5 Ways the Christian Right Perverts Religion to Push Inhumane, Unfettered Capitalism

By Amanda Marcotte

December 18, 2013  |  The classic understanding of the relationship between social and economic conservatives is simple: Social conservatives are often understood as dupes who let their obsession with controlling other people’s sex lives convince them to vote Republican, often against their own economic interest. This was what President Obama was getting at when he said that working-class whites [3] who vote Republican “cling to guns or religion.”

 

There’s some truth to that, but if you start to dig a little deeper, it turns out that the Christian right doesn’t just bait believers into voting against their economic interests. On the contrary, the Christian right works fairly hard at trying to create theological arguments to support economic policies Republicans champion, such as slashing the social safety net or allowing unfettered capitalism to rapidly expand income inequality and environmental damage.

The Government Is Quietly Giving Way More Housing Aid To Rich People Than Poor People

Danny Vinik, Dec. 18, 2013, 4:28 PM

The Center for Budget Policy Priorities released a number of charts today that shows how much the federal government favors high-income households over low-income ones in housing benefits.

This largely results from the fact that homeowners receive significantly more aid than renters and high-income Americans are much more likely to be homeowners.

In 2012, the federal government gave out $240 billion in housing aid. Income data is not available for all of it, but of what is available, more than half went to those with incomes greater than $100,000 ($81.6 billion). Only $40 billion went to those with incomes less than $50,000.

Unemployed Americans Speak Out as Benefits are Slashed at Christmas

Thursday, 19 December 2013 00:00  
By John Dodds, Truthout | Opinion

"One of the hardest things I have ever had to do is sit my two kids down and tell them there might not be a Christmas this year."40-year-old unemployed father from Eubanks, Kentucky

Three days after Christmas this year, 1.3 million laid-off American workers will see their unemployment benefits stopped. In Pennsylvania, the number will be 87,000 people drawing their last check December 28.

"If my wife loses her benefit before she finds a job, we lose our house."
Philadelphia resident

These are working people caught in the worst economic crisis in more than 70 years, one that will not end. Unemployment is still officially 7.0 percent - with nearly 11 million people officially unemployed and millions more out of the labor force or working part time despite wanting full-time jobs.

Volcker Rule Made Meaningless by Abundant Exemptions

By Nomi Prins

The subject of heated debate in financial circles, the Volcker Rule, which was originally passed as part of the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, was finally approved by regulators. It will begin taking effect in April 2014 with full compliance required by July 2015. They say the devil is in the details. Regarding the Volcker Rule, the devil is in the details of its abundant exemptions. These include a laundry list of practices and businesses that mega-banks have performed under one roof, since the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall, as well as the myriad perks they won along the way to that power-consolidating event.

The 40-Year Slump

By Harold Meyerson

The steady stream of Watergate revelations, President Richard Nixon’s twists and turns to fend off disclosures, the impeachment hearings, and finally an unprecedented resignation—all these riveted the nation’s attention in 1974. Hardly anyone paid attention to a story that seemed no more than a statistical oddity: That year, for the first time since the end of World War II, Americans’ wages declined.

Since 1947, Americans at all points on the economic spectrum had become a little better off with each passing year. The economy’s rising tide, as President John F. Kennedy had famously said, was lifting all boats. Productivity had risen by 97 percent in the preceding quarter-century, and median wages had risen by 95 percent. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted in The Affluent Society, this newly middle-class nation had become more egalitarian. The poorest fifth had seen their incomes increase by 42 percent since the end of the war, while the wealthiest fifth had seen their incomes rise by just 8 percent. Economists have dubbed the period the “Great Compression.”

This egalitarianism, of course, was severely circumscribed. African Americans had onl y recently won civil equality, and economic equality remained a distant dream. Women entered the workforce in record numbers during the early 1970s to find a profoundly discriminatory labor market. A new generation of workers rebelled at the regimentation of factory life, staging strikes across the Midwest to slow down and humanize the assembly line. But no one could deny that Americans in 1974 lived lives of greater comfort and security than they had a quarter-century earlier. During that time, median family income more than doubled.

Gaius Publius: TPP trade agreement: Ross Perot on the `giant sucking sound from the East`

As some of you may remember, 1992 Presidential candidate Ross Perot created the phrase “giant sucking sound” to refer to loss of U.S. jobs under the proposed NAFTA agreement:

The “giant sucking sound” was United States Presidential candidate Ross Perot‘s colorful phrase for what he believed would be the negative effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he opposed. … The phrase, coined during the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, referred to the sound of U.S. jobs heading south for Mexico should the proposedfree-trade agreement go into effect.

Perot ultimately lost the election, and the winner, Bill Clinton, supported NAFTA, which went into effect on January 1, 1994.

Paul Krugman: Auditing the Fed is a Terrible Idea

The Washington Post economics commentator Mike Konczal wrote a very good column recently on why Senator Rand Paul's proposal that the Federal Reserve be "audited" is a bad idea. You should read it; I'd just like to offer a complementary take.

Here's the thing: We know what it means to audit a private bank — it means checking to be sure that it isn't wasting depositors' money or taking undue risks with it. But the Fed isn't in the business of investing, except for tactical purposes. It's there to manage money, not to make it. So what exactly would be audited?

How the wealthiest Americans use this one weird trick to avoid $100 billion in taxes

By Travis Gettys
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 15:42 EST

The wealthiest Americans have avoided paying about $100 billion in taxes through a loophole that essentially makes estate taxes voluntary, according to the attorney who devised the legal maneuver.

Under current law, the wealthy must pay taxes on estates valued at more than $5.25 million for an individual or $10.5 million for couples, with the top rate capped at 40 percent.

But many billionaires get around these taxes by shuffling their company’s stock in and out of trusts, which allows them to give away millions of dollars to their heirs while avoiding taxes on gifts valued at more than $14,000.

Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

Process simplifies transformation of algae to oil, water and usable byproducts

RICHLAND, Wash. – Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.

The research by engineers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was reported recently in the journal Algal Research. A biofuels company, Utah-based Genifuel Corp., has licensed the technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a pilot plant using the technology.

Matt Taibbi: The Rumored Chase-Madoff Settlement Is Another Bad Joke

Just under two months ago, when the $13 billion settlement for JP Morgan Chase was coming down the chute, word leaked out that that the deal was no sure thing. Among other things, it was said that prosecutors investigating Chase's role in the Bernie Madoff caper – Chase was Madoff's banker – were insisting on a guilty plea to actual criminal charges, but that this was a deal-breaker for Chase.

Something had to give, and now, apparently, it has. Last week, it was reported that the state and Chase were preparing a separate $2 billion deal over the Madoff issues, a series of settlements that would also involve a deferred prosecution agreement.

Dean Baker: Paul Krugman and TPP

I've got to take some issue with my friend Paul Krugman over his blog post pronouncing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) no big deal. As a trade question he is undoubtedly right. The countries in the pact are ones with whom the United States already has extensive trade ties and generally low barriers. Eliminating or reducing the remaining barriers cannot possibly have much impact on the U.S. economy.

However it is a misunderstanding to see the TPP as being about trade. This is a deal that focuses on changes in regulatory structures to lock in pro-corporate rules. Using a "trade" agreement provides a mechanism to lock in rules that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get through the normal political process.

