Greed? Duplicity? Delusion? Denial? American values?
American or not, if we’ve learned anything from our financial meltdown, it’s that these were the “values” that guided those really smart folks on Wall Street.
Salt away as much money as humanly possible in the shortest possible time using whatever tools it takes to make you rich but keep you [...]
One thing that’s serendipitous about Rod Blagojevich’s refusal to yield to those who want him to go away, is that it presents a golden opportunity to discover how little the rule of law means to the very people who are most expected to honor it.
As I wrote Tuesday, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan showed [...]
Rarely is the debunking of conventional wisdom more apropos than in response to certain widely held misconceptions about the former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, and the current governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. Indeed, the analogous scandals surrounding both men produced two of the year’s biggest fallacies.Fallacy #1: Spitzer Was Targeted for Crimes He [...]
During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama spoke out against the militarization and politicization of the intelligence community and indicated that an Obama administration would address the intelligence abuses of the past decade. Unfortunately, his maneuvers over the past several weeks strongly suggest that business as usual will dominate the president-elect’s intelligence policy.
Even [...]
The New York Yankees just bought a first baseman for $180 million. For the next eight years, Mark Teixeira will earn about $22.5 million a season. The week before, the Yanks bought seven years of pitcher CC Sabathia’s life for $161 million, about $23 million a season-and five years of A.J. Burnett for $82.5 million, [...]
The year was 1961. The venue was the spacious, deeply carpeted office of the secretary of a major cabinet department – one of the “best and brightest” recruited by the newly installed administration of President John F. Kennedy.
The audience assembled for this morning meeting consisted of the department’s fifty or so most senior officers [...]
Barack Obama’s decision to have the evangelical megachurch leader Rick Warren conduct the invocation at next month’s presidential inauguration suggests that fundamentalist Christians still wield enormous power within the federal government and will likely continue to be a dominating force under an Obama administration.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the U.S. military where, [...]
The government has taken extraordinary measures to keep this economy that most people have thought was capitalist and dominated by a free market from collapsing: the Federal Reserve has been buying trillions of dollars of assets of poor quality. This is something that central banks aren’t ever supposed to do in Capitalism. They are supposed [...]
The Securities and Exchange Commission has for the first time publicly released its enforcement manual, also known as the “Red Book.”
According to The National Law Journal, the manual, designed to provide officials with the SEC’s Enforcement Division guideline to investigate possible violations of securities laws, “directs its staff not to ask a party to [...]
The Department of Justice said Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview with the special prosecutor who investigated the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson is top secret and the document’s classified status is the reason the agency has rebuffed demands to turn the document over to Congress.
In a letter sent to the government [...]
