What Motivates Rejection of (Climate) Science?

Saturday, 15 September 2012 07:43 By University of Western Australia Staff , The Universtiy of Western Australia | Report 

Researchers from The University of Western Australia have examined what motivates people who are greatly involved in the climate debate to reject scientific evidence.

The study Motivated Rejection of Science, to be published in Psychological Science, was designed to investigate what motivates the rejection of science in visitors to climate blogs who choose to participate in the ongoing public debate about climate change.

 

New Report Finds Financial Crisis Cost Economy $12.8 Trillion

By Pat Garofalo on Sep 13, 2012 at 3:00 pm

 The U.S. is still struggling to claw out of the hole created by the Great Recession, the Wall Street-caused crisis that resulted in the loss of millions of jobs. According to a new report from Better Markets, a pro-financial reform organization, the crisis cost Americans about $12.8 trillion in lost economic output:

– Estimated actual gross domestic product (“GDP”) loss from 2008 to 2018, of $7.6 trillion. This is the cumulative difference between potential GDP — what GDP would have been but for the financial and economic crises– and actual and forecast GDP during the period.

The Right-Wing Machine Behind ‘School Choice’

Think public-school teachers are bad and vouchers are good? You may be prey to a well-funded stealth campaign.

By Rachel Tabachnick
September 13, 2012

In June 1995, the economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for the Washington Post promoting the use of public education funds for private schools as a way to transfer the nation’s public school systems to the private sector. "Vouchers," he wrote, "are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system." The article was republished by "free market" think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution, with the title "Public Schools: Make Them Private."

While Friedman has promoted vouchers for decades, most famously in his masterwork Free to Choose, the story of how public funds are actually being transferred to private, often religious, schools is a study in the ability of a few wealthy families, along with a network of right-wing think tanks, to create one of the most successful "astroturf" campaigns money could buy. Rather than openly championing dismantling the public school system, they promote bringing market incentives and competition into education as a way to fix failing schools, particularly in low-income Black and Latino communities.

Home sweet lab: Computerized house to generate as much energy as it uses

NIST unveils net-zero energy residential test facility to improve testing of energy-efficient technologies

In a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sept. 12, 2012, the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) unveiled a new laboratory designed to demonstrate that a typical-looking suburban home for a family of four can generate as much energy as it uses in a year. Following an initial year-long experiment, the facility will be used to improve test methods for energy-efficient technologies and develop cost-effective design standards for energy-efficient homes that could reduce overall energy consumption and harmful pollution, and save families money on their monthly utility bills.

The unique facility looks and behaves like an actual house, and has been built to U.S. Green Building Council LEED Platinum standards—the highest standard for sustainable structures. The two-story, four-bedroom, three-bath Net-Zero Energy Residential Test Facility incorporates energy-efficient construction and appliances, as well as energy-generating technologies such as solar water heating and solar photovoltaic systems.
 

Behind Romney's Welfare Attacks, America's Top Poverty Denier

The false ads are inspired by a man with a long history of minimizing the struggles of the poor.

—By Andy Kroll  | Thu Sep. 13, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

In recent weeks, a Mitt Romney campaign ad has flashed across television screens blasting President Obama on the issue of welfare. The ad claims Obama "gutted" the requirement in the 1996 welfare reform law that recipients look for work in exchange for government support. Media fact-checkers quickly debunked Romney's attack—PolitiFact rated it "Pants on Fire"—and Obama's campaign lashed back with a TV ad of its own. Yet Romney stuck with the welfare attack on the stump, and Romney aide Ashley O'Connor said the ad was the campaign's most potent of 2012.

Romneyland didn't whip up the bogus welfare attack on its own. It relied instead on the work of Robert Rector, a senior researcher at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, DC.
 

Poorest miss out on benefits, experience more material hardship, since 1996 welfare reform

Although the federal government's 1996 reform of welfare brought some improvements for the nation's poor, it also may have made extremely poor Americans worse off, new research shows.

