Remembering an earlier time when a theft unmasked government surveillance

By Betty Medsger

On March 24, 1971, I became the first reporter to inform readers that the FBI wanted the American people to think there was an “FBI agent behind every mailbox.” That rather alarming alert came from stolen FBI files I had found in my own mailbox at The Washington Post when I arrived at work the previous morning. ¶ It was the return address on the big tan envelope that prompted me to open it first: “Liberty Publications, Media, PA.” I had worked at the Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia before coming to The Post in January 1970, so I knew of Media, a small town southwest of Philadelphia. ¶ The letter inside the envelope informed me that on the night of March 8, 1971, my anonymous correspondents — they called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI — had broken into the Media FBI office and stolen every file. They did so, I learned later, in the dark and as the sounds of the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing match filled the streets.

Wolf Richter: “This Chart Is A True Representation Of The Employment Crisis In This Country”

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Yves Smith
 
Yves here. Wolf’s latest post gives a crisp overview of how bad things are in job land. Among other things, he highlights the catastrophically high unemployment levels among young people, and how financially stressed older workers are hanging on to jobs much more than they used to in the past.

But there’s another layer to this picture. Heretofore, the pattern among employers in a downturn in managing the non-executive/senior managerial workforce was to push out higher-cost older workers in favor of cheap, high energy, less set-in-their-ways new hires. People in my age cohort and a bit older will attest that they know lots of people over 40 who were given the heave-ho. Some eventually found work at much lower pay, some became self-employed (it’s a lot harder than the business press lets on; 9 out of every 10 new businesses fail in the first three years), and some retired, living more modestly than they had wanted to.

Digby: Revisiting the War on Poverty

Today is the 50th anniversary of that speech and there are a lot of commemorations and discussions about how and why we find ourselves still confronting growing poverty 50 years later. I thought it might be interesting to just briefly discuss why it became so discredited over the years and how the right wing won the argument for so long.

There are many reasons for it, but one major way they did it was to sabotage the programs.

Paul Krugman: The Pacific Trade Pact Is Big, but Is It a Huge Deal?

I've been getting a fair bit of correspondence from readers wondering why I have not written about the negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which many regard as something both immense and sinister. The reason: I have been having a hard time figuring out why this deal is especially important. The usual rhetoric - from supporters and opponents alike - stresses the total size of the economies involved: hundreds of millions of people! Forty percent of global output!

But that tells you nothing much. After all, the Iceland-China free trade agreement, which was signed earlier this year, created a free-trade zone with 1.36 billion people. But only 300,000 of those people live in Iceland, and nobody considers the agreement a big deal.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Have the Obits for Peak Oil Come Too Soon?

Posted by Michael Klare at 8:09am, January 9, 2014.

Peak Oil Is Dead
Long Live Peak Oil!
By Michael T. Klare

Among the big energy stories of 2013, “peak oil” -- the once-popular notion that worldwide oil production would soon reach a maximum level and begin an irreversible decline -- was thoroughly discredited.  The explosive development of shale oil and other unconventional fuels in the United States helped put it in its grave.

As the year went on, the eulogies came in fast and furious. “Today, it is probably safe to say we have slayed ‘peak oil’ once and for all, thanks to the combination of new shale oil and gas production techniques,” declared Rob Wile, an energy and economics reporter for Business Insider.  Similar comments from energy experts were commonplace, prompting an R.I.P. headline at Time.com announcing, “Peak Oil is Dead.”

10 Things You Might Not Know About Poverty

By Paul Rosenberg

January 8, 2014  |  Fifty years ago, Lyndon Johnson announced the war on poverty as the central message of his first State of the Union, less than two months after John F. Kennedy's assassination. Conservatives, following Ronald Reagan's quip, like to joke that the War on Poverty is over and poverty won. But as usual, the facts disagree.

We haven't vanquished poverty, it's true. But it's not Johnson's anti-poverty policies that have failed us. They've performed much better over the past 50 years than America's capitalist economy has, which has actually made poverty worseover that same period of time. If we want to make real, dramatic progress toward realizing the American Dream for all Americans, we need to arm ourselves with an accurate understanding of what the War on Poverty has actually achieved, as well as how it has fallen short, in order to make better policy for the future. What follows is a list of some of the most important facts to help guide our way.

Paul Krugman: In Economics, Old Is New Again

Mike Konczal at The Washington Post recently made a very good point about how we teach economics. He suggests that we should return to the way the economist Paul Samuelson did it in 1948, when he wrote the first version of his famous textbook - macroeconomics first, then micro. This, Mr. Konczal explains, would give students a better perspective on reality, even though all the same material would eventually be covered.

I would add that the motives behind Mr. Samuelson's ordering apply just as well today as they did then. He was writing when the memory of the Great Depression was still fresh; students wanted to know how such things could happen. How did he get them to take that stuff about the perfection of markets seriously after all that had just happened? By first teaching them that monetary and fiscal policy could be used to ensure full employment.

Robert Gates Double-Crosses Obama

January 8, 2014

Special Report: Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates is slamming President Obama in a new memoir, accusing him of lacking enthusiasm for the Afghan War. But perhaps Obama’s bigger mistake was trusting Gates, a Bush Family operative with a history of dirty dealing, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

As Barack Obama is staggered by a back-stabbing memoir from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the President can’t say that some people didn’t warn him about the risk of bringing a political opportunist like Gates into his inner circle on national security.

Those warnings date back to just days after Obama’s election in 2008 when word began to spread that some of his advisers were urging Obama to keep Gates on as Defense Secretary as part of a “Team of Rivals” and a show of bipartisanship.

The Circle of Scam

Paul Waldman, January 7, 2014

Welcome to conservative politics, where everybody's fleecing somebody.

I've long held that what William Goldman said about Hollywood—"Nobody knows anything"—is equally true of Washington. At the same time though, people in politics are particularly adept at finding those who know even less than they do, and scamming them into giving over their political support or their money, or both.

I thought of this when reading the long investigation The Washington Post published the other day on the byzantine network of organizations the Koch brothers have established or funded to funnel their ample resources into politics. There are dozens of groups involved, and money moves back and forth between them in intricate ways. The Post was able to trace $400 million they spent in the last election, but since there were a number of organizations whose money they weren't able to track, the real number is almost certainly higher. As a tax law expert quoted in the article says, "It is a very sophisticated and complicated structure ... It's designed to make it opaque as to where the money is coming from and where the money is going. No layperson thought this up. It would only be worth it if you were spending the kind of dollars the Koch brothers are, because this was not cheap." The Koch brothers no doubt can avail themselves of the most skilled and creative accountants money can buy.

