Rick Perlstein: From & Friends

Al From makes two assertions in his new memoir. The first is announced in its title. The New Democrats and the Return to Power argues that the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the group he founded in 1985 to push the Democratic Party to the right, has won: the party has been reformed, and there is no going back to the dark days when, according to From, Democratic presidential candidates suffered humiliation after humiliation at the ballot box for the party’s thralldom to protectionism, isolationism, “constituency groups” and the dread leviathan Jesse Leo Jackson.

The second point is that From and friends deserve all of the credit for the Democratic Party’s transformation. Again and again, our hero narrates his arrival, just in the nick of time, to save the day: “My interjection had stopped the headlong dash into social democracy…. Hillary came over to me and said she and Bill had discussed what I had said and had agreed I was right.” And again: “In a cab crossing the Triborough Bridge in New York, I flipped open my cell phone and called the President of the United States…. [W]hen Clinton and I finished our discussion, I was confident that he would sign the bill.” According to Al From, if you favor NAFTA, tougher laws on crime, welfare reform and, above all, an economic policy focused exclusively on “growth” instead of distributional fairness, you can thank Al From.

Time to End the Cheney/Halliburton Loophole

Wednesday, 12 February 2014 14:38  
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed 

We live in a fracked up country, but thanks to Dick Cheney, there’s pretty much nothing we can do about it.

Over the past decade, the extraction of natural gas through a technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has emerged as one of the fossil fuel industry’s biggest money makers.

In fact, according to Bloomberg, fracking was the biggest reason American oil output hit a 25-year high in 2013.

The boom in fracking is, quite literally, hitting close to home.

Even fact will not change first impressions

February 14, 2014 - Knowledge is power, yet new research suggests that a person's appearance alone can trump knowledge. First impressions are so powerful that they can override what we are told about people. A new study found that even when told whether a person was gay or straight, participants generally identified the person's sexual orientation based on how they looked – even if it contradicted the facts presented to them.

"We judge books by their covers, and we can't help but do it," says Nicholas Rule of the University of Toronto. "With effort, we can overcome this to some extent, but we are continually tasked with needing to correct ourselves." The less time we have to make our judgments, the more likely we are to go with our gut, even over fact, he says.

Paul Krugman: Inequality, Dignity and Freedom

Now that the Congressional Budget Office has explicitly denied saying that Obamacare destroys jobs, some (though by no means all) Republicans have stopped lying about that issue and turned to a different argument. O.K., they concede, any reduction in working hours because of health reform will be a voluntary choice by the workers themselves — but it’s still a bad thing because, as Representative Paul Ryan puts it, they’ll lose “the dignity of work.”

So let’s talk about what that means in 21st-century America.

Plastic shopping bags make a fine diesel fuel, researchers report

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Plastic shopping bags, an abundant source of litter on land and at sea, can be converted into diesel, natural gas and other useful petroleum products, researchers report.

The conversion produces significantly more energy than it requires and results in transportation fuels – diesel, for example – that can be blended with existing ultra-low-sulfur diesels and biodiesels. Other products, such as natural gas, naphtha (a solvent), gasoline, waxes and lubricating oils such as engine oil and hydraulic oil also can be obtained from shopping bags.

The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam

By Matt Taibbi
February 12, 2014 11:00 AM ET

Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It's 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire's biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we've seen in more than a century.

But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS’s news division

By David Sirota
On February 12, 2014

[Update 14th Feb 2014: Following Pando's exposé, PBS has announced it will return John Arnold's $3.5m donation.]

On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service’s flagship station WNET issued a press release announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled “The Pension Peril.” The series, promoting cuts to public employee pensions, is airing on hundreds of PBS outlets all over the nation. It has been presented as objective news on  major PBS programs including the PBS News Hour.

However, neither the WNET press release nor the broadcasted segments explicitly disclosed who is financing the series. Pando has exclusively confirmed that “The Pension Peril” is secretly funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire political powerbroker who is actively trying to shape the very pension policy that the series claims to be dispassionately covering.

The Troika and the New York Times Bury the Issues, not just the Lead

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Devin Smith

By William K. Black

On February 6, 2014, Mario Draghi, the head of the ECB said a series of contradictory things each of which indicated a failure to understand economics – and the BBC article about his policies failed to point out or analyze this failure.  Draghi’s primary message, in response to news that “Eurozone inflation slowed to 0.7% in January from 0.8% in December” was:

“We have to dispense with this idea of deflation. The question is – is there deflation? The answer is no.
We have to treat the recovery with extreme caution. It is very fragile. It is starting from very low levels but it is proceeding.”

As I explained in my January 25, 2014 column, the troika consists of the ECB, the EU Commission, and the IMF.  The troika’s definition of the “recovery” it hopes for in Spain is grim.  The troika made Spain its poster child for the success of austerity in late 2013.  In early 2014 Spain admitted that unemployment had risen to 26 percent and the troika’s most over-the-top propagandist for austerity, Ollie Rehn, was the only one willing to comment on that news.

James Surowiecki Promotes Myth of Consumer Empowerment in the Face of the Crapification of Almost Everything

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Yves Smith

There’s nothing like getting a missive from the alternative reality where neoliberalism works and all consumer problems can be solved by more diligent shopping (and remember, since we are all consumers first and citizens second, the corollary is that pretty much any problem can be solved by better shopping).

The current sighting is a story in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki, The Twilight of Brands, that tries to tell us, in all seriousness, that companies now have to be on their toes because consumers are more vigilant and less loyal. He starts with the backlash against yoga clothes maker Lululemon when quality fell sharply, and states his thesis:

It’s a truism of business-book thinking that a company’s brand is its “most important asset,” more valuable than technology or patents or manufacturing prowess. But brands have never been more fragile. The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos. “Absolute Value,” a new book by Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford, and Emanuel Rosen, a former software executive, shows that, historically, the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment. When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good. It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, nearly four-fifths of American car buyers stayed loyal to a brand.

This is utterly backwards. The reason “brands have become more fragile” does not not reside in demanding, disloyal customers, but in short-sighted corporate behavior.

Paul Krugman: Writing Off the Unemployed

Back in 1987 my Princeton colleague Alan Blinder published a very good book titled “Hard Heads, Soft Hearts.” It was, as you might guess, a call for toughminded but compassionate economic policy. Unfortunately, what we actually got — especially, although not only, from Republicans — was the opposite. And it’s difficult to find a better example of the hardhearted, softheaded nature of today’s G.O.P. than what happened last week, as Senate Republicans once again used the filibuster to block aid to the long-term unemployed.

What do we know about long-term unemployment in America?

First, it’s still at near-record levels. Historically, the long-term unemployed—those out of work for 27 weeks or more — have usually been between 10 and 20 percent of total unemployment. Today the number is 35.8 percent. Yet extended unemployment benefits, which went into effect in 2008, have now been allowed to lapse. As a result, few of the long-term unemployed are receiving any kind of support.

