Public Research for Private Gain

UC Regents recently approved a new corporate entity that will likely give a group of well-connected businesspeople control over how academic research is used.

By Darwin BondGraham

In a unanimous vote last month, the Regents of the University of California created a corporate entity that, if spread to all UC campuses as some regents envision, promises to further privatize scientific research produced by taxpayer-funded laboratories. The entity, named Newco for the time being, also would block a substantial amount of UC research from being accessible to the public, and could reap big profits for corporations and investors that have ties to the well-connected businesspeople who will manage it. 

Paul Krugman: Invest, Divest and Prosper

It has been a busy news week, what with voting rights, gay marriage and Paula Deen. Even so, it’s remarkable how little attention the news media gave to President Obama’s new “climate action plan.” Discount, if you like, the terrific speech he gave when unveiling the proposal; this is, nonetheless, a very big deal. For this time around, Mr. Obama wasn’t touting legislation we know won’t pass. The new plan is, instead, designed to rely on executive action. This means that, unlike earlier efforts to address climate change, it can bypass the anti-environmentalists who control the House of Representatives.

Republicans realize this, and they’re stamping their feet in frustration. All they can do, it seems, is fulminate (and perhaps scare the administration into backing down). Interestingly, however, right now they don’t seem eager to attack climate science, maybe because that would make them sound unreasonable (which they are). Instead, they’re going for the economic angle, denouncing the Obama administration for waging a “war on coal” that will destroy jobs.

Global Power Project, Part 3: The Influence of Individuals and Family Dynasties

Friday, 28 June 2013 09:15  
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com | News Analysis

Also See: Global Power Project, Part 1: Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Class and Global Power Project, Part 2: Identifying the Institutions of Control

Dynastic power, embedded in the institution of "family," has been with humanity for as long as empire: ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the European empires and beyond. With the rise of capitalism, finance and corporations, formal political dynasties became less relevant to the expansion and maintenance of power and empire. Instead, dynastic power was and remains largely wielded in the corporate and financial sectors.

In Europe, the Rothschild banking dynasty was the unparalleled family power of the 19th century, and has continued as a major influence in Britain, France and elsewhere well into the 20th and 21st centuries. Baron Benjamin de Rothschild, considered to be the “world’s richest Rothschild today,” told the Israeli publication Ha’aretz in 2010, “We have an obligation to continue the dynasty.” And indeed, the Rothschild banks and family are doing well. It recently decided to bring together the French and British banking assets under one roof, and the dynasty has even been expanding its influence in merchant banking in London. The Rothschild bank was also seeking to extend its presence in the United States, “to take advantage of the growing demand for independent advice from companies globally.”

Global Power Project, Part 2: Identifying the Institutions of Control

Thursday, 20 June 2013 09:41 
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com | News Analysis

The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today's global power oligarchy. In Part 1, which appeared last week, I provided an overview examining who and what constitute the global ruling elite – often referred to as the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC). In this second part, I will attempt to identify some of the key, dominant institutions that have facilitated and have in turn been supported by the development of this oligarchic class. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.

In an article for the journal International Sociology, William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski examined the relationship between the corporate elite and the emergence of a “transnational policy-planning network,” beginning with its formation in the decades following World War II and speeding up in the 1970s with the creation of “global policy groups” and think tanks such as the World Economic Forum, in 1971, and the Trilateral Commission, in 1973, among many others.
The function of such institutions was to help mobilize and integrate the corporate elite beyond national borders, constructing a politically “organized minority.”

Paul Krugman: The Evolution of Human Capital

Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, suggested in recent commentary for The New York Times that the golden age of human capital — roughly speaking, the era in which the economy strongly demanded the kinds of skills we teach in liberal-arts colleges and universities — is already behind us.

She may well be right: after a long stretch when both technology and trade seemed to be undermining only manual labor, it does look as if many skilled occupations are now under threat by Big Data, Bangalore, or both.

Chemists work to desalt the ocean for drinking water, 1 nanoliter at a time

Microscale method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery

AUSTIN, Texas – By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery.

The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale.

Tomgram: Todd Gitlin, Are "Intelligence" and Instigation Running Riot?

Posted by Todd Gitlin at 8:11am, June 27, 2013.

Back in the early 1970s, I worked for Pacific News Service (PNS), a small antiwar media outfit that operated out of the Bay Area Institute (BAI), a progressive think tank in San Francisco.  The first story I ever wrote for PNS came about because an upset U.S. Air Force medic wanted someone to know about the American war wounded then pouring in from the invasion of Laos.  So he snuck me onto Travis Air Force Base in northern California and into a military hospital to interview wigged-out guys with stumps for limbs who thought the war was a disaster.  In some cases, they also thought we should have bombed the Vietnamese “back to the stone age.”

