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We're headed into an election that will feature the clearest ideological divide since Goldwater-Johnson.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently said that he felt safer in Lebanon than he did when Occupy marched past his house. If nothing else, it proves that Wall Street bankers haven't gotten any better at risk management - the art of knowing where danger lies and avoiding it - than they were when their bad bets crashed the economy and caused the Great Recession.

But then we knew that already, didn't we? After all, Chase is one of five too-big-to-fail banks that could lose $80 billion or more from their poorly-thought-out risk-taking in Europe's most troubled countries. The risky behavior shouldn't surprise anyone, though. These banks know -- or at least believe -- that their too-big-to-fail status means we'll rescue them again when they make the next devastating set of blunders.

What's really striking about comments like these is the fact that executives at America's big banks never seem to worry when police cars approach their houses. Their biggest fear is that that they might glimpse a sign or hear the sound of a mic check reverberating faintly through well-aged brick walls.

Consider JPMorgan Chase, the institution run by Mr. Dimon. To call his bank "scandal-plagued" would be putting it mildly. Chase has settled six fraud cases with the SEC over the last thirteen years and is implicated in several ongoing investigations, including the two most notorious fraud cases of our time. At any other moment in history the headlines would be screaming with various combinations of the words "JPMorgan Chase," "fraud," "probe," "drop," mistakes," "disaster," "incompetence," and "scandal."

Originally posted on Capital Gains and Games.

Forget Michigan. Worry about Steny Hoyer.

While most political eyes are fixed on Romney's primary results, the middle class faces a threat to its financial security right in the heart of the Capitol.The Democratic Party does, too.

Originally published at Capital Gains and Games.

The private prison industry is on the march. In recent months the industry moved to take over 24 state prisons in southern Florida and buy five prisons in Ohio. Now it’s making moves in Michigan.

But the industry doesn’t always win. Resistance isn’t futile.

Who are the 1%?

Who is getting rich exploiting the 99%? Meet the worst of the 1%. This is a series of 1-minute videos by Brave New Films.

"The 1% in 1 Minute. These videos show the facts, plain and simple. Share them with your friends and family so Americans can understand exactly how their democracy is being taken from them."