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Big Oil`s in Good Hands with Sally Jewell
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Christina Hoff Sommers, who played a starring role in the anti-feminist backlash of the 1990s, is back again with a new edition of her book The War Against Boys. Originally subtitled  How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, it's now relabeled How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men; she now stresses–in a major New York Times op-ed (2/3/13) and a 10-minute one-on-one interview on NPR's Tell Me More (2/12/13)–that changing schools to help boys do better educationally is just a question of "basic fairness." She writes in the Times: That boys struggle with school is hardly news…. Over [...]

The New York Times reports that in the last few years, several elite U.S. universities have begun to cover sex reassignment surgery and/or hormones for transgender students. On the one hand, it's great that they're reporting news like this, and after years of extremely disrespectful coverage of transgender issues, it feels like a victory that their "balance" is limited to noting that "the idea still seems radical to plenty of people." On the other hand, not a single trans-identified person is quoted. But what I really want to highlight here is how this kind of article utterly fails to connect some [...]

Today, Representative John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) reintroduced H.R. 676, “The Expanded And Improved Medicare For All Act.” This bill would establish a privately-delivered, publicly-financed universal health care system, where physicians and non-profit health care providers would be in charge of medical decisions — not insurance companies.

H.R. 676 would expand and improve the highly popular Medicare program and provide universal access to care to all Americans. The program would be primarily funded by a modest payroll tax on employers and employees, a financial transaction tax, and higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

H.R.676 has been introduced in Congress since 2003, and has a broad base of support among universal health care activists, organized labor, physicians, nurses, and social justice organizations across the nation. The bill has been endorsed by 26 international unions, Physicians For A National Health Program, two former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, National Nurses United, the American Medical Students Association, Progressive Democrats of America, and the NAACP. Last Congress, 77 other Members in the House of Representatives signed on as cosponsors of the legislation. In 2011, the Vermont legislature passed legislation that lays the foundation for a single-payer health care system in the state.

Representative Conyers issued this statement following the release of the bill:

“I am pleased to announce the reintroduction of H.R. 676, ‘The Expanded And Improved Medicare For All Act,’ in the 113th Congress. I have introduced the bill in each Congress since 2003 and I will continue to do so until the bill is passed,” said Conyers.

“Many Americans are frustrated with high out-of-pocket costs, skyrocketing premiums, and many other serious problems that are part and parcel of a health care system dependent on private health insurance plans. H.R. 676 would reform this broken system.

“Passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was an important initial reform, which will provide health insurance to millions of our nation’s uninsured and eliminate many of the worst practices of the private health insurance industry.

“However, it is my opinion, and the belief of many leading health care practitioners and experts, that establishing a non-profit universal single-payer health care system would be the best way to effectively contain health care costs and provide quality care for all Americans. It is time for Members of Congress, health policy scholars, economists, and the medical community to begin a serious discussion of the merits of a universal single-payer health care system.”

By Lynn Parramore, senior editor at Alternet.

The GOP has plans for a comeback. But it may cost you a lot. The idea is to capitalize on recent Republican state takeovers to conduct an austerity experiment known as the new “red-state model” and prove that faulty policies can be turned into gold.

There will be smoke. There will be mirrors. And there will be a lot of ordinary people suffering needlessly in the wake of this ideological train wreck.

We already have a red-state model, and it’s called Mississippi. Or Texas. Or any number of states characterized by low public investment, worker abuse, environmental degradation, educational backwardness, high rates of unwanted pregnancy, poor health, and so on.

Now the GOP is determined to bring that horrible model to the rest of America.

In Kansas, the Wall Street Journal reports that Governor Sam Brownback is aiming to up his profile “by turning Kansas into what he calls Exhibit A for how sharp cuts in taxes and government spending can generate jobs, wean residents off public aid and spur economic growth.” In remarks quoted in the same article, Brownback announced that “My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.’ “

Brownback’s economic inspiration is Reagan-era supply-side economist Arthur Laffer and the folks at Americans for Prosperity, the conservative outfit backed by the deep coffers of the Koch brothers.

