Education groups battle teachers unions in state races

Billionaire-backed groups spend big pushing charter schools and vouchers

By Rachel Baye, 6:00 am, March 7, 2014 Updated: 6:00 am, March 7, 2014

Three weeks before Tennessee’s August 2012 primary election, state Rep. John DeBerry Jr.’s Memphis-area district was flooded with $52,000 worth of get-out-the-vote efforts supporting the then-nine-term incumbent. Six days later, another $52,000 in materials appeared.

By Election Day, the Tennessee affiliate of StudentsFirst, the education-focused organization behind the influx of support, had spent more than $109,000 backing DeBerry, a rare Democrat who supports voucher programs and charter schools. The state branch of the American Federation for Children, another education group, spent another $33,000.

The Real Story Behind the Detroit Pension Fight and What it Means to America's Future

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

March 3, 2014  |  When the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in July 2013, America sucked in a collective gasp. This was the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history by the amount of debt ($18–20 billion), and Detroit was the largest city ever to officially go bust.

 

A few months before the bankruptcy, the state of Michigan appointed an emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, to sort things out in Motor City. Orr was given extraordinary powers to rewrite contracts and liquidate some of the city’s most valuable assets. The burning question: Who would be responsible for the enormous debt? Soon enough it became clear that the folks who would be asked to take the hit were not those who created the problems. Just as in so many other parts of the world in the wake of the 2007-'08 financial meltdown, innocent people who did nothing but get up every day and go to work would be asked to pay the bill.

Conservative group Alec trains sights on city and local government

Ed Pilkington in New York
Thursday 6 March 2014 16.46 EST

The rightwing group Alec is preparing to launch a new nationwide network that will seek to replicate its current influence within state legislatures in city councils and municipalities.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, founded in 1973, has become one of the most pervasive advocacy operations in the nation. It brings elected officials together with representatives of major corporations, giving those companies a direct channel into legislation in the form of Alec “model bills”.

Critics have decried the network as a “corporate bill mill” that has spread uniformly-drafted rightwing legislation from state to state. Alec has been seminal, for instance, in the replication of Florida’s controversial “stand-your-ground” gun law in more than 20 states.

The Conundrum of ‘Democratic’ Coups

March 6, 2014

The U.S. government says it wants to spread “democracy,” a questionable claim considering the history. Think Iran-1953, Guatemala-1954, Chile-1973, Haiti-1991/2004, etc. Just this past year, the U.S. has embraced coups against elected presidents in Egypt and now Ukraine, as Lawrence Davidson observes.

By Lawrence Davidson

In the past couple of years a disturbing political phenomenon has arisen. To put it simply, groups espousing “democracy” have caused their countries to politically self-destruct by violently turning against the results of free and fair elections. Apparently, they act this way because the elections did not go their way and/or the elected officials adopted policies they oppose. They do so even when there is a possibility that changes in policy, and even changes in constitutions, can be had peacefully through legal means.

Admittedly this is happening in states both new to democratic politics and deeply divided along ideological lines. A tradition of compromise and a sensitivity to minority rights are not yet manifest in some of these fledgling “democracies.”

How an Astounding New Right-Wing Lie About the Economy Was Born

By Joshua Holland

An older item, but worth repeating--Dictynna

December 14, 2012  |   There's a new economic myth that's now being amplified by the conservative media. It demonizes vital public services and suggests that the poor are doing just fine thanks to the largesse of the country's “makers.” Conservatives are being told that the United States is now spending vast fortunes combatting poverty – more than we dedicate to national defense, Social Security and Medicare.

This new spin is notable not for its mendacity – although it is completely divorced from reality – but because its origins are easily traced, allowing us to see how these kinds of distortions come to be.

Why Americans Hate Welfare

March 6, 2014

by Joshua Holland

 

Whatever his faults, Ronald Reagan was undoubtedly a gifted communicator. His ideological preferences often came wrapped in memorable anecdotes.

Reagan justified his antipathy for the social safety net — and capitalized on the racial anxieties held by many white voters — by invoking the infamous, Cadillac-driving welfare queen and the “strapping young buck” who lived large on T-bone steaks purchased with food stamps. Reagan didn’t actually coin the term “welfare queen” — that was the Chicago Tribune. (He did in fact use the term “young buck” — derogatory slang for a young black man.) Reagan merely took advantage of an existing media frenzy surrounding the case of a Chicago woman named Linda Taylor who may have been guilty of murder as well as welfare fraud on a massive scale, according to Josh Levin’s profile on the real “welfare queen.”
 

