Darwin: Scientist but Not Economist

By Mike Lux
Posted: 04/ 5/2012 12:45 pm<

I wrote a book that came out in early 2009 called, The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be, that talked about the history of the American political debate. One of my fundamental arguments was that conservatives are using the same arguments against modern day progress that their ideological ancestors used against the progress we made throughout history. What I underestimated, though, is how fiercely and broadly the modern conservative movement is trying not only to block advances in progress, but to actually roll back the gains of our history. Things that had seemed long settled only a few years back when I wrote that book are now being fought over anew, and not by trivial people on the fringes of our politics but by most of the leaders in the Republican Party.

Meet the ALEC Staffers Who Help Corporations Write Our Laws

Saturday, 07 April 2012 13:52  
By Zaid Jilani, Republic Report | Report 

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the most powerful corporate front group you’ve never heard of. The group, sponsored by some of America’s largest corporations, writes legislation that tends to benefit its donors and ships these template bills to state legislatures for compliant lawmakers to pass. ALEC has pushed for legislation doing everything from attacking workers’ collective bargaining rights, to making it harder for low-income Americans to vote, to the Stand Your Ground law that could prevent justice in the Trayvon Martin case.

One of the reasons ALEC is able to do this is because it’s extremely secretive. ALEC does not openly brand the legislation it passes off to legislators, and its staff is mostly hidden from the public eye. Until now. We dug into ALEC’s personnel to make a short profile of just some of the key Washington, D.C.-based ALEC staffers who help write the laws that pollute our communities, deny Americans access to health care, suppress our right to vote, and generally harm Americans. Their corporate-written bills may be secretly passed on to legislators, but these staffers can’t hide behind ALEC’s veil and avoid taking responsibility for the laws they produce and advance.

3 Corporate Myths that Threaten the Wealth of the Nation

By William Lazonick and Ken Jacobson and Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Posted on April 5, 2012, Printed on April 7, 2012

Corporations are not working for the 99%. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special 5-part AlterNet series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and one of the leading expert on the American corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history, and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?

The wealth of the American nation depends on the productive power of our major business corporations. In 2008 there were 981 companies in the United States with 10,000 or more employees. Although they were less than two percent of all U.S. firms, they employed 27 percent of the labor force and accounted for 31 percent of all payrolls. Literally millions of smaller businesses depend, directly or indirectly, on the productivity of these big businesses and the disposable incomes of their employees.

When the executives who control big-business investment decisions place a high priority on innovation and job creation, then we all have a chance for a prosperous tomorrow. Unfortunately, over the past few decades, the top executives of our major corporations have turned the productive power of the people into massive and concentrated financial wealth for themselves. Indeed the very emergence of “the 1%” is largely the result of this usurpation of corporate power. And executives’ use of this power to benefit themselves often undermines investment in innovation and job creation.

10 Ways Our Democracy Is Crumbling Around Us

By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on April 5, 2012, Printed on April 7, 2012

Our democracy is in grave danger. In fact, it may already be fatally wounded as a financial oligopoly increasingly dominates American politics and the economy. What’s most remarkable about this new form of oligarchy is that it has no face. There are no flesh and blood oligarchs, only unnamed investors. The big financial sharks can swim among our 401ks. They can flex their awesome power without getting fingered. They can set the entire direction of government activity without lobbying at all.

Here are 10 reasons to worry.

Paul Krugman: Not Enough Inflation

A few days ago, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, spoke out in defense of his successor. Attacks on Ben Bernanke by Republicans, he told The Financial Times, are “wholly inappropriate and destructive.” He’s right about that — which makes this one of the very few things the ex-maestro has gotten right in the past few years. 

But why are the attacks on Mr. Bernanke so destructive? After all, nobody in America is or should be immune from criticism, least of all those — like the chairman of the Fed — who, by the nature of their positions, have immense power to make our lives better or worse. And while there is an unmistakable thuggishness to the campaign against the Fed, most famously Rick Perry’s warning that the Fed chairman would be treated “pretty ugly” if he visited Texas, surely the bad manners of the critics aren’t the most important issue.

Capitalism's Dirty Secret: Corporations Don't Create Jobs, They Destroy Them

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Posted on April 3, 2012, Printed on April 6, 2012

Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?

For the last four decades, U.S. corporations have been sinking our economy through the off-shoring of jobs, the squeezing of wages, and a magician’s hat full of bluffs and tricks designed to extort subsidies and sweetheart deals from local and state governments that often result in mass layoffs and empty treasuries.

We keep hearing that corporations would put Americans back to work if they could just get rid of all those pesky encumbrances – things like taxes, safety regulations, and unions. But what happens when we buy that line? The more we let the corporations run wild, the worse things get for the 99 percent, and the scarcer the solid jobs seem to be.