This new austerity talk focused on “fiscal innovations” is emboldening Republicans in other states that have been gerrymandered into submission to the GOP, including Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and alas, my home state of North Carolina.

Republications have been eyeing the Tar Heel state with interest due to its recent swing status in presidential elections. The state was also the target of a gerrymandering strategy that worked out wonderfully for the Republicans, but not so well for democracy. Sam Wang, the founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote recently in the New York Times about how Republican redistricting thwarted Democratic voters:

“Although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan offense, the rather asymmetrical results may surprise you….I have developed approaches to detect such shenanigans by looking only at election returns. To see how the sleuthing works, start with the naïve standard that the party that wins more than half the votes should get at least half the seats. In November, five states failed to clear even this low bar: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. … In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans — a split that occurred in less than 1 percent of simulations. If districts were drawn fairly, this lopsided discrepancy would hardly ever occur.”

The lesson of North Carolina tells you that the GOP red-state model is based, first and foremost, on efforts to flagrantly disregard the will of the people. NC’s discount-store mogul Art Pope, a longtime GOP donor and champion of free-market fundamentalism, has been appointed state budget director by the new Republican governor, Pat McCrory. In an incredible display of money buying political influence, Pope has gone well beyond his donor-counterparts in other states. Instead of just funding the politicians he wants, he has gone for direct rule by occupying government himself. Tax repeal is the centerpiece of his announced plans, but his hatred of public investment means he has much more than that in store for one of the most progressive states in the South. Pope is said to be more powerful than the governor, giving rise to the term “Pope administration” to describe the new political reality.

GOP pols are vying to out-do each other in extreme red-state programming. NC state senator Bob Rucho is pushing a plan to eliminate the state’s income taxes altogether. Such plans go hand-in-hand with calls for increasing the sales tax. Because low-income people pay a higher proportion of their income in sales taxes, abolishing income taxes and raising sales taxes shoves tax burdens onto them. Obviously, the Republicans will not give up on their passionate desire to cut taxes on the wealthy and stick it to the poor and the middle class.

Pope’s ideological opposition to public investment is ringing alarm bells. North Carolina, a state where progressives have fought conservative forces tooth and nail to achieve an enviable university system and a reputation for high-tech and research, is now in danger of being thrown into a period of regressive darkness. University of North Carolina sociologist Andrew Perrin put it this way: “Public investment is part of what has set North Carolina apart from our neighbors in the South.”

But Pope is hell-bent on turning North Carolina into Mississippi.

The GOP economic plans not only subvert common sense and the lessons of history (being played out right now in places like the U.K., where austerity has failed dramatically), they also flip a giant middle finger at the American voter. Unable to win support at the national level for their foolhardy economic programs, Republicans have turned their attention to state-level action because that’s where gerrymandering really works wonders.

Red-state model proponents claim that their maneuvers will spark economic growth. But that was basically what George W. Bush had in mind when he supported a similar program for cutting taxes on the rich. That didn’t work out so well, and increased the very deficits Republicans decry.

But here’s the really scary part. Slashing taxes, squeezing workers and throwing out environmental protections can indeed lure businesses to states where they won’t have to pay their fair share and can get away with all sorts of abuse. If a state like North Carolina promotes such policies, businesses from nearby states like Virginia may indeed move their operations down the road. Unless you believe in the “Confidence Fairy,” as Paul Krugman calls the naïve GOP faith that making everybody poorer is the way to become rich, then you know that what results is simply trade diversion, not genuine growth. In other words, one state’s gain is another state’s loss. The result is a headlong race-to-the-bottom whereby the states losing business will be pressured to slash their taxes and burden their workers and ordinary citizens, too. Nobody wins in that game — except the 1 percent.

The blue-state model, evident in high-income states like Massachusetts, has long been associated with high levels of state investments in education, transportation and other public goods. And guess what? It’s also associated with economic strength. The red-state model, on the other hand, is linked to backwardness, second-rate educational systems and economic weakness.

What the GOP wants to do is create an image-problem for blue states where taxes have been raised to balance budgets and continue vital services and jobs by crying “Look, Ma! No taxes!” in the states where they’ve taken control.

