There’s a lot we have yet to learn about the story of Sen. Mike Lee, Tea Party Republican of Utah, and America's largest bank. But we already know something’s very, very wrong:

Why is it that most Americans can’t get a principal reduction from Chase or any other bank, but JPMorgan Chase was so very flexible with a sitting member of the United States Senate?

The hypocrisy from Sen. Lee and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon overfloweth. But does the Case of the Senator’s Short Sale rise to the level of full-blown corruption? We won’t know until we get some answers.

People should be demanding those answers now.

When Jamie Met Mike

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When the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held its inaugural meeting in London back in 1946, the U.S. delegate, Eleanor Roosevelt, read an open letter to "the women of the world" calling on governments to encourage women everywhere to participate in national and international affairs.

The letter also urged women who are conscious of their opportunities "to come forward and share in the work of peace and reconstruction as they did in war and resistance".

But 66 years later, the worldwide struggle for gender equality and gender empowerment continues unabated - even as women find themselves discriminated against, and victims of violence, both at home and on the battlefield.

As India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri told the Security Council Thursday, close to 90 percent of current casualties in wars and situations of armed conflict are civilians, with the majority being women and children.

"Obviously, women bear a disproportionately large share of the burden of conflict, but have a marginal say in matters of war and peace," he said, pointing out the irony.

This is perhaps a function of the gender imbalance in our societies, reflected in positions of power and influence, he added.

Despite this, Puri argued, women should not be viewed solely as victims of war.

They also have to assume the key role of ensuring family livelihoods in the midst of chaos and destruction, and are particularly active in the peace movements at the grassroots level and cultivating peace within their communities.

"Therefore, the absence of women at the peace negotiating table is unconscionable," declared Puri, as he implicitly criticized the fact that peace negotiators are overwhelmingly male.

Yasmeen Hassan, global director at the New York-based Equality Now, told IPS ...

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”

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What does the New Year hold for the global wave of protest that erupted in 2011? Did the surge of anger that began in Tunisia crest in lower Manhattan, or is 2012 likely to see an escalation of the politics of dissent?

The answers are alarming but quite predictable: we are likely to see much greater centralization of top-down suppression – and a rash of laws around the developed and developing world that restrict human rights. But we are also likely to see significant grassroots reaction.

What we are witnessing in the drama of increasingly globalized protest and repression is the subplot that many cheerleaders for neoliberal globalization never addressed: the power of globalized capital to wreak havoc with the authority of democratically elected governments. From the perspective of global corporate interests, closed societies like China are more business-friendly than troublesome democracies, where trade unions, high standards of human-rights protection, and a vigorous press increase costs.

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It’s called a gang injunction.  A controversial crime tool strategy that some people say should be illegal, and others say is a necessary last resort for communities plagued by violence.   On this edition, we go from the birthplace of gang injunctions in Los Angeles, to their newest use in London, England.  Almost 30 years later, communities remain divided about the best way to address youth violence and crime.

European leaders closed a pivotal week Friday with an agreement in principle to join a new treaty that would force all but one European Union nation into common budget discipline and would empower EU courts to enforce the new rules.

The 17 nations that use the euro as their currency agreed to support the new treaty, and nine of the 10 EU members that have their own currencies agreed. The treaty's rules would allow only small budget deficits, and they'd require EU nations to submit their budgets for review by the European Commission, a considerable erosion of their sovereignty. The commission could request that they revise their budgets; details on enforcement remain to be drawn. The EU leaders hope to have a draft treaty by March.

Great Britain was the lone holdout, concerned that Europe-wide rules could harm its vital financial-services sector. London is the financial center of Europe.

U.S. stocks flat-lined for much of the week awaiting the EU summit, and the trading week ended with modest gains on the news that Europe had moved forward, notwithstanding huge unanswered questions on implementation whose answers matter to Americans. The Dow finished up 186.56 points at 12,184.26, the S&P 500 rose 20.84 points to 1,255.19 and the NASDAQ gained 50.47 points to 2,646.85.

