Revealed: the hunger strikes of America's most secret foreign prisoners

• Protests by detainees held in secret by US in Afghanistan
• Strikes reminiscent of those at Guantánamo Bay
• Detainees say: 'The Americans did not want to talk to us'

Spencer Ackerman in New York
The Guardian, Wednesday 16 July 2014 09.19 EDT

Sometimes they stopped eating to protest unclean drinking water. Other times they stopped eating because their comrades were placed in segregated housing. Still other times they stopped eating out of dissatisfaction with their access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), their only source of connection to their families and the outside world.

Without any visibility beyond the walls of their prison, non-Afghan detainees that the US holds in almost complete secrecy in Afghanistan have engaged in hunger strikes, the Guardian has confirmed. The hunger strikes are reminiscent, on smaller scale, of those at Guantánamo Bay that seized the world's attention last year.

How Shall They Impeach Obama? Conservatives Count the Ways

A rundown of the president's high crimes and misdemeanors, according to his haters.

—By Tim Murphy | Thu Jul. 17, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

Impeachment is having another moment. On Wednesday, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) became the latest conservative politician to suggest that Republicans may attempt to oust President Obama from office if they take control of the Senate next fall, citing "mounting frustration that a lot of people are getting to." For conservative activists, it's no longer of issue of whether the president should be impeached, but what for. Since 2010, the Obama's haters have floated more than two dozen reasons for filing articles of impeachment. They would like to oust the president for, among other things...

Bombshell Study: America's Wealthy Even More Obscenely Rich Than Anybody Thought

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

July 16, 2014 | Just when you think you've got a handle on how bad wealth inequality is in America's Second Gilded Age, researchers find it's even worse than you imagined.

The European Central Bank has crunched the numbers and it looks like wealth inequality in the U.S. is even more astounding than previous statistics have shown. Of the 10 rich countries the researchers analyzed, America's wealthy have grabbed the largest portion of the country's wealth. The most affluent 1 percent is sitting on between 35 percent and 37 percent of the nation’s wealth, according to a working paper [3] by ECB senior economist Philip Vermeulen. The Federal Reserve figure that has been previously cited had the 1 percent's share at 34 percent. But actually it looks like that's a lowball figure.

Capitalism’s Deeper Problem

July 15, 2014
by Richard D. Wolff

Recent press reports refer to troubling price increases for such assets as real estate, government bonds, companies targeted for acquisition and artwork. A New York Times front-page headline read “The Everything Boom, or Maybe the Everything Bubble.”

Yet while asset prices soar, the production of goods and services, employment and workers’ incomes are not recovering and resuming growth. Instead, Western Europe, North America and Japan are stuck in a longer, deeper crisis than almost anyone expected. Millions have left the labor force. Wages, benefits and job security are declining; the so-called “middle classes” are evaporating. Having promised “recoveries,” desperate governments inject massive new quantities of money into their economies. What they accomplish most are fast-rising asset prices.

Sam Pizzigati: A New Gameplan for Taking Down Privatizers

Analysts at the OECD, the Paris-based research agency, have just shared a grim prediction: If current trends "prevail," all developed nations will show by 2060 "the same level of inequality as currently experienced by the United States."

If we let those current trends continue, that conclusion sounds about right. But why on earth should we let those trends continue? The trends that have made our world so unequal don't reflect some inevitable unfolding of globalization. They reflect wrong-headed political decisions. We can make different decisions.

Greenwald: Leaked Docs Reveal Agency's Digital Propaganda Toolkit

Latest files provided by Edward Snowden show GCHQ's ability to 'manipulate' the Internet using 'hacker’s buffet for wreaking online havoc'

- Jon Queally, staff writer

The latest documents released from a trove leaked to journalist Glenn Greenwald by Edward Snowden reveal that GCHQ has created a virtual toolbox of online hacker tactics that allow British intelligence agents to "manipulate" online communities by seeding the Internet "with false information" and conducting the kind of malicious attacks on networks that send civilian hackers to prison.

