The article ‘Junk DNA’ Defines Differences Between Humans and Chimps explains,
“Our findings are generally consistent with the notion that the morphological and behavioral differences between humans and chimpanzees are predominately due to differences in the regulation of genes rather than to differences in the sequence of the genes themselves,” said McDonald.
There is a web site for Citizens Intervention – Enough is Enough Rally Oct 29, U.S. Capitol.
In the above video Annabel Park mentions Thomas Paine. I wonder if she knows that Paine was a socialist. I wonder if you know that.
From Chapter Two “A Broader Patriotism” Thomas Paine and The Promise of Red Republicanism” in the book The “S” Word: A Short History Of An American Tradition… Socialism.
[The] many socialist Paineites …and their affiliation to every species of radicalism in the land boded evil to the future of our republic.
-New York Times, 1856
Things they never told you in high school history class.
I first heard an allusion to her supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement on network news. I am trying to track down a more complete report of exactly what she said.
For now, I will just use this Daily Kos post as a placeholder for more information to follow.
Elizabeth Warren has embraced OWS. In fact, she was fighting Wall Street long before it was cool. 🙂
Elizabeth Warren is running for office in the most high-profile race in the country not involving Barack Obama. It’s a position that calls for some tact. So what does she think about the Occupy Wall Street protests that are roiling the country?
“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she says. “I support what they do.”
Warren’s boast isn’t bluster: As a professor of commercial law at Harvard and the force behind Obama’s consumer-protection bureau, Warren has been one of the most articulate voices challenging the excesses of Wall Street.
No one else has Warren’s gift to send the right into a sputtering frenzy.
The story Warren Takes Credit for Occupy Wall Street comes tantalizingly close to explaining the origins of her remarks. This comes from The Daily Beast blog which is part of Newsweek. Upon further research I find that this post on The Daily Beast is the source of all the news stories and the quote.
The Harvard professor has spooked the right. As she begins her high-profile Senate campaign against GOP star Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the consumer advocate tells Samuel P. Jacobs how she created ‘much of the intellectual foundation’ for the Occupy Wall Street movement. She also talks about her past life as a Republican and the challenges of being a woman on the campaign trail—and says she’s no ‘guileless Marxist.’
For those of you who don’t know much about Elizabeth Warren, below is a video that gives some credence to her claims. For the rest of us, we already know what makes her claims credible.
Here is the Thanks Obamacare web site.
I just found a poster that I had hanging in my office since the 1970s. I can’t even remember where I got it.
I should have explained to people the purpose of the poster. If they ever heard me saying one of these lines, they were supposed to slap me.
Having read newsletters and other publications from Senator Scott Brown and the literature from and about Elizabeth Warren, I see one vast difference that Elizabeth Warren can use to explain why we should vote for her instead of Scott Brown.
In Senator Scott Browns writings, he has shown a good imagination for the positive consequences of his Republican positions and a good imagination for the negative consequences of the Democratic positions.
On the other hand, Elizabeth Warren has made a career of studying what are the actual consequences of both types of policies. If what Scott Brown imagined were actually to be what happens, he would be perfectly justified in taking the policy positions that he does. Elizabeth Warren has discovered by looking at the evidence that Scott Brown’s imaginings are not what really happens.
With the evidence of her research behind her, Elizabeth Warren can explain to Brown and the voters how certain policies actually work out in practice.
I read an article today in a newspaper that is behind a paywall, so I won’t bother to give you the citation or the link. The article was describing the academic proponents of what is called “law and economics.”
Proponents of law and economics argue that laws should be evaluated in terms of the incentives they create. A law making it too easy for debtors to get bailed out and be given a second chance, as they see it, will encourage reckless behavior; by the same token, an orderly bankruptcy process in which creditors can expect as much of their money back as possible will lead to lower interest rates and more ready lending.
I think that Scott Brown would find himself in favor of what the “law and economics” proponents imagine.
According to this brief summary of the “law and economics” view of the world, the proponents only imagine the possible negative incentives for making bankruptcy filing easy and only the positive incentives for making bankruptcy filing difficult.
Elizabeth Warren’s research, and now obvious public exposure of the actual incentives, paints a quite different picture of what has happened since the laws of bankruptcy have been made more strict in recent years. This rewrite of the law was paid for by lender’s intense lobbying efforts and the bribes (oh, sorry, campaign contributions) paid to legislators.
The fact that lenders know that it will be very difficult for borrowers to get out of the legal obligation to repay a loan have resorted to reckless lending practices. They thought that being able to take all the assets of a defaulting borrower including their homes would protect the lender in case of default. They also thought that they could fob off any risk onto investors by packaging up mortgages into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), that were falsely rated as safe. The packagers of the loans bought the safe ratings from ratings agencies that pretended to be objective.
Based on historical rates of mortgage defaults, these safety assumptions were true. However, by breaking all the rules that have historically applied to mortgage lending, the lenders created a situation in which that past history became a poor predictor of actual results. The lenders also concealed the fact that they were breaking all the rules by adding fraudulent information to mortgage applications filled out by the unsuspecting borrowers. They added lies about the borrowers’ income. They bought phony appraisals that justified larger loans with zero or negative equity as collateral. No conservative banker of prior years would ever have engaged in such practices.
The proponents of “law and economics” supposedly never dreamed of these negative incentives. Was it just a lack of imagination brought on by a severe case of knowing the answers before looking at the data? Or was it peer pressure to ignore the facts?
Occupy Protest Finds a Home On the Vineyard tells of the movement on Martha’s Vineyard.
As demonstrators in cities and countries around the world take to the streets in the name of Occupy Wall Street, not one but two Occupy movements are taking shape here on the Island, one virtual and one decidedly not.
It’s nice to know that Ellen and Michael aren’t deprived by living on an island.
Here is a refreshing take on what is going on in Europe. It answers the quetion that Sharon and I have been asking since the story broke, “Why can’t they tax the rich people in Greece instead of taking it out on the rest of the citizens?”
Here is another gem from Robert Reich, The Austerity Death Trap. I am hoping that if we all repeat this story enough times, it might drown out the fiction from the other side.
I’ll single out just one paragraph from the article because it is right on target for one of the things I keep focusing on. While I am at it, I’ll throw in the next paragraph from the article after my focus paragraph. That second paragraph explains Reich’s answer for how to get out of the death trap.
Can we just put ideology aside for a moment and be clear about the facts? Consumer spending (70 percent of the economy) is flat or dropping because consumers are losing their jobs and wages, and don’t have the dough. And businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t have enough customers.
The only way out of this vicious cycle is for the government – the spender of last resort – to boost the economy. The regressives are all calling for the opposite.
The comment I posted on the Truth Out web page for this article was as follows:
What I can never understand is that when Nightly Business Report asks CEO’s about their most important need to start investing again, they never mention “We need more customers.” Maybe they think it is so obvious, it is not worth mentioning. Just once, I’d like NBR to ask a CEO, “Would having more customers get you to start investing again?”
For a business program, you’d think one or two of their reporters might understand the importance of customers to a business.
I have suggested to NBR that the question about customers seems so obvious to me, I cannot figure out why they won’t ask it.
Peter Kim read my blog and emailed this poster to me.
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