Richard (RJ) Eskow - Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase: Why It's the Scandal of Our Time

They're missing the point. When CEO Jamie Dimon announced that JPMorgan Chase had incurred at least $2 billion in losses from risky, unsecured, derivatives-types trading, it uncovered the scandal of our time once and for all.

The Chase disaster gives us a much-needed a glimpse into our corrupt political system, its Wall Street paymasters, and the media voices that allow people like Dimon to escape scrutiny.

The JPMorgan Chase story is the story behind the financial crisis that has thrown millions of people out of work. It's the story behind our ever-growing wealth inequity. It's the story behind Washington's inability to prosecute criminal bankers, regulate reckless ones, and propose the economic solutions the rest of us urgently need.

Predictably, the pundits who aid and abet people like Jamie Dimon are dismissing this story's importance, pointing out that $2 billion (it could become much more) pales against the $19 billion in profit Chase reported last year.

But it was potentially $2 billion earned through crime. And more importantly, this story isn't just about Chase's errors and crimes. It's much bigger than that.

Besides, $19 billion in a single year? That's a big part of the story, too.

The Case Against Chase, its CEO, and its accomplices is too big to cover all at once. Here are the aspects of this under-reported story we plan to address in the days and weeks to come.

The Firm

Depending on the day and the measurement used, JPMorgan Chase is now the largest or second-largest bank in the world. Its Japan operation alone has been cited by that nation's regulators as a systemic risk because of its size.

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Jamie-Dimon-s-JPMorgan-Cha-by-Richard--RJ-Esko-120515-853.html

Dean Baker - The Pirate Party Knows Where the Money Is

One of the oddities of recent election results in Germany and elsewhere in northern Europe is the rise of the Pirate Party. This party received 7.8 percent of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia yesterday, making it the 4th state government in Germany in which it has enough support to get into the state parliament.  It also won enough votes to get seats in the European Parliament. The Pirate Party is widely expected to cross the 5 percent threshold in the German national elections next year, allowing it to get into the national parliament.

Like many new and rapidly growing parties, the Pirate Party has only a partially formed agenda and undoubtedly means many different things to different supporters. However a general theme is clearly a support for freedom of the Internet. This means a rebellion against governmental efforts to track users and to limit the flow of material over the web.

Near the top of the list of the Pirate Party’s demons is copyright protection, and rightly so. Copyright protection is an antiquated relic of the late Middle Ages that has no place in the digital era. It is debatable whether such government-granted monopolies were ever the best way to finance the production of creative and artistic work, but now that the Internet will allow this material to be instantly transferred at zero cost anywhere in the world, copyrights are clearly a counter-productive restraint on technology.

Read More:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012514204029381972.html

Dr. Edward Group - 2 out of 3 Medical Students Do Not Know When to Wash Their Hands

Even though it’s an easy way to help reduce the spread of infectious diseases, like influenza and the common cold, some of us probably wash our hands less often than we should. Toxic alcohol-based sanitizing foams and wipes that can be used quickly and without water have made made it easy to keep our hands clean yet some people wait until after they use the bathroom or become visibly soiled before cleaning up.

If it’s any consolation, doctors in-training apparently aren’t much better.

Data collected by German researchers at the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hospital Epidemiology at Hannover Medical School indicates fewer than one-third of medical students actually know when they’re supposed to wash their hands.

A total of 85 third-year medical students at Hannover Medical School were given a list of seven common hospital scenarios and asked to identify which situations merited hand sanitation, and which did not. Of the seven scenarios presented, five called for washing up afterwards.

These included “before contact to a patient,” “before preparation of intravenous fluids,” “after contact to vomit,” “after removal of gloves,” and “after contact to the patient’s bed.” Roughly 80 percent of students surveyed failed to answer all seven questions correctly. Only one in three managed to at least identify those situations in which hand hygiene should be practiced.

Read More:

http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/medical-students-do-not-know-to-wash-hands/

Dawn Lim - Darpa Wants to Master the Science of Propaganda

Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate. He observed that stringing “incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities,” was the province of the American storyteller. A machine might imitate simple formulas behind yarns, but never quite master them.

The Pentagon’s freewheeling research arm is hoping to prove Twain wrong. Darpa is asking scientists to “take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion.” The idea is to detect terrorists who have been indoctrinated by propaganda. Then, the Pentagon can respond with some messages of its own.

The program is called “Narrative Networks.” By understanding how stories have shaped your mind, the Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas, a neuroscience researcher involved in the project tells Danger Room. With this knowledge, the military can also target groups vulnerable to terrorists’ recruiting tactics with its own counter-messaging.

Read More:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/darpa-science-propaganda/#more-59786

Findings from Flawed Study Used To Discredit Multivitamin/Mineral Supplements

Starting in 1983, the Life Extension Foundation® warned of dangers associated with commercial multivitamin/mineral formulas.

Our earliest concern was that free radicals generated by supplemental iron would increase cancer and heart disease risk. Our fears were born out shortly thereafter in published studies showing that elevation in markers of iron intake increased risk (by more than fivefold) of common degenerative diseases including heart attack and cancer.1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17

Back in 1983, commercial companies bragged in their advertising about how much iron their multivitamins contained. Despite our repeated warnings, very few commercial supplement companies removed iron from their multivitamin formulas as the public perception was that supplemental iron was beneficial.

