Elizabeth Warren’s recent brilliant speech on what ails the US economy just might ‘change the election’

Don Hazen, AlterNet

In the Sanders/Clinton battle for the presidential nomination, Elizabeth Warren stayed on the perimeter. She wasn’t quiet, that’s for sure. But she was the only woman in the Senate not to endorse Hillary, no doubt frustrating many women. She didn’t endorse Bernie, either, making many in the Bern crowd angry. She was threading the needle, as few can do. Warren has now embraced Hillary, which seems appropriate, and is campaigning aggressively with her. This is accompanied by considerable speculation about whether Hillary has the vision, and perhaps the chutzpah, to step out of her cautiousness and tap Warren to be her vice-president. And Warren has been the chief Twitter thorn in Trump’s side—an important job these days. But beyond the presidential maneuvering, Warren is articulating a brilliant (if not obvious) critique of what ails our economy, and it is not just the banks. As Paul Glastris wrote in the Washington Monthly, Warren has:

“…. extended her critique to the entire economy, noting that, as a result of three decades of weakened federal antitrust regulation, virtually every industrial sector today—from airlines to telecom to agriculture to retail to social media—is under the control of a handful of oligopolistic corporations. This widespread consolidation is ‘hiding in plain sight all across the American economy,’ she said, and ‘threatens our markets, threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy.'”

Let's make retirement great again – by bringing back a pension system

As Americans look to build their future on 401k plans, they find themselves perched atop nest eggs that are far too small

Suzanne McGee

Here’s a thought about how to make America great again: bring back pensions.

If Donald Trump really is intent on turning back the clock to the glory days of an America before globalization knocked the stuffing out of the US manufacturing sector, why stop at trade?

Part of what is making all but the wealthiest Americans feel so economically vulnerable today isn’t just that incomes have been eviscerated. It’s the fact that when we retire, those of us without pensions – a growing proportion, especially if we’re not public sector employees or union employees – are perched atop very, very tiny nest eggs.

Last year’s report from the nonpartisan US government accountability office (GAO) reminded us of the perils. Half of all households headed by Americans 55 and older had no retirement savings at all. While some long-term savers may have retirement accounts with as much as $251,600, Fidelity reported that the average amount in a 401k – the replacements to pensions that companies began rolling out during the 1980s – was little more than a third of that amount.

The First Post-Middle-Class Election

The politics of downward mobility and racial diversity have eroded the center, pushing Democrats to the left and Republicans toward an authoritarian right.

By Harold Meyerson

Two years ago, a pollster for Democratic candidates told me he’d begun advising his clients to cease emphasizing “the middle class” when speaking of those Americans whose interests they were defending. Many Americans who once thought of themselves as middle-class, he argued, no longer did.

Last year, a Pew Research Center survey confirmed those Americans’ assessment. The share of income going to middle-class Americans declined from 62 percent in 1970 to 43 percent in 2014, while the share going to upper-income households rose from 29 percent to 49 percent.

Who Are All These Trump Supporters?

At the candidate’s rallies, a new understanding of America emerges.

By George Saunders

He Appears

Trump is wearing the red baseball cap, or not. From this distance, he is strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea captain: Alan Hale from “Gilligan’s Island,” say, had Hale been slimmer, richer, more self-confident. We are afforded a side view of a head of silver-yellow hair and a hawklike orange-red face, the cheeks of which, if stared at steadily enough, will seem, through some optical illusion, to glow orange-redder at moments when the crowd is especially pleased. If you’ve ever, watching “The Apprentice,” entertained fantasies of how you might fare in the boardroom (the Donald, recognizing your excellent qualities with his professional businessman’s acumen, does not fire you but, on the contrary, pulls you aside to assign you some important non-TV, real-world mission), you may, for a brief, embarrassing instant, as he scans the crowd, expect him to recognize you.

He is blessing us here in San Jose, California, with his celebrity, promising never to disappoint us, letting us in on the latest bit of inside-baseball campaign strategy: “Lyin’ Ted” is no longer to be Lyin’ Ted; henceforth he will be just “Ted.” Hillary, however, shall be “Lyin’ Crooked.” And, by the way, Hillary has to go to jail. The statute of limitations is five years, and if he gets elected in November, well . . . The crowd sends forth a coarse blood roar. “She’s guilty as hell,” he snarls.

