Nine Questions for Ben Bernanke

He'd better answer them before the Senate confirms him to another term as Fed chairman.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Friday, Sept. 18, 2009, at 11:18 AM ET

The one-year anniversary of the end of the financial world as we knew it has come and gone. Yet, quite remarkably, the financial world as we knew it is still here—absent a few laggard investment banks and several million jobs.

While regulatory proposals flutter in the wind, big banks have reconstituted themselves, and profits and bonus pools have returned. In numerous articles and books, banking and government leaders applaud themselves for having staved off a crisis that could have been worse. Many of these accounts give us second-by-second depictions of sweat dripping from furrowed brows as tough decisions were made. And, as if to validate these histories, Ben Bernanke has been nominated to serve another term as chairman of the Fed, certifying that his tenure is one of glory gained by defeating the crisis rather than glory lost because of responsibility for its onset.

Wealthcare

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
By Jennifer Burns, (Oxford University Press, 459 pp., $27.95)

Ayn Rand and the World She Made
By Anne C. Heller, (Doubleday, 559 pp., $35)

I.

The current era of Democratic governance has provoked a florid response on the right, ranging from the prosaic (routine denunciations of big spending and debt) to the overheated (fears of socialism) to the lunatic (the belief that Democrats plan to put the elderly to death). Amid this cacophony of rage and dread, there has emerged one anxiety that is an actual idea, and not a mere slogan or factual misapprehension. The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.

You can find iterations of this worldview and this moral judgment everywhere on the right. Consider a few samples of the rhetoric. In an op-ed piece last spring, Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, called for conservatives to wage a "culture war" over capitalism. "Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the ‘sharing economy,' " he wrote. "Advocates of free enterprise . . . have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can." Brooks identified the constituency for his beliefs as "the people who were doing the important things right--and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong." Senator Jim DeMint echoed this analysis when he lamented that "there are two Americas but not the kind John Edwards was talking about. It's not so much the haves and the have-nots. It's those who are paying for government and those who are getting government."

As ACORN grew, so did its clout and its problems

By Barbara Barrett | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Long before two conservative young activists strode into an ACORN office wearing a hidden camera, the grassroots organization had been racking up kills in its decades-long quest to protect working-class people from what it saw as wrongheaded corporate interests.

ACORN -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- was founded in 1970 by a 21-year-old organizer who wanted to try a new way of lifting up low- and moderate-income workers.

We Must Stop the 'Vulture Funds' that Feed on the World's Poor

by Johann Hari

Would you ever march up to a destitute African who is shivering with Aids and demand he "pay back" tens of thousands of pounds he didn't borrow - with interest? I only ask because this is in effect happening, here, in British and American courts, time after time. Some of the richest people in the world are making profit margins of 500 per cent by shaking money out of the poorest people in the world - for debt they did not incur.

Here's how it works. In the mid-1990s, a Republican businessman called Paul Singer invented a new type of hedge fund, quickly dubbed a "vulture fund." They buy debts racked up years ago by the poorest countries on earth, almost always when they were run by kleptocratic dictators, before most of the current population was born. They buy it for small sums - as little as 10 per cent of its paper value - from the original holder and then take the poor country to court in Britain or the US to demand 100 per cent of the debt is repaid immediately, plus interest built up over years, and court costs.

Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message that we’re losing Afghanistan

by Robert Fisk

Obama and Osama are at last participating in the same narrative. For the US president's critics - indeed, for many critics of the West's military occupation of Afghanistan - are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama's (and their) greatest enemy.

There is a growing suspicion in America that Obama has been socked into the heart of the Afghan darkness by ex-Bushie Robert Gates - once more the Secretary of Defense - and by journalist-adored General David Petraeus whose military "surges" appear to be as successful as the Battle of the Bulge in stemming the insurgent tide in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.

Selective deficit disorder

David Sirota, Creators.com

Friday, September 18, 2009

Watching the health care debate unfold these days is a little like watching scenes from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - the ones showing a collage of strung-out, deranged or otherwise incapacitated patients rotting away in a squalid psychiatric ward.

