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• Letter to the President of the United States: Re: Reform of L-1B Visa “Specialized Knowledge” Definition (PDF). Excerpts: Dear President Obama: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 62 multi-national corporations sent you a letter on March 22, 2012 asking you to make it easier for them to transfer employees with “specialized knowledge” from their overseas offices to the U.S. The undersigned organizations urge you to reject their request to weaken the L-1B visa definition of “specialized knowledge,” because the change is not in the best interest of foreign or domestic workers.

  The L-1B visa gives employers access to a large labor force that has very few rights in the workplace. First, employers are not required to pay L-1B visa beneficiaries a minimum or prevailing wage. Workers are not in a position to negotiate better wages, because they can be easily fired, which renders them out of status and requires that they leave the country immediately. Second, the L-1B visa is not a long-term investment in the U.S. economy since only a small fraction of L-1B visa beneficiaries will be sponsored by their employers to stay in the U.S. permanently. The L-1B visa is really about businesses having ready access to a powerless, low-wage workforce.

  The L-1B visa also has a significant impact on U.S. workers. U.S. workers can be fired and replaced with L-1B visa beneficiaries. A report by the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General in January 2006 found “[t]hat so many foreign workers seem to qualify as possessing specialized knowledge [that it] appears to have led to the displacement of American workers.” Labor unions support the use of nonimmigrant visas for high-skilled workers, but also strongly support assessing the impact of work visas on the U.S. workforce.

  The L-1B visa is largely a black box. We do not know how many beneficiaries are currently working in the U.S., where they are working, what their qualifications are, and how much they are earning. We should have answers to these very basic questions and a thoughtful debate before the standard for “specialized knowledge” is weakened. ...

  Editor's note: I can attest that IBM abuses the L-1B visa program extensively. Before leaving IBM recently, most of my IGS projects were staffed with over 50% (and sometimes nearly 100%) employees from IBM India here on L-1B visas. The IBM India employees included program managers, developers, database administrators, business analysts, and others...hardly employees with "specialized knowledge." In fact, many of the IBM employees were newly hired into IBM India and their first IBM job was in the United States on an L-1B vista.

  Unlike the H1-B visa, which is more closely monitored, the L-1B visa program has provided IBM with a means to bring unlimited numbers of offshore employees to the U.S. to staff projects, instead of employing North American employees. It is a travesty.

• Job Cut Reports
  • Comment 05/15/12: At IBM East Fishkill facilities meeting management was overheard commenting on "we have to tighten our belts" regarding future cost cutting measures. Next thing we are being told that there will be no additional overtime under any circumstance. The following week we are being told that Weekend Saturday and Sunday overtime is now being taken away and if you worked the weekend you must take two regular days off during the following week to cancel additional salary cost. Work is still expected To be completed with limited manpower and some employees are now working through their lunch breaks to meet work projections. No different then retail marketing. Another erosion of IBM benefits. Work more and get paid less !! -Just the Beginning-
  • Comment 05/15/12: I got dropped end of march in the big GTS resource action. Talked to mentor, and friends, basically after this last resource action, it is no longer about what can I do to avoid the next actions, they are really seeing the writing on the wall. IBM is going to dump people.

    They have not given raises in several years, this past year, managers ( they do look at Alliance website) basically 1st line managers give you a 2 or 1 , they get told by upper mgmt to reduce all PBC's by one, they are artificially finding ways to get rid of people.

    There is an IBM BUBBLE, so keep stock for time being, let them artificially raise stock price, but 2015 or maybe late 2014, then all of us that have stock, wait until it peaks then sell, because the IBM after 2015 is going to be a crap Yahoo. On the current course, they will fail, ask people to retire, make promises they will not keep. They are betting on filling the gap with Indian and Chinese that provide crap. IBM is a bubble, They will be the next Netscape -Anonymous-

