U.S. Student Debt Exceeds $1 Trillion as Delinquency Rate Increases to as High as One Third

By Jodie Gummow

March 20, 2014  |  As Americans continue to struggle to pay off their increasing debts, a new report reveals the highest delinquency rate belongs to student loans amounting to $1.08 trillion, Forbesreported [3].

 

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Quarterly Report [4], student loans are higher than credit cards, mortgages and auto loans with 11.5 percent of student loan balances 90 or more days in default.

The outstanding student loan balances increase represents an increase of $114 billion for 2013.  What’s more, a closer inspection of the figures released from the report reveals a much more gloomier economic picture than first realized.  According to Credit.com [5], that 11.5 percent figure is really closer to 23 percent because only about half of the overall debt is actually amortizing.

Sudden Deaths of JPMorgan Workers Continue

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 19, 2014

Kenneth Bellando, age 28, was found outside his East Side apartment building on March 12 in what the New York Post is calling “an apparent suicide” despite an ongoing police investigation into the matter. The building from which Bellando allegedly jumped was only six stories – by no means ensuring that death would result – providing the police with an additional reason to investigate for foul play.

The young Bellando, who had previously worked for JPMorgan Chase himself, was the brother of John Bellando, who was named in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ report on how JPMorgan had hid losses and lied to regulators in the London Whale derivatives trading debacle that resulted in losses of at least $6.2 billion. Congressional outrage was heightened by the fact that JPMorgan was gambling in London in high risk and illiquid derivatives using deposits from its FDIC insured bank, not with its own capital.

Georgia Activists Confront GOP Rejection of Medicaid as Moral Mondays Spread Across South

By Amy Goodman, Juan González

March 20, 2014  |  "Medicaid expansion now!" was the rallying cry this week of a rising grassroots movement spreading across the South. Nearly 40 people were arrested at the Georgia State Senate on Tuesday protesting a bill that would bar the expansion of Medicaid. Georgia has the fifth-highest number of uninsured people of any state in the country. Under the Affordable Care Act, an estimated 650,000 additional residents would be eligible for Medicaid. But Georgia is one of a number of Republican-led states that have opted out of such Medicaid expansion. The protest at the Georgia State Senate was the largest to date by Moral Monday Georgia, an outgrowth of the Moral Monday movement that began in North Carolina. We are joined by Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, which was the spiritual home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Rev. Warnock was among the protesters arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience on Tuesday. "Dr. King said that the time comes when silence is betrayal," Rev. Warnock says. "That time is now. The issue is affordable healthcare for all in the richest country in the world."

The Dead Are Wealthier Than the Living: Capital in the 21st Century

By Timothy Noah • March 20, 2014 • 11:41 AM

Patrimonial capitalism—and the landed or urban gentry living off of inherited wealth—was dealt a mortal blow by the Great Depression and World Wars. But it’s making a comeback, and the only way to stop it might be a worldwide tax on capital.

In Honoré de Balzac’s 1835 novel Père Goriot, a cynical observer of Parisian society under the reign of Louis-Philippe extends some career advice to a penniless young nobleman:

The Baron de Rastignac thinks of becoming an advocate, does he? There’s a nice prospect for you! Ten years of drudgery straight away. You are obliged to live at the rate of a thousand francs a month; you must have a library of law books, live in chambers, go into society, go down on your knees to ask a solicitor for briefs, lick the dust off the floor of the Palais de Justice. If this kind of business led to anything, I should not say no; but just give me the names of five advocates here in Paris who by the time that they are fifty are making fifty thousand francs a year! Bah! I would sooner turn pirate on the high seas than have my soul shrivel up inside me like that. How will you find the capital? There is but one way, marry a woman who has money.

It was much the same, the French economist Thomas Piketty tells us in his new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, two decades earlier in Jane Austen’s rural England, and it remained so five decades later on Henry James’ Washington Square. To belong to the landed or urban gentry of the 18th and 19th centuries—that is, to possess “books or musical instruments or jewelry or ball gowns”—you needed at least 20 to 30 times the income of the average person, and the most lucrative professions paid only half that. You needed capital, typically in the form of land. And you needed a lot of it—much more than could typically be amassed in the course of one lifetime. Consequently, “society” (i.e., the rich) consisted almost entirely of rentiers living off inherited wealth. It was much more true in Europe than in the United States, but it was true up to a point here, too, especially in the antebellum South.

Free Money for Everyone

A wacky-sounding idea with surprisingly conservative roots may be our best hope for escaping endless, grinding economic stagnation.

By Ryan Cooper

How would you like to get $2,000 in free money today, fresh off the government printing presses? And what if I told you it wouldn’t just be a nice windfall for you and your friends and family, but that we’d do it for all Americans on an ongoing basis, and that doing so would solve our crippling problem of mass unemployment?