Forget the 1%

By J.D. Alt

All this talk about the 99% versus the 1%? I say the easiest—and likely the most useful—thing to do is just forget the 1%. Write them off. Let them have their gated communities, their mega-yachts, their island retreats and off-shore bank accounts. What do we need them for?

For one thing, we DON’T need their money. Even if we could get it—which we can’t because they steadfastly refuse to use it for anything other than casino gambling in their private and secretive financial networks. We wonder why we have a “jobless recovery”? Does it have anything to do with the fact that such a large percentage of our “capital” has, for all practical purposes, been removed from the economy?

The Great American Working Class U-Turn

by Robert Reich

Do you recall a time in America when the income of a single school teacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?

I remember. My father (who just celebrated his 100th birthday) earned enough for the rest of us to live comfortably. We weren’t rich but never felt poor, and our standard of living rose steadily through the 1950s and 1960s. 

Gaius Publius: A new Crimean War? Putin, Peter the Great & the quest for a warm-water port

We’ve written about the complex situation in the Ukraine, how it’s not just a simple Europe vs. Russia global political conflict.

Ukraine is in trouble financially. So another axis for analysis, for example, is that “Europe” is offering a deeply neoliberal (privatized, austerity) deal to “help” them out of trouble, while Russia is offering a different kind of corruption, and more money.

What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis

March 2, 2014

Special Report: The Ukrainian crisis – partly fomented by U.S. neocons including holdovers at the State Department – has soured U.S-Russian relations and disrupted President Obama’s secretive cooperation with Russian President Putin to resolve crises in the Mideast, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

President Barack Obama has been trying, mostly in secret, to craft a new foreign policy that relies heavily on cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to tamp down confrontations in hotspots such as Iran and Syria. But Obama’s timidity about publicly explaining this strategy has left it open to attack from powerful elements of Official Washington, including well-placed neocons and people in his own administration.

The gravest threat to this Obama-Putin collaboration has now emerged in Ukraine, where a coalition of U.S. neocon operatives and neocon holdovers within the State Department fanned the flames of unrest in Ukraine, contributing to the violent overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and now to a military intervention by Russian troops in the Crimea, a region in southern Ukraine that historically was part of Russia.

Renting Judges for Secret Rulings

NEW HAVEN — SHOULD wealthy litigants be able to rent state judges and courthouses to decide cases in private and keep the results secret?

The answer should be an easy no, but if the judges of Delaware’s Chancery Court persuade the United States Supreme Court to take their case and reverse lower federal court rulings outlawing that practice, corporations will, in Delaware, be able to do just that.

The state has long been a magnet for corporate litigation because of its welcoming tax structures and the court’s business expertise. Yet the State Legislature became concerned that Delaware was losing its “pre-eminence” in corporate litigation to a growing market in private dispute resolution.

Scott Walker’s little-known scandal: When he treated welfare recipients like dogs

When Scott Walker was county executive, how he handled programs for Milwaukee’s poor will shock and amaze you

Joan Walsh

Among the racist jokes and emails found in recently released documents connected to the criminal probe of Gov. Scott Walker’s 2010 campaign, one stood out: A “joke” about a woman trying to sign up her dogs for welfare, because “my Dogs are mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who the r Daddys are. They expect me to feed them, provide them with housing and medical care, and feel guilty.” The punch line: “My Dogs get their first checks Friday.”

Walker’s deputy chief of staff Kelly Rindfleisch replied: “That is hilarious. And so true.”

The joke is bad enough on its own, but it’s also worth noting: Back when Walker was Milwaukee county executive, and Rindfleisch was a top aide, he managed the county’s welfare programs so abysmally that after lawsuits by local clients, the state was forced to take them over. “They didn’t just call people dogs, they treated them like dogs,” one Milwaukee elected official recalled angrily.

Hey, Washington! The Pay Is Too Damn Low: The Minimum-Wage War

Giving America’s lowest-paid workers a raise is great for the economy. And even better for Democratic prospects in 2014

by Tim Dickinson
FEBRUARY 27, 2014

Nearly five years into the recovery from the Great Recession, the American economy remains fundamentally broken. Inequality is getting worse: Ninety-five percent of income gains since 2009 have gone to the top one percent of earners. Private employers have added more than 8 million jobs, but nearly two-thirds are low-wage positions. The American worker's share of the national income is as low as it's been in the six decades since World War II. But even as most Americans struggle just to tread water, corporate profits have soared to record highs.

