America’s Pseudo-Democracy

U.S. pundits mock countries, like Iran or China, where candidates are screened before they go on the ballot, but America has a similar approach, with candidates needing approval from plutocrats and special interests. But that’s just one problem of U.S. democracy, says Lawrence Davidson.

November 15, 2014
By Lawrence Davidson

Given the dangerous results of the recent election in the United States – one that saw the Republicans, a right-wing party increasingly populated with neocon warmongers, reactionaries and plutocrats take control of both houses of Congress – it might be time to take a look at a sober look at U.S. democracy.

We can begin be taking note of the generic observation made by Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worse form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.” The implication here is that democracy is really not the God-blessed system so many of Americans take it to be.

Charles P. Pierce: John Doar, 1921-2014

Anyone who followed the Watergate saga knows that Richard Nixon, history's yard waste and a criminal president, was done in by the monotones. First, there was John Dean before the committee chaired by Sam Ervin, his voice never rising or falling, almost unnaturally without affect, a scapegoat turned lethal, explaining at length why the people in the White House needed a scapegoat in the first place. There was no anger in his presentation. Just one damning fact after another after another, over and over again. The second monotone appeared in July of 1974. It belonged to a lawyer named John Doar. It cut out Richard Nixon's heart and ate it in the marketplace.

For several weeks, the Republicans in the House of Representatives, who were seeking to pull Nixon's chestnuts out of his own self-immolating fire, were leaning on Doar, the counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, to produce his case so they could consider articles of impeachment against the president. Even Democratic members of the House were leaning on Majority Leader Tip O'Neill, who in turn was leaning on committee chairman Peter Rodino, who in turn was leaning on Doar and his staff. Knowing that, ultimately, Rodino had his back just as O'Neill had Rodino's, Doar sent word back up the chain of command to tell the Republican water-haulers and the impatient and nervous Democrats to pound sand. Doar would deliver his report when it was ready, and not before. He was not a nervous fellow, this John Doar. Long before he ever came to Congress, he had been threatened by experts.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Reveals Why Robots Really Are Coming For Your Job

Tomas Hirst

Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz has a new NBER paper out that comes to a worrying conclusion — the robots really are coming for your job.

In economic theory innovation should make workers more efficient — they can produce more for less — but it comes at the cost of lower skilled jobs as fewer people are required to produce the same amount of output.

Exclusive: Controversial U.S. energy loan program has wiped out losses

By Nichola Groom

(Reuters) - The controversial government program that funded failed solar company Solyndra, and became a lighting rod in the 2012 presidential election, is officially in the black.

According to a report by the Department of Energy, interest payments to the government from projects funded by the Loan Programs Office were $810 million as of September - higher than the $780 million in losses from loans it sustained from startups including Fisker Automotive, Abound Solar and Solyndra, which went bankrupt after receiving large government loans intended to help them bring their advanced green technologies to market.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Accepted Campaign Contributions From Financial Firms Managing City Pension Money

By David Sirota

Executives at investment firms that manage Chicago pension funds have since 2011 poured more than $600,000 in contributions into Mayor Rahm Emanuel's campaign operation and political action committees (PACs) that support him, according to documents reviewed by International Business Times. These contributions appear to flout federal rules banning companies that manage pension funds from financing the campaigns of officials with authority over pension systems, say legal experts.

The contributions also potentially conflict with an executive order Emanuel himself signed in 2011 prohibiting city contractors and subcontractors from making campaign donations to city officials.

Mission Creep-y

Google Is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation’s Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collection Empire

Nov. 13, 2014 — Google is so rapidly expanding both its information-collecting capabilities and its political clout that it could become too powerful to be held accountable, a new Public Citizen report finds.

Paul Krugman: China, Coal, Climate

It’s easy to be cynical about summit meetings. Often they’re just photo ops, and the photos from the latest Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, which had world leaders looking remarkably like the cast of “Star Trek,” were especially cringe-worthy. At best — almost always — they’re just occasions to formally announce agreements already worked out by lower-level officials.

Once in a while, however, something really important emerges. And this is one of those times: The agreement between China and the United States on carbon emissions is, in fact, a big deal.

Wall Street Takes Over More Statehouses

By David Sirota

No runoff will be needed to declare one unambiguous winner in this month’s gubernatorial elections: the financial services industry. From Illinois to Massachusetts, voters effectively placed more than $100 billion worth of public pension investments under the control of executives-turned-politicians whose firms profit by managing state pension money.

The elections played out as states and cities across the country debate the merits of shifting public pension money—the retirement savings for police, firefighters, teachers and other public employees—from plain vanilla investments such as index funds into higher-risk alternatives like hedge funds and private equity funds.

Revealed: US Agency Using Spy Planes to Fool Cell Phones, Capture Data

Newly revealed mass surveillance program by the US government is "inexcusable," says ACLU

by Jon Queally, staff writer

According to new reporting by the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Marshals Service—an arm of the Department of Justice—has been using small aircraft equipped with technology that can mimic the functions of cell towers in order to capture the data contained on phones and mobile devices of people across large areas on the ground below.

Citing those familiar with the program, the Journal report (subscription) reveals how the program's use of so-called "dirtbox" technology is part of "a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans" in a dragnet approach that will remind some of similar techniques known to be used by the National Security Agency and other federal agencies.

Leaked TTIP Documents Reveal Powerful Chemical Industry Wins

The European Commission may be conceding to corporate interests in controversial trade negotiations

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer

Corporate interests may be winning in U.S.-EU trade negotiations, endangering public health and the environment, a new cache of documents (pdf) leaked on Tuesday show.

Backed by powerful industry advisers and bolstered by U.S. allies who have already made significant concessions to move negotiations along, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal is poised to derail European regulations around the use and transport of chemicals—regulations which are significantly stronger than those in the U.S. The deal would also limit public access to information on toxic and hazardous substances.

After Gutting the Voting Rights Act, Alabama Cites It As an Excuse for Racial Gerrymandering

The state uses a measure it helped destroy to justify redistricting that ghettoized minority voters.

—By Stephanie Mencimer | Wed Nov. 12, 2014 6:30 AM EST

You have to give Alabama credit for its cheek. Last year, the state's Shelby County persuaded the US Supreme Court to find unconstitutional part of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states with histories of discriminatory election laws to get permission from the federal government before changing their voting practices. On Wednesday, Alabama will argue before the court that the same provision it helped decimate compelled lawmakers to racially gerrymander the entire state.

This convoluted case got its start after the GOP took control of both houses of the Alabama state Legislature in 2010. The Republicans then redrew the state legislative voting districts in 2012 as part of the regular redistricting process. The new plan preserved most of the state's majority-minority districts, where black residents had political power and tended to elect Democrats—often African American ones. But state legislators also redrew the lines in a way that minimized the influence of African American voters in districts where they did not make up a majority of voters.

Paul Krugman: The Temptation to Spend

As I've been noting recently, there's a lot of opposition within Japan to the Bank of Japan's policy of printing more money, and there's also a lot of pressure on the government to raise taxes.And that's not very different from what has been happening throughout the rest of the advanced world: Central banks that have pursued quantitative easing have done so despite political pressure, not because of it, and fiscal austerity has been imposed almost everywhere.

The funny thing is that when you ask for justifications for pursuing hard money and tight budgets in a depressed, low-inflation economy, the answers you get often start from the presumption that money printing and deficit finance are immensely tempting to politicians, so that you shouldn't dare let them get even a slight taste of these addictive drugs.

