FACT CHECK: Social Security scare tactics

By FactCheck.Org
11:08 am, October 3, 2012 Updated: 11:21 am, October 3, 2012

Seniors beware: The Obama and Romney campaigns are making false claims about taxing Social Security benefits:

• Vice President Joe Biden told seniors in Florida that Romney’s tax plan “would raise taxes on your Social Security.” But that’s not part of Romney’s tax plan. It’s the Obama-Biden campaign’s latest misrepresentation of a nonpartisan study. The group that did the analysis disputes the campaign’s interpretation of its work.
• The Romney campaign and the National Republican Committee falsely claim that Biden “repeatedly voted for higher taxes on Social Security benefits.” Obama and Biden repeatedly opposed attempts to cut the tax on Social Security benefits for higher-income seniors, but that’s not a vote for raising taxes higher than they are now.

Wave of Anti-Voter State Laws Detailed by GAO

THE OFFICE OF SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Washington – New state laws that make it harder for millions of voters to cast ballots are detailed in a Government Accountability Office report released today.

The comprehensive study was requested by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). The senators asked the non-partisan research arm of Congress to investigate what they called an "alarming number" of new state laws that will make it "significantly harder" for millions of voters to cast ballots on Nov. 6.

Sanders called the voter restrictions, enacted mostly by Republican legislatures and governors, a "savage attack on American democracy." Leahy said "we must work to protect one of the most fundamental rights Americans enjoy." Durbin said the report confirms that the spate of state voting laws is making it harder for millions of disabled, young, minority, rural, elderly and low-income Americans to vote. "Despite widespread public outcry," Nelson said, "state lawmakers have tried to make it harder" to vote.

 

What You Need to Know About Obama and the Social Security Sell-Out

By Lynn Parramore 

October 5, 2012  |  Watching Wednesday night’s presidential debate, you’d have to be a crack political code reader to know what Obama was really saying about Social Security. It was quick. It was subtle. But it was one of the most telling moments of the debate.

[...]

Obama could have mentioned these facts and cheered the success of a program that Democrats  – and all Americans -- should be proud of. Instead, the discussion went like this:

“Lehrer: Do you see a major difference between the two of you on Social Security?
Obama: You know, I suspect that, on Social Security, we've got a somewhat similar position. Social Security is structurally sound. It's going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Speaker -- Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill.”

Ladies and gentleman, that was the sound of your president offering to screw you on your retirement. This revealing exchange was followed by some politically strategic talk by both candidates about how current retirees shouldn’t be worried, because, as we all know, their votes are needed in the short term. But the rest of us? Be very, very worried.

 

Monetary Mystification

Joseph E. Stiglitz
Oct. 4, 2012

NEW YORK – Central banks on both sides of the Atlantic took extraordinary monetary-policy measures in September: the long awaited “QE3” (the third dose of quantitative easing by the United States Federal Reserve), and the European Central Bank’s announcement that it will purchase unlimited volumes of troubled eurozone members’ government bonds. Markets responded euphorically, with stock prices in the US, for example, reaching post-recession highs.

Others, especially on the political right, worried that the latest monetary measures would fuel future inflation and encourage unbridled government spending.

 

Paul Krugman: Romney's Sick Joke

“No. 1,” declared Mitt Romney in Wednesday’s debate, “pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.” No, they aren’t — as Mr. Romney’s own advisers have conceded in the past, and did again after the debate.

Was Mr. Romney lying? Well, either that or he was making what amounts to a sick joke. Either way, his attempt to deceive voters on this issue was the biggest of many misleading and/or dishonest claims he made over the course of that hour and a half. Yes, President Obama did a notably bad job of responding. But I’ll leave the theater criticism to others and talk instead about the issue that should be at the heart of this election.

The Betrayal of America's Middle Class Was a Choice, Not an Accident

Wednesday, 03 October 2012 00:00  
By Amy B Dean, Truthout | Interview 

The outsourcing of good jobs, the elimination of pensions, rampant home foreclosures; skyrocketing higher education costs and mounting debt: Given these stark realities, the American middle class seems to be sinking fast. The renowned reporting team of Donald Barlett and James Steele insists it is no accident.