  • Comment 05/17/12: Was just given a heads up that IBM Canada has cancelled the pay increase program and profit sharing program for 2012. So other than actually cutting our pay (which will be next for sure) they have taken away everything that they can... We have already lost OT, weekend and on call pay a long time ago. Can't wait to see the few good people that are left now leave. No good reason to work for IBM Canada anymore. :-( -Really?-
  • Comment 05/17/12: In GBS, utilization numbers are in the toilet. Expect demands to work Saturday -Anon-
  • Comment 05/17/12: Transition to Retirement is really the classic "Prisoner's Dilemma" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma How to put 2 people, or groups, against each other. The sad thing is that even if you are aware that's what they are doing it still usually works. In this case, its RA or NO RA. Take the "deal" and get NO RA, but the other guy/group, if they don't "take the deal" is then looking at a possible RA downstream. The only way to beat it is for nobody to take the "deal". If enough people take the TRIP, they guarantee the ones who didn't, will end up Getting RA'd as the number left is small enough to "hide" inside a bigger RA group so its harder to prove age discrimination. We either all hang together or we will for sure "hang" separately. -russ-
  • Comment 05/17/12: You are an "At Will Employee". You can be a 1 performer and they can fire you for no cause at all. Severance is also up to IBM -goodbye-
  • Comment 05/18/12: -Just the Beginning- , Fishkill management has a history of making non-exempts work overtime and not letting them code it. Public response from a third line was if you do not like it perhaps you should rethink your long term goals. They know it is illegal but they hold the cards and own the labor department in New York. -Ex-Fishkill-
  • Comment 05/18/12: -russ- I see this as applying to joining the Alliance...that is, individuals making a choice between 'working their own individual deal' and joining a group to get it done. The psychology of prisoners trying to escape and cooperating with each other, equates to the 'union' dilemma. The 1963 movie, "The Great Escape" is a good example. it clearly shows attempts that fail; but the "prisoners" continue to try again, because they KNOW their fate otherwise.

    This is true with IBMers that believe they will survive RA's if they"do things" IBM's way; knowing in the back of their mind that they too, will get RA'ed eventually. IBMers that visit this site, pro-union or anti-union are aware of the truth. Yet, some comments that have appeared here in the past, suggest that there are IBMers that don't know Alliance exists. The ignorance of IBMers NOT knowing, never quite shrinks in proportion to the RA's that occur. Why? Because those IBMers that find out about Alliance don't tell their co-workers that they know out of fear of being 'caught' and immediately put on an RA list.

    If a few IBMers with the "Great Escape" ideas and notions were to form a committee and reach out to IBMers that DON'T know Alliance exists; but are silently suffering from the fear of an RA just like everyone else...then the process to change EVERYONE's situation could truly escalate and IBM would 'lose' their grip of fear as a tool to destroy US IBM jobs. THINK about it. -Cooler_King-

  • Comment 05/18/12: I've been at IBM for many years, watched countless resource actions. Good people getting thrown out like garbage, with mgmt not even waving goodbye. So I see the handwriting on the wall and go find myself a new job with great opportunity and even a better salary. Send in my two weeks notice and you wouldn't believe the execs coming out of the woodwork asking "Why are you leaving, can you fill us in, have you really thought this out, we can't believe you are quitting IBM." The audacity is unreal, just shows how out of touch the leadership is with the underlying morale of the very company they are supposedly leading. But I suppose they are too busy counting their restricted stock units to even notice the psyche of the folks who actually do the work. Keep your heads up folks, the I/T job market is improving and there are greener pastures out there. I can vouch for that. -outta here-
  • Comment 05/18/12: As the culture of corporate America started changing to its current path of executives first and everyone else second even the executives themselves understood that you just couldn't trust a corporate entity to treat you fairly no matter what they may or may not have done in the past. Thus was born the employment contracts with Golden Parachutes for executives. Executives are in their lofty positions because they understand business and how corporations work. And they do not trust them one little bit.

    Why do we as employees and ex employees waste our time trying to second guess them? We should give them the credit they deserve and learn from them before its too late. We should collectively get our own employment contracts with benefits, bonuses and severance and retirement packages defined in them. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. The faster the "99%" realize that the only way to change corporate America's culture is through labor unions the faster America will recover. You simply cannot legislate fair treatment. You cannot expect someone to negotiate in good faith if nothing forces them to the bargaining table. If Nascar removed all design and engine restrictions why would a crew chief restrict his car in any way? It would be silly to do so, so to think that IBM is going to stop squeezing profits out of your pockets and stop working you like a dog just because its not fair to you or that someone outside of IBM is going to force them to stop is equally as silly.

