For people who like their political wisdom in cartoon form, The Daily Kos has the article Cartoon: Who’s looking out for Lucky Ducky? featuring this Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon.

I am bound and determined to get this message across to the centrist Democrats who just don’t want to hear it.

The Daily Kos has the article and comment board Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges fires back at #pointergate scandal.  The article has a pointer to Mayor Betsy Hodges’ complete response to pointergate.

If the fourth option is correct, my commitment to this work means that the head of the police union or other detractors will pitch more stories that attempt to defame that work and its leaders to various media outlets. So be it. I know the charge that I have been given by the people of Minneapolis and by my own conscience. I will continue to follow that charge.

This mayor will not be bullied.  I wish Ferguson, Missouri  had a mayor like this.

Salon has the article Loretta Lynch’s Wall Street friends: What you should know about AG nominee’s finance past.

Despite all the unabashed punditry, relatively little is known by the country about Loretta Lynch, the low-profile U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, whom President Obama nominated on Saturday to replace Eric Holder as attorney general. We’ve heard about the cases Lynch has prosecuted for the government, from the police shooting of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima to public corruption cases against the likes of Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y.

But what’s less known is Lynch’s career in the private sector. After reviewing her record in this capacity, it’s not that she’s openly corrupted by the forces that increasingly rule our government, so much as she’s marinated in their worldview, in their cultural milieu. To ask her to take on powerful interests in finance would be like asking someone to rat out their friends.
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Eventually, Lynch went back to run the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn for a second stint in 2010, serving there until her nomination for attorney general. But in between, she worked in corporate law and white-collar criminal defense at two mega-law firms for nearly two decades.
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To take this out of the realm of theory, let’s look at some of Lynch’s recent corporate crime actions as a federal prosecutor. She was instrumental in two financial fraud settlements, which President Obama touted in announcing her as attorney general. One was the $7 billion mortgage-backed securities fraud case against Citigroup, part of a series of high-profile settlements that amounted to public relations vehicles for the Justice Department, so they could claim to have “gotten tough” on big banks. In reality, shareholders paid the fines, the perpetrators faced no jail time, investor victims received no compensation, and the public never got the full story on the extent of the wrongdoing.

Lynch’s other major financial fraud case was a $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement with HSBC for facilitating money laundering for terrorists and Mexican drug cartels. Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations basically gift-wrapped this case for federal prosecutors in an extensive report, relating lurid tales of HSBC collaborating with some of the worst people on the planet for years. But nobody from the bank went to jail or paid any fines. Lynch’s office didn’t even force HSBC to plead guilty; the deferred prosecution agreement just imposes a fine and a monitoring process as an out-of-court settlement. As Matt Taibbi pointed out at the time, a kid caught with a few ounces of drugs will get thrown into jail for years, but a bank helping the criminals sell billions in drugs to those kids will have no trouble.

In my previous post Obama to nominate Loretta Lynch for attorney general, I voiced my suspicions based on Lynch’s employment history and her lack of record in criminal prosecutions of bank executives.  It is unfortunate, but no surprise, to see my suspicions confirmed in a more detailed look at her record.

Maybe the Democrats who stayed away from the election in droves, knew something that the few of you who voted did not know.

I  did know, or suspect this, but I voted anyway.  At least the Democrats I voted for did not directly refuse to prosecute executive crime on Wall Street as certain people, who were not directly on the ballot this time, did.

All the pretty numbers of how well the top 10% of  income earners have fared under Obama, does not cover up some ugly truths.  With this appointment, it appears that Obama is still deaf to the cries of the people he could not get to come out to vote for him.  What vote could they have cast to get his attention?

CBS News has the story The young voter turnout in 2014. Near the beginning it says:

Voters ages 18-29, a core part of the Democratic party’s coalition, made up 13 percent of the national electorate this year, compared to 19 percent in 2012, representing approximately 14 million fewer young voters–an early estimate based on exit polling and the number of votes cast for the House of Representatives.

Then it goes on to give you lots more fascinating pieces of data.  Remember that as Nassim Nicholas  Taleb said in his book The Black Swan, and here I paraphrase, people run into trouble not so much in telling what happened historically, but they run into trouble when they try to tell you why.

Nevertheless, I have been raving on about why it happened ever since the election.  So trust me, folks, I am an exception to what Taleb said. 🙂

I was quite skeptical of the Gruber video that was out of  context, highly edited, had skips and jumps, and cut off Gruber’s words at strategic moments.  The video was more intent on making its own point than telling you what Gruber thought.

Reader WayneP sent a link to The Washington Post article Who is Jonathan Gruber? This article tries to put in a little context.

I have found the MSNBC article The mess Jonathan Gruber created.

Part of the problem with the Jonathan Gruber “stupid” story is that it’s a shiny object for the political world to stare at for a while. It offers more heat than light. It’s a bouncing ball for political insiders to chase after, despite its relative insignificance.

