Corporations, pro-business nonprofits foot bill for judicial seminars

George Mason University top host of events

By Chris Young, Reity O'Brien, Andrea Fuller
6:00 am, March 28, 2013, Updated: 11:33 am, March 28, 2013

Conservative foundations, multinational oil companies and a prescription drug maker were the most frequent sponsors of more than 100 expense-paid educational seminars attended by federal judges over a 4 1/2-year period, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

Among the seminar titles were “The Moral Foundations of Capitalism,” “Corporations and the Limits of Criminal Law” and “Terrorism, Climate & Central Planning: Challenges to Liberty & the Rule of Law.”

Leading the list of sponsors of the 109 seminars identified by the Center were the conservative Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, The Searle Freedom Trust, also a supporter of conservative causes, ExxonMobil Corp., Shell Oil Co., pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and State Farm Insurance Cos. Each were sponsors of 54 seminars.
 

IRS To 'Social Welfare' Groups: Show Me The Political Ad Money

by Peter Overby

March 30, 201312:51 PM

 

There are still unanswered questions about the politically active 501(c)(4) "social welfare" groups. The anonymously funded entities' multimillion-dollar ad budgets helped to clog the airwaves last year.

How much did they really spend to intervene in the 2012 campaign? What kinds of sources supplied their money? What ties do they maintain with other nonprofit organizations or for-profit companies?

The IRS is now trying to address some of the unknowns by asking organizations to fill out a questionnaire about their finances.
 

How the Heritage Foundation Manufactured a New Obamacare Myth

By Jonathan Bernstein

Over the weekend, Alyene Senger at Heritage ran an item called “Obamacare at Three Years: Increasing Cost Estimates.” Her claim:

Over the last three years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has revised its cost estimates for Obamacare’s new entitlements—the Medicaid expansion and exchange subsidies—many times, and they have more than doubled since 2010.

And she has a chart showing estimated new costs rising from $898 billion in March 2010 to $1.6 trillion in February 2013. The chart is titled “Obamacare’s New Spending Estimates Keep Rising,” and includes text saying “The Congressional Budget Office as made several estimates of the 10-year cost of Obamacare’s new spending on the Medicaid expansion and exchange subsidies, and the costs keep rising.”

Slaves of Defunct Economists

Why politicians pursue austerity policies that never work.

By Henry Farrell

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
by Mark Blyth
Oxford University Press, 304 pp.

On January 25, the British statistics office announced that the United Kingdom’s economy had shrunk by 0.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012. After enduring two recessions in the last four years, Britain is now well on its way into a third. The pain has been compounded by a succession of austerity budgets, in which Britain’s Conservative-led government has tried to hack away at spending. Repeated rounds of cuts have battered the British economy. However, Britain’s chief economic policymaker, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, wants still more pain. He is pushing the government to identify £10 billion more in cuts this year.

This makes no economic sense. Olivier Blanchard, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, has pleaded for Britain to start focusing on growth rather than fiscal virtue, claiming that “we’ve never been passionate about austerity.” It doesn’t make any political sense, either. Voters like vague proposals for “reducing government waste” in the abstract, but hate cuts to programs that they care about. Why do so many members of the political elite disagree with Blanchard in their visceral passion for austerity? Why do they keep on pushing for pain when it threatens economic ruin and hurts their election chances?

New e-mails reveal Feds not “forthright” about fake cell tower devices

E-mails could have implications for accused tax fraudster caught via "stingray."

by Cyrus Farivar - Mar 27 2013, 9:20pm EDT

According to new Justice Department e-mails obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, and published on Wednesday, federal investigators have been routinely using “stingrays" to catch bad guys. A stingray is a device that can create a false cellphone tower, and allows authorities to determine a particular mobile phone’s precise location. Stingrays aren't new—law enforcement agencies nationwide are believed to have been using them for years.

But one e-mail in the new trove reveals something brand-new: that the Feds were not fully clear about the fact that they were specifically using stingrays (also known as “IMSI catchers”) when asking for permission to conduct electronic surveillance from federal magistrate judges.

 

Neonicotinoid pesticides 'damage brains of bees'

By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC World Service

Commonly used pesticides are damaging honey bee brains, studies suggest.

Scientists have found that two types of chemicals called neonicotinoids and coumaphos are interfering with the insect's ability to learn and remember.

Experiments revealed that exposure was also lowering brain activity, especially when the two pesticides were used in combination.

