7 Ways Paul Ryan Wants to Betray His Fellow Generation X-ers

By Lynn Parramore
August 30, 2012  |  Last Wednesday in Tampa, Paul Ryan launched himself as the youthful face of his party, and much as been made of what he means to that ship of restless, and by now, somewhat battered, souls that sailed forth onto the American scene between the mid-'60s and mid-'70s. Is he truly a Gen Xer or not? His risk-taking, nose-thumbing at authority and taste for AC/DC and Led Zeppelin fit the image, but in many ways, he bears scant resemblance to his generational compatriots. His rigid political stance, for example, is atypical of a generation famous for its skepticism of institutions and party lines. And his white-bread-dipped-in-mayonnaise style is at odds with many of today’s multiculturally hip late 30- and 40-somethings.

But there’s one key way that Ryan fits a common negative image of Gen X: His is a case of seriously arrested development.

Ryan and I are exactly the same age. I attended the University of Georgia from 1988-'92, when young people were leaning toward the GOP. The political message of unapologetic self-interest was happy news to young folks, dudes in particular, who rejected the Baby Boomers’ collective ethos and really didn’t want to share their toys.

Christian Right Hypocrite Ralph Reed Has Resurrected Himself in the GOP -- He Must Be Praying We'll Forget His Past

By Bill Moyers, Michael Winship

August 31, 2012  |  As the sun slowly sets over the Republican National Convention in Tampa, we settle back in the chairs that nice Mr. Eastwood just gave us and ponder some of the other oddities of the week. Like this item in the official GOP platform pointed out by Brad Plumer of The Washington Post:

“No minimum wage for the Mariana Islands.‘The Pacific territories should have flexibility to determine the minimum wage, which has seriously restricted progress in the private sector.’” This caught our attention (and thanks to colleague Theresa Riley for sending) because it once again reminds us of the sordid past of evangelical and political entrepreneur Ralph Reed who, as this week’s edition of Moyers & Company reports in detail, has emerged from the ashes of epic career fail to reestablish himself as a powerful figure in Republican politics.  As head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Reed boasts he’s building a political dynamo of five million members with a massive database, an annual budget of $100 million and full-time lobbyists in all fifty state capitals, a colossal effort aimed at putting in place a right-wing social agenda and identifying and establishing contact with what it estimates as 27 million conservative voters in America. As you can imagine, with clout like that, Reed and his coalition were in high cotton at the Tampa convention. Which brings us to that curious Mariana Islands minimum wage plank in the Republican platform. Some years ago, our government made an effort to clean up sweatshops on the islands – including Saipan -- that have been under the control of the United States since the end of World War II. Chinese women were brought over to the islands to work under awful conditions – subject to forced abortions and prostitution and paid pennies for producing garments labeled “Made in the USA.”

How Your Movements Are Being Tracked, Probably Without Your Knowledge

By Tana Ganeva
August 31, 2012  |  In May, Utah lawmakers were surprised to learn that the US Drug Enforcement Agency had worked out a plan with local sheriffs to pack the state's main interstate highway, I-15, with Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that could track any vehicle passing through. At a hearing of the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee, the ACLU of Utah and committee members aired their concerns, asking such questions as: Why store the travel histories of law-abiding Utah residents in a federal database in Virginia? What about residents who don't want anyone to know they drive to Nevada to gamble? Wouldn't drug traffickers catch on and just start taking a different highway? (That's the case, according to local reports.)

The plan ended up getting shelved, but that did not present a huge problem for the DEA because as it turns out, large stretches of highway in Texas and California [3] already use the readers.

So do towns all over America. Last week Ars Technica reported [4] that the tiny town of Tiburon in Northern California is using tag reader cameras to monitor the comings and goings of everyone that visits. Despite the Utah legislature's stand against the DEA, local law enforcement uses them all over the place anyway, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune. [5] Big cities, like Washington, DC and New York, are riddled with ALPRs. According to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, ALPRs have become so pervasive in America that they constitute a "covert national surveillance grid." The civil liberties group has mapped the spread of ALPRs, and contends on its Web site that, "Silently, but constantly, the government is now watching, recording your everyday travels and storing years of your activities in massive data warehouses that can be quickly 'mined' to find out when and where you have been, whom you’ve visited, meetings you’ve attended, and activities you’ve taken part in."

Simon Johnson: Why Are the Big Banks Suddenly Afraid?

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.”

Top executives from global megabanks are usually very careful about how they defend both the continued existence, at current scale, of their organizations and the implicit subsidies they receive. They are willing to appear on television shows – and did so earlier this summer, pushing back against Sanford I. Weill, the former chief executive of Citigroup, after he said big banks should be broken up.

Typically, however, since the financial crisis of 2008 the heavyweights of the banking industry have stayed relatively silent on the key issue of whether there should be a hard cap on bank size.

Your Must-Do Assignment for This Year, Read This Chart and Pass It On

Thursday, 30 August 2012 09:15  
By Dina Rasor, Truthout | Solutions 

If you are a regular Truthout reader, you probably know this in your gut. However, take the time to look at this chart, examine it carefully and internalize what it means.

[...]

