The Sorry State of Our Union

by Robert Kuttner

President Obama delivers his fifth State of the Union Address on Tuesday. Based on White House leaks, the president will emphasize rebuilding the middle class. He will invoke the importance of education, infrastructure, clean energy, and manufacturing.

These are terrific themes, economically and politically. The only problem is that rebuilding the middle class by the public investments that the society needs is out of the question -- because of the downward drag of a budget politics that the president shares.

Quietly Killing a Consumer Watchdog

If you’d like to know why Republicans are trying to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, take a look at three things the agency has already accomplished in its first 18 months:

¶It called a halt to predatory practices by mortgage lenders, ensuring that borrowers are not saddled with loans they can’t afford and preventing brokers from earning higher commissions for higher interest rates. 

¶It won an $85 million settlement from American Express, which it accused of deceptive and discriminatory marketing and billing practices.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Will the Keystone XL Pipeline Go Down?

A Presidential Decision That Could Change the World

The Strategic Importance of Keystone XL

By Michael T. Klare

Presidential decisions often turn out to be far less significant than imagined, but every now and then what a president decides actually determines how the world turns. Such is the case with the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if built, is slated to bring some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-rich oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.  In the near future, President Obama is expected to give its construction a definitive thumbs up or thumbs down, and the decision he makes could prove far more important than anyone imagines.  It could determine the fate of the Canadian tar-sands industry and, with it, the future well-being of the planet.  If that sounds overly dramatic, let me explain.

Sometimes, what starts out as a minor skirmish can wind up determining the outcome of a war -- and that seems to be the case when it comes to the mounting battle over the Keystone XL pipeline. If given the go-ahead by President Obama, it will daily carry more than 700,000 barrels of tar-sands oil to those Gulf Coast refineries, providing a desperately needed boost to the Canadian energy industry. If Obama says no, the Canadians (and their American backers) will encounter possibly insuperable difficulties in exporting their heavy crude oil, discouraging further investment and putting the industry’s future in doubt.

 

Why Are Conservatives Trying to Destroy the Voting Rights Act?

Ari Berman, February 5, 2013

In 2006, Congress voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for another twenty-five years. The legislation passed 390–33 in the House and 98–0 in the Senate. Every top Republican supported the bill. “The Voting Rights Act must continue to exist,” said House Judiciary chair James Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican, “and exist in its current form.” Civil rights leaders flanked George W. Bush at the signing ceremony.

Seven years later, the bipartisan consensus that supported the VRA for nearly fifty years has collapsed, and conservatives are challenging the law as never before. Last November, three days after a presidential election in which voter suppression played a starring role, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Section 5 of the VRA, which compels parts or all of sixteen states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to clear election-related changes with the federal government. The case will be heard on February 27. The lawsuit, originating in Shelby County, Alabama, is backed by leading operatives and funders in the conservative movement, along with Republican attorneys general in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. Shelby County’s brief claims that “Section 5’s federalism cost is too great” and that the statute has “accomplished [its] mission.” 

Why Is Washington Reducing the Deficit Instead of Creating Jobs?

December 7, 2012 | J. Mijin Cha

 

This Demos Explainer explores the tension between political support for deficit reduction versus job creation and economic security policies.

Most available research indicates a significant difference in priorities between the majority of Americans and the affluent that comprise the political donor class, which may explain the current bi-partisan drive for deficit reduction at the expense of stimulus policies, in spite of persistent high unemployment.
 

US Air Force veteran, finally allowed to fly into US, is now banned from flying back home

Secret, unaccountable no-fly lists are one of many weapons the US government uses to extra-judicially punish American Muslims

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 February 2013 07.40 EST

In early November, I wrote about the infuriating story of Saadiq Long, the 43-year-old African-American Muslim who - despite having never been charged with any crime - was secretly placed on a no-fly list and thus barred from flying to the US to visit his seriously ill mother. When I met with Long in early November in Doha, Qatar, where he has lived for several years with his wife and her two children while teaching English, he was in the middle of his futile months-long battle just to find out why he was placed on this list, let alone how he could be removed.

Two weeks after that article was published, Long - without explanation - was finally removed from the no-fly list and he flew from Doha to Oklahoma City to visit his mother and other family members. He took several flights to make the 20-hour journey, all without incident. He has remained in Oklahoma for the last ten weeks, visiting his family in the US for the first time in over a decade.
 

Revealing the Real TANF

by Greg Kaufmann

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and again: the American people have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program created in 1996. Both parties tout it as a “success,” but if you look at the numbers—and at the real lives of people who turn to the program for assistance when they are out of work—the picture is bleak, to say the least.

This March, TANF is set to expire and will need to be renewed. It will mark yet another opportunity to have an honest, fact-based discussion about the program. So it was good to see a top-notch panel of experts at the Center for American Progress (CAP) yesterday talking about TANF—“Learning from the Past, Planning for the Future.”

Churning Isn’t Just for Butter Anymore

by Donna Smith

It isn’t often anymore that I learn a new word in the health care system discussion, but this week I did.  Churning.  I was at a meeting here in Colorado where I have taken on a new role in advocating and administering for a publicly financed, universal, single-payer system with Health Care for All Colorado.  And the definition of churning I learned is a sad commentary on a system that still allows access to care based on inequality of coverage that leaves so (Photo: Health Care for All Oregon via Flickr)many people suffering and tens of thousands dying in America every year.

Churning is the policy wonk term for those who qualify and are covered by a public program like Medicaid and who then have access to a private insurance plan through a new job that offers it or through a family member’s coverage but who then lose that coverage and end up back on the public insurance for which they qualify.  They churn.  And they suffer.
 

Increasing Social Security Benefits: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

By Richard Eskow | February 10, 2013

rchaeologists of the future will sift through our newspapers, websites, and other ephemera and marvel at the inverted shape of our political debate. They’ll be particularly surprised to discover that, at a time when retirement security was being destroyed for an entire generation, politicians were posturing over how to make the problem even worse by cutting Social Security.

And they’ll marvel over how long it took us to agree on the right solution: Increasing Social Security benefits instead.

Bill Moyers: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair

February 9, 2013  |  BILL MOYERS: You’ve heard me before quote one of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” That’s why two books are rattling the cages of powerful people who would rather you not read them. Here’s the first one. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan Crawford. Read it and you’ll understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many other countries and getting much less in return. That, despite the fact that our very own academics and engineers, working with our very own Defense Department, invented the internet in the first place.

Back then, the U.S. was in the catbird seat – poised to lead the world down this astonishing new superhighway of information and innovation. Now many other countries offer their citizens faster and cheaper access than we do. The faster high-speed access comes through fiber optic lines that transmit data in bursts of laser light, but many of us are still hooked up to broadband connections that squeeze digital information through copper wire. We’re stuck with this old-fashioned technology because, as Susan Crawford explains, our government has allowed a few giant conglomerates to rig the rules, raise prices, and stifle competition. Just like standard oil in the first Gilded Age a century ago.

