Righteous rage, impotent fury: Thomas Frank returns to Kansas to hunt the last days of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts

On eve of a possible GOP rout, Frank goes home to rediscover the matter with Kansas and all American politics

PRAIRIE VILLAGE, KANSAS – One of the treasured vanities of my home state of Kansas is the idea that, although we are the nation’s laggards and late-comers in so many ways, there are other departments in which we are way ahead of everyone else, savoring the fast-food treats you will one day savor and debating the issues that you, too, will agonize over before too long. It’s an understandable fantasy for a people who are constantly reminded by the culture at large how lame and uncool they are, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t coming true, for once, in 2014. This week, Kansas may well be the one state that bucks all the national political trends.

Here you have several prominent conservatives, Republicans in one of the most Republican states in the country, running in a year that looks to be a Republican sweep nationwide, and these Kansas Republicans are either behind in the polls or barely keeping pace with their Democratic opponents.

Understanding and Overcoming America's Plutocracy

Jeffrey Sachs

Pity the American people for imagining that they have just elected the new Congress. In a formal way, they of course have. The public did vote. But in a substantive way, it's not true that they have chosen their government.

This was the billionaires' election, billionaires of both parties. And while the Republican and Democratic Party billionaires have some differences, what unites them is much stronger than what divides them, a few exceptions aside. Indeed, many of the richest individual and corporate donors give to both parties. The much-discussed left-right polarization is not polarization at all. The political system is actually relatively united and working very effectively for the richest of the rich.

Brand-name companies' secret Luxembourg tax deals revealed

Landlocked European duchy a “magical fairyland” for global corporations seeking to slash their tax bills

By Leslie Wayne, Kelly Carr, Marina Walker Guevara, Mar Cabra, Michael Hudson

Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and hundreds of other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny Western European duchy, leaked documents show.

These 343 companies appear to have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg and saved billions of dollars in taxes, according to a review of nearly 28,000 pages of confidential documents conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a team of more than 80 journalists from 26 countries.

Coming Up: Repatriation, A HUGE Huge Tax Giveaway To Big Corporations

Dave Johnson

Washington insiders are saying that one deal Republicans and President Obama think they can make is a deal to let corporations off the hook for taxes they owe if they “bring back” the money the multinational corporations have stashed outside of the country. The deal is that this is in exchange for using some of it to fix up our country’s crumbling infrastructure. Here is why this is a bad deal.

A Huge tax Loophole

You have probably heard that big companies use all kinds of schemes to shift profits out of the country to avoid paying taxes. A loophole in our tax laws lets companies dodge (“defer”) taxes on “offshore” profits until they “repatriate” the money, meaning “bring it back into the country.” Of course it would be easy for Congress to just fix this loophole, but this is about really big money, and big money is able to keep loopholes like this from getting fixed.

“It’s about forgetting the past”: Eric Lichtblau exposes how the CIA protected ex-Nazis

The New York Times reporter tells Salon about his new book on one of the U.S.'s greatest moral failures

Elias Isquith

Roughly three-quarters of a century ago, the United States of America threw itself into the giant, history-defining and utterly nightmarish orgy of death, destruction and cruelty that nowadays goes by the name of World War II. And while the U.S. did not enter the abyss because of the Nazis — and in fact only declared war after Hitler did it first — there is little doubt that, ever since VE-Day, the U.S. has been more than happy to take credit as the vanquisher of a regime that most of the developed world still sees as the ultimate embodiment of political evil. (Even if much of that credit is undeserved.)

All of which is to say that when it comes to protecting America’s “brand” as the moral leader of the globe, the protector of liberty and the guardian of human rights, not being in league with the people chiefly responsible for the death of roughly 2.5 percent of the world’s population ranks high on the list. Yet according to reports that first surfaced years ago, but which are now being much more fully substantiated, cooperating with — and even protecting — former Nazis is exactly what the United States once did.

Matt Taibbi: The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn't take it anymore.

