Why Are Cows Tails Dropping Off?

Friday, 30 November 2012 09:20 
By Elizabeth Royte, The Nation | Report 

In a Brooklyn winery on a sultry July evening, an elegant crowd sips rosé and nibbles trout plucked from the gin-clear streams of upstate New York. The diners are here, with their checkbooks, to support a group called Chefs for the Marcellus, which works to protect the foodshed upon which hundreds of regional farm-to-fork restaurants depend. The foodshed is coincident with the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation that arcs northeast from West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into New York State. As everyone invited here knows, the region is both agriculturally and energy rich, with vast quantities of natural gas sequestered deep below its fertile fields and forests. 

In Pennsylvania, the oil and gas industry is already on a tear—drilling thousands of feet into ancient seabeds, then repeatedly fracturing (or “fracking”) these wells with millions of gallons of highly pressurized, chemically laced water, which shatters the surrounding shale and releases fossil fuels. New York, meanwhile, is on its own natural-resource tear, with hundreds of newly opened breweries, wineries, organic dairies and pastured livestock operations—all of them capitalizing on the metropolitan area’s hunger to localize its diet.

But there’s growing evidence that these two impulses, toward energy and food independence, may be at odds with each other.

Surprise! Single Moms Aren't to Blame for Violent Crime

By Amanda Marcotte   |   Posted Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2012, at 1:42 PM ET

Back during the presidential debates, Mitt Romney responded to a question about gun violence by invoking the tired old conservative claim that violence is the result of dumb women who forget to get married before they had kids:

But let me mention another thing. And that is parents. We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids. Wherever possible the—the benefit of having two parents in the home, and that's not always possible. A lot of great single moms, single dads. But gosh to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that's a great idea.

It sounded like a non sequitur—as far as I know, no one has shot up a crowd because society forgot to tell them to find a random person to marry prior to childbirth—but Romney was drawing on a long history of claims that single motherhood is the root cause of violence. These claims are based in no small part on the trend lines showing single motherhood and violent crime rising at the same rate.

Watergate scandal: secret files released

Previously undisclosed discussions involving John J Sirica, the Watergate judge, are revealed in 850 pages made public

Staff and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 1 December 2012 01.05 EST

The US government has released more than 850 pages from the Watergate political scandal, providing new insights on privileged legal conversations and prison evaluations of several of the burglars in the case. A federal judge had decided earlier in November to unseal some material, but other records still remain off limits.

The files from the National Archives show that Judge John J Sirica aided the prosecution in pursuing the White House connection to the Democratic headquarters break-in at the Watergate Hotel in 1972. Sirica provided the special prosecutor information from a probation report in which one of the burglars said he was acting under orders from top Nixon administration officials

Long-term research reveals how climate change is playing out in real ecosystems

NORTH WOODSTOCK, N.H., December 1, 2012—Around the world, the effects of global climate change are increasingly evident and difficult to ignore. However, evaluations of the local effects of climate change are often confounded by natural and human induced factors that overshadow the effects of changes in climate on ecosystems. In the December issue of the journal BioScience, a group of scientists writing on long-term studies of watershed and natural elevation gradients at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire and in the surrounding region report a number of surprising results that may shed more light on the complex nature of climate change.

According to Peter Groffman, one of the lead authors and a principal investigator at the Hubbard Brook Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, these studies highlight the value of long-term integrated research to assessments of the subtle effects of changing climate on complex ecosystems.

Dean Baker: Economics 101 for the Debt Fixers

Friday, 30 November 2012 06:33

Many economists have pointed out that the Campaign to Fix the Debt and the rest of the austerity crew seem badly confused about basic economics. The most obvious item that they seem to be missing is that large current deficits are the result of the downturn that was caused by the collapse of the housing bubble.

We did not go on a sudden spending spree and tax cutting orgy in 2008. The deficits exploded from a completely sustainable 1.2 percent of GDP in 2007 to levels close to 10 percent of GDP in 2009 and 2010 because the downturn sent tax collections plummeting and increased spending on programs like unemployment insurance. Were it not for the downturn, the deficits would again be relatively small. Rather than posing a risk to the economy, the deficits are sustaining demand and growth, keeping unemployment lower than it would otherwise be.

