“It’s Certainly Not For A Lack Of Effort”

The fundamental divide in opinion regarding our financial system is: Are the people running “large integrated financial groups“ hapless fools, buffeted by forces beyond their comprehension and control; or do they know exactly how to ensure they get the upside and the awful, sickening downside is borne by society – including through high unemployment.

Some light was shed on this issue by Monday’s meeting at the White House or, more specifically, by who didn’t turn up and why. Of the dozen bank CEOs invited, Vikram Pandit was supposedly busy trying to extricate Citi from TARP and asked Dick Parsons to attend instead – a wimpy but smart move, as Parsons is close to the President.

Foreclose on the Banks

How to Give America Its Best Christmas Ever

by Ted Rall

NEW YORK - Citibank is suspending foreclosures and evictions for 30 days, until after the holidays.

Mighty white of them.

Who knew bankers could be so amusing? In an interview, Citi mortgage czar Sanjiv Das acknowledged that "moratoriums are not permanent solutions" and said his company was looking for "some long-term fundamental alternatives" to throwing people out of their homes because they've fallen behind on their payments. But he didn't offer a specific example.

Stephen King Meets the Estate Tax

by Bill Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins

Imagine a story about tax policy created by horror writer Stephen King. A fictional Congress, divided between anti-tax ideology and fiscal responsibility, amends the inheritance tax on the very wealthy so that it disappears entirely one year and then returns at steeper rates the following year. Over the "zero year," death rates skyrocket in the nation's most affluent ZIP codes. Seemingly robust and healthy billionaires perish in mysterious accidents. Lexus wheels fall off from Bloomfield Hills to Scarsdale to Beverly Hills. Sailboats and yachts inexplicably crash in calm coastal and Caribbean waters. Tainted champagne wipes out clusters of prosperous alumni at class reunions from dozens of elite prep schools from Groton to Choate.

Paul Volcker Picks Up A Bat

For most the past 12 months, Paul Volcker was sitting on the policy sidelines. He had impressive sounding job titles – member of President Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board immediately after last November’s election, and quickly named to head the new Economic Recovery Board.

But the Recovery Board, and Volcker himself, have seldom met with the President. Economic and financial sector policy, by all accounts, has been made largely by Tim Geithner at Treasury and Larry Summers at the White House, with help from Peter Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget, and Christina Romer at the Council of Economic Advisers.

Testing, Testing

The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?

by Atul Gawande

Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage. Those gaps have widened to become graves—resulting in an estimated forty-five thousand premature deaths each year—and have forced more than a million people into bankruptcy. The emerging health-reform package has a master plan for this problem. By establishing insurance exchanges, mandates, and tax credits, it would guarantee that at least ninety-four per cent of Americans had decent medical coverage. This is historic, and it is necessary. But the legislation has no master plan for dealing with the problem of soaring medical costs. And this is a source of deep unease.

Paul Krugman: Pass the Bill

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. Declare that you’re disappointed in and/or disgusted with President Obama. Demand a change in Senate rules that, combined with the Republican strategy of total obstructionism, are in the process of making America ungovernable.

But meanwhile, pass the health care bill.

Yes, the filibuster-imposed need to get votes from “centrist” senators has led to a bill that falls a long way short of ideal. Worse, some of those senators seem motivated largely by a desire to protect the interests of insurance companies — with the possible exception of Mr. Lieberman, who seems motivated by sheer spite.

Kucinich: ‘Class war is over, working people lost’

WASHINGTON -- Reflecting on the growing divide between Wall Street and Main Street, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) on Wednesday offered a powerful critique on the state of the economy in an open committee hearing.

"The class warfare is over -- we lost," Kucinich said before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "I want to make that announcement today. Working people lost. The middle class lost."

