David Sirota: How Corruption Shapes State Policy

A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Tennessee—a state that has been called the most corrupt in the country. That’s right, according to a 2010 Daily Beast analysis compiling data about convictions on charges of public corruption, racketeering, extortion, forgery, counterfeiting, fraud and embezzlement, the Volunteer State is America’s single most corrupt. Similarly, a 2012 Harvard study lists Nashville as one of the nation’s most corrupt capitals.

Since I was traveling to the state for a conference about technology and innovation, I had a simple question on my mind: How does such rampant corruption shape state policy?

Scott Beauchamp: Blog On Robot Soldiers and the Recession

June 26, 2014

After more than twelve years in Afghanistan, with approximately 2,200 Americans killed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, the proposed conclusion to what has ended up being America’s longest war has been met with resigned apathy from many Americans, and predictable vitriol from Congressional Republicans.

The triumvirate of senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Kelly Ayotte called Obama’s promised withdrawal of troops “irresponsible and a triumph of politics over strategy.” Channeling Bush’s counterintuitive reasoning for bloating troop presence in the first place, they went on to call the announcement of American departure “a short-sighted decision that will make it harder to end the war in Afghanistan responsibly.”

Paul Krugman: An Innovation Lesson From Germany: Less Disruption, More Quality

Jill Lepore has written a great article in The New Yorker debunking the hyping of "disruptive innovation" as the key to success in business and everything else. It's not a bah-humbug piece; it is instead a careful takedown, in which she goes back to the case studies supposedly showing the overwhelming importance of upstart innovators, and shows that what actually happened didn't fit the script.

Specifically, many of the "upstarts" were actually long-established firms, and more often than not the big payoffs went not to disruptive innovators but to firms that focused on incremental change and ordinary forms of efficiency and quality.

Kathleen Geier: Ikea and the Business Case for a Living Wage

June 27, 2014

This week, the Swedish furniture giant Ikea announced that it plans to start paying its retail workers a living wage. The new hourly minimum will be based on regional estimates derived from the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Beginning next year, the average minimum wage of Ikea workers will increase by 17 percent, to $10.76 an hour.

Ikea’s new policy may be a sign that retailers are, at last, starting to have second thoughts about the low-wage, race-to-the-bottom business strategy that has dominated the retail sector for decades. Earlier this year, Gap announced that it would raise its minimum pay to $10 an hour, and it’s seen job applications increase by 10 percent as a result. Even the most infamous low-wage employer in America, Walmart, said recently that it would not oppose a minimum wage increase, marking a reversal of long-standing policy (if true).

Brian Beutler: The Maddening Illogic of the IRS 'Coverup' Conspiracy Theory

We know that there aren't many scientists in the Republican congressional delegation, because if there were, they couldn't use the "I'm not a scientist" excuse to duck questions about climate change.

But by sheer coincidence, pretty much every Republican in Congress who's "not a scientist" turns out to be an IT expert, and they've rendered a unanimous judgment: The official explanation of the missing Lois Lerner emails is a lie, and the IRS is perpetrating a coverup.

From Ancient Egypt to Modern America, Spying Has Always Been Used to Crush Dissent

Posted on June 27, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

What Americans Need to Know About the History of Spying

Americans are told that we live in a “post-9/11 reality” that requires mass surveillance.

But the NSA was already conducting mass surveillance prior to 9/11 … including surveillance on the 9/11 hijackers.

And top security experts – including the highest-level government officials and the top university experts – say that mass surveillance actually increases terrorism and hurts security. And they say that our government failed to stop the Boston bombing because they were too busy spying on millions of innocent Americans instead of focusing on actual bad guys.

Climate: Will We Lose the Endgame?

Bill McKibben, July 10, 2014 Issue

Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent
by Gabrielle Walker
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 388 pp., $27.00

What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change
a report by the Climate Science Panel of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
28 pp., March 2014

Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment
a report by the US Global Change Research Program
829 pp., May 2014 

We may be entering the high-stakes endgame on climate change. The pieces—technological and perhaps political—are finally in place for rapid, powerful action to shift us off of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, the players may well decide instead to simply move pawns back and forth for another couple of decades, which would be fatal. Even more unfortunately, the natural world is daily making it more clear that the clock ticks down faster than we feared. The whole game is very nearly in check.