How Rev. Billy Graham Taught the Republican Party to Sacrifice the Poor on the Altar of Big-Business

By CJ Werleman

December 17, 2013  |  Since turning 95 last month, Reverend Billy Graham’s health has deteriorated, and judging by his family’s call for prayers, his life is nearing its end. Many things will be written about Graham's life by both disciples and his detractors, but if you want to know where the base of today’s Republican Party—the Christian Right—gets its mojo, look no further than this Southern Baptist preacher.

 

The genetic makeup of the GOP is one chromosome away from Graham’s DNA. Today’s Republican Party is a neo-Confederate pro-corporation movement, thanks to the supposed life-long Democrat (when he wasn’t endorsing Mitt Romney)—the Reverend Billy Graham. A close friend of Richard Nixon's, it was Graham who helped the disgraced president articulate the “Southern Strategy,” which won Nixon the White House in 1968.

Paradise of untouchable assets

Trusts held in the Cook Islands can put money beyond the reach of American justice.

By Leslie Wayne
6:37 pm, December 15, 2013 Updated: 12:32 pm, December 16, 2013

Picture a paradise where you can be lawsuit-proof. A place to hide your hard-earned assets far from the grasp of former or soon-to-be-former spouses, angry business partners or, if you happen to be a doctor, patients who might sue you.

Lawyers drumming up business say they have found just the place: the Cook Islands. And, thanks to a recently released trove of documents, it’s become clear that hundreds of wealthy people have stashed their money there, including a felon who ran a $7 billion Ponzi scheme and the doctor who lost his license in the Octomom case.

Paul Krugman: No Reason to Fret About France

First things first: France has problems. Unemployment is high, especially among young people; many small businesses are struggling; the population is aging (although not nearly as much as it is in many other countries, Germany very much included.) By just about any measure I can find, however, France looks not too bad by European standards. Gross domestic product has recovered roughly to precrisis levels; the budget deficit is fairly small and the medium-term debt outlook not at all scary; the long-term budget outlook is actually pretty good compared to France's neighbors, thanks to a higher birth rate.

Yet the country is the subject of vituperative, over-the-top commentary. Last year The Economist was declaring that France was "the time bomb at the heart of Europe." Earlier this year, Shawn Tully, an editor at CNNMoney, wrote that that France was in "free fall." The latter actually offered a few specifics, arguing that France faces a "yawning competitiveness gap" due to rising labor costs. Hmm.

There's No Way to Follow the Money

A patchwork of vague and lax campaign-finance regulations mean hundreds of millions of dollars changed hands in 2012 with no one tracking them.

Lee Aitken, Dec 16 2013, 2:01 PM ET

Christmas comes early for campaign watchdogs—or late, depending on your perspective. Thanks to a lag in IRS reporting rules, the tax returns of independent groups that spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2012 election are just now coming due. Considered together with a recent campaign-finance investigation in California, these filings hint at an orgy of self-dealing and “dark money” shenanigans unprecedented in American politics.

The first presidential election since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision spawned what Bloomberg Businessweek called “a Cayman Islands-style web of nonprofit front groups and shell companies.” These not only shielded donors’ identities but also obscured the huge profits of political operatives who moved nimbly between the candidates, the super PACs, and the vendors that get their business.

Gaius Publius: "Liberalism Doesn't Carry the Critique of Capitalism That Progressivism Does"

I’ve been fascinated lately with the meaning of the terms “liberal” and “progressive.” It’s clear that what we now call “liberalism” is really a variant, a side branch of the real thing, and should be more properly named “FDR liberalism” or “social liberalism.” Today’s “liberalism” — FDR-liberalism — is an offshoot of pre-FDR liberalism that diverges from its original meaning in a rather important way, by including a role for government. Prior to FDR, “liberalism” just meant basic free-market capitalism.

That’s why so-called modern (Clintonian) “neoliberals” are so different from FDR liberals, and why they’re so similar to Milton Friedman free-market conservatives.

401(k) Plan Abuses Finally Coming to Light

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Yves Smith
 
I doubt that I’m unusual in being a finance type who has heard about 401 (k) abuses and bad practices for a very long time. So it’s gratifying to see the Financial Times that something is finally being done to try to curb this behavior. But that is hardly the full extent of what is rotten in retirement fund land.

Some of the failings reflect a combination of poor implementation of already not-so-hot finance orthodoxy (see a layperson rendering in Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, or a recap of Mandelbrot and other critiques in chapter 3 of ECONNED). For instance, one mainstay of investing is to diversify across asset classes. It won’t increase your returns but it will lower your risk.

Paul Krugman: Why Inequality Matters

Rising inequality isn’t a new concern. Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street,” with its portrayal of a rising plutocracy insisting that greed is good, was released in 1987. But politicians, intimidated by cries of “class warfare,” have shied away from making a major issue out of the ever-growing gap between the rich and the rest.

That may, however, be changing. We can argue about the significance of Bill de Blasio’s victory in the New York mayoral race or of Elizabeth Warren’s endorsement of Social Security expansion. And we have yet to see whether President Obama’s declaration that inequality is “the defining challenge of our age” will translate into policy changes. Still, the discussion has shifted enough to produce a backlash from pundits arguing that inequality isn’t that big a deal.

Dean Baker | The End of the Assault on Social Security and Medicare

When Senator Elizabeth Warren came out for increasing Social Security last month it set in motion a remarkable turn of events. For over a decade the only discussion of Social Security by the Washington power types was over how much to cut it and when. The extreme left position was that current spending was about right.

Senator Warren changed the debate when she endorsed a bill proposed by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin that would index retirees’ benefits to an index that more closely tracks the cost-of-living of seniors. The bill also would raise benefits by roughly $70 a month. As a result of Warren’s prominence in national politics, and the fact that raising Social Security benefits is actually quite popular, the Washington insider types were forced to take the idea seriously.

"Corporatism" is the Latest Hysterical Right-Wing Accusation

The secret history of a smear

by Mike Konczal | December 15, 2013

Right-wing critics have a new favorite word to malign President Obama’s economic policies: corporatism. Naturally, it’s an ugly word. Whether it evokes Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy or just an image of the rich growing richer through government collusion, it’s a vision nobody would defend. Nobody is for corporatism.

Starting with Tim Carney’s 2009 book Obamanomics the idea that Obama is either consciously or accidently enriching the well-off has become a conservative meme. The right-wing blogosphere uses it, as does conservative intellectual heavyweights like Yuval Levin. Thus liberal readers were surprised the other week to learn that the contraception mandate in health-care reform was “corporatist.” Likewise, it may have been news to you that the Dodd-Frank financial reform overhaul—the one Wall Street is perpetually fighting against—is a corporatist sop to the big banks. The Federal Reserve’s efforts to move the economy closer to something like full employment? Yet more corporatism. Ditto both the stimulus and cap-and-trade.

7 Rip-Offs Corporations and the Wealthy Don't Want You to Know About

By Paul Buchheit

December 15, 2013  |  Tax-avoiding, consumer-exploiting big business leaders are largely responsible for these abuses. Congress just lets it happen. Corporate heads and members of Congress seem incapable of relating to the people that are being victimized, and the mainstream media seems to have lost the ability to express the views of lower-income Americans.

[...]

