How Big Is the Long-Term Debt Problem?

By James Kwak

Articles about the deficits and the national debt generally talk about unsustainable long-term deficits that will drive the national debt up to a level where scary things happen. Sensible commentators usually acknowledge that our current deficits are a sideshow and the real problems happen in the 2020s and 2030s due to modestly increasing Social Security outlays and rapidly increasing health care spending. I admit that this has generally been my line as well; for example, in a previous post I said that the ten-year deficit problem is entirely a product of extending the Bush tax cuts, but that even if we let them expire things will get worse over the next two decades.

But looking at the numbers, it’s not clear that the long-term picture is really that bad. Here I’ll lay out the numbers, and then, as they say on Fox News, you can decide.

Paul Krugman: Economic "Experts" Got Crisis All Wrong

It took bad thinking and bad policy by many players to get us into the state we’re in; rarely in the course of human events have so many worked so hard to do so much damage.

But if I had to identify the players who really let us down the most, I think I’d point to European institutions that lent totally spurious  intellectual credibility to the  Pain Caucus.

Truthdigger of the Week: Jesse LaGreca

Posted on Oct 7, 2011

Every week, Truthdig recognizes an individual or group of people who spoke truth to power, blew the whistle or stood up in the face of injustice. You can see past winners here, and make your own nomination for our next awardee here.
 

An article in The New York Observer this week pointed out that Fox News has “generally been a tad dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street movement.” With zero references to the protest on the Fox News homepage, that’s quite an understatement. But what Fox News has done to cover the protest is send a reporter out to ask questions in what appeared to be a ploy to rile up the participants. Fox News did succeed in pushing the buttons of at least one Occupy Wall Street protester, who in turn responded with such clarity and fortitude in support of the movement that his message gained viral attention, despite the fact that Fox News ultimately left the entire interview on the cutting room floor. That protester, Jesse LaGreca, is our Truthdigger of the Week.

Follow the Money: Behind Europe’s Debt Crisis Lurks Another Giant Bailout of Wall Street

Thursday 6 October 2011

by: Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog | Op-Ed

Today Ben Bernanke added his voice to those who are worried about Europe’s debt crisis.

But why exactly should America be so concerned? Yes, we export to Europe – but those exports aren’t going to dry up. And in any event, they’re tiny compared to the size of the U.S. economy.

If you want the real reason, follow the money. A Greek (or Irish or Spanish or Italian or Portugese) default would have roughly the same effect on our financial system as the implosion of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

Watch Your Health and Your Pocketbook: A Bi-Partisan Scheme for Regulatory Deform

Thursday 6 October 2011

by: Gerald Epstein, TripleCrisis | Report 

 

Right wing politicians in the U.S. have gotten very good at channeling George Orwell: As the world economy teeters on the brink of another economic catastrophe whose precipitating cause was a twenty year project to de-regulate finance in the U.S. and abroad, they insist that the cause of our woes is “job killing” regulations. Never mind that, according to the World Bank, the U.S. ranks 5th in the world in terms of ease of doing business in relation to regulations, and that over the past 5 years, doing business in the U.S. overall has become easier, not harder. The same report shows that in the OECD the ease of doing business has stayed the same or improved since 2006. Yet in the OECD countries 50% more people were unemployed in 2010 than in 2007.

IMF adviser: The global economy could collapse ‘in two to three weeks’

By Stephen C. Webster
Friday, October 7, 2011

In an interview on BBC yesterday, International Monetary Fund (IMF) adviser Robert Shapiro said something quite alarming: without a plan to save the Euro, the global economy will collapse “in two to three weeks.”

Speaking about European leaders, Shapiro said: “If they can not address [the financial crisis] in a credible way I believe within perhaps two to three weeks we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system.

Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now

by Naomi Klein

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

I love you.

And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder
.
Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.

