Hold Fast

Last week I wrote about the smear campaign that’s revving up against New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Now Schneiderman is facing intense pressure from the Obama administration to drop his objections to a bad settlement with Wall Street around the foreclosure crisis. Gretchen Morgenson reports: In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog. The relationships between progressive House Democrats and the administration seems somewhat strained. Jim McGovern (MA-3): “We need to get the focus back on jobs,” said McGovern. “Here we are at the end of August, and Congress hasn’t done anything about jobs.”McGovern voted “no” on the debt ceiling compromise, calling is “a [...]

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David Bromwich of TomDispatch has a long, thoughtful piece about the many disturbing places where the Obama administration has either directly continued or expanded upon policies with regard to war, surveillance, and government fealty to private corporations that were once considered unspeakably bad unto evil or unAmerican. While they policies have not improved with age [...]

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In The Nation, Dana Goldstein has a really great review of Steven Brill’s new book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools. Brill has historically been a big supporter of Michelle Rhee and other education activists whose reforms always seem to center around busting teacher’s unions. Goldstein spends much of the review pointing [...]

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Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has an explosive look at how the SEC has been routinely destroying evidence of financial crimes by Wall Street. Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records – “including case files relating to preliminary investigations” – are supposed to [...]

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Pretty remarkable report from PBS.

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Following his op-ed on Monday in the New York Times, which called for taxing the rich at an undisclosed higher rate than what we currently have, Warren Buffett was held out as a great hero – a traitor to his class and a rare American who actually believed we should tax rich people. While I [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog. Eliot Spitzer has a piece in Slate wherein he offers advice to the President about how to reduce unemployment and fix the housing market. On housing, Spitzer writes: The administration, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, should insist that banks, in return for all the taxpayer subsidies they have gotten and [...]

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This is a great video of striking Verizon workers speaking about why they’re out on strike and what the strike means to them. It’s clear that these are smart, savvy, informed union members. The workers in this video are just a few of the 45,000+ Verizon workers of the CWA and IBEW who are out [...]

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Over at Naked Capitalism, Matt Stoller has a piece pointing out that for nine months the press has been reporting an imminent settlement between the banking industry and the fifty state attorneys general lead by Iowa’s Tom Miller regarding robosigning and fraudulent securitization, despite this settlement never coming. Stoller writes: And so, the moral of [...]

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