Study: Watching Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News

By Michael Kelley

This post originally appeared in Business Insider on May 22, 2012.

Media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC have a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge, while NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative sources of news, according to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s newest PublicMind survey.

Researchers asked 1,185 random nationwide respondents what news sources they had consumed in the past week and then asked them questions about events in the U.S. and abroad. On average, people correctly answered 1.6 of five questions about domestic affairs.

Paul Krugman: Talking Troubled Turkey

O.K., who ordered that? With everything else going on, the last thing we needed was a new economic crisis in a country already racked by political turmoil. True, the direct global spillovers from Turkey, with its Los Angeles-sized economy, won’t be large. But we’re hearing that dreaded word “contagion” — the kind of contagion that once caused a crisis in Thailand to spread across Asia, more recently caused a crisis in Greece to spread across Europe, and now, everyone worries, might cause Turkey’s troubles to spread across the world’s emerging markets.

It is, in many ways, a familiar story. But that’s part of what makes it so disturbing: Why do we keep having these crises? And here’s the thing: The intervals between crises seem to be getting shorter, and the fallout from each crisis seems to be worse than the last. What’s going on?

Another Religious Right Tale Of Anti-Christian Victimization Gets Thoroughly Debunked

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Wednesday, 1/29/2014 10:24 am

We have seen it happen time and again: some right-wing group issues a one-sided press release about a student supposedly being unfairly discriminated against in school simply for exercising their Christian faith and the entire Religious Right movement immediately flies into an outrage, spreading the story far and wide as undisputed truth. Then days or weeks later, the real story emerges once school officials are given an opportunity to investigate and explain what really happened and it inevitably reveals that the Religious Right version was completely false, by which point it is already too late because the fake version has already been accepted as gospel and just continues to spread forever.

Paul Krugman: What Happens When Opportunities Are Lost

National Review recently published what was actually an interesting report by Kevin Williamson on the state of the Appalachian region, providing a valuable portrait of its woes - plus an account of how people make food stamps fungible by exchanging them for cases of soda, which they then trade for cash or other things.

But the piece also has a moral: the big problem, Mr. Williamson argues, is the way government aid creates dependency. It's the Paul Ryan notion of the safety net as a "hammock" that makes life too easy for the poor. But do the facts about Appalachia actually support this view? No, they don't.

Indeed, even the facts presented in the article don't support it. Mr. Williamson dismisses suggestions that economic factors might be driving social collapse in this region: "If you go looking for the catastrophe that laid this area low," you'll eventually discover a terrifying story: Nothing happened."

Scary New Surveillance State Idea: Government Tracking Students from Preschool to Workforce

By Aaron Cantú

January 29, 2014  |  The education sector, long frustrated by transient fads that have failed to uplift decades of sub-par student achievement, thinks it has finally found its knight in shining armor: an omnipresent data archive that will track students from pre-school to graduation, noting every teacher and test score. Then it will tack that trail of data onto a person well after they leave school.

 

Enthusiasts say they hope the constant tracking will help policy-makers identify the precise factors that make a successful student, and foster the creation of well-informed education policy, while opponents worry that growing intrusiveness will normalize the mass surveillance and obsessive record-keeping of humans foretold in dystopian literature.

The $100 million repository that will catalog all the information is called inBloom, an initiative funded primarily through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

The Republican Conspiracy Has Worked

Wednesday, 29 January 2014 15:08  
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed 

Republicans should be thrilled with President Obama’s State of the Union address. That’s because the extremely limited vision of government he presented last night is exactly what Republicans have been plotting to create since day one of the Obama White House.

In his fifth State of the Union address, the president essentially said that he is going to go it alone. His major policy plan for 2014 is to bypass Congress altogether and use targeted executive orders to get things done.

The Great Lakes Go Dry: How One-Fifth Of The World’s Fresh Water Is Dwindling Away

By Joanna M. Foster, on January 28, 2014 at 11:23 am

The frozen opalescent lake and thin, gray sky fade together into white light where the horizon should be. Tall, skeletal grasses shiver on the beach in a wind that makes any sliver of exposed skin burn. The Arni J. Richter, an icebreaking ferry, is about to pull away from Northport Pier for its second and final trip of the day to Washington Island. It’s loaded with food and fuel for the more than 700 hardy residents who call the remote island, just north of Door County peninsula in Wisconsin, home.

