David Cay Johnston: The true cost of national security 

The Pentagon and the White House focus on the core Defense budget, but that’s not the half of it

Soon, we will get the president’s proposed fiscal 2014 spending plan. Much attention will focus on Social Security and Medicare, which have been flashpoints lately. Meanwhile, if coverage in years past is any guide, we can expect stories from many news outlets that will significantly understate a third huge slice of spending—the real costs of military and other national defense spending.

Chuck Hagel, on the griddle now as President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, famously called the Defense Department “bloated,” in a 2011 interview with Financial Times. But budget stories then and now tend to report on the base budget from the Department of Defense, leaving readers with the impression that that is the full cost of fulfilling the Constitutional mandate to “provide for the common defence.”

Rick Perlstein: Libertarian Developer's Ayn Rand Fantasy Is Detroit's Latest Nightmare

January 30, 2013  |  Check out what the loopy Ayn Randroids are up to now. In long-suffering Detroit, a libertarian real estate developer wants to buy a civic crown jewel, Belle Isle, the 982-acre park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead—think the Motor City’s Central Park— [5]and turn it into an independent nation, selling citizenships at $300,000 per. Not, mind you, out of any mercenary motives, says would-be founder Rodney Lockwood—but just “to provide an economic and social laboratory for a society which effectively addresses some of the most important problems of American, and the western world.” (Sic.)

Address how? Well, let’s say I’ve never seen a document [6] that better reveals the extent to which, for libertarians, “liberty” means the opposite of liberty—at least since Rick Santorum held up the company town in which his grandpa was entombed as a beacon of freedom.

Paul Krugman: Consumer Spending and Inequality Denial

I’ve been debating rising inequality with the usual suspects for a couple of decades (despite what it says on this piece, it was actually published in 1992). And what you always encounter from the right is a sort of defense in depth: claims, based on tortured statistics, that it isn’t happening; claims, based on similarly tortured statistics, that it doesn’t matter; and claims that anyway it’s a good thing. You might think that people would have to choose one of these lines: you can’t simultaneously say that inequality isn’t rising and that the rise is a good thing, can you? Well, yes you can; we’re engaged in a political defense of the 1% here, not research.

So, the latest is a piece by Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry purporting to debunk the notion of middle-class stagnation. Their key piece of evidence is the claim that spending on “basics” has been steadily falling as a share of income, showing that people are finding it ever easier to meet the essential demands of middle-class life.
 

Paul Krugman: Looking for Mr. Goodpain

Three years ago, a terrible thing happened to economic policy, both here and in Europe. Although the worst of the financial crisis was over, economies on both sides of the Atlantic remained deeply depressed, with very high unemployment. Yet the Western world’s policy elite somehow decided en masse that unemployment was no longer a crucial concern, and that reducing budget deficits should be the overriding priority. 

In recent columns, I’ve argued that worries about the deficit are, in fact, greatly exaggerated — and have documented the increasingly desperate efforts of the deficit scolds to keep fear alive. Today, however, I’d like to talk about a different but related kind of desperation: the frantic effort to find some example, somewhere, of austerity policies that succeeded. For the advocates of fiscal austerity — the austerians — made promises as well as threats: austerity, they claimed, would both avert crisis and lead to prosperity.

The Judicial Assault on Unions 

By Roy Ulrich

January 31, 2013  |  It should come as no shock that Republicans in Congress would like to see the power of labor further diminished. The same is true of governors and state legislatures in red and purple states such as Wisconsin and Indiana. But now conservative courts have joined the fray.

Just this past week, the National Labor Relations Board [3] was put in legal limbo — with the possibility that more than 300 of its decisions over the last year could be nullified — as a result of a federal appeals court in ruling in the nation’s capital that President Obama [4]’s recess appointments [5] to the Board were invalid.

Among the decisions that could be vacated are three recent rulings in which the Board had assumed a powerful role [6] in telling companies that they can’t issue blanket prohibitions on what their employees say on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

Dean Baker: The Folly of DC's Desperate Deficit Fear Mongers

The UK's looming triple-dip recession should be austerity's death knell, but in the fevered brains of Washington analysts it lives on

The news that the UK, with negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2012, faces the prospect of a triple-dip recession, should be the final blow to the intellectual credibility of deficit hawks. You just can't get more wrong than this flat-earth bunch of economic policy-makers.