ISPs Removing Their Customers' Email Encryption

By Jacob Hoffman-Andrews

Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer's web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers' data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls, including Cisco's PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.

Rachel Maddow trolls Arizona Tea Partiers threatening to censor biology textbooks

Arturo Garcia

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow got a step ahead of a trio of lame-duck Tea Party school board members in Arizona on Tuesday, saying biology materials they tried to censor are now available online.

“They’re lovely in their boring biology-ness,” she said of the pages, taken from an AP Biology textbook. “So if you want to brush up on how a baby’s made or how contraception works and all that stuff at a 10th grade level, be my guest.”

Americans want what 21st century politics has so far not delivered: real options for challenging concentrated wealth.

by Sam Pizzigati

What can we expect Congress to do about America’s staggeringly top-heavy concentration of income and wealth over the next two years? Absolutely nothing.

What do Americans want Congress to do about that concentration? A good bit.

Paul Krugman: Death by Typo

The Latest Frivolous Attack on Obamacare

My parents used to own a small house with a large backyard, in which my mother cultivated a beautiful garden. At some point, however — I don’t remember why — my father looked at the official deed defining their property, and received a shock. According to the text, the Krugman lot wasn’t a rough rectangle; it was a triangle more than a hundred feet long but only around a yard wide at the base.

On examination, it was clear what had happened: Whoever wrote down the lot’s description had somehow skipped a clause. And of course the town clerk fixed the language. After all, it would have been ludicrous and cruel to take away most of my parents’ property on the basis of sloppy drafting, when the drafters’ intention was perfectly clear.

The GOP’s poisonous double-speak: Thomas Frank on how Republicans hijacked the midterms

Once again, Republicans used their patented brand of fake populism to make Democrats look like chumps

Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.”

That phrase, delivered with sneering emphasis on the second word, may have been a key to the whole confusing affair. Consider the many ironies of the 2014 elections. Georgia, the state with the highest unemployment in the nation, just elected as its United States senator a businessman who is “proud” of his career of outsourcing. The voters of Illinois overwhelmingly approved a referendum calling for a higher minimum wage, but they also chose as their governor a Wall Street type who in the past has asserted that the minimum wage ought to be reduced or eliminated. And the public as a whole, driven to fury by the spectacle of Washington gridlock, just handed over the U. S. Senate to a party that has enshrined obstructionism as its most precious article of faith.

Why warnings on climate spark aggressive denials

A new book argues that death threats and abuse illustrate how climate change messengers are being demonised in a way that is without parallel in the history of science.

By: Tim Radford

LONDON, 8 November, 2014 − If you don’t like the message on climate change, it seems that the answer is to shoot the messenger.

According to a new book by veteran environmentalist George Marshall, thousands of abusive emails − including demands that he commit suicide or be “shot, quartered and fed to the pigs, along with your family” – were received by climate scientist Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre, who drew and published the “hockey stick graph” that charts a steep rise in global average temperatures.

30 Years of Conservative Nonsense, An Explainer

If those calls to close the borders over Ebola are giving you déjà vu, you might not be wrong.

By Kurt Eichenwald

Are conservatives ever right?

The question isn’t meant to suggest that liberals are never wrong. But reviewing the last few decades of conservative policy initiatives—or their objections over that timespan to policies they hate—shows a consistent pattern of failure: predictions never pan out, and intended results turn to catastrophic flops.

Given the G.O.P.’s midterm victories this week, the question is of particular import. Come January, conservatives will have control of both houses of Congress, and hold a considerable legislative advantage in the last two years of the Obama presidency. Yet not a week ago, conservative politicians and commentators were screaming out batty ideas as they demanded that President Obama close the borders over Ebola, ignoring the advice of infectious disease specialists who know that shutting borders against a disease leads people to make travel by means that aren’t easily tracked, escalates danger, and harms the ability to stop the infection at its source. Conservative know-nothings dismiss the professionals as know-nothings themselves, despite their training and expertise.

This Democratic Party Is Going Nowhere. Can Progressives Take it Over and Change the World?

By Alan Minsky

Tuesday’s crushing defeat of the centrist Clinton/Obama Democratic Party provides an opening for the American left. The next few years are not going to be pretty, but they could be the beginning of something beautiful.

In 2009, shortly after its most crushing national electoral defeat in 44 years, the GOP was sparked back to life by the tea party insurgency. America’s right wing revived its moribund conservative party with a stark challenge to the Republican establishment. The GOP gained 63 House seats in 2010.

“The president is basically in hiding”: Thomas Frank unloads on Dems, Kansas and crushing midterm losses

The Salon columnist dissects Tuesday's GOP rout and a tumultuous Kansas cycle -- and slams the Democrats' response

Luke Brinker

In an election that witnessed crushing Democratic losses in the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and in key gubernatorial races, the victories of Kansas Republicans Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts have been among the most painful for many Democrats to absorb.

Gov. Brownback, after all, trailed Democratic challenger Paul Davis in the polls for most of the 2014 cycle, owing to the destructive fiscal consequences of his large tax cuts. While Democrats expected to sustain tough losses elsewhere, the prospect of knocking off a right-wing governor in Kansas in an otherwise good year for the GOP provided at least some solace. Likewise, the perception that Sen. Roberts had lost touch with the Sunflower State after 34 years in Congress and the vigorous campaign waged by independent Greg Orman presented a rare opportunity to defeat a GOP Senate incumbent.

Midterms 2014: Paying the Gold Price, and the Iron Price

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

In Game of Thrones, “the iron price” is a concept in the culture of the Ironborn. Paying the iron price means taking by the sword, rather than paying with coin. Thus, it is a primary aspect of the “Old Way”, the traditional lifestyle of the Ironborn. The opposite of the iron price is “the gold price,” which is considered shameful for a man to pay. And it is true that in some ways it’s more honorable to risk your life, sword to sword, than risk your hoard, moneybags to moneybags, and that the midterms were more about gold than iron.

But I’d like to connect “the iron price” to the well-known “Iron Law of Institutions,” explained here by A Tiny Revolution:

Democrats operate according to the Iron Law of Institutions. The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

This is true for all human institutions, from elementary schools up to the United States of America. If history shows anything, it’s that this cannot be changed. What can be done, sometimes, is to force the people running institutions to align their own interests with those of the institution itself and its members.

Could Obama have fixed the economy?

Ian Welsh

I’m hearing “Obama couldn’t have fixed the economy. Wage stagnation is not his fault, it’s been going on for decades!” (For the record it’s been going on for at least 34 years, probably 39, and for some parts of the population, for 46 (that’s when wages for working class white males peaked. Which is why they’re pissy.))

This argument is, to give it more courtesy than it deserves, bullshit. I wrote about this back in 2010, and you can read that article, but let’s run through this one more time, because you will never get good leadership if you keep excusing your leaders for betraying you.

ALEC Corporate Board Chair Quits Over Climate Change, Renewables and Voting Rights

Nick Surgey

The corporate board chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the software company SAP America, has quit the group, telling CMD that it has made the decision to "immediately disassociate itself from ALEC" because of the group's position on climate change, opposition to renewable energy, its position on gun safety and its attacks on voter rights.

