Radical, Not Moderate

The Republican presidential debate revealed how alarmingly far right the mainstream GOP has shifted.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2011, at 3:54 PM ET

The reaction to the first Republican presidential debate baffles me. Here you have the entire roster of candidates endorsing the new Republican orthodoxy—a Hooverism for the 21^st century—and yet commentators are acting as though there is somehow a new moderation among the candidates. Even my own esteemed Slate colleague Jacob Weisberg penned a column headlined "Going Sane," arguing that we are seeing a shift toward the middle among the Republican candidates.

How Conservatives Manipulate Language to Gain Power

Conservatives, the modern version anyway, aren’t good for much, but they retain a marvelous talent for manipulating language.

June 16, 2011 | As kids we learn that sticks and stones can break our bones, but words will never hurt us. Some time later, sophomore year in college for example, we learn that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “names have the power to slay.” As an aside, Nietzsche also said “Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive,” which is a good observation, even though Oscar Wilde would have found a better way to say it. Conservatives, the modern version anyway, aren’t good for much, but they retain a marvelous talent for manipulating language. How else do you explain the fact that a bunch of people who managed to effectively destroy the world economy and are in a rush to eviscerate the social programs, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, that millions of Americans depend on for basic survival, are unashamed to call themselves “conservatives” while liberals, who were on the right side of both history and economics, try to hide behind “progressive”?

Hutchison and Sessions Attempt to Kill Social Security

By Josh Rosenblum
June 16, 2011 - 5:53pm ET

Retiring U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-No Shame, TX) today unveiled a plan to steal Social Security from Americans by cutting their benefits and lying to them about it. In a release and fact sheet with more holes than a piece of swiss cheese in front of Dick Cheney on a hunting trip, Hutchison claims not to cut any “core benefits” in Social Security, but cutting those benefits is exactly what she does, and she cuts them by at least 13% or more. She gave her bill the great, blatantly full of rodeo bull manure title of the Defend and Save Social Security Act. This bill wouldn’t save and defend Social Security in the least. Even the most casual observer can tell the bill would more aptly be named the Attempted Murder of Social Security Act.

David Brooks Gets It Wrong Again

By Dean Baker, Beat the Press
Posted on June 17, 2011, Printed on June 18, 2011

"Night is day," "slavery is freedom," okay David Brooks edited those lines out of his column on Fannie Mae today, but this is pretty much how the rest of it reads. He tells us that the economic crisis was the result of Fannie Mae pushing bad mortgages and buying off everyone who tried to stand in their way.

There's a small problem in this story. The worst junk mortgages that inflated the housing bubble to extraordinary levels were not bought and securitized by Fannie and Freddie, they were securitized by Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman and the other private investment banks. These investment banks gobbled up the worst subprime and Alt-A garbage that sleaze operations like Ameriquest and Countrywide pushed on homebuyers.

The trillions of dollars that the geniuses at the private investment banks funneled into the housing market were the force that inflated the bubble to its 2006 peaks. Fannie and Freddie were followers in this story, jumping into the subprime and Alt-A market in 2005 to try to maintain market share. They were not the leaders.

Six serious proposals to protect Medicare

COMMENTARY | June 11, 2011

The Center for Medicare Advocacy offers six measures to protect Medicare as we know it and reduce costs at the same time. They are so reasonable, and so obvious, that they probably won’t stand a chance with Congress. We thought we’d pass them along nevertheless.

By Judith Stein and Xenia Ruiz

As lawmakers debate the future of Medicare as part of broader efforts to address the federal deficit, proposals have emerged from Congress that would have severe repercussions for beneficiaries and their families. Sound and measured solutions that would protect Medicare coverage while reducing costs to taxpayers have not been seriously addressed.

The six solutions we propose would accomplish both of these goals. These solutions, unlike current proposals, do not shift costs to beneficiaries or completely restructure the Medicare program. They promote choice and competition while shoring up the solvency of Medicare. Adopting these solutions would be a responsible step in reducing our deficit the right way.

A role for national and regional reporters and editors in this would be to interview members of Congress and candidates: Do they favor these measures – would they vote for them? And if not, why not?