They're pretty much batting zero. They failed to foresee the collapse of housing bubbles in the US and Europe and its consequent downturn. They grossly underestimated its severity after it hit. And their policy prescription of austerity has been shown to be wrong everywhere that applied it: in the US, the eurozone and, especially, the UK.

By all rights, these folks should be laughed out of town. They should be retrained for a job more suited to their skill set – preferably, something that doesn't involve numbers, or people.

America Is Turning Into One Big Prison for People in Debt

By Steve Fraser

January 29, 2013  |  Shakespeare’s Polonius offered this classic advice to his son: “neither a borrower nor a lender be.”  Many of our nation’s Founding Fathers emphatically saw it otherwise.  They often lived by the maxim: always a borrower, never a lender be.  As tobacco and rice planters, slave traders, and merchants, as well as land and currency speculators, they depended upon long lines of credit to finance their livelihoods and splendid ways of life.  So, too, in those days, did shopkeepers, tradesmen, artisans, and farmers, as well as casual laborers and sailors.  Without debt, the seedlings of a commercial economy could never have grown to maturity.

Ben Franklin, however, was wary on the subject. “Rather go to bed supperless than rise in debt” was his warning, and even now his cautionary words carry great moral weight.  We worry about debt, yet we can’t live without it.

Debt remains, as it long has been, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of capitalism.  For a small minority, it’s a blessing; for others a curse.  For some the moral burden of carrying debt is a heavy one, and no one lets them forget it.  For privileged others, debt bears no moral baggage at all, presents itself as an opportunity to prosper, and if things go wrong can be dumped without a qualm.

Americans shocked to learn that there isn’t actually a Social Security crisis

A survey shows that deficit fear-mongering works, but it's overcome by simple counter-arguments  

By Alex Pareene

The Washington Post’s WonkBlog has a scoop: People don’t want to cut Social Security!

The post concerns a recent survey that is actually pretty useful, in that it supports what should already be common sense: People have been led to believe that Social Security faces a crisis in funding. When you tell people some proposals for fixing it, they a) overwhelmingly choose to fund it more generously and b) decide that the program actually does not face any sort of crisis at all. A marketing firm hired by the National Academy of Social Insurance surveyed a random sampling of Americans and discovered that what people want is to raise taxes on rich (and regular!) people in order to fund more Social Security benefits, which is a good idea because the program is currently pretty stingy by international standards and Americans don’t actually have pensions anymore.
 

Little-known database sells millions of Americans’ salary information to debt collectors

By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, January 30, 2013 11:31 EST

The credit reporting agency Equifax has created a little-known database that uses employment records, often given freely by human resources departments around the country, to track detailed information on millions of Americans’ pay history, in effect leading employers to help debt collectors extract money from their workforce.

An Equifax subsidiary called The Work Number, according to an investigative report at MSNBC, is often used by larger companies to automate employee work information calls, giving the firm access to human resources data.

Smart Talk On The Next Austerity Disaster

By Robert Borosage | January 28, 2013

The United States is in the midst of the most protracted unemployment crisis in modern history, and for vast segments of the population, the recession has never ended. Wages are still sinking; more than 20 million people are in need of full-time work. Yet, the national debate is fixated on fixing the debt rather than fixing the economy.

This is “austerity” economics, which demands cuts in government spending in the belief that this will reduce government deficits, even as it costs jobs and imposes hardships on people.

Report: Unemployed people pay millions in needless fees under state-run payment-card programs

By Associated Press, Published: January 28 | Updated: Tuesday, January 29, 12:14 PM

WASHINGTON — Jobless Americans are paying millions in unnecessary fees to collect unemployment benefits because of state policies encouraging them to get the money through bank-issued payment cards, according to a new report from a consumer group.

People are using the fee-heavy cards instead of getting their payments deposited directly to their bank accounts. That’s because states issue bank cards automatically, require complicated paperwork or phone calls to set up direct deposit and fail to explain the card fees, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit group that seeks to protect low-income Americans from unfair financial-services products. An early copy of the report was obtained by The Associated Press.

