Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse

Chris Lehmann

By any reasonable measure, the neoliberal dream lies in tatters. In 2008 poorly regulated financial markets yielded a world-historic financial collapse. One generation, weaned on reveries of home ownership as the coveted badge of economic independence and old-fashioned American striving, has been plunged into foreclosure, bankruptcy, and worse. And a successor generation of aspiring college students is now discovering that their equally toxic student-loan dossiers are condemning them to lifetimes of debt. Both before and after 2008, ours has been an economic order that, largely designed to reward paper speculation and penalize work, produces neither significant job growth nor wages that keep pace with productivity. Meanwhile, the only feints at resurrecting our nation’s crumbling civic life that have gained any traction are putatively market-based reforms in education, transportation, health care, and environmental policy, which have been, reliably as ever, riddled with corruption, fraud, incompetence, and (at best) inefficiency. The Grand Guignol of deregulation continues apace.

The Oligarchy Doesn't Care About Democracy, Just Rigged Markets

Monday, 07 April 2014 10:40
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Author Interview

In All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power, Wall Street journalist (and former Goldman Sachs executive) Nomi Prins writes a painstakingly researched history of the financial industry's collusion with the White House to create a self-serving United States financial policy. Get the book directly from Truthout by clicking here.

Through thorough research and incisive writing, Nomi Prins has revealed how tightly Wall Street and White House policy have been aligned for more than a century. This is a difficult relationship to nail down, but Prins - as one reviewer noted - "followed the money." As a result, All the Presidents' Bankers is a must-read blockbuster of a book that names names and nails down the reality that US domestic and foreign policy is largely driven by the interests of economic hegemony and consolidated wealth.

Prins, a former executive on Wall Street and now an author and journalist, knew where to find the evidence - and it is startling to read the details.

In an extensive interview with Truthout, Prins discusses "the hidden alliances that drive Amercan power."

Disappearing Acts

George Scialabba
April 7, 2014

Economics is full of wonderful concepts. One of my favorites is “effective demand.” Like a magic wand, it can make billions of people disappear.

Suppose a farm can produce 100 pounds of food and there are 100 very hungry people who’d like to eat it but have no money. You might think that there’s a demand for 100 pounds of food. Silly you! There’s a need for the food, of course. But this is civilization: you can’t demand something just because you need it. If food costs a dollar a pound and each person has ten cents, then there’s ten dollars of effective demand. If each person has 25 cents, there’s $25 of effective demand. In that case, any sensible farmer-capitalist would produce only ten or twenty-five pounds of food. Supply has to equal demand, and demand equals need plus money.

Obama is deporting more immigrants than any president in history: explained

Updated by Dara Lind on April 9, 2014, 7:00 a.m. ET

President Obama is going to leave the White House having deported more immigrants than any other president in history — at least 2 million deportations to date. And, not surprisingly, many Latinos and immigrant-rights advocates who supported him are angry about it.

In March, the head of the National Council of La Raza called Obama the "deporter-in-chief" — an epithet that gets thrown around a lot in certain circles these days. On the flip side, there are plenty of critics who say that Obama isn't deporting enough people. And the administration has added to the confusion by alternately puffing up and downplaying its record.

Dark Markets May Be More Harmful Than High-Frequency Trading

Mon, Apr 7 2014

(This story has been corrected to fix spelling of name to Preece from Pierce inparagraphs 18, 27, and 30.)

By John McCrank

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fears that high-speed traders have been rigging the U.S. stock market went mainstream last week thanks to allegations in a book by financial author Michael Lewis, but there may be a more serious threat to investors: the increasing amount of trading that happens outside of exchanges.

Some former regulators and academics say so much trading is now happening away from exchanges that publicly quoted prices for stocks on exchanges may no longer properly reflect where the market is. And this problem could cost investors far more money than any shenanigans related to high frequency trading.

