This amazing washing machine uses virtually no water

By Holly Richmond

Nearly a quarter of the water your household uses goes into your washing machine, and the average family of four will use 12,000 gallons of water a year on laundry. What if there were a way to de-stankify your clothes without draining the ocean?

Now there is, thanks to British company Xeros, which has made what it says is the first true leap forward for washing machines in 60 years. Using only a cup of water — about 90 percent less than normal washers — Xeros’ washing machine tumbles clothes with a million little plastic beads that absorb dirt when humidity is present.

Federal Government Soon to Know Everywhere You've Driven

Paul Waldman

February 20, 2014

There are more license-plate cameras installed all the time. Now the government wants to put all the data together in one database.

Well here we go. A few days ago, Ars Technica spotted a listing on a federal government website, explaining that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is looking for a vendor who can assemble for them a database that brings together data from the all the license plate cameras that more and more police departments across the country are installing. You don't like the fact that the government has a file somewhere listing every call you've made on your cell phone? How do you feel about them knowing everywhere you've driven?

Matt Stoller: “Free Trade” Pacts Were Always About Weakening Nation-States to Promote Rule by Multinationals

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Yves Smith
 
Yves here. I hope those of you who are in countries being browbeaten to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will circulate this post widely.

By Matt Stoller, who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, Salon, The Nation and Reuters. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller. Originally published at Observations on Credit and Surveillance

Here’s part one of this series on the origins of NAFTA and our current trading regime.
It’s amazing what you find in the Congressional Record. For example, you find American political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing.

Here’s the backstory.

Paul Krugman: The Stimulus Tragedy

Five years have passed since President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--the 'stimulus'--into law.  With the passage of time, it has become clear that the Act did a vast amount of good.  It helped end the economy's plunge; it created or saved millions of jobs; it left behind an important legacy of public and private investment.

How Tea Party Absolutism Cost The GOP A Huge Win On Entitlements

Sahil Kapur – February 21, 2014, 6:00 AM EST

The GOP's long-held dream of slashing the retirement safety net faded this week.

Back in the summer of 2011, Republicans had it within their grasp. A dejected President Barack Obama placed the crown jewels of liberalism on the chopping block, offering Republicans hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits.

House Speaker John Boehner wanted to seal the so-called grand bargain, and was willing to reciprocate with the $800 billion in new tax revenues that the president sought in return. Democratic leaders were grudgingly willing to support Obama on what they feared was a lopsided deal for conservatives.

Brilliant teen publishes paper on saving the climate with ammonia-fueled cars

By Holly Richmond

Doo Won Kang hasn’t even graduated from high school yet, but he’s already a climate activist and published author. The senior at Alexandria, Va.’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology not only founded a student initiative to tell teens about climate change, but he also wrote an 18-page paper on transportation solutions to lower carbon emissions. And the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently published an excerpt from his paper, making him officially way more impressive than we were at 18.

How Dark Money Flows Through the Koch Network

By Al Shaw, Theodoric Meyer and Kim Barker, ProPublica
Feb. 14, 2014

Fundraising by the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch supports a tangle of nonprofits, sometimes referred to as the Kochtopus, all aimed at advancing conservative causes. Two groups, the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce and TC4 Trust, handed out almost $264 million from mid-2011 to October 2012 to 30 other nonprofits.

Paul Krugman: When Journalists Choose to Speculate Rather Than Report

Earlier this month, Dave Weigel at Slate looked at the media's disastrous initial handling of a Congressional Budget Office report - CBOghazi, hah! - and addressed one of my pet peeves: reporting that skips right past the actual policy issues to speculation about how they will play politically. I think of this as "second-order" reporting, and it's almost always a bad thing.

I wrote about this during the 2004 presidential campaign, when I did some painful research, wading through two months of TV news transcripts.

Virginia House Committee Quietly Kills Bill That Would Have Repealed Mandatory Ultrasound Law

by Emily Crockett, Reporting Fellow, RH Reality Check
February 19, 2014 - 10:31 am

In a Friday afternoon vote that allowed for neither audience testimony nor a recorded roll-call vote from its members, a Republican-dominated subcommittee in the Virginia House of Delegates voted against repealing the state’s 2012 mandatory ultrasound law.

