Michael Hudson: Push against offshore secrecy an uphill battle

Big players are taking unprecedented steps to stop offshore abuses, but financial crime fighters worry reforms don’t go far enough

By Michael Hudson, 8:00 am, November 20, 2013 Updated: 8:06 am, November 20, 2013
In June 2000, international groups rolled out blacklists targeting offshore refuges that shelter tax dodging and money laundering. Some observers predicted “the death of tax havens.”

By 2002 the campaign had, as one tax analyst put it, “dissolved into a series of toothless pronouncements.”

In 2009, offshore centers faced new attacks as the United States pursued an investigation of Swiss banks and nations hit by economic crisis sought to boost tax revenues. “Tax havens and bank secrecy are finished,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared.

Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts

There's no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it's rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So this is me doing that, sort of. 

Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6AM, go to school (I have a full courseload, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 1230AM, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I'm in bed by 3. This isn't every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights I'm in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won't be able to stay up the other nights because I'll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can't afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn't leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn't in the mix.

Saving the city from climate change, one house at a time

By Greg Hanscom

Alex Washburn was one of those New Yorkers who stayed put, defying Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s orders to evacuate when Superstorm Sandy came stomping into town. But unlike those who dug in their heels out of stubbornness or helplessness, Washburn stuck around out of pure curiosity. He’s Bloomberg’s chief urban designer — the guy responsible for shaping the city’s parks, streets, and other public spaces — and he wanted to meet Sandy in person.

“I wanted to watch, feel, understand what a storm surge meant,” he says. “If I don’t understand it viscerally, I can’t design for it.”

Paul Krugman: Expanding Social Security

For many years there has been one overwhelming rule for people who wanted to be considered serious inside the Beltway. It was this: You must declare your willingness to cut Social Security in the name of “entitlement reform.” It wasn’t really about the numbers, which never supported the notion that Social Security faced an acute crisis. It was instead a sort of declaration of identity, a way to show that you were an establishment guy, willing to impose pain (on other people, as usual) in the name of fiscal responsibility.

But a funny thing has happened in the past year or so. Suddenly, we’re hearing open discussion of the idea that Social Security should be expanded, not cut. Talk of Social Security expansion has even reached the Senate, with Tom Harkin introducing legislation that would increase benefits. A few days ago Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a stirring floor speech making the case for expanded benefits.

How a Shadowy Network of Corporate Front Groups Distorts the Marketplace of Ideas

Thursday, 21 November 2013 09:39  
By Joshua Holland, Moyers & Company | Interview 

In 1971, Lewis Powell, who would become a Supreme Court justice the following year, penned a memo calling on the American business community to aggressively engage in shaping the country’s political discourse and regulatory landscape. The “American economic system is under broad attack,” he wrote. He said the time had come to fight back. “Business must learn . . . that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”

For Powell, it was all about organizing and planning over the long-term to sway public opinion and shape public policies. “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations,” he wrote.

The myths of Obamacare's 'failure'

By MICHAEL HILTZIK

Los Angeles TimesNovember 19, 2013  

Attacks on the Affordable Care Act have stepped up over the last week or so. You'd think that the healthcare reform known as Obamacare is leading to the wholesale loss of affordable insurance by huge sectors of the American public, many of whom will be impoverished by being forced into low-quality health plans at exorbitant prices.

You'd think the entire reform is on "life support," as the usually judicious National Journal put it, speculating that Democrats may soon start calling for its repeal.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/19/208994/the-myths-of-obamacares-failure.html#storylink=cpy

Paul Krugman: A Permanent Slump?

Spend any time around monetary officials and one word you’ll hear a lot is “normalization.” Most though not all such officials accept that now is no time to be tightfisted, that for the time being credit must be easy and interest rates low. Still, the men in dark suits look forward eagerly to the day when they can go back to their usual job, snatching away the punch bowl whenever the party gets going.

But what if the world we’ve been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?

Naming Names: The 90 Companies Destroying Our Planet

Analysis highlights the small number of profit-driven entities that are driving us towards destruction, but can a climate revolution from below challenge their rule?

- Jon Queally, staff writer

Narrow it down to the real power-brokers and decision-makers—the CEO's of fossil fuel companies or the energy ministers from the largest petro-states—says climate researcher Richard Heede, and the actual individuals most responsible for the political world's continued refusal to address the planetary crisis of climate change "could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two."

In a newly compeleted study by Heede and his colleagues at the Climate Accountability Institute, their analysis shows that a mere 90 companies, some private and some state-owned, account for a full two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions that are now driving perilous rates of global warming.

Most of NSA’s data collection authorized by order Ronald Reagan issued

By Ali Watkins

McClatchy Washington Bureau, November 21, 2013

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency’s collection of information on Americans’ cellphone and Internet usage reaches far beyond the two programs that have received public attention in recent months, to a presidential order that is older than the Internet itself.

Approved by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Executive Order 12333 (referred to as “twelve-triple-three”) still governs most of what the NSA does. It is a sweeping mandate that outlines the duties and foreign intelligence collection for the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies. It is not governed by Congress, and critics say it has little privacy protection and many loopholes. What changes have been made to it have come through guidelines set by the attorney general or other documents.

How Wall Street — not pensioners — wrecked Detroit

While clueless elites continue to blame "reckless public pensions," a new report tells a very different story 

David Sirota

In its house editorial yesterday, USA Today retold the now-accepted story of Detroit’s bankruptcy. Railing on “reckless public pensions,” the newspaper told its readers that the Motor City is “Exhibit A for municipal irresponsibility” because it allegedly “negotiated generous pensions” that were too lavish. In this fable, the average Detroit pensioner’s $19,000 a year stipend — which many get in lieu of Social Security — is somehow defined not only as excessive, but also as the primary cause of the city’s financial problems. Detroit, thus, becomes a weapon in the larger Plot Against Pensions, as the right holds it up as a cautionary tale supposedly showing that A) police officers, firefighters and sanitation workers are greedy and B) America cannot afford to fulfill negotiated agreements to pay public-sector workers a subsistence retirement benefit.

No doubt, there is a tiny grain of truth in this otherwise inaccurate story. Yes, it is true, Detroit is a cautionary tale for governments about financial management and legacy costs. However, it is not a cautionary tale about allegedly greedy employees living the MTV Cribs life off taxpayers. As an eye-opening new report from a former Goldman Sachs executive documents, it is instead yet another cautionary tale about Wall Street’s too-good-to-be-true schemes that end up being, well, too good to be true.

Special Report: The Pentagon's doctored ledgers conceal epic waste

By Scot J. Paltrow

LETTERKENNY ARMY DEPOT, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense's accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon's main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy's books with the U.S. Treasury's - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

Liberals aren't like the rest, or so they think

Liberals tend to underestimate the amount of actual agreement among those who share their ideology, while conservatives tend to overestimate intra-group agreement, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

These findings may help to explain differences in how political groups and movements, like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, gain traction on the national stage:

"The Tea Party movement developed a succinct set of goals in its incipient stages and effectively mobilized its members toward large-scale social change quite quickly," says psychological scientist Chadly Stern of New York University. "In contrast, despite its popularity, the liberal Occupy Wall Street movement struggled to reach agreement on their collective mission and ultimately failed to enact large-scale social change."

Elizabeth Warren on Social Security: “It’s Values, Not Math”

November 18, 2013

The following remarks on Social Security were made on the floor of the United States Senate on Monday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. As Warren notes, “the conversation about retirement and Social Security benefits is not just a conversation about math. At its core, this is a conversation about our values.” Warren places the debate about Social Security in the context of a broader “retirement crisis” for the American middle class and explains why “we should be talking about expanding Social Security benefits – not cutting them.” 

The fight to provide retirement security for all Americans has an eloquent advocate in Sen. Elizabeth Warren, as the following speech demonstrates.

— Richard Eskow

Dean Baker: Bubbles are Not Funny: The 99% Gets Blasted When They Burst

November 18, 2013  |  Paul Krugman tells us [3] that Larry Summers joined the camp concerned about secular stagnation in his I.M.F. talk last week, something that I had not picked up from prior coverage of the session. This is good news, but I would qualify a few of the points that Krugman makes in his elaboration of Summers' remarks.

 

First, while the economy may presently need asset bubbles to maintain full employment (a point I made in Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy [4]), it doesn't follow that we should not be concerned about asset bubbles. The problem with bubbles is that their inflation and inevitable deflation lead to massive redistribution of wealth.

In the case of the housing bubble in particular we saw millions of people lose much or all of their wealth from buying homes at bubble-inflated prices. The loss of housing wealth is especially devastating because housing is a highly leveraged asset even in normal times and it is an asset often held by middle and moderate income households. It was great that the bubble was able to spur growth and get the economy close to full employment, however the subsequent crash was pretty awful. It would be incredibly irresponsible to go through another round like this.

