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Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers - of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses. So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait - let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

Right now, according to a number of studies, we are losing about $100 billion every year because corporate America and the very wealthy are stashing their money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. We should be aware that in 2009, ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits and not only did the company not pay anything in taxes, it got a $106 million refund from the IRS. We should also be aware that since 1997, we have almost tripled funding for the military. So if we are serious about reducing the deficit, those are things we need to look at-not at Social Security, not programs everyday Americans need.

In December, President Obama signed legislation to extend hundreds of billions of dollars in Bush tax cuts, benefiting the wealthiest Americans. Last week, Obama agreed to billions of dollars in cuts that will impose the greatest burden on the poorest Americans. And now, virtually everyone in Washington believes, the President is about to embark on a path that will ultimately lead to some type of reductions in Social Security, Medicare and/or Medicaid benefits under the banner of "reform." Tax cuts for the rich -- budget cuts for the poor -- "reform" of the Democratic Party's signature safety net programs -- a continuation of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies and a new Middle East war launched without Congressional approval. That's quite a legacy combination for a Democratic President. All of that has led to a spate of negotiation advice from the liberal punditocracy advising the President how he can better defend progressive policy aims -- as though the Obama White House deeply wishes for different results but just can't figure out how to achieve them. Jon Chait, Josh Marshall, and Matt Yglesias all insist that the President is "losing" on these battles because of bad negotiating strategy, and will continue to lose unless it improves. Ezra Klein says "it makes absolutely no sense" that Democrats didn't just raise the debt ceiling in December, when they had the majority and could have done it with no budget cuts. Once it became clear that the White House was not following their recommended action of demanding a "clean" vote on raising the debt ceiling -- thus ensuring there will be another, probably larger round of budget cuts -- Yglesias lamented that the White House had "flunked bargaining 101." Their assumption is that Obama loathes these outcomes but is the victim of his own weak negotiating strategy. I don't understand that assumption at all. Does anyone believe that Obama and his army of veteran Washington advisers are incapable of discovering these tactics on th

What CAFRs reveal is a communist-style policy whereby the US taxpayers surrender enormous assets to the state, who then "invest" these collective trillions that swell in these accounts. Concurrently, taxpayers are informed of budget deficits to either squeeze more taxes from them and/or cut public services. To add insult to injury, the state lies in omission by never reminding Americans of their hard-earned and withheld trillions as they eliminate jobs, reduce education, and attack the quality of our lives.

The Path to 10 Billion Tweets

As a voice at the megaphone of the Portland protest said, "The United States does not have a deficit problem. The United States has a revenue problem." According to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office, 25 percent of the biggest corporations pay no federal income tax. B of A, the recipient of $45 billion in bailout funds, shuttles its would-be tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens. Meanwhile, budget deficits are cited as justification for pay freezes for public workers and cuts to heating assistance programs, Social Security, and other social safety nets.

http://www.mint.com | It's official, trillion is the new billion. No longer is government spending talked about in terms of a mere ten digits. With the recent flurry of government spending, we are going to need another three zeros to make sense of it all. One trillion dollars is a number that few people can comprehend, let alone your standard nine digit calculator. So what does one trillion dollars look like?

The point of all of this is, if you add up all of the MBS-related liability out there, the banks as it stands are facing an Armageddon of claims from all sides. It can't possibly be less than a trillion dollars, and it's probably much, much more. But the Obama administration's current plan is to let them all walk after paying a few shekels apiece into a $20 billion kitty.

Why KBR continues to be awarded huge open-ended, cost-plus, no-compete contracts from the Pentagon is a question worthy of a criminal investigation, because their track record as a military contractor suggests that "KBR" is actually short for "Kickbacks, Bribes & Ripoffs".  According to the POGO Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, since 1995 the company has been involved in not less than 23 documented cases of misconduct including but not limited to Overcharging the Government, Violation of Anti-Kickback Act, Excessive Subcontract Costs, Fraud and Accepting Kickbacks, Exposing Troops to Hazardous Water Conditions, Bribery to Win International Government Contracts, Overpricing Fuel, Breach of Contract, Hurricane Relief Contract Overcharges, Sexual Assault, Freight Forwarding Kickbacks, Procurement Irregularities, and Conspiracy to Defraud the Government.  For this KBR has paid millions in fines, which it surely considers a small price to pay for the billions it continues to receive in new federal contracts every year:

Listen to and SUPPORT those American Veterans that are now AWAKE and MAD AS HELL!! Original maker of this video is http://www.youtube.com/user/StopTheRobbery2 http://www.ivaw.org/about/why-we-are-against-wars http://www.ivaw.org/ I don't think everyone should just comment. I think everyone should re post this video over and over until 1 Billion on the internet have watched this video. End the war by re posting this video. God bless the World and its people with peace and humanity.

Lenghty read Spolsky vs. dhh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky about the valuation of Facebook and SNS