Paul Krugman: Superfreakonomics on climate, part 1

OK, I’m working my way through the climate chapter — and the first five pages, by themselves, are enough to discredit the whole thing. Why? Because they grossly misrepresent other peoples’ research, in both climate science and economics.

The chapter opens with the “global cooling” story — the claim that 30 years ago there was a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling, comparable to the current consensus that it’s warming.

The View From Inside a Depression

By JOE NOCERA

“Dow at 10,000 as Crisis Ebbs”

— Wall Street Journal headline on Thursday

In January 1931, a lawyer named Benjamin Roth, 38 years old, solidly Republican, a solo practitioner in Youngstown, Ohio, decided to start a diary. Realizing that he was “living through an historic thing that will long be remembered” — as he put it in one early entry — he wanted to keep a record for posterity.

Mr. Roth’s diaries have just been published in book form — “The Great Depression: A Diary” — edited by his son Daniel, who worked in his father’s law practice for many years, and James Ledbetter, the editor of The Big Money, a financial site run by Slate. It is an eye-opening read, though not necessarily in the ways you might think.

Because it was written in the 1930s, Mr. Roth’s diary is not the kind of tell-all we’ve come to expect in this less restrained age. Although he mentions repeatedly the struggles of lawyers and other “professional men” during the depression — Mr. Roth always uses the lower-case “d” — he never shares how his family struggled through it, or how he was able to send his daughter to college in 1937. (Daniel Roth told me that his father, who died in 1978, later divulged that he had had a good life insurance policy, which he borrowed against to keep food on the table.)

What’s yours is mine

Andrew Simms
Published 15 October 2009

The scramble for the world’s resources has barely abated with the recession, and our ecological debts are mounting

The elephant is still standing, and still dead. Around its feet are hundreds of coins thrown by visitors. Room after room at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, is full of stuffed animals perched rigidly against crude backdrops of African forest and grassland. Another exhibit surveys Africa's economic contribution to the world: maps on the wall dissect and label each country, tagging them like the pickled fish and stuffed apes.

This is Africa as a cornucopia of natural wealth to be mined, harvested, picked, squeezed and taken. The maps reduce the continent in general, and Congo in particular, to a series of carefully plotted locations for the extraction of oil, cotton, coffee, sugar, rice, maize, diamonds, jute, cobalt, tin, copper and gold. One term for it is the "resource curse", exemplified by King Leopold II's brutal Central African reign during the first scramble for Africa in the 19th century. Leopold still sits proudly in the central courtyard of the museum, chin imperially upturned: a statue in honour of international relations built on murder, theft and deception.

What’s so bad about inflation?

David Blanchflower
Published 15 October 2009

In contrast to the tiny costs of inflation, the costs of unemployment are enormous

[...]

But to business. In his speech to the Tory conference, David Cameron discussed what he felt was the way out of the economic crisis. His three options were as follows, and I quote:

“Option one: we can just default on the debt. Not pay it. Other countries have done that in the past. But I don't think anyone in this country wants to go down that road.

“Option two: we could encourage inflation, which would wipe out the value of the debt, making it easier to pay off. But that's not just an economic disaster, it's a social disaster, too. It doesn't just wipe out debts, it wipes out people's hard-earned savings.

US Healthcare History: Our Very Own Killing Fields

by Donna Smith

Jenny Fritts was 24 years old. Jenny lived with her husband Sean for the past five years, and together they had a little girl named Kylee, 2. Jenny was seven-and-a-half months pregnant with her second child - a beautiful, baby girl.

Jenny is dead. Jenny's unborn baby is dead. They died because they were turned away for appropriate care at a for-profit hospital because they did not have health insurance. Sean rushed Jenny back to another hospital when her symptoms became even more severe, and he lied about having insurance to get her in the door. She was placed on a respirator in intensive care, but she didn't make it. She died. And so did her baby.

The Politics of the Public Option

By Robert Parry
October 16, 2009

From the start, the health-reform debate has been about money – who will get the best break and who may have to pay more. That is why the issue of the public option, a less expensive government-run insurance plan, has been so central to both the policy and political debates.

