Michael Winship - Banks and Congress Grapple with Stubborn, Stupid Facts

Facts are stubborn things, said founding father John Adams, a basic truth Ronald Reagan famously mangled at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when he tried to quote Adams and declared, “Facts are stupid things,” before correcting himself.

Nonetheless, in practice, certain financial and political leaders seem to embrace Reagan’s verbal misstep as closer to reality than Adams’ original aphorism. Witness the resistance on the part of banking institutions and certain members of the congressional leadership, despite regulations demanding that they allow facts and figures to be reported, information that could keep us from the edge of yet another economic meltdown.

The March 5 Wall Street Journal reported that as the Federal Reserve prepares to release the results of the latest round of stress tests, evaluating how banks would respond in the event of another severe financial crisis, “Bankers are pressing the Fed to limit its release of information — expected as early as next week — to what was published after the first test of big banks in 2009.”

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/06-6

Greg Palast - BP Settlement Sells Out Victims

Some deal. BP gets the gold mine and its victims get the shaft. And a few lawyers will get vacation homes—though they won't be so stupid as to build them on the Gulf Coast. 

On Friday night, the judge-picked lawyers for 120,000 victims of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out cut a back-room deal with oil company BP PLC which will save the lawyers the hard work of a trial and save the oil giant billions of dollars. It will also save the company the threat of exposing the true and very ugly story of the Gulf of Mexico oil platform blow-out. 

I have been to the Gulf and seen the damage — and the oil that BP says is gone.  Miles of it.  As an economist who calculated damages for plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case, I can tell you right now that there is no way, no how, that the $7.8 billion BP says it will spend on this settlement will cover that damage, the lost incomes, homes, businesses and boats, let alone the lost lives — from cancers, fetal deformities, miscarriages, and lung and skin diseases. 

Read More:

http://www.gregpalast.com/bp-settlement-sells-out-victimsdeal-buries-evidence-of-oil-company-willful-negligence/

Anthony Gucciardi - Drug Deaths Now Outnumber Traffic Fatalities in US

In 2009, drugs exceeded the amount of traffic-related deaths, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide. According to information provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the very pharmaceuticals that are prescribed to treat life-endangering conditions are now ending lives. The death toll is partially due to an increase in mental illness medication known as psychotropics, which have been criticized by health experts as being oftentimes unnecessarily prescribed. The pills, given to patients to prevent suicide thoughts and tendencies, may actually lead to suicidal thoughts and suicide.

In 2005, it was found that link between Prozac and suicidal behavior was kept a secret. The BBC even reported in as early as the year 2000 that Prozac ‘led to suicide’. Oftentimes killers will end their own lives after shootings, or attempt to force the cops to kill them. This is essentially a form of suicide with a mixture of murderous tendencies. If Prozac can drive someone to suicide, could it also drive someone to end someone else’s life? Paxil, an anti-depressant drug, was found to be linked to violent behavior in 2006. The link incited multiple lawsuits, and brings up questions as to whether or not similar drugs have the same effects.

Read More:

http://naturalsociety.com/drug-deaths-now-outnumber-traffic-fatalities-in-us/#ixzz1oFj05G3W

Stephan Salisbury - How to Fund an American Police State

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California.  American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere. 

There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization -- a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.

The ubiquitous fantasy of “homeland security,” pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public.  It has also excited intense weapons- and techno-envy among police departments and municipalities vying for the latest in armor and spy equipment.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175511/

Peter Bratsis - Will Greece Be Ruled by the Bankers or Its People?

The most central and constant dilemma in modern politics has been the choice between the political desires and demands of citizens versus the policy expertise and prudence of bureaucrats and specialists. For the more democratically inclined, those like Machiavelli and Aristotle, the judgments of the many, as flawed as they often may be, are nonetheless more trustworthy than the commands of the elite. The few, no matter their credentials or honors, are never able to match the collective intelligence of the multitude.

For others, including those who drafted the US Constitution, the whims and desires of the many are a great threat to social order, and the special few must stand as a moderating force between them and the levers of government.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/will_greece_be_ruled_by_the_bankers_-_or_its_people_20120303/

Paul Craig Roberts - Why Can’t Americans Have Democracy?