The reforms radically changed cash assistance—what most Americans think of as 'welfare'— by imposing lifetime limits on the receipt of aid and requiring recipients to work. About the same time, major social policy reforms during the 1990s raised the benefits of work for low-income families.

In the wake of these changes, millions of previous welfare recipients, largely single mothers, entered the workforce. At the same time, welfare has become more difficult to obtain for families at the very bottom, who often have multiple barriers to work. As a result, in the new welfare system, the working poor may be doing better while the deeply poor are doing worse.

The Pay of Chicago School Teachers and Selected Others

Wednesday, 12 September 2012 03:53

Since the Chicago school teachers went out on strike Monday, many political figures have tried to convince the public that their $70,000 average annual pay is excessive. This is peculiar, since many of the same people had been arguing that the families earning over $250,000, who would be subject to higher tax rates under President Obama's tax proposal, are actually part of the struggling middle class. They now want to convince us that a household with two Chicago public school teachers, who together earn less than 60 percent of President Obama's cutoff, have more money than they should.

Anyhow, if we want to assess whether someone is getting too much money, we always have to ask the follow-up question, compared to what? Here are a few comparisons that I have found useful.

 

A Tale of Two Healhcare Plans

by David Cay Johnston

No issue affecting taxes so clearly divides the two parties in the U.S. election as healthcare. The two parties, in their platforms, describe very different approaches to healthcare economics. Both use political plastic surgery to cover up ugly truths.

The stakes are huge. Americans spend $2.64 per person for healthcare for each purchasing power equivalent dollar spent by the 33 other countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD data shows the U.S. spends $8,233 per capita compared with an average of $3,118 in the other 33 countries.

Have we reached the end of economic growth?

By Brad Plumer , Updated: September 11, 2012

Why has the U.S. economy grown so lethargically over the past few years? Economists have ladled out all sorts of diagnoses. Maybe this is just your run-of-the-mill hangover after a financial crisis. Or perhaps the Federal Reserve hasn’t been aggressive enough in stimulating demand. Maybe it’s Obama’s fault. Or Congress’s fault.

Yet there’s another, more controversial theory making the rounds these days. It’s possible that our expectations for future economic growth are just too high. Perhaps the last century or so of strong economic growth in the United States was all just an aberration that’s now coming to an end. Before the Industrial Revolution took off in Great Britain, after all, the world barely experienced any economic growth. Then we got a whole bunch of nifty, life-changing technologies — from electricity to cars to airplanes. But what if that process has run its course, and we’re now entering another low-growth phase?

Sweden recycles so effectively that it has to import garbage to incinerate

By Philip Bump

Every country should be so lucky as to have Sweden’s problem: It doesn’t produce enough garbage.

As reported by Public Radio International, Sweden has a remarkably effective recycling program. Only 4 percent of the country’s waste ends up in landfills, with the other 96 percent being reused in some way. There is one problem with that, however: The country has incinerators that burn waste to create heat (a must-have in the region) and electricity. And too little waste means not enough fuel for those fires.

Census: Middle class shrinks to an all-time low

By Carol Morello
 
The vise on the middle class tightened last year, driving down its share of the income pie as the number of Americans in poverty leveled off and the most affluent households saw their portion grow, new census data released Wednesday showed.

Income inequality increased by 1.6 percent, the Census Bureau said in its annual report on poverty, income and health insurance. This was the biggest one-year increase in almost two decades and suggested that a trend in place since the late 1970s was picking up steam.

As a snapshot of a nation recovering from one of its worst recessions ever, the census report had both shadows and highlights. Median household income declined $777, to $50,054 before taxes. But the poverty rate, which many experts had predicted would rise to rates unseen in nearly half a century, inched down a hair to 15 percent, a decline of about 100,000 people. And fewer Americans were without health insurance, largely because of a provision in the 2010 health-care law allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ policies.

U.S. judge's rule protects reporters, activists in their Middle East work

By Basil Katz
NEW YORK | >Wed Sep 12, 2012 6:25pm EDT

(Reuters) - A federal judge made permanent on Wednesday her order blocking enforcement of a U.S. law's provision that authorizes military detention for people deemed to have "substantially supported" al Qaeda, the Taliban or "associated forces."

