Why Americans Should Work Less – The Way Germans Do

There is a solution to unemployment: if we worked the same shorter hours as Germany, we'd eliminate joblessness overnight

by Dean Baker

 

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, a distinguished British economist, took the lead last week in drafting a sign-on "Manifesto for Economic Common Sense", condemning the turn toward austerity in many countries. This manifesto seems destined to garner tens or even hundreds of thousands of signatures, including mine.

While the basic logic of the manifesto is solid, there is an important aspect to the argument that is overlooked. We can deal with unemployment every bit as effectively by having people work fewer hours, as we can by increasing demand.

Communists in Congress Today? Probing the Roots of 'McCarthyism'

Greg Mitchell on June 30, 2012 - 9:46 AM ET

On Bill Maher’s HBO show last night, Amy Goodman—a guest on the panel for the first time—reminded Bill and the audience that a new McCarthyism was always a threat in America, even if at a more limited range than the original, back in the early 1950s. She pointed out that Representative Allen West, the raging Florida rightwinger, had claimed there were dozens of “Communists” in Congress, and that meant he could only be referring to the Progressive Caucus.

We’re a long way from the “Red Scare” of old, but we have seen, in increasing numbers in recent years, GOP politicians and rightwing pundits and radio hosts decrying the alleged anti-Americanism of many on the left, including liberal centrists like President Obama. So it might be useful here to look back at how “McCarthyism” got its name—a reminder for some, perhaps a revelation to younger people who may know what it means but unsure of the history.

Matt Taibbi: Why is Nobody Freaking Out About the LIBOR Banking Scandal?

The LIBOR manipulation story has exploded into a major scandal overseas. The CEO of Barclays, Bob Diamond, has resigned in disgrace; his was the first of what will undoubtedly be many major banks to walk the regulatory plank for fixing the interbank exchange rate. The Labor party is demanding a sweeping criminal investigation. Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, responded the way a real public official should (i.e. not like Ben Bernanke), blasting the banks:

It is time to do something about the banking system…Many people in the banking industry are hardworking and feel badly let down by some of their colleagues and leaders. It goes to the culture and the structure of banks: the excessive compensation, the shoddy treatment of customers, the deceitful manipulation of a key interest rate, and today, news of yet another mis-selling scandal.

Shamir’s October Surprise Admission

July 3, 2012

 

Exclusive: Two decades ago, ex-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir offered the stunning confirmation that “of course” an October Surprise plot had blocked President Jimmy Carter from gaining the release of 52 U.S. hostages in Iran, thus helping Ronald Reagan win the presidency in 1980, reports Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who died on June 30, was one of the last surviving founders of Israel who lived under the dark cloud of the Holocaust and thus felt justified to do whatever was needed to establish and protect the Jewish state. As such, he was less shy than later Israeli leaders in admitting some harsh realities.

I encountered that side of Shamir in 1993 when I took part in an interview with him at his office in Tel Aviv. One question was whether his Likud predecessor, Menachem Begin, had collaborated with Republicans before the 1980 election to block President Jimmy Carter’s attempts to negotiate freedom for 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran.

Job Insecurity: It's the Disease of the 21st Century -- And It's Killing Us

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Posted on July 1, 2012, Printed on July 4, 2012

Editor's Note: This is the first in an ongoing series on job insecurity. 

Remember Dilbert, the mid-level, white-collar Cubicle Guy of the '90s who could never seem to get ahead? In the 21st century, his position looks almost enviable.

He has been replaced by Waiting-For-the-Other-Shoe-to-Drop Man.

Across America, freaked-out employees are coping with sweat-drenched nights and heart-pounding days. They’re reaching for the Xanax and piling on the work of two or three people. They’re running the risk of short-term collapse and long-term disease.

The hell created by three grinding years of 8 percent-plus unemployment brings us plenty of stories of what people suffer when they lose their jobs. But what about the untold millions who live in chronic fear that tomorrow’s paycheck will be their last?

