Who Bankrolls Congress?

The Big Money Behind Top Lawmakers

By Josh Israel and Aaron Mehta | June 07, 2010

California Assembly Speaker Jesse M. Unruh once famously said of moneyed political interests: “If you can't take their money, drink their booze, eat their food, screw their women, and vote against them, you don't belong here.” In other words, giving cash to politicians is no guarantee they’ll carry your water. But campaign contributions to elected officials don’t hurt either. The links between money and votes is an endlessly debated subject in official Washington. Cynics say campaign cash often buys support.

Did the GOP commission Fox to rewrite the history books?

June 10, 2010 2:20 pm ET

Appearing on Fox & Friends, purported business expert Stuart Varney made extensive revisions to U.S. economic history, among them: the false suggestion that President Obama has not cut taxes; the false suggestion that President Bush presided over strong job growth; and the false claim that after President Clinton took office, the economy did not improve until Republicans took control of Congress.

Is There a Global War Between Financial Theocracy and Democracy?

Senate and House conferees are about to reconcile a financial reform bill that is virtually designed to institutionalize "too big to fail." And when they do we'll lose another battle in the ongoing war between global financial markets and democratic nation-states.

This war has been going on for decades -- but democracy hasn't always been in full retreat.

The New Deal Conquest: During the Great Depression democratic forces gained the upper hand in the war. We realized that financial markets, which are driven by the largest banks and financiers, had to be tightly controlled. We knew that global speculation on currencies only deepened the Depression and had to be strictly limited. We knew that an iron curtain was needed between commercial and investment banking to protect Main Street depositors from market madness (that was the Glass-Steagall Act). And most importantly we knew that the key to preventing economic upheaval was to limit the wealth of the super-rich and to increase the wealth of working people through progressive taxes, Social Security, wage and hour laws, and the promotion of unionization. The Bretton Woods agreements forged by the Allies during WWII set up strict rules for global finance, rules that kept financiers in check for more than a quarter century.

And it worked pretty damn well. As economist Joseph Stiglitz points out, this era saw only one financial crisis (Brazil, 1964), and working people in western democracies made huge gains. Since the era of deregulation took hold in the late 1970s, the world has suffered over a hundred financial crises and middle-class incomes have stagnated.

10 Things That Terrify Right-Wingers

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on June 12, 2010, Printed on June 12, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147159/

Modern American conservatism is based on an almost endless series of grievances. Author Thomas Frank coined a term for it: the conservative “plenty-plaint” -- a long and ever-evolving list of personal and cultural gripes dressed up as an ideology.

But there’s also fear! And while it spans the breadth of the movement, this is the year of the Tea Party revolt, when the grassroots right, disgusted with the idea of semi-affordable health-care and tepid financial reforms is rebelling against even its own establishment. And the divide between the grassroots base and its leadership extends to the very fears that animate them. As we’ll see, the conservative movement’s business-attired hacks and the hard-right Tea Party types waving misspelled signs out in the streets have some very different causes for alarm.

So, here are ten of the most interesting things that absolutely terrify Wingnuttia.

The ‘Blame the Teacher’ Movement, and the Public-Sector Union Crisis

By Richard Greenwald

Will government workers join the race to the bottom?

I was stopped dead in my tracks and felt a cold chill run down my spine while reading the current issue of The Atlantic. Its cover story is “The 14 3/4 Most Powerful Ideas of the Year,” which is a Top 10 list that makes fun of Top 10 lists (hence the 3/4).

Idea number 13 is the one that got me. It was written by The New York Times’ David Brooks and titled “Teachers are Fair Game.” As Brooks sees it, it is now open season for intellectually assaulting teachers. To be honest, Brooks aims mostly for the teachers unions. The result is yet one more mainstream media outlet joining the echo chamber claiming that teachers and their organizations are at fault for the poor state of education in America.

'Experts' Eye 100% Unverifiable E-Vote System in 'Win' of SC's Mystery U.S. Senate Nominee

'Staggering' disparities seen between Alvin Greene's Election Day touch-screen results and paper-based absentee vote

Will corporate MSM have courage to 'go there'?...

