Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

By Robert Scheer

The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news, like reports of the 10 French soldiers killed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and the U.S. government’s imminent nationalization of much of the American mortgage-lending industry, would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

There you have it encapsulated, the McCain campaign for president, an irrational mélange of patriotic swagger and blindness to reality that is proving disturbingly successful with uninformed voters. How else to explain the many millions of Americans who tell pollsters they prefer a continuation of Republican rule when so many of them are losing their homes to foreclosure and the nation is devastated by out-of-control military spending?

The economy is in a downward spiral, the national debt is at an all-time high, the dollar is an international disgrace and inflation in July had the steepest rise in 27 years, driven by oil prices fivefold higher than when George W. Bush invaded the nation with the world’s second-largest petroleum reserves.

While the oil-rich Mideast nations we protect refuse to fully open the oil spigots as payback for our military efforts, McCain celebrates Gen. David Petraeus as his No. 1 hero for “victory” in Iraq. Aside from the reality that victory there is now defined as returning to the level of stability provided by Saddam Hussein, who the Bush administration admits had nothing to do with the bin Laden-led terrorists, even that goal requires the cooperation of our former sworn enemies, Iran’s ayatollahs.

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By David Swanson
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/35281

In the evolving neocon scheme of unconstitutional US governance, the job of running the country may belong to the office of the Vice President, while the primary duty of the president (other than following orders and acting like he’s in charge) may be to pardon the Vice President and all of his henchmen for their crimes.

We have survived (just barely) seven and a half years of life under a government that has eliminated the legislative and judicial branches, installed a certified moron in the oval office, and placed dictatorial power in a new fourth (or first) branch of government located wherever Dick Cheney casts his shadow. The Republican candidate to succeed George W. Bush is a bumbling idiot and senile to boot, clearly incapable of remembering what he had for breakfast, much less running a global empire. (And he lost any right to take pride in his torture victimhood when he began supporting the torture of others.) If he chooses a new Dick Cheney as his running mate, we will know that his role is puppet-in-chief and primary pardoner.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: why can’t Congress pardon each vice president and gang by legalizing their crimes, as done in the FISA modernization act or the military commissions act? Well, of course, it can - in the cases of crimes it finds out about. But Congress can’t be counted on to pardon crimes that are successfully kept secret, which however might be discovered while the criminals remain alive. And laws can always be undone by new laws or court rulings, while presidential pardons cannot be.

Alright, fine, but why couldn’t a president just pardon himself? Well, first of all, you don’t want the president to be in charge of the national crime syndicate for a number of reasons. First of all, he has to be chosen through something resembling an open election - a process well suited to selecting a Bush or a McCain, but not a Cheney or Lieberman. The Vice Presidential candidate need not be chosen through any primary elections, and can remain a footnote in the general election. Second, the Vice President’s office holds greater claim to a privilege of secrecy, by virtue of constituting its own separate and unregulated branch of government. Third, while the Constitution does not explicitly ban self-pardoning, no president has yet attempted it, and any sane Constitutional scholar would denounce it as patently outside the law.

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From Starbucks to Microsoft: a sampling of what US inmates make, and for whom”

Caroline Winter

Tens of thousands of US inmates are paid from pennies to minimum wage—minus fines and victim compensation—for everything from grunt work to firefighting to specialized labor. Here’s a sampling of what they make, and for whom.

Eating in: Each month, California inmates process more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs (from 160,000 inmate-raised hens). Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions has hired Washington prisoners to package holiday coffees (as well as Nintendo Game Boys). Confronted by a reporter in 2001, a Starbucks rep called the setup “entirely consistent with our mission statement.”

Around the Big House: Texas inmates produce brooms and brushes, bedding and mattresses, toilets, sinks, showers, and bullwhips. Bullwhips?

Windows dressing: In the mid-1990s, Washington prisoners shrink-wrapped software and up to 20,000 Microsoft mouses for subcontractor Exmark (other reported clients: Costco and JanSport). “We don’t see this as a negative,” a Microsoft spokesman said at the time. Dell used federal prisoners for PC recycling in 2003, but stopped after a watchdog group warned that it might expose inmates to toxins.

Back to school: Texas and California inmates make dorm furniture and lockers, diploma covers, binders, logbooks, library book carts, locker room benches, and juice boxes.

Patriotic duties: Federal Prison Industries, a.k.a. Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers’ uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have “produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)” and “wiring harnesses for jets and tanks.” In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractor MicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.