More 'Corporate Welfare': Obama Signs 'Monsanto Protection Act' Into Law 

- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

President Obama signed what has been dubbed the "Monsanto Protection Act" on Tuesday, legislation critics say amounts to "corporate welfare" for biotechnology corporations like Monsanto, and puts farmers and the environment in jeopardy.

Summing up the provision in H.R. 933: Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, Eric Darier, a senior campaigner on sustainable agriculture at Greenpeace International explains that it

will effectively bar US federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of genetically engineered (GE) crops even if they failed to be approved by the government's own weak approval process and no matter what the health or environmental consequences might be.

U.S. Pesticide Approval Process “Grievously Flawed”

By Carey L. Biron

WASHINGTON, Mar 28 2013 (IPS) - An environment group here is warning that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a key government regulator, may have been haphazardly approving thousands of pesticides for decades, some of which pose risks to both human and environmental health.


Following on two years of research, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a watchdog group, has found that as much as 65 percent of the 16,000 pesticides the EPA approved between the late 1970s and 2010 were greenlighted through a hasty and potentially incomplete process.

Paul Krugman: Cheating Our Children

So, about that fiscal crisis — the one that would, any day now, turn us into Greece. Greece, I tell
you: Never mind.

Over the past few weeks, there has been a remarkable change of position among the deficit scolds
who have dominated economic policy debate for more than three years. It’s as if someone sent out
a memo saying that the Chicken Little act, with its repeated warnings of a U.S. debt crisis that
keeps not happening, has outlived its usefulness. Suddenly, the argument has changed: It’s not
about the crisis next month; it’s about the long run, about not cheating our children. The deficit,
we’re told, is really a moral issue.

Slick, Paranoid Tea Party Video Aims for Violent Insurrection

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

March 26, 2013  |  Attendees at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) were reportedly thrilled by a short sci-fi video depicting a dictatorial near-future government and the underground "Movement on Fire" that springs up to resist it. The video, a thinly veiled advertisement for violent insurrection from the “Tea Party Patriots" group, boasts professional acting and Hollywood production values. But underneath its bright, professional sheen lurk dark overtones of End Times paranoia that will resonate with millions of American fundamentalists. Its apocalyptic imagery is as ancient as Revelations, its glossy look as modern as a Revlon ad, and its near-subliminal barrage of rapid-cut imagery rings with the terror-fueled sermons of 1,000 preachers.

Why Is Socialism Doing So Darn Well in Deep-Red North Dakota?

By Les Leopold

March 26, 2013  |  North Dakota is the very definition of a red state. It voted 58 percent to 39 percent for Romney over Obama, and its statehouse and senate have a total of 104 Republicans and only 47 Democrats. The Republican super-majority is so conservative it recently passed the nation's most severe anti-abortion resolution [3] – a measure that declares a fertilized human egg has the same right to life as a fully formed person.

But North Dakota is also red in another sense: it fully supports its state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND), a socialist relic that exists nowhere else in America. Why is financial socialism still alive in North Dakota? Why haven't the North Dakotan free-market crusaders slain it dead?

Because it works.

Paul Krugman :It Was Bankers That Brought Cyprus to the Brink

What is it about the islands around Europe's periphery?

Is there some peculiar psychological thing about proximity plus the illusion of isolation that makes them turn themselves into havens for runaway banks? Inquiring minds want to know.
 

Why the National Labor Relations Act Is a Weak Law Today - and How We Can Restore its Power 

Thursday, 28 March 2013 09:11  
By Ellen Dannin and Ann Hodges, Truthout | Op-Ed 

Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act to restore equality of bargaining power between employees and employers. The problem Congress saw was that while employers had the right to incorporate or form partnerships, employees had no legal right to form collective organizations. That inequality of bargaining power was used to depress wages and the purchasing power of wage earners, leading to economic depressions and recessions.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Congress decided it must end this inequality between employees, who had only the power of an individual, and employers, who had the legal right to become collective and pool their power by forming corporations and partnerships. That insight led Congress to enact the National Labor Relations Act to equalize bargaining power and restore prosperity to the United States.

The Confiscation Scheme Planned for U.S. and U.K. Depositors

By Ellen Brown

Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds. 

New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th:

The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . .
Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out.

 

Digital Grab: Corporate Power Has Seized the Internet

by Norman Solomon

If your daily routine took you from one homegrown organic garden to another, bypassing vast fields choked with pesticides, you might feel pretty good about the current state of agriculture.

