How Right-Wing Cult Leader Sun Myung Moon Bought Washington

By Rory O'Connor, RoryOConnor.org
Posted on November 13, 2009, Printed on November 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143914/

With money, media and promotion of a conservative political agenda, a self-styled Messiah and convicted felon became a frequent guest at the White House.

“Moon looked on the media as almost the nervous system for a global empire. Moon was the brain, and the media are to be, or were to be, the communications vehicle for his body politic surrounding the globe.”

In January 1992, PBS Frontline broadcast a film I directed that documented the amazing rise, fall and subsequent resurrection of Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church movement. The documentary showed how, through an adroit combination of money, media and the consistent promotion of a conservative political agenda, a self-styled Messiah and convicted felon had rapidly reinvented himself and was soon hailed at the White House.

At the time, few Americans paid much attention to Reverend Moon – and those that did had bizarre recollections of him and the “Moonies,” as his followers once called themselves: mass weddings of complete strangers, flower-peddling in the street, and repeated allegations of mind control and brainwashing.

New solar panel promises cheaper power

By Jim Downing
jdowning@sacbee.com

Published: Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 8B
Last Modified: Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009 - 11:00 am

The roof of a North Sacramento plastics factory will host the biggest West Coast installation of a new type of solar panel.

The technology, built by Fremont's Solyndra Inc., uses racks of solar cells roughly the size and shape of long fluorescent light tubes. The shape allows the panels to harvest sunlight from any angle, including what's reflected from the white rooftops common on large commercial buildings.

The technology promises to cut the cost of solar power.

Obama urged to turn successful state job program national

By Tony Pugh | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — As job losses continue to slow the nation's economic recovery, labor experts and economists are urging Congress and the Obama administration to boost funding for a little-known program that 17 states are using to avert layoffs and keep workers in their jobs.

Mass layoffs of 50 or more employees claimed 278,000 jobs in the third quarter alone, according to new government data. All the laid-off workers were idled for at least a month and only one-third of their employers expected any of them to be recalled.

Six Smart Progressive Complaints About House Health Bill

posted by John Nichols on 11/09/2009 @ 10:23am

The Affordable Health Care for America Act was approved by the U.S. House Saturday night with overwhelming support from progressive Democrats who serve in the chamber and from a president who was nominated and elected with the enthusiastic support of progressive voters.

But that does not mean that informed and engaged progressives are entirely enthusiastic about the measure.

The Economist The Obama Administration Should Have Listened To

Eight months ago, the Obama administration launched a plan to help troubled homeowners avoid foreclosure by providing $75 billion in taxpayer funds to banks and mortgage servicers. The money was intended to help three to four million homeowners by lowering their monthly payments, largely by cutting their interest rates.

The next day, a Yale economist and a colleague penned a New York Times op-ed arguing for a different approach.

Rachel Maddow: Corporations Are "Child Labor-Endorsing, Pro-Slavery Freaks" for Trying to Skirt Trade Laws

By , AlterNet
Posted on November 11, 2009, Printed on November 12, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143891/

The following is excerpted from the Nov 10 Transcript of the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.

Rachel Maddow: The new rules for Wall Street and the banks will also create a consumer financial protection agency. So in the same way that regulation keeps off the market things that, when used as directed, have a good chance of killing you, things like long darts, or cars with the fuel tank right next to the bumper.

A consumer financial protection agency would keep off the markets, say, really bad mortgages that, when used as directed, are likely to blow up in your face as well. Are these bills from Barney Frank and Chris Dodd the end-all, be-all for Wall Street rules? Will these prevent the shunting of all the financial risk on to the public while those doing the shunting never personally risk anything more than drowning in their own bonus money?

FOX News' Hannity Sort of Apologizes for Falsified Rally Report

By Adele Stan, AlterNet
Posted on November 12, 2009, Printed on November 12, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/143905/

Caught (dare we say it?) red-handed -- by those pinkos at The Daily Show -- falsifying a Hannity show report about last week's Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill, FOX News host Sean Hannity issued a grudging apology last night.

On the November 5 edition of his show, Hannity interviewed Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who had convened a Capitol Hill rally of Tea Party activists to rail against health care and hate on the president that very day. I was there, and would estimate crowd to have been about 5,000. Not bad for a Thursday afternoon.

Americans may be settling into spending less

By ANNE D'INNOCENZIO, AP Retail Writer – Thu Nov 12, 10:34 am ET

NEW YORK – Americans spent about the same amount in October as in August and September, according to figures released Thursday by a key data service, and they may be settling into new low-spending habits.

Including everything from toys to food, but not cars or gasoline, U.S. retail sales rose slightly in October — 1.5 percent — from a year earlier even as consumers grappled with rising unemployment and tight credit.

The Lost Decade

Why the last 10 years have been an economic disappointment for most Americans.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009, at 3:36 PM ET

---

As we dig out from the rubble of the financial sector's collapse, it's common to hear analysts fret that the United States may now be facing a Japan-style "lost decade." Throughout the 1990s, after its real estate and stock bubble burst, Japan struggled with low growth for more than 10 years. It emerged from the decade shrunken and sapped of confidence, with very little to show for a large amount of government spending and near-zero interest rates.

I'm not particularly concerned that the United States is in for a lost decade. Our political and financial leadership reacted much more quickly than Japan's did, and the U.S. system, for all its faults, processes failure quickly.

More importantly, we've already had our lost decade. When 2010 dawns in several weeks, it will bring down the curtain on a decade—the oughts—in which a great deal and not much at all happened, economically and financially speaking. In fact, a startling number of contemporary indicators are at or below the levels at which they stood 10 years ago.

The $900 billion mistake

Barack Obama has not given much in the way of specifics for health-care reform. Few policies have been nonnegotiable and virtually none have been dictated. The exception is a number that was neither nonnegotiable nor dictated, but was received on the Hill as if it was both, and has come to dominate the health-care reform process: $900 billion.

The number sprang from Obama's September speech laying out his own plan on health-care reform. "Add it all up," he said before a joint session of Congress, "and the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years." The plan he proposed, however, did not mention the price tag, and the president did not include any specifics about how that price tag was reached. Nor did the president's language actually set a hard ceiling. "Around $900 billion," when you're talking about internal modeling for a plan that the Congressional Budget Office hasn't seen, is not the same thing as a $900 billion limit.

Critics: Financial oversight council tough only on paper

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — A plan by congressional Democrats and the White House to curb future bad behavior on Wall Street would fail to resolve the bureaucratic infighting that helped bring about the global financial crisis, critics warn.

Congress this week begins considering legislation designed to ensure that never again are federal bank regulators asleep at the switch, as they were before the 2008 financial meltdown. To that end, the bill before the House Financial Services Committee would create a Council of Regulators, headed by the Treasury secretary.

Reducing Greenhouse Gases May Not Be Enough to Slow Climate Change

Georgia Tech City and Regional Planning Professor Brian Stone publishes a paper in the December edition of Environmental Science and Technology that suggests policymakers need to address the influence of global deforestation and urbanization on climate change, in addition to greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Stone’s paper, as the international community meets in Copenhagen in December to develop a new framework for responding to climate change, policymakers need to give serious consideration to broadening the range of management strategies beyond greenhouse gas reductions alone.

Thomas Frank: The Real Danger of 'One Big Regulator'

What if those in control don't believe in oversight?

