After 41 Years, a Belated Victory for Butter

Friday 25 June 2010

by: David Sirota, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

The last time America found itself in a budget debate pitting domestic priorities against war expenditures, Richard Nixon was in the White House and David Obey was the youngest member of Congress -- an antiwar liberal whose insurgent campaign unexpectedly vaulted him into the House seat vacated by the hawkish president's new defense secretary. In those dark days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Obey was still learning his way around Washington, it was the guns of Vietnam and the Cold War versus the butter of the Great Society and the War on Poverty -- and despite Obey's protests, guns won the day.

"President Nixon issued a call to counterrevolution at home," summed up Time magazine in 1973, noting that while the Republican administration was increasing the Pentagon budget, it was proposing the "abolition or deep cutting of more than 100 federal grant programs that have benefited the unemployed, students, farmers, veterans, small businessmen, the mentally ill and tenants in federally aided housing."

Hands Off Social Security: There Are Better Ways to Cut the National Debt

Saturday 26 June 2010

by: Robert Weiner and Jonathan Battaglia | The Palm Beach Post | News Analysis

The Social Security Trustees' Annual Report on the program's finances comes out Wednesday, delayed from March by the health bill. It will be turned into a marketing tool by advocates of cutting Social Security to reduce the national debt.

Among those, the president's newly appointed National Commission on Fiscal Reform (the "debt commission") is threatening to strangle the economic lifeblood of seniors by denying the solvency of Social Security and then using the solvent funds for other purposes.

Imagining a Liberal Court

By NOAH FELDMAN

I .THE CRISIS
After decades of stagnation, progressive constitutional thought is reaching a crisis point. Consider that the two great “liberal” justices who retired from the Supreme Court most recently — David Souter in the spring of 2009 and John Paul Stevens a year later — were conservatives. Not only were both appointed by Republican presidents, but both also subscribed loosely to the adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” With a handful of exceptions, neither favored identifying new constitutional rights where none existed before. Their status as liberals came from the fact that, as the court on which they served tilted to the right, they held their ground as moderate Republicans, consistently voting to sustain the constitutional rights that were discovered by the Supreme Court before they were on it. To be sure, without their votes, the liberal constitutional legacy of the period stretching roughly from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to Roe v. Wade in 1973 would have been reversed. But Souter and Stevens were not independent forces for progressive change in American life.

To a great extent, the crisis of liberal thought on the Supreme Court is a result of liberalism’s success. From the time that Franklin Roosevelt’s appointees came to form a majority on the Supreme Court until the appointees of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan came to predominate, liberal constitutional thinking had two major objectives — both of which it largely achieved. First, it sought to give bite to the 14th Amendment’s promise to extend to all persons the equal protection of laws. The Brown decision voiding racial segregation in schools as unconstitutional was the most famous piece of the court’s push for equality. The same ideal was also encompassed in holdings that demanded “one person, one vote” and — more controversially — that upheld affirmative action as consistent with the values of the Constitution.

Why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan

William Dalrymple

Published 22 June 2010

As Washington and London struggle to prop up a puppet government over which Hamid Karzai has no control, they risk repeating the blood-soaked 19th-century history of Britain’s imperial defeat.

In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."

It is difficult to imagine the current military adventure in Afghanistan ending quite as badly as the First Afghan War, an abortive ­experiment in Great Game colonialism that slowly descended into what is arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the west in the Middle East: an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world utterly routed and destroyed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of £15m (well over £1bn in modern currency) and more than 40,000 lives. But nearly ten years on from Nato's invasion of Afghanistan, there are increasing signs that Britain's fourth war in the country could end with as few political gains as the first three and, like them, terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government that the war was launched to overthrow.

Myths & Facts About "Myth & Facts About AmericaSpeaks"

By Richard Eskow

Created 06/25/2010 - 8:47pm

The organizers of AmericaSpeaks, tomorrow's "town hall meeting"/media event designed to focus attention on budget-cutting, have issued a document called "Myths & Facts About AmericSpeaks: Our Budget, Our Economy [1]." A number of excellent pieces have already been written about the slanted point of view in their materials, which are designed to manipulate attendees into advocated cuts in the social safety net. This document, however, warrants a response of its own.

The organizers present five alleged "myths," together with what they claim are the "facts." They've clearly been stung by the eloquence and visibility of their critics, but they to respond convincingly. A fair-minded review of their "myths" and "facts" led to the following assessment: Their response includes some real facts and a great deal of myth.

