Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist rips Justice Dept. for not bringing JPMorgan Chase to trial

By Arturo Garcia
Friday, October 25, 2013 17:44 EDT

Pulitzer Prize-winning financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson criticized the Justice Department’s $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase in an interview with Bill Moyers released Friday, arguing that it is far from an example of a government crackdown on financial industry malfeasance.

“If the Justice Department were being tough on Wall Street, they would be bringing criminal cases,” Morgenson said on Moyers & Company. “They would not be talking about settlements. They would be talking about bringing criminal cases against individuals who helped to perpetrate this immense crisis. So to say that $13 billion is finally the Justice Department’s getting religion, I’m just not a buyer of that.”

Paul Krugman: Gambling with Civilization

The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World

by William D. Nordhaus

Yale University Press, 378 pp., $30.00

Forty years ago a brilliant young Yale economist named William Nordhaus published a landmark paper, “The Allocation of Energy Resources,” that opened new frontiers in economic analysis.¹ Nordhaus argued that to think clearly about the economics of exhaustible resources like oil and coal, it was necessary to look far into the future, to assess their value as they become more scarce—and that this look into the future necessarily involved considering not just available resources and expected future economic growth, but likely future technologies as well. Moreover, he developed a method for incorporating all of this information—resource estimates, long-run economic forecasts, and engineers’ best guesses about the costs of future technologies—into a quantitative model of energy prices over the long term.

The resource and engineering data for Nordhaus’s paper were for the most part compiled by his research assistant, a twenty-year-old undergraduate, who spent long hours immured in Yale’s Geology Library, poring over Bureau of Mines circulars and the like. It was an invaluable apprenticeship. My reasons for bringing up this bit of intellectual history, however, go beyond personal disclosure—although readers of this review should know that Bill Nordhaus was my first professional mentor. For if one looks back at “The Allocation of Energy Resources,” one learns two crucial lessons. First, predictions are hard, especially about the distant future. Second, sometimes such predictions must be made nonetheless.

The cost of the financial crisis hits Americans harder than banks

As you rise up the financial ladder, the consequences of the financial crisis are increasingly arbitrary

Heidi Moore
theguardian.com, Thursday 24 October 2013 14.24 EDT


What’s the real cost of a financial crisis? Apparently, it depends on who’s paying.

If you’re Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, or Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America, it’s a price your $2tn bank can easily afford to make trouble go away.

If you’re a homeowner, it’s a price that has rendered your past five years a struggle of financial anxiety. If you’re an American, it’s a price that has resulted in a recession and recovery characterized by historically high poverty – with 42 million Americans on food stamps – and historically low rates of Americans working, with only 63% of the population gainfully employed.

Congressional oversight of the NSA is a joke. I should know, I'm in Congress

I've learned far more about government spying on citizens from the media than I have from official intelligence briefings

Alan Grayson
theguardian.com, Friday 25 October 2013 07.45 EDT

In the 1970s, Congressman Otis Pike of New York chaired a special congressional committee to investigate abuses by the American so-called "intelligence community" – the spies. After the investigation, Pike commented:

It took this investigation to convince me that I had always been told lies, to make me realize that I was tired of being told lies.

I'm tired of the spies telling lies, too.

Pike's investigation initiated one of the first congressional oversight debates for the vast and hidden collective of espionage agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA). Before the Pike Commission, Congress was kept in the dark about them – a tactic designed to thwart congressional deterrence of the sometimes illegal and often shocking activities carried out by the "intelligence community". Today, we are seeing a repeat of this professional voyeurism by our nation's spies, on an unprecedented and pervasive scale.

State pro-business organizations are publicly funded, but privately controlled

Public-private partnerships further business interests in Arizona, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Florida, amid persistent questions about transparency, disclosure

By Nicholas Kusnetz, 6:00 am, October 23, 2013, Updated: 3:32 pm, October 23, 2013

The offices of the Arizona Commerce Authority are housed in downtown Phoenix at the Freeport-McMoRan Center, the gleaming glass headquarters of an international mining firm of the same name. The authority, which oversees state corporate tax incentives and grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is not quite a public agency, as its location two miles east of the state government complex suggests. It’s led by a board of directors run by the governor and Jerry Colangelo, who, after four decades as an Arizona sports and real estate mogul, is a local icon.  Sixteen other corporate executives also sit on the board, including Richard Adkerson, President and CEO of Freeport, to which the authority paid about $411,000 in state funds last fiscal year for renting the space.

There’s a name for this arrangement. The Commerce Authority is a “quasi-public” entity, or a public-private partnership. About 10 other states have also given control over lucrative corporate tax incentives to similar organizations, which are often run by the states’ most influential businessmen, generally at the pleasure of the governor. Supporters say these partnerships are more nimble than government bureaucracies and are insulated from the vagaries of electoral politics. But both liberal and conservative watchdog groups say the practice takes a government function already prone to mismanagement and obfuscation and makes the situation worse by giving oversight of business incentives to businesses themselves.