Exclusive: Fox-backed seniors group exposed as conservative front

By Sahil Kapur
Thursday, December 17th, 2009 -- 12:01 pm

Group's founder formerly headed firm bankrolling Beck, Hannity projects

WASHINGTON -- The seniors group American Seniors Association (ASA) describes itself as a conservative alternative to the AARP and has attracted notable press coverage this year for its opposition to health care reform. A Raw Story investigation, however, reveals that the group has a massive web of affiliations to right-wing activists, think tanks, politicians, media and executives -- signaling ideological motivations than extend well beyond serving the interests of seniors.

Paul Krugman: Would cutting the minimum wage raise employment?

It seems that more and more Serious People (and Fox News) are rallying around the idea that if Obama really wants to create jobs, he should cut the minimum wage.

So let me repeat a point I made a number of times back when the usual suspects were declaring that FDR prolonged the Depression by raising wages: the belief that lower wages would raise overall employment rests on a fallacy of composition. In reality, reducing wages would at best do nothing for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary.

Revealed: Bush officials e-mailed bogus rumor blaming Gore for failure to kill Bin Laden

By Margie Burns
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 -- 9:03 am

White House emails retrieved from Bush administration records reveal that top Bush Justice Department officials circulated a memo falsely blaming Al Gore for U.S. failure to get Osama bin Laden. The apocryphal Osama-Al Gore-Oliver North story, already debunked on snopes.com, was forwarded internally to administration personnel by David M. Israelite, Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft.

Valuable, rare, raw earth materials extracted from industrial waste stream

Fierce competition over raw materials for new green technologies could become a thing of the past, thanks to a discovery by scientists from the University of Leeds.

Researchers from Leeds' Faculty of Engineering have discovered how to recover significant quantities of rare-earth oxides, present in titanium dioxide minerals. The rare-earth oxides, which are indispensable for the manufacture of wind turbines, energy-efficient lighting, and hybrid and electric cars, are extracted or reclaimed simply and cheaply from the waste materials of another industrial process.

Greenland Glaciers: What Lies Beneath

Researchers learning more about how water beneath glaciers contributes to ice loss

San Francisco -- Scientists who study the melting of Greenland’s glaciers are discovering that water flowing beneath the ice plays a much more complex role than they previously imagined.

Researchers previously thought that meltwater simply lubricated ice against the bedrock, speeding the flow of glaciers out to sea.

Howard Dean says ‘Kill the Senate bill!’

In a pre-recorded interview given today by Howard Dean and set to air at 5:30pm EST on Vermont Public Radio, Dean has called for the Senate health care bill to be put to death as it no longer proposes enough reform to make a difference. Dean’s comments come in reaction to what appears to be the Democratic Caucus’ decision to remove both the Medicare buy-in and a public option from the Senate health care reform package.

What Public Option Supporters Won

The public option is dead this morning. And this time, it isn't coming back to life. The Senate isn't going to include any version of the idea in its bill. And while the House can still demand a public option in conference, nobody I know expects the House to prevail.

The primary causes of death were the fierce opposition of special interests and the institutional habits of the United States Senate, in which a clear majority of senators representing an even clearer majority of the people lack the power to pass a bill. The time of death? Somewhere around 6:30 p.m. last night, during a meeting of the Democratic caucus, in which Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the votes for a public option just weren't there--and that passing a health care reform bill, as quickly as possible, was too important to risk further debate and delay.

Howard Zinn and Bill Moyers on Right-Wing Demagogues and Progressive Resistance

By Bill Moyers and Howard Zinn, Bill Moyers Journal
Posted on December 15, 2009, Printed on December 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144562/

BILL MOYERS: There's a long tradition in America of people power, and no one has done more to document it than the historian, Howard Zinn. Listen to this paragraph from his most famous book: "If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come through citizen's movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed." This son of a working class family got a job in the Brooklyn shipyards and then flew as a bombardier during World War II. He went to NYU on the G.I. Bill, taught history at Spellman College in Atlanta, where he was first active in the Civil Rights movement, and then became a professor of political science at Boston University.

