Public pays price for privatization

By: Matt Stoller
June 8, 2011 09:29 PM EDT

There is a dignity in the Hoover Dam, a massiveness that speaks to a grand national purpose. A country — our country — decided to build it. As the Hoover Dam was constructed, in the middle of the Great Depression, the nearby city of Las Vegas stretched itself from a sleepy town of 5,000 to accommodate tens of thousands of new residents: the people building the dam and staffing the associated businesses.

In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower embarked on the most aggressive public works project in U.S. history — the jobs-producing interstate highway system. And throughout the 1930s and ’40s, the government designed an elaborate set of public financing vehicles to build the great postwar suburban housing stock.

What Your Taxes Do (and Don’t) Buy for You

By BRUCE BARTLETT

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.

Last week I showed that total taxes at the federal level — individual and corporate income taxes, payroll taxes and so on — are at a 60-year low as a share of the broadest measure of income, the gross domestic product.

Some readers took issue with my failure to include state and local taxes in the calculation. I have now done that, using data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents the major developed countries. Among its most important responsibilities is the collection of internationally comparable data on a wide variety of topics, including taxes and health care spending.

Cut Wall Street Down to Size With a Financial Speculation Tax

by Sarah Anderson

If you want to transform the economy, you have to cut Wall Street down to its proper size. One way to do that is to tax the short-term speculative activities that dominate and distort financial markets.

For ordinary investors, the costs would be negligible, like a tiny insurance fee to protect against crashes caused by speculation. But for the highfliers who are most responsible for the financial crisis, the tax could raise the cost of highly leveraged derivatives trading and stock-flipping enough to discourage the most dangerous behavior.

Sounding the Alarms on Another Social Security Tax Cut

By Daniel Marans

Created 06/09/2011 - 2:22pm

The White House is considering adopting a temporary Social Security tax cut on employers to stimulate the economy as part of the debt ceiling negotiations with the Republicans, according to a Bloomberg News article [1].

If the Administration so much as puts another Social Security tax cut on the table, they will be throwing Social Security under the bus for uncertain—indeed, unlikely—economic gain.

It seems like déjà vu. Wasn’t it just last year that progressives had to talk themselves blue in the face explaining the harm that a temporary payroll tax cut would do?

In case you hadn’t heard, the Obama Administration already enacted a one-year 2 percent payroll tax cut on the employee side as part of the tax cut deal with Republicans in December 2010. The revenue that Social Security would have gotten from the missing 2 percent of taxable payroll is being replaced by a one-time transfer of $105.2 billion from the general fund. (Click here [2] for more on how Social Security is funded.)

At the time, the payroll tax cut was criticized by progressives for endangering Social Security’s finances and undermining the program's political underpinnings. A critique [3] made by Nancy J. Altman, a nationally renowned Social Security expert and co-chair of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, still offers the best explanation for why a payroll tax cut is disastrous.

How to sabotage a recovery

The GOP desperately wants Obama to repeat FDR's notorious mistake of 1937

By Gene Lyons

Having recently praised President Barack Obama's skills as a political counterpuncher, it's worth noting that in politics, as in boxing, it's risky to let your opponent take the initiative.

Many thought Bernard Hopkins clearly outpointed Little Rock's Jermain "Bad Intentions" Taylor in their first middleweight title fight in 2005, but the aggressive young challenger got the decision. See, there's politics in prizefighting. Until Taylor subsequently exhibited a glass chin, he was that sport's next big thing.

If the President Won't Do Something About Jobs, Who Will?

By Richard Eskow

Created 06/10/2011 - 1:29am

When it comes to jobs, sometimes it seems as if the White House is from Mars and the middle class is from Venus. And Republicans act like they're from the Death Star, patrolling the economy in their Imperial Cruisers directing laser blasts at every job initiative they can find.

The resulting political paralysis has left millions of Americans trapped in geographical or demographic pockets of full-blown depression. Unlike Wall Street's America, theirs is a bleak economic landscape from which there seems to be no escape.

