AARON HUGHES, aarhughes at ivaw.org; SCOTT KIMBALL, scttkmbll at gmail.com
Hughes and Kimball are veterans and members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. They will be leading a rally and march on Sunday to the NATO meeting “security perimeter.” Kimball said today: “We plan on returning our medals to the leaders of NATO — it’s been destabilizing, not stabilizing, Afghanistan. We are against this militarism.”

Hughes explained his returning of medals: “Because every day in this country, 18 veterans are committing suicide. Seventeen percent of the individuals that are in combat in Afghanistan, my brothers and sisters, are on psychotropic medication. Twenty to 50 percent of the individuals getting deployed to Afghanistan are already diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, military sexual trauma or a traumatic brain injury. Currently one-third of the women in the military are sexually assaulted.”

DAVID N. GIBBS, dgibbs at arizona.edu
Author of First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Gibbs is a professor of history and government at the University of Arizona who has written extensively on NATO. He said today: “NATO is an organization that lost its relevance with the Cold War. It was originally created to protect Europe against a military invasion by the Soviet Union. By any reasonable standard, it should simply have ceased to exist with the end of the Cold War in 1989. Today, it is largely an example of bureaucratic self-preservation, as well as a drain on the economy.”

FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at law.uiuc.edu
Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. Yesterday, AllAfrica.com reported that Charles Taylor — in his first statements after being convicted by the UN Special Court on Sierra Leone: “President George W. Bush not too long ago ordered torture and admitted to doing so. Torture is a crime against humanity. The United States has refused to prosecute him. Is he above the law? Where is the fairness?” The report noted that “In January of 2010, one Professor Francis A. Boyle of the College of Law at the University of Illinois filed a Complaint with the International Criminal Court against President Bush and at least five of his senior officials for allegedly committing international crimes.”

Just this week, Boyle returned to the U.S. from Malaysia and the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, which convicted Bush in absentia. He said today: “The International Criminal Court has become a joke and a fraud. I supported it originally. But no more. It has no credibility whatsoever. It just goes after tin-pot dictators in Africa while the real war criminals such as Bush, Blair and Netanyahu get off scot-free. Hence I went out to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal to convict Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their consigliore lawyers.”

The Guardian is providing coverage of G8 summit at Camp David and NATO protests in Chicago.

DONNA SMITH, donnas at calnurses.org
CHARLES IDELSON, cidelson at calnurses.org,
Smith and Idelson are with National Nurses United, the largest union and professional association of nurses in the U.S. They are holding a rally Friday in Chicago with other groups and musicians including Tom Morello. In a statement, they derided “the AWOL G8 world leaders, who decided to run off and hide in the woods of rural Maryland [at Camp David] rather than face a disgruntled public in Chicago as originally announced, to determine what they are doing to help average families, not just the banks and Wall Street high rollers, in the midst of a continuing economic gloom.” National Nurses United is calling for a “tax on Wall Street stocks, bonds, derivatives and other financial instruments that can raise up to $350 billion every year to help mitigate the economic crisis created by the banks, with the revenue available for jobs, healthcare, education, and other basic needs and services.”

MARGARET FLOWERS, M.D., mdpnhp at gmail.com,
Flowers is an organizer of the Occupy G8 Peoples’ Summit in Maryland. She appeared on Democracy Now this morning and just co-wrote the piece “Why We Protest the G8,” which states: “Countries representing concentrated wealth will gather in remote Camp David this week to try to prop up a failing global economic system that has funneled wealth to the top, leaving everyone else behind. From its founding, the G8 has been engaged in a struggle between the wealthiest people in a handful of nations and everyone else. The losing side of this corrupt bargain has increasingly come to include many people within those wealthy countries, as well.

“In 1974 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order. This document laid out an economic vision that would have created a much healthier planet and fairer international economy. It would have empowered countries to regulate and control multinational corporations operating within their borders. It sought to develop international trade that was fair so countries received equitable prices for raw materials and labor. It also opposed the use of military, economic or political force to prevent countries from acting in their own economic self-interest, whether individually or jointly. This latter point was in defense of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose oil embargo occurred two years earlier.

“The response from the wealthiest nations was to create the G6, the forerunner to the G8 (as it did not include Russia or Canada) which first met in 1975, amidst another recession that featured high unemployment, inflation, and deficit. The G6 sought to circumvent the UN’s Declaration and prevent the world from participating in economic decision-making that benefited all, not just a few. The G6 put the world on an economic path of concentrated wealth and corporatism that has looted our resources and brought the economy and environment to the breaking point.”