Iraq's oil auction hits the jackpot

By Pepe Escobar

BEIJING - Former United States vice president Dick Cheney, ex-defense minister Donald Rumsfeld and assorted US neo-cons will have plenty of time to nurse their apoplexy. One of their key reasons to unleash the war on Iraq in 2003 was to seize control of its precious oilfields and thus shape a great deal of the new great game in Eurasia - the energy front - by restricting the access of Europe and Asia to Iraq's staggering 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

After at least US$2 trillion spent by Washington and arguably more than a million dead Iraqis, it has come to this: a pipe dream definitely buried this past weekend in Baghdad with round two of bids to exploit a number of vast and immensely profitable oil fields.

These Three Books Explain the American Crisis

Looking for a gift for the policy wonk in your life? Here are some recommendations.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Monday, Dec. 14, 2009, at 9:44 AM ET

More than a year after the most inspiring presidential election in a generation, and despite the most severe economic crisis in two generations, the change that so many Americans hoped for has not come. A modest health care reform bill is limping through Congress. The government has not tackled climate change or fixed the financial markets that nearly destroyed the economy. In the most significant policy arenas—economic growth, health reform, and foreign policy—we are seeing not the transformational politics we had hoped for but, at best, mere incrementalism. Why?

Does the United States even have the capacity—emotionally or politically—to make the massive changes necessary for us to compete in the 21^st century global economy?

Peterson, Conrad Weaken Democracy, Social Security, Medicare, & Recovery

On Monday morning, wealthy hedge fund mogul Peter Peterson and his Commission on Budget Reform will hold a press conference to issue a "Call to Action to Stem the Mounting Federal Debt." Their scary promotional material declares, "The ever-growing federal debt is spiraling out of control. If not addressed . . . Americans could be faced not only with a lower standard of living, but a real fiscal crisis."

Peterson's self-appointed deficit warriors don't really have a plan to cut debt and deficits - although most of them have a clear record of trying to cut America's meager Social Security and Medicare benefits. But they are selling a dangerous and undemocratic new budget process that would take the responsibility for budget-making away from the President and the committees of Congress and give it to a new commission charged with coming up with a plan to reduce the deficit and then jamming it through Congress on an up or down vote, with little debate and no chance for amendments.

Despite Market Plunge, DeMint Calls For Privatizing ‘Socialistic’ Social Security

Last week, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) sent out a recruitment call for “new Republicans,” confirming that he sees “little use for a big-tent approach for his party.” As South Carolina’s The State put it, DeMint is setting himself up as a kingmaker, wading into national races to endorse far-right candidates.

And one of the issues about which DeMint feels very strongly is Social Security. In an interview with Bloomberg News’ Al Hunt, DeMint blasted Social Security as “socialistic,” and advocated reviving President George Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme:

Monsanto seed business role revealed

By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, AP Agribusiness Writer
Sun Dec 13, 1:45 pm ET

ST. LOUIS – Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.'s business practices reveal how the world's biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

With Monsanto's patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.

Matt Taibbi: Obamania

There is an important parallel between those who believe all criticism of Obama to be illegitimate and those on the Right who despise him without pause. The latter is every bit as personality-driven as the former: they despise Obama not for any specific policy decisions (often, those are aligned with their ostensible views), but because of personality caricatures they’ve adopted: he’s a narcissistic, vacant, Socialist Muslim and therefore nothing he does is right. That is simply the opposite side of the same coin as those who revere his personality and thus believe that nothing he does merits real criticism.

That’s unsurprising, given that many of the most vehement Obama-haters were the same ones who most loved Bush and now love Palin: this is all about cultural identification and personality admiration and has nothing to do with the factors that ought to be used to judge political leaders.

via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

I supported Barack Obama. I still do. If I had to vote tomorrow between Obama and Tim Pawlenty, or Sarah Palin, it wouldn’t be a choice that required a whole lot of thought. He’s done some good things. He’s restored some confidence in the United States among foreign leaders. We had something of a revolutionary regime for eight years under George Bush, and Obama has put the United States back into the club of rule-abiding nations, at least to some degree.

