Real concentration camps USA: Our immigrant-detention system is spiraling out of control

Friday, March 20, 2009
-- by Dave

Jackie Mahendra points out an Associated Press story describing some of the most recent information about how we're detaining illegal immigrants -- and it's profoundly disturbing:

The U.S. detention system for immigrants has mushroomed in the past decade, creating a costly building boom in an effort to sweep up criminals and ensure that illegal immigrants are quickly deported.

However, an Associated Press computer analysis of the entire detention population on a Sunday night in January found that most did not have a criminal record and many were not about to leave the country soon — voluntarily or through deportation.

The Rise And Fall Of AIG's Financial Products Unit

By Zachary Roth and Ben Buchwalter - March 20, 2009, 9:36AM

As we delve into the back-story behind the collapse of AIG, we thought it might be useful to lay out some key factual information about the firm's Financial Products unit, known as AIGFP, whose disastrous credit default swaps brought the company to its knees. How and when did AIG Financial Products get started? Who ran it, and from where? How did it get into credit default swaps, and what exactly are they, anyway? And how did this group of derivatives traders eventually wind up bringing down one of the most admired financial firms in the world?

Paul Krugman: Despair over financial policy

The Geithner plan has now been leaked in detail. It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago. The zombie ideas have won.

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.

This is the way the Internet ends: not with a bang, but DPI

Free Press claims that deep packet inspection could bring about the end of the Internet "as we know it." But the rest of the world knows it all too well already.

By Nate Anderson | Last updated March 20, 2009 12:33 PM CT

Does deep packet inspection mean the end of the Internet?

Deep packet inspection (DPI) gear has always been marketed to ISPs as a way to earn more money by scanning Internet traffic and charging more for various services. Want to game online? Better upgrade to the "Gaming Xtreme!" plan. Want to use VoIP? Prepare to open your wallet. Watch much streaming video? Well, it would be a whole lot smoother if you just paid another $2.99 a month.

U.S. seizes 2 big credit unions

U.S. takes over two credit unions after tests find vulnerability. U.S. Central Federal Credit Union and WesCorp have combined assets of $57 billion.

By Catherine Clifford, CNNMoney.com staff writer

Last Updated: March 20, 2009: 9:17 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The federal government, in its latest effort to prop up the financial system, took over two big wholesale credit unions Friday with combined assets of $57 billion.

U.S. Central Federal Credit Union in Lenexa, Kan., and Western Corporate Federal Credit Union in San Dimas, Calif., were placed under conservatorship "to stabilize the corporate credit union system and resolve balance sheet issues," according to the National Credit Union Administration.

Naked Short Sales Hint Fraud in Bringing Down Lehman

By Gary Matsumoto

March 19 (Bloomberg) -- The biggest bankruptcy in history might have been avoided if Wall Street had been prevented from practicing one of its darkest arts.

As Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. struggled to survive last year, as many as 32.8 million shares in the company were sold and not delivered to buyers on time as of Sept. 11, according to data compiled by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bloomberg. That was a more than 57-fold increase over the prior year’s peak of 567,518 failed trades on July 30.

Reagan: The Great American Socialist

Friday 20 March 2009
by: Ravi Batra, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Socialism has been much in the news for some months. Recently, some GOP stalwarts charged President Obama with preaching the heresy. John Boehner, the House minority leader, characterized Obama's stimulus package as, "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment."

"Socialism" is a pejorative term in American politics and needs to be carefully examined. It usually refers to increased government control over the economy, or policies that promote the redistribution of wealth. There is no doubt that President Obama's economic measures, passed and proposed, will raise tax rates on the richest Americans to pay for increased government funding of health care, green energy and education. So the new president is indeed a redistributionist, but so was Ronald Reagan, except that Obama's plans will transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, whereas Reagan's bills transferred wealth from the poor and the middle class to the opulent. In fact, Obama's measures are puny, whereas Reagan's were massive. If the Democrat is a "small" socialist, Reagan was the Great American Socialist.

