News: JPM sued by AG Schneiderman, New York

Jamie Dimon, head of J.P Morgan Chase Bank was whining again before attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland a week ago. It seems that the "vilification" of large banks is unfair and a form of, well, discrimination. He said, "I have disagreed from the beginning with this blanket blame of all banks. It's a form of discrimination." Seems he doesn't like keeping bad company with other banks. [Read more]

Dean Baker , Beat the Press Tuesday

                   The piece (in the Washington Post-Flavius) also includes a number of assertions that are unsupported by anything. For example, it tells readers: [Read more]

As you read this, millions of Americans who desperately want to work either cannot find employment at all, or cannot find the quantity and quality of work they need to meet their own needs and the needs of their families.  This is real suffering.  The unemployed are real flesh-and-blood people, not just fractions of percentage points on Labor Department spreadsheets.

At the same time, we have tremendous unmet social needs.  Any well-informed high school student can point to large, daunting national challenges that we sorely need to address, but that we are not addressing with anything approaching the urgency and commitment that the gravity of the challenges would seem to demand of us. [Read more]

Well, I did it--I updated my Facebook status with the following:  [Read more]

It was just a few years ago, 2006 to be exact that the Washington State Supreme Court upheld a 1998 law that banned gay marriage. Our state Supreme Court refused to overturn the ban:

"The Legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by children's biological parents," wrote supreme court justice Barbara Madsen.

Wednesday evening the Washington State Senate moved to turn that around. The vote was 28-21 in favor of making Washington State the the 7th state in the Union to codify marriage as a legal right for all citizens of the state of Washington.  So in the end, the vote wasn't close, a clear majority in our state senate has voted in favor of equality for all, which is deeply embedded in our state constitution, and this time. [Read more]

The alpha males still control the top of the hill.  For now. Their time, however, may be coming to an end, a victim of necessity, of survival.  In their place will not be a replacement, a mere shifting of their hierarchical ranking from them to their conquerors.  There will be no conquering. Rather, there will be a truce of sorts, an agreement, a reconciliation. Who will be there on the top of hill will shift in a collaborative act of play and thought. [Read more]

The Susan G. Komen foundation hours ago pulled the money they grant to Planned Parenthood to provide mammograms citing a congressional investigation of Planned Parenthood. I predict this is going to turn into an epic failure on the part of the Foundation.

What do you think will happen? Deciding to pull funding for a program that helps low income women receive mammograms, seems like you might be penalizing the people who most need these services . Women are going to be completely outraged at your actions, as once again our health care needs are subject to politicization, and now an organization that once helped is assisting those who would hold our needs hostage.   I am dumbfounded at your reprehensible decision that jeopardizes the health of poor women.  You know you going to have to reverse this horrendous decision, right, you have to know this, because the announcement has caused what now appears to be a mini-firestorm, but by tomorrow will be totally out of control. The longer this goes on the worse your publicity, and the more money the Foundation loses. But it isn't just money that the Foundation is set to lose here, it has also suddenly lost the air of non-partisanship, and the appearance of a willingness to participate in the politicization of reproductive health, and in doing so, you were willing to sacrifice those who can't fight back. [Read more]

Here's an excerpt from Brad Delong, yesterday, writing something that stands common sense on its head: that cutting the deficit doesn't .... well cut the deficit :

Indeed, in less than a year, if current forecasts are correct, Britain’s Cameron-Osborne Depression will not merely be the worst depression in Britain since the Great Depression, but probably the worst depression in Britain…ever. [Read more]

Before the process of deconstructing Willard Romney began in earnest a month ago it was difficult to objectify that special world of Finance which exists as a form of supra-capitalism I choose to call Financiocracy---a Confederation of institutions and individuals who in a multi-national context make money with money. 

The Confederation exists in an ethos which is literally not anchored to our traditional form of locale-specific capitalism. One of the most vivid examples of such un-connectedness is when, in the invention of Mortgage Backed Securities, sold and traded world wide, home mortgages in the U.S.were severed from the established grounding of actual paperwork and signatures, and the physical recording of mortgages in the municipalities where the asset resides, a centuries-old practice, was violated. 

Romneyville crystalizes one aspect of this brave new world of finance so discreetly and clearly that it is likely to remain as Exhibit A of a practice known as Private Equity for a generation to come. Romneyville rests on several important privileges extracted from the government and populace of the U.S (see below). [Read more]

Detail from Corrupt Legislation (1896) by Elihu Vedder. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C

We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, (audience boos) and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table," West said. "Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America...

Following cheers, West added, "Yeah I said 'hell.'"

Moments after the quote was mentioned on Twitter, former Reid spokesman Jim Manley responded via his own Twitter feed: "Me to allen west. You first asshole.

How did we reach such a level of discussion that there is no agreement as to the starting point of discussion between the red and the white, the conservative and the liberal, the republican and the democrat? [Read more]

Has it really been 20 years?  Well, 2012 minus 1992 equals 20, so I guess it has been.

In case you didn't know, twenty years ago the UN convened in Rio the Earth Summit officially known as the Conference on Environment and Development.  [Read more]