Despite What Media Says, TPP Isn’t About Free Trade — It’s About Protecting Corporate Profits

Zaid Jilani

The news media and advocates of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement have repeatedly described opponents of the deal as “protectionist” or opposed to trade itself.

For instance, after Donald Trump pressed Hillary Clinton to swear off passage of the deal, the New York Times reported that Trump was embracing “nationalistic anti-trade policies.” The Wall Street Journal said Trump expressed “protectionist views.” President Obama warned that you can’t withdraw “from trade deals” and focus “solely on your local market.”

But opposition to the TPP is not accurately described as opposition to all trade, or even to free trade.

David Graeber: The elites hate Momentum and the Corbynites - and I’ll tell you why

The movement that backed the Labour leader challenges MPs and journalists alike – because it’s about grassroots democracy

s the rolling catastrophe of what’s already being called the “chicken coup” against the Labour leadership winds down, pretty much all the commentary has focused on the personal qualities, real or imagined, of the principal players.

Yet such an approach misses out on almost everything that’s really at stake here. The real battle is not over the personality of one man, or even a couple of hundred politicians. If the opposition to Jeremy Corbyn for the past nine months has been so fierce, and so bitter, it is because his existence as head of a major political party is an assault on the very notion that politics should be primarily about the personal qualities of politicians. It’s an attempt to change the rules of the game, and those who object most violently to the Labour leadership are precisely those who would lose the most personal power were it to be successful: sitting politicians and political commentators.

The Busted Theory of ‘Broken Windows’ Still Has Media Defenders

By Josmar Trujillo

For the better part of two years, New York City tabloids have been hyping up a return to the “bad old days” in the city. Front-page stories about homeless people and street performers dirtying up the gains of a city that has become impossibly safe alluded to a turn away from the policing method that supposedly saved the city: the Broken Windows theory. This followed years of political and media support for this so-called “quality-of-life” policing style, which held that strong enforcement against low-level infractions and “disorder” lowered violent crime as well. Broken Windows enjoyed, for many years, a reputation as public safety gospel and the miracle solution to New York’s crime-ridden past.

But now a report by the New York Police Department’s inspector general’s office has undermined the premise of the city’s famed crime-fighting philosophy, widely embraced throughout the country. The report found that over an eight-year period, low-level enforcement had had no bearing on felony crimes. Media reported as if the agency’s findings were a bombshell, despite the fact that they mirrored years of academic research that long ago had said the Broken Windows theory didn’t work.

Sanders Supporters: Check Out This Amazing Piece of American History for a Path You Might Take

A "no" vote for corporate farms may have implications for those trying to make the DNC platform more progressive.

By David Morris

On June 14, North Dakotans voted to overrule their government’s decision to allow corporate ownership of farms. That they had the power to do so was a result of a political revolution that occurred almost exactly a century before, a revolution that may hold lessons for those like Bernie Sanders’ supporters who seek to establish a bottom-up political movement in the face of hostile political parties today.

Here’s the story. In the early 1900s North Dakota was effectively an economic colony of Minneapolis/Saint Paul. A Saint Paul-based railroad tycoon controlled its freight prices. Minnesota companies owned many of the grain elevators that sat next to the rail lines and often cheated farmers by giving their wheat a lower grade than deserved. Since the flour mills were in Minneapolis, shipping costs reduced the price wheat farmers received. Minneapolis banks held farmers’ mortgages and their operating loans to farmers carried a higher interest than they charged at home.

Sam Pizzigati: Philadelphia’s Forgotten Spirit of 1776

Later this summer, just a few weeks after this year’s Fourth of July celebrations, Democrats will be gathering in Philadelphia to make some presidential nomination history.

Democrats — small-d variety — gathered in Philadelphia soon after the original Fourth of July, too. Those democrats, all Pennsylvanians, also had some history to make. In September 1776, they would go on to adopt their new nation’s most egalitarian state constitution.

Before the Revolution, only men of property in Pennsylvania could vote and hold office. The new state constitution, notes historian Clement Fatovic in his recently published “America’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality,” totally removed property qualifications for voting and office-holding.