Gaius Publius: Rising Inequality: Economic Recovery Driven Almost Entirely by the Rich

I’m going to call this a news item and let you draw the obvious conclusions.

First, the money quote, then the article that contains it. The quote:

In 2012, the top 5 percent of earners were responsible for 38 percent of domestic consumption, up from 28 percent in 1995, the researchers found.

Even more striking, the current recovery has been driven almost entirely by the upper crust, according to Mr. Fazzari and Mr. Cynamon. Since 2009, the year the recession ended, inflation-adjusted spending by this top echelon has risen 17 percent, compared with just 1 percent among the bottom 95 percent.

Chris Hedges: Legalizing Oppression

The lynching and disbarring of civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart, who because she has terminal cancer was recently released from prison after serving four years of a 10-year sentence, is a window into the collapse of the American legal system. Stewart—who has stood up to state power for more than three decades in order to give a voice to those whom authorities seek to crush, who has spent her life defending the poor and the marginalized, who wept in court when one of her clients was barred from presenting a credible defense—is everything a lawyer should be in an open society. But we no longer live in an open society. The persecution of Stewart is the persecution of us all.

Stewart, 74, is living with her husband in her son’s house in New York City after being released from a Texas prison a month ago. Because she is disbarred she cannot perform any legal work. “Can’t even work in a law office,” she said softly last week when I interviewed her at the Brooklyn home. “I miss it so terribly. I liked it. I liked the work.”

Dean Baker: The disastrous idea for privatizing Fannie and Freddie

A new bill proposes that government guarantee mortgage-backed securities

In his State of the Union Address on Jan. 28, President Barack Obama briefly referred to his hopes for reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored and publicly traded entities that support the mortgage market by buying and securitizing mortgages. Both companies failed during the 2008 financial crisis and had to be taken over by the government.

By “reforming,” the president unfortunately doesn’t mean “improving.” Rather, he likely means “privatizing.” In fact the most likely form of privatization at this point would feature the sort mix of private incentives and government guarantees that makes another financial disaster virtually certain.

The smart money in Washington is betting on the Housing Finance Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act, sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Mark Warner, D-Va. The Corker-Warner bill, put together by two of the more centrist senators in both parties, does not simply get the government out of the mortgage guarantee business — an idea that actually has a plausible argument in its favor.

Behold how badly our political journalists have lost the freakin’ plot

I read hundreds of bylined works of journalism a week. Every so often one of them forces me to go back and read it over and over…

This is usually because the writing contains within it a density of pressthink — my subject here — that cannot be gotten through in one or two tries. It happened this week with a post by Chris Cillizza, one of the Washington Post’s franchise players on the national politics beat: Why the CBO report is (still) bad news for Democrats.

Ordinarily I would summarize what Cillizza was writing about, quote from his piece, and try to isolate what’s screwy or revealing about it. But Dave Wiegel did that at Slate already. And I did it for a very similar piece published on Cillizza’s site in 2012. See my post: Everything That’s Wrong with Political Journalism in One Washington Post Item.

An Elegantly Simple Way to Revolutionize Government

Saturday, 08 February 2014 10:07 
By Carmen Yarrusso, Truthout | Op-Ed 

What started as a somewhat complex mathematical analysis of the game of politics using game theory (the mathematical study of strategic decision making) has evolved years later into an extraordinarily simple idea that would revolutionize government at all levels.

Deception is the lifeblood of our political system. A system claiming to work for the best interests of the people, while in fact largely working for corporate special interests, must necessarily be riddled with elaborate lies and deception. Our political system, with great help from mainstream media, is designed to foster mass deception rather than expose it. But a simple rule change to our game of politics would instantly and reliably expose deception. This would destroy the status quo and revolutionize government.

Richard Eskow: Reagan Remembered: The Failed Legacy of Our First Corporate Politician

January 20 marked the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President. And February 6 marked the 103rd birthday of the former sports announcer, actor, governor of California and 40th President of the United States of America. Reagan’s economic legacy is one of failure, but in another way it could be argued that he was genuinely transformative: as the first celebrity politician for the modern corporate state.

Every president is ultimately judged on great ideas, visions, and responses to historical forces. Some of the forces that shaped the Reagan presidency could be seen with the unaided eye, like the fall of Communism (a long-developing trend that came to a head during the Reagan administration). Others were less visible but nevertheless shaped his Presidency.

US lead in science and technology shrinking

The United States' (U.S.) predominance in science and technology (S&T) eroded further during the last decade, as several Asian nations--particularly China and South Korea--rapidly increased their innovation capacities. According to a report released today by the National Science Board (NSB), the policy making body of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and an advisor to the President and Congress, the major Asian economies, taken together, now perform a larger share of global R&D than the U.S., and China performs nearly as much of the world's high-tech manufacturing as the U.S.

Evidence in NSB's biennial report, Science and Engineering Indicators, which provides the most comprehensive federal information and analysis on the nation's position in S&T, makes it increasingly clear that the U.S., Japan, and Europe no longer monopolize the global R&D arena. Since 2001, the share of the world's R&D performed in the U.S. and Europe has decreased, respectively, from 37 percent to 30 percent and from 26 percent to 22 percent. In this same time period, the share of worldwide R&D performed by Asian countries grew from 25 percent to 34 percent. China led the Asian expansion, with its global share growing from just 4 percent to 15 percent during this period.

Paul Krugman: Health, Work, Lies

On Wednesday, Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said the obvious: losing your job and choosing to work less aren’t the same thing. If you lose your job, you suffer immense personal and financial hardship. If, on the other hand, you choose to work less and spend more time with your family, “we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.”

And now you know everything you need to know about the latest falsehood in the ever-mendacious campaign against health reform.

Let’s back up. On Tuesday, the budget office released a report on the fiscal and economic outlook that included two appendices devoted to effects of the Affordable Care Act.

Paul Krugman: Economic Exaggerations in Europe

Hmm. Allies of British Prime Minister David Cameron's government are now taunting French President François Hollande for having run the French economy "into the sand," according to The Financial Times - presumably in contrast with Britain's triumph.

How does that look in terms of, you know, the actual numbers?

Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever?

February 6, 2014

From the Archive: Ronald Reagan, who was born on Feb. 6, 1911, ranks among the most honored U.S. presidents of modern times with his name etched into public buildings across the country. Even Democrats shy from criticizing his legacy. But is this Reagan worship deserved, Robert Parry asked in 2009.


By Robert Parry (Originally published June 3, 2009)

There’s been talk that George W. Bush was so inept that he should trademark the phrase “Worst President Ever,” though some historians would bestow that title on pre-Civil War President James Buchanan. Still, a case could be made for putting Ronald Reagan in the competition.

Granted, the very idea of rating Reagan as one of the worst presidents ever will infuriate his many right-wing acolytes and offend Washington insiders who have made a cottage industry out of buying some protection from Republicans by lauding the 40th President.

