ANALYSIS: A new kind of house call

VA Independence at Home program may provide model for Medicare savings

By Wendell Potter
6:00 am, August 8, 2011

Dr. Bruce Kinosian still makes house calls, and he’s proud of it. In fact, he introduces himself as a physician who goes to see his patients in their homes rather than insisting that they come to see him at his office

He’s convinced that if more doctors did what he does, we could eliminate billions of dollars we currently spend in this country in an often-futile—and almost always incredibly expensive—effort to get people well.

S&P not shy about using its clout politically

By Michael Hudson and Aaron Mehta
10:00 am, August 9, 2011

In April 2002, Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes won legislative approval for a law to hold Wall Street accountable for bankrolling predatory lending. After the Democrat lost reelection that fall to Republican Sonny Perdue, the finance industry launched an all-out assault on the provisions of the law that held mortgage investors liable if they bought fraud-tainted home loans.

One of the defining moments in the legislative fight came when Standard & Poor’s, the giant debt rating company, announced it would no longer rate securities that might be backed by loans covered by the Georgia law, raising the specter that investors would cut off the flow of money into the state’s mortgage market and cripple its ability to provide credit to homeowners.

In March 2003, the legislature buckled to pressure and passed amendments shielding mortgage investors from liability. Other states saw what happened in Georgia and shied away.

The Grubby Species

by David Michael Green

Nobility is a bitch, and a real seductive one at that.

I’m capable of some serious cynicism, but these days I kinda wish I had a lot more of it. I kinda wish I had born and raised in a more cynical time. Then maybe I wouldn’t get my heart broken so often.

That’s a funny thing to say about the time I grew up in, in a way. It was the era of Vietnam and Watergate, the era of police attack dogs and burning cities. My Lai, Kent State, Nixon, Watts. What’s uglier than that? And can’t one make a very compelling case that these are significantly better times today? I mean, after all, the government isn’t beating and murdering our kids on America’s streets. And while we’re still fighting wars (of course), there are a lot less casualties on either side these days. Aren’t things better?

Leap of Faith

The making of a Republican front-runner.

by Ryan Lizza
August 15, 2011

The transformation of Michele Bachmann from Tea Party insurgent and cable-news Pasionaria to serious Republican contender in the 2012 Presidential race was nearly complete by late June, when she boarded a Dassault Falcon 900, in Dulles, Virginia, and headed toward the caucus grounds of Iowa. The leased, fourteen-seat corporate jet was to serve as Bachmann’s campaign hub for the next few days, and, before the plane took off, her press secretary, Alice Stewart, announced to the six travelling chroniclers that there was one important rule. “I know everything is on the record these days,” Stewart said, “but please just don’t broadcast images of her in her casual clothes.”

Paul Krugman: The Hijacked Crisis

Has market turmoil left you feeling afraid? Well, it should. Clearly, the economic crisis that began in 2008 is by no means over.

But there’s another emotion you should feel: anger. For what we’re seeing now is what happens when influential people exploit a crisis rather than try to solve it.

For more than a year and a half — ever since President Obama chose to make deficits, not jobs, the central focus of the 2010 State of the Union address — we’ve had a public conversation that has been dominated by budget concerns, while almost ignoring unemployment. The supposedly urgent need to reduce deficits has so dominated the discourse that on Monday, in the midst of a market panic, Mr. Obama devoted most of his remarks to the deficit rather than to the clear and present danger of renewed recession.

Roger Ailes and the rise of Fox News

Even Rupert Murdoch is afraid of Roger Ailes, the paranoid boss of Fox News. But 'the Chairman' is using his power to make Americans more rightwing, more ignorant and ever more terrified

Tim Dickinson, Guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 10 August 2011 20.00 BST

At the Fox News Chrismas party the year the network overtook arch-rival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network's founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.

"It was as though we were looking at Mao," recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. "It's like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders," says a former executive with the network's parent, News Corp. "There are people who turn people in."

Harry Reid's Appointments: Social Security And Medicare Now At Risk

By Robert Borosage

Created 08/10/2011 - 8:28am

According to reports, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to announce today that his appointees to the super committee Gang of 12 will be Sens. John Kerry, Patty Murray and Max Baucus. Reid apparently has chosen not to appoint Sens. Bernie Sanders or Sherrod Brown or Jeff Merkley, who have forcefully stood with the majority of Americans who want Medicare and Social Security protected and who favor raising taxes on the rich to help reduce the deficit.

Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is a conservative Democrat. He has been a consistent supporter of Social Security, playing a key role in blocking President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize the program. He was on President Obama's deficit commission but sensibly voted against the plan put forth by the co-chairs, which would have cut deeply from Social Security and Medicare.

On the other hand, Baucus is a leading recipient of contributions from the drug companies and the health insurance industry. He has voted against repealing the tax benefits for companies that ship jobs overseas. He voted for the Bush tax cuts and voted to repeal the estate tax. He is not a champion of sensible health care policy or progressive tax reform.

Paul Krugman: Dismal Thoughts

To be an economist of my stripe these days — basically a Keynes-via-Hicks type, who concluded as soon as Lehman fell that we were in a classic liquidity trap with all that implied — is a bittersweet experience, with the bitter vastly greater than the sweet.

The good news, such as it is, is that our underlying model has performed very well. Interest rates have stayed low despite large government borrowing; crowding out has been totally absent; huge increases in the monetary base have not been highly inflationary.

The bad news is that policy makers almost everywhere have failed dismally, and seem determined not to take on board the lessons of experience, either historical or what we’ve learned the past few years.

Barbara Ehrenreich: On Turning Poverty Into an American Crime

Tuesday 9 August 2011

by: Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch | Op-Ed

I completed the manuscript for "Nickel and Dimed" in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, "Make love not war," and then -- down at the bottom -- "Screw it, just make money."

Obama Agrees With Panetta, Endorses Medicare ‘Adjustments’ Over Defense Cuts

Frank (D-MA) asked President Obama to repudiate Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s insistence that in order to deal with the nation’s debt and deficit, additional revenue should come from tax increases and cuts to entitlement programs, such as Medicare, instead of the reducing military spending.

The Meltdown’s True Villain

With a double-dip recession looming and attacks on Obama mounting, it’s amazing the GOP is still setting the U.S. agenda when its own George W. Bush ran up half the debt we’ve accumulated since Reagan.

Aug 5, 2011 8:52 PM EDT

As we thunder toward a double-dip recession on a possible worldwide scale, let’s step back and remember how all this happened. I’ve been pretty hard on Barack Obama lately (and will be again on Monday, as you’ll see). But Obama is not the villain in this story. Every time I step back and ponder this sordid history, I am amazed that the Republican Party has any credibility and even 100 members of Congress, let alone a sizable House majority and enough juice to be driving the nation’s agenda as it is.

The Boston Globe ran a chart last Sunday that I’d buy billboard space to reproduce in every decent-size city in America, if I were running the Democratic National Committee. The premise of it was very simple: It showed how many trillions each president since Ronald Reagan has added to the nation’s debt. The debt was about $1 trillion when Reagan took office, and then: Reagan, $1.9 trillion; George H.W. Bush, $1.5 trillion (in just four years); Bill Clinton, $1.4 trillion; Obama, $2.4 trillion.

New anticensorship scheme could make it impossible to block individual sites

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A radical new approach to thwarting Internet censorship would essentially turn the whole web into a proxy server, making it virtually impossible for a censoring government to block individual sites.

The system is called Telex, and it is the brainchild of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo in Canada. They will present it Aug. 12 at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco.

"This has the potential to shift the arms race regarding censorship to be in favor of free and open communication," said J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at U-M and one of Telex's developers.

U.Va. Researchers Find High Energy Output From Algae-Based Fuel, But 'No Silver Bullet'

August 8, 2011 — Algae-based fuel is one of many options among the array of possible future energy sources. New University of Virginia research shows that while algae-based transportation fuels produce high energy output with minimal land use, their production could come with significant environmental burdens.

For farmers looking to maximize profits, algae would produce considerably more transportation energy than canola and switch grass for every hectare planted, and can also be grown on poor-quality marginal land that cannot be easily used to grow food crops such as corn, according to a report by Andres F. Clarens and Lisa M. Colosi, both assistant professors of civil and environmental engineering in the U.Va. School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Mark A. White, professor in the McIntire School of Commerce.

