If they were dead puppy parts, or parts from homosexual babies, or babies that self-identified as adults, it’d be a different story. Meaning, it would be a story. But as it is, the fact that these fetuses don’t look like puppies, and their sexual orientation cannot yet be determined, and their sexual-identity cannot yet be expressed, the most viral, re-tweeted, utterly disturbing national issue of the day went largely uncovered by all the major television and radio networks.

—Zeke Pipher
If They Were Dead Puppy Parts…

Forget for a moment the economic debate of the past few months, over issues such as the impact of austerity or economic reforms on growth. Instead ask yourself this simple question: do you really think that an economic reform program, for which a government has no political mandate, which has been explicitly rejected in a referendum, that has been forced through by sheer political blackmail, can conceivably work?

—Wolfgang Münchau
Greece’s Brutal Creditors Have Demolished the Eurozone Project

There is a huge misconception, pushed equally by odd bedfellows in the financial community and Obama supporters, that Eric Holder didn’t send anyone from Wall Street to jail because “no one broke any laws.”

This preposterous meme grew out of something Barack Obama said on 60 Minutes. Here are the president’s exact words:

“Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street — in some cases some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street — wasn’t illegal.”

Obama, a brilliant lawyer and wordsmith, was not saying that all of the behavior leading to the crash was legal. He merely said that some of the worst behavior wasn’t illegal. Which is true. Meaningless, but true.

Of course, some of the worst behavior was very illegal. This is confirmed in the fact that Holder extracted billions of dollars in settlement monies and even, in a few cases, obtained guilty pleas for crimes like fraud, manipulation, bribery, money laundering, and tax evasion.

—Matt Taibbi
Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold

Former governor Jeb Bush’s announcement this week that he thinks people should work more hours puts him in direct opposition to the two leading contenders on the Democratic side — both of whom are pushing proposals that will allow people to work less. This could mean that 2016 will be an election in which work hours play a central role…

The leading Democratic contenders are proposing policies to bring the US more in line with the rest of the world’s work weeks. Secretary Clinton indicated that she will support paid family leave and paid sick days, although she has not yet produced specific proposals. Senator Bernie Sanders, the other leading contender, also supports paid family leave and paid sick days, and he recently offered a proposal that would guarantee all workers two weeks per year of paid vacation. That might seem like small change compared to the five to six weeks a year that is now standard in Europe, but it would be a huge gain for tens of millions of workers.

There is a long way yet before the parties select their nominees, but if the general election ends up being a contest between Jeb Bush and either Clinton or Sanders, it will present the country’s workers with an unusually clear choice. We will have one candidate who wants to ensure that people can work less but keep the same standard of living, and another who wants people to work more hours and retire later for the good of the country’s economy — and the latter candidate is the one who doesn’t identify as a socialist.

—Dean Baker
Jeb Bush Wants Us to Work More for the Collective Good. Who’s the Socialist Now?

Greece has offered an almost unconditional surrender on its bailout, but Germany might not accept anything less than a Carthaginian peace. In other words, a deal that not only forces Athens to submit, but also humiliates it in the process.

This latest melodrama, playing out in Brussels as European finance ministers meet to discuss whether or not to approve a new Greek bailout, appears so nonsensical that it can be hard to believe these people are deciding the future of Europe. Although you wouldn’t know it from the headlines, the truth is that Greece and Europe have been close to a deal for awhile now. Both sides agreed about how much austerity Athens should do, but disagreed about how Athens should do it — at least until last Thursday. That’s when Greece came up with an offer that was not only nearly identical to Europe’s, but also to the one its people had just rejected in a referendum…

Under the plan, the only way Germany would let Greece stay in the euro now is if it sells 50 billion euros of “very valuable Greek assets,” allows international observers to monitor its bailout, and puts automatic spending cuts in place in case it misses its deficit targets. Otherwise, Germany wants Greece to take at least a five year “timeout” from the euro, during which time its debts could be restructured and it could receive humanitarian aid. The entire proposal was less than a page long.

In case there was any doubt, this is an offer Greece can’t accept. Sure, selling assets would lower Greece’s debt today, but it would make the rest of Greece’s debt harder to pay back tomorrow — which, according to the International Monetary Fund, is already unpayable. It’s the kind of thing you ask for if you want Athens to say no…

If Greece does leave the euro, though, it will only be temporary in the sense that all life is temporary. Bringing back the drachma would either be such a boon to Greece’s economy that it’d never want to go back to the euro, or be such a disaster that Europe would never want to invite it back. But in either case, Greece and Europe’s trial separation would turn into a divorce. That might actually be better for Greece now that it’s already gone through a lot of the pain of ditching the euro — like a financial crisis — but it could be a catastrophe for Europe. It wouldn’t just show that countries can leave the euro, but maybe that countries have to leave the euro to recover. So the next time an anti-austerity party wins power, it might decide to do the same, at which point the euro zone would be more like a northern euro zone, if that. Especially if France decides that this makes the euro not worth saving anymore.

