Official Unemployment Rate Understates the Situation

by Meteor Blades

Fri Dec 05, 2008 at 09:34:58 PM PST

Back in 1994, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics changed how it gauged unemployment, choosing to exclude "discouraged workers." That means people available and eager to work but who, after a year of looking, have given up because they cannot find a job. The Clinton administration just chopped these discouraged workers out of the most commonly reported statistic on unemployment.

The figure now used - the official rate (which today clocked in at 6.7%) - is called U3 in BLS jargon. As you can see from this table, it's labeled "Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force." But, as you can also see from the table, there are other, broader measures that rarely get reported in the megamedia, although The Wall Street Journal did include one of these in paragraph 16 of Market Watch today:

An alternative gauge of unemployment -- which includes discouraged workers and those whose hours have been cut back to part-time -- rose to 12.5% from 11.8%. The number of workers forced to work part-time rose by 621,000 to 7.3 million.

That particular measure is labeled U6, which the BLS categorizes as "Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers."

Report: South a big exporter of guns used in crime

Ten states are responsible for the bulk of illegal guns that are shipped across state lines for use in crimes, according to a report released Friday by a national coalition of mayors.

• Police: Attacks targeting security kill 6 in Iraq 12.06.08

About 30 percent of guns traced by federal agents in 2006 and 2007 during crime investigations were bought in a state other than where the crime occurred, said the report by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which largely blamed the transport of illegal guns on states with lax gun laws.

How to unplug from the grid

03 December 2008
by Gaia Vince
Magazine issue 2685

"I HAVEN'T paid an electricity bill since 1970," says Richard Perez with noticeable glee. He can afford to be smug. While most of us fretted over soaring utility bills this year, he barely noticed. Nor is he particularly concerned about forecast price hikes of 30 to 50 per cent in 2009.

Perez, a renewable-energy researcher at the University at Albany, State University of New York, lives "off-grid" - unconnected to the power grid and the water, gas and sewerage supplies that most of us rely on. He generates his own electricity, sources his own water and manages his own waste disposal - and prefers it that way. "There are times when the grid blacks out," he says. "I like the security of having my own electricity company."

Conservation atlas reveals 'most valuable' forest

• 18:25 05 December 2008 by Catherine Brahic
• For similar stories, visit the Endangered Species Topic Guide

A new atlas shows how conservation efforts can most efficiently make use of limited resources by laying out which forests store large amounts of carbon and are also home to a great diversity of animals and plants.

The UN Environment Programme, which released the maps (pdf format) at the ongoing UN climate summit in Poznan, Poland, believes they could guide investments in forest conservation.

"At a time of scarce financial resources and economic concerns, every dollar, euro or rupee needs to deliver double, even triple dividends," says Achim Steiner, executive director of UNEP. "By pinpointing where high densities of carbon overlap with high levels of biodiversity, the atlas spotlights where governments and investors can deal with two crises for the price of one."

UT public health policy expert says US can learn from Dutch universal healthcare coverage

The United States can learn from the Dutch Health Insurance System model, according to an article by Pauline V. Rosenau, Ph.D., in the December issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

Rosenau, professor of management, policy and community health at The University of Texas School of Public Health at Houston, co-authored the lead article, which discusses universal health care coverage in the Netherlands and its possible lessons for the United States.

Chasing Stiglitz

Obama's economic team is missing the one guy who's been right all along.

Dec 4, 2008

OK, enough with the Obamamania already. I have a major bone to pick with our all-praised president-elect. Where, Mr. Obama, is Joseph Stiglitz? Most pundits have pretty much gone ga-ga over your economic team: The brilliant Larry Summers as head of your National Economic Council. The judicious Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary. The august Paul Volcker as chair of the newly formed Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But lost amid the cascades of ticker tape is the fact that, astonishingly, you didn't hire the one expert who's been right about the financial crisis all along—and whose Nobel Prize-winning ideas will probably be most central to fixing the global economy.

