There is no alternative

Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish. Is democracy dead?

by Henry Farrell

Last September, Il Partito Democratico, the Italian Democratic Party, asked me to talk about politics and the internet at its summer school in Cortona. Political summer schools are usually pleasant — Cortona is a medieval Tuscan hill town with excellent restaurants — and unexciting. Academics and public intellectuals give talks organised loosely around a theme; in this case, the challenges of ‘communication and democracy’. Young party activists politely listen to our speeches while they wait to do the real business of politics, between sessions and at the evening meals.

This year was different. The Italian Democratic Party, which dominates the country’s left-of-centre politics, knew that it was in trouble. A flamboyant blogger and former comedian named Beppe Grillo had turned his celebrity into an online political force, Il Movimento 5 Stelle (the Five Star Movement), which promised to do well in the national elections. The new party didn’t have any coherent plan beyond sweeping out Old Corruption, but that was enough to bring out the crowds. The Five Star Movement was particularly good at attracting young idealists, the kind of voters who might have been Democrats a decade before.

What Went Wrong in West, Texas — and Where Were the Regulators?

by Theodoric Meyer
ProPublica, April 25, 2013, 10:56 a.m.

April 25: This post has been corrected.

A week after a blast at a Texas fertilizer plant killed at least 15 people and hurt more than 200, authorities still don’t know exactly why the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company plant exploded.

Here’s what we do know: The fertilizer plant hadn’t been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. Its owners do not seem to have told the Department of Homeland Security that they were storing large quantities of potentially explosive fertilizer, as regulations require. And the most recent partial safety inspection of the facility in 2011 led to $5,250 in fines.

Bayer and Syngenta Lobby Furiously Against EU Efforts to Limit Pesticides and Save Bees

by Rebekah Wilce — April 22, 2013 - 6:53am

Bee populations have been declining rapidly worldwide in recent years -- in the U.S., they have declined by almost 50 percent just since October 2012, according to The Ecologist. The problem is complex, with possible culprits including certain parasites (like Varroa mites), viruses, pesticides, and industrial agriculture. But two studies published in early 2012 in the journal Science suggested a particularly strong connection between the use of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids and the decline of both bumble bee and honeybee populations.

These and other studies led the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to recommend a two-year ban of the most controversial neonicotinoids by the European Commission: thiamethoxam, manufactured by Swiss company Syngenta; and imidacloprid and clothianidin, manufactured by German company Bayer. Private letters recently obtained and released by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) reveal that Bayer and Syngenta have engaged in furious lobbying against these measures. So far, the proposed partial ban has failed to reach a qualified majority of member states in the Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health.

U.S. gives big, secret push to Internet surveillance

Justice Department agreed to issue "2511 letters" immunizing AT&T and other companies participating in a cybersecurity program from criminal prosecution under the Wiretap Act, according to new documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

by Declan McCullagh | April 24, 2013 8:59 AM PDT

Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws.

The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors' Internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12.

Speaking Truth to Power: Ridenhour Prizes Recognize Brave Journalists Who Produced Great Work Against All Odds.

By Anna Simonton

April 25, 2013  |  For ten years, The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation have awarded The Ridenhour Prizes annually, honoring individuals who have shown courage in speaking truth to power. Named for Ron Ridenhour, a Vietnam veteran who exposed the atrocities of the Mei Lai massacre and subsequently became an investigative journalist, past awards have gone to such luminaries as Daniel Ellsberg, Gloria Steinem, Howard Zinn, Jimmy Carter, Bill Moyers, and John Lewis. Most awards though, have gone to whistleblowers, activists, writers, and filmmakers who are not household names, but should be.

 

On Wednesday this year's award-winners were honored in a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington DC. Here's a rundown of the events:

 

The Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling went to Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist, filmmaker and founder of the immigration awareness organization Define American. Unable to accept the award in person, Vargas sent a pre-recorded video in which he described his journey as an undocumented immigrant.

The Strange Billionaire Brothers Behind America's Predator Drones -- And Their Very Strange Past

By Yasha Levine

April 24, 2013  |  Gray Butte, CA: It's around 1 p.m. when my buddy Dave and I finally spot the General Atomics drone base, way out in the wastelands of the Mojave Desert.

 

We're on the border of San Bernardino and Los Angeles Counties. There's not much around for miles--nothing but sandy soil, rocks, Joshua trees, an abandoned trailer here and there, heaps of trash and tires. There's also a salvage yard full of airplane parts a few miles down the road, as well as a dairy plant and a foul-smelling high density feed lot crammed with miserable dairy cows reeking of shit and piss, baking in the desert sun. Next door to that is a trailer with a sign offering baby goats for sale.

