House GOP Ignores Thomas Ethics Scandal To Launch Frivolous Attack On Justice Kagan

By Ian Millhiser on Jun 30, 2011 at 2:47 pm

Last week, the New York Times reported that Justice Clarence Thomas received a series of lavish gifts and other favors from a leading Republican donor, including $500,000 to allow Thomas’s wife to start a Tea Party group and a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass. Additionally, Thomas received a gift worth $15,000 from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that often files briefs in Justice Thomas’ Court. Justice Thomas did not recuse himself from at least three cases where AEI filed a brief.

Minimum Wage Not to Blame for Teen Unemployment

By Anne Thompson

Created 07/01/2011 - 4:21pm

In his latest attack [1] on the minimum wage, Casey Mulligan charges that the 2007-2009 minimum wage increases are adding to teen unemployment. He writes that “Many teenagers cannot find work this summer, [2] victims of a weak economy and a situation made worse by minimum-wage laws.”

Mulligan is correct to note that teens have been hit hard by the recession—as the youngest, least experienced members of the workforce, they are among the last to be rehired in economic recoveries. Due to the dramatic disappearance of jobs during the Great Recession, many older workers are taking jobs previously filled by teens: half of college graduates are now filling jobs that don’t require a college degree. Since the end of World War II, the teen unemployment rate has ranged from 2.5 to 3.5 the overall employment rate, and with overall unemployment at 9.1 percent, May’s teen unemployment rate of 24.2 falls within that historic range.

The NYT’s Favor and Fear

Exclusive: A federal court opinion has revealed that the New York Times’s 2004 spiking of the story about President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans didn’t stand alone. A year earlier, the Times bowed to another White House demand to kill a sensitive story, one about Iran’s nuclear program, Robert Parry reports.

By Robert Parry

June 30, 2011

The New York Times, like most U.S. newspapers, prides itself on its “objectivity.” The Times even boasts about printing news “without fear or favor.” But the reality is quite different, with the Times agreeing – especially last decade – to withhold newsworthy information that the Bush-43 administration considered too sensitive.

A new example of this pattern was buried in a Times article on Wednesday about a subpoena issued to Times reporter James Risen regarding his receipt of a leak about an apparently botched U.S. covert operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear research, a disclosure that Risen published in his 2006 book, State of War.

How To Celebrate the Fourth of July: Read Frederick Douglass

by Kai Wright
Friday, July 1 2011, 10:57 AM EST

I’m content to let most holidays be just that—a time when you come off your daily grind and act up with the friends and family. July 4th—or, Independence Day—is a bit more complicated for me. It’s a celebration of the United States’ mythical founding story, an ahistorical account that was written to obscure the young nation’s many, many crimes against humanity. It never fails to surprise me how little Americans know of their real history, and thus how often we repeat its sins.

Today, Americans of all races hear about slavery, but haven’t the faculties to truly grasp it, or how crucial that brutality was to creating the wealth upon which this nation was built. Few schools teach that, in fact, trans-Atlantic slavery began as British capitalists stole their own countrymen’s common lands and forced the displaced into pressed labor on their ships. Or that it grew through their Irish conquest, where they repeated the formula, shipping forced labor to the Caribbean. Or that white supremacy was concocted by European capitalists who feared a multinational, multiracial coalition of the many hues of people they had forced to labor for them in deadly conditions in the Americas. When African slavery proved the most profitable way to extract labor, they just dehumanized the Africans from which they stole. Anybody who objected to this labor system was branded an outlaw, an illegal, as it were.

The "Social Security Chain-CPI Massacre": Underhanded, Unnecessary, Unfair, Un-American

By Richard (RJ) Eskow
June 30, 2011 - 10:16pm ET

Do you hear a noise like power saws cutting away at your Social Security benefits? That's the sound of the politicians working on the "Chain Gang."

They're promoting the "chained CPI," Washington's latest gimmick for tricking voters and cutting their hard-earned benefits to protect the wealthy. That may sound like inflammatory rhetoric, but the numbers don't allow for any other conclusion. People retiring today could lose more than $18,000 in benefits over their lifetimes - and people who are already retired will feel the pain too.

