Tag: Punting the Pundits

As Treasury Secretary, would Lew take a harder line with banking abuses?

The more information we learn about the mortgage settlement that was announced Monday-official documents are yet to be made public-the more of a smarmy backroom deal it turns out to be.

The deal lets ten major banks and other “loan servicers” off the hook for a corrupted and illegal process of millions of foreclosures, with a paltry one-time settlement of $8.5 billion. The economic damage inflicted on homeowners, and by extension on the economy, was many times that.

The deal was hatched by the weakest of the federal bank regulatory agencies, the Comptroller of the Currency, and signed off on by the Federal Reserve. [..]

The relevance to Jack Lew? The comptroller of the currency is part of the Treasury and reports to him, assuming that Lew is confirmed.

Dean Baker: The 3 Percent Cut to Social Security: aka the Chained CPI

According to inside Washington gossip, Congress and the president are going to do exactly what voters elected them to do; they are going to cut Social Security by 3 percent. You don’t remember anyone running on that platform? Yeah, well, they probably forgot to mention it.

Of course some people may have heard Vice President Joe Biden when he told an audience in Virginia that there would be no cuts to Social Security if President Obama got reelected. Biden said: “I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.”

But that’s the way things work in Washington. You can’t expect the politicians who run for office to share their policy agenda with voters. After all, we might not like it. That’s why they say things like they will fight for the middle class and make the rich pay their fair share. These ideas have lots of appeal among voters. Cutting Social Security doesn’t.

Robert Reich: Obama’s Debt Ceiling Gamble Depends on the GOP Being Sane

A week before his inaugural, President Obama says he won’t negotiate with Republicans over raising the debt limit.

At an unexpected news conference on Monday he said he won’t trade cuts in government spending in exchange for raising the borrowing limit.

“If the goal is to make sure that we are being responsible about our debt and our deficit – if that’s the conversation we’re having, I’m happy to have that conversation,” Obama said. “What I will not do is to have that negotiation with a gun at the head of the American people.”

Well and good. But what, exactly, is the President’s strategy when the debt ceiling has to be raised, if the GOP hasn’t relented?

He’s ruled out an end-run around the GOP. [..]

But Obama’s strategy depends on there being enough sane voices left in the GOP to influence others. That’s far from clear.

Mike Lux: Complicated Politics: Democrats and the Grand Bargain

It is a well-known fact that President Obama wants a “grand bargain” with the Republicans, a deal that would reduce future deficits both by raising tax revenues and cutting spending, including on the so-called “entitlement programs.” He has offered this idea up repeatedly to Speaker Boehner and other Republican leaders in the 2011 debt ceiling talks and in the 2012 fiscal cliff debate, and media reports suggest that he is discussing the idea again with Republicans in the lead-up to the next perils of a budget crisis that is only a few weeks off.

Democrats in the progressive wing of the party (of which, full disclosure, I am a card carrying member) think the idea of cutting Social Security, Medicare and/or Medicaid benefits is terrible public policy because senior citizens who can least afford it will be badly hurt, and we have been working hard to convince the president to back away from this offer. This may be difficult to do, though, as the president has some strong (wrong, in my judgment, but compelling to the president’s political and legislative team) political reasons for wanting to do this grand bargain. But the politics of this deal are very different for the rest of the party, and it may well be that progressives can win over a lot more of those Democrats than conventional wisdom currently expects.

Wendell Potter: Insurers Telling Only Part of the Story in Attempt to Gut Important Consumer Protections

As Ronald Reagan once famously said, “There you go again.”

The culprits in this case are health insurance companies that want to change ObamaCare so they can keep selling highly profitable junk insurance to young people and keep charging older folks so much in premiums they have little money left over for anything else.

What’s happening now is a repeat of the tactics insurers employed during the final weeks of the health care reform debate. Back then, they papered Washington with a flawed “study” warning that premiums would soar if lawmakers ignored their recommendations. And now insurers are once again disseminating a new study with similar predictions. This time they’re trying to convince us that coverage for all young adults will become unaffordable next year if Congress doesn’t gut an important consumer protection in the reform law.

The most significant problem in political discourse is not that people embrace destructive beliefs after issues are rationally debated. It’s that the potency of propaganda, by design, often precludes such debates from taking place. Consider how often one hears the claim that the US is committed to spreading democracy and opposing tyranny in the Middle East in light of this fact from a New York Review of Books article by Hugh Eakin reviewing three new books on Saudi Arabia (via As’ad AbuKhalil):

   “The US does more trade – overwhelmingly in oil and weapons – with Saudi Arabia than any other country in the Middle East, including Israel, and depends on close Saudi cooperation in its counterterrorism efforts in Yemen.”

