The Daily Kos has the article Washington Post, citing anonymous Baltimore PD document, says Freddie Gray severed his own spine. The article discusses The Washignton Post article Prisoner in van said Freddie Gray was ‘trying to injure himself,’ document says.

The Daily Kos article also provides the video clip below.

None of the written matter in either The Daily Kos article nor The Washington Post article shows you the depth of the disinformation that is being spread about this case the way the video clip exposes it. The Daily Kos article just fails to give you the most damaging information. The Washington Post article, by contrast, seems to be deliberately trying to hide things by mis-characterizing what they say.

Aljazeera America has the article GOP opposition to Lynch was a missed opportunity by William K. Black.

Black lays out all the sordid details in one fairly compact article. He then concludes with the following:

Remarkably, the supposedly liberal New York Times and GOP leaders have something in common: Both refused to mention HSBC as a key reason for rejecting Lynch’s nomination. What the GOP’s embarrassingly self-destructive strategy for opposing Lynch proves is that even when the Republicans have the perfect opportunity to embarrass the Obama administration and highlight one of its largest scandals — the failure to prosecute a single bank officer who led the most destructive epidemics of financial fraud in history that caused our Great Recession — the Republicans refused, lest they upset their leading source of political contributions. The approval of the Lynch nomination demonstrates that bipartisanship does exist on Capitol Hill: when it favors the big banks and their lobbyists.

It is amazing how well The New York Times can make a huge scandal disappear before our very eyes. Must be some kind of magic.

Black does fail to give credit to Obama’s brilliant strategy. The one thing that the Republicans could have legitimately held against Loretta Lynch is the one topic the Republicans would most like to bury.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Indicting the Trans – Pacific Partnership: Even One of These Counts Is Sufficient to Vote to Kill It!.

This article has 23 stanzas that can be sung to the tune of Dayenu, a favorite Passover song.

The conclusion of the article says:

Right now, those who want to pass Fast Track Authority and the TPP, in the face of the 23 reasons, recorded in the 23 stanzas, for killing these things, any one of which is reason enough to vote to kill them, apparently number the President of the United States, most of the corporate media, a majority of the Senate, though perhaps not a majority of its Democratic members, a large number of Representatives in the House, mostly Republican, but including some Democrats, who may or may not reach a majority of the House with the help of a full court press corporate and billionaire-funded media campaign that we will see intensify in the coming days and weeks. So, these are the forces arrayed against democracy and for tyranny. These are the forces in back of the attempt of the elite to engineer a bloodless coup, that they hope will replace national popular sovereignty with globalizing corporate rule.

Will we counter them in the coming days and weeks and block Fast Track Authority and the TPP? The fate of democracy depends on how we respond to this question and on whether our loud public outcry can counter them successfully, and persuade some in the House and the Senate that it is dangerous for them to oppose the popular will. Let us not fail this test!

The Republicans should impeach Obama if he signs the deal, and I wish there were someone to impeach the Congress if they vote for the TPP.

Maybe we shouldn’t scoff at my previous post Michele Bachmann says the Rapture is coming: ‘Rejoice’.

The Daily Kos has the article Michele Bachmann says the Rapture is coming: ‘Rejoice’. This article discusses the Talking Points Memo article Michele Bachmann: Thanks Obama For Bringing On The Apocalypse.

Here is a quote from The Talking Points Memo article.

Former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) expressed a mixture of condemnation and appreciation toward President Barack Obama for, in her words, bringing the world to end times.

“We need to cry out to a Holy God,” Bachmann said on Jan Markell’s “Understanding the Times” radio show over the weekend. “This is coming faster than anyone can see.”

You really have to hear the audio clip the article provides.

Listen to the clip, courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

The fact that there are people like this running around our government is really frightening. You can be sure that Michelle Bachmann is not the only one in our government that believes this.