    Stop being a victim. If you want to occupy something to help your cause occupy the union voting booth. This applies not just to IBM but every job in America. Stop playing the helpless victim. JOIN and RECRUIT. -Exodus2007-

  • Comment 05/18/12: -Cooler _King-: good points! IBMers have to know if the majority of them are not happy with the policies and actions being done by IBM then there must be some effort somewhere to try to deal with it. IBMers have to THINK. If they do then they will find the way and ultimately find that the Alliance is the best way to deal with the unhappiness working at IBM and dealing with RAs on a continual basis. So any employee saying they haven't heard of the Alliance hasn't been thinking or searching hard enough. -anonymous- Alliance reply: Even a simple Google search for "IBM employees" brings up the Alliance web site. But we still need email lists of employees to help in our outreach, and for alliance supporters to actively recruit new members.
  • Comment 05/18/12: It appears SSR management is making up their own rules for the Transition to Retirement program for the non-exempt SSR's. They are trying to apply Exempt employee rules. It sure looks like they are doing their best to discourage the program for SSR's! -SSR-
  • Comment 05/18/12: Got the word today that June 29th is my last day. I was bugging them to tell me so I think I may have found out extra early, but I heard that most will find out next week. Good luck all! -Gone baby gone!-

News and Opinion Concerning Health Savings Accounts, Medical Costs and Health Care Reform

• Politico: Health care reform: GOP preps plan for ruling on law. By Jake Sherman and Jennifer Haberkorn. Excerpts: House Republican leaders are quietly hatching a plan of attack as they await a historic Supreme Court ruling on President Barack Obama’s health care law. If the law is upheld, Republicans will take to the floor to tear out its most controversial pieces, such as the individual mandate and requirements that employers provide insurance or face fines.

  If the law is partially or fully overturned they’ll draw up bills to keep the popular, consumer-friendly portions in place — like allowing adult children to remain on parents’ health care plans until age 26, and forcing insurance companies to provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Ripping these provisions from law is too politically risky, Republicans say.

News and Opinion Concerning the "War on the Middle Class"

"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.

• Rolling Stone: How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform. It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. By Matt Taibi. Excerpts: Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history."

  This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street. It was going to put an end to predatory lending in the mortgage markets, crack down on hidden fees and penalties in credit contracts, and create a powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard ordinary consumers. Big banks would be banned from gambling with taxpayer money, and a new set of rules would limit speculators from making the kind of crazy-ass bets that cause wild spikes in the price of food and energy. There would be no more AIGs, and the world would never again face a financial apocalypse when a bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. ...

  Two years later, Dodd-Frank is groaning on its deathbed. The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway's Old Man – no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore. In a furious below-the-radar effort at gutting the law – roundly despised by Washington's Wall Street paymasters – a troop of water-carrying Eric Cantor Republicans are speeding nine separate bills through the House, all designed to roll back the few genuinely toothy portions left in Dodd-Frank. With the Quislingian covert assistance of Democrats, both in Congress and in the White House, those bills could pass through the House and the Senate with little or no debate, with simple floor votes – by a process usually reserved for things like the renaming of post offices or a nonbinding resolution celebrating Amelia Earhart's birthday.

  The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. "It's like a scorched-earth policy," says Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. "It requires constant combat. And it never, ever ends."

  That the banks have just about succeeded in strangling Dodd-Frank is probably not news to most Americans – it's how they succeeded that's the scary part. The banks followed a five-point strategy that offers a dependable blueprint for defeating any regulation – and for guaranteeing that when it comes to the economy, might will always equal right.

• Smirking Chimp: Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase: Why It's the Scandal of Our Time. By Richard Eskow. Excerpts: They're missing the point. When CEO Jamie Dimon announced that JPMorgan Chase had incurred at least $2 billion in losses from risky, unsecured, derivatives-types trading, it uncovered the scandal of our time once and for all.

  The Chase disaster gives us a much-needed a glimpse into our corrupt political system, its Wall Street paymasters, and the media voices that allow people like Dimon to escape scrutiny.

  The JPMorgan Chase story is the story behind the financial crisis that has thrown millions of people out of work. It's the story behind our ever-growing wealth inequity. It's the story behind Washington's inability to prosecute criminal bankers, regulate reckless ones, and propose the economic solutions the rest of us urgently need.

  Predictably, the pundits who aid and abet people like Jamie Dimon are dismissing this story's importance, pointing out that $2 billion (it could become much more) pales against the $19 billion in profit Chase reported last year. But it was potentially $2 billion earned through crime. And more importantly, this story isn't just about Chase's errors and crimes. It's much bigger than that. ...