Roosevelt Institute Abandons Traditional Liberal Health Care Policies For Pete Peterson

By Jon Walker, a senior policy analyst at Firedoglake. Cross posted from Firedoglake.

Worrying about long term deficits with official unemployment over 9 percent and treasury bonds rates at near-record lows is inherently an act of madness. It is the antithesis of both progressive policy and basic logic. Left to their own devices, liberals would relegate reducing the deficit to a very low priority in this economic climate. Of course when you’re a billionaire like Pete Peterson and you’re willing to spend millions promoting deficit hysteria, your can convince “liberals” to play into your deficit fetish at even the most illogical of times. Hence the Peter G. Peterson Foundations 2011 Fiscal Summit.

I’ve berated all the so called “progressive” groups that took part in the Peter G. Peterson Foundation 2011 Fiscal Summit for including health care reform in their deficit reduction proposals, yet totally abandoning the traditional progressive solution: a single payer health care system. If the United States simply adopted a system that was roughly as efficient as France, Finland, Norway, Australia, Denmark, England, or New Zealand, we wouldn’t have a deficit. Yet the clear and demostrable global precedent set by these nations somehow managed to escape inclusion by these leading liberal economic lights.

Key regulator: Speculators swamping oil, grain markets

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In the sharpest criticism yet of excessive speculation in oil markets, the head of a key regulatory agency presented data Thursday showing that almost nine in 10 traders betting that oil prices would rise were financial speculators, not actual end-users of oil.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler vowed during a New York speech that his agency soon will act "to guard against the burdens of excessive speculation."

Neocons Spin Two ‘Lost’ Wars

Exclusive: The looming U.S. defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan represent a threat to the political fortunes of America’s neocons — if they get blamed for the disasters. However, if they can hang the failures around President Obama’s neck, the two lost wars might help bring the neocons back to power as early as 2013, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

June 8, 2011

American neocons still insist that they achieved “victory at last” in the Iraq War and can “win” in Afghanistan, although both bloody conflicts are now grinding inexorably toward grim conclusions as two of the worst strategic defeats in U.S. history.

Yet, paradoxically, the twin disasters carry possible political advantages for the neocons – if they can shift the blame for the defeats onto President Barack Obama. That prospect could even contribute to Obama’s defeat in 2012 and open the door to the neocons reclaiming control of U.S. foreign policy in 2013.

FCC Chair Promises to Kill Fairness Doctrine

By kalmoth, DailyKos

Posted on June 9, 2011, Printed on June 11, 2011

Fairness Doctrine has been a part of FCC (Federal Communications Commission) rulebook since 1949. As summarized by Steve Rendall of FAIR,

The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials.

Sounds reasonable? So why was the enforcement of this rule stopped in 1987? And, since the rule is not enforced anyway, why is the FCC chairman Julius Genachovsky trying so hard to kill it by taking it off the books? Finally, what are the implications?

Paul Krugman: Rule by Rentiers

he latest economic data have dashed any hope of a quick end to America’s job drought, which has already gone on so long that the average unemployed American has been out of work for almost 40 weeks. Yet there is no political will to do anything about the situation. Far from being ready to spend more on job creation, both parties agree that it’s time to slash spending — destroying jobs in the process — with the only difference being one of degree.

Nor is the Federal Reserve riding to the rescue. On Tuesday, Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, acknowledged the grimness of the economic picture but indicated that he will do nothing about it.

And debt relief for homeowners — which could have done a lot to promote overall economic recovery — has simply dropped off the agenda. The existing program for mortgage relief has been a bust, spending only a tiny fraction of the funds allocated, but there seems to be no interest in revamping and restarting the effort.

DeVos, Koch, Scaife, Walton, ALEC, AFC: The Corporate Royalists and Right-Wing Groups Propelling the GOP's Assault on the Middle Class

A handful of rich, right-wing families and corporate chieftains are dedicated to returning America to the days when robber barons ruled.

June 6, 2011 | In January, a small group of Indiana schoolteachers encountered their governor, Mitch Daniels, in a hallway of the state capitol. They were part of an outpouring of Hoosiers who had come to Indianapolis that day to protest Daniels' almost-gleeful political attack on the pay and even the worthiness of public employees. Having the chance, this scrappy group dared to confront his eminence. Why, they asked, was he demonizing and so drastically under-cutting those who educate Indiana's children?