As the insurance industry's Nurse Ratched lurks in the background, congressional Democrats cower in the corner, fearing the phantom menace of their own shadows. Standing next to the window, suicidal Republican leaders rant about "death panels" and threaten to splatter their electoral prospects onto the pavement below. Nearby, White House officials struggle with multiple-personality ailments as they mumble contradictory statements about the public option. Meanwhile, Tea Party protesters lie on the floor in a fetal position, soiling their hospital diapers as they throw incoherent tantrums about everything from socialism to communism to czarism to Nazism. And, not surprisingly, Washington reporters just stare off into the distance, having been long ago lobotomized in the wake of their Watergate heyday.

CNN's Sanchez Slams Fox 'News': 'You Lie!'

Destroys Republican news organization for WaPo ad falsely alleging CNN failed to cover Fox's 9/12 teabagger protest...

UPDATE: CNN pushes back with 'Distoring Not Reporting' ad...

Some must-see video here. CNN's Rich Sanchez stood up for his news organization on air today, against Fox "News" after they ran an add today in the Washington Post alleging that CNN didn't cover Glenn Beck's political rally last week in D.C.

After slamming Fox by showing clips of CNN's extensive (some might say gratuitous, frankly) coverage, and even a clip showing Bill O'Reilly on Fox discussing the fact that CNN covered the event, Sanchez went for the jugular:

Here's the facts. We did cover the event. What we didn't do is promote the event.

Why We Need a Government Agency to Defend the Pursuit of Happiness

By Walter Mosley, The Nation
Posted on September 18, 2009, Printed on September 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142713/

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Americans are an unhappy, unhealthy lot. From the moment we declared our independence from the domination of British rule, we have included the people's right to pursue happiness as one of the primary privileges of our citizens and the responsibility of our government. Life and liberty are addressed to one degree or another by our executive, legislative and judicial branches, but our potential for happiness has lagged far behind.

Evangelicals Divorce More Often Than "Godless" Europeans? Exploring America's Strange Relationship With Marriage

By Amy DePaul, Bookslut
Posted on September 14, 2009, Printed on September 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142626/

The Marriage-Go-Round, an analysis of the state of matrimony and partnering in the U.S., owes some small part of its success to timing. It arrived in bookstores amid a string of high-profile marital meltdowns, i.e. Jon and Kate, Mark Sanford, John Edwards, et al. None of which has been a bad thing for author Andrew Cherlin, whose book recently won prominent mentions in Time, Newsweek and The Atlantic.

Lost in the commentaries and essays about marital crisis, however, are some of the surprising findings to emerge from The Marriage-Go-Round, such as this one, for example: Americans prize marriage more highly than do people in other wealthy countries, and they consider it the hallmark of a successful life. Yet they divorce at higher rates, just as they re-partner in higher numbers, causing turnover that may be highly destabilizing for children. The statistic Cherlin likes to cite is that a child in the U.S. has a greater chance of seeing his married parents break up than a child of unmarried parents in Sweden.

Paul Krugman: Baucus and the Threshold

So Senator Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has released his “mark” on proposed legislation — which would normally be the basis for the bill that eventually emerges from his committee. And serious supporters of health care reform will soon face their long-dreaded moment of truth.

You see, it has been clear for months that whatever health-care bill finally emerges will fall far short of reformers’ hopes. Yet even a bad bill could be much better than nothing. The question is where to draw the line. How bad does a bill have to be to make it too bad to vote for?

Now, the moment of truth isn’t here quite yet: There’s enough wrong with the Baucus proposal as it stands to make it unworkable and unacceptable. But that said, Senator Baucus’s mark is better than many of us expected. If it serves as a basis for negotiation, and the result of those negotiations is a plan that’s stronger, not weaker, reformers are going to have to make some hard choices about the degree of disappointment they’re willing to live with.

Remarks By The President At Rally On Health Insurance Reform

University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland

11:49 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Hello, Maryland! (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you, College Park. (Applause.) Thank you so much. It is good to be back at the University of Maryland. (Applause.) I want to start by wishing The Fridge and the Terps good luck on the game this weekend. (Applause.) Maybe I’ll even rub Testudo’s nose before I leave. (Applause.)

