First step to reduce plant need for nitrogen fertilizer uncovered

MU scientists say discovery could save farmers billions and protect the environment.

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Nitrogen fertilizer costs U.S. farmers approximately $8 billion each year, and excess fertilizer can find its way into rivers and streams, damaging the delicate water systems. Now, a discovery by a team of University of Missouri researchers could be the first step toward helping crops use less nitrogen, benefitting both farmers' bottom lines and the environment. The journal Science published the research this month.

Gary Stacey, an investigator in the MU Bond Life Sciences Center and professor of plant sciences in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, found that crops, such as corn, are "confused" when confronted with an invasive, but beneficial, bacteria known as rhizobia bacteria. When the bacteria interact correctly with a crop, the bacteria receive some food from the plant and, simultaneously, produce nitrogen that most plants need. In his study, Stacey found that many other crops recognize the bacteria, but do not attempt to interact closely with them.

Richard Eskow: The Robots Are Coming – Now What?

A new study says that nearly half of all American jobs may soon be performed by robots. And the White House has just announced the formation of “the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership Steering Committee ‘2.0,’” which it describes as “part of a continuing effort to maintain U.S.leadership in the emerging technologies that will create high-quality manufacturing jobs and enhance America’s global competitiveness.”

That seems like a good idea, but it raises a number of questions. There is only one labor representative on the committee, as compared to eleven corporate CEOs, and it would be good to know why. What’s more, labor isn’t acknowledged in the President’s statement that “industry, academia, and government must work in partnership to revitalize our manufacturing sector.”

The Four Eras of the American Right

September 28, 2013

 

Exclusive: In the coming weeks, the Republican Party and its Tea Party extremists vow to create budgetary and fiscal crises if the Democrats don’t gut health-care reform and submit to a host of other right-wing demands. But a driving force in this craziness is an anti-historical view of the Constitution, writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

As the world ponders why the American Right – through its Tea Party power in Congress – is threatening to shut down the federal government and precipitate a global economic crisis by defaulting on U.S. debt, the answer goes to the self-image of these rightists who insist they are the true defenders of the Founding Principles.

This conceit is reinforced by the vast right-wing media via talk radio, cable TV, well-funded Internet sites and a variety of books and print publications. Thus, the Tea Partiers and many Republicans have walled themselves off from the actual history, which would show the American Right to be arguably the opposite of true patriots, actually the faction of U.S. politics that has most disdained and disrupted the orderly constitutional process created in 1787.

Gaius Publius: Don’t believe the latest lie: There is no “pause” in global warming

One more look, this time in greater detail, at that bogus global warming “pause” you’re going to be hearing so much about shortly.

My guess is that Chuck Todd will be one of those bringing the non-story to you, because … well … Chuck Todd. But hey, watch the Sunday shows as well; they’ll all be hammering the soon-to-be-released fifth assessment report (AR5) from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is due out momentarily. The mainstream media will be denier central (“on the one hand, on the other hand”) for as long as the report is news, and as long they’re paid by climate-denying corporations to report it.

Seymour Hersh on death of Osama bin Laden: ‘It’s one big lie, not one word of it is true’

By Lisa O'Carroll, The Guardian
Friday, September 27, 2013 12:01 EDT

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn’t take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist”.

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

The Fall of the Heritage Foundation and the Death of Republican Ideas

How the Heritage Foundation went from the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement to the GOP's bane -- and how it's hurting the party's hopes for a turnaround

Molly Ball, Sep 25 2013, 7:00 AM ET

During the 1980 election, an up-and-coming Washington think tank called the Heritage Foundation undertook a massive task: to examine the federal government from top to bottom and produce a detailed, practical conservative policy vision.

The result, called Mandate for Leadership, epitomized the intellectual ambition of the then-rising conservative movement. Its 20 volumes, totaling more than 3,000 pages, included such proposals as income-tax cuts, inner-city “enterprise zones,” a presidential line-item veto, and a new Air Force bomber.

Despite the publication's academic prose and mind-boggling level of detail, it caused a sensation. A condensed version -- still more than 1,000 pages -- became a paperback bestseller in Washington. The newly elected Ronald Reagan passed out copies at his first Cabinet meeting, and it quickly became his administration’s blueprint. By the end of Reagan’s first year in office, 60 percent of the Mandate’s 2,000 ideas were being implemented, and the Republican Party’s status as a hotbed of intellectual energy was ratified. It was a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would declare in 1981, “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.”

