Rick Perlstein: The March on Washington in Historical Context

Next week, as no one will be allowed to forget, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the August 28, 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom. In a country in which ignoring history is just about the national pastime, somehow this event—what it was like, and what it accomplished—is remembered indelibly. But here is what we have forgotten: how the event was thought about before it happened. In a way, the contrast between how the March on Washington was envisioned by most Americans on August 27, and how it was recalled on August 29, was its greatest accomplishment of all—the reason it became one of history’s hinges.

How to Be More than a Mindful Consumer

The way we make and use stuff is harming the world—and ourselves. To create a system that works, we can't just use our purchasing power. We must turn it into citizen power. 

by Annie Leonard

Since I released "The Story of Stuff" six years ago, the most frequent snarky remark I get from people trying to take me down a notch is about my own stuff: Don't you drive a car? What about your computer and your cellphone? What about your books? (To the last one, I answer that the book was printed on paper made from trash, not trees, but that doesn't stop them from smiling smugly at having exposed me as a materialistic hypocrite. Gotcha!)

Let me say it clearly: I'm neither for nor against stuff. I like stuff if it's well-made, honestly marketed, used for a long time, and at the end of its life recycled in a way that doesn't trash the planet, poison people, or exploit workers. Our stuff should not be artifacts of indulgence and disposability, like toys that are forgotten 15 minutes after the wrapping comes off, but things that are both practical and meaningful. British philosopher William Morris said it best: "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

Plutocrats' New Pitch: Let Us Rob You Now So You Can Plan Ahead for Poverty

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

August 22, 2013  |  Somehow, I’ve wound up on the mailing list for a group of oligarchs campaigning to swindle Americans out of their hard-earned retirement insurance. Hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson, the budget buffoons Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and the rest of their merry band of hustlers over at the hilariously named Committee for a Responsible Budge [3]t have asked me to consider their latest proposal.

 

So I thought I’d oblige them, what the heck.

Judging from the shrill headline in their mailing [full text here [4]], these men (and a token woman or two) wish to sell me on the idea of “Social Security Reform and the Cost of Delay.”

The cost of delay? Boys, I hear you on that. Any delay in ripping me off must be very costly — for you.

Can we save our urban water systems?

New Rochelle, NY, August 15, 2013—Existing urban water systems are at the end of their design lifetimes. New, innovative solutions are needed, and these must combine technology and engineering with an understanding of social systems and institutions. The current issue of Environmental Engineering Science, the Official Journal of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, focuses on Re-inventing Urban Water Systems. Of particular note is an insightful article that presents the challenges and opportunities facing urban water system innovation, available free on the Environmental Engineering Science website.

Paul Krugman: Those Not-So-Good Old Days

In an online article for New York magazine, the commentator Jonathan Chait mocked Robert Samuelson for his recent column in The Washington Post lamenting the rise of the Internet. I don’t especially want to pile on, but this is an occasion to say something about my own perceptions of how the Web has changed journalism.

Now, obviously the Internet is causing big commercial problems for news organizations. And that is a real problem; someone does have to do basic reporting, which means that someone else has to pay the bills. But that will have to be the subject of another post one of these days.

Larry Summers Decided to 'Take Off the Gloves' in Fed Chair Campaign

Allie Jones, Aug 21, 2013

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who has been hanging out in Cape Cod all summer, did not want to campaign for Federal Reserve chair at first. According to The Washington Post's Zachary A. Goldfarb, Summers told his friends "no lobbying" when his name was first batted around to replace Ben Bernanke. Now, Summers has decided to "take off the gloves," and has instructed friends and former colleagues to counter attacks against him.

Paul Krugman: This Age of Bubbles

So, another BRIC hits the wall. Actually, I’ve never much liked the whole “BRIC” — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — concept: Russia, which is basically a petro-economy, doesn’t belong there at all, and there are large differences among the other three. Still, it’s hard to deny that India, Brazil, and a number of other countries are now experiencing similar problems. And those shared problems define the economic crisis du jour.