Worse: The bottom rung of the economy is growing crowded; 3.8 million Americans – the equivalent population of the city of Los Angeles – now labor at or below the minimum wage. And that wage itself has lost more than 12 percent of its value since it was last hiked to $7.25 in 2007, due to inflation. In a more prosperous era, the stereotype of a minimum-wage worker was a teenager flipping burgers, earning a little beer money on the side. But in the new American economy, dominated by low-wage service jobs, fewer than one in four minimum-wage workers are teens. More than half are 25 or older. "The demographics have shifted," says Rep. George Miller, ranking Democrat on the House labor committee. "These are now important wage earners in their families."

The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics 

And the Big Tobacco-style campaign to bury it.

—By Mariah Blake

Each night at dinnertime, a familiar ritual played out in Michael Green's home: He'd slide a stainless steel sippy cup across the table to his two-year-old daughter, Juliette, and she'd howl for the pink plastic one. Often, Green gave in. But he had a nagging feeling. As an environmental-health advocate, he had fought to rid sippy cups and baby bottles of the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA), which mimics the hormone estrogen and has been linked to a long list of serious health problems. Juliette's sippy cup was made from a new generation of BPA-free plastics, but Green, who runs the Oakland, California-based Center for Environmental Health, had come across research suggesting some of these contained synthetic estrogens, too.

Chris Hedges: Suffering? Well, You Deserve It

OXFORD, England—The morning after my Feb. 20 debate at the Oxford Union, I walked from my hotel along Oxford’s narrow cobblestone streets, past its storied colleges with resplendent lawns and Gothic stone spires, to meet Avner Offer, an economic historian and Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History.

Offer, the author of “The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950,” for 25 years has explored the cavernous gap between our economic and social reality and our ruling economic ideology. Neoclassical economics, he says, is a “just-world theory,” one that posits that not only do good people get what they deserve but those who suffer deserve to suffer. He says this model is “a warrant for inflicting pain.” If we continue down a path of mounting scarcities, along with economic stagnation or decline, this neoclassical model is ominous. It could be used to justify repression in an effort to sustain a vision that does not correspond to the real world.

Paul Krugman: The Inflation Obsession

Recently the Federal Reserve released transcripts of its monetary policy meetings during the fateful year of 2008. And, boy, are they discouraging reading.

Partly that’s because Fed officials come across as essentially clueless about the gathering economic storm. But we knew that already. What’s really striking is the extent to which they were obsessed with the wrong thing. The economy was plunging, yet all many people at the Fed wanted to talk about was inflation.

The Political Underbelly of the Pensions Crisis: What Broke the System, and How Do We Fix It?

Feb 25, 2014, Robert Johnson

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, policymakers and reporters have spoken of a growing crisis in public pensions. Many state and local governments are struggling to meet their obligations to retirees, and the easiest explanation is that government workers are overpaid and their pensions are unaffordable. But the evidence suggests that the pensions crisis is both less pervasive and more complex than that. Beyond the economic crisis, which put enormous pressure on state and municipal budgets, a range of factors including poor decision-making and the influence of big money interests has led to the underfunding of some state and city public pensions. With a clearer understanding of the problem, we can begin to take steps to solve it and keep our promises to public workers.

For Services Rendered? Wall Street’s Big Paydays For Trade Negotiators

Richard Eskow

If you take the king’s shilling, says the old saying, then you do the king’s bidding. So what happens when you take 100 million of them?

Here’s one possible answer: You negotiate trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the new pact that the administration is currently trying to ram through Congress.  A recent report confirms that some of the officials crafting this latest agreement were paid handsomely by the Wall Street institutions that stand to benefit from it.

Emails Reveal Scott Walker Is Who We Thought He Was

Seth D. Michaels – February 27, 2014, 6:00 AM EST

Last week thousands of emails from Scott Walker and his staff were released as the result of one of two lengthy investigations into Walker's political operation. We’ve learned a lot about how his team does business, but so far there’s no smoking gun proving Walker was directly involved in misconduct.

The investigation into Walker’s closest advisors isn’t getting the attention that’s going to Chris Christie’s controversies, and it isn’t as easy to understand as the grubby corruption surrounding former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. Indeed, even though Walker’s talking like a guy who really wants this to go away, the Beltway press seems happy to oblige.

The Greatest Propaganda Coup of Our Time?

by Mike Whitney

 

There’s good propaganda and bad propaganda. Bad propaganda is generally crude, amateurish Judy Miller “mobile weapons lab-type” nonsense that figures that people are so stupid they’ll believe anything that appears in “the paper of record.” Good propaganda, on the other hand, uses factual, sometimes documented material in a coordinated campaign with the other major media to cobble-together a narrative that is credible, but false.

