Maybe Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg, and Elon Musk Just Really Like Butte, Montana

BY DAVID DAYEN

The CEOs of the nation’s largest companies typically don’t have a reason to fly to Butte, Montana. But that’s where they are this week, a who’s who of corporate America, participating in the Montana Economic Development Summit, billed as an effort to “boost our state’s economy by finding Montana solutions for Montana jobs.” That may sound like a regional concern, but the non-Montana titans of industry in attendance include Google CEO Eric Schmidt; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg; Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk; and many more, including executives from Ford, Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, ConocoPhillips, Oracle, FedEx and Delta Airlines. Sponsors of the event include even more behemoths, like Walmart, Pfizer, Pepsi, Microsoft, Nike, Lockheed Martin and dozens more.

How can a local Montana jobs summit attract the giants of American commerce, few of whom have any business interests in the state? Well, the convener of the event, Max Baucus, happens to chair the Senate Finance Committee, the key tax-writing panel in the upper chamber. And when he throws an event, nominally about “bringing jobs to Montana,” corporate America recognizes that this gives them another opportunity to dole out favors to the senator who wants to lead a massive rewriting of the nation’s tax laws, designed to lower corporate rates and allow companies to bring back money stashed overseas with impunity. In fact, every corporation associated with the Montana Economic Development Summit has a stake in the tax reform debate, and most have officially lobbied for favorable treatment. Considering the tens of billions that these companies stand to gain if they are successful, a couple days in Butte doesn’t sound like such a bad trade.

Dean Baker: The Simple Reason for the Long Downturn: Housing Bubble Burst

Monday, 16 September 2013 10:58  
By Dean Baker, Truthout | News Analysis 

Many economists and business writers view the duration and severity of the downturn as being a mystery. They argue that it has something to do with the financial crisis, although the exact nature of the relationship is often not quite clear, with the financial crisis looming as a dark cloud hanging over the head of an otherwise healthy economy.

Fortunately, for arithmetic fans the story was never very difficult. In the last business cycle the economy was being driven in large part by a housing bubble. The unprecedented run-up in nationwide house prices lead to booms in both residential construction and consumption.

My grovelling apology to Herr Schäuble

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
September 17th, 2013

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has been vindicated.

For my part, I have been wrong about everything. German discipline policies for the eurozone have been a tremendous success. I am ashamed for suggesting otherwise.

[...]

I apologise for mentioning that unemployment is 27.8pc in Greece, 26.3pc in Spain, 17.3pc in Cyprus, and 16.5pc in Portugal, or for pointing that it would be far worse had it not been for a mass exodus of EMU refugees. Nor was is proper to mention that Greek youth unemployment in 62.9pc. These are trivial details.

I apologise for pointing out that the EU-IMF Troika originally said the Greek economy would contract by 2.6pc in 2010 and then recover briskly, when in fact it contracted by roughly 23pc from peak-to-trough, and will shrink another 5pc this year according to the think-tank IOBE. This slippage is well within the normal margin of error.

 

The Money Behind the Shutdown Crisis

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: September 17, 2013

Representative Aaron Schock is a conservative Republican from Illinois, but not conservative enough for the hard-right activist group Club for Growth, which is seeking someone to run against him in next year’s primary.

His crime? In 2011, he voted to increase the debt ceiling, and, in 2012, he voted for a stopgap spending bill that prevented a government shutdown. In neither case did he demand the defunding of health care reform.

Nanocrystal Catalyst Transforms Impure Hydrogen into Electricity

Brookhaven Lab scientists use simple, 'green' process to create novel core-shell catalyst that tolerates carbon monoxide in fuel cells and opens new, inexpensive pathways for zero-emission vehicles

September 18, 2013

UPTON, NY—The quest to harness hydrogen as the clean-burning fuel of the future demands the perfect catalysts—nanoscale machines that enhance chemical reactions. Scientists must tweak atomic structures to achieve an optimum balance of reactivity, durability, and industrial-scale synthesis. In an emerging catalysis frontier, scientists also seek nanoparticles tolerant to carbon monoxide, a poisoning impurity in hydrogen derived from natural gas. This impure fuel—40 percent less expensive than the pure hydrogen produced from water—remains largely untapped.

