How the New Monopoly Capitalism Will Crush You to Smithereens

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

August 14, 2014 | Something wicked has crept into American society, something that many hoped was left back in the dustbins of the 19th century. We’re talking about monopoly, the ogre that screams capitalism run amok. Monopolies, or near-monopolies, as are most common in America, rise up through a lack of competition. When one or a handful of players dominate the marketplace, get ready for higher prices, low-quality products, and crap wages for you and me.

Just a few decades ago, this destructive activity would have been illegal. But advocates for small government and faulty market theories successfully drove a complete unraveling of the regulations that used to keep these monsters at bay. The result has been disastrous. Monopolies are back, and they are bigger and nastier than ever.

Jamie Dimon’s $13 Billion Secret

William D. Cohan | August 13, 2014

In the end, the abject fear of Ben Wagner got Jamie Dimon to cave.

For much of 2013, Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of the formidable JPMorgan Chase & Company, was telling anyone who would listen that it was unfair and unjust for federal and state prosecutors to blame him and his bank for the manufacture and sale of mortgage-backed securities that occurred at Bear Stearns & Company and at Washington Mutual in the years leading up to the financial crisis. When JPMorgan Chase bought those two failing firms in 2008, Dimon argued, he was just doing what Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner had asked him to do. Why should his bank be held financially accountable for the bad behavior at Bear and WaMu?

It was a clever argument—and wrong. Dimon’s relentless effort to spin his patriotic story soon collided with the fact that Wagner, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of California, had uncovered evidence that JPMorgan itself was guilty of many of the same greedy and irresponsible behaviors. Piles of subpoenaed documents and e-mails revealed that JPMorgan bankers and traders had underwritten billions of dollars’ worth of questionable mortgage-backed securities that Dimon had been telling everyone had originated at Bear Stearns and WaMu. Worse, the bad behavior had occurred on Dimon’s watch.

Paul Krugman: The Forever Slump

It’s hard to believe, but almost six years have passed since the fall of Lehman Brothers ushered in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Many people, myself included, would like to move on to other subjects. But we can’t, because the crisis is by no means over. Recovery is far from complete, and the wrong policies could still turn economic weakness into a more or less permanent depression.

In fact, that’s what seems to be happening in Europe as we speak. And the rest of us should learn from Europe’s experience.

Should the Internet Be Like the Public Library?

Wednesday, 13 August 2014 15:21
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

As Americans, we love to think we're number one, but the truth is that when it comes to internet speed we're pretty mediocre.

In fact, one recent study put the U.S. at number 31 in the world in overall download speed, lagging behind much smaller and less developed countries like Estonia, Hungary, and Slovakia.

Internet speeds in the U.S. average out around 20.77 megabits per second, which is less than half of the average internet speed in Hong Kong, which has the world's fastest internet.

GOP Seeks to Further Weaken Campaign Finance Laws

Experts say latest challenge could further erode contribution limits

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

Republican lawmakers hoping to rake in more campaign cash from Wall Street are challenging a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule that limits the amount of money financiers can give to governors and state officials.

Last week, the state Republican committees of New York and Tennessee filed a lawsuit aimed at repealing a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule that limits the campaign contributions that can be made by investment advisers on Wall Street to political candidates. The rule is designed to prevent Wall Street from using campaign donations as a form of bribery against state officials who rely on these financial institutions to manage their investments.

Paul Krugman: Standing Up for Liberal Principles

Doug Sosnik, a Democratic political strategist, wrote an interesting piece in Politico recently on how "the left" is taking over the Democratic Party. Of course, what he calls "left" would be centrist, maybe even right of center, in most other Western democracies, and I think it's still true that today's progressive icons - say, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren - are to the right of where old-line liberals like Teddy Kennedy were.

But Mr. Sosnik is right that there has been a pretty big change in the way Democrats approach things. Here's how I'd put it: They have lost their post-Reagan cringe.

The Roots of the Iraq and Syria Wars Go Back More than 60 Years

Posted on August 13, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

It’s Always Been about Oil and Pipelines

The same issues which drove war and terrorism in the Middle East in the 1930s and 1940s are still driving it today

The best way to see this is to start with today, and work backwards …

The U.S. is bombing Iraq again in order to protect the major oil center in Erbil.

