Hold Fast

It was recently announced that President Obama is going to be seeking a new top tax bracket for millionaires. As Aravosis mentioned, it is “politically quite smart to put the Republicans on the defensive regarding tax increases on the wealthy.” A higher tax rate on the people who can most afford is the best way [...]

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Above is Matt Taibbi talking with David Shuster on Countdown. But his blog post on the subject is a deeper take. This part in particular strikes me as incredibly important. In the financial press you’re called a “rogue trader” if you’re some overperspired 28 year-old newbie who bypasses internal audits and quality control to make [...]

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Matt Stoller, writing at New Deal 2.0, on the third anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy. Why should anyone think that Lehman won’t happen again? Elites have learned nothing. This was obvious during the crisis itself, when Nouriel Roubini noted the stark difference between public and private conversations: And while policy makers and regulators now claim [...]

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Michele Bachmann is starting to get some real blowback over her missteps around the HPV attack on Rick Perry. The New York Times reports: In the pugilism of this week’s Republican presidential debate, Representative Michele Bachmann seemed to have landed a clean blow against Gov. Rick Perry over an order he issued requiring Texas schoolgirls [...]

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Apparently a UBS trader lost $2 billion in unauthorized trades and lost a ton of money for the Swiss bank. When UBS found out, they sought to have him arrested and brought to justice. UBS uncovered the trading losses on Wednesday and called the London police and financial regulators at 1 a.m. on Thursday. Mr. [...]

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Via John Aravosis, Democratic uber-strategist James Carville thinks President Obama should start panicking, fire lots of advisers, make a consistently strong case “like a Democrat,” and, most importantly in my book, start prosecuting Wall Street crooks. Carville writes: Indict people. There are certain people in American finance who haven’t been held responsible for utterly ruining [...]

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Maybe, according to the Wall Street Journal: “As the president has consistently said, he does not believe that Social Security is a driver of our near- and medium-term deficits,” White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said in a statement. Changing the inflation formula so Social Security benefits grow more slowly and raising the Medicare eligibility age [...]

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The Financial Times reports that President Obama is going to propose cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security as part of his deficit reduction proposal. Barack Obama is expected to lay out a plan next week that would cut several hundred billion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, the large government healthcare schemes for the elderly [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson has written a very powerful letter to Iowa AG Tom Miller, NY AG Eric Schneiderman and an associate AG at the Department of Justice stating where she stands on the fifty forty-five state robosigning settlement talks with the nation’s five largest banks. In it, she calls [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog A rare moment of political integrity emerges from the Super Congress process, thanks to Senator John Kerry: “I’m not meeting with a lot of lobbyists; I’m meeting with people I choose to meet with, who can inform me, assist in the process of crunching numbers and dealing with consequences, and so [...]

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