USDA Seeks to Expand Pilot Program Which Leaves Meat Contaminated With Fecal Matter

Tuesday, 17 September 2013 09:50  
By Candice Bernd, Truthout | Report 

Half of the USDA inspectors in industrial meat plants will be replaced with inspectors employed by the very same companies whose meats they are inspecting if plans by the US Department of Agriculture are allowed to go forward.

Is there poop in your pork and poultry? It’s a serious question.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has plans to expand a privatized meat inspection model that has been in place for 14 years at five hog plants in the United States and which has been found to fail time and time again at preventing contamination of meat - with fecal matter.

Global Power Project, Part 10: TransCanada Corporation, Kings of the Keystone Pipeline

Saturday, 07 September 2013 09:46 
By Andrew Gavin Marshall

TransCanada Corporation describes itself as “a leader in the responsible development and reliable and safe operation of North American energy infrastructure." Beginning in 2005, the company announced plans for the Keystone XL pipeline. In 2010, Canada’s National Energy Board (NEB) approved the full pipeline project, stating that it was in the “public interest” to transport Canadian tar sands oil to the Gulf Coast in the United States.

If approved, the Keystone XL pipeline would transport oil from Alberta through six U.S. states: Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Russ Girling, President and CEO of TransCanada, said the project would “improve U.S. energy security and reduce dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East and Venezuela.”

First-time measurements in Greenland snowpack show a drop in atmospheric co since 1950s

Cleaner auto combustion appears to have driven the improvement

A first-ever study of air trapped in the deep snowpack of Greenland shows that atmospheric levels of carbon monoxide (CO) in the 1950s were actually slightly higher than what we have today. This is a surprise because current computer models predict much higher CO concentrations over Greenland today than in 1950. Now it appears the opposite is in fact true.

In a paper recently published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Vasilii Petrenko, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, concluded that CO levels rose slightly from 1950 until the 1970s, then declined strongly to present-day values. This finding contradicts computer models that had calculated a 40 percent overall increase in CO levels over the same period.

Breathing better, living longer

• Deseret News
•  

Arden Pope’s students know him as an excellent economics teacher, but some would be surprised to learn that, thanks to him, the air they breathe today is cleaner than the first breath they ever took.

In fact, a new study by this BYU professor concludes that improvements in U.S. air quality since 1990 have sparked a 35 percent reduction in deaths and disability specifically attributable to air pollution. Pope was a member of a large research team who co-authored the study for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dean Baker: Anniversary Present for Wall Street Banks: A Financial Speculation Tax

A tax on financial transactions will reign in banks and other financial institutions, and may prevent another crisis.

As we mark the fifth anniversary of the Wall Street bailouts, it is clear that little has changed in the way they do business. They are still engaging in the same sorts of market manipulation and tax gaming as they did before the crisis. 
 
The weak conditions on the bailout money had no lasting effect in areas like executive compensation. The industry itself is more concentrated than ever as the big banks used the crisis to merge with other banks, making them even bigger. And the Dodd-Frank reforms have been watered down to the extent that many are now pointless.

What we get wrong when we talk about ‘the financial crisis’

By Mike Konczal, Updated: September 14, 2013

This week is the five-year anniversary of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. That’s being taken to mean it’s the five-year anniversary of the financial crisis.

Wrong. Or, at the least, terribly incomplete. The focus on Lehman obscures the fact that there were really three crises. Sure, there was the crisis in the financial markets in late 2008. But there was also the ongoing financial crisis that would have happened even if Lehman’s failure didn’t cause any troubles. Meanwhile, there’s still a crisis of confidence over whether or not our financial markets are actually benefiting the economy as a whole.

This isn’t just academic. Emphasizing Lehman biases the conversation over financial reform in a subtle but powerful way. The implication is that if Dodd-Frank can prevent the events of fall 2008 from happening, then our work here is done. That view is dangerously wrong.

We've Got a Billionaire Bailout Society—And the 99% May Never Recover From It In Our Lifetimes

By Les Leopold

September 12, 2013  |  The odds are that we in the bottom 99 percent may never see a recovery in our lifetimes. That's because our nation has evolved into something entirely new: a billionaire bailout society.

We are entering a disastrous new era in which all the economic gains go to the top 1 percent, according to data from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. They report [3] that, "Top 1% incomes grew by 31.4% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4% from 2009 to 2012. Hence, the top 1% captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery....  In sum, top 1% incomes are close to full recovery while bottom 99% incomes have hardly started to recover." (In 2012, $394,000 is the cutoff to make it into the top 1 percent.)