Posted By Brad Friedman On 11th June 2010 @ 13:55

Nobody in the South Carolina Democratic Party had ever heard of Alvin Greene, the jobless candidate for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination, before he reportedly defeated state legislator Vic Rawl last Tuesday. That, despite the jobless candidate's lack of actual campaigning, campaign website, or even spending any money on a campaign as far as anyone can tell. And there remain questions at this hour, as to where he even came up with the $10,400 filing fee to get on the ballot in the first place. Greene's interview on MSNBC last night is one of the most bizarre ever seen on television (full video posted at end of article).

Unless something changes between now and November, however, Greene's inexplicable victory will pit him against the state's often-controversial, and far-Rightwing Republican incumbent Sen. Jim DeMint.

The Wrong Message on Deficits

The whip-deficits-now fever is running hot on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, politicians are understandably spooked by investors dumping government bonds in the wake of the Greek meltdown. But the sudden fierce enthusiasm for fiscal austerity, especially among stronger economies, is likely to backfire, condemning Europe to years of stagnation or worse.

The United States is running the same very high risk. Democrats have soured on job creation and economic stimulus in favor of antideficit rhetoric, which Republicans have long seen as the easy road to discontented voters in a confusing election year.

At a hearing on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, said job creation and financial-stabilization programs were essential to stop recession from becoming depression, but he also called for “a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility in the longer run.” The emphasis in that statement should be on that “longer run,” but we fear many politicians weren’t listening for nuance.

The Democratic Party and Blanche Lincoln

The run-off between Democratic Senate incumbent Blanche Lincoln and challenger Bill Halter, which culminated on Tuesday night in Lincoln's narrow victory, brightly illuminates what the Democratic Party establishment is. Lincoln is supposedly one of those "centrist"/conservative/corporatist Senators who thwarts the good-hearted progressive agenda of the President and the Party. She repeatedly joined with Republicans to support the extremist Bush/Cheney Terrorism agenda (from the the Protect America Act to the Iraq War and virtually everything in between), serves the corporate interests that run Washington as loyally as any member of Congress, and even threatened to join the GOP in filibustering health care reform if it contained the public option which Obama claimed he wanted. Obama loyalists constantly point to the Blanche Lincolns of the world to justify why the Party scorns the values of their voters: Obama can't do anything about these bad Democratic Senators; it's not his fault if he doesn't have the votes, they insist.

Top Fed Official Supports Restricting Banks' Derivatives Bets, Goes FURTHER Than Obama

First Posted: 06-10-10 08:35 PM | Updated: 06-11-10 12:46 AM

The top fiscal hawk and longest-serving policy maker in the Federal Reserve supports limiting banks' derivatives activities, a potential blow to Wall Street megabanks that use their taxpayer support to trade the kind of risky financial products that nearly brought down the global financial system.

In a letter of support, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas M. Hoenig endorsed a Senate provision Thursday that would force banks to strip their swaps desks out from their depository institutions, calling it "of utmost importance to our nation's long-term financial and economic stability."

The Spill, The Scandal and the President

By Tim Dickinson

Jun 08, 2010 4:30 PM EDT

This article originally appeared in RS 1107 from June 24, 2010.

On May 27th, more than a month into the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, Barack Obama strode to the podium in the East Room of the White House. For weeks, the administration had been insisting that BP alone was to blame for the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf – and the ongoing failure to stop the massive leak. "They have the technical expertise to plug the hole," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had said only six days earlier. "It is their responsibility." The president, Gibbs added, lacked the authority to play anything more than a supervisory role – a curious line of argument from an administration that has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens abroad and has nationalized much of the auto industry. "If BP is not accomplishing the task, can you just federalize it?" a reporter asked. "No," Gibbs replied.

Now, however, the president was suddenly standing up to take command of the cleanup effort. "In case you were wondering who's responsible," Obama told the nation, "I take responsibility." Sounding chastened, he acknowledged that his administration had failed to adequately reform the Minerals Management Service, the scandal-ridden federal agency that for years had essentially allowed the oil industry to self-regulate. "There wasn't sufficient urgency," the president said. "Absolutely I take responsibility for that." He also admitted that he had been too credulous of the oil giants: "I was wrong in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios." He unveiled a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, discussed the resignation of the head of MMS, and extended a moratorium on new deepwater drilling. "The buck," he reiterated the next day on the sullied Louisiana coastline, "stops with me."

As Employers Push Contract Employment, Say Goodbye to Full-Time Jobs With Benefits.