What is more frightening is captured by this quote from The Daily Kos article:

It is flagrantly obvious that the people most convinced that Iran is an irrational theocratic state whose leaders see themselves as religious prophets destined to destroy their enemies and elevate their own religion into global dominance over all others are leaders who consider themselves to be—precisely that.

Even this quote needs further interpretation of how frightening this is. What most of the rest of us think about Iran and its government is more like some people in our own government, and the normal people don’t even recognize it. Not only do they not recognize it in our own people, but they don’t recognize that their understanding of Iran was planted in their minds by crazy people.

Salon magazine has the article “Pagan statism”: The frightening corporate/Christian alliance that invented “In God We Trust” and “One Nation Under God”

In 1949, some of the country’s top advertising executives launched a national marketing campaign. They weren’t selling a physical product. They were selling religion. Before long, the Religion in American Life campaign was placing close to 10,000 newspaper ads per year, coordinating national radio marketing, and putting up thousands of billboards, all intended “to accent the importance of all religious institutions as the basis of American life.” Major corporations bankrolled the effort.

We tend to imagine public expressions of faith as rising spontaneously from the American people, for good or for ill. When a politician says “God bless America,” she’s trying to sound like a populist, not like a corporate pawn. But as Princeton historian Kevin Kruse details in a new book, “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America,” our country’s religious slogans owe more to corporate campaigns than they do to grassroots work.

You probably already had a good guess as to the types of people who were and are the pushers. Did you know about the specifics described in the article, and presumably, the book?

As you may recognize, my headline is derived from something that Karl Marx wrote in an introduction to his paper A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.

You can read the full context, and try to figure out exactly what Marx was saying. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t what you always thought it was. It depends on your interpretation, and what you always thought about the statement.

Politicus USA has the article It Looks Like Bernie Sanders Is Going To Run For President.

If Sen. Sanders (I-VT) does run, it will be great news for Democrats and liberals on numerous fronts. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is not running. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has no traction with Democratic voters. Sen. Sanders is largely unknown to many rank and file Democrats, but he is on television often enough that he has more of a base of support than any of the other non-Clinton Democrats who are considering running.

If he does run, I have the bumper sticker and button all ready for him.

The article discussed in my previous post, The great unraveling of globalization, has some interesting things to say about emerging markets.

“Growth in consumer spending in 2014 hit multiyear lows in many countries,” said Unilever CEO Paul Polman, analyzing his company’s results. “In South Africa, it is half to less than 2 percent, and in Brazil it had fallen to just 1 percent. There was no volume growth in these markets.”

There are myriad reasons why these markets have lagged, some of them unique to specific countries or regions. For instance, China’s one-child policy has produced a penurious generation of young adults who are the sole support for aging family members. And in parts of Southeast Asia and Africa the infrastructure in rural areas, where much of the population lives, is too primitive to support extensive retail activities. But equally problematic is that the growth of the middle class in China and most other developing economies has been slow. And these newly minted consumers face volatile, often expensive prices for housing, food and other staples.

Perhaps the race to the bottom to produce goods at the cheapest prices is also affecting consumers in the emerging markets.

The paradox is that what companies need to do to employees to get the most out of them for the least cost is to minimize wages and benefits.  What consumers need to spur their buying is large enough incomes and less risk in their economic environment.  The paradox is that the workers and the consumers are just two different roles of the same people.

The competition of the free market does not make it easy for an individual corporation to decide that it wants to pay high wages to spur consumption among its customers.  There is no way to assure that the workers whose wages are raised will spend all of that raise with the company that is giving the raise.

One way out of that paradox is for some entity to take a more global approach to a solution.  The global approach would have all companies raise wages to all workers which would cover all consumers.  The increased consumption would be spread across all companies so that the companies raising the wages would be assured of getting some of the benefit of not only their own wage increase, but the wage increases of their competitors.

Sort of reminds me of the situation of an addict, whether that be drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or food.  The addict cannot stop the self destructive behavior without some help from an external source.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what external sources are available and powerful enough to provide this economic intervention.

