Spitzer and Ratigan — Mitt Romney's State of the Union Challenge on the Mortgage Crisis

What Americans should be taking from this episode is that finance, while complex, is not conceptually hard. If it's a lie on the balance sheet, it's going to be destructive to ordinary people. If you stop the balance sheet lying, the economy will do better. But while Mitt Romney might have said this out loud, they all know it behind closed doors. Our question is, who will be the first to make this a policy reality?

Read it at The Huffington Post
Mitt Romney's State of the Union Challenge on the Mortgage Crisis

by Elliot Spitzer and Dylan Ratigan

Dylan Ratigan — Racism was rebranded ‘the war on drugs’

Dylan is on a tear these days.

“Our big story on this Martin Luther King holiday is the new math of racism in America,” he said. “The greedy bastards have rebranded racism, calling it ‘the war on drugs.’ They’ve made it both acceptable and profitable. While the concerns of racism from the 1950s and 60s have improved in this country, if you look at the numbers the war on drugs has become a racist war.”

He noted that African Americans are ten times more likely than white Americans to be imprisoned for the same drug charges. He also noted there were more African Americans in prison or on probation today than there were slaves in America before the civil war.

Read it at Raw Story (MSNBC video)

Dylan Ratigan: Racism was rebranded ‘the war on drugs’
by Eric W. Dolan

Dylan goes on to talk about the growingly private prison industry and the rising tendency to use prisoners as cheap labor.

Chilling.

Dyaln Ratigan — "Corporate Communism"

Corporate Communism — Out of Order