Murrey Marder, Early McCarthy Skeptic, Dies at 93

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: March 19, 2013
By certain journalistic lights, the reporter Murrey Marder was an editor’s nightmare. He wrote slowly and squeezed against deadlines. He debated with editors. His articles were long, often complicated and never laid claim to stylish writing.

But by another, more important standard, Mr. Marder, who died on March 11 at 93, was an ace. In nearly 40 years at The Washington Post, he embodied the role of public watchdog, becoming an emblem of meticulous, thorough news gathering when his persistence in laying bare the lies and exaggerations of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade helped bring McCarthy to ruin.  

ALEC Is Now Deciding What You Eat 

Tuesday, 19 March 2013 15:07 
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Show | Report 

ALEC is back.

The Conservative corporate-friendly group funded in part by the Koch brothers and responsible for the infamous Stand Your Ground and Voter Suppression ID laws, and a slew of other corporate-friendly laws, now doesn't want you to know about the food that you're eating.

The way they come up with all this is that a couple of times a year they get corporate lobbyists and executives together in a fancy hotel or resort with mostly Republican state representatives and state senators. The ratio is roughly one-to-one of lobbyists to elected officials.
 

Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil

By Antonia Juhasz, Special to CNN
March 19, 2013 -- Updated 1507 GMT (2307 HKT)

Editor's note: Ten years ago ,the war in Iraq began. This week, we focus on the people involved in the war and the lives that changed forever. Antonia Juhasz, an oil industry analyst, is author of several books, including "The Bush Agenda" and "The Tyranny of Oil."

(CNN) -- Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil.

It has been 10 years since Operation Iraqi Freedom's bombs first landed in Baghdad. And while most of the U.S.-led coalition forces have long since gone, Western oil companies are only getting started.

Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq's domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms.

Gailbraith and Panitch: Is a New "New Deal" Possible? 

Wednesday, 20 March 2013 11:44  
By Paul Jay, The Real News Network | Interview and Video 

James K. Gailbraith and Leo Panitch discuss the 80th anniversary of the election of FDR and the significance of the New Deal.

TRANSCRIPT:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
It's been 80 years since the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. On the occasion of that, we are doing a series of interviews with various economists, discussing, debating the significance of the New Deal. And in this series we're going to ask the overall question: is a new New Deal possible given today's politics?

Now joining us to discuss this first of all is Professor James K. Galbraith. He's the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Government and Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He's the author of the book The Predator State, and more recently Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis.

Why the Trader Joe's Model Benefits Workers--And the Bottom-Line

Companies that invest in higher salaries for low-level employees find success in a competitive market.

By Sophie Quinton
Updated: March 21, 2013 | 11:07 a.m.
March 19, 2013 | 1:16 a.m.
The average American cashier makes $20,230 a year, a salary that in a single-earner household would leave a family of four living under the poverty line. But if he works the cash registers at QuikTrip, it’s an entirely different story. The convenience-store and gas-station chain offers entry-level employees an annual salary of around $40,000, plus benefits. Those high wages didn’t stop QuikTrip from prospering in a hostile economic climate. While other low-cost retailers spent the recession laying off staff and shuttering stores, QuikTrip expanded to its current 645 locations across 11 states.

Many employers believe that one of the best ways to raise their profit margin is to cut labor costs. But companies like QuikTrip, the grocery-store chain Trader Joe’s, and Costco Wholesale are proving that the decision to offer low wages is a choice, not an economic necessity. All three are low-cost retailers, a sector that is traditionally known for relying on part-time, low-paid employees. Yet these companies have all found that the act of valuing workers can pay off in the form of increased sales and productivity. 

America's Three-Tiered Justice System

Wednesday, 20 March 2013 00:00  
By Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis 

Big shots are above the law, the government now admits, but a three-tiered justice system has Congress churning out new bills to keep the prison industry booming.

"Equal Justice under Law," is the motto inscribed on the frieze of the United States Supreme Court building.

Sticklers for semantics say that the modifiers "equal" and "under law" in the Supreme Court's motto are redundant, because justice by definition is equal treatment under a system of written and publicly accessible rules. Whether that is the case is precisely what is at issue in America today.

America Is STILL Paying For The Civil War

Mike Baker, Associated Press | Mar. 19, 2013, 7:34 AM

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

 

Invasion of Iraq, 10 years later

The Center for Public Integrity

On the evening of March 19, 2003 — ten years ago — U.S. warplanes bombed a site in Baghdad that military officials believed was the hideout of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Although the failed attempt to kill him was followed two days later by hours of missile and bomb strikes, and then a ground invasion, it was an inauspicious start to a war that would lead to a lengthy U.S. occupation of Iraq and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. treasury. Almost 4,500 American troops were killed in the conflict and more than 32,000 were wounded.

Five years ago, in an effort to hold accountable the officials who led the United States into the Iraq war and orchestrated the war’s expansion, the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism combed through thousands of statements made by those officials about the war. The “Iraq; The War Card” project found hundreds of falsehoods, demonstrating that the policy underpinnings of the conflict were based in large measure on poor understanding, at best, or a manipulative public relations campaign, at worst.

Are Health Costs Really Slowing? And What Does it Mean If They Are?

Mar 19, 2013

[This post is based on Chapter 5 of the Council of Economic Advisers new Economic Report of the President.]

The fact shown in the first chart below—a decline in the rate of health spending per person—is becoming pretty widely known.  What’s not known is whether this trend will stick.  As I suggest below, based on the new ERP chapter, I think at least some of it will, and if it does, it signals one of the more important economic developments of our time, with far reaching implications for fiscal policy (and for jobs and growth too, but I’ll speak to that in a different post).

Paul Krugman: Giving Credence to the Wrong People

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is feeling dyspeptic — not for the first time — over a Washington Post article published earlier this month suggesting that slow growth is the new normal in the United States. In a recent online post, Mr. Baker wondered why we should listen to people who have been wrong about everything so far. But it’s actually worse than he said.

In the Washington Post article, the case for slow growth forever is mainly made by quoting Kevin Warsh, a former governor at the Federal Reserve.

Lesson of JPMorgan’s Whale Trade: Nothing Was Learned

by Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, March 19, 2013, 1 p.m.

People have learned their lesson.

We've been told that so many times since the near-death experiences of the financial crisis. Bankers and regulators have flipped roles: Now it's the bankers who are cautious and their overseers who are aggressive.

Details of JPMorgan Chase's multibillion-dollar trading loss — brought to light by a riveting and devastating report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — demonstrate what a sham that is. Bankers aren't acting cautious and chastened. Risk managers aren't in the ascendance on Wall Street. Regulators remain their duped and docile selves.

