Abolish the 401(k)

The real crisis facing America's aging society is not Social Security, but private retirement plans

By Michael Lind

America’s retirement security policies are facing a major crisis. No, not the problem that Pete Peterson, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and other so-called deficit hawks have become famous for exaggerating — therelatively minor mismatch between promised Social Security benefits and scheduled Social Security payroll taxes in the 2030s. The real crisis facing current and future retirees in America’s aging society is the failure of the private components of America’s mixed public-and-privateretirement system.

When Social Security was created in 1935, it was not intended to be the sole source of retirement income for most Americans. It was assumed that employer-provided defined benefit pensions with guaranteed payouts would supplement Social Security checks for many workers after they retired.
 

Monsanto: A Corporate Profile Sheds Light on GE Seed Giant’s Dark History

Food & Water Watch

From its beginnings as a small chemical company in 1901, Monsanto has grown into the largest biotechnology seed company in the world with net sales of $11.8 billion, 404 facilities in 66 countries across six continents and products grown on more than 282 million acres worldwide. Today, the consumer advocacy nonprofit Food & Water Watch released its report, Monsanto: A Corporate Profile.

“There is a growing movement of people around the country who want to take on Monsanto’s undue influence over lawmakers, regulators and the food supply,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of the book Foodopoly. “People need to know about Monsanto’s history as a heavy industrial chemical manufacturer; a reality at odds with the environmentally friendly, feed-the-world image that the company spends millions trying to convey.”

It's Time to Start Paying Close Attention to the Mechanisms of the Deregulation Machine

by Ralph Nader



It's time to start paying close attention to the mechanisms of the deregulation machine. For the past 30 years, the business lobbies have pushed Congress and the executive branch to disassemble the regulatory system that has protected us from the worst excesses of Wall Street and Big Business. The catastrophic effects of this dismantling are well known -- the misbehavior of Wall Street brought us the financial collapse, the global recession, and the dominance of the largest banks being both "Too Big to Fail" and their culpable executives "Too Big to Jail".



Despite negative public sentiment and the rise of the Occupy movement, the avarice on Wall Street arrogantly continues on. The big banks are now even bigger and more powerful than they were in 2008 when they were bailed out by the U.S. taxpayers.

Key data missing at troubled Bank of Cyprus - inquiry

Some key data about bond purchases by Bank of Cyprus - now the focus of a controversial EU-IMF bailout - is missing, investigators have found.

The gaps were found in computer records studied by a financial consultancy, Alvarez and Marsal, Cypriot media say.

Bank of Cyprus - the island's biggest bank - bought Greek bonds which turned into some 1.9bn euros (£1.6bn; $2.4bn) of losses in the Greek debt crisis.
 

America Is Ruled by Billionaires, and They Are Coming After the Last Shreds of Our Democracy

By Michael Brenner

April 4, 2013  |  Plutocracy literally means rule by the rich. “Rule” can have various shades of meaning: those who exercise the authority of public office are wealthy; their wealth explains why they hold that office; they exercise that authority in the interests of the rich; they have the primary influence over who holds those offices and the actions they take. These aspects of “plutocracy” are not exclusive. Government of the rich and for the rich need not berun directly by the rich. Also, in some exceptional circumstances rich individuals who hold powerful positions may govern in the interests of the many, e.g. Franklin Roosevelt.

The United States today qualifies as a plutocracy – on a number of grounds.  Let’s look at some striking bits of evidence. Gross income redistribution upwards in the hierarchy has been a feature of American society for the past decades. The familiar statistics tell us that nearly 80% of the national wealth generated since 1973 has gone to the upper 2%, 65% to the upper 1 per cent. Estimates as to the rise in real income for salaried workers over the past 40 years range from 20% to 28 %. In that period, real GDP has risen by 110% – it has more than doubled.

