Which Way Out of the Greek Nightmare and the Crisis of Europe?

By Marjolein van der Veen

May 30, 2013  |  The Greek economy has crashed, and now lies broken on the ground. The causes of the crisis are pretty well understood, but there hasn’t been enough attention to the different possible ways out. Our flight crew has shown us only one emergency exit—one that is just making things worse. But there is more than one way out of the crisis, not just the austerity being pushed by the so-called “Troika” (the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Commission, and European Central Bank (ECB)). We need to look around a bit more, since—as they say on every flight—the nearest exit may not be right in front of us. Can an alternative catch hold? And, if so, will it be Keynesian or socialist?

The origins of Greece’s economic crisis are manifold: trade imbalances between Germany and Greece, the previous Greek government’s secret debts (hidden with the connivance of Wall Street banks), the 2007 global economic crisis, and the flawed construction of the eurozone. As the crisis has continued to deepen, it has created a social disaster: Drastic declines in public health, a rise in suicides, surging child hunger, a massive exodus of young adults, an intensification of exploitation (longer work hours and more work days per week), and the rise of the far right and its attacks on immigrants and the LGBT community. Each new austerity package brokered between the Greek government and the Troika stipulates still more government spending cuts, tax increases, or “economic reforms”—privatization, increases in the retirement age, layoffs of public-sector workers, and wage cuts for those who remain.

Paul Krugman: When Economic Prudence Is Seen As Folly

Nicholas Crafts, an economics professor at the University of Warwick, wrote a really interesting article on the Vox blog recently about Britain's economic policy in the 1930s. The gist is that monetary policy drove recovery through the expectations channel; the Bank of England managed to credibly promise to be irresponsible — that is, to generate inflation.

But how did it do that? Mr. Crafts argues that this was possible for two reasons: the bank was not independent, but just an arm of the Treasury, and the Treasury had a known need to generate some inflation to bring down high debt levels.

For Real Economic Recovery, Government Must Stop Favoring Banks Over Homeowners

Wednesday, 29 May 2013 00:00  
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers , Truthout | News Analysis 

We're now in the sixth year of the economic collapse and the home foreclosure crisis persists. It continues to drag down families, destroy wealth, weaken communities and prevent economic recovery. Inadequate government response has led to a long-term economic crisis that could have been avoided. With good policy, more losses can still be avoided and the economy can begin a real recovery. According to a 2010 report by the Center for Responsible Lending, 2.5 million homes completed the foreclosure process between 2007 and 2010. The 2011 report by the Center for Responsible Lending found that the country was not even halfway through the foreclosure crisis. In total, the Federal Reserve estimates that $7 trillion in home equity was lost from American households between 2006 and 2011 due to the housing crisis.

Like a Wasting Disease, Neoliberals, Libertarians & the Right are Eating Away Society’s “Connective Tissue” 

Part 1

In an industrial or post-industrial society, a civilization with a complex division of labor dispersed throughout a network of metropolitan regions connected with each other and with smaller cities and rural areas, a class of connecting goods and services is required to keep the society and economy cohesive and functioning.  Unlike the goods bought and sold on markets, these mediating or connecting goods are not themselves often objects of desire for purchase by those who use or otherwise benefit from them. In the hypotheses of social theorists and politicians influenced by neoclassical economic ideals, these goods, they think, ought to be delivered via markets and people ought to pay directly for them in market-like cash transactions. As it has turned out in reality, without a social and political commitment and social pressure to fund these goods and services, individuals in isolation and businesses as a group tend to want to “free ride” and not pay for connective goods and services that are usually the frame but not the focus of everyday consciousness in a modern society. Despite the lack of consistent private markets for most connective goods and services, these “in-between” goods and services are vital and fundamental to the existence and maintenance of something like a civilization, a livable complex society with a strong economy. 

Part 2

Corporatocracy/Plutocracy:  The Neoliberal Compromise with Reality

While there are a certain number of “true believers” in the neoliberal ideal that tend to congregate around the banner of libertarianism or related concepts, a vast swath of the political class and ruling elite has been pulled to the right by neoliberalism without openly embracing its hidden utopia.  These political and economic “realists” or “pragmatists” tend to see the true believers in neoliberal ideology as either an ideological “fig-leaf” that can provide a more appealing cover for the agenda of existing large private interests or, occasionally, as a fanatical embarrassment if they show too strong a belief in libertarian ideals. The notion of defunding public services and reducing public regulation of the private sector has a powerful appeal to many corporate and wealthy interests.  So powerful is this appeal in fact that the label and concept of “libertarianism,”  which is now adopted by the most other-worldly, some would say “idealistic”, individuals in the neoliberal spectrum, was coined by a US business lobbyist in the late 1940’s.
 