Save the American Dream by Fighting the Plutocracy

Monday 3 October 2011

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

 
"Right now, the American dream is endangered. America has become, Citibank analysts wrote, a 'plutonomy,' made of the rich and the rest – and only the rich count."

Thousands rally to defend worker rights in Wisconsin, then nearly a million force a referendum in Ohio to repeal a similar assault. Tens of thousands fill congressional town meetings to demand "Jobs, not Cuts" in August. Over 100,000 join in vetting provisions for a Contract for the American Dream. Nonviolent protestors occupy Wall Street, and stay restrained despite police provocation, and now demonstrations are spreading to financial districts in cities across the country. The press isn’t looking, but there’s a movement building of citizens challenging the gridlocked debate in Washington.

Paul Krugman: Confronting the Malefactors

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.

It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

Key regulator calls for limits on speculation in commodities markets

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Having failed earlier this year to impose congressionally mandated limits on excessive speculation in commodities markets, a key regulator on Thursday called on the Obama administration to immediately impose temporary limits on some Wall Street investments.

"We were supposed to have these done earlier this year but have failed to do so," complained Bart Chilton, one of three Democrats on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The Real Reason Why Police Cage Peaceful Protestors By Dan Hancox, AlterNet

By Dan Hancox, AlterNet
Posted on October 3, 2011, Printed on October 8, 2011

Editor's note: On Saturday, the Occupy Wall St. movement marched on the Brooklyn bridge in New York. Police officers cut the demonstrators off from the exits, entrapping them on the bridge, in the rain, before carting off as many as 700 to jail. In the story below, British journalist Dan Hancox writes about how corralling peaceful protestors, or "kettling," was used by Britain's conservative government to steamroll resistance to their drastic austerity agenda. As the Occupy Wall St. movement spreads to cities all over America, we may see much more of this type of policing of public space to quell protests.

Across the western world, the public is losing a battle for territory. In the UK, publically owned health care, housing, welfare and education are being cut, broken up and sold off for private profit by David Cameron's Conservative government with audacious speed. This has a very physical manifestation-- in the suffocating of peaceful protest through a technique that has become known as "kettling," in which protestors are contained for five, seven or 10 hours without food, water, toilets, or hope of release.

Kettling has become synonymous with the enforcement of the Conservative government's radical austerity and privatization program. In November and December 2010 a student uprising in Britain larger than that of May 1968 saw over 40,000 students take to the streets of London on four separate occasions to protest against the government. They occupied countless university buildings during this period, and linked up with the anti-cuts movement UK Uncut (which I've written about for AlterNet).

Bank Lobbyist-Run Front Group ‘FreedomWorks’ Tries To Trick Protesters Into Only Protesting Federal Reserve

By Lee Fang on Oct 6, 2011 at 12:10 pm

In a post titled “Wall Street Protesters Should Instead Focus on the Federal Reserve,” a staffer for the group FreedomWorks claims:

The Occupy Wall Street website—which surely does not represent the views of all the protesters—has released a 13-point list of pro-government demands. OccupyWallSt.org demonstrates their economic illiteracy by demanding free college education for all, one trillion dollars in infrastructure and ecological spending. One little detail is missing: who is going to pay for all of this?

FreedomWorks is a front group used by Wall Street lobbyists to concoct bank-friendly schemes. FreedomWorks is playing its usual role: masquerading as a grassroots group to confuse activists and help big corporations.

What Are the Latest Revelations About Koch Industries?


by Lois Beckett
ProPublica, Oct. 4, 2011, 11:04 a.m.

Bloomberg Markets Magazine has published an in-depth investigation into business practices at Koch Industries, run by politically influential brothers Charles and David Koch. The story lays out what it suggests is a decades-long pattern of illegal and unethical behavior at Koch.

Both Bloomberg Markets Magazine's story and Koch's official response are long and full of complicated details, and it's not easy to untangle it all. Here's our guide to what seem to be the newest, most significant allegations.