By THOMAS FRANK

Financial regulation is the next item on the political horizon, and it doesn't have to be the deathly dull wonk-battle that it sounds like. In fact, if the Democrats do their job, it can just as easily become a platform for addressing the greatest issues of them all.

Our current way of regulating the financial system is dysfunctional. Oversight is dispersed among numerous confusing bodies that at times have seemed to be racing each other to the bottom. Setting up One Big Regulator would end that problem.

The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a "systemic risk" if they were to fail. Critics suggest the Fed is too close to the banks that it would be charged with cracking down on. What's more, the Fed's main task is monetary policy, so regulating banks would never receive the attention it deserves.

Tampa police: Marine reservist attacked Greek priest he mistook for terrorist

TAMPA — A Marine reservist armed with a tire iron beat and chased a man he thought was an Arab terrorist and even called 911 to say he was detaining the man, police said.

But the man he assaulted was actually a Greek Orthodox priest visiting from overseas who spoke limited English, police said.

Making Wall Street pay

Wall Street's irresponsible bankers caused this economic crisis. It's only fair that they pay to clean up their mess

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 November 2009 19.00 GMT

The deficit hawk crew, famous for missing the $8tn housing bubble that wrecked the economy, is now on the warpath, pressing the case for a big, new, national sales tax. They claim that the United States badly needs additional revenue to address projected budget shortfalls.

While we may need additional revenue at some point, it makes far more sense to impose a financial transactions tax, which would primarily hit the Wall Street banks that gave us this disaster, than to tax the consumption of ordinary working families. We can raise large amounts of money by taxing the speculation of the Wall Street high-flyers while barely affecting the sort of financial dealings that most of us do in our daily lives.

Afghanistan’s Sham Army

Posted on Nov 9, 2009

By Chris Hedges

Success in Afghanistan is measured in Washington by the ability to create an indigenous army that will battle the Taliban, provide security and stability for Afghan civilians and remain loyal to the puppet government of Hamid Karzai. A similar task eluded the Red Army, although the Soviets spent a decade attempting to pacify the country. It eluded the British a century earlier. And the United States, too, will fail.

American military advisers who work with the Afghan National Army, or ANA, speak of poorly trained and unmotivated Afghan soldiers who have little stomach for military discipline and even less for fighting. They describe many ANA units as being filled with brigands who terrorize local populations, exacting payments and engaging in intimidation, rape and theft. They contend that the ANA is riddled with Taliban sympathizers. And when there are combined American and Afghan operations against the Taliban insurgents, ANA soldiers are fickle and unreliable combatants, the U.S. advisers say.

How to Create Good Jobs Now

A bold proposal for meeting human needs through a permanent U.S. employment program.

By Sidney Hollander

This article was written by Ron Baiman, Bill Barclay, Sidney Hollander, Joe Persky, Elce Redmond, Mel Rothenberg.

For the last three decades, U.S. public policy makers have operated on the theory that individual entrepreneurial freedoms are essential to the creation of wealth and thus to the well-being of individuals and society as a whole. One of the great failures this “neo-liberal” approach to economics has been its inability to create enough jobs to keep pace with population growth.

Between 2001 and 2007, the working-age population in the United States outpaced job creation by 10 million individuals. Projections indicate that the shortfall will include another 17 million persons by 2016, making a 16-year total of 27 million missing jobs — 27 million people, in other words, who will have been pushed out of the labor force.

Sustainable Salads

Which fruits, vegetables, and other crops have the smallest environmental footprints?

By Brendan Borrell
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009, at 9:54 AM ET

---

I know you can buy local or buy organic, but I've heard that some crops are simply more resource-intensive than others, regardless of how or where they are grown. So what's the key to picking foods that have the smallest environmental footprint?

We've already been over the environmental benefits of choosing poultry over beefanchovies over haddock. But you're right to suggest that the same sort of logic can apply to picking vegetarian foodstuffs. Certain crops require loads of phosphate fertilizer, for example, which is mined from the ground and can eventually cause stream-choking algal growth. Other fruits and veggies are grown with heavy doses of pesticides, fungicides, and other chemicals that can pollute waterways and cause reproductive problems in animals. So how do you know which crops are best to eat? Here's the Lantern's rule of thumb: Try to keep your more extravagant fruit cravings in check, but don't sweat the low-impact calories that come with your carbs. and

Unemployment to dog US economy for years: Fed

US unemployment, now in the double digits, may remain "high" for several years and dampen economy recovery from a brutal recession, a regional central bank official warned Tuesday.

The United States had experienced so-called jobless recoveries following the previous two recessions in 1991 and 2001, when job creation remained weak for several years following the business cycle trough.

Koalas 'could face extinction'

Australia's koalas could be wiped out within 30 years unless urgent action is taken to halt a decline in population, according to researchers.

They say development, climate change and bushfires have all combined to send the numbers of wild koalas plummeting.

The Australian Koala Foundation said a recent survey showed the population could have dropped by more than half in the past six years.

Stalling Justice

Editorial

November 4, 2009

In Texas and Illinois, recent controversies have exposed our broken criminal justice system. Mounting evidence indicates that Texas Governor Rick Perry ordered the wrongful execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 and has subsequently tried to cover up the details of the case, recently dismissing three experts on the state's Forensic Science Commission forty-eight hours before they were set to examine the evidence. Willingham's case has rightly generated national headlines, and another case of prosecutorial overreach is unfolding in Illinois.

On the evening of September 15, 1978, a white security guard named Donald Lundahl was murdered in a robbery gone awry in a racially fraught southern suburb of Chicago. Police fingered Anthony McKinney, an 18-year-old African-American with no criminal record, as the killer. The prosecution sought death by lethal injection; the judge sentenced McKinney to life in prison.

Study Claims Even the Most Sophisticated News Readers Can Be Manipulated

By Melinda Burns, Miller-McCune.com
Posted on November 9, 2009, Printed on November 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143831/

There's nobody more cynical about the media than your average European.

Only 12 percent of Europeans claim to trust the media, compared to 15 percent of North Americans, 29 percent of Pacific Asians and 48 percent of Africans, the BBC has found.

Yet new research out of the London School of Economics and Political Science suggests that even the most hardened Europeans may succumb to media manipulation and change their political views if they are bombarded long enough with biased news.

Focus on the Family's Insurance Plan Covers Abortion (And Other Ironies of The Latest Assault on Choice)

By Eyal Press, TheNation.com
Posted on November 9, 2009, Printed on November 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.thenation.com/143852/

As is now widely known, added to the health care reform bill just passed by the House of Representatives was a provision barring access to abortion called the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. Passed with the support of sixty-four Democrats, Stupak-Pitts doesn't merely prohibit coverage of abortion in a public option. It also forbids women who receive a federal subsidy from purchasing any health insurance plan that covers the procedure, even if the abortion is paid out of a separate pool of private premium dollars (for all the background and details, see my colleague Emily Douglas' post).

If this highly regressive amendment makes its way into the legislation that Barack Obama eventually signs, millions of less affluent women who obtain access to affordable health insurance will thus join the ranks of low-income women on Medicaid, most of whom live in states that don't cover abortion procedures. The two-tiered system that dictates who in America has "choice" (more privileged women do, less affluent women do not) will be further entrenched.

Oil floats high on easy money

Survey after survey shows that history bores to tears young people the world over, yet it invariably continues to be taught in the same mindlessly tedious fashion.