According to the most recent reporting from Greenwald at The Intercept:

The tools were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive. Previously disclosed documents have detailed JTRIG’s use of “fake victim blog posts,” “false flag operations,” “honey traps” and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users.

Michael Hudson: No to currency slavery

Western support will allow more IMF and European lending to prop the Ukrainian currency so the Ukrainian oligarchs can move their money safely to British and US banks, economist and author Michael Hudson told RT’s Truthseeker.

RT: Could you summarize for us the tried and tested steps that will lead from IMF loans, to Ukraine’s best assets ending up in private Western hands – the IMF’s ‘knee-breaker’ role as you memorably described it as?

Michael Hudson: The basic principle to bear in mind is that finance today is war by non-military means. The aim of getting a country in debt is to obtain its economic surplus, ending up with its property. The main property to obtain is that which can produce exports and generate foreign exchange. For Ukraine, this means mainly the Eastern manufacturing and mining companies, which presently are held in the hands of the oligarchs. For foreign investors, the problem is how to transfer these assets and their revenue into foreign hands – in an economy whose international payments are in chronic deficit as a result of the failed post-1991 restructuring. That is where the IMF comes in.

Paul Krugman: Obamacare Fails to Fail

How many Americans know how health reform is going? For that matter, how many people in the news media are following the positive developments?

I suspect that the answer to the first question is “Not many,” while the answer to the second is “Possibly even fewer,” for reasons I’ll get to later. And if I’m right, it’s a remarkable thing — an immense policy success is improving the lives of millions of Americans, but it’s largely slipping under the radar.

Rutgers Chemists Develop Technology to Produce Clean-Burning Hydrogen Fuel

New catalyst based on carbon nanotubes may rival cost-prohibitive platinum for reactions that split water into hydrogen and oxygen

 

Monday, July 14, 2014

 

NEW BRUNSWICK - Rutgers researchers have developed a technology that could overcome a major cost barrier to make clean-burning hydrogen fuel – a fuel that could replace expensive and environmentally harmful fossil fuels.

The new technology is a novel catalyst that performs almost as well as cost-prohibitive platinum for so-called electrolysis reactions, which use electric currents to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The Rutgers technology is also far more efficient than less-expensive catalysts investigated to-date.

Dean Baker: Fun Accounting and the Export-Import Bank

The establishment types in Washington have become really worried in recent weeks because one of their major troughs, the Export-Import Bank, may not be reauthorized by Congress. The Ex-Im Bank has long been a favored source of below market loans for Boeing, General Electric, and other major companies. If these companies have to pay market interest rates on their loans, it will cost them tens of billions of dollars in profits over the next decade.

The problem became serious after Republican majority leader Eric Cantor's surprise defeat in a Republican primary. As a close ally of big business, Cantor could be counted on to push through re-authorization of the Bank before the September 30 deadline for the current authorization. However his replacement as majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, is more likely to give in to Tea Party demands to end this subsidy to big business.

Texas GOP’s secret anti-Hispanic plot: Smoking gun emails revealed

Rick Perry and GOP state leaders go on trial today -- and the verdict could mean big things for Voting Rights Act

Miriam Rozen

On Nov. 17, 2010, Eric Opiela sent an email to Gerard Interiano. A Texas Republican Party associate general counsel, Opiela served at that time as a campaign adviser to the state’s speaker of the House Joe Straus, R-San Antonio; he was about to become the man who state lawmakers understood spoke “on behalf of the Republican Congressmen from Texas,” according to minority voting-rights plaintiffs, who have sued Texas for discriminating against them.

A few weeks before receiving Opiela’s email, Interiano had started as counsel to Straus’ office. He was preparing to assume top responsibility for redrawing the state’s political maps; he would become the “one person” on whom the state’s redistricting “credibility rests,” according to Texas’ brief in voting-rights litigation.