The hidden truth behind Teach for America’s political empire

Working for more charter schools and fast-tracked teachers, the organization's growing — whether you like it or not

By James Cersonsky

Teach for America, well known for recruiting high-achieving college graduates to teach in urban and rural areas for two years, has expanded to 48 regions, built an alumni base of 32,000 and piled up $350 million in assets.

Now, as the school year begins, it’s planting seeds to grow further — but not without controversy and intrigue.

Government Hands More Than $1 Trillion to Wealthy While Deficit Is $642 Billion

Tuesday, 17 September 2013 10:32  
By Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future | News Analysis 

While our government is laying off hundreds and hundreds of thousands and cutting services in the name of cutting deficits, a new report exposes that taxpayers are handing more than $1 trillion a year to the wealthiest.

DC Focused On Deficits Not Jobs

Instead of focusing on jobs, Congress and the White House obsess on how to cut the budget -– the things We the People do to make our lives and economy better. While the “sequester” has already cost 900,000 jobs — 1.6 million thru 2014 — Republicans are threatening to shut down the government and force the country to default on its debt as leverage to force even more cuts.

The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever

By Marty Kaplan

September 16, 2013  |  Yale law school professor Dan Kahan’s new research paper [3] is called “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” but for me a better title is the headline on science writer Chris Mooney’s piece [4] about it in Grist:  “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math.” 

 

Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people’s ability to think clearly.  His conclusion, in Mooney’s words: partisanship “can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills…. [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.”

Study: Trade Deal Would Mean a Pay Cut for 90% of U.S. Workers

By Susie Madrak

I think most of us realize by now what a bad deal these trade agreements are. This study proves that our suspicions are correct. More important, the agreement gives multinational corporations the ability to override a country's environmental laws. What could possibly go wrong?

The verdict is in: most U.S. workers would see wage losses as a result of theTrans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a sweeping U.S. "free trade" deal under negotiation with 11 Pacific Rim countries. That's the conclusion of a reportjust released by the non-partisan Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

TPP's corporate proponents have tried to sell the NAFTA-style deal to the U.S. public and policymakers by claiming that it will result in gains for the U.S. economy. They often cite a study from the Peterson Institute for International Economics that used sweeping assumptions to project a tiny benefit from the TPP. We brought that study down to size back in January, showing that, even if one accepts the pro-TPP authors' litany of optimistic assumptions, the much-touted "benefit" from the TPP would amount to an extra quarter per person per day.

How Detroit went broke: The answers may surprise you - and don't blame Coleman Young

By Nathan Bomey and John Gallagher/Detroit Free Press Business Writers

Detroit is broke, but it didn’t have to be. An in-depth Free Press analysis of the city’s financial history back to the 1950s shows that its elected officials and others charged with managing its finances repeatedly failed — or refused — to make the tough economic and political decisions that might have saved the city from financial ruin.

Instead, amid a huge exodus of residents, plummeting tax revenues and skyrocketing home abandonment, Detroit’s leaders engaged in a billion-dollar borrowing binge, created new taxes and failed to cut expenses when they needed to. Simultaneously, they gifted workers and retirees with generous bonuses. And under pressure from unions and, sometimes, arbitrators, they failed to cut health care benefits — saddling the city with staggering costs that today threaten the safety and quality of life of people who live here.

How Millions in America Get Entrenched in Poverty

By Sasha Abramsky

September 4, 2013  |  The following are excerpts from Sasha Abramsky's new book The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (Nation Books [3], 2013): 

 

In the fall of 2011, with hunger rearing up across America, the large freezer bins at the Port Carbon Food Pantry (PCFP), in the small, gritty, Appalachian town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, were empty. The shelves next to the freezers were also largely barren. A few boxes of egg noodles provided about the only sign that this was a place in the business of giving out food to those who could no longer afford to buy it. An adjacent room was doing slightly better, displaying stacks of canned fruit, canned corn, beans, and bags of pasta. But, taken as a whole, these were slim pickings. Clients who walked or drove up the hill, the remnants of an unseasonably early snow storm still on the ground, from the center of town to the two-story building were eligible for six to ten days of food, but that food was all they’d be able to get from the pantry for the next two months.

Three years earlier, explained PCFP’s coordinator, Ginny Wallace, the rooms were filled to bursting with food. Then the economy tanked; demand for the free food soared; and at the same time, locals’ ability to donate to the pantry crumbled.

