It’s not news that David Brooks is a pretentious contemptible ass, that he plays fast and loose with facts and at times even ignores them completely.  He was in fine form today with “The Nature of Poverty”.   (It reminded me of his post-earthquake Haiti column from 2010.)   When it comes to substance, his columns are without merit but they do have modest entertainment value.  Spotting the BS in them is a bit like playing Minesweeper or Tetris.  It keeps you entertained for a few minutes while you’re procrastinating.  Anyhow, one sentence in his column today caught my attention in particular:

As Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post has pointed out, in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person.

And I think to myself, “Ya know, that sounds like a stretch.”  Low and behold Dean Baker had already called bullshit.   From “David Brooks and the Federal Government’s $14,000 Per Year Per Poor Person”: Continue reading →

Matt Taibbi is back with Rolling Stone.  From his Nov. 6, 2014 story, The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JP Morgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare –

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.

“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”…

Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.

Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.

Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she’s kept her mouth shut since then. “My closest family and friends don’t know what I’ve been living with,” she says. “Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.”

Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.

She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. “Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way,” Fleischmann says.

Read the whole story at Rolling Stone.