Spooked by Glass-Steagall’s Ghost?

CAMBRIDGE – America’s long-controversial Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated deposit-taking commercial banks from securities-trading investment banks in the United States, is back in the news. This separation long symbolized America’s unusual history of bank regulation – probably the most unusual in the developed world.

American banking regulation had long kept US banks small and local (unable to branch across state lines), unlike their European and Japanese equivalents, while limiting their operational capacity (by barring banks from mixing commercial and investment banking). These limits on American banking persisted until the 1990’s, when Congress repealed most of this regulatory structure. Now the idea of a new Glass-Steagall is back, and not only in the US.

This Former SEAL Attacking Obama's 'Leaks' Has A Very Big Secret Of His Own

Geoffrey Ingersoll | Aug. 17, 2012, 9:32 PM


In an article published recently, I argued that an organization named Operational OpSec Education Fund's recently released Obama attack was insulting and disingenuous, but I really had no idea how right I actually was.


Ken Dilanian of the LA Times gives further depth, reporting that Fred Rustmann, an OpSec member, CIA retiree and an outspoken Republican, appeared on the Hannity and Colmes show in 2005 in order to downplay the outing of a CIA covert operations officer Valerie Plame.


Disclosing the identification of a covert agent is a felony offense, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff for Dick Cheney, went to prison for obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements related to the comment, but he later had his sentence commuted by the Bush administration.

Our Coming Rentcropper Society

We are in the midst of a sea change in terms of the relationship of ordinary Americans to the housing market. Policymakers are not only in denial as to its magnitude, but are actively enabling courses of action that are likely to prove destructive.


One of the accidental and fortunate discoveries of the 1930s was that a long-dated mortgage, meaning 15 to 30 years, was a good fit with working conditions of that era. The Home Owners Loan Corporation refinanced borrowers who were delinquent and in danger of losing their homes from short maturity mortgages to 20 to 25 year ones, considerably lowering borrower payments. This was considered a radical experiment at the time, and was expected to lose $1 billion, a very large sum in those days. When its operations ceased, it had shown a profit. One of the big reasons was the stability of employment. Job tenures were much longer than now; in fact, being fired was rare, and usually a result of business failure or distress, not management whim or need to meet quarterly earnings targets. And with the exception of some very large corporations that liked transferring managers (IBM stood for “I’ve been moved”), families were more likely to remain in the same house over the husband’s working life.

Middle Class Should Rise Up and Ignore the Political Spin

Mary Sanchez | The Kansas City Star


If ever there were a time to pitch a national read-in, this is it.


The 2012 election campaign is upon us, and from what we’ve seen so far, the tenor of the "messaging" is not what anybody would term enlightening.


What the American public needs right now is context. Deeper interpretation of the data that get thrown at us by the news media. Analysis that steps back from conventional wisdom and soberly considers the origin and nature of the stress and fear so many of us feel about where our nation and our society are going.

Glenn Greenwald: US Drone Strikes Target Rescuers in Pakistan - and the West Stays Silent

Attacking rescuers – a tactic long deemed by the US a hallmark of terrorism – is now routinely used by the Obama administration

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 August 2012 10.33 EDT

The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Morally, such methods have also been widely condemned by the west as a hallmark of savagery. Yet, as was demonstrated yet again this weekend in Pakistan, this has become one of the favorite tactics of the very same US government.


A 2004 official alert from the FBI warned that "terrorists may use secondary explosive devices to kill and injure emergency personnel responding to an initial attack"; the bulletin advised that such terror devices "are generally detonated less than one hour after initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population". Security experts have long noted that the evil of this tactic lies in its exploitation of the natural human tendency to go to the scene of an attack to provide aid to those who are injured, and is specifically potent for sowing terror by instilling in the population an expectation that attacks can, and likely will, occur again at any time and place:

"'The problem is that once the initial explosion goes off, many people will believe that's it, and will respond accordingly,' [the Heritage Foundation's Jack] Spencer said … The goal is to 'incite more terror. If there's an initial explosion and a second explosion, then we're thinking about a third explosion,' Spencer said."