The Washington Post has the article The great unraveling of globalization.

Indeed, although multinational executives avoid talking about it publicly, profits in global markets are underwhelming — and doing business internationally is full of unanticipated risks.
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The shortcomings of globalization manifest in any number of ways. For one thing, international trading patterns point to an increase in protectionist attitudes rather than a golden age of open borders. Between 1986 and 2005, global trade volume increased at a rate of about 2 to 3 times that of GDP growth, but the ratio since then has fallen dramatically (except for one year) and is now close to 1, according to research by UBS strategist Bhanu Baweja.
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That’s about the best way to sum up globalization now. Instead of flat and seamless, globalization is full of hurdles and obstacles. There’s money to be made for multinationals the world over, but they are going to have to rethink their strategies for making it. Though presented as a way to eliminate economic disparities and magically expand multinational revenue streams, globalization is, simply put, still a barely profitable and perplexing strategy for most companies.

If you read the details, and believe them, then perhaps this is a clue as to why business is so intent on getting the TPP.  It’s only a clue, because you would have to guess at how the TPP would solve any of these problems.  Perhaps the idea of the “Investor-State Dispute Settlement”  (ISDS) in the TPP is corporations’ way of getting around some of the difficulties mentioned in The Washington Post article.

See my previous post ISDS is a bad deal for America – Part ot TPP “Trade” deal for some background for why US corporations may be pushing for this without any care for the harm it could do to the rest of us.

I wonder if any corporations or trade negotiators ever consider that the cause of increasing protectionism is how badly past “free” “trade” deals hurt the countries who are becoming more protectionist.  Rather than getting even more draconian in the next trade deal, they might consider coming up with something that was actually better for the people in the countries who will sign the pact.

Thanks to reader RichardH for bringing this article to my attention

MoveOn has an addition to its page on the Lawrence Lessig event. VIDEO: When Van Jones met Elizabeth Warren is an introduction by Van Jones.

I loved the introduction, but there is one point that we should not get carried away over. After seeing Elizabeth Warren debate Scott Brown, I am not so sure that she could elevate the conversation. There is only so much one can do when the only questions asked are stupid questions. I have a much better role for Elizabeth Warren in the upcoming debates, if there are any on the Democratic side. Elizabeth Warren should be the moderator.

Have you watched any videos of Elizabeth Warren in action on a Senate panel questioning witnesses? Elizabeth Warren can do more with asking a question than most of the witnesses can do in answering those questions.

Elizabeth Warren Blasts New York Fed President William Dudley

Watch Elizabeth Warren Push The Bank Regulators

Elizabeth Warren still taking on the banksters, regulators

Thinking about my previous post, Joe Firestone: Another Danger of the TPP: It Sacrifices Monetary Sovereignity and taking into account Murphy’s Law, I started to wonder if signing the TPP could bring on Armageddon.

I decided to look up the major foreign holders of US Treasury securities.

Here is the Murphy’s Law scenario. Suppose we decide to devalue the dollar to bring our wage rates more in line with the countries where all our jobs are being outsourced. Supposing some of those countries decided to sue us before one of the tribunals established by the TPP. Their claim is that by devaluing our dollar, we will be harming their profits and the value of their holdings of our currency. It seems pretty obvious that their claim is true, and our sole purpose for taking that action is to take back some of those jobs and lower the value of our foreign debt.

So what could they sue us for? Japan holds $1.2 trillion of our foreign debt and will be one of the major signatories of the TPP. China holds another $1.2 trillion of our foreign debt. China will not be a signatory of TPP, but I bet they could buy lots of companies in countries that will be signatories. That would give them standing before one of the tribunals.

Rather than demanding immediate payment of $2.4 trillion, they could just hold us hostage and control our major policies.

I have come to a new understanding of Murphy’s Law. It is not just by chance that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. It is that if you give an adversary a brand new weapon that they could use against you, then they will use it. Do you want to hold your breath hoping they won’t? You could turn blue in the face just from that.