Economic Theorists: The High Priests of Capitalism

By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | Op-Ed

People have always chosen among different co-existing economic theories to understand the world and to act within it. Who chooses which theory, consciously or not, shapes world history. Disagreements over Brexit emerged partly from different ways of understanding the British economy and its relation to Europe. Donald Trump's support grows partly out of economic theories different from those used by supporters of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. The last century's global politics swirled around quite different theories of the difference between capitalism and socialism. Political struggles often reflect clashing economic theories and political strategies often include making one theory dominant and marginalizing or silencing others.

To appreciate the economic theory choices confronting the capitalist world and global politics today, it helps to see how parallel choices shaped pre-capitalist economies. For example, wherever the chattel-slave economic system has existed (alone or together with other systems), people constructed theories about why the slave system existed, how it worked, etc. The same is true for all other economic systems (feudal, capitalist, etc.). Every system always included those who loved and evaluated it highly and those who hated and opposed it, as well people positioned in between. Individuals' evaluations were typically consistent with their explanations. People chose among theories that either extolled the system's virtues or criticized its flaws and faults, or positioned itself somewhere in between. In short, the line between evaluation and theory has always been -- and is today -- fuzzy and porous. Those who insist that their evaluations and theories do not shape one another usually blur that line the most.

Dean Baker: Neil Irwin Is Far Too Generous to Economists: They Only Care About Efficiency When the Policy Redistributes Income Upward

Neil Irwin raises the question of whether economists have been too single-minded in pushing efficiency, while ignoring issues of distribution. This is way way too generous to economists. In fact, economists have been totally happy to ignore efficiency considerations when the inefficiencies redistribute income upward. This situation pops up all the time.

As I frequently point out in comments here and elsewhere, we protect doctors, dentists and other highly paid professionals from competition with their lower paid counterparts in the developing world or even other wealthy countries. We have maintained these protections even while our trade negotiators did everything they could to make steel workers and textile workers compete against their low-paid counterparts in Mexico, China, and other developing countries.

The History of Privatization

How an Ideological and Political Attack on Government Became a Corporate Grab for Gold

Donald Cohen

The post-WWII era was a tough time for conservative economists, academics, intellectuals, and business leaders. Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities and Exchange Act, and other New Deal programs represented a dangerous expansion of government’s role in the economy and society – nothing short of a frontal assault on freedom and the beginnings of socialism in the U.S.

Today, after 50 years of attack on government, privatization is a standard conservative response to tight public budgets, a key pillar of attacks on government, and a lucrative market opportunity for domestic and global corporations. Large corporations operate virtually every type of public service including prisons, welfare systems, infrastructure, water and sewer, trash, and schools.

Mixed Bag Platform Draft Sets Stage for Fight at DNC Convention

Final Democratic Party platform draft contains wins on minimum wage and death penalty, losses on TPP and fracking

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

The final draft of the Democratic Party's 2016 platform, released Friday, calls for an end to the death penalty, a $15 minimum wage, the establishment of a postal banking system, broad marijuana law reform, and elimination of tax breaks for Big Oil—all victories for Bernie Sanders and his supporters—but fails to include key concessions on trade, Israel-Palestine, or fracking.

Indeed, not only does the document (pdf) fail to endorse a national fracking ban, as climate activists and Sanders are demanding, but "the platform puts the party on record in favor of the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan and the goal of '100 percent clean electricity,'" writes David Weigel for the Washington Post. "That plan and that goal assume that fracking will continue."

Matt Taibbi: In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears

Fears of demagoguery are provoking a frightening swing in the other direction

The "too much democracy" train rolls on.

Last week's Brexit vote prompted pundits and social media mavens to wonder aloud if allowing dumb people to vote is a good thing.

Now, the cover story in The Atlantic magazine features the most aggressive offering yet in an alarming series of intellectual-class jeremiads against the dangers of democracy.

Federal Judge Blocks All of Mississippi’s Vicious Anti-LGBTQ Law From Taking Effect

By Mark Joseph Stern

Anti-LGBTQ activists just suffered their worst defeat since the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision—a rout so stinging and decisive that it calls into question the viability of their entire strategy post-Obergefell.