Let us begin in Antarctica, the least-populated continent, and the one most nearly unchanged by humans. In her book about the region, Gabrielle Walker describes very well current activities on the vast ice sheet, from the constant discovery of new undersea life to the ongoing hunt for meteorites, which are relatively easy to track down on the white ice. For anyone who has ever wondered what it’s like to winter at 70 degrees below zero, her account will be telling.

Are conservatives more obedient and agreeable than their liberal counterparts?

Over the last few years, we've seen increasing dissent among liberals and conservatives on important issues such as gun control, health care and same-sex marriage. Both sides often have a difficult time reconciling their own views with their opposition, and many times it appears that liberals are unable to band together under a unifying platform. Why do conservatives appear to have an affinity for obeying leadership? And why do conservatives perceive greater consensus among politically like-minded others? Two studies publishing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin shed light on these questions.

Bee-ware! Everything we know about neonic pesticides is awful

By John Upton

Neonicotinoid pesticides are great at killing insect pests, which helps to explain the dramatic rise in their use during the past 20 years. They’re popular because they are systemic pesticides — they don’t just get sprayed onto plant surfaces. They can be applied to seeds, roots, and soil, becoming incorporated into a growing plant, turning it into poison for any bugs that might munch upon it.

But using neonics to control pests is like using a hand grenade to thwart a bank robbery.

Amanda Marcotte: Why Do Right-Wing Christians Think 'Religious Freedom' Means Forcing Their Faith on You?

June 25, 2014  |  Religious freedom is one of the most fundamental American values, written directly into the First Amendment of the Constitution. Of course, true religious freedom requires a secular society, where government stays out of the religion game and leaves it strictly to individual conscience, a standard that runs directly against the modern conservative insistence that America is and should be a “Christian nation”. So what are people who claim to be patriots standing up for American values to do? Increasingly, the solution on the right is to redefine “religious freedom” so that it means, well, its exact opposite. “Religious freedom” has turned into conservative code for imposing the Christian faith on the non-believers.

While it seems like a leap even for the most delusional conservatives to believe that their religious freedom can only be protected by giving Christians broad power to force their faith on others, a new report from the People For the American Way shows [3] how the narrative is constructed. The report shows that Christian conservative circles have become awash in legends of being persecuted for their faith, stories that invariably turn out to be nonsense but that “serve to bolster a larger story, that of a majority religious group in American society becoming a persecuted minority, driven underground in its own country.” This sense of persecution, in turn, gives them justification to push their actual agenda of religious repression under the guise that they’re just protecting themselves.

USC scientists create new battery that's cheap, clean, rechargeable… and organic

Scientists at USC have developed a water-based organic battery that is long lasting, built from cheap, eco-friendly components.

The new battery – which uses no metals or toxic materials – is intended for use in power plants, where it can make the energy grid more resilient and efficient by creating a large-scale means to store energy for use as needed.

Glenn Greenwald on Government Snooping: Why It's Dangerous and What We Can Do About It

When it comes to stopping NSA surveillance, it may be more effective to write to Facebook and Google than to government officials.

by Dean Paton
posted Jun 23, 2014

One year ago, Edward Snowden was thrust upon the world stage when he began revealing what he called widespread violations of civil liberties by a growing “surveillance state.”

Glenn Greenwald, one of the three reporters who broke those stories—which won the Pulitzer Prize for public affairs reporting, the Polk Award for national security reporting, and the top award for investigative journalism from the Online News Association—has just published a book about his experiences: No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Shhh. Don’t Wake Congress. Let Them Sleep Through the Next Wall Street Crash

By Pam Martens: June 23, 2014

Two Senate subcommittees held critically important hearings last week so Senators could gauge first hand the level of corruption and self-dealing on Wall Street and 72 percent of the members of those committees failed to show up. Missing in action were Senators Chuck Schumer, Bob Corker, Dick Shelby, David Vitter, Tom Coburn, Tammy Baldwin, and Rand Paul, among many others.

Failure to show up for committee or subcommittee hearings has been tolerated far too long in the U.S. Senate as we reported two years ago when not one member of an 18-member subcommittee, other than the chairman, showed up for a hearing on the failing initial public offering process on Wall Street. It is understandable that Gallup’s new poll last week showed that confidence in Congress has just hit an all-time, historic low of 7 percent.

