Photovoltaics beat biofuels at converting sun's energy to miles driven

New study shows solar power is not only better in terms of energy efficiency, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions -- but cost competitive, too

In 2005, President George W. Bush and American corn farmers saw corn ethanol as a promising fossil fuel substitute that would reduce both American dependence on foreign oil and greenhouse gas emissions. Accordingly, the 2005 energy bill mandated that 4 billion gallons of renewable fuel be added to the gasoline supply in 2006. That rose to 4.7 billion gallons in 2007 and 7.5 billion in 2012.


Since then, life cycle assessments (LCAs) have shown that corn ethanol has modest if any effect on reducing CO2 emissions and may actually increase them, while posing a threat to natural habitats and food supplies, as food stocks are turned to fuel and marginal lands are put under the plough to keep up with demand. In 2010, fuel ethanol consumed 40 percent of U.S. corn production, and 2012 prices are at record highs. Since the U.S. also accounts for 40 percent of the world's corn, U.S. ethanol production has affected corn prices around the planet.
 

The Legacy of Timothy Geithner

By SIMON JOHNSON

“Too big to fail is too big to continue. The megabanks have too much power in Washington and too much weight within the financial system.” Who said this and when?

The answer is Peggy Noonan, the prominent conservative commentator, writing recently in The Wall Street Journal.

As Timothy F. Geithner prepares to leave the Treasury Department, most assessments focus on how his policies affected the economy. But his lasting legacy may be more political, contributing to the creation of an issue that can now be seized either by the right or the left. What should be done about the too-big-to-fail category of financial institutions?

Billmon: Obituary

Died, after long struggle with infectious reality, Hastert Rule:

For the second time this month, Boehner broke the Hastert Rule. The issue was Hurricane Sandy relief, a follow-up vote to a smaller package approved earlier this month. It passed, but the important thing is how it passed: Yeas: 241 (192 Democrats, 49 Republicans)
Nays: 180 (Rep. Jim Cooper + 179 Republicans)
That is to say, with a minority of the majority. The first time was on the fiscal cliff, and now it's happened on hurricane relief.

Mr. Rule, caretaker at the House GOP Asylum for the Criminally Insane, is remembered by all who knew him—Democrats in particular—as an emotionally distant father, abusive husband, and hostile, litigious neighbor. However, he is also widely credited with keeping his asylum under tight control for many years, although some observers attribute much of Mr. Rule's success to his long-time pharmaceutical assistant, Nurse Ratched.  

Republicans Brag They Won House Majority Because Of Gerrymandering

By Scott Keyes on Jan 17, 2013 at 9:00 am

In a classic Kinsley gaffe, the Republican State Leadership Committee released a report boasting that the only reason the GOP controls the House of Representatives is because they gerrymandered congressional districts in blue states.

The RSLC’s admission came in a shockingly candid report entitled, “How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013″. It details how the group spent $30 million in the 2010 election cycle to sweep up low-cost state legislature races in blue states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Their efforts were so successful, in fact, that Republicans went from controlling both legislative chambers in 14 states before Election Day to 25 states afterward.

Exposed! How the Billionaires Class Is Destroying Democracy

Saturday, 19 January 2013 09:19  
By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Op-Ed 

Out of the guts of the internet, we find an endless stream of misattributed quotes and made-up stories that end up in chain emails that you eventually receive from your loopy uncle in Texas who's trying to justify right-wing economics or anti-Obama conspiracy theories.

It's just one of the headaches of the Internet Age.

But, there's one quote in particular that's always attributed to an obscure Scottish historian, Sir Alexander Frasier Tytler (as if that gave it great credibility), and it seemed to both make sense and prophecy the end of the American Republic.

Congress Kills Part of the Affordable Care Act

By karoli

If the ACA is a bundle of experiments in how to lower health care costs and make it more affordable for everyone, then this deal gives Republican a mark in their "kill" column for the ACA and consumers.

On the very last page of the part of the fiscal cliff bill dealing with various Medicare extenders, the doc fix and other health care considerations, there is a provision which de-funds appropriations allowed in the Affordable Care Act for Community Operated and Owned Plans, or "co-ops".

