Nearly half of Americans struggle to get by financially

USA #1, right? If we're going to tell everyone how great we are as a country, we should expect more from the system and provide better opportunity for everyone. Nobody is asking for a free ride, but we need to get back to the goal of providing opportunity for everyone and not just the 1%. Why is this traditional American idea so disregarded by the political class?

"This is a wake-up call for Congress, for our state policy-makers, really for all of us," said Donna Addkison, President and CEO of WOW.

"Nearly half of our nation's families cannot cover the costs of basic expenses even when they do have a job. Under these conditions, cuts to unemployment insurance ... and other programs families are relying on right now would push them from crisis to catastrophe."

The WOW survey compared 2009 pre-tax incomes to a budget of basic and essential monthly expenses for various families that it developed along with researchers at Washington University with funding from the Ford Foundation and W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

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Muslim turkeys are invading America, religious right warns (seriously)

Keep in mind that this joker has a radio show that's a must-visit for the GOP candidates. From PFAW's RightWingWatch:

I want to talk a little bit about Butterball turkeys. And I want to let you know [that] every single Butterball turkey sold in the United States of America has been sacrificed to Allah.

Every single turkey that Butterball sells has been ritually slaughtered according to Islamic practice and has had an Islamic prayer prayed over that bird while it is being slaughtered.

Why stop there? What about kosher food? Is this any different than all the food that's prepared according to kosher rules as well, or is that not "terrorist" food so it's okay?

David Shuster responds:

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Video: Octopus crawls out of water, walks on land, spits up crab

It's a cool video.  Apparently this isn't that rare, for octopus to walk on land. (H/t HuffPo) Read the rest of this post...

Amazon’s customer reviews for "pepper spray"

There appear to be hundreds of these over there.  Do check them out.  Brilliant.  And don't forget to check the photos of the product that customers have uploaded. (H/t to Lauren Miller via Twitter) Read the rest of this post...

Tampa police, hosts to Occupy Tampa & the RNC, have their own tank

The militarization of U.S. police departments continues apace. This is what waits for any protestors at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Click the image to see how wonderful this thing really is. Reminds me of the streets of Cairo the last time I was there — pre-Tahrir tanks on the street corners.

This all started with SWAT teams — birthed in L.A. in 1968 and soon after glorified, in the growing Dirty Harry environment, by their own worshipful TV show.

Since then we have armed our cops with more and more military gear, and more and more instant permission to react "as they see fit."

In a time of "rebellion" can you imagine the enhanced "permission" these folks will think they have? After all, if you bring a gun to a party, someone's going to shoot it.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Legal and moral victories against robosigning

New York Attorney General and leading Justice Democrat Eric Schneiderman has had a pretty great week.

First, a federal judge allowed him and Delaware AG Beau Biden to intervene in the Bank of New York/Bank of America settlement. Bank of New York, a trustee for a huge number of residential mortgage backed securities, had agreed to a paltry settlement with Bank of America. When it was announced, numerous other investors objected to the settlement terms. Schneiderman and Biden objected on the grounds that it left out thousands of other investors whose interests weren't being served by the small deal negotiated by BoNY. In the ruling, Judge William Pauley wrote:

“This action concerns far more than the financial interests of a few sophisticated investors,” the judge wrote. “And the intervention of the state AGs in this action will protect the interests of absent investors.”

This ruling will allow litigation to proceed with Schneiderman and Biden. Perhaps more importantly, though, it provides Schneiderman and Biden with tremendous leverage over Bank of America and Bank of New York - leverage which may be able to be applied to the robosigning investigations these Attorneys General are now conducting.

Also of note, the Steven J. Baum law firm is closing. The firm most recently made headlines when its staff dressed up as homeless foreclosure victims at a staff cocktail party. The outrageous costumes prompted protests by Occupy Buffalo and anger around the country. Beyond being jerks, the Baum law firm was one of New York's largest foreclosure mills. They helped banks steal thousands of homes and sought reduced legal standards for foreclosures. Them going out of business is great news for homeowners and a good sign that people who steal homes illegally are finding life harder and harder, especially if they make fun of Americans while they're stealing their homes.

Between the energy of Occupy Wall Street and the progress made by justice Democrats like Schneiderman, Biden, and Nevada's Catherine Cortez Masto, it's clear that the big banks aren't having things as easy as they used to have it. Read the rest of this post...

Pat Robertson: "What is this ’mac and cheese’? Is that a black thing?"

Yes, I believe it's from Kenya.

