Karl Rove’s Latest Attack On Elizabeth Warren

By Simon Johnson

Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS has another ad out attacking Elizabeth Warren (video here).   This is beyond ludicrous – the ad attempts to blame Ms. Warren for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and for bank bailouts.  The principle here seems to be that when the truth cannot be slanted in a way you want, just ignore the facts and go all out for disinformation.

I count at least five misrepresentations in the ad, and I suggest the following corrections:

The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today-Hallelujah!

I have long argued that the impact of the Affordable Care Act is not nearly as big of a deal as opponents would have you believe. At the end of the day, the law is – in the main – little more than a successful effort to put an end to some of the more egregious health insurer abuses while creating an environment that should bring more Americans into programs that will give them at least some of the health care coverage they need.

There is, however, one notable exception – and it’s one that should have a long lasting and powerful impact on the future of health care in our country.

The Koch Brothers, ALEC and the Savage Assault on Democracy

John Nichols on December 9, 2011 - 8:44am ET

 

Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch finally got their way in 2011. After their decades of funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators, the project began finally to yield the intended result.
 
For the first time in decades, the United States saw a steady dismantling of the laws, regulations, programs and practices put in place to make real the promise of American democracy.

The Rise of the New Confederacy: How America-Hating Right-Wingers Took Over the GOP

In These Times / By Theo Anderson

The rhetoric of Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry about the “real America” is not imagined: They and those who oppose them live in different Americas.

What is America, and what is an American? If anything binds us together across space and time, it is our ideals and the stories we tell about our pursuit of them. From the beginning, we set ourselves against Europe’s hierarchies. We exalted democratic government, equality of opportunity and individual freedom. We conceived of our experiment as “the last best hope of earth,” in Lincoln’s words.

But ideals don’t live in a vacuum; they take root in the soil of institutions. Beginning with our first experiments in self-government, the dissonance between our ideals and our institutional practices–especially the tolerance and extension of slavery–created tensions that finally tore us apart.

Memo to American Consumers: You Just Got Screwed... Again

Posted: 12/ 8/11 09:13 PM ET

The too-big-to-fail boys and their GOP handmaidens -- the Hon. Richard Shelby, the Hon. Mitch McConnell and the other 43 legislative dwarves in the U.S. Senate -- have struck again.

Today, they blocked the confirmation of Richard Cordray as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is the first federal regulator with the sole purpose of protecting regular people from the likes of financial scoundrels.

Plain and simple -- just like we experienced a few months earlier with Elizabeth Warren (whose potential nomination was derailed by the same band of robber barons) -- Mr. Cordray is the newest roadkill on the conservative superhighway, and the American people have been hosed yet again. Now, you might not realize this, because you're about to witness a cable news cycle full of Republican senators prattling on as to why their vote was really about accountability and good government.

Elder Poverty and a GOP Sucker Punch - NOW Will Democrats Pledge to Defend Social Security?

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

December 9, 2011 - 12:20am ET 

Here are three things to consider:

Nearly one American in six over the age of 65 lives in poverty. A newly progressivized Barack Obama is rocking the populist bandwagon from Osawatomie to the Oval Office. And the Republicans have started attacking Democrats on Social Security - from the left.

This would be a good time for the President and other 'centrist' Democrats to offer the country a firm pledge not to cut Social Security benefits in any way, now or in the future.

Paul Krugman: All the G.O.P.’s Gekkos

Almost a quarter of a century has passed since the release of the movie “Wall Street,” and the film seems more relevant than ever. The self-righteous screeds of financial tycoons denouncing President Obama all read like variations on Gordon Gekko’s famous “greed is good” speech, while the complaints of Occupy Wall Street sound just like what Gekko says in private: “I create nothing. I own,” he declares at one point; at another, he asks his protégé, “Now you’re not naïve enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you, buddy?”

Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the movie went a little off at the end. It closes with Gekko getting his comeuppance, and justice served thanks to the diligence of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In reality, the financial industry just kept getting more and more powerful, and the regulators were neutered. 

The U.S. is facing a retirement security crisis -- and Washington wants to make it worse

COMMENTARY | December 08, 2011
 
More and more older people will be living in poverty as it is, writes a scholar at the Claude Pepper Foundation. So why are even Democrats talking about cutting their lifelines?

By Larry Polivka
lpolivka2@fsu.edu
The same political and corporate elites who are largely responsible for the erosion of retirement security now seem dead set on making the problem even worse.

Today's workers -- many of them trapped in low wage jobs with declining benefits -- are already facing a grim future in which the kind of retirement their parents were able to take for granted is out of reach. Unemployment and stagnant or declining wages have drained American families of the capacity to save for retirement. Likewise, the replacement of defined benefits (for the half of the U.S. labor force with a pension of any kind) by defined contributions plans, which depend on the variable performance of markets, have made income from private pensions generally smaller and less reliable. Increasing health care costs have also eroded the retirement security of most workers.