Five Takeaways from the Newly Released Drone Memo

June 23, 2014
By Brett Max Kaufman, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 4:00 pm

Monday morning, a federal appeals court released a government memorandum, dated July 16, 2010, authorizing both the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen, in Yemen.

The publication of the Office of Legal Counsel memo comes, as the court noted, after a lengthy delay. The ACLU (along with the New York Times) has been fighting for this memo since we first asked for it in a Freedom of Information Act request submitted in October 2011.

Monday's release by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is an important victory for transparency. But while the memo advances the public record in significant ways, it still does not answer many key questions about the government's claimed authority to kill U.S. citizens outside of active battlefields. Here are several important takeaways from Monday's release.

Why U.S. Is Not Embracing Inherently Safer Chemical Plants

Chevron Richmond Refinery Explosion Ignored in GOP Red Herring Oversight

Posted on Jun 25, 2014

Washington, DC — Republican lawmakers are using phony whistleblower claims to serve a corporate agenda of blocking critical steps to prevent future chemical plant explosions, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Nearly two years after a massive oil refinery fire sickened 15,000 California residents, the official federal safety report urging adoption of inherently safer technologies still languishes due to both internal and external opposition.

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) is an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents in fixed facilities. It does not issue fines or citations, but makes recommendations to plants, regulatory agencies, industry organizations and labor. In a House hearing last week, Government Reform & Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa released an 84-page staff report making no mention of a critical February 10, 2014 memo from CSB investigative staff defending their Chair Rafael Moure-Eraso and decrying delay of their report on the Chevron refinery.

Yes, Google works with “former military operations people.” But they won’t tell us who, or from where

By Yasha Levine
On June 24, 2014

Last week, I wrote about how Google’s working with a mysterious set of “former military operations people” on Project Loon — the company’s zany and rather frightening attempt to have an army of WiFi/surveillance balloons that are constantly circling the globe way up in the atmosphere.

The information came via a report by Wired’s Steven Levy. Given Google’s history of close collaboration with the military-industrial complex, it wasn’t terribly surprising. Hell, Google’s DC office is crammed to the brim with former spooks, intelligence officials and revolving door military contractors.

Why Corporate 'Negative Speech Rights' Is as Dangerous as Corporate Free Speech

By Simon Davis-Cohen

June 18, 2014 | We all know about political free speech. With a few exceptions, you can say what you want, whether people listen or not. But corporations have twisted the First Amendment to claim that their free speech rights as “people” also means that they cannot be forced by government to put warning labels on their packaging. An established and growing body of law elevates private marketing above public health warnings.

It's called corporate negative free speech rights, and it falls under one particular area of First Amendment law—commercial speech. It's been wielded in a variety of for-profit settings. Cigarette companies have used this rationale to avoid photos on warning labels. The dairy industry has evoked it to hide the use of manmade bovine growth hormones in milk production. Cell phone companies have cited it to block radiation warnings on their packaging.

TomDispatch: Michael Schwartz, The New Oil Wars in Iraq

It’s the Oil, Stupid!
Insurgency and War on a Sea of Oil
By Michael Schwartz

Events in Iraq are headline news everywhere, and once again, there is no mention of the issue that underlies much of the violence: control of Iraqi oil. Instead, the media is flooded with debate about, horror over, and extensive analysis of a not-exactly-brand-new terrorist threat, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). There are, in addition, elaborate discussions about the possibility of a civil war that threatens both a new round of ethnic cleansing and the collapse of the embattled government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Underway are, in fact, “a series of urban revolts against the government,” as Middle Eastern expert Juan Cole has called them. They are currently restricted to Sunni areas of the country and have a distinctly sectarian character, which is why groups like ISIS can thrive and even take a leadership role in various locales. These revolts have, however, neither been created nor are they controlled by ISIS and its several thousand fighters. They also involve former Baathists and Saddam Hussein loyalists, tribal militias, and many others. And at least in incipient form they may not, in the end, be restricted to Sunni areas. As the New York Times reported last week, the oil industry is “worried that the unrest could spread” to the southern Shia-dominated city of Basra, where “Iraq’s main oil fields and export facilities are clustered.”