Paul Krugman: The Euro Zone, Edging Ever Closer to Complete Meltdown

Thursday 16 June 2011

by: Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co. | Op-Ed

Martin Wolf, an economics commentator at The Financial Times wrote a very important column recently on the tough choices facing countries in the euro zone.

“The euro zone, as designed, has failed,” Mr. Wolf wrote on May 31. “It was based on a set of principles that have proved unworkable at the first contact with a financial and fiscal crisis.”

The G.O.P. Debate

Monday’s Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire — full of historical error, economic obfuscation, avoidance of hard truths and even outright bigotry — was a feast for connoisseurs of political dysfunction. Desperate to avoid being outflanked on the right, the seven candidates tried so hard to outdo each other in finding fault with President Obama that they seemed to forget that they are competing for the same party nomination. By evening’s end, they had melted into an indistinguishable mass of privatizing, tax-cutting opponents of Shariah law.

The Five Smartest Congressional Bills You've Never Heard Of

Ryan Rafaty
June 14, 2011

During any given Congressional term, literally thousands of proposals never make it past the committee stage of the legislative process. In recent years, less than 5 percent of all bills introduced ultimately became law. The scope of proposals in Congress garnering considerable media attention is similarly narrow. The pieces of legislation that attract the most publicity from the beltway media—like Paul Ryan’s radically unpopular plan to scrap Medicare—tend to drown out more sensible ideas that hardly stand any chance of enactment without public pressure on lawmakers to move the agenda forward.

Want to reduce your heating, cooling bills by 90 percent?

By Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers

CLEVELAND — Everyone needs a home, but not every home, it seems, needs a furnace — even in Cleveland.

A house built for a new museum exhibit shows how walls more than a foot thick, big triple-pane windows, doors like bank vaults and clever engineering can cut heating and cooling costs — and pollution — by 90 percent. The house keeps a comfortable temperature year-round. No need for heavy sweaters, no drafts, no noise.

Life expectancy in most US counties falls behind world's healthiest nations

The most current county-level analysis finds large disparities nationwide; women fare worse than men, and people in Appalachia, the Deep South, and Northern Texas live the shortest lives

SEATTLE – While people in Japan, Canada, and other nations are enjoying significant gains in life expectancy every year, most counties within the United States are falling behind, according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

IHME researchers, in collaboration with researchers at Imperial College London, found that between 2000 and 2007, more than 80% of counties fell in standing against the average of the 10 nations with the best life expectancies in the world, known as the international frontier.

"We are finally able to answer the question of how the US fares in comparison to its peers globally," said Dr. Christopher Murray, IHME Director and one of the paper's co-authors. "Despite the fact that the US spends more per capita than any other nation on health, eight out of every 10 counties are not keeping pace in terms of health outcomes. That's a staggering statistic."

Do any of our political leaders realize that kissing rich peoples' asses won't magically restore prosperity?

By Brad Reed

Barack Obama's presidency certainly hasn't been an all-out bust -- repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, taking out Osama bin Laden and getting some form of universal health coverage passed are real achievements -- but he's completely crapped the bed when it comes to jobs. And I'm not just talking about the high unemployment rate, either -- I'm talking about the continued collapse in workers' income.

Overcoming Despair as the Republicans Take Over: A Conversation with Noam Chomsky

by Michael Lerner
March 1, 2011

Michael Lerner (ML): You have made many excellent analyses of the power of global capital and its capacity to undermine ordinary citizens’ efforts to transform the global reality toward a more humane and generous world. If there were a serious movement in the U.S. ready to challenge global capital, what should such a movement do? Or is it, as many believe, hopeless, given the power of capital to control the media, undermine democratic movements, and use the police/military power and the co-optive power of mass entertainment, endless spectacle, and financial compensations for many of the smartest people coming up through working-class and middle-income routes? What path is rational for a movement seeking to build a world of environmental sanity, social justice, and peace, yet facing such a sophisticated, powerful, and well-organized social order?

Noam Chomsky (NC): There is no doubt that concentrated private capital closely linked to the state has substantial resources, but on the other hand we shouldn’t overlook the fact that quite a bit has been achieved through public struggles in the U.S. over the years. In many respects this remains an unusually free country. The state has limited power to coerce, compared with many other countries, which is a very good thing. Many rights have been won, even in the past generation, and that provides a legacy from which we can move on. Struggling for freedom and justice has never been easy, but it has achieved progress; I don’t think we should assume that there are any particular limits.

