The Secret to Finland's Success With Schools, Moms, Kids—and Everything

The country has cheaper medical care, smarter children, happier moms, better working conditions, less-anxious unemployed people, and lower student loan rates than we do. And that probably will never change. 

Olga Khazan Jul 11 2013, 8:58 AM ET

It's hard not to get jealous when I talk to my extended family.

My cousin's husband gets 36 vacation days per year, not including holidays. If he wants, he can leave his job for a brief hiatus and come back to a guaranteed position months later.

Tuition at his daughter's university is free, though she took out a small loan for living expenses. Its interest rate is 1 percent.
 

McJobs Are the Future: Why You Should Care What Fast Food Workers Earn

Maybe most McDonald's workers don't make a career of fast food today. But will that be true in 10 or 15 years? 

Jordan Weissmann, Jul 16 2013, 8:08 PM ET

As I wrote earlier today, the corporate brass at McDonald's seem to believe that in order to survive on what they pay their restaurant workers, you need a second job. And hey, credit where it's due: they're probably right. Fast food wages are terrible. If you're relying on a minimum- or near-minimum-wage check each month, it means you're living life on the financial precipice.

Since this out, however, I've gotten a few pointed responses from readers, the gist of which was captured pretty well in this tweet by Vincent from Chicago (I assure you, I'm the one getting yelled at):

Paul Krugman: The Paradox of Flexibility

Bruce Bartlett’s latest has some interesting history from the 1930s that just so happens to bear on my mild chiding of Noah Smith (Smith has an answer that, frankly, I don’t understand — but he’s been such a good guy over time that I’m just going to let this one drop). Anyway, Bartlett focuses largely on the malign influence of Henry Hazlitt, who was among other things writing many editorials for the New York Times, always insisting that the answer to the Great Depression was to encourage big cuts in wages.

Here’s an easy way to protect coastal communities from rising seas and storms

By John Upton

Protecting nature is the best way of protecting ourselves from rising tides and storm surges, according to new research.

Sand dunes, wetlands, coral reefs, mangroves, oyster beds, and other shoreline habitats that ring America help to protect two-thirds of the coastlines of the continental U.S. from hurricanes and other such hazards.

Each degree of global warming might ultimately raise global sea levels by more than 2 meters

07/15/2013 - Greenhouse gases emitted today will cause sea level to rise for centuries to come. Each degree of global warming is likely to raise sea level by more than 2 meters in the future, a study now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows. While thermal expansion of the ocean and melting mountain glaciers are the most important factors causing sea-level change today, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be the dominant contributors within the next two millennia, according to the findings. Half of that rise might come from ice-loss in Antarctica which is currently contributing less than 10 percent to global sea-level rise.

Dean Baker: Stiglitz Explains How Patent Protection Both Slows Growth and Increases Inequality

Very nice column from one of my favorite Nobel prize winning economists. Stiglitz explains some of the ways in which patent protection impedes growth and increases inequality.

It's great to see Stiglitz raising alternatives to patents for financing research, but I would disagree with the prize for patent buyouts that he proposes as being the best alternative. I have always preferred a system of direct upfront funding, which could be done through private firms operating on long-term contracts. In response to  a number of requests, here is the argument in brief. (Here's a little longer discussion.)
 

Part 2: Correcting the Pentagon's Distorted Budget History

By Winslow Wheeler | July 16, 2013

Given the warped measures that high-spending advocates and the Defense Department use to calibrate past, present and future defense spending (described here Monday), it is important to find an independent, objective yardstick to measure Pentagon spending trends accurately.

Unfortunately, there isn’t one.

If there were, this debate would be over, and I could retire.
 

Part 1: Cooked Books Tell Tall Tales

By Winslow Wheeler July 15, 2013

The Pentagon’s budget has increased, over time, much more than the Defense Department tells Congress, and the public.

The vast majority of people in Washington who consider themselves experts on the defense budget also have little idea just how large the increases have been.

Using standard, generally-accepted economic measures to keep the value of dollars spent over time on an equal footing,

Dean Baker: The Return of Larry Summers?

According to accounts in the business press, there is a campaign among Washington insiders to get Larry Summers appointed as Ben Bernanke’s replacement as Federal Reserve Board chair. This could end up being the scariest horror movie of the summer.

It is bizarre that Summers would be seriously considered as the next Fed chair if for no other reason that there is an obvious replacement for Bernanke already sitting at the Fed. Janet Yellen, the vice-chair, has in the past served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, a member of the Board of Governors in the 1990s and head of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also has an impressive academic background, having been a professor at both Berkeley and Harvard.

House Republican GSE Bill Would Codify MERS, Pre-Empt Private Property Rights

By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen

The top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee has tucked a provision into his mortgage finance reform bill that would create a privately held “National Mortgage Data Repository.” The repository would basically look like MERS, the bank-owned electronic database tracking mortgage transfers. The difference is that, while MERS’ activities have drawn legal challenges across the country, the National Mortgage Data Repository would have the force of statute to carry out the exact same behavior. According to the bill text, any document arising from this repository would be seen as presumptively legal, pre-empting state and federal laws on demonstrating the right to foreclose.

Remember Citigroup

By Simon JohnsonOn Thursday of last week, four senators unveiled the 21^st Century Glass-Steagall Act.  The pushback from people representing the megabanks was immediate but also completely lame – the weakness of their arguments against the proposed legislation is a major reason to think that this reform idea will ultimately prevail.

The strangest argument against the Act is that it would not have prevented the financial crisis of 2007-08.  This completely ignores the central role played by Citigroup.

Five Important SCOTUS Rulings You Didn’t Hear About

Sunday, 14 July 2013 12:34
By Crystal Shepeard, Care2 | Report

The Supreme Court is on a summer break, after a session that was controversial and history making. However, behind the high profile cases making headlines were more than 70 other important cases decided without much fanfare.

Here are five that you may have missed while celebrating under rainbow flags and shedding tears about voter suppression.

Massachusetts’ Simple Solution for Preventing Domestic Homicide

By Amanda Marcotte | Posted Monday, July 15, 2013, at 10:56 AM

In theory, domestic homicide should be easy to prevent, since men who kill their wives or girlfriends (85 percent of victims are female) generally give us lots of warning by beating, stalking, and even raping their victims, usually for years before they finally kill. In reality, it's surprisingly hard to stop someone who really wants to murder you, especially if he has easy access to a gun. Restraining orders don't create a magic force field around the victim. Shelters help, but they are underfunded and depend on the victim giving up substantial rights to hold a job (which gives the abuser the ability to find you), have a social life, or even speak to family members. And trying to figure out which abusers are just run-of-the-mill woman batterers and which will actually kill is surprisingly hard to do.