Here's a debt reduction plan: Collect billions from tax cheats

By Tony Pugh | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — At a time when higher taxes or deeper government spending cuts seem to be the only options available to close the gaping federal deficit, going after more $400 billion a year in uncollected taxes should be a no-brainer.

But in the nation's capital, the so-called "tax gap" hardly rates a mention in the official discussion of America's fiscal woes.

How to make short work of unemployment

Germany has actually reduced joblessness through the recession – by cutting working hours. We could make it work too

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk,Thursday 30 June 2011 19.08 BST

Washington always does a superb job of focusing intently on problems that are of little importance. The current, end-of-the-world debt/deficit negotiations is a great case in point. President Obama and the Republican congressional leadership are heatedly negotiating a deal on the deficit that has almost nothing to do with the country's real economic problem: mass unemployment.

The whole effort is a ridiculous charade that is intended to fix a problem that does not exist. There is no story of runaway spending or deficits, as everyone who has ever looked at the budget numbers knows. The deficit exploded, beginning in 2008, because the economy collapsed: end of story. Anyone who says otherwise either has never looked at the budget or is not being honest.

Torture Crimes Officially, Permanently Shielded

by Glenn Greenwald

In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder -- under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House -- announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution: (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., "good-faith" torturers). The one exception to this sweeping immunity was that low-level CIA agents and servicemembers who went so far beyond the torture permission slips as to basically commit brutal, unauthorized murder would be subject to a "preliminary review" to determine if a full investigation was warranted -- in other words, the Abu Ghraib model of justice was being applied, where only low-ranking scapegoats would be subject to possible punishment while high-level officials would be protected.

Paul Krugman: To the Limit

In about a month, if nothing is done, the federal government will hit its legal debt limit. There will be dire consequences if this limit isn’t raised. At best, we’ll suffer an economic slowdown; at worst we’ll plunge back into the depths of the 2008-9 financial crisis.

So is a failure to raise the debt ceiling unthinkable? Not at all.

Many commentators remain complacent about the debt ceiling; the very gravity of the consequences if the ceiling isn’t raised, they say, ensures that in the end politicians will do what must be done. But this complacency misses two important facts about the situation: the extremism of the modern G.O.P., and the urgent need for President Obama to draw a line in the sand against further extortion.

Nobody Ever Wins a Game of Economic Calvinball

Thursday 30 June 2011

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

I was trying to come up with a way to describe Raghuram Rajan’s latest argument on why interest rates should go up despite high unemployment and quiescent inflation — but Mike Konczal, a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, saved me the trouble.

As Mr. Konczal writes in his blog, Rortybomb, it’s Calvinball — making up new rules on the fly to justify whatever you want.

At Behest of Banks, Fed Relaxes Debit Card Regs in Final Rule

by Marian Wang
ProPublica, June 30, 2011, 11:07 a.m.

Putting an end to one of the biggest lobbying fights of the year, the Federal Reserve yesterday finalized rules capping the transaction fees that merchants pay to banks whenever a customer makes a purchase with a debit card. As it turns out, neither the banking industry nor the retail sector are too happy about the final result.

The finalized rule caps debit card fees at 21 to 24 cents per transaction for banks with more than $10 billion in assets. Yes, that’s about half of what current fees are, but it’s double the 12-cent cap that the Fed had originally proposed in December.

Reporting without context on the nation's greatest policy achievement ever

COMMENTARY | June 27, 2011

A scholar at the Claude Pepper Foundation argues that despite the talk in Washington, Social Security remains a bulwark of society and the evidence is clear that it needs to be built up, not watered down.

By Larry Polivka
lpolivka2@fsu.edu

While Washington rushes to reduce benefits in the name of a nonexistent crisis, the overwhelming reality is that Social Security is becoming more, not less, essential for most Americans. Any changes should be with the goal of strengthening it, not reducing benefits.

Journalists covering the debate seem to have forgotten the essential context. Social Security, after all, is an extraordinary public policy achievement that provides economic security for millions of older Americans. Social Security is the major reason that poverty among those 65 and older has been reduced from 30% to under 10% since 1960. Without Social Security benefits, the percentage of older Americans below the poverty level would now exceed 40%. Over 70% of all retirees depend on Social Security for most of their income. Social Security is the essential pillar of the U.S. system of retirement security.

