Showing that Hostage-Taking Works

June 1, 2012

 

Exclusive: The U.S. news media has been quick to cite the lousy May jobs report as proof that President Obama’s economic stimulus has failed and that Mitt Romney’s odds of winning have improved. But the real winner is the Republican strategy to make the U.S. economy “scream,” writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

The dismal May jobs report underscores the success of the Republicans’ strategy of frustrating President Barack Obama’s economic policies from the second he took office and, in effect, holding the struggling U.S. economy hostage to GOP electoral victories.

Already, pundits are declaring that the anemic increase of only 69,000 jobs in May will help put Mitt Romney in the White House – and that may well be true because the mainstream U.S. press is playing the disappointing job numbers as proof of Obama’s “failed” economic policies, rather than a result of persistent Republican sabotage.

Are Christian Fundamentalists Teaching Genocide in Our Schools?

Thanks to Good News Clubs, evangelism in schools is already subverting the separation of church and state. Now they're justifying the murder of nonbelievers.

May 31, 2012  |   The Bible has thousands of passages that may serve as the basis for instruction and inspiration. Not all of them are appropriate in all circumstances.

The story of Saul and the Amalekites is a case in point. It's not a pretty story, and it is often used by people who don't intend to do pretty things. In the book of 1 Samuel (15:3), God said to Saul:

"Now go, attack the Amalekites, and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."

The Legend of the Spat-Upon Veteran

It’s a disproven myth, but politicians, keen on dispelling opposition and maintaining militarism, continue to feed the fable.

BY David Sirota


Out of all the status-quo-sustaining fables we create out of military history, none are as enduring as Vietnam War myths. Desperate to cobble a pro-war cautionary tale out of a blood-soaked tragedy, we keep reimagining the loss in Southeast Asia not as a policy failure but as the product of an America that dishonored returning troops.

Incessantly echoed by Hollywood and Washington since the concurrent successes of the Rambo and Reagan franchises, this legend was the central theme of President Obama’s Memorial Day speech kicking off the government’s commemoration of the Vietnam conflict.

Paul Krugman: The Austerity Agenda

LONDON 

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.” So declared John Maynard Keynes 75 years ago, and he was right. Even if you have a long-run deficit problem — and who doesn’t? — slashing spending while the economy is deeply depressed is a self-defeating strategy, because it just deepens the depression. 

So why is Britain doing exactly what it shouldn’t? Unlike the governments of, say, Spain or California, the British government can borrow freely, at historically low interest rates. So why is that government sharply reducing investment and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, rather than waiting until the economy is stronger? 

Over the past few days, I’ve posed that question to a number of supporters of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, sometimes in private, sometimes on TV. And all these conversations followed the same arc: They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives.

How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us

Gail Collins

“What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks”

No matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to blame.

When it comes to meddling with school textbooks, Texas is both similar to other states and totally different. It’s hardly the only one that likes to fiddle around with the material its kids study in class. The difference is due to size—4.8 million textbook-reading schoolchildren as of 2011—and the peculiarities of its system of government, in which the State Board of Education is selected in elections that are practically devoid of voters, and wealthy donors can chip in unlimited amounts of money to help their favorites win.

Robert Caro's new history of LBJ offers a mistaken account of the Cuban Missile Crisis

He is one of our greatest historians. So why is his retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis so mistaken?

By Fred Kaplan | Posted Thursday, May 31, 2012, at 7:45 PM ET

Robert Caro’s series on The Years of Lyndon Johnson, now in its fourth volume (with, the author’s health willing, one more to go) ranks among the towering achievements in literary biography. Volume 1, The Path to Power, tracing the future president’s youth, may be the best book ever written about the role of money in American politics. Volume 2, Means of Ascent, while deeply flawed, is a seminal study in corruption. Volume 3, Master of the Senate, is a riveting portrait of how LBJ transformed a deliberately sluggish institution into a vehicle for self-aggrandizement and social justice.

Axelrod: Handful of plutocrats trying to buy this government

By Eric W. Dolan
Wednesday, May 30, 2012 21:13 EDT

Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod said Wednesday that billionaires were trying to buy the United States government in the November elections.