Steve Jobs and Alan Greenspan

by Dean Baker

On the tragic passing of Steve Jobs, while still a relatively young man, it is interesting to juxtapose him to Alan Greenspan, one of the other iconic figures of our time. One made us rich, with a vast array of new products and new possibilities. The other made us poor with a long lasting downturn that could persist for more than a decade.

The two of them can be taken as symbols for the best and worst of modern capitalism. Jobs is the symbol of capitalism when it works. Again and again he broke through barriers, creating new products that qualitatively altered the market by making vast improvements over the competition.

Spitzer to Obama: Support Occupy Wall Street

By David Edwards
Thursday, October 6, 2011

Former New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer (D) told Current TV’s Keith Olbermann that the Occupy Wall Street protests should be a sign to President Barack Obama.

“What the NYPD did with the arrest of 700 protesters on Brooklyn Bridge was the single best public relations for the protesters because suddenly people stood up and said, ‘Wait a minute, I agree with these protesters.

Flat-Lining the Middle Class: Economic Numbers to Die For

by Andy Kroll

Food pantries picked over. Incomes drying up. Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets.

Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and you'll witness scenes like these. They are the legacy of the Great Recession, the Lesser Depression, or whatever you choose to call it.

In recent months, a blizzard of new data, the hardest of hard numbers, has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class. Each report sparks a flurry of news stories and pundit chatter, but never much reflection on what it all means now that we have just enough distance to look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century and see how Americans fared in that turbulent period.

If Top 1% Hadn't Ripped Off Trillions, You'd Likely Be Making Thousands of Dollars More Right Now

By JoshuaHolland, AlterNet
Posted on October 5, 2011, Printed on October 6, 2011

The corporate media appear to be obsessed with the idea that the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn't have a cohesive message. Of course, that misses the point: as Nathan Schneider wrote in Yes! magazine, “More than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding Wall Street what real democracy looks like: a discussion among people, not a contest of money.”

And despite the handwringing about the movement's supposed lack of focus, it does have a simple-to-understand message that fits neatly on a bumpersticker: "We Are the Other 99 Percent."

Contained in that simple message is an implied demand, whether or not people recognize it: undoing several decades of increasing inequality in this country.

Fox News and Wall Street Banks Hustle to Kill New Whistleblower Protections

Wednesday 5 October 2011

by: Lee Fang, ThinkProgress | Report 

 

A few years go, a media firestorm erupted over the urban “Stop Snitchin” campaign promoted by gangs and a few hip hop icons. Stop Snitchin refers to the effort to intimidate informants to prevent them from cooperating with police about gang violence or drug trafficking schemes. Rapper Cam’ron received heavy scrutiny for endorsing the trend during an interview on the issue for CBS’s 60 Minutes.

A new Stop Snitchin campaign to deter would-be informants, in this case against people speaking up against crimes on Wall Street, is quietly taking shape, this time far from the media’s eye.

Paul Krugman: US Tax Policies Benefit Rich

Tuesday 4 October 2011

It seems as if a number of people in the media have decided that President Obama was fibbing when he said that some millionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries — because, as the usual suspects triumphantly declare, on average millionaires pay higher average taxes than middle-income Americans.

This is, of course, stupid: the operative word is “some.”

Policing the Prophets of Wall Street

by Amy Goodman

The Occupy Wall Street protest grows daily, spreading to cities across the United States. “We are the 99 percent,” the protesters say, “that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”

The response by the New York City Police Department has been brutal. Last Saturday, the police swept up more than 700 protesters in one of the largest mass arrests in U.S. history. The week before, innocent protesters were pepper-sprayed in the face without warning or reason.

Elizabeth Warren:’Wall St. broke this country’

By TIM MAK | 10/5/11 6:57 AM EDT Updated: 10/5/11 12:10 PM EDT

 

Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren came out swinging against the financial industry in her first U.S. Senate primary debate, arguing that “the people on Wall Street broke this country.”