If your daily routine takes you from one noncommercial progressive website to another, you might feel pretty good about the current state of the Internet.

Cyprus Has the Global Money Elite’s Fingerprints All Over It

By Richard Eskow | March 26, 2013

The debacle in Cyprus is far from over, but it’s already taught us some very important lessons. We’ve seen, for example, that the world’s financial leaders insist on clinging to the principles of austerity economics even after they’ve failed over and over again. They don’t seem very interested in learning from experience.

They don’t seem to be all that interested in principles of national sovereignty, either.

Not Just the Bees: Bayer's Pesticide May Harm Birds, Too

—By Tom Philpott | Wed Mar. 27, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Once again this spring, farmers will begin planting at least 140 million acres—a land mass roughly equal to the combined footprints of California and Washington state—with seeds (mainly corn and soy) treated with a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Commercial landscapers and home gardeners will get into the act, too—neonics are common in lawn and garden products. If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know all of that is probably bad news for honeybees and other pollinators, as a growing body of research shows—including three studies released just ahead of last year's planting season. 

But bees aren't the only iconic springtime creature threatened by the ubiquitous pesticide, whose biggest makers are the European giants Bayer and Syngenta. It turns out that birds are too, according to an alarming analysis co-authored by Pierre Mineau, a retired senior research scientist at Environment Canada (Canada's EPA), published by the American Bird Conservancy. And not just birds themselves, but also the water-borne insect species that serve as a major food source for birds, fish, and amphibians.

Paul Krugman: Britain's Prime Minister Is a Prisoner to His Policies

“If this plan is working, what would a failing one look like?” So asked Martin Wolf in his column in the Financial Times in response to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent speech insisting that his austerity policy was right, is right and is succeeding.

Simon Wren-Lewis, an economist at Oxford, went through Mr. Cameron’s assertions in some detail online, among other things catching him more or less lying about what the Office of Budget Responsibility — roughly speaking the counterpart of the Congressional Budget Office in the United States — actually said about the impact of austerity on growth. I was particularly struck by the way Mr. Cameron is still claiming that Britain’s low interest rates show that his policy is successful and necessary.

You don't 'own' your own genes

Researchers raise alarm about loss of individual 'genomic liberty' due to gene patents that may impact the era of personalized medicine
NEW YORK (March 25, 2013) -- Humans don't "own" their own genes, the cellular chemicals that define who they are and what diseases they might be at risk for. Through more than 40,000 patents on DNA molecules, companies have essentially claimed the entire human genome for profit, report two researchers who analyzed the patents on human DNA. Their study, published March 25 in the journal Genome Medicine, raises an alarm about the loss of individual "genomic liberty."

In their new analysis, the research team examined two types of patented DNA sequences: long and short fragments. They discovered that 41 percent of the human genome is covered by longer DNA patents that often cover whole genes. They also found that, because many genes share similar sequences within their genetic structure, if all of the "short sequence" patents were allowed in aggregate, they could account for 100 percent of the genome.
 

Free trade and unrestricted capital flow: How billionaires get rich and destroy the rest of us

3/26/2013 10:00am by Gaius Publius

Paul Krugman makes a point in this post about Cyprus that I’d like use to make a broader and more important point. His point is that Cyprus is already off the euro and has created its own currency, the Cyprus Euro, which at the moment is pegged to the other euro at 1:1. Why is a euro in a Cyprus bank different from other euros? Because you can’t move it freely, so it has less real value. (Read here to see why he thinks that; also here.)

My point, though, is a little different. My point is about unrestricted free trade and capital flow in general and why understanding both is crucial to understanding:

Trees Used to Create Recyclable, Efficient Solar Cell

Solar cells are just like leaves, capturing the sunlight and turning it into energy. It’s fitting that they can now be made partially from trees.

Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University researchers have developed efficient solar cells using natural substrates derived from plants such as trees. Just as importantly, by fabricating them on cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) substrates, the solar cells can be quickly recycled in water at the end of their lifecycle.

The technology is published in the journal Scientific Reports, the latest open-access journal from the Nature Publishing Group.

Why Does No One Speak of America’s Oligarchs?

