Paul Krugman: Legends of the Fall

This is the way the euro ends — not with a bang but with bunga bunga. Not long ago, European leaders were insisting that Greece could and should stay on the euro while paying its debts in full. Now, with Italy falling off a cliff, it’s hard to see how the euro can survive at all.

But what’s the meaning of the eurodebacle? As always happens when disaster strikes, there’s a rush by ideologues to claim that the disaster vindicates their views. So it’s time to start debunking.

First things first: The attempt to create a common European currency was one of those ideas that cut across the usual ideological lines. It was cheered on by American right-wingers, who saw it as the next best thing to a revived gold standard, and by Britain’s left, which saw it as a big step toward a social-democratic Europe. But it was opposed by British conservatives, who also saw it as a step toward a social-democratic Europe. And it was questioned by American liberals, who worried — rightly, I’d say (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) — about what would happen if countries couldn’t use monetary and fiscal policy to fight recessions.

Meet the Koch Brothers' Wealthy Right-Wing Grandfather: How His Pro-Corporate Agenda Is Echoed by the Kochs' Assault on Our Democracy

By Yasha Levine, Texas Observer
Posted on November 9, 2011, Printed on November 12, 2011

Charles and David Koch are the most powerful right-wing billionaires of our time. They have spent hundreds of millions bankrolling a broad attack against Social Security, organized labor, financial regulations, environmental protection and public education. The brothers plan to spend at least $200 million trying to elect right-wing, anti-government Republicans in 2012, according to Politico. They seem hell-bent on dragging America back to the dark days of unregulated capitalism. The history of their grandfather in Texas may help explain why.

Little has been written about Harry Koch. He's the least-known member of the Koch family, which has been marching under the same laissez-faire banner for the past three generations. Harry Koch emigrated to America in 1888, settled in a North Texas railroad town and became a newspaper publisher and aggressive corporate booster. He advocated for railroad and banking interests, amassing wealth and helping big business fight organized labor and squelch reforms.

3 Ways Elites Rig the System

By Michael Lind, Salon
Posted on November 9, 2011, Printed on November 12, 2011

A growing number of Americans suspect that the American economic system is rigged in favor of the rich and merely affluent. That growing number of Americans is right.

Here are three of the many ways that markets for compensation are rigged to benefit not only the top 1 percent but also the top 10 percent, a group that includes many well-paid professionals:

The Telecom Scam: 5 Behemoths That Strangle Innovation and Ensure You Pay Too Much for Bad Service

America’s communications system is in crisis, hijacked by a handful of giant companies coddled by the agencies that are supposed to regulate them. 

 

November 11, 2011  |  America’s communications system is in crisis and the longterm consequences will be profound. Most distressing, this issue is not on the political agenda for the 2012 electoral campaign.

The nation’s historic strength is embodied in the ongoing development of its communications infrastruture: the telegraph helped launch 19th-century modernity; the telephone fashionend the 20th-century business and consumer society; and broadband communications is shaping the 21st-century global marketplace.

Where regulators failed, citizens took action — testing their own air

Until 'bucket test' and insider tips, polluter said to underreport emissions for years

By Elizabeth Shogren, Kristen Lombardi and Sandra Bartlett
12:00 pm, November 10, 2011 Updated: 12:10 pm, November 10, 2011

TONAWANDA, N,Y. — For the past three decades, Jeani Thomson has been pleading with New York state officials to protect her and her neighbors from air pollution that regularly spreads into her yard from an industrial plant a mile away. Many mornings, a foul-smelling, thick fog settles around her modest house in Tonawanda, a working class town of 16,000 just outside Buffalo. The “toxic blue haze,” as Thomson calls it, smells like ammonia, sulfur and “an oily exhaust.”

She believes it has made her sick. Ailments have transformed her, she said, from a fit mail carrier who walked a 13-mile route into a survivor of multiple illnesses who takes 22 medications and now moves with difficulty on stiff legs. Though only 57 years old, she has only one lung, and half a stomach. Her doctors have diagnosed her with a rare skin rash, as well as asthma and arthritis. Though she claims never to have had a cigarette, her voice has the raspy sound of a smoker. On bad days, she says, she inhales oxygen.

California Refuses to Accept Obama’s Banking Sellout

by Robert Scheer

There is no three-strikes law for crooked bankers, not even a law for a fifth strike, as The New York Times reported in the case of Citigroup, cited last month in a $1 billion fraud case. Unlike the California third-striker I once wrote about whom a district attorney wanted banished forever to state prison for stealing a piece of pizza from the plate of a person dining outdoors, Citigroup executives get off with a fine and by offering a promise not to do it again, and again and again.

As the Times reported when Citigroup agreed to settle SEC charges last month: “Citigroup’s main brokerage subsidiary, its predecessors or its parent company agreed to not violate the very same antifraud statue in July 2010. And in May 2006. Also as far back as March 2005 and April 2000.”

If We Don't Solve the Jobs Crisis We May End Up With Our Streets in Flames and Society Dysfunctional
Unless our policy makers can make job creation the top priority, the mass riots and burning streets of Europe may be coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

Employers added fewer jobs than was forecast in October, which has lots of folks scratching their heads over what to do about it.

In response to the latest unemployment figures, our nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, has again begun talking about additional stimulus measures, such as the purchases of mortgage backed securities (MBS) or a bond-buying program known as “QE3”. But neither of these measures worked before, so why should we expect more success this time?

The Fed’s policies are akin to putting a Band-Aid on a massive bleeding wound. Right now, the US economy is crushed by massive private indebtedness and sluggish job growth. What we really need are policies designed to promote job growth, so that people can service their debts and become open to spending again. Admittedly, the Fed isn’t the only problem. Our whole constellation of policy makers – the Fed, Congress, the Treasury and the White House – keep obsessing about the faux “costs” of the growing budget deficit, rather than the real costs of long term unemployment. And if they don’t give up this flawed economic thinking, then the burning streets and mass riots happening in Europe may soon be coming to a neighborhood near you.

Glenn Greenwald: Journalists have become servants to power

By Eric W. Dolan
Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional rights attorney, said the media’s reaction to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement highlighted how mainstream media journalists had become part of the elite class.