Efforts to Deliver "Kill Shot" to Paid Sick Leave Tied to ALEC

Thursday, 04 April 2013 10:10  
By Mary Bottari and Brendan Fischer, PR Watch | Report 

In a victory for working families, New York is poised to become the largest U.S. city to require businesses offer paid sick days to workers. Community activists and labor leaders struck a deal with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to allow a vote on a paid sick leave ordinance that would cover almost 1 million people. But workers in more than 700 other large American cities must choose between spreading their illness and getting paid.

Advocates have helped pass paid sick days laws in cities like San Francisco, Washington DC, Seattle and Portland, but big business has been pushing back. Corporate-backed bills have passed at the state level in Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Mississippi that would preempt (or as one GOP operative put it, "deliver the kill shot" to) local laws requiring paid sick days. Similar bills are on the legislative docket in Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Washington. This paid sick days preemption effort can be traced back to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Why Was Paul Krugman So Wrong?

William Greider

April 1, 2013  

Paul Krugman, the popular columnist and Nobel economist, recently likened himself to heroic dissenters who stood up to the war whoops and opposed the invasion of Iraq. The go-to-war consensus among policy elites overwhelmed skeptics and tragedy ensued. Professor Krugman evidently sees himself playing a similar role on important economic controversies.

“What we should have learned from the Iraq debacle was that you should always be skeptical and that you should never rely on supposed authority,” Krugman wrote in his New York Times column. “If you hear that ‘everyone’ supports a policy, whether it’s a war of choice or fiscal austerity, you should ask whether ‘everyone’ has been defined to exclude anyone expressing a different opinion.”

Paul Krugman: A Better Road, By Rail

A new paper on the Vox Web site by the European economists Rafael Lalive, Simon Luechinger and Armin Schmutzler on the effects of increased rail service makes clever use of natural experiments created by changes in German ownership and regulation. The results aren't that surprising — more frequent rail service sharply reduces pollution and other costs associated with driving — but it's good to have this kind of solid work to back our intuitions.

Ban pesticides linked to bee deaths, say MPs

By Matt McGrath  
Environment correspondent, BBC News

The UK government should suspend the use of a number of pesticides linked to the deaths of bees, a committee of MPs has said.

Members of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee are calling for a moratorium on the use of sprays containing neonicotinoids.

Britain has refused to back an EU ban on these chemicals saying their impact on bees is unclear.

The "Chained CPI": Why It's Bad for Social Security and Why the White House Shouldn't Be Touting It

Friday, 05 April 2013 11:07

The White House and prominent Democrats are talking about reducing future Social Security payments by using a formula for adjusting for inflation that’s stingier than the current one. It’s called the “Chained CPI.” I did this video so you can understand it — and understand why it’s so wrongheaded.

Even Social Security’s current inflation adjustment understates the true impact of inflation on the elderly. That’s because they spend 20 to 40 percent of their incomes on health care, and health-care costs have been rising faster than inflation. So why adopt a new inflation adjustment that’s even stingier than the current one?

Paul Krugman: The Urge to Purge

When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn’t even try to limit the damage. According to Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury secretary, urged him to “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers. ... It will purge the rottenness out of the system.” Don’t try to hasten recovery, warned the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, because “artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone.”

Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a certain smugness. After all, modern macroeconomics had shown how wrong they were, and we wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, would we?

Detective work uncovers under-reported overfishing

Excessive catches by Chinese vessels threaten livelihoods and ecosystems in West Africa.

Christopher Pala

02 April 2013

It is a whopper of a catch, in more ways than one: China is under-reporting its overseas fishing catch by more than an order of magnitude, according to a study¹ published on 23 March. The problem is particularly acute in the rich fisheries of West Africa, where a lack of transparency in reporting is threatening efforts to evaluate the ecological health of the waters.

“We can’t assess the state of the oceans without knowing what’s being taken out of them,” says Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who led the study. The unreported catch is crippling the artisanal fisheries that help to feed West African populations, he says.

Gaius Publius: When do we start depleting the Social Security Trust Fund? Soon.

This post about the Social Security Trust Fund is a follow-up to this post about the bipartisan push to rollback Social Security. In that piece, I said:

For the owners of the country (and their paid national managers), the real emergency associated with Social Security isn’t the day the last dollar will leave the Trust Fund. It’s the day the first dollar will leave. That’s a whole different problem, and a whole different timeline, for them. How did I come to that conclusion? Read on.