Paul Krugman: Hunger Games, U.S.A.

Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we’re talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.

The occasion for these observations is, as you may have guessed, the monstrous farm bill the
House passed last week.

Locking Out the Voices of Dissent

Posted on Jul 14, 2013

By Chris Hedges

NEW YORK—The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. The vast state surveillance system, detailed in Edward Snowden’s revelations to the British newspaper The Guardian, at the same time ensures that no action or protest can occur without the advanced knowledge of our internal security apparatus. This foreknowledge has allowed the internal security systems to proactively block activists from public spaces as well as carry out pre-emptive harassment, interrogation, intimidation, detention and arrests before protests can begin. There is a word for this type of political system—tyranny.

IMPACT: Maryland bill would protect homeowners from investors buying debt 

Center told story of Baltimore woman who lost residence in water bill dispute 

By Fred Schulte, 12:07 pm, January 18, 2013 Updated: 6:11 pm, January 18, 2013

Maryland lawmakers are sponsoring legislation to prevent Baltimore-area residents from losing their homes for failing to pay small municipal water bills —a stunning scenario detailed in a Center for Public Integrity story.

The legislation is aimed at preventing a repeat of what happened to Vicki Valentine, a Baltimore woman who lost her family’s mortgage-free home over what began as an unpaid water bill of $362. The Center told Valentine’s story in 2010 as part of an investigation into the impact of tax-lien sales on struggling property owners.

Behind The House Conservatives’ Assault On Nutrition Assistance

By Nehemiah Rolle | July 12, 2013

The one thing that’s worse than the House Republican vote Thursday to pass a farm bill that did not include the nutrition assistance program commonly known as food stamps is what was likely to happen if the nutrition assistance program remained part of the bill.

After having been unable to get support for a farm bill that cut $20 billion from what is now the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, House Republicans were aiming for even deeper cuts and higher barriers to keep people from receiving benefits. Now that the subsidies to farmers and agribusiness are taken care of, extremists in the House Republican caucus hope to ram through morally reprehensible changes to the program.
 

Dean Baker: The 1% Want Your Kidney: Tales of Redistribution

It is widely recognized that economists are not very good at economics. That is why we are looking at a decade of economic stagnation with tens of millions of people being unemployed or underemployed in Europe and the United States.

If economists were better at economics, central banks in the United States and Europe would have recognized the housing bubbles that were driving economies in the last decade. They would have taken steps to rein them in before they grew so large that their inevitable collapse would sink the world economy.

REPORT: The Sunday Morning Shows Are Still White, Conservative, And Male

July 10, 2013 4:02 PM EDT ››› ROB SAVILLO

In the first six months of 2013, white men dominated the guest lists on the broadcast network Sunday shows and CNN's State of the Union. MSNBC was the only network achieving notable diversity in its guests, particularly on Melissa Harris-Perry's show. Republicans and conservatives are hosted significantly more on the broadcast Sunday shows than Democrats and progressives.

Media Matters has continued its monitoring of the Sunday morning talk shows on broadcast and cable networks. Following up on our previous study, we've added data for April, May, and June to the existing data collected for January, February, and March of this year on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CBS' Face the Nation, Fox Broadcast Co.'s Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, NBC's Meet the Press, CNN's State of the Union with Candy Crowley, and MSNBC's Up with Steve Kornacki and Melissa Harris-Perry.

The Korean War: Forgotten, Unknown and Unfinished

Friday, 12 July 2013 09:29
By H Patricia Hynes, Truthout | Historical Analysis

The American war in Korea lasted three years, one month and two days and ended in a stalemate on July 12, 1953, at 10:12 am. Fighting continued for 12 more hours, with even more "blood and treasure" on all sides wasted in the intense, deadly fireworks of frustrated, war-wearied soldiers. Americans at home had tired of the deadlocked war and they disconnected from it; American soldiers fighting in it did not understand its historical roots. The war's especially morbid consequences for Korean women have not ended, in what has been "60 years of a war system." The menace of nuclear war in spring 2013 embodies its toxic legacy.

Paul Krugman: Delusions of Populism

Have you heard about “libertarian populism” yet? If not, you will. It will surely be touted all over the airwaves and the opinion pages by the same kind of people who assured you, a few years ago, that Representative Paul Ryan was the very model of a Serious, Honest Conservative. So let me make a helpful public service announcement: It’s bunk.

Some background: These are tough times for members of the conservative intelligentsia — those denizens of think tanks and opinion pages who dream of Republicans once again becoming “the party of ideas.” (Whether they ever were that party is another question.)

Editorial: The Decline of North Carolina 

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: July 9, 2013

Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damage that a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage.

In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot.

Getting Past Stars and Swipes Forever

Thursday, 04 July 2013 09:51

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much | Op-Ed

Back in 1776, public-spirited patriots emerged from the ranks of colonial America's privileged. But our corporate elite today seems to offer up only thieving, tax-dodging parasites. Why such a contrast?

Almost ten generations have come and gone since 1776. Yet the giants of 1776 still fascinate us. Books about Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington still regularly dot our best-seller lists.

What so attracts us to these “founding fathers,” these men of means who put their security, their considerable comfort, at risk for a greater good? Maybe the contrast with what we see all around us.

Matt Taibbi: Wall Street Rips Off 'The Sting'

Hilarious corruption story hit the news wires this week. It's actually a two-part joke.

Part one is that Thomson Reuters got slapped in the face by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for its absurd practice of selling early access to the results of the consumer confidence survey it conducts each month in conjunction with the University of Michigan.

It turns out that in recent times, if you paid them an extra subscription fee of a few thousand dollars a month, Thomson Reuters would allow you access to the Consumer Confidence data a full two seconds earlier than the rest of its subscribers – at 9:54:58 a.m., as opposed to 9:55:00 exactly.

Justice Denied: 71 New 'Tort Reform' Bills Make It Harder to Hold Corporations Accountable for Causing Injury and Death

By Brendan Fischer

July 10, 2013  |  At least 71 bills introduced in 2013 that make it harder for average Americans to access the civil justice system resemble "models" from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or "ALEC," according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org [3]. 

 

ALEC Agenda Tips the Scales of Justice to Help Corporations Win

For decades, ALEC has been a conduit for the oil, tobacco, and pharmaceutical industries to push legislation that changes the rules to limit accountability when a corporation’s products or actions cause injury or death -- such as when a Koch Industries pipeline explodes and kills teenagers [4], or when the tobacco or pharmaceutical industries withhold evidence that their products are dangerous. In just the first six months of 2013, seventy-one ALEC bills that advance these "tort reform" goals have been introduced in thirty states (see chart below).

