10 Ways America Has Come to Resemble a Banana Republic

By Alex Henderson

September 5, 2013  |  In the post-New Deal America of the 1950s and '60s, the idea of the United States becoming a banana republic would have seemed absurd to most Americans. Problems and all, the U.S. had a lot going for it: a robust middle-class, an abundance of jobs that paid a living wage, a strong manufacturing base, a heavily unionized work force, and upward mobility for both white-collar workers with college degrees and blue-collar workers who attended trade school. To a large degree, the nation worked well for cardiologists, accountants, attorneys and computer programmers as well as electricians, machinists, plumbers and construction workers.

 

In contrast, developing countries that were considered banana republics—the Dominican Republic under the brutal Rafael Trujillo regime, Nicaragua under the Somoza dynasty—lacked upward mobility for most of the population and were plagued by blatant income equality, a corrupt alliance of government and corporate interests, rampant human rights abuses, police corruption and extensive use of torture on political dissidents.

Failed Policy — The 401(k) Shrinks In A Growing Economy

September 5th, 2013 12:04 pm 
David Cay Johnston

Disturbing new evidence that government policies are propelling us toward a poorer future turns up in a first-ever government examination of retirement savings plans like 401(k)s.

The report, from the Internal Revenue Service, shows that even though the economy is improving, the number of workers saving out of their paychecks for old age is shrinking. So is the amount they save, down 6 percent in real terms from 2008 to 2010.

Wolf Richter – Bonds Bleed: Largest Bubble In History Unwinds, But The “Great Rotation” Into Stocks Is Deceptive Wall Street Hype

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Cross posted from Testosterone Pit.

The bond-fund massacre has been spectacular. Prime example: antsy investors yanked $7.7 billion in August out of the largest bond fund in the world, Pimco’s Total Return Fund. In July, they’d yanked out $7.5 billion, in June a record $14.5 billion. From May 1 through August 31, the fund’s assets shriveled 14%, from $292 billion to $251 billion; $26 billion from outflows and $15 billion from the shrinking value of the bonds. The fund lost 5.5% during that period.

By riding up the greatest bond bubble in the history of mankind, the fund has become known as a place where investors who don’t mind smaller returns but shudder at the thought of losing some of their principal could park their money without having to worry about it – but now, they’re worrying about it.

Flow Chart Exposes Common Core's Myriad Corporate Connections

Friday, 06 September 2013 00:00
By Candice Bernd, Truthout | Report

U.S. education reform isn't so much a "Race to the Top," because no matter which schools climb to the top of the ladder first, corporations always win.

Morna McDermott mapped the Common Core State Standard Initiative's corporate connections in a new flow chart, which reveals how corporations and organizations that are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have funded and perpetuated Common Core standards throughout the states.

Paul Krugman: Years of Tragic Waste

In a few days, we’ll reach the fifth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers — the moment when
a recession, which was bad enough, turned into something much scarier. Suddenly, we were looking at the real possibility of economic catastrophe.

And the catastrophe came.

Wait, you say, what catastrophe? Weren’t people warning about a second Great Depression? And that didn’t happen, did it? Yes, they were, and no, it didn’t — although the Greeks, the Spaniards, and others might not agree about that second point. The important thing, however, is to realize that there are degrees of disaster, that you can have an immense failure of economic policy that falls short of producing total collapse. And the failure of policy these past five years has, in fact, been immense.

Tobacco ‘Smoking Gun’ Shows Real TPP Agenda

Dave Johnson

I am sounding the alarm. Right now governments and the giant multinational corporations are engaged in writing a treaty that would overrule national laws that try to rein in what these giant corporations can do to us. This treaty will allow corporations to sue governments for “lost profits” if governments try to enforce environmental, health, labor and other laws. One “smoking gun” example that shows us what this treaty is about is an argument over whether to “carve out” special treatment for tobacco because it is so harmful, or give it the same protections that other corporations and their products are due to receive.

The Next Abortion Case Is Here

By Linda Greenhouse

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, author of the 5-to-4 opinion in June that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, may well be a hero to the gay rights community, and deservedly so. But he’s also the author of the 5-to-4 opinion that upheld the federal ban on so-called partial birth abortion back in 2007, and abortion-rights advocates have viewed with something close to dread the prospect that he could play a similarly decisive role in the Supreme Court’s next abortion case.