Facing increased criticism of its role opposing action to tackle climate change and for teaching climate change denial, ALEC has lost numerous major corporate funders in recent months, with tech firms Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Yelp all leaving. Most high profile was Google, with Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt telling the Diane Rehm show on NPR that it made a mistake in funding ALEC. "We should not be aligned with such people. They are just literally lying," Schmidt said in reference to ALEC's teaching climate change denial. "The company has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on fact," said Schmidt.

Q&A: James K. Galbraith on the Myth of Perpetual Growth, How Language Shapes Economic Thought, and More

Lauren Kirchner

In Issue 19 of The Baffler, James K. Galbraith debunked the notion that the world’s economists were caught unawares by the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, in a piece that was appropriately titled “We Told You So.” Now, in his new book, The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (Simon & Schuster, 291 pages, $26), he widens his scope, laying out an economic theory that begins in the years following World War II and extends to the future.

One central argument of his book explains why we would be mistaken to expect perpetual growth in the American economy. The post-war decades have raised our expectations, Galbraith says, but for the economy to continue to grow at the same pace would be unsustainable. So we need to adjust our idea of “normal” growth—and even change how we measure overall economic success.

Righteous rage, impotent fury: Thomas Frank returns to Kansas to hunt the last days of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts

On eve of a possible GOP rout, Frank goes home to rediscover the matter with Kansas and all American politics

PRAIRIE VILLAGE, KANSAS – One of the treasured vanities of my home state of Kansas is the idea that, although we are the nation’s laggards and late-comers in so many ways, there are other departments in which we are way ahead of everyone else, savoring the fast-food treats you will one day savor and debating the issues that you, too, will agonize over before too long. It’s an understandable fantasy for a people who are constantly reminded by the culture at large how lame and uncool they are, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t coming true, for once, in 2014. This week, Kansas may well be the one state that bucks all the national political trends.

Here you have several prominent conservatives, Republicans in one of the most Republican states in the country, running in a year that looks to be a Republican sweep nationwide, and these Kansas Republicans are either behind in the polls or barely keeping pace with their Democratic opponents.

Understanding and Overcoming America's Plutocracy

Jeffrey Sachs

Pity the American people for imagining that they have just elected the new Congress. In a formal way, they of course have. The public did vote. But in a substantive way, it's not true that they have chosen their government.

This was the billionaires' election, billionaires of both parties. And while the Republican and Democratic Party billionaires have some differences, what unites them is much stronger than what divides them, a few exceptions aside. Indeed, many of the richest individual and corporate donors give to both parties. The much-discussed left-right polarization is not polarization at all. The political system is actually relatively united and working very effectively for the richest of the rich.

Brand-name companies' secret Luxembourg tax deals revealed

Landlocked European duchy a “magical fairyland” for global corporations seeking to slash their tax bills

By Leslie Wayne, Kelly Carr, Marina Walker Guevara, Mar Cabra, Michael Hudson

Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and hundreds of other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny Western European duchy, leaked documents show.

These 343 companies appear to have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg and saved billions of dollars in taxes, according to a review of nearly 28,000 pages of confidential documents conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a team of more than 80 journalists from 26 countries.

Coming Up: Repatriation, A HUGE Huge Tax Giveaway To Big Corporations

Dave Johnson

Washington insiders are saying that one deal Republicans and President Obama think they can make is a deal to let corporations off the hook for taxes they owe if they “bring back” the money the multinational corporations have stashed outside of the country. The deal is that this is in exchange for using some of it to fix up our country’s crumbling infrastructure. Here is why this is a bad deal.

A Huge tax Loophole

You have probably heard that big companies use all kinds of schemes to shift profits out of the country to avoid paying taxes. A loophole in our tax laws lets companies dodge (“defer”) taxes on “offshore” profits until they “repatriate” the money, meaning “bring it back into the country.” Of course it would be easy for Congress to just fix this loophole, but this is about really big money, and big money is able to keep loopholes like this from getting fixed.

“It’s about forgetting the past”: Eric Lichtblau exposes how the CIA protected ex-Nazis

The New York Times reporter tells Salon about his new book on one of the U.S.'s greatest moral failures

Elias Isquith

Roughly three-quarters of a century ago, the United States of America threw itself into the giant, history-defining and utterly nightmarish orgy of death, destruction and cruelty that nowadays goes by the name of World War II. And while the U.S. did not enter the abyss because of the Nazis — and in fact only declared war after Hitler did it first — there is little doubt that, ever since VE-Day, the U.S. has been more than happy to take credit as the vanquisher of a regime that most of the developed world still sees as the ultimate embodiment of political evil. (Even if much of that credit is undeserved.)

All of which is to say that when it comes to protecting America’s “brand” as the moral leader of the globe, the protector of liberty and the guardian of human rights, not being in league with the people chiefly responsible for the death of roughly 2.5 percent of the world’s population ranks high on the list. Yet according to reports that first surfaced years ago, but which are now being much more fully substantiated, cooperating with — and even protecting — former Nazis is exactly what the United States once did.

Matt Taibbi: The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn't take it anymore.

"It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'"

Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She's had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

Paul Krugman: Triumph of the Wrong

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet midterms to men of understanding. Or as I put it on the eve of another Republican Party sweep, politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth. Still, it’s not often that a party that is so wrong about so much does as well as Republicans did on Tuesday.

I’ll talk in a bit about some of the reasons that may have happened. But it’s important, first, to point out that the midterm results are no reason to think better of the Republican position on major issues. I suspect that some pundits will shade their analysis to reflect the new balance of power — for example, by once again pretending that Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposals are good-faith attempts to put America’s fiscal house in order, rather than exercises in deception and double-talk. But Republican policy proposals deserve more critical scrutiny, not less, now that the party has more ability to impose its agenda.

Why Innocent People Plead Guilty

Jed S. Rakoff

The criminal justice system in the United States today bears little relationship to what the Founding Fathers contemplated, what the movies and television portray, or what the average American believes.

To the Founding Fathers, the critical element in the system was the jury trial, which served not only as a truth-seeking mechanism and a means of achieving fairness, but also as a shield against tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

Shadow Banking Grows to $75 Trillion Industry, FSB Says

By Ben Moshinsky Oct 30, 2014 12:00 PM ET

The shadow banking industry grew by $5 trillion to about $75 trillion worldwide last year, driven by lenders seeking to skirt regulations and investors searching for yield amid record low interest rates.

The size of the shadow banking system, which includes hedge funds, real estate investment trusts and off-balance sheet investment vehicles, is about 120 percent of global gross domestic product, or a quarter of total financial assets, according to a report published by the Financial Stability Board today.

Shadow banking “tends to take off when strict banking regulations are in place, when real interest rates and yield spreads are low and investors search for higher returns, and when there is a large institutional demand for assets,” according to the report. “The current environment in advanced economies seems conducive to further growth of shadow banking.”

Global Warming Denier Will Head Committee Dealing With Global Warming

How do you deal with a problem you refuse to acknowledge? Ask Jim Inhofe!

By Susie Madrak November 5, 2014 7:00 am

Voting (or not voting) has consequences, and this would be a really bad one. The New Republi on a James Inhofe-led environment committee:

In handing Republicans control of the Senate on Tuesday, Americans effectively voted for the party's hostile plans against President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy.

It's a Rout: Democrats Lose Badly as GOP Extremists Consolidate Power In Congress and Across America

By Steven Rosenfeld

November 4, 2014 | The politics of anti-government rage, fueled by dark money negative ads emerged victorious on Tuesday, as the Republican Party won a U.S. Senate majority and re-elected right-wing governors despite Democrat and progressive organizations' determined efforts to turn out their base.

