Mark Pittman, Reporter Who Foresaw Subprime Crisis, Dies at 52

By Bob Ivry

Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Mark Pittman, the award-winning investigative reporter whose fight to open the Federal Reserve to more scrutiny led Bloomberg News to sue the central bank and win, died Nov. 25 in Yonkers, New York. He was 52.

Pittman suffered from heart-related illnesses. The precise cause of his death wasn’t known, said his friend William Karesh, vice president of the Global Health Program at the Bronx, New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

A former police-beat reporter who joined Bloomberg News in 1997, Pittman wrote stories in 2007 predicting the collapse of the banking system. That year, he won the Gerald Loeb Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the highest accolade in financial journalism, for “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain,” a series of articles on the breakdown of the U.S. mortgage industry.

“He was one of the great financial journalists of our time,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics. “His death is shocking.”

FDR vs. the Great Recession

We must tackle four big issues to revive our economy

Friday, November 27, 2009

By Stephen Herzenberg

I keep seeing this image of Franklin Roosevelt rolling over in his grave.

What might have our late, great President perturbed? Today's debate about how to get the economy going again.

Since the start of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has shed more than 7 million jobs, 208,000 of them in Pennsylvania. We are living through the deepest economic contraction since the Great Depression.

Filibustering the Public

This is not what democracy looks like. When Americans vote, by overwhelming majorities, to place control of the executive and legislative branches in the hands of a party that has promised fundamental change, they are supposed to get that change. They are not supposed to watch as a handful of self-interested and special-interested senators prevent progress by exploiting the arcane rules of the less representative of our two legislative chambers--rules requiring that not a majority but a supermajority be attained in order even to discuss necessary reforms, and that a similar supermajority be in place to thwart a filibuster.

New Report: Triggered Public Option Is Better Than The Existing Public Option Provisions

A new report from the Urban Institute argues that a “strong” public option — one that is triggered in the event that overall growth in national health spending exceeds a pre-determined target — may do more to control health care spending than the public option proposals offered in existing legislation:

In the absence of enough political support to pass a strong public option at this time, a “trigger” for a strong public option should be considered for inclusion in health reform legislation whether or not a weak public option is included as a political compromise. Even the threat of such a plan being triggered offers the potential to affect market dynamics between insurers and providers.

From Dollars To Death Panels: How Republicans Distorted Debates On Capitol Hill

Brian Beutler | November 27, 2009, 8:42AM

With Thanksgiving recess now upon us, it seems an appropriate time to revisit the hysterical Republican whoppers and talking points about the Democratic party agenda that have dominated this Congress. Herewith a top-five list:

All Politics Is Tribal

Obama's Afghanistan strategy should team our soldiers with their militias.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Nov. 23, 2009, at 6:14 PM ET

---

Though it doesn't claim as much, Dexter Filkins' article in Sunday's New York Times, headlined "Afghan Militias Battle Taliban with Aid of U.S.," may offer a clue to where President Barack Obama's strategic review of the war is going.

Or let's put it this way: If, in the coming days, Obama does decide to deepen America's involvement in Afghanistan, and if his strategy bears no resemblance to the approach Filkins describes, it is almost certain to fail.

Filkins, one of the most intrepid war correspondents, reports that special-operations forces have begun to help anti-Taliban militias in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the insurgents are concentrated. These militias have risen up spontaneously in certain tribal groups, but U.S. commanders hope that they can use the example of these revolts "to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland."

Paul Krugman: Taxing the Speculators

Should we use taxes to deter financial speculation? Yes, say top British officials, who oversee the City of London, one of the world’s two great banking centers. Other European governments agree — and they’re right.

Unfortunately, United States officials — especially Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — are dead set against the proposal. Let’s hope they reconsider: a financial transactions tax is an idea whose time has come.

The dispute began back in August, when Adair Turner, Britain’s top financial regulator, called for a tax on financial transactions as a way to discourage “socially useless” activities. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, picked up on his proposal, which he presented at the Group of 20 meeting of leading economies this month.