KINDA MOHAMADIEH, kinda.mohamadieha at annd.org or via Ryme Katkhouda, rymepmc at gmail.com
Mohamadieh is with the Arab NGO Network for Development and is currently visiting Washington, D.C. with a delegation from several Arab countries. The delegation just released a paper, “Overview and Suggestions for Improving Key Areas in U.S. Foreign Policy Towards the Arab Region,” which states: “U.S. development assistance to the Arab region has been closely linked with promoting foreign policy and strategic military goals, while not necessarily serving democracy and human development.”

Multibillonaire Pete Peterson’s Fiscal Summit concluded on Tuesday with a stand for no-compromise austerity and Speaker of the House John Boehner laying out the case for massive spending cuts. Yesterday the Senate voted down budget proposals that would have slashed Medicaid, cut SNAP, voucher-ized Medicare, and shrunk most other domestic human needs programs. At the same time, these proposals protect and even increase the military budget and cut taxes for those at the top. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that nearly two-thirds of those proposed program cuts would hit low-income people disproportionately.

But authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Gary Rivlin argue that any discussion of the safety net and poverty alleviation has to include the ways that local and state governments and private enterprise actively prey on the poor.

BARBARA EHRENREICH, via Beth Schulman, barbara.ehrenreich at economichardship.org,
Ehrereich is the author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” and is most recently the founder of the just-launched Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports innovative journalism on poverty . In her report “Preying On the Poor,” released today by TomDispatch, she writes: “Before we can ‘do something’ for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them. … The amounts extracted from the poor by the private and public sector are comparable to the amounts ‘given’ to the poor through the safety net. It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license.”

She said today: “I am surprised by the size of these numbers, and made all the more impatient with the standard liberal discourse on poverty. We can’t go on talking about poverty without talking about how it is being manufactured and intensified all the time.”

GARY RIVLIN, grivlin at mindspring.com
Journalist and author of five books, including “Broke USA,” and co-editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with Ehrenreich, Rivlin just wrote the piece “America’s Poverty Tax,” where he reports on the exorbitant fees the poor and the working poor pay because they have lousy credit or because they have no savings. Rivlin said today: “The numbers show it’s very expensive to be poor.” The article states: “Add up all the profits pocketed by all those payday lenders, check cashers, subprime auto lenders, and other Poverty, Inc. enterprises and divide it by the 40 million households the Federal Reserve says survive on $30,000 a year or less. That works out to around $2,500 per household, or a poverty tax of around 10 percent.”

Human Rights Information and Training Center in Yemen states: "An ongoing heavy and regular attack by the military forces is targeting and destroying Taiz city's peaceful neighborhoods."

AP is reporting: “Government troops and warplanes pounded al-Qaida positions in southern Yemen on Wednesday, killing at least 29 militants as part of a ramped up campaign against the group, military officials said.”

IZZA-DEEN EL ASBAHI, via Ryme Katkhouda, rymepmc at gmail.com or Kinda Mohamadieh, kinda.mohamadieh at annd.org
El Asbahi is founder and director of the Human Rights Information and Training Center in Yemen. He said today: “The U.S. military and the Yemeni government frequently launch these attacks and claim they are killing al-Qaida fighters. But the fact is quite often they are killing regular people, or political opponents of the regime who are not al-Qaida. This ends up having the effect of causing more resentment and gives al-Qaida more recruits. After the start of the uprising a year ago, the U.S. declared they would get rid of al-Qaida in a matter of three weeks. Today al-Qaida controls a region ten times the size of Bahrain with sea port access.”

This week El Asbahi is in Washington, D.C. with a delegation of the Arab NGO Network for Development, which also includes representatives from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia and other Arab countries.

He added: “Military intervention and use of violence has left a negative impact and does not achieve the stated goal of eliminating terrorism. The elimination of terrorism starts with the support of local development. Airplane and drone bombings nurture terrorism as they enroll more people struggling with poverty, anger and fear with al-Qaida which gives them a salary and a Kalashnikov to empty their anger. While in city of Taiz, a stronghold of the left and revolution in Yemen, they still talk fondly of U.S. aid and the ‘Kennedy project’ of drinking water distribution.”

The Arab NGO delegation just released a paper, “Overview and Suggestions for Improving Key Areas in U.S. Foreign Policy Towards the Arab Region.” For a copy and profiles of the delegates, see here.

While most of the members of the delegation can speak English, El Asbahi would require Arabic translation, which can be provided.