By Susie Madrak Monday Jun 07, 2010 5:00pm

Is it just me, or does Congress seem completely oblivious to what the rest of us are going through? No security of any kind, and instead of expanding the safety net, they're shredding what's left. In the meantime, we're not even going to have full-time jobs again:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Jobs may be coming back, but they aren't the same ones workers were used to.

Many of the jobs employers are adding are temporary or contract positions, rather than traditional full-time jobs with benefits. With unemployment remaining near 10%, employers have their pick of workers willing to accept less secure positions.

Oversight panel: Feds jumped too soon to bail out AIG

By Chris Adams | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The federal government didn't exhaust all its options before it committed tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars to bail out the American International Group during the height of the 2008 financial collapse, according to a new report from a congressional watchdog panel.

The Congressional Oversight Panel, which was created to monitor the spending in the 2008 bank bailout bill known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, detailed in its latest monthly report the government's extraordinary rescue of AIG and its lingering effects on taxpayers and the financial markets.

Robbed of jobs by the deficit cultists

The latest US jobs report shows how feeble this recovery is. Yet those managing the economy are set on a low-employment path

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 June 2010 18.00 BST

Friday's US jobs report caught most economic analysts by surprise. After touting the strength of the recovery for months, they had to come to grips with the fact that the economy just is not creating very many jobs.

If the temporary jobs generated by the census are pulled out of the count, the economy created just 20,000 jobs in May. The average rate of growth of non-census jobs over the last three months has been just 130,000 a month, only slightly faster than the growth of the workforce. At this rate of job growth, it will take decades, not years, to get back to normal levels of unemployment. It's time that we stop the happy talk about recovery and get serious about the country's economic problems.

Swiss solar innovator wins Millennium Technology prize

The inventor of a low-cost solar cell that could be used to build electricity generating windows has been awarded this year's Millennium Technology Prize.

Professor Michael Gratzel of the Lausanne Federal Technology Institute received the €800,000 (£660,000) prize at a ceremony in Helsinki.

A Warning From Noam Chomsky on the Threat Posed By Elites

By Fred Branfman, Truthdig
Posted on June 8, 2010, Printed on June 10, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147144/

Noam Chomsky’s description of the dangers posed by U.S. elites’ “Imperial Mentality” was recently given a boost in credibility by a surprising source—Bill Clinton. As America’s economy, foreign policy and politics continue to unravel, it is clear that this mentality and the system it has created will produce an increasing number of victims in the years to come. Clinton startlingly testified to that effect on March 10 to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

Since 1981 the United States has followed a policy until the last year or so, when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food so thank goodness they can lead directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did, nobody else.

Clinton is to be praised for being the first U.S. president to take personal responsibility for impoverishing an entire nation rather than ignoring his misdeeds or falsely blaming local U.S.-imposed regimes.

Get a Brain, Morons: Why Being Liberal Really Is Better Than Being Conservative

By Greta Christina, AlterNet
Posted on June 10, 2010, Printed on June 10, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146930/

You may have heard about this. It's been in the news and the blogosphere, and has been making the rounds at the nerdier water coolers and cocktail parties. A number of researchers are coming to the conclusion that ethics and values aren't entirely relative, and aren't solely derived from particular cultures. Human beings, across cultures and throughout history, seem to share a few core ethical values, hard-wired into our brains by millions of years of evolution as a social species. Those values: Fairness, harm and the avoidance thereof, loyalty, authority and purity. (Some think there may be one or two others, including liberty and honesty; but those aren't yet as well-substantiated, or as well-studied.)

Different people prioritize different values over others, of course. And of course, different individuals and different cultures come to different conclusions about the right ethical choice in any particular situation: based on our cultural biases, as well as on our own personal observations and experiences. But according to this research, these basic values -- fairness, harm, loyalty, authority and purity -- exist in all of us, at least to some degree, in every non-sociopathic human being.

Man With Napalm Bomb is Latest Oath Keeper to Face Trial

This is getting embarrassing. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes keeps insisting his year-old organization is composed of nothing more than patriotic, Constitution-loving Americans who aren’t a threat to anybody.

Then his members prove otherwise.

Victory! California Voters Reject Two High-Priced Corporate Attempts to Hijack Democracy

By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet
Posted on June 10, 2010, Printed on June 10, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147158/

On Tuesday voters squarely rejected two corporate-backed measures that would have cost ordinary Californians millions of dollars.

