Tag: Opinion

As I feared, the economy has stalled.

Friday’s jobs report for April was even more disappointing than March. Employers added only 115,000 new jobs, down from March’s number (the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the March number upward to 154,000, but it’s still abysmal relative to what’s needed). At least 125,000 new jobs are necessary each month just to keep up with an expanding population of working-age people.

That means the hole is getting even deeper.

Most observers pay attention to the official rate of unemployment, which edged down to 8.1 percent in April from 8.2 percent in March. That may sound like progress, but it’s not. The unemployment rate dropped because more people dropped out of the labor force, too discouraged to look for work. The household survey, from which the rate is calculated, counts as “unemployed” only people who are actively looking for work. If you stop looking because the job scene looks hopeless for you, you’re no longer counted.

Howard Feinman: Kentucky Derby: As in Politics, You Need a Horse, and a Theory

LOUISVILLE — Once you come back here, as we did Thursday night, you remember what you used to know when you lived here but forgot: that everybody has to have a theory and a horse.

It doesn’t matter if you are a Louisvillian, or a regular visitor, or a first-timer. You are required to pick a horse, preferably a semi-obscure one, and have at the ready a plausible explanation — either impressively informed or simply wacko — for your cool choice.

There are 20 horses in the Derby, and already I’ve heard tips and touts about a half-dozen of them. Soon I will no doubt have heard an argument for each and every one.

The Derby is like politics in so many ways. Someone runs. Someone wins. People contribute money and get their hopes up. There is a weird sense that somehow all of your problems will be solved and the world will right itself if only you find the right contender.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Geithner’s World, Part 1: Three Years Of Immunity

Here’s a walk down memory lane that’s worth taking, even if it makes your blood pressure spike a little: Three years ago Tim Geithner was in the position of having to explain why the Federal government wasn’t going to nationalize the nation’s failing banks. In 2009 many people expected that to be part of the government’s bank rescue plan.

Only three years. It seems so long ago, doesn’t it?

In 2009 there was a very compelling argument for a Federal takeover over these failing institutions, which had been so negligently (and very possibly criminally) mismanaged could no longer survive on their own. And while nationalization wasn’t the only course worth considering, this snapshot from our national past reflects the gravity of the crisis caused by bankers.

It’s also a useful reminder of the extent to which bank CEOs failed to pass even the most basic test of executive competence – namely, not destroying your own corporation.

Charles M. Blow: Teaching Me About Teaching

Next week is National Teacher Appreciation Week, and, as far as I’m concerned, they don’t get nearly enough.

On Tuesday, the United States Department of Education is hoping that people will take to Facebook and Twitter to thank a teacher who has made a difference in their lives. I want to contribute to that effort. And I plan to thank a teacher who never taught me in a classroom but taught me what it meant to be an educator: my mother.

She worked in her local school system for 34 years before retiring. Then she volunteered at a school in her district until, at age 67, she won a seat on her local school board. Education is in her blood.

When you hear the phrase “property rights,” you probably think of farmers fighting environmental regulators and homeowners arguing with oil drillers. But in the Information Age, you should also be thinking about your computer-and asking, how much of you is really yours? It’s not a navel-gazing rumination from a college Intro to Existentialism class-it’s an increasingly pressing question in the brave new world of social networking and cloud computing.

Last week’s big technology announcement spotlighted the thorny issue. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Google’s announcement of its “Google Drive” came with the promise that users will “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.” But when you save files to Google’s new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content” as the company sees fit.

Kristen Breitweiser: Heights of Hypocrisy: The Universal Use of 9/11 in Politics

A year ago, I wrote a blog about the death of Osama bin Laden, “Today is Not a Day of Celebration for Me.”

I wrote the blog after witnessing so many Americans celebrating, fist-pumping, dancing, and reveling in the streets about the death of bin Laden.

