MIKE GRAVEL In the D.C. area this week, Gravel is a former two-term senator from Alaska who ran for president last year. He is author of the book A Political Odyssey. He said today: “Whenever something comes up that [Senate minority leader] Mitch McConnell is adamantly opposed to, he just threatens a filibuster. Then [Senate…

LORETTA ALPER Alper is the producer and co-director of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” a film that documents a pattern of falsehoods disseminated by successive administrations and major media to go to war, as well as a series of rationalizations to keep wars going. The film highlights the…

The Los Angeles Times reported: “Mauricio Funes, an affable political moderate running on behalf of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, claimed victory after nearly complete returns gave him a lead that experts said was insurmountable.” The following are in El Salvador and are reachable via Jesse Stewart [[email protected]], who works with…

DEB RICHTER Chair of Vermont Health Care for All, Richter is a physician in rural Vermont. She said today: “Vermont Governor Jim Douglas and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick have been asked by President Obama to host a regional New England health care summit at the University of Vermont on Tuesday, March 17. We do not…

Four leading analysts on finance Monday issued a statement outlining how to stop the AIG bonuses: “AIG’s decision to pay out at least $165 million in bonuses takes the bank bailout program’s abuse of the public trust to a whole new level. “This act simply cannot be allowed to stand. The only question is how…

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 countries are gathering for meetings in Britain. HA-JOON CHANG In the U.S. until Sunday, Chang will then be in the UK where he is Cambridge University economics professor. He is author of Bad Samaritans — The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of…

The cartoonist Tom Toles makes the point that a main difference between Bernard Madoff and other Wall Street “charlatans” is that he’s admitting guilt. CHUCK COLLINS Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, is co-author of “Paying For a Strong Economy: Seven New Revenue Sources That Can Revitalize America and Reduce Financial Speculation.”…

Amb. Chas Freeman, who Tuesday said that he no longer accepts an offer to chair the National Intelligence Council, has released a statement reading in part: “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods,…

RUSSELL MOKHIBER America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main Washington lobbying group for the health insurance corporations, is holding its annual meeting Wednesday at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Washington. Editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, Mokhiber organized a protest Wednesday outside the meeting. He recently wrote the piece “March 11: Burn Your Health Insurance Bill Day”…

RICHARD WOLFF Professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Wolff is featured in a new film produced by the Media Education Foundation, “Capitalism Hits the Fan.” He said today: “We need to see this crisis historically to get a sense of how serious this is. In every decade from 1820 to 1970,…