Cutbacks to Unemployment Insurance Came Long Before the Great Recession

Bryce Covert on August 6, 2012 - 12:20 PM ET

You may have heard that we’re in the middle of an unemployment crisis. It’s little wonder that an average of 365,500 people per week made new claims for unemployment benefits over the past month. These high numbers have been straining unemployment insurance programs at the federal and state level, and many states have run out of reserves to pay for them, triggering a reduction in benefits. But this crisis wasn’t inevitable. The pull back in unemployment benefits is just another result of state-level choices to cut taxes at the expense of state spending, spending that could be cushioning the blow of the Great Recession.

States are unable to adequately finance their unemployment insurance programs just when they are most needed not because they were unexpectedly overwhelmed. As a new report from the National Employment Law Project shows, it was because they failed to finance them during the good times like they’re supposed to. Here’s the way it works: federal law requires each state to collect unemployment insurance contributions from employers and deposit them into a state trust fund held in the treasury. During good times, the trust funds accumulate reserves so that claims can be paid out during downturns. This makes the program countercyclical, helping to pump money into workers’ pockets and therefore businesses (via their spending) when times are tough.

Paul Krugman: US Conservatives Pile on the Excuses


he commentators Mike Konczal and Jonathan Chait both had good blog posts recently on "You didn't build that," the statement President Obama made during a speech in July that, deliberately misinterpreted, has dominated right-wing discourse these past few days. But I think both of them missed a couple of tricks.

The first is that both in effect shrugged their shoulders over the fact that for several days running the central theme of the Romney campaign has rested on a complete lie.

Emails Give Glimpse Into Deals That Fueled Financial Meltdown

by Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein
ProPublica, Aug. 6, 2012, 9:40 a.m.

As ProPublica has been detailing for two years, Wall Street banks and the hedge fund Magnetar worked together to build mortgage-backed deals that the hedge fund also bet against. The more than $40 billion of deals helped fuel the crash of 2008.

Now, recently collected emails from bankers and a Magnetar executive involved in some of the deals appear to shed new light on how they did it.

Fiduciaries threatened with a loss of business if they didn't cooperate. Prime movers behind a billion-dollar deal suggesting they need to keep their actions hidden. It's all portrayed in the emails, which were included as part of a civil lawsuit against Magnetar filed in New York's Southern District Court in late June. (Our reporting is also cited in the complaint.)

Are the hunger wars coming?
COMMENTARY | August 07, 2012

Michael Klare write that if history is any guide, rising food prices caused by drought will also lead to widespread social unrest and violent conflict.


By Michael T. Klare
mtkSS@hampshire.edu

The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but we already know that its consequences will be severe. With more than one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of predictions. This, in turn, will boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported U.S. grains.

This, however, is just the beginning of the likely consequences: if history is any guide, rising food prices of this sort will also lead to widespread social unrest and violent conflict.

Right-Wing Plan for Defeating Obama: Gin Up the Hate

Stuck with a lackluster candidate, Tea Partiers focus their rage on the president.

By Adele M. Stan


Politics is an ugly business, the saying goes, and one aspect of that ugliness are the votes a devoted activist must cast for a candidate he doesn't much like. Take candidate Mitt Romney, for instance. But if the big-money donors of the right have anything to say about, those right-wing voters will be turning out for Mitt Romney on election day.


At a conference staged by David Koch's Americans For Prosperity Foundation, Tea Party activists from around the country gathered in Washington, D.C. last weekend to hear famous right-wingers harangue President Barack Obama, and to learn what part they can play in securing the president's defeat. This year, the anti-Obama rhetoric was typically sharp, while mentions of the Republican presidential candidate were few and far between.

Chris Hayes on elite failure

Why don't American oligarchs fear the consequences of their corruption, and how can that be changed?