"You teachers are all making too much money," the governor snapped. He then lectured them with a prepackaged factoid: "You are all making 22 percent more than the taxpayers who are paying your salaries."

Debtors' Prison

Sometimes, loans simply cannot be paid.

Robert Kuttner | June 8, 2011

Economic history is filled with bouts of financial euphoria followed by painful mornings after. When nations awake saddled with debts incurred to finance wars, episodes of failed speculation, or grand projects that haven't paid off, they have two choices. Either the creditor class prevails at the expense of everyone else, or governments find ways to reduce the debt burden so that the productive power of the economy can recover.

Creditors -- the rentier class in classic usage-- are usually the wealthy and the powerful. Debtors, almost by definition, have scant resources or power. The "money issue" of 19th-century America, about whether credit would be cheap or dear, was also a battle between growth and austerity.

Happy 10th Birthday, Bush Tax Cuts!

You've been a failure in every conceivable way.

By Annie Lowrey
Posted Wednesday, June 8, 2011, at 6:56 PM ET

The massive Bush tax cuts mark their 10^th birthday this week. Sadly, despite my best efforts to find something redeeming about them—honest!—there is little to celebrate. By nearly all of the metrics set out by President Bush himself, the cuts were a colossal failure.

In 2001, the Bush administration inherited a few years' worth of budget surpluses, so it decided to cut income tax rates, double the child-care credit, and sharply reduce the levies on investment income. The economy then slowed, even entering a brief recession. As a form of stimulus, the administration doubled down, expanding and hastening the 2001 changes. Bush promised that the tax cuts would do a whole lot more than put money in people's pockets—which, in fact, they did. He said they would "starve the beast," forcing Congress to reduce the size and scope of government. He promised they would increase the prosperity of all Americans. He also vowed: "Tax relief will create new jobs. Tax relief will generate new wealth. And tax relief will open new opportunities."

The scandal no one is talking about

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

There’s a scandal in Washington that’s taking a back seat to a much sexier one that you don’t need me to tell you about. The partisan obstruction of President Obama’s appointment of Peter A. Diamond to a seat on the Federal Reserve Board ought to be the cause for real outrage about how broken our government is. It’s hardly making a ripple.

Think about it. Diamond is the winner of a Nobel Prize in economics and a professor at MIT. He is as qualified as anyone who has been appointed to the Fed. In case nobody noticed, we’re in the middle of an economic crisis. The Fed is central to getting us out. Yet the president can’t even get his appointee to the Fed confirmed. Diamond withdrew his name this week after a fight that lasted more than a year.

Economists’ Moral Duty On Jobs

By Jeff Madrick
June 8, 2011 - 5:24pm ET

The Federal Reserve's Ben Bernanke could not avoid admitting this week that the American economic recovery was faltering. GDP growth of less than 2 percent annualized in the fourth quarter was a severe disappointment. Responsible economists do not expect it to grow much faster for the rest of the year. The World Bank just forecast that it expects U.S. annual growth to remain below 3 percent through 2013.

Good thing President Obama's chief economist, Austan Goolsbee, is leaving town. His calm, conventional and well-schooled thinking apparently led to a devastating underestimation of how Americans are suffering in these times. Of course, we don't know quite how the conversation has gone in the White House. But the administration has been adopting the old Clinton strategy of admitting to no bad news if it can help it. It evinced no passion about the poor state of employment before the last election.

Green—who, me? Top 10 brownwashing Republicans

by Lisa Hymas
8 Jun 2011 2:12 AM

Greenwashing is out, brownwashing is in. These days, GOP politicians are scrambling to distance themselves from past environment-friendly statements, initiatives, and votes. (Thanks to Grist reader Gary Wockner for naming this trend.)

Check out the top 10 offenders. And watch for a lot more Republicans to join the club as we head toward the 2012 election.