This is not speculation. A source close to Stiglitz told me Thursday that the Columbia University economist has been left out in the cold, even though he was expecting at least an offer. (Stiglitz, traveling in Brazil, could not be reached.) Especially since Stiglitz supported Obama long before most of the others named to his cabinet (at a time when Summers was a key advisor to Hillary Clinton). "Who knows why? Obama has been choosing center-right people," said the source, an associate of Stiglitz's who would speak only on condition of anonymity. She went on to say that Stiglitz's long-time enmity with Summers—whose ideas, Obama said last week, "will be the foundation of all my economic policies"—may be a factor. "Larry's had it in for Joe for decades," she said.

The Safety Net Will Not Catch the Poor This Time

by The Arse

Thu Dec 04, 2008 at 07:50:00 AM PST

Warning: Policy Wonkish post below.

I have been meaning to blog about this NYT article on the recession and America's safety net for quite some time:

Unemployment insurance is not as generous now. Yet the unemployment rate is at 6.5 percent and some forecasters say it could top 8 percent next year. It hit 10.8 percent in the early 1980s.

This is also the first severe economic slump since President Bill Clinton overhauled the welfare system and made it tougher to qualify for, and keep receiving, benefits. Many people who lose their jobs now and fall into poverty may not qualify for public assistance. Other programs designed in part to counter hard times — like job training and housing subsidies — have also been cut back.

Newlyweds now older than at any time since 19th Century

By Suzanne Peres Tobias | Wichita Eagle

Katie Grover was in no rush to get hitched.

"None of my girlfriends were getting married right out of college, so I didn't feel any pressure to do that," says Grover, marketing director for Heartspring in Wichita.

When she and her husband, Travis, married in May, she was 30. He was 31.

Like many couples in Kansas and elsewhere, the Grovers waited to marry until they felt financially and emotionally ready. They're part of a growing trend of young adults waiting until their late 20s or 30s before deciding to marry.

Bernanke Calls for More Help for Homeowners

By JACK HEALY

The Federal Reserve Board chairman said Thursday that the government and banks must do more to curb a flood of foreclosures that has devastated families and neighborhoods and now threatens to deepen the housing crisis.

The Fed chief, Ben S. Bernanke, said the government had made serious attempts to address the housing crisis and ease the rates of foreclosures. But Mr. Bernanke said some of those programs had so far been sparsely used, and might need bolstering.

“Despite good-faith efforts by both the private and public sectors, the foreclosure rate remains too high, with adverse consequences for both those directly involved and for the broader economy,” Mr. Bernanke said in a speech in Washington. “More needs to be done.”

The abundant fossil fuel you’ve never heard of

At the edges of the Alaskan permafrost, a consortium of government and oil industry scientists are preparing to drill. They aim to tap one of the largest potential energy sources ever discovered, and one that few people have ever heard of: flammable ice crystals packed with hydrocarbons, called methane gas hydrates.

The project, a joint effort between BP, the United States Geo­logi­cal Survey (USGS), and the Department of Energy is set to begin in late 2009 or 2010 and marks the first large-scale production test of this unconventional substance. The group is nearing agreement on a drill site. [Editor’s note:The original version called BP by its old name.]

Why Obama Should Replace Larry Summers With Eliot Spitzer

It's easy to snicker at Slate magazine for signing up Eliot Spitzer, former New York governor and onetime john, as a regular columnist. But judging from Spitzer's first outing, it was a master stroke.

The manner in which Spitzer crashed and burned has essentially wiped out the pre-prostitution portion of the Spitzer tale, which included his longtime stint as a critic of corporate excesses. But Spitzer's opening column in Slate is a reminder that in these days of multi-billion-dollar bailouts, there are few powerful and knowledgeable figures in government raising the appropriate questions and challenging the save-the-rich orthodoxy.

Beijing holds key to prosperity

By Henry C K Liu

Part 1: Denial as the storm gathered

The present crisis undermining the very fabric of the United States financial and economic system has conjured up the shades of the crisis that came with the collapse of the economic bubble in Japan in the mid-1990s.

Yet Japan, whose financial system has been in continuous recession for more than a decade, is, ironically, relatively sheltered from the current credit squeeze. It has now come under US and European Union pressure to try to stimulate domestic demand through government spending.

Glenn Greenwald: Why Do Feinstein and Wyden Sound Much Different on the Torture Issue Now?