I know what you’re thinking: it would be crazy. Either it would be a fast track to crippling inflation or it’s some Republican satire of an ultra-liberal government handout program. But it is not quite as radical as it sounds. The key idea behind such a program has a longstanding, bipartisan economic pedigree. John Stuart Mill argued in 1829 that mass unemployment was caused by “a deficiency of the circulating medium” relative to other commodities. John Maynard Keynes used the idea in his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, to lampoon the inherent silliness of gold mining, suggesting that old coal mines could be filled up with bottles full of banknotes, buried over with trash, then left “to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again.” Milton Friedman suggested that monetary policy could never fail to cure mass unemployment, because as a last resort the central bank could just drop cash out of helicopters—an enticing analogy that former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke borrowed in a 2002 speech, earning himself the persistent nickname of “Helicopter Ben.”

Piketty’s Triumph

Three expert takes on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty's data-driven magnum opus on inequality.

In the 1990s, two young French economists then affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, began the first rigorous effort to gather facts on income inequality in developed countries going back decades. In the wake of the 2007 financial crash, fundamental questions about the economy that had long been ignored again garnered attention. Piketty and Saez’s research stood ready with data showing that elites in developed countries had, in recent years, grown far wealthier relative to the general population than most economists had suspected. By the past decade, according to Piketty and Saez, inequality had returned to levels nearing those of the early 20th century.
Last fall, Piketty published his magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in France. The book seeks to model the history, recent trends, and back-to-the-19th-century future of capitalism. The American Prospect asked experts and scholars in the field of inequality to weigh in on Piketty’s argument and potential impact for policymaking on our shores.

Jacob S. Hacker, director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale, and Paul Pierson, the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, are the co-authors most recently of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Heather Boushey is the executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Branko Milanovic is a visiting presidential professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, a visiting senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center, and the author of The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality.

In 1975, the CIA Director Told Congress That Enemies of America Could Destroy the CIA with Freedom of Information Act Requests

In mid-1970s, feminist and peace movement activist Congresswoman Bella Abzug tore through the intel world, fearlessly taking on the CIA and the NSA for surveilling Americans. So I’ve been reading some of her hearings, and it turns out that the dynamics of the intelligence world (in this case the CIA) and its relationship with Congress and the public haven’t changed at all. Today, journalist Jason Leopold is nicknamed a ‘FOIA terrorist’ by a ‘certain government agency’ because he files so many requests so effectively, and sues when they deny him the things to which he is entitled.

This was going on in the 1970s, right after FOIA was amended to allow requests to the intel community. Bella Abzug was one member who helped make that happen, with hearings and legislative initiatives to force various agencies to reveal who they were surveilling.

Thomas Frank: There is no meritocracy....

The game is rigged: We elected Obama to hold the 1 percent accountable. So why are they still running everything? 

The big news after President Obama’s State of the Union address in January was that he didn’t really talk about the issues of inequality that everyone expected him to talk about. Instead, he shifted the “conversation,” as we call it, toward the subject of opportunity. He shied away from the extremely disturbing fact that when you work these days only your boss prospers, and brought us back to the infinitely less disturbing fact that sometimes poor people do get ahead despite it all. In a clever oratorical maneuver, Obama illustrated this comforting idea by referencing the success stories of both himself—“the son of a single mom”—and his arch-foe, Republican House Speaker John Boehner—“the son of a barkeep.” He spoke of building “new ladders of opportunity into the middle class,” a phrase that has become a trademark for his administration.

The problem, as Obama summed it up, is that Americans have ceased to believe they can rise from the ranks. “Opportunity is who we are,” he said. “And the defining project of our generation must be to restore that promise.”

Drones will cause an upheaval of society like we haven’t seen in 700 years

By Noah Smith |  March 11, 2014

The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying attention. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of war. Or to put it another way: the end of the Age of the Gun.

You may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the Age of the Gun because it’s been centuries since that age began. But imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun.

The Voluntarism Fantasy

Conservatives dream of returning to a world where private charity fulfilled all public needs. But that world never existed—and we’re better for it.

Mike Konczal

 

Ideology is as much about understanding the past as shaping the future. And conservatives tell themselves a story, a fairy tale really, about the past, about the way the world was and can be again under Republican policies. This story is about the way people were able to insure themselves against the risks inherent in modern life. Back before the Great Society, before the New Deal, and even before the Progressive Era, things were better. Before government took on the role of providing social insurance, individuals and private charity did everything needed to insure people against the hardships of life; given the chance, they could do it again.

