Meat Wagon: Beef behemoth

If deals go through, three firms will own 90 percent of the U.S. beef market

Posted by Tom Philpott at 3:37 PM on 05 Mar 2008

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.

You'd be hard-pressed to find an industry more consolidated than beef-packing. Just four companies slaughter 83.5 percent of cows consumed in the United States. In standard antitrust theory, a market stops being competive when the four biggest players control 40 percent.

The beef industry's extraordinary concentration gives the Big Four massive leverage to dictate how beef is raised and sold. Their economies of scale give them power to squeeze their smaller competitors, who have to scramble to keep costs down to survive. Their suppliers, known as "calf-cow" operations, essentially have to accept the price the Big Four offers.

Learning from the Cultural Conservatives, Part II: Talking Up The Worldview

By Sara Robinson

March 5th, 2008 - 4:00pm ET

---

This is Part II of a series on the strategies used by the conservatives to promote their worldview, and the lessons progressives can learn from them to promote our own. Part I is here.

As we saw in the previous post, the entire conservative movement was organized around the single goal of changing the country's dominant worldview, weaning it away from liberal assumptions about how the world works, and teaching Americans to assign meaning to the world using conservative values instead. They firmly (and rightly) believed that that once the rest of the country evaluated and prioritized reality the same way they did, the rest of the conservative political, economic, and social agenda could be implemented with strong popular support, and no meaningful resistance.

Paul Krugman: The Anxiety Election

Democrats won the 2006 election largely thanks to public disgust with the Iraq war. But polls — and Hillary Clinton’s big victory in Ohio — suggest that if the Democrats want to win this year, they have to focus on economic anxiety.

Some people reject that idea. They believe that this election should be another referendum on the war, and, perhaps even more important, about the way America was misled into that war. That belief is one reason many progressives fervently support Barack Obama, an early war opponent, even though his domestic platform is somewhat to the right of Mrs. Clinton’s.

Coming Soon ... The Carbon Economy

By Kelpie Wilson, TruthOut.org
Posted on March 6, 2008, Printed on March 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/78900/

By refusing to sign on to the Kyoto climate treaty, Americans have insulated ourselves from the complexities of the carbon market the European Union has been trading in for the last three years. But that state of ignorance, while not exactly blissful, is about to end.

On February 26 and 27, the international carbon trading financial community descended on San Francisco to present Carbon Forum America, the first American carbon trading conference to include a full trade show featuring 80 companies that manage carbon credit assets and trades, negotiate contracts, validate projects, and perform various other market services. Why California and why now?

Fed Takes New Steps on Credit Crisis

Friday March 7, 10:43 am ET
By Jeannine Aversa, Associated Press Writer Federal Reserve Announces Bigger Auctions to Banks to Help Ease the Credit Crisis WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Reserve is taking bigger steps to ease the nation's credit crisis, including increasing the amount of loans it plans to make available to banks this month to $100 billion.

The Federal Reserve announced Friday that it will boost the size of auctions planned for March 10 and March 24 to $50 billion each. That is up from the $30 billion limits it had previously announced. The auctions serve as short-term loans to get banks the cash they need to keep lending to their customers.

Chairman Greenspan's Legacy

By Benjamin M. Friedman

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

by Alan Greenspan

Penguin, 531 pp., $35.00

The US financial markets are suffering their rockiest period since the nation's savings and loan industry collapsed at the end of the 1980s. The economy either is on the verge of the first business recession since 2001 or is already in it. The Federal Reserve System is taking dramatic actions that reflect urgency at best and perhaps even a whiff of panic. In these circumstances, it is worth recalling that US monetary policy—broadly defined as the management of interest rates in order to control inflation and to maintain stable growth—has had a strikingly good run during the last two decades.

Ted Rall: Afghanistan: A War We Can't Believe In

Why Obama's Favorite War is Less Winnable Than Iraq

NEW YORK--Five years after the Republicans got us into war against Iraq, Democrats want to double down on a war that's even more unjustifiable and unwinnable--the one against Afghanistan.

