Former Rep. Allyson Schwartz's new group, The Better Medicare Alliance, is not what it appears

Commentary: Fronting for a phony front group

By Wendell Potter

The health insurance industry took advantage of Washington’s infamous revolving door last week when it named former Rep. Allyson Schwartz of Pennsylvania, perceived by many to be a liberal Democrat, as the face of its latest K Street-operated front group.

Schwartz, a former five-term member of Congress who made an unsuccessful bid for Pennsylvania governor last year, announced in an email blast Tuesday that she had found work again, not back home but back inside the Beltway. “Today I will begin as President and CEO of the Better Medicare Alliance,” she told her “friends and supporters.”

Paul Krugman: Nobody Said That

Imagine yourself as a regular commentator on public affairs — maybe a paid pundit, maybe a supposed expert in some area, maybe just an opinionated billionaire. You weigh in on a major policy initiative that’s about to happen, making strong predictions of disaster. The Obama stimulus, you declare, will cause soaring interest rates; the Fed’s bond purchases will “debase the dollar” and cause high inflation; the Affordable Care Act will collapse in a vicious circle of declining enrollment and surging costs.

But nothing you predicted actually comes to pass. What do you do?

Courting Favor

In a series of articles, Eric Lipton of The New York Times examines the explosion in lobbying of state attorneys general by corporate interests and the millions in campaign donations they now provide.

Part 1 ‘The People’s Lawyers’
Lobbyists, Bearing Gifts, Pursue Attorneys General

Attorneys general have become the object of pursuit by lobbyists who use campaign contributions, personal appeals and other means to sway investigations or negotiate favorable deals, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

Corey Robin: Our perverse centrist patriots: Everything the elite media gets wrong about American politics

Call it Chris Matthews-itis. George Packer wants an exciting politics of heroism, sacrifice, war. It's dead wrong

George Packer is bored with American politics. “The 2016 campaign doesn’t seem like fun to me,” he writes in The New Yorker. Today’s politics “doesn’t quicken my pulse.” It “doesn’t shock me into a state of alert indignation.” The “thrill is gone.”

When George Packer gets bored, I get worried. It means he’s in the mood for war.

How Megan McArdle gets Social Security profoundly wrong

Michael Hiltzik

With even mainstream Democrats coming to embrace the idea of expanding Social Security to help address our looming retirement crisis, it couldn't be long before the pushback emerged from conservatives and Republicans.

Bloomberg's libertarian economics columnist Megan McArdle was quick out of the box, with a column published Tuesday titled, "The Left Gets it Wrong About Social Security." You should read it, because it's rare to find so much sophistry, misunderstanding and misinformation about Social Security packed into one article. You can count McArdle's disdain for retired people, seldom expressed so openly, as a dividend.

Lawsuits were stymied, but CFPB finally puts halt to rent-a-D.A. scheme

By Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Columnist

The ominous letter from the prosecutor's office was addressed to her grandfather, Albert Lachowicz, but it came to Jennifer Paczan because she was handling his finances. Even five years later, the Pennsylvania woman still recalls her reactions: first worried, then confused, and, finally, outraged on his behalf.

The letter was signed by Beaver County District Attorney Anthony J. Berosh, and was on the D.A.'s letterhead. It said Berosh's office had received reports alleging that Lachowicz had engaged in "criminal activity" by "issuing a fraudulent check."

Paczan, then a student at the University of Pittsburgh, knew that hadn't happened. Her grandfather's nursing home had taken an unexpected payment from his bank account on the same day she wrote a $10 check for one of his prescriptions. To fix her error, she not only repaid the $10, but $35 more to cover the pharmacy's returned-check fees.

Strategies of the 1% Revealed

By George Lakey, Waging Nonviolence | Op-Ed

It's too easy to say that the 1 percent has recently been winning the class war in the United States because it is more powerful, with its control of the mass media, ownership of the major parties and command of the means of repression. In the Global Nonviolent Action Database there are plenty of cases in which the 1 percent has all those things and is nevertheless pushed back by people power and smart strategy. In fact, even in the United States, the 1 percent has lost some recent battles.

We Americans often fail to notice the 1 percent's strategy game. Knowing some of the favorite moves they make to achieve their goals will assist us as we stand up for justice, equality and life itself.

A Good Professor Is an Exhausted Professor

A North Carolina education bill would be a disaster for research and pedagogy.

