5 Ways Louisiana’s New Voucher Program Spells Disaster for Public Education

By Kristin Rawls, AlterNet
Posted on June 8, 2012, Printed on June 9, 2012

Late last month, the state of Louisiana unveiled a new school voucher program, joining 14 other states that have recently increased the availability of vouchers to fund private school tuition with public dollars.

This latest pet project of popular Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, called Louisiana Believes, is now regarded as the most extensive voucher system in the United States -- out-privatizing even the state of Indiana, where nearly 60 percent of the state’s students are eligible for vouchers. By eroding caps on family income levels, and thereby providing voucher assistance to both low- and middle-income families, Indiana’s plan aimed to remake public education in the state more extensively than any voucher system in US history – until now.

Like Indiana’s program, Louisiana’s new voucher plan is so wide in scope that it could eventually cut the state’s public education funding in half. But in a number of crucial ways, the Louisiana model works even harder to destroy public education than Indiana’s program does. Already approved by the Louisiana state legislature, the program sets an alarming precedent for undermining public education in other states.

Wage Theft Epidemic: Bosses Pocket 15 Percent of Workers' Pay

By Jake Blumgart, AlterNet
Posted on June 8, 2012, Printed on June 9, 2012

Marco Jacal and Isidro Suarez were fed up with their employer, the owner of Veranda, an upscale nightclub and restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village. The two men worked as bar backs and busboys, but weren’t paid an hourly wage--instead they were forced to survive on tips handed off by waitresses after their shifts ended.

“We were very angry and upset, because one, two months turned into five months only paid in tips,” Suarez says. But the two men are also immigrants and were unsure of their rights.

When a new manager declared he would act as middleman for their tips, Jacal and Suarez’s “pay” began to shrivel. The waitresses told them how much they had been left, but the numbers didn’t add up. The manager was stealing part of their tips while the owner stole all of their wages. That was too much.

Does cooperation require both reciprocity and alike neighbours?

Max Planck scientists develop new theoretical model on the evolution of cooperation 

June 08, 2012

Evolution by definition is cold and merciless: it selects for success and weeds out failure. It seems only natural to expect that such a process would simply favour genes that help themselves and not others. Yet cooperative behaviour can be observed in many areas, and humans helping each other are a common phenomenon. Thus, one of the major questions in science today is how cooperative behaviour could evolve. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Harvard University, and the University of Amsterdam have now developed a new model combining two possible explanations - direct reciprocity and population structure - and found that both repetition and structured population are essential for the evolution of cooperation. The researchers conclude that human societies can best achieve high levels of cooperative behaviour if their individuals interact repeatedly, and if populations exhibit at least a minor degree of structure. 

The scientists addressed the question how cooperative behaviour could evolve using a game called the prisoner’s dilemma, which considers two types of players: co-operators who pay a cost to help others; and defectors who avoid paying the cost, while reaping benefits from the co-operators they interact with. In general, everyone would be better off if they had engaged in cooperation, but from the point of view of the individual, defection is more beneficial. Selection will therefore always favour the defectors, and not cooperation. Researchers have used population structure and direct reciprocity to explain why cooperation has nevertheless evolved. In structured populations, co-operators are more likely to interact with other co-operators and defectors with defectors. Direct reciprocity involves the repetition of interaction and is therefore based on experiences gained from prior events involving cooperation. In the past, both approaches have been regarded separately.

Recovery? What Recovery?

Behind the New Jobs Numbers, Dull Statistics Tell a Terrifying Story

by Ted Rall

 

“Worst U.S. Jobs Data in a Year Signals Stalling Recovery,” The New York Times ran as its lead headline on June 2. The Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy created 69,000 jobs during May. The three-month job-creation average was 96,000. Unemployment ticked up a tenth of a point, from 8.1 to 8.2 percent.

Once again, the media is downplaying a blockbuster story—recovery? what recovery?—by dulling it down with a pile of dry, impenetrable statistics.