Direct Deposit and Social Security: Not so Nice for Those who Owe

posted by Nathalie Martin

Jonathan Ginsberg posted an interesting article on the National Association of Chapter 13 trustees web site this weekend, that will be relevant to many of our readers as well. Social security is now requiring all beneficiaries to set up direct deposit, which means the resulted funds could become available to executing creditors if there are any funds from any other source in the account as well. You might recall my blog about this some time back, which contains cites to some of the relevant law.

As my previous blog explains, Federal law provides that Social Security payments are exempt from garnishment from civil creditors. If, for example, a credit card lender sues you and obtains a judgment, that creditor cannot ask Social Security to withhold funds from your government check. While these protections do not apply with equal force to the IRS collecting a tax debt or a creditor collecting child support, all other creditors are not to touch social security funds under any circumstances.

Secretive U.S. Amendment Would Weaken Biotech Oversight

By Carey L. Biron

WASHINGTON, Mar 19 2013 (IPS) - Food safety advocates, environmentalists and health professionals here are engaging in a fervent last-minute campaign to highlight a controversial legislative amendment they say would gut the ability of both the judiciary and the federal government to regulate genetically modified agricultural products.

The U.S. Senate is slated to vote early this week on amendments to a massive, “must pass” bill that would fund the U.S. government’s operations beyond Mar. 27 to the end of this fiscal year. That bill – a piece of stopgap legislation known as a continuing resolution – is so important that leaders in the U.S. Senate had previously suggested that they would not include any potentially controversial amendments.
 

The Shame of America’s Gulag

By Chris Hedges

If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.
 
Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called “a prison within a prison.” Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he served for the second of two convictions—the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that portrayed his prison conditions.  

Corporate-Backed Trans-Pacific Partnership Shrouded in Secrecy  

Tuesday, 19 March 2013 09:15  
By Sam Knight, Truthout | News Analysis 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a multilateral trade deal currently being hammered out by the United States and ten other countries, could end up affecting every human being and dollar of wealth on the planet. The extent to which it will is clear to no one, apart from negotiators. But the deal, in its current form, has been in the works since 2010, involves Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, and is open to all 21 countries in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) region. US Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk, who just left his post in early March, and other top negotiators have said that they would welcome China, and recent reports in the Japanese and Australian media indicate that Japan is set to join. Thus, even the most minor of edits to the draft text could end up making or breaking people from Brisbane to Bangor. But legislators around the world are being kept in the dark about what they're voting on until the deal is hammered out; it's expected to be completed this year. When it's finished, if the experience of Congress here is any indication, legislators will be feeling extraordinary pressure from corporate lobbyists and their heads of state to accept the deal without a fuss.

Dean Baker: Capitalism, Steven Pearlstein, and Morality

The Washington Post had a major column by Steve Pearlstein on the front page of its Outlook section headlined, "Is Capitalism Moral?" The piece notes the sharp upward redistribution of income over the last three decades and asks whether we should just being willing to accept market outcomes.

Of course this question is absurd on its face. The upward redistribution of the last three decades was the result of deliberate government policies designed to redistribute income upward; it was not the natural workings of the market.
 

Oh no! It’s Climategate Three

by Paul Brown

In 2009, shortly before the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, hackers published a haul of climate scientists’ emails. That was Climategate One. Two years on came another batch, and a few days ago a third. Do they tell us anything about the science – or, perhaps, about the hackers? This Comment offers a few possible pointers.

Black ops” is what the military call it – using false radio messages, news releases and newspapers, leaflets, and creating conspiracy theories so the enemy is confused, demoralized and loses the stomach for the fight.

How Americans Lost the Right to Counsel, 50 Years After 'Gideon'

By Andrew Cohen

You have a right to an attorney in a criminal case, even if you cannot afford one. The Supreme Court said so half a century ago. But today that precious right is systematically ignored or undermined.

Next Monday, America will quietly mark one of the most profound anniversaries in its legal history. Exactly 50 years ago, on March 18, 1963, the United States Supreme Court unanimously announced in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Sixth Amendment guarantees to every criminal defendant in a felony trial the right to a lawyer. "Reason and reflection," Justice Hugo Black wrote, "require us to recognize that, in our adversary system of criminal justice, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided to him."

The Gideon decision, heralded in its own time, has profoundly changed America's criminal justice system ever since. In the past half century since the ruling, the constitutional right to counsel has ensured that millions of criminal suspects -- the guilty, the innocent, and the somewhere-in-between -- have been aided by earnest, capable lawyers. The mandate of Gideon has forced prosecutors to be fairer and more honest in their dealings with defendants. It has burdened trial judges with additional pretrial motions. As a result of all of that, in a justice system designed to test evidence rather than seek truth, the Gideon ruling undoubtedly has resulted in more accurate results at trial.

America’s Latest Phony Fiscal Crisis

By Simon Johnson - Mar 17, 2013

In most countries that experience a fiscal crisis, there is no ambiguity about the situation.

The government is unable to sell debt at a reasonable interest rate. This probably coincides with a broader shift out of domestic assets, as smart investors read the writing on the wall or in the newspapers. The currency collapses and, often, inflation accelerates. The government is forced to slash spending and, cap in hand, asks for help from the world’s least popular ambulance service: the International Monetary Fund.

No part of this description fits the modern U.S. Rates on government debt are very low, the currency isn’t depreciating rapidly and inflation seems stable. There is no imaginable circumstance under which the U.S. would need to borrow from the IMF. Yet this great land of innovation has undeniably invented its unique kind of fiscal crisis.

Paul Krugman: Marches of Folly, From Iraq to the Deficit

Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond
to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that
attack.

Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake — that the case for war was weak and
possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too
likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.
 

7 Things You Need to Know About the Shocking Cyprus Bailout Crisis That Has Everyone Freaked Out

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

March 17, 2013  |  Editor's Note: The parliamentary vote on the bailout has been delayed until Tuesday.

In a small island nation far, far away, the financial shit is hitting the fan. A new bailout package in the euro zone comes with terms that are causing a tsunami of anxiety across Europe and beyond. Here’s what’s happening and why it matters.

1. What the heck is going on?

Since 2008, the Greek economy has gone from bad to worse. As Greece’s economy collapsed, the European and Greek banks that held the nation’s debts should have been told to eat their losses, write off the debts, and replace their managements. Instead, the European Union stepped in to engineer one bailout after another. The prices for the bailouts were high: austerity policies that didn’t work. The result everywhere is that national income has fallen steeply, while the countries fall further into debt.

Cypriot banks got into trouble from their exposure to neighboring Greece. Finance ministers from euro countries and representatives from the IMF and the European Central Bank came up with a radical plan for a bailout to Cyprus’ banks: In exchange for €10 billion ($13 billion) in rescue money, creditors would impose a one-time tax of 6.75 percent on all bank deposits under €100,000 ($131,000) and 9.9 percent over that amount, while Cyprus cut government spending and raised revenues. The decision to make depositors pay was a stunning departure from past EU-led bailouts.

