Elizabeth Warren posted Elizabeth Warren’s reaction to what happened in the midterm elections on her facebook page.

Last night I talked with Late Night with Seth Meyers about what happened in last week’s elections. Take a look.

I think it is really instructive to listen to what she said that drew applause and what she said that met with dead silence from the audience. There is also what she did not say. She did not lay any blame for the failure to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street at the feet of the DOJ.

She really did not own up to any of the mistakes people in her own party made that might have driven potential supporters to stay home rather than vote. I think that is why their was dead silence from the audience for much of what she said.

In my estimation this was not one of her best performances.

Naked Capitalism has the article Joe Firestone: Elizabeth Warren – Better, But Not There Yet. I agree with almost everything Joe Firestone said.  Although I strongly promote Elizabeth Warren for President, I do realize she is not perfect.  I’ll quote one sample of what Firestone had to say, but if you really want to understand the good and the bad of Warren’s positions, you will really have to read the article yourself.

That’s what happened in 2009 – 2010. Democrats structured legislation in a vain search for bipartisanship, and in doing so produced:

— an inadequate stimulus bill that lowered unemployment only very slowly,

— a Credit card Reform Bill that did not limit credit card interest rates to non-usurious levels,

— a FINREG bill that still allows Systemically Dangerous Institutions (SDIs) to thrive and threaten the financial system, and that still allows trading in derivatives, and finally:

— a “health care reform” bill that, four and a half years after its passage in early 2010, covers only 10 of the 45 – 55 million people without insurance, leaves us with 35,000 to 45,000 annual fatalities due to the absence of medical care, and still leaves millions of people who have insurance in danger of bankruptcy, due to overwhelming medical bills.

So, Warren is dead-on about this. We don’t need compromise for its own sake, and legislation that creates the short-lived illusion that Congress is finally “doing something” about our problems. What we need, and have needed since the election of 2008 is that Congress actually legislate solutions to those problems, and end the kabuki theatre.

I posted my reaction to the article on the Naked Capitalism site.

My only quibble is that it is unrealistic to demand promises about specific legislation. No President has free rein to get exactly the legislation that she wants. We all know that. So a promise to get the Congress to enact specific legislation is a promise that no one can believe.

We need to think about what kind of promises we should expect that are within the power of the President to keep. The President can certainly promote certain legislation, fight for certain legislation, take executive actions that are within her power, rally the people to put pressure on Congress, etc. We need to think about what else we should demand that is realistic.

We don’t need more arguments about unrealistic promises not kept.

Politicus USA has the article Bernie Sanders Takes A Big Step Towards Challenging Clinton for 2016 Democratic Nomination.  They cite a number of quotes from The Washington Post article Tad Devine signs on to work with Bernie Sanders on potential 2016 run.  First the good news.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has spent months fishing for a strategist to guide his potential 2016 presidential campaign. On Monday, he hooked a big one: Tad Devine, one of the Democratic Party’s leading consultants…

They also quote a description on what are the issues for Sanders.

Over breakfast on Saturday in Los Angeles, Sanders said that he would center a possible campaign on the “collapse of the middle class” and “income and wealth inequality,” which he calls a “huge issue from a moral sense and a political sense.”

Of course, I would think these are important issues.  Whether or not they are winning issues for any near term political campaign or candidate is even less important than getting the public to focus on these issues.  Well, the voters are already focused on these issues, but they need some indication that someone has some ideas on what to do about it.

Well, I couldn’t make any blog post without criticizing something, so here is the end of the first quote above.

… and a former high-level campaign aide to Al Gore, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis.

if the campaign aide positions were on all of their Presidential campaigns, this does not bode well.  Perhaps he worked on the successful Senatorial and Gubernatorial campaigns for these politicians.

New Economic Perspectives has the article CEO Compensation: “Cheaters Prosper”.

While the scandal of not prosecuting any of the senior officers who were enriched by leading the three epidemics of accounting control fraud that drove the financial crisis for those frauds is well known, the public does not understand that the fraudulent senior bankers have also been able to keep virtually all of the fraud proceeds they received through leading the accounting control frauds.

This excerpt may help to justify my constant harping on the Obama administration’s failure to criminally prosecute cases of accounting control fraud.  Eric Holder’s chosen head of the effort to prosecute criminal conduct in the financial meltdown pretty clearly stated that he had no clue as to what accounting control fraud was.  How can you be in charge of law enforcement in an area that is rife with a crime you gladly profess you don’t even know exists or what it is?

