The Compensation Hustle

Mid-June saw Executive Compensation Week here in Washington. On June 11 the House Financial Services Committee convened a hearing on Compensation Structure and Systemic Risk, just one day after the administration announced that attorney Ken Feinberg (lately of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund) would serve as the "Special Master" overseeing executive compensation at firms receiving TARP funds. His vaguely kinky title notwithstanding, early reports suggest Feinberg won't be imposing much discipline on naughty execs. "Our people kind of thought it was a nonevent," a bank executive told the Washington Post.

But all the attention on bonuses for executives at TARP firms obscures a much bigger issue, one touched on but never sufficiently investigated during the hearing: how to recalibrate the share of gains captured by shareholders, executives and workers in the post-crash economy.

Conservative Justices’ Strange Enthusiasm for the Punishment of the Innocent

Here’s a beaut of a decision from the increasingly brutal and inhumane conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Not content with gutting anti-discrimination legislation, a 5-4 majority has decided that if people are wrongfully convicted they should be punished anyway because, hey, tough on crime!

In 1993, William Osburne was convicted of kidnapping, assaulting and raping a woman in Anchorage, Alaska. He spent the next 14 years of his life behind bars. Osburne insists that he is innocent, the State of Alaska has in its possession DNA evidence which will once and for all prove his guilt or innocence, and Osburne has offered to pay for DNA testing out of his own pocket. Allowing Osburne to prove—or disprove–his claim of innocence will cost Alaska literally nothing.

Memo to the President: What You Must Do To Save Universal Health Care

Mr. President:

Momentum for universal health care is slowing dramatically on Capitol Hill. Moderates are worried, Republicans are digging in, and the medical-industrial complex is firing up its lobbying and propaganda machine.

But, as you know, the worst news came days ago when the Congressional Budget Office weighed in with awful projections about how much the leading healthcare plans would cost and how many Americans would still be left out in the cold. Yet these projections didn't include the savings that a public option would generate by negotiating lower drug prices, doctor fees, and hospital costs, and forcing private insurers to be more competitive. Projecting the future costs of universal health care without including the public option is like predicting the number of people who will get sunburns this summer if nobody is allowed to buy sun lotion. Of course the costs of universal health care will be huge if the most important way of controlling them is left out of the calculation.

Worse than subprime? Other mortgages imploding slowly

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Call it son of subprime. Experts warn that a new wave of mortgage foreclosures may be coming soon and could rival the default rates for subprime mortgages and slow efforts to find bottom in a prolonged national housing slump.

The mortgages in question are $230 billion of option adjustable-rate mortgages, creative lending products that flourished at the height of the housing boom. In an option ARM, a borrower can opt to pay less than his or her monthly balance due, and the difference is tacked onto the outstanding loan balance.

Teens are heading in wrong direction: Likely to have sex, but not use contraception

Between 2003 and 2007, the progress made in the 1990s and early 2000s in improving teen contraceptive use and reducing teen pregnancy and childbearing stalled, and may even have reversed among certain groups of teens, according to the study "Changing Behavior Risk for Pregnancy Among High School Students in the United States, 1991-2007."

Power Play

Obama's new rules are fine, but the feds already have all the authority they need to fix Wall Street.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Thursday, June 18, 2009, at 10:48 AM ET

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In laying the intellectual foundation for the Obama administration's proposed overhaul of financial regulations, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers rightly point out that "basic failures in financial supervision and regulation" contributed to our current predicament. That phrasing is exactly right—but they then jump in exactly the wrong direction. They presume that the failure of supervision and regulation was a result of inadequate power, rather than the lack of will to use existing power. Their conclusion, therefore, is to seek a grant of additional power rather than to question why those who had it didn't use it.

This distinction is important, because if we misunderstand the history of the crisis, we will learn the wrong lesson. Washington loves to pass new laws conferring additional power whenever there is a major mishap or crisis. Doing so implicitly confers immunity on those who were in power at the beginning of the crisis by sending the following message: The appropriate authorities did not have the power to forestall this problem. But now that we have granted new powers to these authorities, they will avert the next crisis. The problem with this grant of immunity is that we then fail to ask why no one used the power they had and whether rigid ideological thinking got us into the crisis in the first place.

