Wikileaks Exposes Super Secret, Regulation-Gutting Financial Services Pact

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Yves Smith

Wikileaks published an April draft of a critical section of pending “trade” deal called the Trade in Services Agreement, which is being negotiated among 50 countries, including the US, the member nations of the EU, Australia, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Peru, South Korea, and Switzerland. TISA would liberalize, as in reduce the ability of nations to regulate, a large range of services.

The document that Wikileaks exposed on Thursday is a portion of the financial services section. It is clearly designed to serve the pet interests of big international players. This agreement is designed to institutionalize the current level of deregulation as a baseline and facilitate the introduction of new products, further ease the movement of funds, data, and key personnel, and facilitate cross-border acquisitions and other forms of market entry.

Digby: He blew it on Iraq, but makes sense now: Peter Beinart’s thoughtful lessons

If there's one Iraq war hawk worth listening to today, it's this one who's truly grappled with his mistake

If there is one Iraq war hawk who has properly grappled with his mistake it has to be Peter Beinart. In fact, he’s written entire books about his own — and America’s — moral failings and the need to confront them with a cold and unsparing honesty if it’s to face threats in the modern world. Indeed, if there’s one Iraq war hawk worth talking to about what’s happening in Iraq today, it’s probably Beinart simply for the fact that he’s one of the few who’s thought this issue through. So, it’s also worth considering his opinion that contrary to popular lefty opinion, the media should be willing to interview the Very Serious People (Paul Krugman’s shorthand for “experts” who never have to account for their failures) — as long as its members will agree to address their own responsibility for the situation.

WikiLeaks Reveals Global Trade Deal Kept More Secret Than the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Thursday, 19 June 2014 14:29
By Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report

The whistleblower and transparency website WikiLeaks published on Thursday the secret draft text of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, a controversial global trade agreement promoted by the United States and European Union that covers 50 countries and is opposed by global trade unions and anti-globalization activists.

Activists expect the TISA deal to promote privatization of public services in countries across the globe, and WikiLeaks said the secrecy surrounding the trade negotiations exceeds that of even the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) that has made headlines in the past year.

The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy

Posted by
Nafeez Ahmed Thursday 19 June 2014 07.30 EDT theguardian.com

The man who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods calls for re-invention of intelligence to re-engineer Earth

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.

With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.

Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.

Another Secret Pro-Corporate Trade Negotiation Is Leaked

Dave Johnson

Another secret trade deal has leaked to WikiLeaks and it looks as if it is one more effort to lock into law the interests of certain already-huge corporations above the interests of governments, their citizens and potentially competing businesses.

As with leaks from the secret Tran-Pacific Partnership negotiations, this leak shows that the largest corporations are working to bypass recent efforts by governments to rein them in by pushing through “trade” agreements that override their ability to write their own laws and regulations.

Paul Krugman: Serious Voices Drown Out Sensible Ones in Europe

I've just finished writing a review of Tim Geithner's new book Stress Test. One thing I didn't mention in it was something surprising and refreshing: Mr. Geithner makes fun of Simpson-Bowles syndrome!

"There was a lot of good policy in Simpson-Bowles," he writes, "including cuts in wasteful farm subsidies and increased infrastructure spending to boost growth, but the benefit cuts and tax reforms were pretty regressive and the health care savings very modest. Nevertheless, the plan would attain mythic status among Washington elites as a symbol of noble bipartisan seriousness."

Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops to Deceive Judges

By Kim Zetter, 06.19.14 | 9:04 pm

Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails.

At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect’s location from a “confidential source” rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.

A series of five emails (.pdf) written in April, 2009, were obtained today by the American Civil Liberties Union showing police officials discussing the deception. The organization has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with police departments throughout Florida seeking information about their use of stingrays.

Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

Neocons' Shocking Iraq Revisionism

By Eric Alterman

June 20, 2014 | In a column entitled “Bush’s toxic legacy in Iraq [3],” terrorism expert Peter Bergen writes about the origins of ISIS, “the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq.”