Indeed, if the Democrats abandon the public option for the sake of passing a bill like the one that came out of the Senate Finance Committee, they may be courting electoral disaster once voters grasp that they will have to wait years for the law to be implemented and then that it could lead to higher costs for much the same unpopular private insurance plans.

The public option offers the only means for a reform to be quickly implemented and to demonstrate a beneficial effect for the people by 2010 and 2012. It has the potential for reducing costs, especially for small businesses and individuals who are now being soaked by private insurers or denied coverage.

What Comes Next for Health-Care Reform?

The first of Harry Reid's meetings to merge the Finance and HELP Committee bills and create one compromise bill able to survive the Senate floor happened Wednesday. The participants in the room were a high-powered bunch: Reid, of course; Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee; Chris Dodd, who led the HELP Committee's health-care reform effort. The White House sent Rahm Emanuel, Peter Orszag, Nancy-Ann DeParle, Kathleen Sebelius and Phil Schiliro. And then staff. Lots and lots of staff. Contrary to reports from earlier this week, it no longer looks like Olympia Snowe will be a constant presence.

Democratic destiny and electoral doom

Last night, on Chris Matthews' "Hardball," there appeared a Tea Partyer -- from Texas, I think, though I'm not sure, as during the segment's opening I was preparing my typical American-proletarian feast of generic Rice Krispies -- who was hustling the fiction that he and his little neanderthal band's "movement," if you will, is nonpartisan and non-ideological.

Matthews sat stupefied, if not amused, pursuing logic and history, which is always a wasteful mistake with these guys.

Where, asked Matthews, were you folks and your outrage when George W. Bush was busting the budget like a Mad King Ludwig and putting plutocrats on lavish government welfare? And what was Barack Obama to do, when he inherited this wreck of a nation, other than try to stimulate the economy? Was he to emulate Herbert Hoover? Is that what you wanted?

Well, Matthews' Tea Partying guest avowed historical ignorance of Hooverism -- strangely, I believed him -- but on the other hand he was expert on what followed; he was, that is, pretty darn sure that FDR's reversal of Hooverism was what deepened and prolonged the Great Depression. Matthews, once an econ major and still a vigorous reader of American history, was too befuddled and time-constrained to educate the idiot. Like that would have helped, anyway.

British Censorship Chills US Reporting

They say that when Wall Street sneezes, Europe catches a cold. But it seems that when London puts a freeze on facts, the chill can spread just as well the other way.

What I'm about to tell you was censored in Britain until yesterday night because of a "super-injunction" won for the oil-trading company Trafigura by the famously aggressive media law firm Carter-Ruck. Super-injunctions, for those unfamiliar with Britain's baroque libel and media law, are gagging orders which cannot themselves be mentioned, thus allowing corporations and oligarchs to carry on their business untainted by public suspicion. They have become increasingly popular with both British and foreign litigants who have something to hide--and with lawyers who make fortunes squeezing foreign libel cases into the British courts. Such is the chilling effect of these dubious legal instruments that even The Nation, First Amendment champion par excellence, felt obliged to hold an earlier version of this post for two and a half days while its lawyers considered the risks of publication. It's only because Trafigura has lifted the injunction in Britain after an outcry on the internet, in the press and in the House of Commons that you are reading this now.

The death of language?

By Tom Colls
Today programme

An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?

In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.

Far from inspiring the world to act, the issue is still on the margins, according to prominent French linguist Claude Hagege.

How Climate Change Kills History

It's eight days to our global climate day of action and I'm just headed back from Nashville, where I spoke to the annual meeting of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. I feel like one of those candidates on the eve of the election, scrambling across the landscape to make sure they leave no vote ungot. But truth be told, I don't really know what I'm doing.

I'm an author turned part-time activist. Not out of desire—my bumper sticker should read "I'd rather be writing"—but out of frustration, and the sense that no one was really building a popular movement about climate change, and that it needed to be done. In this quest I've worked with a crew of young people, all recent college grads, and we've learned side by side about how to organize. Learned by experience, because there's really no guidebook (so we wrote one last year, Fight Global Warming Now).