Paul Krugman: Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted

Robert Benmosche, the chief executive of the American International Group, said something
stupid the other day. And we should be glad, because his comments help highlight an important
but rarely discussed cost of extreme income inequality — namely, the rise of a small but powerful
group of what can only be called sociopaths.

For those who don’t recall, A.I.G. is a giant insurance company that played a crucial role in creating
the global economic crisis, exploiting loopholes in financial regulation to sell vast numbers of debt
guarantees that it had no way to honor. Five years ago, U.S. authorities, fearing that A.I.G.’s
collapse might destabilize the whole financial system, stepped in with a huge bailout. But even the
policy makers felt ill used — for example, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, later
testified that no other episode in the crisis made him so angry.

Anti-GMO Campaigners Claim Victory as 'Monsanto Protection Act' Stripped From Senate Bill

Organizers cheer, saying the voices raised against genetically modified foods and giveaways to biotech giants were heard

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer 

 

An amendment dubbed the "Monsanto Protection Act," which currently allows large agriculture and biotech corporations to ignore court orders involving the safety of genetically modified seeds, has been stripped from Senate's spending bill that could be voted on as early as Wednesday afternoon.

Following an organized campaign against the provision in recent months, its removal was being cheered by food safety and environmental activists as a victory.
 

Seven Things You Should Know About the Wackiest “Fiscal Crisis” Yet

By Joshua Holland, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed 

Sometime in the next week, Congress will either get it together to pass a new budget resolution or the government will shut down (all but essential services). Two weeks after that, the federal government will reach its debt limit. If it is not raised, nobody really knows what will happen. The only sure thing is that it would roil the financial markets and cause some damage to the global economy.

So, we have another fiscal cliff. This contrived crisis is even more irrational than those of the past few years because Republicans in Congress have not only taken a hostage that they can’t shoot, but are demanding that Democrats ditch their signature achievement of the Obama presidency: the Affordable Care Act.

IPCC climate report: human impact is 'unequivocal'

UN secretary-general urges global response to clear message from scientists that climate change is human-induced

Fiona Harvey in Stockholm
theguardian.com, Friday 27 September 2013 06.48 EDT

World leaders must now respond to an "unequivocal" message from climate scientists and act with policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations secretary-general urged on Friday.

Introducing a major report from a high level UN panel of climate scientists, Ban Ki-moon said, "The heat is on. We must act."

The world's leading climate scientists, who have been meeting in all-night sessions this week in the Swedish capital, said there was no longer room for doubt that climate change was occurring, and the dominant cause has been human actions in pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Paul Krugman: Japan: Don't Ruin a Good Thing

So far, Abenomics has been going really, really well.

By signaling that the Bank of Japan has changed, that it won't snatch away the sake bottle just as the party gets going, that it's going to target sustained positive inflation, and also by signaling that some fiscal stimulus is forthcoming despite high levels of debt, Japanese authorities have achieved a remarkable turnaround in short-term economic performance.

Matt Taibbi: Looting the Pension Funds

All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers

September 26, 2013 7:00 AM ET

 

In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.

Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn't even know how to react. "She's Yale, Harvard, Oxford – she worked on Wall Street," says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. "Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn't know what the fuck she was talking about."

Rich Are Waging "Pure Class Warfare"

By Elias Isquith

September 26, 2013  |  In a post at his blog, New York Times columnist and award-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that while it may appear the rich want to destroy all forms of government, that isn’t the case. What they really want to do, Krugman writes, is destroy all forms of government that don’t benefit themselves.

More from Krugman:

[M]any of the rich are selective in their opposition to government helping the unlucky. They’re against stuff like food stamps and unemployment benefits; but bailing out Wall Street? Yay!

Seriously. Charlie Munger says [4] that we should “thank God” for the bailouts, but that ordinary people fallen on hard times should “suck it in and cope.” AIG’s CEO — the CEO of a bailed out firm! — says that complaints about bonuses to executives at such firms are just as bad as lynchings [5] (I am not making this up.)

Scientists Break The World Record For The Most Efficient Solar Cell

Rob Wile, Sep. 25, 2013, 9:21 AM

A German-French research team has created a solar cell that can convert 44.7% of the sunlight it receives into energy.