Take a close look at the peaks and see that the first one is the Korean War, the second one is the Vietnam War, the third one is the peak of the long cold war and the final blue peak is ... no, it isn't the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it is what our defense budget grew to because of our national fear after 9/11 ... the cost of these two wars is the looming giant red peak, above and beyond our post-9/11 frenzy. Notice that each one of these last peaks is higher than the height of the cold war, when we were building a nuclear arsenal and all types of cold war planes, ships and tanks to defeat the Soviet Union if they invaded Europe.

Paul Krugman: The Medicare Killers

Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless.

Some of his fibs were trivial but telling, like his suggestion that President Obama is responsible for a closed auto plant in his hometown, even though the plant closed before Mr. Obama took office. Others were infuriating, like his sanctimonious declaration that “the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” This from a man proposing savage cuts in Medicaid, which would cause tens of millions of vulnerable Americans to lose health coverage. 

And Mr. Ryan — who has proposed $4.3 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, versus only about $1.7 trillion in specific spending cuts — is still posing as a deficit hawk. 

First Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Report Shows Preponderance of Mortgage Relief from Already-Popular Short Sales

By: David Dayen Wednesday August 29, 2012 8:40 am

The Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight has released their initial assessment of the foreclosure fraud settlement. And what they’re finding is that banks are “paying off” their portion of the settlement by engaging in short sales with their borrowers. Which is something they were already doing in greater numbers prior to the settlement.

The report covers the time period from March 1 to June 30, and looks at the settlement in terms of gross dollars. In other words, some of the formulas for “credits” that banks get for various mortgage relief and other activities give less than a dollar-for-dollar payout. So the figures in the report refer to just the amount of relief, not how much credit the banks will get for it.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Warrant: The Disturbing, Unchecked Rise of the Administrative Subpoena

By David Kravets

When Golden Valley Electric Association of rural Alaska got an administrative subpoena from the Drug Enforcement Administration in December 2010 seeking electricity bill information on three customers, the company did what it usually does with subpoenas — it ignored them.

That’s the association’s customer privacy policy, because administrative subpoenas aren’t approved by a judge.

But by law, utilities must hand over customer records — which include any billing and payment information, phone numbers and power consumption data — to the DEA without court warrants if drug agents believe the data is “relevant” to an investigation. So the utility eventually complied, after losing a legal fight earlier this month.

Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIA

Mark Mazzetti's emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power


Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 August 2012 14.58 EDT

The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that "heroic" killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.

Thanks to prior disclosures from Judicial Watch of documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this is old news. That's what the Obama administration chronically does: it manipulates secrecy powers to prevent accountability in a court of law, while leaking at will about the same programs in order to glorify the president.

“The Dumbest Idea in the World”: Corporate America's False - and Dangerous - Ideology of Shareholder Value

By Lynn Stout

August 29, 2012  |  For at least the past two decades, Americans have been duped into believing that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize value for its shareholders. That belief, first promoted in business schools, has been absorbed in the media, in academic circles, and in the political realm -- even progressives like Al Franken have repeated it as if it were indisputable fact. But in reality, it has no basis in the law or American precedent. The maniacal quest to raise share price is bad for eveyone -- even shareholders themselves. This is why scholars, journalists (most recently, Joe Nocera of the New York Times [2]) and even corporate leaders are coming to the realization that the American corporation has made a wrong turn based on a false ideology. No less than Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric and a former enthusiast for shareholder value ideology, has done an about-face, calling it "the dumbest idea in the world."

Fortunately, there's new movement aimed at challenging the destructive ideology shareholder value. AlterNet has been on the forefront of this movement, publishing a series of articles, "Corporations for the 99% [3]" in partnership with William Lazonick, one of America's top authorities on the American business corporation, who, along with AtlerNet's Lynn Parramore and jouranlist Ken Jacobson, set about debunking this dangerous myth. Cornell University law professor Lynn Stout's new book [4], “The Shareholder Value Myth,” is a welcome contribution to this movement -- a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand the relationship between corporations and the public and to learn how to overturn a myth that has done incalculable damage to our society and economy. Below is an excerpt from the Introduction to Stout's book. ~Editor

The Dumbest Idea in the World
The Deepwater Horizon was an oil drilling rig, a massive floating structure that cost more than a third of a billion dollars to build and measured the length of a football field from bottom to top. On the night of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon was working in the Gulf of Mexico, finishing an exploratory well named Macondo for the corporation BP. Suddenly the rig was rocked by a loud explosion. Within minutes the Deepwater Horizon was transformed into a column of fire that burned for nearly  two days before collapsing into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the Macondo well began vomiting tens of thousands of barrels of oil daily from beneath the sea floor into the Gulf waters. By the time the well was capped in September 2010, the Macondo well blowout was estimated to have caused the largest offshore oil spill in history.1

The  Deepwater  Horizon disaster was tragedy on an epic scale, not only for the rig and the eleven people who died on it, but also for the corporation BP. By June of 2010,  BP had suspended paying  its regular  dividends, and  BP common stock (trading around $60  before the spill) had plunged to less than $30 per share. The result  was a decline in BP’s total stock market value amounting to nearly $100 billion. BP’s shareholders were not the only ones to suffer. The value of BP bonds  tanked as BP’s credit rating was cut from a prestigious AA to the near-junk status BBB. Other oil companies working in the Gulf were idled, along with BP, due to a government-imposed moratorium  on further deepwater drilling in the Gulf. Business  owners and workers in the Gulf fishing  and tourism industries struggled to make a living. Finally, the Gulf ecosystem itself suffered  enormous damage, the full extent of which remains unknown today.