Bergen notes that, “One of George W. Bush’s most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship. If this wasn’t so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein’s men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.”

The ISIS Fiasco: It’s Really an Attack on Iran

For Once, Not a CIA Plot?

by MIKE WHITNEY

There’s something that doesn’t ring-true about the coverage of crisis in Iraq. Maybe it’s the way the media reiterates the same, tedious storyline over and over again with only the slightest changes in the narrative. For example, I was reading an article in the Financial Times by Council on Foreign Relations president, Richard Haass, where he says that Maliki’s military forces in Mosul “melted away”. Interestingly, the Haass op-ed was followed by a piece by David Gardener who used almost the very same language. He said the “army melts away.” So, I decided to thumb through the news a bit and see how many other journalists were stung by the “melted away” bug. And, as it happens, there were quite a few, including Politico, NBC News, News Sentinel, Global Post, the National Interest, ABC News etc. Now, the only way an unusual expression like that would pop up with such frequency would be if the authors were getting their talking points from a central authority. (which they probably do.) But the effect, of course, is the exact opposite than what the authors intend, that is, these cookie cutter stories leave readers scratching their heads and feeling like something fishy is going on.

The Big Money Behind California's Tenure Lawsuit

Thursday, 19 June 2014 00:00
By Yana Kunichoff, Truthout | News Analysis

On the surface, the ruling in the Vergara v. California lawsuit which effectively abolished tenure and fair hearings for misconduct in California on June 10 pitted nine mostly low-income, public school students, trying to use the power of the courts to patch up an education system they argued is failing them, against the state of California and two of its largest teachers unions.

The lawsuit, filed in May 2012 by a nonprofit called Students Matter, argued that five statutes of California's education code detailing legal protections for teachers, including tenure, made it difficult to fire incompetent teachers. According to the lawsuit, these educators were primarily concentrated in low-income schools. Two years after the suit was filed, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu ruled that the statutes setting forth a two-year review process for teachers to receive tenure and due process procedures prior to dismissal - among others - were unconstitutional.

But dig a little deeper, and a bevy of venture capitalists, charter investors and Obama administration officials invested in the education reform agenda materialize as part of the swirling, multimillion-dollar brew of the Vergara lawsuit.

Billionaires Behind the Attack on Public Education in California Tenure Suit

Sabrina Joy Stevens
June 17, 2014

As outspoken teachers are already finding out, what good are First Amendment rights if you have to choose between exercising them and paying your bills?

Last week, something happened in a Los Angeles courtroom that rocked the education policy world. A judge declared due process rights for teachers—commonly known as "tenure" unconstitutional in the state of California in the case Vergara v. California, so named for one of the several students named as plaintiffs.

Virtually everything about the Vergara trial is misleading, starting with the trial’s name. Though my heart goes out to the students whose district has likely not offered them anything close to the educational resources and opportunities they deserve, this trial has nothing to do with fixing what ails them. Indeed, some of the people bankrolling it, like billionaire Eli Broad, donated millions to a campaign against the Proposition 30 millionaires’ tax that passed as a ballot measure in 2012, and is designed to restore much needed funding to cash-strapped public schools. Then there’s billionaire David Welch.



Vergara v. California really ought to be known as the Welch trial, after the Silicon Valley tycoon whose “lawsuit in search of a district” finally found the one where these students reside, in the City of Los Angeles.

Why Big Oil is giving piles of money to the NRA

By Jim Meyer

Everybody needs one friend who, if things ever go south in a big way, will show up to help. And bring a gun. At least that’s what Big Oil thinks, and so it’s gone one better: It’s made friends with the guys who have all the guns — the NRA.

Is The House Ways And Means Committee Insider Trading?