Their first statement suggests that there are actually two "myths" about their organization, one from the Left and one from the Right: "AmericaSpeaks: Our Budget, Our Economy is either (a) a liberal effort to raise taxes, or (b) a conservative effort to cut Social Security." This is an example of the false picture organizers have been promoting for weeks. They continue to insist they're getting equal criticism from conservatives and liberals. That's not true.

Newspaper retracts "climategate" story, months too late

By Alex Pareene

Remember "climategate"? Someone hacked and distributed emails from climate scientists from the University of East Anglia. (It was kind of like Weigelgate except the entire Earth is going to die in a fire.) Some of the scientists used words like 'trick" and "hide." Instant scandal: Global warming is made up! A British newspaper has finally gotten around to correcting the record.

It was obvious to anyone who actually bothered to read the stolen "climategate" emails that they didn't actually contain anything particularly scandalous, and they certainly didn't contain anything at all that remotely called into the question the legitimacy of years of science demonstrating the effect of human activity on climate change.

The Dodd-Frank bank reform bill: A deeply flawed success

In a world where incremental progress is all but impossible to achieve, this is what a triumph looks like

By Andrew Leonard

Now that the newly dubbed "Dodd-Frank" bank reform bill is all but complete -- awaiting President Obama's signature, possibly on July 4 -- what are we supposed to think? Is it a good bill? Will it rein in the financial sector? Will the words "Dodd-Frank" ring through the history with the same awesome knell as "Glass-Steagal"?

Let's start with the easy question first. Dodd-Frank is no Glass-Steagal. Glass-Steagal separated commercial and investment banking with one stroke of a giant Chinese meat cleaver -- no ambiguity allowed. Dodd-Frank is the polar opposite, a concatenation of intricate compromises tied up in 2,000 pages of complexity so dense that it willfully defies comprehension. Maybe the most optimistic way to think of this bill is as a stimulus program to create jobs for securities lawyers -- they'll be chewing on it for decades to come.

15,000 Progressive Activists in Detroit: Why No Media or Respect?

By Sally Kohn, AlterNet
Posted on June 26, 2010, Printed on June 26, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147341/

It’s not surprising that the mainstream media is paying little attention to the 15,000-plus community organizers and progressive activists gathered in Detroit, Michigan this week for the second United States Social Forum. After all, the center-left political establishment isn’t paying attention either.

Why is it that the Tea Party -- the right-wing edge of the conservative political sphere -- exerts a gravitational pull on the Republican party and the conservative mainstream while the United States Social Forum and the leaders and groups gathered here, who represent the left of the liberal mainstream, are disregarded as marginal and irrelevant -- that is, if they’re regarded at all?

Paul Krugman: The Renminbi Runaround

Last weekend China announced a change in its currency policy, a move clearly intended to head off pressure from the United States and other countries at this weekend’s G-20 summit meeting. Unfortunately, the new policy doesn’t address the real issue, which is that China has been promoting its exports at the rest of the world’s expense.

In fact, far from representing a step in the right direction, the Chinese announcement was an exercise in bad faith — an attempt to exploit U.S. restraint. To keep the rhetorical temperature down, the Obama administration has used diplomatic language in its efforts to persuade the Chinese government to end its bad behavior. Now the Chinese have responded by seizing on the form of American language to avoid dealing with the substance of American complaints. In short, they’re playing games.

To understand what’s going on, we need to get back to the basics of the situation.

House and Senate in Deal on Financial Overhaul

By EDWARD WYATT and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — An overhaul of the nation’s financial regulatory system, reached after an all-night Congressional horse-trading session, will vastly expand the authority of the federal government over Wall Street in a bid to curb the free-wheeling culture that led to the near collapse of the world economy in 2008.

The deal between House and Senate negotiators, sealed just before sunrise on Friday, imposes new rules on some of the riskiest business practices and exotic investment instruments. It also levies hefty fees on the financial services industry, essentially forcing big banks and hedge funds to pay the projected $20 billion, five-year cost of the new oversight that they will face. And it empowers regulators to liquidate failing financial companies, fundamentally altering the balance between government and industry.

But after weeks of intense lobbying and months of debate, Congress in the end stopped short of prohibiting some of the practices that led to the crisis two years ago, betting instead that a newly empowered regulatory regime can rein in the big financial players without shackling the markets and drying up the flow of credit to businesses.

Mission Accomplished: The Reagan Occupation and the Destruction of the American Middle Class

By BuzzFlash

Created 06/25/2010 - 8:32am

DAVID MICHAEL GREEN FOR BUZZFLASH

Eighty years ago, something occurred in America that was never supposed to happen. An aristocrat came to the presidency and engineered a policy revolution that created a broad and prosperous middle class where it had not existed as such before.

