Talking Points Memo has the article Harry Reid Threatens ‘Nuclear Option’ — And Soon.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday threatened to “go nuclear” on filibuster reform in his strongest terms yet, one day after Republicans completed a triple-filibuster of President Barack Obama’s most high-profile judicial nominees.

“I’m considering looking at the rules,” said the Nevada Democrat. “All this [talk of the] sacred nature of the filibuster — I think what we need, and the American people want, is to get things done around here. I’m not talking about changing anything dealing with the Supreme Court or dealing with basic legislation. I am talking about executive nominations.”

“I’m at the point where we need to do something to allow government to function,” he said. “The obstruction we’ve seen in the last five years is nothing like we’ve ever seen before. … This is not how democracy is supposed to work, or function, and the American people are sick of this.”

An aide to the majority leader told TPM that “Reid’s keeping the whip count in his head and talking with each of his colleagues directly. When he feels ready, he’ll do it. Could be soon.”

Just reading the headline, I would have said, “It’s about time.  What’s he waiting for, the end of Obama’s term?”

I think the last paragraph of the excerpt makes it clear that Reid is just waiting until he has enough votes.

When someone mentioned this to me in passing in an email, I thought it might be a joke.  I decided to just Google it.  Surprisingly, I came up with this Worcester Telegram and Gazette article, Sturbridge selectman resigns citing town’s priorities at odds with his faith.

Thomas R. Creamer, a selectman since 2009 and whose second three-year term ends April 2015, dropped the bombshell Monday night, but not before he chastised his fellow board members and the community as a whole.

Calling the past year, a “journey,” Mr. Creamer said he was unable to escape the reality his personal relationship with Christ was at a “spiritual void” and “needed to become the single most important thing” in his life. He said he couldn’t achieve this goal if he remained a selectman.
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Despite alleging that the needs and suffering are so prevalent in Sturbridge, Mr. Creamer said the 60 or so attendees at town meeting continue to approve every single expenditure and tax increase presented them, “based not upon validated need or true merit, but rather the social circles that they identify themselves with.”

As I read the first two paragraphs, I was having a hard time figuring out how this was going to connect to what I know about Tom Creamer’s political views.  The last paragraph excerpted above, makes the connection.  It must have been a half-gainer with a double twist that he made to get from the start of his remarks to the end.

I do hope Tom is alright. He has done a lot of good work in Sturbridge.

Truthout also has the article Greg Palast: Rand Paul’s Zombie-nomics Versus Janet Yellen.

Unbowed, Paul contends he is channeling Friedman from beyond the grave, invoking the Nobel Prize economist to support the senator’s quest against Yellen’s well-known commitment to easy money policies at the Fed.

I feel almost psychic for having posted my previous post, Paul Krugman | Alan Greenspan, Doing His Best to Make Things Worse.  Well, now the secret is out about which award in particular that I disparage.

As follows, I posted my feelings about Greg Palast’s article on the Truthout web site.

Greg, glad to see you correct the record that it was Friedman, not Keynes, that thought you could end a depression by pumping liquidity into the economy. Since you were his student, perhaps I can understand why you still think Friedman was correct, and that he deserved the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, Keynes is still right about how to fix depressions, and Friedman is full of baloney. He even had to fake the data to prove his point. Even Yellen complained about the Congress working at cross-purposes to the Fed. In this complaint she meant that the Congress was not providing the Keynesian stimulus the economy needs. The monetarism the Fed is practicing, is at best a very weak tool beyond a certain point, and that fiscal stimulus is really what is needed. This is all according to Keynes Theory, which Friedman unsuccessfully tried to contradict.

If Friedman had been right, certainly the trillions of dollars that the Fed has pumped in would have solved the problem by now. What the Fed has done is far larger and far longer lasting than the puny fiscal stimulus Obama tried, and then counteracted after the first year of the stimulus. The deficit has been falling under Obama since his first year in office. Infrastructure spending is at historical lows. Perhaps Friedman would have applauded this, but Keynes would have been trying to warn us against such folly.

I don’t know if Keynes said this, but the current experience has validated the idea that pushing on a string does not get you very far.

Consortium News has the story How France Sank the Iran-Nuke Deal.

Lavrov implies that the Russian delegation, forced to make a quick up or down decision on the amended draft, did not realize the degree to which it was likely to cause the talks to fail. “At first sight, the Russian delegation did not notice any significant problems in the proposed amendments,” Lavrov said.

He made it clear, however, that he now considers the U.S. maneuver in getting the six powers on board a draft that had been amended with tougher language – even if softened by U.S. drafters — without any prior consultation with Iran to have been a diplomatic blunder. “[N]aturally, the language of these ideas should be acceptable for all the participants in this process – both the P5+1 group and Iran,” Lavrov said.