Thom Hartmann: There Has Not Been a Legitimately Elected Republican President Since Dwight Eisenhower

Tuesday, 08 April 2014 13:13
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview

Thom Hartmann, of course, appears on Truthout at least five days a week, and is also seen regularly in videos of his television program, "The Big Picture," on BuzzFlash at Truthout.

He talked with Truthout about his latest book The Crash of 2016, a discussion that included Hartmann's wide-ranging counterpoints to a corporate media of conventional wisdom, including the notion that many US CEOs are sociopaths.

The following is an excerpt from that extended interview:

MARK KARLIN: You use the term economic royalists often in the book to define the oligarchy in the US. How would you define the term?

THOM HARTMANN: The economic royalists are the people who have enough wealth and income that they have the ability to influence public policy in a very significant and meaningful way. The way that I use to define those people in the book is the multimillionaire and billionaire classes who are using their wealth to advance their own interests politically, but sometimes just as an economic weapon to suck up money from the rest of the population.

Richard Eskow: Invisible Social Security Cuts: Now You See Them, Now You Don’t

The unseen hand of antigovernment ideology can be found everywhere nowadays – even in your mailbox. The proof is in what you won’t find there, like your annual statement of earned Social Security benefits.

The government stopped mailing those out in 2011.

It’s also getting a lot harder to find Social Security field offices, or to find someone to pick up the phone, as the Social Security Administration enters into yet more rounds of steep budget cuts.

The Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act. What Happened Next in These 8 States Will Not Shock You.

When his court weakened the civil-rights-era law last year, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that "our country has changed." We crunched the numbers. He was wrong.

—By Dana Liebelson | Tue Apr. 8, 2014 3:00 AM PDT

When the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn a key section of the Voting Rights Act last June, Justice Ruth Ginsburg warned that getting rid of the measure was like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." The 1965 law required that lawmakers in states with a history of discriminating against minority voters get federal permission before changing voting rules. Now that the Supreme Court has invalidated this requirement, GOP lawmakers across the United States are running buck wild with new voting restrictions.

Before the Shelby County v. Holder decision came down on June 25, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required federal review of new voting rules in 15 states, most of them in the South. (In a few of these states, only specific counties or townships were covered.) Chief Justice John Roberts voted to gut the Voting Rights Act on the basis that "our country has changed," and that blanket federal protection wasn't needed to stop discrimination. But the country hasn't changed as much as he may think.

Corporate Clout Chips Away at Organic Standards

The Organic Consumers Association has a long history of defending the integrity of organic standards.

Last September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), under pressure from corporate interests represented by the Organic Trade Association, made our job harder.

They also made it more important than ever for consumers to do their homework, even when buying USDA certified organic products.

Thinking About a Majority-Minority Shift Leads to More Conservative Views

Facing the prospect of racial minority groups becoming the overall majority in the United States leads White Americans to lean more toward the conservative end of the political spectrum, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The findings suggest that increased diversity in the United States could actually lead to a wider partisan divide, with more White Americans expressing support for conservative policies.

Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability

Under the regime of neoliberalism, especially in the United States, war has become an extension of politics as almost all aspects of society have been transformed into a combat zone. Americans now live in a society in which almost everyone is spied on, considered a potential terrorist, and subject to a mode of state and corporate lawlessness in which the arrogance of power knows no limits. The state of exception has become normalized. Moreover, as society becomes increasingly militarized and political concessions become relics of a long-abandoned welfare state hollowed out to serve the interest of global markets, the collective sense of ethical imagination and social responsibility toward those who are vulnerable or in need of care is now viewed as a scourge or pathology.

What has emerged in this new historical conjuncture is an intensification of the practice of disposability in which more and more individuals and groups are now considered excess, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance and incarceration. Moreover, this politics of disappearance has been strengthened by a fundamental intensification of increasing depoliticization, conducted largely through new modes of spying and the smothering, if not all-embracing, market-driven power of commodification and consumption.

Greed Is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous Idea

Not long ago, the pursuit of commercial self-interest was largely reviled. How did we come to accept it?