Arizona Republican: Middle Easterners ‘look Mexican’ and want ‘to cause harm’

By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 10:06 EDT

A leading Muslim civil rights group said Wednesday that Republican Party officials in Arizona should repudiate a freshly minted congressional candidate after her Democratic opponent published video of her making several bizarre statements about “Middle Easterners.”

“If you know Middle Easterners, a lot of them, they look Mexican, you know, like a lot of people in South America,” tea party favorite Gabriela “Gabby” Mercer, who legally migrated from Mexico, says in the video (watch below). “Dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes. And they mix. They mix in. And those people, their only, their only goal in life is to cause harm to the United States. So, why do we want them here either legally or illegally?”

The Jobs Crisis

Obama, Romney and the Low-Wage Future of America 

August 27, 2012  

By Dan Froomkin

To the extent that there has been any attention paid to public policy issues amid all the mud-slinging in the 2012 presidential campaign, the most frequent subject has been jobs—and which candidate can create more of them over the next four years.

So far, that debate mostly involves attacking the other guy, rather than advancing any real solution. The Obama campaign has been trying to define Mitt Romney as an effete champion of outsourcing (with some justification) while the Romney camp has dwelled on Barack Obama’s failure to reignite the job market (also with some justification, though in some significant part the failure is because of GOP obstruction).

Their descriptions of their own plans are no more edifying. As the incumbent, Obama has to run on his record—and despite his talk of bold solutions, that means either exaggerating his successes or making a lot of excuses. 

Food shortages could force world into vegetarianism, warn scientists

Water scarcity's effect on food production means radical steps will be needed to feed population expected to reach 9bn by 2050

John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 August 2012 14.00 EDT
Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world's population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.

Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world's leading water scientists.

"There will not be enough water available on current croplands to produce food for the expected 9 billion population in 2050 if we follow current trends and changes towards diets common in western nations," the report by Malik Falkenmark and colleagues at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) said.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien confronts director of Citizens United’s anti-Obama film

By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, August 27, 2012 20:07 EDT

CNN host Soledad O’Brien on Monday questioned Steve Bannon of Breitbart.com over falsehoods in his new movie The Hope and The Change.

The film, a project of the conservative group Citizens United, highlights 40 Democrats and Independents who voted for President Barack Obama in 2008 but no longer support him. One person in the film complains that taxes have gone up, while another complains about the bank bailout. However, tax rates have actually gone down and the bank bailout occurred under President Bush.

Film highlights the temptations and perils of blind obedience to authority

Indie film Compliance recalls notions that the past decade's worst events are explained by failures to oppose authority

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 August 2012 07.41 EDT

One can object to some of its particulars, but Frank Bruni has a quite interesting and incisive New York Times column today about a new independent film called Compliance, which explores the human desire to follow and obey authority.

Based on real-life events that took place in 2004 at a McDonalds in Kentucky, the film dramatizes a prank telephone call in which a man posing as a police officer manipulates a supervisor to abuse an employee with increasing amounts of cruelty and sadism, ultimately culminating in sexual assault – all by insisting that the abuse is necessary to aid an official police investigation into petty crimes.

That particular episode was but one of a series of similar and almost always-successful hoaxes over the course of at least 10 years, in which restaurant employees were manipulated into obeying warped directives from this same man, pretending on the telephone to be a police officer.

Pavlina Tcherneva: Economists for Romney – A Closer Look

Yves here. Paul Krugman already pounced on a major, and disturbing, deception on behalf of the Romney economics team: that Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and John Taylor (along with Kevin Hassett) published a white paper which grossly misrepresented the research of multiple economists. In other words, they are willing to flat out lie to create the impression their policies ideas have wide-spread support among economists.

Pavlina Tcherneva makes separate observations about the key advisors in Romney’s camp and how well their ideas have fared in our depression-in-the-making.

She also makes sure to include Gary Becker, and with good reason. Becker was among the speakers at a keynote session at the Milken Conference in 2008 which I attended. It was the first time I’d seen toads hop out of someone’s mouth when speaking.

By Pavlina Tcherneva, Assistant Professor of Economics at Franklin and Marshall College, Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute, and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney boasts support from the scientific community for his supply-side trickle-down economic proposal. It is outlined here, along with the list of economists endorsing the plan.

Several Nobel Prize winners grace the top of the list. Here is a quick look at some of these luminaries and their contributions to some of the most pressing problems of our time.

Team Romney White-Vote Push: ‘This Is the Last Time Anyone Will Try to Do This’

By Jonathan Chait

A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.