Paul Krugman: Disaster and Denial

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on December 11, 2009, Printed on December 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

The supply-side tax con

By Henry CK Liu

In recent decades, an intuitive myth has been pushed on the unsuspecting public by supply-side economists - that low taxes encourage corporations, employers and entrepreneurs to create high-paying jobs. The counterintuitive historical truth is that a progressive income tax regime with over 90% for top-bracket incomes actually encourages management and employers to raise wages. The principle behind this truth is that it is easier to be generous with the government’s money.

In the past, when the top corporate income tax rate was over 50% and the personal income tax rate at over 90%, both management and employers had less incentive to maximize net income by cutting costs in the form of wages. Why give the government the money when it could be better spent keeping employees happy?

22 million missing Bush White House e-mails found

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
29 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that filed suit over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.

The two private groups — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive — said Monday they were settling the lawsuits they filed against the Executive Office of the President in 2007.

Reining in, and Reigning Over, Wall Street

A chat with Elizabeth Warren, President Obama's point person for financial regulation.

By Tim Fernholz | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Dec 7, 2009

Conservative Joe Scarborough thinks she should be treasury secretary. Lefty Matt Taibbi thinks she should run for president. Wherever you sit on the political spectrum, it's clear that Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor charged with overseeing the government rescue of the financial system, has struck a nerve with her plain-spoken populism. She took time from preparing her students for their final exams to critique the Obama administration's efforts to stop foreclosures and to tell NEWSWEEK what she thinks is the real solution to our financial mess. Hint: it's not breaking up big banks.

Education Rate in U.S. Declines

by Daniel Luzer

Virtually everywhere in the world people tend to be more educated than their parents. This is no longer true in the United States. A report ... indicates that the U.S. is one of only two nations on Earth in which people aged 25 to 34 have lower educational attainment than their parents.

On Obama’s Sellout

This is pernicious for a lot of journalistic reasons, but politically it’s bad for progressives beacuse conspiracy theories stand in the way of good policy analysis and good activism, replacing them with apathy and fear.

via TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect.

When we went to print with the latest Rolling Stone piece about Obama’s economic hires, a couple of my sources advised me to expect some nastiness in the way of a response from Obama apologists. One jokingly suggested that there would be a waiting period to see if anyone even read the piece first, and only if there was enough negative buzz would I start getting hit with the charges of being an irresponsible conspiracy theorist, factually sloppy, and so on.

Well, weeks after the piece came out, that process is finally underway, most notably with this post on the American Prospect. And, to be perfectly honest, some of this is my own fault, since there is indeed a factual error in the piece — a minor biographical detail that identifies Bob Rubin’s son Jamie as a former Clinton diplomat. There is in fact a James Rubin who was a diplomat in the Clinton White House, but that James Rubin is not the James Rubin I’m referring to in the piece.

US business interests suspected in ‘fabricated’ climate scandal

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, December 13th, 2009 -- 12:02 pm

Business interests and US partisan politics are behind the furor over leaked emails that have whipped up a controversy at the Copenhagen climate talks, Canadian experts say.

The global talks to hammer out a deal on curbing greenhouse gas emissions are being derailed by public attention on the so-called "Climategate," scientist Andrew Weaver and author James Hoggan told AFP.

Frank Rich: Hollywood’s Brilliant Coda to America’s Dark Year

ON Christmas Day, Hollywood will blanket America with a most unlikely holiday entertainment. That’s when “Up in the Air,” the acclaimed new movie starring George Clooney, will spread from its big-city engagements to more than 2,000 screens. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a corporate road warrior for a small, Omaha-based contractor hired to lay off employees for companies that prefer to outsource that unpleasant task. Ryan has fired so many people in so many cities that he is approaching a frequent-flier status unknown to all but a few Americans.