Thomas Frank: The animatronic presidency: How presidential museums become propaganda palaces, whitewashing Bush’s disasters and Clinton’s failings

At presidential museums, even the cynical melt before multimillion-dollar efforts to portray scoundrels as leaders

Barack Obama has formally entered that phase of the presidential life cycle that is all about defining his legacy, building a presidential library, and courting the judgment of historians. I suppose it is a good thing for politicians to consider the scrutiny of future generations. In fact, I wish they worried about it more; I wish they constantly asked themselves and their advisers what the nation’s scholars will make of their decisions. It would be a healthful check on an otherwise too-powerful office, where the decision to drop a bomb or render a suspect is attended by few other consequences.

Unfortunately, presidential libraries and historical scrutiny are not the same thing. They aren’t even in the same category, really. I visited three of the most recently built presidential museums a few weeks ago—the Bill Clinton Presidential Center plus two museums commemorating the administrations of men named George Bush—and found them to be, by and large, institutions of bald propaganda, buildings on which hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to cast, literally, in stone, a given individual’s personal war with reality.

Members of Congress Declare "Immunity" from Insider Trading Probe

House panel refuses to submit to SEC subpoenas

- Nadia Prupis, staff writer

The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee is refusing to cooperate with an insider trading investigation, saying its employees are “absolutely immune” from having to comply with subpoenas from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

U.S. District Court Judge Paul Gardephe ordered the committee last week to explain why it hadn’t responded to the SEC’s year-long request for documents, phone records and the testimony of staff director Brian Sutter, as part of a probe into whether he or other House members leaked private information about health care policy to insurance companies.

Rather than turning over the information, top House lawyer Kerry W. Kircher answered the order by requesting that the case be dismissed.

Why Are TBTF Banks So Happy With The EU Banking Union?

by Don Quijones • July 10, 2014

On Tuesday, November 4th of this year, supervision of the Eurozone’s 130 biggest banks, representing 80% of total financial assets, will be passed from national authorities into the welcoming hands of the ECB. From that day on, European banking union will be a reality.

The banks love the idea, as do apparently most Eurocrats, Members of the European Parliament, and national leaders. Even Angela Merkel and her government have finally come on board, in exchange for guarantees of “quality surveillance, tighter coordination of economic policies, and more binding agreements.”

As for the rest of the inhabitants of the Eurozone – all of whom will be impacted in one way or another – most are blissfully unaware that it is even happening. A new continent-wide banking system is taking shape right before our eyes and under our noses, but our eyes are closed and our noses are blocked.

Ever Wondered Why the World is a Mess?

By Roberto Savio

ROME, Jul 11 2014 (IPS) - While the Third World War has not been formally declared, conflicts throughout the world are reaching levels unseen since 1944.

Of course, for the large majority of people throughout the world, news about these conflicts is just part of our daily news, but another share of our daily news is about the mess in our countries.

This is so complex and confusing that many people have given up the effort to attempt any form of deep understanding, so I thought it would be useful to offer ten explanations of how we succeeded in creating this mess.

The Fifth Surveillance: Corporate Spying On Non-Profits

from the more-revolving-doors dept

In the age of innocence that was brought to an end by Edward Snowden's revelations, we broadly knew of three kinds of surveillance: the classic kind, by countries against other countries; the industrial kind, by companies against companies; and -- the most recent addition -- the Google/Facebook kind, carried out by companies against their customers. Snowden made us aware that countries also carried out large-scale surveillance against huge numbers of their own citizens, the vast majority of whom had done nothing to warrant that invasion of their privacy. But there's a fifth kind of surveillance that has largely escaped notice, even though it represents a serious danger for democracy and freedom: spying carried out by companies against non-profit organizations whose work threatens their profits in some way.
A new report called "Spooky Business" (pdf), from the Essential Information organization (founded by Ralph Nader in 1982), throws some much-needed light on this murky world:

The corporate capacity for espionage has skyrocketed in recent years. Most major companies now have a chief corporate security officer tasked with assessing and mitigating "threats" of all sorts -- including from nonprofit organizations. And there is now a surfeit of private investigations firms willing and able to conduct sophisticated spying operations against nonprofits.