What’s going on? It’s a variant on the same old story: investors loved these economies not wisely but too well, and have now turned on the objects of their former affection. A couple years back, Western investors — discouraged by low returns both in the United States and in the noncrisis nations of Europe — began pouring large sums into emerging markets. Now they’ve reversed course. As a result, India’s rupee and Brazil’s real are plunging, along with Indonesia’s rupiah, the South African rand, the Turkish lira, and more.

Why Can’t Democracy Trump Inequality?

Sam Pizzigati

Fifty years ago, average Americans lived in a society that had been growing — and had become — much more equal. In 1963, of every $100 in personal income, less than $10 went to the nation’s richest 1 percent.

Americans today live in a land much more unequal. The nation’s top 1 percent are taking just under 20 percent of America’s income, double the 1963 level.

But no Americans, in all the years since 1963, have ever voted for doubling the income share of America’s most affluent. No candidates, in all those years, have ever campaigned on a platform that called for enriching the already rich.

The More Likely Reason for Spying: It's For Protecting the Profits of the Oligarchs

JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Coincidentally, after reading that the world’s last Amazon rainforest is disappearing for oil profits, a review on Matt Damon’s new film “Elysium” appeared on the same page.  It described the earth as gray, barren, little more than a polluted prison for all those not wealthy enough to live on the luxury space station “Elysium,” hovering a short 20-minute shuttle ride above earth. The poor are left to fight in squalid conditions, which is the deplorable situation right now for over half the world’s children.

Dean Baker: AP Goes Off The Deep End With Deficit Scold David Walker

On Wednesday the Associated Press fielded its entry in the classics in bad reporting on economic policy contest: a profile it did of David Walker, the former head of the Government Accountability Office and also former president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The piece presented everything that Walker said at face value, making no effort to put his scare story in any context nor to verify his assertions.

The Real, Terrifying Reason Why British Authorities Detained David Miranda 

The scariest explanation of all? That the NSA and GCHQ are just showing they don't want to be messed with.

Bruce Schneier | Aug 22 2013, 1:01 PM ET

Last Sunday, David Miranda was detained while changing planes at London Heathrow Airport by British authorities for nine hours under a controversial British law -- the maximum time allowable without making an arrest. There has been much made of the fact that he's the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter whom Edward Snowden trusted with many of his NSA documents and the most prolific reporter of the surveillance abuses disclosed in those documents. There's less discussion of what I feel was the real reason for Miranda's detention. He was ferrying documents between Greenwald and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker and his co-reporter on Snowden and his information. These document were on several USB memory sticks he had with him. He had already carried documents from Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro to Poitras in Berlin, and was on his way back with different documents when he was detained.

The DOJ Has Corrupted the Rule of Law by Not Prosecuting Wall Street Financial Looters

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Journalist and scholarly muse Thomas Frank noted in a recent e-mail to colleagues,

September 15 will mark five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the official beginning of the slump that never ends. It was a moment that smashed the faith of millions of people. And so it’s time for a look back: What did the nation learn from that moment of complete disillusionment?

Well, basically nothing. We came to the turning point and didn’t turn.

US Economic Policy: Keeping Wages Flat Since 1979 

Pro-worker policies have been under attack for a generation, but the last decade has been simply devastating, says report

- Jon Queally, staff writer 

 

In the United States of America the rich get richer, the poor stay poor, and the middle class—if they're lucky—just stay "flat".

For the last tens years, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, the failure of the economy to provide a living wage to a majority of its workers has created a decade of stagnation.

From Spying on "Terrorists Abroad" to Suppressing Domestic Dissent: When We Become the Hunted

Wednesday, 21 August 2013 00:00  
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview 

If you're wondering why the ongoing revelations about the development and use of a massive public and private surveillance complex should be of concern to you, read what Michael German, senior policy counsel for the ACLU (and former FBI agent), says about the new book, Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance:

Heidi Boghosian's 'Spying on Democracy' is the answer to the question, 'If you're not doing anything wrong, why should you care if someone's watching you?' It's chock full of stories about how innocent people's lives were turned upside-down by public and private-sector surveillance programs. But more importantly, it shows how this unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.

Truthout recently spoke with Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, about the ever-expanding government/corporate surveillance state.

