Michael Hudson: Debt and Democracy – Has the Link Been Broken?

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

A longer version of this article in German was published in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5, 2011 [the FAZ provided this anachronistic note].

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

The Lost Opportunity of Iran-Contra

by: Robert Parry, Consortium News | News Analysis

Special Report: A quarter century ago with the breaking of the Iran-Contra scandal, the United States had a chance to step back from its march toward Empire and to demand accountability for White House crimes. But instead a powerful cover-up prevailed, reports Robert Parry.

If you want to solve the perplexing mystery of modern-day America – and understand what went so terribly wrong – an important place to look for clues would be the Iran-Contra scandal, which began a quarter century ago, on Nov. 25, 1986.

The scandal’s failure to achieve meaningful accountability for high-level lawbreakers can be seen as a key turning point in modern American history. In effect, it was the moment that the United States veered firmly back onto a path toward Empire after a brief side trip toward again trying to be a functioning Republic.

Solyndra Was An Anomaly, Independent Report Finds

Carl Franzen - December 2, 2011, 6:36 PM

Unfortunate as the bankruptcy of California solar panel company Solyndra was, considering it defaulted on a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, it isn’t reflective of the overall performance of the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program.

In fact, aside from Solyndra, the loan guarantee program is actually extremely sound, supporting low-risk investments and maintaining a reserve of funding to draw upon, and ending it — as Republicans have tried to do — wouldn’t help balance the budget. Instead, it would probably sacrifice advances in clean energy.

Seniors Group With Republican Ties Honors Republicans For Protecting Seniors

Jillian Rayfield - December 3, 2011, 10:44 AM<

A seniors group that claims to be grassroots but has ties to Republicans and members of the pharmaceutical industry has been handing out awards to vulnerable Republicans for standing up for senior citizens.

RetireSafe.org purports to be “a grassroots organization that advocates and educates on behalf of America’s seniors on issues regarding Social Security, Medicare, health and financial well being.”
But according to a Roll Call report this week, the group’s board has close ties to Republicans, and it receives a chunk of its financing from the pharmaceutical industry.

Decoding the Payroll-Tax Cut: How Well Does It Work?

by Marian Wang
ProPublica, Dec. 1, 2011, 12:54 p.m.

As Congress tries to deal with its long list of unfinished business, among the top and most contentious items has been the proposed extension of the payroll-tax cut.


It has certainly inspired plenty of political posturing. Democrats have charged Republicans with hypocrisy for opposing a measure that would put hundreds of dollars into the pockets of American workers; Republicans have fired back, accusing President Obama of failed economic policies and misguided efforts to grant tax relief to some while upping taxes on the rich, who they say often create jobs.

David Cay Johnston: In New York, gifts circumvent a ban
Taxpayers can expect ever more picking of their pockets by businesses with political clout thanks to the Nov. 21 decision by Judge Theodore Jones and four colleagues on the New York Court of Appeals.

At issue is $1.4 billion in state gifts whose primary beneficiary is a microchip maker, GlobalFoundries, a company controlled by Abu Dhabi’s hereditary ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, one of the wealthiest people ever. The gifts, labeled economic development grants and made through a state-sponsored corporation, work out to about a million dollar subsidy per job at the plant near Albany.

The New York Court of Appeals said the 50 taxpayers who sued over the deal and over gifts to apple and wine trade associations have no standing to challenge the gift because it is proper.

The Greatest Hoax in the History of Money: The Fed, the Banks, the Lies

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

December 1, 2011 - 10:14pm ET 

It took the journalists at Bloomberg News two years - and presumably lots of legal fees - to pry information out of the Federal Reserve that should have been made public long ago. We now know that the Fed's secret $7.7 trillion lending program wasn't just the most massive bank bailout ever seen, and it wasn't just free money for mega-bankers - though it was certainly both of those things. It was also the greatest hoax in stock market history.

No, scratch that. It was the greatest hoax in the history of money. And it was built on lies. How many? Let us count the ways.

Three Pillars of a Revived Republic

December 2, 2011

As local governments shut down more Occupy encampments, the movement for the “99 percent” is at a crossroads. Some supporters advocate more civil disobedience; others urge a shift toward media outreach; and still others want a move into politics. But Robert Parry notes that all three approaches may be required.