Austerity Measures Will Only Worsen Current Recession

By Eileen Appelbaum, AlterNet
Posted on June 6, 2011, Printed on June 8, 2011

The administration and Congress made a terrible mistake switching their attention from jobs to deficit reduction -- and the country is already suffering the consequences. GDP growth fell from 3.1 percent in the last quarter of 2010 to just 1.8 percent in the first quarter of this year. Consumer spending has slowed. The pace of business investment has weakened. Factory orders are down. In fact, the Institute for Supply Management’s May manufacturing figure fell to 53.5 from 60.4, the largest one-month decline since January 1984. Housing still hasn’t recovered from the bursting of the bubble and remains a disaster zone.

Friday’s job report for May -- showing an increase in the official unemployment rate to 9.1 percent from 8.8 percent in March -- should give the "Austerity Now!" crowd pause. Amid the assault on government spending, public sector employment fell by 29,000 in May, mostly at the local level. Local government jobs are down nearly half a million since they peaked in September 2008. Expect this to worsen in July, when the new budget year starts in most states. Teachers are getting pink slips.

House Republicans Look To Privatize Social Security

Benjy Sarlin | June 7, 2011, 9:26AM

Republican leaders left Social Security untouched in their House budget this year, but a group of GOP lawmakers are looking to fill the gap themselves with legislation that would create a voluntary privatized version of the program.

Introduced by Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), who also chairs the House's campaign efforts at the NRCC, the "Savings Account For Every American Act" would allow people to immediately opt out of Social Security in favor of a private "S.A.F.E." account. Eventually the program would expand to let employers send their matching contribution to workers' Social Security to a "S.A.F.E." account as well.

How Koch Became An Oil Speculation Powerhouse

By Lee Fang on Jun 6, 2011 at 2:42 pm

In April, ThinkProgress caused a stir when we uncovered a series of Koch Industries corporate documents revealing the company’s role as an oil speculator. Like many oil companies, Koch uses legitimate hedging products to create price stability. However, the documents reveal that Koch is also participating in the unregulated derivatives markets as a financial player, buying and selling speculative products that are increasingly contributing to the skyrocketing price of oil. Excessive energy speculation today is at its highest levels ever, and even Goldman Sachs now admits that at least $27 of the price of crude oil is a result from reckless speculation rather than market fundamentals of supply and demand. Many experts interviewed by ThinkProgress argue that the figure is far higher, and out of control speculation has doubled the current price of crude oil.

Carbon release and global warming now and in the ancient past

June 07, 2011

The present rate of greenhouse carbon dioxide emissions through fossil fuel burning is higher than that associated with an ancient episode of severe global warming, according to new research. The findings are published online this week by the journal Nature Geoscience.

Around 55.9 million years ago, the Earth experienced a period of intense global warming known as the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which lasted for around 170,000 years. During its main phase, average annual temperatures rose by around 5°C.

Our Economy's Best Chance

Posted: 06/ 6/11 05:32 PM ET

The terrible wrongness of the Ryan budget plan combined with the strangest, craziest Republican presidential candidate field ever makes it rather obvious how important it is to get President Obama re-elected. To have extreme right Republicans (that seems to be pretty much all of them these days) control every branch of government would do even more damage now, as weakened economically as we are, than the 2003-2006 run they had with Bush and Congressional Republicans running everything -- and think how ugly that was for the country. The good news is that Republicans are doing a very good job right now showing how bad they are, with this weak field of presidential hopefuls in all-out pander mode to the far right of their party, and the lockstep support for the Ryan budget showing how extreme they are -- not just on Medicare but on a wide range of other major issues. And I feel good about many of the Obama team's moves so far this cycle, especially creating Democratic unity around opposition to Ryan's budget.

However, as is obvious to pretty much everyone who follows politics at all (and probably a fair share of people who don't), the continued problems with our economic trajectory is going to remain a serious problem dragging down the president's re-election chances. Conventional economists and D.C. politicos, who generally focus on fiscal policy to the exclusion of just about everything else, feel stymied because they feel like the economy needs another fiscal stimulus package, and they know that is the exact opposite direction that House Republicans want to go. As a result, most people in Washington have pretty much given up on improving the economy between now and the 2012 election, and are devising strategies for Obama around running without the background of an improving economy.