By Greg Morcroft
on June 19 2014 7:50 AM

Wall Street and Washington don’t like each other all that much but they need each other, and investigations into their relationship rarely reach the level they’ve hit this week as federal prosecutors subpoenaed the powerful Ways and Means Committee and a congressional health care aide.

At issue is how a government decision about how it funds Medicare made it to a handful of stock traders who turned the news into profits ahead of the decision.

Paul Krugman: Does He Pass the Test?

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises
by Timothy F. Geithner
Crown

1.
Midway through Timothy Geithner’s Stress Test, the former treasury secretary describes a late-2008 conversation with the then president-elect. Obama “wanted to discuss what he should try to accomplish.” Geithner’s reply was that his accomplishment would be “preventing a second Great Depression.” And Obama shot back that he didn’t want to be defined by what he had prevented.

It’s an ironic tale for Geithner to be telling, although it’s not clear whether he himself realizes just how ironic. For Stress Test is meant to be a story of successful policy—but that success is defined not by what happened but by what didn’t. America did indeed manage to avoid a full replay of the Great Depression—an achievement for which Geithner implicitly claims much of the credit, and with some justification. We did not, however, avoid economic disaster. By any plausible accounting, we’ve lost trillions of dollars’ worth of goods and services that we could and should have produced; millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, and their dreams. Call it the Lesser Depression—not as bad as the 1930s, but still a terrible thing. Not to mention the disastrous consequences abroad.

Police Can Just Take Your Money, Car and Other Property — and Good Luck Getting It Back

By Aaron Cantú

June 18, 2014  |  Alda Gentile was driving back home to New York from Florida, after having viewed condos with her son and grandson ahead of a potential move. She had $11,000 in cash with her, which she brought in order to make a deposit on her new place. As she drove through Georgia, she was stopped for speeding, and upon hearing that she was carrying such a large sum of cash (which is legal, by the way), state troopers questioned her on the side of the road for a total of six hours. In the end she was sent on her way—without the cash, which the officers kept.

Gentile’s case is an extreme example, but such occurrences happen on a smaller, broader scale across the country every year. Civil asset forfeiture is one of those arcane statutes you never hear about until it screws you. It’s a legal fiction spun up hundreds of years ago to give the state the power to convict a person’s property of a crime, or at least, implicate its involvement in the committing of a crime. When that happened, the property was to be legally seized by the state.

Paul Krugman: Saving the Planet Won't Kill the Economy

Nate Silver got a lot of grief when he chose Roger Pielke Jr., of all people, to write about the environment for his new web site, FiveThirtyEight. Mr. Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado, is regarded among climate scientists as a concern troll - someone who pretends to be open-minded, but is actually committed to undermining the case for emissions limits any way he can.

But is this fair?

Well, I'm happy to report that Mr. Pielke recently wrote a letter to the editor of the Financial Times about the economics of emissions caps - something I know a fair bit about - that abundantly confirms his bad reputation.

Startling Medical Research Results Suggest Air Pollution Is Linked to Autism and Schizophrenia

By Cliff Weathers

June 17, 2014  |  A study recently released by University of Rochester researchers [3] indicates that air pollution exposure may have a negative impact on mental health and could possibly play a role in schizophrenia and autism. The university's study was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

The researchers found that air pollution causes inflammation in the brains of newly born mice, which damages the development of “white matter.” The same parts of the brain are known to be affected in humans exhibiting autism and schizophrenia traits. The university researchers say that when mice are exposed to extra fine particle air pollution in the first few weeks of life, they developed neurological abnormalities similar to those seen in humans with the two health disorders. The abnormalities were mostly found in male mice, which also corresponds to the high numbers of men and boys diagnosed with both schizophrenia and autism.

Secret Collaboration Between the Power of Force and the Pursuit of Profit

Wednesday, 18 June 2014 10:12
By Beatrice Edwards, Berrett-Koehler Publishers | Book Excerpt

CHAPTER 4

The Zombie Bill: The Corporate Security Campaign That Will Not Die

Reason to be afraid #4:

The government-corporate surveillance complex is consolidating. What has been a confidential but informal collaboration now seeks to legalize its special status.