[..]

In other words, the single most repressive regime in that region is also America’s closest ally. Eakin also notes that while Saudi leaders have exploited the rhetoric of the Arab Spring to undermine leaders its dislikes (primarily in Syria and Iran), its only direct action was to send its troops into Bahrain “to stave off a popular revolt and prop up the Bahraini monarchy” and use “its influence in the Gulf Cooperation Council, the alliance of autocratic Persian Gulf states, to pull together support for the beleaguered royal houses of Morocco and Jordan.” About all of this Saudi bolstering of tyranny, Eakin says: “The White House has remained silent.”

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Corporate Gold on the Fiscal Cliff

In economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s book, End This Depression Now!, there’s a chapter titled “The Second Gilded Age” in which he describes the extraordinary rise in wealth and power of the very rich during this era of unregulated greed. Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the top one percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent. After accounting for inflation, the typical hourly wage for a worker has increased just $1.23.

Big Money, as Krugman writes in his book, buys Big Influence. And that’s why the financiers of Wall Street never truly experience regime change – their cash brings both political parties to heel. So it is that the policies that got us where we are today – in this big ditch of chronic financial depression – have done little for most, but have been very good to a few at the top.

John Nichols: Why Bernie Sanders Objects to Obama’s Treasury Nominee

Bernie Sanders campaigned, hard, for Barack Obama’s re-election.

But the independent senator from Vermont is not going to rubberstamp the president’s selection of Jack Lew, a supporter of banking deregulation who has passed back and forth through the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington, as the nation’s seventy-sixth secretary of the Treasury. [..]

One of the Senate’s most vital duties is that of providing “advice and consent” on presidential nominations. A president has broad leeway when it comes to naming members of the cabinet-arguably broader leeway than in the naming of lifetime appointees to the federal judiciary. But that leeway is not such that senators can or should simply approve every nominee. Advice should be given, and at times consent should be denied-not just by partisan foes of the sitting president but, sometimes, by allies of that president.

Dana Milbank: Obama’s Cabinet of yes men

President Obama hasn’t even begun his second term, yet already he has been ensnared by scandal.

Republicans have uncovered a shocking level of wrongdoing in the Oval Office, and I’m afraid what they say is true: The president is brazenly trying to fill his Cabinet with . . . people he likes.

Alas, the perfidy doesn’t end there. Not only is Obama naming agreeable people to his Cabinet, he is also – audaciously, flagrantly – nominating people who . . . agree with his policies. [..]

But that’s Obama’s prerogative. He won the election. The only scandal is denying him the right to choose his own advisers.  

That sound you hear is the sound of a cultural paranoia by people who have lost their grip on the reins of power, and on reality, and who fear the worst is coming.

And they are preparing for it, whatever it may be – a war, a revolution, an apocalypse.

These extremists make sensible, reasonable gun control hard to discuss, let alone achieve in this country, because they skew the conversations away from common-sense solutions on which both rational gun owners and non-gun owners can agree.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Is the US Budget ‘Wanton’ and ‘Wild?’ The IMF Says Yes, These Charts Say No

Well, there they go again. Less than a week after its chief economist apologized for wrongly imposing austerity on European nations — hey, sorry about that, unemployed millions! — the International Monetary Fund is misleading another country into the miasma of austerity economics: ours.[..]

The IMF report calls us “profligate” because we’re imbalanced between the amount of money our government collects and the amount it spends. But, as Howard Schneider notes in the Washington Post, Denmark offers much better social benefits than the U.S. and isn’t called “profligate” because it collects the revenues to pay for it.

At this rate, only concerted action can stop the trend toward more of the same austerity madness that has wounded Europe — and us — thanks to the misguided guidance we keep receiving from institutions like the IMF — which will no doubt ‘apologize’ for this absurd report someday too — long after the damage has been done.

New York Times Editorial: Senator Reid Takes Fresh Aim

During a tight re-election campaign in 2010, when the vote of gun owners was crucial, Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader of the Senate, not only showed his prowess with a 12-gauge shotgun – hitting two clay pigeons from the air – but also invited Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, as his guest for the opening of a new shooting range in Searchlight, Nev. Mr. Reid, a former policeman, eagerly displayed his sportsman’s enthusiasm to the voters. [..]