“Each of these bills would weaken the legal rights of everyday people who are wrongfully harmed by a corporation or health care provider,” says Joanne Doroshow, Executive Director of the Center for Justice & Democracy, a group that works to protect the civil justice system and fight tort reform. “[The bills] are carefully crafted to provide relief and protections for the industries who wrote them."

Can We Afford to Wait for Redistribution?

Sunday, 07 July 2013 10:16  
By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much | Op-Ed 

The ‘market’ isn’t working for working people. The rich have rigged the rules. We ought to keep trying, of course, to reduce the resulting inequality. But why not, unions are asking, end the rule rigging?

Labor analysts are increasingly making the case for what they call “predistribution.”

Sometimes we need new words to get a grasp on new ideas. Frances O’Grady, Britain’s highest-ranking labor leader, has a new word for us. Predistribution.

Why does O’Grady, the general secretary of the UK’s Trades Union Congress, want us talking “predistribution”? In our staggeringly unequal modern times, her union federation argues in a new paper released last week, redistribution no longer gets us particularly far.

How capitalism's great relocation pauperised America's 'middle class'

As long as workers could wrest gains from capitalism, the system was safe. But with production offshored, that bargain blew up

Richard Wolff
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 July 2013 08.30 EDT
Detroit's struggle with bankruptcy might find some relief, or at least distraction, by presenting its desperate economic and social conditions as a tourist attraction. "Visit Detroit," today's advertisement might begin, "see your region's future here and now: the streets, neighborhoods, abandoned buildings, and the desolation. Scary, yes, but more gripping than any imaginary ghost story."

Detroit, Cleveland, Camden and many other cities display what capitalism left behind after it became profitable for capitalists to relocate and for new capital investments to happen more elsewhere. Capitalism and its driving profit motive first developed in England before spreading to western Europe, north America and then Japan. Over the last two centuries, those areas endured a growing capitalism's mix of horrific working conditions, urban slums, environmental degradation, and cyclical instability. Capitalism also brought economic growth, wealth for a minority, labor unions and other workers' organizations. Writers like Dickens, Zola, Steinbeck, and Gorky saw that capitalism's workings clearly, while those like Marx, Mill and Bakunin understood it critically.

Keep states' hands off your right to vote

By Mark Pocan, Special to CNN

updated 9:08 AM EDT, Wed July 10, 2013

Editor's note: U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat, represents Wisconsin's second congressional district. He serves on both the Budget Committee and the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and has been appointed an assistant minority whip.

(CNN) -- That didn't take long. Just two weeks since the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, state legislatures are moving quickly on voter suppression measures.

Already, six of the nine states that were previously covered by the requirement that changes in voting procedures be pre-cleared have started to bring up restrictive voter ID laws. If there is a glimmer of hope for voting rights advocates, however, it's that the court merely ruled that the formula was outdated, and that Congress "may draft another formula based on current conditions."

 

In a Nation in Decline, a Lust for Hatred

Monday, 08 July 2013 16:31  
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed 

The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.

Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s 30-man crew—there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod’s destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.

Koch Pledge Tied to Congressional Climate Inaction

Posted by Jane Mayer

When President Obama unveiled his program to tackle climate change last month, he deliberately sidestepped Congress as a hopeless bastion of obstruction, relying completely on changes that could be imposed by regulatory agencies. A two-year study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, released today, illustrates what might be one of the reasons why he had to take this circuitous route. Fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch have, through Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group they back, succeeded in persuading many members of Congress to sign a little-known pledge in which they have promised to vote against legislation relating to climate change unless it is accompanied by an equivalent amount of tax cuts. Since most solutions to the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions require costs to the polluters and the public, the pledge essentially commits those who sign to it to vote against nearly any meaningful bill regarding global warning, and acts as yet another roadblock to action.

A Patriot Act History Lesson: How Warnings Were Mocked in the Senate

In 2006, Russ Feingold anticipated exactly how the government would stretch, exploit, and abuse vague language -- and was derided for it.

Conor Friedersdorf Jul 9 2013, 6:30 AM ET

During the winter of 2006, the U.S. Senate was debating the re-authorization of the Patriot Act. The legislation would ultimately pass by a wide margin, and George W. Bush signed it into law. But before that could happen, civil libertarians, led by then-Senator Russ Feingold, tried to amend the 2001 law. They warned that its overly broad language would permit government to pry into the privacy of innocent Americans and warned about the likelihood of executive branch "fishing expeditions."

Dismissive Senate colleagues scoffed at their concerns.

Where the Hell Is the Outrage?

Tuesday, 09 July 2013 09:35  
By Richard Eskow, Campaign for America's Future | Report 

From the first breaths of life to the last, our lives are being stolen out from under us. From infant care and early education to Social Security and Medicare, the dominant economic ideology is demanding more lifelong sacrifices from the vulnerable to appease the gods of wealth.

Middle-class wages are stagnant. Unemployment is stalled at record levels. College education is leading to debt servitude and job insecurity. Millions of unemployed Americans have essentially been abandoned by their government.  Poverty is soaring. Bankers break the law with impunity, are bailed out, and go on breaking the law, richer than they were before.

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.

By Eric Lichtblau
Published: July 6, 2013

WASHINGTON — In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The Right’s Made-up ‘Constitution’

July 6, 2013

 

For Tea Partiers and libertarians, it is an article of faith that the Constitution tightly constrained the federal government and gave broad powers to the states. But that is bogus history — mere propaganda — and suggests that the Right’s rank-and-file has never read or understood the document, says historian Jada Thacker.


By Jada Thacker

The Cato Institute’s Handbook for Policy Makers says, “The American system was established to provide limited government.” The American Enterprise Institute states its purpose to “defend the principles” of “limited government.” The Heritage Foundation claims its mission is to promote “principles of … limited government.” A multitude of Tea Party associations follow suit.

At first glance the concept of “limited government” seems like a no-brainer. Everybody believes the power of government should be limited somehow. All those who think totalitarianism is a good idea raise your hand. But there is one problem with the ultra-conservatives’ “limited government” program: it is wrong. It is not just a little bit wrong, but demonstrably false.

Paul Krugman: Defining Prosperity Down

Friday’s employment report wasn’t bad. But given how depressed our economy remains, we really should be adding more than 300,000 jobs a month, not fewer than 200,000. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, we would need more than five years of job growth at this rate to get back to the level of unemployment that prevailed before the Great Recession. Full recovery still looks a very long way off. And I’m beginning to worry that it may never happen.

