May 14, 2014

Robert Reich: Tim Geithner and the Wall Street Bailout Redux

Tim Geithner and the Wall Street Bailout Redux
TUESDAY, MAY 13, 2014


Timothy Geithner’s new book about the financial crisis, “Stress Test,” is basically an argument that the Wall Street bailout succeeded. That’s hardly surprising, given that Geithner was in charge of the bailout when Treasury Secretary (as was his predecessor at Treasury, Hank Paulson), and so has an inherit interest in telling the public it succeeded.

Even so, the bailout clearly did succeed, if success means avoiding another Great Depression.

But another Great Depression might have been avoided if the crisis had been handled differently — for example, by allowing the bankruptcy laws to do what they were intended to do, and forcing the big Wall Street banks to reorganize under them.

......(snip)......

So pardon me if I take issue with Tim Geithner. The bailout was a success in the narrowest terms. Seen more broadly it was a terrible failure. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://robertreich.org/post/85654652535

May 13, 2014

National Flaws (a sobering cartoon by Mike Luckovich)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/national_flaws_20140511

May 13, 2014

Campus morons

The NCAA declared the University of North Dakota's Fighting Sioux mascot "hostile and abusive" in 2005, and the state voted to remove it in 2012, which leaves the school without a nickname until 2015. Not to worry, though. A group of students has found a solution: Use the same mascot, but add a beer bong to the logo. There's no way this could possibly backfire.

"Siouxper Drunk" T-shirts featuring the beer-bonging Fighting Sioux character debuted over the weekend at Springfest, a popular party not sponsored by UND, leading to several complaints to Indian Student Services Monday morning. One student called the shirts "degrading and demeaning."

American Indian Student Services Director Leigh Jeanotte told the Grand Forks Herald he doesn't expect the school to take the complaints seriously.

"Until there is a statement, until there is action, true action, to say that this is wrong, hurtful and it shouldn't be continued, it's going to just keep going on and on and on," he said. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://gawker.com/north-dakota-students-siouxper-drunk-shirts-are-super-1575223043

May 13, 2014

Impeach Clarence Thomas?

from truthdig:


Impeach Clarence Thomas?

Posted on May 12, 2014
By Bill Blum


Of all the justices on the Supreme Court, none—not even the fulminating homophobic Antonin Scalia—deserves more consideration for impeachment than Clarence Thomas, and for reasons having nothing to do with Anita Hill.

But can a sitting justice really be removed from office, and if so, when is removal warranted?

The answer to the first question, of course, is a straightforward yes. Although the justices are appointed for life, their tenure is subject to “good behavior.” Under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, all federal officials—including judges—can be removed from office “on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Technically, the removal process consists of two steps. First, members of the House of Representatives adopt by a simple majority vote articles of impeachment, which read very much like a criminal complaint or grand jury indictment. Step two proceeds with a trial in the Senate, which has the power to convict on a two-thirds ballot. Ouster from office follows conviction automatically, and cannot be appealed. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/impeach_clarence_thomas_20140513

May 13, 2014

Don’t Be Fooled: FCC Chairman Appears Determined to F Up the Internet

via truthdig:



Under immense pressure from corporations and consumers alike, former cable-industry-lobbyist-turned-FCC-chair Tom Wheeler will reportedly revise his scheme to create an Internet toll road, but early reports suggest the new version will make no difference.

Here’s the back story: Net neutrality (aka the Internet as we know it) is the principle that the Internet is open and indiscriminate. Your Web browser can access Truthdig just as easily as Fox News or Wikipedia. Some Internet Service Providers desperately want to boost their profits by charging Internet companies such as Netflix a toll to have speedy access to their customers. Netflix already pays such a toll to Comcast, for example. ISPs are able to do this because the FCC refuses to treat broadband Internet as a “common carrier” utility. Instead, the regulator treats ISPs like AOL or Yahoo. Former FCC chair Julius Genachowski ushered in a compromised effort to maintain net neutrality on land-based networks (not cellular networks) called the Open Internet Order. That rule was overturned by a court, with the presiding judge strongly suggesting that the FCC reclassify broadband as a utility.

Instead, Wheeler, who formerly ran both the cable and wireless trade organizations, has offered a new take on the Open Internet Order that basically gives the Comcasts of the world everything they want. Under the guidelines as they’ve been reported, ISPs can charge fees for improved access to their customers.

