Paul Krugman: Sex, Money and Gravitas

Can a woman effectively run the Federal Reserve? That shouldn’t even be a question. And Janet Yellen, the vice chairwoman of the Fed’s Board of Governors, isn’t just up to the job; by any objective standard, she’s the best-qualified person in America to take over when Ben Bernanke steps down as chairman.

Yet there are not one but two sexist campaigns under way against Ms. Yellen. One is a whisper campaign whose sexism is implicit, while the other involves raw misogyny. And both campaigns manage to combine sexism with very bad economic analysis.

Are Humans Hard-Wired for Racial Prejudice?

By Robert M. Sapolsky

July 31, 2013  |  Reaction to the acquittal of George Zimmerman was just the latest reminder: Race continues to divide us as a species.

But why? Are human brains hard-wired to notice and react to racial differences? At first glance, that's precisely what research seems to demonstrate.

Some of the most compelling evidence for a hard-wired racial divide concerns a brain region called the amygdala, which plays a central role in processing fear and aggression. If you were put in a brain scanner that identifies levels of activity in different regions and shown a picture of something scary, your amygdala would leap into action, telling your heart to race and your skin to get clammy. It would also help you decide what to do next: Run like hell? Pull the trigger? Wet your pants?

Larry Summers and the End of Political Shame 

Jonathan Kirshner

Larry Summers, campaigning to become the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has a rap sheet that would make Anthony Wiener blush. In the 1990s he led the charge for the deregulations that contributed to the financial crisis. In the 2000s, willfully blind to the growing systemic risk metastasizing throughout the banking system, he became a very well-paid consort of the financial sector (firms over which the Fed Chair is the ultimate supervisor). With lines on his resume like “Enron Advocate,” and “villain of the Asian Financial Crisis,” Summers has a vast and remarkably robust reservoir of self-confidence, but no practical experience in central banking, a notable detail given that Fed Chair is not an entry-level position.

New Monetary Systems for a Sustainable Democracy and "The Great Turning"

Wednesday, 31 July 2013 00:00  
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Truthout | News Analysis

Our money system is ill-equipped to help us solve the pervasive socio-economic and ecological challenges we face. Transformation of our money system is critical because monetary diversity is just as important to human survival as biodiversity is to the fate of the earth.

There is a lot that we can learn from nature, and one important lesson is that diverse systems have greater strength and resilience. When conditions change, various components within a diverse system will step in to pick up where others fail. The weaknesses of monocultures are evident in agricultural systems where crops either flourish or wither each season. We also know that using permaculture, in which multiple types of plants are grown together to fill different functions and aid each other, creates greater abundance.

Less obvious is that these same principles can be applied to monetary systems. The dominant type of money, a fiat currency, essentially a mono-currency based on debt and scarcity, is failing most of us. Inherently, it encourages competition and hoarding, traits that mean some will win, and some will be left out. It is also required to perform functions that are at odds with each other: to both circulate in the economy and to be accumulated for future use. And it requires constant growth to survive, a trait that becomes more maladaptive as we bump into the limits of a finite planet.

Dirty Hands: 77 ALEC Bills in 2013 Advance a Big Oil, Big Ag Agenda

by Brendan Fischer — August 1, 2013 - 8:33am

At least 77 bills to oppose renewable energy standards, support fracking and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and otherwise undermine environmental laws were introduced in 34 states in 2013, according to a new analysis from the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org. In addition, nine states have been inspired by ALEC's "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act" to crack down on videographers documenting abuses on factory farms. At least 77 bills to oppose renewable energy standards, support fracking and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and otherwise undermine environmental laws were introduced in 34 states in 2013, according to a new analysis from the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org. In addition, nine states have been inspired by ALEC's "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act" to crack down on videographers documenting abuses on factory farms.

From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education

By Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal - Fall 2012

The California student movement has a slogan that goes, “Behind every fee hike, a line of riot cops.” And no one embodies that connection more than the Ronald Reagan of the 1960s. Elected governor of California in 1966 after running a scorched-earth campaign against the University of California, Reagan vowed to “clean up that mess in Berkeley,” warned audiences of “sexual orgies so vile that I cannot describe them to you,” complained that outside agitators were bringing left-wing subversion into the university, and railed against spoiled children of privilege skipping their classes to go to protests. He also ran on an anti-tax platform and promised to put the state’s finances in order by “throw[ing] the bums off welfare.” But it was the University of California at Berkeley that provided the most useful political foil, crystallizing all of his ideological themes into a single figure for disorder, a subversive menace of sexual, social, generational, and even communist deviance.

Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality

By Ryan Singel, 07.30.13, 1:55 PM

In a dramatic about-face on a key internet issue yesterday, Google told the FCC that the network neutrality rules Google once championed don’t give citizens the right to run servers on their home broadband connections, and that the Google Fiber network is perfectly within its rights to prohibit customers from attaching the legal devices of their choice to its network.

At issue is Google Fiber’s Terms of Service, which contains a broad prohibition against customers attaching “servers” to its ultrafast 1 Gbps network in Kansas City.

BPA exposure disrupts human egg maturation 

Brigham and Women's Hospital research could explain why some couples have trouble conceiving

Boston - As many as 20 percent of infertile couples in the United States have unexplained reasons for their infertility. Now, new research led by Catherine Racowsky, PhD, director of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), shows that exposure to BPA (Bisphenol-A) could be a contributing factor as to why some infertile couples are having difficulty conceiving. The study will be published online on July 31, 2013 in the journal Human Reproduction.

Revealed: NSA Program Collects 'Nearly Everything a User Does on the Internet' 

XKeyscore gives 'widest-reaching' collection of online data; NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches; Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history

by Glenn Greenwald

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The State of Rights and Wrongs

July 30, 2013

by Bernard Weisberger

 

The world continues to turn upside down and sometimes you can’t make sense of it even by standing on your head.

