The plan to save the middle class & trim the deficit

It's budget time again in Washington. Ryan and company want to cut - cut - cut. Is this what's best for the economy?

We'll talk to Congressman Mark Pocan (D-WI, 2nd District) about the progressive plan to save the middle class AND trim the deficit.

The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann on RT TV & FSTV "live" 7pm and 9pm check www.thomhartmann.com/tv for local listings.

Fox News VERY Upset That The Economy Is Recovering

By T. Steelman

Meanwhile, in Foxland, the conservatives who run the PR branch of the Republican party are busily building fantasy castles in the sky… As we have always suspected, the folks over at Fox “News” are not only ignoring the stock market’s several-day record-setting numbers, they are actively naysaying any recovery news.

Frequent Fox guest Caroline Heldman of Occidental College, appearing on Rev. Al Sharpton’s Politics Nation show Tuesday night, went so far as to say:

“I have never met a group of people who are so upset that the economy is rebounding than the folks over at Fox.

That’s right, among the lies they tell themselves (and their viewers) is that the stock market’s recent surge is unimportant. Sean Hannity, on whose show Heldman was appearing Monday night to talk about the recovery, was so upset he lost his head. In trying to make his point that the stock market boom was not a sign of recovery, he actually asked – rhetorically, of course, as he doesn’t really give a damn – “those people on food stamps, are they investing in the stock market?” Heldman replied that she was “impressed” that Hannity was concerned about the poor. With a healthy dose of sarcasm, one notes.

When she appeared on Rev. Sharpton’s show she was spot on with her analysis of the recovery, noting that this insistence upon denial could actually harm the recovery. She went on to say:

“I think that Sean Hannity is a perfectly likeable person. I happen to know that he tips 100% in his private life. I just wish that his public stances and the stances of Republicans didn’t go after the poor, the elderly, kids – with Pell Grant cuts, Medicaid cuts, job training cuts. You really do have to put your money where your mouth is.”

Well, that’s as may be. I’m not one to judge a person by only one aspect, that being the public face they turn to the world, but Sean Hannity has shown himself to be uncaring and cold when it comes to people not like him. That is to say: white, male, hetero and rich. As for his tipping well… I saw a few comments indicating that may not be completely true and even so, the only thing it really is, is a sign of insecurity and a need to impress. Since he claims to be a Christian, I will go by John’s “actions not words” yardstick. By that measure, Hannity falls far short.

Here’s video of Heldman’s appearnace on Politics Nation:

Scott Prouty - The man behind the 47% video

Scott Prouty, a bartender working during the Mitt Romney fundraiser, talks to Ed Schultz about why he’s coming forward about filming Mitt Romney making the “47%” statement, which changed the conversation during the 2012 elections.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Brooklyn protests over teen killed by NYPD reflect the complete lack of trust between the police and the community

Cenk Uygur talks with Michael Skolnik, GlobalGrind.com editor-in-chief, about how a Brooklyn vigil honoring 16-year-old Kimani Gray turned into a protest. Gray was shot and killed by undercover New York City detectives. Skolnik attended the protest, and he says major news reports calling participants thugs who turned violent is disrespectful.

“There were a lot of young people who were there … who were exercising their constitutional right to peacefully protest and assemble against the 67th precinct, who they think is responsible for killing their friend.”

Skolnik says that both Gray’s death and the resulting protest show that there’s no trust between New York City’s minority residents and the police force.

The Quickest, Easiest Destruction of a Conservative Pundit You'll See Today

Posted by Rude One

Tucker Carlson - that bow-tie wearing cockhole, one of the most purely stupid "thinkers" the right has produced in the last twenty years, belonging to the decent-face, dim-brain species that includes S.E. Cupp and Ben Domenech - now prances and preens with his internet concern, The Daily Caller, which is sort of like Huffington Post except with less side-boob and more full-on boob obsession.

Lately, The DC (see? Isn't that clever?) has been hawking the "story" of how Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez might have hired prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. The Washington Post did some, you know, reporting and discovered that one of the prostitutes was hired to read a script on video and lie to incriminate Menendez. The DC accused the Post of talking to "the wrong prostitute." Carlson himself spoke to the Post's Erik Wemple to say that the newspaper was wrong and Carlson's website's story was right. Wemple helpfully points out another part of the Post's story: "FBI agents conducting interviews in the Dominican Republic have found no evidence to back up the tipster’s allegations."

Today, we are not concerned with Menendez. No, today we are concerned with Tucker Carlson and the way that conservative allegations on anything skeevy that a Democrat may or may not have done automatically become articles of faith around the right-wing biosphere.

For we can take Carlson apart so easily on this matter it barely requires more than a Google search of "Tucker Carlson" and "David Vitter." In case the kids out there don't remember, Vitter is the Republicans senator from Louisiana who frequented prostitutes in New Orleans. He got reelected in 2010, post-scandal, precisely because conservatives like Carlson decided that, when it comes to their own, who gives a happy monkey fuck what they do, as long as they toe the ideological line.

In fact, let's let Carlson speak for himself, as he did on his then-MSNBC show Tucker, on July 11, 2007. It is an object lesson in how repulsive this bottom-feeding scum worm actually is. Remember: Vitter wasn't "accused" of whoring it up. He did it. And, believe it or not, even in New Orleans, that's illegal. Carlson, talking to Michael Rectenwald, the head of some fucking organization that released the names of public figures who visited the brothel of a certain madam, actually said, "How could you justify doing something like this? Why is it your business?"

Remember, again: Vitter, a Senator, broke the law. "I don‘t remember David Vitter making any case that people who frequent prostitutes ought to be punished more severely than they are," Carlson offered.

