Paul Krugman: Inequality Is a Drag

For more than three decades, almost everyone who matters in American politics has agreed that higher taxes on the rich and increased aid to the poor have hurt economic growth.

Liberals have generally viewed this as a trade-off worth making, arguing that it’s worth accepting some price in the form of lower G.D.P. to help fellow citizens in need. Conservatives, on the other hand, have advocated trickle-down economics, insisting that the best policy is to cut taxes on the rich, slash aid to the poor and count on a rising tide to raise all boats.

The Problem With the Private Option

Wednesday, 06 August 2014 10:24
By A.W. Gaffney, Truthout | News Analysis

Last week's dueling federal appeals court decisions on the legality of subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) cast - yet again - uncertainty on the future of President Obama's health care law. Yet even as this latest case plays out, the consequences of previous legal challenges to the law are still unfolding - to some extent in surprising ways.

When, for instance, the Supreme Court made the ACA's expansion of Medicaid optional for states, it was clear that this would limit the law's reach for some time to come: Even today, some 24 states have failed to expand the program, a number that includes many of the states that need it the most. But as I'll explore here, the Supreme Court's decision also had a less predictable effect: It gave conservatives power to remake the Medicaid program. As Sarah Kliff of The Washington Post put it, while Obamacare is expanding Medicaid, it is ironically making it "more Republican" too.

Humans Have Tripled Mercury Levels in the Ocean

Pollution may soon overwhelm deep seas' ability to sequester mercury, which builds up in tuna and other predatory fish

Aug 6, 2014 | By Anne Casselman and Nature magazine

Mercury levels in the upper ocean have tripled since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and human activities are to blame, researchers report today in Nature.

Although several computer models have estimated the amount of marine mercury, the new analysis provides the first global measurements. It fills in a critical piece of the global environmental picture, tracking not just the amount of mercury in the world's oceans, but where it came from and at what depths it is found.

Paul Krugman Just Made the Worst Call of His Career

By Pam Martens: August 5, 2014

For years now, Paul Krugman, the esteemed Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, has been using his columns at the New York Times to defend President Obama on multiple fronts. Until yesterday’s column, Krugman, who is typically spot on in the arena of monetary and economic issues, could be forgiven for his self-imposed myopia of a President who ran not once, but twice, on a populist message and then enabled the greatest wealth inequality in our nation’s history through his obsequious servility to Wall Street.

Wolf Richter: Goal of Booming ‘Internet of Things’: Monitoring, Sensing, Remote Control – Factory Workers First, You Next

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Yves Smith

Society is now created for technological, rather than human requirements. And that’s where tragedy begins.--C.V. Gheorgiu, The Twenty-Fifth Hour, 1950

I first heard about what would later be called the Internet of Things in 1991 from Michael Hawley, who happened to be providing support for my NeXT computer. Hawley was then a graduate student at MIT and favorite of Nick Negroponte. (Hawley, who had also worked at NeXT, pointed out that having him do my tech support was tantamount to having Steve Jobs on deck). He later became a professor in the MIT Media Lab

In addition to showing me the coolness of networks (like accessing files on remote computers, which was bleeding edge back then), he was also keen about discussing digital libraries and how his belt buckle would be able to talk to his refrigerator and why that would be useful. I kept quiet about my reservations about my objects having private conversations about me. In 1999, Hawley co-founded Things That Think, “a groundbreaking research program that explores the limitless ways digital media will infuse everyday objects.” The Internet of Things program draws much of its inspiration from the Things That Think initiative.

Getting to the Real Roots of the Net Neutrality Debate

Thursday, 07 August 2014 09:58
By Candace Clement, Free Press | News Analysis

When FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler released his Internet rule proposal in May, he said all the right things:

The FCC must stand strongly behind its responsibility to oversee the public interest standard and ensure that the Internet remains open and fair. The Internet is and must remain the greatest engine of free expression, innovation, economic growth and opportunity the world has ever known. We must preserve and promote the Internet.

But the path the agency has laid out to do that is inherently flawed. And unless the FCC reverses course, we’ll end up right back where we started … again.

Beyond the Minimum Wage: What’s Really Keeping Hourly Workers in Poverty?

by Sarita Gupta

In the debate about poverty and rising economic inequality, we need to think beyond the minimum wage.