This vision has always been implicit in the conservative ascendancy. It existed in the 1980s, when President Reagan announced, “The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern,” and called for voluntarism to fill in the yawning gaps in the social safety net. It was made explicit in the 1990s, notably through Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, a treatise hailed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and William Bennett, which argued that a purely private nineteenth-century system of charitable and voluntary organizations did a better job providing for the common good than the twentieth-century welfare state. This idea is also the basis of Paul Ryan’s budget, which seeks to devolve and shrink the federal government at a rapid pace, lest the safety net turn “into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” It’s what Utah Senator Mike Lee references when he says that the “alternative to big government is not small government” but instead “a voluntary civil society.” As conservatives face the possibility of a permanent Democratic majority fueled by changing demographics, they understand that time is running out on their cherished project to dismantle the federal welfare state.

Pensiongate? Christie Campaign Donors Won Huge Contracts

While trumpeting “pension reform,” the New Jersey governor placed retiree assets in the hands of hedge fund managers bankrolling his political career.

Lee Fang, March 18, 2014

 

Four months into his first term, Governor Chris Christie stood at the podium of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and laid out what was billed as the “Christie Reform Agenda.” To enthusiastic applause, the New Jersey governor railed against what he described as an out-of-control state public pension system. “Our benefits are too rich, and our employees aren’t contributing enough, either,” he said. “We are careening our way toward becoming Greece.”

Christie had just won his first statewide election with the help of Paul Singer, the hedge fund manager who chairs the Manhattan Institute. The month before Christie’s election victory in November 2009, Singer had given $100,000 to the Republican Governors Association (RGA), which aired a barrage of advertisements in Christie’s favor.
 

Banks Seek To Sway Critical GAO Report

Wednesday, 19 March 2014 09:51 
By Alison Fitzgerald, The Center for Public Integrity | Report 

Lobbyists are working hard to get ahead of a critically important report by the government’s internal watchdog that may determine how banks are regulated in the future.

The Government Accountability Office was asked by Congress to determine whether the nation’s largest banks are able to borrow money at lower rates than smaller institutions because of the view that the government will bail out the behemoths or pay off their creditors in a crisis. The study, the second of two related reports, is due out later this year.

New Study Shows Dangers of Trade Agreements that Help Corporations Sue Governments

Posted on March 19, 2014 by David Dayen

By Robin Broad, a Professor of International Development at the School of International Service, American University, and John Cavanagh. Originally published at Triple Crisis

As the Obama administration negotiates new trade agreements with European and Pacific nations, a battle has emerged over the agreements’ egregious rules that grant giant corporations unreasonable powers to subvert democracy. These rules, dubbed “investor rights” by the corporations, allow firms to sue governments over actions—including public interest regulations—that reduce the value of their investments.

Oxfam, the Institute for Policy Studies, and four other non-profits are releasing a new study that explains why these rules are so dangerous to democracy and the environment. We are among the co-authors of this study, titled “Debunking Eight Falsehoods by Pacific Rim Mining/OceanaGold in El Salvador.” The report offers a powerful case study of everything that is wrong with this corporate assault on democracy.

Henry Giroux | Beyond Neoliberal Miseducation

As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor while expanding the ranks of their managerial class. Modeled after a savage neoliberal value system in which wealth and power are redistributed upward, a market-oriented class of managers largely has taken over the governing structures of most institutions of higher education in the United States. As Debra Leigh Scott points out, "administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country."1 There is more at stake here than metrics. Benjamin Ginsberg views this shift in governance as the rise of what he calls ominously the "the all administrative university," noting that it does not bode well for any notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere.2

More evil than genius? How iPad and Google Glass makers are secretly scamming America

We already knew Google and Facebook were resourceful. But their new scheme to rip off the U.S. Treasury is chilling 

David Dayen

To really understand the extent of Google and Apple’s innovative zeal, you may want to look past their groundbreaking products – and more at their tax avoidance strategies. In a new scheme that defies belief, some of the nation’s top tech giants are managing to evade taxation on money by parking it overseas – and then somehow taking government payments on it.

Though the rest of the business sector had a head start, tech firms have begun to lobby Washington with more persistence over the past few years; the top 10 spent more than $61 million in 2013. The more hopeful among us might believe this shift could possibly produce more beneficial results for the public. (After all, Google’s motto is “don’t be evil,” right?)

But while it’s true that, in certain discrete areas, tech lobbying has yielded positive results — like when companies aided grass-roots efforts to stop Internet censorship legislation sought by Hollywood — in the vast majority of cases, Silicon Valley wants what the rest of our multinational conglomerates want: low taxes and cheap labor. And they’ve been at the forefront of efforts to ensure that.

Nomi Prins: The Inevitability of Income Inequality

There’s been a lot of discussion about the historically high levels of income and wealth inequality lately—mostly from people on the shorter end of that stick—with good reason: There’s no end in sight.