Green space can make people happier for years

Nearly 10 years after the term "nature deficit disorder" entered the nation's vocabulary, research is showing for the first time that green space does appear to improve mental health in a sustained way. The report, which appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, gives urban park advocates another argument in support of their cause.

Democratic Members Of Congress Slam Obama For Massive Cave To Republicans On Judges 

By Ian Millhiser on January 6, 2014 at 3:53 pm

Last November, Senate Democrats invoked a procedural maneuver that allowed them to confirm judicial nominees by a simple majority vote, thus cutting off the GOP’s ability to maintain control over a key federal appeals court by simply refusing to permit anyone to be confirmed. So it’s a bit odd that, just over a month after Senate Republicans effectively lost their ability to veto nominees from the minority. President Obama decided to outsource selecting nominees to most of the open judicial seats in Georgia to two Republican senators.

Presently, five judicial vacancies need to be filled in Georgia. Yet, 2013 wound down, Obama agreed to a deal that would place most of these seats in Republican hands.

Jim Garrow & Pete Santilli Now Openly Calling For Military Coup Against Obama

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Tuesday, 1/7/2014 1:30 pm

Jim Garrow brought his tall tale about President Obama trying to murder him to The Pete Santilli Show on Friday, where he also plugged the anti-Obama Operation American Spring. Santilli, the radio host who called for the murder of Obama and for Hillary Clinton to be “shot in the vagina” and has advocated for violence against the government, said that a national strike and even a military coup is necessary to bring down the Obama administration.

“I’m not calling for — well, yes I’m calling for the military to restore our Republic. Is it a military coup? I would say that it’s probably the most orderly fashion to do this,” Santilli told Garrow, who responded that it would take just “three percent of the population to rise up” and “control the country.”

The Danger of NSA Spying on Members of Congress

An executive-branch agency has been empowered to store revealing information about the communications of everyone in the legislature. 

Conor Friedersdorf, Jan 6 2014, 12:00 PM ET

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter to the NSA on Friday asking, "Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?" The only acceptable answer ought to be, "No, of course not."

The honest answer: "Yes."

The NSA has spied on members of Congress, but acknowledging that would unnerve millions of Americans. That's why their official response to the letter was so evasive that CNN summed it up, "NSA won't say whether it spies on Congress."

Infrastructure 101: The Evolution of Building Big Things (Part 1)

Wednesday, 08 January 2014 09:18  
By Ellen Dannin, Truthout | News Analysis 

As this country’s public infrastructure crumbles,  prominent organizations, such as Reason and its allies, strongly advocate using privatization to solve the problem. However, this country has a long and continuing history of successfully taking on big infrastructure projects through direct public support and funding - circumventing privatization while getting the job done well. As will be discussed next week in part two, the true cost of privatizing our roads, water and other infrastructure includes lost public control.

Richard Eskow: Now We Know. JPMorgan Chase is Worse Than Enron.

It’s beginning to look as if JPMorgan Chase has had a hand in every major banking scandal of the last decade. In fact, it’s the Zelig of Wall Street crime. Take a snapshot of any major bank fraud and chances are you’ll see JPMorgan Chase staring out at you from the frame.

Foreclosure fraud, investor fraud, cheating customers, market manipulation, LIBOR … and now, the coup de grâce to JPM’s tattered reputation: a $2 billion fine for closing its eyes and covering up as Bernie Madoff literally bilked widows and orphans, along with a lot of other families and charities. (Here’s a list of investors.)

Millionaire Steve Forbes has a cynical campaign to keep working people down

A minimum wage hike would improve the lives of 30 million working Americans. Forbes wants to falsely spin it as a job killer

Richard L Trumka
theguardian.com, Wednesday 8 January 2014 08.45 EST

What do you give to a man who has everything? A man like publisher Steve Forbes, worth a reported $430m. What do you give him if you're his beloved-but-on-the-ropes Republican Party?

How about a cynical campaign to defeat a US federal minimum wage increase?

That's what Forbes calls for in his column in the 18 November edition of Forbes magazine. To keep from getting "smacked around by President Obama and congressional Democrats", instead of "passively taking a hit", Republicans should gin up their spin machine to portray a minimum wage increase as a job-killer. Hold House hearings, he says, and parade out people who will say they were hurt by the last minimum wage increase.

50 Years After the War on Poverty, Will the Middle Class Become the New Poor?

January 8, 2014  |  Fifty years ago today, LBJ threw down the gauntlet on poverty in his famous State of the Union address of 1964 [3]. Fired with passion and buoyed by bipartisan support, his anti-poverty team kicked off new health insurance programs for the old and the poor, increased Social Security, established food stamps and nutritional supplements for low-income pregnant women and infants, and started programs to give more young people a chance to succeed, like Head Start and Job Corps.

Americans have greatly benefited from big-picture economic changes like the minimum wage; investments in worker training and education; civil rights policies; social insurance; and programs like food stamps and Medicaid. As Georgetown University’s Peter Edelman pointed out in the New York Times, without these programs, research shows that poverty would be nearly double [4] what it is today. According to economist Jared Bernstein, Social Security alone has reduced the official elderly poverty rate [5] from 44 percent, which it would be without benefits, to 9 percent with them.

'Burglars' Revealed: Sixties Activists Who Stole FBI COINTELPRO Files

'On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.'

- Jon Queally, staff writer

In an exclusive with the New York Times on Tuesday, published to coincide with a new book about a fateful plan more than four decades ago that helped bring down J. Edgar Hoover and expose the dark nature of the FBI's obsessive targeting of the dissident and anti-war left, the original burglars who broke into a bureau field office in 1971 have now stepped forward to discuss the meticously planned theft that altered the course of modern history.

Corporations Control Our Lives

Sunday, 05 January 2014 09:21
By Thom Hartmann, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

In our nation, finance has a hold on almost every single part of our lives – from the day we’re born, until we take our last breath. Capitalism and the quest for larger profits have taken hold of our healthcare, our education, our homes, our communication, and even our government. Today, most babies are born in for-profit hospitals, and their medical claims are paid by for-profit insurance. As children grow, many go to for-profit charter schools or private schools, and our public education system continues to crumble. Young adults are forced to deal with for-profit lenders to go to college at for-profit universities, and everything from their backpack to their first home will generate a profit for someone on Wall Street.