Government Debt and Deficits Are Not the Problem. Private Debt Is.

By Michael Hudson

(Remarks by Prof. Michael Hudson at The Atlantic’s Economy Summit, Washington DC, Wednesday, March 13, 2013)

There are two quite different perspectives in the set of speeches at this conference. Many on our morning panels – Steve Keen, William Greider, and earlier Yves Smith and Robert Kuttner – have warned about the economy being strapped by debt. The debt we are talking about is private-sector debt. But most officials this afternoon focus on government debt and budget deficits as the problem – especially social spending such as Social Security, not bailouts to the banks and Federal Reserve credit to re-inflate prices for real estate, stocks and bonds.

Glenn Greenwald: Charles Krauthammer's false statement about the US Constitution

To justify the president's War on Terror policies, the Washington Post columnist spreads a demonstrable myth

Charles Krauthammer's Washington Post column this morning, which calls on Congress to enact new legislation authorizing and regulating Obama's drone attacks, is actually worth reading. That's because it highlights the central fact about the Obama legacy when it comes to US militarism, war, and civil liberties. Referencing the monumental shift in how Democrats think about such matters now as compared to the Bush years, he writes:

"Such hypocrisy is the homage Democrats pay to Republicans when the former take office, confront national security reality, feel the weight of their duty to protect the nation — and end up doing almost everything they had denounced their predecessors for doing. The beauty of such hypocrisy, however, is that the rotation of power creates a natural bipartisan consensus on the proper conduct of this war . . .
"Necessity having led the Bush and Obama administrations to the use of near-identical weapons and tactics, a national consensus has been forged. Let's make it open."

That Obama has ushered in a "bipartisan consensus" for these policies - transforming them from the divisive symbols of right-wing extremism into the unchallenged framework of both parties' establishments - is indisputable, one of the most consequential aspects of his presidency.

This Man Wants You to Believe That BPA-Laced Plastic Is Harmless

—By Tom Philpott  |  Wed Mar. 13, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Bisphenol-A (BPA) is an industrial chemical found in everything from food-can linings to cigarette filters to retail receipts. Nationwide testing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found it in "nearly all" of its subjects. A growing body of research has established BPA as an endocrine-disrupting chemical that does harm at tiny doses. But is BPA no big deal, after all?

That's the message of a presentation given at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science last month by Justin Teeguarden, a scientist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a lab that operates under contract with the US Department of Energy. According to a PNNL press release about the presentation, Teeguarden analyzed 150 BPA exposure studies and found that "people's exposure may be many times too low for BPA to effectively mimic estrogen in the human body." The study's funder, the press release adds, was the US Environmental Protection Agency.

EXCLUSIVE - U.S. to let spy agencies scour Americans' finances

Wed, Mar 13 2013

By Emily Flitter and Stella Dawson and Mark Hosenball

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.

The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates.
 

NAFTA at 20: The New Spin

Saturday, 16 March 2013 10:29
By Manuel Perez-Rocha and Javier Rojo, Foreign Policy in Focus | News Analysis

Only a few years ago, analysts were warning that Mexico was at risk of becoming a “failed state.” These days, the Mexican government appears to be doing a much better PR job.
 
Despite the devastating and ongoing drug war, the story now goes that Mexico is poised to become a “middle-class” society. As establishment apostle Thomas Friedman put it in the New York Times, Mexico is now one of “the more dominant economic powers in the 21st century.”

How Monsanto outfoxed the Obama administration

The inside story of how the government let one company squash biotech innovation, and dominate an entire industry 

By Lina Khan

Last November, the U.S. Department of Justice quietly closed a three-year antitrust investigation into Monsanto, the biotech giant whose genetic traits are embedded in over 90 percent of America’s soybean crop and more than 80 percent of corn. Despite a splash of press coverage when the investigation was initially announced, its termination went mostly unreported. The DOJ released no written public statement. Only a brief press release from Monsanto conveyed the news.

The lack of attention belies the significance of the decision, both for food consumers around the world and for U.S. businesses. Experts who have examined Monsanto’s conduct say the Justice Department’s decision not to act all but officially establishes the firm’s sovereignty over the U.S. seed industry. Many of them also say the decision ratifies aggressive practices Monsanto used to entrench its dominance and deter competition. This includes highly restrictive contractual agreements that excluded rivals, alongside a multibillion-dollar spree to buy up seed companies.

Florida Legislature Pushing ALEC, CSG Sham Fracking Chemical Disclosure Model Bill

Friday, 15 March 2013 09:48  
By Steve Horn, DeSmogBlog | Report 

Florida may soon become the fourth state with a law on the books enforcing hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") chemical disclosure. The Florida House of Representatives' Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee voted unanimously (11-0) on March 7 to require chemical disclosure from the fracking industry. For many, that is cause for celebration and applause.

Fracking for oil and gas embedded in shale rock basins across the country and world involves the injection of a 99.5-percent cocktail of water and fine-grained sillica sand into a well that drops under the groundwater table 6,000-10,000 feet and then another 6,000-10,000 feet horizontally. The other .5 percent consists of a mixture of chemicals injected into the well, proprietary information and a "trade secret" under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which current President Barack Obama voted "yes" on as a Senator.
 

After a Powerful Lobbyist Intervenes, EPA Reverses Stance on Polluting Texas County’s Water

by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, March 13, 2013, 6 a.m.

When Uranium Energy Corp. sought permission to launch a large-scale mining project in Goliad County, Texas, it seemed as if the Environmental Protection Agency would stand in its way.

To get the ore out of the ground, the company needed a permit to pollute a pristine supply of underground drinking water in an area already parched by drought.

Further, EPA scientists feared that radioactive contaminants would flow from the mining site into water wells used by nearby homes. Uranium Energy said the pollution would remain contained, but resisted doing the advanced scientific testing and modeling the government asked for to prove it.
 

Paul Krugman: After the Flimflam

It has been a big week for budget documents. In fact, members of Congress have presented not one
but two full-fledged, serious proposals for spending and taxes over the next decade.

Before I get to that, however, let me talk briefly about the third proposal presented this week — the
one that isn’t serious, that’s essentially a cruel joke.

Way back in 2010, when everybody in Washington seemed determined to anoint Representative
Paul Ryan as the ultimate Serious, Honest Conservative, I pronounced him a flimflam man. Even
then, his proposals were obviously fraudulent: huge cuts in aid to the poor, but even bigger tax cuts
for the rich, with all the assertions of fiscal responsibility resting on claims that he would raise
trillions of dollars by closing tax loopholes (which he refused to specify) and cutting discretionary
spending (in ways he refused to specify).

