Lean, green killing machines

As the Taliban gunman hides from an approaching Apache attack helicopter, he may not care that the American aircraft is painted with chrome-free primer to reduce its environmental impact. Nor may he be impressed that the next generation of pilotless surveillance drones will be part-powered by solar energy.

The US military is rushing to embrace sustainability. Its primary motive is not ethical. It is trying to keep pace with China in a strategic race to harness clean energy. Any future conflict between superpowers will almost certainly feature eco-weapons and green tactics. The oil-burning Americans are starting to realise how badly they are lagging behind.

Hannity's double whammy: falsely claims Obama is cutting troops' pay and military spending

Sean Hannity falsely claimed that President Obama is "cutting troops' pay" and "cutting back on the military spending now as we speak." In fact, the Obama administration requested an increase in soldiers' salaries and also requested a larger overall defense budget for fiscal year 2011.

A New Deal for Young Adults: Social Security for Students

By Alexander Hertel-Fernandez

Created 05/14/2010 - 8:20am

This post is based on a brief written for the National Academy of Social Insurance, read the entire brief here [1].

As graduation season commences, President Obama and other policymakers have called for efforts to increase college completion rates, especially for disadvantaged students. To help achieve this goal, Congress and the administration ought to look to a program with a strong historical record of aiding students: Social Security.

Social Security already provides support to the children of parents who have retired, died, or become disabled up through the child’s nineteenth birthday at the latest. From 1965 to 1981, Congress extended these benefits to age 22 if the child was enrolled in a form of higher education. Research has shown that these Social Security “student benefits” aided college enrollment and completion amongst low-income and minority young adults.

Climate Change: Four Futures

By Sara Robinson

Created 05/14/2010 - 2:04pm

As the debate over the climate bill heats up, there's one rule of thumb that may help you keep your bearings as the rhetoric becomes more gaseous and the weeds grow ever higher around the facts.

It's this: There are, in the end, only four possible futures here.

Future 1: Continuation
More business as usual. The people favoring this approach aren't just the deniers; they're also the people who intellectually understand and accept the reality of global heating, but are so locked into the status quo and its systems that they're either unable to imagine or impotent to instigate the kind of responses required to meet it.

(A rather sobering example: a friend told me earlier this week about a meeting with a Congressional staffer who proffered the opinion that 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon -- the absolute target set by the IPCC as necessary to avoid catastrophic warming -- wasn't possible, but a target of 450 ppm could probably be sold on the Hill. The guy honestly thought you could negotiate with physics the same way you negotiate state school lunch funding -- that Mother Nature is a bureaucrat who can be counted on to pad her budget request forms, expecting Congress to dock them. That's classic Continuation thinking.)

Senator Kaufman Was Right – Our Financial System Has Become DangerousBy Simon Johnson, co-author, “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next F

By Simon Johnson, co-author, “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown“

Update: link to Senator Kaufman’s speech yesterday

Senator Ted Kaufman (D, DE) is best known these days for arguing that, as part of comprehensive financial reform efforts, our biggest banks need to be made smaller. His advocacy on this issue helped build support around the country and forced a Senate floor vote on the Brown-Kaufman amendment, which was defeated 33-61 last Thursday.

Senator Kaufman has also pushed strongly the idea that in recent years there was a pervasive “arc of fraud” within the mortgage-securitization-derivatives complex. This thesis also seems to be gaining traction – according to the WSJ today, the criminal probe into this part of the financial sector continues to develop.

The Return of Madcap Capitalism

By Robert Parry
May 14, 2010

For much of the post-World War II era, there was a broad consensus that well-regulated capitalism – paired with an effective public sector – was the economic model that worked best, especially compared with the Soviet Union’s heavy-handed central planning or the madcap capitalism that had led to the Great Depression.

The harsh Soviet approach failed to meet basic consumer needs, and laissez-faire capitalism was too susceptible to the boom-and-bust cycles that brought on the Great Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had charted a middle course that let capitalists make money producing and selling products while the government constrained capitalism’s worst excesses.

