Republican Moron of the Week Sen. Mike Lee Calls Child Labor Laws Unconstitutional

Republican Moron of the Week Sen. Mike Lee Calls Child Labor Laws Unconstitutional

Last week, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) posted a lecture on his YouTube channel where he explains in great detail his views on the Constitution. As part of the lecture, which is essentially a lengthy defense of his radical tenther interpretation of the Constitution, Lee claims that federal child labor laws are unconstitutional:

    Congress decided it wanted to prohibit [child labor], so it passed a law—no more child labor. The Supreme Court heard a challenge to that and the Supreme Court decided a case in 1918 called Hammer v. Dagenhardt. In that case, the Supreme Court acknowledged something very interesting — that, as reprehensible as child labor is, and as much as it ought to be abandoned — that’s something that has to be done by state legislators, not by Members of Congress. [...]

    This may sound harsh, but it was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh. Not because we like harshness for the sake of harshness, but because we like a clean division of power, so that everybody understands whose job it is to regulate what.

    Now, we got rid of child labor, notwithstanding this case. So the entire world did not implode as a result of that ruling.


Lee’s call for a return to failed constitutional vision that spawned the Great Depression is obviously wrong. The Constitution gives Congress the power “[t]o regulate commerce…among the several states,” and to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” this power to regulate commerce. Even ultraconservative Justice Antonin Scalia agrees that these powers give Congress broad authority to regulate “economic activity” such as hiring and firing. Which explains why the Supreme Court unanimously overruled Hammer v. Daggenhardt in a 1941 decision called United States v. Darby.

Moreover, Lee is simply wrong to claim that child labor magically disappeared after the Supreme Court rendered Congress powerless to prevent it. The reason why exploitative child labor has largely disappeared is because Congress placed very strict limits on child labor when it enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and the constitutional cloud over this law was removed three years later when the Court overruled Lee’s pet decision.

Child labor laws are also only one of many essential protections that would evaporate in Mike Lee’s America. The same legal theory Lee uses to impugn child labor laws applies equally to the federal minimum wage and the ban on whites-only lunch counters. And Lee doesn’t even stop there. In a subsequent section of the lecture, Lee attacks President Franklin Roosevelt for calling for the federal government to provide “a decent retirement plan” and “health care” because “the Constitution doesn’t give Congress any of those powers.”

So Lee wouldn’t just remove the most basic protections against child sweatshops, he would also eliminate Social Security and Medicare.

Lee does think the federal government should have the last word on what a woman does with her own uterus. His views of the Constitution seem to rest solely on whatever mood he happens to be in or what satisfies his agenda.

Wingnut Blogger Jim Hoft Mistakes Closed Caption for Applause Prompt at Tucson Memorial. Jim never read a lie about Democrats did would not push. It must be painful to be so possessed by hate and stupidity. Another Jimmy boy plot also spoiled by reality - Shameless: Jim Hoft Falls For Fake Facebook Profile In Attempt To Link Loughner To Obama

Conservative Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Proves He is an Idiot Incapable of Governing

Conservative Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Proves He is an Idiot Incapable of Governing

Wisconsin’s new Republican Governor Scott Walker has rushed to make hay out of the Illinois Assembly’s decision to raise individual and corporate tax rates, urging Illinois residents and businesses to move to Wisconsin. But, ironically, Illinois residents who move to Wisconsin should bank on paying higher taxes.

Conservatives like Walker have insisted on using the figure that Illinois is increasing taxes by a whopping 66 percent. While this is factually accurate, it’s misleading as it makes the tax increase seem much bigger than it actually is. Illinois tax rates will only go from 3 to 5 percent (hence 66 percent increase), representing a total increase in tax rates of just 2 percent. This will allow Illinois to solve a massive $15 billion budget deficit without gutting state programs. But even with this increase, tax rates for individuals will still be lower than in Wisconsin. Wisconsin has different tax brackets; the lowest income rate if you make over $11,000 is 6.15 percent. The highest rate is 7.75 percent. Bloomberg noted this yesterday:

    Absent from Walker’s sales pitch was the fact that Wisconsin’s top income tax rates remain higher than Illinois even under the increase … Walker hasn’t yet proposed lowering the state’s income or corporate tax rates.

But this didn’t stop Fox New host Neil Cavuto yesterday from insisting that Illinois is experiencing a “tax storm.” Nor did it stop Walker from calling on Illinois residents to “escape to Wisconsin”:

    CAVUTO: That storm [blizzard in the northeast] is nothing compared to this one – a tax storm and in Illinois a big one. Democratic Governor Pat Quinn is set to sign a 66 percent hike in the state’s income tax… Governor, what do you make of this?