They’ll soon be able to say, “Look, Ma! No economy.”

Papacy used offshore tax havens to create an international portfolio of around 1,000 million dollars, featuring real estate in UK, France and Switzerland more... | PDA

How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini`s millions
Papacy used offshore tax havens to create an international portfolio of around 1,000 million dollars, featuring real estate in UK, France and Switzerland ...read more: MEMBERS | FREE version.

Republican leader John Boehner must have some expertise when it comes to labor economics. Either that, or the New York Times is allowing him to make misleading claims without being challenged.

Costas Lapavitsas: Lower wages, austerity, high unemployment creating situation like 1930's with a dangerous rise of the right

Stephanie Luce: Union members earn on average 27% more, yet union density drops; Obama takes labor law reform off his agenda

Patrick Bond: Mining interests are a powerful force shaping African politics

Cop-on-Cop Crime in LA: American Blowback: Dorner`s ``Last Resort`` more... | PDA

American Blowback: Chris Dorner
Cop-on-Cop Crime in LA: American Blowback: Dorner`s ``Last Resort`` ...read more: MEMBERS | FREE version.

By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. His Twitter is @ian_fraser.  [An edited version of this article was published on pages 34-35 of the Sunday Herald on February 10th, 2013].

It has been described as the biggest banking felony in history … yet no-one has been prosecuted for the Libor fixing scandal. Ian Fraser looks at the RBS sacrificial lambs.

During Royal Bank of Scotland’s IT meltdown last summer, chief executive Stephen Hester referred to the risk “that you turn over rocks and find new things [that you have to clean up].” Last Wednesday, nearly five years on from the £45.5 billion taxpayer funded rescue of the Edinburgh based lender, a vast rock was hoisted aloft by three regulators. What lurked underneath was not a pleasant sight.

In a deferred prosecution deal with the United States Department of Justice, Commodities Futures Trading Commission and the London-based Financial Services Authority, the bank admitted that between 2006 and 2010 staff based in London, Singapore, Tokyo and the US conspired to manipulate the global financial benchmark, the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) calculated in both Swiss Francs and Japanese Yen. They did this in order to make money for themselves and the bank at the expense of others. Libor is a global benchmark used to price some $300 trillion of contracts, ranging from mortgages to student loans to interest-rate swaps, calculated by averaging out submissions from up to 40 global banks

“This is the biggest scandal, the biggest anti-trust felony, in the history of the world, and it continued for years,” said Bill Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and a world leading expert on financial crime. “Even after the investigation became public knowledge, the felony continued, and it continued with greater efforts being made to cover it up, with people being instructed to no longer to use instant messages and such like in order to make it harder for the regulators.

“What is most stunning is that these traders and submitters were willing to say these things, knowing that there was a verbatim record being kept. What does that tell you not just about the institution itself, but also about the FSA and the Serious Fraud Office? That is the one of the most important and revealing fact that comes out of this. The perception inside the bank was ‘we don’t need to worry about those clowns’.”

By pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud in its Japanese arm, RBS managed to avoid having its US operations shut down by the US Department of Justice. Over and above the plea, and a two-year deferred prosecution in the United States conditional on good behaviour in that jurisdiction, RBS is paying a fine of $612m (£390m) to three regulators. “We are holding RBS accountable for a stunning abuse of trust,” said assistant US attorney general Lanny Breuer. “Our message is clear: no financial institution is above the law.”

The penalties, handed out alongside revelations of hundreds of lurid, sexist and semi-literate ‘IMs’ or instant messages in which RBS traders and managers laughed as they displayed a casual disregard for the law, were unveiled at 1pm on Wednesday. They included one from Neil Danziger, a yen foreign exchange trader, who the bank dismissed in 2011, dated 15 September 2009. Danziger celebrated one successful falsification of the Libor rate by comparing his actions to those of a hooker pulling up and down her underwear. “im [sic] like a whores drawers,” he messaged.

Two other global banks have reached settlements along similar lines over Libor crimes. UBS was fined $1.5 billion (£950m) in December, and Barclays was fined $451m (£287m) in June 2012. A further 20 or so global banks are have yet to reach settlements. In the UK they are thought to include Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC.