Remember, one more time: Carlson acknowledges that Vitter had sex with prostitutes, which is against the law. But still he could say, "I don‘t know anything about you other than you are holding up this guy‘s sex life to public ridicule. And you ought to be ashamed of yourself."

Now, all that is fine and dandy. We could stop there, having shown that Carlson is a hypocrite, of course, of course. But let's nail this coffin shut and toss it in the ocean with Carlson still alive inside. Let's show the true depths of delusion, the miasma of hypocrisy in which the right wallows.

Tucker Carlson, whose internet news outlet is unrelentingly pursuing Bob Menendez on whether or not he had sex with prostitutes, who proclaimed that David Vitter's actual sex with prostitutes was off-limits for discussion, said on July 11, 2007, on a program that bore his first name, "If this were [Democrat] Russ Feingold...I would be up there making the same argument that Russ Feingold's personal [life] ought to be off limits from creeps and scandal mongers like you...who profit from digging into other people's sex lives."

Annnd...scene.

Krugman To Obama: Stop Listening To The GOP, It’s The Economy, Not The Deficit, Stupid

By Egberto Willies

The President has fallen into the Republican trap: a false narrative that the biggest crises facing America are our national debt and our budget deficits.

Middle Class and Poor America must be climbing the walls. President Barack Obama ran a middle class centric campaign and won handily, and added to the Senate and the House.  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s policies were soundly rejected. President Obama’s 2nd Inaugural Speech gave the impression that he would be presenting his version of FDR’s 2nd Bill Of Rights.

Instead, the president has fallen into the Republican trap: a false narrative that the biggest crises facing America are our national debt and our budget deficits. In fact, neither of these are insurmountable, nor do they need to be tackled now. The results of attempting austerity and debt reduction during recessions are clear. The United Kingdom and European Union countries that attempted this have depressed their economies further.

When one focuses on numbers and not emotions, clarity comes quickly. Paul Krugman’s New York Times article “Dwindling Deficit Disorder” needs to be read by our President. He should also pass it on to every Congressman and Senator.

Krugman states:

For three years and more, policy debate in Washington has been dominated by warnings about the dangers of budget deficits. A few lonely economists have tried from the beginning to point out that this fixation is all wrong, that deficit spending is actually appropriate in a depressed economy. But even though the deficit scolds have been wrong about everything so far — where are the soaring interest rates we were promised? — protests that we are having the wrong conversation have consistently fallen on deaf ears.

The fact that Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman along with economists like Joseph Stiglitz’ numbers and predictions over the years have been spot on while those “sanctioned” by Wall Street  (e.g., Peter Morici) have been steadily wrong speaks poorly of the media’s reporting and politician’s honesty or at best their knowledge.

Krugman continues explaining the realities of “public debt management”:

People still talk as if the deficit were exploding, as if the United States budget were on an unsustainable path; in fact, the deficit is falling more rapidly than it has for generations, it is already down to sustainable levels, and it is too small given the state of the economy.

Bear in mind that the budget doesn’t have to be balanced to put us on a fiscally sustainable path; all we need is a deficit small enough that debt grows more slowly than the economy. To take the classic example, America never did pay off the debt from World War II — in fact, our debt doubled in the 30 years that followed the war. But debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell by three-quarters over the same period.

Yes, we’ll want to reduce deficits once the economy recovers, and there are gratifying signs that a solid recovery is finally under way. But unemployment, especially long-term unemployment, is still unacceptably high. “The boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity,” John Maynard Keynes declared many years ago. He was right — all you have to do is look at Europe to see the disastrous effects of austerity on weak economies. And this is still nothing like a boom.

Krugman acknowledges the structural problems that must be addressed with an aging population in the long term (but first, we need to assure a robust recovery).

There are, of course, longer-term fiscal issues: rising health costs and an aging population will put the budget under growing pressure over the course of the 2020s. But I have yet to see any coherent explanation of why these longer-run concerns should determine budget policy right now. And as I said, given the needs of the economy, the deficit is currently too small.

Krugman acknowledges that many are using the fear of the debt and deficit as an excuse to dismantle the social safety net:

Now, I’m aware that the facts about our dwindling deficit are unwelcome in many quarters. Fiscal fearmongering is a major industry inside the Beltway, especially among those looking for excuses to do what they really want, namely dismantle Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. People whose careers are heavily invested in the deficit-scold industry don’t want to let evidence undermine their scare tactics; as the deficit dwindles, we’re sure to encounter a blizzard of bogus numbers purporting to show that we’re still in some kind of fiscal crisis.

He finishes with the reality that must be broadcast loudly and often throughout the country.

The deficit is indeed dwindling, and the case for making the deficit a central policy concern, which was never very strong given low borrowing costs and high unemployment, has now completely vanished.

Many get upset when the President is accused of not leading. Most people who have made that accusation were rarely friends of the middle class, the poor, or of this President. The President has now been re-elected by a substantial margin. The policies he ran on are what most Americans want. These are not policies that can be considered the tyranny of the majority that need protection from Senate filibusters and obstructionists Republicans in the House (e.g., the majority pilfering the wealthy minority, the majority taking away rights of the minority). After-all, the converse is true.

With that said one must admit that if the debate is on the debt and deficits and not what ails the economy, the middle class, the poor, the students, the veterans, etc., then it is fact that the President is not using his bully pulpit to lead and to educate. It is true that the Right Wing echo chamber has polluted the body politic with misinformation as Krugman so aptly states. It is the President’s duty to now to begin the real fight against the damage inflicted on America by the Right. He is not leading on this issue. He has no more elections to be concerned about. It is time for him to pull his Party kicking and screaming if necessary to do the right thing.

