Blog Archive: January, 2012

On Dec. 18, a dozen retirees, men and women in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, began occupying a median strip along Route 33 in front of the closed Century Aluminum smelter in Ravenswood, W.Va. In tents and under tarps, a small group stays overnight, despite hypertension, arthritis and other old age ailments. more »

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On the menu this morning:

• MORNING MESSAGE: China Cheats—Push May Come To Shove
• Trade Battles with China
• Florida Vote: From SuperPACs to Super Crash
• More Mortgage Fraud Settlement Fears
• Freddie Mac's Bets against Homeowners
• Unemployment Compensation Fight
• Breakfast Sides

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China cheats – it openly flouts trade laws – and routinely denies it. It restricts access to its markets, forces companies that want to sell in China to transfer technology and manufacture there, and then often steals the technology. It purposefully underprices its currency to keep the down the price of its exports. more »

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This is the audio clip of an interview I did for The Breakdown this weekend with journalist and author Michael Hudson, who did a terrific piece on GE Capital's mortgage crisis called more »

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Last week the political world was all agog over Ryan Lizza's New Yorker article about the administration in which he revealed that after three long years of GOP obstruction the president resigned himself to the fact that post-partisanship wasn't going to work out. It may have shifted something fundamental --- for the first time people in the Village are questioning whether their beloved bipartisanship is the only way the government can function.

Lizza reminds people that Obama had always held a starry-eyed view of the various divides in the American political culture (a concern that was so aggressively attacked by his supporters in the 2008 race that those of us who raised it were left with permanent scars from the experience.) Indeed, in this respect, Lizza's analysis seems stale to me --- it's just that it apparently took four years for it to be allowed to be aired publicly. Still, it's an important piece of political journalism that may turn out to be politically significant: more »

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The statue of Civil War General James B. McPherson, which sits in the center of the square in downtown D.C. that bears his name, was used by Occupy D.C. protesters today as the center pole for a "tent of dreams," in rebellion against a National Park Service bar against sleeping in the park.

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At the risk of repeating myself, my response to the Romney campaign staffer who summed up the Florida primary by saying "It's about destroying Gingrich," is the same as my response to Sarah Palin's claim that the "liberal media" and "the establishment" were out to destroy Newt Gingrich: Nobody needs to lift a finger to destroy Newt. All you have to do is sit back, give him room, and let him do it himself.

In fact, Newt's accomplishing his own destruction just by his dogged determination to stay in the race all the way to convention, and he's threatening to take his party down with him.

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President Obama has proposed a specific new minimum tax rate for millionaires. Should America's rich feel angry or relieved? We check the IRS tax data archives for an answer.

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Originally published at Capital Gains and Games

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I'm a middle-aged, middle-class PTA dad who participates in Occupy DC because I want a better country for our kids.

On Sunday, the National Park Service brutally tased a peaceful, young Occupy DC demonstrator. This was a prelude to their threatened crackdown of Occupy DC today at noon.

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