RBS received a heftier fine that Barclays because the bank effectively bribed interdealer brokers, including RP Martin, to persuade other banks to also misrepresent their Libor borrowing costs. The Edinburgh-based bank did this via so-called ‘wash’ trades – matching buy and sell trades placed with the same counterparty for the same amount on the same day, which earn the broker a commission, but cancel each other out.

The regulatory documents reveal how Tom Hayes, a derivatives trader at UBS who has been characterised as the “Jesse James” of the global Libor rigging scandal, and RBS’s Danziger (who worked together at RBS in 2002-03) expedited corrupt payments to brokers “to increase [their] influence over the broker firms,” the FSA said. Together Hayes and Danziger gave £211,000 in bribes to brokers, one of which was RP Martin, as part of their push to manipulate global interest rates so their own rate-related bets would come up trumps, regulators said.

“Can you do me a favor,” one broker asked Danziger on September 19, 2008, just days after the Lehman Brothers collapse. “You’re not going to get paid any bro for this and we’ll send you lunch around for the whole desk.” As the broker outlined the trade, he said “Take it from UBS, give it back to UBS. He wants to pay some bro,” referring to fees. “Yeah, yeah,” Danziger replied. Later that day, the broker asked Danziger if he could “do another 100 yards” or 100 billion, increasing the size of the transaction. “Flat switch,” the broker said. “I know I’m pushing my luck.”

Another reason RBS’s fine was marginally bigger than Barclays’s was because it allowed the Libor rigging to continue for longer, and because it failed to stamp out the wrongdoing even after FSA launched its investigation. However on the plus side, unlike Barclays and UBS, RBS’s top management was not found to have low-balled the bank’s Libor numbers in order to deceive investors about their institution’s financial health in the build up to the global financial crisis.

Since being found out by regulators, RBS’s strategy has been to blame junior and middle-ranking people for the scandal, claiming that no one at the top of the bank knew it was going on. This is surprising, given that in September 2007, the Financial Times’s Gillian Tett highlighted concerns that Libor was “a bit of a fiction” [FT 25 September 2007], and that in April 2008 the British Bankers’ Association sent a memo to ‘panel’ banks including RBS asking them to check their Libor submission processes and ensure they were “submitting honest rates” after the Wall Street Journal’s Carrick Mollenkamp highlighted “growing suspicions about Libor’s veracity” [WSJ 16 April 2008]. And the financial rewards of rigging rates were, and are, immense. For example RBS’s rates, currencies and commodities group — the one where Libor rigging and other forms of market manipulation are believed to be commonplace — saw its income rise by 87% in the half year to June 2008, at a time when the overall income RBS Global Banking and Markets fell 10%, according to the bank’s former finance director Guy Whittaker.

Some RBS traders who have been dismissed for Libor rigging argue that they are being used as scapegoats, claiming that their superiors in in GBM in London ‘condoned collusion’. In court papers filed with the Singapore High Court last year, Tan Chi Min, RBS’s ex-head of Japanese Yen interest-rate trading , declared that Libor rigging was a well-known and common practice at the bank in 2006-11. He is suing RBS for wrongful dismissal, claiming the bank condoned the practice saying: “The defendant’s [RBS] consequent internal investigations were intended to create the impression that such conduct was the conduct not of the defendant itself, but the conduct of specific employees. Tan, also known as ‘Jimmy’ Tan, worked for RBS from August 2006 to November 2011 and is claiming £1 million in bonuses and 3.3 million RBS shares.

Hayes, a former RBS trader also known as ‘Rain Man’ as a result of his reported lack of social skills, “dwarfed them all” where Libor rigging was concerned, as he “spearheaded a massive effort” to manipulate benchmark rates, according to the CTFC. On leaving RBS, Hayes, who also made massive trading profits for each subsequent employer, jumped ship to Royal Bank of Canada, then to UBS, then to Citigroup. Hayes, 33, was seen as a valuable commodity in investment banking circles due to the strength of his strong network of contacts who could help him nudge the Libor rate up and down. His pay package more than doubled from $2m to $5m  when he moved from UBS to Citi.

However, Hayes was fired by Citi in September 2010 and in December 2012 he was arrested by the Serious Fraud Office and bailed without charge. Separately, he was charged with wire fraud, price-fixing and conspiracy by the US Department of Justice. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Hayes is now ‘singing like a canary’, and seeking to prove to the authorities that Libor rigging was condoned at the highest levels at his former employers. Jennifer Arcuri, a close friend of Hayes, said he is helping police with their inquiries. “He believes he’s innocent,” Arcuri told the WSJ. She added that trying to rig Libor “was common industry practice. It was like spanking children in the 1970s – it wasn’t bad.”

On Thursday RBS said it had thrown a couple of senior people overboard, confirming that global head of treasury markets, Scott Nygaard, and global head of short-term interest-rate trading, Kevin Liddy, had gone. Nygaard was a member of the Bank of England’s money markets liaison group, set up to advise the central bank on City developments. On Wednesday the bank said that Jezri Mohideen, its head of rates trading for Europe and Asia-Pacific, and Paul Walker, head of money-markets trading, had also been dismissed. It has not clarified how much of their bonuses will be clawed back, but the UK government is determined that the RBS’s fines will come out of the bonus pot, even of workers who had nothing to do with Libor rigging. So far, RBS said that eight of the 23 individuals who appear to have been implicated in the price-fixing scam have been dismissed. Eight left before the main disciplinary process started, and six have either been disciplined or going through a disciplinary process.

Black, author of ‘The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One’ and a former senior US regulator with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Office of Thrift Supervision, believes this is wholly inadequate. “They’re talking about keeping six of the people who were part of the largest anti-trust violation in history and they’re talking about internal discipline?! This is becoming more and more like a Eugène Ionesco play. It does look as though no-one – or at least no-one senior – Is going to be prosecuted for this. It’s all being presented as if there were just a few rogues who operated for between six and ten years of rogue-dom.”

Seemingly determined to protect Hester, chancellor George  Osborne was instrumental in persuading the bank to oust its head of investment banking, John Hourican, at the same time relieving him of Hourican of some £4m in unvested bonuses. In a memo to staff, Hourican, who oversaw the division in which Libor rigging occurred from October 2008, said he bore “some responsibility for the continuing actions of all our employees” but had no knowledge or involvement in Libor rigging.

Some are questioning how long Hester can remain in post. One problem for Hester is the bank’s seeming nonchalance about Libor rigging, even three years after Hester replaced Fred Goodwin as chief executive. The FSA said that, in March 2011, RBS misled the regulator, indicating that it had put proper systems and controls in place when it had not. FSA enforcement head Tracey McDermott said: “The FSA takes it very seriously when firms tell us that they have appropriate systems but do not.” On Wednesday, Hester said the RBS board had turned down his offer to resign. “The people who sit in judgement of us can dismiss us at any time if they feel that the bad bits get to be bigger than the good bits.”

The FSA and the Serious Fraud Office are still reported to be considering prosecutions. And a spokesman for Crown Office in Edinburgh told the Sunday Herald “COPFS continues to consider all information published or received as part of its investigation into the Scottish banking sector announced last year.”

Last Wednesday’s settlement is far from being the end of RBS’s Libor woes. The bank had its London offices raided European Union in October 2011 as part of an EU inquiry into the rigging of Libor, Euribor and other alleged market abuse. The results of the Brussels-led anti-trust probe are not due until 2014. In Canada, the competition bureau is investigating RBS for alleged collusion with other banks to manipulate a number of interest rates and has subpoenaed the bank for information, but RBS is refusing to cooperate, citing data privacy laws in the UK. In Switzerland, the competition commission is investigating whether traders at 12 financial institutions including RBS rigged Libor and Tibor to manipulate “market conditions regarding derivative products based on these reference rates”. There is also a potential £15 billion damages bill arising from civil actions from investors and others who lost out as a result of the Libor manipulation, some of which were buoyed by Wednesday’s settlement. Cenkos analyst Sandy Chen said that, assuming there was just 0.05% mispricing in interbank rates over four years – much less than the 0.4% that some class action lawsuits allege – RBS could face damages of £80bn. That would mean bankruptcy.