That has upset many, including Sen. Al Franken, not to mention “more than 100 prominent Internet companies and two of the five FCC commissioners,” by Information Week’s count. The FCC has asked the public to write, not call, presumably because the phone won’t stop ringing. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/dont_be_fooled_fcc_chairman_appears_determined_to_f_up_the_internet_2014051

May 13, 2014

I have great respect for Andre Agassi, but I've got to disagree with him on this one......

SINGAPORE -- Andre Agassi says Rafael Nadal should be considered the greatest tennis player ever, not Roger Federer.

Agassi made the comments in an interview with Singapore newspaper Straits Times, saying Nadal's achievements are more impressive because he has had to deal with tougher competition.

Federer has 17 Grand Slam titles to Nadal's 13, although the Spaniard leads his Swiss rival 23-10 in head-to-head meetings.

Agassi is quoted as saying that "I'd put Nadal No. 1, Federer No. 2," adding that "it's just remarkable to me what he has done, and he has done it all during Federer's prime." ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://espn.go.com/tennis/story/_/id/10901358/andre-agassi-said-rafael-nadal-greatest-tennis-player-ever-not-roger-federer

May 13, 2014

Brooklyn Teachers Strike a Blow Against Excessive Testing with May Day Boycott

(In These Times) On May Day 2014, a group of teachers at the International High School at Prospect Heights (IHSPH) in Brooklyn stood outside their school building and informed gathered reporters that they would not be administering the New York City English Language Arts (ELA) Performance Assessment Exam scheduled to take place that day. The test, which is part of a new teacher evaluation system imposed by the state last year, exists solely to rate teacher performance; unlike, for example the Regents Exam, which dates back to 1866 and determines whether students graduate. Thirty people—nearly all of the teachers and staff at the small public school—signed a statement declaring they would not participate.

The date was a coincidence—May Day, the internationally recognized workers' day, happened to be the day the test was scheduled—but it could not have been better for the teachers' action. Amid growing unrest among teachers, parents and students over high-stakes testing and the new Common Core educational standards, these teachers' action is another step in challenging what new Massachusetts Teachers Association President Barbara Madeloni (whose recent victory I cover in a forthcoming piece) calls “predatory education reform,” driven by private companies that aim to run schools like corporations and pocket the profits.

“This is taking back the whole conversation around education,” Rosie Frascella, a 12th grade English teacher at IHSPH, tells In These Times. That conversation has been dominated by heated rhetoric from “reformers” and anti-union elected officials about “bad” or “lazy” teachers, but Frascella and her colleagues challenged that idea by putting themselves on the line to do what they believed was right. “I'd rather take a zero, you can fail me in my evaluations but you are not going to hurt my students. You can say I'm a bad teacher but I'm standing up for my students and what I know is right for them.”

After their press conference, the teachers proceeded into the building, where, according to Emily Giles, who teaches ninth- and 10th-grade science at IHSPH, they taught class as they would have any other day. Although 50 percent of the students had already been opted out of taking the test by their parents, Giles says administrators still attempted to give the test to a small handful—with little success. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/16679/protest_the_test

May 13, 2014

Professor Richard Wolff's Economic Update: Corporations, Wages and Jail

Listen: http://rdwolff.com/content/economic-update-corporations-wages-and-jail


by Richard Wolff.
PUBLISHED ON MAY 12, 2014


Updates on no growth in US, China overtakes US, costs of GM bailout, defeat of bill to raise minimum wage while Hawaii raises its minimum. Major discussions of Pfizer decision to relocate to UK, European Court supports Tobin (financial transactions) Tax and the stunning economics of prisons and jails in the US.

May 12, 2014

Truthdigger of the Week: Cecily McMillan

from truthdig:


Truthdigger of the Week: Cecily McMillan
By Alexander Reed Kelly


[font size="1"]Occupy Wall Street activists Eric Linkser, center left, and Cecily McMillan, far right, take turns shouting information to fellow protesters preparing to return to Zuccotti Park in 2011. AP/Bebeto Matthews[/font]

Every week the Truthdig editorial staff selects a Truthdigger of the Week, a group or person worthy of recognition for speaking truth to power, breaking the story or blowing the whistle. It is not a lifetime achievement award. Rather, we’re looking for newsmakers whose actions in a given week are worth celebrating.

Feelings of dread took hold around the nation May 5 as reporters announced that a Manhattan jury had found Occupy Wall Street organizer Cecily McMillan guilty of assaulting an NYPD officer. Since the incident two years ago, McMillan’s case has become a hallmark of the U.S. government’s ongoing use of the law to suppress dissent, and for many observers, news that the 25-year-old graduate student could serve up to seven years in jail for self-defense was a chilling confirmation of the desertion of ordinary citizens by officials.