  Depending on the day and the measurement used, JPMorgan Chase is now the largest or second-largest bank in the world. Its Japan operation alone has been cited by that nation's regulators as a systemic risk because of its size. If Chase began to collapse because of risky betting, the government would be forced to step in again. Jamie Dimon knows that. It's a lot easier to gamble when you know somebody else will be forced to bail you out if you lose too much.

  Chase, like the other mega-banks, has systematically engaged in criminal activity for years. At the same time, it has used its vast wealth to corrupt our political and regulatory systems. And it has been aided and abetted by willing collaborators in the media, every step of the way. It gave up nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees to settle one case alone -- that of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County, Alabama. Chase has paid out billions to settle charges that include perjury and forgery (in its systemic foreclosure fraud and abuse), investor fraud, and sale of unregistered securities. And these charges were for actions that took place while Jamie Dimon was the CEO.

• Huffington Post: Brooksley Born On JPMorgan Chase Loss: Nothing's Changed Since LTCM. By D.M. Levine. Excerpts: To Brooksley Born, JPMorgan Chase's trading blowup looks a lot like the Long-Term Capital Management debacle of 14 years ago. It's "happening all over again," Born told The Huffington Post on Monday. "We have to learn from these experiences, and we don't seem to be doing it yet."

  Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1996 to 1999, was one of the earliest observers to warn about the dangers of unregulated derivatives. She was thwarted in her efforts to impose regulation in the late 90s despite the cautionary tale of LTCM, a hedge fund that needed a government bailout in 1998 after making risky bets on credit derivatives and government bonds. As a Public Citizens report released Monday, "Forgotten Lessons of Deregulation: Rolling Back Dodd-Frank's Derivatives Rules Would Repeat a Mistake that Led to the Financial Crisis," points out, Born and other regulation advocates at the time cited LTCM as a prime example of the need for regulation and the risks of the market's opacity.

  JPMorgan's $2 billion trading loss suggests the need for derivatives regulation is as urgent as ever. "As long as we don't have derivatives reform in place, this kind of loss can occur without any advanced warning," Born, now a retired partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter, said.

• New York Times: A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College. By Andrew Martin and Andrew W. Lehren. Excerpts: With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.

  About two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients borrow money to attend college, either from the government or private lenders, according to a Department of Education survey of 2007-8 graduates; the total number of borrowers is most likely higher since the survey does not track borrowing from family members.

  By contrast, 45 percent of 1992-93 graduates borrowed money; that survey included family borrowing as well as government and private loans. ...

  In the last decade, even as enrollment at state colleges and universities has grown, some states have cut spending for higher education and many others have not allocated enough money to keep pace with the growing student body. That trend has accelerated as state budgets have shrunk because of the recent financial crisis and the unpopularity of tax increases.

  Nationally, state and local spending per college student, adjusted for inflation, reached a 25-year low this year, jeopardizing the long-held conviction that state-subsidized higher education is an affordable steppingstone for the lower and middle classes. All the while, the cost of tuition and fees has continued to increase faster than the rate of inflation, faster even than medical spending. If the trends continue through 2016, the average cost of a public college will have more than doubled in just 15 years, according to the Department of Education.

• The New Yorker: How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision. By Jeffrey Toobin. Excerpts: When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law prohibited corporations from running television commercials for or against Presidential candidates for thirty days before primaries. During that period, Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had wanted to run a documentary, as a cable video on demand, called “Hillary: The Movie,” which was critical of Hillary Clinton. The F.E.C. had prohibited the broadcast under McCain-Feingold, and Citizens United had challenged the decision. There did not seem to be a lot riding on the outcome. After all, how many nonprofits wanted to run documentaries about Presidential candidates, using relatively obscure technologies, just before elections? ...

  In a different way, though, Citizens United is a distinctive product of the Roberts Court. The decision followed a lengthy and bitter behind-the-scenes struggle among the Justices that produced both secret unpublished opinions and a rare reargument of a case. The case, too, reflects the aggressive conservative judicial activism of the Roberts Court. It was once liberals who were associated with using the courts to overturn the work of the democratically elected branches of government, but the current Court has matched contempt for Congress with a disdain for many of the Court’s own precedents. When the Court announced its final ruling on Citizens United, on January 21, 2010, the vote was five to four and the majority opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy. Above all, though, the result represented a triumph for Chief Justice Roberts. Even without writing the opinion, Roberts, more than anyone, shaped what the Court did. As American politics assumes its new form in the post-Citizens United era, the credit or the blame goes mostly to him.