By Rebecca Schuman

In higher-ed parlance the herculean act of teaching eight courses per year is what’s known as “a 4-4 load” or, alternatively, a “metric ass-ton” of classroom time. And yet a new bill currently under consideration in the North Carolina General Assembly would require every professor in the state’s public university system to do just that. The results would be catastrophic for North Carolina’s major research universities. The region known as the Research Triangle—Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, so named because of the three “Research-I”–level universities that anchor it—would quickly lose two of its prongs—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University—were this bill to pass. And it just might.

According to the official press release from its sponsor, Republican state Sen. Tom McInnis, Senate Bill 593—called “Improve Professor Quality/UNC System”—would “ensure that students attending UNC system schools actually have professors, rather than student assistants, teaching their classes.” Another result would be more courses taught by fewer professors. But that shouldn’t matter, according to Jay Schalin of North Carolina’s Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, who recently explained to the Daily Tar Heel that “the university system is not a jobs program for academics.” What the bill’s supporters either fail to realize—or, more likely, realize with utter glee—is that this bill actually has nothing to do with “professor quality” and everything to do with destroying public education and research. Forcing everyone into a 4-4 minimum (so ideally an excruciating 5-5, I guess?) is a “solution” that could only be proposed by someone who either doesn’t know how research works or hates it. It’s like saying: Hey, I’ll fix this car by treating it like a microwave.

Read All About It: Cops Break Up Fight, Subdue Aggressor, Nobody Dies (Maybe 'Cause the Cops Were Swedish?)

by Abby Zimet, staff writer

New Yorkers used to being terrorized by the NYPD are all agog because four young Swedish cops on vacation managed to stop a subway beatdown without shedding any blood, breaking any necks, shooting any retreating backs or otherwise launching any entirely unwarranted executions. The four Swedes - Samuel Kvarzell, Markus Asberg, Eric Jansberger and Erik Naslund - were riding an uptown train on their way to see Les Misérables when a brawl broke out between two reportedly homeless men, with one beating on the other. When the conductor called for help, cell phone video captured the four visitors as they calmly moved in - separating the two men, holding down the aggressive guy and asking both if they were okay as they awaited the arrival of the NYPD. They later met with NYPD bigwigs evidently astonished to meet law enforcement officers who actually seem to take all that quaint protect and serve stuff to heart and just...do...their...job.

Dean Baker: Obama is failing us all by ignoring the need for currency rules in TPP

The sums at stake over currency issues are an order of magnitude larger than any potential gains from the rest of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

The Obama administration is doing its full court press, pulling out all the stops to get Congress to approve the fast-track authority that is almost certainly necessary to get the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through Congress. One of the biggest remaining stumbling blocks is that the deal will almost certainly not include provisions on currency. This means that parties to the agreement will still be able to depress the value of their currency against the dollar in order to gain a competitive advantage. This is a really big deal, which everyone thinking about the merits of the TPP should understand.

The value of the dollar relative to other currencies is by far the main determinant of our balance of trade. We can talk about better education and training for our workforce, improving our infrastructure and better research, all of which are important for the economy.

The Washington Post Should Tell You When Its Columnists Are Paid to Disinform You

If you’re getting paid to advocate for the destruction of the world as we know it, shouldn’t you at least let people know?

The Washington Post apparently doesn’t think so.

The Post regularly publishes columns by Ed Rogers, a veteran of the Reagan/Bush administration turned lobbyist.

Long-term exposure to air pollution may harm your brain

American Heart Association

DALLAS, April 23, 2015 -- Long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution may cause subtle structural changes in the brain that could precede cognitive impairment and hidden brain damage, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke.

Fine particle air pollution - smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5) - may be the most common and hazardous type of air pollution. It comes from burning wood or coal, car exhaust and other sources.

More Craven Arguments Used to Sell TPP and Fast Track to Congress, With Mixed Results

Posted on April 23, 2015 by David Dayen

I don’t know what’s occurring more rapidly, Congressional votes on Trade Promotion Authority (aka fast track) or the parade of half-truths and outright falsehoods being promoted to sell it. Committees in the House and Senate held meetings Wednesday on the bill. The Senate Finance Committee markup got off to a slow start when Bernie Sanders used an obscure Senate maneuver to delay the markup:

Early Wednesday, Sanders forced the Senate Finance Committee to abandon a legislative hearing on a bill that would grant Obama so-called fast-track authority on trade agreements. Sanders invoked an arcane procedural maneuver, objecting to a rule that allows committees to meet during legislative sessions. By doing so, Sanders has prevented the Finance Committee from dealing with the trade bill until at least 4:00 p.m.