Tax Burden for Most Americans Is Lower Than in the 1980s

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM> and ROBERT GEBELOFF
Published: November 29, 2012

BELLEVILLE, Ill. — Alan Hicks divides long days between the insurance business he started in the late 1970s and the barbecue restaurant he opened with his sons three years ago. He earned more than $250,000 last year and said taxes took more than 40 percent. What’s worse, in his view, is that others — the wealthy, hiding in loopholes; the poor, living on government benefits — are not paying their fair share.

“It feels like the harder we work, the more they take from us,” said Mr. Hicks, 55, as he waited for a meat truck one recent afternoon. “And it seems like there’s an awful lot of people in the United States who don’t pay any taxes.”

The Trans-Pacific Partnership: What "Free Trade" Actually Means

By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com

To discuss “free trade agreements” or the “free market,” we must first identify the theoretical versus the functional definitions of these terms – because theoretical definitions look at what those terms should mean, whereas functional definitions look at what the terms mean actually.

The theoretical definition of a “free market” is one in which every individual actor in the realm of exchange exists in a state of equality of opportunity; where all compete with one another to produce the best products at the cheapest prices for consumers, thus the most innovative and efficient producers succeed while others fail, unregulated - and unhelped - by the state. Within “free markets,” what we call “free trade agreements” are meant to reduce barriers such as tariffs, subsidies and regulations so that market "competitors" can freely move products and goods across borders and compete in an ever-expanding global “free market."

Meet the Climate Denial Machine

By Jill Fitzsimmons, Media Matters 

Despite the overwhelming consensus among climate experts that human activity is contributing to rising global temperatures, 66 percent of Americans incorrectly believe there is "a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening." The conservative media has fueled this confusion by distorting scientific research, hyping faux-scandals, and giving voice to groups funded by industries that have a financial interest in blocking action on climate change. Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets have shied away from the "controversy" over climate change and have failed to press U.S. policymakers on how they will address this global threat. When climate change is discussed, mainstream outlets sometimes strive for a false balance that elevates marginal voices and enables them to sow doubt about the science even in the face of mounting evidence.

Murdoch’s British News Operation Has Now Been Fully Exposed. What About His American One?

By Eliot Spitzer | Posted Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, at 10:52 AM ET

Forget the “fiscal cliff” and the Benghazi kerfuffle for a few minutes. Let's talk British press scandals—in particular the breaches of trust, integrity, and law within Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

On Thursday, Lord Justice Leveson released his report on the conduct of the British media, especially focused, of course, on the Murdoch-owned enterprises that have been implicated in the scandals that have erupted over the past several years.  To say it is not a pretty picture is to state the obvious.

U.S. overseeing mysterious construction project in Israel

By Walter Pincus,
 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to supervise construction of a five-story underground facility for an Israel Defense Forces complex, oddly named “Site 911,” at an Israeli Air Force base near Tel Aviv.

Expected to take more than two years to build, at a cost of up to $100 million, the facility is to have classrooms on Level 1, an auditorium on Level 3, a laboratory, shock-resistant doors, protection from nonionizing radiation and very tight security. Clearances will be required for all construction workers, guards will be at the fence and barriers will separate it from the rest of the base.

Saudi-Led Oil Lobby Group Financed 2012 Dark Money Attack Ads

Lee Fang on November 29, 2012 - 5:10 PM ET

 

The “American” in American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil lobby group, is a misnomer. As I reported for The Nation in August, the group has changed over the years, and is now led by men like Tofiq Al-Gabsani, a Saudi Arabian national who heads a Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) subsidiary, the state-run oil company that also helps finance the American Petroleum Institute. Al-Gabsani is also a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government.

New disclosures retrieved today, showing some of API’s spending over the course of last year, reveal that API used its membership dues (from the world’s largest oil companies like Chevron and Aramco) to finance several dark money groups airing attack ads in the most recent election cycle.
 

ALEC Convenes in Washington; Damage Control at Top of Agenda

By Brendan Fischer, PRWatch

At the end of a tumultuous year that has seen the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)come under unprecedented scrutiny for its role in advancing a slate of right-wing legislation, the corporate-friendly organization of state lawmakers and special interest lobbyists convenes this week in Washington, DC to try and salvage its viability.