As the study reveals, this kind of activity is now commonplace:

Many of the world’s largest corporations and their trade associations -- including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald's, Shell, BP, BAE, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON -- have been linked to espionage or planned espionage against nonprofit organizations, activists and whistleblowers.

A Dark Alliance: European Union Joins Forces With Wall Street

by Don Quijones • July 7, 2014

Unbeknownst to the vast majority of Europeans and Americans, late-stage negotiations are under way to significantly water down all forms of financial regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. This is part of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Treaty (TTIP) being negotiated behind closed doors.

However, contrary to popular wisdom, it’s not the U.S. government that is leading the charge, but rather an unholy alliance between the European Commission, Wall Street, and the City of London.

Oligarchy Blues

Posted on July 11, 2014 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This article by Michael Ventura, on the degeneration of representative process in the US and the rise of oligarchy, calls for new terminology and frameworks in order to describe our current political and economic conditions accurately, which Ventura contends is a necessary condition for action. I imagine many NC readers will agree with him on that, since many of you engage in precisely this sort of debate in the comments section daily. This piece is a quick sketch, but nevertheless hits some key issues. (Readers might also protest that Ventura isn’t as hard on the Democrats as he ought to be, but they still get some serious whacks in his piece).

Yet one could cynically argue that what Ventura describes is more the path to how we got where we are than our current location. He describes the power of oligarchy, but focuses almost entirely on the political part of the equation. Yet as Tom Ferguson has described in his work on elections, such as his classic book, The Golden Rule, American politics has long been money driven. So the key questions might be: how did a system that has always favored the wealthy and corporate interests nevertheless come to deliver decent outcomes for ordinary citizens for a protracted period?

Thomas Frank: The god that sucked: How the Tea Party right just makes the 1 percent richer

Business won on welfare, taxes, regulation, then sat silent as the crazies took over the GOP. Now we're all screwed 

This Independence Day weekend let’s uncork some vintage Jeremiad. I wrote “The God That Sucked” for Baffler magazine in 2001; the title (for those who don’t remember the Cold War) refers to The God That Failed, an anticommunist tract that had been ubiquitous in the Fifties. My target, however, was a different god, and my setting was the tail end of the “New Economy” boom of the 1990s, during which the worship of “free markets” had become a kind of mania, a millennial revival, even. It was an age of extraordinary consensus on matters economic; everyone believed they had seen the light, that history’s great problems had been solved. And nothing could persuade them otherwise. The market god would punish us again and again as the years passed, but its followers could not be shaken from their simple faith. Today the situation is different, of course. The financial disaster of 2008 put a permanent dent into the reputation of the deity. The public came to despise Wall Street and the One Percent. Weirdly, however, our leadership class still chatters on as happily and obliviously as before. For them nothing has changed, the god’s benevolence has never dimmed, all’s still right with the world—and the stern accountability of the marketplace only applies to others. The original version of this essay appeared in Baffler #14 in 2001 and was later reprinted in the magazine’s anthology, Boob Jubilee; this version has been slightly edited. Read more at TheBaffler.com

 

**************

Despite this, many economists still think that electricity deregulation will work. A product is a product, they say, and competition always works better than state control.

“I believe in that premise as a matter of religious faith,” said Philip J. Romero, dean of the business school at the University of Oregon and one of the architects of California’s deregulation plan. — New York Times, Feb. 4, 2001

Time was, the only place a guy could expound the mumbo-jumbo of the free market was in the country club locker room or the pages of Reader’s Digest. Spout off about it anywhere else and you’d be taken for a Bircher or some new strain of Jehovah’s Witness. After all, in the America of 1968, when the great backlash began, the average citizen, whether housewife or hardhat or salary-man, still had an all-too-vivid recollection of the Depression. Not to mention a fairly clear understanding of what social class was all about. Pushing laissez-faire ideology back then had all the prestige and credibility of hosting a Tupperware party.