U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar

By Jeremy Gaunt, European Investment Correspondent

LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar.

Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.

US Fed's move is the bigger problem

By Julian Delasantellis

It couldn't always have been like this. No, the country today would be a far different place if across the span of American history had the nation constantly chosen to focus on the most picayune of arcane and unimportant irrelevancies, as it's doing currently with the AIG bonus controversy, instead of on matters with some actual import.

FEMA concentration camps? The militia good times are rollin' again

-- by Dave

David Shuster was making fun of Glenn Beck's preoccupation with militia-style right-wing conspiracy theories yesterday on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and wondering why mainstream conservatives have so much trouble standing up to and denouncing this stuff.

There's actually a reason why mainstream conservatives never stand up to the far-right elements within their own coalition: they find them very useful.

It has ever been so. Harkening back to the days when Monarchists attacked the Enlightenment's pro-democracy thinkers as a plotting cabal of elites (which is where the old Illuminati conspiracy theories originate), the wealthy and those otherwise invested in maintaining the status quo in our civilization have always found these kinds of conspiracy theories a handy way of stirring up working-class resentment against progressive reformers.

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The AIG Saga: A Brief Primer

by Dean Baker

The awarding of $165 million in bonuses to AIG executives has dominated the news in the last week. There has been widespread outrage over the idea that taxpayers' dollars are being used to reward the people who effectively bankrupted AIG and cost the government more than $160 billion in bailout funds to meet the company's obligations. This primer addresses some of the issues raised by both the bonuses and the much larger sum going toward the AIG bailout.

The Bonuses: What Did They Know and When Did They Know It?

One of the silliest distractions in the AIG saga has been the various accounts of when AIG told Treasury Secretary Geithner of the bonuses and when Geithner passed the information along to President Obama. This discussion is silly because Geithner almost certainly knew of the bonuses ever since the initial takeover on September 15th. He just didn't think they were important.

In a State

Being a governor has become America's toughest job.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Thursday, March 19, 2009, at 12:16 PM ET

---

There has never been a tougher time to be a governor. Governors must deal with all the problems confronting our economy, but they lack the federal government's ability to run a deficit. With the $787 billion stimulus and sundry other bailout spending, President Obama and Congress have the rather pleasant task of printing gobs of money and throwing it toward favored sectors and projects.

Governors can only gaze on with envy. The numbers from the states are downright horrifying—and getting worse. The best estimate is that states, nearly all of which are constitutionally obligated to balance their budgets, collectively face deficits of about $350 billion over the next 30 months. That is about 20 percent of total state spending.

Don't Be Afraid To Kill the F-22

Why Pentagon program cuts won't necessarily bring job cuts.

By Fred Kaplan
Updated Thursday, March 19, 2009, at 6:19 PM ET

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Word is that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates plans to slash or kill several big-ticket weapons programs when he rolls out the full details of the Pentagon budget next month. The contractors for some of the projects on the chopping block are fighting back pre-emptively with the most potent slogan in politics today: Jobs!

Many lawmakers and commentators who are otherwise critical of excess military spending wonder whether it's a good idea to swing the ax at a time when the government is spending more than a trillion dollars to stimulate the economy.

Lockheed-Martin is milking this sentiment, most blatantly with a full-page ad in the Washington Post warning that halting production of its F-22 Raptor fighter jet—believed to be a top candidate for cancellation—would mean the loss of 95,000 jobs. The advertisement's photo features not the sleek supermodern plane itself, as similar ads have in the past, but rather a blue-collar worker in a Chicago foundry, one of more than 1,000 factories in 46 states that share a piece of the Raptor's action.

