Savage capitalism is back – and it won’t tame itself

Back in the 90s, I used to get into arguments with Russian friends about capitalism. This was a time when most young eastern European intellectuals were avidly embracing everything associated with that particular economic system, even as the proletarian masses of their countries remained deeply suspicious. Whenever I’d remark on some criminal excess of the oligarchs and crooked politicians who were privatising their countries into their own pockets, they would simply shrug.

“If you look at America, there were all sorts of scams like that back in the 19th century with railroads and the like,” I remember one cheerful, bespectacled Russian twentysomething explaining to me. “We are still in the savage stage. It always takes a generation or two for capitalism to civilise itself.”

The Real Origins of the Religious Right

They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.

By RANDALL BALMER | May 27, 2014

One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.

Some of these anti-Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny.

Paul Krugman: Thomas Doubting Refuted

OK, Thomas Piketty has replied at length (pdf) to the attempted takedown of his work by Chris Giles, and done it very effectively. Essentially, Giles tried to compare apples and oranges, and the result was a lemon.

The central point here is one that’s familiar to anyone who works at length on inequality issues. We have two kinds of data on distribution of both income and wealth: surveys, in which people are asked what they make or own, and tax data.

Dean Baker: Why Is It So Acceptable to Lie to Promote Trade Deals?

It's not polite to use the "L" word here in Washington, but it's hard not to be more than a bit disgusted with the frequency with which trade pacts are sold as great engines of job creation and economic growth, when they clearly are not. The latest offender in this area is Bruce Ackerman, a Yale Law professor.

In a Washington Post column Ackerman called on President Obama to push for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP), which he described as, "opening the path for job-creating opportunities for workers on both continents." Really, what evidence does Professor Ackerman have for this assertion?

The Pentagon Wants to Tackle Climate Change -- But Congress Forbids It

Mark Strauss

As rising sea levels begin to engulf naval bases and extreme weather exacerbates conflicts worldwide, the military has sounded the alarm that climate change poses a long-term threat to U.S. security. The GOP response? It passed legislation that blocks funding for any Pentagon program that tackles climate change.

Just prior to Memorial Day weekend, the House of Representatives stuck an amendment onto the National Defense Authorization Act, which stipulates that:

None of the funds authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to implement the U.S. Global Change Research Program National Climate Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report, the United Nation's Agenda 21 sustainable development plan, or the May 2013 Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order.

In other words, don't even THINK about initiating programs to prepare for the potential impacts of climate change, either in the United States or abroad.

Documents Show the VA Debacle Began Under George W. Bush

The Bush administration was aware of the backlogs and secret waiting lists but failed to fix the problem.

—By Mariah Blake | Fri May 30, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

President Barack Obama and his administration have come under fire following a string of revelations about the huge backlogs of patients at Department of Veterans Affairs clinics and the underhanded tactics many of them used to hide the long wait times for medical care. As of Thursday evening, more than 100 lawmakers were calling on Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki to step down. But according to VA inspector general reports and other documents that have gone overlooked in the current firestorm, federal officials knew about the scheme at the heart of the scandal—falsifying VA records to cover up treatment delays—years before Obama became president. VA officials first learned of the problems in 2005, when George W. Bush was entering his second term, and the problems went unfixed for the duration of his presidency.

Paul Krugman: Cutting Back on Carbon

Next week the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce new rules designed to limit global warming. Although we don’t know the details yet, anti-environmental groups are already predicting vast costs and economic doom. Don’t believe them. Everything we know suggests that we can achieve large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at little cost to the economy.

Just ask the United States Chamber of Commerce.

O.K., that’s not the message the Chamber of Commerce was trying to deliver in the report it put out Wednesday. It clearly meant to convey the impression that the E.P.A.’s new rules would wreak havoc. But if you focus on the report’s content rather than its rhetoric, you discover that despite the chamber’s best efforts to spin things — as I’ll explain later, the report almost surely overstates the real cost of climate protection — the numbers are remarkably small.

Colleges are getting millions to steer students toward certain banks

By Danielle Douglas, May 27 at 12:39 pm

There are a few things I remember about my college ID: the goofy picture, class insignia and resident hall sticker on the card. One thing that crucial piece of plastic did not feature was a debit card function. Things have changed.

Now many student IDs double as debit or prepaid cards that come loaded with financial aid money. Colleges promote these hybrid cards as a convenient way for students to manage funds. But the terms of the accounts aren't always transparent, and some cards are riddled with fees. And what's in it for the schools? A few million dollars in payments from financial firms.

