How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

POSTED: May 15, 3:10 PM ET | By Rick Perlstein

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Sound Familiar? Florida's Pre-Election Voter Restrictions

The State of Florida, likely to be a key battleground in the 2012 elections, is hastily undertaking a purge of voter rolls using methods that seem to be unusually clumsy and inaccurate.

Hmmm. Pre-election voting purge in Florida. Lot of errors. Where have I heard that before?

Philip Pilkington: Keynes’ Alleged Totalitarianism – The ‘Malign’ Forward to the German Edition of the General Theory

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

In 1936 Keynes wrote a forward to the German edition of his General Theory. Since then it has, as far as I can see, been ignored by his defenders and held up by his most virulent detractors (notably, Austrian School ideologue Henry Hazlitt). Detractors point to what they perceive to be a damning indictment of Keynes’ system in the form of the following quote:

The theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire.

Where are the Missing Five Million Workers?

by Laura Flanders

 

"Where have all the workers gone?" David Wessel of the Wall St. Journal wondered about the labor force this week:

 “In the past two years, the number of people in the U.S. who are older than 16 (and not in the military or prison) has grown by 5.4 million. The number of people working or looking for work hasn't grown at all.”

So, where have all the workers gone? Have they retired, suspended their labors temporarily, or are they languishing on public assistance? Asks Wessel.

Arizona Goes Birther: Secretary Of State Says It’s ‘Possible’ Obama Won’t Be On Ballot

Nick R. Martin
May 18, 2012, 10:53 AM

The man in charge of running Arizona’s elections has gone to the birthers. Secretary of State Ken Bennett now says he’s not convinced Barack Obama was really born in the United States and so he is threatening to keep the president off the ballot in November.

Bennett’s comments came in an interview late Thursday with conservative radio talk show host Mike Broomhead on Phoenix station KFYI.

216 Reasons We're Losing Ground On Social Issues

May 18, 2012

By Don Hamel

 

Have you been shaking your head over how the U.S. seems to be going nowhere on the issue of LGBT civil rights, and backwards on contraception, and women’s health and reproduction rights? Doesn’t it seem illogical, even counter-intuitive that lawmakers are speaking out against such basic needs? Can’t think of any reason for it?

 I can give you 216.

In 1970 there were around 40 lobbying firms advocating on behalf of religious organizations, today there are over 200. 

Don't Buy the Spin: How Cutting the Pentagon's Budget Could Boost the Economy

Friday, 18 May 2012 09:22  
By Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier, The Nation | News Analysis 

Should the enormous US military budget—which is more than double the combined levels of military spending by China, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and Germany—be cut? This question is finally on the table, thanks to the winding down of combat activities in Iraq and Afghanistan and to Washington’s obsession with tamping down the federal deficits that have arisen from the Great Recession. Many who would like to protect the military from the budget knife raise economic arguments to make their case: Won’t cutting military spending be bad for jobs, just when we need to maintain focus on reducing unemployment? Won’t it threaten the country’s long-term technological capabilities?

Paul Krugman: Apocalypse Fairly Soon

Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union
without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs — both
economic and, arguably even more important, political — could be huge.

This doesn’t have to happen; the euro (or at least most of it) could still be saved. But this will require that
European leaders, especially in Germany and at the European Central Bank, start acting very differently
from the way they’ve acted these past few years. They need to stop moralizing and deal with reality; they
need to stop temporizing and, for once, get ahead of the curve.

Campaign Finance Disclosure Decision Means Rove, Others Could Suddenly Have To Disclose Donors


WASHINGTON -- One of the most consequential campaign finance loopholes affecting the 2012 race -- the one allowing big-money donors to secretly funnel millions into campaign ads -- is now closed, after an appellate court ruling on Monday.

In April, a district court judge struck down a Federal Election Commission regulation that allowed donors to certain nonprofit groups -- including those created by Karl Rove and the Koch brothers -- to evade normal disclosure requirements.

And on Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit turned down a request to stay that ruling on a 2 to 1 vote.

Preying on Poverty: How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks

by Barbara Ehrenreich

 

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Judge Blocks Enforcement of National Defense Authorization Act

—By Adam Serwer  | Thu May. 17, 2012 6:59 AM PDT

Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin Drum is on vacation.

On Wednesday, Obama-appointed(!) Judge Katherine B. Forrest blocked the section of last year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that purported to "reaffirm" the 2001 authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda. A group of activists and journalists had argued that the vague wording of the law could subject them to indefinite military detention because their work brings them into contact with people whom the US considers to be terrorists, and in doing so violated their First Amendment rights.