ALEC to Attack North Carolina Renewable Energy Initiatives

Saturday, 19 January 2013 12:27  
By Steve Horn, DeSmogBlog | Report 

Renewable energy is under attack in the Tar Heel State. That's the word from Greenpeace USA's Connor Gibson in a report that implicates King Coal powerhouse, Duke Energy and the fossil fuel industry at-large.

The vehicle Duke Energy is utilizing for this attack is one whose profile has grown in infamy in recent years: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

ALEC is described as a "corporate bill mill" by its critics. It's earned such a description because it passes "model bills" written by corporate lobbyists and to boot, the lobbyists typically do so behind closed doors at ALEC's annual meetings.

New West Point Study Highlights Threat Posed by Far Right-Wing Groups In U.S.

By Hayes Brown

January 18, 2013  |  A new study [2] from a think tank connected to the West Point Military Academy highlights the threat of violent far-right movements in the United States, leading to the conclusion that, while diverse in in their causes, they are similar in their use of violence to achieve their aims.

West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center was founded in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and has primarily focused its research on international terrorist threats. Titled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right, [3]” this new report instead looks as the risk that domestic groups pose to the U.S. Breaking down these groups into three categories — the Racist/White Supremacy Movement, the Anti-Federalist Movement, and the Christian Fundamentalist Movement — allows the study to examine the background ideologies and methods of each subset thoroughly, opposed to lumping them all together as most studies have.

Each of the groupings in the study represent competing ideological views, with none of them likely to cooperate in achieving their aims. The chances that each of these groups will use violence also varies. What they share, however, is a use of violence against their chosen targets — be it minority races or abortion clinics — to draw attention to and emphasize their given ideology.

6 Economic Steps to a Better Life and Real Prosperity for All

by Gar Alperovitz, Steve Dubb

January 15, 2013  |  Most activists tend to approach progressive change from one of two perspectives: First, there’s the “reform” tradition that assumes corporate control is a constant and that “politics” acts to modify practices within that constraint. Liberalism in the United States is representative of this tradition. Then there’s the “revolutionary” tradition, which assumes change can come about only if the major institutions are largely eliminated or transcended, often by violence.

But what if neither revolution nor reform is viable?

Paradoxically, we believe the current stalemating of progressive reform may open up some unique strategic possibilities to transform institutions of the political economy over time. We call this third option evolutionary reconstruction. Like reform, evolutionary reconstruction involves step-by-step nonviolent change. But like revolution, evolutionary reconstruction changes the basic institutions of ownership of the economy, so that the broad public, rather than a narrow band of individuals (i.e., the “one percent”) owns more and more of the nation’s productive assets.

Dean Baker: Michelle Rhee's Failing Report Card

Monday, 14 January 2013 14:29 

Michelle Rhee gained notoriety as the chancellor of DC's public schools under Adrian Fenty's administration from 2007 to 2011. Her conduct in this position was one of the main reasons he was not re-elected. Among other things, she publicly took pleasure in firing large numbers of teachers and administrators. Incredibly, she also claims not to have realized that high stake testing would provide incentives for teachers or administrators to cheat on the scoring of exams.

Since she left the DC school system she started a new organization, StudentsFirst, which was created to push for the sort of changes to the school system she sought to implement as chancellor. The organization received considerable media attention for a report card it issued on the public school systems in the 50 states earlier this week. While most of the items on the report card were part of an educational agenda of questionable merit (see Diana Ravitch's blog for specific critiques), one item had nothing to do with education whatsoever.

The South's Shocking Hidden History: Thousands of Blacks Forced Into Slavery Until WW2

By Douglas A. Blackmon

January 15, 2013  |  On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line.

The sender was a barely literate African American woman named Carrie Kinsey. With little punctuation and few capital letters, she penned the bare facts of the abduction of her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, who a year earlier had been sold into involuntary servitude.

Kinsey had already asked for help from the powerful white people in her world. She knew where her brother had been taken—a vast plantation not far away called Kinderlou. There, hundreds of black men and boys were held in chains and forced to labor in the fields or in one of several factories owned by the McRee family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful in Georgia. No white official in this corner of the state would take an interest in the abduction and enslavement of a black teenager.
 

