Corporations have no more place in a democracy than carpenter ants and mold have in the beams of an old barn.

By Dave Lindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or
underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing
patience with the Obama administration’s and Congress’ economic
stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the
growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the US workforce,
at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and
early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this
year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of
the Obama administration’s signature $780-billion stimulus spending
package is under 150,000—a far cry from the 3.5 million that were
promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

By Dave Lindorff

My bank, a small regional institution that was not involved in sub-prime lending, and that was not a recipient of any TARP bailout money, cut off my home equity line of credit two weeks ago. They did it abruptly, with no notice—I only discovered it had happened when I tried to get a $500 advance from it to cover a payment I was making on my credit card. When I asked what was going on, the local branch manager informed me that “we are closing out a lot of credit lines while we reassess the value of houses in this region, which have been falling.”

By Dave Lindorff

A new study of 1004 union organizing drives conducted by the
director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of
Industrial and Labor Relations has found that two-third of the
companies involved were violating US labor law by holding one-on-one
interrogations of workers, by threatening workers about their union
support, by firing union organizers or using half a dozen other illegal
tactics to defeat unionization campaigns.

Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner, author of No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition ot Organizing,
says that these illegal tactics by employers have been used to drive
union representation at American companies down to only 12.4 percent
from a level of 22 percent just 30 years ago.

By Dave Lindorff

The accounting profession might seem like the last place that you’d
find serious political hanky-panky going on, and it’s probably not on
very many people’s A-list of fun subjects to read about, but the
Financial Accounting Standards Board, a quasi-governmental body that
has statutory authority to regulate and establish the rules by which
public companies, including banks, do their books, has just caved in to
pressure from those banks and from the large number of members of
Congress who pocket huge piles of campaign swag and perks from those
banks and other public companies, and gravely undermined the integrity
of corporate balance sheets.

By Dave Lindorff

George Santayana once famously said, “Those who cannot learn from
history are doomed to repeat it.” But what about those who don’t just
ignore history, but who hire and take counsel from those who committed
historic follies in the past?

Back in November 1999, Congress passed legislation pushed by then
Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), rescinding the Depression-era Glass-Steagall
Act. The measure, backed by the Clinton administration, and
overwhelmingly passed by the Senate (90-8) and the House (362-57),
opened the way for banks to merge with investment banks and insurance
companies, and led directly to the current financial cataclysm.

By Dave Lindorff

Six months after the failed Bush administration effort to "rescue"
the US financial system, and after two months of failed efforts by his
own new administration, at an expense to the American public of several
trillion dollars and counting, the Obama administration is announcing
plans to blow another $1 trillion in a massive taxpayer giveaway to
investors who will be subsidized in an effort to get them to buy the
so-called toxic assets on the books of the nation's biggest banks.

The problem with this plan is that its goal--getting these zombie banks to start lending again--is not going to work.

By Dave Lindorff

For years, advocates of open government, mostly on the left, but
also on the right, have railed against the growing secrecy of the US
government. But the focus, particularly of left critics, has been on
the Intelligence budget, a $40+ billion “black box” that is completely
protected from public and even congressional scrutiny, and on large
swaths of the Pentagon budget, which are kept hidden allegedly for
“national security” reasons.

For the most part, the American public has adopted an ovine
attitude towards such secrecy, assuming that the “government knows
best.”

By Dave Lindorff

The calls for a reckoning for the criminals of the Bush/Cheney
administration are growing by the day, as the final few days of the
Bush presidency tick down, and as new evidence of their crimes keep
pouring out of the deflating gas bag that was the Bush White House.

For years, the Democrats in Congress, with a few notable
exceptions, have sat on their hands, allowing the ongoing destruction
of the Constitution, of the US military, of the nation’s reputation,
and of the rule of law, as well as of the institution of Congress
itself, by a cabal of Republicans in the White House, led by Vice
President Dick Cheney, who have sought to establish an executive-led government
that answered only to itself.

By Dave Lindorff

The most entertaining thing about this Wall Street crisis and the
refusal of the House of Representatives (not failure but refusal) to
pass a bailout bill negotiated by the Bush White House and the House
leadership is how shocked and upset those leaders and the pundit class
have been by the idea that members of Congress would actually heed the
wishes of their constituents!

The Founding Fathers always saw the lower house of Congress as
voice of the people—the elected body that, because its members had to
face the voters every two years, would be most responsive to public
sentiment.