September 17, 2010

America's Decoupling from Reality

by Robert Parry

As Election Day 2010 approaches – as the United States wallows in the swamps of war, recession and environmental degradation – the consequences of the nation’s three-decade-old decoupling from reality are becoming painfully obvious.

Yet, despite the danger, the nation can’t seem to move in a positive direction, as if the suctioning effect of endless spin, half-truths and lies holds the populace in place, a force that grows ever more powerful like quicksand sucking the country deeper into the muck – to waist deep, then neck deep.


The Tax-Cut Racket

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“Nice middle class you got here,” said Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. “It would be a shame if something happened to it.”

O.K., he didn’t actually say that. But he might as well have, because that’s what the current confrontation over taxes amounts to. Mr. McConnell, who was self-righteously denouncing the budget deficit just the other day, now wants to blow that deficit up with big tax cuts for the rich. But he doesn’t have the votes. So he’s trying to get what he wants by pointing a gun at the heads of middle-class families, threatening to force a jump in their taxes unless he gets paid off with hugely expensive tax breaks for the wealthy.

Most discussion of the tax fight focuses either on the economics or on the politics — both of which suggest that Democrats should hang tough, for their own sakes as well as that of the country. But there’s an even bigger issue here — namely, the question of what constitutes acceptable behavior in American political life. Politics ain’t beanbag, but there’s a difference between playing hardball and engaging in outright extortion, which is what Mr. McConnell is now doing. And if he succeeds, it will set a disastrous precedent.


Wall Street ‘casino’ spooks small American investors

By Agence France-Presse
Friday, September 17th, 2010 -- 12:19 pm

Michael McCaslin is wary of investing his retirement funds in Wall Street. Its volatility and cryptic trading techniques make him feel lost and unsafe, he says.

"I tried to watch the market over the past couple of years, and you're just lost. I look at the market now and it's like Las Vegas, it's a gamble," the 65-year-old pensioner said.

September 16, 2010

Pa. ordeal raises new questions about states' info-gathering

By John Gramlich, Stateline Staff Writer

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has canceled a $125,000 contract with a consulting firm that sent a bulletin to the state's Office of Homeland Security in which it described opponents of natural gas drilling as "environmental extremists" and suggested they were a threat to the state.

Rendell told reporters in a news conference on Tuesday (Sept. 15) that Pennsylvania would cancel its deal with the firm, the Institute of Terrorism Response and Research, which also identified animal rights demonstrations and anti-war events as potential security threats to the state.


As the Aging Stoop to Their Labors, Prosperous Pundits Lecture Them About Sacrifice

By Richard Eskow
Created 09/15/2010 - 3:48am

The aging American workforce has been vilified a lot lately, in much the same way the poor were in previous decades. Politicians who once might have spread myths about "welfare queens" are now describing retired people as "greedy geezers." Not to be outdone, well-paid pundits are rushing to lecture people on their moral failings and urging them to rediscover the nobility of sacrifice. But sacrifice for whom, exactly, and to what end? It doesn't seem to matter - and that's the problem.

Fortunately, not everyone's joining the crusade. Today's shining example is John Leland from the New York Times, [1] who took the time to review the data on aging workers. What's more, he even went out and talked to some of them.

Here's what Mr. Leland learned. As a new analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research demonstrates, "one in three workers over age 58 does a physically demanding job ... including hammering nails, bending under sinks, lifting baggage -- (a job) can be radically different at age 69 than at age 62. " Leland also met workers like 58-year-old Jack Hartley, who "works a 12-hour shift assembling tires: pulling piles of rubber and lining over a drum, cutting the material with a hot knife, lifting the half-finished tire, which weighs 10 to 20 pounds, and throwing it onto a rack."


Graveyard DNA rewrites African American history

13:43 16 September 2010
by Shanta Barley

Two of Christopher Columbus's shipmates were the first Africans to set foot in the New World, a study has found.

Using DNA analysis of human bones excavated from a graveyard in La Isabela, Dominican Republic – the first colonial town in the Americas – the new study adds weight to the theory that Africans crossed the Atlantic at least 150 years earlier than previously thought.

September 15, 2010

After Summers Comes the Fall

Tuesday 14 September 2010
by: Robert Scheer | Truthdig | Op-Ed

When will the president give Lawrence Summers his pink slip? He can thank him for his years of service and use the excuse that his top economic adviser wants to spend more time with his family. I don’t care how he sugarcoats it. But Summers deserves the same fate as the millions of workers laid off because of the banking debacle he helped cause, the dire consequences of which he has done precious little to mitigate.

It was Summers who, as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which opened the floodgates to the toxic mortgage-backed derivatives that still haunt the economy.

Health-Care Reform, 2015

It's five years after passage, and the landmark reforms championed by a progressive president have survived two election campaigns in which opponents have called for their repeal. The leading critics in the business sector seem resigned to working with the new law. And the major implementation milestones have been met, though the slow rollout means that tangible benefits have only just become apparent. Yet all this is not enough to ensure that the law will achieve its key purposes. Without additional reforms, the act passed with much fanfare five years prior will not guarantee universal coverage. More important, it will remain inadequate in key areas, with the real, continuing danger that its limited funding will be outrun by skyrocketing costs.

It sounds like a forecast of where the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the landmark health-care legislation passed earlier this year, will be in 2015. But in fact it describes the actual historical standing of the Social Security Act on the law's fifth anniversary in 1940. During the 1936 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Alf Landon had criticized the legislation as a "cruel hoax"-and gone down to defeat. By the end of 1937, the Supreme Court had affirmed the act's constitutionality, and its "old-age insurance" component, which we now call Social Security, had been implemented successfully (although states were dragging their heels on other parts of the legislation, such as public assistance for the poor). But Social Security covered only half the population. Worse, its benefits were meager and not tied to inflation. As prices rose, those benefits were destined to fall, and they did. It would be another ten years before the program was put on a stronger foundation with the Social Security Amendments of 1950, the founding law for the modern program.

Legal analysis: The health insurance mandate is constitutional

The most politically charged feature of the health reform law is the mandate that legal residents have health insurance. Within weeks of the law's passage, 20 states had filed lawsuits charging that the mandate is unconstitutional because it gives the federal government more power than it actually has. State lawsuits are expected to reach the Supreme Court next year. Legal scholar Lawrence O. Gostin writes that the health insurance mandate rests on firm legal ground.

September 14, 2010

Ageing populations and fewer workers strain pensions

By Andrew Walker Economics correspondent, BBC World Service

The world is getting older. In most countries, the population is ageing.

That inevitably has dramatic consequences for pensions and other arrangements for supporting older people.

There are two factors behind the trend. The first is clearly, in itself, good news. People are living longer.


Veterans Agency Made Secret Deal Over Benefits

By David Evans - Sep 14, 2010

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs failed to inform 6 million soldiers and their families of an agreement enabling Prudential Financial Inc. to withhold lump-sum payments of life insurance benefits for survivors of fallen service members, according to records made public through a Freedom of Information request.

The amendment to Prudential’s contract is the first document to show how VA officials sanctioned a payment practice that has spurred investigations by lawmakers and regulators. Since 1999, Prudential has used so-called retained-asset accounts, which allow the company to withhold lump sum payments due to survivors and earn investment income on the money for itself.


Why "Scientific Consensus" Fails to Persuade

Individuals with competing cultural values disagree about what most scientists believe

September 13, 2010

Suppose a close friend who is trying to figure out the facts about climate change asks whether you think a scientist who has written a book on the topic is a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert. You see from the dust jacket that the author received a Ph.D. in a pertinent field from a major university, is on the faculty at another one, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Would you advise your friend that the scientist seems like an "expert"?

September 13, 2010

Light posting for the next few months while I'm in school--Dictynna

Light posting for the next few months while I'm in school--Dictynna

Paul Krugman: China, Japan, America

Last week Japan’s minister of finance declared that he and his colleagues wanted a discussion with China about the latter’s purchases of Japanese bonds, to “examine its intention” — diplomat-speak for “Stop it right now.” The news made me want to bang my head against the wall in frustration.

You see, senior American policy figures have repeatedly balked at doing anything about Chinese currency manipulation, at least in part out of fear that the Chinese would stop buying our bonds. Yet in the current environment, Chinese purchases of our bonds don’t help us — they hurt us. The Japanese understand that. Why don’t we?

Some background: If discussion of Chinese currency policy seems confusing, it’s only because many people don’t want to face up to the stark, simple reality — namely, that China is deliberately keeping its currency artificially weak.

Do Not Pity the Democrats

By Chris Hedges

There are no longer any major institutions in American society, including the press, the educational system, the financial sector, labor unions, the arts, religious institutions and our dysfunctional political parties, which can be considered democratic. The intent, design and function of these institutions, controlled by corporate money, are to bolster the hierarchical and anti-democratic power of the corporate state. These institutions, often mouthing liberal values, abet and perpetuate mounting inequality. They operate increasingly in secrecy. They ignore suffering or sacrifice human lives for profit. They control and manipulate all levers of power and mass communication. They have muzzled the voices and concerns of citizens. They use entertainment, celebrity gossip and emotionally laden public-relations lies to seduce us into believing in a Disneyworld fantasy of democracy.

A Broader Media Problem

Updated September 10, 2010, 03:56 PM

Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" and "Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus."

The problem is not the Web. Anti-JFK rallies "revealing" to every school child in Orange County, California that Communists planned to colonize the United States by the year 1970 drew bigger crowds than Tea Parties today, with nary a blogger among them.

The problem is that elite media gatekeepers have abandoned their moral mandate to stigmatize uncivil discourse. Instead, too many outlets reward it. In fact, it is an ironic token of the ideological confusions of our age that they do so in the service of upholding what they understand to be a cornerstone of civility: the notion that every public question must be framed in terms of two equal and opposite positions, the "liberal" one and the "conservative" one, each to be afforded equal dignity, respect — and (the more crucial currency) equal space. This has made the most mainstream of media outlets comically easy marks for those actively working to push public discourse to extremes.

Low-Ball America

When employers and shoppers pay less, everyone suffers.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, Sept. 11, 2010, at 6:54 AM ET

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The strike of about 300 workers at a Mott's apple-juice plant in Williamson, N.Y., is nearly four months old. Union members walked off the job after Mott's parent company, Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc., pushed them for concessions. Although Dr Pepper Snapple is highly profitable, a company representative said that it wanted to cut wages by $1.50 per hour and freeze pensions to align factory cost with "local and industry standards." In other words, because its employees were doing better than other workers in the depressed upstate New York region, the company demanded that they do the same jobs for lower wages.

Mott's isn't the only company squeezing its employees during this recovery. With millions out of work, it's a buyer's market for employees. In the economy at large, wages have risen only 1.7 percent in the past year while corporate profits are up nearly 40 percent. A report by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found that between the second quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2010, men's wages fell 1.3 percent.

Welcome to the low-ball culture. In a world of sluggish growth, excess capacity, and depressed expectations, buyers of goods and services—labor, houses, and restaurant meals, among other things—have come to believe that desperate sellers should take any offer they make. But that kind of systemic bargain-hunting can create a dangerous spiral: Employers short-change workers, workers buy fewer goods—and the overall economy suffers.

Executives With Criminal Records Slip Through FHA Crackdown, Documents Show

By Brian Grow | September 10, 2010

A crackdown on reckless mortgage lenders by the Federal Housing Administration has failed to root out several executives with criminal records whose firms continue to do business with the agency in violation of federal law, according to government documents, court records and interviews.

The get-tough campaign has also been hamstrung because, even when the FHA can ban mortgage companies for wrongdoing or an excessive default rate, the agency does not have the legal power to stop their executives from landing jobs at other lenders, or open new firms.

Frank Rich: Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back

NO, he can’t. President Obama can’t reverse the unemployment numbers by Election Day. He can’t get even a modest new stimulus bill past the Party of No, and even if he could, there would be few jobs to show for it until (maybe) 2011. Nor can he rewrite the history of his administration. Its signal accomplishments to date are an initial stimulus package that was overrun by the calamity at hand and a marathon health care battle as yet better known for its unseemly orgy of backroom wrangling than its concrete results. While that brawl raged, the White House seemed indifferent to the mounting number of Americans being tossed onto the Great Recession scrapheap.