• The Smirking Chimp: Why We Have A Deficit. By Dave Johnson. Deficit theater is coming to DC today, with a well-funded "fiscal summit." The plot summary is that we have Deficit Trouble - Right Here In River City! so to fix it we need to cut Social Security and Medicare and the things democracy does for We, the People -- while cutting taxes on the rich and their corporations to make us more "business-friendly." (This musical is sometimes billed as "Simpson-Bowles" but it's the same old song.)

  All of this deficit hysteria today - when just over ten years ago we had such a large a budget surplus that we were projected to pay off our entire debt in ... ten years! That's right, Ten Years Ago We Were Paying Off The Nation's Debt. But Then We Elected Obama.

  Just ten years ago this country was running huge surpluses and paying off its debt. But then we elected Obama and all hell broke loose. Oh, wait...

  Between the time ten years ago when we had big surpluses and were paying off the debt and now when we are told the "Obama spending and deficit" mean we have to cut back on the things We, the People do for each other, something happened. Something changed. The things that happened, the things that changed, are being ignored in the current DC discussion about what we need to do to fix things.

  Something happened. We had a surplus, and it was replaced by massive deficits. The last Bush budget year had a deficit of $1.4 trillion!

  Why We Have A Deficit. What happened under Bush? We cut taxes on the rich and doubled military spending. (And started wars.) And don't forget collapsing the economy, forcing people onto unemployment and food stamps. That is why we have a deficit. We have a deficit because of tax cuts for the rich, huge military budget increases and the consequences of deregulating corporations.

• New York Times editorial: Not Too Late to Curb the Filibuster. Excerpts: Fed up and rueful, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, made a startling admission on Thursday: he should have reined in the filibuster rule last year, when he had a chance. As Republicans engaged in yet another of their endless filibusters on what should have been a routine matter — reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank — Mr. Reid took to the floor and praised two senators for being right last year when he was wrong.

  Tom Udall of New Mexico and Jeff Merkley of Oregon were prophetic in wanting to change Senate rules, he said. “The rest of us were wrong, or most of us, anyway,” he added. “What a shame.”

  Since 2007, Democrats have been forced to try to break Republican filibusters 360 times — by far the highest rate in Congressional history. Ending them requires Democrats to get over a 60-vote hurdle. If Mr. Reid helped enact the proposal of the two senators, he would instantly make Congress more efficient and more democratic.

  The plan would prevent the filibuster from being used abusively, without eliminating an important tool to give a minority party a voice. Among other changes, filibusters would require 10 senators to start, and members would have to speak continuously on the floor to keep it going. In current practice, a single senator can simply declare a filibuster against a measure. This rule change could have been enacted on a simple majority vote on the first day of the session. But Mr. Reid and other Democrats did not want to lose the ability to obstruct the Republican agenda if they lost control of the chamber.

  On Monday, four Democratic congressmen, including John Lewis of Georgia, got so frustrated that they filed suit against the Senate, saying its filibuster rule is unconstitutional and illegally nullified their legislative votes. They argue that unlimited debate was never envisioned by the Constitution, and that supermajorities were required only in unusual cases, like overriding a veto or treaty ratification.

• The Fiscal Times: Constitutional or Not, Let's End the Filibuster. By Bruce Bartlett. Excerpts: One of the things people constantly complain about is the tendency of the media to treat Republicans and Democrats as equally complicit on issues such as the deficit, even if one side actually deserves the bulk of the blame. However, there is one area in which both sides truly are almost equally to blame and that is in abusing the Senate filibuster. This means that the solution will necessarily have to be bipartisan.

  Politicians aren’t the only hypocrites favoring the filibuster when it is good for their side and opposing it when it benefits the other. In 1995, when Republicans controlled Congress and there was a Democrat in the White House, The New York Times said the filibuster had to go. It had become “the tool of the sore loser” and “an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.” ...

  I have previously argued that if Republicans believe they will retake the White House next year, they would be wise to cut a deal with Democrats on the filibuster now while they are sympathetic to the idea. A year from now, when Senate Democrats are back doing the same thing to Republicans that Republicans are now doing to Democrats, Republicans will regret not acting when both parties think they may benefit from filibuster reform.