• No cuts to Social Security. Raise the cap to ensure that the wealthy pays in more.
• Reform Medicare to prevent drug companies, hospitals, and specialists from pilfering the country’s coffers.
• Tax capital gains at the same rate as working people’s income.
• Remove all corporate tax breaks for companies that offshore and outsource American jobs.

This is not a tax the rich scheme. There are policies that acknowledge the structural income and wealth disparity built into our form of capitalism that can only be mitigated through policies that act as a damper to a structural defect. Is a teacher or professor worth orders of magnitude less than the broker or banker she taught? I cover much of this in my book “As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom”.

In 2011 when the discussion focused solely on the debt and deficits, it took the emergence of Occupy Wall Street to change the narrative. Income inequality and wealth disparity entered the lexicon. After an election where middle class, income, and wealth was likely uttered more than in the last 30+ years, it is incumbent that the President, his Party, the middle class, and the poor do not allow Republicans to change the narrative for their ultimate goal of destroying America’s social safety net. It may take a new Occupy style movement to peacefully march on the streets with resolve to demand that their will is effected.

Dick Cheney's Epic Fail

Maureen Dowd/Repent, Dick Cheney

Vice comes clean: He was the real president, and he stands by all of his mistakes

March 7, 2013 12:24 am

By Maureen Dowd

Dick Cheney certainly gives certainty a black eye.

In a documentary soon to appear on Showtime, "The World According to Dick Cheney," America's most powerful and destructive vice president woos history by growling yet again that he was right and everyone else was wrong.

R.J. Cutler, who has done documentaries on the Clinton campaign war room and Anna Wintour's Vogue war paint room, now chronicles Mr. Cheney's war boom.

"If I had to do it over again," the 72-year-old says chillingly of his reign of error, "I'd do it over in a minute."

Mr. Cheney, who came from a family of Wyoming Democrats, says his conservative bent was strengthened watching the anti-Vietnam War protests at the University of Wisconsin, where he was pursuing a doctorate and dodging the draft.

"I can remember the mime troupe meeting there and the guys that ran around in white sheets with the entrails of pigs, dripping blood," he said. Maybe if he'd paid more attention to the actual war, conducted with a phony casus belli in a country where we did not understand the culture, he wouldn't have propelled America into two more Vietnams.

The documentary doesn't get to the dark heart of the matter about the man with the new heart.

Did he change, after the shock to his body of so many heart procedures and the shock to his mind of 9/11? Or was he the same person, patiently playing the courtier, once code-named "Backseat" by the Secret Service, until he found the perfect oblivious frontman who would allow him to unleash his harebrained, dictatorial impulses?

Talking to Mr. Cutler in his deep headmaster's monotone, Mr. Cheney dispenses with the fig leaf of "we." He no longer feigns deference to W., whom he now disdains for favoring Condi over him in the second term and for not pardoning "Cheney's Cheney," Scooter Libby.

"I had a job to do," he said.

Continuing: "I got on the telephone with the president, who was in Florida, and told him not to be at one location where we could both be taken out." Mr. Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynn left on a helicopter for a secure undisclosed location, leaving Washington in a bleak, scared silence, with no one reassuring the nation in those first terrifying hours.

"I gave the instructions that we'd authorize our pilots to take it out," he says, referring to the jet headed to Washington that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. He adds: "After I'd given the order, it was pretty quiet. Everybody had heard it, and it was obviously a significant moment."

This guy makes Al Haig look like a shrinking violet.

When they testified together before the 9/11 Commission, W. and Mr. Cheney kept up a pretense that in a previous call, the president had authorized the vice president to give a shoot-down order if needed. But the commission found "no documentary evidence for this call."

In his memoir, W. described feeling "blindsided" again and again. In this film, the blindsider is the eminence grise who was supposed to shore up the untested president. The documentary reveals the Iago lengths that Mr. Cheney went to in order to manipulate the unprepared Junior Bush. Vice had learned turf fighting from a maniacal master of the art, his mentor Donald Rumsfeld.

When he was supposed to be vetting vice presidential candidates, Mr. Cheney was actually demanding so much material from them that there was always something to pick on. He filled W.'s head with stories about conflicts between presidents and vice presidents sparked by the vice president's ambition, while protesting that he himself did not want the job.

In an unorthodox move, he ran the transition, hiring all his people, including Bush Senior's nemesis, Rummy, and sloughing off the Friends of George; then he gave himself an all-access pass.

He was always goosing up W.'s insecurities so he could take advantage of them. To make his crazy and appallingly costly detour from Osama to Saddam by cherry-picking his fake case for invading Iraq, he played on W.'s fear of being lampooned as a wimp, as his father had been.

But after Vice kept W. out of the loop on the Justice Department's rebellion against Mr. Cheney's illegal warrantless domestic spying program, the relationship was ruptured. It was too late to rein in the feverish vice president, except to tell him he couldn't bomb a nuclear plant in the Syrian desert.

"Condi was on the wrong side of all those issues," Mr. Cheney rumbled to Cutler.

Mr. Cheney still hearts waterboarding. "Are you going to trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your honor?" he asked, his voice dripping with contempt.

"I don't lie awake at night thinking, gee, what are they going to say about me?" he sums up.

They're going to say you were a misguided powermonger who, in a paranoid spasm, led this nation into an unthinkable calamity. Sleep on that.

We have no business raising the retirement age for Medicare or Social Security

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, joins Cenk Uygur from Washington to discuss whether it’s likely that President Obama will cut Social Security and Medicare. “I want to trust the President mostly on this, but I also draw some lines too,” Brown says. “We have no business raising the retirement age for Medicare or Social Security. That’s a red line for me.”