When we talk about poverty it’s difficult to track—and give voice to—all of the different ideas around causes and solutions that need attention. Multiply those competing demands exponentially and you may get a feel for what working people in some of the fastest growing job sectors in our economy face every day.

Wall Street’s Regulators are Denying FOIAs and Fostering More Public Distrust

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 6, 2014

Getting what should already be public domain information from Wall Street’s regulators using the public records law known as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become next to impossible; and it’s fueling contempt for the Obama administration.

Another Reminder About the Stupidity of Austerity

Posted August 5, 2014 at 8:48 am by Josh Bivens

Neil Irwin has a good piece up on the NYT Upshot blog aiming to demonstrate why the recovery from the Great Recession has been so weak. He rightly highlights the drag of government spending, but I’d argue that if one narrows down on the question of how big a role has austerity played in slowing recovery, even Irwin’s numbers don’t quite capture it.

Irwin’s method is to look at the various components of gross domestic product and calculates the average share of total GDP that they accounted for between 1993 and 2013. Then, he multiplies this average share by the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of 2014 potential GDP to get the level that each of these components “should be” today. The difference between today’s actual level and what that level “should be” is then the contribution of the sector to today’s economic weakness. Using this method, he comes up with government spending accounting for 40 percent of the gap between today’s actual versus potential GDP.

The right’s “plagiarism” scam: How low it will stoop to protect Reagan’s legacy

A right-wing operative is mad Rick Perlstein's new book calls Reagan into question. Here's his pathetic response

David Dayen

Last week, I published an interview with Rick Perlstein, author of “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.” And this week, as the book gets released, Perlstein has been mired in a ginned-up scandal, validated by he-said/she-said journalism from the New York Times.

According to a Reagan biographer who currently serves as the publicist for Ann Coulter, Perlstein is a serial plagiarist. Only this accuser has defined plagiarism down to “quoting with full attribution” and “using the same historical facts.” The resulting controversy has enmeshed Perlstein in a political war he had no idea he was fighting. “I feel like a character in one of my books,” he told Salon.

Don’t Be Fooled: Banks Still Too Big to Fail

August 4, 2014
by Michael Winship

Analyzing a government report is like eating and digesting a meal — better to take it slowly than gobble quickly and suffer the possible consequences.

Example: last Thursday’s report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on whether or not large financial institutions were still perceived as “too big to fail.”

Mysterious Craters Are Just the Beginning of Arctic Surprises

Researchers are rethinking century-old observations as they witness the unexpected and peculiar perils that are emerging from thawing Arctic permafrost

Aug 5, 2014 | By David Biello

It's not just craters purportedly dug by aliens in Russia, it's also megaslumps, ice that burns and drunken trees. The ongoing meltdown of the permanently frozen ground that covers nearly a quarter of land in the Northern Hemisphere has caused a host of surprising arctic phenomena.

Temperatures across the Arctic are warming roughly twice as fast as the rest of the globe, largely due to the reduction in the amount of sunlight reflecting off of white, snow-covered ground. "At some point, we might get into a state of permafrost that is not comparable to what we know for 100 years or so, some new processes that never happened before," says geologist Guido Grosse of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany.

Don't Believe the Haters—The Truth About the U.S. Post Office

By Jim Hightower

August 6, 2014  |  One public service that people really like and count on is the post office -- which literally delivers for us.

Antigovernment ideologues and privatization dogmatists, however, hate the very word "public," and they've long sought to demonize the U.S. Postal Service, undercut its popular support and, finally, dismantle it. Their main line of attack has been to depict it as a bloated, inefficient, outmoded agency that's a hopeless money loser, sucking billions from taxpayers. Never mind that USPS doesn't take a dime of tax money to fund its operation -- it's actually a congressionally chartered, for-profit corporation that earns its revenue by selling stamps and providing services to customers. And here's something that will come as a surprise to most people: The post office makes a profit -- expected to be more than a billion dollars this year.

Michael Hudson: The Fracking/World Bank/IMF/Hunter Biden Dismantling Plan for Ukraine

Posted onAugust 5, 2014 by Yves Smith

Richard Smith was early to take a dim view of R. Hunter Biden becoming a director of a Ukraine’s biggest private gas producer, Burisma Holdings:

This has to be a hoax, right?
It’s so bizarre that you almost have to assume it’s a hoax. It sounds more like a cliched movie plot — a shady foreign oil company co-opts the vice president’s son in order to capture lucrative foreign investment contracts — than something that would actually happen in real life. But the indications as of this afternoon are that the board appointments actually happened, and that a Ukrainian energy company has retained the counsel of the vice president’s son and the Secretary of State’s close family friend and top campaign bundler.

