Banking Union Time Bomb: Eurocrats Authorize Bailouts AND Bail-Ins

by Ellen Brown

“As things stand, the banks are the permanent government of the country, whichever party is in power.” – Lord Skidelsky, House of Lords, UK Parliament, 31 March 2011)

On March 20, 2014, European Union officials reached an historic agreement to create a single agency to handle failing banks. Media attention has focused on the agreement involving the single resolution mechanism (SRM), a uniform system for closing failed banks. But the real story for taxpayers and depositors is the heightened threat to their pocketbooks of a deal that now authorizes both bailouts and “bail-ins” – the confiscation of depositor funds. The deal involves multiple concessions to different countries and may be illegal under the rules of the EU Parliament; but it is being rushed through to lock taxpayer and depositor liability into place before the dire state of Eurozone banks is exposed.

ALEC and Big Polluters Try to Attack Limits on Climate Change Pollution One State at a Time

by Frances Beinecke

 

Last week the Kentucky legislature passed a bill to undermine national standards to reduce climate change pollution. The bill would prop up the profits of Kentucky’s biggest polluters while saddling ordinary Kentuckians with higher electricity bills.

A coal-friendly bill may not be surprising in Kentucky, but this effort didn’t originate in the Bluegrass State. The bill’s language mirrors legislation being pushed in statehouses across the country by the American Legislative Exchange Council—a cabal of corporate giants and Tea Party supporters including the Koch brothers, Peabody Coal, ExxonMobil, and other fossil fuel companies.

The Future of Work in America, Part 2: How the Weakening of American Labor Led to the Shrinking of America’s Middle Class

Mar 26, 2014, Richard Kirsch

When General Motors President Charles Wilson told a U.S. Senate Committee in 1953 that what was good for General Motors was good for the country, he captured an era in which the good wages and benefits earned by the workers at U.S. manufacturing companies powered the nation’s economy and built the middle class.

But sixty years later, what is good for the GM of our day – Walmart – is clearly not good for America, as a comparison between the biggest private employers of both eras underscores. While the American auto industry operated on the premise of one of its founders, Henry Ford, that workers should get paid enough to buy its costly products, Walmart operates on the premise that its workers should get paid so little that the only place they can afford to shop is at their low-priced employer.

The Future of Work in America: Policies to Empower American Workers and Secure Prosperity for All

Mar 25, 2014, Richard Kirsch
 
The Future of Work is bringing together thought and action leaders from multiple fields to re-imagine a 21st century social contract that expands workers’ rights and increases the number of living wage jobs. The Future of Work is focusing on three areas: promoting new and innovative strategies for worker organizing and representation; raising the floor of labor market standards and strengthening enforcement of labor laws and standards; and assuring access to good jobs for women and workers of color.

The Stakes On Hobby Lobby Cases Are Much Bigger Than Birth Control

Seth D. Michaels – March 27, 2014, 6:00 AM EDT2584

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments over the ACA’s provision requiring contraceptives like Plan B to be covered as a basic part of health plans.

The implications of this decision for women’s health are huge. Contraception is health care, as surely as any other kind of medicine is, but this decision would put that decision in the hands of bosses rather than the women whose decision it should be. And the strategy on the right tomake it seem like a debate about abortion distorts the facts even further--though it apparently is working on Justice Anthony Kennedy.

It’s obviously also an attempt by the case’s conservative backers to undermine the ACA and limit its reach -- a political tactic made apparent by the fact that Hobby Lobby covered the contraceptive options it’s now suing over.

Paul Krugman: A Panicked Press Turns Economics Into a Morality Play

Recently the big, front-page headline on the Financial Times website - at least in the U.S. edition - led to an article about the Bank for International Settlements. According to the F.T., the bank is warning that "forward guidance" - the attempt to drive long-term interest rates down by promising to keep short-term rates low for a long time - "could endanger the international financial system." Typical B.I.S., I thought - the gnomes of Basel have been consistently against any policies that might restore full employment, and have been into punishment all the way. And I got ready to write a blog post bashing the organization.

Brian Beutler: Scalia & co. can still destroy Obamacare — without you seeing it coming

Here's the absurd case, currently in a federal appeals court, that could kill subsidies in 36 Healthcare.gov states 

Hobby Lobby’s challenge to the ACA’s contraception requirement carries huge stakes, but mostly because they aren’t bounded by Obamacare itself. Its threat to the ACA’s actual program architecture is pretty small.