I was a good boy from the 1950s and sneaking onto that base made me nervous indeed.  It was also the most illegal act I encountered at either PNS or the institute in those years.  We did, of course, regularly have active duty antiwar soldiers and members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War pass through our office, and we had an antiwar GI in Vietnam writing for us under a pseudonym.  (At some point, we found out that the Pentagon had actually tracked down and interviewed every soldier in Vietnam with that pseudonymous name in its attempt to uncover our journalist.)

Dean Baker: Baffling Budget Numbers: Making Reporters Do Their Jobs

Monday, 24 June 2013 10:07 

The vast majority of the public does not have a clue about where their tax dollars go. Polls consistently show that the vast majority of the public has almost no idea of where their tax dollars go.

They tend to hugely overestimate the portion of the budget that goes to items like food stamps, public broadcasting and foreign aid, and to underestimate the importance of Medicare, the military and other core items in the budget. As a result, people are often ill-informed when it comes to political debates on budget priorities.

The Court, The Corporate Coup, And The Call To Struggle

By Richard RJ Eskow

Our democracy was under siege even before the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act. This decision caps the Court's clean sweep on behalf of the United States Chamber of Commerce and is part of a concerted effort to seize democracy on behalf of moneyed interests.

It's a mistake to view this decision in isolation. It's part of an ongoing, corporate-backed constitutional coup.

We could decide the forces of greed are too powerful, and give up. But in a few weeks the nation will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech. The dream of full and equal rights is no more impossible now than it was then.

A rightwing 1950s PSA about income inequality can teach us a lot

by David Atkins

While doing some research on income inequality, I came across this little noticed 1955 PSA on income inequality in America. It was produced by the "National Education Program," an institution created by conservative red-baiter George S. Benson.

[...]



There is an entire book's worth of social and economic analysis to be gleaned from careful study of this bit of propaganda compared to our current situation.

Clear Evidence That Corporate America Wants the Govt. to Treat Protesters as 'Terrorists'

By Thom Hartmann

June 20, 2013  |  Corporations are trying to use the PATRIOT Act in ways that have nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden because the PATRIOT Act gives transnational corporations the power to snuff out the activism of all those who oppose them.

 

Terrorism, as it is commonly considered, is the use of violence against civilians to achieve any number of political ends: the destruction of the federal government, the overturning of Roe V. Wade, the restoration of a Caliphate. If you try to kill people – or succeed in killing people for a political purpose - you’re a terrorist. If you blow up the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building and kill 168 civilians, like Timothy McVeigh, you’ve committed an act of terrorism.

6 Mind-Blowing Stats on How 1 Percent of the 1 Percent Now Dominate Our Elections

—By Andy Kroll  | Mon Jun. 24, 2013 12:13 PM PDT

Here's a statistic that should jolt you awake like black coffee with three shots of espresso dropped in: In the 2012 election cycle, 28 percent of all disclosed donations—that's $1.68 billion—came from just 31,385 people. Think of them as the 1 percenters of the 1 percent, the elite of the elite, the wealthiest of the wealthy.

That's the blockbuster finding in an eye-popping new report by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan transparency advocate. The report's author, Lee Drutman, calls the 1 percent of the 1 percent "an elite class that increasingly serves as the gatekeepers of public office in the United States." This rarefied club of donors, Drutman found, worked in high-ranking corporate positions (often in finance or law). They're clustered in New York City and Washington, DC. Most are men. You might've heard of some of them: casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Texas waste tycoon Harold Simmons, Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Obama's Transformation from National Security Dove to Hawk Is the Norm: Presidents Are Captive to America's Imperial Power

By Gary Younge

June 22, 2013  |  Not long after the story into the National Security Administration's spying programme broke, US president Barack Obama insisted the issues raised were worthy of discussion [3]:

"I welcome this debate and I think it's healthy for our democracy. I think it's a sign of maturity because probably five years ago, six years ago we might not have been having this debate."

In fairly short order, a YouTube compilation appeared [4], showing Obama debating with himself as he matured. Flitting back and forth between Obama the candidate and the Obama the president, we see the constitutional law professor of yore engage with the commander-in-chief of today.

Paul Krugman: Et Tu, Bernanke?

For the most part, Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve have been good guys in
these troubled economic times. They have tried to boost the economy even as most of Washington
seemingly either forgot about the jobless, or decided that the best way to cure unemployment was
to intensify the suffering of the unemployed. You can argue — and I would — that the Fed’s
activism, while welcome, isn’t enough, and that it should be doing even more. But at least it didn’t
lose sight of what’s really important.