• New York Times editorial: Mr. Boehner and the Debt. It clearly does not bother Speaker John Boehner that he pushed the United States to the brink of default last year. It does not matter that the deep spending cuts in the resolution he demanded to end that crisis will hurt economic growth. It does not even matter that the House he leads is determined now to break that agreement with even deeper cuts in vital programs. No, Mr. Boehner wants to do it all over again: he announced on Tuesday that the House will not agree to raise the debt ceiling when it is reached later this year or early next, unless the increase is matched by equal spending cuts. “We shouldn’t dread the debt limit,” he said, instantly forcing the country to do just that. “As a matter of fact, I think we should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction.”

  An official who actually wanted to help the country rather than appeasing the Tea Party might have remembered what happened a year ago, after Mr. Boehner first made that extortionate demand. The bond rating agencies said the country’s credit and reputation had been seriously damaged, and the government lost its AAA credit rating. (Mr. Boehner shamelessly blamed Mr. Obama for that on Tuesday.) The Federal Reserve warned of “catastrophic” and “calamitous” effects if Republicans carried through on their threat to default. The stock market sank, and Congress’s approval rating has never recovered. ...

  Washington’s need to deal with the long-term deficit can be met only with a combination of new revenues and rational cuts, not extortion. The overly deep cuts in last year’s deal were necessary only because Republicans refused to end tax cuts for the rich. ...

  Some members might be willing to reach a deal, but Mr. Boehner’s decision to again threaten a default shows that he is an unreliable budget negotiator. President Obama failed to recognize that last time, and Congressional Democrats gave in too easily. We hope both are hearing the message this time around. ...

• Forbes: What Mitt Romney Is Really Worth: An Exclusive Analysis Of His Latest Finances. By Edwin Durgy. Excerpts: Mitt Romney isn’t the richest person to ever run for President – Ross Perot had him beat by a factor of ten. And if he’s elected, inflation adjustments might favor sprawling plantation owners like Washington and Jefferson, or Kennedy if family assets counted. But there’s no denying that in terms of total dollars a President Romney would be the wealthiest White House occupant ever, and would be even wealthier had he not set aside a trust, now worth $100 million, for his 5 boys. So just how rich is he? ...

  The Romneys own three properties now: a La Jolla, Calif. beach house that they bought for $12 million in 2008 but was reassessed last year at $8.7 million (a local agent thinks that even that figure is “pie in the sky” today), a townhouse condo in Belmont, Mass purchased for $895,000 in 2010 and an $8 million summer compound in Wolfeboro, N.H., on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, consisting of a main home, a converted stable and other land. ...

  Mitt Romney’s Total Wealth: $230 million

• Washington Post: Romney, responding to Bain attacks, says Obama responsible for 100,000 auto job losses. By Philip Rucker. Excerpts: Personally responding for the first time to Democratic attacks this week over his business record at Bain Capital, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Wednesday accused President Obama of being responsible for the elimination of more than 100,000 auto industry jobs. ...

  “We were able to help create over 100,000 jobs,” Romney said of his tenure at Bain, the venture capital and corporate buyout firm he founded. “On the president’s watch, about 100,000 jobs were lost in the auto industry and auto dealers and auto manufacturers, so he’s hardly one to point a finger.”

  It was an unusual line of defense for Romney considering that the Obama administration’s rescue of the auto industry is one the president’s most popular accomplishments, especially in critical midwestern battlegrounds like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The federal bailout of two of the Big Three domestic auto companies has been widely considered a success, and Democrats have attacked Romney for instead advocating a managed bankruptcy in a New York Times op-ed titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

  The Obama campaign, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said auto industry employment actually increased by about 102,000 jobs since Obama took office in January 2009. ...

  The Post’s Fact Checker determined that Romney’s claim that he created 100,000 jobs at Bain was unproven and untenable.

• New York Times op-ed: Why We Regulate. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: One of the characters in the classic 1939 film “Stagecoach” is a banker named Gatewood who lectures his captive audience on the evils of big government, especially bank regulation — “As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks!” he exclaims. As the film progresses, we learn that Gatewood is in fact skipping town with a satchel full of embezzled cash.

