How an Astounding New Right-Wing Lie About the Economy Is Born

By Joshua Holland

December 14, 2012  |  

There's a new economic myth that's now being amplified by the conservative media. It demonizes vital public services and suggests that the poor are doing just fine thanks to the largesse of the country's “makers.” Conservatives are being told that the United States is now spending vast fortunes combatting poverty – more than we dedicate to national defense, Social Security and Medicare.

This new spin is notable not for its mendacity – although it is completely divorced from reality – but because its origins are easily traced, allowing us to see how these kinds of distortions come to be. This one originated with the work of an analyst at the Heritage Foundation who is well known for his intellectual dishonesty. It was then picked up by Republican staffers on Capitol Hill, who lent the claim credibility by requesting a Congressional Research Service report on the analysis. They then further distorted the narrative before distributing it to friendly writers at conservative media outlets, who dutifully reported the falsehood. It will soon become conventional wisdom on the Right, further distorting conservatives' view of taxes and spending.

The Best Reporting on Guns in America

by Blair Hickman, Suevon Lee and Cora Currier
ProPublica, Dec. 14, 2012, 4:34 p.m.

Update: With today's shooting in Newtown, Conn., this article, first published July 24, 2012, unfortunately seems relevant again.

In the wake of last week's shooting in Aurora, Colo., we've taken a step back and laid out the best pieces we could find about guns. They're roughly organized by articles on rights, trafficking and regulation. And include your suggestions in comments.

What If There Is No Fiscal Crisis?

—By David Corn  | Thu Dec. 13, 2012 1:05 PM PST

If there is no fiscal crisis, can there be a fiscal cliff?

The current hullabaloo over tax cuts, spending cuts, entitlement programs, and the debt ceiling has yielded much fodder for policy-minded columnists, practically establishing a job creation program for budget-following wonks. Recently, there have been a rash of articles from this set advancing the essential point that raising the eligibility age for Medicare, a proposal that might be on the table (that is, if there is a table), would be awful policy because doing so would remove healthier seniors from the Medicare pool and place this older group into the non-Medicare pool and boost costs there. (Health care costs would presumably go up overall—and particularly for private employers who would have to carry these 65- and 66-year-olds on their policies.) Has this spate of policy op-edding influenced the negotiating positions? We don't know. The talks are all hush-hush. And this week, another policymeister, in one of the most consequential columns of the past fortnight, added another significant contention to the discourse: There is no fiscal crisis.

Paul Krugman: The GOP's Existential Crisis

We are not having a debt crisis.

It’s important to make this point, because I keep seeing articles about the “fiscal cliff” that do, in fact, describe it — often in the headline — as a debt crisis. But it isn’t. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its deficit. In fact, its borrowing costs are near historic lows. And even the confrontation over the debt ceiling that looms a few months from now if we do somehow manage to avoid going over the fiscal cliff isn’t really about debt. 

No, what we’re having is a political crisis, born of the fact that one of our two great political parties has reached the end of a 30-year road. The modern Republican Party’s grand, radical agenda lies in ruins — but the party doesn’t know how to deal with that failure, and it retains enough power to do immense damage as it strikes out in frustration. 

Why Are Anti-Union Laws Called “Right To Work”?

A mini-Explainer on the history of management’s favorite political catchphrase.

By Brian Palmer  |  Posted Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012, at 4:51 PM ET

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill banning mandatory union membership Tuesday. Republicans have been pressing for so-called “right to work” laws across the Midwest. Major labor groups almost uniformly oppose these bills, so why do we call them “right to work” laws?

Because they allow you to work through a strike. Commentator and lexicographer William Safire chronicled the origins of the phrase “right to work” in his Political Dictionary. A 1912 Bernard Partridge cartoon depicted an employer telling a striking worker, “I can’t make you work if you won’t; but if this man wants to, I can make you let him. And I will.” By the 1930s, the phrase “right to work” was common in American political parlance, and it was meant to draw a contrast to labor’s claim of a right to strike.

Michigan Adopts the ALEC Model for Diminishing Democracy

John Nichols on December 12, 2012 - 7:50 AM ET

 

Michigan legislators did not write the so-called “right to work” legislation that they have enacted in a mad rush of anti-democratic excess.