Stop Apologizing for the Stimulus

The president needs to make the case for his economic policies, not hide from them.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Monday, June 6, 2011, at 4:19 PM ET

The White House may hope to dismiss last week's dismal jobs data as a "little bump," but the reality is that the state of the economy is dire. President Obama must acknowledge the economic malaise. Then he can make the powerful and true case that the policies he has been pursuing are correct while the Republican alternatives are horrendous canards.

It's alarming that once again we are letting the Republican candidates' rhetoric and near-hysterical fear of government spending distort the national debate and keep us from the more dramatic economic changes we still need.

White House Fires Back Against New Study Saying HCR Will Be Disruptive To Workers

Brian Beutler | June 8, 2011, 11:25AM

Republicans have seized on a new study to argue that health care reform will harm workers, and that's put the White House on the defensive.

One of the key political planks of President Obama's universal health care push was the claim that his reforms would allow people who are happy with their current benefits to keep them. The argument was never completely true. In the pre-reform era, employees have been at their employers' whims, unable to count on their benefits remaining unchanged. And come 2014, when the law is fully implemented, the reforms themselves will mean some employees are nudged into different insurance policies. But the law was designed to minimize this sort of turbulence.

Dedicated Taxes, Deceptions, and Driving Fast

David Cay Johnston | Jun. 6, 2011 10:47 AM EDT

One of the most curious themes in tax policy is the steady attack on the best-funded and most stable government programs while taxpayer funds are diverted to risky commercial ventures unlikely to succeed.

These troubling developments are related. They reveal how we have lost faith in the future and are mining the present rather than investing. These policies mean a future that is poorer.

Paved surfaces can foster build-up of polluted air

BOULDER—New research focusing on the Houston area suggests that widespread urban development alters weather patterns in a way that can make it easier for pollutants to accumulate during warm summer weather instead of being blown out to sea.

The international study, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), could have implications for the air quality of fast-growing coastal cities in the United States and other midlatitude regions overseas. The reason: the proliferation of strip malls, subdivisions, and other paved areas may interfere with breezes needed to clear away smog and other pollution.

High-speed Euro train gets green boost from two miles of solar panels

Tunnel on Paris-to-Amsterdam line topped with 16,000 solar panels to power Antwerp station and Belgian train network

Damian Carrington
The Guardian, Monday 6 June 2011

A two-mile-long Belgian rail tunnel, built to shelter trains from falling trees, will from Monday provide a double environmental benefit by hosting a unique solar power project.

The high-speed line running from Paris to Amsterdam passes Antwerp and a nearby ancient forest. To avoid the need to fell protected trees, a long tunnel was built over the line which has now been topped with 16,000 solar panels. The electricity produced is equivalent to that needed to power all the trains in Belgium for one day per year, and will also help power Antwerp station.

Past Trade Agreements Have Cut Jobs, Wages and Democracy

Monday 6 June 2011
by: Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future [3]

Our trade agreements have pitted working people in countries that do not protect rights or people against the working people here who fought to win the protections of democracy. The result has been devastating to our communities, our economy and our democracy.

America is (was, anyway) a democracy governed by We, the People. As Monday’s Memorial Day ceremonies remind us Americans fought and sacrificed to build and keep the protections and benefits that democracy offers. Those include good jobs with good wages, worker safety laws, rules preventing companies from polluting, and so many other things that companies complain make us less “business-friendly.” But we got involved in “trade” deals that let countries get around democracy’s protections, pitting employees here against people who have no voice, no power and no money. You can see the results all around us.

Paul Krugman: Fatal Fatalism

Our current economic discourse is pervaded by fatalism. Leave aside the people who insist that somehow Obama has destroyed capitalist incentives by passing Mitt Romney’s health care plan and threatening to raise tax rates to Clinton-era levels. Even among people who should be sensible, you hear many assertions that run something like this: historically, recovery from financial crisis is usually slow, so we have to accept a slow recovery this time around too. Actually, that’s more or less what Obama has been saying.