Seeing so many Americans acting like that was too much of an uncomfortable reminder of those who celebrated in the streets during the attacks of 9/11 while men like my husband either burned alive, were crushed alive, or horrifically jumped to their deaths.

A year ago, what drove me to write was my sadness in bearing the sight of Americans celebrating the death of anyone — even the man largely responsible for the murder of my husband.

Now one year later, I am once again driven to write due to witnessing President Obama resort to the same campaign tactics as George W. Bush.

Frankly, for what it’s worth, it sickens me; and it saddens me.

New York Times Editorial: ‘Beyond Debate’

Jose Padilla, the American citizen detained as an enemy combatant after he was arrested by the Bush administration in May 2002, was denied contact with his lawyer, his family or anyone else outside the military brig for almost two years and kept in detention for almost four. His jailers made death threats, shackled him for hours, forced him into painful stress positions, subjected him to noxious fumes that hurt his eyes and nose and deafening noises at all hours, denied him care for serious illness and more.

This treatment was indisputably cruel, inhumane and shocking, in breach of the minimum standard required for anyone in American custody, especially a citizen. Some of it was torture, though Mr. Padilla should not have had to prove that to show his treatment was unconstitutional.

Robert Naiman: John Brennan Should Tell the Whole Truth About the Drone Strikes

On Monday, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan publicly addressed the U.S. use of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in countries with which the United States is not at war, like Yemen and Pakistan. The fact that Brennan publicly addressed the drone strikes is a significant improvement, long overdue. We can’t say we have meaningful democratic oversight over government policy if government officials refuse to talk about government policy in public – enabling us to challenge what they say – and it’s preposterous to claim that the drone strikes are “secret” when they are openly reported in the media.

But John Brennan didn’t tell the whole truth about the drone strikes. Brennan claimed that “the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaeda terrorists,” but Brennan didn’t admit that the U.S. has launched drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen against people who are not known to be on any list of “suspected terrorists,” without knowing who would be killed.

WASHINGTON – Where is the “Mission Accomplished” banner?

There was no aircraft carrier in Kabul and President Barack Obama wasn’t wearing a jumpsuit when he landed there in secret. But his drop-in on the one year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden was the most dramatically political photo-op by a president in a commander-in-chief role since President George W. Bush landed in a jet on the S.S. Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. [..]

We may have signed a new deal with Karzai, and the American troops are on their way out, though perhaps 20,000 will stay for a decade or more.

What exactly have we accomplished there? That’s a deeper question, but it’ll have to wait until after Osama Week.

Henry A. Giroux: Violence, USA: The Warfare State and the Brutalizing of Everyday Life

Since 9/11, the war on terror and the campaign for homeland security have increasingly mimicked the tactics of the enemies they sought to crush. Violence and punishment as both a media spectacle and a bone-crushing reality have become prominent and influential forces shaping American society. As the boundaries between “the realms of war and civil life have collapsed,” social relations and the public services needed to make them viable have been increasingly privatized and militarized.(1) The logic of profitability works its magic in channeling the public funding of warfare and organized violence into universities, market-based service providers and deregulated contractors. The metaphysics of war and associated forms of violence now creep into every aspect of American society.

Bill Boyarsky: Organizers, Not Occupiers: The Young People Working in the Shadows of a National Movement

By chance, the revelation of how Apple evades millions of dollars in taxes broke three days before May Day, when workers of the world traditionally protest such injustice.

Although the Apple practices aren’t illegal, the dodging of taxes on revenue generated, to a large extent, by low-wage Chinese workers, was a perfect introduction to this year’s May 1 observance, highlighted by the Occupy movement’s call for strikes and demonstrations around the country. The goal: Protest corporate domination of an economy being pulled downward by growing income inequality and intractable unemployment.

The culture of Wall Street is pervasive and contagious. I drank the Kool Aid. I’m out of it now. But I’d like to tell you what it was like.