To do this, Franklin Roosevelt and his party had to rewrite the existing rules of wealth redistribution in the United States such that the traditionally fantastically wealthy overclass (which had grown even fatter as the industrialism of the prior century concentrated wealth yet further) would become merely tremendously wealthy from that point forward, in order to leave enough for others to live a decent life.

Needless to say, this rankled the country club set, but, remarkably, they more or less made peace with this development during the early decades of the post-war era, and largely cooperated with the new economic order. So did their political representatives. The Eisenhower administration was the first chance after twenty years of the New Deal to dismantle the newly created American welfare state, and Ike not only refused to take that opportunity, but famously labeled those in his party who wanted to as “stupid."

McChrystal: Gone and Soon Forgotten

Naming Petraeus in his place is a stroke of personnel genius.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, June 23, 2010, at 4:36 PM ET

---

President Barack Obama has accomplished what many might have thought impossible just a few hours earlier. He has fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, his combat commander in Afghanistan, in such a way that not only will the general go unmissed but his name will likely soon be forgotten.

Obama's decision to replace McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus is a stroke of brilliance, an unassailable move, politically and strategically.

On a political level, McChrystal has many fans inside Congress and the military, but Petraeus has orders of magnitude more. No one could accuse Obama of compromising the war effort, knowing that Petraeus is stepping in.

On a strategic level, while McChrystal designed the U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, Petraeus is its ur-architect. Petraeus literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency strategy while McChrystal was still running the black-bag hunter-killers of the special-ops command.

Congress Fails to Pass an Extension of Jobless Aid

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — Legislation to extend unemployment subsidies for hundreds of thousands of Americans who have exhausted their jobless benefits teetered on the edge of collapse on Thursday, as Senate Democrats and Republicans traded bitter accusations about who was to blame for an eight-week impasse.

Senate Republicans and a lone Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, joined forces to filibuster the bill in a procedural vote on Thursday. Visibly frustrated, the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said he would move on to other business next week because he saw little chance of winning over any Republican votes.

The vote was 57 to 41, with the Democrats falling three short of the 60 votes needed to advance the measure.

“You’ll hear a lot of excuses,” Mr. Reid said at a news conference. “The bottom line is the minority just said no.”

Responding to Republican demands, Mr. Reid on Wednesday night introduced yet another version of the legislation, which also includes important tax changes. But even as he unveiled the new package, aides conceded he did not have the votes.

Once again we must ask: ‘Who governs?’

Robert Skidelsky

Published: June 16 2010 23:47 | Last updated: June 16 2010 23:47

In 1974, Edward Heath asked: “Who governs – government or trade unions?” Five years later British voters delivered a final verdict by electing Margaret Thatcher. The equivalent today would be: “Who governs – government or financial markets?” No clear answer has yet been given, but the question may well define the political battleground for the next five years.

In one sense, next week’s emergency Budget is simply the logical working out of an intellectual theorem. The implicit premise of the coming retrenchment is that market economies are always at, or rapidly return to, full employment. It follows that a stimulus, whether fiscal or monetary, cannot improve on the existing situation. All that increased government spending does is to withdraw money from the private sector; all that printing money does is to cause inflation.

These propositions are a re-run of the famous “Treasury view” of 1929. By contrast, Keynes argued that demand can fall short of supply, and that when this happened, government vice turned into virtue. In a slump, governments should increase, not reduce, their deficits to make up for the deficit in private spending. Any attempt by government to increase its saving (in other words, to balance its budget) would only worsen the slump. This was his “paradox of thrift”. The current stampede to thrift shows that the re-conversion to Keynes in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008 was only skin-deep: the first story remains deeply lodged in the minds of economists and politicians.

The Dollar Might Be Having Problems, But Here's Why We Really Don't Want to Go Back to Gold

By Katherine Sciacchitano, Dollars and Sense
Posted on June 18, 2010, Printed on June 24, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147239/

For more than half a century, the dollar was both a symbol and an instrument of U.S. economic and military power. At the height of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, the dollar served as a safe haven for investors, and demand for U.S. Treasury bonds (“Treasuries”) spiked. More recently, the United States has faced a vacillating dollar, calls to replace the greenback as the global reserve currency, and an international consensus that it should save more and spend less.

At first glance, circumstances seem to give reason for concern. The U.S. budget deficit is over 10% of GDP. China has begun a long-anticipated move away from Treasuries, threatening to make U.S. government borrowing more expensive. And the adoption of austerity measures in Greece—with a budget deficit barely 3% higher than the United States—hovers as a reminder that the bond market can enforce wage cuts and pension freezes on developed as well as developing countries.

