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Credit: The Professional Left

“Recorded live from just outside the Rick Perry Friars Club Roast, it's the Professional Left with Driftglass and Blue Gal.”

Links for this week's podcast include:

Congressman Walsh screams lies about the housing debacle.

Richard Eskow also thinks that America’s Bullshit detector went off.

NY Times: How a Financial Pro Lost His House

You can listen to the archives at The Professional Left Podcast and make a donation there if you'd like to help keep these going. You can also follow them on Facebook at The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal. You can also find them at their individual blogs here:

Blue Gal

Driftglass

Happy Veterans Day and enjoy the podcast everyone!

Open thread below...

Happy Saturday! Here's some Soul Train for you.

And our sister site Newstalgia has Nights At The Roundtable - Sonny Rollins With The MJQ - 1953

Ultimate O'Jays
	Artist: O'Jays Price: $4.45 (As of 11/12/11 03:01 pm details)

Tina Dupuy on the Stephanie Miller Show (2011/11/11) by karlfrisch

Heartthrob John Fugelsang was subbing Friday when I was on to talk about vets and Occupy Wall Street.

It's never been more obvious that the unemployed have no one looking out for them. This is really a shocking story and if you still have a Bank of America account, this might finally motivate you to move your money:

CORDOVA, S.C.-- Shawana Busby does not seem like the sort of customer who would be at the center of a major bank's business plan. Out of work for much of the last three years, she depends upon a $264-a-week unemployment check from the state of South Carolina. But the state has contracted with Bank of America to administer its unemployment benefits, and Busby has frequently found herself incurring bank fees to get her money.

To withdraw her benefits, Busby, 33, uses a Bank of America prepaid debit card on which the state deposits her funds. She could visit a Bank of America ATM free of charge. But this small community in the state's rural center, her hometown, does not have a Bank of America branch. Neither do the surrounding towns where she drops off her kids at school and attends church.

She could drive north to Columbia, the state capital, and use a Bank of America ATM there. But that entails a 50-mile drive, cutting into her gas budget. So Busby visits the ATMs in her area and begrudgingly accepts the fees, which reach as high as five dollars per transaction. She estimates that she has paid at least $350 in fees to tap her unemployment benefits.

"It really boggles my mind," she said. "This bank is taking little bits of money out of thousands of pockets, including mine."

Bank of America recently aborted plans to charge ordinary banking customers $5 a month to use their debit cards in the face of national outrage. But the bank has quietly continued to mine another source of fees: jobless people who depend upon the bank's prepaid debit cards to tap their benefits. Bank of America and other financial firms -- including U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase -- have secured contracts to provide access to public benefits in 41 states. These contracts typically allow banks to collect unlimited fees from merchants and consumers.

In short, the same banks whose speculation delivered a financial crisis that has destroyed millions of jobs have figured out how to turn widespread unemployment into a profit center: The larger the number of people who are out of work and dependent upon the state for sustenance, the greater the potential gains through administering their benefits.

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Credit: Blue Gal

The GOP Candidates meet in South Carolina for a debate on foreign policy. No I am not making any of that up. Take a drink every time Teddy Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower spin in their graves.

Airtime is 8PM Eastern; CBS is airing and also promises a live-streaming here.

Open Debate Thread

From TPM -- Perry vs Perry: Rick’s Ultimate Reel.

TPM shares some of their favorite moments from the Perry campaign since he threw his hat into the GOP primary race.

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What has happened, it turns out, is that by going on the euro, Spain and Italy in effect reduced themselves to the status of third-world countries that have to borrow in someone else’s currency, with all the loss of flexibility that implies. In particular, since euro-area countries can’t print money even in an emergency, they’re subject to funding disruptions in a way that nations that kept their own currencies aren’t — and the result is what you see right now. America, which borrows in dollars, doesn’t have that problem.

The other thing you need to know is that in the face of the current crisis, austerity has been a failure everywhere it has been tried: no country with significant debts has managed to slash its way back into the good graces of the financial markets. For example, Ireland is the good boy of Europe, having responded to its debt problems with savage austerity that has driven its unemployment rate to 14 percent. Yet the interest rate on Irish bonds is still above 8 percent — worse than Italy.

The moral of the story, then, is to beware of ideologues who are trying to hijack the European crisis on behalf of their agendas. If we listen to those ideologues, all we’ll end up doing is making our own problems — which are different from Europe’s, but arguably just as severe — even worse.