By any measure, U.S. troops and their NATO allies are getting their asses kicked in the country that Reagan's CIA station chief for Pakistan called "the graveyard of empires." Afghanistan currently produces a record 93 percent of the world's opium. Suicide bombers are killing more U.S.-aligned troops than ever. Stonings are back. The Taliban and their allies, "defeated" in 2001, control most of the country--and may recapture the capital of Kabul as early as this summer.

Dangerous Cracks Appearing in Job Market

Friday March 7, 6:29 pm ET
By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer Employers Slash Jobs, Thousands Drop Out of the Labor Force WASHINGTON (AP) -- Dangerous cracks in the nation's job market are deepening. Employers slashed jobs by the largest amount in five years and hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the labor force -- ominous signs that the country is falling toward a recession or has already toppled into one.

For the second straight month, nervous employers got rid of jobs nationwide. In February, they sliced payrolls by 63,000, even deeper than the 22,000 cut in January, the Labor Department reported Friday.

What's behind record oil prices?

Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: March 05, 2008 05:57:53 PM

WASHINGTON — Record high oil prices notwithstanding, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said Wednesday that its members wouldn't boost production to rescue a U.S. economy that's suffering from what it labeled as self-inflicted "mismanagement."

"If the prices are high, definitely they are not (high) due to a lack of crude," Chakib Khelil, OPEC's president, said in Vienna, Austria, where the 13-member cartel met to determine what it considered the right level of production.

Global oil prices, meanwhile, continued their upward climb into record territory. Contracts for April delivery of light, sweet crude oil shot up $5 a barrel on a surprise dip in U.S. inventories, settling at $104.52 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Personal bankruptcies highest since 2005

Reports show surge in filings due to the housing slump and credit crunch; home foreclosures called 'leading impetus.'

March 4 2008: 5:40 PM EST

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones/AP) -- Personal bankruptcy filings climbed last month to their highest level since 2005, when Congress enacted laws aimed at discouraging such filings, and experts predicted more than a million Americans will seek bankruptcy protection this year.

The American Bankruptcy Institute, citing data from the National Bankruptcy Research Center, said 76,120 people filed for bankruptcy in February, a 15% increase from January. Business bankruptcies also surged, climbing to a four-month high of 4,326, according to Jupiter eSources, which tracks business and personal bankruptcy filings.

Official: Iraq, China nearing oil deal

SINAN SALAHEDDIN, AP News
Mar 06, 2008 10:26 EST

Iraq and China are close to re-signing a $1.2 billion oil deal that was called off after the 2003 U.S. invasion, an Iraqi Oil Ministry official said Thursday.

Iraq sits on more than 115 billion barrels of oil, the world's third-largest reserves, but violence and sabotage have crippled efforts to use the resource to fund the country's reconstruction.

Global warming 'skeptics' conference enabled by conservative philanthropy

Heartland Institute and dozens of other sponsors of conference funded by Coors, Bradley, Walton, Scaife and DeVos foundations

"Ignored, and often even censored and demonized" is how the promotional materials for the Heartland Institute's recent conference "The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change," described the way "distinguished scholars from the U.S. and around the world," that have had the courage to question global warming, have been treated by environmentalists and the mainstream media. In a "Background" piece, conference organizers claimed that "They [the scholars] have been labeled 'skeptics' and even 'global warming deniers,' a mean-spirited attempt to lump them together with Holocaust deniers.

The real problem with FISA: They've got all our email. (Foreign-to-foreign is pure disinformation.)

Submitted by lambert on Wed, 2008-03-05 13:22.

Remember how Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program was originally about wiretaps? And then morphed into being about foreign-to-foreign communication? Well, that was all disinformation. Turns out it’s all about email. Your “papers,” as the Fourth Amendment has it. WaPo:

At the breakfast yesterday [Kenneth Weinstein, assistant attorney general for national security] highlighted a different problem with the current FISA law than other administration officials have emphasized. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, for example, has repeatedly said FISA should be changed so no warrant is needed to tap a communication that took place entirely outside the United States but happened to pass through the United States.

