Wisconsin official tells DMV employees to 'refrain from offering' information on free voter IDs

By Chris Bowers

Wisconsin wanders into poll tax territory:

A Wisconsin official has discouraged state workers from volunteering information about free IDs available under a controversial voter identification law that critics complain is designed to suppress votes, a memo leaked on Wednesday showed.

The memo, provided to the press by Democratic State Senator Jon Erpenbach, was likely to fan concerns among critics of the Republican-backed law that it aimed to suppress votes of thousands of otherwise eligible Wisconsin voters.

How Fewer Working Hours Can Save Our Health, Economy, and the Planet

By Juliet B. Schor, YES! Magazine
Posted on September 9, 2011, Printed on September 10, 2011

Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time. It’s a way of life that undermines basic sources of wealth and well-being—such as strong family and community ties, a deep sense of meaning, and physical health.

Imagining a world in which jobs take up much less of our time may seem utopian, especially now, when a scarcity mentality dominates the economic conversation. People who are employed often find it difficult to scale back their jobs. Costs of medical care, education, and child care are rising. It may be hard to find new sources of income when U.S. companies have been laying people off at a dizzying rate.

How to Put America Back to Work

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

The country is — or should be — focused on jobs. Some 25 million Americans who want a full-time job can’t get one. The youth unemployment rate is as much as twice that of the already unacceptable national average.

America has always thought of itself as a land of opportunity — but where is the opportunity for our youngsters who face such bleak prospects? Historically, those who lose their jobs quickly got another, but an increasingly large fraction of the unemployed — now more than 40 percent — have been out of work for more than six months.

President Barack Obama will deliver an address tonight outlining his vision of what can be done. Others should be doing the same.

NJ Governor Christie's Secret Meeting With Koch Brothers Causes Political Firestorm

iThe fallout has led the Democratic Speaker of the NJ Assembly to call the governor "disgraceful," and that she is "beginning to wonder if Gov. Christie is mentally deranged."September 8, 2011 |

Editor's Note: Brad Friedman wrote two recent stories for Mother Jones about secret Koch tapes that caused a "political firestorm" and he follows up here with what he learned about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's tight relationship with the Kochs.

One of the firestorms my stories have created has led the Democratic Speaker of the NJ Assembly to call Gov. Chris Christie "disgraceful", charge that his comments about her were "outright lies", that he is "not fit to lead the state," and that she is "beginning to wonder if Gov. Christie is mentally deranged." All statements given to local media late today in response to our release of the tapes. Though some local Dems are still wondering if it may be the Speaker, rather than Christie, who is hiding the truth.

As I described in my BRAD BLOG piece linking to Part 2 at MoJo on Wednesday morning, the good citizens of the Garden State (and the whole of the mainstream media along with them) learned only yesterday that their Republican Governor had snuck out of state on June 26th, right after appearing on Meet the Press, jetted across the country to deliver the keynote address at the super-secret, ultra-exclusive gathering of rightwing corporate barons and billionaires --- otherwise known as the Koch Brothers 2011 Summer Seminar --- at a resort near Vail, Colorado, before he then flew back home to NJ that night, and went on to appear on three cable news shows, in studio in Manhattan, the next morning. Nobody ever knew he was gone --- at least until my story broke at MoJo yesterday morning.

Let's find progressive ways to tax the winners in our trickle-up economy

Blaming Britain's lack of growth on the taxation of high earners is nonsense – and totally out of step with the rest of the world

Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 September 2011 22.00 BST

I know very few rich people who got rich to make money. They got rich because, other than spivs and gamblers, they enjoyed their work and were good at it. How much they made might be due to competition, greed, love, prestige, personal rivalry or, as JK Galbraith said of senior executives, a "warm personal gesture by an individual to himself". But there is no evidence that output rises or falls in response to shifts in post-tax income, except for some hourly-paid workers. It therefore does not respond to changes in marginal income tax.

While a few obsessives may so hate paying taxes that they would rather live out their lives in an airport lounge, the differential impact on economic growth of this year's rise from 40p to 50p on incomes over £150,000 must be negligible. So why all this week's talk of abandoning the 50p rate?

Katha Pollitt: The Poor: Still Here, Still Poor

What ever happened to poor people? Even on the left, Cornel West and Tavis Smiley’s Poverty Tour was an exception. Mostly, the talk is of the “middle class”—its stagnant wages, foreclosed houses, maxed-out credit cards and adult kids still living in their childhood bedrooms. The New York Times’s Bob Herbert, the last columnist who covered poverty consistently and with passion, is gone. Among progressive organizations, Rebuild the Dream, a new group co-founded with much fanfare by Van Jones and MoveOn, is typical. It bills its mission as “rebuilding the middle class”—i.e., the “people willing to work hard and play by the rules.” (What are those rules? I always wonder. And do middle-class people really work all that hard compared with a home health aide or a waitress, who cannot get ahead no matter how hard she works and how many rules she plays by?) The ten steps in its “Contract” contain many worthy suggestions—invest in America’s infrastructure, return to fairer tax rates, secure Social Security by lifting the cap on Social Security taxes. There’s nothing wrong with any of this as far as it goes—middle-class people have indeed suffered in the current recession. But let’s not forget that the unemployment rate for white college grads is 4 percent, and every single one of them has been written up in Salon. It’s who’s missing that troubles me: poor people.

Can the Middle Class Be Saved?

The Great Recession has accelerated the hollowing-out of the American middle class. And it has illuminated the widening divide between most of America and the super-rich. Both developments herald grave consequences. Here is how we can bridge the gap between us.

By Don Peck

In October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading.

In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.

Study reveals cultural characteristics of the Tea Party movement

LAS VEGAS — American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, according to new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

"Our findings show that the Tea Party movement can best be understood as a new cultural expression of late 20th century conservatism," said Andrew J. Perrin, an associate professor of sociology in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study, "Cultures of the Tea Party."

Findings are based on two telephone polls of registered voters in North Carolina and Tennessee (conducted May 30-June 3, 2010 and Sept. 29-Oct. 3, 2010), and a set of interviews and observations at a Tea Party movement rally in Washington, N.C. Nearly half of poll respondents (46 percent) felt favorably toward the Tea Party movement.

Boredom Can Fuel Hostility Toward Outsiders

Friday 19 August 2011

by: Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune | News Analysis

It’s all too easy to divide the world into people like us and outsiders. Newly published research points to a surprising factor that exacerbates this unfortunate tendency: Boredom.

Writing in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, University of Limerick psychologists Wijnand van Tilburg and Eric Igou report boredom increases the value we place on groups we feel a part of and decreases the value of those who feel alien to us. They describe five experiments that provide evidence backing up this idea.

I can't believe I haven't posted since Aug. 20...

Computer problems kept me offline for a time.