Why The Bush Tax Cut Vote Was So Important

Brian Beutler, July 27, 2012, 7:55 AM

During and after yesterday’s big Senate tax vote, I noticed some observers were pretty quick to diminish the magnitude of what transpired, and what Harry Reid managed to accomplish. That wasn’t exactly a widely shared sentiment, but common enough that I think it’s worth breaking down exactly why it wasn’t a predictable development, and why it matters.

In hindsight, an inability or unwillingness to phase out the Bush tax cuts for high earners before the 2010 election was the Democrats’ single largest failure of President Obama’s first two years. That single omission underlies so many of the difficulties he’s faced in the ensuing year and a half that it’s difficult to fathom how different the political landscape would look today if Dems had handled things differently in 2009 or 2010.

Jaw-Dropping Corruption: America's 47 Million Hungry Mouths Are Just Another Corporate Cash Cow

By Mark Anderson

A unique, hard-hitting report just completed by a California attorney exposes a largely unknown federal food-stamp racket involving large grocery retailers, food manufacturing giants and other private players, including the Federal Reserve and JPMorganChase, which combine to channel food stamp spending into a gravy train for the heavy hitters in the food industry.

And the report’s author, Michele Simon, says administrative costs added by these privateers inflate the overall price tag of the Supplemental Nutrition Allowance Program (SNAP). And high program costs are prompting potentially deep legislative cuts to SNAP in the pending Farm Bill — when a record 46 million Americans use SNAP, of which 47% are children.

A major fear is that SNAP cuts could wrongly target the program’s central mission to feed the hungry, when cuts should target the private players who harness the program for their own gain.

The 44 Senators Who Believe The Rich Pay Too Much And The Poor Pay Too Little In Taxes

By Bill Scher

July 26, 2012 - 6:11am ET 

Yesterday the Senate passed legislation to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but extend them for annual income below $250,000. This passed with only Democratic votes, as Republicans for once decided not to filibuster.

The agreement not to filibuster included the opportunity for Senators to vote on a Republican alternative: which literally cut taxes for the wealthy (by extending the Bush tax cuts) while raising taxes on the poor and middle class (by refusing to extend Obama tax cuts for college tuition and for working familes).

Increase in Extreme Storms Causing 'Rapid Ozone Destruction'

Injection of water vapor makes ozone layer sensitive to global warming -- and geoengineering

- Common Dreams staff 

Extreme summer thunderstorms are likely causing accelerated damage to the ozone layer over the United States, as the frequency and strength of storms continue to increase, according to a study released Thursday by the journal Science at Harvard University.

Scientists have previously known that strong storms pose a threat to the ozone layer, due to an effect known as water-vapor injections which project H2O high into the stratosphere where it doesn't belong; however, recent studies of storms have revealed that such 'injections' are reaching far higher and at greater capacity than thought possible, and are likely providing conditions for 'rapid ozone destruction.'

The Nakedness of Their Greed

By Richard (RJ) Eskow
July 26, 2012 - 9:36pm ET

It's truly unbelievable: At no time in modern memory has the privileged class been richer, the middle class more endangered, or the number of people in poverty been so high. And yet the Republican Party, whose leaders are overwhelmingly wealthy themselves, is openly and shamelessly proposing to give more tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires - including heirs and heiresses who have done nothing to earn their riches - while actually raising taxes on millions of poor and middle class people.

There will be a time to engage in argument. But first let's take a moment to gaze in wonder at the nakedness of their greed.

Paul Krugman: Money for Nothing

For years, allegedly serious people have been issuing dire warnings about the consequences of large budget deficits — deficits that are overwhelmingly the result of our ongoing economic crisis. In May 2009, Niall Ferguson of Harvard declared that the “tidal wave of debt issuance” would cause U.S. interest rates to soar. In March 2011, Erskine Bowles, the co-chairman of President Obama’s ill-fated deficit commission, warned that unless action was taken on the deficit soon, “the markets will devastate us,” probably within two years. And so on.

Well, I guess Mr. Bowles has a few months left. But a funny thing happened on the way to the predicted fiscal crisis: instead of soaring, U.S. borrowing costs have fallen to their lowest level in the nation’s history. And it’s not just America. At this point, every advanced country that borrows in its own currency is able to borrow very cheaply.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation Quietly Jump-Starts an Education Division

By BuzzFlash

Created 07/25/2012 - 4:55pm

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Any enterprise that has Rupert Murdoch's fingerprints on it should be accompanied by a, "Warning: Danger Ahead" sign. A recent report by Education Week's Jason Tomassini detailing Murdoch's News Corporation's rebooting of its efforts to develop and market digital educational products to public schools will either have you shaking your head in disbelief, or make your head explode.