While there were some bright spots for progressives, such as minimum wage increases passing in Nebraska and Arkansas, and legalizing recreational marijuana in Oregon and in Washington DC, the national political landscape has taken a hard turn to the right. Differing Republican Party factions have been empowered in ways that will resonate well into the 2016 presidential election—from anti-regulatory corporatists taking control in Congress to union-bashing, anti- choice, anti-voting rights governors dominating their states.

John Maynard Keynes Is the Economist the World Needs Now

By Peter Coy, October 30, 2014

Is there a doctor in the house? The global economy is failing to thrive, and its caretakers are fumbling. Greece took its medicine as instructed and was rewarded with an unemployment rate of 26 percent. Portugal obeyed the budget rules; its citizens are looking for jobs in Angola and Mozambique because there are so few at home. Germans are feeling anemic despite their massive trade surplus. In the U.S., the income of a median household adjusted for inflation is 3 percent lower than at the worst point of the 2007-09 recession, according to Sentier Research. Whatever medicine is being doled out isn’t working. Citigroup (C) Chief Economist Willem Buiter recently described the Bank of England’s policy as “an intellectual potpourri of factoids, partial theories, empirical regularities without firm theoretical foundations, hunches, intuitions, and half-developed insights.” And that, he said, is better than things countries are trying elsewhere.

There is a doctor in the house, and his prescriptions are more relevant than ever. True, he’s been dead since 1946. But even in the past tense, the British economist, investor, and civil servant John Maynard Keynes has more to teach us about how to save the global economy than an army of modern Ph.D.s equipped with models of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. The symptoms of the Great Depression that he correctly diagnosed are back, though fortunately on a smaller scale: chronic unemployment, deflation, currency wars, and beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies.

Who’s Tripping up the Designs of the Global Corporatocracy?

by Don Quijones • November 2, 2014

Resistance comes not only from certain quarters of the largely disenfranchised public but also from the least likely national governments.

In Europe, opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Treaty is rising. The primary cause of concern, both among the general public and certain national governments, is the proposed inclusion of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).

As I previously reported, this rather innocuous-sounding provision is what gives the new generation of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements their sharpened claws and canine teeth, by allowing private companies and investors to sue entire nations if they feel that a law lost them money on an investment. As even The Economist now admits, while the original intention of ISDS was to encourage foreign investment by protecting them from discrimination or expropriation, their implementation has proven disastrous:

Multinationals have exploited woolly definitions of expropriation to claim compensation for changes in government policy that happen to have harmed their business…

Paul Krugman: Business versus Economics

TOKYO — The Bank of Japan, this country’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve, has lately been making a big effort to end deflation, which has afflicted Japan’s economy for almost two decades. At first its efforts — which involve printing a lot of money and, even more important, trying to assure investors that it will keep printing money until inflation reaches 2 percent — seemed to be going well. But more recently the economy has lost momentum, and last week the bank announced new, even more aggressive monetary measures.

I am, as you might guess, very much in favor of this move, although I worry that the policy might nonetheless fail thanks to fiscal mistakes. (More about that later.) While the bank did the right thing, however, it did so amid substantial internal dissent. In fact, the new stimulus was approved by only five of the bank board’s nine members, with those closest to business voting against. Which brings me to the subject of this column: the economic wisdom, or lack thereof, of business leaders.

The New Loan Sharks

by Susanne Soederberg

The dependence of the poor on payday loans is neither natural nor inevitable. It is the result of neoliberal policies.

Before World War I, American wage earners who couldn’t make ends meet before their next paycheck relied on an insidious form of loan sharks known as salary lenders. These predators lent money at an illegal rate of interest and without collateral. They often charged annual interest rates in excess of 1,000 percent. State sanctions against salary lenders were not rigorously imposed, and the industry thrived not through the threat of physical violence, but the illusion of a legal obligation.

Fast-forward one hundred years, and salary lending has expanded, but under a different name: payday lending, a wildly lucrative industry that occupies more storefronts than McDonald’s and Starbucks combined. These new loan sharks operate under the same logic as salary lenders, but specifically target more vulnerable populations like welfare recipients, and are armed with new techniques to squeeze as much surplus as possible from debtors.

FCC reportedly close to reclassifying ISPs as common carriers

"Hybrid" approach wouldn't prevent all Internet fast lane deals.

by Jon Brodkin - Oct 31, 2014 4:45 am UTC

The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reportedly close to proposing a "hybrid approach" to network neutrality in which Internet service providers would be partially reclassified as common carriers, letting the commission take a harder stance against Internet fast lane deals.

However, the proposal would not completely outlaw deals in which Web services pay for faster access to consumers.

Study reveals startling decline in European birds

Bird populations across Europe have experienced sharp declines over the past 30 years, with the majority of losses from the most common species

Bird populations across Europe have experienced sharp declines over the past 30 years, with the majority of losses from the most common species, say the University of Exeter, the RSPB and the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) in a new study. However numbers of some less common birds have risen.

The study, published today in the journal Ecology Letters, reveals a decrease of 421 million individual birds over 30 years. Around 90 percent of these losses were from the 36 most common and widespread species, including house sparrows, skylarks, grey partridges and starlings, highlighting the need for greater efforts to halt the continent-wide declines of our most familiar countryside birds.

Corporate Propagandist Richard Berman Secretly Taped Bragging About How He Smears Progressives

By Steven Rosenfeld

October 31, 2014 | One of corporate America’s most notorious political hitmen, Richard Berman, whose ugly campaigns rely on smears and fake front groups that hide sponsors’ identities, has been secretly tape-recorded bragging about his dirty tactics.

“Think of this as an endless war,” told a group of oil and gas industry executives at a June meeting of the Western Energy Alliance in Colorado Springs, as he sought to raise $3 million for a campaign called “Big Green Radicals” aimed at environmentalists and fracking opponents. “You can either win ugly or lose pretty.”

Berman’s remarks were secretly recorded by an attendee who gave them to the Center for Media and Democracy [3]. His speech was filled with the inflammatory rhetoric and bruising tactics he has used for decades in corporate propaganda campaigns to smear, discredit and destroy public-interest causes and groups. As a lengthy profile in AlterNet detailed [4], Berman—labeled Dr. Evil by CBS’s "60 Minutes"—is known for pioneering a toxic mix of front groups, distortion-filled attacks, ridicule and bullying to stoke prejudice and hatred as a means of turning public attention and regulators away from clients’ business practices.

Why Taxation Must Go Global

BERLIN – We are witnessing profound changes in the way that the world economy works. As a result of the growing pace and intensity of globalization and digitization, more and more economic processes have an international dimension. As a consequence, an increasing number of businesses are adapting their structures to domestic and foreign legal systems and taxation laws.

Thanks to technical advances in the digital economy, companies can serve markets without having to be physically present in them. At the same time, sources of income have become more mobile: There is an increasing focus on intangible assets and mobile investment income that can easily be “optimized” from a tax point of view and transferred abroad.

Paul Krugman: Apologiziing to Japan

TOKYO — For almost two decades, Japan has been held up as a cautionary tale, an object lesson on how not to run an advanced economy. After all, the island nation is the rising superpower that stumbled. One day, it seemed, it was on the road to high-tech domination of the world economy; the next it was suffering from seemingly endless stagnation and deflation. And Western economists were
scathing in their criticisms of Japanese policy.

