Thom's blog

There are now Bankster Sharks in the Water...

In his New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman is ringing the warning bell and saying we are in the early stages of a “third depression.” “This third depression,” he writes, “will be primarily a failure of policy” as the world’s leading governments focus “about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.” It's truly bizarre to watch country af

This So-Called "Banking Reform" Bill

Nearly two years after the American financial system teetered on the edge of a great Republican depression, Congressional lawmakers have come to an agreement early Friday morning to reconcile competing versions of the the bill in the biggest overhaul of financial regulations since the last Republican Great Depression. Big banks won big in this, as they can continue investing a significant amount of equity in hedge funds.

Why are the for-profit corporate leeches still in charge?

The Washington, DC-based nonpartisan think tank The Commonwealth Fund has a report out evaluating the health care systems of seven major industrialized countries. The study ranks the United States “dead last” in the quality, efficiency, and equity of its health care system, and that Americans pay roughly twice as much for health care as residents of other nations, and get poorer outcomes.

Get Ready for The McChrystal Soap Opera

In calling the top officials of the Obama administration whom he criticized to a Rolling Stone reporter, Gen.

Fremont, Nebraska Goes after Employers...of Illegal Immigrants

Fremont, Nebraska, a meat-packing town of about 25,000 people, voted Monday in favor by 57% to banish illegal immigrants from jobs by using a federal database, and rental homes by requiring renters to provide citizenship information to the police and to obtain city occupancy licenses, overturning an earlier decision by city leaders.

Corporate Tentacles

Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, just after Rep. Joe Barton's "off the wall" apology to BP, laid out how deeply "corporate tentacles" have reached into our regulatory agencies in Congress. He said, "The scope, the extent, the insidious nature of corporate influence in regulatory agencies of government--this question of regulatory capture--is something we should attend to here.

Will the Internet be Shut Down?

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), along with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), introduced a bill called, The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, last week that would permit the President to effectively shut down the internet by emergency decree.

Here's BP by the numbers...

Here's BP by the numbers. Corporate felon BP agreed to pay $20 billion into an escrow account. They will build the fund over 3.5 years with the first payment of $3 billion in the third quarter, and $2 billion in the fourth quarter. Then BP will pay $1.25 billion each quarter until the $20 billion is met.

President Obama or Sitcoms and Rock & Roll?

In an address from the Oval Office last night, President Obama asked Americans to get behind clean energy legislation, saying that BP’s Gulf oil spill is “the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.” Obama compared the move to clean energy to emergency preparations for WWII and the mission to the moon, although, unlike those very real and dramatic and successful government programs, he offered no s

The Only American Part of BP was the BP Oil Disaster

The LA Times is reporting that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded in the Gulf "was built in South Korea. It was operated by a Swiss company under contract to a British oil firm. Primary responsibility for safety and other inspections rested not with the U.S. government but with the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a tiny, impoverished nation in the Pacific Ocean.

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