They simply did as they were told.

The ideas, the outlines and the words themselves came from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing “bill mill” that produces “model legislation” at the behest of Koch Industries, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, ExxonMobil and the corporate cabal that is always looking to “buy” states.
 

Dear “Chained-CPI”: When You’ve Lost the VFW, You’ve Lost America

By Richard Eskow | December 12, 2012

The “chained CPI” is an attempt to camouflage deep cuts to Social Security and other benefits, along with tax hikes on middle class wages (but not for high incomes), in a forest of numbers and terminology.

Know who’s expert at camouflage? Veterans. And a whole lot of their organizations hate the “chained CPI.”

How Michigan Republicans Caught Labor Off-Guard, Making Law Worse than Wisconsin's

By Adele M. Stan

December 12, 2012  |  It seemed to happen so fast. Actually, it was years in the making: A law designed to eviscerate the membership rolls of labor unions in the state in which the mighty United Auto Workers makes its home was rammed through both houses of the Michigan legislature and signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Rick Snyder. As Wisconsin is to public employee unions, so is Michigan to the unions of the manufacturing sector -- a place emblematic of labor’s political sway, a force now diminished by the new law.

Taken up in a lame-duck legislative session, the prospects for the bill’s passage caught everybody off-guard, thanks to a sudden change of heart by Snyder who had, throughout his term, expressed opposition to any law that, like the one he just signed, would allow workers in union shops -- such as those employed by the big-three automakers whose plants account for more than 136,000 Michigan jobs [3] -- to opt out of paying dues to the unions that represent them.

But Snyder faces re-election [4] in 2014, which means his campaign begins now, with this opening volley. Had the legislature passed the law, drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (the organization funded by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch that drafted Wisconsin’s anti-union law), and Snyder failed to sign it, he might have faced fierce opposition from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded astroturf group that was also instrumental in the passage of the Wisconsin law. Even worse (for him), Snyder might have faced a primary challenge.

Poisoning the Well: How the Feds Let Industry Pollute the Nation’s Underground Water Supply

by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, Dec. 11, 2012, 12:01 a.m.

Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation's drinking water.

In many cases, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted these so-called aquifer exemptions in Western states now stricken by drought and increasingly desperate for water.

EPA records show that portions of at least 100 drinking water aquifers have been written off because exemptions have allowed them to be used as dumping grounds.

Economists calculate true value of ‘who’ you know, rather than ‘what’ in US politics

Economists at the University of Warwick have calculated the true value of US political lobbyists, proving the old adage ‘it is not what you know, but who you know’.

In a paper published this month in the American Economic Review Mirko Draca, from the University of Warwick’s Department of Economics, looked at the role of lobbyists in the US. He found their revenue falls by 24% when their former employer leaves government office.

The study examined the so-called ‘revolving door’ of politics, which refers to the movement of people from government service into lobbying positions.

Can Algae-Derived Oils Support Large-Scale, Low-Cost Biofuels Production?

New Rochelle, NY, December 12, 2012—ExxonMobil and many other energy companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to develop transportation biofuels from renewable resources such as the oil or hydrocarbons produced by microalgae. As global supplies of fossil fuels continue to shrink, biofuels derived from algae represent one promising source of low-cost, scalable renewable energy. The feasibility and economic projections for large-scale biofuels production from microalgae are examined in a Review article and accompanying Commentary published in Disruptive Science and Technology, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The articles are available on the Disruptive Science and Technology website.

Microalgae are single-celled organisms that can be grown in open ponds, tubes, or bags, with just sunlight and carbon dioxide, or in the dark and fed sugars or starches. They can be genetically modified to optimize their productivity.

How Michigan’s Right-To-Work Law Came to Be

December 11, 2012

by Theresa Riley

 

As police held back thousands of protesters near the state capital building, Michigan, the birthplace of the modern labor movement, became the 24th state to enact so-called “right-to-work” legislation. Earlier today, Governor Rick Snyder signed two bills preventing public and private sector unions from requiring workers to pay union fees.

The Detroit News reports that after requests from Grover Norquist and others, Snyder switched sides on the issue. United Auto Workers President Robert King said in an interview, that the Koch brothers and Amway owner Dick DeVos “bullied and bought their way to get this legislation in Michigan.”
 