America Cowed: Are We Too Frightened to Forge Our Future?

By Robert Borosage

Created 06/23/2010 - 1:57pm

Americans have grown fearful. Most believe, not surprisingly, that the country is headed in the wrong direction. For the first time ever, most Americans believe their children may not fare as well as they have. We spend nearly as much as the rest of the world combined on our military, chasing phantoms across the world. Conservatives in both parties rail about debt and deficits. They line up to support adding another $33 billion in emergency spending for the misbegotten war in Afghanistan, while blocking the $23 billion needed to forestall the layoff of a staggering 275,000 teachers across the country.

Washington is crazed about debt and deficits, but the real deficit is in fortitude, not finances. Consider the contrast between this country emerging from the Great Depression and World War II and now.

Then our debt was a far greater burden than now—over 120 percent of gross domestic product. The country had suffered a decade long Great Depression and a global war. The troops were coming home, but the entire economy was mobilized for war. Europe and Japan were devastated. And America was led by Harry S. Truman, a former haberdasher, product of the corrupt Pendergast machine in Kansas City.

Republicans kill Senate jobless aid measure

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 7 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Republicans on Thursday defeated Democrats' showcase election-year jobs bill, including an extension of weekly unemployment benefits for millions of people out of work more than six months.

The 57-41 vote fell three votes short of the 60 required to crack a GOP filibuster, delivering a major blow to President Barack Obama and Democrats facing big losses of House and Senate seats in the fall election.

The rejected bill would also have provided $16 billion in new aid to states, preserving the jobs of thousands of state and local government workers and providing what White House officials called an insurance policy against a double-dip recession. It also included dozens of tax breaks sought by business lobbyists, and tax increases on domestically produced oil and on investment fund managers.

U.S. scores dead last again in healthcare study

Wed, Jun 23 2010

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries -- Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found.

"As an American it just bothers me that with all of our know-how, all of our wealth, that we are not assuring that people who need healthcare can get it," Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis told reporters in a telephone briefing.

The Incentives Catastrophe

The same policy mistake caused both the Wall Street meltdown and the BP spill.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Wednesday, June 23, 2010, at 3:00 PM ET

---

Incentives matter. In fact, they determine outcomes. It's obvious, but we usually forget this law until after the fact, after the crisis, when we ask almost naively: "Why did they act that way?" The law of incentives is what links the Wall Street cataclysm and BP's ongoing eco-disaster: In each case, we socialized risk and privatized gain, creating an asymmetry that created an incentive for private actors to accept and create too much risk in their business model, believing that at the end of the day, somebody else would bear the burden of that risk, should it metastasize into a disaster.

Two Visions of Justice

Next week, as the Senate begins hearings to confirm his successor, Justice John Paul Stevens will take his seat at the Supreme Court's bench for the last time. He will leave a Court that has shifted far to the right since he joined 35 years ago. Since Stevens joined the Court, virtually every subsequent appointee has been more conservative than the justice they replaced -- resulting in a conservative bloc of justices who consistently place powerful interests before the law, and a smaller, more moderate bloc that struggles to ensure that the law still applies equally to powerful and powerless alike. Both visions of the Court's role will be on display tonight at a debate between former acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger and former Bush assistant attorney general Rachel Brand. The event at George Washington University will be hosted by the Center for American Progress, the conservative American Action Forum, and Politico. Where are the courts headed? Today's Progress Report offers a few answers.

General Discharge

Posted on Jun 22, 2010

By Robert Scheer

After the brilliant Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings, President Barack Obama has no valid option other than to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Not because of the dozen outrageous anti-administration verbal gaffes which have been reported, but rather because this definitive piece on the “Runaway General” establishes the man in charge of the Afghanistan misadventure as an egotistical flake whose half-baked Afghan war-fighting strategy should never have been endorsed in the first place. It is McChrystal’s policy of counterinsurgency (COIN) that must be fired more than the man who exemplifies its irrationality.

It was the 66-page McChrystal Report that provided Obama with the justification for escalating rather than ending the decade-long Afghanistan war: winning the hearts and minds of people who have no intention of opening either to our tender mercies. They don’t like us or trust us and probably think we smell funny and our food tastes awful. Such profound cultural differences are what make the world an interesting place, but the continuing arrogance of centuries of U.S. imperial policy insists that the rest of the world wants to be just like us.

