Uncovering the Other ALECs

Wednesday, 16 May 2012 00:00 
By Sarah Blaskey and Steve Horn, Truthout | News Analysis 

Taxpayer-subsidized stealth lobbyists: Lobbyists who circumvent normal lobbying regulations and procedures to advance the corporate agenda in statehouses nationwide on the taxpayer dime.

If Washington DC is the new Versailles, run by corporate overlords and their lobbyist-hired guns, then the 50 statehouses are its paternal twins. That is, while they look different in form, they share the same genetic function as avenues for the fulfillment of the corporate agenda.

Exposed: The Other ALECs' Corporate Playbook

Thursday, 21 June 2012 00:00  
By Steve Horn and Sarah Blaskey, Truthout | News Analysis 

How is it that no matter whom we elect as our state representatives - Democrat, Republican, or other - we most often end up with policies that privilege the corporate agenda over the public interest?

It's a simple question, raised by laws promoting charter schools, fracking, union-busting, privatization, deregulation, and countless other corporate-friendly policies that have spread like wildfire around the country, particularly in recent legislative sessions.

Serious People Do Not Use Wealth of People Under Age 35 as a Measure of Their Well-Being

by Dean Baker

 

There is a well-funded effort in this country to try to distract the public's attention from the massive upward redistribution of income over the last three decades by trying to claim that the issue is one of generational conflict rather than class conflict. Billionaire investment banker Peter Peterson is the most well-known funder of this effort, having kicked in a billion dollars of his own money for the cause.

However, he is far from the only generational warrior. The Washington Post has often gone into near hysterics screaming about retirees living on their $1,100 a month Social Security benefits and getting most of their health care paid for through Medicare. And, there is no shortage of politicians in Washington who like think themselves brave because they will cut these benefits for seniors will protecting the income and wealth of the richest people in the country.

The Tiny Tax that Terrifies Wall Street

By Sam Pizzigati

June 23, 2012 - 3:18pm ET 

Robin Hood would not be happy if he happened upon our incredibly top-heavy modern world. But the new campaign to levy a tax on speculative trading would most certainly have him smiling.

The most lavishly paid bank CEO in America, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, sashayed back to Capitol Hill last Tuesday for still another congressional hearing on JPMorgan’s billions in speculative trading losses this past spring.

Dimon didn’t have much trouble fending off the few tough questions that came his way from lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee. But Dimon and his fellow Wall Streeters may have much more trouble handling a new campaign — for taxing financial speculation — that launched the same day Dimon testified.

Organized Wealth is Out to Screw US

Public attention on right-wing funding in political campaigns has been galvanized by the attack on working people in Wisconsin by an ultraconservative governor out to crush labor unions. Funders such as the Kock Brothers and right-wing institutions such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have been explored by numerous progressive groups.

There is, however, a much larger elaborate strategic right-wing process at work here. It started with the Powell Memo in 1971 urging corporations and wealthy elites to defend the “Free Market” against “Tax & Spend” liberals, “Big Government” progressives, and “Thugish” union leaders. These slogans are part of a carefully-crafted propaganda campaign by organized wealth.

Another View: The Myth of the Postal Service's Finances

Thursday, 21 June 2012 09:11  
By Robert Weiner and George Clingan, Des Moines Register | Op-Ed 

The future of the U.S. Postal Service has been in limbo for several years. It lost an astounding $25.4 billion between 2007 and 2011 and has already lost $3.2 billion in the first quarter of 2012. The service is on the road to bankruptcy.

The Des Moines Register reported last month that Iowa narrowly avoided 178 closures that the agency planned as part of a national cutback of 3,700 post offices. Because of political pressure against the closings, in their place, and for now, many outposts will see dramatically shorter operating hours.

Sen. Jeff Merkley puts the wood to Jamie Dimon in the Senate Banking Committee hearing

By Gaius Publius on 6/22/2012 09:15:00 AM

There have been a number of stories about Jamie Dimon's recent appearance before the Senate Banking Committee.

Most of them, including Matt Taibbi's, comment on the shameful and ignorant performance of almost every senator in the room — especially, but not exclusively, the Republicans.

Paul Krugman: Welcome to the 30s

Martin Wolf is shrill (and rightly so). "Before now, I had never really understood how the 1930s could happen," the Financial Times columnist wrote in an op-ed published on June 5.

"Now I do. All one needs are fragile economies, a rigid monetary regime, intense debate over what must be done, widespread belief that suffering is good, myopic politicians, an inability to co-operate and failure to stay ahead of events."

Right on cue, the European Central Bank declined to cut interest rates, or announce any other policies that might help. Because what possible reason might there be to take action?

David Cay Johnston: America's Long Slope Down

A broad swath of official economic data shows that America and its people are in much worse shape than when we paid higher taxes, higher interest rates and made more of the manufactured goods we use.

