Truth Out has Bill Moyers’ video and transcript, Bill Moyers: The Cowardly Lions of Free Speech.

Speech is already rationed in America. On your playing field, those who have no money have no speech. And just who do you think is doing this “speaking”? Hello, poor people, are you there? It’s your election, too. All 50 million of you; Hello, we can’t hear you. Better get a Super Pac and speak up!

Poor people haven’t lost their voice. They can’t afford a voice. And every day working people: universal laryngitis, the chronic absence of money. As for children – children who have a big stake in our elections but no vote – for them to be heard they would need piggy banks the size of Wal-Mart heirs. Or the Koch brothers for uncles.

Politico has the story headlined Schumer drops objection to Obama tax plan.

Pelosi announced her support in a press release Monday afternoon.

“Today, President Obama once again stood firmly with America’s middle class and small businesses,” she said. “Democrats and the President have always fought for an extension of the tax cuts for middle-income families to offer greater relief and economic certainty to all working Americans. Once again, Republicans must decide: will they continue to hold middle class tax cuts hostage to tax breaks for the wealthiest or will they agree to pass the middle class tax cuts we all agree should become law?

Obama press secretary Jay Carney was also quoted:

Carney also said a White House push could actually help to get the tax cuts through Congress despite suggestions otherwise.“What we’ve seen in the last year or so, the last 10 or 12 months, when the president makes a public case for policy that is sensible, that’s broadly supported by the American people and he continues to make that case when we see the kind of movement that initially seems unlikely in Congress and hopefully that’ll be the case here.”

And to think, it has only taken them almost 4 years to figure out that Obama has to push a policy to get it through Congress.  The White House used to think that Congress would just present Obama with good legislation that he could sign.

Then we get to the Republican reaction:

Republicans weren’t buying the show of unity — or the notion that Obama wasn’t pushing a broad tax increase.

“Americans are struggling in a ‘zombie economy’ and President Obama’s only answer is to pass one of the largest tax hikes in history,” said Amanda Hennenberg, a Romney campaign spokesperson. “President Obama’s tax increases on families and job creators will create more economic uncertainty and fewer opportunities for struggling middle-class families. From Day One, Mitt Romney will take action to lower marginal rates, help middle-class Americans save and invest, and jumpstart economic growth and job creation.”

Have you had it with the so called job creators yet?  They are sitting on trillions of dollars in liquid assets, but they don’t create any jobs with that money.  And why should they?  They can “invest” those assets in fancy financial instruments and make more money that they can in hiring people to do work for which there is no demand.  And why is there no demand?  Because the wealthy suck up all the money and “invest” it in financial derivatives and don’t buy anything that requires workers to produce it.  They also don’t let any money trickle down to the workers so that they can buy stuff.

The only solution that will work is to extract some of those liquid assets by taxing them, and then putting those assets to work with government investments in education, research, and fixing our crumbling infrastructure.  When that infrastructure crumbles into dust, it is going to have to be replaced anyway.  Why not do it now when workers are begging for jobs?  Would we rather that the government try to do this during times of full employment when they would have to pay top dollar to get the work done?

I saw the pointer to the ad shown below on Rachel Maddow’s web site in the article On the offensive on women’s rights.

Rachel Maddow writes:

But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. This new campaign ad hammers Romney for wanting to overturn Roe, outlaw abortions, and scrap aid to Planned Parenthood — and Obama’s re-election campaign wouldn’t put a spot like this together unless it knew the American mainstream agrees with the president’s position.

Indeed, it’s of particular interest that the spot will be airing in Virginia, a Southern state where social issues tend to cut against Democrats, but where state Republicans drew national outrage for pushing a forced-vaginal-ultrasound proposal.

It also occurred to me that maybe others on Obama’s side have been withholding donations as I have because of his weak defense of our ideals. He finally realizes that he has to excite his base if he is going to get the support he needs. Another lesson in how to avoid being taken for granted.

Truth Out has the article After Five Years: Report Card on Crisis Capitalism by Richard D Wolff.  Here is a nice summary from the article:

Lets summarize: (1) capitalists decided in the 1970s to computerize and increasingly relocate production overseas; (2) that enabled them to impose wage stagnation and greatly increase surpluses and profits; (3) financial capitalists lent to consumers and built a speculative bubble based on consumer debt; (4) when rising consumer debts exceeded what stagnant wages could afford, the system crashed; (5) capitalists got trillion-dollar bailouts while lending government the money for those bailouts; and (6) now, capitalists make entire populations pay for the crisis and bailouts by directing politicians to impose austerity. This capitalist system not only fails to “deliver the goods,” it dumps ever-more-outrageous bads.

I am not ready to buy into the solutions this author poses.  I guess I still have some nostalgic  feelings for the good, old fashioned, mixed, capitalist society.

Here is a video for the racists with whom I socialized yesterday. Too bad they will never see it.

No stranger to the contradictions of history and their racial touchpoints is Bill’s studio guest Khalil Gibran Muhammad, head of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and author of The Condemnation of Blackness. Muhammad and Moyers discuss the importance of confronting the contradictions of America’s past to better understand present issues of race and equality.

The new and improved version of the Elizabeth Warren For Senate web site debuted recently.