By Robert Parry

American progressives are buoyed by Occupy Wall Street’s success in shifting the political debate from Republican demands for government austerity to the issue of concentrated private wealth at the top, but the question of what to do next is fraught with risks.

The discussion appears to be breaking down into which of three approaches should be pursued: activism (and civil disobedience), electoral (and legislative) politics, or outreach (via a stronger media infrastructure). Often the three are presented as somehow exclusive of one another.

Paul Krugman: Killing the Euro

Can the euro be saved? Not long ago we were told that the worst possible outcome was a Greek default. Now a much wider disaster seems all too likely.

True, market pressure lifted a bit on Wednesday after central banks made a splashy announcement about expanded credit lines (which will, in fact, make hardly any real difference). But even optimists now see Europe as headed for recession, while pessimists warn that the euro may become the epicenter of another global financial crisis.

How did things go so wrong? The answer you hear all the time is that the euro crisis was caused by fiscal irresponsibility. Turn on your TV and you’re very likely to find some pundit declaring that if America doesn’t slash spending we’ll end up like Greece. Greeeeeece!

Norquist Tells GOP That Raising Taxes On The Middle Class Doesn’t Count As A Tax Increase

By Travis Waldron on Dec 1, 2011 at 5:50 pm

Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, the president of Americans For Tax Reform and author of the radical anti-tax pledge that has played a significant role in hamstringing budget and deficit-reduction negotiations, has said that it is unacceptable for those who have signed his pledge to vote in favor of any tax increase. But now that President Obama and congressional Democrats are backing a tax cut aimed at stimulating economic growth, Norquist has changed his tune.

Declining Labor Force Participation Leads to Sharp Drop in Unemployment

By Dean Baker


The employment rate for women is down 0.7 percentage points from its year-ago level.

The Labor Department reported a decline of 315,000 people in the labor market in October. This was the main factor driving a drop of 0.4 percentage points in the unemployment rate to 8.6 percent. The establishment survey showed a weaker-than-expected 120,000 job gain for the month; although this bad news was largely offset by upward revisions of 72,000 to the job growth numbers for the prior two months.

Researchers Find that Abstinence-Only Sex Education Does Not, In Fact, Promote Abstinence

By J. Bryan Lowder  |  Posted Thursday, Dec. 1, 2011, at 10:25 AM ET

This one may come as a shock to those conservative types who believe that telling hormone-riddled teens to ‘just say no’ actually does anything to promote their sexual health:

Researchers at the University of Georgia have just published the first large-scale study of teen pregnancy rates by state in comparison with sex education curricula. The results demonstrate that rates of teen pregnancy are “significantly higher” in states that use “abstinence-only” models, while lower in those that provide a more comprehensive education, including birth control instruction and STI prevention alongside abstinence. Moreover, the significance of the relationship remained even when the researchers adjusted for potentially important factors like socioeconomic status, education level and ethnicity.

Military Police State


Why is the Senate so determined to allow the U.S. military to arrest and detain U.S. citizens?

By Dahlia Lithwick | Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011, at 7:02 PM ET

On Tuesday 60 members of the United States Senate voted to preserve a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act—that would be the bill that funds the Pentagon—allowing the U.S. military to pick up and detain, without charges or trial, anyone suspected of terrorism, including American citizens, and to restrict transfers of prisoners out of Guantanamo Bay. Specifically, 60 senators voted against an amendment that would have invalidated the part of the bill which empowers the president and the military to detain anyone they suspect was involved in the 9/11 attacks or supports al-Qaida, the Taliban, or “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

A Secret Scandal

The government and the big banks deceived the public about their $7 trillion secret loan program. They should be punished.

By Eliot Spitzer | Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011, at 1:34 PM ET

Imagine you walked into a bank, applied for a personal line of credit, and filled out all the paperwork claiming to have no debts and an income of $200,000 per year. The bank, based on these representations, extended you the line of credit. Then, three years later, after fighting disclosure all the way, you were forced by a court to tell the truth: At the time you made the statements to the bank, you actually were unemployed, you had a $1 million mortgage on your house on which you had failed to make payments for six months, and you hadn’t paid even the minimum on your credit-card bills for three months. Do you think the bank would just say: Never mind, don’t worry about it? Of course not. Whether or not you had paid back the personal line of credit, three FBI agents would be at your door within hours.