The crucial details provided by Lavrov on the timing of the amended draft shed new light on Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim in a press conference in Abu Dhabi on Monday of unity among the six powers on the that draft. “We were unified on Saturday when we presented a proposal to the Iranians.” Kerry said, adding that “everybody agreed it was a fair proposal.”

Kerry gave no indication of when on Saturday that proposal had been approved by the other five powers, nor did he acknowledge explicitly that it was a draft that departed from the earlier draft agreed upon with Iran. Lavrov’s remarks make it clear that the other members of the group had little or no time to study or discuss the changes before deciding whether to go along with it.
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Although the nature of the changes in the amended draft remain a secret, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has charged that they were quite far-reaching and that they affected far more of the draft agreement that had been worked out between the United States and Iran than had been acknowledged by any of the participants.
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Now the Obama administration will face a decision whether to press Iran to go along with those changes or to go back to the original compromise when political directors of the six powers and Iran reconvene Nov. 20. That choice will provide the key indicator of how strongly committed Obama is to reaching an agreement with Iran.

The United States has a long history of making offers to Iran such that the public face of the offer seems eminently reasonable, but hidden actions by the U.S. are slaps in the face of Iran.  I wonder why the U.S. press does not educate the U.S. public about this history.

For a few weeks, I thought that President Obama had finally learned his lesson and was turning toward making a valid offer to Iran that didn’t have any tricks in it.

Unfortunately for President Obama, the Iranians refuse to act the Charlie Brown to Lucy’s offer to hold the football for him.  It takes a lot of patience on Iran’s part to even be willing to talk to the U.S. given this history.  We didn’t like Ahmadinejad when he was leading Iran.  So we reward the Iranians for electing someone much more reasonable to us by trying to trick him.  Why do they hate us so?

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee sent me an email about this video.  Talking about some of the things Elizabeth Warren has done recently, they said:

And just this week, she gave an amazing speech on the floor of the Senate on Republican abuse of filibuster rules to block judicial nominees. She called it a “naked attempt to nullify the results of the last presidential election.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered remarks on the Senate floor on November 13, 2013, about Republicans’ efforts to block three qualified nominees to the D.C. Circuit Court

If you really want something and the means to get it are readily at hand, what can explain why you don’t try to get it? Harry Reid could do away with the filibuster pretty readily. We are 5 years into the Obama administration and yet the Republicans filibuster almost everything. When is Reid really going to want to get these court positions filled? Is he waiting until Obama has left office? Why would he do that?

It is time someone lit a fire under Harry Reid. (Figuratively speaking)

The Real News Network has the video Yellen In Line to Head Fed, But How Will She Lead?

I find the entire video mildly interesting, but I took especial note of remarks by Greg Palast.

PALAST: You know, in the case of Rand Paul, you know, he preferred Milton Friedman for the post of Federal Reserve chief. And The Wall Street Journal reminded him that Friedman had been dead a few years. I know that because I was a student of Friedman.

There is a belief among the Republicans, who have a very poor understanding of economics, and some of the moderate Democrats, who have even a poorer understanding of economics, they think that if you print a lot of money, that automatically prices go up. You know, it’s some real simple formula that if you double the money supply, prices double tomorrow. And they’re always scaring us about the 1920 hyperinflation Germany, when you needed it to, you know, take a barrel full of currency to buy a loaf of bread.

Well, it was actually Milton Friedman, my professor, who came up with the monetarist theory that one way that you stop a depression is by printing more money. And as long as the economy is–as long as there’s a lot of unemployment in the economy, that is, the economy’s not at its maximum capacity, you’re not going to see prices rise. We have increased the money supply in America by over $4 trillion in the last few years, and prices are barely above dead flat.

So, first of all, they’re attacking Yellen on the basis of a theory that they do not understand.

Compare this to my previous post Senator Richard Shelby’s Ignorance of Keynesian Economics. In Shelby’s questioning of Yellen, he pinned the blame for monetarism on Keynes and cut Yellen short when she tried to correct him and said it was a Friedman concept. The very dead Friedman that Paul wants to head the Fed. Talk about confused over economics.

As for the economy being dead flat after the money supply has increased by $4 Trillion, what does that say about Friedman’s monetarist theory?

The Alternet has the article The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People: How to succeed at self-sabotage. To give you just a flavor of this article, here is a brief excerpt.

After perusing the output of some of the finest brains in the therapy profession, I’ve come to the conclusion that misery is an art form, and the satisfaction people seem to find in it reflects the creative effort required to cultivate it. In other words, when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity. It can even give life a distinctive meaning.

I’ll be amazed if you read this article and don’t recognize some people you know, or perhaps even yourself. I did, and I won’t tell you which is which.

For a hint, I’ll say that when the book by Stephen R. Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® was all the rage, I had no interest in reading it.  My interest became especially low when the book became the suggested reading of the CEOs and HR departments of companies where I worked.