We stop short of the gate, pulling over on the shoulder. Dave is a Victorville native whose dad was in the Air Force. He' s been around drones since they started popping up here in the 1990s. Right after high school, he even scored a brief gig with the infamous Pinkertons, guarding an early prototype of the Predator. But today in our drop-top Mustang rental car--a perfect car for drone hunting--Dave and I look just like a couple'a tourists. I pretend to fumble with the roof controls while we check out the scene.

Even Harsh Frontline Program on Retirement Investments Understates How Bad They Are

Wall Street must get indigestion every time Frontline rolls out another program showing the depths of its chicanery. The only problem is the industry deserves much worse punishment.

The latest report, The Retirement Gamble, focuses on the scams in the retirement industry, the retail brokers and asset managers who sell products to 401 (k)s and other tax exempt plans. Anyone who knows this arena will find that the report covers familiar terrain. But the appalling fact remains that ordinary Americans who don’t have the time or interest to be full time investors but want to take prudent steps to prepare for retirement are systematically fleeced by the industry. And due to the time limits and complexity of the terrain, the program can hit only on some important issues.

Six Claims on Detainee Torture, Skewered

by Christie Thompson
ProPublica, April 22, 2013, 4:04 p.m.

Among the news that ended up being buried in the events last week: A nonpartisan think tank, the Constitution Project, released a scathing, 577-page report on the U.S.’s treatment, and torture, of detainees in the aftermath of 9/11. The investigation began in 2009, after Obama opposed creating a “truth commission.”

With a Senate investigation of detainee treatment still classified, the report from the bipartisan task force is the most comprehensive public review to date. The 11-member panel interviewed more than 100 former military officials, detainees and policymakers.

Creatures of the Dark: Wisconsin GOP Caught Deleting Records, Again

Tuesday, 23 April 2013 10:11  
By Brendan Fischer, PR Watch | Report 

New federal court filings allege that hundreds of thousands of Republican redistricting files in Wisconsin were deleted last year, in defiance of court orders to turn over all documents. The deletions fit into a pattern of the Wisconsin GOP covering their tracks and could result in sanctions for the attorneys or individuals involved in deleting the files.

According to the April 18 court filings, a forensic analysis of computers used during redistricting indicates multiple files were deleted just after Republicans were instructed to turn them over to Democrats -- but before they had actually done so.

Recipe for Low-Cost, Biomass-Derived Catalyst for Hydrogen Production 

Promising results are a step toward a range of renewable energy strategies fueled by Nature

April 24, 2013

UPTON, NY — In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of Energy & Environmental Science (now available online), researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory describe details of a low-cost, stable, effective catalyst that could replace costly platinum in the production of hydrogen. The catalyst, made from renewable soybeans and abundant molybdenum metal, produces hydrogen in an environmentally friendly, cost-effective manner, potentially increasing the use of this clean energy source.

The research has already garnered widespread recognition for Shilpa and Shweta Iyer, twin-sister high school students who contributed to the research as part of an internship under the guidance of Brookhaven chemist Wei-Fu Chen, supported by projects led by James Muckerman, Etsuko Fujita, and Kotaro Sasaki.

Paul Krugman: Europe's Leaders Disregard Anti-Austerity Logic

Simon Wren-Lewis recently tried to show some sympathy for the devil. In a post titled "The View From Brussels" on his blog, the Oxford professor attempted to get into the mindset of European officials who defend austerity. And he got at an important point in the process, although he may have let the austerians off too lightly.

As he suggests, the crucial place to start at is why economists like himself, Brad DeLong, Martin Wolf, Larry Summers (at this point, anyway), yours truly and others are against austerity now. We're not always against fiscal consolidation; give me the right economic circumstances and I'll turn at least modestly deficit hawk. We are, instead, against implementing austerity when the interest rate is against the zero lower bound because the economy is in a liquidity trap, so the contractionary effects of fiscal tightening can't be offset by monetary expansion.

Unanswered Questions About Watergate

There are many—why is no one asking them?

By Beverly Gage  |  Posted Monday, April 22, 2013, at 10:26 AM

The title of Robert Redford’s new documentary, which aired on the Discovery Channel last night, is All the President’s Men Revisited. At times, it seems more like All the President’s Men Repeated. Though created to coincide with the 40^th anniversary of Watergate, the first half of the film contains little that could not be found in Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 political thriller starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman. You know the story: A pair of scrappy young reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stick to their guns when nobody else will, and their reporting helps to bring down a president.

This is, to be sure, a terrific story. No matter how many times you’ve heard it before, there is something gripping about watching Nixon’s slow, painful descent into national disgrace. Redford’s film hits all the highlights: Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissing the original break-in as a “third-rate burglary”; Woodward and Bernstein scrambling to “follow the money” all the way to the White House; Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield admitting to Congress that his boss maintained a voice-activated taping system; Nixon’s restrained farewell address to the nation, then his devastating, heartfelt goodbye to the White House staff.