The war in Syria is also largely about oil and gas. International Business Times noted last year:

[Syria] controls one of the largest conventional hydrocarbon resources in the eastern Mediterranean.

Syria possessed 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil as of January 2013, which makes it the largest proved reserve of crude oil in the eastern Mediterranean according to the Oil & Gas Journal estimate.

A new look at what's in 'fracking' fluids raises red flags

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 13, 2014 — As the oil and gas drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") proliferates, a new study on the contents of the fluids involved in the process raises concerns about several ingredients. The scientists presenting the work today at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) say that out of nearly 200 commonly used compounds, there's very little known about the potential health risks of about one-third, and eight are toxic to mammals.

Why There’s A No-Fly Zone Over Ferguson, Missouri

by Annie-Rose Strasser, Posted on August 12, 2014 at 4:42 pm, Updated: August 13, 2014 at 9:50 am

On Tuesday, a freelance journalist noticed that a no-fly zone had been issued over Ferguson, Missouri, the site of the recent protests over police violence.

Residents have taken to the streets to express their anger at the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old shot dead by a police officer there. Witnesses allege that Brown was innocent and doing nothing but jaywalking, while police officials have stayed vague on the topic. In recent days, the protests have become violent, with police officers using rubber bullets and tear gas to quell unrest.

NPR Is Laundering CIA Talking Points to Make You Scared of NSA Reporting

By Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman 12 Aug 2014, 10:12 AM EDT

On August 1, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what she called “a tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” That firm, Recorded Future, worked together with “a cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs,” to produce a new report that purported to vindicate the repeated accusation from U.S. officials that “revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their own countermeasures.”

The Fire Sale of the Post Offices

August 6, 2014

In an earlier time, U.S. post offices were more than just places to mail letters. They were noble structures, symbols of democracy, stone-and-mortar testimony to the value of community. But many are now neglected and up for sale, laments Gray Brechin.

By Gray Brechin

Who owns America’s post offices and their continent-spanning gallery of public art? The “as is” sale of the Bronx’s decaying central post office — and of so many other post offices recently sold or for sale — begs the question of Americans for whom those buildings were intended and for which they paid.

The once-noble lobby of the Bronx post office has filled with the cheesy clutter that choked New York City’s original Penn Station before wrecking balls leveled that elegant Victorian-era structure in the 1960s. At the Bronx post office, garish signs and obstructive furniture mute the dialogue between marble-framed murals by artists Ben Shahn and his wife Bernarda Bryson, while neglect and a botched restoration renders some of their images virtually illegible.

Climate Movement Agenda: One Million (Frequent) Electric Buses Plus Protected Bikeways, “Everywhere”

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Hoexter makes an important point, that many climate activists’ proposals have focused on energy sources, as in promoting more use of solar or wind energy, and haven’t focused on how consumers use energy, as in the related infrastructure. Whether or not you agree with his proposals for electric buses and bicycles, they do make for a point of departure in getting to pragmatic reforms.

By Michael Hoexter, a policy analyst and marketing consultant on green issues, climate change, clean and renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives.

The US climate movement, in which I am active, has not to date been effective enough in getting serious climate action on the agenda of government leaders, especially on the federal level. This weakness is in part shared with the international climate movement more generally, though the level of climate denial both among political elites and among the general population in the US is unmatched in the world. With that denial comes resistance to climate action, though for a variety of reasons, no actions commensurate to the climate challenge have really been attempted by governments in the world, whatever the local level of resistance offered.

The government wants Big Ten schools to come clean about deals with banks

By Danielle Douglas, August 8

As thousands of students prepare to flood college campuses, the government’s consumer watchdog is urging universities to disclose how much money they receive when banks promote debit cards, prepaid cards and checking accounts on their campuses.

Regulators say the terms of the accounts being offered to students are not always clear and some are riddled with fees. Rather than presenting unbiased information to students, they say, schools are getting paid to act as middlemen for financial partners, a potential conflict of interest.