In those days, it was muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens rattling the cages and calling for fair play. Today it’s independent thinkers like Susan Crawford. The big telecom industry wishes she would go away, but she’s got a lot of people on her side. In fact, if you go to the White House citizen’s petition site, you’ll see how fans of Captive Audience are calling on the President to name Susan Crawford as the next chair of the Federal Communications Commission. “Prospect” magazine named her one of the “top ten brains of the digital future,” and Susan Crawford served for a time as a special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation. Right now she teaches communications law at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law here in New York City and is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Susan Crawford, welcome.

SUSAN CRAWFORD: Thank you so much.

What It's Going to Take to Claw Back Middle Class Wealth from the 1%

By Les Leopold

February 6, 2013  |  If you truly care about economic justice, then you've got to worry about the precipitous decline of labor unions in the United States. Just take a look at these two charts. The first shows the rise and decline of union membership in the private sector from the depths of the Great Depression to today. You can clearly see that unions were a very big deal from the mid-1930s to the early 1980s. By 1953, more than one out of three American workers were members of private sector unions. That means there was a union member in nearly every family.

Through the late 1950s and 1960s, the percentage of union members declined, but the absolute number continued to increase, peaking at nearly 21 million members in 1979, (largely due to the influx of public sector workers during the 1960s and 70s). Then the decline accelerated as the share of union members fell by half between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. (If we include public employee union members, the current rate is 11.3 percent.)

 

They Talk Deficits Instead Of Jobs — It’s Corruption

By Dave Johnson | February 6, 2013

Washington is back to talking about deficits and not about jobs. Didn’t we just have an election? Didn’t we vote to tax the wealthy, provide public services and benefits and provide people with jobs? Isn’t the deficit down 50% from where Bush left it? So why are even our own people talking about deficits instead of jobs? Unemployment is destroying people. Do something about that.

I was going to write about the trade deficit again today, and the damage it is doing to the country’s economy. (And the trade deficit is one more way the billionaires grab more and more of the country’s income and wealth.) But I read this, Unemployment Stories, Vol. Six: ‘If It Weren’t For My Children I Probably Would Have Killed Myself By Now’, linked by Atrios, and I’m too depressed to do the research.
 

What’s Now Happening On Federal Budget is Worse Than The Fiscal Cliff

By Stan Collender | February 8, 2013

When I was much younger, I helped start a monthly breakfast meeting for a handful of inside-the-beltway budget wonks.

The group has gotten considerably larger over the past three decades and its makeup – Democrats and Republicans, former House and Senate staffers, former executive and legislative branch officials, conservatives and liberals — has changed quite a bit from its five original members. But 30 years after it started, the group continues to get together each month to share thoughts, experience, research and lots of snarky comments. When it meets, as it did this week, there’s more than 600 years of federal budget expertise sitting around the table and the discussion is one that couldn’t happen most other places. For me, it’s a reality check and a source of information and inspiration.

 

Paul Krugman: Kick That Can

John Boehner, the speaker of the House, claims to be exasperated. “At some point, Washington has to deal with its spending problem,” he said Wednesday. “I’ve watched them kick this can down the road for 22 years since I’ve been here. I’ve had enough of it. It’s time to act.” 

Actually, Mr. Boehner needs to refresh his memory. During the first decade of his time in Congress, the U.S. government was doing just fine on the fiscal front. In particular, the ratio of federal debt to G.D.P. was a third lower when Bill Clinton left office than it was when he came in. It was only when George W. Bush arrived and squandered the Clinton surplus on tax cuts and unfunded wars that the budget outlook began deteriorating again.
 

The Great Tax-Cut Experiment

Has cutting tax rates for the rich helped the economy?

BY GERALD FRIEDMAN | January/February 2013

Since the late 1970s, during the Carter Administration, conservative economists have been warning that high taxes retard economic growth by discouraging productive work and investment. These arguments have resonated with politicians, who have steadily cut income taxes, especially those borne by the richest Americans. The highest marginal tax rate, which stood at 70% by the end of the 1970s, was cut to less than 30% in less than a decade. (The marginal rate for a person is the one applied to his or her last dollar of income. A marginal rate that applies to, say, the bracket above $250,000, then, is paid only on that portion of income. The portion of a person’s income below that threshold is taxed at the lower rates applying to lower tax brackets.)
 

The US should grow the deficit, not shrink it

The US economy is too fragile to reduce spending and raise taxes. Fiscal austerity is a recipe for worse pain.

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 February 2013 10.39 EST

There is an astounding level of confusion surrounding the current US deficit. There are three irrefutable facts about the deficits:

First, the United States has large deficits because the collapse of the housing bubble sank the economy.

Second, if we had smaller deficits the main result would be slower growth and higher unemployment.

Third, large projected long-term deficits are the result of a broken health care system, not reckless government "entitlement" programs.

Austerity, US Style, Exposed 

Thursday, 07 February 2013 10:53  
By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis 

Austerity policies include various combinations primarily of government spending cuts and secondarily of general tax increases. Republicans and Democrats have endorsed austerity since 2010. Austerity was the result of their deal on taxes last December 31: increasing the payroll tax on wages and salaries from 4.2 to 6.2 percent. Austerity is what they are negotiating now in regard to federal spending cuts.

After 2010, with "recovery" underway for them following bailouts for them, large private capitalist interests focused on three key interests. First, they wanted to ensure that the bailouts' costs were not paid for by higher taxes on corporations and the rich. By stressing government spending cuts and broad-based tax increases, austerity policies serve that interest. Second, they worried about crisis-heightened government economic intervention and power and wanted to reduce them back to pre-crisis levels. Austerity's focus on reduced government spending lessens the government's economic footprint. Third, because big banks and other large capitalists are among the major creditors of the US government, they wanted signs that their crisis-increased holdings of US debt were safe investments for them. Austerity policies provide just those signs, as we shall show.
 

“Alchemy” Investigation Alleges Wall Street Fraud at Standard & Poor’s

Posted by Pratap Chatterjee on February 5th, 2013
CorpWatch Blog

The medieval alchemists claimed they could turn ordinary metals into gold. Analysts at Standard & Poors (S&P), Wall Street’s top ratings agency, claimed that bad loans to poor people were wildly profitably. A U.S. government investigation alleges that S&P financial analysts are no different from the hucksters of yore.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice sued S&P for $5 billion for misleading the Western Federal Corporate Credit Union, the first federally chartered credit union, which collapsed in 2008.  Sixteen states have joined the lawsuit while the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission has also launched an investigation. S&P has offered to settle for $100 million instead without admitting any guilt. 
  