“If you look at, say, a host on MSNBC, what you’re actually seeing is a very high ranking employee of what was General Electric and now is Comcast, who makes many millions of dollars a year and has a make-up artist sitting in front of their face for an hour applying all sorts of make-up and another person working on their hair.”

How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich

The inside story of how the Republicans abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent

by: Tim Dickinson

Party of the Rich

Matt Mahurin

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."


Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"


The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"

Mark Ames: Why Finance is Too Important to Leave to Larry Summers

By Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine who writes regularly at The Exiled.

If you’ve been reading Naked Capitalism for any period of time without giving back in donations—and most of us have been hooked from the time we discovered Yves Smith’s powerful, sharp voice and brilliant mind—then you you’ve been getting away with murder. Naked Capitalism is that rare blog that makes you smarter. Smarter about a lot of things, but primarily about Yves’ area of expertise, finance.

By a quirk of historical bad luck, the American Left has gone two generations without understanding finance, or even caring to understand. It was the hippies who decided half a century ago that finance was beneath them, so they happily ceded the entire field—finance, business, economics, money—otherwise known as “political power”—to the other side. Walking away from the finance struggle was like that hitchhiker handing the gun back to the Manson Family.

Rove-founded group again blanketing airwaves with falsehoods, distortions, and sleaze

By Greg Sargent

During the 2010 elections, Crossroads GPS, the group co-founded by Karl Rove, spent millions and millions of dollars blanketing airwaves across the country with ads full of falsehoods and distortions that were widely debunked by independent fact checkers.

Now that’s happening again — only if anything, this time the distortions are even more brazen, and the sleaze factor is even higher.

Beyond the Banks: 3 More Ways to Move Your Money Away from Corporations

By Anna Lekas Miller, AlterNet
Posted on November 7, 2011, Printed on November 10, 2011

On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country organized to move their money from predatory big banks to smaller local banks and credit unions. After 650,000 Americans joined credit unions during the month of October alone—more than in all of 2010 combined—even more people organized to make November 5 the beginning of a collective blow to the corporate financial institutions that crashed our economy.

Is there a move-your-money equivalent for corporate power? Can we organize to actively—and sustainably—move our money from the corporations that control our political systems to sustain their greed, and invest in more just and sustainable economies?

Yes.

Religion and government must not mix in America, experts say

By Shahid Ali Panhwer and Maha Mussadaq | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The separation of church and state in American public life is essential to ensure that U.S. citizens retain their civil liberties and that the nation retains its exceptionalism in the world, a group of experts told a forum Tuesday at the National Press Club.

As the 2012 election season heats up, the experts voiced concern over the view held by some that the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion, allows religion to be mixed with governance, which they said is incorrect. They said that American exceptionalism stems in no small part from religious liberty.

Saving the Democratic Internet

by Tim Karr

 

Opponents of the open Internet like to portray its guiding rule, Net Neutrality, as "a government takeover of the Internet."

They argue that from the day of its inception the Internet has existed free of regulation — a perfect expression of the marketplace at work.

What they don’t understand is that the Internet is a far better expression of democracy, and as such needs rules like Net Neutrality to ensure all users have equal access to online content.

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen


Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 November 2011 15.30 EST
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Looming Crisis of Climate Chaos

November 7, 2011

Amid the anti-science fervor on the American Right, Republican presidential contenders either shy from the worsening crisis of global warming or deny the problem exists. But the crisis of climate chaos is already spreading across the earth, warns Richard Lee Dechert.


By Richard Lee Dechert

On June 21, I had six hours of surgery for renal cell cancer. At age 79, I’m devoting my remaining time and energy to the vital issue of climate chaos and dedicating this piece to Luc, my first grandchild, who was born on Aug. 31 as an innocent, unaware member of what researcher and writer Mark Hertsgaard calls “Generation Hot” — “the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption.”

Since the First Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1730s and the Second Industrial Revolution began in the U.S. in the 1860s, global atmospheric CO2 has exponentially increased from a stable level of about 280 parts per million (ppm) to a record 394.97 ppm in May 2011.

Audio and Video Documenting the Demonization of Others in TheCall Detroit Preparations

Rachel Tabachnick
Tue Nov 08, 2011 at 01:13:38 PM EST

Following are three list of links: 1) audio and video documenting the preparations for the upcoming TheCall Detroit on 11/11/11, 2) links to video of TheCall events in past years in locations around the U.S. and the world, and 3) links to other videos of Lou Engle and members of TheCall Detroit's national leadership team.  Leadership preparing for TheCall Detroit have used the jargon of racial reconciliation while literally demonizing homosexuality, Islam, Freemasonry, Mormonism, Judaism, and other faiths. While it may be tempting to dismiss the outlandish-sounding rituals in the audio below and the talk about demonic principalities as the cause of societal problems, this is part of a very sophisticated and successful brand of religo-political community organizing that is taking place across the nation.

Extreme Poverty Is Now at Record Levels -- 19 Statistics About the Poor That Will Absolutely Astound You

By Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse
Posted on November 8, 2011, Printed on November 10, 2011

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty than they have ever measured before.  In 2010, we were told that the economy was recovering, but the truth is that the number of the "very poor" soared to heights never seen previously.  Back in 1993 and back in 2009, the rate of extreme poverty was just over 6 percent, and that represented the worst numbers on record.  But in 2010, the rate of extreme poverty hit a whopping 6.7 percent.  That means that one out of every 15 Americans is now considered to be "very poor".  For many people, this is all very confusing because their guts are telling them that things are getting worse and yet the mainstream media keeps telling them that everything is just fine.  Hopefully this article will help people realize that the plight of the poorest of the poor continues to deteriorate all across the United States.  In addition, hopefully this article will inspire many of you to lend a hand to those that are truly in need.

Should You Transfer Your Money to a Credit Union?

The feel-good movement to punish corporate banks, and why it will probably increase bank profits.

By Will Oremus | Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2011, at 5:26 PM ET

It’s a noble-sounding idea: Pull your money out of one of the big, risk-taking, profit-driven corporate banks whose speculation helped ruin our economy, and put it in a nonprofit, community-minded credit union. No outrageous debit fees. No sneaky other fees inserted insidiously into the fine print. And you’re not just a customer at a credit union, you’re the owner.