By contrast, while the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments in that case Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals was simultaneously hearing oral arguments in a case that is bounded by Obamacare, but threatens to shatter it.

The case is Halbig v. Sebelius. I wrote about it here, most recently when a federal judge did the right thing and essentially called the challenge horseshit. It is based on an opportunistic reading of sloppy text in the statute, and perpetuated by professional liars who claim that Congress possibly wanted to withhold insurance subsidies from people in states that did not build their own exchanges, knowing that what they’re saying is false.

Lessons for Other States from Kansas' Massive Tax Cuts

By Michael Leachman and Chris Mai

March 27, 2014

Tax cuts enacted in Kansas in 2012 were among the largest ever enacted by any state, and have since been held up by tax-cut proponents in other states as a model worth replicating.  In truth, Kansas is a cautionary tale, not a model.  As other states recover from the recent recession and turn toward the future, Kansas’ huge tax cuts have left that state’s schools and other public services stuck in the recession, and declining further — a serious threat to the state’s long-term economic vitality. Meanwhile, promises of immediate economic improvement have utterly failed to materialize.

Class War with a Smiley Face

Kathleen Geier
March 28, 2014

In Silicon Valley there really is a class war going on, a wage-fixing cartel that’s pitting the one percent against everyone else. Thomas Piketty, the economist who wrote the new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is most famous for his insight that economic inequality is mostly driven by the top one percent of income earners. The incomes of the top one percent have pulled away from the rest of us and their economic interests have, over time, come to diverge dramatically from those of the mainstream of American society. The one percenters are waging class war not just on the traditional targets, poor and working class Americans, but increasingly, on middle class professionals as well.

Paul Krugman: What America Isn't, or Anyway Wasn't

I get mail:

Paul you are a subhuman communist traitor who should be deported. You are a disgrace to america’s founders and an affront to the Constitution. Republicans believe in protecting the money of WORKERS not RECEIVERS. All workers, poor and rich, should be protected from high taxes equally.

Well, I get at least one of these each day. But it’s kind of interesting to read this right after reviewing Piketty, because one point Piketty makes is that the modern notion that redistribution and “penalizing success” is un- and anti-American is completely at odds with our country’s actual history.

Sam Pizzigati: Our Last Flesh-and-Blood Link to Plutocracy 1.0

Let us pause now to pay our respects to Bunny Mellon. She died last week on her 4,000-acre farm in Virginia’s fabled horse country. But no tears, please. Bunny — nobody called her by her given name Rachel — lived a long and rich life.

Very long. Very rich.

One hundred and three at her death, Bunny Mellon spent every year of her century-plus existence in luxury. Her grandfather had made a fortune off Listerine mouthwash. Her father ran the Gillette razor company.

More Proof Corporate Tax Cuts Have Done More Harm Than Good

Richard Long

The taxes paid by corporations today are near record lows as a percentage of the United States’ total tax bill, even as they are recording massive profits. Yet the unemployment rate is still high. However, if we turned back the clock on corporate tax rates and returned to Nixon-era levels and closed loopholes, millions of American jobs would be created, according to The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base, a new report released today.

The study, produced by the Center for Effective Government and National People’s Action, highlights the damage done by hewing to a central conservative tenet, that “cutting corporate taxes will stimulate job creation and grow the economy.” The report shows the aftermath of a lower corporate tax rate on state budgets, and argues that a slight increase in the corporate share of federal revenues would restore cuts to education and public services and add an additional 3.2 million jobs.

Citigroup Flunks Stress Test: Ghosts of Glass-Steagall Haunt the Fed

By Pam Martens: March 27, 2014

It only took three press releases over as many days but the Federal Reserve finally spit out the truth yesterday on its stress tests of the big banks: Citigroup, the largest bank bailout recipient of 2008, still doesn’t have its house in order more than five years later. How many more years of economic malaise will it take before the delusional Fed admits to the public that only the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, separating banks holding insured deposits from gambling casinos on Wall Street, will put our financial system back on sound footing?