The memo Bush tried to destroy

A document advising the Bush administration against torture has resurfaced, despite his best efforts to hide it

By Jordan Michael Smith

 

In February of 2006, Philip Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, authored a memo opposing the Bush administration’s torture practices (though he employed the infamous obfuscation of “enhanced interrogation techniques”). The White House tried to collect and destroy all copies of the memo, but one survived in the State Department’s bowels and was declassified yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive. 

Nothing screams fiscal charlatan like a $4.6 trillion tax cut financed by gimmicks

Posted April 3, 2012 at 4:59 pm by Andrew Fieldhouse

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget, which passed the House of Representatives on a party-line vote last week, continues to receive deserved criticism for its thoroughly dishonest treatment of the sweeping tax cuts it proposes. In a scathing critique, Paul Krugman honed in on its “fraudulent” nature: “The Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.” William Gale of the Brookings Institution similarly concluded that “Ryan is gaming the system in creating budget estimates. … This is smoke and mirrors.”

Deciphering Right-Wing Code: What Conservatives Are Really Saying When They Seem to Spew Nonsense

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on April 4, 2012, Printed on April 6, 2012

Progressive commentators have been piling on Rick Santorum for a weirdly incoherent statement he made about the state of American history classes in America's colleges. Here's what he said:

"I was just reading something last night from the state of California. And the state of California universities -- I think it's seven or eight of the California system of universities -- don't even teach an American history course. It's not even available to be taught. Just to tell you how bad it's gotten in this country, where we're trying to disconnect the people from the root of who we are...."

The derision Santorum has received is well-deserved. He messed up the facts badly: 10 of the 11 UC campuses do teach US history (the only exception is UC San Francisco, which is exclusively a graduate-level health sciences campus and offers no humanities classes at all).
It also misses the point. It's not news when a conservative says something that was flat-out wrong, or when liberals take smug satisfaction in demonstrating that they are (as usual) factually right. But there was something else Santorum said in that statement that was newsworthy and important -- and in our zeal to debunk the facts, many progressives are completely missing it.

Rupert Murdoch's American media immunity

The paradox is how little interest, until now, the US press has taken in the scandals engulfing the tycoon's News Corp empire

Michael Wolff
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 April 2012 10.03 EDT
Last week, PBS aired a Frontline documentary, more then six months in the making, about Rupert Murdoch's phone-hacking scandal. The big budget film, hosted and reported by Lowell Bergman, one of the pre-eminent US investigative journalists, broke no news nor offered new perspectives about the affair. Rather, the show – the first US documentary to delve into the Murdoch scandals – gave a diligent, if somewhat flat-footed account of events that came to a head last summer, for an audience that, the producers seemed to assume, had missed most of the story.

In the same week, the BBC and the Australian Financial Review, opened up an entirely new chapter in the ever-expanding chronicles of News Corporation's scandals: NDS, a News Corp subsidiary company that developed encryption technology for pay TV outlets, had allegedly mounted a long-term effort of piracy and hacking in an effort to undermine its competitors. News Corp's Australian arm has denied the allegations.

Reconstructing America's Economic System Is Within Reach

Tuesday, 03 April 2012 00:00  
By Gar Alperovitz, Democracy Collaborative Press | Book Excerpt 

The primary theoretical and strategic argument of America Beyond Capitalism is that an "evolutionary reconstruction" of the system is not only necessary but well within the range of long run possibility. The argument rests on three challenging assessments:

The first and foundational judgment is that (quite apart from other considerations) with the radical decline of organized labor as an institution from 35 percent of the labor force to 6.9 percent in the private sector (11.9 percent overall, and falling), a new progressive politics must ultimately build new institutional foundations to undergird its fundamental approach, or it will continue to remain in an essentially defensive and ultimately declining posture.

10 Big Mistakes People Make in Thinking About the Future

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on April 3, 2012, Printed on April 6, 2012

Being a working futurist means that I think a lot about how people think about the future. It also means spending a lot of time with people who are also thinking about their own futures.
Typically, this involves a dialogue between three distinct groups.

First, there's usually a small handful of very foresighted people, who are aware of their own blind spots and biases, and who are eager and open about the prospect of soaring into a wild blue sky to gather a lot of exciting new information.

Second, there's a larger group of people who don't usually think at 50,000 feet -- but are willing to go there if they're with people they trust. Their wings aren't sturdy, and they are prone to some very common mistakes in thinking, but they're often the most gratifying group to work with. What they want is permission to let go, encouragement to go big, and a watchful eye to keep them out of the rocks and ditches.