Climate Change's Most Deadly Threat: Drought

By Todd Wilkinson, Christian Science Monitor
Posted on March 6, 2008, Printed on March 6, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/78676/

Spring is on its way back to northern latitudes. In many locales, it will arrive earlier than "normal," yielding, ostensibly, a longer growing season, a hotter summer, balmier autumn, and future winters will lack their ferocious post-Pleistocene bites.

While vineyards are being planned for northern England, millions of residents around desiccated Atlanta are praying for enough rain to flow through their taps.

'Frankenfoods' Giant Monsanto Plays Bully Over Consumer Labeling

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on March 6, 2008, Printed on March 6, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/78660/

"There are some corporations that clearly are operating at a level that are disastrous for the general public … And in fact I suppose one could argue that in many respects a corporation of that sort is the prototypical psychopath, at the corporate level instead of the individual level."

--Dr. Robert Hare, The Corporation

Since 1901, Monsanto has brought us Agent Orange, PCBs, Terminator seeds and recombined milk, among other infamous products. But it's currently obsessed with the milk, or, more importantly, the milk labels, particularly those that read "rBST-free" or "rBGH-free." It's not the "BST" or "BGH" that bothers them so much; after all, bovine somatrophin, also known as bovine growth hormone, isn't exactly what the company is known for. Which is to say, it's naturally occurring. No, the problem is the "r" denoting "recombined." There's nothing natural about it. In fact, the science is increasingly pointing to the possibility that recombined milk is -- surprise! -- not as good for you as the real thing.

Home foreclosures hit record high

By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer

Thu Mar 6, 2:43 PM ET

Home foreclosures soared to an all-time high in the final three months of 2007 and probably will keep rising, evidence of homeowners' suffering and the economic danger from the meltdown.

The Mortgage Bankers Association said Thursday the proportion of all mortgages that slipped into foreclosure set a record, 0.83 percent, from October through December. The previous high, 0.78 percent, came in the July-through-September period.

"Clearly it's the worst it's been," the association's chief economist, Doug Duncan, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The Moderate Income Homeowner Tax

By Dean Baker - March 2, 2008, 10:01PM

There are some folks in Congress who apparently think that the best thing that government can do for low and moderate income families is to impose a special 18 percentage point tax on their income. Of course they don’t call it an income tax, they call it being a homeowner in a home on which families have no equity.

Yep, you guessed it -- this is yet another twist on those wild and crazy bailout schemes that the bankers’ buddies are devising to use government money to buy up their mortgage debt. Prior posts have focused on the money going from ordinary taxpayers to incredibly wealthy investment bankers. This one focuses on how badly these plans screw the moderate income families they are supposed to help.

Double Bubble Trouble

By STEPHEN S. ROACH

Hong Kong

AMID increasingly turbulent credit markets and ever-weaker reports on the economy, the Federal Reserve has been unusually swift and determined in its lowering of the overnight lending rate. The White House and Congress have moved quickly as well, approving rebates for families and tax breaks for businesses. And more monetary easing from the Fed could well be on the way.

The central question for the economy is this: Will this medicine work? The same question was asked repeatedly in Japan during its “lost decade” of the 1990s. Unfortunately, as was the case in Japan, the answer may be no.

A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

By ADAM LIPTAK

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.

The sites, in English, French and Spanish, had been online since 1998. Some, like www.cuba-hemingway.com, were literary. Others, like www.cuba-havanacity.com, discussed Cuban history and culture. Still others — www.ciaocuba.com and www.bonjourcuba.com — were purely commercial sites aimed at Italian and French tourists.

US service industry shrinks again

The US service sector contracted less than analysts had expected in February, according to a survey from the Institute of Supply Management (ISM).

The ISM's index of service sector activity hit 49.3 last month, up from 44.6 in January. A figure of less than 50 indicates contraction.