Here are some answers to questions about ...

On Veteran's Day 2011, Timothy Jackson, a former sailor in the U.S. Navy and the son of a man who was the same, visited a small, unfinished gravesite on a hilltop alongside a winding road. It belonged to Timothy Matthew Jackson, who went by Matt and had himself been a Marine.

And in three generations of Jackson men to serve, Matt was the first to die in combat. He was 22 years old.

It's been a wrenching year for the Jackson family. And for the communities in and around London, it's been a wrenching decade. A decade ago in October, America went to war — first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. At 10 years, the war on terror is almost as long as World War I, World War II and the Korea War combined.

Now, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are nearing their end, as President Barack Obama has plans to bring U.S. troops back from Iraq by the end of this month and reduce forces in Afghanistan — still a hot zone — by the middle of 2012.

But for the soldiers of Kentucky and their families, the war is far from over.

To understand the impact of these wars on the American fabric, McClatchy reviewed reams of reports and records from the Department of Veterans Affairs. It settled on London — a typical small American town that, when it comes to matters of war, is anything but ...

Standing on a picket line in front of her work place at a world renowned heart-lung hospital in London wasn’t Jeanette Anderson’s first choice for how to spend her day.

However, Anderson said protesting was her “only choice.”

Protesting as part of a nationwide general strike in the UK, Anderson said, was necessary to combat austerity measures from Britain’s conservative led government that now targets the pensions of public sector workers like Anderson and her picket line colleagues at the Royal Brompton Hospital in this city’s up-scale Chelsea section.

“We do not get the fat-cat pensions like the rich,” Anderson said, noting that participating in the one-day strike action wasn’t something she took lightly.

“Public sector workers are already into a two-year pay freeze and now the government plans to extend that pay freeze for another two years.”

Anderson, her Brompton Hospital picket line colleagues and an estimated two million other public sector workers staged a one-day general strike across Britain Wednesday ...

From Tunis to Tel Aviv, Madrid to Oakland, a new generation of youth activists is challenging the neoliberal state that has dominated the world ever since the Cold War ended.  The massive popular protests that shook the globe this year have much in common, though most of the reporting on them in the mainstream media has obscured the similarities.   

Whether in Egypt or the United States, young rebels are reacting to a single stunning worldwide development: the extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands thanks to neoliberal policies of deregulation and union busting.  They have taken to the streets, parks, plazas, and squares to protest against the resulting corruption, the way politicians can be bought and sold, and the impunity of the white-collar criminals who have run riot in societies everywhere.  They are objecting to high rates of unemployment, reduced social services, blighted futures, and above all the substitution of the market for all other values as the matrix of human ethics and life.

Pasha the Tiger

In the “glorious thirty years” after World War II, North America and Western Europe achieved remarkable rates of economic growth and relatively low levels of inequality for capitalist societies, while instituting a broad range of benefits for workers, students, and retirees.  From roughly 1980 on, however, the neoliberal movement, rooted in the laissez-faire ...

In mid-October I spent two days and a night with Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park. Since then I’ve read a barrage of advice for what OWS and its companion movements around the world should be doing. But I’ve been haunted by another question: What should those of us who are sympathetic to OWS (according to polls, roughly two-thirds of Americans are), but are not going to relocate to a downtown park, be doing to advance the wellbeing of the 99 percent?

I got one part of my answer as I groggily logged on to the web at 5:30 the morning after I returned home from Zuccotti Park. When I left the park, its private owner Brookfield Properties had announced it would clear the park “for cleaning” and enforce rules preventing tarps, sleeping bags, and lying down. Mayor Bloomberg said the NYPD would enforce those rules, effectively ending the encampment.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the eviction. When OWS put out a call for support, thousands of people began to converge on the park for nonviolent resistance to eviction. Unions called on their members to protect the encampment. The president of the AFL-CIO’s Central Labor Council lobbied the city to cancel the crackdown. Lawyers prepared to bring suit to protect the occupiers’ first amendment rights. City council members and other New York politicians lobbied the mayor to halt the eviction. Against all expectation, Mayor Bloomberg announced that Brookfield was abandoning the “cleanup” plan and the company announced it would try to reach an accommodation with the ...