That case has arrived.

The Ted Cruz Effect: How One Man Destabilized the Government

By Brian Beutler

September 4, 2013  |  Late in August, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, traveled to a private residence in Dublin, N.H., to headline a fundraiser for the state Republican Party. Cruz’s spiel lasted about an hour, and was packed with the mix of straw men and inflammatory nonsense we’ve come to expect out of the junior senator from Texas.

But before he really got into it, he took a moment to say a few nice words about his GOP colleague from the state, who was also in attendance.

“Kelly Ayotte is a rock star,” Cruz said. “Let me tell you, your senator is as tough as granite. There is no stronger advocate of the men and women in our military in the U.S. Senate than is Kelly Ayotte, and there is no one tougher going to get the truth about what happened in Benghazi than Kelly Ayotte.”

Naomi Klein: Why Big Green Groups Can Be More Damaging Than Right-Wing Climate Deniers

By Jason Mark

September 5, 2013 | Canadian author Naomi Klein is so well known for her blade-sharp commentary that it’s easy to forget that she is, above all, a first-rate reporter. I got a glimpse into her priorities as I was working on this interview. Klein told me she was worried that some of the things she had said would make it hard for her to land an interview with a president of the one of the Big Green groups (read below and you’ll see why). She was more interested in nabbing the story than being the story; her reporting trumped any opinion-making.

Such focus is a hallmark of Klein’s career. She doesn’t do much of the chattering class’s news cycle blathering. She works steadily, carefully, quietly. It can be surprising to remember that Klein’s immense global influence rests on a relatively small body of work; she has published three books, one of which is an anthology of magazine pieces.

What's Killing Poor White Women?

Monica Potts
September 3, 2013

For most Americans, life expectancy continues to rise—but not for uneducated white women. They have lost five years, and no one knows why.

n the night of May 23, 2012, which turned out to be the last of her life, Crystal Wilson baby-sat her infant granddaughter, Kelly. It was how she would have preferred to spend every night. Crystal had joined Facebook the previous year, and the picture of her daughter cradling the newborn in the hospital bed substituted for a picture of herself. Crystal’s entire wall was a catalog of visits from her nieces, nephews, cousins’ kids, and, more recently, the days she baby-sat Kelly. She was a mother hen, people said of Crystal. She’d wanted a house full of children, but she’d only had one.

The picture the family chose for her obituary shows Crystal and her husband holding the infant. Crystal leans in from the side, with dark, curly hair, an unsmiling round face, and black eyebrows knit together. She was 38 and bore an unhealthy heft, more than 200 pounds. Crystal had been to the doctor, who told her she was overweight and diabetic. She was waiting to get medicine, but few in her family knew it, and no one thought she was near death.

A Hedge-Fund Billionare From Texas is Waging War On California Pensions

By Gary Cohn

September 3, 2013 | Benjamin Gamboa doesn’t know John Arnold, but they are linked by a shared concern over the fate of public-employee pensions in California.

“I’m proud to have a pension,” the 30-year-old Gamboa says. “I believe every American should have a pension.”

The two men live in very different worlds. Gamboa is a research analyst at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California. Arnold is a hedge-fund billionaire from Houston, Texas.
There’s another difference between them: Arnold recently had a representative present at a secret “pension summit” held at a Sacramento hotel, where strategies to limit public employee retirement benefits were discussed; Gamboa, a union member, did not – representatives of labor were specifically not invited.

Georgia governor gets paid through secret PAC to obstruct Obamacare

By David Ferguson
Tuesday, September 3, 2013 10:01 EDT

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R)’s family and business partner have been receiving payments from a secret Political Action Committee called Real PAC. Half a million dollars of the money donated to the PAC has come from corporate health care interests which — like the governor and Georgia state Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens — oppose the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as “Obamacare.”

According to investigative reporter Jim Walls of Atlanta Unfiltered, the PAC hasn’t filed taxes or the required financial disclosures in two years, and the information it did file for 2011 was incorrect.

Paul Krugman: Love for Labor Lost

It wasn’t always about the hot dogs. Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor.

Here’s how it happened: In 1894 Pullman workers, facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike — and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically honoring the nation’s workers.

Catch up on the Syria issue with the two following articles from the Atlantic:

Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 1: Stevenson and Lofgren

"Attacking Syria is simply not in the U.S. national interest; and absent an objective assessment from a neutral inspection team, and absent a UN resolution, the U.S. has no legitimate authority under any law or treaty to act unilaterally. Period."