The Nationalization Option

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, March 18, 2009; A13

You might think that having anted up $173 billion of our own money, we taxpayers would have some leverage at AIG, now that we own 80 percent of the shares. You might think that when chief executive Edward Liddy, a holdover appointee of Hank Paulson's, told Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that he had just mailed $165 million of our money as bonuses to the geniuses at the firm's financial products unit -- who probably did more on a per-banker basis to destroy global capitalism than any other kindred group -- that Geithner, upon hearing this news, would have responded, "Liddy, you're fired."

No Return To Normal

Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think.

by James K. Galbraith

Barack Obama's presidency began in hope and goodwill, but its test will be its success or failure on the economics. Did the president and his team correctly diagnose the problem? Did they act with sufficient imagination and force? And did they prevail against the political obstacles-and not only that, but also against the procedures and the habits of thought to which official Washington is addicted?

The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind that program, and there may not be one, until the first report of the new Council of Economic Advisers appears next year. We therefore resort to what we know about the economists: the chair of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers; the CEA chair, Christina Romer; the budget director, Peter Orszag; and their titular head, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. This is plainly a capable, close-knit group, acting with energy and commitment. Deficiencies of their program cannot, therefore, be blamed on incompetence. Rather, if deficiencies exist, they probably result from their shared background and creed-in short, from the limitations of their ideas.

How to Destroy the Government in Three Easy Steps

Thursday 19 March 2009

by: Joe Brewer, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

In eight short years, conservatives have effectively bankrupted many state governments and left the fed in shambles. And now citizens have to "make tough decisions" and share the suffering equally across the land (unless of course, you're part of that lucky 1 percent who co-opted the functions of government to serve their own ends ... they'll be cozy with their offshore bank accounts, golden parachutes and permanent tax holidays).

Are you a teacher who educates our future citizens? Too bad. You've got to tighten your belt and let that job go. Manual laborer? Sorry, but that job can earn more money for our shareholders if it's done in Micronesia. Need a college degree? Prepare for indentured servitude because you'll be working to pay us off for most of your adult life. Health care? Ha! That's just a Ponzi scheme dreamed up by a bunch of socialists.

Climate change deniers have media outlets 'everywhere' now

Despite the success of public awareness efforts on the dangers of climate change by the likes of Al Gore and others, the global warming denial lobby is still going strong, as can be seen by recent polling numbers that show fewer Americans believe climate change is a serious threat.

A poll released last week by Gallup says that while a majority of Americans still believe the seriousness of global warming is “either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated,” an all-time high of 41 percent of those polled say it is exaggerated.

Why money messes with your mind

8 March 2009 by Mark Buchanan

Dough, wonga, greenbacks, cash. Just words, you might say, but they carry an eerie psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments, and you will become a different person. Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.

This is all the stranger when you consider what money is supposed to be. For economists, it is nothing more than a tool of exchange that makes economic life more efficient. Just as an axe allows us to chop down trees, money allows us to have markets that, traditional economists tell us, dispassionately set the price of anything from a loaf of bread to a painting by Picasso. Yet money stirs up more passion, stress and envy than any axe or hammer ever could. We just can't seem to deal with it rationally... but why?

Forget the bonuses: AIG can't repay its loans, GAO says

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Lost in all the shouting over the $165 million in bonuses paid to executives of disgraced insurer American International Group was this sober message delivered to Congress on Wednesday by a government watchdog: AIG's ability repay its $170 billion in loans from taxpayers has eroded significantly.

Testifying before Congress, Orice Williams, the director of the Government Accountability Office's financial markets division, said that AIG has had only limited success in restructuring itself, despite more than $170 billion in federal aid in four separate bailouts since last September.

Great Tech Innovation: Find Food Health and Safety Info From Your Phone

By Tim Kingston, AlterNet
Posted on March 19, 2009, Printed on March 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/131752/

The price of a dysfunctional food system is a potentially dangerous dinner. To put it bluntly, in our profit-driven food system, the very nutrients needed to stay alive could kill you. If it's not Chinese melamine in your milk, it's American E.coli in your spinach. If it's not the salmonella in your peanut butter from Georgia, it's that same bug in your Mexican green chilies. Consumers -- health conscious or not -- have a right to be paranoid.