Paul Krugman: Regarding Three-Piece Suits, Breakfast Meetings and Overwork

No, this isn't about "American Hustle"; it's a commentary on James Surowiecki's interesting article in The New Yorker on the cult of long working hours. I don't exactly disagree with his argument, but I'd place the emphasis a bit differently.

First of all, he's right that for what he calls knowledge workers - I'd just say elite workers in general - the whole time ethos has changed. When I was growing up on Long Island, there was a clear class hierarchy in commute times. Early trains were filled with menial workers; the later the train, the more and fancier the suits, with executives starting their day at 9:30 or 10 a.m. These days, if anything, it is reversed: There are a lot of hard-driving suits on the early trains, and the later trains are much more mixed.

The Koch Brothers Left a Confidential Document at Their Last Donor Conference—Read It Here

A list of one-on-one meetings between VIP donors and the Kochs and their operatives offers a revealing look into their mighty political machine.

 

—By Andy Kroll and Daniel Schulman | Wed Feb. 5, 2014 8:59 AM GMT

There's one main rule at the conservative donor conclaves held twice a year by Charles and David Koch at luxury resorts: What happens there stays there.

The billionaire industrialists and their political operatives strive to ensure the anonymity of the wealthy conservatives who fund their sprawling political operation—which funneled more than $400 million into the 2012 elections—and to keep their plans private. Attendees of these summits are warned that the seminars, where the Kochs and their allies hatch strategies for electing Republicans and advancing conservative initiatives on the state and national levels, are strictly confidential; they are cautioned to keep a close eye on their meeting notes and materials. But last week, following the Kochs' first donor gathering of 2014, one attendee left behind a sensitive document at the Renaissance Esmeralda resort outside of Palm Springs, California, where the Kochs and their comrades had spent three days focused on winning the 2014 midterm elections and more. The document lists VIP donors—including John Schnatter, the founder of the Papa John's pizza chain—who were scheduled for one-on-one meetings with representatives of the political, corporate, and philanthropic wings of Kochworld. The one-page document, provided to Mother Jones by a hotel guest who discovered it, offers a fascinating glimpse into the Kochs' political machine and shows how closely intertwined it is with Koch Industries, their $115 billion conglomerate.

AOL is leading the way to make 401(k)s worse for everyone

In our imperfect 401(k) system, there's one critical perk that many employees appreciate and count on: companies matching some part of their retirement savings every paycheck.

So when IBM changed its 401(k) system in 2012 to hand out employee matches in one lump sum at the end of the year, there was an uproar. Those who left the company before Dec. 15 would not see any matched dollars unless they were retiring. And employees would also miss out on all the compounding throughout the year from the contributions.

Senior US congressman Mike Rogers: Glenn Greenwald is 'a thief'

• Rogers accused journalist of illegally selling NSA documents
• Congressman is chairman of the House intelligence committee
• Greenwald denounces Rogers for 'fabrications and lies'

Spencer Ackerman in Washington
theguardian.com, Tuesday 4 February 2014 18.01 EST 

A senior US legislator has accused the former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald of illegally selling National Security Agency documents provided to him by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House intelligence committee, suggested Greenwald was a “thief” after he worked with news organizations who paid for stories based on the documents.

“For personal gain, he’s now selling his access to information, that’s how they’re terming it … A thief selling stolen material is a thief,” Politico quoted Rogers as saying after a committee hearing on Tuesday. Rogers said his source for the information was “other nations' press services”.

The Four Principles of Prosperity

by Ian Welsh

All economic theories are statements about what sort of people we are, or rather, what sort of people we should be. Economics has homo economicus, economic man, the rational utility maximizer who always acts in his or her own interest. We know that humans aren’t rational and we know that we don’t always do what is best for us, or even know what it is, but economics stands, nonetheless.

Economic man is prescriptive: it is about how we believe we should act. In ordinary terms a rational utility maximizer is a greedy, selfish bastard: a functional sociopath. They are concerned with other people’s well-being precisely and only to the extent that that affects their own. That we strive to realize this philosophy in our society is obvious from a perfunctory look at how we run our primary economic institutions: corporations. Our society insists and has put into law that corporations be concerned only with profit and nothing else(x). Our culture celebrates greed, we declare that “greed is good”. We believe that if everyone acts selfishly, for themselves, in freely agreed upon contracts, no matter how unequal the power of the people entering into them “freely”, that maximum well-being will result.

Mounting evidence links lead's toxic effects to criminal behavior

When crime rates drop, politicians like to give themselves pats on the back for being "tough on crime." But a new theory explaining why violence has declined across the country since the 1990s is gaining credence, and it has nothing to do with the criminal justice system. An article in Chemical & Engineering News details the mounting data that suggests taking lead out of gas and paint has played a critical role.

Dean Baker: CBO Says Obamacare Will Raise Wages

Apparently a lot of media folks have made such a habit of repeating Republican talking points that they can't see what is right in front of their eyes. The Republicans are touting the fact that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to reduce the number of people working.

Guess what? This was one of the motivations for the ACA. It is a feature, not a bug. There are a lot of people who would prefer not to work and would not work if they had some other way to get health care insurance. Imagine a 62 year-old with diabetes and other health conditions. No insurer will touch this person. If they can get insurance at all they are looking at bill that will certainly run well over $10k a year. If this person has a job that provides insurance they will keep it until they qualify for Medicare no matter how much of a struggle it is to go to work each day.

Job Creationism: The Myth of the Entrepreneur as God

Wednesday, 05 February 2014 09:09  
By David Gespass, Truthout | Op-Ed

The State of the Union Address from President Obama, and the reactions to it, were sadly predictable. Take, for example, the issue of the economy and "getting America back to work," a refrain we have been hearing for a decade during which corporate profits and CEO salaries have exploded, not enough jobs exist for all those seeking work and millions who are employed are still destitute. Parenthetically, the chauvinist conceit of referring to the United States as "America," thereby consigning Canada and every country in Central and South America to nonexistence, is a matter for a separate article.

Approach helps identify new biofuel sources that don't require farmland

While the debate over using crops for fuel continues, scientists are now reporting a new, fast approach to develop biofuel in a way that doesn't require removing valuable farmland from the food production chain. Their work examining the fuel-producing potential of Streptomyces, a soil bacterium known for making antibiotics, appears in ACS' The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The method also could help researchers identify other microbes that could be novel potential fuel sources

The "Skills Gap" Is a Convenient Myth

Sunday, 02 February 2014 12:04  
By Toni Gilpin, Labor Notes | News Analysis 

Haven't seen too many "Help Wanted" signs lately? You haven't been looking hard enough. At factories across the country, thousands of good jobs are going begging.

If that doesn’t sound quite right to you, take it up with the National Association of Manufacturers. NAM and other industry groups insist at least 600,000 factory positions remain open.

Ocean temperatures spiked in 2013

By John Upton

Perhaps climate skeptics should be forced to walk the plank — so they can feel for themselves where so much of the globe’s extra heat is ending up.

