Deputies want to know why Tea Partiers got locked in MS courthouse where ballots counted

By Travis Gettys
Thursday, June 5, 2014 8:56 EDT

Authorities in Mississippi are trying to determine how three Tea Party officials wound up locked inside a courthouse hours after ballots were counted in an extremely tight Republican primary election.

Incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran and state Sen. Chris McDaniel will face off in a runoff election later this month after both candidates fell short of the 50 percent needed for victory.

The Tea Party challenger McDaniel received about 1,400 more votes than his rival.

But one of his top aides and two others associated with McDaniel’s campaign are under investigation by the Hinds County sheriff’s department after they were found locked inside the courthouse where votes were counted.

The Italian Disaster

Perry Anderson

Europe is ill. How seriously, and why, are matters not always easy to judge. But among the symptoms three are conspicuous, and inter-related. The first, and most familiar, is the degenerative drift of democracy across the continent, of which the structure of the EU is at once cause and consequence. The oligarchic cast of its constitutional arrangements, once conceived as provisional scaffolding for a popular sovereignty of supranational scale to come, has over time steadily hardened. Referendums are regularly overturned, if they cross the will of rulers. Voters whose views are scorned by elites shun the assembly that nominally represents them, turnout falling with each successive election. Bureaucrats who have never been elected police the budgets of national parliaments dispossessed even of spending powers. But the Union is not an excrescence on member states that might otherwise be healthy enough. It reflects, as much as it deepens, long-term trends within them. At national level, virtually everywhere, executives domesticate or manipulate legislatures with greater ease; parties lose members; voters lose belief that they count, as political choices narrow and promises of difference on the hustings dwindle or vanish in office.

With this generalised involution has come a pervasive corruption of the political class, a topic on which political science, talkative enough on what in the language of accountants is termed the democratic deficit of the Union, typically falls silent.

After Charges of Running a Price Fixing Cartel on Nasdaq in the 90s, Wall Street Banks Are Now Trading Their Own Stocks in Darkness

by Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2014

On July 17, 1996, the U.S. Justice Department charged the biggest names on Wall Street, names like Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and predecessor firms to Citigroup, with pricing fixing on the electronic stock market known as Nasdaq.

The Justice Department felt the firms were so untrustworthy to make a fair electronic marketplace that as part of its settlement it required that some traders’ phone calls be tape recorded when making Nasdaq trades and it gave itself the right to randomly show up and listen in on the traders’ calls. The scandal made headlines for years and revealed that the price fixing had been going on under the unwatchful eye of regulators for more than a decade.

Charles P. Pierce: The Bones of History

The Republic Of Ireland has been doing a very hard job over the past couple of decades of confronting the awful legacy of having its civil government so closely married to the institutional Roman Catholic Church. For years, the Church was given a free hand in running a great deal of what passed for educational and social-welfare policies in Ireland. The results were almost uniformly authoritarian and almost uniformly godawful, in every sense of that word. Over the past 20 years, the country has slowly, but steadily, made a project of telling the truth to itself about the atrocities that the civil government allowed to be perpetrated against its citizens by the institutional church. A remarkable number of these crimes against decency and humanity were conducted against the country's women, although the crimes of the Christian Brothers against boys and young men were no less horrendous, as were the crimes committed in Cork that were the subject of the Cloyne Report, which prompted this remarkable speech in Dail Eireann by Taoiseach Enda Kenny, which may be the clearest and most uncompromising statement of the importance of the separation of church and state produced since Madison's Memorial And Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. it was Irish women who took the brunt of the Church's vengeful indecencies.The country is still coming to grips with what it still owes the women who suffered the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries, the last of which closed only midway through the Clinton administration.

No Bull: Scientists Create Technology That Converts Cow Manure Into Clean Water

By Brandon Baker

June 4, 2014 | What’s clean about cow manure?

Absolutely nothing, unless researchers from Michigan State University [3] get their hands on it. Sounds gross, but they would be doing so to convert it into clean water [4]. Once the manure runs through the McLanahan Nutrient Separation System, the result is water clean enough for livestock to drink.

Is the Market Crazy? Treasurys Are Screaming Crisis While Stocks Yawn

By Pam Martens: June 2, 2014

One critical gauge of how fair and efficient a market is resides in the degree to which it reflects the composite wisdom of all participants. A rigged market, for example, reflects the composite wisdom of just those doing the rigging since they are privy to information that is not shared with all market players.

On March 30, bestselling author Michael Lewis appeared on 60 Minutes to summarize the findings in his newest book, Flash Boys, as follows: “stock market’s rigged.” Michael Lewis was talking about stock market manipulation by high frequency traders.