The New Racism--This is how the civil rights movement ends

By Jason Zengerle

Long before he became the most powerful man in the Alabama Senate, before he controlled billions of dollars in state money and had lobbyists, governors, and future presidents seeking his favor, Hank Sanders used newspapers and magazines as bathroom tissue. His mother would collect periodicals from the wealthy white family whose house she cleaned and bring them back for Sanders and his brothers and sisters. There were 13 children, all told, and they lived with their parents in a three-room shack that their father had built out of one-by-eight boards among the tall pines and chinaberry trees in Blacksher, a speck of a town 50 miles north of Mobile.

This was Alabama in the 1950s, when Jim Crow reigned and a governor’s race was determined by which candidate managed to secure the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. Life in Baldwin County, where Blacksher was located, may have been marginally less horrid for its black residents than in other parts of the state: The county’s last lynching had occurred in 1919 and some of the white men who perpetrated it had even gone to prison. But there were certain realities by which Sanders, as a black child, knew he must abide. He knew not to spend any of the money he earned picking cotton on the six-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola at the drugstore; those were only for white customers, and a black person who tried to buy one risked more than just being refused service. He also knew not to look in the direction of a white woman. The one time he did, the woman’s male companion threatened to whip him, and probably would have had Sanders’s mother, a strong-willed woman named Ola Mae, not intervened. For Sanders, the fact that there was no electricity or running water in his house—to say nothing of toilet paper—was far less distressing than the constant threat of danger.

Charles Koch’s plan to fix the economy: Destroy minimum wage and ‘addictive’ welfare

By Travis Gettys
Monday, August 11, 2014 12:52 EDT

The chairman and CEO of Koch Industries outlined his economic plan with an opinion piece published Monday by USA Today, where he expressed deep concern over chronic underemployment and diminished opportunities for younger or disadvantaged workers.

“The effects of underemployment are not just economic, they are also social and psychological,” Koch said. “Real work is an important part of how we define ourselves. Meaningful work benefits both us and others. Those who lack real jobs often end up depressed, addicted or aggressive.”

Koch argued that welfare benefits provided “addictive disincentives” to work, citing a recent Cato Institute study that found low-income assistance paid more than a minimum wage job in 35 states, and he claimed Obamacare encouraged business owners to hire part-time workers instead of full-time employees.

CIA Intervention in Ukraine Has Been Taking Place for Decades

By: Jeff Kaye, Saturday August 9, 2014 7:38 pm

“The most powerful form of lie is the omission…” — George Orwell
Of all the aspects of the current crisis over the NATO/Russia standoff in Ukraine, the determined intervention into Ukrainian political affairs by the United States has been the least reported, at least until recently. While new reports have appeared concerning CIA Director John Brennan’s mid-April trip to Kiev, and CIA/FBI sending “dozens” of advisers to the Ukrainian security services, very few reports mention that U.S. intervention in Ukraine affairs goes back to the end of World War II. It has hardly let up since then.

Dean Baker: The Entitlement of the Very Rich

The very rich don't think very highly of the rest of us. This fact is driven home to us through fluke events, like the taping of Mitt Romney's famous 47 percent comment, in which he trashed the people who rely on Social Security, Medicare, and other forms of government benefits.

Last week we got another opportunity to see the thinking of the very rich when Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, complained at a summit with African heads of state and business leaders that there is even an argument over the reauthorization of Export-Import Bank. According to the Washington Post, Immelt said in reference to the Ex-Im Bank reauthorization, "the fact that we have to sit here and argue for it I think is just wrong."

To get some orientation, the Ex-IM Bank makes around $35 billion a year in loans or loan guarantees each year. The overwhelming majority of these loans go to huge multi-nationals like Boeing or Mr. Immelt's company, General Electric. The loans and guarantees are a subsidy that facilitates exports by allowing these companies and/or their customers to borrow at below market interest rates.

2,061 of Citigroup’s Subsidiaries Go Missing

By Pam Martens: August 11, 2014

Meet the new, slimmed down, less complex, more manageable Citigroup. Or not.

 Figuring out what Citigroup owns and what it has sold is getting harder by the day as a vast number of its subsidiaries in the 160 countries in which it operates have up and vanished from its public filings but do not actually appear to have been sold in many cases.

When Did Republicans Start Hating the Environment?

Roughly 1991, according to a new study.

