The ‘America-Held-Hostage’ Narrative

July 10, 2012

Exclusive: From the moment Barack Obama took office, the Republicans plotted to sabotage his presidency, even though the nation faced its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The U.S. news media knows that, but can’t resist blaming the President for the high unemployment, reports Robert Parry.



By Robert Parry


Misguided media conventional wisdom can prove decisive in close elections, and we are seeing that again this year as one of the key storylines of the U.S. presidential campaign is that Barack Obama is at fault for the poor jobs numbers. Reporters know better, but they can’t break from this “blame Obama” narrative.


So, every time disappointing jobs numbers are released, the media chorus is that Obama will pay a steep price on Election Day 2012. You hear this even from liberal commentators. But it’s no secret that the Republicans have done all they can – since Inauguration Day 2009 – to obstruct the President’s plans to boost hiring.

National Reconnaissance Office Accused of Illegally Collecting Personal Data

By Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — One of the nation’s most secretive intelligence agencies is pressuring its polygraphers to obtain intimate details of the private lives of thousands of job applicants and employees, pushing the ethical and legal boundaries of a program that’s designed instead to catch spies and terrorists.


The National Reconnaissance Office is so intent on extracting confessions of personal or illicit behavior that officials have admonished polygraphers who refused to go after them and rewarded those who did, sometimes with cash bonuses, a McClatchy investigation found.

Elizabeth Warren's Plan Cuts Deficit More Than Scott Brown's: Analysis

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's deficit-cutting proposals would reduce the national debt by 67 percent more over a period of 10 years than proposals offered by Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), according to a Boston Globe report.

The report is based on an independent analysis after both candidates offered five ideas for bridging the country’s $1.2 trillion deficit to the Globe. Though neither candidate provided a comprehensive plan, the analysis concluded that Warren's plan would trim $1.029 trillion from the deficit over the next 10 years, while Brown’s would cut $614.4 billion.

Fact-Check: How the NYPD Overstated Its Counterterrorism Record

by Justin Elliott
ProPublica, July 10, 2012, 11:33 a.m.

The NYPD is regularly held up as one of the most sophisticated and significant counterterrorism operations in the country. As evidence of the NYPD's excellence, the department, its allies and the media have repeatedly said the department has thwarted or helped thwart 14 terrorist plots against New York since Sept 11.

In a glowing profile of Commissioner Ray Kelly published in Newsweek last month, for example, journalist Christopher Dickey wrote of the commissioner's tenure since taking office in 2002: The record "is hard to argue with: at least 14 full-blown terrorist attacks have been prevented or failed on Kelly's watch."

Don't Blame Technology For Shrinking Middle Class

By Dean Baker

July 9, 2012 - 3:13pm ET 

Thomas Edsall devoted his blog post today to several economists who claim that the upward redistribution we have seen over the last three decades is a result of revolutions in technology and that it will be difficult to reverse this development. In fact, much of this economic analysis is quite sloppy and it is easy to show that many of the factors leading to upward redistribution had nothing to do with technology.

For example, the post features a graph that shows for the first time a sustained decline in the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) even as output has continued to rise. While the graph is accurate, it is wrong to imply that this demonstrates any new impact of technology.

What the Court has wrought: the coming Medicaid wars

by Armando for Daily Kos

The opinion of the Supreme Court (PDF) regarding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act has mostly drawn attention to the individual mandate. Five justices of the Supreme Court, the four less conservative justices plus the author of the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts, found that the individual mandate was a valid exercise of Congress' taxing power. I myself have focused much attention on the views expressed by the five conservative justices regarding Congress' power under the Commerce and Necessary and Proper powers and the threat these views may pose to our conception of our modern national government as established by the New Deal and court decisions of the era.

There's a class war, all right. Guess who's winning.

COMMENTARY | July 10, 2012
 
Noted journalist Phil Meyer calls on reporters to follow the example of Barlett and Steele and see the patterns, the underlying structures that created and are perpetuating so much inequality.

By Philip Meyer
pmeyer@email.unc.edu

“Class warfare,” expressed as an epithet, keeps coming up in the election campaign as though it were something novel and dangerous. In reality, it is older than the republic.

And for the past four decades, the upper class has been getting the upper hand. Has anybody noticed?