6 Right-Wing Zealots and the Crazy Ideas Behind the Most Outrageous Republican Platform Ever

By Peter Montgomery
August 28, 2012  |  TAMPA, FLA. -- The official 2012 Republican Party platform is a far-right fever dream, a compilation of pouting, posturing and policies to meet just about every demand from the overlapping Religious Right, Tea Party, corporate, and neo-conservative wings of the GOP. If moderates have any influence in today’s Republican Party, you wouldn’t know it by reading the platform. Efforts by a few delegates to insert language favoring civil unions, comprehensive sex education and voting rights for the District of Columbia, for example, were all shot down. Making the rounds of right-wing pre-convention events on Sunday, Rep. Michele Bachmann gushed [3] about the platform’s right-wing tilt, telling fired-up Tea Partiers that “the Tea Party has been all over that platform.”

Given the Republican Party’s hard lurch to the right, which intensified after the election of Barack Obama, the “most conservative ever” platform is not terribly surprising. But it didn’t just happen on its own. Here are some of the people we can thank on the domestic policy front.

New Real Estate Train Wreck Coming: Securitized Rentals

No matter how bad things get, it turns out they can always get worse. Wall Street is about to foist a new “innovation” on investors that even the ratings agencies won’t touch.

Greedy, reckless, and just plain lazy mortgage originators, servicers, and trustee took what was actually a not unreasonable idea, that of mortgage securitizations, and turned it into a loss-bomb. Remember, that movie did not have to end badly. First, participants in the private label mortgage securitization market did for the most part comply with the requirements of their contracts for the first decade plus of that product’s existence. It was their wanton disregard for their own products which have led to the chain of title mess and difficulties in foreclosing that still plagues that market. Second, securitization markets that developed later than the US market (most notably, in of all places Russia and Eastern Europe) and featured some improvements on the US template have not seen the abuses of borrowers and investors suffered here and got through the global downturn reasonably well. However, the sell side has completely refused to implement the sort of reforms necessary to make the product safe for investors. So the US mortgage is and is likely to remain on government life support for the next decade.

Big Banker Bill Harrison's Bogus Brief for Broken Big Banks

By Richard (RJ) Eskow
August 23, 2012 - 8:03pm ET

Every day we rise and tell ourselves this will be a good day, free of that unique combination of predation, self-pity, mediocrity and disingenousness which characterizes the modern bank executive. And every day somebody proves us wrong.

Today it's William B. "Bill" Harrison, Jr., the retired banker who engineered the mega-merger which created JPMorgan Chase. That means the capstone of Harrison's career was the creation of an institution that has repeatedly broken the law, deceived its customers, foreclosed on homeowners with a motley crew of college-aged temps known as "the Burger King kids," received billions in public assistance ...

... and still underperformed the Dow Jones average, dropping in stock value to $37.23 (Thursday's closing price) from around $53 per share when it was created by Harrison in 2000.[1] You'd have been better off buying Treasuries.

American Meteorological Society releases revised climate change statement

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) today released an updated Statement on Climate Change, replacing the 2007 version that was in effect. The informational statement is intended to provide a trustworthy, objective, and scientifically up-to-date explanation of scientific issues of concern to the public. The statement provides a brief overview of how and why global climate has changed in recent decades and will continue to change in the future.

Paul Krugman: The Comeback Skid

There will be two big stars at the Republican National Convention, and neither of them will be Mitt Romney. One will, of course, be Paul Ryan, Mr. Romney’s running mate. The other will be Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who will give the keynote address. And while the two men could hardly look or sound more different, they are brothers under the skin.

How so? Both have carefully cultivated public images as tough, fiscally responsible guys willing to make hard choices. And both public images are completely false. 

I’ve written a lot lately deconstructing the Ryan myth, so let me turn today to Mr. Christie.

Uygur: Did David Koch buy Paul Ryan the VP slot?

By David Ferguson
Saturday, August 25, 2012 14:08 EDT

On Friday night’s edition of “The Young Turks,” host Cenk Uygur highlighted a report by controversial Republican political operative Roger Stone. The report alleges that vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) arrived at his place on the ticket through the machinations of David Koch, half of the powerful billionaire Koch brothers.

Stone claims to have heard from sources inside the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney that the governor was approached at a fundraiser in the Hamptons (the notorious “We are V.I.P.!” bash) by David Koch and his wife.

The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era

Mike Grunwald, August 27, 2012, 9:32 AM

Hi, everyone. I’m Michael Grunwald from TIME Magazine, and Josh has generously invited me to blog this week about my new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. It’s the story of President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, which—wait, don’t click away!—was one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in modern history. The much-mocked Failed-Stimulus was actually a remarkable success. It was also the purest distillation of what Obama meant by change. And the story of the stimulus is the best way to understand the president, his policies, his approach to politics, his achievements, and his problems marketing those achievements in a city that’s gone bonkers. It’s also the best way to understand his enemies; The New New Deal documents how Republican leaders secretly devised their strategy of all-out obstructionism before he even took office.

I’ll be in Tampa for the GOP convention, so I’ll write about the Republicans tomorrow. Today I’ll give a taste of what I discovered about the stimulus, because almost everything most Americans think they know about it is wrong. The bottom line is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is, as Vice President Biden would say, a BFD, both the short-term Recovery and the long-term Reinvestment. Even though Washington thinks it’s a joke. Even though the country agrees.
 

Paul Ryan’s Social Extremism
Mitt Romney, who will be officially nominated this week as the Republican nominee for president, appears to trim his social convictions to the party’s prevailing winds. There is no doubt, however, about where the party’s vice-presidential candidate stands. A long history of social extremism makes Paul Ryan an emblem of the Republican tack to the far right.