2. Crash the Economy, Get Your Money Back. Die with a Student Loan, Stay in Debt.

The financial industry has manipulated [6] the bankruptcy laws to ensure that high-risk derivatives, which devastated the market in 2008, have FIRST CLAIM [7] over savings deposit insurance, pension funds, and everything else.

But the same banker-friendly "bankruptcy reform" has ensured that college graduates keep their student loans [8] till they die. And sometimes even after that [9], as the debt is assumed by their co-signing parents.

 

Paul Krugman: The Biggest Losers

The pundit consensus seems to be that Republicans lost in the just-concluded budget deal. Overall spending will be a bit higher than the level mandated by the sequester, the straitjacket imposed back in 2011. Meanwhile, Democrats avoided making any concessions on Social Security or Medicare. Call this one for Team D, I guess.

But if Republicans arguably lost this round, the unemployed lost even more: Extended benefits weren’t renewed, so 1.3 million workers will be cut off at the end of this month, and many more will see their benefits run out in the months that follow. And if you take a longer perspective — if you look at what has happened since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010 — what you see is a triumph of anti-government ideology that has had enormously destructive effects on American workers. 

Truth As Well As Reconciliation

Posted December 12, 2013 at 6:00 pm by Richard Rothstein

In the last week, we’ve paid great attention to Nelson Mandela’s call for forgiveness and reconciliation between South Africa’s former white rulers and its exploited black majority. But we’ve paid less attention to the condition that Mandela insisted must underlie reconciliation—truth. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Mandela established, and that Bishop Desmond Tutu chaired, was designed to contribute to cleansing wounds of the country’s racist history by exposing it to a disinfecting bright light. As for those Afrikaners who committed even the worst acts of violence against blacks, they could be forgiven and move on only if they acknowledged the full details of their crimes.

Shining a light on ALEC's power to shape policy

Commentary: American Legislative Exchange Council's behind-the-scenes influence peddling should be getting more attention from the Washington press corps

By Wendell Potter
6:00 am, December 9, 2013 Updated: 9:53 am, December 9, 2013

It’s amazing how a little sunlight will change the behavior of some of the biggest names in corporate America — sunlight here meaning greater transparency and accountability.

It’s also amazing how the U.K.’s The Guardian is covering this changed behavior — and its potential consequences for every American — without much competition from U.S.-based media. It seems that reporters in Washington in particular can’t be bothered.

Over the past several decades, one of the country’s most influential political organizations — the 40-year-old American Legislative Exchange Council — was able to operate largely under the radar. Never heard of it? That’s by design. Founded in 1973 by conservative political operatives, ALEC has been successful in shaping  public policy to benefit its corporate patrons in part because few people — including reporters — knew anything about the organization, much less how it went about getting virtually identical laws passed in a multitude of states.

Rick Perlstein: Chicago and the Municipal-Industrial Complex

December 13, 2013 - 8:16 PM ET

On Tuesday I quoted Chicago anti-privatization activist Tom Tresser about why corporate America is falling in love with cities: “We have a massive global movement of capital which, because they’ve burned their own fucking houses down through their own greed, don’t have the gilt returns that they’re used to receiving…. So the new guaranteed annual returns that big business and big capital are looking for is our assets.”

Consider the very model of the modern major municipal contractor: Cubic. Trading on the NASDEQ with a market capitalization of almost a billion dollars under the adorable stock symbol CUB, Cubic earns over 99 percent of its revenues from government contracts, according to a Credit Suisse equity research report. When it’s not mismanaging urban fare-transit collection systems like Chicago’s Ventra, it does a once-pretty trade as “the leading pure-play provider of [the] defense training and mission support service areas which stand at the heart of modern military practices.” But, as we’ll see, defense isn’t offering the gilt-edged returns it once did. So look for Chicago’s very stupid smart cards to come soon to a city bus near you. Look, in other words, for Cubic to be picking your pocket, too.

The End of the Internet As We Know It

Unless the FCC protects net neutrality, the biggest Internet providers will run amok.

by Jenn Topper

The Internet is the world’s largest shopping mall, library, video store, post office and town square. When you turn on your computer, you’re in the driver’s seat, choosing what you want to read, watch, and hear.

We owe everything we love about the Web to net neutrality, the principle that the Internet is an open platform and service providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner can’t dictate where you go and what you do online.

Without net neutrality, the Web would look a lot like cable, with the most popular content available only on certain tiers or with certain providers. (Imagine AT&T as the exclusive home of Netflix and Comcast as the sole source of YouTube.)

A modern understanding of a long ago confession and a boy’s execution

By Corey Hutchins
6:00 am, December 11, 2013 Updated: 9:53 am, December 11, 2013

ALCOLU, S.C. — A few miles off I-95, past acres of brown-and-white fields where blackbirds circle overhead, this small town in the heart of Deep South cotton country isn't known for much. It has a post office and a few churches, some abandoned houses and some nicer ones, ramshackle trailers and cotton fields.

After church on a recent Sunday there, George Frierson was scuffing a shiny black dress shoe across some gravel at a railroad crossing. Back whhttp://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7444299331135530598#editor/target=post;postID=8032897417947926364en he was a kid the rail line split this tiny, rural town along racial lines. But for blacks like him growing up in Alcolu, the train tracks signified something even more sinister than segregation.

“Where they actually found the girls' bodies, they say it was just along the tracks,” he said.
Frierson is a local historian and community activist who works at the nearby Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church and serves on the county school board. The general area he was marking with his shoe was the scene of a double murder in 1944. Two young white girls out picking flowers had their skulls bashed in and were found in a nearby water-filled ditch.

Actually Existing Capitalism: Wrecking Societies for the Benefit of Big Capital and the Super-Rich

Thursday, 12 December 2013 00:00  
By CJ Polychroniou, Truthout | Op-Ed 

The evidence suggests that capitalism has become wholly predatory and has given up all pretense of being "socially responsible."

Are all of the socioeconomic issues confronting Europe and the United States - recession or stagnant growth, skyrocketing unemployment, lowered prospects for new job creation, a demand shortage, a widening gap between the haves and have-nots, social malaise - merely consequences of the financial crisis of 2007-08?

A strong case can be made that what we have been witnessing since then is not simply a severe financial crisis centered in the developed world but the fact that today's capitalism is simply incapable of functioning in an economic way conducive to maintaining sustainable and balanced growth.

Lurid Subprime Scams Unveiled in Long-Running Fraud Trial

by Matt Taibbi

DECEMBER 12, 2013

 

Lost amid the hoopla over JP Morgan Chase's record-setting $13 billion settlement this fall was news of another monster court resolution – a $2.46 billion judgment, the largest ever awarded after trial in a securities fraud class action case, handed down in October against a HSBC acquisition called Household International.

It's an old case, with the trial completed way back in 2009 and the fraud in question having all taken place between 1997 and 2002. But it has crucial ramifications for the present, for one key reason:
The evidence uncovered in the Household suit should put to lie once and for all the oft-repeated myth – spread by many of America's most notable dumb people, from Rush Limbaugh to New York City Mayor-unelect Mike Bloomberg – that the financial crisis was caused by the government "forcing" banks to lend to poor people.

In reality, of course, the subprime bubble exploded because financial companies and banks were in a mad rush to get as many iffy borrowers into loans as quickly as possible – and not because they were forced to, but because they made assloads of money doing so.