Democracy Corps: Republican Base Voters Living In Another World

A new focus-group of Republican base voters by the Democracy Corps (D), the consulting and polling outfit headed up by James Carville and Stan Greenberg, presents a picture of the GOP base as being motivated by a fundamentally different worldview than folks in the middle or on the Dem side -- and they see the country as being under a dire threat.

"They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a 'secret agenda' to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism," the analysis said." While these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have failed in its mission, they overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country's founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail."

Paul Krugman: A Hatchet Job So Bad It’s Good

In the past, the insurance industry’s power has been a major barrier to health-care reform. Most notably, the industry paid for the infamous “Harry and Louise” ads that helped kill the Clinton plan. But times have changed.

Last weekend, the lobbying organization America’s Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, released a report attacking the reform plan just passed by the Senate Finance Committee. Some news organizations gave the report prominent, uncritical coverage. But health-care experts quickly, and correctly, dismissed it as a hatchet job. And the end result of AHIP’s blunder may be a better bill than we would otherwise have had.

Brilliant! Roof Tiles Change Color to Save Energy

On a blazing summer day, a black roof gets miserably hot, while a white roof reflects the sun and keeps a home cooler. In winter, the warmth generated by a solar-radiation-absorbing black roof can save energy.

That's well-known and simple enough. Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways. Well ...

Bill Shields Most Banks From Review

By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON — Bowing to political pressure from community bankers, the House Financial Services Committee approved an exemption on Thursday for more than 98 percent of the nation’s banks from oversight by a new agency created to protect consumers from abusive or deceptive credit cards, mortgages and other loans.

The carve-out in legislation overhauling the regulatory system would prevent the new consumer financial protection agency from conducting annual examinations of the lending practices at more than 8,000 of the nation’s 8,200 banks, leaving only the largest banks and other lenders subject to the agency’s examiners.

Earlier in the day, the committee completed its work on a different contentious provision of the legislation when, on a nearly straight party-line vote of 43 to 26, it approved tougher regulations over the derivatives market. That provision, too, contained exemptions for many businesses.

The Roving Eye: Putin lays down law for Clinton

By Pepe Escobar

For the (Western) news cycle, what stood out from United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Russia this week was an "appeal for cooperation" and a "challenge" for Russia to open up its political system, embrace "diversity" and shelve Cold War thinking.

Who's fooling whom? One might be forgiven to picture a torrent of laughter echoing in the Kremlin's corridors - later washed down with prime Stoli vodka - especially considering Washington's current poor standing in the world, as well as those usual suspects, "Western values"; and the fact that Russian intelligentsia has been pointing out for years that it is Washington hawks who are still in fact mired in the Cold War. Such a pity that Iran hawk Hillary did not cross paths with chess master Vladimir.

The Chamber of Commerce Has It Backwards

The US Chamber of Commerce is opposing the administration’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, on the grounds that it would hurt small business. Their argument is that this agency will extend the dead hand of government into every small business.

For the Chamber of Commerce, government is the enemy of small business and should always and everywhere be fought to a standstill. Chamber Senior Vice President (and former Fred Thompson campaign manager) Tom Collamore sees this as “advocacy on behalf of small businesses, job creators, and entrepreneurs” (quoted in the WSJ link above), and the Chamber has launched the “American Free Enterprise” campaign.

Hidden Costs of Medicare Advantage

Plans' Free Perks Are Subsidized By Government

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 15, 2009

TUCSON -- Patrick Higney, 66, doesn't want to give up the freebies that come with his zero-premium Medicare Advantage plan: free aspirin and free Band-Aids, a free blood pressure machine and a free ear thermometer.

Nancy Smyth, 68, wants to keep the free gym membership that comes with the Medicare Advantage policy she bought from Health Net, a private HMO. And John Kizer, 72, hopes his plan will continue to offer free prescription eyeglasses and free hearing aids.