We've got a number of extraordinary elected officials who are here. I just want to introduce them real quick. Your Governor, Martin O'Malley, is in the house. (Applause.) The two outstanding senators from Maryland, Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin are in the house. (Applause.) One of the finest leaders that we have in Congress, Steny Hoyer is in the house. (Applause.) Lt. Governor Anthony Brown is here. (Applause.) Prince George's County Executive Jack Johnson is here. (Applause.) Mayor Stephen Brayman is here. (Applause.) State Senate Majority Leader Tom Miller is in the house. (Applause.) Congresswoman Donna Edwards is here. (Applause.) Congressman Elijah Cummings. (Applause.) Congressman Chris Van Hollen. (Applause.) Congressman Sarbanes is here. (Applause.) Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger is here. (Applause.)

Paranoia Strikes Deep in America ... Over and Over

By Michael Kazin, The Nation
Posted on September 16, 2009, Printed on September 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142690/

"If something is not done shortly, this country is going the way of Italy, Germany or Russia, and it is high time we did something," exclaimed Irenee du Pont, one of the more prominent conservatives of the 1930s. Many of his fellow Americans agreed there was good cause to be alarmed: a new Democratic president was proposing an unprecedented expansion of federal power that would increase taxes on the well-off and dole out benefits to the jobless and other unfortunates.

The Return of the Repressed

It should come as no surprise that with the election of Barack Obama, the right has returned to a politics of racial resentment.

Michelle Goldberg | September 15, 2009

Now that popular conservatism has given itself over so avidly to racial resentment, it's curious to remember how hard the right once tried to scrub itself of the lingering taint of prejudice. Indeed, for a decade and a half the Christian right -- until recently the most powerful and visible grassroots conservative movement -- struggled mightily to escape its own bigoted history. In his 1996 book Active Faith, Ralph Reed acknowledged that Christian conservatives had been on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. "The white evangelical church carries a shameful legacy of racism and the historical baggage of indifference to the most central struggle for social justice in this century, a legacy that is only now being wiped clean by the sanctifying work of repentance and racial reconciliation," wrote Reed.

Shielded-Obama's smart decision to scuttle Bush's European missile-defense plan.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009, at 5:27 PM ET

---

President Barack Obama's scuttling of George W. Bush's plan to deploy a missile-defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland—or, more particularly, the way he scuttled it—amounts to a remarkably shrewd bit of politics and statesmanship.

The decision, which he announced this morning after completing a six-month review of the program, removes the biggest obstacle in U.S.-Russian relations—a step that could clear the way for cooperative measures on a wide range of international issues—without scrapping the general idea of some sort of "missile shield" for Europe.

Bush came up with the plan to put 10 anti-missile interceptors and radars on Czech and Polish soil in 2007, and the Russians have been clamoring about it ever since. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused Bush of trying to upset the balance of power.

The Distracting Benefits of ACORN Hysteria

by Glenn Greenwald

Earlier this week, I wrote about [1] how the Fox-News/Glenn-Beck/Rush-Limbaugh leadership trains its protesting followers to focus the vast bulk of their resentment and anxieties on largely powerless and downtrodden factions, while ignoring, and even revering, the outright pillaging by virtually omnipotent corporate interests that own and control their Government [2] (and, not coincidentally, Fox News). It's hard to imagine a more perfectly illustrative example of all of that than the hysterical furor over ACORN [3].

ACORN has received a grand total of $53 million [4] in federal funds over the last 15 years -- an average of $3.1 million per year. Meanwhile, not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars of public funds have been, in the last year alone, transferred to or otherwise used for the benefit of Wall Street. Billions of dollars in American taxpayer money vanished into thin air, eaten by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan [5], led by Halliburton subsidiary KBR [6]. All of those corporate interests employ armies of lobbyists and bottomless donor activities that ensure they dominate our legislative and regulatory processes, and to be extra certain, the revolving door between industry and government is more prolific than ever, with key corporate officials constantly ending up occupying the government positions with the most influence over those industries.

Banner Week for Big Insurance

— By James Ridgeway | Thu September 17, 2009 11:15 AM PST

This is turning out to be a very good week for the private health insurance companies (or as I like to think of them, the bloodsucking middle-men of the health care system). Yesterday, AP/Forbes reported on the uptick in insurer stocks, which jumped from 3 to 6 percent in a single day:

Shares of health insurers jumped Wednesday after an key Democrat released a much anticipated Senate version of a health care reform bill that excluded a government-run insurance option.