New Exposé Tracks ALEC-Private Prison Industry Effort to Replace Unionized Workers with Prison Labor

Many of the toughest sentencing laws responsible for the explosion of the U.S. prison population were drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helps corporations write model legislation. Now a new exposé reveals ALEC has paved the way for states and corporations to replace unionized workers with prison labor. We speak with Mike Elk, contributing labor reporter at The Nation magazine. He says ALEC and private prison companies "put a mass amount of people in jail, and then they created a situation where they could exploit that." Elk notes that in 2005 more than 14 million pounds of beef infected with rat feces processed by inmates were not recalled, in order to avoid drawing attention to how many products are made by prison labor. [includes rush transcript]

8 Ways America's Headed Back to the Robber-Baron Era

By Erik Loomis, AlterNet
Posted on July 3, 2012, Printed on July 4, 2012

Over the past 40 years, corporations and politicians have rolled back many of the gains made by working and middle-class people over the previous century. We have the highest level of income inequality in 90 years, both private and public sector unions are under a concerted attack, and federal and state governments intend to cut deficits by slashing services to the poor.

We are recreating the Gilded Age, the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians, using violence against unions, and engaging in open corruption. During the Gilded Age, many Americans lived in stark poverty, in crowded tenement housing, without safe workplaces, and lacked any safety net to help lift them out of hard times.

Paul Krugman: Europe’s Great Illusion

Over the past few months I’ve read a number of optimistic assessments of the prospects for Europe. Oddly, however, none of these assessments argue that Europe’s German-dictated formula of redemption through suffering has any chance of working. Instead, the case for optimism is that failure — in particular, a breakup of the euro — would be a disaster for everyone, including the Germans, and that in the end this prospect will induce European leaders to do whatever it takes to save the situation. 

I hope this argument is right. But every time I read an article along these lines, I find myself thinking about Norman Angell.

Giving Health Care a Chance to Evolve

By ROBERT H. FRANK
Published: June 30, 2012

INTRADE, an online betting site with an excellent record for predicting events, pegged the odds of the Supreme Court overturning President Obama’s health care overhaul law at almost 80 percent. 

When the court affirmed the law’s constitutionality on Thursday, many forecasters were astonished. The ruling came by the slimmest of margins and was defended, in places, by deeply flawed economic reasoning. But it has paved the way for an orderly rehabilitation of America’s gravely dysfunctional health care system.

ALEC faces new challenge to tax-exempt status

Legislative group benefits private, not public interest, complaint says

By John Dunbar

A prominent tax attorney has accused an organization of state lawmakers and corporations officials with improperly claiming nonprofit status, alleging the group’s role is to benefit businesses, the Republican Party, and legislators and not the public.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “elevates commercial gain for a few over the well-being of society’s less fortunate,” says a complaint penned by Marcus Owens, the former chief of the Internal Revenue Service’s nonprofit corporations division, on behalf of Clergy VOICE, a group of ministers from progressive churches in Ohio.

A Wall Street Gambling Tax: The Remedy to Inequality

As the presidential election builds up steam, the Washington elites in both parties are actively scheming to find ways to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for retired workers. The media have widely reported on efforts to slip through a version of the deficit reduction plan developed by Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles and former senator Alan Simpson. Since the vast majority of voters across the political spectrum reject cuts to these programs, the Washington insiders hope to spring this one on us after the election, when the public will have no say.

That is the sort of anti-democratic behavior we expect from elites who naturally want to protect their own interests. Of course the rest of us are more concerned about the well-being of the country as a whole rather than the preserving the wealth of the richest 1 percent.

Trans-Pacific Partnership: Under Cover of Darkness, a Corporate Coup Is Underway

By Lori Wallach, AlterNet
Posted on June 29, 2012, Printed on July 2, 2012

Editor's note: On this week's AlterNet Radio Hour, Joshua Holland spoke with Lori Wallace about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the larger mythology of "free trade." You can listen to their discussion below this article.

Have you heard about the small U.S. government agency engaged in years of closed-door negotiations that could undermine the Obama administration’s declared goals of creating jobs, reregulating the financial sector and lowering healthcare costs?

