The Futurist Weighs In, Part II: The Things We Leave Behind

By Sara Robinson

Created 01/22/2010 - 6:36pm

My little series on the turn of the decade (which started last week [1]) was originally conceived as a two-parter: a look back to the past, and a look ahead to the future.

That changed a bit this week, when the present rose up and made itself known in a very big way.

American history has a rhythm to it: years of calm punctuated by seasons of astonishing upheaval. Sometimes, the long quiet spells -- like the long intervals between earthquakes in places like Haiti -- can go on for so long that we forget that life could ever be different, or that History, writ large, can possibly happen to us at all. All the really heinous, traumatic stuff -- war, famine, economic panic -- happened in somebody else's past. The sweet prosperity we have now is what forever looks like.

Obama Puts Social Security on the Chopping Block

— By James Ridgeway

| Wed Jan. 20, 2010 8:36 AM PST

Hope for lasting liberal change was washed away on Tuesday—not just with the loss of the Democrats' super-majority in the Senate, but with a closed-door deal that would lead to cuts in bedrock liberal programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. While Massachusetts voters were casting their ballots to install Republican Scott Brown in Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, President Obama was hammering out an agreement with Democratic leaders to support a commission on the deficit with the power to propose reductions to entitlement programs. This proposal represents a capitulation to conservatives in both parties, and leaves liberals surrendering not only on health care, but on the core achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society.

SCOTUS eviscerates campaign finance regulations: What to do about it

No doubt by now you’ve heard that the Supreme Court’s “conservatives” took an axe to regulations that for a century have limited corporate spending on political campaigns. By the slimmest of majorities, SCOTUS ruled today that corporations and unions may spend without limit on political issues and in support of candidates because they have free speech rights under the 1st Amendment just as any actual human being.

The ruling threatens to open floodgates to spending on a massive scale by corporations seeking to advance their own interests against the interests of, well, actual human beings. It should also do nicely to enhance the public’s cynicism about corporate influence over legislators (and elective judges). By itself the mere potential for uncontrolled corporate spending will tend to distort political calculations and legislative/judicial decisions – and the public’s perception of those things. The impact could be most severe in congressional elections where corporate spending or its potential will be most likely to overwhelm actual humans’ spending.

Paul Krugman: Do the Right Thing

A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail the test of history.

Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election means that Democrats can’t send a modified health care bill back to the Senate. That’s a shame because the bill that would have emerged from House-Senate negotiations would have been better than the bill the Senate has already passed. But the Senate bill is much, much better than nothing. And all that has to happen to make it law is for the House to pass the same bill, and send it to President Obama’s desk.

Right now, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, says that she doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate bill. But there is no good alternative.

Obama Adopts Volcker's Solution: If Banks Want Govt. Guarantees, They Have to Close Their Casino Operations

By Zach Carter, AlterNet
Posted on January 21, 2010, Printed on January 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145321/

The news that President Barack Obama is finally listening to Paul Volcker is welcome, but the specifics of Obama's big bank crackdown are not as positive as initial reports had indicated.

For more than a year now, Volcker has been urging policymakers to deliver strong regulatory medicine to revive the weak U.S. financial system. But Obama and other top advisers like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner have resisted the former Federal Reserve Chairman's overtures, instead opting for a set of small-bore, technocratic tweaks to a system that is fundamentally broken. (There's one major exception to this pattern—Obama's proposal to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency is a dramatic and critical step for salvaging the American economy, and the President has advocated for it over Geithner's objections.) Volcker has repeatedly suggested that banks that are too-big-to-fail are simply too-big-to-exist, and has consistently and correctly urged that banks be banned from participating in risky, high-flying securities trading. Today, Obama acknowledged these were good ideas.

Ex-AG Took Down License Plates of Visitors to Dr. Tiller's Clinic, Ethics Probe Reveals

Posted by Staff, AlterNet on January 21, 2010 at 3:27 PM.

An ethics complaint lodged against former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline reveals that the ex AG engaged in unethical and deeply disturbing behavior in his crusade against Dr. Tiller, the late-term abortion provider murdered last May. Among the most disturbing charges is the accusation that Kline sent staff to record the license plate numbers of visitors to Dr. Tiller's clinic and subpoenaed the guest list from a hotel used by patients.

Bee decline linked to falling biodiversity

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

The decline of honeybees seen in many countries may be caused by reduced plant diversity, research suggests.

Bees fed pollen from a range of plants showed signs of having a healthier immune system than those eating pollen from a single type, scientists found.

Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the French team says that bees need a fully functional immune system in order to sterilise food for the colony.

Smart mud could be the new plastic

Could a mixture of water and clay replace plastics? The desire to wean the world off oil has sparked all manner of research into novel transportation fuels, but manufacturing plastics uses large amounts of oil too. Researchers at the University of Tokyo, Japan, think their material could be up to the task.