ORNL scientists solve mercury mystery, Science reports

By identifying two genes required for transforming inorganic into organic mercury, which is far more toxic, scientists today have taken a significant step toward protecting human health.

The question of how methylmercury, an organic form of mercury, is produced by natural processes in the environment has stumped scientists for decades, but a team led by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has solved the puzzle. Results of the study, published in the journal Science, provide the genetic basis for this process, known as microbial mercury methylation, and have far-reaching implications.

"Until now, we did not know how the bacteria convert mercury from natural and industrial processes into methylmercury," said ORNL's Liyuan Liang, a co-author and leader of a large Department of Energy-funded mercury research program that includes researchers from the University of Missouri-Columbia and University of Tennessee.

Marcy Wheeler: This Isn’t the Memo You’re Looking For

As important as it is to see the white paper DOJ gave Congress to explain its purported legal rationale, it is just as important to make clear what this white paper is not.

First, is it not the actual legal memos used to authorize the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and who knows who else. As Michael Isikoff notes in his story, the Senators whose job it is to oversee the Executive Branch — even the ones on the Senate Intelligence Committee that are supposed to be read into covert operations — are still demanding the memos, for at least the 12th time. The release of this white paper must not serve to take pressure off of the White House to release the actual memos.

Which brings me to an equally important point: memos. Plural.

Credit Ratings Agencies Are Pimps of Wall Street: It's Time to Ban Them!

By Marshall Auerback

February 5, 2013  |  Is Eric Holder’s “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” Department of Justice finally getting serious about investigating fraud on Wall Street? At first glance, it would seem so, given the news that the Department of Justice has filed civil fraud charges against the nation’s largest credit-ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, accusing the firm of inflating the ratings of mortgage investments and setting them up for a crash [3] when the financial crisis struck.

On the one hand, there is no question that without the credit rating agencies the Wall Street guys would not have been able to pull off this colossal heist against the American people, and the ratings agencies cannot be excused.  In fact, Standard & Poor’s employees openly joked about the company’s willingness to rate deals “structured by cows” and sang and danced to a mock song inspired by “Burning Down the House” before the 2008 global financial collapse, according to the DOJ lawsuit. On the other, the ratings agencies are simply the gift wrappers. DOJ has yet to go after the banksters who created these packages in the first place and who seem to be in the clear as a result of a series of unconscionably low settlements recently reached with the Justice Department.

Paul Krugman: A Technological Drive Toward Driverless Cars

Tuesday, 05 February 2013 09:19 

Felix Salmon has been converted to the cult of the self-driving car. "While I've generally been a fan of just about any alternative to the automobile, now I'm not so sure," Mr. Salmon, a financial writer for Reuters, wrote in a blog post on Jan. 24. "I think that smart car technology is improving impressively, to the point at which it could be the most promising solution, especially in developed parts of the world like California." Indeed, this is starting to look like a real thing. And I'm impressed.

By and large, I'm in the camp of those disillusioned about technology — mainly, I think, because the future isn't what it used to be. A case in point is Herman Kahn's "The Year 2000," a 1967 exercise in forecasting that offered a convenient list of "very likely" technological developments. When 2000 actually did roll around, the striking thing was how overoptimistic the list was: Mr. Kahn foresaw most things that actually did happen, but also many things that didn't (and still haven't). And economic growth fell far short of his expectations.

Extraordinary Rendition Report Finds More Than 50 Nations Involved In Global Torture Scheme 

Posted: 02/04/2013 11:14 pm EST  |  Updated: 02/05/2013 11:24 am EST

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. counterterrorism practice known as extraordinary rendition, in which suspects were quietly moved to secret prisons abroad and often tortured, involved the participation of more than 50 nations, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Open Society Foundations.

The OSF report, which offers the first wholesale public accounting of the top-secret program, puts the number of governments that either hosted CIA "black sites," interrogated or tortured prisoners sent by the U.S., or otherwise collaborated in the program at 54. The report also identifies by name 136 prisoners who were at some point subjected to extraordinary rendition.
 

Privatization Group Tied To California Dark Money Millions

Eric Lach, February 6, 2013, 6:05 AM

An engineering trade organization that advocates for privatizing government work has been tied to the group behind the $11 million dark money donation that prompted a legal showdown in California last fall.

The $400,000 that can now be traced back to a group called the American Council of Engineering Companies in California (ACEC-CA) may not be the biggest of disclosures, but when it comes to dark money in politics, any transparency at all is a revelation.

Maternal exposure to outdoor air pollution associated with low birth weights worldwide

Largest study of its kind shows link between outdoor particulate pollution and impaired fetal growth

Mothers who are exposed to particulate air pollution of the type emitted by vehicles, urban heating and coal power plants are significantly more likely to bear children of low birth weight, according to an international study led by co-principal investigator Tracey J. Woodruff, PhD, MPH, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and reproductive sciences at UC San Francisco along with Jennifer Parker, PhD, of the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study, the largest of its kind ever performed, analyzed data collected from more than three million births in nine nations at 14 sites in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

The researchers found that at sites worldwide, the higher the pollution rate, the greater the rate of low birth weight.

Deficit Obsession Has Hurt The Recovery: CBO

Brian Beutler, February 5, 2013, 1:47 PM 

Here’s the buried lede from the Congressional Budget Office, which on Tuesday released its Budget and Economic Outlook for the coming decade: D.C.’s deficit obsession has been quite effective at cutting deficits at the expense of the still-struggling economy.

“[E]conomic activity will expand slowly this year, with real GDP growing by just 1.4 percent,” according to CBO’s projections. “That slow growth reflects a combination of ongoing improvement in underlying economic factors and fiscal tightening that has already begun or is scheduled to occur-including the expiration of a 2 percentage-point cut in the Social Security payroll tax, an increase in tax rates on income above certain thresholds, and scheduled automatic reductions in federal spending. That subdued economic growth will limit businesses’ need to hire additional workers, thereby causing the unemployment rate to stay near 8 percent this year, CBO projects.”
 

Harvard professor has it right: U.S. climate push requires intense grassroots support around ‘cap-and-dividend’ bill 

By Mike Tidwell

In the past three weeks there’s been much debate in U.S. environmental circles over a provocative new paper [PDF] from Harvard University political scientist Theda Skocpol. In it, Skocpol gives the most compelling analysis yet of why the 2009 cap-and-trade bill to fight global warming went down in flames. In sum, Skocpol argues that intense and radical opposition from Tea Party Republicans proved much stronger than the environmentalists’ insider-game, partner-with-business, harness-polls-instead-of-the-grassroots approach.

