By Marci Greenstein

When it comes to protecting citizens from unfair credit card and lending practices, what does the chair of the panel overseeing the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street want? She wants Congress to cut through the “complexity machine” created by the financial industry – in the form of hidden fees, arbitrary rate hikes, and unintelligible, lengthy, one-sided contracts for credit cards, homes loans and cars. Elizabeth Warren wants to make obtaining credit simple, clear, and fair.

Elizabeth Warren

“I expect to pay for what I get, but I don’t want to be tricked.”  That was the message, delivered with extraordinary clarity by the Harvard Law School professor, a noted expert on bankruptcy law and chair of Congress’ TARP oversight panel, to an audience March 11 at the New America Foundation’s Washington, D.C. offices.

According to Warren, the “complexity machine” got started in the 1980s as banks began complicating and increasing the small print in credit card and other lending agreements. (more…)

Sure it’s creepy when American citizens start working with overseas terrorist organizations, even when they’re people as clearly unstable and “wanna-be” prone as Colleen LaRose.  LaRose’s advantage (let’s stop giving her the benefit of an attractive pseudonym right now) to certain Islamic terrorists was that she wouldn’t stand out in places like Sweden, where she allegedly planned to commit murder.   But consider what a huge opportunity for the FBI and other intelligence agencies, which certainly have no shortage of Americans of European descent working for them.  The FBI has shown itself very skilled at introducing undercover agents into organized crime syndicates, the Hell’s Angels, and drug cartels.  Who’s to say they can’t work a few fake Jihad Joes into the mix?

A national infrastructure bank — government-backed and -administered — would create jobs, encourage competition among states and localities, and force local leaders to make responsible decisions.  In the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson looks at Los Angeles’s surprising plan for light rail and buses to ease that city’s congestion and then brings the conversation back around to a national infrastructure bank:

At bottom, the problem is that we don’t have much in the way of institutions of public finance. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, has been trying to establish a national infrastructure bank since 1994. With $25 billion in public funds, such a bank could leverage far greater amounts in loans for badly needed construction projects.

The kicker is how some members of Congress reacted when LA’s leaders said they wanted to take out a loan rather than get money from Washington outright:  they laughed.  If our political leadership would take a closer look at DeLauro’s proposal, we all could be laughing our way to the bank — a bank that works for all of us.

Why do I keep expecting government officials to behave rationally with the people’s money?  Many state pension fund officials are still betting on stocks and high-risk investments, reports Mary Williams Walsh of the New York Times, just scant months after these same funds took massive hits from investments in . . . stocks and high-risk investments.  While claiming their portfolios are “aimed at diversification,”

public pension funds are trying a wide range of investments: commodity futures, junk bonds, foreign stocks, deeply-discounted mortgage securities and margin investments.

This is the same strategy that helped decimate pension funds in California and Florida.  And state pension funds are often intertwined with operating cash (in case you weren’t already concerned).  Some states are more creative and choose real diversity for their investments, but Williams Walsh’s reporting shows that too many are trying to win in the short term.  They’re liable to lose what millions of teachers, police, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and social workers are owed in the long run.  Federal rules are needed — and soon.

By Marci Greenstein

National Institutes of Health chief, Dr. Frances Collins was talking up his agency’s partnership with the Food and Drug Administration on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show last week.  The move is intended to speed up the process for getting drugs from laboratories to the marketplace.  What’s surprising is that this collaboration hasn’t happened sooner.  How often have we heard about patients desperate to get drugs that are successful in clinical trials but are moving at a snail’s pace through the FDA’s regulatory maze? (more…)

Harper’s Magazine, one of the best publications in America today, continues to expose hypocrisy in American government and the violence that is integral to our country today.  Read Scott Horton’s shocking investigation into the deaths of three detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Naval Base.  These three men each “committed suicide” in one night, in the same way:  by first (somehow) stuffing rags down their own throats and then (improbably) hanging themselves. (more…)

The argument that Phil Longman and Barry Lynn make in the latest Washington Monthly is that America’s post-WWII boom, and the explosion of innovative companies which appeared in 1970s and 1980s America, depended on government anti-monopoly initiatives taken during Roosevelt’s New Deal.  It’s a provocative idea, and a hard one to prove in a magazine article, but Longman and Lynn point out that FDR’s Justice Department

set out to engineer rivalries within large industries whenever possible . . . and in sectors of the economy where efficiencies of concentration were far harder to prove — retail, restaurants, services, farming — the government protected open markets.

Competition among the fast-growing corporations of America’s post-war boom led to “an astounding burst of innovation,” one that the authors say is lacking in today’s economy — one dominated by fewer and fewer large corporations that not only throttle competition, but even cut back their own innovations in order not to upset a marketplace they comfortably control. (more…)

Another in Understanding Government’s “Public Service Announcement” series profiling the careers and challenges of notable government employees

By Norman Kelley

Einstein once remarked that it is more important to have an imagination than knowledge. In the case of Markham K. Smith, now a program manager with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), one led to the other.

As a child, Smith’s imagination was spurred by his mother’s admonishment not to lift the lid of the pot that was cooking rice, his favorite food.

“She would always say, “Don’t lift the lid off the pot! Do not touch the pot!’” he remembers.

Intrigued, Markham wondered why he could not lift the cover to see inside. “So, as a little kid I had the idea that I was going to invent see-through cookware so I could see what going on in that pot while that rice was cooking.”

Little did he know that his mother’s command was actually stirring the pot of his imagination, leading him years later to work for the Defense Dept., managing programs devised to thwart chemical or biological Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). Working at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, Smith is one of the people protecting America’s armed service members from chemical and biological weapons, a job that could have important implications if the U.S. faces a terrorist or military attack.

DTRA was organized in 1998 as part of the U.S. Strategic Command to help face the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The agency’s brief includes detecting, stopping, and providing protection in the event of chemical and biological attacks on American military forces or the US public at large. DTRA’s mission is to think through possible threat scenarios and devise ways to neutralize them.

“We are the science and technology arm of the Chemical and Biological Defense program,” explains Smith. (more…)

Credit card debt is an embarrassment, but it’s a reality for many Americans, me included.   So it’s nice to see that what the White House and Congress vowed to do is actually happening.  Government has changed the way banks calculate credit card debt and has made it harder for them to keep you on the hook by camouflaging usurious practices.  Consider these sensible sentences I got in the mail this week from my good friends at Chase: (more…)

Consider what would happen if America’s military became known more for humanitarian aid than for anything else.  This NPR story from Juan Forero on U.S. Army aid work in Haiti shows what a shift in America’s priorities could mean for the servicemembers involved, foreign populations, and for all of us.