Inside the Koch brothers' campus crusade

The billionaire industrialists aren’t just investing in politicians, but also young hearts and minds

By Dave Levinthal, 5:01 am, March 27, 2014 Updated: 10:22 am, March 27, 2014

The campus of Koch Brothers Academy spans a nation.

Learn about the “role of government institutions in a capitalistic society” at South Carolina’s College of Charleston.

Dive into the “integrated study of philosophy, politics and economics” at Duke University and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

And philosophize about the “moral imperatives of free markets and individual liberty” at the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University in Alabama.

Spy Agencies, Not Politicians, Hold the Cards in Washington

Thursday, 27 March 2014 11:11
By William Greider, The Nation | Op-Ed

I am addicted to House of Cards, the British and American versions, but I suggest that both TV series have been looking at the wrong game.

On television, the story line is about a wicked political schemer, accompanied by his wicked wife, who climbs to the ultimate perch of power—prime minister or president—through fiendishly malevolent manipulations, including homicide. In the real world of Washington, however, politicians look more like impotent innocents compared to their true masters. It is the spooks and the spies who shuffle the deck and deal the cards. They hide their cut-throat intrigues behind bland initials—the CIA and the NSA.

In recent weeks, a lurid real-life melodrama has been playing out in the nation's capital that has the flavor of old-fashioned conspiracy theories. The two clandestine agencies are the true puppet masters.

Richard Eskow: Bill Clinton and Steny Hoyer: The “Wall Street Democrats” Fight Back

If progressive and populist ideas resonate with most voters, some people have asked, why isn’t the Democratic Party doing better in the polls? Here’s one reason: Some of the party’s most prominent leaders are still pushing Wall Street’s unpopular and discredited economic platform.

Recent speeches by former President Bill Clinton and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer showed that Wall Street continues to hold considerable sway in their party, despite the fact that its austerity agenda has failed. Its “deficits over growth” ideology has wounded both Europe and the United States. To hear Clinton and Hoyer speak, you’d think we’d learned nothing from the economic experience of the last five years.

It Saves Millions To Simply Give Homeless People A Place To Live

By Scott Keyes on March 24, 2014 at 1:09 pm

It is cheaper to give homeless people a home than it is to leave them on the streets.

That’s not just the opinion of advocates working to end homelessness, nor is it the opinion of homeless people themselves. It is a fact that has been borne out by studies across the country, from Florida to Colorado and beyond.

The latest analysis to back up this fact comes out of Charlotte, where researchers from the University of North Carolina Charlotte examined a recently constructed apartment complex that was oriented towards homeless people.

Paul Krugman: Redefining Conservatism in the US

Here's a term we really need: Center-Right In Name Only.

John Sides at The Monkey Cage - a political science blog from The Washington Post that you should be reading - recently took on the often-repeated claim that the United States is a center-right nation, which is mainly based on polls showing that many more Americans identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals. Mr. Sides, in a post published on March 6, pointed out that if you ask people about their position on issues, as opposed to how they label themselves, the picture is reversed: "Looked at this way, almost 30 percent of Americans are 'consistent liberals' - people who call themselves liberals and have liberal politics," Mr. Sides, a political-science professor, wrote. "Only 15 percent are 'consistent conservatives' - people who call themselves conservative and have conservative politics. Nearly 30 percent are people who identify as conservative but actually express liberal views. The United States appears to be a center-right nation in name only."

Dave Dayen: The Next Financial Crisis Looms

Thanks to bank misconduct, odds are that trouble will present itself again soon. And this is what it will look like

Bloomberg financial reporter Bob Ivry has written an entertaining new book, “The Seven Sins of Wall Street,” which, instead of rehashing the various illegal activities that triggered the financial meltdown, focuses on what the banks have been up to since the crisis. Much of it would be familiar to readers of this space: the Bank of America whistle-blowers who were instructed to lie to homeowners, and received gift card bonuses for pushing them into foreclosure; the London Whale derivatives trade that lost JPMorgan Chase more than $6 billion; the investment banks who traded commodities while also operating physical commodity warehouses and facilities; and more. All the while, megabanks continue to enjoy subsidies on their borrowing costs because of the (accurate) perception that they will get bailed out in the event of any trouble.

The odds are that trouble will present itself soon.