Obama's Flawed Emissions Proposal: Cap-and-Trade, ''Offsets'' Allow Plants to Pay to Pollute

Saturday, 07 June 2014 10:44
By Gaius Publius, AmericaBlog | Op-Ed

We recently mentioned that we expected Obama's new carbon emission rules to allow a lot of flexibility to carbon companies, include the implementation of "cap-and-trade" as a market-based "enforcement" mechanism.

I put "enforcement" in quotes above, because there's little force in most market-based systems for carbon emissions. Cap-and-trade works better (depending on the implementation) if the goal is to reduce pollution (like sulphur) by an industry you want to preserve (like coal-burning energy facilities). Cap-and-trade works terribly for an industry you want to destroy — like coal-burning energy facilities.

Cap-and-trade is a let-you-down-easy way to regulate, and it generally lets the regulated industry decide how easy.

Paul Krugman: Why Economists Worry About Population Growth

When the economist Alvin Hansen first proposed the concept of secular stagnation, he emphasized the role of slower population growth in depressing investment demand. (His warnings were made moot by the postwar baby boom.)

Modern discussions have returned to that emphasis: Japan's shrinking working-age population appears to be an important source of the country's problems, and the slowing population growth in Europe and the United States are important indicators that we may be entering a similar regime.

But whenever I raise these points, I get questions from people who ask why I don't regard slowing population growth as a good thing.

Chris Christie donor's property venture given $106m by state after law changed

• New Jersey awarded public subsidy to close friend of governor
• Amendments made to state law eased approval of tax break
• Paterson city mayor suggests inquiry into funding process

Jon Swaine in Paterson, New Jersey
theguardian.com, Monday 2 June 2014 12.01 EDT

Chris Christie’s New Jersey administration awarded a $105.6m public subsidy to a property venture involving a close friend and financial backer of the governor, after state law was amended to enable the project to qualify for the money.

The venture, in one of the state’s poorest cities, appears potentially lucrative for the friend, Jon Hanson, a wealthy real estate tycoon who headed the fundraising operations for Christie's election campaigns, chairs a policy commission for the governor, and is a longstanding Republican donor.

8 Things You Should Know About The Biggest Thing A President’s Ever Done On Climate Change

By Ryan Koronowski, June 2, 2014 at 11:09 am, Updated: June 2, 2014 at 11:14 am

On Monday morning, the Environmental Protection Agency released its proposed rule to limit the amount of carbon pollution that existing power plants can dump into the atmosphere. This is the most significant move President Obama has made to address the direct causes of climate change.

The Clean Air Act, passed by Congress in 1970 and amended in 1990, is finally getting to tackle carbon pollution from the nation’s 491 smoke-spewing coal power plants. Contrary to what fossil fuel advocates claim, though, it does not mean that EPA will be directly shutting down coal plants. Each state would have a broad menu of carbon-cutting options, including energy efficiency improvements, adding clean energy sources, implementing a carbon tax, or instituting or joining a cap-and-trade system.

ALEC’s sneaky new ally: Behind the 1 percent’s brazen new scheme to raise your taxes — and cut their own

Reality-challenged report tries to justify tax cuts for the rich, again. Here are the many places where it's wrong

Paul Rosenberg

You might think that tax cuts that pay for themselves had disappeared from rational discourse ages ago. If so, you’d be sadly mistaken. Instead, “rationality” has been redefined to make such tax cuts “true by definition,” at least in one economic model that’s playing an influential role in state-level politics. As gridlock in Washington intensifies, and midterm campaigning focuses attention on statewide races for senator and governor, a new report paints a damning picture of a free market economic model that’s been used to push failed conservative economic policies — especially on taxes — at the statewide level all across the nation.

By now, everyone’s heard of ALEC, the organization that helps push such policies in all 50 states, but the Beacon Hill Institute, a free-market think tank located at Suffolk University, is ALEC’s much less well-known co-conspirator, and its State Tax Analysis Modeling Program is no better known than any other economic modeling program. (Quick, name three of them!) But STAMP has come in for some fairly withering criticism over the years, and now the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has integrated that criticism with its own analysis to produce a devastatingly critical report on STAMP’s biases and failings.

Paul Krugman: On Inequality Denial

A while back I published an article titled “The Rich, the Right, and the Facts,” in which I described politically motivated efforts to deny the obvious — the sharp rise in U.S. inequality, especially at the very top of the income scale. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I found a lot of statistical malpractice in high places.