Inequality, the Flavor of the Month

Kathleen Geier, July 11, 2014

Last December, President Obama delivered a speech in which he boldly declared that economic inequality is a “defining issue of our time.” It was a watershed moment—an ambitious speech on a topic presidents rarely address, let alone at such at length. Commenters called the speech “historic.”

So much for history. Last week, the Washington Post’s Zachary A. Goldfarb reported that in recent months, Obama and Democrats have turned their backs on economic populism and “largely abandoned” talk about economic inequality.

A Parting Shot at Richard Mellon Scaife

by JOSEPH L. FLATLEY

Here in Pittsburgh, one can almost be perversely proud that a man who leached so much poison into the earth owed his fortune and prominence to the city we call home. Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire philanthropist whose fortune was almost entirely misapplied, died 82 years too late on Independence Day, July 4, 2014.

The “Mellon” in his name came from his mother’s side of the family, whose prominence dates back to the founding of T. Mellon & Sons’ Bank in the 1870s. Mellon would go on to finance many of the coal mines in the area. Further wealth came to the family in 1889, when his son Andrew discovered oil in his backyard in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania. At the turn of the last century, Western Pennsylvania was the Dubai of its day — a fossil-fuel-fed confirmation of the maxim “geography is destiny.” This particular destiny would most famously lead to what Hillary Rodham Clinton once termed “a vast right-wing conspiracy” (as if the worst thing this man ever did was attack her husband). It is indeed with great sadness that the Great Panic of 1873 didn’t ruin Mellon’s bank the way that it did over half of Pittsburgh’s nearly 100 others, eventually leading to the civil unrest that the local aristocracy had been fearing for years.

Dean Baker: The Good News About Obamacare in the June Jobs Report

Many people touted the 288,000 new jobs the Labor Department reported for June, along with the drop in the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent as good news. And they were right. For now it appears the economy is creating a job at a decent pace. We still have a long way to go to get back to full employment, but at least we are now finally moving forward at a faster pace.

However there is another important part of the jobs picture that was largely overlooked. There was a big jump in the number of people who report voluntarily working part-time. This figure is now 830,000 (4.4 percent) above its year ago level.

Richard Eskow: Citigroup’s $7 Billion Fraud Deal: The Clique’s Still Clicking in D.C.

July 11, 2014

Pop quiz: Which bank is widely considered too big to fail, needed (and got) a $45 billion government loan during the financial crisis, recently failed a stress test performed by the Federal Reserve – and has enjoyed a revolving-door relationship with both the Clinton and Obama administrations?

If you answered Citigroup, congratulations.

Right-wing “populism” is a joke: Poor-bashing, immigrant-hating and a revolting agenda

From Sarah Palin to Pat Buchanan, here's what it really means when they speak to "the American worker"

Heather Digby Parton


Writer John Judis presciently published an important book about American politics about a decade before its time called “The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of the Public Trust” in which he accurately observed the seeds of discontent among the American public and its mistrust of political institutions. He saw the Tea Party coming before it was born. In the wake of David Brat’s recent win over Eric Cantor he analyzed the race and helpfully defined the right-wing populism that drove it:

American populism is rooted in middle class resentment of those who are seen as enjoying the benefits of the goods and services the middle class produces without having earned them through work. Its ideology is what historians call “producerism.” It first appears in the Jacksonian Workingmen’s Parties and then in the Populists of the late nineteenth century. But it takes a leftwing and a rightwing form.

Facing an ailing economy, leftwing populists from Huey Long to Paul Wellstone primarily blame Wall Street, big business and the politicians whom they fund. Rightwing populists from George Wallace to Pat Buchanan also blame Wall Street, but put equal if not greater blame on the poor, the unemployed, the immigrant, and the minorities, who, like the coupon-clipper on Wall Street, are seen as economic parasites.

Paul Krugman: The Monetary Fever Swamps

July 10, 2014 6:31 pm

Urg. Glug. Mmph. My head feels like it’s stuffed with oatmeal.