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan had ruled in May in favor of non-profit groups and reporters whose work relates to conflicts in the Middle East and who said they feared being detained under a section of the law, signed by President Barack Obama in December.

Foreclosure Fail: Study Pins Blame on Big Banks

by Paul Kiel
ProPublica, Sept. 11, 2012, 1:35 p.m.

Over the past several years, we've reported extensively on the big banks' foreclosure failings. As a result of banks' disorganization and understaffing — particularly at the peak of the crisis in 2009 and 2010 — homeowners were often forced to run a gauntlet of confusion, delays, and errors when seeking a mortgage modification.

But while evidence of these problems was pervasive, it was always hard to quantify the damage. Just how many more people could have qualified under the administration's mortgage modification program if the banks had done a better job? In other words, how many people have been pushed toward foreclosure unnecessarily?

Chart: How 9/11 Changed the Law

—Brennan Center for Justice, Liberty and National Security Program
| Fri Sep. 9, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Law change

What it means

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008

Allowed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to authorize warrantless surveillance of Americans' international electronic communications. In 2005, the New York Times reported on the Bush administration's secret wiretapping of American citizens since 9/11. Civil liberties advocates were outraged, but it didn't stop Congress from passing this law in 2008 essentially legalizing certain aspects of the system. Under the new law, for the first time since the inception of the modern legal framework governing surveillance, the government can intercept Americans' international communications without a warrant as long as one party to the communication is "reasonably believed" to be outside the US.

Number of U.S. poor holds steady but earnings gap grows

By Susan Heavey and Lucia Mutikani | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The poverty rate in the United States stabilized in 2011 for the first time in three years even as incomes fell and inequality grew, according to government figures.

The share of people living in poverty edged down to 15 percent from 15.1 percent in 2010, a "statistically insignificant" drop in the words of analysts at the U.S. Census Bureau, which released the report.

Unemployment benefits helped soften the blow from a harsh economic environment, the report said. All told, 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty last year, little changed from 2010.

Deficit Rorschach Test: The Presidents, the Editors, and the Truth

By Richard (RJ) Eskow
September 10, 2012 - 7:47pm ET

Both political parties have "an aversion to telling the truth," says The Washington Post. The truth? That newspaper's editors are part of a small but powerful billionaire-funded circle that seems to believe that any facts which don't support their distorted and unpopular ideas are deviations from the "truth."

With a few selected phrases, President Obama and former President Clinton appeared to endorse this tiny faction's recovery-crushing austerity approach last week in Charlotte. But the rest of their speeches, along with others given at the convention, were a strong rejection of the privately-authored set of policy proposals known as "Simpson-Bowles."

Getting Economics to Acknowledge Rentier Finance

The economics discipline has for the most part managed to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room: that of the role that the financial services industry has come to play. Astonishingly, even though the reengineering of the world economy along the lines preferred by mainstream economists resulted in a prosperity-wrecking global financial crisis and a soft coup by financiers, the discipline carries on methodologically as if nothing much had happened. And one of its huge blind spots is its refusal to acknowledge the role of banking and finance in modern commerce. Interest rates are simply an input into the preferred form of macro models, DSGE (dynamic stochastic equilibrium models). Economies are assumed to be self correcting, and to automagically “correct” to full employment. All shocks to the system are exogenous. In other words, boom-bust credit cycles are simply omitted because they are ideologically inconvenient and instability is too hard to model.

The secret GOP meeting to destroy the economy in time for 2012

By Gaius Publius
on 9/10/2012 04:01:00 PM

Yep, welcome back to me — I return in time to see Paul Krugman's tale of Republican destruction of American lives and futures for political gain. This is actually a two-parter.