Maybe this can change. Consider a new way to teach of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. According to William Shakespeare, prior to the nefarious deed, the soothsayer Artemidorus tried to warn the would-be dictator.

Defending the Arsenal

In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?

by Seymour M. Hersh
November 16, 2009

In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen penetrated the Army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed. The terrorists had been dressed in Army uniforms. There were also attacks on police installations in Peshawar and Lahore, and, once the offensive began, an Army general was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles on the streets of Islamabad, the capital. The assassins clearly had advance knowledge of the general’s route, indicating that they had contacts and allies inside the security forces.

Pakistan has been a nuclear power for two decades, and has an estimated eighty to a hundred warheads, scattered in facilities around the country. The success of the latest attacks raised an obvious question: Are the bombs safe? Asked this question the day after the Rawalpindi raid, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We have confidence in the Pakistani government and the military’s control over nuclear weapons.” Clinton—whose own visit to Pakistan, two weeks later, would be disrupted by more terrorist bombs—added that, despite the attacks by the Taliban, “we see no evidence that they are going to take over the state.”

EPA demands attorneys remove video critical of cap-and-trade

Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel are EPA attorneys who have taken up advocating against cap-and-trade on behalf of rebated carbon taxes, most recently in a Washington Post op-ed. They also posted a video to YouTube making many of the same arguments at somewhat greater length. Now the EPA has instructed them to take the video down by the close of business today, at pain of disciplinary action from EPA ethics officials, and to submit any future drafts to EPA officials before posting.

Paul Krugman: Paranoia Strikes Deep

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

Rachel Maddow: The Healthcare Bill Contains a Poison Pill for Progressives

Rachel Maddow was on Meet The Press today talking about the healthcare bill that the House recently passed. Maddow said that language restricting access to abortion in the bill is a poison pill for liberals and progressives that could end up costing Democratic candidates votes with pro-choice women. Maddow called it the biggest restriction on abortion in a generation.

Oklahomans rally at State Capitol to protest anti-choice law that would post abortion details online.

Oklahoma recently passed a law (HR 1595) that will collect personal details about every single abortion performed in the state and post them on a public website. Critics of the legislation worry that the information could be used to identify individuals. Portions of the law were supposed to take effect on Nov. 1, but a judge delayed activation pending the outcome of a legal challenge.

Despite Censorship By Beef Magnate, Michael Pollan Spreads Message About the Real Price of Cheap Food

By , AlterNet
Posted on November 9, 2009, Printed on November 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143718/

Award-winning food journalist Michael Pollan was invited to speak on October 15 at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo but after pressure from a university donor who is chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co., the university changed his speech to a panel discussion.

Pollan, whose works include The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto is the Knight Professor of Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He's also no stranger to attacks from Big Ag.

Failure written into 'too big' policy

By Henry C K Liu

The potential failure of banks deemed too big to fail (TBTF) presents unsolvable challenges for policymakers. The unacceptability of the systemic impact of such failures on the financial, economic and social order necessitates government intervention in a market crisis.

Thus far, the official response to the TBTF threat has been focused on unlimited government protection of big bank creditors from losses they otherwise would face from big bank failures. Yet creditor expectation of TBTF protection actually encourages big banks to take more risk, thus pushing them closer to the cliff of failure, resulting in significant recurring net costs to the economy and society.

The less optimistic view of Treasury’s handling of the crisis

By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns

The Obama Administration is captured. To understand why it has acted as it has, one doesn’t have to take the view that its efforts to save the baking industry were a deliberate attempt to line bankers’ pockets by transferring money from taxpayers to the banking industry. One need merely read the last post I wrote on this topic.

In their wildly optimistic view, the banking industry is solvent and always has been. All that was needed to ‘solve’ than banking crisis was a lot of liquidity, government backstops and, most importantly, time. This blinkered view sees a looting of taxpayer money to bailout the banking industry as necessary to save banks whose credit is the ‘lifeblood of our economy.’

They are wrong. The banks did not need to bailed out. The banking industry industry needed to made solvent again. There is a big difference between those two sentences: banks versus banking industry and liquidity versus solvency that goes to the core of the captured and politically damaging world view we have seen on display by the Obama Administration.

The Forever War of the Mind

By MAX CLELAND

“EVERY day I was in Vietnam, I thought about home. And, every day I’ve been home, I’ve thought about Vietnam.” So said one of the millions of soldiers who fought there as I did. Change the name of the battlefield and it could have been said by one of the American servicemen coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan today. Wars are not over when the shooting stops. They live on in the lives of those who fight them. That is the curse of the soldier. He never forgets.

While the authorities say they cannot yet tell us why an Army psychiatrist would go on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas, we do know the sorts of stories he had been dealing with as he tried to help those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan readjust to life outside the war zone. A soldier’s mind can be just as dangerous to himself, and to those around him, as wars fought on traditional battlefields.

Frank Rich: The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down

FOR all cable news’s efforts to inflate Election 2009 into a cliffhanger as riveting as Balloon Boy, ratings at MSNBC and CNN were flat Tuesday night. But not at Fox News, where the audience nearly doubled its usual prime-time average. That’s what happens when you have a thrilling story to tell, and what could be more thrilling than a revolution playing out in real time?

As Fox kept insisting, all eyes were glued on Doug Hoffman, the insurgent tea party candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. A “tidal wave” was on its way, said Sean Hannity, and the right would soon “take back the Republican Party.” The race was not “even close,” Bill O’Reilly suggested to the pollster Scott Rasmussen, who didn’t disagree. When returns showed Hoffman trailing, the network’s resident genius, Karl Rove, knowingly reassured viewers that victory was in the bag, even if we’d have to stay up all night waiting for some slacker towns to tally their votes.

As oceans fall ill, Washington bureaucrats squabble

By Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers

Off the coast of Washington state, mysterious algae mixed with sea foam have killed more than 8,000 seabirds, puzzling scientists. A thousand miles off California, researchers have discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling vortex roughly twice the size of Texas filled with tiny bits of plastic and other debris.

Why fundamentalism will fail

A seemingly unstoppable force is being undone from the inside

By Harvey Cox | November 8, 2009

IN 1910, A COHORT of ultra-conservative American Protestants drew up a list of non-negotiable beliefs they insisted any genuine Christian must subscribe to. They published these “fundamentals” in a series of widely distributed pamphlets over the next five years. Their catalog featured doctrines such as the virgin birth, the physical resurrection of Christ, and his imminent second coming. The cornerstone, though, was a belief in the literal inerrancy of every syllable of the Bible, including in matters of geology, paleontology, and secular history. They called these beliefs fundamentals, and proudly styled themselves “fundamentalists” - true believers who feared that liberal movements like the social gospel and openness to other faiths were eroding the foundation of their religion.

Protestant fundamentalism was not an isolated impulse. The same tendency had already appeared in Catholicism; beginning with Pius IX, who issued his famous “Syllabus of Errors” in 1864, most popes severely condemned all liberal Catholic efforts. Muslims hate having the word “fundamentalist” applied to them, considering it a foreign term. Nonetheless, when some 19th-century Koran scholars sought to rethink their faith in the light of science and democracy, an angry opposition resisted these new ideas. Then, as European colonial powers tightened their grip on the region, other thinkers, like the Egyptian Sayyed Qutb, scorned any such reform efforts as imperialist pollution.