Paleoclimate Record Points Toward Potential Rapid Climate Changes

New research into the Earth's paleoclimate history by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James E. Hansen suggests the potential for rapid climate changes this century, including multiple meters of sea level rise, if global warming is not abated.

By looking at how the Earth's climate responded to past natural changes, Hansen sought insight into a fundamental question raised by ongoing human-caused climate change: "What is the dangerous level of global warming?" Some international leaders have suggested a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times in order to avert catastrophic change. But Hansen said at a press briefing at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on Tues, Dec. 6, that warming of 2 degrees Celsius would lead to drastic changes, such as significant ice sheet loss in Greenland and Antarctica.

Rupert Murdoch Lobbies Congress To Restrict Internet

First Posted: 12/ 7/11 08:26 PM ET Updated: 12/ 8/11 08:32 AM ET 

WASHINGTON -- News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch threw his weight behind Congress' attempt to restrict the Internet, personally lobbying leaders on Capitol Hill Wednesday for two measures that purport to combat piracy.

Murdoch's media empire is among some 350 large corporations that have come out in favor of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, as well as the Protect IP Act in the Senate.

Both measures would require Internet operators to police activity online, and would mandate Internet giants like Google and AOL (the parent company of The Huffington Post and an opponent of the bills) and credit card companies to take down sites that have content deemed to be in violation of copyright rules.

Economic Experts Gather In DC To Explain Why Politics Has Doomed Us

Brian Beutler, December 9, 2011, 6:00 AM

 

As the U.S. government and governments in Europe respond to the global economic slump with conservative austerity measures, it’s easy to forget that the overwhelming professional economic consensus is that depressed countries that can afford to should be doing the opposite — ramping up government purchases of goods and services and putting off the budget cuts and tax increases for a few years.

This isn’t even close to what’s happening. And as the space between what these experts think should happen and what global elites are actually doing grows, the experts’ forecast is becoming more and more pessimistic.

The Internet’s Intolerable Acts

You should be very afraid of a pair of bills that threaten Internet freedom.

By James Losey and Sascha Meinrath
Posted Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011, at 7:19 AM ET

The United States of America was forged in resistance to collective reprisals—the punishment of many for the acts of few. In 1774, following the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed a series of laws—including the mandated closure of the port of Boston—meant to penalize the people of Massachusetts. These abuses of power, labeled the “Intolerable Acts,” catalyzed the American Revolution by making plain the oppression of the British crown.

More than 200 years later, the U.S. Congress is considering bills that would lead to collective reprisals against online communities.* The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House are supposed to address copyright infringement and counterfeiting. In reality, they are so technically impractical that they do little to address these problems. They would, however, undermine participatory democracy and human rights, which is why these bills have garnered near-universal condemnation from both human rights groups and technologists.

Building a sustainable hydrogen economy

SHE helps the environment more than HE

The concept of the hydrogen economy (HE), in which hydrogen would replace the carbon-based fossil fuels of the twentieth century was first mooted in the 1970s. Today, HE is seen as a potential solution to the dual global crises of climate change and dwindling oil reserves. A research paper to be published in the International Journal of Sustainable Design suggests that HE is wrong and SHE has the answer in the sustainable hydrogen economy.

Plummeting Income Shaves Household Cash

By Frank Bass and Timothy R. Homan - Dec 8, 2011 12:00 AM ET

The housing market collapse, historically low interest rates and corporations stingy with dividends helped cut the median household income in two of every three U.S. counties, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today.

The number of American households that made money from rent, interest or dividends fell by one-third to 24.2 percent in 2010, even in affluent counties including those that encompass New York City and San Francisco.

Nancy Pelosi Games Out The Long Fight Over Medicare And The Rest Of The Safety Net

Brian Beutler, December 7, 2011, 4:45 AM

 

Eight months is a long time in politics, but it will be eight months ago next week that House Republicans voted overwhelmingly for a budget that envisioned a massively scaled-down social safety net — a smaller, privatized health care system for old people, to replace traditional Medicare; Medicaid financially constrained, and handed over to state governments; cuts to various other support programs that benefit the poor, the young, and the elderly.

That didn’t sit well with voters. And in the months that followed, Republicans tried to contain the fallout by making federal deficits a central political issue while forcing Democrats to agree to real cuts to these programs — all while refusing themselves to raise taxes, even on the very wealthiest Americans.

Michigan's Radical Assault on Public Education

The state's GOP leaders are at the forefront of a national movement to eviscerate teachers' unions and privatize public schools.

—By Andy Kroll | Mon Dec. 5, 2011 3:00 AM PST

The list of initiatives reads like a grand plan to dismantle public education as we know it: Slash education spending. Outsource public teachers. Curb collective-bargaining rights. Kneecap teachers' unions. Open the floodgates to charter and "cyber" schools.