This fatalism is deeply destructive — because there’s no good reason we need to experience many years of high unemployment. What historical experience shows isn’t that there’s no answer to post-crisis slumps, it only shows that most governments have responded to such slumps with the same kind of fatalism and learned helplessness we’re showing now. (Hey, Greg, I have first dibs on that!)

3 Massive World Events That Will Change Your Life

By Michael T. Klare, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on June 5, 2011, Printed on June 6, 2011

Here’s the good news about energy: thanks to rising oil prices and deteriorating economic conditions worldwide, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that global oil demand will not grow this year as much as once assumed, which may provide some temporary price relief at the gas pump. In its May Oil Market Report, the IEA reduced its 2011 estimate for global oil consumption by 190,000 barrels per day, pegging it at 89.2 million barrels daily. As a result, retail prices may not reach the stratospheric levels predicted earlier this year, though they will undoubtedly remain higher than at any time since the peak months of 2008, just before the global economic meltdown. Keep in mind that this is the good news.

As for the bad news: the world faces an array of intractable energy problems that, if anything, have only worsened in recent weeks. These problems are multiplying on either side of energy’s key geological divide: below ground, once-abundant reserves of easy-to-get “conventional” oil, natural gas, and coal are drying up; above ground, human miscalculation and geopolitics are limiting the production and availability of specific energy supplies. With troubles mounting in both arenas, our energy prospects are only growing dimmer.

Are We in the Process of Creating a New and Enduring American Underclass?

Monday 6 June 2011

by: Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Corporate America appears to be prospering with far fewer workers than it employed before the crash. Wages are down, the stock market is up and firms are expanding their operations overseas. Meanwhile, Congress is suffering from the delusion that our greatest problem is the deficit, rather than the extreme economic insecurity so many Americans are suffering from today. And that focus will only exacerbate the crisis on "Main Street."

The question is whether these trends will become "the new normal," consigning millions to an emerging American underclass. Is our notably cruel brand of capitalism ultimately leading to something that looks more like feudalism – with low-paid serfs feeling fortunate just to have an opportunity to toil for their lords' enrichment?

A World at Financial War

Will Greece Let EU Central Bankers Destroy Democracy?

By MICHAEL HUDSON

When Greece exchanged its drachma for the euro in 2000, most voters were all for joining the Eurozone. Their hope was that it would ensure stability, and that this would promote rising wages and living standards. Few saw that the stumbling point was tax policy. Greece was excluded from the eurozone the previous year as a result of failing to meet the 1992 Maastricht criteria for EU membership, limiting budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP, and government debt to 60 percent.

The euro also had other serious fiscal and monetary problems at the outset. There is little thought of wealthier EU economies helping bring less productive ones up to par, e.g. as the United States does with its depressed areas (as in the rescue of the auto industry in 2010) or when the federal government does declares a state of emergency for floods, tornados or other disruptions. As with the United States and indeed nearly all countries, EU “aid” is largely self-serving – a combination of export promotion and bailouts for debtor economies to pay banks in Europe’s main creditor nations: Germany, France and the Netherlands. The EU charter banned the European Central Bank (ECB) from financing government deficits, and prevents (indeed, “saves”) members from having to pay for the “fiscal irresponsibility” of countries running budget deficits. This “hard” tax policy was the price that lower-income countries had to sign onto when they joined the European Union.

The Religious Right and GOP Escalate Battle to Destroy Public Schools

By Joseph L. Conn, Church & State Magazine
Posted on June 5, 2011, Printed on June 6, 2011

America’s public school system and the constitutional separation of church and state are under relentless assault.

In late April, the Indiana legislature approved House Bill 1003, a measure that broadly funds religious and other private schools. The multi-million-dollar program sets up a new school voucher scheme, expands a tax credit program and offers tax deductions for the costs of private education and homeschooling.

Gov. Mitch Daniels was a chief promoter of the package, and he clearly means to force taxpayers to fund religious education. He is the founder and driving force behind The Oaks Academy, a “Christ-centered” private school in Indianapolis. Daniels sometimes poses as a moderate, but his education plan is anything but.