The Washington Post is reporting: “President Obama issued an executive order Wednesday giving the Treasury Department authority to freeze the U.S.-based assets of anyone who ‘obstructs’ implementation of the administration-backed political transition in Yemen.

“The unusual order, which administration officials said also targets U.S. citizens who engage in activity deemed to threaten Yemen’s security or political stability, is the first issued for Yemen that does not directly relate to counterterrorism.”

IBRAHAM QATABI, Ibraham.Qatabi at gmail.com
Qatabi is a Yemeni American human rights activist and a legal worker with Center for Constitutional Rights specializing in Yemen. He said today: “The USG isn’t naming groups or people who it’s illegal to work with, so any sensible person would be very cautious about working with anyone they aren’t 100 percent sure the USG approves of. In fact, the USG’s officials have flat out told the press that the sanctions are a ‘deterrent’ to ‘make clear to those who are even thinking of spoiling the transition’ to think again — in other words, think again before you work with any democracy activists who we think are ‘spoiling the transition’ to the U.S. government’s favored candidate for leadership. It reminds me of something the government said in the 9th Circuit in HLP v. Holder — that the aim of these broadly-worded sanctions regimes, capable of criminalizing speech, is to make groups the U.S. government disfavors so ‘radioactive’ that American citizens won’t even want to go near them. That’s not democracy – either here or in Yemen.”

See on the White House website: “Executive Order — Blocking Property of Persons Threatening the Peace, Security, or Stability of Yemen.”

Background: Obama urged the Yemeni dictator Saheh to keep the journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye in prison. This was apparently because Shaye was exposing that U.S. strikes were killing civilians. See “Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?” by Jeremy Scahill.

Marcy Wheeler today notes that the new executive order could be used to target Scahill: “The Jeremy Scahill Yemen Executive Order”

“The deal under which some 1,600 Palestinian prisoners agreed on Monday to end a month-long fast against Israel’s prison policy was struck on the eve of Nakba (catastrophe) Day…”

ALLAM JARRAR, via Ryme Katkhouda, rymepmc at gmail.com; Kinda Mohamadieh, kinda.mohamadieh at annd.org
Jarrar is with the Palestinian NGO Network. He is in Washington, D.C. with a delegation of the Arab NGO Network for Development, which also includes representatives from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Yemen and other Arab countries. The delegation just released a paper, “Overview and Suggestions for Improving Key Areas in U.S. Foreign Policy Towards the Arab Region.” Point one is “The centrality of recognizing the Palestinian rights to democratic and development processes.”

NOURA ERAKAT, nourae at mac.com; RICHARD FALK, rfalk at princeton.edu
Erakat is an adjunct professor of international human rights law in the Middle East at Georgetown University and the U.S.-based legal advocacy consultant for the Badil Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights. She is also a contributing editor to Jadaliyya.com.

Available for a limited number of interviews, Falk is professor of international law emeritus, Princeton University and Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories for the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Erakat said today: “It is empowering that on the day of the 64th commemoration of the Nakba, or the day that marks the initial displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, that Thaer Halahleh and Bilal Diab will be ending their hunger strike in exchange for their freedom. As a result of an Egyptian-brokered deal between Israelis and Palestinians, all the hunger strikers will end their strike upon Israel’s vow to not renew their arbitrary detention without charge or trial upon its expiration. This marks a significant milestone in the struggle against colonial violence in Palestine. It does not however, signal an end to the struggle as demonstrated by the case of Hana al-Shalabi who spent two years in administrative detention before obtaining her release as part of the Hamas-brokered prisoner exchange only to be re-arreseted two months later. A definitive end to these punitive and racist practices necessitates the political will of international governments and agencies who have the ability to exert the requisite pressure upon Israel to comply with international law and human rights norms.”

Falk and Erakat recently wrote the piece “Palestinian Hunger Strikers: Fighting Ingrained Duplicity,” which states: “On his seventy-third day of hunger strike, Thaer Halahleh was vomiting blood, bleeding from his lips and gums, while his body weighs in at 121 pounds—a fraction of its pre-hunger strike size. The thirty-three-year-old Palestinian follows the still-palpable footsteps of Adnan Khader and Hana Shalabi whose hunger strikes resulted in release. He also stands alongside Bilal Diab who is also entering his seventy-third day of visceral protest. Together, they inspired nearly 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners to go on hunger strike in protest of Israel’s policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial.

“Administrative detention has constituted a core of Israel’s 1,500 occupation laws that apply to Palestinians only, and which are not subject to any type of civilian or public review. Derived from British Mandate laws, administrative detention permits Israeli Forces to arrest Palestinians for up to six months without charge or trial, and without any show of incriminating evidence. Such detention orders can be renewed indefinitely, each time for another six-month term.