That’s pretty straightforward. A little radical, but not complicated. Read the rest to see the logic that leads me to that conclusion. I also promised:

Have Wall Street’s “Third Way” Democrats Ever Been Right About Anything?

By Richard Eskow | April 5, 2013


Have the Wall Street Democrats of “Third Way” or their predecessors in the Clintonite “Democratic Leadership Council” ever been right about an important economic issue?

That’s not meant as a thoughtless insult or flippant one-liner.  We consider it a legitimate line of inquiry, especially at a time when their pronouncements are being used as ammunition for an aggressive campaign against Social Security, Medicare, and other vital government programs.
 

Data Leak Shakes Notion of Secret Offshore Havens and, Possibly, Nerves

BRUSSELS — They are a large and diverse group that includes a Spanish heiress; the daughter of the former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos; and Denise Rich, the former wife of the disgraced trader Marc Rich, who was pardoned by President Bill Clinton. But, according to a trove of secret financial information released Thursday, all have money and share a desire to hide it.

And, it seems safe to say, they — and thousands of others in Europe and far beyond, in places like Mongolia — are suddenly very anxious after the leak of 2.5 million files detailing the offshore bank accounts and shell companies of wealthy individuals and tax-averse companies.

The 1% Bug-Out Plan: Why Third-World Billionaires Are Buying Fortresses in London, New York and Miami

By Lynn Stuart Parramore 

April 2, 2013  |  A recent article from Vanity Fair [3] paints a curious picture of London’s well-heeled Knightsbridge, a neighborhood of quaint Victorian houses and elegant hotels serving high tea. Today, a ginormous complex of concrete and metal towers looms above; a development some call the world’s most exclusive address. Though London has long been a place where the cops don’t even carry guns, security is the watchword at One Hyde Park: high-tech panic rooms, bulletproof glass and “bowler-hatted guards trained by British Special Forces” offer residents the promise of perfect safety and privacy in luxurious surroundings.

Only, nobody really lives there. At night, the building is nearly pitch-dark despite the fact that most of the units have been sold.

The story of who bought these apartments and why reveals the complex dynamics of a tectonic economic shift that is creating a bumper crop of billionaires in the Third World as the austerity-strapped First World stagnates. This year, Forbes [4]magazine’s [4] [4]annual list of billionaires [4] included the first recorded in Angola, Nepal, Swaziland and Vietnam. Japan, once second in the number of billionaires, has been left behind by Russia and China. Europe long boasted the most billionaires after the U.S. but the Asia-Pacific region has taken off and may soon leave Europe in the dust. Today it is home to 386 10-figure fortunes (a decade ago, there were only 61). The world’s wealthiest person is a Mexican telecom mogul, Carlos Slim [5].
 

A MuckReads Guide to North Korea

ProPublica, April 2, 2013, 2:31 p.m.

As tensions simmer over North Korea’s latest nuclear threats, we take a look at some of the best reading on Kim Jong Un, the prospects for a nuclear conflict and life in the DPRK. What did we miss? Tweet your recommended reading with #MuckReads or leave us a note in the comments below.

Meet Kim Jong Un, Time, February 2012
When Kim Jong Il died in December 2011, there was little known about his successor Kim Jong Un. “The only sure thing for now is that Kim Jong Un is the least-known and understood leader ever of a nuclear-armed nation,” wrote Bill Powell. Powell explores the life of Kim’s third son, from his childhood spent playing pickup basketball to his schooling in Switzerland, and his eventual ascension of power.

Oh rot, the White House just gutted the new food safety rules

By Tom Laskawy

A little over two years ago, Congress passed and President Obama signed a historic reform to America’s food safety laws, the Food Safety and Modernization Act. It was the first major update in over 80 years to the laws that aim to keep our food from killing us.