Make no mistake. This is not about “education reform.” This is part of a national drive to radically privatize education. Indiana is just one of many states where mega-bucks foundations and sectarian interest groups are demanding taxpayer dollars for parochial and other private schools. Their long-term goal is to shut down the public school system or leave it so damaged that its role in American life is minimal.

Disaster Not Averted

The latest jobs numbers and the very real chance of another Great Depression.

• Dean Baker
• June 6, 2011 | 12:00 am

When the financial system was on the edge of melting down back in the fall of 2008, there was much talk in the punditocracy of a second Great Depression. The story was that we risked repeating the mistake at the onset of the first Great Depression: allowing a cascade of bank failures that both destroyed much of the country’s wealth and left the financial system badly crippled. Instead, however, we acted, and these days the accepted wisdom is that the TARP and other special lending facilities created by the Federal Reserve Board prevented a similar collapse that saved us from a second Great Depression. But this view badly misunderstands the nature of the first Great Depression—and may, in fact, result in the country suffering the second Great Depression that the pundits claim we have averted.

Allowing the cascade of financial collapses at the start of the first Great Depression was a mistake. However, there was nothing about this initial collapse that necessitated the decade of double-digit unemployment that was the central tragedy of the Great Depression. This was the result of the failure of the federal government to respond with sufficient vigor to mass unemployment. Indeed, the economy only broke out of the Depression when the federal government undertook massive deficit spending to fight World War II. Deficits peaked at more than 25 percent of GDP. This would be the equivalent, in today’s economy, of running annual deficits of $4 trillion.

Krugman: There’s a political "apparatchik test" for professional economists who want to work with Republicans

by Gaius Publius on 6/06/2011 12:15:00 PM

Finally, Mr. Krugman cottons to what's growing in the Republican professional fields; it's not integrity, it's not honest disagreement about ideas, and it's not "learned helplessness."

It's obeisance to power and political reality. If you're an economist who wants to work on the Republican side, to get your career in gear you get your mouth in line.

Who Created This Mess?

Monday 6 June 2011

by: James Kwak, The Baseline Scenario

Not us, say the Republicans. "We didn't create this mess," a Republican said to Tim Geithner in a meeting recently, referring to the national debt and the need to raise the debt ceiling this summer. Yet, as the New York Times continues,

"Independent analyses have shown that more than half of the $14.3 trillion debt is from policies enacted during the past decade when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, and much of the rest from lost revenues and stimulus spending and tax cuts since Mr. Obama took office at the height of the financial crisis and recession."

I did one of those "independent analyses" (although not one that has made it into the media) myself a few months ago.

Stanford climate scientists forecast permanently hotter summers

The tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer temperatures within the next 20 to 60 years if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, according to a new climate study by Stanford University scientists. The results will be published later this month in the journal Climatic Change.

In the study, the Stanford team concluded that many tropical regions in Africa, Asia and South America could see "the permanent emergence of unprecedented summer heat" in the next two decades. Middle latitudes of Europe, China and North America – including the United States – are likely to undergo extreme summer temperature shifts within 60 years, the researchers found.

"According to our projections, large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years," said the study's lead author, Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science and fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford. The study is co-authored by Stanford research assistant Martin Scherer.

Paul Krugman: Vouchercare is Not Medicare

What’s in a name? A lot, the National Republican Congressional Committee obviously believes. Last week, the committee sent a letter demanding that a TV station stop running an ad declaring that the House Republican budget plan would “end Medicare.” This, the letter insisted, was a false claim: the plan would simply install a “new, sustainable version of Medicare.”

But Comcast, the station’s owner, rejected the demand — and rightly so. For Republicans are indeed seeking to dismantle Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a much worse program.

I’m seeing many attempts to shout down anyone making this obvious point, and not just from Republican politicians. For some reason, many commentators seem to believe that accurately describing what the G.O.P. is actually proposing amounts to demagoguery. But there’s nothing demagogic about telling the truth.