Bob Ney attacks John Boehner

Former Ohio congressman Bob Ney is a convicted felon who is blowing the whistle on John Boehner's past. Ed Schultz spoke to Ney on his radio show today, and he spilled the beans on Boehner's relationships with special interest groups and more.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bill O’Reilly Screams ‘Bullshit’ At Alan Colmes, Apologizes

By David Pakman

It’s been a while since David Pakman’s had an O’Reilly segment, so here’s a clip from the “O’Reilly Factor” with Bill O’Reilly shouting down Alan Colmes. In this classic Fox News maneuver, the talk show host challenged his guest to identify any spending cuts that Barack Obama has made to government programs, then shouted the hapless guest down when he attempted to answer the question.

Colmes kept trying to say “Medicare and Medicaid,” but O’Reilly kept screaming at him and even yelled “Bull Shit!”

The next day, O’Reilly issued a standard non-apology … but only for saying a bad word, not for abusing his guests. But that’s okay, the event was pre-taped and obviously staged: O’Reilly and Colmes are obviously quite comfortable and friendly with each other.

60,000 Federal Workers Furloughed

By Alan Colmes

The workers are responsible for securing borders and facilitating trade.

Customs and Border Protection said it expects furloughs and other austerity will cause delays at ports of entry, including international arrivals at airports, and reduce the number of border patrol officers on duty at any one time.

David Aguilar, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said it must cut about $754 million by September 30, the end of the fiscal year.

It aims to reach that goal through agency-wide furloughs, a hiring freeze, and reducing or eliminating overtime, compensatory time, travel and training.

God of War: Ascension: Trial of the Gods on PS3 Revealed

By PS3 News

Sony Level Designer Andrew Chrysafidis in Santa Monica has revealed some fresh God of War: Ascension: Trial of the Gods PS3 videos today.

Below are the details, to quote: With less than a week until God of War: Ascension launches, it's time to drop the curtain on our fourth Multiplayer mode, Trial of the Gods, and our next God allegiance reveal - the Lord of the Sea, Poseidon.

In Trial of the Gods, the first two-player God of War co-op time trial mode, you and a friend will tag-team with your Champions to face five increasingly hard waves of mythological beasts, whilst surviving against the hourglass of Olympus.

Over 15 types of enemies await you, including Satyrs, Cerberuses, Cyclopes, Gorgons, Juggernauts, and more deadly creatures. You will start with a set amount of time on the clock, and win time back with every beast you slay.

Decimate a wave and you will be granted a Bonus Time Tiered Award (gold, silver, or bronze) based on how fast you cleared the wave. If you die or run out of time, you'll have to start over again. If you reach the end of the fifth round, an epic boss awaits.

At launch, Trial of the Gods will be available in the following maps: Desert of Lost Souls, Forum of Hercules, and Rotunda of Olympus, with more arenas planned for later!

With Trial of the Gods, we wanted to help bridge the single player and multiplayer experience, giving players a chance to work on their skill-set and gain valuable experience points with a friend, before jumping into the competitive arena.

Playing Trial of the Gods is also a great way to grind some extra experience between competitive games, test newly acquired weapons and abilities, or even try a new allegiance. Any experience gained in Trial of the Gods will go towards upgrading your Champions across the entire multiplayer experience.

What happens if you don't have a friend to play co-op with, or you don't want to team up with a stranger? No worries - you can play Trial of the Gods solo too!

God of the Sea and brother to Zeus, Poseidon's realm is almost as great as the sky itself, and his power is second only to Zeus because of it. Poseidon grants his loyal sentinels unique support capabilities: a large pool of health, the ability to fortify allies, and command over water and ice.

Unleash freezing attacks to obliterate an enemy's defense and agility or boost your own team's elemental defense and health. The wise warrior knows how to control a large area of space and can keep multiple enemies at a distance. For more on aligning with Lord Poseidon, check out his strategic profile in our God section at GodofWar.com.

Finally, if you have yet to pre-order God of War: Ascension, this video may put you over the edge. For the first time ever, King Leonidas will be brought to life in God of War: Ascension Multiplayer as depicted by Gerard Butler in "300".

If you pre-order either the standard or Collector's Edtion, exclusively at Gamestop, you will receive a voucher to access history's most heroic Spartan.

Whether you pre-order at Gamestop, or any retailer supporting our programs (such as Best Buy or Amazon), you will also receive our Mythological Heroes Pack. You will adorn the armor of four of the most legendary heroes in Greek Mythology - Perseus, Orion, Odysseus, and Achilles.

Click here to check out the Mythological Heroes gameplay trailer, then pre-order in the final hours you have left to ensure you get this content!

Is America Ready For Another Bush? I say HELL NO!

Jeb Bush was coy about his desire to run for president, but he made a real splash reversing his position on immigration and moving to the right. Ed Schultz talks to Florida Democratic Party Chair Mitch Ceasar, Bloomberg View's Jonathan Alter and author Jim Moore about the reality of another Bush presidency.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bill Maher Presents His Thoughtful Sequester Solutions

Mitt Romney Breaks His Silence

Mitt Romney gives his first post-election interview, and wastes no time attacking President Obama's leadership skills over the sequester. Ed Schultz talks with Democratic strategists Tara Dowdell and Chris Kofinis as well as Republican strategist Susan del Percio about Romney's comments, the state of the Republican Party, and where things are heading.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Stunning List of Economists, Financial Experts and Bankers Say We Need to Break Up the Big Banks

Posted on March 1, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Top Economists and Financial Experts Say We Must Break Up the Giant Banks

The following top economists and financial experts believe that the economy cannot recover unless the big, insolvent banks are broken up in an orderly fashion:

• Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz

• Nobel prize-winning economist, Ed Prescott

• Nobel prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman

• Former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan

• Former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker

• Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich

• Current Vice Chair and director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – and former 20-year President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City – Thomas Hoenig (and see this)

• Chief Stability Officer at the Bank of England, Andrew Haldane (and see this and this)

• Former Federal Reserve Bank of New York economist and Salomon Brothers vice chairman, Henry Kaufman

• Dean and professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, R. Glenn Hubbard

• Former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, Simon Johnson (and see this)

• President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Richard Fisher (and see this)

• President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Thomas Bullard

• Deputy Treasury Secretary, Neal S. Wolin

• The Congressional panel overseeing the bailout (and see this)

• The former head of the FDIC, Sheila Bair

• The head of the Bank of England, Mervyn King

• The Bank of International Settlements (the “Central Banks’ Central Bank”)

• The International Monetary Fund

• The leading monetary economist and co-author with Milton Friedman of the leading treatise on the Great Depression, Anna Schwartz

• Economics professor and senior regulator during the S & L crisis, William K. Black

• Leading British economist, John Kay

• Economics professor, Nouriel Roubini

• Economist, Marc Faber

• Professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the Chicago Booth School of Business, Luigi Zingales

• Economics professor, Thomas F. Cooley

• Economist Dean Baker

• Economist Arnold Kling

• Chairman of the Commons Treasury, John McFall

• The Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Harvey Rosenblum

• Director, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, and Professor of Economics, University of Bonn, Martin Hellwig

And the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank – and former Goldman Sachs chief economist – William Dudley says that we should not tolerate a financial system in which certain financial institutions are deemed to be too big to fail.

Federal Reserve Board governor Daniel Tarullo also backs a cap on the size of banks, and Former Treasury secretary under Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Nicolas Brady, says that we need to put a cap on leverage.

Top Bankers Call for Big Banks to Be Broken Up

While you might assume that bankers themselves don’t want the giant banks to be broken up, many are in fact calling for a break up, including:

• Former Citi CEO Sandy Weill

• Former Citi CEO John Reed

• Former Citi chairman Richard Parsons

• Former Merrill Lynch chairman and CEO David Komansky

• Former Morgan Stanley CEO Philip Purcell

• Former managing director of Goldman Sachs – and head of the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London- Nomi Prins

• Numerous other bankers within the mega-banks (see this, for example)

• Founder and chairman of Signature Bank, Scott Shay

• Former Natwest and Schroders investment banker, Philip Augar

• The President of the Independent Community Bankers of America, Camden Fine

Indeed, a bipartisan consensus is forming regarding the need to break up the big banks. Click here for background on why so many top bankers, economists, financial experts and politicians say that the big banks should be broken up.

Here's Who Is Really to Blame for Sequestration

By Molly Ball

Don't look at Obama or Republicans in Congress. The failure of the bipartisan "supercommittee" 15 months ago created the current mess.

Reuters

Patty Murray. Jon Kyl. Max Baucus. Rob Portman. John Kerry. Pat Toomey.

These six senators from both parties, along with six members of the House of Representatives, are the people to blame for the sequestration cuts scheduled to hit the federal budget beginning Friday. And yet in the energetic round of finger-pointing that has consumed Washington in recent days, their names have hardly been mentioned.

They are the former members of the so-called "supercommittee" -- the bipartisan crew that, back in 2011, was given four months to propose $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. It was their failure to come together that created the current mess. Today, Republicans are focused on pinning sequestration on President Obama, who came up with the idea, while Obama has pointed the finger at Congress, which voted for it on an overwhelming, bipartisan basis. But that's silly. Nobody who "agreed" to sequestration actually wanted it to happen. In classic Washington fashion, they thought they could assign the hard work to somebody else and get them to do it. They were wrong.

The supercommittee was supposed to forge the deal that Obama and House Speaker John Boehner could not in their July 2011 debt-ceiling talks. It was this hypothetical future deficit reduction that got Republicans, grudgingly, to agree to raise the debt limit.

Sequestration -- automatic cuts to defense and discretionary spending -- was to be the punishment if the supercommittee could not come up with a plan. The cuts were designed to be as clumsy and inflexible as possible, in order to motivate lawmakers to come up with a better approach. That's why agency heads have very little discretion on which programs are hit by the cuts: They were designed to inflict maximum suffering on both parties' priorities, with little wiggle room to mitigate the pain. Republicans would be motivated to compromise to keep defense spending from being axed, while Democrats would come to the table to protect domestic programs.

That was the stick, but there was also a carrot: The supercommittee had enormous power. Whatever deal it produced would go directly to the floor of the House and Senate, ineligible for filibuster or amendment.

And so, in September 2011, the supercommittee held its first and only formal meeting. (It would also hold four public hearings, but most of its business was conducted behind the scenes.) The six senators (two of whom, Kyl and Kerry, have since left the Senate) and six representatives (Xavier Becerra, Jeb Hensarling, Jim Clyburn, Fred Upton, Chris Van Hollen, and Dave Camp) had been chosen by the Republican and Democratic leaders of their respective houses of Congress.

At first, there were glimmers of hope. As recounted in Politico's excellent supercommittee postmortem, there were private, bipartisan meetings between Baucus and Camp, who chair the Senate and House tax committees, respectively; Kerry and Portman went on bike rides and tried till the bitter end to work out a compromise.

But it didn't take long for the two sides to realize there was little middle ground between their irreconcilable positions. Republicans wouldn't raise taxes, and Democrats wouldn't cut entitlements. Each side offered what it saw as concessions -- Republicans proposing modest revenue increases from tax reform, Democrats offering trims to Medicare and Medicaid. But each side saw the other's idea of "compromise" as laughably insufficient.