'The Limits to Growth': A Book That Launched a Movement

Christian Parenti

December 5, 2012

In the spring of 1972, a slim book called The Limits to Growth dropped like an intellectual bomb on the developed world’s most optimistic assumptions about itself. Peppered with computer-generated graphs and written in clear, dispassionate language by a team of MIT graduate students led by two young scholars, Dennis and Donella Meadows, the book delivered a seemingly extreme argument, which ran as follows: If 1970 rates of economic growth, resource use and pollution continued unchanged, then modern civilization would face environmental and economic collapse sometime in the mid-twenty-first century. Yes, collapse—as in massive human die-offs.

It was a message that many people in the industrialized world already seemed to feel intuitively. They could see it—or thought they could—in the ever-faster pace of change embodied in highways, smog, telecommunications, jet travel, tasteless frozen TV dinners, urban riots, youth rebellion, and the bloody spectacle of a high-tech military fighting low-tech guerrillas in Vietnam. For many people, the world was moving too fast and in the wrong direction, and The Limits to Growth seemed to prove that point scientifically.

Public Buses Across Country Quietly Adding Microphones to Record Passenger Conversations

By Kim Zetter, 12.10.12, 4:46 PM

Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.

The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.

This Is Not Wisconsin. It's Worse.

Rich Yeselson

December 10, 2012

If union adversaries can pass a right-to-work law in the home of the once-powerful United Auto Workers, they can pretty much do it anywhere.

Let’s clear one thing up. “Right to work” laws, which permit employees working at a unionized workplace to refuse to join the union or to pay the union the cost of representing the worker, are designed to weaken the economic and political power of organized labor and, by extension, wage workers. Full stop. They allow workers to “free ride” all the benefits of a collective-bargaining agreement (increased wages, benefits, rights to adjudicate a dispute with a supervisor, safety and health requirement beyond those mandated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, etc.) negotiated by the union without paying any of the union dues their fellow employees pay.

The vaunted libertarian argument in support of right to work would be far more convincing if libertarians supported the rights of employees to reject at their discretion the countless rules and obligations that employers mandate as a condition of employment. The argument seems to be that employees are free either to quit a job or not take it in the first place if they find various company requirements—e.g., what time they are to come to work—onerous or unpleasant. Libertarians do not argue, however, that workers have the right to retain their employment yet arrive at work at noon if their employer wishes them to arrive at 9. Don’t start, or quit, but if you’re on the job, follow the boss’s rules, right?

Paul Krugman: The New Republicans: Weighed Down By Plutocrats and Preachers

Thursday, 06 December 2012 09:54 
By Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co. | Op-Ed 

There has been a lot of talk since the presidential election about the possible emergence of a new faction within the Republican Party, or at least among the conservative intelligentsia. These new Republicans, we're told, are willing to be more open-minded on cultural issues, more understanding of immigrants, and more skeptical that trickle-down economics is enough; they'll favor direct measures to help working families.

So what should we call these new Republicans? I have a suggestion: why not call them "Democrats"?

Why Is the Failed Monti a 'Technocrat' and the Successful Correa a 'Left-Leaning Economist'?

by William K. Black

 

The New York Times produces profiles of national leaders like Italy’s Mario Monti and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa.  I invite readers to contrast the worshipful treatment accorded Monti with the Correa profile.  The next time someone tells you the NYT is a “leftist” paper you can show them how far right it is on financial issues.

The NYT’s slant in describing Monti as a “technocrat” and Correa as a “left-leaning economist” is typical of the dominant media.  Monti and Correa both have doctorates in economics from U.S. universities and both have been professors of economics.  Why does the NYT treat Monti reverentially and Correa dismissively?

Paul Krugman: Robots and Robber Barons

The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are at a record high. How is that possible? It’s simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.

Wait — are we really back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in our modern information economy? Well, that’s what many people thought; for the past generation discussions of inequality have focused overwhelmingly not on capital versus labor but on distributional issues between workers, either on the gap between more- and less-educated workers or on the soaring incomes of a handful of superstars in finance and other fields. But that may be yesterday’s story. 

