The Angry Bear

Last year in Chicago: Among the Sun-Times’ findings, based on a review of police and Cook County medical examiner’s reports, court files and interviews: • The vast majority of those killed in Chicago in the first half of this year — 90 percent —died from a gunshot wound. • Seventy-two percent were African-American men, their average age 29. • Four out of five had faced criminal charges in Cook County at some point, mostly for drug offenses — the leading...

Election Tax Returns In an effort to force our present president when running for re-election and future presidential candidates to release income tax returns, California passed SB249 Disclose Act. California became the first state to require presidential candidates to release their tax returns in order to appear on the state ballot. Lawmakers sent Gov. Jerry Brown AB249 Friday requiring candidates to publicly share five years of returns. This comes after...

“ In Cutting Deals With Trump, Are Democrats Walking Into a Trap?” Over the weekend the mainstream press published a flurry of articles about Donald Trump, the pragmatic independent outsider who has no loyalty to any party and will work with anyone to Get Things Done. This excited reaction was in response to the president’s agreement to raise the debt ceiling and fund disaster relief with the help of Democrats. But that’s nothing compared to the delirium...

Via Alternet: Why a Case Against a Dark Money Charter School Group Is Great News for Democracy Billionaire charter school backers in Massachusetts wanted their identities kept secret. In one of the most important decisions ever about dark money in politics, a Massachusetts charter school advocacy group has been ordered to make the names of its donors public, and pay the largest campaign finance fine in state history. The case is likely to reverberate...

Dan here…a reminder about our federal deficit. Deficits Do Matter, But Not the Way You Think 07.20.10    Roosevelt institute  L. Randall Wray In recent months, a form of mass hysteria has swept the country as fear of “unsustainable” budget deficits replaced the earlier concern about the financial crisis, job loss, and collapsing home prices. What is most troubling is that this shift in focus comes even as the government’s stimulus package winds down and...

Hurricane adjusted initial claims for week of Sept. 2: 239,000 Last week I promised I would repeat an exercise I first undertook in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy disrupted the initial claims data: estimating what the initial jobless claims would have been, but for the hurricane. In 2012 I created that adjustment by backing out the affected states (NY and NJ) from the non-seasonally adjusted data.  That gave me the number of initial claims filed in the other...

On September 7, I pointed out Republicans are preparing Another Assault on the PPACA/ACA in 2017. Republican senators Lindsey Graham S.C. and Bill Cassidy LA are making a last stand in an effort to repeal and replace the ACA by “proposing legislation doing away with many of the subsidies and mandates of the 2010 law. Instead, the Graham – Cassidy Bill would provide block grants to the states to help individuals pay for health coverage. Graham taking it...

by Peter Dorman  (originally published at Econospeak) Price Gouging Whenever there’s a natural disaster, a famine or some other such crisis, people zero in on price gouging.  Are grain merchants jacking up prices to take advantage of a food shortage?  What about airlines raising fares to cash in on desperate attempts to flee an impending hurricane, or stores that double or triple the price on bottled water?  And generators that suddenly only the rich can...

With the the recent Equifax data theft fiasco, I thought of a post I wrote 10 years ago: Based on a conversation I had with reader Debbie, I was thinking about identity theft for the last day or so. I also had a discussion with the Ex-GF (for new readers, that’s my wife) about this; she was the victim of identity theft at one point. Its a big deal in this society, and I think I have a potential solution… If someone steals someone else’s identity, their...