In one of the biggest cases, the City of Baltimore has filed a class action on behalf of entities and individuals who purchased financial instruments indexed to Libor in the United States between August 2007 and May 2010. The most valuable parts of the RBS deferred prosecution agreement for these plaintiffs are the underlying documents, including details of the instant messages, according to legal experts. But to gain access to those documents, the plaintiffs may have to survive a motion to dismiss by the defendants. In the Baltimore case, a hearing on RBS’s motion to dismiss will be heard on March 5 by US District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan. William Carmody, a lawyer for the city of Baltimore, said last week he had not carefully studied RBS’s deferred prosecution agreement, but added that the statement of facts contained in it was remarkably detailed. “It’s incredibly helpful for our case,” he said.

There are further stones to turn over at RBS. One is an ongoing US Department of Justice and Federal Reserve inquiry into money laundering for rogue states by its US arm Citizens Financial, which some informed sources predict will lead to a bigger fine than Libor rigging. RBS said: “The Group is co-operating fully with these investigations. It is not possible to reliably measure what effect these investigations, any regulatory findings and any related developments may have on the Group, including the timing and amount of fines or settlements.”

Another scandal on the horizon for RBS involves the alleged manipulation of exchange rates between the Vietnamese Dong, Indonesian Rupiah and Malaysian Ringgit on the non-deliverable currency forwards (NDFs) market. These are derivatives that allow speculation in or hedging of emerging market currencies that cannot be traded directly or freely due to exchange controls. The effect of manipulation  on the performance of NDFs can be spectatular, with one trader likening it to the “financial equivalent of a cyclist on steroids.” The probe has already seen Ken Choy, a Singapore based director in RBS emerging markets foreign exchange trading unit, who was an active player in Singapore’s NDF market, put on leave, according to Bloomberg News.

Many people believe the UK government and UK authorities, together with those in the US, are being too soft on financial crimes, seeing mollycoddling miscreant financial institutions that it majority owns as more important than seeking justice. The fact that RBS’s share price rose on the day of its settlement suggests investors believe it got off lightly. Referring to the RBS deferred prosecution, Neil Barofsky, former special inspector-general of the Troubled Asset Relief Programme and author of Bailout, said: ‘It seems some banks are still too big to jail.”

In a an op-ed in the Financial Times last week, Barofsky added: “This forbearance will have potentially devastating long-term effects, as each settlement on favourable terms reinforces the perception that, for a select group of executives and institutions, crime pays. It is only rational. They know that they will get to keep all of the ill-gotten profits if they go undetected, and on the small chance that they’re caught, most probably only the shareholders will pay – and only a relatively minor fine at that. The lack of meaningful consequences for those committing these frauds encourages future fraudulent conduct. Ultimately, the financial crisis was a game of incentives gone wild, and the lack of accountability in the aftermath of the crisis has only reinforced those bad incentives.

“Breaking those incentives requires ditching the ‘Geithner doctrine’, which has led to the banks becoming even larger and more systemically significant than they were before the crisis … To reclaim our system of justice, the global threat posed by the failure of any of our largest financial institutions must be neutralised once and for all. They must be reduced in size, their safety nets must be dramatically constricted and their capital requirements enhanced far beyond the current standards. Then, and only then, can the same set of rules apply to all.”

Black said: ‘Why does RBS exist? The bank is too big to prosecute, it’s too big to run honestly, it creates enormous distortions, it’s created catastrophic harm to the British people. It should be shrunk and divided up into vastly more efficient entities. But none of that seems to be on the table. Instead we get inadequate solutions like the ‘electric ring-fence’ to separate retail and investment banking. In essence, RBS holds the British economy and the British people hostage.’

Finally, I am living up to my “please be nice, you aren’t getting much today” threat. I had competing responsibilities and couldn’t start on this till 3:30 AM, and I have to get off this Godawful sleep cycle.