The above excerpt barely scratches the surface of what you would learn if you actually read the article at the above link.  It is so frustrating for me to know what is in these articles, and to also know that even the people reading my blog are mostly unaware of the content of these articles.  Short of plagiarizing these articles, or copyright infringement by publishing them on this blog, I don’t know what else I could do.  Any suggestions?

The New Yorker has the article Country on Wrong Track, Say People Who Did Not Vote by Andy Borowitz.

The United States of America is on the wrong track and no one is taking action to fix it, says a broad majority of registered voters who did not vote last Tuesday.

According to a new survey, anger, frustration, and a pervasive view that the nation is moving in a fatal direction dominated the mood of those who were doing something other than voting on Election Day.

This is so close to not being the satire that is customary for Andy Borowitz, that I cannot tell if this is satire or a satire on satire.  Does Andy Borowitz not understand the problem, or does he understand it so well that it is a satire of the people who believe this is a “straight” satire?  Is this what they invented the phrase “kidding on the square” for?

Maybe this will clarify what I am trying to say.

Is Andy Borowitz satirizing the people who are too stupid to vote to change the system they claim to dislike? Or is he satirizing the people who think the people who don’t vote are too stupid to vote to change the system they claim to dislike?

Reader BillM brought The American Prospect article The Hidden History of Prosperity to my attention. The following excerpts are from the article.

In the crisis of World War II, the nation made the political choices that created the robust egalitarian economy of the next 30 years. Can we respond to the climate crisis with similar policies to rebuild the middle class?

This article by Robert Kuttner debunks many of the myths that some leading economists and pundits try to use to explain the increasing inequality of wealth and the shrinking middle class.

Tinkering with education and training or even a higher minimum wage will not restore good earnings for the working and middle class. But the wartime experience demonstrates that a different structure of a capitalist economy, rooted in public investment and full employment, is possible. The current failure to spread productivity gains has little to do with technology, skills, or even globalization—and everything to do with our failure to constrain great private wealth, empower labor, and creatively use democratic government for national purposes.

The article then has a great discussion of the changes that the two Roosevelt presidents brought about.

Several aspects of TR’s presidency illuminate our current situation. Significantly, there was no deep economic crisis, and no war. There was, however, a set of robber barons with unprecedented concentrations of wealth. With indignation and passion, Teddy rallied his countrymen to right the imbalance. He did not fully succeed—that was left to his cousin. But he made a good start.

The significance of this description is that Theodore Roosevelt was able to bring about great change without the need for a deep economic crisis or a war.

With that lesson in mind, it seems like the article’s search for a deep crisis to trigger reform is not the most important part of the article.

First, because there is something else other than a crisis that is needed to get us started down the path of reform.  If the collapse of the world financial system weren’t a big enough crisis, one has  to wonder what would be. Timid leadership from Obama was enough to get us over the crisis stage without getting us to the  reform stage.  During the great depression, the timid leadership of Herbert Hoover similarly did not produce great reform.

Second, I am not sure that global climate change will reach, any time soon, an obviously enough crisis level to spur people to action in the face of the crisis deniers.

What it may boil down to is for the public to find the bold leader that they can get behind and support the changes that we need.  Any such bold leader on the horizon?  Hillary Clinton? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders?  Alan Grayson?  Which one does not belong in the above list?

Presented for your consideration, the video from the Politicus USA article Bernie Sanders Delivers A Gut Punch To the Republican Agenda To Screw Ordinary Americans.

The Daily Kos has the article 26-Year Old Founder of U.S. UnCut Sends Open Letter To Democrats On Young Voter Disillusion.

Contrast the unified Republican message with the profound silence from you Democrats on addressing the trillion-dollar student debt crisis, rampant inequality and underemployment, and your collective fear of openly embracing economic populism, and you cook up what we saw on Tuesday night. Older people showed up, highly motivated to elect war hawks. Younger people mostly stayed home, disillusioned with the only alternative on the ballot who didn’t even talk about the issues affecting our lives every day.
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You Democrats, on the other hand, looked pitiful in the year leading up to the midterms. You didn’t seem to stand for anything in particular, you just pointed the finger at the other guy, told us they were bad, and that you weren’t like them. That’s not enough. Take a risk, be bold. Get behind Elizabeth Warren’s 0.75 percent interest rate for student loans. Allow student debt to be abolished with bankruptcy. Push for single-payer healthcare, or at the very least a public health insurance option. Need some catchy buzzwords? Try “affordable education,” “good jobs,” and “healthy families.”

