Antarctic Icebergs Play a Previously Unknown Role in Global Carbon Cycle, Climate

Passage of icebergs through surface waters changes their physical and biological characteristics

March 25, 2011

In a finding that has global implications for climate research, scientists have discovered that when icebergs cool and dilute the seas through which they pass for days, they also raise chlorophyll levels in the water that may in turn increase carbon dioxide absorption in the Southern Ocean.

An interdisciplinary research team supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) highlighted the research this month in the journal Nature Geosciences.

Vt. House Passes Single-Payer Health Care Bill

by Chris Garofolo

MONTPELIER -- The Vermont House of Representatives passed a bill calling for a single-payer system Thursday afternoon, putting the state on a path to become the first in the nation to adopt universal access to health care.

Lawmakers voted 92 to 49 after nearly two days of debate, including discussion on the floor until the early morning hours on Thursday.

Chemical that killed thousands in Bhopal finally abandoned by U.S. producer

Updated: 3/18/2011, 1:33 pm | Sooner than expected, the last major U.S. producer of the chemical that killed thousands in Bhopal, India, 26 years ago –and was nearly released in a 2008 explosion in West Virginia –is ceasing production of the compound.

An announcement Friday by Bayer CropScience, whose plant in Institute, West Virginia, stores 200,000 pounds of methyl isocyante (MIC), coincided with the start of a court hearing in a lawsuit by residents seeking to stop the company from restarting the unit that produces MIC.

Lobbyists Admit Corporate Tax "Holiday" Didn't Work, But Demand It Again

By Dave Johnson

Created 03/24/2011 - 3:01pm

The usual suspects are trying to sell us on yet another scheme to keep from paying their taxes. This one is called a repatriation tax holiday—a huge cut in the tax rate on money companies are holding outside of the country. We did this before and it didn't work out so well for us, so of course they want to do it again.

Multinational corporations hide profits in offshore shell companies to avoid taxes. Here is how the scheme works:

One shell company manufactures in China or another low-cost country, sells the products to a shell company "based" in a tax-haven like the Cayman Islands at a low price so the manufacturer doesn't show much profit. The tax-haven company immediately sells it to their U.S. company at a very high price, so the tax-haven shell company gets most of the profits.

Washington Post On Social Security: Long On Hyperbole, Short On Facts

By Blue Girl

Created 03/25/2011 - 12:27pm

Journamalism [1] in 2011 is long on hyperbolic headlines and short on actual facts.

If you go to The Washington Post business section this morning, you will see what I mean. Lori Montgomery has turned in, and an editor has seen fit to publish, 700 or so words of ignorant, unresearched blather and nonsense under the headline Social Security splinters Democrats in debate over reining in budget deficits [2]. And the article lives down to the headline. It is a journalistic chimera of unsourced allegations and speculation, innuendo, conflated information and mindlessly regurgitated talking points asserted as fact.

With momentum building to rein in record budget deficits, Democrats are sharply divided over whether to tackle popular but increasingly expensive safety-net programs for the elderly, particularly Social Security.

Social Security does not contribute one penny to the deficit. It is a self-funded program and it is solvent until 2039 if we do nothing, indefinitely if we make a minor tweak and raise the earnings cap.

Rick Scott's Medicaid Overhaul to Benefit…Rick Scott?

Florida's governor is pushing a privatization plan that could be a major boon for health care companies. Like his.

By Suzy Khimm | Fri Mar. 25, 2011 12:01 AM PDT

---

Republican governor Rick Scott's push to privatize Medicaid in Florida is highly controversial—not least because the health care business Scott handed over to his wife when he took office could reap a major profit if the legislation becomes law.

Scott and Florida Republicans are currently trying to enact a sweeping Medicaid reform bill [1] that would give HMOs and other private health care companies unprecedented control over the government health care program for the poor. Among the companies that stand to benefit from the bill is Solantic, a chain of urgent-care clinics aimed at providing emergency services to walk-in customers. The Florida governor founded Solantic in 2001, only a few years after he resigned as the CEO of hospital giant Columbia/HCA amid a massive Medicare fraud scandal. In January, he transferred [2] his $62 million stake in Solantic to his wife, Ann Scott, a homemaker involved in various charitable organizations.

The Voter ID Scam

By Bill Shein
March 23, 2011

We have many problems with our electoral system: Long lines at the polls, registration snafus, noncompetitive districts, proprietary voting-machine software, and so on. The list is long and there’s much work to do.

But we don’t have a problem with voter-impersonation fraud, in which someone shows up at the polls claiming to be someone else. It almost never occurs. Since voter-impersonation fraud is the only crime prevented by requiring voters to have photo ID, such a requirement does nothing to improve our electoral system.

Losing Our Way

By BOB HERBERT

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Why the Chamber of Commerce Has Been Wrong on All the Issues -- For 99 Years and Counting

By Bill McKibben, AlterNet
Posted on March 22, 2011, Printed on March 26, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150341/

What if I told you I'd found a political group that for a hundred years had managed to be absolutely right on every crucial political issue? A political lodestone, reliably pointing toward true policy north at every moment.

Sorry. But I have something almost as good: a group that manages to always get it wrong. The ultimate pie-in-the-face brigade, the gang that couldn't lobby straight.

Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now

By David Sirota, Ballantine Books
Posted on March 25, 2011, Printed on March 26, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150364/

The following is an excerpt from Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now--Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything by David Sirota (Ballantine Books, 2011).

Die, Hippie, Die! Every time one of these ex-hippies comes prancing in from yesteryear, we gotta get out the love beads and pretend we care about people. - Alex P. Keaton, 1986

For the past several days I've been noticing a steep rise in the number of hippies coming to town. . . . I know hippies. I've hated them all my life. I've kept this town free of hippies on my own since I was five and a half. But I can't contain them on my own anymore. We have to do something, fast! -Eric Cartman, 2005

In 1975, a Democratic Party emboldened by civil rights, environmental, antiwar, and post-Watergate electoral successes was on the verge of seizing the presidency and a filibuster-proof congressional majority. That year, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were two of the three top-grossing films -- the former a parody using the late-sixties sexual revolution to laugh at the puritanical fifties, the latter based on the novel by beat writer Ken Kesey. Meanwhile, three of the top-rated seven television shows were liberal-themed programs produced by progressive icon Norman Lear, including "All in the Family" --a show built around a hippie, Mike Stivic, poking fun at the ignorance of his traditionalist father-in-law, Archie Bunker.

Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy?

By Noah Shachtman

Finally, the investigation was over. The riddle solved. On August 18, 2008—after almost seven years, nearly 10,000 interviews, and millions of dollars spent developing a whole new form of microbial forensics—some of the FBI’s top brass filed into a dimly lit, flag-lined room in the bureau’s Washington, DC, headquarters. They were there to lay out the evidence proving who was responsible for the anthrax attacks that had terrified the nation in the fall of 2001.

It had been the most expensive, and arguably the toughest, case in FBI history, the assembled reporters were told. But the facts showed that Army biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins was the person responsible for killing five people and sickening 17 others in those frightening weeks after 9/11. It was Ivins, they were now certain, who had mailed the anthrax-filled letters that exposed as many as 30,000 people to the lethal spores.

Dividend Lost

By Simon Johnson

Four types of people were directly affected by the Federal Reserve’s decision at the end of last week to allow major banks to increase their dividends and to buy back shares. Three of these groups – bankers, bank shareholders, and government officials – were somewhere between happy and delighted. The four group, US taxpayers, should be much more worried (see also this cautionary letter to the Financial Times by top finance academics).

The bankers’ reaction is obvious. They are officially released from the financial hospital ward that was set up for them in 2008. No matter that this was a very comfortable place with few conditions relative to any other bailout in recent US or world history – there were still restrictions on what banks could do and, naturally, bank executives chafed at these constraints.

My Worlds Collide

Josh Marshall | March 24, 2011, 11:58PM

This is a bizarre, ugly turn of events. And for me it's a little weird because of the people involved. I just found out about it from TPM Reader AS.

Bill Cronon -- or William Cronon, as I think of him -- is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. A few days ago he wrote an oped in the Times critical of Gov. Walker and his push to abolish collective bargaining rights for public employees in Wisconsin. About a week before that, he wrote a blog post -- the first in a new blog called Scholar as Citizen -- examining just who's behind this big anti-union push. He focused on a group called ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council).

The Threat of America's Nativist Far Right

While Peter King holds hearings on homegrown jihadists, the growing menace of white supremacist terror goes unremarked

by James Ridgeway

As emerging reports would have it, Kevin William Harpham, 36, who is accused of setting a bomb to go off at the Martin Luther King Jr Day parade in Spokane, Washington, was yet another "lone wolf" terrorist, acting at his own behest and on his own behalf. Even groups on the racist, radical far right that so clearly inspired him are rushing to disown and denounce the indicted man. Regardless of whether he was a "member" of an organised group, there can yet be no doubt that Harpham saw himself as part of a movement – one that has an especially broad reach in the age of Obama, and roots as deep as American culture itself.

Paul Krugman: The Austerity Delusion

Portugal’s government has just fallen in a dispute over austerity proposals. Irish bond yields have topped 10 percent for the first time. And the British government has just marked its economic forecast down and its deficit forecast up.

What do these events have in common? They’re all evidence that slashing spending in the face of high unemployment is a mistake. Austerity advocates predicted that spending cuts would bring quick dividends in the form of rising confidence, and that there would be few, if any, adverse effects on growth and jobs; but they were wrong.

It’s too bad, then, that these days you’re not considered serious in Washington unless you profess allegiance to the same doctrine that’s failing so dismally in Europe.

Back to Full Employment

Robert Pollin

This is the lead article in a forum on the possibilities for full employment in today’s economy.

Employment conditions in the United States today, in the aftermath of the 2008–09 Wall Street collapse and worldwide Great Recession, remain disastrous—worse than at any time since the Depression of the 1930s.

Since Barack Obama entered office in January 2009, the official unemployment rate has averaged more than 9.5 percent, representing some fifteen million people in a labor force of about 154 million. By a broader definition, including people employed for fewer hours than they would like and those discouraged from looking for work, the unemployment rate has been far higher—16.5 percent, on average. Still worse, if we count people who have dropped out of the labor force, unemployment would rise to nearly 20 percent, or 30 million people, roughly twice the combined populations of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

One-Year Anniversary: The Incredible Shrinking Obama Health Care Law

Kevin Zeese | Thursday 24 March 2011

The health care crisis grows while the 2010 health reform shrinks.

At its one-year anniversary, the Obama health care law is shrinking while the health care crisis grows. Americans who lack any health coverage still exceeds 50 million, over 45,000 deaths occur annually due to lack of health insurance, and 40 million Americans, including over 10 million children, are underinsured.

Premiums are rising and coverage is shrinking; a new norm is taking hold in America: "Unaffordable underinsurance." This month, the number of waivers granted to the Obama health law broke 1,000, protecting inadequate insurance plans. The expansion of health insurance to the uninsured is becoming a mirage. The Obama administration has told states they could reduce the number of people covered by Medicaid as well as reduce the services provided. And the centerpiece of the law is under court challenge, - the mandate is the first time ever the federal government has forced Americans to buy a corporate product, private health insurance - heading to a close Supreme Court decision.

Intelligence Community Fears U.S. Manufacturing Decline

Last week, the federal government reported that the U.S. trade deficit grew by 33 percent in 2010 to nearly half a trillion dollars. Most of the gap resulted from an imbalance in trade with China, which shipped $365 billion in goods to America but only bought $92 billion in U.S. goods. The resulting U.S. deficit of $273 billion in bilateral trade with Beijing reflects a persistent feature of the Sino-American relationship since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Over the last ten years, China has mounted the biggest challenge to the U.S. manufacturing sector ever seen, threatening producers of steel, chemicals, glass, paper, drugs and any number of other items with prices they cannot match. Not coincidentally, the United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs every month during the same period.

Intelligence Community Fears U.S. Manufacturing Decline

Last week, the federal government reported that the U.S. trade deficit grew by 33 percent in 2010 to nearly half a trillion dollars. Most of the gap resulted from an imbalance in trade with China, which shipped $365 billion in goods to America but only bought $92 billion in U.S. goods. The resulting U.S. deficit of $273 billion in bilateral trade with Beijing reflects a persistent feature of the Sino-American relationship since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Over the last ten years, China has mounted the biggest challenge to the U.S. manufacturing sector ever seen, threatening producers of steel, chemicals, glass, paper, drugs and any number of other items with prices they cannot match. Not coincidentally, the United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs every month during the same period.

Five Fun Facts About the $14 Trillion National Debt

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on March 24, 2011, Printed on March 25, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150371/

Our public debt – now at around $14 trillion dollars ($14,233,559,283,692.40 as of this writing, to be precise) – has been in the news lately, but how we accrued it, who holds it and whether it represents a problem are not well understood.

In one sense, for better or worse, our growing public debt has put trillions into the pockets of the American people. There's an economic principle known as “Wagner’s law,” which holds that as a country gets wealthier, its tax burden tends to increase.

The Bizarre Religious Myths Mormon Right-Wingers Are Pushing on Tea Partiers -- With Glenn Beck's Help

By Alexander Zaitchik, SPLC Intelligence Report
Posted on March 22, 2011, Printed on March 25, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150333/

FAIRMONT, W. Va. — One fine Saturday morning last year, around 60 mostly middle-aged conservatives trickled onto the otherwise deserted campus of Fairmont State University. Clutching notebooks and coffee cups, they looked like groggy Continuing Ed students as they took seats in a modern lecture hall on the ground floor of the school's engineering building. In a sense, they were Continuing Ed students. The room had been booked months in advance for a one-day, intro-level history and civics seminar entitled, "The Making of America."

But this was no ordinary summer school. Randall McNeely, the seminar's kindly, awkward, and heavy-set instructor, held no advanced degree and made no claims to being a scholar of any kind. He was, rather, a product of rote training in a religious and apocalyptic interpretation of American history that has roots in the racist right of the last century. His students for the day had learned about the class not in the Fairmont State summer catalog, but from the website of the obscure nonprofit run by fringe Mormons. Founded as the Freeman Institute in Provo, Utah, in 1971, the outfit now goes by the name National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCSS), and works out of a remote farmhouse in Malta, Idaho (population 177).

Cutting carbon dioxide helps prevent drying

Washington, D.C.—Recent climate modeling has shown that reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would give the Earth a wetter climate in the short term. New research from Carnegie Global Ecology scientists Long Cao and Ken Caldeira offers a novel explanation for why climates are wetter when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations are decreasing. Their findings, published online today by Geophysical Research Letters, show that cutting carbon dioxide concentrations could help prevent droughts caused by global warming.

Cao and Caldeira's new work shows that this precipitation increase is due to the heat-trapping property of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide traps heat in the middle of the atmosphere. This warm air higher in the atmosphere tends to prevent the rising air motions that create thunderstorms and rainfall.

The Truth Behind the Public Pensions Funding Gap

by Jack Rasmus

State governors across the nation, led by newly elected right wing Republicans (with several Democratic governors in tow), are whipping up anti-union sentiment by declaring public workers and their unions are the cause of state budget deficits. They argue that various labor costs are driving up their deficits, but the lead cause of those labor costs is overly generous increases public employee pension benefits.

But increases in public employee pension benefits are not the cause of the States’ budget crises. There are, indeed, serious pension funding gaps in many states public pension plans. But a close investigation of these gaps shows clearly they do not exist because of states’ granting public employees exorbitant pension benefits.

Buried Provision In House GOP Bill Would Cut Off Food Stamps To Entire Families If One Member Strikes

All around the country, right-wing legislators are asking middle class Americans to pay for budget deficits caused mainly by a recession caused by Wall Street; they are attacking workers’ collective bargaining rights, which has provoked a huge Main Street Movement to fight back.

The Imaginary World in Which Washington Lives

Dean Baker | Wednesday 23 March 2011

It is a beautiful spring day in Washington. This is a nice respite from the horrors taking place in Japan and the ever-growing nuttiness of DC politics. Enjoying the weather provides a nice alternative to listening to the news or reading the newspaper.

The flood of nonsense in the traditional news outlets just continues to grow. At the top of the list is the steady stream of senators or members of Congress whose response to higher gas prices is to insist on drilling in every square inch of environmentally sensitive territory in the country. This is supposed to reduce our dependence on imported oil and lower the price of gas. Both sides of this assertion are absurd.

Conservatives Tell Liberals Why They Should Support Cuts to Social Security

By Dean Baker

Created 03/23/2011 - 11:21am

Showing the sort of balanced journalism that we have come to expect from the Washington Post, its oped page featured a column by Robert Pozen [1], a financial industry executive and proponent of Social Security privatization, telling liberals why they should support cuts to Social Security. The gist of Mr. Pozen's argument is that Social Security is becoming less progressive over time because the gap in life expectancies between higher paid workers and lower paid workers is growing.

Furthermore, because of growing wage inequality, a larger share of wage income is escaping the Social Security tax. In addition, Pozen tells us that the structure of retirement income subsidies is highly regressive since the bulk of the tax benefits go to high income earners.

Merchants of Danger

By Richard Eskow

Created 03/22/2011 - 12:23am

Fukushima is "a very huge disaster that has caused very large damage at a nuclear power generation plant on a scale that we had not expected," according to the deputy director general of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency [1].

But the risk of disaster was easily calculated, and an effective regulator would have demanded that the Tokyo Electric Power Company take the appropriate precautions. That didn't happen. The ugly truth, here and in Japan, is this: Unless government regains the will and the ability to regulate private industry, more catastrophes are all but inevitable.

Paul Krugman: Commodities and Inflation, a Misunderstood Pair

Tuesday 22 March 2011

Whenever I write about inflation (or the lack thereof), I get a lot of remarkably angry mail from people who are focused on commodity prices. They just can’t imagine why economists and officials like myself and Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, appear to be relaxed about others’ inflation fears when the prices of wheat, oil and other commodities have risen so much lately.

Many of my correspondents don’t seem to realize how small a role commodity prices play in determining overall consumer prices. Not that they have zero effect: for example, the price of oil is a big part of the price of gasoline, which in turn has a big impact on consumer prices.

U.S. vs highest-achieving nations in education

By Valerie Strauss

This post was written by Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, where she was founding director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. She now directs the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. A former president of the American Educational Research Association, Darling-Hammond focuses her research, teaching, and policy work on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity.

By Linda Darling-Hammond

The first ever International Summit on Teaching, convened last week in New York City, showed perhaps more clearly than ever that the United States has been pursuing an approach to teaching almost diametrically opposed to that pursued by the highest-achieving nations.

In a statement rarely heard these days in the United States, the Finnish Minister of Education launched the first session of last week’s with the words: “We are very proud of our teachers.” Her statement was so appreciative of teachers’ knowledge, skills, and commitment that one of the U.S. participants later confessed that he thought she was the teacher union president, who, it turned out, was sitting beside her agreeing with her account of their jointly-constructed profession.

We’re Not Broke

We Could Pay All Our Bills Without Borrowing a Cent

By Michael Linden, Michael Ettlinger | March 21, 2011

Really, we’re not broke.

The notion that the United States is “broke” is a popular talking point for conservative lawmakers. They use the claim to justify cuts in government services for middle-class Americans and those with whom they have ideological quarrels. Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner (R-OH), for example, likes to say that the United States is “broke, going on bankrupt,” which is why he says we absolutely have to slash government services such as poison control centers, meat inspections, law enforcement funding, afterschool programs, and disease research.

Shaping State Laws With Little Scrutiny

When you walk into the offices of the American Legislative Exchange Council, it's hard to imagine it is the birthplace of a thousand pieces of legislation introduced in statehouses across the county.

Only 28 people work in ALEC's dark, quiet headquarters in Washington, D.C. And Michael Bowman, senior director of policy, explains that the little-known organization's staff is not the ones writing the bills. The real authors are the group's members — a mix of state legislators and some of the biggest corporations in the country.

Paul Krugman: The War on Warren

Last week, at a House hearing on financial institutions and consumer credit, Republicans lined up to grill and attack Elizabeth Warren, the law professor and bankruptcy expert who is in charge of setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Ostensibly, they believed that Ms. Warren had overstepped her legal authority by helping state attorneys general put together a proposed settlement with mortgage servicers, which are charged with a number of abuses.

Crime Rates Are Plummeting -- And No One Knows Why

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet
Posted on March 20, 2011, Printed on March 22, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150307/

Los Angeles' violent-crime rates are four times lower now than they were 1992. The interesting thing is, nobody can really explain why.

As of December 25, last year, only 293 homicides were reported in LA, along with 781 rapes, 10,734 robberies, and 9,129 aggravated assaults. In 1992, that blood-soaked year of the Rodney King Riots, Los Angeles saw 1,092 murders, 1,861 rapes, 39,222 robberies, and 47,736 aggravated assaults.

Paul Krugman: Rantings of an Ex-Maestro

Some people have asked me for reactions to this piece by Alan Greenspan (pdf) on how Obama’s activism is preventing economic recovery. I could go through the weak reasoning, the shoddy econometrics that ignores a large literature on business investment and ignores simultaneity problems, etc., etc..

NPR O'Keefes James O'Keefe With Misleadingly Edited Version Of Interview

Ryan J. Reilly | March 19, 2011, 9:30AM

National Public Radio's "On The Media" gave conservative provocateur James O'Keefe a taste of his own medicine by employing the "black arts of broadcast editing" to create an "utterly dishonest impression" of his views.

Nuclear Nightmare

by Ralph Nader

The unfolding multiple nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan is prompting overdue attention to the 104 nuclear plants in the United States—many of them aging, many of them near earthquake faults, some on the west coast exposed to potential tsunamis.

Nuclear power plants boil water to produce steam to turn turbines that generate electricity. Nuclear power’s overly complex fuel cycle begins with uranium mines and ends with deadly radioactive wastes for which there still are no permanent storage facilities to contain them for tens of thousands of years.

Atomic power plants generate 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. Over forty years ago, the industry’s promoter and regulator, the Atomic Energy Commission estimated that a full nuclear meltdown could contaminate an area “the size of Pennsylvania” and cause massive casualties. You, the taxpayers, have heavily subsidized nuclear power research, development, and promotion from day one with tens of billions of dollars.