19 July 2008

Digby: Jess Folks

Jamison Foser has a good column this week about the Village media's obsessive desire to help the Republicans depict Barack Obama as some sort of exotic freak that "regular people" (according to Chris Matthews) can't relate to. He points out that they insist on this despite ample evidence in the polling that says "regular people" relate to him just fine.

It's infuriating to watch these gasbags presume to speak for Real Americans on this matter in the first place. I know that Brian Williams loves to shop at Target, but I still think they might, on the whole, be a little bit removed from the cares of the average American, seeing as they are multi-millionaires and all --- just like their favorite maverick flyboy, the fabulously wealthy everyman St. John McCain.

Commercial bankruptcies soar, reflecting widening economic woes

WASHINGTON — Driven by a sour economy and skittish consumers, U.S. business bankruptcies saw their sharpest quarterly rise in two years, jumping 17 percent in the second quarter of 2008, according to an analysis by McClatchy.

Commercial filings for the first half of 2008 are up 45 percent from last year, as the national climate for commerce continues to deteriorate amid rising energy and food costs, mounting job losses, tighter credit and a reticence among consumers to part with discretionary income.

Iraq: 1-year limit on no-bid contracts

BAGHDAD: The Iraqi government will limit no-bid contracts being negotiated with several major oil companies to one year to avoid overlap with longer-term deals expected to be signed next June, a senior Oil Ministry official said Thursday.

The contracts sparked a backlash because they involve major Western oil companies.

There are concerns that granting such contracts to Western oil companies could feed perceptions that U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein to seize the world's third-largest oil reserves.

Al Gore Steals the Show at Netroots

by Lilly Rockwell

AUSTIN - Former Vice President Al Gore stole the show from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fireside policy chat at the Netroots Nation conference in Austin on Saturday.

Pelosi spent 45 minutes talking about abortion rights, efforts to bring the troops back from Iraq and why she didn’t think the Senate version of the FISA bill was appropriate. Some questions seemed to take her off guard, such as when one audience member asked about care packages being sent to troops, and if Congress should pass a bill to provide basic hygiene supplies to them.

Mother’s Milk of Politics Turns Sour

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Once again we’re closing the barn door after the horse is out and gone. In Washington, the Federal Reserve has finally acted to stop some of the predatory lending that exploited people’s need for money. And like Rip Van Winkle, Congress is finally waking up from a long doze under the warm sun of laissez faire economics. That’s French for turning off the alarm until the burglars have made their getaway.

Philosophy is one reason we do this to ourselves; when you worship market forces as if they were the gods of Olympus, then the gods can do no wrong — until, of course, they prove to be human. Then we realize we should have listened to our inner agnostic and not been so reverent in the first place.

Economic Realities Are Killing Our Era of Fantasy Politics

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on July 19, 2008, Printed on July 19, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/91927/

I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. To stay warm at night my son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and pile them on the kitchen floor. I'd hang a blanket from the kitchen doorway and we'd sleep right there on the floor. By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother's dining room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I'd like to order one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital building... we are certainly a country in distress. -- Letter from a single mother in a Vermont city, to Senator Bernie Sanders

The Republican and Democratic conventions are just around the corner, which means that we're at a critical time in our nation's history. For this is the moment when the country's political and media consensus finally settles on the line of bullshit it will be selling to the public as the "national debate" come fall.

18 July 2008

Police Spied on Activists In Md.

Officers Infiltrated Groups During Ehrlich Years

By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 18, 2008; A01

Undercover Maryland State Police officers conducted surveillance on war protesters and death penalty opponents, including some in Takoma Park, for more than a year while Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. was governor, documents released yesterday show.

Detailed intelligence reports logged by at least two agents in the police department's Homeland Security and Intelligence Division reveal close monitoring of the movements as the Iraq war and capital punishment were heatedly debated in 2005 and 2006.

Water fresh from the tarp

By Matthew Knight
For CNN

LONDON, England (CNN) -- It may look like an air mattress you might see lying around next to a swimming pool but in reality its function couldn't be less trivial.

The Solar Water Disinfecting Tarpaulin (SWDT) -- a new portable water purifier -- could be a major step forward in the fight against disease and mortality in the Third World.