When some people think about Wall Street, they conjure up images of traders shouting on the stock exchange, of bankers dining at five-star restaurants, of CEOs whispering in the ears of captured Congress members.

When I think about Wall Street, I think about its stunted rainbow of pale pastel shirts. I think about the vaulting, highly secured, and very cold lobbies. And I think about the art passed daily by the harried workers, virtually unseen.

Before I occupied Wall Street, Wall Street occupied me. What started as a summer internship led to a seven-year career. During my time on Wall Street, I changed from a curious college student full of hope for my future into a cynical, bitter, depressed, and exhausted “knowledge worker” who felt that everyone was out to screw me over.

The culture of Wall Street is pervasive and contagious. While there are Wall Street employees who are able to ignore or block it out, I was not one of them. I drank the Kool Aid. I’m out of it now. But I’d like to tell you what it was like.

Maureen Dowd: Libertine on the Loose

It’s the most chilling warning you can hear in France: Dominique Strauss-Kahn is out on the town, looking for a good time.

When Julien Dray, a prominent Socialist Party deputy, had a birthday party for himself Sunday night at a cocktail lounge, he didn’t bother to tell his V.I.P. guests that he had invited the most notorious man in France.

The randy economist – once considered the leading prospect to beat Nicolas Sarkozy before a swan dive from grace – could not resist popping up as a Socialist Party pooper on the eve of the election.

Rebecca Solnit: American Dystopia: Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into the Arena

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s — which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment. [..]

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Paula Crossfeild Pink Slime and Mad Cow Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Following on the heels of pink slime, mad cow disease (AKA bovine spongiform encephalopathy-or BSE) is back this week after a California dairy cow destined for a rendering plant that makes pet food was found to have the disease. So far, it looks like the beef industry is playing down the finding, hoping to dodge a loss in sales at home and abroad. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was quick to tell Americans that our food supply is entirely safe. But the re-emergence of mad cow and the conversation around pink slime has re-opened questions about our food system. It has exposed how food safety falls inevitably through the cracks in a country where over 9 billion animals are being slaughtered per year and budgets for the departments that oversee these processes are being slashed. The incredible media coverage of both issues reflects a growing consumer interest in more transparency in what we’re eating and how it’s being produced.

Of course, most of us know what’s wrong with the world. We know about the poverty, war, violence and disease. We’re conscious of the injustice, but not fully conscious of it, because frankly, we have enough to worry about in our own lives. As such, we’ve come to accept these injustices as simple facts of life – prepackaged side effects of the human condition, as natural and intertwined with our existence as water to a stream, beyond our capacity to effect in any significant way. This collective sense of powerlessness and default apathy is why we’re striking.

Our growing sense of isolation and disconnection, whether from ourselves, from those next door to us, or from those producing our food and products halfway across the globe, is why we’re striking. Our forced support of perpetual war waged for and by the 1% – whether explicitly with speech, or implicitly with inaction and tax dollars – without ever paying mind to the true causes and motives behind it, is why we’re striking. Our failure uptil now to connect the dots and realize that the benefits of a cheap iPod, lovely as it may be, would be far outweighed by the benefits of a truly just world free of exploitation, is why we’re striking.

Michelle Chen: Freeing the University: Education Occupation on May Day

Pop quiz: what’s the value of an American education? To some, it’s a booming industry that preys on debt-crippled students. But to the educators, youth and workers who keep the system running, school increasingly seems like it’s just not worth the struggle. This May Day, masses of working people-and students who are working to build a future for themselves-are converging in New York City to rethink education and test those ideas in the real world.

Everyone understands that merit and hard work should pay off somehow in the economy. But the narrowing and commercialization of education at every level, from preschool to postdoc, has drained people’s academic aspirations and bank accounts.