    WALKER: Well I got a simple message… I pulled this out of the archives, we used to have this for tourism, its a bumper sticker that says “escape to Wisconsin.” And instead of sending it to tourists, we are going to send it to employers, because boy with their taxes going up through the roof we want them to come to Wisconsin…

Watch it:

Instead of following the responsible budgeting in Illinois, Walker is proposing to increase taxes on the working poor in Wisconsin by cutting the state’s earned income tax credit.

Republicans claim they have not declared war on Americans who are not millionaires - i.e. there is no class warfare. Why than are Republicans always trying to make the poorest and hardest working Americans pay more out of their pocket. Millionaires- the class of people conservatives most care about stay wealthy no matter who governs. They benefit simply from the income that wealth provides - wealth made possible by people who actually work for a living. Why is it that Republicans have this delusional idea they know anything about economics. People like Walker will steal more money from the middle and working class than bank robbers ever will.

Rage on the Right The Year in Hate and Extremism

Rage on the Right The Year in Hate and Extremism

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called "Patriot" groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight.

The anger seething across the American political landscape — over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as "socialist" or even "fascist" — goes beyond the radical right. The "tea parties" and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.

“We are in the midst of one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States history,” Chip Berlet, a veteran analyst of the American radical right, wrote earlier this year. "We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage."

Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Just a quarter think the government can be trusted. And the anti-tax tea party movement is viewed in much more positive terms than either the Democratic or Republican parties, the poll found.

The signs of growing radicalization are everywhere. Armed men have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the "tree of liberty" needs to be "watered" with "the blood of tyrants." The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and Oath Keepers, a Patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps. Politicians pandering to the antigovernment right in 37 states have introduced "Tenth Amendment Resolutions," based on the constitutional provision keeping all powers not explicitly given to the federal government with the states. And, at the "A Well Regulated Militia" website, a recent discussion of how to build "clandestine safe houses" to stay clear of the federal government included a conversation about how mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph were supposedly betrayed at such houses.

Doing the Numbers
The number of hate groups in America has been going up for years, rising 54% between 2000 and 2008 and driven largely by an angry backlash against non-white immigration and, starting in the last year of that period, the economic meltdown and the climb to power of an African American president.

According to the latest annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), these groups rose again slightly in 2009 — from 926 in 2008 to 932 last year — despite the demise of a key neo-Nazi group. The American National Socialist Workers Party, which had 35 chapters in 28 states, imploded shortly after the October 2008 arrest of founder Bill White for making threats against his enemies.

At the same time, the number of what the SPLC designates as "nativist extremist" groups — organizations that go beyond mere advocacy of restrictive immigration policy to actually confront or harass suspected immigrants — jumped from 173 groups in 2008 to 309 last year. Virtually all of these vigilante groups have appeared since the spring of 2005.

But the most dramatic story by far has been with the antigovernment Patriots.

The militias and the larger Patriot movement first came to Americans’ attention in the mid-1990s, when they appeared as an angry reaction to what was seen as a tyrannical government bent on crushing all dissent. Sparked most dramatically by the death of 76 Branch Davidians during a 1993 law enforcement siege in Waco, Texas, those who joined the militias also railed against the Democratic Clinton Administration and initiatives like gun control and environmental regulation. Although the Patriot movement included people formerly associated with racially based hate groups, it was above all animated by a view of the federal government as the primary enemy, along with a fondness for antigovernment conspiracy theories. By early this decade, the groups had largely disappeared from public view.

But last year, as noted in the SPLC’s August report, "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias," a dramatic resurgence in the Patriot movement and its paramilitary wing, the militias, began. Now, the latest SPLC count finds that an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244% jump.

That is cause for grave concern. Individuals associated with the Patriot movement during its 1990s heyday produced an enormous amount of violence, most dramatically the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead.

Already there are signs of similar violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, right-wing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation’s first black president. One man from Brockton, Mass. — who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites — is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama’s inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with antigovernment, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases.

As the movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream. While in the 1990s, the movement got good reviews from a few lawmakers and talk-radio hosts, some of its central ideas today are being plugged by people with far larger audiences like FOX News’ Glenn Beck and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn). Beck, for instance, re-popularized a key Patriot conspiracy theory — the charge that FEMA is secretly running concentration camps — before finally “debunking” it.

Last year also experienced levels of cross-pollination between different sectors of the radical right not seen in years. Nativist activists increasingly adopted the ideas of the Patriots; racist rants against Obama and others coursed through the Patriot movement; and conspiracy theories involving the government appeared in all kinds of right-wing venues. A good example is the upcoming Second Amendment March in Washington, D.C. The website promoting the march is topped by a picture of a colonial militiaman, and key supporters include Larry Pratt, a long-time militia enthusiast with connections to white supremacists, and Richard Mack, a conspiracy-mongering former sheriff associated with the Patriot group Oath Keepers.

What may be most noteworthy about the march, however, is its date — April 19. That is the date of the first shots fired at Lexington in the Revolutionary War. And it is also the anniversary of the fiery end of the government siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Yea sure, conservatives don't have a problem with violence and hate.