The Supreme Scream: Obamacare After the Court Ruling

by Dean Baker

The conventional wisdom following the oral arguments before the Supreme Court last week is that, at the least, the health insurance mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act is going down. Many observers thought it likely that the Republican-controlled court would strike down the entire bill. Either way, it will be necessary to do some serious rethinking of health care policy.

The simpler case, where the mandate is struck down but most of the rest of the bill is left intact, could likely be repaired without great difficulty. The mandate that everyone buy insurance was a quid pro quo with the insurance industry. Insurers are prohibited from discriminating against sick people in issuing insurance policies; in exchange the government is going to force healthy people to buy insurance.

Repealing ‘Obamacare’ Would Explode Debt, Says Government Auditor

Brian Beutler, April 3, 2012, 6:05 AM

 

A new report by an independent government auditor concludes that implementing President Obama’s health care law as intended will make a significant dent in the long-term debt forecast.

The report comes as Supreme Court justices weigh striking some of “Obamacare’s” central provisions — and perhaps the law in its entirety — and as the Republican Party remains committed to repealing the law if it seizes control of government in November.

The Economic Story Progressives Need to Tell

uesday, 04/3/2012 - 9:02 am by Richard Kirsch
As part of the How We Value Government series, a simple narrative with clear heroes and villains that progressives too often fail to tell.

In his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush vowed to protect Medicare two sentences after he trashed “nationalized health care.” The fact that Medicare is our national health care system was apparently as lost on the president — and most of the listening American public — as it was on the senior citizens who went to town hall meetings to protest the government takeover of health care after seeing their doctor earlier in the day on government health insurance.

Why Conservatives Shouldn’t Gloat Yet

The right is giddy after last week’s Supreme Court arguments on Obamacare. Their glee may come back to haunt them.

By Eliot Spitzer  |  Posted Monday, April 2, 2012, at 5:24 PM ET

Conservative intellectuals are feeling giddy. Last week they feasted on the veritable mauling of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli by the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices. (In truth, Verrilli was only questioned by four of the conservatives—Justice Clarence Thomas, true to form, didn’t speak. But we know where his vote lies.) It is now conventional wisdom that health care reform—the Affordable Care Act, to be precise—will be deemed unconstitutional, at least in part. I tell the students in my class at the City College of New York that “five” is the most powerful number in the nation. For as we have seen, five votes on the Supreme Court can pick a president—voters notwithstanding—and five votes could redefine our understanding of Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution—precedents notwithstanding. So maybe the conservative celebration is merited. Yet it is also plausible that an element of hubris has overtaken the right.

Empathy Doesn’t Extend Across the Political Aisle

When we try to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we usually go all the way, assuming that they feel the same way we do. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that we have limits: we don’t extend this projection to people who have different political views, even under extreme circumstances.

The researchers chose to examine political differences because of the big divide perceived between people on opposing sides, as shown by earlier research. We can look beyond someone having a different gender or being from a different country, but if you’re a Democrat and someone else is a Republican, that person seems extremely different. “Political values are emotionally charged. People get really fired up,” says Ed O’Brien of the University of Michigan, who cowrote the study with Phoebe C. Ellsworth.

Good Jobs

Three Reasons There Aren’t More

Paul Osterman

Far too many American adults work in low-wage jobs. In 2010, 20 percent of adults earned a wage that would put a family of four below the poverty line. Twenty-four percent of adults earned less than two-thirds of the median wage, another widely used international standard for gauging low-wage work.

Better jobs seem the obvious solution. The government could raise and enforce labor standards and push firms to invest in training and to create advancement opportunities for low-wage workers. Unions can also play a key role by advocating for increased wages and training opportunities within firms. These steps would be effective, but they would face enormous resistance, even among liberals, because they intervene directly in the job market.

Obama: Ryan Budget Is ‘Thinly Veiled Social Darwinism’

Sahil Kapur, April 3, 2012, 6:00 AM

 

Today the presidential gloves really come off.

In a Tuesday speech hosted by the Associated Press in Washington, D.C., President Obama will deliver a broadside to the House-passed Republican budget, which calls for upending Medicare and making deep cuts to domestic social programs. Obama will describe it as a dark vision for America and draw a clear contrast with his campaign themes of reducing inequality and asking the wealthy to help pay down the nation’s debt.

How Long-Term Unemployment Decreases Life Expectancy

By Pat Garofalo on Apr 2, 2012 at 5:30 pm

The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that more than 40 percent of America’s unemployed have been out of work for six months or more. The Associated Press reported recently that the long-term unemployed are facing increased hiring bias, with employers refusing to take on workers who have been out of work for a longer stretch of time.