Proposition 16, cleverly disguised as the Taxpayers' Right to Vote Act, was placed on the state ballot as a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds vote to create public power districts or allow local governments to purchase their own renewable power. In other words, it was a way for electric utility behemoth PG&E to further protect its monopoly. PG&E saw such potential for its bottom-line that it spent $45 million to persuade voters to approve the measure. But 52.5 percent of California voters saw through the language and knocked it down.

Stimulus Talk Yields to Calls to Cut Deficits

By DAVID E. SANGER and SEWELL CHAN

WASHINGTON — At a moment when many economists warn that the American economic recovery is likely to be imperiled by prolonged high unemployment and slow growth, President Obama is discovering that the tools available to him last year — a big economic stimulus and action by the Federal Reserve — are both now politically untenable.

The mood in both parties of Congress has turned decidedly anti-deficit, meaning that the job-creation programs once favored by the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress have been cut back, then cut again. It is a measure of the mood that Mr. Obama on Tuesday hailed an initiative by his administration to cut the budgets of most major government agencies by 5 percent, at a time when conventional theory would call for more government spending to lift the economy.

Personality predicts political preferences

Values deeply embedded in biology

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

TORONTO, ON - There is a strong relationship between a voter's politics and his personality, according to new research from the University of Toronto.

Researchers at UofT have shown that the psychological concern for compassion and equality is associated with a liberal mindset, while the concern for order and respect of social norms is associated with a conservative mindset.

Chronic Unemployment: Crisis or "Correction"

By Terrance Heath

Created 06/08/2010 - 2:07pm

Like any parents, we want the best possible future for our children, and we're doing all we can to prepare them to attain it as our parents did for us. Being the grandson of sharecroppers and the son of 1st generation Polish immigrants, to us that means getting an education, being able to land a "good job" with the possibility of moving up the economic ladder, and possibly doing better than one's parents did. But the current rate of long-term joblessness, and Washington's apparent lack of political will to remedy it make me wonder if our elected officials see long-term unemployment as a crisis to be averted or "the new normal" — a "correction" [1] that must simply be accepted.

Every night I help our seven year old with his homework. In the event he doesn't have any, then we work on other things with him to help him in school; like handwriting practice or going through his math flash cards. He's a bright kid, bright enough to have been placed in an advanced math class — which, in the first grade, means he's already taking on some second grade math. His teacher also says he's one of the best readers in his class, which I think is due to the fact that we started reading to him at an early age and keep him reading with regular trips to the nearby public library.

Senate Won't Extend COBRA Subsidies For Unemployed!

by slinkerwink

Tue Jun 08, 2010 at 11:45:11 AM PDT

Here comes the news that the Senate won't extend COBRA subsidies for the unemployed. This means millions of Americans and their families will now go without health insurance since they cannot afford the full cost of their COBRA premiums. As a result of the Senate's misplaced priorities, people will suffer.

Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage As Truth -- Why Did America Buy It?

Rand was mediocre. But she had a preternatural ability to translate her sense of self into reality.

June 7, 2010 | St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both. Many other people have thought so too. In 1998 readers responding to a Modern Library poll identified Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as the two greatest novels of the twentieth century—surpassing Ulysses, To the Lighthouse and Invisible Man. In 1991 a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club found that with the exception of the Bible, no book has influenced more American readers than Atlas Shrugged.

One of those readers might well have been Farrah Fawcett. Not long before she died, the actress called Rand a "literary genius" whose refusal to make her art "like everyone else's" inspired Fawcett's experiments in painting and sculpture. The admiration, it seems, was mutual. Rand watched Charlie's Angels each week and, according to Fawcett, "saw something" in the show "that the critics didn't."

Part 10: The trillion-dollar failure

By Henry CK Liu

This is the 10th article in a series.
Part 1: The crisis of wealth destruction
Part 2: Banks in crisis: 1929 and 2007
Part 3: The Fed's no-exit strategy
Part 4: Fed's double-edged rescue
Part 5: Too big to save
Part 6: Public debt - prudence and folly
Part 7: Global sovereign debt crisis
Part 8: Greek tragedy
Part 9: Greek crisis, German politics

At the close of an emergency Sunday meeting of financial ministers from the 27-member European Union (EU) that lasted until the early hours of Monday, May 10, 2010, the exhausted attendees emerged to announce a startling nearly 750 billion euro (US$1 trillion) financial stabilization package for EU member states with sovereign debt problems and the European Monetary Union (EMU) to restore market confidence in the euro, its common currency for the 16-country eurozone.