"Everybody's trying to save their little kingdom," Kizer, a retired dairy farmer, said last week after receiving a flu shot. The shot was free, of course.

Is Foreclosure Relief Failing?

Why the Treasury's mortgage modification plan may need its own rescue.

—By Andy Kroll

Oct 14, 2009

Is the Obama administration's signature foreclosure relief program succeeding? Absolutely, according to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who last Thursday trumpeted the news that 500,000 mortgages had been modified—on a trial basis—under the Home Affordable Modification Program, a month ahead of the administration's November 1 benchmark for reaching this goal. A day later, however, the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) reached a far different conclusion when it released its own evaluation of the Treasury Department's foreclosure prevention efforts. According to the financial watchdog, the efficacy of HAMP is very much in doubt, and the program may wind up doing little to assuage the growing foreclosure mess.

The Great Challenge of Our Time: Re-Creating America's Great Middle Class

By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted on October 14, 2009, Printed on October 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143284/

The challenge of our time is to re-create America as a middle-class nation.

The idea does not find voice in the cacophony of the 24-hour news cycle. It has no place in the media's daily digest of gossip, false controversy and ideological cant. It is barely mentioned in the halls of power, where the very officials who capitalize on the economic angst of working people to win election forget that this raw anguish -- not the sophisticated arguments of lobbyists and campaign donors -- is supposed to motivate them every day.

It is easy to blame the financial crisis, Wall Street's breathtaking bonuses or the culture of excess that glittered until we found ourselves on the precipice of a second Great Depression. In truth, we've been dismantling the economic foundation of the middle class for more than three decades.

Without Drastic CO2 Cuts Immediately, the World Faces a Massive 'Oh Sh*t' Moment

By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation. Posted October 15, 2009.

A frightening new climate change study says the United States must eliminate its enormous rate of carbon emission within ten years.

Editor's Note: This is the kickoff to a series of pieces as a Copenhagen Primer about climate change that we will be running in the lead up to the international climate talks in Copenhagen beginning on December 7. Stay tuned.

They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an "Oh, shit" moment -- an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. Listening to the speeches, ground-breaking in their way, that President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao delivered September 22 at the UN Summit on Climate Change, I was reminded of my most recent "Oh, shit" moment. It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly enough, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study, Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach, has now been published here. If its conclusions are correct -- and Schellnhuber ranks among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists -- it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.

Not Your Father's Chamber of Commerce

National Organization Is Now a Tool of the Radical Right

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 15, 2009.

Once a sane advocate and even community-minded organization, the Chamber of Commerce has been captured by the Republican Party.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is often seen as an extension of the local Chambers of Commerce with which many of us grew up -- the staid, nonpartisan organizations that not only advocated for local businesses, but were also a part of the broader fabric of communities across America. They lobbied local governments, but they also promoted small towns' business districts, sponsored local parades and outfitted Little League teams.

But that image couldn't be further out of date. The organization was formed some 90 years ago to represent an umbrella group of American businesses' diverse interests. But under the leadership of Thomas J. Donahue, it has become increasingly partisan, even reactionary, in its steadfast opposition to even modestly progressive proposals in Congress, including those that are in the apparent interests of some of its member firms

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Private equity firms are trying to cash out of their investments. Uh-oh.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009, at 6:00 PM ET

The stock market has rallied impressively since this spring and closed above 10,000 for the first time in about a year. The S&P 500 is up 60 percent since the sages were declaring an Obama bear market in March. (In fact, the bottom came precisely when the Wall Street Journal editorial page published economist Michael Boskin's piecebad things have frequently happened in the bourses. "Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow.") Even so, investors should be worrying. The rally has occurred as unemployment has risen and housing has continued to struggle. Plus, it's October, a month in which bad things have frequently happened in the bourses.

Krugman says too early to exit crisis measures

By KELLY OLSEN
10.14.09, 04:54 AM EDT

SEOUL, South Korea -- Central banks should fight the urge to raise interest rates until the global economy shows stronger signs of recovery and joblessness begins to decline, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said Wednesday.