The so called Fed’s transcripts, which were released last week, fall into the latter category. The transcripts (1,865 pages) reveal the details of 14 emergency meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2008, when the financial crisis was at its peak and the Fed braintrust was deliberating on how best to prevent a full-blown meltdown. But while the conversations between the members are accurately recorded, they don’t tell the gist of the story or provide the context that’s needed to grasp the bigger picture. Instead, they’re used to portray the members of the Fed as affable, well-meaning bunglers who did the best they could in ‘very trying circumstances’. While this is effective propaganda, it’s basically a lie, mainly because it diverts attention from the Fed’s role in crashing the financial system, preventing the remedies that were needed from being implemented (nationalizing the giant Wall Street banks), and coercing Congress into approving gigantic, economy-killing bailouts which shifted trillions of dollars to insolvent financial institutions that should have been euthanized.

Noam Chomsky: How America's Great University System Is Getting Destroyed

February 28, 2014  |  The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA. The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards and edited by Prof. Chomsky.

On hiring faculty off the tenure track

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

How the Fed Let the World Blow Up in 2008

High oil prices blinded the Fed to the growing danger before the crash 

Matthew O'Brien, Feb 26 2014, 3:50 PM ET

It was the day after Lehman failed, and the Federal Reserve was trying to decide what to do.

It had been fighting a credit crunch for over a year, and now the worst-case scenario was playing out. A too-big-to-fail bank had just failed, and the rest of the financial system was ready to get knocked over like dominos. The Fed didn't have much room left to cut interest rates, but it still should have. The risk was just too great. That risk was what Fed Chair Ben Bernanke calls the "financial accelerator," and what everyone else calls a depression: a weak economy and weak financial system making each other weaker in a never-ending doom loop.

But the Fed was blinded. It had been all summer. That's when high oil prices started distracting it from the slow-burning financial crisis. They kept distracting it in September, even though oil had fallen far below its July highs. And they're the reason that the Fed decided to do nothing on September 16th. It kept interest rates at 2 percent, and intoned that "the downside risks to growth and the upside risks to inflation are both significant concerns."
 

No, the Pentagon Is NOT Cutting Army Budget to 1930s Levels: Media's Latest Big Lie Debunked

By Steven Rosenfeld

February 27, 2014  |  On Monday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel unveiled his 2015 Pentagon budget in a detailed speech [3] where he proposed spending $496 billion—about $45 billion less than the White House, retiring a tank-shooting aircraft and spy plane, cutting the army’s size from 520,000 to 450,000 troops, and trimming subsidies for military housing and health care.

 

The rationale was that after America’s longest overseas war, 11 years in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military had to balance downsizing and modernizing. The coverage that ensued was anything but rational. “Pentagon set to Slash Military to Pre-World War II Levels,” blared NBCNews.com. The New York Times [4], Reuters [5], NewsMax.com [6], FoxNews [7], Time [8], CNN [9] all had headlines that the Army reduction was to “pre-World War II levels.”

A Shadow US Foreign Policy

February 27, 2014

Exclusive: A shadow foreign policy apparatus built by Ronald Reagan for the Cold War survives to this day as a slush fund that keeps American neocons well fed and still destabilizes target nations, now including Ukraine, creating a crisis that undercuts President Obama, reports Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

The National Endowment for Democracy, a central part of Ronald Reagan’s propaganda war against the Soviet Union three decades ago, has evolved into a $100 million U.S. government-financed slush fund that generally supports a neocon agenda often at cross-purposes with the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

NED is one reason why there is so much confusion about the administration’s policies toward attempted ousters of democratically elected leaders in Ukraine and Venezuela. Some of the non-government organizations (or NGOs) supporting these rebellions trace back to NED and its U.S. government money, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials insist the U.S. is not behind these insurrections.

Richard Wolff: Enterprise Structure Is Key to the Shape of a Post-Capitalist Future

Wednesday, 26 February 2014 09:33  
By Leslie Thatcher, Truthout | Interview 

Richard Wolff talks about "The Shape of a Post-Capitalist Future," his entry in the new anthology Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA, and his conviction that making the transition from capitalism to socialism requires a deliberate critique of capitalist workplace organization.

GOP's New Plan Hikes Taxes On Americans In Blue States

Sahil Kapur – February 27, 2014, 6:00 AM EST

A central feature of the House Republicans' ambitious new tax reform bill would raise taxes disproportionately on residents of blue states -- especially middle-to-upper income people who live in New York and California.

The sweeping proposal released Wednesday by Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the House's top tax writer, eliminates the deduction for state and local taxes, which lets taxpayers who itemize deductions subtract general state and local taxes when calculating their federal taxable income. It's currently the seventh most expensive tax break in code, costing the federal government about $1.1 trillion in revenue over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Gaius Publius: Are Democrats who Propose Cuts to Social Security “Stupid” or Just Doing Risk-Analysis?