Forrest agreed with the plaintiffs that the relevant section of the law was "not merely an 'affirmation'" of the 2001 authorization for use of military force (AUMF). "Basic principles of legislative interpretation," she wrote, "require Congressional enactments to be given independent meaning"—judges can't simply assume a law does nothing. None of this brings the war on terror to a halt, mind you, because Forrest says there are "a variety of other statutes which can be utilized to detain those engaged in various levels of support of terrorists," so her injunction "does not divest the Government of its many other tools."

5 Things the Science Doesn't Say About the Conservative Brain

By Chris Mooney, AlterNet
Posted on May 8, 2012, Printed on May 19, 2012

Recently here at AlterNet, and around the web, there’s been a lot of discussion of the science of political ideology—basically, the differing psychological or even physiological traits that separate liberals from conservatives. (For a scientific overview of how strongly personality in particular predicts one’s political views, see here.) The debate tends to produce an odd effect: Liberals are intrigued, but many conservatives seem to take it all as an insult--based on a major misunderstanding of what the research actually means.

It’s time to set the record straight. So herewith, we dismantle five major myths about the science of ideology, and what it has to say about conservatism.

Are JPMorgan's Losses a Canary in a Coal Mine?

by Bill Moyers and Simon Johnson

 

That sound of shattered glass you’ve been hearing is the iconic portrait of Jamie Dimon splintering as it hits the floor of JPMorgan Chase. As the Good Book says, “Pride goeth before a fall,” and the sleek silver-haired, too-smart-for-his-own-good CEO of America’s largest bank has been turning every television show within reach into a confessional booth. Barack Obama’s favorite banker faces losses of $2 billion and possibly more – all because of the complex, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t trading in exotic financial instruments that he has so ardently lobbied Congress not to regulate.

Paul Krugman: In South America, Separating Fact From Fiction

The columnist Matt Yglesias, who just spent time in Argentina, recently wrote in Slate about the lessons of that country's recovery following its exit from the one-peso-one-dollar "convertibility law." As he says, it's a remarkable success story, and one that arguably holds lessons for the euro zone.

"Default and devaluation were hardly a party. They destroyed the country's banking system and wiped out many Argentines' savings," Mr. Yglesias wrote on May 1. "But it did work. Argentina has grown rapidly in subsequent years and its unemployment rate has fallen steadily to 6.7 percent, a rate we envy in the United States."

Pete Peterson Spent Nearly Half A Billion In Washington Targeting Social Security, Medicare


WASHINGTON -- Peter Peterson, a Wall Street billionaire who has been calling for cuts to Social Security and other government programs for years, is hosting a "fiscal summit" Tuesday that brings together Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former President Bill Clinton, Rep. Paul Ryan, House Speaker John Boehner, Tom Brokaw and Politico's John Harris, among a host of other elites who will gather at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium.

The bipartisan luminaries will be carrying on a discussion to a large extent framed by Peterson, who has spent lavishly to shape a national conversation focusing on the deficit rather than on jobs and economic growth.

Accidentally Released - and Incredibly Embarrassing - Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in 'Naked Short Selling'

by Matt Taibbi

 

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.

The lawyers for Goldman and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch have been involved in a legal battle for some time – primarily with the retail giant Overstock.com, but also with Rolling Stone, the Economist, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. The banks have been fighting us to keep sealed certain documents that surfaced in the discovery process of an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit filed by Overstock against the banks.

Uncovering the Other ALECs

Wednesday, 16 May 2012 00:00  
By Sarah Blaskey and Steve Horn, Truthout | News Analysis 

Taxpayer-subsidized stealth lobbyists: Lobbyists who circumvent normal lobbying regulations and procedures to advance the corporate agenda in statehouses nationwide on the taxpayer dime.

If Washington DC is the new Versailles, run by corporate overlords and their lobbyist-hired guns, then the 50 statehouses are its paternal twins. That is, while they look different in form, they share the same genetic function as avenues for the fulfillment of the corporate agenda.

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has made this abundantly clear through its ongoing ALEC Exposed project, bringing sunshine to the tax-deductible, statehouse-level influence-peddling efforts made by corporations through the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC has been described by CMD as a "corporate bill mill." (Full disclosure: Steve Horn is a former reporter and researcher at CMD. He was on the team that broke ALEC Exposed in the summer of 2011.)