After five banker deaths in January, a sixth: J.P. Morgan exec jumps in Hong Kong

By John Byrne
Wednesday, February 19, 2014 10:09 EST

Across the world, bankers are plummeting to their deaths.

In the latest of a series of fatal falls,  a 33-year-old J.P. Morgan employee leapt from the roof of J.P. Morgan’s Hong Kong headquarters on Tuesday, above, plunging thirty stories to his death.

The employee’s role at the bank was unknown. Witnesses say police tried to stop the man from jumping to no avail. The employee’s death is just the latest in a string of seeming suicides that have wreaked havoc in the moneyed class over the past months.

The New Fascism: Terms and Conditions

Tuesday, 18 February 2014 14:13
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

Let's talk about those pesky terms and conditions.

Last month, I had a chance to talk with John McAfee, the founder of the popular McAfee computer security programs.

We talked about how people usually don't read the terms and conditions of the smartphone applications that they download onto their phones.

But McAfee did read the terms and conditions of the Bank of America smartphone application, and what he saw was pretty shocking.

Glenn Greenwald: On the UK’s Equating of Journalism with Terrorism

As my colleague Ryan Deveraux reports, a lower U.K. court this morning, as long expected, upheld the legality of the nine-hour detention of my partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow Airport last August, even as it acknowledged that the detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom”. For good measure, the court also refused permission to appeal (though permission can still be granted by the appellate court). David was detained and interrogated under the Terrorism Act of 2000.

The UK Government expressly argued that the release of the Snowden documents (which the free world calls “award-winning journalism“) is actually tantamount to “terrorism”, the same theory now being used by the Egyptian military regime to prosecute Al Jazeera journalists as terrorists. Congratulations to the UK government on the illustrious company it is once again keeping. British officials have also repeatedly threatened criminal prosecution of everyone involved in this reporting, including Guardian journalists and editors.

Congress Is About to Shower More Tax Breaks on Corporations After Telling the Unemployed to Drop Dead

If Congress decides it cannot spend money to help working families and the unemployed without offsetting the costs by cutting spending, then lawmakers should also refuse to enact tax cuts for businesses unless they can offset the costs by closing business tax loopholes. Sadly, both Democrats and Republicans refuse to acknowledge this commonsense principle as they discuss enacting the so-called “tax extenders” without closing any business tax loopholes — after failing to extend Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) because of a dispute over how to offset the costs.

Paul Krugman: In Argentina, the Rules Still Apply

In an article published on Slate earlier this month titled "Argentina Did the Right Thing in 2002, the Wrong Thing Last Year," the commentator Matthew Yglesias said what needed to be said about Argentina's economic troubles: there's no contradiction at all between arguing that Argentina was right to follow heterodox policies in 2002, but that it is wrong to reject advice to curb deficits and control inflation now.

I know some people find this hard to grasp, but the effects of economic policies, and the appropriate policies to follow, depend on circumstances. I would add that we know what those circumstances are! Policies like running deficits and printing a lot of money are inflationary and bad in economies that are constrained by limited supply; they are useful and good when the problem is persistently inadequate demand. Similarly, unemployment benefits probably lead to lower employment in a supply-constrained economy; they increase employment in a demandconstrained economy; and so on.

Toxins in Huggies and Pampers Aren't What You Want to Put Near Baby's Skin

By Jill Richardson

February 18, 2014  |  When parents pull a box of diapers off the shelf, how many of them are aware of the risks to which they are exposing their children: cancer, asthma, hormone disruption, and others. Dioxins, sodium polycrylate [3], dyes, fragrances, and phthalates are some of the ingredients credible scientific researchers have found in disposable diaper brands including Huggies and Pampers used by millions of parents. It's even been discovered that the dyes used to put decorations on diapers are known to cause diaper rash. Fortunately, there are much healthier alternatives.

Dioxins [4] are a class of potent carcinogens (cancer causers) that are not made on purpose but are created as a byproduct of industrial processes like chlorine bleaching of paper pulp and some natural processes like volcano eruptions. The name dioxins refers to hundreds of chemicals, out of which about 30 are the most toxic. The most toxic, TCDD, was the contaminant in the infamous Agent Orange that made it so deadly. They are considered persistent pollutants because, once created, they hang around for a long time without breaking down and they stay in the human body for a long time, too.