No, I haven’t been drinking (although I plan to start in a few minutes.) I have, instead, been spending a lot of time in the monetary fever swamps.

I was aware that there were a fair number of people on the right attacking the Fed, not for running the risk of inflation or financial instability or something, but for expropriating the property of right-thinking, clean-living people who deserve higher interest earnings. But there’s more of it, and it’s more explicit, than I realized. Here’s an example, but there are many more.

“Forbidden Bookshelf” Series Acquaints Public with Books Vanished by Government or Powerful Interests

By: Kevin Gosztola, Thursday July 10, 2014 10:52 am

A digital publisher called Open Road Integrated Media has launched a series called the “Forbidden Bookshelf,” in order to acquaint the public with books that were vanished or, in one way or another, killed at birth by the government or corporate entities when they were first published.

Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University, came up with the idea. He told Firedoglake in an interview that over the years he had found a lot of books he wanted to assign in his courses were unavailable,” which he said “speaks to certain problems in the book publishing industry.”

Utilities to battery-powered solar: Get off our lawn

By Heather Smith

In Wisconsin, utilities are jacking up the price to connect to their electrical grid. In Oklahoma, utilities pushed through a law this spring that allows them to charge the people who own solar panels and wind turbines more to connect to their electrical grid. In Arizona, the state has decided to charge extra property taxes to households that are leasing solar panels.

Welcome to the solar backlash. In Grist’s “Utilities for Dummies” series last year, David Roberts prophesied that solar and other renewables could “lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground.” And lo, it is coming to pass — though not without a fight from the utilities first.

Paul Krugman: Who Wants a Depression?

One unhappy lesson we’ve learned in recent years is that economics is a far more political subject than we liked to imagine. Well, duh, you may say. But, before the financial crisis, many economists — even, to some extent, yours truly — believed that there was a fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues.

This was especially true of monetary policy. It’s not that many years since the administration of George W. Bush declared that one lesson from the 2001 recession and the recovery that followed was that “aggressive monetary policy can make a recession shorter and milder.” Surely, then, we’d have a bipartisan consensus in favor of even more aggressive monetary policy to fight the far worse slump of 2007 to 2009. Right?

Inside the Wild, Shadowy, and Highly Lucrative Bail Industry

How $550 and a five-day class gets you the right to stalk, arrest, and shoot people.

—By Shane Bauer

The largest annual gathering of bail bondsmen in the country—the convention of the Professional Bail Agents of the United States, or PBUS—was slotted between Dunkin' Donuts and Elk Camp 2013 at the Mirage Resort and Casino, a tall, shiny structure shaped like an open book and set against replicas of the Colosseum and Eiffel Tower on Las Vegas' Strip. The sidewalk out front was littered with cards bearing phone numbers and pictures of naked women. In the courtyard, flames licked the late-winter air to the rhythm of a tribal drum every hour, on the hour. A sign at the entrance announced that the casino's dolphin just had a baby and we would be able to see it soon. As I walked through the smoky slots area I saw a man with a PBUS lanyard doing an extremely forced I'm-having-fun dance with his assistant while a casino employee showed them how to play the one-armed bandit. It was a bit of a letdown from what I'd been anticipating—all-night blackjack sessions with bondsmen and bounty hunters telling tales from the street over stiff drinks. I'd even grown a mustache for the event, thinking it would help me blend in a little—bondsmen have mustaches, don't they?

Paul Krugman: A Delusional Search for Reasonable Republicans

Hank Paulson, the former Treasury secretary, wrote a very sad op-ed about climate change in The New York Times recently. We must act, he declared, in the same way we acted to contain the financial crisis.

It's a dubious analogy: the crisis in 2008 was fast-moving, and people like Mr. Paulson could credibly warn that unless the United States took action, the whole world economy would fall apart in a matter of days. Meanwhile, climate change is slow but inexorable, with enormous momentum; by the time it becomes undeniable that there's a crisis, it will be too late to avoid catastrophe.