The new law gave the feds broad new enforcement powers to do things that most Americans probably thought they could do already — issuing mandatory food recalls, for example, and requiring frequent inspections of the riskiest food production facilities, and prosecuting executives of companies that knowingly ship contaminated food. Good news!

And now for the bad news. It looks like several of those new protections were quietly gutted earlier this year by a White House office charged with reviewing new regulations for their impact on corporate America.

UTHealth research: Vermont's health care reform has lessons for other states

Paper will appear tomorrow in the New England Journal of Medicine

HOUSTON – (April, 3 2013) – Vermont's aggressive health care reform initiatives can serve as a roadmap for other states, according to a Master of Public Health candidate at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The paper, "Lessons from Vermont's Health Care Reform," will appear tomorrow in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study's author, Laura Grubb, M.D., of The University of Texas School of Public Health, part of UTHealth, wrote that Vermont is well ahead of most other states in implementing federal and state health care reforms.

"Vermont is progressive," said Grubb, also a fellow in adolescent medicine at the UTHealth Medical School. "They didn't wait until each step of the Affordable Care Act had to be implemented. They voted on their own state-based reform system."

Who Polices Prosecutors Who Abuse Their Authority? Usually Nobody

by Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica, and Sergio Hernandez,
Special to ProPublica, April 3, 2013, 5:30 a.m.

This is Part 1 of a series. Read Part 2.

The murder case against Tony Bennett seemed pretty straightforward.

Shortly before midnight on May 7, 1994, police found a 26-year-old man in the foyer of an apartment building near Flushing, Queens. Jake Powell was near death, blood pouring from a gunshot wound, but he managed to speak the name of the man who had shot him: "Tony Bennett."

Bennett, a two-time felon, was eventually captured, convicted of murder, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Breakthrough in hydrogen fuel production could revolutionize alternative energy market

New method is environmentally friendly and inexpensive

A team of Virginia Tech researchers has discovered a way to extract large quantities of hydrogen from any plant, a breakthrough that has the potential to bring a low-cost, environmentally friendly fuel source to the world.

"Our new process could help end our dependence on fossil fuels," said Y.H. Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering "Hydrogen is one of the most important biofuels of the future."

Hedrick Smith: It’s Human Deficits, Not Budget Deficits

By Isaiah J. Poole | April 3, 2013

Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith is definitely on a mission these days, barnstorming the country not only to promote his latest book, “Who Stole the American Dream?,” but to help us change the focus of the Washington political debate from debt and deficits to restoring the economic prosperity of working-class Americans.

Felony Charges Dropped for Virginia Republican Who Trashed Voter Registration Forms Last Year

Did conflicts of interest by Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Prosecutor Marsha Garst play a role in dismissal?...

 

By Brad Friedman on 4/3/2013, 6:05am PT 

 

Given the professed concerns about election fraud among Virginia Republicans, it seems somewhat astonishing that the man at the center of the Commonwealth's most notorious fraud scandal last year seems to be getting off the hook after initially being charged with 13 criminal counts including eight felony charges.

 Colin Small, a Republican Party Voter Registration Supervisor who secretly tossed filled-out voter registration forms into a dumpster last year, had all of his felony charges dropped by the local Republican Commonwealth Attorney prosecuting the case yesterday.
 

Senses of Entitlement

by Hendrik Hertzberg
April 8, 2013

Names make news, an old newsroom motto has it. But names also make opinions. What something gets called can have more spin on it than a Mariano Rivera cutter, whether the person doing the calling intends it that way or not. Sometimes the difference between positive and negative is a matter of taste, literally or figuratively. (My sweet might be your treacly. Or your cloying.) Sometimes the difference is a product of circumstances, as when yesterday’s beachfront property becomes today’s flood zone. Sometimes it gets all judgmental. After a couple of Martinis one may regard oneself as pleasantly pixillated, but one’s spouse may consider one drunk as a skunk.