With the direct participation of 600 corporations and shocking levels of secrecy, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is rushing to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Branded as a trade agreement (yawn) by its corporate proponents, TPP largely has evaded public and congressional scrutiny since negotiations were launched in 2008 by the George W. Bush administration.

Pension Gimmicks Blamed on Workers

By Dave Johnson

June 28, 2012 - 3:36pm ET 

The student loan deal is badly needed. It should have just been extended - duh! But the 1 percenters took it hostage and demanded their pound of flesh before We, the People can preserve even this little bit of what we do for ourselves. So as part of the "sweetener" for those 1 percenters there is a corporate pension giveaway in the deal that has nothing to do with student loans. It appears they are going to let companies underfund pensions -- money that should be set aside for worker pensions tomorrow will instead go into 1 percenter pockets today -- and are setting up for a taxpayer bailout (or just stiffing retirees) later.

Quelle Surprise! Fed Economists Side Firmly With Bank Criminality Over the Rule of Law

Although Dave Dayen and Abigail Field have already given a well-deserved shellacking to a remarkable piece of bank PR masquerading as “insight” at Reuters, “Evidence suggests anti-foreclosure laws may backfire,” it merits longer-form treatment as a crude macedoine of anti-homeowner messaging.

The way Big Lies get sold is by dint of relentless repetition. In the wake of the heinous mortgage settlement, foreclosure fatigue has set in. A lot of policy people want to move on because the topic has no upside for them. Nothing got fixed, the negotiation process took a lot of political capital (meaning, as we pointed out, it forestalls any large national initiatives in the near-to-medium term), and Good Dems don’t want to dwell on a crass Obama sellout (not that that should be a surprise by now). But the fact that this issue, which ought to be front burner given its importance both to individuals and the economy, is being relegated to background status creates the perfect setting for hammering away at bank-friendly memes. When people are less engaged, they read stories in a cursory fashion, or just glance at the headline, and don’t bother to think whether the storyline makes sense or the claims are substantiated.

Justice Roberts's Decision Is Not For Cheering

Laura Flanders on June 29, 2012 - 10:00 AM ET

Call me Debbie Downer, but the general jubilation among liberals over Justice Roberts’s ruling makes me shudder. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing in her lengthy dissent puts it this way:

THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s crabbed reading of the Commerce Clause harks back to the era in which the Court routinely thwarted Congress’ efforts to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it.

Writing right here, Leslie Savan’s correct. There are booby traps in the Court’s Commerce Clause reading. Those traps are baited and ready for tripping in the Medicaid part of the ruling.

Paul Krugman: The Real Winners

So the Supreme Court — defying many expectations — upheld the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. There will, no doubt, be many headlines declaring this a big victory for President Obama, which it is. But the real winners are ordinary Americans — people like you.

How many people are we talking about? You might say 30 million, the number of additional people the Congressional Budget Office says will have health insurance thanks to Obamacare. But that vastly understates the true number of winners because millions of other Americans — including many who oppose the act — would have been at risk of being one of those 30 million. 

Roberts’ Switch

ROBERT B. REICH

Today a majority of the Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare in recognition of its importance as a key initiative of the Obama administration. The big surprise, for many, was the vote by the Chief Justice of the Court, John Roberts, to join with the Court’s four liberals.

Roberts’ decision is not without precedent. Seventy-five years ago, another Justice Roberts – no relation to the current Chief Justice – made a similar switch. Justice Owen Roberts had voted with the Court’s conservative majority in a host of 5-4 decisions invalidating New Deal legislation, but in March of 1937 he suddenly switched sides and began joining with the Court’s four liberals.  In popular lore, Roberts’ switch saved the Court – not only from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s threat to pack it with justices more amenable to the New Deal but, more importantly, from the public’s increasing perception of the Court as a partisan, political branch of government.

Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on June 28, 2012, Printed on July 1, 2012

It's been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don't know is that they're also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are.

Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that's corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here's what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.