That's a new world record (though as CleanTechnica points out some places measure efficiency differently).

Paul Krugman: Free to be Hungry

The word “freedom” looms large in modern conservative rhetoric. Lobbying groups are given names like FreedomWorks; health reform is denounced not just for its cost but as an assault on, yes, freedom. Oh, and remember when we were supposed to refer to pommes frites as “freedom fries”?

The right’s definition of freedom, however, isn’t one that, say, F.D.R. would recognize. In particular, the third of his famous Four Freedoms — freedom from want — seems to have been turned on its head. Conservatives seem, in particular, to believe that freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat.

Get Out While You Can: Why Young Americans Should Emigrate

By Thomas McGath 

September 17, 2013  |  The 20-somethings of my generation have been marginalized by the economic situation in America. We've had a tricky time finding a place in the economy and many of us have become burdens on our families, through student loans and living costs. Now, how do we fix that?

 

Emigrate, if you can afford it. Millennials have a ton of education and no use for it. There are many other countries that represent a great opportunity for millennials looking to enter into an increasingly globalized work market. I'm not saying we should try to be members of an elite in other countries -- we should reject our shackles and become more worldly.

Part of that is learning a second or third language, something I thought I never would do. This changed after my time abroad in Ireland while studying at University College Dublin. I decided I was going to learn German, even though it was not the most useful of languages. Four years later, after teaching myself German from scratch, I have an operating fluency in German and now live in Berlin, where I will soon start my master's degree. The tuition costs a fraction of what it would in America. Despite being an foreigner, I have access to public health insurance available for students at only 60 Euros a month.

Dean Baker: The Media's Complicity in Cutting Social Security and Medicare

US media outlets are disingenuously claiming that social programs are putting Americans in debt.

Most people have probably heard about the Wall Street efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare. There is a vast list of organizations like Campaign to Fix the Debt, the Can Kicks Back, Third Way, and many more that have as a central agenda item cutting back or privatizing Social Security and Medicare. When we hear one of these organizations tell us these programs should be cut it is not a surprise.

The question is why do mainstream news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post use their news sections to tell the same stories? Last week when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued new long-range budget projections both papers were quick to ignore the numbers and to tell readers that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Paul Krugman: The (Very) Rich Are Getting (Much) Richer

Inequality wonks wait eagerly for updates to the Piketty-Saez data, in which the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez estimate the concentration of income at the top in the United States based on income tax returns.

The latest edition does not disappoint: It shows, as one might expect but needed confirmed, that the very rich have recovered just fine from the Great Recession, even as the great majority of Americans continue to struggle. In fact, the super-elite — the top 0.01 percent — actually had higher incomes in 2012 than they did at the height of the bubble.

How America’s 401(k) Revolution Rewarded the Rich and Turned the Rest of Us Into Big Losers

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

September 23, 2013  |  It was a bad idea from the get-go, but new research shows that America’s 401(k) revolution has left us even worse off than we thought. Here’s a look at how we got into this mess, and where it will take us if we don’t wise up.

 

The Dumbest Retirement Policy in the World

Thirty years ago, as laissez-faire fanaticism took hold of America, misguided policy-makers decided that do-it-yourself retirement plans, otherwise known as 401(k)s, would magically secure our financial future in the face of gyrating markets, economic crises, unpredictable life events, stagnant wages and rampant job insecurity. It was an extraordinary shift in thinking about public policy: Instead of having predictable streams of income from traditional pensions, ordinary people with little financial expertise would suddenly transform themselves into financial gurus, putting money aside and managing complicated investments in tax-deferred accounts.

Dean Baker: Obamacare: It's Better Than You Think

In just one week the main part of Obamacare will begin to kick in. This is the state level exchanges that will allow the uninsured to be covered. Beginning on October 1, people will be able to sign up to get insurance in their state regardless of their health.

Most people signing up on the exchanges will qualify for subsidies based on their income and family size. This means that the cost of insurance will be less than the advertised price.

Fox Pushes Dishonest Claims To Defend GOP's Food Stamp Cuts

September 20, 2013 9:19 PM EDT ››› MIKE BURNS & OLIVIA MARSHALL 

Fox News rushed to defend a GOP plan to cut $39 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), misportraying the program as riddled with fraud and abuse and downplaying the effects those cuts would have on families with children. In reality, fraud amounts to less than 1 percent of the total program, and the cuts would take benefits away from 3.8 million people*.