Paul Krugman: Anger, Not Envy, Is Raising American's Ire

Suddenly, or so it seems, inequality has surged into public consciousness - and neither the 1 percent nor its reliable defenders seem to know how to cope.

Some of the reactions are crazy - "it's Kristallnacht," "they're coming to kill us" - and the craziness is quite widespread.

Notice how many billionaires, plus of course The Wall Street Journal, rallied around the venture capitalist Tom Perkins (who compared public criticism of the 1 percent to Nazi attacks on Jews in a letter to the editor of The Journal in January).

Ted Rall: Isn't It Time We Talk About the Skyrocketing Suicide Epidemic?

March 27, 2014  |  As I waited for the body of a man who jumped in front of my train [3] to be cleared from the tracks — less than a week before another train I was riding struck a suicide victim [4] — it occurred to me that (a) I should check whether suicide rates are increasing due to the bad economy (they are, especially among men in their 50s [5]), and that (b) talking about suicide is long overdue.

 

With modernity comes depression; depression sometimes leads to suicide [6]. And it’s a global phenomenon. “The World Health Organization reports that suicide rates have increased 60 percent over the past 50 years, most strikingly in the developing world, and that by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world,” T.M. Luhrmann wrote [7] in The New York Times recently.

Why are so many people opting out?

Rep. Alan Grayson: Money, Money, Everywhere

In an age of disparity, corporate wealth is far from an indicator of economic health. 

I read a number of finance-industry newsletters. I want to share with you a recent excerpt from one of them. Here it is:

$1,265,836,000,000.

This is the amount of cash that S&P 500 companies (excluding banks and other financial institutions) are currently sitting on. As of the beginning of the third quarter, the largest U.S. companies collectively held $1.27 trillion. That’s about 13.5 percent more than this time last year. ...

Where is this cash coming from? Well, borrowing accounts for some of it. But mostly, it’s that companies are simply generating cash faster than they are spending it.

Companies sitting on cash—the financial newsletter thinks that this is great news! Spectacular news! How nice—for them.

10 Poverty Myths, Busted

No, single moms aren't the problem. And neither are absentee dads.

—By Erika Eichelberger  |  March/April 2014 Issue

1. Single moms are the problem. Only 9 percent of low-income, urban moms have been single throughout their child's first five years. Thirty-five percent were married to, or in a relationship with, the child's father for that entire time.*

2. Absent dads are the problem. Sixty percent of low-income dads see at least one of their children daily. Another 16 percent see their children weekly.*

The Right's New 'Welfare Queens': The Middle Class

Posted by George Packer

Two weeks ago, I was invited to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on the subject of the economic problems of the middle class. Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, who became chairman of the committee in February, let me know that he wanted someone to bring news from outside Washington to the hearing. He wanted me to tell a few of the stories about hard-pressed Americans from my book “The Unwinding,” to help him steer the committee’s agenda in a new direction. This isn’t the sort of request I regularly receive, so I said yes.

There were four other panelists that Thursday morning at the committee-room table in the Dirksen Senate Office Building: the chief economist of the small-business lobby; the director of the left-leaning Tax Policy Center; an economist from a Chicago financial-services firm; and Lawrence Lindsey, who was a top economic adviser to George W. Bush and an architect of the huge 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and is now a consultant in Washington. Looking down from the dais were Wyden and the committee’s ranking Republican, Orrin Hatch, of Utah, along with a handful of other committee members who were present at various points during the hearing: the Republicans Charles Grassley, of Iowa, and John Thune, of South Dakota, as well as the Democrats Debbie Stabenow, of Michigan; Sherrod Brown, of Ohio; and Michael Bennet, of Colorado.

Overwhelming Evidence that Half of America is In or Near Poverty

By Paul Buchheit

March 23, 2014  |  The Charles Koch Foundation recently released a commercial [3] that ranked [4] a near-poverty-level $34,000 family among the Top 1% of poor people in the world. Bud Konheim, CEO and co-founder of fashion company Nicole Miller, concurred [5]: "The guy that's making, oh my God, he's making $35,000 a year, why don't we try that out in India or some countries we can't even name. China, anyplace, the guy is wealthy."