Kristen Christian, a 27-year-old Los Angeles art gallery owner, touched off a national movement in October when, fed up with Bank of America in the wake of its announcement that it would charge a $5-per-month debit card fee, she went on Facebook to encourage friends to make the switch to credit unions. They told friends, who told friends. More than 80,000 people RSVP’d to Christian’s “National Bank Transfer Day” Facebook event page, proposing to leave their banks on or by Nov. 5.

Both sexism and racism are similar mental processes

Prejudiced attitudes are based on generalised suppositions about certain social groups and could well be a personality trait. Researchers at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) have confirmed the link between two types of discriminatory behaviour: sexism and racism. They also advise of the need for education in encouraging equality.

Maite Garaigordobil, professor of Psychological Testing at the UPV, is the co-author of this study which explores the link that sexism has with racism and other variables. She explains that "people who are highly sexist, whether they be hostile (seeing women as the inferior sex) or benevolent (believing that women are the weaker sex and need to be protected and cared for), also have racist tendencies".

The Reckoning Begins

By Michael Moran | Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2011, at 1:21 PM ET

America’s insularity knows no bounds. This is a paradoxical statement, of course, but it’s an apt way to describe America’s current debate about “our future,” and not a bad way to view Washington’s strained efforts to grapple with an economy wounded by two decades of economic Puritanism. As grand as the rhetoric may be, politicians in the United States remain incapable of looking beyond the next election—this goes for the haughty Democrat in the White House and goes double for the Republican opposition. The fact is, airy-fairy optimism still sells on the campaign trail, particularly when the day-to-day reality of the average American is so difficult. Christian, agnostic, Jew, Muslim, or otherwise, we’re a country of people constantly seeking redemption, and we’re suckers for a smooth-talking messiah.

Not this time. At the risk of breaking the hearts that throb for Rick Perry, Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, they cannot deliver us from the future. Thanks to a catastrophic series of decisions by presidents of both parties that radically deregulated our financial system and arrogantly dismissed the “lessons of Vietnam” as dusty, irrelevant history, the United States has shortened the period during which it will remain the dominant power in the 21^st century. I know, I know, all the presidential candidates say we’re still the best! And so we are, in almost every economic and military measure. But measurements of power are like the altimeter of an aircraft: It’s not the altitude that matters, it’s the trajectory, and by now most Americans finally understand that Captain America is trending downward.

Seniors block busy Chicago street to protest cuts to social programs

By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, November 7, 2011

Chicago police on Monday issued citations to 43 senior citizens and their supporters who linked arms to block an intersection near the city’s financial district.

The action was part of a protest against proposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other benefits.

Black, Asian teens less likely than whites to abuse drugs, Duke study concludes

By Jay Price | McClatchy Newspapers

DURHAM, N.C. — Black and Asian adolescents are much less likely than their white peers to abuse or become dependent on drugs and alcohol, according to a Duke University-led study based on an unusually large sample from all 50 states.

"There is certainly still a myth out there that black kids are more likely to have problems with drugs than white kids, and this documents as clearly as any study we're aware of that the rate of . . . substance-related disorders among African American youths is significantly lower," said Dr. Dan Blazer of Duke's Department of Psychiatry, a senior author of the study.

Using Biochar to Boost Soil Moisture

By Ann Perry
November 8, 2011
 
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are leading the way in learning more about "biochar," the charred biomass created from wood, other plant material, and manure.

The studies by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists at laboratories across the country support the USDA priorities of promoting international food security and responding to global climate change. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency.

Greece, home of democracy, deprived of a vote

Armed by Papandreou with a referendum, the Greek people had clout. Now, they're powerless before the troika's austerity plan

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 November 2011 07.30 EST

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou touched off a firestorm last week when he proposed putting the austerity package designed by the "troika" (the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Union) up for a popular vote. The idea that the Greek people might directly be able to decide their future terrified leaders across Europe and around the world. Financial markets panicked, sending stocks plummeting and bond yields soaring.

However, by the end of the week, things were back under control. The leaders of France and Germany apparently laid down the law to Papandreou and he backed off plans for the referendum. While the government is in the process of collapsing in Greece, the world can now rest assured that the Greek people will not have an opportunity to vote on their future.

An All-American Nightmare

This Is What Defeat Looks Like

By Tom Engelhardt

How about a moment of silence for the passing of the American Dream?  M.R.I.C.  (May it rest in carnage.)

No, I’m not talking about the old dream of opportunity that involved homeownership, a better job than your parents had, a decent pension, and all the rest of the package that’s so yesterday, so underwater, so OWS.  I’m talking about a far more recent dream, a truly audacious one that’s similarly gone with the wind.

I’m talking about George W. Bush’s American Dream.  If people here remember the invasion of Iraq -- and most Americans would undoubtedly prefer to forget it -- what’s recalled is kited intelligence, Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal, dumb and even dumber decisions, a bloody civil war, dead Americans, crony corporations, a trillion or more taxpayer dollars flushed down the toilet... well, you know the story.  What few care to remember was that original dream -- call it The Dream -- and boy, was it a beaut!

"The Story of Broke"

by: Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff Project

TRANSCRIPT

These last few years, I’ve had to get a lot more careful about how I spend my paycheck. Everyone has. Like I’m eating out less often, holding back on expenses I don’t really need, saving for my kid’s college.

I’m getting more responsible, taking control of how I spend.

But one thing I can’t control is that every month a big chunk of my paycheck goes off to the government.

It’s not the most fun part of my budget, but I believe in paying taxes.

Not just because it’s the law but because that’s how I invest in a better future that I can’t afford to build on my own.

Why The Super Committee Is Heading For Super Catastrophe

Brian Beutler November 8, 2011, 5:48 AM 

  As of Tuesday morning, betting on the Super Committee to succeed would be playing the odds.

A key member of the Senate Democratic leadership team has openly predicted the panel will gridlock and fail, and placed the blame squarely on Republicans.

As GOP committee members met privately, Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen — a Democrat on the panel — told Bloomberg, “You need to close some of these tax loopholes and you need to generate additional revenue. And so that balance is going to be important. We saw the dueling letters just last week. We had a bipartisan group in the House that said, ‘Look, everything is on the table including revenues - tax revenues.’ And within 24 hours you had 33 [Republican] Senators say, ‘no new net tax revenues.’”

