This could be the most frightening ad that has run in this campaign so far.

How would you rate this compared to the Lyndon Johnson Daisy ad?

With new technology that is at your fingertips, you have much more political power than you may have realized. You ought to use it if you think the upcoming election is important.

In response to the fact that I had a previous post, Facebook Boosts Voter Turnout, I received an email about an interesting info-graphic.

I am part of a team of designers and researcher that put together an infographic showing how social media has affected elections in the past and how it will affect the US presidential election next month.

Here is the introduction that went along with the image Provided by: open-site.org.

The legal briefs are all available for Scott Brown to read. He claims to be a lawyer. How could he look at the briefs and misinterpret them so badly as he has been doing before he even made his disparaging remarks? He had no reason to believe the people in her ads were actors.

Scott Brown has dug himself such a deep hole that you’d think he would know enough to stop digging.

When the country is several trillion dollars behind in the upkeep of its infrastructure, costs are low, business in the construction industry is slow, interest rates are at historic lows, why isn’t now the best time of all to invest in the work we will need to do sometime in the future anyway? Should we wait until business is very busy and the costs will be higher and delays longer? Can anyone explain the logic to me?

Is the Republican strategy to do the work when it will cost the most and compete with private sector work that needs to be done? Are Republicans in favor of inflation and bubbles? It would seem so by the timing they choose to do things like infrastructure investing and deficit financing.

It must be an indication of how desperate the Scott Brown supporters in Sturbridge are. The first sign we had for Elizabeth Warren was free-standing. It did have an old VISE-GRIP^® attached to one leg to stabilize it and keep it from blowing away in the wind. One day, we found the sign, VISE-GRIP^® and all, were missing. I figure that nobody would steal an opposition sign if they thought their own candidate could win legitimately.

Being an experienced resident of Sturbridge, I have a number of signs in reserve. This one went up on October 17, 2012 with a few extra security measures to protect it from theft. I guard with vigilance the expression of my political views as one of my federally guaranteed civil rights.

There are very few people in this world who have tried to intimidate me and have come away from the experience feeling that they are better off or have accomplished their mission.

Supposing there were a central being whose concern was running a good world economy.

This being might rightly notice that “If I can cut (labor) costs without destroying the customers, I could make more profit.”

This is the issue being discussed in my previous posts, Low Wages And High Unemployment Are Paralyzing The Global Economy and The Labor Market Is Not Self-Regulating; Governments Must Support Worker’s Fight For Higher Wages.

It occurred to me that the reason why people might be so resistant to the ideas in these posts is because they are focused on the other, equally valid face of the global economy.

The central being posited above might also rightly notice that “If I can raise the buying power of the customers without increasing my (labor) costs to profit killing levels, I could make more profit.”

There is a range in the middle between extremely low wages and no customers and extremely high wages and no profits where the economy can do well.  Adjustments to keep the economy in this range should always be sought.

However, when you reach or pass the extremes of low wages, no customers or high wages, no profits, then you have to recognize which boundary you are at to apply the proper remedy.  If you apply the proper remedy for the wrong boundary, this leads to further disaster.

To convince people to let you apply the proper remedy for the boundary you are at right now, you have to assure them that you know there is the other extreme and you are not proposing to go there.

Rather than construct your rules and enforcing mechanisms to address only the boundary problem you now face, it would be best if you could come up with rules that recognize the full spectrum of conditions that do occur and adjust themselves accordingly.  This is a very difficult task.  However, if you do not  have a clear picture of what are your goals, then you might not see what is wrong with the changes you propose that only address the current problem.

The Labor Market Is Not Self-Regulating; Governments Must Support Worker’s Fight For Higher Wages is part 2 of the 2 part interview that The Real News Network has with Heiner Flassbeck, Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Part 1 is in my previous post Low Wages And High Unemployment Are Paralyzing The Global Economy.

Quoting from Flassbeck’s remarks:

One should remember there is an interesting story in a new book that came out called The Assumptions Economists Make. The author shows that in 1948 there was a kind of Detroit consensus in the automobile industry which said that the workers should systematically get the productivity increase plus an inflation compensation. So the compensation should rise with inflation plus productivity. This was a good formula.

If you revise it a bit and say it should be a productivity trend, a four or five years’ productivity trend, should be extrapolated one year or two years, that should be reflected in nominal wages plus the inflation target of the economy, then you get a perfect formula to stabilize a growing economy and to get back into a growing economy. We have to relearn this lesson.

In these two interviews Paul Jay, the interviewer, interjects some of the arguments against what Flassbeck is arguing. This gives Flassbeck the opportunity to acknowledge the other side of the argument and to explain why it is wrong.

I am not nearly as sanguine as Flassbeck is that the situation can be turned around politiclly stating with the upcoming election for President and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Romney is so good at explaining the false economic doctrine and Obama is so weak on explaining the correct doctrine, that the electorate has a chance of falling for the wrong medicine, If even some economists are still plugging the old, failed doctrine, how can we get the public to be smarter than they are.

The only hope is that the the economists are blinded to reality because of what they perceive as their own short term financial interests, whereas the public has a chance to have their eyes opened by the current financial disaster for them.

The Real News Network has the video Low Wages And High Unemployment Are Paralyzing The Global Economy is the first part of a two part interview with Heiner Flassbeck Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Part 2 is in my subsequent post The Labor Market Is Not Self-Regulating; Governments Must Support Worker’s Fight For Higher Wages.

Quoting from Flassabeck’s remarks:

Let me explain that briefly. Take the United States. In the United States, which has also very low—everybody talks about high degree of inequality in the United States. But at the same time, unemployment has jumped. But it has jumped not due to high wages before, but it has jumped due to the financial crisis. But now you have high unemployment that puts pressure on wages, because the power is in the market, in the labor market, such that wage earners have nothing to negotiate for, and so they put pressure on wages. If wages fall, incomes fall for the average American household, and if incomes fall, consumption will fall. If consumption falls, investment falls, and the economy will not get out of recovery but deeper into recession.

So this is obviously a big problem with the market economies, because every good economist would say, well, if you have unemployment, then there should be pressure on wages, but if wages have never risen before and there’s nevertheless unemployment, then you’re in trouble somehow. And that is why the president and others will have big, big difficulties to get out of the slump. And that is why monetary policy does so desperate things as they’re doing now.

This is all so logical and easy to understand, but it flies in the face of what people think they know about economics.

In my list of favorite quotes, I have the following:

Mark Twain

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

This makes so much sense, that it is hard to believe there is any opposition to this.

Foolish talk about how we cannot cut anything in the military budget won’t help smart decisions to get made.

It’s also funny how the opposition keeps telling us that government doesn’t make jobs, but if we cut military spending, Massachusetts will lose jobs. Does the sitting Senator not know that the government runs the military?

I am going to have to look up which committee a Senator of 2 years seniority is the ranking member as Scott Brown claims he is. His Senate web pages list 4 committees for Senator Brown:

• Senate Committee on Armed Services – Ranking Member John McCain
• The Committee on Veterans’ Affairs – Ranking Member Richard Burr
• The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee – Ranking Member Susan Collins
• The Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship – Ranking Member Olympia Snowe

www.govtrack.us does list some subcommittees on which Senator Brown is the ranking member.

• Senate Committee on Armed Services – Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Airland
• Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs -Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security

It is odd how the other candidate claims to believe in the same things Elizabeth Warren espouses here, but, when the chips are down, always manages to come up with some reason to vote the other way.

He won’t compromise his other principles, but when it comes to women’s issues he will always compromise on those.