Richard (RJ) Eskow

Dear Self-Described "Producer": I received your hate mail this morning. Thank you for emerging from your self-creating illusion long enough to write it.. I particularly enjoyed your oblique references to the John Galt character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, who isn't acknowledged enough nowadays for his special role: Galt may be the most long-winded and incoherent crybaby in literary history.

A Missouri grand jury handed down multiple felony indictments for foreclosure fraud on Monday. That's the same kind of crime being negotiated in nationwide settlement talks with America's big banks. If people can be indicted for doing it, why should bankers be allowed to write a check and walk away?

"Robo-signing" is the nickname that's been given to the practice of hiring large groups of inexperienced workers (they called them "Burger King Kids" at JPMorgan Chase) to file false statements with local courts in order to process foreclosures. In a typical "robo-signing," someone who sign a statement testifying that they had personally reviewed documents that prove the bank has title to a home that's being foreclosed - and might do that many times every hour. That's either perjury or forgery, depending on the way in which the robo-signing was done.

Forgery and perjury are serious crimes. It's an even more serious crime to ask others to do it for you.

Banks, and some friendly and lazy journalists, were quick to dismiss the whole issue as a "paperwork problem." If robo-signing is a "paperwork problem," then the St. Valentine's Day Massacre was a "misplaced bullet problem."

The Susan G. Komen breast cancer fund reversed its Planned Parenthood action, and the right wing anti-choice politician it hired has resigned. But the real lesson of this incident is broader than one decision or one person.

Our society is permeated with a cultural of corporate greed, aggression, and power that reaches from the boardrooms of New York to the meeting rooms of Washington, and from to the hospital rooms of the sick and suffering.

The Susan G. Komen foundation has raised millions to support vitally important work, but it has also reinforced some of the worst tendencies in our society. It has leveraged big-company resources so that it could dominate its 'marketplace,' usually by serving as a marketing arm for a client list that includes some very poorly-behaved corporate citizens. Then it has used its market dominance to bully other organizations, push its own political agenda, and tried to reshape the course of US cancer research in dangerous ways.

Just like its most prominent sponsor, the Susan G. Komen foundation has become too big to fail.

Once again we're hearing that a foreclosure fraud deal is about to be announced between major banks, the US government, and most or all of the states. We've heard that before, only to have the deadline pushed back so that holdout Attorneys General can be brought on board with the agreement.

Deal, or no deal? We're not sure, but it's certainly possible we'll hear something today, tonight, or tomorrow.

How will we know if it's a good deal for the American people? After all, this is an issue with a lot of moving parts. It includes all of the states and multiple agencies within the Federal government, and involves a multitude of allegations involving several different kinds of crime that come under different jurisdictions. Even the statutes of limitations are a moving target.

That doesn't mean we don't know enough to judge the deal, if and when it's announced. There are well-established facts to guide us, and the principles involved are clear.

The reaction to January's jobs report shows how tragically our expectations have fallen, especially among some Democrats and their supporters. Their cheerleading isn't just bad policy or bad politics, although it is both of those things. It's also callous and insensitive to the misery of millions.

It's important to keep explaining what needs to be done to end that misery. To do otherwise is to serve, however unintentionally, an insidious agenda from the right that would lower our expectations until these tragic levels of unemployment are seen as the "new normal."

An increase in jobs is a good thing, of course, even if it's far from what's needed. Here's something else that was good about the report: Conservatives keep telling us that manufacturing jobs have moved offshore permanently, but 50,000 of them were created last month. Now we can put that argument to bed and can get to work creating more of them.

The Susan G. Komen foundation has reversed its defunding of Planned Parenthood, at least temporarily, but the falsehoods and hypocrisy haven't ended.

 Last week Republican Mitch Daniels once again pushed the "means testing" argument against Social Security, saying that we can no longer "afford to send millionaires pension checks" or  "pay medical bills for even the wealthiest among us."