Holding Our Economy Hostage ... For 25 People

By Richard Eskow

Created 06/29/2011 - 8:25pm

Republicans are perpetrating a fraud. They say they're concerned about reducing government deficits. But you don't need to look at how they treat all of the country's biggest corporations (which is extremely well) or even how they kowtow to its richest 400 families, who now have 6900 times as much income as the average household, [1] to know that's a lie.

You only need to look at the way they treat a handful of billionaires. They're holding the entire country's budget hostage because they don't want to raise taxes on the wealthy, and they don't want to eliminate a tax loophole that could be bringing in more than $4 billion each year ... from only 25 people.

The top 25 hedge fund managers in the United States collectively earned $22 billion last year, and yet they have their own cushy set of tax rules. If they operated under the same rules that apply to other people - police officers, for example, or teachers - the country could reduce its national debt by as much as $44 billion in the next ten years.

Obama and the Debt Ceiling: An Outrage Deficit?

In the current face-off, the president's playing the adult. Is it time he gives reckless GOPers a public spanking?

— By David Corn
Wed Jun. 29, 2011 12:06 PM PDT

Can President Barack Obama triumph by being the grown-up-in-chief?

During a White House press conference on Wednesday, the president declined to get into a food fight with Republicans playing chicken with the debt ceiling negotiations. Repeatedly, he noted that he expected GOP leaders to act responsibly. He did not lambast House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the GOP representatives to the in-limbo talks led by Vice President Joe Biden, for storming out of the negotiations because the White House insists that any deficit reduction plan include revenue boosters, not just spending cuts. "Call me naive," he said, "but my expectation is that leaders are going to lead."

So is Obama naive or crafty?

Report: Koch Industries outspends Exxon Mobil on climate and clean energy disinformation

By Climate Guest Blogger on Mar 31, 2010 at 11:06 am

In a must-read report, Greenpeace details how Koch Industries has “become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition,” spending over $48.5 million since 1997 to fund the anti-science disinformation machine. Brad Johnson has the story.

Climate Progress and the Wonk Room have long detailed the role of the billionaire brothers of Koch Industries, Charles and David Koch, in destroying American prosperity. Their pollution-based fortunes have fueled a network of right-wing ideologues, from McCain mouthpiece Nancy Pfotenhauer to loony conspiracy theorist Christopher Monckton. In public, the Kochs like to burnish their reputations by buying museum and opera halls.

Guess How Much More Wall St. Spends on Bonuses Than on Penalties for Torpedoing the Economy?

By Nomi Prins, AlterNet
Posted on June 27, 2011, Printed on June 30, 2011

Are you enraged about JPM Chase’s puny $156.3 million fine? The fine was part of an SEC settlement in which the firm "neither admits nor denies" any wrong-doing. Translation: Stuffing assets with carefully selected crap is not wrong. Creating the crap loans to begin with: Also, not wrong.

Of course you’re pissed off. I know I am.

There aren’t enough synonyms for the word "tiny" to adequately describe the size and impact of this settlement. It's a fleabite on the hand of the nation's second largest bank in punitive pain terms, and meaningless in stopping the creation of toxic assets, or reducing the criminal complexity of our banking system.

4 Trillion Dollars? New Report Shows the Hidden Costs of War

By Rae Gomes, AlterNet
Posted on June 29, 2011, Printed on June 30, 2011

President Obama cited the $1 trillion cost of the war in Afghanistan as a reason to bring some of the troops home, but that figure grossly underestimates the actual costs of war, which may already be as high 4 trillion dollars.

A new report just published by Brown University\'s Watson Institute for International Studies measures the categories of cost to make the point that the pay out is miniscule, if there\'s any at all. The report uses September 11 as a paradigm for cost and return: "Nineteen hijackers plus other al Qaeda plotters spent an estimated $400,000 to $500,000 on the plane attacks that killed 2,995 people and caused $50 billion to $100 billion in economic damages. What followed were three wars in which $50 billion amounts to a rounding error. For every person killed on September 11, another 73 have been killed since." Catherine Lutz, co-director of the study and head of the anthropology department at Brown said "We decided we needed to do this kind of rigorous assessment of what it cost to make those choices to go to war," she said. "Politicians, we assumed, were not going to do that kind of assessment."

