I found the link to this video on Max Keiser: Financial War Reports blog in the article U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson: we should be applauding Russian action in Ukraine and Crimea…

Alan Grayson may be right, but this is sure to be fodder for his political opponents. You can tell from the comment by the person who made this video clip. I almost wish he had been a little more cautious in his words, but then that would not have been Alan Grayson.

One of the commenters posted a substantial excerpt from a 2002 article Big Oil and US Foreign Policy.

I don’t know anything of the provenance of these blogs, so there is no guarantee that goes along with any of this. Of course I will take the C-SPAN excerpt as reliable until proven otherwise.

There is the Reuters article I quoted in a previous post Exxon says pursuit of Ukraine Skifska block on hold that does corroborate some of the remarks about the oil.

Naked Capitalism has the article Bengt-Ake Lundvall: The Portuguese Manifesto Sends a Message to Europe’s Elite That Austerity Has Failed and “Project Europe” Must be Rethought.  I’ll leave you with the final words of the article.

Q: That means that a debt restructuring operation in Portugal is not sufficient, you need a Euro-wide initiative?

A: As I said in the beginning a debt restructuring could result in a shake-up of the current economic and political order. But what is needed is a radical rethinking of the relationships between economic integration on the one hand and political and social integration on the other hand. We would need European leaders who were honest on the fact that economic integration without political and social integration leads to growing inequality and to instability. One important signal could be to call for a time-out for economic integration while Europe starts to establish some elements of a common fiscal and social investment policy. It could begin with modest measures related to minimum income and unemployment support. European-wide programs aiming at upgrading the skills of the low skilled, labor market flexicurity and modern open education systems would send signals to all Europeans that Europe from now on would build it competitiveness on competence and not on low wages. Green investment plans would show that Europe takes into account also the survival of the coming generation.

Q: Is it politically feasible in the present European context?

A: As I see it, what appears to be feasible now brings us closer to the end of the European project. Therefore the only possible strategy is to ask for what seems to be out of reach. We know that history offers us surprises from time to time. Let us hope for a positive surprise.

Maybe there are some good ideas here for fixing what ails us in the U.S.

Here, I have saved you the trouble of looking up flexicurity.

PC World has the article Trial to proceed in Silicon Valley employee ‘no poaching’ case.

A lawsuit that accuses Google, Apple and other top Silicon Valley companies of driving down wages by agreeing not to hire each other’s workers can go to trial, a judge ruled on Friday.
.
.
.
Some 64,000 technology workers could be affected by the suit, which was first filed in 2011 by five software engineers.

It’s not nice to fool software engineers.

Press TV has the story Flight 370 The CIA Hoax: Gordon Duff.

The CIA along with Joint military commands set up during the Global War on Terror, tracked Flight 370, monitoring it continually, monitoring the murder of its passengers, monitoring its landing, monitoring its refueling and know exactly where it is.
.
.
.
Sources claim the plane landed on Diego Garcia, was refueled, dead passengers “disembarked” and was moved elsewhere?

Is this a better explanation than flying to the South Pole hidden from the world through multiple simultaneous failures of safety, communications, counter-hijacking and autopilot systems?

 If you decide you want to believe this story, then do not use Google to find out who Gordon Duff is.

On the other hand, you can read my previous post Conjecture On Where That Plane Really Is. No doubt, there are some who think I am as wacky as Gordon Duff.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Why Minsky Matters.

American economist Hyman Minsky died in 1996, but his theories offer one of the most compelling explanations of the 2008 financial crisis. His key idea is simple enough to be a t-shirt slogan: “Stability is destabilising”.

The link to BBC Radio 4′s Analysis program episode on Minsky is the prize for reading the article.

American economist Hyman Minsky died in 1996, but his theories offer one of the most compelling explanations of the 2008 financial crisis. His key idea is simple enough to be a t-shirt slogan: “Stability is destabilising”. But TUC senior economist Duncan Weldon argues it’s a radical challenge to mainstream economic theory. While the mainstream view has been that markets tend towards equilibrium and the role of banks and finance can largely be ignored, Minsky argued that in the good times the seeds of the next crisis are sown as the financial sector engages in riskier and riskier lending in pursuit of profit. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, this might seem obvious – so why did Minsky die an outsider? What do his ideas say about the response to the 2008 crisis and current policies like Help to Buy? And has mainstream economics done enough to respond to its own failure to predict the crisis and the challenge posed by Minsky’s ideas?