When the american invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard set by the US after WW II, overthrew the Saddam Hussein secular government, the Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites went to war against one another. The civil war between Iraqis saved the american invasion. Nevertheless, enough Sunnis found time to fight the american occupiers of Iraq that the US was never able to occupy Bagdad, much less Iraq, no matter how violent and indiscriminate the US was in the application of force.

The consequence of the US invasion was not democracy and women’s rights in Iraq, much less the destruction of weapons of mass destruction which did not exist as the weapons inspectors had made perfectly clear beforehand.  The consequence was to transfer political power from Sunnis to Shi’ites. The Shi’ite version of Islam is the Iranian version. Thus, Washington’s invasion transferred power in Iraq from a secular government to Shi’ites allied with Iran.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29594

Dave Lindorff - Unemployment Mumbo Jumbo

The US stock market jumped up today on word that the number of new unemployment applications fell to the lowest level in four years.

Sounds good, right? It’s meant to sound good, but if you look at the number, and if you think about what it really means, it’s not good news at all.

What the US Labor Department reported was that new unemployment claims filed for the week ended Feb. 24 totaled 351,000, which was slightly lower than the 353,000 new claims filed the prior week. “Slightly indeed! a better term for this 0.57% decline is “statistically insignificant! 

The idea that such a “drop” in new claims would spark a jump in the Dow or the S&P shows how completely divorced from reality investors really are.

Read More:

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2012/03/02/UNEMPLOYMENT-MUMBO-JUMBO/

Prof. Michael Hudson - There is an Alternative to Neoliberal Monetary Austerity

I have just returned from Rimini, Italy, where I experienced one of the most amazing spectacles of my academic life. Four of us associated with the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) were invited to lecture for three days on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and explain why Europe is in such monetary trouble today – and to show that there is an alternative, that the enforced austerity for the 99% and vast wealth grab by the 1% is not a force of nature.

Stephanie Kelton (incoming UMKC Economics Dept. chair and editor of its economic blog, New Economic Perspectives), criminologist and law professor Bill Black, investment banker Marshall Auerback and me (along with a French economist, Alain Parguez) stepped into the basketball auditorium on Friday night. We walked down, and down, and further down the central aisle, past a packed audience reported at over 2,100. It was like entering the Oscars as People called out our first names. Some told us they had read all of our economics blogs. Stephanie joked that now she understood how the Beatles felt. There was prolonged applause – all for an intellectual rather than a physical sporting event.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29605

Costs of Climate Change Touching Down All Around: Insurers

As southern Indiana, Kentucky and other midwestern states woke Saturday to devastated communities and a rising death toll, the world again was treated to pictures and video of mother nature's ferocious power and the merciless power of her most precise and terrifying storm, the tornado.  Most striking to some is the early arrival of this year's tornado season, which usually begins later in the spring and runs into summer.  For climate scientists, who have long predicted longer or more powerful storms and less predictable seasons, the events are an affirmation that offer no comfort.

More striking this week, however, was a little noticed hearing -- just a day before these massively destruction storms -- where the nation's insurance and re-insurance companies came together to recognize the impact that climate change is having on their industry, a direct measure of the financial costs on US taxpayers and private businesses.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/03-0

David Swanson - Un-Cheating Justice: Two Years Left to Prosecute Bush

Elizabeth Holtzman knows something about struggles for justice in the U.S. government.  She was a member of Congress and of the House Judiciary Committee that voted for articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon in 1973. She proposed the bill that in 1973 required that "state secrets" claims be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. She co-authored the special prosecutor law that was allowed to lapse, just in time for the George W. Bush crime wave, after Kenneth Starr made such a mockery of it during the Whitewater-cum-Lewinsky scandals.  She was there for the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. She has served on the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, bringing long-escaped war criminals to justice.  And she was an outspoken advocate for impeaching George W. Bush.

Holtzman's new book, coauthored with Cynthia Cooper, is called "Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law and Plotted to Avoid Prosecution -- and What We Can Do About It."  Holtzman begins by recalling how widespread and mainstream was the speculation at the end of the Bush nightmare that Bush would pardon himself and his underlings.  The debate was over exactly how he would do it.  And then he didn't do it at all.

Read More:

http://www.truth-out.org/un-cheating-justice-two-years-left-prosecute-bush/1330872233