One Small Town in America Quietly Enjoys the Health Care We All Dream Of

When Congress passes a national single-payer bill, we can all be enrolled in the twinkling of an eye -- just like Libby, Montana.

June 28, 2011 | Back when he presided over the Senate's health care reform debate, Max Baucus, chairman of the all-powerful Senate Finance Committee, had said everything was on the table — except for single-payer universal health care. When doctors, nurses, and others rose in his hearing to insist that single payer be included in the debate, the Montana Democrat had them arrested. As more stood up, Baucus could be heard on his open microphone saying, "We need more police."

Yet when Baucus needed a solution to a catastrophic health disaster in Libby, Montana and surrounding Lincoln County, he turned to the nation's single-payer healthcare system, Medicare, to solve the problem.

How Corporations Buy Access to Power

By BooMan, BooMan Tribune
Posted on June 29, 2011, Printed on June 30, 2011

I think you can imagine how a major bank/investment firm like Goldman Sachs can gain access to power. They obviously can make or withhold campaign contributions. They can throw money into political action committees that go after politicians who want to mess with them. They also can offer politicians lucrative six or seven figure jobs should they ever fail to win reelection or want to retire from public service. They can use their pull to get their employees hired by the government. They can hire their regulators. There are many ways that rich Wall Street bankers can assure that Washington DC will let them do pretty much anything they want to do, even if it's harmful to the country. But, sometimes, they don't need to do anything.

Domestic Spy Agency? 5 Outrageous Examples of FBI Intimidation and Entrapment

By Kevin Gosztola, AlterNet
Posted on June 30, 2011, Printed on June 30, 2011

In 2010, the FISA court approved all 1,506 requests by the FBI to electronically monitor suspects. They were also generous with granting “national security letters," which allow the FBI to force credit card companies, financial institutions, and internet service providers to give confidential records about customers’ subscriber information, phone number, email addresses and the websites they’ve visited. The FBI got permission to spy on 14,000 people in this way.

Do they really think there are 14,000 terrorists living in the US?

That's just the beginning.

Paul Krugman: Distressed Greece.Delutional Europe

The reaction of European leaders and institutions to the Greek crisis is a sight to behold. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that default would be very inconvenient, both as a practical matter and in terms of prestige. Therefore, default must not be considered a possibility, even though it has long been obvious that nondefault is not an option.

While Fighting To Block SEC Investigation Of Goldman Sachs, Rep. Darrell Issa Bought Goldman Sachs Bonds

By Lee Fang on Jun 29, 2011 at 9:30 am

Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) raised hell last year to stop the federal government from investigating Goldman Sachs regarding allegations that the company defrauded investors. In April 2010, shortly after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a civil suit against Goldman Sachs, Issa sent a letter to SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro demanding to know if there was “any sort of prearrangement, coordination, direction from, or advance notice” between the SEC and the Obama administration or congressional Democrats over the timing of the lawsuit.

The hidden Greek bailout — a €50 billion privatization of state-owned assets

by Gaius Publius on 6/29/2011 08:45:00 AM

A quick follow-up to this report from Chris in Paris on the ongoing attempt by Greece to substitute austerity for default (and the parallel attempt by the governments of creditor banks to loan Greece enough money to indirectly bail out its bankers — remember, those loans will end up in bankers' pockets).

Apple Wants "Kill Switch" for Camera Phones

Tuesday 28 June 2011
by: Nadia Prupis, Truthout | Report

The technology would trigger an infrared sensor, like the kind that is often installed at concert venues, which would instruct the iPhone to shut off its camera. Apple filed the patent application 18 months ago in California, but only became public knowledge after the Daily Mail uncovered the documents.

CHART: Number Of Contractors In Afghanistan Will Surge As U.S. Troops Withdraw

By Guest Blogger on Jun 29, 2011 at 10:10 am

Our guest blogger is CAP Visiting Fellow Pratap Chatterjee.

The number of contractors in Afghanistan is likely to increase significantly in the next year as the Obama administration pulls back some of the extra 68,000 troops that it has dispatched there since January 2009.