“There was a report this morning that the Republican Super PACs, apart from Romney and apart from his own super PAC, intend to spend a billion dollars in this campaign setting up shadow state organizations—district-wide organizations—as well as running media,” he told Current TV host Jennifer

Politicians' gas price promises just hot air

By DEAN BAKER and BRUCE BARTLETT | 5/30/12 9:30 PM EDT 

 

The recent decline in gasoline prices has at least temporarily made this a less pressing issue in the presidential campaign. There is a real risk, however, that the summer driving season will again push the price to near $4 a gallon and that it will again assume center stage in the national political debate.

That would be unfortunate. No one can be happy about paying more money for gas. But the question is what can Barack Obama, or any other president, really do about it? The answer, which may disappoint some people, is not much.

The Career of Reaganite Barney Frank

Most Democrats think that they belong to the party of the little guy, the party that attempts to constrain Wall Street.  Sometimes a Democrat won’t fight hard enough, or, like Obama, will make political calculations that shave off the better angels of their nature.  This myth says that Reagan deregulated, and Bush led us into the financial crisis.  In fact, that’s a fairy tale.  It was Jimmy Carter who began the deregulation of the financial services industry, who got rid of usury caps, and Bill Clinton that deregulated derivatives and ended Glass-Steagall.  The rush headlong into madness has been fully bipartisan, from the get-go.  It’s not a surprise that as both Republicans and Democrats shed their liberal wings, in favor of neoliberalism, financial instability increased.

The career of Barney Frank casts a large shadow upon the Democratic approach to financial matters, as he perfectly epitomizes how they behaved throughout this time period.  Frank was elected in 1981, as a quintessential Reagan-era Democrat.  He is frequently misunderstood, and cast as a liberal.  In another era, he would have been such.  But he was first and foremost interested in cutting deals, and to that end, his ideology ended up as that of a Reagan-lite.  It’s unfortunate, because by the time he had real power in 2008, he had no firm basis upon which to make decisions for the broad public, and ended up consolidating wealth into the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people.

The Battle for the Cato Institute

Charles Koch and Ed Crane were once allies in the libertarian movement. Now the former friends are facing off in a fight for control of Cato, the think tank they founded together 35 years ago.  

By Luke Mullins

Ed Crane lumbered into Capitol Hill’s Christ Church on a rainy morning in October 2011. He walked the creaky floors in the 19th-century nave and found a seat in the paint-chipped pews. Mourners crowded the interior as the choir began singing.

William Niskanen’s death, at age 78, hadn’t come as a shock. His health had been in decline for two years before his stroke four days earlier. But to Crane, Niskanen’s passing meant more than the loss of a friend and colleague.

“Crane was devastated,” said one observer. “He looked as though it was his own family member who had died.”

America's Spy State: How the Telecoms Sell Out Your Privacy

By David Rosen, AlterNet

Posted on May 29, 2012, Printed on May 31, 2012

You need to know one simple truth: you have no privacy with regard to your electronic communications.

Nothing you do online, via a wireline telephone or over a wireless device is outside the reach of government security agencies and private corporations. Your ostensible personal communication -- whether a phone call, an email, a search, visiting a website, a credit card purchase, a 140 character Tweet, a movie download or a Facebook friending -- is a public commodity, subject to the dictates of the security state and market opportunists.

Corporate surveillance has begun to raise consumer, Congressional and regulatory concerns – a major case, Amnesty v. Clapper, is now before the Supreme Court. One can only wonder why it is not an issue in this year’s election?

Transition to Sustainable Agriculture Key to Global 'Food Security': UN

World can feed more people more efficiently with sustainable agriculture and less waste

- Common Dreams staff 

 

For the millions of hungry and underfed people on the planet, food security is not an issue of insufficient production, but is an issue of inadequate access, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In a report release today, and presented with the Rio+20 Earth Summit just weeks away, the FAO argues that the "only way to ensure [global] food security is by creating decent jobs, paying better wages, giving world's hungry access to more productive assets and distributing income in a more equitable way."