John Paul Rollert Apr 7 2014, 11:32 AM ET

Among MBA students, few words provoke greater consternation than “greed.” Wonder aloud in a classroom whether some practice might fairly be described as greedy, and students don’t know whether to stick up for the Invisible Hand or seek absolution. Most, by turns, do a little of both.

Such reactions shouldn’t be surprising. Greed has always been the hobgoblin of capitalism, the mischief it makes a canker on the faith of capitalists. These students' troubled consciences are not the result of doubts about the efficacy of free markets, but of the centuries of moral reform that was required to make those markets as free as they are.

Feelings of failure, not violent content, foster aggression in video gamers

Aggressive behavior linked to players' experiences

The disturbing imagery or violent storylines of videos games like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto are often accused of fostering feelings of aggression in players. But a new study shows hostile behavior is linked to gamers' experiences of failure and frustration during play—not to a game's violent content.

The study is the first to look at the player's psychological experience with video games instead of focusing solely on its content. Researchers found that failure to master a game and its controls led to frustration and aggression, regardless of whether the game was violent or not. The findings of the study were published online in the March edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Chris Hedges: The Crucible of Iraq

“The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq,” by Hassan Blasim, is the most important book to come out of the Iraq War. Blasim, whom I met with last week in Princeton, N.J., has a faultless eye for revealing detail, a ribald black humor and a psychological brilliance that makes every story in his book a depth charge. In this collection of short stories he explores through fiction the culture of violence unleashed under the bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and exacerbated by an American occupation that has destroyed the damaged social cohesion and civil life that survived Saddam’s regime. His prose, courtesy of a brilliant translation by Jonathan Wright, is lyrical, taut and riveting.

Militarism and violence are diseases. It does not matter under what guise they appear. Renegade jihadists, Shiite death squads, Sunni militias, Saddam’s Baathists and secret police, Kurdish Peshmerga rebels, al-Qaida cells, gangs of kidnappers and the U.S. Army 101st Airborne are all infected with the same virus. And it is a virus Blasim fearlessly inspects. By the end of this short-story collection the reader grasps, in a way no soldier’s memoir or journalistic account from Iraq can explicate, the crucible of war and the unmitigated horror of violence itself. The book is a masterpiece.

Rebecca Solnit: Call climate change what it is: violence

Social unrest and famine, superstorms and droughts. Places, species and human beings – none will be spared. Welcome to Occupy Earth

Monday 7 April 2014 08.28 EDT

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you're the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.

Paul Krugman: Oligarchs and Money

Econonerds eagerly await each new edition of the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook. Never mind the forecasts, what we’re waiting for are the analytical chapters, which are always interesting and even provocative. This latest report is no exception. In particular, Chapter 3 — although billed as an analysis of trends in real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates — in effect makes a compelling case for raising inflation targets above 2 percent, the current norm in advanced countries.

This conclusion fits in with other I.M.F. research. Last month the fund’s blog — yes, it has one — discussed the problems created by “lowflation,” which is nearly as destructive as outright deflation. An earlier edition of the World Economic Outlook analyzed historical experience with high debt, and found that countries that were willing to let inflation erode their debt — including the United States — fared much better than those, like Britain after World War I, that clung to monetary and fiscal orthodoxy.

US schoolchildren exposed to arsenic in well water have lower IQ scores

In Maine study, rates of contamination exceed WHO and EPA guidelines

NEW YORK (April 7, 2014)—A study by researchers at Columbia University reports that schoolchildren from three school districts in Maine exposed to arsenic in drinking water experienced declines in child intelligence. While earlier studies conducted by the researchers in South Asia, and Bangladesh in particular, showed that exposure to arsenic in drinking water is negatively associated with child intelligence, this is the first study to examine intelligence against individual water arsenic exposures in the U.S. Findings are reported online in the journal, Environmental Health.

The research team, led by Joseph Graziano, PhD, professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, assessed 272 children in grades 3-5, who were, on average, 10 years old, from three school districts in Maine where household wells are the predominant source for drinking water and cooking. The Augusta area in particular was studied because of earlier research indicating higher than normal exposures.