Paul Krugman Bashes Niall Ferguson's Newsweek Cover Story As 'Unethical'

The Huffington Post | By Bonnie Kavoussi
Posted: 08/20/2012 10:17 am Updated: 08/21/2012 12:20 pm


Paul Krugman says that Newsweek needs to issue a correction for columnist Niall Ferguson's new cover story on why President Obama does not deserve reelection.

Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning Princeton economics professor, wrote in a Sunday New York Times blog post titled "Unethical Commentary" that Ferguson misrepresented the costs of health care reform.

Politics and Prejudice – Insights from Psychological Science

New research from psychological science explores factors operating in political attitudes that could explain why political ideology and prejudice are often linked.

Liberals and Conservatives Both Prejudiced Against Groups with Opposing Values

Research has associated political conservatism with prejudice toward various stereotyped groups. But research has also shown that people select and interpret evidence consistent with their own pre-existing attitudes and ideologies. In this article, Chambers and colleagues hypothesized that, contrary to what some research might indicate, prejudice is not restricted to a particular political ideology. Rather, the conflicting values of liberals and conservatives give rise to different kinds of prejudice, with each group favoring other social groups that share their values. In the first study, three diverse groups of participants rated the ideological position and their overall impression of 34 different target groups. Participants’ impressions fell in line with their ideology. For example, conservatives expressed more prejudice than liberals against groups that were identified as liberal (e.g., African-Americans, homosexuals), but less prejudice against groups identified as conservative (e.g., Christian fundamentalists, business people).

The Creators of the Financial Crisis Are Trying To Rewrite History

By Eliot Spitzer   |   Posted Monday, Aug. 20, 2012, at 12:32 PM ET

National Review, a magazine founded by the late William F. Buckley, is the intellectual leader of the conservative movement. It speaks for the agenda of deregulation and pure free-market theory that overtook and then destroyed our economy.

Back in 2004, National Review put a caricature of me on its cover and called me the most destructive politician in America. Why? Because, as the magazine pointed out in the accompanying article, I was the attorney general of New York at that time, and I and my office were pursuing wrongdoing in a multitude of areas. We were suing coal-burning power plants that were violating the Clean Air Act, we were suing the tobacco companies because of their illegal marketing and deceptive practices, and we were suing virtually all the major Wall Street investment banks for committing fraud and violating their duty of honesty to the public. The feds were doing nothing about these problems before we did. We sued the largest mutual fund companies—which were gaming the market—leading to billions of dollars in refunds to customers and lower fees totaling billions of dollars. Again, this was something the feds were unwilling to do. And, as the article pointed out, we were suing predatory lending companies, long before 2004, and I was warning that subprime debt could be both harmful to the borrower and toxic to the economy. The federal government tried to shut down our effort.

The neverending Republican war on Medicare

by Jon Perr aka Avenging Angel for Daily Kos

In the week since Mitt Romney named Paul Ryan as his running mate, both Democrats and Republicans have claimed theirs is the party which will save and protect Medicare, the federal health insurance program for nearly 50 million seniors. But Americans have good reason to believe one side is lying to them. After all, the Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Obama adds 8 years to the Medicare trust fund, realizing $716 billion in savings over 10 years from private insurers, hospitals and waste while expanding today's benefits to include free preventive care and closing the prescription "donut" hole. In stark contrast, in 2011 and 2012 98 percent of Republicans in Congress voted for Paul Ryan's budget plan, which not only repeals the ACA but would transform Medicare into an under-funded voucher scheme the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed would dramatically shift health care costs onto future elderly. Just as damning, the Ryan plan takes the same $716 billion in savings to partially offset the cost of its budget-busting tax cut windfall for the wealthy.

Paul Krugman: An Unserious Man

Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate led to a wave of pundit accolades. Now, declared writer after writer, we’re going to have a real debate about the nation’s fiscal future. This was predictable: never mind the Tea Party, Mr. Ryan’s true constituency is the commentariat, which years ago decided that he was the Honest, Serious Conservative, whose proposals deserve respect even if you don’t like him.

But he isn’t and they don’t. Ryanomics is and always has been a con game, although to be fair, it has
become even more of a con since Mr. Ryan joined the ticket.