According to Tomassini, Murdoch's News Corporation recently "jump-started its fledgling - and mostly quiet - education division ... unveiling Amplify, a new brand for its education business that will include education software products and, in a surprising move, curriculum development."

40 Economists Say The GOP Has Abandoned Economic Reality

By Jeff Spross on Jul 25, 2012 at 2:05 pm

A survey of forty economists from across the ideological and partisan spectrum has concluded that on some of its most cherished issues, the Republican Party has simply taken leave of economic reality. For instance, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers noted that one of the results from the survey — run by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, which is hardly known for a left-wing slant — is an overwhelming agreement that the 2009 Recovery Act (i.e. the stimulus) brought down unemployment. But GOP leaders have spent years roundly denouncing the stimulus as a failure:

The Other ALECs' K-12 Education Agenda Exposed

Wednesday, 25 July 2012 00:00  
By Sarah Blaskey and Steve Horn, Truthout 

This is the fourth and last article in Sarah Blaskey's and Steven Horn's series, "The Other ALECs Exposed."

For over 30 years, corporate America and its allies on both sides of the political aisle have carried out an assault on US workers, pushing down wages, slashing benefits and busting unions.

But after decades of repeated and near-fatal assaults, the US labor movement has waged a fight back, with teachers in the forefront of the battle. Public schools have become the centerpiece of the struggle. Through an array of recent policy initiatives, influential policy wonks are attempting to restructure education fundamentally. According to Jesse Hagopian, a teacher and union activist in Seattle, part of this restructuring process is happening through model bills being enacted systematically in statehouses nationwide.

Austero-Erotic Fantasies For the Elites, Terror For Everyone Else

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

July 25, 2012 - 12:06am ET 

It was a dream come true for the austerity crowd when Great Britain's conservative/"centrist" coalition government took power in 2010. And for commentators like Slate's Anne Appelbaum it was that kind of dream. Her celebratory column reflected the orgiastic glee with which the new government's austerity plans were greeted, reveling in admiring (yes, admiring) phrases like these:

"Vicious cuts." "Savage cuts." "Swingeing (sic) cuts." "Axe-wielders."

As we noted at the time, never before had a government budget been greeted with such lurid, sado-masochistically charged imagery. Appelbaum's piece read like a cross between Free to Choose and The Story of O.

"Articles about the nation's finances are filled with talk of blood, knives, and amputation," Applebaum wrote about the UK press, adding with palpable envy: "And the British love it."

The Careerists

by Chris Hedges

 

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

Paul Krugman: A Nation Is Not A Business

President Obama gets this exactly right: "When some people question why I would challenge [Mitt Romney's] Bain record," he told CBS News on July 13, "the point I've made there in the past is, if you're a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money. It's not to create jobs. It's not even to create a successful business — it's to make sure that you're maximizing returns for your investor."

A country is not a company — and it's definitely not a private equity firm.

If The Public Knew - Corporate Media Helps GOP Sneak In Plutocrat Agenda

By Dave Johnson
July 24, 2012 - 2:48pm ET

Last week Republicans filibustered the Bring Jobs Home Act, when polls show dramatic support for ending tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas. Last week Republicans filibustered the DISCLOSE Act which would at least let us know who is pumping hundreds of millions into our election, when polls show overwhelming opposition to corporate purchases of politicians. That's two BIG ones, and that's just last week. You'd think that would clinch the election -- but the public doesn't know who to blame. In a democracy accountability is important but in a plutocracy impunity carries the day.

Campaigned Saying Dems Cut Medicare - Got Voted In And Eliminated Medicare

If people knew what Republicans were doing... but they don't. In the 2010 election Repubicans spent hundreds of millions on ads telling the public that Democrats had "cut half a trillion from Medicare." So the public "knew" that and Republicans took the senior vote for the first time, enabling them to gain a majority in the House. Except it wasn't true. And when Repubicans got into office they passed a budget that ... pretty much eliminates Medicare.

‘On his own’ Romney ad star took over $1 million in government loans

By Stephen C. Webster
Tuesday, July 24, 2012 11:00 EDT

The up-by-his-bootstraps businessman who stars in an ad for Republican hopeful Mitt Romney seems to have built his business through government-sponsored loans, putting a dent in the campaign’s attack on President Barack Obama’s saying to business owners, “you didn’t get there on your own.”

“My father’s hands didn’t build this company? My hands didn’t build this company? My son’s hands aren’t building this company?” New Hampshire businessman Jack Gilchrist, president of Gilchrist Metal, asks in the ad that’s been making waves since last week.