Does Anybody Who Gets It Believe Central Banks Did All That Much Yesterday?

I’m still mystified as to the market reaction on Wednesday to the coordinated central bank effort at waving a bazooka at the escalating European financial crisis. But as readers pointed out in comments, the big move was overnight, in futures, when trading is thin, and there was no follow through when markets opened. And volume was underwhelming.

The officialdom in the US seems to have been slow to wake up as to the direct effects of the Eurobank wobbles on the US economy. I worked for the Japanese in the 1980s, did some work for the US ops of a major German bank in the 1990s, and the story of big foreign banks in the US is largely unchanged: they provide commodity credit (big corporate lending facilities and acting as participants in loan syndications) as their best route to breaking into more lucrative services at the same companies. So as the Journal noted earlier this week, Eurobank stress is leading to a big crunch on all sorts of lending activities.

Washington state scrambles to fight massive tree die-offs

By Craig Welch | The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — So many pine, fir and spruce trees in the Northwest are riddled with bugs and disease that major tree die-offs are expected to rip through a third of Eastern Washington forests - an area covering nearly 3 million acres - in the next 15 years, according to new state projections.

Because Washington's forests are deteriorating so quickly, the state commissioner of public lands last week said he'll appoint an emergency panel of scientists and foresters to seek ways to stabilize or reverse the decline.

We Asked Obama for Change, Got Lousy T-Shirt Instead

By Ezra Klein
Nov 30, 2011 7:00 PM ET

Guess who tweeted this: “This Black Friday, take 10% off all purchases ... with code 10%TURKEYDAY.”

Wal-Mart? Best Buy? A hedge fund trying to unload Greek bonds?

Nope. That was the official Twitter account of President Barack Obama -- excuse me, President @BarackObama. And it’s not the first time that Obama’s 2012 campaign has sounded like a commercial for Al’s Used Car Lot.

You Can Arrest an Idea

Posted on Dec 1, 2011
By Robert Scheer

The bankers slept well. Their homes in Beverly Hills were not spotlighted by a noisy swarm of police helicopters, searchlights burning through the sanctity of the night, harassing the forlorn City Hall encampment of those who dared protest the banks’ seizure of our government. I live within sight of the iconic Los Angeles City Hall, and at first I thought it was being used once again as a movie location, given the massive police presence, as if an alien invasion was being thwarted.

Not eager to test the resilience of my new heart valve, I hesitated until the first crack of dawn to visit the place where former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and I had spoken weeks before at a teach-in on the origins of the economic crisis. I described the scene back then as a Jeffersonian moment, exactly the kind of peaceful assembly to redress grievances that the Founders of our nation enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But at 5 a.m. Wednesday there was only a graveyard of democratic hope. The protesters were gone, 200 arrested for exercising their constitutional rights, and only the television crews stayed to pick over the carcass of tents, books and posters, including one I pulled from the debris that read “99% you can’t arrest an idea.” Actually, you can, and the bankers have, as a result, been able to reoccupy Los Angeles’ City Hall and every other contested outpost of power throughout the nation

Republicans Make Rare Retreat on Payroll Tax Cuts—Why?

George Zornick on November 30, 2011 - 12:58pm ET

There was a time—up until last night—when Republicans would not support a payroll tax cut in order to goose the economy.

The party swallowed it in last December’s agreement on the Bush tax rates, and so this year Americans were subject to a payroll tax rate of 4.2 percent instead of 6.2 percent. But in the ensuing months, most Republicans made it clear they wouldn’t support extending the payroll tax cut again because they felt it didn’t do enough and cost too much money. “I think that it is time we stop with putting these Band-Aids over huge chest wounds,” said Representative Allen West, a Tea Party favorite from Florida. Representative Paul Ryan called it “sugar-high” economics this summer, and added later that it “simply exacerbates our debt problems in my opinion.”