Fueling the future with renewable gasoline and diesel

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 20, 2012 — A new process for converting municipal waste, algae, corn stalks and similar material to gasoline, diesel and jet fuel is showing the same promise in larger plants as it did in laboratory-scale devices, the developers reported here today. It was part of the 244^th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society, which continues through Thursday.

"These results are essential in establishing the credibility of a process that may seem too good to be within the realm of possibility," said Martin Linck, Ph.D. "However, we are moving steadily toward having multiple demonstration-scale facilities in operation by 2014, with each facility producing a range of 3,500-17,500 gallons of fuel a day from non-food plant material. We will be designing commercial-scale facilities that could produce as much as 300,000 gallons per day from the same kinds of feedstocks."

Revealed: How Conservative Radio Creates an Echo Chamber of Hate

August 16, 2012  |  By itself, Pamela Geller's May 2010 appearance on the "Sean Hannity Show" was par for the right-wing talk-radio course. The conservative blogger was brought on to rail against the conservative raison d'outrage of the moment, what she habitually called the “Mega mosque on Ground Zero [3]” (SPOILERS: the whole building really wasn't a mosque, but that wasn't going to stop her) that was being planned in New York City around that time. But a recent study places the Geller-Hannity encounter in a bigger, more dangerous context that observers have noted for years.

The study, released last month by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, used Hannity's radio show and four programs – the "Rush Limbaugh Show," the "Glenn Beck Program," "Savage Nation" and the "John & Ken Show" -- as the focus of an investigation of the influence and confluence of specific interests in ultra-conservative radio programming. The results, as you might imagine, were not surprising.

“The findings reveal that the hosts promoted an insular discourse that focused on, for example, anti-immigration, anti-Islam and pro-Tea Party positions,” the study concluded. “This discourse found repetition and amplification through social media.”

Is an Anti-Austerity Alliance of Left Neo-Classicals and Post-Keynesians Possible? Is it Desirable? (Part 1)

Yves here. The discussion of tribal allegiances in economics in this post helps illustrate why it is so difficult to push back against failed ideas when they are dear to the mainstream. It is also a useful ethnographic guide.

By Michael Hoexter. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

I drafted the “Mixed Economy Manifesto” as one attempt to create a common basis for anti-austerity economists and non-economists to argue against, in the clearest terms possible, the waves of government spending cutbacks that are advocated by misguided elites, by the right-wing and by right-leaning neoclassical economists. The 87 “theses” listed at the end of the Manifesto enumerated empirically and logically sound propositions about the economy as it now exists with its mixture of government and private institutions that can under many circumstances productively interact with each other. (I may attempt or others may attempt to expand the arbitrarily numbered 87 to 95 theses which would then be suitable for nailing on doors.) The Mixed Economy Manifesto also contained many statements that would appeal to Left Neo-classicals or New Keynesian economists, while maintaining a basis in what I perceive to be the more realistic ideas about the economy that have been put forward by post-Keynesians, MMTers, and the institutionalist tradition, including Thorsten Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Paul Ryan and the Problem With Competitve Bidding

—By Kevin Drum  | Sat Aug. 18, 2012 10:40 AM PDT

Paul Ryan is in Florida today promoting his Medicare plan, but there's a part of his plan that he very carefully avoided talking about: what he'll do if his cost controls don't work.

Let's recap: Ryan's plan relies on competitive bidding to hold down costs. Insurance companies bid for Medicare contracts, and seniors all get a voucher that allows them to purchase the second cheapest plan. They can buy one of the cheap plans; they can buy standard Medicare (which submits a bid along with everyone else); or they can pay more and buy a more expensive plan.

New oil spill dispersant made from ingredients in peanut butter, chocolate, ice cream

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 20, 2012 — With concerns about the possible health and environmental effects of oil dispersants in the Deepwater Horizon disaster still fresh in mind, scientists today described a new dispersant made from edible ingredients that both breaks up oil slicks and keeps oil from sticking to the feathers of birds.

"Each of the ingredients in our dispersant is used in common food products like peanut butter, chocolate and whipped cream," said Lisa K. Kemp, Ph.D. She reported on the dispersant at the 244^th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, being held here this week.