Bill Clinton, Boehner, and Some Other Rich White Guys Had a "Summit" and Agreed: It's Your Fault

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

May 15, 2012 - 11:53pm ET 

Today a bunch of rich white guys held a "Fiscal Summit" and agreed that:

1. Despite the fact that unemployment is causing untold suffering for millions of people, it's not very important.
2. Despite the fact that wage stagnation is destroying the middle class, that's not important either.
3. Despite the fact that we need the social safety net more than ever after what they've done to the economy, it's expendable.
4. Despite the fact that our government can borrow money at record low rates and use it to put people to work, thereby ending the recession and jumpstarting the economy, that option's not even worth discussing.
5. Despite the fact that these men all possess great power, wealth, and/or influence, everything that's wrong with the economy is your fault.
6. Since it's all your fault, you better get ready to pay up.

Oh, and one other thing:

7. They're all very smart and very brave. It's too bad the rest of you people are such jerks.

'Mortgage Settlement' Funds Paying for Prisons, Not Foreclosure Relief

Needy states use housing aid cash to fund prisons, education shortfalls, and plug budgets

- Common Dreams staff 

 

As part of a financial settlement over fraudulent mortgage practices earlier this year, some of the nation's largest banks agreed to make payments to state government totaling $2.5 billion that would be earmarked for victims of wrongful foreclosure and other distressed homeowners. Instead, reports the New York Times today, a majority of those funds are going to plug state budget shortfalls, leaving homeowners without recourse and validating critics who questioned the strength of the deal when it was announced in February.

The total settlement was for $25 billion, but only a tenth of that was to come in the form of cash payment to the states. The remainder was to come in the form of “credits” for reducing mortgage debt and other loan activities. 

How the Conservative Worldview Quashes Critical Thinking -- and What That Means For Our Kids' Future

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on May 18, 2012, Printed on May 19, 2012

The Conservative War On Education continues apace, with charters blooming everywhere, high-stakes testing cementing its grip on classrooms, and legislators and pundits wondering what we need those stupid liberal arts colleges for anyway. (Isn't college about job prep? Who needs to know anything about art history, anthropology or ancient Greek?)

Amid the din, there's a worrisome trend: liberals keep affirming right-wing talking points, usually without realizing that they're even right wing. Or saying things like, "The education of our children is a non-partisan issue that should exist outside of any ideological debate."

The hell it is. People who say stuff like this have no idea what they're talking about. The education of our children is a core cultural and political choice that reflects the deepest differences between liberals and conservatives -- because every educational conversation must start with the fundamental philosophical question: What is an education for?

The wrong Carlos: how Texas sent an innocent man to his death

Groundbreaking Columbia law school study sets out in shocking detail the flaws that led to Carlos DeLuna's execution in 1989

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 May 2012 23.00 EDT

A few years ago, Antonin Scalia, one of the nine justices on the US supreme court, made a bold statement. There has not been, he said, "a single case – not one – in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred … the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."

Scalia may have to eat his words. It is now clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit, and his name – Carlos DeLuna – is being shouted from the rooftops of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. The august journal has cleared its entire spring edition, doubling its normal size to 436 pages, to carry an extraordinary investigation by a Columbia law school professor and his students.

The book sets out in precise and shocking detail how an innocent man was sent to his death on 8 December 1989, courtesy of the state of Texas. Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution, is based on six years of intensive detective work by Professor James Liebman and 12 students.

Seniors' Social Security Garnished for Student Debts

Friday, 11 May 2012 00:00 
By Ellen Brown, Truthout | News Analysis 

The Social Security program ... represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.  -President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977.

[This law] assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half century ago ... [The Social Security Amendments of 1983 are] a monument to the spirit of compassion and commitment that unites us as a people. -President Ronald Reagan, April 20, 1983.

So said Presidents Carter and Regan, but that was before 1996, when Congress voted to allow federal agencies to offset portions of Social Security payments to collect debts owed to those agencies. (31 U.S.C. §3716.) Now, we read of horror stories like this:

I'm a 68 year old grandma of 2 young grandchildren. I went to college to upgrade my employment status in 1998 or 1999. I finished in 2000 and at that time had a student loan balance of about 3500.00.

Could not find a job and had to request forbearance to carry me. Over the years I forgot about the loan, dealt with poor health, had brain surgery in 2006 and the collection agents decided to collect for the loan in 2008.

Who Really Caused The Deficit?

