Paul Krugman on How to Fix the Economy - and Why It's Easier Than You Think

POSTED: May 2, 1:55 PM ET | By Julian Brookes

Four years after the start of the Great Recession, nobody would mistake U.S. economy for a thrumming engine of growth, prosperity, and human flourishing. Sure, we're officially out of "recession." But the recovery is painfully slow and uneven, and 24 million Americans are still unemployed or underemployed. There's a lot of pain out there, and a lot of potential going to waste.

The worst part? It doesn't have to be this way. Or so says Paul Krugman. In a new book, End This Depression Now!, the Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist makes an urgent, even passionate case that our economic problems are, at root, fairly simple, and we have the knowledge and the tools to solve them. We've been here before, Krugman argues, during the Great Depression, and the actions that got us out of that crisis will get us out of this one, too.

Katha Pollitt: Occupy the Left

Katha Pollitt

May 2, 2012

Women’s rights have always been a bit of an add-on for the left. At this spring’s Left Forum, only fifteen of 440 panels touched on any feminist issue, broadly understood. New Left Review is famous, at least in my apartment, for its high testosterone content (despite being edited by a woman); ditto Verso, the left’s flagship publishing house, where women authors are as rare as Siberian tigers. And it’s not just the left—women’s rights, in fact women period, tend to get set aside whenever economics or “class” is the focus. Occupy Wall Street’s initial declaration, a long list of grievances from colonialism to the maltreatment of “nonhuman animals,” mentioned women’s inequality only in the context of the workplace—no mention of the systematic inequality that affects every area of life. Occupy Austin went further: a paper put out by its Language of Unity Working Group describes Occupy Austin as “radically inclusive,” open to everyone from disaffected Tea Partiers to Greens and anarchists, as well as homeless people and “soccer moms looking for a cause” (not too patronizing!) and highlighting only “the things that bring people together.” “For instance, you will never see Occupy approach the issue of abortion. It is too derisive (sic). Rather than championing one side, the huge innovation of the Occupy movement is its focus only on issues which unite people. We care most about people and care what most people support.”

Deposition Reveals Payout For Undercover ACORN Video

James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles Deposed In Civil Suit Filed By Former ACORN Worker Juan Carlos Vera

 

POSTED: 4:16 pm PDT May 2, 2012

UPDATED: 6:48 pm PDT May 2, 2012

 

SAN DIEGO -- Explosive new information obtained by 10News reveals for the first time the payout for an undercover video that helped bring down the group ACORN.

 

James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the role of pimp and prostitute in the video, were both deposed in a civil suit. O'Keefe wore a suit, while Giles donned a dark blouse, in contrast to the images that are familiar to many.

Ron Paul’s Delegate Antics Could Spell Trouble For GOP Convention

Benjy Sarlin & Pema Levy May 3, 2012, 6:21 AM

 

With Newt Gingrich finally out of the race, there’s only one other candidate standing between Mitt Romney and the official nomination. And while Ron Paul doesn’t have a chance to stop Romney, he seems poised to make some trouble for him in at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Across the country, fired-up Paul supporters are crashing the delegate-nominating process long after the rest of the party has moved onto the general election. Exploiting a byzantine nominating process that often flies under the radar, supporters are working the system to gain delegate majorities in states Paul lost in the primaries or caucuses (he hasn’t won a single contest outright).

A Warmer World and Weather Gone Wild: The Most Important Story of Our Lives

It's too hot not to notice, and too important to remain passive

by Bill McKibben

 

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011.  It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

What You Need To Know About ALEC

By Diane Ravitch on May 1, 2012 10:28 AM

Dear Deborah,
Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.

When Liberals Attack ... Social Security: Drum v. Lieberman

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

May 2, 2012 - 11:45am ET 

"Hmm," writes a blogger. "Liberals need to get off their fainting couches." It's in an argument for cutting Social Security benefits - and it comes from a liberal.

Benefit cuts would hurt millions of disabled and elderly people, harm our economy, and wound our social character.

Cear-eyed historians of the future wouldn't just point their fingers at radical right-wingers. They'd also cite collaborators in the Democratic Party and other members of what is still called (with no apparent sense of irony) "the Left."

How ‘Obamacare’ Is Saving Seniors Billions On Meds

Sahil Kapur May 1, 2012, 6:16 AM

 

In the first two years after “Obamacare” was signed, Medicare reforms in the law saved seniors a total of $3.4 billion in prescription drug costs by bridging a coverage gap, according to official figures.

Over 220,000 beneficiaries have saved an average of $837 in the first three months of 2012, the Medicare agency said Monday. That’s on top of $3.2 billion in savings enjoyed by some 5.1 million seniors in 2010 and 2011 thanks to the Affordable Care Act, according to the advisory on the new figures.

Fascist America: Have We Finally Turned The Corner?

