Enron billionaire expands craven plot to abuse workers

A billionaire's scheme to loot public workers' pensions now includes a shadowy front group -- and brand-new target

By David Sirota

A week after the simultaneous release of my Institute for America’s Future report and Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone investigation into John Arnold, huge news hit California: The Enron billionaire whose former company wrecked the Golden State’s economy appears to be using a shadowy Texas front group to now try to loot the Golden State’s public pension system. As the Sacramento Bee reports (emphasis added):

With the first deadline looming for a new public-pension proposal to make the November 2014 ballot, a Texas nonprofit has emerged in a behind-the-scenes battle poised to break into public view next year.

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, a Democrat pushing a controversial idea to dial down government retirement benefits, asked a Houston-based group (called Action Now Initiative) to give $200,000 to his local chamber of commerce last summer for “policy analysis for statewide pension reform” according to a report Reed filed in August…

Paul Krugman: American Craziness and Class Warfare

Tuesday, 08 October 2013 10:52 

The economist Mark Thoma recently wrote an excellent column for the Fiscal Times linking the fight over the debt ceiling to the larger issue of extreme inequality. I'd like to suggest that the reality is even worse than Mr. Thoma suggests.

Here's how he put it: "Rising inequality and differential exposure to economic risk has caused one group to see themselves as the 'makers' in society who provide for the rest and pay most of the bills, and the other group as 'takers' who get all the benefits. The upper strata wonders, 'Why should we pay for social insurance when we get little or none of the benefits?' and this leads to an attack on these programs."

The Koch Brothers’ ‘Samson Option’

October 8, 2013

 

Exclusive: The fiscal crisis in Washington is not simply a threat to economic and government stability, as serious as that is. It is a premeditated scheme to carve out a new constitutional structure that gives the Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires the power to void the democratic process, writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

The Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires who provoked the government shutdown and now are angling for an even more devastating credit default see themselves as the people who deserve to rule the United States without interference from lesser citizens, especially those with darker-colored skin.

Their “masters of the universe” world view is that they or their daddies or their daddies’ daddies were the ones who “built America” and, thus, it’s their right to tear down the remarkable edifice of U.S. law, politics and economics created over the past two-plus centuries — if the country’s less-deserving inhabitants insist on raising taxes on the rich to fund programs benefiting the poor and the middle class.

Kings, Warlords and Theocrats Have No Place in America

Monday, 07 October 2013 14:55  
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed 

We The People are supposed to have the power in America.

That was the idea of the Founders, but it has been taken from us.

Since the Reagan Revolution, we've become the land of kings, warlords and theocrats.

As Thomas Jefferson pointed out, from the founding of Samaria 7000 years ago until 1776, one of three types of people and groups ruled everyone else.

They were the hereditary kings, violent warlords or theocrats.

Renowned Farmer and Writer Wendell Berry: Confronting the Consequences of Runaway Capitalism

By Bill Moyers

October 7, 2013  |   BILL MOYERS: Welcome. In this broadcast you will meet an effervescent man who still believes we can make democracy work. Later we’ll talk about those people in Washington who refuse to let it work, but first Wendell Berry. A master of the written word, he rarely appears on television. For one thing, when he’s not writing, he’s farming—and that can keep a fellow busy from sunrise to sunset. But we met recently and after considerable persuasion he said “OK, bring your cameras with you.” This portrait is the result. Produced with the Schumann Media Center, which I head.

WENDELL BERRY: We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?

BILL MOYERS: For Wendell Berry, the defense of the Earth is a mission that admits no compromise. This quiet and modest man who lives and works far from the center of power on a farm in Kentucky where his family has lived for 200 years has become an outspoken, even angry advocate for a revolution in our treatment of the land.

The Supreme Court is poised to legalize corruption

By Dana Milbank,

There’s a certain irony in the Supreme Court remaining open while much of the federal government is shut, for the high court created much of the dysfunction that cripples Washington today.

The court has failed to undo the partisan redistricting that has left the House hopelessly polarized. It has furthered Americans’ cynicism toward politics with nakedly political rulings such as Bush v. Gore. And, above all, it has created a campaign-finance system that is directly responsible for the rise of uncompromising leaders on both sides of the Capitol.

