G-20 finance officials: Too early to end stimulus

By JANE WARDELL, AP Business Writer – Sat Nov 7, 1:58 pm ET

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland – Finance officials from rich and developing countries pledged Saturday to maintain emergency support for their economies until recovery is assured, but failed to reach a clear agreement to bear the cost of fighting climate change.

There was also a mixed reaction among the Group of 20 leading rich and emerging nations to a British-led push to consider a fund for bank bailouts, possibly financed by a tax on financial transactions, to ensure that taxpayers don't bear the brunt of any future rescues.

The House Public Plan: Yes, It's Worth It

By Jacob S. Hacker

Created 11/06/2009 - 12:54pm

with Diane Archer

How short memories are in Washington. A few weeks ago, when it looked possible that Nancy Pelosi could marshal enough Democratic support to create a “robust” public insurance option with rates tied to Medicare’s, everyone was talking about the big savings and reduced premiums that a series of estimates by the CBO showed this option could create. Then, the concern was that the public insurance plan would put private insurers out of business by using the government’s bargaining power to drive too hard a bargain with providers, creating an “un-level” playing field.

Now, however, the punditocracy is abuzz about the latest CBO estimates that show that the public plan eventually embraced by Pelosi--one that would negotiate rates with providers, rather than base them on Medicare’s--might actually charge higher premiums than the average private plan. No matter that the CBO estimates clearly state that the higher projected premiums reflect its expectation that the public plan will disproportionately enroll less healthy Americans--which might be seen as a virtue, since these are folks private insurance tends to serve most poorly. And no matter that a subsequent CBO letter to the House stated that even a public plan with negotiated rates would still place “downward pressure on the premiums of private plans.” Suddenly, in the commentariat, the public plan isn’t a fearsome predator. It’s a complacent kitten. Initially not worth having because it would be too strong, it’s now, according to critics, not worth having because it would be too weak.

Investors Beware

Published: November 6, 2009

Things turned Orwellian in the House Financial Services Committee this week when members — with the backing of the White House — passed an investor protection bill that would make it all too easy for thousands of publicly traded companies to cook their books.

While the bill offers investors important protections — including imposing a fiduciary duty on brokers who give investment advice — an amendment was added to permanently exempt smaller public companies (worth less than $75 million) from a post-Enron auditing requirement. It passed with votes from 28 of the committee’s 29 Republicans (one was absent) and 9 Democrats. All clearly were more interested in pleasing corporate constituents than protecting investors who, last time we checked, are also constituents.

The cost of not enacting health care reform

By Linda J. Bilmes and Rosemarie Day | November 7, 2009

MUCH OF the health care debate is focused on whether the country can afford the $850 billion the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will cost. The debate centers on whether the bundle of new taxes, credits, efficiencies, and Medicare spending cuts will be sufficient to offset the new spending so as to deliver health care reform without, in President Obama’s words, “adding a dime to the federal deficit.’’

This debate misses the point. It assumes that doing nothing will cost nothing. It turns out that not expanding health insurance is a pretty costly option, because uninsured people impose big financial and economic costs that are not properly appreciated.

The key question is: what difference does it make if you have health insurance? Several major medical studies have determined that people with health insurance have lower death rates compared to the uninsured, fewer medical ailments, and better all-around health. This means more individuals contribute to the economy for longer. Not having health insurance means these economic benefits are lost.

The US health system 'headache'

When the BBC's David Willis recently found himself caught up in the American healthcare system in Los Angeles, he says he only just lived to tell the tale.

It is amazing how within a matter of minutes fate can build you up almost beyond recognition, only to deliver a well-aimed slap across the backside.

Going through the mail last week, the first envelope was marked US Immigration and Naturalisation Service and contained a laminated piece of plastic, confirming that my application for permanent residency had finally been approved.

Obama's First Year: It Ain't No Crystal Staircase

By Robert L. Borosage, Campaign for America's Future
Posted on November 7, 2009, Printed on November 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143805/

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor --
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners...
- Langston Hughes

Barack Obama is a leader of great capacities and great contradictions. Perhaps the measure of his capacities is the magnitude of his contractions. He is a man of exceptional grace. But the grace misleads; this is a politician of intense ambition, discipline and grit. He understands and wields the power of the word. But his soaring oratory misleads, for his temperament is moderate; his predilection is for compromise. He rouses a new generation to politics, but prefers to cut the deals in the backrooms. He calls us to a new direction, then staffs his administration's team with the acolytes of the old ideas he scorns.