Time constraints prevented me yesterday from writing about Dianne Feinstein's comments concerning torture in yesterday's New York Times, in which the California Senator -- who will replace Jay Rockefeller as Chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee -- rather clearly backtracked on what had been her repeated, unequivocal insistence throughout the year that the CIA should be required to comply with the Army Field Manual when interrogating detainees. But Time's Michael Scherer picked up on the same backtracking and did a very good job of highlighting what appears to be Feinstein's (as well as Ron Wyden's) conspicuous, and rather disturbing, reversals.

But it's actually somewhat worse even than Scherer suggests. According to Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, who wrote the article, Feinstein and Wyden are just two of the "senior Democratic lawmakers" who have "seemed reluctant in recent interviews to commit the new administration to following the Army Field Manual in all cases" -- despite the fact that both Feinstein and Wyden said throughout the year that they emphatically favored such a measure and even co-sponsored legislation requiring it.

Actions Have Consequences (1) (update)

By Rick Perlstein
December 4th, 2008 - 12:13pm ET

---

I was heading somewhere in my post on Tuesday; today, here, I hope to get there. I was writing about how a favorite conservative bromide—"ideas have consequences"—also applies to them, and in spades. The saying is marshaled, self-righteously, as a way for conservatives to "argue" that everything bad in modern life, from Mao's Great Famine to Susan Smith driving her children into a lake, can be traced back in origin to awful liberal intellectuals—say, Emmanuel Kant, arguing that humans can derive moral codes from our faculty for reason.

Too Big Not To Fail

We need to stop using the bailouts to rebuild gigantic financial institutions.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008, at 5:59 PM ET

---

Last month, as the financial crisis and the government rescue plan dominated headlines, almost everyone overlooked a news item that could have enormous long-term impact: GE Capital announced the acquisition of five mid-size airplanes—with an option to buy 20 more—produced by CACC, a new, Chinese-government-sponsored airline manufacturer.

Why is that so significant? Two reasons: First, just as small steps signaled the Asian entry into our now essentially bankrupt auto sector 50 years ago, so the GE acquisition signals Asia's entry into one of our few remaining dominant manufacturing sectors. Boeing is still the world's leading commercial aviation company. CACC's emergence—and its particular advantage selling to Asian markets—means that Boeing now faces the rigors of an entirely new competitive playing field and that our commercial airplane sector is likely to suffer enormously over the coming decades.

Al Gore leads new ‘Reality’ Coalition to debunk ‘clean coal’ myth

Today, Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, the League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club launched the “Reality” Coalition, a national grassroots and advertising effort to tell a simple truth: there is no such thing as “clean coal.”

Suit contesting Barack Obama's citizenship heads to U.S. Supreme Court Friday

Justices will decide whether to consider the ase

By James Janega | Tribune reporter
December 4, 2008

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama's election.

The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer's supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation's highest court.

The suit originally sought to stay the election, and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells.

Obama's Health Care Reform Plan Is Based on the Clintons' Failed 1990s Model

By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted on December 4, 2008, Printed on December 4, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/109844/

WASHINGTON -- Here is a number easily understood by even the math-phobic: Every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate leads to another 1.1 million Americans becoming uninsured -- and causes still another million more children and adults to become eligible for state health insurance programs.

This means that over the past 10 months, as the hemorrhage of jobs began to push the national unemployment rate toward its October level of 6.5 percent, about 3 million Americans were thrown off the insurance rolls or had their incomes fall so much that they became eligible for Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

Denial as the storm gathered

By Henry C K Liu

China's response to the current global financial crisis is predicated on the reality of the international situation and the separate responses of other major economies around the world.

It took more than a year for US President George W Bush, in whose country the decades-long credit joyride finally imploded in August 2007, to belatedly acknowledge that the financial crisis resulting from decades of US monetary indulgence and fiscal irresponsibility is not merely a passing shower needed to deflate the latest debt bubble in the housing sector of the US economy.

For Bush - and Obama - a Gut Check

by Scott Ritter

George Bush's candid interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson has one moment of awful truth - when the president, asked if he'd have gone to war had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, stated: "That's a do-over that I can't do." If only he could.