What's to be done?

Does America Face the Risk of a Fascist Backlash?

By Robert Freeman, AlterNet
Posted on March 19, 2009, Printed on March 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/132155/

In early 1919, Germany put in place a new government to begin rebuilding the country after its crushing defeat in World War I. But the right-wing forces that had led the country into the War and lost the War conspired even before it was over to destroy the new government, the "Weimar Republic." They succeeded.

The U.S. faces a similar "Weimar Moment." The devastating collapse of the economy after eight years of Republican rule has left the leadership, policies, and ideology of the right utterly discredited. But, as was the case with Germany in 1919, Republicans do not intend to allow the new government to succeed. They will do everything they can to undermine it. If they are successful, the U.S. may yet go the way of Weimar Germany.

Free markets are not rational

By Aetius Romulous

The markets are rational. From that inviolate truth, a pillar of economic thought for 233 years, flows all else economics understands about markets, men, and money - an unalterable belief that markets can be measured, quantified, cut and pasted in mute acceptance that under it all lies the consistent and undeniable force of rational behavior, a religion gone unquestioned.

The theory of rational markets - that buyers and sellers will always act in their best interests - was given life by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations in 1776. The new study of economics, born into a moment between ages, grew and developed with its gospel already written and sanctified. Economics became nothing more than competing studies that tried to squeeze the maximum utility out of the blandness of rational, human behavior. The competition reached a turning point at the end of two brutal wars and an economic depression that sent buildings full of newly minted economists running for their slide rules.

Burn, Balochistan, burn

By Pepe Escobar

The "strategic reviewers" of United States President Barack Obama's "good war" in Afghanistan are almost finished. Even before the new policy is set in stone - in Badakshan's famed lapis lazuli, maybe? - by Obama himself within the next few days (with sensitive covert aspects of course withheld from public opinion), its contours are raising many an eyebrow.

The new mix will likely feature an ongoing wild goose chase for "good Taliban"; an expanded Central Intelligence Agency-operated drone war (a George W Bush policy decision); assorted CIA and special forces cross-border attacks (also a Bush policy decision); more carrots for the Pentagon-friendly Pakistani army (and Inter-Services Intelligence); more US troops in Afghanistan (starting with the announced 17,000 who will hit Helmand province before summer); and more training for the Afghan army.

Treasury Attempts to “Blame Dodd” for AIG Bonuses

By: Jane Hamsher
Tuesday March 17, 2009 1:15 pm

As Geithner tries to get out of the way of the AIG bonus train wreck, it looks like the designated sin eater is going to be Chris Dodd:

The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.

So Treasury says Chris Dodd did this? In a word. . . no.

Battling the CRA Myth

Push To Expand Law That Encourages Loans to Low-Income Communities

By Mike Lillis 3/18/09 6:00 AM

Amid the ongoing debate over mortgage lending reform, a top federal regulator took a seat before Congress last week and debunked the myth — popular among conservatives — that a law encouraging loans to low-income communities has been largely responsible for the nation’s housing crisis.

“I can state very definitively,” Sandra Braunstein, director of the Federal Reserve’s consumer and community affairs division, said during a House Financial Institutions subcommittee hearing Wednesday, “that from the research we have done, the Community Reinvestment Act is not one of the causes of the current crisis.”

" Diebold Admits Audit Logs in ALL Versions of Their Software Fail to Record Ballot Deletions "

Startling admission made during public hearing in CA to consider decertification of the company's voting and tabulation software...

Guest Blogged by Mitch Trachtenberg, with Brad Friedman

Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems --- used in some 34 states across the nation --- fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That's the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier's Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier's tabulator system, GEMS v. 1.18.19.

Hedge funds could reap billions from AIG

$160 million in bonuses to AIG executives? Try billions in dollars slated to be paid by AIG to hedge funds.