Paul Krugman: An Irresponsible Austerity Narrative Endures

The Financial Times published an interesting article on May 16 about problems with Ireland's gross national product (not gross domestic product) accounting. Essentially, measured income is being inflated by foreign companies with no real activity in Ireland that, nonetheless, find ways to make profits materialize in a low-tax jurisdiction.

We sort of knew this was happening — that, for example, a lot of the apparent rise in productivity was just a shift to pharmaceutical companies that add little to the Irish economy. But a new report from the Economic and Social Research Institute suggests that the problem is bigger than realized.

Lead acts to trigger schizophrenia 

Behavioral and MRI study in mice points to a synergistic relationship between lead exposure and schizophrenia gene

Mice engineered with a human gene for schizophrenia and exposed to lead during early life exhibited behaviors and structural changes in their brains consistent with schizophrenia. Scientists at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine say their findings suggest a synergistic effect between lead exposure and a genetic risk factor, and open an avenue to better understanding the complex gene-environment interactions that put people at risk for schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

Results appear online in Schizophrenia Bulletin.

Going back to 2004, work by scientists at the Mailman School suggested a connection between prenatal lead exposure in humans and increased risk for schizophrenia later in life.

How Tea Party Favorite Rick Scott Helped Cook Up a Sweetheart Deal for His Florida Friends

By Kurt Eichenwald

I’m not going to say anything about this deal cooking among Tea Party politicos in Florida other than, hmm . . . this seems smarmy.

The blend of politics and commerce has always been an ugly one, and it boggles my mind that some who rage about the poor using food stamps for potato chips stand by in silence when the government hands out the financial equivalent of snack companies to corporations.

The Florida example is a transaction that I find to be the most discomforting I’ve come across in a long career writing about business. (Full disclosure: Much of this involves Governor Rick Scott. Years ago when I worked at The New York Times, I investigated Columbia/HCA, where he worked as C.E.O. The reporting turned up an array of illegal activities and financial shenanigans. Scott was tossed out as C.E.O. by the board and the company went on to pay a $1.7 billion fine for cheating Medicare through the filing of false records. Scott was not charged with wrongdoing.)

New CBO Study: US to Gift Wealthiest Americans $12 Trillion In Tax Cuts This Decade

A new bombshell report from the Congressional Budget Office shows that the top 10 US tax deductions, credits and exclusions ensure that over $12 trillion in tax revenues will be gifted to multinational corporations over the next decade, with nearly all of the benefits accruing to the wealthiest Americans.

The tax loopholes have been written into the tax code by a bought-and-paid-for Congress that receives its marching orders from the multinational corporations that dominate campaign-finance.

Paul Krugman: From the Mouths of Babes

Like many observers, I usually read reports about political goings-on with a sort of weary cynicism.
Every once in a while, however, politicians do something so wrong, substantively and morally, that
cynicism just won’t cut it; it’s time to get really angry instead. So it is with the ugly, destructive war
against food stamps.

The food stamp program — which these days actually uses debit cards, and is officially known as
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — tries to provide modest but crucial aid to
families in need. And the evidence is crystal clear both that the overwhelming majority of food
stamp recipients really need the help, and that the program is highly successful at reducing “food
insecurity,” in which families go hungry at least some of the time.

The Best and Simplest Way to Fight Global Poverty

Proof that giving cash to poor people, no strings attached, is an amazingly powerful tool for boosting incomes and promoting development.

By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Wednesday, May 29, 2013, at 12:26 PM

Poverty is, fundamentally, a lack of money. So doesn’t it make sense that simply delivering cash to poor people can be an effective strategy for alleviating it?

Transferring money to poor Americans has been a much bigger success than most of us realize. When it comes to the global poor—the hundreds of millions of slum-dwellers and subsistence farmers who still populate the world—one might be more skeptical. Perhaps the problems facing these unfortunates are simply too profound and too complex to be addressed by anything other than complicated development schemes. Well, perhaps.

Democrat Levels Fox News By Explaining Why Karl Rove Should Be Investigated By IRS

Fox News had a gotcha moment go wrong, when Sen. Dick Durbin explained why Karl Rove deserves to be investigated by the IRS.