Sahil Kapur  

May 15, 2012, 5:17 AM 38253

 

This week Republicans will attempt to move the national political conversation back to a familiar theme with a series of attacks on President Obama over the national debt. The GOP released a web video Monday bashing his “broken promises” on the deficit and previewed a major speech Tuesday by likely presidential nominee Mitt Romney on the issue.

Divorced from context, the numbers are uncomfortable for the President and are ready-made for pointed partisan attacks. Under Obama’s watch the national debt has risen from roughly $10 trillion to $15 trillion, a record high. But to what extent are his decisions while in office to blame? The answer: very little. The vast bulk of the debt is the result of policies enacted during the Bush administration coupled with automatic increases in federal spending and decreases in tax revenue triggered by the economic downturn.

Europe’s Man-Made Disaster

The consequences of the rush to austerity will be long-lasting and possibly severe.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz  |  Posted Sunday, May 13, 2012, at 6:30 AM ET

This year’s annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund made clear that Europe and the international community remain rudderless when it comes to economic policy. Financial leaders, from finance ministers to leaders of private financial institutions, reiterated the current mantra: The crisis countries have to get their houses in order, reduce their deficits, bring down their national debts, undertake structural reforms, and promote growth. Confidence, it was repeatedly said, needs to be restored.

It is a little precious to hear such pontifications from those who, at the helm of central banks, finance ministries, and private banks, steered the global financial system to the brink of ruin—and created the ongoing mess. Worse, seldom is it explained how to square the circle. How can confidence be restored as the crisis economies plunge into recession? How can growth be revived when austerity will almost surely mean a further decrease in aggregate demand, sending output and employment even lower?

Colleges as Merchants of Debt

by Yves Smith

 

Student loan debt slavery is even worse than you probably thought. The Grey Lady tonight has a long, informative story, “A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College“, that early on presents the stunning tidbit that 94% of the recipients of bachelor’s degrees borrowed in order to pay for it. The Times doesn’t report what average debt levels are in this cohort, but the average across all borrowers, per the New York Fed, is $23,000. Remember, this total includes graduates who have have been paying down debt, meaning they’ve amortized principal and almost certainly had borrowed less on average to complete school.

Contrast this “certain to be higher on average than $23,000″ for new graduates with their earning power, or more accurately, lack thereof. The Times article also mentions a Rutgers survey which seems to have some sample bias or underreporting of borrowing (of 2006-2011 graduates, only 55% of the respondents said they had borrowed to help fund college, and the median reported debt level was $20,000). The 2009-2011 graduates’ income averaged $27,000. In addition, only half said that their job required a college degree.

5 Things to Know About Single Mothers in Poverty

A Look at the Challenges Facing These Mothers and Their Families

By Katie Wright | May 11, 2012

As we approach another Mother’s Day, we as Americans reflect on the challenges facing some of the mothers struggling the most out there—single mothers living in poverty—and what we can do to create greater economic opportunity for all kinds of families.

Too often the space in the national discourse for this discussion is clouded by myths, personal attacks, and stereotypes about this group of women. This Mother’s Day let’s move beyond the stereotypes and take a fresh look at not only the challenges facing single mothers living in poverty but also some of the policy solutions that can lift them out of poverty.

 

Shocking New Oil Propaganda Plan to Fool Americans

Posted: 05/08/2012 8:49 pm

The Guardian has unearthed a shocking new propaganda plan intended to turn the American public against wind energy in the 2012 election cycle. The plan is to be deployed by a shadowy network of propaganda contractors like the disgraced Heartland Institute, who recently compared those who accept the mainstream science on climate change to mass murderers, and was prepared by a fellow of the American Tradition Institute (ATI), the same law-breaking group that is suing climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann to gain access to his personal papers and emails while at the University of Virginia.

If anyone doubts there is a well-coordinated, well-funded assault on science in America that is designed to fool people, look no further than this plan.

Money Unlimited

How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision.

by Jeffrey Toobin  

May 21, 2012

When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law prohibited corporations from running television commercials for or against Presidential candidates for thirty days before primaries. During that period, Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had wanted to run a documentary, as a cable video on demand, called “Hillary: The Movie,” which was critical of Hillary Clinton. The F.E.C. had prohibited the broadcast under McCain-Feingold, and Citizens United had challenged the decision. There did not seem to be a lot riding on the outcome. After all, how many nonprofits wanted to run documentaries about Presidential candidates, using relatively obscure technologies, just before elections?

Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on May 14, 2012, Printed on May 15, 2012

 When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

Paul Krugman: Easy Useless Economics

A few days ago, I read an authoritative-sounding paper in The American Economic Review, one of the leading journals in the field, arguing at length that the nation’s high unemployment rate had deep structural roots and wasn’t amenable to any quick solution. The author’s diagnosis was that the U.S. economy just wasn’t flexible enough to cope with rapid technological change. The paper was especially critical of programs like unemployment insurance, which it argued actually hurt workers because they reduced the incentive to adjust.

O.K., there’s something I didn’t tell you: The paper in question was published in June 1939. Just a few months later, World War II broke out, and the United States — though not yet at war itself — began a large military buildup, finally providing fiscal stimulus on a scale commensurate with the depth of the slump. And, in the two years after that article about the impossibility of rapid job creation was published, U.S. nonfarm employment rose 20 percent — the equivalent of creating 26 million jobs today. 

Economic Democracy, Not Austerity or Keynesian "Growth"

Thursday, 10 May 2012 11:59  
By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis 

Recent defeats of Dutch, Greek and French governing parties show rising opposition to their austerity policies. Across Europe and North America, similar oppositions mount. Bailing out large financial and other corporations with borrowed money has been the almost universal government plan for coping with global capitalist crisis. The result - rising government deficits and debts - was followed by "austerity policies" to reduce those deficits and debts. After suffering a crisis and then bailouts that bypassed them to favor major corporations, people now face austerity cutbacks of government jobs and services to offset the bailouts' costs. As opposition mounts, will it seek Keynesian "growth" or go beyond capitalism to economic democracy?

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House.

By Matt Taibbi

May 10, 2012 8:00 AM ET

 

Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history."

This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street. It was going to put an end to predatory lending in the mortgage markets, crack down on hidden fees and penalties in credit contracts, and create a powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard ordinary consumers. Big banks would be banned from gambling with taxpayer money, and a new set of rules would limit speculators from making the kind of crazy-ass bets that cause wild spikes in the price of food and energy. There would be no more AIGs, and the world would never again face a financial apocalypse when a bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.

Don’t Mess with Massachusetts

It may be everyone’s punching bag, but it’s time to face facts: The Bay State is best.

By Mark Vanhoenacker  |  Posted Monday, May 14, 2012, at 6:00 AM ET

Massachusetts, in today’s political culture, is more epithet than state. The People’s Republic, Taxachusetts, “Sweden”—this is America’s arugula-munching, maple syrup-swigging, receding-ponytail hippy uncle, exiled to its cold, lonely corner of American geography by Sunbelt population growth and a rightward-leaning national discourse. That “Spirit of America” license plate doth protest too much. For much of the country, Massachusetts, if not actually un-American, is the suspicious redoubt of the American left.

Paul Krugman: Why We Regulate

One of the characters in the classic 1939 film “Stagecoach” is a banker named Gatewood who lectures his captive audience on the evils of big government, especially bank regulation — “As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks!” he exclaims. As the film progresses, we learn that Gatewood is in fact skipping town with a satchel full of embezzled cash.

As far as we know, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, isn’t planning anything similar. He has, however, been fond of giving Gatewood-like speeches about how he and his colleagues know what they’re doing, and don’t need the government looking over their shoulders. So there’s a large heap of poetic justice — and a major policy lesson — in JPMorgan’s shock announcement that it somehow managed to lose $2 billion in a failed bit of financial wheeling-dealing.

How the Corporate Right Hijacked America's Courts to Enrich the Top 1 Percent

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on May 10, 2012, Printed on May 14, 2012

For a generation, America's political-economy has been gripped in a vicious cycle. Those at the top of the economic pile have taken an ever-growing share of the nation's income, and then leveraged that haul into ever-greater political power, which they have in turn used to rewrite the rules of “the market” in their favor. Wash, rinse and repeat.

It's the result of years of institutional investments by the corporate Right to advance a reactionary legal regime in America's courts. In the process, the richest Americans now have their hands in both our legislative and judicial branches, while working America has become a voiceless stepping stone.

“The more pernicious effect of economic inequality comes indirectly through its impact on political inequality,” says MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, co-author of Why Nations Fail.

If the U.S. is now an oil exporter, why $4 gas?

April 11, 2012: 10:27 AM ET
 

Today's high gasoline prices prove that drilling for more oil in the U.S. doesn't lower energy costs. We have Wall Street to thank for that.

By Leah McGrath Goodman, contributor

FORTUNE -- The U.S. is now selling more petroleum products than it is buying for the first time in more than six decades. Yet Americans are paying around $4 or more for a gallon of gas, even as demand slumps to historic lows. What gives?