Welcome to education reform in the state of Michigan, where a Republican-dominated Legislature and a GOP governor are pushing one of the broadest anti-union, pro-privatization agendas in the country. Michigan is grappling with budget shortfalls like other states including Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Jersey—all places where GOP leaders (and occasionally Democrats) are exploiting the economic downturn to launch an ideological assault on teachers' unions and public school systems. Although some of Michigan's legislative attempts to overhaul public education have met resistance, state lawmakers have made an unprecedented push toward for-profit schools, dubious online curricula, and budget cuts and anti-union measures that would make the public teaching profession ever more insecure.

The Real History of 'Corporate Personhood': Meet the Man to Blame for Corporations Having More Rights Than You

By Jeffrey Clements, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Posted on December 6, 2011, Printed on December 10, 2011

The following is an excerpt of Jeffrey Clement's Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It.) Click here to order a copy.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a mild-mannered, courtly, and shrewd corporate lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, soon to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court, wrote a memorandum to his client, the United States Chamber of Commerce. He outlined a critique and a plan that changed America.

Lewis Powell, like the Citizens United dissenter Justice John Paul Stevens, was a decorated World War II veteran who returned to his hometown to build a most respected corporate law practice. By all accounts, Powell was a gentleman — reserved, polite, and gracious — and a distinguished lawyer and public servant. Commentators and law professors cite Powell’s “qualities of temperament and character” and his “modest” and “restrained” approach to judging. At his funeral in 1998, Sandra Day O’Connor, who had joined the Supreme Court in 1987, said, “For those who seek a model of human kindness, decency, exemplary behavior, and integrity, there will never be a better man.” Even the rare critic will cite Lewis Powell’s decency and kindness.

Solar power much cheaper to produce than most analysts realize, study finds

2011-12-07

The public is being kept in t
he dark about the viability of solar photovoltaic energy, according to a study conducted at Queen’s University.

“Many analysts project a higher cost for solar photovoltaic energy because they don’t consider recent technological advancements and price reductions,” says Joshua Pearce, Adjunct Professor, Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. “Older models for determining solar photovoltaic energy costs are too conservative.”

Dr. Pearce believes solar photovoltaic systems are near the “tipping point” where they can produce energy for about the same price other traditional sources of energy.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, A New Cold War in Asia?

Posted by Michael Klare at 9:24am, December 6, 2011.

 

Last Friday, the U.S. military formally handed over its largest base in Iraq, the ill-named “Camp Victory,” to the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.  The next morning, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius officially declared counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East dead in -- if you don’t mind an inapt word -- the water.  (He is personally in mourning.)  He quoted one unnamed official describing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s planning for the new Pentagon budget in this fashion: “It’s not going to be likely that we will deploy 150,000 troops to an area the way we did in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

No indeed.  As a result, in the inter-service scramble for the biggest slice of the Defense Department’s budgetary pie, the winners, Ignatius tells us, are going to be the Air Force and the Navy.  Translated geopolitically, this means that the focus of future military planning will switch to the Pacific -- with this country’s largest foreign creditor, China (not al-Qaeda), as the new enemy.

They're Sacrificing Us to Save Wall Street - But "Occupy Our Homes" Could Change That

By Richard Eskow

Created 12/05/2011 - 9:00pm

This week 60 Minutes gave viewers a good look [1] at the widespread criminality that created the Wall Street mortgage boom and led to our ongoing financial crisis. They also saw some of the overwhelming evidence of illegal activity on the part of big banks, and were reminded that none of those banks' executives have been prosecuted.
As u
gly as the situation is, there is some logic behind the government's actions - and its inactions. They're acting on a tragically incorrect (but internally coherent) set of assumptions that can be summed up in one sentence. It goes something like this:

"To preserve the health of the American economy, banks must be allowed to keep preying on their consumers."

That's it. That's the logic.

The infantile style in American politics

The GOP has reverted to a pre-potty-trained state. A 50-year-old essay explains why

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The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium

by Bill McKibben

 

The most important piece of news yesterday, this week, this month, and this year was a new set of statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project. It showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the most important pieces of data in the last, oh, three centuries, since according to the New York Times it represented “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.”

What it means, in climate terms, is that we’ve all but lost the battle to reduce the damage from global warming. The planet has already warmed about a degree Celsius; it’s clearly going to go well past two degrees. It means, in political terms, that the fossil fuel industry has delayed effective action for the 12 years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It means, in diplomatic terms, that the endless talks underway in Durban should be more important than ever--they should be the focus of a planetary population desperate to figure out how it’s going to survive the century.

The Stop Online Piracy Act is Class War in Cyberspace, Enriching the 1% at the Expense of the 99%

SOPA would require every web site in the country to become unpaid copyright enforcement officers for Time Warner, Disney and The Washington Post, among others.

