Ben Slade

I just love these quotes from Paul Krugman. This one from a June 17, 2010 Op Ed article

"In America, many self-described deficit hawks are hypocrites, pure and simple: They’re eager to slash benefits for those in need, but their concerns about red ink vanish when it comes to tax breaks for the wealthy. Thus, Senator Ben Nelson, who sanctimoniously declared that we can’t afford $77 billion in aid to the unemployed, was instrumental in passing the first Bush tax cut, which cost a cool $1.3 trillion."

From a really gloomy article dated April 2010 on the ThePrudentBear.com website:

"The real economy remains fragile. Government actions, such as fiscal stimulus and special industry support schemes (cash for clunkers; investment incentives, trade credit subsidies), have boosted demand and industrial activity in the short term. As Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf told The Wall Street Journal on September 19, 2009: “If it’s not a government program, it’s basically not getting done.” Private demand remains somnolent. The problem remains as government incentives encourage current consumption and investment but ultimately “steal” from future demand."

By Peter Beinart from The New York Review of Books:

"Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead."

From The Business Insider:

Prosecutors haven't found wrongdoing [during the financial crash] because, under the laws in effect at the time, there wasn't any wrongdoing.

And that highlights the real crime here: The laws in effect at the time.

So it's time to call a few more people to the stand.

The folks who made the laws that allowed all this stuff [the financial crash] to happen, for example. And the folks responsible for the agencies that missed the only criminal behavior that has been found:

• The Senators who approved the lax "mark-to-market" accounting rules (which allowed banks like Lehman to print huge phantom "profits" for bonus and stock purposes, and then, on the way down, lie about the value of their crap assets until they collapsed in a heap).
  
• The folks who championed all those neg-am option-ARM mortgages (Alan Greenspan).
  
• The folks who decided Glass-Steagall was an unnecessary anachronism (Greenspan, Bill Clinton, Bob Rubin, Sandy Weill).
  
• The people who decided derivatives shouldn't be regulated (Greenspan, Rubin, Phil Gramm, Larry Summers, Enron).
  
• The man who ran the SEC while it whiffed on Madoff and Stanford (Christopher Cox).
  
• The man who ran the SEC when it decided to eliminate leverage rules, allowing the banks to gamble themselves into oblivion (Cox).
  
• The folks who got Fannie and Freddie into the sub-prime business (Daniel Mudd, etc.).
  

A great rant by Joe Conason in truthdig.com:

If the public actually wants to stop bailing out rich brats who make stupid and destructive bets in the Wall Street casino, government must be empowered to oversee derivative trading. And if the public wants a national economy that provides decent jobs and useful goods - rather than super-profits for financial firms - then government should encourage production and construction while sharply regulating speculation.

Steven Pearlstein writes in the Wash Post:

"it remains a disappointment that there have been no sufficiently powerful voices in Congress or the Obama White House to challenge the idea that financial crises are inevitable and that the best we can hope for is to lessen the economic and human damage that they cause"

1. Pass Whistleblower Protection Law
2. Create an Independent Audit Agency
3. Improve Economic Recovery Efforts
4. Put the Teeth Back in Financial Regulatory Agencies
5. Uncover the Hidden Costs of Privatizing Government
6. Ensure Taxpayers Get Their Fair Share of Revenues from Royalty Collection
7. Increase Government Accountability and Transparency
8. End Wasteful Defense Spending
9. Make Government Watchdog Organizations More Accountable
10. Drag the Nuclear Complex Out of the Cold War, and Ensure Oversight of Lab Contractors
11. Disclose Conflicts of Interest in Scientific Research
12. And of Course: Fix the Broken Federal Contracting System

"opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place"

"American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy's enemies, whether they are slavemasters, states imposing poll taxes on voters, or the opponents of woman suffrage. Today, the Court has enthroned corporations, permitting them not only all kinds of special economic rights but now, amazingly, moving to grant them the same political rights as the people. This is a moment of high danger for democracy so we must act quickly to spell out in the Constitution what the people have always understood: that corporations do not enjoy the political and free speech rights that belong to the people of the United States."

"...The Washington Post published an political lobbying article, presented as a news story, which could be a signal of the death of the Post as an independent and objective news source.

The piece, entitled 'Support grows for tackling nation's debt,' appeared to be one of those background news pieces common in newspapers like the Post.

But article was written not by the newspaper's reporters - and not by an objective wire service, like the Associated Press - but by a new organization called The Fiscal Times, whose founder and major backer [is] Peter G. Peterson [partner in Wall Street’s Blackstone Group and former Republican Treasury Secretary, president of the Concord coalition to reduce the deficit]

I might even support radical plans to cut the deficit, but that's not the point. I want to know who I can trust, and apparently the Washington Post is no longer on the list.

It's just shocking that the Post would so casually sell their journalistic soul. Shouldn't an editor at the Wash Post get fired or demoted for this?