What’s the German word for kicking-someone-out-of-the-euro-and-regretting-it-later?

—Matt O’Brien
Germany Doesn’t Want to Save Greece. It Seems to Want to Humiliate Greece.

It’s amazing the progress Malaysia has shown in human rights ever since Obama decided the Trans Pacific Partnership was his top priority…

Malaysia has done all it needed to do — become important to Obama’s trade agenda. At this point, it can use all the slave labor it wants, knowing Obama will do nothing. Promoting pharmaceutical companies’ rights for long monopolies over profitable medicines and allowing corporations to sue nations for raising their minimum wage or implementing new pollution controls is far more important than the human rights of migrant laborers in southeast Asia for this administration.

—Erik Loomis
Malaysia: A Leader in Human Rights Once It Joined the TPP!

The roots of the crisis lie far away from Greece; they lie in the architecture of European banking. When the euro came into existence in 1999, not only did the Greeks get to borrow like the Germans, everyone’s banks got to borrow and lend in what was effectively a cheap foreign currency. And with super-low rates, countries clamoring to get into the euro, and a continent-wide credit boom underway, it made sense for national banks to expand private lending as far as the euro could reach.

So European banks’ asset footprints (loans and other assets) expanded massively throughout the first decade of the euro, especially into the European periphery. Indeed, according the Bank of International Settlements, by 2010 when the crisis hit, French banks held the equivalent of nearly 465 billion euros in so-called impaired periphery assets, while German banks had 493 billion on their books. Only a small part of those impaired assets were Greek, and here’s the rub: Greece made up two percent of the eurozone in 2010, and Greece’s revised budget deficit that year was 15 percent of the country’s GDP — that’s 0.3 percent of the eurozone’s economy. In other words, the Greek deficit was a rounding error, not a reason to panic. Unless, of course, the folks holding Greek debts, those big banks in the eurozone core, had, over the prior decade, grown to twice the size (in terms of assets) of — and with operational leverage ratios (assets divided by liabilities) twice as high as — their “too big to fail” American counterparts, which they had done. In such an over-levered world, if Greece defaulted, those banks would need to sell other similar sovereign assets to cover the losses. But all those sell contracts hitting the market at once would trigger a bank run throughout the bond markets of the eurozone that could wipe out core European banks.

Clearly something had to be done to stop the rot, and that something was the troika program for Greece, which succeeded in stopping the bond market bank run — keeping the Greeks in and the yields down — at the cost of making a quarter of Greeks unemployed and destroying nearly a third of the country’s GDP. Consequently, Greece is now just 1.7 percent of the eurozone, and the standoff of the past few months has been over tax and spending mixes of a few billion euros. Why, then, was there no deal for Greece, especially when the IMF’s own research has said that these policies are at best counterproductive, and how has such a small economy managed to generate such a mortal threat to the euro?

—Mark Blyth
A Pain in the Athens

The final issue has to do with the meaning of a cost of living index. The underlying idea is that we are supposed to have enough money to buy a basket of quality adjusted goods and services over time that will leave us equally well off through time. An explicit assumption is that the physical and natural infrastructure have not changed. This is seriously problematic.

It means, for example, that in 2015 we would be able to buy the same phone and television as we did in 1979 and we would be as well off. There is no provision for the cost of buying a cell phone and paying for the service, nor the cost of the internet. We are supposed to believe that a person would be as well off without internet access in 2015 as they were in 1979. That doesn’t seem very plausible.

—Dean Baker
Quick Thoughts on Wage Stagnation

I’ve had writers who have sat exactly where you’re sitting, and I’ve talked for an hour on every major issue facing the American people — gone on for an hour — and at the end, somebody asks me for a word on Hillary Clinton. And the story is “Bernie Sanders Hillary Clinton.” That is the corporate media’s worldview. That is their only understanding of how a campaign can be run: when one candidate attacks the other candidate.

Now, I’ve known Hillary Clinton for many years. Let me confess: I like Hillary. I disagree with Hillary Clinton on many issues. My job is to differentiate myself from her on the issues — not by personal attacks. I’ve never run a negative ad in my life. Why not? First of all, in Vermont, they don’t work — and, frankly, I think increasingly around this country they don’t work. I really do believe that people want a candidate to come up with solutions to America’s problems rather than just attacking his or her opponent. If you look at politics as a baseball game or a football game, then I’m supposed to be telling the people that my opponents are the worst people in the world and I’m great. That’s crap; I don’t believe that for a second… I don’t need to spend my life attacking Hillary Clinton or anybody else. I want to talk about my ideas on the issues.

—Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders Speaks