U.N. Monitors for American Elections?

Posted at 6:08 pm, June 14th, 2012 

Republican lawmakers are fond of talking about voter fraud to justify measures to make it harder to vote. Wendy Weiser of New York University’s Brennan Center of Justice put her finger on the nation’s biggest source of voter fraud when she said, “Every year, election officials strike millions of names from the voting rolls using processes that are secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation.” So in the name of combating scandal officials perpetuate it by denying Americans one of their most precious rights. And instead of correcting the abuse, partisan lawmakers are busy erecting still more obstacles to voting.

It’s OK to add to debt to grow jobs

By Josh Bivens | June 13, 2012

Casual observers of budget politics (that is, most voters) may know that the experts in such things are very concerned about rising public debt. They have also probably heard much talk about the “fiscal cliff” the nation is headed for in 2013.

What they might not know is the real danger is that public debt will stop rising quickly. That cutting spending and raising taxes to slow the growth of debt will cause spending to fall across the economy and bring about a new recession.

FBI Terror Plot: How the Government Is Destroying the Lives of Innocent People

By Petra Bartosiewicz, The Nation
Posted on June 14, 2012, Printed on June 16, 2012

It wasn’t long after he met the man called Shareef that Khalifa Al-Akili began to sense he was being set up. Within days of their seemingly chance meeting, Shareef was offering to drive Akili, a 34-year-old Muslim living in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, to the local mosque for prayers. Shareef told Akili he was “all about fighting” and “had a lot of resources at his disposal.” But when Shareef began to probe Akili about his views on jihad and asked him if he could obtain a gun, Akili grew nervous. “I begin to try to avoid him, but would still see him due to the fact that he lived two minutes’ walking distance from my apartment,” Akili said later. In January of this year, Shareef showed up with a “brother” who called himself Mohammed and was keen to meet Akili. Mohammed told Akili that he was a businessman from Pakistan involved in jihad. “He kept attempting to talk about the fighting going on in Afghanistan, which I clearly felt was an attempt to get me to talk about my views,” Akili recalled. “I had a feeling that I had just played out a part in some Hollywood movie where I had just been introduced to the leader of a terrorist sleeper cell.”

 

Out of curiosity, Akili did an Internet search on the cellphone number he’d received from Mohammed. Much to his surprise, he discovered that the man was, in fact, an FBI informant named Shahed Hussain, who had played a pivotal role in at least two major terrorism-related sting operations in recent years. In a lengthy posting on his Facebook page recounting these events, Akili wrote, “I would like to pursue a legal action against the FBI due to their continuous harassment.” He also set up a press conference in Washington with Muslim civil liberties groups to publicize his fear that he was being entrapped. But it was too late. In mid-March, Akili was arrested and charged with being in possession of a .22-caliber rifle at a shooting range several years earlier, an act deemed illegal because of a decade-old drug conviction. Though his arrest was on nonterrorism-related charges, at his bond hearing FBI agents and US Attorneys told the judge they’d seen unspecified “jihadist literature” at his apartment and also alleged that he’d told one of the informants of his desire to go to Pakistan and join the Taliban. The judge ordered Akili held without bail.

What Happens When Universities Are Run By Robber Barons

Er, UVA’s Teresa Sullivan was fired for what?

By Siva Vaidhyanathan  |  Posted Friday, June 15, 2012, at 7:30 PM

In the 19^th century, robber barons started their own private universities when they were not satisfied with those already available. But Leland Stanford never assumed his university should be run like his railroad empire. Andrew Carnegie did not design his institute in Pittsburgh to resemble his steel company. The University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller’s dream come true, assumed neither his stern Baptist values nor his monopolistic strategies. That’s because for all their faults, Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller knew what they didn’t know.

In the 21^st century, robber barons try to usurp control of established public universities to impose their will via comical management jargon and massive application of ego and hubris. At least that’s what’s been happening at one of the oldest public universities in the United States—Thomas Jefferson’s dream come true, the University of Virginia.