By Glenn Greenwald

The Nation‘s Editor-at-Large and MSNBC’s weekend host, Chris Hayes, recently published a book documenting the fundamental failure of America’s elite institutions and exploring the causes and solutions: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. What makes this book genuinely outstanding, and so rare, is that it is actually difficult to decide whether one agrees with many of its arguments. That’s because, as is typical of Hayes, he is more interested in grappling with complex questions in novel, non-obvious ways than he is in eliciting pat answers and easy agreement.

The highest compliment one can give a writer is not to say that one wholeheartedly agrees with his observations, but that he provoked — really, forced — difficult thinking about consequential matters and internal questioning of one’s own assumptions, often without quick or clear resolution. That achievement, at its core, is what defines Twilight of the Elites, and it’s what makes it so genuinely worth your time to read and think about. Provoking that type of questioning in people is a much more difficult task, and a much more valuable one, than inducing clear-cut, unequivocal agreement (which is often, though not always, accomplished by simply validating someone’s already held convictions). For that reason, Hayes’ book stays with you long after you are done reading it.

Why Washington Accepts Mass Unemployment

By Jonathan Chait

Good news! The economy added 163,000 jobs last month, just a bit over the level required to keep up with population growth. A return to a free fall now seems less likely. On the other hand, there is the small footnote that the return to full employment is nowhere in sight. The recovery looks safe for those of us who are not already screwed. That, sadly, has come to be the primary focus of our economic policy.

In the years since the collapse of 2008, the existence of mass unemployment has stopped being something the economic powers that be even pretend to regard as a crisis. To those directly impacted, the economic crisis is an emergency, a life-altering disaster the damage from which will endure for years. But most of those in a position to address it simply have not seen it in such terms. History will record that the economic elite has viewed the economic crisis from a perspective of detached complacency.

What's Campbell Brown Doing Smearing Teachers All Over the Media?

By Sarah Jaffe

Unfortunately, teacher-union-bashing has become one of the few areas in which many Democrats seem to agree with Republicans—and where people with no experience in the classroom declare themselves experts and pontificate to anyone who will listen about how if we could just fire those bad teachers, everything would be fine.

The latest self-proclaimed expert to grace the pages of the national media -- in this case Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal [3] -- is Campbell Brown, former CNN and NBC anchor and reporter. Brown, whose expertise appears to be that she testified in front of Governor Cuomo's Education Reform Commission, doesn't note that she has a personal connection to an organization that spends its time doing just that--demonizing teachers. She painted what appears to be a horrific tale of sexual predators let loose in public schools to prey on our children, and blames the processes that exist to provide teachers with some sort of job security—processes that unions have fought for over the course of decades—for keeping them there. She then hit Morning Joe, MSNBC's morning program, to make the same argument.

Fussbudget

How Paul Ryan captured the G.O.P.

by Ryan Lizza August 6, 2012

One day in March, 2009, two months after the Inauguration of President Obama, Representative Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, sat behind a small table in a cramped meeting space in his Capitol Hill office. Hunched forward in his chair, he rattled off well-rehearsed critiques of the new President’s policies and America’s lurch toward a “European” style of government. Ryan’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all died before their sixtieth birthdays, so Ryan, who is now forty-two, could be forgiven if he seemed like a man in a hurry. Tall and wiry, with a puff of wavy dark hair, he is nearly as well known in Washington for his punishing early-morning workouts as he is for his mastery of the federal budget. Asked to explain his opposition to Obama’s newly released budget, he replied, “I don’t have that much time.”

Ryan won his seat in 1998, at the age of twenty-eight. Like many young conservatives, he is embarrassed by the Bush years. At the time, as a junior member with little clout, Ryan was a reliable Republican vote for policies that were key in causing enormous federal budget deficits: sweeping tax cuts, a costly prescription-drug entitlement for Medicare, two wars, the multibillion-dollar bank-bailout legislation known as TARP. In all, five trillion dollars was added to the national debt. In 2006 and 2008, many of Ryan’s older Republican colleagues were thrown out of office as a result of lobbying scandals and overspending. Ryan told me recently that, as a fiscal conservative, he was “miserable during the last majority” and is determined “to do everything I can to make sure I don’t feel that misery again.”