Trade policy, tax cuts and other incentives that have been implemented in Washington since the Reagan era have allowed corporations to score record profits at the expense of the American workforce. Donald Barlett and James Steele, recipients of two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Magazine Awards, powerfully advanced this thesis in their 1992 bestseller, "America: What Went Wrong?"

Now, in a new book, "The Betrayal of the America Dream," they return to the same topic to examine what has happened in the two decades since. Having first come across Barlett and Steele's work in the early 1990s, when they were writing the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper series that ultimately became "America: What Went Wrong?", I was excited to talk with the duo about the problems now facing our middle class - and about how we can pull ourselves from the abyss.

Why the New 'Golden Age of Oil' Has Been a Bust

By Michael T. Klare
October 4, 2012  |  Last winter, fossil-fuel enthusiasts began trumpeting the dawn of a new “golden age of oil” that would kick-start the American economy, generate millions of new jobs, and free this country from its dependence on imported petroleum. Ed Morse, head commodities analyst at Citibank, was typical.  In the Wall Street Journal he crowed [4], “The United States has become the fastest-growing oil and gas producer in the world, and is likely to remain so for the rest of this decade and into the 2020s.”

Once this surge in U.S. energy production was linked to a predicted boom in energy from Canada’s tar sands reserves, the results seemed obvious and uncontestable.  “North America,” he announced, “is becoming the new Middle East.”  Many other analysts have elaborated similarly on this rosy scenario, which now provides the foundation for Mitt Romney’s plan to achieve “energy independence [5]” by 2020.
 

U.S. military’s secret experiment sprayed radiation on low-income housing

By David Edwards
Thursday, October 4, 2012 10:36 EDT

A college professor from St. Louis, Missouri has released research claiming that the U.S. Army conducted secret Cold War tests by spraying toxic radioactive chemicals on cities like St. Louis and Corpus Christi.

St. Louis Community College-Meramec sociology professor Lisa Martino-Taylor told The Associated Press that her research showed that the Army may have sprayed radioactive particles with zinc cadmium sulfide while claiming that it was testing a smoke screen that could prevent Russians from observing St. Louis from the air.

Those tests were concentrated in predominately-black areas of the city, which Army documents called “a densely populated slum district.”

 

Billionaires Are the Victims! Thomas Frank on the Republican Strategy

Oct 3, 2012 10:50 PM EDT

Welcome to an America where billionaires are the victims and capitalism is in chains, or so they say, writes Thomas Frank. Plus, read the transcript of our live chat about why billionaires are whining and the Republicans are winning on a strategy of victimhood.

During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires. But among the nation’s economic titans, the idea of billionaire victimhood caught on immediately. And so, in the months and years that followed, the believers in true capitalism gathered in the nation’s parks to make their voices heard—and to complain sorrowfully about how this nation of moochers and looters persists in making snippy remarks about the successful.

I admit that I was impressed at first by the unconflicted way in which these proud voices of the strong—these hymners of Darwinian struggle, of the freedom to fail, of competition to the death—advanced their war on the world by means of tearful weepy-woo. But then I started to get it: self-pity is central in the consciousness of the resurgent right.

 

Money, Power and the Rule of Law

By SIMON JOHNSON

 

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.”

Economic policy is always torn between helping the broader social interest – lots of ordinary people – and favoring particular special interests. Unfortunately, special interests typically win out in the kind of situation we have in America in 2012, when it’s all about spending money to win friends and influence people.

The most effective way to push back against powerful special interests is to have the same rules for everyone – and to enforce those rules fairly, even when they are broken by the richest and most politically connected people in the land. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York took a major step toward restoring the rule of law this week, by bringing a case against JPMorgan Chase. But it will be an uphill battle; the forces against him are incredibly strong, including some within the Obama administration.

Paul Krugman: A Presidential Campaign With No Plan B

Karl Rove recently wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal explaining the deep trouble Mitt Romney is in. Of course, that's not how Mr. Rove puts it — it's an effort to buck up Republicans, not discourage them.