Dean Baker: Timothy Geithner Saved Wall Street, Not the Economy

The accolades for Timothy Geithner came on so thick and heavy in the last week that it’s necessary for those of us in the reality-based community to bring the discussion back to earth. The basic facts of the matter are very straightforward. Timothy Geithner and the bailout he helped engineer saved the Wall Street banks. He did not save the economy.

We can’t know exactly what would have happened if we did not have the TARP in October of 2008. We do know there was a major effort at the time to exaggerate the dangers to the financial system in order to pressure Congress to pass the TARP.
 

Latest Pathetic Conservative Attack on Social Security: Disability Fraud Hysteria

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

January 28, 2013  |  Conservatives are not happy. Despite their best efforts, the public continues to give Social Security a big thumbs up [3], and the President has just launched his second term with a speech hailing the program as a force that strengthens America.

You can understand their frustration. They’ve tried so very hard to make Americans think that we cannot afford to treat sick, disabled and elderly people with dignity while we subsidize the rich and fight unnecessary wars. But the public hasn't bought their solvency fabrications. And we haven’t been fooled by various pretenses for cutting, from the “chained CPI” adjustment to extending the retirement age again [4]. Even the means-testing ruse [5], cloaked as sensitivity to the poor but intended to drain public support for the program, hasn’t worked out for them so far.
 

Paul Krugman: Makers, Takers, Fakers

Republicans have a problem. For years they could shout down any attempt to point out the extent to which their policies favored the elite over the poor and the middle class; all they had to do was yell “Class warfare!” and Democrats scurried away. In the 2012 election, however, that didn’t work: the picture of the G.O.P. as the party of sneering plutocrats stuck, even as Democrats became more openly populist than they have been in decades. 

As a result, prominent Republicans have begun acknowledging that their party needs to improve its image. But here’s the thing: Their proposals for a makeover all involve changing the sales pitch rather than the product. When it comes to substance, the G.O.P. is more committed than ever to policies that take from most Americans and give to a wealthy handful.

To End Extreme Poverty, Let’s Try Ending Extreme Wealth

By Sam Pizzigati | January 27, 2013 

The world’s wealthy gathered in the Alps again last week to discuss how to ‘solve’ the world’s problems. The world’s biggest problem, suggests one top global anti-poverty outfit, may be their fortunes.

Apologists for inequality have a standard retort to anyone who calls for a more equal distribution of the world’s treasure. If you took all the wealth of the wealthy and divvied it up equally among all the poor, the retort goes, no one would gain nearly enough to accomplish much of anything.

Oxfam International, one of the world’s premiere anti-poverty charitable organizations, would beg to differ. The world’s top 100 billionaires now hold so much wealth, says a new Oxfam report, that just the increase in their net worth last year would be “enough to make extreme poverty history four times over.”
 

Paul Krugman: Coin or Not, Is There a Plan?

If I'd spent the past five years living in a monastery or something, I would take the Treasury Department's recent declaration that the trillion-dollar coin option is out as a sign that there's some other plan ready to go. Maybe the 14th Amendment, maybe moral obligation coupons or some other form of scrip, but something.

And maybe there is a plan. But as we all know, the last debt ceiling confrontation crept up on the White House because President Obama refused to believe that Republicans would actually threaten to provoke default. Is the White House being realistic this time, or does it still rely on the sanity of crazies?
 

US unions' continued decline masks new forms of worker activism

Michael Paarlberg
guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 January 2013 12.39 EST
America's long and steady march toward a fully disposable workforce continues apace, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week. Union membership is at its lowest point in nearly a century, with just 11.3% of all workers – the same level it was in 1916. To put this in proper historical perspective, union members are as rare today as they were at a time when being one could get you shot to death in a mining camp by the Colorado national guard.

Not that there is a great public outcry to return to the halcyon days of garment factory fires and tubercular slaughterhouses, or workers rallying to demand their bosses take away their pensions and bathroom breaks. Surveys show that most people wish they had more, not less input into their working conditions, and that a majority of non-union workers would choose to join a union, given the opportunity. Most do not get that opportunity, whether due to outright intimidation, or the ongoing shift of large parts of the economy toward part-time, temporary, low-wage and no-benefit jobs.
 