The Long, Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Locking up the innocent. Arresting his critics. Racial profiling. Meet America's meanest and most corrupt politician.

By Joe Hagan

August 2, 2012 11:57 AM ET

Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!

Joe Arpaio, the 80-year-old lawman who brands himself "America's toughest sheriff," is smiling like a delighted gnome. Nineteen floors above the blazing Arizona desert, the Phoenix sprawl ripples in the heat as Arpaio cues up the Rolling Stones to welcome a reporter "from that marijuana magazine."

Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!

The guided tour of Arpaio's legend has officially begun. Here, next to his desk, is the hand-painted sign of draconian rules for Tent City, the infamous jail he set up 20 years ago, in which some 2,000 inmates live under canvas tarps in the desert, forced to wear pink underwear beneath their black-and-white-striped uniforms while cracking rocks in the stifling heat. HARD LABOR, the sign reads. NO GIRLIE MAGAZINES!

Raising the Minimum Wage: A Sure Path to Economic Health

Sunday, 05 August 2012 00:00  
By Dick Meister, Dick Meister's Blog | Op-Ed 


It's way past time to raise the pitifully low federal minimum wage. That would provide badly needed help to the millions who are living in poverty or near-poverty at the current rate of $7.25 an hour, and would help all Americans by stimulating the sagging economy.

Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois are carrying bills that would set a new minimum of $10 an hour. They're pressing hard – as they very well should – to get the general public and their allies in Congress to fully appreciate the widespread good that would come from helping some of the country's neediest workers.
"We've bailed out banks, we've bailed out corporations, we've bailed out Wall Street, we've tried to create sound fundamentals in the economy," Jackson noted. "Now it's time to bail out working people who work hard every day and still make only $7.25. The only way to do that is to raise the minimum wage."

Tax breaks for businesses led to state unemployment funds going broke

by Laura Clawson for Daily Kos Labor

Over the past four years, a whopping 36 states have had to borrow from the federal government to pay unemployment insurance benefits. Obviously a recession with high unemployment has a lot to do with that, but not as much as you might think. Tax breaks for businesses (PDF) are once again a hidden culprit for state budget problems.

A new report from the National Employment Law Project shows that, recession or not, many states could have avoided borrowing for unemployment payments if they hadn't spent a decade weakening their unemployment insurance trust funds by slashing employer contributions:

Federal Spending Is Not Trapped by the Social Safety Net

By James Galbraith
August 2, 2012 - 3:14pm ET

The nub of Bill Keller's recent essay on why Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid must be cut is a graph – taken from a report by a group called Third Way – that compares federal “investments” with “entitlements,” showing that one is in decline and the other is on the rise. As a baby boomer, former Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee, and an economist concerned with military matters (I chair the Board of Economists for Peace and Security), my antennae went up immediately.

Note, as Keller acknowledges, that the federal budget counts weapons systems as “investments.” Back in the 1960s, we were building nuclear bombers, submarines, missiles, and warheads; today we are downsizing that arsenal, happily unused. Does Mr. Keller really think that those “investments” had anything much to do with economic growth? If so, he's misinformed.

Big Banks Fall Back On Three Myths

By Simon Johnson

Global megabanks have had a tough summer.  Jamie Dimon, vociferous opponent of restrictions on reckless risk-taking by big banks, presided over large losses due to exactly such behavior in the London office of JP Morgan Chase.  HSBC, which prided itself on running a uniquely decentralized management model, was found to have violated – massively, over many years, and in a uniquely decentralized manner – US money laundering and other laws; the head of global compliance resigned while on the witness stand during a Senate hearing in July.  And Barclays – which had bulked up on the strength of its capital market activities – conceded that traders from that part of the company had conspired to rig Libor, a key benchmark for global interest rates; in the ensuing public outcry, the top two executives were forced out.