This is part editorial, and part analysis of my own. The kickoff point relates to Social Security, but it also relates to a whole set of similar unpopular, unpopulist proposals.

Let’s start here. I frequently read statements like these:

How can Democrats be so stupid? Don’t they realize that when they agree with Republicans about cutting Social Security (or whatever), they’ll still get attacked by Republicans for … cutting Social Security? How dumb is that? When will they learn?

This has been happening recently, in fact, on just the issue above. Buzzfeed:

Republicans Now Attacking Florida Democrat For Supporting Simpson-Bowles

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has taken an odd course in the Florida special election to replace Republican Rep. Bill Young after his death in October of last year: The NRCC is bashing Democratic candidate Alex Sink for supporting Simpson-Bowles, a deficit reduction plan Republicans most often attack President Obama for abandoning or ignoring.

Meet the Powerful Billionaire Family Hell Bent on Imposing Their Right-Wing Agenda and Defunding the Left

By Andy Kroll

February 26, 2014  |  In the predawn twilight of December 4, 2012, Randy Richardville [4], the Republican majority leader of the Michigan Senate, called an old friend to deliver some grim news. Richardville's two-hour commute to the state capitol in Lansing gave him plenty of time to check in with friends, staff, and colleagues, who were accustomed to his early morning calls. None more so than Mike Jackson.

Jackson and Richardville had grown up in the auto town of Monroe, 40 miles south of Detroit. Jackson now headed Michigan's 14,000-member carpenters and millwrights' union [5], which had endorsed Richardville, a moderate Republican, for 10 of the 12 years he'd served in the state Legislature.

"Guess where I was last night," Richardville said.

The simple math that tells you the new GOP tax plan is a scam

By Michael Hiltzik

February 26, 2014, 1:52 p.m.

The long-awaited Republican tax reform plan was released today by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich). It's being hailed as a breakthrough in putting real reform on the table, but also being instantly eulogized as dead-on-arrival in a Congress that wants no part of any tax reform, now or ever.

Still, it's instructive to examine the Camp plan for a primer on the latest mathematical trickery aimed at making something that preserves, even enhances, tax benefits for the wealthy appear instead to be a tax increase for the wealthy. Nice try, Congressman Dave.

Henry Giroux on Resisting the Neoliberal Revolution

Wednesday, 26 February 2014 09:17  
By Henry A Giroux, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed 

The notion of the “Deep State” as outlined by Mike Lofgren may be useful in pointing to a new configuration of power in the US in which corporate sovereignty replaces political sovereignty, but it is not enough to simply expose the hidden institutions and structures of power.

What we have in the US today is fundamentally a new mode of politics, one wedded to a notion of “power unaccompanied by accountability of any kind,” and this poses a deep and dire threat to democracy itself, because such power is difficult to understand, analyze and counter.

The mysterious online war against a payday lending crackdown

Anonymous issue campaign says government crackdown is 'destroying the free market'

By Daniel Wagner
6:00 am, February 19, 2014 Updated: 3:39 pm, February 25, 2014

An online campaign waged by a mysterious new nonprofit group claims that an Obama administration effort to curb lending abuses will take away people’s guns, close down charities and destroy the free market. To drive the point home, the group portrays President Barack Obama as a marauding Godzilla.

The attack’s sponsors are at this point anonymous.

At issue is a government initiative to sue banks that debit people’s bank accounts illegally on behalf of companies in fraud-prone industries.

How TPP Would Harm You At the Drug Store and On The Internet

A law affecting content on the Internet that was rejected by Congress shows up in a trade agreement designed to bypass and override Congress. Small, innovative companies that manufacture low-cost, generic drugs find their products blocked.

Those are examples of what is in store based on provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is now being negotiated by the United States and 11 other nations, that have been leaked to the public. The leaks appear to show that provision after leaked provision will take power away from democracy and countries and hand it to the biggest corporations. No wonder these giant, monopolistic corporations want Congress to approve Fast Track before they – and We the People – get a chance to read the agreement.

How Govt. Hides the Poor: Formula for Measuring Poverty Dates to When a Loaf of Bread Cost 22 Cents

By Steven Rosenfeld

February 24, 2014  |  Why is Congress still measuring poverty based on a 1963 trip to the grocery store?

 

To determine who is officially poor in America, the federal government compares a family’s annual cash income to a figure produced by an arcane formula that's based on the price of food [3] in 1963, when a loaf of bread was 22 cents and a burger less than a quarter. Starting under President Lyndon Johnson, the government's official way of defining who is poor comes from calculating [4] a minimum food budget for a family of four, tripling that figure to cover other living costs, and then indexing it annually for inflation.