New Bank Leak Shows How Rich Exploit Tax Haven Loopholes

By The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
July 8, 2014, 3:45 pm

The identities of thousands of wealthy offshore clients of a major Channel Isles private bank have been leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The individuals include donors to the British government, which has been outspoken against tax havens, and some of the most prominent people in British life.

The ICIJ has exclusively allowed The Guardian newspaper to analyze more than 20,000 of the names, all of whom had dealings with a discreet Jersey, Channel Islands branch of Kleinwort Benson, a famous London firm which specializes in “wealth management.”

Paul Krugman: More on Class and Monetary Policy

A bit more on the question of whose interests are served by hard-money ideology: One way to identify what you might call the creditor class is to look at who derives a lot of income from interest. The Piketty-Saez tables calculate interest income as a share of total income for various percentiles of the income distribution; I looked at the numbers from 2007, when the crisis had not yet struck and returns were “normal”.

David Cay Johnston: Americans have lost out on $6.6 trillion

The inability to maintain 2000-level prosperity has cost us all

July 9, 2014 6:00AM ET

Why are so many Americans feeling squeezed economically even as the economy expands at an accelerating pace?

Last month set a new record for sustained job creation: 52 straight months of added jobs, with a robust 288,000 more jobs in June and more than 9 million jobs created since February 2010. The unemployment rate is down to 6.1 percent, and the number of long-term unemployed has been slashed, from about 5 million people to about 3 million.

The stock market is soaring, reaching a record high on July 3. The Dow Jones industrial average passed 17,000 — amazing compared with its Great Recession low of 6,627 in March 2009, just weeks after President Barack Obama took office.

Who Owns the U.S. Stock Market?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2014

Serious observers of Wall Street are increasingly asking this question: could a group of trading venues with giant pools of capital, operating in the dark, using high-speed algorithms and artificial intelligence that has a massive historical database and gets smarter with each micro-second trade — effectively own the stock market. Today, we take a look at the massive trading control exercised by just five Wall Street firms.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup jointly control trillions of dollars in commercial bank deposits with thousands of branch bank buildings stretching across the United States scooping up the life savings of everyday Joes who have no clue these are also the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street.

Bee Foraging Chronically Impaired by Pesticide Exposure: Study

A study co-authored by a University of Guelph scientist that involved fitting bumblebees with tiny radio frequency tags shows long-term exposure to a neonicotinoid pesticide hampers bees’ ability to forage for pollen.

The research by Nigel Raine, a professor in Guelph’s School of Environmental Sciences, and Richard Gill of Imperial College London was published today in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology.

The Beveridge report revisited: where now for the welfare state?

After unprecedented public spending cuts, we revisit Sir William Beveridge’s welfare state 70 years on and explore the modern evils that society professionals must battle and defeat

Seventy years ago, as the allies were driving Nazi forces back across Europe, Britain was preparing for eventual peace and reconstruction. The nation was gripped not only by dispatches from the front but also by the Beveridge report, the blueprint for what was to become known as the welfare state.

In proposing a system of cradle-to-grave social security, improved education and a national health service, the report lacked nothing in ambition. Its author, Sir William Beveridge, declared that “a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not patching”. Overnight, he became a national hero.

Shades of 1930 in Wall Street Banks’ Dark Pools?

By Pam Martens: July 7, 2014

On June 2 of this year, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a self-regulator of Wall Street’s broker-dealers, dropped a bombshell. For the first time, FINRA released trading data for Wall Street’s dark pools – unregistered stock exchanges that the SEC recklessly allows to trade stocks without making the bids and offers public, along with many other details.

What does states' refusal to expand Medicaid mean for Southerners?

This week the White House Council of Economic Advisers released "Missed Opportunities: The Consequences of State Decisions Not to Expand Medicaid," a report examining the effect of states' decisions on whether to expand Medicaid, the government health care program for low-income people and people with disabilities. The Affordable Care Act gives states the option of extending Medicaid to all non-elderly individuals in families with incomes below 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

Robert Reich: The New Way Big Corporations Like Walgreen Are Shamelessly Dodging Their Taxes

By Robert Reich

July 7, 2014 | Dozens of big U.S. corporations are considering leaving the United States in order to reduce their tax bills.

