Using Potter’s indisputable logic, it’s hard not to see something obscene in how Wall Street reaped massive profits and bonuses in 2009 — and continues to do so, as is clear from Monday’s announcement by Citigroup that it had earned $4.4 billion in the first quarter of 2010, which was even more than earned by Bank of America ($3.2 billion) and JPMorgan Chase ($3.3 billion) in the same period — merely 18 months after trillions of dollars of American taxpayers’ treasure was used to save a financial system brought to the precipice by Wall Street’s greed and irresponsible risk-taking. Goldman Sachs, which is facing a civil fraud suit filed by Washington regulators, is expected to report robust earnings Tuesday morning as well.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES:   You’re Welcome, Wall Street – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

“Salaam aleikum,” he said, offering the traditional Arabic greeting “Peace be upon you” at the start of his Cairo speech last year.

The address of the first American president with Muslim roots was a bravura attempt to leech out the poison between the Islamic and Western worlds, and revive the moribund Middle East peace talks. But now, many disillusioned Muslims are echoing the all-talk, no-action refrain first popularized by the woman who became secretary of state.

“He said all the right words in his speech,” said Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister. “But the implementation took traditional roads.”

Privately, other highly placed princes in the family oil business groused louder. “Things are worse now than before,” asserted one, “because our hopes were so high after Cairo.”

Actually, the president didn’t say all the right words in his speech. He created an obstacle for himself by demanding that Israel stop expanding settlements when it was not going to do so — even though it should — and when that wasn’t the most important condition to Arabs.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Op-Ed Columnist – Arabia – Inshallah, Obama – NYTimes.com.

Henderson is not alone. Workers in our corporate state earn little when they work—Henderson made $18 an hour—and they are abandoned when they can no longer contribute to corporate profits. It is the ethic of the free market. It is the cost of unfettered capitalism. And it is plunging tens of millions of discarded workers into a collective misery and rage that is beginning to manifest itself in a dangerous right-wing backlash.

“This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company vehicles,” Henderson, a 40-year-old military veteran, told me. “My foot is destroyed. I have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008 FedEx said I had to come back to work and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers’ compensation payments. I worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They washed their hands of me and none of this was my fault.”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK TO TRUTHDIG: Chris Hedges: Boycott FedEx – Chris Hedges’ Columns – Truthdig.

The answer given for decades, from the national to the local level, from Democrats and Republicans, is that education prepares the young for the world of work and enables the nation to maintain global economic pre-eminence. There is an occasional nod to the civic purpose of schooling in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, but that goal pales next to the economic justification.

To be sure, economic prosperity has long provided a potent incentive to fund and improve schools in the United States, but it is only one of multiple goals of education in a democracy. The architects of public education knew this. In a landmark report to the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1848, state Secretary of Education Horace Mann did make the economic argument—original at the time—that education is the great equalizer, fostering social mobility and national prosperity. But this economic goal was embedded in a celebration of the physical, intellectual, civic and moral goals of schooling.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR TRUTHDIG: Mike Rose: Race to the Top of What? Education Is About More Than Jobs – Truthdig.

Challenges of historic import threaten America’s future. Action on the deficit, economy, energy, health care and much more is imperative, yet our legislative institutions fail to act. Congress must be reformed.

There are many causes for the dysfunction: strident partisanship, unyielding ideology, a corrosive system of campaign financing, gerrymandering of House districts, endless filibusters, holds on executive appointees in the Senate, dwindling social interaction between senators of opposing parties and a caucus system that promotes party unity at the expense of bipartisan consensus.

Many good people serve in Congress. They are patriotic, hard-working and devoted to the public good as they see it, but the institutional and cultural impediments to change frustrate the intentions of these well-meaning people as rarely before. It was not always thus.

While romanticizing the Senate of yore would be a mistake, it was certainly better in my father’s time. My father, Birch Bayh, represented Indiana in the Senate from 1963 to 1981. A progressive, he nonetheless enjoyed many friendships with moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats.

FOR CONTINUATIN OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: Op-Ed Contributor – Why I’m Leaving the Senate – NYTimes.com.

One year ago today the Democrats forced a huge, bloated, pork-barrel spending bill through Congress that they called an “economic stimulus.” When the legislation was conceived they thought it would sail through with 75 or 80 votes in the U.S. Senate. Instead the American people rose up, took to the streets, and protested. President Obama went back out on the campaign trail and spent his then-considerable political capital to get his stimulus bill passed.