The Rebirth of Social Darwinism

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out

by BooMan
Wed Nov 30th, 2011 at 11:50:17 PM EST

We all know the story to one degree or another. The financial sector set up a system that encouraged mortgage initiators to prefer subprime loans to prime loans. They stopped asking for any documentation proving an ability to pay back home loans. They sought out unsavvy borrowers and steered them to riskier loans because they got bigger bonuses that way. The garbage loans were packaged up into derivatives and given deceptively high credit ratings. Then those derivatives were sold to unwitting customers who lost tons of money when they went bad. Meanwhile, the big banks bet against their own financial products even as they marketed them as safe investments. When the house of cards fell, the government had no choice but to save the banks because our economy can't function without a banking system. Then the bankers took the money and paid themselves big bonuses while millions lost their jobs, their homes, and their retirement security.

There are a few bankers who are honest about what happened.

6 Shocking Revelations About Wall Street's "Secret Government"

By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on November 30, 2011, Printed on December 2, 2011

We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. Through a freedom of information request by Bloomberg News, the public now has access to over 29,000 pages of Fed documents and 21,000 additional Fed transactions that were deliberately hidden, and for good reason. (See here and here.)

These documents show how top government officials willfully concealed from Congress and the public the true extent of the 2008-'09 bailouts that enriched the few and enhanced the interests of giant Wall Streets firms. Here’s what we now know:

• The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008. 

• Knowledge of the secret bailout funds was not shared with Congress even while it was drafting and debating legislation to break up the big banks.

Artificial leaf could debut new era of 'fast-food energy'

Technology for making an "artificial leaf" holds the potential for opening an era of "fast-food energy," in which people generate their own electricity at home with low-cost equipment perfect for the 3 billion people living in developing countries and even home-owners in the United States. That's among the prospects emerging from research on a new genre of "electrofuels" described in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, the American Chemical Society's weekly newsmagazine.

That Bell Curve Crap -- Again

by Steven D
Tue Nov 29th, 2011 at 07:14:13 PM EST

I understand the fascination with certain white people wanting to justify their political agenda through insisting that African Americans are genetically pre-determined to be less intelligent than whites. Andrew Sullivan is perhaps the most well known media figure who continues to promote this view over and over:

[The study of intelligence] has been strangled by p.c. egalitarianism. The reason is the resilience of racial differences in IQ in the data, perhaps most definitively proven by UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen:

"Jensen is still greatly respected by many traditional intelligence researchers," Garlick says. "By 'traditional intelligence researchers,' I mean researchers who still value IQ and continue to do studies that evaluate the effectiveness of IQ in predicting outcomes, or studies that examine possible mechanisms that may cause differences in IQ. However, due to the unpopularity of Jensen’s findings, this group of researchers is now very small. 

"The major move in response to Jensen’s findings hasn’t been rigorous and compelling research to try and disprove his hypotheses and findings. Rather, it has led to an exodus of researchers away from the area, and a drying up of grant funding and research positions for researchers interested in IQ."

Andrew Sullivan fails to acknowledge that the conclusions reached by the authors of the Bell Curve have been shown to be insufficient to show a genetic component between IQ and race (two nebulous concepts in and of themselves).

The Enshrined Entitlements of America’s Wealthy

Tuesday, 11/29/2011 - 10:16 am by Suzanne Mettler

Thirty years ago, Republicans criticized tax expenditures for distorting the market. Now both parties view them as sacrosanct.

The super committee on deficit reduction has now disbanded without even having managed to agree on scaling back tax expenditures. These social welfare policies that are hidden in the tax code bestow their greatest benefits on high-income taxpayers, as I have shown elsewhere. They amount to over 7 percent of GDP, more than what we spend on either defense, Social Security, or Medicare and Medicaid combined, not to mention domestic discretionary programs, which cost far less than any of these.

People's Guide to the Federal Budget

Introduction – Why a People’s Guide?

For a number of years as part of the President's annual budget request the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) included “A Citizen's Guide to the Federal Budget." OMB released the last Citizen's Guide in February, 2001 to accompany the Fiscal Year 2002 budget request. According to that last version, "we know you care a lot about how the Government spends your money. That’s why A Citizen’s Guide to the Federal Budget was created...We hope to make the budget more accessible and understandable."