More than 4,207 US service members, 314 coalition troops (including 176 British fatalities) and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis might be alive, including, of course, Saddam Hussein, the former ruler of Iraq whom Bush promised to disarm together with America's "friends of freedom". Saddam, Bush proclaimed in the weeks leading up to his decision to invade, and subsequently occupy, Iraq, was "a dangerous, dangerous man with dangerous, dangerous weapons." The Iraqi dictator was "a danger to America and our friends and allies, and that is why the world has said 'disarm'".

Eco-problems of the 80s return to haunt us

Not only are 1980s garish clothes and synthpop music back in fashion, but it seems the era's environmental problems are also returning to haunt us.

One of the first empirical studies to look at how global warming is affecting ecosystem health has found that the wet winters of recent years have hampered the recovery of streams from damage caused by acid rain decades ago.

EPA to gut mountaintop mining rule that protects streams

Renee Schoof and Bill Estep | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: December 03, 2008 07:47:18 AM

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday approved a last-minute rule change by the Bush administration that will allow coal companies to bury streams under the rocks leftover from mining.

The 1983 rule prohibited dumping the fill from mountaintop removal mining within 100 feet of streams. In practice, the government hadn't been enforcing the rule. Government figures show that 535 miles of streams were buried or diverted from 2001 to 2005, more than half of them in the mountains of Appalachia. Along with the loss of the streams has been an increase of erosion and flooding.

The 11th hour change before President George W. Bush leaves office would eliminate a tool that citizens groups have used in lawsuits to keep mining waste out of streams. Mining companies had been pushing for the change for years.

FDIC chief: Intervene on foreclosures

Bank efforts to modify mortgages for troubled homeowners fail to reduce foreclosures - Sheila Bair urges resistant investors to be 'fiscally responsible.'

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The nation's top banking regulator warned Tuesday that help for troubled homeowners is failing to keep pace with the foreclosure crisis.

"We're definitely behind the curve, and we fall further behind the curve every day," FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair told an audience at the Fortune 500 Forum in Washington, D.C.

Thomas Frank: Health-Care Reform Could Kill the GOP

Bill Kristol was right to panic.

By THOMAS FRANK

Can policy be both wise and aggressively partisan? Ask any Republican worth his salt and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Ask a Democrat of the respectable Beltway variety and he will twist himself into a pretzel denying it.

For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side. One of their fondest slogans is "Defund the Left," and under that banner they have attacked labor unions and trial lawyers and tried to sever the links between the lobbying industry and the Democratic Party. Consider as well their long-cherished dreams of privatizing Social Security, which would make Wall Street, instead of Washington, the protector of our beloved seniors. Or their larger effort to demonstrate, by means of egregious misrule, that government is incapable of delivering the most basic services.

Big Personalities Join Obama Foreign-Policy Team

President-elect Says He Will Set Agenda

By Spencer Ackerman 12/1/08 2:30 PM

In 1936, the Republican Party nominated for vice president an uncompromising critic of the New Deal named Frank Knox. A veteran of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, Knox attained prominence as a Chicago newspaperman, branding Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s economic agenda “alien and un-American” and repeatedly proclaiming its failure.

Four years later, knowing Knox’s prestige among the GOP faithful and mindful of the need for national unity as Europe fell to the Nazis, President Roosevelt made Knox, who agreed with Roosevelt on the scope of the German threat, his secretary of the Navy.

Obama, Ask the Kremlin about Gates

by: Robert Parry, Consortium News

Nearly 16 years ago, during the last transition from a President Bush to a Democrat, Moscow made an extraordinary gesture to Washington: The Kremlin supplied a summary of its intelligence information about secret U.S.-Iranian contacts in the 1980s.

The report was from a national security committee of the Russian Duma to Rep. Lee Hamilton, who had requested what might be in Moscow's files as part of a task force investigation into whether the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 had interfered with President Jimmy Carter's bid to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

Rick Perlstein: Ideas Have Consequences (1)

December 2nd, 2008 - 12:04pm ET

---

I have a conservative friend I've been emailing back and forth with for years—which means, basically, that for years and years he's been bombarding me with insistent bleats about the horrors of government. Any government. It turns human beings into serfs, slaves, little babies slurping on mother's breasts and unable to do anything else. It breaks up families, corrodes souls, tears the bond between man and God asunder. This particular conservative, in fact, used to be a survivalist.