In his new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty argues that worsening inequality is inevitable in a mature capitalist system, based on his analysis of 200 years of data. But inequality isn’t just an evolving condition like a crippling allergy that comes and goes, or just grows, enumerated by horrifying statistics. Nor is it just the result of a capitalist-utopian idea of free markets in which everyone gets a fair shot armed with equal information (which simply don’t exist in the real world, where markets are routinely gamed by the biggest players). Inequality is endemic to the core structure of an America that operates more as a plutocracy than a democracy. It is an inherent result of the consolidation of a substantial amount of both financial power and political influence in the hands of a few families.

In my upcoming book, “All the Presidents’ Bankers,” I trace the lineage of the banking and political families and their associates who have had the most combined influence on American policy. Inequality of income or wealth is a byproduct of the predisposition and genealogy of this coterie of America’s power elite. True, being born into wealth means having a greater chance of accumulating more of it—but take it a step further. Expanding on the adage of “it takes money to make money,” we get a much better idea of why inequality is so rampant: Because aside from income and wealth issues, it takes power to keep power.

New Report: Fortune 100 Companies Have Received a Whopping $1.2 Trillion in Corporate Welfare Recently

By Aaron Cantú

March 19, 2014  |  Most of us are aware that the government gives mountains of cash to powerful corporations in the form of tax breaks, grants, loans and subsidies--what some have called "corporate welfare." However, little has been revealed about exactly how much money Washington is forking over to mega businesses.

 

Until now.

A new venture called Open the Books, based in Illinois, was founded with a mission to bring transparency to how the federal budget is spent. And what they found is shocking: between 2000 and 2012, the top Fortune 100 companies received $1.2 trillion from the government. That doesn't include all the billions of dollars doled out to housing, auto and banking enterprises in 2008-2009, nor does it include ethanol subsidies to agribusiness or tax breaks for wind turbine makers.

Beware Of The “Sneak Laws”

Dave Johnson

One way the corporate/plutocrat/conservative agenda gets foisted on us is through what I call “sneak laws.” These are laws that sneak through state legislatures and the Congress before We the People get a chance to learn about them and organize opposition. (Read to the end to learn about a monster of a sneak law sneaking through the Congress that could cost our government as much as $700 billion now and tens to hundreds of billions a year from now on.)

There are tons of federal, state and local sneak laws written to benefit a few key corporations or billionaires. These sneak laws limit competition, grant monopolies, provide subsidies, give (sometimes huge) tax breaks, grant special waivers from laws and regulations, prohibit consumers from fighting back when harmed … you name it. But they never, ever help regular We the People.

Dean Baker: Money in Hyping the Generational War Story

At the same time that we are seeing growing support for proposals to increase Social Security benefits it appears that we are witnessing another set of calls for generational warfare. The argument of the generational warriors is that the Social Security and Medicare benefits received by our parents and grandparents pose a threat to the living standards of our children and grandchildren.

The generational warfare argument may not make much sense, but many people with money stand behind it. Therefore we are likely to hear it frequently in the months ahead.

Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

The US Is Abandoning Democracy, Becoming an Aristocracy Instead

ERIC ZUESSE FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Each country is either an aristocracy, ruled by hereditary wealth and status; or else a democracy, ruled by the public or "demos" (without hereditary wealth or status being a major factor deciding a person's success).

It's either one, or the other -- or somewhere between those two political poles.

The American Revolution was waged against aristocracy (which was the longstanding system), who happened to consist of British aristocrats. The American Revolutionists fought to establish a democracy instead. They did this, though democracy had never before existed (except in very limited form, in very small places, such as ancient Athens, and even there only briefly).

Joseph E. Stiglitz: On the Wrong Side of Globalization

Trade agreements are a subject that can cause the eyes to glaze over, but we should all be paying attention. Right now, there are trade proposals in the works that threaten to put most Americans on the wrong side of globalization.

The conflicting views about the agreements are actually tearing at the fabric of the Democratic Party, though you wouldn’t know it from President Obama’s rhetoric. In his State of the Union address, for example, he blandly referred to “new trade partnerships” that would “create more jobs.” Most immediately at issue is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, which would bring together 12 countries along the Pacific Rim in what would be the largest free trade area in the world.

Billionaires... First They Came for the Economy

Monday, 17 March 2014 15:45
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

First the oligarchs came for our economy, and we said nothing.

Then they came for our government, and again, we said nothing.

Now, they've come for science, and we're not saying a word.

Thanks to Republican-backed austerity measures, our nation's scientific infrastructure has been hit with devastating budget cuts.

All across America, research labs are shutting their doors, scientists are joining unemployment lines, and potentially life-saving drug trials and research projects are being put on hiatus.

12 Facts You Need to Know About Our Retirement Crisis as the Battle Over Social Security Is Far From Over

By Steven Rosenfeld

March 15, 2014  |  Progressive organizers [3] and blue-leaning media [4] have been declaring victory because the Obama White House has dropped its push for using a new cost-of-living formula that would cut into future increases in monthly Social Security benefits.