The numbers since the turn of the millennium point to even worse times ahead if we stay the course. 

Let’s look at the official numbers in today’s dollars and then what can be done to change course.

First, incomes and jobs since 2000 measured per American:

Internal Revenue Service data show that average adjusted gross income fell $2,699 through 2010 or 9 percent, compared to 2000. That’s the equivalent of making it through Thanksgiving weekend and then having no income for the rest of the year.

Obama Channels Cheney's Geopolitical Energy Policy

Four Ways the President Is Pursuing Cheney’s Geopolitics of Global Energy

by Michael T. Klare

 

As details of his administration’s global war against terrorists, insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known -- a war that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations, and presidentially selected assassinations -- President Obama has been compared to President George W. Bush in his appetite for military action.  “As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign,” Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state, wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.”

When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president.  As recent events have demonstrated, Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie likeness to Cheney’s, especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics of oil as part of an American global struggle for future dominance among the major powers.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy - until they were caught on tape

By Matt Taibbi

June 21, 2012 11:20 AM ET

Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won't hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you're probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government's massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo.

But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

Paul Krugman: Prisons, Privatization, Patronage

Over the past few days, The New York Times has published several terrifying reports about New Jersey’s system of halfway houses — privately run adjuncts to the regular system of prisons. The series is a model of investigative reporting, which everyone should read. But it should also be seen in context. The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which essential functions of government are being both privatized and degraded.

First of all, about those halfway houses: In 2010, Chris Christie, the state’s governor — who has close personal ties to Community Education Centers, the largest operator of these facilities, and who once worked as a lobbyist for the firm — described the company’s operations as “representing the very best of the human spirit.” But The Times’s reports instead portray something closer to hell on earth — an understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force, from which the most dangerous individuals often escape to wreak havoc, while relatively mild offenders face terror and abuse at the hands of other inmates. 

Katha Pollitt: What's the Matter With Creationism?

Do you know what the worst thing about the recent Gallup poll on evolution is? It isn’t that 46 percent of respondents are creationists (“God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years or so”). Or that 32 percent believe in “theistic evolution” (“Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process”). Or that only 15 percent said humans evolved and “God had no part in this process.” It isn’t even that the percentage of Americans with creationist views has barely budged since 1982, when it was 44 percent, with a small rise in the no-God vote (up from 9 percent) coming at the expense of the divine-help position (down from 38 percent). Or that 58 percent of Republicans are creationists, although that does explain a lot.

It’s that the proportion of college graduates who are creationists is exactly the same as for the general public. That’s right: 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. Even 25 percent of Americans with graduate degrees believe dinosaurs and humans romped together before Noah’s flood. Needless to say, this remarkable demonstration of educational failure attracts little attention from those who call for improving our schools.

Study: Renewable sources could supply 80% of U.S. electricity by 2050

By Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, June 21, 2012 10:00 EDT

If the U.S simply committed to building out the transmission infrastructure, the Department of Energy (DOE) believes that currently existing renewable energy technology “is more than adequate” to supply up to 80 percent of the nation’s daily electricity use by the year 2050, a new study has found.

Put together by the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Labratory, the study is the largest-ever to examine the nation’s potential renewable energy capacity. It predicts that while fossil and nuclear fuels will still be needed in 2050, they won’t continue to supply the more than 60 percent of America’s energy they do today.

Maddow on "Fast and Furious," AKA "What Your Uncle Who Watches Fox News All Day Is All Worked Up About"

Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow did progressives a solid by explaining to us what the deal is with the "Fast and Furious" controversy, AKA "What your uncle who watches Fox News all day is all worked up about." Bless you, Rachel Maddow. We all have that uncle/father/brother-in-law/high school friend.

"This is one of those days when what happened today in politics means something totally different to the portion of Americans who watch Fox News than it does to everybody else in the country," she said.

Liberals Working for the Right

Monday, 18 June 2012 09:29  
By Dean Baker, Truthout | News Analysis 

Last week, Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent picked up on a blog post from Democracy editor Michael Tomasky about how liberals should be touting the merits of "government." That is a great idea, if the point is to advance the conservatives' agenda.

It is astounding how liberals are so happy to work for the right by implying that conservatives somehow just want to leave markets to themselves whereas the liberals want to bring in the pointy-headed bureaucrats to tell people what they should do. This view is, of course, nonsense. Pick an issue, any issue, and you will almost invariably find the right actively pushing for a big role for government.

Why Congress Won’t Touch Jamie Dimon: JPM Derivatives Prop Up US Debt

by Ellen Brown

 

When Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase Bank, appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on June 13, he was wearing cufflinks bearing the presidential seal.  “Was Dimon trying to send any particular message by wearing the presidential cufflinks?” asked CNBC editor John Carney.  “Was he . . . subtly hinting that he’s really the guy in charge?”