On May 1, following the massive 1T Day rally against the “student debt bubble,” the Free University of New York City will bring together various Occupy-inspired grassroots education experiments. Combined with other May Day-related Occupy demonstrations, the program of workshops and talks aims to put theories of “horizontal pedagogy” into practice by inviting regular folks to learn about and question the systems surrounding them: the economy, politics, and school itself.

Glenn Greenwald: Dog-Training the Press Corps

Journalists who heap the most lavish praise on the White House are rewarded with the most valuable treats

This weekend, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was held, and it is – as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan explained in the best analysis ever of that event – the purest expression of the total blending of political power, media subservience, and vapid celebrity in one toxic, repulsive, and destructive package. It’s imperial rot – the Versailles virus – in its most virulent form. Of course, Stephen Colbert, in the best political speech of the last decade, used his appearance at that banquet in 2006 to clearly set forth the rules by which they function:

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

Chris Hedges: Welcome to the Asylum

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression-which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.

PARIS — There is a celebrated observation of the 1920s Italian radical, Antonio Gramsci, that perfectly fits the economic paralysis of today’s Europe: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

A week before the final round of the French presidential election, which is very likely to propel the Socialist, Francois Hollande, to the Elysee Palace, it is hard to see how even a left government in a single European nation can defy the austerity consensus.

Mike Lux: Banking Wars

The banking wars are getting more and more interesting. The legal and political implications are bigger than most people understand, and the players involved need to be very careful with the loaded guns they are gesturing with or they might shoot themselves in the foot (or perhaps an even more vulnerable body part.)

Underlying the entire drama is this fundamental subtext: the American people are fundamentally (and correctly) cynical about how the big bankers always seem to get away with whatever they want to get away with. Bailing out the bankers with no strings attached in order to save an economy that didn’t seem to most people to be very well saved, then watching the banks get record profits and bonuses the very next year while the rest of the economy was in the toilet didn’t engender much good cheer about whether justice had been done. Neither have the tons of books, news articles, and blog posts about the things these bankers were able to get away with in the course of the buildup to the crisis and the things that have happened since.

Robert Reich: The GOP’s Death Wish: Why Republicans Can’t Stop Pissing Off Hispanics, Women, and Young People

What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.

It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll. [..]

How can a political party be so dumb as to piss off Hispanics, women, and young people? Because the core of its base is middle-aged white men — and it doesn’t seem to know how to satisfy its base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, and middle-aged.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Connecticut’s Death Penalty Message

GREENWICH, Conn.-Since the 2010 elections, the activism of newly empowered conservative and Republican state legislatures has gained national attention with their wars on public employee unions, additional restrictions on abortion and new barriers to voting.

Against this backdrop, the little state of Connecticut has loomed as a large progressive exception. Last year, it became the first state to require employers to grant paid sick leave. It also enacted a law granting in-state tuition to students whose parents brought them to the United States illegally as young children.

And last week, Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy signed a law repealing the state’s death penalty. There are now 17 states without capital punishment, Illinois having joined the ranks last year. What happened in Connecticut brings home the flaw in seeing everything that has happened in the states since the midterm vote as embodying a steady shift rightward.

The austerity fetish of those making economic decisions is killing Europe’s economy.

The last few days have provided further proof.

“Spain officially slipped back into recession for the second time in three years Monday, after following the German remedy of deep retrenchment in public outlays, joining Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic,” the New York Times reported this week.

And more bad news has followed.

“Britain slid back into recession in the first quarter of the year, according to official figures released Wednesday, undercutting the government’s argument that its austerity program was working,” says today’s Times.

But those in charge seem to be eternally clueless.

Michelle Chen: Depression Symptoms: What’s Behind Europe’s Spike in Suicides

The metaphor of suicide has been used to depict the downward spiral surrounding countries bludgeoned by the economic crisis-particularly U.S. and Eurozone communities plagued by epidemic joblessness and a rash of budget cuts. Now the term literally describes the psychological dimension of the crisis, according to studies on suicide rates.