By Chris Mooney | Tue Aug. 12, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

It's one of those facts that sweeps you back into an alien, almost unrecognizable era. On July 9, 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon announced to Congress his plans to create the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By the end of that year, both agencies were a reality. Nowadays, among their other tasks, they either monitor or seek to mitigate the problem of global warming—actions that make today's Republicans, Nixon's heirs, completely livid.

To give one example of how anti-environment the right today is, just consider this ThinkProgress analysis, finding that "over 58 percent" of congressional Republicans refuse to accept the science of climate change.

So what happened to the GOP, from the time of Nixon to the present, to turn an environmental leader into an environmental retrograde?
According to a new study in the journal Social Science Research, the key change actually began around the year 1991—when the Soviet Union fell. "The conservative movement replaced the 'Red Scare' with a new 'Green Scare' and became increasingly hostile to environmental protection at that time," argues sociologist Aaron McCright of Michigan State University and two colleagues.

Tales of the cities: the progressive vision of urban America

A union leader is being hailed as a possible mayor in Chicago while elsewhere mayors are pursuing policies Obama has been unable to enact on the national stage

Gary Younge
The Guardian, Sunday 10 August 2014 15.16 EDT

After Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 one of his key aides, Rahm Emanuel, sat in the campaign’s favourite restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas, venting his frustration at those who had tried to stand in their way. He would call out a name, ram his steak knife into the table and, like Bluto in Animal House, shout “Dead!” Then he would pull the knife out and call another name and stab the table again.

Heaven only knows what damage he does to the furniture when he mentions Karen Lewis’s name. Emanuel, who was Barack Obama’s chief of staff, is now mayor of Chicago. Lewis is the head of the Chicago Teachers Union who got the better of him after leading the teachers in a strike two years ago. The two genuinely despise each other. When Lewis took on Emanuel over lengthening the school day, he told her: “Fuck you, Lewis!”; during the strike Lewis branded him a “liar and a bully”.

Now Lewis is seriously considering running against Emanuel for the mayoralty next year.

Paul Krugman: Phosphorus and Freedom

The Libertarian Fantasy

In the latest Times Magazine, Robert Draper profiled youngish libertarians — roughly speaking, people who combine free-market economics with permissive social views — and asked whether we might be heading for a “libertarian moment.” Well, probably not. Polling suggests that young Americans tend, if
anything, to be more supportive of the case for a bigger government than their elders. But I’d like to ask a different question: Is libertarian economics at all realistic?

The answer is no. And the reason can be summed up in one word: phosphorus.

As you’ve probably heard, the City of Toledo recently warned its residents not to drink the water. Why? Contamination from toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie, largely caused by the runoff of phosphorus from farms.

Finally, A Simple Plan That Can Reverse Inequality and Save America's Sinking Middle-Class

By Steven Rosenfeld

August 8, 2014 | Editor’s Note: As economic inequality grows in America, very few people have put forth solutions that can revive the middle class. Peter Barnes is a writer and entrepreneur whose focus is improving capitalism to solve big problems like climate change and inequality. Steven Rosenfeld spoke with Barnes about his latest book [3],With Liberty and Dividends For All: How To Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough.

Steven Rosenfeld: Your book starts with a very sober assessment of the American middle-class. It’s shrinking. It’s disappearing in our lifetime. And the reason is that most work-related income is not enough. It’s insufficient and that’s getting worse. Tell me about that.

Peter Barnes: One can throw out all the numbers, but rather than do that, just think back. Some of us, like myself, are old enough to remember when there were lots of good-paying steady jobs, both in the private sector and public sector. They had benefits, covered health insurance, and provided pensions. That was what the middle-class was built on when I was growing up. Now, for a variety of reasons, including globalization, and automation, and the decline of labor unions, that is no longer the case. And most of the younger people who are entering the labor market today don’t get jobs like that.

Dahr Jamail | Open Source Farming: A Renaissance Man Tackles the Food Crisis

Given Anthropogenic Climate Disruption and our dwindling capacities for producing enough healthy food, a cutting-edge farming technique that dramatically increases produce yields from a design engineer in Port Townsend, Washington, may well already be filling a critical void.

The news about our global food supply is not good.