Too Many Secrets: Fixing the Government's Broken System for Classifying Information

Friday, 13 December 2013 10:41  
By Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report 

The sweeping spying and surveillance programs revealed by the Snowden leaks have raised serious questions about whether the United States government values the privacy of foreign governments and its own citizens, but it's clear that the government values its own privacy. The government and its contractors spent nearly $11 billion last year on the system for classifying and declassifying information kept hidden from public view, according to the Information Security Oversight Office.

That’s billion with a "b," and that number may not even include the amount of money spent by secretive national security agencies like the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, which classify the information on how much money they spend on classifying information, according to Elizabeth Goitein, a national security analyst for the Brennan Center for Justice.

Corporate Extortion: States Are Giving Billions to Corporations That Don’t Create Jobs

By Steven Rosenfeld

December 12, 2013  |  As the nation turns its attention to the latest federal budget deal where curtailed spending and cuts are the defining principal, a dozen blue and red state governors are in a bidding war recklessly offering to spend billions for tax breaks and other public-paid subsidies to lure the corporate giant Boeing to build its next-generation aircraft factory.

 

Beyond the schizophrenic spectre of congressional negotiators saying no to spending as governors are offering [3] mountains of cash is a maddening reality: these taxpayer subsidies do not create the promised jobs or investments, a series of striking academic studies have found. All they do is boost bottom lines by cutting corporate costs.

Paul Krugman: The Punishment Cure

Six years have passed since the United States economy entered the Great Recession, four and a half
since it officially began to recover, but long-term unemployment remains disastrously high. And
Republicans have a theory about why this is happening. Their theory is, as it happens, completely
wrong. But they’re sticking to it — and as a result, 1.3 million American workers, many of them in
desperate financial straits, are set to lose unemployment benefits at the end of December.

Merry Christmas.

Now, the G.O.P.’s desire to punish the unemployed doesn’t arise solely from bad economics; it’s
part of a general pattern of afflicting the afflicted while comforting the comfortable (no to food
stamps, yes to farm subsidies). But ideas do matter — as John Maynard Keynes famously wrote,
they are “dangerous for good or evil.” And the case of unemployment benefits is an especially clear
example of superficially plausible but wrong economic ideas being dangerous for evil.

Personal care products are possible sources of potentially harmful parabens for babies

Through lotions, shampoos and other personal care products (PCPs), infants and toddlers are likely becoming exposed to potentially harmful substances, called parabens, at an even higher level than adult women in the U.S., researchers have reported. They published their findings on parabens, which have been linked to reproductive and other health issues, in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.

'Dumb' & 'Cruel': Budget Deal Attacks America's Most Vulnerable

Lauded as a "step in the right direction" by high-level members from both parties, progressives--calling it both 'dumb' and 'cruel'--say that should be a warning to the nation

- Jon Queally, staff writer

"Dumb."

That's what University of California, Berkely economist Robert Reich called the budget deal announced by Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray and House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan late Tuesday.

Why dumb? According to Reich, the "deal doesn't close tax loopholes for wealthy, restore food stamps to poor, or extend unemployment benefits for jobless."

How the Big Six Cover Tracks in Murder of the Honeybee

Tuesday, 10 December 2013 12:41

By Jennifer Sonntag, Truthout | Op-Ed

The Big Six agrochemical companies have turned the honeybee into a factory animal, a workhorse that cannot exist without antibiotics, and are using the term "Colony Collapse Disorder" to cover the poisoning of pollinators vital to agriculture.

It is only by fiat of a corporate-captured EPA, a bought press and willed ignorance that colony collapse continues to be known as a bee "disorder."

Neonics, systemic pesticides that work through a neurotoxin, which is applied to the seed of a plant and taken up into all its tissue so that the insect is exposed at every turn to a new vehicle bearing the same poison, work in a very orderly manner indeed. Poisoned food crops and the honeybees that pollinate them are perfectly efficient bearers of the values of the Big 6 - Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont. The empty beehive isn't mysterious. It is no magician's cabinet. The bees aren't disordered - they are designed. There is, that is, no Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

The Fracking Files: Stratfor Provided Energy Industry with Intel on ProPublica, Environmental Groups

by Adam Federman – December 10, 2013

Industry’s 2009 fears of a muscular fracking opposition have come to pass

Long before the first anti-fracking bans were passed in North America, the oil and gas industry was taking stock of its adversaries through profiles and briefings produced by Stratfor, the Austin-based global intelligence company. The company is known for its investigations into activist groups on behalf of some of the world’s largest corporations and government agencies. The documents – part of a massive cache of emails, reports, and communiques published by Wikileaks beginning in early 2012 – reveal an industry concerned about an impending grassroots backlash to the fracking boom. In hindsight, it appears the industry was right to be worried: Today, opposition to oil and gas fracking is one of the most vigorous strands of the larger environmental movement.

Hidden disaster in new budget: Demonic plot to raid pensions

What you won't hear about this new deal: Public workers will get eviscerated, to achieve "deficit reduction"

David Dayen

2013 has not been a pleasant year if you work for the federal government. You’ve been subject to pay freezes, furloughs and shutdowns. One of you got yelled at by a Tea Party Republican at the World War II memorial. And if Congress passes the budget deal announced Tuesday night by Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray – a big if – you will get a final Christmas present: You’ll have to pay more into your pension, an effective wage cut that just adds to the $114 billion, with a “B,” federal employees have already given back to the government in the name of deficit reduction.

The deal between House and Senate negotiators Ryan and Murray would reverse part of sequestration for 2014 and 2015, itself a major source of pain for federal workers. But negotiators want to pay for that relief in future years, with the overall package cutting the deficit by an additional $23 billion. And one of the major “pay-fors” is an increase in federal employee pension contributions. President Obama’s 2014 budget included such a proposal, which would have raised the employee contribution in three stages, from 0.8 percent of salary to 2 percent. Congress had already made this shift for new hires; the Obama proposal would affect all workers hired before 2012.

Wanted: Fed Policy Focused on Jobs for Americans Instead of Profits for Banks

By Nomi Prins

December 7, 2013  |  There is a prevailing, politically expedient myth that the Fed’s bond purchase programs are somehow akin to job fairs; as if there’s an economic umbilical cord stretching from a mortgage-backed security lying on the Fed’s books to a decent job becoming available in the heart of America. Yet, since the Fed began its unprecedented zero-interest rate and multi-trillion dollar bond-buying policies - the real beneficiaries have been the Big Six banks (that hold more than $500 billion of assets): JPM Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

 

The Big Six banks’ stock prices have outperformed the Dow’s rise by a factor of more than TEN times, since early 2009. Moreover, low to zero percent interest rates on citizens’ savings accounts have catalyzed depositors, pensions, and mutual funds to buy more stocks to make up for low returns on bonds and money market instruments, further buoying the stock market.

Paul Krugman: In Europe, a Repudiation of Austerity Policies

The European Central Bank's rate cut has led to huge tensions, with the executive board split and many German economists protesting. As usual, a lot of the argument is about the perception that those lazy Southern Europeans are getting a free ride.

According to an article published recently in the Financial Times: "A commentary by the chief economist of the financial weekly WirtschaftsWoche called the decision a 'diktat from a new Banca d'Italia, based in Frankfurt.'" Why can't those Italians, etc., pull up their socks the way the Germans did?