How a Lone Grad Student Scooped the Government and What it Means for Your Online Privacy

Thursday, 28 June 2012 09:26  
By Peter Maass, ProPublica | News Analysis 

Jonathan Mayer had a hunch.

A gifted computer scientist, Mayer suspected that online advertisers might be getting around browser settings that are designed to block tracking devices known as cookies. If his instinct was right, advertisers were following people as they moved from one website to another even though their browsers were configured to prevent this sort of digital shadowing. Working long hours at his office, Mayer ran a series of clever tests in which he purchased ads that acted as sniffers for the sort of unauthorized cookies he was looking for. He hit the jackpot, unearthing one of the biggest privacy scandals of the past year: Google was secretly planting cookies on a vast number of iPhone browsers. Mayer thinks millions of iPhones were targeted by Google.

Wall Street's City Bid-Rigging Racket: Who Ran It? How Many Billions Are Missing? Where's the Investigation?

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

June 26, 2012 - 2:31pm ET 

A recent court case proves what many of us have long suspected: Big banks have been ripping off this nation's towns and cities for years in an old-fashioned racketeering scam. We ran some numbers to see how much this criminality might have cost the American people.The answer? Billions.

That's billions that might have been used to educate our children, pave our roads, and protect us from crime, disease, and fire. Will somebody take this investigation as high in these organizations as it needs to go, pursuing the truth wherever it may lead?

The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal

June 27, 2012: 5:00 AM ET

A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.

By Katherine Eban

FORTUNE -- In the annals of impossible assignments, Dave Voth's ranked high. In 2009 the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives promoted Voth to lead Phoenix Group VII, one of seven new ATF groups along the Southwest border tasked with stopping guns from being trafficked into Mexico's vicious drug war.

Some call it the "parade of ants"; others the "river of iron." The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF's congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one.

Paul Krugman: To End This Depression, What Do We Do Now?

The Preface to Paul Krugman's "End This Depression Now!"

This is a book about the economic slump now afflicting the United States and many other countries - a slump that has now entered its fifth year and that shows no signs of ending anytime soon. Needless to say, many books about the financial crisis of 2008, which marked the beginning of the slump, have already been published, and many more are no doubt in the pipeline. But this book is, I believe, different from most of those other books, because it tries to answer a different question. For the most part, the mushrooming literature on our economic disaster asks, "How did this happen?" My question, instead, is "What do we do now?"

Obviously these are somewhat related questions, but they are by no means identical. Knowing what causes heart attacks is not at all the same thing as knowing how to treat them; the same is true of economic crises. And right now the question of treatment should be what concerns us most. Every time I read some academic or opinion article discussing what we should be doing to prevent future financial crises - and I read many such articles - I get a bit impatient. Yes, it's a worthy question, but since we have yet to recover from the last crisis, shouldn't achieving recovery be our first priority?
For we are still very much living in the shadow of the economic catastrophe that struck both Europe and the United States four years ago. Gross domestic product, which normally grows a couple of percent a year, is barely above its precrisis peak even in countries that have seen a relatively strong recovery, and it is down by double digits in several Euro- pean nations. Meanwhile, unemployment on both sides of the Atlantic remains at levels that would have seemed inconceivable before the crisis.

Whiff of Phenol Spells Trouble

by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, June 21, 2012, 10 a.m.

The stench of phenol was overpowering, wafting from mud taken from a layer of rock thousands of feet beneath southern Ohio.

It was 1989 and workers for the Aristech Chemical Corp. had begun drilling a disposal well for dangerous, chemical-laden waste from the company's acetone manufacturing plant in Haverhill.

Here Is Why Our Elites Are Not Fixing The Economy

By Dave Johnson

June 27, 2012 - 12:24pm ET 

When we had democracy, We, the People made the rules and we ran our country and our economy for our benefit. Now that we are a plutocracy things are different. The reason our elites are not doing anything to fix the economy is because from their viewpoint, things are just fine.
Merriam-Webster:

plu·toc·ra·cy noun \plü-ˈtä-krə-sē\
1: government by the wealthy
2: a controlling class of the wealthy

Our political leaders dance with the ones that bring them. Increasingly they are dancing with the billionaires and their giant corporations.