WOW: In No State Is a 40-Hour, Minimum Wage Work Week Enough to Afford a Two-Bedroom Apartment

The above graphic exploded on Facebook this weekend. It shows how many minimum wage hours a worker needs to work in order to be able to afford a two-bedroom unit at “Fair Market Rent” in any given state. The FMR is a figure determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

How the "Job Creators" REALLY Spend Their Money

by Paul Buchheit

 

In his "Gospel of Wealth," Andrew Carnegie argued that average Americans should welcome the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, because the "superior wisdom, experience, and ability" of the rich would ensure benefits for all of us. More recently, Edward Conard, the author of "Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong, said: "As a society, we're not offering our talented few large enough rewards. We're underpaying our 'risk takers.'"

Does wealthy America have a point, that giving them all the money will ensure it's disbursed properly, and that it will create jobs and stimulate small business investment while ultimately benefiting society? Big business CEOs certainly think so, claiming in a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that an increase in the capital gains tax would reduce investment "when we need capital formation here in America to create jobs and expand our economy."

Why A Cyber Security Bill Will Pass

Everyone from hackers to gamers to average netizens will have to get used to a new normal.

 
BY Kenneth Rapoza

It’s been a year of one step forward, one step backward for Internet freedom and privacy advocates.

The tug of war over the Internet’s cherished anonymity and chaotic democracy has government on one side and the public on the other holding tight. But at one point in the not-so-distant future, the gamers and the hackers and the libertarian haters of government regulation will prove no match for reality.

Center's activities provide glimpse into network of conservative advocacy groups

Matea Gold and Joseph Tanfani | McClatchy-Tribune News Service
 
WASHINGTON — The financial firepower that fueled the rise of a network of conservative advocacy groups now pummeling Democrats with television ads can be traced, in part, to Box 72465 in the Boulder Hills post office, on a desert road on the northern outskirts of Phoenix.

That's the address for the Center to Protect Patient Rights, an organization with ties to Charles and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankroll a number of conservative organizations.

Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala

by Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, and Ana Arana, Fundación MEPI May 25, 2012, 6:59 a.m.

Chapter 1: 'You Don't Know Me'

The call from Guatemala put Oscar on edge.

Prosecutors came looking for you, relatives in his rural hometown told him. Big shots from Guatemala City. They want to talk to you.

Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda had plenty to lose. Although he was living in the United States illegally, the 31-year-old had built a solid life. He worked two full-time jobs to support his three children and their mother, Nidia. They had settled in a small but cheerful townhouse in Framingham, Mass., a blue-collar suburb of Boston.

Oscar usually did his best to avoid contact with the authorities. But he decided to call the prosecutor in Guatemala City. She said it was a sensitive matter about his childhood and a massacre in the country's civil war long ago. She promised to explain in an email.

Obama faces Armageddon

The trouble in Greece may be Mitt Romney's best shot at winning the White House 

By Steve Weissman and Frank Browning


September 2008: The collapse of Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers provokes a worldwide economic meltdown.

May 2012: Barack Obama is warned before the Camp David G-8 summit that the financial maelstrom seizing Europe could turn out even worse. If much of Europe slides back into double-dip recession, as Britain has done, millions of Americans will be smacked hard, from Toyota workers in Kentucky to lettuce pickers in sunny California. And almost certainly, Mr. Obama will have turned over the keys to the White House come next January to the “vulture capitalist” Mitt Romney.

Here is the dreadful scenario that growing numbers of analysts fear: Long lines of Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese pound on bank doors demanding to pull their money out before it is replaced by devalued drachmas, pesetas, escudos. Long-suffering Greek voters fail on June 17 to elect political parties that can form a governing coalition, and Greece takes a messy exit from the Euro. Europe’s already faltering financial system then collapses, sending the entire world into a long-lasting global depression for the new President Romney to tackle.

Paul Krugman: Big Fiscal Phonies

Quick quiz: What’s a good five-letter description of Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, that ends in “y”? 

The obvious choice is, of course, “bully.” But as a recent debate over the state’s budget reveals, “phony” is an equally valid answer. And as Mr. Christie goes, so goes his party. 

Until now the attack of the fiscal phonies has been mainly a national rather than a state issue, with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, as the prime example. As regular readers of this column know, Mr. Ryan has somehow acquired a reputation as a stern fiscal hawk despite offering budget proposals that, far from being focused on deficit reduction, are mainly about cutting taxes for the rich while slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. In fact, once you strip out Mr. Ryan’s “magic asterisks” — claims that he will somehow increase revenues and cut spending in ways that he refuses to specify — what you’re left with are plans that would increase, not reduce, federal debt.