The massive now mostly-government owned insurer American International Group is slated to shell out billions of dollars to hedge funds that bet against the US housing market, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

Senate quietly stripped measure restricting bonuses from bailout legislation

A new revelation in the scandal surrounding AIG's decision to pay multi-million dollar bonuses to executives -- a provision that would have restricted companies receiving federal government bailout aid from paying bonuses was quietly stripped from a bill last month.

Media ignore Bush Treasury Department role in last year's AIG bailouts, notwithstanding bonus packages

Summary: In numerous instances, media reporting on AIG's employee retention bonus packages did not point out that it was the Bush Treasury Department that worked with the Federal Reserve in carrying out last year's bailouts and bought AIG stocks notwithstanding the existence of these bonus contracts.

Thomas Frank: Financial Journalists Fail Upward

"Listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months," said "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart to CNBC superstar Jim Cramer in their much-discussed confrontation last week. "The entire network was, and so now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."

The applause Mr. Stewart has received for his j'accuse is the sound of the old order cracking. We have turned on the financial CEOs, inducting them one by one into the Predator Hall of Fame. We have gone deaf to the seductive rhythms of the culture wars. We have tossed out the politicians whose antigovernment rhetoric seemed invincible for so long.

The Granny Bashers: Different Facts, Same Policy

Monday 16 March 2009
by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

The granny basher crew constitutes one of the largest and most determined lobbies in Washington. The top priority for this lobby is to cut Social Security and Medicare.

The lobby includes the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, with an endowment of more than $1 billion from the private equity tycoon himself. It also includes The Washington Post, which liberally sprinkles assertions about the need to cut Social Security and Medicare in both its news and editorial pages. Many prominent members of Congress also belong to the club, along with much of the punditry who make their living pronouncing on public policy.

The granny bashers' theme is that Social Security and Medicare constitute an enormous generational injustice because the young, and those yet to be born, will be forced to pay for the cost of these programs for retirees and current workers. Of course, the reality is that the vast majority of the granny bashers' horror stories about generational inequity stems from the cost of sustaining a broken health care system not from programs for retirees.

Getting Lehman Wrong a Second Time

US officials were wrong to let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt. Now they wrongly assume all banks are too big to fail

by Dean Baker

There are few economists who would defend the decision to allow Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt last September. Its collapse induced a worldwide panic that sent stock markets plummeting and caused credit to freeze up. In the subsequent months, the downturn went into over-drive, with the United States losing almost three million jobs from October through February.

This set of events has led almost everyone to conclude that the trio who let Lehman go under - Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and the then-head of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner - erred badly in this decision. That seems a reasonable judgment.

The Real AIG Scandal

It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at 10:41 AM ET

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Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.

Florida legislator wants random drug tests for the unemployed

03/16/2009 @ 9:42 am

Filed by David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Employers have justified drug tests in the workplace by pointing to such negative effects of drug use as absenteeism and work-related injuries. Now a Florida legislator has proposed that random drug-testing also be applied to those receiving unemployment insurance, justifying it as a way to make state funds go further.

Florida State Senator Michael S. Bennett told Fox News host Steve Doocy on Monday that with the unemployment rate in his recession-battered state running between 10% and 11%, he worries that the Unemployment Trust Fund might be exhausted.

Scientists hope satellites will solve riddle of missing CO2

Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: January 29, 2009 07:54:23 PM

WASHINGTON — For years, scientists have been trying to solve what they call the "Mystery of the Missing Sinks.''

No, they're not talking about misplaced kitchenware. These "sinks'' are the world's forests, pastures, crops and soil, which soak up the excess carbon — in the form of carbon dioxide — that's a major driver of global warming. Even golf courses and suburban lawns serve as carbon sinks.

"Humans dump about 9 million tons of carbon daily into the atmosphere, but only half stays there,'' said David Crisp, principal investigator for NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory.

