Jack on December 15th, 2008

I come late to the party, honoring the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I won’t waste space here reinventing what news and commentary you can find elsewhere. I do want to mention the sad irony of the recent report of the Senate Armed Services Committee on detainee abuse under the Bush [...]

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Jack on October 10th, 2008

What news will come from the MastersButtheads of the Universe today, a continuing fall in the global economy perhaps? Maybe the MBAs should have “learned to play the guitar,” as Mark Knopfler suggests, instead of learning to play the market. At least then the suffering we are enduring would have been limited to our ears [...]

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Jack on October 2nd, 2008

It could be the slogan that was, “let capitalists be capitalists.” It likely will be again, soon enough. But the “bailout” is coming soon with restrictions that Wall Street and others haven’t seen for awhile. Don’t hold your breath that the pending legislation will reverse much of the effects of deregulatory fervor that swept the Congress [...]

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Jack on September 23rd, 2008

Obama will tell you it’s Bush and his buddy McCain that helped make the current money morass happen. He is not entirely wrong but he is not entirely right either. Congress facilitated the mess by repealing the Glass-Steagal Act that kept the insurance, investment and banking businesses firewalled from one another. Institutional investors, including the [...]

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Jack on April 5th, 2008

What bothers me the most about the memos that this bozo (who actually is a law professor at Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley; ugh, boy would I have some serious dialogue in his class) wrote saying essentially that whatever the president decides is OK during a “time of war” is legally OK. Rape, murder, Vlad the [...]

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