This one is for my daughter, Shelah, the accountant. My cousin, Michael, the CPA, ought to appreciate this too.

Jane Gleeson-White, author of a new book about the genesis of double-entry book-keeping, discusses the little known roots of the practice in Renaissance Venice

ABC News has the story Carter Grandson Arranged Romney Video’s Release.

“I’ve gotten a lot of Twitter messages from people supporting me and saying that it’s poetic justice that it was a Carter that uncovered this, considering the way that the Romney campaign has been talking about my grandfather,” Carter said. “I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly.”

Maybe Romney has learned a lesson here.  Old former Presidents are not defenseless.

I hope Scott Brown doesn’t take to crying when he sees this ad. After all, he is a very sensitive fellow. Maybe Elizabeth Warren is trying to soften the blow by saying “Scott Brown’s not a bad guy, he doesn’t always vote the wrong way.” Could she be any nicer?

Like a lot of you, I came up in a family that worked hard and I’ve spent years fighting for working people. I wasn’t looking to run for office but I see how Washington’s rigged for the big guys: oil companies, billionaires, and I can’t stand by. My fight’s for our families, for a level playing field. Scott Brown’s not a bad guy, he doesn’t always vote the wrong way. But too often, on things that really matter, he’s not with you. With almost a quarter of a million people out of work in Massachusetts, Scott Brown voted against three of President Obama’s jobs bills. He voted against making millionaires pay the same tax rate as working families. And he voted to give more than 20 billion dollars in subsidies to the big oil companies. Kids are drowning in student loans, roads need repair, the deficit is sky high, and Scott Brown’s voting for giveaways to big oil? I wouldn’t do that. I’m Elizabeth Warren and I approve this message. I’d be in there fighting for you, not some of the time — all of the time.

It’s too bad that YouTube only has like or dislike buttons. If they had a love button, I would click it for this ad.

My dislike of John Keller prevented me from getting the message originally.  At the end he gives credit to the Elizabeth Warren campaign field workers (volunteers and staff) for starting to turn this campaign around.

The Warren campaign made sure that we volunteers got the message. It is both a statement of appreciation and a request to keep up the effort until election day and beyond.

The Kansas City Star has the article Commentary: Our economy has recovered when…

The long and staggering recovery has made a distant memory of what a normal economy on two feet looks like.

There is one thing, however, we should know by now: It’s really hard for government to light the fires of an organic recovery that leads to self-sustaining growth.

My response to that article was:

It is hard  for the government to get the economy moving because of politics, not because of lack of economic theory about how to do it.

You mention in the article that a large enough stimulus for a long enough time would do it.  Obama’s stimulus was too small, it ended too soon, and Congress would not allow him to do more.

The government debt level is trivial compared to the contraction of private debt for which it was trying to compensate.  So that is not an issue.

The concentration of wealth that is aided by such things as the Bush tax cut for the wealthy is also a large stumbling block.   Congress would not allow Obama to rescind this.

As long as the wealthy can make money by investing in unregulated  financial trickery instead of having to find something productive to invest in, they will continue to suck money out of the economy instead of putting people to work.  The Congress prevented Obama from getting all the regulations that are needed.

When Bush stopped the ongoing negotiations to harmonize tax policy across nations, he prevented the only mechanism that would allow the taxation of the wealthy without inducing the flight of money to foreign tax havens.

Insisting on trade treaties that could not include any rules about labor unions, environmental protection, or product safety, the Congress has hamstrung any administration from negotiating treaties that enhance the economy instead of ruining it.

The Republicans and their big campaign donors have done an excellent job of seeing to it that we are exactly in the position we are now in.

It takes a lot of concerted effort to screw things up as badly as they are.

I was typing so fast and furiously, I forgot to add the budget busting soaring of health care costs.  If Congress had not forced President Obama to water down the Affordable Care Act in order to continue big money giveaways to the big drug companies and the big insurance companies, we would have started to control the problem much sooner.

People seem to get upset when Elizabeth Warren gesticulates in her TV ads. I hear that they think she is acting like a teacher and a scold.

Compare her described behavior to that of our esteemed Governor Deval Patrick.