Marriage Promotion Has Failed to Stem Poverty among Single Moms

On 50th anniversary of War on Poverty, expert says new approach needed

COLUMBUS, Ohio – As the United States marks the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty this month, a new report suggests one recent weapon in the battle has been a disappointing failure.

The federal government has made marriage promotion among single mothers a key part of its continuing effort to fight poverty.

But that approach has missed the mark because marriage doesn’t provide the same benefits to poor, single mothers as it does for others, according to Kristi Williams, associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

Dean Baker: All eyes on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, America's leading progressive

De Blasio is to the left of America's Democratic party, but he's no Marxist. Instead, he'll likely usher in progressive policies

Reporting on the significance of Bill de Blasio becoming mayor of New York may have led some to fear that the Soviet Union was being reincarnated in the country's largest city. While De Blasio is certainly to the left of many leaders of the America's Democratic party, he is certainly no radical seeking to overthrow capitalism. Furthermore, even if he did plan to seize the means of production, his ability to do so as the mayor of a major city would be quite limited.

Nonetheless, there are many areas where the mayor of New York can have a substantial impact. The top of this list would be education policy. De Blasio's predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, was a vocal and visible supporter of the education reform movement. While this movement has produced big profits for corporations in the testing business and made some policy entrepreneurs rich and famous, it has not done much to improve education for inner city kids.

The Last Gasp of American Democracy

By Chris Hedges

This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives.

The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises—and one will arise—that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive.

Tax Dollars for Sweatshops

While feigning outrage at worker abuse in Bangladesh, the U.S. government has been quietly supporting the same sweatshop factories used by Wal-Mart and the Gap.

By Robert J.S. Ross, January 6, 2014

The world was shocked last April when over 1,100 workers were killed in a building collapse in a Bangladesh garment factory. Warnings had been issued the day before about cracks in the walls of the Rana Plaza building in Savar, but the workers were forced to enter the building on the morning of the collapse anyway. Illegal floors had been added to the structure, and the permitting process that had somehow allowed the modifications was redolent of shady political influence. Even now, over eight months later, the families of survivors and the hundreds of wounded workers have yet to receive full and just compensation for their losses.

The Rana Plaza collapse obliterated all previous records for deadly garment industry disasters, including New York’s Triangle Factory blaze in 1911, which claimed 146 lives; the Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh in November 2012, which killed 112 workers; and the Ali Enterprises fire in Pakistan from September 2012, which killed 298 workers.

The players in the Koch-backed $400 million political donor network

By Matea Gold

The Washington Post and the Center for Responsive Politics identified a coalition of allied conservative groups active in the 2012 elections that together raised at least $407 million, backed by a donor network organized by the industrialists Charles and David Koch. Most of the funds originated with two groups, the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce and TC4 Trust, both of which routed some of the money through a Phoenix-based nonprofit group called the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR).

From Nixon to Paul Ryan: How right-wing radicals deceive America

By shifting the spectrum of debate, here's how America's rightward march has been normalized throughout history 

Paul Rosenberg

From Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush to Paul Ryan and Chris Christie today, leaders who’ve shifted America to the right have been aided by moderating misrepresentations.  In the case of Reagan, it was not just the man, but conservatism itself that received the flattering reinterpretation. That was a difference that mattered; it goes to the heart of why Reagan is the American right’s touchstone. But the more general process of misrepresenting and reinterpreting increasingly radical ideological figures as if they were normal, everyday pragmatic problem-solvers is one that’s been a repeated leitmotif in America’s political trajectory since Richard Nixon’s political resurrection in 1968.

60 Minutes Hit Job On Clean Energy Ignores The Facts

By Joe Romm on January 5, 2014

Clean technology is booming by every key indicator — but you would never know that from Sunday’s absurd 60 Minutes piece touting an imaginary “Cleantech Crash.”

As documented in the recent Department of Energy (DOE) report, “Revolution Now: The Future Arrives for Four Clean Energy Technologies,” the only thing in cleantech that is crashing is the cost of key components.

Dean Baker: Obamacare and Those Invincible Youngsters

There is an ongoing media obsession with the number of young people who sign up for health care insurance through Obamacare. We have been repeatedly told that the success of the program depends on large numbers of healthy young people -- the “young invincibles” -- signing up for the program.

The story is that these young people will subsidize the rest of us by paying more for their insurance than they receive back from the system in benefits. The excessive payments from young people will cover the cost of the older sick people in the exchange.

Brian Beutler: GOP’s ulterior motive on unemployment: Economic sabotage?

There's more to Republican opposition to extending unemployment benefits than conservative principles

Congress returns from the holidays in earnest today, more than a week after allowing emergency unemployment compensation to lapse for millions of jobless Americans, which raises the critical question of what lies behind the GOP’s reluctance to do the obviously correct thing.

Senate Democrats hope just a handful of Republicans will break away from the opposition later today, to pass legislation that would renew the lapsed benefits, and pressure John Boehner to follow suit, but they’re having a hard time finding the votes.

What gives?

Dumbing America Down, Conservative Style

By Susan J. Douglas

January 4, 2014  |  Among the many visionary goals of our nation’s right wing—impoverish older people, starve the poor, deny climate change, outlaw abortion and contraception, eliminate healthcare for millions—few are more foundational than defunding education in general and higher education in particular. [3] Public colleges and universities nationwide have seen significant funding cuts over the past five years, and while the recession is usually blamed, the Right keeps the fiscal screws tight by cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Here in Michigan, in Republican Gov. Rick Snyder’s first budget, there was a 15 percent cut in state aid to universities and a $1.8 billion tax cut for businesses. This equals a win-win for the Right: Keep the fat cats in your corner, and constrain the opportunity for young people to learn a host of things that might, well, make them interrogate right-wing policies. The Pew Research Center and others have found that lower income and less-educated whites arebecoming more likely to vote Republican than Democrat [4], with 54 percent of those without a college degree identifying as Republican in 2012; only 37 percent identified as Democratic, so the gap is, well, quite wide.

Scalia’s golden chance to kill unions

A "sweeping" ruling could force right to work on every U.S. public sector worker, Harvard's Ben Sachs warns 

Josh Eidelson

A Supreme Court case to be heard this month could deal another body blow to the embattled U.S. labor movement. The case, Harris v. Quinn, offers the court’s conservative majority a chance to make so-called right to work the law of the land for millions of public sector workers.