The Real Entitlement Crisis

by William E. Connolly

According to the Republican Party, Wall Street, “Morning Joe”, Fox News and every neoliberal financial analyst we live in an Entitlement Society. And it is carrying us into crisis. All the entitlements they want to reform or eliminate are provided by the state. Medicare and Social Security are the biggest villains, with Medicaid hot on their heels. So the critique of the entitlement society goes hand in hand with the demand by neoliberals to divest more and more activities from the state so that the market can handle them in its way. The neoliberal claim, in contrast to both the Keynesian liberals and radical democrats they oppose, is that the more activities folded into the “impersonal” market the more rational the world will be and the less taxes the state will gulp down. You can thus have both tax reduction and deficit reduction according to this fantasy. This story is all too familiar.

Paul Krugman: Debt, Depression, DeMarco

There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way — and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.

And this week’s shocking refusal to implement debt relief by the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — a Bush-era holdover the president hasn’t been able to replace — illustrates perfectly what’s going on.

U.S. Growth in 'prosperity economics'

By: Jacob Hacker and Nathaniel Loewentheil
August 2, 2012 04:34 AM EDT

The political fight over America’s ailing economy is dominated by one word: debt. For most Americans, however, the real problems are jobs and growth — we don’t have enough of either. Yet our political system seems incapable of tackling the true crisis.

Republicans, to be sure, have called for big changes — witness Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity.” But his proposals would take us back to the tax-cutting, deregulatory spree of the past decade, when gains mostly went to the richest (as is true again today) while the economy went down in flames.

President Barack Obama, in response, talks about “winning the future” and has proposed critical steps in the right direction. Yet he is having a hard time getting even Democrats to put aside the debt obsession to focus on jobs and growth. And he has yet to lay out the kind of bold proposals needed to tackle today’s massive jobs shortage and rebuild a strong middle class.

Paul Krugman: Romney Still Doubling Down on Failed Policies

There's a tone of incredulity to the writings of Romney apologists. It seems as if they can't believe that the magic words — Capitalism! Free markets! Job creators! — aren't silencing his critics. After all, they say, wasn't Mitt Romney just doing what has been standard for the past 30 years?

Actually, we don't know just how standard his behavior was and won't until we see his tax returns, which will probably never happen (there has to be something really explosive in there). In any case, however, the fact that we've had a Gordon Gekko economy for 30 years doesn't make it O.K.

Matt Taibbi: Ludicrous Times Op-Ed Forgets Entire Year of Wall Street History

It was riotous, side-splitting comedy last week when Sanford Weill, the onetime head of Citibank, went on CNBC to announce that he thought it was time to break up the big banks.

Why this was funny: Through his ambitious (and at the time not yet legal) decision to merge Citibank, Travelers, and Salomon Brothers into one giant wrecking ball of greed, self-dealing and global irresponsibility called Citigroup, Weill more or less single-handedly created the Too-Big-To-Fail problem. You know, the one currently casting that thick, black doomlike shadow over all humanity which, if you look out your window, you can see floating over all our heads this very minute.

One In Four American Workers Will Be In Low-Wage Jobs For The Next Decade

By Travis Waldron on Aug 2, 2012 at 9:30 am

The share of the economy made up by low-wage jobs has grown since the Great Recession, and according to one new study, it won’t shrink in the future even as the economy continues to recover. The number of Americans working in low-wage jobs — those that pay wages equal to or below the poverty line — will remain steady over the next decade, according to the Economic Policy Institute, as CNNMoney reports:

Education reform’s central myths

The education debate rests on two faulty premises: that public schools are failures, and choice is the solution

The “Overton Window” is not a new kind of low-glare, high-insulation windowpane. Nor is it the title of a paperback thriller like “The Eiger Sanction” or “The Bourne Supremacy.” Identified by Joseph P. Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Overton Window refers to the boundaries of the limited range of ideas and policies that are acceptable for consideration in politics at any one time. In other words, the Overton Window is the “box” that we are constantly exhorted to think outside of, only to be ignored or punished if we succeed.

