Secret Donors Multiply in U.S. Election Spending

By J. Crewdson, A. Fitzgerald, J. Salant and C. Babcock - May 19, 2011 6:01 AM ET

In the weeks before last November’s election, television viewers in South Carolina were treated to an animated caricature of Representative John Spratt high- kicking in a chorus line with President Barack Obama and then- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“It’s the worst economy in decades,” the ad intoned, “and the folks in Washington are living it up, spending our tax dollars like there’s no tomorrow.”

That ad and a second one mocking Spratt appeared at least 723 times between Sept. 25 and Election Day and were paid for by a group called the Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity, according to ad trackers at Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of WPP Plc. Spratt, a 14-term Democrat, saw a seven-point lead in an early poll vanish and lost the election.

Politico Has Not Heard About the Collapse of the Housing Bubble and Economic Crisis

By Dean Baker
May 20, 2011 - 3:10pm ET

That is the conclusion that readers of a Politico article headlined, "budget surplus to deficit: how we got here," must conclude. This article attributes the increase in the deficit in the Obama years to increased spending coupled with tax cuts, only mentioning in passing at the end of the article that the single biggest factor in the rise of the deficit was the economic collapse. It fails to point out that virtually all of the additional spending and tax cuts by President Obama was carried through for the explicit purpose of counteracting the loss of private sector demand due to the collapse of the bubble.

It is absolutely inexcusable for a serious news organization to run a piece like this. The collapse of the housing bubble was by far the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression. Complaining about the size of the deficit under President Obama, while only mentioning in passing the reason for the deficit, is like complaining about a city's use of water without mentioning that it had been trying to extinguish a massive fire.

Birtherism Is Dead. Long Live Otherism.

Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and other 2012 contenders don't think Obama was born in Kenya—they're just saying he's not one of us.

— By David Corn
Thu May. 19, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Mitt Romney has tried to be the adult in the 2012 GOP race. He hasn't echoed the extreme rhetoric of other Republican presidential wannabes or that of his party's tea party base. In mid-April—before President Barack Obama eviscerated the birther movement by releasing his longform birth certificate (and ordering the raid that killed Osama bin Laden)—Romney declared he would have none of that birther nonsense: "I think the citizenship test has been passed. I believe the president was born in the United States." Yet the former Massachusetts governor is still playing footsie with a popular conservative meme: Obama's not really one of us.

The Big Squeeze: How Americans Are Being Crushed by Financial Insecurity and Doubt

By David Rosen, AlterNet
Posted on May 19, 2011, Printed on May 21, 2011

The Great Recession officially started in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. It was the gravest financial crisis the nation has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Sadly, most Americans have yet to recover.

It fostered what many call the “new normal,” the unspoken sense that America is stuck if not in decline. This new sensibility bears profound consequences; foremost is the recognition that Americans are living lives of lowered expectation and intensified financial uncertainty.

The “American Century” is over. The great historical phase of America’s domestic prosperity and global hegemony is withering. In the decades following the Second World War, American capitalism fashioned the postmodern, and increasingly globalized, world order. In the process, it abandoned America and the American people.

The Great Switch by the Super Rich: How Wealthy Americans Started Paying So Little in Taxes

By Robert Reich, RobertReich.org
Posted on May 20, 2011, Printed on May 21, 2011

Forty years ago, wealthy Americans financed the U.S. government mainly through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans finance the government mainly by lending it money. While foreigers own most of our national debt, over 40 percent is owned by Americans – mostly the very wealthy.

This great switch by the super rich – from paying the government taxes to lending the government money – has gone almost unnoticed. But it’s critical for understanding the budget predicament we’re now in. And for getting out of it.

Over that four decades, tax rates on the very rich have plummeted. Between the end of World War II and 1980, the top tax bracket remained over 70 percent — and even after deductions and credits was well over 50 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. As recently as the late 1980s, the capital gains rate was 35 percent. Now it’s 15 percent.

10 Steps to Defeat the Corptocracy

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on May 20, 2011, Printed on May 21, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151018/10_steps_to_defeat_the_corptocracy

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.

At a Time of Needed Financial Overhaul, a Leadership Vacuum

by Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, May 18, 2011, 3:10 p.m

After the worst crisis since the Great Depression, President Obama has unleashed an unusual force to regulate the financial system: a bunch of empty seats.

With Sheila C. Bair soon to leave her post at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Obama administration will have five major bank regulatory positions either unfilled or staffed with acting directors.

Paul Krugman: Making Things in America

Some years ago, one of my neighbors, an émigré Russian engineer, offered an observation about his adopted country. “America seems very rich,” he said, “but I never see anyone actually making anything.”

That was a bit unfair, but not completely — and as time went by it became increasingly accurate. By the middle years of the last decade, I used to joke that Americans made a living by selling each other houses, which they paid for with money borrowed from China. Manufacturing, once America’s greatest strength, seemed to be in terminal decline.

But that may be changing. Manufacturing is one of the bright spots of a generally disappointing recovery, and there are signs — preliminary, but hopeful, nonetheless — that a sustained comeback may be under way.

Deal Reached on Extension of Patriot Act

Friday 20 May 2011
by: Charlie Savage, The New York Times News Service

Washington - Congressional leaders on Thursday reached a deal to extend by four years several statutes that expanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterterrorism and surveillance powers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, aides said.

Under the deal, two sections of the so-called USA Patriot Act and a third provision from a related intelligence law would be extended, without any changes, until June 1, 2015. The provisions had been set to expire later this month.

The sections allow investigators to get “roving wiretap” court orders allowing them to follow terrorism suspects who switch phone numbers or providers; to get orders allowing them to seize “any tangible things” relevant to a security investigation, like a business’s customer records; and to get national-security wiretap orders against noncitizen suspects who are not believed to be connected to any foreign power.

Digby: Uhm, don't tell anyone but we're not broke

I would imagine that the conservatives and corporatists in both parties would prefer that this message not get out lest the people start demanding a more equitable sharing of the wealth in this country:

We’re not broke nor will we be
Lawrence Mishel
May 19, 2011

Policy choices will determine whether rising national income leads to a prosperous middle class

Read Briefing Paper

Many policymakers and pundits claim “we’re broke”¹ and “can’t afford”² public investments and policies that support workers. These claims are meant to justify efforts to scale back government programs and public sector workers’ wages and benefits. The “we’re broke” theme also implies that America’s working families should be satisfied with the status quo in terms of wages that have been stagnant for 30 years.

"We have a plan. It's called Medicare"

By Digby
May 19, 2011 - 3:43pm ET

With Republicans going far beyond line drawing to a full blown assault, a big Democrat finally digs in. Greg Sargent:

“It is a flag we’ve planted that we will protect and defend. We have a plan. It’s called Medicare.”

That’s from Nancy Pelosi, who called me from Wisconsin, where she’s holding events today defending Medicare in Paul Ryan’s back yard. On the call, Pelosi laid out a message on Medicare she hopes Dems will use for — well, forever...

Forced Pooling: When Landowners Can’t Say No to Drilling

by Marie C. Baca, Special to ProPublica May 19, 2011, 12:01 a.m.

As the shale gas boom sweeps across the United States, drillers are turning to a controversial legal tool called forced pooling to gain access to minerals beneath private property--in many cases, without the landowners' permission.

Forced pooling is common in many established oil and gas states, but its use has grown more contentious as concerns rise about drilling safety and homeowners in areas with little drilling history struggle to understand the obscurities of mineral laws.

Katha Pollitt: DSK Déjà Vu

The French political class is aghast at the treatment being meted out in New York to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and likely Socialist Party candidate for the French presidency, who is charged with attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment of a housekeeper in his $3,000-a-night suite at the Sofitel hotel in midtown Manhattan. On the radio, his friend Robert Badinter, husband of Élisabeth, one of France’s most famous feminists, declared he had been “destroyed before any trial.” Martine Aubry, first secretary of the Socialist Party and also a possible presidential contender, declared herself “stunned, shocked”—not by the allegations, but by photos of DSK in handcuffs. “The heart can only contract before these humiliating and poignant images that they’re giving of him,” wrote Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a senator and former minister. “A horrible global lynching! And what if it were all a monstrous injustice?”

Can the Greek People Teach the ECB Economics?

If the European Central Bank does not ease up on its austerity policies, it may push the heavily indebted countries into a downward economic spiral.

by Dean Baker

There is an old maxim that in any bureaucracy people will always rise to the level of their incompetence. This certainly seems to be the case with the European Central Bank (ECB). After totally ignoring the build-up of dangerous housing bubbles in most euro zone countries, as well as the imbalances that supported these bubbles, the ECB now seems intent on punishing the people in many of these countries for its mistakes.

This is the likely result of the policies that it is now pursuing, whether or not this is the intention. The insistence that the heavily indebted countries in the euro zone - Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain - pay off their debt in full will inevitably lead to years of high unemployment in these countries and trillions of dollars of lost output throughout the euro zone as a whole. The budget cuts demanded of these countries will force large reductions in pensions and other social supports at a time when macroeconomic policies ensure that few jobs are available.

Gov. Rick Perry endorses voter intimidation, say Texas Democrats

By Eric W. Dolan
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011 -- 5:53 pm

Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry pandered to those who openly intimidate and harass minority voters by cutting the ribbon at the grand opening of King Street Patriots' new headquarters Monday, according to the Texas Democratic Party.

Talking Points Memo reported in October 2010 that the Justice Department was investigating the King Street Patriots' anti-voter fraud campaign after receiving a number of complaints about voter intimidation in Hispanic and African-American areas.

Hospital visitation rights for same sex couples under threat in Wisconsin

By Stephen C. Webster
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011 -- 4:01 pm

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) this week asked a judge if the state may stop defending a law that gives citizens in same sex relationships the right to visit their partner if they're in a hospital.

Passed by Democrats in 2009, the state's domestic partnership registry was meant to give same sex couples more rights. While it succeeded in doing so, rights for domestic partners in Wisconsin do not rise to the level of special rights granted by marriage.

Rise of for-profit hospice industry raises troubling questions, new study says

Ethical and quality concerns grow as end-of-life hospice care, once the province of charitable organizations, is increasingly dominated by investor-owned chains that cherry-pick patients and cut labor costs in order to maximize profits.

A new survey of hospice care in the United States says that the rapidly growing role of for-profit companies in providing end-of-life care for terminally ill patients raises serious concerns about whose interests are being served under such a commercial arrangement: those of shareholders or those of dying patients and their loved ones.

"Under a corporate model of hospice care, there's an inherent conflict of interest between a company's drive to maximize profits and a patient's need for the kind of holistic, multidisciplinary and compassionate care originally envisioned by the founders of the modern hospice movement," said Dr. Robert Stone, an emergency medicine physician in Bloomington, Ind.

The Democrats Attack Unions Nationwide

Wednesday 18 May 2011
by: Shamus Cooke, Truthout

Obvious political truths are sometimes smothered by special interests. The cover-up of the Democrats' national anti-union agenda is possible because to reveal it for the ruse it is would cause enormous disturbances for the Democratic Party, some labor leaders, liberal organizations and, consequently, the larger political system.

Here is the short list of states with Democratic governors where labor unions are undergoing severe attacks: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Hawaii, Minnesota, Maryland and New Hampshire. Other states with Democratic governors are attacking unions to a lesser degree.

The Democrats in these states have sought to distance themselves from the Republican governors of Wisconsin and Ohio, who have specifically attacked the collective bargaining rights of unions. The Democrats in the states listed above all hide their anti-union attacks behind a "deep respect for collective bargaining," a position akin to that of a thief who will steal your car but, out of respect, will not target your deceased grandmother's diamond earrings.

How We Can Kick-Start the Economy, Save Lives, Give Working People a Raise and Turn a Deficit into a Surplus

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on May 15, 2011, Printed on May 17, 2011

It won't make you better looking, stop climate change or result in world peace, but progressives in Congress are pushing a bill that would prove a cure for much of the economic pain we're suffering. If passed, it would save lives, make American companies more competitive, put more cash in our pockets and turn those deficits everyone's obsessing over into surpluses as far as the eye can see.

This week, Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington, introduced the American Health Security Act of 2011(S. 915 in the Senate and HR 1200 in the House), a bill that would create a state-based system similar to Medicare but open to Americans of all ages.

Ron Paul Calls Social Security and Medicare Unconstitutional, Compares Them to ‘Slavery’

Appearing on Fox News Sunday this morning, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) defended his longstanding view that Medicare, Social Security (and pretty much everything else) violate the Constitution. At one point, Paul even claimed that letting Social Security and similar programs to move forward is just like permitting slavery:

WALLACE: You talk a lot about the Constitution. You say Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are all unconstitutional.

PAUL: Technically, they are. … There’s no authority [in the Constitution]. Article I, Section 8 doesn’t say I can set up an insurance program for people. What part of the Constitution are you getting it from? The liberals are the ones who use this General Welfare Clause. … That is such an extreme liberal viewpoint that has been mistaught in our schools for so long and that’s what we have to reverse—that very notion that you’re presenting.

Deprivation and neglect found to age children's chromosomes

Study of institutionalized Romanian children finds prematurely shortened telomeres, a mark of cell aging

Boston, Mass. -- Studies in institutionalized Romanian children have found that the length of time spent in conditions of social deprivation and neglect correlates with lower IQ and behavioral problems. A new study, led by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and Tulane University, shows that early adversity even affects children's chromosomes – prematurely shortening the chromosome tips, known as telomeres, and hastening how quickly their cells "age."

The study, published online this week in Molecular Psychiatry, is the first to find an association between adversity and telomere length in children. It is part of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), which is conducting a long-term clinical trial tracking two groups of institutionalized children: those who remained in the institution and those who were removed to high-quality foster care at varying ages.

Insider: "The Christian Right is Aiming to Destroy All Things Public"

By Frank Schaeffer, De Capo Press
Posted on May 13, 2011, Printed on May 17, 2011

The following is an excerpt from Frank Schaeffer's new book, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway (Da Capo Press, 2011). Raised in Switzerland in l'Abri, a utopian community and spiritual school his evangelical parents founded, Schaeffer was restless and aware even at a young age that "my life was being defined by my parent's choices." Still, he took to "the family business" well, following his dad as he became one of the "best-known evangelical leaders in the U.S." on whirlwind speaking tours. While rubbing shoulders with Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, Schaeffer witnessed the birth of the Christian anti-abortion movement, and became an evangelical writer, speaker and star in his own right.

****

Ironically, at the very same time as Evangelicals like Dad and I were thrusting ourselves into bare-knuckle politics in the 1970s and 80s, we were also retreating to what amounted to virtual walled compounds. In other words we lashed out at “godless America” and demanded political change—say, the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—and yet also urged our followers to pull their own children out of the public schools and homeschool them. The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants was a harbinger of virtual civil war carried on by other means. Protestants had once been the public schools’ most ardent defenders.

For instance, in the 1840s when Roman Catholics asked for tax relief for their private schools, Protestants said no and stood against anything they thought might undermine the public schools that they believed were the backbone of moral virtue, community spirit, and egalitarian good citizenship.

The Koch Brothers and the End of State Universities

The real scandal around the endowment by the Koch brothers of two chairs at Florida State University is that state universities now have to seek such outside money and accept strings. The reason they have to do so is that many state legislatures have chosen not to have state universities any more. At many ‘state universities’ the state contribution to the general operating fund is less than 20 percent, falling toward 10 percent.

This abandonment of their responsibilities to higher education on the part of the states hurts students in the first instance. Institutions that used to be affordable to students from working and lower middle class backgrounds are now increasingly out of reach for them. State universities are becoming the new Ivies, a good bargain still for the upper middle class and the wealthy, but a distant dream for the daughter or son of a worker in a fast food restaurant.

Paul Krugman: Inflation and Economic Hooliganism

In a way, I miss the months that followed Lehman’s failure. O.K., not really — but if it was a time of terror, it was also a time of clarity. The whole world was going to hell in a handbasket, and policy makers everywhere shared a common goal: stopping the plunge.

Today, by contrast, the picture is full of seeming contradictions. Are we in a runaway boom, or is growth weak? Is inflation low, or is it spiraling out of control? The answer to all of these questions is yes. China, India and Brazil are growing much too fast for comfort; America, Europe and Japan remain depressed. Inflation is running high in the emerging world, while the prices of oil and food, which are determined in global markets and are largely driven by demand from those emerging nations, have soared; but underlying inflation in the wealthy nations remains low.

In short, at this point we’re living in a world that is characterized not so much by the sum of all fears as by some of all fears. Whatever you’re afraid of, be it inflation or unemployment or fiscal crisis, it’s happening somewhere — but the problems are different in different places.

South Carolina Republican Named ‘Legislator of the Year’ For Writing A Bill That Disenfranchises Voters

Governor Nikki Haley (R-SC) is expected to soon sign a Voter ID bill passed by both chambers of the South Carolina Legislature. When she does, South Carolina will become the second state in the country to pass such legislation this year, although Voter ID bills are being considered by GOP-led state legislatures nationwide. According to the ACLU, “nearly 180,000 voters in South Carolina – most of whom are elderly, student, minority or low-income voters – will be disenfranchised as a result of this discriminatory bill.” The NAACP adds that it “immediately disenfranchises eight percent of registered voters in the state.”

Freedom Riders inspire new generation of Arab protest leaders

(CNN) -- Joan Mulholland was watching television one day when something flashed across the screen that gave her chills.

Unarmed young men and women blocked rows of tanks. Giddy demonstrators placed flowers in soldier's bayonets. Protesters sang "We Shall Overcome" -- with an Arabic accent.

The images hurled the retired schoolteacher back to another moment in spring when she was a teenager risking her life for change. In May 1961, Mulholland joined the "Freedom Rides." She was part of an interracial group of college students who were attacked by mobs and imprisoned simply because they decided to ride passenger buses together through the Deep South.