Galbraith: Is This the End for the Deficit Drones? 

By James K. Galbraith

January 23, 2013  |  In wars, sometimes there comes a moment when the tide turns. The collapse of Ludendorff's offensive in 1918 presaged the Armistice;  failure in the Ardennes meant the end for Germany in 1944.

Today we have two drone wars in a similar state. One is mainly in Pakistan. Built on a gee-whiz technology that can't do what it promised, this war has claimed too many victims for too little effect. It is a diplomatic disaster and its days are numbered, almost surely, for that reason.

The other drone war is in Washington. The drones are in groups with names like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and Campaign to Fix the Debt. They drone on, and on, about the calamities that await unless we cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That the goal of the deficit drones is to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has been plain for years to anyone who looks at where the money comes from. It comes largely from Peter G. Peterson, a billionaire former secretary of Commerce under Nixon, who is Captain Ahab to Social Security's Moby Dick. And when one trick, such as privatization, falls flat, his minions always have another, whether it's raising the retirement age or changing the COLA. But a cut by any other name is still, and always, just a cut.

The Myth of Living Beyond Our Means

Friday, 25 January 2013 11:42  
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog | Op-Ed 

Brace yourself. In coming weeks you’ll hear there’s no serious alternative to cutting Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on middle class, and decimating what’s left of the federal government’s discretionary spending on everything from education and job training to highways and basic research.

“We” must make these sacrifices, it will be said, in order to deal with our mushrooming budget deficit and cumulative debt.
 

Billionaires Covertly Funding Attacks on Climate Science

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly

Secretive groups known as Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund are funneling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate science “without revealing the identities of [their] wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.”

Big surprise. An audit trail reveals that infamous American billionaire and financier of right-wing causes Charles Koch indirectly supports the Donors groups through a third-party organization called the Knowledge and Progress Fund. That group does not advertise its connection to Charles Koch and his brother, David Koch.

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, estimates that in the past decade roughly $500 million has been given to organizations bent on undermining the science of global warming, with much of the cash flowing through such stealth third parties.

As Federal Prosecutors Cash In, Big Bankers Go Unpunished

By Richard Eskow | January 28, 2013

We needed heroes after the financial crisis. Instead we got bureaucrats, compromisers, and perhaps something much worse. Federal law enforcement officials, our “thin gray line” against banker crime, were charged with restoring the balance of justice and reducing the threat of future crises. Seems they had other things on their minds.

Now the Obama administration’s first-term posse is riding off into the sunset. The most visible departure is Deputy Attorney General Lanny Breuer. Remember those submissive or avaricious sheriffs in the old Westerns, the ones who were always letting the bad guys run wild ?  ”Sorry, Ma’am, I’d like to help you and the boy but there ain’t nothin’ I can do.”  That’s Breuer, whose shattered credibility and extreme reluctance to prosecute has become the stuff of legend.

Boehner’s 10-Year Budget Plan: Take Unpopular Ryan Budget Cuts. Then Double Them.

By Bill Scher | January 25, 2013

To get House conservatives to capitulate on temporarily suspending the debt limit without securing any spending cuts, Boehner made a stunning pledge: the upcoming House budget would eliminate the deficit in 10 years.

As a talking point, that sounds great. As a budget, it is literally double the crazy of the last House Republican budget, written and personified by failed VP candidate Paul Ryan.
 

Iceland Inches Toward Direct Democracy

Sunday, 27 January 2013 07:10 
By Sam Knight, Truthout | News Analysis 

When the global financial system crumbled over four years ago, Iceland played host to one of the most dramatic economic collapses in modern history. Its three largest banks were unable to refinance debt roughly ten times the size of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), causing one of the world's wealthiest nations to limp with hat in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The island became a symbol for capitalism's systemic failure.

Now, Iceland is making headlines for more positive reasons: activists there are in the process of advancing some of the strongest freedom of information laws and journalist protections in the world, and the Icelandic economy, while still beset by problems, is significantly outperforming other crisis-stricken countries.