The Deal That Saved Detroit (and Banned Strikes)

by Laura Flanders

 

President Obama is, as AP puts it, “wearing his decision to rescue General Motors and Chrysler three years ago as a badge of honor” on his re-election campaign. It saved jobs and working communities, brought the US auto industry back from the brink. In January, US auto sales were up 11 percent over a year ago, and a proud president was cooing to the college students of Ann Arbor, Michigan:

“The American auto industry was on the verge of collapse and some politicians were willing to let it just die. We said no.… We believe in the workers of this state.”

Social Security: Mitch Daniels and the Millionaires' "Means-Testing" Scam

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

February 2, 2012 - 2:56pm ET 

Last week Republican Mitch Daniels once again pushed the "means testing" argument against Social Security, saying that we can no longer "afford to send millionaires pension checks" or  "pay medical bills for even the wealthiest among us."

Daniels even appropriated the rhetoric of the 99 percent, arguing that we must "stop sending the wealthy benefits they do not need, and stop providing them so many tax preferences that distort our economy and do little or nothing to foster growth."

I kept waiting for Grover Norquist or Karl Rove to yell "mic check!"  But behind Daniels' 99-percent rhetoric lies a means-testing scam designed to protect millionaires, not restore justice.

7 Privacy Threats the Constitution Can't Protect You Against

By Tana Ganeva

When it comes to a spate of new technologies, our privacy protections are wildly outdated.

February 4, 2012 | Last week, the Roberts Supreme Court uncharacteristically handed down a decision that doesn't radically infringe on civil liberties. The justices unanimously ruled that police overshot their authority by planting a GPS device on suspected drug dealer Antoine Jones' car without a warrant, tracking his movements for over a month. For now, Americans can rest assured that police can't secretly tag them -- at least without a warrant.

At the same time, privacy advocates pointed out -- and some of the justices admitted -- that the court's majority opinion in US vs. Jones completely skirted more pressing privacy issues. The problem, the majority argued, was that police had trespassed on Jones' private property by planting a GPS device on his car. The majority opinion did not address whether or not it's okay for law enforcement to use a sophisticated surveillance technology to log someone's movements for a whole month without a warrant.

Koch Brothers Convene Super-Secret Billionaires' Meeting for 2012 Elections

By Lee Fang

Some of America's wealthiest Republicans flew into Palm Springs last weekend to update their stealthy political strategy for 2012.

February 4, 2012  |   At a retreat last weekend, dozens of wealthy donors convened in a large golf resort in Indian Wells, Calif. for a four day conference to raise money and plot out election year strategy, the Republic Report has confirmed. We traveled to the conference, and spoke to a few of the attendees.

The summit, organized by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, was cloaked in secrecy. Helicopters, private security and police officers from neighboring cities patrolled the area constantly. In previous years, Supreme Court justices, some of the wealthiest businessmen in the country and Republican politicians like Congressman Paul Ryan have all gathered at these twice-annual events. The Esmerelda Renaissance, the conference venue this year, was guarded carefully with every entrance blocked and the entire 560-room resort rented out. I arrived at the hotel the night before the event, but was followed closely by security and asked to leave the next morning before the Koch meeting guests arrived.

Washington Post Gets Behind Republican Economic Agenda

In a major business section article on President Obama's plans to address inequality, the Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) came down squarely on the side of the Republicans. The Republican slant starts with the headline, "Obama's push to revive middle class will clash with long-term trends." This one undoubtedly had people all over the metro area saying, "duh."

Of course it will clash with long-term trends, that would be the point. No one thinks that the 1 percent just got all of our money yesterday. The process of upward redistribution has been going on for more than three decades.

Why Do Dangerous Financial Criminals Roam Free?

By June Carbone

Prosecutors like Eric Schneiderman need cops on the beat to put financial crooks behind bars. But thanks to Bush, these cops are missing in action.