How the Feds Are Recruiting Spies at Campuses Across the US

By Roberto J. Gonzalez

June 11, 2014  |  The following is an excerpt from The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent [3] edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira. Reprinted with permission of University of Minnesota Press.

In July 2005, a select group of fifteen- to nineteen-year-old high school students participated in a week-long summer program called “Spy Camp” in the Washington, DC, area. The program included a field trip to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, an “intelligence simulation” exercise, and a visit to the $35 million International Spy Museum. According to the Spy Museum’s website, visiting groups have the option of choosing from three different “scavenger hunts,” in which teams are pitted against one another in activities ranging “from code-breaking to deceptive maneuvers. . . . Each team will be armed with a top secret bag of tricks to help solve challenging questions” that can be found in the museum.

On the surface, the program sounds like fun and games, and after reading about the program one might guess that it was organized by an imagina- tive social studies teacher. But for some, “Spy Camp” was more than just fun and games—it was very serious business. The high school program was car- ried out by Trinity University of Washington, DC—a predominantly African American university with an overwhelmingly female student population—as part of a pilot grant from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to create an “Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence” (or IC Center).

Richard Eskow: A Secret Plan to Close Social Security’s Offices and Outsource Its Work

For months there have been rumors that the Social Security Administration has a “secret plan” to close all of its field offices. Is it true? A little-known report commissioned by the SSA the request of Congress seems to hold the answer. The summary document outlining the plan, which is labeled “for internal use only,” is unavailable from the SSA but can be found here.

Does the document, entitled “Long Term Strategic Vision and Vision Elements,” really propose shuttering all field offices? The answer, buried beneath a barrage of obfuscatory consultantese, clearly seems to be “yes.” Worse, the report also suggests that many of the SSA’s critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners and contractors.

Lynn Stuart Parramore: Meet the Guy Stealing Your Retirement Savings Right Under Your Nose

June 23, 2014  |  Let's say you're a person who has worked very hard. You've done the right thing — you've saved every possible penny for your 401(k). For this, you're hoping to have a decent stream of income in your golden years. And yet in the end, you may not have access to all of that hard-earned money.  Why? Because the legal standards that govern people who give advice on retirement plans are a complete joke.

 

Right now, all across the country, the savings of blameless, hard-working people are being nibbled away without their knowledge by unscrupulous actors. And there doesn’t seem to be anything that can be done about it.

The Deadly Disease in Meat That Health Officials Are Ignoring

By Martha Rosenberg

June 23, 2014  |  When the first U.S. mad cow was found in late 2003, 98 percent of U.S. beef exports evaporated overnight. There was such national revulsion to cow "cannibalism" when described in the late 1990s as the presumed cause of the fatal disease, Oprah Winfrey said she would never eat a hamburger again and was promptly sued by Texas cattle producers [3]. They lost.

 

But this month a fourth U.S. death [4] from the human version of mad cow, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), in Texas barely made the news. Neither did therecall [5] of 4,000 pounds of "organic" beef possibly contaminated with mad cow (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) shipped to Whole Foods and two restaurants, in New York and Kansas City, Mo. The restaurant meat was eaten before the recall, speculated one news [6] source.

Paul Krugman: The Big Green Test

On Sunday Henry Paulson, the former Treasury secretary and a lifelong Republican, had an Op-Ed article about climate policy in The New York Times. In the article, he declared that man-made climate change is “the challenge of our time,” and called for a national tax on carbon emissions to encourage
conservation and the adoption of green technologies. Considering the prevalence of climate denial within today’s G.O.P., and the absolute opposition to any kind of tax increase, this was a brave stand to take.

But not nearly brave enough. Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax. But that isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future. A carbon tax may be the best thing we could do, but we won’t actually do it.

BPA stimulates growth of breast cancer cells, diminishes effect of treatment

DURHAM, N.C. – Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical commonly used in plastics, appears to increase the proliferation of breast cancer cells, according to Duke Medicine researchers presenting at an annual meeting of endocrine scientists.

The researchers found that the chemical, at levels typically found in human blood, could also affect growth of an aggressive hormone-independent subtype of breast cancer cells called inflammatory breast cancer and diminish the effectiveness of treatments for the disease.