By about a week before the November 23 deadline, it was clear that there was no deal to be had. Members left town for Thanksgiving, and their staffs spent the final days, pathetically enough, discussing "how the panel should publicly admit that lawmakers could not meet their mandate of shaving $1.2 trillion from the federal debt." Even on that, naturally, they couldn't agree: The Republicans wanted to release a printed statement from the committee's co-chairs, Murray and Hensarling, while Democrats wanted them to give the statement in person.

Why did the supercommittee fail so miserably, and what lessons can we draw from it for the current stalemate, which is really the same stalemate 15 months later?

First and foremost, the supercommittee seems to prove that romantic notions of legislative dealmaking are misplaced, and Obama's deficiencies as a horse-trader, significant as they may be, aren't principally to blame for the ongoing standoff. There's been a welter of punditry of late pining for the days of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill, or even Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich - swashbuckling pols who were willing to take political risks to make big things happen. If only Obama had that ability and willingness to drive a bargain and bend the other side to his will, this line of thinking goes, things might be different.

But the supercommittee was made up of some of Congress's biggest dealmakers. As the Washington Post's Paul Kane noted:

There are at least a half dozen folks on this panel that either have a history of working on big deals, or they sorta grew into that role in this process. Max Baucus, Rob Portman, Dave Camp, John Kerry, Chris Van Hollen -- that was a core group of folks that are serious about legislating. Or, in Kerry's case, have clearly grown into the role during these talks, despite this not being his area of expertise (that being foreign affairs). There was a core here that should have been able to get this done.

In a priceless scene from the Politico tick-tock, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and former Senator Chris Dodd made a pilgrimage to the burial plot of Ted Kennedy, where "Dodd poured some whiskey on Kennedy's grave while Reid recited a prayer." But even this shamanistic conjuring of the spirit of deals past couldn't make the supercommittee magic happen.

In the end, nobody could agree, and nobody took the deadline very seriously anyway. Sound familiar?

Hannity Stops Interview After A Brutal Ass Kicking By Keith Ellison

Rep. Keith Ellison hammers Sean Hannity: You’re a shill for the Republican Party

By Eric W. Dolan
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 22:44 EST

 

 

Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota ripped into Fox News host Sean Hannity during a tense interview on Tuesday night.

Hannity began his segment by claiming President Barack Obama was to blame for looming across-the-budget cuts known as the sequester. The conservative Fox News host insisted the President was “fear-mongering” about the consequences of the cuts and played an irreverent mash-up of Obama’s recent speeches.

“You’re the worst excuse for a journalist I’ve ever seen,” Ellison said after being introduced.

Hannity asked for Ellison to repeat himself, claiming he couldn’t hear him. Instead, Ellison continued to blast Hannity, saying his mash-up was deceptive “yellow journalism” and a “breach of every journalistic ethic I know of.” Ellison told Hannity he was a “shill for the Republican Party,” but Hannity repeatedly insisted he was a “registered conservative.”

“Keep going, keep ranting,” Hannity said.

Ellision said it was wrong for Hannity to blame Obama for the sequester. The across-the-board
spending cuts were part of a political deal to raise the federal debt ceiling in 2011. The sequester was intended to be so painful that it would force Republicans and Democrats to compromise on a plan to reduce the federal deficit. Ellison noted a so-called “super committee” that was supposed to hash out a deal had failed and blamed the failure on Republicans’ stubborn opposition to raising taxes.

The two men continued to exchange barbs. Eventually, Hannity asked Ellison about the “immoral” debt.

“You’re immoral,” Ellison replied. “You say things that aren’t true.”

 

Watch video, courtesy of Fox News, below:

The Sequester – How Obama Outfoxed The Entire GOP Leadership

By Nathaniel Downes

The hot buzz word in DC today is “Sequester.” From the lunchroom to the floor of the Senate, everybody is talking about it. And the pressure is on to resolve it.

Obama has nothing to lose in the sequester negotiations. He gave the GOP everything they asked for, and have been asking for in their rhetoric for years. You ask an average Republican voter, they demand to slash government spending. The Sequester is just what they’ve been asking for, and now they are fighting it tooth and nail.

What happened? Simple, Obama, along with the Democrats, stopped being the enablers. Without the Democratic Party being responsible adults, the Republican policies would result in a complete federal government shutdown. So, the Democratic Party, lead by Obama, simply decided on giving the GOP exactly what they wanted, and stepped back to let them deal with the mess.

Confused as to how the Democrats were enablers? Lawrence O’Donnell explains how this setup works here:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Republicans have been given everything they have ever wanted. They now have the across the board budget slashing that they have campaigned on since Newt Gingrich took power in 1994.

They expect the Democrats to bail them out again after running up the nation’s credit card. And now Obama and the Democrats say “No deal.” This is putting an incredible amount of pressure on the Republican party, more than they’ve ever faced before. That Obama already got the tax increases he demanded. Obama knows, if the Republicans don’t cave, they will suffer from the public backlash.

The sequester was their idea, now they are panicking because it is looming. They assumed they could get their way, that the Democratic Party would save their hide while they go back to their tired old talking points and strategies. Now they are being forced to actually participate in politics, that being the party of “NO” means that they are the ones who are wearing the emperors new clothes.

Obama is letting the pressure of the sequester settle in, and force the existing divisions within the Republican party to the surface. Already the GOP’s civil war is forcing serious divides to settle in and become wedges. The division is exposing how fragile the GOP’s coalition truly is. Being built not on responsible governance, but on radical ideology, it could not stand on its own, only in opposition to some outside force. For decades, that outside force had been the Democrats, who predictably enabled the GOP radicalism by being the responsible party. Obama simply took away that opposition, and gave them the very thing they have been demanding, and now tells them to solve the mess they made.