An Unexpected Reason Americans Are Overweight

By Martha Rosenberg

May 28, 2014  |  The documentary Fed Up,released in theaters on May 9, untangles the roots of obesity in America’s youth. Directed by Stephanie Soechtig and narrated by Katie Couric, Fed Up does not shrink from telling viewers how the government’s decades-long capitulation to Big Food and its lobbyists has fostered an epidemic of excess pounds. The national focus on diet, diet foods and exercise is not abating the obesity epidemic and actually making it worse, charges the film.

Examples of capitulation to Big Food are many in the film. In 1977, the McGovern Report warned about an impending obesity epidemic and suggested revised USDA guidelines to recommend people eat less foods high in fat and sugar. The egg, sugar and other Big Food industries, seeing a risk to profits, demanded that guidelines not say "eat less" of the offending foods but rather eat more "low-fat" foods. Ka-ching. They won over the objection of Sen. McGovern.

Categorising the poor

Posted by Frances Coppola on May 27th 2014

I have been meaning to write this post for a long time. It's the history of what we might call a “British disease” - the desire to judge people's motives rather than addressing their needs.

For centuries, successive British social systems have recognised that there are people who cannot work,whether because they are too young, too old, too ill or too infirm. These people need to be provided for by others – in the first instance families, but where family support networks break down, support must be provided by the wider community.

And for centuries, successive British social systems have also recognised the existence of people who are perfectly capable of working but are not doing so. Most of these people are unemployed due to economic circumstances. But a small minority are not working because they don't want to. And an even smaller minority pretend to be ill, infirm or unfortunate in order to claim benefits, often while working on the sly.

Paul Krugman: Free Markets Are Not Always the Best Medicine

Steven Levitt, in his new book, Think Like a Freak, with Stephen Dubner, thinks he was being smart by telling British Prime Minister David Cameron that he should scrap the National Health Service and let the magic of the marketplace deal with health care. Strangely, Mr. Cameron wasn't impressed.

I think there are several things going on here. One is a Levitt-specific, or maybe Freakonomics-specific, effect: the belief that a smart guy can waltz into any subject and that his shoot-from-the-hip assertions are as good as those of the experts. Remember, Mr. Levitt did this on climate in his last book, Super Freakonomics, delivering such brilliant judgments as the assertion that because solar panels are black (which they actually aren't), they'll absorb heat and make global warming worse.

Big Dairy Is Putting Microscopic Pieces of Metal in Your Food

—By Tom Philpott | Wed May 28, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

The rapid emergence of nanotechnology suggests that size does, indeed, matter. It turns out that if you break common substances like silver and nickel into really, really tiny particles—measured in nanometers, which are billionths of a meter—they behave in radically different ways. For example, regular silver, the stuff of fancy tableware, doesn't have any obvious place in sock production. But nano-size silver particles apparently do. According to boosters, when embedded in the fabric of socks, microscopic silver particles are "strongly antibacterial to a wide range of pathogens, absorb sweat, and by killing bacteria help eliminate unpleasant foot odor." (By most definitions, a particle qualifies as "nano" when it's 100 nanometers wide or less. By contrast, a human hair clocks in at about 80,000 nanometers in diameter.)

Dean Baker: The Wall Street Pension Scam

In recent years there has been a regular drum beat of news stories warning us about the enormous unfunded liabilities of state and local pension funds. Much of this has come from reports issued from well-endowed foundations, most notably the Pew and Arnold foundations who have a joint project on public pensions.

Ostensibly these foundations are simply providing information to allow the public to address a major policy problem. However, it is difficult not to ask whether these foundations may be pursuing a different agenda.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, What's Big Energy Smoking?

[...]

Let Them Eat Carbon

Like Big Tobacco, Big Energy Targets the Developing World for Future Profits

By Michael T. Klare

In the 1980s, encountering regulatory restrictions and public resistance to smoking in the United States, the giant tobacco companies came up with a particularly effective strategy for sustaining their profit levels: sell more cigarettes in the developing world, where demand was strong and anti-tobacco regulation weak or nonexistent. Now, the giant energy companies are taking a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook. As concern over climate change begins to lower the demand for fossil fuels in the United States and Europe, they are accelerating their sales to developing nations, where demand is strong and climate-control measures weak or nonexistent. That this will produce a colossal increase in climate-altering carbon emissions troubles them no more than the global spurt in smoking-related illnesses troubled the tobacco companies.