Dean Baker: Thomas Friedman Escaped and Is Writing About Economics Again

Saturday, 15 February 2014 21:33

Thomas Friedman is loose in Silicon Valley, the economic hub best known for colluding to rip off its workers. He can't contain his enthusiasm for "start-up America," telling readers;

"What they all have in common is they wake up every day and ask: 'What are the biggest trends in the world, and how do I best invent/reinvent my business to thrive from them?' They’re fixated on creating abundance, not redividing scarcity, and they respect no limits on imagination. No idea here is 'off the table.'"

Bill Moyers: David Simon on Our Rigged Political System

David Simon, journalist and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme, returns to talk with Bill Moyers about the triumph of capital over democracy.

“If I could concentrate and focus on one thing … and start to walk the nightmare back, it would be campaign finance reform” Simon says.

Simon warns that if we don’t fix our broken election system — by getting big money out of elections and ending gerrymandering — we will have reached “the end game for democracy.”

Paul Krugman: Barons of Broadband

Last week’s big business news was the announcement that Comcast, a gigantic provider of cable TV and high-speed Internet service, has reached a deal to acquire Time Warner, which is merely huge. If regulators approve the deal, Comcast will be an overwhelmingly dominant player in the business, with around 30 million subscribers.

So let me ask two questions about the proposed deal. First, why would we even think about letting it go through? Second, when and why did we stop worrying about monopoly power?

Chris Hedges: Our Sinister Dual State

On Thursday the former National Security Agency official and whistle-blower William E. Binney and I will debate Stewart A. Baker, a former general counsel for the NSA, P.J. Crowley, a former State Department spokesman, and the media pundit Jeffrey Toobin. The debate, at Oxford University, will center on whether Edward Snowden’s leaks helped or harmed the public good. The proposition asks: “Is Edward Snowden a Hero?” But, on a deeper level, the debate will revolve around our nation’s loss of liberty.

The government officials who, along with their courtiers in the press, castigate Snowden insist that congressional and judicial oversight, the right to privacy, the rule of law, freedom of the press and the right to express dissent remain inviolate. They use the old words and the old phrases, old laws and old constitutional guarantees to give our corporate totalitarianism a democratic veneer. They insist that the system works. They tell us we are still protected by the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Yet the promise of that sentence in the Bill of Rights is pitted against the fact that every telephone call we make, every email or text we send or receive, every website we visit and many of our travels are tracked, recorded and stored in government computers. The Fourth Amendment was written in 1789 in direct response to the arbitrary and unchecked search powers that the British had exercised through general warrants called writs of assistance, which played a significant part in fomenting the American Revolution. A technical system of surveillance designed to monitor those considered to be a danger to the state has, in the words of Binney, been “turned against you.”

Time to Restore the Power of the National Labor Relations Act

Monday, 17 February 2014 09:48
By Ellen Dannin, Truthout | Op-Ed

One in seven Americans - that is 46.5 million of us - live in poverty. And in the wake of the Great Recession, there is more to poverty today than just a bad economy. We have an increasingly unequal society in which the top 1% holds 40% of the wealth. According to a Global Post study, the United States leads the trend toward greater inequality which is rising faster - and already greater - here than in nearly all other developed countries.

Until the Reagan Administration, the minimum wage was set at a level that allowed one wage earner to support a family. The minimum wage has never been required to keep up with inflation nor been benchmarked to ensure that a full-time worker's wages can keep a family above the poverty line. As a result, many workers' families have now become destitute.

Brian Beutler: Ted Cruz just doomed the GOP--but not in the way you think

He won a small battle with his debt limit gambit, but also made the GOP's extortion tactics much harder. Here's why

Last week the seams holding together factions of the Republican party burst open once again. And once again, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was the guy scraping at them with a scalpel.

He didn’t shut down the government, or talk himself hoarse on the Senate floor. But he did spoil his leadership’s plan to let Senate Democrats increase the debt limit on their own without implicating any individual Republicans — including the highest-ranking Republican, who just happens to be in the midst of an unexpectedly tough election.