People have lived on Washington Island for over 160 years. They’re proud of their tight-knit community and their Icelandic heritage. But life on the island is threatened. For the past 15 years, islanders have watched Lake Michigan slowly disappear. Last January, the lake hit a record low, 29 inches below the long-term average as measured since 1918. The Richter Ferry was just inches away from grounding in some spots along its increasingly treacherous six-mile route to the island.

Mirabile Dictu! Post Office Bank Concept Gets Big Boost

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Yves Smith

Naked Capitalism readers have frequently called for the Post Office to offer basic banking services, as post offices long have in many countries, notably Japan. That idea has gotten an important official endorsement in the form of a detailed, extensively researched concept paper prepared by the Postal Service’s Inspector General. I’ve embedded it and strongly urge you to read and circulate it.

One of the stunning parts in reading the document is to see how wildly successful this program could be, precisely because traditional banks are withdrawing from many of the neighborhoods in which moderate and lower-income people live, and non-banks offer targeted, richly priced services, too often designed to take advantage of desperation or simple lack of alternatives. Even though most of us are aware of this general picture, the USPS IG, dimensions the scale of this problem and the costs to the affected households

27 Shocking Numbers That Reveal the True State of the Union

Scary statistics on unemployment, inequality, climate change and more

by Tim Dickinson
JANUARY 28, 2014

In tonight's State of the Union speech, we're likely to hear a lot about the nation's continuing recovery from the Great Recession, and about President Obama's determination to run an executive end-run around obstructionist Republicans in order to kick the economy into a higher gear.

But as the nation pauses for this annual moment of reflection on our fiscal and social health, too many leading indicators get short shrift. Here are 27 statistics – on unemployment, inequality, the drug war, defense spending, climate change and more – that underscore the troubled reality of America in 2014:

1. New income generated since 2009 that has gone to the top 1 percent: 95 percent
2. Financial wealth controlled by the bottom 60 percent of all Americans: 2.3 percent
3. Record combined wealth of the top 400 richest Americans: $2,000,000,000,000
4. Real decline in median middle-class incomes since 1999: $5,000

Wendy Davis' Daughters Strike Back At GOP Smear Machine

By karoli, January 28, 2014 11:55 am

After a week of relentless, sexist smears, Wendy Davis' daughters have had enough.

Don't you love how Republicans claim they're all about the children until it's inconvenient? They're so valiant, standing for those poor persecuted imaginary 'children' lost forever to abortions.

But when the kids are actual flesh and blood, they don't give a damn. If they did, they'd limit their attacks on Wendy Davis to her policies instead of going after her personally for her history and making specious claims that she abandoned her children to go to school.

Paul Krugman: Hollande Takes a Wrong Turn

"You shall not crucify mankind upon a croissant d'or."

That was the economist Alan Taylor's response (in correspondence) to French President François Hollande's embrace of Say's Law - Mr. Hollande literally said that "supply actually creates demand" in a press conference - together with his shift to, again in his own words, supply-side policies.

The amazing thing to me, aside from Mr. Hollande's haplessness, is the extreme pessimism that has evidently enveloped the French elite. You'd think that France was a disaster area. Yet the numbers, while not good, just aren't that dramatic.

Problems of Eurozone, European Integration Stem From Deeply Unpopular Elite Economic, Social Policy

Wednesday, 29 January 2014 09:07  
By Mark Weisbrot, Truthout | Op-Ed 

The February 2014 issue of Harper's Magazine has an interesting discussion of Europe and the eurozone, "How Germany Reconquered Europe: the Euro and its Discontents." Some of the big questions of European unity, democracy and national sovereignty are debated in broad and direct terms not often seen in other analyses:

"The basic lesson of the past ten, twenty years - even of the past hundred years - is that the upper limit, not only of democracy but of political legitimacy, is the nation-state." (John N. Gray, London School of Economics.)