How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign

Dan Froomkin

Post-mortems of contemporary election coverage typically include regrets about horserace journalism, he-said-she-said stenography, and the lack of enlightening stories about the issues.

But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital's media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

Dean Baker: The Nonsense About a Demographic Crisis

One of themes that recurs endlessly in news coverage is that the United States and other countries face a disastrous threat to their living standards as a result of a falling ratio of workers to retirees. This is one that can be easily dismissed with some simple arithmetic.

A falling ratio of workers to retirees means that a larger chunk of what each worker produces must be put aside to a support the retired population. (Btw, this is true regardless of whether or not we have a Social Security or Medicare system. The only issue is whether retirees are able to maintain something resembling normal living standards.) However, that does not imply that the working population must see a drop in their living standards.

From Soap to Cities, Designing From Nature Could Solve Our Biggest Challenges

Saturday, 08 December 2012 13:30  
By Sven Eberlein, Yes! Magazine | Report 

Can a boat be designed to clean the water? How does a spider manufacture resilient fiber? We need products that don’t harm us or the environment, and nature’s already done the research.

Imagine this assignment, says Bill McDonough in a recent TED talk: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, converts nitrogen into ammonia, distills water, stores solar energy as fuel, builds complex sugars, creates microclimates, changes color with the seasons, and self-replicates. Sound impossible? Well, nature’s already completed this one. It’s called 
a plant. And the fact that it does these things safely and efficiently is inspiring engineers and designers to reconceive the ways we manufacture such basics as soap bottles, raincoats, and wall-to-wall carpeting.

Biomimicry and Cradle to Cradle, the two fields of inquiry that frame this emerging discipline, stem from the work of biologist Janine Benyus, architect William McDonough, and chemist Michael Braungart, who realized that the very models they considered key to making safer, more environmentally friendly products were sitting right before us, in the natural world.

CPI Unchained

The sneaky plan to cut Social Security and raise taxes by changing how inflation is calculated.

By Matthew Yglesias  |  Posted Friday, Dec. 7, 2012, at 2:24 PM ET

On Wednesday I wrote about one of the most widely discussed and high-profile ideas for reducing federal spending on the elderly—raising the eligibility age for Medicare. It’s a simple idea to understand and a pretty terrible one. The other idea that comes up constantly in negotiations and rumors of negotiations and hypothetical grand bargains, by contrast, languishes in obscurity. It involves indexing Social Security benefits to the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (C-CPI-U) rather than the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) that’s currently in use. This change shows up in all kinds of think-tank plans and unofficial sketches, and it has at various times secured the endorsement of everyone from Dick Durbin to Eric Cantor.

When Postmasters Attack

Sunday, 09 December 2012 07:48  
By Alexandra Bradbury, Labor Notes | Report 

Two years ago, there were 574,000 postal workers, not counting temps. Last year, 546,000. This year only 533,000 are braving snow, rain, and gloom of night.

The number will be fewer next year, and every year from now on, until the beloved institution shrinks beyond recognition, if the Postmaster General and other privatization advocates get their way.

“This was a great job, one of the best jobs in America,” said recently retired Oregon letter carrier Jamie Partridge. “It pisses me off that it’s being dismantled.”

Only A Populist Anti-Corruption Movement Can Repair American Democracy, Says Larry Lessig

By Steven Rosenfeld 

November 29, 2012  |  Editor’s note: What follows is a Q&A with Larry Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor [3] who is one of the country’s leading public intellectuals on what needs to happen [4] to repair American democracy for the 21^st century. Lessig believes that the impact of private money in politics has created a culture of legal political corruption that is destroying American democracy. He has called for a convening constitutional convention to adopt reforms that he believes Congress would not propose on its own unless tremendous grassroots pressure emerges. AlterNet interviewed Lessig at the 28^th Amendment conference [5] in Los Angeles in November.)  

Steven Rosenfeld: We've been at the 28th Amendment conference all day where we’ve heard about all kinds of ideas for reforming our democracy starting with the campaign finance system, going towards constitutional amendments, constitutional conventions, things that could happen with the regulatory agencies in Washington, D.C. Professor Lessig, what progress do you see when you hear with everybody talking now? Stepping back, how do you think this movement is changing or where is it in its development?