Immediately after foreign exchange markets opened several hours later on the same day, the dramatic news caused the euro to soar against the dollar and the yen, reversing its recent sharp decline as fallout from the sovereign debt crisis in Greece.

A Short History of "Feminist" Anti-Feminists

The early sisters of Sarah Palin.

By Amanda Marcotte
Posted Tuesday, June 8, 2010, at 10:00 AM ET

---

Sarah Palin made quite the splash recently with her comments to the anti-abortion group the Susan B. Anthony List about conservative women reclaiming feminism, asserting that anti-choicers were "returning the woman's movement back to its original roots." Because no central authority exists to control use of the word feminist, Palin's cooption of the term caused anxious questions: Is there such thing as conservative feminism? Can you be a feminist who opposes abortion rights? Does the word feminism mean anything at all? Does merely wearing a power suit and smart-girl glasses automatically make you a feminist?

The invocation of the word feminist at a meeting of anti-abortion women can be confusing, but it shouldn't be. There's no real reason to consider Sarah Palin a feminist. She's just the latest incarnation of a long and noble line of feminist anti-feminists: women who call themselves feminist but also object to the existence of the feminist movement and organize in opposition to it. Feminist anti-feminism has evolved in the shadow of feminism since the days when many women adamantly insisted they didn't want or need the right to vote. And as feminism has morphed rapidly since the early days of the second wave, so has anti-feminism changed arguments and strategies, going through three distinct phases.

Few health reform options would have covered more people at lower cost than new law, study finds

The recently enacted federal health care reform law provides health insurance coverage to the largest number of Americans while keeping federal costs as low as reasonably possible, according to a new analysis from the RAND Corporation.

The only alternatives that would have covered more Americans at a lower cost to the federal government were all politically untenable – substantially higher penalties for those who don't comply with mandates, lower government subsidies and less-generous Medicaid expansion, according to research published in the June edition of the journal Health Affairs.

"Of all the proposals on the table that would expand health insurance to more Americans, the final health reform law included those that covered the largest number of people at the lowest cost to the federal government," said Elizabeth A. McGlynn, the study's lead author and a senior researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

Senate Dems move on jobs bill

By: David Rogers
June 7, 2010 09:55 PM EDT

Trying to get to 60 votes, Senate Democrats proposed changes to a House-passed jobs bill Tuesday that would increase aid to cash-strapped states while treading more lightly on new tax rules aimed at private equity interests with clout in the party.

An estimated $24 billion in Medicaid funds — dropped by the House before Memorial Day — would be restored after an outcry from governors and liberals. At the same time, a handful of swing Democrats on the East and West coasts would win concessions to soften House reforms that target wealthy investment-fund partners who now shelter their income at lower rates afforded capital gains.

Richard Fisher (Federal Reserve Bank Of Dallas): Larry Summers, The G20, And Financial Dementia

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

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Fed, has long been a proponent of serious financial sector reform. As a former commercial banker, he sees quite clearly that the legislation now headed into “reconciliation” between House and Senate versions amounts to very little. He also knows that pounding away repeatedly on this theme is the best way to influence his colleagues within the Fed and across the policy community more broadly.

He is now taking his game to a new, higher level. Couched in the diplomatic language of senior officials, his speech on June 3 to the SW Graduate School of Banking was both a carefully calibrated assault on the administration’s general “softly, softly” approach to the big banks and a direct refutation of arguments put forward by Larry Summers in particular.

A Troubling Pattern in America’s Obama Story

By: Glenn W. Smith Sunday June 6, 2010 9:30 am

George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and was appointed president by the conservative U.S. Supreme Court. A sanctimonious pundit class tells us it is crabby, unpatriotic and uncivil to dwell upon that bit of history. But questions of legitimacy (“does he really belong here?”) have dogged Barack Obama since he won the Iowa caucuses. Where have the “get over it” arguments gone? Long time passing.

A Troubling Pattern in America’s Obama Story

By: Glenn W. Smith Sunday June 6, 2010 9:30 am

George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and was appointed president by the conservative U.S. Supreme Court. A sanctimonious pundit class tells us it is crabby, unpatriotic and uncivil to dwell upon that bit of history. But questions of legitimacy (“does he really belong here?”) have dogged Barack Obama since he won the Iowa caucuses. Where have the “get over it” arguments gone? Long time passing.