CLAIM: GOP's Food Stamp Cuts Won't Affect Children

Fox Regular Stephen Moore Falsely Claims That Cuts Wouldn't Hurt Children. On the September 20 edition of America's Newsroom, Wall Street Journal editorial board member and Fox regular Stephen Moore downplayed the proposed cuts, claiming that "families with children would not be affected by any of this." [Fox News, America's Newsroom, 9/20/13, via Media Matters]

Why Arne Duncan is threatening to withhold funds for poor kids

By Valerie Strauss, Published: September 21 at 10:58 am

It’s hard to decide  which of the following aspects of the U.S. Education Department’s fight with the state of California over standardized testing is worse:

* Education Secretary Arne Duncan is threatening to withhold some of the approximately $1.5 billion that California receives annually from the federal Title 1 program — funds intended to help poor children receive an education — if state officials don’t agree to implement a standardized-testing regime that he likes.

It's the Austerity, Stupid: How We Were Sold an Economy-Killing Lie

Once again, the Beltway fell for cherry-picked data—and you paid the price.

—By Kevin Drum | September/October 2013 Issue

It was the Excel error heard round the world.

In January 2010, as the global economy was slowly beginning to claw its way out of the depths of the Great Recession, the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff published a short paper with a grim message: Too much debt kills economic growth. They had compiled a comprehensive database of debt episodes throughout the 20th century, and their data told an unmistakable story: Time and again, countries that rack up high debt levels have gone on to suffer years—sometimes decades—of stagnation.

As economics studies go, it was nothing short of a bombshell. As its conclusions were invoked from Washington to Brussels, tackling the recession suddenly became less important than tackling deficits. For the next three years, stimulus was out, austerity was in, and the protests of critics were all but buried amid the headlong rush to slash spending.

Buy a House, Make Your Payments, Then Discover You've Been Foreclosed On Without Your Knowledge

By David Dayen

September 20, 2013  |  A few months ago, Ceith and Louise Sinclair of Altadena, California, were told that their home had been sold. It was the first time they’d heard that it was for sale.

 

Their mortgage servicer, Nationstar, foreclosed on them without their knowledge, and sold the house to an investment company. If it wasn’t for the Sinclairs going to a local ABC affiliate [3] and describing their horror story, they would have been thrown out on the street, despite never missing a mortgage payment. It’s impossible to know how many homeowners who didn’t get the media to pick up their tale have dealt with a similar catastrophe, and eventually lost their home.

As finance writer Barry Ritholtz has explained [4], home purchases involve a series of precise safeguards, designed to protect property rights and prevent situations where borrowers who are perfect on their payments get evicted. “In a nation of laws, contract and property rights, there is no room for errors,” Ritholtz writes. “The only way these errors could have occurred is if several people involved in the process committed criminal fraud.”

Nowhere to Hide: The Government's Massive Intrusion Into Our Lives

Tom Dispatch / By Christopher Calabrese, Matthew Harwood

September 22, 2013  |  For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database [5] filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with “burner” phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents “are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” according to a recently released [6] government PowerPoint slide.

 

You’re probably assuming that we’re talking about another blanket National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program focused on the communications of innocent Americans, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. We could be, but we’re not. We’re talking about a program of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a domestic law enforcement agency.

US nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina – secret document

Exclusive: Journalist uses Freedom of Information Act to disclose 1961 accident in which one switch averted catastrophe

Ed Pilkington in New York
The Guardian, Friday 20 September 2013 12.03 EDT

A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

US nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina – secret document

Exclusive: Journalist uses Freedom of Information Act to disclose 1961 accident in which one switch averted catastrophe

Ed Pilkington in New York
The Guardian, Friday 20 September 2013 12.03 EDT

A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

NPR's New Boss: Financial Industry Lobbyist, GOP Donor, Right-Wing Think Tank Booster

By Peter Hart

Last month NPR CEO Gary Knell left to take a job at National Geographic, making him the latest in a string of CEOs who left after a short stint running the public radio outlet. On September 13, NPR named a new acting president and CEO: board member Paul G. Haaga.