They Know Much More Than You Think

James Bamford

In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets.

Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the “Movers & Shakers” list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day. Written sixty-five years ago, it described a fictitious totalitarian society where a shadowy leader known as “Big Brother” controls his population through invasive surveillance. “The telescreens,” Orwell wrote, “have hidden microphones and cameras. These devices, alongside informers, permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone….”

Paul Krugman: Rich Man's Recovery

A few days ago, The Times published a report on a society that is being undermined by extreme inequality. This society claims to reward the best and brightest regardless of family background. In practice, however, the children of the wealthy benefit from opportunities and connections unavailable to children of the middle and working classes. And it was clear from the article that the gap between the society’s meritocratic ideology and its increasingly oligarchic reality is having a deeply demoralizing effect.

The report illustrated in a nutshell why extreme inequality is destructive, why claims ring hollow that
inequality of outcomes doesn’t matter as long as there is equality of opportunity. If the rich are so much
richer than the rest that they live in a different social and material universe, that fact in itself makes
nonsense of any notion of equal opportunity.

'Grassroots action' in livestock feeding to help curb global climate change

Scientists meeting in Australia describe how they are turning a dream into reality, with major benefits for people and the environment
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA (13 September 2013)—In a series of papers to be presented next week, scientists offer new evidence that a potent chemical mechanism operating in the roots of a tropical grass used for livestock feed has enormous potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Referred to as "biological nitrification inhibition" or BNI, the mechanism markedly reduces the conversion of nitrogen applied to soil as fertilizer into nitrous oxide, according to papers prepared for the 22nd International Grasslands Congress. Nitrous oxide is the most powerful and aggressive greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential 300 times that of carbon dioxide.

Recovery for the Rich, Recession for the Rest

Richard Eskow

Five years after the financial crisis, it’s become increasingly apparent that the government didn’t rescue “the economy.” It rescued the wealthy, while doing far too little for everyone else.

That didn’t happen by accident. Our government’s response was largely designed by – and for – the wealthiest among us, and it shows. Here’s one highlight from a new analysis: The highest-earning Americans saw their income rise by nearly one-third in a single year, while the needle barely moved for 99 percent of us.

Secret Quarter-Billion-Dollar Koch Brothers Political Operation Revealed

By Steven Rosenfeld

September 12, 2013  |  Politico.com, the Washington insider website, has the money-in-politics scoop [3] of the year: It has unmasked a previously unknown political money laundering operation, set up by the energy billionaires and libertarian Koch brothers, that raised $256 million and secretly spent almost all of it last year against Democrats.

 

The “Koch brothers’ secret bank,” which is what the website [3] calls the Virginia-based group, whose formal name is Freedom Partners, is the glue that has been holding together the right-wing pantheon of pro-corporate, anti-regulatory, anti-Obama, anti-labor front groups that are against everything from healthcare reform to labor unions to financial market reform to progressive taxation.

Massive $238 billion financial bailout 5 years ago ‘avoided catastrophe,’ only $3 billion has yet to be paid back: Treasury

By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 7:15 EDT

The US Treasury said Wednesday the government’s massive response to the economic crisis five years ago paid off, avoiding a catastrophic breakdown of the financial system.

In a report marking the anniversary of the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers — which snowballed into the worst crisis since the 1930s — the Treasury defended deploying hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to save other banks, major financial institutions and auto companies.

How the cult of shareholder value wrecked American business

By Steven Pearlstein, Published: September 9 at 12:20 pm

In the recent history of management ideas, few have had a more profound — or pernicious — effect than the one that says corporations should be run in a manner that “maximizes shareholder value.”

Indeed, you could argue that much of what Americans perceive to be wrong with the economy these days — the slow growth and rising inequality; the recurring scandals; the wild swings from boom to bust; the inadequate investment in R&D, worker training and public goods — has its roots in this ideology.

EPA Moves To Fire 9/11 Whistleblower – Again

Scientist Who Disclosed First Responder Risks Faces Removal after Restoration

 

Posted on Sep 11, 2013  | Tags: EPA

---

Washington, DC — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientist who raised the alarm about dangers to First Responders and residents at the World Trade Center conflagration has received a proposed removal more than a year after a federal civil service court ordered her returned to work, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). EPA re-filed the same charges from 2010 which had been thrown out for violations of her constitutional due process rights.