At this week's meeting, ALEC members will by treated to presentations like "Best Practices for Debt Collection and Tax Amnesty" from student loan company Sallie Mae and a talk on state unemployment from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center. Representatives of the Mortgage Bankers Association will present to the Financial Services Subcommittee, which is co-chaired by a lobbyist for Visa. The Heritage Foundation's James Sherk (whose work is funded by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation) will discuss "how to limit union influence."

Paul Krugman: Class Ward of 2012

On Election Day, The Boston Globe reported, Logan International Airport in Boston was running short of parking spaces. Not for cars — for private jets. Big donors were flooding into the city to attend Mitt Romney’s victory party.

They were, it turned out, misinformed about political reality. But the disappointed plutocrats weren’t wrong about who was on their side. This was very much an election pitting the interests of the very rich against those of the middle class and the poor. 

And the Obama campaign won largely by disregarding the warnings of squeamish “centrists” and embracing that reality, stressing the class-war aspect of the confrontation. This ensured not only that President Obama won by huge margins among lower-income voters, but that those voters turned out in large numbers, sealing his victory.

Five Things You Should Know About the FCC’s Big Media Giveaway

by Josh Stearns

The Federal Communications Commission is charging ahead with its plan to let Rupert Murdoch gobble up more media outlets. And we've just learned that the FCC may try to hold a secret vote to allow more media consolidation in the U.S. — possibly within the next two weeks.

Murdoch has set his sights on the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune — the major papers in the nation's second- and third-largest cities (where, incidentally, he already owns several TV stations).

And get this: The FCC is trying to change the rules so Murdoch can get exactly what he wants. Worse, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is hoping the agency can pass these changes without you noticing.

Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional, brain study shows

By William Harms

November 28, 2012

 

People are able to detect, within a split second, if a hurtful action they are witnessing is intentional or accidental, new research on the brain at the University of Chicago shows.

The study is the first to explain how the brain is hard-wired to recognize when another person is being intentionally harmed. It also provides new insights into how such recognition is connected with emotion and morality, said lead author Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at UChicago.

Whistleblower: Nuclear Disaster in America Is More Likely Than the Public Is Aware of

By William Boardman

November 28, 2012  |  The likelihood was very low that an earthquake followed by a tsunami would destroy all four nuclear reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, but in March 2011, that’s what happened, and the accident has yet to be contained [4]. 

Similarly, the likelihood may be low that an upstream dam will fail, unleashing a flood that will turn any of 34 vulnerable nuclear plants into an American Fukushima [5].  But knowing that unlikely events sometimes happen nevertheless, the nuclear industry continues to answer the question of how much safety is enough by seeking to suppress [6] or minimize what the public knows about the danger. 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has known at least since 1996 that flooding danger from upstream dam failure was a more serious threat than the agency would publicly admit. The NRC failed from 1996 until 2011 to assess the threat even internally.  In July 2011, the NRC staff [7] completed a report finding [8] “that external flooding due to upstream dam failure poses a larger than expected risk to plants and public safety” [emphasis added] but the NRC did not make the 41-page report [7] public.

What Do Republicans Want on Entitlement Reform?

By Matthew Yglesias  |  Posted Thursday, Nov. 29, 2012, at 9:05 AM ET

Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen have the scoop on how the fiscal cliff talks look from the perspective of insiders who think a deal is likely, from which vantage point the basic framework of a deal is in place and it's all about the details. But I think the piece in some respects simply highlights how many impediments there are to a deal, one of the most neglected of which is that Republicans lack a well-formulated negotiating position on the crucial issue of entitlements.

Glenn Greenwald: AP believes it found evidence of Iran's work on nuclear weapons

A primitive graph provided by 'a country critical of Iran's atomic program' indicts the news outlet more than Tehran

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 November 2012 06.49 EST


Uncritical, fear-mongering media propaganda is far too common to take note of each time it appears, but sometimes, what is produced is so ludicrous that its illustrative value should not be ignored. Such is the case with a highly trumpeted Associated Press "exclusive" from Tuesday which claims in its red headline to have discovered evidence of "Iran Working on Bomb".

What is this newly discovered, scary evidence? It is a "graph" which AP says was "leaked" to it by "officials from a country critical of Iran's atomic program to bolster their arguments that Iran's nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon" (how mysterious: the globe is gripped with befuddlement as it tries to guess which country that might be). 