How The NRA Impeded The Boston Bomber Investigation

April 20th, 2013 12:00 am
David Cay Johnston

The intense hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers illustrates another way that the National Rifle Association helps mass murderers — by delaying how quickly they can be identified.

The inability to quickly track the gunpowders in the Boston bombs is due to government policy designed and promoted by the NRA, which has found a way to transform every massacre associated with weapons into an opportunity for the munitions companies that sustain it to sell more guns, gunpowder and bullets.

Unbelievable! Bowles and Simpson Release New Deficit-Reduction Plan Based on Discredited Austerity Research

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

April 21, 2013  |  On April 19th, just after I had written about how the key academic research used to bolster austerity policies was exposed by a 28-year-old grad student at U Mass-Amherst [3], I got a surprise in my email inbox: Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson giddily announced their new deficit-reduction plan, which includes, among other things, a recommendation to increase the eligibility age for Medicare. Their plan would reduce debt as a share of GDP below 70 percent by 2023, and as the Washington Post  [4]reports [4], “seeks far less in new taxes than the original, and it seeks far more in savings from federal health programs for the elderly.”

 

What’s incredible is that over the last week, the study by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff that famously warned of the dangers of government debt has been proven to be riddled with errors and questionable methodology. To recap: R&R’s paper purported to show that countries with public debt in excess of 90 percent of gross domestic product suffered negative economic growth. Austerity hawks everywhere used it to justify cuts that have cost people jobs and vital services. The original spreadsheet used by R&R was obtained by a U Mass grad student, who found that in addition to the mistakes already noted by several economists, there was a coding error in their Excel spreadsheet that significantly changed the results of their study.

Paul Krugman: The Jobless Trap

F.D.R. told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. But when future historians look
back at our monstrously failed response to economic depression, they probably won’t blame fear,
per se. Instead, they’ll castigate our leaders for fearing the wrong things.

For the overriding fear driving economic policy has been debt hysteria, fear that unless we slash
spending we’ll turn into Greece any day now. After all, haven’t economists proved that economic
growth collapses once public debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P.?

Plan B Ruling: Fox and Family Research Council Seize Opportunity to Spread Misinformation

Sunday, 21 April 2013 00:00  
By Valerie Tarico, Truthout | News Analysis

The Fox News response to the recent Plan B ruling provides a graphic example of how the channel uses what it calls "fair and balanced" reporting to create false perceptions. A press release issued by the conservative Family Research Council uses misdirection to attain the same goal. Anyone who wants to understand why the United States is so divided need look no farther than these two pieces of political communication disguised as reporting.

In 2011, the FDA said that Plan B and other brands of levonorgestrel emergency contraception like Next Choice should be available over the counter to all who seek it. But in an unprecedented move, then-Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, countermanded their recommendation, requiring that females younger than 17 obtain a prescription. On Friday, April 5, Judge Edward R. Korman called those restrictions "arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable" and said that "the secretary's action was politically motivated, scientifically unjustified and contrary to agency precedent." In his ruling making Plan B unrestricted, Korman had a long list of credentialed supporters including the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics - in other words, all of the most relevant regulatory bodies and professional associations.

Police ‘Cleaning Up’ Detroit By Kidnapping The Homeless, Stranding Them In Other Cities 

By T. Steelman

Imagine that you are homeless in Detroit. You have an area where you know you are safe, where you can find food and shelter if you ask. Now imagine that a cop grabs you from the street, throws you into a van, drives you to the edge of the city or even a suburb and then kicks you out. That’s what the ACLU is accusing the Detroit PD of doing.: they filed a complaint with the Justice Department against the DPB this week.

The complaint comes at the end of a year-long investigation into claims that the department routinely drove homeless people to areas unfamiliar to them, leaving them to get back on their own. They will approach homeless people, especially in tourist areas like Greektown, force them into vans and drive them miles away, the complaint alleges. Sometimes the officers would even take what little money they had, leaving them with no recourse but to walk back to the city. Sometimes the homeless victims would even be left in neighboring towns and suburbs like Dearborn and River Rouge.

Why American CEOs Get Paid Way More Than CEOs Anywhere Else (Hint: It's Not Performance Based)

By Dean Baker

April 18, 2013  |  Top corporate executives have always been well-paid for obvious reasons. Running a major corporation is a demanding job; you would expect to pay a high salary to get and retain talented hardworking people.

But in the last three decades, the pay of CEOs has gone from just being high -- say 30 or 40 times the pay of typical workers -- to being in the stratosphere. The pay of CEOs at major corporations now averages several hundred times the pay of ordinary workers. Annual compensation packages routinely run into the tens of millions of dollars and can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Furthermore, CEOs generally can count on big paychecks in good times and bad. They tend to do well even when their companies do poorly; although they can expect to do better when corporate profits or stock prices rise. This is true even when their actions had little or nothing to do with the increase. For example, the CEOs of the major oil companies got incredibly rich as a result of the run-up in world oil prices in the last decade.