In the 1950s and 1960s, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system and John Kennedy’s space program also showed how smart government programs could help create an infrastructure to spur economic growth. Tax rates on the wealthy were relatively high in those days, but an expanding middle class was generating an unprecedented national prosperity.

Repairing The Job Machine

More jobs might be created this year than during George W. Bush's presidency.

Saturday, May 15, 2010
by Ronald Brownstein

If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush's presidency.

That comparison comes with many footnotes and asterisks. But it shows how the economic debate between the parties could look very different over time -- perhaps by November, more likely by 2012. More important, the comparison underscores the urgency of repairing an American job-creation machine that was sputtering long before the 2008 financial meltdown.

James K. Galbraith: Why the 'Experts' Failed to See How Financial Fraud Collapsed the Economy

By James K. Galbraith, AlterNet
Posted on May 15, 2010, Printed on May 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146883/

Editor's Note: The following is the text of a James K. Galbraith's written statement to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee delivered this May.

Chairman Specter, Ranking Member Graham, Members of the Subcommittee, as a former member of the congressional staff it is a pleasure to submit this statement for your record.

I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis. Concepts including "rational expectations," "market discipline," and the "efficient markets hypothesis" led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur. Not all economists believed this – but most did.

Why The Way We're Working Isn't Working -- A Survival Manual for the Modern Age

By Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
Posted on May 15, 2010, Printed on May 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146880/

From Wall Street, to the lagging economy, to Greece and the "euro zone," to our broken regulatory system, to the high-speed computer trading system that might have played a role in last week's mini-meltdown in the stock market, to those two wars we're still in a decade later, it's clear that something is wrong. It's not that our political leaders and economic chieftains aren't, for the most part, smart people -- it's that they're making their decisions without judgment or wisdom. And when so many smart people end up making so many mistakes, clearly the way we're working isn't working.

Figuring out why this is so -- and what we can do about it -- is the animating idea behind The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance by Tony Schwartz, Jean Gomes, and Catherine McCarthy, a terrific new book. It is essential reading for anyone who wants a more productive and meaningful life.

Glenn Greenwald: New Target of Rights Erosions: US Citizens

A primary reason Bush and Cheney succeeded in their radical erosion of core liberties is because they focused their assault on non-citizens with foreign-sounding names, casting the appearance that none of what they were doing would ever affect the average American. There were several exceptions to that tactic -- the due-process-free imprisonment of Americans Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, the abuse of the "material witness" statute to detain American Muslims [1], the eavesdropping on Americans' communications without warrants -- but the vast bulk of the abuses were aimed at non-citizens. That is now clearly changing.

The most recent liberty-abridging, Terrorism-justified controversies have focused on diluting the legal rights of American citizens (in part because the rights of non-citizens are largely gone already and there are none left to attack). A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation [2] to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations. Barack Obama claims the right [3] to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and with no due process of any kind. The Obama administration begins covertly abandoning [4] long-standing Miranda protections for American suspects by vastly expanding what had long been a very narrow "public safety" exception, and now Eric Holder explicitly advocates [5] legislation to codify that erosion. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduce legislation [6] to bar all Terrorism suspects, including Americans arrested on U.S. soil, from being tried in civilian courts, and former Bush officials Bill Burck and Dana Perino -- while noting (correctly) that Holder's Miranda proposal constitutes a concession to the right-wing claim that Miranda is too restrictive -- today demand [7] that U.S. citizens accused of Terrorism and arrested on U.S. soil be treated as enemy combatants and thus denied even the most basic legal protections (including the right to be charged and have access to a lawyer).

PAUL KRUGMAN: We’re Not Greece

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and the crisis in Greece is making some people — people who opposed health care reform and are itching for an excuse to dismantle Social Security — very, very happy. Everywhere you look there are editorials and commentaries, some posing as objective reporting, asserting that Greece today will be America tomorrow unless we abandon all that nonsense about taking care of those in need.

The truth, however, is that America isn’t Greece — and, in any case, the message from Greece isn’t what these people would have you believe.

So, how do America and Greece compare?