"Among environmental groups, there is, understandably, less focus on the finer points of financial regulation. 'The derivatives side is not something that a person who comes to the table worried about carbon emissions has on their agenda,' says Michael Greenberger, a derivatives expert at the University of Maryland who has also served in the CFTC and the Justice Department. 'Those people—and they're fighting a good battle—opened the door.'

"Already, the industry has achieved its main objective: The Waxman-Markey bill would create a big, convoluted market for carbon derivatives. Experts from the Congressional Budget Office have said that the most stable and effective form of cap and trade would involve a system in which the government periodically sets prices in much the same way that the Fed determines interest rates. That would prevent volatility, which would in turn remove the temptation to gamble on big price swings. In other words, it would provide far less opportunity for wheeling and dealing—and profits. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) offered a proposal for a managed-price cap-and-trade scheme, but failed to gain any traction. Meanwhile, industry groups like the International Swaps and Derivatives Association pushed for a system in which a "broad suite" of financial products can be traded, and that's what Waxman-Markey delivers.

"Perhaps the biggest uncertainty hinges on how offset derivatives—such as a contract to buy offset credits at a future date for a determined price—will be monitored. This too would be left to the White House task force to figure out. It will be a tough task because the quality of offset projects is notoriously difficult to verify. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) has described them as "fraught with opportunity for game playing, which will be fully exploited, I'm sure."

"Congressional Democrats voted in the majority to authorize the Iraq invasion.  They voted in the majority to fund the Iraq adventure long after the lies leading to war were well known.  A majority of Senate Democrats voted for the Patriot Act.   A Democratic controlled Senate allowed further government spying on personal communication (FISA Amendments) in 2008 and a third of Senate Democrats supported the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which gutted habeas corpus.

"Democrats voted for the initial Wall Street welfare bill; also known as the bailout.  Right now, the Obama administration is responsible for doubling the Bush administrations cash transfer form the U.S. Treasury to Wall Street and the banks.  Democrats failed to pass the only major bill to ease rampant foreclosures.  This left 1.7 million families likely to lose their homes.  Democrats did pass a credit card reform bill but forgot to cap those 29% interest limits that the banks arbitrarily assign.

"One party created the current disaster.  The other has embraced the broadest parameters of the policies that created the disasters that voters want fixed -- wealth transfers to the ultra rich while the vast majority gets just about nothing plus mindless, counter productive fantasies of empire through war.

"The two parties and the elitists who look down their noses on the overwhelming majority of citizens assume that the people will simply tolerate the creation of a catastrophe by one party and the perpetuation of that grave injustice to citizens by the other.

"When you're broke, you know it.

"When you're out of work, you know it.

"When there are no jobs, you know it.

"And when the country continues to fight overseas but does nothing to protect economic security at home, you know it.

"The game is up.  The party is over.  The people have a fundamental right to survive, at the very least.  If both parties continue to promote policies that leave out almost all citizens, as is now the case, there will be alternatives that look nothing like the current two political parties.  The binary fallacy and the two parties that fail to address our crises will be no more.  Relying solely on the failures of the opposing party while embracing their programs will soon be defunct."

Alfred W. McCoy writes at Tomgram about torture as a history that still haunts us; even before the Bush "in-house" torture policy, American outsourced it's torture.

"If, like me, you've been following America's torture policies not just for the last few years, but for decades, you can't help but experience that eerie feeling of déjà vu these days. With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years.

"Like Chile after the regime of General Augusto Pinochet or the Philippines after the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Washington after Bush is now trapped in the painful politics of impunity. Unlike anything our allies have experienced, however, for Washington, and so for the rest of us, this may prove a political crisis without end or exit.

"Despite dozens of official inquiries in the five years since the Abu Ghraib photos first exposed our abuse of Iraqi detainees, the torture scandal continues to spread like a virus, infecting all who touch it, including now Obama himself. By embracing a specific methodology of torture, covertly developed by the CIA over decades using countless millions of taxpayer dollars and graphically revealed in those Iraqi prison photos, we have condemned ourselves to retreat from whatever promises might be made to end this sort of abuse and are instead already returning to a bipartisan consensus that made torture America's secret weapon throughout the Cold War.

"To most Americans, whether they supported the Bush administration torture policy or opposed it, all of this seemed shocking and very new. Not so, unfortunately. Concealed from Congress and the public, the CIA had spent the previous half-century developing and propagating a sophisticated form of psychological torture meant to defy investigation, prosecution, or prohibition -- and so far it has proved remarkably successful on all these counts. Even now, since many of the leading psychologists who worked to advance the CIA's torture skills have remained silent, we understand surprisingly little about the psychopathology of the program of mental torture that the Bush administration applied so globally.

"Physical torture is a relatively straightforward matter of sadism that leaves behind broken bodies, useless information, and clear evidence for prosecution. Psychological torture, on the other hand, is a mind maze that can destroy its victims, even while entrapping its perpetrators in an illusory, almost erotic, sense of empowerment. When applied skillfully, it leaves few scars for investigators who might restrain this seductive impulse. However, despite all the myths of these last years, psychological torture, like its physical counterpart, has proven an ineffective, even counterproductive, method for extracting useful information from prisoners.

"Over a 40-year period, Americans have found themselves mired in this same moral quagmire on six separate occasions: following exposés of CIA-sponsored torture in South Vietnam (1970), Brazil (1974), Iran (1978), Honduras (1988), and then throughout Latin America (1997). After each exposé, the public's shock soon faded, allowing the Agency to resume its dirty work in the shadows.

"Unless some formal inquiry is convened to look into a sordid history that reached its depths in the Bush era, and so begins to break this cycle of deceit, exposé, and paralysis followed by more of the same, we're likely, a few years hence, to find ourselves right back where we are now. We'll be confronted with the next American torture scandal from some future iconic dungeon, part of a dismal, ever lengthening procession that has led from the tiger cages of South Vietnam through the Shah of Iran's prison cells in Tehran to Abu Ghraib and the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

"The next time, however, the world will not have forgotten those photos from Abu Ghraib. The next time, the damage to this country will be nothing short of devastating."