Mr. Romney’s choice of Mr. Ryan carried some risks, considering Mr. Ryan’s advocacy of overhauling Medicare, but it has sent the strongest signal of solidarity to those who have made the party unrecognizable to moderates. Strident conservatives had been uneasy with Mr. Romney, but it is the rest of the country that should be nervous about conservatives’ now-enthusiastic acceptance of the Republican ticket. 

The Battle Over NDAA's Police-State Provisions Continues in Court

Sunday, 26 August 2012 10:14

By Jake Olzen, Waging Nonviolence | Report

The Obama administration continues to defend its right to violate the rights of the people it is supposed to govern. On August 6, Department of Justice lawyers filed an appeal in federal court against a recent ruling that temporarily enjoined section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which gives powers to the military to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens — on U.S. soil — without charge or trial. The case, and the organizing that surrounds it, will have profound implications for basic constitutional rights, though it has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.

The so-called anti-terrorism legislation was signed on New Year’s Eve by President Barack Obama and went into effect on March 1, 2012. The NDAA had been the target of little public scrutiny in 2011, but after its passage both Congress and the Obama administration became targets of outrage among liberals and conservatives alike for the act’s alleged unconstitutionality.

Methane’s Contribution to Global Warming Is Worse than You Thought

By Jason Mark

August 21, 2012  |  Methane is 21 times more heat-trapping that carbon dioxide.” If you’re a frequent reader of environmental websites, no doubt you’ve seen some version of that sentence many times. The “twenty-times” figure is the most common way of explaining how methane (or CH4, or uncombusted natural gas) reacts in the atmosphere.

Just one problem: It’s not entirely accurate — at least not in the time-scale we should be using to think about how to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.

Actually, any CH4 released today is at least 56 times more heat-trapping than a molecule of C02 also released today. And because of the way it reacts in the atmosphere, the number is probably even higher, according to research conducted by Drew Shindell [3], a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Center. So why is the 21 times figure the one that gets bandied about? Because methane breaks down much faster than carbon dioxide. While CO2 remains in the atmosphere for at least a century (and probably much, much longer, according to Stanford’s Ken Caldeira [4]), CH4 lasts only about a dozen years. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to come up with a way for comparing different greenhouse gases, it decided to use a century baseline to calculate a molecule’s “global warming potential.”

How Some States Are Giving Oil and Gas Companies the Right to Take Your Land

By Alison K. Grass

No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property … unless the oil and gas industry says so.

 

August 21, 2012  |  Eminent domain, the government’s right to condemn (or take) private land for “public use,” has at times been a highly contentious topic because it can displace people from their homes to make way for construction of different projects, like highways or roads, civic buildings and other types of public infrastructure. However, what some may not realize is that several states have granted eminent domain authority to certain private entities, including oil and gas companies. These companies are using it as a tool to seize private land, which increases profits and benefits their wallets.


According to the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, in order to pursue eminent domain, the land must be taken for “public use” and the private property owners must receive “just compensation.”


No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Paul Ryan: The Man Who Wasn't There

Eric Alterman, August 22, 2012

One reads of people obsessed with finding Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster or even Elvis. These folks may be silly, deluded and no doubt annoying, but for most of us, they are not really a problem. The same cannot be said of those pundits obsessed with a quest to locate that equally elusive creature, the intellectually honest, public-spirited conservative Republican politician. Combining their wishful delusion with an apparently congenital inability to admit error, these pundits are succeeding in the creation of an entirely fictional narrative about this year’s election.

Paul Krugman: Galt, Gold and God

So far, most of the discussion of Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, has focused on his budget proposals. But Mr. Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would ordinarily be a good thing.


In his case, however, most of those ideas appear to come from works of fiction, specifically Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”


For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader; even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through that part. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life.

Obama’s squandered hope


In a dramatic essay, Thomas Frank blames Obama's conciliatory nature for a first term that looked like Bush's third 


By David Daley


This is the point in a presidential election when people begin talking about the lesser of two evils, when the weaknesses in one’s own candidate pale in comparison to the reality of the other side taking over. But in a remarkable essay in the new issue of Harper’s magazine, the political thinker Thomas Frank levels President Obama’s first term as a dramatic failure compared to the rhetoric that landed him in office, and the potential he had to truly transform the country.


Frank, whose books include “What’s the Matter With Kansas” and “Pity the Billionaire,” makes the case that Obama’s conciliatory nature has been a tragic flaw, one exploited by conservatives in Congress again and again. But he also argues that Obama has “enthusiastically adopted” the ideas of the right when it comes to deficit spending, Wall Street regulation, torture policies, healthcare and more. And his reward for reaching for compromise and grand bargains, “for bowing to their household gods,” has been to be depicted as a socialist and a radical leftist.

Going Undercover at the GOP's Voter Vigilante Project to Disrupt the Nov. Election

By Steven Rosenfeld

The Republican True the Vote project is a well-funded scheme with training sessions for activists across the country. Will it work?