Wonder why you can’t find a job or get a raise, and your house has been sitting on the market for years? The new jobs numbers are the key to understanding how bad the economy is—and why it’s not likely to get better any time soon.

David Cay Johnston: The Fortunate 400

Six American families paid no federal income taxes in 2009 while making something on the order of $200 million each. This is one of many stunning revelations in new IRS data that deserves a thorough airing in this year’s election campaign.

The data, posted on the IRS website last week, brings into sharp focus the debate over whether the rich need more tax cuts (Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans) or should pay higher rates (President Obama and most Democrats).

The annual report, which the IRS typically releases with a two-year delay, covers the 400 tax returns reporting the highest incomes in 2009. These families reported an average income of $202.4 million, down for the second year as the Great Recession slashed their capital gains.

The Almost Scoop on Nixon’s ‘Treason’

June 7, 2012

 

Special Report: At the end of Campaign 1968, as Richard Nixon feared his narrow lead could disappear if progress were made on Vietnam peace, a U.S. correspondent in Saigon got wind of a cabal between Nixon and South Vietnamese leaders to block peace talks and secure his victory. History was at a crossroads, writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

In late October 1968, Beverly Deepe, a 33-year-old Saigon correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, came upon a story that could have changed history. A six-year veteran covering the Vietnam War, she learned from South Vietnamese sources that Richard Nixon’s campaign was collaborating behind the scenes with the Saigon government to derail President Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks.

On Oct. 28, Deepe sent her startling information to her Monitor editors in the United States, asking them to have the Washington bureau “check out a report that [South Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States] Bui Diem had sent a cable to the Foreign Ministry about contact with the Nixon camp,” she told me in a recent e-mail exchange.

Case closed: the stimulus worked

By Steve Benen  - Thu Jun 7, 2012 10:43 AM EDT

  Among Republicans, it's taken as a given that President Obama's Recovery Act -- a.k.a., the "stimulus" -- was a failed Keynesian experiment. Among many voters, it's also widely assumed that the effort to get the economy back on track simply did not work.

Among those who know what they're talking about, however, there is no real doubt that the stimulus was a success. Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, reminded Congress of this inconvenient truth yesterday.

Paul Krugman: Reagan Was a Keynesian

There’s no question that America’s recovery from the financial crisis has been disappointing. In fact, I’ve
been arguing that the era since 2007 is best viewed as a “depression,” an extended period of economic
weakness and high unemployment that, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, persists despite episodes
during which the economy grows. And Republicans are, of course, trying — with considerable success — to turn this dismal state of affairs to their political advantage.

They love, in particular, to contrast President Obama’s record with that of Ronald Reagan, who, by this
point in his presidency, was indeed presiding over a strong economic recovery. You might think that the
more relevant comparison is with George W. Bush, who, at this stage of his administration, was — unlike
Mr. Obama — still presiding over a large loss in private-sector jobs. And, as I’ll explain shortly, the
economic slump Reagan faced was very different from our current depression, and much easier to deal
with. Still, the Reagan-Obama comparison is revealing in some ways. So let’s look at that comparison, shall we?

A Study Shows That America's Biggest Banks Would Need Another $500 Billion Bailout Should Our Economy Fail Again, and More

Friday, 08 June 2012 15:14  
By Thom Hartmann, The Thom Hartmann Program | News Report 

TRANSCRIPT:

Thom Hartmann here – on the news...

You need to know this. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's recall victory this week is reverberating around the country – and helping other controversial right-wing Governors keep their jobs. In Michigan – a petition drive to recall Governor Rick Snyder – the man behind the controversial "financial managers" law – was dropped. As a spokesman for the group Michigan Rising, which was spearheading the recall effort said, "The results of Wisconsin crystallized how difficult a task it is to recall a sitting governor, even when the unions and the Democratic Party play a significant role in the effort." Recalls are made even more difficult when the Governor has the full-support of America's oligarchs like the Koch brothers – who are willing to spend whatever it takes to keep their guy in the Governor's Mansion. Now is the time for progressives around the nation to continue building a new movement to reverse thirty years of damage done to this nation, its democracy and its economy. Progressives have done this before – building a movement to push back against the Robber Barons of the late 1800's and the Economic Royalists of the 1920's. Time to do it again today to push back against the 1%ers.

