“Banksters,” the cover of the Economist magazine charges, depicting a gaggle of bankers dressed as extras off the “Goodfellas” lot. The editors were reacting to Libor-gate, the collusion among traders of major banks to fix the London interbank offered lending rate, the most recent, most obscure and the most explosive revelation from what seems a bottomless pit of corruption in global banks.

The Oath Keepers are the last line of defense against tyranny, apparently.

The Tea Party Nation, one of the more extreme factions of the Tea Party movement, has dipped deeper into the conspiratorial waters of antigovernment lore, most recently promoting the Oath Keepers and other antigovernment “Patriots” as the last line of defense for Americans increasingly confronted with “a government verging on evil.”

One of the refrains we heard when job numbers started to dip from early-year highs was not to put too much stock in one month’s reports. The White House is still saying that today—on the dismaying news that the economy added only 80,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained unchanged—but it’s now clear that the spring slump is real and ongoing.

America’s corporations and their executives are in grave danger, warns Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. According to Mr. McConnell, if President Obama were to find out who was giving hundreds of millions to secretive groups running political attack ads, he would “punish and intimidate” them with all the governmental tools at his disposal.      

Bad news for the U.S. economy and for Barack Obama. We’re in the jobs doldrums. Unemployment for June is stuck at 8.2 percent, the same as in May. And only 80,000 new jobs were added.

Remember, 125,000 news jobs are needed just to keep up with the increase in the population of Americans who need jobs. That means the jobs situation continues to worsen.

In April of 2003, I returned from Iraq after having lived there during the U.S. Shock and Awe bombing and the initial weeks of the invasion. Before the bombing I had traveled to Iraq about two dozen times and had helped organize 70 trips to Iraq, aiming to cast light on a brutal sanctions regime, with the “Voices in the Wilderness” campaign.