Dean Baker: As Profit Shares Hit New Highs, Washington Focuses on Abuse of Disability System

Monday, 01 April 2013 11:52  
By Dean Baker, Truthout | News Analysis 

The Commerce Department released data on corporate profits last week that showed the before-tax profit share in 2012 reaching its highest level since 1951. The after-tax profit share edged down by one-tenth of a percentage point from its 2011 level, but was still higher than every other year since 1930. Naturally this new information led the Very Serious People (VSP) in Washington to focus on the problems of abuses of the Social Security disability system.

If soaring profits and rising disability rates seem unrelated, then you better look closer. The most obvious reason that profit shares are soaring is that high unemployment takes away workers' bargaining power. As a result of the collapse of the housing bubble, the economy is still down almost 9 million jobs from its trend growth path.

The Treason of the Intellectuals

Posted on Mar 31, 2013

By Chris Hedges

The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens—did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.

Aryan Brotherhood of Texas: How did neo-Nazi prison gangs become so powerful?

By Jon Kelly  
BBC News Magazine, Washington DC

Three US justice officials who tackled white supremacist prison gangs have been killed. Originally formed to fight other gangs, these groups are now accused of a range of criminal activities on the outside, from drug smuggling and kidnapping to murder. How did neo-Nazi prisoners set up huge criminal networks?

With skinhead haircuts and swastika tattoos, their leaders are buried deep within the brutal confines of America's penitentiaries.

But three murders in less than three months have shone a spotlight on far-right prison gangs, whose empire of drug-dealing, racketeering and murder extends well beyond the walls and barbed wire around them.

Paul Krugman: Lessons From a Comeback

Modern movement conservatism, which transformed the G.O.P. from the moderate party of
Dwight Eisenhower into the radical right-wing organization we see today, was largely born in
California. The Golden State, even more than the South, created today’s religious conservatism; it
elected Ronald Reagan governor; it’s where the tax revolt of the 1970s began. But that was then. In
the decades since, the state has grown ever more liberal, thanks in large part to an ever-growing
nonwhite share of the electorate.

As a result, the reign of the Governator aside, California has been solidly Democratic since the late
1990s. And ever since the political balance shifted, conservatives have declared the state doomed.
Their specifics keep changing, but the moral is always the same: liberal do-gooders are bringing
California to its knees.
 

Corporate Kangaroo Courts Supplant Our Seventh Amendment Rights

By Jim Hightower, Truthout | News Analysis



Being wronged by a corporation is painful enough, but just try getting your day in court. Most Americans don't realize it, but our Seventh Amendment right to a fair jury trial against corporate wrongdoers has quietly been stripped from us. Instead, we are now shunted into a stacked-deck game called "Binding Mandatory Arbitration." Proponents of the process hail it as superior to the courts — "faster, cheaper and more efficient!" they exclaim.



But does it deliver justice? It could, for the original concept of voluntary, face-to-face resolution of conflict by a neutral third party makes sense in many cases. But remember what Mae West said of her own virtue: "I used to be Snow White, then I drifted." Today's practice of arbitration has drifted far away from the purity of the concept.

From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital

July 30, 2010

By Michael

 

As published in Critique, based on a presentation given at the China Academy of Sciences, School of Marxist Studies in Beijing in November 2009, and at the Left Forum in New York City, March 20, 2010.

Classical economists developed the labor theory of value to isolate economic rent, which they defined as the excess of market price and income over the socially necessary cost of production (value ultimately reducible to the cost of labor). A free market was one free of such “unearned” income – a market in which prices reflected actual necessary costs of production or, in the case of public services and basic infrastructure, would be subsidized in order to make economies more competitive. Most reformers accordingly urged – and expected – land, monopolies and banking privileges to be nationalized, or at least to have their free-lunch income taxed away.

In keeping with his materialist view of history, Marx expected banking to be subordinated to the needs of industrial capitalism. Equity investment – followed by public ownership of the means of production under socialism – seemed likely to replace the interest-extracting “usury capital” inherited from antiquity and feudal times: debts mounting up at compound interest in excess of the means to pay, culminating in crises marked by bank runs and property foreclosures.

But as matters have turned out, the rentier interests mounted a Counter-Enlightenment to undermine the reforms that promised to liberate society from special privilege.