David Barton’s latest lunacy: “I’ve decided that Mikey Weinstein is now the new Secretary of the Air Force”

Posted by Mikey Weinstein on @ 11:10 am

We at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) are used to baseless, slanderous attacks. As the sole organization looking out for the constitutionally guaranteed civil rights of armed service members who suffer the horrors of religious oppression and unsolicited, aggressive proselytizing, it comes as no surprise to us that we are daily the specific target of those same perpetrators of religious zealotry who victimize our clients.

Sometimes, though, we can only sit back and chuckle in amusement at the ignorant calumnies and insinuations tossed about by our Christian fundamentalist foes.

Everyone Hates Inflation Because They Don't Understand What It Is

By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Thursday, May 24, 2012, at 11:10 AM ET

I basically agree with Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry about the failure of the "independent" central bank concept, but I think the question of why the politics of the price level have shifted requires a different explanation than this one:

Politicians are crankish about monetary policy for a simple reason: because they know that it's out of their hands anyway. It's like national politicians in Europe who demagogue about policies that are EU competency. They know they're not going to do anything about it, so they don't have to think about it, they don't have to know about it, and they can say whatever they like. It's interesting to note that, historically, the populist political position was generally pro-inflation--remember William Jennings Bryan and the Cross of Gold? Inflation squeezes creditors--bankers and rich people--and helps debtors--less-rich people. Instead and in defiance of political logic, populists in Europe and in the US are anti-inflation. This is because they don't have to think about monetary policy because they know they can't do anything about it. So they bleat about inflation because when regular people hear "inflation" they hear "higher prices = bad".

I think the real issue here is the changing structure of the economy, not the changing structure of central banking.

10 Reasons You Should be Suspicious of Wall Street's Facebook Fiasco

By RJ Eskow, Campaign for America's Future
Posted on May 23, 2012, Printed on May 27, 2012

Three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO, so why were people immediately suspicious when the stock soared and then promptly tanked? Easy answer: Because three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO.

Each of them - Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase - has a history of exactly the kinds of unethical and/or illegal behavior that might, just might, explain what happened with Facebook.

Mark Gongloff offers a good overview of Mr. Zuckerberg's Wild Ride, in which a stock that was offered at an IPO price of $38 soared to $45 and then plunged to its current (as of this writing) price of $31. A lot of people lost money - which means a lot of people made money, too.

Florida Right-Wingers Erect Barriers To Unemployment Claims

By Isaiah J. Poole

May 24, 2012 - 3:35pm ET 

Thursday's reports that unemployment claims are edging downward take on a slightly different cast after reading a complaint filed with the Labor Department detailing how a new Florida law is hindering unemployed people from claiming the benefits that are rightfully theirs.

The changes in the unemployment law are just one of the ways Republican Gov. Rick Scott and his tea-party-dominated legislature is remaking the state into a extremist conservative dystopia. They are detailed in a 10-page complaint sent to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis by Florida Legal Services Inc. and the National Employment Law Project.

Memorial for America's Conscience - Guantanamo

On this holiday, Americans should confront a grim fact about our country: We are torturers

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship


Facing the truth is hard to do, especially the truth about ourselves. So Americans have been sorely pressed to come to terms with the fact that after 9/11 our government began to torture people, and did so in defiance of domestic and international law. Most of us haven’t come to terms with what that meant, or means today, but we must reckon with torture, the torture done in our name, allegedly for our safety.

It’s no secret such cruelty occurred; it’s just the truth we’d rather not think about. But Memorial Day is a good time to make the effort. Because if we really want to honor the Americans in uniform who gave their lives fighting for their country, we’ll redouble our efforts to make sure we’re worthy of their sacrifice; we’ll renew our commitment to the rule of law, for the rule of law is essential to any civilization worth dying for.

The Facebook IPO: Shareholders Weren't Invited to the Real Party

by Matt Taibbi

 

A suit has been filed by Facebook shareholders against Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, Morgan Stanley and others. It's based on a very simple concept: when internal analysts learned that Facebook’s numbers were going to be worse than expected, the company and its bankers didn’t tell everyone, but just "selectively disclosed" information to a small group of "preferred investors."