Why it's one law for the rich in America and McJustice for the rest

Fifty years after the supreme court ordered states to provide legal counsel to all, Americans still only get the justice they can afford

David A Love
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 March 2013 10.30 EDT
With an historic vote in the state senate for repeal of that state's death penalty statute, Maryland is on track to become the 18th US state to abolish capital punishment. As much as such repeals are worth celebrating, though, they reform just one aspect of a criminal justice system in which poor defendants are provided shoddy, substandard legal representation, if any at all, and innocent people are convicted and imprisoned and, on occasion, may even have been executed.

Coincidentally, 18 March marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark US supreme court decision in Gideon v Wainwright, which ruled that states under the 14th amendment must provide counsel to criminal defendants who cannot afford a lawyer. The right to counsel already existed in federal criminal prosecutions under the sixth amendment, but the supreme court forcefully reiterated that.

The GOP Knows Power

Special Report: Today’s Republican Party doesn’t believe in democracy, at least not when an election is decided by the votes of blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and young urban whites comfortable with multiculturalism. Then, the outcome is deemed illegitimate and deserves obstruction, as Robert Parry explains.


By Robert Parry

Many Washington pundits are scratching their heads over Republican refusal to budge hardly at all in the face of electoral reversals in 2012 – whether on the budget, judicial appointments or other initiatives from reelected President Barack Obama. But that confusion misses a fundamental fact about the modern GOP: it is contemptuous of the public will and the democratic process.

Indeed, looking back over the last half century as today’s Republican Party was stitched together, the common thread has been a readiness to manipulate elections through dirty tricks, deceptions or the disenfranchisement of voting blocs seen as likely to support the Democratic Party. These strategies weave through GOP actions involving Executive, Legislative or Judicial authority, at both the federal and state levels.

The White House Still Doesn’t Know Who It’s Dealing With

By Terrance Heath | March 13, 2013

After listening to National Economic Advisor to the President Gene Sperling this morning, I think I have a better understanding of at least one reason why we ended up in this sequestration mess, and why no one in Washington can seem to figure way out of it. The White House didn’t know who it was dealing with on the Republican side of the negotiating table during the “fiscal cliff” fiasco. Even more distressing, now that the sequester is in effect, is the possibility that the White House still doesn’t know who it’s dealing with.

Sperling was one of this morning’s speakers at “The Economy Summit” in Washington, DC, sponsored by The Atlantic magazine. Sperling’s interview with Editor in Chief James Bennett followed a panel titled, “Debating America’s Addiction to Debt & Debt Debates: Which Matters More?”, featuring Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, economist Craig Alexander of TD Bank, Paul McCully of the Global Interdependence Center, Yves Smith from Naked Capitalism, and moderated by Financial Times columnist Edward Luce — who also acted as a rhetorical stand-in for Fix the Debt’s Maya MacGuineas, who arrived late.

Sherrod Brown Goes After the Big Banks

William Greider, March 13, 2013

In olden days, it used to be that the bad guys robbed the banks. Now it seems the bad guys are running the banks, at least the big ones, and robbing the rest of us. Nearly every day, newspapers have another disturbing report about how the largest and most influential banks managed to escape prosecution for their blatant fraud or else finagled outrageous subsidies and profits from their monopolistic dominance of the financial system. The worst that happens to privileged bankers who are “too big to fail” is an occasional scolding lecture from angry members of Congress.

Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, fresh from his impressive re-election victory last fall, is back again with a simple, straightforward solution: make the big boys smaller. He is working on legislation with Republican Senator David Vitter to break up the half-dozen mega-banks and strengthen capital standards. This forced downsizing would make space in the marketplace, allowing many more midsize and smaller banking institutions to flourish. It could also protect the nation from another disastrous bailout of Wall Street at public expense.

Why Americans Don’t Save — and What We Can Do About It

Five studies on American’s dwindling savings

March 7, 2013 • By Pacific Standard Staff
Imagine your car needs a new transmission. It’s going to cost $2,000. Can you scrape that together within the month? If so, you’re better off than nearly half your fellow Americans.

We’re used to thinking of the nation’s economic woes in terms of unemployment. But even our sobering jobless rate masks a deeper economic sickness. In 2011, the National Bureau of Economic Research reported that 44 percent of Americans say they would have trouble coming up with two grand in 30 days if they needed to. These “financially fragile” households—one medical bill or busted furnace away from bankruptcy—cut across low-income groups and the middle class alike. What unites this huge swath of America is not an employment problem, but a savings problem.

How industry scientists stalled action on carcinogen

David Heath, 6:00 am, March 13, 2013 Updated: 2:06 pm, March 13, 2013

HINKLEY, Calif. – Ten days before Christmas 1965, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. station chief Richard Jacobs walked a half-block on a dusty road lined with scraggly creosote shrubs to check out a neighbor’s toilet.

Jacobs carried with him a secret, something he referred to as the “chromate problem.”

Starting in 1952, the power company began mixing a toxic form of chromium with water to prevent rust at a new pipeline pumping station in Hinkley, a remote desert community united by a single school and a general store. PG&E dumped the chromium-laced water into a pond.
 

Dean Baker: Does Paul Ryan Want to Change the Relationship Between Americans and Their Government or Give Money to Rich People?

Ezra Klein looked at Paul Ryan's latest budget and told readers:

"Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career."

Well, that is one possibility. There is another option: Paul Ryan wants to makes rich people richer. I think the evidence supports the latter view.
 

A Smart and Principled Plan to End ‘Too Big to Fail’

By Richard Eskow | March 13, 2013

The CEO and Research Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas have written a clear, smart, and principled proposal for reforming our banking system, and for managing the moral and financial crises our too-big-to-fail banks have caused and perpetrated. The plan proposed by Richard Fisher and Harvey Rosenblum is clear, because it follows a simple three-point structure; smart, because it provides a comprehensive framework for reform; and principled, because it restores several fundamental principles to our banking system, include the “free-market” principle which conservatives claim (often falsely) to hold so dear.
 

11 Most Absurd Lies Conservatives Are Using to Brainwash America's School Kids

By Amanda Marcotte

March 11, 2013  |  If recent elections have taught us anything, it’s that young Americans have taken a decided turn to the left. Young voters delivered Obama the election: the under-44 set voted Obama and the over-45 set broke for Romney. The youngest voters, age 18-29, gave Obama a whopping 60% of their vote.

Now Republicans have a plan to try to recapture the youngest voters out there: Take over the curriculum in public schools, replace education with a bunch of conservative propaganda, and reap the benefits of having a new generation that can’t tell reality from right-wing fantasy.

Infants prefer individuals who punish those not like themselves, Yale researchers find

Infants as young as nine months old prefer individuals who punish those who are not like them, and this seemingly innate mean streak grows stronger in the next five months of life, a study by researchers at Yale University has found.