Then there is the Franco-German relationship, which is central to the eurozone:

"I'm really sorry, but the idea that there is such a thing as Franco-German friendship is just nonsense. In France we're very glad we have no big problems with Germany and the wars are over. But the idea of a special cultural or sociological link between German and France is nonsense. … Among the French bourgeoisie, the elite, there is a sort of reverence for Germany, because Germany is obviously more efficient and because the German people are obviously easier to govern than the French people, so there's this kind of friendship among the upper classes. …

Pay no attention to those insurance lobbyists behind the Medicare curtain!

Commentary: 'Grass roots' group says it represents seniors but is really run by health insurers

By Wendell Potter
6:00 am, January 27, 2014 Updated: 5:00 pm, January 28, 2014

If you go to 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Suite 500, in Washington, D.C. in search of what you’ve been told is the address of a grass roots organization concerned about “cuts” to Medicare, you will likely be surprised what you find there.

You will indeed find an organization that is lobbying hard to keep federal dollars flowing, but it is anything but grass roots.

Digby: “Inequality Doesn’t Just Happen. The 1% Make It Happen”

Responding to the depressing news that the administration has succumbed to elite pressure to “tone down” the rhetoric about wealth inequality, Damon Silvers, special counsel for the AFL-CIO, points out the uncomfortable truth:

[T]he president faces a choice of rhetoric on Tuesday night—but that choice is not just about political gamesmanship. It will have serious policy implications. But there is also an issue of simple credibility. The American people are watching, and they are furious about inequality. Large majorities in poll after poll want a more progressive tax system, accountability for bankers, less power in public life for corporations and the rich and, most of all, higher wages.

Richard Eskow: A Billionaire’s “Nazi” Rant Has Secret Roots – in Landscaping

By now millions of people have heard that Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Perkins compared progressive political speech to Kristallnacht, the night of religious violence which led to the death of 91 Jews and paved the way politically for the Nazi Reich and the Holocaust. Here’s what you probably don’t know: Perkins’ rage appears to have been fueled, at least in part, by a dispute over gardening.

That’s right: Gardening.

Common crop pesticides kill honeybee larvae in the hive

Four pesticides commonly used on crops to kill insects and fungi also kill honeybee larvae within their hives, according to Penn State and University of Florida researchers. The team also found that N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) -- an inert, or inactive, chemical commonly used as a pesticide additive -- is highly toxic to honeybee larvae.

"We found that four of the pesticides most commonly found in beehives kill bee larvae," said Jim Frazier, professor of entomology, Penn State. "We also found that the negative effects of these pesticides are sometimes greater when the pesticides occur in combinations within the hive. Since pesticide safety is judged almost entirely on adult honeybee sensitivity to individual pesticides and also does not consider mixtures of pesticides, the risk assessment process that the Environmental Protection Agency uses should be changed."

Dean Baker: President Obama's Inequality Story

The advance word is that inequality is going to be the central theme in President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday. That’s certainly good news, since it is a huge problem. The question is whether President Obama is prepared to talk about inequality in a way that gets to the core of the problem as opposed to just clipping away at the edges.

It’s a safe bet that we will see the latter. Obama has indicated that he will redouble his efforts to push for a $10.10 minimum wage. This is good news. This will mean a substantial increase in the wages for people at the bottom of the income ladder. The bulk of the gains from a higher minimum wage will go to people who really need it.

UK to Shred Over 80,000 Pages of Environmental Protections

'The Government must stop making the environment a scapegoat for the economic challenges we face,' critics warn

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

In a sweeping overhaul of environmental regulations in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday announced plans to slash over 80,000 pages of laws that protect the environment against business practices.

The list of over 3,000 regulations on the chopping block—outlined in a speech at the Federation of Small Businesses Conference Monday—includes guidance on contaminated land and hazardous waste management, food labeling regulations, and building regulations such as requirements for onsite green technologies.

The overhaul, which is part of Cameron's Red Tape Challenge campaign, include proposals to “wind down” the code for sustainable homes and limit Environmental Impact Assessments for building projects, according to Naomi Luhde-Thompson from Friends of the Earth.

Working poor now majority of food stamp recipients — with college educated among fastest growing group of users

By George Chidi
Sunday, January 26, 2014 20:20 EST

In the wake of recent cuts to the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program — or food stamps — the Associated Press reported Sunday that working-age people have now passed children and the elderly as the majority of recipients for households relying on food stamps.

The program now covers one in seven Americans, with the fastest growth in use among workers with some college training, the AP reported.