The debate about K-12 educational reform in the U.S. is an example of the Overton Window at work. For a generation, almost all of the debate about improving American schools has been limited to minor variations on two themes. First, it is endlessly asserted, American public education is a miserable failure, compared to the educational systems of our major economic rivals in Asia and Europe. Second, the solution to this alleged failure is the privatization and marketization of public education.

Underwater Homeowners Face a Tax Time Bomb

The letter from Bank of America Home Loans got right to the point. “We are pleased to inform you that we have approved your Home Equity Account for participation in a principal forgiveness program offered as a result of the Department of Justice and State Attorneys General global settlement with major mortgage servicers.” In the letter, which I obtained from an anti-foreclosure activist, Bank of America offered the homeowner full forgiveness of their entire home equity loan balance of over $177,000. But then Paragraph 5 came with an ominous warning: “Please be aware that we are required to report the amount of your cancelled principal debt to the Internal Revenue Service.”

Under current law, a principal reduction like this would be exempted from tax liability. However, that law, the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, expires at the end of the year, and after that, any mortgage debt forgiveness provided to a borrower will count as gross income for tax purposes, potentially costing millions of families several billion dollars. In the above case, the borrower would be required to pay taxes on the entire $177,000 amount forgiven by the bank, as if it were earned income. And that’s money that struggling homeowners simply don’t have.

“They wouldn’t be able to handle it,” said Peggy Mears of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a community organizing group in California that has worked extensively on foreclosure issues. “If they could handle it, they wouldn’t be in arrears with their house notes. They don’t have that kind of money.”

The CEO Plan to Steal Your Social Security and Medicare

Monday, 30 July 2012 11:02
By Dean Baker, Truthout | News Analysis


Many people are following the presidential election closely with the idea that the outcome will have a major impact on national policy. However, according to Steven Pearlstein, a veteran Washington Post columnist and reporter, it may not matter who wins the election. In a column last week, Pearlstein told readers that the top executives of some of the country's largest companies are getting together to craft a budget package that they will try to push through Congress and get the president to sign.

While Pearlstein clearly sees these backroom meetings of corporate chieftains in positive terms (he refers to them as "grown-ups" who have been noticeably absent from the conversation about the budget), the rest of us might view this plotting a bit differently. As Pearlstein openly acknowledges, this corporate coup is an end-run around the electorate. As corrupt as the political process may have become, at least we will get a vote in the election. Pearlstein's plotters are not inviting the rest of us into the conversation.

3 Big Lies Perpetuated By the Rich

When it comes to the economy, too many Americans continue to be numbed by the soothing sounds of conservative spin in the media. Here are three of their more inventive claims:

1. Higher taxes on the rich will hurt small businesses and discourage job creators

A recent Treasury analysis found that only 2.5% of small businesses [3] would face higher taxes from the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.

As for job creation, it's not coming from the people with money. Over 90% of the assets [4]owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), the stock market, real estate, and personal business accounts [5]. Angel investing [6] (capital provided by affluent individuals for business start-ups) accounted for less than 1% of theinvestable assets [4] of high net worth individuals in North America in 2011. The Mendelsohn Affluent Survey [7] agreed that the very rich spend less than two percent of their money on new business startups.

The Wall Street Journal [8] noted, in way of confirmation, that the extra wealth created by the Bush tax cuts led to the "worst track record for jobs in recorded history."

Paul Krugman: Expecting the Worst

The Spanish bailout was agreed to this month, but with so many restrictions and indications that it isn't the start of something bigger that the markets were, to say the least, not happy.

I also think it's especially interesting to see just how much the recent rally in Irish bonds reflected hopes that the country's bank rescue could be "Europeanized"; once those hopes were dashed, it all went away. So when does the full-blown crisis start? Hard to say. At least some indicators say that the market expects the worst, but not right away.