The Daily Kos has the article Real Estate “Flopping” The New Corporate Screw Job.

I was reading the article, thinking there is nothing wrong with what the corporations are doing. This does not sound too different from what I proposed in my previous post in June 2011 Solution to The Housing Market Crash.

Then I read this quote of a quote in this most recent article that is the subject of this blog post.

In ‘flopping,’ a home is purchased by insiders at a steep discount, then immediately sold for a big profit.

Not only are home buyers being cheated out of the chance to buy a home at a reasonable price, but I suspect that the shareholders of the banks that are selling these houses at steep discounts are taking a licking too. What’s in it for the banks?  For the answer to that question read my previous post, The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One.  The title of that post comes from the same named book.  I just realized that the “owning” in the title is not about being a stock holder. It is about owning control of the management of the bank.  It is what the author of the book, William Black, calls “control fraud”.  This new scam is not about the specific items from the book that I chose to highlight in the previous post, but is about some new ways for the “owners” to rob the bank. You can think of this as the perfect example of what is wrong with the government accepting cash settlements from the bankers who perpetrated previous crimes instead of sending them to jail.  How many times must they be repeat offenders before we finally decide that they need to be in jail? Besides being the New Sheriff In Town, Elizabeth Warren could ride this issue all the way to the White House in 2016 if she were a mind to.

Well, this story may be worse than I thought.  I started to do a little research to if see I could prove that the Fed’s Quantitative Easing effort could be a loser in this fraud scheme, too. I found a Jun 10, 2010 Bloomberg story Banks Face Short-Sale Fraud as Home `Flopping’ Spreads.

By allowing broker price opinions, the Treasury exposes taxpayers to short-sale fraud after $49 billion of government bailouts for housing, Barofsky wrote to Congress. “As constituted now, the program permits home valuation, the key vulnerability point for a flopping scheme, without a true appraisal,” he wrote. “No program of this type and scale can be considered well designed without robust protections of taxpayer funds against the predation of criminals, particularly given the inconsistent treatment of home valuation.”

The Barofsky quoted above is Special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program Neil Barofsky.  So the TARP inspector general has known about this for over 3 years. I don’t know if the Fed’s buying of CDO’s (Collateralized Debt Obligations) existed three years ago when Barofsky made the $49 billion estimate of the loss to the government. The WikiPedia article Federal Reserve responses to the subprime crisis, uses the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance for its assertion that

The Federal Reserve created five programs to give assistance to AIG: . . . Maiden Lane III, a special purpose vehicle created to purchase collateralized debt obligations on which AIG Financial Products had written credit default swaps.

I’ll let the professional journalists dig into this further.  I have already suggested this to The Real News Network.

If you believe in “The greater fool” theory of investing, you might be interested in this quote of a quote that originated in The New York Times article Behind the Rise in House Prices, Wall Street Buyers. This was cited in The Daily Kos article.

Wall Street played a central role in the last housing boom by supplying easy — and, in retrospect, risky — mortgage financing. Now, investment companies like the Blackstone Group have swooped in, buying thousands of houses in the same areas where the financial crisis hit hardest.

Of course, The New York Times should have added “fraudulent” to the list of adjectives describing Wall Street’s role.

You might want to invest in the Blackstone Group, if you weren’t badly enough burned in the last boom and bust, or if you managed to get out just in time last time.

I just received an email from Nancy Pelosi.

Steven —

With everything happening with health reform recently, I keep remembering this story from 2010. It’s a real tearjerker, but it reminds me why we are fighting every day to make sure that every American has access to health care. It’s worth a read.

CINDY MERCER JONES — March 19, 2010 11:25 am

“My beautiful daughter, Courtney Leigh Huber was an insulin dependent diabetic who was kicked off her father’s insurance the day she graduated from college. To try to conserve her insulin, she attempted to wean herself off her nighttime insulin dosage. She slipped into a coma and never woke up.” (You can hear more heartfelt health care stories here.)

This week, we got back in contact with Cindy to let her know how much her story motivates us all. Here’s what she said:

“Thanks 🙂 Means a lot.. my 14 year old son was recently diagnosed with Type I Diabetes too.. I am reliving Courtney’s disease with him now.. BUT he has insurance! It’s a struggle, and we are both scared, but we are strong and will pull through this… I am constantly reminded now, that Courtney’s death was not in vain.”

It’s inspiring to know that Cindy — because of all of your work — won’t have to worry about her son being kicked off health insurance for having a pre-existing condition.

This is what we’re fighting for. Thank you for standing with us.

Nancy

P.S. Will you take a moment today to show the strength of our grassroots movement to ensure that health care is a right, not a privilege, afforded to all Americans? Click here to automatically sign your name >>