Ask yourself the hard question: What, exactly, will bring us back to full employment?

We certainly can’t count on fiscal policy. The austerity gang may have experienced a stunning defeat in the intellectual debate, but stimulus is still a dirty word, and no deliberate job-creation program is likely soon, or ever.

Are Corporations Trying to Distract Us with Social Issues While They Take Control of Our Economy?

By RJ Eskow

July 4, 2013  |  I was having breakfast with a friend in North Carolina the day after that state voted against gay marriage, and after Barack Obama said on television that he now supported it. My friend knew I had supported the cause for a long time, so he asked me what I thought of Obama’s comments. I said "I think he’ll be tacking to the right economically once he’s re-elected."

I was right, but not because I have any special predictive gifts. History had provided the background for Obama’s changed views while Republicans had pioneered his tactics.

Antifreeze, cheap materials may lead to low-cost solar energy

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A process combining some comparatively cheap materials and the same antifreeze that keeps an automobile radiator from freezing in cold weather may be the key to making solar cells that cost less and avoid toxic compounds, while further expanding the use of solar energy.

And when perfected, this approach might also cook up the solar cells in a microwave oven similar to the one in most kitchens.

To feed the future, we must mine the wealth of the world's seed banks today

ITHACA, N.Y. – With fewer than a dozen flowering plants out of 300,000 species accounting for 80 percent of humanity's caloric intake, people need to tap unused plants to feed the world in the near future, claims Cornell University plant geneticist Susan McCouch in the Comment feature of the July 4 issue of Nature.

To keep pace with population growth and rising incomes around the world, researchers estimate that food availability must double in the next 25 years. The biodiversity stored in plant gene banks coupled with advances in genetics and plant breeding may hold the keys for meeting the demands of more food in the face of climate change, soil degradation and water and land shortages, according to the paper.

Pacific Ocean Floor Is a Huge Underwater Garbage Dump 

Thursday, 04 July 2013 11:41  
By Judy Molland, Care2 | Report

It’s old news that plastic bags, aluminum cans and fishing debris not only clutter our beaches, but accumulate in open-ocean areas such as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” (basically a giant vortex of plastic soup, roughly twice the size of Texas.)

So much for the myth of the beautiful, natural ocean, stretching off towards the horizon.

Now, a paper by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) shows that trash is also accumulating in the deep sea, particularly in Monterey Canyon, off the coast of California.

How the rich strip wealth of the 99% through debt

7/3/2013 10:00am by Gaius Publius

Coming up on July 4 — a day in which we patriots honor patriotism — I offer this on modern “debt peonage” from Virtually Speaking and David Cay Johnston. It’s a terrific interview; Johnston is just so quick with the numbers and the easy-to-grasp framing.

As Johnston says here (my emphasis and paragraphing):

The idea of modern debt peonage or neo-feudalism came to my attention at Marcy Wheeler’s FDL blog. It’s an old concept–the idea is that you can sell yourself into temporary slavery, with a plan of working off the debt.

Paul Krugman: E Pluribus Unum

It’s that time of year — the long weekend when we gather with friends and family to celebrate hot dogs, potato salad and, yes, the founding of our nation. And it’s also a time for some of us to wax a bit philosophical, to wonder what, exactly, we’re celebrating. Is America in 2013, in any meaningful sense, the same country that declared independence in 1776?

The answer, I’d suggest, is yes. Despite everything, there is a thread of continuity in our national identity — reflected in institutions, ideas and, especially, in attitude — that remains unbroken.  Above all, we are still, at root, a nation that believes in democracy, even if we don’t always act on that belief.

People Get Ready: 'Unprecedented' Weather Glimpses Century Ahead

Latest report from WMO says first decade of century was hottest, wettest on record with more to come

- Jon Queally, staff writer 

 

The rate of rising oceans has doubled, the heat temperatures for both land and water are on the rise, the melting of the Arctic ice is speeding up, and both the weather extremes the world is experiencing and the overall global warming trends are simply 'unprecedented.'

 

That's the assessment contained in the World Meteorological Organization's latest report, The Global Climate 2001-2010, A Decade of Climate Extremes, which examined the first decade of the 21st century. The report, released Wednesday, arrived with this warning: we better get ready for more.
 

Mitch McConnell: We Must Rewrite The Constitution Because ‘Elections’ Haven’t ‘Worked’

By Ian Millhiser on Jul 13, 2011 at 11:49 am

Speaking on the Senate floor this morning, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) offered what may be the most concise summary of conservative constitutionalism ever spoken — America must rewrite the Constitution to force conservative outcomes because we the people consistently elect lawmakers who disagree with McConnell:

The time has come for a balanced budget amendment that forces Washington to balance its books. If these debt negotiations have convinced us of anything, it’s that we can’t leave it to politicians in Washington to make the difficult decisions that they need to get our fiscal house in order. The balanced budget amendment will do that for them. Now is the moment. No more games. No more gimmicks. The Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check. We’ve tried persuasion. We’ve tried negotiations. We’re tried elections. Nothing has worked.

There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says

By Spencer Ackerman, 05.25.11, 4:56 PM

You think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden says it’s worse than you know.

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. Wyden (D-Oregon) says that powers they grant the government on their face, the government applies a far broader legal interpretation — an interpretation that the government has conveniently classified, so it cannot be publicly assessed or challenged. But one prominent Patriot-watcher asserts that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

Insecticide causes changes in honeybee genes, research finds

New research by academics at The University of Nottingham has shown that exposure to a neonicotinoid insecticide causes changes to the genes of the honeybee.

The study, published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, supports the recent decision taken by the European Commission to temporarily ban three neonicotinoids amid concerns that they could be linked to bee deaths.

The High Road to 21st Century Economic Success

By Salvatore Babones, Truthout | Op-Ed 

Where will this century's jobs come from? What can we do about youth unemployment and underemployment? How can today's developed countries maintain their labor standards and environmental laws in the face of competition from China and southeast Asia?

These are questions that keep parents awake at night worrying for the futures of their children. The usual answers offer little hope. No wonder today's underemployed twentysomethings are so depressed.

Eroding soils darkening our future

June 28, 2013 by Lester Brown

In 1938 Walter Lowdermilk, a senior official in the Soil Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, traveled abroad to look at lands that had been cultivated for thousands of years, seeking to learn how these older civilizations had coped with soil erosion. He found that some had managed their land well, maintaining its fertility over long stretches of history, and were thriving. Others had failed to do so and left only remnants of their illustrious pasts.

