Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: September 20, 2012

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990. 

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

 

The Latest Lie: "Redistribution Is A Foreign Concept"

By Dave Johnson

September 21, 2012 - 2:22pm ET 

Now Mitt Romney is using another selectively edited video to make it sound like President Obama is a communist who wants to seize all the wealth of the rich and hand it out to ... negroes and communist party members?

This week the Romney campaign dragged out a 1998 video of then-State Senator Barack Obama, doctored it to make it seem to sound bad, and used clips from the doctored video to drive a point that Obama is "foreign" and antin-American.

 

Feast of Fools: How American Democracy Became the Property of a Commercial Oligarchy

Thursday, 20 September 2012 10:11
By Lewis H Lapham, TomDispatch | Op-Ed

All power corrupts but some must govern. -- John le Carré

The ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2012 promises the conspicuous consumption of $5.8 billion, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there. Forbidden the use of words apt to depress a Q Score or disturb a Gallup poll, the candidates stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. The sponsors of the event, generous to a fault but careful to remain anonymous, dress it up with the bursting in air of star-spangled photo ops, abundant assortments of multiflavored sound bites, and the candidates so well-contrived that they can be played for jokes, presented as game-show contestants, or posed as noble knights-at-arms setting forth on vision quests, enduring the trials by klieg light, until on election night they come to judgment before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they were produced.

Best of all, at least from the point of view of the commercial oligarchy paying for both the politicians and the press coverage, the issue is never about the why of who owes what to whom, only about the how much and when, or if, the check is in the mail. No loose talk about what is meant by the word democracy or in what ways it refers to the cherished hope of liberty embodied in the history of a courageous people.

The Waning of the Modern Ages

September 20, 2012

 

Time to Abolish the American Dream

by MORRIS BERMAN

 

La longue durée —the long run—was an expression made popular by the Annales School of French historians led by Fernand Braudel, who coined the phrase in 1958. The basic argument of this school is that the proper concern of historians should be the analysis of structures that lie at the base of contemporary events. Underneath short-term events such as individual cycles of economic boom and bust, said Braudel, we can discern the persistence of “old attitudes of thought and action, resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic.” An important derivative of the Annales research is the work of the World Systems Analysis school, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, which similarly focuses on long-term structures: capitalism, in particular.

The “arc” of capitalism, according to this school, is about 600 years long, from 1500 to 2100. It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital—money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency—in the twentieth and twenty-first. In dialectical fashion, it will be the very success of the system that eventually does it in.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time the medieval world began to come apart and be replaced by the modern one. In his classic study of the period, The Waning of the Middle Ages, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga depicted the time as one of depression and cultural exhaustion—like our own age, not much fun to live through.  One reason for this is that the world is literally perched over an abyss. What lies ahead is largely unknown, and to have to hover over an abyss for a long time is, to put it colloquially, a bit of a drag. The same thing was true at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire as well, on the ruins of which the feudal system slowly arose.

A Conservative History of the United States

Posted by Jack Hitt

1500s: The American Revolutionary War begins: “The reason we fought the revolution in the sixteenth century was to get away from that kind of onerous crown.”—Rick Perry

1607: First welfare state collapses: “Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow.”—Dick Armey

1619-1808: Africans set sail for America in search of freedom: “Other than Native Americans, who were here, all of us have the same story.”—Michele Bachmann

Secret Ryan Transcript: Social Security and Medicare are the Target

Posted at: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 09:47:50 AM
Author: Vincent Miller

This isn’t from a secret video, it's from the untranscribed portion of Ryan’s 2005 speech at the Atlas Society’s “Celebration of Ayn Rand.”  It fits well with the Romney video because it makes clear that middle class entitlements, “so called defined benefit programs” such as Social Security and Medicare ARE an explicit strategic target because they are collectivistic, socialistic and foster dependency.

This is the event where Ryan stated that Rand was the “one thinker” who is the “reason I got involved in public service;” and that Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are “required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.”  Statements he would latter dismiss as “urban legends.”

The speech has been hidden in plain sight on the Atlas Society website, which offers only a partial transcript.  This omits several revealing passages that illuminate Ryan’s philosophy as it relates to policy priorities.