Babies, like adults, prefer individuals who like the same things they do. A new study reports that they want individuals who share their tastes to be treated well by others, but want those whose tastes differ from their own to be treated badly. The study of 200 nine- and 14-month-old infants was published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Why We Can’t Shop Our Way to a Real Economy

Wresting control of the real economy from corporate banks, commodity crops, and big-box retail means reversing policies that concentrate power at the top.

By Stacy Mitchell, adapted from her TEDx talk at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, October 20, 2012
March/April 2013 

 

At its core, the Boston Tea Party was an act of corporate sabotage. Those ships were owned by the British East India Company, the most powerful corporation of its day. The Company was tightly connected to the British government, so much so that when it stumbled and found itself teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, Parliament quickly stepped in and passed the Tea Act. The Tea Act created a special exemption for the British East India Company so that it could sell tea in the colonies without paying any tax. The idea was that it could undercut local tea merchants and take their business. So what ignited the Boston Tea Party was not so much a tax, but a corporate tax loophole.

 

Paul Krugman: Dwindling Deficit Disorder

For three years and more, policy debate in Washington has been dominated by warnings about the dangers of budget deficits. A few lonely economists have tried from the beginning to point out that this fixation is all wrong, that deficit spending is actually appropriate in a depressed economy. But even though the deficit scolds have been wrong about everything so far — where are the soaring interest rates we were promised? — protests that we are having the wrong conversation have consistently fallen on deaf ears.

What’s really remarkable at this point, however, is the persistence of the deficit fixation in the face of
rapidly changing facts. People still talk as if the deficit were exploding, as if the United States budget were on an unsustainable path; in fact, the deficit is falling more rapidly than it has for generations, it is already down to sustainable levels, and it is too small given the state of the economy.
 

Report: U.S. companies keeping $166 billion in offshore tax shelters

By Agence France-Presse
Monday, March 11, 2013 7:00 EDT

US companies are keeping more of their profits offshore, choosing overseas tax havens amid talk in Washington about closing corporate tax loopholes, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The business newspaper said its analysis of 60 big American companies had found that they had collectively parked a total of $166 billion offshore last year.

That shielded more than 40 percent of their annual profits from US taxes, the report said.

Beyond Deficit Scare-Mongering

Conservatives’ real aim in their fiscal brinkmanship is to gut Social Security and Medicare.

By Ellen Frank

U.S. politics seems stuck in an endless debate about the size of the federal deficit and federal debt. From congressional Republicans’ refusals to lift the debt ceiling, fears of the “fiscal cliff,” disputes about the “sequestration” and its automatic federal spending cuts, and upcoming debates on a new federal budget and the need for so-called entitlement reform (primarily cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid)—all hinge on the presumed need to get the U.S. budget in balance and curb deficit spending.

 

In a February appearance on ABCs “This Week,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the chair of the House Budget Committee and his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012, repeatedly raised fears of an imminent “debt crisis” if the government deficit and debt were not cut quickly and dramatically. “We want economic growth. We want job creation. We want people to go back to work. We want to prevent a debt crisis from hurting those who are the most vulnerable in society,” Ryan argued, “from giving us a European-like economy. In order to do that, you’ve got to get the debt and deficit under control and you’ve got to grow the economy.”

Paul Krugman: Bad Ideas That Will Never Die

Three decades ago, when I went off for my year in the United States government, an old hand explained to me the nature of the job: it was mostly about fighting bad ideas. And these bad ideas, he went on to explain, were like cockroaches: no matter how many times you flush them down the toilet, they keep coming back. Lovely image, isn't it? But I have been noticing a lot of cockroaches lately.

I recently gave a book talk at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which was actually a lovely event. But sure enough, there were people in the audience insisting that former Congressman Barney Frank, as part of a powerless Democratic minority in the House of Representatives, nonetheless somehow caused the recent housing bubble and the whole economic crisis; years of careful, evidence-based refutations from economists have made no impact at all on these people.

A President Who’ll Cut Social Security – And Liberals Who Love Him Too Much

By Richard Eskow< | March 8, 2013

The spectacle of a supposedly liberal President repeatedly and needlessly trying to cut Social Security is enough to bring a reasonable, economically literate person to the point of existential despair. To see leading liberal lights like Rachel Maddow and Ezra Klein chuckle indulgently at those foolish Republicans in Congress over the subject – Don’t they know he’s already giving them what they want? – is to risk plunging into the depths of that despair.

This week the President hosted a dinner for Republicans leaders where he worked to sell his budget proposal, including his harmful plan to cut benefits through the “chained CPI.” National Security was the main course and Social Security was the dessert.  And guess who wasn’t coming to dinner: The elderly, the disabled, or any policy experts who understand the disastrous implications of the chained CPI.

No, the United States Will Never, Ever Turn Into Greece

By Matthew O'Brien

There is no evidence that countries like the United States face debt tipping points

Have you read the opinion section of any newspaper in the last three years? Yes? Then there is a better-than-even chance you have come across some impressive-sounding analyst predict that the United States is "turning into Greece."

Maybe it's been a while, so we'll recap. The short version of this story is that we'll spend ourselves into bankruptcy. The longer version says that too much public debt makes markets nervous. Nervous markets demand higher interest rates. Higher rates mean higher deficits and lower growth, both of which mean more burdensome debt. More burdensome debt makes markets even more nervous. And around and around we go in a vicious circle into insolvency.

Chomsky: The Corporate Assault on Public Education

March 8, 2013  |  Let’s turn to the assault on education, one element of the general elite reaction to the civilizing effect of the ‘60s. On the right side of the political spectrum, one striking illustration is an influential memorandum written by Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer working for the tobacco industry, later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon. At the other end of the narrow spectrum, there was an important study by the Trilateral Commission, liberal internationalists from the three major state capitalist industrial systems: the US, Europe and Japan. Both provide good insight into why the assault targets the educational system.

Let's start with the Powell memorandum. Its title is, “The Attack on the American Free-Enterprise System." It is interesting not only for the content, but also for the paranoid tone. For those who take for granted the right to rule, anything that gets out of control means that the world is coming to an end, like a spoiled three-year-old. So the rhetoric tends to be inflated and paranoid.

The War on Entitlements

By Thomas B. Edsall

The debate over reform of Social Security and Medicare is taking place in a vacuum, without adequate consideration of fundamental facts.

These facts include the following: Two-thirds of Americans who are over the age of 65 depend on an average annual Social Security benefit of $15,168.36 for at least half of their income.

Currently, earned income in excess of $113,700 is entirely exempt from the 6.2 percent payroll tax that funds Social Security benefits (employers pay a matching 6.2 percent). 5.2 percent of working Americans make more than $113,700 a year. Simply by eliminating the payroll tax earnings cap — and thus ending this regressive exemption for the top 5.2 percent of earners — would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, solve the financial crisis facing the Social Security system.