My added value in commenting here is that I experienced the run-up to — and aftermath of — the failed Waxman-Markey bill from the field. I’ve been a grassroots climate organizer for 10 years, having founded the organization I still direct: the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. CCAN straddles much of the political landscape of America, organizing in the conservative “South” (Virginia) and the liberal “Northeast” (Maryland), while staying very involved in national climate initiatives in Washington, D.C., the geographic center of our region.

Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

The president's partisan lawyers purport to vest him with the most extreme power a political leader can seize

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 February 2013 10.56 EST

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki's 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama's top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president's power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title "disposition matrix".

Dean Baker: Tax Games and Redistributing Income Upward

Posted: 02/05/2013 5:59 am

The corporate profit share of national income is near a post-World War II high. The share of income going to the richest 1 percent is almost at its pre-Depression peak.

These would seem like impressive accomplishments but the process of upward redistribution, from Joe Sixpack to Joe Six Houses, is a never-ending struggle. Toward this end, Louisiana Governor and Republican wunderkind Bobby Jindal has just proposed replacing the state's income tax with a sales tax.

Sales taxes will generally be more regressive than income taxes for the simple reason that low- and moderate-income people will spend a larger share of their income than upper-income people. That means that the portion of income that wealthy Louisianans save will escape taxation, imposing a larger burden on low- and middle-income families in any revenue neutral shift.

 

As Public Makes “Hard Choices” On Social Security, Alan Simpson Ducks His “Moment of Truth”

By Richard Eskow | February 4, 2013

Alan Simpson’s the lead pitchman for a billionaire- and corporate-funded initiative to slash Social Security that has subjected the public to years of nonstop haranguing and lecturing.

The lecturing’s gotten crude, too, as when Simpson insisted that anyone who disagrees with him is shoveling “bullsh*t.”

That’s tough talk, but it’s a funny thing: When the public makes tough decisions, as it did in a new National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) survey, the tough-talking Mr. Simpson is nowhere to be found.

Hard Times, USA: Would You Consider Thinking Differently About Poverty and Poor and Homeless People? 

By Don Hazen

February 4, 2013  |  What do the words poor, hungry, homeless, destitute, and economic hardship mean to you? Would you rather not think about it? Can I ask you a harder question? Have you lost your empathy for people who may be down and out? Or maybe it is in reserve, waiting for a chance to be revitalized.

The ability of the U.S. to deal with problems of money, housing, healthcare, food and the basics of life for many millions of people, is pretty damn rotten. The problem is getting worse. Increasingly, as the gap between rich and poor keeps growing, more people may be less interested in and have less empathy for the people who are left out. That is what I am wondering about.

Some of us were lucky, some privileged, and some of us have been able to achieve a level of economic security where we never have to worry about the necessities for the rest of our lives. But a very large number of Americans, a shocking number really, feel vulnerable every day of every week. Their future is unknown. They don't even how they are going to get through tomorrow.
 

Sea urchin nickel 'trick' could be key to capturing carbon

By Matt McGrath  
Environment correspondent, BBC News

Researchers say that the natural ability of sea urchins to absorb CO2 could be a model for an effective carbon capture and storage system.

Newcastle University scientists discovered by chance that urchins use the metal nickel to turn carbon dioxide into shell.

They say the technique can be harnessed to turn emissions from power plants into the harmless calcium carbonate.

Why Conservatives Don't Understand Marriage

By Jill Filipovic

February 4, 2013  |  The traditionalists who oppose same-sex marriage [3] rights are losing the war, and they know it.

A few have a new strategy: instead of fear-mongering about gay marriage, they'll target single mothers and low-income women. Although they'll roundly trumpet marriage's social importance, they're simply moral scolds – uncomfortable with gender [4] equality [5] and dedicated to the values that cause higher rates of divorce, unwanted pregnancy, and poverty. They're calling it a "Call for a New Conversation on Marriage [6]", but they've just dressed the same regressive arguments in new, gay-marriage-approving clothes.

At the heart of this call lies a hostility toward women and a reductive view of family and economics. Their "appeal" doesn't actually say much; it claims that marriage is an economic savior mysteriously dying off, and it implicitly blames single moms for the demise of the middle-class marital unit.
 

Paying the Bin Laden Tax 

Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 9:27am, February 5, 2013.
 
The American Lockdown State 
Post-Legal Drones, the Bin Laden Tax, and Other Wonders of Our American World 

Consider Inauguration Day, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past.  In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his “liberal” second inaugural address.  On that day everything from his invocation of women’s rights (“Seneca Falls”), the civil rights movement (“Selma”), and the gay rights movement (“Stonewall”) to his wife’s new bangs and Beyoncé’s lip-syncing was fodder for the media extravaganza.  The president was even praised (or reviled) for what he took pains not to bring up: the budget deficit.  Was anything, in fact, not grist for the media mill, the hordes of talking heads, and the chattering classes?

One subject, at least, got remarkably little attention during the inaugural blitz and, when mentioned, certainly struck few as odd or worth dwelling on.  Yet nothing better caught our changing American world.  Washington, after all, was in a lockdown mode unmatched by any inauguration from another era -- not even Lincoln’s second inaugural in the midst of the Civil War, or Franklin Roosevelt’s during World War II, or John F. Kennedy’s at the height of the Cold War.
 

2 Years in Jail for Sitting on a Milk Crate? The Shocking Ways America Punishes Poor People Living on the Street

By Tana Ganeva

February 2, 2013  |   In 2008, Atlanta police orchestrated an unusual sting: officers shed their uniforms to go undercover as tourists and office workers, a stunt designed to entrap beggars in the city's tourist areas. Forty-four people were arrested for panhandling in one month [4]. The best part about the sting, police officials said at the time, according [5] to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, [6] was that while actual tourists rarely bothered to come back to testify about their terrible abuse at the hands of the city's beggars, the undercover cops would make for enthusiastic witnesses. At the time, Atlanta had banned panhandling within 15 feet of an ATM, bus stop, taxi stand, payphone, public toilet -- and anywhere after dark.

Laws that restrict panhandling are designed to target poor people living on the street. Other examples of laws that apply almost exclusively to the unhoused include bans on sitting or lying down on the sidewalk, eating in public, setting up camp or sleeping in a park or other public places. Advocates say these laws are used as a tool to drive the homeless out of sight.

No Austerity Has Helped Any Economy

Sunday, 03 February 2013 11:06  
By Gaius Publius, America Blog | News Analysis 

Paul Krugman’s recent column looks at the romance between the “austerians” — the promoters of austerity for economically troubled nations — and the need to inflict pain to get economic gain. His bottom line — no country that has tried austerity has seen a major economic benefit.

My bottom line — add “to its people” to the end of Krugman’s bottom line and you’ve got it exactly. There is an obvious economic benefit, but only for a few.
 