Jobless Recovery

Published: November 7, 2009

If you are looking for an economic recovery you can believe in, the October employment report is not for you.

After contracting for a year and a half, the economy grew in the quarter that ended in September, driven largely by federal stimulus. But government spending, as large and as necessary as it has been, has not been enough to revive hiring.

Tough road ahead in Senate for health care bill

By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – The Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed far-reaching health care legislation, handing President Barack Obama a hard-won victory on his chief domestic priority though the road ahead in the Senate promises to be rocky.

The 220-215 vote late Saturday cleared the way for the Senate to begin a long-delayed debate on the issue that has come to overshadow all others in Congress.

G-20 finance officials: Too early to end stimulus

By JANE WARDELL, AP Business Writer – Sat Nov 7, 1:58 pm ET

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland – Finance officials from rich and developing countries pledged Saturday to maintain emergency support for their economies until recovery is assured, but failed to reach a clear agreement to bear the cost of fighting climate change.

There was also a mixed reaction among the Group of 20 leading rich and emerging nations to a British-led push to consider a fund for bank bailouts, possibly financed by a tax on financial transactions, to ensure that taxpayers don't bear the brunt of any future rescues.

The House Public Plan: Yes, It's Worth It

By Jacob S. Hacker

Created 11/06/2009 - 12:54pm

with Diane Archer

How short memories are in Washington. A few weeks ago, when it looked possible that Nancy Pelosi could marshal enough Democratic support to create a “robust” public insurance option with rates tied to Medicare’s, everyone was talking about the big savings and reduced premiums that a series of estimates by the CBO showed this option could create. Then, the concern was that the public insurance plan would put private insurers out of business by using the government’s bargaining power to drive too hard a bargain with providers, creating an “un-level” playing field.

Now, however, the punditocracy is abuzz about the latest CBO estimates that show that the public plan eventually embraced by Pelosi--one that would negotiate rates with providers, rather than base them on Medicare’s--might actually charge higher premiums than the average private plan. No matter that the CBO estimates clearly state that the higher projected premiums reflect its expectation that the public plan will disproportionately enroll less healthy Americans--which might be seen as a virtue, since these are folks private insurance tends to serve most poorly. And no matter that a subsequent CBO letter to the House stated that even a public plan with negotiated rates would still place “downward pressure on the premiums of private plans.” Suddenly, in the commentariat, the public plan isn’t a fearsome predator. It’s a complacent kitten. Initially not worth having because it would be too strong, it’s now, according to critics, not worth having because it would be too weak.

Investors Beware

Published: November 6, 2009

Things turned Orwellian in the House Financial Services Committee this week when members — with the backing of the White House — passed an investor protection bill that would make it all too easy for thousands of publicly traded companies to cook their books.

While the bill offers investors important protections — including imposing a fiduciary duty on brokers who give investment advice — an amendment was added to permanently exempt smaller public companies (worth less than $75 million) from a post-Enron auditing requirement. It passed with votes from 28 of the committee’s 29 Republicans (one was absent) and 9 Democrats. All clearly were more interested in pleasing corporate constituents than protecting investors who, last time we checked, are also constituents.

The cost of not enacting health care reform

By Linda J. Bilmes and Rosemarie Day | November 7, 2009

MUCH OF the health care debate is focused on whether the country can afford the $850 billion the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will cost. The debate centers on whether the bundle of new taxes, credits, efficiencies, and Medicare spending cuts will be sufficient to offset the new spending so as to deliver health care reform without, in President Obama’s words, “adding a dime to the federal deficit.’’

This debate misses the point. It assumes that doing nothing will cost nothing. It turns out that not expanding health insurance is a pretty costly option, because uninsured people impose big financial and economic costs that are not properly appreciated.

The key question is: what difference does it make if you have health insurance? Several major medical studies have determined that people with health insurance have lower death rates compared to the uninsured, fewer medical ailments, and better all-around health. This means more individuals contribute to the economy for longer. Not having health insurance means these economic benefits are lost.

The US health system 'headache'

When the BBC's David Willis recently found himself caught up in the American healthcare system in Los Angeles, he says he only just lived to tell the tale.

It is amazing how within a matter of minutes fate can build you up almost beyond recognition, only to deliver a well-aimed slap across the backside.

Going through the mail last week, the first envelope was marked US Immigration and Naturalisation Service and contained a laminated piece of plastic, confirming that my application for permanent residency had finally been approved.

Obama's First Year: It Ain't No Crystal Staircase

By Robert L. Borosage, Campaign for America's Future
Posted on November 7, 2009, Printed on November 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143805/

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor --
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners...
- Langston Hughes

Barack Obama is a leader of great capacities and great contradictions. Perhaps the measure of his capacities is the magnitude of his contractions. He is a man of exceptional grace. But the grace misleads; this is a politician of intense ambition, discipline and grit. He understands and wields the power of the word. But his soaring oratory misleads, for his temperament is moderate; his predilection is for compromise. He rouses a new generation to politics, but prefers to cut the deals in the backrooms. He calls us to a new direction, then staffs his administration's team with the acolytes of the old ideas he scorns.

Under The Afpak Volcano

By Pepe Escobar

Part 1
Welcome to Pashtunistan

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief - Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

PARIS - Something's happening in AfPak, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Beltway think-tanker?

As Washington mashes up the "Taliban" - be they Afghan neo-Taliban or Pakistani Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) - in Empire of Chaos logic to justify perennial United States/North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops stationed in AfPak, an increasing number of Pashtuns living on both sides of the border have seized the opportunity and started to look to the Taliban as a convenient facilitator for the emergence of Pashtunistan.

Part 2

Breaking up is (not) hard to do

The Pentagon well knows that AfPak is the key land bridge between Iran to the west and China and India to the east; and that Iran has all the energy that both China and India need. The balkanization of AfPak would neutralize China's drive for land access from Xinjiang across Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, via the port of Gwadar in Balochistan province.

Squawking Hawks

The current deficit debate is for the birds.

By Daniel GrossPosted Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009, at 2:21 PM ET

A once-endangered species is staging a robust comeback: the deficit hawk. Hunted nearly to death during the Bush years, many varieties not seen in Washington in a decade are now perching on branches and dropping their wisdom. Look, there's the puff-chested congressional peacock hawk, frequently seen strutting about Sunday-morning-TV-show sets complaining about pork while emitting loud honks on the receipt of stimulus funds. The furrowed-brow warbler hawk (natural habitat: the op-ed pages) loathes deficit spending for the purpose of eliminating social injustice but loves it when the spending is used to finance military actions abroad. The blue-bellied partisan hawk nests in think tanks; it goes mute when members of its own party run the show but squawks loudly when opponents run up debt. On Nov. 3, birders sighted the rare skinny parrot hawk, which repeats back calls about fiscal probity. Said President Barack Obama on that date: "The government is going to have to get serious about reducing our debt levels."

Paul Krugman: Obama Faces His Anzio

Remember those Republican boasts that they would turn health care into President Obama’s Waterloo? Well, exit polls suggest that to the extent that health care was an issue in Tuesday’s elections, it worked in Democrats’ favor. But while health care won’t be Mr. Obama’s Waterloo, economic policy is starting to look like his Anzio.

