arianna huffington

Arianna Huffington is calling attention to “the great budget battle of 2011,” between the President and the Republicans. She correctly points out that whichever of the two sides win, we, the people, lose. more »

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President Obama's Department of Justice announced last week that there would be no indictments in the collapse of AIG, an event which led to a worldwide economic collapse and cost the American taxpayer trillions. As someone who once worked for AIG I was shocked, but apparently that's how this mystery ends: Hundreds of millions of victims, smoking guns in every room, and not a perp to be found anywhere.

Yves Smith is disappointed that PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the auditors who signed off on AIG's financial claims despite mounds of disturbing evidence, escaped serious legal scrutiny. She observes that our "Potemkin" financial reform (her word) won't remove the barriers that prosecutors face in pursuing secondary parties like auditors (although I believe the Supreme Court ruling she cited only addressed civil suits.) Not only is the auditor protected, but that allows the fraudster himself to use the defense that he kept his auditor informed - kind of like Bush and Cheney using John Yoo's legal opinion to inoculate themselves from criminal prosecution.

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At what point does "bipartisanship" begin to erode the democratic process?

Here's my answer: When it's used to take decision-making power away from voters and place it in the hands of a governing elite - an elite which acts in secret so that its members cannot be held accountable to anyone for their actions.

Democrats traded away some of the most critical elements of health reform for bipartisan comity that never appeared - and yet didn't bring those elements back when the other side of the aisle rebuffed them. Now they appear to be doing the same thing with financial reform. more »

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