In a debate that focused on criticism of those not in the room — notably Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Wall Street honchos — Warren drew applause when she took on investment firms and banks.

Unequal Protection: Jefferson Versus the Corporate Aristocracy

Tuesday 19 April 2011

by: Thom Hartmann

Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.
— Samuel Webster, 1777

Although the first shots were fired in 1775 and the Declaration was signed in 1776, the war against a transnational corporation and the nation that used it to extract wealth from its colonies had just begun. These colonists, facing the biggest empire and military force in the world, fought for five more years—the war didn’t end until General Charles Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. Even then some resistance remained; the last loyalists and the British left New York starting in April 1782, and the treaty that formally ended the war was signed in Paris in September 1783.

The first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, was written in 1777 and endorsed by the states in 1781. It was subsequently replaced by our current Constitution, as has been documented in many books. In this chapter we take a look at the visions that motivated what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call America’s experiment with democracy in a republic. One of its most conspicuous features was the lack of vast wealth or any sort of corporation that resembled the East India Company—until the early 1800s.

Talking About the American Dream: Drew Westen and Celinda Lake

By Sara Robinson

Created 10/04/2011 - 9:36am

How do we talk about the American Dream? And is this a story Americans are ready to hear?

According to communications experts Drew Westen and Celinda Lake, they're beyond ready to hear it; in fact, they've been waiting for years for progressives to speak to them with the muscular populism that marked earlier progressives like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. This is the kind of language that actively challenges old Republican frames, and stands strongly for the interests of the middle class.

Westen and Lake got down to the details of what this kind of language sounds like during their presentation at Take Back the American Dream on Monday afternoon. "Without vision, the people will perish," said Westen, quoting from the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. And right now, he continued, the right wing's vision for America seems limited to death and no taxes.

Spend, Spend, Spend

There is only one way out of the global recession, and government must lead the way.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz | Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, at 5:52 PM ET

As the economic slump that began in 2007 continues, the question persists: Why? Unless we have a better understanding of the causes of the crisis, we can’t implement an effective recovery strategy. So far, we have neither.

We were told that this was a financial crisis, so governments on both sides of the Atlantic focused on the banks. Stimulus programs were sold as being a temporary palliative, needed to bridge the gap until the financial sector recovered and private lending resumed. But, while bank profitability and bonuses have returned, lending has not recovered, despite record-low long- and short-term interest rates.

Nobel-winning economist supports ‘Occupy Wall Street’

By Stephen C. Webster
Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz showed up at “Occupy Wall Street” this week to show his support for the protest and clearly outline what he sees as the worst crimes of the American financial sector.
In a brief speech amplified by an “echo chamber” of protesters (who shouted Stiglitz’s own words as a group because they’re banned from using megaphones), the Colombia University professor said that Wall Street had become wealthy by “socializing losses and privatizing gain,” calling it a scheme that’s “not capitalism.”

Secret Docs Show Foreclosure Watchdog Doesn’t Bark or Bite

by Paul Kiel
ProPublica, Oct. 4, 2011, 11:26 a.m.

Why has the administration’s flagship foreclosure prevention program been so ineffective in helping struggling homeowners get loan modifications and stay in their homes? One reason: The government’s supervision of the program has apparently ranged from nonexistent to weak.

Documents obtained by ProPublica — government audit reports of GMAC, the country’s fifth-largest mortgage servicer — provide the first detailed look at the program’s oversight. They show that the company operated with almost no oversight for the program’s first eight months. When auditors did finally conduct a major review more than a year into the program, they found that GMAC had seriously mishandled many loan modifications — miscalculating homeowner income in more than 80 percent of audited cases, for example. Yet, GMAC suffered no penalty. GMAC itself said it hasn’t reversed a single foreclosure as a result of a government audit.