True, the elections weren’t a referendum on Mr. Obama. Most voters focused on local issues — and those who did focus on national issues tended, if anything, to go Democratic. In New Jersey, voters who considered health care the top issue went for Gov. Jon Corzine by a 4-to-1 margin; Chris Christie won voters who were concerned about property taxes and corruption.

Jon Stewart Devastates Glenn Beck in a Brilliant, Dark, Stunning Parody

Over nearly 10 years, BuzzFlash has repeatedly received e-mails and letters from readers thanking us for helping them by offering articles that dispel the right wing/centrist mainstream media myths. During the Bush years, many a time people wrote something akin to "I don't know how I would have survived with my sanity intact without you."

Since I only have a salary of $22,500 a year, these are the rewards of our work.

But who do I go to in order to make sure that I maintain my sanity?

Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show."

Tiny tech sparks cell signal find

By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Tiny metal particles have been shown to cause changes to DNA across a cellular barrier - without having to cross it.

The nanometre and micrometre scale particles resulted in an increase of damage to DNA across the barrier via a never-before-seen cell signal process.

Reporting in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers say the mechanism could be both a risk and an opportunity.

How a Public Jobs Program Could Put America Back on Track

By Julianne Malveaux, The Progressive
Posted on November 6, 2009, Printed on November 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143710/

Eighty years ago this week, the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression. We need to apply the lessons from that era to our own to relieve the needless suffering of the Great Recession.

In just two days, between Oct. 28 and 29, 1929, the stock market plummeted by 25 percent. Between September and November of that year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 40 percent of its value. By July of 1932, the Dow had lost nearly 90 percent of its value.

Why Congress' Health Care Bills Are Better Than You Think

By Maggie Mahar, Health Beat
Posted on November 6, 2009, Printed on November 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143747/

Many progressives are expressing deep disappointment with the health reform legislation now moving through Congress.

Some suggest that some legislators made deals with lobbyists and let them write the bills. Others complain that both the subsidies and the penalties are too low. Still others don't like the fact that states can "opt out" of the public insurance option and decide not to offer "Medicare E" -- Medicare for everybody.

Is Obama's Iran policy doomed?

By Dilip Hiro

While the tone of the Barack Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W Bush, both administrations subscribe at their core to the same doctrine: whatever the White House perceives as a threat - whether it be Iran, North Korea, or the proliferation of long-range missiles - must be viewed as such by Moscow and Beijing.

In addition, by the evidence available, Obama has not drawn the right conclusion from his predecessor's failed Iran policy. A paradigm of sticks-and-carrots simply is not going to work in the case of the Islamic Republic.

Ex-OSHA official says agency let employers underreport injuries

By Ames Alexander | The Charlotte Observer

Bob Whitmore, a former federal OSHA official who contends the government has allowed companies to underreport workplace injuries, has filed a complaint alleging he was fired from his job in retaliation for speaking out about his agency's failings.

His whistle-blower complaint is set to be heard by the federal Merit Systems Protection Board in early December.

Professor: Fear, shame keep homeowners from defaulting

Millions of American homeowners are "underwater" on their mortgages – owing more than the value of their homes – and would be better off walking away.

That is the suggestion Brent T. White, a University of Arizona associate professor of law, makes in his newly released working paper, "Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis."

White, whose article will be published in this month's issue of Arizona Legal Studies, said fear, guilt and shame are what keep many homeowners from making rational economic decisions.

Igor Panarin's Doomsday Tea Party

One ex-KGB analyst has been warning for years that the US will collapse in 2010. Conservative activists think he may be on to something.

—By Nick Baumann

Thu November 5, 2009 3:03 AM PST

For more than a decade Dr. Igor Panarin, a Russian academic, has been predicting that sometime around 2010 the United States will collapse, splintering into separate states, some of them controlled by foreign powers. Outside of Russia, no one's put much stock in his crackpot and stereotype-based theories—until now, that is. Who are the newest members of the Igor Panarin fan club? Tea partiers who’ve rallied against the Obama administration's policies and blasted the president for pushing a "socialist" agenda. And he's especially big among tea party activists in Texas, who have hosted Panarin and promoted his work.

Many Still Believe That Saddam Hussein Was Behind 9/11, and Now We Have Some Idea Why

By Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com
Posted on November 4, 2009, Printed on November 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143731/

President Obama has had a hard time dislodging misperceptions about his health care proposal — those stubborn beliefs that there are death panels and free care for illegal aliens that don't actually exist in the legislation. Recent research about the way people defend their faith in false information, though, suggests calling out the inaccuracies may not be all that effective in converting the suspicious.

Sociologists at the University of North Carolina and Northwestern University examined an earlier case of deep commitment to the inaccurate: the belief, among many conservatives who voted for George W. Bush in 2004, that Saddam Hussein was at least partly responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

Want to Save Our Economy from Almighty Greed? Here Are 10 Crucial Fights and Key Fighters to Watch

By Zach Carter, AlterNet
Posted on November 5, 2009, Printed on November 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143737/

Let's face it, financial regulation is boring and complicated. But if the economic crisis taught us anything, it's that bringing Wall Street under control is one of the most critical domestic policies facing the country right now.

Here's what you need to know, and who you need to watch, as Congress readies its banking overhaul.

1. A New Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Subprime mortgages. Abusive and arbitrary rate hikes on your credit card. Payday loans. If you're wondering who lets banks get away with this crap, there are more people at it than you think. There are no less than four federal regulators responsible for overseeing consumer protection in finance, and all of them are terrible.

Barbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up

If you can't find any swine flu vaccine for your kids, it won't be for a lack of positive thinking. In fact, the whole flu snafu is being blamed on "undue optimism" on the part of both the Obama administration and Big Pharma.

Optimism is supposed to be good for our health. According to the academic "positive psychologists," as well as legions of unlicensed life coaches and inspirational speakers, optimism wards off common illnesses, contributes to recovery from cancer, and extends longevity. To its promoters, optimism is practically a miracle vaccine, so essential that we need to start inoculating Americans with it in the public schools -- in the form of "optimism training."

Thomas Frank: Glenn Beck's Hotline to Nowhere

The White House has no obligation to correct willful ignorance.

Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News host, has a red telephone on his desk that never seems to ring. Every now and then, in a moment of acute frustration, he will pick it up and give the camera his trademark pleading-puppy look.

What Mr. Beck wants to hear from the phone are answers, and he wants to hear them from the highest authority in the land: the phone, he says, is "a dedicated line right to the White House." And when Mr. Beck gets things wrong, he wants his antagonists on Pennsylvania Avenue to correct him. But "They don't call. They're not going to call."

In fight over credit rules, she wields a plan

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | November 3, 2009

CAMBRIDGE - Her critics portray her as an ivory tower elitist intent on disrupting the American Dream. But to her legions of fans in the Democratic Party, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren is the nation’s leading economic David, fighting to protect middle-class families from corporate Goliaths.

Her critique of the lending practices of big banks and mortgage companies is drawing plenty of attention, airing on everything from CNN to “The Daily Show’’ and Dr. Phil, even winning a cameo in Michael Moore’s latest movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story.’’

And she is chief architect of a new government agency to protect consumers from predatory lenders, a central element of President Obama’s efforts to avoid another economic meltdown. That makes her a big target.