How Big Banks Run the World - At Your Expense

Friday, 08 June 2012 00:00  
By Gar Alperovitz, Truthout | News Analysis 

The recent Public Banking conference held in Philadelphia offered a message that is at once so simple - but also so bold - it is hard for most Americans to pause long enough to understand how profoundly their thinking had been corralled by the masters of finance - in ways far, far, far more insidious and powerful than even the latest financial crisis suggests.

To understand what has happened, however, you first have to take a minute to shake a few cobwebs out of your brain about "money" - and how it is created and by whom and for whose benefit.

Too Much Faith in Markets Denies Us the Good Life

By Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky - Jun 7, 2012

John Maynard Keynes’s generation of economists assumed that as people became more efficient at satisfying their wants, they would, and should as rational agents, work less and enjoy life more. Yet power relationships and the insatiability of human wants are such that we have maintained an ethic of acquisitiveness.

International rivalries add fuel to the acquisitive fire. We are constantly being told to gear up to face further challenges, particularly from the Chinese and other poor but industrious peoples. But why, if we already have enough, should we strive for a larger presence in emerging markets?

It is worth recalling that the ideal of economic growth as an end without end is of fairly recent origin. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the voters in 1959 that they had “never had it so good,” he was echoing the widely held view at the time that the capitalist countries of the West were rapidly approaching a consumption plateau, and the main problem of the future would be to ensure that the fruits of the new abundance were democratically distributed.

Why Do Working-Class People Vote Conservative?

By Jonathan Haidt, The Guardian
Posted on June 6, 2012, Printed on June 9, 2012

Why on Earth would a working-class person ever vote for a conservative candidate? This question has obsessed the American left since Ronald Reagan first captured the votes of so many union members, farmers, urban Catholics and other relatively powerless people – the so-called "Reagan Democrats". Isn't the Republican party the party of big business? Don't the Democrats stand up for the little guy, and try to redistribute the wealth downwards?

Many commentators on the left have embraced some version of the duping hypothesis: the Republican party dupes people into voting against their economic interests by triggering outrage on cultural issues. "Vote for us and we'll protect the American flag!" say the Republicans. "We'll make English the official language of the United States! And most importantly, we'll prevent gay people from threatening your marriage when they … marry! Along the way we'll cut taxes on the rich, cut benefits for the poor, and allow industries to dump their waste into your drinking water, but never mind that. Only we can protect you from gay, Spanish-speaking flag-burners!"

The Price of Inequality

Joseph E. Stiglitz

NEW YORK – America likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity, and others view it in much the same light. But, while we can all think of examples of Americans who rose to the top on their own, what really matters are the statistics: to what extent do an individual’s life chances depend on the income and education of his or her parents?

Nowadays, these numbers show that the American dream is a myth. There is less equality of opportunity in the United States today than there is in Europe – or, indeed, in any advanced industrial country for which there are data.

30,000 secret surveillance orders approved each year, judge estimates

If the government spies on you but brings no charges, you'll never know.

by Nate Anderson - June 5 2012, 9:33am EDT

A federal judge estimates that his fellow federal judges issue a total of 30,000 secret electronic surveillance orders each year—and the number is probably growing. Though such orders have judicial oversight, few emerge from any sort of adversarial proceeding and many are never unsealed at all. Those innocent of any crime are unlikely to know they have ever been the target of an electronic search.

In a new paper, called "Gagged, Sealed & Delivered" (PDF), US Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith bashes this culture of continuing secrecy. (Magistrate judges are important members of the federal judiciary; they handle many of the more routine judicial matters, such as warrant applications and initial case management.) In his work as a judge, Smith has become dismayed by the huge number of electronic surveillance orders he sees and by the secrecy that accompanies them.