Violent Rhetoric and Media False Balance

Yesterday in the New York Times Paul Krugman (1/10/11) suggests that we not pretend that "both sides" are responsible for toxic political rhetoric:

    Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: It's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Rep. Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the GOP.

    ...Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you'll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won't hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at the Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly, and you will.

Unfortunately, that false balance is not just coming from the right, but appears all across the media. On Meet the Press (1/9/11), NBC's David Gregory rounded up examples of demonizing rhetoric:

    Let's be honest, there is a demonization.  It happens amongst all of you, it happens in the public, it happens in the polarized aspects of the press, a demonization of the other side.  Whether it's a congressman saying, "You lie," from the House floor, whether it's a Democrat who literally shoots the cap-and-trade bill in a campaign advertisement.  Or your former colleague, Alan Grayson from Florida, compared Republicans to the Taliban.  I mean, this kind of vitriol on both sides does contribute to that, that demonization.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post (1/10/11):

    Politicians in both parties have said this is not a time for one side to try to score political points against the other over who bears responsibility for these conditions, though there is plenty of finger-pointing in the blogosphere and on Twitter. The reality is everyone bears some responsibility, from politicians to political operatives to the media to ordinary Americans.

New York Times (1/10/11):

    Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence.

New York Times' Matt Bai leads off with examples from "both sides," and in so doing equates one of the most prominent national figures in the Republican Party (and a regular contributor to the GOP house organ Fox News Channel) with some unnamed diarist from Arizona who didn't support a recent Gifford vote:

    Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin's infamous "cross hairs" map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords', with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman's apparently liberal constituents declared her "dead to me" after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

To his credit, Bai spends significant time recounting violent rhetoric from Republican and conservative leaders--likely because there is just a lot more of that to write about. But he offers an excuse for their behavior:

It's not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they're not. It's more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that--like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater--they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.

Bai adds:

    None of this began last year, or even with Mr. Obama or with the Tea Party; there were constant intimations during George W. Bush's presidency that he was a modern Hitler or the devious designer of an attack on the World Trade Center, a man whose very existence threatened the most cherished American ideals.

Yes, there are people who called Bush a "modern Hitler," or believed he had some role in the 9/11 attacks. Those people are generally not given talkshows, and cannot be found in positions of power in the Democratic Party.

Peter Hart is the activism director at FAIR. He writes for FAIR's magazine Extra, and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. He is the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly" (Seven Stories Press, 2003).

Republicans Are Spreading a Big Fat Lie About the Economy

                                                                                                          






















Republicans Are Spreading a Big Fat Lie About the Economy

Republicans are telling Americans a Big Lie, and Obama and the Democrats are letting them. The Big Lie is our economic problems are due to a government that’s too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.

The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928, combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us. The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity. Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can’t borrow as before, and must save for retirement.

The short-term solution is for government to counteract this shortfall by spending more, not less. The long-term solution is to spread the benefits of economic growth more widely (for example, through a more progressive income tax, a larger EITC, an exemption on the first $20K of income from payroll taxes and application of payroll taxes to incomes over $250K, stronger unions, and more and better investments in education and infrastructure.)

But instead of telling the truth, Obama has legitimized the Big Lie by freezing non-defense discretionary spending, freezing federal pay, touting his deficit commission co-chairs’ recommended $3 of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increase, and agreeing to extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

Will Obama stand up to the Big Lie? Will he use his State of the Union address to rebut it and tell the truth? Maybe, but so far there’s no evidence.

In his weekly address yesterday, the President restated his “commitment” for 2011 “to do everything I can to make sure our economy is growing, creating jobs, and strengthening our middle class.” He added that it’s important “to look ahead - not just to this year, but to the next 10 years, and the next 20 years” to find ways to stimulate the economy through innovation. And that it is critical that the U.S. discover ways to “out-compete other countries around the world.”

Become more innovative? Out-compete? Who or what is he talking about? Big American corporations are innovating like mad all over the world, with research and development centers in China and India. And their profits are soaring. They’re sitting on almost $1 trillion of cash. But they won’t create jobs in America because there’s not enough demand here to justify them.

In the Republican address in response, U.S. Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) restated the Big Lie. “The American people sent us to Congress with clear instructions: make government smaller, not bigger,” she said. Deficit reduction “isn’t a Republican problem or a Democrat problem — it’s an American problem that will require tough decision-making from both parties.” And the way to shrink the deficit is to cut government. The extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts over the next two years, she said, was an “important first step” to jump-start the economy.

Starting Wednesday, when the 112th Congress convenes with a Republican majority in the House, we’ll be hearing far more of the Big Lie.

George Orwell once explained that when a public is stressed and confused, a Big Lie told repeatedly can become the accepted truth. Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that “the size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed” and that members of the public are “more easily prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.”

