Paul Krugmam: Money and Morals

Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.

So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals. 

The People's Media: Preventing Corporate Takeover of the Internet

Saturday 11 February 2012

by: Joseph Torres, Yes! Magazine | News Analysis 

 

Public interest groups have waged a spirited campaign to prevent a corporate takeover of the Internet.

AT&T spared no expense in 2011 when it sought government approval of its $39 billion deal to acquire T-Mobile. The merger would have created a duopoly, leaving AT&T and Verizon in control of nearly 80 percent of the wireless market.

AT&T would then have been able to set higher prices, at a cost to people on modest incomes who depend on their cell phones to connect with work, family, and the details of modern life.

 

Charles Murray's New Book 'Coming Apart' Shamelessly Blames the Victims of Our Economic Collapse

By June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, AlterNet
Posted on February 8, 2012, Printed on February 11, 2012

Charles Murray, the man who blamed welfare and a host of other liberal sins for weakening the moral fiber of the poor, has redirected his focus to the white working-class. And guess what? The problem with the declining fortunes of those on the losing end of the economic spectrum, he argues in his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, is not the loss of jobs. It's not about the increase in contingent hiring that makes the remaining jobs less stable. And it's certainly not the disappearance of unions that once fought for worker protection. Instead, the problem with the working class is – surprise, surprise – the working class. In the world according to Murray, they have lost their moral fiber, giving up on the values that once made America great. Instead of eagerly accepting the $10/hr, no-benefit jobs that remain, they work less and attend church less often. The men fail to support their families and the women respond by refusing to marry the ne'er-do-wells and foolishly raising children on their own.

Murray, to his credit, seems to agree that the six-figure bonuses of the new economy are “unseemly,” but rather than connect those bonuses to the corporate practices responsible for the job losses, he reserves his criticism of the new upper class for their isolation. They have deserted their less successful brethren by failing to “preach what they practice” and presumably by failing to insist on the necessity of hard work and marriage on wages of $10 an hour. The problem with Murray’s account is that he chooses not to hear the message of the new upper class or see their efforts to make the terms of their success available to the newly impoverished working class. He fails to see or hear these messages because, in fact, Murray is in league with those who actively oppose efforts to help the working class realize the terms that succeed in the new economy.

Why Going 'Back To Normal' Is No Longer An Option for the American Economy -- And Where We're Headed Now

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on February 7, 2012, Printed on February 11, 2012

Former IMF chief economist Joseph Stiglitz has a message for everybody who's sitting around waiting for the economy to "get back to normal."

Stop waiting. ‘Cause that train’s gone, and it ain’t coming back. And the sooner we accept that “normal,” as post WWII America knew and loved it, will not be an option in this century, the sooner we’ll get ourselves moving forward on the path toward a new kind of prosperity. The only real question now is: What future awaits us on the other side of the coming shift?

In a don't-miss article in this month’s Vanity Fair, Stiglitz argues that our current economic woes are the result of a deep structural shift in the economy — a once-in-a-lifetime phase change that happens whenever the foundations of an old economic order are disrupted, and a new basis of wealth creation comes forward to take its place. The last time this happened was in the 1920s and 1930s, when a US economy that was built on farm output became the victim of its own success. Advances in farming led to a food glut. As food prices plummeted, farmers had less money to spend. This, in turn, depressed manufacturing and led to job losses in the cities, too. Land values in both places declined, impoverishing families and trapping them in place.

The GOP’s new push to defang the CFPB

By Suzy Khimm, Published: February 8

Republicans couldn’t stop President Obama from installing Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But they hope they can rein the bureau in by passing legislation. The House GOP is now moving forward with bills that would remove the CFPB director from overseeing the Federal Deposit Insurance Company and allow Congress to directly control its funding every year. The bills are DOA in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But the GOP’s new bills provide a clear guide to what is likely to happen to the CFPB if Republicans take full control of Congress and/or the White House.

The right's stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left

Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object

by George Monbiot, Monday 6 February 2012 15.30 EST

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today's progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

The Battle for Vermont's Single Payer System

by Wendell Potter

 

MONTPELIER, Vermont — You can’t see them. They’re hidden from view and probably always will be. But the health insurance industry’s big guns are in place and pointed directly at the citizens of Vermont.

Health insurers were not able to stop the state’s drive last year toward a single-payer health care system, which insurers have spent millions to scare Americans into believing would be the worst thing ever. Despite the ceaseless spin, Vermont lawmakers last May demonstrated they could not be bought nor intimidated when they became the first in the nation to pass a bill that will probably establish a single-payer beachhead in the U.S.

Shocker! Komen for the Cure knew defunding Planned Parenthood was a bad idea

Things are looking so bad for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, leadership there is probably looking back at last week as the good ol' salad days, when the biggest problem was national outrage at a new policy to defund Planned Parenthood.

In the past week, though, things have gone from bad to so, so, so much worse.

Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining

POSTED: February 8, 11:02 AM ET 

Everybody on Wall Street is talking about the new piece by New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, entitled "The End of Wall Street as They Knew It."

The article argues that Barack Obama killed everything that was joyful about the banking industry through his suffocating Dodd-Frank reform bill, which forced banks to strip themselves of "the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading."

Obama Explained

As Barack Obama contends for a second term in office, two conflicting narratives of his presidency have emerged. Is he a skillful political player and policy visionary—a chess master who always sees several moves ahead of his opponents (and of the punditocracy)? Or is he politically clumsy and out of his depth—a pawn overwhelmed by events, at the mercy of a second-rate staff and of the Republicans? Here, a longtime analyst of the presidency takes the measure of our 44th president, with a view to history.

By James Fallows

In the late 1990s, when his fellow University of Chicago professor Barack Obama had just run for the Illinois State Senate and long before a newly inaugurated President Obama named him to his Council of Economic Advisers, the economist Austan Goolsbee was on the most terrifying airplane trip of his life. He was traveling on Southwest Airlines from St. Louis back to Chicago’s Midway Airport. The plane got into a thunderstorm, and for a while many passengers thought they were doomed.

One jolt of turbulence was so strong that a flight attendant, not yet strapped in, hit her head on the airplane’s ceiling. After another sudden drop, the lights went out on one side of the cabin. The violent ups and downs kept getting worse. Two rows ahead of Goolsbee, a professional-looking woman in her 50s began wailing, “We’re going to die! We’re all going to die!” “Everyone was looking around and on the border of panic,” Goolsbee told me recently. “I was kind of wishing someone would start yelling, ‘No, we’re all not going to die!’”

The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement

As readers may know by now, 49 of 50 states have agreed to join the so-called mortgage settlement, with Oklahoma the lone refusenik. Although the fine points are still being hammered out, various news outlets (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal) have details, with Dave Dayen’s overview at Firedoglake the best thus far.

The Wall Street Journal is also reporting that the SEC is about to launch some securities litigation against major banks. Since the statue of limitations has already run out on securities filings more than five years old, this means they’ll clip the banks for some of the very last (and dreckiest) deals they shoved out the door before the subprime market gave up the ghost.

States line up to challenge stringent Section 5 voting rights provision

By Robert Barnes, Thursday, February 9, 8:37 AM

Conservative activists and Republican attorneys general have launched a series of lawsuits meant to challenge the most muscular provision of the Voting Rights Act 0f 1965 before a Supreme Court that has signaled it is suspicious of its constitutionality.

Working their way to the high court are lawsuits from Arizona to North Carolina, challenging Section 5 of the historic civil rights act. The provision requires states and localities with a history of discrimination to get federal approval of any changes in their voting laws.

The combination of skeptical justices and an increasingly partisan political environment has led some experts to predict that the end is near for that requirement, which civil rights groups have called the most effective weapon for eliminating voting discrimination.

Scott Walker and the Secret "John Doe" Investigation Explained (Updated)

Everything you need to know about the scandal embroiling Wisconsin's governor.

—By Andy Kroll  | Tue Feb. 7, 2012 3:00 AM PST

A dark cloud hangs over Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

A "John Doe" investigation launched in May 2010 has embroiled former Walker staffers and appointees from his time as Milwaukee County executive, his job before winning the governorship in November 2010. The investigation, led by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, has led to home raids targeting former staffers with close ties to Walker and numerous felony charges for election law violations, embezzlement, and misconduct in office.

Pass the Romney Rule!

The philosophical, economic, and political case for raising capital gains taxes.

By Eliot Spitzer | Posted Monday, Feb. 6, 2012, at 12:32 PM ET

The U.S. tax code: Never has so much been done by so many for so few who need so little. The recent public debate about the inequities built into the tax code—triggered by the disclosure of Mitt Romney’s tax returns—is all for the good. So is the call for a “Romney rule” mandating that capital gains be treated as ordinary income, and so be subject to the same top marginal rate of 35 percent that applies to ordinary income, rather than the current top rate of 15 percent.

But we shouldn’t raise the capital gains tax just because it’s a popular idea. The rate should rise for philosophical, economic, and political reasons, as several colleagues and I argued in a recent debate at the Maxwell School of Public Policy at Syracuse University.

Axelrod: Obama may back down on birth control access

By David Edwards
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 10:52 EST


A top adviser to President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign suggested on Tuesday that the administration was open to working with Catholic hospitals and universities over their objections to providing birth control services to women.

“I’m less concerned about the messaging of this than to find a resolution that makes sense,” David Axelrod said on MSNBC.

The Case For Economic Optimism, From A Leading Pessimist

For more than five years before the recession began in December of 2007, I was one of the leading economic pessimists, warning of the housing bubble and the damage that its collapse would do to the economy. I based this pessimism on my analysis of the housing market, not a genetic disposition to pessimism. Given the economy's current situation, I find the warnings of the pessimists – the double-dip gang – to be wrongheaded and seriously counterproductive.