I was one of those critics; Ben Bernanke, who went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, was another. And these days, I often find myself thinking that we ought to apologize.

Police Using Controversial Patriot Act Authority for 'Everyday' Cases: Civil Liberties Group

Created under the guise of fighting terrorism, 'Sneak and Peek' now being used to spy on drug suspects, immigrants, rights group finds

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer

A contentious surveillance provision of the Patriot Act, which allows law enforcement to conduct searches while delaying informing the suspect, is broadly used, but almost never in terrorism cases—despite Justice Department officials arguments to the contrary, according to an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

"Yet again, terrorism concerns appear to be trampling our civil liberties," writes EFF’s Mark Jaycox.

The rights group analyzed federal reports from 2011, 2012, and 2013, released after an unexplained three-year delay, on warrants that were issued under Section 213, known colloquially as "Sneak and Peek."

Number of global billionaires has doubled since the financial crisis

Jamie Merrill, Wednesday 29 October 2014

The number of billionaires has doubled since the start of the financial crisis, according to a major new report from anti-poverty campaigners.

According to Oxfam, the world’s rich are getting richer, leaving hundreds of millions of people facing a life “trapped in poverty” as global “inequality spirals out of control”.

While You Were Getting Worked Up Over Oil Prices, This Just Happened to Solar

By Tom Randall

Every time fossil fuels get cheaper, people lose interest in solar deployment. That may be about to change.

After years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and variable subsidies, solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states -- in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this week. That’s assuming the U.S. maintains its 30 percent tax credit on system costs, which is set to expire that same year.

How Dark Money Is Taking Over Judicial Elections

By AJ Vicens

Most people don't think about judicial elections until they find themselves staring at a group of unfamiliar names on the ballot. But judges are selected by voters in 39 states, whether in an initial election or a retention election after being appointed. The explainer below details how special-interest money has increasingly flooded the system over the last several decades—including the first ever set of data on campaign money in lower court races.

Living Wages, Rarity for U.S. Fast-Food Workers, Served Up in Denmark

By LIZ ALDERMAN and STEVEN GREENHOUSE, OCT. 27, 2014

COPENHAGEN — On a recent afternoon, Hampus Elofsson ended his 40-hour workweek at a Burger King and prepared for a movie and beer with friends. He had paid his rent and all his bills, stashed away some savings, yet still had money for nights out.

That is because he earns the equivalent of $20 an hour — the base wage for fast-food workers throughout Denmark and two and a half times what many fast-food workers earn in the United States.

“You can make a decent living here working in fast food,” said Mr. Elofsson, 24. “You don’t have to struggle to get by.”

American Exceptionalism

By Charles P. Pierce on October 28, 2014

In Sunday's New York Times, there was a fascinating story about fast-food workers, both here and in Denmark. The story is interesting in that it pretty much blows a hole below the water line of every precept of conservative economics promulgated here since Ronald Reagan turned the federal budget process stupid in 1981. Quite simply, if you, the average Dane named Hampus, wants to make a career out of working at Burger King, you can do it. Everybody needs to have a dream.

On a recent afternoon, Hampus Elofsson ended his 40-hour workweek at a Burger King and prepared for a movie and beer with friends. He had paid his rent and all his bills, stashed away some savings, yet still had money for nights out. That is because he earns the equivalent of $20 an hour - the base wage for fast-food workers throughout Denmark and two and a half times what many fast-food workers earn in the United States. "You can make a decent living here working in fast food," said Mr. Elofsson, 24. "You don't have to struggle to get by."

Naturally, the example provided by Denmark cannot apply because America, that's why.

How the Washington Press Turned Bad

October 28, 2014

Exclusive: There was a time when the Washington press corps prided itself on holding the powerful accountable – Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Vietnam War – but those days are long gone, replaced by a malleable media that puts its cozy relations with insiders ahead of the public interest, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Following the death last week of legendary Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee at age 93, there have been many warm remembrances of his tough-guy style as he sought “holy shit stories,” journalism that was worthy of the old-fashioned demand, “stop the presses.”

Many of the fond recollections surely are selective, but there was some truth to Bradlee’s “front page” approach to inspiring a staff to push the envelope in pursuit of difficult stories – at least during the Watergate scandal when he backed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the face of White House hostility. How different that was from Bradlee’s later years and the work of his successors at the Washington Post!

Thomas Frank: “We are such losers”

Liberals yearn to believe in post-ideological blank slates -- and get disappointed every time. Will we ever learn?

That we are living through an endless repeat of the 1970s is becoming more apparent all the time. Nostalgia and retro culture burn as brightly today as they did in the era of “Happy Days” and “American Graffiti,” while distrust and suspicion of government hover at near-Watergate levels. Disaster dreams are everywhere, just as they were in the days of “The Towering Inferno” and Three Mile Island. The culture wars, the 1970s’ No. 1 gift to American politics, still drag on and on, while the New Right, the decade’s other great political invention, effortlessly rejuvenates itself. Jerry Brown is governor of California again. The Kansas City Royals are a good team.

No reminiscence of that decade of malaise would be complete without mentioning Jimmy Carter, the president who—fairly or not—will be forever associated with national drift and decline and all the other horrors that were eventually swept away by the Reagan magisterium. Indeed, comparing the hapless Carter to whoever currently leads the Democratic Party remains a powerful shibboleth for American conservatives, and in 2011 and 2012 Republicans indulged in this favorite simile without hesitation.

Economists Say We Should Tax The Rich At 90 Percent

Ben Walsh

America has been doing income taxes wrong for more than 50 years.

All Americans, including the rich, would be better off if top tax rates went back to Eisenhower-era levels when the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent, according to a new working paper by Fabian Kindermann from the University of Bonn and Dirk Krueger from the University of Pennsylvania.

The top tax rate that makes all citizens, including the highest 1 percent of earners, the best off is “somewhere between 85 and 90 percent,” Krueger told The Huffington Post. Currently, the top rate of 39.6 percent is paid on income above $406,750 for individuals and $457,600 for couples.

One-Third of Top Websites Restrict Customers’ Right to Sue

Jeremy B. Merrill

Walk into the grocery store, and you can sue if a clumsy clerk drops a box on your head. But what happens if a website leaks your personal data? Or if an online retailer misleads you about the cost of a purchase? Depending on the site you’re visiting, your legal rights are murkier.

That’s because, tucked into the dense legalese of their terms-of-service rules, many of the Internet’s most popular sites have inserted language that forbids users from suing if something goes wrong, an analysis by The Upshot has found. In some cases, you don’t even have to pretend to read a contract and click an “I accept” box for the restrictions to kick in.

The Stealth Campaign to Buy US Courts

Sunday, 26 October 2014 09:12
By Zoë Carpenter, The Nation | Report

Cole County, Missouri, seems an unlikely place for a national Republican group to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s a small county of 75,000, and its leadership is solidly red, with few exceptions. One of those exceptions is Pat Joyce, a Democrat who’s held her seat on the country circuit court for two decades. Until a few weeks ago, with $17,000 on hand and her opponent nearly $13,000 in debt, her chances of serving another term seemed good.

That financial advantage vanished abruptly in mid-October when the Republican State Leadership Committee stepped in with $200,000 to save Republican Brian Stumpe. Half of that money went directly to his campaign. The rest went to the RSLC’s local political action committee, which ran a tie-dye hued ad that accused Joyce of being a “groovy” ally of “radical environmentalists.”