Only the President has the bully pulpit. But will he use it to tell the Big Truth?

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is Supercapitalism.

American loves its myths. One of the favorites seems to be to keep the rich richer so they'll invest and create jobs. They are investing in Chinese sweat jobs that provide over thirty percent of the crap you can buy at Wal-Mart. Profits are up, but gosh American payrolls are down. If only Americans workers would work for 75 censt an hour our problems would be over, right?

Era of Substance Free Republican Gimmicks Begins - House Reading Amended Slavery-Free Constitution

House Reading Amended Slavery-Free Constitution

Members of the House of Representatives, led by their new Republican majority, will kick off the 112th Congress this morning with a reading of the U.S. Constitution. The reading is largely a political maneuver, so it's no real surprise that the Constitution you'll hear read on C-SPAN this morning will be the politically correct version.

It's fairly likely that no elected politician wants to stand up and read aloud the Founder's vision of African Americans as equaling three-fifths of a white person, so the GOP has decided to leave that part, and others, out when the Constitution is read today.

From The Daily Caller:


    Instead of reading the Constitution in its entirety, House members will read an "amended version" that only includes the sections and amendments that were not changed at a later date. The decision in part will allow members to avoid reading less pleasant sections, like the clause in Article 1, Section 2, which counted black slaves as three-fifths of a person.

The reading of the Constitution on the House floor has never been done before, and it's only happening today thanks to the tea party. Throughout the campaign last year, "returning to the Constitution" (in a vague and largely undefined way) was sacred to the tea party, and supporters of reading the document aloud today seem to hope that hearing the words in the House chamber will cause members to adhere to the document more closely.

Democrats and Republicans are expected to participate in the reading, but not all members of Congress think it's a worthy use of their time.

From a Washington Post interview with Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY):


    Nadler called the "ritualistic reading" on the floor "total nonsense" and "propaganda" intended to claim the document for Republicans. "You read the Torah, you read the Bible, you build a worship service around it," said Nadler, who argued that the Founders were not "demigods" and that the document's need for amendments to abolish slavery and other injustices showed it was "highly imperfect."

    "You are not supposed to worship your constitution. You are supposed to govern your government by it," he said.

Whatever the motivation of the supporters of reading the Constitution today, it's clear that politics is playing a major factor in what's being read. So, what won't you hear about in the version of the Constitution entered into the Congressional record today? The DC's Chris Moody offers this rundown:

    The Constitution contains nine parts that were later changed -- including an entire amendment, the 18th, which banned the manufacturing and sale of alcohol -- which will be left out of Thursday's reading. The omitted sections, which do not apply to the 112th Congress, include the so-called "three-fifths clause," the election of senators by state legislatures and the original process outlined for electing the vice president.

On MSNBC's "Last Word" Tuesday, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), who's the man in charge of the reading today, defended the scheme -- and the decision to leave out some of the words written by the Founders.

This little bit of political theater will cost TAX PAYERS ABOUT ONE MILLION DOLLARS. How many lunches for poor kids will one million dollars buy? How many middle-aged jobless could get two years of community college and a new set of job skills for one million dollars? How many blue collar workers could get their dental work done for one million dollars? How many teachers would one million dollars employ for a year? Nothing has changed, Republicans learned nothing from the borrow and spend Bush years.

Republicans Won in Watering Down Financial Reform. We'll All be Paying the Price

Full Catastrophe Banking in 2011

With a $4.7 trillion dollar bailout under their belts with no harm done to their billion-dollar bonuses, don't expect Wall Street bankers to be chastened by the 2008 financial crisis. Below we list eight things to watch out for in 2011 that threaten to rock the financial system and undermine any recovery.
1) The Demise of Bank of America

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cashe of secret documents from the troubled Bank of America (BofA). BofA is already under the gun, defending itself from multiple lawsuits demanding that the bank buy back billions worth of toxic mortgages it peddled to investors. The firm is also at the heart of robo-signing scandal, having wrongfully kicked many American families to the curb. If Assange has emails showing that Countrywide or BofA knew they were recklessly abandoning underwriting standards and/or peddling toxic dreck to investors, the damage to the firm could be irreparable.
2) Robo-signers Wreaking Havoc

With lawsuits abounding, new types of fraud in the foreclosure process are being uncovered daily, including accounting fraud, fake attorneys, destroyed promissory notes and false notarizations. The crisis not only calls into question the legality of untold foreclosures, it also calls into question the value of trillions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities held by banks, pension funds, federal, state and local governments. The only government report on the topic by the feisty Congressional Oversight Panel for the TARP acknowledges that "it is possible that ‘robo-signing' may have concealed deeper problems in the mortgage market that could potentially threaten financial stability."
3) MERS Madness