Under The Afpak Volcano, Parts 1 and 2

By Pepe Escobar

Part 1
Welcome to Pashtunistan

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief - Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

PARIS - Something's happening in AfPak, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Beltway think-tanker?

As Washington mashes up the "Taliban" - be they Afghan neo-Taliban or Pakistani Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) - in Empire of Chaos logic to justify perennial United States/North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops stationed in AfPak, an increasing number of Pashtuns living on both sides of the border have seized the opportunity and started to look to the Taliban as a convenient facilitator for the emergence of Pashtunistan.

Part 2

Breaking up is (not) hard to do

The Pentagon well knows that AfPak is the key land bridge between Iran to the west and China and India to the east; and that Iran has all the energy that both China and India need. The balkanization of AfPak would neutralize China's drive for land access from Xinjiang across Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, via the port of Gwadar in Balochistan province.

Squawking Hawks

The current deficit debate is for the birds.

By Daniel GrossPosted Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009, at 2:21 PM ET

A once-endangered species is staging a robust comeback: the deficit hawk. Hunted nearly to death during the Bush years, many varieties not seen in Washington in a decade are now perching on branches and dropping their wisdom. Look, there's the puff-chested congressional peacock hawk, frequently seen strutting about Sunday-morning-TV-show sets complaining about pork while emitting loud honks on the receipt of stimulus funds. The furrowed-brow warbler hawk (natural habitat: the op-ed pages) loathes deficit spending for the purpose of eliminating social injustice but loves it when the spending is used to finance military actions abroad. The blue-bellied partisan hawk nests in think tanks; it goes mute when members of its own party run the show but squawks loudly when opponents run up debt. On Nov. 3, birders sighted the rare skinny parrot hawk, which repeats back calls about fiscal probity. Said President Barack Obama on that date: "The government is going to have to get serious about reducing our debt levels."

Paul Krugman: Obama Faces His Anzio

Remember those Republican boasts that they would turn health care into President Obama’s Waterloo? Well, exit polls suggest that to the extent that health care was an issue in Tuesday’s elections, it worked in Democrats’ favor. But while health care won’t be Mr. Obama’s Waterloo, economic policy is starting to look like his Anzio.

True, the elections weren’t a referendum on Mr. Obama. Most voters focused on local issues — and those who did focus on national issues tended, if anything, to go Democratic. In New Jersey, voters who considered health care the top issue went for Gov. Jon Corzine by a 4-to-1 margin; Chris Christie won voters who were concerned about property taxes and corruption.

Jon Stewart Devastates Glenn Beck in a Brilliant, Dark, Stunning Parody

Over nearly 10 years, BuzzFlash has repeatedly received e-mails and letters from readers thanking us for helping them by offering articles that dispel the right wing/centrist mainstream media myths. During the Bush years, many a time people wrote something akin to "I don't know how I would have survived with my sanity intact without you."

Since I only have a salary of $22,500 a year, these are the rewards of our work.

But who do I go to in order to make sure that I maintain my sanity?

Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show."

Tiny tech sparks cell signal find

By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Tiny metal particles have been shown to cause changes to DNA across a cellular barrier - without having to cross it.

The nanometre and micrometre scale particles resulted in an increase of damage to DNA across the barrier via a never-before-seen cell signal process.

Reporting in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers say the mechanism could be both a risk and an opportunity.

How a Public Jobs Program Could Put America Back on Track

By Julianne Malveaux, The Progressive
Posted on November 6, 2009, Printed on November 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143710/

Eighty years ago this week, the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression. We need to apply the lessons from that era to our own to relieve the needless suffering of the Great Recession.

In just two days, between Oct. 28 and 29, 1929, the stock market plummeted by 25 percent. Between September and November of that year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 40 percent of its value. By July of 1932, the Dow had lost nearly 90 percent of its value.

Why Congress' Health Care Bills Are Better Than You Think

By Maggie Mahar, Health Beat
Posted on November 6, 2009, Printed on November 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143747/

Many progressives are expressing deep disappointment with the health reform legislation now moving through Congress.

Some suggest that some legislators made deals with lobbyists and let them write the bills. Others complain that both the subsidies and the penalties are too low. Still others don't like the fact that states can "opt out" of the public insurance option and decide not to offer "Medicare E" -- Medicare for everybody.

Is Obama's Iran policy doomed?

By Dilip Hiro

While the tone of the Barack Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W Bush, both administrations subscribe at their core to the same doctrine: whatever the White House perceives as a threat - whether it be Iran, North Korea, or the proliferation of long-range missiles - must be viewed as such by Moscow and Beijing.