Study: growing up in bad neighborhoods has a devastating impact

WASHINGTON, DC -- Growing up in a poor neighborhood significantly reduces the chances that a child will graduate from high school, according to a study published in the October issue of the American Sociological Review. And, the longer a child lives in that kind of neighborhood, the more harmful the impact.

The study, by University of Michigan sociologists Geoffrey Wodtke and David Harding and University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Felix Elwert, is the first to capture the cumulative impact of growing up in America's most disadvantaged neighborhoods on a key educational outcome -- high school graduation.

Settlement Reached Over Arrest of Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Producers at 2008 GOP Convention

A final settlement has been reached in a federal lawsuit challenging the police crackdown on journalists reporting on the 2008 Republican National Convention and protests in St. Paul, Minnesota. Democracy Now! host and executive producer Amy Goodman, along with former producers Nicole Salazar and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, filed the lawsuit last year against the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments, the Ramsey County Sheriff and United States Secret Service personnel.

Reagan insider: 'GOP destroyed U.S. economy'

Commentary: How: Gold. Tax cuts. Debts. Wars. Fat Cats. Class gap. No fiscal discipline

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch 

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- "How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy." Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse." 

Get it? Not "destroying." The GOP has already "destroyed" the U.S. economy, setting up an "American Apocalypse."

The Big Picture: A 40-Year Scan of the Right-Wing Corporate Takeover of America

By Don Hazen and Colin Greer, AlterNet
Posted on October 3, 2011, Printed on October 4, 2011

At this moment, there are growing protests on Wall Street in Manhattan, in Boston at the Bank of America, and in cities around the country. These embryonic and creative efforts are targeting the greed of the banks, the collusion of the corporate class with their corrupt elected officials, the high level of unemployment, the huge burden of student loans in a time of diminished opportunities, the increasing numbers of poor and hungry people, and much more. These protests, along with those earlier in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, are signs of revival of a long tradition of popular revolt against excesses of wealth and the corporate class.

The new protests come after a long dark period -- specifically the last 11 years of George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- during which time conservatives have gained more power and ability to control the national debate than they have in the past 75 years. The current right-wing power presence, spiked by the corporate media's obsession with Tea Party protests, came most immediately as a result of the Great Recession caused by the housing bubble and obscene corruption of the banks. This crisis was exacerbated by large-scale anger about the subsequent bank bailout, and corporate-backed attacks on the health care reform package passed by Congress. But that is just part of the latest political news.

 

Recession Risk Overtaking ’New Normal': Gross

By Liz Capo McCormick - Oct 3, 2011 1:57 PM ET 

Bill Gross, the manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, said the global economy risks lapsing into recession with the pace of growth falling below the “new normal” level the firm has predicted since 2009.

“Sovereign balance sheets resemble an overweight diabetic on the verge of a heart attack,” Gross wrote in a monthly investment outlook posted on Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co.’s website today. “If global policy makers could focus on structural as opposed to cyclical financial solutions, new normal growth as opposed to recession might be possible. Long-term profits cannot ultimately grow unless they are partnered with near equal benefits for labor.”

Culture Poisons Brain With Racism, Study Finds

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

Date: 02 October 2011 Time: 02:47 PM ET

For years, social scientists have uncovered the unsettling truth that no matter how egalitarian a person purports to be, their unconscious mind holds some racist, sexist or ageist thoughts.

But a new study finds that this may say less about the person and more about the culture that surrounds him or her.

Paul Krugman: Holding China to Account

The dire state of the world economy reflects destructive actions on the part of many players. Still, the fact that so many have behaved badly shouldn’t stop us from holding individual bad actors to account.

And that’s what Senate leaders will be doing this week, as they take up legislation that would threaten sanctions against China and other currency manipulators.

Respectable opinion is aghast. But respectable opinion has been consistently wrong lately, and the currency issue is no exception.

Ask yourself: Why is it so hard to restore full employment? It’s true that the housing bubble has popped, and consumers are saving more than they did a few years ago. But once upon a time America was able to achieve full employment without a housing bubble and with savings rates even higher than we have now. What changed?