The law won: In Texas, prisoners make officers’ duty belts, handcuff cases, and prison-cell accessories. California convicts make gun containers, creepers (to peek under vehicles), and human-silhouette targets.

A stitch in time: California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria’s Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace “Made in Honduras” labels on garments with “Made in the usa.”

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As the Bush administration heads for “closure,” Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska seems to be heading for the same fate in a “redecorating” scandal; Monica Goodling of the (in)Justice Department is back in town for her hiring and firing practices; the eternally Foxy Karl Rove continues to give contempt of Congress real meaning; a federal judge ruled against the administration’s typically imperial idea of “immunity”; and rumors are flying about coming “preemptive,” blanket presidential pardons for those who organized the administration’s torture regime and committed other crimes. All the while, holding up the glorious banner of the Great Tradition, the John McCain campaign continues to be a chop shop for K Street Lobbyists. And that’s just a two-second glance at the Washington scene as August begins. As always, give them all high marks for consistency! Après Bush, of course, le déluge.

Thomas Frank, a Kansas boy who once followed conservatism deep into his home state and now writes op-eds that probably drive the readers of the Wall Street Journal crazy, has had a front seat at the Washington spectacle these last years as the Bush administration applied its “enhanced interrogation techniques” to the Federal government. In his latest must-read book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, Frank offers nothing short of a how-to history of the conservative era — specifically how to destroy a government, leave Americans in the lurch, and enrich yourselves all at the same time. It wasn’t just, as he argues, that this administration left “smoking guns” littered around the landscape, but that it itself was the smoking gun. If you want to know just what we face as a nation in terms of rebuilding America, his book is a good place to start. Tom

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Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush’s Washington
By Thomas Frank

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president’s friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president’s former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president’s liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

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By Jan Dahinten

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The worst of the global financial crisis is yet to come and a large U.S. bank will fail in the next few months as the world’s biggest economy hits further troubles, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff said on Tuesday.

“The U.S. is not out of the woods. I think the financial crisis is at the halfway point, perhaps. I would even go further to say ‘the worst is to come’,” he told a financial conference.

“We’re not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper, we’re going to see a big one, one of the big investment banks or big banks,” said Rogoff, who is an economics professor at Harvard University and was the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist from 2001 to 2004.

“We have to see more consolidation in the financial sector before this is over,” he said, when asked for early signs of an end to the crisis.

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by Bill Carter

Dan Abrams on “Verdict.” The program will end on Thursday.

Just in time for the closing rush of the presidential election, MSNBC is shaking up its prime-time programming lineup, removing the long-time host –- and one-time general manager of the network — Dan Abrams from his 9 p.m. program and replacing him with Rachel Maddow, who has emerged as a favored political commentator for the all-news cable channel.

The moves, which were confirmed by MSNBC executives Tuesday, are expected to be finalized by Wednesday, with Mr. Abrams’s last program on Thursday. After MSNBC’s extensive coverage of the two political conventions during the next two weeks, Ms. Maddow will begin her program on Sept. 8.

MSNBC is highlighting the date, 9/8/08, connecting it to the start of the Olympics on 8/8/08, as a way to signal what the network’s president, Phil Griffin, said “will be the final leg of the political race this year.” He added, “We making that Rachel’s debut.”

• Update: Maddow comments on new role

Mr. Abrams, who is well liked at MSNBC, is expected to remain at both that network and at NBC News, where he is the chief legal correspondent. He will also serve as an anchor during some of MSNBC’s daytime coverage, as well as a substitute host on NBC’s “Today” show, Mr. Griffin said.

The addition of Ms. Maddow as prime-time host had been expected for some time. Only a month ago, Mr. Griffin said she was at the top of the list to get a show at the network, and would likely get one soon.

MSNBC has put heavy emphasis this year on presidential election coverage (it has given itself the tag line, “The Place for Politics”) and has turned to Ms. Maddow frequently both as a guest and as a substitute for the network’s most popular host, Keith Olbermann. Mr. Olbermann’s emergence as the signature personality on the network has led to an unofficial rebranding of MSNBC as the liberal alternative to Fox News, which is dominated by conservative hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

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[A TomDispatch recommendation: Bill Moyers had Andrew Bacevich on his "Journal" for an hour Friday night, discussing his new book, The Limits of Power (which is now the number one bestseller at Amazon.com). It was nothing short of a tutorial for the American people on the three-pronged crisis that faces us -- economic, political, and military. Believe me, it's not to be missed and can still be watched at Moyers's website by clicking here. Make sure as well to check out Bacevich's two-part series on the American military crisis, excerpted from his book, which appeared at TomDispatch last week: "Illusions of Victory" and "Is Perpetual War Our Future?"]