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, No-Fly-List America

Posted on April 6, 2014, Printed on April 12, 2014
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175827/

Here’s what the president said back in June 2013, while reassuring the American people about the National Security Agency’s collection of their phone metadata: “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.”

And indeed, the NSA was analyzing the metadata it was collecting from all of us. Only one small problem (shades of the Bush era): it was also listening in and reading, too. To be exact, without warrants and using a “backdoor loophole” in the law, the agency repeatedly plunged into massive databases that, while gathering emails and phone calls from "foreign targets," swept up prodigious numbers of American ones in the process. (Evidently, the CIA and the FBI were using similar backdoors to similar ends.) It’s true that, strictly speaking, those calls and emails were being collected by a different program than the one the president was referring to; so, if you’re a stickler for details, he didn’t exactly, officially lie. In any case, it’s nothing you or I should really worry our little heads about, not when it turns out that whatever was done was perfectly "legal."

8 Things Mainstream Media Doesn't Have the Courage to Tell You

By Paul Buchheit

April 6, 2014 | The following are all relevant, fact-based issues, the "hard news" stories that the media has a responsibility to report. But the business-oriented press generally avoids them.

1. U.S. Wealth Up $34 Trillion Since Recession. 93% of You Got Almost None of It.
That's an average of $100,000 for every American. But the people who already own most of the stocks took almost all of it. For them, the average gain was well over a million dollars -- tax-free as long as they don't cash it in. Details available here [3].

2. Eight Rich Americans Made More Than 3.6 Million Minimum Wage Workers
A recent report [4] stated that no full-time minimum wage worker in the U.S. can afford a one-bedroom or two-bedroom rental at fair market rent. There are 3.6 million [5] such workers, and their total (combined) 2013 earnings is less than the 2013 stock market gains of just eight Americans [6], all of whom take [7] more than their share from society: the four Waltons, the two Kochs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett.

David Dayen: Wall Street’s Subsidy Safety Net

Studies by the Federal Reserve and IMF say big banks are getting better borrowing deals because of the implicit promise of government bailouts.

Financial reformers in both parties have insisted for years that the largest banks remain too big to fail, and that Dodd-Frank did not cleanse the system of this reality. You can mark down this week as the moment that this morphed into conventional wisdom. In successive reports, two of the more small-c conservative economic institutions, without any history of agitating for financial reform—the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund—both agreed that mega-banks, in America and abroad, enjoy a lower cost of borrowing than their competitors, based on the perception that governments will bail them out if they run into trouble. This advantage effectively works as a government subsidy for the largest banks, allowing them to take additional risks and threaten another economic meltdown. With institutional players like the Fed and the IMF both identifying the same problem, Wall Street grows more and more isolated, setting up the possibility of true reform.

How Paul Ryan's Budget Paves the Way for Another Financial Crisis

George Zornick on April 2, 2014 - 12:28 PM ET

Representative Paul Ryan released his budget blueprint this week, and fans of his work were no doubt pleased: it called for $5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, focused heavily on domestic, non-military spending. Safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps would face savage cuts, and the Affordable Health Care Act would be repealed entirely. Meanwhile, both corporate and individual tax rates would be lowered.

It is easy to make the case that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer under Ryan’s so-called “Path to Prosperity” plan: one needs only to look at the literally trillions cut from Medicaid and food stamps while the rich pay much less in taxes.

Revealed: Rahm Emanuel cuts public pensions, diverts money to benefit campaign donors

By David Sirota
On April 4, 2014

If you’ve read the financial news out of Chicago the last few weeks, you’ve probably heard that the city faces a major pension shortfall, supposedly because police officers, firefighters, teachers and other public workers are selfishly bleeding the city dry.

You’ve also probably heard that the only way investment banker-turned-mayor Rahm Emanuel can deal with the seemingly dire situation is to slash his public workers’ retirement benefits and to jack up property taxes on those who aren’t politically connected enough to have secured themselves special exemptions.