Recent news has focused on the scramble of a number of states, following the Supreme Court’s evisceration of a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to rush through new measures aimed at booby-trapping the path of low-income — particularly, black and Hispanic – voters to the polls.

In Texas, the spotlight fell on the failed struggle of women to defeat a fiercely restrictive law that would in effect shut down most of the state’s few remaining abortion services. Elsewhere, the campaign to destroy public unions goes merrily on in various state capitals and the strangulation of public services with chokeholds on funding continues with a zeal that must warm Grover Norquist‘s heart.
 

Telecom Industry’s Imaginary Book Critics Try to Discredit Susan Crawford

Jul 30, 2013, Rachel Goldfarb

The more the telecommunications industry tries to discredit Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford, the stronger her work looks.

It’s always entertaining to watch when the opposition is clearly worried about something you’re working on, but it’s less fun when they try to smear you and misrepresent your work. When you can prove that’s what they’re up to? Then it comes full circle, and it’s amusing again.

Bombshell: Plutocrats Brazenly Collude to Hurt State Economies and Screw Working People

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

July 29, 2013  |  These days, many Americans walk around feeling like no matter how hard they work, how much they manage to save or how carefully they plan for the future, the game is rigged against them. They suspect that behind closed doors, CEOs and Wall Street honchos are eagerly scheming to rip them off.

 

Their worst fears of corruption and collusion just came true in Illinois, where corporate titans were caught red-handed in the act of Rigging the Game.

Let’s step inside a recent gathering of the corporate-backed Union League Club of Chicago, where former Illinois Attorney General Ty Fahner, who now leads a band of plutocrats known as the “Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago,” recently launched into an hour-long diatribe on the evils of state pensions.

FED STUDY: We Conservatively Estimate That The Financial Crisis Cost Us Up To $14 Trillion

Rob Wile, Jul. 29, 2013, 7:09 PM

Dallas Federal Reserve researchers Tyler Atkinson, David Luttrell and Harvey Rosenblum have a new paper out in which they attempt to calculate the true cost of the 2007-2009 financial crisis and recession.

"The 2007-09 Financial crisis was associated with a huge loss of economic output and financial wealth, psychological consequences and skill atrophy from extended unemployment, an increase in government intervention, and other significant costs," they write.

Paul Krugman: Stranded by Sprawl

Detroit is a symbol of the old economy’s decline. It’s not just the derelict center; the metropolitan
area as a whole lost population between 2000 and 2010, the worst performance among major
cities. Atlanta, by contrast, epitomizes the rise of the Sun Belt; it gained more than a million people
over the same period, roughly matching the performance of Dallas and Houston without the extra
boost from oil.

Yet in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places
where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty
climbing the economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which children
manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents — is even lower in Atlanta
than it is in Detroit. And it’s far lower in both cities than it is in, say, Boston or San Francisco, even
though these cities have much slower growth than Atlanta.

US Cities Under Water: New Study Shows Flooded Future

Climate Crisis Threaten to Flood Hundreds of Coastal Cities

- Common Dreams staff

"Hundreds of American cities are already locked into watery futures and we are growing that group very rapidly."

That's the message from Dr. Ben Strauss, the lead author of a new analysis of climate change data that shows the amount of carbon pollution already in the atmosphere could lead to "more than 4 feet of sea level rise past today’s levels" which would be enough, at high tide, to "submerge more than half of today’s population in 316 coastal cities and towns (home to 3.6 million) in the lower 48 states."

Why NSA Surveillance Will Be More Damaging Than You Think

The real threat from terrorism is not the harm it inflicts directly but the over-reaction it provokes. We saw that with the invasion of Iraq. We're seeing it with security-state overreach. 

James Fallows, Jul 30 2013, 4:39 AM ET

This column over the weekend, by the British academic John Naughton in the Guardian, takes us one more step in assessing the damage to American interests in the broadest sense-- commercial, strategic, ideological - from the panopticon approach to "security" brought to us by NSA-style monitoring programs.

Naughton's essay doesn't technically tell us anything new. For instance, see earlier reports like this, this, and this. But it does sharpen the focus in a useful way.

Another Citizens United—but Worse

Posted by Jeffrey Toobin

Think the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United was bad? A worse one may be on the horizon.

To recognize the problem, it’s necessary to review some of the Court’s gnarled history on the subject of campaign finance. In Citizens United, which was decided in 2010, the Court rejected any limits on what a person or corporation (or labor union) could spend on an independent effort to help a candidate win an election.

Global Power Project, Part 8: Banking on Influence with Wells Fargo

Friday, 02 August 2013 09:21  
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com | Report

Just recently, in late July, Wells Fargo surpassed the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) as the world’s largest bank by market capitalization. This followed Wells Fargo reporting a 19% increase in profits over the second quarter as the bank has been busy consolidating the housing market while other big banks have retreated from it. Wells Fargo had amassed a share of almost 40% of the U.S. mortgage market by early 2013.

Now, let's put this in context with the company's other recent activities.

Billionaire Gets New Sports Arena in Bankrupt Detroit

Tuesday, 30 July 2013 09:13  
By Dave Zirin, The Nation | Op-Ed

The headline juxtaposition boggles the mind. You have, on one day, “Detroit Files Largest Municipal Bankruptcy in History.” Then on the next, you have “Detroit Plans to Pay For New Red Wings Hockey Arena Despite Bankruptcy.”

Yes, the very week Michigan Governor Rick Snyder granted a state-appointed emergency manager’s request to declare the Motor City bankrupt, the Tea Party governor gave a big thumbs-up to a plan for a new $650 million Detroit Red Wings hockey arena. Almost half of that $650 million will be paid with public funds.