Eric Olsen, a San Francisco-based architect and the inventor of the SWDT believes the product could help eradicate the scourge of polluted water which the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate claims over 1.5 million lives every year.

Ocean quest: The race to save the world's coral reefs

Last week, scientists issued their latest, grim assessment of the world's coral reefs. But as Steve Connor reports from Florida, extraordinary new ocean 'reseeding' techniques mean there may still be time to halt – or even reverse – the destruction of mother nature's marine marvels

Thursday, 17 July 2008

Coral reefs are often described as the tropical rainforests of the oceans. But marine biologists sometimes use another analogy: that of the canary in the coalmine. These birds were used by miners as an early warning for lethal gas; corals, too, are extraordinarily sensitive to environmental change. For Nancy Knowlton, a scientist at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, it's an apt description: "If that's the analogy, then the canary has passed out on the floor of the cage. Coral reefs are potentially immortal. They only have to die if we make them."

And that's just what we seem to be doing. In the 25 years that Knowlton has been studying the reefs, she has witnessed all the signs of their terminal decline. They are being degraded at a rate of 2 per cent a year. About a fifth of the world's stock has already gone, and nearly half of the remainder is in danger of disappearing within the next 20 years. And like so many other experts in her field, Knowlton is worried: a lethal combination of pollution, predators, disease, rising sea temperatures, over-fishing and the acidification of the sea have put our coral reefs on the critical list.

Gore Calls for Carbon-Free Electric Power

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts.

“The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. “The future of human civilization is at stake.”

Paul Krugman: L-ish Economic Prospects

Home prices are in free fall. Unemployment is rising. Consumer confidence is plumbing depths not seen since 1980. When will it all end?

The answer is, probably not until 2010 or later. Barack Obama, take notice.

It’s true that some prognosticators still expect a “V-shaped” recovery in which the economy springs back rapidly from its slump. On this view, any day now it will be morning in America.

But if the experience of the last 20 years is any guide, the prospect for the economy isn’t V-shaped, it’s L-ish: rather than springing back, we’ll have a prolonged period of flat or at best slowly improving performance.

17 July 2008

MoveOn at Ten

Five years to the day after American forces began their campaign of "shock and awe" in Iraq, opponents of the war gathered in Washington. While some came with bullhorns and drums and flag-draped coffins, danced down K Street and confronted legislators on Capitol Hill, others formed a quiet vigil in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Here there were no bullhorns or drums. Instead, there were a few news cameras, a banner that read Invest in America, Not Endless War in Iraq and a clutch of several dozen members of MoveOn. Bill Hamm, a retired Air Force pilot from Texas who had come to Washington for the Take Back America conference, told me that during his military career, fellow pilots often gave him push back because of his liberal politics. But, he said, "I think that's changing now." Hamm told me that back in Austin, where he and his wife serve as regional coordinators for MoveOn's local councils, his wife was organizing a 150-person vigil outside the governor's mansion. Because of "war on terror" restrictions they were told they couldn't bring candles. "So they're going to use flashlights."

Ted Rall: War Zero

Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War

NEW YORK--Every presidential candidacy relies on a myth. Reagan was a great communicator; Clinton felt your pain. Both storylines were ridiculous. But rarely are the constructs used to market a party nominee as transparent or as fictional as those we're being asked to swallow in 2008.

Still more laughable than the notion of Obama as the second coming of JFK is the founding myth of the McCain campaign: (a) he is a war hero, and (b) said heroism increases his credibility on national security issues. "A Vietnam hero and national security pro," The New York Times calls him in a typical media blandishment.

Daily Kos: Rove Tried to Fire Fitzgerald During CIA Leak Investigation

Thu Jul 17, 2008 at 03:13:56 PM PDT

In a supplement to his responses to the House Judiciary Committee, Patrick Fitzgerald confirms what we've always suspected: Karl Rove was trying to have Patrick Fitzgerald fired while Fitzgerald was still investigating Rove for his role in leaking Valerie Wilson's identity--and the timing lines up perfectly with the Administration's efforts to fire a bunch of US Attorneys.

Remember back in June, when Fitzgerald publicly suggested he had more details to share with Congress about Rove's efforts to get him fired?

"If I owe a response [about the putsch to remove him from his job], I owe it to Congress, first," Fitzgerald said when asked about all this after the verdict.