Some symptoms of the social despair have been grimly spectacular. Greece was jolted one recent morning after aging pensioner Dimitris Christoulas put a pistol to his head in Athens’s main square. In 2010 Americans were shaken by the suicide-by-plane of Andrew Stack, whose anger at the political establishment propelled him into an Austin office complex. Poorer regions have flared with public self-immolations, particularly in the communities of the “Arab Spring” where many youth come to see life as a dead-end street. Underlying these more dramatic examples are statistical patterns that reflect society’s unraveling.

A recently published Lancet study showed spikes in suicide across Europe during the recession. While many factors could contribute to this pattern, researchers found a significant correlation between unemployment and suicide trends.

Robert C. Koehler: States of Fear in a World of Injustice

This was the headline: “Zimmerman, Martin’s parents to face off in court.”

The words, of course, merely summed up a moment in the news cycle last week. We, the news-consuming public, were primed – by CBS, but it could have been any mainstream outlet – for a tidbit of potential drama the next day in the hottest murder trial around right now. But in the process, we were also silently reminded, yet again, that everything is spectacle. At the level at which we call ourselves a nation, nothing is serious, not even matters of life and death

There’s something so painful about all this – painful beyond the horror of the crime itself, or the national murder rate. The 24-7 media trivialize the stakes and gleefully report the “courtroom drama” as a sporting event; but even more distressingly, the legal bureaucracy swings into motion without the least awareness of any value beyond its own procedures. It all happens with a certainty of purpose that generates the illusion that things are under control and social order prevails.

But none of this has anything to do with what social order actually requires when harm has occurred, which is . . . healing.

Scientists Cry Fowl Over the FDA’s Regulatory Failure

Overuse of antibiotics in factory farming kills thousands every year, yet the industry is force-feeding chickens pharmaceuticals

In 2005, the antibiotic fluoroquinolone was banned by the FDA for use in poultry production. The reason for the ban was an alarming increase in antibiotic-resistant campylobacter bacteria in the meat of chickens and turkeys – “superbugs”, which can lead to a lethal form of meningitis that our current antibiotics are no longer effective against.

Antibiotic-resistant infections kill tens of thousands of people every year, more than die of AIDS, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. This problem is on the rise because antibiotics are recklessly overused, especially in the commercial livestock industry, where 80% of all antibiotics manufactured in the US end up.

Fluoroquinolone used to be fed to chickens primarily to stimulate their growth. But why did the banned substance show up recently in eight of 12 samples of “feather meal”, the ground-down plumage leftover from commercial poultry production?

We’ve talked at times about George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, and the amnesia that sets in when we flush events down the memory hole, leaving us at the mercy of only what we know today. Sometimes, though, the past comes back to haunt, like a ghost. It happened recently when we saw Congressman Allen West of Florida on the news.

A Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.”

He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

Robert Naiman: Budget Control Act Military Cuts Will Cover the Social Security Shortfall

Americans might remember that when the first mad cow was confirmed in the United States in December, 2003, it was major news.  The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been petitioned for years by lawyers from farm and consumer groups I worked with to stop the cannibal feeding practices that transmit this horrible, always fatal, human and animal dementia.  When the first cow was found in Washington state, the government said it would stop such feeding, and the media went away.  But once the cameras were off and the reporters were gone nothing substantial changed.

In the United States, dairy calves are still taken from their mothers and fed the blood and fat of dead cattle.  This is no doubt a way to infect them with the mad cow disease that has now been incubating here for decades, spread through such animal feeding practices.  No one knows how the latest dairy cow was infected, the fourth confirmed in the United States.  Maybe it was nursed on cow’s blood.  Perhaps it was fed feed containing cattle fat with traces of cattle protein.  Or perhaps there is a mad cow disease in pigs in the United States, which simply has not been found yet, because pigs are not tested for it at all, even though pigs are fed both pig and cattle byproducts, and then the blood, fat and other waste parts of these pigs are fed to cattle.