  As far as we know, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, isn’t planning anything similar. He has, however, been fond of giving Gatewood-like speeches about how he and his colleagues know what they’re doing, and don’t need the government looking over their shoulders. So there’s a large heap of poetic justice — and a major policy lesson — in JPMorgan’s shock announcement that it somehow managed to lose $2 billion in a failed bit of financial wheeling-dealing.

  Just to be clear, businessmen are human — although the lords of finance have a tendency to forget that — and they make money-losing mistakes all the time. That in itself is no reason for the government to get involved. But banks are special, because the risks they take are borne, in large part, by taxpayers and the economy as a whole. And what JPMorgan has just demonstrated is that even supposedly smart bankers must be sharply limited in the kinds of risk they’re allowed to take on.

  Why, exactly, are banks special? Because history tells us that banking is and always has been subject to occasional destructive “panics,” which can wreak havoc with the economy as a whole. Current right-wing mythology has it that bad banking is always the result of government intervention, whether from the Federal Reserve or meddling liberals in Congress. In fact, however, Gilded Age America — a land with minimal government and no Fed — was subject to panics roughly once every six years. And some of these panics inflicted major economic losses.

• Washington Post: The deficit and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By Jonathan Capehart. Excerpts: Folks such as Greg Sargent, Steve Benen and Jonathan Chait have effectively dissected Mitt Romney’s Monday chatter about the deficit and how President Obama is to blame. And now I want to add my two cents by jumping off something that Sargent, my colleague, wrote.

  He noted that the press coverage of Romney’s “prairie fire of debt” speech failed to note two things.

  1. Nonpartisan experts believe Romney’s plans would increase the deficit far more than Obama’s would.
  2. George W. Bush’s policies arguably are more responsible for increasing the deficit than Obama’s are.

  It is on Sargent’s second point to which I want to add. Talking Points Memo put out this handy graph, highlighting where the federal red ink comes from. ...

  At the top you see “Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” During the George W. Bush presidency those costs were financed through supplemental spending that was not part of the appropriations process. In short, the funding was kept off the books. But in a speech to a joint session of Congress in 2009, a newly inaugurated Obama announced the end to that deceptive budgetary practice.

• New York Times editorial: JPMorphing. Excerpts: When he disclosed a stunning $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase last week, Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive, insisted that the trades had not violated the Volcker Rule, a crucial part of the Dodd-Frank reform law that is supposed to bar banks from doing risky trading for their own account.

  This week, however, the story changed. On Monday, a JPMorgan official told The Times that the trades — which have since ballooned to at least $3 billion — started out as allowable, but had “morphed into something” that crossed the line. On Tuesday, at the bank’s annual shareholder meeting, Mr. Dimon echoed that statement, calling for rules to ensure that permitted trades don’t “morph into something different.”

  It might sound as if Mr. Dimon, whose lobbyists have led the charge to undermine Dodd-Frank, is calling for more and better rules. If only. We still don’t know the details of JPMorgan’s disastrous bets. But the Volcker Rule was supposed to be clear: federally insured banks would not be allowed to make speculative bets with their own capital. The problem is that Mr. Dimon and other bankers have been fighting to make the regulations as loose and vague — and as prone to morphing — as possible.

  And before JPMorgan’s losses were disclosed, the bankers were almost certain to get what they wanted. In October, regulators issued proposed rules that were weak and toothless, and the final version due this summer isn’t expected to be any better. ...

  Without a strong Volcker Rule, taxpayers — via deposit insurance and bailouts — will continue to be on the hook for risky trades that boost bankers’ pay when things go well but that can wreak havoc on the financial system and broader economy when they blow up. ...

  For anyone who forgot what happened during the financial meltdown, the JPMorgan debacle should leave no doubts about the need for tougher regulations. The banks cannot be allowed to keep to their risky business as usual. The country cannot afford it.

• National Journal: The 1 Percent Solution. Nick Hanauer is the kind of innovator and venture capitalist expected to power the country’s next wave of growth. So why does he insist that only the fading middle class can rescue America? By Jim Tankersley. Excerpts: Hanauer is 52 and worth several hundred million dollars. His brown hair is thick and mossy, with just a fleck or two of gray, and he is fond of wearing dark denim pants and shirts with open collars. An ace venture capitalist, he is the founder of several companies, including one called aQuantive that he sold to Microsoft for $6.4 billion. On the day of the sale he personally banked $270 million.