Advance brings low-cost, bright LED lighting closer to reality

Researchers have overcome a major obstacle in reducing the cost of "solid state lighting," a technology that could cut electricity consumption by 10 percent if widely adopted. The technology, called light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, is about four times more efficient than conventional incandescent lights and more environmentally friendly than compact fluorescent bulbs. The LEDs also are expected to be far longer lasting than conventional lighting, lasting perhaps as long as 15 years before burning out.

Thomas Frank: Where Have You Gone, Dickey Flatt?

July 16, 2008

When former Sen. Phil Gramm, who now serves as an economic adviser to John McCain, declared last week that Americans had become a "nation of whiners"—that we were scared of a recession that was only "mental"—what struck me was not so much the remark's meanness but its symbolic significance. This, historians will someday say, was the snarling end of an era in which our leaders believed that markets represented the very will of the people; that to serve one was to serve the other.

Although it seems hard to believe now, it once pleased the press to call Mr. Gramm a "populist." Long before he scolded the common man as a whiner, Mr. Gramm was widely thought to have the common touch himself. He was the sort of politician who could "connect with working people," he said in 1995, and he used to wax righteous about "the people who do the work and pay the taxes and pull the wagon." Mr. Gramm even came up with his own salt-of-the-earth everyman to champion: one Dickey Flatt, a printer in Texas, whose tax burden had to be weighed against the cost of any federal program before it won Sen. Gramm's judicious nod.

China's All-Seeing Eye

With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

NAOMI KLEIN
Posted May 29, 2008 3:24 PM

Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn't exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location close to Hong Kong's port — to be China's first "special economic zone," one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the "real" China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture — the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer. Hundreds of luxury condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high, topped with three-story penthouses. Newer neighborhoods like Keji Yuan are packed with ostentatiously modern corporate campuses and decadent shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, Prada's favorite architect, is building a stock exchange in Shenzhen that looks like it floats — a design intended, he says, to "suggest and illustrate the process of the market." A still-under-construction superlight subway will soon connect it all at high speed; every car has multiple TV screens broadcasting over a Wi-Fi network. At night, the entire city lights up like a pimped-out Hummer, with each five-star hotel and office tower competing over who can put on the best light show.

Many of the big American players have set up shop in Shenzhen, but they look singularly unimpressive next to their Chinese competitors. The research complex for China's telecom giant Huawei, for instance, is so large that it has its own highway exit, while its workers ride home on their own bus line. Pressed up against Shenzhen's disco shopping centers, Wal-Mart superstores — of which there are nine in the city — look like dreary corner stores. (China almost seems to be mocking us: "You call that a superstore?") McDonald's and KFC appear every few blocks, but they seem almost retro next to the Real Kung Fu fast-food chain, whose mascot is a stylized Bruce Lee.

Hydrogen vehicles making impressive progress toward commercialization

A transition to hydrogen vehicles could greatly reduce US oil dependence and carbon dioxide emissions, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council, but making hydrogen vehicles competitive in the automotive market will not be easy.

Why Our Food Waste May Be Our Greatest Asset

By Ruben Anderson, The Tyee
Posted on July 17, 2008, Printed on July 17, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/91732/

You and I are caring people. And caring people care about composting, which is why many of us bemoan the fact that our civic governments do not collect compost. The well-informed among us may even talk fondly of municipal organic waste collection systems, like those started in San Francisco in 1998 and Toronto in 2004.

But let's play these municipal collection systems out a bit. First the city gives every household a pricey new plastic rolling tote. They buy additional trucks and hire more people. Those trucks chug up every single lane in the city until they are full, then they drive somewhere far away and dump the organic waste. Large machines pile and re-pile the organics for a few months until it breaks down into compost. They do this two to four times each month, 12 months of the year, for the rest of time.

Financial collapse edges closer

By Martin Hutchinson

The financial crisis in the United States and worldwide entered a new phase this week, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two huge US home-loan institutions, began what appears to be a "death spiral" similar to that which claimed Bear Stearns four months ago. Fannie and Freddie are unique institutions and will almost certainly be bailed out by the long-suffering taxpayer. However, for the first time, the specter has been raised of a general financial meltdown, such as the US managed to avoid in 1933 but Sweden succumbed to in 1991.