Paul Krugman: Addicted to the Apocolypse

Once upon a time, walking around shouting “The end is nigh” got you labeled a kook, someone not to be taken seriously. These days, however, all the best people go around warning of looming disaster. In fact, you more or less have to subscribe to fantasies of fiscal apocalypse to be considered respectable.

And I do mean fantasies. Washington has spent the past three-plus years in terror of a debt crisis that keeps not happening, and, in fact, can’t happen to a country like the United States, which has its own currency and borrows in that currency. Yet the scaremongers can’t bring themselves to let go.

Secret Trade Agenda Threatens Shift Toward Sustainable Food System

by Karen Hansen-Kuhn

 

After being delayed by the U.S. government shutdown, talks for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are quietly gearing up again. Tariff barriers between the U.S. and EU are already low, so these negotiations are focused squarely on achieving “regulatory coherence.” In other words, industry lobby groups and their political allies on both sides of the Atlantic see the trade deal as an opportunity to get rid of rules and regulations that limit their ability to buy and sell goods and services. The outcome of TTIP has implications for the rest of the world. Leaders from both regions have made clear, the terms of this trade agreement will set the standard for future free trade agreements.

TTIP could affect a broad range of issues, from energy to the environment, and intellectual property rights to labor rights. It could also have a significant impact on the evolution of agricultural markets and food systems in the U.S. and EU, as well as solidify the ability of corporations and investors to challenge new regulations that could affect expected profits through international tribunals. Unfortunately, little concrete information is known about the content of the TTIP proposals, since the governments involved have refused to publish draft text.

Dave Johnson: Republicans Demand Social Security And Medicare Cuts, Is It Reported?

Republicans are demanding cuts in Social Security and Medicare if Democrats want to change the terms of the “sequester.” I’m sure their Tea Party “base” would be shocked if they understood this. So would most Americans. So is the media giving Americans the information they need in order to make informed decisions?

4 Things You Need to Know About the Plot to Sell Off Your Pensions to Wall Street

By David Sirota

October 23, 2013  |  

Less than a year ago, the Wall Street Journal [3] alerted its national readership to what was happening in the tiny state of Rhode Island. In a story headlined “Small State Gets Big Pension Push,” the paper noted that the state’s “rollback of public-employee retirement benefits has turned (it) into a national battleground over pensions.” With the help ofbillionaire former Enron trader John Arnold [4] and his partnership with the Pew Charitable Trusts [5], conservative ideologues and Wall Street profiteers who engineered Rhode Island’s big pension cuts were looking to export those “reforms” to other states. Now, after two huge revelations in the last few days, we know more about what that means in practice – we know the kind of corruption and damage the “reforms” mean for taxpayers and retirees, and we know what kind of new muscle is behind the effort to bring that corruption and destruction to other states.

The first set of revelations comes from a detailed forensic analysis of Rhode Island’s pension system by Forbes columnist [6] and former SEC investigator Edward Siedle. Commissioned by groups representing public pensioners [7] in the Ocean State, the data-driven analysis ends up reading like a criminal indictment of the speculator-turned-State-Treasurer Gina Raimondo (D), who is now cheerily touted [8] by the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party as a rising star. Raimondo has received such billing from corporatist Democrats in no small part because of her role in helping turn her state’s pension fund into a private profit center. Indeed, in 2012, this Wall Street-funded Democrat [9] joined with Arnold to champion specific pension reforms that simultaneously slash guaranteed retirement income and give adisproportionate [10] amount of retiree money to the hedge fund industry, thus enriching Raimondo’s old pals in the financial industry. According to Siedle’s report, they also potentially enrich Raimondo personally.

The Scholars Who Shill for Wall Street

Academics get paid by financial firms to testify against Dodd-Frank regulations. What’s wrong with this picture?

Lee Fang

October 23, 2013

Professor Todd Zywicki is vying to be the toughest critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency set up by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law to monitor predatory lending practices. In research papers and speeches, Zywicki not only routinely slams the CFPB’s attempts to regulate bank overdraft fees and payday lenders; he depicts the agency as a “parochial” bureaucracy that is “guaranteed to run off the rails.” He has also become one of the leading detractors of the CFPB’s primary architect, Elizabeth Warren, questioning her seminal research on medical bankruptcies and slamming her for once claiming Native American heritage to gain “an edge in hiring.”

Zywicki’s withering arguments against financial reform have earned him guest columns in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and on The New York Times’s website. Lobbyists representing the largest consumer finance companies in the country have cited his writings in letters to regulators, and the number of times he has testified before Congress is prominently displayed on his academic website at the George Mason University School of Law.