Appeals court backs Obama healthcare law

By Jeremy Pelofsky and Lisa Lambert | Reuters – 7 hrs ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law got a boost on Tuesday when an appeals court agreed with a lower court that dismissed a challenge and found the law's minimum coverage requirement was constitutional.

The Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that had found it constitutional to require Americans to buy healthcare insurance coverage by early 2014 or face a penalty and had dismissed a lawsuit challenging it.

Killer frog fungus 'spread by trade'

By Richard Black  
Environment correspondent, BBC News

The fungus killing frogs around the world comes in several forms, and has almost certainly been distributed by trade in amphibians, research shows.

Scientists led from Imperial College London found three distinct lineages of the chytrid fungus in various nations.

The most widespread and lethal form was probably created by a crossing of two prior forms, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Secretive right-wing groups pour millions into Ohio's Issue 2 fight

Laura Clawson for Daily Kos Labor

In Ohio's Issue 2 fight, as in so many elections these days, it's hard to take the classic advice "follow the money." On one side we know: Unions and grassroots donors have made sure that the fight to reject Issue 2 is well-funded. On the other side, it's a lot more mysterious. That's because so many of the anti-worker groups pushing to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public workers by passing Issue 2 are allowed to keep their operations secret.

Paul Krugman: A Brave New World Wide Web of Economics

Ryan Avent, the economics writer at The Economist, and I have been corresponding about the role of the economics blogosphere, for the Christmas issue of the magazine.

I don’t know what parts of our conversation will actually show up there, but having assembled my thoughts I might as well put some of them here.

Federal Workers Are Underpaid Compared To Their Private Sector Counterparts, Despite GOP’s Assertions

By Travis Waldron on Nov 7, 2011 at 2:10 pm

To hear Republican presidential primary candidates tell it, the federal workforce under President Obama has experienced ballooning job growth and huge wage increases. Such claims are a staple of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) stump speeches, and for months, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has promised to bring the rest of the workers’ pay into line with comparable employees in the private sector.


Speaking at the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity annual summit Friday, Romney repeated this pledge, saying the pay gap between public and private workers “must be corrected.” “Public servants shouldn’t get a better deal than the taxpayers they work for,” Romney added.

New Charter School Study More Bad News for Corporate Ed Reform

by Jim Horn

The first national charter school study was conducted in 2009 by CREDO at Stanford, and the co-funders of the study (the Walton Foundation and Pearson) were not enamored by the results. So bad were they for charter school fans that the study, though given skimpy coverage by the LA Times, was never reported by WaPo or the NYTimes, and received minimal coverage from one news magazine, U. S. News and World Report, which obviously did not get the memo:

June 17, 2009 12:58 PM ET | Zach Miners | Permanent Link | Print

On average, charter schools are not performing as well as their traditional public-school peers, according to a new study that is being called the first national assessment of these school-choice options. The study, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University,

Gates Foundation funds novel Third World sanitation proposal

DURHAM, N.C. – For less than $100 and a day's work, a single family in an undeveloped country can construct a solid waste disposal system that not only processes the waste, but requires no electricity or additional energy while destroying harmful pathogens.

So argues a Duke University environmental engineer who envisions a simple system that can be constructed from everyday items designed specifically for Third World countries, where the disposal of solid human waste and the corresponding spread of disease is a leading health concern.

Marc Deshusses, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, has plans to develop a novel sewage digestion system with capture of the methane gas produced during the breakdown of the waste to produce enough heat to kill the bacteria and viruses most commonly associated with human waste.

What caused the financial crisis? The Big Lie goes viral.

By Barry Ritholtz, Published: November 5

I have a fairly simple approach to investing: Start with data and objective evidence to determine the dominant elements driving the market action right now. Figure out what objective reality is beneath all of the noise. Use that information to try to make intelligent investing decisions.

But then, I’m an investor focused on preserving capital and managing risk. I’m not out to win the next election or drive the debate. For those who are, facts and data matter much less than a narrative that supports their interests.

One group has been especially vocal about shaping a new narrative of the credit crisis and economic collapse: those whose bad judgment and failed philosophy helped cause the crisis.

Middle Class Pays for Financial Market Mistakes

By Simon Johnson
Nov 6, 2011 7:15 PM ET

At one level, all financial crises are the same. A relatively small group of people, typically bankers, find the opportunity to take very big risks. For a while, financiers show high profits, justifying rising stock prices for their companies and large bonuses for their top executives. But these profits are never properly adjusted for what will actually materialize over five to 10 years, meaning that they understate risk and overstate true earnings.

Greater short-term returns are often available if you take more risk; just look at the Icelandic banking system after 2003. Three banks were allowed to develop very large offshore businesses, building up a combined balance sheet that was 10 times the size of Iceland’s gross domestic product, mostly based on short-term funding. Iceland’s political leaders thought they had found a new road to prosperity. In October 2008 they discovered a perennial truth: Giant profits involve giant risks. Iceland’s banks collapsed, plunging the economy into a deep recession.

The War Against the Poor

by: Frances Fox Piven, TomDispatch | Op-Ed

 

Occupy Wall Street and the politics of financial morality

We’ve been at war for decades now -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home.  Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news.  Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed -- until now.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics.  Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

Paul Krugman: Here Comes the Sun

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months — has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power.

Far Right on Rise in Europe, Says Report

Study by Demos thinktank reveals thousands of self-declared followers of hardline nationalist parties and groups

 

by Peter Walker and Matthew Taylor 

 

The far right is on the rise across Europe as discontent with the fallout from globalisation reverberates across the continent, a study has revealed ahead of a meeting of politicians and academics in Brussels to discuss the rapid spread of hardline nationalist and anti-immigrant groups.

The report, by the British thinktank Demos, attempts for the first time to examine attitudes among supporters of the far right online. Using advertisements on Facebook group pages, they persuaded more than 10,000 followers of 14 parties and street organisations in 11 countries to fill in detailed questionnaires.

Chart: Super Committee Dems, GOP Differ On Jobs

As noted previously, the deficit Super Committee is gridlocked largely because the GOP is unwilling to accept higher taxes on wealthy people as part of a compromise with Democrats that also cuts Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But the parties also differ on the question of whether their recommendations should include any near term spending and/or tax cuts to give the weak economy a much-needed boost.