Romney, a Gaffe-Proof Candidate for Our Cynical Times

By Charles P. Pierce at 11:06AM

It is a capital mistake in judging an American political campaign to fail to take into account the effectiveness of the purely cynical. Over the past month or so, the campaign of Willard Romney, the onetime, one-term, now largely unrecognizable governor of Massachusetts, has engaged in a series of gaffes and missteps, a positive gavotte of dick-stepping both here and abroad, from which most political wise guys agree it should have difficulty recovering. He can't talk about domestic issues with sounding like the worst patrician foof in the history of watercress. He goes overseas and pisses off the Brits, praises the pale pink socialist wonderland that is the Israeli national health-care system while also gleefully tossing a few matches into the open gas tank of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, and, on the whole, demonstrates that, in the field of foreign policy, he'll pretty much believe anything he's told by the rags-and-bones neo-con retreads he's hired.

Glenn Greenwald: Extremism Normalized

How Americans are efficiently trained to acquiesce to ideas once deemed so radical as to be unthinkable 

By Glenn Greenwald

Remember when, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act was controversial, held up as the symbolic face of Bush/Cheney radicalism and widely lamented as a threat to core American liberties and restraints on federal surveillance and detention powers? Yet now, the Patriot Act is quietly renewed every four years by overwhelming majorities in both parties (despite substantial evidence of serious abuse), and almost nobody is bothered by it any longer. That’s how extremist powers become normalized: they just become such a fixture in our political culture that we are trained to take them for granted, to view the warped as normal.

What’s Happening With Voting Rights Near You? Here’s a National Look

Voting Rights Watch 2012
on July 31, 2012 - 2:33 PM ET

Pennsylvania’s voter ID case continues this week, and so does the fight against voter suppression throughout the country. As students seek to organize around the Pennsylvania law, an online initiative seeks to register student voters. In New Mexico, meanwhile, several counties simply run out of registration forms. And Alabama becomes ground for a new redistricting fight. Here’s some of the latest voting rights news.

Why Our Phones and Internet Are Being Threatened by a Big Telecom Privatization Scheme

July 26, 2012

Regulatory capture is when private corporate interests take over an agency and instead of serving the “public” good, it serves the interests of private corporations. Such capture is playing out at both the state and federal levels throughout America, eroding the basic ethical standards in government.

Nowhere is this more evident than at the Federal Communications Commission, one of the most influential agencies in which capture is part of the operating culture.

The most scandalous recent example of the FCC’s cozy relationship with the companies it ostensibly regulates took place in January 2011. Just a few weeks after the agency approved Comcast’s acquisition of NBC-Universal, a deal worth $30 billion, Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker left to take a senior position at Comcast. One unanswered question is whether Baker was negotiating her compensation package while the agency deliberated the acquisition.

There's Nothing "Technical" About Changing the Cost-of-Living Index

By Matthew Yglesias  |  Posted Monday, July 30, 2012, at 11:58 AM ET

Bill Keller for various reasons wants to reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits, and one way to achieve the former is to stop pegging annual increases in nominal benefits to the Consumer Price Index and start pegging them to the slower-growing chained CPI. Another feature of using chained CPI is that since tax brackets are indexed to inflation, doing the switch comprehensively would constitute a de facto tax increase.

This is perhaps a good idea and perhaps a bad idea, but these certainly aren't what Keller says they are "technical fixes like aligning the automatic cost-of-living formula with reality."

Another New York Times Columnist Attack on Social Security And Medicare

By Dave Johnson

July 30, 2012 - 12:18pm ET

The New York Times contains another elite-columnist attack on our Social Security and Medicare systems today. This time it's in the form of an op-ed by Bill Keller. Recently and regularly, New York Times columnists David Brooks and Tom Friedman have also gone after the things We, the People do for each other.