Tomgram: William Hartung, The Cost of a Week in Hell

How far off were they? Well, it depends on which figure you choose to start with. Here's the range: According to key officials in the Bush administration back in 2002-2003, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq was either going to cost $60 billion, or $100-$200 billion. Actually, we can start by tossing that top figure out, since not long after Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey offered it in 2002, he was shown the door, in part assumedly for even suggesting something so ludicrous.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz championed the $60 billion figure, but added that much of the cost might well be covered by Iraqi oil revenues; the country was, after all, floating on a "sea of oil." ("To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he told a congressional hearing.) Still, let's take that $60 billion figure as the Bush baseline. If economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes are right in their recent calculations and this will turn out to be more than a $3 trillion war (or even a $5-7 trillion one), then the Bush administration was at least $2,940,000,000,000 off in its calculations.

Learning from The Cultural Conservatives, Part I

By Sara Robinson

February 29th, 2008 - 9:10pm ET

---

Make no mistake: When the conservatives set out to take over America 30 years ago, they were working off of a well-thought-out plan.

The plan was put in place by a wide variety of thinkers—but three of the main strategists were Howard Phillips, Richard Viguerie, and Paul Weyrich, each of whom wrote important books and papers laying out the goal of creating a conservative America, and showing specifically how the movement could make that happen.

Glenn Greenwald: The WSJ editorial page lies about our surveillance laws

There are very few opinion venues -- if there are any -- more brazenly fact-free than the Editorial Page of the Wall St. Journal. They have an Editorial this morning warning of all the grave dangers posed by efforts from the "anti-antiterror left" to limit the Leader's warrantless eavesdropping powers -- the most dangerous of which, they warn, is the campaign "to deny legal immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the government on these wiretaps after 9/11." The Editorial is filled with one demonstrable factual falsehood after the next.

Just marvel at this paragraph, incoherent and false in equal parts:

By far the worst threat is an amendment from Senator Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) to deny legal immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the government on these wiretaps after 9/11. The companies face multiple lawsuits, so a denial of even retrospective immunity would certainly lead to less such cooperation in the future.

The Gaza Bombshell

After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

by David Rose April 2008

“A Dirty War”

The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel’s airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the video.

Digby: The Manly Man's Best Friend

It's going to be a long campaign. The Washington Post is so in love with St John of Sedona that it features two different stories in the paper today about a bar-b-que he gave for the boyz on the bus at his "cabin" this week-end. Feel the love:

PAGE SPRINGS, Ariz., March 2 -- If he loses the presidency, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will have a career as a barbecue chef to fall back on.

Paul Krugman: Deliverance or Diversion?

After their victory in the 2006 Congressional elections, it seemed a given that Democrats would try to make this year’s presidential campaign another referendum on Republican policies. After all, the public appears fed up not just with President Bush, but with his party. For example, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows Democrats are preferred on every issue except terrorism. They even have a 10-point advantage on “morality.”

Add to this the fact that perceptions about the economy are worsening week by week, and one might have expected the central theme of the Democratic campaign to be “throw the bums out.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 2008 election.

The Heritage Foundation at 35

Washington, D.C.-based tax-exempt "non-partisan" Republican think tank celebrating three-plus decades of saying no to government and yes to privatization, deregulation, wars, intervention and 'traditional family values'

President Bush opened a recent speech at the Heritage Foundation about the "War on Terror" by acknowledging that while he had only 14 months left in his presidency he was going to be "sprinting to the finish line." Bush complained about the Senate being slow to confirm Michael Mukasey for attorney general, urged Congress to make the Protect America Act permanent, and blasted "MoveOn.org bloggers" and "Code Pink protesters." He wrapped up his speech by saying he believed a president of the United States will come to the Heritage Foundation 50 years from now and say "Thank God that generation that wrote the first chapter in the 21st century understood the power of freedom to bring the peace we want."

Ahmadinejad welcomed heartily in Iraq

MARK MACKINNON
From Monday's Globe and Mail
March 2, 2008 at 9:53 PM EST

BAGHDAD — It's a damning indication of how poorly things have gone for the United States during its five-year misadventure in Iraq that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can drive in broad daylight though this war-ravaged city and spend the night at the presidential palace, but George W. Bush can't.
Mr. Ahmadinejad was greeted with lavish ceremony yesterday as he became the first Iranian President to visit Baghdad, a trip some said reflected Iran's great and growing power in Iraq and how severely the U.S. effort to remake Iraq into a Western-friendly democracy has gone awry.
Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have died since the war began in 2003, but Iraq's U.S.-backed government warmly welcomed Washington's No. 1 enemy with flowers and a band.