Recently committee Republicans and Democrats presented each other with competing plans — some details of which were leaked to the press. Aides note that the Dem plan contained about $300 billion in expansionary measures, while the GOP plan contained… well, see for yourself.

The Global 99 Percent


The Occupy Wall Street protesters are part of a worldwide movement against inequality.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz | Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2011, at 3:35 PM ET

The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt and then to Spain, has now engulfed Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enable social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: a sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right—at least not without strong pressure from the street.

In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests. In July, I talked to Spain’s indignados. From there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. And last month I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: “We are the 99 percent.”

What Should Occupy Wall Street Do Now?

Three organizing ideas and five policy ideas that could make the protests even more successful.

By Eliot Spitzer | Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2011, at 2:50 PM ET

This is the question frequently—and properly—asked of Occupy Wall Street and its fans. Those of us who have written and spoken vigorously in support of OWS and for its capacity, almost unparalleled in today’s political environment, to shift our political focus, have an obligation to contribute our answers to the question of what OWS should do. We should answer not because there is any reason for this organic movement—which has done just fine without advice from outsiders—to listen to any of the advice rendered, but because it will help those of us outside the movement clarify our own political ideas.

Debunking the Iran "Terror Plot"

by Gareth Porter

 

At a press conference on October 11, the Obama administration unveiled a spectacular charge against the government of Iran: The Qods Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had plotted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, right in Washington, DC, in a place where large numbers of innocent bystanders could have been killed. High-level officials of the Qods Force were said to be involved, the only question being how far up in the Iranian government the complicity went.

The US tale of the Iranian plot was greeted with unusual skepticism on the part of Iran specialists and independent policy analysts, and even elements of the mainstream media. The critics observed that the alleged assassination scheme was not in Iran’s interest, and that it bore scant resemblance to past operations attributed to the foreign special operations branch of Iranian intelligence. The Qods Force, it was widely believed, would not send a person like Iranian-American used car dealer Manssor Arbabsiar, known to friends in Corpus Christi, Texas as forgetful and disorganized, to hire the hit squad for such a sensitive covert action.

New York Post declares war on Occupy Wall Street

Rupert Murdoch's tabloid runs three covers in a row attacking the movement
 
By Justin Elliott

From the beginning, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post was never exactly friendly to the cause of Occupy Wall Street.

When the NYPD arrested hundreds on the Brooklyn Bridge in one of the watershed events of the young movement on Oct. 1, most of the media seized on the heavy-handed (and possible illegal) police tactics.

Raising Medicare Eligibility Age Erodes Social Security, New Study Shows

By Daniel Marans

November 3, 2011 - 6:09pm ET 

A proposal to increase the Medicare eligibility age, which the Super Committee is considering, would drive up health care costs to the point where they would consume almost half of the Social Security check of a middle-class retiree, according to a new analysis by Social Security Works.

In his testimony before the Super Committee yesterday, Erskine Bowles, a Morgan Stanley executive and co-chair of the President’s Fiscal Commission, recommended raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 as a way to bridge the differences between Democrats and Republicans on the Super Committee.

Digby: Sacrifice Scam

Oh spare me:

To underscore the fact that GOP’s intransigence on taxes is the source of the gridlock, the committee’s Democratic co-chair confirmed that Democrats are willing to make the sort of deep cuts to entitlement programs Republicans are demanding — but only if Republicans abandon the pledge.

“It’s not enough for either side to simply say they want to reduce the deficit—now is the time when everyone needs to be putting some real skin in the game and offering serious compromises,” Murray said at the hearing, in her most pointed public comments to date. “Democrats have made clear we are prepared to do that. We’ve said we are very open to painful concessions and compromises if Republicans are as well—and we have put forward serious ideas that reflect this. But these concessions would only be made—and only considered—in the context of a balanced deal that doesn’t just fall on the middle class and most vulnerable Americans—but that requires big corporations and the wealthiest among us to share in the sacrifices.”

No, corporations and wealthy people will not be "sacrificing" anything. They won't even notice it. Corporations are nothing more than a legal construct so they don't have the capacity for "sacrifice."

Deadbeat Rep. Joe Walsh, Who Owes $100k In Child Support, Receives ‘Pro-Family’ Award From Family Research Council

By Lee Fang on Nov 4, 2011 at 10:20 am

In July, the press learned that Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), a Tea Party freshman in Congress, owed $117,000 in unpaid child support to his ex-wife. Walsh, despite earning a hefty salary as a member of Congress, has continued to refuse to pay his ex-wife to support his children. Now, it appears, an influential Christian right lobbying group is lending some support to the deadbeat congressman.

The Sun-Times reports that the Family Research Council, a social conservative advocacy nonprofit headed by CNN pundit Tony Perkins, has awarded Walsh a 100 percent rating as a “True Blue” member of Congress.

Thomas Ferguson: How to Take Back Our Political System From the 1%

Ferguson outlines bold measures to stop the tsunami of money that threatens our democracy, starting with a Constitutional Amendment. 

 

November 3, 2011  |  The following has been adapted from a version of a speech delivered to Occupy Boston by Thomas Ferguson, the father of the "Investment Theory of Politics." 

 

I’m honored to speak to you today about money and politics, but it’s not the first time I’ve been here. This is actually the third time I’ve visited your encampment. The first couple of times I walked around and looked at the signs. Many were priceless; the best tutorials I’ve ever seen on the subject of money and politics. My favorite was the one that advised that Congressmen and women should emulate NASCAR drivers and show us their sponsors. Another styled contemporary capitalism “socialism for the 1%.” And many sharply attacked the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which helped throw open the floodgates to the tidal wave of secret money that is now engulfing American elections.

Raises and cuts in public sector salaries have a direct effect on the private sector

A joint study of the Bank of Spain and the Pablo de Olavide University (UPO) confirms that public salaries are clearly influential throughout the whole of Europe's economy. For the study, researchers chose a representative sample of four EU countries: Italy, Spain, Germany and France. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the public sector employs an average of 20% of Europe's working population.

"The rises and cuts in the salaries of public sector workers put pressure on the private sector in the same financial year," states A. Jesús Sánchez Fuentes, co-author of the study by the Pablo de Olavide University and the Bank of Spain which is published in the Empirical Economics journal.