Grayson With Ratigan: Best Interview Ever

by David Swanson

The video embeded at the bottom of this article and posted on the frontpage of http://congressmanwithguts.com may be the best corporate television interview ever. Not the funniest or most entertaining, but the most willing to directly and clearly expose the most forbidden topics and insist on the most needed changes in perspective.

The CongressmanWithGuts website is Congressman Alan Grayson's public and participatory demonstration of a simple fact that should be made known to a few hundred congress members who have not grasped it: If you do what the public wants and reach out to the public, you can raise your own funds and not depend on the Party Leadership to fund your campaigns. This, of course, is what allows you to do what the public, and not the Party Leadership, wants.

The Fate of the Internet. Decided in a Back Room

by Tim Karr

The Wall Street Journal [1] just reported that the Federal Communications Commission is holding "closed-door meetings" with industry to broker a deal on Net Neutrality – the rule that keeps control over the Internet with the people who use it.

Given that the corporations at the table all profit from gaining control over information, the outcome won't be pretty.

The meetings include a small group of industry lobbyists representing the likes of AT&T, Verizon, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and Google. They reportedly met for two-and-a-half hours on Monday morning and will convene another meeting today. The goal according to insiders is to "reach consensus" on rules of the road for the Internet.

This is what a failed democracy looks like: After years of avid public support for Net Neutrality – involving millions of people [2] from across the political spectrum – the federal regulator quietly huddles with industry lobbyists to eliminate basic protections and serve Wall Street’s bottom line.

How to impress the bond markets

Instead of beating up on retirees by cutting social security, we can reduce deficits by standing up to powerful interest groups

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 June 2010 19.00 BST

The deficit hawks have been pushing the line in recent months that we have to make cuts in social security, along with some revenue increases, in order to reassure the bond markets about the creditworthiness of the US government. According to this argument, by taking tough steps (ie cutting social security benefits) we will have shown the bond markets that we are prepared to do what is necessary to keep our budget deficits within manageable levels.

There is some reason to question the merits of this argument. First off, the deficit hawks don't have an especially good track record in the insight category. Not one person among the leading crusaders was able to see the $8tn housing bubble that wrecked the economy. If they couldn't see something so huge that was right in front of their face, we might wonder about their ability to ascertain anything as amorphous as the sentiment of actors in bond markets.

Furthermore, the fixation on social security is peculiar. The Congressional Budget Office shows the programme can pay all future benefits through the year 2044 with no changes whatsoever. Even after that date the shortfalls are relatively minor. If we instituted a fix in 2030 that is comparable to the one put in place in 1983 it would leave the programme fully solvent out to the 22nd century.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Coming Era of Energy Disasters

Posted by Michael Klare at 3:00pm, June 22, 2010.

Isn’t it strange that, no matter how terrible the news from the Gulf, the media still can’t help offering a lurking, BP-influenced narrative of hope? Here’s a recent headline from my hometown paper, for instance: “Signs of Hope as BP Captures Record Oil Amounts.” The piece is based on a BP report that, last Thursday, its woefully inadequate, ill-fitting “top hat” had captured more than 25,000 barrels of the gushing oil -- that is, five times more than it long claimed was spewing from its busted well (25 times more than it originally suggested).

With semi-official estimates in the range of 35,000-60,000 barrels escaping a day (and those numbers regularly on the rise), this represents a strange version of hopeful news. Ominously enough, by the end of July, with a new, larger, “tighter” cap theoretically in place, BP is aiming to capture up to 80,000 barrels a day (that is, 20,000 barrels more than it has publicly acknowledged might possibly be spewing from the floor of the Gulf). In all such articles, the real narrative of hope, however, involves the relief wells, the first of which is now within “200 feet” of the busted well. Usually, the date for one of those wells to plug the leak is given as “early August” or “mid-August” and it’s regularly said that the drilling of those wells is advancing “ahead of schedule.”

Loan Mod Program Still Sputtering, Despite Attempted Fixes

by Paul Kiel, ProPublica - June 22, 2010 11:15 am EDT

New data released Monday by the Treasury Department shows continued delays and disappointment faced by homeowners in the administration’s mortgage modification program [1].

190,000 homeowners remain stuck in trial mods that have lasted over six months, still waiting to hear whether they’ll receive a permanent modification. Most of those homeowners will likely be dropped from the program.

My Father and Alan Greenspan

By Robert Reich - June 21, 2010, 8:31AM

When I was a small boy at the start of the 1950s, my father gave me my first economics lesson. "Bobby," he said with obvious concern, "you and your children and your children's children will be repaying the national debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt."