Obama is the adult in the room, dealing with a Republican congress who are now, for the first time since Newt Gingrich reshaped them in the 1990′s, being forced to pay the piper. Governing is hard, it requires compromise, and responsibility. The Republican Party has been given a free pass from responsibility for too long.

And the piper is standing there, holding out his hand for the promised payment.

---

Nathaniel Downes is the son of a former state representative of New Hampshire, now living in Seattle Washington. Feel free to follow Nathaniel Downes on Facebook.

Land Grab Cheats North Dakota Tribes Out of $1 Billion

Fort Berthold in North Dakota

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica

Native Americans on an oil-rich North Dakota reservation have been cheated out of more than $1 billion by schemes to buy drilling rights for lowball prices, a flurry of recent lawsuits assert. And, the suits claim, the federal government facilitated the alleged swindle by failing in its legal obligation to ensure the tribes got a fair deal.

This is a story as old as America itself, given a new twist by fracking and the boom that technology has sparked in North Dakota oil country. Since the late 1800's, the U.S. government has appropriated much of the original tribal lands associated with the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota for railroads and white homesteaders. A devastating blow was delivered when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River in 1953, flooding more than 150,000 acres at the heart of the remaining reservation. Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes — the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara — were forced out of the fertile valley and up into the arid and barren surrounding hills, where they live now.

But that last-resort land turns out to hold a wealth of oil, because it sits on the Bakken Shale, widely believed to be one of the world's largest deposits of crude. Until recently, that oil was difficult to extract, but hydraulic fracturing, combined with the ability to drill a well sideways underground, can tap it. The result, according to several senior tribal members and lawsuits filed last November and early this year in federal and state courts, has been a land grab involving everyone from tribal leaders accused of enriching themselves at the expense of their people, to oil speculators, to a New York hedge fund, to the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The rush to get access to oil on tribal lands is part of the oil industry's larger push to secure drilling rights across the United States. Recent estimates show that the U.S. contains vast quantities of oil and gas. As fracking has opened new fields to drilling, and the U.S. has striven to get more of its energy from within its borders, leases from Louisiana to Pennsylvania have been gobbled up. Now the pressure is increasing on one of the last sizeable holdouts — lands owned by Native Americans.

A review of tribal and federal records as well as lawsuit documents reveals a dizzying array of lowball, non-competitive deals brokered by numerous companies, often entwined with the tribal council and with individual landholders on the reservation. But at heart the alleged practices are simple: Tribal leaders and outsiders set up companies to buy drilling rights cheap and flip them later for spectacular profits — in one case earning as much as a 200-fold return in just four years.
"Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost," said Tex Hall, the current chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, in an interview. "It's just a huge loss and we'll never get it back."

At the center of that particular alleged scheme, according to one of the suits, was Spencer Wilkinson, Jr., longtime manager of 4 Bears Casino, a time-worn warehouse of slot machines, swirling cigarette smoke and stained carpets that serves as the reservation's entertainment nexus and its financial hub. Wilkinson also sat on the board of the tribe's development corporation, where he was charged with finding new opportunities to enhance the economy of the reservation.

According to interviews with tribal members, former employees of the Three Affiliated Tribes, and a class action lawsuit filed in federal district court in Bismarck, ND against Wilkinson and others, Wilkinson used his access to casino funds — and to the development corporation — to gain influence and craft an oil deal that would leave him one of the richest men on the reservation.

In 2006 he became an owner of a company, Dakota-3, with Richard Woodward, a white consultant who, records show, was receiving more than $20,000 a month from tribal funds for his work at the development corporation. Together, the suit and other legal filings allege, Wilkinson and Woodward planned to raise money and buy up rights to much of the remaining land not yet slated for drilling, all the while maintaining their work with the tribes and employing Wilkinson's relationship with the council to help get the oil leases approved.

Leases for oil rights generally work like this: A company purchases the right to drill for oil underneath an acre of land by paying a one-time upfront payment, called a bonus, and a percentage of the profits earned on the well, known as a royalty. On Indian lands additional laws also apply, dictating who can negotiate for whom and how the government has to oversee the agreements.

Wilkinson declined to comment and Woodward could not be reached. Wilkinson has filed a motion to dismiss the case. The suit alleges that Wilkinson and others aided and abetted the U.S. government in failing to fulfill its fiduciary responsibility to the tribes; Wilkinson's motion argues, among other things, that the government had no such responsibility. Woodward has not yet filed a response to the suit in court.

Many details of Dakota-3's deals remain murky. There is limited transparency into tribal government affairs, no public access to documents, no annual reporting on accounts, and limited communication about what tribal council members discuss in their meetings.

But, according to separate lawsuits and records filed with the North Dakota Secretary of State, Dakota-3 partnered with an Oklahoma-based oil speculator named Robert Zinke and his company Zenergy to buy leases and form additional joint venture companies. Documents from two law suits mention the involvement of the New York based hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management Group but do not specify the firm's role. The hedge fund is publicly traded and, according to its web site, has more than $33 billion under management.

A spokesman for Och-Ziff declined to comment, and Zinke did not return a telephone message.
The interlinked companies, the documents show, purchased drilling rights to some 42,500 acres of lands owned by individuals and families through dozens of separate small deals. Those rights were ultimately controlled by Dakota-3, which also purchased from the tribal council drilling rights to another 44,000 acres of lands managed by the council. Altogether, Dakota-3 accumulated rights to about a fifth of the 420,000-odd acres of leasable land on the reservation, having bought much of those rights for as little as $50 per acre and royalties of around 18 percent. At about the same time, records and interviews show, other companies were purchasing drilling rights to land on and near the reservation for $300 to $1,000 per acre plus royalties as high as 22.5 percent.