But here's what he says in the article, published on Sept. 19: "In the two weeks before the presidential debates begin, Mr. Romney must define more clearly what he would do as president. In spelling out his five-point plan for the middle class, he'll have to deepen awareness of how each element would help families in concrete, practical ways, and offer optimism for renewed prosperity."

 

UPDATE: A Closer Look at the Contraceptive Coverage Lawsuits: The Radical Agenda Behind the Fight Over Religious Exemptions

by Bridgette Dunlap
October 1, 2012 - 11:25am

The article to which this update is appended was originally published Wednesday, September 26th. The update was published on Monday, October 1st at 11:25 a.m.

UPDATE TO CONTRACEPTIVE COVERAGE LAWSUITS:

Shortly after the original article on this issue was published, a district court in Missouri made the first ruling on the merits in any of the contraceptive mandate challenges, dismissing all claims in O’Brien v. HHS. The court held, among other things, that providing contraceptive coverage is not a “substantial burden” on religious exercise barred by the Religious Freedom Information Act and that the religious employer exemption does not excessively entangle government with religion in violation of the First Amendment.
The case involves a secular for-profit employer, but the arguments rejected by the court are representative of those found in the complaints filed by religiously-affiliated plaintiffs. The decision is a fairly readable primer on the controlling law in these cases. It illustrates that beyond these cases being premature in the case of the religiously-affiliated plaintiffs, the substantive claims are extremely weak. For this reason, the religiously-affiliated plaintiffs might not see any benefit in waiting until they have standing in cases that are likely to fail. The weakness of these cases may also explain their quantity. In addition to making a big pre-election statement, filing numerous cases increases the likelihood of finding one judge willing to depart from settled law or expand the reach of a statute, in an act of so-called “judicial activism.”

Original article follows below.

 

The Real Incumbent In Tonight's Debate Is "The Plutocracy"

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

October 3, 2012 - 2:21am ET 

The conventional wisdom says that when a President runs for re-election the race becomes a referendum on the economy. Unemployment's still at record highs, poverty has soared, and middle-class Americans are struggling to stay afloat. And yet the President has a commanding lead in the polls.

Why? The polls hold some clues: Voters believe that billionaires and corporations have come to dominate our political process, and they think the President has very little ability to affect their economic future.

They have a point. Both political parties are concentrating on government deficits at a time when they should be focused on jobs and growth the middle class. That's the mark of a plutocracy: government by and for the wealthy.

  

Here's The Biggest Problem In The American Economy

Henry Blodget  |  Sep. 29, 2012, 9:25 AM

Several factors have come together to produce a frustratingly weak economy that has persisted in the U.S. for more than a decade:

• "Globalization" has opened up a vast pool of billions of workers who work for much less than Americans. This, in turn, has resulted in companies shifting formerly middle-wage-paying jobs overseas.
• Technology has continued to increase productivity, allowing companies to do more with fewer employees.

GOP Consultant: Koch Brothers Bought Ryan’s Nomination With $100 Million Promise

August 18th, 2012 1:10 am
Joe Conason

Here is how Stone led his latest post, headlined “The Paul Ryan Selection, “which also delivers an amusing swipe at a certain Fox News analyst:

I’ve waited a few days to lay out my analysis of the selection of Paul Ryan for the VP slot on the Romney ticket. Unlike politicos like Dick Morris who badmouths the selection privately and shills for it publicly, I’ll tell you what I really think. My sources tell me David Koch played a key role in Ryan’s selection and that Koch’s wife Julia had been quietly lobbying for Ryan. The selection was cemented at the July 22nd fundraiser Koch held for Romney at the former’s sumptuous Hamptons estate. Koch pledged $100 million more to C-4 and Super PAC efforts for Romney [in exchange] for Ryan’s selection.

Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened

By Peter Robison - 2012-10-02T04:01:00Z

Since 2009, Anita Reyes’ wages have been as frozen as Lake Minnetonka in January.

While the U.S. economy was recovering from the Great Recession, Reyes, 52, a casino dealer from Minneapolis, was dining on $1.67 cans of soup and searching for a way to keep her house, which was foreclosed on last October.