December 5, 2011  |  The One Percent and their employees are masters of word play. They turned the estate tax into the "death tax," life-saving health and environmental rules became "job-killing" regulations and, of course, when it comes to taxes, the richest of the rich are now "job creators" who are supposed to be exempt from paying taxes. 

Given this track record, it is hardly surprising that a bill that would require every web site in the country to become unpaid copyright enforcement officers for Time Warner, Disney and The Washington Post comes packaged as the "Stop Online Piracy Act." While the name may lead the public to believe that Congress is trying to keep our email pure and our computer screens safe, the real story is that the One Percent are again trying to rig the rules so that they get as many dollars as possible from the rest of us.

David Cay Johnston: The taxpayers’ burden

Dec 3, 2011 20:38 EST

Taxpayers have much at risk in the coordinated action that six central banks took this week to lower short-term interest rates and make it easier to issue dollar-denominated loans to cope with the European debt crisis.

The joint action on the last day of November is being characterized widely as buying time to deal with the European government debt crisis. But fears about whether the PIGS — Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain — can pay back their debts in full are just a symptom of a metastasizing economic disease that has been plaguing the West for three decades. That is where the risks to taxpayers come in.

The disease was man-made, a policy virus cooked up by the Chicago School, where leading theorists persuaded the world to cast aside four millennia of human experience in favor of their radical legal and economic ideas. They have achieved this by couching their plans in language that made them seem conservative when the theories were the antithesis of conservative, at least in the classic meaning of that word.

Digital mutiny sinks piracy bill

05 December 2011 by Jim Giles

An online revolt has forced US Congress to rethink a draconian piracy bill, but the war isn't over

SO THAT'S what a digital revolt looks like. A million-and-a-half emails and almost 90,000 phone calls to US Congress. Public complaints from Google and Facebook. Even a few thousand old-fashioned letters to the US House of Representatives.

This internet ire, marshalled under the banner of American Censorship Day on 16 November, came in opposition to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), legislation aimed at tackling the online trade in copyrighted movies and music. Claims that the act, if passed, will "break the internet" helped persuade several big companies, including a trade group which represents Apple and Microsoft, to withdraw their support. Then, last week, SOPA's backers in the House said they were open to changing the bill. Internet Activists 1, Big Media 0.

Paul Krugman: Send in the Clueless

There are two crucial things you need to understand about the current state of American politics. First, given the still dire economic situation, 2012 should be a year of Republican triumph. Second, the G.O.P. may nonetheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — because Herman Cain was not an accident.

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).

And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.

Bullies, Liars and Impostors: How Facebook and Go Daddy Shield Scott Walker's Online Guerillas

By Adele M. Stan and Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on December 4, 2011, Printed on December 5, 2011

In Wisconsin, as in states around the nation, Republican lawmakers claim to be concerned with the integrity of the voting process and with fighting fraud. At least that 's the rationale for the passage of a new voter ID law passed this spring.

But as hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites seek a recall election of Gov. Scott Walker, a spate of online disinformation, bullying and outright calls for the destruction of recall petitions by anonymous Web entities, possibly administered from out of state, raise a question: Who are the real impostors and fraudsters in Wisconsin's elections?

White House Threatens Veto Of Indefinite Detention Bill

by MIchael McAuliff 

 

WASHINGTON -- Accusing the Senate of "political micromanagement" of national security, the White House Friday stood by its threat to veto a defense bill over controversial military detention provisions.

The National Defense Authorization Act passed Thursday by the Senate contains a section that spells out the military's power to detain Americans indefinitely without trial and mandates military detention for some terrorism suspects.

New reports identify impacts of climate change on world's highest mountains

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA -- Findings from the most comprehensive assessment to date on climate change, snow and glacier melt in Asia's mountainous Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region -- site of Mount Everest and many of the world's tallest peaks -- highlight the region's extreme vulnerability to climate change, as rising temperatures disturb the balance of snow, ice and water, threatening millions of mountain people and 1.3 billion people living downstream in Asia's major river basins.

The findings, published in three reports by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), were released today during Mountain Day, a convening of mountain experts, policy makers, and climate change negotiators on the sidelines of UN climate talks.

America's army of jobless

The real number of unemployed or underemployed people in the U.S. is a stunning 26.9 million.

By David B. Grusky

November 30, 2011

When President Obama announced that 40,000 troops now in Iraq would come home by the end of the year, the initial excitement quickly turned to concern that our already struggling economy couldn't easily handle the shock of an additional 40,000 job seekers.

Although we should, of course, care deeply about returning Iraq war veterans, we ought not to think for a moment that adding 40,000 workers to the job-seeking pool will break the back of the economy. It's already broken. The nation is laboring under the weight of a reserve army of nearly 27 million women and men who don't have a full-time job, but most surely want one.