One of the lawsuits alleges that the difference in the one-time bonus payments, plus the difference in royalty payments, "could mean billions of dollars" over the life of the oil field.

In late 2010, an Oklahoma-based oil production company, Williams, bought Dakota-3 for $925 million. At the time of the purchase, Dakota-3 was pumping a small amount of oil, but the bulk of its assets were the drilling rights. Two lawsuits allege that by buying Dakota-3, Williams effectively paid more than $10,000 per acre for those rights — as much as 200 times what Dakota-3 had paid for the leases.

At issue is not just the question of how Dakota-3 managed to win the tribal council's approval for the deal, but whether the federal government should have stepped in to ensure that the tribes were paid higher rates.

Reservation lands are still held in trust by the U.S. government. As a trustee, the Department of the Interior has responsibility for overseeing the development of oil and gas on tribal lands, and for ensuring that any leases or sales of that land are made in "the best interest" of the Native Americans.

When it comes to leases to drill for oil — even those negotiated directly between the tribal council and the oil industry — the Bureau of Indian Affairs is required to make sure the leases meet this standard.

The bureau did not respond to a list of written questions, but according to interviews and documents obtained by ProPublica, the bureau approved the leases even though some Interior Department staffers expressed misgivings. Other documents show that tribal members appealed to high-level Interior Department officials and others to reject the leases and step in on their behalf.

"Mr. Secretary, this company, Dakota-3, like the other companies in the oil business will turn around and sell the lease," wrote Russell Mason Sr., a tribal elder, to the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in a December, 2007 letter. "We are making a plea to you that you exercise your trust responsibilities."

"The United States has uniformly failed in its duties to the Indian landowners," states one lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. that was brought by tribal landowners seeking restitution for the Dakota-3 leases sold to Williams.

The Dakota-3 deals are not the only controversial ones. For example, a company called Black Rock Resources purchased drilling rights to about 12,800 acres of land for $35 per acre and a 16.7 percent royalty. It later sold those rights to Marathon Oil for about $42 million, according to financial documents that describe the deal.

Messages left for multiple Black Rock Resources officials were not returned, and Marathon Oil did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs approved the Black Rock deal, and documents obtained by ProPublica reveal the sometimes-contradictory advice the Bureau of Indian Affairs received from its own staff and other federal officials.

When Black Rock first offered to buy up reservation leases for $35 per acre beginning in 2005, some bureau staff justified the rates saying the cumbersome regulations and past problems with leasing on the reservation had driven down demand. "Unfortunately," wrote one staffer in a department letter, $35 per acre "is what the market will bear."

But in a review dated November, 2005, an expert at the Bureau of Land Management wrote that the offered price "appears to look low compared to those offered recently at both BLM and North Dakota State competitive oil and gas lease sales in the area." He cited other sales that same month for as much as $370 an acre. An Interior Department lawyer in Washington sent a letter to North Dakota BIA officials expressing similar concerns.

Even at the time, the tribe received higher offers. Jerry Nagel is a tribe member, businessman and former program analyst for the tribe who has been outspoken against leases he thought were being sold for too little. In an interview, he said that he financed a venture in 2006 that offered the tribe $140 per acre plus a royalty rate more than twice as high as the tribal council was offered for the big leases it ultimately signed. It's unclear why the tribal council didn't take that offer, but Nagel claims it's evidence that the council gave preferential treatment to certain suitors.

The tribal council's office did not immediately respond to questions about why the council passed over Nagel's offer.

Kyle Baker is a tribe member, geologist and former environment official for minerals and energy for the tribe. He said that his family struck deals to lease its acreage on and near the reservation for as much as $700 per acre around the same time as the Black Rock deal.

"Companies will come and find your weaknesses and then drive themselves in," Baker said on a recent wintery morning in his living room overlooking Lake Sakakawea. "Our laws, our setup wasn't ready for it."

Companies and the U.S. government have long known that the Ft. Berthold reservation lay in the heart of the oil-rich Williston Basin, a reserve thought by some to contain as much as 20 billion barrels of oil. But previous efforts to lease and drill on the Indian lands stalled in the 1970s, and again in the late 1990s, thwarted by a dense bureaucracy and a tangle of laws governing leasing on reservations.

Only after the advent of modern fracking — and after Congress passed a handful of laws to ease corporate access to the Ft Berthold reservation — did companies begin to invest seriously in drilling there.

Today it's estimated that the three tribes and individual Native American landholders are receiving some $50 to $80 million a year from the drilling leases and royalties, compared with revenues of about $5 million a year before the boom began in about 2006.

But that money has brought allegations of sweetheart arrangements that have left a few tribal members with disproportionate profits from oil development.

In 2011 a team of elders audited the tribal council's activities. They found widespread financial inconsistencies that they said indicated systemic misconduct. "We saw millions of dollars going out and hardly anything coming back" to the Three Affiliated Tribes, said Tony Foote a forensic auditor who chaired the team. "We're not just talking about cash. It's rooms, food, travel, donations, and there's only a handful of people that can get all this stuff."

Hall, the tribes' current chairman, had previously held that post from 1998 until 2006. He didn't deny that there had been corruption, but he said that since he came back into office in 2010 he has focused on reform and on making sure that the oil revenues benefit the broader tribal community. He said he has formed tribal entities to directly control a pipeline and refinery project, set up a $100 million trust fund for the tribes, and begun to sign lease agreements that are more favorable to the Native Americans on the reservation. He also demoted Wilkinson, who is now an administrative officer at the casino, not its CEO.

"I was called back because people were concerned about sweetheart deals, so we have totally changed the dynamic," he said.