August 24, 2012  |  I was nervous getting onto the flight to Denver. Since 2004, I have been a national radio producer, investigative reporter, author and consultant—writing about how elections are won, lost, bungled and improved, with a big focus on voter registration. But I had never snuck into a meeting of right-wing voting vigilantes who are the frontline of a national voter suppression strategy, and where the main speaker was a man whose new book I’d aggressively debunked days before, in an AlterNet article [3] lauded by a leading election law blog [4] and Washington Post [5]. The meeting was a state summit organized by a group called True The Vote [6]. The author was John Fund, who absurdly claims that more than 1,000 felons voted illegally in Minnesota in 2008, sending Democrat Al Franken to the U.S. Senate, where he was the final vote that passed Obama's health care reform.

I didn’t want to be outed or bullied. I support citizen activism and was intrigued, even if I knew I was heading into the heart of the GOP election fraud brigade at the Colorado summit. On the plane, I wondered why many of the right-wing activists I hoped to meet in Denver believe as they do—eyeing almost all phases of the voting process with suspicion and mistaking errors as political conspiracies. The group’s Web site was very thin, but as knowledgeable people told me, they had big money behind them and were organizing on a scale that recalled the early days of the Christian Coalition [7]. 

America's Exceptional Fiscal Conservatism

Simon Johnson

WASHINGTON, DC – In most countries, to be “fiscally conservative” means to worry a great deal about the budget deficit and debt levels – and to push these issues to the top of the policy agenda. In many eurozone countries today, “fiscal conservatives” are a powerful group, insisting on the need to boost government revenue while bringing spending under control. In Great Britain, too, leading Conservatives have recently proved willing to raise taxes and attempted to limit future spending.

The United States is very different in this respect. There, leading politicians who choose to call themselves “fiscal conservatives” – such as Paul Ryan, now the Republican Party’s presumptive vice-presidential nominee to run alongside presidential candidate Mitt Romney in November’s election – care more about cutting taxes, regardless of the effect on the federal deficit and total outstanding debt. Why do US fiscal conservatives care so little about government debt, relative to their counterparts in other countries?

“Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier”

Harold Meyerson    August 23, 2012

The economic downturn has not been kind to the middle class. Corporations, however, are basking in prosperity.


Another day, another survey charting the decline of the American middle class. Yesterday, the Pew Research Center weighed in with “The Lost Decade of the Middle Class,” to which they appended the kicker, “Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier.”


The median net worth of the middle-tier households (Pew defines “middle-tier” as households whose income is between two-thirds and twice the national median) declined from $152,950 in 2007 to $93,150 in 2010, reflecting the sharp loss in home value. Taking the longer view, people in the middle tier made 62 percent of all the household income in the United States in 1970, but just 45 percent in 2010. Middle tiersters didn’t lose to the lower tier, whose share of the national income also declined, from 10 percent to 9 percent. They lost it to the upper tier (who else?), whose share of national income rose from 29 percent to 46 percent.

Is an Anti-Austerity Alliance of Left Neo-classicals and Post-Keynesians Possible? Is it Desirable? (Part 2)

By Michael Hoexter. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives. Part 1 of this post is available here

United as they are in their critique of neoclassical economics, it would be a mistake to portray post-Keynesians as united among themselves, a further complication for the emergence of any unified message from anti-austerity economists. Post-Keynesian Thomas Palley has recently likened MMTers proposal that government institute a WPA-style “job guarantee” program to the policies of the Tory Cameron government that unemployment benefit recipients work for free. Palley’s concern is that the MMT job guarantee will undermine public sector unions but MMTers dispute that Cameron’s policy is a job guarantee program. Palley’s objections to the job guarantee and MMT were also the subject of a caustic review by Randy Wray, a prominent MMT economist. Steve Keen, who calls himself as “Monetary Circuit Theorist”, has shown an interest in finding points of commonality with MMTers while maintaining at other times a distance from it. MMT, perhaps because it has a popular following and momentum, seems to be a particular target of criticism and self-differentiation by non-MMT post-Keynesians. Perhaps this criticism is meant to be constructive but at times the disputes are often conducted in relatively heated exchanges in blogs and on Twitter, where ultimately outsiders to these disputes will remain confused and will perhaps throw up their hands.

The Five Most Under-Reported Stories of the Summer

Peter Rothberg on August 21, 2012 - 6:01 PM ET

I find back-to-school signs in mid-August jarring and unwanted, but it’s undeniable that summer is quickly fading into another electoral autumn. Before yielding to the insatiable demands of fall though, I solicited thoughts on the summer’s most neglected stories.

The competition is tough, as the London Olympics, the presidential campaign and the tragic Kristen Stewart/Robert Pattinson break-up have sucked up most of the media oxygen in recent months. But these five issues especially demand far more attention than they’ve received this summer.

Thomas Frank: Check It Yourself

I share a sentiment with the Tea Party movement, and it's not a trivial one: Historical illiteracy is a threat to the health of the republic. Our ignorance of the key events and basic concepts of the nation's development is a matter of statistical fact, and despite years of warnings we continue to show little interest in how the past determines contemporary choices.