Rick Perlstein: Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: 'Survivalism'

There’s nothing new under the wingnut sun.

Survivalists are back in the news this week, though now we call them “preppers.” In Alabama the hostage standoff against a doomsday prepper holding a 5-year-old in a bunker he’d been working on in the middle of the night for over a year approaches the end of its first week. Adam Lanza shot up the children of Sandy Hook elementary with weapons his mother was reportedly stockpiling “for the economic and social meltdown.” And the brittle worldview that drives the survivalist mentality—the imagination of one’s one innocent enclave, always ever threatened by siege from dread unnamed Others—was laid bare at the recent congressional hearings on gun control, when Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women’s Forum (incidentally: not independent, not by and for women, not a forum) spun out her delirious fantasy of “a young woman defending her babies in her home” by fending off “three, four, five violent attackers” with one of those lightweight, easy-to-handle assault rifles.
 

Paul Krugman: Friends of Fraud

Like many advocates of financial reform, I was a bit disappointed in the bill that finally emerged. Dodd-Frank gave regulators the power to rein in many financial excesses; but it was and is less clear that future regulators will use that power. As history shows, the financial industry’s wealth and influence can all too easily turn those who are supposed to serve as watchdogs into lap dogs instead. 

There was, however, one piece of the reform that was a shining example of how to do it right: the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a stand-alone agency with its own funding, charged with protecting consumers against financial fraud and abuse. And sure enough, Senate Republicans are going all out in an attempt to kill that bureau.

Breaking the Chains of Debt Peonage

by Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday night in Brooklyn at the People’s Recovery Summit.

The corporate state has made it clear there will be no more Occupy encampments. The corporate state is seeking through the persistent harassment of activists and the passage of draconian laws such as Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act—and we will be in court next Wednesday to fight the Obama administration’s appeal of the Southern District Court of New York’s ruling declaring Section 1021 unconstitutional—to shut down all legitimate dissent. The corporate state is counting, most importantly, on its system of debt peonage to keep citizens—especially the 30 million people who make up the working poor—from joining our revolt. 

The OTHER GOP Plan To Blow Up The Electoral Vote

Benjy Sarlin, February 4, 2013, 6:10 AM 

GOP efforts to rig the Electoral College in favor of GOP presidential candidates may be close to dead, but a group of Republicans are hard at work at another plot to blow up the system: switch to the popular vote.

Although more closely associated with progressive circles in recent years, the idea has a number of conservative activists behind it as well. And there are signs it’s gaining momentum.

Controlling the International Flow of Money

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly
Posted on Feb 2, 2013

“For the past 35 years, the world’s largest financial institutions and most Western governments have worked to strip away all obstacles to the free flow of money from country to country,” and the results have been disastrous, the New Economics Foundation reports.

“Neoliberalism has come to dominate economic policy in the modern world,” the foundation says in a short film on the subject. “As the wisdom goes, removing restrictions on the flow of capital will ensure that investment naturally makes its way from rich countries to poorer ones. But this doesn’t seem to be happening.”

Economist columnist Philip Coggan says in the film that “We’ve had 40 years of money being freely available, of no real restrictions on exchange rates in the developed world to move. The result of all that has been a whole series of asset bubbles and a huge expansion of debt relative to GDP. It’s very hard to see how that’s sustainable.

David Cay Johnston: The true cost of national security 

The Pentagon and the White House focus on the core Defense budget, but that’s not the half of it

Soon, we will get the president’s proposed fiscal 2014 spending plan. Much attention will focus on Social Security and Medicare, which have been flashpoints lately. Meanwhile, if coverage in years past is any guide, we can expect stories from many news outlets that will significantly understate a third huge slice of spending—the real costs of military and other national defense spending.

Chuck Hagel, on the griddle now as President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, famously called the Defense Department “bloated,” in a 2011 interview with Financial Times. But budget stories then and now tend to report on the base budget from the Department of Defense, leaving readers with the impression that that is the full cost of fulfilling the Constitutional mandate to “provide for the common defence.”

Rick Perlstein: Libertarian Developer's Ayn Rand Fantasy Is Detroit's Latest Nightmare

January 30, 2013  |  Check out what the loopy Ayn Randroids are up to now. In long-suffering Detroit, a libertarian real estate developer wants to buy a civic crown jewel, Belle Isle, the 982-acre park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead—think the Motor City’s Central Park— [5]and turn it into an independent nation, selling citizenships at $300,000 per. Not, mind you, out of any mercenary motives, says would-be founder Rodney Lockwood—but just “to provide an economic and social laboratory for a society which effectively addresses some of the most important problems of American, and the western world.” (Sic.)

Address how? Well, let’s say I’ve never seen a document [6] that better reveals the extent to which, for libertarians, “liberty” means the opposite of liberty—at least since Rick Santorum held up the company town in which his grandpa was entombed as a beacon of freedom.

Paul Krugman: Consumer Spending and Inequality Denial

I’ve been debating rising inequality with the usual suspects for a couple of decades (despite what it says on this piece, it was actually published in 1992). And what you always encounter from the right is a sort of defense in depth: claims, based on tortured statistics, that it isn’t happening; claims, based on similarly tortured statistics, that it doesn’t matter; and claims that anyway it’s a good thing. You might think that people would have to choose one of these lines: you can’t simultaneously say that inequality isn’t rising and that the rise is a good thing, can you? Well, yes you can; we’re engaged in a political defense of the 1% here, not research.

So, the latest is a piece by Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry purporting to debunk the notion of middle-class stagnation. Their key piece of evidence is the claim that spending on “basics” has been steadily falling as a share of income, showing that people are finding it ever easier to meet the essential demands of middle-class life.
 

Paul Krugman: Looking for Mr. Goodpain

Three years ago, a terrible thing happened to economic policy, both here and in Europe. Although the worst of the financial crisis was over, economies on both sides of the Atlantic remained deeply depressed, with very high unemployment. Yet the Western world’s policy elite somehow decided en masse that unemployment was no longer a crucial concern, and that reducing budget deficits should be the overriding priority.

In recent columns, I’ve argued that worries about the deficit are, in fact, greatly exaggerated — and have documented the increasingly desperate efforts of the deficit scolds to keep fear alive. Today, however, I’d like to talk about a different but related kind of desperation: the frantic effort to find some example, somewhere, of austerity policies that succeeded. For the advocates of fiscal austerity — the austerians — made promises as well as threats: austerity, they claimed, would both avert crisis and lead to prosperity.

The Judicial Assault on Unions 

By Roy Ulrich

January 31, 2013  |  It should come as no shock that Republicans in Congress would like to see the power of labor further diminished. The same is true of governors and state legislatures in red and purple states such as Wisconsin and Indiana. But now conservative courts have joined the fray.