“I went backwards,” Reyes said. “Two years ago, three years ago, I didn’t know I’d be looking at being homeless.”

Attack of the Blob: How Professional Democrats and Professional Republicans Ran America Into the Ground

This is a review of the new book by former Senate staffer and super-lobbyist Jeff Connaughton, Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins. The review is written by Roosevelt Institute fellow Matt Stoller, who you can follow on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.

There’s a slate of important books coming out by reformers this year on what it was like to fight, and lose, for better policy during the financial reform fight. Neil Barofsky talked about facing the administration and Wall Street in Bailout, Sheila Bair has written about her experience at the FDIC, and now former Senate chief of staff for reform Senate Ted Kaufman, Jeff Connaughton, has provided his own memoir. Connaughton is not a rube, and doesn’t pretend to be shocked by DC corruption. His whole career is an anomaly, an idealist turned corporate super-lobbyist in the 1990s turned unlikely reformer in 2009. As such, he is uniquely positioned to describe how our political leaders, and which political leaders, think and act.

One anecdote in his new book The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins really gets at when the failsafe mechanisms for our financial system were in the midst of collapsing. The crisis of 2008 was when the dam broke, but the actual structural weaknesses appeared long before, in the 1970s, and accelerated in the 1990s. Connaughton was a player in both the period of accelerating weakness, in the 1990s, and in the collapse itself.

'Fusion Centers' Erode Civil Liberties Not Terrorism: Senate Study

Two year study by Senate subcommittee says regional information-sharing centers have done more harm than good

- Common Dreams staff

Following an exhaustive two year study on the impact that the creation of so-called 'fusion centers' have had on counter-terrorism efforts in the US, a report released on Tuesday showed that hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the information-sharing effort between local and federal law enforcement agencies yielded no practical results.

The findings of the investigation, conducted by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, were presented in a 146-page report on Tuesday said that the review of intelligence documents from from regional fusion centers between April 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010,"could identify nothing that uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution any fusion center made to disrupt an active terrorist plot."

Paul Krugman: The Real Romney Emerges

As many people have been pointing out, Mitt Romney's talk about the "47 percent" was no different from what you hear all the time from Rush Limbaugh and the like. But bear in mind that Mr. Romney was talking to the financial super-elite, and gave every appearance of believing what he said. (I'm usually scornful of analyses based on how someone "comes across," and would never put much weight on it, but the Mitt Romney of this video was a lot looser and more articulate than the guy we usually see.)

What this strongly suggests is that the Masters of the Universe, and Master Mitt himself, really believe all this stuff — which is pretty remarkable. His "lucky ducky" trope about people who depend on the government and pay no federal income tax is clearly, obviously nonsense. Equally obviously, it was originally created in an effort to dupe people who didn't know better.

"Empowerment" Against Democracy: Tinseltown and the Teachers' Unions

Liza Featherstone - September 26, 2012

“You know those mothers who lift one-ton trucks off their babies?” says Jamie Fitzpatrick, a working-class mom (played Maggie Gyllenhall), in a confrontation with a corrupt union rep in Daniel Barnz’s edu-drama, Won’t Back Down. “They’re nothing compared to me.”

It’s a “you-go-girl” moment. But real moms can’t lift trucks. And just about everything in this movie is as wildly fantastical as that image.
 

Bill Black: Robert J. Samuelson tries to create a moral panic about deficits

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
The Washington Post leads the pack when it comes to generating what scientists term a “moral panic” about budget deficits.  As part of that effort they generated the series of myths that Paul Ryan was “serious,” “courageous,” and “expert” about “solving” the “deficit crisis.”  The newspaper’s theme is that anyone who doesn’t fall for their effort to create a moral panic is not “serious” and should be ignored.  The paper runs a column by Robert J. Samuelson that is devoted to generating a moral panic about the deficit.  Like Ryan, his central targets are imposing austerity and cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Samuelson’s latest column claims that President Obama and Governor Romney are lying to the nation because they have not sufficiently embraced the moral panic as the transcendent campaign issue that will determine America’s future.  Samuelson demands the candidates implore the American people to urgently adopt austerity and attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
 

David Cay Johnston: Pilfering Your Paycheck

Tuesday, 02 October 2012 10:04 

Take a look at your pay stub. In all but six states, workers will see a deduction for state income taxes. You probably expect that money to finance public schools, the state university and college system, law enforcement and the other services that businesses and individuals rely on. Mostly it does, but in a growing number of states, your state income taxes will also be increasing the profits of your employer.