Larry Lessig: We’re at the very beginning. And at the beginning people are fumbling to understand both where they should be standing and in which direction they should be walking. I think the movement should celebrate enormous success so far in inspiring a movement around Citizens United that has produced millions of people who think of this as a fundamental problem that has to be addressed. This corruption and the movement to get states to pass resolutions calling on Congress to propose a constitutional amendment I think is a fantastic, important measure of its success. I think that we’ve got to now think what’s the next step, what’s the next move we can make that makes it easier for us to achieve cross-partisan support but also create the pressure on Congress that will be necessary for it to actually be forced to do something.

The Civil Rights Case of Our Generation

The Supreme Court has agreed to consider the constitutionality of gay marriage. This is gonna be big.

By Emily Bazelon  |  Posted Friday, Dec. 7, 2012, at 4:56 PM ET

It’s going to be one blockbuster of a history-making year at the Supreme Court.

The justices announced Friday that they will hear two cases about gay marriage. The first, United States v. Windsor, is the small step. The second, Hollingsworth v. Perry, is potentially giant. With the choice between staging a nice little one-act play about states that recognize gay marriage and a full-dress, five-act opera about whether states can constitutionally ban it, the court chose the big production. This is it: The civil rights issue of our generation, in the hands of nine justices. As a reporter, I couldn’t be more excited. As a supporter of gay marriage who is also a nervous Nellie, I’m kind of terrified.

The Election Is Over. Now What?

America needs a jobs bill, a better energy policy, and a revamped financial system. Will we get any of those?

By Joseph E. Stiglitz  |  Posted Sunday, Dec. 9, 2012, at 7:00 AM ET

After an election campaign costing well in excess of $2 billion, it seems to many observers that not much has changed in American politics: Barack Obama is still president, the Republicans still control the House of Representatives, and the Democrats still have a majority in the Senate. And now America faces the “fiscal cliff.” What next?

Some of Mitt Romney’s advisers seemed taken aback by Obama’s victory: Wasn’t the election supposed to be about economics? They were confident that Americans would forget how the Republicans’ deregulatory zeal had brought the economy to the brink of ruin, and that voters had not noticed how their intransigence in Congress had prevented more effective policies from being pursued in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Voters, they assumed, would focus only on the current economic malaise.

David Ignatius and the Washington Post Flunk Trade Arithmetic Again

Thursday, 06 December 2012 07:35

The Washington Post is notorious for getting numbers terribly wrong when it comes to trade. It once ran a lead editorial touting the wonders of NAFTA that claimed Mexico's GDP had quadrupled from 1987 to 2007. According to the IMF the number was 83 percent. But the Post is willing to toss numbers, logic, and arithmetic to the wind when it comes to pushing the trade agreements that have been on the political agenda in recent years.

Paul Krugman: The Forgotten Millions

Let’s get one thing straight: America is not facing a fiscal crisis. It is, however, still very much experiencing a job crisis.

It’s easy to get confused about the fiscal thing, since everyone’s talking about the “fiscal cliff.” Indeed, one recent poll suggests that a large plurality of the public believes that the budget deficit will go up if we go off that cliff. 

In fact, of course, it’s just the opposite: The danger is that the deficit will come down too much, too fast. And the reasons that might happen are purely political; we may be about to slash spending and raise taxes not because markets demand it, but because Republicans have been using blackmail as a bargaining strategy, and the president seems ready to call their bluff.

Tiny structure gives big boost to solar power

Princeton researchers have found a simple and economic way to nearly triple the efficiency of organic solar cells, the cheap and flexible plastic devices that many scientists believe could be the future of solar power.

The researchers, led by electrical engineer Stephen Chou, were able to increase the efficiency 175 percent by using a nanostructured "sandwich" of metal and plastic that collects and traps light. Chou said the technology also should increase the efficiency of conventional inorganic solar collectors, such as standard silicon solar panels, although he cautioned that his team has not yet completed research with inorganic devices.

Chou said the research team used nanotechnology to overcome two primary challenges that cause solar cells to lose energy: light reflecting from the cell, and the inability to fully capture light that enters the cell.

Get Ready For America’s Next ‘Education Crisis’

By Jeff Bryant | December 6, 2012

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” has become a popular mantra of the ruling class. Of course, these are not the people who usually experience the brunt of a crisis.