Paul Krugman: Oligarchy, American Style

Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

A Hot Wet Thousand Years and 10 Green Energy Stories to Avert it

The bad news is that I’ve been reading David Archer’s The Long Thaw on climate change projections, and he thinks that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been way too conservative. As I understand him, his research shows that because of massive carbon emissions produced by human beings, by 2100 the average temperature of the earth’s surface will likely increase by 3 degrees C. But, he thinks that thereafter it will go on up another 2 degrees, for a total of 5 over the next few generations. The last time you had a climate 5 degree C. warmer than our prehistoric climate was the Eocene, 40 million years ago. All surface ice melted and the climate was tropical all the way to the poles.

We don’t actually know if there has ever been such a rapid increase in carbon in the atmosphere (there have been occasional periods in geological time when the earth warmed up similarly, as with the Eocene, but it is impossible to know at the moment over what time period that occurred). Human beings nowadays are carbon-spewers on steroids.

Smearing Social Security

William Greider on November 3, 2011 - 2:19pm ET

 

The Washington Post published a sensational story last Sunday that claimed that Social Security is already broke. “Adding billions to US budget woes,” the headline read. Instead of piling up surpluses, as the Social Security trust fund has done for nearly thirty years, this year the system became “cash negative.” Social Security, the Post warned, “is sucking money out of the Treasury.”

This is alarming news, if true. Fortunately, it is not true. The Post committed what I call fact-filled mendacity—a pejorative mash of scary buzz words and opaque statistics that encourages readers to reach false conclusions. The newspaper’s obvious objective is goosing the so-called supercommittee whose Congressional members seem to be reluctant about whacking Social Security benefits. The formerly liberal Washington Post has long urged that as a solution to federal debt and deficits. Its ideological posture influences its reporting and also what “informed observers” think. Last night, I heard a TV anchor remark in passing, “We just read that Social Security is in the red.”

Polling the 'Sabotage' Question


By Steve Benen


To one degree or another, the “sabotage” question has been generating some debate for about a year now. It is, admittedly, a provocative subject: are Republicans trying to hurt the nation’s economy on purpose, simply to undermine the Obama presidency?

Over the last few months, the charge has become more common and more mainstream, with the question being raised by leading officials in President Obama’s re-election team, Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, and a growing number of pundits and political observers.

Romney Campaign Memo: The Koch Brothers Are The ‘Financial Engine Of The Tea Party’

By Lee Fang on Nov 3, 2011 at 3:10 pm

Tomorrow, billionaire David Koch and presidential candidate Mitt Romney are set to speak at the a Tea Party conference financed by the same Koch brother’s fortune. The Defending the Dream Summit, a conference funded by Koch and sponsored by his Americans for Prosperity group, is a yearly event where Republican politicians come to praise the Koch brothers and their political network. For instance, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), as he was seeking the Republican nomination, paid tribute to the Koch’s political network at the same event in 2007.

The GOP's Deregulatory Christmas List

—By Adam Serwer  | Thu Nov. 3, 2011 11:50 AM PDT

The Senate is set to take up votes on the Republican and Democratic infrastructure proposals this afternoon, but the GOP has already stuffed their proposal with regulatory rollbacks they know the Democrats will never agree to.

The GOP proposal contains the REINS Act, which would require a separate vote on economic regulations "with an expected annual economic impact of $100 million or more," which would, as Ezra Klein noted back in February, "destroy the government's capacity to pass major regulations," by adding a major procedural hurdle that sounds like a minor change.

Mike Bloomberg's Marie Antoinette Moment

Last year I had a chance to see New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg up close at the Huffington Post’s "Game Changers" event. I was standing right behind the guy when he was introduced by Nora Ephron, and watched as the would-be third party powerhouse wowed the liberal crowd with one zinger after another.

What Happened When Overzealous Terrorist Hunters Took Off With My Money

By Ann Jones, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on November 3, 2011, Printed on November 4, 201

Where did I go wrong? Was it playing percussion with an Occupy Wall Street band in Times Square when I was in New York recently? Or was it when I returned to my peaceful new home in Oslo and deleted an email invitation to hear Newt Gingrich lecture Norwegians on the American election? (Yes, even here.)

I don’t know how it happened. Or even, really, what happened. Or what it means.  So I’ve got no point -- only a lot of anxiety. I usually write about the problems of the world, but now I’ve got one of my own. They evidently think I’m a terrorist.

That is, someone in the U.S. government who specializes in finding terrorists seems to have found me and laid a heavy hand on my bank account. I think this is wrong, of course, but try to tell that to a faceless, acronymic government agency.

Super Committee Cuts to Social Security Divert from Real Issues

Tuesday, 11/1/2011 - 2:45 pm by Jeff Madrick

What would cutting a mostly solvent program doling out already meager benefits get us? Very little.

The Congressional Super Committee to cut the budget deficit, due to report soon, has let it be known that it will cut Social Security benefits. Let me be short and sour about this. It is a public relations stunt. They basically say so. All this is about is showing the world America is serious about cutting its long-term deficit. The nation has the guts to do what it takes. It is no bleeding heart country. It is willing to beat up on the elderly.

Other allegedly serious Democratic economists from fancy institutions have made the same argument. The reason is simple. You seemingly can make modest adjustments to Social Security to dent or even eliminate the projected longer-run shortfall. You can’t do that with Medicare.

'Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy'

COMMENTARY | November 01, 2011
 
Bill Moyers traces the history of the 40-year crusade by the rich against the institutions, ideas, and laws that helped create America’s iconic middle class – and delivers a powerful broadside against the corrupt political system that has allowed itself to be bought off. Why protesters are occupying Wall Street is no mystery, he says. They are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country.


Longtime journalist and commentator Bill Moyers was the keynote speaker on October 20 at the 40th anniversary celebration of Public Citizen, the "countervailing force to corporate power" founded by Ralph Nader in 1971. Here are his prepared remarks, and the video of his speech.

I am honored to share this occasion with you. No one beyond your collegial inner circle appreciates more than I do what you have stood for over these 40 years, or is more aware of the battles you have fought, the victories you have won, and the passion for democracy that still courses through your veins. The great progressive of a century ago, Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin – a Republican, by the way – believed that “Democracy is a life; and involves constant struggle.” Democracy has been your life for four decades now, and would have been even more imperiled today if you had not stayed the course.