Typically, the U.S. pays one contractor to support every soldier that has deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The ratio of contractors to troops increases dramatically during a military surge as well as during a drawdown, and often stays higher than troop levels when military numbers are low, i.e. down to 30,000-50,000.

The real causes of the economic crisis? They’re history.

By Phil Angelides,
Published: June 28

They say that winners get to write history. Three years after the meltdown of our financial markets, it’s clear who is winning and who is losing. Wall Street — arms outstretched in triumph — is racing toward the finish-line tape while millions of American families are struggling to stay on their feet. With victory seemingly in hand, the historical rewrite is in full swing.

The contrast in fortunes between those on top of the economic heap and those buried in the rubble couldn’t be starker. The 10 biggest banks now control more than three-quarters of the country’s banking assets. Profits have bounced back, while compensation at publicly traded Wall Street firms hit a record $135 billion in 2010.

Matt Stoller: Beyond Elections – Why Political Elites Hedge Their Bets

By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His Twitter feed is
http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0

Washington’s rigged system of special interests ensures that brave politicians and staffers don’t stick around long.

Political analysts tend to gloss over what I would call hedging behavior on the part of political elites. While elections are somewhat random, the fact that you will be on the losing side of an election at some point is guaranteed. So politicos don’t ask: What’s the best way to win an election? Rather, they ask: What’s the best way to preserve my risk-adjusted position in the political ecosystem of influence and money? This means setting yourself up to win an election if possible, but not in an especially populist manner that could increase the downside of losing or falling into the minority.

Tax.com Helps Win One for Taxpayers

David Cay Johnston | Jun. 28, 2011 02:48 PM EDT

Taxpayers just won an important round against the monopolists in California, defeating a scheme to impose a fake tax on captive customers.

A lot of hard work by lawyers brought forth the real issues in this scheme, but in the end it was readers of Tax Analysts journalism who made the difference, just by asking to speak at a public hearing.

Pythagoras Solar Turns Windows Into Panels Of Energy

Sarah Lai Stirland | June 27, 2011, 8:00AM

A start-up in Northern California is working on creating "solar windows" that could act as solar panels at the same time as blocking sunlight from entering office buildings to reduce their energy needs, according to a Sunday story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The company Pythagoras Solar is based in San Mateo, California, and it won an award from the "GE ecomagination Challenge," award of $100,000 last week for its idea.

Fighting the Culture Wars With Hate, Violence and Even Bullets: Meet the Most Extreme of the Radical Christians

From the Army of God to the Hutaree Militia to Gary North and his Christian reconstructionists, radical Christianity is alive and well in the United States.

June 27, 2011 | If there is one name some residents of Amarillo, Texas wish they could forget, it’s Repent Amarillo. Based in that North Texas city, Repent Amarillo is a militant Christian fundamentalist group whose antics have ranged from staging a mock execution of Santa Claus by firing squad to posting a “spiritual warfare” map on its Web site that cited a Buddhist temple, an Islamic center, gay bars, strip clubs and sex shops as places of demonic activity.

Repent Amarillo is also infamous for mercilessly harassing a local swingers club called Route 66. Throughout 2009, members of Repent Amarillo made a point of showing up at Route 66’s events, where they would typically wear military fatigues, shout at Route 66 members through bullhorns and write down the license plate numbers of people attending the events. After finding out who the swingers were, Repent Amarillo’s members would find out where they worked and try to get them fired from their jobs (according to Route 66 coordinator Mac Mead, at least two members of the club lost their jobs because of Repent Amarillo).

Shock Doctrine: 'Emergency Finance Managers' and the Right-Wing's Power Grab

Emergency financial managers are being put in place by democratically elected governors throughout the country.

June 26, 2011 | The onslaught of radical policies from the wave of Tea Party-supported right-wing state politicians swept in in the 2010 elections has been nearly overwhelming. Nearly every state that saw a Republican takeover of the statehouse or legislature has faced attacks on collective bargaining, immigration, reproductive freedoms, or health care. New power grabs have popped up constantly, and copycat bills have sprung up in their wake as if an official playbook has been passed around the country.

But one of the nastiest moves has been the institution, by Michigan governor Rick Snyder, of an “emergency manager” over several cities in his state, as well as the Detroit public school system. This manager has the unilateral authority to fire officials, close schools, void union contracts, and assume total control over areas declared to be in a financial state of emergency by the state.