Stanford scientist to unveil 50-state plan to transform US to renewable energy

Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson and his colleagues recently developed detailed plans to transform the energy infrastructure of New York, California and Washington states from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable resources by 2050. On Feb. 15, Jacobson will present a new roadmap to renewable energy for all 50 states at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago.

The online interactive roadmap is tailored to maximize the resource potential of each state. Hovering a cursor over California, for example, reveals that the Golden State can meet virtually all of its power demands (transportation, electricity, heating, etc.) in 2050 by switching to a clean technology portfolio that is 55 percent solar, 35 percent wind (on- and offshore), 5 percent geothermal and 4 percent hydroelectric.

Congress twists the relevant facts on purpose

Commentary: lawmakers deliberately distorted a recent Congressional Budget Office report

By Wendell Potter, 6:00 am, February 10, 2014, Updated: 9:50 am, February 10, 2014

If you’re curious about what I used to do as a PR guy for the health insurance industry, how I often took facts and figures and twisted them to advance a specific political or financial agenda, take a look at the behavior of some members of Congress last week.

Like I used to do, they took numbers in a report from a government agency — in this case the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — and twisted their meaning to suggest something never intended by the report’s authors. Like I used to do, they misled the public with statistics to advance their team’s ultimate agenda, which, of course, is to win votes in November. And if getting people to vote against their own best interests means making comments that not only are dishonest but also contradict what they’ve said previously, so be it.

Usurious Returns on Phantom Money: The Credit Card Gravy Train

The credit card business is now the banking industry’s biggest cash cow, and it’s largely due to lucrative hidden fees.

by Ellen Brown

You pay off your credit card balance every month, thinking you are taking advantage of the “interest-free grace period” and getting free credit. You may even use your credit card when you could have used cash, just to get the free frequent flier or cash-back rewards. But those popular features are misleading. Even when the balance is paid on time every month, credit card use imposes a huge hidden cost on users—hidden because the cost is deducted from what the merchant receives, then passed on to you in the form of higher prices.

Research on urban ghettos must recognize differences among cities

Research on urban neighborhoods must take into account differences among cities and rely on some techniques that have not been used extensively by sociologists studying neighborhood effects, according to Mario Small, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.

Small, who is also dean of UChicago's Division of the Social Sciences, studies urban neighborhoods and has studied the diversity of experiences for people living in poor neighborhoods in cities across the country.

Food Hubs: Sustainable agriculture's missing link

Nathanael Johnson

A few years ago, I bought a little share in a dairy farm so I could receive my own portion of creamy Jersey milk. Each week I’d fish a heavy Mason jar out from under a blanket of tinkling ice cubes. It was delicious, and when it went off it only got better: mixed with scalloped potatoes, salt, and onions, the fermenting milk transformed in the oven into cheesy ambrosia.

But there was a big problem with this milk: It waited for me on the other side of town. It took me a little over an hour to fetch it by car. I know because I didn’t have a car at the time, and so I’d rent a Zipcar and try to run the errand in under an hour. Then the farm started asking for members to drive out regularly to do chores. That was too much for me. I bailed out and went back to buying milk at Safeway.

Making biodiverse agriculture part of a food-secure future

Policy makers should value environmental, health benefits of small-scale local farming, researcher argues
Is biodiverse agriculture an anachronism? Or is it a vital part of a food-secure future?

Given the need to feed an estimated 2.4 billion more people by the year 2050, the drive toward large-scale, single-crop farming around the world may seem inexorable.

But there's an important downside to this trend, argues Timothy Johns, Professor of Human Nutrition at McGill University in Montreal, in a paper to be presented Saturday, Feb. 15, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.

Brian Beutler: Right-wing nuts’ anti-gay implosion: How a new ploy can doom the party

What began as opposition to a contraception mandate, on religious grounds, is now a real can of worms. Oops!

An anti-gay bill that may become law in Kansas could test the consistency of conservatives who oppose the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer sponsored insurance include birth control coverage.

What does being gay have to do with birth control, other than that religious conservatives regard both as sinful forms of contraception?

I’ll get to that in a minute.