The groveling of the Senators was so obvious that Jon Stewart did a spoof news clip on it, featured in a Huffington Post piece titled “Jon Stewart Blasts Senate’s Coddling Of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon,” and Matt Taibbi wrote an op-ed called “Senators Grovel, Embarrass Themselves at Dimon Hearing.”  He said the whole thing was painful to watch.

Senators Try to Kill EPA Effort to Reduce Mercury and Toxic Air Pollution

Wednesday, 20 June 2012 00:00  
By Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report 

The Senate is expected to vote Wednesday on a Republican proposal to stop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from implementing new rules that would reduce the amount of dangerous pollutants such as mercury, lead and arsenic emitted from coal burning power plants and prevent more than 100,000 heart and asthma attacks each year.

Lawmakers backing the proposal, led by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), claim the rules are part of the Obama administration's job killing "war on coal."

Rahm Emanuel Still Hates Democracy; and Other Sequels from Five Months of Columnizing

POSTED: June 18, 3:20 PM ET | By Rick Perlstein

This past April I published a piece here I wanted to call "Rahm Emanuel Hates Democracy." Cooler heads in the front office prevailed, and the piece ended up being called "Rahm Emanuel Has a Problem with Democracy." Here's the sequel: Every time I gave a radio interview in Chicago and mentioned my original title for the piece, some newsroom guy just about kissed me.

There have been innumerable articles about Mayor Rahm Emanuel in national publications. Mine, I learned, was the only one anyone could think of that had been critical. Fawning, should-know-better journalistic big shots praised Rahm, at Rahm's word, as a model of democratic openness. Which made the guys I was talking to – guys used to having mayoral flacks feed them questions for the mayor while they were live on the radio interviewing him – just about ready to spit.

Conservatives Of All Stripes Ignore the Suffering of Their Fellow Americans

By: Rmuse
June 19, 2012

As a virtue of empathy, compassion is concern for the suffering of others, and a fundamental part of Christian love. It is also one of the cornerstones of social interconnection and humanism that is the basis of the highest principles in philosophy, society, and community. Unless someone has been hiding in a cave for the past three years, they understand that Republicans, teabaggers, Libertarians, and a major segment of the religious right have abandoned any sense of compassion for their fellow Americans, but especially the poor. Indeed, conservatives of all stripes have demonstrated that instead of compassion, their agenda is increasing the suffering of tens-of-millions of Americans to reward the wealthiest Americans.

Democratic Unfreedom - Social Technique and the Manufacture of Control

Tuesday, 19 June 2012 10:32  
By Kingsley Dennis, Truthout | News Analysis 

A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. - Herbert Marcuse

As Noam Chomsky pointed out, in both "old" and "new" world orders the central goal has pivoted around the issue of control: "Control of the population is the major task of any state that is dominated by particular sectors of the domestic society and therefore functions primarily in their interest ..."[1] Such "particular sectors" as referred to are the minority elite, who pursue controlling strategies to "engineer" national and international affairs in line with their aims. And these aims are for the most part based on greed and power; and the need to keep the masses contented and docile.

The construction of what Marcuse refers to as democratic unfreedom is often implemented through scientific rationalism. The pattern often adopted is in parading rational thinking as the vehicle in which to present specific agendas most suitable to hierarchical power structures. And it is through the rationalism of the elite technocratic establishment that global governance has found its most articulate expression. One of these forms is corporatism and the rise of the conglomerates (media conglomerates were explored in a previous Truthout article). A particular example of corporatism and social control can be found within global food systems, the ways they are monopolized and managed.

How to Tell if Your Favorite Companies Are Truly Progressive or Secretly Selling Out

By Brittany Shoot, AlterNet
Posted on June 18, 2012, Printed on June 23, 2012

Many progressives know that some of their favorite companies have dirty secrets. Many are also aware that in the last 30 years, a number of socially responsible independent companies have accepted buy-outs from larger corporations for various reasons. French Group Danone acquired organic yogurt purveyor Stonyfield Farms in several stages over the last decade. Unilever bought Vermont-based ice-cream company Ben & Jerry’s in 2000. Colgate-Palmolive bought all-natural toothpaste brand Tom’s of Maine in 2006. Clorox purchased natural personal care products manufacturer Burt’s Bees in 2008.

There are many compelling reasons for these corporate acquisitions. In the case of Tom’s of Maine, for instance, the family-owned company became too much to handle for its aging founders, who first launched their humble line of truly all-natural toothpaste in 1970. With none of their children ready to take the reins, founders Tom and Kate Chappell sold an 84 percent controlling stake in the business to Colgate-Palmolive for $100 million. The family retains enough controlling power to keep the company true to its core values, but many loyal customers still saw the sale—and the subsequent packaging changes—as a betrayal.