"It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'"

Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She's had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

Paul Krugman: Triumph of the Wrong

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet midterms to men of understanding. Or as I put it on the eve of another Republican Party sweep, politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth. Still, it’s not often that a party that is so wrong about so much does as well as Republicans did on Tuesday.

I’ll talk in a bit about some of the reasons that may have happened. But it’s important, first, to point out that the midterm results are no reason to think better of the Republican position on major issues. I suspect that some pundits will shade their analysis to reflect the new balance of power — for example, by once again pretending that Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposals are good-faith attempts to put America’s fiscal house in order, rather than exercises in deception and double-talk. But Republican policy proposals deserve more critical scrutiny, not less, now that the party has more ability to impose its agenda.

Why Innocent People Plead Guilty

Jed S. Rakoff

The criminal justice system in the United States today bears little relationship to what the Founding Fathers contemplated, what the movies and television portray, or what the average American believes.

To the Founding Fathers, the critical element in the system was the jury trial, which served not only as a truth-seeking mechanism and a means of achieving fairness, but also as a shield against tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

Shadow Banking Grows to $75 Trillion Industry, FSB Says

By Ben Moshinsky, Oct 30, 2014 12:00 PM ET

The shadow banking industry grew by $5 trillion to about $75 trillion worldwide last year, driven by lenders seeking to skirt regulations and investors searching for yield amid record low interest rates.

The size of the shadow banking system, which includes hedge funds, real estate investment trusts and off-balance sheet investment vehicles, is about 120 percent of global gross domestic product, or a quarter of total financial assets, according to a report published by the Financial Stability Board today.

Shadow banking “tends to take off when strict banking regulations are in place, when real interest rates and yield spreads are low and investors search for higher returns, and when there is a large institutional demand for assets,” according to the report. “The current environment in advanced economies seems conducive to further growth of shadow banking.”

Global Warming Denier Will Head Committee Dealing With Global Warming

How do you deal with a problem you refuse to acknowledge? Ask Jim Inhofe!

By Susie Madrak November 5, 2014 7:00 am

Voting (or not voting) has consequences, and this would be a really bad one. The New Republi on a James Inhofe-led environment committee:

In handing Republicans control of the Senate on Tuesday, Americans effectively voted for the party's hostile plans against President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy.

It's a Rout: Democrats Lose Badly as GOP Extremists Consolidate Power In Congress and Across America

By Steven Rosenfeld

November 4, 2014 | The politics of anti-government rage, fueled by dark money negative ads emerged victorious on Tuesday, as the Republican Party won a U.S. Senate majority and re-elected right-wing governors despite Democrat and progressive organizations' determined efforts to turn out their base.

While there were some bright spots for progressives, such as minimum wage increases passing in Nebraska and Arkansas, and legalizing recreational marijuana in Oregon and in Washington DC, the national political landscape has taken a hard turn to the right. Differing Republican Party factions have been empowered in ways that will resonate well into the 2016 presidential election—from anti-regulatory corporatists taking control in Congress to union-bashing, anti- choice, anti-voting rights governors dominating their states.

John Maynard Keynes Is the Economist the World Needs Now

By Peter Coy, October 30, 2014

Is there a doctor in the house? The global economy is failing to thrive, and its caretakers are fumbling. Greece took its medicine as instructed and was rewarded with an unemployment rate of 26 percent. Portugal obeyed the budget rules; its citizens are looking for jobs in Angola and Mozambique because there are so few at home. Germans are feeling anemic despite their massive trade surplus. In the U.S., the income of a median household adjusted for inflation is 3 percent lower than at the worst point of the 2007-09 recession, according to Sentier Research. Whatever medicine is being doled out isn’t working. Citigroup (C) Chief Economist Willem Buiter recently described the Bank of England’s policy as “an intellectual potpourri of factoids, partial theories, empirical regularities without firm theoretical foundations, hunches, intuitions, and half-developed insights.” And that, he said, is better than things countries are trying elsewhere.

There is a doctor in the house, and his prescriptions are more relevant than ever. True, he’s been dead since 1946. But even in the past tense, the British economist, investor, and civil servant John Maynard Keynes has more to teach us about how to save the global economy than an army of modern Ph.D.s equipped with models of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. The symptoms of the Great Depression that he correctly diagnosed are back, though fortunately on a smaller scale: chronic unemployment, deflation, currency wars, and beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies.

Who’s Tripping up the Designs of the Global Corporatocracy?

by Don Quijones • November 2, 2014

Resistance comes not only from certain quarters of the largely disenfranchised public but also from the least likely national governments.

In Europe, opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Treaty is rising. The primary cause of concern, both among the general public and certain national governments, is the proposed inclusion of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).

As I previously reported, this rather innocuous-sounding provision is what gives the new generation of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements their sharpened claws and canine teeth, by allowing private companies and investors to sue entire nations if they feel that a law lost them money on an investment. As even The Economist now admits, while the original intention of ISDS was to encourage foreign investment by protecting them from discrimination or expropriation, their implementation has proven disastrous:

Multinationals have exploited woolly definitions of expropriation to claim compensation for changes in government policy that happen to have harmed their business…

Paul Krugman: Business versus Economics

TOKYO — The Bank of Japan, this country’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve, has lately been making a big effort to end deflation, which has afflicted Japan’s economy for almost two decades. At first its efforts — which involve printing a lot of money and, even more important, trying to assure investors that it will keep printing money until inflation reaches 2 percent — seemed to be going well. But more recently the economy has lost momentum, and last week the bank announced new, even more aggressive monetary measures.

I am, as you might guess, very much in favor of this move, although I worry that the policy might nonetheless fail thanks to fiscal mistakes. (More about that later.) While the bank did the right thing, however, it did so amid substantial internal dissent. In fact, the new stimulus was approved by only five of the bank board’s nine members, with those closest to business voting against. Which brings me to the subject of this column: the economic wisdom, or lack thereof, of business leaders.

The New Loan Sharks

by Susanne Soederberg

The dependence of the poor on payday loans is neither natural nor inevitable. It is the result of neoliberal policies.

Before World War I, American wage earners who couldn’t make ends meet before their next paycheck relied on an insidious form of loan sharks known as salary lenders. These predators lent money at an illegal rate of interest and without collateral. They often charged annual interest rates in excess of 1,000 percent. State sanctions against salary lenders were not rigorously imposed, and the industry thrived not through the threat of physical violence, but the illusion of a legal obligation.

Fast-forward one hundred years, and salary lending has expanded, but under a different name: payday lending, a wildly lucrative industry that occupies more storefronts than McDonald’s and Starbucks combined. These new loan sharks operate under the same logic as salary lenders, but specifically target more vulnerable populations like welfare recipients, and are armed with new techniques to squeeze as much surplus as possible from debtors.

FCC reportedly close to reclassifying ISPs as common carriers

"Hybrid" approach wouldn't prevent all Internet fast lane deals.

by Jon Brodkin - Oct 31, 2014 4:45 am UTC

The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reportedly close to proposing a "hybrid approach" to network neutrality in which Internet service providers would be partially reclassified as common carriers, letting the commission take a harder stance against Internet fast lane deals.

However, the proposal would not completely outlaw deals in which Web services pay for faster access to consumers.

Study reveals startling decline in European birds

Bird populations across Europe have experienced sharp declines over the past 30 years, with the majority of losses from the most common species

Bird populations across Europe have experienced sharp declines over the past 30 years, with the majority of losses from the most common species, say the University of Exeter, the RSPB and the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) in a new study. However numbers of some less common birds have risen.

The study, published today in the journal Ecology Letters, reveals a decrease of 421 million individual birds over 30 years. Around 90 percent of these losses were from the 36 most common and widespread species, including house sparrows, skylarks, grey partridges and starlings, highlighting the need for greater efforts to halt the continent-wide declines of our most familiar countryside birds.

Corporate Propagandist Richard Berman Secretly Taped Bragging About How He Smears Progressives

By Steven Rosenfeld

October 31, 2014 | One of corporate America’s most notorious political hitmen, Richard Berman, whose ugly campaigns rely on smears and fake front groups that hide sponsors’ identities, has been secretly tape-recorded bragging about his dirty tactics.

“Think of this as an endless war,” told a group of oil and gas industry executives at a June meeting of the Western Energy Alliance in Colorado Springs, as he sought to raise $3 million for a campaign called “Big Green Radicals” aimed at environmentalists and fracking opponents. “You can either win ugly or lose pretty.”

Berman’s remarks were secretly recorded by an attendee who gave them to the Center for Media and Democracy [3]. His speech was filled with the inflammatory rhetoric and bruising tactics he has used for decades in corporate propaganda campaigns to smear, discredit and destroy public-interest causes and groups. As a lengthy profile in AlterNet detailed [4], Berman—labeled Dr. Evil by CBS’s "60 Minutes"—is known for pioneering a toxic mix of front groups, distortion-filled attacks, ridicule and bullying to stoke prejudice and hatred as a means of turning public attention and regulators away from clients’ business practices.

Why Taxation Must Go Global

BERLIN – We are witnessing profound changes in the way that the world economy works. As a result of the growing pace and intensity of globalization and digitization, more and more economic processes have an international dimension. As a consequence, an increasing number of businesses are adapting their structures to domestic and foreign legal systems and taxation laws.

Thanks to technical advances in the digital economy, companies can serve markets without having to be physically present in them. At the same time, sources of income have become more mobile: There is an increasing focus on intangible assets and mobile investment income that can easily be “optimized” from a tax point of view and transferred abroad.

Paul Krugman: Apologiziing to Japan

TOKYO — For almost two decades, Japan has been held up as a cautionary tale, an object lesson on how not to run an advanced economy. After all, the island nation is the rising superpower that stumbled. One day, it seemed, it was on the road to high-tech domination of the world economy; the next it was suffering from seemingly endless stagnation and deflation. And Western economists were
scathing in their criticisms of Japanese policy.

I was one of those critics; Ben Bernanke, who went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, was another. And these days, I often find myself thinking that we ought to apologize.

Police Using Controversial Patriot Act Authority for 'Everyday' Cases: Civil Liberties Group

Created under the guise of fighting terrorism, 'Sneak and Peek' now being used to spy on drug suspects, immigrants, rights group finds

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer

A contentious surveillance provision of the Patriot Act, which allows law enforcement to conduct searches while delaying informing the suspect, is broadly used, but almost never in terrorism cases—despite Justice Department officials arguments to the contrary, according to an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

"Yet again, terrorism concerns appear to be trampling our civil liberties," writes EFF’s Mark Jaycox.

The rights group analyzed federal reports from 2011, 2012, and 2013, released after an unexplained three-year delay, on warrants that were issued under Section 213, known colloquially as "Sneak and Peek."

Number of global billionaires has doubled since the financial crisis

Jamie Merrill, Wednesday 29 October 2014

The number of billionaires has doubled since the start of the financial crisis, according to a major new report from anti-poverty campaigners.

According to Oxfam, the world’s rich are getting richer, leaving hundreds of millions of people facing a life “trapped in poverty” as global “inequality spirals out of control”.

While You Were Getting Worked Up Over Oil Prices, This Just Happened to Solar

By Tom Randall

Every time fossil fuels get cheaper, people lose interest in solar deployment. That may be about to change.

After years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and variable subsidies, solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states -- in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this week. That’s assuming the U.S. maintains its 30 percent tax credit on system costs, which is set to expire that same year.

How Dark Money Is Taking Over Judicial Elections

By AJ Vicens

Most people don't think about judicial elections until they find themselves staring at a group of unfamiliar names on the ballot. But judges are selected by voters in 39 states, whether in an initial election or a retention election after being appointed. The explainer below details how special-interest money has increasingly flooded the system over the last several decades—including the first ever set of data on campaign money in lower court races.

Living Wages, Rarity for U.S. Fast-Food Workers, Served Up in Denmark

By LIZ ALDERMAN and STEVEN GREENHOUSE, OCT. 27, 2014

COPENHAGEN — On a recent afternoon, Hampus Elofsson ended his 40-hour workweek at a Burger King and prepared for a movie and beer with friends. He had paid his rent and all his bills, stashed away some savings, yet still had money for nights out.

That is because he earns the equivalent of $20 an hour — the base wage for fast-food workers throughout Denmark and two and a half times what many fast-food workers earn in the United States.

“You can make a decent living here working in fast food,” said Mr. Elofsson, 24. “You don’t have to struggle to get by.”

American Exceptionalism

By Charles P. Pierce on October 28, 2014

In Sunday's New York Times, there was a fascinating story about fast-food workers, both here and in Denmark. The story is interesting in that it pretty much blows a hole below the water line of every precept of conservative economics promulgated here since Ronald Reagan turned the federal budget process stupid in 1981. Quite simply, if you, the average Dane named Hampus, wants to make a career out of working at Burger King, you can do it. Everybody needs to have a dream.

On a recent afternoon, Hampus Elofsson ended his 40-hour workweek at a Burger King and prepared for a movie and beer with friends. He had paid his rent and all his bills, stashed away some savings, yet still had money for nights out. That is because he earns the equivalent of $20 an hour - the base wage for fast-food workers throughout Denmark and two and a half times what many fast-food workers earn in the United States. "You can make a decent living here working in fast food," said Mr. Elofsson, 24. "You don't have to struggle to get by."

Naturally, the example provided by Denmark cannot apply because America, that's why.

How the Washington Press Turned Bad

October 28, 2014

Exclusive: There was a time when the Washington press corps prided itself on holding the powerful accountable – Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Vietnam War – but those days are long gone, replaced by a malleable media that puts its cozy relations with insiders ahead of the public interest, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Following the death last week of legendary Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee at age 93, there have been many warm remembrances of his tough-guy style as he sought “holy shit stories,” journalism that was worthy of the old-fashioned demand, “stop the presses.”

Many of the fond recollections surely are selective, but there was some truth to Bradlee’s “front page” approach to inspiring a staff to push the envelope in pursuit of difficult stories – at least during the Watergate scandal when he backed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the face of White House hostility. How different that was from Bradlee’s later years and the work of his successors at the Washington Post!

Thomas Frank: “We are such losers”

Liberals yearn to believe in post-ideological blank slates -- and get disappointed every time. Will we ever learn?

That we are living through an endless repeat of the 1970s is becoming more apparent all the time. Nostalgia and retro culture burn as brightly today as they did in the era of “Happy Days” and “American Graffiti,” while distrust and suspicion of government hover at near-Watergate levels. Disaster dreams are everywhere, just as they were in the days of “The Towering Inferno” and Three Mile Island. The culture wars, the 1970s’ No. 1 gift to American politics, still drag on and on, while the New Right, the decade’s other great political invention, effortlessly rejuvenates itself. Jerry Brown is governor of California again. The Kansas City Royals are a good team.

No reminiscence of that decade of malaise would be complete without mentioning Jimmy Carter, the president who—fairly or not—will be forever associated with national drift and decline and all the other horrors that were eventually swept away by the Reagan magisterium. Indeed, comparing the hapless Carter to whoever currently leads the Democratic Party remains a powerful shibboleth for American conservatives, and in 2011 and 2012 Republicans indulged in this favorite simile without hesitation.

Economists Say We Should Tax The Rich At 90 Percent

Ben Walsh

America has been doing income taxes wrong for more than 50 years.

All Americans, including the rich, would be better off if top tax rates went back to Eisenhower-era levels when the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent, according to a new working paper by Fabian Kindermann from the University of Bonn and Dirk Krueger from the University of Pennsylvania.

The top tax rate that makes all citizens, including the highest 1 percent of earners, the best off is “somewhere between 85 and 90 percent,” Krueger told The Huffington Post. Currently, the top rate of 39.6 percent is paid on income above $406,750 for individuals and $457,600 for couples.

One-Third of Top Websites Restrict Customers’ Right to Sue

Jeremy B. Merrill

Walk into the grocery store, and you can sue if a clumsy clerk drops a box on your head. But what happens if a website leaks your personal data? Or if an online retailer misleads you about the cost of a purchase? Depending on the site you’re visiting, your legal rights are murkier.

That’s because, tucked into the dense legalese of their terms-of-service rules, many of the Internet’s most popular sites have inserted language that forbids users from suing if something goes wrong, an analysis by The Upshot has found. In some cases, you don’t even have to pretend to read a contract and click an “I accept” box for the restrictions to kick in.

The Stealth Campaign to Buy US Courts

Sunday, 26 October 2014 09:12
By Zoë Carpenter, The Nation | Report

Cole County, Missouri, seems an unlikely place for a national Republican group to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s a small county of 75,000, and its leadership is solidly red, with few exceptions. One of those exceptions is Pat Joyce, a Democrat who’s held her seat on the country circuit court for two decades. Until a few weeks ago, with $17,000 on hand and her opponent nearly $13,000 in debt, her chances of serving another term seemed good.

That financial advantage vanished abruptly in mid-October when the Republican State Leadership Committee stepped in with $200,000 to save Republican Brian Stumpe. Half of that money went directly to his campaign. The rest went to the RSLC’s local political action committee, which ran a tie-dye hued ad that accused Joyce of being a “groovy” ally of “radical environmentalists.”

Thomas Frank: Paul Krugman's Sloppy Wet Kiss

Krugman's ode to Obama in Rolling Stone seems like the work of someone who hasn't read Krugman the last six years

Paul Krugman is easily the best newspaper columnist at work today; for years, he has been the only American columnist who matters. His relentless, one-man war on austerity, I believe, should have earned him a second Nobel Prize.

As Salon readers know, Krugman has for years been willing to criticize the Obama administration. However, in a much-discussed essay the economist published in Rolling Stone last week, he reverses himself and declares that Obama has won him over; that the president is “one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history.”

Past Climate Change Was Caused by the Ocean, Not Just the Atmosphere, New Rutgers Study Finds

The study published in Science provides a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of climate change today

 

Thursday, October 23, 2014

 

Most of the concerns about climate change have focused on the amount of greenhouse gases that have been released into the atmosphere.

  But in a new study published in Science, a group of Rutgers researchers have found that circulation of the ocean plays an equally important role in regulating the earth’s climate.
 

William K. Black: Jamie Dimon: U.S. Must Create a “Safe Harbor” Where JPM’s Corruption Is Not “Punished”

I want to give a hat tip to a recent Wall Street Journal article that brought to my attention two damning admissions by JPMorgan’s (JPM) CEO and Chairman of the Board, Jamie Dimon.  The irony is that Dimon was lulled into making these admissions because he was basking in the perfect calm created by the confluence of Sorkin’s and CNBC’s storied sycophancy at the one place on earth where elite bankers feel most loved, honored, and protected – the annual meeting of the ultra-wealthy in Davos, Switzerland.  Sorkin was the only interviewer, so Dimon faced no risk of tough questions.  It may well have been this perfect setting that caused Dimon to let slip the mask and reveal two illustrative sins of elite bankers reported in the WSJ article.

Off-grid German village banks on wind, sun, pig manure

FELDHEIM (GERMANY) (AFP) - If Germany has taken a pioneering though risky role in shifting to renewable energy, then the tiny village of Feldheim -- population 150 -- is at its vanguard.

The hamlet near Berlin is Germany's first to have left the national grid and switched to 100 percent local, alternative energy, swearing off fossil fuels and nuclear power decades before the rest of the country plans to near the same goal.

Electricity now comes from a wind park towering over its gently rolling fields and reaches homes through Feldheim's own mini smart grid.

Paul Krugman: Ideology and Investment

America used to be a country that built for the future. Sometimes the government built directly: Public projects, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, provided the backbone for economic growth. Sometimes it provided incentives to the private sector, like land grants to spur railroad construction. Either way, there was broad support for spending that would make us richer.

But nowadays we simply won’t invest, even when the need is obvious and the timing couldn’t be better. And don’t tell me that the problem is “political dysfunction” or some other weasel phrase that diffuses the blame. Our inability to invest doesn’t reflect something wrong with “Washington”; it reflects the destructive ideology that has taken over the Republican Party.

Frank Rich on the National Circus: Ebola Panic Is Straight From the Twilight Zone

In the two weeks since the death of Thomas Eric Duncan, Ebola hysteria has taken hold in some corners of the U.S., with school closures, paid leaves, and cruise ship quarantines enacted to protect the populace from dozens of people who did not actually have the disease. So far, only two people we know of have been infected by Ebola on U.S. soil (both were nurses who treated Duncan), public health officials have offered clear and consistent explanations of the minimal risks of contracting the disease, and even Fox News — or, at least, Fox News anchor Shep Smith — has tried to quell the panic. Why are Americans still so worked up about this?

Of all the incidents of runaway Ebola hysteria in America, the one that most grabbed me was reported by the Times on Sunday: A man in Payson, Arizona, decided to submit to a self-imposed quarantine and remain in his house for no other reason than he had been in Liberia as a missionary on a church trip. His good deed did not go unpunished: After taking that extra (and gratuitous) precaution, he found himself the victim of a “lynch-mob mentality” manifested by at least one anonymous threat to burn down his house. The incident made me think of that classic 1960 Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which paranoid suburban neighbors, gripped by fear of an invasion from outer space, do the monsters’ work for them by destroying their community and each other in mob violence.

Dead babies near oil drilling sites raise questions for researchers

By Nancy Lofholm
The Denver Post
Posted: 10/26/2014 12:01:00 AM MDT
Updated: 10/28/2014 04:54:57 PM MDT

VERNAL, Utah — The smartphone-sized grave marker is nearly hidden in the grass at Rock Point Cemetery. The name printed on plastic-coated paper — Beau Murphy — has been worn away. Only the span of his life remains.

"June 18, 2013 - June 18, 2013"

For some reason, one that is not known and may never be, Beau and a dozen other infants died in this oil-booming basin last year. Was this spike a fluke? Bad luck? Or were these babies victims of air pollution fed by the nearly 12,000 oil and gas wells in one of the most energy-rich areas in the country?

Some scientists whose research focuses on the effect of certain drilling-related chemicals on fetal development believe there could be a link.

Feds Kill Funds for Most Successful Senior Housing Project

By Andre Shashaty

October 27, 2014 | When construction started in mid-October on Heritage Park Senior Village in Taylor, Michigan, it marked the end of 55 years of effort by the federal government to make sure low-income elders can live out their years in decent housing.

The development getting underway 18 miles southwest of downtown Detroit is one of the very last to be constructed under a federal housing program that dates back to 1959.

The Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly Program produced 20,000 housing units per year at its peak in the 1970s. It provided public housing agencies and nonprofit groups with grants that covered the cost to build decent rental housing, as well as subsidies for people who were too poor to pay market-rate rents for comparable housing.

Where the Tea Party Rules

Lima, Ohio, has been struggling for decades – and the GOP’s radical policies are making it even worse

By Janet Reitman | October 14, 2014

Dewey Chaffins was 19 years old when he left Appalachia for northwestern Ohio in 1958. The youngest of 10, he'd grown up in Garrett, Kentucky, a hardscrabble coal town where his family had lived and mined for generations. During the 1950s, when the coal industry in eastern Kentucky fell into a steep decline, scores of young men packed up all they had and headed north toward the industrial Midwest. Chaffins found opportunity in the city of Lima, a manufacturing boomtown where there were so many factories, as one retired autoworker recently told me, ''you could walk into a place, get a job without even a high school diploma, and if you didn't like it, you could quit, walk across the street and have another job that afternoon.'' By the time Dewey and his 18-year-old wife, Linda, settled in Lima, seven of his siblings, their spouses and some of their in-laws were living in and around the city, where they quickly found work in the automotive plants or tire factories or steel mills, joined the UAW or other unions, and set about raising their children in a manner none of them had ever dreamed possible.