The latest mortgage foreclosure mess is just another financial crisis.

It’s not a real economic crisis- no houses have been actually destroyed- no fire, hurricane, or earthquake damage, etc.

So the responses aren’t about bulldozers, hammers, concrete pouring, etc.

The question is whether this financial discovery/event spills over into the real economy.

Nobel prize winner Joe Stieglitz recently called for a second stimulus to reduce unemployment and get the economy working well again. But the Administration seems uninterested in pushing the idea or making it an issue in the election, because it has been unsuccessful in setting the necessary frame for persuading the public that its first inadequate stimulus was only a political compromise that has done some good, but left much more yet to do. Yet we badly need that second stimulus, and if the Democrats could get their act together, get people back to work this month, and were willing to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate, we could have it quickly, and they probably could even avoid catastrophic losses in November.

This is the second in a series of posts based on youtubes from a speech in Milford CT by Warren Mosler. Warren is running for the Senate in CT in the Independent Party primary. Unlike both the Democratic and Republican candidates Warren really understands economics and his forté is explaining it to people. Here’s a youtube on his proposals for restoring our economy to normal functioning and to full employment.

It looks like the Democratic Leadership will get its wish, a sprawling “health care reform” bill, mostly focused on changes to the health insurance system that deliver many millions of new customers to the health insurance industry. The Democrats are making many upbeat claims about this bill, calling it historic and claiming that it will produce affordable “universal” health care coverage for Americans, and for 32 million more than are covered by insurance today, while blithely ignoring the contradiction between these two statements. There have been many recent analyses of these claims, and I won’t add another one here. The analysis of the FDL team authored by Jane Hamsher, contrasting mythical claims about the pending bill with “the truth,” is the best of the analyses of the bill I’ve seen in the past few days.

So, assuming that the Leadership’s HCR legislation passes the Senate and moves to the President’s desk for final approval, I’d now like to look forward and ask where the Democrats stand politically in the wake of their nearly one year investment in painstakingly crafting their “health care reform” bill. To put it crassly, what will they have to run on that means something to most, or, at least, a large number of voters?