The Mystery of the Rising Stock Market

If the economy's stagnant, why are stocks up? The answer is disturbing.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2009, at 1:09 PM ET

---

Here's a puzzle: The stock markets are doing very well, yet the performance of the underlying economy doesn't seem to justify optimism. The buoyant S&P 500 has risen 53 percent since the March bottom. And while the economy expanded at a 3.5 percent rate in the third quarter, unemployment is high, incomes are stagnant, and consumers are shaky.

It's possible that the stock market is just getting it wrong again. After all, the markets, which are supposed to process investors' attitudes about the future, hit record highs in October 2007, just as the U.S. economy was about to pitch into recession. But it could be that the notion the stock market is an accurate gauge of the domestic economy's temperature is outdated.

The Dow, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ are primarily indices of large U.S.-based companies, not main street businesses: more Davos than Chamber of Commerce. These increasingly cosmopolitan firms have been busy globalizing and expanding their operations overseas. In 2006, according to Standard & Poor's, 238 members of the S&P 500 broke out revenues between U.S. and non-U.S. sales. These companies notched about 43.6 percent of sales outside the United States. For large companies that had already saturated the U.S. market, the home market was something of an afterthought. In the second quarter of 2007, 66 percent of Coca-Cola's beverage business came from outside North America.

Protecting your virtual privacy

Dr. Michael Birnhack of TAU's Faculty of Law recently completed a comprehensive study that revealed dangerous loopholes in the collection of personal information by Internet sites and club cards.

Stimulus and Jobs: We Can Do Better

By Dean Baker - November 2, 2009, 8:21PM

The Obama administration came out with its first set of numbers on the jobs impact of its stimulus package. It's pretty much along the lines of what was predicted. To date, the package has created close to one million jobs. That is good news, but in an economy with more than 15 million unemployed workers, it is not nearly good enough. We need to do more, much more.

Fortunately, there is an easy and quick way to begin to get these unemployed workers back to work. It involves paying workers to work shorter hours. The mechanism can take the form of a tax credit to employers. The government can give them a tax credit of up to $3,000 in order to shorten their workers' hours while leaving their pay unchanged. The reduction in hours can take the form of paid sick days, paid family leave, shorter workweeks or longer vacations. The employer can choose the method that is best for her workers and the workplace.

As GOP Holds Up Unemployment Extension, Nearly 200,000 Lose Their Benefits

In the world outside the Senate, time is money; inside it, time is everything. Senate Republicans are taking full advantage of that reality, using every parliamentary device at their disposal to slow down an extension of unemployment insurance benefits -- even after Democrats added billions for big business to sweeten the pot.

The saga is a cast study both in the difficulty of passing even popular legislation in the Senate and the lengths to which the GOP is going to slow down the process.

The myth of Fox News' ratings spike

November 03, 2009 9:32 am ET

Fact: The breathless claim that Fox News' ratings recently spiked thanks to the White House's public critique is bogus hype -- hype that Fox News and the Beltway press have relentlessly pushed.

It's just not true.

No matter how many times reporters and pundits made the claim, a detailed analysis of Nielsen ratings numbers clearly indicates that in the two weeks after the White House in mid-October sparked a media controversy by claiming Rupert Murdoch's channel was not a legitimate news organization, Fox News' ratings did not soar or go "through the roof." In fact, not only did Fox News' overall ratings not soar, they experienced no significant increase at all. Instead, in the two weeks following the initial verbal jousts with the White House, Fox News' total day ratings virtually flatlined.

Goldman left foreign investors holding the subprime bag

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

NEW YORK — Inside the thick Goldman Sachs investment circular were the details of a secret, $2 billion deal channeled through a Caribbean tax haven.

The Sept. 26, 2006, document offered sophisticated U.S. and European investors an opportunity to buy into a pool of supposedly high-grade bonds backed by residential, commercial and student loans. The transaction was registered through a shell company in the Cayman Islands.

Experts Favor Broad Medicare Reforms to Control Costs and Foster Health Care Innovations, Survey Says

New York, N.Y., November 2, 2009—A vast majority of leaders in health care and health policy believe Medicare has been successful in providing access to care and stable coverage to the elderly and disabled individuals; however only a small percentage think the program has realized its potential to achieve other important goals, like using its leverage as the country's largest purchaser of services to control costs and promote a high performance health system. In the latest Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Health Care Opinion Leaders survey, the experts surveyed favor sweeping changes to Medicare—reforms that would help control program costs and support broader health system reform.

Financial reform next for Obama

By Julian Delasantellis

Had not the joke ended so badly with the tragedy of Anna Nicole Smith [1], the story of the old, conservative captain of banking or industry throwing away all his probity and industry at the end of his life used to be quite humorous.

Picture a painfully dry, dark-paneled lawyer's office. The memorial service for a late local potentate, attended by the mayor, and all the town's various prelates, has finished, with but one formal ritual left to attend to - the reading of the will. A stenographer keeps the record.

Breaking up the banks is hard to do

Remember US banks that were 'too big to fail'? If Congress gets its way, they will be bigger and less accountable than ever

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk
Monday 2 November 2009 18.36 GMT

Those who like banks that are too big to fail will love the latest financial reform proposals circulating in the US Congress. The bill put forward by Barney Frank, the chairman of the House finance committee, does little to change the current structure of the financial system.

The "too-big-to-fail" banks will be left in place, even bigger and less accountable than before. There will be nothing done to separate commercial and investment banking, so giants like Goldman Sachs will be free to speculate with money guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The main difference is that the Federal Reserve Board will be granted even more power than it has now. And, we will tell the Fed to be smarter in the future, so that it doesn't make the same stupid mistakes that gave us the current crisis.

GOP ‘dividing apples by oranges’ to create bogus stimulus figures, AP says

WASHINGTON — Beware the math. Some Republican lawmakers critical of President Barack Obama's stimulus package are using grade-school arithmetic to size up costs and consequences of all that spending. The math is satisfyingly simple but highly misleading.

It goes like this: Divide the stimulus money spent so far by the estimated number of jobs saved or created.

Paul Krugman: Too Little of a Good Thing

The good news is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the Obama stimulus plan, is working just about the way textbook macroeconomics said it would. But that’s also the bad news — because the same textbook analysis says that the stimulus was far too small given the scale of our economic problems. Unless something changes drastically, we’re looking at many years of high unemployment.

And the really bad news is that “centrists” in Congress aren’t able or willing to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that we need a lot more federal spending on job creation.

People, pollution and profits

THE buses that take our children to school should be safe places. But according to John Wargo, a professor of environmental risk analysis and policy at Yale University, they are polluted by diesel exhausts.

Riding the buses with monitors, Wargo and his colleagues discovered that children were at "significant risk" from tiny particles of half-burnt diesel fuel sucked in through doors at bus stops or belched out by the bus in front. At its worst, when lines of idling buses dropped off and picked up students at schools, the pollution caused "a burning sensation at the back of the throat", he says.

Bill Moyers and James Galbraith: Our Free Market Makes Economic Collapse Inevitable

By Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal
Posted on November 2, 2009, Printed on November 2, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143649/

Editor's note: In the following segment of Bill Moyers' Journal, Moyers interviews economist James K. Galbraith about the tragic impact of the recession on ordinary people and steps we must take to avoid future meltdowns.

BILL MOYERS: Americans are mad at bankers. Just Google the three words "I hate banks," and see what comes up. But nowhere has the anger been more palpable than outside the annual convention of the American Bankers Association in Chicago this week.

FOOTAGE OF PROTESTERS: We're fired up, can't take no more! We're fired up, can't take no more!