Paul Krugman: Disdain for Workers

By now everyone knows how Mitt Romney, speaking to donors in Boca Raton, washed his hands of almost half the country — the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes — declaring, “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” By now, also, many people are aware that the great bulk of the 47 percent are hardly moochers; most are working families who pay payroll taxes, and elderly or disabled Americans make up a majority of the rest.

But here’s the question: Should we imagine that Mr. Romney and his party would think better of the 47 percent on learning that the great majority of them actually are or were hard workers, who very much have taken personal responsibility for their lives? And the answer is no. 

A return to economic sanity

Miracle at the Fed: A hawk becomes a dove, signaling hope, change and job creation are possible in a second term  

By Andrew Leonard

Seven weeks before Election Day in the United States, a wonky speech by the president of a regional Federal Reserve Bank is hardly the kind of thing likely to make waves in the larger political discourse. At this point in the campaign, even the most die-hard economy watchers tend to be obsessed more by the latest poll numbers in Iowa or Colorado than the intricacies of monetary policy. Meanwhile, the politicians that one might hope would be focusing their attention on spurring economic growth are locked in a permanent nightmare of partisan sniping. Don’t look for sense from Congress — just try to keep your head down and avoid the mud.

But that’s all the more reason why the speech delivered Thursday by Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Minneapolis Fed, is worth paying attention to. Because an amazing, remarkable thing happened in the course of that that speech: A hawk became a dove! One of the Federal Reserve’s strongest critics of aggressive monetary policy aimed at bringing down unemployment changed his mind.

 

The Looming Threat That Could Initiate the Next Economic Collapse

By Alexander Arapoglou, Jerri-Lynn Scofield
September 17, 2012  |  Most people now realize big banks aren’t their friends. Only in the fairy tale movie world of It’s a Wonderful Life [4] does banker George Bailey lend a helping hand to friends and neighbors to build a prosperous Bedford Falls.

But many people have no idea that the regulated banking system is only one part of a gigantic problem. Lurking behind regulated banks is the shadow banking system. And it’s from out of these shadows that the next big shock to the global financial system, threatening everyone’s nest egg, might come.
What is shadow banking? Different writers mean different things when they use the term. But the fact that it’s hard to explain only makes it more difficult to constrain.

For our purposes, “shadow banking” is the loosely regulated or unregulated portion of the financial system outside the boundaries of the large and well-known commercial and investment banks.  The shadow banking system includes shadow banks, such as hedge funds, and shadow practices, such as inadequately regulated derivatives. This system is vast, and grew by a factor of five between 1990 and 2011, so that it now represents more than 15 trillion dollars in liabilities, according to a staff report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  Shadow banking liabilities exceed those of the formal banking sector, and are currently about equal to the entire U.S. gross national product.

 

The Radical Rich: Moving From Romney to Re-Occupy

By Richard (RJ) Eskow
September 19, 2012 - 12:00am ET

Two recent movements have transformed the political landscape. The Occupy movement literally operates in the light of day. The other movement operates in secrecy, with money as its "speech" rather than ... well, you know, speech.

The Romney video offers us a rare glimpse of the other movement. This movement of the extremely rich is ruthless, radical, and full of rage. And it's on the rise.

If you're not scared, you're not paying attention.

We Ar All Welfare Queens Now

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Sep 18 2012, 10:02 AM ET
 
Thinking some more on Mitt Romney's high-handed claim that one in two Americans will vote for Obama simply to better ensure their own sloth, I was reminded of Lee Atwater's famous explanation of the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

The process Atwater is describing really stretches back to 1790 (sorry if I am on repeat here) when Congress restricted citizenship to white people. Progress has meant a series of fights first over direct and indirect components of citizenship (voting, serving in public office, serving in the Army, serving on juries etc.) and less explicit tactics to curtail access to them.