February 4, 2012  |   American Public Media's "Marketplace" had a recent segment focused on why it has taken so long to bring criminal prosecutions related to the financial crisis. Reporters observed that at the beginning of the crisis, the Obama administration wanted to calm the financial industry rather than impose accountability. They speculated, along with Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street participants, many of whom have been calling for prosecutions, that Obama’s creation of a new group to prosecute mortgage fraud led by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman was likely to be politically motivated. And they indicated that financial crimes are complex and prosecutors need time to develop their cases.

But here's what they didn't say: A major reason the prosecutions don’t exist is that President George W. Bush took the cops off the beat.

Paul Krugman: Romney Isn’t Concerned

If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.

Katha Pollitt: The Komen Foundation Pinkwashes Anti-choicers, Punks Planned Parenthood

Remember when anti-choicers got LifeWay Christian Resources to pull its pink-covered Here’s Hope Breast Cancer Bibles from Walmart and other stores because one dollar of every sale went to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation? The antis were upset that the wealthy and influential breast-cancer charity made grants to Planned Parenthood for breast exams and mammograms for low-income women. And remember when Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio, told his flock to stop raising money for Komen because someday in the future it might endorse stem cell research? Crazy, right?

The anti-choice movement can be so clumsy, and so weird, we forget that it is also smart and strategic and busy busy busy. Because while you were shaking your head over pink Bibles and stem-cell futurology, Komen was hiring Karen Handel as senior vice president for public policy. Handel is not your typical philanthropy administrator. She is a Republican pol, a former Georgia secretary of state, who ran in the 2010 gubernatorial primary, with endorsements from Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and anti-immigrant finger-pointing Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.

Soaking the Poor, State by State

—By Kevin Drum | Fri Feb. 3, 2012 3:00 AM PST

You have heard, perhaps, that rich people in America are egregiously overtaxed. And the poor? They're the lucky duckies! Why, 47 percent of Americans pay no taxes at all!

(This is not true, of course. Many poor and elderly Americans pay no federal income tax, but they pay plenty of other taxes.)

Still and all, it's true that the federal income tax is indeed progressive. Conservatives are right about that—though it's not as progressive as it used to be, back before top marginal rates were lowered and capital gains taxes were slashed in half. But conservatives are a little less excited to talk about other kinds of taxes.

Why We Got Ayn Rand Instead of FDR: Thomas Frank on How Tea Party 'Populism' Derailed a New New Deal

By Thomas Frank, Picador Press
Posted on February 1, 2012, Printed on February 4, 2012

An appropriate metaphor for the conservative revival is the classic switcheroo, with one fear replacing another, theoretical emergencies substituting for authentic  ones, and a new villain shuffling onstage to absorb the brickbats meant for another. The conservative renaissance rewrites history according to the political demands of the moment, generates thick smokescreens of deliberate bewilderment, grabs for itself the nobility of the common toiler, and projects onto its rivals the arrogance of the aristocrat. Nor is this constant redirection of public ire a characteristic the movement developed as it went along; it was present at the creation. Indeed, redirection was the creation.

Drawer of Water, Hewer of Bullshit

The call that awakened the rebellion came not from some itinerant IWW organizer but from a TV “rant” delivered on February 19, 2009, by one Rick Santelli, a business reporter standing on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade— a reporter ranting, let us be clear, not against the traders who surrounded him but on their behalf. In retrospect, there would be few better examples of the spirit of inversion that drives  the conservative revival.

Rick Santelli had criticized many aspects of the bank bailouts over the preceding months, but on that day in February when he had the ear of the nation, the part of the  TARP that drew his disgust was, significantly, the element designed to help homeowners modify the terms of certain underwater mortgages, making payments more affordable and thus preventing foreclosures. It was the only part of TARP that was intended to directly benefit individual borrowers rather than institutional players, and thus it was supposed to help make the program popular. Instead, it brought down the wrath of this man Santelli, who found it inconceivable that such an initiative was even under consideration. “This is America!” he yelled, working himself into a rage.

One Town's War on Gay Teens

In Michele Bachmann's home district, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back. 

By Sabrina Rubin Erdely

February 2, 2012 10:55 AM ET

Every morning, Brittany Geldert stepped off the bus and bolted through the double doors of Fred Moore Middle School, her nerves already on high alert, bracing for the inevitable.