The mainstream media repeatedly uttered the false but reassuring-sounding phrase “global warming pause” last year, a reference to an unexpected decline in the rate at which land temperatures have been recently warming, but meanwhile temperatures in the world’s oceans were spiking.

Sam Pizzigati: What Will Reversing Inequality Really Take?

In the fierce debate over our top-heavy distribution of income and wealth, egalitarians have vanquished both inequality’s deniers and defenders. Now the debate is shifting to the most pivotal question of all.

America’s ongoing debate over economic inequality may be turning a new page.

In the debate’s first chapter, starting the 1980s, scholars, pundits, and policy makers did battle over whether the United States was becoming more unequal.

We still have some “denialists” floating around in right-wing think tank circles. But this debate has essentially ended. No serious analyst any longer argues that the gap between America’s rich and everyone else hasn’t jumped substantially.

Future near perfect: How humans can still save the day by 2050

By Amelia Urry

Though scientists and environmentalists often feel obligated to hawk the apocalyptic view of the world-to-come, there is a neglected version of the future well worth considering: the one where we win.

British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt is in the optimism business. He’s one of the founding directors of the Forum for the Future, a nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading the gospel of a sustainable future. “I hear good news every day,” he says, which makes us wonder what newspapers he’s reading. But he seems to mean it.

One American City Enjoys a Hyperfast Internet--Any Surprise Corporations Don't Control It?

By The Thom Hartmann Show

February 4, 2014  |  It’s time for high-speed internet access for all!

This morning, President Obama spoke to a crowd at a middle school in Adelphi, Maryland about the importance of high-speed internet access for America’s students.

But while high-speed internet access may still seem out-of-reach for many Americans, down in Chattanooga, Tennessee it’s been a reality for a long time.

That’s because Chattanooga is home to “The Gig,” a taxpayer-owned, high-speed fiber-optic network.

Nate Heckmann: Peter Schiff is Wrong About Everything

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Yves Smith
 
Yves here. I’m of two minds about featuring a post about Peter Schiff, since criticizing him treats him as being a more legitimate commentator than he is. But some targets ask so hard for a debunking that it’s hard to resist.

Schiff has been in the press recently for having said on the Daily Show that some people, such as the “mentally retarded,” didn’t even deserve minimum wage but should be paid only $2 an hour. But being offensive is not the worst of his sins.

Schiff is a money manager who claims to be an economist but has no formal credentials.* He such a terrible money manager that one wonders why the SEC hasn’t come calling. He lost 60% to 70% of customer assets in a two-year period when he was supposedly making correct macro calls. It isn’t just that he made disastrously bad timing decisions. He violated one of the basic rules of investment management, which is diversification (as of the last time his account results were made public, his picks represented only 2 bets: energy and gold, and that via small gold stocks or trusts). And he also appears to loaded up his customers with lots of risk. If so, he might have violated “know your customer” rules.

Universal pre-K: France is about 180 years ahead of America on preschool education

Universal pre-K is a long tradition in France, and one that American parents might envy.

By Claire Lundberg

I started the New Year in Paris with a mission: to enroll my daughter in école maternelle, France’s universal preschool program. This required a visit to our local city hall. As I walked across the park that sits between it and my apartment, I felt a little emotional—Sophia had just turned 2 in November, and now in just a few months she’d be headed off to school? It didn’t seem possible.

But I had no second thoughts about sending her to maternelle in the fall. Though school isn’t mandatory in France until age 6, all 3-year-olds are guaranteed a place in maternelle, and over 95 percent of French 3-to-5-year-olds attend. It’s the one part of France’s educational system that everyone seems to agree is great. It’s also remarkably cost-efficient: France paid 12.8 billion euros in 2007 to educate just over 2.5 million preschool age children—a cost of about 5,000 euros per student, or about $6,700. (By way of comparison, the state of New Jersey spends about $13,000 per student in their own, nonuniversal pre-K program, and Mayor de Blasio proposes allocating about $10,000 per student in New York City.) In the U.S., fewer than three in 10 4-year-olds are enrolled in pre-K programs, and we rank in the bottom third of developed countries in early childhood education, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Why Power Elites Are So Afraid of Telling the Truth

by Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers 

February 3, 2014  |  In the last week there were two high profile events that highlighted the inability of those in power to reflect reality and put forward solutions to the urgent problems faced by the United States and the world: the State of the Union and the World Economic Forum at Davos.

The reality is that the current economic and political systems are in crisis. The economy will not recover and the government cannot function to meet people’s needs or to protect the planet. Structural change is needed but the power elites are addicted to the current system. They happily funnel more wealth to the top with confidence that their own pockets will be filled. There is no room in their lives for attention to anyone else.

Dean Baker: Silicon Valley billionaires believe in the free market, as long as they benefit

Google, Apple and other tech firms likely colluded to keep their workers' wages down. So much for that libertarian worldview

Last week, Mark Ames published an article that should forever destroy any connection between the Silicon Valley tech billionaires and their supposed libertarian worldviews. The article reports on a court case that alleges that Apple, Google, and other Silicon Valley powerhouses actively conspired to keep their workers' wages down. According to documents filed in the case, these companies agreed not to compete for each others' workers dating at least as far back as 2005. Workers in the industry have filed a class action suit that could lead to the payment of billions of dollars in lost wages.

This case is striking on many levels, the most obvious being the effective theft of large amounts of money by some of the richest people on the planet from their employees. This is pernicious, but not altogether surprising. After all, the boss stealing from the workers is as dog bites man as it gets. Few would be surprised that rich people were willing to break the law to get even richer.

The Internet You Know and Love Is in Real Danger

By Sandra Fulton

February 3, 2014  |  Net neutrality – the principle that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must treat all data on the Internet equally – is vital to free speech. But earlier this month, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the FCC's net neutrality rules [3], jeopardizing the openness of the Internet that we have come to take for granted.

 

The court ruled that for the FCC to preserve net neutrality, it must first reclassify the Internet as a "common carrier" – a term used to describe a utility like plain-old telephone service or an electric company – so that it can be subject to particular government regulations. Today we delivered a petition with more than 1 million signatures calling on them to do just that.

Rethinking Economics: From the UK, a Global Student Movement Takes Shape

Sunday, 02 February 2014 10:13  
By Ruby Russell, Occupy.com | News Analysis 

When the financial crisis hit in 2007, economics students at respected institutions around the world found that theories handed down in classrooms failed to explain the reality outside, and an international movement began to demand a change in the way economics is taught.

“The crash was a wake-up call,” says Yuan Yang, who started her undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, at the height of the crisis in 2008. “On the one hand, we were being taught as if the financial system was not an important part of the economy. And on the other hand, what the markets were doing was quite different, so we asked, 'Why is there this disconnect?'”

Dean Baker: The Attack of the Robots: Economists' Silly Fantasies

Economists are not very good at economics. We know this because we had a huge housing bubble that collapsed, which almost none of them saw. The pre-crash projections from the Congressional Budget Office imply that this downturn has already cost us more than $7.6 trillion or $25,000 per person. This could have been prevented if we had economists in policy positions who understood how the economy worked.