The Coming Double-Dip Recession

Sunday 5 June 2011

by: Jack Rasmus, Truthout

On June 1, stock markets in New York and around the world declined in levels not seen since summer 2010. Days and weeks immediately ahead will likely register even further significant market declines, as the obvious becomes increasingly evident: the US and other major global economies are once again on the cusp of a significant slowdown.

In a recent post a few weeks ago, entitled "Why March-April's Job Gains Will Collapse This Summer," this writer warned that the official hype about job recovery promoted by the business press and distorted US government data was grossly inaccurate. Behind the false jobs data lay a growing picture of imminent economic relapse. The US Labor Department's jobs numbers due this Friday, June 3, will likely further corroborate this view.

The Fascinating Story of How Shameless Right-Wing Lies Came to Rule Our Politics

By Rick Perlstein, Mother Jones
Posted on May 26, 2011, Printed on June 6, 2011

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it. The former has always been with us: Kings, corporate executives, politicians, and ideologues from both sides of the aisle have been entirely willing to bend the truth when they felt it necessary or convenient. So why does it seem as if we're living in a time of overwhelmingly brazen deception? What's changed?

Today's marquee fibs almost always evolve the same way: A tree falls in the forest -- say, the claim that Saddam Hussein has "weapons of mass destruction," or that Barack Obama has an infernal scheme to parade our nation's senior citizens before death panels. But then a network of media enablers helps it to make a sound -- until enough people believe the untruth to make the lie an operative part of our political discourse.

How To Choose the IMF's Next Leader

It's time to abandon the corrupt practices and secretive agreements that have steered the organization so wrong.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz
Posted Friday, June 3, 2011, at 11:14 AM ET

Sooner than expected, the International Monetary Fund will have a new managing director. For more than a decade, I have criticized the fund's governance, symbolized by the way its leader is chosen. By gentlemen's agreement among the majority shareholders—the G-8—the managing director is to be a European, with Americans in the No. 2 post and at the head of the World Bank.

The Europeans typically picked their nominee behind the scenes, as did the Americans, after only cursory consultation with developing countries. The outcome, however, was often not good for the IMF, the World Bank, or the world.

US Supreme Court Deals Mortal Blow to Privacy

by Michael Mears

Last month, the United States Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision in the case of Kentucky v. King, told the police in our nation that they may break into a home without a warrant if they believe that the occupants might be in the act of destroying evidence.

Only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg realized that this might be the last nail in the coffin of one of the most important personal protections left for Americans. While the politicians in Washington are fiddling away our economic security, the Supreme Court has lit a match that will burn up what is left of the right of privacy and the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

A Simple Plan To Fix The Jobs Emergency -- And The Economy, too

By Dave Johnson

Created 06/05/2011 - 1:11pm

We have a jobs emergency. We have a stagnant economy. We are falling behind in economic competitiveness. We have developed a terrible concentration of income and wealth. We can address all of these at once.

Robert Kuttner, writing in The Economic Relapse [1] at the American Prospect,

For starters, we need a large-scale program of public investment to improve our infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers puts the basic price tag for deferred maintenance at $2.2 trillion. That refers to collapsing water and sewer systems, roads, bridges, public buildings -- it doesn't even include 21st century infrastructure like smart-grid power systems, green energy, universal broadband and green energy.

But beside providing for basic maintenance needs, what the economy needs to fully recover is a massive -- and I mean massive -- infrastructure and jobs program financed by surtaxes on wealthy individuals and on windfall financial-sector profits, including taxes on profits from short-term financial trades. We could also get upwards of $200 billion a year from tax enforcement, mainly on trans-national evasion used by America's wealthiest. Some of the funds for this program could also come from winding down the gratuitous wars we're currently engaged in. And some could even come from a modest increase in short-term deficits.

The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths

by David Schwartz

The great writer Kurt Vonnegut titled his final book A Man without a Country. He was the man; the country was the United States of America. Vonnegut felt that his country had disappeared right under his – and the Constitution’s – feet, through what he called “the sleaziest, low-comedy Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.” He was talking about the Bush administration. Were Vonnegut still alive in the post-Bush era, he would not have felt that his country had returned.