And it targets one of the most effective ways unions have grown their ranks – getting governors to classify the growing ranks of taxpayer-funded home care workers as public employees with unionization rights – and a decades-old precedent that the 2012 Knox v. SEIU case suggests justices may be itching to overturn. If the court strikes that 1977 (Abood) precedent – that workers in union workplaces can be required to pay fees for “collective bargaining activities,” though not for “ideological activities unrelated to collective bargaining” – unions fear further defunding, diversion, division and discrimination will follow.

Retirement Theft in 4 Despicable Steps

By Paul Buchheit

January 5, 2014  |  The fear of running out of money in retirement is America's greatest [3] financial concern. It's a fear greater than death [4].

But the American workers who have paid all their lives for retirement security are being cheated by wealthy individuals and corporations who refuse to meet their tax obligations, and who have found other ways to keep expanding their wealth at the expense of the middle class.

1. Federal Tax Avoidance is the Biggest Threat to Social Security

Conservatives say that Social Security is too expensive, and that cutbacks [5] and a later retirement age [6] are necessary. But they refuse to acknowledge the facts about missing revenue. Annual tax avoidance [7] by wealthy individuals and corporations is in the trillions of dollars, over double the cost of Social Security.

Big corporations are the worst offenders. The numbers are startling. For every dollar they paid relative to payroll tax in the 1950s, they now pay [8] ten cents. In just the past ten years they've cut their tax rate in half [9].

India Is a Dystopia of Extremes, but Resistance Is Stirring

Sunday, 05 January 2014 00:00
By John Pilger, Truthout | News Analysis 

The worldwide assault on social democracy and the collusion of major parliamentary parties - begun in the United States and Britain in the 1980s - has produced in India a dystopia of extremes, but the great popular resistance that gave India its independence is stirring.

In five-star hotels on Mumbai's seafront, children of the rich squeal joyfully as they play hide and seek. Nearby, at the National Theatre for the Performing Arts, people arrive for the Mumbai Literary Festival: famous authors and notables drawn from India's Raj class. They step deftly over a woman lying across the pavement, her birch brooms laid out for sale, her two children silhouettes in a banyan tree that is their home.

It is Children's Day in India. On page nine of the Times of India, a study reports that every second child is malnourished. Nearly two million children under the age of 5 die every year from preventable illness as common as diarrhea. Of those who survive, half are stunted due to a lack of nutrients. The national school dropout rate is 40 percent.  Statistics like these flow like a river permanently in flood. No other country comes close. The small thin legs dangling in a banyan tree are poignant evidence.

The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century

By Charles Homans • November 12, 2013

In the fall of 1946,  a 508-foot ship steamed out of the port of Odessa, Ukraine. In a previous life she was called the Wikinger (“Viking”) and sailed under the German flag, but she had been appropriated by the Soviet Union after the war and renamed the Slava (“Glory”). The Slava was a factory ship, crewed and equipped to separate one whale every 30 minutes into its useful elements, destined for oil, canned meat and liver, and bone meal. Sailing with her was a retinue of smaller, nimbler catcher vessels, their purpose betrayed by the harpoon guns mounted atop each clipper bow. They were bound for the whaling grounds off the coast of Antarctica. It was the first time Soviet whalers had ventured so far south.

The work began inauspiciously. In her first season, the Slava caught just 386 whales. But by the fifth—before which the fleet’s crew wrote a letter to Stalin pledging to bring home more than 500 tons of whale oil—the Slava’s annual catch was approaching 2,000. The next year it was 3,000. Then, in 1957, the ship’s crew discovered dense conglomerations of humpback whales to the north, off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. There were so many of them, packed so close together, the Slava’s helicopter pilots joked that they could make an emergency landing on the animals’ backs.

Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For

Guaranteed jobs, universal basic incomes, public finance and more

By Jesse A. Myerson
January 3, 2014 10:00 AM ET

It's a new year, but one thing hasn't changed: The economy still blows. Five years after Wall Street crashed, America's banker-gamblers have only gotten richer, while huge swaths of the country are still drowning in personal debt, tens of millions of Americans remain unemployed – and the new jobs being created are largely low-wage, sub-contracted, part-time grunt work.

Millennials have been especially hard-hit by the downturn, which is probably why so many people in this generation (like myself) regard capitalism with a level of suspicion that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But that egalitarian impulse isn't often accompanied by concrete proposals about how to get out of this catastrophe. Here are a few things we might want to start fighting for, pronto, if we want to grow old in a just, fair society, rather than the economic hellhole our parents have handed us.

“Surveillance breeds conformity”: Salon’s Glenn Greenwald interview

Glenn Greenwald tells us what he'd have done different in '13, why privacy matters and his hope for his new venture

Natasha Lennard

Longtime Salon readers will have known for some years that Glenn Greenwald is an unapologetically opinionated journalist with an unwavering skepticism about corporate-government power. In 2013, the rest of the world learned the same. It was an intense, banner year for Greenwald, who has played a principal role in releasing startling revelations about the National Security Agency through Edward Snowden’s leaks.

Without Greenwald’s work with Snowden (and fellow journalists like Laura Poitras), it’s safe to say we would be considerably less informed about the sprawling, totalized surveillance state in which we live. For this service, Greenwald now fears returning to the U.S. from his home in Brazil (although he plans to do so in 2014); his partner, David Miranda, was detained for nine hours in a London airport for the crime of carrying journalistic materials; and his source, Snowden, faces Espionage Act charges. Truly, Greenwald stands on the front lines of the U.S. government’s war on information.

Brian Beutler: GOP's Dishonest 2014 Strategy: Exploit People's Pain then Drum Up Faux Outrage

January 3, 2014  |  A quick look at the House and Senate vote calendars indicates that Congress did not in fact come back into session over the holidays to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which means that as of today (depending on how you count it) millions and millions of people who were previously uninsured now have comprehensive healthcare coverage.

 

There’s the 3-or-so million young adults under 26 who have been covered under their parents plans for a couple of years now, about 4 million new Medicaid beneficiaries, and some large percentage of the 2 million who have enrolled in a private plan via Healthcare.gov or one of 14 state-based insurance exchanges and submitted their first premium payment.

In Which I Continue To Despair Of The Rebranding

By Charles P. Pierce at 2:00PM
 

Tout le Beltway is abuzz over the double-barrelled attempt by National Affairs -- Motto: Conservatism Without Crayons -- to arrest the spread of the prion disease currently making the brains of the Republican party, and of American conservatism generally -- bleed out. I will pass over the one co-authored by the insufferable Michael Gerson because Gerson was a word-whore for the Avignon Presidency who has been attempting with varying degrees of pathetic to leave behind the perfumed lies he concocted on behalf of bloodthirsty morons and is thus unworthy of serious consideration. (If Gerson's pet war had not been the obvious catastrophe it has been, then Gerson would be down in College Station, polishing with his own dick the marble statue of C-Plus Augustus.) The other piece -- by Michael Strain -- which proposes a Republican push on a "jobs" plan is far more interesting because it contains within it political matter and political anti-matter in such close proximity that the piece ultimately annihilates itself.