Mr. Reid must be held to nothing less as his friends in the N.R.A. mount their ferocious campaign against effective reform. A significant part of the gun lobby’s supporters on Capitol Hill are Democrats. As their leader, Harry Reid will be crucial in making genuine change happen, and he will share the blame if it does not.

Gail Collins: The Flu. Who Knew?

Everybody is talking about the flu. Never have I seen so many people trying to open doorknobs with their elbows. “Epidemic spurs rush to hospitals,” announced The New York Post under a “Flu York” front-page headline. A financial Web site offered a list of undervalued stocks in the funeral service industry. The mayor of Boston declared a public health emergency. Google Flu Trends painted a map of the country in deep red and inspired a raft of terrifying predictions. (“Outbreak could be the worst on record.”)

It’s hard to tell the extent of a flu outbreak because most of the victims just snivel away unhappily in the privacy of their own homes. The Google site solves this problem by tracking the number of times people search for flu-related terms online. Does this make sense to you, people? If we could determine what was going on in the world by the most popular searches, wouldn’t the universe be run by mischievous kittens and Kate Middleton?

Last week, I said that if Congress has to make cuts, we should embrace the idea of ridding ourselves of wasteful giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. Here’s an idea. Let’s cut the Master Limited Partnership loophole and fossil fuel subsidies.

The Master Limited Partnership is an obscure but harmful multibillion dollar loophole that allows fossil fuel companies to avoid all income taxes on transportation or processing of fossil fuels — things like oil pipelines. [..]

The Master Limited Partnership is just one example of the billions of dollars in handouts that polluters get from Congress. [..]

It’s time for Republicans in Congress to put their money where their mouth is. Middle class families should not be forced to scrape by with less while oil companies get away with more. Any cuts we make should reflect our priorities and needs as a country. Rather than cutting important lifelines like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, let’s cut corporate tax loopholes. The five largest oil companies made more than $1 trillion in profits in the last decade. They don’t need our help.

Ray McGovern: Excusing Torture, Again

Would-be tough guys like former CIA torturer-in-chief José A. Rodriguez Jr. brag that “enhanced interrogation” of terrorists – or doing what the rest of us would call “torturing” – has made Americans safer by eliciting tidbits of information that advanced the search for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Rodriguez makes this case again in the Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section in the context of the new “hunt-for-bin-Laden” movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” though Rodriguez still disdains the word “torture.” He’s back playing the George W. Bush-era word game that waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation and other calculated pain inflicted on detainees in the CIA’s custody weren’t really “torture.” [..]

Yet, while quibbling with some details of the movie and its gory depiction of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rodriguez largely agrees with the film’s suggestion that the harsh tactics played a key role in getting the CIA on the trail of bin Laden’s courier who eventually led Seal Team 6 to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. [..]

But others familiar with the chronology of events dispute that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were responsible for any significant breaks in the case. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Armed Service Committee respectively, have asserted that “The original lead information had no connection to CIA detainees” and a detainee in CIA custody who did provide information on bin Laden’s courier “did so the day before he was interrogated by the CIA using their coercive interrogation techniques.”

Eugene Robinson: Is It Hot Enough for You?

All right, now can we talk about climate change? After a year when the lower 48 states suffered the warmest temperatures, and the second-craziest weather, since record-keeping began?

Apparently not. The climate change denialists-especially those who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course-have been silent, as one might expect. Sensible people accept the fact of warming, but many doubt that our dysfunctional political system can respond in any meaningful way.

Robert Reich: Debt Ceiling and Guns: Using Presidential Authority to the Fullest

Anyone who thinks congressional Republicans will roll over on the debt ceiling or gun control or other pending hot-button issues hasn’t been paying attention.

But the president can use certain tools that come with his office — responsibilities enshrined in the Constitution and in his capacity as the nation’s chief law-enforcer — to achieve some of his objectives. [..]

But it’s a fair argument that when the nation is jeopardized — whether in danger of defaulting on its debts or succumbing to mass violence — a president is justified in using his authority to the fullest.

The mere threat of taking such actions — using the president’s executive authority to pay the nation’s bills or broadly interpret gun laws already on the books — could be useful in pending negotiations with congressional Republicans.

It must’ve been like old home week when the old gang of Wall Street and Washington insiders finalized a couple more cushy settlements last week.