Paul Krugman: The Market Speaks

Four years ago, as a newly elected president began his efforts to rescue the economy and
strengthen the social safety net, conservative economic pundits — people who claimed to
understand markets and know how to satisfy them — warned of imminent financial disaster.
Stocks, they declared, would plunge, while interest rates would soar.

Even a casual trawl through the headlines of the time turns up one dire pronouncement after
another. “Obama’s radicalism is killing the Dow,” warned an op-ed article by Michael Boskin, an
economic adviser to both Presidents Bush. “The disciplinarians of U.S. policy makers return,”
declared The Wall Street Journal, warning that the “bond vigilantes” would soon push Treasury
yields to destructive heights.

Recent Heat Spike Like Nothing in 11,000 Years

Seth Borenstein, March 7, 2013, 10:23 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new study looking at 11,000 years of climate temperatures shows the world in the middle of a dramatic U-turn, lurching from near-record cooling to a heat spike.

Research released Thursday in the journal Science uses fossils of tiny marine organisms to reconstruct global temperatures back to the end of the last ice age. It shows how the globe for several thousands of years was cooling until an unprecedented reversal in the 20th century.

With Millions in Assets And Hundreds of Attorneys, Christian Right Is Waging War on the Church-State Wall 

By Rob Boston

March 5, 2013  |  Stanford Law School in California is a prestigious institution with a distinguished past. Founded in 1893, one of its first professors was a former president, Benjamin Harrison.

When the school opened new offices in 1975, another president, Gerald Ford, was on hand for the festivities. On its website, Stanford proudly calls itself “one of the nation’s top law schools.” U.S. News & World Report agrees and ranks the school number two in the nation, behind only Yale Law School.
It came as quite a surprise, then, when officials at Stanford announced recently that they would open a “Religious Liberty Clinic” thanks to a $1.6 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation that was funneled through the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C.-based legal group that seeks to undermine church-state separation with arguments straight out of the Religious Right’s playbook.

The creation of such a clinic at one of the nation’s best law schools underscores the incredible growth, financial power and political influence of the Religious Right’s legal organizations. Thirty years ago, fundamentalist Protestant and ultra-conservative Catholic political forces were represented in court by small, ill-funded and mostly ineffective outfits that few took seriously. They certainly didn’t have the clout to graft themselves onto major law schools.

Dean Baker: Has NPR Joined Peter Peterson's Crusade Against Social Security and Medicare?

Wednesday, 06 March 2013 05:30

The most striking feature of the U.S. economy over the last three decades has been the upward redistribution of income. The top 1.0 percent of households has managed to pocket the vast majority of gains over this period. That is a sharp contrast with the three decades immediately following World War II when the benefits of much more rapid growth were broadly shared.

This pattern of growth might lead people to question the policies that have led to this upward redistribution (e.g. trade policy, labor policy, monetary policy, and anti-trust policy). In order to prevent such questioning and to further the process of upward redistribution many wealthy people have sought to focus public attention on programs that benefit the middle class and/or poor.

From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads

In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in a veteran of Central America's dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centres, torture and a spiral into sectarian carnage

Mona Mahmood, Maggie O'Kane, Chavala Madlena, Teresa Smith, Ben Ferguson, Patrick Farrelly, Guy Grandjean, Josh Strauss, Roisin Glynn, Irene Baqué, Marcus Morgan, Jake Zervudachi and Joshua Boswell
The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 11.16 EST
An exclusive golf course backs onto a spacious two-storey house. A coiled green garden hose lies on the lawn. The grey-slatted wooden shutters are closed. And, like the other deserted luxury houses in this gated community near Bryan, Texas, nothing moves.

Retired Colonel Jim Steele, whose military decorations include the Silver Star, the Defence Distinguished Service Medal, four Legions of Merit, three Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart, is not at home. Nor is he at his office headquarters in Geneva, where he is listed as the chief executive officer of Buchanan Renewables, an energy company. Similar efforts to track him down at his company's office in Monrovia are futile. Messages are left. He doesn't call back.

Noam Chomsky: Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?

March 5, 2013  |  There is “capitalism” and then there is “really existing capitalism.”

The term “capitalism” is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the “too-big-to-fail” government insurance policy for banks.

The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney in his new book “Digital Disconnect.”

“Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz.
 

Dean Baker: The Scary Truth About Seniors and Money

March 3, 2013  |  I realize that Pew is a very prestigious outfit, but Pew's garbage is still garbage. It's report on wealth by age group, or at least the interpretation that it and others have given this report, fits the bill.

A couple of years ago, Pew did an analysis [2] that gave breakdowns of wealth by age group. It found that the median household over the age of 65 had $170,500 in net worth. I was actually pleased that they came up with this number, since it meant that theprojections that I had done more than two years earlier [3] with my colleague David Rosnick were almost right on the nose. It's always gratifying to see other researchers independently corroborate your findings.

But what was remarkable about this report was that the Pew researchers took this number as evidence of the affluence of the elderly. The study points out that this was a 42 percent real increase from the 1984 level. By contrast, households under age 35 saw their median net worth fall by 68 percent to just $3,700. This disparity in wealth by age continues to be the take away from this report in the media [4].

The CISPA Government Access Loophole

March 1, 2013 | By Kurt Opsahl

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act—CIPSA, the so-called “cybersecurity” bill—is back in Congress. As we've written before, the bill is plagued with privacy problems and we’re urging concerned users to email their Representatives to oppose it.
 
Many of the bill’s problems stem from its vague language.  One particularly dangerous provision, designed to enable corporations to obtain and share information, is drafted broadly enough to go beyond just companies, creating a government access loophole. 

Drowned Polar Bear Paper Vindicated - Again

Interior Rejects IG Call for Further Scientific Reviews yet Case Remains Open 

Posted on Feb 14, 2013
Washington, DC — The U.S. Department of Interior has found no scientific error in a high profile research paper by its scientists on sightings of polar bears drowned in open water following a storm, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). This is another black eye for the agency’s Office of Inspector General (IG), which has waged a controversial but fruitless campaign against the paper’s authors for nearly three years.

Since March 2010 the IG has vigorously pursued unspecified allegations about the peer-reviewed observational note published in a 2006 issue of the journal Polar Ecology, which galvanized public understanding of the effects of sea ice loss and other climate changes in the Arctic. The lead author is Dr. Charles Monnett, a senior scientist with Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).
 