The New 30-Years' War: Who Will Be the Winners and Losers in the Great Global Energy Struggle to Come?

By Michael T. Klare, Tomdispatch.com

Posted on June 26, 2011, Printed on June 27, 2011

A 30-year war for energy preeminence? You wouldn’t wish it even on a desperate planet. But that’s where we’re headed and there’s no turning back.

From 1618 to 1648, Europe was engulfed in a series of intensely brutal conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years’ War. It was, in part, a struggle between an imperial system of governance and the emerging nation-state. Indeed, many historians believe that the modern international system of nation-states was crystallized in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which finally ended the fighting.

Think of us today as embarking on a new Thirty Years’ War. It may not result in as much bloodshed as that of the 1600s, though bloodshed there will be, but it will prove no less momentous for the future of the planet. Over the coming decades, we will be embroiled at a global level in a succeed-or-perish contest among the major forms of energy, the corporations which supply them, and the countries that run on them. The question will be: Which will dominate the world’s energy supply in the second half of the twenty-first century? The winners will determine how -- and how badly -- we live, work, and play in those not-so-distant decades, and will profit enormously as a result. The losers will be cast aside and dismembered.

Five economic lessons from Sweden, the rock star of the recovery

By Neil Irwin
Published: June 24

STOCKHOLM — Almost every developed nation in the world was walloped by the financial crisis, their economies paralyzed, their prospects for the future muddied.

And then there’s Sweden, the rock star of the recovery.

This Scandinavian nation of 9 million people has accomplished what the United States, Britain and Japan can only dream of: Growing rapidly, creating jobs and gaining a competitive edge. The banks are lending, the housing market booming. The budget is balanced.

Commentary: The truth about the Postal Service

By Fredric Rolando

Few institutions touch more Americans than the U.S. Postal Service, which six days a week delivers mail to 150 million homes and businesses in big cities and remote areas. And we do more than link the country; we become part of local communities, getting to know our customers and occasionally saving elderly residents who are ill, finding missing children, putting out fires and more. In our spare time, we conduct the nation's largest single-day food drive, replenishing food pantries in your community in tough economic times.

That degree of familiarity and personal interaction is why the amount of misinformation floating around about the Postal Service is so counter-intuitive. There's plenty of room for differing ideas about public policy, but we should all start from a factual basis - something too many columnists and commentators with an ideological ax to grind fail to do.

Gone With the Papers

by Chris Hedges

I visited the Hartford Courant as a high school student. It was the first time I was in a newsroom. The Connecticut paper’s newsroom, the size of a city block, was packed with rows of metal desks, most piled high with newspapers and notebooks. Reporters banged furiously on heavy typewriters set amid tangled phone cords, overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacks of paper, many of which were in sloping piles on the floor. The din and clamor, the incessantly ringing phones, the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that lay over the feverish hive, the hoarse shouts, the bustle and movement of reporters, most in disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. I was infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for more than two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent.

The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret

First Hormel gutted the union. Then it sped up the line. And when the pig-brain machine made workers sick, they got canned.

— By Ted Genoways

On the cut-and-kill floor of Quality Pork Processors Inc. in Austin, Minnesota, the wind always blows. From the open doors at the docks where drivers unload massive trailers of screeching pigs, through to the "warm room" where the hogs are butchered, to the plastic-draped breezeway where the parts are handed over to Hormel for packaging, the air gusts and swirls, whistling through the plant like the current in a canyon. In the first week of December 2006, Matthew Garcia felt feverish and chilled on the blustery production floor. He fought stabbing back pains and nausea, but he figured it was just the flu—and he was determined to tough it out.

Apple, Google, Microsoft Sitting on 58 Billion in Overseas Profits, Blackmailing Us to Avoid Taxes

By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on June 23, 2011, Printed on June 27, 2011

America’s largest global corporations are holding $1.5 trillion dollars in profits overseas in order to avoid US taxes. “Apple has $12 billion waiting offshore, Google has $17 billion and Microsoft, $29 billion,” reports the New York Times.