In the end, the Democratic Congress, aided by three Republicans–Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and the now-former Republican Arlen Specter, squeaked through a bill hated by the American people. President Obama and Congressional Democrats claimed their bill would save our economy. A year later the verdict is clear: Obama and the Democrats were wrong, and the American people were right.

Many of the claimed jobs “created or saved” (an inherently dishonest construct, since no matter how bad the employment situation is you can always claim to have saved it from being even worse still) were in fictitious congressional districts, and reports of fraud and abuse are piling up. While the White House claims a different inflated number of “jobs created or saved” or now simply points to “jobs funded” just about every day, the overall numbers tell the story. When President Obama signed the bill, the unemployment rate was at 7.6 percent, and the president promised it would never go above 8 percent. Instead we’ve spent much of the past year with unemployment hovering above 10 percent. The current rate sits just below that level at 9.7 percent.

Retiring Democratic Senator Evan Bayh spoke the plain truth on Monday when he said: “If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR FOX NEWS: FOXNews.com – Please, Mr. President, No More Stimulus!.

The Department of Energy recently proposed $36 billion in new federal loan guarantees on top of $18.5 billion already budgeted – for a total of $54.5 billion. That’s enough to help fund six or seven new power plants.

It’s a full-speed nuclear-power gambit that many say is largely a bid to win votes from pro-nuclear senators for legislation to address climate change. But his strategy is generating a firestorm of opposition, amid warnings that much more is at stake than a political calculus.

From environmentalists to fiscal hawks to nuclear security experts, the Obama plan is sparking near-open revolt. The nuclear-power expansion is not accompanied by any plan to store commercial radioactive waste, they note, and includes a new push by the Department of Energy into spent-fuel reprocessing and small “pocket nuke” reactor research, which they see as a proliferation risk. The Obama nuclear policy is at cross purposes to his nonproliferation goals, they add, and might even cement his energy legacy as the president who revived a moribund industry that hadn’t built a nuclear plant in decades because of the financial, environmental, and security risks involved.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Obama’s nuclear power policy: a study in contradictions? / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com.

Neither is entirely fair. Still, when Mr. Biden claims success for a victory won by a surge he and Barack Obama opposed, you wonder what he’s up to. When this same genius is then dispatched to counter Mr. Cheney on the weekend talk shows, you wonder what the administration is up to.

Start with Mr. Biden’s first whopper: telling CNN’s Larry King last week that “one of the great achievements of this administration” may well be a democratic Iraq. “You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”

Now, many have jumped on Mr. Biden for claiming this as an Obama achievement. Perhaps more striking, however, is that the same Iraqi government that so impresses him today is something he once declared impossible.

That was back during a Democratic presidential debate in 2007, when Mr. Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos it was a “fundamental strategic mistake” to believe “there is any possibility in the lifetime of anyone here of having the Iraqis get together, have a unity government in Baghdad that pulls the country together. That will not happen, George.”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: William McGurn: Biden’s Diversion Strategy – WSJ.com.

Thursday was particuarly puzzling for Reid-watchers. Did the Senate have a bipartisan deal on a jobs bill, or not? Depends on what time during the day you asked the question. First Max Baucus and Charles Grassley rolled out a compromise package, followed quickly by statements of praise from key Republicans and even the White House. And then, within a matter of hours, Reid calmly knocked down the whole house of cards, dismissing a bill that many Senators thought he’d already signed off on.

So is Reid playing offense? “Senate Democrats scrapped a bipartisan jobs bill in favor of one they say is leaner and focused solely on putting Americans back to work, and they’re all but daring Republicans to vote against it,” the Associated Press reports. Or is the Nevadan just sowing confusion? “Reid led colleagues and the White House to believe he supported a bipartisan jobs bill — only to scuttle the plan as soon as it was released Thursday over concerns it could be used to batter Democratic incumbents, according to Senate sources,” Politico writes. Reid’s move, according to the New York Times, “caught some lawmakers by surprise and threatened to undermine Republican support for the proposal even as members of Congress and the White House sought ways of working together across party lines after months of deep partisan division.”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST: 44 – Harry Reid’s jobs strategy a puzzle.

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, FT.com / Comment / Analysis – America: A fearsome foursome.