Takuzo Aida and his team mixed a few grams of clay with 100 grams of water in the presence of tiny quantities of a thickening agent called sodium polyacrylate and an organic "molecular glue". The thickening agent teases apart the clay into thin sheets, increasing its surface area and allowing the glue to get a better hold on it.

America’s Low-Wage Future

British historian E.H. Carr once said something to the effect that while no serious scholar makes up the facts, they all choose which facts “to put on stage.” The problem of cultural bias is that there are way too many facts to give them all their proper due, and in choosing what we think is most significant among them, we are guided by our own focus and general sense of significance – that is, by our values, our hopes and fears, and our everyday sense of how the world works.

Every two years the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) makes detailed projections of how many jobs there will be in which occupations ten years from now.

Progressives Issue "Warning" On Debt Commission

Bill Scher
January 20, 2010 - 12:21pm ET

Earlier today, progressive leaders representing more than 50 organizations declared their opposition to the Conrad-Gregg debt commission proposal, which is expected to be introduced on the Senate floor soon as part of the bill to allow our federal government to meet its obligations by raising the debt ceiling.

The commission as originally envisioned -- with the power to prevent any amendments to its recommendations on the House and Senate floors -- is expected to be defeated by the full Senate. But the minority of pro-austerity, anti-Social Security/Medicare senators has threatened to force the entire US government into default if a compromise isn't reached that satisfies them.

Supreme Court rolls back campaign spending limits

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer
Thu Jan 21, 10:18 am ET

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in federal campaigns.

By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

Thomas Frank: One Cross of Gold, Coming Up

How the government could get even with right-wing cranks.

• By THOMAS FRANK

These are polarized times, but one thing everyone agrees on is that it sure is great when government makes a profit.

Supporters of President Obama like to point to recent TARP-loan payoffs, plus interest, as an example of federal success. His opponents, by and large, have long held that government should be run like a business; their former leader, George W. Bush, once announced that "government should be market-based."

It is a terrible idea. Were the government actually to begin understanding itself as a market-based, profit-maximizing enterprise, determined to bring down the deficit by whatever means present themselves, can there be any doubt what it would do?

It would sell gold. Oh, it would sell lots of gold. It would put Fort Knox on eBay. Mr. Obama could film the TV commercials.

It's the Fault of the All-Powerful 'Left'

by Glenn Greenwald

I have a contribution this morning to the New York Times examining the Scott Brown victory, and I'll post the link to it once it's up. But for the moment, I want to address two equally moronic themes emerging over the last couple of days which seek to blame the omnipotent, dominant, super-human "Left" for the Democrats' woes -- one coming from right-wing Democrats and the other from hard-core Obama loyalists (those two categories are not mutually exclusive but, rather, often overlap).

Last night, Evan Bayh blamed the Democrats' problems on "the furthest left elements," which he claims dominates the Democratic Party -- seriously. And in one of the dumbest and most dishonest Op-Eds ever written, Lanny Davis echoes that claim in The Wall St. Journal: "Blame the Left for Massachusetts" (Davis attributes the unpopularity of health care reform to the "liberal" public option and mandate; he apparently doesn't know that the health care bill has no public option [someone should tell him], that the public option was one of the most popular provisions in the various proposals, and the "mandate" is there to please the insurance industry, not "the Left," which, in the absence of a public option, hates the mandate; Davis' claim that "candidate Obama's health-care proposal did not include a public option" is nothing short of an outright lie).

Translating David Brooks

A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a genuinely beautiful piece of occasional literature. Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and why it sometimes makes natural disasters seem timely, but then again, David Brooks isn’t just any writer.
Rather than go through the Brooks piece line by line, I figured I’d just excerpt a few bits here and there and provide the Cliff’s Notes translation at the end. It’s really sort of a masterpiece of cultural signaling — if you live anywhere between 59th st and about 105th, you can hear the between-the-lines messages with dog-whistle clarity. Some examples:

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.”

Crisis probe lacks Pecora edge

By Julian Delasantellis

During the darkest days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, businessmen knew that they had to go the extra mile to separate customers from their money. For the movie-theater owner, this frequently involved presenting substantially more entertainment and information than just the feature film attraction.

One of these might be what came to be known as the "cliffhanger", basically, a 10-20 minute segment of an adventure/science fiction film, one that began with a resolution of the protagonist's crisis from the previous week, and ended with him getting into another one (as in, hanging off a cliff) that would hold the audience's attention and interest until the following week.

Don't Try It, Banks!

Big banks are considering challenging Obama's proposed tax as unconstitutional. This is a bad idea.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010, at 5:29 PM ET

The big banks are considering challenging President Obama's proposed tax on very large banks and financial institutions in court as unconstitutional. Let's see if I have this right. The Federal Reserve deciding unilaterally, without public debate, to assume hundreds of billions of dollars of financial companies' liabilities, spent hundreds of billions to buy mortgage-backed securities and potentially expose taxpayers to massive losses: That's totally constitutional. Congress passing a law suggesting that a small portion of the bailed-out financial industry, which is still benefitting from massive government subsidies, pay a fee for running huge balance sheets: That's unconstitutional.