Perry's handling of Texas pension, health care funds is questioned

By Yamil Berard | The Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Gov. Rick Perry is making headlines with his attacks on Social Security and Medicare, blasting their fiscal stability, likening them to Ponzi schemes and calling them a "monstrous lie to our kids."

But the tables are being turned on the Republican presidential contender as scrutiny increases of his handling of Texas' public pension funds and the $1 billion healthcare fund for Texas teachers.

Fighting prejudice through imitation

Asking white people to mirror the movements of a black person lowers their levels of implicit prejudice

New research shows that you can reduce racial prejudice simply by having a person mimic the movements of a member of the race he or she is prejudiced against. The method may work by activating brain mechanisms that contribute to feelings of empathy.

Normally, when we watch another person perform an action, our brain activity changes as we mentally simulate the other person. But the brain activity is less strong when we're watching people from other racial groups, and is least strong among people who are prejudiced against the racial group.

New Rules Will Support Farmers and Jobs

The meatpacking industry, giant poultry companies, and largest food processors have forced more than 1 million American farmers and ranchers out of business since 1980.

by Mardy Townsend

Several lawmakers are proposing a time-out on new regulations to supposedly generate a more job-friendly environment. To some that might sound reasonable given the nation's entrenched unemployment, but there's one set of new rules in particular that should not be blocked.

Smaller-scale and independent farmers like me have waited 90 years for the government to enforce a law that would finally give us the chance to compete on a more level playing field. These new regulations are supposed to do just that.

Falling Wages Threatening U.S. as Consumers May Cut Spending

By Sho Chandra and Steve Matthews - Oct 3, 2011 4:57 AM ET 

Ninety-one percent of people in the U.S. labor force have a job. That may be the extent of the good news for these Americans, whose incomes tell a darker story.

Take-home pay, adjusted for prices, fell 0.3 percent in August, the third decrease in five months, and personal income dropped for the first time in two years, the Commerce Department reported last week. The declines followed news from the Census Bureau that median household income in 2010 fell to $49,445, the lowest in more than a decade, and the poverty rate jumped to 15.1 percent, a 17-year high

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, How the American Taxpayer Got Plucked in Iraq

Chickening Out in Iraq
How Your Tax Dollars Financed “Reconstruction” Madness in the Middle East
By Peter Van Buren

Very few people outside the agricultural world know that if the rooster in a flock dies the hens will continue to produce fertile eggs for up to four weeks because “sperm nests,” located in the ovary ducts of hens, collect and store sperm as a survival mechanism to ensure fertile eggs even after the male is gone. I had to know this as part of my role in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Like learning that Baghdad produced 8,000 tons of trash every day, who could have imagined when we invaded Iraq that such information would be important to the Global War on Terror? If I were to meet George W., I would tell him this by way of suggesting that he did not know what he was getting the country into.

Koch Brothers Flout Law With Secret Iran Sales

By Asjylyn Loder and David Evans - Oct 3, 2011 1:28 PM ET

Bloomberg Markets Magazine

 

In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.

“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”

She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.

State for Sale

A conservative multimillionaire has taken control in North Carolina, one of 2012’s top battlegrounds.

by Jane Mayer, October 10, 2011

In the spring of 2010, the conservative political strategist Ed Gillespie flew from Washington, D.C., to Raleigh, North Carolina, to spend a day laying the groundwork for REDMAP, a new project aimed at engineering a Republican takeover of state legislatures. Gillespie hoped to help his party get control of statehouses where congressional redistricting was pending, thereby leveraging victories in cheap local races into a means of shifting the balance of power in Washington. It was an ingenious plan, and Gillespie is a skilled tactician—he once ran the Republican National Committee—but REDMAP seemed like a long shot in North Carolina. Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 and remained popular. The Republicans hadn’t controlled both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly for more than a century. (“Not since General Sherman,” a state politico joked to me.) That day in Raleigh, though, Gillespie had lunch with an ideal ally: James Arthur (Art) Pope, the chairman and C.E.O. of Variety Wholesalers, a discount-store conglomerate. The Raleigh News and Observer had called Pope, a conservative multimillionaire, the Knight of the Right. The REDMAP project offered Pope a new way to spend his money.

