Thanks to Rebecca Deans-Rowe for posting this on Facebook.

How many of you are old enough to remember when news in the USA was reported like this? I bet you young ones think I am kidding when I say that our news media once were capable of this. I don’t say all of them always acted this way. However, the ones that acted like most of today’s media in the USA used to be called by the pejorative term “tabloid media”.

Elizabeth Warren sent me the following email:

Steven,

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is supposed to be responsible for regulating the nation’s biggest banks.

But 46 hours of secret audio recordings released by a former New York Fed regulator – a woman who says she was fired for being too tough on Goldman Sachs – indicate that the big banks are the ones in charge, not the Fed.

When regulators care more about protecting big banks from accountability than protecting the American people from risky behavior on Wall Street, it threatens our whole economy.

Join Senator Sherrod Brown and me in calling for a Congressional oversight investigation into the disturbing issues raised by the Goldman Sachs tapes.

Our regulators seem to think they’re being tough on the big banks. But when I ask them about the last time they took a big bank to trial, or the last time they referred a senior bank executive for criminal prosecution, they’re stumped.  

They claim that closed-door settlement agreements – agreements that don’t hold any individuals accountable – are enough to teach the big banks a lesson.  

Call me skeptical, but when Wall Street CEOs like Jamie Dimon are getting massive pay raises for negotiating sweetheart deals with the regulators, it doesn’t seem like the American people are getting a good deal. That’s why I introduced a bipartisan bill earlier this year to require detailed, public disclosures of all settlements so we can see what’s hidden in these secret agreements.

But the tapes from this whistleblower show that the problem isn’t simply that the big banks get sweetheart deals. It shows that the relationship between the regulators and the financial institutions they oversee is far too cozy to provide the tough oversight that’s really needed – and calls into question whether the Federal Reserve is up to the task of protecting us at all.

This is simple: Bankers on Wall Street need to follow the law – and when they don’t, they should be held accountable. For that to work, regulators in Washington and New York need to enforce the law – and when they don’t, they should be held accountable.

Join Senator Sherrod Brown and me in calling for a Congressional oversight investigation into issues raised by the Goldman Sachs tapes.

We can keep making the rules on Wall Street tougher and tougher, but it won’t make an ounce of difference if the regulators won’t enforce the rules that are there. We need to get to the bottom of this.

Thank you for being a part of this,

Elizabeth

I love the bulldog nature of Elizabeth Warren. Once she gets her teeth into an issue, she does not let go. Imagine if the Republicans take over the Senate, and she loses her power to hold hearings.

It finally dawned on me that I ought to write some letters to the editor of various newspapers in the area.

Editor:

The beauty of Martha Coakley’s economic plan for Massachusetts is that it focuses on investing in enhancing the advantages that Massachusetts already has for attracting businesses to the state. Corporations want to come to Massachusetts for its educated work force. We also have concentrations of expertise in many fields of technology, health sciences, and research. Companies on the leading edges in these fields want to be located where there are centers of excellence in those fields.

What Charlie Baker refuses to acknowledge is that you don’t have to give away our precious tax revenue to companies to entice them to come here. He fails to recognize that we have advantages that companies are eager to get. His short sighted policies rob the state of the money it could use to enhance the value of Massachusetts as a place to do business. No wonder we seem to be unable to afford investments in education and infrastructure. People like Baker would rather give the money away to corporations that don’t need it rather than to spend it wisely on enhancing what attracts business to the state.

Charlie Baker’s policies end up driving away the very corporations we seek to attract, and these policies impoverish us at the same time.

It’s no wonder that Charlie Baker’s ads would rather have you believe that Martha Coakley has no economic plan for Massachusetts. If you didn’t believe his big lie, you might realize that the Coakley plan is outstanding compared to his tired old formula of giving tax cuts to the wealthy corporations.

Does this give anybody else any ideas?

The Daily Kos has the article The Official Michael Brown Autopsy Report Doesn’t Say What the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Says It Does.  In the article there is a list of discrepancies between what the newspaper said the expert said and what she actually said.  I picked one which may or may not be representative.