Galbraith: The danger posed by the deficit ‘is zero’

James Galbraith is an economist and the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. chair in government and business relations at the University of Texas at Austin. He's also a skeptic of the prevailing concern over America's long-term deficit. With many people now comparing America's fiscal condition to Greece, I spoke with Galbraith to get the other side of the argument. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

EK: You think the danger posed by the long-term deficit is overstated by most economists and economic commentators.

JG: No, I think the danger is zero. It's not overstated. It's completely misstated.

Call to Act: Save and Strengthen Financial Reform

DANNY SCHECHTER FOR BUZZFLASH

An Appeal for a Financial Crisis Education Outreach Campaign from “Plunder” Filmmaker and Author Danny Schechter

We have less than a month to go before the Congress votes on financial reform.

Ironically, the deadline seems to be July 4th, our independence day, an occasion that will likely usher in ever more dependence on Wall Street despite appearances.

The conference on the Hill formally begins this week after weeks of behind-the-scenes legislative "reconciliation" --a fancy name for horse-trading and compromising between the House and Senate over different versions of the "reforms" with thousands of lobbyists for the financial industry using every trick in their infinite playbooks of persuasion and payoffs to assure that the final bill is loop-hole full, weak, and easy to maneuver around.

Prison-Based Gerrymandering Dilutes Blacks' Voting Power

Thursday 03 June 2010

by: Emily Badger | Miller-McCune

Sixty-six percent of the inmates in the state of New York come from New York City. But 91 percent of them are incarcerated upstate, in communities where they have long been counted by the U.S. census.

On paper, this means prisoners belong not to the communities from which they’ve come (and to which they eventually will return), but to places where they can neither vote, check out a library book or attend a local school.

The counting quirk sounds like a quandary for demographers. But it also means, come gerrymandering time, that many urban black communities look smaller than they actually are, a disproportionate number of their residents having been counted in the rural areas that are home to penitentiaries.

Banks Profit From Near-Zero Interest Rates: Another Reason for States to Own Their Own Banks

Saturday 05 June 2010

by: Ellen Brown, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

While individuals, businesses and governments suffer from a credit crisis created on Wall Street, the banks responsible for the crisis are tapping into nearly-interest-free credit lines and using the money to speculate or to make commercial loans at much higher rates. By forming their own banks, states too can tap into very low interest rates, and can buffer themselves from another Lehman-style credit collapse.

Keeping interest rates low is considered the first line of defense for central banks bent on easing the credit crisis and getting banks to lend again. The Federal Reserve's target for the federal funds rate - the overnight interest rate that banks charge each other - has been kept at a rock-bottom 0% to 0.25% ever since December 2008. A growing number of economists now think it could stay there well into 2011 or even 2012, prompted by fears that a spreading debt crisis in Europe could hurt a budding U.S. recovery.

"The Price That We Pay" - Undocumented Immigrants and Taxation

Sunday 06 June 2010

by: Yana Kunichoff, t r u t h o u t | Report

Editor's Note: This is the first installment of a three-part series on immigration.

Rita's house on the South Side of Chicago could be any Mexican-American family home - In the corner a big "I love you, Mom!" balloon sags against the wall, a relic of Mother's Day a couple of weeks ago. On the coffee table sits an orange Brain Quest game, and hanging on the wall is a large, framed photo of Rita's eldest daughter, resplendent in her white quinceanera dress. As many people do, she keeps her tax statements for each year in separate, pristine manila envelopes, away from the clutter of the living room and the curious nose of the family's chihuahua.

Rita, a 47-year-old Hispanic woman, may in fact be the blueprint for a growing number of Mexican-American immigrant lifestyles: Rita is an undocumented immigrant, and a taxpayer.

Blanche's Moment Of Truth: Arkansas Runoff Will Be 'Very Close'

Christina Bellantoni | June 4, 2010, 6:40PM

It's down to the final stretch for Sen. Blanche Lincoln and Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who each are predicting a victory in Tuesday's Democratic primary runoff election. But of course, only one Arkansas candidate can prevail, and incumbents aren't doing so well this season.

Lincoln and Halter are criss-crossing the state in hopes of enticing voters who were almost evenly divided between the two during the May 18 primary that they should head to the polls a second time in the election that really counts. Team Halter spun his 43 percent second place finish to her 45 percent as a victory since the incumbent senator wasn't able to hold more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff.