Family's economic situation influences brain function in children

Mobile neuroscience lab looks at differences in brain activity across social spectrum in Canada

Children of low socioeconomic status work harder to filter out irrelevant environmental information than those from a high-income background because of learned differences in what they pay attention to, according to new research published in the open access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Numerous studies in the past few years have begun to reveal how poverty affects brain development and function. In 2008, Amedeo D'Angiulli of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and his colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain wave patterns associated with an auditory selective attention task in children of high and low socioeconomic status (SES).

They found that the two groups of children exhibited differences in theta brain waves in the frontal lobe, which plays an important role in attention. This suggested that each group of children recruits different neural mechanisms for this particular type of task, and that the lower SES children allocate additional resources to attending to irrelevant information.

Ron Paul’s Appalling World View

November 27, 2012

 

Exclusive: There was buzz on the Internet after libertarian Ron Paul delivered what was billed as his final address in Congress. But his near-hour-long speech sounded more like the ramblings of a right-wing crank than the coherent thoughts of the principled idealist that his fans rave about, writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

Rep. Ron Paul, an icon to the libertarian Right and to some on the anti-war Left, gave a farewell address to Congress that expressed his neo-Confederate interpretation of the Constitution and his anti-historical view of the supposedly good old days of laissez-faire capitalism.

In a near-hour-long rambling speechon Nov. 14, Paul also revealed himself to be an opponent of “pure democracy” because government by the people and for the people tends to infringe on the “liberty” of businessmen who, in Paul’s ideal world, should be allowed to do pretty much whatever they want to the less privileged.

Tight Times May Change Our Perceptions of Who ‘Belongs’

From the playground to the office, a key aspect of our social lives involves figuring out who “belongs” and who doesn’t. Our biases lead us — whether we’re aware of it or not — to favor people who belong to our own social group. Scientists theorize that these prevalent in-group biases may give us a competitive advantage against others, especially when important resources are limited.

Psychological scientist Christopher Rodeheffer and his colleagues at Texas Christian University wanted to examine whether resource scarcity might actually lead us to change our definition of who belongs to our social group. Their new research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Why rich guys want to raise the retirement age

By Ezra Klein , Updated: November 21, 2012

If you’re the CEO of Goldman Sachs – if you have a job that you love, a job that makes you so much money you can literally build a Scrooge McDuck room where you can swim through a pile of gold coins wearing only a topcoat – then you should perhaps think twice before saying this:

You can look at the history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. … So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed. Maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

That’s Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, talking to CBS. And he’s not saying anything that people, particularly wealthier people with desk jobs, don’t say all the time in Washington and New York. So I don’t want to just pick on him. But the cavalier endorsement of raising the retirement age by people who really love their jobs, who make so much money they barely pay Social Security taxes, and who are, actuarially speaking, are ensured a long and healthy life, drives me nuts.

What Happens If Labor Dies?

By Harold Meyerson

November 27, 2012  |  Imagine America without unions. This shouldn’t be hard. In much of America unions have already disappeared. In the rest of America they’re battling for their lives.

Unions have been declining for decades. In the early 1950s, one out of three American workers belonged to them, four out of ten in the private sector. Today, only 11.8 percent of American workers are union members; in the private sector, just 6.9 percent. The vanishing act varies by region—in the South, it’s almost total—but proceeds relentlessly everywhere. Since 1983, the number of states in which at least 10 percent of private-sector workers have union contracts has shrunk from 42 to 8.

Following the 2010 elections, a number of newly elected Republican governors and legislatures in the industrial Midwest, long a union stronghold, moved to reduce labor’s numbers to the trace-element levels that exist in the South. A cold political logic spurred their attacks: Labor was the chief source of funding and volunteers for their Democratic opponents, and working-class whites, who still constitute a sizable share of the electorate in their states, were far more likely to vote Democratic if they belonged to a union. The fiscal crisis of the states provided the pretext for Republicans to try to take out their foremost adversaries, public-employee unions.
 

