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Goldman Plays, We Pay
The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.
HAITI EARTHQUAKE LIVE BLOG: Who to Follow and What to Read for Breaking Developments
Here is the link to Thursday's live blog. Please check the page regularly for updates.
7:45am PDT: The BBC has a disturbing first hand video report from a hospital in Port-au-Prince where, last night, injured people waiting for treatment slept amongst dead bodies.
Justice Department Sponsors National Internet Crimes Against Children Conference
Justice Department Announces Fourth Jurisdiction to Implement Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act
Justice Department Announces Streamlined Grant Solicitation for Tribal Communities
Strengthen Social Security Coalition Puts Both Parties on Notice
More than 60 organizations that represent more than 30 million Americans are banding together to deliver a straightforward message to politicians this fall: Don't mess with Social Security.
Lost Billions in Iraq
If public schools or Medicare providers were held to the same standards as military contractors, they'd never have to beg for cash. Need money? Sure! -- Congress would say -- what's a few missing billions of tax dollars?
Congress agreed to pump an extra $33 billion into Afghanistan this week, even as a new report revealed that almost nine billion earmarked for the nation's other occupation -- Iraq -- simply, it seems, went missing.
Greek Society Begins to Crack Under Harsh Measures
Athens - Every working day, more than a hundred people crowd around the entrance of the merchant and passenger boats' reconstruction industry, well known as 'The Zone', in the southern suburb of Attiki.
Most of them are unemployed steel workers and torch welders, who wait desperately from the early hours of the morning for an announcement of jobs offered on a daily basis on the ships that dock at the port.
'The Dumbest Thing' in Education Thinking
It's a little hard to make sense of what happened this week in the world of education, but, let's give it a fast try:
*President Obama gave a speech to the Urban League convention in which he joked about the Jersey Shore's Snooki and also said the following: "Now, over the past 18 months ... I think the single most important thing we've done is to launch an initiative called Race to the Top."
American Politics: Lucy vs. Charlie Brown
American politics has turned into the comic strip Peanuts, with the liberal Charlie Brown attempting to kick a football while the conservative Lucy pulls it away from him for the thousandth time. Nothing better illustrates a politics that is polarized between an immoral, unscrupulous right and a spineless, incompetent left than the sad story of Shirley Sherrod, an obscure employee in the U. S. Department of Agriculture who became a household name overnight.
Cut Tax Expenditures to Stimulate the Economy
When Federal Reserve Board Chairman Bernanke announced that the Fed was not prepared to fund additional economic stimulus at this time, the market fell, suggesting strongly that Wall Street disagrees with Republican calls to cut expenditures because deficits have gotten too large. Only when record corporate earnings were announced did the market rise.
Primer for Ed Reformers (or, It’s the Curriculum, Stupid!)
Just about everybody who’s ever been to school has a theory about what’s wrong with education. And a good many of them have a theory about what would make what’s wrong right.
Curbing Your Enthusiasm
Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?
These questions were inspired by the ongoing suspense over whether President Obama will do the obviously right thing and nominate Elizabeth Warren to lead the new consumer financial protection agency. But the Warren affair is only the latest chapter in an ongoing saga.
Dallas Darling | Appeasement and the Politics of Flexibility
At the Senate Armed Services Committee, when General David Petraeus said keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan to fight was an "enduring" mission and that the July 2011 deadline for a troop withdrawal was flexible, it reminded me of what then-U.S. President George W. Bush claimed when he first announced the preemptive wars in Afghanistan and later Iraq. Some within the Bush Administration claimed the defeat of Kabul and Jalalabad and Baghdad would take only three to six weeks, perhaps at the most six months.
No Place for Washington in Colombia-Venezuela Row
In March I wrote about the Obama administration's contribution to the election campaign under way in Venezuela, where voters will choose a new national assembly in September. I predicted that certain things would happen before September, among them some new "discoveries" that Venezuela supports terrorism.
Louisiana Vessel Company Pleads Guilty to Dumping Oil on High Seas, Will Pay $2.1 Million in Penalties
The Deception of Real-Life 'Inception'
For all of its "Matrix"-like convolutions and "Alice in Wonderland" allusions, the new film "Inception" adds something significant to the ancient ruminations about reality's authenticity-something profoundly relevant to this epoch of confusion. In the movie's tale of corporate espionage, we are asked to ponder this moment's most disturbing epistemological questions: Namely, how are ideas deposited in people's minds, and how incurable are those ideas when they are wrong?
Top Democrats Pressure White House on Afghan War as WikiLeaks Reveals Bloody Realities
The Afghan war is coming under renewed scrutiny as web surfers across the world browse through the bloody battle scenes and military follies described in the thousands of classified military reports released by WikiLeaks, and now top Democrats are finally expressing concerns over the longevity of a war that has dragged on for nearly a decade.
Gareth Porter | The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign
Reuel Marc Gerecht’s screed justifying an Israeli bombing attack on Iran coincides with the opening the new Israel lobby campaign marked by the introduction of House resolution 1553 expressing full support for such an Israeli attack.
What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran.
What's Sadly Missing in Time's Afghan Cover
The Time magazine cover story this week arrives with a graphic cover image next to the title, "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan." It shows an Afghan teen named Aisha whose nose and ears had been sliced off by the Taliban.
Inside, editor Rick Stengel explains that he consulted psychologists about what harm could be done to children who might see this disturbing image. But he also defends the aim of the story itself in the following paragraph:
