The American Banker reported (log in required) that Home Depot announced that it would end its bid to purchase a Utah industrial loan company (ILC).  This comes just less than one year after Wal-Mart withdrew its bid to buy an ILC.  These bids by companies such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot have been vehemently opposed by an aggressive banking lobby, which does not welcome the competition from commercial firms.  For now at least, it seems that this lobby has won.

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HigherEdWatch.org proposes a compelling solution to the deeply distressing problem of for-profit educational institutions steering students into high-interest private loans they cannot afford when the students actually qualify for cheaper government-subsidized loans. HigherEdWatch.org proposes that Congress put an end to this reprehensible and predatory practice by requiring the exhaustion of federal loans prior to private loan assumption.

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The Israeli government keeps repeating the same mistakes, the big ones and the small ones. The biggest one of all is believing that it can “win” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by making the Palestinians “cry uncle.” That is what the economic blockade of Gaza is all about.

It is not about the shelling of Sderot. Israel began applying sanctions on the Palestinians immediately following the Hamas legislative elections of June 2006. Those were the elections that the United States insisted upon (over the objections of both the Israeli government and the Palestinians). Sharansky had convinced President Bush that all elections are good by definition. So the Palestinians were pressured into holding them, voted “wrong,” and the United States, Israel (including Sharansky, of course), and the Europeans all decided that the Palestinians had to be punished. Almost immediately, Congress moved to cut off aid.

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The annual right-wing Israeli shindig known as the Herzliya Conference has just drawn to a close. The conference is organized by Uzi Arad, former adviser to Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, and has in the last years become an Israeli-American neo-con love-fest. Of course like on any good Fox News show, there is a generous sprinkling of non-neo-con folk who lend legitimacy to the gathering. The conference was co-sponsored by a far right donor, Sheldon Adelson’s Shalem Center, and the star performer was Ambassador John Bolton.

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It’s sad to see a highly regarded scholar holding to his neo-con misbegotten worldview, despite mountains of new contradictory evidence pilling up on top of old ones. Fouad Ajami, a leading scholar at Johns Hopkins University, just stated that he has come to agree with Sam Huntington: there is a clash of civilizations, between our free world and the brutal Muslim one.

The essence of prejudice, the mother of discrimination, is to tar all the members of any given group with attributes that some of its members may well indeed exhibit. Thus the cardinal flaw in Huntington’s thesis is to treat whole civilizations as if they were of one kind. Huntington argued that “fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate” that the West has problems not only with violent Islamist extremists, but Islam itself. But actual data from many sources (which I summarized in Security First’s Part III) show that most Muslims reject violence, terrorism, suicide bombing and the ways of bin Laden. This is especially true for Muslims in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Morocco -- where most Muslims live. For instance, many Muslim view Jihad as a spiritual journey and not a war against infidels. Moreover, there are those who favor violence in all civilizations.

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A new study by researchers at the Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School shows another way that our patchwork system of private health insurance is, to paraphrase FDR, both bad morals and bad economics. Doctors David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, who are also primary-care physicians, show that emergency room waiting times in the U.S. have increased starkly in the last decade—the median wait increased from 22 minutes in 1997 to 30 minutes in 2004, a 36% increase; a quarter of heart-attack patients now have to wait over 50 minutes—as more Americans have had to rely on emergency rooms for routine coverage and as hospitals have diverted emergency-room resources to more profitable uses (what a law-and-economics type might call "highest and best" uses). Lack of universal coverage doesn't just leave tens of millions of Americans uninsured and even more only precariously insured; it also directly affects the quality of care that those with insurance can receive. As this paper makes clear, supporting universal healthcare isn't just about the uninsured, but about everyone.

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So rightwingers are taking great glee in Bill Clinton's taking up the cugel of allegations of "union intimidation" during the Nevada caucuses. See this editorial by Reaganite Lawrence Lindsey to use Clinton to more generally go after pro-labor laws:

Now that Bill Clinton has seen for himself that union leaders can and do intimidate employees over whom to vote for in a party caucus, he might want to think about whether union leaders might do the same things when something even more relevant to them is at stake--such as whether their union can win an organizing battle and begin forcing workers to pay dues.

Of course, the irony is that Nevada showed exactly the opposite, since Hillary actually won in the union strip hotel caucuses, reflecting that members felt quite comfortable publicly voting against their union leadership, as this Politico story outlined:

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In The New Republic, Gabriel Sherman has an interesting piece on the in-house grousing at the NYT about Bill Kristol's appointment right-wing mediocrity issuing weekly boilerplate on a subpar op-ed page:

...behind much of the internal distaste for Kristol lies the paper's complicated relationship with the Iraq war. In an August 2002 column in The Weekly Standard, as the Bush administration began marshaling its case for war, Kristol labeled the Times a member of the "Axis of Appeasement," and a piece in his magazine commented that the paper's bias against the war "colors . . . practically every news story on the subject."

According to a former Times staffer, criticism from Kristol and other conservatives weighed heavily on the Times' pre-war coverage, which turned more hawkish under then-executive editor Howell Raines and Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson.

 

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Want further proof that John McCain is living in an alternate universe when it comes to Iraq? Check out this exchange on Iraq in tonight’s debate:

(Here's the video link)

Did you catch McCain’s key quip? “I know of no military leader, including General Petraeus, who says we can’t sustain our effort in Iraq.” Oh really?

Well, maybe Senator McCain was taking a nap last month, but Army Chief of Staff, General Casey disagrees. The Christian Science Monitor’s Gordon Lubold reported the following last Christmas Eve:

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I'm not so surprised that the stimulus package is disappointing -- not efficient, fair, or expeditious -- but I am surprised that my party's leadership was so late to the topic, unclear about its goals, and apparently unable to get its message across.

I guess we need a President to get the right results. Or perhaps some other leaders from somewhere else in our uncivil society.

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A government that spies on its citizens, on Americans, without oversight is not democracy; it is tyranny. And yet this is what the Bush administration continues to try and do.

In yet another installment of high-fear politicking, Vice President Richard Cheney, lobbying for the passage of new FISA legislation, spoke at the Heritage Foundation today -- obviously speaking to a room filled with folks who mostly agree with him rather than venturing forth to talk to those who don't.

From Cheney's speech:

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Don't miss this Los Angeles Times article about foreclosure rates in California. In the last quarter of 2007, there were 31,676 foreclosures, more than twice as many as the previous record from 1996. Additionally, foreclosures have occurred in neighborhoods that experienced few foreclosures in past downturns. Rates of default are also at an all-time high for California.

 

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Every time I see the word ‘mild’ next to the word ‘recession,’ I cringe, and you should too.

Economists endlessly describe the 2001 recession as mild, meaning that the economy didn’t contract much at all in terms of real gross domestic product, or GDP. Same with the previous downturn in the early 1990s. Today, there’s a lot of debate as to the how deep the current downturn (if that’s where we are) will be, and there’s no shortage of mild assessments.

Remember, this is all purely in terms of GDP. These judgments largely ignore the part of the economy that matters most to most people: the job market.

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The scenes out of Gaza are incredible. After blowing up the border walls with Egypt, 350,000 Palestinians have crossed over.

This is the last thing Israel wants (an open Gazan border) but this is the inevitable result of Ehud Barak's policy of blocking essential supplies to starving and freezing people.

And it's more evidence -- if any more is needed -- that the United States and the international community must help Israel and the Palestinians end the occupation and establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank/Gaza,

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United for a Fair Economy has come out with a new report detailing the disparate effects that the current subprime crisis is having on people of color. They estimate that people of color will lose 164 to 213 billion dollars of accumulated wealth -- a loss, the report says, that will be the largest displacement of wealth for that community in history.

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There's nothing better than getting something for free. Apparently, that is what the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that we can do with green stimulus.

The basic story is simple. Suppose that we had a generous tax credit (30-40 percent) for homeowners and businesses who increased insulation, installed energy efficient windows or other energy conservation measures.

Suppose we also set up a pot of money for transit agencies that reduce fares for riders. The federal government meets their fare reductions dollar for dollar. This is effectively a tax credit for people who take mass transit.

CBO says these policies won't cost the federal government anything.

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Health care reform has remained front and center for the Democrats in a nomination fight that has been taking place for over a year now, and Ezra Klein has a web-only article on the American Prospect's website that mines the Clintons' bold debacle of 1994 for lessons for the current roster of candidates.

 

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Liz Pullam Weston is pulling no punches. She begins her column today with "The Bankruptcy law from two years ago should be renamed the Drive More People into Bankruptcy Act of 2005." She notes that creditors seized on the tighter bankruptcy laws "to crank their wide-open spigots even wider" so that revolving debt per household rose at a real rate of 4.6%, the steepest increase in five years.

Teaser mortgages are creating a mess, but if the consumer starts to melt, it will be widely held credit card debt that are fueling the fires.

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So there I am, in the CNBC studio early this AM, ready to weigh in on the recent swoon in global financial markets, when they break in with an emergency statement by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in support of a quick stimulus package to jumpstart growth.

He does his thing, and I’m ready to start playing some of my own chin music, when the Fed jumps in with their own emergency news: a rare, big inter-meeting rate cut: they took the Federal Funds Rate down three-quarters of a percentage point, and did so without waiting for their scheduled meeting later this month.

Other than the fact that I spent a lot more time in the studio than I expected to, what does it all mean?

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These are wild days on Wall Street. The broad S&P 500 index is already down 11 percent in January and almost 20 percent from its peak last fall. This decline corresponds to a loss of $4 trillion in wealth, more than $13,000 for every person in the country.

Of course the carnage has not been easily distributed. The financial sector has been especially hard hit. Citigroup’s stock price is down almost 60 percent from its year ago level, corresponding to a loss of $160 billion in stock value. Merrill Lynch is down by 48 percent, which translates into a loss of $40 billion in stock value. And Countrywide Financial, the wizard of the subprime mortgage world, is down by almost 90 percent, costing shareholder more than $25 billion.

The cause of the chaos is no mystery; the housing bubble is bursting

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Last week, a New York state agency sued two payday lenders for targeting minority and military communities with short-term, high-cost loans that sometimes charge as much as 700 percent in annualized interest.  Preying on low-income individuals who may need quick cash to make ends meet, these companies offer loans against anticipated paychecks or tax refunds with rates so high that borrowers can sometimes end up in the hole after they’ve paid the interest and other fees.  While advocates have long attacked these loans as predatory, this suit marks the first time state law enforcers have sought to curb the practice through anti-discrimination laws.

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As we celebrate the life and achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I am reminded of his prescient and courageous speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at Riverside Church in Manhattan on April 4, 1967, just one year before he was assassinated.

The speech is much too rich in content, analysis, and rhetoric to summarize here, but this segment is particularly appropriate at a time when the country is sinking into recession, poverty rates are on the rise, and we are in the midst of a seemingly endless war that will cost taxpayers and our economy as a whole over $2 trillion at the least:

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The Washington Post is out Monday with an article pushing the nonsense that most of the violence in Iraq, particularly suicide bombers, was caused by foreign fighters. Karen DeYoung writes:

Based on the Sinjar records, U.S. military officials in Iraq said they now think that nine out of 10 suicide bombers have been foreigners, compared with earlier estimates of 75 percent. Similarly, they assess that 90 percent of foreign fighters entering Iraq during the one-year period ending in August came via Syria, a greater proportion than previously believed.

Although there is no way of knowing how many of the total entrants the 606 recorded individuals represent, officials said Sinjar was a primary entrance point. Its importance increased as Iraq’s Anbar province — farther south and bordering Saudi Arabia and Jordan — became more difficult for foreigners to cross.

I do not dispute that there are foreign fighters and that they have carried out suicide bombing attacks. But check out these numbers:

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Ill Doctrine offers up some thoughts from King the thinker, beyond the pop icon.

What have you been thinking about today?

Here is what he said:

"in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends."

(Ed. note: Professor Ganz has consulted for the Obama campaign.)

The recent flare-up between Senators Obama and Clinton over Martin Luther King, Jr., LBJ, and civil rights tells us less about race than it does about a different understanding of leadership and how to make enduring political change.