How could a film with that premise be a Christmas hit in a country reeling from the highest unemployment rate in decades? By using the power of pop culture to salve national wounds that continue to fester in the real world.

“Up in the Air” is not a political movie. It won’t be mistaken for either a Michael Moore or Ayn Rand polemic on capitalism. What makes it tick is Ryan’s struggle to reclaim his own humanity, a story that will not be described or spoiled here. But the film’s backdrop is just as primal — and these days perhaps more universal — than the personal drama so movingly atomized by Clooney in the foreground.

The end of a dream

John Gray
Published 10 December 2009

Unreality is the defining feature of the fashionable ideas of the past decade. Perhaps only a more serious crisis will overturn these delusive fancies

To look back on the ideas that shaped the past decade is to survey a scene of wreckage. Ten years ago, the best and the brightest were believers in the "Washington consensus" - the idea that the debt-fuelled free market that had existed in the US for little more than a decade was the only economic system consistent with the imperatives of modernity, and destined to spread universally.

It was not only the neocon right that believed this. Centre-left parties, whose historical role had been to set limits on free markets, bought in to this idea with enthusiasm. When Bill Clinton and Tony Blair embraced neoliberal economics, they did more than triangulate policies for the sake of electoral advantage. They endorsed the belief that a bubble engineered by Alan Greenspan at the end of the 1990s, when he lowered interest rates to artificial levels after the blow-up of a hedge fund, represented a new era in economic history. Both the triangulating politicians and many left-of-centre commentators became convinced that, for all practical purposes, neoliberal capitalism was indestructible.

Sick of swine flu? Toxic algae could be the next big threat

By Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — With a new theory surfacing that toxic algae rather than asteroids killed the dinosaurs, scientists are still trying to unravel the mystery of what caused a massive algae bloom off the Northwest Coast that left thousands of seabirds dead and may have sickened some surfers and kayakers.

The bloom, which stretches roughly 300 miles from Newport, Ore., north to the Canadian border, still persists, though it's a shadow of its September and October peak.

U.S. has role in Africa's unplanned baby bonanza

By Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers

SIRAKANO, Uganda — At age 45, after giving birth to 13 children in her village of thatch roofs and bare feet, Beatrice Adongo made a discovery that startled her: birth control.

"I delivered all these children because I didn't know there was another way," said Adongo, who started on a free quarterly contraceptive injection last year. Surrounded by her weary-faced brood, her 21-month-old boy clutching at her faded blue dress, she added glumly: "I fear we are already too many in this family."

Despite U.S. laws, thousands still virtual slaves in America

The United States banned slavery on Dec. 6, 1865. Yet tens of thousands of foreign-born workers are held in involuntary servitude throughout the United States — and the U.S. government has been unable to stop it. America declared war on human trafficking nearly a decade ago, but still the scourge of involuntary servitude has spread from America's coasts into its heartland.

Under the Icy North Lurks a ‘Carbon Bomb’

Tropical deforestation is a climate change crisis, but scientists fear for boreal wilderness, too

by Beth Daley

OTTAWA - North of Canada's capital, underneath an endless expanse of spruce, pine, and birch, ticks what some scientists are calling a carbon bomb: Peat.

A thick layer of the black spongy soil, the remnants of ancient forests, wraps the globe's northern tier. Deeper than 15 feet in places, the peat layer extends over more than 6 million square miles across Russia, Scandinavia, China, Canada, and the United States.

Why ACORN Won

by Bill Quigley

On December 11, 2009, a federal judge ruled that Congress had unconstitutionally cut off all federal funds to ACORN. The judge issued an injunction stopping federal authorities from continuing to cut off past, present and future federal funds to the community organization.

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and its allies in 75 cities will again have access to millions of federal dollars to counsel people facing foreclosure, seeking IRS tax refunds, and looking for affordable low cost housing. ACORN, which has received about $54 million in government grants since 1994, will be able to apply for new federal programs just like any other organization.