Michael Hudson reports in a Real News Network interview that the commercial and geopolitical logic behind the Biden role, and the bigger US and World Bank/IMF program, is to push fracking onto a decidedly unreceptive population in Eastern Ukraine.

Dean Baker: Inflation Hawks: The Job Killers at the Fed

Discussions of inflation and Federal Reserve Board policy take place primarily in the business media. That's unfortunate, because these discussions can have more impact on the jobs and wages of most workers than almost any other policy imaginable.

The context of these discussions is that many economists, including some in policy making positions at the Fed, claim that the labor market is getting too tight. They argue this is leading to more rapid wage growth, which will cause more inflation and that this would be really bad news for the economy. Therefore they want the Fed to raise interest rates.

ALEC's Jeffersonian Project Pushes to Amend the Constitution

Tuesday, 05 August 2014 10:38
By Jessica Mason, PRWatch | Report

The United States could be on the verge of calling its first constitutional convention since 1787, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, or "ALEC," has been working behind the scenes to make it happen, including through its new lobbying arm, the Jeffersonian Project.

ALEC is urging state legislators to pass state resolutions calling for a constitutional convention in order to pass a federal balanced budget amendment.

Paul Krugman: Obama's Other Success

Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Is Working

Although the enemies of health reform will never admit it, the Affordable Care Act is looking more and more like a big success. Costs are coming in below predictions, while the number of uninsured Americans is dropping fast, especially in states that haven’t tried to sabotage the program. Obamacare is working.

But what about the administration’s other big push, financial reform? The Dodd-Frank reform bill has, if anything, received even worse press than Obamacare, derided by the right as anti-business and by the left as hopelessly inadequate. And like Obamacare, it’s certainly not the reform you would have
devised in the absence of political constraints.

But also like Obamacare, financial reform is working a lot better than anyone listening to the news media would imagine.

3 Facts that Poverty-Deniers Don't Want to Hear

By Paul Buchheit

August 3, 2014 | Three-quarters [3] of conservative Americans say poor people have it easy.

The degree of ignorance about poverty is stunning, even for people far removed from the realities of an average American lifestyle. Both oilman Charles Koch [4] and Nicole Miller CEO Bud Konheim [5] have suggested that we should compare ourselves to poor people in China and India, and then just shut up and be happy. The Cato Institute [6] informs Americans that "The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work." And entrepreneur Marc Andreessen [7] explains, rather incomprehensibly, that "Technology innovation disproportionately helps the poor more than it helps the rich, as the poor spend more of their income on products."

How We Can Push Back the Privatization Assault That's Destroying the Postal System

By David Morris

July 31, 2014  |  The United States Postal Service (USPS) management just ran into a possible game-changing obstacle to its shameful pursuit of a fully privatized post office: labor solidarity.

 

Here’s the background. For a decade the USPS has been aggressively shrinking, consolidating, and outsourcing the nation’s postal system. In July 2011 management upped the ante by announcing [3] the rapid closure of 3600 local post offices, a step toward the eventual closing of as many as 15,000, half of all post offices in the nation.

Mississippi’s Willful Neglect

It and some other red states can’t be trusted to take care of the poor.

By Jamelle Bouie

Like most Republicans, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant is an Obamacare refusenik. A staunch opponent of the law, he rejected the Medicaid expansion, refused to build an exchange, and won’t encourage Mississippians to enroll in the federal backstop.

All of this is why, according to a recent report, the number of uninsured in the state has grown since last year, when Obamacare went into effect. As of this month, Mississippi has an uninsured rate of more than 21 percent, a 3.34 percentage-point increase over the previous year. By contrast, West Virginia—a similarly poor state that took the opposite approach—has seen its uninsured rate decline from more than 17 percent to an estimate of less than 7 percent, a slightly more than 10-point drop.

Paul Krugman: Knowledge Isn’t Power

One of the best insults I’ve ever read came from Ezra Klein, who now is editor in chief of Vox.com. In 2007, he described Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, as “a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”

It’s a funny line, which applies to quite a few public figures. Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, is a prime current example. But maybe the joke’s on us. After all, such people often dominate policy discourse. And what policy makers don’t know, or worse, what they think they know that isn’t so, can definitely hurt you.