■ One, The Professor calls the Republican Party on its Shermanesque March to the White House, burning everything in its path. A joyful return indeed (my usual emphatic and paragraphic intrusions):
Does anyone remember the American Jobs Act? A year ago President Obama proposed boosting the economy with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, aimed in particular at sustaining state and local government employment. Independent analysts reacted favorably. For example, the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that the act would add 1.3 million jobs by the end of 2012. ...

ORNL roof and attic design proves efficient in summer and winter

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Sep. 10, 2012 — A new kind of roof-and-attic system field-tested at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory keeps homes cool in summer and prevents heat loss in winter, a multi-seasonal efficiency uncommon in roof and attic design.

The system improves efficiency using controls for radiation, convection and insulation, including a passive ventilation system that pulls air from the underbelly of the attic into an inclined air space above the roof.

Debt Default, the End of the World and Timothy Geithner's Thoughts

Sunday, 09 September 2012 07:55

Real reporters and newspapers don't try to tell audiences what political figures think because they don't know what they think. But Bob Woodward does not fit the description of the former and the Washington Post does not fit the description of the latter, hence we have a front page account of the battle over the debt ceiling that concludes with a section beginning:

"Geithner thought there was one other consideration. He did not mention it to anyone, not even the president, but he had thought about it a great deal. It was not just that Obama faced an economic choice or a political choice. He faced a moral choice."

The piece then goes on to explain how Geithner thought it would be horribly immoral to default on the debt because of the price the country would pay for generations.

Sheila Bair Visits Occupy Wall Street

Sheila Bair, the former FDIC chairman who heads the Systemic Risk Council, and Ricardo Delfina, a fellow Systemic Risk Council member, met on Sunday with members of several Occupy Wall Street working groups: Occupy Bank, Alternative Banking, and Occupy the SEC. I’ve watched presentations by Bair twice previously: once when she was at the FDIC, another not long after she had left government service. Even though she had been pretty direct in those discussions, she was surprisingly specific in this meeting about some of the impediments she faced during the crisis. Some of the topics:

Citigroup. Bair wanted Citi resolved. However, she was not in a good position to do so, since the OCC was Citi’s primary regulator and it, along with the Treasury and Fed, were adamantly opposed. The FDIC regulated only the depositary, which was about $1 trillion of the then roughly $2 trillion bank. That meant it had data only on that operation, since the Treasury and OCC, which had better data, refused to share it. And she stressed that that the information she had was not very good thanks to Citi’s lousy information systems. She could have forced a resolution through a seldom-used mechanism (used only 6 times in the FDIC’s history) but it would have been extremely aggressive to do so, and she felt she could justify it given her incomplete vantage. She pushed hard for a fallback of firing incumbent management and the board and using a good bank/bad bank structure, which would have had shareholders and bondholders take losses.

Study Finds How BPA Affects Gene Expression, Anxiety; Soy Mitigates Effects

Matt Shipman | News Services | 919.515.6386

Dr. Heather Patisaul | 919.513.7567

Release Date: 09.07.2012

New research led by researchers at North Carolina State University shows that exposure to the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) early in life results in high levels of anxiety by causing significant gene expression changes in a specific region of the brain called the amygdala. The researchers also found that a soy-rich diet can mitigate these effects.


“We knew that BPA could cause anxiety in a variety of species, and wanted to begin to understand why and how that happens,” says Dr. Heather Patisaul, an associate professor of biology at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the work. BPA is a chemical used in a wide variety of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins, and is used in consumer products such as some food containers.

Paul Krugman: Obstruct and Exploit

Does anyone remember the American Jobs Act? A year ago President Obama proposed boosting the economy with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, aimed in particular at sustaining state and local government employment. Independent analysts reacted favorably. For example, the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that the act would add 1.3 million jobs by the end of 2012.

There were good reasons for these positive assessments. Although you’d never know it from political debate, worldwide experience since the financial crisis struck in 2008 has overwhelmingly confirmed the proposition that fiscal policy “works,” that temporary increases in spending boost employment in a depressed economy (and that spending cuts increase unemployment). The Jobs Act would have been just what the doctor ordered.