Stories about the rising use of food stamps by seemingly-undeserving recipients — prompting the conservative backlash — began near the start of the recession with tales of Brooklyn hipsters using food stamps for organic salmon. But with increasing regularity we’re reading stories of adjunct college professors and government employees relying on SNAP to feed themselves and their children, evidence that SNAP is the virtual breadline of the Great Recession.

DDT: Pesticide linked to Alzheimer's

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News
 

Exposure to a once widely used pesticide, DDT, may increase the chances of developing Alzheimer's disease, suggest US researchers.

A study, published in JAMA Neurology, showed patients with Alzheimer's had four times as much DDT lingering in the body as healthy people.

Some countries still use the pesticide to control malaria.

How Private Probation Companies Make Money From the Those They Trap in the Justice System

By Aaron Cantú

January 20, 2014  |  Marietta Conner watched the judge expectantly. The 63-year-old assistant minister had just pled guilty to “fail[ing] to yield to a pedestrian”—a criminal misdemeanor in Georgia—and did not have enough money to pay her $140 fine. The judge ordered that she be put on probation. But instead of county probation, Conner was assigned a private probation company supposed to mimic normal court probabation: meet with her once a month through a probation officer, collect payments and confirm her work and address. In the end, the company sapped Conner of well over the original amount of the fine, and even dangled an arrest warrant over her head when it erroneously claimed she had missed a payment.

 

Conner was lucky. She knew someone at the Southern Center for Human Rights who helped her escape the trap the correctional corporation tried to put her in. Yet for hundreds of thousands of others on probation through a private company, the experience routinely entails prolonged harassment, indebtedness and even imprisonment—and sometimes all with the blessing of a judge.

Rick Perlstein: Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Five): Epistemology and Empathy

A friend pointed me to a letter to the editor published in the Badger Herald, an independent newspaper published at the University of Wisconsin , widely tweeted with such comments as “Motherfucker, what the fuck” and “how do people like this actually exist?” It argues that rape culture is, in the writer’s words, “non-existent.” I provide the link for documentation purposes only; you should most decidedly not click on it, especially if you are a woman vulnerable to rape-trauma triggers, or a woman, or, actually, if you are a human being. The letter, from a junior majoring in political science, goes on to say that the term “rape culture” merely “aggressively paints men as dangerous and as the root of evil,” and complains “women feel the need to exploit anything that may be rape for publicity.”

I’ll say no more about this “argument.” I bring it up to make a broader point about right-wing rhetoric. It is this: Have you ever noticed how conservatives who say the most controversial things imaginable consistently frame such utterances as self-evident, as simple “truth,” explaining with unshakable confidence that anyone who disagrees with them… no, scratch that.

Utah is Ending Homelessness by Giving People Homes

Earlier this month, Hawaii State representative Tom Bower (D) began walking the streets of his Waikiki district with a sledgehammer, and smashing shopping carts used by homeless people. “Disgusted” by the city’s chronic homelessness problem, Bower decided to take matters into his own hands — literally. He also took to rousing homeless people if he saw them sleeping at bus stops during the day.

Bower’s tactics were over the top, and so unpopular that he quickly declared “Mission accomplished,” and retired his sledgehammer. But Bower’s frustration with his city’s homelessness problem is just an extreme example of the frustration that has led cities to pass measures that effective deal with the homeless by criminalizing homelessness.

“I feel like I was set up to fail”: Inside a for-profit college nightmare

Some schools feast on federal aid and don't care if the student can repay it. Here's one woman's tragic story

Adam Rust

Jaqueta Cherry did not have a glittering GPA or a résumé loaded with internships and varsity letters. She dropped out of high school at age 17. But last fall, right after she received a general equivalency diploma, for-profit colleges and universities besieged her with offers of admission. Admissions officers told her that she could start right away. They said she could get a degree that would help her land a professional job working in computers. Hoping to escape from a future of dead-end jobs, she enrolled in a two-year associate’s program at Everest University Online.

But a year later, she has failed or dropped out of six courses at two different schools. She has never earned a single credit hour. Despite attending Everest University Online and then later the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online, she still cannot find a “salary job.” But now she has thousands of dollars in outstanding federal student loans. And she’s not the only one.