What Germans — economists as well as the general public — still don't seem to get is how much Germany's success at emerging from its late-1990s doldrums depended on a somewhat inflationary boom in southern Europe. And they therefore also don't realize how much damage Germany is causing by refusing to allow higher inflation in the euro zone.

Who Should Control Our Water?

Posted by Renuka Rayasam

During the Industrial Revolution, when people moved to cities en masse, household and human waste began to mix in Berlin’s gutters. A stench rose from the street. Fouled water lead to deadly outbreaks of cholera and other water-borne diseases. By 1852, the Prussian government had to do something: it hired an English company, Fox and Crampton, to take over the city’s water service. It was one of the early Western experiments in the privatization of water.

Because water is so abundant—it rains from the sky, it collects in the earth—it feels like it should be free. The United Nations even recognized water as a human right in 2010. “It’s not like shoes,” Saskia Solar, a spokeswoman at Berlin’s water authority, told me. “Water is something fundamental to our existence.” But delivering safe water comes at a cost, and the fight over who should bear that cost has transformed water—and the merits and shortcomings of privatizing it—into an ideological battleground.

How We're Destroying Our Kids' Brains

As many as one in six children has a neurodevelopmental disability, and scientists are finding links to pollution.

—By Florence Williams  | Sat Dec. 7, 2013 3:00 AM GMT

This story originally appeared on the OnEarth website.

Carlos Jusino grew up a typical kid in Harlem, rollerblading near the Hudson River, eating at the McDonald's on 145th Street and Broadway, hanging out with friends in his building. Also typical was the fact that many of Jusino's neighbors and family members, including his mother, had asthma. "When I was growing up, she went to the hospital about once a month for asthma," he says. Although he didn't know it at the time, more than 30 percent of the kids in Harlem have asthma, one of the highest rates in the country.

Jusino's family was worried about the air quality around Harlem, but most of its attention was directed to a sewage treatment facility built in 1985 along the West Side Highway next to the Hudson, where a foul-smelling settling tank lay exposed. The plant galvanized the community, including a group of environmental justice activists known as the Sewage Seven. They sued the city and won a settlement in 1994 that helped establish air-monitoring stations around the plant.

Thomas Frank: Home of the Whopper

Let me tell you about this one stretch of Hillsborough Road in Durham, North Carolina. It’s between two freeways, just a short drive from the noble towers of Duke University, and in the space of about a mile, you will find a McDonald’s, a Cracker Barrel, a Wendy’s, a Chick-fil-A, an Arby’s, a Waffle House, a Bojangles’, a Biscuitville, a Subway, a Taco Bell, and a KFC. As you walk down this roaring thoroughfare, you’ll notice that the ground is littered with napkins and bright yellow paper cups. But then again, you aren’t really supposed to be walking along this portion of Hillsborough Road and noticing things like those cups, or that abandoned concrete pedestal for some vanished logo, or the empty Aristocrat Vodka bottle hidden behind that broken Motel 6 sign. This is a landscape meant to be viewed through a windshield and with the stereo turned up. In fact, drivers here sometimes seem bewildered by the very presence of pedestrians, which may be the reason I was almost run down twice.

But it wasn’t a car that struck me on Hillsborough Road, it was a vision: a spontaneous understanding of fast-food efficiency. I was gazing on a simple yellow structure that contained the workings of a Waffle House when it came to me — the meaning of this whole panorama of chain restaurants. The modular construction, the application of assembly-line techniques to food service, the twin-basket fryers and bulk condiment dispensers, even the clever plastic lids on the coffee cups, with their fold-back sip tabs: these were all triumphs of human ingenuity. You had to admire them. And yet that intense, concentrated efficiency also demanded a fantastic wastefulness elsewhere — of fuel, of air-conditioning, of land, of landfill. Inside the box was a masterpiece of industrial engineering; outside the box were things and people that existed merely to be used up.

Saving the Net from the surveillance state: Glenn Greenwald speaks up (Q&A)

The man to whom Edward Snowden entrusted his NSA documents isn't content just to save the Bill of Rights and reinvent journalism. He also wants to stop the Internet from becoming history's most dangerous spy tool.

by Edward Moyer

December 6, 2013 12:01 AM PST  
Big Brother may be watching you. But Glenn Greenwald is watching Big Brother.

That's not a bad take on how the 46-year-old constitutional-law attorney turned crusading journalist turned thorn in the side of the NSA might describe his mission.

At least in part. Greenwald is doing more than just watching. By combing through the tens of thousands of classified NSA documents leaked to him by Edward Snowden -- and publishing in newspapers around the globe report after report on the secretive agency's mass-spying activities -- he's got the whole world watching too.

The Mandela Years in Power

by PATRICK BOND

The death of Nelson Mandela, at age 95 on 5 December 2013, brings genuine sadness. As his health deteriorated over the past six months, many asked the more durable question: how did he change South Africa? Given how unsatisfactory life is for so many in society, the follow-up question is, how much room was there for Mandela to maneuver? South Africa now lurches from crisis to crisis, and so many of us are tempted to remember the Mandela years – especially the first democratic government – as fundamentally different from the crony-capitalist, corruption-riddled, brutally-securitised, eco-destructive and anti-egalitarian regime we suffer now. But were the seeds of our present political weeds sown earlier?

The critical decade was the 1990s, when Mandela was at the height of his power, having been released from jail in February 1990, taken the South African presidency in May 1994 and left office in June 1999. But it was in this period, alleges former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, that “the battle for the soul of the African National Congress was lost to corporate power and influence… We readily accepted that devil’s pact and are damned in the process. It has bequeathed to our country an economy so tied in to the neoliberal global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room to alleviate the dire plight of the masses of our people.”

Given much more extreme inequality, much lower life expectancy, much higher unemployment, much worse vulnerability to world economic fluctuations, and much more rapid ecological decay during his presidency, how much can Mandela be blamed? Was he pushed, or did he jump?

South Africa won its democracy in 1994. But regardless of the elimination of formal racism and the constitutional rhetoric of human rights, it has been a “choiceless democracy” in socio-economic policy terms and more broadly a “low-intensity democracy”, to borrow terms coined respectively by Thandika Mkandawire for Africa, and by Barry Gills and Joel Rocamora for many ex-dictatorships. Nelson Mandela’s South Africa fit a pattern: a series of formerly anti-authoritarian critics of old dictatorships – whether from rightwing or left-wing backgrounds – who transformed into 1980s-90s neoliberal rulers: Alfonsin (Argentina), Aquino (Philippines), Arafat (Palestine), Aristide (Haiti), Bhutto (Pakistan), Chiluba (Zambia), Dae Jung (South Korea), Havel (Czech Republic), Mandela (South Africa), Manley (Jamaica), Megawati (Indonesia), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Museveni (Uganda), Nujoma (Namibia), Obasanjo (Nigeria), Ortega (Nicaragua), Perez (Venezuela), Rawlings (Ghana), Walesa (Poland) and Yeltsin (Russia).The self-imposition of economic and development policies – typically at the behest of financial markets and the Washington/Geneva multilateral institutions – required an extraordinary insulation from genuine national determinations: in short, an “elite transition.”