“Ayed Dudeen is one of the longest-serving detainees in Israeli captivity. First arrested in October 2007, Israeli officials renewed his detention thirty times without charge or trial. After languishing in a prison cell for nearly four years without due process, prison authorities released him in August 2011 only to re-arrest him two weeks later. His wife Amal no longer tells their six children that their father is coming home, because, in her words, ‘I do not want to give them false hope anymore, I just hope that this nightmare will go away.’”

See recent New York Times report: “Palestinians Go Hungry to Make Their Voices Heard”

WILLIAM K. BLACK, blackw at umkc.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Black is now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. He was the deputy staff director of the national commission that investigated the cause of the savings and loan debacle. He just wrote a piece for CNN which states: “Financial institutions such as JPMorgan love to buy derivatives because they are opaque, create fictional income that leads to real bonuses and when (not if) they suffer losses so large that they would cause the bank to fail, they will be bailed out. The Dodd-Frank Act’s Volcker Rule was designed to solve the problem.

“However, JPMorgan led the effort to gut the Volcker Rule and the provision that requires transparency. JPMorgan is the world’s largest proprietary purchaser of financial derivatives — precisely what the Volcker Rule sought to end. The bank claims that it does not engage in proprietary trading and that it purchases derivatives solely to hedge. That claim is an example of what Stephen Colbert meant when he invented the term: ‘truthiness.’

“A hedge is an investment that offsets losses in another investment. JPMorgan’s supposed hedges aren’t hedges under accounting rules because they haven’t been shown to perform as hedges. JPMorgan bought tens of billions of dollars of derivatives that increased its losses rather than reduced them. It calls these anti-hedges ‘hedges’ — in other words, it practiced ‘hedginess.’”

On Friday, Black will be speaking at a United Nations summit on the “State of the World Economy and Finance in 2012.”

GERALD EPSTEIN, gepstein at econs.umass.edu
Professor of economics and a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Epstein just wrote the piece “Standing Up to Jamie Dimon: Is it Safe?” which states: “How do we stand up to Jamie Dimon and the other tax payer subsidized bankers that use the privileged position of tax payer underwritten banks to engage in risky activity that harms the real economy and generates massive salaries and bonuses for the bankers (Ina Drew is reportedly in line to make $14 million this year).

“First, we must unmask the Republican and Democratic politicians that have actively served to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank rules on proprietary trading, derivatives and swaps regulations and other parts of the Dodd-Frank regulations, in the name of job creation and liquidity enhancement. The regulators at the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission and others must be badgered to write and enforce rules that implement strict enforcement of the Dodd-Frank rules against proprietary trading, controls over derivatives…

“But such provisions will not be enough because banks will eventually find ways around them and continue to act like the world is one big casino and ponzi palace. There is increasing recognition by economists and public officials that the too big to fail banks need to be cut down to size. Senator Sherrod Brown has introduced the SAFE banking act”

Epstein was just interviewed by The Real News

Discretionary Spending Areas (Billions of Dollars)

STEVEN KULL, skull at pipa.org
Kull is director of the Program for Public Consultation, a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and lead author of the recently released study “Consulting the American People on National Defense Spending.”

He said today: “Three quarters of respondents favored cutting defense as a way to reduce the deficit, including two thirds of Republicans as well as nine in ten Democrats. …

“Other polls on defense spending have mostly asked simply whether respondents favor or oppose defense cuts, and generally found smaller numbers favoring cuts. This suggests that Americans generally underestimate the size of the defense budget and that when they receive balanced information about its size they are more likely to cut it to reduce the deficit. …

“The area cut by the greatest percentage was nuclear weapons, which respondents reduced an average of 27 percent (Republicans 18 percent, Democrats 35 percent). The area that was cut the most in dollar terms was for existing ground force capabilities which was cut an average of $36.2 billion (Republicans $23.8 billion, Democrats $44.5 billion) or 23 percent.

“What is striking is that it appears that the American people, unlike Congress, are able to thoughtfully recognize the validity of arguments both for and against cutting defense spending and still come to hard and even bold decisions.

“Eight in ten favored cutting the Obama administration’s proposed budget of $88 billion for 2013 war spending in Afghanistan. Overall, on average it was cut 40 percent or $35 billion.”

Note: Respondents were queried about “defense” spending, not “military” spending, which likely would have drawn even less support.

