Why is Anyone Surprised that Abenomics Failed?

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Yves Smith

In case you managed to miss it, there’s been a fair bit of hand-wringing over the fact that Japan has fallen back into a recession despite the supposedly heroic intervention called Abenomics, whose central feature was QE on steroids.

But Japan of all places should know that relying on the wealth effect to spur growth has always bombed in the long term. They were the first to try that approach of a large scale. That idea was the basis for the Bank of Japan keeping monetary policy super loose in the later 1980s. They explicitly wanted to increase stock market and real estate prices to stimulate more consumer spending. We know how that movie ended.

Social Security advocates fear more cuts in staff and service

By Joe Davidson Columnist November 18

In advance of feared Republican budget cuts, Social Security advocates gathered on Capitol Hill to ward off more hits to a basic federal program that serves nearly all American families.

But while the anxiety over cuts to Social Security might have increased with election victories that will put the GOP in control of Congress in January, everyone gathered in the Capitol Visitors Center meeting room knew that service reductions have been a reality for years, with Congress providing less money than President Obama requested.

We Need to Act Now to Save the Post Office

Wednesday, 19 November 2014 15:40
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

Congress has a lot on its plate this lame-duck session. It has to pass a bill to continue to fund the government by December 11, should fill a number of judicial vacancies, and, at least according to the Constitution, must either authorize or put an end to the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

But those are just the major headline-grabbing items. There are also many less-well-known things that Congress has to get done before the end of the year if it wants to, you know, actually govern the country.

A Citigroup Banker Dies – Along With Responsible Press Reporting

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 20, 2014

Depending on where and when you got your news yesterday on the tragic death of Shawn D. Miller, a Managing Director of Wall Street mega bank, Citigroup, you were either emphatically told he died of a suicide or you were led to believe he was murdered. By late evening yesterday, the story had disintegrated into wild speculation. The New York Daily News ran this stunning headline, based on anonymous sources, at 9:22 p.m.: “Banker, 42, slashed his own throat in Manhattan bathtub during drug- and booze-filled bender: sources.”

It is becoming abundantly clear that if you work for a major Wall Street firm and die a sudden death, it will be shaped, molded, twisted and contorted until it fits with the suicide narrative – no matter how strongly the facts argue otherwise.

Bank of North Dakota Outperforms Wall Street

by ELLEN BROWN

While 49 state treasuries were submerged in red ink after the 2008 financial crash, one state’s bank outperformed all others and actually launched an economy-shifting new industry. So reports the Wall Street Journal this week, discussing the Bank of North Dakota (BND) and its striking success in the midst of a national financial collapse led by the major banks. Chester Dawson begins his November 16th article:

It is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003. Meet Bank of North Dakota, the U.S.’s lone state-owned bank, which has one branch, no automated teller machines and not a single investment banker.

Paul Krugman: Suffer Little Children

The Tenement Museum, on the Lower East Side, is one of my favorite places in New York City. It’s a Civil War-vintage building that housed successive waves of immigrants, and a number of apartments have been restored to look exactly as they did in various eras, from the 1860s to the 1930s (when the building was declared unfit for occupancy). When you tour the museum, you come away with a powerful sense of immigration as a human experience, which — despite plenty of bad times, despite a cultural climate in which Jews, Italians, and others were often portrayed as racially inferior — was overwhelmingly positive.

I get especially choked up about the Baldizzi apartment from 1934. When I described its layout to my parents, both declared, “I grew up in that apartment!” And today’s immigrants are the same, in aspiration and behavior, as my grandparents were — people seeking a better life, and by and large finding it.

Paul Krugman: Anxieties Over Interest Rates

As usual, my inbox is full of speculations about when the Federal Reserve Board will raise interest rates in the United States. June 2015? Earlier? Has the Fed already waited too long? And as usual, I wonder why anyone is talking about this at all. Yes, the unemployment rate has fallen. But there is huge ambiguity about what level of unemployment is sustainable given the changing demographics, the uncertain degree to which people might return to the work force given better job availability, and so on.

There's also a huge asymmetry in risk between raising rates too soon - which can leave us stuck in either a low-inflation or a deflationary trap for a very long time - and raising rates a bit too late, which at worst means temporarily overshooting an inflation target that's arguably too low anyway. Meanwhile, both wages and the Fed's preferred measure of inflation are showing no hint of an overheated economy.

The Real Roots of Hedge Fund Manager Rage

by Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, Nov. 12, 2014, 12:10 p.m.

The anger of the investing class has curdled into paranoia.

Paul Singer, the head of the $25 billion hedge fund Elliott Management, had an Edvard Munch moment in his most recent letter to his investors. "Nobody can predict how long governments can get away with fake growth, fake money, fake jobs, fake financial stability, fake inflation numbers and fake income growth," he wrote. Some commenters think the economy is improving, but he wrote, "We do not think this optimism is warranted, and we think a lot of the data is cooked or misleading."

Could hydrogen vehicles take over as the 'green' car of choice?

Now that car makers have demonstrated through hybrid vehicle success that consumers want less-polluting tailpipes, they are shifting even greener. In 2015, Toyota will roll out the first hydrogen fuel-cell car for personal use that emits only water. An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, explains how hydrogen could supplant hybrid and electric car technology -- and someday, even spur the demise of the gasoline engine.