Buying Up the Planet: Out-of-Control Central Banks on a Corporate Buying Spree

By Ellen Brown, The Web of Debt Blog | News Analysis

"Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means?"
- Dr. Michael Hudson, Counterpunch, October 2010

When the US Federal Reserve bought an 80% stake in American International Group (AIG) in September 2008, the unprecedented $85 billion outlay was justified as necessary to bail out the world’s largest insurance company. Today, however, central banks are on a global corporate buying spree not to bail out bankrupt corporations but simply as an investment, to compensate for the loss of bond income due to record-low interest rates. Indeed, central banks have become some of the world’s largest stock investors.

Central banks have the power to create national currencies with accounting entries, and they are traditionally very secretive. We are not allowed to peer into their books. It took a major lawsuit by Reuters and a congressional investigation to get the Fed to reveal the $16-plus trillion in loans it made to bail out giant banks and corporations after 2008.

The food industry’s hiding something: How to expose America’s most secretive industry

Will Potter tells Salon about his ambitious new project: Using drones to investigate the facts behind our food

Lindsay Abrams

In 2008, the Humane Society released a shocking video taken in a Southern California slaughterhouse. The footage depicted workers using chains and forklifts to drag cows that were too sick to stand across the floor. The abuse was appalling; the cows’ condition, which indicated a food safety risk, led the USDA to order a recall of 143 million pounds of beef. It was the largest meat recall in U.S. history — and it was all brought about by the work of an undercover whistleblower.

Since then, Big Ag has been hard at work preventing this sort of thing from happening again, but not by actually working to stop abuse — at least, not completely. Instead, the industry’s been pushing states to implement laws, known collectively as “ag-gag,” aimed at silencing activists.

Farming for the Future

Monday, 23 June 2014 09:29
By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report

As the impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) continue to escalate, drought, wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather events continue to intensify and last longer as a result.

In parts of Africa, the sociopolitical translation of this means wars over water, crops and animals, as drought and the ensuing conflict spinning out of it have become the norm.

Wall Street and Washington want you to believe the stock market isn't rigged. Guess what? It still is

Michael Lewis woke up Average Joe investors, but the fat cats are still trying to lull you into financial submission with their intellectual dishonesty

Heidi Moore
theguardian.com, Sunday 22 June 2014 07.45 EDT

Most Americans don't think much about the stock market, and that's just fine with Wall Street. Because once you wake up to how screwed up the stock market really is, the financial industry knows you're likely to get very nervous and take your money out.

Many are catching on: between 2007 and 2014, investors pulled $345bn from the stock market. E-Trades are down and worries are up, with 73% of Americans still not inclined to buy stocks, five years after the financial crisis.

11 maps that explain the US energy system

Updated by Brad Plumer on June 12, 2014, 3:20 p.m. ET

Ever wonder what America's energy infrastructure looks like? All those power plants and coal mines and oil wells and transmission lines?

Then you're in luck. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) has a fascinating new mapping tool that lets you take a detailed look at every aspect of America's energy system.

Dean Baker | The Sharing Economy and the Mystery of the Mystery of Inequality

Last week I had a fascinating 3:00 AM cab ride from San Francisco airport to a hotel in downtown Oakland. My cab driver was an immigrant from Pakistan who was putting two kids through college. After working for years as a driver he managed to save enough money to buy his own cab, and more importantly to buy the medallion that gives him the right to operate a cab in San Francisco. The medallion cost $250,000. He is still paying $2,300 a month on the loan to get the medallion in an addition to annual fee to the city of $1,500.

The medallion is far from the only cost the city imposes on cab drivers. It requires a special license, which involves four days of classes (i.e. lost work time), plus fees. They also must get a special background check by the FBI and a special badge, both of which involve additional fees. In addition, cab owners must have a special safety inspection for their car and brakes, which means yet more time and fees. And they must carry a $1 million insurance policy to protect passengers, which costs around $750 a month.

Michael Perelman: Why Adam Smith Advocated Controls Over Workers

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Yves Smith

Yves here. In this post, Michael Perelman continues his discussion of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Here, he focuses on the contradiction between Smith’s laissez faire attitude towards commerce and the need he saw for extensive control of the behavior of workers.

By Michael Perelman, a professor of economics at California State University, Chico

Military Discipline, Market Discipline

Smith addressed two kinds of controls to maintain social and economic order – controls over the market and controls over the workers. Smith’s call for market controls are minimal compared to those that control people. This imbalance should not be surprising considering Smith’s interest in molding the human personality to fit the needs of a market society.