Quote of the Day: How the 1 Percent Won

—By Kevin Drum  | Thu Jun. 14, 2012 10:36 AM PDT

Andrew Sprung diagnoses American politics:

Over time, an increasingly extremist GOP has managed to induce a critical mass of voters to green-light its embodiment in law of two ideological tenets that are simple naked rationalizations of the narrowest interests of what we now call the 1%: 1) that tax increases always inhibit productive economic activity, and 2) that "free speech" entails prohibiting any restrictions on vested interests' access to the airwaves for any purpose whatever.

And the epic destruction of American unions over the past few decades has meant there was really no one to fight back against this.

Moyers: How the 1% Is Buying Our Democracy

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, BillMoyers.com
Posted on June 15, 2012, Printed on June 16, 2012

If you’re visiting a candidate this summer and looking for a thoughtful house gift, might we suggest a nice super PAC? Thanks to the Supreme Court and Citizens United, they’re all the rage among the mega-wealthy. All it takes is a little paperwork and a wad of cash and presto, you can have, as The Washington Post describes it, a “highly customized, highly personalized” political action committee.”

It’s easy — super PACs come in all amounts and party affiliations. You don’t have to spend millions, although a gift that size certainly won’t be turned aside.  Cable TV tycoon Marc Nathanson got a super PAC for his friend, longtime Democratic Congressman Howard Berman from California, and all it cost was $100,000. Down in North Carolina, Republican congressional candidate George Holding received a handsome super PAC that includes $100,000 each from an aunt and uncle and a quarter of a million from a bunch of his cousins. Yes, nothing says family like a great big, homemade batch of campaign contributions.

Paul Krugman: We Don’t Need No Education

Hope springs eternal. For a few hours I was ready to applaud Mitt Romney for speaking honestly about what his calls for smaller government actually mean.

Never mind. Soon the candidate was being his normal self, denying having said what he said and serving up a bunch of self-contradictory excuses. But let’s talk about his accidental truth-telling, and what it reveals. 

Workers’ group releases shockingly short list of ethical restaurants

By David Ferguson
Wednesday, June 13, 2012 17:07 EDT

A group dedicated to the rights of food service workers called Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC) has released an annual list of national restaurants and how they treat employees.  A surprising number of U.S. restaurant chains fail to even meet the minimum requirements listed in the guide to be considered fair places to work or ethical places to eat.

The ROC National Diners’ Guide 2012 notes whether restaurants belong to ROC’s “High Road” Restaurant Roundtable program, which brings workers together “to promote the high road to profitability” in the restaurant industry, and then scores restaurants in four categories, the minimum wage for tipped workers, the minimum wage for non-tipped workers, whether or not workers get paid sick days and whether the company offers opportunities for advancement.

Why The Economy Can’t Get Out of First Gear: The Rich Have Sucked It Dry

by Robert Reich

 

Rarely in history has the cause of a major economic problem been so clear yet have so few been willing to see it.

The major reason this recovery has been so anemic is not Europe’s debt crisis. It’s not Japan’s tsumami. It’s not Wall Street’s continuing excesses. It’s not, as right-wing economists tell us, because taxes are too high on corporations and the rich, and safety nets are too generous to the needy. It’s not even, as some liberals contend, because the Obama administration hasn’t spent enough on a temporary Keynesian stimulus.

What happens if America loses its unions

By Harold Meyerson,  
Published: June 12

Are American unions history?

In the wake of labor’s defeated effort to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) last week, both pro- and anti-union pundits have opined that unions are in an all-but-irreversible decline. Privately, a number of my friends and acquaintances in the labor movement have voiced similar sentiments. Most don’t think that decline is irreversible but few have any idea how labor would come back.

What would America look like without a union movement? That’s not a hard question to answer, because we’re almost at that point. The rate of private-sector unionization has fallen below 7 percent, from a post-World War II high of roughly 40 percent. Already, the economic effects of a union-free America are glaringly apparent: an economically stagnant or downwardly mobile middle class, a steady clawing-back of job-related health and retirement benefits and ever-rising economic inequality.

Economics and Morality: Paul Krugman’s Framing

by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling

 

In his June 11, 2012 op-ed in the NY Times, Paul Krugman goes beyond economic analysis to bring up the morality and the conceptual framing that determines economic policy. He speaks of “the people the economy is supposed to serve” — “the unemployed,” and “workers”— and “the mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming.