[...]
Like many 13-year-olds, Brittany knew seventh grade was a living hell. But what she didn't know was that she was caught in the crossfire of a culture war being waged by local evangelicals inspired by their high-profile congressional representative Michele Bachmann, who graduated from Anoka High School and, until recently, was a member of one of the most conservative churches in the area. When Christian activists who considered gays an abomination forced a measure through the school board forbidding the discussion of homosexuality in the district's public schools, kids like Brittany were unknowingly thrust into the heart of a clash that was about to become intertwined with tragedy.

The Right-Wing Zombie Lie About Public Workers That Just Won't Die

By Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet
Posted on February 2, 2012, Printed on February 4, 2012

With the new year, we've seen a new round of attacks on working people. Just this week, Arizona Republicans introduced a bill attacking public workers that makes Wisconsin's look mild by comparison. And just in time to add fuel to the fire, the Congressional Budget Office released a study this week on government employees' earnings that has the Right buzzing – and even some progressive pundits repeating the myth that government workers are “overpaid.”

When it comes to wages and benefits, those government workers have unions to thank for their good fortune. The CBO notes that around 21 percent of the federal workforce is unionized, as opposed to the 8 percent of the private sector that enjoys union protections. Longtime organizer and senior fellow at the Citizen Engagement Lab Matt Browner-Hamlin pointed out to AlterNet that the private sector labor movement has been decimated by decades of concerted attacks, and indeed in the last year we've seen moves both successful and unsuccessful (Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio) to curtail the power of public sector unions on the state level.

The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It

by Robert Scheer

 

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.

Yet, there they go again. Clinton is presented, in a fawning cover story in the current edition of Esquire magazine, as “Someone we can all agree on. ... Even his staunchest enemies now regard his presidency as the good old days.” In a softball interview, Clinton is once again allowed to pass himself off as a job creator without noting the subsequent loss of jobs resulting from the collapse of the housing derivatives bubble that his financial deregulatory policies promoted.

The Wall Street Journal’s willful climate lies

By Auden Schendler

1 Feb 2012 6:36 AM 

 

It wasn’t surprising that the Wall Street Journal published an error-riddled op-ed about climate change last week, essentially saying it was bunk and we shouldn’t “panic” about it. We’ve gotten used to that. But what has really started to amaze me about that newspaper’s editorial page and the far right is that they now venture beyond delusion or misinformation. They lie, and they know they are lying.

That’s a big claim, but how else do you account for the statement that “the earth hasn’t warmed for well over 10 years now” when it is well known by anyone working on climate that 2010 was the hottest year on record?

America's waning influence

Any honest diplomat will tell you that American power and global influence is waning, and if we shy away from acknowledging that fact, we'll only speed up the process.

By Rosa Brooks

February 1, 2012

Is America in decline? Is our global influence waning?

Expect that question to get plenty of airtime as the presidential campaign heats up. According to the Republicans, President Obama's fundamental foreign policy problem is that he thinks America is a fading power and all we can hope for is to "manage the decline."

Mysteries of Data Pool 3 give Rupert Murdoch a whole new headache


The arrest of four Sun journalists threatens to open a fresh phase of the scandal surrounding News International

Nick Davies
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 January 2012 15.00 EST

On Saturday morning, the police arrested four journalists who have worked for Rupert Murdoch. For a while, it looked as though these were yet more arrests of people related to the News of the World but then it became clear that this was something much more significant.

This may be the moment when the scandal that closed the NoW finally started to pose a potential threat to at least one of Murdoch's three other UK newspaper titles: the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.

The four men arrested on Saturday are not linked to the NoW. They come from the Sun, from the top of the tree – the current head of news and his crime editor, the former managing editor and deputy editor.

In Bad Faith: New Study Further Underscores Lack of Truth in Anti-Choice Claims

by Amanda Marcotte

 

One of the most frustrating parts of dealing with the modern conservative movement is their incredibly practiced disingenuousness. From a bunch of white people denying racism while pushing racist policies to a bunch of straight people claiming that they want to ban gay marriage not because they hate gays, but because they love “traditional marriage,” the constant pose of the modern right winger is one of bad faith.

Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the anti-choice movement. Despite arsons, vandalism and occasional assassinations, anti-choice activists demand the right to label their movement “non-violent.” And despite the fact that the movement is organized by religious people whose religion teaches that women should be constrained to traditional gender roles and that sex outside of marriage (or for pleasure instead of procreation) is wrong, anti-choicers cry foul if you suggest that their activism against women’s liberation or sexual freedom somehow is rooted in opposition to women’s liberation or hostility to sex.

Taxing the Rich Won't Help the Poor

by Ted Rall

 

Reacting to and attempting to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement, President Obama used his 2012 State of the Union address to discuss what he now calls "the defining issue of our time"--the growing gap between rich and poor.

"We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by," Obama said. "Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules."

6 Shocking Ways Capitalism Is Failing Working America

AlterNet / By Les Leopold

Without a dramatic rethink, our "free-enterprise" system may never again provide enough decent jobs for those who need them.

January 31, 2012  |   Capitalism is coming apart at the seams and the middle-class is paying the price. This week’s news alone bombards us with examples of how, absent a dramatic rethink, our "free-enterprise" system may never again provide enough decent jobs for those who need and want them.

1. iSlavery

Apple is arguably the world’s most successful company. Yet most of the 700,000 jobs needed to produce its cherished products are located abroad, especially in China. Why doesn’t Apple manufacture in the United States? Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher writing for the New York Times reveal that Apple is looking for a cheap, “flexible” workforce that can be put to work whenever and wherever it is needed on the company's terms.

Schneiderman: Task Force Will Go After 'Stuff That Blew Up the Economy'

George Zornick on January 30, 2012 - 11:17am ET

 

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, co-chair of the new financial fraud task force that plans to investigate the malfeasance that led to the financial meltdown, appeared on Up w/ Chris Hayes yesterday to talk about the new effort. While many important details are yet to be known—Schneiderman hedged, for example, on the number of people who would be assigned to the task force—he expressed in very strong terms that Wall Street will be held accountable.

Can Labor Help Break the Power of the Democratic Establishment? A Connecticut City's Model for Change

The success of a union-organized campaign to take over New Haven's city government offers a counternarrative to the old story of labor’s political decline. 

January 30, 2012  |  On January 1, as their colleagues around the country geared up for another year of battling governors and mayors to hold on to eroding union rights, progressive labor activists in New Haven, Connecticut, took on a different challenge: running a city government. Or at least one branch of city government.

On that day, thirty newly elected aldermen (the equivalent of city councilors) took the oath of office for a new term. Eighteen of the thirty won their seats as members of a union-organized slate taking on City Hall–backed candidates; fifteen were first-time candidates. Combined with other solidly pro-labor members of the Board of Aldermen, the slate begins its term with a commanding two-thirds majority of the city’s perennially reactive, pliant legislature. The success of the campaign startled the city—including the union activists who organized it. And it offered a counternarrative and possible strategic antidote to the old story of labor’s political decline.

Why the right hates Planned Parenthood

The pressure on the Susan G. Komen Foundation is just part of a war to separate abortion rights and women's health 

By Irin Carmon

“I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood,” Karen Handel, the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s senior vice president for public policy, wrote in 2010, during her failed gubernatorial bid in Georgia. It’s worth asking again what that mission is and why the right hates it so much, now that the foundation has withdrawn its funding for Planned Parenthood to provide breast cancer screenings to low-income women.

The right’s hatred of Planned Parenthood requires some logical inconsistencies, to put it mildly. It means constantly accusing the nonprofit organization of greedy profiteering, even while fantasizing over how stripping Planned Parenthood of federal funding for health services might shut its doors.