Sweden's financial meltdown of 1991 involved the government guaranteeing the obligations of the entire Swedish banking system, and recapitalizing the major banks, with the sole major exception of Svenska Handelsbanken. The total cost of the rescue to Swedish taxpayers was around US$10 billion, equivalent to about $1 trillion in the context of today's US economy. The causes of the crisis would be familiar to most Americans today: misuse of off-balance sheet securitization vehicles to invest excessively in real estate and mortgage lending. It is thus not impossible for the entire US banking system to implode. It didn't happen in 1933 (though about a quarter of US banks failed) because US banks in the 1920s had been relatively conservative in their lending, with many banks requiring a 50% down payment for home mortgage loans, for example. Stock margin lending got way out of control in 1928-29, but relatively few banks were involved significantly in that.

US lends Iran a listening ear

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - In the seemingly never-ending internal battle between hawks and realists in the administration of US President George W Bush for control of foreign policy, the realists appear to have chalked up another win over their once-dominant foes.

The decision to send the State Department's third-ranking official to Geneva on Saturday to join talks between the other four permanent members of the United Nations Security (France, China, Russia and Britain) and Germany, on the one hand, and Iran, one of the three charter members of Bush's "axis of evil", on the other, marks a significant relaxation of administration policy which, until now, had insisted it would not participate in direct talks until Tehran froze its uranium-enrichment program.

16 July 2008

Federal court: Bush can indefinitely detain civilians

A federal court has issued two rulings, the New York Times reports: One favoring President Bush's indefinite detentions of "enemy combatants," and another granting one of said "enemy combatants" the opportunity to challenge his detention in court.

The court effectively ruled that President Bush has the same right to indefinitely detain a civilian on American soil as he does an enemy soldier on a battlefield.

Glenn Greenwald: Tom Friedman Doesn’t Understand Why America Is Unpopular In The World

Tom Friedman is befuddled. He cannot understand “the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush” and is specifically upset about the fact that “China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States.” Friedman generously allows that “[a]n America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down” — a “thumbs-down”: what a playful movie critic says about a boring film. In listing America’s small imperfections that have caused this worldwide unpopularity, Friedman forgot to mention America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, which Friedman himself cheered on.

Despite that list of America’s “mistakes” (”Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay”), Friedman nonetheless pronounces that worldwide disapproval of America is “self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly.” Why? Because Zimbabwe is worse (its dictator stole the last election and represses the country’s citizens), as is China and Russia (they vetoed U.N. sanctions against Zimbabwe this week).

Los Angeles Times: McCain Takes a Social Security Risk

Even when criticizing John McCain's characterization of Social Security as a "disgrace," reporter Wallsten gives a misleading explanation of the financial reality:
A government report in March painted a gloomy picture of the program's future, estimating that its costs will surpass payroll tax revenue in 2017—forcing the system to rely on a trust fund that, the report said, will go broke in 2041. After that, workers' payroll taxes would cover only a fraction of the benefits promised to retirees. Most experts agree that fixing the system will require benefit reductions, tax increases, a rise in the retirement age, or some combination of the three.

Energy reality starts to bite

By Dilip Hiro

(Note: This article was written before Tuesday's fall in the oil price - the biggest drop in one day in 17 years. Light, sweet crude plunged US$6.44, or 4.4%, to settle at $138.74 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.)

When will it end, this crushing rise in the price of gasoline, now averaging US$4.10 a gallon at the pump? The question is uppermost in the minds of American motorists as they plan vacations or simply review their daily journeys. The short answer is simple as well: "Not soon."

As yet there is no sign of a reversal in oil's upward price thrust, which has more than doubled in a year, cresting recently above $146 a barrel. The current oil shock, the fourth of its kind in the past three-and-a-half decades, and the deadliest so far, shows every sign of continuing for a long, long stretch.

15 July 2008

Firedoglake: There Was a Class War. The Rich Won It.

By: Ian Welsh Sunday July 13, 2008 12:00 pm

What happens if there's a class war and only one side bothers to show up and fight it? That's what happened over the last thirty years. There was a class war, and the rich won. Period. It's over, they kicked our knees out from under us, put on their steel toed boots and spent the last thirty years telling us that they were going to trickle on us and we're going to like it and beg for more.