It’ll Take More Than an Apocalypse to Unseat House Republicans

By Jonathan Chait

There is a morally intuitive connection between crime and punishment that is leading many people in Washington to speculate that the dysfunction of the Republican House could cost the party in the midterm elections. If House Republicans are preventing any alternative to terribly designed budget sequestration, blocking agreement on immigration reform, and threatening fiscal and economic crises in order to posture against Obamacare, the fair and rational thing would be for voters to punish them. Such ideologically diverse analysts as Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, Byron York, and Ruy Teixeira have all floated variations of this possibility.

Unfortunately, life isn’t fair or rational.

The Deep State, the Permanent Campaign, and the Frayed Fabric of American Democracy

By James Fallows

Obviously I consider yesterday's Senate developments to be (modestly) good news. The McConnell-era Republican minority had finally over-reached in subjecting Barack Obama to a burden no other president has faced: routine filibuster blockage of his own executive-branch appointees and attempted de-facto nullification of several agencies. The Reid-era Democratic majority finally decided to draw the line. When they stuck together, with their 51+ votes, McConnell and his minority backed down. [Fake ad from Daily Kos.] 

So we have returned, for our 44th president, to some of the rules that applied for presidents #1 through #43. That this counts as a "breakthrough" is really a reminder of how far things have devolved. I refer you to my main theme, laid out in detail in dispatches like these (one, two, three): that America has almost everything working in its favor, except for the increasingly flawed structure of our governing institutions.

The Snowden Effect, Continued

By Charles P. Pierce at 10:05AM 

There is one thing for which we can thank Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage. His revelations clearly have delineated, once and for all, the parameters of liberalism's inner authoritarian. We all have one, that little voice that whispers, "Not all slopes are slippery," and we take its advice and then, 60 years or so later, we wonder how we all wound up in the ditch. Those parameters now appear to be sharply defined as Don't Be Unpleasant To Me On The Teevee, and Don't Inconvenience A President I Like. We've seen that over the weekend as various liberals half-defended the bullshit use of an anti-terrorism statute to detain David Miranda because of documents Miranda was carrying, which requires you to ignore the loud bell that ought to ring every time the British government starts using anti-terrorism statutes to conduct its intelligence business. (Ask the Irish what I'm talking about.)

Scott Walker's War Against Free Speech Escalates: Elected Official, News Editor Arrested in WI

In a nation already at war with itself...

 

By Brad Friedman on 8/20/2013, 1:57pm PT 

 

By now, you've certainly heard of the outrageous 9-hour detention of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda at Heathrow Airport under Great Britain's supposed "Terrorism Act" over the weekend. As Rachel Maddow amazingly, but justifiably, found it necessary to point out loudly last night, "journalism is not terrorism", and both the British government and U.S. government (which has admitted receiving a "heads-up" about the planned detention by British authorities in advance, but didn't stop it from happening) should be ashamed of themselves and held accountable for the outrage.

Paul Krugman: One Reform, Indivisible

Recent political reporting suggests that Republican leaders are in a state of high anxiety, trapped between an angry base that still views Obamacare as the moral equivalent of slavery and the reality that health reform is the law of the land and is going to happen.

But those leaders don’t deserve any sympathy. For one thing, that irrational base is a Frankenstein monster of their own creation. Beyond that, everything I’ve seen indicates that members of the Republican elite still don’t get the basics of health reform — and that this lack of understanding is in the process of turning into a major political liability.

NAFTA on Steroids: The TransPacific Partnership and Global Neoliberalism

Monday, 19 August 2013 09:23
By Cliff DuRand, Truthout | News Analysis

A world without democracy, ruled by a technocratic elite serving the interests of US and global capital - protecting "investor rights" against national laws and regulations - is now being created in secret negotiations over free-trade treaties, one of which, the TransPacific Parnership (TPP), may be sewn up this fall. Can popular will stop it?

For four decades now, we have seen corporate-led neoliberal globalization transforming nation-states into globalized states that serve the interests of transnational capital above the interests of national populations. This tendency has been strong in states both of the global North and of the global South. Everywhere sovereignty is being compromised. The ideal political system most suitable for such globalized states is polyarchy, since it legitimates relatively autonomous elite rule. However, even in such a managed "democracy," there are moments when elites can be made accountable to national populations through the struggles of social movements. Occupy Wall Street was the beginning of such a social movement.