Henry Blodget, who unfortunately should know about these things, gave a good summary of it all on CBS This Morning:

I was on the phone last night with a former hedge fund CEO who was talking about this. "Facebook," he said, "is a colossal example of a complete clusterfuck where everybody wins except the ordinary investor."

What the Facebook Fiasco Tells Us About Our Rigged Stock Market

How long will we keep getting Zuckered?

By Lynn Parramore

May 24, 2012  |  In the wake of the JP Morgan blow-up and the Facebook debacle, Americans are contemplating the stock market with a mixture of alarm and disgust. Both are justified. In world of high-speed trading and other manipulations, the ordinary investor who wants to make money over the long haul can easily get screwed by those playing a short-term game.

On May 18, Facebook went public to relentless mainstream media cheers. As of Thursday, May 24, the stock was down 15 percent of the initial offering of $38 per share. The Internet bubble of 1998-2000 gave us a brutal lesson in what happens when investors shell out gigantic sums for unproven companies. But never mind. Those “rational” creatures neoliberal economists are always going on about -- you know, the kind that operate on “perfect information” -- did what actual humans tend to do. They got overly excited, followed the herd and found out that their information was far from perfect.

FBI quietly forms secretive Net-surveillance unit

CNET has learned that the FBI has formed a Domestic Communications Assistance Center, which is tasked with developing new electronic surveillance technologies, including intercepting Internet, wireless, and VoIP communications.

by Declan McCullagh | May 22, 2012 11:44 PM PDT

The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.

The establishment of the Quantico, Va.-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement's ability to listen in on private communications.

Messing With Our Minds: The Ever Finer Line Between News and Advertising

Thursday, 24 May 2012 10:58  
By Kingsley Dennis, Truthout | News Analysis 

The manufacturing of consent is endemic within modern societies. Throughout history, the need to "persuade and influence" has always been manipulated by those people in power as a means to maintain authority and legitimacy. In more recent years, the overall manipulation of the mass public mind has become less about making speeches and more about becoming a pervasive presence within the lives of each individual.

Edward Bernays has often been called "the father of public relations," as it was his teachings and research that spurred the postwar years of propaganda. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, utilized psychological and psychoanalytical ideas to construct an informational system - propaganda - capable of manipulating public opinion. Bernays, apparently, considered that such a manipulative apparatus was necessary because society, in his regard, was composed of too many irrational elements - the people - which could be dangerous to the efficient mechanisms of power (or so-called "democracy").

How Can States Give Tax Money to Private, Religious Schools? Loopholes, Of Course

By Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog
Posted on May 23, 2012, Printed on May 27, 2012

There was a story in The New York Times today about state programs that offer tax credits to people who donate to private (mostly religious) primary and secondary schools. It's a long story ,and you may have skipped over it, but I'd like to recommend it to you, because so many of the most infuriating things about America happen as a result of these laws.

First of all, the laws are an end run around legal restrictions on the funding of religious schools. The people who support the laws claim that they're constitutional because no tax money goes to religious schools, but if you get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donating to a religious school, as the story says you do in Georgia, that's indirect funding of religious schools by means of diverted tax money -- but, of course, wingnut-dominated courts don't see it that way, so the state laws are routinely upheld.

What really lies behind the 'war on women'

It would be a mistake to see these attacks as simply a backlash against women. This is about empire struggling for social control

Naomi Wolf
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 May 2012 16.21 EDT


Are women suddenly running rampant in the streets by the millions, threatening society in unexpected ways?

You would surely think so by looking at the pattern that is visible across the nation: state by state, a well-funded legislative war on women is being unleashed. Many of these new proposed bills, or recently passed state laws, attack in novel ways women's rights to ownership of their bodies and their basic life choices, which second-wave feminists thought long won.

Paul Krugman: Egos and Immorality

In the wake of a devastating financial crisis, President Obama has enacted some modest and obviously
needed regulation; he has proposed closing a few outrageous tax loopholes; and he has suggested that Mitt Romney’s history of buying and selling companies, often firing workers and gutting their pensions along the way, doesn’t make him the right man to run America’s economy.