Where we differ, the Tea Partiers and I, is on the question of what historical literacy looks like. For them, it is strictly a matter of everyone else acknowledging that the Founding Fathers would take their side in the present-day debates; that Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington were "rightwing extremists," as a popular T-shirt puts it. At Tea Party rallies, quotes from Founding Fathers are emblazoned on protest signs and declaimed from podiums; audiences recite them right along with the speaker; and, of course, there are always a few people on hand who feel such a surge of enthusiasm that they are moved to dress up in the manner of late-eighteenth century Bostonians.

Tomgram: Greg Muttitt, Whatever Happened to Iraqi Oil?

Posted by Greg Muttitt at 8:35am, August 23, 2012.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.


It was never exactly rocket science.  You didn’t have to be Einstein to figure it out.  In early 2003, the Bush administration was visibly preparing to invade Iraq, a nation with a nasty ruler who himself hadn’t hesitated to invade another country, Iran, in the early 1980s for no purpose except self-aggrandizement.  (And the Reagan administration had backed him in that disastrous war because then, as now, Washington loathed the Iranians.)  There was never the slightest evidence of the involvement of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 9/11 attacks or in support of al-Qaeda; and despite the Bush administration’s drumbeat of supposed information about Saddam’s nuclear program (which was said, somehow, to threaten to put mushroom clouds over American cities), the evidence was always, at best, beyond thin and at worst, a potage of lies, concoctions, and wishful thinking. The program, of course, proved nonexistent, but too late to matter.


There was only one reason to invade Iraq and it could be captured in a single word, “oil,” even if George W. Bush and his top officials generally went out of their way to avoid mentioning it.  (At one point, post-invasion, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did point out that Iraq was indeed afloat “on a sea of oil.”)  Unfortunately, oil as a significant factor in invasion planning was considered far too simpleminded for the sophisticated pundits and reporters of the mainstream media.  They were unimpressed by it even when, as the looting began in Baghdad, it turned out that U.S. troops only had orders to guard the Oil Ministry and Interior Ministry (which housed Saddam’s dreaded secret police).

Mitt's Medicare Time Bomb

Brian Beutler - August 23, 2012, 5:57 AM

When Mitt Romney signs legislation fully repealing Obamacare, he’ll be setting a time bomb. Not for the uninsured, who will simply continue to go without health care coverage, but for the very Medicare recipients whose benefits Romney’s promising to leave untouched.

By overturning the Affordable Care Act, Romney will restore major spending commitments to the program — billions of dollars worth of higher reimbursements for private insurance companies and hospitals that Obama cut out of the program.
 

First Our Homes, Now Our Water?


Food & Water Watch Analysis Reveals Wall Street’s Hold on Municipal Water Systems


WASHINGTON - August 22 - Following its disastrous foray into the housing market, Wall Street’s latest earnings scheme is as close as your kitchen sink: the finance industry is increasingly targeting public water systems. A new report released today by the national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch, Private Equity, Public Inequity: The Public Cost of Private Equity Takeovers of U.S. Water Infrastructure reveals that as of January 2012, private equity players had raised $186 billion through 276 infrastructure funds and were seeking another $93 billion to take over infrastructure worldwide.


“Like Wall Street’s manipulation of the housing market in the previous decade, private equity firms and investment bankers are increasingly looking to cash in on one of our most essential resources—water,” said Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter. “These deals are ultimately a bum deal for consumers, who will end up paying the price through increased water bills and degraded service.”

US middle class in 'lost decade' as income falls

The US middle class is in a "lost decade" as its share of the country's income has been surpassed by affluent earners, a new report says.

The Pew Research Center found that 62% of middle-class Americans reported they were being forced to reduce spending.

And 43% expect their children's standard of living will be better than their own, down from 51% in 2008.

The Fascinating Differences Between The Conservative and Liberal Personality

Evidence suggests that differences between liberals and conservatives begin to emerge at an early age.

August 20, 2012  |   "There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin," laments Linus van Pelt in a 1961 Peanuts comic strip. Yet in today's hyperpartisan political climate, religion and politics are obsessively debated, while the "American people" that politicians and reporters constantly refer to seem hopelessly divided. Meanwhile, psychologists are increasingly exploring the political arena, examining not just the ideological differences, but also the numerous factors - temperamental, developmental, biological, and situational - that contribute to the formation and maintenance of partisan political beliefs.

Personality differences are a leading candidate in the race toward understanding the rift between political liberals and conservatives. Using data compiled from nearly 20,000 respondents, Columbia University researcher Dana Carney and colleagues found that two common personality traits reliably differentiated individuals with liberal or conservative identifications. Liberals reported greater openness, whereas conservatives reported higher conscientiousness. This means that liberals (at least in their own estimation) saw themselves as more creative, flexible, tolerant of ambiguity, and open to new ideas and experiences. Across the political personality divide, conservatives self-identified as more persistent, orderly, moralistic, and methodical. These personality differences were even reflected in the bedroom belongings and offices or workspaces of ideological undergrads, with liberal students collecting more CDs, books, movie tickets, and travel paraphernalia, as opposed to their conservative peers, who showed more sports décor, U.S. flags, cleaning supplies, calendars, and uncomfortable furniture. Lest you think that the partisan personality is a uniquely American phenomenon, similar findings on personality and political ideology have emerged in samples across the globe, from North America, Europe, and Australia.