In Courtroom Showdown, Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms

SAN FRANCISCO — The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation's telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans' private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

At issue in the high-stakes showdown — set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST — are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.

Glenn Greenwald: NBC and McCaffrey's coordinated responses to the NYT story

Following up on yesterday's post regarding NBC News' suppression of the "military analyst" scandal and its ongoing reliance on the deeply conflicted Barry McCaffrey: I have obtained, from a very trustworthy source, emails sent last week between NBC News executives and McCaffrey (which cc:d Brian Williams), reflecting the extensive collaboration between NBC and McCaffrey to formulate a coordinated response to David Barstow's story. The emails are re-printed here.

Rather than honestly investigate the numerous facts which Barstow uncovered about McCaffery's severe conflicts, NBC instead is clearly in self-protective mode, working in tandem with McCaffrey to create justifications for what they have done. As these emails reflect, both this weekend's story about McCaffrey and the earlier NYT story in April have caused NBC News to expend substantial amounts of time, effort and resources trying to manage the P.R. aspects of this story.

Bailout Monitor Sees Lack of a Coherent Plan

By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

The head of a new Congressional panel set up to monitor the gigantic federal bailout says the government still does not seem to have a coherent strategy for easing the financial crisis, despite the billions it has already spent in that effort.

Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the oversight panel, said in an interview Monday that the government instead seemed to be lurching from one tactic to the next without clarifying how each step fits into an overall plan.

“You can’t just say, ‘Credit isn’t moving through the system,’ ” she said in her first public comments since being named to the panel. “You have to ask why.”

The Many Ways Our Future is a Mess

By Michael T. Klare, The Nation
Posted on December 2, 2008, Printed on December 2, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/109437/

In a remarkable evocation of the strategic environment of 2025, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a government intelligence service, portrays a world in which the United States wields considerably less power than it does today but faces far greater challenges. The assessment, contained in Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, was released November 20 and is intended to be read by President-elect Obama's transition team as well as the general public. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor," the council notes, "the United States' relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and US leverage will become more constrained."

The report is devoted largely to an examination of the major trends -- political, economic, military and environmental -- that will shape the world of 2025: the rise of China and India as major actors in world affairs; Russia's growing significance as a power broker in Europe; the increasing role of corporations, crime networks and other nonstate actors; and the growing impact of climate change. But two key developments, by the council's own admission, stand out above all others: the decline of America's global primacy and the growing international competition for energy.

U of Minnesota Institute on Race and Poverty reports dismal results for charter schools

The University of Minnesota Law School's Institute on Race and Poverty has released a report that reveals very troubling data concerning the success rates of charter schools in the Twin Cities metro area.

Glenn Greenwald: The Ongoing Disgrace of NBC News and Brian Williams

The New York Times's David Barstow, whose excellent and aggressive journalism led to the uncovering last April of the Pentagon's domestic propaganda program involving network "military analysts," today returns to this topic with another lengthy front-page exposé. Barstow focuses today on the numerous, undisclosed conflicts of interest of Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who continues to be featured frequently by NBC News as an objective analyst as he opines about war policies in which he has a substantial (and concealed) financial stake.

Some of the key facts which Barstow reports concerning the improper behavior of McCaffrey and NBC News were documented all the way back in April, 2003, in this excellent article from The Nation, which Barstow probably should have credited today. That article -- entitled "TV's Conflicted Experts" -- detailed the numerous defense contractors to which McCaffrey had a substantial connection -- including Mitretek, Veritas and Integrated Defense Technologies, all featured by Barstow today -- and highlighted how the policies and viewpoints McCaffrey was advocating as a "military analyst" on NBC directly benefited those companies.

Persistent pollutant may promote obesity

Compound shown to affect gene activity at extremely low concentrations

Tributyltin, a ubiquitous pollutant that has a potent effect on gene activity, could be promoting obesity, according to an article in the December issue of BioScience. The chemical is used in antifouling paints for boats, as a wood and textile preservative, and as a pesticide on high-value food crops, among many other applications.