In addition to outright fraud, numerous state Supreme Courts have questioned the legal standing of the Mortgage Electronic Registration or "MERS" system. MERS is a private database created by industry to bypass the property registration system developed by our forefathers in precolonial days to ensure that the King could not easily rob the subjects of their land. Wall Street turned to MERS to speed securitizations (and now foreclosures), but its legal standing is now in doubt and its shoddy processing of documents has major ramifications for the securitization process as well. Look for a rotten "MERS fix" in the new Congress. Let's hope it gives consumer advocates some leverage to demand justice for Americans being robbed by the new Kings on Wall Street.
4) Flash Crash Calamity

The "flash crash" of May 2010 rattled the markets and caused a stunning 700 point drop in the Dow within minutes. Regulators think they know what occurred, but they are moving too slowly to put the brakes on hair-trigger trading. Seventy percent of Wall Street trades take place in milliseconds, so it is no surprise that mini-flash crashes are becoming a constant. With traders now gearing up to trade on raw news feeds and Twitter, we can anticipate even more volatility. A small financial transaction tax targeting high-volume, high-speed trades is long overdue. It would throw sand in the roulette wheel and raise much needed revenue for the federal government.
5) Bigger Behemoth Banks

The Federal Reserve is planning to "stress test" the big banks again. The same 19 banks that underwent the first stress tests in 2009 will be tested again, but this time the Fed says it won't release the results. Why not? Banks with toxic mortgages and mortgage-backed securities on their books and concomitant legal exposure to "put back" law suits are being kept afloat by accounting tricks, TARP and Fed loans. Honest stress tests of still weak financial institutions may well result in sales and buyouts that will further consolidate the already concentrated banking industry and create larger and more unwieldy "too big to fail" behemoths -- backed by the guarantee of the American taxpayer.
6) Foreclosure Tsunami

Housing foreclosures may top nine million in 2011 and Goldman Sachs predicts the number will reach 12 million in the next few years. The result will be another significant drop in home prices in 2011 and even more families underwater. Civilized nations see the forcible migration of a city the size of New York as an economic and humanitarian catastrophe, but not the United States. The Obama administration and Congress have callously refused to take meaningful action to aid families facing foreclosure even in the face of widespread predatory lending and rampant foreclosure fraud. The only hope now for millions of American families is aggressive action by the 50 state Attorneys General who are actively investigating foreclosure fraud. Whether they have the guts to wrestle a settlement out of the big banks that slows the foreclosure machine and offers families meaningful options has yet to be seen.
7) Bankrupt Cities and States

Meredith Whitney, a research analyst who correctly predicted the credit crunch, is now warning that over 100 American cities could go bust next year. She anticipates billions worth of municipal bond defaults and warns: "next to housing this is the single most important issue in the U.S. and certainly the biggest threat to the U.S. economy." States are also in dire straits. The economic shock of mass unemployment on top of years of population decline, deindustrialization and the like have left cities unable to meet their obligations to taxpayers and retirees. With an austerity anschluss underway in the House, it may take a bankruptcy of a major player to prod an appropriate federal response to this looming disaster.
8) Gas Prices above $4.00

The price of energy and other commodities shifted into high gear in late August when the Federal Reserve Chairman decided to stimulate the economy with quantitative easing. Speculators quickly began bidding up the value of asset classes like crude oil, metals and food commodities. In December, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission failed to apply position limits to these commodities, delaying rules that would crack down on speculators and aid consumers who are already seeing big price hikes at the pump. Without swift action, skyrocketing gas prices will further tank an already stalled economy.

As we hope for the best in 2011, let's prepare for the worst. The big banks are sure to deliver.
© 2011 Bankster - USA

Mary Bottari is the Director of the Center for Media and Democracy's Real Economy Project and editor of their www.BanksterUSA.org site.

Watch for this Republican code word - "pro business". That means conservatives want the same rickety regulatory atmosphere that was part of the blame for the worse financial collapse since the Great Depression. "Pro business" in Republican code means let Wall St do anything it wants including retaining the power to crash the economy again.

Republicans and The Abuse of Executive Orders

Ten To Toss

Newly minted presidents have often used executive orders to set the tone for their administration right out of the gate, as Barack Obama is expected to do this week. But while these orders can be issued unilaterally, they can just as easily be overturned by the next guy. Last fall, Slate compiled a list of the top 10 executive orders signed by George W. Bush that the next president should roll back right away. The list is reprinted below.

The presidency comes with a superpowered pen for signing executive orders. Without negotiating with Congress to pass a law, or even going through the notice-and-comment period that precedes a new federal rule, the president can change the music that federal agencies dance to. He's the executive, and it's his executive branch.