BILL MOYERS: These demonstrators wanted to know why regular folks are facing foreclosures, rising credit card and checking fees, while bankers are laughing all the way-- well, all the way to the bank.

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

By Amy Wallace
October 19, 2009

To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a “biostitute” who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor’s attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: “Grab ‘em and stab ‘em.” Recently, Carrey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN’s Larry King Live and singled out Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: “Greed.”

Aerosols make methane more potent

Aerosols' complicated influence on our climate just got more threatening: they could make methane a more potent greenhouse gas than previously realized, say climate modellers.

Drew Shindell, at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues ran a range of computerized models to show that methane's global warming potential is greater when combined with aerosols — atmospheric particles such as dust, sea salt, sulphates and black carbon.

How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Chomsky: Far-Right Threat Is No Joke

by Rob Brown

Noam Chomsky, the world's leading dissident intellectual, has warned the grievances exploited by far-right extremists need to be taken seriously by their left-wing opponents.

Speaking at the annual Amnesty International lecture in Belfast, Professor Chomsky noted: "There is now a mass of people with real grievances who want answers and are not receiving them. A common reaction in elite educated circles and much of the left is to ridicule the right-wing ­protesters, but that is a serious error.

Dr Chomsky said history had shown it was a grave mistake not to answer the calls of people mired in poverty, who are susceptible to the argument that rich liberals are giving their money to illegal ­immigrants and the shiftless poor.

5 myths about our land of opportunity

By Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Americans have always believed that their country is unique in providing the opportunity to get ahead. Just combine hard work with a bit of talent and you'll climb the ladder -- or so we've told ourselves for generations. But rising unemployment and financial turmoil are puncturing that self-image. The reality of this "land of opportunity" is considerably more complex than the myths would suggest:

1. Americans enjoy more economic opportunity than people in other countries.

Actually, some other advanced economies offer more opportunity than ours does. For example, recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they're adults.

If you are born into a middle-class family in the United States, you have a roughly even chance of moving up or down the ladder by the time you are an adult. But the story for low-income Americans is quite different; going from rags to riches in a generation is rare. Instead, if you are born poor, you are likely to stay that way. Only 35 percent of children in a family in the bottom fifth of the income scale will achieve middle-class status or better by the time they are adults; in contrast, 76 percent of children from the top fifth will be middle-class or higher as adults.

The Generals' Revolt

As Obama rethinks America's failed strategy in Afghanistan, he faces two insurgencies: the Taliban and the Pentagon

ROBERT DREYFUSS

Posted Oct 28, 2009 1:51 PM

In early October, as President Obama huddled with top administration officials in the White House situation room to rethink America's failing strategy in Afghanistan, the Pentagon and top military brass were trying to make the president an offer he couldn't refuse. They wanted the president to escalate the war — go all in by committing 40,000 more troops and another trillion dollars to a Vietnam-like quagmire — or face a full-scale mutiny by his generals.

Obama knew that if he rebuffed the military's pressure, several senior officers — including Gen. David Petraeus, the ambitious head of U.S. Central Command, who is rumored to be eyeing a presidential bid of his own in 2012 — could break ranks and join forces with hawks in the Republican Party. GOP leaders and conservative media outlets wasted no time in warning Obama that if he refused to back the troop escalation being demanded by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander overseeing the eight-year-old war, he'd be putting U.S. soldiers' lives at risk and inviting Al Qaeda to launch new assaults on the homeland. The president, it seems, is battling two insurgencies: one in Afghanistan and one cooked up by his own generals.

The gaggle of economic sociopaths

By Neal Gabler | October 31, 2009

YOU MAY be wondering how it is that this week the financial industry, which was on taxpayer life support, announced it would be doling out more than $140 billion in bonuses to the very executives who created the mess in the first place. Or how it is that some of these same institutions recently began raising the interest rates on your credit cards to unprecedented levels. Or how it is that there are now reports of new and risky financial skulduggery afoot.

To answer these questions, it may help to consult the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,’’ the handbook for psychologists. The manual describes a broad category called “antisocial personality disorder,’’ which includes those whom we commonly describe as sociopaths. According to the manual, this disorder manifests itself, among other ways, in “deceitfulness’’ as indicated by “conning others for personal profit or pleasure’’; “irresponsibility’’; and “lack of remorse as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.’’

The Evolution Of An Eco-Prophet

Al Gore's views on climate change are advancing as rapidly as the phenomenon itself.

By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 31, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 9, 2009

Al Gore steps onto the portico of his century-old white colonial, its stately columns framing him and the black Lab mix, Bojangles, that he and his son rescued from a shelter as a birthday present for Tipper. Dressed in blue jeans and a button-down shirt open at the collar, Gore looks younger than his 61 years: the mountain-man beard he grew in the wake of the Florida recount debacle of 2000 is long gone, and the extra weight, which hung on several more years, is nowhere in evidence. Nor are the trappings of office, unless you count an electronic gate at the bottom of his circular driveway in the wealthy Nashville neighborhood of Belle Meade. When he travels—as he does about one quarter of the time, often to train volunteers to give the slide show that formed the core of An Inconvenient Truth—it is with no more than one aide, and he pulls his own luggage.

Frank Rich: The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York

BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.

Baseline Scenario, October 30, 2009

Yesterday morning I testified to a Joint Economic Committee of Congress hearing (update: that link may be fragile; here’s the JEC general page). The session discussed the latest GDP numbers, the impact of the fiscal stimulus earlier this year, and whether we need further fiscal expansion of any kind.

I argued that a global recovery is underway and in the rest of the world will likely be stronger than the current official or private consensus forecast, but growth remains fragile in the United States because of problems in our financial sector. While our situation today is quite different in key regards from that of Japan in the 1990s, the Japanese experience strongly suggests that fiscal stimulus is not an effective substitute for confronting financial sector problems head on (e.g., lack of capital, distorted incentives, skewed power structure).

Paul Krugman: If a deficit falls in the forest …

Matt Yglesias makes a good point:

A lot of politicians and political operatives in DC are very impressed by polling that shows people concerned about the budget deficit. I think it would be really politically insane for people to take that too literally. If congress makes the deficit even bigger in a way that helps spur recovery, then come election day people will notice the recovery and be happy. If, by contrast, the labor market is still a disaster then people will be pissed off. It’s true that they might say they’re pissed off at the deficit, but the underlying source of anger is the objective bad conditions.

The Pluses and Minuses of Pelosi’s Package

Nancy Pelosi’s health care reform bill has much to commend it, and much to condemn it.

On the plus side, there’s a public option, with no opt out.

The insurance companies won’t be able to deny coverage for preexisting conditions or rescind policies once someone gets sick.

And it greatly expands Medicaid.

Higher Ed Slashed, Left Dripping in Red

The Chronicle of Higher Education released a survey of chief financial officers at four-year universities across the country and it is no treat; their outlook for this budget year (FY 2010) was gloomy, by next year? Even scarier. According to universities surveyed, 62% of officials expect the worst of financial pressures are still to come, with higher education budgets dripping in red ink, bitten by the recession looking forward.

This is despite the fact that universities have already slashed budgets, passed hair-raising tuition hikes, and in some cases chopped enrollment. At least 34 states already took the ax to public colleges and universities, reducing faculty and staff, coupled with steep tuition increases for the upcoming year.