 

Articles such this detailed retelling [5] from In These Timesproclaim that Social Security was "saved,” when in fact, the formula for future Social Security benefits is unchanged, and is still insufficient for the retiring baby boom generation.

Meanwhile, glee over the White House’s reversal eclipses the harsh truth that Obama’s proposed 2015 budget would raise [6] out-of-pocket costs for 50 million seniors—saving the government $60 billion—starting in 2018 by increasing Medicare deductibles, co-pays and premiums, and adding a surcharge if people buy supplemental insurance coverage.

Ralph Nader: What A Destructive Wall Street Owes Young Americans

Wall Street’s big banks and their financial networks that collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008-2009, were saved with huge bailouts by the taxpayers, but these Wall Street Gamblers are still paid huge money and are again creeping toward reckless misbehavior. Their corporate crime wave strip-mined the economy for young workers, threw them on the unemployment rolls and helped make possible a low-wage economy that is draining away their ability to afford basic housing, goods, and services.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is declaring huge bonuses for their executive plutocrats, none of whom have been prosecuted and sent to jail for these systemic devastations of other peoples’ money, the looting of pensions and destruction of jobs.

Ukraine is About Oil. So Was World War I

by Robert Freeman

Ukraine is a lot more portentous than it appears. It is fundamentally about the play for Persian Gulf oil. So was World War I. The danger lies in the chance of runaway escalation, just like World War I.

Let’s put Ukraine into a global strategic context.

The oil is running out. God isn’t making any more dinosaurs and melting them into the earth’s crust. Instead, as developing world countries aspire to first-world living standards, the draw-down on the world’s finite supply of oil is accelerating. The rate at which known reserves are being depleted is four times that at which new oil is being discovered. That’s why oil cost $26 a barrel in 2001, but $105 today. It’s supply and demand.

Neocons Have Weathered the Storm

March 14, 2014

Exclusive: Official Washington’s bipartisan hysteria over Ukraine and Crimea is evidence that the neocons not only weathered the public fury over the Iraq War but are now back shaping U.S. geopolitical strategies, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

By the middle of last decade, the storm clouds were building over the neocons: their “regime change” in Iraq was a disaster; President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech was a running joke; news articles were appearing about their “dark side” behavior in the “war on terror”; and the public was tired of the blood and treasure being wasted.

You might have expected that the neocons would have been banished to the farthest reaches of U.S. policymaking, so far away that they would never be heard from again. However, instead of disappearing, the neocons have proved their staying power, now reemerging as the architects of the U.S. strategy toward Ukraine.

Disenfranchised: Why Are Americans Still Buying Into the Franchise Dream?

By Timothy Noah • March 04, 2014 • 6:00 AM

Bhupinder “Bob” Baber bought two Quiznos franchises in Long Beach, California, in 1998 and 1999. His investment totaled $500,000, and Baber’s wife, Ratty, quit her job to work at the restaurants for no pay. The Babers did this because, as Bob would later recall, he “trusted in Quiznos.” But, as he soon found out, being a franchisee can be a very swift and painful way to lose a lot of money.

Over the past year, thousands of fast-food workers have staged protests and rallies for a higher hourly wage. As they see it, big corporations like McDonald’s and Domino’s can well afford to pay workers more. But the vast majority of these workers don’t work for these giants. They work for people like Bob Baber. Franchisees don’t enjoy the market powers and economies of scale of their parent companies. Rather, they run small businesses with narrow profit margins, high failure rates, and plenty of anti-corporate grievances of their own. Anyone who wants to help immiserated fast-food workers, in other words, also needs to spare a few thoughts for their immiserated bosses. That means reforming the deeply troublesome franchise system.

Warning Signs: How Pesticides Harm the Young Brain

The pathbreaking CHAMACOS study has detected developmental problems in children born to mothers who toiled in California’s treated fields—but will anything change?

Susan Freinkel, March 11, 2014

Driving along Highway 101 through California’s Salinas Valley, it’s hard to miss the fact that you are traveling through one of the most bountiful farm belts in the country. No matter the time of year, it seems, green fields unfurl toward the mountains that flank the valley, and crews of workers are stooped in the act of picking. Some unique alchemy of air, soil and climate exists here to create a place where dozens of crops flourish, from artichokes to zucchini. Growers plant red and green lettuces side by side in rows so they can be picked and packaged directly as ready-mixed salads. Eighty percent of the country’s leafy greens come from the valley, thus its longtime nickname: “America’s Salad Bowl.”

For all the natural blessings, that bounty also depends on pesticides—more than 8 million pounds of them in 2011. Farmland is expensive here, which puts the farmers under constant pressure to keep increasing their yields. So they rely on an ever-evolving chemical arsenal to fight weeds, insects and diseases in order to grow the blemish-free produce that consumers want to buy. Pesticides are so deeply ingrained in the way agriculture is practiced here that people scarcely notice the noisy helicopters spraying the crops, or the warning signs—complete with skulls—posted in the fields after they’re treated.

