The official position of Robert Khuzami, the Chief of Enforcement of the SEC, is laid out in a brief asking Judge Rakoff to stay his stinging rejection of the weakling settlement with Citigroup last week pending appeal. The public will suffer because the SEC will have to devote its meager resources to trying a case, so they can’t do other great stuff, like investigate insider trading (57 cases this year, big deal) and ignore dozens of other cookie cutter cases just like the ones they settle for beans.

Across the board the American people overwhelming think too much power in this country is concentrated in the hands of a few very rich people and very large corporations. A full 77 percent of the country shares this opinion including even a majority, 53%, of Republicans.

A few odds and ends from the week just past.

In retrospect, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement shouldn’t be all that surprising.  Millions of hopeful people flocked to the ballot box in hopes of reversing decades of pro-corporate, pro-wealth, anti-ordinary people policies, only to realize that they had voted in what they thought they had voted out.  Progressives who had dedicated themselves [...]

The Wall Street Journal article about how the Obama administration decided to shelve an ozone regulation provides a great example for why we need to eliminate the absurd electoral college and switch to a national popular vote system for president.

In the United States and most democracies, voters don’t primarily use elections to choose between competing ideologies or plans. First and foremost, voters use the ballot to depose those they think failed to govern efficiently. Elections are often a referendum on the party in power.

The number of Americans who think our two party system is seriously broken has edged up slightly to 34 percent, a new high in the Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll.

Now, the only scientific proof we will have that this exposure caused certain rare cancers is if we see very high rates of said cancers among the workers. The only way any 9/11 related cancers are going to be covered is if large numbers of workers, who are first denied help paying for their treatments, develop these cancers. Once enough workers suffer without, then we might have the scientific proof that they actually deserved help in the first place. Hello Kafka.

Surely we must be in some kind of parallel mirror universe where everything is backwards and nothing makes any sense.

Overall, 52 percent of Americans would like to add a third major political party, while only 40 percent feel Democrats and Republicans do an adequate job representing the American people, according to the latest Gallup poll. The interesting finding of this poll is that it found across the political spectrum, liberals, moderates and conservatives, all equally felt the need for more than the two parties.