The article claims the expert said the autopsy didn’t support witnesses who said Michael Brown was shot while running away or with his hands up. She apparently said nothing of the sort.

The Daily Kos article mentioned interviews and reports by Lawrence O’Donnell.  Rather than read second, or third hand info, I decided to look up those broadcasts. The two segments are ‘Inaccurate and misleading’ on Brown autopsy and Paper obtains official Michael Brown autopsy.  Each one of these segments may be way more than you want to listen to.  O’Donnell certainly pinpoints the issues of incompetence by reporters and newspapers.

In one of the video segments O’Donnell interviews the expert, Dr. Judy Melinek, who was so badly misquoted by the newspapers.  She does a good job of clarifying exactly what she did say and what seh didn’t say.  At first O’Donnell seems to be scrupulously separating what you can learn from an autopsy from what you can’t by getting the expert to talk about these issues.  Unfortunately toward the end, even O’Donnell wants her to say things that she cannot say from the autopsy report she was given to review.   However, if you listen to what the doctor says in answer to his questions, she just refused to play along and give him the answers he wants that are just not concusively proven by the evidence she had at her disposal.

Even though O’Donnell seems to be orders of magnitude more careful in what he says than the newspapers were, he still falls down a little.

I think this is a perfect example of how important it is to get to original sources if you want to know what was really said.  Even this expert  who reviewed the autopsy report, and is trying to be extremely cautious in what she says, is not an original source.

Vox has the article 6 reasons Elizabeth Warren should run for president.

4) What else is she going to be doing between 2015 and 2016?

If Warren were, say, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and if Democrats controlled the House and the Senate and the presidency, then there would be a good argument that Warren could do more as a legislator than as a candidate. But Warren is, in real life, the second-most junior senator on the Banking Committee. And she’s likely to be serving in a Senate controlled by Republicans, at a time when the White House is controlled by a Democrat, and absolutely nothing is getting done.

So it’s not just that running for president could do an enormous amount to push Warren’s issues forward. It’s that hanging around the Senate isn’t going to do anything for Warren’s issues at all. It’s hard to imagine two better years to spend away from the Senate than 2015 and 2016.

This would be the most delicious irony of all time.  Elizabeth Warren is a Senator because the Republicans wouldn’t let her be the head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.  If the Republicans do manage to take over the Senate, wouldn’t it be great if this were the very factor that made Elizabeth Warren our next president?

The Boston Globe has the article Charlie Baker jumps 9 points in new Globe poll.

Baker’s standing has improved from last week’s poll, which showed the two candidates dead even. It can be attributed largely to the gains he has made in voters’ perceptions of who would improve the economy and manage state government, areas that already were tilting his way.

It only takes about 2.5 seconds for the big lie to be said. Here is the antidote to the big lie. Martha Coakley has a better jobs plan than Charlie Baker has, yet he wants to claim that she has no plan.

My October 19, 2014 post A Vision for Massachusetts shows a comparison table between Coakley and Baker that tells exactly why Coakley will be better for the state than Baker will be. Coakley has the first part of the item below, Baker is hoping for the second part. He will actively seek to give away our precious tax revenue to the wealthy, oligarchic corporations in a continuation of the Republican class warfare.

Has an economic development plan that focuses on building from the ground up, not hoping that tax breaks for businesses will trickle down.

The reason the state can’t seem to afford to do many of the positive things it needs to do is exactly the fact that we give away the tax revenues it collects as incentives to bring in corporations. Instead we need a governor who recognizes that we have many resources in our state that corporations are eager to get. We need to invest in enhancing these resources, not give away tax money so we cannot afford to have these resources. I think this principle of the Martha Coakley administration will be the key factor in stopping the race to the bottom that Charlie Baker seems to want to win.

Martha Coakley’s web site has the page on Jobs and the Economy.

Here is the suggestion I just emailed to the Martha Coakley campaign

I hope you are planning to run an ad that says,

“Martha Coakley wants to enhance what’s great about Massachusetts that makes corporations want to get in on the action.

