Opponents of a U.S. law they claim may subject them to indefinite military detention for activities including news reporting and political activism persuaded a federal judge to temporarily block the measure.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan yesterday ruled in favor of a group of writers and activists who sued President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Defense Department, claiming a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law Dec. 31, puts them in fear that they could be arrested and held by U.S. armed forces.

The complaint was filed Jan. 13 by a group including former New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges. The plaintiffs contend a section of the law allows for detention of citizens and permanent residents taken into custody in the U.S. on “suspicion of providing substantial support” to people engaged in hostilities against the U.S., such as al-Qaeda.

“The statute at issue places the public at undue risk of having their speech chilled for the purported protection from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’ – i.e., ‘foreign terrorist organizations,’” Forrest said in an opinion yesterday. “The vagueness of Section 1021 does not allow the average citizen, or even the government itself, to understand with the type of definiteness to which our citizens are entitled, or what conduct comes within its scope.”

Continue reading Military Detention Law Blocked by New York Judge →

Tell Congress: End Too-Big-To-Fail. Make Banking SAFE

By Isaiah J. Poole

May 16, 2012 – 3:05pm ET

JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion bad bet has made it crystal clear: The Wall Street banksters are still recklessly gambling with government-guaranteed money. And the too-big-to-fail banks are still too big.

It is time for Congress to act. Tell Congress to break up the big banks by passing Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Keith Ellison’s SAFE Banking Act. That legislation is the one tool on the table that will cut too-big-to-fail banks down to size.

When President Obama signed Wall Street reform into law two years ago, one crucial piece was missing: a cap on how big banks can get. The bank lobby defeated all efforts to include a limit on their size.

Now the six largest banks – led by JPMorgan Chase – are collectively bigger and more concentrated than they were before they blew up the economy, with the assets they control growing from $6.1 trillion before the collapse to more than $8.5 trillion today, according to Federal Reserve data.

Continue reading Tell Congress to Pass the SAFE Banking Act →

Elizabeth Warren Is Right: Jamie Dimon Needs To Resign From NY Fed

Peter S. Goodman

Business Editor, The Huffington Post

Not for the first time, Elizabeth Warren has spoken a simple truth, one that ought to be heeded: Jamie Dimon must surrender his seat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The seat in question is part of a body that has god-like influence over the most crucial questions governing high finance. Like, for example, whether colossal institutions such as Dimon’s ought to be spared from collapse by taxpayer largess when bad things happen. And as Dimon’s bank has just helpfully reminded us, courtesy of its $2 billion-plus in losses on a bum trade, bad things happen all the time, especially when the financial lobby manages to keep fighting off any semblance of sensible regulation.

Yes, you heard right: The chief executive of JP Morgan Chase — the largest bank in the land, and the exemplar of a ‘too big to fail’ institution — is allowed to sit at the table with the people tasked with deciding when and how much of other people’s money gets earmarked for his rescue. This is not the fox guarding the hen house; this is the fox guarding the hen house while selling synthetic derivatives whose value increases with every hen he gobbles up, and who burns down the hen house so he can collect on his fire insurance policy, and then gets the government to build him a new hen house at taxpayer expense. And then, after that, he still gets to guard the new hen house.

Continue reading Oust JP Morgan Oligarch from New York Federal Reserve →

By Randy Shannon

South Heights Borough Council President Bob Schmetzer will represent concerned citizens before a panel of drillers and their paid Republican Party legislators at Beaver Lakes Country Club at 1:00pm on Tuesday May 15th.

Schmetzer chaired an April 21st public meeting  in Ambridge where scientific experts presented evidence of the dangers to the Ambridge Reservoir of hydraulic fracturing of shale.

Schmetzer has also alerted local communities to the risks to the Creswell Water Authority aquifer that will be caused by drilling. Site clearing around the aquifer is now underway.

The Brockway, PA Municipal Authority recently experienced loss of its Well No. 5 when the aquifer was pierced by a gas well. Water flow was halted for 29 hours and subsequent turbidity increased 500%.  Well casing requirements in PA are below standard quality that would avoid such leakages. This substandard practice saves money for the drillers, who pass it on to Republican politicians who control the DEP.

Continue reading Gas Drillers Send Republican Jim Christiana to Attack Concerned Citizens →

JP Morgan Debacle Reveals Fatal Flaw In Federal Reserve Thinking

by Simon Johnson

MIT professor; Co-author, ’13 Bankers’ and ‘White House Burning’; Columnist on fiscal affairs

Experienced Wall Street executives and traders concede, in private, that Bank of America is not well run and that Citigroup has long been a recipe for disaster. But they always insist that attempts to re-regulate Wall Street are misguided because risk-management has become more sophisticated — everyone, in this view, has become more like Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase, with his legendary attention to detail and concern about quantifying the downside.

In the light of JP Morgan’s stunning losses on derivatives, announced yesterday but with the full scope of total potential losses still not yet clear (and not yet determined), Jamie Dimon and his company do not look like any kind of appealing role model. But the real losers in this turn of events are the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the New York Fed, whose approach to bank capital is now demonstrated to be deeply flawed.