The result of this misconception was that individuals using commercial supplements were obtaining miniscule quantities of antioxidants to protect against free radicals, while simultaneously ingesting large amounts of iron (and sometimes copper) that are known free radical generators.18

Read More:

http://www.lef.org/featured-articles/1014_Flawed-Study-Used-To-Discredit-Multivitamin-Mineral-Supplements.htm

Immanuel Wallerstein - European Elections: Is the Center Holding?

Elections in Western parliamentary systems are always about the center. The standard situation is one in which there are two dominant parties - one somewhat right of center and one somewhat left of center. There are differences between the policies these parties pursue when in office, but there are also enormous similarities. The election never reflects a profound political split. Rather, it is about recentering the center - what is to be considered the leverage point in the seesaw between the parties.

The rarer situation is about repudiating the center, and therefore repudiating the two erstwhile principal parties that revolve around the center. Such a result throws national politics into major turmoil, and sometimes has considerable impact outside the country as well.

The recent elections in France and Greece illustrate these two situations well. In France, the Socialists defeated the conservative UMP, and have indeed recentered the center. In the larger chaotic situation of the world-system, and particularly that of the European Union, recentering the center in France will have a great impact. But do not expect the actual policies of François Hollande to be radically different from those of Nicolas Sarkozy.

In Greece, quite the contrary happened. The center was dramatically repudiated. Both major parties - the conservative New Democracy and the socialist PASOK - lost more than half the votes they normally had. Their combined total went from about two-thirds of the votes to one-third. PASOK even was reduced to third place, outvoted by a further left coalition of parties, Syriza, which was generally considered the big victor in the election. The basic issue of the elections was the austerity program imposed on Greece by outside forces, and most unflinchingly by Germany. All the parties except the two traditional major parties called for repudiating the austerity measures. The leader of Syriza, Alexis Tsirpas, asserted that the election results made the government's commitment to the austerity program "null and void."

Read More:

http://www.iwallerstein.com/european-elections-center-holding/

Siv O'Neall - "We do not want to die in the rubble of neoliberalism!"

It seems perfectly clear that Roosevelt didn't implement the various reforms to get out of the Great Depression from any excessive sense of charity (even though he was most likely a basically sound man) but really in order to save Capitalism. That's a well-known fact and Pierre Larrouturou's founding of Roosevelt 2012 does not to me make him a Messiah. However, through his reforms, FDR did save millions of people from lives in poverty, hunger and misery. He implemented new work relief programs - the WPA (Work Projects Administration) and also banking reforms, the 'Emergency Banking Act' and several other social reforms.

If, however, you hesitate to call Roosevelt a people's man (as I do), just compare Roosevelt to Obama or his predecessors! And when, for that matter, would a revolutionary man or woman be elected President of the United States? It's clear that Roosevelt was a realist, not a flaming revolutionary.

Systems often hold longer than we think, but they end up by collapsing much faster than we imagine. "In those few words, the former chief economist of the IMF International, Kenneth Rogoff, sums up the situation of the global economy. As the Governor of the Bank of England, he asserts that "the next crisis may be worse than 1930" ...

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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/43160

Elizabeth Warren - Wall Street Waging 'Guerrilla War' on Financial Regulations

Elizabeth Warren speaking on CNN stated that the issue embodied by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is a symptom of the regulation-avoiding power that financial behemoths have to take on risks and let the public take on the consequences.

"This isn't personal to Jamie Dimon. It's what's been going on ever since Dodd-Frank passed. There's been a guerrilla war out there in which the largest financial institutions have been doing everything they can to make sure that financial regulations don't get put in place. And if they do get put in place, that they're loaded with loopholes and not very effective. There's been a lobbying army hired by these financial institutions because they really don't want to have any oversight," stated Warren.

“The problem is a combination of size and attitude. They’re too big, there’s too much power concentrated in just a handful of institutions but it’s also that they have the attitude of leave us alone, we’ll manage our risks internally, we’ll take care of it all ourselves, we’ll come back to you only if things go wrong and we need some help and we need a bailout. We can’t run an economy that way. We can’t run a country that way. We have to stand up as a people and say, 'No more of this.'"

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/14-2

[Video] Iraqi Boy on Factor-X

Brian Moench - Climate Crisis: The Silence is Deafening

Those of us who have been waiting impatiently for Obama to shed his apparent cocoon of compromise, caution and cowardice finally got a hint last week that a real leader may yet emerge and spread his wings at the White House.

But, there are public policy issues more important than gay marriage, issues where there is no margin for error and no time to waste, issues where the clock is not only ticking but nearing the end of its prelude to catastrophe.  The survival of mankind is just such an issue.  I'm talking of course about "the climate crisis"--what the coniving Republican strategist Frank Luntz convinced the media to start calling "climate change" in 2003 because polling showed that it sounded less ominous than "global warming."

With the President having shown some mettle on gay rights,  we must now convince him that he must bring that courage to bear on the greatest threat that mankind has ever faced.  Pragmatists, please don't respond with:  "The public doesn't want to hear it." "It's not in the top ten of voters' concerns."  "He can't win the election talking about it." Molding oneself for the sole purpose of electability is not leadership, it's pandering, something for which his opponent, Mr. Romney, is widely regarded as breaking the world record, whose only core political belief is that he deserves to be President.  There has never been a more noble opportunity for a President  to contrast himself from, and elevate himself above a soulless pandering opponent than President Obama has now.  

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/14-5