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Aussie senator says Murdoch’s "news" company tried to bribe him for vote on legislation

Raise your hand if you're surprised with this charge? If the same thing happened in the US or UK, would you be surprised? The Guardian:

Australian police are investigating a former senator's allegations that an executive from Rupert Murdoch's News Limited offered him favourable newspaper coverage and "a special relationship" in return for voting against government legislation....

The newspapers reported that an unnamed executive of News Ltd asked O'Chee during a lunch on 13 June 1998 to vote against his conservative government's legislation on the creation of digital TV in Australia. The news group stood to profit from the legislation failing.

Offering a senator a bribe or inducement to influence a vote is an offence punishable by up to six months in prison.

One wonders whether the opposite was implied as well - don't vote our way and we'll give you bad coverage. That would be worse than a bribe, it would be extortion. Read the rest of this post...

It’s easy to steal your ATM pin, and easy to stop it - why won’t US banks fix it?

The image is of an ATM skimmer. This is a device that a fraudster sticks onto an ATM machine that captures the magnetic stripe data and pin code typed in. The data is then used to create bogus cards that are sold to petty criminals.


Skimmers come in all shapes and sizes, Brian Krebs (who I took this photo from) has a whole gallery you can check out.

Now before going any further, I should point out that banking security is my main business, or rather was before the crash. Chances are that sometime today you will use a security system I had a part in designing.

I lost interest in banking security after the crash because security is all about risk management and the crash proved that the banks were doing a lousy job at managing the risks they were meant to understand. According to estimates based on my conversations with bank security staff and information from financial reports etc., Internet related fraud costs US banks approximately $1 billion a year of which about a quarter is actual losses and the rest is the cost of dealing with the fraud. A billion dollars sounds a lot of money because it is a lot of money. But the banks managed to blow over a trillion dollars because it turned out they had been mismanaging the risk of mortgage lending for decades.

Technology exists that could make ATM skimming impossible. There is a little chip embedded in the card that implements a cryptographic protocol which allows the card to prove that it is genuine without revealing the secret key used to generate the proof. The banks in France have been using this technology for twenty years and recently the same technology was deployed throughout Europe to secure credit card payments (Chip and PIN).

There are several reasons that US banks have not followed the European's lead. But the biggest difference is the lack of government leadership in the US. The Bush administration was as uninterested in the actual business of governing as the banks were in banking. The US has 10,000 banks. The costs and benefits of deploying Chip and PIN would fall on different banks. Without strong government leadership it only takes one bank to scream 'anti-trust' to collapse an industry-wide initiative.

The result of US government inaction is that organized crime is currently stealing a quarter billion dollars from US banks who pass that cost (plus markup) onto consumers. It also means that anyone with a US bank account is finding it increasingly difficult to use a credit card outside the US.

PS There's another result.  US credit cards are increasingly not accepted abroad - they simply don't work.  I've had my card refused by a hospital emergency room (that was fun) among other places. Read the rest of this post...

Gingrich proposes private retirement accounts

As in the same idea that nobody wanted when Bush was president. As in the kind of plan that would have left Americans retirement accounts with Wall Street, the guys who blew the economy in 2008. It's bad enough that Americans are stuck with 401K plans that have too little regulation so they're clobbered by high fees and lousy products, but turning Social Security over to Wall Street is about the last thing the US or any country needs now.

Creating plans to screw yet another generation can only generate excitement within the loony GOP circle. Just leave it alone and fix what you already broke, Newt.

Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich on Monday proposed allowing younger workers still decades away from retirement to bypass Social Security and instead choose private investment accounts that would be subject to stock market gyrations.

The former House speaker, who has risen in the polls, would allow younger workers to take their share of the payroll tax that funds Social Security and put it in a private account.

Employers would still pay their share of the tax, which would be used to pay benefits for current retirees. But it would create a funding shortfall that Gingrich brushed off.

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Study: The "optimal tax rate on the highest earners is in the vicinity of 70%"

This comes via Paul Krugman, but the research is not his. The source is a paper by Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez (pdf).

The headline is the news, or at least part of it. Krugman:

Using parameters based on the literature, D&S suggest that the optimal tax rate on the highest earners is in the vicinity of 70%.

That's surprisingly close to the Nixon-era Top Marginal Tax Rate of 75% (down from that job-killing Eisenhower-era rate of 91-92%). That measure of max tax takes into account the "they'll go Galt" factor, by the way; an offset for that effect is built into the calculation.

(It's not clear whether the 75% number is the total tax, or just the top rate on the highest dollars earned. It's almost certainly the latter, since that's the way we do taxes in the U.S. but still, I wanted to add that caution.)