Comments like these are condescending and self-righteous. They display an ignorance of the needs of lower-income and middle-income families in America. The costs of food and housing and education and health care and transportation and child care and taxes have been well-defined by organizations such as the Economic Policy Institute [6], which calculated that a U.S. family of three would require an average of about $48,000 a year to meet basic needs; and by the Working Poor Families Project [7], which estimates the income required for basic needs for a family of four at about $45,000. The median household income [8] is $51,000.

Thomas Frank: The Hope Diet: Would the Tea Party fall for this?

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both peddled a diet of hope. It's time for Democrats to demand more of a sure thing

It is a peculiar coincidence that the last two Democratic presidents, men unusually anxious to compromise and capitulate, have also chosen to market themselves as homegrown philosophers. More curious still, both have presented their hard-won insights in the great American tradition of positive thinking. Like so many aphorists-on-the-make before them, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama entered the marketplace of ideas selling tidy homilies on the very same concept: Hope.

Then again, perhaps there is something more to all this than coincidence. Maybe this high-minded creed and these two presidents’ fecklessness actually complement and explain one another. Maybe “hope” is the ideal philosophical doctrine for a party determined to dump its old constituents and chart a brave new course in a marketized world. As a slogan, “hope” is vague and ethereal—as opposed to former, more earthly Democratic concepts like “shared prosperity” and “equal rights for all”—but perhaps that is what makes it the consummate brand identity for a party that so often triangulates away the concerns of its rank and file.

Free Market Groups: The Invisible Hand in the Hobby Lobby Case

by Sharona Coutts, Director of Investigations and Research, RH Reality Check
March 24, 2014 - 9:41 am

In the world of big lawsuits, they call it “air traffic control”: One person, or organization, becomes the point person for recruiting plaintiffs, coordinating multiple legal briefs, and ensuring that everyone submits their filings on time.

And in the landmark case going before the U.S. Supreme Court this Tuesday, challenging the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act—the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases, which are being heard together—the role of air traffic controller was played by some of the nation’s most radical anti-choice and free-market groups on the political right, according to emails obtained by RH Reality Check through public records requests.

Academia Under the Influence

Sunday, 23 March 2014 00:00  
By Eleanor J Bader, Truthout | Book Review 

While we may tend to romanticize universities as bastions of free thought and intellectual rigor, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira's new book, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, demonstrates their subjection to the same ideological underpinnings as the general body politic.

The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira University of Minnesota Press, 400 pages, $29.95.

For the past 10 years, I've taught English at a large, public community college in Brooklyn, New York. Most of my students are the first in their families to attend a university - and while some are disaffected, the majority are engaged and eager, hopeful that the promise of a higher education will open doors and provide them with a stable future. They're also largely immigrants, and it is not uncommon for 28 students from 20 countries to find themselves sitting side-by-side in a classroom, arguing and debating about the meaning of a particular text.

But if it sounds idyllic, don't worry - it's not. As tuition increases, students are often forced to take leaves of absence, causing a program that might be completed in two years to stretch into five or six. Not surprisingly, some students get discouraged and vanish. Others attempt to juggle full-time work with evening or weekend classes, only to eventually learn that an associate's degree is far less useful than they had initially imagined. Even more troubling, as their exhaustion mounts, few are able to muster the energy to protest soaring fees or inadequate financial aid packages. And my school is not unique.

Revealed: Apple and Google’s wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees

By Mark Ames
On March 22, 2014

Back in January, I wrote about “The Techtopus” — an illegal agreement between seven tech giants, including Apple, Google, and Intel, to suppress wages for tens of thousands of tech employees. The agreement prompted a Department of Justice investigation, resulting in a settlement in which the companies agreed to curb their restricting hiring deals. The same companies were then hit with a civil suit by employees affected by the agreements.

This week, as the final summary judgement for the resulting class action suit looms, and several of the companies mentioned (Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm) scramble to settle out of court, Pando has obtained court documents (embedded below) which show shocking evidence of a much larger conspiracy, reaching far beyond Silicon Valley.

Did Hyman Minsky find the secret behind financial crashes?

American economist Hyman Minsky, who died in 1996, grew up during the Great Depression, an event which shaped his views and set him on a crusade to explain how it happened and how a repeat could be prevented, writes Duncan Weldon.

Minsky spent his life on the margins of economics but his ideas suddenly gained currency with the 2007-08 financial crisis. To many, it seemed to offer one of the most plausible accounts of why it had happened.