Rick Perlstein: “Ronald Reagan absolved America almost in a priestly role not to have to contend with sin. The consequences are all around us today”

From climate change to foreign affairs, Reagan pushed America toward easy lies, just as reckoning seemed possible 

Rick Perlstein is one of America’s greatest chroniclers of the origins of the modern American right wing. In “Before the Storm,” about the rise of Barry Goldwater, and “Nixonland,” about the backlash politics that drove Nixon into the White House, Perlstein has captured, in big set pieces and small details, the forces that came together to move the nation’s ideological center of gravity. Now, with “The Invisible Bridge,” Perlstein tells the story of another important figure in that shift – Ronald Reagan.

The title refers to a statement from Nikita Khrushchev to Richard Nixon: “If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” Nobody internalized this advice more than Reagan, who ignored American shortcomings like Vietnam or Watergate in favor of tightly wrapped fables, mesmerizing his audience with tales about a simpler time where America can never fail. It turned out, despite the enormous complications of the political moment, such stories were just what a large segment of the public wanted to hear. Reagan bridged the gulf between America’s perceptions and its reality, and transformed the terrain upon which we battle politically.

The Charter School Profiteers

by Allie Gross

In Detroit charter schools, mismanagement and opportunistic “education entrepreneurs” thrive.

Jenay* crouches on the carpet, her spine curved into a lowercase “c” as she concentrates on the flimsy picture book in her lap. Every few minutes her fingers slide off the page, tapping the floor until she locates a bottle of purple soda. She never breaks eye contact with the book.

It’s 4 p.m. on a Monday in Detroit, and the fifth grader is staying after school to work on her reading. Jenay is reading at a second-grade level. She has been placed in summer school each June since the third grade, and every September she is promoted to the next grade. It is the unspoken truth all students know: Getting held back is an idle threat. It could lead to families switching schools and the loss of thousands in per-pupil funding — mutually assured destruction for the school and the student.

Greenspan Says Stocks to See ‘Significant Correction’

By Christopher Condon - Jul 30, 2014

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said equity markets will see a decline at some point after surging for the past several years.

“The stock market has recovered so sharply for so long, you have to assume somewhere along the line we will get a significant correction,” Greenspan, 88, said today in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop” with Betty Liu. “Where that is, I do not know.”

The Original Geo-Engineers: How Beavers Can Help Save the Humans

(or How to Save the Iconic West from the Cow)

by Chip Ward

The great novelist Wallace Stegner sorted the conflicting impulses in his beloved American West into two camps. There were the “boomers” who saw the frontier as an opportunity to get rich quick and move on: the conquistadors, the gold miners, the buffalo hunters, the land scalpers, and the dam-building good ol’ boys. They are still with us, trying to drill and frack their way to Easy Street across our public lands. Then there were those Stegner called the “nesters” or “stickers” who came to stay and struggled to understand the land and its needs. Their quest was to become native.

That division between boomers and nesters is, of course, too simple. All of us have the urge to consume and move on, as well as the urge to nest, so our choices are rarely clear or final. Today, that old struggle in the American West is intensifying as heat-parched, beetle-gnawed forests ignite in annual epic firestorms, reservoirs dry up, and Rocky Mountain snow is ever more stained with blowing desert dust.

Conservative group Alec devises offshoot ACCE to lobby at local levels

As Republicans debate party future, aggressive ‘corporate dating service’ launches new group to push for conservative policies

Ed Pilkington in New York

The corporate lobbying network American Legislative Exchange Council, commonly known as Alec, is seeking to extend its brand of aggressive privatization and tax cuts to the local level, with the launch on Wednesday of a new offshoot focused on America’s cities and counties.

The new network, the American City County Exchange (ACCE), will hold its first public meeting in Dallas, Texas, on Wednesday. It is timed to sit alongside Alec’s annual meeting at which the parent body will debate its usual menu of conservative priorities – pushing back government regulation, fighting moves to curb climate change, reducing trade union powers and cutting taxes.

Democrats want to ban government contracts for companies that leave the U.S. to avoid taxes

By Danielle Douglas

Lawmakers are growing tired of corporate America's persistent efforts to dodge U.S. taxes.