The so-called public option had been a contentious issue with health insurers, with the industry viewing it as unfair competition. Instead, Sen. Max Baucus released a proposed bill that would require every American to obtain health insurance, which would be a financial boon for the health insurance industry.

It doesn’t take Einstein to figure out why the Baucus bill is great for the insurance industry: If there’s no public alternative to compete with private insurance companies, guess where all those people will have to go to buy their government-mandated insurance?

Is the U.S. Really on the Brink of Budget Collapse?

By Robert Pollin, AlterNet
Posted on September 17, 2009, Printed on September 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142625/

Is the United States government facing “fiscal suicide?” Are U.S. Treasury Bonds “heading for the dumpster?” Such claims have been published regularly in the mainstream media following the passage of the Obama economic stimulus program, which became law last February (these particular quotes were in the New York Times and Bloomberg News last May). Of course, the Obama stimulus program was implemented to counteract the economic disaster that was already at hand as of last February and continues to the present.

In fact, the stimulus program is too small relative to the magnitude of the crisis and too loaded with corporate tax breaks. But it is still among the most progressive pieces of economic legislation since the 1960s. Of the $787 billion total in new government spending being pumped into the economy over the next two years, major funds are flowing into clean energy and traditional infrastructure investments, health care, and education, as well unemployment insurance, food stamps and similar measures to support people who are suffering most severely from the crisis. Overall, the stimulus program aims to generate about 3.5 million jobs over the next two years, to compensate at least in part for the nearly 7 million jobs the economy has shed since January 2008.

Toxic Chemicals in Everyday Products: Find Out What's in the Stuff You Use

By Jeff Gearhart, AlterNet
Posted on September 16, 2009, Printed on September 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142664/

Guess how I spent my summer? Testing over 900 everyday consumer products to find out what hazardous chemicals they might contain. Our team tested everything from pet collars and chew toys, to women's handbags, sedans and SUVs. Yet, despite all of the attention in 2008 to lead in toys, we are still universally finding elevated levels of lead, mercury, arsenic and other chemicals that can be hazards to human health, especially for children and pets.

At our new website, HealthyStuff.org, consumers can find over 15,000 test results on over 5,000 common items including pet products, back-to-school items, children's toys, and the latest on cars and children's car seats.

Obama gets the Clinton treatment

Anybody shocked by nasty GOP attacks on Obama must have forgotten what happened to the last Democratic president

By Gene Lyons

Sep. 17, 2009 |

From a political standpoint, the worst thing about blaming President Obama's perceived difficulties on racism is that there's not a damn thing anybody can do about it. Determined bigots can't be shamed, while many see invoking race as more an excuse than an explanation.

Democrats who cry racism risk looking like whiners fearful they're losing the argument. Not to mention illogical. If Obama's approval rating among white voters has dropped from 63 to 43 percent, as the Los Angeles Times recently documented, it's not because they suddenly heard about his African father.

Nor should there be any reason to panic. As Joan Walsh has pointed out, 43 is the exact percentage of whites that supported Obama in 2008. Rep. Joe Wilson's, R-S.C., rude outburst during the president's speech to Congress spoke for itself, along with his longtime support for flying the Rebel flag over South Carolina's capitol.

Would You Know How to Survive After the Oil Crash?

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on September 17, 2009, Printed on September 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142575/

Do you know how to make shoes? Can you build a house? How about grow food? Do you have a doctor and a dentist in your circle of friends?

These are the questions that Andre Angelantoni thinks you should be able to answer in order to plan for the next 10 to 15 years. Angelantoni believes there are radical changes ahead for our society -- and no, it's not the rapture he sees coming, but a post-peak-oil world.

Teen Birth Rates Higher in Highly Religious States

Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer
LiveScience.com
Wed Sep 16, 7:08 pm ET

U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests.

The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn't successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise.

Mississippi topped the list for conservative religious beliefs and teen birth rates, according to the study results, which will be detailed in a forthcoming issue of the journal Reproductive Health. (See the full top 10 below.)

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

Sept. 16, 2009 | On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Even if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

A Republican Trap for Democrats on Health Care?