Just this past week, the National Labor Relations Board [3] was put in legal limbo — with the possibility that more than 300 of its decisions over the last year could be nullified — as a result of a federal appeals court in ruling in the nation’s capital that President Obama [4]’s recess appointments [5] to the Board were invalid.

Among the decisions that could be vacated are three recent rulings in which the Board had assumed a powerful role [6] in telling companies that they can’t issue blanket prohibitions on what their employees say on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

Dean Baker: The Folly of DC's Desperate Deficit Fear Mongers

The UK's looming triple-dip recession should be austerity's death knell, but in the fevered brains of Washington analysts it lives on

The news that the UK, with negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2012, faces the prospect of a triple-dip recession, should be the final blow to the intellectual credibility of deficit hawks. You just can't get more wrong than this flat-earth bunch of economic policy-makers.

They're pretty much batting zero. They failed to foresee the collapse of housing bubbles in the US and Europe and its consequent downturn. They grossly underestimated its severity after it hit. And their policy prescription of austerity has been shown to be wrong everywhere that applied it: in the US, the eurozone and, especially, the UK.

By all rights, these folks should be laughed out of town. They should be retrained for a job more suited to their skill set – preferably, something that doesn't involve numbers, or people.
 

America Is Turning Into One Big Prison for People in Debt

By Steve Fraser

January 29, 2013  |  Shakespeare’s Polonius offered this classic advice to his son: “neither a borrower nor a lender be.”  Many of our nation’s Founding Fathers emphatically saw it otherwise.  They often lived by the maxim: always a borrower, never a lender be.  As tobacco and rice planters, slave traders, and merchants, as well as land and currency speculators, they depended upon long lines of credit to finance their livelihoods and splendid ways of life.  So, too, in those days, did shopkeepers, tradesmen, artisans, and farmers, as well as casual laborers and sailors.  Without debt, the seedlings of a commercial economy could never have grown to maturity.

Ben Franklin, however, was wary on the subject. “Rather go to bed supperless than rise in debt” was his warning, and even now his cautionary words carry great moral weight.  We worry about debt, yet we can’t live without it.

Debt remains, as it long has been, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of capitalism.  For a small minority, it’s a blessing; for others a curse.  For some the moral burden of carrying debt is a heavy one, and no one lets them forget it.  For privileged others, debt bears no moral baggage at all, presents itself as an opportunity to prosper, and if things go wrong can be dumped without a qualm.

Americans shocked to learn that there isn’t actually a Social Security crisis

A survey shows that deficit fear-mongering works, but it's overcome by simple counter-arguments  

By Alex Pareene

The Washington Post’s WonkBlog has a scoop: People don’t want to cut Social Security!

The post concerns a recent survey that is actually pretty useful, in that it supports what should already be common sense: People have been led to believe that Social Security faces a crisis in funding. When you tell people some proposals for fixing it, they a) overwhelmingly choose to fund it more generously and b) decide that the program actually does not face any sort of crisis at all. A marketing firm hired by the National Academy of Social Insurance surveyed a random sampling of Americans and discovered that what people want is to raise taxes on rich (and regular!) people in order to fund more Social Security benefits, which is a good idea because the program is currently pretty stingy by international standards and Americans don’t actually have pensions anymore.
 

Little-known database sells millions of Americans’ salary information to debt collectors

By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, January 30, 2013 11:31 EST

The credit reporting agency Equifax has created a little-known database that uses employment records, often given freely by human resources departments around the country, to track detailed information on millions of Americans’ pay history, in effect leading employers to help debt collectors extract money from their workforce.

An Equifax subsidiary called The Work Number, according to an investigative report at MSNBC, is often used by larger companies to automate employee work information calls, giving the firm access to human resources data.

Smart Talk On The Next Austerity Disaster

By Robert Borosage | January 28, 2013

The United States is in the midst of the most protracted unemployment crisis in modern history, and for vast segments of the population, the recession has never ended. Wages are still sinking; more than 20 million people are in need of full-time work. Yet, the national debate is fixated on fixing the debt rather than fixing the economy.

This is “austerity” economics, which demands cuts in government spending in the belief that this will reduce government deficits, even as it costs jobs and imposes hardships on people.

Report: Unemployed people pay millions in needless fees under state-run payment-card programs

By Associated Press, Published: January 28 | Updated: Tuesday, January 29, 12:14 PM

WASHINGTON — Jobless Americans are paying millions in unnecessary fees to collect unemployment benefits because of state policies encouraging them to get the money through bank-issued payment cards, according to a new report from a consumer group.

People are using the fee-heavy cards instead of getting their payments deposited directly to their bank accounts. That’s because states issue bank cards automatically, require complicated paperwork or phone calls to set up direct deposit and fail to explain the card fees, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit group that seeks to protect low-income Americans from unfair financial-services products. An early copy of the report was obtained by The Associated Press.

Dean Baker: Timothy Geithner Saved Wall Street, Not the Economy

The accolades for Timothy Geithner came on so thick and heavy in the last week that it’s necessary for those of us in the reality-based community to bring the discussion back to earth. The basic facts of the matter are very straightforward. Timothy Geithner and the bailout he helped engineer saved the Wall Street banks. He did not save the economy.

We can’t know exactly what would have happened if we did not have the TARP in October of 2008. We do know there was a major effort at the time to exaggerate the dangers to the financial system in order to pressure Congress to pass the TARP.
 

Latest Pathetic Conservative Attack on Social Security: Disability Fraud Hysteria

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

January 28, 2013  |  Conservatives are not happy. Despite their best efforts, the public continues to give Social Security a big thumbs up [3], and the President has just launched his second term with a speech hailing the program as a force that strengthens America.

You can understand their frustration. They’ve tried so very hard to make Americans think that we cannot afford to treat sick, disabled and elderly people with dignity while we subsidize the rich and fight unnecessary wars. But the public hasn't bought their solvency fabrications. And we haven’t been fooled by various pretenses for cutting, from the “chained CPI” adjustment to extending the retirement age again [4]. Even the means-testing ruse [5], cloaked as sensitivity to the poor but intended to drain public support for the program, hasn’t worked out for them so far.
 

Paul Krugman: Makers, Takers, Fakers

Republicans have a problem. For years they could shout down any attempt to point out the extent to which their policies favored the elite over the poor and the middle class; all they had to do was yell “Class warfare!” and Democrats scurried away. In the 2012 election, however, that didn’t work: the picture of the G.O.P. as the party of sneering plutocrats stuck, even as Democrats became more openly populist than they have been in decades. 

As a result, prominent Republicans have begun acknowledging that their party needs to improve its image. But here’s the thing: Their proposals for a makeover all involve changing the sales pitch rather than the product. When it comes to substance, the G.O.P. is more committed than ever to policies that take from most Americans and give to a wealthy handful.