Double Standards in the Global War on Terror

Anthrax Department
By Tom Engelhardt

Oh, the spectacle of it all — and don’t think I’m referring to those opening ceremonies in Beijing, where North Korean-style synchronization seemed to fuse with smiley-faced Walt Disney, or Michael Phelp’s thrilling hunt for eight gold medals and Speedo’s one million dollar “bonus,” a modernized tribute to the ancient Greek tradition of amateurism in action. No, I’m thinking of the blitz of media coverage after Dr. Bruce Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, committed suicide by Tylenol on July 29th and the FBI promptly accused him of the anthrax attacks of September and October 2001.

You remember them: the powder that, innocuously enough, arrived by envelope — giving going postal a new meaning — accompanied by hair-raising letters ominously dated “09-11-01″ that said, “Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” Five Americans would die from anthrax inhalation and 17 would be injured. The Hart Senate Office Building, along with various postal facilities, would be shut down for months of clean-up, while media companies that received the envelopes were thrown into chaos.

For a nation already terrified by the attacks of September 11, 2001, the thought that a brutal dictator with weapons of mass destruction (who might even have turned the anthrax over to the terrorists) was ready to do us greater harm undoubtedly helped pave the way for an invasion of Iraq. The President would even claim that Saddam Hussein had the ability to send unmanned aerial vehicles to spray biological or chemical weapons over the east coast of the United States (drones that, like Saddam’s nuclear program, would turn out not to exist).

Today, it’s hard even to recall just how terrifying those anthrax attacks were. According to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and Dec. 4, 2001, 389 stories appeared in the New York Times with “anthrax” in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories appeared in the Washington Post. That’s the news equivalent of an unending, high-pitched scream of horror — and from those attacks would emerge an American world of hysteria involving orange alerts and duct tape, smallpox vaccinations, and finally a war, lest any of this stuff, or anything faintly like it, fall into the hands of terrorists.

And yet, by the end of 2001, it had become clear that, despite the accompanying letters, the anthrax in those envelopes was from a domestically produced strain. It was neither from the backlands of Afghanistan nor from Baghdad, but — almost certainly — from our own military bio-weapons labs. At that point, the anthrax killings essentially vanished… Poof!… while 9/11 only gained traction as the singular event of our times.

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John McCain is soaring to new heights of hypocrisy on his wife’s personal jet. He flies around the country bent on duping the public into believing he’s “one of them,” a regular guy who can empathize with Americans facing an overwhelming economic crush. What’s more, he disparages those who oppose his ridiculous policy proposals as “elitist.” But who’s the real elitist?

The REAL McCain is a multimillionaire who owns ten luxurious homes. The REAL McCain backs President Bush’s tax cuts for big corporations. The REAL McCain empathizes only with the interests of our nation’s wealthy minority, not its money-strapped majority. But far too many are buying into McCain’s deceit because the corporate press won’t present the whole picture, so we created this video to educate the public about the REAL McCain.

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Clarence Page

So you think the chorus of white hate groups is seething with rage that Barack Obama could become president? Think again.

Members of the knuckle-dragging set are taking a rosier view, judging by their Internet posts. They say the possibility of a biracial president is helping their recruitment efforts.

“It will be a beautiful day when the masses look at the paper and truly realize they have lost their own country,” according to one of the postings spotted by Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“White people aren’t going to do a thing until their toys are taken away from them,” says another. “So things have to be worse for things to be better.”

So much for the question of whether Obama will be able to reach beyond his core liberal constituency.

Even former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has taken time from his international network of Holocaust-deniers to blog: “Obama is a visual aid for white Americans who just don’t get it yet that we have lost control of our country, and unless we get it back we are heading for complete annihilation as a people.”

Mercy. Can’t we all get along?

Of course, these alleged hater-supporters might be expressing odd support for Obama in order to avoid receiving visits by the Secret Service.

Either way, their rhetoric is rife with pitiful themes of anger, fear and resentment—the three basic food groups of paranoid movements.