Are the Democrats about to walk into a Republican trap on health care? As I monitor the latest back and forth, I feel as if I'm watching a cheesy horror flick and some poor unsuspecting person is about to open the wrong door--and you want to scream, "Hey, don't open that door!" But....

In the Senate, the Democrats (presumably with President Barack Obama's blessings) are still trying to win one to three Republican votes for a health care reform package. So as the Gang of Six--that bipartisan group of senators--has continued to negotiate, Senator Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the finance committee, has released a "framework" that he says is aimed to address Republican concerns. Yet Democrats should be concerned about his bill.

POWER WITHOUT CREDIBILITY, Part 3 Politics of the financial crisis

By Henry CK Liu

This article concludes a three-part report.
Part 1: Bogged down at the Fed
Part 2: A lost decade ahead

United States Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is visibly frustrated that many in Congress do not give the Fed what he believes is enough credit for what it has accomplished in responding to the economic crisis, even as Wall Street heaps praise on his bold actions and steady hand in pulling the financial system out of an impending meltdown.

Bernanke, whom President Barack Obama this month appointed for a second term as Fed chairman, faces a far from smooth passage through calmer seas over his next four years in the post. All the structural weaknesses that caused the economy to implode two years ago are still in the financial system, albeit swept under the rug into the Fed's balance sheet and masked by massive amount of new money and public debt not backed by any new wealth creation.

Short Sellers: The Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

By Dean Baker - September 15, 2009, 5:33AM

Last year, as the collapse of the housing bubble was threatening to turn Wall Street into a pre-industrial economy, many leading financial commentators were blaming short-sellers for the meltdown. They argued that the fundamentals of the financial industry were essentially sound. The only problem was that evil short-sellers had teamed up to push the price of the stock of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and the rest into the toilet. In response this outcry, the Securities and Exchange Commission actually took steps to limit the shorting of financial stocks.

As should be very clear in retrospect, the problem was not the shorts. The problem was that the clowns who ran these institutions somehow failed to see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world. As a result, they made huge bets that went bad, and drove their companies into bankruptcy.

Glenn Greenwald: Who Are the Undeserving 'Others'?

Who are those benefiting from expanded government actions?

by Glenn Greenwald

The New York Times' Ross Douthat argues [1], uncontroversially, that the tea-party protests, townhall outbursts and related appendages aren't about specific health care proposals but, instead, are motivated by a more generalized anger over what is happening in Washington:

At the same time, [the health care protests have] become the vessel for a year's worth of anxieties about bailouts, deficits and Beltway incompetence.

This August's town-hall fury wasn't just about the details of health care. Neither were the anti-Obama protests that crowded Washington over the weekend. They were about the Wall Street bailout, the G.M. takeover, the A.I.G. bonuses, and countless smaller examples of middle-income Americans' "playing by the rules," as [GOP pollster Frank] Luntz puts it, "and having someone else benefit."

Notably, Douthat never specifies the identity of this so-called "someone else" who, as a result of government behavior, is unfairly benefiting from the hard work of middle-class Americans, but he gives a clue when he compares current anger over the health care bill to the anger over the 1994 crime bill, which he argues drove Democrats out of, and Newt Gingrich into, Beltway power:

The Public Plan Option and the Big Government Conservatives

Monday 14 September 2009

by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

We all know that there are basic philosophical differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals believe that the government can be used to improve the lives of ordinary people. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the government should redistribute money to the wealthy. This philosophical difference has come through very clearly in the debate over giving people the option to buy into a publicly run health insurance plan.

Since the conservatives are not honest enough to own up to their true principles in this case, it is worth briefly recapping the argument they put up as a cover. The conservatives claim that if people are given the option to buy into a public plan, then so many people will choose to do so, that it will drive the private plans out of business. The country will then be stuck with only a government-run insurer and patients will have no choice. This will be bad news, because the government can't do a good job providing the American people with health insurance.

Obama Banking Too Much On Banks

On Monday—one year after the once-mighty Lehman Brothers collapsed in the nation’s biggest bankruptcy—President Obama addressed the state of the economy and again outlined his proposals for what he calls reform. The location—Federal Hall at 26 Wall Street, near the New York Stock Exchange and New York Federal Reserve Bank—was fitting. George Washington took his presidential oath there, a precursor for how intertwined Washington and Wall Street would become. And Obama’s speech indicates that he’s still making the grave error of mistaking the health of Wall Street for the health of the American economy.