To End Extreme Poverty, Let’s Try Ending Extreme Wealth

By Sam Pizzigati | January 27, 2013 

The world’s wealthy gathered in the Alps again last week to discuss how to ‘solve’ the world’s problems. The world’s biggest problem, suggests one top global anti-poverty outfit, may be their fortunes.

Apologists for inequality have a standard retort to anyone who calls for a more equal distribution of the world’s treasure. If you took all the wealth of the wealthy and divvied it up equally among all the poor, the retort goes, no one would gain nearly enough to accomplish much of anything.

Oxfam International, one of the world’s premiere anti-poverty charitable organizations, would beg to differ. The world’s top 100 billionaires now hold so much wealth, says a new Oxfam report, that just the increase in their net worth last year would be “enough to make extreme poverty history four times over.”
 

Paul Krugman: Coin or Not, Is There a Plan?

If I'd spent the past five years living in a monastery or something, I would take the Treasury Department's recent declaration that the trillion-dollar coin option is out as a sign that there's some other plan ready to go. Maybe the 14th Amendment, maybe moral obligation coupons or some other form of scrip, but something.

And maybe there is a plan. But as we all know, the last debt ceiling confrontation crept up on the White House because President Obama refused to believe that Republicans would actually threaten to provoke default. Is the White House being realistic this time, or does it still rely on the sanity of crazies?
 

US unions' continued decline masks new forms of worker activism

Michael Paarlberg
guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 January 2013 12.39 EST
America's long and steady march toward a fully disposable workforce continues apace, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week. Union membership is at its lowest point in nearly a century, with just 11.3% of all workers – the same level it was in 1916. To put this in proper historical perspective, union members are as rare today as they were at a time when being one could get you shot to death in a mining camp by the Colorado national guard.

Not that there is a great public outcry to return to the halcyon days of garment factory fires and tubercular slaughterhouses, or workers rallying to demand their bosses take away their pensions and bathroom breaks. Surveys show that most people wish they had more, not less input into their working conditions, and that a majority of non-union workers would choose to join a union, given the opportunity. Most do not get that opportunity, whether due to outright intimidation, or the ongoing shift of large parts of the economy toward part-time, temporary, low-wage and no-benefit jobs.

Galbraith: Is This the End for the Deficit Drones? 

By James K. Galbraith

January 23, 2013  |  In wars, sometimes there comes a moment when the tide turns. The collapse of Ludendorff's offensive in 1918 presaged the Armistice;  failure in the Ardennes meant the end for Germany in 1944.

Today we have two drone wars in a similar state. One is mainly in Pakistan. Built on a gee-whiz technology that can't do what it promised, this war has claimed too many victims for too little effect. It is a diplomatic disaster and its days are numbered, almost surely, for that reason.

The other drone war is in Washington. The drones are in groups with names like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and Campaign to Fix the Debt. They drone on, and on, about the calamities that await unless we cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That the goal of the deficit drones is to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has been plain for years to anyone who looks at where the money comes from. It comes largely from Peter G. Peterson, a billionaire former secretary of Commerce under Nixon, who is Captain Ahab to Social Security's Moby Dick. And when one trick, such as privatization, falls flat, his minions always have another, whether it's raising the retirement age or changing the COLA. But a cut by any other name is still, and always, just a cut.

The Myth of Living Beyond Our Means

Friday, 25 January 2013 11:42  
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog | Op-Ed 

Brace yourself. In coming weeks you’ll hear there’s no serious alternative to cutting Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on middle class, and decimating what’s left of the federal government’s discretionary spending on everything from education and job training to highways and basic research.

“We” must make these sacrifices, it will be said, in order to deal with our mushrooming budget deficit and cumulative debt.
 

Billionaires Covertly Funding Attacks on Climate Science

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly


Secretive groups known as Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund are funneling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate science “without revealing the identities of [their] wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.”

Big surprise. An audit trail reveals that infamous American billionaire and financier of right-wing causes Charles Koch indirectly supports the Donors groups through a third-party organization called the Knowledge and Progress Fund. That group does not advertise its connection to Charles Koch and his brother, David Koch.

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, estimates that in the past decade roughly $500 million has been given to organizations bent on undermining the science of global warming, with much of the cash flowing through such stealth third parties.

As Federal Prosecutors Cash In, Big Bankers Go Unpunished

By Richard Eskow | January 28, 2013

We needed heroes after the financial crisis. Instead we got bureaucrats, compromisers, and perhaps something much worse. Federal law enforcement officials, our “thin gray line” against banker crime, were charged with restoring the balance of justice and reducing the threat of future crises. Seems they had other things on their minds.

Now the Obama administration’s first-term posse is riding off into the sunset. The most visible departure is Deputy Attorney General Lanny Breuer. Remember those submissive or avaricious sheriffs in the old Westerns, the ones who were always letting the bad guys run wild ?  ”Sorry, Ma’am, I’d like to help you and the boy but there ain’t nothin’ I can do.”  That’s Breuer, whose shattered credibility and extreme reluctance to prosecute has become the stuff of legend.
 

Boehner’s 10-Year Budget Plan: Take Unpopular Ryan Budget Cuts. Then Double Them.

By Bill Scher | January 25, 2013

To get House conservatives to capitulate on temporarily suspending the debt limit without securing any spending cuts, Boehner made a stunning pledge: the upcoming House budget would eliminate the deficit in 10 years.

As a talking point, that sounds great. As a budget, it is literally double the crazy of the last House Republican budget, written and personified by failed VP candidate Paul Ryan.
 

Iceland Inches Toward Direct Democracy

Sunday, 27 January 2013 07:10 
By Sam Knight, Truthout | News Analysis 

When the global financial system crumbled over four years ago, Iceland played host to one of the most dramatic economic collapses in modern history. Its three largest banks were unable to refinance debt roughly ten times the size of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), causing one of the world's wealthiest nations to limp with hat in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The island became a symbol for capitalism's systemic failure.

Now, Iceland is making headlines for more positive reasons: activists there are in the process of advancing some of the strongest freedom of information laws and journalist protections in the world, and the Icelandic economy, while still beset by problems, is significantly outperforming other crisis-stricken countries.

Senators’ secret plan to give Amgen half a billion in fiscal cliff deal reveals Capitol Hill’s ‘sordid swamp’

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Friday, January 25, 2013 12:55 EST

The inauguration of a president is one of those spectacles of democracy that can make us remember we’re part of something big and enduring. So for a few hours this past Monday the pomp and circumstance inspired us to think that government of, by, and for the people really is just that, despite the predatory threats that stalk it.