The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America's Middle Class

They had good, stable jobs - until the recession hit. Now they're living out of their cars in parking lots.

By Jeff Tietz
June 25, 2012 11:45 AM ET

Every night around nine, Janis Adkins falls asleep in the back of her Toyota Sienna van in a church parking lot at the edge of Santa Barbara, California. On the van's roof is a black Yakima SpaceBooster, full of previous-life belongings like a snorkel and fins and camping gear. Adkins, who is 56 years old, parks the van at the lot's remotest corner, aligning its side with a row of dense, shading avocado trees. The trees provide privacy, but they are also useful because she can pick their fallen fruit, and she doesn't always­ have enough to eat. Despite a continuous, two-year job search, she remains without dependable work. She says she doesn't need to eat much – if she gets a decent hot meal in the morning, she can get by for the rest of the day on a piece of fruit or bulk-purchased almonds – but food stamps supply only a fraction of her nutritional needs, so foraging opportunities are welcome.

What We Know After Rio: Governments Have Given Up on the Planet

by George Monbiot

 

It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.

The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.

Robert Mundell, evil genius of the euro

For the architect of the euro, taking macroeconomics away from elected politicians and forcing deregulation were part of the plan

Greg Palast
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 June 2012 08.30 EDT


The idea that the euro has "failed" is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.

That progenitor is former University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell. The architect of "supply-side economics" is now a professor at Columbia University, but I knew him through his connection to my Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, back before Mundell's research on currencies and exchange rates had produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.

With Gas Prices Expected To Drop Below $3, Republicans Suddenly Silent On Obama’s Role

By Rebecca Leber on Jun 25, 2012 at 2:59 pm

Experts predict average gas prices may fall below $3 this fall after dropping 14 cents in two weeks. When prices hit a record high, Republicans attributed sole responsibility to President Obama, even though there is no evidence that factors like drilling impact what consumers pay.

Just two months ago, Republicans said Obama shouldered the blame for rising gas costs, and that only he had the “key” to lower gas prices:

Paul Krugman: Why This Economic Crisis Is Not Like The Others

A number of people have asked me to respond to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Phil Gramm, the former United States senator from Texas, and Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia University's business school, about the Reagan recovery versus the Obama recovery, and why it proves that right-wing economics roolz.

But I already did respond. When? In February 2008 — back when people like Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Gramm were denying that there was any recession at all. In fact, Mr. Gramm declared that all we had was a "mental recession," and that America had become a "nation of whiners" in an interview published in The Washington Times on July 9, 2008.

Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith: How the Wall Street Mafia Holds America -- and the World -- Hostage

By Bill Moyers and Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, BillMoyers.com
Posted on June 25, 2012, Printed on July 1, 2012

Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, creator of the finance and economics blog Naked Capitalism, join Bill to discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government, and how that tag-team leaves deep wounds in our democracy. Taibbi's latest piece is "The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia." Smith is the author of "ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism."

Bill Moyers: Welcome. This past week, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, was back on Capitol Hill, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, as he had earlier done before the Senate Banking Committee. He was being questioned on how his bank had lost two billion dollars -- or more -- on risky trading. His reception in the House was less fawning than what he got from the senators. Although many of them also are beneficiaries of JP Morgan largesse, House members were more combative.

Drone Documents: Why The Government Won’t Release Them

by Cora Currier
ProPublica, June 25, 2012, 9:15 a.m.

The covert U.S. effort to strike terrorist leaders using drones has moved further out of the shadows this year — targeted killing has been mentioned by President Obama and defended in speeches by Attorney General Eric Holder and Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan. The White House recently declassified the fact that it is conducting military operations in Yemen and Somalia.

But for all the talk, the administration says it hasn't officially confirmed particular strikes or the CIA's involvement.

Romney and the Rise of the Superpredator Corporate Class

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

June 24, 2012 - 11:14pm ET 

Remember the "superpredators"? They were the supposedly super-violent youngsters of dark complexion that conservatives kept screaming about in the 1990s. We were told they were about to unleash an unprecedented wave of vicious crime any day now.

