Check It Out on the first day of July contains the following:

Dean Baker writes at The Guardian that banks own the US government (not just Congress) and is working furiously to kill any financial reform.

"Last month, when the US Congress failed to pass a bankruptcy reform measure that would have allowed home mortgages to be modified in bankruptcy, senator Dick Durbin succinctly commented: "The banks own the place." That seems pretty clear.

"After all, it was the banks' greed that fed the housing bubble with loony loans that were guaranteed to go bad. Of course the finance guys also made a fortune guaranteeing the loans that were guaranteed to go bad (ie AIG), and when everything went bust, the taxpayers got handed the bill. The cost of the bailout will certainly be in the hundreds of billions, if not more than $1tn when it is all over.

"More importantly, we are looking at the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The cumulative lost output over the years 2008-2012 will almost certainly exceed $5tn. That comes to more than $60,000 for an average family of four. This is the price that we are paying for the bankers' greed, coupled with incredible incompetence and/or corruption from our regulators.

"Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable to think that the bankers would be keeping a low profile for a while. That's not the way it works in Washington. The banks are aggressively pushing their case in Congress and Obama administration. Not only are we not going to see bankruptcy reform, but any financial reform package that gets through Congress will probably contain enough loopholes that it will be almost useless.

"This is why it was so encouraging to see congressman Peter DeFazio's (D-OR) proposal to tax trades in oil options and futures. DeFazio proposed a tax of 0.02% on trades in oil futures and options as a way to make up a shortfall in the federal government's highway trust fund. This tax could raise billions of dollars each year in revenue and make speculation in the oil market a more dangerous affair.

"This tax can best be thought of as a tax on gambling. Gambling is heavily taxed in every state that allows it. DeFazio's bill is effectively a tax on gambling in the oil markets. It will not stop it, but it would discourage it, and in the process raise a huge amount of money that could go to productive purposes.

"The bill faces an enormous uphill struggle in Congress. As Durbin said, the banks own the place, and they are not going to just step aside and let Congress impose a tax on such a lucrative business. But, it is important that people know about the DeFazio bill. "

Dean Baker also weighs in at Campaign for America's Future with a question about the upcoming 21st century Pecora Commission; whether it will be super sleuths and as effective as the 1930's original or just Keystone Cops?

"Congress will be appointing a special commission to investigate the causes of the economic crisis and to determine who is to blame. This proposal originated among progressives who wanted to see a replay of the depression era Pecora Commission, which exposed the Wall Street corruption that laid the basis for the 1929 stock market crash and the depression that followed.

"At the very least, a similar exposure of the greedheads at Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the rest could provide an element of justice to this disaster and possibly lay the basis for criminal prosecutions of the worst offenders. Undoubtedly there are many multi-millionaires at these institutions who would make far more appropriate prisoners than some of the 2 million current guests of our criminal justice system.

"Unfortunately, there is a real possibility that the commission appointed by Congress may follow a different precedent. Instead of striving to uncover the truth, it may seek to conceal it.

"There is precedent for this of cover-up commission. The Iran-Contra Committee that Congress appointed in 1987 strove to conceal fundamental and deliberate violations of the law. Congress had explicitly prohibited the use of government money to support the Contras who were fighting to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.

"The basic story of the current crisis is very simple. We had an $8 trillion housing bubble as house prices had hugely diverged from fundamentals in a way that had never happened before. The bubble was fueled by loans that were virtually guaranteed to go bad once house prices stopped rising. The banks that issued the loans didn’t care because they sold them in the secondary market. By the time the loans went bad, they had already cashed out their stake.

"The investment banks that securitized the loans didn’t care because they sold their (investment grade) junk all over the world. The executives running the operations pocketed tens of millions before the music stopped and the bubble burst.

"So, what questions does the commission have to ask? How about putting all the 7 and 8 figure executives under oath and ask them if they were really too dumb to see an $8 trillion housing bubble. For a follow-up, the commission can ask them what exactly they do to earn those multi-million dollar paychecks. Those questions should make for some very informative testimony."