High-quality child care leads to academic success for low-income kids

Boston College professor says high-quality care can negate poverty impact

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (September 15, 2009) – For low income parents, finding high quality child care not only boosts the performance of their children in school, but actually combats the effects of poverty, according to a new study in the journal Child Development.

Children who spent more time in high-quality child care in the first five years of their lives had better reading and math scores in middle school, according to researchers from Boston College, the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Samford University, who studied 1,300 middle school students.

PhRMA’s Big Bribe Comes In

"The drug industry’s trade group plans to roll out a series of television advertisements in coming weeks specifically to support Senator Max Baucus’s health care overhaul proposal, according to an industry official involved in the planning."

via Drug Makers to Back Baucus Plan With Ad Dollars – Prescriptions Blog – NYTimes.com.

I’ve been completely out of the loop with the health care story these last week and half or so, out of touch actually with the entire earth (I’ve been on a deadline on another story), but upon returning to work today I began getting calls about some alarming maneuverings in congress. We’re apparently finally seeing delivery of the Big Bribe that President Obama and Rahm Emanuel extracted from that pharmaceutical industry in exchange for dropping drug-pricing reform in the health care bill.

Life Without Bumblebees? It's Not Just Honeybees That Are Mysteriously Dying

By Adam Federman, Earth Island Journal
Posted on September 15, 2009, Printed on September 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142616/

Bombus franklini, a North American bumblebee, was last seen on August 9, 2006. Professor Emeritus Robbin Thorp, an entomologist at UC Davis, was doing survey work on Mt. Ashland in Oregon when he saw a single worker on a flower, Sulphur eriogonum, near the Pacific Crest Trail. He had last seen the bee in 2003, roughly in the same area, where it had once been very common. "August ninth," Thorp says. "I've got that indelibly emblazoned in my mind."

Thorp had been keeping tabs on the species since the late 1960s. In 1998, the US Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management supported an intensive monitoring project to determine whether the bee should be listed as an endangered species, in part because of its narrow endemism. The total range of B. franklini is only 190 miles north to south, from southern Oregon to northern California, and 70 miles east to west between the Coast and Sierra-Cascade Ranges.

US Economy Facing 'Death by a Thousand Cuts': Roubini

The US economy faces a difficult time ahead as consumers stop spending and the fallout escalates from the collapse of the commercial real estate market, economist Nouriel Roubini told CNBC.

Repeating his prediction that the economy faces a threat of a "double-dip" recession and at best a slow-growth U-shaped recovery, Roubini said in a live interview that more banks will fail and residential real estate prices have more room to decline.

New film ‘Earth Days’ takes a sometimes devastating look at the history of environmental activism

In the 1970s, just after the first Earth Day and in the midst of oil shortages, recessions, and uprisings by restless youth, politicians were suddenly expected to show concern for the environment. President Jimmy Carter went above and beyond by installing solar panels on the White House in 1979. Solar panels on the White House!

Seven years later, President Ronald Reagan took them down.

Former NY Gov Spitzer: Regulate the regulators

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who drove a crackdown on Wall Street before being brought down by scandal, said U.S. financial reform should target federal regulators as well as big banks.

"We have not reformed the system," Spitzer told the CBS "Early Show" on Monday. "We still have institutions that are too big to fail, institutions that have received billions ... of taxpayer dollars are not investing that back into the system to create jobs for the future.

"We have a regulatory system that is utterly in disarray."

Glenn Beck and The 9/12 Marchers: Subversives From Within

Who are these people?! Where do they come from?! Ordinary Americans might wonder why anyone would stoop so low as to follow Glenn Beck, Fox News and Dick Armey (and their corporate sponsors masquerading as "FreedomWorks") as they organize their "9/12 March On Washington" to cynically exploit the 9/11 attack.

Patriotic Americans might question the organizer's aim to provide a media forum for dimwitted right wingers to scream "Liar!" "Socialist!" "Antichrist!" "Muslim!" "Death Panels!" "He's not an American!" and so on and on and on about the commander in chief charged with defending us from further attacks. And some people might even cry "shame on you!" to the more mainstream Republicans participating that include Dick Armey of FreedomWorks, as well as GOP Reps. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Mike Pence of Indiana, Tom Price of Georgia, and South Carolina GOP Sen. Jim DeMint.