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on May 1, 2012, Printed on May 3, 2012

America has never been without fascist wannabes. Research by Political Research Associates estimates that, at any given time in our history, roughly 10-12 percent of the country's population has been bred-in-the-bone right-wing authoritarians -- the people who are hard-wired to think in terms of fascist control and order. Our latter-day Christian Dominionists, sexual fundamentalists and white nationalists are the descendants -- sometimes, the literal blood descendants -- of the same people who joined the KKK in the 1920s, followed Father Coughlin in the 1930s, backed Joe McCarthy in the early '50s, joined the John Birch society in the '60s, and signed up for the Moral Majority in the 1970s and the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.

Given its rather stunning durability, it's probably time to acknowledge that this proto-fascist strain is a permanent feature of the American body politic. Like ugly feet or ears that stick out, it's an unchanging piece of who we are. We are going to have to learn to live with it.

Straight Talk on Social Security

POSTED: April 27, 5:30 PM ET | By Jared Bernstein

Here’s what Social Security is not:
• going broke;
• a Ponzi scheme;
• expected to stop paying out benefits in your lifetime;
• bankrupting our nation or future generations.

Here’s what Social Security is:
• a critical source of income support for millions of retirees;
• an elegant and binding intergenerational contract between yesterday's and today’s workforces;
• a progressive social insurance program that efficiently provides a reliable, affordable, guaranteed pension to those past their working years.
• a national treasure to be fiscally strengthened and carefully preserved for both today’s elderly and for future generations.

Some of these facts may surprise you, but I can and will easily defend each one.

40 Years Of Workers Left Behind

Brian Beutler May 2, 2012, 5:42 AM
conomic fairness is one of the persistent themes of the 2012 election, and in that spirit the liberal Economic Policy Institute is revisiting the plight of the U.S. worker over the last several decades.

Many of the institute’s findings, which will be presented in greater detail in the forthcoming edition of “The State of Working America,” will be familiar to economists who study income inequality. But they provide a stark illustration of the fact that the vast majority of workers have been closed out of the country’s gains for nearly 40 years.

Paul Krugman: Wasting Our Minds

In Spain, the unemployment rate among workers under 25 is more than 50 percent. In Ireland almost a
third of the young are unemployed. Here in America, youth unemployment is “only” 16.5 percent, which is
still terrible — but things could be worse.

And sure enough, many politicians are doing all they can to guarantee that things will, in fact, get worse.
We’ve been hearing a lot about the war on women, which is real enough. But there’s also a war on the
young, which is just as real even if it’s better disguised. And it’s doing immense harm, not just to the young, but to the nation’s future.

Five Tax Fallacies Invented by the 1%

by Paul Buchheit

 

We hear these claims often, even though they're entirely false. An analysis of the facts should make that clear.

1. The Rich Pay Almost All the Taxes

That's simply not true. The percentage of total taxes paid by the very rich (the top 1%) is approximately the same as the percentage paid by middle class Americans (the 4th quintile, average income $68,700). Here are the details:

SIGIR Audit Finds Some U.S. CERP Funds Went to Insurgents in Iraq

Apr 29, 2012 12:01 AM EDT 
 
Funds from a $4 billion program intended to improve relations between the two countries were siphoned off by the enemy, a new audit finds. Eli Lake reports on why CERP was still called a success.

During the war in Iraq, battalion commanders were allocated packets of $100 bills and authorized to use them for anything from repairing a schoolhouse to paying off ex-rebels and paying blood money to the families of innocents killed by U.S. forces. But a new audit finds that in some cases that cash made its way to the pockets of the very insurgents the United States was trying to fight.

The money was part of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), and from 2004 to 2011 the U.S. government poured $4 billion into it in Iraq. And because the Pentagon gauged CERP a success, a similar initiative is under way in Afghanistan. “We think CERP is an absolutely critical and flexible counterinsurgency tool,” Michele Flournoy, who was then undersecretary of defense for policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2010.

Krugman Debunks Claim That Businesses Pay ‘The Single Highest Tax Rate In The World’

By Igor Volsky on Apr 29, 2012 at 4:34 pm

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman hit back against the GOP’s claim that American businesses pay the highest corporate taxes in the world during an appearance on ABC’s This Week Sunday morning, lashing out at Mitt Romney’s California campaign co-chair and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.

Fiorina — who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-CA) senate seat in 2010 — insisted that “we now have the single highest business tax rate in the world” and claimed that companies are moving jobs overseas to avoid this burden.

Behind the Right's Phony War on the Nonexistent Religion of Secularism

POSTED: April 25, 12:40 PM ET | By Rick Perlstein

Once upon a time, in early 2004, I attended one of hundreds of "Parties for the President" organized nationwide for grassroots volunteers who wanted to help reelected George W. Bush, at a modest middle class home in Portland, Oregon. At one point, a nice old lady politely pressed into my hand a grubby little self-published pamphlet she had come upon, purporting to prove that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had faked the heroics that had won him three purple hearts in Vietnam. I added it to my mental store of the night's absurdities that I expected to hear rattling across the wingnutosphere the entire fall: "I still believe there are weapons of mass destruction"; "There is an agenda—to get rid of God in this country"; "John Kerry attended a party in which there was bad language!" What I didn't expect was to see Kerry's war-hero cred earnestly debated night after night on CNN. Then came August and "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" — and that little old lady's fever dream began dominating the media discussion of the campaign, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Sibel Edmonds Finally Wins

By davidswanson - Posted on 30 April 2012

Sibel Edmonds' new book, "Classified Woman," is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as "page-turners" and "gripping dramas," but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.