GOP 'trackers' stalk Dems in hunt for 'macaca' moment

David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: March 16, 2009 07:15:15 PM

WASHINGTON — Rep. Chris Carney was walking down a Capitol Hill street when suddenly — bam — an anonymous Republican with a video camera who'd been following him asked him a question that was intended to embarrass the Pennsylvania Democrat.

The interviewer asked first about a single provision in the massive economic stimulus bill, then asked if Carney was going to be "ready to vote tomorrow."

An irritated Carney answered: "Like I told you before, if I see the damn package, I'll have an answer."

A "macaca" moment meant to replayed on the Internet and possibly wound a vulnerable Democrat?

The electorate should get a grip: AIG isn't the prime enemy

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter<

Populism is the crudest embodiment of democratic expression, chiefly because it harbors a mob mentality over individual reason and is therefore the ideal tool of demagogues.

It's all heart and no brain. It often means well, but also leans to the morbidly shortsighted -- a shortsightedness hatched of a usually justified anger, but unmindful of unwanted consequences.

Reports question U.S. shield of Europe

By Ken Dilanian, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — After 24 years and more than $100 billion spent to develop a U.S. missile defense, an American-operated system proposed for Europe would cost billions more to deploy and still may fail, a series of independent reports concludes.

President Obama recently suggested he would consider scrapping the Europe system in exchange for Russia's help in thwarting Iran's nuclear ambitions. During last year's campaign, Obama said he would support missile defense if it proved workable.

AIG names recipients of its bailout money

(CNN) -- Troubled insurance giant AIG, already under fire for intending to pay out $165 million in bonuses and compensation, succumbed Sunday to congressional pressure, identifying banks that received chunks of the company's billions in federal bailout funds last year.

AIG says it "recognizes the importance of upholding a high degree of transparency" relating to bailout money.

AIG, a recipient of at least $170 billion in federal bailout money , got an $85 billion loan from the Federal Reserve.

Paul Krugman: A Continent Adrift

MADRID

I’m concerned about Europe. Actually, I’m concerned about the whole world — there are no safe havens from the global economic storm. But the situation in Europe worries me even more than the situation in America.

Just to be clear, I’m not about to rehash the standard American complaint that Europe’s taxes are too high and its benefits too generous. Big welfare states aren’t the cause of Europe’s current crisis. In fact, as I’ll explain shortly, they’re actually a mitigating factor.

The clear and present danger to Europe right now comes from a different direction — the continent’s failure to respond effectively to the financial crisis.

The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment

by Robert Freeman

In early 1919, Germany put in place a new government to begin rebuilding the country after its crushing defeat in World War I. But the right-wing forces that had led the country into the War and lost the War conspired even before it was over to destroy the new government, the "Weimar Republic." They succeeded.

The U.S. faces a similar "Weimar Moment." The devastating collapse of the economy after eight years of Republican rule has left the leadership, policies, and ideology of the right utterly discredited. But, as was the case with Germany in 1919, Republicans do not intend to allow the new government to succeed. They will do everything they can to undermine it. If they are successful, the U.S. may yet go the way of Weimar Germany.

Frank Rich: The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off

SOMEDAY we’ll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation. The subject — which Bush hyped as “one of the most profound of our time” — was stem cells. For a presidency in thrall to a thriving religious right (and a presidency incapable of multi-tasking), nothing, not even terrorism, could be more urgent.

When Barack Obama ended the Bush stem-cell policy last week, there were no such overheated theatrics. No oversold prime-time address. No hysteria from politicians, the news media or the public. The family-values dinosaurs that once stalked the earth — Falwell, Robertson, Dobson and Reed — are now either dead, retired or disgraced. Their less-famous successors pumped out their pro forma e-mail blasts, but to little avail. The Republican National Committee said nothing whatsoever about Obama’s reversal of Bush stem-cell policy. That’s quite a contrast to 2006, when the party’s wild and crazy (and perhaps transitory) new chairman, Michael Steele, likened embryonic stem-cell research to Nazi medical experiments during his failed Senate campaign.