6 Ways Neoliberal Education Reform May Be Destroying a College Near You

By Owen Davis

October 7, 2013  |  This past August at the State University of New York, Buffalo, President Obama made a familiar offer: “major new reforms,” this time in higher education, “that will shake up the current system.” The New York Times [3] described it as a plan “to shame universities into holding down prices.”

 

Obama’s remarks [4] were an overture to what will become a major campaign to transform higher education through three measures: instituting a ratings system and performance funding for federal student aid; encouraging technological innovation and competition; and mitigating student debt.

If the plan sounds familiar, it’s because they've played this tune before.

Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, Big Bro Wants You

Posted by Pratap Chatterjee at 8:04am, October 8, 2013.

The Data Hackers
Mining Your Information for Big Brother

By Pratap Chatterjee

Big Bro is watching you. Inside your mobile phone and hidden behind your web browser are little known software products marketed by contractors to the government that can follow you around anywhere. No longer the wide-eyed fantasies of conspiracy theorists, these technologies are routinely installed in all of our data devices by companies that sell them to Washington for a profit.

That’s not how they’re marketing them to us, of course. No, the message is much more seductive: Data, Silicon Valley is fond of saying, is the new oil. And the Valley’s message is clear enough: we can turn your digital information into fuel for pleasure and profits -- if you just give us access to your location, your correspondence, your history, and the entertainment that you like.

The Punishers Want To Run The Country or We Are All Tipped Waitstaff Now

We've seen a lot of weird reactions on the right wing to the Government Shut down. These range from "it doesn't matter" to "its terrible" but one thing that really strikes me is the rage and antipathy that has been displayed towards Federal Workers themselves.  It doesn't strike me as unusual, but it does strike me as significant.  Yesterday's on air rant by Stuart Varney makes it pretty explicit: Federal Workers and, indeed, the entire Government are failing Stuart Varney. They cost too much and they do too little.  In fact: they are so awful they don't even deserve to be paid for the work they have already done. Contracts, agreements, and labor be damned. If Stuart Varney isn't happy then they deserve to be fired. Here's the quote if you haven't seen it:

HOWELL: Do you think that federal workers, when this ends, are deserving of their back pay or not?

VARNEY: That is a loaded question isn't it? You want my opinion? This is President Obama's shutdown. He is responsible for shutting this thing down; he's taken an entirely political decision here. No, I don't think they should get their back pay, frankly, I really don't. I'm sick and tired of a massive, bloated federal bureaucracy living on our backs, and taking money out of us, a lot more money than most of us earn in the private sector, then getting a furlough, and then getting their money back at the end of it. Sorry, I'm not for that. I want to punish these people. Sorry to say that, but that's what I want to do.

The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government

Monday, 07 October 2013 09:10
Chris Hedges

There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.

Paul Krugman: The Boehner Bunglers

The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic
consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the
radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in
their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier —
ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful
of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and
dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The Income Tax Turns 100 — Who Pays What?

by Joshua Holland

Thursday marks the 100th anniversary of the federal income tax. That is, the income tax that we have today – the first US tax raised on earned incomes was a temporary one imposed to help pay for the War of 1812. Another helped pay for the Civil War, but was allowed to expire in 1872.

One of the most simplistic statements one can utter is, “taxes are too damn high.” The US has a complex tax system — there are many, many different taxes — so a more salient question than whether taxes are “too high” or “too low” is: who pays what?

Former Representative Brad Miller: Naked Capitalism – My Hot Sheet on Finance

By Brad Miller, who was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2003 to 2013 and is now Of Counsel to the law firm of Grais & Ellsworth LLP

Matt Taibbi described in “How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform” the many ways “the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law,” including the effort by House Republicans after the 2010 election to “pass a gazillion loopholes.”
“You might wonder,” Taibbi wrote, “how a bunch of lunkhead Republican Congressmen would even know how to write a coordinated series of ‘technical fixes’ to derivatives legislation, a universe so complicated that it has become hard to find anyone on the Hill who truly understands the subject. (One Congressman who sits on the Financial Services Committee laughingly admitted that when the crash of 2008 happened, he had to look up ‘credit default swaps’ on Wikipedia.)”

The Debt Ceiling Dates Back to Founding Fathers

Sunday, 06 October 2013 10:47  
By Kevin G Hall, McClatchy Newspapers | Report 

Washington - Wondering who to thank for the bizarre rules that allow Congress to approve spending, then later slam the door on new borrowing to pay the bills? Thank the Founding Fathers.

Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the exclusive powers to legislate and the power of the purse. In fact, Section 8 of the first article deals specifically with paying debts.

Secret Ballot Initiative Would Slash Retirement Benefits for Public Employees

By Gary Cohn

September 26, 2013  |  In a move to slash the retirement benefits of public employees in California, a group of mostly conservative policy advocates has been working behind the scenes on a possible 2014 ballot initiative. A copy of the still-secret draft initiative, which could dramatically impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of Californians and send a signal nationwide, has been obtained by Frying Pan News. (See the document’s text following this article or click here [3].)

 

If enacted, the proposed law would allow the state and local governments to cut back retirement benefits for current employees for the years of work they perform after the changes go into effect. Previous efforts to curb retirement benefits for public employees have largely focused on newly hired workers, but the initiative would shrink pensions for workers who are currently on the job.

Playing Chicken with Food Safety

October 5, 2013

 

The U.S. Constitution empowers the federal government to “provide for the … general Welfare,” but free-market ideologues have distorted the Founding document’s plain language to fit their desires, including their new demands that food-safety rules be gutted, as Michael Winship explains.


By Michael Winship

The other day there was this guy in a chicken suit on Pennsylvania Avenue protesting outside the White House. Silly, but the reason the chicken and other demonstrators had crossed the avenue was to deliver a petition of more than half a million names, speaking out against new rules the U.S. Department of Agriculture wants to put into effect – bad rules that would transfer much of the work inspecting pork and chicken and turkey meat from trained government inspectors to the processing companies themselves.

Talk about putting the fox in the henhouse! The revised regulations also call for a substantial speeding up of the disassembly line along which workers use sharp knives and often painful, repetitive hand motions to cut up and clean carcasses of dirt, blood and other contaminants that can cause infection and sickness.

Beginning of the end for major health insurers

Obamacare will unleash innovation in insurance market, expose irrelevance of the big firms 

By Wendell Potter

I’ve often said that the Affordable Care Act is the end of the beginning of reform. Starting tomorrow, October 1, 2014, that law will signify the beginning of the end of the health insurance industry as we know it.

As I’ve noted previously, my former CEO at Cigna said at a leadership retreat that what kept him up at night was the fear that big health insurance corporations might someday be viewed as unnecessary middlemen, that their “value proposition” would come under scrutiny and found to be wanting. That insurance companies would, to use his term, be disintermediated.

That day has arrived.

Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent

A stunning 35 to 40 percent of everything we buy goes to interest. As Ellen Brown reported, “That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street.” In her report, Brown cited the work of Margrit Kennedy, PhD, whose research in Germany documents interest charges ranging from 12 percent for garbage collection, to 38 percent for drinking water, and 77 percent for rent in public housing. 

For Pennsylvania's Doctors, a Gag Order on Fracking Chemicals

A new provision could forbid the state’s doctors from sharing information with patients exposed to toxic fracking solutions.

—By Kate Sheppard | Fri Mar. 23, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction—but they won't be able to share it with their patients.* A provision buried in a law passed last month is drawing scrutiny from the public health and environmental community, who argue that it will "gag" doctors who want to raise concerns related to oil and gas extraction with the people they treat and the general public.

Pennsylvania is at the forefront in the debate over "fracking," the process by which a high-pressure mixture of chemicals, sand, and water are blasted into rock to tap into the gas. Recent discoveries of great reserves in the Marcellus Shale region of the state prompted a rush to development, as have advancements in fracking technologies. But with those changes have come a number of concerns from citizens about potential environmental and health impacts from natural gas drilling.

Paul Krugman: Reform Turns Real

At this point, the crisis in American governance has taken on a life of its own. Some Republicans
are now saying openly that they want concessions in return for reopening the government and
avoiding default, not because they have any specific policy goals in mind, but simply because they
don’t want to feel “disrespected.” And no endgame is in sight.

But this confrontation did start with a real issue: Republican efforts to stop Obamacare from going
into effect. It’s long been clear that the great fear of the Republican Party was not that health
reform would fail, but that it would succeed. And developments since Tuesday, when the
exchanges on which individuals will buy health insurance opened for business, strongly suggest
that their worst fears will indeed be realized: This thing is going to work.

Diesel exhaust stops honeybees from finding the flowers they want to forage

Exposure to common air pollutants found in diesel exhaust pollution can affect the ability of honeybees to recognise floral odours, new University of Southampton research shows.