But even if economists aren’t very good at dealing with the economy, they still can provide value to society. In particular they can be a great source of entertainment. That’s how we should view the story that robots will take all of our jobs and leave most of the population unemployed.

Paul Krugman: Delusions of Failure 

The Republican response to the State of the Union was delivered by Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican representative from Washington — and it was remarkable for its lack of content. A bit of uplifting personal biography, a check list of good things her party wants to happen with no hint of how it plans to make them happen.

The closest she came to substance was when she described a constituent, “Bette in Spokane,” who supposedly faced a $700-a-month premium hike after her policy was canceled. “This law is not working,” intoned Ms. McMorris Rodgers. And right there we see a perfect illustration of just how Republicans are trying to deceive voters — and are, in the process, deceiving themselves.

5 Big Education Stories to Watch in 2014

By Owen Davis

January 16, 2014  |  For people looking to "disrupt” public education, it’s become requisite to bemoan the “educational status quo [3]” — a phrase meant to evoke images of poor kids striving against the impediments of failing schools and incompetent teachers. Those who question these disruptors’ methodologies are cast aside as hidebound intransigents who likely have some vested interest in an ossified order.

But as a report [4] from Bolder Broader Approach, a progressive advocacy group, noted last year, a new “status quo” has not so quietly taken root. “A popular set of market-oriented education ‘reforms,’” such as test-based teacher evaluation and public school choice, “look more like the new status quo than real reform.”

Study: Watching Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News

By Michael Kelley

This post originally appeared in Business Insider on May 22, 2012.

Media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC have a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge, while NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative sources of news, according to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s newest PublicMind survey.

Researchers asked 1,185 random nationwide respondents what news sources they had consumed in the past week and then asked them questions about events in the U.S. and abroad. On average, people correctly answered 1.6 of five questions about domestic affairs.

Paul Krugman: Talking Troubled Turkey

O.K., who ordered that? With everything else going on, the last thing we needed was a new economic crisis in a country already racked by political turmoil. True, the direct global spillovers from Turkey, with its Los Angeles-sized economy, won’t be large. But we’re hearing that dreaded word “contagion” — the kind of contagion that once caused a crisis in Thailand to spread across Asia, more recently caused a crisis in Greece to spread across Europe, and now, everyone worries, might cause Turkey’s troubles to spread across the world’s emerging markets.

It is, in many ways, a familiar story. But that’s part of what makes it so disturbing: Why do we keep having these crises? And here’s the thing: The intervals between crises seem to be getting shorter, and the fallout from each crisis seems to be worse than the last. What’s going on?

Another Religious Right Tale Of Anti-Christian Victimization Gets Thoroughly Debunked

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Wednesday, 1/29/2014 10:24 am

We have seen it happen time and again: some right-wing group issues a one-sided press release about a student supposedly being unfairly discriminated against in school simply for exercising their Christian faith and the entire Religious Right movement immediately flies into an outrage, spreading the story far and wide as undisputed truth. Then days or weeks later, the real story emerges once school officials are given an opportunity to investigate and explain what really happened and it inevitably reveals that the Religious Right version was completely false, by which point it is already too late because the fake version has already been accepted as gospel and just continues to spread forever.

Paul Krugman: What Happens When Opportunities Are Lost

National Review recently published what was actually an interesting report by Kevin Williamson on the state of the Appalachian region, providing a valuable portrait of its woes - plus an account of how people make food stamps fungible by exchanging them for cases of soda, which they then trade for cash or other things.

But the piece also has a moral: the big problem, Mr. Williamson argues, is the way government aid creates dependency. It's the Paul Ryan notion of the safety net as a "hammock" that makes life too easy for the poor. But do the facts about Appalachia actually support this view? No, they don't.

Indeed, even the facts presented in the article don't support it. Mr. Williamson dismisses suggestions that economic factors might be driving social collapse in this region: "If you go looking for the catastrophe that laid this area low," you'll eventually discover a terrifying story: Nothing happened."

Scary New Surveillance State Idea: Government Tracking Students from Preschool to Workforce

By Aaron Cantú

January 29, 2014  |  The education sector, long frustrated by transient fads that have failed to uplift decades of sub-par student achievement, thinks it has finally found its knight in shining armor: an omnipresent data archive that will track students from pre-school to graduation, noting every teacher and test score. Then it will tack that trail of data onto a person well after they leave school.

 

Enthusiasts say they hope the constant tracking will help policy-makers identify the precise factors that make a successful student, and foster the creation of well-informed education policy, while opponents worry that growing intrusiveness will normalize the mass surveillance and obsessive record-keeping of humans foretold in dystopian literature.

The $100 million repository that will catalog all the information is called inBloom, an initiative funded primarily through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

The Republican Conspiracy Has Worked

Wednesday, 29 January 2014 15:08  
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed 

Republicans should be thrilled with President Obama’s State of the Union address. That’s because the extremely limited vision of government he presented last night is exactly what Republicans have been plotting to create since day one of the Obama White House.

In his fifth State of the Union address, the president essentially said that he is going to go it alone. His major policy plan for 2014 is to bypass Congress altogether and use targeted executive orders to get things done.

The Great Lakes Go Dry: How One-Fifth Of The World’s Fresh Water Is Dwindling Away

By Joanna M. Foster, on January 28, 2014 at 11:23 am

The frozen opalescent lake and thin, gray sky fade together into white light where the horizon should be. Tall, skeletal grasses shiver on the beach in a wind that makes any sliver of exposed skin burn. The Arni J. Richter, an icebreaking ferry, is about to pull away from Northport Pier for its second and final trip of the day to Washington Island. It’s loaded with food and fuel for the more than 700 hardy residents who call the remote island, just north of Door County peninsula in Wisconsin, home.

People have lived on Washington Island for over 160 years. They’re proud of their tight-knit community and their Icelandic heritage. But life on the island is threatened. For the past 15 years, islanders have watched Lake Michigan slowly disappear. Last January, the lake hit a record low, 29 inches below the long-term average as measured since 1918. The Richter Ferry was just inches away from grounding in some spots along its increasingly treacherous six-mile route to the island.

Mirabile Dictu! Post Office Bank Concept Gets Big Boost

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Yves Smith

Naked Capitalism readers have frequently called for the Post Office to offer basic banking services, as post offices long have in many countries, notably Japan. That idea has gotten an important official endorsement in the form of a detailed, extensively researched concept paper prepared by the Postal Service’s Inspector General. I’ve embedded it and strongly urge you to read and circulate it.

One of the stunning parts in reading the document is to see how wildly successful this program could be, precisely because traditional banks are withdrawing from many of the neighborhoods in which moderate and lower-income people live, and non-banks offer targeted, richly priced services, too often designed to take advantage of desperation or simple lack of alternatives. Even though most of us are aware of this general picture, the USPS IG, dimensions the scale of this problem and the costs to the affected households

27 Shocking Numbers That Reveal the True State of the Union

Scary statistics on unemployment, inequality, climate change and more

by Tim Dickinson
JANUARY 28, 2014

In tonight's State of the Union speech, we're likely to hear a lot about the nation's continuing recovery from the Great Recession, and about President Obama's determination to run an executive end-run around obstructionist Republicans in order to kick the economy into a higher gear.