Paul Krugman: The Dollar Will Be All Right

Oh, dear. I'm starting to notice a shift in the scare talk. Cries that "We're about to turn into Greece, Greece, I tell you," are getting a bit fainter, maybe because of what I've been writing in response. But taking their place are dire warnings that the dollar's role as a reserve currency is endangered.

Urk.

People who talk like this generally have no idea what they are saying — that is, they have no idea what the dollar's role really is, what might endanger that role, and why it matters (to the extent that it does).

Think the Tea Party Is Crazy? Europe's Rising Neo-Fascism Is a Taste of What's Coming If Austerity Prevails in America 

By Marshall Auerback

November 15, 2013  |  American political dysfunction looks pretty bad — but just take a look at what’s going on across the Atlantic. A poisonous wave of right-wing, neo-fascist parties is emerging in response to the continent’s ongoing austerity and hugely ineffectual policy response to the resulting jobs crisis. 

 

The U.S. could be headed in the same direction if the austerity-pushers have their way. Europe is a case study in what happens when mainstream parties on both the right and the left fail to deliver relief to the people. Extremists seize the opportunity to assert themselves, and things get ugly very fast.

Bringing countries together in the European Union was supposed to make violent nationalist conflict a thing of the past. Member countries were supposed to prosper economically. But now countries like Greece and Spain are fracturing politically and falling into a downward economic spiral.

People new to power more likely to be vengeful

New research has shown that people who are not accustomed to holding power are more likely to be vengeful when placed in charge. Experienced power-holders, on the other hand, were found to be more tolerant of perceived wrongdoing.

The research, co-led by Dr Mario Weick of the University of Kent, and Dr Peter Strelan, of the University of Adelaide, Australia, explored for the first time the relationship between power and revenge.

The research concluded that revenge and other acts of aggression are more likely to be enacted by individuals who are new to holding power and feel more vulnerable to threats, relative to those who feel more self-assured and experienced in their exercise of power.

State “Stink Tanks” Exposed

Dave Johnson

How many times have you read or heard in the news something along the lines of “a new report from the Institute of Free Markets and Liberty finds that giant corporations and billionaires create jobs if given tax cuts,” or how about your classic “Toxic Sludge Is Good For You“? Well guess what, a new report from an actual, honest think tank exposes a national network of corporate PR firms masking themselves as think tanks. The report calls these corporate-front PR firms “Stink Tanks.”

The Stink Tanks

The report, titled Stinktanks.org, exposes the State Policy Network (SPN), an $83 million web of right-wing “think tanks” in every state across the country. These organizations present themselves as nonpartisan, objective and scholarly, But instead of being actual, honest “think tanks” all of these organizations are funded by and/or work for groups like the corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers and other billionaire conservative and corporate funders like the Waltons, the Bradley Foundation, the Roe Foundation, and the Coors family. Instead of acting as honest “think tanks” they instead operate as PR firms. The “reports” and “studies” these organizations issue always support the legislative efforts of these conservative billionaires and corporations.

The glorious, dystopian future envisioned by our libertarian masters

by David Atkins

I've written often before about how much of the war between the American left and right is essentially the building of sand castles in the face of the oncoming tide of globalization, deskilling and mechanization of the workforce accompanied by catastrophic climate change. Many of the public policy battles in this country are fought between the one-percenters simply trying to loot what's left before it all crashes and burns, and neoliberals desperately trying to pump up asset prices and force everyone into engineering programs to disguise the destruction of the regular wage economy. The far right and progressive left, meanwhile, are each trying to bring back the social and economic norms of the 1950s and early 1960s, respectively, in efforts of utter futility.

In this environment it's rare to find columnists who are asking themselves the right questions. It's rarer still to find ones who have the right answers. But it's when conservatives and libertarians ask the right questions and come up with their honest responses that we see the crippling danger of allowing them anywhere near the levers of power.

How Privatizers Are Killing Our Schools

November 17, 2013  |  Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast [3] called the public school system a "socialist regime." Michelle Rhee [4]cautions us against commending students for their 'participation' in sports and other activities.

Privatizers believe that any form of working together as a community is anti-American. To them, individual achievement is all that matters. They're now applying their winner-take-all profit motive to our children.

Environmental toxins linked to heart defects

Children's congenital heart defects may be associated with their mothers' exposure to specific mixtures of environmental toxins during pregnancy, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2013.

Congenital heart defects occur when the heart or blood vessels near the heart don't develop normally before birth. Defects may be caused by chromosomal abnormalities, but the cause is unknown in most cases.