Why is this a good idea? The Turner-Brown proposal is a modern version of an idea originally floated in 1972 by the late James Tobin, the Nobel-winning Yale economist. Tobin argued that currency speculation — money moving internationally to bet on fluctuations in exchange rates — was having a disruptive effect on the world economy. To reduce these disruptions, he called for a small tax on every exchange of currencies.

Understanding Our Hollow ‘Centrists’

By Joe Conason

The puzzling thing about politicians of either party who claim to be “centrist” or “moderate” is how much they sometimes sound like party-line right-wing Republicans. Distinguishing among these species of politicians can be almost impossible during the current struggle over health care reform, especially when a senator like Blanche Lambert Lincoln of Arkansas tries to explain herself.

Like so many of the Republicans they try to emulate, the conservative Democrats claim to worry about spending and deficits—except with respect to programs that benefit them, their favorite constituents or the lobbyists who pay their campaign expenses.

Facing re-election and plummeting poll numbers, Lincoln voted to commence debate last weekend. But then she turned around and warned that she would probably join a Republican filibuster against the Democratic health reform bill. Why? Because the Democratic legislation, favored by a clear majority, is likely to include a public option.

The NS Interview: Seymour Hersh

Is it always a journalist's duty to report the truth, even if it may damage innocents?
I'm a total First Amendment Jeffersonian. It's their job to keep it secret and my job to find it out and make it public. But once one gets some information, one doesn't run pell-mell into it. You know, maybe six or seven times in 40 years I've had a story and the president has called
up and said: "If you write this story, American security will be damaged." In every case except one, we wrote the story. And son of a bitch, the Russians didn't launch paratroopers into the foothills of San Francisco the next day.

Are there times when you have a scoop, or a piece of information, but let it go?
You're constantly not publishing everything you know. That's part of the game.

Do you ever worry that your phone is bugged?
Some people I only talk to in their home or their office, but I arrange the calls here. To bug me legally they'd have to get a warrant; once you have something illegally you can't use it very much. If the 9/11 attacks taught us one thing, it's that the agencies collect lots of wonderful stuff they don't share with anybody.

Liberal Groups Organize In Opposition To Entitlement Reform Panel

Earlier this month, Republican and Democratic deficit hawks in the Senate, led by Kent Conrad issued a veiled threat to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: let us set up an entitlement-reform commission to address budget deficits, or we'll kill annual legislation raising the country's debt ceiling.

That may sound like a bunch of jargon, but loosely translated it means they want to get their hands on Social Security and they're willing to let America default on its debt, potentially unleashing economic catastrophe, if they don't get their way.

ORNL "deep retrofits" can cut home energy bills in half

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Nov. 25, 2009 — Oak Ridge National Laboratory has announced plans to conduct a series of deep energy retrofit research projects with the potential to improve the energy efficiency in selected homes by as much as 30 to 50 percent.

The projects will be supported by up to $1.4 million from the Department of Energy's Building America Program, which has received additional funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The Family: C Street Group Tied To Proposed Uganda Law That Would Carry Death Penalty for Gays

Jon Ponder | November 25, 2009

With their reported $13 billion tax-exempt financial empire, the Mormons may be the wealthiest cult in America — and Scientology may be the big thing among the rich and powerful in Hollywood — but when it comes to political power neither of those sects holds a candle to The Family, the Christian extremist political group that operates the now infamous C Street house on Capitol Hill in Washington. Members of The Family have occupied seats in both houses of Congress going back to the 1930s.

For all but its most recent history, the hallmark of The Family has been secrecy. In the past year, however, three sex scandals involving highly placed members of the cult — Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C.; Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.; and Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss. — have thrust the group and its C Street house into the national spotlight.

Yes, Sarah, There is a Media Conspiracy

Just to get this out of the way, since the teabaggers have apparently re-discovered my site and in response to the previous Palin post have begun bombarding me with letters of the “Yeah, but Obama…” genus:

Is the media out to get Sarah Palin? It seems like most of the letters I get are insisting that I admit it. “Surely you can’t deny,” writes one woman from Florida, “that no political figure in American history has had to put up with what Sarah Palin has had to put up with from the mainstream media.”