In the past month, Congress and the White House have denounced a loophole that lets companies lower their tax rate by moving their headquarters overseas. These so-called "inversions" have been the subject on Congressional hearings and legislation to eliminate the tax benefit.

Dean Baker: More Fun and Games With Export-Import Bank

Tuesday, 29 July 2014 04:12

It is great fun watching the establishment get so upset over the possibility that Boeings' the Export-Import Bank may not be reauthorized to issue more loans. Just to remind everyone, the Export-Import Bank issues the overwhelming majority of its loans and guarantees to benefit a small number of huge corporations. It is a straightforward subsidy to these companies, giving them loans at below market interest rates. (Yes, they are almost all paid back. This means that our financial wizards have discovered arbitrage -- the government borrows at a lower rate than anyone else so it can show a profit any time it lends to anyone else by splitting the difference in borrowing costs.)

Anyhow, today's fun is a column in the NYT (major media outlets have an open door policy to anyone who wants to argue to preserve the subsidies) by William Brock, a former senator and trade representative under President Reagan.

Worldwide water shortage by 2040 

Jul 29, 2014
Two new reports that focus on the global electricity water nexus have just been published. Three years of research show that by the year 2040 there will not be enough water in the world to quench the thirst of the world population and keep the current energy and power solutions going if we continue doing what we are doing today. It is a clash of competing necessities, between drinking water and energy demand. Behind the research is a group of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, Vermont Law School and CNA Corporation in the US.

The Forgotten Financial Panic of 1914, and the Eternal Recurrence of Short-Term Thinking

Posted on July 30, 2014 by David Dayen

This week marks the 100th anniversary of a nearly forgotten yet critical moment in global finance. As the looming outbreak of World War I became more and more imminent when Austria made an ultimatum to Serbia in the last week of July 1914, the resulting fear in global markets set off a massive financial panic. Investors, fearing unpaid debts, pulled out of stocks and bonds in a scramble for cash, which at this point in history meant gold. The London Stock Exchange reacted by closing on July 31 and staying closed for five straight months. The U.S. stock exchange, which witnessed a mass dumping of securities by European investors in exchange for gold to finance the war, would also close on the same day, for about four months. Britain declared war while on a bank holiday. Over 50 countries experienced some form of asset depletion or bank run. Here’s an incredible statistic: “For six weeks during August and early September every stock exchange in the world was closed, with the exception of New Zealand, Tokyo and the Denver Colorado Mining Exchange.”

U.S. Court of Appeals Decision on Country of Origin Labeling a Victory for Consumers and Farmers

Statement of Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, on today’s U.S. Court of Appeals country of origin labeling decision

WASHINGTON - “Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously upheld the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s authority to issue rules implementing the Country of Origin Labeling law for meat and poultry products. This landmark ruling supporting commonsense consumer disclosure rules that are, as the Court noted, ‘purely factual and uncontroversial’ ensures all Americans can know the source of the food they feed their families.

Wall Street Journal Reporter: “The Entire United States Market Has Become One Vast Dark Pool”

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2014

In 2012, Wall Street Journal reporter, Scott Patterson, released his 354-page prescient overview of U.S. market structure titled, Dark Pools: High Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System. (For those whose computer prowess is limited to turning on a laptop, like millions of fellow Americans, “A.I.” means artificial intelligence – machines teaching themselves to think like humans, but faster.)

Patterson comes to an epiphany on page 339 of his book, writing in the notes section: “The title of this book doesn’t entirely refer to what is technically known in the financial industry as a ‘dark pool.’ Narrowly defined, dark pool refers to a trading venue that masks buy and sell orders from the public market. Rather, I argue in this book that the entire United States stock market has become one vast dark pool. Orders are hidden in every part of the market. And the complex algorithm AI-based trading systems that control the ebb and flow of the market are cloaked in secrecy. Investors – and our esteemed regulators – are entirely in the dark because the market is dark.” (The italics in this excerpt are as they appear in the hardcover book.)

Fox Cheerleads U.S. Companies Moving Overseas - Because Obama

By News Hound Ellen, July 29, 2014 7:00 am

Fox & Friends all but got out pom poms to cheer corporations fleeing the country to avoid paying taxes.
In his weekend address, President Obama denounced “tax inversions,” i.e. a loophole that allows U.S. corporations to avoid taxes by moving overseas. “They’re basically renouncing their citizenship and declaring that they’re based somewhere else, just to avoid paying their fair share,” Obama said.