What Hillary Clinton plan are they clamoring for? Oh, that’s right, they didn’t say diddly about any kind of Clinton.  Apparently they do get excited about Elizabeth Warren’s plans for student debt relief.

I wonder how the Democrats will ever figure out what the millenials want?  Do you suppose they would think of reading the open letters written to them?  Nah, too easy.  Let’s survey how well the things we want to emphasize do with this generation.  What words can we use to sell them on our ideas?

One of the millenials I speak to tells me that what his age group really wants is bipartisanship and centrism.  Funny that the letter didn’t mention any of that.

We saw the movie Interstellar last night.

We thought it was a great movie, but I had forgotten how much effort has been put into having real science in the movie.

NBC News has an article,  After ‘Cosmos,’ Neil deGrasse Tyson Dives Into Science of ‘Interstellar’, that goes into Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s comments about the movie.  There are numerous web links in the article that I am still following.

Here is a little featurette that I found from following the links. Supposedly not full of spoilers. INTERSTELLAR Featurette – The Science Of Interstellar (2014) Matthew McConaughey Sci-Fi Movie HD.

I’ll let you follow your own trail through the links whenever you are ready. Some of them have spoilers in them, so you might want to see the movie first. Just remember that the science is pretty real given that this is a movie and by necessity it has to go beyond what we already know.

Here is a question that perhaps someone out there can answer. What role did Topher Grace play in the movie? We think we have figured it out, but we cannot find anything on the web that definitely confirms what we think. We can find the name of the character he plays, but that does not help us be certain of who that character was. If you have the answer, leave a link to the answer rather than an explanation. we don’t want any spoilers for the people who have not seen the movie yet.

Lot’s of spoilers in the following link

‘Interstellar’ Ending & Space Travel Explained.

You might be interested in the real definition of tesseract after you read the above article.

This article does not answer the question about Topher Grace, but it does explain some things we weren’t sure about. The table of contents links to other pages seem to be broken, but if you read the first page to the end, you will be able to navigate to succeeding pages.

Naked Capitalism has the article Matt Stoller: Why the Democratic Party Acts The Way It Does.  This is another in a series of my posts that drive a few people (at least one) into a tizzy.  The article itself is too long for anybody to read except for maybe one or fewer people reading this post.  Here is the excerpt talking about the recriminations in the Democratic party over the recent electoral loss:

Everything is put on the table, except the main course — policy. Did the Democrats run the government well? Are the lives of voters better? Are you as a political party credible when you say you’ll do something?

This question is never asked, because Democratic elites — ensconced in the law firms, foundations, banks, and media executive suites where the real decisions are made — basically agree with each other about organizing governance around the needs of high technology and high finance. The only time the question even comes up now is in an inverted corroded form, when a liberal activist gnashes his or her teeth and wonders — why can’t Democrats run elections around populist themes and policies? This is still the wrong question, because it assumes the wrong causality. Parties don’t poll for good ideas, run races on them, and then govern. They have ideas, poll to find out how to sell those ideas, and run races and recruit candidates based on the polling. It’s ideas first, then the sales pitch. If the sales pitch is bad, it’s often the best of what can be made of an unpopular stew of ideas.

Still, you’d think that someone, somewhere would have populist ideas. And a few — like Zephyr Teachout and Elizabeth Warren — do. But why does every other candidate not? I don’t actually know, but a book just came out that might answer this question. The theory in this book is simple. The current generation of Democratic policymakers were organized and put in power by people that don’t think that a renewed populist agenda centered on antagonism towards centralized economic power is a good idea.

I am proud to say my blog, here, has persistently put policy on the table as the culprit, much to the annoyance of a few (at least one).  This article reviews a book about how the policy of the Democratic party was turned into what it is today.  This shift started before Bill Clinton became President.  Though Bill Clinton is the most famous person for pushing these changes forward, the man of ideas behind this shift is the author of the book being reviewed.

I have some ambivalence about the book, the movement, and the review.  I had been seduced by many of the ideas for which Bill Clinton became the embodiment, although I had been repulsed by some of the other ideas.  I still struggle with the feeling that there were problems with the Democrats and the party that led to the rise of Clinton who seemed to “fix” many of those problems.  Something did need to be “fixed”, but I have become completely disenchanted with the way they were “fixed”.  I had my doubts about some of these “fixes” at the time, but it seemed hard to argue with “success”.  I supported some of the “fixes” at the time, that I now recognize have turned into disasters.  I also railed against some of the bad ideas at the time they were proposed and enacted.