Since 2001 taxpayers have had to fend for themselves in efforts to make the budget more accessible and understandable. Yet we still care a lot about how the government spends our money, perhaps now more than ever. National Priorities Project (NPP) believes that all people affected by federal spending priorities should have the ability and opportunity to shape our nation's budget. To that end, NPP strives to make complex federal budget information transparent and accessible so people can prioritize and influence how their tax dollars are spent.

Time to Retake Politics From the One Percent in Both Political Parties

by Dean Baker

The country is still celebrating the inability of the supercommittee to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it is important to move on from this victory to retake control of the political debate from the One Percent. As it stands, the One Percent are insisting that the country genuflect over the non-problem of the budget deficit, at a time when tens of millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed, millions of people are facing the loss of their homes and tens of millions of baby boomers are approaching retirement with little other than their Social Security to support them.

The deficit is the agenda of the One Percent. There is no reason that the rest of us should be concerned about budget deficits when the rest of the country is struggling with the economic disaster created by the greed and incompetence of the One Percent.

How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word of Fannie Mae Rescue

By Richard Teitelbaum - Nov 29, 2011 12:46 PM ET

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)

Now, amid tumbling home prices and near-record foreclosures, attention was focused on a new source of contagion: Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac, which together had more than $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and other debt outstanding, Bloomberg Markets reports in its January issue.

Judge Rakoff stands up to SEC and Citigroup

by AdamB

You don't want to mess with the Hon. Jed Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

He's the judge, after all, who sought to declare the federal death penalty unconstitutional (even though the parties didn't ask him to), refused in 2009 to approve the SEC's settlement with Merrill Lynch over bonuses until the penalty increased from $33M to $150M, and who ordered the Pentagon in 2006 to release the names of all Guantanamo detainees.

GOP Deniers Block Creation Of Climate Service

By Brad Johnson on Nov 21, 2011 at 12:36 pm

Science-averse Republicans have once again blocked the establishment of a National Climate Service by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, moving from denial of man-made climate change to the denial of climate itself. “I’m very concerned that NOAA has taken steps to form what amounts to a shadow climate service operation,” House science committee chair Ralph Hall (R-TX) cried in September. At a hearing in June, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) blasted the budget-neutral plan to consolidate NOAA’s existing, widely dispersed, climate capabilities under a single management structure as “propaganda services.”

They're owning this cooperation

Taking a cue from a Spanish hill town, the mayor of Richmond, Calif., is recognizing worker-owned co-ops as a possible path out of the poverty and unemployment that plague her city.

By Lee Romney, Los Angeles Times

November 28, 2011, 5:33 p.m.

Reporting from Richmond, Calif.— 

 

Where a hot dog stand now is the main lunchtime option for city workers in this distressed Bay Area town, soon they'll be able to choose from steel-cut oatmeal, goat cheese empanadas and white bean and kale stew, prepared in a mobile cafe. Its owners will share in the decision-making — and any profits.

Richmond Solar has trained needy residents to work as green-energy installers and now aims to transform some into bosses by forming a worker-owned cooperative.

Paul Krugman: Things to Tax

The supercommittee was a superdud — and we should be glad. Nonetheless, at some point we’ll have to rein in budget deficits. And when we do, here’s a thought: How about making increased revenue an important part of the deal?

And I don’t just mean a return to Clinton-era tax rates. Why should 1990s taxes be considered the outer limit of revenue collection? Think about it: The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts? Why not also push some taxes above their levels in the 1990s?

Let me suggest two areas in which it would make a lot of sense to raise taxes in earnest, not just return them to pre-Bush levels: taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions.

5 Things to Know About the Durban Climate Talks


The 17th-annual UN climate conference begins this week. What can we expect?

—By Kate Sheppard | Mon Nov. 28, 2011 3:00 AM PST

What a difference two years makes. Heading into the 15th Conference of the Parties, the annual United Nations confab on climate change, hopes were high in Copenhagen, Denmark, that world leaders would hash out a new international agreement on how to address rising temperatures. Now, two years later, many of the same questions remain as negotiators arrive in Durban, South Africa, this week.