A Grand Bargain is a Grand Betrayal: The Forgotten, Lonely World of Facts

That the United States is center-right and Obama needs compromise on slashing the welfare state is a myth

by Paul Rosenberg

 

"Facts are stupid things," Ronald Reagan once said, hilariously misquoting Founding Father John Adams, your typical elitist Enlightenment intellectual, who actually said, "Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." But in the contest between the real world of John Adams and the fantasy world bequeathed to us by Ronald Reagan, stupid and stubborn are on both on the side of the latter... and the latter is winning, hands down, as can be seen in President Obama's pursuit of a so-called "grand bargain" that would cut far more in spending than it would raise in taxes. In the Reaganite fantasy world of Washington DC, Obama represents the left. In the real world? Well, take a look for yourself.

There is a political party in the United States whose presidential candidate got over 60 million votes, and whose members - according to the General Social Survey - overwhelmingly think we're spending too little on Social Security, rather than spending too much, by a lopsided margin of 52-12. The party, of course, is the Republican Party.

9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

November 26, 2012  |  A gang of brazen CEOs has joined forces to promote economically disastrous and socially irresponsible austerity policies. Many of those same CEOs were bailed out by the American taxpayer after a Wall Street-driven financial crash. Instead of a thank-you, they are showing their appreciation in the form of a coordinated effort to rob Americans of hard-earned retirements, decent medical care and relief for the poorest.

Using the excuse of a phony, manufactured crisis known as the “fiscal cliff” – which isn’t a crisis at all, as economist James K. Galbraith has succinctly explained [3] -- they are gearing up to pull the wool over the public's eyes by cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The CEOs are part of the Fix the Debt campaign run by the Peter Peterson [4]-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to unleash tens of millions pushing for a deficit reduction deal that favors the rich.

You can be sure that many more CEOs in addition to the names on the list below sympathize with plans to shred the social safety net and enjoy windfall tax breaks. But these Scrooges are so bold as to publicly announce their desire to pick the pockets of fellow Americans while simultaneously pigging out at the corporate welfare trough. Multitasking!

Congressional Proposal Could Create 'Bubble' in Tax Code

By NATE SILVER

The coming Congressional debate over fiscal policy is sure to feature a wide array of proposals, some of which would hit certain taxpayers harder than others.

But one idea being floated by Congressional negotiators, as described in an article by The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman on Thursday, is hard to defend from the standpoint of rational public policy making.

Its arithmetic could require that the 300,000th dollar of income was taxed at a rate of about 50 percent – even while the three millionth dollar of income, or the three billionth, was taxed at a lower 35 percent rate instead.

Billmon: The GOP tax Plan: Leave no billionaire behind

Amid the endless (and endlessly confusing) Beltway chatter about the deal that supposedly will keep the U.S. economy from gunning it over the fiscal cliff on New Year’s Day, one thing has already become crystal clear: The Republican strategy for protecting its plutocratic donor base from the party’s inevitable surrender on taxes.

Basically, it consists in offering up the 20% as human shields to protect the 0.0001% from the rapacious revenue demands of the 47%.

Who says Republicans don’t do math?

Party of Entitled Rich Threatens Economy

By Leo Gerard, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed

Republicans, the party of the nation’s entitled rich, are holding a knife to the throat of America’s frail recovery.

The GOP sore losers have America up against a wall. Republicans don’t care that the majority of the country voted for a candidate who promised to raise taxes on the rich. Republicans don’t care that an even larger majority – 60 percent – told election day pollsters they wanted those taxes raised. Republicans don’t care about majority-rule democracy at all. They’re demanding ransom – extension of tax cuts for the rich. If Americans don’t submit, Republicans will slash the nation’s economy.

Anger as Hungary far-right leader demands lists of Jews

By Marton Dunai

BUDAPEST | Tue Nov 27, 2012


(Reuters) - A Hungarian far-right politician urged the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a "national security risk", stirring outrage among Jewish leaders who saw echoes of fascist policies that led to the Holocaust.

Marton Gyongyosi, a leader of Hungary's third-strongest political party Jobbik, said the list was necessary because of heightened tensions following the brief conflict in Gaza and should include members of parliament.

Opponents have condemned frequent anti-Semitic slurs and tough rhetoric against the Roma minority by Gyongyosi's party as populist point scoring ahead of elections in 2014.

Paul Krugman: Beyond Fiscal Cliff, an Austerity Bomb

Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo seems to have been the first to use the phrase "austerity bomb" to describe what's scheduled to happen in the United States at the end of the year. It's a much better term than "fiscal cliff."