Everybody knew the drill: Ignore the potential criminal charges and agree on settlement figures they think the public will swallow — figures that are big enough to sound impressive but far smaller than the banks’ ill-gotten gains.  They’ve done this dozens of times before.

But there was an empty chair at the negotiating table. [..]

That chair belongs to you, and it belongs to me. And as long as it’s empty these deals will all turn out the same. A small circle of friends will keep cutting the same cushy deals over and over again until we go to Washington and demand a change, this change:

No more deals.  No more negotiations. Not until we’re in the room. Not until we’re  seated in the chair, at the table, in the chambers of justice, that have always rightfully belonged to us — and only us.

Gail Collins: The Woes of Roe

Forty years ago this month, the Supreme Court handed down the great abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade. To be honest, you’re not going to be seeing a whole lot of cake and Champagne. Time magazine recognized the occasion with a downbeat cover story. (“They’ve Been Losing Ever Since.”) Gallup polls suggest support for abortion rights is fading, particularly among young Americans, and that more people now regard themselves as “pro-life” than “pro-choice.”

On the other hand – I know you had faith that eventually we’d get to the other hand – the polls depend on the question. According to the Quinnipiac poll, if you ask Americans whether they agree with the Roe decision, nearly two-thirds say yes.

It’s always been this way. Americans are permanently uncomfortable with the abortion issue, and they respond most positively to questions that suggest it isn’t up to them to decide anything. “Should be a matter between a woman and her doctor” is usually a popular option.

Sen. Bernie Sanders: The Soul of America

Despite such terminology as “fiscal cliff” and “debt ceiling,” the great debate taking place in Washington now has relatively little to do with financial issues. It is all about ideology. It is all about economic winners and losers in American society. It is all about the power of Big Money. It is all about the soul of America. [..]

We are entering a pivotal moment in the modern history of our country. Do the elected officials in Washington stand with ordinary Americans — working families, children, the elderly, the poor — or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the millions, must send Congress the answer to that question.

Bob Cesca: Attention Democrats: Chris Christie Isn’t Your New Best Friend

There’s no doubt that, at a glance, Chris Christie (I just did it again, by the way) sounds like the real deal. His press conference last week in which he mercilessly pummeled the congressional Republicans for not passing a Hurricane Sandy relief bill is just the latest example of Christie stepping onto the national stage and providing a brief but welcome breath of fresh air in a universe where Republicans hardly ever break ranks and eat their own, and a universe where even fewer politicians sound as forthright and authentic. [..]

So just because he criticized the most unproductive and unpopular House of Representatives in the history of the U.S. Congress doesn’t make him particularly brave (maybe tomorrow he’ll bravely come out against brain cancer and deer ticks), and it certainly doesn’t mitigate his more conservative policy positions — positions in areas that kind of matter to liberals, especially issues that deal with the female reproductive zone.

Simply put: we’ve seen this maverick act before. It gave us “9/11 Tourettes” and, you know, Sarah Palin. Be careful who you fall in love with.

The same week that a leaked video out of Steubenville, Ohio showed high school boys joking and laughing about an unconscious teenager in the next room who had just been raped – “They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson!” – House Republicans let the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) expire. They opposed an expanded version of the legislation that had increased protections for the LGBT community, immigrants and Native American women.

This week we’ve also seen mass protests in India after a woman was brutally gang raped and died from her injuries. American media covering the Indian protests have repeatedly referenced the sexist culture, reporting how misogyny runs rampant in India. The majority of mainstream coverage of what happened in Steubenville (click here for a primer), however, has made no such connection. In fact, the frequent refrain in discussions of Steubenville in comment threads is that these boys are “sociopaths,” shameful anomalies. We’d rather think of them as monsters than hold ourselves accountable as a nation and tell the truth – these rapists are our sons.

Bryce covert: Social Issues Are Economic Issues, Exhibit 1,463: Michigan’s Dual Agenda Slams Low-Income Women

We’re barely more than a week into 2013, but Michigan has been very busy lately. As a pre-holiday gift to workers, Governor Rick Snyder signed a “right-to-work” bill into law after the Republican-controlled state house passed it 58-51, making the payment of union dues voluntary for most unions and thus severely weakening their power. Just over two weeks later, Snyder signed another bill into law restricting abortion access for the state’s women. The bill prohibits telemedicine prescriptions for medical abortion, hampers clinics with new costly and challenging requirements and places new barriers between women and the procedure they seek through “coercion screenings.”