A Baptist Historian Responds to "Lies"

Frederick Clarkson
Sun Mar 03, 2013 at 02:06:57 PM EST

Bruce Gourley, Executive Director of the Baptist History & Heritage Society, maintains a helpful web site, Church/State Separation, A Historical Primer.   He writes:

America's historical commitment to freedom...  has taken an unexpected turn in modern America. In short, the closing decades of the twentieth century to the present have witnessed an intense effort, spearheaded by many conservative and fundamentalist Christians, to discard our nation's heritage of church state separation in favor of government favoritism of certain expressions of faith, and hence a curtailing of religious freedom for all. 

Constructed upon phony history, this theocratic-leaning quest makes a mockery of America's religious heritage and endangers the very foundations of American government and freedom.

One section of his web site is devoted to how to respond to the "lies" told by the Religious Right about church state separation. He invites readers to reprint this section as long as it is properly credited.
 

Paul Krugman: Mooching Off Medicaid

Conservatives like to say that their position is all about economic freedom, and hence making government’s role in general, and government spending in particular, as small as possible. And no doubt there are individual conservatives who really have such idealistic motives.

When it comes to conservatives with actual power, however, there’s an alternative, more cynical view of their motivations — namely, that it’s all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, about giving more to those who already have a lot. And if you want a strong piece of evidence in favor of that cynical view, look at the current state of play over Medicaid. 

Deficit hawks' 'generational theft' is a sham

The idea that we're spending much more on our seniors than our children is wrong on the numbers and wrong on the implications.

By Michael Hiltzik
February 27, 2013

Here's a phrase you can expect to be hearing a lot in the national debate over fiscal policy, as we move past the "sequester," which is the crisis du jour, and toward the budget cliff/government shutdown deadline looming at the end of March:

"Generational theft."

The core idea the term expresses is that we're spending so much more on our seniors than our children that future generations are being cheated. An important corollary is that the government debt we incur today will come slamming down upon the shoulders of our children and grandchildren.

Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?

By the Editors Feb 20, 2013 6:30 PM ET

On television, in interviews and in meetings with investors, executives of the biggest U.S. banks -- notably JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon -- make the case that size is a competitive advantage. It helps them lower costs and vie for customers on an international scale. Limiting it, they warn, would impair profitability and weaken the country’s position in global finance.

So what if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers?
 

Paul Krugman: Ben Bernanke, Hippie

We’re just a few weeks away from a milestone I suspect most of Washington would like to forget: the start of the Iraq war. What I remember from that time is the utter impenetrability of the elite prowar consensus. If you tried to point out that the Bush administration was obviously cooking up a bogus case for war, one that didn’t bear even casual scrutiny; if you pointed out that the risks and likely costs of war were huge; well, you were dismissed as ignorant and irresponsible. 

It didn’t seem to matter what evidence critics of the rush to war presented: Anyone who opposed the war was, by definition, a foolish hippie. Remarkably, that judgment didn’t change even after everything the war’s critics predicted came true. Those who cheered on this disastrous venture continued to be regarded as “credible” on national security (why is John McCain still a fixture of the Sunday talk shows?), while those who opposed it remained suspect.
 

News outlets unearth more Donors Trust recipients

Series of recent reports aim to reveal beneficiaries of conservative charity's dollars

By Paul Abow, 6:00 am, February 26, 2013 Updated: 11:37 am, February 26, 2013

Virginia-based charity Donors Trust has promised anonymity to donors who seek to fund “sensitive or controversial” issues.

A Center for Public Integrity report last week lifted that veil — at least partially — revealing dozens of conservative foundations that together in recent years have given tens of millions of dollars to Donors Trust .

Donors Trust, in turn, has funded a nationwide network of free-market think tanks, media outlets and university programs to the tune of nearly $400 million since 2002.
 

The Right Wing Takes Aim at Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is under attack this week in the Supreme Court by Shelby County, Alabama, backed by much of the legal infrastructure of the Right. 

 

While the Roberts Court Considers Turning the Clock Back, 21st Century Progressives Need to Fight for Strong Democracy

By Jamie Raskin

“The past isn’t dead.  It isn’t even past.”    --William Faulkner

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, the monumental statutory achievement of Congress in the last century, is under attack this week in the Supreme Court by Shelby County, Alabama, backed by much of the legal infrastructure of the American right.

When Chief Justice Roberts and his fellow “color blind” arch-conservatives take up the ominous Shelby County v. Holder¹  on Wednesday, hold your breath. Despite the painstaking rejection of Shelby County’s arguments below in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the far right is salivating because Chief Justice Roberts, in a near-miss decision on the same subject in 2009, has already expressed the sentiment of his colleagues in the majority that the Act now “raises serious constitutional questions.”² Of course, John Roberts was never much of a fan--as a lawyer, he tried to kill the implementation of a “results” test for voting rights violations under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it came up for reauthorization in 1982.

Barbara and John Ehrenreich: The Real Story Behind the Crash and Burn of America's Managerial Class

February 19, 2013  |  Every would-be populist in American politics purports to defend the “middle class,” although there is no agreement on what it is. Just in the last couple of years, the “middle class” has variously been defined as everybody, everybody minus the 15 percent living below the federal poverty level; or everybody minus the very richest Americans. Mitt Romney famously excluded [4] “those in the low end” but included himself (2010 income $21.6 million) along with “80 to 90 percent” of Americans. The Department of Commerce has given up on income-based definitions, announcing in a 2010 report that “middle class families” are defined “by their aspirations more than their income […]. Middle class families aspire to home ownership, a car, college education for their children, health and retirement security and occasional family vacations”—which excludes almost no one.

Class itself is a muddled concept, perhaps especially in America, where any allusion to the different interests of different occupational and income groups is likely to attract the charge of “class warfare.” If class requires some sort of “consciousness,” or capacity for concerted action, then a “middle class” conceived of as a sort of default class—what you are left with after you subtract the rich and the poor—is not very interesting.

Capitalism is so broken it can’t be fixed

Commentary: Saving capitalism will not save America

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Clayton Christensen, one of the world’s brilliant minds on business innovation, believes capitalism is broken. Needs a fix.

But look closely at his three innovations for saving capitalism. He’s really talking about saving America from a broken political system that was broken by capitalists. What if it’s the other way around? If capitalism is America’s biggest problem, why save it? 

This story begins with Andy Grove. He once held up Christensen’s 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” at a Las Vegas Comdex trade show and said it was “the most important book I’ve read in 10 years.” Why? Solving the “innovator’s dilemma” helped Grove build Intel into what’s now a $100 billion semiconductor giant.
 

UC Santa Barbara scientists develop a whole new way of harvesting energy from the sun

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — A new method of harvesting the Sun's energy is emerging, thanks to scientists at UC Santa Barbara's Departments of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Materials. Though still in its infancy, the research promises to convert sunlight into energy using a process based on metals that are more robust than many of the semiconductors used in conventional methods. The researchers' findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

"It is the first radically new and potentially workable alternative to semiconductor-based solar conversion devices to be developed in the past 70 years or so," said Martin Moskovits, professor of chemistry at UCSB.