What, then, is the worst of the damage President Bush has caused all on his own? In putting together a top (or bottom) 10 list from the Bush administration's 262 EOs, we sifted through some familiar targets, such as his faith-based initiative and diversion of funds from stem-cell research. We also realize that some of the Bush moments we rue didn't come in the form of an executive order. The recent bid to force family-planning clinics to certify that their employees won't have to assist with any procedure they find objectionable, for example, took the form of a federal rule. So did the administration's decisions to open up new swaths of public land to logging and mining and to raise the allowable level of mercury emissions.

We'd like to see those rules repealed, too, but we decided to stick with EOs for this list because of their consoling simplicity. If they can be conjured by a stroke of the pen, they can also quickly be made to vanish—presidents show little reluctance to excise their predecessors' dictums. Here are our picks for the nine orders most deserving of the presidential eraser come January, plus a tenth suggested by readers.

No. 1: Gutting the Presidential Records Act
Executive Order 13233 (PDF)
Nov. 1, 2001

What the order says: With Executive Order 13233, the Bush administration tried to gut the Presidential Records Act, passed in 1978 to make sure that the internal documents of the executive branch are public and generally will become part of the historical record. The 1978 law itself was a compromise in favor of privacy in some respects: Presidential records aren't disclosed for up to 12 years after an administration leaves office, and requests for them are subject to the limits imposed by the Freedom of Information Act, which means that classified documents stay secret. But the Bush order essentially threw out the law's bid for transparency altogether. After stonewalling for months over access to documents from the Reagan era, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales drafted an order that gives a sitting president, or the president whose records are being requested, the power to review a documents request, with no time limit. If either president says no, you have to sue to get the records.

Why it should go: The American Historical Association hates this order for good reason: It puts a president's interest in secrecy—to prevent embarrassment, inconvenient revelations, whatever—over the public's interest in understanding past events of national import. In 2007, a federal judge struck down part of EO 13233 for conflicting with the Presidential Records Act—which trumps a presidential order, since it's a law enacted by Congress. But parts of the order remain in effect, and a bill in Congress to scrap the whole thing has stalled. The next president shouldn't wait for the judiciary or the legislature: He should throw out this order on his own, as proof that a dozen years after he leaves office, he won't be afraid of an inside view of his White House.

No. 2: Blocking Stem-Cell Research
Executive Order 13435 (PDF)
June 20, 2007

What the order says: In August 2001, Bush issued a rule limiting federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research to existing colonies of such cells. Five years later, he expended the first veto of his presidency to reject legislation served up by a Republican Congress to ease those restrictions. This subsequent executive order a year later, issued the same day he vetoed the legislation a second time, encourages research into alternative measures of creating pluripotent stem cells. The order directs the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health to prioritize research consistent with Bush's previous directives and devote resources to finding other means of creating human stem cells.

Why it should go: Supporting alternative means of creating stem cells is a fine idea—just not at the expense of supporting the more immediately available source of stem cells, which are among the most promising lines of medical research today. There is certainly hope that the debate over whether to destroy human embryos to collect these valuable one-size-fits-all cells will eventually be moot. Researchers have found ways to turn back the clock on adult skin cells, reprogramming them as embryonic cells. But this is a tricky process that involves inserting new genes, and it's not yet a sufficient alternative to embryonic stem cells. In the meantime, Bush's order is diverting funds even from research that could eventually sidestep his ethical concerns; scientists have successfully harvested bone fide stem cells without harming the nascent embryo. Both McCain and Obama supported the legislation that would have loosened Bush's research restrictions when it came before the Senate in 2006 and 2007. While some supporters of embryonic-stem-cell research have questioned McCain's resolve, his campaign says his position is unchanged. This order should go no matter who is elected.

No. 3: Finessing the Geneva Conventions
Executive Order 13440 (PDF)
July 20, 2007

What the order says: After the Supreme Court pushed back against the Bush administration's efforts to hold the Guantanamo detainees indefinitely and without charges, doubts arose about the legality of the CIA's use of coercive interrogation techniques (or torture, if you think water-boarding amounts to that). For a time, the CIA's interrogation squeeze was on hold. Then Bush issued Executive Order 13440, and the interrogators started rolling again. The order isn't explicit about which practices it allows—that remains classified—but it may still sidestep the protections in the Geneva Convention against humiliating and degrading treatment. According to the New York Times, water-boarding is off-limits, but sleep deprivation may not be, and exposure to extreme heat and cold is allowed.

Why it should go: EO 13440 looks like an improvement on previous directives to the CIA, like the memos from the Justice Department written by John Yoo, which narrowly defined torture and Geneva's protections. (According to Barton Gellman's new book about Cheney, the only technique Yoo rejected on legal grounds was burying a detainee alive.) Still, the executive order leaves the door open to techniques that the United States would not want used against its own soldiers and so is part of the Bush administration detritus that has damaged the United States' moral authority abroad. The administration's record is so tarnished on this score that the next president should declare that he is scrapping this order, so he can start over and come up with his own policy on interrogation and the CIA.

