Found this poster on the Occupy Democrats’ Facebook page.

They posed an interesting thought in the remarks about the poster.

The takeaway from this election is that if we want progressive reforms, popular ballots might be the most effective electoral strategy. Let’s up and down vote on the most important social, economic, and environmental justice questions of our time. It’s time we bypass the two-party system corrupted by corporate money. Who’s ready for direct democracy? What are your thoughts?

During the civil rights era, progressives found the way to get things done was to use the Supreme Court.  Now that regressives have managed to block that avenue, we just need to find another avenue.  Perhaps this is it.

The Boston Globe has the useless article Obama to nominate Loretta Lynch for attorney general.  There was a particular piece of information that I had read about before, and wanted to quote here.  The New York Times article Loretta Lynch, Federal Prosecutor, Will Be Nominated for Attorney General comes close enough.

After graduating from law school in 1984, she spent six years as an associate at the New York law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel before becoming a federal prosecutor. She became the chief assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York in 1998 and was nominated a year later to lead the office for the rest of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Before returning in 2010, she was a partner at Hogan & Hartson, now known as Hogan Lovells.

Oh, Lord no, here we go again.  From the interview in my previous post, Democrats, This Is Why You Lost, I pick up some dialog that I did not put in the previous post.

Juan Cole: How would you judge the tenure of Eric Holder and now that obviously he is going to be leaving in terms of his particular role in going after these banks and this whole idea of bankers being able to call directly to the Justice Department to negotiate their deals and stop prosecutions at the lower levels.

Matt Taibbi: Well, it’s funny.  For years now I have been covering a lot of this stuff, and I have spoken to a lot of people in law enforcement, and there are really two types of people that I talk to who are prosecutors. One is the kind of old school law enforcement type, they want to get the bad guy at all costs and the are really career civil servants who just want to do their jobs and want to see justice happen. And then there is this new kind of person who is appearing in government now who comes out of the corporate defense sector. These are people who grew up as corporate lawyers defending companies like Chase and Bank of America and that’s who Eric Holder is very pointedly. He spent a long time at a company being called Covington and Burling, and this type of lawyer, this type of law enforcement official is much more interested in coming up with the settlement that everybody feels  good about when they walk out of the room as opposed to the old school kind of justice where the bad guy gets his or her comeuppance in the end and I think his tenure was very representative of a big sea change in the way we  do white collar  crime in this country.

Should I have expected Obama to learn a damn thing about the Democrats’ losses last Tuesday?  I  would have been pretty naive, wouldn’t I?  These kinds of appointments and governance do not happen by accident.  These people know exactly what they are doing.  I am beginning to think that if any party is going to have this type of corrupt administration on their record, perhaps i would prefer it to be a Republican administration.  I’ll be thinking very strongly about this in 2016.

In answer to a question a little before the closing Q & A above, there are some remarks about whether or not the whistle blower case in this interview will be fully prosecuted at last.  This may reinforce what Taibbi said above.

Matt Taibbi: The is an important distinction, too. It’s often not the line investigators who are the problem. The people who actually work these cases, the career prosecutors who are doing this digging. Often times they are very talented and aggressive lawyers who really know what they are doing. The problem is the political wing of the Justice Department can take those cases and do whatever they want with them. So in Alayne’s case and in many other cases that they take these excellent investigations and they turn them into these slap on the wrist settlements, and that’s what she is worried about, I think.

So this is why we lost so big last Tuesday.

On Facebook I was warned:

Norman Hobson Better look at her record before you spout off Steve

Oh my, could I have jumped to conclusions too soon?  A Google search pointed me to the ABC News item The 5 Most Interesting Cases of Attorney General Nominee Loretta Lynch’s Career.  I can breathe a sigh of relief.  No executives of giant corporations in that list.

Naked Capitalism has the article Matt Taibbi and Alayne Fleischmann Discuss JP Morgan Mortgage Fraud, Eric Holder CoverUp on Democracy Now.

The article features this video from Democracy Now:

There are so many quotes from this video that I jotted down, that I’ll probably put some of them in the addendum to this post. Here is the one, I have chosen to feature.

Juan Cole: And Matt Taibi, The reality that despite all the claims of the Obama administration that they pursued all these civil cases that they never really went after the people who practically wrecked the world economy and how that relates to this election result that we just had. We obviously, Americans across the board from Democrats to Republicans to Independents are still furious about their economic situation and the failure of holding these people accountable

Matt Taibbi: It’s hard not to make a connection between the total lack of enthusiasm we saw for the Democratic Party this past week. For instance their behavior in pushing investigations of the financial services community. We saw it with the Occupy protests. I talk to people on Wall Street all the time. All my sources come from Wall Street, and they all say the same thing taht Barack Obama had an incredible opportunity in late 2008 just after he took office with his communication skill he could have gotten in front of the American people and explained to them exactly what happened and said this is why the economy is bad, this is why you are losing your job, there was massive criminal activity, it’s not just an accident, and then he could have gone and a few people in jail, and really put some teeth behind those words. The they swept it all under the rug and people, even if they don’t completely understand what happened they sense that nothing was done. I think it is important to understand that.