You read that right. Many employers in nineteen states can now keep state income taxes withheld from paychecks. General Electric, Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble have these deals, along with a host of foreign firms from the German computer maker Siemens to the Swedish appliance maker Electrolux and a host of Canadian, European and Japanese banks. In all more than 2,700 companies get to pocket the state income taxes withheld from some of their workers' paychecks.

 

Back to $chool: College Is the Past, Prison Is the Future

Tuesday, 02 October 2012 09:51  
By Andy Kroll, TomDispatch | News Analysis 

It was the greatest education system the world had ever seen. They built it into the eucalyptus-dotted Berkeley hills and under the bright lights of Los Angeles, down in the valley in Fresno and in the shadows of the San Bernardino Mountains. Hundreds of college campuses, large and small, two-year and four-year, stretching from California's emerald forests in the north to the heat-scorched Inland Empire in the south. Each had its own DNA, but common to all was this: they promised a “public” education, accessible and affordable, to those with means and those without, a door with a welcome mat into the ivory tower, an invitation to a better life.

Then California bled that system dry. Over three decades, voters starved their state -- and so their colleges and universities -- of cash. Politicians siphoned away what money remained and spent it more on imprisoning people, not educating them. College administrators grappled with shriveling state support by jacking up tuitions, tacking on new fees, and so asking more each year from increasingly pinched students and families. Today, many of those students stagger under a heap of debt as they linger on waiting lists to get into the over-subscribed classes they need to graduate.

 

A Plutocrat Epiphany: All Votes Need Not Count

By Sam Pizzigati

September 30, 2012 - 1:48pm ET 

America's billionaires have realized they really don't have to bother convincing a majority of people to vote their way. They can put their cash instead into campaigns to keep the hard-to-convince from voting.

Our two major presidential candidates descended on Ohio last week, and legions of reporters followed closely behind. Those reporters filed tens of thousands of words on what they saw and heard on their quick in-and-out Ohio excursion.

But not one of those reporters filed a word about what may have been the most nationally significant news out of Ohio last week: the release of a new analysis on income inequality from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Big Finance's Pathology Compels the Logic of Socialized Banking

A Washington state supreme court finding against improper foreclosures is just the latest instance of banks' malfeasance

by Richard Wolff

 

A long string of socially costly misdeeds by major private US banks have been exposed since the current crisis hit in 2007. The latest concerns an obscure enterprise named Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or Mers.

Founded in 1995, this private company in Virginia never employed more than 50 people full-time. Big private banks (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, etc) and housing finance companies, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, founded Mers in order to speed the processing of mortgages into mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Investors were willing to buy these new securities (bundles of Americans' mortgages). Most importantly, US financial institutions wanted the huge profits from producing and trading MBS.

Judge Rules That Mass Arrests at a 2004 Protest Were Illegal

By BENJAMIN WEISER
Published: October 1, 2012

A federal judge has ruled that the New York Police Department illegally arrested large numbers of demonstrators at a protest in Lower Manhattan during the 2004 Republican National Convention. But the judge upheld aspects of how the city had handled the protesters’ arrests.

The judge, Richard J. Sullivan of Federal District Court, said that the city had lacked the required probable cause because the police were unaware of whether each individual protester had broken the law.