Dr. Cate Jenkins, a senior chemist with more than three decades of agency tenure, publicly charged that due to falsified EPA standards, First Responders waded into dust so corrosive that it caused chemical burns deep within their respiratory systems. After raising the issue to the EPA Inspector General, Congress and the FBI, Dr. Jenkins was isolated, harassed and ultimately removed from her position on December 30, 2010 by EPA, based upon an un-witnessed and contested claim that the soft-spoken, petite childhood polio survivor threatened her 6-foot male supervisor.

5 Years Later, We've Learned Nothing From the Financial Crisis

Why haven't we destroyed the idea that destroyed the world? 

James Kwak, Sep 10 2013, 8:35 AM ET

Five years ago, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and the global financial system were not blown up by subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, or credit default swaps. They were not blown up by greed or fraud, alone. The financial crisis that left millions of people still out of work was caused by an idea: the idea that unregulated financial markets are always good and that we can rely on the self-interest of bankers to improve all of our lives.

The ideology of free financial markets gained sway in the 1990s, with Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve and Robert Rubin at Treasury, and was not seriously contested in Washington before 2008. It was a Wall Street-to-Washington consensus that spanned bankers, lawyers, lobbyists, journalists, college career counselors, legislators, regulators, and the highest reaches of the Clinton and Bush administrations. It gave us derivatives non-regulation, consumer non-protection, the end of Glass-Steagall, creative capital accounting, regulatory arbitrage, and, ultimately, tens of thousands of empty houses rotting in the desert. Ultimately it delivered a financial shock from which the world has still not recovered.

Paul Krugman: C'est La V No More

Dean Baker weighs in on the self-correcting economy discussion — it’s not really a debate — and expresses some skepticism about whether we can expect a recovery even in the Keynesian long run. Fair enough. But a quibble: Dean seems to think that I’m saying that 2008 was unique and completely unlike previous recessions. Actually that was never my view — and my actual view ties in with some of the arguments David Warsh makes in his attack on Larry Summers.

Net neutrality is on trial in Washington. Here’s what you need to know.

By Timothy B. Lee, Published: September 10 at 9:23 am

On Monday, network neutrality got its day in court. The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments from Verizon that the Federal Communications Commission had exceeded its authority by enacting network neutrality regulations.

But if you had gone to court expecting a rousing argument about the merits of network neutrality regulation, you would have been disappointed. Drenched in legal jargon, the argument focused on minutia of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and of past legal precedents.

Fortunately, we're here to help. Read on to learn how we got to this point, what's at stake in the debate, and what will happen if the courts find the FCC overstepped its authority.

No, poverty is not the fault of the poor

It was the banks that crashed the economy, remember?

By Jared Bernstein

We’re starting to prep for “poverty day” around these parts–it’s next Tues, 9/17–the Census Bureau will release the poverty and household income results for last year. There’s lots of rich data and both CBPP and yours truly will have much to say about the results.

But in prepping for a presentation on this stuff for tomorrow, I made the graph below, just showing the sharp increase in the official poverty rate over the great recession. I’ve noted in many posts the limits of the official measure, most importantly re the dates shown in the figure, how it leaves out many of the safety net benefits that expanded to offset the downturn.

NSA admits it put phone numbers on an 'alert list'

By DAVID G. SAVAGE | Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON-The National Security Agency admitted in documents released Tuesday that it had wrongly put 16,000 phone numbers on an "alert list" so their incoming calls could be monitored, a mistake that a judge on the secret surveillance court called a "flagrant violation" of the law.

The documents are the latest to show that not only did the secret spy agency collect more data than most Americans suspected, its agents sometimes went too far when tapping into the data.

Paul Krugman: The Wonk Gap

On Saturday, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming delivered the weekly Republican address. He
ignored Syria, presumably because his party is deeply conflicted on the issue. (For the record, so
am I.) Instead, he demanded repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “The health care law,” he declared,
“has proven to be unpopular, unworkable and unaffordable,” and he predicted “sticker shock” in
the months ahead.

So, another week, another denunciation of Obamacare. Who cares? But Mr. Barrasso’s remarks
were actually interesting, although not in the way he intended. You see, all the recent news on
health costs has been good. So Mr. Barrasso is predicting sticker shock precisely when serious fears
of such a shock are fading fast. Why would he do that?