If you are a Democrat searching for a reason why the Democrats suffered big losses this past Tuesday, then look no further from this discussion. If you cannot see how this behavior of the Obama administration has soured the public on Obama, then you must be unwilling to face the truth.

If you cannot see why Hillary Clinton must not be the 2016 Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party and someone like Elizabeth Warren must be the nominee, then you are doing your party and your country a terrible disservice.

Here is another quote. Amy Goodman had played a video clip of Obama’s press conference announcing Holder’s resignation. Obama offered high praise for the fines Holder extracted from the financial industry. Amy Goodman asked for Matt Taibbi’s reaction.

Matt Taibbi: The first thing I would say is, ok, they brought a bunch of settlements, collected a bunch of money, but there isn’t a single individual in this entire tableau who is actually individually paying any kind of penalty for any of these misdeeds. All of that money came out of the pockets of shareholders. No executives had to pay a fine. No executives had to do a single day in jail. There were not even charges filed against any individuals.

As I reread this quote as I place it here, I realize how much it reinforces the points I made above the line.

Brave New Films has a series called Over Criminalized.

I have seen two of the episodes on YouTube. Here is the first episode, Why Are We Using Prisons to Treat Mental Illness?

It’s simple. Diversion programs work better than incarceration – for everyone. In cities like Seattle, San Antonio, and Salt Lake City, we see that successful solutions are a viable option to help end serious social problems. These services alter the course of people’s lives in a positive way and save taxpayers huge amounts of money. We cannot continue to isolate and imprison people who suffer from mental illness, substance abuse, or homelessness. We must treat them with compassion and care to better serve our communities and our pocketbooks.

When Charlie Baker first saw the horrible conditions in the underfunded Massachusetts state mental hospitals, I wonder if programs like the one in the above video existed. Had he known about these, would he have “fixed” Massachusetts’ problem the way he did? He closed the state mental hospitals, relegated the residents to underfunded to non-existent community based programs, and called it a success.

This is the kind of “successful” management skills that the people of Massachusetts just chose to put in the Governor’s office. Would the people of Massachusetts have been so eager to have Charlie Baker if someone like Don Berwick had explained that there is a more humane way to treat mentally ill people that costs even less than the Baker plan? Martha Coakley, who made mental health treatment a major component of her campaign, should have used this video to explain to the voters what she meant. I am sad to say that I came across this video three days after she lost the election.

The Colbert Report has this segment The Republicans’ Inspiring Message on Climate Change.

Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe gears up to chair the Senate Environmental Committee despite literally writing the book on global warming denial.

I rue the day my parents allowed me to attend MIT. Now I cannot ever become an influential politician on matters of science because I can’t claim to be a pure “not a scientist.”

Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Scientists.

Here is a thought experiment.  Imagine Bernie Madoff getting the Obama/Holder treatment. In case you have forgotten, the WikiPedia article on Bernie Madoff starts out with this introduction.

Bernard Lawrence “Bernie” Madoff (/ˈmeɪdɒf/; born April 29, 1938) is an American convicted of fraud and a former stockbroker, investment advisor, and financier. He is the former non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of a Ponzi scheme that is considered to be the largest financial fraud in U.S. history.

If only Bernie had incorporated and had stolen more money, the results might have been quite different.

The Obama administration, fearing the damage to the economy from a collapse of the Ponzi scheme, decides to pour in enough bailout money to make the investors whole.  Not knowing how to unravel the mess after pouring in the money to cover up the disaster, they decide to pay Madoff huge bonuses in the hopes that he can figure out how to fix it.  After all, corporations are so diffuse that you can’t figure out who is responsible for the corporate acts of the corporate person, so you must protect people from the  damage that would come from too big to fail actually failing.

Moreover, you  cannot imagine how a corporation could possibly succeed by making no investments with the investors’ money, let alone bad investments.  So there is obviously no criminality or fraud to be found in the corporation.  If there is fraud to be found it must be in the investors putting money into a corporation that promised unbelievable financial gains.  The fact that Madoff had successfully invested people’s money for 20 or 30 years is no excuse for the investors not to realize that this couldn’t go on.  Why were they stupid enough to think that past performance was indicative of  future results?  Maybe these investors had criminal intent for trying to take advantage of offers that clearly could not be fulfilled.