Krugman is right to bring these matters up. Markets are not provided by nature. They are constructed — by laws, rules, and institutions. All of these have moral bases of one sort or another. Hence, all markets are moral, according to someone’s sense of morality. The only question is, Whose morality? In contemporary America, it is conservative versus progressive morality that governs forms of economic policy. The systems of morality behind economic policies need to be discussed.

GOP Senator Cornyn demands AG Holder resign, Holder gives epic smack-down response

By Eclectablog on June 13, 2012 in GOPocrisy

Day-um…

Yesterday, during his ninth appearance before Congress regarding the “Fast and Furious” debacle (read more about that HERE), Senator John Cornyn, Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked Attorney General Eric Holder to resign, saying he hoped President Obama would replace him.

AG Holder’s response was epic and a total smack-down of Cornyn. The transcript below is courtesy of Meteor Blades at Daily Kos from his post Sen. Cornyn accuses Eric Holder of perjury, asks him to resign. Gets told to pound sand:

The "Fiscal Cliff"? A Hoax. The Democrats' "Long Game"? A Myth. This Is the Real Budget Battle

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

June 11, 2012 - 8:47pm ET 

Suddenly the headlines are filled with talk of an impending "fiscal cliff," a series of tax and budget changes which the news pages say is an impending catastrophe and which the editorial pages are urging Washington lawmakers to prevent.

How would they do that? Why, with the same "Grand Bargain" we keep hearing about, an economically destructive plan in which Democrats betray their principles by imposing benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare in return for the Republicans' grand concession of raising taxes on - you.

The Dark Continuum of Watergate

June 12, 2012

Special Report: The 40^th anniversary of the Watergate break-in has brought reflections on the scandal’s larger meaning, but Official Washington still misses the connection to perhaps Richard Nixon’s dirtiest trick, the torpedoing of Vietnam peace talks that could have ended the war four years earlier, Rober Parry reports.


By Robert Parry

The origins of the Watergate scandal trace back to President Richard Nixon’s frantic pursuit of a secret file containing evidence that his 1968 election campaign team sabotaged Lyndon Johnson’s peace negotiations on the Vietnam War, a search that led Nixon to create his infamous “plumbers” unit and to order a pre-Watergate break-in at the Brookings Institution.

Indeed, the first transcript in Stanley I. Kutler’s Abuse of Power, a book of Nixon’s recorded White House conversations relating to Watergate, is of an Oval Office conversation on June 17, 1971, in which Nixon orders his subordinates to break into Brookings because he believes the 1968 file might be in a safe at the centrist Washington think tank.

Obama Trade Document Leaked, Revealing New Corporate Powers And Broken Campaign Promises

Posted: 06/13/2012 9:17 am Updated: 06/14/2012 6:45 pm

WASHINGTON -- A critical document from President Barack Obama's free trade negotiations with eight Pacific nations was leaked online early Wednesday morning, revealing that the administration intends to bestow radical new political powers upon multinational corporations, contradicting prior promises.

The leaked document has been posted on the website of Citizens Trade Campaign, a long-time critic of the administration's trade objectives. The new leak follows substantial controversy surrounding the secrecy of the talks, in which some members of Congress have complained they are not being given the same access to trade documents that corporate officials receive.

Louisiana Reps Object to Vouchers for Islamic School, No Problem With Christian Schools

The Louisiana legislature narrowly passed a new education spending bill last week that allows students in low-performing districts to pay for private school tuition using state-funded vouchers.

The new provisions for funding private and parochial schools has quickly devolved into a war of words over religion. Even though millions of dollars are being made available to dozens of schools with overt religious agendas, some Republicans balked at the last minute when it was revealed that a private Islamic school had also applied for 38 vouchers under the new program:

Why Conservatives Wrongly Blame Single Moms for the Disastrous Failures of the Right-Wing Economic Model

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on June 12, 2012, Printed on June 16, 2012

We should view lower-income single moms as heroes. Most of them make enormous sacrifices to raise their kids -- trying to balance work and parenthood in a society that offers them very little support. Many are forced to forgo opportunity to advance, working multiple jobs just to scrape by. But too often, they're villified – blamed not only for failing to “keep their man,” but also for America's persistently high poverty rate and dramatic inequality.