Tributyltin affects sensitive receptors in the cells of animals, from water fleas to humans, at very low concentrations—a thousand times lower than pollutants that are known to interfere with sexual development of wildlife species. Tributyltin and its relatives are highly toxic to mollusks, causing female snails to develop male sexual characteristics, and it bioaccumulates in fish and shellfish.

Biofuel plantations on tropical forestlands are bad for the climate and biodiversity, study finds

WASHINGTON DC, December 1, 2008 -- Keeping tropical rain forests intact is a better way to combat climate change than replacing them with biofuel plantations, a study in the journal Conservation Biology finds.

The study reveals that it would take at least 75 years for the carbon emissions saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost through forest conversion. And if the original habitat was carbon-rich peatland, the carbon balance would take more than 600 years. On the other hand, planting biofuels on degraded Imperata grasslands instead of tropical rain forests would lead to a net removal of carbon in 10 years, the authors found.

Rivers are carbon processors, not inert pipelines

Microorganisms in rivers and streams play a crucial role in the global carbon cycle that has not previously been considered. Freshwater ecologist Dr. Tom Battin, of the University of Vienna, told a COST ESF Frontiers of Science conference in October that our understanding of how rivers and streams deal with organic carbon has changed radically.

Microorganisms such as bacteria and single celled algae in rivers and streams decompose organic matter as it flows downstream. They convert the carbon it contains into carbon dioxide, which is then released to the atmosphere.

Bush’s 11th-Hour Bid for Secrecy

By Stanley Kutler

The times are unprecedented. Not since 1861 have we watched the last gasps of an outgoing administration with such anxiety. Then the nation was concerned with drift and inertia; now we watch for further ideological mischief.

Republicans were aghast in 2001 to discover that President Bill Clinton’s staff allegedly had dropped the “W” from White House computer keyboards. Frat house stuff. George W. Bush has left a legacy significantly more troubling, measured by the breakdown of normal government processes, as well as of constitutional guarantees and practices. We watch last-minute rushes to implement new administrative rules, to transform and burrow political appointees into tenured civil servants, to further weaken environmental safeguards, to shift public funds to a desired end, and to lay down policy declarations to leave the current administration’s successors bound or embarrassed until they are undone.

Paul Krugman: Deficits and the Future

Right now there’s intense debate about how aggressive the United States government should be in its attempts to turn the economy around. Many economists, myself included, are calling for a very large fiscal expansion to keep the economy from going into free fall. Others, however, worry about the burden that large budget deficits will place on future generations.

But the deficit worriers have it all wrong. Under current conditions, there’s no trade-off between what’s good in the short run and what’s good for the long run; strong fiscal expansion would actually enhance the economy’s long-run prospects.

The claim that budget deficits make the economy poorer in the long run is based on the belief that government borrowing “crowds out” private investment — that the government, by issuing lots of debt, drives up interest rates, which makes businesses unwilling to spend on new plant and equipment, and that this in turn reduces the economy’s long-run rate of growth. Under normal circumstances there’s a lot to this argument.

Tomgram: Steve Fraser, Empire of Depression

If you want to catch something of the fears and hopes of Americans right now, go to News.Google.com and try searching for a few words. For instance, put in "FDR" -- the well-known initials of the man who was president four times and took America through the Great Depression and all but the last months of World War II -- and endless screens of references pop up.

The Nation and the National Review have both devoted space to him. Paul Krugman and George Will both thought this was the moment to focus on him. Checking out the headlines you might think that the intervening sixty-four years since his death had simply vanished: ("Will FDR Inspire Obama?" "Obama's jobs plan could echo FDR's," "Clinton's potential pitfalls seen in FDR's secretary of State," Channeling FDR," "FDR saved capitalism -- now it's Obama's turn," and so on); headlines galore, not to speak of that Time Magazine "Obama as FDR?" cover.

AP IMPACT: US diluted loan rules before crash

By MATT APUZZO – 16 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

"Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

An Obama National Security Pick More Important than Hillary

By David Corn | December 1, 2008 11:05 AM

All the talk is Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. As President-elect Barack Obama announced his national security team on Monday morning, the headliner was indeed the junior senator from New York State. While this move remains a surprise and perhaps even a gamble--I've had my say on this--it could be that the more important pick of the day is retired General James Jones to be Barack Obama's national security adviser.