A Simple Economic Truth America's Super Rich Don't Want Us to Know About

by Thom Hartmann

January 2, 2014  |  For the past 32 years, Americans have been living a lie. It's a lie that helps out rich people and screws working people, and it's a lie that needs to be called out.

 

The people promoting this lie - most all of them rich people themselves - have been so good at promoting this lie that pretty much everybody believes it. It's even asserted as fact, without contradiction, in the mainstream media. But it's a lie.

The lie is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies hurts economies and even leads to unemployment. The truth is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies actually helps economies and causes companies to hire more and more people, thus lowering unemployment.

Seattle Arson that Could Have Killed Hundreds Probed as Hate Crime

By David Neiwert

January 3, 2014  |  A horrific tragedy in which hundreds could have died was narrowly averted in Seattle [2] on New Year’s Eve, stopped by patrons of an iconic gay bar who managed to extinguish a raging arson fire at the bar’s entrance before the flames spread. Now Seattle police are investigating the case as a possible hate crime, although they say that so far there is no evidence that it was one beyond the fact that gay people appear to have been targeted.

The fact that the bar was a famous Capitol Hill nightclub called Neighbours immediately raised suspicions in Seattle. In 1990, the same establishment was targeted by a group of neo-Nazis from Idaho who plotted a bombing attack there intended to kill large numbers of people.

Bill Black: They’re Back: The Poltergeists in the Kansas Senate Renew their Attack on Education

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posed from New Economic Perspectives

Two Kansas legislative leaders who have been attacking Kansas education for over a decade through their wars on teaching about sex and evolution are back.  Their threats drove the Regents’ policy destroying academic freedom and tenure.

[...]

I have written two prior columns (here and here) explaining how the Kansas Regents casually ended academic freedom and tenure in their universities with no notice to or participation by the faculty.

My columns explained how the Regents’ policy was deliberately drafted to chill academic freedom.  The policy is not limited to “social media.”  Anything that is posted on line, which includes academic research, is grounds for firing.  It does not matter that what the professor publishes on line is accurate, well-intentioned, and polite – if the university “CEO” decides that the article is “contrary to the best interests of the University.”  The professor who is fired on this vague, subjective criterion can appeal the dismissal – to the CEO!  Universities are simply businesses led by CEO and the faculty must demonstrate “loyalty” to the CEO and whatever the CEO decides are “the best interests of the University” (which can include not criticizing corporate CEOs’ crimes because they might donate to the university).

Google’s for-profit surveillance problem

By Yasha Levine
On December 16, 2013

Early last week, some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley announced that they had gotten together to form a new forward-thinking organization dedicated to promoting government surveillance reform in the name of “free expression” and “privacy.”

The charade should have been laughed at and mocked — after all, these same companies feed on privacy for profit, and unfettered surveillance is their stock and trade. Instead, it was met with cheers and fanfare from reporters and privacy and tech experts alike. “Finally!” people cried, Silicon Valley has grown up and matured enough to help society tackle the biggest problem of our age: the runaway power of the modern surveillance state.

Why TED Is a Recipe for Civilazational Disaster

December 31, 2013  |  The following is the text of a talk given at TEDx San Diego by Benjamin Bratton: 

 

In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.

But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks [3] actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?

I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. It's where philosophy and design intersect.

'Military-Style' Raid on California Power Station Spooks US

BY Shane Harris, DECEMBER 27, 2013 - 02:02 PM

When U.S. officials warn about "attacks" on electric power facilities these days, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a computer hacker trying to shut the lights off in a city with malware. But a more traditional attack on a power station in California has U.S. officials puzzled and worried about the physical security of the the electrical grid--from attackers who come in with guns blazing.

Around 1:00 AM on April 16, at least one individual (possibly two) entered two different manholes at the PG&E Metcalf power substation, southeast of San Jose, and cut fiber cables in the area around the substation. That knocked out some local 911 services, landline service to the substation, and cell phone service in the area, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Foreign Policy. The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility. Ten transformers were damaged in one area of the facility, and three transformer banks -- or groups of transformers -- were hit in another, according to a PG&E spokesman.

Why Oil is Mightier than the Sword for U.S. Foreign Policy

By Daniel J. Graeber | Sun, 29 December 2013 00:00

The American Petroleum Institute said the United States is emerging as a superpower in terms of energy and should use that leverage by exporting crude oil overseas. Some U.S. lawmakers pressing for tighter sanctions on Iran, meanwhile, oppose the export drive, suggesting potential superpower influence may run up against protectionist policies.

U.S. crude oil exports are restricted under legislation enacted in response to the 1970s Arab oil embargo. Now, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicting crude oil production will reach 9.5 million barrels per day by 2016, the industry and its supporters said it's time to reverse that policy.

Dean Baker: Centrists Have No Right to Lecture Anyone On Growth

Last week former New York Times editor Bill Keller had a column that distinguished the “left-left” and the center-left. His left-left included people like Senator Elizabeth Warren and incoming New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio while his center-left included President Obama, most of the Democratic Party leadership and the DC-based policy group Third Way.

Keller’s left-left might more appropriately be called center-left (these are not radicals pushing for the overthrow of capitalism) and his center-left should probably just be called “centrists.” However what’s more important than the labeling is the main line of distinction Keller tries to draw.

Paul Krugman: Fiscal Fever Breaks

In 2012 President Obama, ever hopeful that reason would prevail, predicted that his re-election would finally break the G.O.P.’s “fever.” It didn’t.

But the intransigence of the right wasn’t the only disease troubling America’s body politic in 2012. We were also suffering from fiscal fever: the insistence by virtually the entire political and media establishment that budget deficits were our most important and urgent economic problem, even though the federal government could borrow at incredibly low interest rates. Instead of talking about mass unemployment and soaring inequality, Washington was almost exclusively focused on the alleged need to slash spending (which would worsen the jobs crisis) and hack away at the social safety net (which would worsen inequality).