The Conservative Psyche: How Ordinary People Come to Embrace Paul Ryan's Cruelty

By Joshua Holland

August 19, 2012  |  Earlier this year, Democratic operatives looking for the best way to define Mitt Romney discovered something interesting about Paul Ryan's budget. The New York Times reported that when the details of his proposals were run past focus groups, they found that the plan is so cruel that voters [3] “simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”

In addition to phasing out the Earned Income Tax Credit that keeps millions of American families above the poverty line and cutting funding for children's healthcare in half, Jonathan Cohn described [4] the “America that Paul Ryan envisions” like this:

Many millions of working-age Americans would lose health insurance. Senior citizens would anguish over whether to pay their rent or their medical bills, in a way they haven’t since the 1960s. Government would be so starved of resources that, by 2050, it wouldn’t have enough money for core functions like food inspections and highway maintenance.

Ryan's “roadmap” may be the least serious budget plan [5] [5]ever to emerge in Washington, but it is reflective of how far to the right the GOP has moved in recent years. According to a recent study of public attitudes conducted by the Pew Research Center, in 1987, 62 percent of Republicans said “the government should take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” but that number has now dropped to just 40 percent (PDF [6]). That attitude was on display during a GOP primary debate last fall when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul what fate should befall a healthy person without health insurance who finds himself suddenly facing a catastrophic illness. “Congressman,” Blitzer pressed after Paul sidestepped the question, “are you saying that society should just let him die?" Before Paul had a chance to respond, the audience erupted in cheers [7], with some shouting, “yeah!”

Recognizing Paul Ryan’s ‘tell’ when he is trying to avoid something

By Matt Miller

In poker a “tell” is the physical giveaway or tic that lets you know someone is lying about his or her hand. In politics it’s the mode of evasion a politician chooses to sidestep a truth he or she doesn’t want to admit or to avoid saying something against self-interest. In his debut interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan’s “tells” were audacious and revealing. They suggest an opening Democrats would be wise to pursue.

Ryan (R-Wis.) tried to cloak himself in his supposedly charming “wonky-ness” to sidestep two simple questions from Hume: When does Mitt Romney’s budget reach balance, and when does Ryan’s own budget plan do the same? Ryan pirouetted because Hume’s queries threatened to expose his famed “fiscal conservatism” as a fraud.

It’s worth parsing Ryan’s tactics in this exchange because it shows the brand of disingenuousness we’re dealing with. So let’s go to the videotape. Have a look at the relevant two-minute portion of the clip (excerpted on this CNN video) and then we’ll dissect it.

On Social Security, Say It IS So, Joe!

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

August 16, 2012 - 12:30am ET 

What Vice President Joe Biden said today was, to use his now-famous phrase, "a big effin' deal." No, we're not talking about his "chains" comment which, as usual, has fascinated a press corps obsessed with taking statements out of context and playing "gotcha" games. We're referring to the comments he made about Social Security in a Virginia coffee shop.
From a press corps pool report, as relayed by NBC News:

"Hey, by the way, let's talk about Social Security," Biden said after a diner at The Coffee Break Cafe in Stuart, VA expressed his relief that the Obama campaign wasn't talking about changing the popular entitlement program. "Number one, I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security," Biden said, per a pool report.

O’Brien lays waste to anti-Obama Navy SEAL’s claim of ‘non-partisanship’

By David Ferguson
Friday, August 17, 2012 14:42 EDT

It seems that Soledad O’Brien, the host of CNN’s “Starting Point,” is on a roll. Each day brings another ill-prepared surrogate from one of the presidential campaigns before her, and each day she proceeds to cheerfully eviscerate their talking points before sweetly thanking them for coming on the show and sending them on their way.

On Friday’s edition of “Starting Point” O’Brien challenged “OPSEC” or “Operational Security group” spokesperson and former Navy SEAL Scott Taylor’s purported “non-partisan” status.

Paul Krugman: What’s In The Ryan Plan?

A number of commenters have asked for a summary of what’s actually in the Ryan plan. So this is a utility post.


The first thing you should know is that there are a couple of vintages of the plan, with some changes in detail, but not in general thrust. As it happens, the best nonpartisan analysis, in my judgment, is the CBO report on the first vintage (pdf); as I said, details change, but the general idea remains the same.