Reporting by The New Hampshire Union Leader disputed this claim by looking into Gilchrist’s history, revealing that he took over $1 million in government loans since the 1980s, including $800,000 in tax-exempt bonds issued by the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority to build a new manufacturing plant and buy equipment. Gilchrist also admitted to the paper that he took a U.S. Small Business Administration loan of “somewhere south of” $500,000 in the 1980s, and said that to this day about 10 percent of his business comes from defense-related projects.‘On his own’ Romney ad star took over $1 million in government loans

Raising the Minimum Wage Is Cheap and Easy

Monday, 23 July 2012 11:44
By Dean Baker, Truthout

There are some policies that are pretty much no-brainers. We all agree that the Food and Drug Administration should keep dangerous drugs off the market. We all agree that the government should provide police and fire protection. And, we pretty much all agree that workers should be able to count on at least some minimal pay for a day's work.

The minimum wage is non-controversial. The vast majority of people across the political spectrum support the minimum wage. In fact, one of the big accomplishments of the Gingrich Congress in 1996 was a 22 percent increase in the minimum wage. The only real issue is how high it should be. There are good reasons for believing that the minimum wage should be considerably higher than it is today.

Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate

By GAR ALPEROVITZ
Published: July 22, 2012


College Park, Md.

THE Barclays interest-rate scandal, HSBC’s openness to money laundering by Mexican drug traffickers, the epic blunders at JPMorgan Chase — at this point, four years after Wall Street wrecked the global economy, does anyone really believe we can regulate the big banks? And if we broke them up, would they really stay broken up? 

Most liberals in Washington — President Obama included — keep hoping the banks can be more tightly controlled but otherwise left as is. That’s the theory behind the two-year-old Dodd-Frank law, which Republicans and Wall Street are still working to eviscerate.

Frank Rich: Mayberry R.I.P.

Declinist panic. Hysterical nostalgia. America may not be over, but it is certainly in thrall to the idea.

By Frank Rich
Published Jul 22, 2012

Andy Griffith was a genial and gifted character actor, but when he died on Independence Day eve, you’d have thought we’d lost a Founding Father, not a television star whose last long-running series, the vanilla legal drama Matlock, expired in 1995. The public tributes to Griffith were over-the-top in a way his acting never was, spreading treacle from the evening newscasts to the front page of the New York Times.


It was as if the nation were mourning its own demise. To commentators in the liberal media, Griffith’s signature television role, Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, North Carolina, was “one of the last links to another, simpler time” (the Miami Herald) and a repository of “values which actually transcended the deep divides which tore the nation apart during the years the show aired from 1960 to 1968” (the Washington Post). On the right, the sermonizers quickly moved past an inconvenient fact (Griffith made a spot endorsing Obamacare in 2010) to deify Sheriff Taylor for embodying “a time when television was cleaner and simpler” and for giving “millions of Americans the feeling the country stood for all the right things” (National Review). Among those “right” things was the fictional Mayberry’s form of governance, which, in the ideological take of the Daily Caller, demonstrated that “common sense and local control work better than bureaucracy or top-down management.”

Noam Chomsky: Destroying the Commons

Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive.  Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.


That should be a matter of serious immediate concern.  What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event.  It is not an attractive prospect if present tendencies persist -- not least, because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.

Paul Krugman: Loading the Climate Dice


A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a severe heat wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New Jersey, considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.


And this banal observation may be what dooms us to climate catastrophe, in two ways. On one side, the variability of temperatures from day to day and year to year makes it easy to miss, ignore or obscure the longer-term upward trend. On the other, even a fairly modest rise in average temperatures translates into a much higher frequency of extreme events — like the devastating drought now gripping America’s heartland — that do vast damage.

Hello From the Underclass: Unemployment Stories, Vol. One


Hamilton Nolan


Near-suicidal despair. That is what many Americans have earned from this recession. Yesterday, we asked for stories from those of you who are or have been unemployed. We've been flooded with responses. Today, ten stories from economy's bad side.


Unemployment in America touches young and old, educated and uneducated, poor and privileged, men and women. We heard from all of them. This first batch of ten stories (there will be more) represents a mere cross-section of the unemployed. They are lengthy, but worth your time. This is not a contest for most heartstring-tugging tale, nor an invitation for judgment. This is just what's happening out there.


'I spend every day hating myself'


Prompted by lack of child support, in 2007 I left my job (where I would never get a raise) for a new position that paid more in order to take care of my family. I didn't survive the probationary period due to continued harassment and stress from the baby daddy. I was soon evicted and finally filed for child support in anger instead of avoiding it out of fear. I disappeared to Jersey City with an order of protection so that baby daddy couldn't find me and retaliate. My dad left his assisted living facility to at first help me with child care, then to support and supplement my unemployment benefits once it became clear there was little interest in hiring a long term unemployed person that wears hearing aids.

We’re Not Even Close to a Robust Recovery

Here are five reasons why.