What Happened to Canada?

by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

Leon Panetta's explicitly authoritarian decree

By Glenn Greenwald

CBS News‘ Scott Pelley appears to be one of the very few American journalists bothered by, or even interested in, the fact that President Obama has asserted and exercised the power to target U.S. citizens for execution-by-CIA without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield. It was Pelley who deftly interrogated the GOP presidential candidates at a November debate about the propriety of due-process-free assassinations, prompting Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Michele Bachmann to applaud President Obama for assassinating U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki (just as Rick Perry, Dick and Liz Cheney, and Bill Kristol had done). Last night, Pelley did the same when he interviewed Defense Secretary and former CIA chief Leon Panetta on 60 Minutes. It’s well worth watching this three-minute clip because, although Panetta doesn’t say much that is new (he simply asserts the standard slogans and unproven assertions that Obama defenders on this topic always assert), watching a top Obama official, under decent questioning, defend the power to target U.S. citizens for assassination viscerally conveys the rigidly authoritarian mindset driving all of this:

Secret Email System Revealed In 'John Doe' Probe of Walker Staff

Submitted by Mary Bottari on January 27, 2012 - 8:00am

The morning after his "State of the State" address where Governor Scott Walker reassured Wisconsin "We are turning things around. We are heading in the right direction," the Milwaukee County District Attorney charged two more Walker staffers with multiple felony and misdemeanor counts of misconduct in public office.


Darlene Wink and Kelly Rindfleisch were charged with conducting partisan campaign work while on the public payroll. The alleged crimes took place while Walker was Milwaukee County Executive and running to be governor. These charges are no joke in the state of Wisconsin, where in 2005, two Senate Democrats and the Republican Assembly Speaker were sentenced to jail time for similar crimes in an episode dubbed "the Caucus Scandal."

Pentagon Unable to Account for Missing Iraqi Millions

Published:Monday, 30 Jan 2012 | 3:43 AM ET
Eamon Javers
CNBC Washington, DC Correspondent

The Pentagon doesn’t know what happened to more than $100 million in cash held at Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad during the Iraq war, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

What’s more, the Pentagon can’t find documents to explain what it spent as much as $1.7 billion on from funds held on behalf of the Iraqi government by the New York Federal Reserve, the report says.

How Male Global Elites Work Hard to Fix the Economy - In Their Favor

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Posted on January 30, 2012, Printed on February 2, 2012

The pomp and the platitudes. The champagne and the canapés. In the tony ski resort of Davos, Switzerland, the gemütlich gathering of global leaders for the World Economic Forum seemed like business as usual…five days of hobnobbing and male-dominated, Euro-centric jaw-flapping on the economic state of the planet. A rich and rewarding experience for the rich and rewarded.

But what about this year’s theme? Billed as “The Great Transformation,” the WEF promised sessions on rethinking capitalism, reducing inequality and solving Europe's financial crisis. Founder Klaus Schwab opened the forum with a wise observation that capitalism needs to be fixed "to serve society." Was it possible that these leaders wanted change? Had they opened their ears to the 99 percent?

Paul Krugman: The Austerity Debacle

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy. 

What Happened to the War Powers Act?

by Renee Parsons

 

On Sunday night's 60 Minutes program, Scott Pelley opened an interview with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta with the question, "How many countries are we currently engaged in a shooting war?" Surprised by the question, Panetta, who laughed heartily as if Pelley had just told him a really humorous knock-knock joke that tickled his funny bone, responded 'that's a good question. I have to stop and think about that." Panetta proceeded to answer "we're going after al Qaeda wherever they're at.... Clearly, we're confronting al Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa...." In case you're wondering, yes, Panetta confirmed that US troops are in Pakistan.

The Truth About the Conservative Mind: Why Reactionaries from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Have Fought Real Liberty

By Corey Robin, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Posted on January 29, 2012, Printed on February 2, 2012

It's been a rotten few months for the nation's wealthiest 1 percent. From the senatorial candidacy of Elizabeth Warren to Occupy Wall Street, economic elites have faced a concerted attack on their riches and power, their arrogant and unaccountable ways. And you can hear it in their voices, or at least the voices of their spokesmen. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor declared, "I, for one, am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country." Mitt Romney told an audience in Florida that "I think it's dangerous—this class warfare." So rattled is George Will that he's been forced to pull out a playbook from an older time. All but calling Warren a Communist, he accused the Oklahoma-born scholarship kid of believing that the government "is entitled to socialize—i.e., conscript—whatever portion" of an individual's property "it considers its share."