Clinton has for months tried to frame Obama as someone who “hopes for change” while she can “make change”. Despite all the noisy charges and countercharges these past few days, that was her point about Dr. King’s “dream” of change—that it couldn’t become “real” without a President able to “make change.”

But she misunderstands the history. The civil rights revolution represented a major mobilization of the public, starting with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, (itself encouraged by Brown v. Board of Education the year before)--and was then built by the courage, sacrifice and “good organizing” of thousands of leaders, many of whom were young people.

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An article in today's New York Times suggests that John Edwards is remaining in the presidential race because he has no "plan B" after hoping to win the race for so many years.

It's clear that he isn't going to win, and it will become more clear with each primary in the next two weeks. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't have something to say or add to the current debate.

One of the deficits of American politics is that we don't have strong social movements as the labor movement has weakened and the civil rights and women's movements are more remnants of the 1960s and early seventies and now more 'insider' than mass movements. Therefore, everything congregates around the presidential race. ( the right wing does have a strong social movement with the religious right).

We need someone to keep up the public debate about inequality and economic justice someone who doesn't occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, no matter which Democrat wins. Edwards, who has staked his reputation post-Senate on fighting poverty and inequality could assist in building that movement.

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This is a video clip of Barack Obama's speech yesterday in Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church -- Martin Luther King's church. I reflected on it here -- and despite Obama's surprising and refreshing critique of intolerance in the African-American community, I still don't like politicking from churches.

In tribute to Martin Luther King, AP's Deepti Hajela reminds us that King was reviled by many in his time -- even by some who were trying to support his cause of racial equality. He was the person running against the grain and it was hard for some of the more risk averse to support him.

Today, Martin Luther King is an icon, and his cause has become sacrosanct -- so sacrosanct sometimes that people have stopped thinking about the emerging tectonics of racial politics.

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I ranted to a "60 Minutes" producer that the campaign coverage was shallow, trivial, preoccupied with the evanescent ups and the electrifying downs, the insiders' moods, the rumors and gaffes, and incurious about the candidates' records, and the weight or weightlessness of their arguments, the truth and untruth of their claims, and seemingly indifferent to the stakes of the most consequential election on earth. "I know, I know," he said. "We talk constantly about how to do it better next time."

That was in 1980.

Seven presidentiads later, the horse race is still in play, the handicappers thrive however shoddy their records (talk about people who don't have to put their money where their mouths are!), and still more blowhards blow harder, and mainline adrenaline, and fall in and out of love like middle-schoolers, and extapolate to the moon from the most recent primaries, and trot out their new improved story lines, and pretend that they have the slightest idea what's going to happen next; and we become connoisseurs of our own bamboozlement.

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The narrative of the 2007 Democratic presidential campaign was this: Hillary Clinton declared her inevitability and focussed on the general election, whereas Barack Obama and John Edwards challenged her ownership of core Democratic constituencies that typically dominate primary voting.

But in 2008 Senator Clinton, responding principally to the Obama challenge, is focussing on the factions that vote in primaries. She has repositioned herself less as a moderate, and more as the candidate of women, liberal activists, and minorities, especially Hispanics and Latinos. To this end, she has employed Bill Clinton as her Attacker-in-Chief so as to create the highly tendentious impression that Obama is soft on women's issues and a johnny-come-lately or even an ambivalent supporter of various liberal causes, such as Social Security and universal health care. As the Bill Clinton tactics suggest and her many micro-sallies and mini-attacks against Obama make clear, Hillary Clinton is now running, as did Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, to win the primaries, but at the expense of appealing to the broader base necessary to win the general election.

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The next President of the United States -- whether it's Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, or Mitt Romney -- is going to have the crap kicked out of him or her by friends and foes around the world.

The problem is that America's mystique as a superpower was shorn off by Iraq. The US showed its limits -- militarily and I would argue economically.

Mystique is ethereal -- and comes with decades of collective assessment, and to some degree awe, by other nations that a hyper-power like the United States once "seemed to have no limits." Mystique can't be re-established by the success of "the surge" in Iraq or some military conquest or victory. Mystique, and frankly, real global power, comes from decades of being the world's constructive, deciding vote -- from being the Sandra Day O'Connor of judicious engagement in one big problem after another.

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