VIJAY PRASHAD, vijay.prashad at trincoll.edu
Author of Arab Spring, Libyan Winter and The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Prashad is chair of South Asian history and director of international studies at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut.

He said today: “A United Nations report released in early March 2012 asked for an investigation of NATO’s potential war crimes, but was snubbed by the military alliance, whose lawyer, Peter Olsen, wrote in February of this year to the UN Commission that, ‘in the event the Commission elects to include a discussion of NATO actions in Libya, its report clearly states that NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya.’ In other words, it is impossible for NATO to commit war crimes. NATO, unlike the Libyans, is too civilized to be guilty of any such violations. It is, therefore, above investigation. The scandal here is that NATO, a military alliance, refuses any civilian oversight of its actions. It operated under a UN mandate (Security Council Resolution 1973) and yet refuses to allow a UN evaluation of its actions. NATO, in other words, operates as a rogue military entity, outside the bounds of the prejudices of democratic society. It is precisely because NATO refuses an evaluation that the UN Security Council will not allow another NATO-like military intervention. The new HRW report reinforces what was raised in the UN report from March. It simply underlines the necessity of a formal and independent evaluation of NATO’s actions in Libya.”

On May 18, Prashad will be speaking at the the NATO Counter-Summit

See Prashad’s pieces:

“NATO’S Craven Coverup of Its Libyan Bombing”

“Straining NATO on Short Syrian Leash”

“So for all those candidates and elected officials interested in the women’s vote and eager to prove their support for motherhood and families, here’s a sampling of what mothers want and need, not just one day a year but every day:

“The right to care for a sick child or personal illness without losing our paychecks or our jobs. Moms need leaders to actively support the right for workers to earn paid sick days and champion local, state and federal policies that would guarantee this protection. Make sure no one has to choose between being a good parent and being a good employee — and that no one has to serve you flu with your soup. …”

TERRY O’NEILL, via Latoya Veal, press at now.org
O’Neill is president of the National Organization for Women Foundation. The group today released the report “Breaking the Social Security Glass Ceiling: A Proposal to Modernize Women’s Benefits” with the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare Foundation and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. She said today: “If implemented, the recommendations we make in ‘Breaking the Social Security Glass Ceiling’ will go a long way toward creating a retirement and disability insurance program that recognizes the new reality of working women and men, and values women’s role in society as both breadwinners and primary caregivers. Crediting women’s years out of the paid labor force is a long overdue feature that NOW strongly supports and urges lawmakers to support as well.”

LAURA KACERE, laura.kacere at gmail.com
Kacere is a feminist activist working with Occupy D.C. who recently wrote the piece “The Radical History of Mother’s Day,” which states: “There’s a good number of us who question holidays like Mother’s Day in which you spend more time feeding money into a system that exploits our love for our mothers than actually celebrating them. It’s not unlike any other holiday in America in that its complete commercialization has stripped away so much of its genuine meaning, as well its history. Mother’s Day is unique in its completely radical and feminist history, as much as it has been forgotten.

“Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.”

Howe wrote:

“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

“Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’

“From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: ‘Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’ Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.

“In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed …to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

“The shock disclosure, made after the market closed on Thursday in a regulatory filing, prompted renewed calls for tougher regulation. Investors reacted by sending the bank’s shares down by more than 9 percent when Wall Street opened on Friday. Other U.S. banking stocks also suffered sharp falls.”

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu
Stephany Griffith-Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University.

WILLIAM K. BLACK, blackw at umkc.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Black is now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the author of “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.” He was the deputy staff director of the national commission that investigated the cause of the savings and loan debacle. He said today: “JPMorgan has announced that it has suffered large losses, and remains exposed to far greater losses, because purported ‘economic hedges’ did not perform as ‘expected’ because they were poorly designed. These purported hedges are not real. JPMorgan was speculating wildly and its panicky releases reveal that it is afraid that the positions it took exposed it to grave risks. The experience demonstrates the importance of the Volcker rule, the largest banks’ efforts to gut and evade the rule, and the continuing refusal of bank regulators to say ‘no’ to practices of the systemically dangerous institutions or SDIs (the roughly 20 ‘too big to fail’ banks) that are unsafe and unsound. As long as we permit the SDIs to remain so large that regulators fear that their failure will produce a global crisis we are rolling the dice 20 times a day wondering when (not ‘if’) the next SDI failure will occur and blow up the economy. JPMorgan’s losses on its faux hedges are the wake-up call we dare not ignore.”

Also see: “‘JOBS Act’ a ‘Recipe for Fraud’ Creating a ‘Race to the Bottom’.”