Now, this is the part of this red-blue schtick where I’m supposed to strike back without thinking and re-hash the history of, say, the Monica Lewinsky scandal in rebuttal and then, as the argument progresses, do the whole “I know you are but what am I?” thing until the end of time.

FDIC insurance fund closes quarter $8.2 billion in debt

As the number of problem U.S. banks swells to the hundreds, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is increasingly hard-pressed to fill in the gaps where institutions have put depositor's funds at risk.

Unfortunately, a dire prediction made by government officials in early 2009 has come true: the FDIC's deposit insurance fund is now broke, according to published reports.

D.C. to pay 13.7 million to mistreated World Bank, IMF protesters

WASHINGTON — The city of Washington has agreed to pay 13.7 million dollars to some 700 demonstrators and bystanders mistreated by police during demonstrations against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 2000.

"We think it's an historic settlement. It's the largest settlement for a protest case in Washington D.C. and we believe in the country," Partnership for Civil Justice, which filed the class action lawsuit, said in a statement.

Thomas Frank: A Liberal Thanksgiving

We hear much less nonsense about the wisdom of markets these days.

By THOMAS FRANK

The positive psychologists tell us that being thankful makes us healthy and happy. For entirely selfish reasons, it seems, we need to show lots of gratitude as we go through life. And with Thanksgiving coming up, I figure it's time to get with the program.

But what to be thankful for? These are anxious times, with staggering unemployment and record numbers of bank failures.

According to a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture report, the percentage of households that are "food insecure," to use the preferred term, rose to its highest level since 1995, when the current technique for measuring hunger came into use. (Among households with children, the percentage who are "food insecure" is a stunning 21%.)

Obama Risks Losing His Judicial Prize

By Stanley Kutler

During the Civil War and Reconstruction era—best described as our “Second American Revolution”—the political parties marched in virtual lock step in consistent, rigid opposition to each other. Democrats steadfastly resisted the Republicans’ organic program for a new nation, including the Homestead Act, the land-grant college program, a protective tariff, a transcontinental railroad, a national currency and a reordering of judicial power.

Party discipline soon weakened, and legislators again comfortably crossed party lines. Even at the New Deal’s high point, the Republican minority, after opposing many of the details, often supported major reforms, such as Social Security. More recently, in the mid-1960s, conservative Midwestern Republicans helped break filibusters and the obstructionist tactics of conservative Southern Democrats (many still mired in “lost cause” nostalgia).

We have now regressed. Rarely in our history has partisanship been more narrow and rigid. The Republican Party is frozen in an obstructionist, anti-Obama posture, while offering no counterproposals. Our vaunted democratic process is dysfunctional. Party comity and bipartisanship are at an ebb. As a result, the process of nominating and confirming federal judges has broken down.

Geithner's Disgrace

The new AIG report reveals how the Treasury secretary—and U.S. taxpayers—were fleeced by Wall Street banks.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Monday, Nov. 23, 2009, at 2:57 PM ET

The issue has been festering for months: Why were AIG's counterparties—including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and UBS—paid 100 cents on the dollar when the feds rescued the insurance giant, helping raise the cost of the bailout to nearly $200 billion? A new report issued by Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky now reveals that government officials, notably then-New York Fed President and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, grievously damaged the nation and capitulated to the very banks they should have been supervising.

Barofsky's report reads like a case study in failed negotiation. The New York Fed didn't have the backbone to stand up to Wall Street, didn't understand its capacity to protect taxpayers, and didn't appreciate that its responsibility was to taxpayers.

The Budget Crisis: The Blame Is Bipartisan

Monday 23 November 2009

by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

The country is being bombarded with stories claiming that record budget deficits threaten our children's future and jeopardize the credibility of the dollar. These stories are a serious problem - they have hugely confused the public about the nature of the country's economic crisis. And both parties share the blame.