Until now.

Editorial: Fighting the 4 Plagues -- We Have To Do Things Differently

By Don Hazen

June 22, 2013  |  Almost two weeks ago, I wrote an article:  "4 Plagues - Getting a Handle on the Coming Apocalypse [3]."  Reader response was strong, and the article quickly shot to top of our most-read list. I detailed the "plagues" that dominate our economy and way of life: financialization, militarization, and criminalization — forces that exacerbate the huge array of problems we face—poverty, unemployment, mass incarceration, climate destruction, gun violence, financial corruption, spying and privacy, and much more. They threaten democracy, fray our social order, worsen conditions in communities round the world, and damage our psychological health.

 

As a result, many of us are alarmed at the direction of our country, and rightly so. By many measures, our society is a depressing mess. Tens of millions are severely suffering economically, while many more are stressed out and traumatized, desperately attempting to cope with both chronic and acute problems they have never faced before.

7 Institutions That Have Grown So Monstrously Big They Threaten to Destroy America

By Richard Eskow

June 21, 2013  |  Bigger isn’t always better. From the Tower of Babel to Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting, that principle’s been enshrined in law and legend since the dawn of history. Have we forgotten the lesson?

Corporations, databases, storehouses of personal and institutional wealth all are expanding at ever-increasing speed, threatening to engulf our economy and our lives as they do. That’s the problem with Big Things: Once they reached a certain size, they keep on getting bigger.

Here are seven ways the runaway power of Bigger in finance and in data is threatening to overwhelm us all.

Sea level along Maryland's shorelines could rise 2 feet by 2050, according to new report

ANNAPOLIS, MD (June 26, 2013)—A new report on sea level rise recommends that the State of Maryland should plan for a rise in sea level of as much as 2 feet by 2050. Led by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the report was prepared by a panel of scientific experts in response to Governor Martin O'Malley's Executive Order on Climate Change and "Coast Smart" Construction. The projections are based on an assessment of the latest climate change science and federal guidelines.

"The State of Maryland is committed to taking the necessary actions to adapt to the rising sea and guard against the impacts of extreme storms," said Governor Martin O'Malley. "In doing so, we must stay abreast of the latest climate science to ensure that we have a sound understanding of our vulnerability and are making informed decisions about how best to protect our land, infrastructure, and most importantly, the citizens of Maryland."

Paul Krugman: Profits Without Production

One lesson from recent economic troubles has been the usefulness of history. Just as the crisis was
unfolding, the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — who unfortunately
became famous for their worst work — published a brilliant book with the sarcastic title “This Time
Is Different.” Their point, of course, was that there is a strong family resemblance among crises.
Indeed, historical parallels — not just to the 1930s, but to Japan in the 1990s, Britain in the 1920s,
and more — have been vital guides to the present.

Yet economies do change over time, and sometimes in fundamental ways. So what’s really different
about America in the 21st century?

The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis 

It's long been suspected that ratings agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's helped trigger the meltdown. A new trove of embarrassing documents shows how they did it

by Matt Taibbi

JUNE 19, 2013

 

What about the ratings agencies?

That's what "they" always say about the financial crisis and the teeming rat's nest of corruption it left behind. Everybody else got plenty of blame: the greed-fattened banks, the sleeping regulators, the unscrupulous mortgage hucksters like spray-tanned Countrywide ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo.

But what about the ratings agencies? Isn't it true that almost none of the fraud that's swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's rubber-stamping it? Aren't they guilty, too?

How American Society Unravelled After Greedy Elites Robbed the Country Blind

By George Packer

June 20, 2013  |  In or around 1978, America's character changed. For almost half a century, the United States [3] had been a relatively egalitarian, secure, middle-class democracy, with structures in place that supported the aspirations of ordinary people. You might call it the period of theRoosevelt [4] Republic. Wars, strikes, racial tensions and youth rebellion all roiled national life, but a basic deal among Americans still held, in belief if not always in fact: work hard, follow the rules, educate your children, and you will be rewarded, not just with a decent life and the prospect of a better one for your kids, but with recognition from society, a place at the table.

 

This unwritten contract came with a series of riders and clauses that left large numbers of Americans – black people and other minorities, women, gay people – out, or only halfway in. But the country had the tools to correct its own flaws, and it used them: healthy democratic institutions such as Congress, courts, churches, schools, news organisations, business-labour partnerships. The civil rights movement of the 1960s was a nonviolent mass uprising led by black southerners, but it drew essential support from all of these institutions, which recognised the moral and legal justice of its claims, or, at the very least, the need for social peace. The Roosevelt Republic had plenty of injustice, but it also had the power of self-correction.