“Charlie Baker wants to give away our tax revenues to these corporations so that we cannot afford to invest in what makes this state so attractive in the first place.

“He will end up driving away the very corporations we seek to attract and impoverish us at the same time.”

/Steve

Use this email address, office@marthacoakley.com, to reinforce my message.

People Magazine web site has the teaser An Early Halloween Fright for Wall St.: Elizabeth Warren for Treasury Secretary.

But is the freshman senator from Massachusetts herself on board with a run for the White House? Warren wrinkles her nose.

“I don’t think so,” she tells PEOPLE in an interview conducted at Warren’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home for this week’s issue. “If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.”

I say where there is hope there is fire.  Or was that smoke?

I attended a debate in Wales last night between the candidates for the State Senate seat that includes Sturbridge where I live.

Anne Gobi is a current State Representative. Mike Valanzola has been on the Board of Selectmen for Wales  and he is currently the head of the Tantasqua Regional School committee that encompasses 5 towns including Sturbridge and Wales.

Valanzola seemed to be quite eloquent and dogmatic in putting forth his point of view. I don’t think Anne Gobi did quite as good a job at touting the value of her experience as a a State Representative. Some of the things I point out below as negatives for Valanzola are positives for Gobi because she decidely does not think along the same lines as Valanzola.

Valanzola’s focus on Wales has narrowed his views on what the job is that he is running for. When he gets to the Senate, he will have to work with Senators who represent other parts of the state. In fact he will be representing other parts of the state other than just Wales. The interests of the other Senators for their parts compete with his interests for his part. He will have to learn to work with these people. He will even have to look after the interests of the other parts of his Senatorial district other than just Wales. He can’t just focus on what he wants without regard to what the other Senators need if he is going get any cooperation from them. You have to give some cooperation to get some cooperation.

Working on the Board of selectmen and on the regional school committee, he has a distinctly management focus. He wants to get as much out of the workers in the town and the schools as he can get for as little money as he can spend. That is good for the taxpayers as taxpayers. But the taxpayers are also workers. If you squeeze the workers and help other business owners to squeeze the workers, then you may harm the voters/taxpayers in their roles as workers.

When he decries the power of the unions to extract better working conditions and pay from the state than what the state wants to pay, he fails to realize that the lack of unions for all the people in his town who are workers impedes their abilities to get a fair wage and working conditions. Some of these people in his town who are workers seem to also fail to make this connection. I can’t imagine that every person in the town of Wales is a small (or even large) business owner.

He emphasized having grown up in Wales, learning his values in Wales, and living his adult life in Wales. That is a great point of view, but he doesn’t seem to understand that it also restricts his view. He has to consider the greater world outside of Wales. He didn’t get all of his education in Wales. He had to go to college outside of Wales. Not all people who live in Wales earn their livings from jobs in Wales. Other parts of the state must prosper for the people of Wales to prosper.

The great universities and businesses of the state depend on the prospering of the great cities of the state. In turn, the well being of Wales depends to a larger degree than he seems to understand on the well being of other parts of the state including the cities.

Valanzola kept hitting Gobi with the claim that the state budget has gone up $10 billion over the last 8 years, but local funding has been cut. The state budget went up by 38% he claimed, while local aid went down by a similar percent. He kept wondering how this could be.

I decided to do a little research of my own.

All numbers below are in $ millions. I couldn’t find numbers for what was spent, but since the state has a balanced budget, the revenues will have to stand in as a close approximation for what was spent.

So total revenue went up $8,561 or 33.8%, local aid went up $627 or 13.6%

From the peak year of local aid in 2008 to 2014 it went down $417.2 or 7.4%. From 2007 to 2008, local aid went up $1,044.6 or 22.78% while total revenue went up $1,293.4 or only 5.1%. I don’t have a local aid number for 2009.

I noticed that Valanzola made passing reference to the Quinn Bill in his litany of complaints about how the state is being run. For those who aren’t up on these things it is the Quinn Bill or Police Career Incentive Program. I am not sure he made it clear, but from his tone that I heard I presume his complaint has to be the state’s recent underfunding of this program. How ironic that in other parts of his talk he decries unions and the costs they put on the state, and on the other hand he decries the underfunding of a benefit that was extracted from the state by the strong police unions.

