It's not enough to punish criminal banks and banksters, even if it were done properly. We need to regulate the system so that they don't have an opportunity for crime.

Part of the necessary change is to eliminate complicated financial derivatives. The reason banksters create these is because nobody knows how to regulate them well enough to prevent the banksters from using them to cheat people.

We need to regulate banks to the point that being a banker is not an opportunity for creativity.

Economists report on how a treaty to give foreign corporations more power, such as the TPP, can do economic harm.

This is in addition to the other forms of injustice, such as bad copyright law, and forbidding many sorts of protection of the environment and public health.

Republican opposition to Obama's medical insurance program is based on one simple goal: denying the Democratic party a success that could win support from millions of appreciative Americans.

The fact that they turned against the Massachusetts system, that Romney himself turned against his own success, demonstrates this.

Obama's law failed to get the insurance companies out of the system, so it did not reduce the costs, but it does provide medical care to millions of Americans who couldn't get it before (though not everyone).

You will now find Republicans and other right-wingers attacking it for the high costs, which it did not cause. But none of them wants the solution that will really reduce the costs: a National Health Service.

US citizens: oppose the TPP as an obstacle to saving the Earth from global heating.

An experiment will use underwear with sensors to monitor the mental state of inmates of psychiatric hospitals.

To judge this ethically depends on the guidelines for treatment of the mentally ill, which are more or less reasonable, and on guidelines for respecting people's personal data, which are far too weak. Society has failed to establish is guidelines for the rights of computer users in general.

Wearable sensors should make their output directly available to the user, and to no one else except if the user supplies it. Companies should not be allowed to ask for that data as a condition for services.

Meanwhile, if this sensor-clothing is skintight, it could be painfully hot. I would rip it off just because of that.