July 9, 2012, was a scorcher in Washington, DC, with afternoon temperatures over 100 degrees, when an audience of about fifty think-tankers convened in a third-floor briefing room of the Senate's Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill. Then-Senator John Kyl sponsored the show, although he did not appear in person. He had invited the American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Economic Warfare Institute (EWI) to explore the topic of "Economic Warfare Subversions: Anticipating the Threat."

At the front of the room, under a swag of the heavy red draperies and the American flag, sat the panel. The lineup was peculiar. The speakers, waiting for the audience to settle in, included a number of very big names from the intelligence community, including General Michael Hayden, by this time the former director of both the CIA and the NSA; James Woolsey, former CIA director; and Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General for George W. Bush.

Cutting the Poor Out of Welfare

Thomas B. Edsall

Over the past three decades, Congress has conducted a major experiment in anti-poverty policy. Legislators have restructured benefits and tax breaks intended for the poor so that they penalize unmarried, unemployed parents — the modern-day version of the “undeserving poor.” At the same time, working parents, the aged and the disabled are getting larger benefits.

Legislative changes in three major programs have driven these shifts.

Democrats propose legislation that would force FCC to ban Internet fast lanes

Sen. Patrick Leahy and Rep. Doris Matsui were set to reveal bicameral legislation today

Sarah Gray

Today the Washington Post reported that Democratic lawmakers in both the Senate and House would unveil legislation aimed to prevent an Internet fast lane.

The proposed bill was introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif. It would require the FCC to use its authority to prevent the speeding up of some Internet entities at the expense of others. For example, speeding up a streaming video service at the expense of another Web service.

Meet the Billionaire Brothers You Never Heard of Who Fund the Religious Right

Peter Montgomery
June 13, 2014

The Wilks brothers, whose fortune comes from fracking, give tens of millions to right-wing groups and anti-choice "pregnancy centers," anti-LGBT groups, and organizations affiliated with ALEC.
Last June, presidential hopefuls Rand Paul and Ted Cruz traveled to Iowa for an event convened by David Lane, a political operative who uses pastors to mobilize conservative Christian voters.

Lane is a Christian-nation extremist who believes the Bible should be a primary textbook in America’s public schools, and that any politician who disagrees should be voted out. Lane’s events are usually closed to the media, but he has given special access to the Christian Broadcasting Network’s sympathetic David Brody. Brody’s coverage of the Iowa event included short video clips of comments by brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, who were identified only as members of Lane’s Pastors and Pews group.

Weather-Sensitive Watering, and 4 Other Simple Fixes for California's Drought

—By Gabrielle Canon | Tue Jun. 17, 2014 6:01 AM EDT

There's been a lot of scary news on the drought front lately. In the midst of its third dry year in a row (and what's shaping up to be the driest in 500 years), California faces worsening wildfires and drinking water shortages. The state will likely have to rely on dirty and costly fossil fuels instead of hydropower for energy. Plus, because the state is the nation's largest agricultural producer and international exporter, California's crisis will have severe economic implications for the entire country, including raising the price of your favorite produce.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on water supply options that are now tapped out, and a recent survey showed that Californians are unwilling to invest in any new infrastructure or programs. Are we doomed?

The coming 'tsunami of debt' and financial crisis in America

Forces that caused the world economy to collapse, including income inequality and debt, are again in action, and could drag corporations down in their wake

Dimitri Papadimitriou
theguardian.com, Sunday 15 June 2014 12.58 EDT

The US Congressional Budget Office is projecting a continued economic recovery. So why look down the road – say, to 2017 – and worry?

Here's why: because the debt held by American households is rising ominously. And unless our economic policies change, that debt balloon, powered by radical income inequality, is going to become the next bust.

