"In response, lenders are squeezing what they can from those borrowers who are still trying to pay their debts—cutting back on credit limits, jacking up interest rates, and shortening the time to pay bills. By drafting legislation that won't take effect until 2010, Congress has simply encouraged banks to accelerate their predatory lending practices before the bill comes due. 

"But the bill has bigger problems than timing—its design hardly ensures better protection for consumers. The Federal Reserve will be responsible for writing the rules to put the legislation into practice. Not only has the Fed turned a deaf ear to consumer problems for years, stringent credit card regulation goes against its institutional interest. The Fed's main job is to pump-prime and oversee banks. Why should the bankers who run the Fed strip their client banks of credit card profits when those banks already need billions from taxpayers to stay afloat?

"Once written, the new rules will be enforced by the utterly supine Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department. This unit has rarely imposed public penalties on big banks, although it has managed to fend off critics by claiming that it hands out penalties in private. Whether it actually does so, and what kind of penalties it enforces, remains anyone's guess.

"A more effective alternative to this inherently flawed plan would be to hand regulatory power to a financial products safety commission, a concept advocated by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, a longtime critic of the credit card industry who is running the bailout oversight board. 'The Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and other financial regulatory institutions are not currently charged to protect consumer safety,' Warren explained to me in 2007. 'The primary responsibility of the regulatory agencies is to assure the profitability of the banks and other lending institutions, not to protect consumers from deceptive and unsafe products.' "

Jeremy Scahill at Alternet writes about a military thug squad still brutalizing prisoners at Gitmo.

"As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated … through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

"More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.

"The force is officially known as the the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantánamo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force. Despite President Barack Obama's publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture -- and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces' actions illegal -- IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.

"According to Gen. Miller's memo: 'The physical security of U.S. forces and detainees in U.S. care is paramount. Use the minimum force necessary for mission accomplishment and force protection ... Use of the IRF team and levels of force are not to be used as a method of punishment.'

"But human rights lawyers, former prisoners and former IRF team members with extensive experience at Guantánamo paint a very different picture of the role these teams played. 'They are the Black Shirts of Guantánamo,' says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented the most Guantánamo prisoners. "IRFs can't be separated from torture. They are a part of the brutalization of humans treated as less than human.'

"Clive Stafford Smith, who has represented 50 Guantánamo prisoners, including 31 still imprisoned there, has seen the IRF teams up close. 'They're goons,' he says. 'They've played a huge role.'

"The IRF teams 'were fully approved at the highest levels [of the Bush administration], including the Secretary of Defense and with outside consultation of the Justice Department," says Scott Horton, one of the leading experts on U.S. Military and Constitutional law. This force "was designed to disabuse the prisoners of any idea that they would be free from physical assault while in U.S. custody," he says. "They were trained to brutally punish prisoners in a brief period of time, and ridiculous pretexts were taken to justify" the beatings.

"So notorious are these teams that a new lexicon was created and used by prisoners and guards alike to describe the beatings: IRF-ing prisoners or to be IRF-ed.

"Former Guantánamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described 'the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke.' Yee said he believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners' "private areas" and Korans to 'rile the detainees,' saying it 'seemed like harassment for the sake of harassment, and the prisoners fought it. Those who did were always IRFed.'

'I'll put it like this,' Stafford Smith says. "My clients are afraid of them.'

'Up to 15 people attempted to commit suicide at Camp Delta due to the abuses of the IRF officials,' according to the Spanish investigation. Combined with other documentation, including prisoner testimony and legal memos, the IRF teams appear to be one of the most significant forces in the abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo, worthy of an investigation by U.S. prosecutors in and of themselves."

David Macaray at Counterpunch says that labor needs a southern strategy.

"Labor’s only hope is to organize the South.  They need to do whatever it takes to recruit new union members.  Sponsor rodeos.  Sponsor gun shows.  Sponsor chili cook-offs, monster truck pulls, pee-wee sports leagues.  Hire Tennessee Titan and Atlanta Falcon football players to do radio and TV spots.  Start your own record company, produce country music using home-grown musicians, and put a union-made American flag on your label. 