By Nouriel Roubini | Posted Sunday, July 22, 2012, at 7:30 AM ET

While the risk of a disorderly crisis in the eurozone is well recognized, a more sanguine view of the United States has prevailed. For the last three years, the consensus has been that the U.S. economy was on the verge of a robust and self-sustaining recovery that would restore above-potential growth. That turned out to be wrong, as a painful process of balance-sheet deleveraging—reflecting excessive private-sector debt, and then its carryover to the public sector—implies that the recovery will remain, at best, below-trend for many years to come.

Even this year, the consensus got it wrong, expecting a recovery to annual GDP growth of better than than 3 percent. But the first-half growth rate looks set to come in closer to 1.5 percent at best, even below 2011’s dismal 1.7 percent. And now, after getting the first half of 2012 wrong, many are repeating the fairy tale that a combination of lower oil prices, rising auto sales, recovering house prices, and a resurgence of U.S. manufacturing will boost growth in the second half of the year and fuel above-potential growth by 2013.

Young adults, Depression-era seniors reflect on economic blows

By BONNIE MILLER RUBIN AND DAWN TURNER TRICE | Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — In 2008, Maria Sanchez was a full-time student at Harper College when the bottom dropped out of the economy and her world. Her parents lost their jobs, forcing the freshman to quit school to support her family.

In 1933, in the midst of the Depression, Norma Anderhous was just 8 when her father's hours were cut back and her mom had to find work, leaving her alone to look after her younger sister in their West Side apartment.

Sanchez and Anderhous are separated in age by 60-plus years, but both have been profoundly shaped by their experiences during times of financial upheaval.

Break the Power of Big Money

by Eric Margolis

Jamaica’s Port Royal used to be called the wickedest city on earth. During the 1600’s, it was a favorite lair for pirates, buccaneers like Henry Morgan, cutthroats, and assorted criminals.

To paraphrase Somerset Maugham’s wonderful quip about Monaco, “a sunny place for shady people.”

In 1692, a massive earthquake plunged most of this tropical Sodom and 2,000 of its inhabitants into the sea. God’s punishments cried preachers.

A Point of View: What would Keynes do?

What would John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the 20th Century, have made of the current economic situation, ponders philosopher John Gray.

"I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath."


That was how John Maynard Keynes, speaking in 1938 in a talk later published as his brilliant memoir My Early Beliefs, recalled his younger self and his friends in the Bloomsbury Group as they had been in the years before World War I.

Cap and Trade Resurrected? Some States Awaken to Its Economic Benefits

Saturday, 21 July 2012 12:14
By Maria Gallucci, InsideClimate News

Evidence showing that cap and trade can bolster a new revenue stream has some state and federal officials quietly seeking answers.

Cap and trade is long dead in the United States, a victim of shifting political winds, fierce oil industry opposition and a weak economy.

Or is it?

Congress and a dozen Midwest and Western states abandoned plans for such programs during the past three years. That's left California and nine Northeast states alone in their embrace of the scheme, which sets a ceiling on CO2 emissions and allows polluters to meet it by buying permits in auctions—and sends hundreds of millions of dollars into state coffers.

The Whole Country May Soon Look Like These American Wastelands

Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse | Jul. 21, 2012, 6:17 AM


Do you want to see where this country is headed?  If so, don't focus on the few areas that are still very prosperous.  New York City has Wall Street, Washington D.C. has the federal government and Silicon Valley has Google and Facebook. Those are the exceptions.


The reality is that most of the country has been experiencing a slow decline for a very long time and once thriving cities such as Gary, Indiana and Flint, Michigan have become absolute hellholes. They are examples of what the rest of America will look like soon.

Tax havens: Super-rich 'hiding' at least $21tn

A global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion (£13tn) hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010, according to a major study.

The figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined.

The Price of Offshore Revisited was written by James Henry, a former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, for the Tax Justice Network.

Tax expert and UK government adviser John Whiting said he was sceptical that the amount hidden was so large.

The Obama Gitmo Myth

New vindictive restrictions on detainees highlights the falsity of Obama defenders regarding closing the camp

by Glenn Greenwald

Most of the 168 detainees at Guantanamo have been imprisoned by the U.S. Government for close to a decade without charges and with no end in sight to their captivity. Some now die at Guantanamo, thousands of miles away from their homes and families, without ever having had the chance to contest accusations of guilt. During the Bush years, the plight of these detainees was a major source of political controversy, but under Obama, it is now almost entirely forgotten. On those rare occasions when it is raised, Obama defenders invoke a blatant myth to shield the President from blame: he wanted and tried so very hard to end all of this, but Congress would not let him. Especially now that we’re in an Election Year, and in light of very recent developments, it’s long overdue to document clearly how misleading that excuse is.