Two Pulitzer Prize winning reporters did, and they put a spotlight on the class war two decades ago with a series in the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1992, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele compiled their reports into a best-selling book, America: What Went Wrong.

Robert Samuelson Blames the 60s Again

Robert Samuelson decided to blame the 60s again for the economic problems that we are suffering today. He argues that the decision by Kennedy to deliberately run higher deficits to boost the economy and to tolerate a higher rate of inflation gave us all of our current headaches. The former because we ended up with so much debt that we can't now use large deficits to boost demand and the latter because it led to the runaway inflation of the 70s. It's easy to show that both contentions are wrong.

First, the decision by Kennedy to run larger deficits did not lead to an increase in our debt to GDP ratio. In fact, this continued to decline through the 60s and 70s. The rise in the debt to GDP ratio was a Reagan era innovation. The ratio actually fell in the Clinton years, so for those keeping score on such things, rising debt to GDP ratios is largely a post-Reagan Republican president story.

After Five Years: Report Card on Crisis Capitalism

Monday, 09 July 2012 00:00
By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis

After five years of crisis - with no end in sight - it's time to evaluate what happened, why and what needs to be done. One key cause of this crisis is the class structure of capitalist enterprises. I stress that because most treatments miss it. By class structure, I mean enterprises' internal organization pitting workers against corporate boards of directors and major shareholders. Those boards seek first to maximize corporate profits and growth. That means maximizing the difference between the value they get from workers' labor and the value of the wages paid to workers. Those boards also decide how to use that difference ("surplus value") to secure the corporation's reproduction and growth. The major shareholders and the directors they select make all basic corporate decisions: what, how and where to produce and how to spend the surplus value (on executive pay hikes and bonuses, outsourcing production, buying politicians etc.) Workers (the majority) live with the results of decisions made by a tiny minority (shareholders and directors). Workers are excluded from participating in those decisions: a lesson in capitalist democracy.

US capitalism changed in the 1970s. The prior century of labor shortages had required real wage increases every decade (to bring in immigrant workers). In the 1970s, many capitalists installed labor-saving computers, while others relocated production to lower-wage countries. Demand for US laborers fell. Simultaneously, women moved massively into wage work as did new immigrants from Latin America. The supply of laborers in the US rose. Capitalists no longer needed to raise real wages, so they stopped doing so. Since the 1970s, what capitalists paid workers stayed the same. Meanwhile, computers helped labor productivity to rise: what workers produced for capitalists to sell kept increasing. Surplus value (and profits), therefore, soared (stock market boom, rising financial sector etc.) while the wage portion of national product/income fell.

New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson Applaud British, Issue Challenge To American Regulators Over LIBOR Scandal

The New York Times and its outstanding financial reporter, Gretchen Morgenson, have published an important article about the LIBOR banking crisis, challenging American regulators to take this mess as seriously as the British appear to be.

We found out just over a week ago that Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, as well as several other senior Barclays officials, were pushed out of their jobs after Bank of England chief Mervyn King trained a mysterious Vaderesque power on them, impelling them to leave with an "inflection of the eyebrows."

Stiglitz: Much of the financial sector involves "rent-seeking" not production—An essay on rentiers

By Gaius Publius on 7/09/2012 09:15:00 AM 

I put "rent-seeking" in quotes in the headline because it's a special term. The fancy term is "being a rentier" — a renter.

I've written about rent-seeking before, in several places in fact. But this is a place to collect those thoughts in essay form. 

Paul Krugman: Mitt's Gray Areas

Once upon a time a rich man named Romney ran for president. He could claim, with considerable justice, that his wealth was well-earned, that he had in fact done a lot to create good jobs for American workers. Nonetheless, the public understandably wanted to know both how he had grown so rich and what he had done with his wealth; he obliged by releasing extensive information about his financial history.

But that was 44 years ago. And the contrast between George Romney and his son Mitt — a contrast both in their business careers and in their willingness to come clean about their financial affairs — dramatically illustrates how America has changed. 

Digby: It's not personal, it's strictly business
Yesterday I linked to a post by Jonathan Schwartz featuring a loony quote from a misanthropic billionaire and which fatured a quote from David Frum pointing out that one of the reasons billionaires are loony is because they watch Fox News too.