Learn Everything You Need to Know About the Economy from a 'South Park' Episode

By Anat Shenker-Osorio

October 1, 2012  |  Editor's Note: In her new book Don't Buy It: The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About the Economy [3], communications specialist Anat Shenker-Osorio makes a compelling case for why progressives have to find a better way of talking about the economy if we ever hope to set things right. In a presidential election where voters' preferences often hinge on language, telling the right story with the right words is as important as getting citizens to the polls. Below is an excerpt from the preface of this handy guide that can help make policy discussions -- not to mention dinner table conversations -- a lot more clear and effective.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. -- Exodus 20:13

Many of us are daily left wondering how to make sense of the contradictions we personally experience and hear about the economy. The news tells us the recession ended in 2009, but unemployment has proven stubbornly stable. Pundits contend we’ve seen the end of the housing bubble, but home prices in most places won’t budge and foreclosures continue. Our growth rate has registered positive since the summer of 2009, but poverty levels are also on the rise. What’s going on, what will happen next, and how do we even begin to make sense of the economy?

I’m here to save you some boring. There’s no need to actually read long economic treatises, sit through lectures, or decipher expensive textbooks; you don’t even have to bother scrutinizing the graphs on the Wall Street Journal business page to learn what’s going on right now with the U.S. economy.  It’s simpler than you think: all you need to know about the economy you can get from cartoons—a single show, in fact.
 

50 Months to Avoid Climate Disaster – and a Change Is in the Air

by Andrew Simms

 

"One or other of us will have to go," Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said on his deathbed to the hated wallpaper in his room. The perilous acceleration of Arctic ice loss, and the imminent threat of irreversible climate change poses a similar ultimatum to the economic system that is pushing us over the brink. For society's sake I hope this time we redecorate.

Fortunately, many people are queuing up to propose better designs, rather than just cursing the interiors, as you can read about here.
 

A Glimpse of the Oligarchy’s View of the Future for US Workers
By: masaccio Sunday September 30, 2012 10:40 am

The richest humans on the planet no longer bother masking their control over nations and individuals. In England, employment is falling, wages are falling, and people are falling into poverty. The rich are doing quite well during austerity, though, thanks to Quantitative Easing:

But Spencer Dale, the Bank of England economist, said that for pensioners the negative impact of QE [because it depresses interest rates on savings] was offset by the rise in asset prices. He said that without the central bank creating money and using it to buy bonds, the stock market would have collapsed and property prices fallen through the floor. Pension funds are heavily invested in shares, bonds and property, which means they might not be getting a good interest rate, but the value of their assets has largely been maintained.

Dale doesn’t say it, but it’s obviously true that this is huge benefit to the richest Britons, who own most of the stocks and real property. Dale also avoids another piece of reality, the richest Britons joined the richest Americans in wrecking the lives of millions of their fellow citizens, and now insist that those citizens protect them from loss, and accept poverty as their lot in life. Screw those 3.5 million British kids in poverty, and especially the 1.6 million kids in extreme poverty.

Why I Remain Irritated at the Sierra Club

By lambert strether. A version of this post appeared at Corrente. This post has with new material added that applies in part to fracking.

So here’s the deal, and linky goodness will be lacking today (and a lot of this is what activists have put together in discussion, so links are lacking anyhow. And as the great Peggy Noonan once said: “It would be irresponsible not to speculate!”)

One of Maine’s issues as a state is that we have an extractive economy that’s doesn’t support us as well as it used to, what with producing more with less in pulp and paper, and with the forest product industry tending to move where costs and regulations are lower, and/or closer to the equator, where trees grow faster and bigger. We continue to extract from fisheries and summer people, naturally, but those resources, although renewable with careful management, are seasonal and mostly support the coast. And Nestlé extracts our water at Poland Springs. But the sort of people who play golf together and fly over the state in executive jets seem to see two main “opportunities”: One is our oodles of empty space,* hence landfills and importing of out-of-state trash.** The other is our geographical position between Quebec and New Brunswick. Location, location, location!

Republican strength in Congress aids super-rich, president's affiliation has no effect

Study investigates the rise of the top 1 percent

WASHINGTON, DC, September 27, 2012 — Republican strength in Congress increases the share of income held by the top 1 percent, but the president's political affiliation has no effect, suggests a new study in the October issue of the American Sociological Review that looks at the rise of the super-rich in the United States.

"This points to the central role that Congress has in the legislative process," said study co-author Thomas W. Volscho, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at CUNY-College of Staten Island. "The president has limited ability to make the sort of legislative changes necessary to affect the top 1 percent without the support of Congress, making Congress the central actor here."