In a section of his report entitled “The Hundred Dead Cities,” he describes a site in northern Syria, near Aleppo, where ancient buildings are still standing in stark isolated relief, but they are on bare rock. During the seventh century, the thriving region had been invaded, initially by a Persian army and later by nomads out of the Arabian Desert. In the process, soil and water conservation practices used for centuries were abandoned. Lowdermilk noted, “Here erosion had done its worst. If the soils had remained, even though the cities were destroyed and the populations dispersed, the area might be repeopled again and the cities rebuilt. But now that the soils are gone, all is gone.”

Paul Krugman: War On the Unemployed

Is life too easy for the unemployed? You may not think so, and I certainly don’t think so. But that, remarkably, is what many and perhaps most Republicans believe. And they’re acting on that belief: there’s a nationwide movement under way to punish the unemployed, based on the proposition that we can cure unemployment by making the jobless even more miserable.

Consider, for example, the case of North Carolina. The state was hit hard by the Great Recession, and its unemployment rate, at 8.8 percent, is among the highest in the nation, higher than in long-suffering California or Michigan. As is the case everywhere, many of the jobless have been out of work for six months or more, thanks to a national environment in which there are three times as many people seeking work as there are job openings.

NSA spying is legal because once upon a time Dick Cheney's lawyer said so in secret documents that later vanished

by Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis

June 28, 2013 Throughout the past weeks of revelations regarding the NSA and other agencies spying on millions of Americans, a bipartisan clique of hawks in both the Obama administration and Congress have repeatedly stated that the secret survellance practices are legal. The NSA director, General Keith Alexander, has already lied to Congress once that can be proven, without even a threat of sanction. The UK Guardian has released new documents today that show the legal justification for these survellance was so secret the former NSA director may have never actually read them.

The Guardian released the NSA Inspector General's report on the legalities of certain ongoing wiretap programs. It reveals without a doubt that as time progressed, intelligence gathering on people around the world increased, restrictions relaxed, and successive secret legal opinions normalized and regularized what was originally a secret temporary emergency measure. Federal judges and the vast majority congressional Democrats enthusiastically approved the measures without ever actually examining the legal underpinnings due to the reported success of the programs.

America's Poor Are Demonized To Justify Huge Cuts in Gov't Prgrams 

By Bill Moyers, Greg Kaufmann

June 28, 2013  |  In the following interview with Bill Moyers, Greg Kaufmann, poverty correspondent for The Nation, says the poor in America are stereotyped and demonized in an effort to justify huge cuts in food stamps and other crucial programs for low-income Americans.

 

“People are working and they’re not getting paid enough to feed their families, pay their utilities, pay for their housing, pay for the healthcare… if you’re not paying people enough to pay for the basics, they’re going to need help getting food,” Kaufmann tells Moyers. “There are a lot of corporations that want to be involved in the fight against hunger. The best thing they can do is get on board for fair wages.”

Public Research for Private Gain

UC Regents recently approved a new corporate entity that will likely give a group of well-connected businesspeople control over how academic research is used.

By Darwin BondGraham

In a unanimous vote last month, the Regents of the University of California created a corporate entity that, if spread to all UC campuses as some regents envision, promises to further privatize scientific research produced by taxpayer-funded laboratories. The entity, named Newco for the time being, also would block a substantial amount of UC research from being accessible to the public, and could reap big profits for corporations and investors that have ties to the well-connected businesspeople who will manage it.

Paul Krugman: Invest, Divest and Prosper

It has been a busy news week, what with voting rights, gay marriage and Paula Deen. Even so, it’s remarkable how little attention the news media gave to President Obama’s new “climate action plan.” Discount, if you like, the terrific speech he gave when unveiling the proposal; this is, nonetheless, a very big deal. For this time around, Mr. Obama wasn’t touting legislation we know won’t pass. The new plan is, instead, designed to rely on executive action. This means that, unlike earlier efforts to address climate change, it can bypass the anti-environmentalists who control the House of Representatives.

Republicans realize this, and they’re stamping their feet in frustration. All they can do, it seems, is fulminate (and perhaps scare the administration into backing down). Interestingly, however, right now they don’t seem eager to attack climate science, maybe because that would make them sound unreasonable (which they are). Instead, they’re going for the economic angle, denouncing the Obama administration for waging a “war on coal” that will destroy jobs.

Global Power Project, Part 3: The Influence of Individuals and Family Dynasties

Friday, 28 June 2013 09:15  
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com | News Analysis

Also See: Global Power Project, Part 1: Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Class and Global Power Project, Part 2: Identifying the Institutions of Control

Dynastic power, embedded in the institution of "family," has been with humanity for as long as empire: ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the European empires and beyond. With the rise of capitalism, finance and corporations, formal political dynasties became less relevant to the expansion and maintenance of power and empire. Instead, dynastic power was and remains largely wielded in the corporate and financial sectors.

In Europe, the Rothschild banking dynasty was the unparalleled family power of the 19th century, and has continued as a major influence in Britain, France and elsewhere well into the 20th and 21st centuries. Baron Benjamin de Rothschild, considered to be the “world’s richest Rothschild today,” told the Israeli publication Ha’aretz in 2010, “We have an obligation to continue the dynasty.” And indeed, the Rothschild banks and family are doing well. It recently decided to bring together the French and British banking assets under one roof, and the dynasty has even been expanding its influence in merchant banking in London. The Rothschild bank was also seeking to extend its presence in the United States, “to take advantage of the growing demand for independent advice from companies globally.”

Global Power Project, Part 2: Identifying the Institutions of Control

Thursday, 20 June 2013 09:41 
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com | News Analysis

The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today's global power oligarchy. In Part 1, which appeared last week, I provided an overview examining who and what constitute the global ruling elite – often referred to as the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC). In this second part, I will attempt to identify some of the key, dominant institutions that have facilitated and have in turn been supported by the development of this oligarchic class. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.

In an article for the journal International Sociology, William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski examined the relationship between the corporate elite and the emergence of a “transnational policy-planning network,” beginning with its formation in the decades following World War II and speeding up in the 1970s with the creation of “global policy groups” and think tanks such as the World Economic Forum, in 1971, and the Trilateral Commission, in 1973, among many others.
The function of such institutions was to help mobilize and integrate the corporate elite beyond national borders, constructing a politically “organized minority.”

Paul Krugman: The Evolution of Human Capital

Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, suggested in recent commentary for The New York Times that the golden age of human capital — roughly speaking, the era in which the economy strongly demanded the kinds of skills we teach in liberal-arts colleges and universities — is already behind us.

She may well be right: after a long stretch when both technology and trade seemed to be undermining only manual labor, it does look as if many skilled occupations are now under threat by Big Data, Bangalore, or both.