Honeybees use floral odours to help locate, identify and recognise the flowers from which they forage.

The Southampton team, led by Dr Tracey Newman and Professor Guy Poppy, found that diesel exhaust fumes change the profile of flora odour. They say that these changes may affect honeybees' foraging efficiency and, ultimately, could affect pollination and thus global food security.

There Is No Such Thing as the Tea Party; There Is Only a Collection of Billionaires

Wednesday, 02 October 2013 15:17

By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as the Tea Party. There is only a collection of individual billionaires.

Back in 2009 and 2010, during the debate about Obamacare and during the mid-term elections that swept Republicans into power in the House of Representatives, Americans first caught a glimpse of a monster. That monster has now taken over the halls of Congress and shut down the government that George Washington had three horses shot out from under from him to create.

Improving water security with blue, green, and gray water

Agriculture is one of the most insatiable consumers of dwindling water resources around the world. And food production will need to increase by about 70% over the next 35 years to meet the needs of a growing population. Crops aren't creating the only demands; agriculture will face competition for water from cities, industries, and recreation.

With limited water and the increasing number of people depending on it, water security is tenuous. But integrated water management plans using "blue," "green," and "gray" water can increase water security. What do these colors mean and why are these waters vital?

Mysterious Study Backs Financial Adviser Thieves Who Want To Keep Bilking Small Investors

By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen

At the risk of self-promotion, allow me to point you in the direction of a piece by me running today in The New Republic. It’s about a proposed update to the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, and how the financial services industry, along with members of both parties, are working to stop it. An excerpt:

The Labor Department proposal, known as the “fiduciary rule,” would change the ethical standards by which employer-based retirement products like 401(k)’s and IRAs are marketed and sold. The rule has not been updated since 1975, before 401(k)’s and IRAs even existed. The Labor Department wants to broaden the definition of a “fiduciary” to cover all financial advisers who offer individual investment advice for a fee. Under the rule, they would be legally required to work in the best interest of their clients. For example, a fiduciary would not be able to push investment products on customers in which they have a financial stake…

Paul Krugman: No Triumph for Austerity

It was, I suppose, predictable that Europe's austerians would claim vindication at the first hint of an economic upturn. Still, an op-ed by the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in the Financial Times, in which he claims complete vindication because Europe has had one, count it, one quarter of growth, is pretty awesome even relative to expectations.

It takes quite a lot of chutzpah — do they have that word in German? — to claim that this is a record of successful preparation for structural transformation. What about all the livelihoods, and in some cases lives, destroyed? What about the millions of young Europeans who still have no hope of getting a decent job?

The Cult of the Selfish

When did America lose sight of the common good?

BY Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President

Last week, in an example of what makes America beautiful, several strangers rushed to the aid of a New York City construction worker trapped in a burning fifth-floor apartment. The rescuers hoisted a ladder up a fire escape and extended it to the smoky windowsill where the victim clung.

One of the rookie rescuers risked his life clambering across the ladder-bridge four stories high and grabbing the victim as he dropped from the window.

Financial Media Cheering Banksters Will Speed the Next Crisis

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

September 30, 2013  |  If you take a tour through the pre-crisis world of the financial media, you will be greeted with eye-popping examples of journalism gone wrong. Over and over, the American public was told that the doomsayers were wrong about the economy, that the titans of Wall Street were national heroes, and that everything would be fine if we just let Mr. Market do his magical thing. (There were notable exceptions [3], and those bold journalists deserve our thanks). In that upside-down world, exotic financial products were the best thing since sliced bread and subprime mortgages were no biggie.

 

In the years leading up to 2008, the financial media was so far up the butt of Wall Street that not only was it unable to warn the public about the impending crisis, it arguably helped bring on the disaster.

Wall Street, we know, has learned almost nothing from the crisis, and continues its crime spree, from money laundering and market manipulation to reckless speculation and bogus fees.

Are Republicans So Frantic to Stop Obamacare Because They Fear It Will Work?

By Kurt Eichenwald

What is it about Obamacare that compels seemingly intelligent people to explode in bubbling spasms of stupid? Are they misinformed? Unable to see past the rage-fueled partisan sweat dripping into their eyes? Or just plain dishonest?