Nontaxpayers are Overwhelmingly the Elderly and Students

When Romney talks about the people who don't pay taxes and tries to make you believe that 47 percent of us are moochers living off the system, it's important to recognize that the people who don't pay federal income taxes are mostly the elderly and students. And notice how narrow the category is -- it's only federal income taxes -- but there are lots of other types of taxes. When all things are considered, "nearly 100 percent of Americans pay taxes in some way, shape or form":

Who Pays Taxes?, Hamilton Project: A popular myth swirling around Washington, DC, and throughout the media these days is that many Americans do not pay taxes, and are therefore free-riding off of our society without contributing themselves. ...  The origin of this misconception is the observation that only about 54 percent of American households paid federal income taxes during recession-affected 2011.  But that statistic is misleading because it provides an incomplete picture of the overall tax burden on American families, and because it incorporates individuals who naturally shouldn’t be paying taxes because of their age or economic circumstances due to the Recession. A closer look reveals that nearly all Americans do, in fact, pay taxes. ...

 

Matt Taibbi: A Rare Look at Why the Government Won't Fight Wall Street

POSTED: September 18, 10:28 AM ET 

The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who've come at the issue from the inside.

We get one of those rare inside accounts in The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, a new book by Jeff Connaughton, the former aide to Senators Ted Kaufman and Joe Biden. Jeff is well known to reporters like me; during a period when most government officials double-talked or downplayed the Wall Street corruption problem, Jeff was one of the few voices on the Hill who always talked about the subject with appropriate alarm. He shared this quality with his boss Kaufman, the Delaware Senator who took over Biden's seat and instantly became an irritating (to Wall Street) political force by announcing he wasn’t going to run for re-election. "I later learned from reporters that Wall Street was frustrated that they couldn’t find a way to harness Ted or pull in his reins," Jeff writes. "There was no obvious way to pressure Ted because he wasn’t running for re-election."

 

Why Sneering at Public Servants Comes So Naturally to Many of America's Richest Citizens

By Sam Pizzigati

September 18, 2012  |  Last year state lawmakers in Illinois did their best to make a Chicago teacher strike impossible. They passed a new law that required at least 75 percent of the city’s teachers to okay any walkout in advance.

How did Chicago teachers respond? In advance balloting early this June, 92 percent of the city’s teachers voted, and 98 percent of those teachers voted [3] to strike if contract negotiations broke down.
This near-total teacher support for the walkout that began last week shows just how intensely frustrated the city’s teachers have become. They’ve been teaching for years in schools woefully ill-equipped to serve the city’s students.

The vast majority of these students, 87 percent [4], rate as “low income.” Many have no books in their homes and no quiet place to study. Some — over 15,000 — have no homes [5] at all.

 

Big Ag Can't Feed the World -- Here's Who Can

Raj Patel

September 11, 2012  |  Raj Patel is no fan of messiahs and iconic leaders. “One bright shining light is dangerous,” says the writer, activist, and academic who was once mistaken as the savior of humankind by an obscure religious group. Still, there’s no denying that Patel – young, charming, and sharp as a tack – does, in fact, shine. With his critically acclaimed books on food systems and capitalism he has distinguished himself as one of the progressive world’s up and coming public intellectuals.

His quest to understand the global inequities caused by free market economics took the London-born Patel from the halls of Oxford to the London School of Economics, to the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Along the way he wrote Stuffed and Starved [3] (2008), a cutting critique of how the free market keeps millions of people hungry and millions more obese. His next book, the 2010 New York Times bestseller The Value of Nothing [4], drew on the Great Recession to expose the core cause of our current social, political, and environmental problems.

Patel isn’t just armchair pontificator, though. A self-proclaimed “anarchist sympathizer,” he often can be spotted in the midst of street demonstrations, lending body and voice to grassroots protests against the very organizations he once worked with. Patel is currently traveling the world collecting material for a documentary film, Generation Food, which will show how “people are doing amazing things to feed one another, across the table, across generations, and across the world.”

 

Frank Rich: My Embed in Red

A week steeped in right-wing media reveals a Republican Party far more despairing than the
lamestream knows.

Published Sep 16, 2012

On the sixth day, I listened to Glenn Beck, and I saw that he was good. Or if not exactly good, then honest-to-God funny.

I had tuned in as part of a thought experiment then entering its final lap: an attempt to put myself in the
Republican brain by spending a solid week listening to, watching, reading, surfing, and otherwise gorging on conservative media. As would also be true of an overdose of liberal media, it was lulling me into a stupor, and I was desperate for a jolt. Beck provided exactly that, in the form of comedy, and to my astonishment, I found myself laughing out loud—with him, not at him.