Family resources, parenting quality influence children's early cognitive development

Mothers with greater social and economic resources were found to be more supportive parents than those with fewer resources, which in turn affected young children's cognitive performance. Conversely, children's cognitive performance also influenced mothers' supportiveness, which included displaying more warmth and sensitivity, and encouraging more cognitive stimulation. This was true even among low-income families. Findings are from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Study, which included 2,089 low-income mothers and their children.

Researchers generate hydrogen without the carbon footprint

A greener, less expensive method to produce hydrogen for fuel may eventually be possible with the help of water, solar energy and nanotube diodes that use the entire spectrum of the sun's energy, according to Penn State researchers.

Citigroup's $1.1 Trillion of Mysterious Assets Shadows Earnings

By Bradley Keoun

July 14 (Bloomberg) -- At an investor presentation in May, Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit said shrinking the bank's $2.2 trillion balance sheet, the biggest in the U.S., was a cornerstone of his turnaround plan.

Nowhere mentioned in the accompanying 66-page handout were the additional $1.1 trillion of assets that New York-based Citigroup keeps off its books: trusts to sell mortgage-backed securities, financing vehicles to issue short-term debt and collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, to repackage bonds.

Wall Street's Great Deflation

posted by William Greider on 07/14/2008 @ 12:38pm

Phil Gramm, the senator-banker who until recently advised John McCain's campaign, did get it right about a "nation of whiners," but he misidentified the faint-hearted. It's not the people or even the politicians. It is Wall Street--the financial titans and big-money bankers, the most important investors and worldwide creditors who are scared witless by events. These folks are in full-flight panic and screaming for mercy from Washington, Their cries were answered by the massive federal bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the endangered mortgage companies.

When the monied interests whined, they made themselves heard by dumping the stocks of these two quasi-public private corporations, threatening to collapse the two financial firms like the investor "run" that wiped out Bear Stearns in March. The real distress of the banks and brokerages and major investors is that they cannot unload the rotten mortgage securities packaged by Fannie Mae and banks sold worldwide. Wall Street's preferred solution: dump the bad paper on the rest of us, the unwitting American taxpayers.

TPM: Fournier to Rove: "Keep Up the Fight"

Buried in the 50-page report on Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch released today by the House Oversight Committee, is a priceless quote from none other than the new head of the AP's Washington Bureau, Ron Fournier.

Bush officials' 'lack of recall' thwarted Tillman, Lynch probes

WASHINGTON — "A near universal lack of recall" by Bush administration officials has thwarted a congressional investigation into whether the administration deliberately misrepresented the details of the friendly fire death of former NFL player Patrick Tillman in Afghanistan and the capture of Jessica Lynch in the first days of the Iraq invasion.

In a report released Monday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform expressed skepticism about the widespread lack of memory of the two events, which were the subject of widespread media coverage and can be counted among the best known incidents of the wars.

U.S. terrorism watch list tops 1 million

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. watch list of terrorism suspects has passed 1 million records, corresponding to about 400,000 people, and a leading civil rights group said on Monday the number was far too high to be effective.

The Bush administration disagreed and called the list one of the most effective tools implemented after the September 11 hijacked plane attacks -- when a federal "no-fly" list contained just 16 people considered threats to aviation.

Paul Krugman: Fannie, Freddie and You

And now we’ve reached the next stage of our seemingly never-ending financial crisis. This time Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in the headlines, with dire warnings of imminent collapse. How worried should we be?

Well, I’m going to take a contrarian position: the storm over these particular lenders is overblown. Fannie and Freddie probably will need a government rescue. But since it’s already clear that that rescue will take place, their problems won’t take down the economy.

Furthermore, while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren’t responsible for the mess we’re in.

Also check Krugman's blog here and here for more on this issue.--Dictynna

A war waiting to happen

Washington has invested huge sums of money and effort in support of Georgia's inclusion into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a move that will tighten the alliance's iron ring around Russia. Moscow in return is increasing its military backing of the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia, risking a a major escalation of tensions between Russia and NATO, in addition to disrupting vital energy corridors.

14 July 2008

New report: Greatest value of forests is sustainable water supply

The forests of the future may need to be managed as much for a sustainable supply of clean water as any other goal, researchers say in a new federal report -- but even so, forest resources will offer no "quick fix" to the insatiable, often conflicting demands for this precious resource.