Contrary to Popular Myth, Americans Not Very Litigious

By Sadhbh Walshe

October 24, 2013  |  I went swimming at a lake upstate [3] this summer with some friends who were visiting from Canada. From a distance it looked like a magical spot to cool off on a particularly sticky day. When we got there, however, we learned that the only place we were allowed to swim was a tiny cordoned off area that was further divided into even tinier subsections. As if that wasn't enough to drain any possible pleasure out of the experience, the lifeguards, who could pass for navy Seal trainees, were so authoritarian that a five-year-old girl was ordered out of the toddler section because her rubber duckie ring was not a "coast guard approved floatation device".

As we were driving away soon afterwards, in pursuit of a more hospitable watering hole, one of the Canadians remarked:

I guess that's what you get for living in such a litigious society.

And this is the problem, right? Because of the presumption that Americans never leave the safety of their own home without their personal injury lawyer's phone number on speed dial, we are forced to live in a society where excessive precautions are taken in most public spaces – and many private ones as well – to ensure that no accident or injury ever occurs. I mean, this is the country where you can spill hot coffee on yourself, sue the company that sold it to you for millions and, worse still, win.
Or so goes the narrative, anyway. The truth is that Americans don't sue that much at all. Seriously, who do you know who can afford to? But because the myth [4] has been so successfully propagated, Americans have to live with the consequences of excessive law suit avoidance that tramples on the one thing that is supposed to be truly sacred in this country – our liberty.

Harry Reid: 'We're Not Going To Have A Grand Bargain'

Sahil Kapur – October 24, 2013, 5:42 PM EDT

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Thursday put the kibosh on prospects of a deficit-reduction "grand bargain," instead making clear this his priority in upcoming negotiations will be to get rid of sequestration.

"That's all happy talk," he told KNPR Nevada Public Radio. "I would hope that were the case but we're not going to have a grand bargain in the near future."

"I hope that we can do some stuff to get rid of sequestration and go on to do some sensible budgeting," he said.

Brian Beutler: Ross Douthat’s right-wing fairy tale: What the New York Times columnist misses about Obamacare

A prominent New York Times columnist doesn't understand GOP opposition to Obamacare is part of its war on the poor 

Here’s some good news. Jeff Zients — the guy President Obama tasked with managing the Healthcare.gov cleanup job — told reporters on a conference call Friday that Obamacare’s federally facilitated insurance marketplaces should be working well by the end of November.

The Healthcare.gov rollout has been so bad and the threat to the integrity of the law is so real, it stands to reason this isn’t just spin or wishful thinking. It could turn out to be wrong. But at this point the administration gains nothing by sugarcoating things. Quieting criticism for a month won’t have any demonstrable benefits if by the end of November the system’s still broken. They’ll have just compounded the damage they’ve done to their credibility and people’s faith in the project.

The real Social Security retirement age is already 70

10/25/2013 8:00am by Gaius Publius

A Quick Hits piece, and a nice catch from Alicia H. Munnell at MarketWatch. The actual, real, functional retirement age for Social Security is … 70 years old. The logic is impeccable.

Your bottom line — The full Social Security benefit is pegged to a “retirement age” that’s many years after most people retire.

Your other bottom line — Who needs a Grand Bargain? You’re already being screwed by Social Security. Thanks to every Democratic and Republican politician who keeps taxes low for Your Betters.

The Govt. Shutdown Drama Is Over, But There's a New Threat to Our Most Important Social Programs

By Karen Higgins

October 19, 2013  |  With the current lunacy over keeping the lights on in the federal government and the debt ceiling in abeyance, until (fittingly, as one columnist has noted) right before next Groundhog Day, it’s time to step up attention to the next home invasion.

 

With the hostage taking of the current crisis has passed, a budget conference committee will be convened whose charge will be further deep cuts beyond the much detested sequester cuts negotiated late last year. And, there’s already “bipartisan” consensus that a central target of those knives will be two of the most important social reforms in U.S. history, Social Security and Medicare.

Look out below, Congress and the White House are preparing to throw Grandma off the cliff.

The Lies That Will Kill America

October 25, 2013

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

 

Here in Manhattan the other day, you couldn’t miss it — the big bold headline across the front page of the tabloid New York Post, screaming one of those sick, slick lies that are a trademark of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire. There was Uncle Sam, brandishing a revolver and wearing a burglar’s mask. “UNCLE SCAM,” the headline shouted. “US robs bank of $13 billion.”

Say what? Pure whitewash, and Murdoch’s minions know it. That $13 billion dollars is the settlement JPMorgan Chase, the country’s biggest bank, is negotiating with the government to settle its own rip-off of American homeowners and investors — those shady practices that five years ago helped trigger the financial meltdown, including manipulating mortgages and sending millions of Americans into bankruptcy or foreclosure. If anybody’s been robbed it’s not JPMorgan Chase, which can absorb the loss and probably take a tax write-off for at least part of it. No, it’s the American public. In addition to financial heartache we still have been denied the satisfaction of seeing jail time for any of the banksters who put our feet in cement and pushed us off the cliff.
 