Dean Baker: The 3 Percent Cut to Social Security, a.k.a. the Chained CPI

According to inside-Washington gossip, Congress and the president are going to do exactly what voters elected them to do: they are going to cut Social Security by 3 percent. You don't remember anyone running on that platform? Yeah, well, they probably forgot to mention it.
 
Of course, some people may have heard Vice President Joe Biden when he told an audience in Virginia that there would be no cuts to Social Security if President Obama got re-elected. Biden said: "I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you."
 

US employee 'outsourced job to China'

A security check on a US company has reportedly revealed one of its staff was outsourcing his work to China. 

The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.

He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job.
 

America’s Bloody Price for Power

January 11, 2013

 

Exclusive: “The Untold History of the United States” shakes up the traditional recounting of the last century, forcing Americans to rethink key assumptions, but director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick have not written a people’s history, says Jim DiEugenio in part two of his review.


By Jim DiEugenio

It’s challenging to review a book like The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, with its broad sweep covering more than a century – from the late 19^th to the early 21^st centuries – especially given the authors’ ambition to reorder how Americans see their nation as it evolved into a global empire and force them to confront how that empire has trampled on the lives and dreams of other people.

Without doubt, there is much value in their effort, which you can also watch in a Showtime documentary series by the same name. It is always good when a serious work comes out that shakes the pillars of the historical establishment by challenging cherished conventional wisdoms. Director Stone and historian Kuznick surely do that.
 

Paul Krugman: Japan Steps Out

For three years economic policy throughout the advanced world has been paralyzed, despite high unemployment, by a dismal orthodoxy. Every suggestion of action to create jobs has been shot down with warnings of dire consequences. If we spend more, the Very Serious People say, the bond markets will punish us. If we print more money, inflation will soar. Nothing should be done because nothing can be done, except ever harsher austerity, which will someday, somehow, be rewarded.

But now it seems that one major nation is breaking ranks — and that nation is, of all places, Japan.
 

The four business gangs that run the US

Ross Gittins

IF YOU'VE ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you - at least in respect of the United States.

In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ''Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,'' he says.

What Watchdog? How the Financial Press Has Failed the American Public

By Laura Gottesdiener

January 9, 2013  |  From revelations about this week’s hasty, multibillion-dollar bank settlement [3]s to AIG’s brief threat to sue the federal government for its own $128-billion bailout (which the company contends wasn’t as generous as other bailouts), 2013 is already shaping up to be another year of government-backed wins for Wall Street.

As the New York Times’Gretchen Morgenson wrote, “If you were hoping that things might be different in 2013 — you know, that bankers would be held responsible for bad behavior or that the government might actually assist troubled homeowners — you can forget it. A settlement reportedly in the works with big banks will soon end a review into foreclosure [4] abuses, and it means more of the same: no accountability for financial institutions and little help for borrowers.”

This type of clear condemnation of Wall Street and its lack of accountability remains a rare voice in mainstream media, with few willing to join Morgenson and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on their crusades against banking abuses.

"Failure of Epic Proportions": Treasury Nominee Jack Lew’s Pro-Bank, Austerity, Deregulation Legacy

Former bank regulator William Black and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi join us to dissect the career of Jack Lew, President Obama’s pick to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy Geither. Currently Obama’s chief of staff, Lew was an executive at Citigroup from 2006 to 2008 at the time of the financial crisis. He backed financial deregulation efforts while he headed the Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton. During that time, Clinton enacted two key laws to deregulate Wall Street: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Black, a white-collar criminologist and former senior financial regulator, is the author of "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." A contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, Taibbi is the author of "Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History." [includes rush transcript]

Surely We Have Learned Some Lessons Since 2001?

—By Kevin Drum  | Thu Jan. 10, 2013 10:35 PM PST

Fred Hiatt is disturbed by President Obama's apparent desire to disengage in Afghanistan and, more generally, to intervene less often in foreign countries. This inclination toward disengagement has taken hold of American public opinion before, he says:

Traditionally two philosophies have fueled it. One sees the United States as a moral exemplar but believes we aren’t obliged to solve the world’s problems.

The other is skeptical about America’s moral standing to impose its will, believing that more often than not it has used its power to exploit other people on behalf of U.S. corporations or other selfish interests.