Austerity, and a New Recession?

by Joseph Stiglitz — 23.04.2012

Austerity policies are driving us towards a double-dip recession, warns US economist Joseph Stiglitz. He sat down with Martin Eiermann to discuss new economic thinking and the influence of money in politics.

The European: Four years after the beginning of the financial crisis, are you encouraged by the ways in which economists have tried to make sense of it, and by the ways in which those insights have been taken up by policy makers?

Stiglitz: Let me break this down in a slightly different way. Academic economists played a big role in causing the crisis. Their models were overly simplified, distorted, and left out the most important aspects. Those faulty models then encouraged policy-makers to believe that the markets would solve all the problems. Before the crisis, if I had been a narrow-minded economist, I would have been very pleased to see that academics had a big impact on policy. But unfortunately that was bad for the world. After the crisis, you would have hoped that the academic profession had changed and that policy-making had changed with it and would become more skeptical and cautious. You would have expected that after all the wrong predictions of the past, politics would have demanded from academics a rethinking of their theories. I am broadly disappointed on all accounts.

Is It Possible To Build An Economy Without Jobs?

By Frank Joyce, AlterNet
Posted on April 29, 2012, Printed on May 1, 2012

Suppose that something caused iTunes, Sony Music, "American Idol," SiriusXM and every other commercial music entity to disappear. Would humans still make music? Of course we would.

Although capitalists would prefer we think otherwise, human ingenuity created capitalism—not the other way around. And work long precedes the existence of the capitalist system of jobs. Like music and art, work is intrinsic to the human condition. It is essential not just to our survival but to our progress as a species. It is something we do naturally, regardless of the economic and political systems in place at any given time or place in human history.

Of all the systems that contain and define our lives, perhaps the most opaque is the job system. While it is common for us to think about our individual job—or the lack thereof—it is rare that we consider the job system itself. It seems to us that humans have always been either employers or employees -- and we always will be. It’s the ultimate TINA (There Is No Alternative).

Don't Let Business Lobbyists Kill the Post Office

The Times has an editorial today about the future of the U.S. Postal Service:

Postal officials say they must close about 3,700 underused post offices (there are 32,000 nationally) while offering alternative services through local businesses. They also want to consolidate hundreds of regional processing centers and eliminate Saturday mail deliveries.

An aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was warning me about this last week. There are organic reasons for all of this: The U.S. Postal Service is staring down the same barrel trained at our magazine and newspaper businesses, i.e. its revenue model is being wiped out by the internet.
But politics also plays a huge part in this. In 2006, in what looks like an attempt to bust the Postal Workers' Union, George Bush signed into law the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. This law required the Postal Service to pre-fund 100 percent of its entire future obligations for 75 years of health benefits to its employees – and not only do it, but do it within ten years. No other organization, public or private, has to pre-fund 100 percent of its future health benefits.

'Wrong Font Size' Keeps Michigan's 'Shock Doctrine' in Place

- Common Dreams staff 

 

Opponents of Michigan's emergency manager law who had gathered more than enough petitions to put the law on the November ballot were told yesterday that it wouldn't happen because the petitions had used the wrong font size.


Organizers had hoped to suspend Public Act 4, the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act, also known as the “emergency financial manager law” signed by Gov. Snyder last year.  The Center for Public Integrity explained that with the law, "appointed managers can nullify labor contracts, sell public utilities and dismiss elected officials."  Greatly contested was the ability of emergency managers under this law to nullify collective bargaining agreements.

Mad Cow Number Four

Posted by Martha Rosenberg on @ 6:20 pm

 

News of a new “mad cow” in the United States could not come at a worse time.

The U.S. is in the process of trying to win back Japan and China’s business, not fully restored since the first U.S. mad cow, discovered in 2003. Ninety-eight percent of U.S. beef exports evaporated within 24 hours when Mexico, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, and 90 other countries banned US beef. The only reason the European Union didn’t ban U.S. beef was because it had already banned it for excessive use of growth hormones!

Halfway Through the Lost Decade

By Robert Scheer

Does anyone care that the economy is floundering and that we are not getting out of this crisis anytime soon? Housing values are in the cellar, the Fed foresees unemployment remaining unacceptably high for the next three years, and national economic growth is predicted to be, at best, anemic.

Even the substantial rise of stock averages during recent years has been based in large part on the ability of companies such as Apple to outsource jobs and sales to booming markets led by China—while America’s graduating students face mountainous debt and what is shaping up as a decade without opportunity.