Starting with the reality behind the scare stories - trillion-dollar deficits are really huge relative to the money that any of us will ever see in our lifetime. But this is an absurd measure. The United States is a country with more than 300 million people. It doesn't matter than a trillion dollars is a huge amount to any of us individually. What matters is the size of the deficit and the debt relative to the size of the economy.

Blaming It on Obama

Last week I wrote a post about “government debt hysteria” that has gotten a lot of attention because of a link from Paul Krugman. (As Felix Salmon, said, “blogging is a lottery on the individual-blog-entry level.”) The main point of last week’s post was not that it’s wrong to be concerned about the national debt (I think everyone is concerned about it — the question is what to do about it and when), but that it’s irresponsible to title a column “Could America Go Broke?” and talk about hyperinflation without providing some evidence, or at least a logical argument that goes beyond tautology, that hyperinflation is something we should be worrying about it.

Here’s something else that’s irresponsible. In that same column, Robert Samuelson says, “The Congressional Budget Office reckons the Obama administration’s planned budgets would increase the debt-to-GDP ratio from 41 percent in 2008 to 82 percent in 2019″ (emphasis added).

Obama Quietly Backs Patriot Act Provisions

William Fisher

NEW YORK, 23 Nov (IPS) - With the health care debate preoccupying the mainstream media, it has gone virtually unreported that the Barack Obama administration is quietly supporting renewal of provisions of the George W. Bush-era USA Patriot Act that civil libertarians say infringe on basic freedoms.

And it is reportedly doing so over the objections of some prominent Democrats.

Study: CEOs cashed in before Wall Street meltdown

The CEOs of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the two investment banks that collapsed during last year's financial meltdown, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation even as the company's shareholders lost everything, says a new report from Harvard Law School.

The top five executives at Bear Stearns made a total of $1.4 billion from bonuses and equity sales between 2000 and 2008, while the top five executives at Lehman Brothers made around $1 billion during that same period -- the period during which the companies ran up the bad investments that would see them collapse in 2008, according to "The Wages of Failure" (PDF), a report from Harvard Law School's Program on Corporate Governance.

Obama plans to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan

By Jonathan S. Landay, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he's called "a war of necessity" in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy.

Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said.

Johann Hari: The real reason Obama is not making much progress

Before you can appeal to America's voters you have to appeal to the corporations

Friday, 20 November 2009

Almost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his supporters are bemused. His healthcare bill is a hefty improvement but it still won't provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public alternative to the over-charging insurance companies - if it passes at all. His environmental team is vandalising the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the US – the single biggest emitter of warming gases – will not sign up to any legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery. Despite the real improvements on Bush – such as the end of torture, the resumption of stem-cell research, and opposition to the coup in Honduras – many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan Revealed

By Jeremy Scahill, The Nation
Posted on November 24, 2009, Printed on November 24, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144153/

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

Vampire banks rise again

Wall Street will never be fair while industry lobbyists wander the halls of Congress, sucking the life out of financial reform

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 November 2009 19.00

There are more than 15 million people unemployed and almost 2 million people set to lose their homes to foreclosure this year. But there is good news: the Wall Street banks are as profitable as ever and set to give out record bonuses this year. The taxpayer bailouts worked.

Congress is now debating a financial reform bill that is supposed to prevent this sort of disaster from ever happening again. Leaders in Congress are promising us tough measures that will put an end to "too big to fail" institutions and the other implicit and explicit subsidies that allow the Wall Street crew to get incredibly wealthy at our expense.

Paul Krugman: The Phantom Menace

A funny thing happened on the way to a new New Deal. A year ago, the only thing we had to fear was fear itself; today, the reigning doctrine in Washington appears to be “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

What happened? To be sure, “centrists” in the Senate have hobbled efforts to rescue the economy. But the evidence suggests that in addition to facing political opposition, President Obama and his inner circle have been intimidated by scare stories from Wall Street.

Consider the contrast between what Mr. Obama’s advisers were saying on the eve of his inauguration, and what he himself is saying now.