The United Kingdom is falling apart. And nobody seems to have really noticed. It’s not the riots and the burning buildings, nor the stumbling stock markets. Those fill every front page.

At a slower, less alarming pace, something more profound is happening: The United Kingdom may well be on the verge of breaking up; actually disuniting its disparate parts.

The word “secession” conjures up images of splinter groups, fringe corners of far-flung states agitating for the independence of their often imaginary fiefdoms: Bomb blasts in the Basque region; guns in Grozny.

But in generally less dramatic fashion, Scotland has voted for a Scottish National Party (SNP) government, committed to an independence referendum; a long-cherished dream. Signs of a rift were also on display when Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond complained bitterly about broadcasters heading coverage of the riots as "UK riots" when they were, in fact, English ones alone. Claiming the footage would damage Scotland's reputation as a tourism destination, he told BBC Radio Scotland: "We know we have a different society in Scotland, and one of my frustrations was to see this being described on BBC television and Sky as riots in the UK."

But the friction and current constitutional confusion between the two countries harks back much further, to the Jacobite uprisings of the 18th century; the Culloden massacre and 1747 Act of Proscription, a law that banned the wearing of traditional dress, use of Gaelic, bearing of arms or even enjoyment of traditional music in an attempt by the British government to pacify the “unruly” Scottish clans.

It was a process that author Alastair MacIntosh describes as the final internal colonization of the British Isles; one that saw some half a million people forced off their land in what became known as the Highland Clearances, while remaining clan chiefs were incorporated into the British ...

As England’s cities have burned and slowly simmered to an uncertain calm, the debate over the causes of the country’s latest outbreak of civil unrest has heated up. Sparked by the death of Mark Duggan, a Tottenham local shot by police on August 4, the once peaceful protests for justice in front of Tottenham police station have since evolved into disorder and riotous violence, spreading from London to Leeds, Bristol, Liverpool, and Birmingham. On one end of Britain’s political spectrum, Labour politician and former London mayor Ken Livingstone has linked the riots to brutal cuts in government spending. On the other end, Prime Minister David Cameron has characterized the violence as “pure criminality.” Senior officers of the Metropolitan Police informed Cameron when he returned from his Tuscan holiday on August 8 that criminal gangs largely coordinated the rioting: “we have said consistently that the people doing this are not protesters, they are criminals.”

This depiction, however, flies in the face of evidence that many ‘rioters’ possessed no criminal background whatsoever. Nor did they all fall into one homogenous category. Those charged have ranged from schoolchildren to professional members of the work force. As one resident of Southall, west London,  READ FULL POST DISCUSS

Another former News of the World editor has been arrested in the phone-hacking debacle that is rocking News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

James Desborough was arrested for alleged crimes that occurred prior to his move to Hollywood in 2009. The arrest nonetheless could prompt further investigation into the practices of News of the World and other tabloid journalists in the U.S.

At the same time, Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the center of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, filed a lawsuit Thursday against News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of the News International division that operated the London tabloid.

Britain's phone-hacking scandal - in which journalists allegedly broke into the voicemail messages of the royals, celebrities, athletes and even crime victims - prompted News Corp. to close the 168-year-old News of the World in July. The damaging disclosures also have resulted in high-level resignations of high-ranking government and police officials and within the media conglomerate.

Desborough, 38, was arrested Thursday on suspicion of intercepting phone communications when he arrived in London for police questioning, according to Britain's newspaper the Guardian. His arrest is the 13th made in connection with the ongoing investigation.