Paul Krugman: Economic Opportunity Has Collapsed, So Poverty Endures

I wanted to say something about the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

By 1980 or so, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, there was widespread consensus that it had failed. But, as the C.B.P.P. also concluded in an online article earlier this month, that doesn't stand up once you do the numbers right: poverty measures that take into account government aid - aid of the kind provided by the war on poverty! - do show a significant decline since the 1960s.

There's more sheer misery in America than there should be, but less than there was. Even so, progress against poverty has obviously been disappointing. But why? At this point in the argument, it's important to realize that American conservatives are stuck with a fossil narrative - a story about persistent poverty that may have had something to it three decades ago, but is all wrong now.

Paul Krugman: The Undeserving Rich

The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact — American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society — shouldn’t be up for argument.

But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But it also, I think, reflects distaste for the implications of the numbers, which seem almost like an open invitation to class warfare — or, if you prefer, a demonstration that class warfare is already underway, with the plutocrats on offense.

The Lost Legacy of Otis Pike

January 22, 2014

Former Rep. Otis Pike died Monday at the age of 92, stirring recollections of his courageous efforts in the 1970s to expose abuses committed by the CIA, a struggle that ultimately bogged down as defenders of state secrecy proved too strong, as ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman writes.

By Melvin A. Goodman

The death of Rep. Otis G. Pike, a nine-term New York congressman, is a sharp reminder that once upon a time this country had congressmen who were willing to conduct oversight of the secretive intelligence community, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, and press for genuine reform.

In the wake of CIA abuses during the Vietnam War, including the pursuit of political assassination and illegal searches and seizures, Rep. Pike and Sen. Frank Church — both Democrats — established the Pike Committee and the Church Committee in order to create bipartisan congressional oversight of the intelligence community and to place the CIA under a tighter rein.

Matt Taibbi: Bailout Architect Runs for California Governor; World Laughs

I want to apologize for this space being blank for quite some time. I actually spent the bulk of the last two days on a long blog post about the "Dr. V." story in Grantland. But then I got all the way to the end, and realized I was completely wrong about the entire thing.

So, I spiked my own piece. Now I've been in Talk Radio-style "This is totally dead air, Barry" territory for about two weeks. I could swear I saw a cobweb when I logged on this morning.

So thank God for Neel Kashkari, and the news that this goofball footnote caricature of the bailout era has decided to run for Governor of California. Never in history has there been an easier subject for a blog post.

Did These 68 Words Just Kill IRS Oversight of Dark Money?

In a vaguely worded section of a vast new law, Congress may have accidentally blocked the agency from supervising political groups.

—By Patrick Caldwell  | Wed Jan. 22, 2014 3:00 AM GMT

Congress rushed to pass a 1,524-page bill last week that funds government agencies for 2014. The bill—which President Obama signed into law last Friday—is full of minor measures that were slipped in to appease various members, but one small section could upend the Internal Revenue Service's ability to regulate political organizations hoping to become nonprofits. Tacked on as a symbolic effort to mollify conservatives' anti-IRS mania, the text is so overly vague that it could mean the dissolution of long-standing rules. Or nothing at all. No one's really sure.

"It's really hard to know if this is clever or just abysmal drafting," says Frances Hill, a tax law professor at the University of Miami School of Law.

Paul Krugman: Good Republicans Reject Evolution

I'm a bit late to this party, but the Pew Research Center recently released a new report about changing views on evolution in the United States. The big takeaway was that a plurality of self-identified Republicans now believe that no evolution whatsoever has taken place since the day of creation - let alone that evolution is driven by natural selection.

The move is big: an 11-point decline since 2009. Obviously there isn't any new scientific evidence driving this rejection of Darwin. And Democrats are slightly more likely to believe in evolution now than they were four years ago. So what happened after 2009 that might be changing Republican views?

Paul Krugman: Scandal in France

I haven’t paid much attention to François Hollande, the president of France, since it became clear that he wasn’t going to break with Europe’s destructive, austerity-minded policy orthodoxy. But now he has done something truly scandalous.