Smith’s suggested controls of personal behavior are vastly more far reaching than one might expect after reading the first part of The Wealth of Nations, where volunteerism promises a world of harmonious prosperity. People’s response to the grain trade suggested that markets were not changing personal behavior the way Smith preferred.

Revealed: ALEC’s 2014 Attacks on the Environment

By Nick Surgey on April 24, 2014

An internal tracking document obtained from the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC -- by the Center for Media and Democracy/the Progressive Inc. under Texas public records law -- reveals the scope of ALEC's anti-environmental efforts in 2014.

The spreadsheet (dated from late March 2014 and made public by CMD/The Progressive today) reveals ALEC tracking a total of 131 bills that, amongst other things, roll back state renewable energy standards, increase costs for American households with solar, hype the Keystone XL pipeline, push back on proposed EPA coal regulations that protect human health, and create industry-friendly fracking rules despite growing national and international concerns about fracking.

Thomas Frank: Hillary Clinton forgets the ’90s: Our latest gilded age and our latest phony populists

The gilded age Clinton now laments had its roots in the dark side of Bill's economic record. So why trust her now?

A few weeks ago I was surprised to read that Hillary Clinton acknowledged the current economy to be “a throwback to the Gilded Age of the robber barons.” It wasn’t the comparison itself that astonished me. That we are living in a “new Gilded Age” is a commonplace that is rapidly becoming a cliché. The former senator and secretary of state’s words affected me because they reminded me of the days when talking about a “New Gilded Age” was the opposite of trite; when it was an affront to what every responsible person knew to be true. Specifically, I thought of the mid-1990s, when my colleagues and I at The Baffler magazine used the phrase to describe the era presided over by Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill. We inscribed the expression in the subtitle of our 1997 anthology, “Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age.”

Lynn Stuart Parramore: How Inequality Shapes the American Family

June 18, 2014

How do you decide who to marry, or whether to marry at all? How many children to have? Whether to engage in short-term hookups or long-term partnerships?

We don’t like to think that economic forces outside our individual control can shape the most intimate aspects of our lives, like whether or not we wed, when to have kids, and what kinds of families we create. But a growing body of evidence suggests that inequality is changing not only American family structures, but the roles men and women play and the calculations they make in pairing and establishing households. Inequality changes who we are, individually and collectively.

Bradley Foundation Bankrolled Groups Attacking Criminal Probe

By Brendan Fischer on June 19, 2014

The campaign against Wisconsin’s “John Doe” criminal probe is being led by groups bankrolled by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, according to a new analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy/PRwatch.org.

The Bradley Foundation and its directors have given nearly $18 million to groups that are now connected to individuals involved in the John Doe investigation and the campaign against it. That high-profile probe is examining possible campaign finance violations during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections as Wisconsin Club for Growth and other nonprofit "dark money" groups spent tens of millions trying to protect the seats of Scott Walker and Republican legislators.

The Texas GOP's Sara Legvold Problem

She's a nearly bottomless fountain of paranoid racism. So why has she been allowed to play such a prominent role in the Texas GOP?

by Christopher Hooks, Published on Wednesday, June 18, 2014, at 11:05 CST

Ever heard of Sara Legvold? She’s a diminutive, older Cuban-American woman from Roanoke, Texas. She loves animals and small dogs. She’s also friendly with fascists and white supremacists, supports apartheid and is a nearly bottomless fountain of paranoid racism. And for two years, she’s proudly served as an elected member of the Republican Party of Texas’ Executive Committee. She’s served as an elected part of the leadership team of the state GOP—even after they realized who she was, and what she believed.

Paul Krugman: The Incompetence Dogma

Have you been following the news about Obamacare? The Affordable Care Act has receded from the front page, but information about how it’s going keeps coming in — and almost all the news is good. Indeed, health reform has been on a roll ever since March, when it became clear that enrollment would surpass expectations despite the teething problems of the federal website.

What’s interesting about this success story is that it has been accompanied at every step by cries of impending disaster. At this point, by my reckoning, the enemies of health reform are 0 for 6. That is, they made at least six distinct predictions about how Obamacare would fail — every one of which turned out to be wrong.