The cliff stuff makes people imagine that it's a problem of excessive deficits when it's actually about the risk that the deficit will be too small; also and relatedly, the fiscal cliff stuff enables a bait-and-switch in which people say "So, this means that we need to enact Bowles-Simpson and raise the retirement age!" — both of which have nothing at all to do with it.

ALEC and Heartland Aim to Crush Renewable Energy Standards in the States

by Sara Jerving — November 27, 2012

An effort to stomp out state renewable energy mandates across the country has roots in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). As reported by The Washington Post, the Heartland Institute wrote the bill, had it passed through ALEC, and is now targeting the 29 states and the District of Columbia, which have passed renewable energy requirements in some form.

Renewable energy not only produces cleaner energy, it grows the local job base and allows state's to diversify their supply and not be held hostage to the fossil fuel industry. Green energy jobs are a robust sector of the economy employing some 175,000 Americans. But some of ALEC's most powerful members are deeply rooted in the "drill, frack, burn" method of energy supply. ALEC is a corporate bill mill that puts corporate lobbyists and state legislators together behind closed doors to vote on cookie-cutter legislation that is then introduced in statehouses across the nation. ALEC's membership includes fossil fuel companies, utility companies, and energy trade groups in the United States including Chevron, BP, Peabody Energy, Duke Energy, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, and only a handful of green energy firms. 

Why So Secretive? The Trans-Pacific Partnership as Global Coup

By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com | News Analysis 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the most secretive and “least transparent” trade negotiations in history.

Luckily for the populations and societies that will be affected by the agreement, there are public research organizations and alternative media outlets campaigning against it – and they’ve even released several leaks of draft agreement chapters. From these leaks, which are not covered by mainstream corporate-controlled news outlets, we are able to get a better understanding of what the Trans-Pacific Partnership actually encompasses.

For example, public interest groups have been warning that the TPP could result in millions of lost jobs. As a letter from Congress to United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk stated, the TPP “will create binding policies on future Congresses in numerous areas,” including “those related to labor, patent and copyright, land use, food, agriculture and product standards, natural resources, the environment, professional licensing, state-owned enterprises and government procurement policies, as well as financial, healthcare, energy, telecommunications and other service sector regulations.”

Paul Krugman: Fighting Fiscal Phantoms

These are difficult times for the deficit scolds who have dominated policy discussion for almost three years. One could almost feel sorry for them, if it weren’t for their role in diverting attention from the ongoing problem of inadequate recovery, and thereby helping to perpetuate catastrophically high unemployment.

What has changed? For one thing, the crisis they predicted keeps not happening. Far from fleeing U.S. debt, investors have continued to pile in, driving interest rates to historical lows. Beyond that, suddenly the clear and present danger to the American economy isn’t that we’ll fail to reduce the deficit enough; it is, instead, that we’ll reduce the deficit too much. For that’s what the “fiscal cliff” — better described as the austerity bomb — is all about: the tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to kick in at the end of this year are precisely not what we want to see happen in a still-depressed economy. 

4 Ways to Improve America's Labor Market

A 30-year backlog of policies has created staggering income inequality. Here's how we can address them 

By Annette Bernhardt, Next New Deal

Now that the election is over, our hope is that we can finally move beyond the vacuous invocations of an imaginary middle class where everyone is in the same boat. It’s time to get real about the concrete policies needed to take on the multiple inequalities that run deep through the U.S. labor market. And we’re not talking about the “skills mismatch,” another red herring routinely flung into this debate by both sides (including by President Obama as recently as the last week of the campaign).

What we’re talking about is a broad, multi-year agenda to give America’s workers a living wage and voice on the job and to take on the continuing exclusion of workers of color, immigrants, and women from good jobs. The media may have discovered inequality last year with the surprise emergence of Occupy Wall Street, but in truth, there is a 30-year backlog of policies to fix the extreme maldistribution of wages and opportunity in the labor market.

The Working Poor Pay High Taxes, Too

By Evan Soltas - Nov 25, 2012

As Washington works out a deal (or doesn't) to resolve the fiscal cliff, negotiations will center on federal marginal income tax rates. President Barack Obama wants rates to go up on high earners, with the top rate returning to nearly 40 percent. Congressional Republicans would prefer to trim back tax deductions to avoid rate increases.