Overthrow the Speculators

Posted on Dec 29, 2013By Chris Hedges

Money, as Karl Marx lamented, plays the largest part in determining the course of history. Once speculators are able to concentrate wealth into their hands they have, throughout history, emasculated government, turned the press into lap dogs and courtiers, corrupted the courts and hollowed out public institutions, including universities, to justify their looting and greed. Today’s speculators have created grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge the masses into crippling forms of debt peonage. They steal staggering sums of public funds, such as the $85 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that they unload each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash. And when the public attempts to finance public-works projects they extract billions of dollars through wildly inflated interest rates.

Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged.

The Shocking Redistribution of Wealth in the Past Five Years

by Paul Buchheit

Anyone reviewing the data is likely to conclude that there must be some mistake. It doesn't seem possible that one out of twenty American families could each have made a million dollars since Obama became President, while the average American family's net worth has barely recovered. But the evidence comes from numerous reputable sources.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main - perhaps only - beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years.

Thomas Frank: If memory swerves: The 1 percent laughs last, as Wall Street wins again

Five years after wrecking our economy, the big banks are back. Here's why we need real government regulations 

September 15 marked five years since the beginning of the economic slump that defines the world we live in. Disaster was in the air already by that day in 2008: real-estate values had been falling for some time, Bear Stearns and several big commercial banks had failed, and the government had taken over the mortgage insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the previous week. But that Monday morning in September was when the larger economy went over a cliff — after Lehman Brothers, the nation’s fourth largest investment bank, finally succumbed to the effects of the noxious securities on which it had gorged itself for years.

Later that day, in a climate of almost complete panic, Merrill Lynch — the nation’s third-largest investment bank, which had fed at the same trough — managed to find shelter in the arms of Bank of America. By the next day, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department announced that they were saving AIG, the mammoth insurance company that had transformed itself into a stealth hedge fund. As for actual hedge funds, more than 700 of them collapsed in the subsequent four months. And Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two investment-banking leviathans, desperately registered themselves as “bank holding companies” and threw themselves upon the mercy of the all-forgiving Fed.

Judge on NSA Case Cites 9/11 Report, But It Doesn’t Actually Support His Ruling

by Justin Elliott
ProPublica, Dec. 28, 2013, 11:35 a.m.

Update Dec. 28, 2013: In a new decision in support of the NSA's phone metadata surveillance program, U.S. district court Judge William Pauley cites an intelligence failure involving the agency in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. But the judge's cited source, the 9/11 Commission Report, doesn't actually include the account he gives in the ruling. What’s more, experts say the NSA could have avoided the pre-9/11 failure even without the metadata surveillance program.

We previously explored the key incident in question, involving calls made by hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar from California to Yemen, in a story we did over the summer, which you can read below.

Paul Krugman: The Fear Economy

More than a million unemployed Americans are about to get the cruelest of Christmas “gifts.” They’re about to have their unemployment benefits cut off. You see, Republicans in Congress insist that if you haven’t found a job after months of searching, it must be because you aren’t trying hard enough. So you need an extra incentive in the form of sheer desperation.

As a result, the plight of the unemployed, already terrible, is about to get even worse. Obviously
those who have jobs are much better off. Yet the continuing weakness of the labor market takes a
toll on them, too. So let’s talk a bit about the plight of the employed.

The entire economy is a house of cards waiting to tumble

by David Atkins

Yesterday Digby highlighted the outstanding piece by Matt Taibbi on HSBC executives avoiding even a second of jail time for engaging in blatant drug money laundering for major cartels.

The most shocking bit bears repeating:

Though this was not stated explicitly, the government's rationale in not pursuing criminal prosecutions against the bank was apparently rooted in concerns that putting executives from a "systemically important institution" in jail for drug laundering would threaten the stability of the financial system. The New York Times put it this way:

Federal and state authorities have chosen not to indict HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system.

Now, there are a lot of people who read that statement and say "Bull." It's widely assumed on the right that this is just another example of liberal crony capitalism, that all we need to do is let capitalism and the legal system take their course, watch those liberal Brits and New Yorkers flounder, and the free market will take care of everything. Liberals tend to think that campaign finance, big bank lobbying, neoliberal ethics and big business corruption in general leads the justice department to make excuses for the failure to see justice done.

But I would posit a far more shocking conclusion: that the authorities actually believe it when they say such things. And an even more shocking conclusion: that they may well be right.

50 Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted from Their Jobs -- and Denied New Opportunities

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

December 22, 2013  |  In every corner of America, millions of people are terrified of losing their jobs and falling into financial ruin. Men and women with impressive professional achievements and credentials are being let go, nudged out and pushed aside. They are pounding the pavement and scouring the job sites, but find themselves turned away even for the most basic retail jobs. Not because they aren’t competent. Not because they lack skills. But simply because they have a gray hair or two.

This is not just a story of people in their 60s or 70s. Workers as young as 50 are shocked to find themselves suddenly tossed onto the employment rubbish heap, just when they felt on top of their game. They’re feeling stressed, angry and betrayed by a society which has benefited greatly from their contributions.

As the global population grows older, age discrimination is on the rise. It could be headed for you, much sooner than you think.

The Past and Future of America's Social Contract

By Josh Freedman and Michael Lind


The problem of low pay has dominated headlines this year thanks to striking fast food workers, tone-deaf employers, and a spate of successful campaigns to raise state and local minimum wages.

Behind the news cycle, however, there’s a deeper issue than what Walmart or McDonald’s pay their workers today. Americans are once again wrestling with what they fundamentally want from the social contract—the basic bargain most of us can expect from the economy throughout our lives.

A generation ago, the country’s social contract was premised on higher wages and reliable benefits, provided chiefly by employers. In recent decades, we’ve moved to a system where low wages are supposed to be made bearable by low consumer prices and a hodgepodge of government assistance programs. But as dissatisfaction with this arrangement has grown, it is time to look back at how we got here and imagine what the next stage of the social contract might be.

David Cay Johnston: District Court Rebukes IRS Church Plan Rulings

The IRS Office of Chief Counsel came in for sharp criticism from a federal judge in the first significant decision in five lawsuits by workers who complain that the IRS is helping employers quietly strip away their pension rights.
 
Hundreds of thousands of workers at hospitals and other nonprofit organizations have been moved into so-called church pension plans, which are exempt from ERISA. IRS private letter rulings enabled each of these moves.
 
Most of the nonprofits that were granted IRS approval to operate as church plans exempt from ERISA were seriously under funded, the trustees having failed to set aside enough money to pay the old-age benefits workers had earned. The federal government guarantees the pensions of workers in ERISA plans, although when a plan fails, workers typically get less than they had been promised. Workers moved into church plans, however, lose the federal guarantee.