Watch Out, Democrats: A New Silicon Valley-Funded Group is Preparing to Rock the Conservative Christian Vote

By BuzzFlash

Created 09/29/2011 - 4:19pm

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

"As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election," Ari Berman recently wrote in Rolling Stone magazine, "Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008." Amongst the methods being put forward in Republican-controlled state houses across the country are initiatives making registering to vote a much more difficult and laborious process.

In a piece titled "The GOP War on Voting," [1] Berman reported that "Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering [while] Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters [and] Maine repealed Election day voter registration."

Paul Krugman: Austerity Caucus Pushes Europe to the Brink

One of the good ideas in a now-essential recent paper by Paul De Grauwe, a professor of economics at the University of Leuven in Belgium and a research fellow at the Center for European Policy Studies, was to do a head-to-head comparison of Spain and Britain to illustrate the problems the euro faces.

Here’s an update.

Individual-Mandate Hypocrisy

Why aren’t conservatives complaining about this South Carolina insurance law?

By Eliot Spitzer | Posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2011, at 2:36 PM ET

The “individual mandate” in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act has provoked incredible enthusiasm among the act’s supporters and towering rage in its opponents. The obligation either to purchase insurance or to pay a fine whose proceeds would be used to offset the cost of care to the uninsured is viewed either as an essential part of the architecture of health care reform or as an affront to liberty. In few places has the attack on the individual mandate been more vociferous than in South Carolina, where both new Governor Nikki Haley and Senator Jim DeMint are leading members of the Tea Party movement. They view the individual mandate as inimical to our Constitution and the worst manifestation of government excess.

Euro Crisis: The Biggest Story In American Politics And Nobody’s Talking About It

Brian Beutler | September 30, 2011, 6:15AM

It could easily force the United States back into recession and become the issue on which the 2012 elections turn. But the national political press has all but ignored it, and none of the GOP's Presidential hopefuls have been asked about it in any of their endless series of debates.

The European monetary union is on the verge of collapse. In the wake of 2008's global financial crisis, several countries on the Euro have amassed crushing debt burdens and seen their economies stall or buckle. And now the severity of their problems, combined with political paralysis in the union's more stable countries, threatens to bring the whole system down.

 

Change GDP, change the world

by David Roberts
29 Sep 2011 2:22 PM

It is taken for granted by just about everyone that the developing world is going to grow like gangbusters over the next few decades. Population will grow, GDP will grow, and consumption of energy and other resources will grow. 

Koch brothers spooked by forthcoming story

Anonymous sources try to discredit Bloomberg article on Koch Industries before it's even published

By Justin Elliott 

 

Here’s a rule of thumb about public relations: When P.R. pros begin furiously spinning a story before it has even come out, there’s a pretty good chance the story is going to be damaging to the reputation of said P.R. pros’ bosses.

And that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now, as an anonymous person or persons in the orbit of the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch try to discredit a forthcoming story in Bloomberg Markets magazine.

Phone giants store callers' private data

By Peter Svensson, The Associated Press

A document obtained by the ACLU shows for the first time how the four largest cellphone companies in the U.S. treat data about their subscribers' calls, text messages, Web surfing and approximate locations.

The one-page document from the Justice Department's cybercrime division shows, for instance, that Verizon Wireless keeps, for a year, information about which cell towers subscriber phones connect to. That data that can be used to figure out where the phone has been, down to the level of a neighborhood. AT&T has kept the same data continuously since July 2008.

The Best Among Us

Posted on Sep 29, 2011

By Chris Hedges

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.