But since it’s likely to soon be the subject of congressional hearings, and since your crazy uncle who watches Fox News all day will be talking about nothing else at Thanksgiving, let’s grudgingly tackle this week’s Most Important Story Of All Time As Agreed Upon By Republicans And The Beltway Media.
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What about the notion that a “lack of transparency” created a “huge political advantage”? At face value, that doesn’t even make any sense – the entirety of the ACA process couldn’t have been much more transparent. There were countless open hearings, debates, meetings, and reports, all played out under the spotlight over the course of a year. Congressional Republicans have worked in secret, behind closed doors, on an ACA alternative for five years, but the process of creating “Obamacare” was the polar opposite.

So the question is, are you really prepared for Thanksgiving this year?

Well, chalk up another one  for a professor from my alma mater.  Do you think this might lower the value of consulting gigs for MIT professors?

The Daily Kos has published a Cartoon: The people* have spoken!. Follow the previous link to read and join the conversation about the cartoon.

Can you hear me now?

Robert Reich has posted a video on his Facebook page The choice ahead for the Democrats, and what we must do to help them make the right choice..

Reich has put together all the pieces that you have found scattered about many of my recent posts.

When I first read the headline, I read it as I have put it in the subject of this blog post.  I was going to say to readers in Massachusetts that I bet you think this is about Charlie Baker and Chris Christie.

After reading the story, and  then went back to reread the Naked Capitalism headline which is State Street, Governor Elect Rauner Both Implicated in Pay-to-Play Scandals.

Rauner’s aides tried dismissing the revelation arguing that these firms were already feeding at the public fund management trough. That argument doesn’t cut it from a legal or common sense standpoints, as Sirota explains:

But legal experts, former SEC officials and campaign finance lawyers interviewed by IBTimes said the [SEC] rule applies over the entire life of a pension fund investment because those investments can be terminated, sold off or extended at any time. The point is to prevent political contributions from influencing not just the original decision to invest, but the ongoing choice to continue or terminate the investment.

David Melton of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform said pension “contracts come up for renewal periodically,” and that it’s therefore “inconsistent with the spirit and purpose of the law” to rely on the argument that the donations are acceptable because they were made after the original investment decision.

In the case involving Baker and Christie, bake was the fund manager at the time and Christie was the governor of New Jersey.  This case has been under investigation, but the results are being withheld from the public until well after the election is in the past.

Naked Capitalism has yet another article to add to the pile – Why Democrats Lost: It’s Not All About Millennials by Joe Firestone.

In this case, I am going to talk about what I like in this article and what needs a better presentation to be plausible.

But why in heavens name, should I contribute to any candidate who won’t tell me what they’ve done, and what they plan to do down to the level of specific commitments? Why in heavens name should I move to buy a pig-in-a-poke?
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In short, this year’s Democratic Campaign handling of e-mail was incompetent. It could not have been better designed to generate anger and contempt from Democratic Party-inclined supporters. It was a series of no-reply harangues intermixed by messages about “your supporter record shows . . . “ (which were like dunning messages from debt collectors), and whining pleas for money from seemingly idiot candidates who, apparently, could not even say who they were and what they stood for. They had absolutely nothing to run on, a condition I predicted would result as far back as 2010 when they chained themselves to PPACA. No wonder they got blown out by the worst gaggle of Republicans ever assembled for a political campaign.

Joe has finally put into words what I felt subconsciously when I got all those fund-raising emails.

At a conscious level, I kept wondering why the party of the middle and lower classes was expecting us to have enough money to match what the wealthy top 1% could spend.

A party that truly understood their constituency might have tried to put together a better plan than raising money from people who don’t have it. Had they thought really hard, they might have come up with a plan such as build a policy record that would show these people which side we are really on.

So, third, here’s what the Democrats could have run on, on the condition that the voters delivered both Houses of Congress to them, with the Republican constituencies that likely would have been impacted.

[Admirable list of 11 proposed benefits and increases in benefits. and some paragraphs about other proposals.]

In the political debate that might have ensued over them, the main Republican counters would have been funding problems, the prospect of inflation, and the debt, apart from their usual calls for self-discipline and condemnation of lazy people and moral degenerates (unlike them and their Wall Street and big bank allies of course) who won’t stand on their own two feet and want, instead to rely on big Government. There are of course MMT answers explaining why all these supposed problems are faux problems, or can be easily be managed.

This is where Joe needs to come up with specifics on how this would be paid  for. If he recognizes that Democrats’ problem was that they  failed to come up with specifics about what solutions they have, then he shouldn’t make the same mistake himself.  He does provide links which would supposedly answer these questions, but that isn’t enough.  He needs to say something more specific about this in the same article where he makes his costly proposals.

Modern Money Theory says that a country like ours is not limited by having enough money, but it is limited by real resources. Given this real limitation, I would think his long list of benefits would have to be accompanied by an explanation of what shifting real resources to all these people with suddenly more money would do to the economy. At some point real resources and unemployed people would be in short supply. Then inflation would be an issue. MMT proponents can’t expect people to believe that nobody else would have to adjust so that inflation could be controlled. MMT proponents always must show explicitly that they take the problem seriously.