Wisconsin Firefighters Spark "Move Your Money" Moment

Mary Bottari | Saturday 12 March 2011

On the day that the bill passed the Wisconsin Assembly effectively ending 50 years of collective bargaining in Wisconsin and eviscerating the ability of public unions to raise money through dues, a new front opened in the battle for the future of Wisconsin families.

Bagpipes blaring, hundreds of firefighters walked across the street from the Wisconsin Capitol building, stood outside the Marshall and Ilsley Bank (M&I Bank) and played a few tunes -- loudly. Later, a group of firefighters and consumers stopped back in at the bank to make a few transactions. One by one they closed their accounts and withdrew their life savings, totaling approximately $190,000. See a video clip. After the last customer left, the bank quickly closed its doors, just in case the spontaneous "Move Your Money" moment caught fire.

Nearly Identical Anti-Labor Bills Appear In Maine, Missouri, New Hampshire, Other States

Reporting for the progressive Maine blog Dirigo Blue, Gerald Weinand has discovered that a proposed “right to work” law in Maine mirrors similar proposals in several other states, like New Hampshire and Missouri. The legislation in Maine, LD788, sponsored by State Rep. Tom Winsor (R), would make Maine like other low-wage anti-labor states by weakening unions. Right to work laws typically allow workers to opt-out of union dues while benefiting from union contracts, a cycle that usually kills a labor union over time.

Paul Krugman: Military Cutbacks Won't Fix Deficit

I am baffled by the argument that the United States can incur big savings by ending the war in Afghanistan and, more generally, by cutting bloated defense budgets. I’ve mostly been hearing this from liberals, and indeed this is a variation of a debate that has continued for years.

Now, I am not endorsing our current levels of defense spending. The nation’s military buildup following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was outrageous. The United States was hit by a handful of men wielding box-cutters (or something similar — I am aware that’s not certain), and we responded by buying a lot of heavy tanks and later invading a country that had nothing to do with the attack.

In Defense of NPR

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship | Friday 11 March 2011

Come on now: let's take a breath and put this National Public Radio (NPR) fracas into perspective.

Just as public radio struggles against yet another assault from its longtime nemesis - the right-wing machine that would thrill if our sole sources of information were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and ads paid for by the Koch Brothers - it walks into a trap perpetrated by one of the sleaziest operatives ever to climb out of a sewer.

First, in the interest of full disclosure: While not presently committing journalism on public television, the two of us have been colleagues on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) for almost 40 years (although never for NPR). We've lived through every one of the fierce and often unscrupulous efforts by the right to shut down both public television and radio. Our work has sometimes been the explicit bull's eye on the dartboard as conservative ideologues sought to extinguish the independent reporting and analysis they find so threatening to their phobic worldview.

Rep. Peter King's Anti-Muslim Hearings Revealed Just One Thing -- He's Bad at His Job

By Joe Conason, AlterNet
Posted on March 11, 2011, Printed on March 11, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150202/

Despite the dubious credentials of Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., as an opponent of terrorism, owing to his years fronting for the Irish Republican Army, his controversial hearings on the "Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response" might still have proved useful. Had they included testimony from real experts, officials who are responsible for counter-terrorism and actual leaders from the Muslim community, the proceedings could have revealed fresh and important information.

That is, after all, the traditional purpose of congressional oversight hearings such as these, which are supposed to monitor the performance of federal agencies and highlight serious problems. Predictably, however, this particular show turned out to be almost fact-free and laden with emotion -- including long and pointless speeches by Homeland Security Committee members insisting that the whole exercise was not nearly as pointless as it seemed.

Paul Krugman: Dumbing Deficits Down

Like anyone who writes regularly about what passes for economic and fiscal debate in American politics, I’ve developed a strong tolerance for nonsense. After all, if I got upset every time powerful people were illogical and/or dishonest, I’d spend every waking hour in a state of raging despair.

Yet there are still moments when I find myself saying, “They can’t really be that stupid,” or maybe, “They can’t really think the rest of us are that stupid.” And I had one of those moments reading about a recent conference on national health policy, which featured a bipartisan dialogue among Congressional staffers.

Corporations Are Working to Destroy One of the Few Tools We Have to Stop Their Abusive Behavior

By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet
Posted on March 11, 2011, Printed on March 11, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150133/

Everyone has heard of the woman who spilled coffee on herself and won $3 million from McDonald’s. Perhaps you recall an editorial similar to the one that ran in the San Diego Union Tribune: “A winning lottery ticket…absurd… a stunning illustration of what’s wrong with America’s civil justice system.”

I saw the injuries. One look was all it took. An 82-year-old woman with such severe burns on the insides of her upper thighs, inches from her vagina, that they required skin grafts. You can see it too, in the documentary Hot Coffee, when it’s released. Hot Coffee is the most exciting movie ever made about tort reform.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh And The Men Who Are Trying to Paint Him as Crazy

By Matthew Phelan, WhoWhatWhy.com
Posted on March 4, 2011, Printed on March 10, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150129/

It seems unusual for a staid, respected publication (one that has received three National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) to start treating a celebrated journalist (who himself has won two National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) as if he were nothing more than a paranoid crank.

It seems unusual, but it’s exactly what the staff of Foreign Policy has done to Seymour Hersh, following a lecture the venerated reporter gave at Georgetown University’s campus in Doha, Qatar. You may know Hersh as the dogged investigator who exposed the My Lai Massacre during Vietnam. You may know him as the staff writer for The New Yorker who published some of the earliest pieces on Abu Ghraib in May 2004. You might even know him as the man derided and then vindicated for claiming that Dick Cheney was running a secret assassination squad right out of the Vice President’s office. (In truth, the squad was and is a bipartisan affair, initiated under Clinton and still operative under Obama.)

House Goes Nuts Over Net Neutrality by Tim Karr

by Tim Karr

Late Wednesday, Republican members of a key House Commerce subcommittee decided to give phone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over the Internet.

By a party-line vote of 15 to 8 they passed a "resolution of disapproval" that would strip the FCC of its ability to protect Internet users -- freeing up companies like Verizon and Comcast to block our right to speak freely and share information on the Internet.

This reckless action opens the door even wider to corporate abuse of Net Neutrality, the principle that protects our ability to connect with everyone else online.

Naomi Klein: Why Climate Change Is So Threatening to Right-Wing Ideologues

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on March 9, 2011, Printed on March 10, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150180/

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Naomi Klein, journalist and author. Her latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She’s writing a new book on climate change and the climate change deniers. Naomi, take it from there.

NAOMI KLEIN: The book is not about the deniers, but it does get into it, because I started trying to understand these dramatic drops in belief that climate change is real. I mean, we’ve just ended the hottest decade on record. There’s overwhelming evidence that climate change is real now. It’s not just about reading the science. It’s about people’s daily experience. And yet, we’ve seen this remarkable drop, where, in 2007, 71—this is a Harris poll—71 percent of Americans believed climate change was real, and two years later, 51 percent of Americans believed it. So, a 20 percent drop. And we’ve seen a similar dramatic just the floor falling out in the same period in Australia, in the U.K. It’s not happening everywhere. It’s happening in countries that have very polarized political debates, where they have very strong culture wars.

By the Numbers: A Revealing Look at the Mortgage Mod Meltdown

by Olga Pierce and Paul Kiel
ProPublica, March 8, 2011, 12:37 p.m.

For the past year, we've been digging into the administration's fumbling efforts [1]. We've crunched a lot of numbers along the way, and now we're sharing what we found – including loads of previously unreported data.

Using new Treasury Department figures, previously unreleased documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, and new analyses of state and industry data, we have assembled the most detailed look yet at how the the mortgage industry [2] and the government's main effort, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), have failed homeowners. It provides crucial context to the ongoing government investigation into mortgage servicing practices, which might lead to reforms [3] of how banks and servicers handle homeowner requests for modifications.

Koch Brothers Key Political Employee Has Dark And Disturbing Past

It is often said that you can judge a person by the company they keep.

If this is true, it is small wonder that billionaire libertarians Charles and David Koch have become notorious in the eyes of many Americans.

Tim Phillips, the man who heads up the Americans For Prosperity group that serves as a political front for the brothers Koch (David serves as Chairman of the organization), and is leading the effort to support Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to neuter the public employee unions in Wisconsin, is a key cog in the Koch political machine – earning in excess of $250,000 for his services in 2009 (latest tax filing data available.)

Rachel Maddow Exposes Michigan Republicans Secret War On Democracy

March 9, 2011

By Sarah Jones

Last night on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show, Maddow explained that Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder is pushing a bill through that will give ultimate governmental power literally to corporations, thereby using shock doctrine tactics to create a dystopian government. Synder’s bill not only goes after collective bargaining rights, but does in fact seem to represent the Republicans’ final solution to killing democracy by enabling the replacement of elected officials, dissolving entire city’s government and handing them over to corporations. Snyder calls his “budget bill” a “shared sacrifice,” but it gifts corporations with 1.8 billion in tax breaks while hitting citizens with harder taxes, including seniors and other vulnerables, and cutting essential services to an already suffering region.

Robert Samuelson Wants To Take Money From Seniors To Make The Wall Street Boys Richer

Dean Baker, CEPR | Mar. 6, 2011, 9:16 PM

Yes, Robert Samuelson is at it again, spreading inaccurate and misleading claims about Social Security to justify taking money from retirees.

It seems that for some reason he has a hard time understanding the idea of a pension. This shouldn't be that hard, many people have them.

Passive news reports may lead readers to feel they can't find the truth

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Passive news reporting that doesn't attempt to resolve factual disputes in politics may have detrimental effects on readers, new research suggests.

The study found that people are more likely to doubt their own ability to determine the truth in politics after reading an article that simply lists competing claims without offering any idea of which side is right.

"There are consequences to journalism that just reports what each side says with no fact checking," said Raymond Pingree, author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

"It makes readers feel like they can't figure out what the truth is. And I would speculate that this attitude may lead people to tune out politics entirely, or to be more accepting of dishonesty by politicians."

Jon Stewart: ‘Wait Until Congressman Peter King Gets A Hold Of Terrorist Sympathizer Peter King!’

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) will kick off his anti-Muslim hearings tomorrow on Capitol Hill which he claims will look into the radicalization of the Muslim-American community. In the face of widespread criticism of his witch-hunt, King has refused to back down, saying he is not going to bow to “political correctness.” King has made a number of erroneous and false claims in defense of his crusade, claiming that 80 percent of American mosques are run by radicals and that Muslims aren’t doing anything to combat extremism.

New study shows government spending preferences of Americans

Spending Study is the 27th in a series since 1973 by NORC at the University of Chicago

In its 27th survey of American spending priorities since 1973 conducted as part of its General Social Survey (GSS), NORC at the University of Chicago Wednesday released a report on its most recent findings. By a notable margin, education and health care were the top two spending priorities of Americans. And Americans are consistent in that: those two categories have finished in the top two in each of the ten surveys since 1990.

The spending priorities report is derived from recently released data of the 2010 General Social Survey which NORC has conducted for forty years. The GSS is a biennial survey that gathers data on contemporary American society in order to monitor and explain trends and constants in attitudes, behaviors, and attributes.

Rachel Maddow: Koch Brothers 'Pop Up In Every Scummy Political Scandal'

iThe Kochs are everywhere, says Maddow, chronicling the brothers' recent efforts to push the conservative agenda.

March 8, 2011 | Monday, Think Progress released a video that showed Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown slavishly fawning over David Koch and begging him for money. "Your support during the election, it meant a ton. It made a difference and I can certainly use it again," said Brown on the tape.

Brown's gross display of subservience is only the latest reminder of the right-wing billionaire brothers' shockingly outsized influence on our politics.

Dem Blue Dogs: Implement Catfood Commission Recommendations, Or Face FINANCIAL ARMAGEDDON!!!!! OH NOES!!!!!!

I hardly know where to begin. First of all, it's clear that the Democrats plan to implement the recommendations of the Catfood Commission, the same recommendations that couldn't muster enough of the votes it allegedly had to get before it would be presented to the House for a vote. So that's one really big lie to the American public; we were never meant to have any say, it's already decided.

Second, this reporter talks about what Mark Warner's presentation "shows." It does not "show" anything -- it contends, and it is widely disputed by many reputable economists, two of them Nobel Prize winners. It is in the same factesque vein of a prosecutor's opening statement to the jury.

But facts don't seem to matter anymore, do they?

More on Taxpayer Burdens and Public Employee Pay

David Cay Johnston | Mar. 7, 2011 01:20 PM EST

I have reviewed a study by the Center for Governmental Research, which runs the NYS Data Center, a Census Bureau designated affiliate that is the primary repository of economic and demographic data on New York State. The study is not online, though many others are.

The study shows that public sector workers who are lawyers, executives, managers, software engineers -- that is to say, occupations requiring a lot of education and training -- tend to make less than private sector workers. For example, state and local government lawyers on average earn 49 percent less than lawyers working for private business, data from the 2000 Census publicly available microdata sample files shows.

ALEC: The Behind the Scenes Player in the States' Fight Against the Middle Class

It is no coincidence that Republican legislators and governors -- not just in Wisconsin, but in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Tennessee and many other states -- are rushing to pass laws to undermine the collective bargaining rights of both public sector and private sector unions and pass budgets to drastically cut funding for education and other services that serve the broad middle class. It is part of a concerted corporate-funded campaign to continue shifting power and wealth from middle class majority to the richest 1%.

It includes conservative think tanks, lobbying organizations, corporate campaign cash, and corporate-funded astroturf organizations. While the Koch Brothers are poster boys for this campaign, it goes far beyond the Koch Brothers and includes some of the largest corporations headquartered in America from the energy sector to health care to telecommunications.

One of the most influential organization which connects state legislators with corporate money and corporate think tanks to influence pro-corporate, anti-union state legislation is the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council, often known as ALEC. Funded by some of the largest corporations based in the United States, ALEC takes the policy ideas of corporate-friendly think tanks, turns them into hundreds of "model legislation" bills undermining unions, blocking environmental protections, opposing health care reform, and supporting the tobacco and private prison industries.

Business fights Obama's fix for sick corporate pensions

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — State and local government pensions aren't the only ones in trouble.

Corporate pensions, too, are woefully underfunded, and the federal agency that insures them against losses is facing a dangerous deficit that taxpayers may end up covering. One government watchdog agency says the federal insurance funds are at "high risk" of failure. Moreover, the Obama administration's proposal to fix this is meeting stiff resistance from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business interests.

Unions' Many Mistakes and Opportunities to Mend

by Ted Rall

I will never understand why the people who are jealous of unionized workers who earn $50,000 a year give a pass to the incompetent bank executives who get $5,000,000. Resentment is a terrible thing to waste.

Given how terribly companies have treated workers in recent years—mass layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages, piling on the work, while they pay their executives seven-figure salaries—you’d think Americans would be more receptive to unions. But organized labor’s bad rep isn’t surprising. A half-century of smears by big business and their media allies and sleazy laws passed by corrupt anti-worker politicians (c.f. the Taft-Hartley Act) have established today’s image of organized labor as corrupt, selfish and marginal.

How Politicians Are Using 911 Emergency Services to Scam Millions of Consumers

By David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick, AlterNet
Posted on March 5, 2011, Printed on March 8, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150132/

The Great Blizzard of 2010 dumped record levels of snow throughout the Northeast. On day one of the snowstorm, New York's 911 service got nearly 50,000 calls and, at its peak, had a backlog of 1,300 calls that almost brought the service to its knees. Sadly, the combination of 911 failures and the inability of EMS ambulances to get through the snowdrifts likely contributed to a number of needless deaths.

Many elected officials, most especially New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, were put on the proverbial hot seat over their failure to meet unprecedented volumes of emergency calls. After an initial phase of finger pointing and mea culpas, politicians made their customary promises to make sure such a crisis would not happen again. Fortunately, while this was a record year for snowstorms, none was as devastating as the initial December 2010 blizzard.

America Still Needs Jobs

First Posted: 03/ 7/11 11:45 AM
Updated: 03/ 7/11 12:31 PM

It was back in late September that I launched my "America Needs Jobs" series for The Huffington Post.

Then as now, no issue seemed of more importance to this country -- politically, economically and morally -- than jobs.

Just that week, President Barack Obama had provided this excuse for his do-almost-nothing approach to the crisis: "We are willing to look at any idea that's out there that we think will help," he said at a CNBC town hall on the economy. "But we've got to do so in a responsible way. We've got to make sure that whatever it is that we're proposing gives us the best bang for the buck. A lot of ideas that look good on paper, when you start digging into them it turns out that they're more complicated and they may end up not working the way they're supposed to."

The Wisconsin union fight isn't about benefits. It's about labor's influence.

By Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Sunday, March 6, 2011;

The battle between Republicans and labor unions in Ohio, Wisconsin and other states is ostensibly about public workers' pay, benefits and bargaining rights. What is really at stake, however, isn't labor's income. It's labor's influence - not just in the American workplace but in American politics.

Critics of unions cast them as exclusive clubs for which the rest of Americans pay the dues. Wisconsin's GOP governor, Scott Walker, likes to say that unions are the "haves" and everyone else the "have-nots." And it's certainly true that unions aggressively pursue their own interests - sometimes to others' detriment. When asked in the early 20th century what the American Federation of Labor wanted, the union's gruff head, Samuel Gompers, famously replied, "More."

Paul Krugman: Degrees and Dollars

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

How Republicans Could Dramatically Undermine Health Reform Law Without A Fight

Brian Beutler | March 7, 2011, 8:45AM

In the coming days, Republicans could quietly weaken the health care law by imposing a major financial burden on middle-class consumers, without even having to put up a fight. And privately, Democratic sources in both chambers say they fear that the Senate Democratic leadership won't go to bat to prevent it.

The issue arises because of a bipartisan consensus that one financing provision in the law -- the so-called 1099 provision -- should be repealed. Bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate have voted to strike the measure, which requires businesses to report all transactions with vendors in excess of $600 to the IRS. Lax reporting requirements cost the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars a year.

Single-payer health legislation on the move in Vermont

MONTPELIER — By the end of this week, the House Health Care Committee will vote on a bill that authorizes the building blocks for a future single-payer health care system.

The bill will largely follow the template provided to the Legislature by Gov. Peter Shumlin, who set transformation of health care as a priority for his first term in the state’s top job.

In a Rare Turn for MSM, '60 Minutes' Covers "The Other America"

If you missed this segment last night, please watch. It is rare to see such in-depth coverage of child poverty: Scott Pelley really puts a human face on this problem and challenges us to look around and ask how many of our neighbors and acquaintances are in, or verging on, similar circumstances, and what we can do.

Austan Goolsbee weasels on Social Security benefit cuts

by Gaius Publius
3/06/2011 12:10:00 PM

Based on this interview with Austan Goolsbee, it looks like Team Change hasn't given up "fixing" Social Security on the backs of the needy and the recipients. O'Donnell, to his credit, questions him pretty closely. The obviously weaselly answer is the result.

The Goolsbee interview starts at 3:20; the Social Security discussion starts at 7:15. At 8:80, weasel words begin leaving Goolsbee's mouth — and they just don't stop.

Paul Krugman: Central Bankers, Politicized

Tuesday 1 March 2011

Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has crossed the line by acting as cheerleader for the Conservative Party’s policies of making deep cuts in public spending — cuts that have affected everything from university tuition fees to tax breaks for families.

“The last thing you ever want is for the Bank of England to be drawn into the political arena,” Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor and a spokesman for the opposition Labour Party, told the Financial Times in an interview on Feb. 17. Mr. Balls has criticized the governor for publicly backing the harsh austerity policies, which Mr. Balls says could spark a double-dip recession and more unemployment in Britain.

If It Sounds Too Good ... What You Need to Know, but Don't, About Privatizing Infrastructure

Saturday 05 March 2011
by: Ellen Dannin, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

Remember the old joke about some sharpie who takes innocents by "selling" them the Brooklyn Bridge? By the time the poor guy finds out he was taken, the crook is long gone.

Flash forward to the present. States and cities are being told that they can fix their budgets and have money left over by leasing their infrastructure for 50, 75 or even 99 years. It sounds great, even miraculous. But we all need to slow down and do our homework, because the rule "If it sounds too good to be true, it is" still applies, and there are good reasons why state and local governments should not want any part of these deals.

The Fleecing Taxpayers Bait-and-Switch

By Sam Pizzigati

Created 03/06/2011 - 11:32am

Home Feature Box:

Lavishly paid corporate executives, flush with tax-deductible taxpayer dollars, have plenty of reason to relish the right-wing assault on 'overpaid' public employees. But we can wipe that grin off their faces.

Somebody is getting rich off our tax dollars. That somebody, governors in Wisconsin, New Jersey, and a host of other states would have us believe, just happens to be our neighbor the public employee.

Teachers, fire fighters, cops, and case workers, have become, in effect, the new “welfare queens.” Ambitious pols the nation over, taking a page from the Ronald Reagan playbook, are creating mythic tax dollar-gobbling stereotypes that demonize Americans just struggling to get by.

Why employee pensions aren't bankrupting states

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — From state legislatures to Congress to tea party rallies, a vocal backlash is rising against what are perceived as too-generous retirement benefits for state and local government workers. However, that widespread perception doesn't match reality.

A close look at state and local pension plans across the nation, and a comparison of them to those in the private sector, reveals a more complicated story. However, the short answer is that there's simply no evidence that state pensions are the current burden to public finances that their critics claim.

Premiere Plants

By Liz Cox Barrett

Well, here’s a shocker: Some of the people who phone in to talk radio shows (that caller with the pitch-perfect rant, provocative comment or burning question) may actually be hired actors reading from scripts. I’m not an angry listener, but I play one on radio!

Via Tablet Magazine:

If [the actor] passed the audition, he would be invited periodically to call in to various talk shows and recite various scenarios that made for interesting radio. He would never be identified as an actor, and his scenarios would never be identified as fabricated—which they always were.