Nicholas von Hoffman

For years and years a minority of savvy people would ask themselves, “Just how long can this go on?” The “this” was lending people money that they were not earning enough to repay. Now we know. Now the question is not how long can this go on but how come it went on so long.

Lending money to dubious risks is hardly something invented in the past 10 or 15 years. Until recently, however, the rule was that high risks paid high interest rates. The payday loan industry operates on that basis, as do the gangsters who lend to people gambling on sporting events.  read more »

The tale of the C.I.A.’s torture tapes grows longer, more twisted and interlaced. The list of question grows apace, too.

What part did members of Congress play? When were these tapes showing C.I.A. agents inflicting pain on their captives destroyed? Who destroyed them? On whose orders? What were the motives for doing so? Or is this yet one more C.I.A. ruse? We are dealing here with an institution of habitual mendacity.  read more »

While cam-paigning, Barack Obama is often heard to quote his wife, Michelle, saying, “We are not that far away from being normal.” He then goes on to explain that it was only five years ago that he and his wife were still struggling to pay off their student loans and were wondering how they could get together enough money to move out of their condo, which wasn’t big enough to hold them and their two little girls.  read more »

This is no time for trade union idiocy, but we’ve got it anyway. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees are back at work, but employers succeeded in making the case that this union struck for what used to be called featherbedding. Featherbedding is a union contract that includes paying workers for not working. In the overworked and perpetually exhausted society that is our current-day America, news of such goings-on confirms the idea in many a head that unions have little to offer.  read more »

Mr. Russert has found a safe way to be a bully and to embarrass those who do not have the protection afforded by the role of journalist.  read more »

The underlying economic system that has brought us to this loan crisis grows crazier by the year.  read more »

Since there is no rule requiring the United States to finish one war before starting the next, with each passing day the bookies are shortening the odds that Iran will be next.  read more »

“Now,” Alan Greenspan told The Wall Street Journal the other day, “it turns out politics is less important, domestically, than it was, because globalization is taking over an ever increasing part of the decision making process with the exception of national security.” What he says, many feel.  read more »

Now he tells us. Alan Greenspan has come out from behind the cloud of gas where he had hidden himself for the past couple of decades to say in public what he should have said years ago when it might have mattered.  read more »

Judging from recent reviews the world’s most efficient capital market has come a cropper.  read more »

It took forever, but the government has announced that Medicare will no longer pay for hospital-caused diseases. The policy will cover hospital-caused injuries, preventable errors and infections.  read more »

As the subprime mortgage mess continues to play itself out, certain words that ought to pop up in the discussion are not to be heard. These are words like “fraud,” “conspiracy,” “misrepresentation” and “felony.”  read more »

The court’s vacations are getting longer as, year after year, the justices take fewer cases. This may be just as well considering the damage they do on those occasions when they show up for work.  read more »

Bruce Ackerman, a law professor at Yale, has come up with an idea that might possibly sell itself.  read more »

At the rate things are going, instead of wondering if he can win, many of us may be signing petitions begging Michael Bloomberg to run for president.  read more »

When it comes to discussion about the “external intervention” in Iraq, the talk is mostly about what we are doing to Iraq and less about what Iraq has done to us. Our forces are now well into their fifth year there, and in the opinion of some men who are qualified to make the judgment, our Army is disintegrating.  read more »

When Washington has demonstrated that it has closed the borders, something which might, incidentally, discourage the rampant drug trade, it will be in a better position to bring forth some kind of program to legitimate the 12 million squatters or illegals or undocumenteds.  read more »

On the basis of this track record, it would seem that the last thing in the world a society with its head screwed on tight would consider is establishing the beginnings of private militias within its own jurisdiction or territory. That, however, is what the United States appears to be doing.  read more »

A move is underway to put Robert Moses back up on the pedestal where he stood in the 1930’s. If the people backing the rehabilitation of New York’s quondam transportation, housing and recreation czar succeed, they might consider Joseph Stalin for their next revisionist project.  read more »

Poisoned pet-food ingredients are coming in from China. Are the Communists out to kill our pets, or is the mood in America beginning to shift?  read more »

We have hit a wall. Congress will not close down the war. It is not going to happen.  read more »