The journalist made his reputation delivering scoops about the lives of the rich and famous, including chronicling the messy divorce of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, who has claimed her voice mails were hacked by a reporter from News of the World rival the Mirror.

Desborough is an award-winning celebrity journalist who had once received the British Press Award for show business reporter of the year. During his stint in Los Angeles, he reported on high-profile show business developments such as the 2009 death of pop star Michael Jackson.

The arrest comes as Mulcaire, who was jailed in 2007 for intercepting voicemail messages ...

Watching the riots in Britain's cities, I recalled visiting an English friend who ran a big company and had a country house grand enough to be called a "hall." (I will not disclose his identity.) Though hardly liberal, my friend was politically moderate. He was also a very decent person.

But one thing struck me as we motored around the perfected countryside of Essex, a smart-set county northeast of London. (Essex was the setting for the 1980s BBC series "Lovejoy.") Every tree-lined vista, village center and winding road radiated English loveliness. "Doesn't anyone around here fix transmissions?" I wondered.

Only when we had to go to a supermarket did I realize that he had created an inner GPS device that had eliminated a working-class reality from his field of vision. We were forced to endure the sight of ugly public housing and boxy stores selling cheap goods only because we had to buy groceries.

There were two Englands, even among the whites. Then, when mass immigration flooded low-income areas with nonwhite and Muslim populations — often from conflicting cultures — life on that side of the wall became far more complex. The riots in London and elsewhere were attended by both minorities and white, the poor and not-so-poor — many of whom don't like living with each other. The government reacted with shock, but it shouldn't have.

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British Prime Minister David Cameron is backing eviction for public housing tenants who participated in last week's riots. "Let's make sure if people riot and break the law, they get thrown out of their [public subsidized] council houses," Cameron said this weekend.  The first riot-related eviction papers have already been served on an entire family in London.  Meanwhile, former New York and Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton (of "zero tolerance" fame) is being considered as Britain's top cop after the resignation of the chief of the Metropolitan Police over the Murdoch hacking scandal. Before Cameron and the British go down this Murdoch-media fueled path to mass incarceration and collective punishment, they'd do well to spend ten minutes with Michelle Alexander, legal scholar and author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." Getting tough the US way has created a caste-like closed-system in which ex-felons are discriminated against in housing and employment  - forever.  "If your family lives in public housing they risk eviction if you even go home to visit. If you're a drug offender you can be denied food stamps in some states, for the rest of your life, and for the rest of your life, when you apply for employment you have to check that box whether the felony is three weeks or thirty years old." What does this system accomplish? It returns people right back to prison. "Which ...

Last Thursday night, in circumstances that remain unclear, police shot dead Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man. The next day, a group of 200 protesters gathered outside the police station in London's Tottenham district, demanding an explanation. In the hours that followed, the peaceful protest somehow disintegrated.

Four days later, after rioting and looting spread first to other poor suburbs but then reached wealthier areas Monday in the worst civil unrest Britain has seen in years, Britons were undertaking a national debate over the pervasive poverty and unemployment that many think have fed the disturbances and what role the country's austerity drive has played in making matters worse.

London's former mayor, Ken Livingstone, blamed the turmoil on the economic challenges young people face and the disenfranchisement many feel.

"A generation are growing up completely uncertain about their future," he said in an interview on BBC News. "They're not certain they can get a home. They're not certain they can get a job. They see politicians that don't engage with them. They don't care. They don't have a stake in society."

As in the United States, Britain's economy is weak and struggling to recover from the Great Recession. The government has undertaken deep budget cuts to try to close its burgeoning deficit, and many now are worried that that push for austerity has cut too far into services for underprivileged areas.

"This has been brewing for some years: the delayed effect of the credit crunch, the recession. It's gradually having an effect, especially on young people," said Paul Bagguley, an expert on the sociology of protests. "People have very much got the impression that the government doesn't listen to them."

Adding to the tensions, Bagguley said, is rising anger over a controversial "stop and search" policy that allows ...