Glenn Greenwald: How Former Treasury Officials and the UAE Are Manipulating American Journalists

The tiny and very rich Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar has become a hostile target for two nations with significant influence in the U.S.: Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Israel is furious over Qatar’s support for Palestinians generally and (allegedly) Hamas specifically, while the UAE is upset that Qatar supports the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (UAE supports the leaders of the military coup) and that Qatar funds Islamist rebels in Libya (UAE supports forces aligned with Ghadaffi (see update below)).

This animosity has resulted in a new campaign in the west to demonize the Qataris as the key supporter of terrorism. The Israelis have chosen the direct approach of publicly accusing their new enemy in Doha of being terrorist supporters, while the UAE has opted for a more covert strategy: paying millions of dollars to a U.S. lobbying firm – composed of former high-ranking Treasury officials from both parties – to plant anti-Qatar stories with American journalists. That more subtle tactic has been remarkably successful, and shines important light on how easily political narratives in U.S. media discourse can be literally purchased.

Thomas Frank: In Brownbackistan, everything is awesome! And don’t let any liberal tell you different

Sam Brownback's wrecking crew built "model red state" with huge tax cuts. They gutted Kansas and people now know it

If you visit the campaign web site of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, who is fighting a difficult battle for re-election, you will see a series of large-type boasts about his nonexistent economic achievements, and then you will read this:

“Our administration has accomplished this and so much more in my first term as Governor. . . . Help me stand up for Kansas against an over-reaching federal government. Join Lt Governor Colyer and I today.”

Yes: Join I today. The governor of Kansas wrote this—or signed it, anyway—and just above a list item declaring “Investing in Education.”

How to make Isis fall on its own sword

Degrade and destroy? The west should try to disrupt the canny militants into self-destruction, because bombs will only backfire

Chelsea E Manning in Fort Leavenworth
theguardian.com, Tuesday 16 September 2014 11.00 EDT

The Islamic State (Isis) is without question a very brutal extremist group with origins in the insurgency of the United States occupation of Iraq. It has rapidly ascended to global attention by taking control of swaths of territory in western and northern Iraq, including Mosul and other major cities.

Based on my experience as an all-source analyst in Iraq during the organization’s relative infancy, Isis cannot be defeated by bombs and bullets – even as the fight is taken to Syria, even if it is conducted by non-Western forces with air support.

I believe that Isis is fueled precisely by the operational and tactical successes of European and American military force that would be – and have been – used to defeat them.

10 Ways Conservatives Sell Their Failed Policies

By Alex Henderson

September 24, 2014 | A big problem for modern-day Republicans and the Tea Party is that when they are too forthcoming with their ideas—handing social security over to Wall Street oligarchs, outlawing abortion for rape victims, wiping out what’s left of the New Deal, turning the United States into a Christian fundamentalist theocracy—they risk alienating swing voters. So wingnuts often use warm, fuzzy language to make negative things sound positive. Terrible working conditions are sold as “right to work” laws. Being abused by health insurance companies is called “self-determination,” butchering the social safety net is sold as “self-reliance.”

‘They Ordered Us To Kill All The People’

by Sebastian Rotella
ProPublica, Sep. 30, 2013, 9 a.m.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Shaken by sobs, his head bowed, a former Guatemalan commando testified last week that he wept as he hurled a little boy to his death in a village well 31 years ago while a commanding officer, Lt. Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes, snarled: “This is a job for men!”

Sosa, now a 55-year-old U.S. citizen, watched that grim testimony from a defense table guarded by U.S. marshals in a federal courtroom here. His former comrade-in-arms, Gilberto Jordán, accused Sosa of playing a lead role in one of the worst war crimes in the recent history of the hemisphere: the massacre of 250 people in the Guatemalan hamlet of Dos Erres in 1982. Sosa is charged with fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship years later by concealing his participation in the massacre.

Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and a Culture Clash

A confidential report and a fired examiner’s hidden recorder penetrate the cloistered world of Wall Street’s top regulator—and its history of deference to banks.

by Jake Bernstein
ProPublica, Sep. 26, 2014, 5 a.m.

Barely a year removed from the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York faced a crossroads. Congress had set its sights on reform. The biggest banks in the nation had shown that their failure could threaten the entire financial system. Lawmakers wanted new safeguards.

The Federal Reserve, and, by dint of its location off Wall Street, the New York Fed, was the logical choice to head the effort. Except it had failed miserably in catching the meltdown.

The Tenacity of Free Market Fundamentalism

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Yves Smith

This is an important and wide ranging conversation about the history of economic ideas and how it played out in political discourse, specifically, how free market fundamentalism, an idea that appeared to be dead in the 1940s, survived and became dominant.

One of the themes in this talk between Fred Block, professor of sociology at UC Davis, and Rob Johnson of INET is the conflict between the idea of “freedom” at the root of free market fundamentalism, which means “freedom to be left alone” versus democracy. As this discussion makes clear, markets cannot self-regulate. They become bare-fisted brawls for assets and power. Perversely from the perspective of the free market fundamentalists, aka libertarian utopians, for markets to deliver the positive benefits ascribed to them, you need government intervention: good access to court systems to enforce contracts and other rights, regulation to contend with externalities and curb predatory practices which are purely extractive, as well as the accumulation of monopoly/oligopoly power.

The $1-Billion-a-Year Right-Wing Conspiracy You Haven’t Heard Of

Jay Michaelson

Are you female, gay, non-Christian, or otherwise interested in the separation of church and state? Get to know The Gathering, a shadowy, powerful network of hard-right funders meeting Thursday in Florida.

Have you heard of the $1,750-per-person “Gathering,” which starts Thursday in Orlando, Florida?

Probably not. But if you’re female, gay, non-Christian, or otherwise interested in the separation of church and state, your life has been affected by it.

The Gathering is a conference of hard-right Christian organizations and, perhaps more important, funders. Most of them are not household names, at least if your household isn’t evangelical. But that’s the point: The Gathering is a hub of Christian Right organizing, and the people in attendance have led the campaigns to privatize public schools, redefine “religious liberty” (as in the Hobby Lobby case), fight same-sex marriage, fight evolution, and, well, you know the rest. They’re probably behind that, too.

IBM’s solar concentrator can produce energy, clean water and AC

By Lucas Mearian

IBM Research and Switzerland-based Airlight Energy today announced a new parabolic dish that increases the sun's radiation by 2,000 times while also producing fresh water and air conditioning.

The new Concentrator PhotoVoltaics (CPV) system uses a dense array of water-cooled solar chips that can convert 80% of the sun's radiation into useful energy.

Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb

By Ryan Devereaux

Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.

The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.

The SEC Coverup for Private Equity: Worse Than for TBTF Banks

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Yves Smith

In a mere four months, the SEC has gone from calling out widespread abuses in the private equity industry to not just walking back its detailed criticisms, but actually enabling a coverup.

Readers may recall that in May, SEC inspection chief Andrew Bowden gave what was by regulatory standards a blistering speech describing widespread misconduct in the private equity industry. His detailed account followed SEC Chairman Mary Jo White setting forth uncharacteristically clear-cut details of private equity abuses in testimony to Congress.

Bowden was specific about the extent of the abuses by general partners, which included what amounts to theft, as in taking funds they weren’t entitled to. Bowden categorically stated that the bad acts implicated over half the firms they’d examined. Moreover, he described in considerable detail the types of grifting they’d found so far. Privately, the SEC has made clear that the abuses weren’t concentrated at small fry but were across the spectrum of firms, including the very top players.

Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire

Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world's largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don't want you to know is how they made all that money

By Tim Dickinson | September 24, 2014

The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.

What is less clear is where all that money comes from. Koch Industries is headquartered in a squat, smoked-glass building that rises above the prairie on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas. The building, like the brothers' fiercely private firm, is literally and figuratively a black box. Koch touts only one top-line financial figure: $115 billion in annual revenue, as estimated by Forbes. By that metric, it is larger than IBM, Honda or Hewlett-Packard and is America's second-largest private company after agribusiness colossus Cargill. The company's stock response to inquiries from reporters: "We are privately held and don't disclose this information."

'Fracking' wastewater that is treated for drinking produces potentially harmful compounds

Concerns that fluids from hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," are contaminating drinking water abound. Now, scientists are bringing to light another angle that adds to the controversy. A new study, appearing in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, has found that discharge of fracking wastewaters to rivers, even after passage through wastewater treatment plants, could be putting the drinking water supplies of downstream cities at risk.

Health insurers turning into who knows what?

Commentary: squeeze on profits will continue to transform the industry

By Wendell Potter, 5:00 am, September 22, 2014 Updated: 5:00 am, September 22, 2014

As I wrote last week, one of the nation’s biggest employers — Boeing — is pioneering a concept in providing health care benefits to its employees that eliminates insurance companies as middlemen.

What Boeing is doing represents a seismic shift in health care financing and delivery that potentially will have more far-reaching effects than Obamacare, primarily because it is coming from the private sector, not the government. It is a shift that the big health insurers have been anticipating and preparing for since long before the Affordable Care Act was enacted.

The Right-Wing’s Trashy Response To The Biggest Climate March Ever

by Jeff Spross, Posted on September 23, 2014 at 11:55 am, Updated: September 24, 2014 at 8:20 am

On Sunday, as many as 400,000 people descended on New York City to demand that world leaders finally get serious about global warming.

But all some news sites could talk about was the trash.

“Litterbug Climate Marchers Leave Behind Piles of Trash” reported Breitbart, over a compilation of pics and tweets documenting the admittedly unsightly piles of bags, cups, cans and signs that marchers left behind on corners and sidewalks and piled around garbage cans. The self-satisfied hosts of Fox News’ “The Five” admonished the marchers to “practice what they preach.” The Independent Journal Review tisked that the trash “distinctly contradicts the purpose of the march in the first place.”

America’s dark economic secret: How a giant gimmick has wages and jobs hanging by a thread

Welcome to the "gimmick economy" -- where it's not about good products or labor, but something far more scary

David Dayen

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s announcement of a series of new rules to reduce the financial incentives behind corporate inversions tells you a lot about where our economy sits right now. Productivity and growth scarcely matter as much as what I would call the “gimmick economy.” Companies now spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out not how to beat their competition, but how to prosper from tricks and loopholes their accountants find buried in the law. Every corporation has become, at the root, a financial company, adept at moving money around on paper and little else. And the government has to scramble in a never-ending race to keep up with the innovations.

To start with, understand what a corporate inversion is: an on-paper transaction involving a merger between a larger U.S. company and a smaller counterpart abroad. No worker moves overseas as a result of the merger. No production facilities or corporate offices transfer. Instead, the address on the corporate masthead changes from America to the low-tax alternative where the overseas company is headquartered. It’s a completely fictitious pretension, no different than if I used a handicapped placard to park in good spots everywhere I went, and then limped around after getting out of the car.

Shocking Racist Ideas Are Getting Treated as Science in Leading National Publications

By Steve Rendall

September 22, 2014 | Nicholas Wade was a leading New York Times science writer for three decades, at one point the editor of the “Science Times” section. He retired from full-time work at the paper in 2012, and in May 2014 published A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, a book that has been described as a full-throated defense of “scientific racism” (New Statesman, 5/20/14 [3]). Wade’s embrace of the pseudoscience of eugenics raises questions about his tenure at theTimes, and about corporate media vigilance when it comes to racism.

Media frequently fail to challenge racism in high places (FAIR Blog, 6/27/14 [4]) - in part because some highly placed corporate media figures are themselves attracted to racialist ideologies. Extra! (4/05 [5]) documented this after New York Times columnists David Brooks (12/7/04 [6]) and John Tierney (10/24/04 [7]) approvingly cited the work of Steve Sailer, a central figure in the promotion of racist and anti-immigrant theories.

Paul Krugman: Errors and Emissions

Could Fighting Global Warming Be Cheap and Free?

This just in: Saving the planet would be cheap; it might even be free. But will anyone believe the good news?

I’ve just been reading two new reports on the economics of fighting climate change: a big study by a blue-ribbon international group, the New Climate Economy Project, and a working paper from the International Monetary Fund. Both claim that strong measures to limit carbon emissions would have hardly any negative effect on economic growth, and might actually lead to faster growth. This may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. These are serious, careful analyses.

The United Kingdom Nearly Died for Margaret Thatcher's Sins

Robert Kuttner, September 23, 2014

The Scots got sick and tired of Thatcherite policies imposed from London.

Why on earth did the Scots, largely quiescent as part of Great Britain for three centuries, suddenly become the mouse that roared?

It wasn't because they became besotted watching re-runs of Braveheart or Rob Roy, or even because they coveted more of a share of North Sea oil revenues. No, the Scots got sick and tired of Thatcherite policies imposed from London.

Thanks to the partial form of federalism known as "devolution" provided by the Labour government of Tony Blair in 1997, Scotland got to keep such progressive policies as free higher education and an intact national health service, while the rest of the U.K. partly privatized the health service and began compelling young people to go into debt to finance college like their American cousins.

Attacks on abortion, voting, follow similar paths

By Irin Carmon and Zachary Roth

The laws sound innocuous, even boring. Requiring photo identification to vote, or hospital credentials to perform an abortion. Changing building requirements for clinics, or schedules for elections.

But seen together, state measures that have swept the nation in recent years restricting access to voting and to abortion could represent some of the keenest successes of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

The bulk of these restrictions have been passed since Republicans took control of a slew of state legislatures in 2010: Voter ID laws were passed in states like Texas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, along with cuts to early voting in several more. Medically unnecessary restrictions have also been placed on abortion clinics in all three of those states, and similar laws threaten to close clinics in Louisiana, Alabama and Oklahoma.

Sam Houston State study finds gang life is short-lived

HUNTSVILLE, TX 9/24/14 -- Although membership in a gang often is depicted as a lifelong commitment, the typical gang member joins at age 13 and only stays active for about two years, according to a study at Sam Houston State University.

"Gang membership is not a fixed identity or a scarlet letter," said David Pyrooz in an article published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. "Media and popular culture have led to misconceptions about gangs and gang membership, chief among them the myth of permanence, as reflected in the quote from West Side Story –'When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dyin' day'."

Dean Baker: The Mysteries of Inequality Are Only Mysterious to Elites

Developing explanations for the growth in inequality over the last three decades has been a huge growth industry in economics and policy circles. Many economists have made their careers with a novel explanation of how the natural development of technology and the market has concentrated income and wealth in the top 1 percent. It’s even better if you can show that inequality hasn’t risen. While the explanations that blame inequality on technology can get complicated, there were three items in the last week that painted the picture very clearly for the rest of us.

First, we got new data from the Federal Reserve Board and the Census Bureau, both of which showed that typical families are still seeing very little benefit from the recovery to date. The Fed released the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finance which showed median family wealth was still below the 2010 level in spite of the run-up in the stock market.

Census data on poverty show results of economic policy gone wrong

Michael Hiltzik

The headline number in last week's release of Census Bureau data on poverty was pretty good. It was widely noted that the rate dropped significantly for the first time since 2006, with especially sharp declines among children and Latino families.

A peek under the hood, however, reveals the dismal realities of the modern U.S. economy. Other than the population over 65 and under 18, wages and economic mobility are frozen solid. The national safety net is barely keeping up with need. And years of austerity politics — cutoffs of unemployment benefits, premature termination of low-income assistance programs, resistance in some regions to bringing healthcare coverage to low-income residents via Medicaid — have kept millions of Americans mired in near-poverty or in economic stagnation.

American elites have completely failed to understand what the Fed should be doing right now

By Jared Bernstein

Here are a few questions I’d like you to consider, and you don’t need to be an economist to give a valid responses. In fact, it’s better if you’re not.

Which do you think is a bigger problem facing the U.S. economy right now: a) inflation, or b) unemployment? Do you think wages are growing: a) too quickly, or b) too slowly? Which is the bigger threat to the economy: a) that it overheats, or b) is undercooked?

I’m going to make the bold assumption that most of you answered “b” on all of the above. And in a moment, I’ll provide the data to confirm your gut. What’s unsettling, and in need of explanation, is why so many influential voices, from the punditry to the markets, answer “a.”

Paul Krugman: Those Lazy Jobless

Last week John Boehner, the speaker of the House, explained to an audience at the American Enterprise Institute what’s holding back employment in America: laziness. People, he said, have “this idea” that “I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think I’d rather just sit around.” Holy 47 percent, Batman!

It’s hardly the first time a prominent conservative has said something along these lines. Ever since a financial crisis plunged us into recession it has been a nonstop refrain on the right that the unemployed aren’t trying hard enough, that they are taking it easy thanks to generous unemployment benefits, which are constantly characterized as “paying people not to work.” And the urge to blame the victims of a depressed economy has proved impervious to logic and evidence.

Professors on food stamps: The shocking true story of academia in 2014

Forget minimum wage, some adjunct professors say they're making 50 cents an hour. Wait till you read these stories

Matt Saccaro

You’ve probably heard the old stereotypes about professors in their ivory tower lecturing about Kafka while clad in a tweed jacket. But for many professors today, the reality is quite different: being so poorly paid and treated, that they’re more likely to be found bargain-hunting at day-old bread stores. This is academia in 2014.

“The most shocking thing is that many of us don’t even earn the federal minimum wage,” said Miranda Merklein, an adjunct professor from Santa Fe who started teaching in 2008. “Our students didn’t know that professors with PhDs aren’t even earning as much as an entry-level fast food worker. We’re not calling for the $15 minimum wage. We don’t even make minimum wage. And we have no benefits and no job security.”

The GOP Social Security Deception Game Is On - Here's How to Fight Back

Sunday, 21 September 2014 13:22
By Isaiah J Poole, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed

The Social Security deception game that Republican candidates have resorted to playing in recent election cycles is back. But, at a rally on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) showed how candidates and activists can defeat the gamesmanship and be true champions of strengthening Social Security.

The deception game is showing up in ads such as one now being aired in New York’s 21st congressional district, in which Republican Elise M. Stefanik is running against Democrat Aaron G. Woolf for a seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Bill Owens. The ad claims that Woolf supports policies that would dramatically cut Social Security benefits, while Stefanik says that she is committed to policies that “protect and preserve Social Security.”

Paul Krugman: Missing-A Massive "Skills Gap"

Claims that there is a huge "skills gap" in the United States - that much of our unemployment is structural, reflecting an inadequately prepared work force or something like that - generally rest on claims that there is an unusual situation in which many jobs are vacant even as many workers remain unemployed.

For example, at the beginning of this year Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, wrote an article in Politico with Marlene Seltzer about the alleged skills gap that began, "today, nearly 11 million Americans are unemployed. Yet, at the same time, 4 million jobs sit unfilled. This is the 'skills gap' - the gulf between the skills job seekers currently have and the skills employers need to fill their open positions."

Thomas Frank: All these effing geniuses: Ezra Klein, expert-driven journalism, and the phony Washington consensus

Ezra Klein and his data brigade think political science will save us. But expert opinion is why we're in this mess

In a recent article on Vox, Ezra Klein declared that his generation of Washington journalists had discovered political science, and it is like the hottest thing on wheels. In the old days, he writes, journalists “dealt with political science episodically and condescendingly.” But now, Klein declares, “Washington is listening to political scientists, in large part because it’s stopped trusting itself.” Klein finds that political scientists give better answers to his questions than politicians themselves, because politicians are evasive but scientists are scientists, you know, they deal in “structural explanations” for political events. So the “young political journalists” who are roaring around town in their white lab coats frightening the local bourgeoisie “know a lot more about political science and how to use it” than their elders did.

Hence Klein’s title: “How Political Science Conquered Washington.”

The Solution to ISIS is the First Amendment

Matt Stoller

As the elite panic about ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant — continues apace, it’s worth looking at how violations of the First Amendment have allowed this group to flourish, and just generally screw up US policy-making. The gist of the problem is that Americans have been lied to for years about our foreign policy, and these lies have now created binding policy constraints on our leaders which make it impossible to eliminate groups like ISIS.

Let’s start by understanding what ISIS actually is. First, ISIS is a brutal fascistic movement of radical Sunni militants, well-armed and well-trained, and bent on the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate throughout the Middle East. Second, it may also be and almost certainly was an arm of a wealthy Gulf state allied with the United States. This contradiction probably doesn’t surprise you, but if it does, that’s only because it cuts against a standard narrative of good guys and bad guys peddled by various foreign policy interests. The reality is that ally and enemy in post-colonial lands is often a meaningless term —it’s better to describe interests. A good if overly romanticized Hollywood illustration of this dynamic is the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, about the secret collaboration between Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan Israel and the CIA to undermine the Soviets in Afghanistan. This foreign policy apparatus is usually hidden in plain sight, known to most financial, political, military, and corporate elites but not told to the American public.

Fed: Forget “Escape Velocity,” Not Gonna Happen, Ever

by Wolf Richter • September 18, 2014

Wall Street’s and the media’s attention was riveted single-mindedly on whether or not the Fed would include in its statement the two words, “considerable time,” the two vaguest, stretchable latex words available that describe absolutely nothing and leave the door wide open for wishful thinkers of every stripe. That’s what the Fed’s gyrations since the financial crisis have so successfully accomplished; they have reduced the market, a place of price discovery, to a crummy joke.

The Fed delivered those two words, but during the press conference, Fed Chair Janet Yellen doused them with so many qualifiers that they’ve become even more meaningless, if that were even possible.

Did Senator Orrin Hatch Just Censor Testimony on the Retirement Crisis?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 18, 2014

Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican from Utah, is not the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. That post is held by Democrat Ron Wyden – whose party currently holds the majority of seats in the Senate. But this Tuesday, in a hearing that he was not even chairing, Senator Hatch appeared to be attempting to censor the speech of the witnesses before they testified by admonishing them not to use a list of specific words and phrases.

How Did Being a Public School Teacher Become So Controversial?

By Dana Goldstein

September 17, 2014 | Editor’s note: The history of teaching in America is one that is bedeviled with blame. For at least two centuries, we, the public, have engaged in continuing battles over the quality of those individuals who dedicate their lives to educating our children, with little knowledge of the historical context out of which our attempts at education “reform” grow. In her new book, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession [3], education journalist Dana Goldstein presents a first-of-its-kind history of public school teaching, “bringing the lessons of history to bear on the dilemmas we confront today.” The following is an excerpt from the introduction to the book.

I began this book in early 2011 with a simple observation: Public school teaching had become the most controversial profession in America. Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana, and even the Democratic governor of deep blue Massachusetts, sought to diminish or eliminate teachers’ rights to collectively bargain. Teacher tenure was the subject of heated debate in statehouses from Denver to Tallahassee, and President Obama swore in his State of the Union address to “stop making excuses” for bad teachers. One rising-star Republican, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, even became a conservative folk hero after appearing in a series of YouTube videos in which he excoriated individual public school teachers—all of them middle-aged women—who rose at public events to challenge him on his $1 billion in education budget cuts, even as he cut $1.6 billion in corporate taxes.

No other profession operates under this level of political scrutiny, not even those, like policing or social work, that are also tasked with public welfare and are paid for with public funds. In 2010 Newsweek published a cover story called “The Key to Saving American Education.” The image was of a blackboard, with a single phrase chalked over and over again in a child’s loopy handwriting: We must fire bad teachers. We must fire bad teachers. We must fire bad teachers. Wide-release movies like Waiting for “Superman” and Won’t Back Down, funded by philanthropists who made their fortunes in the private sector, portray teacher tenure and its defender, teachers unions, as practically the sole causes of underperforming schools. Everywhere I traveled as a reporter, from the 2008 Democratic National Convention to the 2010 meeting of former president Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative, powerful people seemed to feel indignant about the incompetence and job security of public school teachers, despite polls showing that the American public considers teachers highly respected professionals, nearly on par with medical doctors.

Dean Baker: The Myth That Sold the Financial Bailout

Monday marked the sixth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The investment bank’s bankruptcy accelerated the financial meltdown that began with the near collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008 (saved by the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan) and picked up steam with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going under the week before Lehman’s demise. The day after Lehman failed, the giant insurer AIG was set to collapse, only to be rescued by the Fed.

With the other Wall Street behemoths also on shaky ground, then–Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ran to Capitol Hill, accompanied by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner. Their message was clear: The apocalypse was nigh. They demanded Congress make an open-ended commitment to bail out the banks. In a message repeated endlessly by the punditocracy ever since, the failure to cough up the money would have led to a second Great Depression.

The claim was nonsense then, and it’s even greater nonsense now.

Amanda Marcotte: Conservative Christians Trying Their Damnedest to Make America's Kids Wildly Ignorant

September 17, 2014 | One of the biggest obstacles for the conservative movement when it comes to recruiting new members is, to be frank, reality itself. History, science, economics are all fields constantly churning out information that makes right-wing ideology look silly, nonsensical and even delusional. In response, the conservative movement has launched a massive media campaign against reality that spreads out on Fox News, talk radio and the web, but despite all this, conservatives are not satisfied. The kids are who conservatives really want. That’s why the right is relentless about its attempts to get into public schools, throw out actual information and replace it with false and misleading ideology. Whether or not they’ll actually be successful in tricking kids into becoming conservatives is up for debate, but in the meantime, they are doing a lot of damage to childrens' ability to get a decent education.

The latest battle in the ongoing war to turn public schools into propaganda machines for the right is being fought in the state of Texas. The state is often at the center of conservative-fomented education controversies, as right-wingers there keep trying to sneak creationism into the science classroom [3]. Texas also continues to maintain its abysmally high teen pregnancy rate by pushing sex “education” that usually doesn’t bother [4] to mention contraception. While the right has been losing some ground on those two issues, a new report from the Texas Freedom Network [5] suggests that conservatives have been able to inject a shocking number of lies and disinformation into public school history classrooms.

20 Years Later, Parts Of Major Crime Bill Viewed As Terrible Mistake

by Carrie Johnson
September 12, 2014

Twenty years ago this week, in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton signed a crime bill. It was, in effect, a long-term experiment in various ways to fight crime.

The measure paid to put more cops on the beat, trained police and lawyers to investigate domestic violence, imposed tougher prison sentences and provided money for extra prisons.

[...]

And if Clinton and Congress reflected the punitive mindset of the American people, what they didn't know was that soaring murder rates and violent crime had already begun what would become a long downward turn, according to criminologists and policymakers.

How the Defense Industry Bankrolls Pro-War Pundits

Monday, 15 September 2014 15:50
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

The US military media industrial complex is corrupting our airwaves.

As the debate over ISIS and US actions against that terrorist group continues, we're seeing more and more so-called "policy experts" appearing on the mainstream media, explaining why American military action against ISIS is our only choice.

Well, as it turns out, these "policy experts" who are so quick to pitch war and military conflict are often really just shills for our nation's military industrial complex, and they're being paid very handsomely for all of their fear-mongering.

Fast Food Franchise Owners Ask Congress For Help To Stop Worker Campaign For Wages, Union

by Alan Pyke, Posted on September 16, 2014 at 9:33 am

The fast food industry is hoping that a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill can blunt the momentum that fast food workers have gained through nearly two years of strikes and multiple lawsuits.

The International Franchise Association (IFA) is flying fast food store owners and other franchisees into Washington on Tuesday to drum up congressional opposition to a recent legal decision that could make corporations liable for how franchise employees are treated. The trade group expects more than 350 business owners from both the franchisee and franchisor sides of the business model to show up at its event this week, according to The Hill.

Demonizing the Minimum Wage

By William Finnegan

With the midterm elections approaching, the United States Congress finds itself in an exaggerated version of its customary posturing gridlock. Among the many urgent issues that it almost certainly won’t address this year are immigration reform, gun control, the Keystone XL Pipeline, the fate of the Export-Import Bank, and the federal minimum wage. A bill to raise the minimum wage from its current level, $7.25 per hour, to $10.10 an hour, over the course of two years, has been rattling around on Capitol Hill for eighteen months—with, it now seems, no hope of passing. Because the federal minimum wage has never been indexed to the cost of living, the debate over its efficacy and morality is regularly reëngaged as its value sinks and Congress is called upon to act.

The arguments against—a hundred years’ worth—were recently collected by a group of scholars calling itself the Cry Wolf Project. They sound hair-curling. “The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression,” Ronald Reagan said in 1980. “Rome, two thousand years ago, fell because the government began fixing the prices of services and commodities,” Guy Harrington, of the National Publishers Association, told Congress in 1937. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a national minimum wage of twenty-five cents an hour, in 1938, and also abolished most child labor, “constitute[d] a step in the direction of communism, bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism,” according to the National Association of Manufacturers. In the view of its opponents, the minimum wage—or raising an existing minimum—will always and inevitably damage the economy, kill jobs, doom American freedom, and/or harm the very people that it is meant to help. This litany of alarm has a dismal record as a description of reality, and yet has not changed much over the past century.

US Corporate Executives to Workers: Drop Dead

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Yves Smith

The Washington Post has a story that blandly supports the continued strip mining of the American economy. Of course, in Versailles that the nation’s capitol has become, this lobbyist-and-big-ticket-political-donor supporting point of view no doubt seems entirely logical.

The guts of the article:

Three years ago, Harvard Business School asked thousands of its graduates, many of whom are leaders of America’s top companies, where their firms had decided to locate jobs in the previous year. The responses led the researchers to declare a “competitiveness problem” at home: HBS Alumni reported 56 separate instances where they moved 1,000 or more U.S. jobs to foreign countries, zero cases of moving that many jobs in one block to America from abroad, and just four cases of creating that many new jobs in the United States. Three in four respondents said American competitiveness was falling.

Harvard released a similar survey this week, which suggested executives aren’t as glum about American competitiveness as they once were…

Fixing Climate Change May Add No Costs, Report Says

By JUSTIN GILLIS, SEPT. 16, 2014

In decades of public debate about global warming, one assumption has been accepted by virtually all factions: that tackling it would necessarily be costly. But a new report casts doubt on that idea, declaring that the necessary fixes could wind up being effectively free.

A global commission will announce its finding on Tuesday that an ambitious series of measures to limit emissions would cost $4 trillion or so over the next 15 years, an increase of roughly 5 percent over the amount that would likely be spent anyway on new power plants, transit systems and other infrastructure.

When the secondary benefits of greener policies — like lower fuel costs, fewer premature deaths from air pollution and reduced medical bills — are taken into account, the changes might wind up saving money, according to the findings of the group, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.

When Rulers Can’t Understand the Ruled

Johns Hopkins study finds significant gap in demographics, experience and partisanship between Washingtonians and the Americans they govern

Johns Hopkins University political scientists wanted to know if America’s unelected officials have enough in common with the people they govern to understand them.