But marginal tax rates are not as large a problem for the wealthy as they are for the poor and working classes. According to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office, the Americans paying the highest effective marginal tax rates are, for the most part, low- to middle-income individuals. It's these Americans -- not House Speaker John Boehner's "job creators" -- who are materially discouraged by their effective marginal tax rates.

Will the FCC Give Rupert Murdoch the Powerful Gift of Media Consolidation?

By Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report 

Just in time for the holidays, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering changes to media cross-ownership rules that watchdogs say could good give Rupert Murdoch's massive conglomerate News Corporation the go-ahead to acquire more big media outlets.

The proposal could also keep women and minorities out of the media market, according to civil rights groups.

Stop Using “Obama for America” Against the People!

Yves here. Team Obama is fast out of the box with its plan to redeploy its campaign ops to sell Americans on why they should lie back and think of England why they should embrace a future with more income disparity and more catfood for old people. The media got wind of the plan the evening before the messaging barrage started. Joe Firestone does a able job of taking it apart. He treats Obama as “caving” as opposed to being fully and enthusiastically in favor of deficit cutting and Social Security and Medicare “reform” but I trust NC readers will forgive him for being unduly charitable.

The best way to stop this garbage might indeed, to forward the Obama messages with the headlines altered (many people don’t get past the headline!) and a short debunking at the top. Mutilating (or cleverly editing) Obama PR and then circulating it as requested might be the best way to undermine this campaign. Maybe we can have an NC reader competition for the best “improvements” of these missives (as in achieving maximum intended course change with the fewest word changes).

Pentagon Wants to Keep Running Its Afghan Drug War From Blackwater's HQ

By Spencer Ackerman

The U.S. war in Afghanistan is supposed to be winding down. Its contractor-led drug war? Not so much.

Inside a compound in Kabul called Camp Integrity, the Pentagon stations a small group of officers to oversee the U.S. military’s various operations to curb the spread of Afghanistan’s cash crops of heroin and marijuana, which help line the Taliban’s pockets. Only Camp Integrity isn’t a U.S. military base at all. It’s the 10-acre Afghanistan headquarters of the private security company formerly known as Blackwater.

Those officers work for an obscure Pentagon agency called the Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office, or CNTPO. Quietly, it’s grown into one of the biggest dispensers of cash for private security contractors in the entire U.S. government: One pile of contracts last year from CNTPO was worth more than $3 billion. And it sees a future for itself in Afghanistan over the long haul.

Who's Really to Blame for the Wal-Mart Strikes? The American Consumer

Jordan Weissmann

The Wal-Mart workers threatening to walk off the job on Black Friday aren't just fighting their employer. They're fighting a whole system.

Forget the stampeding shoppers, the half-priced waffle irons, or the pepper spray wielding wackos: barring a federal intervention, the main event this Black Friday could turn out to be a showdown between organized labor and its arch corporate nemesis, Wal-Mart.

After organizing the first retail workers' strikes in the company's 50-year history last month, a union-backed group has promised to lead work stoppages and demonstrations at Wal-Mart stores around the country this holiday weekend in protest of its famously aggressive labor practices. Nobody truly knows how big the turnout will be, or if even more than a handful of Wal-Mart's 1.4 million U.S. employees will actually walk off the job. We might witness something historic, or we might witness a sideshow that shoppers ignore while brawling for bargains. Either way, the threat has made Wal-Mart nervous enough to ask the National Labor Relations Board for an injunction stopping the protests. Should they go on, they will be a test of whether, after years of failing to organize the country's largest employer, labor groups still have the wherewithal to take it on. 

Frank Rich on the National Circus: Lessons for Obama’s New Cabinet

John McCain has been on the war path, vowing to block U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice as secretary of State (should Obama nominate her) and then saying he would block any State nominee until he was satisfied his questions were answered about the Benghazi attacks. Is this a principled stand? Or a fit of personal pique? For the good of the country, it’s time to fetch a butterfly net for McCain. At a moment when the Middle East is on fire, you have a United States Senator threatening to hold our State Department hostage for no coherent reasons other than to exercise his temper and to satisfy his insatiable desire for television coverage.

