Feist:
Month: April 2012
Fooled again
Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I’ve been out there on radio and TV in the last few months saying that I thought there was a chance Barack Obama was listening to the popular anger against Wall Street that drove the Occupy movement, that decisions like putting a for-real law enforcement guy like New York AG Eric Schneiderman in charge of a mortgage fraud task force meant he was at least willing to pay lip service to public outrage against the banks.
Then the JOBS Act happened.
The “Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act” (in addition to everything else, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market.
In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.
[…] There are some crazy side-stories that I’ll get to later in the week, including the hilarious influence certain preposterous individuals had in pushing this bill (most notably Steve Case, former co-founder of AOL and a veteran of multiple accounting fraud scandals, who was recruited by both parties to lobby the bill). There are also some remarkable contradictions in the arguments the bill’s supporters made when they pushed for the bill’s passage. Anyway, more on this to come.
In the meantime, let’s just say this is a dramatic step taken by Barack Obama. Nobody should have any illusions about where he stands on Wall Street corruption after this thing. Boss Tweed himself couldn’t have done any worse.
Go read the rest. Charlie Brown, meet football!
Liberalism on life support
Why do so many so-called liberal politicians in our time openly embrace cultural liberalism — i.e., equal rights for blacks, women, gays and other constituencies — while running like hell from the sort of economic liberalism that made the New Deal possible? More here.
Max explains it all for you
I don’t agree with all of Max Keiser’s opinions, but he’s the closest thing to an economic truth-teller we have:
Arghh
Just got back from the gym for the first time since I got sick. And you know what? It was even harder this time, mostly due to the trainer’s mandatory use of a medicine ball. Everything hurts.
It occurs to me that this “getting in shape” thing is not going to be easy, is it?
Extraordinary rendition
Now we help the UK when they do it!
Stand your ground!
One of the things I ‘ve found interesting for decades is how many Americans are under the impression that if they want to do something, it must be legal. No matter how carefully I’d explain that it wasn’t true, such conversations invariably ended with the person waving his hand, shaking his head and saying, “No, no! I got a right!”
And finally, they’re telling the truth. Thanks to the NRA and ALEC and the “Stand Your Ground” laws they’ve propogated, the jumpiest, most paranoid, gun-toting toads in the majority of states get to blow holes in imagined bad guys — and in most cases, no one’s going to say boo to them. Who could have known that this law would mean the number of justifiable homicides in those states would triple? Why, just about anyone with common sense:
When Billy Kuch knocked on the wrong door, he had a cigarette in one hand and a shirt in the other. The homeowner, Gregory Stewart, stepped outside, stood his ground, fired a round from his semiautomatic into Kuch’s chest, and in the eyes of the state of Florida, committed no crime.
Three years after that shooting, in a Land O’ Lakes subdivision called Stagecoach Village, Kuch is alive but damaged by his injuries and the shock of being shot at point-blank range. Stewart is free but lying low, still sought out by neighbors and others who want him to account for his actions.
“I have no problem with people owning guns to protect themselves,” says Bill Kuch, Billy’s father. “But somehow, we’ve reached the point where the shooter’s word is the law. The victim doesn’t even get his day in court. I don’t think most Americans realize it, but that’s where we are.”
In Florida and across the country, “Stand Your Ground” laws — the same kind of legislation that authorities cited for not arresting a neighborhood-watch volunteer after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida in February — have coincided with a sharp increase in justifiable-homicide cases.
Prosecutors still reject many claims of self-defense under the new law, and no long-term studies definitively tie the rise in justifiable killings to the passage of laws that relieve citizens of the responsibility to back away from threats. But the Martin case has focused a spotlight on incidents in which the mere statement that people feel endangered allows them to — depending on your sense of what’s right — defend themselves against thugs or act like vigilantes.
This sharp turn in American law — expanding the right to defend one’s home from attack into a more general right to meet force with force in any public place — began in Florida in 2005 and has spread to more than 30 other states as a result of a campaign by the National Rifle Association and a corporate-backed group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which promotes conservative bills.
Continue reading “Stand your ground!”
The resurrection
And immaculate deception of Paul Ryan!
Gaping holes in the welfare system
I live in an area that’s been solidly working class for decades. Now I see grown men and women standing at intersections, begging for change from passing cars. What is left in the system for people who have run out of options? Not much. When Bill Clinton changed “welfare as we know it,” it left an awful lot of people out in the cold.
The wingnuts don’t see it that way, of course. (See the lying Heritage Foundation video above.) Oh no, they want to cut even more – to give poor people “hope.”*
The people who’ve lost their jobs and tapped out unemployment benefits aren’t eligible for help. That’s because the bare-bones system only gives benefits to the hardcore, chronically poor without assets.
And for those people who are eligible, times are so hard, they’re selling off their food stamp cards for cash.
Conclusion: If a rising tide lifts all boats, an ebbing tide leaves them stranded without food, medical care or housing. Progress!
To keep her lights on, Rosa Pena, 24, sold the groceries she bought with food stamps and then kept her children fed with school lunches and help from neighbors. Her post-welfare credo is widely shared: “I’ll do what I have to do.”
Critics of the stringent system say stories like these vindicate warnings they made in 1996 when President Bill Clinton fulfilled his pledge to “end welfare as we know it”: the revamped law encourages states to withhold aid, especially when the economy turns bad.
Continue reading “Gaping holes in the welfare system”