The New Goliath

Tuesday, 10 September 2013 09:33  
By William Greider, The Nation | Report 

Whatever Congress decides to do about bombing Syria, the United States is still trapped by a historic contradiction of its own invention. Our open-ended commitment to deter or punish bad guys anywhere around the world has not led to the peaceful vision of military planners and humanitarian hawks. It leads instead to more war—longer and more ambiguous conflicts in which there will be no victory, only abstract claims about teaching lessons to wayward nations.

The American Goliath, armed with awesomely superior weaponry and described as "indispensable" by admiring scholars, seems to have forgotten an ancient truth the Greeks and Romans understood. War is about purposeful violence, not diplomacy by other means.

Elizabeth Warren's Powerful Speech: Supreme Court Is on the Path to Being a "Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Big Business"

By Elizabeth Warren

September 9, 2013  |  The following is taken from a transcript of Sen. Elizabeth Warren's remarks to the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles on September 8.

When important decisions are made in Washington, too often, working families are ignored.  From tax policy to retirement security, the voices of hard-working people get drowned out by powerful industries and well-financed front groups.  Those with power fight to take care of themselves and to feed at the trough for themselves, even when it comes at the expense of working families getting a fair shot at a better future.

This isn’t new. Throughout our history, powerful interests have tried to capture Washington and rig the system in their favor. But we didn’t roll over. At every turn, in every time of challenge, organized labor has been there, fighting on behalf of the American people.

Remember When People Had Pensions? 

Sam Pizzigati

America’s corporate chiefs deserve all their hefty rewards, we’re told, because they take hefty risks. And what exactly are these richly rewarded corporate chiefs putting at risk? Our retirement security.

How’s your 401(k) doing?

Working Americans ask themselves this question — and angst about the answer — an awfully lot these days. Any why not? For most Americans, retirement reality has turned chillingly stark: Either you have a robust set of investments in your 401(k) or you’re facing a rocky retirement.

The 1 percent played Tea Party for suckers

When the super-rich feel threatened, they foment grass-roots uprising on their behalf. Here's why it always works
 
By Isaac William Martin

On Election Day, November 2, 2010, more than eight million Americans voted for congressional candidates who claimed to represent the Tea Party and its grassroots insurgency against the federal government. Most of the Tea Party candidates won. Their victory marked a sea change in American government. Even before the winners were sworn in, reporters began to refer to the 112th Congress as “the Tea Party Congress.” On the day of the swearing-in, the prominent Tea Party backer David Koch likened the electoral success of the Tea Party to the American Revolution. “It’s probably the best grassroots uprising since 1776 in my opinion,” he said.

The proposals of the new Congress had little in common with the revolutionary slogans of 1776, but many of them would be familiar to activists who had participated in the grassroots uprisings on behalf of the rich in the twentieth century.

‘Unacceptable Levels’ of Chemical Toxins in Our Lives Exposed in New Film

by Beth Buczynski  |  September 8, 2013  |  5:00 am

Americans have access to modern healthcare, a glut of food and clean water. Yet most of us are sicker, more depressed and more overweight than ever before. Something is poisoning us, but we can’t see it, feel it or taste it. Could it be the thousands of chemicals that flow, often undeclared, through our food and retail systems? “Unacceptable Levels” is a film that seeks to answer that question.

The True History of Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate Agenda

By Mark Ames

September 6, 2013
This is an adapted version of an article that first appeared on NSFWCORP. Published daily online and monthly in print, NSFWCORP is The Future of Journalism (With Jokes). For more features, or to subscribe, click here. [3]

This important article kicks off what will be a focus of coverage of AlterNet over the next few months on the corporate-funded "pro-market" arm of  libertarianism in America and the sophisticated methods of inserting business propaganda into the public debate.

***

Every couple of years, mainstream media hacks pretend to have just discovered libertarianism as some sort of radical, new and dynamic force in American politics. It’s a rehash that goes back decades, and hacks love it because it’s easy to write, and because it’s such a non-threatening “radical” politics (unlike radical left politics, which threatens the rich). The latest version involves a summer-long pundit debate in the pages of the New York Times, Reason magazine and elsewhere over so-called “libertarian populism.” It doesn’t really matter whose arguments prevail, so long as no one questions where libertarianism came from or why we’re defining libertarianism as anything but a big business public relations campaign, the winner in this debate is Libertarianism.