But as the nation pauses for this annual moment of reflection on our fiscal and social health, too many leading indicators get short shrift. Here are 27 statistics – on unemployment, inequality, the drug war, defense spending, climate change and more – that underscore the troubled reality of America in 2014:

1. New income generated since 2009 that has gone to the top 1 percent: 95 percent
2. Financial wealth controlled by the bottom 60 percent of all Americans: 2.3 percent
3. Record combined wealth of the top 400 richest Americans: $2,000,000,000,000
4. Real decline in median middle-class incomes since 1999: $5,000

Wendy Davis' Daughters Strike Back At GOP Smear Machine

By karoli, January 28, 2014 11:55 am

After a week of relentless, sexist smears, Wendy Davis' daughters have had enough.

Don't you love how Republicans claim they're all about the children until it's inconvenient? They're so valiant, standing for those poor persecuted imaginary 'children' lost forever to abortions.

But when the kids are actual flesh and blood, they don't give a damn. If they did, they'd limit their attacks on Wendy Davis to her policies instead of going after her personally for her history and making specious claims that she abandoned her children to go to school.

Paul Krugman: Hollande Takes a Wrong Turn

"You shall not crucify mankind upon a croissant d'or."

That was the economist Alan Taylor's response (in correspondence) to French President François Hollande's embrace of Say's Law - Mr. Hollande literally said that "supply actually creates demand" in a press conference - together with his shift to, again in his own words, supply-side policies.

The amazing thing to me, aside from Mr. Hollande's haplessness, is the extreme pessimism that has evidently enveloped the French elite. You'd think that France was a disaster area. Yet the numbers, while not good, just aren't that dramatic.

Problems of Eurozone, European Integration Stem From Deeply Unpopular Elite Economic, Social Policy

Wednesday, 29 January 2014 09:07
By Mark Weisbrot, Truthout | Op-Ed

The February 2014 issue of Harper's Magazine has an interesting discussion of Europe and the eurozone, "How Germany Reconquered Europe: the Euro and its Discontents." Some of the big questions of European unity, democracy and national sovereignty are debated in broad and direct terms not often seen in other analyses:

"The basic lesson of the past ten, twenty years - even of the past hundred years - is that the upper limit, not only of democracy but of political legitimacy, is the nation-state." (John N. Gray, London School of Economics.)

Then there is the Franco-German relationship, which is central to the eurozone:

"I'm really sorry, but the idea that there is such a thing as Franco-German friendship is just nonsense. In France we're very glad we have no big problems with Germany and the wars are over. But the idea of a special cultural or sociological link between German and France is nonsense. … Among the French bourgeoisie, the elite, there is a sort of reverence for Germany, because Germany is obviously more efficient and because the German people are obviously easier to govern than the French people, so there's this kind of friendship among the upper classes. …

Pay no attention to those insurance lobbyists behind the Medicare curtain!

Commentary: 'Grass roots' group says it represents seniors but is really run by health insurers

By Wendell Potter
6:00 am, January 27, 2014 Updated: 5:00 pm, January 28, 2014

If you go to 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Suite 500, in Washington, D.C. in search of what you’ve been told is the address of a grass roots organization concerned about “cuts” to Medicare, you will likely be surprised what you find there.

You will indeed find an organization that is lobbying hard to keep federal dollars flowing, but it is anything but grass roots.

Digby: “Inequality Doesn’t Just Happen. The 1% Make It Happen”

Responding to the depressing news that the administration has succumbed to elite pressure to “tone down” the rhetoric about wealth inequality, Damon Silvers, special counsel for the AFL-CIO, points out the uncomfortable truth:

[T]he president faces a choice of rhetoric on Tuesday night—but that choice is not just about political gamesmanship. It will have serious policy implications. But there is also an issue of simple credibility. The American people are watching, and they are furious about inequality. Large majorities in poll after poll want a more progressive tax system, accountability for bankers, less power in public life for corporations and the rich and, most of all, higher wages.

Richard Eskow: A Billionaire’s “Nazi” Rant Has Secret Roots – in Landscaping

By now millions of people have heard that Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Perkins compared progressive political speech to Kristallnacht, the night of religious violence which led to the death of 91 Jews and paved the way politically for the Nazi Reich and the Holocaust. Here’s what you probably don’t know: Perkins’ rage appears to have been fueled, at least in part, by a dispute over gardening.

That’s right: Gardening.

Common crop pesticides kill honeybee larvae in the hive

Four pesticides commonly used on crops to kill insects and fungi also kill honeybee larvae within their hives, according to Penn State and University of Florida researchers. The team also found that N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) -- an inert, or inactive, chemical commonly used as a pesticide additive -- is highly toxic to honeybee larvae.

"We found that four of the pesticides most commonly found in beehives kill bee larvae," said Jim Frazier, professor of entomology, Penn State. "We also found that the negative effects of these pesticides are sometimes greater when the pesticides occur in combinations within the hive. Since pesticide safety is judged almost entirely on adult honeybee sensitivity to individual pesticides and also does not consider mixtures of pesticides, the risk assessment process that the Environmental Protection Agency uses should be changed."

Dean Baker: President Obama's Inequality Story

The advance word is that inequality is going to be the central theme in President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday. That’s certainly good news, since it is a huge problem. The question is whether President Obama is prepared to talk about inequality in a way that gets to the core of the problem as opposed to just clipping away at the edges.

It’s a safe bet that we will see the latter. Obama has indicated that he will redouble his efforts to push for a $10.10 minimum wage. This is good news. This will mean a substantial increase in the wages for people at the bottom of the income ladder. The bulk of the gains from a higher minimum wage will go to people who really need it.

UK to Shred Over 80,000 Pages of Environmental Protections

'The Government must stop making the environment a scapegoat for the economic challenges we face,' critics warn

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

In a sweeping overhaul of environmental regulations in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday announced plans to slash over 80,000 pages of laws that protect the environment against business practices.

The list of over 3,000 regulations on the chopping block—outlined in a speech at the Federation of Small Businesses Conference Monday—includes guidance on contaminated land and hazardous waste management, food labeling regulations, and building regulations such as requirements for onsite green technologies.

The overhaul, which is part of Cameron's Red Tape Challenge campaign, include proposals to “wind down” the code for sustainable homes and limit Environmental Impact Assessments for building projects, according to Naomi Luhde-Thompson from Friends of the Earth.

Working poor now majority of food stamp recipients — with college educated among fastest growing group of users

By George Chidi
Sunday, January 26, 2014 20:20 EST

In the wake of recent cuts to the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program — or food stamps — the Associated Press reported Sunday that working-age people have now passed children and the elderly as the majority of recipients for households relying on food stamps.