"Under the best of circumstances we're going to have years before we return to anything that approaches reasonable levels of employment in the major advanced economies," Krugman told the World Knowledge Forum, an annual conference sponsored by a South Korean business newspaper.

Thomas Frank: The GOP vs. Labor Law

Why Republicans are blocking the nomination of Patricia Smith.

By THOMAS FRANK

The signature achievement of the late Republican ascendancy was government failure. Regulators scaled back enforcement. Agencies were filled with former lobbyists.

It worked superbly for the party's supporters, but not so well for the rest of us. And today, though the GOP has paid for its sins at the polls, it is still playing the same game.

Last week, Sen. Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, announced that he was placing a "hold" on the nomination of M. Patricia Smith as solicitor of the U.S. Department of Labor. I suspect his reason for going after Ms. Smith, who is currently the New York State labor commissioner, is because she is an effective and innovative labor bureaucrat. With Mr. Enzi's hold, she will now need 60 votes in the Senate to win confirmation.

Small classes give extra boost to low-achieving students

Small classes in early grades improve test scores in later grades for students of all achievement levels, but low achievers get an extra boost. That's the finding of a study on the long-term effects of class size in the November issue of the American Journal of Education.

The study suggests that reducing class size in early grades provides a dual benefit: It raises achievement for all students through middle school, while also closing the persistently large gap between high- and low-achievers, say authors Spyros Konstantopoulos from Michigan State University and Vicki Chung from Northwestern University.

Still on the Job, but at Half the Pay

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. — The dark blue captain’s hat, with its golden oak-leaf clusters, sits atop a bookcase in Bryan Lawlor’s home, out of reach of the children. The uniform their father wears still displays the four stripes of a commercial airline captain, but the hat stays home. The rules forbid that extra display of authority, now that Mr. Lawlor has been downgraded to first officer.

He is now in the co-pilot’s seat in the 50-seat commuter jets he flies, not for any failure in skill. He wears his captain’s stripes, he explains, to make that point. But with air travel down, his employer cut costs by downgrading 130 captains, those with the lowest seniority, to first officers, automatically cutting the wage of each by roughly 50 percent — to $34,000 in Mr. Lawlor’s case.

The demotion, the loss of command, the cut in pay to less than his wife, Tracy, makes as a fourth-grade teacher, have diminished Mr. Lawlor, 34, in his own eyes. He still thinks he will return to being the family’s principal breadwinner, although as the months pass he worries more. “I don’t want to be a 50-year-old pilot earning $40,000 a year,” he said, adding that his wife does not want to be married to a pilot with so little earning power.

Debunking the "Too Big To Fail" Myth

As MIT economics professor and former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson points out today, the official White House position is that:

(1) The government created the mega-giants, and they are not the product of free market competition

(2) The White House needs to "regulate and oversee them", even though it is clear that the government has no real plans to regulate or oversee the banking behemoths

(3) Giant banks are good for the economy

In response to the latest claims by the government, let me recap the real reason the government doesn't want to break up the too big to fails.

Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways

By CHARLES DUHIGG

MASONTOWN, Pa. — For years, residents here complained about the yellow smoke pouring from the tall chimneys of the nearby coal-fired power plant, which left a film on their cars and pebbles of coal waste in their yards. Five states — including New York and New Jersey — sued the plant’s owner, Allegheny Energy, claiming the air pollution was causing respiratory diseases and acid rain.

So three years ago, when Allegheny Energy decided to install scrubbers to clean the plant’s air emissions, environmentalists were overjoyed. The technology would spray water and chemicals through the plant’s chimneys, trapping more than 150,000 tons of pollutants each year before they escaped into the sky.

But the cleaner air has come at a cost. Each day since the equipment was switched on in June, the company has dumped tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater containing chemicals from the scrubbing process into the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to 350,000 people and flows into Pittsburgh, 40 miles to the north.

Ridiculous Study Blames Feminism for Non-Existent 'Happiness Gap' Between Men and Women

By Barbara Ehrenreich, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on October 14, 2009, Printed on October 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143260/

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.