Bringing some investors to trial for their criminal activities ends up in a big flop when some former regulator comes in and explains to the jury that Madoff’s plan was what we call a Ponzi scheme.  He is the real criminal, not the investors.  (See previous post Sacramento Residents Found Not Guilty of Mortgage Fraud)

In the meantime there are all sorts of witnesses from inside the corporation who have evidence that Madoff was warned time and time again that his scheme was fraudulent and could not continue.  Of course he fired those people if he couldn’t intimidate them into silence, and you cannot depend on people with an axe to grind.  Nevertheless, these people might testify in a courtroom, convince a jury, and upset the bailout.  So you string them along by pretending you care about their testimony.  All the while you are plotting with Madoff about some fig leaves you can use to cover up the real fraud, and pretend that things have changed so that it cannot happen again.

If you read the article in my previous post, The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare,  with the Madoff thought experience in mind, you might find it easier to understand.  (By the way, the link to the article in the previous post has been fixed.)

Do you suppose that the Massachusetts Democratic Party will wake up to the fact that if a candidate does not excite people in one election, then trying the same ideas and candidate again may not be the best bet?  Of course the counter argument is who the Republicans managed to get into office.  However, in this case when both parties try the same old, same old, then one of them is bound to win.  In this election, the results showed that the majority of people could not agree on which one of the two major party candidates they wanted.  We had to leave it up to a plurality of 48% of the voters to choose Baker.

Do we want to place the same bet in the 2016 Presidential election?  Do we  want to  depend on the Republicans to put up Mitt Romney against Hillary Clinton?

My reading of the election results is that when you tell people that the current direction of the ruling party’s policy are making their lives better, but they feel in their gut that it isn’t true, then they are not coming out in droves to keep you in office.  If the people who are supposed to be on my side, don’t even know how bad it is for me, how can I possibly get their attention?  Or more likely, if these people won’t listen to me, why bother?

Giving the people the same old same old, which they have already rejected, won’t get them excited.  The Democrats need turn out to overcome the resources that the Republicans  have to throw at the elections.  If Martha Coakley was outspent 10:1 or 11:1, should she have been surprised, or should she have had a plan?

I know that sending pleading emails and phone calls asking for 10 times more money from a constituency that doesn’t have any money is not a plan.

I can also imagine that starting the planning for the 2016 Presidential campaign is something that should already be well underway.  If a Democrat is going to win, then a winning message needs to be delivered yesterday, today, and every day thereafter, until the election.  That winning message can’t be based on pushing ideas that your potential voters know are not true.  If you show by your actions that you care more about transferring wealth to the already wealthy, then any protestations that you are for the other 90% will be completely ignored.

The Republicans seem to have hot button issues that drive their supporters into a frenzy of activity and  voting.  The Democrats only issue that could possibly excite a large number of people to compensate for the ardor of the smaller base of Republicans, is the economics one – equality and justice.  Equality being not giving breaks to the wealthy that the non-wealthy don’t get.  Justice being to bring criminal charges against the biggest criminals imaginable, rather than doing everything you can to help them cover up  their crimes.  (See my previous post  The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare.)

The losers in an election like to think the voters are stupid.  May it is the losers just not being very smart.  The losers were given an issue on a silver platter, but they let their leaders fritter it away.  If we only have two versions of a Republican Party in this country, maybe it is time to recognize the fact that we need to bend one of those two parties in a new direction – or start another party.

The Ready For Warren facebook page highlights this Rolling Stone article The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare.

And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”
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Because after all this activity, all these court actions, all these penalties (both real and abortive), even after a fair amount of noise in the press, the target companies remain more ascendant than ever. The people who stole all those billions are still in place. And the bank is more untouchable than ever – former Debevoise & Plimpton hotshots Mary Jo White and Andrew Ceresny, who represented Chase for some of this case, have since been named to the two top jobs at the SEC. As for the bank itself, its stock price has gone up since the settlement and flirts weekly with five-year highs. They may lose the odd battle, but the markets clearly believe the banks won the war. Truth is one thing, and if the right people fight hard enough, you might get to hear it from time to time. But justice is different, and still far enough away.

So the Democrats are wondering why there was no enthusiasm for Democrats in the recent election.  Even if most people have no inkling of the details in the above article, at least 90% of the people know that things are not as  rosy as the Democrats pretended they were.  If the Democratic administration cannot perform any better than it has with respect to the massive transfer of wealth upwards, then why bother?  Elizabeth Warren is the only plausible answer to why bother.

CBS News has the story Four reasons Elizabeth Warren should run for president in 2016.  I’ll just give you the four reasons, you’ll have to read the article itself if you want to know more.

1. She fits the national mood

2. Clinton’s current standing in the polls won’t last

3. Someone has to do it

4. She has little to lose and a lot to gain

While these ideas aren’t all that original to CBS, it is significant that a major lame stream press news outlet would start talking about it.

I have been Ready for Warren for quite some time.