Paul Krugman: Capitulation, Not Compromise, Led to a Debt Deal

What would I have done?

That’s the question President Obama’s kinda-sorta defenders keep asking; it’s supposed to be a conversation-stopper.

But the answer is clear: I would have made a statement declaring that giving in to this kind of blackmail would constitute a violation of my oath of office, and that my lawyers, on careful reflection, have determined that there are several legal options that allow me to ignore this extortionate demand.

Now, the Obama people say that this wasn’t actually an option.

Well, I hate to say this, but I don’t believe them.

School Vouchers: How the GOP is Using Free Market Philosophy To Wipe Out Public Education

By Julianne Hing, ColorLines
Posted on August 8, 2011, Printed on August 13, 2011

Legislators in at least 30 states introduced school voucher bills this year that would allow students to take the public money set aside for their public education and “spend” it in private schools. It’s the largest rush of such policy proposals ever, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures, the AP reported. The surge was enabled in part by new Republican majorities that have taken hold of state legislatures in the past year.

In 2010, just nine voucher bills were debated in state legislatures, less than a third of this year’s volume. As of July, 28 states had also considered offering tax breaks to students who enroll in private schools.

Indiana’s voucher law, passed this year, is the most notable—and it offers both vouchers and tax breaks for private education. Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels aggressively pushed for the law, which would allow families who qualify to receive up to $4,500 a year if they send their child to a private school. It will allow 7,500 students in its first year, 15,000 the second and an unlimited number of students in its third to take advantage of the program.

S.F. gay married couple loses immigration battle

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Washington -- Citing the Defense of Marriage Act, the Obama administration denied immigration benefits to a married gay couple from San Francisco and ordered the expulsion of a man who is the primary caregiver to his AIDS-afflicted spouse.

Bradford Wells, a U.S. citizen, and Anthony John Makk, a citizen of Australia, were married seven years ago in Massachusetts. They have lived together 19 years, mostly in an apartment in the Castro district. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denied Makk's application to be considered for permanent residency as a spouse of an American citizen, citing the 1996 law that denies all federal benefits to same-sex couples.

Why Are the Big Banks Getting Off Scot-Free?

By Yves Smith

For most citizens, one of the mysteries of life after the crisis is why such a massive act of looting has gone unpunished. We've had hearings, investigations, and numerous journalistic and academic post mortems. We've also had promises to put people in jail by prosecutors like Iowa's attorney general Tom Miller walked back virtually as soon as they were made.

Yet there is undeniable evidence of institutionalized fraud, such as widespread document fabrication in foreclosures (mentioned in the motion filed by New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman opposing the $8.5 billion Bank of America settlement with investors) and the embedding of impermissible charges (known as junk fees and pyramiding fees) in servicing software, so that someone who misses a mortgage payment or two is almost certain to see it escalate into a foreclosure. And these come on top of a long list of runup-to-the-crisis abuses, including mortgage bonds having more dodgy loans in them than they were supposed to, banks selling synthetic or largely synthetic collateralized debt obligations as being just the same as ones made of real bonds when the synthetics were created for the purpose of making bets against the subprime market and selling BBB risk at largely AAA prices, and of course, phony accounting at the banks themselves.

New Exposé Tracks ALEC-Private Prison Industry Effort to Replace Unionized Workers with Prison Labor

Many of the toughest sentencing laws responsible for the explosion of the U.S. prison population were drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helps corporations write model legislation. Now a new exposé reveals ALEC has paved the way for states and corporations to replace unionized workers with prison labor. We speak with Mike Elk, contributing labor reporter at The Nation magazine. He says ALEC and private prison companies "put a mass amount of people in jail, and then they created a situation where they could exploit that." Elk notes that in 2005 more than 14 million pounds of beef infected with rat feces processed by inmates were not recalled, in order to avoid drawing attention to how many products are made by prison labor.

Shock Doctrine: How Conservatives and Corporate Elites Are Stoking Economic Hysteria to Force Catastrophic Cuts

By Robert L. Borosage, Blog for Our Future
Posted on August 8, 2011, Printed on August 13, 2011

Global economic turmoil is getting worse. Europe’s financial crisis now imperils Spain and Italy. The folly of premature austerity savages economies in Great Britain, Europe and, increasingly, the United States. China and the emerging economies are slowing down. This economy seems stalled at best. People are sensibly scared, worried about their jobs, their homes, their lost savings, their prospects.