Nor will it surprise you to learn that nothing much has changed. Not only do the usual suspects continue to deny the obvious, but they keep rolling out the same discredited arguments: Inequality isn’t really rising; O.K., it’s rising, but it doesn’t matter because we have so much social mobility; anyway, it’s a good thing, and anyone who suggests that it’s a problem is a Marxist.

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images

By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS, MAY 31, 2014

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

Hedge funds: the mysterious power pulling strings on Wall Street

Hedge funds operate with nearly free rein and on murky ethical ground, bullying banks and recruiting the best – all to questionable results

Chris Arnade
theguardian.com, Sunday 1 June 2014 10.00 EDT

Hedge funds, those financial funds run by extraordinarily rich men, are going mainstream. Not content to be investments for just the super rich and super connected, they are starting to offer services to the average investor.

A good example comes this week from hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, who is famous on Wall Street but not yet a household name. He wants to start a small fund with a public listing to collect money from the public that he can then invest.

Ackman's new fund itself is not a hedge fund, but because he is a giant in the hedge-fund world, regular investors may be attracted to the mystique of a world that usually locks them out.

Don’t believe brokers, the government, or Piketty: Your property values won’t grow faster than your paycheck

By Amar Bhide | May 31, 2014

Thomas Piketty’s contentious thesis about ever-increasing inequality rests on the surprisingly conventional premise that aggregate wealth grows faster than overall income. Financiers and public officials have peddled virtually the same idea for decades in claiming that stocks and homes will always keep ahead of GNP and inflation.

Unfortunately, this is a fantasy.

The Dow-Jones index would have to close at about 2,000,000 on December 31, 2099, Warren Buffett has pointed out, just to match its 5.3% nominal gain of the 20th century (when it rose from 66 to 11,497).

Worse, because the belief that wealth grows faster than incomes is now so deeply embedded, it threatens our financial security, helps inflate bubbles, and by promoting a perverse redistribution of income, undermines the legitimacy of profit-seeking enterprise.

SEC Chair Mary Jo White Earns the Wrath of the Media for Refusing to Acknowledge High Frequency Trading Perks as a Crime

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 30, 2014

SEC Chair Mary Jo White’s untenable position that “markets are not rigged” is bringing unwelcome attention to the SEC’s dismal record on ensuring that stock exchanges operating in the U.S. are fair.

Since bestselling author, Michael Lewis, went on 60 Minutes on March 30 to detail, step by step, how the stock market is rigged – there has been a slow, but steady, realization that the woman President Obama sold to the American people as the white knight who would rein in abuses on Wall Street has failed miserably in that role.

It's simple. If we can't change our economic system, our number's up

It's the great taboo of our age – and the inability to discuss the pursuit of perpetual growth will prove humanity's undoing

George Monbiot
The Guardian, Tuesday 27 May 2014 13.38 EDT

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It's 2.5 billion billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

Seven Key Takeaways From Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Tax Plan for Growth and Equality

Taxes pay for roads, schools, firefighters, Coast Guard rescues and a thousand other goods and services we need for our society to function.

But taxes also shape our incentives. We tax things that we deem to be harmful — like tobacco and alcohol — and hand out tax breaks to encourage things we find beneficial, like research.

David Graeber: “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded”

David Graeber explains why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid

Thomas Frank

David Graeber is an American anthropologist who teaches at the London School of Economics. He is the author of the classic “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years” and played an important role in the launching of Occupy Wall Street. Last year, he wrote a much-discussed essay asking what happened to society’s old promise of more leisure time for workers; for the tasks that have come to occupy the hours that were once promised to be ours, Graeber invented the delicate and slightly obscure label, “bullshit jobs.”

I wanted to know exactly what he meant by that, and so we discussed the matter over email. The following conversation has been lightly edited.

Why the Oil Industry is Running Into Major Trouble

By Joe Costello

May 30, 2014  |  Over the last year, some deep truths about oil and the oil industry have begun to bubble to the surface. Not necessarily that they were ever hard to see, but they were easy to obscure and maybe more importantly, without too much effort, ignore. No longer. Spread across the oil companies' quarterly reports and the pronouncements of government agencies from the U.S. Energy Information Agency to the International Energy Agency are the hard facts that the era of cheap oil is over. It's impacting the U.S. and global economies and forcing a fundamental rethinking and restructuring of our economic activities and thinking.

Four decades ago, it was abruptly brought to the world's attention oil was a limited resource. This was of greatest concern for the United States, who at that point had built an economic infrastructure completely oil dependent. With only 5% of the global population, the U.S. consumed over 25% of the world's oil, a model neither sustainable or exportable to the vast majority of earth's population.