The second point that's interesting about this paper — aside from the headline number — is the meaning of the phrase "optimal tax rate." What does "optimal" mean? Krugman again:

In the first part of the paper, D&S analyze the optimal tax rate on top earners. And they argue that this should be the rate that maximizes the revenue collected from these top earners — full stop.

Why isn't the rate then 100%? The answer is what I noted above, that too high a tax will either cause earnings to drop or drive part of the economy of the very wealthy to go underground (into a kind of black-velvet, jewel-encrusted market). Around 70% represents the calculated balance point where Max Tax is created.

As to why we apply Max Tax to everyone but the rich — well, that has to do with our 18th century belief that God (conveniently) shows the Elect his predestined favor — and their future place at his right hand — by rewarding them with riches on earth. Unlike all those other sinners our Angry God holds in his hand, ready to fry at a whim.

How convenient for the wealthy that God chose that method, and especially interesting that the wealthy were first to discover it. (Hmm.)

But that gets us into the discussion of Erich Fromm's seminal study of the modern sado-masochistic (i.e., authoritarian) personality — the discussion I haven't written yet. So we're not going there. (Sorry.)

GP Read the rest of this post...

How GOP Sen. Jon Kyl killed the Super Committee deal for Grover Norquist

From Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, the nation was reeling over the death and destruction in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. But Kyl, now the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, saw opportunity: According to a voice-mail recording left at the time by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Kyl and Sessions were hoping to find a business owner killed in the storm so they could use that in their campaign to repeal the estate tax.

It was vintage Kyl: cold and ruthless.

So when the Arizonan was named as one of six Republicans on the debt supercommittee, Democrats feared the worst — and they got what they feared. It exaggerates little to say that Kyl thwarted agreement almost singlehandedly. While some Republicans on the panel — notably Reps. Dave Camp and Fred Upton — were, with House Speaker John Boehner’s blessing, prepared to strike a deal, Kyl rallied resistance with his usual table-pounding tirades.

There was an interesting exchange between Paul Krugman and Martin Feldstein (chair of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers) on The NewsHour last night. Both men were talking about the Super Committee and why it failed. Krugman explained how the Democrats were, if anything, being far too generous in the offers they were making, whereas the Republicans, he explained, insisted on no tax increases whatsoever. What's interesting is what Feldstein said: He blamed it on both parties (which is what forced Krugman to speak up in the first place). What was interesting was that Feldstein wasn't even trying to blame it solely on the Democrats - the best he felt he could do (he could get away with) was to blame both Ds and Rs. I just found that very interesting, in terms of the Republicans worrying that they're going to get the blame for what happened. Read the rest of this post...

Egyptian military accepts government resignation, violence continues

The Egyptian military is now saying that sure, they are keeping to their word and that they want nothing more than a peaceful transition to democracy. On paper it sounds good but using live ammunition on your own people and leaving 33 dead on the streets of Cairo does raise some suspicions. Al Jazeera:

But neither the cabinet's announcement nor Tantawi's speech ended the street fighting, which continued to rage on the side streets leading from Tahrir Square to the Interior Ministry.

Riot police from the Central Security Forces, backed by soldiers, fired tear gas and rubber rounds to disperse mobs of young men using rocks and petrol bombs in an attempt to force their way through barricades and reach the ministry.

There were similar scenes in Alexandria, Egypts second biggest city, where protesters repeatedly tried to reach the local police headquarters and fought pitched battles with security forces.

"I could clearly hear the sound of stun guns to try and electrocute protesters gathered around [the police]. " Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh reported.

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New Libyan government is exclusively secularist

If only we were so lucky in America to have the religious extremists out of government. The Guardian:

Prime minister Abdulrahman El Keib has sent Libya on a bumpy road towards democracy by naming a cabinet of secularists and thereby snubbing prominent Islamists.

The biggest surprise on the list was Osama al-Juwali, chief of the Zintan military council, who was appointed defence minister at the expense of Islamist Hakim Bilhaj.

Juwali is an accomplished commander whose forces were originally a militia from the small city of Zintan that went on to play a central role in storming Tripoli in August, but until now he had no national political profile. Sources in the city in west Libya told the Guardian at the weekend its leadership demanded a cabinet post in return for handing over Saif al-Islam, Muammar Gaddafi's son and heir, captured in the south on Saturday. He is now held at a secret location in Zintan.

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Tom Tomorrow on the Myth of sexual harassment

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow weighs in on a new-old right-wing discovery — that sexual harassment doesn't really exist.

Click to see the whole thing.


"Oh, the humanity" indeed.

GP Read the rest of this post...