But a pervasive narrative in the mainstream media is that Americans are a people beset by near-continuous crisis, whether it’s the fake crisis of a looming “fiscal cliff” or a real crisis like Frankenstorm Sandy that still has many Northeasterners inexplicably living in the dark in unheated homes.

Arguably no sector of American society has been cast with the narrative of crisis as much as public education. And the fever pitch is about to go higher.

An economy that works for the middle class won’t happen on its own

Posted December 6, 2012 at 11:49 am by Rebecca Thiess

A vital goal of economic policy should be to raise the living standards of the millions of American households who have seen their wages and living standards stagnate or decline over the last few decades. Fundamental to this is an economy that produces good, well-paying jobs. The biggest obstacle to this, currently, is the jobs crisis driven by a shortfall in aggregate demand. Additional factors though, written into our current policies, mean that even when the economy does recover, there is no reason to believe that the jobs it produces will actually be well-paying jobs.

A Sign That Obama Will Repeat Economic Mistakes

By Robert Scheer

Please don’t tell me that these reports in the business press touting Sallie Krawcheck as a front-runner for chairman of the SEC or even a possible candidate to be the next Treasury secretary are true. Who is she? Oh, just another former Citigroup CFO, and therefore a prime participant in the great banking hustle that has savaged the world’s economy. Krawcheck was paid $11 million in 2005 while her bank contributed to the toxic mortgage crisis that would cost millions their jobs and homes.  

Not that you would know that sordid history from reading the recent glowing references to Krawcheck in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News that stress her pioneering role as a leading female banker—a working mother no less—but manage to avoid her role in a bank that led the way in destroying the lives of so many women, men and their children. Nor did her financial finagling end with Citigroup, as Krawcheck added a troubling stint in the leadership at Merrill Lynch and Bank of America to her résumé. 

A woman who would be an excellent choice as the most experienced as well as principled candidate to head the SEC or Treasury is Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC, who labored to protect consumers rather than undermine them. Indeed, her outstanding book “Bull by the Horns,” chronicling her fight in the last two administrations to hold the banksters accountable, should be required reading for the president and those who are advising him on selecting his new economic team.  

The Mother of All Government Shutdowns

Josh Marshall, December 6, 2012, 10:39 PM


It seems crystal clear that Republicans will and know that they will concede the game on rates and try to reclaim power with a new debt ceiling hostage drama early next year. Having spent a few days in DC, it seems clear to me that absent a dramatic and preemptive climb down on the part of Congressional Republicans, this means we’re headed for the Mother of All Government Shutdowns.

Here’s why.

The President says under no circumstances will he negotiate a ransom for a debt ceiling extension as he agreed to do in 2011. It’s still not entirely clear to me what end game they envision. But they’re being very clear that this is their line in the sand. That ups the stakes dramatically and the President will have a hard time climbing down from that promise even if he needs or wants to.
 

Christian Right Leader Lauds Uganda Dictator as 'Kill the Gays' Bill Is Revived

By Cynthia Burack

December 5, 2012  |  In the past week the Family Research Council has been busy praising Uganda’s commitment to Christian faith and “national repentance” -- even as the Ugandan Parliament once again takes up a bill that would legally mandate the persecution of LGBT people. The bill appears to be part and parcel of dictator Yoweri Museveni’s “repentance” program, and its reappearance before the legislature has drawn no criticism from FRC or the other Christian right groups allied with the dictator. If anything, it seems to be drawing tacit, artfully-phrased praise.  

Many who have followed the human rights crisis for LGBT people in Uganda know that, in 2009, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill [3] was introduced into the Ugandan Parliament to supplement laws that already banned homosexuality. The bill, quickly dubbed the “Kill the Gays” bill because of its provision of a death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” also includes severe penalties for other actions and non-actions, including the “failure to disclose the offense” by anyone who might be aware of another person’s same-sex sexuality. Although the bill has not been yet passed, it has attracted harsh international condemnation, and many attacks [4] on LGBT people and activists [5] have been attributed to the public debates surrounding it.