Paul Krugman: Out of the Shadows

Would the Obama administration’s plan for financial reform do what has to be done? Yes and no.

Yes, the plan would plug some big holes in regulation. But as described, it wouldn’t end the skewed incentives that made the current crisis inevitable.

Let’s start with the good news.

Our current system of financial regulation dates back to a time when everything that functioned as a bank looked like a bank. As long as you regulated big marble buildings with rows of tellers, you pretty much had things nailed down.

But today you don’t have to look like a bank to be a bank. As Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, put it in a widely cited speech last summer, banking is anything that involves financing “long-term risky and relatively illiquid assets” with “very short-term liabilities.” Cases in point: Bear Stearns and Lehman, both of which financed large investments in risky securities primarily with short-term borrowing.

Firing Back on Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism

By Sara Robinson

Created 06/18/2009 - 10:56am

It's been a wild couple of weeks for those of us in the wingnutology business. Our services have been in tremendous demand as the mainstream media tries to sort out the meaning of what Scott Roeder and James von Brunn did. I've done an average of one radio show every day for the past two weeks trying to help various lefty talkers around the country make some sense of it all; and I'm generally gratified at how seriously people are starting to take this.

At the same time, I'm also appalled (though, sadly, hardly surprised) by the conservative myth-making that's going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. So it's obviously time to pull together another "Firing Back" piece to give progressives what they need to separate fact from fiction when these talking points start flying.

Glenn Greenwald: The Washington Post fires its best columnist. Why?

One of the rarest commodities in the establishment media is someone who was a vehement critic of George Bush and who now, applying their principles consistently, has become a regular critic of Barack Obama -- i.e., someone who criticizes Obama from what is perceived as "the Left" rather than for being a Terrorist-Loving Socialist Muslim. It just got a lot rarer, as The Washington Post -- at least according to Politico's Patrick Gavin -- just fired WashingtonPost.com columnist, long-time Bush critic and Obama watchdog (i.e., a real journalist) Dan Froomkin.

What makes this firing so bizarre and worthy of inquiry is that, as Gavin notes, Froomkin was easily one of the most linked-to and cited Post columnists. At a time when newspapers are relying more and more on online traffic, the Post just fired the person who, in 2007, wrote 3 out of the top 10 most-trafficked columns. In publishing that data, Media Bistro used this headline: "The Post's Most Popular Opinions (Read: Froomkin)." Isn't that an odd person to choose to get rid of?

The growing controversy over military chaplains using the armed forces to spread the Word

Ever since former president George W. Bushreferred to the war on terror as a “crusade” in the days after the September 11 attacks, many have charged that the United States was conducting a holy war, pitting a Christian America against the Muslim world. That perception grew as prominent military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin described the wars in evangelical terms, casting the U.S. military as the "army of God." Although President Obama addressed the Muslim world this month in an attempt to undo the Bush administration's legacy of militant Christian rhetoric that often antagonized Muslim countries, several recent stories have framed the issue as a wider problem of an evangelical military culture that sees spreading Christianity as part of its mission.

Obama's New Economic Plan: The Good, the Bad and the Weak

By Nomi Prins, Mother Jones
Posted on June 19, 2009, Printed on June 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140770/

On Wednesday, after weeks of the requisite press leaks and prefabricated spin, the Obama administration released details of its new "rules of the road" financial regulations, which had been billed as the most sweeping overhaul of the financial system since the Great Depression.

Obama, alas, is no FDR. Roosevelt's New Deal reforms included the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which split complex financial institutions into commercial banks (for consumers) and investment banks (for speculators). This enabled government to safeguard the boring, conventional activities of consumer banking without insuring the dice-rolls of high-risk investors. His reforms also opened the banking sector to independent audits to ensure financial soundness -- as opposed to just taking the banks' word for it, as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's recent stress tests effectively did -- and established the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, which helped people at risk of foreclosure cover their mortgages.