The result is the federal poverty level. For 2014, that threshold was $23,850 for a family of four. Smaller families can subtract $4,060 per person. Individuals making $11,670 or less in 2014 were officially poor. Many government programs, from School Lunch to the Earned Income Tax Credit to Obamacare's subsidies, decide eligibility by comparing one’s annual cash income to the official poverty level—or to a multiple of it, say 150 percent.

This is no recovery, this is a bubble – and it will burst

Stock market bubbles of historic proportions are developing in the US and UK markets. With
policymakers unwilling to introduce tough regulation, we're heading for trouble

Ha-Joon Chang
The Guardian, Monday 24 February 2014 13.00 EST

According to the stock market, the UK economy is in a boom. Not just any old boom, but a historic one. On 28 October 2013, the FTSE 100 index hit 6,734, breaching the level achieved at the height of the economic boom before the 2008 global financial crisis (that was 6,730, recorded in October 2007).

Since then, it has had ups and downs, but on 21 February 2014 the FTSE 100 climbed to a new height of 6,838. At this rate, it may soon surpass the highest ever level reached since the index began in 1984 – that was 6,930, recorded in December 1999, during the heady days of the dotcom bubble.

Hidden History: The War on Poverty at 50

Tuesday, 25 February 2014 09:50
By Ted Morgan, Truthout | News Analysis

Despite mass media attention to the War on Poverty at 50, its centerpiece, the Community Action Program, is ignored. Thus an important story - how the poor were empowered then cast aside - is lost.

Who controls the past controls the future;
who controls the present controls the past.
 - George Orwell, 1984

In the totalitarian world of 1984, Winston Smith was assigned the job of changing news accounts of past events so the total rule of the Party could never be challenged by facts that contradicted Big Brother's propaganda. Control of the past isn't quite so total in the United States, but to read about the 50th anniversary of the "War on Poverty" in the American press is to appreciate how significantly history is rewritten in this country, how information that doesn't square with the interests and propaganda of elites has disappeared down the "black hole" of memory.

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty" in his first State of the Union address. The centerpiece of the poverty program was passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, which featured most prominently the Community Action Program (CAP) and the Job Corps. The long-invisible history of empowerment, struggle and ultimately defeat and abandonment of America's poor under CAP contains powerful lessons of hope and despair that Americans need to understand. That hidden history holds important lessons about both the possibility and erosion of democracy in America.

Wits scientists debunk climate change myths

By Kanina Foss

25 February 2014

 

Wits University scientists have debunked two big myths around climate change by proving firstly, that despite predictions, tropical storms are not increasing in number. However, they are shifting, and South Africa could be at increased risk of being directly impacted by tropical cyclones within the next 40 years. Secondly, while global warming is causing frost to be less severe, late season frost is not receding as quickly as flowering is advancing, resulting in increased frost risk which will likely begin to threaten food security.

Thomas Frank: Paul Krugman won’t save us: We need a new conversation about inequality

Democrats are scared of class. But issues like inequality are why liberals exist, and talk can't be left to elites 

When President Obama declared in December that gross inequality is the “defining challenge of our time,” he was right, and resoundingly so. As is his habit, however, he quickly backed away from the idea at the urging of pollsters and various Democratic grandees.

I can understand the Democrats’ fears about venturing into this territory. It feels like a throwback to an incomprehensible time — to a form of liberalism that few of them understand anymore. Unfortunately, they really have no choice. Watching first the way the bankers steered us into disaster in 2008 and then the way they harvested the fruits of our labored recovery — these spectacles have forced the nation to rediscover social class, and as we dig deeper into the subject we are appalled to learn what has been going on for the last three decades.

It Doesn't Take Much Sugar for It to Wreak Havoc on Your Body

By Jill Richardson

February 23, 2014  |  Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Righteous Porkchop, just coined a new catchphrase that ought to go viral: “Sugar is NOT just an empty calorie.”

 

Her statement contradicts the notion we’ve had for years that the worst thing about sugar is its lack of nutrients. Either you’re eating sugar in addition to all of the calories you need to stay healthy, or you’re eating it instead of them. In the former case, you’re getting too many calories; in the latter, you’re getting too few nutrients. This idea is so dominant it was recently cited [3] in an anti-sugar op-ed in the Guardian.

Even if that was the case, we’re eating too much sugar. Or, more specifically, too much added sugar. Sugars that are naturally present in whole foods like fruit are okay; it’s the sugar added to whole foods that we must worry about. Previously, the World Health Organization said we should limit consumption of added sugars to 10 percent of calories. Even then, more than seven in 10 Americans [4] ate too much sugar. On average, about 15 percent of our calories came from added sugars.