 

The Design Economy: How to Meet the Challenges of the Next Economic Era

By Joe Costello, SmashWords
Posted on June 4, 2012, Printed on June 8, 2012

Joe Costello, author of the new book Of, By, For: The New Politics of Money, Debt & Democracy, has a message for America: our political economy must be democratically reformed. As we confront a moment of massive historical change, Costello explores, among other things, how electronic information technologies are transforming industrial economies. He explains how the understanding of this shaping process, or design, can help us meet the challenge of the next economic era. Hint: We're going to have to wake up to our power as citizens to get there. 

"The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods." -- Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

Humanity's great agrarian era produced agrarian government systems, economies, and cultures. Human life and human identity derived overwhelmingly from the processes of farming. The much shorter two-centuries old industrial era redefined life. The processes of production and consumption became the overwhelming dual identities of individuals and our institutions that evolved to foster the processes of unlimited industrial growth. As we move into the design economy, increasingly the most imperative questions will be what are the roles, identities, institutions, and processes of design.

Eliot Spitzer: U.S. needs ‘big, old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus’

By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, June 4, 2012 23:01 EDT

Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer said Monday that the United States needed to invest in the public sector, because the country’s current policies clearly were not revving up the economy.

“One thing that could help is a big, old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus,” he said on his Current TV show Viewpoint.

Austerity has never worked

It's not just about the current economic environment. History shows that slashing budgets always leads to recession

Ha-Joon Chang
guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 June 2012 17.14 EDT

Last week saw a string of bad economic news reports. The eurozone leaders seem unwilling or unable to change from their austerity policies, even as Greece and Spain fall apart and the core eurozone economies contract. Britain watches on as its economy is heading for the third consecutive quarter of contraction, with an unexpectedly sharp fall in manufacturing. Last week's jobs figures confirmed that the US recovery is stuttering. The largest developing economies that have so far provided some support for world demand levels – especially India and Brazil but even China – are slowing down too. Four years after the financial crisis began, many rich capitalist economies have not recovered their pre-crisis output levels.

Even more serious is the unemployment problem. The International Labour Organisation estimates there are 60 million fewer people employed worldwide than if the pre-crisis trend had continued. In countries like Spain and Greece, overall jobless rates are approaching 25%, with youth unemployment over 50%. Even in countries experiencing "milder" unemployment problems, like the US and the UK, between 8% and 10% are out of work. If we include those who have given up looking for jobs or those who are forced to work part-time for want of fulltime opportunities, "real" unemployment could be easily over 15% even in these countries.

Alan Simpson: The Washington Elite's Attack Dog


Dean Baker

Alan Simpson, the foul-mouthed former senator, is back in the news. He once again launched an obscenity-laden diatribe against those who oppose his plans to cut Social Security and Medicare. Unfortunately, the focus of the media attention has been on the senator's use of obscenities, which is really beside the point. After all, a single, well-placed expletive can often do the work of a hundred G-rated words. The real issue is the senator's open contempt for the portion of the population that is either dependent on Social Security or Medicare now or will be in the future. Given that that group comprises almost everyone except the rich, Senator Simpson's diatribes are expressing contempt for just about the whole population -- in other words the 99 percent.

The Real Bombshell in the MF Global Post Mortem

John Giddens, the bankruptcy trustee in MF Global, garnered headlines Monday by saying that he will decide in the next 60 days whether to filing suits against Jon Corzine and other officers for breach of fiduciary duty and negligence and against JP Morgan if he is unable to come to a settlement. JP Morgan so far has returned roughly $518 million in MF Global assets and $89 million in customer monies, a meager recovery relative to $1.6 billion in missing customer funds.

The report Giddens released Monday is thorough and confirms many of the observations made in journalistic accounts of the firm’s collapse, particularly regarding inadequate risk and accounting controls, JP Morgan’s aggressive posture greatly increasing the liquidity squeeze. It also makes clear that this is an interim report, and unlike the trustee’s report on Lehman, says that reaches no conclusion regarding legal strategies, including whether prosecutions are warranted.