The idea that the decline of “traditional marriage” is the root cause of all manner of social problems is especially prominent on the political Right. Serious research into the causes of wealth and income inequality has not been kind to the cultural narratives conservatives tend to favor, but they nonetheless persist because such explanations have immense value for the Right. They offer an opportunity to shift focus from the damage corporate America's preferred economic policies have wrought on working people – union-busting, defunding social programs in order to slash taxes for those at the top and trade deals that make it easy for multinationals to move production to low-wage countries and still sell their goods at home – and onto their traditional bogeymen: feminism, secularism and whatever else those dirty hippies are up to.

The Miseducation of Mitt Romney

Diane Ravitch

On May 23, the Romney campaign released its education policy white paper titled “A Chance for Every Child: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Restoring the Promise of American Education.” If you liked the George W. Bush administration’s education reforms, you will love the Romney plan. If you think that turning the schools over to the private sector will solve their problems, then his plan will thrill you.

The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican education ideas from the past thirty years, namely, subsidizing parents who want to send their child to a private or religious school, encouraging the private sector to operate schools, putting commercial banks in charge of the federal student loan program, holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ test scores, and lowering entrance requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of his advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush administration and several prominent conservative academics, among them former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Deputy Secretary of Education Bill Hansen, and school choice advocates John Chubb and Paul Peterson.

 

'Lost Decade' for US Middle Class, says Economist

- Common Dreams staff 

 

A survey released by Federal Reserve on Monday tells a grim story in numbers what millions of Americans have been feeling in reality for nearly ten years.

The Survey of Consumer Finances, conducted every three years and covering a span from 2007 to 2010, documents steep declines in family income and an overall loss of wealth, mostly fueled by the collapse of the housing market in the US following the subprime mortgage crisis caused by Wall Street in 2008.

How Microsoft and Yahoo Are Selling Politicians Access to You

by Lois Beckett
ProPublica, June 11, 2012, 12:45 p.m.

Microsoft and Yahoo are selling political campaigns the ability to target voters online with tailored ads using names, Zip codes and other registration information that users provide when they sign up for free email and other services.

The Web giants provide users no notification that their information is being used for political targeting.

Family Net Worth Drops to Level of Early ’90s, Fed Says

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
Published: June 11, 2012

WASHINGTON — The recent economic crisis left the median American family in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, the Federal Reserve said Monday.

A hypothetical family richer than half the nation’s families and poorer than the other half had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010, compared with $126,400 in 2007, the Fed said. The crash of housing prices directly accounted for three-quarters of the loss.

Maine study finds potentially disastrous threat to single-celled plants that support all life

By Christopher Cousins, BDN Staff

Posted June 10, 2012, at 5:02 p.m.
Last modified June 11, 2012, at 6:18 a.m. 

BOOTHBAY, Maine — Phytoplankton. If the mention of the tiny plant organisms that permeate the world’s oceans isn’t enough to pique your interest, consider this: They produce the oxygen in every other breath you take.

Still not interested? This is where it’s hard not to take notice. In 2007, the reproduction rate of phytoplankton in the Gulf of Maine decreased suddenly by a factor of five — what used to take a day now takes five — and according to a recently released study by the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay, it hasn’t bounced back.

JP Morgan’s $2 billion experiment with truthiness

By David Cay Johnston

June 11, 2012

 

JPMorgan Chase & Co blames its $2 billion, and maybe much larger, trading loss on mistakes made in hedging the market. Bill Black, a finance criminologist, calls this “hedginess.”

“Hedginess” riffs on “truthiness,” the word the comedian Stephen Colbert invented in 2005. Truthiness means favoring versions of events that one wishes to be true, and acting as if they were true, while ignoring facts to the contrary that are staring you in the face. Fake hedges are to real hedges as “truthiness” is to truth. Hence “hedginess.” JPMorgan’s trades got around the Volcker rule, which tries to prevent banks from speculating in financial derivatives, by labeling as “hedges” bets that were clearly not hedges.
 

