Speculators swamping oil, grain markets

In the sharpest criticism yet of excessive speculation in oil markets, the head of a key regulatory agency presented data Thursday showing that almost nine in 10 traders betting that oil prices would rise were financial speculators, not actual end-users of oil

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/06/09/115551/key-regulator-speculators-swamping.html#ixzz1VudJA9gc



http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/06/09/115551/key-regulator-speculators-swamping.html

Corporate Power Decried By Former Lawmaker

Because [corporations] have become so international and global in nature, it's highly questionable whether governments can actually control corporations to a sufficient degree to prevent them from controlling governments,"

Corporate Power Decried By Former Lawmaker

"What Was Really Great About The Great Society" by Joseph A. Califano Jr.

Without such programs as Head Start, higher-education loans and scholarships, Medicare, Medicaid, clear air and water, and civil rights, life would be nastier, more brutish, and shorter for millions of Americans.

"What Was Really Great About The Great Society" by Joseph A. Califano Jr.

Concerns About the Religious Right Are Not Overblown | Psychology Today

In a Washington Post On Faith column a few days ago, Lisa Miller, a senior Newsweek religion writer, makes a rather puzzling argument, saying that concerns of secular progressives about the influence of conservative religion in presidential politics are overblown. "Here we go again," she complains. "The Republican primaries are six months away, and already news stories are raising fears on the left about 'crazy Christians.


Concerns About the Religious Right Are Not Overblown | Psychology Today

TIME: Fareed Zakaria-The Pragmatic President

Obama’s temperament was eloquently expressed by the late Bart Giamatti, a former president of Yale and former baseball commissioner, when he urged students not to fall prey to ideology from the right or left and to celebrate the democratic process that balances the two extremes. “My middle view is the view of the centrist,” he said, before quoting law professor Alexander Bickel, “who would ... fix ‘our eyes on that middle distance, where values are provisionally held, are tested, and evolve within the legal order derived ... from the morality of consent.’ To set one’s course by such a centrist view is to leave oneself open to the charges, hurled by the completely faithful of some extreme, of being relativistic, opportunistically flexible, secular, passive, passionless ... Be of good cheer ... To act according to an open and principled pragmatism, to believe in the power of process, is in fact to work for the good.”









TIME: Fareed Zakaria

Is Standard and Poor’s Manipulating US Debt Rating to Escape Liability for the Mortgage Crisis? | Firedoglake

Whatever S&P’s agenda, it has nothing to do with avoiding default risks or putting the US on sound fiscal footing. It appears to be intertwined with their attempts to absolve themselves from responsibility for their role in the 2008 financial crisis, and they are willing to manipulate not only the 2012 election but the world economy to escape the SEC’s attempts to regulate them.

It’s time the media and Congress started asking Standard and Poors what their political agenda is and whom it serves.





Is Standard and Poor’s Manipulating US Debt Rating to Escape Liability for the Mortgage Crisis? | Firedoglake

Oh, you want a dictatorship! | Norbrook's Blog

The far Left and the far Right both have some things in common. They both have an innate belief that they, and only they, know the “truth” and want to “save the country.” The other thing they have in common is a complete inability to understand the Constitution, although they’re more than willing to use it as a convenient justification. Virtually everything they say circles around it. Read them, and you hear the same things. The President should have “forced” Congress to do something, the President should “demand” they do this, the President should have “done” that by Executive Order. He needs to be strong and forceful. Reading all those comments, either in favor if their party is in the Presidency or worrying about it if their party isn’t, just tells me one thing: They don’t want the system of government we have.




Oh, you want a dictatorship! | Norbrook's Blog

The health care law is constitutional : SCOTUSblog

The health care law is constitutional : SCOTUSblog

The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism - War Room - Salon.com

The debt ceiling crisis is the latest case in which the radical right in the South has held America hostage until its demands are met. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln refused to appease the Southern fanatics. Unfortunately, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress chose not to follow their example and instead gave in. In doing so, they have encouraged the neo-Confederate minority in Congress to find yet another opportunity in the near future to extort concessions from America's majority by sabotaging America's government.





The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism - War Room - Salon.com

The Debt Crisis, Merely Postponed - NYTimes.com

By ERSKINE B. BOWLES and ALAN K. SIMPSON


The Debt Crisis, Merely Postponed - NYTimes.com

The Crisis in Washington: Where We Are and How We Got Here - Jared Bernstein, The Atlantic - NationalJournal.com

But mostly, it's a story of destructive ideas (self-regulation, supply-side economics) amplified by powerful political forces to claim an ever-growing share of national output, such that by the end of this period, the share of income held by the top one percent--over 20 percent--was more than double its level before this brief history began. And this is, of course, a zero-sum calculation. Their gains in share were the bottom 99 percent's losses.





The Crisis in Washington: Where We Are and How We Got Here - Jared Bernstein, The Atlantic - NationalJournal.com

The Willful Ignorance That Has Dragged the US to the Brink | Common Dreams

The Tea Party version of the American Revolution is not just fundamentalist: it is also Disneyfied, sentimentalized, and whitewashed. It rests on a naïve, solipsistic and exceptionalist faith that for America it will all work out in the end, because America is "the greatest nation in the world". They take solace in tautology: America is great – this they know – because Fox News tells them so.




The Willful Ignorance That Has Dragged the US to the Brink | Common Dreams

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Debt Deal--Hardball with Chris Matthews

Hardball with Chris Matthews

Debt Deal: How Obama Helped Himself in 2012 Campaign - The Daily Beast

Disenchanted liberals may eventually think better of Obama, especially if the next stage of the deficit deal produces some of that 'shared sacrifice.'




Debt Deal: How Obama Helped Himself in 2012 Campaign - The Daily Beast

Highlights of the plan to raise the debt ceiling - The Washington Post

Highlights of the plan to raise the debt ceiling - The Washington Post