In Which I Continue To Despair Of The Rebranding

By Charles P. Pierce at 2:00PM
 

Tout le Beltway is abuzz over the double-barrelled attempt by National Affairs -- Motto: Conservatism Without Crayons -- to arrest the spread of the prion disease currently making the brains of the Republican party, and of American conservatism generally -- bleed out. I will pass over the one co-authored by the insufferable Michael Gerson because Gerson was a word-whore for the Avignon Presidency who has been attempting with varying degrees of pathetic to leave behind the perfumed lies he concocted on behalf of bloodthirsty morons and is thus unworthy of serious consideration. (If Gerson's pet war had not been the obvious catastrophe it has been, then Gerson would be down in College Station, polishing with his own dick the marble statue of C-Plus Augustus.) The other piece -- by Michael Strain -- which proposes a Republican push on a "jobs" plan is far more interesting because it contains within it political matter and political anti-matter in such close proximity that the piece ultimately annihilates itself.

A Simple Economic Truth America's Super Rich Don't Want Us to Know About

by Thom Hartmann

January 2, 2014  |  For the past 32 years, Americans have been living a lie. It's a lie that helps out rich people and screws working people, and it's a lie that needs to be called out.

The people promoting this lie - most all of them rich people themselves - have been so good at promoting this lie that pretty much everybody believes it. It's even asserted as fact, without contradiction, in the mainstream media. But it's a lie.

The lie is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies hurts economies and even leads to unemployment. The truth is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies actually helps economies and causes companies to hire more and more people, thus lowering unemployment.

Seattle Arson that Could Have Killed Hundreds Probed as Hate Crime

By David Neiwert

January 3, 2014  |  A horrific tragedy in which hundreds could have died was narrowly averted in Seattle [2] on New Year’s Eve, stopped by patrons of an iconic gay bar who managed to extinguish a raging arson fire at the bar’s entrance before the flames spread. Now Seattle police are investigating the case as a possible hate crime, although they say that so far there is no evidence that it was one beyond the fact that gay people appear to have been targeted.

The fact that the bar was a famous Capitol Hill nightclub called Neighbours immediately raised suspicions in Seattle. In 1990, the same establishment was targeted by a group of neo-Nazis from Idaho who plotted a bombing attack there intended to kill large numbers of people.

Bill Black: They’re Back: The Poltergeists in the Kansas Senate Renew their Attack on Education

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posed from New Economic Perspectives

Two Kansas legislative leaders who have been attacking Kansas education for over a decade through their wars on teaching about sex and evolution are back.  Their threats drove the Regents’ policy destroying academic freedom and tenure.

[...]

I have written two prior columns (here and here) explaining how the Kansas Regents casually ended academic freedom and tenure in their universities with no notice to or participation by the faculty.

My columns explained how the Regents’ policy was deliberately drafted to chill academic freedom.  The policy is not limited to “social media.”  Anything that is posted on line, which includes academic research, is grounds for firing.  It does not matter that what the professor publishes on line is accurate, well-intentioned, and polite – if the university “CEO” decides that the article is “contrary to the best interests of the University.”  The professor who is fired on this vague, subjective criterion can appeal the dismissal – to the CEO!  Universities are simply businesses led by CEO and the faculty must demonstrate “loyalty” to the CEO and whatever the CEO decides are “the best interests of the University” (which can include not criticizing corporate CEOs’ crimes because they might donate to the university).

Google’s for-profit surveillance problem

By Yasha Levine
On December 16, 2013

Early last week, some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley announced that they had gotten together to form a new forward-thinking organization dedicated to promoting government surveillance reform in the name of “free expression” and “privacy.”

The charade should have been laughed at and mocked — after all, these same companies feed on privacy for profit, and unfettered surveillance is their stock and trade. Instead, it was met with cheers and fanfare from reporters and privacy and tech experts alike. “Finally!” people cried, Silicon Valley has grown up and matured enough to help society tackle the biggest problem of our age: the runaway power of the modern surveillance state.

Why TED Is a Recipe for Civilazational Disaster

December 31, 2013  |  The following is the text of a talk given at TEDx San Diego by Benjamin Bratton: 

 

In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.

But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks [3] actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?

I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. It's where philosophy and design intersect.

'Military-Style' Raid on California Power Station Spooks US

BY Shane Harris, DECEMBER 27, 2013 - 02:02 PM

When U.S. officials warn about "attacks" on electric power facilities these days, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a computer hacker trying to shut the lights off in a city with malware. But a more traditional attack on a power station in California has U.S. officials puzzled and worried about the physical security of the the electrical grid--from attackers who come in with guns blazing.