I began my public journalism the same year you began your public advocacy, in 1971. Our paths often paralleled and sometimes crossed. Over these 40 years journalism for me has been a continuing course in adult education, and I came early on to consider the work you do as part of the curriculum – an open seminar on how government works – and for whom. Your muckraking investigations – into money and politics, corporate behavior, lobbying, regulatory oversight, public health and safety, openness in government, and consumer protection, among others – are models of accuracy and integrity. They drive home to journalists that while it is important to cover the news, it is more important to uncover the news. As one of my mentors said, “News is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” And when a student asked the journalist and historian Richard Reeves for his definition of “real news”, he answered: “The news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” You keep reminding us how crucial that news is to democracy. And when the watchdogs of the press have fallen silent, your vigilant growls have told us something’s up.

Climate change causing massive movement of tree species across the West

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A huge "migration" of trees has begun across much of the West due to global warming, insect attack, diseases and fire, and many tree species are projected to decline or die out in regions where they have been present for centuries, while others move in and replace them.

In an enormous display of survival of the fittest, the forests of the future are taking a new shape.

In a new report, scientists outline the impact that a changing climate will have on which tree species can survive, and where. The study suggests that many species that were once able to survive and thrive are losing their competitive footholds, and opportunistic newcomers will eventually push them out.

18 Arrested in Wisconsin Assembly for Using Cameras; Guns Still Allowed

by Brendan Fischer

 

Eighteen people were arrested Tuesday for using cameras in the Wisconsin Assembly gallery, including the editor of The Progressive magazine, Matt Rothschild.

Rothschild and others had gone to the capitol to protest a series of arrests in recent weeks of individuals who carried signs or took photos or video in defiance of an Assembly ban.

"We ought to have a right to take a picture," Rothschild said.

A Woman with a Plan: The Real Story of Margaret Sanger

Wednesday, 11/2/2011 - 10:19 am by Ellen Chesler

Her opponents have smeared her as a racist and classist, but she devoted her life to fighting for equal access to reproductive choice.

Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger is back in the news this week thanks to GOP presidential candidate and abortion rights opponent Herman Cain, who claimed on national television that Planned Parenthood, the visionary global movement she founded nearly a century ago, is really about one thing only: “preventing black babies from being born.” Cain’s outrageous and false accusation is actually an all too familiar canard — a willful repetition of scurrilous claims that have circulated for years despite detailed refutation by scholars who have examined the evidence and unveiled the distortions and misrepresentations on which they are based (for a recent example, see this rebuttal from The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler).

Hubris Watch: US Bank CEO Sniffs About Breaking Rules When His Bank Has Huge Trustee Liability

One of the benefits of the Occupy movement is that it is flushing out some particularly egregious behavior among the top 1%.

A writer for the Minneapolis CityPages managed to worm his way into a presentation to the annual meeting of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce by US Bank’s CEO, Richard Davis. Even though Occupy Minnesota was protesting outside, Davis chose to ignore them. His speech made clear that the business community does not care about long-term self interest, let alone social responsibility. Housing and the foreclosure crisis were absent from the 2012 legislative priorities. But tax reform, which is code for shifting even more of the cost of government on to the small fry? Yeah, that’s a big deal.

EARTH: Return of the dust bowl: Geoscientists predict a dry, dusty future for the American West

Aexandria, VA – Haboobs, giant dust storms, walloped Arizona last summer — some close to 2 kilometers high and 160 kilometers wide — knocking out electricity, creating traffic jams and grounding airplanes. Even old-timers say they can't remember anything quite like this year's aerial assaults. Meanwhile Texas is experiencing one of the most extreme droughts in recent history, with almost 90 percent of the state in the most extreme level of drought. Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and other states are also experiencing drought conditions. The worry is that this might just be the start of a trend, as EARTH reports in the November issue: Over the next couple of decades, researchers say, the American West will transition to an environment that may make the 1930s Dust Bowl seem mild and brief.

End of the Reagan Narrative?

November 2, 2011

 

Exclusive: Election 2012 may turn on whether Ronald Reagan’s narrative of evil government and beneficent tax cuts for the rich has finally run its course – and has been replaced by a new narrative demanding government intervention to save the American middle-class, writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

As yet another statue of Ronald Reagan is unveiled – a $1 million one at Washington’s National Airport which was renamed in his honor in the mid-1990s – the key question about the 40^th president is whether his long and destructive era is finally coming to an end.

More than any other political figure, it was Ronald Reagan who put America on its present course toward stunning income inequality and into a brave new world of deregulated industries, which were then able to exploit lax government controls to devastate the economy.

Secret of the Flat Tax: Middle Class Pays More So Rich Pay Less

By Dean Baker

With Herman Cain soaring to the top of the Republican pack on the basis of his 9-9-9 plan, a flat tax is once again at the center of public debate. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and some days Mitt Romney, are always spouting the virtues of a tax system that is "simpler, flatter, and fairer."

While simplicity is generally desirable in a tax code, it has nothing to do with the tax code being flat. And being flat would be the opposite of being fair, unless people think it is unfair that they don't pay more taxes.


Confusing a simple tax code with a flat tax is a cheap political stunt. The number of tax brackets doesn't affect simplicity at all. Regardless of the number of brackets, there is only one calculation needed. The instruction is simple. It looks like this: "pay $1,000, plus 15 percent of income above $50,000." You can have a flat tax or 100 tax brackets, it is the same formula. Even a Republican presidential candidate can figure it out.

 

The People Versus the Police

Naomi Wolf

America’s politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement – sometimes with shocking and utterly gratuitous violence.

In the worst incident so far, hundreds of police, dressed in riot gear, surrounded Occupy Oakland’s encampment and fired rubber bullets (which can be fatal), flash grenades, and tear-gas canisters – with some officers taking aim directly at demonstrators. The Occupy Oakland Twitter feed read like a report from Cairo’s Tahrir Square: “they are surrounding us”; “hundreds and hundreds of police”; “there are armored vehicles and Hummers.” There were 170 arrests.

Feds: Four Members Of Georgia ‘Fringe Militia Group’ Plotted Biological Attack On Citizens, Government Officials

Ryan J. Reilly November 2, 2011, 6:30 AM 

  Four Georgia men who belonged to a “fringe militia group” were arrested by FBI agents on Tuesday and charged with plotting an attack against U.S. citizens and federal employees using the biological toxin ricin.