Our macro models at the Levy Economics Institute are showing that the US economy is about to face a repeat of pre-crisis-style, debt-led growth, based on increased borrowing. Falling government deficits are being replaced by rising debts on everyone else's ledgers – well, almost everyone else's.

Pension Funds, Dancing a Two-Step With Ratings Firms

By Gretchen Morgenson

Pension fund investors lost billions of dollars trusting the rosy credit ratings stamped on troubled mortgage securities before the 2008 crisis. In its aftermath, they have spent years and many dollars suing Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, the main purveyors of those dubious grades.

That these funds and other plaintiffs are trying to hold the ratings agencies to account is a good thing.

And yet, there’s a mystifying disconnect in some of these disputes. On one hand, pension funds or state officials are telling the courts that Moody’s and S.&P. were negligent and their ratings marred by flawed methods and conflicts of interest. On the other hand, when the professionals who manage state funds buy bonds or mortgage securities, their investment policies require them to rely on the assessments of — you guessed it — the very same ratings agencies.

Senator Ron Wyden wants to know why IRS has ignored hedge funds’ tax-avoidance strategy

By Reuters
Tuesday, June 17, 2014 7:53 EDT

(Reuters) – Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden has asked the Obama administration why the United States failed to stop a tax-avoidance strategy used by hedge funds, including John Paulson’s Paulson & Co, Bloomberg reported.

Wyden asked the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service what they had done to challenge funds that channel investments through insurance companies in tax havens as a way to lower fund managers’ personal income-tax bills, according to the report.

Paul Krugman: Yes He Could

Health Care and Climate: President Obama’s Big Deals

Several times in recent weeks I’ve found myself in conversations with liberals who shake their heads sadly and express their disappointment with President Obama. Why? I suspect that they’re being influenced, often without realizing it, by the prevailing media narrative.


The truth is that these days much of the commentary you see on the Obama administration — and a lot of the reporting too — emphasizes the negative: the contrast between the extravagant hopes of 2008 and the prosaic realities of political trench warfare, the troubles at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the mess in Iraq, and so on. The accepted thing, it seems, is to portray Mr. Obama as floundering, his presidency as troubled if not failed.

Could Politics Trump Economics As Reason for Growing Income Inequality?

Study finds decline in union strength played key role

By: Jeff Grabmeier
Published on June 16, 2014

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Most research examining growing income inequality in the United States has focused on economic causes, for seemingly obvious reasons.

But a new study suggests that a different cause – the politically induced decline in the strength of worker unions – may play a much more pivotal role than previously understood.

In fact, the role that union decline has played in growing income inequality may actually be larger than many of the favorite explanations offered by economists, such as the education gap in the United States.

A New Spin from the Inequality Denialist Set

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Inequality.org Staff

A key keeper of the free-market fundamentalist flame wants us to know that all his rich and powerful red-state pals really do care about income maldistribution.

By Sam Pizzigati

The go-to intellectual guardians of our corporate order — those conservative analysts whose op-eds appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal — have a problem. Their defense of plutocracy just isn’t selling.

Two events this spring have now put this failure in particularly stark relief.

First came the cultural phenomenon of Thomas Piketty: An obscure French economist jumps to the top of the bestseller lists with a book that makes a compelling case for no longer tolerating, anywhere on earth, grand concentrations of private wealth.

What Happens If You Have No Welfare and No Job?

By Olga Khazan

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the welfare reform of the 1990s led to many poor mothers being kicked off welfare rolls. While some poor adults could still receive help from food stamps and disability insurance, the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act" dramatically cut how much cash aid they could collect. The hope was that they would find work, but many didn’t.

Meanwhile, spending on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, the only cash assistance program that non-disabled, non-elderly, poor single mothers are eligible for, has dropped precipitously: It was lower in 2007 than it had been in 1970.

That left me wondering—what happened to the moms who had neither jobs nor cash assistance through TANF, which comes with strict time limits?