I didn't know what a national debt was, but I remember being scared out of my wits.

Dad was wrong, of course. Even though the national debt then was a much higher percentage of the national economy than it is today, it shrank as the economy boomed. My children have never mentioned FDR's debt. My granddaughter (almost 2) will never pay a penny of it.

When Greatness Slips Away

By BOB HERBERT

We’ve blown so many enormous opportunities over the past several years. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, when most of the world had lined up in support of the United States, President George W. Bush had the chance to lead a vast cooperative, international effort to combat terrorism and lay the groundwork for a more peaceful, more secure world.

He blew it with the invasion of Iraq.

In the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we had not just the chance but an obligation to call on our best talent to creatively rebuild the historic city of New Orleans. That could have kick-started a major renovation of the nation’s infrastructure and served as the incubator for a new and desperately needed urban policy. Despite President Bush’s vow of “bold action” during a carefully staged, nationally televised appearance in the French Quarter, we did nothing of the kind.

The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans. Radical change was called for. (One thinks of Franklin Roosevelt raging against the “economic royalists” and asserting that “we need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.”)

Dead On Arrival: Financial Reform Fails

By Simon Johnson

The House-Senate reconciliation process is still underway and some details will still change. But the broad contours of “financial reform” are already completely clear; there are no last minute miracles at this level of politics. The new consumer protection agency for financial products is a good idea and worth supporting – assuming someone sensible is appointed by the president to run it. Yet, at the end of the day, essentially nothing in the entire legislation will reduce the potential for massive system risk as we head into the next credit cycle.

Rough Radio: Bob Ehrlich Hammered By Callers On Oil Politics

Christina Bellantoni | June 21, 2010, 10:47AM

Former Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R-MD) cut the microphones of callers to his talk radio show this weekend after they questioned his stance on oil drilling. Ehrlich is in an electoral rematch with Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) to win back the governor's mansion and, after Democrats tried and failed to force his radio show off the air, they settled on a different approach.

They bought commercial air time on "The Kendel and Bob Ehrlich Show" on WBAL radio to run an attack ad using Ehrlich's own "Drill, baby, drill" words against him. The ad and a series of callers criticizing Ehrlich's time in office began "getting under Ehrlich's skin," according to a Baltimore Sun reporter.

Canada's economy is suddenly the envy of the world

By ROB GILLIES, Associated Press Writer
Sun Jun 20, 4:51 pm ET

TORONTO – Canada thinks it can teach the world a thing or two about dodging financial meltdowns.

The 20 world leaders at an economic summit in Toronto next weekend will find themselves in a country that has avoided a banking crisis where others have floundered, and whose economy grew at a 6.1 percent annual rate in the first three months of this year. The housing market is hot and three-quarters of the 400,000 jobs lost during the recession have been recovered.

World leaders have noticed: President Barack Obama says the U.S. should take note of Canada's banking system, and Britain's Treasury chief is looking to emulate the Ottawa way on cutting deficits.

How a Right-Wing Immigration Lie Went Viral

Meet the ex-Border Patrol agent behind the myth that California has its own Arizona-like immigration law.

By Suzy Khimm | Mon Jun. 21, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

---

Did California really pass an immigration law that's just as punitive as Arizona's—but just failed to enforce it? That's the claim currently richocheting around right-wing blogs [1] and Tea Party sites [2]—trickling all the way up to conservative standard-bearers like The Washington Times [3]. The origin of this claim seems to be a viral email [4] sent from retired Border Patrol agent and Arizona resident Harold Beasley, who claims that California has an immigration law on the books that’s almost identical to the Arizona measure. Beasley is partially right, but mostly wrong. The state did pass such as law as part of Proposition 187, a harsh immigration measure that tried to deny any state-sponsored services to illegal immigrants. But the law is no longer enforceable—because the federal courts struck it down over a decade ago.

This important fact hasn't stopped Beasley—and others—from crying hypocrisy. Beasley cites a passage of the California Penal Code, Section 834b, which says that California law enforcement must attempt to verify the immigration status of suspected illegal immigrants and turn them over to the federal authorities for prosecution or deportation. "Wow, is this the pot calling the kettle black?" writes [4] Beasley, according to one version of his viral email. "You are telling Arizona that we are racists and will be racial profiling… You have had the same law for many years and NO ONE has been protesting your law. WHY IS THAT?"

Paul Krugman: Now and Later

Spend now, while the economy remains depressed; save later, once it has recovered. How hard is that to understand?

Very hard, if the current state of political debate is any indication. All around the world, politicians seem determined to do the reverse. They’re eager to shortchange the economy when it needs help, even as they balk at dealing with long-run budget problems.

But maybe a clear explanation of the issues can change some minds. So let’s talk about the long and the short of budget deficits. I’ll focus on the U.S. position, but a similar story can be told for other nations.

At the moment, as you may have noticed, the U.S. government is running a large budget deficit. Much of this deficit, however, is the result of the ongoing economic crisis, which has depressed revenues and required extraordinary expenditures to rescue the financial system. As the crisis abates, things will improve. The Congressional Budget Office, in its analysis of President Obama’s budget proposals, predicts that economic recovery will reduce the annual budget deficit from about 10 percent of G.D.P. this year to about 4 percent of G.D.P. in 2014.

General Franco gave list of Spanish Jews to Nazis

• Register compiled in case dictator joined Axis forces
• Archive find undermines claim Franco helped Jews

Giles Tremlett in Madrid
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 June 2010 23.06 BST

It was the list that would have sent thousands more Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz and other extermination camps run by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime during the second world war, but this time the victims were to be Spaniards.

The Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, whose apologists usually claim that he protected Jews, ordered his officials to draw up a list of some 6,000 Jews living in Spain and include them in a secret Jewish archive.

That list was handed over to the Nazi architect of the so-called "final solution", the German SS chief Heinrich Himmler, as the two countries negotiated Spain's possible incorporation into the group of Axis powers that included Italy, according to the El País newspaper today.

The Town That Loved Its Bank

By ANDREW MARTIN

MAYWOOD, Ill.

LIKE many working-class towns in the Midwest, this Chicago suburb has been on the cusp of better times for decades.

Separated by a river and woods from its wealthier neighbors, Oak Park and River Forest, it shares some of their charms: imposing, century-old homes and stately elms and maples draping the streets. But Maywood is decidedly more blue-collar than its neighbors, and its residents are predominantly African-American. Most of its homes are modest bungalows and frame houses that were built for factory workers whose jobs disappeared long ago. Many storefronts are vacant, and there appear to be more churches than viable businesses.

For more than a decade, a silver-haired banker from River Forest named Michael E. Kelly — owner of Park National Bank in the Chicago area and eight others around the country — took an unusual interest in Maywood. He did things most bankers don’t do.

The Constitution Party: Delusional Religious Fanatics Pushing for Christian Tyranny

By Liam Fox, News Junkie Post
Posted on June 20, 2010, Printed on June 21, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147264/

Sharron Angle, Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Nevada was a member of the Independent American Party, the Nevada affiliate of the Constitution Party, for six years, 1992 through 1998, before becoming a Republican in order to increase her chance of getting elected to office. If the Constitution Party sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Todd Palin was revealed to have belonged, for seven years, to the Alaska Independence Party; Alaska’s Constitution Party affiliate.

The Constitution Party is not simply a political party that supports a strict adherence to the Constitution, as its name might suggest, but rather a party that promotes a very specific reinterpretation of the Constitution, based on founder Howard Phillips’ commitment to Christian Reconstructionism. His son, Doug Phillips, also involved with his father in the Constitution Party, is the founder of Vision Forum, an organization ideologically compatible with the Constitution Party, which describes its motivation as “a zeal for the restoration of Biblical patriarchy.”

How the Democrats got to be the way they are

by: John Emerson

Sat Jun 19, 2010 at 15:13

(More history from John Emerson - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)

The Democratic Party established itself in more or less its present form roughly between 1945 and 1955. The Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the sixties severely challenged the new party orthodoxy, but after 1972 (when many of the pros abandoned McGovern) the old guard took over again. The DLC takeover in 1988 moved the party still further to the right, but the foundations for an anti-populist, anti-progressive Democratic Party were laid immediately after WWII.

The New Coalition

A couple of weeks ago I described how the congressional progressives had at first been the New Deal's biggest supporters, but went into opposition after 1937, so that the New Deal coalition was replaced by the old Grover Cleveland Democratic Party (the South and the urban machines) plus the unions. After 1937 the impending world war (which most Progressives opposed) increasingly dominated politics, and once the war had begun it trumped all domestic concerns, so that the Congressional role became rather limited and the progressives were marginalized.

Reprise: Renormalizing the Wal-Mart world

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Jun 20, 2010 at 12:00

[Note]: I'm under the weather today. So here's a reprise diary from late last summer that I think still speaks quite well to the tasks we face.

Wal-Mart is the dominant corporate model of our time, the same way that General Motors was during the New Deal Era. If we want to change the norms that govern our world, it pays to look at Wal-Mart as a way to understand just what those norms are and where they came from. This diary is divided into three parts. In Part 1, I start by talking about a direct look at Wal-Mart. In Part 2, I look at the enabling ideology of Frederich Hayek. In Part 3, I look at the downside of "low prices"

VA quietly giving benefits to Marines exposed to toxic water

Barbara Barrett | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: June 18, 2010 03:35:59 PM

WASHINGTON — Former Marine Corps Cpl. Peter Devereaux was told about a year ago that he had just two or three years to live.

More than 12 months later, at 48, he still isn't ready to concede that the cancer that's wasting his innards is going to kill him. He swallows his pills and suffers the pain and each afternoon he greets his 12-year-old daughter, Jackie, as she steps off her school bus in North Andover, Mass.

The U.S. Department of the Navy says that more research is needed to connect ailments suffered by Marines such as Devereaux who served at Camp Lejeune and their families who lived there to decades of water contamination at the 156,000-acre base in eastern North Carolina. Meanwhile, however, the Department of Veterans Affairs has quietly begun awarding benefits to a few Marines who were based at Lejeune.

"Right now, I would venture to say that any Camp Lejeune veteran who files a claim now is presumed to have been exposed to the contaminated drinking water," Brad Flohr, the assistant director for policy, compensation and pension service at the VA, told a meeting of affected Marines and family members in April.

In Budget Crisis, States Take Aim at Pension Costs

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Many states are acknowledging this year that they have promised pensions they cannot afford and are cutting once-sacrosanct benefits, to appease taxpayers and attack budget deficits.

Illinois raised its retirement age to 67, the highest of any state, and capped public pensions at $106,800 a year. Arizona, New York, Missouri and Mississippi will make people work more years to earn pensions. Virginia is requiring employees to pay into the state pension fund for the first time. New Jersey will not give anyone pension credit unless they work at least 32 hours a week.

“We can’t afford to deny reality or delay action any longer,” said Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, adding that his state’s pension cuts, enacted in March, will save some $300 million in the first year alone.

But there is a catch: Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired. Though heralded as breakthrough reforms by state officials, the cuts phase in so slowly they are unlikely to save the weakest funds and keep them from running out of money. Some new rules may even hasten the demise of the funds they were meant to protect.

Lawmakers wanted to avoid legal battles or fights with unions, whose members can be influential voters. So they are allowing most public workers across the country to keep building up their pensions at the same rate as ever. The tens of thousands of workers now on Illinois’s payrolls, for instance, will still get to retire at 60 — and some will as young as 55.

Pentagon revives Rumsfeld-era domestic spying unit

By Daniel Tencer
Saturday, June 19th, 2010 -- 7:13 pm

The Pentagon's spy unit has quietly begun to rebuild a database for tracking potential terrorist threats that was shut down after it emerged that it had been collecting information on American anti-war activists.

The Defense Intelligence Agency filed notice this week that it plans to create a new section called Foreign Intelligence and Counterintelligence Operation Records, whose purpose will be to "document intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism and counternarcotic operations relating to the protection of national security."

Frank Rich: Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock

PRESIDENT Obama is not known for wild pronouncements, so it was startling to hear him liken the gulf oil spill to 9/11. Alas, this bold analogy, made in an interview with Roger Simon of Politico, proved a misleading trailer for the main event. In the president’s prime-time address a few days later, there was still talk of war, but the ammunition was sanded down to bullet points: “a clean energy future,” “a long-term gulf coast restoration plan” and, that most dreaded of perennials, “a national commission.” Such generic placeholders, unanimated by details or deadlines, are Washingtonese for “The buck stops elsewhere.”

The speech’s pans were inevitable, but in truth it was doomed no matter what the words or how cool or faux angry the performance. The president had it right the first time — this is a 9/11 crisis — and only action will do. The sole sentence that really counted on Tuesday night was his prediction that “in the coming weeks and days, these efforts should capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well.” He will be judged on whether that’s true. The sole event that mattered last week was his jawboning of BP for a $20 billion down payment of blood money — to be overseen, appropriately enough, by Kenneth Feinberg of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

That action could be a turning point for Obama if he builds on it. And he must. In this 9/11, it’s not just the future of the gulf coast, energy policy or his presidency that’s in jeopardy. What’s also being tarred daily by the gushing oil is the very notion that government can accomplish anything. The current crisis in that faith predates this disaster. In the short history of the Obama White House, two of its most urgent projects, reducing unemployment and pacifying Afghanistan, have yet to yield persuasive results. The dividends on the third, health care reform, won’t be in the mail for years.