Midwest Soil Could Take 2 Years to Recover from Drought AgWeb

Non-Profit Hospital Executive Salaries Continue to Defy Gravity and Logic Health Care Renewal (Francois T)

SARS-Like Virus Infecting More People Spurs Hunt for Source Bloomberg

Can computers save health care? IU research shows lower costs, better outcomes: Indiana University (Chuck L)

The astonishing ineptitude of the MRRT (updated) MacroBusiness. This is an amazing little story.

One Billion Rising – live coverage Guardian

GDP data reveal Japan mired in recession Financial Times

US banks attack Europe’s ‘Tobin Tax’ Telegraph

Euro-Area Economy Shrinks Most Since Depths of Recession Bloomberg

Scavengers Stripping Greece of Metals Greek Reporter (Lambert)

Obama’s Expanding Kill List Paul Craig Roberts (jsmith)

Pentagon Creates New Medal For Cyber, Drone Wars Associated Press

SOTU {{facepalm}} riverdaughter (Lambert)

SOTU: Obama Opens Door to Grand Betrayal Real News Network

To Reduce Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns New York Times. How many gun stories have we had before someone brings up the elephant in the room?

Lew’s Senate Finance hearing as Treasury Nominee Linda Beale. Be sure to read the bit at the end.

FreedomWorks Made Video of Fake Giant Panda Having Sex With Fake Hillary Clinton MotherJones (Richard Smith). Department of weird.

Fresh Juice Party Announces the FUBAR! Fresh Juice Party

Punishing Anti-Nuke Protesters ConsortiumNews

How Law Enforcement and Media Covered Up the Plan to Burn Christopher Dorner Alive Alternet

UPDATE: Taylor Swift Back Together With Former Flame Christopher Dorner Onion

Texas wins on housing MacroBusiness. Nothing like people who have never been to Texas or California speculating on California v. Texas real estate. I don’t know how much the rest of the state is like this (I’ve been to Dallas, Houston, and Austin, FYI), but Dallas has astonishingly expensive toll roads and disposable looking cookie cutter housing, low rise offices, and strip malls. That plus the beastly weather in the summer must explain some of the difference. (I am sure Texans who live in the more civilized spots, namely Austin, will yell at me, but I’d also pay a big premium to live in a state that isn’t full of gun fetishists).

Ben Bernanke Is Actually A Hawk Clusterstock. Clever, but I don’t think anyone is afraid of Bernanke. By contrast, everyone on Wall Street stopped what they were doing at 4:00 PM every Thursday in Volcker’s day to read the latest money supply numbers.

Affluent Americans Downbeat on Economy OnWallStreet (j33)

The Convergence of George Will and Sherrod Brown Simon Johnson, New York Times

Sorry, Economists: The Crisis is a Huge Problem for Your Discipline Unlearning Economics

The smell test for big data Cathy O’Neil

Which Consumer Financial Education Programs Are Most Effective?: Assuming a Fact Not in Evidence Lauren Willis, Credit Slips

Antidote du jour (Francois T). OMG, cute overload! I had to give you two of the four he sent:

Due to an unforeseen technical problem, we were unable to publish Pambazuka News on Thursday, January 31, 2013. The inconvenience to all our subscribers and readers is sincerely regretted. The Editors

Omoyele Sowore of SaharaTV interviews Prof. Horace Campbell on the crisis in Mali 2013-02-06 - https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/view?q=french+forces+in+Mali&uname=110842048834086824084&psc=G&filter=1#5833594904544861442The jihadists in Mali are a real threat to freedom, peace and security in the country and region. But French military intervention will not solve the problem. The regional bloc ECOWAS must take the lead in the search for a political solution.

Recent successes inspire hope 2013-02-06 - https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/view?q=african+girl+child&uname=110842048834086824084&psc=G&filter=1#5346937545901820546A world without FGM is within sight. But more efforts are needed to ensure worldwide legislation against the practice and increased education to attain that goal.

Imam Baba Leigh disappears, Ba Kawsu exiled 2013-02-06 - http://kibaaro.com/?p=3276Religious leaders and journalists are being persecuted in the Gambia under the dictatorship of President Jammeh. Yet, they have critical roles to play in cultivating a positive culture of understanding, harnessing the energies of citizens towards social and economic development in the genuine interests of the greater good