Dahr Jamail at Asia Times delves into the increasing numbers of US military refusing to obey what they consider illegal and immoral orders to deploy to Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

"...some American soldiers have come up with ingenious ways to express defiance or dissent on our distant battlegrounds. These have been little noted in the mainstream media, and when they do surface, officials in the Pentagon or in Washington just brush them aside as "bad apple" incidents (the same explanation they tend to use when a war crime is exposed).

"But in the stories of men and women who served in the occupation of Iraq, they often play a different role. In October 2007, for instance, I interviewed Corporal Phil Aliff, an Iraq War veteran, then based at Fort Drum in upstate New York. He recalled:

During my stints in Iraq between August 2005 and July 2006, we probably ran 300 patrols. Most of the men in my platoon were just in from combat tours in Afghanistan and morale was incredibly low. Recurring hits by roadside bombs had demoralized us and we realized the only way we could avoid being blown up was to stop driving around all the time. So every other day we would find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapon caches in the fields and everything was going fine. All our enlisted people had grown disenchanted with the chain of command.

"Aliff referred to this tactic as engaging in "search-and-avoid" missions, a sardonic expression recycled from the Vietnam War when soldiers were sent out on official "search-and-destroy" missions.

"These understated acts of refusal were often survival strategies as well as gestures of dissent, as the troops were invariably undertrained and ill-equipped for the job of putting down an insurgency. Specialist Nathan Lewis, who was deployed to Iraq with the 214th Artillery Brigade from March 2002 through June 2003, experienced this firsthand. "We never received any training for much of what we were expected to do," he said when telling me of certain munitions catching fire while he and other soldiers were loading them onto trucks, "We were never trained on how to handle [them] the right way."

"Dissent starts as simple as saying this is bullshit. Why am I risking my life?

"Sometimes such feelings have permeated entire units and soldiers in them have refused to follow orders en masse. One of the more dramatic of these incidents occurred in July 2007. The 2nd Platoon of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, in Baghdad had lost many men in its 11 months of deployment. After a roadside bomb killed five more, its members held a meeting and agreed that it was no longer possible for them to function professionally. Concerned that their anger might actually touch off a massacre of Iraqi civilians, they staged a quiet revolt against their commanders instead.

"Kelly Kennedy, a reporter with the Military Times embedded with Charlie Company prior to the revolt, described the shape the platoon members were in by that time: "[T]hey went right to mental health and they got sleeping medications, and they basically couldn't sleep and reacted poorly. And then, they were supposed to go out on patrol again that day. And they, as a platoon, the whole platoon - it was about 40 people - said, 'We're not going to do it. We can't. We're not mentally there right now'."

"In response, the military broke up the platoon. Each individual involved was also "flagged" so he would not get a promotion or receive any award due.

"To this day, troops in Iraq continue to be plagued by equipment and manpower shortages, and work long hours in an extreme climate. In addition, their stress levels are regularly raised by news from home of veterans returning to separations and divorces, and of a Veteran's Administration often ill-equipped and unwilling to provide appropriate physical and psychological care to veterans.

"In November 2007, the Pentagon revealed that between 2003 and 2007 there had been an 80% increase in overall desertion rates in the army (desertion refers to soldiers who go AWOL and never intend to return to service), and army AWOL rates from 2003 to 2006 were the highest since 1980. Between 2000 and 2006, more than 40,000 troops from all branches of the military deserted, more than half from the army. Army desertion rates jumped by 42% from 2006 to 2007 alone.

"Right now, acts of dissent, refusal and resistance in the all-volunteer military remain small-scale and scattered. Ranging from the extreme private act of suicide to avoidance of duty to actual refusal of duty, they continue to consist largely of individual acts.

"Present-day GI resistance to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan cannot begin to be compared with the extensive resistance movement that helped end the Vietnam War and brought an army of draftees to the point of near mutiny in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the ongoing dissent that does exist in the US military, however fragmented and overlooked at the moment, should not be discounted.

" 'If we want soldiers to choose the right but difficult path, they must know beyond any shadow of a doubt that they will be supported by Americans.' So said First Lieutenant Ehren Watada of the US Army, the highest-ranking enlisted soldier to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq. (He finally had the military charges against him dropped by the Justice Department.) The future of any such movement in the military is now unknowable, but keep your eyes open. History, even military history

, holds its own surprises."