Conservatives’ 25-year goal of ‘defunding the left’ revealed by ACORN controversy

When Michele Bachman crowed in September that the exposure of alleged illegal activity by the anti-poverty group ACORN was just the start of a campaign to "defund the left," she may have revealed more about current Republican strategy than she intended.

“Defunding the left is going to be so easy,” Bachmann told the audience at a conservative conference, “and it’s going to solve so many of our problems.”

Does Ben Bernanke Have The Facts Right On Banking?

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has stayed carefully on the sidelines while a major argument has broken out among and around senior policymaking circles: Should our biggest banks be broken up, or can they be safely re-regulated into permanently good behavior? (See the recent competing answers from WSJ, FT, and the New Republic).

But the issues are too pressing and the stakes are too high for key economic policymakers to remain silent or not have an opinion. On Cape Cod last Friday, Mr. Bernanke appeared to lean towards the banking industry status quo, arguing that regulation would allow us to keep the benefits of large complex financial institutions.

Paul Krugman: The Defining Moment

O.K., folks, this is it. It’s the defining moment for health care reform.

Past efforts to give Americans what citizens of every other advanced nation already have — guaranteed access to essential care — have ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, usually dying in committee without ever making it to a vote.

But this time, broadly similar health-care bills have made it through multiple committees in both houses of Congress. And on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, unveiled the legislation that she will send to the House floor, where it will almost surely pass. It’s not a perfect bill, by a long shot, but it’s a much stronger bill than almost anyone expected to emerge even a few weeks ago. And it would lead to near-universal coverage.

Former Wall Street Player Reveals the Inside World Behind Shady Bailouts to Bankers

By Joshua Holland and Nomi Prins, AlterNet
Posted on October 30, 2009, Printed on October 30, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143573/

A former managing director at Goldman Sachs and now a razor-sharp financial muckraker (and regular AlterNet contributor), Nomi Prins understands the labyrinthine world of Wall Street finance, with all its warts, as well as anyone.

In her new book, It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals From Washington to Wall Street, Prins lays bare the whole fetid corpse of the burst mortgage bubble.

Pentagon officials won’t confirm Bush propaganda program ended

By Brad Jacobson
Thursday, October 29th, 2009 -- 9:36 am

Read Part I and Part II of this series.

The covert Bush administration program that used retired military analysts to generate favorable wartime news coverage may not have been terminated, Raw Story has found.

In interviews, Pentagon officials in charge of the press and community relations offices — which worked in partnership on the military analyst program — equivocated on the subject of whether the program has ended.

Right-wing blogs distort Frank's comments

October 28, 2009 12:26 pm ET — 88 Comments

Numerous right-wing websites, including the Fox Nation and the Drudge Report, have parroted a misleading headline posted on October 26 by Real Clear Politics and NewsBusters asserting that Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) stated, "We are trying on every front to increase the role of government." In fact, while specifically discussing financial regulation, Frank actually said, "[W]e are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area" [emphasis added].

Rove-Dean health care debate punctuated by name calling

By Ed Mahon | Centre Daily Times

Karl Rove and Howard Dean brought the national health care debate to Penn State on Tuesday night.

There was little agreement, but a good bit of name calling, during the event, which ranged in tone from heated to humorous.

"That's a made up statistic, Karl Rove. . . . For the first time tonight, I'm calling you on it," said Dean, a physician and the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. "You made that up."

Pelosi unveils House version of health care bill

By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled revised health care-overhaul legislation Thursday that includes a stronger government-operated insurance option than the one that the Senate plans to consider.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is pushing a government health insurance plan that would allow states to "opt out." Pelosi, D-Calif., is expected to support a public option with no such escape hatch. The revised measure she unveiled merges terms from three separate but similar bills that three committees in the House of Representatives passed earlier.

Lack of insurance may have figured in nearly 17,000 childhood deaths, study shows

Lack of health insurance might have led or contributed to nearly 17,000 deaths among hospitalized children in the United States in the span of less than two decades, according to research led by the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

According to the Hopkins researchers, the study, to be published Oct. 30 in the Journal of Public Health, is one of the largest ever to look at the impact of insurance on the number of preventable deaths and the potential for saved lives among sick children in the United States.

Using more than 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1988 and 2005, the Hopkins investigators compared the risk of death in children with insurance and in those without. Other factors being equal, researchers found that uninsured children in the study were 60 percent more likely to die in the hospital than those with insurance. When comparing death rates by underlying disease, the uninsured appeared to have increased risk of dying independent regardless of their medical condition, the study found. The findings only capture deaths during hospitalization and do not reflect deaths after discharge from the hospital, nor do they count children who died without ever being hospitalized, the researchers say, which means the real death toll of non-insurance could be even higher.

Is Obama Plotting to Shut Down the Internet?

— By Stephanie Mencimer | Tue October 27, 2009 8:15 PM PST

The world is full of a lot of conservative anti-Obama craziness these days—Glenn Beck, the Birther movement, etc. But anti-immigration activist William Gheen might take the prize as this week's most paranoid Obama critic. On Tuesday, Gheen circulated an email claiming that the Obama administration may intend to use the swine flu epidemic as an excuse to shut down the web and thus silence his critics. Gheen’s source for his claim? A small Reuters story about a recent GAO report suggesting the Department of Homeland Security doesn't have a backup plan should millions of bored Americans, home with swine flu, overload the Internet with too many games of XBlaster.

Lesson unlearned

By Henry CK Liu

October 29, 2009, is the 80th anniversary of the market crash in the United States that led to the Great Depression. Did the world learn the lesson of 1929?

Milton Friedman identified through exhaustive analysis of historical data the potential role of monetary policy in shaping the course of inflation and business cycles, with the counterfactual conclusion that the Great Depression of the 1930s could have been avoided with appropriate Federal Reserve monetary easing to counteract destructive market forces.

Thomas Frank: Obama Is Right About Fox News

But the criticism was clumsy.

Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution. There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source. And the Newseum in Washington, D.C., establishes the profession's legitimacy with a memorial to fallen scribes, thus drawing an implicit connection between the murdered abolitionist editors of long ago and the struggling outfit that gave you this morning's page-one story about cute pets in Halloween costumes.

But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.

Elizabeth Warren for President

“Beyond monitoring how the government is mopping up after the financial crisis, Warren is pushing a proposal that could help prevent the next one: creating a Financial Product Safety Commission to protect consumers from abusive lenders. Mortgages and credit cards, she wrote in a 2007 journal article about the proposal, “should be subject to the same routine safety screening that now governs the sale of every toaster, washing machine, and child’s car seat.”

Commission Impossible

How the Angelides Commission can crack open the Wall Street scandal—if it dares.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009, at 12:24 PM ET

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Commissions are often created to defer tough decisions; to forge a consensus around a hard solution to a genuine problem; and, rarely, actually to delve into underlying facts. The Angelides commission, officially chartered by Congress this summer as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, has the chance to be that third kind of commission, gathering the missing empirical data on fundamental questions that can guide future decision-making.

We already know an awful lot more about what happened last year than we did in 1932, when the legendary Pecora commission was created to investigate the Wall Street crash. We know the fundamental violations of sound banking practice and regulatory failures that brought us to the precipice. Yet there are still critical areas that would benefit from the commission's detailed analysis: four structural issues that have not yet received adequate attention and one particular transaction that is still highly ambiguous.