State conservative groups plan US-wide assault on education, health and tax

• State Policy Network co-ordinating plans across 34 US states
• Strategy to 'release residents from government dependency'
• Revelations come amid growing scrutiny of tax-exempt charities
• Read key excerpts from the SPN proposals
• Portland Press Herald: group's plan to eliminate taxes
• Texas Observer: the money behind the fight to wreck Medicaid

Ed Pilkington in New York and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
theguardian.com, Thursday 5 December 2013 13.21 EST


Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

Next, say goodbye to the waiters and waitresses

by David Atkins

The internet, workforce mechanization and deskilling have already decimated America's manufacturing jobs. Soon those forces will be coming for the white collar jobs as well. Also, package delivery people. Cab drivers and car salesmen, too.

But service sector jobs should be OK, right? You still need people to serve other people, right?

About that:

Score one for the machines. On Tuesday, Applebee’s announced plans to install a tablet at every table in its 1,860 restaurants across the United States. Customers will be able to use the devices to order food, pay the bill, and ignore their dining companions by playing video games.

Dean Baker: Pension Theft: Class War Goes to the Next Stage

In the past two days we've seen a federal judge rule that Detroit can go bankrupt, putting its workers' pensions in jeopardy, and we have seen Illinois' Legislature vote for substantial cuts in its retirees' pensions. Undoubtedly these two actions are just the tip of the iceberg. We have opened up a new sport for America's elite: pension theft.

The specifics of the situations are very different, but the outcome is the same. Public employees who spent decades working for the government are not going to get the pensions that were part of their pay package. In both cases we have governments claiming poverty, and therefore the workers are just out of luck.

Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets

How two alienated, angry geeks broke the story of the year

by Janet Reitman

DECEMBER 04, 2013

 

Early one morning last December, Glenn Greenwald opened his laptop, scanned through his e-mail, and made a decision that almost cost him the story of his life. A columnist and blogger with a large and devoted following, Greenwald receives hundreds of e-mails every day, many from readers who claim to have "great stuff." Occasionally these claims turn out to be credible; most of the time they're cranks. There are some that seem promising but also require serious vetting. This takes time, and Greenwald, who starts each morning deluged with messages, has almost none. "My inbox is the enemy," he told me recently.

And so it was that on December 1st, 2012, Greenwald received a note from a person asking for his public encryption, or PGP, key so he could send him an e-mail securely. Greenwald didn't have one, which he now acknowledges was fairly inexcusable given that he wrote almost daily about national-security issues, and had likely been on the government's radar for some time over his vocal support of Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks. "I didn't really know what PGP was," he admits. "I had no idea how to install it or how to use it." It seemed time-consuming and complicated, and Greenwald, who was working on a book about how the media control political discourse, while also writing his column for The Guardian, had more pressing things to do.

ALEC calls for penalties on 'freerider' homeowners in assault on clean energy

• Documents reveal conservative group's anti-green agenda
• Strategy to charge people who install their own solar panels
• Environmentalists accuse Alec of protecting utility firms' profits

• ALEC facing funding crisis after exodus of big donors

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 December 2013 12.49 EST

An alliance of corporations and conservative activists is mobilising to penalise homeowners who install their own solar panels – casting them as "freeriders" – in a sweeping new offensive against renewable energy, the Guardian has learned.

Over the coming year, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) will promote legislation with goals ranging from penalising individual homeowners and weakening state clean energy regulations, to blocking the Environmental Protection Agency, which is Barack Obama's main channel for climate action.

Details of Alec's strategy to block clean energy development at every stage – from the individual rooftop to the White House – are revealed as the group gathers for its policy summit in Washington this week.

Paul Krugman: Obama Gets Real

Much of the media commentary on President Obama’s big inequality speech was cynical. You know the drill: it’s yet another “reboot” that will go nowhere; none of it will have any effect on policy, and so on. But before we talk about the speech’s possible political impact or lack thereof, shouldn’t we look at the substance? Was what the president said true? Was it new? If the answer to these questions is yes — and it is — then what he said deserves a serious hearing.

And once you realize that, you also realize that the speech may matter a lot more than the cynics imagine. 

New Guardian Docs Show ALEC Misled Press, Public

Thursday, 05 December 2013 09:07  
By Brendan Fischer, PR Watch | Report

Internal documents from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) published by The Guardian provide stunning insight into the inner workings of the "corporate bill mill" -- and offer new evidence about how the group has continually misled reporters, the public, and even its own members.

The notoriously secretive ALEC has been thrust into the sunlight in the two years since the Center for Media and Democracy launched ALECexposed.org, analyzed over 800 of ALEC's previously-secret model bills, and documented the corporations and legislators pushing ALEC's legislative agenda. It now appears that ALEC has been scorched by the sunshine.

David Cay Johnston: A Hard Lesson from Motown: They Will Steal Your Pension

Anyone in a public-sector job looking forward to retiring in comfort should look carefully at what is going on in Detroit and Springfield, Ill. Sherlock Holmes would call it the case of the missing pension money.

News leaking out this week from the Motor City tells how the enormous gap between the pensions workers earned and the money set aside to pay for them will be closed. By stealing from the workers.

Courts, legislatures, and corporations are all working in concert not to pay the full benefits owed. For decades, political and business leaders failed to set aside the right amount of money each payday to cover the pensions workers earned and, in some cases, covered up the mismanagement of pension fund investments.

The lies behind this transatlantic trade deal

Plans to create an EU-US single market will allow corporations to sue governments using secretive panels, bypassing courts and parliaments

George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 2 December 2013 15.31 EST

Panic spreads through the European commission like ferrets in a rabbit warren. Its plans to create a single market incorporating Europe and the United States, progressing so nicely when hardly anyone knew, have been blown wide open. All over Europe people are asking why this is happening; why we were not consulted; for whom it is being done.

They have good reason to ask. The commission insists that its Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership should include a toxic mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement. Where this has been forced into other trade agreements, it has allowed big corporations to sue governments before secretive arbitration panels composed of corporate lawyers, which bypass domestic courts and override the will of parliaments.

They have good reason to ask. The commission insists that its Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership should include a toxic mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement. Where this has been forced into other trade agreements, it has allowed big corporations to sue governments before secretive arbitration panels composed of corporate lawyers, which bypass domestic courts and override the will of parliaments.

Another Batch of Wall Street Villains Freed on Technicality

by Matt Taibbi
DECEMBER 04, 2013

I love covering trials, which is one reason I've been a little sad since switching over to the Wall Street beat: Few of the bad guys in this world ever even get interviewed by the authorities, much less indicted, so trials are comically rare.

But we did have one last year, a big one, and though it was boring and jargon-laden enough on the surface that at least one juror fought sleep in its opening days, I thought it was fascinating. In a story about the Justice Department's Spring 2012 prosecution of a wide-raging municipal bond bid-rigging case, I called it the "first trial of the modern American mafia":

"Of course, you won't hear about the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that . . . But this just completed trial in downtown New York . . . allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street."

Paul Krugman: France's Ideological Downgrade

So Standard & Poor's has downgraded France's credit rating. What does this tell us? The answer is: not much about France. It can't be overemphasized that the ratings agencies have no special information about national solvency — especially for big countries like France. Does S.&P. have inside knowledge of the state of French finances? No. Does it have a better macroeconomic model than, say, the International Monetary Fund? You have to be kidding. So what's this about?