Nanotubes pose health risk, study shows

Tiny fibres used to strengthen items such as bike frames and hockey sticks could pose risks to workers who make them.

Certain types of carbon nanotubes - cylindrical molecules about one-thousandth of the width of a human hair - could cause cancer in the lining of the lung, University research shows.

The study in mice found short carbon nanotubes appear relatively harmless if they entered lung cavities.

However, longer nanotubes were more likely to get stuck there and ultimately cause a type of cancer known as mesothelioma.

"Merchants of Doubt": A Review

Monday 13 June 2011

by: Christine Shearer, Left Eye On Books | Book Review

Merchants of Doubt is a very well-researched book about a small group of scientists and scientific advisers to the U.S. government who transitioned from their role as Cold War warriors supporting nuclear weapons to ideologically-motivated “contrarians” battling anything they saw as a threat to liberty and free enterprise, even if that meant the science on acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer.

FBI to Expand Domestic Surveillance Powers As Details Emerge of Its Spy Campaign Targeting Activists

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on June 14, 2011, Printed on June 18, 2011

AMY GOODMAN: Civil liberties advocates are raising alarm over news that the FBI is giving agents more leeway to conduct domestic surveillance. According to the New York Times, new guidelines will allow FBI agents to investigate people and organizations "proactively" without firm evidence for suspecting criminal activity. The new rules will free up agents to infiltrate organizations, search household trash, use surveillance teams, search databases, conduct lie detector tests, even without suspicion of any wrongdoing.

Debt-Ceiling Deal's Cuts Could Crash Economy

By Dave Johnson

Created 06/12/2011 - 5:37pm

Negotiating with crazy people is always a bad idea and negotiating with hostage-takers is dangerous. But negotiating with crazy hostage-takers is worse than dangerously bad. The “debt-ceiling” deal being negotiated to keep the economy from being crashed could crash the economy anyway. Making draconian cuts could throw us into another recession -- one that would be much, much harder to get out of because we have used up many of our recession-fighting tools.

Withdrawing government spending literally “takes money out of the economy.” Democrats should instead offer the country a plan to invest in We, the People by modernizing our infrastructure, improving our schools, making us energy self-sufficient, improving our social safety net and restoring our manufacturing and key industries thereby making American businesses more competitive in the world economy. Propose this instead of painful cuts the benefit only the rich and take it to the country.

Dominionist Battle Cry "We are the Head and Not the Tail" Used by Bachmann in Debate

Rachel Tabachnick
Tue Jun 14, 2011 at 11:15:01 AM EST

It's not unusual for candidates to use "dog whistles" or language that has a unique interpretation to a specific voter base, and last night's Republican debate was no exception. Michele Bachmann answered a question about U.S. involvement in Libya using the phrase, "We are the head and not the tail." Deuteronomy 28:13, "The Lord will make you the head and not the tail," has been adopted by the apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation as a theme for the Charismatic "dominionist" movement. The wording is often slightly altered to "We are the head and not the tail," and used as the battle cry for the Reclaiming the Seven Mountains campaign to take dominion over seven areas - arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media, and religion. At Talk2action.org, contributors have documented the repeated use and meaning of this phrase as used by New Apostolic leaders, including my September 2010 article titled "The Head and Not the Tail" - Battle Cry for the Seven Mountains Campaign.

The Warren Court

James Surowiecki
June 13, 2011

Elizabeth Warren may well be the most popular person in Washington. When she was head of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP, her willingness to go after Wall Street, the Treasury Department, and the Fed made her a liberal icon. And her folksy, Midwestern air and her ability to express complex financial issues in simple language turned her into an unlikely media superstar. Warren is now working to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new government agency inspired by her own work on consumer credit, and in the past couple of weeks almost a quarter of a million people have signed an online petition asking President Obama to nominate her as the official boss of the agency. Yet Warren may also be the most hated person in Washington. The banking lobby sees her as its nemesis, congressional Republicans are openly hostile to her, and conservatives decry her as the exemplary “totalitarian liberal.” At this point, the only way Warren will run the C.F.P.B. is if President Obama makes her a recess appointment,

Michael Hudson: The Financial Road to Serfdom – How Bankers are Using the Debt Crisis to Roll Back the Progressive Era

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Cross posted from CounterPunch.