In conventional photoprocesses, a technology developed and used over the last century, sunlight hits the surface of semiconductor material, one side of which is electron-rich, while the other side is not. The photon, or light particle, excites the electrons, causing them to leave their postions, and create positively-charged "holes." The result is a current of charged particles that can be captured and delivered for various uses, including powering lightbulbs, charging batteries, or facilitating chemical reactions.
 

Dean Baker: Fix the Economy, Not the Deficit

As the sequester looms, what's most clear is that both parties have given in to the idea that our chief problem is deficits.

It’s hard to be happy about the prospect of the sequester—the huge, automatics cuts to domestic spending set to take place if lawmakers can't reach a long-term budget deal—going into effect at the end of the week. Not only will it will mean substantial cuts to important programs; it will be a further drag on an already weak economy, shaving 0.6 percentage points off our growth rate. The end of the payroll tax cut, which expired on January 1, has already pushed it down to around 2.0, but the sequester cuts will depress it below the rate needed to keep pace with those entering the labor market. As a result, we are likely to see a modest increase in unemployment over the course of the year if the cuts are left in place.

Of course, it could be worse. Half of the cuts are on the military side. This will help to bring our bloated military sector closer to its pre-September 11 share of the economy, and going forward, the principle that domestic cuts be matched by cuts in defense spending is certainly better than the idea of attacking domestic spending alone. In addition, the most important programs in the budget—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—have been largely spared the ax—an important victory in the 2011 negotiations.
 

The Next Denialism about Dominionism

Frederick Clarkson
Sat Feb 23, 2013 at 11:20:43 PM EST

In the summer of 2011 several journalists and bloggers wrote about the obvious dominionist views, history and involvements of several major Republican politicians -- notably Religious Right favorite, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.  Dominionism (generally the idea that Christians of the correct sort, should dominate all aspects of society, including in politics and government) has been the main ideological engine of the Christian Right for decades, and continues to be more the case rather than less.  We should not have been surprised when the journalists and bloggers who had been writing about these things were the subject of a high profile smear campaign -- some of us by name, others of us by implication.

This profoundly animating, theocratic ideology cuts both ways for the Religious Right and aligned politicians. Dominionism has benefited the movement -- which aspires at once to religious transcendence, cultural control and political power.  But it is also controversial, even within evangelicalism, and rightly concerns people who believe in such basic civic values as respect for constitutional democracy, religious pluralism and separation of church and state -- not to mention reproductive rights and LGTB civil rights.
 

Paul Krugman: Austerity, Italian Style

Two months ago, when Mario Monti stepped down as Italy’s prime minister, The Economist opined that “The coming election campaign will be, above all, a test of the maturity and realism of Italian voters.” The mature, realistic action, presumably, would have been to return Mr. Monti — who was essentially imposed on Italy by its creditors — to office, this time with an actual democratic mandate.

Well, it’s not looking good. Mr. Monti’s party appears likely to come in fourth; not only is he running well behind the essentially comical Silvio Berlusconi, he’s running behind an actual comedian, Beppe Grillo, whose lack of a coherent platform hasn’t stopped him from becoming a powerful political force.
 

India's rice revolution: Chinese scientist questions massive harvests

Revelations in last week's Observer Food Monthly have created controversy over the truth of record yields

John Vidal
The Observer, Saturday 23 February 2013 07.06 EST
China's leading rice scientist has questioned India's claims of a world record harvest, following a report in last week's Observer of astonishing yields achieved by farmers growing the crop in the state of Bihar.

Professor Yuan Longping, known as the "father of rice", said he doubted whether the Indian government had properly verified young Indian farmer Sumant Kumar's claim that he had produced 22.4 tonnes of rice from one hectare of land in Bihar in 2011.

Yuan, director-general of China's national rice research centre and holder of the previous record of 19.4 tonnes a hectare, asked: "How could the Indian government have confirmed the number after the harvesting was already done?" 
 

Sequestration Sacrifices Jobs to Save Billionaire Tax Breaks

by John Nichols 

 

There is a great deal of talk about how Republican senators have gone off the rails in their opposition to the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to serve as Secretary of Defense. And there have been some bizarre deviations, with senators making pronouncements based on internet rumors and unfounded speculation.

But none of the fantastical filibustering of the Hagel fight can compare with the delusional dialogue regarding the federal budget.
 

Washington’s Stupid, Destructive Game

By Richard Eskow | February 24, 2013 

It’s Monday morning in America. That means we’re about to endure another week of pointless debate over the precise methods by which our federal government will impose more needless misery on the hapless population, instead of addressing its eminently fixable economic problems.

Readers of our nation’s newspapers might be forgiven for believing that the citizens of our nation have been condemned to some sort of quotidian hell as punishment for our collective crimes, where we must suffer the pangs of deprivation while listening to endless debates about how best to compound our misery.

4 Bogus Right-Wing Theories About Poverty, and the Real Reason Americans Can’t Make Ends Meet (Hard Times USA)

By Joshua Holland

January 22, 2013  |  When is a secret not at all secret? Consider the fact that one in three Americans are poor, if we define it as struggling to cover the basic necessities of life. That's according to a Census Bureau analysis, and it was reported in the New York Times, but I have yet to hear a politician or pundit make reference to this eye-opening reality of our vaunted “new economy.”

In 2011, the Census Bureau took a new look at the “near-poor” – Americans with incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the poverty line. They found that this group, most of whom earn paychecks and pay taxes, represented a whopping one in six U.S. households – a figure that was almost twice as high as had previously been thought.

When those under the poverty line are added, Census found that a stunning 33 percent of the population was struggling to make ends meet in 2010. Analyzing the Census data, the Working Poor Project suggested [3] that the number of near-poor, which they define as those making between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty line, continued to inch up in 2011 as many returning to work in this sluggish recovery have been forced to settle for lower-paying service jobs.

When You're Cutting Social Security, 'Wealthy' Begins at $25K

by Jim Naureckas

Here's a proposal for Social Security that was on the New York Times' op-ed page Wednesday (2/20/13):

The top third of beneficiaries (by lifetime income) [would] receive no annual cost-of-living adjustment in retirement. The middle third would get half of today’s adjustment, and the bottom third would receive the same annual increase they do now. Such a reform…would reduce Social Security spending by more than a tenth over a decade and fix the program’s long-term financing.

This is part of Paul Ryan adviser Yuval Levin's attempt to find "common ground" on the entitlement issue: "Both sides should agree at least to spend less money on the wealthy." So who are these "wealthy" people who would be getting a benefit cut equal to the rate of inflation every year? According to the SSA, about 34 percent of people over 65 have family incomes of $50,000.