Conservative and corporate elites are stoking the turmoil, and using fear to panic a public into accepting harsh measures that would be otherwise unacceptable. The stock market tanks after the debt ceiling debacle. Standard & Poor's, the discredited and corrupted rating agency, rushes to downgrade U.S. debt, with such haste it doesn’t even get its math right. China’s news service announces the U.S. must roll back its bloated “welfare state” and its bloated military. The talk shows are inundated with pundits expounding the urgent need for the U.S. to get its deficits under control to regain its credit status.

Barbara Ehrenreich: America's Tragic Decline

Barbara Ehrenreich discusses the sorry state of the American economy and how it impacts real people.

August 8, 2011 | Editor's note: In the following Democracy Now! interview, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich and Amy Goodman talk about the human cost of the economic meltdown.

AMY GOODMAN

: Standard & Poor’s announced Friday it’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time in history. The move by S&P, one of three leading credit rating agencies, came just days after Congress approved a $2.1 trillion deficit-reduction plan. S&P called the outlook "negative," indicating that another downgrade is possible in the next 12 to 18 months. Lowering the nation’s rating to one notch below AAA, the credit rating company said "political brinkmanship" in the debate over the debt had made the U.S. government’s ability to manage its finances, quote, "less stable, less effective and less predictable." It said the $2.1 trillion bipartisan agreement reached last week "fell short" of what was necessary to reduce the nation’s debt over time.

What Can We Do About The Great American Lie?

by Michael Lewis

I. F. Stone told us many years ago that All Governments Lie. Daniel Ellsberg, in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, told us why governments, including Presidents, always lie, and must continue to lie about what they know to be true, but about which they cannot talk under constraints of "National Security." The lies place an impermeable barrier between Those Who Know and Those Who Cannot Be Told, a barrier that trickles downhill, forever separating the citizenry of the United States from their government.

Today, the lies continue, as they must, even though journalists, bloggers and other malcontents desperately chip away at the facade. The raid into Pakistan to capture Bin Laden is revealed to have been not a one-off military adventure, but part of an on-going campaign of covert military intervention in 120 countries around the world on the part of a highly organized and secretly funded cadre of 15,000 specially trained soldiers let loose on the world.

The Truth About Taxes

A week later and we are still amazed at how the Republicans in Congress pulled it off. They held the economy hostage, won some cheap political points, and all of us will spend the next decade paying the ransom as government programs — $900 billion over 10 years in the first round — are slashed and the recovery is put at risk.

The only glimmer of hope is that the battle is not completely over — if President Obama is finally willing to fight.

Under the terms of the ill-conceived debt agreement, Congress has to propose another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures by December. Just to ensure that rationality does not have a chance, Republican leaders said they would not put anyone on the deficit-cutting “super-committee” who might entertain the idea of raising taxes.

The Bad Deal

The debt agreement should finally make clear to Europeans that Barack Obama is not the progressive President they had hoped for. Instead, writes James K. Galbraith, he is a willful player in the Washington politics game.

by James K. Galbraith

Political news travels slowly, and in my casual observation progressive Europeans have held on to the myth of Barack Obama as a good man much longer than most progressive Americans did. How could a young black American from Chicago and Harvard be otherwise?

Over here reality has been evident for a while, thanks to the President's pattern of giving way to banks, lobbies, Republicans and right-wing extremists. Whether your prime interest is housing, health care, peace, justice, jobs or climate change, if you are an activist in America you have known for a long time that this President is not your friend.

Conservative Crusade to Discredit Labor Experts Spreads to MI

—By Andy Kroll | Tue Mar. 29, 2011 9:26 AM PDT

On March 24, William Cronon, an acclaimed history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered a startling revelation on his personal blog: The Wisconsin Republican Party had filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding all emails sent or received via Cronon's UW email account mentioning certain labor unions, labor leaders, the words "recall" and "collective bargaining," and the names of a host of state Republican lawmakers, including Governor Scott Walker. The request was clearly aimed at intimidating and discrediting Cronon, a prominent academic who has criticized Wisconsin Republicans, especially Walker, on his blog and in the pages of the New York Times.