It’s a measure of the fallen state of the GOP that this bitter, ever-more-incoherent hothead is now the party’s only elected official with a voice on foreign affairs — unless you count his boot-licking Sancho Panza, Lindsey Graham. (The saner Republican foreign policy hand in the Senate, Richard Lugar, was defrocked earlier this year when the crackpot Richard Mourdock, the now-vanquished tea-party favorite, ousted him in Indiana’s Republican primary.) McCain is so out of it that he even suggested that Bill Clinton be sent to the Middle East to broker negotiations — apparently forgetting that there actually is another Clinton in place in the cabinet to do that job.

Dean Baker: Why the Country's Top Economists Keep Making Wildly Stupid Claims

November 23, 2012  |  Anyone wanting to learn about the economy who talked to the nation's top economists in 2006 would have been wasting their time. Almost none of them had any clue that the collapse of the $8 trillion housing bubble was going to wreck the economy. This presumably reflects a rigid dogmatism and conformity on the part of these economists, since it should have been both very easy to recognize an unprecedented run-up in house prices as a bubble and also to understand that the collapse of the bubble, which was quite evidently driving growth, would lead to a severe downturn.

Remarkably, it seems from a Washington Post article [3] that attributes the continuing weakness of the economy to the indebtedness of underwater homeowners, that many of the country's top economists have no better understanding of the economy today than in 2006.The claim is the dropoff in consumption due to the debt burden of these homeowners explains the weakness of the recovery.

Inequality is Killing Capitalism

Robert Skidelsky

LONDON – It is generally agreed that the crisis of 2008-2009 was caused by excessive bank lending, and that the failure to recover adequately from it stems from banks’ refusal to lend, owing to their “broken” balance sheets.

A typical story, much favored by followers of Friedrich von Hayek and the Austrian School of economics, goes like this: In the run up to the crisis, banks lent more money to borrowers than savers would have been prepared to lend otherwise, thanks to excessively cheap money provided by central banks, particularly the United States Federal Reserve. Commercial banks, flush with central banks’ money, advanced credit for many unsound investment projects, with the explosion of financial innovation (particularly of derivative instruments) fueling the lending frenzy.

Exclusive: Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy

Rick Perlstein

November 13, 2012

 

It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:
 

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, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

 
Now, the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, James Carter IV, has dug up the entire forty-two-minute interview from which that quote derives. Here, The Nation publishes it in its entirety for the very first time. 

Paul Krugman: Grand Old Planet

Earlier this week, GQ magazine published an interview with Senator Marco Rubio, whom many consider a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, in which Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”

It’s funny stuff, and conservatives would like us to forget about it as soon as possible. Hey, they say, he was just pandering to likely voters in the 2016 Republican primaries — a claim that for some reason is supposed to comfort us.

6 Reasons the Fiscal Cliff is a Scam

by James K. Galbraith

November 22, 2012  |  Stripped to essentials, the fiscal cliff is a device constructed to force a rollback of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as the price of avoiding tax increases and disruptive cuts in federal civilian programs and in the military.  It was policy-making by hostage-taking, timed for the lame duck session, a contrived crisis, the plain idea now unfolding was to force a stampede.

In the nature of stampedes arguments become confused; panic flows from fear, when multiple forces – economic and political in this instance – all appear to push the same way.  It is therefore useful to sort through those forces, breaking them down into separate questions, and to ask whether any of them justify the voices of doom.

First, is there a looming crisis of debt or deficits, such that sacrifices in general are necessary?  No, there is not.  Not in the short run – as almost everyone agrees.  But also: not in the long run.  What we have are computer projections, based on arbitrary – and in fact capricious – assumptions.  But even the computer projections no longer show much of a crisis. CBO has adjusted its interest rate forecast, and even under its “alternative fiscal scenario” the debt/GDP ratio now stabilizes after a few years.

Women's Longevity Declining in Parts of the US

By Rochelle Sharpe, Connecticut Health I-Team/New America Media | Report 

Hartford, Connecticut - One of the most disturbing trends in American public health is that women's life expectancy is shrinking in many parts of the U.S.

Women's longevity took an unprecedented nosedive during the past decade, researchers recently discovered, with their life expectancy tumbling or stagnating in one of every five counties in the country.

In Connecticut, for example, New London County saw a drop in longevity, while Fairfield and Hartford counties saw significant jumps.