On Slate's DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised as manifestos… and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: "[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach... [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."

Take America Back From the Banks

Reining in the financial industry's power and greed will be a long, hard-fought war. But it is one that must be fought

by Dean Baker

The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam war was constrained by the huge anti-war movement. It was the civil rights movement, not compelling arguments, that convinced members of the US Congress to end legal racial discrimination. More recently, the town hall meetings dominated by people opposed to healthcare reform have been a serious roadblock for those pushing reform.

Those disgusted by the bank bailouts, and the bankers who brought us this recession, will have a chance to make their views known when the American Bankers Association has its annual meeting in Chicago this month. A large coalition of labour, community and consumer organisations are organising a protest at this "Showdown in Chicago".

One nation, under illusion

By Neal Gabler | October 13, 2009

THE HOARIEST and most oft-repeated cliche in American politics may be that America is the greatest country in the world. Every politician, Democrat and Republican, seems duty bound to pander to this idea of American exceptionalism, and woe unto him who hints otherwise. This country is “the last, best hope of mankind,’’ or the “shining city on the hill,’’ or the “great social experiment.’’ As if this weren’t enough, Jimmy Carter upped the fawning ante 30 years ago by uttering arguably the most damning words in modern American politics. He called for a “government as good as the American people,’’ thus taking national greatness and investing it in each and every one of us.

Carter was speaking when Watergate was fresh, and government had been disgraced, but still. The fact of the matter is that whenever anything really significant has been accomplished by our government, it is precisely because it was better than the American people.

Think of World War II, America’s entrance into which was strenuously resisted by the populace until Franklin Roosevelt carefully laid the groundwork and Pearl Harbor made it inevitable. Think of civil rights, which Lyndon Johnson pressed despite widescale opposition, and not just in the South. Even then it took more than 100 years. Or think of the current health care debate in which Americans seem to desire some sort of reform, just not a reform that would significantly help people in dire need, while the Obama administration is pushing to provide that assistance. In the end, government has inspired Americans far more than Americans have inspired their government. They are too busy boasting.

Bans 'do not cut abortion rate'

Restricting the availability of legal abortion does not appear to reduce the number of women trying to end unwanted pregnancies, a major report suggests.

The Guttmacher Institute's survey found abortion occurs at roughly equal rates in regions where it is legal and regions where it is highly restricted.

The 12-step path to white-collar crime

Adelphia Communications, Barings Bank, Enron, HealthSouth, HIH Insurance, Hollinger International, Tyco International, WorldCom/MCI, Xerox...the white collar crime list goes on. But, did the executives at these companies start out as criminals or did they head down the slippery slope to criminality one misplaced step at a time? According to research to be published in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, there are twelve steps to white-collar crime.

Ruth McKay of the Sprott School of Business, at Carleton University, Carey Stevens of Carey Stevens and Associates, in Ottawa, and Jae Fratzl of Artworks Counselling and Psychotherapy, in Ontario, Canada, worked together to examine the psychopathology of the white-collar criminal acting as a corporate leader.

Why Republicans Are in the Grip of an Apocalyptic Rapture Cult Centered on Revenge and Vindication

By Frank Schaeffer, Da Capo Press
Posted on October 13, 2009, Printed on October 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143232/

The following is an excerpt from Frank Schaeffer's new book, Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism) (Da Capo Press, 2009) to be released at the end of this month.

Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series of sixteen novels (so far!) represents everything that is most deranged about religion. If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I'd pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn't try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine.

The Left Behind novels have sold tens of millions of copies while spawning an "End Times" cult, or rather egging it on. Such products as Left Behind wall paper, screen savers, children's books, and video games have become part of the ubiquitous American background noise. Less innocuous symptoms include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition, adopting "Christ-centered" home school curricula, fearing higher education, embracing rumor as fact, and learning to love hatred for the "other," as exemplified by a revived anti-immigrant racism, the murder of doctors who do abortions, and even a killing in the Holocaust Museum.