Focus on Ocean’s Health as Dolphin Deaths Soar

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: December 22, 2013

MIAMI — Like a macabre marine mystery, the carcasses — many badly deteriorated and tossing about in the surf — first turned up along the coast of New Jersey in June. Soon, droves of them washed up in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and most recently Florida, their winter home.

So far this year, nearly 1,000 bottlenose dolphins — eight times the historical average — have washed up dead along the Eastern Seaboard from New York to Florida, a vast majority of them victims of morbillivirus. Many more are expected to die from the disease in the coming months.

Joseph E. Stiglitz: In No One We Trust

In America today, we are sometimes made to feel that it is naïve to be preoccupied with trust. Our songs advise against it, our TV shows tell stories showing its futility, and incessant reports of financial scandal remind us we’d be fools to give it to our bankers.

That last point may be true, but that doesn’t mean we should stop striving for a bit more trust in our society and our economy. Trust is what makes contracts, plans and everyday transactions possible; it facilitates the democratic process, from voting to law creation, and is necessary for social stability. It is essential for our lives. It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.

We do not measure trust in our national income accounts, but investments in trust are no less important than those in human capital or machines.

Ninety-Nine Years Ago: A Pause in the War on Christmas

Wednesday, 25 December 2013 11:00  
By David Swanson, War Is a Crime | Op-Ed 

Frank Richards Recalled:
"On Christmas morning we stuck up a board with 'A Merry Christmas' on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one. Platoons would sometimes go out for twenty-four hours' rest -- it was a day at least out of the trench and relieved the monotony a bit -- and my platoon had gone out in this way the night before, but a few of us stayed behind to see what would happen. Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans done the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench.

"Buffalo Bill [the Company Commander] rushed into the trench and endeavoured to prevent it, but he was too late: the whole of the Company were now out, and so were the Germans. He had to accept the situation, so soon he and the other company officers climbed out too.

Leaves of Poison 

Why are children working in American tobacco fields?

By Gabriel Thompson, The Nation, November 14, 2013 

The air was heavy and humid on the morning the three Cuello sisters joined their mother in the tobacco fields. The girls were dressed in jeans and long-sleeve shirts, carried burritos wrapped in aluminum foil, and had no idea what they were getting themselves into. "It was our first real job," says Neftali, the youngest. She was 12 at the time. The middle sister, Kimberly, was 13. Yesenia was 14.

Their mother wasn't happy for the company. After growing up in Mexico, she hadn't crossed the border so that her kids could become farmworkers. But the girls knew their mom was struggling. She had left her husband and was supporting the family on the minimum wage. If her girls worked in the tobacco fields, it would quadruple the family's summer earnings. "My mom tends to everybody,"  Neftali says. This was a chance to repay that debt.

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, The Future Needs Us

Posted by Rebecca Solnit at 4:50pm, December 22, 2013.

The Arc of Justice and the Long Run
Hope, History, and Unpredictability
 
By Rebecca Solnit

North American cicada nymphs live underground for 17 years before they emerge as adults. Many seeds stay dormant far longer than that before some disturbance makes them germinate. Some trees bear fruit long after the people who have planted them have died, and one Massachusetts pear tree, planted by a Puritan in 1630, is still bearing fruit far sweeter than most of what those fundamentalists brought to this continent. Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.

Three years ago at this time, after a young Tunisian set himself on fire to protest injustice, the Arab Spring was on the cusp of erupting. An even younger man, a rapper who went by the name El Général, was on the verge of being arrested for “Rais Lebled” (a tweaked version of the phrase “head of state”), a song that would help launch the revolution in Tunisia.

Paul Krugman: Bits and Barbarism

This is a tale of three money pits. It’s also a tale of monetary regress — of the strange determination of many people to turn the clock back on centuries of progress.

The first money pit is an actual pit — the Porgera open-pit gold mine in Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s top producers. The mine has a terrible reputation for both human rights abuses (rapes, beatings and killings by security personnel) and environmental damage (vast quantities of potentially toxic tailings dumped into a nearby river). But gold prices, while down from their recent peak, are still three times what they were a decade ago, so dig they must.

PBS Drops a Bombshell on the Federal Reserve’s 100th Birthday Party

By Pam Martens: December 22, 2013

PBS promised a “debate” this past Friday night on the “benefits and dangers” of the Federal Reserve as the Fed marks its 100 years of existence tomorrow. Instead of a debate, two famous stock market historians made the same stunning announcement – that the Fed has decided its job is to push up the stock market.

Consuelo Mack’s Wealthtrack program on PBS had invited James Grant, Editor and Founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, and Richard Sylla, the Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets at NYU’s Stern School of Business. The opening scene for the program shows Sylla in a party hat lighting the candles on the Fed’s birthday cake while Grant snuffs them out – suggesting that Sylla would be making pro-Fed statements while Grant would take the opposing view.

How America abandoned its “undeserving” poor

With poverty on the rise in the late 1970s, Reagan conservatives waged war on the needy — and won 

Michael B. Katz

After the mid-1970s progress against poverty stalled. The 1973 oil crisis ushered in an era of growing inequality interrupted only briefly by the years of prosperity during the 1990s. Productivity increased, but, for the first time in American history, its gains were not shared by ordinary workers, whose real incomes declined even as the wealth of the rich soared. Poverty concentrated as never before in inner city districts scarred by chronic joblessness and racial segregation. America led western democracies in the proportion of its children living in poverty. It led the world in rates of incarceration. Trade union membership plummeted under an assault by big business abetted by the federal government. Policy responded by allowing the real value of the minimum wage, welfare benefits, and other social protections to erode. The dominant interpretation of America’s troubles blamed the War on Poverty and Great Society and constructed a rationale for responding to misery by retrenching on social spending. A bipartisan consensus emerged for solving the nation’s social and economic problems through a war on dependence, the devolution of authority, and the redesign of public policy along market models.

Truman’s True Warning on the CIA

December 22, 2013

 

Exclusive: National security secrecy and a benighted sense of “what’s good for the country” can be a dangerous mix for democracy, empowering self-interested or misguided officials to supplant the people’s will, as President Truman warned and ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.

By Ray McGovern

Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.”

It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.

Charts: The Worst Long-Term Unemployment Crisis Since the Depression

Corporate profits have rebounded while more than four million Americans have been without work for six months or longer.

—By Dave Gilson, Tasneem Raja, and AJ Vicens | Mon Dec. 23, 2013 3:00 AM GMT

Officially, the Great Recession of 2007 ended in June 2009. Yet the economic downturn remains in full effect for millions of Americans, particularly the nearly 40 percent of the unemployed who have been looking for work for six months or more.