In addition, by the evidence available, Obama has not drawn the right conclusion from his predecessor's failed Iran policy. A paradigm of sticks-and-carrots simply is not going to work in the case of the Islamic Republic.

Ex-OSHA official says agency let employers underreport injuries

By Ames Alexander | The Charlotte Observer

Bob Whitmore, a former federal OSHA official who contends the government has allowed companies to underreport workplace injuries, has filed a complaint alleging he was fired from his job in retaliation for speaking out about his agency's failings.

His whistle-blower complaint is set to be heard by the federal Merit Systems Protection Board in early December.

Professor: Fear, shame keep homeowners from defaulting

Millions of American homeowners are "underwater" on their mortgages – owing more than the value of their homes – and would be better off walking away.

That is the suggestion Brent T. White, a University of Arizona associate professor of law, makes in his newly released working paper, "Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis."

White, whose article will be published in this month's issue of Arizona Legal Studies, said fear, guilt and shame are what keep many homeowners from making rational economic decisions.

Igor Panarin's Doomsday Tea Party

One ex-KGB analyst has been warning for years that the US will collapse in 2010. Conservative activists think he may be on to something.

—By Nick Baumann

Thu November 5, 2009 3:03 AM PST

For more than a decade Dr. Igor Panarin, a Russian academic, has been predicting that sometime around 2010 the United States will collapse, splintering into separate states, some of them controlled by foreign powers. Outside of Russia, no one's put much stock in his crackpot and stereotype-based theories—until now, that is. Who are the newest members of the Igor Panarin fan club? Tea partiers who’ve rallied against the Obama administration's policies and blasted the president for pushing a "socialist" agenda. And he's especially big among tea party activists in Texas, who have hosted Panarin and promoted his work.

Many Still Believe That Saddam Hussein Was Behind 9/11, and Now We Have Some Idea Why

By Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com
Posted on November 4, 2009, Printed on November 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143731/

President Obama has had a hard time dislodging misperceptions about his health care proposal — those stubborn beliefs that there are death panels and free care for illegal aliens that don't actually exist in the legislation. Recent research about the way people defend their faith in false information, though, suggests calling out the inaccuracies may not be all that effective in converting the suspicious.

Sociologists at the University of North Carolina and Northwestern University examined an earlier case of deep commitment to the inaccurate: the belief, among many conservatives who voted for George W. Bush in 2004, that Saddam Hussein was at least partly responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

Want to Save Our Economy from Almighty Greed? Here Are 10 Crucial Fights and Key Fighters to Watch

By Zach Carter, AlterNet
Posted on November 5, 2009, Printed on November 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143737/

Let's face it, financial regulation is boring and complicated. But if the economic crisis taught us anything, it's that bringing Wall Street under control is one of the most critical domestic policies facing the country right now.

Here's what you need to know, and who you need to watch, as Congress readies its banking overhaul.

1. A New Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Subprime mortgages. Abusive and arbitrary rate hikes on your credit card. Payday loans. If you're wondering who lets banks get away with this crap, there are more people at it than you think. There are no less than four federal regulators responsible for overseeing consumer protection in finance, and all of them are terrible.

Barbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up

If you can't find any swine flu vaccine for your kids, it won't be for a lack of positive thinking. In fact, the whole flu snafu is being blamed on "undue optimism" on the part of both the Obama administration and Big Pharma.

Optimism is supposed to be good for our health. According to the academic "positive psychologists," as well as legions of unlicensed life coaches and inspirational speakers, optimism wards off common illnesses, contributes to recovery from cancer, and extends longevity. To its promoters, optimism is practically a miracle vaccine, so essential that we need to start inoculating Americans with it in the public schools -- in the form of "optimism training."

Thomas Frank: Glenn Beck's Hotline to Nowhere

The White House has no obligation to correct willful ignorance.

Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News host, has a red telephone on his desk that never seems to ring. Every now and then, in a moment of acute frustration, he will pick it up and give the camera his trademark pleading-puppy look.

What Mr. Beck wants to hear from the phone are answers, and he wants to hear them from the highest authority in the land: the phone, he says, is "a dedicated line right to the White House." And when Mr. Beck gets things wrong, he wants his antagonists on Pennsylvania Avenue to correct him. But "They don't call. They're not going to call."