That drubbing came in the form of an astonishing 60-page opinion by U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves blocking every single part of Mississippi’s sweeping, vicious anti-LGBTQ segregation law from taking effect. The law, HB 1523, granted special protections to three religious beliefs: Those who oppose same-sex marriage; those who oppose sex outside of marriage; and those who dislike trans and gender-nonconforming people. Starting July 1, HB 1523 would have allowed religious landlords to evict gay and trans renters; permitted religious employers to fire workers for being LGBTQ; granted state and private adoption agencies the right to turn away same-sex couples; allowed private businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people; given doctors a right to refuse to treat LGBTQ people in most circumstances; and permitted clerks to refuse to marry same-sex couples.

Report: A host of common chemicals endanger child brain development

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- In a new report, dozens of scientists, health practitioners and children's health advocates are calling for renewed attention to the growing evidence that many common and widely available chemicals endanger neurodevelopment in fetuses and children of all ages.

The chemicals that are of most concern include lead and mercury; organophosphate pesticides used in agriculture and home gardens; phthalates, found in pharmaceuticals, plastics and personal care products; flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers; and air pollutants produced by the combustion of wood and fossil fuels, said University of Illinois comparative biosciences professor Susan Schantz, one of dozens of individual signatories to the consensus statement.

Thomas Frank: The Influence of Influence: On Worshipping Money in Washington, D.C.

A closer look at the influential, the influencers, and those looking—for the right price—to be influenced in the nation's capital

Although it’s difficult to remember those days eight years ago when Democrats seemed to represent something idealistic and hopeful and brave, let’s take a moment and try to recall the stand Barack Obama once took against lobbyists. Those were the days when the nation was learning that George W. Bush’s Washington was, essentially, just a big playground for those lobbyists and that every government operation had been opened to the power of money. Righteous disgust filled the air. “Special interests” were much denounced. And a certain inspiring senator from Illinois promised that, should he be elected president, his administration would contain no lobbyists at all. The revolving door between government and K Street, he assured us, would turn no more.

Instead, the nation got a lesson in all the other ways that “special interests” can get what they want -- like simple class solidarity between the Ivy Leaguers who advise the president and the Ivy Leaguers who sell derivative securities to unsuspecting foreigners. As that inspiring young president filled his administration with Wall Street personnel, we learned that the revolving door still works, even if the people passing through it aren’t registered lobbyists.

The GOP’s War on Voting Is Working

 Wisconsin and Minnesota are case studies in the difference between Republican and Democratic rule.

By Ari Berman

On April 5, the day of Wisconsin’s presidential primary, Anita Johnson picked up Dennis Hatten at his new apartment in West Milwaukee and took him to the polls. “We’re going to complete your journey and make sure you vote today,” Johnson told him.

 Simply being able to vote in Wisconsin was no small feat for Hatten, a 53-year-old former Marine. He’d met Johnson, a 70-year-old Wisconsin coordinator for VoteRiders, in August 2015, as the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Hatten was living in temporary housing for homeless veterans across the street from Milwaukee’s VA hospital. Wisconsin’s strict new voter-ID law would be going into effect in 2016, and Johnson was part of the effort to help 300,000 registered voters without an acceptable government-issued ID obtain one—9 percent of the electorate.

Bernie-backed progressive Zephyr Teachout wins New York Democratic primary

Sarah K. Burris

Progressive Zephyr Teachout scored a major victory for the progressive wing of the Democratic primary in New York’s 19th Congressional District, Tuesday night. This pits her against John Faso, a Republican former state assemblyman, on the November ballot.

“I am running for Congress to break down those doors in Washington, D.C. The doors that are keeping the people of America — the real people, the citizens of America — locked out,” Teachout said in an email to supporters after the win had been announced. “I’ve been fighting well-paid lobbyists on behalf of working families my entire life. I will fight until we win — for the people of NY 19. For the American people.”

Bernie Sanders: Democrats Need to Wake Up

Surprise, surprise. Workers in Britain, many of whom have seen a decline in their standard of living while the very rich in their country have become much richer, have turned their backs on the European Union and a globalized economy that is failing them and their children.

And it’s not just the British who are suffering. That increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite, is failing people everywhere. Incredibly, the wealthiest 62 people on this planet own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population — around 3.6 billion people. The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the whole of the bottom 99 percent. The very, very rich enjoy unimaginable luxury while billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.