Fox Business’ Stuart Varney joined the Curvy Couch Crew and right away scoffed at President Obama’s stance as little more than an election-year ploy to make himself look good by painting corporations as unpatriotic. Any loyal Fox viewer's blood probably started boiling already. Even if those corporations are behaving - well, unpatriotically.

Paul Krugman: Corporate Artful Dodgers

Tax Avoidance du Jour: Inversion

In recent decisions, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has made clear its view that corporations are people, with all the attendant rights. They are entitled to free speech, which in their case means spending lots of money to bend the political process to their ends. They are entitled to religious beliefs, including those that mean denying benefits to their workers. Up next, the right to bear arms?

There is, however, one big difference between corporate persons and the likes of you and me: On current trends, we’re heading toward a world in which only the human people pay taxes.

GOP Leader Questions Candidate About Hate Group That Advocates Death Squads - Updated

jhutson
Fri Jul 25, 2014 at 01:50:09 AM EST

The head of Maryland's Republican Party, Joe Cluster, has called local candidate Michael Peroutka to the woodshed for a "clarification" about his involvement with a high-­profile, white nationalist hate group. At least that's what Cluster thinks the subject of their July 25 meeting will be.

But wait until he reads this.
On July 8, as I reported, Peroutka wrote a letter to Michael Hill, president of the League of the South, asking the neo­-Confederate hate group to help his campaign. Peroutka wanted to thank the League, which advocates for secession and theocratic government by and for white people, for its friendship, work, and hospitality. Peroutka had just won the GOP's nomination for Anne Arundel County Council, as well as a seat on the Republican Central Committee there, and it made perfect sense that he would reach out to the no doubt many members of the organization on which he once served on the Board of Directors for their support.

 
'Guerilla War' and Assassinations

Perhaps Peroutka was surprised the following week, when on July 15, Hill wrote an essay for the League's website titled "A Bazooka in Every Pot," in which he outlines a program of "guerrilla war," marked by "three-­to-­five-­man" death squads which would target government leaders, journalists, and other public figures for assassination, in order to advance the League's goals.

The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third Less

By ANNA BERNASEK
JULY 26, 2014

Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.

Gay Marriage and the Political Psychology of Disgust

Why is it that some react to the LGBT community with the same emotions we use for rotting food? Scientists are starting to figure it out.

By Brian Resnick

July 28, 2014 When Michael Sam kissed his boyfriend on television to celebrate his successful draft into the NFL, some viewers were disgusted. The charged comments that followed demonstrated that when it comes to public displays of gay affection, some people have a gut reaction to recoil. But why?

The answer to that question is not fully known, but scientists are beginning to establish an understanding of how biology and the environment may interact to form such reactions.

First, it's important to understand that disgust in humans can be good. We should recoil from the truly gross things that can harm us—festering wounds, rancid meat, and feces, to name a few examples, are dangerous incubators of infection. "Disgust is a part of what is referred to as the behavioral immune system, which protects us from dealing with items and individuals that might make us sick, that might kill us," says Patrick Stewart, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas (and not of X-Men, Star Trek fame).

The Neoliberal Bailout

Jonathan Kirshner

July 07, 2014

 

The System Worked: How the World Stopped Another Great Depression

Daniel W. Drezner

Oxford University Press, $29.95 (cloth)

The System Worked is a smart, thoughtful, and important book that I largely disagree with. Daniel Drezner, a professor of International Politics at Tufts University and notable public intellectual (he wrote a pioneering and widely admired blog for Foreign Policy and now writes for the Washington Post), has crafted a cogent, counterintuitive interpretation of the global financial crisis. The argument is neatly summed up by the book’s title, and on its first page: “The punch line of this book is that the conventional wisdom is wrong. In response to the 2008 financial crisis . . . global economic governance responded in an effective and nimble fashion. In short, the system worked.”

There is much to agree with in this claim: however bitter the experience of our lingering economic malaise—the “great recession”—the world did indeed avoid another Great Depression. Another such cataclysmic meltdown could have easily taken place in the wake of the financial crisis, as many analysts at the time feared. Drezner disarmingly notes that he was among the pessimists in those dark hours. He positions the book as his explanation of why he was wrong then and why, unlike many more conventional analysts, he is more sanguine now.