First, The Basics Of The Borrowing

Any discussion of our deficit/debt "crisis" must start with a few quick points about the history of the "crisis":

Paul Krugman: Crash of the Bumblebee

Last week Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, declared that his institution “is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro” — and markets celebrated. In particular, interest rates on Spanish bonds fell sharply, and stock markets soared everywhere.

But will the euro really be saved? That remains very much in doubt.

First of all, Europe’s single currency is a deeply flawed construction. And Mr. Draghi, to his credit, actually acknowledged that. “The euro is like a bumblebee,” he declared. “This is a mystery of nature because it shouldn’t fly but instead it does. So the euro was a bumblebee that flew very well for several years.” But now it has stopped flying. What can be done? The answer, he suggested, is “to graduate to a real bee.”

Social Security is Not Headed for Disaster

by Barbara R. Bergmann

The gloomy annual report of the trustees of Social Security has provoked the usual ominous predictions of big trouble ahead. Media accounts spoke of significant deterioration in the financial outlook of the system, and declared it unsustainable unless structural changes were made. The scare words might seem to justify the often-heard prediction that Social Security may last long enough to sustain our current oldsters, but that it is headed for bankruptcy and "won't be there" for our younger citizens.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Perversion of Scholarship


By Chris Hedges


Fraternities, sororities and football, along with other outsized athletic programs, have decimated most major American universities. Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and a search for artistic and esoteric forms of expression—in short, the world of ethics, creativity and ideas—are shouted down by the drunken chants of fans in huge stadiums, the pathetic demands of rich alumni for national championships, and the elitism, racism and rigid definition of gender roles of Greek organizations. These hypermasculine systems perpetuate a culture of conformity and intolerance.  They have inverted the traditional values of scholarship to turn four years of college into a mindless quest for collective euphoria and athletic dominance.

There is probably no more inhospitable place to be an intellectual, or a person of color or a member of the LGBT community, than on the campuses of the Big Ten Conference colleges, although the poison of this bizarre American obsession has infected innumerable schools. These environments are distinctly corporate. To get ahead one must get along. The student is implicitly told his or her self-worth and fulfillment are found in crowds, in mass emotions, rather than individual transcendence. Those who do not pay deference to the celebration of force, wealth and power become freaks. It is a war on knowledge in the name of knowledge.

Former FDA Reviewer Speaks Out About Intimidation, Retaliation and Marginalizing of Safety

Sunday, 29 July 2012 08:37
By Martha Rosenberg, Truthout | Interview

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is often accused of serving industry at the expense of consumers. But even FDA defenders are shocked by reports this week of an institutionalized FDA spying program on its own scientists, lawmakers, reporters and academics that included an enemies list of "actors" and collaborators.

The paranoid and retaliatory email monitoring program, which sought to suppress the safety opinions of those hired to give their safety opinions, has provoked swift action from Capitol Hill. "I am writing to express my disappointment and disbelief with the way the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has retaliated against whistleblowers who expressed concern to Members of Congress and the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) regarding safety concerns about medical products," wrote Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, to FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, the day after the breadth of the surveillance was reported in The New York Times.

Beyond Throwaway Cities: How To Build An Export-Proof Local Economy
July 26, 2012

Americans face a unique challenge in solving the climate crisis. Unlike other Western countries and Japan, where population is projected to be relatively constant, the U.S. population is set to grow by at least 100 million—and likely 150 million—people by 2050. Where and under what conditions these people live present serious challenges to sustainability planning. American cities today are so spatially and economically unstable that anything beyond superficial sustainability planning is impossible.

Alternatively, we can radically change existing community and regional planning strategies to more sustainably house and serve the growing population. Fortunately, emerging approaches are capable of helping with this shift. One involves building local economies that anchor capital in place through community, worker, or public forms of ownership—so-called green community wealth strategies. By linking such stabilizing forms of economic organization to democratic forms of local, regional, and national planning, cities can regain the capacity to target jobs and investment to specific locations.