After decades of "compassionate conservatism," "a thousand points of light," and "Morning in America," dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we've forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much. With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type. It thus behooves us to take a second look at the conservative tradition, not just its current incarnation but also across time, for that tradition provides us with an understanding of why the conservative responds to Occupy Wall Street as he does.

A Scalpel, Not a Hatchet

Why is Obama cutting so little out of the Pentagon budget? He could cut even more.

By Fred Kaplan | Posted Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012, at 4:59 PM ET

The Pentagon revealed a bit more of its defense budget today, and, really, the proposed cuts in spending amount to no big deal. It would be hard to justify not making these cuts. If Congress winds up wanting to cut deeper, there’s plenty of room for more hacking.

First, a word of caution: There are many ways to calculate a “cut,” and some will no doubt invoke a few to claim that the Obama administration’s cuts are severe. Let’s go to the numbers.

Thomas Friedman Wants to Take Away the Weekend

Mark Engler - January 27, 2012 9:00 am

 

The labor movement brought you the weekend. Thomas Friedman wants to take it away.

Even as he serves as a leading champion of corporate globalization, the New York Times columnist and flat-world author has a way of highlighting how ordinary people hardly have reason to be thrilled by what transnational capitalism has on offer. Case in point: in his most recent column, Friedman argues that “Average is Over.” Those with merely par-for-the-course skills and education, he tells us, are bound to find their jobs replaced by foreign workers or by new technology.

Capital Income Taxation and Estate Taxation

By Matthew Yglesias  |  Posted Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012, at 10:10 AM ET

With the differential tax treatment of investment income and labor income in the news, I thought it would be interesting to highlight some of the academic research on the subject. The standard "classic" result in this field is, in fact, that an optimal system would have no taxation of investment income. But there are several strands of research that question some of the premises underlying that analysis. One popular line of inquiry makes what amounts to a political economy argument that if you have hugely differentially taxation of different kinds of income you end up generating more and more shenanigans like the "carried interest" loophole where smartypants rich guys find ways to reclassify labor income as capital income. But Thomas Piketty and Emannuel Saez take a different approach in "A Theory of Optimal Capital Taxation" (PDF) arguing that we should see capital income taxation as a kind of distributed inheretance tax:

The Siren Call of Austerity

by David Cay Johnston

 

The World Economic Forum opened in Davos amid choruses of central bankers and economists calling for governments to cut spending.
 
This message of austerity is like the call of the ancient Sirens, whose music lured sailors to shipwreck.

Who is Sheldon Adelson and why is he buying Newt Gingrich?
By Gaius Publius on 1/29/2012 09:15:00 AM 


In a recent article in that wonderful publication, New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew examines our election system and asks: "Can We Have a Democratic Election?"

It's a longish piece and worth your time. She covers many aspects of the answer, including the Republican war on voting rights.

Dirty Money

The astonishing new data showing that simply eliminating inefficient fossil fuel subsidies could achieve half the world’s carbon reduction goals.

By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012, at 1:20 PM ET

What if I told you that we could obtain half the reduction in carbon emissions needed to stave off climate disaster not with new government interventions in the economy but simply by removing existing interventions?

Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency is telling you exactly that.

Drive-by Scanning: Officials Expand Use and Dose of Radiation for Security Screening

by Michael Grabell
ProPublica, Jan. 27, 2012, 9:30 a.m.

U.S. law enforcement agencies are exposing people to radiation in more settings and in increasing doses to screen for explosives, weapons and drugs. In addition to the controversial airport body scanners, which are now deployed for routine screening, various X-ray devices have proliferated at the border, in prisons and on the streets of New York. 

Not only have the machines become more widespread, but some of them expose people to higher doses of radiation. And agencies have pushed the boundaries of acceptable use by X-raying people covertly, according to government documents and interviews.