One of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's many accomplishments was to wreck the national security apparatus of the United States government--with key assists from Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. For years, Foggy Bottom and the CIA were at war with the Pentagon and the White House, while the national security adviser (that would be Rice) became not a policy broker (as the job requires) but an enabler. She allowed ideologues to run wild and to trump expertise. She made sure that dissenting opinions were not placed front and center before the president. Foreign policy became the territory of a small band of arrogant know-it-alls who, it turned out, did not know nearly enough.

US factory output plummets again

US manufacturing activity fell in November to a fresh 26-year low, the latest figures from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) have shown.

For the second month in succession, figures have hit lows last seen in 1982, with activity declining to 36.2 in November from 38.9 in October.

Health Care: It's Time for a Major Overhaul

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet
Posted on December 1, 2008, Printed on December 1, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/109230/

Back in early September, a microcosm of the looming health care debate played out on the stage of the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce. Karen Ignagni, CEO of the insurers' largest industry association, was leading a roundtable discussion as part of a national "listening tour" organized by her organization, America's Health Insurance Plans. Waiting for Ignagni in the auditorium were activists from the local chapter of ACORN, who had come to share their thoughts on the CEO's market-based reform ideas. It didn't take long before the line of questioning became a little too heated for the Chamber of Commerce moderator. "What do you expect?" he exploded in front of a stunned audience. "The insurance industry has to make a profit -- that's what they do!"

The GOP's McCarthy gene

Think Goldwater is the father of conservatism? Think again.

By Neal Gabler
November 30, 2008

Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or, more specifically, which wing of the party will prevail in setting the new Republican course -- whether it will be what conservative writer Kathleen Parker has called the "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy" branch or the more pragmatic, intellectual, centrist branch. To determine the answer, it helps to understand exactly how Republicans arrived at this spot in the first place.

The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party's presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. Then, Richard Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, and drawing the opprobrium of true believers. But Ronald Reagan embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country. George W. Bush picked up Reagan's fallen standard and "conservatized" government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That's how the story goes.

Surprise! Bailout oversight not happening

I suspect that oversight is being evaded so that the public won't find out that the money has gone overseas. I can see other countries that hitched themselves to our financial wagon threatening to nationalize US commercial and military property within their borders.--Dictynna

by Kagro X

Sat Nov 29, 2008 at 01:30:04 PM PST

TPM reports an "interesting nugget" from the continuing bailout saga: an unnamed Republican Senator is blocking the confirmation of Neil Barofsky, nominated by the White House to the newly created position of Special Inspector General at the Treasury Department.

Last week, Sen. Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the banking committee, issued a little-noticed statement saying that although the nomination "was cleared by members of the Senate Banking Committee, the leadership of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and all Democratic Senators," it was "blocked on the floor by at least one Republican member." (itals ours.) [meaning theirs]

TPM further notes that, "Senate rules allow any senator to anonymously block a vote on confirmation to any federal post, for any reason."

Bush aides push for rule to hamper worker health protections

Bush administration aides are rushing to pass a safety rule which would make government regulation of workers' exposure to toxic chemicals more difficult; a rule President-elect Barack Obama opposes.

Public health officials worry the decreased protections will result in additional, unnecessary deaths.

Commentary: So much for letting the free market rule

By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

Hear that humming sound? That's the printing presses at the United States Treasury running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, churning out an ocean of green paper to bail out the billionaire bankers, brokers and assorted brigands who are responsible for the economic disaster that's befallen us.

They're busy running off $3.7 trillion in bailout money for those who don't deserve it. It's a Happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas to the very pirates whose greed got us, and them, in all the trouble.

Isn't capitalism grand?

Salmon-tracking network upends some sacred cows

By Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — They were two of the 1,000 juvenile salmon implanted with almond-sized transmitters as they headed out of the Rocky Mountains, down the Snake River bound for the sea.

Their remarkable three-month, 1,500-mile journey of survival to the Gulf of Alaska was tracked by an underwater acoustic listening network that has wired the West Coast from just north of San Francisco to southeastern Alaska. The tracking network could provide a model for a global system.