Financial strategists do not intend to let today’s debt crisis go to waste. Foreclosure time has arrived. That means revolution – or more accurately, a counter-revolution to roll back the 20th century’s gains made by social democracy: pensions and social security, public health care and other infrastructure providing essential services at subsidized prices or for free. The basic model follows the former Soviet Union’s post-1991 neoliberal reforms: privatization of public enterprises, a high flat tax on labor but only nominal taxes on real estate and finance, and deregulation of the economy’s prices, working conditions and credit terms.

What is to be reversed is the “modern” agenda. The aim a century ago was to mobilize the Industrial Revolution’s soaring productivity and technology to raise living standards and use progressive taxation, public regulation, central banking and financial reform to distribute wealth fairly and make societies more equal. Today’s financial aim is the opposite: to concentrate wealth at the top of the economic pyramid and lower labor’s returns. High finance loves low wages.

America's Future: The Cayman Islands With Nuclear Weapons

Just accept it, America: we'll never get back to anything resembling full employment again, because business owners simply don't have any intention of ever hiring Americans again. So we all just have to face the fact that the middle class is going to disappear and the only job opportunities in the future are going to center on catering to the delusional self-images of the wealth

The German Example

By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: June 7, 2011
WASHINGTON

Germany has been a frequent cudgel in recent fights over the American economy. When Germany has grown faster than the United States, stimulus skeptics like to point across the Atlantic Ocean and say that austerity works. When it has grown more slowly, people who think the American stimulus made a big difference — including me — return the favor.

But the full story is more interesting than any caricature. In the last decade, Germany has succeeded in some important ways that the United States has not. The lessons aren’t simply liberal or conservative. They are both.

Study: Students who resist change see teachers as biased

By Muriel Kane
Friday, June 10th, 2011 -- 10:37 pm

It has become a truism among conservative activists that college professors typically have a liberal bias which causes them to give lower grades to students who express right-wing opinions.

In 2005, for example, when Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was a Minnesota state senator, she and another Republican legislator called for a law to forbid this sort of alleged bias.

American Banks 'High' On Drug Money: How a Whistleblower Blew the Lid Off Wachovia-Drug Cartel Money Laundering Scheme

By Clarence Walker, AlterNet
Posted on June 10, 2011, Printed on June 12, 2011

Martin Woods, an Englishman in his mid-40s, is blessed with a Sherlock Holmes instinct and demeanor. Woods is an expert at sniffing out "dirty" money passing through International Banking Systems.

A police officer for 18 years and later a detective with London Metro Police Agency, Woods capitalized on his unique expertise as a fraud expert by joining Wachovia's London-based Bank in March 2005 as an anti-money laundering officer.

In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war

By Glenn Greenwald

When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued -- regime change through the use of military force. We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West. That's not even a debatable proposition at this point.

Fox & Friends Misleadingly Attacks Obama For Having Not "Fired Up The Job Machine"

June 10, 2011 12:33 pm ET

Fox & Friends attacked President Obama's economic record, saying that the president "seems to be differing from the facts" and that administration has not "fired up the job machine." However, the evidence shows Obama's policies have contributed to a trend of job creation.

The Pivot

Suppose you were a policy maker who wanted to pivot away from emphasizing the need to reduce the budget deficit and towards the need to reduce the jobs deficit.

You’d get out there on TV and stress the 20+ million un- and underemployed, including the 45% of the unemployed who have been jobless for at least half a year (about as high as it’s ever been). You’d stress the recent slowing of any already slow-growth recovery, and you’d stress the low cost of borrowing, which significantly boosts your bang-for-buck in terms of spending on jobs right now. And you’d remind anyone listening that you haven’t forsaken the truly necessary work of getting the budget on a sustainable path. It’s just that with unemployment at 9.1%, deficit reduction simply isn’t the country’s most important mandate right now. That would be jobs.