The answer: Not really.

Surveying 850 people who either work in government or directly with it, researchers found that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has very little in common with America at large.

The United States Heading for a Crash

by Immanuel Wallerstein

President Barack Obama has told the United States, and in particular its Congress, that it must do something very major in the Middle East to stop disaster. The analysis of the presumed problem is extremely murky, but the patriotic drums are being turned to high pitch and almost everyone is for the moment going along. A cooler head might say that they are all flailing around in desperation about a situation that the United States has the major responsibility for creating. They don't know what to do, so they act in panic.

The explanation is simple. The United States is in serious decline. Everything is going wrong. And in the panic, they are like a driver of a powerful automobile who has lost control of it, and doesn't know how to slow it down. So instead it is speeding it up and heading towards a major crash. The car is turning in all directions and skidding. It is self-destructive for the driver but the crash can bring disaster to the rest of the world as well.

The Great Avian Die-Off: Two Reports Point to Grim Future for US Birds

Monday, 15 September 2014 12:34
By Patrick Glennon, Truthout | News Analysis

Billions to None

Many Americans living today cannot conceive just how innumerable the passenger pigeon was. Until the late 19th century, the species' numbers were biblical in proportions. It flew in flocks up to a billion strong, stretching for hundreds of miles and blackening the sky with its immensity. For people living at the time, the prospect of such a creature becoming extinct would probably have been equally hard to conceive.

But it happened.

In September 1914 - a hundred years ago this September - the last passenger pigeon died in captivity in Cincinnati. The last confirmed wild passenger pigeons were shot down over a decade earlier, in 1902. Over the course of several decades, a creature that once comprised up to 40 percent of the continental bird population ceased to be.

Paul Krugman: How to Get It Wrong

Last week I participated in a conference organized by Rethinking Economics, a student-run group hoping to promote, you guessed it, a rethinking of economics. And Mammon knows that economics needs rethinking in the wake of a disastrous crisis, a crisis that was neither predicted nor prevented.

It seems to me, however, that it’s important to realize that the enormous intellectual failure of recent years took place at several levels. Clearly, economics as a discipline went badly astray in the years — actually decades — leading up to the crisis. But the failings of economics were greatly aggravated by the sins of economists, who far too often let partisanship or personal self-aggrandizement trump their professionalism. Last but not least, economic policy makers systematically chose to hear only what they wanted to hear. And it is this multilevel failure — not the inadequacy of economics alone — that accounts for the terrible performance of Western economies since 2008.

Wall Street Is Coming to Fleece Your Town

By Ellen Brown

September 12, 2014 | In an inscrutable move that has alarmed state treasurers, the Federal Reserve, along with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, just changed the liquidity requirements for the nation’s largest banks. Municipal bonds, long considered safe liquid investments, have been eliminated from the list of high-quality liquid collateral. assets (HQLA). That means banks that are the largest holders of munis are liable to start dumping them in favor of the Treasuries and corporate bonds that do satisfy the requirement.

Muni bonds fund the nation’s critical infrastructure, and they are subject to the whims of the market: as demand goes down, interest rates must be raised to attract buyers. State and local governments could find themselves in the position of cash-strapped Eurozone states, subject to crippling interest rates. The starkest example is Greece, where rates went as high as 30% when investors feared the government’s insolvency. Sky-high interest rates, in turn, are the fast track to insolvency. Greece wound up stripped of its assets, which were privatized at fire sale prices in a futile attempt to keep up with the bills.

Why US Middle East Policy is Fraught with Danger

by PATRICK COCKBURN

The United States is reluctantly but decisively becoming engaged in the civil wars in Iraq and Syria as it seeks to combat Isis, which calls itself Islamic State.

President Barack Obama will outline his plans in a speech today to create a grand coalition of Western and regional powers to contain and defeat Isis, which has established a quasi-state stretching from the frontiers of Iran to the outskirts of Aleppo.

The US is encouraged by the formation on Monday of what it sees as a more inclusive government in Iraq under Haider al-Abadi, the new Prime Minister. He replaces Nouri al-Maliki who, in his eight years in office, became a hate figure for the Sunni minority as the architect of Shia dominance and arbitrary power. Mr Maliki’s government was notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional, its 350,000-strong army routed in June by a few thousand Isis fighters in northern and western Iraq. Fear of Isis has led former rivals and opponents such as the US and Iran, Kurdish parties and Shia and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, to sink some of their differences, though these have not gone away.