No. 4: Handing the Keys to the Vice President
Executive Order 13292 (PDF)
March 25, 2003

What the order says: In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton issued an executive order that made it easier to declassify documents, and hundreds of millions of pages of information about the White House tumbled forth. In 2003, the Bush administration took another tack, amending Clinton's order to get the vice president into the business of classifying whatever he wants. Executive Order 13292 gives the vice president the same power to classify documents that the president has.

Why it should go: EO 13292 is a twofer: It both expands the scope of secrecy and the powers of the vice presidency. As Byron York argues in the National Review, "Since the beginning of the administration, Dick Cheney has favored measures allowing the executive branch to keep more things secret. And in March 2003, the president gave him the authority to do it." This is reminiscent of Cheney's efforts to prevent the National Archives and Records Administration from enforcing the rules that govern classified information as they pertain to the vice president. Cheney is famous for wanting his office to be a closed box. Executive Order 13292 looks like it was written expressly for him. We hope that the next vice president won't also want to keep secrets to this extent. But the boss should eliminate this worry by revoking this order.

No. 5: Free Rein in Iraq
Executive Order 13303 (PDF)
May 28, 2003

What the order says: Issued two months after the invasion of Iraq, this order offers broad legal protection for U.S. corporations dealing in Iraqi oil. Bush's directive, justified as a means of protecting Iraqi oil profits, nullifies any sort of judicial proceedings relating to either Iraqi petroleum or the newly created Development Fund for Iraq. The executive order also declares a national emergency to deal with the threat to a peaceful reconstruction of Iraq, which Bush has renewed every year since, most recently in May 2008.

Why it should go: This directive is the foundation for all of Bush's subsequent executive orders on Iraq (see No. 6, below), so it's the logical place to begin rolling back abuses of authority relating to the war. Given the many concerns over cronyism and waste by U.S. contractors in Iraq, revoking their blanket legal protection when oil is on the table is justified. Watchdog groups originally feared that the order could be used to prevent people with tort claims from suing corporations working in Iraq. That hasn't come to pass so far—Tom Devine, the legal director at the Government Accountability Project, says he has not seen the order applied in any legal case. Still, given that the United States will probably be in Iraq for at least 16 months after the next president takes office, it's not too late to inject a little accountability into the contracting. As the Government Accountability Project wrote at the time, "The scope of the EO's mandate for lawlessness is limited only by the imagination." The order is also overkill; the U.N. resolution that passed concurrently with it, which was hailed as a major diplomatic victory for the United States and Britain at the time, contains more limited legal immunity for oil-related commerce in Iraq.

No. 6: Going After Troublemakers in Iraq
Executive Order 13438 (PDF)
July 17, 2007

What the order says: This order grants the administration the power to freeze the assets of an abstract but broadly defined group of people who threaten the stability of Iraq. The list of targeted people includes anyone who has propagated (or helped to propagate) violence in Iraq in an effort to destabilize the reconstruction. Most ominously, it also applies to anyone who poses a "significant risk of committing" a future act of violence to that end. The order, which applies to anyone in the United States or in U.S. control abroad, also declares, "Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited." The order appears to acknowledge that it could conflict with constitutional protections but then states that targets of its provisions do not need to be notified ahead of time that their assets will be frozen.

Why it should go: The Fifth Amendment has a few interesting things to say about the seizure of property without due process—namely, you can't do it. While this is far from the first time the Bush administration has trampled constitutional rights in the name of national security, this order, if broadly interpreted, could target war protesters in the United States. Then-White House spokesman Tony Snow said at the time that it was intended to target terrorists and insurgents, but the language of the order is vaguer. This EO drew condemnation from all ideological directions, from Swift-boater Jerome Corsi to the ACLU. One needn't be a civil libertarian to see the danger of the order's loose definitions or wonder why we needed the order in the first place. Bonus: The next month, Bush issued a similar order targeting mischief-makers in Lebanon and their supporters. That one can go, too.

No. 7: Eyes and Ears in the Agencies
Executive Order 13422 (PDF)
Jan. 18, 2007

What the order says: Recent presidents have gone back and forth over how much control the White House should exert over writing federal regulations, particularly in contested areas like environmental policy. Unsurprisingly, Bush came down on the side of strong White House influence. This order mandates the designation of a presidential appointee in each federal agency as "regulatory policy officer," with authority to oversee the rule-making process. This largely revises Bill Clinton's 1993 executive order granting agencies more regulatory independence from the White House (which nullified two of Reagan's executive orders). Defenders contend that it is important for the administration to be able to balance regulatory policy with business and economic concerns.

Why it should go: The Bush administration has shown no qualms about interfering with federal regulations normally left to civil servants, particularly on environmental fronts like ozone limits, as Democrats like Rep. Henry Waxman, the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, have pointed out. Repealing the order would be a step toward scrubbing the agencies of the stench of political tampering. The next president shouldn't mix political appointees with civil servants from the inception of the regulatory process by requiring a company man in each agency to supervise.