In less than a week, emergency federal unemployment benefits for 1.3 million of these jobless Americans are set to run out. Proponents of ending the benefits argue that the economy is expanding and that the benefits prevent people from finding work. "You get out of a recession by encouraging employment not encouraging unemployment," according to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who opposes extending benefits. However, the data shows that while corporate America has bounced back, it is not restoring all the jobs it shed when the economy tanked five years ago.

Researchers Find Factors Tied To Voting Restriction Bills Are 'Basically All Racial'

Eric Lach – December 20, 2013, 4:02 PM EST

The debate over voting rights has gone to college.

Two University of Massachusetts Boston academics -- Keith G. Bentele, an assistant professor of Sociology, and Erin O'Brien, an associate professor of Political Science -- recently published a paper looking at the proposal and passage of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006 to 2011. In the paper, titled "Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies," the authors conclude that restrictive voter measures are connected to both partisan and racial factors.

NAFTA at 20: State of the North American Farmer

In the United States and throughout North America, NAFTA has accelerated the industrial consolidation of agriculture and pushed out smaller, more sustainable food producers.

By Karen Hansen-Kuhn, December 20, 2013

Foreign Policy In Focus is partnering with Mexico’s La Jornada del campo magazine, where an earlier version of this commentary appeared, to publish a series of pieces examining the impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 20 years since its implementation. This is the second in the series.

One of the clearest stories to emerge in the two decades since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented is the devastation wreaked on the Mexican countryside by dramatic increases in imports of cheap U.S. corn.

But while Mexican farmers, especially small-scale farmers, undoubtedly lost from the deal, that doesn’t mean that U.S. farmers have won. Prices for agricultural goods have been on a roller coaster of extreme price volatility — caused by unfair agriculture policies and recklessly unregulated speculation on commodity markets, as well as by increasing droughts and other climate chaos. Each time prices take their terrifying ride back down, more small- and medium-scale farmers are forced into bankruptcy, concentrating land ownership and agricultural production into ever fewer hands.
 

Not Just the Koch Brothers: New Drexel Study Reveals Funders Behind the Climate Change Denial Effort

A new study conducted by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle, PhD, exposes the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the powerful climate change countermovement. This study marks the first peer-reviewed, comprehensive analysis ever conducted of the sources of funding that maintain the denial effort.

Through an analysis of the financial structure of the organizations that constitute the core of the countermovement and their sources of monetary support, Brulle found that, while the largest and most consistent funders behind the countermovement are a number of well-known conservative foundations, the majority of donations are “dark money,” or concealed funding.

Report Suggests NSA Engaged In Financial Manipulation, Changing Money In Bank Accounts

by Mike Masnick

Matt Blaze has been pointing out that when you read the new White House intelligence task force report and its recommendations on how to reform the NSA and the wider intelligence community, that there may be hints to other excesses not yet revealed by the Snowden documents. Trevor Timm may have spotted a big one.

Paul Krugman: Osborne and the Stooges

There was, I’m pretty sure, an episode of “The Three Stooges” in which Curly kept banging his head against a wall. When Moe asked him why, he replied, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

Well, I thought it was funny. But I never imagined that Curly’s logic would one day become the main rationale that senior finance officials use to defend their disastrous policies.

Klayman Says Obama, Clinton & DNC Behind Disastrous CNN Interview, Floats Lawsuit

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Thursday, 12/19/2013 10:30 am

Larry Klayman is still reeling from his embarrassing appearance on CNN with host Don Lemon this week, and in a WorldNetDaily interview today says that he may file a defamation lawsuit against the network, charging that the interview was a set up by President Obama, the Clintons and the Democratic National Committee.

Klayman told birther leader and WND correspondent Jerome Corsi that Lemon should be fired for being a “shill” for the DNC and “a well-known ultra-leftist African-American political activist who pursues a LGBT sexual agenda.”

Paul Krugman: Learning to Speak Economese

What we have here is a problem of communication. Actually, mostly that's not true. Most of the arguments about economic policy involve real disputes about how the world works. Sometimes these are smart disputes, like the argument over the effectiveness of quantitative easing, and sometimes they're stupid disputes, like the one over whether the Federal Reserve is debasing the currency, but, anyway, the disputes are about something real.

But to such arguments one must add an extra layer of confusion arising from the way economists use words. Fairly often, a term that is pretty deeply embedded in the professional discourse either sounds strange to outsiders or can be misinterpreted. An example of the first is the term "secular stagnation." I know many of my readers dislike it. It relies on definition 3(c) of "secular" in Merriam-Webster's dictionary: "of or relating to a long term of indefinite duration" — not exactly the meaning that comes to most people's minds.

Right-Wing Front Group Poses as Journalists to Attack Investigation Into Political Money Laundering

By Brendan Fischer

December 19, 2013  |  The Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity (through its Wisconsin Reporter and Watchdog.org [2] websites) has aggressively attacked the government’s "John Doe" probe into possible campaign finance violations during Wisconsin's 2011 and 2012 recall elections. Its media outlets have also published new information about the apparent targets of the investigation, but they have omitted an important detail: Franklin Center has close ties to individuals and groups that may be caught up in the John Doe probe.

 

The only name associated with the investigation led by the Milwaukee County's District Attorney's office, Eric O'Keefe, helped launch the Franklin Center's operations in 2009, and his Sam Adams Alliance group provided the majority [3] of its startup budget. O'Keefe has spoken publicly [4] about being subpoenaed in his capacity as director of Wisconsin Club for Growth. Franklin Center's Director of Special Projects [5] John Connors, and the Executive Assistant to the President [5] Claire Milbrandt, also have close ties to a group reportedly involved in the probe. Its former Director of Operations and General Counsel, James Skyles, worked with another group active in the Wisconsin recalls.

Rick Perlstein: The Grand Old Tea Party

A Democratic president begins a new term in the White House. Two years later, America votes a cadre of aggressive conservatives into Congress, loaded for bear. At first the Republican establishment, thrilled to have the Democrats on the run, puts its wariness about the fire-breathers aside. Within a few years, though, the new guys throw out all the old rules of consensus and compromise, and the establishment shows signs of buyer’s remorse. One of the new conservatives, a bulky, take-no-prisoners senator who sees socialist quislings everywhere, takes control of the agenda and threatens to drive the GOP into the ground.

But this is not 2008 or 2013. It’s the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the senator is not Ted Cruz but Joseph McCarthy.