The tobacco industry’s shift from rich, developed nations to low- and middle-income countries has been well documented. “With tobacco use declining in wealthier countries, tobacco companies are spending tens of billions of dollars a year on advertising, marketing, and sponsorship, much of it to increase sales in... developing countries,” the New York Times noted in a 2008 editorial. To boost their sales, outfits like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco also brought their legal and financial clout to bear to block the implementation of anti-smoking regulations in such places. “They’re using litigation to threaten low- and middle-income countries,” Dr. Douglas Bettcher, head of the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO), told the Times.

Dean Baker: Don't buy the 'sharing economy' hype: Airbnb and Uber are facilitating rip-offs

Dodging taxes and regulation isn't just disruptive – it's bad for the economy

The "sharing economy" – typified by companies like Airbnb or Uber, both of which now have market capitalizations in the billions – is the latest fashion craze among business writers. But in their exuberance over the next big thing, many boosters have overlooked the reality that this new business model is largely based on evading regulations and breaking the law.

For the uninitiated, Airbnb is an internet-based service that allows people to rent out spare rooms to strangers for short stays. Uber is an internet taxi service that allows tens of thousands of people to answer ride requests with their own cars. There are hundreds of other such services that involve the renting or selling of everything from power tools to used suits and wedding dresses.

The Party's Over

Jan-Werner Müller

Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy by Peter Mair
Verso, 174 pp, £15.00, June 2013, ISBN 978 1 84467 324 7

The word ‘party’ – as in ‘political party’ – is in bad odour across the West, though for different reasons in different places. In the United States, everyone from the president down seems to lament the polarisation of politics and the rise of partisanship. But then hostility to parties is nothing new in American history; ‘if I could not go to heaven but with a party,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘I would not go there at all.’ Europeans tend to be less in thrall to the ideals of the one indivisible nation. They worry about the opposite problem: that the parties are all the same. So there’s a problem when parties have distinct ideologies, and there’s a problem when they don’t. What, then, do we really want from them?

Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void offers some disturbing answers to this question. We remain in the dark about the strategies Mair might have recommended to address the crisis of Western democracy – he died of a heart attack in 2011 before his book was finished – but his brilliance as a political scientist comes through clearly, as does the magnitude of the challenge posed by the passing of the ‘age of party democracy’.[*] Modern democracy, Mair tells us, simply cannot work without parties, so that when parties cease to play their proper role, democracy itself is at stake.

Why should tech people care about public pension scandals? I’m glad you asked…

By David Sirota
On May 24, 2014

This week, Pando published the latest in a series of investigations into the connection between political donations and which firms are handed lucrative public pensions contracts. As a result of our reporting, there is now an investigation underway in New Jersey, with the possibility of more to follow.

Still, while most agree that corruption around billion dollar public pension contracts is a story that someone ought to be covering, some readers have wondered whether that someone has to be us.

Dean Baker: Robert Samuelson Wants Us to Default on the National Debt

Thursday, 22 May 2014 04:36

Actually, he probably doesn't, but that would be the logic of his complaint (taken from Gene Steuerle) that "dead men" have established priorities for federal spending. After all, dead men made the decision to borrow the money that constitutes the debt, which thereby obligates the country to pay back the interest and principal.

But Samuelson's complaint is not about the interest and principal being paid back to rich people like Peter Peterson, Samuelson is upset about the money being paid out to ordinary workers (mostly retirees) for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Paul Krugman: Europe's Secret Success

SINTRA, Portugal — I’ll be spending the next couple of days at a forum sponsored by the European Central Bank whose de facto topic — whatever it may say on the program — will be the destructive monetary muddle caused by the Continent’s premature adoption of a single currency. What makes the story even sadder is that Europe’s financial and macroeconomic woes have overshadowed its remarkable, unheralded longer-term success in an area in which it used to lag: job creation.

What? You haven’t heard about that? Well, that’s not too surprising. European economies, France in particular, get very bad press in America. Our political discourse is dominated by reverse Robin-Hoodism — the belief that economic success depends on being nice to the rich, who won’t create jobs if they are heavily taxed, and nasty to ordinary workers, who won’t accept jobs unless they have no alternative. And according to this ideology, Europe — with its high taxes and generous welfare states — does everything wrong. So Europe’s economic system must be collapsing, and a lot of reporting simply states the postulated collapse as a fact.