Will the United States and leaders of major developing nations like China and India agree to legally binding emission reduction targets? What will come of the Kyoto Protocol, the current pact that guides climate goals set by industrialized nations? (Excluding, of course, the US.) Where will the promised $100 billion in long-term financing to help the poorest nations deal with climate change come from? All of these questions loom as negotiators meet in Durban from November 28 through December 10.

Wall Street Banks Earned Billions In Profits Off $7.7 Trillion In Secret Fed Loans Made During The Financial Crisis

By Travis Waldron on Nov 28, 2011 at 9:25 am

In the lead-up to the financial crisis that crippled the American economy and plunged the country into a recession, the Federal Reserve made trillions in undisclosed loans to struggling banks and financial institutions, according to official documents obtained by Bloomberg News. Six of the country’s largest banks then turned those loans into more than $13 billion in previously undisclosed profits.


The total cost of the Fed loans amounted to $7.77 trillion, and unlike the funds made available by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the loans came with virtually no strings attached for the banks:

Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Offers Anything but the Truth

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on November 26, 2011, Printed on November 28, 2011

There has been a flurry of speculation surrounding various reports suggesting that a “coordinated,” nationwide crack-down on the Occupy Movement is underway. The problem with these stories lies in the fact that the word “coordinated” is too vague to offer any analytic value.

The difference between local officials talking to each other — or federal law enforcement agencies advising them on what they see as “best practices” for evicting local occupations — and some unseen hand directing, incentivizing or coercing municipalities to do so when they would not otherwise be so inclined is not a minor one. It’s not a matter of semantics or a distinction without difference. As I wrote recently, “if federal authorities were ordering cities to crack down on their local occupations in a concerted effort to wipe out a movement that has spread like wildfire across the country, that would indeed be a huge, and hugely troubling story. In the United States, policing protests is a local matter, and law enforcement agencies must remain accountable for their actions to local officials. Local government’s autonomy in this regard is an important principle.”

To Conservatives, Climate Change is Trojan Horse to Abolish Capitalism

By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on November 27, 2011, Printed on November 28, 2011

The following article first appeared on the Web site of the Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for its email newsletters. 

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

Senators Demand the Military Lock Up American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window

While nearly all Americans head to family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving, the Senate is gearing up for a vote on Monday or Tuesday that goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans. The Senate will be voting on a bill that will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield — even people in the United States itself.

Senators need to hear from you, on whether you think your front yard is part of a “battlefield” and if any president can send the military anywhere in the world to imprison civilians without charge or trial.

The 1%’s European Coup

by swellsman

The last thing the world needs at a time like this is democracy.  That is what got us into this mess in the first place.  People wanting stuff, and voting for people who said they’d give ‘em that stuff, without showing they’re working.             --Comedian Andy Zaltzman to John Oliver
            The Bugle, Ep. 173a

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Harold Meyerson wrote about “The Growing Tension Between Capitalism and Democracy.”  Meyerson pointed out that

Over the past year . . . capitalism has fairly rolled over democracy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Europe, where financial institutions and large investors have gone to war under the banner of austerity, and governments of nations with not-very-productive or overextended economies have found that they could not satisfy those demands and still cling to power. The elected governments of Greece and Italy have been deposed; financial technocrats are now at the helm of both nations. . . .  It’s as though the markets throughout Europe have had enough with this democratic sovereignty nonsense.  (emphasis added)

Essentially, Meyerson is arguing that the entwined financial system of the Eurozone now gives “financial technocrats” more power to dictate any particular Eurozone country’s fiscal policies than that country’s own citizens have.

The Real Scandal: The Endless Effort to Smear Climate Scientists
By Climate Guest Blogger on Nov 25, 2011 at 4:05 pm

This year has already witnessed multiple events that break climate records: the drought in East Africa, the worst drought in Texas’ recorded history, and record breaking storms and floods in the US south. Those events, anticipated by climatologists decades ago, should remind us that those who persecute and harass scientists, or mendaciously misrepresent their actions and findings, have no sense of decency.