Those superpredators don't exist, and never did. But the myth of the "superpredator" offers us a new (and, admittedly, partially ironic) lens through which to view today's corporate executives, a class of people which is apparently remorseless about the harm it causes in the pursuit of self-enrichment.

Supreme Court Upholds Citizens United; Tightens Corporate Stranglehold on Campaign Finance

In 5-4 decision, court strikes down Montana ban on corporate donation law, strengthening Citizens United

- Common Dreams staff 

 

In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court has struck down (pdf) Montana's 100 year old law that banned direct corporate political campaign spending in state and local elections. The court reversed a lower court ruling, but did so without allowing full briefing or argument in the case.

Previously, the Montana Supreme Court upheld the law due to the state’s dramatic history of corruption, but the Supreme Court's ruling today rejected that decision, arguing that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Critics, however, say all available evidence -- especially in the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens United decision -- suggests such arguments are absurd and say today's decision only strengthens the role of corporate money and independent wealth while weakening the ability of lawmakers and citizens who might try to temper the amount of corporate money that is now flooding into state-level campaigns.

Some Employers and Republicans Want to Lower the Minimum Wage -- Here's Why They're Completely Out of Touch

If you've been on Facebook this week, you've probably seen the Chris Rock quote making the rounds:

"I used to work at McDonald's making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss is trying to say? It's like, 'Hey, [if] I could pay you less, I would, but it's against the law.'"

Now it seems that some minimum wage employers are trying to pay their workers less -- and to even make it legal to do so. It seems unfathomable that anyone would consider the minimum wage -- which, for a full-time worker, provides a yearly salary that is thousands of dollars below the poverty line for a family of three or four -- to be too high. But in Arizona, Republican legislators are pushing a bill that would allow employers to pay teenagers working part-time a full three dollars per hour less than the state minimum wage, which works out to a mere $4.65 per hour.

'Shock Doctrine' in Action: Vital Freshwater Resources Under Attack by Privatization Capitalists

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on June 19, 2012, Printed on July 1, 2012

Set in South America's breathtaking Andes landscape, the visually sweeping new documentary Patagonia Rising bills itself as a frontier story of water and power. But both its frontier and its story nevertheless belong to anyone on the planet that needs water to live.

We are countless compared to the infinitesimal contingency who live to profit off of water. For the purposes of Patagonia Rising, screening now in New York and beyond, that includes the privatization capitalists of HidroAysen, which is planning to build five hydroelectric power plants (marketspeak for dams) to choke off Chile's glacially fed Baker and Pascua rivers, two of the planet's purest. Signed by President Sebastien Pinera, the first billionaire to be sworn into the Chilean presidency, but stalled thanks to vigorous protests, HidroAysen would effectively hand over almost all of Chile's energy market to a duopoly run by Spain's Endesa and Italy's Enel. And they're not exactly hiding their distaste for environmental impact of five dams cornering the prize jewel of Patagonia's freshwater business.

"This exploits the best use of water," a HidroAysen executive argues in Patagonia Rising. "That's sustainability."

Lawmakers reworked financial portfolios after talks with Fed, Treasury officials

By Kimberly Kindy, Scott Higham, David S. Fallis and Dan Keating,

 

In January 2008, President George W. Bush was scrambling to bolster the American economy. The subprime mortgage industry was collapsing, and the Dow Jones industrial average had lost more than 2,000 points in less than three months.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner became the Bush administration’s point person on Capitol Hill to negotiate a $150 billion stimulus package.

In the days that followed, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. made frequent phone calls and visits to Boehner. Neither Paulson nor Boehner would publicly discuss the progress of their negotiations to shore up the nation’s financial portfolio. 

Yes, there is an alternative to capitalism: Mondragon shows the way

Why are we told a broken system that creates vast inequality is the only choice? Spain's amazing co-op is living proof otherwise

Richard Wolff

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 24 June 2012 10.13 EDT

There is no alternative ("Tina") to capitalism?