POWER WITHOUT CREDIBILITY, Part 2: A lost decade ahead

By Henry CK Liu

Part 1: Bogged down at the Fed

The US Federal Reserve faces an intractable problem of unemployment. Non-farm payroll employment in the United States continued to decline in July 2009, with the loss of 247,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 9.4% for the second consecutive month, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August.

The average monthly job loss for May through July was 331,000 jobs, about half the average decline for November 2008 through April 2009, which lost 645,000 per month. Employment decreased by 117,000 a month on average during that period.

Obama clings to hope as Iran hawks circle

Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - As nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West continue to move slowly, United States President Barack Obama is coming under growing pressure from what appears to be a concerted lobbying and media campaign urging him to act more aggressively to stop Iran's nuclear program.

Obama has given Tehran an end-of-September deadline to respond substantively to his offer of diplomatic engagement. But already hawks in the US - backed by hardline pro-Israel organizations - have pressed him to quickly impose "crippling" economic sanctions against Tehran, and some are arguing that he should make preparations for a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Borlaug, father of Green Revolution, dies at 95

Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize winning scientist whose work on disease-resistant wheat is credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, has died at the age of 95.

The acclaimed agriculturalist, often called the father of the Green Revolution, died late on Saturday in Dallas, Texas, due to complications from cancer, according to Texas A&M University, where Borlaug served since 1984.

He was best known for his work developing disease-resistant "dwarf" wheat, which yielded two to three times as much as the normal crop.

Better world: Take Friday off… forever

The four-day week could boost employment, save energy and make us happier.

FANCY a three-day weekend - not just once in a while but week in week out? You may think your bosses would never agree to it, but the evidence suggests that employers, employees and the environment all benefit.

The four-day week comes in two flavours. One option is to switch from five 8-hour days to four 10-hour days, meaning overall hours and salaries stay the same. In August 2008, the state of Utah moved all of its employees, apart from the emergency services, to working 4/10, as it has become known. The hope was that by shutting down buildings for an extra day each week, energy bills would be slashed by up to a fifth.

Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman

By Mark Deen and David Tweed

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Joe Wilson and AHIP Team Up to Write Max Baucus’s Health Care Bill

By: Jane Hamsher Friday September 11, 2009 7:06 am

There really doesn't seem to be any limit to what the administration will do to pass Rahm Emanuel's neoliberal giveaway to the insurance industry. The "author" of the plan released by Baucus (and apparently by Mike Ross) is a former VP of Wellpoint. Now AHIP is boasting about their role in crafting it:

Many of the changes to the insurance system now under discussion are the ones that have been advocated this year by the insurance companies themselves, said Karen M. Ignagni, the chief executive of America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group. "The industry has been the leader in creating the proposals everyone is about to endorse," she said.

No wonder insurance company stocks shot up after the President's speech.

Closing The Book On The Bush Legacy

Thursday's annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty and access to health care-the Bureau's principal report card on the well-being of average Americans-closes the books on the economic record of George W. Bush.

It's not a record many Republicans are likely to point to with pride.

Frank Rich: Obama's Squandered Summer

THE day before he gave his latest brilliant speech, Barack Obama repeated a well-worn mantra to a television interviewer: “My job is not to be distracted by the 24-hour news cycle.” The time has come for him to expand that job description. His White House has a duty to push back against the 24-hour news cycle, every 24 hours if necessary, when it threatens to derail his agenda, the nation’s business, or both. This was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted. The president deserves his share of the blame.

After a good couple of years of living with the guy, we know the drill that defines his leadership, for better and worse. When trouble lurks, No Drama Obama stays calm as everyone around him goes ballistic. Then he waits — and waits — for that superdramatic moment when he can ride to his own rescue with what the press reliably hypes as The Do-or-Die Speech of His Career. Cable networks slap a countdown clock on the corner of the screen and pump up the suspense. Finally, Mighty Obama steps up to the plate and, lo and behold, confounds all the doubting bloviators yet again by (as they are wont to say) hitting it out of the park.