I am not, of course, talking about his alleged affair with an actress, which, even if true, is neither surprising (hey, it’s France) nor disturbing. No, what’s shocking is his embrace of discredited right-wing economic doctrines. It’s a reminder that Europe’s ongoing economic woes can’t be attributed solely to the bad ideas of the right. Yes, callous, wrongheaded conservatives have been driving policy, but they have been abetted and enabled by spineless, muddleheaded politicians on the moderate left.

Paul Krugman: The Populist Imperative

“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”

John Maynard Keynes wrote that in 1936, but it applies to our own time, too. And, in a better world, our leaders would be doing all they could to address both faults.

Unfortunately, the world we actually live in falls far short of that ideal. In fact, we should count ourselves lucky when leaders confront even one of our two great economic failures. If, as has been widely reported, President Obama devotes much of his State of the Union address to inequality, everyone should be cheering him on.

Right-Wing Media: Low-Income Americans Are Inheriting Too Much, Working Too Little

Right-Wing Media Take BLS Study Out Of Context

Blog ››› January 22, 2014 4:38 PM EST ››› BRIAN POWELL 

A new right-wing media narrative is brandishing out-of-context statistics on inherited wealth to argue that lower-income Americans are disproportionately benefiting from inherited wealth transfers, unlike the wealthiest Americans who earn their wealth with hard work.

As a national dialogue heats up over the problem of global and domestic income inequality, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and others are rushing to the defense of the wealthiest Americans by claiming that low-income Americans simply don't work as hard as their wealthy peers. As evidence, the conservative outlets are pointing to a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) study showing top income brackets inherit a smaller percentage of their wealth than do lower income Americans, a finding that, according to National Review's Kevin Williamson, proves that rich Americans "work more -- a lot more."
 

Paul Krugman: Encouraging Signs for a Brighter 2014

There's an alarming amount of optimism out there about the United States' economic prospects for 2014. Let me make the situation even more alarming by saying that I basically share that optimism. Why? Because of the Three Stooges effect: if you've been banging your head against a wall for no good reason, you'll feel a lot better when you stop.

One way to describe the American economy in 2013 is to say that it was, in effect, trying to begin a strong recovery, but was held back by terrible federal fiscal policy. Housing was making a comeback; if state and local austerity policies were not going into reverse, at least they were not getting more intense; and household spending was starting to revive as debt levels came down.

Richard Eskow: They’re Fast-Tracking the Future, TPP Style – But We Can Stop Them

The “TPP,” or Trans-Pacific Partnership, is our nation’s newest proposed trade deal. It was negotiated without democratic input, and they’re trying to ram it through Congress the same way. Like NAFTA before it, the TPP would kill jobs. It would also cause lasting harm to democracy, here in the United States and around the world.

There has been an understandable sense of outrage over the Obama administration’s attempt to ram the most extreme trade deal yet through Congress with a “fast-track” provision that forbids amendments or filibustering. Representatives who have had very little chance to review the bill will be expected to vote on it without the chance to change it.

The Workers' Scorecard on NAFTA

Thursday, 23 January 2014 09:14  
By David Bacon, Truthout | News Analysis 

Sold by its promoters as a migration-preventing device that ultimately would produce more and better-paid jobs in all three countries, the North American Free Trade Agreement has displaced jobs and people, weakened unions and ravaged US cities and rural Mexico. But worker solidarity may prove to be its most important product.

In 1986, a provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act created a commission to investigate the causes of Mexican migration to the United States. When it made its report to Congress in 1992, it found, unsurprisingly, that the biggest was poverty. It recommended the negotiation of a free trade agreement, modeled on the one that had been implemented a few years before between the United States and Canada. The commission argued that opening the border to the flow of goods and capital (but not people) would, in the long run, produce jobs and rising income in Mexico, even if, in the short run, it led to some job loss and displacement.

The negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement began within months. When completed, it was sold to the public by its promoters on both sides of the border as a migration-preventing device. During the debate, executives of companies belonging to USA-NAFTA, the agreement's corporate lobbyist, walked the halls of Congress wearing red, white and blue neckties. They made extravagant claims that US exports to Mexico would account for 100,000 jobs in the agreement's first year alone.

The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley's most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers' wages

By Mark Ames On January 23, 2014

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple’s board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.”

Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information “verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”

Brian Beutler: The real problem with the American right: Aging, white radicals

Everyone knows the GOP has been unable to moderate its image or agenda. But less understood is the true reason why

The Republican Party’s total failure to make even cosmetic changes to its image and policy agenda last year has at this point become the kind of cliché-cum-running joke that often attaches itself to accepted truisms in American politics. Like chucking about Bill Clinton’s inability to contain himself in the company of women, or noting that Dick Cheney actually ran the show during George W. Bush’s first term, observing that Republicans have failed to moderate or reinvent themselves after losing badly in 2012 is the kind of thing even sympathetic political wise men can say to signal that they get it. That in what was a tough year for President Obama, Republicans screwed up too.

But the observation of these symptoms is less crucial than the diagnosis. Why are Republicans so stuck?
 

Paul Krugman: A Virtual Currency Raises Real-World Questions

It's always important, and always hard, to distinguish positive economics (how things work) from normative economics (how things should be). Indeed, with many of the macroeconomics issues I've written about, it has been obvious that large numbers of economists can't bring themselves to make that distinction; they dislike an activist government on political grounds, and this leads them to make really bad arguments about why fiscal stimulus can't work and how monetary stimulus will be disastrous.

But I'd like to talk not about macroeconomics but about money - specifically, about Bitcoin, the virtual currency. So far, almost all of the Bitcoin discussion has centered on positive economics - can this actually work? And I have to say that I'm still deeply unconvinced.

Can Microgrids Bring Low-Carbon Power to Tens of Millions of People?

By David Ferris

Powered by solar panels and biomass, microgrids are spreading slowly across India, where 300 million people live without electricity.  

January 21, 2014  |  Bharath Kumar was furious that the lights went out an hour early. His candy-making operation in the village of Tamkuha, in northern India, had been plunged into darkness at mid-batch, forcing him to use a weak, battery-powered lantern to manage his boiling pots.

"If I knew that the power would be shut off an hour earlier, I would not have mixed the sugar in the flour," he fumed. "This is not the first time. I will keep a record of when the power is switched off every night and show this when they come for collections."

Virginia Tech researcher develops energy-dense sugar battery

'Sugar is a perfect energy storage compound in nature,' Y.H. Percival Zhang said. 'So it's only logical that we try to harness this natural power in an environmentally friendly way to produce a battery.'

A Virginia Tech research team has developed a battery that runs on sugar and has an unmatched energy density, a development that could replace conventional batteries with ones that are cheaper, refillable, and biodegradable.

The findings from Y.H. Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering, were published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Selective outrage over federal health care costs

Commentary: Republicans feign outrage over Obamacare's risk fund for insurers, but have nothing to say about waste in Medicare Advantage 

By Wendell Potter, 6:00 am, January 20, 2014 Updated: 10:52 am, January 21, 2014


Knowing I’ve been both a critic of insurance company practices and a supporter of efforts to reform the industry, a FOX news producer reached out last week to get my take on accusations by conservatives that Obamacare will actually result in a bailout of big insurance companies.

Under the headline, “Bailing Out Health Insurers and Helping Obamacare,” The Weekly Standard on Monday urged Republicans to insist that future debt ceiling increases contain a no-bailout provision. The magazine also cited Sen. Marco Rubio’s, R-Fla., bill to repeal a provision of the Affordable Care Act designed to limit potential initial losses of insurers selling policies on the new health insurance exchanges.

Dean Baker | The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Warnings From NAFTA

With the New Year the corporate lobbyists and the Obama administration are stepping up their drive for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the new trade deal being negotiated in secret by the United States and eleven countries in the Pacific region. The key at the moment is Congressional approval of fast-track authority. This would give any agreement a straight up or down vote on an accelerated timetable.

Fast-track authority would virtually guarantee passage since members would face intense pressure from corporate contributors and the media, in both the news and opinion sections, to support the deal. Failure to support a deal would mean that a member would be labeled a protectionist Neanderthal (name-calling is standard fare in Washington when pushing for trade deals) in addition to being badly under-funded in their re-election campaign.

A housing relief program with policies that 'throw people into the grinder'

One of the biggest housing relief programs under the Obama administration has failed desperate homeowners in huge ways

David Dayen
theguardian.com, Sunday 19 January 2014 08.00 EST

Amal and Rizkalla Kamel survived the housing crisis and the recession with their home and finances intact; their personal collapse wouldn’t come until 2012.