How Sleazy Christian Con Artists Took Over the GOP

By Amanda Marcotte

October 23, 2013  |  The culture of fundamentalist Christianity has had profound impacts on the Republican party in the past few decades, moving Republicans to the right on various issues and forcing Republicans to prioritize gay-bashing and attacks on reproductive rights. The shutdown, however, ended up demonstrating something even more sinister. Republicans are no longer just cribbing their political ideology from fundamentalist Christianity. Increasingly, conservative politicians are abandoning the basic task of representing the interests of their voters and instead are exploiting their voters in the same way televangelists and other fundamentalist charlatans exploit the true believers that come to them looking for spiritual salvation.

 

Ted Cruz is the most prominent example, at least in the past month. After the shutdown debacle, it became clear that Cruz has no interest in using his position as a Texas senator to work on behalf of the voters who got him there. Instead, his M.O. is pure sleazy televangelist: Lots of public grandstanding to convince his marks, previously known as constituents, that he's on their side, for the sole purpose of shaking them down for money and support without offering anything in return.

Paul Krugman: The World According to the GOP

Over at The Washington Post's Wonkblog, the reporter Lydia DePillis recently asked: "Remember when Republicans were worried about 'economic uncertainty'?" Actually, no, I don't. I remember when they claimed to be worried about economic uncertainty - but it was completely obvious even at the time that this was nothing but an attempt to put a new, quasi-academic gloss on the same old, same old.

What they really meant was that the economy will boom only once we get rid of the Islamic atheist Kenyan socialist and install someone who will be nice to rich people. They grabbed hold of some research that seemed, if you didn't read it carefully, to support their complaints, but there was never any question that they would drop the uncertainty thing the moment it became inconvenient in the pursuit of their real goals. And so they did.

Your College Is Watching You

By Nico Perrino

October 23, 2013  |  It monitors email and social media [3] accounts, uses thousands of surveillance [4] cameras to track behavior and movement, is funded by billions of dollars from the federal government, and has been called "the most authoritarian institution in America [5]".

The National Security Agency? Nope. It's your average college or university.

Earlier this year, when Harvard University violated school policy [6] by secretly searching deans' email accounts, the world glimpsed the intrusive measures one school took to monitor online activity of its staff. "We needed to act to protect our students," said then-dean [7] of Harvard College Evelynn Hammonds, who authorized the search in response to leaked information about a high-profile cheating scandal at the Ivy League institution.

The Trillion Dollar Money Pump for the 1%

by Stan Sorscher

 

I saw the movie Inequality for All, where Robert Reich explains the depth and meaning of inequality in America. He paints a compelling picture.

Reich sets up the movie with a teaser: "Something happened in the mid-'70s."

Indeed "something did happen in the mid-'70s." For one thing, since then workers' wages as a fraction of the total economy have lagged by over a trillion dollars per year. If workers' wages had kept up with gains in productivity since the mid-70's, wages would be double what they are now. Most new income goes to the top 1 Percent.

Vinyl flooring linked to potentially harmful substances at schools and daycare centers

Large areas of vinyl flooring in daycares and schools appear to expose children to a group of compounds called phthalates, which have been linked to reproductive and developmental problems, scientists are reporting. They published their results on the ubiquitous plastic ingredients in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Chungsik Yoon and colleagues note that polyvinyl chloride (PVC), also known as vinyl, is the second most-produced plastic by volume and is commonly used in flooring.

Who Buys the Spies? The Hidden Corporate Cash Behind America’s Out-of-Control National Surveillance State

By Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, Jie Chen

October 21, 2013  |  Long before President Obama kicked off his 2008 campaign, many Americans took it for granted that George W. Bush’s vast, sprawling national security apparatus needed to be reined in. For Democrats, many independents, and constitutional experts of various persuasions, Vice President Dick Cheney’s notorious doctrine of the "unitary executive" (which holds that the President controls the entire executive branch), was the ultimate statement of the imperial presidency. It was the royal road to easy (or no) warrants for wiretaps, sweeping assertions of the government’s right to classify information secret, and arbitrary presidential power. When Mitt Romney embraced the neoconservatives in the 2012 primaries, supporters of the President often cited the need to avoid a return to the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld National Security State as a compelling reason for favoring his reelection. Reelect President Obama, they argued, or Big Brother might be back.

 

But that’s not how this movie turned out: The 2012 election proved to be a post-modern thriller, in which the main characters everyone thought they knew abruptly turned into their opposites and the plot thickened just when you thought it was over.