The Mystery of Neocon Influence

September 18, 2012

The neocons – despite the disastrous Iraq War and other harm they have caused – remain influential in Official Washington, given time on talk shows and space on op-ed pages to expound on their latest dreams of American intervention in the Middle East. But ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar asks, why are they still listened to?

By Paul R. Pillar

Recent attempts by adversaries of President Barack Obama to blame him for yet another undesirable circumstance — in this case, popular outrage in the Middle East over an anti-Islam video — remind us of one of the oddest aspects of discourse in the United States about foreign and security policy: that the same people who not too many years ago inflicted on us the Iraq War are still part of that discourse.

They get air time and column space, and evidently at least somebody seems to be listening to them.

Soledad O’Brien calls out Peter King over Obama ‘apology tour’ myth

By David Edwards
Monday, September 17, 2012 9:52 EDT

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) found himself being grilled by CNN host Soledad O’Brien on Monday about the claim President Barack Obama had gone on an “apology tour” — and the congressman was unable to name a single instance in which the president had apologized for the United States.

After the U.S. embassy in Cairo condemned an anti-Muslim film that mocked the prophet Muhammad and led to protests and the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya last week, GOP hopeful Mitt Romney accused Obama of “sympathizing” with the enemy. And other Republicans quickly followed by reviving a debunked claim that the president had spent part of his first term going on an “apology tour.”

Paul Krugman: Hating on Ben Bernanke

Last week Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, announced a change in his institution’s recession-fighting strategies. In so doing he seemed to be responding to the arguments of critics who have said the Fed can and should be doing more. And Republicans went wild.

Now, many people on the right have long been obsessed with the notion that we’ll be facing runaway inflation any day now. The surprise was how readily Mitt Romney joined in the craziness.

Your Body Doesn’t Lie: People Ignore Political Ads of Candidates They Oppose

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A recent study examined people’s bodily responses while watching presidential campaign ads - and discovered another way that people avoid political information that challenges their beliefs.

In the last days of the 2008 campaign, researchers had people watch a variety of actual ads for Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his Democratic rival Barack Obama while the viewers’ heart rates, skin conductance and activation of facial muscles were monitored.

The results showed that partisan participants reacted strongly to ads featuring their favored candidate, but barely responded to ads featuring the rival candidate.

 

Does President Obama Want to Cut Social Security by 3 Percent?

Monday, 17 September 2012 09:56  
By Dean Baker, Truthout | News Analysis 


That is a pretty simple and important question. Unfortunately, most voters are likely to go to the polls this fall without knowing the answer.

If the backdrop to this question is not immediately clear, then you should be very angry at the reporters who cover the campaign. One of the items that continuously comes up in reference to the budget deficit is President Obama's support for the plan put forward by the co-chairs of his deficit commission, Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles and former senator Alan Simpson. On numerous occasions, President Obama has indicated his support for this plan.

 

One of the Worst Ideas from Congress in Decades

Sep 10 2012 - 8:12am

The New York Times today has an article with a dramatically understated title: "Lawmakers Push to Increase White House Oversight of Financial Regulators."  It's a good article, but is mislabeled because the bill discussed would actually result in Congress subjecting ALL independent agencies (not just the financial regulators) to White House oversight and, indeed, control.  The article also missed the most important consequence of the bill:  a breathtaking, almost inconceivable power give-a-way by Congress to the White House.  Here's why it's such a dumb idea:

First, if the Legislature passed this bill, it would be one of the biggest transfers of power from the Legislative Branch to the Executive Branch in history.  Since at least 1936, independent agencies have been considered primarily instruments of the Legislative not the Executive Branch – that is why they are called “independent” agencies.  If this bill became law, that would end almost 80 years of a primary method that Congress has used to implement its policy  goals and 22 or more agencies would no long be independent of the Executive Branch; indeed, they would be expressly subject to Executive Branch control.  This would be a dramatic and historic change.

 

Obama Says One Thing in Spotlight, Another Behind Closed Doors

Sunday, 16 September 2012 09:49  
By Kevin Zeese, October 2011 | News Analysis 

Jobs. That is the issue in the election – at least that is the issue Obama and Romney are focused on – who will create more jobs for a country in desperate need of them. During his convention speech, President Obama mentioned jobs 19 times, Romney did so 16 times. Obama promised a future where the U.S. will "outsource fewer jobs." Of course, Romney is known as someone who made hundreds of millions by outsourcing jobs. Former President Clinton put forth a job scorecard, arguing Obama and the Democrats will create more jobs.