In fight over credit rules, she wields a plan

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | November 3, 2009

CAMBRIDGE - Her critics portray her as an ivory tower elitist intent on disrupting the American Dream. But to her legions of fans in the Democratic Party, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren is the nation’s leading economic David, fighting to protect middle-class families from corporate Goliaths.

Her critique of the lending practices of big banks and mortgage companies is drawing plenty of attention, airing on everything from CNN to “The Daily Show’’ and Dr. Phil, even winning a cameo in Michael Moore’s latest movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story.’’

And she is chief architect of a new government agency to protect consumers from predatory lenders, a central element of President Obama’s efforts to avoid another economic meltdown. That makes her a big target.

The Mystery of the Rising Stock Market

If the economy's stagnant, why are stocks up? The answer is disturbing.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2009, at 1:09 PM ET

---

Here's a puzzle: The stock markets are doing very well, yet the performance of the underlying economy doesn't seem to justify optimism. The buoyant S&P 500 has risen 53 percent since the March bottom. And while the economy expanded at a 3.5 percent rate in the third quarter, unemployment is high, incomes are stagnant, and consumers are shaky.

It's possible that the stock market is just getting it wrong again. After all, the markets, which are supposed to process investors' attitudes about the future, hit record highs in October 2007, just as the U.S. economy was about to pitch into recession. But it could be that the notion the stock market is an accurate gauge of the domestic economy's temperature is outdated.

The Dow, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ are primarily indices of large U.S.-based companies, not main street businesses: more Davos than Chamber of Commerce. These increasingly cosmopolitan firms have been busy globalizing and expanding their operations overseas. In 2006, according to Standard & Poor's, 238 members of the S&P 500 broke out revenues between U.S. and non-U.S. sales. These companies notched about 43.6 percent of sales outside the United States. For large companies that had already saturated the U.S. market, the home market was something of an afterthought. In the second quarter of 2007, 66 percent of Coca-Cola's beverage business came from outside North America.

Protecting your virtual privacy

Dr. Michael Birnhack of TAU's Faculty of Law recently completed a comprehensive study that revealed dangerous loopholes in the collection of personal information by Internet sites and club cards.

Stimulus and Jobs: We Can Do Better

By Dean Baker - November 2, 2009, 8:21PM

The Obama administration came out with its first set of numbers on the jobs impact of its stimulus package. It's pretty much along the lines of what was predicted. To date, the package has created close to one million jobs. That is good news, but in an economy with more than 15 million unemployed workers, it is not nearly good enough. We need to do more, much more.

Fortunately, there is an easy and quick way to begin to get these unemployed workers back to work. It involves paying workers to work shorter hours. The mechanism can take the form of a tax credit to employers. The government can give them a tax credit of up to $3,000 in order to shorten their workers' hours while leaving their pay unchanged. The reduction in hours can take the form of paid sick days, paid family leave, shorter workweeks or longer vacations. The employer can choose the method that is best for her workers and the workplace.

As GOP Holds Up Unemployment Extension, Nearly 200,000 Lose Their Benefits

In the world outside the Senate, time is money; inside it, time is everything. Senate Republicans are taking full advantage of that reality, using every parliamentary device at their disposal to slow down an extension of unemployment insurance benefits -- even after Democrats added billions for big business to sweeten the pot.

The saga is a cast study both in the difficulty of passing even popular legislation in the Senate and the lengths to which the GOP is going to slow down the process.

The myth of Fox News' ratings spike

November 03, 2009 9:32 am ET

Fact: The breathless claim that Fox News' ratings recently spiked thanks to the White House's public critique is bogus hype -- hype that Fox News and the Beltway press have relentlessly pushed.

It's just not true.

No matter how many times reporters and pundits made the claim, a detailed analysis of Nielsen ratings numbers clearly indicates that in the two weeks after the White House in mid-October sparked a media controversy by claiming Rupert Murdoch's channel was not a legitimate news organization, Fox News' ratings did not soar or go "through the roof." In fact, not only did Fox News' overall ratings not soar, they experienced no significant increase at all. Instead, in the two weeks following the initial verbal jousts with the White House, Fox News' total day ratings virtually flatlined.

Goldman left foreign investors holding the subprime bag

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

NEW YORK — Inside the thick Goldman Sachs investment circular were the details of a secret, $2 billion deal channeled through a Caribbean tax haven.

The Sept. 26, 2006, document offered sophisticated U.S. and European investors an opportunity to buy into a pool of supposedly high-grade bonds backed by residential, commercial and student loans. The transaction was registered through a shell company in the Cayman Islands.