Repubs Will Raise Taxes - For Civil War

by Steven D
Wed Aug 22nd, 2012 at 06:05:35 PM EST

So under what circumstances would a Republican ever call for raising taxes (other than taxes on poor people, that is)?

It's simple: Rebellion! Specifically to fund a civil war if President Obama is re-elected:

Lubbock County Judge Tom Head and Commissioner Mark Heinrich went into great detail Monday night on FOX 34 News @ Nine about why it is necessary to raise the tax rate by 1.7 cents the next fiscal year. [...] “He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the UN, and what is going to happen when that happens?,” Head asked.

“I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.["]

240 Million Americans to Lose Protections From Coal Pollution

US Court Throws Out EPA Coal Pollution Rule, Leaves Millions Exposed to Harmful Emissions

- Common Dreams staff 

Up to 240 million Americans will now lose protections against dangerous smog and soot pollution, following a decision by a US appeals court on Tuesday. In a 2-1 decision the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned the Environmental Protection Agency's Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which would have reduced harmful emissions from coal-burning power plants and saved the lives of up to 34,000 people per year.

“This decision allows harmful power plant air pollution to continue to aggravate major health problems and foul up our air. This is a loss for all of us, but especially for those living downwind from major polluters,” said John Walke, clean air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Proposal to privatize Social Security rears its ugly head again

Despite two major stock market crashes since 2000, the idea of privatizing Social Security is creeping back into public debate via the presidential campaign.

By Michael Hiltzik
August 21, 2012, 6:06 p.m.

Ghosts have nothing on some of the ideas that come out of Washington when it comes to rattling chains and knocking pictures off the wall to terrify the common people.

Case in point: the privatization of Social Security.

One would have thought that this proposal was done in by two major stock market crashes since 2000, not to mention the generally noisome odor arising from almost everything that Wall Street has touched in recent years.

 

Iceland Was Right, We Were Wrong: The IMF

Jeff Nielson

08/15/12 - 03:14 PM EDT 

VANCOUVER (Silver Gold Bull) -- For approximately three years, our governments, the banking cabal, and the Corporate Media have assured us that they knew the appropriate approach for fixing the economies that they had previously crippled with their own mismanagement. We were told that the key was to stomp on the Little People with "austerity" in order to continue making full interest payments to the Bond Parasites -- at any/all costs.

Following three years of this continuous, uninterrupted failure, Greece has already defaulted on 75% of its debts, and its economy is totally destroyed. The UK, Spain and Italy are all plummeting downward in suicide-spirals, where the more austerity these sadistic governments inflict upon their own people the worse their debt/deficit problems get. Ireland and Portugal are nearly in the same position.

Now in what may be the greatest economic "mea culpa" in history, we have the media admitting that this government/banking/propaganda-machine troika has been wrong all along. They have been forced to acknowledge that Iceland's approach to economic triage was the correct approach right from the beginning.

Paul Krugman: A (Not So) Serious, (Not So) Honest Running Mate

Paul Ryan for vice president, or as Mitt Romney said at the press conference introducing Mr. Ryan as his running mate, "the next president of the United States."

There is lots of horse-race speculation: It's a disaster! No, it changes the conversation away from Bain and those missing tax returns! I have no idea who's right.

What I do know is that anyone who believes in Mr. Ryan's carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mr. Ryan is, in fact, a big fraud who doesn't care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he'll fit into the Romney campaign just fine.

Inside ALEC's Powerful, Right-Wing Indoctrination Machine

By Alexander Zaitchik

August 20, 2012  |  SALT LAKE CITY -- You won't see signs for the country's sweetest travel-club deal in the window of your local travel store. To join the American Legislative Exchange Council, your fellow citizens must first elect you to statewide office. If you win as a Republican or conservative Democrat, your ALEC state chair will approach with terms of membership you'll find generous, if not impossible to resist. A token $100 buys the opportunity to attend all-inclusive events on ALEC's busy calendar of summits, conferences, and academies, where you and your family can enjoy some of the country's finest resorts and destination hotels. Joints like Utah's Grand America, site of ALEC's just concluded national conference and proud bearer of AAA's "Five Diamond" rating.

It was on the eve of this conference that I first glimpsed the privileges and perks of ALEC membership. I was sitting in the Grand America's Viennese style lobby café, pondering the primrose bush courtyard outside as a young harpist plucked out Fur Elise, when an ALEC staffer appeared and began placing laminated cards on the tables. She was followed by groups of women, the wives and daughters of ALEC state legislators and lobbyists, sitting down to enjoy a British Full Tea of sweets, scones and jams, laid out on an elaborate spread of fine china. I picked up one of the laminated cards and read: "Enjoy your 'ALEC-SNACKS'!" Beneath the text were the logos of Americans for Prosperity and the American Insurance Association, two ALEC sponsors. As ALEC snacks were served, the tables grew atwitter. "This is so nice," said the wide-eyed wife of a Virginia state representative.

Not long after, the china was taken away and the café grew busy with attendees getting down to business. A hundred or so legislators, corporate representatives, and think tank staff [2] greeted each other and ordered cocktails, filling the room with an ambient babble of right-leaning schmooze and networking. I've had to deal with those same damn unions.... We've got a few big tort reform bills in the pipe.... I'd love for you to come visit the plant .... Are you with Goldwater or Heritage now?