Wall Street has responded — predictably, I suppose — by whining and throwing temper tantrums. And it
has, in a way, been funny to see how childish and thin-skinned the Masters of the Universe turn out to be.
Remember when Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group compared a proposal to limit his tax breaks to Hitler’s invasion of Poland? Remember when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase characterized any discussion of income inequality as an attack on the very notion of success?

Capitalism Has Failed: 5 Bold Ways to Build a New World

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on May 16, 2012, Printed on May 27, 2012

As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In New Economic Visions, a special five-part AlterNet series edited by economics editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: The old economic model has utterly failed us. It has destroyed our communities, our democracy, our economic security, and the planet we live on. The old industrial-age systems -- state communism, fascism, free-market capitalism -- have all let us down hard, and growing numbers of us understand that going back there isn't an option.

But we also know that transitioning to some kind of a new economy -- and, probably, a new governing model to match -- will be a civilization-wrenching process. We're having to reverse deep and ancient assumptions about how we allocate goods, labor, money, and power on a rapidly shrinking, endangered, complex, and ever more populated planet. We are bolding taking the global economy -- and all 7 billion souls who depend on it -- where no economy has ever gone before.

Bain Capital Debate Busting Larger Story About Role of Business Leaders in Job Creation

By: David Dayen Wednesday May 23, 2012 7:41 am

I focused on fundraising in my story yesterday about the President and Bain Capital, but I should double back and say that the actual argument Obama made is a fairly sound one on the merits. He basically said that the role of a President bears no resemblance to the role of a business leader, particularly a private equity or leveraged buyout specialist. One should have a concern on how to create jobs and the other has what amounts to a fiduciary duty to create profit. And those simply aren’t always compatible.

James K. Galbraith: We Told You So

Like many Americans, I was doing everything I could to help elect Barack Obama. It wasn’t all that much—but as an economist in Texas, I had some authority on the thinking of former Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain’s chief economic adviser. I’d made the front page of the Washington Post describing Gramm as a “sorcerer’s apprentice of financial instability and disaster.” (Gramm, with a certain sense of humor, denied it.) For that, and for my experience drafting policy papers, I was in contact every few days with Obama’s economists.

To economists in my own circle, it had long been clear that the financial crisis then unfolding was an epic event. We had watched the subprime mortgage disaster build up. In August 2007 we knew the meltdown had begun. Bear Stearns had failed. But for reasons that have to do with the pace and rhythm of politics, these issues remained on the back burner, the campaign being dominated by health care and the Iraq war. For those of us on the outside, it was hard to know whether the insiders understood what was coming.

Commonly used pesticide turns honey bees into 'picky eaters'

Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that a small dose of a commonly used crop pesticide turns honey bees into "picky eaters" and affects their ability to recruit their nestmates to otherwise good sources of food.

The results of their experiments, detailed in this week's issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, have implications for what pesticides should be applied to bee-pollinated crops and shed light on one of the main culprits suspected to be behind the recent declines in honey bee colonies.

Since 2006, beekeepers in North America and Europe have lost about one-third of their managed bee colonies each year due to "colony collapse disorder." While the exact cause is unknown, researchers believe pesticides have contributed to this decline. One group of crop pesticides, called "neonicotinoids," has received particular attention from beekeepers and researchers.

How Homeownership Has Changed in America And Why You Shouldn't Give Up on Buying

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on May 21, 2012, Printed on May 27, 2012

In one short decade, home ownership has gone from being the Holy Grail of middle-class financial achievement -- the biggest and most lucrative investment most of us would ever make, and the one most reliably likely to pay off -- to a very risky financial ball-and-chain that more and more of us are going way out of our way to avoid.

To be sure, rental housing is no joy. You're answerable to the landlord for every picture nail, plugged drain and loose window; and you get to endure bad landscaping, cheap appliances and paint and carpet colors not even Martha Stewart could work with. But if the trade-off is between spending your life co-existing with your landlord's surreal aesthetic choices or watching your life savings turn into six-figure debt as the value of your house sinks beneath the waves, more and more of us are choosing to suck it up and embrace the charms of bubblegum pink bathroom tile.

For the last few years, renting has seemed prudent and safe -- even for those lucky enough to have the cash for a down payment and a stable enough income to buy. But as the bubble has deflated, and the prices are getting closer to what they would have been in a less exuberant economy, a few hardy souls are starting to venture back in.