Around the world - from the Middle East, across much of Africa, to California - wars over water and food are already occurring.

Billions of people already lack adequate supplies of potable water on a daily basis, and by 2030, nearly half the world's population will live in "water-stressed" areas, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Environmental Outlook 2030 Report.

Sam Pizzigati: Inside Our Profoundly Unequal "New Normal"

Wealth's current tilt to the top sometimes seems almost eternal. But can our economy "self-correct"? A provocative new paper out of the developed world's official research agency contemplates our tomorrow.

The Commerce Department released some revised figures on America’s economy last week. Previous numbers, Commerce researchers noted, had overestimated the share of the nation’s income going to workers and underestimated the share going to America’s asset-rich.

“Everything’s coming up roses for people who own a chunk of American capital,” observed Brookings Institution economist Gary Burtless after the new stats emerged. “What we’ve seen in the economic recovery is inequality on steroids. The market is giving wealthy people a very good run.”

Tennessee Drug Tests Welfare Applicants, Discovers Less Than One Percent Use Drugs

by Bryce Covert, Posted on August 7, 2014 at 9:36 am Updated: August 7, 2014 at 11:19 am

In July, Tennessee began a drug testing program for applicants to the state’s welfare program. Since then, just one person has tested positive out of more than 800.

Applicants have to answer three questions about drug use to get benefits, and if they answer yes to any of them, they get referred to urine testing. If the result is positive, they have to complete a treatment plan and then take another test. If the second comes back positive, they get cut off from benefits for six months. Those who refuse to take a drug test in the first place can’t get benefits.

The US Has a Scary Sewage Problem: Let's Clean It Up and Jumpstart the Economy While We're at It

Sunday, 10 August 2014 12:15
By Gar Alperovitz, AlterNet | Op-Ed

The problem is simple, surprising, and quite honestly disgusting: Our nation’s older cities depend largely on sewage treatment systems that overflow when it rains, dumping 860 billion gallons of raw sewage a year into “fresh” water across the country—enough to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania an inch deep.

This problem is very, very real for people like Lori Burns in Chicago, whose basement full of sewage and "climate change maggots" recently found its way into the Washington Post. Or for the people of Toledo, where a chronic "combined sewer overflow" problem has combined with runoff from industrial agriculture to drastically alter the ecological balance of Lake Erie, with toxic algal blooms making the city's drinking water poisonous.

But the stormwater crisis is also a tremendous opportunity to move in the direction of a new, community sustaining local economy.

Brian Beutler: Why Did the Washington Post Flip Flop on Obama's Immigration Policy?

I don’t know if the proximity of President Obama’s forthcoming executive action to expand deportation relief is making people go wobbly, or what, but some of the same critics who were until recently pressuring him to make a move are now warning him to back off.

Back in the spring, when Obama first ordered the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to review U.S. immigration law, the Washington Post editorial board told the White House to accept that its strategy of appealing to Republicans with a more aggressive deportation policy had "failed."

Thomas Frank: Ayn Rand’s libertarian “Groundhog Day”: Billionaire greed, deregulation and the myth that markets aren’t free enough

Wall Street wrecks the economy, and we keep pretending they're heroes worth emulating. Maybe we really are suckers

I published the following in Harper’s Magazine to mark ten years since the demise of Enron. It was more than an anniversary piece, though: this was the story of our times. The architecture of modern-day corruption never changes and, as every day’s newspaper reminds us, the Age of Enron is still very much alive.

This summer will mark 13 years since the series of disclosures that led to the sudden bankruptcy of the Enron Corp. of Houston. The collapse of the gas-and-power leviathan, then one of the largest companies in the nation, was the starting gun for the modern age of neoliberal scandal, the corporate crime that set the pattern. It was not the first episode to feature grotesque bonuses for insiders, or a fawning press, or bought politicians, or average people being fleeced by scheming predators. But it was the first in recent memory to bring together all those elements in one glorious fireball of fraud.

And in the years since, we’ve seen many more fireballs, each following the Enron pattern and all of them culminating in the financial meltdown of 2008, along with the seemingly unending recession it triggered. It is fair to say that in some genuine, dismaying sense, we are living in the Age of Enron.