Chemists work to desalt the ocean for drinking water, 1 nanoliter at a time

Microscale method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery

AUSTIN, Texas – By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery.

The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale.

Tomgram: Todd Gitlin, Are "Intelligence" and Instigation Running Riot?

Posted by Todd Gitlin at 8:11am, June 27, 2013.

Back in the early 1970s, I worked for Pacific News Service (PNS), a small antiwar media outfit that operated out of the Bay Area Institute (BAI), a progressive think tank in San Francisco.  The first story I ever wrote for PNS came about because an upset U.S. Air Force medic wanted someone to know about the American war wounded then pouring in from the invasion of Laos.  So he snuck me onto Travis Air Force Base in northern California and into a military hospital to interview wigged-out guys with stumps for limbs who thought the war was a disaster.  In some cases, they also thought we should have bombed the Vietnamese “back to the stone age.”

I was a good boy from the 1950s and sneaking onto that base made me nervous indeed.  It was also the most illegal act I encountered at either PNS or the institute in those years.  We did, of course, regularly have active duty antiwar soldiers and members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War pass through our office, and we had an antiwar GI in Vietnam writing for us under a pseudonym.  (At some point, we found out that the Pentagon had actually tracked down and interviewed every soldier in Vietnam with that pseudonymous name in its attempt to uncover our journalist.)

Dean Baker: Baffling Budget Numbers: Making Reporters Do Their Jobs

Monday, 24 June 2013 10:07 

The vast majority of the public does not have a clue about where their tax dollars go. Polls consistently show that the vast majority of the public has almost no idea of where their tax dollars go.

They tend to hugely overestimate the portion of the budget that goes to items like food stamps, public broadcasting and foreign aid, and to underestimate the importance of Medicare, the military and other core items in the budget. As a result, people are often ill-informed when it comes to political debates on budget priorities.

The Court, The Corporate Coup, And The Call To Struggle

By Richard RJ Eskow

Our democracy was under siege even before the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act. This decision caps the Court's clean sweep on behalf of the United States Chamber of Commerce and is part of a concerted effort to seize democracy on behalf of moneyed interests.

It's a mistake to view this decision in isolation. It's part of an ongoing, corporate-backed constitutional coup.

We could decide the forces of greed are too powerful, and give up. But in a few weeks the nation will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech. The dream of full and equal rights is no more impossible now than it was then.

A rightwing 1950s PSA about income inequality can teach us a lot

by David Atkins

While doing some research on income inequality, I came across this little noticed 1955 PSA on income inequality in America. It was produced by the "National Education Program," an institution created by conservative red-baiter George S. Benson.

[...]

There is an entire book's worth of social and economic analysis to be gleaned from careful study of this bit of propaganda compared to our current situation.

Clear Evidence That Corporate America Wants the Govt. to Treat Protesters as 'Terrorists'

By Thom Hartmann

June 20, 2013  |  Corporations are trying to use the PATRIOT Act in ways that have nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden because the PATRIOT Act gives transnational corporations the power to snuff out the activism of all those who oppose them.

 

Terrorism, as it is commonly considered, is the use of violence against civilians to achieve any number of political ends: the destruction of the federal government, the overturning of Roe V. Wade, the restoration of a Caliphate. If you try to kill people – or succeed in killing people for a political purpose - you’re a terrorist. If you blow up the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building and kill 168 civilians, like Timothy McVeigh, you’ve committed an act of terrorism.

6 Mind-Blowing Stats on How 1 Percent of the 1 Percent Now Dominate Our Elections

—By Andy Kroll  | Mon Jun. 24, 2013 12:13 PM PDT

Here's a statistic that should jolt you awake like black coffee with three shots of espresso dropped in: In the 2012 election cycle, 28 percent of all disclosed donations—that's $1.68 billion—came from just 31,385 people. Think of them as the 1 percenters of the 1 percent, the elite of the elite, the wealthiest of the wealthy.

That's the blockbuster finding in an eye-popping new report by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan transparency advocate. The report's author, Lee Drutman, calls the 1 percent of the 1 percent "an elite class that increasingly serves as the gatekeepers of public office in the United States." This rarefied club of donors, Drutman found, worked in high-ranking corporate positions (often in finance or law). They're clustered in New York City and Washington, DC. Most are men. You might've heard of some of them: casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Texas waste tycoon Harold Simmons, Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Obama's Transformation from National Security Dove to Hawk Is the Norm: Presidents Are Captive to America's Imperial Power

By Gary Younge

June 22, 2013  |  Not long after the story into the National Security Administration's spying programme broke, US president Barack Obama insisted the issues raised were worthy of discussion [3]:

"I welcome this debate and I think it's healthy for our democracy. I think it's a sign of maturity because probably five years ago, six years ago we might not have been having this debate."

In fairly short order, a YouTube compilation appeared [4], showing Obama debating with himself as he matured. Flitting back and forth between Obama the candidate and the Obama the president, we see the constitutional law professor of yore engage with the commander-in-chief of today.

Paul Krugman: Et Tu, Bernanke?

For the most part, Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve have been good guys in
these troubled economic times. They have tried to boost the economy even as most of Washington
seemingly either forgot about the jobless, or decided that the best way to cure unemployment was
to intensify the suffering of the unemployed. You can argue — and I would — that the Fed’s
activism, while welcome, isn’t enough, and that it should be doing even more. But at least it didn’t
lose sight of what’s really important.

Until now.

Editorial: Fighting the 4 Plagues -- We Have To Do Things Differently

By Don Hazen

June 22, 2013  |  Almost two weeks ago, I wrote an article:  "4 Plagues - Getting a Handle on the Coming Apocalypse [3]."  Reader response was strong, and the article quickly shot to top of our most-read list. I detailed the "plagues" that dominate our economy and way of life: financialization, militarization, and criminalization — forces that exacerbate the huge array of problems we face—poverty, unemployment, mass incarceration, climate destruction, gun violence, financial corruption, spying and privacy, and much more. They threaten democracy, fray our social order, worsen conditions in communities round the world, and damage our psychological health.

As a result, many of us are alarmed at the direction of our country, and rightly so. By many measures, our society is a depressing mess. Tens of millions are severely suffering economically, while many more are stressed out and traumatized, desperately attempting to cope with both chronic and acute problems they have never faced before.

7 Institutions That Have Grown So Monstrously Big They Threaten to Destroy America

By Richard Eskow

June 21, 2013  |  Bigger isn’t always better. From the Tower of Babel to Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting, that principle’s been enshrined in law and legend since the dawn of history. Have we forgotten the lesson?