His long out-of-print books were suddenly in high demand with copies changing hands for hundreds of dollars - not bad for densely written tomes with titles like Stabilizing an Unstable Economy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind

How Jonathan Chait and other Obama-era liberals misunderstand the role of white supremacy in America's history and present

Among opinion writers, Jonathan Chait is outranked in my esteem only by Hendrik Hertzberg. This lovely takedown of Robert Johnson is a classic of the genre, one I studied incessantly when I was sharpening my own sword. The sharpening never ends. With that in mind, it is a pleasure to engage Chait in the discussion over President Obama, racism, culture, and personal responsibility. It's good to debate a writer of such clarity—even when that clarity has failed him.

On y va.

Chait argues that I've conflated Paul Ryan's view of black poverty with Barack Obama's. He is correct. I should have spent more time disentangling these two notions, and illuminating their common roots—the notion that black culture is part of the problem. I have tried to do this disentangling in the past. I am sorry I did not do it in this instance and will attempt to do so now.

Paul Krugman: America's Taxation Tradition

As inequality has become an increasingly prominent issue in American discourse, there has been furious pushback from the right. Some conservatives argue that focusing on inequality is unwise, that taxing high incomes will cripple economic growth. Some argue that it’s unfair, that people should be allowed to keep what they earn. And some argue that it’s un-American — that we’ve always celebrated
those who achieve wealth, and that it violates our national tradition to suggest that some people control too large a share of the wealth.

And they’re right. No true American would say this: “The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” and follow that statement with a call for “a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes ... increasing rapidly in
amount with the size of the estate.”

US University Science: The Shopping Mall Model

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Lambert Strether
 
Lambert here: The comparison is hardly fair to shopping malls. Many retail positions pay just as well or better than adjunct professorships.

By Paula Stephan, Professor of Economics at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University; Research Associate, NBER. Originally published at VoxEU.

Universities have relied heavily on federal funds for research for many years. Yet, since 2005, federal funds have been flat in real terms, with the exception of funds received through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). More importantly, the hope for a substantial increase in federal funds is dim. At the same time, public research institutions such as the University of California Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin, face the added challenge that funds from state governments for higher education have been flat or have declined in recent years and are likely to remain low.

The economic rationale for governments to invest in university research was laid out more than 60 years ago by Kenneth Arrow (1962) and Richard Nelson (1959). It rests on the understanding that knowledge has properties of what economists call a public good in the sense that once research findings are made public it is difficult to exclude others from their use, and that research findings are not depleted when shared. Economists have gone to considerable lengths to show that, if left to the private sector, society would underinvest in public goods. An additional rationale is that research, especially basic research, is inherently risky and society has a tendency to underinvest in risky research without government support (Arrow 1962). Last but not least is the role that research plays in economic growth (Romer 1990).

Paul Krugman: The Timidity Trap

There don’t seem to be any major economic crises underway right this moment, and policy makers in many places are patting themselves on the back. In Europe, for example, they’re crowing about Spain’s recovery: the country seems set to grow at least twice as fast this year as previously forecast.

Unfortunately, that means growth of 1 percent, versus 0.5 percent, in a deeply depressed economy with 55 percent youth unemployment. The fact that this can be considered good news just goes to show how accustomed we’ve grown to terrible economic conditions. We’re doing worse than anyone could have imagined a few years ago, yet people seem increasingly to be accepting this miserable situation as the new normal.

Robert Strauss's Watergate Secret

March 20, 2014

Special Report: Robert Strauss, who died Wednesday, was a Democratic powerbroker who thrived in the age of Nixon, Reagan and Bush-41. But an enduring Watergate mystery is whether Strauss earned his GOP spurs by secretly helping the Republicans in the spy scandal, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Longtime Washington powerbroker Robert Strauss, who died Wednesday at the age of 95, took to the grave the answer to one of the most provocative Watergate mysteries, whether he was, in effect, a Republican mole serving in the highest ranks of the Democratic Party.

In his later years, Strauss rebuffed my requests for an interview on this topic, but it never seemed likely that he would tell the full truth anyway, answering questions about whether his close collaboration with senior Republicans in the early 1970s was just personal or whether he was privately helping them undermine Democratic election prospects in 1972 and then trying to shut down the Watergate investigation in 1973-74.