Transcript via Fox News Sunday:

WALLACE: Senator Durbin, I want to pick up on this culture. Starting in 2010, a number of Democratic senators — Democrat senators — sent letters to the IRS asking them to investigate various groups that they said were seeking tax-exempt status, but were improperly involved in politics. Now, in October 2010, you sent a letter to the IRS in which you talked about going after groups.

But you only mentioned one specifically by name and I want to put this up from the October 2010 letter that you wrote to the IRS, “One organization whose activities appear to be inconsistent with the tax status is Crossroads GPS.” That, of course, a group co-founded by Karl Rove.

A Vision For Social Security

By Richard Eskow | May 28, 2013

Is our country losing the vision and values that gave rise to Social Security?

Social Security benefits lag far behind those of other developed countries. A new analysis of census data shows that elder poverty is much higher than we first realized. And yet the discussion in Washington is of cutting, not expanding, it. The number of impoverished seniors would rise sharply if that happened, or if the Medicare cuts currently under discussion became law.

Beware of Economic Nonsense Trotted Out by Profit-Seeking Corporations and Their Stooges

By Robert Reich

May 28, 2013  |  Forbes Magazine likes to call itself a “capitalist tool,” and routinely offers tool-like justifications for whatever it is that profit-seeking corporations want to do. Recently it has deployed its small army of corporate defenders and apologists in the multi-billion dollar fight to keep the effective tax rates of global corporations low.

One of its contributors, Tim Worstall, recently took me to task [3] for suggesting that a way for citizens to gain some countervailing power over large global corporations is for governments to threaten denial of market access unless corporations act responsibly.

He argues that the benefits to consumers of global corporations are so large that denial of market access would hurt citizens more than it would help them. The “value to U.S. consumers of Apple is they can buy Apple products,” Worstall writes. “Why would you want to punish U.S. consumers, by banning them from buying Apple products, just because Apple obeys the current tax laws?”

I Want to Believe

By Jarrod Shanahan

My old co-driver Nick and I would pass the time on interstate furniture deliveries by assessing the incipient mass movements taking off around the world. We debated the potential of the Arab Spring, Occupy, anti-austerity strikes in Europe, daily wildcats in Chinese factories, and other tantalizing glimpses of working class self-activity. And before long, we always reached the same impasse.

“I agree with you” he’d object, “but how can you expect everyday people to get behind all this?”

Engineering Empire: An Introduction to the Intellectuals and Institutions of American Imperialism

Tuesday, 28 May 2013 10:55  
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, The Hampton Institute | News Analysis 

Educating yourself about empire can be a challenging endeavor, especially since so much of the educational system is dedicated to avoiding the topic or justifying the actions of imperialism in the modern era. If one studies political science or economics, the subject might be discussed in a historical context, but rarely as a modern reality; media and government voices rarely speak on the subject, and even more rarely speak of it with direct and honest language. Instead, we exist in a society where institutions and individuals of power speak in coded language, using deceptive rhetoric with abstract meaning. We hear about 'democracy' and 'freedom' and 'security,' but so rarely about imperialism, domination, and exploitation.

More on the Trumped-Up Charges Against Cyprus

As readers may recall, the Eurozone decided to make an example of Cyprus by using it to set the precedent of raiding deposits to fund a bailout (query: is a self-bailout even properly called a bailout?). Admittedly, if you are going to let your banking sector get to be 800% to 900% of GDP, you had better be sure your banks have really good assets and lots of equity, and the authorities look to have been remiss in that regard. And a lot of cynics thought the real reason for Cyprus being handled so harshly was that the Greek Cypriots had rejected the Annan Plan in a 2004 referendum, nixing integration of the island. The EU had wanted Cyprus to enter the union undivided and was unhappy about the rebuff.

But that wasn’t the reason given for being rough on Cyprus. Instead, the European and US media ran the official script that Cyprus was a big seedy tax haven.

9 Things You Should Know About the New Farm Bill

By Patty Lovera

May 20, 2013  |  This week, both the House and Senate Agriculture committees adopted their versions of the 2013 Farm Bill. This is the latest move in the long-running attempt to pass a “normal” 5-year farm bill to replace one that was last passed in 2008. Several attempts to pass a farm bill in 2012 were unsuccessful [2] and the farm bill that is currently in effect is a short-term extension that expires in September 2013.