These corporations claim that if we reduce their tax rate on that cash from 35 percent to 5.25 percent (which is less than the rest of us pay in sales taxes), they will bring the money home and invest it in creating badly needed jobs. They claim that for every billion invested, 15,000 to 20,000 jobs will be created directly and indirectly, which means such a tax holiday could create up to 30 million jobs – more than enough to bring us back to full employment and then some!

The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why?

July 14, 2011

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present
by Jeff Madrick
Knopf, 464 pp., $30.00

Suppose we describe the following situation: major US financial institutions have badly overreached. They created and sold new financial instruments without understanding the risk. They poured money into dubious loans in pursuit of short-term profits, dismissing clear warnings that the borrowers might not be able to repay those loans. When things went bad, they turned to the government for help, relying on emergency aid and federal guarantees—thereby putting large amounts of taxpayer money at risk—in order to get by. And then, once the crisis was past, they went right back to denouncing big government, and resumed the very practices that created the crisis.

What year are we talking about?

We could, of course, be talking about 2008–2009, when Citigroup, Bank of America, and other institutions teetered on the brink of collapse, and were saved only by huge infusions of taxpayer cash. The bankers have repaid that support by declaring piously that it’s time to stop “banker-bashing,” and complaining that President Obama’s (very) occasional mentions of Wall Street’s role in the crisis are hurting their feelings.

America's poor are its most generous givers

By Frank Greve | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — When Jody Richards saw a homeless man begging outside a downtown McDonald's recently, he bought the man a cheeseburger. There's nothing unusual about that, except that Richards is homeless, too, and the 99-cent cheeseburger was an outsized chunk of the $9.50 he'd earned that day from panhandling.

The generosity of poor people isn't so much rare as rarely noticed, however. In fact, America's poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What's more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.

Them That’s Not Shall Lose

By CHARLES M. BLOW

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

James Baldwin penned that line more than 50 years ago, but it seems particularly prescient today, if in a different manner than its original intent.

Baldwin was referring to the poor being consistently overcharged for inferior goods. But I’ve always considered that sentence in the context of the extreme psychological toll of poverty, for it is in that way that I, too, know well how expensive it is to be poor.

I know the feel of thick calluses on the bottom of shoeless feet. I know the bite of the cold breeze that slithers through a drafty house. I know the weight of constant worry over not having enough to fill a belly or fight an illness.

WikiLeaks Haiti: Country's Elite Used Police as Private Army

Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives

June 22, 2011

Haitian business organizations and members of the country's tiny elite used the Haitian police force as their own private army in the wake of the 2004 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, according to a secret US Embassy cable.

Then–US Ambassador to Haiti James Foley warned in the cable "against private delivery of arms" to the Haitian National Police (HNP) after learning from a prominent Haitian businessman that "some business owners have already begun to purchase weapons and ammunition from the street and distribute them to local police officials in exchange for regular patrols."

How the Middle Class is its Own Worst Enemy

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

Pseudo-progressive group MoveOn.org posted on its site a 2 minute video featuring Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary under the Clinton presidency. The video, titled “The Truth About the Economy”, gave a very abbreviated half-of-the-story illustration of the cause for the middle class’s current plight. But it completely whitewashed and ignored the role that the middle class played in its own demise by deliberately hurting the poor during the “better times” of the Reagan Revolution followed by the Clinton-era of prosperity.

The middle class suburban-dwelling voters — most of them white males with “soccer mom” wives — literally drove the Welfare Reform engine which eliminated what miserly inadequate safety net there was for the poorest of the poor on the very bottom economic rung (most whom are women).

How To Spark a Right-Wing Frenzy

My one-minute YouTube clip of Al Gore was a conservative-media sensation. Here's why I took it down.

By Brian Merchant
Updated Saturday, June 25, 2011, at 7:11 AM ET

Last Monday, I watched Al Gore deliver the keynote address at a low-profile conference. He gave a pleasant, even boring, speech about how video games can inspire social change. Afterward, there was a brief discussion that touched on global warming, education, and women's empowerment. I recorded a couple snippets with my Flip camera and popped them onto YouTube.

By Wednesday, I was receiving scores of messages from far-right commenters. Many heralded me as a hero of their cause; others simply sought an outlet for more Gore-bashing. I'll explain.