Team converts sugarcane to a cold-tolerant, oil-producing crop

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A multi-institutional team reports that it can increase sugarcane's geographic range, boost its photosynthetic rate by 30 percent and turn it into an oil-producing crop for biodiesel production.

These are only the first steps in a bigger initiative that will turn sugarcane and sorghum – two of the most productive crop plants known – into even more productive, oil-generating plants.

Is the U.S. Backing Neo-Nazis in Ukraine?

By Max Blumenthal

February 24, 2014  |  As the Euromaidan protests in the Ukrainian capitol of Kiev culminated this week, displays of open fascism and neo-Nazi extremism became too glaring to ignore. Since demonstrators filled the downtown square to battle Ukrainian riot police and demand the ouster of the corruption-stained, pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, it has been filled with far-right streetfighting men pledging to defend their country’s ethnic purity.

White supremacist banners and Confederate flags were draped [3] inside Kiev’s occupied City Hall, and demonstrators have hoisted [4] Nazi SS and white power symbols over a toppled memorial to V.I. Lenin. After Yanukovich fled his palatial estate by helicopter, EuroMaidan protesters destroyed [5] a memorial to Ukrainians who died battling German occupation during World War II. Sieg heil salutes and the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol have become an increasingly common site in Maidan Square, and neo-Nazi forces have established “autonomous zones” in and around Kiev.

Frances Fox Piven | Extreme Poverty Has Been Used to Divide and Terrify Working People for Centuries

In the following excerpted chapter, scholar Frances Fox Piven argues that the guarantee of a universal income would facilitate a new economic fairness and stability to a financial system careening out of control.

Most of the world is now in the grip of hyper-capitalism, what we call neoliberalism. This new system has brought us careening economic instabilities, worsening ecological disasters, brutal wars, a depleted public sector and poverty in the affluent global north, and the prospect of mass famine in the global south.

It seems high time to think about alternatives to the capitalist behemoth. I don’t know whether we will ultimately call the new ways of organizing our society "socialist," but the values that have inspired movements for socialism in the past should inform our search. Those values include a society with sharply reduced inequalities in both material circumstances and social status. Socialist movements also aspire to lessen the grinding toil now imposed on those who work for wages. They dream of an inclusive culture. They fight for democratic practices and policies in which influence is widely shared. And they believe in eliminating the pervasive terror in everyday life that is produced by the exigencies of capitalist markets and the arbitrary power of the state regimes that support those markets.

What Media Should Know About The Next Big Class Action Case At The Supreme Court

February 24, 2014 7:58 AM EST ››› SERGIO MUNOZ

On March 5, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund, a class action brought on behalf of investors allegedly defrauded by false disclosures of the Texas oil giant. Halliburton has fought to deny a trial on the merits for over a decade, and is now asking the conservative justices to overturn decades of precedent that allows shareholder lawsuits under the rebuttable presumption that this type of disinformation is a "fraud on the market."

Conservative Justices Invited This Opportunity To Dismantle Protections For Securities Fraud Victims

The New York Times' DealBook: This Case Could "Put A Stake Through The Heart" Of These Class Actions. In his analysis of why decades of Supreme Court precedent aimed at effectively regulating stock markets could be at risk, legal expert Steven M. Davidoff noted that four of the conservative justices are willing to do away with a 25-year old legal doctrine. From The Times' DealBook on October 15, 2013:

A group of pro-corporate forces has begun a behind-the-scenes fight at the Supreme Court. You may not have heard about it, but it could just end shareholders' ability to sue companies for securities fraud.
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Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers

You might find your Prime membership morally indefensible after reading these stories about worker mistreatment 

Simon Head

Excerpted from "Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans"
When I first did research on Walmart’s workplace practices in the early 2000s, I came away convinced that Walmart was the most egregiously ruthless corporation in America. However, ten years later, there is a strong challenger for this dubious distinction—Amazon Corporation. Within the corporate world, Amazon now ranks with Apple as among the United States’ most esteemed businesses. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, came in second in the Harvard Business Review’s 2012 world rankings of admired CEOs, and Amazon was third in CNN’s 2012 list of the world’s most admired companies. Amazon is now a leading global seller not only of books but also of music and movie DVDs, video games, gift cards, cell phones, and magazine subscriptions. Like Walmart itself, Amazon combines state-of-the-art CBSs with human resource practices reminiscent of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

How Morgan Stanley Has Raked in Billions by Manipulating the Prices of Everyday Commodities

By Jed Morey

February 21, 2014  |  The following is an excerpt from Jed Morey's new book, The Great American Disconnect: Seven Fundamental Threats To Our Democracy (Long Island Press, 2013).

