For all the caterwauling from the right and, stupifyingly, from the Obama Administration and Blue Dog left as well, here is the real reason the United States has the sizable deficit issues it does (well, in addition to the fact we will not tax even rich individuals appropriately either) – our biggest corporations pay no tax.

I get it, I do. People have exploited those they considered beneath them since the beginning of time. It’s only recently that we’ve begun to tell ourselves we ought to like it and help them to do it, in the hopes we may someday be the exploiters. I don’t know when that became an admirable thing to be, but it seems that’s the motivation: Side with billionaires because someday you’ll be a billionaire and then you’ll want to keep all your money instead of giving it to the government so they can teach unwashed poles like you to read and patrol the filthy streets where you live in your hovel.

I’m not surprised by this — but I simply don’t understand how the Obama Administration can claim they haven’t found anything fundamentally flawed (though that could be HuffPo’s formulation) when thousands of people have been thrown out of their homes based on documents whose signers falsely attested to those documents.

If we all stand together, we can turn around a horrific status-quo by putting cannabis in the realm of health, not law enforcement. Persuade our community leaders to stand up and speak for humanity and humane practices. For voters unsure of the result of legalization, let’s demand an immediate cease fire in the War on Drugs, to show that all hell will not break loose.

Nelnet improperly exploits a loophole in the student lending regulations for years, and then last Friday afternoon settled a $1+ billion student loan fraud case for $55 million, just as college students head back to campus. Lovely.

But I’m sure that nothing like this could happen with insurance companies and the Health Insurance reform regulations, or the Wall Street firms and the FinReg rules . . .

Welcome back to campus, everyone.

Foolish consistencies are the hobgoblins of Senator Tom Coburn.

A disturbing account from another survivor of the Deepwater Horizon suggests that Transocean, the owner of the rig, deliberately isolated the survivors from contact with the outside world for more than a day and a half in what the survivor suggested was an attempt to sign away liability.

More and more Americans are waking up to the fact that with a few notable exceptions, both Republicans and Democrats in Washington are basically employees of corporate lobbyists. How do we fight the corporate beast?

There is still enough energy left in the wounded serpent that is the Southern Strategy to lash out in a furious flowering of poison to corrode our moral fiber. The question is whether the corporate interests that back this strategy in order to keep their taxes low (or non-existent) will finally forsake the oncological, selfish model of capitalism for the more civic-minded one that prevails in Europe and elsewhere.

In Baker’s retelling, the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department, specifically Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson (featured on the cover as the “false profits” of the title), allowed the housing bubble to grow unchecked, ignored and even encouraged the reckless mortgages that intensified risk, and were caught completely off-guard by the eventual meltdown. Stripped of their home equity wealth, consumers could not ring up the purchases that fed the national economy. Foreclosures and a glut of vacant housing on the market devastated the construction industry. The write-offs and toxic securities at the banks brought them to their knees. Baker says this was completely predictable: