By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

By Dave Lindorff

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their
heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that
unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a
record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists
had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a
percent!

What’s going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are
a “lagging” indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall
economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring
waiting until a recovery is well underway.

Regulation of the financial System currently Zero!
 

From Michael Moore:

For two months, we've sat and watched the rabid right achieve the
unimaginable: Derail universal health care and send the Democrats in
Congress running for cover. Many have asked, "How did this happen? How
could a small minority of angry people control the public agenda? Where
is the majority's response? Why the silence?"

I don't have the answers to all these questions. But I do know
this: I've had enough. As far as I'm concerned, Tea Bag Nation ends
today -- at noon to be precise. For that's when I set loose, on a
thousand screens across this great land, a movie I've made that's so
relentless, so dangerous, so damning in its humor, that it will -- I
can only hope -- do what no movie has done before: Take them down, take
them all down, once and for all.

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

Economic meltdown : real causes

By David Swanson

I've just interviewed Les Leopold, who blames the recent financial disasters on trends that began over 30 years ago, explains how a great deal of Wall Street's "investing" has had as much connection to the real economy as fantasy baseball has to baseball, diagnoses the failures of labor and the left to resist the financialization of the economy, views the current situation with genuine optimism as a rare moment in which we might be able to make necessary changes to regulate finance and to shift money from a tiny group of billionaires to the rest of society, and explains why that latter step is needed to stabilize any economy.

With teach-ins planned everywhere on June 10th and people trying to educate each other on exactly what just happened to trillions of our children's dollars, you could do a lot worse than to gather some friends together, read or listen to, and discuss, this interview, and then take appropriate actions.

Here's the audio in an mp3. It's a little under an hour.

David Swanson interviewing Les Leopold:

By David Swanson

If you're like me you find it at least a bit disturbing that we're giving trillions of dollars to save the economy to the very people who wrecked it, and more disturbing that we're doing so without any solid basis for expecting to get much of it back and without making fundamental changes to prevent a repetition. But if you're like me, you also aren't 100 percent certain how a credit default swap works with a cubed collateralized debt obligation, much less whether such a monstrosity needs to be eliminated or reformed. What to do?

Atrios nails it as always:

I really do hope that Larry and Timmeh get that turning the machines back on and returning to a world where massive amounts of cheap credit are available regardless of ability to repay is actually a bad idea.

And this idea that banks just need to lend more... to whom? For what?

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.