Pull up libertarianism’s floorboards, look beneath the surface into the big business PR campaign’s early years, and there you’ll start to get a sense of its purpose, its funders, and the PR hucksters who brought the peculiar political strain of American libertarianism into being — beginning with the libertarian movement’s founding father, Milton Friedman. Back in 1950, the House of Representatives held hearings on illegal lobbying activities and exposed both Friedman and the earliest libertarian think-tank outfit as a front for business lobbyists. Those hearings have been largely forgotten, in part because we’re too busy arguing over the finer points of “libertarian populism.”

Our Triple Jobs Problem

Sunday, 08 September 2013 10:12 
By Alejandro Reuss, Dollars & Sense | Op-Ed 

If you hear somebody talking about the U.S. “jobs problem,” ask them which one they mean. Let’s talk about three: First, even as unemployment has inched down, the economy has created barely enough jobs to match population growth. Second, this enormous labor-market “slack” has stifled workers’ bargaining power and kept wages low. Third, even with a “tighter” labor market, workers would still be in a weak bargaining position due to the policies of the last thirty-some years, which have undermined unions, the welfare state, and labor-market regulation.

10 Ways America Has Come to Resemble a Banana Republic

By Alex Henderson

September 5, 2013  |  In the post-New Deal America of the 1950s and '60s, the idea of the United States becoming a banana republic would have seemed absurd to most Americans. Problems and all, the U.S. had a lot going for it: a robust middle-class, an abundance of jobs that paid a living wage, a strong manufacturing base, a heavily unionized work force, and upward mobility for both white-collar workers with college degrees and blue-collar workers who attended trade school. To a large degree, the nation worked well for cardiologists, accountants, attorneys and computer programmers as well as electricians, machinists, plumbers and construction workers.

 

In contrast, developing countries that were considered banana republics—the Dominican Republic under the brutal Rafael Trujillo regime, Nicaragua under the Somoza dynasty—lacked upward mobility for most of the population and were plagued by blatant income equality, a corrupt alliance of government and corporate interests, rampant human rights abuses, police corruption and extensive use of torture on political dissidents.

Failed Policy — The 401(k) Shrinks In A Growing Economy

September 5th, 2013 12:04 pm 
David Cay Johnston

Disturbing new evidence that government policies are propelling us toward a poorer future turns up in a first-ever government examination of retirement savings plans like 401(k)s.

The report, from the Internal Revenue Service, shows that even though the economy is improving, the number of workers saving out of their paychecks for old age is shrinking. So is the amount they save, down 6 percent in real terms from 2008 to 2010.

Wolf Richter – Bonds Bleed: Largest Bubble In History Unwinds, But The “Great Rotation” Into Stocks Is Deceptive Wall Street Hype

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Cross posted from Testosterone Pit.

The bond-fund massacre has been spectacular. Prime example: antsy investors yanked $7.7 billion in August out of the largest bond fund in the world, Pimco’s Total Return Fund. In July, they’d yanked out $7.5 billion, in June a record $14.5 billion. From May 1 through August 31, the fund’s assets shriveled 14%, from $292 billion to $251 billion; $26 billion from outflows and $15 billion from the shrinking value of the bonds. The fund lost 5.5% during that period.

By riding up the greatest bond bubble in the history of mankind, the fund has become known as a place where investors who don’t mind smaller returns but shudder at the thought of losing some of their principal could park their money without having to worry about it – but now, they’re worrying about it.

Flow Chart Exposes Common Core's Myriad Corporate Connections

Friday, 06 September 2013 00:00  
By Candice Bernd, Truthout | Report 

U.S. education reform isn't so much a "Race to the Top," because no matter which schools climb to the top of the ladder first, corporations always win.

Morna McDermott mapped the Common Core State Standard Initiative's corporate connections in a new flow chart, which reveals how corporations and organizations that are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have funded and perpetuated Common Core standards throughout the states.

Paul Krugman: Years of Tragic Waste

In a few days, we’ll reach the fifth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers — the moment when
a recession, which was bad enough, turned into something much scarier. Suddenly, we were looking at the real possibility of economic catastrophe.

And the catastrophe came.

Wait, you say, what catastrophe? Weren’t people warning about a second Great Depression? And that didn’t happen, did it? Yes, they were, and no, it didn’t — although the Greeks, the Spaniards, and others might not agree about that second point. The important thing, however, is to realize that there are degrees of disaster, that you can have an immense failure of economic policy that falls short of producing total collapse. And the failure of policy these past five years has, in fact, been immense.