 

Dean Baker: Wall Street thanks you for your service, Tim Geithner

First the treasury secretary propped up the big banks with public spending. Then he backed their agenda: cuts to public spending

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 January 2013 15.08 EST

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's departure from the Obama administration invites comparisons with Klemens von Metternich. Metternich was the foreign minister of the Austrian empire who engineered the restoration of the old order and the suppression of democracy across Europe after the defeat of Napoleon.

This was an impressive diplomatic feat – given the widespread popular contempt for Europe's monarchical regimes. In the same vein, protecting Wall Street from the financial and economic havoc they brought upon themselves and the country was an enormous accomplishment.

During his tenure as head of the New York Fed and then as treasury secretary, most, if not all, of the major Wall Street banks would have collapsed if the government had not intervened to save them. This process began with the collapse of Bear Stearns, which was bought up by JP Morgan in a deal involving huge subsidies from the Fed.
 

How to Pay for What We Need

Congress could create money, as it did during the Civil War, funding public projects that shock the economy back to life 

By Richard Striner

Just after the election of 2008, the Nobel laureate liberal economist Paul Krugman made a prophecy: we will not restore prosperity, he warned in The New York Review of Books, “unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead.” But as Krugman’s thoughts drifted back to the maxims of John Maynard Keynes—maxims he called “more relevant than ever”—our thoughts could be turning to the older and in some respects wiser innovations of President Lincoln and the Republican Congress during the Civil War. Here’s the gist of it: using the monetary methods of Lincoln, updated to employ the inflation-fighting tools of the Federal Reserve, we could pay for a faster recovery and a great many worthy projects without higher taxes, without more national debt, and believe it or not, without inflation. How? By letting Congress exercise a little-known power that is used (very quietly indeed) by the Federal Reserve: the power to create new money.

If you’re skeptical about this assertion, ask Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. In an interview with 60 Minutes on March 15, 2009, Scott Pelley asked Bernanke to state the cost to American taxpayers of the Fed’s attempts to prop up banks.

JP Morgan Gets a Big Holiday Gift From the SEC

Lina Khan
December 31, 2012 | 12:00 am

n 1996, the world learned a Japanese firm had cornered the copper market. The company, Sumitomo, was fined $125 million for squeezing copper supplies and artificially inflating prices--at that point the largest penalty ever levied by a U.S. government agency. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission called the scheme “one of the most serious worldwide manipulations” of a commodity in decades. Last Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission posted a decision that could effectively lead to a repeat of the Sumitomo corner, with one key difference: hoarding copper will now be legal.

Until now, the main people buying physical copper have been the people who use it, like manufacturers that produce basic industrial goods such as pipes and electrical wires. Speculators have been limited to trading in futures, which are forms of bets that link only indirectly with physical supply of copper. Two weeks ago, however, the SEC blessed a controversial fund designed by J.P. Morgan Chase that, for the first time, will let investors buy shares backed by physical, warehoused copper, to use as a form of investment.  

Bill Black: Krugman and Obama’s Dangerous Austerity Myths

Yves here. I have to confess, it is frustrating to see Krugman say many of the right things but not be willing to go too far afield of orthodox thinking.

By Bill Black


Austerity in response to the Great Recession has proven to be an economic weapon of mass destruction. On January 10, 2013, Paul Krugman (Nobel Laureate in Economics) and President Obama launched the same dangerous austerity myth in remarkably similar language.

January 10, 2013
Coins Against Crazies
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Lately, revenue has fallen far short of spending, mainly because of the depressed state of the economy. If you don’t like this, there’s a simple remedy: demand that Congress raise taxes or cut back on spending. And if you’re frustrated by Congress’s failure to act, well, democracy means that you can’t always get what you want.

Remarks by the President in Nomination of Secretary of the Treasury

And thanks in large part to [Treasury Secretary Geithner’s] steady hand, our economy has been growing again for the past three years, our businesses have created nearly 6 million new jobs.
And we’ve begun to reduce our deficit through a balanced mix of spending cuts and reforms to a tax code….

I know that many, perhaps most Americans, would read these quotations and think: “of course, they’re repeating obvious truisms.” Both quotations are, however, dangerous myths.