Group of Two is the wrong number

Advocates in the United States of a Group of Two power pairing that would link Beijing and Washington in leading a new world order acknowledge China's desire for recognition as a global power. They overlook China's preference for multilateralism and the energy it is devoting to deepening ties around its northern and western borders.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes

Of the many reckonings that black people of honest political consciousness must endure, the appointment with black slavery is the most agonizing. I don't mean the appointment with the notion of white people as the enslavers of our ancestors, but the appointment with our African ancestors as brokers.

I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in fact and in spirit.

E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress

By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: June 16, 2009

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.

The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.

GOP Introduces Bill To Derail Comparative Effectiveness Research

On Monday, Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Pat Roberts (R-KS) introduced the “Preserving Access to Targeted, Individualized, and Effective New Treatments and Services (PATIENTS) Act of 2009,” a new bill prohibiting Medicare or Medicaid from using “comparative effectiveness research to deny coverage.”

For Kyl, fear mongering about the consequences of government-takeover of health care or medical research is a part time job. He actively rallied against medical research during the stimulus debate, Kathleen Sibelius’ confirmation, and today, he took to the Senate floor to attack Democrats of seeking to “ration care”:

Dean On Conrad's Co-op Plan: Insurance Industry Licking Its Lips

Sen. Kent Conrad's proposal for a cooperative approach to health insurance coverage has created a unique challenge for progressive health care advocates who don't object to the idea but find it inadequate. Hoping not to seem uncompromising on what is health care reform's bipartisan flavor for the day, several high-profile figures began a push-back on Monday, insisting that while Conrad's idea was well intentioned, it simply would not suffice.

"This is a big mistake," former Gov. Howard Dean told the Huffington Post. "These co-ops will be very weak. Many won't have the half-million members that most experts think is necessary to influence the market... Insurance companies will be licking their lips."

Thomas Frank: Modern Slavery Comes to Kansas

Workers who were exploited abroad tend to be exploited here.

Prairie Village, Kan.

Back in grade school our teachers would take us to the statehouse in Topeka, Kan., and maneuver us in front of John Steuart Curry's terrifying mural of John Brown, trying to make abolitionism seem fresh and vivid. But we were children of the 1970s and knew that slavery was a brutish subject from long ago. This was the modern world. If we thought about such things at all, we understood that the concerns of our time were matters like inflation and the Problem of Conformity.

Over the intervening years, however, bonded labor has made a comeback, spotted by journalists in places like Saipan. And now it has apparently come all the way home, from the exotic periphery to the beige office building you pass every day in your air-conditioned sedan.

On May 27, a federal grand jury indictment was unsealed accusing a group of 12 people, mainly Uzbekistanis along with a company called Giant Labor Solutions, of running a labor trafficking ring in Kansas City, Mo., and its suburbs. If the indictment is to be believed, the scam involved the same sort of debt-bondage tricks that have pushed workers elsewhere into servitude for years.

Obama Reg Plan (Sort of) Blames Summers for Financial Mess

— By David Corn | Wed June 17, 2009 9:20 AM PST

On Wednesday, the White House released its plan for reviving financial regulatory reform. And the plan nicely sums up how credit default swaps--complex financial instruments traded between financial firms to cover possible losses--helped grease the way to the current economic disaster:

One of the most significant changes in the world of finance in recent decades has been the explosive growth and rapid innovation in the market for financial derivatives. Much of this development has occurred in the market for OTC derivatives, which are not executed on regulated exchanges. In 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) explicitly exempted OTC derivatives, to a large extent, from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In addition, the law limited the SEC’s authority to regulate certain types of OTC derivatives. As a result, the market for OTC derivatives has largely gone unregulated.

Tip-toe regulatory reform

By Henry C K Liu

United States Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers jointly wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post on Monday, June 15, to lay out the policy goal of the Barack Obama administration's regulatory reform plan to be announced two days later.