Have We Seen the End of the 8-Hour Day?

Nathan Schneider on April 22, 2015 - 3:34PM ET

A glance across the exhibit halls of the National Retail Federation's annual conference gives little indication that this sector is the country's largest employer. Inside the glass-walled Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on the west side of Midtown Manhattan, the human fray shuffles beneath a skyline of towering displays that compete with one another to present the most alluring glimpse of a spotless, angular, automated future. They announce countless machines for point of sale, for payments, for disembodied experience. Mixed among them, one slowly begins to notice, is trace evidence of actual retail workers—for instance, a "gamified" console "to help sales associates personalize in-store shopper interaction." Another display summarizes the prevailing ambition: "Sell more…manage less."

Somewhere on that floor this past January, Carrie Gleason was rapt in conversation with a salesman from Workplace, a British firm whose software allows managers to optimize workers' shifts hour by hour for maximum profit. She plied him with detailed questions, discovering in the process that the software can schedule only four weeks ahead, and that it really works best day-to-day. He walked her through both the worker-facing mobile version and the managers' back end. When he tried to seal some kind of deal, Gleason explained a bit about the nature of her interest—without exactly volunteering the fact that she happens to be a labor organizer.

We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership

Kyle Wiens

It’s official: John Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don’t own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway.

In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic

by Ellen Brown

"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." —Article IV, Section 4, US Constitution

A republican form of government is one in which power resides in elected officials representing the citizens, and government leaders exercise power according to the rule of law. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison defined a republic as “a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people . . . .”

On April 22, 2015, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade agreement that would override our republican form of government and hand judicial and legislative authority to a foreign three-person panel of corporate lawyers.

Bees may become addicted to nicotine-like pesticides, study finds

Bees have a preference for sugar solutions laced with the pesticides, scientists say, as a separate landmark field trial show neonicotinoids harm bee population

Karl Mathiesen

Bees may become addicted to nicotine-like pesticides in the same way humans get hooked on cigarettes, according to a new study, which was released as a landmark field trial provided further evidence that such neonicotinoids harm bee populations.

In a study published in the journal Nature, scientists from Newcastle Univeristy showed that bees have a preference for sugar solutions that are laced with the pesticides imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, possibly indicating they can become hooked on the chemicals.

Economists have discovered how bad the economy really is

By Matt O'Brien

Unemployment is almost back to normal, but the economy isn't.

That isn't because the unemployment rate is a conspiracy to make things look better than they really are. It's because even though the unemployment rate tells us the most about the labor market, it doesn't tell us the full story. All it does is show us how many people who are actively looking for work can't find it. But that leaves out the "shadow unemployed" who want full-time jobs but have either given up looking for them or can only find part-time ones. That usually doesn't make that big a difference, but it does now, because, even six years after the crisis has ended, there still isn't much that's usual about this economy.

Study: “Right-To-Work” Lowers Wages

Terrance Heath

A new study published by the Economic Policy Institute confirms that “right-to-work” laws aren’t about protecting worker’s rights. “Right-to-work” laws lower workers’ wages, no matter how you look at them. That’s the conclusion of “‘Right-To-Work’ States Still Have Lower Wages,” a EPI briefing paper by Elise Gould and Will Kimball. The briefing paper is a follow-up to, and a response to criticism of a 2012 study by Gould and Heidi Shierholz.

The 2012 study found that wages in “right-to-work” states were 3.2 percent lower than in non-“right-to-work” states. The current study confirms this, finding that wages in “right-to-work” states are 3.1 percent lower than in non-“right-to-work” states, which translates into $1,558 less in annual wages for workers in “right-to-work” states. Currently, 25 states have “right-to-work” laws. (Three states — Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin — passed “right-to-work” laws in the interim between the two studies, but are not included in the study, because the impacts of “right-to-work” laws can take a long time to manifest, and not enough time had passed.)

Bank of America tries to seize widow's home while forgetting to mention that her loan was insured

by Walter Einenkel

Laura Coleman Biggs and her experience with Bank of America is absolutely criminal. When her husband George Mitchell passed away, 12 years ago this month, Ms. Biggs continued paying off her mortgage.

George “Kenny” Mitchell had taken out a special lender-pushed insurance policy to pay off most of his loan if he died.

But when he passed away on April 26, 2003, the subsidiary of Charlotte-based Bank of America did not arrange a payoff of the $100,000 policy and continued to charge his widow an insurance premium every month along with her mortgage payment.