Hard-liners Peddle Zombie Lies About Immigrants and Crime

By Walter Ewing, Immigration Impact
Posted on November 22, 2009, Printed on November 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://immigrationimpact.com//144091/

A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue, attempts to overturn a century’s worth of research which has demonstrated repeatedly that immigrants are less likely than the native-born to commit violent crimes or end up behind bars. The CIS report focuses much of its attention on questioning the accuracy of the 2000 Census data used in two particular studies, one from the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) and another from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC)—both of which dispel the myth of immigrant criminality. However, CIS ignores not only the many other sources of data in these two studies, but also the myriad studies from other researchers which have reached the same conclusion.

The real agenda behind the CIS report seems to be the promotion of the 287(g) and Secure Communities programs, in which local law-enforcement agencies and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collaborate for the ostensible purpose of identifying and capturing “criminal aliens.” However, both programs actually end up snaring many individuals who are neither criminals nor immigrants. CIS relies heavily on data generated by these programs, even though this data is of dubious quality and is not representative of the United States as a whole. For instance, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified in March 2009 that the 287(g) program is poorly managed and yields inconsistent data. Secure Communities is an even smaller program with a similarly questionable data and reporting system.

US should regulate cross-border cash

By Henry CK Liu

In this season of debate on regulatory reform, an obvious area that has been crying out for reform seems to have been overlooked by government officials and market participants.

Much of past and current global financial crises lies in the unrestricted cross-border flow of speculative funds and the ability of market participants to deploy cross-border speculative financial and regulatory arbitrage for risky profit at the expense of central banks and local market fundamentals.

Matt Taibbi: Sarah Palin, WWE Star

Obama knows the long odds against a right-wing populist winning the presidency, no matter how good she looks in a skirt or running clothes, brandishing a gun. He shouldn’t be too cocky, however, because the death of the center is ultimately a problem for him and the whole country. If the Palinistas seize the GOP, they probably cannot take the White House. But their brand of no-prisoners partisanship sure can tie up Congress.

via How Sarah Palin Hurts the GOP And the Country | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com.

The really beautiful thing about the culture war, from an entertainment standpoint, is that it is fundamentally irresolvable. There isn’t a concrete set of issues involved, where in theory both sides could give in a little and find middle ground, reach some sort of compromise.

New Consensus Sees Stimulus Package as Worthy Step

By JACKIE CALMES and MICHAEL COOPER

WASHINGTON — Now that unemployment has topped 10 percent, some liberal-leaning economists see confirmation of their warnings that the $787 billion stimulus package President Obama signed into law last February was way too small. The economy needs a second big infusion, they say.

No, some conservative-leaning economists counter, we were right: The package has been wasteful, ineffectual and even harmful to the extent that it adds to the nation’s debt and crowds out private-sector borrowing.

These long-running arguments have flared now that the White House and Congressional leaders are talking about a new “jobs bill.” But with roughly a quarter of the stimulus money out the door after nine months, the accumulation of hard data and real-life experience has allowed more dispassionate analysts to reach a consensus that the stimulus package, messy as it is, is working.

Frank Rich: The Pit Bull in the China Shop

AT last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised “Going Rogue” as “well-written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only “parts” of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in The Washington Post while confessing that she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it.

“Going Rogue” will hardly be the first best seller embraced by millions for talismanic rather than literary ends. And I am not recommending that others follow my example and slog through its 400-plus pages, especially since its supposed revelations have been picked through 24/7 for a week. But sometimes I wonder if anyone has read all of what Palin would call the “dang” thing. Some of the book’s most illuminating tics have been mentioned barely — if at all — by either its fans or foes. Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves.

Stolen CRU emails: Who are the criminals behind the conspiracy theorists?

Former Republican strategist Marc Morano is having as much fun with the stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit that he did with the Swift Boat Veteran's for Truth attack he led against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

Morano and his site Climate Depot has become the climate conspiracy hub since this story broke on late Thursday.

This cabal of climate deniers seems to think that 12 year-old emails between climate scientists somehow refutes the thousands of research papers produced over decades by thousands of researchers at some of the best scientific institutions in the world.