But they’ll be leaving the country only on paper. They’ll still do as much business in the U.S. as they were doing before.

The only difference is they’ll no longer be “American,” and won’t have to pay U.S. taxes on the profits they make.

Hospitals Are Mining Patients' Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick

By Shannon Pettypiece and Jordan Robertson, July 03, 2014

Imagine getting a call from your doctor if you let your gym membership lapse, make a habit of buying candy bars at the checkout counter, or begin shopping at plus-size clothing stores. For patients of Carolinas HealthCare System, which operates the largest group of medical centers in North and South Carolina, such a day could be sooner than they think. Carolinas HealthCare, which runs more than 900 care centers, including hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ offices, and surgical centers, has begun plugging consumer data on 2 million people into algorithms designed to identify high-risk patients so that doctors can intervene before they get sick. The company purchases the data from brokers who cull public records, store loyalty program transactions, and credit card purchases.

Let’s Just Pretend We Didn’t Offshore Manufacturing

Is an iPhone made in China and exported to Europe a U.S. export?

Is an Apple executive a manufacturing worker?

Yes, and yes. At least those could become the answers if a new proposal afoot among some in the administration is allowed to take effect. Federal agencies grouped under the bland-sounding Economic Classification Policy Committee (ECPC) are proposing to radically redefine U.S. manufacturing and trade statistics.

Under the proposal, U.S. firms that have offshored their production abroad – like Apple – would become “factoryless goods” manufacturers. The foreign factories that actually manufacture the goods – like the notorious iPhone-producing Foxconn factories in China – would no longer be manufacturers, but “service” providers for the rebranded “manufacturing” firms like Apple.

Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein: Full Employment and the Path to Shared Prosperity

There are many policies that can reduce inequality, but there is none as straightforward conceptually and as difficult politically as full employment. The basic point is simple: at low rates of unemployment, the demand for labor allows workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution to achieve gains in hourly wages, annual hours of work, and thus income.

Levels of unemployment are not the gift or curse of the gods; they are the result of conscious economic policy. The decision to tolerate high rates of unemployment is a choice. It is one that has enormous implications not just for the millions of people who are needlessly unemployed or underemployed but also for tens of millions of workers in the bottom half of the wage distribution whose bar-gaining power is undermined by high unemployment.

Joseph Stiglitz: The Myth of America’s Golden Age

What growing up in Gary, Indiana, taught me about inequality.

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, July/August 2014

I hadn’t realized when I was growing up in Gary, Indiana, an industrial town on the southern shore of Lake Michigan plagued by discrimination, poverty and bouts of high unemployment, that I was living in the golden era of capitalism. It was a company town, named after the chairman of the board of U.S. Steel. It had the world’s largest integrated steel mill and a progressive school system designed to turn Gary into a melting pot fed by migrants from all over Europe. But by the time I was born in 1943, cracks in the pot were already appearing. To break strikes—to ensure that workers did not fully share in the productivity gains being driven by modern technology—the big steel companies brought African-American workers up from the South who lived in impoverished, separate neighborhoods.

Paul Krugman: Build We Won’t

You often find people talking about our economic difficulties as if they were complicated and mysterious, with no obvious solution. As the economist Dean Baker recently pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. The basic story of what went wrong is, in fact, almost absurdly simple: We had an immense housing bubble, and, when the bubble burst, it left a huge hole in spending. Everything else is footnotes.

And the appropriate policy response was simple, too: Fill that hole in demand. In particular, the aftermath of the bursting bubble was (and still is) a very good time to invest in infrastructure. In prosperous times, public spending on roads, bridges and so on competes with the private sector for resources. Since 2008, however, our economy has been awash in unemployed workers (especially
construction workers) and capital with no place to go (which is why government borrowing costs are at historic lows). Putting those idle resources to work building useful stuff should have been a no-brainer.