Thrown Out of Court

How corporations became people you can't sue.

By Lina Khan

Late last year a massive data hack at Target exposed as many as 110 million consumers around the country to identity theft and fraud. As details of its lax computer security oversight came to light, customers whose passwords and credit card numbers had been stolen banded together to file dozens of class-action lawsuits against the mega-chain-store company. A judge presiding over a consolidated suit will now sort out how much damage was done and how much Target may owe the victims of its negligence. As the case proceeds, documents and testimony pertaining to how the breach occurred will become part of the public record.

All this may seem like an archetypical story of our times, combining corporate misconduct, cyber-crime, and high-stakes litigation. But for those who follow the cutting edge of corporate law, a central part of this saga is almost antiquarian: the part where Target must actually face its accusers in court and the public gets to know what went awry and whether justice gets done.

Thomas Frank: Off with their heads! Eric Cantor, the Tea Party guillotine, and the certainty of conservative sell-out

Cantor's just the latest: From Reagan to Rove, the GOP's driven ever-rightward by clash of idealism and betrayal

“We got what we had coming,” wrote Rep. Eric Cantor in his book “Young Guns” in 2010. He was referring to the drubbing his party took in the 2006 Congressional elections.

Back in 1994, he reminded readers, his fellow Republicans had taken control of Congress on a platform of high idealism. Once in power, however, “too often they left these principles behind.” The Republicans in that Congress, Cantor continued, “became what they had campaigned against: arrogant and out of touch. There were important exceptions, but the GOP legislative agenda became primarily about Republican members themselves, not the greater cause.”

Robert Fisk: The old partition of the Middle East is dead. I dread to think what will follow

“Sykes-Picot is dead,” Walid Jumblatt roared at me last night – and he may well be right.

The Lebanese Druze leader – who fought in a 15-year civil war that redrew the map of Lebanon – believes that the new battles for Sunni Muslim jihadi control of northern and eastern Syria and western Iraq have finally destroyed the post-World War Anglo-French conspiracy, hatched by Mark Sykes and François Picot, which divided up the old Ottoman Middle East into Arab statelets controlled by the West.

Dead Economic Dogmas Trump Recovery: The Continuing Crisis in the Eurozone Periphery

Sunday, 15 June 2014 00:00
By CJ Polychroniou, Truthout | News Analysis

In the four bailed-out countries of the European periphery, there is not a trace of solid evidence that the austerity / structural reforms / export-led growth approach insisted upon by the EU and the IMF has paid any solid economic or social dividends, yet it is hailed as a "success."

Four years after the start of the euro crisis, the bailed-out countries of the eurozone (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) [1] are still facing serious problems, as the austerity policies imposed on them by the European Union (EU) authorities and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) not only failed to stabilize their economies, but actually made matters worse; in fact, much worse: The debt load increased substantially; national output was seriously undermined; unemployment reached potentially explosive levels; a credit crunch ensued; and emigration levels rose to historic heights. Because of these highly adverse effects, the citizens in the bailed-out countries have grown indignant and mistrustful toward parliamentary democracy itself, euro-skepticism has taken firm roots and a cleavage has reemerged between north and south.

A fissure in the dam of political reality: How Eric Cantor’s defeat foreshadows the coming apocalypse

For what could be a portrait of our own societal collapse, look to Robert Pattinson's dystopian drama "The Rover"

Andrew O'Hehir

The unexpected defeat of a sitting House Majority Leader by an obscure primary opponent in one of the safest of all deep-red gerrymandered seats is an event that cries out for interpretation – and we’ve been deluged with those all week long. Most political analysts agree that Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., was punished by Tea Party Jacobins, who perceive him as squishy on immigration and lacking in ideological purity. That might sound like a funny way to describe a guy who has been the ultimate embodiment of an intransigent, obstructionist, do-nothing Congress, but the Tea Partyers had a point. (We’ll get to that.) Or maybe Cantor was ousted by “savvy Democrats” who crossed over to vote against him in Virginia’s open-primary system, or was a victim of covert anti-Semitism, as a Jewish congressman from a district rich in evangelical conservatives.

