The New York Times has the article Treasure Island Trauma by Paul Krugman.

But it also reflects Cyprus’s own reluctance to accept the end of its money-laundering business; its leaders are still trying to limit losses to foreign depositors in the vain hope that business as usual can resume, and they were so anxious to protect the big money that they tried to limit foreigners’ losses by expropriating small domestic depositors. As it turned out, however, ordinary Cypriots were outraged, the plan was rejected, and, at this point, nobody knows what will happen.
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But step back for a minute and consider the incredible fact that tax havens like Cyprus, the Cayman Islands, and many more are still operating pretty much the same way that they did before the global financial crisis. Everyone has seen the damage that runaway bankers can inflict, yet much of the world’s financial business is still routed through jurisdictions that let bankers sidestep even the mild regulations we’ve put in place. Everyone is crying about budget deficits, yet corporations and the wealthy are still freely using tax havens to avoid paying taxes like the little people.

This is the kind of thing that happens when “little people” refuse to take the fall for the “big people.”

If we get Ed Markey as our next Senator, he can work with Elizabeth Warren to start making the “big people” pay the consequences for their greed.  Perhaps this way, we can prevent the destruction of that part of the international banking system that we, the “little people”, depend on.

Thanks to RichardH for sending the link to this article in response to my previous post Cyprus: Has the Next Phase of the Global Crisis Arrived?

McClatchy DC has the article Commentary: Sen. Rob Portman’s gay marriage ‘change of heart’ by Leonard Pitts Jr.

But true compassion and leadership require the ability to look beyond the narrow confines of one’s own life, to project into someone else’s situation and to want for them what you’d want for your own. Portman’s inability to do that created hardship for an untold number of gay men and lesbians.

It never ceases to amaze me how the religiously oriented conservative Republicans can look into the mind of an imaginary God to figure out what he wants, but they cannot look into the mind of a fellow human being to figure out what he or she might want.

Perhaps my years of writing software, for other people to use, strengthened my ability to sometimes see the world through someone else’s eyes.  Sometimes, when designing software, it takes just a little extra effort to make it possible for the user to do something with the software that you don’t immediately see the use for.  An observer might come along (and often did) and say something like, “Why would someone ever want to be able to do that?”  After years of helping people use my software, I often found them doing imaginative things with the features that I had put in that I could never have anticipated in advance.  I guess this is not even being able to see the world through someone else’s eyes.  It is the ability to realize that my own imagination might fall short of what someone else might be able to imagine.  Unless there is a darn good reason, it is better not to close off opportunities that lead to freedom for someone else (or even yourself at another time).

Here is a video from the Ed Markey YouTube Channel. At about 0:34 into the video you will see a couple of Sturbridge/Southbridge supporters holding Ed Markey signs. I was too busy taking pictures to get into one.

I’ll be posting more of these videos.

The New Yorker has the story Cheney Marks Tenth Anniversary of Pretending There Was Reason to Invade Iraq from The Borowitz Report.

“Making up a reason to invade a country is the easy part,” Mr. Cheney told them. “Sticking to a pretend story for ten years—that is the stuff of valor.”

I did tell you this was from The Borowitz Report, didn’t I?  Its tag line is “The news, reshuffled.”

This is what many supporters have been trying to tell Obama during his first 4 years. I would like to believe that he really understands the words he is speaking. In the last few days with Republican taunts that Obama is trying to politicize politics, he seems to be already backing away. It is up to us, to keep Obama’s feet to the fire.

It is discouraging to hear reports from Republicans that in a meeting with them Obama said that he understands the need to balance the budget, but many of his supporters do not.

That’s hogwash, and Obama should not ever say things like this unless he unfortunately actually believes this. If he actually believes this, that is even worse.

This supporter believes in balancing the budget when it is the correct thing to do during the right time in the economic cycle. Now is not that time.

This supporter believes that we need to balance the budget in a way that turns-around the tremendous shift of wealth in the last 30 years from the middle-class to the extremely wealthy. We need to shift some of that wealth back to the middle and lower classes.

We need to bring the budget to balance by growing the economy in such a way that each segment of the economy including the government can afford to do its necessary part.

I was reading headlines such as Asia stocks dive on Cyprus deposit levy plan .  So by the time I got to the Minyanville artcle Cyprus: Has the Next Phase of the Global Crisis Arrived?, I decided to check into it.

In a stunning shift from previous aid packages, EU Finance Ministers—the folks up north, primarily German—asked Cypriot savers to forfeit a portion of their deposits in return for a $13 billion bailout.
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One could intelligently argue that both of those situations were symptoms rather than the cause of those respective crises, and the same can be said of Cyprus, which is seemingly a guinea pig for a new approach from those pulling the policy strings.  Cue the unintended consequences (the potential for bank runs across Europe) and moral hazard (word on the street is that wealthy Russian oligarchs have size holdings in the heretofore stealth, sunny island); in an interwoven finance-based global economy, credit of a different breed—that of credibility, as posited in 2007—is the issue at hand for markets at large.

Should I panic? I haven’t the foggiest idea. This is the second item I have read this week about the coming apocalypse. The previous one was trying to sell a book.

Robert Reich’s reasoning behind raising the minimum wage.

You could say that some of this is just his opinion, logical though it may be. Other parts of this appear to be actual facts that counter the usual arguments against raising the minimum wage.

Sign the petition at signon.org/minwage.

It is well known that Stephen Lynch voted against Obamacare when he had the chance. Up until this point I could imagine some explanations why he might have done that, but I had not actually looked for an explanation. The video below gives you his explanation.

This explanation is one of the reasonable ones I could have imagined. I am still working for Ed Markey, but at least I now know that Stephen Lynch is not as bad as I could have imagined him to be.

The video below shows that Lindsey Garahm hasn’t quite got it when he tries to steal a page from the Elizabeth Warren playbook.

When an attorney asks the witness an embarrassing question, the point is that it is supposed to embarrass the witness, not the attorney. Perhaps they didn’t teach that where Graham earned his law degree.

If enough people watch this video, maybe the word will spread as to what a wind bag Lindsey Graham really is.

I was wondering if it were actually illegal to have a background check and fail it. this PolitiFact article provides some insight into the issue.

Jennifer Karberg of the St. Louis research organization that did the report told us that if a person trying to buy a gun indicates on the application form that, for example, he is a felon, the application will simply be denied. On the other hand, if a felon lied on the form about his conviction, that’s a crime that could be prosecuted, she said.

The Huffington Post has the article Elizabeth Warren: Banks Get Wrist Slaps While Drug Dealers Get Jail.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren unloaded on bank regulators Thursday about the fact that British bank HSBC is still doing business in the U.S., with no criminal charges filed against it, despite confessing to what one regulator called “egregious” money laundering violations.

Her comments came just a day after the attorney general of the United States confessed that some banks are so big and important that they are essentially above the law. His Justice Department’s failure to bring any criminal charges against HSBC or its employees is Exhibit A of that problem.

After this video, there is the one with Ben Bernanke, and another one after that. In the one with Ben Bernanke, apparently the idea never occurred to him no matter what Warren said that he could charge the banks a fee for getting $83 billion in insurance.

Thanks to CarolG for bringing this article to my attention.