Thomas Frank: Paul Krugman's Sloppy Wet Kiss

Krugman's ode to Obama in Rolling Stone seems like the work of someone who hasn't read Krugman the last six years

Paul Krugman is easily the best newspaper columnist at work today; for years, he has been the only American columnist who matters. His relentless, one-man war on austerity, I believe, should have earned him a second Nobel Prize.

As Salon readers know, Krugman has for years been willing to criticize the Obama administration. However, in a much-discussed essay the economist published in Rolling Stone last week, he reverses himself and declares that Obama has won him over; that the president is “one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history.”

Past Climate Change Was Caused by the Ocean, Not Just the Atmosphere, New Rutgers Study Finds

The study published in Science provides a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of climate change today

 

Thursday, October 23, 2014

 

Most of the concerns about climate change have focused on the amount of greenhouse gases that have been released into the atmosphere.

  But in a new study published in Science, a group of Rutgers researchers have found that circulation of the ocean plays an equally important role in regulating the earth’s climate.
 

William K. Black: Jamie Dimon: U.S. Must Create a “Safe Harbor” Where JPM’s Corruption Is Not “Punished”

I want to give a hat tip to a recent Wall Street Journal article that brought to my attention two damning admissions by JPMorgan’s (JPM) CEO and Chairman of the Board, Jamie Dimon.  The irony is that Dimon was lulled into making these admissions because he was basking in the perfect calm created by the confluence of Sorkin’s and CNBC’s storied sycophancy at the one place on earth where elite bankers feel most loved, honored, and protected – the annual meeting of the ultra-wealthy in Davos, Switzerland.  Sorkin was the only interviewer, so Dimon faced no risk of tough questions.  It may well have been this perfect setting that caused Dimon to let slip the mask and reveal two illustrative sins of elite bankers reported in the WSJ article.

Off-grid German village banks on wind, sun, pig manure

FELDHEIM (GERMANY) (AFP) - If Germany has taken a pioneering though risky role in shifting to renewable energy, then the tiny village of Feldheim -- population 150 -- is at its vanguard.

The hamlet near Berlin is Germany's first to have left the national grid and switched to 100 percent local, alternative energy, swearing off fossil fuels and nuclear power decades before the rest of the country plans to near the same goal.

Electricity now comes from a wind park towering over its gently rolling fields and reaches homes through Feldheim's own mini smart grid.

Paul Krugman: Ideology and Investment

America used to be a country that built for the future. Sometimes the government built directly: Public projects, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, provided the backbone for economic growth. Sometimes it provided incentives to the private sector, like land grants to spur railroad construction. Either way, there was broad support for spending that would make us richer.

But nowadays we simply won’t invest, even when the need is obvious and the timing couldn’t be better. And don’t tell me that the problem is “political dysfunction” or some other weasel phrase that diffuses the blame. Our inability to invest doesn’t reflect something wrong with “Washington”; it reflects the destructive ideology that has taken over the Republican Party.

Frank Rich on the National Circus: Ebola Panic Is Straight From the Twilight Zone

In the two weeks since the death of Thomas Eric Duncan, Ebola hysteria has taken hold in some corners of the U.S., with school closures, paid leaves, and cruise ship quarantines enacted to protect the populace from dozens of people who did not actually have the disease. So far, only two people we know of have been infected by Ebola on U.S. soil (both were nurses who treated Duncan), public health officials have offered clear and consistent explanations of the minimal risks of contracting the disease, and even Fox News — or, at least, Fox News anchor Shep Smith — has tried to quell the panic. Why are Americans still so worked up about this?

Of all the incidents of runaway Ebola hysteria in America, the one that most grabbed me was reported by the Times on Sunday: A man in Payson, Arizona, decided to submit to a self-imposed quarantine and remain in his house for no other reason than he had been in Liberia as a missionary on a church trip. His good deed did not go unpunished: After taking that extra (and gratuitous) precaution, he found himself the victim of a “lynch-mob mentality” manifested by at least one anonymous threat to burn down his house. The incident made me think of that classic 1960 Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which paranoid suburban neighbors, gripped by fear of an invasion from outer space, do the monsters’ work for them by destroying their community and each other in mob violence.

Dead babies near oil drilling sites raise questions for researchers

By Nancy Lofholm
The Denver Post
Posted: 10/26/2014 12:01:00 AM MDT
Updated: 10/28/2014 04:54:57 PM MDT

VERNAL, Utah — The smartphone-sized grave marker is nearly hidden in the grass at Rock Point Cemetery. The name printed on plastic-coated paper — Beau Murphy — has been worn away. Only the span of his life remains.

"June 18, 2013 - June 18, 2013"

For some reason, one that is not known and may never be, Beau and a dozen other infants died in this oil-booming basin last year. Was this spike a fluke? Bad luck? Or were these babies victims of air pollution fed by the nearly 12,000 oil and gas wells in one of the most energy-rich areas in the country?

Some scientists whose research focuses on the effect of certain drilling-related chemicals on fetal development believe there could be a link.

Feds Kill Funds for Most Successful Senior Housing Project

By Andre Shashaty

October 27, 2014 | When construction started in mid-October on Heritage Park Senior Village in Taylor, Michigan, it marked the end of 55 years of effort by the federal government to make sure low-income elders can live out their years in decent housing.

The development getting underway 18 miles southwest of downtown Detroit is one of the very last to be constructed under a federal housing program that dates back to 1959.

The Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly Program produced 20,000 housing units per year at its peak in the 1970s. It provided public housing agencies and nonprofit groups with grants that covered the cost to build decent rental housing, as well as subsidies for people who were too poor to pay market-rate rents for comparable housing.

Where the Tea Party Rules

Lima, Ohio, has been struggling for decades – and the GOP’s radical policies are making it even worse

By Janet Reitman | October 14, 2014

Dewey Chaffins was 19 years old when he left Appalachia for northwestern Ohio in 1958. The youngest of 10, he'd grown up in Garrett, Kentucky, a hardscrabble coal town where his family had lived and mined for generations. During the 1950s, when the coal industry in eastern Kentucky fell into a steep decline, scores of young men packed up all they had and headed north toward the industrial Midwest. Chaffins found opportunity in the city of Lima, a manufacturing boomtown where there were so many factories, as one retired autoworker recently told me, ''you could walk into a place, get a job without even a high school diploma, and if you didn't like it, you could quit, walk across the street and have another job that afternoon.'' By the time Dewey and his 18-year-old wife, Linda, settled in Lima, seven of his siblings, their spouses and some of their in-laws were living in and around the city, where they quickly found work in the automotive plants or tire factories or steel mills, joined the UAW or other unions, and set about raising their children in a manner none of them had ever dreamed possible.

IRS Whistleblowers: Agency Executives Behind Multibillion-Dollar Corporate Tax Giveaways

Thursday, 23 October 2014 00:00  
By Nafeez Ahmed, Truthout | Report 

A veteran Internal Revenue Service attorney demands a congressional audit of the IRS to investigate the agency's alleged role in allowing US corporations to illegally avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes even as it cracks down on individuals and small businesses.

A 10-year veteran Internal Revenue Service (IRS) attorney has demanded a congressional audit of the IRS to investigate the agency's alleged role in allowing US corporations to illegally avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes even as it cracks down on individuals and small businesses.

