tdog

It seems almost inevitable that as the perceived economic benefits of free trade collapse, more countries have started slapping up protectionisht measures, such as tariffs. As WaPo’s piece notes, increased tariff activity (such as the United States’s Smoot-Hawley tariffs) are widely blamed for exacerbating the Great Depression… and so… here we go again. In some sense, we have no one to blame but ourselves for not pushing harder to get the “Doha Round” of international free trade talks through, largely by not making it worthwhile enough for developing countries (and because of our, and Europe’s, insistence on coddling our already...

Glenn Greenwald hits a walk-off grand-slam with this piece, critical of Beltway NEO-CONventional wisdom that “oh, we’ll all have the vapors should law-breaking by those in the highest circles of power actually be punished.” The specific target of Glenn’s baseball bat is Ruth Marcus of WaPo, and her justification of Ronald Reagan’s pardon of Watergate’s then still unknown “Deep Throat,” Deputy FBI Director Mark Felt, for illegal wiretapping and surveillance of dirty hippies and others on Nixon’s enemies’ list. Marcus’s case is that there is some kind of a delicate balance between national security and upholding the law, and that...

Our post title, widely attributable to William Gladstone (though some say to William Penn) takes on a special resonance today, as in the Guantanamo litigation, which, after some men have been in what has been determined to be unlawful American detention for nearly seven years, the very, very first GTMO detainees released pursuant to court order (a pathetic total of three men) reached their home country of Bosnia. To be honest, I write this post more in sorrow than in anger. As the Bush Administration comes to an end, only the most hardened dead enders have anything to say in...

The Federal Reserve cut a key interest rate to its lowest level ever, in turn prompting a one day stock market rally. Specifically: The central bank cut its target for the federal funds rate, at which banks lend to each other, from 1 percent to a target range of 0 percent to 0.25 percent, the lowest rate on record. Although the Fed has no more room to reduce the interest rate — it has been cut 10 times in 15 months — the bank’s leaders said in a statement that they would use “all available tools” to bolster the economy....

Our friends at Media Matters for America nail it with their take on the sudden media feeding frenzy of baseless attempts to tie Pres.-elect Obama to some wrongdoing in the current Gov. Blagojevich scandal. In short, after eight years of pretty much ignoring official malfeasance and private corruption at a level so obscene that it has brought our nation’s financial and moral standing to their breaking points, the (as always subservient to their corporate masters) media has reverted to its beloved story-line of “the Democrats must have done something wrong… because, well they must have“. We’ll overlook the seemingly obvious...

The (domestic) auto industry has clearly been investing in stupid things over the years, such as lobbyists to insist on not raising the auto fleet mileage averages (so-called “CAFE” standards) which would have, over the course of time, resulted in our nation being virtually free of the need to import foreign oil by now… instead, electing to go the opposite way so they could sell more SUVs. They could have instead used their once considerable clout to lobby for socialized medicine national single-payer health care and improved pensions, to relieve them of those crushing obligations. They could have made vehicles...

Are we talking about Henry II “musing” out loud directly resulting the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Beckett… ? Or are we talking about former SecDef Rumsfeld (interviewed here (!)]… who is now the subject of a “better late than never” (no, actually, IMHO, better never than late… because this sort of thing allows members of Congress the pretense of misrepresenting that they are anything other than a bunch of self-serving corporate-teat-sucking whores with less courage than the average coward)… Where was I… oh yes… the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report blaming detainee abuses on Rumsfeld. Holy crap! YOU...

How many times are we going to have to see that overbearing show-boating prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald bear down on a probably innocent person for some technicality? He did it with Martha Stewart while in New York’s United States Attorney’s office. He did it with that nice Scooter Libby (the President had to correct his overbearingness and commute Scooter’s sentence, and probably pardon Scooter outright in a few weeks) and now, he does it with that nice Governor Rod Blagojevich (Crook-IL). Near as I can tell, Blagojevich’s “crime” was the excessive use of salty language. But I’m sorry: if you can’t...

And so the Soviet show trials Guantanamo military commissions proceed, with their buttoned-down motto being “expect the unexpected”… after the Pentagon went through the trouble of lotterying off seats for families of 9-11 victims at the show trial commission hearing of KSM and a total of 5 of the alleged masterminds of the 9-11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammad and the other defendants offered to plead guilty. KSM and the others are isolated from all the other prisoners, but despite being so bad that he and some others were admittedly waterboarded (the only actual acknowledged torture committed by the United States),...

That would be the Sam Zell owned (via leveraged buy-out) Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, which amidst the rapid decline in advertising revenue caused by the current Depression economic recession along with the high debt payments resulting from the leveraged buy-out, has hired legal and investment banking advisors to consider a possible bankruptcy filing. Query when the Trib Co. will send its executives to Washington in their corporate jets to ask Congress for a bailout of its own… ? The dead-tree newspaper business has been under assault for years now from the internet;...