Study finds cost of future flood losses in major coastal cities could be over $50 billion by 2050

Climate change combined with rapid population increases, economic growth and land subsidence could lead to a more than nine-fold increase in the global risk of floods in large port cities between now and 2050.

'Future Flood Losses in Major Coastal Cities', published in Nature Climate Change, is part of an ongoing project by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to explore the policy implications of flood risks due to climate change and economic development. This study builds on past OECD work which ranked global port cities on the basis of current and future exposure, where exposure is the maximum number of people or assets that could be affected by a flood.

Don’t Get Complacent About Social Security. They Still Want to Cut It.

Richard Eskow

In every successful struggle there’s a time to celebrate a hard-fought victory. When it comes to Social Security, this is not that time.

It’s true that, after including the “chained CPI” benefit cut in his latest budget, President Obama seems to have dropped the idea. And it’s true there’s no talk of a “grand bargain” on the horizon.  But it would still be a serious mistake to become complacent about Social Security.

Multinationals Are Plotting to Steamroll What's Left of Our Democracy to Make Huge Profits

By Dave Johnson

August 20, 2013  |  The giant multinationals are pushing a trade deal that will literally let them bypass our laws. This deal is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and it is coming at us in the next few months. The corporations are trying to switch this gravy-train onto the “Fast Track.” For them this deal is the light at the end of the tunnel of democracy and self-government that has been trying to reign them in. We need to get this runaway train back on the rails or We the People will be begging for scraps thrown from the caboose. Call your Senators and Representative today and let them know that people are paying attention and oppose “Fast Track trade authority.”

Scott Walker Goes All 1798: Arrests Elected Official, Editor in Wisconsin

John Nichols on August 16, 2013 - 12:24 PM ET

 

The first great test of the American Constitution came in 1798, when President John Adams became so agitated with his critics that he disregarded the Bill of Rights and the rule of law and arranged for the arrest of dissenting elected officials and editors.

Adams was so lawless that his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson, organized the opposition. Two years later, Adams was the first American president to be removed from office by the electorate. And rightly so.
 

Social Security Is the Only Reason Most Americans Can Afford to Retire

By Ross Eisenbrey | August 14, 2013

As we celebrate the 78^th birthday of Social Security today, it’s worth noting the vital role the program continues to play in Americans’ retirement security. Though Americans are increasingly turning to savings in 401(k)-type accounts, Social Security remains the most reliable and equitable system of retirement savings. The expected stream of Social Security benefits for a household at the median is not very much less than for a household in the top 10 percent—in 2008, the median household age 65-69 had $315,300 of Social Security wealth, while a household at the 90^th percentile had $643,100, a little more than twice as much.¹

New IPCC Report: Climatologists More Certain Global Warming Is Caused By Humans, Impacts Are Speeding Up

By Joe Romm on August 18, 2013 at 1:13 pm

The Fifth — and hopefully final — Assessment Report (AR5) from the UN Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) is due next month. The leaks are already here:

Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the UN panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities – chiefly the burning of fossil fuels – are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.

That is up from at least 90 percent in the last report in 2007, 66 percent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995, steadily squeezing out the arguments by a small minority of scientists that natural variations in the climate might be to blame.

Government Agents Went to the Guardian Offices and Oversaw Smashing of Hard Drives to Erase Snowden Files 

By Alex Kane

August 20, 2013  |  Two officers from a British intelligence agency oversaw the destruction of hard drives at The Guardian newspaper’s office last month in an effort to stop the paper from reporting on the documents that Edward Snowden gave them. The account was reported yesterday [3] by The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger.

Rusbridger described [3]various attempts at intimidation that the British government made before he agreed to finally destroy the hard drives. In an interview with the BBC [4], Rusbridger explained that "given that there were other copies and we could work out of America, which has better laws to protect journalists, I saw no reason not to destroy this material ourselves rather than hand it back to the government." Rusbridger said that the alternative to destroying the hard drives--a move forced by the government--was a court case with little prospect of winning.