Russ Feingold Tried to Warn Us About Section 215 of the Patriot Act

Wisconsin voters replaced the civil-liberties champion with an ostensibly Tea Party senator -- who doesn't seem to care about government snooping. 

 

Conor Friedersdorf,  Jun 14 2013, 8:00 AM ET

 

In September 2009, Russ Feingold, the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act when it was first proposed, released a statement expressing concern that critical information about the way it was being used hadn't been released, "information that I believe would have a significant impact on the debate." He singled out "information about the use of Section 215 orders that I believe Congress and the American people deserve to know," adding that "before we decide whether and in what form to extend these authorities, Congress and the American people deserve to know at least basic information about how they have been used." (Section 215 allows the government to use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to compel businesses to turn over certain information.) Congress ought to add limits to the bill "that allow agents to actively pursue criminals, terrorists and spies, but that also protect the privacy of innocent Americans," Feingold said, or else more privacy abuses would happen. 

Dean Baker: Celebrate the Defeat of the Granny Bashers!

It isn't often that progressives in the United States have much to celebrate. After all, the news has swung between bad and worse for most of the last three decades. That is why we should be celebrating the victory over the Campaign to Fix the Debt and its efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Just to remind everyone, the Campaign to Fix the Debt (CFD) is yet another Peter Peterson inspired initiative that has as its main goal cutting and/or privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Peterson has used the billions of dollars he earned as a Wall Street investment banker and private equity fund manager to finance a whole slew of Washington-based outfits for this purpose over the last two decades.

Efficient and inexpensive: Researchers develop catalyst material for fuel cells

Platinum-nickel nano-octahedra save 90 percent platinum

Efficient, robust and economic catalyst materials hold the key to achieving a breakthrough in fuel cell technology. Scientists from Jülich and Berlin have developed a material for converting hydrogen and oxygen to water using a tenth of the typical amount of platinum that was previously required. With the aid of state-of-the-art electron microscopy, the researchers discovered that the function of the nanometre-scale catalyst particles is decisively determined by their geometric shape and atomic structure. This discovery opens up new paths for further improving catalysts for energy conversion and storage. The results have been published in the current issue of the respected journal Nature Materials (DOI: 10.1038/nmat3668).

ICIJ releases offshore leaks database revealing names behind secret companies, trusts

Users can search ICIJ information about more than 100,000 offshore entities and discover the networks around them
By Marina Walker Guevara

10:00 pm, June 14, 2013; Updated: 10:03 am, June 15, 2013

When Bernard Madoff built his $65 billion house of cards; when food distributors passed off horsemeat as beef lasagna in Europe; and when Apple, Google and other American companies set up structures to channel their profits through Ireland — they all used tax havens.

They bought secrecy, minimal or zero taxes and legal insulation, the distinctive products that tax havens market and that allow companies to operate in a fiscal and regulatory vacuum. Using the offshore economy is akin to acquiring your own island where the rules that most citizens follow don’t apply.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists publishes today a database that, for the first time in history, will help begin to strip away this secrecy across 10 offshore jurisdictions.

We Already Tried Libertarianism - It Was Called Feudalism

Jun 11, 2013 
Mike Konczal

Bob Dole recently said that neither he nor Ronald Reagan would count as conservatives these days. It’s worth noting that John Locke probably wouldn’t count as a libertarian these days, either.

Michael Lind had a column in Salon in which he asked, “[i]f libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?” EJ Dionne agrees. Several libertarians argue that the present is no guide, because the (seasteading?) future belongs to libertarians.

Paul Krugman: Fight the Future

Last week the International Monetary Fund, whose normal role is that of stern disciplinarian to
spendthrift governments, gave the United States some unusual advice. “Lighten up,” urged the
fund. “Enjoy life! Seize the day!”

O.K., fund officials didn’t use quite those words, but they came close, with an article in IMF Survey
magazine titled “Ease Off Spending Cuts to Boost U.S. Recovery.” In its more formal statement, the
fund argued that the sequester and other forms of fiscal contraction will cut this year’s U.S. growth
rate by almost half, undermining what might otherwise have been a fairly vigorous recovery. And
these spending cuts are both unwise and unnecessary.

Global Power Project, Part 1: Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Class

Friday, 14 June 2013 09:14
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com | News Analysis

The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today's global power oligarchy. By studying the relationships and varying levels of leadership that govern our planet's most influential institutions — from banks, corporations and financial institutions to think tanks, foundations and universities — this project seeks to expose the complex, highly integrated network of influence wielded by relatively few individuals on a national and transnational basis. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.