Labor Ramps Up Effort to Stop Trade Deals

by Vicki Needham

WASHINGTON - Organized labor and other opponents of three pending free-trade deals are ramping up grass-roots campaigns intended to pressure lawmakers to oppose the agreements.

The fight over the agreements is splitting President Obama from unions and other liberal groups at a time when there is already tension between the White House and the left over the debt-ceiling deal. While the accords with South Korea, Colombia and Panama have broad support from the White House and Republican leaders, opponents are using the August recess to try to build up opposition.

They argue the deals will harm an economy still struggling to create jobs amid a fragile economic recovery.

Dirty Tricks in WI: Deceptive Absentee Ballot Mailers Appear to be Coordinated Hoaxes

Several RW groups cooperate on fraudulent recall scams

PLUS: Election Integrity volunteer needed in WI...

No doubt by now you've heard of the deceptive absentee ballot applications mailed to Democrats in Wisconsin by David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, WI, as reported earlier this week by David Catanese at Politico.

As seen below, the mailer instructed recipients to return the application to the "Absentee Ballot Application Processing Center" by August 11th, even though the recall elections for 6 Republicans is next Tuesday, August 9th...

Shock Doctrine? Fight Back

Monday 8 August 2011

by: Robert Borosage, Campaign for America's Future [3] | Op-Ed

Global economic turmoil is getting worse. Europe’s financial crisis now imperils Spain and Italy. The folly of pre-mature austerity savages economies in Great Britain, Europe and, increasingly, the United States. China and the emerging economies are slowing down. This economy seems stalled at best.

People are sensibly scared, worried about their jobs, their homes, their lost savings, their prospects.

Conservative and corporate elites are stoking the turmoil, and using fear to panic a public into accepting harsh measures that would be otherwise unacceptable. The stock market tanks after the debt ceiling debacle. Standard and Poors, the discredited and corrupted rating agency, rushes to downgrade US debt, with such haste it doesn’t even get its math right. China’s news service announces the US must roll back its bloated “welfare state” and its bloated military. The talk shows are inundated with pundits expounding the urgent need for the US to get its deficits under control to regain its credit status.

Paul Krugman: Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt

To understand the furor over the decision by Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, to downgrade U.S. government debt, you have to hold in your mind two seemingly (but not actually) contradictory ideas. The first is that America is indeed no longer the stable, reliable country it once was. The second is that S.& P. itself has even lower credibility; it’s the last place anyone should turn for judgments about our nation’s prospects.

Let’s start with S.& P.’s lack of credibility. If there’s a single word that best describes the rating agency’s decision to downgrade America, it’s chutzpah — traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

America’s large budget deficit is, after all, primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis. And S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a major role in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets that have since turned into toxic waste.

A timeline of events

By Steve Benen

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

1980: Ronald Reagan runs for president, promising a balanced budget

1981 - 1989: With support from congressional Republicans, Reagan runs enormous deficits, adds $2 trillion to the debt.

1993: Bill Clinton passes economic plan that lowers deficit, gets zero votes from congressional Republicans.

1998: U.S. deficit disappears for the first time in three decades. Debt clock is unplugged.

Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s Ongoing Collusion With Terrorists

Sunday 7 August 2011
by: Peter Dale Scott, Japan Focus [3] | Op-Ed

Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America’s interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe.

U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.

In virtually all the wars since 1989, America and Islamist factions have been battling to determine who will control the heartlands of Eurasia in the post-Soviet era. In some countries – Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan in 2001 – the conflict has been straightforward, with each side using the other’s excesses as an excuse for intervention.

Dumb Ideas From Both Sides of the Atlantic

European banks and American politicians are both making serious economic mistakes.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz
Posted Saturday, Aug. 6, 2011, at 6:50 AM ET

The Great Recession of 2008 has morphed into the North Atlantic Recession: It is mainly Europe and the United States, not the major emerging markets, that have become mired in slow growth and high unemployment. And it is Europe and America that are marching, alone and together, to the denouement of a grand debacle. A busted bubble led to a massive Keynesian stimulus that averted a much deeper recession but that also fueled substantial budget deficits. The response—massive spending cuts—ensures that unacceptably high levels of unemployment (a vast waste of resources and an oversupply of suffering) will continue, possibly for years.