Neither candidate is arguing for a New Deal style government jobs program. Both are relying on private industry to create jobs. But, big business profits by spending less on labor. While in the spotlight of the convention, Obama is critical of jobs being sent overseas but at the same time his U.S. trade representative, Ron Kirk, who works out of the executive office of the president, is negotiating a secret treaty behind closed doors – the Trans-Pacific Partnership – known as 'NAFTA on steroids'. This is a corporate trade agreement that will result in massive outsourcing of jobs.

“Cost-Benefit Analysis”: The Innocent Phrase Masking a Deplorable GOP Scheme To Stop Wall Street Regulation

By Eliot Spitzer   |   Posted Friday, Sept. 14, 2012, at 3:31 PM ET

Beware neutral-sounding phrases that mask hidden agendas. One example from Washington, D.C., this week: “cost-benefit analysis.” Why would anyone oppose assessing whether the benefits of an action outweigh the costs? Of course we favor that!

But now comes a bill sponsored by Sens. Rob Portman, Susan Collins, and Mark Warner (two Republicans and a Democrat) giving the White House the power to intervene in the business of independent regulatory agencies such as the SEC, FDIC, and FCC, under the guise of cost-benefit analysis.

 

What Krugman & Stiglitz Can Tell Us

End This Depression Now!
by Paul Krugman
Norton, 259 pp., $24.95                                                  

The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Norton, 414 pp., $27.95

Five years after the onset of the financial crisis that badly damaged the US economy, the nation remains mired in chronic joblessness. The unemployment rate, stubbornly above 8 percent, actually makes the situation look better than it is. Many millions have given up looking for work and no longer figure in the statistics. Long-term unemployment remains at levels unseen since the Great Depression. Young Americans are entering the worst job market in at least a half-century. For both the long-term unemployed and new job seekers, this sustained absence from the workforce will have permanent effects on both their earnings and their well-being. And not just theirs. We have all lost, and continue to lose, from the prolonged mass idleness of potentially productive workers.

Yet Washington is stuck in neutral. Worse than neutral; it is in reverse. As the last elements of the 2009 stimulus phase out, the initial flood of federal aid has slowed to a trickle. If no agreement is reached before early next year, the trickle will become a huge backward flow, as President Obama’s payroll tax cut and all the Bush tax cuts expire while automatic spending cuts agreed to in previous legislative sessions kick in. Already, Republican leaders are threatening to replay last year’s standoff over the debt ceiling. Meanwhile, state and local governments—prohibited from running sustained deficits, increasingly dominated by anti-spending forces—continue to cut aid to those out of work and slash programs that invest in the nation’s future while laying off teachers and other public workers. Without those layoffs, the current unemployment rate would probably be around 7 percent.

 

Dirty Money: Cities and States Addicted to Soliciting for Corporate Favors

Saturday, 15 September 2012 01:37
By Mike Alberti, Remapping Debate | News Analysis

When executives from the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus announced their plans to build a new $600 million factory in Mobile, Alabama in early July, local politicians wasted no time in congratulating themselves. "We have worked a long time and have put in many hours to make this announcement a reality," Alabama Governor Robert Bentley said in a press release. "This project will create thousands of well-paying jobs that the people of this area need and deserve."

Airbus wasn't coming to Mobile for free: state and local officials had offered the company an incentive package worth more than $158 million for the plant. To some experts, those subsidies — and the fact that Airbus will compete directly with U.S. companies like Boeing — made the deal disturbingly familiar.

 

Where the candidates stand on Medicare and Medicaid

by Suevon Lee
ProPublica, Sept. 14, 2012, 2:26 p.m.

Medicare and Medicaid, which provide medical coverage for seniors, the poor and the disabled, together make up nearly a quarter of all federal spending. With total Medicare spending projected to cost $7.7 trillion over the next 10 years, there is consensus that changes are in order. But what those changes should entail has, of course, been one of the hot-button issues of the campaign.

With the candidates slinging charges, we thought we’d lay out the facts.