Corporations, databases, storehouses of personal and institutional wealth all are expanding at ever-increasing speed, threatening to engulf our economy and our lives as they do. That’s the problem with Big Things: Once they reached a certain size, they keep on getting bigger.

Here are seven ways the runaway power of Bigger in finance and in data is threatening to overwhelm us all.

Sea level along Maryland's shorelines could rise 2 feet by 2050, according to new report

ANNAPOLIS, MD (June 26, 2013)—A new report on sea level rise recommends that the State of Maryland should plan for a rise in sea level of as much as 2 feet by 2050. Led by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the report was prepared by a panel of scientific experts in response to Governor Martin O'Malley's Executive Order on Climate Change and "Coast Smart" Construction. The projections are based on an assessment of the latest climate change science and federal guidelines.

"The State of Maryland is committed to taking the necessary actions to adapt to the rising sea and guard against the impacts of extreme storms," said Governor Martin O'Malley. "In doing so, we must stay abreast of the latest climate science to ensure that we have a sound understanding of our vulnerability and are making informed decisions about how best to protect our land, infrastructure, and most importantly, the citizens of Maryland."

Paul Krugman: Profits Without Production

One lesson from recent economic troubles has been the usefulness of history. Just as the crisis was
unfolding, the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — who unfortunately
became famous for their worst work — published a brilliant book with the sarcastic title “This Time
Is Different.” Their point, of course, was that there is a strong family resemblance among crises.
Indeed, historical parallels — not just to the 1930s, but to Japan in the 1990s, Britain in the 1920s,
and more — have been vital guides to the present.

Yet economies do change over time, and sometimes in fundamental ways. So what’s really different
about America in the 21st century?

The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis 

It's long been suspected that ratings agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's helped trigger the meltdown. A new trove of embarrassing documents shows how they did it

by Matt Taibbi

JUNE 19, 2013

 

What about the ratings agencies?

That's what "they" always say about the financial crisis and the teeming rat's nest of corruption it left behind. Everybody else got plenty of blame: the greed-fattened banks, the sleeping regulators, the unscrupulous mortgage hucksters like spray-tanned Countrywide ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo.

But what about the ratings agencies? Isn't it true that almost none of the fraud that's swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's rubber-stamping it? Aren't they guilty, too?

How American Society Unravelled After Greedy Elites Robbed the Country Blind

By George Packer

June 20, 2013  |  In or around 1978, America's character changed. For almost half a century, the United States [3] had been a relatively egalitarian, secure, middle-class democracy, with structures in place that supported the aspirations of ordinary people. You might call it the period of theRoosevelt [4] Republic. Wars, strikes, racial tensions and youth rebellion all roiled national life, but a basic deal among Americans still held, in belief if not always in fact: work hard, follow the rules, educate your children, and you will be rewarded, not just with a decent life and the prospect of a better one for your kids, but with recognition from society, a place at the table.

 

This unwritten contract came with a series of riders and clauses that left large numbers of Americans – black people and other minorities, women, gay people – out, or only halfway in. But the country had the tools to correct its own flaws, and it used them: healthy democratic institutions such as Congress, courts, churches, schools, news organisations, business-labour partnerships. The civil rights movement of the 1960s was a nonviolent mass uprising led by black southerners, but it drew essential support from all of these institutions, which recognised the moral and legal justice of its claims, or, at the very least, the need for social peace. The Roosevelt Republic had plenty of injustice, but it also had the power of self-correction.

The contribution of particulate matter to forest decline

Bonn University scientists demonstrate that hygroscopic air pollutants decrease tree drought tolerance 

 

Air pollution is related to forest decline and also appears to attack the protecting wax on tree leaves and needles. Bonn University scientists have now discovered a responsible mechanism: particulate matter salt compounds that become deliquescent because of humidity and form a wick-like structure that removes water from leaves and promotes dehydration. These results are published in “Environmental Pollution”.

Nature conservationists call it “lingering illness”, and the latest report on the North-Rhine Westphalian forest conditions confirms ongoing damage. Bonn University scientists have now shown that salt deposits on leaves may decrease the drought tolerance of trees, thereby contributing to forest decline. “Our study reveals that so-called wax degradation on pine needles may develop from deposited particulate matter”, says Dr. Jürgen Burkhardt from the Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation. Wax helps to protect leaves and needles from water loss.

Russ Feingold Tried to Warn Us About Section 215 of the Patriot Act

Wisconsin voters replaced the civil-liberties champion with an ostensibly Tea Party senator -- who doesn't seem to care about government snooping. 

 

Conor Friedersdorf,  Jun 14 2013, 8:00 AM ET

 

In September 2009, Russ Feingold, the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act when it was first proposed, released a statement expressing concern that critical information about the way it was being used hadn't been released, "information that I believe would have a significant impact on the debate." He singled out "information about the use of Section 215 orders that I believe Congress and the American people deserve to know," adding that "before we decide whether and in what form to extend these authorities, Congress and the American people deserve to know at least basic information about how they have been used." (Section 215 allows the government to use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to compel businesses to turn over certain information.) Congress ought to add limits to the bill "that allow agents to actively pursue criminals, terrorists and spies, but that also protect the privacy of innocent Americans," Feingold said, or else more privacy abuses would happen. 

Dean Baker: Celebrate the Defeat of the Granny Bashers!

It isn't often that progressives in the United States have much to celebrate. After all, the news has swung between bad and worse for most of the last three decades. That is why we should be celebrating the victory over the Campaign to Fix the Debt and its efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Just to remind everyone, the Campaign to Fix the Debt (CFD) is yet another Peter Peterson inspired initiative that has as its main goal cutting and/or privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Peterson has used the billions of dollars he earned as a Wall Street investment banker and private equity fund manager to finance a whole slew of Washington-based outfits for this purpose over the last two decades.

Efficient and inexpensive: Researchers develop catalyst material for fuel cells

Platinum-nickel nano-octahedra save 90 percent platinum

Efficient, robust and economic catalyst materials hold the key to achieving a breakthrough in fuel cell technology. Scientists from Jülich and Berlin have developed a material for converting hydrogen and oxygen to water using a tenth of the typical amount of platinum that was previously required. With the aid of state-of-the-art electron microscopy, the researchers discovered that the function of the nanometre-scale catalyst particles is decisively determined by their geometric shape and atomic structure. This discovery opens up new paths for further improving catalysts for energy conversion and storage. The results have been published in the current issue of the respected journal Nature Materials (DOI: 10.1038/nmat3668).