  In 2011, Hanauer says he paid an effective federal tax rate of 11 percent. He occupies the upper echelon of an elite group of Americans, the top 1 percent of all earners, who have amassed the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth gains over the past several decades. Many economists expect he and his class of entrepreneurs to fuel the country’s next great engine of growth.

  Like a lot of self-made rich guys, Hanauer has developed a theory on how to fix the ailing economy. He preaches it in op-ed columns, television interviews, political gatherings, and casual conversations with Seattle’s innovation royalty. He was invited to give a speech this spring by the organizers of TED, the nonprofit that has grown famous for commissioning “TED talks” on such diverse topics as the nature of innovation, the science of global warming, and the need to spread contraceptives throughout the developing world. Hanauer’s pitch took five minutes at the TED University conference on March 1. Afterward, organizers seemed keen to post it on their website. Then in May, they abruptly told him his remarks were too controversial, too political for TED, and wouldn’t be published online.

  The disqualifying notion at the center of Hanauer’s talk was that the innovators and businessmen are not, in fact, “job creators”—that the fate of the economy rests instead in the hands of the middle class. So Hanauer wants to tax rich guys like himself more, to pay for investments to nurture middle-class families.

  “We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years,” Hanauer said at the TED conference. “Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather, they are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers.” When the middle class thrives, he said, “businesses grow and hire, and owners profit.” Emerging research from high-powered experts across the ideological spectrum backs that economic inversion. Their work shows how America’s long-term prosperity is in jeopardy because the middle class is struggling and the super-rich are pulling away.

• New York Times opinion: Win Some, Lose Some Is it possible that I have misjudged Mitt Romney? By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: Is it possible that I have misjudged Mitt Romney? My take has always been that he’s a smart guy who also happens to be both ambitious and completely amoral; he decided that his career can best be advanced by pandering to the crazies of the right, and will say anything to that end.

  More and more, however, he has been coming out with statements suggesting that he is, in fact, a dangerous fool.

  The latest: JPMorgan’s loss was no biggie:

  This was a loss to shareholders and owners of JPMorgan and that’s the way America works Some people experienced a loss in this case because of a bad decision. By the way, there was someone who made a gain. The $2 billion JPMorgan lost someone else gained.

  Hey, when Lehman Brothers lost a lot of money, that was money someone else gained. No problem, right?

  Can Romney really not understand that key financial institutions are different from any old business — that when they fail they can wreak havoc? And can he really not understand that for that reason taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for large losses — and that JPMorgan in particular has government-guaranteed deposits?

• Washington Post: Conservative groups outspending liberal counterparts 4 to 1 on congressional races. By Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam. Excerpts: Conservative interest groups have dumped well over $20 million into congressional races so far this year, outspending their liberal opponents 4 to 1 and setting off a growing panic among Democrats struggling to regain the House and hold on to their slim majority in the Senate. The surge suggests that big-spending super PACs and nonprofit groups, which have become dominant players in the presidential race, will also play a pivotal role in House and Senate contests that will determine the balance of power in Washington in 2013. ...

  A number of super PACs have become de facto arms of the two political parties, whose leaders can help raise money for the groups within legal limits of $5,000 per individual. But once introduced, those same PACs can hit up donors for unlimited amounts on their own and then use those funds to help the party candidates. So far, the fundraising has primarily benefited conservative organizations such as the Club for Growth, the Congressional Leadership Fund and American Crossroads, the group connected to George W. Bush’s former White House adviser Karl Rove, which plans to spend up to $100 million on House and Senate races through its super PAC and nonprofit arms.

  Overall, congressionally focused super PACs have raised $100 million so far this election cycle, including $28 million by American Crossroads, according to FEC data.

  Democratic-leaning groups have lagged badly by comparison. House Majority PAC has reported raising $4.5 million since last year, primarily from unions, and had $1.7 million on hand at the end of March. ...

  Liberal groups have been hobbled by widespread reluctance among Democrats to support unlimited-spending groups, which have been criticized by President Obama and others as unhealthy for democracy. But Democratic strategists say donors are coming around. “It’s no secret that it’s not the way we would prefer to do things,” said J.B. Poersch, a strategist for Majority PAC, which is focused on bolstering Senate Democrats. “But we’re also recognizing that we have no choice but to compete. . . . You can’t just give away the store.”