The Iowa GOP platform, more outrageous than ever

COMMENTARY | May 31, 2012
 
Up for adoption soon, the platform, with 400 planks, is so extreme that an op ed in the Des Moines Register carried the headline, “A letter to the good people of Iowa: Are you crazy?” Aside from that column, however, a check showed no news coverage by the three largest newspapers in the state.


By Herb Strentz

 

Like Jack Torrance, the crazed axe wielder played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining, the Iowa Republican party platform is ‘BAAAAAACK!” And, like its predecessors over the past decade or so, the draft of the 2012 platform is every bit off its rocker as Jack.

 

The platform will be up for worship and adoption at the Iowa Republican state convention on June 16. “Worship” is a good word, given the domination of the Iowa GOP by evangelical zealots and the platform’s homage to their takes on Christian doctrine.

Bilderberg 2012: real men don't like oligarchs

Can the might of Bilderberg be worn down by this torrent of testosterone, megaphones and blatantly eaten goji berries?

Posted by Charlie Skelton, Sunday 3 June 2012 00.55 EDT

I handed the goji berries to the cop. "He dropped these." The cop thanked me, tossed the gojis in the trunk, and bustled away his captive amid a cacophony of outrage from the crowds. Moments earlier, the man with the berries had called out to the crowd: "They can't arrest us all! Let's stand together!" Moments later, poignantly, he was grabbed by the police and bundled into the squad car.

It was a silly arrest, really. He wasn't doing anything at all. He was eating goji berries, standing on the edge of the road. Jaysnacking. A token flex of muscle from Fairfax County police. I'm not sure this constitutes a legal defence, but I'm pretty sure that if you're eating a bag of organic goji berries, you're probably not much of a threat to society. As the police pulled away, the bullhorn sirens started up and I walked away from the noise.

America’s Clean Water Under Siege by U.S. House of Representatives

WASHINGTON - June 1 - Today the U.S. House of Representatives voted against Clean Water Act protections for streams, lakes, and rivers across the United States. The House majority voted to keep a Dirty Water Rider in the House’s Energy and Water Appropriations bill, which would expose 60 percent of our country’s streams and at least 20 million acres of wetlands to toxic pollution and threaten the drinking water of 117 million Americans. The Dirty Water Rider was introduced by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) in an effort to block the Obama administration from protecting waters of the United States, making it easier for polluters to dump their waste into our waters.

OPINION: Could nonprofit health insurance plans be the real reformers?

'Consumer Oriented and Operated Plans' have potential to topple the big guys, some say

By Wendell Potter
6:00 am, May 29, 2012 Updated: 6:00 am, May 29, 2012

 

When members of Congress who led the effort to overhaul the U.S. health care system saw the public option slipping away, some of them suggested that a viable alternative would be the fostering of nonprofit health insurance CO-OPs (Consumer Oriented and Operated Plans) throughout the country.

I was among the many who belittled the idea. Having spent two decades in the health insurance industry, I knew how difficult it is for even the biggest insurers to establish a presence in markets where one or two other insurance firms dominate. And there are hardly any markets left where that is not the case.
 

How Corporate Socialism Destroys

by David Cay Johnston

 

A proposal to spend $250 million of taxpayer money on a retail project here illustrates the damage state and local subsidies do by taking from the many to benefit the already rich few.

Nationwide state and local subsidies for corporations totaled more than $70 billion in 2010, as calculated by Professor Kenneth Thomas of the University of Missouri-St. Louis

In a country of 311 million, that’s $900 taken on average from each family of four in 2010. There are no official figures, but this one is likely conservative because — as documented by Thomas, this column and Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations — these upward redistributions of wealth keep increasing.