Wonder Why States Are Broke? One Reason is Companies Play Them Off Against Each Other

By David Segal, executive director of the online organizing group Demand Progress and former member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives

The New York Times published an expose this week on Texas’s regime of business incentives, but for anybody who pays passing attention to so-called municipal and state economic development schemes, there wasn’t much news: Our states and localities are cannibalizing one another as they concoct targeted tax breaks which they use to lure corporations from their neighbors. Meanwhile, a bevy of middlemen wet their beaks by helping corporations pit sucker states off of one another and brokering deals to sell the tax credits that comprise much of the ensuing largess. Here’s the rub:

Granting corporate incentives has become standard operating procedure for state and local governments across the country. The Times investigation found that the governments collectively give incentives worth at least $80 billion a year.

That’s an especially big deal for cash-strapped states, banned from deficit spending, no printing presses on hand. The $80 billion figure represents a full ten times the budget of my state of Rhode Island, and more than 15 times the amount spent from locally-generated funds.

Synthetic fuels could eliminate entire U.S. need for crude oil, create 'new economy'

Posted November 27, 2012; 09:00 a.m.
by John Sullivan, Office of Engineering Communications

The United States could eliminate the need for crude oil by using a combination of coal, natural gas and non-food crops to make synthetic fuel, a team of Princeton researchers has found.

Besides economic and national security benefits, the plan has potential environmental advantages. Because plants absorb carbon dioxide to grow, the United States could cut vehicle greenhouse emissions by as much as 50 percent in the next several decades using non-food crops to create liquid fuels, the researchers said.

Why Capital Gains Tax Should Go Up, and Go Up a Lot

By Eliot Spitzer  |  Posted Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012, at 10:22 AM ET

The fiscal cliff negotiations aren’t just about plugging holes in the deficit: They are about restoring fairness to our tax code. This should go beyond merely raising the rates on the top 2 percent of income earners—the current line in the sand drawn by the White House.

Two of the fundamental economic problems we need to confront are the increasingly disproportionate percentage of income earned by the top tier, and the underlying lack of demand that is inhibiting economic growth. Fortunately both of these trends can be at least partially reversed in the negotiations now underway, because the tax code—which is surely going to be reformed as part of this process—is one of the best tools we have to confront each of these problems. A couple of data points: First, in 2010, 93 percent of the income that was added to our economy accrued to the top 1 percent of families. Second, corporate earnings as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high—totaling 1.75 trillion in the third quarter of this year, while wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low—just about 43 percent of GDP.

The FCC Must Not Give Rupert Murdoch More Control Over US Media

John Nichols on December 6, 2012 - 9:16 AM ET

 

We now know that top players with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel plotted with General David Petraeus about the prospect of using the cable network as a platform for launching a “Petraeus for President” campaign. As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author Bob Woodward writes in the The Washington Post:

So in spring 2011, [former Republican campaign strategist and now Fox News president Roger] Ailes asked a Fox News analyst headed to Afghanistan to pass on his thoughts to Petraeus, who was then the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. Petraeus, Ailes advised, should turn down an expected offer from President Obama to become CIA director and accept nothing less than the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military post. If Obama did not offer the Joint Chiefs post, Petraeus should resign from the military and run for president, Ailes suggested.

Koch-Funded ALEC and Americans For Prosperity Launch Assault on Michigan Unions

By Mary Bottari 

December 7, 2012  |  Yesterday in Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder and his GOP controlled lame-duck legislature pulled a fast one, introducing and then ramming through the House and the Senate so-called "right to work" legislation. The bill was introduced at 11 a.m., passed the House at 5 p.m. by a narrow margin and the Senate at around 6:00 p.m. When the process is complete and the bill is signed, Michigan will become the 24th right to work state.

Why the rush? The GOP majority felt it might not have the votes once the newly elected legislature was seated in January. The bill is designed so it cannot be repealed by popular referendum.

The Capitol was chaotic today as police peppersprayed protesters and locked down the building, forcing Democrats to seek a court order to get the doors open again. "It's not only anti-worker, its anti-democratic," Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero told MSNBC.

Jim DeMint, Tea Party US senator, quits

US Republican senator and Tea Party champion Jim DeMint is resigning to lead a conservative think tank.

His office said the South Carolina politician would become president of the Heritage Foundation next month.

The 61-year-old Republican was first elected to the Senate in 2004 and won a second term in 2010.