No matter. At this point, it has become obvious that history will look back on the four-year war on Obamacare as one of the saddest, most bizarre, and most dishonestly embarrassing episodes of our time. I have given up trying to understand the vehement opposition of so many who cannot offer up truthful reasons for their objections, and instead fuel the hatred and fears of the uninformed with the most illogical, mendacious, and fundamentally bizarre arguments that have ever been marshaled. By comparison, Joe McCarthy’s McCarthyistic McCarthyism was an exercise in reason.

Global study: World not ready for aging population

Sep 30, 11:04 PM (ET)
By KRISTEN GELINEAU

The world is aging so fast that most countries are not prepared to support their swelling numbers of elderly people, according to a global study being issued Tuesday by the United Nations and an elder rights group.

The report ranks the social and economic well-being of elders in 91 countries, with Sweden coming out on top and Afghanistan at the bottom. It reflects what advocates for the old have been warning, with increasing urgency, for years: Nations are simply not working quickly enough to cope with a population graying faster than ever before. By the year 2050, for the first time in history, seniors older than 60 will outnumber children younger than 15.

Dean Baker: Debt Default: The Only Way to Get to Full Employment?

All the usual suspects are giving us all the usual warnings about the disaster that would ensue if the government defaults on its debt. Much of what they say is undoubtedly true; it would create a huge amount of fear and uncertainty in financial markets.

 

Look for stock and bond prices to tumble and interest rates to soar. The viability of many banks and other financial institutions may be called into question if even government debt cannot be viewed as entirely safe and highly liquid asset. This is not the sort of thing that an economy still struggling to recover from the recession needs right now.

Paul Krugman: Rebels Without A Clue

This may be the way the world ends — not with a bang but with a temper tantrum.

O.K., a temporary government shutdown — which became almost inevitable after Sunday’s House vote to provide government funding only on unacceptable conditions — wouldn’t be the end of the world. But a U.S. government default, which will happen unless Congress raises the debt ceiling soon, might cause financial catastrophe. Unfortunately, many Republicans either don’t understand this or don’t care.

Let’s talk first about the economics.

Taibbi on How Wall Street is Looting Public Pension Funds

You must go, pronto, and read Matt Taibbi’s latest expose, on how hedge funds are plundering public pension funds, meaning pension funds managed on behalf of government employees like policemen, sanitation workers, and teachers. Taibbi describes how a concerted PR campaign has made workers the scapegoats for large pension shortfalls when in fact public officials and unscrupulous financiers (both through their machinations with these funds and via damage done by the global financial crisis) are the real perps.

We're Not Lovin' It

Wednesday, 25 September 2013 12:12  
By Nicole Aschoff, Dollars & Sense | News Analysis 

There’s a line in Johnny Paycheck’s 1977 hit song that goes “I’d give the shirt right off my back, if I had the guts to say ... Take this job and shove it, I ain’t working here no more.” In the past year, fast-food, retail, and warehouse workers have shown they do have the guts—but instead of quitting, they’re fighting back. From New York to California they’re taking to the streets. They’re fighting for a living wage, for respect from their bosses, and in some cases, for the right to form a union.

Back in June 2012, eight immigrant workers peeling crawfish under sweatshop conditions for C.J.’s Seafood (then a Walmart supplier) went on strike in Louisiana. They stayed out for weeks, demanding an end to forced labor, wage theft, and other unfair labor practices—and they won. Following up on the C.J.’s workers’ successful action, Walmart warehouse workers in California and Illinois walked out in September, calling for improved workplace safety and a fair wage. A month later, Walmart associates walked out at 28 stores in twelve cities. The strikes marked the first time in history that Walmart retail workers had ever gone on strike, and were quickly followed by more strikes and demonstrations on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year.

Paul Krugman: What's It All About Then

Simon Wren-Lewis writes with feeling about the “austerity deception“; what sets him off is a post that characterizes the whole austerity debate as being about “big-state” versus “small-state” people.

Wren-Lewis’s point is that only one side of the debate saw it that way. Opponents of austerity in a depressed economy opposed it because they believed that this would worsen the depression — and they were right.

Report Exposes The Right-Wing Tag Team Plotting Against Pensions

Isaiah J. Poole

News stories around the country have trumpeted a public pension “crisis” in various states, featuring elected officials who insist that these crises justify slashing the retirement benefits of public employees.

What these stories usually don’t say is that conservative activists are manufacturing the perception of a public pension crisis in order to both slash modest retiree benefits and preserve expensive corporate subsidies and tax breaks.