Greenhouse gases will heat up planet 'for ever'

New study shows the effects of CO2 pollution will be felt for hundreds of thousands of years

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 30 November 2008

Global warming is for ever, some of the world's top climate scientists have concluded. Their research shows that carbon dioxide emitted from today's homes, cars and factories will continue to heat up the planet for hundreds of thousands of years.

Their findings – which contradict a widespread belief that the atmosphere would recover quickly once humanity stopped polluting it – come at the beginning of the most crucial week for the climate this year. Tomorrow Britain's powerful Climate Change Committee will lay out a road map to put the country on track to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. At the same time, the world's governments will meet in Poznan, in Poland, to try to set the world on the path to agreeing a new international treaty next year, billed as the last chance to keep global warming to tolerable levels.

Saved by their stripes: Africa's vanishing herds

Jessica Aldred
guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 30 2008 00.01 GMT

As the rain begins to fall on Tanzania's Tarangire National Park, thousands of zebra, wildebeest and giraffe will begin one of the world's greatest migrations. But many of the herds trampling across the grass at the foot of the Rift Valley highlands are falling in number - and scientists do not know why.

To find out, they are using a new 'photo-fit' system that can recognise individual animals by their unique skin patterns, which are as distinct as a human fingerprint.

It's a depression

By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON -- Few prominent economists will say it, but to me it looks and feels like we are in another Great Depression or a reasonable facsimile.

The current meltdown is dubbed a "financial crisis." But a rose by any other name would still inflict the same hardship and suffering on most people and businesses.

Clearly, the lessons have not been learned from the Herbert Hoover era. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, says the current banking crisis is "functionally similar to that of the Great Depression."

Glenn Greenwald: Mumbai, the NYT's revisionism, and lessons not learned

The New York Times Editorial Page, today, on poor U.S./Latin American relations:

[T]he Bush administration did enormous damage to American credibility throughout much of the region when it blessed what turned out to be a failed coup against Mr. Chávez.

Indeed it did. But what the Times fails to mention, and is apparently eager to erase, is that "the Bush administration" was far from alone in blessing that coup attempt:

The New York Times Editorial Page, April 13, 2002 -- one day after the coup:

With yesterday's resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona. . . .

In Maryland, Focus on Poultry Industry Pollution

By IAN URBINA

WILLARDS, Md. — Standing before a two-story-tall pile of chicken manure, Lee Richardson pondered how times had changed.

“When I left school and started working the land, this stuff was seen as farmer’s gold,” said Mr. Richardson, 38, a fifth-generation chicken grower, explaining that the waste was an ideal fertilizer for the region’s sandy soil. “Now, it’s too much of a good thing.”

How to handle the 650 million pounds of chicken manure produced in the state each year has sparked a fierce debate between environmentalists and the state’s powerful poultry industry. State officials hope to bring Maryland in line with most other states next month by enacting new rules for where, how and how long chicken farmers can spread the manure on their fields or store it in outdoor piles.

Study's Claim on the 'Myth' of Obama's Small Donor Base Is Itself a 'Myth'

The Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) study disclosing that Barack Obama actually raised most of his campaign money from "larger" not "small" donors has gained wide, approving, coverage in recent days, from USA Today to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and countless web sites, even making Huffington Post at least twice, including as a top link. Inevitably the headlines refer to the "myth" of Obama riding a wave of small donations to victory. That study's author himself uses it.

But the "myth" is actually in the spinning of the report, including by its author, Michael Malbin, a former speechwriter for Dick Cheney, when he was Pentagon chief, and a resident fellow at The American Enterprise Institute from 1977 to 1986.

At the Last Minute, a Raft of Rules

Bush White House Approves Regulations on Environmental, Security Matters

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 30, 2008; A04

In a burst of activity meant to leave a lasting stamp on the federal government, the Bush White House in the past month has approved 61 new regulations on environmental, security, social and commercial matters that by its own estimate will have an economic impact exceeding $1.9 billion annually.

Some of the rules benefit key industries that have long had the administration's ear, such as oil and gas companies, banks and farms. Others impose counterterrorism security requirements on importers and private aircraft owners.