I think it's useful to compare I.M.F. projections for France with those for another country that has been getting nice words from the raters lately: Britain. The charts on this page show data from the World Economic Outlook Database — real numbers through 2012, I.M.F. projections up to 2018. First, real gross domestic product per capita: France has done better than Britain so far, and the I.M.F. expects that advantage to persist.

GAO Report Highlights Compelling Reasons for New Federal Privacy Law

Consumers keep sharing and disclosing lots of personal data—each time they shop, surf the Web, subscribe to magazines, or contribute to charities. Mounds of this data are being compiled and combined, creating so-called digital dossiers that outline much about who we are—or, at least, some approximation of who companies think we are, based on our consumer preferences. As our data gets resold, recombined, and repurposed, we often have little idea who has data about us, where a given company may have initially obtained that data, and what that data will be used for in the future. It feels as if we have no real control over our own data. This is the brave new world of big data.

US Health Reform Keeps Insurance Companies in the Mix, No Matter the Cost

Tuesday, 03 December 2013 13:08  
By Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co. | Op-Ed

In a recent online post for the Roosevelt Institute, the economics commentator Mike Konczal said most of what needs to be said about the underlying sources of the Affordable Care Act's complexity, which in turn set the stage for the current tech problems. Basically, Obamacare is not complicated because government social insurance programs have to be complicated: Neither Social Security nor Medicare is complex in structure. As Mr. Konczal wrote, it's complicated because political constraints made a straightforward single-payer system unachievable.

New Study Confirms that Lower Corporate Tax Rates Don’t Create Jobs

Corporate executives love to peddle the notion that they need to have their low tax payments reduced even further, even as the share of GDP represented by company profits is at unprecedentedly high levels. In fact, corporations paid between 5% and 6% of GDP in taxes in the early 1950 versus a trivial 1.3% in 2010. The GAO reported earlier this year that the effective Federal tax rate paid by large corporations in 2010 was 12.6%, versus a nominal rate of 35%. And roughly 10% of large companies pay no Federal tax at all.

One of the arguments made by big companies in favor of making their low payments even low is that they’d go out and create more jobs. This is clearly spurious. Large companies are already awash with cash, thanks in no small measure to taking advantage of the Fed’s largesse and issuing bonds. They could invest and create jobs with the dough they already have if they were so inclined. But in fact, large corporations have been shedding jobs for some time, since Wall Street reacts positively to downsizing and higher stock prices lead to bigger executive pay packages. And don’t blame the crappy economy. Big companies weren’t investing even in the last expansion; they had abandoned the role of capitalists and were net saving. Large companies have been more keen to buy back stock than invest in the business of their business.

The Rise Of Obamacare McCarthyism

Sahil Kapur – December 2, 2013, 1:50 PM EST

When House Republicans unveiled a proposal in the fall aimed at avoiding a dead-end government shutdown over Obamacare, the conservative backlash was swift and brutal: they called it a surrender, a betrayal, an appeasement of the health care law they all abhor.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) decried it as "procedural chicanery" that would make House Republicans "complicit in the disaster that is Obamacare," should they go along with it. FreedomWorks called it a "bait and switch to give the Senate a hall pass to fund Obamacare" and accused House GOP leaders of wanting to "cave and run."

Dispelling an urban legend, new study shows who uses emergency departments frequently

While it has often been said that the most frequent users of overburdened hospital emergency departments are mentally ill substance abusers, a study out today (Dec. 3) by researchers from NYU Wagner and the University of California, San Francisco, has found that this belief is unfounded – an "urban legend."

Co-authored by John Billings of NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and Maria C. Raven of the University of California and published in the December issue of Health Affairs, the new analysis of hospital emergency department (ED) use in New York City by Medicaid patients reveals that conditions related to substance abuse and mental illness are responsible for a small share of the emergency department visits by frequent ED users, and that ED use accounts for a small portion of these patients' total Medicaid expenditures. However, according to the study, frequent emergency department users have a substantial burden of disease, often having multiple chronic conditions and many hospitalizations.

The Facts Are in: Austerity Politics Doesn't Work

Wednesday, 04 December 2013 09:20  
By Sally Kohn, Yes! Magazine | Opinion

From England's double-dip recession to Portugal's spiking unemployment, there is now conclusive evidence of the complete failure of austerity.

The idea that rational thinking should govern political decision making in America dates back to our very founding. “Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams said, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Oh, John Adams, where are you when we need you? Facts have been buried in a political era in which partisan ideology overrides reason. And while the Republican Party has embraced fact-free governance as its personal brand, Democrats are not entirely innocent either.

What You Need to Know About the International Test Scores

by Diane Ravitch

The news reports say that the test scores of American students on the latest PISA test are "stagnant," "lagging," "flat," etc.

The U.S. Department of Education would have us believe -- yet again -- that we are in an unprecedented crisis and that we must double down on the test-and-punish strategies of the past dozen years.

The myth persists that once our nation led the world on international tests, but we have fallen from that exalted position in recent years.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

US Government Has Secret Kill Switch for Communications

Wednesday, 04 December 2013 11:29  
By Kevin Mathews, Care2 | Report

Someday, your cell phone and internet may suddenly go out, but it will have nothing to do with failing to pay your bills. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the President has the authority to shut down everyone’s internet and phone service in one fell swoop, reports Mother Jones. 

Though it seems sinister, the government assures us that this “kill switch” capability is for our own protection. Developed during the George W. Bush administration, the plan is that the executive branch can turn off communication technology in the event of a mass emergency or terrorist attack.

GOP debunked on food stamps: Everything they say about SNAP is wrong

Forget the nonsense about them breeding dependency. Food stamps increase self-sufficiency, research shows

Paul Rosenberg

Hilary Hoynes is a University of California at Berkeley economist who wrote a particularly notable paper last year. Instead of increasing dependency, as conservative critics have repeatedly claimed, Hoyen’s paper showed that, for women at least, food stamp use during pregnancy and early childhood has exactly the opposite impact of what conservatives allege: It actually increases economic self-sufficiency when children grow up, in the next generation.

That was just one of two main results reported in “Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net,” which Hoynes co-authored with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond.  As stated in the paper’s abstract, access to food stamps for women leads to “increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, and income, and decreases in welfare participation).”  Hoynes and her colleagues took advantage of the fact that food stamp programs were established county-by-county over a period of years, creating a sort of “natural experiment” beginning half a century in the past.

John Pilger | Discovering the Power of People's History - and Why It Is Feared Today

Tuesday, 03 December 2013 10:07  
By John Pilger, Truthout | Op-Ed 

England is two countries. One is dominated by London, the other remains in its shadow. When I first arrived from Australia, it seemed no one went north of Watford, and those who had emigrated from the north worked hard to change their accents, and obscure their origins and learn the mannerisms and codes of the southern comfortable classes. Some would mock the life they had left behind. They were changing classes, or so they thought.

Here’s the most depressing coffee table book of all time

By Holly Richmond

There’s nothing like a thick book of gorgeous nature photography to show the Avon lady you’re a savvy art connoisseur. But if you’d rather passive-aggressively shoo her and those door-to-door evangelists away as quickly as possible, just show ‘em Your Beautiful, Fragile World: The Nature and Environmental Photographs of Peter Essick.