Chris Hedges: Thomas Paine, Our Contemporary

Cornel West, Richard D. Wolff and I, along with moderator Laura Flanders, next Sunday will inaugurate “The Anatomy of Revolution,” a series of panel discussions focusing on modern revolutionary theorists. This first event will be part of a two-day conference in New York City sponsored by the Left Forum, and nine other discussions by West, Wolff and me will follow in other venues later this year.

Sunday’s event will be about Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason”—the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, works that established the standards by which rebellion is morally and legally permissible. We will ask whether the conditions for revolt set by Paine have been met with the rise of the corporate state. Should Paine’s call for the overthrow of British tyranny inspire our own call for revolution? And if it should, to echo Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?

An American Banking Revolution Awaits

Sunday, 25 May 2014 12:21
By William A Collins, OtherWords | Op-Ed

These tough economic times require creative alternatives to Wall Street, including more state banks.
Vermonters aren’t like the rest of us: They live in a small state with a flinty history and a legendary suspicion of outsiders.

That independent streak gained luster when 15 Vermont towns voted earlier this year to reinforce this independent tradition by approving a proposal to create a state bank.

The Vermont Economic Development Authority would get a license to do what private banks normally do — only with a mandate to serve the public interest no matter what.

Thomas Frank: The trigger warning we need: “College is a scam meant to perpetuate the 1 percent”

The trigger warning we need: "Borrowing to attend an American college may be hazardous to your dreams"

Is there a greater gift to the hack editorialist than the American university and its taste for sensitivity and euphemism? I doubt it. What wonderful opportunities it presents to wax indignant: Shrinking-violet rich kids in a lather about patriarchy; tenured professors scheming to drain the English language of its animal spirits. It’s a never-ending saga of privilege run amok, which of course allows our op-ed moralists to completely overlook the real scandal on campus—the corporatization of the university, a development that has plunged an entire generation into inescapable debt but that is somehow less visible to the columnist than the latest political-correctness fantasia.

But then comes a campus outrage so gloriously stupid, so fantastically self-negating, that the prof-bashers miss its true significance. Last week, The New York Times described a push at a handful of fancy colleges to require “trigger warnings” on class syllabi, which would alert sensitive students to reading materials that might cause them psychic distress. Note that “trigger warnings” have been actually applied at no college campus to any literary classic. The mere suggestion here and there is all that was needed to make this 100-proof pundit bait. One after another,the columnists piled on, mocking the hypersensitive and moaning about what kids these days have come to.

Dave Johnson: Let’s Stop Searching For A ‘Messiah’ And Build A Movement

After Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) gave her rousing speech at the New Populism Conference Thursday, she, of course, was asked if she was going to run for President. (The crowd was chanting “Run, Elizabeth, Run!”)

Warren replied, “I am not running for president,” which prompted one hopeful progressive to tweet, “Interesting choice of tense.”

Debating A Foreign Policy for the Left: article and response--Dictynna

A Foreign Policy for the Left

By Michael Walzer - Spring 2014

1. The Default Position

Is there such a thing as a leftist foreign policy? What are the characteristic views of the left about the world abroad? When have leftists, rightly or wrongly, defended the use of force? The arguments about what to do in Syria have led me to ask these questions, but I am after a more general answer, looking not only at the left as it is today but also at the historical left. The questions aren’t easy—first, because there have been, and there are, many lefts; and second, because left views about foreign policy change more often than left views about domestic society. Relative consistency is the mark of leftism at home, but that’s definitely not true abroad. Still, it’s possible to make out a kind of default position and then to describe the various alternative positions and the arguments for and against them. I want to join those arguments and suggest why they have gone well, sometimes, and very badly at other times.

The basic position appears early in recorded history. I first discovered it when reading the biblical prophets, who have often been an inspiration to Western leftists. The prophets argued that if the Israelites obeyed the divine commandments, stopped grinding the faces of the poor, and established a just society, they would live in their land forever, safe against Assyrian and Babylonian imperialism. Justice would bring security—and also serve a higher purpose: Israel would be “a light unto the nations.” All that was necessary was to sit still and shine.

A Foreign Policy for the Left? Defending the “Default Position”

By Eric Alterman, Jeff Faux, and Michael Walzer - May 8, 2014


In the following responses to Michael Walzer’s “A Foreign Policy for the Left”(Dissent,
Spring 2014), two interlocutors make the case for the “default position.”