The easiest way to think about commodities is that they are things — physical things — that can be measured in size, quantity or volume. Fruit. Oil. Grains. Metals. Currency. All these have unique characteristics and trade against one another on commodities exchanges throughout the world.

It is a complicated system that’s not for the faint of heart. Only a select few traders on Wall Street have the acumen and desire to deal in this sector, an exchange that had been efficiently regulated by the CEA since 1936. To help understand the markets, in 2008 I interviewed Michael Greenberger, an outspoken critic and former employee of the CFTC, who described these as “backwater markets,” but ones that recently have become “as important to understand and regulate as the securities and debt markets are.”

Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism?

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Trust me, you must read this post. In its entirety. Varoufakis discusses the operation of “liberal democracy” as opposed to “classical democracy,”. and argues that voter apathy is a feature, not a bug. But the real meat is in his discussion of how the economic rights of laborers has changed over time and how that has had profound implications for democracy.

By Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog

Technological fixes to time-honoured problems are all the rage these days. Bitcoin is meant to fix money, social media are seen as an antidote to Rupert Murdoch and assorted tyrants, networked robots are to help countries like Japan deal with demographic declines etc. Perhaps the largest claim is that the Internet has helped (or is about to help) democratise capitalism. Ten years ago that claim struck me as both fascinating and dubious. So, I sat down and wrote an article about it (circa 2004). Its gist: The Internet is a wonderful leveller. But democracy requires a great deal more than mere ‘levelling’. Primarily, it requires political institutions that enable the economically weak to have a decisive say on policy against the interests of the rich and powerful. Ten years later, I am re-visiting this question, under the shadow of a global crisis that made it even harder to convert an e’Demos into genuine e’Democracy. What follows is an updated version of the original paper.

Will Plug-in Cars Crash the Electric Grid?

By Joshua E. Brown

Selecting a Chevy Volt, Tesla Model S, Nissan Leaf — or one of many other new models — shoppers in the United States bought more than 96,000 plug-in electric cars in 2013. That’s a tiny slice of the auto market, but it’s up eighty-four percent from the year before. In Vermont, as of January 2014, there were 679 plug-in vehicles, according to the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation. That’s two hundred percent growth over 2013.

This is good news in terms of oil consumption and air pollution. But, of course, every plug-in has to be, well, plugged in.

David Cay Johnston: Comcast's Costly Package

February 19, 2014  |  If you’re wondering why ordinary Americans aren’t even close to achieving economic prosperity nearly five years after the official end of the Great Recession, you should pay close attention to the proposed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable by Comcast.

 

The deal, which was announced [4] last week, would create a monopolistic behemoth, reducing competition in the telecommunications sector and granting the consolidated companies more power to simultaneously raise prices and depress wages. It would reduce the number of jobs on the market, weaken smaller businesses and restrain the deployment of technology — especially the high-speed Internet access that’s necessary to support economic growth in this digital age.

New, inexpensive production materials boost promise of hydrogen fuels

MADISON, Wis. — Generating electricity is not the only way to turn sunlight into energy we can use on demand. The sun can also drive reactions to create chemical fuels, such as hydrogen, that can in turn power cars, trucks and trains.

The trouble with solar fuel production is the cost of producing the sun-capturing semiconductors and the catalysts to generate fuel. The most efficient materials are far too expensive to produce fuel at a price that can compete with gasoline.

The Myth Behind Public School Failure

In the rush to privatize the country’s schools, corporations and politicians have decimated school budgets, replaced teaching with standardized testing, and placed the blame on teachers and students. 

by Dean Paton

Until about 1980, America’s public schoolteachers were iconic everyday heroes painted with a kind of Norman Rockwell patina—generally respected because they helped most kids learn to read, write and successfully join society. Such teachers made possible at least the idea of a vibrant democracy.

Since then, what a turnaround: We’re now told, relentlessly, that bad-apple schoolteachers have wrecked K-12 education; that their unions keep legions of incompetent educators in classrooms; that part of the solution is more private charter schools; and that teachers as well as entire schools lack accountability, which can best be remedied by more and more standardized “bubble” tests.

What led to such an ignoble fall for teachers and schools? Did public education really become so irreversibly terrible in three decades? Is there so little that’s redeemable in today’s schoolhouses?

There's a Shadow Govt. Running the Country, And It's Not Up for Re-Election

BillMoyers.com / By Mike Lofgren

February 21, 2014  |  

Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.
—"The Martyrdom of Man" by Winwood Reade (1871)

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There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates on its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.


During the last five years, the news media have been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: in the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.