Many now know the rhetoric of the 1% very well: the imagery of a small elite owning most of the wealth while the 99% take the table scraps. This rhetoric and imagery was made popular by the growth of the Occupy movement, so it seems appropriate that a project of Occupy.com should expand on this understanding and bring the activities of the global elite further to light.

In 2006, a UN report revealed that the world’s richest 1% own 40% of the world’s wealth, with those in the financial and internet sectors comprising the “super rich.” More than a third of the world’s super-rich live in the U.S., with roughly 27% in Japan, 6% in the U.K., and 5% in France. The world’s richest 10% accounted for roughly 85% of the planet's total assets, while the bottom half of the population – more than 3 billion people – owned less than 1% of the world’s wealth.

Financial Totalitarianism: The Economic, Political, Social and Cultural Rule of Speculative Capital

Wednesday, 12 June 2013 09:57
By Max Haiven, Truthout | News Analysis

At the end of May, it was revealed that a new bill for the regulation of the banking and financial sector was, for all intents and purposes, drafted by Citigroup. This is only the latest in a long list of what can only be called legalized corruption at the highest levels of American power, which has ultimately led to no meaningful policy or legal change in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Avid readers of intrepid Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi and others cannot help but be sickened and struck by the impunity and hubris of America's financial elites, even as astute students of history will point out the previous moments when the power and influence of financiers has overshadowed economics and politics.

The Mad Science of the National Debt

With Congress gridlocked by the debt-ceiling debate, the Federal Reserve is conducting a radical experiment with the American economy

by Matt Taibbi
MAY 22, 2013

Welcome back to the dumb season. It's debt-ceiling time again.

We've been at this two years now. It was back in 2011 when the Republican Party, seized by anti-government furor, first locked on the lifting of the federal debt ceiling – an utterly routine governmental mechanism that allows the Treasury to borrow to pay for spending already approved by the entire Congress, Republicans included – as a place to hold a showdown over . . . government spending. That first battle resulted in a "Mutually Assured Destruction"-type stalemate, in which both parties agreed that if they couldn't reach a deal by New Year's Day 2013, a series of brutal, automatic, across-the-board spending cuts would take effect. At the time, it seemed unthinkable Congress would let that happen. By the time we passed that date, the thing that seemed unthinkable was the idea that Congress would ever make a deal. The cuts took effect in March and we were headed for a full-on fiscal crash on May 19th, when fate intervened to stop this stupidest-in-history blue-red catfight in its tracks, if only temporarily.

Secret Trade Agreements Threaten to Undo Our Last Shreds of Food Safety

by Katherine Paul, Ronnie Cummins

June 13, 2013  |  If you think the U.S. government is doing a sub-par job of keeping your food safe, brace yourself. You could soon be eating imported seafood, beef or chicken products that don’t meet even basic U.S. food safety standards. Under two new trade agreements, currently in negotiation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could be powerless to shut down imports of unsafe food or food ingredients. And if it tries, multinational corporations will be able to sue the U.S. government for the loss of anticipated future profits.

More frightening? Negotiations for both agreements are taking place behind closed doors, with input allowed almost exclusively from the corporations and industry trade groups that stand to benefit the most. And the Obama Administration intends to push the agreements through Congress without so much as giving lawmakers access to draft texts, much less the opportunity for debate.

Corey Robin: David Brooks: The Last Stalinist

David Brooks disapproves of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Snowden’s actions, Brooks says, are a betrayal of virtually every commitment and connection Snowden has ever made: his oath to his country, his promise to his employer, his loyalty to his friends, and more.

But in one of those precious pirouettes of paradox that only he can perform, Brooks sees those betrayals as a symptom of a deeper pathology: Snowden’s inability to make commitments and connections.

NGOs Target Financial Investment in Farmland

Jennifer Clapp

Banks, pension funds, hedge funds and other financial institutions have stepped up their investment in farmland in recent years, including financing for controversial large-scale land deals in developing countries. NGOs are now calling specifically on financial institutions to ensure that their investments are environmentally and socially sound, or consider divestment.

Last month, Friends of the Earth released a report that linked a number of European banks and investment firms to large-scale land acquisitions in Uganda. In this case, the financial institutions provided financing to Wilmar, a major agricultural trading firm with extensive interests in palm oil production and refining. FOE’s research showed that Wilmar’s subsidiary in Uganda had violated environmental and land tenure legislation in connection with recent land purchases in the country.