The $800 Billion Deception

Conservatives claim the stimulus has already failed. But it has barely started.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Oct. 12, 2009, at 4:10 PM ET

---

From the moment it passed, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—the stimulus bill—has been the subject of controversy. Many critics have deemed it a debacle, since unemployment has continued to rise in the months since its passage. The Republican Party declared the bill a failure over the summer, and House Minority Leader John Boehner recently deemed it a waste: "You can't spend $800 billion of taxpayer money and not create jobs when you say that's what the goal was." At a dinner several weeks ago, I heard a cable news reporter, one whose job is to report numbers accurately, declare that "we've already spent $800 billion and it was a waste." I suppose it's too much to ask political hacks and TV reporters to get the size and timing of the stimulus package right. But I expect better from my colleagues at the Washington Post editorial page, which on Sunday argued against further stimulus measures because they would add to the scary national debt and because "the government still hasn't run through half of the $787 billion in tax cuts and spending increases enacted this year."

Some things about the stimulus are indeed complicated. How precisely do you measure the number of jobs "saved" when the federal government cuts checks to states, thus allowing them to avoid budget cuts? But some things about the stimulus are quite simple, including its size and the amount of it that has been spent so far.

Is the Insurance Industry Declaring War?

Over the weekend, America's Health Insurance Plans circulated a study it commissioned from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In a memo to AHIP members, reproduced here, president Karen Ignani explained its significance:

The report makes clear that several major provisions in the current legislative proposal will cause health care costs to increase far faster and higher than they would under the current system. The report finds that the proposal “will increase premiums above what they would increase under the current system for both individual and family coverage in all four market segments for every year from 2010-2019.

The Insurance Industry's Deceptive Report

In the hallowed tradition of the tobacco and energy industries, the health insurance industry has commissioned a report (pdf) projecting doom and despair for those who seek to reform its business practices. The report was farmed out to the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has something of a history with this sort of thing: In the early-'90s, the tobacco industry commissioned PWC to estimate the economic devastation that would result from a tax on tobacco. The report was later analyzed by the Arthur Andersen Economic Consulting group, which concluded that "the cumulative effect of PW’s methods … is to produce patently unreliable results." It's perhaps no surprise that the patently unreliable results were all in the tobacco industry's favor. He who pays the piper names the tune, and all that.

Paul Krugman: Misguided Monetary Mentalities

One lesson from the Great Depression is that you should never underestimate the destructive power of bad ideas. And some of the bad ideas that helped cause the Depression have, alas, proved all too durable: in modified form, they continue to influence economic debate today.

What ideas am I talking about? The economic historian Peter Temin has argued that a key cause of the Depression was what he calls the “gold-standard mentality.” By this he means not just belief in the sacred importance of maintaining the gold value of one’s currency, but a set of associated attitudes: obsessive fear of inflation even in the face of deflation; opposition to easy credit, even when the economy desperately needs it, on the grounds that it would be somehow corrupting; assertions that even if the government can create jobs it shouldn’t, because this would only be an “artificial” recovery.

In the early 1930s this mentality led governments to raise interest rates and slash spending, despite mass unemployment, in an attempt to defend their gold reserves. And even when countries went off gold, the prevailing mentality made them reluctant to cut rates and create jobs.

Why It's Time to Retire the 401(k)

Retiree Robert Shively spends his days on the golf course. For many, that would be a dream come true, but not quite in the way Shively does it. The 68-year-old is the cart mechanic at the Niagara Falls Country Club.

Two and a half decades ago, his then employer, Occidental Petroleum Corp., cut its traditional defined pension plan in favor of a 401(k)-type system. So instead of getting a guaranteed pension check of $1,308 a month for his 36 years as a full-time, salaried employee, the former chemical-factory worker receives $225 a month from his 13 years as an hourly employee, plus $180.16 a month from a profit-sharing plan Oxy had for salaried employees until 1994. He also has $70,000 left of the money he saved from his tax-deferred 401(k). On the days he works, Shively rises at 5 a.m. to get to the golf course. He mostly enjoys the job. But on tournament mornings, he has to be at the course at 4 a.m. A few years ago the country club switched from gas to electric carts, some of which have four 84-lb. batteries each. Every year, Shively and another worker have to lift out all the batteries and store them for winter. "Your body aches all over," he says.