 

Barry Commoner, Pioneering Environmental Scientist and Activist, Dies at 95

by Peter Dreier 

 

Barry Commoner, a pioneering environmental scientist and activist, died Sunday at age 95.

Described in 1970 by Time magazine as the "Paul Revere of ecology," Commoner followed Rachel Carson as America's most prominent modern environmentalist. He viewed the environmental crisis as a symptom of a fundamentally flawed economic and social system. A biologist and research scientist, he argued that corporate greed, misguided government priorities, and the misuse of technology undermined "the finely sculptured fit between life and its surroundings."

Christmas In September for Deregulated Commodity Speculators

By Susie Madrak

David Dayen with an important story about how an Obama-appointed judge jettisoned the part of Dodd-Frank that limited commodities trading. Since we are frequently squeezed by food and fuel speculators, this was an attempt to stop the worst abuses. Oh well! Not such a complete shock, since Wilkins refused to issue an injunction against speculators back in February, but you'd think a federal judge wouldn't want to make the rape-and-pillage policy quite so obvious:

A federal judge today threw out the Dodd-Frank provision that empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to set position limits on commodity trading. Judge Robert Wilkins said in his ruling that the CFTC did not prove the necessity of position limits to curb runaway speculation, and that the law itself did not “constitute a clear and unambiguous mandate to set position limits, as the Commission argues.”

Paul Krugman: The Real Referendum

Republicans came into this campaign believing that it would be a referendum on President Obama, and that still-high unemployment would hand them victory on a silver platter. But given the usual caveats — a month can be a long time in politics, it’s not over until the votes are actually counted, and so on — it doesn’t seem to be turning out that way.

Yet there is a sense in which the election is indeed a referendum, but of a different kind. Voters are, in effect, being asked to deliver a verdict on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, on Social Security, Medicare and, yes, Obamacare, which represents an extension of that legacy. Will they vote for politicians who want to replace Medicare with Vouchercare, who denounce Social Security as “collectivist” (as Paul Ryan once did), who dismiss those who turn to social insurance programs as people unwilling to take responsibility for their lives?

 

Scott Brown: ATM For The Big Banks

Posted on September 30, 2012 by Simon Johnson 

During the Dodd-Frank financial reform debate in early 2010, newly elected Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts was referred to as an ATM for the bankers – meaning that whenever they needed some more cash, they would stop by his office.  It was not paper money he was handing out, of course, it was something much more valuable – rule changes that conferred a greater ability to take on reckless risk, damage consumers, and impose higher future costs on the taxpayer.

Mr. Brown had this ability because he represented the final vote needed to pass Dodd-Frank through the Senate.  He could have asked for many things – including greater consumer protection, a more thorough investigation into mortgage practices, and reforms that would have cleaned up unscrupulous lenders.  He asked for none of those changes – or anything else that would have made the financial system safer and fairer.

Mitt Romney's Real Agenda

If you want to understand Romney's game plan, just look at what Republicans have been doing in Congress

by: Tim Dickinson

It was tempting to dismiss Mitt Romney's hard-right turn during the GOP primaries as calculated pandering. In the general election – as one of his top advisers famously suggested – Romney would simply shake the old Etch A Sketch and recast himself as the centrist who governed Massachusetts. But with the selection of vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, the shape-shifting Romney has locked into focus – cementing himself as the frontman for the far-right partisans responsible for Washington's gridlock.

There is no longer any ambiguity about the path that Romney would pursue as president, because it's the same trajectory charted by Ryan, the architect of the House GOP's reactionary agenda since the party's takeover in 2010. "Picking Ryan as vice president outlines the future of the next four or eight years of a Romney administration," GOP power broker Grover Norquist exulted in August. "Ryan has outlined a plan that has support in the Republican House and Senate. You have a real sense of where Romney's going." In fact, Norquist told party activists back in February, the true direction of the GOP is being mapped out by congressional hardliners. All the Republicans need to realize their vision, he said, is a president "with enough working digits to handle a pen."