Those of us like myself, who learned our economics in the early 1960s when Keynesian ideas were still being taught, are mystified why Minsky’s insights should be so shocking and outside the mainstream.  I guess it helps to have been in a career that had nothing to do with academic economics so that I avoided having been infected by people who thought that they had better ideas than Keynes.

Having listened to this interview, I know better understand the need for the diatribe in the Naked Capitalism article Philip Pilkington: How Krugman’s Addiction to the ISLM Model Has Led to Repeated Bad Forecasts.

Before that article, I was even less sure of the reason for the animus in the article The Government Hack Trying to Squash Discussion of Government Corruption – Cass Sunstein – Doesn’t Understand BASIC Math Or Law.

I might not have had the fawning idolatry for Krugman and Sunstein as some did, but I did have (and still do have) respect for some of their ideas.

The Daily Kos has the article Papantonio: Hobby Lobby Is DOA.

It would end Corporate Indemnity. Or as Mike Papantonio says, it would completely alter corporate law on such a grand scale, “It would pierce the corporate veil,” and allow law suits to proceed against the owners of a corporation for the illegal or negligent acts of the corporation.

Here is the interview:

It almost makes you wonder if we should hope that the Supreme Court does decide in favor of Hobby Lobby.

Here is the web site Koch Addiction.

THE KOCHS HAVE SPENT $30 MILLION TO DEFEAT THESE DEMOCRATS
.
.
.
BUT IF WE STAND TOGETHER, WE CAN STOP THEM

I just love their animated graphic.

Read The Daily Kos story Democrats’ $60 Million Code Name “Bannock Street Project” Set to Destroy Kochs & Goposaurs in 2014.

The U.S.  government archives says that the following are the words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Any law that gives rights on the grounds of religion is “an establishment of religion”.  So the clauses in the ACA (Obamacare) that give religious organizations the right to ignore rules that everyone else must obey is “an establishment of religion”.  In order  for the government to know which establishments qualify for a religious exemption, they must set up criteria for “an establishment of religion”.  Could the U.S. Constitution be any clearer that this is unconstitutional?

To allow any corporation an exemption from a rule that requires the declaration of a religious reason for that exemption is “an establishment of religion”.  If people who do not declare religion as a reason cannot get the exemption, then this is “an establishment of religion”.

How many of our current Supreme Court Justices could pass a first grade reading comprehension test if they cannot comprehend the first 10 words of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights?

I wonder if the Senate needs to ask all prospective judicial appointees what they think those 10 words mean before the Senate can give consent to a judicial appointment.

The Real News Network has the interview with Larry Wilkerson What’s Driving Putin & Obama’s Posturing on Ukraine?  

There is a very good statement on what we ought to do, but i have chosen to highlight the ending remarks for those people who don’t have the time to watch the video below.

WILKERSON: The United States’s role has been the same in Kiev, I think, that it is in Caracas and that it was before in Damascus, and that is essentially fomenting regime change, whether you’re doing it through the National Endowment for Democracy, its counterparts the IRI and the NDI, or with the CIA, who are all in tandem, which is what I think we’re doing. We have no one to blame but ourselves for what results when a great power sitting on the border of the country we’re trying to change the regime in suddenly objects. I mean, this is Hungary in 1956, when we egged, by propaganda and CIA covert actions, the Hungarians to rise up. And they rose up, and the Soviet tanks rolled in. Or it’s Prague in 1968. We’ve been through this before. It’s just Russia now and not the U.S.S.R., but some things simply don’t change. Great power and the influences and moves and the procedures that they go through in exercising that power simply don’t change over time. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s Putin or Catherine the Great or some future leader of Russia, or whether it’s Obama or Mitt Romney. Their hands should be tied in terms of taking this further and risking a really serious war.

With matters as serious as this, I wish that world leaders could dispense with the need to play political gamesmanship. What ever happened to the “no drama Obama” that I thought I voted for? Despite the constant calls for war from McCain and Graham, I had hoped Obama could resist forever. Unfortunately, having Clinton as Secretary of State didn’t bolster Obama’s resistance. John Kerry seemed more amenable to being reined in, but I start to wonder about him as well.

What do you suppose Obama and Putin talk about in their extended phone calls?  Could they possibly play these childish political games and do it with a straight face for an hour or so?

I wandered through The Daily Kos to this video on YouTube.

Here are the author’s comments about the video.

Actual people in Louisiana are benefiting from Obamacare. Vote however you like, but don’t let outsiders lie to you.

I wonder what we can say or do to stop Scott Brown from spreading the same lies in New Hampshire.

I have such great luck meddling in other people’s politics. Just ask the people of Charlton. (That was a self-deprecating joke in case anybody from Charlton misreads that last statement.)