The NPR press release  (9/13/13) states that Haaga's "accomplished career" included a stint as "chairman of the Investment Company Institute"–the powerful lobbying group of the mutual fund industry. As the Los Angeles Times  (11/29/03) once reported, "Mutual funds have been mostly shielded from the reforms forced on the financial world–thanks in large part to the efforts of the Investment Company Institute."

The GOP’s “Hunger Games” vision of America

Cutting food stamps and sabotaging Obamacare aren't irrational – they're part of the 1 percent's all-out class war

By Andrew O'Hehir

American conservatives love to attack anyone who raises the issue of worsening economic inequality for waging “class war.” Their compulsion to keep repeating that phrase is revealing in itself; it’s like the serial killer in a movie who can’t help returning to the scene of the crime. Because the only class war being waged in 21st-century America is the relentless, all-fronts struggle conducted by the rich against the poor.

Within the last week, we have learned that poverty remains at near-record levels in our supposedly affluent nation. Even amid a so-called economic recovery, nearly 22 percent of the nation’s children live in poverty, and the overall number of poor people reached an all-time high, at 46.5 million. Income inequality, meanwhile, is roughly twice as bad as it was in the 1970s, reaching a level never seen before in this country or any other industrialized nation.

Richard Eskow: JPMorgan Chase: “Incredibly Guilty”

An outside observer might be forgiven for thinking JPMorgan Chase isn’t so much a bank as it is a criminal enterprise with a bank attached to it. Even before the London Whale scandal, Chase’s documented list of crimes included repeated fraud, perjury, forgery, bribery, and violations of laws against trading with Iran and Syria.

It also shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Okay, that last statement isn’t true. But the rest of the crimes on that list, and a number of others, are well-documented. And yet, remarkably, not a single senior executive at the bank has been indicted – or, to our knowledge, even been the subject of a criminal investigation.

Case for climate change is overwhelming, say scientists

Eleven days before the IPCC publishes its latest report, a group of eminent scientists says there is massive evidence of human responsibility

By Alex Kirby for Climate News Network, part of the Guardian Environment Network
theguardian.com, Monday 16 September 2013 11.25 EDT
With the IPCC report not yet published, there is already heated debate about what it will say, and about the implications of its findings for human development.

The scientists' statement is unequivocal, and is not based on whatever the IPCC may publish. They say: "The body of evidence indicating that our civilisation has already caused significant global warming is overwhelming."

The statement comes from 12 members of the recently established Earth League, which describes itself as "a voluntary alliance of leading scientists and institutions dealing with planetary processes and sustainability issues".

The 10 Farm Subsidy Recipients Who Voted To Cut Food Stamps

Derek Pugh

The House GOP believes in welfare – just not the kind that goes to help the poor, sick, students, elderly or working class. Thursday’s vote to cut food stamps embodies what House conservatives are all about: giving billions away in corporate welfare to the richest with taxpayer dollars.

They are also about helping themselves. Before they rushed off to summer recess House Republicans voted in favor of a farm subsidy bill that was condemned by sensible conservatives as well as progressives for continuing to give wasteful subsidies to Big Agra.

Public Education in the Crosshairs: - ALEC's Private Scholarship Tax Credits

Thursday, 19 September 2013 00:00 
By Ellen Dannin, Truthout | Report 

A commitment to high-quality, free public education for all children has long been the foundation of our democracy and prosperity. Although never fully honored, our commitment to an educated citizenry has created a society that is generally literate and able to participate in democratic governance. That commitment is now under multiple attacks by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), and many ALEC-created bills target public schools, teachers and teacher unions. One ALEC bill in particular, the "Resolution Supporting Private Scholarship Tax Credits," has mostly flown under the radar - but could have grave, far-reaching consequences.

Gaius Publius: Is privatization driven by corruption? The Chicago parking meter debacle

I’ve been writing about privatization lately, a movement that’s picking up steam all over the country, and indeed all over the world. The Mubarak regime, for example, was widely considered a  ”neoliberal” and privatizing one, famous for looting the Egyptian state and economy of its wealth.

I want to just add this. Given the immensely favorable deals that governments — federal, state and local — give to their private “partners,” how can crony corruption and kickbacks not be a part of it.

Paul Krugman: The Crazy Party

Early this year, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, made headlines by telling his fellow Republicans that they needed to stop being the “stupid party.” Unfortunately, Mr. Jindal failed to offer any constructive suggestions about how they might do that. And, in the months that followed, he himself proceeded to say and do a number of things that were, shall we say, not especially smart.