Continue reading Smash the Banker Oligarchy →

We can’t devise a successful electoral strategy for “The Left”—meaning the forces of peace, social/economic justice and sustainability—unless we face a simple fact: We’re getting our asses kicked.

For three decades, our country’s politics have moved steadily rightward and become more corporate-dominated. With few exceptions (gay rights, for example), the right wing has been winning on almost every issue. That’s why we have record levels of war-spending, with near record levels of poverty and wealth disparities. Labor is weakened and under attack, while corporate power over government and both major parties keeps increasing. Our earth faces environmental disasters while the mindless “Drill, Baby, Drill” slogan gains popularity. Issues we thought we’d won decades ago—like reproductive rights and separation of church and state—are under constant threat.

There’s an essential reason for this sad state of affairs: Rightwing activists have seized one of the two major parties, the GOP, and used that party to amass power and dominate the terms of debate on most issues since Reagan was elected in 1981.

Continue reading Progressive Democrat for Congress – Norman Solomon →

The Top Short-Term Threat to Humanity: The Fuel Pools of Fukushima

The Greatest Single Threat to Humanity: Fuel Pool Number 4

We noted days after the Japanese earthquake that the biggest threat was from the spent fuel rods in the fuel pool at Fukushima unit number 4, and not from the reactors themselves. See this and this.

We noted in February:

Scientists say that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hitting Fukushima this year, and a 98% chance within the next 3 years.

Given that nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says that an earthquake of 7.0 or larger could cause the entire fuel pool structure collapse, it is urgent that everything humanly possible is done to stabilize the structure housing the fuel pools at reactor number 4.

Tepco is doing some construction at the building … it is a race against time under very difficult circumstances, and hopefully Tepco will win.

As AP points out:

The structural integrity of the damaged Unit 4 reactor building has long been a major concern among experts because a collapse of its spent fuel cooling pool could cause a disaster worse than the three reactor meltdowns.

***

Gundersen (who used to build spent fuel pools) explains that there is no protection surrounding the radioactive fuel in the pools. He warns that – if the fuel pools at reactor 4 collapse due to an earthquake – people should get out of Japan, and residents of the West Coast of America and Canada should shut all of their windows and stay inside for a while.

The fuel pool number 4 is apparently not in great shape, and there have already been countless earthquakes near the Fukushima region since the 9.0 earthquake last March.

Continue reading Top Threat to Humanity: The Fuel Pools of Fukushima →

End Student Debt!

The student loan crisis finally reached center stage in Washington after the House GOP budget called for letting interest rates double on government-subsidized loans (and for deep cuts in Pell grants and other student support). If it passes, students who borrow the maximum will end up paying as much as $1,000 a year in added interest. President Obama sensibly called for extending the lower rate, stumping at colleges and on talk-shows to enlist students and others in the cause.

Republican leaders quickly realized the perils of angering young voters. In another flip-flop, Mitt Romney decided to support extending the lower rate, while the House GOP passed an extension but taunted the president by stipulating that it be paid for with money taken from the preventive health fund created by the Affordable Care Act. Senate Democrats propose paying for it by closing a loophole that doctors, lawyers and small businesses use to avoid payroll taxes.

Ignored in the standoff is that even at the lower rates, more and more students can’t afford the college education or advanced training everyone but Rick Santorum believes they need. Since 1982 the cost of living has doubled and healthcare costs have tripled; college tuition and fees have exploded more than four times. All this comes amid revelations about the hundreds of billions in loans—at below-market rates—ladled out to the banks by the Federal Reserve and Treasury during the financial crisis.

Continue reading Bailout Student Loan Debt – Tax Wall Street →

Philadelphia Daily News reporter Will Bunch, in  “How a Natural-gas Tycoon Tapped into Corbett,” has helped reveal the tragic impact of massive gas industry campaign contributions on Pennsylvania politics (for the big picture see MarcellusMoney.org, meticulously researched up to the minute by Common Cause).   Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon has been bankrolling Pennsylvania’s current gas-loving governor as far back as 2004.

Will Bunch’s feature on Governor Corbett’s rise to power and the role the gas industry has played in it was the cover story in yesterday’s Daily News. (Source: Keegan Gibson/politicspa.com)

In the Daily News’ June 29th cover story,  Bunch explains that a wildcat well is “when a prospector takes a big risk drilling deep in an unexplored area.” Bunch then suggests that a “flamboyant Oklahoma City multimillionaire” did just this – and struck it big – back in 2004:

The $450,000 in campaign checks that energy mogul Aubrey McClendon wrote that fall helped elect a man he said he’d never even met – a relatively obscure GOP candidate for Pennsylvania attorney general, Tom Corbett.

And so the story goes in Bunch’s high-profile article exploring the power relationships behind Governor Corbett’s devotion to the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania. While Bunch begins by raising unanswerable questions of intent and foresight on the part of McClendon, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy, the overall impact of industry donations is unquestionably terrible for the environment and public health.

Continue reading PA Governor Corbett Bankrolled by Gas Drillers →