Among the many new features I found is a listing of all the Elizabeth Warren field offices in Massachusetts.  For those of us out in the boonies of central and western Massachusetts, it is nice to know where the Worcester and Springfield offices are.

There are links to videos going back to May 1, 2012.  Of course, I have a much more extensive set of links to videos on this blog.

Just use the search box over on the right side of this blog to look for warren video.  It is too bad that there is no search box on the new Warren web site.

The Nation Of Change has the article Jobs Report: Challenge Congress to Act, Obama to Fight.

As former White House Council of Economic Advisers chairman Laura Tyson wrote earlier this week, “Congress left at least one million jobs on the negotiating table” just in the past year alone, thanks to congressional Republicans who are “holding unemployed workers hostage to the outcome of November’s election.”

That is almost enough jobs to close the jobs deficit we’ve been calculating since January, based on the number of jobs the economy would have to create on average each month—about 400,000—to bring the unemployment rate down to 5 percent by the end of 2014. From January to May, the economy created a net 832,000 jobs; to be on pace to meet the 5-percent-in-2014 goal, the economy should have created 2 million jobs.
.
.
.
But let’s not wait for Obama to lead. We have to push. Start by confronting members of Congress this weekend, before they return to Washington for more right-wing political grandstanding such as “repealing Obamacare,” as well as candidates running for Congress. Ask them whether they will take steps to put people to work on the work that needs to be done, or will they push instead for policies designed to enrich the already rich, while imposing austerity on everyone else. It will be up to us to make it clear to every politician, from Obama down to the freshman House candidate, that political reward only lies in support of an authentic middle-class jobs agenda.

One of the major messages of this blog, is that we can’t just choose between politicians at election time.  We need to push the elected politicians to go down the right path.  If we had gathered together to push Obama to fight harder, then the Republicans would not have had the courage to block his every move.  If we cannot stay focused on fighting this battle, then the battle will go to the only side that can stay focused.

The more the focused side can keep you worrying about your financial stability, the less you can focus on the root cause of the instability.  The root cause is the attack by the Republicans and their supporters on your middle-class life-style.

President Obama discusses legislation he signed on Friday that does two important things: It keeps thousands of construction workers on the job rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and it stops interest rates on federal loans from doubling this year for more than seven million students.

We can blame President Obama for the economic performance brought on by Republican blockage in the Congress, or we can solve the problem by getting rid of the blockage. The solution is in the hands of the voters.

If you, as a voter, cannot figure out where the problem lies, then you surely won’t be able to figure out what the solution is. How hard are you working to understand the biggest political issue you may face in your lifetime?

The New York Times article On Tricky Terrain of Class, Contrasting Paths addresses the issue of how to play the class warfare story in the Presidential campaign.

Most of all, even Mr. Obama’s inner circle seems cognizant of the risks of making wealth an issue. Asked whether Mr. Obama’s emphasis on fairness for the middle class and his contrast with Mr. Romney pushed that line, Mr. Axelrod replied: “It is not right to say that to work for and hope for and fight for some basic economic security means that you resent people who’ve done very, very well.”

I was at a birthday party today listening to some people complain about not even being able to get a full day of vacation off from work to attend a son’s wedding, even though the vacation time had been asked for many months in advance.  Those same people who didn’t like the way management was treating them, then turned around to say how much they did not like President Obama.

At the same party today, I also heard a story of a violent confrontation at an auto service station between an irate customer and a technician who insisted on applying the testing standards that the law demands.  Because the customer who was launching the attack was a person of color, President Obama was blamed for letting “these people” into the country.

My bet is that the party goers’ inability to put two and two together to see where the work pressure is coming from are being blinded by their prejudice. If  there are not enough people who can put their prejudice aside so that they are able to figure out who is for them and who is not, then the Democrats haven’t got a hope.

So, while there are risks in President Obama focusing on the attacks being made on the middle class by the ruling capitalists, it is the best and most honest focus.  If the American people are not ready for such honesty, maybe they need another dose of Republican control to wake them up.  Talk about a little shock therapy.

I’d be willing to let the people have their shock therapy if I weren’t forced to accompany them through the treatment.

I found the article Crime of the Century by Robert Scheer on the Truth Out web site.

How to explain a $450 million settlement for one bank whose defense, in a plea bargain worked out with regulators in London and Washington, is that every institution in their elite financial circle was doing it? Not just Barclays but JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and others are now being investigated on suspicion of manipulating the Libor rate, so critical to a $700 trillion derivatives market.

Remember how upset the Republicans are about this country’s $14 trillion debt?  That number doesn’t look so big when compared to the “$700 trillion derivatives market”, does it?

Both Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were reported by The Wall Street Journal years ago to be suspected of rigging the Libor interest rate. The leaders of those banks, despite such media exposure, clearly remained confident enough to continue on their merry way.

The sad reality is that they will probably get away with it. The world of high finance is by design as obscure and opaque as the bankers and their political surrogates can make it, and even this most recent crack in their defense of deception will soon be made to go away.

My blog posts castigating the world of high finance may start to sound repetitive.  It is because these articles are so easy to find.  May be the repetition will finally start sinking into the minds of the voters.