What exactly did McMillan do? According to prosecuting attorney Erin Choi, McMillan committed deliberate assault. Choi told the court that as Officer Grantley Bovell proceeded to remove McMillan from Zuccotti Park, McMillan “crouched down, then bent her knees, and then aimed her elbow at the officer and then jumped up to strike.” Photographs showed Bovell developed a black eye. He told the judge and jury that he went on to suffer headaches and sensitivity to light.

McMillan’s defenders told a different story. On March 17, defense attorney Martin Stolar said, McMillan had taken a “day off from protest.” She stopped by the park to pick up a friend she planned to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with. McMillan got “caught up” in the NYPD’s “manufactured need” to clear the park on the sixth anniversary of the start of the occupation. During the sweep, Bovell grabbed McMillan’s right breast from behind, and she, without seeing him, swung her elbow and hit Bovell in the eye. Then officers pinned McMillan to the ground, and as she claims and video footage seems to confirm, she then endured a seizure. She woke up in a hospital with a black eye, bruises on her arms and back, and another that could correspond to the shape of a hand on her breast. She was one of roughly 70 people arrested as police cleared the area of protesters, journalists and bystanders.

Exactly what happened between Bovell and McMillan may be impossible to say. The grainy video shown to the court confirms the elbowing. But as Stolar pointed out, it does not show what happened to his client just before. And Bovell’s history is suggestive. According to the NYPD’s own files, Bovell was twice investigated by the force’s bureau of internal affairs. In 2009 he was suspected of kicking a man on the floor while arresting him in a Bronx bodega. In 2010 he received a “command discipline” for failing to tell his supervisors that he and a partner were chasing a 17-year-old boy who was riding a dirt bike through the Bronx. The boy sued Bovell, “claiming he was intentionally run down and sent flying head-first into a street lamp,” The Guardian reported. “He said he was left with broken teeth and a wound requiring stitches in his head.” .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_cecily_mcmillan_20140511

May 12, 2014

Chris Hedges: The Power of Imagination

from truthdig:


The Power of Imagination

Posted on May 11, 2014
By Chris Hedges


Those in the premodern world who hoarded possessions and refused to redistribute supplies and food, who turned their backs on the weak and the sick, who lived exclusively for hedonism and their own power, were despised. Those in modern society who are shunned as odd, neurotic or eccentric, who are disconnected from the prosaic world of objective phenomena and fact, would have been valued in premodern cultures for their ability to see what others could not see. Dreams and visions—considered ways to connect with the wisdom of ancestors—were integral to existence in distant times. Property was communal then. Status was conferred by personal heroism and providing for the weak and the indigent. And economic exchanges carried the potential for malice, hatred and evil: When wampum was exchanged by Native Americans the transaction had to include “medicine” that protected each party against “spiritual infection.”

Only this premodern ethic can save us as we enter a future of economic uncertainty and endure the catastrophe of climate change. Social and economic life will again have to be communal. The lusts of capitalism will have to be tamed or destroyed. And there will have to be a recovery of reverence for the sacred, the bedrock of premodern society, so we can see each other and the earth not as objects to exploit but as living beings to be revered and protected. This means inculcating a very different vision of human society.

Our greatest oracles have sought to impart this wisdom. William Shakespeare lamented the loss of the pagan rituals eradicated by the Reformation. When Shakespeare was a boy, the critic Harold Goddard pointed out, he experienced the religious pageants, morality plays, church festivals, cycle plays, feast and saint days, displays of relics, bawdy May Day celebrations and tales of miracles that made up the belief system during the reign of the medieval Catholic Church. The Puritans, the ideological vanguard of the technological order, would eventually ban or greatly weaken all of these, and they made war on the Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters for celebrating these premodern practices.

.......(snip).......

It is through imagination that we can reach the dark regions of the human psyche and face our mortality and the brevity of existence. It is through imagination that we can recover reverence and kinship. It is through imagination that we can see ourselves in our neighbors and the other living organisms of the earth. It is through imagination that we can envision other ways to form a society. The triumph of modern utilitarianism, implanted by violence, crushed the primacy of the human imagination. It enslaved us to the cult of the self. And with this enslavement came an inability to see, the central theme of “King Lear.” Imagination, as Goddard wrote, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two—as if the birds, unable to understand the speech of man, and man, unable to understand the songs of birds, yet longing to communicate, were to agree on a tongue made up of sounds they both could comprehend—the voice of running water perhaps or the wind in the trees. Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.” ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_power_of_imagination_20140511