In a letter to Treasury secretary Jacob Lew, IRS commissioner John A. Koskinen and IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, Jane J. Kim, an attorney in the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel in New York, accused IRS executives of "deliberately" facilitating multibillion-dollar tax giveaways. The letter, dated October 19, will add further pressure on the agency, which is under fire for allegedly targeting conservative and Tea Party groups.

Paul Krugman: Plutocrats Against Democracy

It’s always good when leaders tell the truth, especially if that wasn’t their intention. So we should be grateful to Leung Chun-ying, the Beijing-backed leader of Hong Kong, for blurting out the real reason pro-democracy demonstrators can’t get what they want: With open voting, “You would be talking
to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month. Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies” — policies, presumably, that would make the rich less rich and provide more aid to those with lower incomes.

So Mr. Leung is worried about the 50 percent of Hong Kong’s population that, he believes, would vote for bad policies because they don’t make enough money. This may sound like the 47 percent of Americans who Mitt Romney said would vote against him because they don’t pay income taxes and, therefore, don’t take responsibility for themselves, or the 60 percent that Representative Paul Ryan argued pose a danger because they are “takers,” getting more from the government than they pay in. Indeed, these are all basically the same thing.

Dark Money and Our Looming Oligarchy

Michael Tomasky 

Hundreds of millions of untraceable donations are flowing to candidates, and at some point soon untraceable ‘dark money’ will likely overtake the system.

 

There is something obscene in looking at the raw numbers, is there not? More than $500 million being spent on House races, and north of $300 million on Senate contests. A half-billion dollars! In the House! Where, as of yesterday, the Cook Political Report was counting a mere 17 contests as toss-ups, with 19 others as vaguely competitive. [This paragraph originally said $300 billion, which was incorrect.]


But the gross (double entendre intended) amounts aren’t the money story of this campaign. The money story of this campaign is that undisclosed money is starting to overtake the system and overtake our politics, and that at the heart of this corruption sits a lie peddled to us by the Supreme Court when it handed down the Citizens United decision. Whether it did so naively or cynically, I honestly do not know. But let’s just say that if it was naïve, it was almost too naïve to believe, Steve.

David Bromwich, American Exceptionalism and Its Discontents

[...]

The Importance of Being Exceptional
From Ancient Greece to Twenty-First-Century America
By David Bromwich
The origins of the phrase “American exceptionalism” are not especially obscure. The French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, observing this country in the 1830s, said that Americans seemed exceptional in valuing practical attainments almost to the exclusion of the arts and sciences. The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, on hearing a report by the American Communist Party that workers in the United States in 1929 were not ready for revolution, denounced “the heresy of American exceptionalism.” In 1996, the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset took those hints from Tocqueville and Stalin and added some of his own to produce his book American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. The virtues of American society, for Lipset -- our individualism, hostility to state action, and propensity for ad hoc problem-solving -- themselves stood in the way of a lasting and prudent consensus in the conduct of American politics.

Now Congressional Republicans Are Digging Through Scientists' Grant Proposals

—By Tim McDonnell | Fri Oct. 17, 2014 5:22 PM EDT

When scientists across the country need money for research projects, one place they often turn is the National Science Foundation. The NSF is an independent federal agency with an annual budget of about $7 billion, which it doles out to fund about a quarter of all federally supported science research.

Of course, the agency doesn't just give money away to anyone who asks. Proposals have to survive a rigorous review process that includes close scrutiny by a panel of top scientists in the relevant field. Competition is fierce: Of the 49,000 proposals submitted in 2013, only a fifth were ultimately funded. So as far as most scientists are concerned, an NSF grant is about the highest mark of scientific legitimacy a research project can get.

Now Congressional Republicans Are Digging Through Scientists' Grant Proposals

—By Tim McDonnell | Fri Oct. 17, 2014 5:22 PM EDT

When scientists across the country need money for research projects, one place they often turn is the National Science Foundation. The NSF is an independent federal agency with an annual budget of about $7 billion, which it doles out to fund about a quarter of all federally supported science research.

Of course, the agency doesn't just give money away to anyone who asks. Proposals have to survive a rigorous review process that includes close scrutiny by a panel of top scientists in the relevant field. Competition is fierce: Of the 49,000 proposals submitted in 2013, only a fifth were ultimately funded. So as far as most scientists are concerned, an NSF grant is about the highest mark of scientific legitimacy a research project can get.

States Ease Interest Rate Laws That Protected Poor Borrowers

By Michael Corkery, October 21, 2014 8:55 pm

Lenders have come under fire in Washington in recent years. Yet one corner of the financial industry — lending to people with poor credit scores — has found sympathetic audiences in many state capitals.

Over the last two years, lawmakers in at least eight states have voted to increase the fees or the interest rates that lenders can charge on certain personal loans used by millions of borrowers with subpar credit.

Shocking New Report: Superrich Have Grabbed Half the World's Assets

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

October 21, 2014  |  According to a new report, the richest one percent have got their mitts on almost half the world's assets. Think that’s the end of the story? Think again. This is only the beginning.

The “Global Annual Wealth Report [3],” freshly released by investment giant Credit Suisse, analyzes the shocking trend of growing wealth inequality around the world. What the researchers find is that global wealth has increased every year since 2008, and that personal wealth seems to be rising at the fastest rate ever recorded, much of it driven by strong equity markets. But the benefits of this growth have largely been channeled to those who are already affluent. While the restaurant workers in America struggled to achieve wages of $10 an hour for their labor, those invested in equities saw their wealth soar without lifting a finger. So it goes around the world.

Major breakthrough could help detoxify pollutants

Scientists at The University of Manchester hope a major breakthrough could lead to more effective methods for detoxifying dangerous pollutants like PCBs and dioxins. The result is a culmination of 15 years of research and has been published in Nature. It details how certain organisms manage to lower the toxicity of pollutants.

The team at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology were investigating how some natural organisms manage to lower the level of toxicity and shorten the life span of several notorious pollutants.

Vote all you want. The secret government won't change.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon

By Jordan Michael Smith | October 19, 2014

The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Paul Krugman: Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not O.K.

Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America.

O.K., I know that was kind of abrupt. But I wanted to get the central point out there right away, because discussions of Amazon tend, all too often, to get lost in side issues.

For example, critics of the company sometimes portray it as a monster about to take over the whole economy. Such claims are over the top — Amazon doesn’t dominate overall online sales, let alone retailing as a whole, and probably never will. But so what? Amazon is still playing a troubling role.

US Treasury and Transportation Departments Hold a Privatization Party

Thursday, 16 October 2014 10:05
By Ellen Dannin, Truthout | News Analysis

The infrastructure investment summit held last month by the Departments of the Treasury and Transportation appears likely to provide a boost to the privatization industry, ironically, just as privatized infrastructure is filing for bankruptcy.

Chances are, whatever you were doing on September 9, 2014, (births and deaths excluded) will not affect your life as much as that summit, "Expanding Our Nation's Infrastructure Through Innovative Financing," did.

Living through the era of Jamie Dimon's "creative" financing might rightly make people suspicious of "innovation." Indeed, rational people might want to return to the tried and true processes and relationships that, for decades, have provided our roads, bridges and other transportation infrastructure instead of the "innovations" that now privatize the roads that were the poster children of privatization into bankruptcy, through a process that highway expert Randy Salzman recently exposed. That complex process uses the tax and bankruptcy codes and assumptions that private is always better than public to place as much as 97 percent of the costs on the public.