Americans can be forgiven for doubting the U.S. is producing more oil today than anytime in the last eight years – a fact President Obama has hammered home again and again in his latest rounds of campaign stumping. Meanwhile, Republicans point to the rising price of gas, which seems to indicate a less-than-plentiful oil supply.

Waiting for Copernicus: Moving Beyond Wall Street-Centric Economics

Saturday, 12 May 2012 12:30  
By John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus | Op-Ed 

It’s happening in Buenos Aires. It’s happening in Paris and in Athens. It’s even happening at the World Bank headquarters.

The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the last three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Latin Americans are nationalizing enterprises. The next head of the World Bank has actually done effective development work.

Maybe that long-heralded “end of the Washington consensus” is finally upon us.

Jamie's Cryin: Dimon, J.P. Morgan Chase Lose $2 Billion

 by: Matt Taibbi

A quick note on the disastrous news emanating from J.P. Morgan Chase, whose unflappable (well, unflappable until yesterday) CEO Jamie Dimon yesterday disclosed that the bank suffered $2 billion in trading losses this quarter.

Here’s the summation from the New York Times:

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, blamed "errors, sloppiness and bad judgment" for the loss, which stemmed from a hedging strategy that backfired.
The trading in that hedge roiled markets a month ago, when rumors started circulating of a JPMorgan trader in London whose bets were so big that he was nicknamed "the London Whale" and "Voldemort," after the Harry Potter villain.

I’m still not entirely clear on what the trades by Bruno Iksil, the so-called "London Whale," were exactly. According to the excellent Felix Salmon at Reuters, Iksil had taken a massive long position on corporate CDS, and when word of this leaked out, the market turned on him and beat his brains out. From Salmon’s piece:

Whenever a trader has a large and known position, the market is almost certain to move violently against that trader — and that seems to be exactly what happened here. On the conference call, when asked what he should have been watching more closely, Dimon said “trading losses — and newspapers”. It wasn’t a joke. Once your positions become public knowledge, the market will smell blood.

If you’re wondering why you should care if some idiot trader (who apparently has been making $100 million a year at Chase, a company that has been the recipient of at least $390 billion in emergency Fed loans) loses $2 billion for Jamie Dimon, here’s why: because J.P. Morgan Chase is a federally-insured depository institution that has been and will continue to be the recipient of massive amounts of public assistance. If the bank fails, someone will reach into your pocket to pay for the cleanup. So when they gamble like drunken sailors, it’s everyone’s problem.

The Politics of Reduction

By Kingston Reif | 10 May 2012 
 
One of the perks of being a Republican president in the United States is the freedom to make drastic changes to US nuclear posture while Democratic presidents are forced to travel a much tougher road, often in the pursuit of far less ambitious goals. This pattern has been ongoing since the end of the Cold War and sadly continues unabated today. On May 9, the House Armed Services Committee wrote the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, and Republican leaders used their majority to pass legislative provisions that will restrict and perhaps even block the Pentagon's ability to implement the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) and prevent the president and senior military leaders from making future changes to the size and structure of the US nuclear arsenal. According to Republican Strategic Force Subcommittee Chairman Michael Turner, "It’s not even clear that the unilateral reductions to U.S. nuclear forces required by the New START are in the interest of our national security. ... The president’s most recent budget, however, abandons the nuclear modernization funding he promised. This can only be described as bait and switch. The Senate has been deceived."

America's Looming Default Crisis

House Republicans just reneged on the debt-ceiling deal, making a default in 2013 almost inevitable.

By Matthew Yglesias  |  Posted Friday, May 11, 2012, at 3:22 PM ET

Something terrible happened in Congress yesterday—and nobody seemed to notice. House Republicans voted to take money away from programs meant to help poor people and give it to the military instead. That’s not my idea of wise policy, but that’s what was terrible about it. The problem is that the vote constitutes a collective Republican welching on the agreement that was reached last spring to raise the statutory debt ceiling and avoid national default. Yesterday’s vote doesn’t undo the deal or cause any immediate problems, but by so speedily backing out of their agreement, the Republicans have done something much worse—made it impossible for anyone to negotiate with them in the future, because it’s clear they cannot be trusted to keep the promises they made.

If President Obama wins re-election, the debt-ceiling issue will have to be confronted again, but now in a Congress that has been poisoned by the Republicans’ welching on the last agreement. The country, in other words, is set for an even more severe version of the crisis that crushed financial markets last summer.