Six Degrees of Social Security: The President, The Senator, and the Billionaire

By Richard (RJ) Eskow
September 6, 2012 - 12:36pm ET

President Obama and Vice President Biden both gave powerful speeches this evening, summoning the ideal of an inclusive nation and effectively distinguishing their mainstream American views from their opponents' radical right-wing vision. The only real false notes were the passages in which they both embraced a right-wing set of proposals known as "Simpson Bowles."

That means they were embracing a plan which would cut Social Security benefits and raise its retirement age. It also means they were embracing the ideology of a small network of well-funded individuals who are determined to take our country down the austerity path that is destroying Europe - and who may be personally antagonistic toward the President as well.

Romney and Ryan’s Dangerous Tax Roadmap

by David Cay Johnston

 

Together Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have put human faces on how the super-rich game the tax system to pay less, pay later and sometimes not pay at all. Both want to expand tax favors for the already rich, like themselves.

Their approach favors dynastic wealth with largely tax-free (Romney) or completely tax-free (Ryan) lifestyles, encouraging future generations of shiftless inheritors. What we need instead is a tax system that encourages strivers in competitive markets, not a perpetual oligarchy.

Missing Pieces of the Story of Sun Myung Moon

Frederick Clarkson
Sat Sep 08, 2012 at 11:56:26 PM EST

The reporting and pundtiry in the wake of the death of Sun Myung Moon left a lot to be desired. Even long, seemingly comprehensive treatments of Moon's life and empire, such as the one that ran in The New York Times, did not delve deeply into Moon's profound far right and criminal involvements; antidemocratic politics; or even the mysterious sources of foreign cash for The Washington Times, and extensive political operations in the U.S. for decades, let alone the Moon organization's broad, insidious affects on American culture and democracy. There has also been some embarrassingly credulous material published about the nature of life in the Church itself, and some odd, unsubstantiated pooh poohery about the problem of cultism.

Of course, history lives, despite the best efforts of some of us not to notice.
Here are a few things from my own knowledge that merit far greater, and better attention than they have generally received so far.

Republicans, the Post-Truth Party

The Editors

September 5, 2012

The acceptance speeches by Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney at the GOP convention were only slightly more grounded in reality than Clint Eastwood’s conversation with an empty chair. Ryan is infamous for his pack of lies, from the attempt to blame President Obama for the closing of a Wisconsin GM factory that began shutting down during the Bush presidency, to the fantasy that Ryan’s austerity agenda is about something other than gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in order to enrich Wall Street speculators and the insurance industry.

Romney was just as bad, with a rambling rumination on how much he wished Barack Obama’s presidency had “succeeded.” Coming from the man who tried to scuttle Obama’s successful interventions to save GM and Chrysler, and who spent the rest of the president’s first term organizing a campaign to displace him, Romney’s line wasn’t remotely believable.

 

Paul Krugman: Cleaning Up the Economy

Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention was a remarkable combination of pretty serious wonkishness — has there ever been a convention speech with that much policy detail? — and memorable zingers. Perhaps the best of those zingers was his sarcastic summary of the Republican case for denying President Obama re-election: “We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.”

Great line. But is the mess really getting cleaned up?

The answer, I would argue, is yes. The next four years are likely to be much better than the last four years — unless misguided policies create another mess.

Undercover Agents Assault Journalists at Democratic Convention in Charlotte

Wednesday, 05 September 2012 14:50
By Steve Horn and Kevin Gosztola, SpeakOut | Press Release

Charlotte, NC — Two journalists covering the Democratic National Convention were confronted on Sunday by two undercover agents who assaulted one and threatened to punch the other in the mouth for photographing them.

The two journalists, Kevin Gosztola of Firedoglake.com and Steve Horn, a Truthout contributor credentialed to cover the DNC for WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin, took notice of four burly middle-aged white males during a public march. The four were taking photos of the undocumented immigrant contingent in the march. They were carrying "No Papers, No Fear" blue flags and had put stickers from Code Pink on their person to make it seem like they were protesters in the demonstration. One man in an orange shirt had a black piece in one of his ears.