Authorities say 73-year-old Frederick Thomas of Cleveland; 67-year-old Dan Roberts; 65-year-old Ray H. Adams; and 68-year-old Samuel J. Crump, all of Toccoa, Ga. began meeting in March 2011 as part of a covert group that called itself, well, the “covert group.”

Who's Paying for the GOP's Plan to Hijack the 2012 Election?

Someone is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to rig the rules of the presidential election against Obama. But the source of the money is a mystery.

—By Nick Baumann

Wed Nov. 2, 2011 7:20 AM PDT

 

Over the past six months, someone—or a group of someones—has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund an effort to change the rules of the 2012 presidential election to make it very difficult for President Barack Obama to win reelection. But the shadowy lobbying group mounting this campaign hasn't disclosed its donors—and under current law, it doesn't have to.

In two states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, GOP legislators have introduced bills that would change how electoral votes—a candidate needs 270 of the 538 to win the presidency—are awarded in a presidential election. Under the current system, the winner of the statewide popular vote receives all of the electoral votes from that state.

Supercommittee of the One Percent Won't Even Think of Taxing Wall Street

Posted: 10/31/11 03:11 PM ET

If anyone still questioned who owns Washington, the Congressional supercommittee charged with reducing projected deficits by $1.2 trillion seems determined to end any doubts. According to press accounts, both the Republicans and Democrats on the committee support a plan to reduce average Social Security benefits by 3 percent.

While whacking our parents and grandparents with a big cut in Social Security benefits apparently draws bipartisan support, the supercommittee will not even score a plan to tax Wall Street financial speculation. No committee member from either party is prepared to make a simple request to the Joint Tax Committee of Congress that would allow a speculation tax to be one of the items considered in the mix.

Paul Krugman: Bombs, Bridges and Jobs


A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.”

Right now the weaponized Keynesians are out in full force — which makes this a good time to see what’s really going on in debates over economic policy.


What’s bringing out the military big spenders is the approaching deadline for the so-called supercommittee to agree on a plan for deficit reduction. If no agreement is reached, this failure is supposed to trigger cuts in the defense budget.

Solving America’s teen sex problem

The Dutch have dramatically reduced adolescent pregnancies, abortions and STDs. What do they know that we don't?

By Thomas Rogers

When 16-year-old Natalie first started dating her boyfriend, her mother did something that would mortify most American parents: She took her to the doctor’s office to get her contraceptives. Her mother wasn’t weirded out by the fact that her teen daughter was about to have sex — in fact, she fully supported it. She merely wanted to make sure that she was doing it safely, and responsibly. A couple of months later, when it finally happened, her parents were totally accepting. As her father put it, “sixteen is a beautiful age” to lose your virginity.

If that seems like an unfamiliar attitude toward sex and parenting, it might have something to do with the fact that Natalie’s parents aren’t American — they’re Dutch.

Occupy Wall Street protesters' own security detail sets standards for conduct in Zuccotti Park

Demonstrators set to eject rulebreakers

BY Edgar Sandoval & Joe Kemp
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, November 1 2011, 12:01 AM

Protesters in Zuccotti Park may be free spirits, but they’ve decided they need some rules all the same.

And if you dare break them - you’re out.

The group has formed its own security detail to enforce a code of ethics mapped out during their general assembly meeting Monday.

Why the supercommittee should disband

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, November 1, 11:16 AM

Congress has now achieved the remarkable feat of making itself less popular than Wall Street bankers.

And the way it is heading, it hasn’t hit bottom yet — there’s still 9 percent of the public that approves of the job the legislators are doing.

Occupy the Future

Tuesday 01 November 2011

by: Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Speech 

(This article is adapted from Noam Chomsky's talk at the Occupy Boston encampment on Dewey Square on Oct. 22. He spoke as part of the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series held by Occupy Boston's on-site Free University. Zinn was a historian, activist and author of "A People's History of the United States.")

Delivering a Howard Zinn lecture is a bittersweet experience for me. I regret that he's not here to take part in and invigorate a movement that would have been the dream of his life. Indeed, he laid a lot of the groundwork for it.

If the bonds and associations being established in these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead, victories don't come quickly, the Occupy protests could mark a significant moment in American history.

Tomgram: Lawrence Weschler, The Great American Shakedown

Posted by Lawrence Weschler at 7:53am, November 1, 2011.

In the U.S., corruption is seldom “corruption.”  Take as an example our president, who has been utterly clear: he will not take money for his electoral campaign from lobbyists.  Only problem: according to the New York Times, 15 of his top “bundlers,” who give their own money and solicit that of others -- none registered as federal lobbyists -- are “involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies,” and they are raising millions for him.  They also have access to the White House on policy matters.  According to a June report from the Center for Public Integrity, “President Obama granted plum jobs and appointments to almost 200 people who raised large sums for his [2008] presidential campaign, and his top fundraisers have won millions of dollars in federal contracts.”

The president’s spokespeople insist, of course, that he’s kept to his promise, as defined by the labyrinthine lobbying legislation written by a Congress filled with future lobbyists.  And keep in mind that Obama looks like Little Mary Sunshine compared to the field of Republican presidential candidates who seem determined to campaign cheek to jowl with as many lobbyists as they can corral.  More than 100 federal lobbyists have already contributed to Mitt Romney’s campaign, while Rick Perry has evidently risen to candidate status on the shoulders of Mike Toomey, a former gubernatorial chief of staff, friend, and money-raising lobbyist whose clients “have won $2 billion in [Texas] state government contracts since 2008.”  And that’s just the tip of the top of the iceberg.

Mayor Bloomberg: ‘It Was Not The Banks That Created The Mortgage Crisis’
By Pat Garofalo on Nov 1, 2011 at 2:55 pm

A favorite conservative pastime since the financial crisis of 2008 struck is to try and deflect blame away from Wall Street and its excesses and onto Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and government housing policy. No matter how many times the theory that the government mortgage giants caused the crisis gets debunked, it keeps on coming back to life.

The latest political figure to join this parade was New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I), who responded to a question about the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests by saying that the protesters’ grievances are “unfounded,” since “it was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis