The L-Word

Liberals have been failing to live up to their ideals for centuries, but we mustn't give up on liberalism.

By Peter Clarke
Posted Saturday, May 14, 2011, at 7:54 AM ET

Liberal has been a dirty word in US politics for some time. President Barack Obama can supply convincing answers to the two preposterous charges about his identity that he has faced recently. One, that he is not really an American, was dismissed by producing his birth certificate. The other, that he is a socialist, is more difficult. It could be exploded by declaring that he is self-evidently liberal in his political convictions. But we can be fairly confident that he will not be using the L-word, even though it claims a political pedigree stretching back to the founding fathers.

Speculation explains more about oil prices than anything else

Kevin G. Hall and Robert A. Rankin | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: May 13, 2011 08:12:21 PM

WASHINGTON — Feel like you're being robbed every time you fill the gas tank? Not sure who to blame? Try Wall Street.

That's not the conventional explanation, but it's the one the facts point to. Usually analysts say today's high prices stem simply from "supply and demand." They mean demand for oil and gas is rising and supplies aren't keeping up, so people bid up their price. But global and U.S. supplies are plentiful and demand is stable, so that's not it.

Then the analysts say it's because the market's afraid Middle East turmoil will interrupt oil supplies, so nervous buyers are bidding up prices to ensure they lock in a contract for oil now, just in case it's scarce later. There's probably some truth to that, but after five months of turmoil, there's been no significant impact on Middle East oil supplies, even as prices have see-sawed, so that's not credible either.

How Fox News Outfoxes Americans

To understand how so many average Americans can be duped into embracing right-wing positions that go against their own interests, you must look at how Fox News (and right-wing media outlets) use faux populism and phony outrage as propaganda techniques, a topic explored by Danny Schechter in this guest essay.

By Danny Schechter

May 13, 2011

Grrrrrrrr. You can almost hear the growling in the background as the masters of attack politics go into action, virtually every hour on the hour, on the Fox News Channel.

The issues they focus on are carefully selected by top executives and then broken down into highly politicized message points. Their dominant emotion is annoyance as expressed in sarcasm and scowling; contempt is the underlying attitude.

In the Fox view, the other side is usually not just wrong but plain stupid, almost unbelievable in its softheaded naiveté and distance from reality.

An FCC Commissioner’s Brazen Dash Through the Revolving Door

Buried by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News

By Ryan Chittum

The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News show some terrible news judgment today, burying news that FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker is jumping ship to Comcast less than four months after voting to approve the company’s controversial purchase of NBC Universal.

The Journal stuffs a brief inside the Marketplace section. Bloomberg only bothers to give it 124 words.

The Washington Post is somewhat less bad, giving it 400-plus words but burying it on A18 and going with wire copy.

Mitch Daniels, Architect of US Debt Crisis

Exclusive: Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is the new Republican darling of the Washington establishment, which hails him as a “fiscal conservative” who would be “serious” about addressing the nation’s staggering debt problem. But his many admirers forget to mention what Daniels did in creating the debt crisis as George W. Bush’s budget director, notes Robert Parry.

Robert Parry

May 14, 2011

To hear Official Washington tell it, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is the new “serious” Republican presidential contender. He’s praised as a “fiscal conservative” who isn’t obsessed with the Right’s divisive social agenda nor marred by the crazy “birther” conspiracy theories.

Mentioned only in passing is a key fact that – in a saner world – would disqualify him from holding any government office: Mitch Daniels was President George W. Bush’s original budget director in 2001.

In other words, the “fiscal conservative” Daniels oversaw the federal budget as it was making its precipitous dive from a $236 billion surplus – then on a trajectory to eliminate the entire federal debt in a decade – to a $400 billion deficit by the time he left in June 2003.

Actually, "the Rich" Don't "Create Jobs" -- We Do

You hear it again and again, variation after variation on a core message: if you tax rich people it kills jobs. You hear about "job-killing tax hikes," or that "taxing the rich hurts jobs," "taxes kill jobs," "taxes take money out of the economy, "if you tax the rich they won't be able to provide jobs." ... on and on it goes. So do we really depend on "the rich" to "create" jobs? Or do jobs get created when they fill a need?

GOP Bill Shifts Oil Drilling Cases To Court Dominated By Judges With Oil Investments

Yesterday, the House passed the so-called “Putting the Gulf Back to Work Act,” which is intended to make it easier for the oil industry to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. Sadly, this bill also continues the GOP’s longstanding practice of rigging the court system to favor wealthy and influential interest groups. Tucked within the bill is a provision that consigns many lawsuits involving oil drilling into a federal court that is dominated by judges with close ties to the oil industry:

SEC. 202. EXCLUSIVE VENUE FOR CERTAIN CIVIL ACTIONS RELATING TO COVERED ENERGY PROJECTS IN THE GULF OF MEXICO.

Venue for any covered civil action shall not lie in any district court not within the 5th circuit unless there is no proper venue in any court within that circuit.

Where Republicans want to take education

can be clearly seen in a biting column this morning by Gail Collins in The New York Times. In Reading, ’Riting and Revenues she takes us through what is happening in Ohio and in Texas. In the former, the State House

approved legislation that would allow for-profit businesses to open up their own taxpayer-financed charter schools.

The bill would also reduce oversight. Collins implies that no one will take credit for inserting the provisions into the legislation.

But consider this:

It got a rave review in The Columbus Dispatch from an op-ed contributor named Thomas Needles, who cheered legislators for trying to end the “drip-drop of wrongheaded regulation” of charter schools.

. Collins informs us that Needles is a consultant for White Hat, a chain of for-profit charter schools with a dubious track record.

With 56% of American Internet connections now capped, advocates ask FCC for probe

By Stephen C. Webster
Monday, May 9th, 2011 -- 12:34 pm

The practice of capping Internet bandwidth and selling it as a metered commodity has fully taken hold, to the point where 56 percent of U.S. internet connections are now on plans that restrict how much information users can access before triggering additional fees.

For an Internet landscape that's been accustomed to unlimited access to information the world over, this represents a sea-change for many broadband subscribers. And to at least two prominent Washington, D.C. advocacy groups, it's cause for immense concern.

7 Ways Hedge Funds Lie, Cheat and Steal

The billionaire head of the Galleon hedge fund was found guilty of 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy, but he's not just an isolated "bad apple."

May 11, 2011 | The verdict is in: Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire head of the Galleon hedge fund, was found guilty of 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy on Wednesday: 5 counts of conspiracy, and 9 counts of insider trading – which means he could be joining Bernie Madoff in prison for the rest of his life. The prosecution, which played 43 secretly recorded conversations that revealed how insider information was sought, received and covered-up, provides the clearest view to date of how far billionaires will go to earn their riches.

Which raises an even more perplexing question: Why would a billionaire go out of his way to break the law in order to make “only” a few million more? ($63 million to be exact, which is less than 5 percent of his net worth.)

Mike Huckabee Fixes American History

Evan McMorris-Santoro | May 11, 2011, 7:49PM

Don't worry, American youth: Mike Huckabee has fixed American history. No longer will you suffer under what Huckabee calls "the 'blame America first' attitude prevalent in today's teaching."

Late Wednesday, Huckabee announced LearnOurHistory.com, a sort of BMG Music Club for what he calls "unbiased" historical lessons for kids. For around $15 each, the company will send you a new animated tale of American history each month, told through the eyes of a gang of time traveling kids.

Despite Rhetoric, Cutting Oil Subsidies Would Have Little Effect on Gas Prices

by Nicholas Kusnetz
ProPublica, May 12, 2011, 10:19 a.m.

Democrats renewed their push to cut oil subsidies this week, saying high gasoline prices and big revenues for oil and gas companies make this as good a time as any to eliminate billions in annual tax incentives to the industry. Republicans countered that higher taxes on oil companies would only mean higher prices for consumers.

Most experts agree, however, that the tax incentives in question don’t have much effect on gasoline prices, one way or the other.

Don't Ever Bet Against America's Wealthy

By Sam Pizzigati

Created 05/11/2011 - 6:29pm

Financial industry analysts are going ga-ga over the soaring cohorts of mega rich in China and India. But researchers at one influential global financial consulting group are calculating that the U.S. millionaire share of world millionaire wealth will actually increase over the next decade.

Financial industry analysts are going ga-ga over the soaring cohorts of mega rich in China and India. But researchers at one influential global financial consulting group are calculating that the U.S. millionaire share of world millionaire wealth will actually increase over the next decade.

Deloitte LLP has just become the latest global financial industry giant to take a stab at tallying the wealth of the world’s wealthy, joining, among others, Merrill Lynch [1], the Boston Consulting Group [2], and Credit Suisse [3]. But Deloitte seems to be carving out a niche all its own in the wealth census sweepstakes: the future.

The global wealth study Deloitte's Center for Financial Services released last week [4] projects, a decade ahead, the wealthy's wealth in 25 major countries “selected for their size, growth potential, and strategic importance.”

It's Time to Break Up AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner and the Rest of the Telecoms

By David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick, AlterNet
Posted on May 11, 2011, Printed on May 13, 2011

To join the fight to break up the telecom giants, check out the Web site Break Up the Communications Trusts! and 'like' them on Facebook.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the oil pipes defined America. As the 21st century emerges, the information pipes define America and the world.

A century ago, a courageous muckraker, Ida Tarbell, wrote a series of articles that lead to the breakup of Standard Oil, which had become a trust controlling the energy and associated industries to fix prices, restrict competition and harm the nation.

Is conservative student group preaching white nationalism?

Advocates for 'defense of the Western homeland' become a campus lightning rod

msnbc.com, updated 5/12/2011 7:54:31 AM ET

Last weekend, several hundred right-wing political activists gathered for a rally in the German city of Cologne to protest the "Islamization" of the West and immigration policies that they contend threaten the "Western culture."

They included representatives of Vlaams Belang, a Belgian organization that changed its name and liberalized some of its positions after it was convicted of racism in 2004 by a Belgian court; the Freedom Party of Austria, a right-wing party formerly led by the late Jörg Haider, who was often denounced for seeming to praise some Nazi policies; and the National Democratic Party of Germany, which is classified by the Bavarian government as a right-wing extremist institution.

Paul Krugman: Britain Still Awaits Good Results From Bad Ideas

The bad gross domestic product number for Britain, announced on April 27, wasn’t a surprise — in fact, judging from market response, investors seem to have expected something even worse. Still, if you step back and look at what has been happening, it’s doubleplusungood: zero growth over the past six months, with every reason to be worried looking forward, as Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity bites deeper.

Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in Britain, got to the nub of it in an article for the Financial Times that day: “On fiscal policy, the message is that we should listen to economists, not credit rating agencies. Most mainstream economists argued that the impact of the government’s fiscal consolidation on confidence and consumer demand would be negative; so it has proved,” he wrote.

How Raising The Retirement Age Screws the Poor

— By Kevin Drum | Fri May. 13, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

I've never been a fan of raising the Social Security retirement age. It's a blunt instrument mainly favored by journalists and policymakers who don't plan to retire at age 65 anyway and figure that asking people to work a little bit longer than they used to is no big deal. But people who don't have white collar jobs quite plainly don't feel the same way about it, as the skyrocketing number of people who retire early at age 62 demonstrates. We've already raised the full retirement age to 67 (this was part of the 1983 Social Security deal put in place by the Greenspan Commission), and I think there are plenty of better ways of bringing Social Security into balance than by raising it yet again.

For-Profit Colleges’ Debt Disorder

As the industry whitewashes its image and fights new regulations, a leading company offloads its own sour student loans.

By Pat Garofalo

Late last month, an organization called the Coalition for Educational Success (CES) announced its intention to formulate a new code of conduct to govern for-profit higher education institutions. CES said that, in conjunction with former Govs. Ed Rendell (D-Penn.) and Thomas Kean (R-N.J.), it plans to develop standards that “will improve and ensure transparency, disclosure, training, [and] provide strong new protections for students” attending “career colleges.”

Sounds great. But what is CES and why is it proposing a higher education code of conduct right now? To understand that, one has to dive into a hotly-contested federal policy battle: the attempt by the U.S. Department of Education to implement new rules governing the for-profit college industry, which the coalition represents.

The Tenfold Path to Guts, Solidarity and the Defeat of the Corporate Elite

Wednesday 11 May 2011

by: Bruce E. Levine, Truthout

Many Americans know that the United States is not a democracy but a "corporatocracy," in which we are ruled by a partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite and corporate-collaborator government officials. However, the truth of such tyranny is not enough to set most of us free to take action. Too many of us have become pacified by corporatocracy-created institutions and culture.

Some activists insist that this political passivity problem is caused by Americans' ignorance due to corporate media propaganda, and others claim that political passivity is caused by the inability to organize due to a lack of money. However, polls show that on the important issues of our day - from senseless wars, to Wall Street bailouts, to corporate tax-dodging, to health insurance rip-offs - the majority of Americans are not ignorant to the reality that they are being screwed. And American history is replete with organizational examples - from the Underground Railroad, to the Great Populist Revolt, to the Flint sit-down strike, to large wildcat strikes a generation ago - of successful rebels who had little money but lots of guts and solidarity.

Paul Krugman: Seniors, Guns and Money

This has to be one of the funniest political stories of recent weeks: On Tuesday, 42 freshmen Republican members of Congress sent a letter urging President Obama to stop Democrats from engaging in “Mediscare” tactics — that is, to stop saying that the Republican budget plan released early last month, which would end Medicare as we know it, is a plan to end Medicare as we know it.

Now, you may recall that the people who signed that letter got their current jobs largely by engaging in “Mediscare” tactics of their own. And bear in mind that what Democrats are saying now is entirely true, while what Republicans were saying last year was completely false. Death panels!

Well, it’s time, said the signatories, to “wipe the slate clean.” How very convenient — and how very pathetic.

Say What? A Chemical Can Damage Your Lungs, Liver and Kidneys and Still Be Labeled "Non-Toxic"?

You will be shocked at all the loop-holes given by the government to industrial chemicals to avoid safety regulation and accurate labeling.

May 12, 2011 | Bisphenol A, parabens, phthalates, formaldehyde, and on and on. Do they expect us all to be chemists? I’m a chemist and even I don’t want make every trip to the store a research project. Why not just provide a simple label like “nontoxic” that we can look for? Surely it is illegal to put a nontoxic label on products containing known toxic or carcinogenic substances—especially on children’s products. Not so. And we all should know how we got into this mess.

Economic Conflicts of the Founding Era Dispel Tea Party Myths...

By William Hogeland, New Deal 2.0
Posted on May 11, 2011, Printed on May 13, 2011

Looking closely at founding-era struggles over finance challenges Tea Party history — and some liberal preconceptions too.

Anything but a lost, halcyon epoch of unity and consensus, our founding era saw deep, harsh oppositions among Americans over what kind of society our independence from England was meant to bring about. Like today, the direst political oppositions devolved on the economy, and on proper uses of public and private finance. From the North Carolina Regulation of the 1760s to the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, Americans struggled mightily with other Americans over economic issues.

Though little-known, those struggles had decisive impacts on all of the famous moments in founding history. The Continental Congress’s adopting the Declaration of Independence occurred in the summer of 1776 only because those among the financial and political elites who wanted American liberty made secret, common cause with radical populists who wanted American equality. The Constitutional Convention’s proposing a national government in 1787 came in direct opposition to progress made by the radical democrats who promoted ordinary, working Americans over the high-finance investing class.

Does Cupid play politics? That 'something special' might be your mate's political ideology

Researchers discover spouses select partners based on social and political attitudes

Though "variety is the spice of life" and "opposites attract," most people marry only those whose political views align with their own, according to new research from Rice University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Political scientists found that political attitudes were among the strongest shared traits and even stronger than qualities like personality or looks.

In an article published in the April issue of the Journal of Politics, researchers examined physical and behavioral traits of more than 5,000 married couples in the United States. They found spouses in the study appeared to instinctively select a partner who has similar social and political views.

"It turns out that people place more emphasis on finding a mate who is a kindred spirit with regard to politics, religion and social activity than they do on finding someone of like physique or personality," said John Alford, associate professor of political science at Rice University and the study's lead author.

Look Past Public Workers—the Root of Labor’s Crisis Lies in Private Sector

by Joe Burns

When I remember the heroic upsurge in Madison this winter, the subtitle of labor journalist Steve Early’s latest book comes to mind: “The Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or the Death Throes of the Old?” Although Early was speaking of the grandiose promises of the Change to Win union federation, the question can be applied to the massive demonstrations in Madison.

Will the struggle in Wisconsin be seen as the dying gasp of unionism in America, or the turning point marking the construction of a new labor movement? That depends, of course, on the actions of trade unionists in the coming months and years.

America's Largest Newspaper Launches a Nasty Attack on Grandma and Grandpa

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on May 12, 2011, Printed on May 13, 2011

The conservative playbook isn't difficult to decipher. They rely heavily on the politics of resentment – point to someone in our society, claim they're a lucky-duck using unverifiable anecdotes or cherry-picked data, and then urge people to ask, "Why does that person have it so good when I'm busting my ass to make ends meet?"

It was apparent in Ronald Reagan's “welfare queen” rhetoric, and also in the ubiquitous references to “young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with their food-stamps. Now the Right's using the exact same play for those greedy public employees supposedly living large on their fat salaries.

This week, the Wall Street Journal featured an excellent example of the genre by John Cogan, a fellow at the corporate-backed Hoover Institution. The piece, titled, “The Millionaire Retirees Next Door,” is a shining testament to the dishonesty surrounding our discourse on “entitlements.”

Alan Simpson Attacks AARP, Says Social Security Is 'Not A Retirement Program'

First Posted: 05/09/11 05:19 PM ET | Updated: 05/10/11 11:34 AM ET

WASHINGTON -- Alan Simpson’s cold relationship with AARP is no secret, but the former Republican Senator from Wyoming took it to a new level Friday. At an event hosted by the Investment Company Institute, Simpson delighted the finance industry audience members by aiming a rude gesture at the leading lobby for senior citizens.

Financial and investment interests have long been supportive of Simpson’s broad critique of Social Security, since privatizing the old-age and disability support program would be a tremendous boon for Wall Street’s financial managers. ICI represents mutual funds and other money managers who control more than $13 trillion in assets.

Simpson’s forceful gesture came after an extended diatribe against Social Security, which he said is a "Ponzi" scheme, "not a retirement program.”

Scientific Study Links Flammable Drinking Water to Fracking

by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, May 9, 2011, 3 p.m.

For the first time, a scientific study has linked natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing with a pattern of drinking water contamination so severe that some faucets can be lit on fire.

The peer-reviewed study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stands to shape the contentious debate over whether drilling is safe and begins to fill an information gap that has made it difficult for lawmakers and the public to understand the risks.

Koch Brother Buys Professors At Public University to Spread Free Market Propaganda

The latest Koch brother affront is an "unheard of" breach of academic freedom--a donation to FSU only on the condition they can oversee the faculty appointees.

Usually, when billionaires or millionaires give a large sum of money to a university, even a private one, they can specify where that gift will go -- which department or function, facilities, new hires, dorms, or what have you. And it's no secret that some of those big donations may lead to a little bit of wink-and-nudge affirmative action when it comes time for the little billionaires Jr. to apply to college.

But what these monied donors cannot do, what remains taboo in the academic world, is leverage that kind of gift to influence who gets hired and fired by the faculty and what they teach--until now, thanks to Charles G. Koch.

Why CEOs Avoided Getting Busted in Meltdown

By William K. Black - May 10, 2011

Bloomberg Opinion

The defining characteristic of crony capitalism is the ability of favored elites to loot with impunity and the failure of regulators to do their jobs.

We have seen this in the financial crisis that started in 2008 and in an earlier era, when the savings-and-loan industry collapsed.

In the Texas “Rent-a-Bank” scandal of the 1970s, for example, two ringleaders created a fraud network of 50 lenders that caused billions of dollars in losses. The watchdogs removed and sanctioned one of the main culprits, but because the crimes weren’t prosecuted, the same crooks reappeared in the 1980s to do it all over again, only on a bigger scale. Unless you imprison the fraudsters, sophisticated financial scams grow ever more destructive.

It seems as if we have forgotten this lesson.

War Against the Weak

The brutal Republican campaign to eliminate the collective rights of individuals and increase the collective rights of corporations.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Monday, May 9, 2011, at 1:59 PM ET

---

Three recent Republican efforts, each one critical to the conservative agenda:

1) the attempt by Republican governors to eliminate the right of public employees to bargain collectively;

2) the attempt to eliminate the consumer protection bureau created in the Dodd-Frank financial services reform law—probably the most important part of the law for ordinary investors;

3) the recent 5-4* Supreme Court decision to limit the right to "class-arbitration" in many circumstances—taking away the collective power of those whose injuries are too small to be effectively remedied individually yet who, together, might be able to stand up to much stronger institutions.

The unifying theme is an assault on the weak. The power of individuals, each of us feeble in isolation, to act collectively and hence stand up to the powerful is being eviscerated. Those who already begin behind are finding the few legal protections afforded them under attack. A critical element of the Republican agenda has become increasing the legal power of those who already have power, and diminishing the power of the weak.

CO2 makes life difficult for algae

The acidification of the world’s oceans could have major consequences for the marine environment. New research shows that coccoliths, which are an important part of the marine environment, dissolve when seawater acidifies.

Associate Professor Tue Hassenkam and colleagues at the Nano-Science Center, University of Copenhagen, are the first to have measured how individual coccoliths react to water with different degrees of acidity.

Coccoliths are very small shells of calcium carbonate that encapsulate a number of species of alga. Algae plays an important role in the global carbon-oxygen cycle and thus in our ecosystem. Our seawater has changed because of our emissions of greenhouse gases and therefore it was interesting for Hassenkam and his colleagues to investigate how the coccoliths react to different types of water.

The Sneaky Ways the Christian Right Has Re-Entrenched Itself In Our Politics

The rapid rise of the Tea Party and its burgeoning alliance with the Religious Right are further proof of the staying power of theocratic movements in American politics.

May 2, 2011 | In late February, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John Boehner (R-Ohio) flew to Nashville to address a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters, a group of mostly far-right television and radio personalities. While there, he took some time to chat with a reporter for TV preacher Pat Robertson’s “700 Club.”

Boehner assured Robertson’s viewers that their concerns are his concerns -- and he urged them to be patient. Reflecting on a recent House vote to cut off tax funding of family planning and health programs for women, Boehner asserted, “I met with a lot of religious leaders earlier today to talk about the strategy, and I think it’s important that we understand that what we want to do here is win the war, not just win a battle. And there will be an opportunity some time in order to win the big war, and we’re looking for that opportunity.”

Ryan's $34 Trillion Tax Folly

David Cay Johnston | May. 9, 2011 09:31 AM EDT

If repairing your car cost 18 percent of your income, would you buy a new car? Of course you would.

Now imagine that your mechanic tried to persuade you to keep the jalopy with a clever tax argument: The costs of your annual car tax and registration would decline over time, saving you money. Keep the car long enough and you would save a third of a year's income just in taxes.

That sounds appealing, unless you stop to think about how much more you would pay for repairs as your vehicle ages and breaks down ever more often.

In Fine Print, Banks Require Struggling Homeowners to Waive Rights

by Paul Kiel
ProPublica, May 9, 2011, 7 a.m.

A few months ago, Bank of America offered Sergio Cortez of Staten Island, N.Y., the help he desperately needed to stay in his home: a break on his mortgage. Like millions of others, he was facing foreclosure. But there was a catch buried in the fine print. Cortez had to waive any possibility of ever suing the bank for anything relating to the loan.

Cortez isn't alone. While regulators have banned the practice, some banks and others who handle mortgages have still been forcing homeowners into a corner: You want a chance at saving your home? Then you'll have to waive your rights.

Paul Krugman: The Unwisdom of Elites

The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?

Well, what I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.

So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong.

The Myth of the Natural Economy

By James Kwak

“The general equilibirum view tends to lend support to those who want to make the economy more efficient in the sense of having fewer ‘distortions’—you know, all of these neutral economic words—from taxes, from labor unions, from minimum wages, and so on. Now, what has happened in the last thirty years—and this is what Hacker and Pearson note in their book [Winner-Take-All Politics]—is we have gotten ourselves into a feedback situation. As people have gotten richer, conservative people have funded organizations which generate economic research promoting their political views.”

That’s from an excellent interview with economic historian Peter Temin in The Straddler. Temin’s main point is that what he calls general equilibrium approaches to macroeconomics have a political agenda, but they hide that agenda behind an ideology of naturalness.

Weekend thoughts on Obama, Monsanto & food

by Gaius Publius on 5/08/2011 05:09:00 PM

The corporate money-vacuuming beast known as Monsanto has scored a major under-the-radar victory in the last few months, and few but organic farmers have noticed. From Food Democracy Now (my emphasis):

[In January] the Obama administration has unbelievably chosen to approve three biotech crops, Roundup Ready genetically modified (GMO) alfalfa, Roundup Ready genetically modified (GMO) sugar beets and a new industrial biotech corn for ethanol production. Obama's recent approval of them will allow them to be planted as early as this spring, despite widespread acknowledgement that these crops are certain to contaminate both conventional and organic farmers non-GMO crops. ... [T]he USDA's approval of the new industrial biotech corn for ethanol production occurred despite massive outcry from major food companies who know that it will contaminate and possibly ruin the food they sell to you everyday.

Katha Pollitt: It Takes a Village, Not a Tiger

Are you a tiger mother, a soccer mom, a helicopter parent, an attachment mom, a permissive free spirit who just wants your child to be herself? Congratulations. Your kids have a good chance of turning out reasonably well. Not because you are a parenting genius who has hit on the perfect method but because you have the time and energy and cultural capital to give your child what he needs to be successful in today’s world no matter what child-raising method you choose. You are probably not, for example, poor, homeless, functionally illiterate, socially isolated, an addict, in prison, living in substandard housing, working three low-paid jobs—or unemployed for life. You have books in your house, and probably a computer too. You know enough to help your child with homework—and if not, you have the money or networks to find a tutor. You feel comfortable volunteering at your child’s school, being in the PTA, calling the principal, going to parent-teacher conferences. You can afford to take your child to the doctor and the dentist for regular care. If your child should happen to get arrested, as quite a few do—if he’s caught with pot, say, or spray-paints graffiti, or jumps a turnstile—there’s a good chance that the charges can be made to go away, or at least not become part of his permanent record. Your ex may have run off with your best friend, your apartment may be too small, you may hate your job—but you are still a white-collar, college-educated, middle-class person. And that makes all the difference for your children.

From Two Breadwinners to One

Louis Uchitelle
May 4, 2011

Keith Baudendistel counts himself lucky. The reason is convoluted. He is, after all, unemployed, having lost his factory job in East St. Louis nearly three and a half years ago.That puts him easily among the 6.1 million Americans labeled by the government as long-term unemployed. What makes Baudendistel lucky is that his wife works. And her second income, which once made the couple comfortable, is now in effect their unemployment insurance.

Born of the women’s movement and the income stagnation that started in the 1970s—soon making one income inadequate—the two-income family became a means of staying in the middle class or striving for that status. Now, one of those incomes is rapidly disappearing as more and more husbands or wives lose a job and, in a period of minimal job creation, can’t get back into the workforce. Once the unemployment benefits expire for the jobless husband or wife, the working spouse’s income then becomes the couple’s jobless pay, sustaining them, but at a lower—sometimes much lower—standard of living.

Beyond Foreclosuregate - It Gets Uglier

Saturday 7 May 2011
by: Michael Collins, Daily Censored [3]

The ForeclosureGate scandal poses a threat to Wall Street, the big banks, and the political establishment. If the public ever gets a complete picture of the personal, financial, and legal assault on citizens at their most vulnerable, the outrage will be endless.

Foreclosure practices lift the veil on a broader set of interlocking efforts to exploit those hardest hit by the endless economic hard times, citizens who become financially desperate due medical conditions. A 2007 study found that medical expenses or income losses related to medical crises among bankruptcy filers or family members triggered 62% of bankruptcies. There is no underground conspiracy. The facts are in plain sight.

Bin Laden’s war against the U.S. economy

By Ezra Klein

Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t. So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?

Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.

Putting the Squeeze on Jobless Benefits

It's the wrong time to cut unemployment benefits, so why are Republican-run states doing it anyway?

By Annie Lowrey
Posted Friday, May 6, 2011, at 2:59 PM ET

This morning's jobs report confirms for what feels like the thousandth month in a row that the U.S. economy is getting better, but from a very low trough and somewhat slowly. The economy added 244,000 jobs in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning. But the unemployment rate jumped up two-tenths of a percentage point, to 9.0 percent. The month saw the strongest job growth since 2006. But there were fewer people employed overall.

The report, then, will do little to change Americans' firm, and correct, conviction that the economy is still totally in the can. According to a CNN survey released today, about 80 percent of Americans say the economy is in poor shape. Only 1 percent—hedge fund managers and the serially confused, perhaps—say the economy is "very good." Unemployment remains the top concern. So why are governments across the country starting to kick the support out from under the chairs of the jobless?

How the press aids and abets the GOP attack on the middle class

COMMENTARY | May 02, 2011

Henry Banta writes that the media pay excessive attention and give excessive credibility to the constant drumbeat of propaganda on the budget and debt streaming from those who have the most to lose if the middle class tries to get back some of what has been taken from it.

By Henry Banta
henrybanta@aol.com

One positive thing to come out of our current budget squabble is that we can now more clearly see what each of the parties really cares about – or at least what the Republicans really care about. In the end it was not Planned Parenthood, abortion, or EPA regulations. It was all about money. Lower taxes for the rich and fewer resources for the poor and middle class were at the core of what they would fight for until the bitter end. Unfortunately, this clarity has escaped the major media, most of which are, once again, totally absorbed by the political games.

By now the Republican obsession should surprise no one, as the single most important fact about the American economy for the last three decades has been, by far, the massive shift in wealth and income to the top of the economic ladder.

Life Satisfaction and State Intervention Go Hand in Hand, Baylor Researcher Finds

May 5, 2011

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People living in countries with governments that have a greater number of social services report being more satisfied with life, according to a study by a Baylor University researcher.

Dr. Patrick Flavin, assistant professor of political science at Baylor, said the effect of state intervention into the economy equaled or exceeded marriage when it came to satisfaction. The study is published in the spring issue of the journal Politics & Policy.

Free market capitalism has been championed by leaders such as the late President Ronald Reagan and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, while left-leaning political parties and labor movements argue for more government intervention into the market. But scholars have paid little empirical attention to the debate in terms of which leads to more satisfaction among citizens, Flavin said.

Columbia researchers find green roof is a cost-effective way to keep water out of sewers

NEW YORK – Green roofs like the one atop a Con Edison building in Long Island City, Queens can be a cost-effective way to keep water from running into sewer systems and causing overflows, Columbia University researchers have found.

The Con Edison Green Roof, which is home to 21,000 plants on a quarter acre of The Learning Center, retains 30 percent of the rainwater that falls on it. The plants then release the water as vapor, the researchers said in the study (http://www.coned.com/greenroofcolumbia).

If New York City's 1 billion square feet of roofs were transformed into green roofs, it would be possible to keep more than 10 billion gallons of water a year out of the city sewer system, according to the study led by Stuart Gaffin, research scientist at Columbia's Center for Climate Systems Research.

Supply-Side Economics in Fact and Fancy

by Robert E. Prasch

Supply-side economics is a hearty perennial, one that closely follows the election cycle. Every four years ambitious Republican politicians (and not a few ‘centrist’ Democrats) rediscover that the wealthy would like to pay less in taxes. But the rhetoric of politics does inhibit the wealthy, their kept intellectuals, and paid spokesmen from arguing their case directly. In democracies, even those resembling plutocracies, the rich must present their own interests as coinciding with the general good.

With this in mind, and yet still aspiring to a tax cut, the wealthy have lavishly supported ‘astroturf’ political organizations and ‘think tanks’ which, in turn, hire photogenic and eloquent spokespersons to present their case to the public. In its best form, the argument is that tax cuts for the rich will: (1) increase the national savings rate because the wealthy save a larger percentage of their incomes than others. This increased quantity of savings will (2) provide the funds required to spur business investment in plant and equipment. From this it follows that (3) supply-side tax cuts will have the effect of providing strong economic growth, which will “trickle down” to the “regular guy.” We are assured that not only are these propositions true, but that they were proven decisively during the Reagan Administration.

Deconstructing the Paul Ryan Sound Bite

By Sam Pizzigati

Created 05/07/2011 - 6:18pm

Real policy wonks bore people. The phony wonk from Wisconsin now driving Congress seduces, with a patter that leaves our wealthy almost completely disappeared.

Real policy wonks bore people. The phony wonk from Wisconsin now driving Congress seduces, with a patter that leaves our wealthy almost completely disappeared.

Rep. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin revels in his rep [1], inside the beltway, as America’s ultimate conservative public policy “wonk.” He plays the part well. He knows his lines. He can rattle off, at the drop of a hat, a stream of stats that make his rich people-friendly budget nostrums seem eminently reasonable — and good for us all.

Last month, for instance, Ryan smoothly dispatched an angry constituent who dared challenge the tax-no-rich federal budget plan that has made the Wisconsin lawmaker a right-wing hero.