James Galbraith has more:

Greece and Ireland are being destroyed. Portugal and Spain are in limbo, and the crisis shifts to Italy – truly too big to fail – which is being put into an IMF-dictated receivership as I write. Meanwhile France struggles to delay the (inevitable) downgrade of its AAA rating by cutting every social and investment program.

If there were an easy exit from the Euro, Greece would be gone already. But Greece is not Argentina with soybeans and oil for the Chinese market, and legally exit from the Euro means leaving the European Union. It’s a choice only Germany can make. For the others, the choice is between cancer and heart attack, barring a transformation in Northern Europe that not even Socialist victories in the next round of French and German elections would bring.

So the cauldrons bubble. Debtor Europe is sliding toward social breakdown, financial panic and ultimately to emigration, once again, as the way out, for some. Yet – and here is another difference with the United States – people there have not entirely forgotten how to fight back. Marches, demonstrations, strikes and general strikes are on the rise. We are at the point where political structures offer no hope, and the baton stands to pass, quite soon, to the hand of resistance. It may not be capable of much – but we shall see.

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At an Veteran's Day campaign event in South Carolina Friday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney hinted that he might introduce "private sector competition" for veterans' health care and other benefits.

Romney told a group of veterans at Mutt's BBQ in Mauldin that it might be possible to create a "voucher" system.

"When you work in the private sector and you have a competitor, you know if I don't treat this customer right, they're going to leave me and go somewhere else," the candidate said. "Whereas if you're the government, they know there's nowhere else you guys can go. You're stuck."

Romney added: "Sometimes you wonder if there would be some way to introduce some private sector competition, somebody else that could come in and say, you know, each soldier gets X thousand dollars attributed to them. And then they can choose whether they want to go into the government system or the private system with the money that follows them."

"Like what happens in Florida, where people have a voucher that goes with them. Who knows?"

Last week, the former Massachusetts governor proposed a Medicare overhaul that would also include the option of vouchers, a plan similar to one offered by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) earlier this year.

A Bloomberg Government study found that the Ryan plan would result in very little health care savings.

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After Keith Olbermann running us through some of the recent news on various Occupy protests across the country, AlterNet's Joshua Holland joined the set of Countdown to discuss the latest from Occupy Oakland, where police are threatening to again evict the protesters there and whether the shooting nearby was being used as an excuse to justify the eviction.

HOLLAND: It's entirely possible that he had stayed there a couple of nights before. I spoke with three eyewitnesses who said that the fight started outside the camp, kind of moved through the camp and then this tragedy happened on the far end of the camp.

You know, this is the hundred and first homicide in Oakland this year and it's a real tragedy. I spoke to people out there who were saying that another young man had been shot to death, just caddy-corner from the incident last night and there were no news vans, there were no helicopters overhead. So I think that this is being used as a premise by City Hall officials to evict the camp, but you know, these problems run deep in the community.

They're social problems that aren't going to be addressed by evicting the occupation.

OLBERMANN: Give us a sense, because I don't think everybody knows the geography of downtown Oakland, about just what kind of area we're talking about and how unlikely it is that there would be a shooting that had no connection to the camp, so close to the camp, or how likely it might be.

HOLLAND: Well again, this is the fifth... this is the city with the fifth highest violent crime rate in the United States. It isn't downtown Oakland. It's not a residential area. It's mostly office buildings around. But, you know, again, we've heard that these things happen all the time. Somebody told me yesterday that if this had taken place in west Oakland, the body would still be sitting there hours after the fact.

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This judge is a Bush appointee and a George Mason law school grad. Surprised? Nah, me neither:

Should the government be able to collect information related to your Internet use without a warrant? According to a U.S. District Court opinion in the case of three WikiLeaks associates, it should.

Judge Liam O’Grady ruled Thursday that the associates had no reasonable expectation of privacy when they used Twitter services, even if the information in question was known only to Twitter and not publicly disclosed. The government is seeking data from their accounts including their devices’ Internet protocol (IP) addresses, which can reveal information about location, and data on people with whom they communicated.

The WikiLeaks associates – Jacob Appelbaum, Birgitta Jonsdottir and Rop Gonggrijp – “voluntarily chose to use Internet technology to communicate with Twitter and thereby consented to whatever disclosures would be necessary to complete their communications,” Judge O’Grady wrote.

Judge O’Grady also denied the trio’s petition to unseal the parts of the government’s secret requests to Twitter and other service providers.

The ruling represents a setback for the WikiLeaks associates, who have not been charged with wrongdoing. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that the government also has made requests to other Internet companies for information on Mr. Appelbaum, a computer developer for a nonprofit that provides free tools that help people maintain their anonymity online.