They also hear from the financial and banking industry. Here's an email I received from a friend in the upper 1%:

I just received a 12-page analysis from my bank recounting the prevailing anti-Keynesian analysis of the 'Great Recession'. It directly states that wages have to go down in the USA, that it's inevitable, so draw your own political conclusions. It's a long 'apology' (in the sense of explanation) for Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. It ends with the conclusion that the November election is a crucial tipping point.

First, the big lie:

Despite massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, the global economy failed to rebound briskly from the “great recession.” Growth in the major developed economies remains mired at a pace that is insufficient to absorb excess labor.

This sums up their economic analysis: "Krugman is wrong."

Libor's Dirty Laundry

by Joe Nocera

 

Here in the early stages of the Libor scandal — and, yes, this thing is far from over — there are two big surprises.

The first is that the bankers, traders, executives and others involved would so openly and, in some cases, gleefully collude to manipulate this key interest rate for their own benefit. With all the seedy bank behavior that has been exposed since the financial crisis, it’s stunning that there’s still dirty laundry left to be aired. We’ve had predatory subprime lending, fraudulent ratings, excessive risk-taking and even clients being taken advantage of in order to unload toxic mortgages.

Nonprofit Groups Shield Millions in Political Gifts From Big Business

Sunday, 08 July 2012 09:45 
By Mike McIntire and Nicholas Confessore, The New York Times News Service | Report 

American Electric Power, one of the country's largest utilities, gave $1 million last November to the Founding Fund, a new tax-exempt group that intends to raise most of its money from corporations and push for limited government.

The giant insurer Aetna directed more than $3 million last year to the American Action Network, a Republican-leaning nonprofit organization that has spent millions of dollars attacking lawmakers who voted for President Obama's health care bill — even as Aetna's president publicly voiced support for the legislation.

Other corporations, including Prudential Financial, Dow Chemical and the drugmaker Merck, have poured millions of dollars more into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a tax-exempt trade group that has pledged to spend at least $50 million on political advertising this election cycle.

As long as the rich can speculate on food, the world's poor go hungry

Published: July 1, 2012 - 3:00AM

WHEN we think of overseas aid, we think of helping people who need it. The government says aid helps people overcome poverty. But does it?

Obviously, to overcome poverty we have to overcome the causes of poverty, and the big causes of poverty today are untouched by aid. Poor countries are still forced to pay off unpayable debts. The global poor are facing ever-higher food prices, driven by speculation. And climate change is already destroying lands and livelihoods.

The United Nations warns that these three factors are now reversing global development. To stop this we need radical change.

The Death of Quality Local News: Why I Blew the Whistle on Journatic's Practices

I went public about my experience at Journatic because people should know how their local newspapers are being hollowed out

by Ryan Smith

 

HBO's new late-night series The Newsroom is set in the busy backstage of a CNN-like cable news TV show, but had the creators of the premium cable show really wanted to expose the most shocking behind-the-scenes realities of modern journalism, they'd instead have had to cast actor Jeff Daniels as a reporter for a company named Journatic.


Perhaps not even Aaron Sorkin could pen a compelling drama about copy-editors staring at computers alone in their living rooms, or outsourced reporters silently typing stories on their MacBooks at far-flung Starbucks in St Louis or Manila. Nonetheless, a quiet revolution is happening in the American newspaper industry and it has not been televised. Don't feel bad that you haven't noticed or heard of Journatic – I hadn't either until after nearly a year of working for its sister outfit Blockshopper.

Bill O'Reilly Selectively Edits Melissa Harris-Perry's Comments, Making Her Appear 'Unpatriotic'

By karoli

There's a major right-wing freakout right now over remarks made by several prominent and vocal African-American media personalities over their thoughts about Independence Day.

The point, as Harris-Perry says in the video at the end of this post, is that Independence Day has a different meaning to African Americans than it does to white Americans. Her point in saying so at all is to remind all of us that no matter how far we've come, there's still a long way to go.

The press needs to expose the siege of democracy, not abet it

COMMENTARY | July 06, 2012
 
‘We have become overly fearful, willing to surrender many core freedoms for the illusion of absolute security…We as a nation are less free than we were 11 years ago. And the mainstream press needs to say so, needs to explore this in news articles, as well as editorially and on the op-ed pages and in the broadcast media.’