Telecoms take HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS for national broadband, but don't want to deliver

by kos

I want one of these deals:

After making a big, bold promise to wire every corner of America, the telecom giants are running away from their vow to provide nationwide broadband service by 2020. For almost 20 years, AT&T, Verizon and the other big players have collected hundreds of billions of dollars through rate increases and surcharges to finance that ambitious plan, but after wiring the high-density big cities, they now say it's too expensive to connect the rest of the country. But they'd like to keep all that money they banked for the project.

It's awesome to get paid for something you decide you don't want to do, right?

C'mon America...let's keep the lights on

Submitted by Thom Hartmann A... on 13. March 2014 - 12:07

It’s time for America to leave the 19th century behind, and keep the lights on. Last night, the U.S. Capitol building and other Washington, D.C. landmarks went dark, as powerful wind gusts of up to 55 MPH knocked out power for thousands of people in the D.C. area. In fact, as of 10 PM last night, around 5,000 people were in the dark in the D.C. metropolitan area, for what was a very, very cold night.

While mass power outages in and around our nation’s capital are unusual, they’re becoming more frequent, and they’re a sign of this nation’s aging electrical infrastructure, which is stuck in the 19th century. We're still using the model of giant, centralized power stations that then distribute electricity over long distances to areas as large as states and blocks of states. This is bad for a number of reasons.

10 Things Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Protection Agency Has Done for You

The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is already shielding Americans from shady dealings by mortgage lenders, student loan servicers, and credit card companies.

—By Erika Eichelberger  |  Fri Mar. 14, 2014 3:00 AM GMT

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the watchdog agency conceived of and established by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the wake of the financial crisis, had a hard time getting on its feet. The GOP tried everything it could to hobble the bureau, but to no avail. Over the past couple of years, the CFPB has issued dozens of protections shielding consumers from shady practices by mortgage lenders, student loan servicers, and credit card companies.

Paul Krugman: Did Texas Really Experience an Economic Miracle?

Philip Longman, a senior editor at Washington Monthly magazine, wrote a very good article in the latest edition that debunks the hype about the Texas economy. Things I didn't know included the fact that net inward migration by native-born Americans is actually quite small.

But I wanted to follow up on one particular point: the role of oil and gas in recent years. In his article, Mr. Longman concedes that these industries directly account for a fairly small share of the economy even in Texas, but argues that their rapid growth, combined with multiplier effects, makes them a much bigger story when it comes to Texas growth.

Wells Fargo made up on-demand foreclosure papers plan: court filing charges

By Catherine Curan

Wells Fargo, the nation’s biggest mortgage servicer, appears to have set up detailed internal procedures to fabricate foreclosure papers on demand, according to allegations in papers filed Tuesday in a New York federal court.

In a filing in New York’s Southern District in White Plains for a local homeowner in bankruptcy, attorney Linda Tirelli described a 150-page Wells Fargo Foreclosure Attorney Procedures Manual created November 9, 2011 and updated February 24, 2012. According to court papers, the Manual details “a procedure for processing [mortgage] notes without endorsements and obtaining endorsements and allonges.”

Gaius Publius: We could solve unemployment immediately if we wanted to. Read 2 “sensible” proposals.

We don’t need to regulate prices with the pain of unemployment. There are other ways.

We wrote recently about economic systems that inflict pain, our prime example being classic “free market” economics (as it existed before FDR) and also neoliberalism (as it exists today, in post-FDR world). That piece is here:

“Neoliberalism, “just deserts” and the post–climate crisis economy“
A number of people, including Paul Krugman, have noted that we may well be entering a world, certainly in the U.S., where there may not be enough good jobs to go around, either because of technical innovation or because of job export by the already-wealthy, likely both. Does that mean that people should be consigned to their fate, to unemployment, simply to regulate prices and inflation?

David Dayen: This Is the Fed's Most Brazen and Least Known Handout to Private Banks

Rarely does a day go by when some House Republican doesn’t demand an end to Federal Reserve funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). But you will never hear about the Fed’s direct subsidy to private banks that costs over three times as much as the total CFPB budget.

The subsidy comes in the form of a 6 percent dividend, paid on stock that over 2,900 banks purchase to participate in the Federal Reserve system. Very few places where ordinary Americans park their money offer such a risk-free benefit. In 2012 (the last year with available data), the Fed gave away $1.637 billion in dividends to banks, tax-free in the majority of cases. And the Fed has been doing this for the last 100 years. It’s one of the many unknown ways the Fed extends special benefits to Wall Street.