That winter, Amal suffered two heart attacks in two months, drastically reducing his ability to work. At the same time, Rizkalla lost her job at a gas station. Then everything really started falling apart. A year later, the family found themselves $36,000 in debt, spending what money they had on a lawyer they hired to help them avoid losing their home. They filed motions against their bank, but they had another nemesis too: the Kamels were in court battling the very government relief agency that they had turned to in hopes it would save them from their mortgage troubles.

Thievery: How Congress Keeps Stealing From Our Retirement Benefits and Social Safety Net

By Steven Rosenfeld

January 19, 2014  |  Congress has a nasty habit that’s not going away. It has been stealing a few billion here and a few billion there from earned retirement and safety net payments, overlooking whether those benefits have been promised or are even sufficient.

 

As the House and Senate passed its $1.012 trillion 2014 budget last week [3], veterans were blindsided when they learned that Congress had cut cost-of-living increases for retiree pensions by 1 percent. A master sergeant who served 20 years could lose $80,000 in his lifetime, said Col. Mike Barron of the Military Officers Association of America.

The cuts will affect 1.1 million retirees, 400,000 of whom retired after 9/11, and save an estimated $6 billion. “It’s deferred compensation,” Barron said. “You are changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game. It’s very unfair. It’s a clear breach of faith with us.”

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, It's About Blackmail, Not National Security

Posted by Alfred McCoy at 4:53pm, January 19, 2014.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

Spying has a history almost as ancient as humanity itself, but every now and then the rules of the game change.  This post-9/11 moment of surveillance is one of those game-changers and the National Security Agency (NSA) has been the deal-breaker and rule-maker.  The new rules it brought into existence are simple enough: you -- whoever you are and wherever you live on Planet Earth -- are a potential target.  Get used to it.  The most basic ground rule of the new system: no one is exempt from surveillance.

But then there’s human nature to take into account.  There’s the feeling of invulnerability that the powerful often have.  If you need an example, look no further than what key officials around New Jersey Governor Chris Christie were willing to commit to emails, even in this day and age, when it came to their scheme to tie up traffic on the George Washington Bridge.  Something similar has been true of the system NSA officials set up.  Its rules of the road were that no one was to be exempt from surveillance. (Call me Angela Merkel.)  They then plunged their creation into the deepest secrecy, in part because they couldn’t imagine a world without at least one categorical exemption: themselves.

Dark Affinities: Liberal and Neoliberal

Monday, 20 January 2014 10:37  
By Joseph Natoli, Truthout | Op-Ed 

Each society determines which thoughts and feelings shall be permitted to arrive at the level of awareness and which have to remain unconscious. Just as there is a social character, there is also a "social unconscious."
- Eric Fromm

Newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio's "tale of two cities," referring to the wealth divide in New York, sounds nicely Dickensian, but the "boots on the ground" reality is not divided so clearly. Roughly speaking, the bottom 40 percent of Americans are what Dickens' Noddy Boffin called "scrunched" while a top 20 percent, if we follow the counsel here of "Scrunch or be scrunched," are doing the scrunching. A middle 40 percent, are, as Gradgrind facts show, decidedly more of the scrunched class than the scrunching class, although their confusions, misrecognitions and dreams of former well-being render them as liable to identify with the scrunchers as with their fellow scrunched.

So, we have some 80 percent of the American population in need of legislative action that 20 percent of the population either does not require or requires precisely the opposite. The numbers are on the side of Have Less Each Day and Have Nothing at All and not on the side of the Have Mores. However, the top 20 percent are holding positions of power, while the 80 percent are fractured, disillusioned, disinterested, confused and pliable. So our expectations of victory by overwhelming numbers fade.

The Global Elite: Rigging the Rules That Fuel Inequality

New report from Oxfam states that 85 of the world's richest people own the wealth of half of the world’s population.

- Andrea Germanos, staff writer 

 

The global elite have rigged the rules so that "economic growth looks more like a winner-take-all system" that undermines democracy and threatens future generations with a "cascade of privilege and disadvantage," a new report from Oxfam states.

The report, Working for the Few: Political capture and economic inequality, states that just 85 of the world's richest people own the wealth of half of the world’s population.