Nonetheless, Republicans did follow his advice. In recent months, the G.O.P. seems to have transitioned from being the stupid party to being the crazy party.

Walker’s Wrecking Crew Goes After Judiciary

By Rebecca Kemble, September 18, 2013

Control over the executive and legislative branches of Wisconsin state government apparently isn’t enough for Republicans and their corporate backers. Now they want to curtail the powers of the judicial branch by effectively eliminating circuit court judges’ ability to block unconstitutional state laws.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and their Republican allies in the legislature pushed a bill through the Wisconsin State Assembly last June that would automatically nullify an injunction against a state law ordered by a circuit court judge immediately upon appeal. Furthermore, the appeals process is automatically triggered by the filing of any such injunction or restraining order by a circuit court judge.

Algae Biofuel Can Cut CO2 Emissions by up to 68 Percent Compared to Petroleum Fuels Finds New Peer Reviewed Study

Algae fuel will have a significant energy return on investment, consume waste CO₂ and can be grown in saltwater on marginal lands

MINNEAPOLIS (September 19, 2013) –Algae-derived biofuel can reduce life cycle CO₂ emissions by 50 to 70 percent compared to petroleum fuels, and is approaching a similar Energy Return on Investment (EROI) as conventional petroleum according to a new peer-reviewed paper published in Bioresource Technology. The study, which is the first to analyze real-world data from an existing algae-to-energy demonstration scale farm, shows that the environmental and energy benefits of algae biofuel are at least on par, and likely better, than first generation biofuels.

“This study affirms that algae-based fuels provide results without compromise,” said Mary Rosenthal, ABO’s executive director. “With significant emissions reductions, a positive energy balance, nutrient recycling and CO₂ reuse, algae-based fuels will be a long-term, sustainable source of fuels for our nation.”

'Winning the Race to the Bottom'

Critics slam highly secretive deal as a tool for U.S. and corporate power

- Sarah Lazare, staff writer 

As Obama moves to fast-track the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), critics are blasting the highly-secretive trade deal as "NAFTA on steroids" and a tool for advancing U.S. and corporate power.

"If impoverishing working people around the world is the goal, then the trade policies like this are working quite effectively," Chris Townsend, political director for United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), told Common Dreams. "This is the grand-daddy of trade deals, a very destructive project, and it is happening completely under the radar."

Rick Perlstein: On Privatization's Cutting Edge

Last week, for the opening of the school year, I wrote about my interview with Tom Geoghegan about his (so-far) failed suit to stop Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s morally and educationally disastrous crusade to close fifty schools in Chicago. But that’s not all I talked about with Tom. “I don’t want this just to be a Mayor Emanuel–bashing session,” I said. “Because we have to bash Mayor Daley.”

Everyone, I suppose, dislikes parking meters. Chicagoans hate them even more. That’s because Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2008 struck a deal with the investment consortium Chicago Parking Meters LLC, or CPM, that included Morgan Stanley, Allianz Capital Partners and, yes, the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Abu Dhabi, to privatize our meters. The price of parking—and the intensity of enforcement—skyrocketed. The terms were negotiated in secret. City Council members got two days to study the billion-dollar, seventy-five-year contract before signing off on it. An early estimate from the Chicago inspector general was that the city had sold off its property for about half of what it was worth. Then an alderman said it was worth about four times what the city had been paid. Finally, in 2010, Forbes reported that in fact the city had been underpaid by a factor of ten.

Gaius Publius: This week in privatization — they really do have a bridge to sell you

The privatization of public property is something that both Democratic and Republican public officials love to promote.

Republicans love it because they’re vultures, always feeding the poor (you, me and the rest of the “99%”) to the rich. Neoliberal Democrats — that is, the whole of the party leadership — love it because somehow “free markets” unfettered by government regulation means “freedom”.

Blocking the Public’s Right to Know About ALEC

John Nichols on September 18, 2013 - 4:28 PM ET

In the two years since the ALEC Exposed project revealed the role that the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council plays in shaping the laws of states across the nation, the group has had a much harder time hiding its meddling.

In fact, so much national attention has been paid to ALEC’s role in promoting restrictive voter ID laws and controversial Stand Your Ground initiatives that ALEC officials announced last year that they would shut down the task force that was responsible for promoting those measures.