is worthwhile.  The article focuses on medical research.  However, as I read it, I  kept thinking of the investing world.  The Nightly Business Report on PBS is typical of all business reporting.  When the stock market has a big move (or no move at all), they come up with specific stories as to what made the market move the way it did (or didn’t).  These stories are mostly fantasies made to explain the cause and effect that is really almost totally unknown.  To quote the article again:

We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.

In the previous post Mike Capuano: The Pragmatic Reformer, I mentioned the lessons learned from the books “How We Decide“, by Jonah Lehrer and  “Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable“, by Nicholas Taleb.  Jonah Lehrer is the author of the article that is the subject of this post.  In Nicholas Taleb’s book, he takes pains to warn us that when we are describing the facts of what happened we may be on safe ground, but when we descend into explanations of why it happened, we are more like being on thin ice.

In rereading my comments on How We Decide I notice the irony of Jonah Lehrer falling victim to just the problem he is highlighting in the article Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us

Now here is an ad from MoveOn.org that rivals in attention grabbing what Karl Rove has been spewing about Elizabeth Warren.

I know people think the OWS movement is a flash in the pan or has not accomplished anything. Tell me if the phrase “The 1%” was in everybody’s thoughts to the extent it is now that OWS has taken this on as its mantra.

This item from MoveOn.org puts an interesting spin on the subject.

Thomas R. Creamer (Chairman of the Sturbridge Board of Selectmen) and Selectman Priscilla C Gimas. wrote a Letter to the Department of Public Utilities regarding the DPU’s investigation specific to National Grid’s October storm response.

At the end of the letter is this very interesting statement:

Finally, we call upon DPU to support legislation that would reduce the impediments to the establishment of more municipally owned and operated power entities. It is our hope that the levying of fines and greater competition by way of municipal power companies are the surest way of establishing a more competitive and proactive customer service approach by National Grid.

The position of Selectman in Sturbridge is non-partisan.  Apart from his position on the board, I know that Thomas R. Creamer says that he is a Republican.  He is the kind of Republican I can like (Sharon and I both voted for him.  We also voted for Priscilla Gimas.)

If you promise to keep this a secret, I’ll tell you that the idea of a municipal power company is a Socialist idea.  Municipal power companies were mentioned in the book The “S” Word: A Short History Of An American tradition … Socialism as a successful application of socialism in this country.

Sewer systems, public health programs, municipal power plants were all public responses to what city-hall Socialists described as “the dirty and polluted legacy of the Industrial Revolution.”
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The “sewer socialists” were not averse to heavenly rewards, but felt that serving up some dessert in the here and now might be necessary to advance the cause.

Somehow, I find it hard to believe that Thomas Creamer would consider himself a socialist.  It is his ability to take pragmatic action without having ideological blinders on that I thought I detected when I voted for him.  So far, I have not been disappointed.

George Monbiot: This Bastardised Libertarianism Makes “Freedom” an Instrument of Oppression is another gem I found on Truth Out. Monbiot quotes author Isaiah Berlin, as follows:

As Berlin noted: “No man’s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. ‘Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’.” So, he argued, some people’s freedom must sometimes be curtailed “to secure the freedom of others”.

I have had many philosophical discussions  with libertarians over the years.  I wonder if this article would have made any difference.    Monbiot apparently had good luck with it in a debate.

Yet when I asked her a simple question – “do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?” – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen.

He describes the problem with modern day libertarians like Ron Paul:

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people.

This is how I finally came to realize, when I was a sophomore in college, the flaws in Ayn Rand’s books and in her philosophy.  I learned some truths about the “weaker people” who were the victims of Ayn Rand’s exploiting hero types.  Many of these “weaker people” were born into circumstances that prevented them from even realizing that there were alternatives to their current situations.  There were examples of some extraordinary people among them who found a way to a better life, but the odds were just stacked against the people who didn’t even know their was a way out to be found.  Some of the exploiters were not just innocent partakers of the advantages of their own circumstances.  Many used government policy to prevent the “weaker people” from ever discovering what was being done to them and by whom.

What the 1% so fear about Elizabeth Warren is that her research, her books, and her lectures reveal the ugly truth of how the exploiters keep the 99% down.  See the video of Warren’s explanation at The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class.

The book review McJournalism: The Unbearable Lightness of Thomas Friedman comes from the Truth Out web site.

The fact that this three-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s writing qualifies as serious, award-winning journalism and punditry is why Belén Fernandez latest book, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work is such an important read.

Fernandez writes that the point of her book “is to demonstrate the defectiveness in form and in substance of [Friedman’s] disjointed discourse, and in doing so offer a testament to the degenerate state of the mainstream media in the United States.”

I cannot believe that I have stumbled across a reviewer and an author that hold Thomas Friedman in the same low regard as I do.

I like the description of the book on its web page at The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work.

Factual errors, ham-fisted analysis, and contradictory assertions—compounded by a penchant for mixed metaphors and name-dropping—distinguish the work of Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman.

When I first heard Thomas Friedman being interviewed on the Charlie Rose show, I mistakenly thought he actually knew something about the Middle East. His prescriptions for the Middle East turned out to be nothing but baloney. Then he started touting his insights into the outsourcing of jobs from the United States. I recognized these “new” ideas that he was breathlessly touting to be something I had been observing and commenting on for more than 30 years from my perch in the high tech world. Thomas Friedman certainly holds himself in high regard. I am glad to see that there are many others who are not so easily fooled.