How a Mysterious Redacted Document Could Affect Money in Politics

Why have FEC lawyers locked away a potentially crucial bit of evidence that campaigns could use to craft election strategy?

By Shane Goldmacher

The Federal Election Commission was deadlocked, and no one was surprised. Democrats had wanted to crack down; Republicans didn't. No matter that it could have been among the most important campaign finance decisions in years. No matter that the agency's general counsel had recommended action. Divided equally and hopelessly by ideology, the six commissioners were at a stalemate.

It was all perfectly ordinary for this dysfunctional agency. All except for footnote 111.

How Reagan Enforced US Hypocrisy

March 11, 2014

Exclusive: The mainstream U.S. news media has so fully bought into the U.S. government’s narrative on Ukraine that almost no one sees the layers of hypocrisy, an achievement in “group think” that dates back to Ronald Reagan’s war against “moral equivalence,” writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Official Washington’s hearty disdain for anyone who cites U.S. hypocrisy toward the Ukraine crisis can be traced back to a propaganda strategy hatched by the Reagan administration in 1984, dismissing any comparisons between U.S. and Soviet behavior as unacceptable expressions of “moral equivalence.”

This “moral equivalence” concern stemmed, in part, from the prior decade’s disclosures of U.S. government misconduct – the Vietnam War, CIA-sponsored coups and other intelligence abuses at home and abroad. In that climate of heightened skepticism, U.S. journalists felt it was their job to show some skepticism and hold U.S. officials accountable for their behavior.

How a Court Secretly Evolved, Extending U.S. Spies’ Reach

By Charlie Savage and Laura Poitras - March 11, 2014

WASHINGTON — Ten months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation’s surveillance court delivered a ruling that intelligence officials consider a milestone in the secret history of American spying and privacy law. Called the “Raw Take” order — classified docket No. 02-431 — it weakened restrictions on sharing private information about Americans, according to documents and interviews.

The administration of President George W. Bush, intent on not overlooking clues about Al Qaeda, had sought the July 22, 2002, order. It is one of several still-classified rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court described in documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor. 

Developed Nations Give Up on Stopping Climate Change, Turn to Mitigating Impact, Largely Abandoning Third World

Wednesday, 12 March 2014 09:18

By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Review

In Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, environmental author McKenzie Funk pulls off the nearly impossible task of covering the most cynical of profiteering (making money off of the Earth's catastrophic reconfiguration because of climate change), while penning a captivating read that avoids being funereal. Even while being aware of the dangers at hand, Funk regularly acknowledges the droll ironies of a society that can even make money off of its own self-destruction.

Gaius Publius: Neoliberalism, "Just Desserts,” and the Post-Climate-Crisis Economy

Chris Hedges has a terrific piece up at Truthdig that I couldn’t resist showing to you, since we’ve been talking about neoliberalism and also the convulsions that climate change will bring to the world.

This piece has a couple of parts, since there are a couple of intersecting thoughts. I’ll discuss each of those parts in turn (see the subheadings below and also the summary).

But first, a definition. We’ve talked before about how “neoliberalism” is the same as “old (pre-FDR) liberalism,” which is also the same as Adam Smith–style “free market capitalism.” In the context of Adam Smith, neoliberalism is just “liberalism.”

Thomas Frank: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Is the left enjoying a moment of triumph -- or has a president with no bearings left the Tea Party in charge? 

I used to talk to the political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. a lot back in the ’90s when we both lived in Chicago and wrote for the same magazines. I thought of him in those days as a man of brilliant skepticism, as someone who could always be counted upon to have the exact right word for the situation of the left in the Clinton years.

Reed has a great and important essay in the current issue of Harper's Magazine in which he assesses the situation under President Obama—and manages to throw bucket after bucket of cold water over a Democratic Party that is still exulting after its big win in 2012.

Dean Baker: Would you delay buying a $30 shirt for months to save 8 cents? Me neither

Hyperinflation and runaway deflation are extremely rare. The eurozone’s panic is simply an absurd excuse for inaction

 The collapse of the housing bubble and the subsequent devastation to the economy caught almost the entire economics profession by surprise. Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, along with other people in top policy positions, were left dumbfounded. They didn’t think a prolonged downturn was possible. They were wrong in a really big way.

The current group of central bank chairs and other top policymakers would like us to believe that they’ve learned their lesson and now everything is under control. They want us to think they actually have a clue about how the economy operates. There is good reason to believe otherwise. The European Central Bank (ECB) recognizes that inflation has been running below its 2% inflation target and is likely to stay below that target for several years to come. But the ECB has reassured the public that’s prepared to act, making sure that the eurozone doesn’t see deflation. That the bank cares about the inflation rate crossing zero and turning negative is a sign that it has no clue about how the economy works.