Why can’t Elizabeth Warren be more like a man? Or is it “Why can’t the people of Massachusetts give her the same respect as a man gets automatically?” Even an effeminate man like Scott Brown gets that respect, at the same time he is whining about how that mean woman is hurting his tender feelings because she talks about his record.

How come a five and a half foot tall, 100 pound woman frightens a self-deluded he-man like Scott Brown? He was similarly frightened by Martha Coakley’s treatment of him. No wonder Republicans like Scott Brown seem to feel like they have to wage war against women.

Elizabeth Warren is no shorter than I am although she weighs a lot less, and she doesn’t frighten me in the slightest.

In the better late than never category, The Boston Globe has published the article Warren’s extended family split about heritage with the subhead Some recall, others deny any links to Native Americans. This is the article The Boston Globe should have published instead of initially falling for Scott Brown’s attempt to make this an issue with which to challenge Warren’s credibility. The damage the newspaper did in the beginning may be impossible for it to erase now.

It is an extensive article which you ought to read for yourself, but I have chosen the following excerpt to give you an idea of the conclusion.

The article starts off with a story about Ina Mapes.

Mapes, a mother of four who volunteers in a clothing bank, is a second cousin to US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. The two women, who have never met, share more DNA than most second cousins: Not only were their grandmothers sisters, their grandfathers were brothers. Those brothers — a team of carpenters named Harry and Everett Reed who plied their trade in the Indian Territory that would become the state of Oklahoma — are believed by some family members to have roots in the Delaware tribe. Mapes, who said she was unaware of her cousin’s candidacy until contacted by a reporter, said she does not doubt her heritage.

Surprisingly, early on in the article it says:

But other cousins, some of whom also do not know Warren, say they know nothing of Native American blood in the family. According to one family biography, on file at the California State University at Fullerton, one of Warren’s relatives once shot at an Indian.

What are they implying? It is not as if one Indain never shot at another Indian, or no Christian ever shot at another Christian, or no Jew ever shot at another Jew, or no European American ever shot at another European American.

Sharon’s great-grandfather wrote in his brief autobiography A Brief Sketch of The Life of a Confederate Soldier AND THE UPS AND DOWNS During Pioneer and Indian Warfare in Texas:

I am American born, aboriginal American by birth. On my fathers side am of Black Hawk and Tecumcie, on my mothers side Grey Horse and Wyandott, of the Tribes and Decendants of Minnini.
.
.
.
On joining Winfield Scott at Marshall, father, my brothers and myself, I was promoted to Major and hold that rank to this day. I put in six years, nine months and two days under Winfield Scott, Bowie, General Sam Houston, Sickle and Deaf Smith, in the Mexican or Frontier War (what I term the “cut throat war”).
.
.
.
Lieutenant Cummons and I not only fought together in the War between the States but in the Spanish and American War sixteen months, having come in close contact with each other during the Pioneer or Indian War.
.
.
.
The Yankees were wanting men to fight Indians. They would come around every day, trying to get us to sign up, offering us $100.00 in real green back if we would desert the Confederacy and go with them and fight the Indians and $25.00 a month for two years, and if the war was not ended and we wanted a discharge at the end of two years we could get it.

My mess mate and myself caught a hole open after we had signed up for our bounty. Of course we became trusties. We were doomed at the time to be Yankee soldiers, being detailed as Quartermaster and Assistant. I played asleep, my pal being on guard. Finally the Captain of the bunch lay down and being sound asleep my pal came to me saying “now is our time to get away.” So that ends our career in the Rock Island prison camp, by an old Confederate soldier.

I infer from these passages that Sharon’s Native American great-grandfather may have shot at other Native Americans or at least worked on the non-Native American side in some wars against them.

The Real News Network has PT2 The Fed and the Crisis. If you have not looked at part 1 yet, you will find it in my previous post The Fed and the Crisis.

There is a plethora of good information in the above video, but I shoose to pull out this one section for emphasis. It explains a little appreciated, but important part of the Dodd-Frank bill.

So what other macroprudential possibilities are there? Actually, there is one in Dodd–Frank, which will come into effect at the end of July 2012, and that is section 610, which goes back and corrects an enormous error made by a controller of the currency at the end of the Clinton administration, who acceded to the request of the banks to remove their requirement in the sense that loans to a single borrower had to be a given percentage of capital, if that affected financial institutions. In other words, the commonsense notion of don’t put your eggs all in one basket, which had been part of the National Bank Act since 1865, was to be waived if that basket was another financial or group of financial institutions. What section 610 does is say, no, the law requires you to break it all up, to distribute your lending across the spectrum in relation to capital.