In case I haven’t made it clear in my comments in this post, I think that Mike Valanzola shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near state government.

Then there was the issue of driver’s licenses for undocumented workers. Valanzola is against. Apparently Gobi voted for on one occasion. Gobi failed to point out that by refusing to give driver’s licenses to undocumented workers, we take away their incentive to learn how to drive in this country. Valanzola’s position will only increase the numbers of undocumented workers who may be driving without having studied the laws for driving in Massachusetts.

This is just another example of Valanzola’s constrained world view that prevents him from seeing the larger consequences of what he advocates.

October 23, 2014 14:03

I just remembered the frequent complaint that Valanzola had about the House shutting off amendments on the last vote on local aid. To refresh my memory on what Anne Gobi had to say about the dates involved, I found an April Mass Live article Massachusetts’ $36.2 billion budget bill is peppered with add-ons.

House leaders say amendments to increase local aid will not be considered during the budget debate, since the House and Senate previously approved a resolution calling for a $25 million increase in unrestricted aid for cities and towns and $100 million more in Chapter 70 aid for public school districts. Still, Republicans hope to offer a proposal that would require the state to return to cities and towns at least 50 percent of any unanticipated tax revenue surplus at the end of the next fiscal year.

As Gobi explained, the cutoff of amendments was agreed to by the Republicans because this could allow the towns and cities to know in April the level of local aid that they would get for the year. Since this was prime planning time for them, it was better to know in April than to have to hold their budgets open until the July passage of the bill. According to Gobi, the bill was eventually passed unanimously. Valanzola couldn’t seem to get his head around this explanation as demonstrated by his repeating his complaint several times. He kept getting the same answer from Gobi. I wonder if he expected the answer to change if he kept repeating the complaint. Presumably some of the people in the audience were able to understand Gobi’s explanation.

Writing my previous post, Does Charlie Baker Care About People More Than Dollars?, finally gave me the incentive to look up a Charlie Baker quote that I had read, but had forgotten where I read it.

I found it in the September 30, 2014 The Boston Globe article Baker embraces housing program that requires work or studies.  To make my point let me change the order of some excerpts from that article.

“I’ve never met anybody who’s been in public housing or on public assistance who wanted to be there,” Baker told Worcester Housing Authority officials during a roundtable discussion about the program.

With Baker’s compassionate care for people rather than dollars, he is obviously preparing to spend money to make life more bearable in public housing.  Isn’t that what you would do if you saw such a problem, and it affected you to the core?

Charlie Baker, a Republican who has made welfare reform a central issue in his campaign for governor, promoted a controversial program Tuesday that limits how long residents can remain in public housing if they are not working or enrolled in school.

Under the program, called A Better Life, residents in Worcester public housing face eviction after three years if they or another adult in their household is not employed or enrolled in school full-time. Residents over 55 and those with a disability are exempt.

So, Baker is essentially saying that “since you don’t want to be in public housing, we’ll cater to your wishes and throw you out after three years.  Did I read your wishes correctly?  Do I have a heart, or what?”

Sometimes people don’t need any more negative incentives to change their lives. What they need is the means to change their lives. I wonder if Charlie Baker ever considered that providing the means to people who don’t have it might be a better option than punishing people for not doing what they cannot do. I wonder if he ever stopped to consider what people might need that they don’t have.

This has been an interesting few days for The Boston Globe.  Today they had the article Coakley, Baker face off in first head-to-head TV debate.

Baker’s desire to cultivate a softer image — a contrast with the hard-edged tone he presented in his 2010 campaign for governor — was evident throughout the night. When he was asked what the biggest misconception about him is, he said he chafed at the image painted by Democrats that he cares more about numbers than people.

“For me, it’s always been about people, and it bothers me that a guy who is pretty facile with math, which does matter when you’re talking about a $38 billion budget, is somehow considered to be somebody who doesn’t care about people,” he said.