The European Union has finally committed itself to helping its financially distressed members. It had no choice—with financial turmoil threatening to spread from small countries like Greece and Ireland to large ones like Italy and Spain, the euro's very survival was in growing jeopardy. Europe's leaders recognized that distressed countries' debts would become unmanageable unless their economies could grow and that growth could not be achieved without assistance.

Would Cutting the Military Budget Threaten Our Security?

It depends how we define our priorities.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2011, at 4:19 PM ET

Here are some numbers to help you decide whether it really would be dangerous to take another slash at the military budget, as the debt-ceiling deal (and other fiscal politics) might soon require.

In 1985, at the height of President Ronald Reagan's Cold War arms build-up, the Pentagon budget (adjusted for inflation, to make it comparable in today's dollars) amounted to $574 billion.

How to Think About Standard and Poor's Downgrade

by Dean Baker

Standard and Poor's downgrade of U.S. government debt captured headlines across the country and around the world. It is a newsworthy event, but primarily as another colossal failure by a major credit rating agency.

First, it is worth mentioning the important background here. S&P, along with the other credit rating agencies, rated hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime mortgage backed securities as investment grade. They were paid tens of millions of dollar by the investment banks for these ratings. We know that concerns were raised by their own people about the quality of many of these issues. This was at the least astoundingly incompetent. It was quite possibly criminal.

This raises the question of whether S&P fears an investigation and possible prosecution. In such circumstances the desire to curry favor with powerful politicians could certainly influence their credit rating decisions. There are also rules affecting the credit rating agencies in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. The desire to have these rules written in a favorable way could affect the credit rating agencies' decisions. It would be nice if we could just assume that the credit rating agencies make their rulings on an objective assessment of the evidence, but we can't.

Will 2012 Be the End of the Presidential Public Financing System?

by Tarini Parti

It happened with typewriters, eight-tracks, VCRs and even flip-phones.

Now advocates for the public financing of political campaigns fear that the system once used by most presidential candidates could also become irrelevant without an upgrade.

The public funding program was established in 1976 as a response to Watergate scandal. It has seen few changes during the 30 years it has been used. And as historic levels of money pour into campaign coffers -- and outside groups gain increased freedom to spend unlimited amounts of cash on advertisements of their own -- more and more presidential candidates are choosing to fund their campaigns with private contributions.

The Rating Game: PowerPoints and Emails Illustrate the Play-For-Play "Agencies" Scheme

By Richard Eskow

Created 08/06/2011 - 1:22pm

Must Read:

An Economy for All

(Reposted from May of last year to commemorate the S&P "downgrade." The "agency" scams have since spent millions in lobbying money to weaken and delay the Franken Amendment and other urgently needed reforms.)

PowerPoints, emails, and transcripts obtained by Sen. Carl Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations illustrate the real magnitude of Sen. Al Franken's victory today. Sen. Franken was able to pass an amendment which eliminates the conflict of interest that's created when ratings agencies "compete for business." It passed the Senate in a 64/35 vote - and it was a bipartisan victory, no less, with 10 Republicans joining 54 Dems to support it.

Here's how broken our current system has become: Not only are the ratings agencies competing as for-profit businesses, but our two largest agencies are publicly traded companies. That means they don't just worry about making a profit. They also have to worry about impressing the stock market on a quarterly basis to boost their stock prices and further enrich their executives. And who influences stock prices the most? Traders on Wall Street, who are also the agencies' customer base and the objects of their scrutiny.

A Tale of Two Lootings

Wednesday 3 August 2011
by: Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis

The political posturing around the debt ceiling "crisis" was mostly a distraction from the hard issues. The hardest of those - underlying US economic decline - keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains and injustices that threaten to dissolve society. Its causes - two long-term trends over the last 30 years - help also to explain the political failures that now compound the social costs of economic decline.

The first trend is the attack on jobs, wages and benefits, and the second is the attack on the federal government's budget. The first trend enables the second. A capitalist economy suffering high unemployment with all its costly consequences shapes a bizarre, disconnected politics. The two major parties ignore unemployment and the system that keeps reproducing it. They argue instead over how much to cut social programs for the people while they agree that such cutting is the major way to fix the government's broken budget.