Paul Krugman: Greece as Victim

Ever since Greece hit the skids, we’ve heard a lot about what’s wrong with everything Greek. Some of the accusations are true, some are false — but all of them are beside the point. Yes, there are big failings in Greece’s economy, its politics and no doubt its society. But those failings aren’t what caused the crisis that is tearing Greece apart, and threatens to spread across Europe.


No, the origins of this disaster lie farther north, in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin, where officials created a deeply — perhaps fatally — flawed monetary system, then compounded the problems of that system by substituting moralizing for analysis. And the solution to the crisis, if there is one, will have to come from the same places.

Thomas Frank: It's a rich man's world: How billionaire backers pick America's candidates

While visiting Kansas City last December, I read a local newspaper story lamenting the gradual transformation of Missouri into a reliably Republican citadel—a red state, as we like to say. In the past, I read, Missouri had been different from its more partisan neighbors. It had been a “bellwether” state that “reflected national trends,” rather than delivering votes for any particular party. But now all that was over, and I assumed the article would go on to mourn the death of judicious public reason—the tradition of giving rival arguments a hearing and testing them with that famous “Show Me” skepticism.

I was wrong. Forget the death of open-mindedness. What was actually being mourned that day in the Kansas City Star was a possible loss of advertising revenue by the state’s TV stations. If Missouri was no longer a battleground state, then the two parties and their various backers would no longer fight their expensive electronic war over the airwaves between St. Louie and St. Joe, and “spending on TV ads in the state [would] plummet.”

Is the Secret War in Yemen and Somalia Secret No Longer?

Obama openly described ‘direct action’ – military operations – in both Yemen and Somalia.

by Chris Woods 

 

In what is being viewed by some as a significant move towards greater transparency, President Obama has officially acknowledged for the first time previously secret US military combat operations in Yemen and Somalia.

The US military has been mounting aggressive combat operations in both countries for some years. Attacks began in Somalia in January 2007, and in Yemen in December 2009. The Bureau monitors operations in both nations, and its data suggests that as many as 180 combat strikes may have taken place in both countries. However until now the US would not even admit that such attacks occurred.

The Economy Comes Unglued

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and Quantitative Easing, the question has been before us:  How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits?  Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued.

In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street’s gambles, the US government’s decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position.  It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.

An Institutional Flaw At The Heart Of The Federal Reserve

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Simon Johnson

 

On the “PBS NewsHour” in late May, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner indicated that the continued presence of Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, on the board on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York creates a perception problem that should be addressed. He used the diplomatic language favored by finance ministers, but the message was loud and clear: Mr. Dimon should resign from the board of the New York Fed.

Mr. Dimon has been an effective opponent of financial reform over the past four years. He remains an outspoken advocate of the view that global mega-banks can manage their own risks, and he has stated publicly that the new international and national rules on capital requirements are “Anti-American.”

Senators Grovel, Embarrass Themselves at Dimon Hearing

by Matt Taibbi

 

I was unable to watch J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s Senate testimony live the other day, so I had to get up yesterday morning and check it out on the Banking Committee’s web site. I had an inkling, from the generally slavish news reports about the hearing that started to come out Wednesday night, that it would be a hard thing to watch.

But I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it was. If not for Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, who was the only senator who understood the importance of taking the right tone with Dimon, the hearing would have been a total fiasco. Most of the rest of the senators not only supplicated before the blowdried banker like love-struck schoolgirls or hotel bellhops, they also almost all revealed themselves to be total ignoramuses with no grasp of the material they were supposed to be investigating.

Did the Supreme Court Just Gut Habeas Rights?

—By Adam Serwer | Mon Jun. 11, 2012 10:30 AM PDT

The Supreme Court's decision on Monday not to hear appeals from a group of Gitmo detainees leaves the remaining 169 detainees at the facility with little chance of securing their freedom through US courts.

In the 2008 case Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled detainees at Gitmo could challenge their detention in US courts. That decision was seen as effectively ending the Bush administration's attempt to carve out a legal black hole for suspected terror detainees. Shortly thereafter, Gitmo detainees began appealing their detentions—and frequently winning in court. But in the years since the decision, conservative judges on the DC Circuit have interpreted the law in a way that assumes many of the government's claims are true and don't have to be proven in court. By not taking any of these cases, the Supreme Court has ensured these stricter rules will prevail. Civil-libertarian groups say that essentially leaves detainees at Gitmo with habeas rights in name only, since the rules make it virtually impossible for detainees to win in court. A Seton Hall University School of Law report from May found that, prior to the DC Circuit's reinterpretation of the rules, detainees won 56 percent of cases. Afterwards, they won 8 percent.