Experts Favor Broad Medicare Reforms to Control Costs and Foster Health Care Innovations, Survey Says

New York, N.Y., November 2, 2009—A vast majority of leaders in health care and health policy believe Medicare has been successful in providing access to care and stable coverage to the elderly and disabled individuals; however only a small percentage think the program has realized its potential to achieve other important goals, like using its leverage as the country's largest purchaser of services to control costs and promote a high performance health system. In the latest Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Health Care Opinion Leaders survey, the experts surveyed favor sweeping changes to Medicare—reforms that would help control program costs and support broader health system reform.

Financial reform next for Obama

By Julian Delasantellis

Had not the joke ended so badly with the tragedy of Anna Nicole Smith [1], the story of the old, conservative captain of banking or industry throwing away all his probity and industry at the end of his life used to be quite humorous.

Picture a painfully dry, dark-paneled lawyer's office. The memorial service for a late local potentate, attended by the mayor, and all the town's various prelates, has finished, with but one formal ritual left to attend to - the reading of the will. A stenographer keeps the record.

Breaking up the banks is hard to do

Remember US banks that were 'too big to fail'? If Congress gets its way, they will be bigger and less accountable than ever

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk
Monday 2 November 2009 18.36 GMT

Those who like banks that are too big to fail will love the latest financial reform proposals circulating in the US Congress. The bill put forward by Barney Frank, the chairman of the House finance committee, does little to change the current structure of the financial system.

The "too-big-to-fail" banks will be left in place, even bigger and less accountable than before. There will be nothing done to separate commercial and investment banking, so giants like Goldman Sachs will be free to speculate with money guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The main difference is that the Federal Reserve Board will be granted even more power than it has now. And, we will tell the Fed to be smarter in the future, so that it doesn't make the same stupid mistakes that gave us the current crisis.

GOP ‘dividing apples by oranges’ to create bogus stimulus figures, AP says

WASHINGTON — Beware the math. Some Republican lawmakers critical of President Barack Obama's stimulus package are using grade-school arithmetic to size up costs and consequences of all that spending. The math is satisfyingly simple but highly misleading.

It goes like this: Divide the stimulus money spent so far by the estimated number of jobs saved or created.

Paul Krugman: Too Little of a Good Thing

The good news is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the Obama stimulus plan, is working just about the way textbook macroeconomics said it would. But that’s also the bad news — because the same textbook analysis says that the stimulus was far too small given the scale of our economic problems. Unless something changes drastically, we’re looking at many years of high unemployment.

And the really bad news is that “centrists” in Congress aren’t able or willing to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that we need a lot more federal spending on job creation.

People, pollution and profits

THE buses that take our children to school should be safe places. But according to John Wargo, a professor of environmental risk analysis and policy at Yale University, they are polluted by diesel exhausts.

Riding the buses with monitors, Wargo and his colleagues discovered that children were at "significant risk" from tiny particles of half-burnt diesel fuel sucked in through doors at bus stops or belched out by the bus in front. At its worst, when lines of idling buses dropped off and picked up students at schools, the pollution caused "a burning sensation at the back of the throat", he says.

Bill Moyers and James Galbraith: Our Free Market Makes Economic Collapse Inevitable

By Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal
Posted on November 2, 2009, Printed on November 2, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143649/

Editor's note: In the following segment of Bill Moyers' Journal, Moyers interviews economist James K. Galbraith about the tragic impact of the recession on ordinary people and steps we must take to avoid future meltdowns.

BILL MOYERS: Americans are mad at bankers. Just Google the three words "I hate banks," and see what comes up. But nowhere has the anger been more palpable than outside the annual convention of the American Bankers Association in Chicago this week.

FOOTAGE OF PROTESTERS: We're fired up, can't take no more! We're fired up, can't take no more!

BILL MOYERS: These demonstrators wanted to know why regular folks are facing foreclosures, rising credit card and checking fees, while bankers are laughing all the way-- well, all the way to the bank.

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

By Amy Wallace
October 19, 2009

To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a “biostitute” who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor’s attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: “Grab ‘em and stab ‘em.” Recently, Carrey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN’s Larry King Live and singled out Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: “Greed.”

Aerosols make methane more potent

Aerosols' complicated influence on our climate just got more threatening: they could make methane a more potent greenhouse gas than previously realized, say climate modellers.

Drew Shindell, at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues ran a range of computerized models to show that methane's global warming potential is greater when combined with aerosols — atmospheric particles such as dust, sea salt, sulphates and black carbon.