Michael Walzer’s historical tour d’horizon of liberal and leftist attitudes about foreign policy is characteristically thoughtful and generous-minded, consistent with everything Walzer has published in Dissent and elsewhere during the past half-century. It is not, however, useful in the task of guiding us toward a foundation on which to construct an effective left-liberal foreign policy doctrine.

Like so many of those whose views he wishes to critique, Walzer misses the fundamental point about foreign policy: the world is what it is, not what we wish it to be. And it is the way it is in most places owing to centuries, if not millennia, of complex, often overlapping sociological, technological, economic, psychological, and of course cultural developments that have shaped regional history. In order to intervene effectively, therefore, in any one of these places, one must first understand and evaluate these forces before trying to calculate the likely effect of one’s intervention. Does this sound like something American politicians might be good at? I didn’t think so.

Government Treating Peaceful Left Activists Like Terrorists--Again

Paul Waldman, May 23, 2014

Our recent history is full of right-wing terrorism, but it's the harmless liberals who put law enforcement on high alert.

Both liberals and conservatives spend time arguing that the other side contains people who are nutty, highlighting extreme statements in an attempt to convince people that there's something fundamentally troubling about their opponents. There are many differences between the extreme right and the extreme left, perhaps most importantly that the extreme right has a much closer relationship with powerful Republicans than the extreme left has with powerful Democrats. When you find a crazy thing a liberal said, chances are it's an obscure professor somewhere, or a blogger with twelve readers, or a random person at a protest. The crazy people on the right, in contrast, are often influential media figures or even members of Congress, people with real influence and power.

Two articles about the press and government secrets--Dictynna

The Government Isn't Very Good at Deciding What to Keep Secret

So why do so many Americans insist that the state, not the press, should call the shots?
Conor Friedersdorf | May 23 2014, 8:00 AM ET

The U.S. government routinely tries to hide its unlawful behavior. It hides evidence of its incompetence too. That's a matter of historical record, not an opinion. Exposing government misbehavior sometimes requires publishing classified documents—take the Pentagon Papers or the Bush Administration's secret wiretaps.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Kinsley declares, "The Snowden leaks were important—a legitimate scoop—and we might never have known about the N.S.A.'s lawbreaking if it hadn’t been for them." As he sees it, unauthorized disclosures of classified information typically benefit the public. "Most leaks from large bureaucracies are 'good' leaks," he writes. "No danger to national security, no harm to innocent people, information the public ought to have."

Why the Press Can Publish Any Classified Material It Likes

Justice Hugo Black explained it in his 1971 opinion in New York Times v. United States.
Conor Friedersdorf | May 23 2014, 11:17 AM ET

In 1971, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black set forth his views on the press and its ability to publish classified information whether the government likes it or not. He did so during debate about whether the New York Times and Washington Post could be stopped from publishing leaked, classified Vietnam War documents. His full opinion in New York Times v. United States is online, and here are his words slightly condensed, with my emphasis added throughout.

Black's words are important to consider in the debate over who ought to have the final say on whether secret information is revealed, which I wrote about elsewhere here today. Black was right.

No, David Brooks, we don’t need less democracy

By Matt O'Brien, May 20 at 5:02 pm

Conservatives have lost a few elections, and now some of them think democracy is broken.

Okay, this isn't exactly what they've said. But it's close enough. David Brooks, for one, thinks that we've become "neurotically democratic." That we need to pivot from our system of checks and balances to a system of "elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions to push populist reforms" if we're going to avoid being disrupted by innovative one-party states like China. In other words, Brooks says, "we need to become less democratic at the national level," so we can implement the kind of policies that Brooks likes.

The University and the Company Man

By Tressie McMillan Cottom - Spring 2014

The U.S. higher education crisis has been well documented. College is overpriced, over-valued, and ripe for disruption (preferably, for some critics, by the outcome-driven private sector). At the same time, many Americans are flailing in the post-recession economy. With rising income inequality, persistent long-term unemployment, and declining real wages, Americans are searching for purchase on shifting ground. Not so long ago, the social contract between workers, government, and employers made college a calculable bet. But when the social contract was broken and policymakers didn’t step in, the only prescription for insecurity was the product that had been built on the assumption of security. We built a university system for the way we worked. What happens to college when we work not just differently but for less? And what if the crisis in higher education is related to the broader failures that have left so many workers struggling?