Why Obama Caved In on National Security

—By Kevin Drum | Mon Jun. 11, 2012 8:50 PM PDT

I just finished reading Daniel Klaidman's Kill or Capture, a book about the evolution of Barack Obama's national security policy during the first three years of his administration. It's a good book to read if you want an answer to the question, "What happened?" That is, what happened to the idealistic Obama of the 2008 campaign who was going to shut down Guantanamo, end indefinite detention, try terrorist suspects in civilian courts, take civil liberties more seriously, and end the rabid secrecy of the Bush era? How did he turn into the guy who not only didn't do any of that stuff, but became a drone-obsessed killing machine in the process?

Fed Says U.S. Wealth Fell 38.8% in 2007-2010 on Housing

By Jeff Kearns - 2012-06-12T04:01:02Z

The financial crisis wiped out 18 years of gains for the median U.S. household net worth, with a 38.8 percent plunge from 2007 to 2010 that was led by the collapse in home prices, a Federal Reserve study showed.

Median net worth declined to $77,300 in 2010, the lowest since 1992, from $126,400 in 2007, the Fed said in its Survey of Consumer Finances. Mean net worth fell 14.7 percent to a nine- year low of $498,800 from $584,600, the central bank said yesterday in Washington. Almost every demographic group experienced losses, which may hurt retirement prospects for middle-income families, Fed economists said in the report.

The Real Reason Apple Can't Make Your iPhone in America

by Dave Johnson, AlterNet
Posted on June 11, 2012, Printed on June 15, 2012

The following is an adapted version of a speech delivered at Netroots. 

We used to make things here, and then came free trade and then China opened up, and we moved a lot of manufacturing there, especially electronics. We say Apple here, because Apple is the most obvious, and because the supposed values of Apple conflict dramatically with what we now know about the working conditions of the people who make their products. But we mean ALL OF THEM.

We used to think that China got so much business because labor was cheap. The elites, benefiting from that, said take advantage of the low prices, and our workers can move on to better, more productive pursuits.

FEC Gives Progressives a Boost: You Can Donate to Campaigns By Text Message

Thanks to a new ruling by the Federal Election Commission, citizens can text in donations to political campaigns in 2012. Because many Americans who don't have personal computers access the internet and communicate via their smartphones, this decision opens up a new avenue for small donors.

Sp while it may not quite be the campaign finance equivalent of empowering America's Davids in the David-versus-Goliath struggle against big money flowing intp political campaigns (that would be public financing), progressive groups in coalition had petitioned the FEC to allow the text donations.

Rebuild America Act is a model of the New New Deal legislation we should be hammering

by Meteor Blades for Daily Kos

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said to a bleary-eyed but appreciative audience at a Saturday, June 9, morning panel at Netroots Nation that progressives need to stake out and hammer, hammer, hammer our policy positions on the economy. To give no quarter to Congress and the president when it comes to the creation of jobs and the protection of workers already on the job. That's not a new message from Trumka. Because he takes his own advice and hammers, hammers, hammers.

In a fiery Netroots Nation keynote address June 8, Darcy Burner, who is running in Washington's first district for Congress, said progressives tend to view politics as being all about having the best policy. However, she said, the fight is really about power. As obvious as that may sound, it's an essential reminder.

Nanoparticles in polluted air, smoke & nanotechnology products have serious impact on health

Trinity College Dublin scientists establish link between autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and nanoparticles

Dublin, June 11th, 2012 − New groundbreaking research by scientists at Trinity College Dublin has found that exposure to nanoparticles can have a serious impact on health, linking it to rheumatoid arthritis and the development of other serious autoimmune diseases. The findings that have been recently published in the international journal 'Nanomedicine' have health and safety implications for the manufacture, use and ultimate disposal of nanotechnology products and materials. They also identified new cellular targets for the development of potential drug therapies in combating the development of autoimmune diseases.

Environmental pollution including carbon particles emitted by car exhaust, smoking and long term inhalation of dust of various origins have been recognised as risk factors causing chronic inflammation of the lungs. The link between smoking and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis has also been established. This new research now raises serious concerns in relation to similar risks caused by nanotechnology products which if not handled appropriately may contribute to the generation of new types of airborne pollutants causing risks to global health.