No. 8: Letting Religious Groups Call the Hiring Shots
Executive Order 13279 (PDF)
Dec. 12, 2002

What the order says: Adding to the pair of 2001 executive orders that encouraged religious groups to apply for federal money for social services, Bush's December 2002 order made it easier for churches and synagogues to take the money by letting them skirt certain anti-discrimination laws. Because of this order, the faith-based groups can take federal funds while refusing to hire people who aren't of the faith the groups espouse.

Why it should go: As Timothy Noah pointed out in Slate at the time, this seems sensible enough at first: "Why shouldn't government-funded religious charities be allowed to favor members of their own religion when hiring, firing, and promoting?" But there are a couple of problems here. The first is that the groups get to define for themselves who counts as a good Baptist or a good Jew—and what if they decide someone is out because he or she is gay, for example? The second problem is that it's not really clear why Catholic charities should be able to hire only Catholics to serve meals to the homeless, if that work is being funded by the government. In a debate on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, Christopher Anders of the ACLU framed the order this way: "What this is about is creating a special right for some organizations that don't want to comply with the civil rights protections." James Towey, then director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said, "The question is, 'Do they lose right to hire according to religious beliefs when they take federal money?' " Either way you frame it, the order is a bad idea. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have pledged to continue federal funding of faith-based programs, but Obama has promised that groups taking the money won't be able to make social-services hires on the basis of religion.

No. 9: The Alternative-Fuel Fix-All
Executive Order 13423 (PDF)
Jan. 26, 2007

What the order says: Shortly after his 2007 State of the Union address, in which he devoted significant time to environmental proposals, Bush signed Executive Order 13423. Among other things, the order requires federal agencies to cut petroleum-based-fuel usage by 2 percent annually through 2015 while increasing alternative-fuel use by 10 percent each year. The order also requires agencies to reduce overall energy consumption and purchase more hybrid vehicles.

Why it should go: On the face of it, Bush's directive seems like a step in the right direction. Officials in California, however, were quick to question the policy's ecological bottom line. Producing alternative fuels, they argued, can result in a large spike in greenhouse-gas emissions, particularly when harvesting resources like oil shale and coal. There's also doubt that the alternative-fuel industry simply has the capacity to meet the order's requirements. As the Washington Post editorialized, "Where might 20 billion alternative-fuel gallons come from?" To complicate matters, the Supreme Court ruled two months later that the Environmental Protection Agency does have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, prompting Bush to issue another executive order directing several agencies to draft guidelines for reducing emissions from cars and trucks. The sound, responsible energy policy that should be at the top of the list for the next president—and Congress—will need realistic goals and a big-picture understanding of costs and benefits of alternative fuels.

Update, Oct. 3, 2008

Last week, Slate compiled the nine most odious executive orders issued by George W. Bush that the next administration should overturn and asked readers to supply the 10th. Of the submissions, the most popular by far was National Security Presidential Directive 51, the Bush administration's plan for keeping the government functional in the case of a catastrophic crisis. The policy is not technically an executive order, but we'll allow it. The national-security presidential directive is a close-enough cousin and highly worthy of revocation.

What the order says: The public part of NSPD-51 grants broad authority to the president in a time of emergency, explicitly stating, "The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government." The rest of the order is fairly bureaucratic, appointing a national continuity coordinator and directing agency heads to develop their own plans.

But that's not all. Not only has the White House classified most of the annexes to the directive, it has refused to show them to the members of Congress on relevant committees. As the Oregonian reported, the White House stonewalled efforts by Rep. Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat and member of the homeland-security committee, to gain access to the classified parts of the directive.

Why it should go: A partly classified plan for national emergencies only fuels the sense of foreboding that the White House has staked out wider and wider powers under the guise of national security. As Ron Rosenbaum wrote in Slate when the directive was released, the secrecy gives rise to all sorts of fears about plans for succession that set aside those provided for in the Constitution, of the sort that Ronald Reagan supposedly put in place. To be sure, cataclysmic emergencies may call for strong, centralized leadership in their immediate aftermath. But any responsible policy for such a scenario should be both transparent and short-lived, focused on the speedy restoration of checks and balances on executive power.

Bush's final tally on ruling like a fascist-lite gave him a total of 291 executive orders. This total does not include "federal rules" that he single handedly passed down. All of this was supposedly OK according to right-wing Republicans who had pushed for years for the executive branch to have fascist-lite authority. They were warned by liberals that future president tend to keep such powers and that we would not have a right-wing zealot for president forever. Conservatives who are complaining now about Obama's use of executive orders are choking on their own hypocrisy and constitutionally questionable approach to the office of president. Next we might have another right-wing nut job like Dubya Bush. Will they complain about his abuse of executive orders. Of course not and so the cycle of crazy continues.