The New Boom-Bust Cycle

The housing and finance sectors caused the economic mess. Here's why they can't fix it.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, June 16, 2009, at 5:32 PM ET

---

The financial media are desperate to find good news in the troubled finance and housing sectors, the very industries that got us into this mess. This quest for green shoots is frequently comical. Today, the Wall Street Journal featured a piece about new jobs in the financial services industry. Why, JPMorgan hired 950 new loan counselors, and a former Morgan Stanley guy found a job with an asset-management company! But given that financial services firms have shed 600,000 jobs since December 2006, that hardly seems like a triumph.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg noted that housing starts were "soaring," in May, up 17.2 percent from April. That's up three straight months, the Journal chimed in. But housing is an extremely seasonal business. The CEO of a large bank once told me that his bank's mortgage business all but disappeared in the fall because men in the Northeast wouldn't look at houses on Sundays during the football season. So noting that housing starts or sales rose sequentially in the spring months is a little like saying traffic at the train station next to Yankee Stadium was up hugely in April, when 20 games were played, from March, when no games were played. What really matters is the comparison with the previous year. And the news is horrid on that front. "Year over year, housing starts were 45.2 percent lower than the pace of construction in May 2008," the Journal noted.

chatterbox

The Isolationism of Health Reform

Why won't Congress consider how other countries do it?

By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, June 15, 2009, at 8:36 PM ET

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The health care debate is, within mainstream political discourse, isolationism's last refuge.

Every day Washington's leaders tell us that we live in an interdependent world with a globalized economy. A butterfly beats its wings in Guangdong province, and four Wal-Marts materialize in Duluth. The peso plunges, and 30 Honda workers get laid off in Marysville. A coal-fired power plant belches carbon dioxide in Prague, and Lohachara Island sinks into the Bay of Bengal.

But change the subject to reform of the health care system, and the community of nations abruptly vanishes. No France, no Canada, no Germany, no Japan. Let there be no mention of any industrialized democracy save that of the United States, which is proud to claim 37^th place in the World Health Organization's rankings of the world's health systems and 15^th in the Commonwealth Fund's ranking by avoidable mortality of 19 industrialized countries (the highest rank indicates the fewest such deaths). To achieve a better score would be unpatriotic!

In huge change, Obama to strip Fed of power over credit cards

By Kevin G. Hall and Tony Pugh | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will propose Wednesday creating a new body to regulate financial products such as mortgages and credit cards, with an eye toward protecting consumers and ordinary investors. It's a radical shift in approach and a tacit acknowledgment of federal failure.

Obama will unveil the broadest proposed revamp of financial regulations since the Great Depression, addressing many of the shortcomings that left the U.S. financial system on the brink of collapse and triggered the recession.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Too Poor to Make the News

THE human side of the recession, in the new media genre that’s been called “recession porn,” is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the “great leveler,” smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.

But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility — the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view “the economy,” as a shared condition, is a fiction.

School Daze: Religious Right Still Can't Grasp Separation Of Church And School

By Rob Boston
Tue Jun 16, 2009 at 12:39:31 PM EST

Yesterday, I took the day off to attend a special end-of-the-year event at my son's school: He and other members of his fifth-grade class wrote and illustrated stories, which they bound in books and read aloud to visiting parents.

As I surveyed the classroom full of eager students and proud parents, I couldn't help but be struck by the diversity. All races were represented, and several kids mentioned being born in other countries.

I'd guess there was a lot of religious diversity there, too. I suspect we had many varieties of Christians in that room, along with Jews, non-believers, Muslims and probably others.

It was a stark example of why we don't preach religion in public schools.

Un-Cooperative: The Trouble with Conrad's Compromise

Editor's Note: Jacob S. Hacker is co-director of the Center for Health, Economic, and Family Security at U.C. Berkeley; a fellow at the New America Foundation; and the editor of Health at Risk: America's Ailing Health System--and How to Heal It. He's also a regular guest contributor to The Treatment.

In the fast-moving debate over health care, no idea invites more admiration or ire than the “public health insurance option”--or what I’ve been trying to get people to describe as “public plan choice”. The idea is overwhelmingly popular with Americans, garnering 85 percent support in a new independent poll from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. It’s also compelling and simple: If you don’t have coverage from your employer, you can choose from a menu of health insurance products that includes not just a range of private health plans but also a public insurance plan provided on the same terms nationwide.