The Paycheck Fairness Act's Realpolitik

On average, women make only 77 cents for every dollar men get. But election year grandstanding has put paid to real equity

Naomi Wolf
guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 June 2012 13.20 EDT

Once again, with dispiriting regularity, yet another bill to make it easier to fight for equal pay for women and men has come up for debate by Congress. And once again, we are being bombarded by misleading punditry funded by interested thinktanks.

Is this issue dead, as claimed – and if so, is one of the key justifications for arguing that feminism is unnecessary, correct? Sadly, the answer is a resounding "no".

Opponents of the Paycheck Fairness Act have been stealthy and effective at seeding the debate with disinformation. A well-worn iteration on television and in highbrow analysis magazines is that the wage gap is really due to a "choices gap" – meaning that, these days, any wage disparity between men and women has to do only with the different lifestyle choices women are making. They say women opt for a "mommy track", for instance, or for professions that yield them more freedom to stay home with children.

7 Plutocrats That Bankrolled the GOP Primary -- and What They Want in Return

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
Posted on June 9, 2012, Printed on June 13, 2012

Leave it to Bill Moyers, one of America's most useful citizens, to sum up our country's present political plight in a succinct metaphor: "Our elections have replaced horse racing as the sport of kings. These kings are multibillionaire, corporate moguls who by divine right--not of God, but [of the Supreme Court's] Citizens United decision--are now buying politicians like so much pricey horseflesh."

Pricey, indeed. In its disgraceful, democracy-crushing judicial edict of January 2010, the Court took the big advantage that America's corporate elite already had in politics--and super-sized it. This is the first presidential election to be run under the rigged rules invented by the Court's five-man corporatist majority, and even though voting day is months away, we can already see the results of the thuggish power they bestowed on the moneyed few.

Paul Krugman: Another Bank Bailout

Oh, wow — another bank bailout, this time in Spain. Who could have predicted that?

The answer, of course, is everybody. In fact, the whole story is starting to feel like a comedy routine: yet
again the economy slides, unemployment soars, banks get into trouble, governments rush to the rescue —but somehow it’s only the banks that get rescued, not the unemployed.

Just to be clear, Spanish banks did indeed need a bailout. Spain was clearly on the edge of a “doom loop” — a well-understood process in which concern about banks’ solvency forces the banks to sell assets, which drives down the prices of those assets, which makes people even more worried about solvency. Governments can stop such doom loops with an infusion of cash; in this case, however, the Spanish government’s own solvency is in question, so the cash had to come from a broader European fund.

The Arsenic Diet

By Deborah Blum
June 8, 2012 |  8:57 am

In late May, the organic baby formula maker Nature’s One announced a goal of ”zero arsenic” in its product. Good, you say. Great. Makes perfect sense. Or it would except for this question -  why is a poison like arsenic, of all things, an issue in baby formula?

Read a little further in the Nature’s One press release, and you’ll find a direct link to the problem. The link goes to a February study, published in the Journal of Applied Chemistry, titled “Arsenic Concentration and Speciation in Infant Formula and First Foods.”

Greening the Knowledge Economy: A Critique of Neoliberalism

Sunday, 10 June 2012 08:29  
By Michael A Peters, Truthout | News Analysis 

I was convinced from the outset that the global system based on commodity production could not perpetuate itself indefinitely. Since the end of Fordism and the beginning of the information revolution, the system has been working with growing effectiveness towards the destruction of the foundations of its survival.
-Andre Gorz, 1983, "The Roads to Paradise"

What this age demands more than ever is an understanding not simply of systems in natural, social and geopolitical environments and their interrelations, but also the logic of large-scale system-events, their emergence and collapse, and their impacts for humanity. In the economic and political realm, as social scientists, we need to know more about the logic of large-scale events governing system failures, such as the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989 and the collapse of the neoliberal global financial system in 2008. The social sciences have not been good at predicting or analyzing these kinds of events, which demand a better interface between social and natural sciences and their mediation and understanding through new mathematical and computational theories of complex systems, of complexity and chaos, and of the difficulties with formal mathematical modeling and simulation. Complexity theory is a broad term used for a research approach to problems in diverse disciplines (physics, chemistry, molecular biology, meteorology, economics, sociology, psychology and neuroscience) based on nonlinear, nondeterministic systems evolution. Cybernetic, catastrophe, chaos and complexity are forms of thinking that historically have attempted to theorize these phenomena.