Two extreme measures, but ones that aren’t directly related, right? One is clearly about “economic issues,” the other about “social issues.” Yet those who are hurt by both are, as is so often the case, low-income women. Michigan has shone a spotlight on the inextricable link between economic and social issues when it comes to the right-wing agenda. And we can only expect more of this news from statehouses as the year progresses.

Maureen Dowd: He Who Knew Not

Everyone told me not to fall in love so quickly, that I’d get my heart broken.

But I couldn’t help it. Robert Griffin III and Alfred Morris, the stellar Redskins rookies, were such appealing palliatives to our ugly, nihilistic politics and our cascade of lurid sports scandals.  [..]

But then, on Sunday, the spell snapped when the knee snapped. Coach Mike Shanahan committed malpractice, letting a hobbled young quarterback lurch around “like a pirate with a peg leg,” as The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins wrote. The autocratic, crusty 60-year-old, who makes $7 million a year, risked the kid’s career and the team’s future trying to win a wild-card playoff game – the opposite of what the Nationals did with Stephen Strasburg.

At that moment, the Redskins became like the rest of Washington, and the rest of our self-centered, grasshopper attention-span culture – going for short-term gain and avoiding long-term pain.

Michelle Dean: Without Public Arts Funding, We Wouldn’t Have ‘Les Misérables’

Here is a thing it is difficult to remember in the midst of its box office tidal wave: Les Misérables owes its birth to a debate over public arts funding. We think of blockbusters as antithetical to the high arts that public funding might typically support, but in Les Mis‘s case, at least, the relationship was symbiotic. Some might say parasitic, of course, but the story reveals that we don’t quite know who was leeching off of who.

Les Misérables was originally staged in 1985 under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a large portion of whose budget was provided by the English Arts Council. It wasn’t the RSC’s idea to develop it, mind you. Cameron Mackintosh, a private producer coming off a wave of success with 1981’s Cats, had been looking to put on an English version of the musical, which was developed and staged in Paris in French. Mackintosh wanted a good director for it, and found himself knocking on the door of Trevor Nunn, then the RSC’s co-artistic director. Nunn and his co-director, John Caird (then an RSC associate director), substantially overhauled the plot and the script. They also gave the production what was, until the emaciated cheekbones of Anne Hathaway entered our collective consciousness, the musical’s signature image: the revolving stage. In other words, the look and content of the show were developed not just with public money, but by people who had made their careers in a publicly supported arts environment.

Throughout much of the United States, cell phone service is terrible (so is broadband, as Susan Crawford shows). And not just in rural or sparsely populated areas, but cell phone calls routinely drop in major metropolitan areas. You can’t use your phone underground in New York, and there are plenty of places on Capitol Hill you can’t get service. I actually once had trouble getting service near the Federal Communications Commission. This is a result of a lack of competition and increasingly poor regulatory policies. In the late 1990s, 50 percent of wireless revenues were invested in wireless infrastructure. By 2009, that number dropped to a little over 10 percent. What is it today? We don’t know, because the FCC no longer even collects the data. The result is that your cell phone drops calls. Cell phone service is also expensive, and the companies nickel and dime you — America is one of two countries where the person receiving the call has to pay for the call. A rough calculation shows that up to 80 percent of the cost of your cell phone service comes from corruption. [..]

Antitrust is the core problem here. Without restraint on behavior, corporate executives will work to grab as much market and political power as possible, because only market power and political power allows them to have pricing leverage without investment, risk, or innovation. Competition is the enemy of these businessmen. America has a long tradition of monopoly power and anti-monopoly sentiment and activism. From the progressive era of Teddy Roosevelt to the early 1980s, America had a strong tradition of antitrust regulation rooted in the understanding that too much market power led to inefficiency and price gouging. This tradition ended under Reagan. [..]

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Real Deficit Argument

Should our politicians dedicate themselves to solving the problems we face now? Or should they spend their time constructing largely theoretical deficit solutions for years far in the future to satisfy certain ideological and aesthetic urges?

This is one of the two central choices the country faces at the beginning of President Obama’s second term. The other is related: Will the establishment, including business leaders and middle-of-the-road journalistic opinion, stand by silently as one side in the coming argument risks cratering the economy in an effort to reverse the verdict of the 2012 election? Yes, I am talking about using the debt ceiling as a political tool, something that was never done until the disaster of 2011.