Maybe the unlikely primary victory of economics professor David Brat demonstrates that money doesn’t matter in politics as much as people think (since Cantor’s campaign outspent Brat’s many times over), and maybe it was the result of a long-term strategy and “dark money” from libertarian billionaires. Maybe the result is a welcome wakeup call for the Republican Party, and maybe it’s a boost to the Democrats’ chances of retaking the House in November (which were, and still are, slim to none). But the people on both sides trying to argue those positions are partisan hacks, desperately trying to spin the Cantor-quake such that it fits into the established Manichaean narrative of American politics. Which it clearly does not. In fact, I would argue that Cantor’s defeat is bad news for both parties and for the stagnant system they represent. If anything, it may signify a nascent or immanent threat to that system.

The single most important fact about American politics

Updated by Ezra Klein on June 13, 2014, 8:00 a.m. ET

Perhaps the single most important fact about American politics is this: the people who participate are more ideological and more partisan, as well as angrier and more fearful, than those who don't.

these divisions are greatest among those who are the most engaged and active in the political process

The finding emerges from Pew's massive survey of 10,000 Americans, which concluded that "Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines — and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive — than at any point in the last two decades."

How Big Pharma (and others) began lobbying on the Trans-Pacific Partnership before you ever heard of it

by Lee Drutman, investigations, March 13, 2014, 9:10 a.m.

In 2009, four years before the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was a widely-debated trade deal, few would have noticed a new issue popping up in a handful of lobbying reports. That year, 28 organizations filed 59 lobbying reports mentioning the then far-off trade agreement. Almost half of those organizations were pharmaceutical companies or associations.

It was an early clue as to which industry would take the most active role in trying to shape the trade agreement while it was still secret from the public. From 2009 until mid-2013 (the time during which the language of the agreement was still reasonably fluid), drug companies and associations mentioned the trade agreement in 251 separate lobbying reports – two and a half times more than the next most active industry (at least measured by lobbying reports).

North Carolina is still suing Facebook, wants to pass law banning public from knowing what else it’s doing

By David Sirota
On June 13, 2014

In the last few months, there has been increasing pressure on public officials to stop hiding the basic terms of the investment agreements being cemented between governments and Wall Street’s “alternative investment” industry.

That pressure has been intensified, in part, by two sets of recent leaks showing how these alternative investment companies (private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, etc.) are using the secret deals to make hundreds of millions of dollars off taxpayers. It is also in response to the Securities and Exchange Commission recently declaring that many of the stealth schemes may be illegal.

And yet, as the demands for transparency grow louder, a potentially precedent-setting push for even more secrecy is emerging. Pando has learned that legislators in North Carolina — whose $86 billion public pension fund is the 7th largest in America – are proposing to statutorily bar the public from seeing details of the state’s Wall Street transactions for at least a decade. That time frame is significant: according to experts, it would conceal the terms of the investment agreements for longer than the statute of limitations of various securities laws.

Bill Black: How Hayek Helped the Worst Get to the Top in Economics and as CEOs

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Yves Smith
 
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives

Libertarians are profoundly anti-democratic. The folks at Cato that I debate make no bones about their disdain for and fear of democracy. Friedrich von Hayek is so popular among libertarians because of his denial of the legitimacy of democratic government and his claims that it is inherently monstrous and murderous to its own citizens. Here’s an example from a libertarian professor based in Maryland.

[W]hen government uses its legal monopoly on coercion to confiscate one person’s property and give it to another, it is engaging in what would normally be called theft. Calling this immoral act “democracy,” “majority rule” or “progressive taxation” does not make it moral. Under democracy, rulers confiscate the income of productive members of society and redistribute it to various supporters in order to keep themselves in power.