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It's getting too late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy. Sure, he inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled "Dixie" while the banking system imploded. But it's time for Democrats to admit that their guy bears considerable responsibility for not turning things around. 

What was becoming of civil liberties during the recently departed Bush administration. Doesn't address the uncomfortable question of whether this is a continuation of trends seen during the Clinton administration.

If it had been revealed that Jeffrey Immelt once hired an undocumented nanny, or defaulted on his mortgage, he would be forced to resign as head of President Barack Obama's "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness." But the fact that General Electric, where Immelt is CEO, didn't pay taxes on its $14.5 billion profit last year-and indeed is asking for a $3.2 billion tax rebate-has not produced a word of criticism from the president, who in January praised Immelt as a business leader who "understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy." What it takes, evidently, is shifting profit and jobs abroad: As of last year only 134,000 of GE's total workforce of 304,000 was based in the U.S. and, according to The New York Times, for the past three years 82 percent of the company's profit was sheltered abroad. Thanks to changes in the tax law engineered when another avowedly pro-business Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president, U.S. multinational financial companies can avoid taxes on their international scams. And financial scams are what GE excelled in for decades, when GE Capital, its financial unit, which specialized in credit card, consumer loan and housing mortgage debt, accounted for most of GE's profits. That's right, GE, along with General Motors with its toxic GMAC financial unit, came to look more like an investment bank than a traditional industrial manufacturing giant that once propelled this economy and ultimately it ran into the same sort of difficulties as the Wall Street hustlers. As The New York Times' David Kocieniewski, who broke the GE profit story, put it: "Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company's profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines." Maximizing corporate profits at the taxpayer's expense is what top CEOs are good at, and after all it

Poor urban neighborhoods have already learned what is only dimly being understood by the rest of us-in the eyes of the state we are increasingly no longer citizens with constitutional rights but enemy combatants.  - 2011/07/10

As the trial began, the judge refused to let DeChristopher's defense team inform the jury that the auction was later overturned and declared illegal. The judge also refused to let the defense team inform the jury that DeChristopher had raised the money for the initial payment and offered it to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which then refused to accept it.

Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that's the case, or he wouldn't have had the temerity to write a 14-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president. 

While politicians from Athens to Washington are pushing through devastating austerity programs, Argentines voted in droves Sunday to re-elect their populist, welfare queen of a president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Fernandez is the widow of Nestor Kirchner, who died a year ago after winning the award for world's best husband (Nestor decided not to run for re-election so that his wife could take a turn). But before he left office, Nestor Kirchner infuriated global elites by defaulting on Argentina's $95 billion foreign debt. Greece, facing an external debt load five to six times that amount, has decided instead to severely cut back on public spending while it works with other governments to address its debt crisis. Argentina, on the other hand, pumped money into subsidies and social programs. And while the rest of the world has been circling the drain, financially speaking, Argentina's economy has been booming, with GDP growing last year by more than 9 percent. There are a lot of learned fellows who don't approve of the economic policies of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, but the undisputed result in the short term is a thriving economy and a landslide re-election.  −PZS

Fritz Stern wrote "In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented." It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. - 2010/03/29

TRUTHDIG - President Barack Obama signed a slew of bills into law during the lame-duck session of Congress and was dubbed the "Comeback Kid" amid a flurry of fawning press reports. In the hail of this surprise bipartisanship, though, the one issue over which Democrats and Republicans always agree, war, was completely ignored. The war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, and 2010 has seen the highest number of U.S. and NATO soldiers killed.

Commentary on the notion that the Bush Administration and neocons were pro-free enterprise.

This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).    A "working class hero," John Lennon told us in his song of that title, "is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you're so clever and classless and free/ But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."