Regulation

By Dave Lindorff

So much for economic “green shoots.”

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, along with the servile corporate media, have been quick to grasp at and trumpet every little suggestion that things might be improving, as they did when the Labor Dept. announced last week that new unemployment claims had dropped to “just” 434,000, from a high of 684,000 in the week ended March 28 or last year.

Or when the Commerce Dept. reported last month that November housing starts had risen by 8.9% compared to the prior month.

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

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

http://www.livestream.com/anewwayforward

The webcasting events are:
New York City, 6/8 at 7PM with Leo Hindery, Les Leopold, Alice Kessler-Harris at the Tank, (webcasted)

San Francisco, 6/10 at 6:30PM with Ernesto Dal Bo, Doug Rucskoff, Donald Goldmacher at Mechanic Library, (webcasted)

New York City, 6/10 at 7PM video screening with Danny Shechter, New Roosevelt Institute, Working Families at Le Poisson Rouge (webcasted)

Washington DC, 6/11 at 9:00AM with Simon Johnson, John Taylor, Nancy Cleeland, Mike Lux at the Capitol Hill, (one hour broadcast delay)

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?

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.

Larry Kudlow's relentless demands for Wall Street bailouts are a major reason why working Americans are being forced to give trillions to the rich. Today he's demanding an end to mark-to-market pricing of toxic assets (h/t Josh Marshall) and a return to "mark-to-model" Enron Accounting. (He calls it "discounted cash flow model," which lets banks assume the mortgages underlying their toxic assets will be repaid at significantly higher rates than markets currently expect.)