Military accepting neo-Nazis, white supremacists, probe finds

The US military has effectively adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy concerning white supremacists and neo-Nazis in an effort to bolster recruiting and retention, an article published Monday says.

Numerous articles have detailed the Army’s recruiting woes in the wake of two ongoing US wars abroad. Soldiers are less likely to enlist — or re-enlist — when faced with possible death overseas, though recruiting has gotten easier during the current recession.

Paul Krugman: Stay the Course

The debate over economic policy has taken a predictable yet ominous turn: the crisis seems to be easing, and a chorus of critics is already demanding that the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration abandon their rescue efforts. For those who know their history, it’s déjà vu all over again — literally.

For this is the third time in history that a major economy has found itself in a liquidity trap, a situation in which interest-rate cuts, the conventional way to perk up the economy, have reached their limit. When this happens, unconventional measures are the only way to fight recession.

Yet such unconventional measures make the conventionally minded uncomfortable, and they keep pushing for a return to normalcy. In previous liquidity-trap episodes, policy makers gave in to these pressures far too soon, plunging the economy back into crisis. And if the critics have their way, we’ll do the same thing this time.

Fertilizer industry finds its alternative energy: corncobs

By Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — American agriculture has become increasingly dependent on foreign sources of natural gas, a key ingredient in the nitrogen fertilizer that farmers use to get high yields of crops such as corn and wheat.

Now, a California start-up company is preparing to open a plant that will make fertilizer in the U.S. and reduce fossil fuel emissions from agriculture.

Nothing exotic needed, said the company, SynGest of San Francisco. The raw ingredient for the same ammonia-based fertilizer farmers have used for decades is something many already have and don't really need: corncobs.

The Age of Tom Paine

By Bill Moyers

Created 06/15/2009 - 11:50am

Summary:

He was the master wordsmith of the American Revolution. His ideas are embedded deep in our DNA. "These are the times that try men's souls," he wrote, and patriots of every rank responded — farmers, blacksmiths, merchants and aristocrats. But he died broke, scorned and alone, here in New York City two hundred years ago this week. So unsung is this hero, a foundling father one historian calls him, that only a handful of his most ardent fans showed up at the ceremonies marking the bicentennial of his death.

The following is a transcript from the June 12 edition of PBS' Bill Moyers Journal.

BILL MOYERS: He was the master wordsmith of the American Revolution. His ideas are embedded deep in our DNA. "These are the times that try men's souls," he wrote, and patriots of every rank responded — farmers, blacksmiths, merchants and aristocrats. Thomas Paine lived a life of adventure, stirred radical sentiments on two continents, knew Washington and Jefferson, Lafayette and Napoleon. But he died broke, scorned and alone, here in New York City two hundred years ago this week.

So unsung is this hero, a foundling father one historian calls him, that only a handful of his most ardent fans showed up at the ceremonies marking the bicentennial of his death.

Fascism is not liberal: The profound dishonesty of Jonah Goldberg

-- by Dave

I picked up the most recent copy of National Review – the one with the strange “Sotomayor as a Buddhist” cover – while I was in D.C. because I wanted to read the piece headlined across the cover: “Jonah Goldberg on His Critics”. Brian Beutler at TPM pointedly observed: “That better be a long article.”

Actually, it’s only two pages long. So, predictably, it’s pretty short on any discussion, as is the list of critics he actually addresses by name or argument. Namely: two – David Oshinsky and Michael Tomasky. And just as predictably, he completely misrepresents their arguments, setting up little strawmen and knocking them down instead.

And as if on cue, we get the point of writing the piece in the headline: “Obama’s Playbook, In Paperback.” (I’ll add the link if and when it ever becomes available online.) Yes, you see, Barack Obama is now the leading exponent of “liberal fascism.” This, of course, is Glenn Beck’s favorite thesis these days too.