One of the striking elements of the demonization of Cyprus was how it was depicted as a willing tool of Russian money launderers and oligarchs. Never mind the fact, as we pointed out, that Cyprus is not a tax haven but a low-tax jurisdiction, and in stark contrast with the Caymans and Malta, has double-taxation treaties signed with 46 nations and has (now more likely had) with six more being ratified. Nor is it much of a tax secrecy jurisdiction, according to the Financial Secrecy Index. Confusingly, in the overall ranking, lower numbers are worse (Switzerland as number 1 is the baaadest) but in the secrecy score used to derive the rankings, higher is worse, with 100 being utterly opaque. The total rank is a function of “badness” (secrecy score) and weight (amount of business done). You’ll notice that all the countries ranked as worse than Cyprus have secrecy scores more unfavorable than it, with the exception of Germany, which is a mere 1 point out of 100 less bad, and the UK, which scores considerably lower (Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands, would take issue with that reading, but he takes a more inclusive view of the boundaries of a financial services industry. For the UK, thus he not only includes the “state within a state” of the City of London, but also the UK’s secrecy jurisdictions, such as the Isle of Man, in his dim view of the UK as well as the US on secrecy). And even so, its greater volume of hidden activity gives it a much worse overall ranking. Of countries 21 tp 30, only 3 rank as less bad on secrecy: Canada, India, and South Korea.

 

Ash from refuse could become hydrogen gas

Every year, millions of tons of environmentally harmful ash is produced worldwide, and is mostly dumped in landfill sites or, in some countries, used as construction material. The ash is what is left when rubbish has been burnt in thermal power stations. A researcher from Lund University in Sweden has now developed a technique to use the ash to produce hydrogen gas. The method is presented in a new thesis.

The technique has significant potential: 20 billion litres of hydrogen gas a year, or 56 gigawatt-hours (GWh). Calculated as electricity, the energy is the equivalent of the annual needs of around 11 000 detached houses. Hydrogen gas is valuable and is viewed by many as an increasingly important energy source, for example as a vehicle fuel.

Frank Rich on the National Circus: How Iraq Wounded America

Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: what the Iraq War has wrought, Reince Priebus's GOP rebranding report, and Rob Portman's convenient gay-marriage reversal.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In The Greatest Story Ever Sold, written after the war's “Mission Accomplished” phase, you called the conflict a catastrophe “that might have been averted.” Looking back on it now, what surprised you most about how the war unfolded? And what do you think its most lasting impact on America will be? 
If there’s one opinion shared by the war’s critics and cheerleaders, it would be their shock in discovering the Bush administration’s utter incompetence in executing its own ambitions. Given that Bush and Cheney professed to believe that Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction, why did they assume the mission would be a cakewalk and have no Plan B for a protracted fight, let alone a multiyear occupation? (The answer can’t be that it’s all Donald Rumsfeld’s fault.) Then again, given the Bush team’s utter ignorance of the country it was invading, perhaps every element of this fiasco was foretold. 

Paul Krugman: Hot Money Blues

Whatever the final outcome in the Cyprus crisis — we know it’s going to be ugly; we just don’t
know exactly what form the ugliness will take — one thing seems certain: for the time being, and
probably for years to come, the island nation will have to maintain fairly draconian controls on the
movement of capital in and out of the country. In fact, controls may well be in place by the time
you read this. And that’s not all: Depending on exactly how this plays out, Cypriot capital controls
may well have the blessing of the International Monetary Fund, which has already supported such
controls in Iceland.

That’s quite a remarkable development. It will mark the end of an era for Cyprus, which has in
effect spent the past decade advertising itself as a place where wealthy individuals who want to
avoid taxes and scrutiny can safely park their money, no questions asked. But it may also mark at
least the beginning of the end for something much bigger: the era when unrestricted movement of
capital was taken as a desirable norm around the world.

147 People

By Richard Eskow | March 25, 2013

Can 147 people perpetuate economic injustice – and make it even worse? Can they subvert the workings of democracy, both abroad and here in the United States? Can 147 people hijack the global economy, plunder the environment, build a world for themselves that serves the few and deprives the many?

There must be some explanation for last week’s economic madness.

Leaked EPA Documents Expose Decades-Old Effort to Hide Dangers of Natural Gas Extraction

Efforts by lawmakers and regulators to force the federal government to better police the natural gas drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," have been thwarted for the past 25 years, according to an exposé in the New York Times. Studies by scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on fracking have been repeatedly narrowed in scope by superiors, and important findings have been removed under pressure from the industry. The news comes as the EPA is conducting a broad study of the risks of natural gas drilling with preliminary results scheduled to be delivered next year. Joining us is Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a firm that tracks environmental spills and releases across the country, based in Ithaca, New York, where fracking is currently taking place.