How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Chomsky: Far-Right Threat Is No Joke

by Rob Brown

Noam Chomsky, the world's leading dissident intellectual, has warned the grievances exploited by far-right extremists need to be taken seriously by their left-wing opponents.

Speaking at the annual Amnesty International lecture in Belfast, Professor Chomsky noted: "There is now a mass of people with real grievances who want answers and are not receiving them. A common reaction in elite educated circles and much of the left is to ridicule the right-wing ­protesters, but that is a serious error.

Dr Chomsky said history had shown it was a grave mistake not to answer the calls of people mired in poverty, who are susceptible to the argument that rich liberals are giving their money to illegal ­immigrants and the shiftless poor.

5 myths about our land of opportunity

By Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Americans have always believed that their country is unique in providing the opportunity to get ahead. Just combine hard work with a bit of talent and you'll climb the ladder -- or so we've told ourselves for generations. But rising unemployment and financial turmoil are puncturing that self-image. The reality of this "land of opportunity" is considerably more complex than the myths would suggest:

1. Americans enjoy more economic opportunity than people in other countries.

Actually, some other advanced economies offer more opportunity than ours does. For example, recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they're adults.

If you are born into a middle-class family in the United States, you have a roughly even chance of moving up or down the ladder by the time you are an adult. But the story for low-income Americans is quite different; going from rags to riches in a generation is rare. Instead, if you are born poor, you are likely to stay that way. Only 35 percent of children in a family in the bottom fifth of the income scale will achieve middle-class status or better by the time they are adults; in contrast, 76 percent of children from the top fifth will be middle-class or higher as adults.

The Generals' Revolt

As Obama rethinks America's failed strategy in Afghanistan, he faces two insurgencies: the Taliban and the Pentagon

ROBERT DREYFUSS

Posted Oct 28, 2009 1:51 PM

In early October, as President Obama huddled with top administration officials in the White House situation room to rethink America's failing strategy in Afghanistan, the Pentagon and top military brass were trying to make the president an offer he couldn't refuse. They wanted the president to escalate the war — go all in by committing 40,000 more troops and another trillion dollars to a Vietnam-like quagmire — or face a full-scale mutiny by his generals.

Obama knew that if he rebuffed the military's pressure, several senior officers — including Gen. David Petraeus, the ambitious head of U.S. Central Command, who is rumored to be eyeing a presidential bid of his own in 2012 — could break ranks and join forces with hawks in the Republican Party. GOP leaders and conservative media outlets wasted no time in warning Obama that if he refused to back the troop escalation being demanded by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander overseeing the eight-year-old war, he'd be putting U.S. soldiers' lives at risk and inviting Al Qaeda to launch new assaults on the homeland. The president, it seems, is battling two insurgencies: one in Afghanistan and one cooked up by his own generals.

The gaggle of economic sociopaths

By Neal Gabler | October 31, 2009

YOU MAY be wondering how it is that this week the financial industry, which was on taxpayer life support, announced it would be doling out more than $140 billion in bonuses to the very executives who created the mess in the first place. Or how it is that some of these same institutions recently began raising the interest rates on your credit cards to unprecedented levels. Or how it is that there are now reports of new and risky financial skulduggery afoot.

To answer these questions, it may help to consult the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,’’ the handbook for psychologists. The manual describes a broad category called “antisocial personality disorder,’’ which includes those whom we commonly describe as sociopaths. According to the manual, this disorder manifests itself, among other ways, in “deceitfulness’’ as indicated by “conning others for personal profit or pleasure’’; “irresponsibility’’; and “lack of remorse as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.’’

The Evolution Of An Eco-Prophet

Al Gore's views on climate change are advancing as rapidly as the phenomenon itself.

By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 31, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 9, 2009

Al Gore steps onto the portico of his century-old white colonial, its stately columns framing him and the black Lab mix, Bojangles, that he and his son rescued from a shelter as a birthday present for Tipper. Dressed in blue jeans and a button-down shirt open at the collar, Gore looks younger than his 61 years: the mountain-man beard he grew in the wake of the Florida recount debacle of 2000 is long gone, and the extra weight, which hung on several more years, is nowhere in evidence. Nor are the trappings of office, unless you count an electronic gate at the bottom of his circular driveway in the wealthy Nashville neighborhood of Belle Meade. When he travels—as he does about one quarter of the time, often to train volunteers to give the slide show that formed the core of An Inconvenient Truth—it is with no more than one aide, and he pulls his own luggage.

Frank Rich: The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York

BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.