Moreover, it does something else extremely important. It recognizes, unlike the Federal Reserve, that the financial sector has changed. It now doesn’t speak of banks lending; it speaks in the statute of credit exposures. And the credit exposures include repurchase agreements, reverse repurchase agreements, derivatives, securities lending, etc.—in other words, all those exciting things that brought us into crisis.

The Real News Network has the article The Fed and the Crisis. This is “a commentary by Jane D’Arista assessing the actions of the Federal Reserve in managing the economic crisis.”

I want to particularly emphasize the following quote even though the commentary is filled with other good information, too.

The configuration which we face now, all the other institutions—mutual funds, investment banks, asset issuers, insurance companies—contribute three times as much credit to the system as does the Federal Reserve—or, excuse me, as does the banking system.

I have been trying to make this point in the blog from its inception, but this is the first time I have heard an expert provide quantitative figures. The factor of three is probably even larger than I have been assuming. Remember the factor of three is not a comparison between the private sector and the Federal Reserve Bank. It is a comparison between the enumerated parts of the private sector — mutual funds, investment banks, asset issuers, insurance companies — and the banking system. The Federal Reserve bank is only part of the banking system. The private sector banks create a lot of the credit that is created by the banking system.

So the next time you hear some politician or some business news medium railing against the Federal Reserve “printing” money, just remember that the private sector “prints” money at more than three times the rate of the Federal Reserve Bank. In other words, less than one third of the credit being created is being created by the Federal Reserve Bank.

In a press release from the University of California San Diego, Facebook Boosts Voter Turnout, there is a description of an interesting experiment.  Do not underestimate the impact you have by liking political articles and Facebook pages on Facebook, and increasing traffic to political web sites.

In 61-million-person experiment, researchers show online social networks influence political participation, with close relationships mattering most
.
.
.
Published in Nature, the massive-scale experiment confirms that peer pressure helps get out the vote – and demonstrates that online social networks can affect important real-world behavior.

“Voter turnout is incredibly important to the democratic process. Without voters, there’s no democracy,” said lead author James Fowler, UC San Diego professor of political science in the Division of Social Sciences and of medical genetics in the School of Medicine. “Our study suggests that social influence may be the best way to increase voter turnout. Just as importantly, we show that what happens online matters a lot for the ‘real world.’”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, voter participation was about 53 percent of the voting-age population for the presidential election in 2008. For the Congressional election in 2010, which this study focused on, the turnout was 37 percent. The numbers are clear: Many more people in the United States could vote than do.

In the study, more than 60 million people on Facebook saw a social, non-partisan “get out the vote” message at the top of their news feeds on Nov. 2, 2010.

The message featured a reminder that “Today is Election Day”; a clickable “I Voted” button; a link to local polling places; a counter displaying how many Facebook users had already reported voting; and up to six profile pictures of users’ own Facebook friends who had reported voting.

About 600,000 people, or one percent, were randomly assigned to see a modified “informational message,” identical in all respects to the social message except for pictures of friends. An additional 600,000 served as the control group and received no Election Day message from Facebook at all.

Fowler and colleagues then compared the behavior of recipients of the social message, recipients of the informational message, and those who saw nothing.

Users who had received the social message were more likely than the others both to look for a polling place and to click on the “I Voted” button.

Previously, I had received the following in an email from MariaT

From the comfort of our homes, we can improve search results for Warren by visiting her links below.

• ‘Like’ Elizabeth on Facebook www.facebook.com/ElizabethWarren
• Visit her website elizabethwarren.com/elizabeth
• Visit her Wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Warren
• NY Times news on Elizabeth topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/elizabeth_warren/index.html
• Warren news on Bloomberg topics.bloomberg.com/elizabeth-warren/
• Her YouTube stuff www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elizabeth+warren&oq=eliz&gs_l=youtube.1.3.0l10.5657.6344.0.9121.4.4.0.0.0.0.119.337.3j1.4.0…0.0…1ac.qjfjCLE3Oy0