Rates to rise under Senate health plan, industry group says

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Health insurance premiums for the typical American family would increase by another $4,000 by 2019 under a key Senate overhaul plan, according to an industry trade group analysis.

The report raised new questions about the political viability of the 10-year, $829 billion compromise bill drafted under the guidance of Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, chairman of the Finance Senate Finance Committee.

The safety net and the recession

By Lawrence Mishel
October 8, 2009

"Some claim somehow that the recovery package isn't working by simply pointing to continued job losses. I consider this peculiar, especially from those who favored the policies that actually caused the recession to begin with," EPI President Lawrence Mishel said in testimony to Congress on October 8, where he proposed a five-part strategy for creating and preserving jobs, and stressed that the causes of today’s high unemployment pre-date President Obama.

"I consider President Obama to be in the situation of having inherited a burning apartment building. He proceeded to gather all the available fire trucks and douse the fires in half the floors. Yet his critics complain that the other floors are still on fire. Even worse, those critics are the ones who started the fire. And they want to withdraw the fire trucks."

President Warren Harding's lover Carrie Phillips spied for Kaiser

Despite being prone to verbal gaffes and political scandal, Warren Harding routinely tops polls of America’s dullest presidents. Now a new biography has added unexpected spice.

An Ohio lawyer has unearthed documents suggesting that Harding’s mistress while he was a senator during the first world war was a German spy whose network helped sink British ships.

Melting glaciers bring 1980s pollution revival

Bad hair and shoulder pads are not the only things from the 1980s that we'd rather not see again. Nasty chemicals banned in that decade are also on the list. Unfortunately, melting Alpine glaciers are generating a revival of toxic organic pollutants.

Christian Bogdal and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich studied levels of pollution in sediment at the bottom of the Oberaar lake in Bern, Switzerland.

The Man Nobody Wanted to Hear

Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis

By Beat Balzli and Michaela Schiessl

William White predicted the approaching financial crisis years before 2007's subprime meltdown. But central bankers preferred to listen to his great rival Alan Greenspan instead, with devastating consequences for the global economy.

William White had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life after shedding his pinstriped suit and entering retirement.

White, a Canadian, worked for various central banks for 39 years, most recently serving as chief economist for the central bank for all central bankers, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.

Then, after 15 years in the world's most secretive gentlemen's club, White decided it was time to step down. The 66-year-old approached retirement in his adopted country the way a true Swiss national would. He took his money to the local bank, bought a piece of property in the Bernese Highlands and began building a chalet. There, in the mountains between cow pastures and ski resorts, he and his wife planned to relax and enjoy their retirement, and to live a peaceful existence punctuated only by the occasional vacation trip. That was the plan in June 2008.

And now this.

Frank Rich: Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco

THOSE of us who love F. Scott Fitzgerald must acknowledge that he did get one big thing wrong. There are second acts in American lives. (Just ask Marion Barry, or William Shatner.) The real question is whether everyone deserves a second act. Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.

Steep Losses Pose Crisis for Pensions

By David Cho

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 11, 2009

The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their promises to future generations of retirees.

Glenn Greenwald: On the government's owners

The most revealing political quote of the last year came, in my view, from the second-highest ranking Democratic Senator, Dick Durbin, who told a local radio station in April: "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." The best Congressional floor speech of the last year on the financial crisis was this extraordinarily piercing five-minute revelation from Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio on the Wall Street bailout and how the Congress is subservient to their dictates. And the single most insightful article on the financial crisis was written by former IMF Chief Economist and current MIT Professor Simon Johnson in the May, 2009 issue of The Atlantic, when he argued that "the finance industry has effectively captured our government" and detailed how the U.S. has become very similar to failed emerging-market nations in both its political and economic culture.