Around 1:00 AM on April 16, at least one individual (possibly two) entered two different manholes at the PG&E Metcalf power substation, southeast of San Jose, and cut fiber cables in the area around the substation. That knocked out some local 911 services, landline service to the substation, and cell phone service in the area, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Foreign Policy. The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility. Ten transformers were damaged in one area of the facility, and three transformer banks -- or groups of transformers -- were hit in another, according to a PG&E spokesman.

Why Oil is Mightier than the Sword for U.S. Foreign Policy

By Daniel J. Graeber | Sun, 29 December 2013 00:00

The American Petroleum Institute said the United States is emerging as a superpower in terms of energy and should use that leverage by exporting crude oil overseas. Some U.S. lawmakers pressing for tighter sanctions on Iran, meanwhile, oppose the export drive, suggesting potential superpower influence may run up against protectionist policies.

U.S. crude oil exports are restricted under legislation enacted in response to the 1970s Arab oil embargo. Now, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicting crude oil production will reach 9.5 million barrels per day by 2016, the industry and its supporters said it's time to reverse that policy.

Dean Baker: Centrists Have No Right to Lecture Anyone On Growth

Last week former New York Times editor Bill Keller had a column that distinguished the “left-left” and the center-left. His left-left included people like Senator Elizabeth Warren and incoming New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio while his center-left included President Obama, most of the Democratic Party leadership and the DC-based policy group Third Way.

Keller’s left-left might more appropriately be called center-left (these are not radicals pushing for the overthrow of capitalism) and his center-left should probably just be called “centrists.” However what’s more important than the labeling is the main line of distinction Keller tries to draw.

Paul Krugman: Fiscal Fever Breaks

In 2012 President Obama, ever hopeful that reason would prevail, predicted that his re-election would finally break the G.O.P.’s “fever.” It didn’t.

But the intransigence of the right wasn’t the only disease troubling America’s body politic in 2012. We were also suffering from fiscal fever: the insistence by virtually the entire political and media establishment that budget deficits were our most important and urgent economic problem, even though the federal government could borrow at incredibly low interest rates. Instead of talking about mass unemployment and soaring inequality, Washington was almost exclusively focused on the alleged need to slash spending (which would worsen the jobs crisis) and hack away at the social safety net (which would worsen inequality).

Overthrow the Speculators

Posted on Dec 29, 2013By Chris Hedges

Money, as Karl Marx lamented, plays the largest part in determining the course of history. Once speculators are able to concentrate wealth into their hands they have, throughout history, emasculated government, turned the press into lap dogs and courtiers, corrupted the courts and hollowed out public institutions, including universities, to justify their looting and greed. Today’s speculators have created grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge the masses into crippling forms of debt peonage. They steal staggering sums of public funds, such as the $85 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that they unload each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash. And when the public attempts to finance public-works projects they extract billions of dollars through wildly inflated interest rates.

Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged.

The Shocking Redistribution of Wealth in the Past Five Years

by Paul Buchheit

Anyone reviewing the data is likely to conclude that there must be some mistake. It doesn't seem possible that one out of twenty American families could each have made a million dollars since Obama became President, while the average American family's net worth has barely recovered. But the evidence comes from numerous reputable sources.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main - perhaps only - beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years.

Thomas Frank: If memory swerves: The 1 percent laughs last, as Wall Street wins again

Five years after wrecking our economy, the big banks are back. Here's why we need real government regulations 

September 15 marked five years since the beginning of the economic slump that defines the world we live in. Disaster was in the air already by that day in 2008: real-estate values had been falling for some time, Bear Stearns and several big commercial banks had failed, and the government had taken over the mortgage insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the previous week. But that Monday morning in September was when the larger economy went over a cliff — after Lehman Brothers, the nation’s fourth largest investment bank, finally succumbed to the effects of the noxious securities on which it had gorged itself for years.

Later that day, in a climate of almost complete panic, Merrill Lynch — the nation’s third-largest investment bank, which had fed at the same trough — managed to find shelter in the arms of Bank of America. By the next day, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department announced that they were saving AIG, the mammoth insurance company that had transformed itself into a stealth hedge fund. As for actual hedge funds, more than 700 of them collapsed in the subsequent four months. And Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two investment-banking leviathans, desperately registered themselves as “bank holding companies” and threw themselves upon the mercy of the all-forgiving Fed.