First to the economy's near-term prospects: the economy is growing and will in all probability continue to grow. Economies do generally grow. We see new investment, leading to more employment and higher productivity, which leads to higher profits and higher wages.

Paul Krugman: Things Are Not O.K.

In a better world — specifically, a world with a better policy elite — a good jobs report would be cause for unalloyed celebration. In the world we actually inhabit, however, every silver lining comes with a cloud. Friday’s report was, in fact, much better than expected, and has made many people, myself included, more optimistic. But there’s a real danger that this optimism will be self-defeating, because it will encourage and empower the purge-and-liquidate crowd.

So, about that jobs report: it was genuinely good, certainly compared with the dreariness that has become the norm. Notably, for once falling unemployment was the real thing, reflecting growing availability of jobs rather than workers dropping out of the labor force, and hence out of the unemployment measure. 

Thomas Frank: The Silence of the Technocrats

Democrats let the resurgent Right claim the mantle of populism—and win.

By Thomas Frank
January 26, 2012

In 2008, the country's financial system suffered an epic breakdown, largely the result -- as nearly every credible observer agrees -- of the decades-long effort to roll back bank supervision and encourage financial experimentation. The banks' stumble quickly plunged the nation and the world into the worst recession since the 1930s. This was no ordinary business-cycle downturn. Millions of Americans, and a large number of their banks, became insolvent in a matter of weeks.

Sixteen trillion dollars in household wealth was incinerated on the pyre Wall Street had kindled. And yet, to date -- the Occupy movement notwithstanding -- the most effective political response to these events has been a campaign to roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain and to clamp down on federal spending.

6 Things You Should Know About Arizona's Worse-Than-Wisconsin's Attack on Public Workers

By Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet
Posted on February 5, 2012, Printed on February 6, 2012

Not content to let Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich get all the fame (and recall elections, and ballot referenda) for their attempts to curtail union workers' rights, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators have jumped into the fray and proposed their own anti-union bills in recent weeks.

Along with South Carolina's Nikki Haley and Indiana's Mitch Daniels, Arizona's Jan Brewer, not content with making her state the least friendly to immigrants and people of color, has decided to get in on the union-busting action as well, introducing a bill that makes Walker's and Kasich's attacks on public workers look mild.

What Did the SEC Really Do in 2004?

By James Kwak

Andrew Lo’s review of twenty-one financial crisis books has been getting a fair amount of attention, including a recent mention in The Economist. Simply reading twenty-one books about the financial crisis is a demonstration of stamina that exceeds mine. I should also say at this point that I have no arguments with Lo’s description of 13 Bankers.

Lo’s main point, which he makes near the end of his article, is that it is important to get the facts straight. Too often people accept and repeat other people’s assertions—especially when they are published in reputable sources, and especially especially when those assertions back up their preexisting beliefs. This is a sentiment with which I could not agree more. One of the things I was struck by when writing 13 Bankers was learning that nonfiction books are not routinely fact-checked (Simon and I hire and pay for fact-checkers ourselves). As technology and the Internet produce a vast increase in the amount of writing on any particular subject, the base of actual facts on which all that writing rests remains the same (or even diminishes, as newspapers cut back on their staffs of journalists).

Beyond the Bubble Economy

We've finally learned that a growing financial sector isn't the same thing as actual economic improvement. So how can we stimulate the real economy?

by David Korten

 

Public anger at the 2008 Wall Street bailout, concerns about debt, and a deep and pervasive fear that another financial crash is just a matter of time create an important moment of opportunity for a long overdue public conversation about the purpose of financial services and the necessary steps to assure that the financial sector fulfills that purpose.

Much of the recent discussion of financial reform has centered on limiting Wall Street excesses to curb fraud and reduce the risk of another financial crash. 

How the GOP Is Resegregating the South

By Ari Berman

Republicans—to protect and expand their gains from 2010— are diluting the minority vote in swing districts held by white Democrats. 

 

February 4, 2012  |  North Carolina State Senator Eric Mansfield was born in 1964, a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed the right to vote for African-Americans. He grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and moved to North Carolina when he was stationed at Fort Bragg. He became an Army doctor, opening a practice in Fayetteville after leaving the service. Mansfield says he was always “very cynical about politics” but decided to run for office in 2010 after being inspired by Barack Obama’s presidential run.


 He ran a grassroots campaign in the Obama mold, easily winning the election with 67 percent of the vote. He represented a compact section of northwest Fayetteville that included Fort Bragg and the most populous areas of the city. It was a socioeconomically diverse district, comprising white and black and rich and poor sections of the city. Though his district had a black voting age population (BVAP) of 45 percent, Mansfield, who is African-American, lives in an old, affluent part of town that he estimates is 90 percent white. Many of his neighbors are also his patients.