 

There are some significant differences between the House and the Senate, in both what their bills actually contain and in the process used to get them through the committee. Both sides had an abbreviated process, skipping the normal step of conducting a series of hearings to explore various issues before writing the bill. But the Senate Agriculture Committee took the streamlining even further, managing to discuss, amend and pass its version of the bill in a little under three hours on Tuesday. The House Agriculture Committee finished theirs in a marathon session that took most of the day, wrapping up just before midnight Wednesday night.

The Real Reason Kids Aren't Getting Vaccines

Forget Jenny McCarthy. This shot scandal is much scarier. 

—By Kiera Butler | Mon May. 27, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Much ink has been spilled railing against vaccine skeptics—you know, those people who don't get their kids immunized against catastrophic childhood diseases because they believe the shots can cause autism and other serious problems. In a recent Parade magazine piece, reporter Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear, pointed out that vaccine resisters tend to cluster in places "where parents are often focused on being environmentally conscious and paying close attention to every aspect of their children's development."

Journalist Megan McArdle, in a 2011 post for The Atlantic, opined: "We spent most of the last century trying to stamp out the infectious diseases that used to cripple and kill hundreds and thousands of people every year. Sometimes it seems like the bobo elites plan to spend the 21st century bringing them all back."

Race Is Not Biology

How unthinking racial essentialism finds its way into scientific research

Merlin Chowkwanyun May 23 2013, 12:42 PM ET

During the past two weeks, much outrage has arisen over former Heritage Foundation staffer Jason Richwine's Harvard doctoral dissertation, which speculated that IQ differences between "Hispanic" and "non-Hispanic' populations were genetically rooted. The claims mirrored those of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's scurrilous The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which made similar claims about the intelligence of blacks. (Murray receives thanks in Richwine's dissertation acknowledgments and wrote recently in National Review Online in defense of Richwine.)

The fury continues. In the past couple days, a group of scholars has circulated a petition excoriating Harvard for approving the dissertation and condoning scientific racism in the process. Their petition situates Richwine within an odious lineage stretching back to the era of eugenics and charges that his work rests on shoddy intellectual foundations. (These scholars are right: the late J. Phillipe Rushton, best known for claiming associations among race, brain size, and penis length, is cited by Richwine.) A group of 1,200 Harvard University students has also put together their own petition.
 

Why Does the NYT Refrain from Explaining the Predatory Motives of a Billionaire-Backed Think Tank?

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

May 27, 2013  |  One of the all-time greatest hits of right-wing pundits is the insistence on a “liberal bias” in the media. Journalist and historian Eric Alterman exposed this myth in his 2003 book, What Liberal Media? [3] yet it persists, often resulting in mainstream media outlets caving to a strategy known as “working the refs,” in which shrill cries of bias cause journalists and pundits to privilege right-leaning perspectives so they won’t be accused.

A disturbing example of this trend haunts the pages of the New York Times, in which the pernicious work of the decidedly right-wing Peter G. Peterson Institute is treated as ideologically unbiased while that of other organizations across the spectrum are consistently mentioned along with an ideological tag; often one designed to misguide readers on the actual nature of the organization’s agenda.

Let’s take a tour of the NYT archives.

Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food

By JO ROBINSON
Published: May 25, 2013

WE like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won’t need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health.

This health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

American exceptionalism is a dangerous myth

Move beyond Tea Party lies and phony patriotism. This Memorial Day, let's remember our history honestly 

By Patrick Smith

At one end of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., in the expanse between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, the Bush administration authorized a memorial to World War II. This was a matter of months before the events of September 11. It seemed a strange design when it was first shown in the early summer of 2001, and so it proved when the monument was finished and open to the public in 2004. It consists of fifty-six granite pillars arranged in two half-circles around a pool, each pillar standing for a state or territory, each endowed with a bronze wreath. Each side of the entranceway—graceful granite steps down to the level of the pool—is lined with a dozen bas-relief bronzes depicting important moments in either the European or the Pacific war. At the opposite end of the small circular pool, a “freedom wall” commemorates the 400,000 American dead with 4,000 gold stars.

Paul Krugman: The Obamacare Shock

The Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare, goes fully into effect at the beginning of next year, and
predictions of disaster are being heard far and wide. There will be an administrative “train wreck,” we’re
told; consumers will face a terrible shock. Republicans, one hears, are already counting on the law’s
troubles to give them a big electoral advantage.

No doubt there will be problems, as there are with any large new government initiative, and in this case, we have the added complication that many Republican governors and legislators are doing all they can to sabotage reform. Yet important new evidence — especially from California, the law’s most important test case — suggests that the real Obamacare shock will be one of unexpected success.