My first questions are, admittedly, loaded. They refer to a difference of opinion we need to face squarely.

Wendell Potter: One of the Most Helpful Parts of ObamaCare Just Kicked In, Despite Fierce Opposition From Insurers

You probably missed it because of the media’s focus on the fiscal cliff, but a provision of ObamaCare took effect on January 1 that can help you avoid making costly mistakes when you sign up for health insurance. At the very least you’ll be able to understand what you’re actually signing up for.

From now on, health insurers will have to provide us with information in plain English, and in no more than four pages, about what their policies cover and how much we’ll have to pay out of our own pockets when we get sick. And they’ll have to provide it in a standard format that will enable us to make apples-to-apples comparisons among health plans. Click [here v] to see an example of what the plan descriptions must now look like.

As you can imagine, insurers fought hard to kill that part of the law. That’s because they’ve profited for years by using legalese and gobbledygook in describing their policies, and also by purposely withholding information we really need to make informed coverage decisions.

Ralph Nader: Who Can Stop the People?

If your next-door neighbors were the U.S. Congress, spending your income and using their power to influence your life, would you pay close attention to them?

Over the past several weeks, Congress has been the focal point of much controversy for its inability to come together on a comprehensive fiscal cliff deal until the absolute final hour. More and more Americans are becoming aware — and upset — about the systemic gridlock in Congress, which results in the failure to solve or even address numerous major problems that plague our country. Issues such as the stagnant minimum wage, the bloated military budget, undeclared wars, the corporate crime wave, the business plunder of Medicare, corporate welfare sprees and many others. Consider the governing power that Congress possesses — the power to raise or lower taxes, the power to spend, the power to declare war, the power to give away your public lands, airwaves, and taxpayer dollars to wealthy corporations looking to widen their profit margins, the power to investigate and hold hearings, the power to oversee the executive branch, the power to impeach, and the power to confirm cabinet nominees and federal judges. Congress is the most powerful branch of government which is why it’s the branch with the most dire need for citizen oversight.

Not only is he the world’s best-known economist, Krugman has the intellect and integrity to resist Wall Street’s calls for austerity

President Obama hasn’t picked a treasury secretary yet for his second term, so he has a chance to do something different.

He could ignore what Wall Street and conservative media interests want and pick somebody who would represent what the electorate voted for. And not even just the people who voted for him: there are a lot of Republican voters out there who are also unemployed.

It would be great to have a treasury secretary who can cut through all that crap. And since most of Wall Street’s money went to Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the run-up to the November election, Obama doesn’t owe anything to the people who crashed our economy and are now fighting to make senior citizens, working and poor people reduce their living standards.

The renowned actor and human rights activist Danny Glover has launched a petition to the president for him to nominate Paul Krugman for secretary of the treasury. It’s worth signing.

Michael Moore: Six Years Ago, Chuck Hagel Told the Truth About Iraq

You might have seen that on Monday President Obama will likely nominate former Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, to be Secretary of Defense.

But what you probably haven’t seen — because everyone has forgotten — is that back in 2007, Chuck Hagel went totally crazy and told the truth about our invasion of Iraq. Here’s what he said:

   People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.

Robert Reich: The Hoax of Entitlement Reform

It has become accepted economic wisdom, uttered with deadpan certainty by policy pundits and budget scolds on both sides of the aisle, that the only way to get control over America’s looming deficits is to “reform entitlements.”

But the accepted wisdom is wrong. [..]

Taming future deficits requires three steps having nothing to do with entitlements: Limiting the growth of overall healthcare costs, cutting our bloated military, and ending corporate welfare (tax breaks and subsidies targeted to particular firms and industries).

Robert Kuttner: The Jobs Numbers and the Deficit

The private sector created 155,000 jobs in December, almost exactly the average for the 11 previous months of 2012 and for all of 2011. Once again, it is a record far too weak to produce real progress towards either an adequate recovery or decent growth in wages and salaries. At this rate of job creation, according to the Economic Policy Institute, it will take another decade to get back to the employment rate of early 2008.

According to the Labor Department, there were 7.5 million net jobs lost in the recession, and a gain of only 3.5 million net jobs so far in the recovery. We have 4 million fewer jobs now than five years ago, and a much larger labor force.

Consider the connection between these tepid job figures and the debate that still occupies center-stage in Washington — deficit reduction. Supposedly, businesses are not creating enough jobs because business leaders are anxious about the Federal debt.