Paul Krugman: What Markets Will

In the Middle Ages, the call for a crusade to conquer the Holy Land was met with cries of “Deus vult!” — God wills it. But did the crusaders really know what God wanted? Given how the venture turned out, apparently not.

Now, that was a long time ago, and, in the areas I write about, invocations of God’s presumed will are rare. You do, however, see a lot of policy crusades, and these are often justified with implicit cries of “Mercatus vult!” — the market wills it. But do those invokingthe will of the market really know what markets want? Again, apparently not.

America's Wealthiest Are Just Too Damn Rich to Have a Functioning Society

By Sam Pizzigati

October 16, 2014  |  Imagine yourself part of the typical American family. Your household would have, the Federal Reserve reported [3] in September, a net worth of $81,200.

 

That’s not a whole lot of money. But half of America’s households would actually have less wealth than you do.

Now imagine that your net worth suddenly quadrupled, to about $325,000. That sum would place you within the ranks of America’s most affluent 20 percent of income earners. You would be “typical” no more. On the other hand, you still wouldn’t be rich, or even close to possessing a grand fortune.

Following the Charter Dollars

This cogent analysis is cross posted from the website of the Louisiana School Boards Association. Don Whittinghill has been a LSBA consultant since 2000, responsible for production of the quarterly journal, The Louisiana Boardmember, for editorial content of the LSBA web site, and is a former reporter for the Times-Picayune.

Who benefits financially from the pro-market charter school movement?

The charter school reform emerged in part out of a progressive effort to promote innovation that could be used to improve all public schools, and to open up discus­sion on the relationship between school and community, particularly in urban areas. It was a movement initiated by Ray Budde, a professor at the University of Massachusetts and envisioned as a school that would gain freedom to try different methods of teaching that could be transferred to all public schools.

However, a funny thing happened along the way. Free-market zealots (with riches) realized that over $600 billion is spent in the U.S. on public schools. A whole new frontier leading to stable profits was recognized.

A Trade Storm Is Brewing 

At the beginning of the year, we warned you about the upcoming trade tsunami. Well hold on to your hats everyone, because another “trade” storm is heading our way.

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators are meeting in Australia this month and are aiming to finish the massive 12-country “trade” agreement.

Despite mounting evidence that the TPP should not be completed — including the leak of another part of the top-secret text earlier this week — President Barack Obama wants the TPP done by November 11. That is when he will be meeting with other TPP-country heads of state in China at the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference.

Humble spud poised to launch a world food revolution

Dutch team is pioneering development of crops fed by sea water

Tracy McVeigh

In a small army field-hut Dr Arjen de Vos shows off his irrigation machine with pride. Pipes lead out to several acres of muddy field, where only a few stragglers from the autumn harvest of potatoes, salads, carrots and onions are left. The tubes are lined with copper to stop corrosion because – in a move that defies everything we think we know about farming – de Vos is watering his plants with diluted sea water.

Last week the project beat 560 competitors from 90 countries to win the prestigious USAid grand challenge award for its salt-tolerant potato. “It’s a game changer,” said de Vos. “We don’t see salination as a problem, we see it as an opportunity.”

The Shell Game of Contingent Employment

By Darlene Lombos, Sarah Leberstein, and Elvis Mendez, on September 1, 2014

When subcontractors, freelancers, and independent contractors get hurt or abused on the job, these workers are finding it harder to hold employers accountable. This is no accident—it’s a direct result of a neoliberal labor agenda.

In 2011, Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc., a corporate partner of the Marriott hotel chain, used a general contractor that it had hired to renovate guest rooms at the Host-owned Copley Marriott in Boston. A convoluted web of subcontractors emerged, as the general contractor subcontracted the work to several other companies, and some of that subcontracted work was then further subcontracted, with more than a dozen firms working on the same project.

A state-led, multi-agency investigation found that 15 contractors on the project committed a wide array of labor law violations. Workers from a church-sponsored rehabilitation project in Philadelphia were paid only four dollars an hour—just half the state minimum wage—and no overtime, though they were required to work 12-hour days and more than 60 hours per week. All told, contractors failed to report or pay taxes on more than $1 million in wages, and at least one of them failed to maintain workers’ compensation insurance policies for the hazardous work. They misclassified many of the workers as independent contractors, thus evading tens of thousands of dollars more in unemployment insurance taxes, workers compensation premiums, and employer-side taxes, while stripping workers of basic workplace rights.

Breaking Up Fortunes

by Nick Tabor

The rich have too much. Hiking the estate tax would be a powerful tool in a broader anti-inequality campaign.

Forbes recently released the latest installment of its “Where Not to Die” guide, an annual public service to geriatric one-percenters. The magazine knows that millionaires, as maximizers of rational utility, commonly decide where to spend their golden years based on projections of how much of their money the government will seize once they’re no longer around to use it themselves. This year’s news is good for the millionaires and bad for everyone else.

The guide helpfully includes a map that marks in bold colors all the oppressive states that impose an estate or inheritance tax, drawing particular attention to Maryland and New Jersey, which have both kinds. Eight states have decided to reduce or eliminate these taxes in the near future, and a similar proposal is now gaining ground in New Jersey, as the governor scrambles to impress tea partiers ahead of a possible presidential bid. Tennessee will wipe out its estate tax by 2016; five other states have done the same since 2010.

“I’m not going away”: James Risen unloads to Salon about his government foes

In historic legal fight to protect sources, embattled reporter James Risen tells Salon how he plans to fight back

Elias Isquith

James Risen, the New York Times reporter responsible in part for the 2005 Times bombshell on the Bush administration’s use of warrantless surveillance — which is widely seen as one of the seminal pieces of journalism of its era — has plenty of experience when it comes to battling the federal government. Not only in his celebrated investigative reports but, perhaps more prominently, in the courts, where for years he’s held his ground in refusing government demands that he reveal a confidential source.

For Risen, in other words, fighting the post-9/11 national security state is a full-time job, albeit one for which he never truly applied. But while he may be at a profound disadvantage when it comes to defending himself (and, some would say, his profession) in our federal courts, “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” his new exposé of the malfeasance and waste behind the war on terror, offers ample evidence that he’s still a Pulitzer Prize winner when it comes to combat on the page. Salon spoke with Risen this week to discuss his book, seeing counterterrorism from a broader perspective and how much history will blame President Obama for the war on terror and the damage it’s done. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

A Red State Privatization Horror Story

Wednesday, 15 October 2014 15:47
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

Conservatives and libertarians have been saying for a long time that if we just get rid of government and replace it with the private sector, everything will run a whole lot better.

The idea is that since the main goal of all private corporations is to make money, they’ll be much more willing than the government is to cut costs and eliminate waste.

The Neocons — Masters of Chaos

October 17, 2014

Exclusive: America’s neoconservatives, by stirring up trouble in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, are creating risks for the world’s economy that are surfacing now in the turbulent stock markets, threatening another global recession, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

If you’re nervously watching the stock market gyrations and worrying about your declining portfolio or pension fund, part of the blame should go to America’s neocons who continue to be masters of chaos, endangering the world’s economy by instigating geopolitical confrontations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Of course, there are other factors pushing Europe’s economy to the brink of a triple-dip recession and threatening to stop America’s fragile recovery, too. But the neocons’ “regime change” strategies, which have unleashed violence and confrontations across Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and most recently Ukraine, have added to the economic uncertainty.