Dean Baker: The New York Times Budget Reporting Looks Like RT on Ukraine

RT, the Russian government owned English language television network, has been the butt of much humor in recent days. It has mindlessly repeated Russian propaganda surrounding the events in Ukraine. The ridicule is well-deserved. News organizations are supposed to inform readers about the world, not make stuff up. Unfortunately, much of the U.S. media deserve comparable ridicule when it comes to budget reporting.

While news outlets don’t just invent numbers on the budget, it would not be much of a change for the worse if they did. The news stories that we saw following the release of president Obama’s budget followed the same practice we have seen in budget stories for decades. They threw very large numbers at readers that no one understands.

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Evacuate the Economy

By Rebecca Solnit
Posted on March 11, 2014

Call it a nightmare that passes for good news. Recently, the New York Times optimistically headlined a front-page piece by reporters Coral Davenport and Steven Erlanger, "U.S. Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin." It offered an eerie overview of where the administration of the president who came into office committed to reversing global warming has ended up.  If there’s "green" left in his presidency, it’s evidently the green of envy -- that's what some of his advisors believe countries like Russia will feel on learning that, with our new frackable energy wealth, we are going to be "Saudi America" in a decade or two.  Then, the implication is, Washington will really be able to throw its weight around geopolitically.

The Failed Libertarian Experiment in Chile

By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed 

The libertarian experiment failed in Chile, and now Chileans once-and-for-all have said goodbye to the religion of Reaganomics.

On Tuesday, Michelle Bachelet, a socialist, will take office as President of Chile.

This is a great personal achievement for her. Bachelet was president before from 2006 to 2010, but because Chile’s constitution prevents presidents from serving for more than one consecutive term, she was unable to run in the 2009 elections, which were won by outgoing right-wing president Sebastian Pinera.

Blueprint for Destroying Unions Is About Amassing Power

By CJ Werleman

March 10, 2014  |  There was little from last week’s CPAC that should have surprised America. We get it, conservatives. You want the poor to “keep their knees together.” You want a 1950s-era Berlin-styled wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. You believe gays, atheists, immigrants, liberals, and whatever else isn’t white and straight is destroying the country.

None of this comes as a surprise to anyone who has watched five minutes of Fox & Friends.

What did come as a surprise, however, is the right wing let the metaphorical cat out of the bag when it comes to their strategy of transforming America’s democracy for the many into a tyrannical plutocracy for the very few, revealing just how disingenuous the Republican Party is whenever it offers any lip service to dealing with income inequality.

How Did College Education Become So Ridiculously Expensive?

By Bill Zimmerman

March 10, 2014  |  The student loan crisis is a new phenomenon. Despite its huge impact, as recently as the late 1980s there was no student loan crisis. Then, middle and working class students suffered from cutbacks and had difficulty financing their educations, but overall, while the system of paying for college was beginning to break down, it had not yet become the disaster it is today. The crisis came because in later years the cost of getting a higher education rose many times faster than the overall cost of living. To make matters worse, wages were stagnant and the real purchasing power of working Americans was in decline.

The crisis now centers on the inability of borrowers to repay their student loans, but those borrowers only needed loans in the first place because in the mid-1990s the cost of tuition escalated so dramatically. By the first decade of the new century, it virtually went through the roof. What drove this sudden and rapid increase?

Paul Krugman: Liberty, Equality, Efficiency

Most people, if pressed on the subject, would probably agree that extreme income inequality is a bad thing, although a fair number of conservatives believe that the whole subject of income distribution should be banned from public discourse. (Rick Santorum, the former senator and presidential candidate, wants to ban the term “middle class,” which he says is “class-envy, leftist language.” Who knew?) But what can be done about it?

The standard answer in American politics is, “Not much.” Almost 40 years ago Arthur Okun, chief economic adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, published a classic book titled “Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff,” arguing that redistributing income from the rich to the poor takes a toll on economic growth. Okun’s book set the terms for almost all the debate that followed: liberals might argue that the efficiency costs of redistribution were small, while conservatives argued that they were large, but everybody knew that doing anything to reduce inequality would have at least some negative impact on G.D.P.

The South's Battered Psyche: 8 Trends of Bad Health, Gun Violence, Religious Fervor, and Poverty

By Steven Rosenfeld

March 8, 2014  |  Across red-state America, especially in the Deep South, recent statistics—such as these Huffington Post graphics [3]—show that the cycle of poverty, in its many manifestations, is unchanged and holding firm. Why is this?

It’s easy to say this is how Republicans like to run states—cutting budgets, not raising the minimum wage, opposing labor unions. They let the poor and working class stew in their hardscrabble juices. Meanwhile, they distract voters by accusing liberals of waging war on the few sources of personal power in Southerners' difficult lives: their religious beliefs and owning guns. But go back several decades when segregationist Democrats ruled; for the most part, they weren’t very different from today’s Republicans.