James Fallows, Sep 2 2013, 9:15 AM ET

Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2: William Polk 

James Fallows, Sep 2 2013, 4:55 PM ET

Many times I've mentioned the foreign-policy assessments of William R. Polk [... ] who first wrote for the Atlantic (about Iraq) during Dwight Eisenhower's administration, back in 1958, and served on the State Department's Policy Planning staff during the Kennedy years. He now has sent in a detailed analysis about Syria.

Gaius Publius: Deep State — Is the Upper Echelon of the Intelligence Community Running America?

Yves here. As you may have noticed, I’m taking a bit of a break (I’m currently in Maine). I had hoped that this would be a quiet period, but the ugly Syrian war-mongering has no respect for calendars (particularly since Obama might hope that acting during a Congressional recess would reduce their ability to squawk). Nevertheless, it is a welcome surprise to see the Administration’s plan to rush into Syria with the British and French go a bit pear-shaped, thanks to the UK parliament showing an unexpected bit of spine. It seems that after Iraq, the public and legislatures aren’t accepting WMD scare stories on executive say-sos. Quelle surprise!

The Last Chance to Stop the NDAA

By Chris Hedges, TruthDig | Report

I and my fellow plaintiffs have begun the third and final round of our battle to get the courts to strike down a section of theNational Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) that permits the military to seize U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities. Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran, the lawyers who with me in January 2012 brought a lawsuit against President Barack Obama (Hedges v. Obama), are about to file papers asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear our appeal of a 2013 ruling on the act’s Section 1021.

It’s a Myth That Entrepreneurs Drive New Technology

For real innovation, thank the state.

By Mariana Mazzucato | Posted Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013, at 5:00 AM

Images of tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs are continually thrown at us by politicians, economists, and the media. The message is that innovation is best left in the hands of these individuals and the wider private sector, and that the state—bureaucratic and sluggish—should keep out. A telling 2012 article in the Economist claimed that, to be innovative, governments must "stick to the basics" such as spending on infrastructure, education, and skills, leaving the rest to the revolutionary garage tinkerers.

Yet it is ideology, not evidence, that fuels this image. A quick look at the pioneering technologies of the past century points to the state, not the private sector, as the most decisive player in the game.

CEO Pay: A Revealing Retrospective

Sam Pizzigati

Over the last 20 years, the annual lists of America’s highest-paid chief execs — our corporate ‘best and brightest’ — have included an amazingly high concentration of outright frauds and flops.
On Wall Street, they’re giving Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer the bum’s rush.

Ballmer has just announced he’ll soon retire. After his announcement, Microsoft’s shares shot up 7 percent. The wise guys on Wall Street obviously can’t wait to see Ballmer go. And neither can business pundits. Ballmer’s 13 years at Microsoft’s summit, they seem to agree, have been a huge disappointment.

Organized labor's decline in the US is well-known. But what drove it?

To secure gains for working people requires a social transition that puts them in charge of producing society's services

Richard Wolff
theguardian.com, Monday 2 September 2013 09.00 EDT

Organized labor's decline in the US over the past half century is well-known; what drove that decline, less so. The New Deal's enemies – big business, Republicans, conservatives – had developed a coordinated strategy by the late 1940s. They would break up the coalition of organized labor, socialist and communist parties: the mass base that had forced through the 1930s New Deal. Then each coalition member could be individually destroyed.

One line of attack used anti-communist witch-hunts (McCarthyism) to frighten socialists and labor unions into dissociating themselves from former communist allies. Another attack targeted socialists by equating them with communists and applying the same demonization. Still another attack, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, directly weakened labor unions, their organizing capability and their alliance with the left.

Summers’ Lending Club makes money by bypassing the Equal Credit Opportunity Act

Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe

Don’t know about you, but for some reason I have a sinking feeling when it comes to the idea of Larry Summers. Word on the CNBC street is that he’s about to be named new Fed Chair, and I am living in a state of cognitive dissonance.

To distract myself, I’m going to try better to explain what I started to explain here, when I talked about the online peer-to-peer lending company Lending Club. Summers sits on the board of Lending Club, and from my perspective it’s a logical continuation of his career of deregulation and/or bypassing of vital regulation to enrich himself.