Really? We are to believe, with Margaret Thatcher, that an economic system with endlessly repeated cycles, costly bailouts for financiers and now austerity for most people is the best human beings can do? Capitalism's recurring tendencies toward extreme and deepening inequalities of income, wealth, and political and cultural power require resignation and acceptance – because there is no alternative?

I understand why such a system's leaders would like us to believe in Tina. But why would others?

Joseph Stiglitz Sees Terrifying Future for America If We Don't Reverse Inequality

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Posted on June 24, 2012, Printed on July 1, 2012

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of America's most prescient voices, wrote an article for Vanity Fair several months before Occupy Wall Street was born. "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" called attention to the widening gap between rich and poor and its deadly impact on our society and its democratic institutions. In his newly released book, The Price of Inequality, Stiglitz returns to this theme of a divided society, delving into the origins and consequences of economic unfairness. I caught up with Professor Stiglitz and talked to him about how the persistent myths and beliefs associated with our capitalist system help to drive this trend, turning America from a land of opportunity to a land of broken dreams.

Lynn Parramore: An argument has been made, particularly since the end of the Cold War, that capitalism is great at producing things that can improve our lives, and so we ought to therefore tolerate some unfairness. What's wrong with that narrative?

Joseph Stiglitz: Well, capitalism does have a lot of strengths, including producing things that are very innovative. But what drives capitalism is the profit motive. You can profit not only by making good things, but also by exploiting people, by exploiting the environment, by doing things that are not so good. The narrative that you describe ignores the extent to which a lot of the inequalities in the United States are not the result of creative activity but of exploitive activity. And if you look at the people at the top, what is so striking is that the people who've made the most important creative contributions are not there.
By that I mean the really foundational things like the computer, the transistor, the laser. And how many people at the top are people who made their money out of monopoly -- exercising monopoly power? Like bankers who exploited through predatory lending practices and abusive credit card practices. Or CEOs who took advantage of deficiencies in corporate governance to get a larger share of the corporate revenues for themselves without any regard to the extent to which they have actually contributed to increasing the the sustainable well-being of the firm.

Paul Krugman: The Great Abdication

Among economists who know their history, the mere mention of certain years evokes shivers. For example, three years ago Christina Romer, then the head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, warned politicians not to re-enact 1937 — the year F.D.R. shifted, far too soon, from fiscal stimulus to austerity, plunging the recovering economy back into recession. Unfortunately, this advice was ignored.

But now I’m hearing more and more about an even more fateful year. Suddenly normally calm economists are talking about 1931, the year everything fell apart. 

Getting Away With It

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells

In the spring of 2012 the Obama campaign decided to go after Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, a private-equity firm that had specialized in taking over companies and extracting money for its investors—sometimes by promoting growth, but often at workers’ expense instead. Indeed, there were several cases in which Bain managed to profit even as it drove its takeover targets into bankruptcy.

So there was plenty of justification for an attack on Romney’s Bain record, and there were also clear political reasons to make that attack. For one thing, it had worked for Ted Kennedy, who used tales of workers injured by Bain to good effect against Romney in the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race. Also, to the extent that Romney had any real campaign theme to offer, it was his claim that as a successful businessman he could fix the economy where Obama had not. Pointing out both the many shadows in that business record and the extent to which what was good for Bain was definitely not good for America therefore made sense.

Why Is the Government Collecting Your Biometric Data?

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
Posted on June 24, 2012, Printed on July 1, 2012

The next time you get pulled over, watch for a blocky, black gadget attached to the officer's iPhone. That's the MORIS device, one of many mobile fingerprint and biometric scanners proliferating in police departments around the country. MORIS is designed to ascertain identity and dig up an unsavory past, but that's not all: the device can also gather iris scans, fingerprints, and photos searchable with face recognition technology.

Mobile scanners like MORIS are just one of the many ways biometric data (unique, identifying physical features including fingerprints, DNA or iris scans) is collected and potentially fed into government and private biometric databases that have swelled in both size and sophistication in the decade after 9/11.