Tobacco ‘Smoking Gun’ Shows Real TPP Agenda

Dave Johnson

I am sounding the alarm. Right now governments and the giant multinational corporations are engaged in writing a treaty that would overrule national laws that try to rein in what these giant corporations can do to us. This treaty will allow corporations to sue governments for “lost profits” if governments try to enforce environmental, health, labor and other laws. One “smoking gun” example that shows us what this treaty is about is an argument over whether to “carve out” special treatment for tobacco because it is so harmful, or give it the same protections that other corporations and their products are due to receive.

The Next Abortion Case Is Here

By Linda Greenhouse

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, author of the 5-to-4 opinion in June that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, may well be a hero to the gay rights community, and deservedly so. But he’s also the author of the 5-to-4 opinion that upheld the federal ban on so-called partial birth abortion back in 2007, and abortion-rights advocates have viewed with something close to dread the prospect that he could play a similarly decisive role in the Supreme Court’s next abortion case.

That case has arrived.

The Ted Cruz Effect: How One Man Destabilized the Government

By Brian Beutler

September 4, 2013  |  Late in August, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, traveled to a private residence in Dublin, N.H., to headline a fundraiser for the state Republican Party. Cruz’s spiel lasted about an hour, and was packed with the mix of straw men and inflammatory nonsense we’ve come to expect out of the junior senator from Texas.

But before he really got into it, he took a moment to say a few nice words about his GOP colleague from the state, who was also in attendance.

“Kelly Ayotte is a rock star,” Cruz said. “Let me tell you, your senator is as tough as granite. There is no stronger advocate of the men and women in our military in the U.S. Senate than is Kelly Ayotte, and there is no one tougher going to get the truth about what happened in Benghazi than Kelly Ayotte.”

Naomi Klein: Why Big Green Groups Can Be More Damaging Than Right-Wing Climate Deniers

By Jason Mark

September 5, 2013 | Canadian author Naomi Klein is so well known for her blade-sharp commentary that it’s easy to forget that she is, above all, a first-rate reporter. I got a glimpse into her priorities as I was working on this interview. Klein told me she was worried that some of the things she had said would make it hard for her to land an interview with a president of the one of the Big Green groups (read below and you’ll see why). She was more interested in nabbing the story than being the story; her reporting trumped any opinion-making.

Such focus is a hallmark of Klein’s career. She doesn’t do much of the chattering class’s news cycle blathering. She works steadily, carefully, quietly. It can be surprising to remember that Klein’s immense global influence rests on a relatively small body of work; she has published three books, one of which is an anthology of magazine pieces.

What's Killing Poor White Women?

Monica Potts
September 3, 2013

For most Americans, life expectancy continues to rise—but not for uneducated white women. They have lost five years, and no one knows why.

n the night of May 23, 2012, which turned out to be the last of her life, Crystal Wilson baby-sat her infant granddaughter, Kelly. It was how she would have preferred to spend every night. Crystal had joined Facebook the previous year, and the picture of her daughter cradling the newborn in the hospital bed substituted for a picture of herself. Crystal’s entire wall was a catalog of visits from her nieces, nephews, cousins’ kids, and, more recently, the days she baby-sat Kelly. She was a mother hen, people said of Crystal. She’d wanted a house full of children, but she’d only had one.

The picture the family chose for her obituary shows Crystal and her husband holding the infant. Crystal leans in from the side, with dark, curly hair, an unsmiling round face, and black eyebrows knit together. She was 38 and bore an unhealthy heft, more than 200 pounds. Crystal had been to the doctor, who told her she was overweight and diabetic. She was waiting to get medicine, but few in her family knew it, and no one thought she was near death.

A Hedge-Fund Billionare From Texas is Waging War On California Pensions

By Gary Cohn

September 3, 2013 | Benjamin Gamboa doesn’t know John Arnold, but they are linked by a shared concern over the fate of public-employee pensions in California.

 

“I’m proud to have a pension,” the 30-year-old Gamboa says. “I believe every American should have a pension.”

The two men live in very different worlds. Gamboa is a research analyst at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California. Arnold is a hedge-fund billionaire from Houston, Texas.
There’s another difference between them: Arnold recently had a representative present at a secret “pension summit” held at a Sacramento hotel, where strategies to limit public employee retirement benefits were discussed; Gamboa, a union member, did not – representatives of labor were specifically not invited.