Yesterday, The Boston Globe had the article Mental health record may be predictor for Baker.

 Charlie Baker walked in unannounced to tour Danvers State Hospital, and his face grew ashen as he witnessed patients jammed in rooms with little space, worn bedding, and most everything in disarray.

It was early 1991, Baker was Massachusetts’ new undersecretary for health, and the 34-year-old Harvard grad was having his first look at the state’s decrepit mental hospitals.

“It was almost like he was thinking, ‘My God, I have never seen anything like this,’ ” said Bernie Carey, executive director of the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health, who joined Baker for that tour.

So how do you think this story ends given that Charlie Baker is “For me, it’s always been about people”?  Do you suppose he saw the horrors and vowed to fix the problem by fully funding our mental health facilities.  Would he spend the money to give these patients better conditions in the hospital’s where they desperately needed better treatment?  If you have been around long enough, did you read the news stories published after 1991 how the Massachusetts mental health facilities became a model of humane treatment that the world has gladly followed?  Maybe you can search the archives of The Boston Globe for those stories.  I certainly don’t remember them  when I was living in Massachusetts from 1976 to 1994.

I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. Here is what yesterday’s article had to say.

Soon after, a special state commission recommended closing nine of the state’s most antiquated institutions, including Danvers and two other hospitals for mentally ill patients, and moving much of that care to the community. It was Baker’s job to get it done. His strategy involved a first-in-the-nation use of a for-profit company with power to approve or deny treatments for low-income mental health patients.

Baker’s blueprint saved Massachusetts millions of dollars at a time when the state was staring at a nearly $2 billion deficit, but it left thousands of mental health patients often waiting weeks for treatments. The controversial approach became his template for rescuing financially ailing Harvard Pilgrim Health Care a decade later.

The aftershocks of both initiatives are still being felt as the now 57-year-old Republican runs for governor, and those experiences, say Baker supporters and critics, provide a window into how he might handle similarly fraught and costly issues if elected.

Here are some more carefully chosen words from the article.

Over the next several years, suicide rates among mental health patients who had received state services soared. That prompted a blistering 1997 report from a legislative panel that criticized the Weld administration for lax monitoring of patients and failing to investigate their deaths in a timely way.

Two years later, a Brandeis University study gave the state high marks for innovative community-based mental health programs launched during the 1990s, but found too many patients waiting for services. The researchers also found that claims were paid more quickly, the state reaped savings, and some health care providers felt that Massachusetts’ long-fragmented mental health services were better coordinated.

As we have been finding out in the run-up and aftermath to the adoption of Obama’s ACA, the US has some of the finest medical care for those who can get it.  For those people who can’t get it, the system sucks.  Brandeis University showed that if you take off your eyeglasses and squint just right, you can find a lot of merit in our current system.  The people who committed suicide aren’t around to tell you about what you missed.

Here, let me pile on some more with tis excerpt from  the article.

After Baker left state government and became chief executive at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care in 1999, he continued to champion privatizing mental health services. With Harvard Pilgrim teetering on bankruptcy in 2000, Baker clamped down on mental health costs by bringing in ValueOptions — the same for-profit company that managed those services in the state’s Medicaid program.

Within months, a number of mental health specialists dropped Harvard Pilgrim patients because of low reimbursements for services. That exacerbated a phenomenon known as “stuck kids,” children who were deemed well enough to leave psychiatric hospital units but had nowhere to go because of a lack of community-based services.

However, here is the capper to explain how Baker cares about people, not just numbers.

He defends his decision to bring in a for-profit company to manage mental health services in state government, noting in an interview, “If it was such a bad idea, how come the Commonwealth is still running the same model 20 years later?”

Charlie, you closed the state mental hospitals.  You diverted the money you saved to other programs other than mental health. How was the state supposed to go back and fix the permanent damage that you had done?   How will we fix the damage you will do if you are elected Governor?  Will we be suffereing the consequences for more than 20 years as we have from your last reign of error?

See my subsequent post Charlie Baker Finds Solution To Public Housing Crisis.