Eugene Robinson: What Immigration ‘Crisis’?

Now that the immigration “crisis” has solved itself, this is the perfect time for Congress and the president to agree on a package of sensible, real-world reforms.

Yeah, right, and it’s also the perfect time for pigs to grow wings and take flight.

Perhaps this week’s most significant news was a report from the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center showing that net migration from Mexico to the United States has slowed to a halt and may actually have reversed. That’s right: There may be more people leaving this country to live in Mexico than leaving Mexico to live here.

J. Peter Pham: An Incomplete Justice

THE verdict delivered Thursday against Charles G. Taylor for crimes against humanity ends a saga that began on Christmas Eve 1989, when Mr. Taylor and a group of Libyan-trained followers invaded Liberia, igniting a regional conflagration that eventually engulfed parts of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast.

Although Mr. Taylor’s conviction, by a special tribunal in The Hague, will prevent him from endangering the security of West Africa again, the trial – with its limited scope – didn’t even begin to address the devastating damage Mr. Taylor did to his country. Though it is just, the conviction, with sentencing next month, demonstrates the severe limitations of an international justice system that is insufficient to deter future atrocities.

The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, earlier this year sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.

For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.

John Cavanagh and Scott Klinger: Bank CEOs Gain as Millions Lose Dreams, Retirement to Foreclosure

Inside and outside of Wells Fargo’s annual meeting in San Francisco yesterday, thousands of angry protesters decried the bank’s leading role in the loss of millions of American homes to foreclosure.

If you want to know why the protesters are so angry, consider this double standard. For most Americans, retirement security lies in the value of their homes. Millions of these people have been losing that security as the nation’s largest banks have foreclosed on them. Yet the CEOs of these banks are reaping giant pay packages and padding their own retirement security with profits squeezed from ordinary people.

For many American families, a paid-off home is part of the dream of a secure retirement. The roof over their heads has long comprised the largest element of most families’ net worth. The housing crisis brought to us by the country’s biggest bankers has stolen the dreams of the nearly 4 million families who have lost their homes to foreclosure since the housing crisis began in 2007.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Will a Young Generation’s Dreams Be Rescued — Or Bundled and Sold on Wall Street?

Interest rates for student loans will double on July 1 unless Congress acts. That’s outrageous — but the fiscal abuse of our nation’s young people runs far deeper than that. An entire generation has been trapped into debt servitude and joblessness by the implacable machinery of Wall Street greed. Bank-servile scolds insult the young people of America while the bankers’ economic engines strip-mine their financial future.

Jobless or overextended college graduates aren’t even allowed to declare bankruptcy — a privilege that’s extended to every reckless investor and mismanaged corporation in the nation. Once they finally find work, college graduates face years of garnished wages to repay the loans that funded their often-overpriced educations. If they haven’t repaid that debt by the time they grow old — a very real possibility at the cost of a college education today — they’ll even be forced to surrender part of their Social Security benefits.

That’s indentured servitude.

Mike Lux: K Street and Wall Street in Trouble in 2012

The big news coming out of the Pennsylvania primaries yesterday are that two of K Street’s favorite Capitol Hill Democrats, Tim Holden and Jason Altmire, got upset in races where they had lots more cash than their opponents but still got taken down. The way these races played out should be a big lesson to Democrats who think they can take special interest cash, make pro-special interest votes and still win elections. And with big issues like student loans, tax subsidies for Wall Street and Big Oil, and accountability for the big banks in play the rest of the year, politicians should pay attention.

Holden was an incumbent and his only weakness was that he was forced to run in a more Democratic district than he used to have. Given that he voted with corporate special interests and Republicans a lot of the time — including on the Bush tax cuts and fracking and factory farms — that became a big problem when he faced a progressive challenger named Matt Cartwright. Holden had the support of the Democratic establishment and the monied interests, but Cartwright thumped him.