Paul Krugman: Sometimes the Evidence Is Not Evident Enough

Friday, 01 June 2012 09:58 

This seems to be a meta period, with reactions to how people think — or, all too often, don’t think — about economics taking center stage. Justin Fox, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group, posted an interesting article on HBR.com recently documenting something I more or less knew, but am glad to see confirmed: People aren’t very receptive to evidence if it doesn’t come from a member of their cultural community.

Financial Times Calls For Full Employment Policies

By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Sunday, June 3, 2012, at 8:55 PM ET

All too often, the business class is ideologically reluctant to embrace the idea that public policy should aim at stabilizing adequate demand and ensuring something approaching full employment. But today's Financial Times editorial steps up to the plate and hopefully people are listening:

First, and most immediately, Ben Bernanke could reverse the hawkish drift at the Federal Reserve and announce a third round of quantitative easing at the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting, later this month.

Pessimists have been forecasting runaway inflation since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. Clearly the markets do not agree.

Paul Krugman: 'I'm sick of being Cassandra. I'd like to win for once'

The American economist has a plan to escape the financial crisis, and it doesn't involve austerity measures or deregulating the banks. But will policy-makers, including our coalition government, heed his advice?

Decca Aitkenhead
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 June 2012 15.00 EDT

By now you will probably have read an awful lot about the financial crisis. Perhaps I've been reading all the wrong stuff, but until now I hadn't managed to find answers to the most puzzling questions. If the crash of 2008 was preceded by an era of unprecedented prosperity, how come most of the people I know weren't earning much?

Deregulation of financial services was supposed to have made us all better off, so why did most of us have to live off credit to keep up? Now that it has all gone wrong, and everyone agrees we're in the worst crisis since the Great Depression, why aren't we following the lessons we learned in the 1930s?

Simple Arithmetic, Not False Narratives Offer Antidote for US Jobs Crisis

by Dean Baker

 

Last week's May jobs numbers were bad news, regardless of how you look at them. Job growth over the last three months has averaged slightly less 100,000 a month, roughly the pace needed to keep pace with labor force growth. The unemployment rate ticked up to 8.2% and the employment to population ratio is still just 0.4 percentage points above its trough for the downturn. And real wages almost certainly declined in May.

However bad this story is, the usual gang of pundits cited in the media had their usual burst of over-reaction. There were many talking of a worldwide slowdown and a possible recession. This is a serious misreading of the jobs report and other recent economic data.

Paul Krugman: This Republican Economy

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut
taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past
couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams.

So the Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed.

Steering from the Abyss

May 31, 2012

 

Exclusive: The world seems on a headlong rush toward the abyss, with American neocons eager to escalate their “clash of civilizations” and religious fundamentalists of various stripes insisting their own ancient texts must be accepted as political prescriptions for the modern era, a crisis addressed by Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

When thousands of people including women and children die in Syria amid what amounts to a sectarian civil war, the Syrian government is condemned and “regime change” is demanded. The West debates military intervention and feeble peace efforts by the United Nations are mocked.

By contrast, when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses touching off a conflagration that killed hundreds of thousands or when President Barack Obama authorizes drone strikes inside Yemen, such as his first known one in the al-Majala region on Dec. 17, 2009, killing dozens, including 14 women and 21 children, most Americans just shrug. The international community stays mostly silent.

Conservatives Attack Scientific Findings About Why They Hate Science (Helping to Confirm the Science)

Some would like to dismiss the inconvenient findings about the political right,  but the science won’t let them.

By Chris Mooney 

May 29, 2012  |  Two months have passed since my new book, The Republican Brain, was published, and so far it has gotten a lot of media attention. However, the coverage has followed a noteworthy pattern: while progressives and liberals seem intrigued about what I’m saying, the so-called “mainstream” media—the CNNs of the world—have shied away from the subject.

 

What’s up with this? Well, a book with conclusions closely related to mine—Norman Ornstein’s and Thomas Mann’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism—seems as though it is being handled similarly by some in the press. And perhaps there’s a reason: Centrist (aka “mainstream”) journalists might well prefer that the findings of these books not be true.