Only Bankruptcy Can Help Now

Greece has disappointed its creditors yet again. Now its government plans to ask for more time -- and needs billions more in aid. But Greece's euro-zone partners are unwilling to provide any more help, meaning that the only hope now is to admit defeat and let the country make a fresh start.


Officially, at least, everything is going according to plan. In September, officials with the troika -- made up of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- are planning to travel to Athens to check on the progress that Greece has made with its cost-cutting program. Then, according to the plan, they could disburse billions more in aid out of the second bailout package for Greece, which the euro-zone countries and the IMF agreed on in February.

But, in reality, it is rather unlikely that all of the €130 billion ($160 billion) in the bailout package will ever be paid out. And what is even more unlikely is that the money would keep Greece from going bankrupt.

On 77th Birthday, Social Security Under Attack

by Bernie Sanders

We are now in the midst of the fiercest and best-financed attack against Social Security in our lifetimes.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are now being spent to destroy Social Security and endanger the well-being of millions of Americans. We must not allow that effort to succeed.

Will the Real Independents Please Stand Up?

For die-hard Democrats and Republicans, the decision of who to vote for in November may be a no-brainer. In recent years, however, many voters have rejected such partisan identities, choosing to call themselves Independents.


But new research suggests that Independents may not be as independent as they think.


Psychological scientists Carlee Beth Hawkins and Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia decided to use a tool called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, to explore the unconscious biases that churn deep inside the Independent mind.

Ryan's Plan Kills Medicare Now, Not in 10 Years

Posted: 08/13/2012 7:11 pm

I just read a fast-moving mystery novel, Pryme Knumber, by Matthew J Flynn. It was a great read, and none other than Paul Ryan (R-WI) appears briefly. Very appropriately, he appears first standing with a lobbyist. Presciently, Flynn says that, because he does not appear as someone who would "torch a lingerie factory," and for that reason only, he was considered a "future leader" by Republicans who might "do something."


We know what that "something" is -- killing Medicare. And, that is not fiction.

4 Ways Paul Ryan’s Budget Would Devastate The Poor

By Igor Volsky and Pat Garofalo on Aug 17, 2012 at 10:25 am


National media attention has focused on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) drastic restructuring of the Medicare program, detailing the Vice Presidential candidate’s efforts to transform the current benefit guarantee into a “premium support” program for future enrollees. 

BPA link to narrowing of the arteries

A research team from the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry (PCMD), University of Exeter, and University of Cambridge has for the first time established a link between high levels of urinary Bisphenol-A (BPA) and severe coronary artery stenosis (narrowing of the arteries).

The study is published in PLoS ONE today, 15th August 2012.

The team analysed data from 591 patients who participated in the Metabonomics and Genomics Coronary Artery Disease (MaGiCAD) study in Cambridgeshire, UK. They compared urinary BPA with grades of severity of coronary artery disease (CAD).

5 Ways Privatization Is Ruining America

August 13, 2012 | A grand delusion has been planted in the minds of Americans, that privately run systems are more efficient and less costly than those in the public sector. Most of the evidence points the other way. Private initiatives generally produce mediocre or substandard results while experiencing the usual travails of unregulated capitalism -- higher prices, limited services, and lower wages for all but a few 'entrepreneurs.'

With perverse irony, the corruption and incompetence of private industry has actually furthered the cause of privatization, as the collapse of the financial markets has deprived state and local governments of necessary public funding, leading to an even greater call for private development.

Spiteful behavior is 'extreme', according to study

Given the option to commit spiteful acts, reducing the money payoffs of others at no cost to themselves, many people avoid acting spitefully, but those that do, consistently impose the maximum harm, according to research reported on Aug. 15 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

Nature | News Demand for water outstrips supply

Groundwater use is unsustainable in many of the world's major agricultural zones.

Amanda Mascarelli

08 August 2012

Almost one-quarter of the world’s population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished, concludes a comprehensive global analysis of groundwater depletion, published this week in Nature¹.


Across the world, human civilizations depend largely on tapping vast reservoirs of water that have been stored for up to thousands of years in sand, clay and rock deep underground. These massive aquifers — which in some cases stretch across multiple states and country borders — provide water for drinking and crop irrigation, as well as to support ecosystems such as forests and fisheries.