Going to Jail for Being a Democrat: How Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman Got Roved

By Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch
Posted on March 3, 2008, Printed on March 3, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/78407/

Don Siegelman, a popular Democratic governor of Alabama, a Republican state, was framed in a crooked trial, convicted on June 29, 2006, and sent to Federal prison by the corrupt and immoral Bush administration.

The frame-up of Siegelman and businessman Richard Scrushy is so crystal clear and blatant that 52 former state attorney generals from across America, both Republicans and Democrats, have urged the US Congress to investigate the Bush administration's use of the US Department of Justice to rid themselves of a Democratic governor who "they could not beat fair and square," according to Grant Woods, former Republican Attorney General of Arizona and co-chair of the McCain for President leadership committee. Woods says that he has never seen a case with so "many red flags pointing to injustice."

Reduce your carbon footprint now: Checklist Toward Zero Carbon

by bklynarch

Sat Mar 01, 2008 at 05:44:08 AM PST

In 2005 the eminent climate scientist Dr. James Hansen said, "We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption." Just three years later, we are now crossing some of those tipping points. It's time to stop talking. We must reduce now. Read the checklist. Download it, edit it, make it your own and distribute it.

Digby: The Transformation Project

We are hearing a lot these days about political "transformation" in politics. Aside from a desire for a change in policy, the public also indicates that they desire a change in the way our politics are conducted. But as much as everyone likes the idea of an end to partisan squabbling, it's not entirely clear yet how this transformation will take place, or what the character of the transformation will actually be. So naturally, the political establishment, anxious to have it on terms they can control, will increasingly be taking the lead in defining it for us.

The Washington Post recently ran an editorial ostensibly about Senator Barack Obama, but which actually seemed less about him than about what they believe parameters of "transformation" should be:

Pols: Govt here to help, not bail out

Selling Housing Aid Proposals in Washington Means Staying Out of Bailout Neighborhood

ALAN ZIBEL
AP News

Mar 02, 2008 16:07 EST

Bailout is a dirty word in the nation's capital. Lately, efforts by both Democrats and Republicans to clean up the housing mess are getting sullied with the b-word.

An inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars is what President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson call some plans in Congress to aid homeowners stung by the mortgage market mess. For their part, Democrats say the Bush administration is more interested in bailing out Wall Street than Main Street.

Frank Rich: McCain Channels His Inner Hillary

BEFORE they were sidetracked into a new war against The New York Times, the Rush Limbaugh posse had it right about John McCain. He is a double agent. Some Democrats do admire and like him. So does Jon Stewart, and so do many liberal editorial boards and card-carrying hacks in the mainstream American press. So, in fact, do many at The Times, including myself. As long as I don’t look too hard at the fine print.

You’ve got to love a guy who said a few years ago that he regretted likening Mr. Limbaugh to “a circus clown” because of all the complaints from circus clowns insulted by the comparison. “I would like to extend my apologies to Bozo, Chuckles and Krusty,” Senator McCain told a rather startled Neil Cavuto of Fox News.

S.F. judge dissolves his Wikileaks injunction

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, March 1, 2008

(02-29) 17:35 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge in San Francisco who had ordered the shutdown of a whistle-blowers' Web site where private bank documents were posted changed his mind Friday, conceding his original ruling might not have been constitutional.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White drew nationwide attention, and widespread criticism from civil liberties groups and news organizations, with his Feb. 15 injunction requiring a Bay Area Internet registrar to disable the Wikileaks.org site and prevent the organization from transferring to another server.

Horrifying and Unnecessary

In the next few days President Bush is expected to again claim the right to order mistreatment of prisoners that any civilized person would regard as torture.

Mr. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the C.I.A. and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the United States Army Field Manual. Mr. Bush says the Army rules are too restrictive.