But the mood didn’t last. Every now and then, as the cameras panned upward, the Capitol dome towering over the ceremony was a reminder of something the good feeling of the moment couldn’t erase. It’s the journalist’s curse to have a good time spoiled by the reality beyond the pageantry. Just a couple of days before the inaugural festivities, The New York Times published some superb investigative reporting by the team of Eric Lipton and Kevin Sack, and their revelations were hard to forget, even at a time of celebration.

Don’t Buy Lies About Social Security

by Dave Zweifel

Let’s be brutally frank today: The claim by some of those Wall Street money changers and politicians like Wisconsin’s own Paul Ryan and many of his Republican colleagues that Social Security is contributing to the national debt and therefore needs to be “fixed” is nothing more than an outright lie.

Because the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to make sure that the Social Security Trust Fund was protected from the ever-changing political winds, it was set up as a separate self-financed system that gets its revenues from three sources — roughly 80 percent from the payroll tax of 6.2 percent for both the employee and employer (the 6.2 was reduced to 4.2 for employees to help provide relief during the recession and went back to 6.2 percent on Jan. 1), another 15 percent from interest earned by the trust fund, and the other 5 percent from taxes that Social Security recipients wind up paying at income tax time. In Social Security’s 75-year history, it has collected $15.5 trillion and currently has $2.6 trillion in the bank, enough money to pay full benefits until about 2037.

This is a Big, Big Deal

Josh Marshall, January 24, 2013, 7:08 PM


A week ago I noted a new Republican push to gerrymander the electoral college to make it almost impossible for Democrats to win the presidency in 2016 and 2020, even if they match or exceed Barack Obama’s vote margin in 2012. Is something like that really possible? Yes, very possible.

To review, here’s how it works. The US electoral college system is based on winner take all delegate allocation in all but two states. If you get just one more vote than the other candidate you get all the electoral votes. One way to change the system is go to proportional allocation. That would still give some advantage to the overall winner. But not much. The key to the Republican plan is to do this but only in Democratic leaning swing states — not in any of the states where Republicans win. That means you take away all the advantage Dems win by winning states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and so forth.

The Longest War is the One Against Women

A rape a minute, a thousand corpses a year: hate crimes in America (and elsewhere)

by Rebecca Solnit

 

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren’t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large.  Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern.

There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.
 

Why Filibuster Reform Died

Brian Beutler, January 24, 2013, 4:33 PM 

The big news today is that Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell have agreed to a very modest set of Senate rules reforms (I can’t call them filibuster reforms, because they don’t reform the modern filibuster at all). It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following the story for the past few weeks. When the majority’s big stick is threatening to use the nuclear option to impose very modest reforms because the party can’t reach internal consensus on anything meaningful — well, it mean things aren’t going very well. 
 

Paul Krugman: Deficit Hawks Down

President Obama’s second Inaugural Address offered a lot for progressives to like. There was the spirited defense of gay rights; there was the equally spirited defense of the role of government, and, in particular, of the safety net provided by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But arguably the most encouraging thing of all was what he didn’t say: He barely mentioned the budget deficit.

Mr. Obama’s clearly deliberate neglect of Washington’s favorite obsession was just the latest sign that the self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — are losing their hold over political discourse. And that’s a very good thing.
 

'Foodopoly:' Exposing the Handful of Corporations That Control Our Food System From Seed to Dinner Plate

By Wenonah Hauter

January 24, 2013  |  The following is an excerpt from Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America [3], published by The New Press and reprinted here with permission. Copyright © 2012 by Wenonah Hauter.

In 1963 my dad bought a ramshackle farm with rich but extremely rocky soil in the rural Bull Run Mountains of Virginia, forty miles southwest of Washington, D.C. Today it is on the verge of suburbia.

He grew up in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, rode the rails, and eventually, in his late fifties, found his way “back to the land.” So we moved to what was then a very rural landscape -- a place culturally a world away from the nation's capital and physically linked only indirectly by two-lane roads. Our old farmhouse, with a mile-long rutted driveway accessible only by fourwheel drive, was off another dirt road and had no electricity or plumbing. Eventually my dad did manage to get the local rural electricity co-op to put in poles and hook up power, but he never did get around to installing indoor plumbing.

He was an unusual man -- a religious iconoclast and an organic gardener at a time when few people knew the term. He was considered a crank and a hobby farmer, if you can call it that, growing a few vegetables and keeping bees. His wild-blossom honey was the only vaguely successful part of his farming venture. My dad, who died in 1991 at the age of eighty-one, would be shocked now to see both his farm and the massive development around it.

David Brooks Is Shocked When Tribes Let Sick People Die. He Also Wants to Cut Medicare.

By Richard Eskow | January 23, 2013

In his review of Jared Diamond’s new book, David Brooks is appropriately horrified by the stories of tribal women who were left to die rather than be cared for by their communities. He’s so horrified, in fact, that he seems to reject Diamond’s core thesis that these tribespeople have something to teach us about ourselves.

“It’s hard to know,” Brooks concludes with a nearly audible sigh. “They seem so distant.”

When he was done writing that review Brooks went back to one of his primary preoccupations, which is pushing for Medicare cuts. 
 

Glenn Greenwald: The Untouchables: How the Obama administration protected Wall Street from prosecutions

A new PBS Frontline report examines a profound failure of justice that should be causing serious social unrest

PBS' Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable.

What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.
 

What do the Beltway moderates actually want?

Centrist thinkers keep begging Barack Obama to pursue "bipartisan" goals he already supports 

By Alex Pareene

As David Brooks taught us last week, Barack Obama’s cunning plan to sabotage and undermine the Republican Party is to repeatedly force them to act as extremist and irresponsible as possible by proposing popular and sensible things that they refuse to support. By advocating gun control and immigration reform, two things Obama supports because he and most liberals believe them to be morally and politically necessary, Obama is tricking Republicans into revealing that they are dysfunctional, leaderless, and increasingly divided into two camps: the all-out crazies and the merely corrupt. This saddens David Brooks, naturally, because most things seem to sadden David Brooks, America’s Foremost Humility Expert.

But as the president begins his second term, I thought it’d be useful to try to figure out what “moderate Republican” columnists and “pox on both houses” centrists actually want the president to be doing. 
 

Paul Krugman: A New Industrial Revolution: The Rise of the Robots

It's taken me a while to get around to Bob Gordon's stimulating essay suggesting that the great days of economic growth are behind us. It's not that different from things he's been saying before, and I have in the past had a lot of sympathy for that view. I now believe, however, that his technological pessimism is wrong — or if you prefer, it's the wrong kind of pessimism. But this is definitely a discussion worth having.

Mr. Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University, argues, rightly in my view, that we've really had three industrial revolutions so far, each based on a different cluster of technologies.