The US Government Can Track Your Location at Any Time Without a Warrant

—By Adam Serwer  | Thu Aug. 16, 2012 3:01 AM PDT

Is law enforcement tracking your cell phone's GPS more like intercepting a phone call or tailing someone on the street? A federal court decision says it's more like following you—which means the authorities don't need to get a warrant to find out where you are at any given time.


The case involves a marijuana courier, Melvin Skinner, whose disposable cell phone was being tracked by the Drug Enforcement Agency as he moved his cargo from Arizona to Tennessee. The DEA got a court order (not a warrant) compelling Skinner's cell phone company to share his GPS information—the release of which led to Skinner's capture and arrest.

Obama Campaign Strikes Back Against Former Navy SEALs

John Hudson  

Aug 16, 2012

Politically speaking, Navy SEALs aren't the safest targets to rail against in a presidential race, but the Obama campaign isn't hesitating to take down a group of former SEALs who've criticized the president's national security decisions.


On Thursday morning, campaign officials waged a full court press against the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund, a group of former U.S. Special Forces and intelligence officials accusing President Obama of leaking vital national security secrets and taking too much credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden. When the group launched its anti-Obama media campaign Wednesday, consisting of TV ads and a 22-minute film, it wasn't clear if Obama officials would avoid a potentially messy confrontation or refute the military veterans publicly. But now the campaign has made clear it views the attacks in the same light as the 2004 John Kerry "Swift Boat" attack ads, which, however misleading, were painfully effective.

The One Housing Solution Left: Mass Mortgage Refinancing

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ and MARK ZANDI
Published: August 12, 2012

MORE than four million Americans have lost their homes since the housing bubble began bursting six years ago. An additional 3.5 million homeowners are in the foreclosure process or are so delinquent on payments that they will be soon. With 13.5 million homeowners underwater — they owe more than their home is now worth — the odds are high that many millions more will lose their homes. 

Housing remains the biggest impediment to economic recovery, yet Washington seems paralyzed. While the Obama administration’s housing policies have fallen short, Mitt Romney hasn’t offered any meaningful new proposals to aid distressed or underwater homeowners. 

Glenn Greenwald: The Right’s Brittle Heroes

The contrast between Paul Ryan's iconic image and his personal reality is typical of America's
partisan leaders

The contrast between (a) how Paul Ryan is depicted by worshipful Republicans and media figures alike — as a principled fiscal conservative and advocate of Randian self-sufficiency  – and the reality of what he’s done in his life is as stark as it is typical. The American Right has an amazing ability to lionize leaders whose lives are the precise antithesis of the political values that define their image.

For the last decade, conservatives transformed George Bush and Dick Cheney into the embodiments of warrior courage, even though they both scampered away from combat, letting others fight and die for them in a war they both supported. The same is true of almost every leading right-wing super-patriot tough-guy: John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh – and Mitt Romney. Somehow, when the authoritarians on the Right search for icons of manly warrior power to venerate, they find only those who like to melodramatically play-act as such, but who ran away when it came time to actually perform. Indeed, such figures dress themselves up with extra-flamboyant trappings of faux Toughness for the same reason female impersonators have long favored over-the-top feminine costumes and gaudy make-up: the more one lacks an attribute which one wishes to project, the more extreme one must be in pretending.

Saving the Post Office: Letter Carriers Consider Bringing Back Banking Services

Sunday, 12 August 2012 00:00  
By Ellen Brown, Truthout | News Analysis 


On July 27, 2012, the National Association of Letter Carriers adopted a resolution at their national convention in Minneapolis to investigate the establishment of a postal banking system. The resolution noted that expanding postal services and developing new sources of revenue are important components of any effort to save the public post office and preserve living-wage jobs; that many countries have a long and successful history of postal banking, including Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the United States itself; and that postal banks could serve the nine million people who don't have a bank account and the 21 million who use usurious check cashers, giving low-income people access to a safe banking system. "A USPS [United States Postal Service] bank would offer a 'public option' for banking," concluded the resolution, "providing basic checking and savings - and no complex financial wheeling and dealing."