August Town Halls 2.0: Tea Party, Republicans Plan Renewed Push For Ryan’s Medicare Privatization Plan

By Igor Volsky on Aug 3, 2011 at 4:08 pm

In yet another sign that the debt ceiling negotiations have re-ignited conservatives’ fervor to privatize the Medicare program, Reuters is reporting that Tea Party activists are planning to descend on the town halls held by members of Congress while on recess this month to demand that the new super committee and future legislative proposals to reduce entitlement spending incorporate Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to push future beneficiaries into private insurance plans:

Thousands of Tea Party movement activists are expected to descend this month on town hall meetings across key battleground states as part of an intensifying campaign ahead of the 2012 presidential and congressional elections.

How to Take Our Country Back From the Money Men Who Fund the Tea Party

Friday 5 August 2011

by: June Carbone , New Deal 2.0 | Op-Ed

If there is a silver lining to the debt limit crisis — and it's a big if — it would be that the extremism of Republican agenda has finely become visible to a larger number of Americans. It is time to recognize what it means to face a determined ideological bloc. And what it means to fight back.

While New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently described the Tea Party as an American Hezbollah, Islamic terrorists would not have much clout without their funders in Saudi Arabia and Iran. So, too, the Republican right would be impotent without its behind-the-scenes creators. A small number of incredibly wealthy businessmen — the principle beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts — have created an ideological machine determined to destroy government. Taking our country back, restoring pragmatism over ideology, and making government function requires making the deep pocket money men (and they are mostly men) visible and identifying their cause with the looting of the country.

Is the U.S. Credit Rating a Victim of GOP Sabotage?

By Daniel Gross | Contrary Indicator – Fri, Aug 5, 2011 10:16 PM EDT

The fiscal clown show continues. A few days after Congress and the White House agreed to raise the debt ceiling and cut spending, Standard & Poor's has downgraded the United States of America's credit rating from AAA to AA+.

S&P, which covered itself in a substance other than glory during the mortgage crisis, may have a poor record and strange methodology when it comes to sovereign ratings. France, which has a far higher debt per capita ratio than the U.S., still enjoys a AAA rating. And a downgrade, alone, doesn't mean U.S. interest rates will spike -- on Monday or at any time in the future. Japan's credit rating was downgraded several years ago, when the interest rates its government paid on bonds was already extremely low, and they've generally trended lower in the years since.

Why the insurance industry gets climate change

Insurance companies understand risk – which is why, unlike our myopic political class, they do not have their heads in the sand

Jules Boykoff
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 June 2011 17.00 BST

When it comes to climate change, the US Congress is a hornets' nest of political dysfunction. Last month, President Barack Obama nominated energy executive John Bryson to lead the commerce department. From the response of congressional Republicans, you might have thought Obama had nominated Ed Abbey and Rachel Carson's imaginary love child.

In 2009, Bryson had the audacity to support a cap-and-trade system to address climate change and, 40 years earlier, he helped launch the Natural Resource Defence Council. This spurred Darrell Issa (Republican, California) to deride him as a "green evangelist", while Senator John Barrasso (Republican, Wyoming) called Bryson an "environmental extremist" and Senator James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma) pegged him as "a founder of a radical environmental organisation".

Once Upon a Time in the West

A Commentary by Jakob Augstein

This week, the United States nearly allowed itself to succumb to economic disaster. Increasingly, the divided country has more in common with a failed state than a democracy. In the face of America's apparent political insanity, Europe must learn to take care of itself.

The word "West" used to have a meaning. It described common goals and values, the dignity of democracy and justice over tyranny and despotism. Now it seems to be a thing of the past. There is no longer a West, and those who would like to use the word -- along with Europe and the United States in the same sentence -- should just hold their breath. By any definition, America is no longer a Western nation.

The US is a country where the system of government has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite. An unruly and aggressive militarism set in motion two costly wars in the past 10 years. Society is not only divided socially and politically -- in its ideological blindness the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy. It is losing its ability to compromise.

America has changed. It has drifted away from the West.