Stiglitz Bares Billionaires’ Weapon -- Government

By James Pressley - Jun 10, 2012

As a populist war cry, “We are the 99 percent” is hard to beat. What the movement has lacked, though, is a coherent message and agenda. Until now.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who grew up amid the steel-mill grit and grind of Gary, Indiana, has spent decades studying the subject of his provocative new book, “The Price of Inequality.”

His conclusion: Economic growth, democracy and even the upper class itself suffer when the top 1 percent of Americans earns a fifth of the country’s income and controls more than a third of its wealth, as they do today.

The GOP's Bizarre, Disturbing Passion for Raising Taxes on the Poor

By James Kwak

Let's hope the Republican Party is bought and paid for by the rich, because the other explanation for its obsession with raising taxes at the bottom is far more disturbing

The Republicans, it goes without saying, are the party of low taxes. Their position for the past two years has been simple: Budget deficits should be reduced solely through spending cuts, not increases in tax revenues--even if those revenues are increased solely by closing loopholes in the tax code. The vast majority of Republicans in Congress have signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which commits them to vote against any bill that would either increase tax rates or increase tax revenues.

That should be the whole story. But it isn't.

States to Residents: Forget Promises to Restore School Funding

Saturday, 09 June 2012 11:12  
By Mike Alberti, Remapping Debate | News Analysis 

When Wichita Public Schools Superintendent John Allison learned that, thanks to rising revenues, Kansas was projected to have a budget surplus of more than $300 million at the end of the year - the state’s first surplus since the recession - he hoped that the legislature would use the money to restore the hundreds of millions of dollars that it had cut from education in the last three years.

From 2008 to the end of the current fiscal year on June 30th, Kansas will have slashed school funding by nearly $700 per student, a decline of more than 12 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. In Wichita, the state’s largest school district, those cuts came to about $60 million of its $600 million budget, Allison said, and translated into large-scale layoffs; the closure of five schools; the elimination of programs such as driver’s education, art, and music; the curtailment of professional development for teachers; and the deferral of necessary maintenance to school buildings.

“We couldn’t take another year like the last three,” Allison said. When news broke about the surplus, “We thought, ‘Finally, things are going to start getting back to normal.’”

Why the United States Can’t Win a Cyberwar

And our political leaders need to understand this—fast.

By Fred Kaplan | Posted Friday, June 8, 2012, at 6:49 PM ET

Sen. John McCain rarely ceases to boggle the mind. He did it again today, highlighting a provision that he inserted in the defense authorization bill requiring U.S. Cyber Command “to provide a strategy for the development and deployment of offensive cyber capabilities.”

“I am very concerned,” he stated, “that our strategy is too reliant on defensive measures in cyber space, and believe we need to develop the capability to go on the offense as well … I believe that cyber warfare will be the key battlefield of the 21^st century, and I am concerned about our ability to fight and win in this new domain.”

Tiny corn could be the next big thing

By John Upton

If modern baseball can teach kids anything about science, it’s that steroids make things huge. We’ve all seen players with tree-trunk sized arms blast baseballs out of ballparks thanks to steroid hormones that bulk up muscle cells.

But what’s good for athletic prowess isn’t always good for farmers. Take corn — a crop we grow on 70 million acres of the nation’s farmland. Naturally occurring veggie steroids give corn long stalks, which require lots of water and fertilizer to grow.

40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought

By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, Published: June 8

As Sen. Sam Ervin completed his 20-year Senate career in 1974 and issued his final report as chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, he posed the question: “What was Watergate?”


Countless answers have been offered in the 40 years since June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars wearing business suits and rubber gloves was arrested at 2:30 a.m. at the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate office building in Washington. Four days afterward, the Nixon White House offered its answer: “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it was,” press secretary Ronald Ziegler scoffed, dismissing the incident as a “third-rate burglary.”

History proved that it was anything but. Two years later, Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign, his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice — the Watergate coverup — definitively established.

Another answer has since persisted, often unchallenged: the notion that the coverup was worse than the crime. This idea minimizes the scale and reach of Nixon’s criminal actions.