There are several deleterious effects of long-term unemployment, but the New York Times’ Binyamin Applebaum highlighted a particularly harrowing one — increased mortality rates. According to a study by Columbia’s Till von Wachter and the Chicago Federal Reserve’s Daniel Sullivan, long-term unemployment can knock up to 18 months off of life expectancy:

Booming Bamboo: The Next Supermaterial?

By Mike Wooldridge  
BBC News, Nicaragua

Bamboo is being hailed as a new super material, with uses ranging from textiles to construction. It also has the potential to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas, and provide some of the world's poorest people with cash. 

Bamboo's image is undergoing a transformation. Some now call it "the timber of the 21st Century".
Today you can buy a pair of bamboo socks or use it as a fully load-bearing structural beam in your house - and it is said that there are some 1,500 uses for it in between.

Five Preposterous, Persistent Conservative Myths

by Paul Buchheit

With the mainstream media in the hands of the mostly conservative wealthy, it's difficult for average Americans to learn the truth about critical issues. The following five conservative claims are examples of mythical beliefs that fall apart in the presence of inconvenient facts:

1. Entitlements are the Problem

Beyond the fact that we're 'entitled' to Social Security and Medicare because we pay for them, these two government-run programs have been largely self-sustaining while supporting the needs of millions of Americans.

Welcome to the New Third World of Energy, the United States

How Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State

 

by Michael T. Klare

 

The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.  Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas.  But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere?  Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

How American Corporations Transformed from Producers to Predators

By William Lazonick, AlterNet
Posted on April 1, 2012, Printed on April 2, 2012

Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?

In 2010, the top 500 U.S. corporations – the Fortune 500 – generated $10.7 trillion in sales, reaped a whopping $702 billion in profits, and employed 24.9 million people around the globe. Historically, when these corporations have invested in the productive capabilities of their American employees, we’ve had lots of well-paid and stable jobs.

That was the case a half century ago.

Unfortunately, it’s not the case today. For the past three decades, top executives have been rewarding themselves with mega-million dollar compensation packages while American workers have suffered an unrelenting disappearance of middle-class jobs. Since the 1990s, this hollowing out of the middle-class has even affected people with lots of education and work experience. As the Occupy Wall Street movement has recognized, concentration of income and wealth of the top “1 percent” leaves the rest of us high and dry.

Paul Krugman: Pink Slime Economics
The big bad event of last week was, of course, the Supreme Court hearing on health reform. In the course of that hearing it became clear that several of the justices, and possibly a majority, are political creatures pure and simple, willing to embrace any argument, no matter how absurd, that serves the interests of Team Republican.

But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing
spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.

Meet the man who invented the GOP’s defense of the wealthy—in 1883.

By Beverly Gage | Posted Thursday, March 29, 2012, at 7:15 AM ET

Last month, Rick Santorum announced that he likes inequality. “There is income inequality in America,” he told the Detroit Economic Club in a much-quoted speech. “There always has been and, hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be.”

Many political observers have since ridiculed this stance, declaring Santorum “unhinged,” or at least unfit to conduct a serious presidential campaign. But the positive defense of inequality is not entirely new in American politics. From the moment that social reformers began to “discover” poverty in the 19^th century, naysayers were on hand to explain why extremes of wealth and poverty made for a just society. By embracing inequality, Santorum is reviving the politics of our last Gilded Age.

State takeover of Michigan cities slowed by courts

By Paul Abowd

6:00 am, March 29, 2012 Updated: 6:00 am, March 29, 2012

It’s not clear who is in charge of Flint, Mich., these days.

Earlier this month, a state circuit court judge unseated the city’s emergency manager, Michael Brown, and voided all decisions he’s made since being appointed by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder four months ago.

The ruling found the state violated the Open Meetings Act when appointing Brown in December and is just the latest in a series of legal challenges that could freeze Michigan’s controversial emergency manager law.

Is Our Health Care Debate Just a Sideshow?

By Sam Pizzigati
Created 03/25/2012 - 4:41pm

We obsess over health care in the United States, because we all want to be healthy. In the process, new evidence suggests, we're ignoring the social dynamics that actually determine our health.

The U.S. Supreme Court this week begins the process of deciding the fate of the Obama health care reform, and much, as the pundits like to say, will be at stake in the high court’s decision. The extent of federal authority. The political momentum into November. Access to health care for millions of Americans.
What won’t be at stake in the Supreme Court’s health care reform decision: the ultimate health of the American people.

Most Americans, of course, assume otherwise. We’ve become totally accustomed to equating “health care” with “health.” If you have health care, our conventional wisdom goes, you’re going to have health.