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By Robert Parry

Millions of Americans who watched Barack Obama and then John McCain respond to nearly identical questions from evangelical minister Rick Warren were surely impressed by McCain’s quick and sharp answers. Supposedly he had been in a “cone of silence” while Obama was getting grilled during the preceding hour.

However, as it turned out, TV viewers and other Americans were misled. McCain had not been in any “cone of silence” shielding him from hearing Warren’s questions and Obama’s answers.

On Saturday night as Obama was on stage, McCain was in his motorcade on the way to the church and thus would have had access through his staff to the questions and how Obama had answered them.

When McCain came on the set, he played along with the fiction about being in a “cone of silence,” joking that “I was trying to hear through the wall.”

McCain then proceeded to knock the questions out of the proverbial park, impressing not only the audience at Rev. Warren’s Saddleback Church in California, but the political pundits who spent the next two days praising McCain’s performance and judging him the clear winner over Obama.

For instance, New York Times columnist William Kristol declared that it was “McCain’s night” and marveled at how “McCain, who went second, was crisp by contrast [to Obama] and his anecdotes colorful.”

Kristol also mocked grousing from Obama’s aides that McCain may have had access to the questions beforehand. “There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage,” Kristol wrote in his Monday column.

However, in the same newspaper, New York Times reporters discovered that the assertion by Warren that McCain had been in some “cone of silence” wasn’t true.

“Members of the McCain campaign staff, who flew here Sunday from California, said Mr. McCain was in his motorcade on the way to the church as Mr. Obama was being interviewed,” wrote reporter Katharine Q. Seeyle.

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By Taegan Goddard

Last week, a speech by Sen. John McCain had phrases that were likely lifted directly from Wikipedia.

Now it seems McCain may have lifted another story last night at megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s Faith Forum. According to a very persuasive Daily Kos diary, the anecdote McCain told about a North Vietnamese prison guard making a cross in the dirt as a sign of solidarity — or as he said, “just two Christians worshiping together” — is very similar to a story about Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his times in the Soviet Gulags.

“As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union.  He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.”

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By Gary Matsumoto

Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) — On March 11, the day the Federal Reserve attempted to shore up confidence in the credit markets with a $200 billion lending program that for the first time monetized Wall Street’s devalued collateral, somebody else decided Bear Stearns Cos. was going to collapse.

In a gambit with such low odds of success that traders question its legitimacy, someone wagered $1.7 million that Bear Stearns shares would suffer an unprecedented decline within days. Options specialists are convinced that the buyer, or buyers, made a concerted effort to drive the fifth-biggest U.S. securities firm out of business and, in the process, reap a profit of more than $270 million.

Whoever placed the bet used so-called put options that gave purchasers the right to sell 5.7 million Bear Stearns shares for $30 each and 165,000 shares for $25 apiece just nine days later, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That was less than half the $62.97 closing price in New York Stock Exchange composite trading on March 11. The buyers were confident the stock would crash.

“Even if I were the most bearish man on Earth, I can’t imagine buying puts 50 percent below the price with just over a week to expiration,” said Thomas Haugh, general partner of Chicago-based options trading firm PTI Securities & Futures LP. “It’s not even on the page of rational behavior, unless you know something.”

`Lottery Ticket’

The 57,000 puts that traded March 11 at the $30 strike price and the 1,649 that traded at $25 were collectively worth about $1.7 million, Bloomberg data show. Each put is equal to 100 shares of stock.

“That trade amounted to buying a lottery ticket,” said Michael McCarty, chief options and equity strategist at New York-based brokerage Meridian Equity Partners Inc. “Would you buy $1.7 million worth of lottery tickets just because you could? No. Neither would a hedge fund manager.”

During the next four days, New York-based Bear Stearns unraveled in the swiftest investment-banking failure in Wall Street history. Speculation about a cash shortage proved self- fulfilling, causing customers and lenders to demand their money back. Bear Stearns’s stock sank 47 percent to $30 on Friday, March 14. That’s when the Fed moved to stave off a panic by helping the U.S. Treasury arrange JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s purchase of the company for $2 a share, a price unimaginable to the firm’s 14,000 employees.

Wall Street Seizure

In the aftermath, Bear Stearns Chief Executive Officer Alan Schwartz told Congress that the firm was toppled by rumor- mongering and abusive trading. Regulators have begun peeling back trading records, hunting for suspects.