"To gain a foothold, organized labor needs to embark upon the Mother of All Public Relations Campaigns.  It should consider putting together a racing team and entering a car in a NASCAR event.  The Teamsters and the SEIU should jointly sponsor a “Change to Win” racing team, using local drivers.  What labor needs more than anything is positive exposure, and lots of it.  

"Unions should begin making conspicuous donations to impoverished high school football teams in the region, offering to buy new uniforms.  The IAM should make a big deal of inaugurating scholarship programs.  The Steelworkers should give $5,000 grants to deserving high school students, naming him or her as their annual “Student of Steel.”   

"The AFT (American Federation of Teachers) should establish a generous endowment at the University of Alabama, tied in, perhaps, to the formation of a Chair in Labor Relations.  The AFL-CIO should announce that it’s going to donate money for a new athletic facility at LSU.  The IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) should set up vocational apprenticeship programs at community colleges.

"Fortunately, one thing Big Labor still has plenty of—at least for now—is money; but it needs to spend that money more wisely.  Big Labor needs to take the cure—it needs to quit depending on sympathetic, smooth-talking Democrats to carry its water.  Clearly, the American South is where their resources should be focused.  

"Some smart guy (it may have been labor historian Irving Bernstein, in The Lean Years) once suggested that big-time labor unions should move their national headquarters from Washington D.C. and relocate to a large southern city, like Atlanta, Georgia or Nashville, Tennessee.  It’s a brilliant idea. 

"By becoming an integral part of a municipal economy in the Deep South, organized labor will have effectively infiltrated enemy lines without, figuratively, firing a shot (i.e., without anyone even having to join a union).  Brilliant.

"The only reason most blue-chip unions in America (the UAW is a notable exception, with its headquarters at Solidarity House, in Detroit) have their offices in D.C. is, ostensibly, to mingle with the nation’s power brokers.  More accurately, it’s a convenient way for slick lobbyists and predatory Democratic politicians to take the AFL-CIO’s money. 

"But hasn’t that relationship been one sorry, monumental scam?  I mean, what tangible benefits have been gained by being at the epicenter of America’s political power?  In the 62 years since the Taft-Hartley Act—arguably the most anti-union legislation is U.S. history—organized Labor has poured tens of millions of dollars into efforts to get the Act repealed or, at the minimum, significantly modified, and virtually nothing has come of it. 

"Instead, organized labor continues to be marginalized, national membership rolls continue to be chipped away, and union members across the country continue to be demoralized. 

"So why stay in Washington?  Why not move to Dixie, where the battles of the next several decades will almost certainly be fought?  At the very least, the commercial real estate will be much cheaper."

Jeff Faux comments at The Nation

"In the great Italian historical novel The Leopard, the Sicilian prince asks his nephew Tancredi why he is joining Garibaldi's revolt against their king. Tancredi replies, 'Unless we...take a hand now they'll foist a Republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." about the lack of change regarding the flawed and failed financial system.

"Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke says he understands that citizens are "concerned" that the people who caused the problem are being rewarded. But suck it up, he advises. "Our economic system is critically dependent on the free flow of credit."

"So banks have used the bailout to increase their reserves, finance mergers, overpay their executives and hire lobbyists to kill Obama's bill to allow bankruptcy judges to protect homeowners from foreclosure. Geithner, Summers, Bernanke and the rest of their cohort certainly know this. It follows that the purpose of the multitrillion-dollar bailout is not to spark a recovery through increased lending but to preserve our financial behemoths until the economy recovers. Then, unburdened by their self-created bad debt, the hedge-funders, arbitrageurs and leverage artists will be in good shape to get back into the credit-bubble business.

"The real recovery, which will be financed when banks begin to see customers coming into their clients' stores with money in their pockets, is being left to the comparatively modest stimulus package. Many economists think we will need a new round of government spending perhaps by the end of the year."