The program now covers one in seven Americans, with the fastest growth in use among workers with some college training, the AP reported.

Stories about the rising use of food stamps by seemingly-undeserving recipients — prompting the conservative backlash — began near the start of the recession with tales of Brooklyn hipsters using food stamps for organic salmon. But with increasing regularity we’re reading stories of adjunct college professors and government employees relying on SNAP to feed themselves and their children, evidence that SNAP is the virtual breadline of the Great Recession.

DDT: Pesticide linked to Alzheimer's

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News
 

Exposure to a once widely used pesticide, DDT, may increase the chances of developing Alzheimer's disease, suggest US researchers.

A study, published in JAMA Neurology, showed patients with Alzheimer's had four times as much DDT lingering in the body as healthy people.

Some countries still use the pesticide to control malaria.

How Private Probation Companies Make Money From the Those They Trap in the Justice System

By Aaron Cantú

January 20, 2014  |  Marietta Conner watched the judge expectantly. The 63-year-old assistant minister had just pled guilty to “fail[ing] to yield to a pedestrian”—a criminal misdemeanor in Georgia—and did not have enough money to pay her $140 fine. The judge ordered that she be put on probation. But instead of county probation, Conner was assigned a private probation company supposed to mimic normal court probabation: meet with her once a month through a probation officer, collect payments and confirm her work and address. In the end, the company sapped Conner of well over the original amount of the fine, and even dangled an arrest warrant over her head when it erroneously claimed she had missed a payment.

 

Conner was lucky. She knew someone at the Southern Center for Human Rights who helped her escape the trap the correctional corporation tried to put her in. Yet for hundreds of thousands of others on probation through a private company, the experience routinely entails prolonged harassment, indebtedness and even imprisonment—and sometimes all with the blessing of a judge.

Rick Perlstein: Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Five): Epistemology and Empathy

A friend pointed me to a letter to the editor published in the Badger Herald, an independent newspaper published at the University of Wisconsin , widely tweeted with such comments as “Motherfucker, what the fuck” and “how do people like this actually exist?” It argues that rape culture is, in the writer’s words, “non-existent.” I provide the link for documentation purposes only; you should most decidedly not click on it, especially if you are a woman vulnerable to rape-trauma triggers, or a woman, or, actually, if you are a human being. The letter, from a junior majoring in political science, goes on to say that the term “rape culture” merely “aggressively paints men as dangerous and as the root of evil,” and complains “women feel the need to exploit anything that may be rape for publicity.”

I’ll say no more about this “argument.” I bring it up to make a broader point about right-wing rhetoric. It is this: Have you ever noticed how conservatives who say the most controversial things imaginable consistently frame such utterances as self-evident, as simple “truth,” explaining with unshakable confidence that anyone who disagrees with them… no, scratch that.

Utah is Ending Homelessness by Giving People Homes

Earlier this month, Hawaii State representative Tom Bower (D) began walking the streets of his Waikiki district with a sledgehammer, and smashing shopping carts used by homeless people. “Disgusted” by the city’s chronic homelessness problem, Bower decided to take matters into his own hands — literally. He also took to rousing homeless people if he saw them sleeping at bus stops during the day.

Bower’s tactics were over the top, and so unpopular that he quickly declared “Mission accomplished,” and retired his sledgehammer. But Bower’s frustration with his city’s homelessness problem is just an extreme example of the frustration that has led cities to pass measures that effective deal with the homeless by criminalizing homelessness.

“I feel like I was set up to fail”: Inside a for-profit college nightmare

Some schools feast on federal aid and don't care if the student can repay it. Here's one woman's tragic story

Adam Rust

Jaqueta Cherry did not have a glittering GPA or a résumé loaded with internships and varsity letters. She dropped out of high school at age 17. But last fall, right after she received a general equivalency diploma, for-profit colleges and universities besieged her with offers of admission. Admissions officers told her that she could start right away. They said she could get a degree that would help her land a professional job working in computers. Hoping to escape from a future of dead-end jobs, she enrolled in a two-year associate’s program at Everest University Online.

But a year later, she has failed or dropped out of six courses at two different schools. She has never earned a single credit hour. Despite attending Everest University Online and then later the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online, she still cannot find a “salary job.” But now she has thousands of dollars in outstanding federal student loans. And she’s not the only one.

Paul Krugman: Economic Opportunity Has Collapsed, So Poverty Endures

I wanted to say something about the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

By 1980 or so, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, there was widespread consensus that it had failed. But, as the C.B.P.P. also concluded in an online article earlier this month, that doesn't stand up once you do the numbers right: poverty measures that take into account government aid - aid of the kind provided by the war on poverty! - do show a significant decline since the 1960s.

There's more sheer misery in America than there should be, but less than there was. Even so, progress against poverty has obviously been disappointing. But why? At this point in the argument, it's important to realize that American conservatives are stuck with a fossil narrative - a story about persistent poverty that may have had something to it three decades ago, but is all wrong now.

Paul Krugman: The Undeserving Rich

The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact — American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society — shouldn’t be up for argument.

But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But it also, I think, reflects distaste for the implications of the numbers, which seem almost like an open invitation to class warfare — or, if you prefer, a demonstration that class warfare is already underway, with the plutocrats on offense.

The Lost Legacy of Otis Pike

January 22, 2014

Former Rep. Otis Pike died Monday at the age of 92, stirring recollections of his courageous efforts in the 1970s to expose abuses committed by the CIA, a struggle that ultimately bogged down as defenders of state secrecy proved too strong, as ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman writes.

By Melvin A. Goodman

The death of Rep. Otis G. Pike, a nine-term New York congressman, is a sharp reminder that once upon a time this country had congressmen who were willing to conduct oversight of the secretive intelligence community, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, and press for genuine reform.

In the wake of CIA abuses during the Vietnam War, including the pursuit of political assassination and illegal searches and seizures, Rep. Pike and Sen. Frank Church — both Democrats — established the Pike Committee and the Church Committee in order to create bipartisan congressional oversight of the intelligence community and to place the CIA under a tighter rein.

Matt Taibbi: Bailout Architect Runs for California Governor; World Laughs

I want to apologize for this space being blank for quite some time. I actually spent the bulk of the last two days on a long blog post about the "Dr. V." story in Grantland. But then I got all the way to the end, and realized I was completely wrong about the entire thing.

So, I spiked my own piece. Now I've been in Talk Radio-style "This is totally dead air, Barry" territory for about two weeks. I could swear I saw a cobweb when I logged on this morning.

So thank God for Neel Kashkari, and the news that this goofball footnote caricature of the bailout era has decided to run for Governor of California. Never in history has there been an easier subject for a blog post.

Did These 68 Words Just Kill IRS Oversight of Dark Money?

In a vaguely worded section of a vast new law, Congress may have accidentally blocked the agency from supervising political groups.