Extend bank tax to do the business

A speculation tax would not just claw back billions lost in bailouts – it would make the financial sector more efficient and productive

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 January 2010 19.00

President Obama proposed a tax on the country's largest banks to help recover the money lost under the Troubled Assets Relief Programme (Tarp). This tax is a positive step. However, it will not come close to recovering the losses incurred in the bailouts and it will do almost nothing to change the way that the banks do business. For this we will need a larger financial speculation tax.

First, it is necessary to be clear on the extent of the losses incurred in the bailouts of the financial system. The losses in the Tarp are currently pegged at close to $120bn, mostly due to the bailout of AIG, the giant US insurance company. This money was virtually a direct handout to several large banks, as the government's money allowed AIG to make payments to Goldman Sachs and other large banks that would not have been possible if it had fallen into bankruptcy.

Bill Moyers & Thomas Frank: How America's Demented Politics Let the GOP Off the Hook for Their Giant Mess

By Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank, Bill Moyers Journal
Posted on January 19, 2010, Printed on January 19, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145249/

Editor's note: In the following interview Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank, author of "What's the Matter With Kansas" and "The Wrecking Crew," talk about why conservatives can get away with blaming Obama for the past decade of conservative failures.

Bill Moyers: There were hands in the air in Washington this week, but it wasn't a stickup. The new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, appointed by Congress to find out how America got rolled, began hearings this week. These four are not the victims of one of the greatest bank heists in history - they're the perpetrators, bankers so sleek and crafty they got off with the loot in broad daylight, and then sweet talked the government into taxing us to pay it back.

Watching that scene on the opening day of the hearings, it was hard enough to believe that almost a year has passed since Barack Obama raised his hand, too -- taking the oath of office to become our 44th President. Even harder to remember what America looked like before Obama, because we've also been robbed of memory, assaulted by what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz described as a "fantastic proliferation of mass media." We live in a time "characterized by a refusal to remember." Inconvenient facts simply disappear down the memory hole, as in George Orwell's novel, "1984."

FBI got 2,000 phone records with fake terrorism emergencies: report

By Tom A. Peter / January 19, 2010

The Federal Bureau of Investigation used false terrorism emergencies to illegally collect more than 2,000 phone records between 2002 and 2006. A series of e-mails and memos obtained by The Washington Post details how FBI officials violated their own procedures and strained their communication analysis unit with non-urgent requests. In many instances, approval was granted after records had been collected to justify the FBI’s actions.

Later this month, the Justice Department is expected to issue a report that will find the FBI violated regulations many times with its terrorism-related phone record requests. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III did not know about the problems until late 2006 or early 2007 when they were brought to light by an inspector general investigation, reports the Associated Press.

If You're Disillusioned with Obama, You Don't Understand How He Won

The distance between the aspirations he raised and his record a year on is the distinction between the electoral and the political

by Gary Younge

You've got to feel sorry for the Democratic ­Senate leader, Harry Reid. In 1995, when it seemed Colin Powell might run for president, Powell explained his ­appeal to white voters thus: "I speak reasonably well, like a white person", and, visually, "I ain't that black".

More than a decade later, Reid said almost the same thing about Barack Obama, arguing that the presidential candidate owed his success in part to his "light-skinned" appearance and the fact that he spoke "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one".

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

1. “Asymmetrical Warfare”

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Mass. Senate race's lesson for Obama

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Monday, January 18, 2010; A17

In June 2008, a few months before the financial implosions began, I asked two smart financiers who happened to be Republican about the future of the seemingly shaky American economy.

Defying the moment's conventional predictions that we would somehow muddle through, one offered a dire and uncannily accurate forecast. He explained why banks would blow up, investments would crash and the federal government would have to spend "at least $300 billion" to bail out financial institutions.

The other financial expert listened closely, took a sip from his drink, and smiled. "This," he said, "would seem like an excellent time for the Democrats to take power."

Frank Rich: The Great Tea Party Rip-Off

Even given the low bar set by America’s bogus conversations about race, the short-lived Harry Reid fracas was a most peculiar nonevent. For all the hyperventilation in cable news land, this supposed racial brawl didn’t seem to generate any controversy whatsoever in what is known as the real world.

Eugene Robinson, the liberal black columnist at The Washington Post, wrote that he was “neither shocked nor outraged” at Reid’s less-than-articulate observation that Barack Obama benefited politically from being “light-skinned” and for lacking a “Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Besides, Robinson said, Reid’s point was “surely true.” The black conservative Ward Connerly agreed, writing in The Wall Street Journal that he was “having a difficult time determining what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive.”

Paul Krugman: What Didn't Happen

Lately many people have been second-guessing the Obama administration’s political strategy. The conventional wisdom seems to be that President Obama tried to do too much — in particular, that he should have put health care on one side and focused on the economy.

I disagree. The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.

About the stimulus: it has surely helped. Without it, unemployment would be much higher than it is. But the administration’s program clearly wasn’t big enough to produce job gains in 2009.