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat… Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
     From A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt

 

By John Hanrahan
johnhanrahan5@gmail.com

 

Have we in the United States cut down much of  “Man’s laws” – our Bill of Rights – in the name of protecting ourselves from, and attacking, those whom our government has identified as our modern-day devils? 

 

Has the mainstream press largely ignored the chilling story that, pushed by the alarmist warnings of national leaders since the September 11, 2001 attacks, we have become overly fearful, willing to surrender many core freedoms for the illusion of absolute security against what we are told is a never-ending terrorism threat? Never mind reality, we’re scared, as polls show: Do whatever you need to do to keep us safe, please, no questions asked.

10 explosive bubbles that will kill capitalism

Commentary: Slow-motion train wreck in store for U.S.

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch 

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — In mid-2005, three years before Wall Street’s credit meltdown, the Economist warned of the “Biggest Bubble in History.” In five short years after the 2000 dot-com crash property prices across the world had risen an unprecedented 75%. Real estate had become the new dot-com. 

In his April 2007 quarterly newsletter, Jeremy Grantham, founder of the $95 billion GMO firm, reinforced the warning: “First Truly Global Bubble, impacting all countries, all assets worldwide.”

Fox News Edits Obama Clip to Create a Bogus Attack on the Wealthy

By: Jason Easley July 6th, 2012

Fox News has edited a clip from President Obama’s bus tour in order to claim that the president is attacking the wealthy.

[...]


Fox News played a clip of President Obama saying, “And middle class is also an attitude. It’s not just about income; it’s about knowing what’s important and not measuring your success just based on your bank account. But it’s about your values, and being responsible– and looking after each other.”

Crime of the Century

Posted on Jul 6, 2012

By Robert Scheer

Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay—they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.

Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor—short for London interbank offered rate—has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world’s top financers. It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.

A Case Study in How Kris Kobach's Cabal Aims to Remake Election Law

Voting Rights Watch 2012 on July 5, 2012 - 11:14 AM ET

 “Some 1,500 people voted under dead people’s and prisoners’ names from 2008-11, according to Michigan’s auditor general. Many might be clerical errors, but this illustrates the need to ensure accurate voter rolls.”

Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson wrote this in a July 2 Times-Herald column, and she lied.

Johnson is a member of a fifteen-state consortium of right-wing elections officials that’s hellbent on purging voters. And her dishonest jousting in Michigan this week offers a window into how that consortium works—playing fast and loose with facts in order to create the impression of a problem that would justify their hardline solutions, and flouting the law themselves when necessary.

LIBOR for Laymen—What is it and why should you care?

By Gaius Publius on 7/05/2012 09:15:00 AM

UPDATE: For fans of the bottom line, click here.
________

Answers to the headline questions first, then explanations.

■ What is it? LIBOR is the London InterBank Offered Rate — it's the rate at which banks loan each other money. (More on why that matters below.)

■ Why should you care? The LIBOR scandal is the biggest financial and political threat since the Masters of the Universe almost took down the world in 2007–2008.

How Scalia Distorts the Framers

July 4, 2012

 

Exclusive: In rejecting the Commerce Clause as the constitutional foundation for the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court’s right-wing justices distorted America’s founding narrative, including one made-up view attributed to Alexander Hamilton, writes Robert Parry.


By Roberet Parry

Antonin Scalia and the three other right-wing justices who sought to strike down health-care reform cited no less an authority on the Constitution than one of its key Framers, Alexander Hamilton, as supporting their concern about the overreach of Congress in regulating commerce.

In their angry dissent on June 28, the four wrote: “If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws  . . .  spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor pro­fane.’” They footnoted Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 33.

Economics for the 99%

Thursday, 05 July 2012 09:42
By The Center for Popular Economics, Truthout | Op-Ed

The Center for Popular Economics of Amherst, Massachusetts, has released a new booklet, "Economics for the 99%," about the questions raised by the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. That movement has brought about a remarkable change in public consciousness. Before the movement began in September 2011, it was rare to hear politicians or mainstream media discuss problems of growing poverty or income inequality. The movement turned a spotlight on these long-ignored injustices, and it shifted the public conversation. It gave all of us new ways to talk about the economy; OWS turned "the 99 percent" and "the 1 percent" into household terms.