—By Patrick Caldwell  | Wed Jan. 22, 2014 3:00 AM GMT

Congress rushed to pass a 1,524-page bill last week that funds government agencies for 2014. The bill—which President Obama signed into law last Friday—is full of minor measures that were slipped in to appease various members, but one small section could upend the Internal Revenue Service's ability to regulate political organizations hoping to become nonprofits. Tacked on as a symbolic effort to mollify conservatives' anti-IRS mania, the text is so overly vague that it could mean the dissolution of long-standing rules. Or nothing at all. No one's really sure.

"It's really hard to know if this is clever or just abysmal drafting," says Frances Hill, a tax law professor at the University of Miami School of Law.

Paul Krugman: Good Republicans Reject Evolution

I'm a bit late to this party, but the Pew Research Center recently released a new report about changing views on evolution in the United States. The big takeaway was that a plurality of self-identified Republicans now believe that no evolution whatsoever has taken place since the day of creation - let alone that evolution is driven by natural selection.

The move is big: an 11-point decline since 2009. Obviously there isn't any new scientific evidence driving this rejection of Darwin. And Democrats are slightly more likely to believe in evolution now than they were four years ago. So what happened after 2009 that might be changing Republican views?

Paul Krugman: Scandal in France

I haven’t paid much attention to François Hollande, the president of France, since it became clear that he wasn’t going to break with Europe’s destructive, austerity-minded policy orthodoxy. But now he has done something truly scandalous.

I am not, of course, talking about his alleged affair with an actress, which, even if true, is neither surprising (hey, it’s France) nor disturbing. No, what’s shocking is his embrace of discredited right-wing economic doctrines. It’s a reminder that Europe’s ongoing economic woes can’t be attributed solely to the bad ideas of the right. Yes, callous, wrongheaded conservatives have been driving policy, but they have been abetted and enabled by spineless, muddleheaded politicians on the moderate left.

Paul Krugman: The Populist Imperative

“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”

John Maynard Keynes wrote that in 1936, but it applies to our own time, too. And, in a better world, our leaders would be doing all they could to address both faults.

Unfortunately, the world we actually live in falls far short of that ideal. In fact, we should count ourselves lucky when leaders confront even one of our two great economic failures. If, as has been widely reported, President Obama devotes much of his State of the Union address to inequality, everyone should be cheering him on.

Right-Wing Media: Low-Income Americans Are Inheriting Too Much, Working Too Little

Right-Wing Media Take BLS Study Out Of Context

Blog ››› January 22, 2014 4:38 PM EST ››› BRIAN POWELL 

A new right-wing media narrative is brandishing out-of-context statistics on inherited wealth to argue that lower-income Americans are disproportionately benefiting from inherited wealth transfers, unlike the wealthiest Americans who earn their wealth with hard work.

As a national dialogue heats up over the problem of global and domestic income inequality, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and others are rushing to the defense of the wealthiest Americans by claiming that low-income Americans simply don't work as hard as their wealthy peers. As evidence, the conservative outlets are pointing to a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) study showing top income brackets inherit a smaller percentage of their wealth than do lower income Americans, a finding that, according to National Review's Kevin Williamson, proves that rich Americans "work more -- a lot more."
 

Paul Krugman: Encouraging Signs for a Brighter 2014

There's an alarming amount of optimism out there about the United States' economic prospects for 2014. Let me make the situation even more alarming by saying that I basically share that optimism. Why? Because of the Three Stooges effect: if you've been banging your head against a wall for no good reason, you'll feel a lot better when you stop.

One way to describe the American economy in 2013 is to say that it was, in effect, trying to begin a strong recovery, but was held back by terrible federal fiscal policy. Housing was making a comeback; if state and local austerity policies were not going into reverse, at least they were not getting more intense; and household spending was starting to revive as debt levels came down.

Richard Eskow: They’re Fast-Tracking the Future, TPP Style – But We Can Stop Them

The “TPP,” or Trans-Pacific Partnership, is our nation’s newest proposed trade deal. It was negotiated without democratic input, and they’re trying to ram it through Congress the same way. Like NAFTA before it, the TPP would kill jobs. It would also cause lasting harm to democracy, here in the United States and around the world.

There has been an understandable sense of outrage over the Obama administration’s attempt to ram the most extreme trade deal yet through Congress with a “fast-track” provision that forbids amendments or filibustering. Representatives who have had very little chance to review the bill will be expected to vote on it without the chance to change it.

The Workers' Scorecard on NAFTA

Thursday, 23 January 2014 09:14
By David Bacon, Truthout | News Analysis

Sold by its promoters as a migration-preventing device that ultimately would produce more and better-paid jobs in all three countries, the North American Free Trade Agreement has displaced jobs and people, weakened unions and ravaged US cities and rural Mexico. But worker solidarity may prove to be its most important product.

In 1986, a provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act created a commission to investigate the causes of Mexican migration to the United States. When it made its report to Congress in 1992, it found, unsurprisingly, that the biggest was poverty. It recommended the negotiation of a free trade agreement, modeled on the one that had been implemented a few years before between the United States and Canada. The commission argued that opening the border to the flow of goods and capital (but not people) would, in the long run, produce jobs and rising income in Mexico, even if, in the short run, it led to some job loss and displacement.

The negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement began within months. When completed, it was sold to the public by its promoters on both sides of the border as a migration-preventing device. During the debate, executives of companies belonging to USA-NAFTA, the agreement's corporate lobbyist, walked the halls of Congress wearing red, white and blue neckties. They made extravagant claims that US exports to Mexico would account for 100,000 jobs in the agreement's first year alone.

The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley's most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers' wages

By Mark Ames On January 23, 2014

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple’s board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.”

Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information “verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”

Brian Beutler: The real problem with the American right: Aging, white radicals

Everyone knows the GOP has been unable to moderate its image or agenda. But less understood is the true reason why

The Republican Party’s total failure to make even cosmetic changes to its image and policy agenda last year has at this point become the kind of cliché-cum-running joke that often attaches itself to accepted truisms in American politics. Like chucking about Bill Clinton’s inability to contain himself in the company of women, or noting that Dick Cheney actually ran the show during George W. Bush’s first term, observing that Republicans have failed to moderate or reinvent themselves after losing badly in 2012 is the kind of thing even sympathetic political wise men can say to signal that they get it. That in what was a tough year for President Obama, Republicans screwed up too.

But the observation of these symptoms is less crucial than the diagnosis. Why are Republicans so stuck?
 

Paul Krugman: A Virtual Currency Raises Real-World Questions

It's always important, and always hard, to distinguish positive economics (how things work) from normative economics (how things should be). Indeed, with many of the macroeconomics issues I've written about, it has been obvious that large numbers of economists can't bring themselves to make that distinction; they dislike an activist government on political grounds, and this leads them to make really bad arguments about why fiscal stimulus can't work and how monetary stimulus will be disastrous.

But I'd like to talk not about macroeconomics but about money - specifically, about Bitcoin, the virtual currency. So far, almost all of the Bitcoin discussion has centered on positive economics - can this actually work? And I have to say that I'm still deeply unconvinced.