Elena Kagan's Papers: No 'Smoking Guns' For Practical, Liberal Lawyer

Andrew Cohen

Columnist

While clerking for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in 1952, the brilliant Stanford Law School graduate (and already dogmatic) William H. Rehnquist wrote and delivered to his boss a memo arguing against the integration of public schools. The memo from the earnest clerk came about during the Court's early deliberations over the school desegregation cases that we now know as Brown v. Board of Education. "I realize that it is an unpopular and un-humanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my 'liberal' colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson (the Court's 1896 segregation precedent) was right and should be re-affirmed," Rehnquist wrote to Justice Jackson, who wisely ignored the advice.

If Sestak Offer Is Impeachable, GOP Should Also Retroactively Impeach Reagan over Hayakawa ‘Bribe’

Jon Ponder | Jun. 3, 2010

Last week, all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions — who will become chairman if Republicans take the Senate this year — signed a letter demanding that special prosecutor be assigned to investigate the Sestak offer.

Rep. Darrell Issa, the laughingstock California pol in line to assume chair of the House Oversight Committee if Republicans win control of the House in the fall, has repeatedly compared the Sestak offer to Watergate, which is to say impeachment.

Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready

By JOHN LELAND

As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

For Mrs. Wilkerson, 33, a moderate Democrat from Oakton, Va., who designs computer interfaces, the spill reinforced what she had been obsessing over for more than a year — that oil use was outstripping the world’s supply. She worried about what would come after: maybe food shortages, a collapse of the economy, a breakdown of civil order. Her call was part of a telephone course about how to live through it all.

In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.

Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and likeminded others, have a new focus: peak oil. They argue that oil supplies peaked as early as 2008 and will decline rapidly, taking the economy with them.

My bright idea: Learn to want less

Following the frugal example set by our hunter‑gatherer forebears is the best way to combat today's environmental challenges, says explorer Spencer Wells

Spencer Wells
The Observer, Sunday 6 June 2010

Spencer Wells has a job that most people would kill for. He is explorer-in-residence for National Geographic and his work has taken him to every corner of the globe. His particular interests have nothing to do with wild places, however. His fascination lies with the people who inhabit these remote corners: how did they get there and what are their biological relations with other inhabitants of the planet?

Wells is a geneticist and leader of the Genographic project, funded by National Geographic, which has traced the movements of human populations since we first emerged from our sub-Saharan homeland 100,000 years ago and colonised the planet. In the process of this work, Wells noted that a swath of genetic changes occurred to our species around 12,000 years ago.

Skewed Wealth Distribution and the Roots of the Economic Crisis

By David Barber

David Barber is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He is the author of A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed (University Press of Mississippi, 2008).

Recently, Robert Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale University, penned a New York Times article warning that the fear of a double dip recession might actually bring on the dreaded event. “Ultimately,” Professor Shiller warned, “the risk resides largely in social psychology.”

As someone who is not a professional economist I do not know whether Professor Shiller’s views are typical of his field. What I do know is that while “social psychology” may have had some small role as a causal factor in the Crash of ’08, it was the actual structure of the American and world economies which brought on the crisis. And if in fact we enter a second round of this Crash, it will not stem from what Dr. Shiller calls a “weakness and vulnerability of confidence,” but will result from the same structural elements of our economy as those that brought on the “first dip.”

Frank Rich: Don’t Get Mad, Mr. President. Get Even.

IT turns out there is something harder to find than a fix for BP’s leak: Barack Obama’s boiling point.

The frantic and fruitless nationwide search for the president’s temper is now our sole dependable comic relief from the tragedy in the gulf. Only The Onion could have imagined the White House briefing last week where a CBS News correspondent asked the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, if he had “really seen rage from the president” and to “describe it.” Gibbs came up with Obama’s “clenched jaw” and his order to “plug the damn hole.” (Thank God he hadn’t settled for “darn.”) This evidence did not persuade anyone, least of all Spike Lee, who could be found on CNN the next night begging the president, “One time, go off!”

Not going to happen. Obama will never unleash the anger of the antagonists in “Do the Right Thing” or match James Carville’s rebooted “ragin’ Cajun” shtick. That’s not who Obama is. If he tried to go off, he’d look ridiculous. But the debate over how to raise the president’s emotional thermostat is not an entirely innocuous distraction. It allows Obama to duck the more serious doubts about his leadership that have resurfaced along with BP’s oil.