Phil Gramm’s Enron Favor

Watchdog: Senator Pushed End to Oversight for Campaign Contributor

James Ridgeway
published: January 15, 2002

The one person in the Enron scandal whom congress is not likely to subpoena is its own revered Phil Gramm, the retiring Republican Senator from Texas. Gramm and his wife, Wendy, have tight links to Enron, Wendy being a director and Gramm the pusher of legislation that assisted the company during its troubles last year. In December, his press secretary denied the latter charge, saying, "Senator Gramm took no role, had no say, and did not vote on the energy futures provisions."

Medicare’s Bias

The intense struggle in Congress last week over a relatively modest Medicare reform bill has underscored a disturbing truth: many of the private plans that participate in the huge government-sponsored health insurance program for older Americans have become a far too costly drain on Medicare’s overstretched budget.

Private health plans were promoted in the 1980s and 1990s in the belief that they could reduce costs and improve care through better management. And for a while they did. But policy changes that were championed by the Bush administration and a Republican-controlled Congress led to exactly the opposite outcome.

Many Retirees Face Prospect of Outliving Savings, Study Says

By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 13, 2008; F01

Nearly three out of five middle-class retirees will probably run out of money if they maintain their pre-retirement lifestyles, a new study from Ernst & Young has concluded.

The study, set to be released tomorrow, finds that Americans will have to drastically reduce their standard of living before retirement to live comfortably, or even avoid destitution, later in life. Middle-income Americans entering retirement now will have to reduce their standard of living by an average of 24 percent to minimize their chances of outliving their financial assets, the study found. Workers seven years from retirement will have to cut their spending by even more -- 37 percent.

The Bad Frame: Why Are the New Yorker, Salon and Other Liberal Media Doing the Right's Dirty Work?

By Don Hazen, AlterNet
Posted on July 14, 2008, Printed on July 14, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/91355/

New Yorker magazine hits the newsstands today with a shocking cover -- a caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama depicting the presidential candidate in a turban, fist-bumping his wife who has a machine gun slung over her shoulder, while the American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover is shocking in that it depicts the Obamas in bizarre, caricatured images and associations that reflect the very stereotypes with which the conservatives, particularly Fox News, have been trying to frame both the Obamas. Thus, instead of satire, the cover becomes a political poster for conservatives to reinforce their messages. Sen. Obama was shown the cover image by a reporter covering the campaign on Sunday, and while seemingly taken aback, he declined to comment.

After IndyMac's failure, which bank could be next?

Monday July 14, 4:46 pm ET
By Madlen Read, AP Business Writer

As banks prepare to reveal quarterly results, investors wonder which could be next to fail NEW YORK (AP) -- The bank executives who promised months ago that the worst of the financial crisis had passed are looking less and less credible to investors. And that could pose a problem as the industry releases what are expected to be dismal second-quarter earnings over the next few weeks.

Certainly, not all banks are going the way of IndyMac Corp., which was seized by the government on Friday. In fact, analysts expect several banks to come out on top as the industry consolidates in the coming years.

13 July 2008

An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants

WATERLOO, Iowa — In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own.

Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.

The Death of Reaganomics

By E.J. Dionne

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.

Since the Reagan years, free-market clichés have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn’t matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to “grow the pie” is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is “protectionism.”

Frank Rich: The Real-Life ‘24’ of Summer 2008

WE know what a criminal White House looks like from “The Final Days,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic account of Richard Nixon’s unraveling. The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.

“The Final Days” was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and perhaps most chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, long a relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat. Her book “The Dark Side” connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of her top-tier colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New York Times) to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution.

Glenn Greenwald: Torture and the Rule of Law

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, one of the country’s handful of truly excellent investigative journalists over the last seven years, has written a new book — “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals” — which reveals several extraordinary (though unsurprising) facts regarding America’s torture regime. According to the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which received an advanced copy, Mayer’s book reports the following:

  • “Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.”
  • “A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were ‘enemy combatants’ subject to indefinite incarceration.”

President George W Bush backs Israeli plan for strike on Iran

As Tehran tests new missiles, America believes only a show of force can deter President Ahmadinejad

President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.

Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread scepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an “amber light” to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.