Microplastics make marine worms sick

Tiny bits of plastic trash could spell big trouble for marine life, starting with the worms, say a team of researchers from Plymouth University and the University of Exeter who report their evidence in a pair of studies in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 2. Those marine worms play a key ecological role as an important source of food for other animals.

Work by Stephanie Wright from the University of Exeter found that if ocean sediments are heavily contaminated with microplastics, marine lugworms eat less and their energy levels suffer. A separate report, from Mark Anthony Browne on work performed at Plymouth University, shows that ingesting microplastic can also reduce the health of lugworms by delivering harmful chemicals, including hydrocarbons, antimicrobials, and flame retardants, to them.

The Retirement Deficit

Many of America's CEOs don't think we're "entitled" to a secure retirement.

Sunday, 01 December 2013 11:18  
By Sam Pizzigati, OtherWords | Op-Ed 

Struggling families all across America now have less food on their tables. Budget cuts that kicked into effect November 1 have lowered the nation’s average federal food stamp benefit to less than $1.40 per person per meal.

Austerity American-style is squeezing elsewhere as well, from Head Start for kids to Meals on Wheels for seniors, and more cuts are looming, as lawmakers on Capitol Hill near still another budget deliberation deadline, this one midway through December.

The next federal program in the crosshairs? Maybe the biggest of them all: Social Security.

Fighting the 'spin' war over Obamacare

Commentary: claims are distorted, but GOP is displaying message discipline 

By Wendell Potter
6:00 am, December 2, 2013 Updated: 11:13 am, December 2, 2013


Now that November is history, will the Obamacare website work flawlessly from now on? Or, as the president has said, will it at least work for the “vast majority” of people who need to buy insurance on their own?

We will know in a few days if, as administration officials pledged last week, most of the problems that plagued HealthCare.gov were actually resolved. They predicted that at least 90 percent of folks seeking to enroll in a health plan online would be able to do so by the first of December.

Paul Krugman: Better Pay Now

’Tis the season to be jolly — or, at any rate, to spend a lot of time in shopping malls. It is also, traditionally, a time to reflect on the plight of those less fortunate than oneself — for example, the person on the other side of that cash register.

The last few decades have been tough for many American workers, but especially hard on those employed in retail trade — a category that includes both the sales clerks at your local Walmart and the staff at your local McDonald’s. Despite the lingering effects of the financial crisis, America is a much richer country than it was 40 years ago. But the inflation-adjusted wages of nonsupervisory workers in retail trade — who weren’t particularly well paid to begin with — have fallen almost 30 percent since 1973.

Where the Minimum Wage Would Be If It Kept Pace With the Earnings of the 1%

By Alan Pyke

December 2, 2013  |  If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as the earnings of the top one percent of Americans the federal wage floor would be more than triple [2] the current hourly minimum of $7.25. Instead, the minimum wage has been lower than a poverty wage ever since 1982.

The New York Times compiled those and other basic facts about the minimum wage into an infographic. Together with demographic data about who actually holds [3] minimum-wage jobs — less than a quarter of the minimum-wage workforce are teenagers, and nearly four in ten are over the age of 30 — the graphic makes the fundamental case for fighting inequality and economic hardship by raising the minimum wage.

The war on democracy

How corporations and spy agencies use "security" to defend profiteering and crush activism

A stunning new report compiles extensive evidence showing how some of the world's largest corporations have partnered with private intelligence firms and government intelligence agencies to spy on activist and nonprofit groups. Environmental activism is a prominent though not exclusive focus of these activities.

The report by the Center for Corporate Policy (CCP) in Washington DC titled Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage against Nonprofit Organizations draws on a wide range of public record evidence, including lawsuits and journalistic investigations. It paints a disturbing picture of a global corporate espionage programme that is out of control, with possibly as much as one in four activists being private spies.

Dean Baker: Everyday Low Wages at Walmart: Brought to You by Government Policy

There is a large and growing movement to pressure Walmart to raise its workers’ wages. This has taken the form of direct action by workers, efforts to pass higher minimum wage or living wage laws, and implicit threats of consumer boycotts if Walmart does not raise wages and benefits.

This drive is encouraging, and often inspiring, as many workers have bravely risked their jobs and their livelihoods to try to get a better deal for themselves and their co-workers. But an important part of the story is missing in the way it usually gets presented.

The Fascinating Ways the Global Recycling Industry Really Works

By Adam Minter

November 21, 2013  |  Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade [3] by Adam Minter. Copyright ©2013 by Adam Minter. Published by Bloomsbury Press. Reprinted with permission.

A single strand of burned-out Christmas tree lights weighs almost nothing in the hand. But a hay-bale-sized block? That weighs around 2,200 pounds, according to Raymond Li, the fresh-faced but steely general manager of Yong Chang Processing, a scrap-metal processor in the southern Chinese town of Shijiao.

He would know.

I am standing between him and three such bales, or 6,600 pounds of Christmas tree lights that Americans tossed into recycling bins, or dropped off at the Salvation Army, or sold to someone in a "We Buy Junk" truck. Eventually they found their way to a scrapyard that pressed them into a cube and shipped them off to Raymond Li's Christmas tree light recycling factory. Raymond is anxious to show me how it works.

The Real Privacy Problem

By Evgeny Morozov on October 22, 2013

In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing … the same way one now buys electricity.”

Our home computer console will be used to send and receive messages—like telegrams. We could check to see whether the local department store has the advertised sports shirt in stock in the desired color and size. We could ask when delivery would be guaranteed, if we ordered. The information would be up-to-the-minute and accurate. We could pay our bills and compute our taxes via the console. We would ask questions and receive answers from “information banks”—automated versions of today’s libraries. We would obtain up-to-the-minute listing of all television and radio programs … The computer could, itself, send a message to remind us of an impending anniversary and save us from the disastrous consequences of forgetfulness.

It took decades for cloud computing to fulfill Baran’s vision. But he was prescient enough to worry that utility computing would need its own regulatory model. Here was an employee of the RAND Corporation—hardly a redoubt of Marxist thought—fretting about the concentration of market power in the hands of large computer utilities and demanding state intervention.

Tea Party Bill Would Gut Endangered Species Act

Center for Biological Diversity | November 25, 2013 12:53 pm

Tea Party senators introduced a bill last week that would effectively end the protection of most endangered species in the U.S. by gutting some of the most important provisions of the Endangered Species Act. Senate Bill 1731, introduced by Tea Party members Sen. Paul (R-KY), Sen. Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Heller (R-NV) would end protections for most of the species that are currently protected by the act and make it virtually impossible to protect new species under the law. It would also eliminate protection for habitat that’s critical to the survival of rare and struggling animals and plants around the country.

Paul Krugman: Obamacare’s Secret Success

The law establishing Obamacare was officially titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And the “affordable” bit wasn’t just about subsidizing premiums. It was also supposed to be about “bending the curve” — slowing the seemingly inexorable rise in health costs.

Much of the Beltway establishment scoffed at the promise of cost savings. The prevalent attitude in Washington is that reform isn’t real unless the little people suffer; serious savings are supposed to come from things like raising the Medicare age (which the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded would, in fact, hardly save any money) and throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid. True, a 2011 letter signed by hundreds of health and labor economists pointed out that “the Affordable Care Act contains essentially every cost-containment provision policy analysts have considered effective in reducing the rate of medical spending.” But such expert views were largely ignored.