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BEIJING’S BALANCING ACT

By Ullrich Fichtner

The Chinese Communist regime’s had planned to stage the 2008 Olympic Games as a triumphant celebration of itself as a model of success. But anyone traveling through the country’s provinces will encounter a crumbling realm threatened by forces released by its economic boom.

The man who can explain China is sitting in a private booth in an old teahouse in Beijing, holding court at an antique table with a laptop on it. Black and white photos hang on the walls and silk cushions adorn the benches. In the world outside, the Olympic Torch is making its way through the country and slowly approaching Beijing. The man says that the West is taking the easy route with China, despite its enormous complexity. “In this country, every movement takes place at the edge of an abyss.”

The group gathered around the man in the teahouse booth includes a woman who professes to be a Christian, a young Chinese man who studied political science abroad, a Western attorney and an African diplomat. They spend six hours drinking tea and snacking on nuts and dried olives, six hours during which the man will talk about his country, both critically and with affection, and about the steep, rocky path on which he believes the country finds itself, and he will say that China would probably break apart without the regulatory hand of the party, and that holding it all together takes patience, wisdom and even some luck.

The man insists on anonymity because his connections extend into the highest ranks of the party and government and because, now, shortly before the Olympics, all words are laden with meaning. He knows the major players because he himself is the son of a once-powerful man who fell out of favor while former dictator Mao Zedong was still alive. The man, who looks to be about 50, leads a bohemian lifestyle today. Nevertheless, he has access to the palaces surrounding Tiananmen Square — the Square of Heavenly Peace — and continues to act as a go-between among the influential.

Coming to a Head

He wears a traditional Chinese silk shirt and as he speaks, he conveys the impression that this country — after 30 years of phenomenal growth, after decades of fairy-tale success, after an epoch of economic prosperity — stands at a crossroads once again, and perhaps even on the brink of disaster. Paradoxically, all of this is coming to a head at once — in the year of the 2008 Olympics.

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Hillary Clinton’s campaign was undone by a clash of personalities more toxic than anyone imagined. E-mails and memos—published here for the first time—reveal the backstabbing and conflicting strategies that produced an epic meltdown.

by Joshua Green

For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened, or why.

The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed, reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.

How did things look on the inside, as they unraveled?

To find out, I approached a number of current and former Clinton staffers and outside consultants and asked them to share memos, e-mails, meeting minutes, diaries—anything that would offer a contemporaneous account. The result demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard. Everything from major strategic plans to bitchy staff e-mail feuds was handed over. (See for yourself: much of it is posted online at www.theatlantic.com/clinton.)

Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

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Penalty fees make up nearly half of industry revenues.

By Mark Lange

Blue Ridge Summit, PA. - Would you sign a contract that says, “Any term can be changed at any time for any reason, including no reason”? Anyone who uses a credit card already has.

Such are the absurd terms of the consumer credit-card industry, which is poised to be the next big crisis (after housing) that banks have aided and abetted in US households.

Americans have now racked up nearly $1 trillion in credit-card debt. As housing equity shrinks and costs rise, agencies such as Moody’s report swelling numbers of accounts with balances three or more payments past due. Reinforced by abusive industry practices, the plastic safety net is becoming a permanent cage.

But here’s the good news: If you’ve ever been steamed by surprise fees on your credit-card statement or had your interest rate cranked up without warning, the Federal Reserve Board wants to help you. The Fed? That oracular secret society whose chairmen say Yoda-like things about interest rates? Well, actually, yes.

Ever since its remarkable “oversight” of junk lending led to the mortgage melt-down, the Fed seems determined not to let credit-card defaults drive the American banking system any closer to Third World standards.

There’s plenty to reform. During the housing bubble, credit-card vendors inflated interest rates – even as the Fed slashed them – and found increasingly sneaky ways to usher their customers into perpetually indebted servitude. Such as:

•Raising rates as high as 32 percent on existing balances, with no notice, even when they’ve always been paid on time.

•Compressing the time between statement mailings and due dates.

•Charging interest on debt already repaid.

•Posting on-time payments after their due date – and then charging late fees.

•Neglecting to disclose how much interest and time it will take to pay off a balance with minimum payments (if ever).

Banks in the card game are raising rates and fees to limit their losses on mortgage loans they made. This is doubly ironic, since their delusional lending and exotic mortgage cocktails gave the housing bubble its irrational effervescence to begin with. So now millions of American households are being dragged under even further.

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