ICIJ releases offshore leaks database revealing names behind secret companies, trusts

Users can search ICIJ information about more than 100,000 offshore entities and discover the networks around them
By Marina Walker Guevara

10:00 pm, June 14, 2013; Updated: 10:03 am, June 15, 2013

When Bernard Madoff built his $65 billion house of cards; when food distributors passed off horsemeat as beef lasagna in Europe; and when Apple, Google and other American companies set up structures to channel their profits through Ireland — they all used tax havens.

They bought secrecy, minimal or zero taxes and legal insulation, the distinctive products that tax havens market and that allow companies to operate in a fiscal and regulatory vacuum. Using the offshore economy is akin to acquiring your own island where the rules that most citizens follow don’t apply.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists publishes today a database that, for the first time in history, will help begin to strip away this secrecy across 10 offshore jurisdictions.

We Already Tried Libertarianism - It Was Called Feudalism

Jun 11, 2013 
Mike Konczal

Bob Dole recently said that neither he nor Ronald Reagan would count as conservatives these days. It’s worth noting that John Locke probably wouldn’t count as a libertarian these days, either.

Michael Lind had a column in Salon in which he asked, “[i]f libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?” EJ Dionne agrees. Several libertarians argue that the present is no guide, because the (seasteading?) future belongs to libertarians.

Paul Krugman: Fight the Future

Last week the International Monetary Fund, whose normal role is that of stern disciplinarian to
spendthrift governments, gave the United States some unusual advice. “Lighten up,” urged the
fund. “Enjoy life! Seize the day!”

O.K., fund officials didn’t use quite those words, but they came close, with an article in IMF Survey
magazine titled “Ease Off Spending Cuts to Boost U.S. Recovery.” In its more formal statement, the
fund argued that the sequester and other forms of fiscal contraction will cut this year’s U.S. growth
rate by almost half, undermining what might otherwise have been a fairly vigorous recovery. And
these spending cuts are both unwise and unnecessary.

Global Power Project, Part 1: Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Class

Friday, 14 June 2013 09:14
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com | News Analysis

The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today's global power oligarchy. By studying the relationships and varying levels of leadership that govern our planet's most influential institutions — from banks, corporations and financial institutions to think tanks, foundations and universities — this project seeks to expose the complex, highly integrated network of influence wielded by relatively few individuals on a national and transnational basis. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.

Many now know the rhetoric of the 1% very well: the imagery of a small elite owning most of the wealth while the 99% take the table scraps. This rhetoric and imagery was made popular by the growth of the Occupy movement, so it seems appropriate that a project of Occupy.com should expand on this understanding and bring the activities of the global elite further to light.

In 2006, a UN report revealed that the world’s richest 1% own 40% of the world’s wealth, with those in the financial and internet sectors comprising the “super rich.” More than a third of the world’s super-rich live in the U.S., with roughly 27% in Japan, 6% in the U.K., and 5% in France. The world’s richest 10% accounted for roughly 85% of the planet's total assets, while the bottom half of the population – more than 3 billion people – owned less than 1% of the world’s wealth.

Financial Totalitarianism: The Economic, Political, Social and Cultural Rule of Speculative Capital

Wednesday, 12 June 2013 09:57
By Max Haiven, Truthout | News Analysis

At the end of May, it was revealed that a new bill for the regulation of the banking and financial sector was, for all intents and purposes, drafted by Citigroup. This is only the latest in a long list of what can only be called legalized corruption at the highest levels of American power, which has ultimately led to no meaningful policy or legal change in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Avid readers of intrepid Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi and others cannot help but be sickened and struck by the impunity and hubris of America's financial elites, even as astute students of history will point out the previous moments when the power and influence of financiers has overshadowed economics and politics.

The Mad Science of the National Debt

With Congress gridlocked by the debt-ceiling debate, the Federal Reserve is conducting a radical experiment with the American economy

by Matt Taibbi
MAY 22, 2013

Welcome back to the dumb season. It's debt-ceiling time again.

We've been at this two years now. It was back in 2011 when the Republican Party, seized by anti-government furor, first locked on the lifting of the federal debt ceiling – an utterly routine governmental mechanism that allows the Treasury to borrow to pay for spending already approved by the entire Congress, Republicans included – as a place to hold a showdown over . . . government spending. That first battle resulted in a "Mutually Assured Destruction"-type stalemate, in which both parties agreed that if they couldn't reach a deal by New Year's Day 2013, a series of brutal, automatic, across-the-board spending cuts would take effect. At the time, it seemed unthinkable Congress would let that happen. By the time we passed that date, the thing that seemed unthinkable was the idea that Congress would ever make a deal. The cuts took effect in March and we were headed for a full-on fiscal crash on May 19th, when fate intervened to stop this stupidest-in-history blue-red catfight in its tracks, if only temporarily.

Secret Trade Agreements Threaten to Undo Our Last Shreds of Food Safety

by Katherine Paul, Ronnie Cummins

June 13, 2013  |  If you think the U.S. government is doing a sub-par job of keeping your food safe, brace yourself. You could soon be eating imported seafood, beef or chicken products that don’t meet even basic U.S. food safety standards. Under two new trade agreements, currently in negotiation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could be powerless to shut down imports of unsafe food or food ingredients. And if it tries, multinational corporations will be able to sue the U.S. government for the loss of anticipated future profits.

More frightening? Negotiations for both agreements are taking place behind closed doors, with input allowed almost exclusively from the corporations and industry trade groups that stand to benefit the most. And the Obama Administration intends to push the agreements through Congress without so much as giving lawmakers access to draft texts, much less the opportunity for debate.

Corey Robin: David Brooks: The Last Stalinist

David Brooks disapproves of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Snowden’s actions, Brooks says, are a betrayal of virtually every commitment and connection Snowden has ever made: his oath to his country, his promise to his employer, his loyalty to his friends, and more.

But in one of those precious pirouettes of paradox that only he can perform, Brooks sees those betrayals as a symptom of a deeper pathology: Snowden’s inability to make commitments and connections.

NGOs Target Financial Investment in Farmland

Jennifer Clapp

Banks, pension funds, hedge funds and other financial institutions have stepped up their investment in farmland in recent years, including financing for controversial large-scale land deals in developing countries. NGOs are now calling specifically on financial institutions to ensure that their investments are environmentally and socially sound, or consider divestment.

Last month, Friends of the Earth released a report that linked a number of European banks and investment firms to large-scale land acquisitions in Uganda. In this case, the financial institutions provided financing to Wilmar, a major agricultural trading firm with extensive interests in palm oil production and refining. FOE’s research showed that Wilmar’s subsidiary in Uganda had violated environmental and land tenure legislation in connection with recent land purchases in the country.