Paul Krugman's fear for lost decade

As analysts and media hailed the tentative emergence of green shoots last week, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman caused international shock with a prediction that the world economy would stagnate just as badly, and for just as long, as Japan's did in the 1990s. In an exclusive interview, he talks to Will Hutton about his anxiety for the future - and how Gordon Brown might have saved Britain from the blight that hangs over the West

• Will Hutton
• The Observer, Sunday 14 June 2009
  

Will Hutton: You are warning that what happened to Japan could happen to the whole world. Japan's GDP at the end of this year will be no higher than it was in 1992 - 17 lost years. You are saying that this is an ongoing risk, certainly for the North Atlantic economy - maybe the world economy.

Paul Krugman: Yes. It's not that the risk of the Japan syndrome has receded very much. The risk of a full, all-out Great Depression - utter collapse of everything - has receded a lot in the past few months. But this first year of crisis has been far worse than anything that happened in Japan during the last decade, so in some sense we already have much worse than anything the Japanese went through. The risk for long stagnation is really high.

Fitch Expects Home Prices to Fall through 2nd Half of 2010

by CalculatedRisk on 6/13/2009 08:44:00 AM

Fitch expects "home prices will fall an additional 12.5% nationally and 36% in California" from Q1 2009.

And, oh, you remember subprime?

From HousingWire: Subprime Bloodletting Continues at Fitch

Fitch Ratings today made massive downgrades on various vintage ‘05 through ‘08 subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), indicating the extent of the fallout related to subprime defaults has yet to subside.

About Climate Change: Never Mind

How one think tank adapted when the debate moved on from its favorite issue.

By Lydia DePillis
Posted Friday, June 12, 2009, at 5:24 PM ET

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It was a gathering of the anti-Washington elite. On Thursday evening, in a vast hotel ballroom just steps from the Capitol, the Competitive Enterprise Institute celebrated 25 years of existence. The Cato Institute, Reason magazine, and Americans for Prosperity all sent contingents. Master of ceremonies Tucker Carlson cracked jokes about Al Sharpton and Al Gore. The crowd of 500 dined on sea bass and toasted liberty.

But on its signature issue—climate change—at the still-young age of 25, CEI is already going senile.

Frank Rich: The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers

WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.

Conspiracy as Prophecy

Ruth
Fri Jun 12, 2009 at 03:58:13 PM EST

What is New World Order conspiracy theory and how is it spreading through our society?

A few weeks ago I spoke at an event sponsored by one of the local chapters of the American Jewish Committee and emphasized the growing dangers of New World Order Conspiracy theories. Included in my presentation were video clips and examples of the rapid mainstreaming of this conspiracy storyline. However, my presentation was not focused on white supremacist groups but Christian Zionist leaders who freely and openly disseminate this paranoid conspiracy to millions worldwide in the guise of end times prophecy.

The press is focusing on the manifestations of hatred by white supremacist groups as opposed to the narrative through which they teach their hateful obsession with Jews. This "New World Order" narrative, as well as the process through which this narrative is transmitted to others, is an important part of understanding the growing epidemic of paranoid conspiracy theories. The narrative is not just about indulging in hatred of "the other" but a cohesive storyline about the battle between good and evil in society. This narrative can be disseminated in religious or secular versions, and can be told in an anti-Semitic or "philo-Semitic" millennial frame. But the basic storyline of world control by an interconnected and demonic cabal remains the same. Understanding this narrative can help to explain a question that numerous commentators posed this week, as they wondered why the election of our first African American president could bring about an increase in anti-Semitic violence.

A wake-up call on water use

A long-running resource issue finally trickles down to more consumers.

By Gloria Goodale | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor/ June 10, 2009 edition

Santa Monica, Calif.

Move over, carbon, the next shoe to drop in the popular awareness of eco-issues is the “water footprint.”

That’s the word in environmental circles these days. Just as the image of a heavy carbon foot made it possible for the masses to grasp the power of carbon-dioxide emissions, water footprint is the phrase now drawing attention to the impact of human behavior regarding water.

“H2O is the next CO2,” says Nicholas Eisenberger, managing principal of GreenOrder, a consulting firm that specializes in sustainable business. As a phrase, water footprint “will probably move more quickly through the public mind as it catches on,” he says, because water is more tangible than carbon.

Juan Cole: Stealing the Iranian Election

op Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)