Conclusion: Slow Growth and Inequality are Political Choices. We Can Choose Otherwise.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

A rich country with millions of poor people. A country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, but in which a child’s prospects are more dependent on the income and education of his or her parents than in other advanced countries. A country that believes in fair play, but in which the richest often pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than those less well off. A country in which children every day pledge allegiance to the flag, asserting that there is “justice for all,” but in which, increasingly, there is only justice for those who can afford it. These are the contradictions that the United States is gradually and painfully struggling to come to terms with as it begins to comprehend the enormity of the inequalities that mark its society—inequities that are greater than in any other advanced country.

Those who strive not to think about this issue suggest that this is just about the “politics of envy.” Those who discuss the issue are accused of fomenting class warfare. But as we have come to grasp the causes and consequences of these inequities we have come to understand that this is not about envy. The extreme to which inequality has grown in the United States and the manner in which these inequities arise undermine our economy. Too much of the wealth at the top of the ladder arises from exploitation—whether from the exercise of monopoly power, from taking advantage of deficiencies in corporate governance laws to divert large amounts of corporate revenues to pay CEOs’ outsized bonuses unrelated to true performance, or from a financial sector devoted to market manipulation, predatory and discriminatory lending, and abusive credit card practices. Too much of the poverty at the bottom of the income spectrum is due to economic discrimination and the failure to provide adequate education and health care to the nearly one out of five children growing up poor.

House Passes Bill That Makes It Harder For Scientists To Advise The EPA

by Emily Atkin
Posted on November 18, 2014 at 6:07 pm

While their Senate colleagues were engaged in a fiery debate over the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline, the House on Tuesday quietly passed a bill that environmentalists say would hamper the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to use the best scientific information when crafting regulations to protect public health and the environment.

The House voted 229-191 to pass H.R. 1422, which would change the rules for appointing members to the Science Advisory Board (SAB), a group that gives scientific advice to the EPA Administrator. Also called the Science Advisory Board Reform Act, the bill would make it easier for scientists with financial ties to corporations to serve on the SAB, prohibit independent scientists from talking about their own research on the board, and make it more difficult for scientists who have applied for grants from the EPA to join the board.

Inside the Right-Wing Mania over Including 'Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance

By Tina Dupuy

November 14, 2014 | Did you hear atheists are suing god? According to Fox News’ for-profit preacher Mike Huckabee they do it all the time! “Dear Lord!” he tweeted this week, “Atheists are suing God AGAIN!”

Never mind the spurious premise of a group of people suing the very thing they don’t believe in. That’d be like Republicans suing birth control, scientific evidence or a living wage. Or Democrats, respectively, suing winning.

Dean Baker | The Problem of "Stupid" in Economics

MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber has inadvertently become a YouTube celebrity as a result of a video of him referring to the public as "stupid." The immediate point of reference was the complexity of the design of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which Gruber was describing as being necessary politically in order to deceive the public. With the right-wing now in a state of near frenzy after the Republican election victories, the Gruber comment was fresh meat in their attack on the ACA.

Apart from merits of the ACA, there is something grating about seeing a prominent economist refer to the US public as "stupid." After all, the country and the world have suffered enormously over the last seven years because the leading lights of the economic profession were almost completely oblivious to the largest asset bubble in the history of the world.

Thomas Frank on Ronald Reagan’s secret tragedy: How ’70s and ’80s cynicism poisoned Democrats and America

Nixon's lies and Reagan's charms created the space for Clinton, Carter and Obama to redefine (and gut) liberalism

“The Invisible Bridge” is the third installment in Rick Perlstein’s grand history of conservatism, and like its predecessors, the book is filled with startling insights. It is the story of a time much like our own—the 1970s, which took America from the faith-crushing experience of Watergate to economic hard times and, eventually, to a desperate enthusiasm for two related figures: the nostalgic presidential aspirant Ronald Reagan, and the “anti-politician” Jimmy Carter. (I discussed Perlstein’s views on Carter in this space a few weeks ago.)

In blending cultural with political history, “The Invisible Bridge” strikes me as an obvious addition to any list of nonfiction masterpieces. But I also confess to being biased: Not only do I feel nostalgia for many of the events the book describes—Hank Aaron’s pursuit of the home run record, for example—but I have been friends with Rick since long ago, when he was in college and The Baffler was publishing his essays. I interviewed Rick on an Amtrak train traveling from Seattle to Portland, Oregon, a few weeks ago (we were there to do readings from a new anthology of essays); here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Paul Krugman: When Government Succeeds

The great American Ebola freakout of 2014 seems to be over. The disease is still ravaging Africa, and as with any epidemic, there’s always a risk of a renewed outbreak. But there haven’t been any new U.S. cases for a while, and popular anxiety is fading fast.

Before we move on, however, let’s try to learn something from the panic.

Frenzied Financialization

Shrinking the financial sector will make us all richer.

By Michael Konczal

If you want to know what happened to economic equality in this country, one word will explain a lot of it: financialization. That term refers to an increase in the size, scope, and power of the financial sector—the people and firms that manage money and underwrite stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other securities—relative to the rest of the economy.

The financialization revolution over the past thirty-five years has moved us toward greater inequality in three distinct ways. The first involves moving a larger share of the total national wealth into the hands of the financial sector. The second involves concentrating on activities that are of questionable value, or even detrimental to the economy as a whole. And finally, finance has increased inequality by convincing corporate executives and asset managers that corporations must be judged not by the quality of their products and workforce but by one thing only: immediate income paid to shareholders.

Report Funded by Big Business Explains to Small Businesses What's Best for Them

The Atlantic Council has just released another report cheerleading the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), the controversial U.S.-EU deal under negotiation, also known as TTIP.

The report pitches the deal as a gift to small businesses.

It was financed by FedEx, the 64th largest corporation in the United States.

Is It Time for the United States to Consider a Shorter Work Week?

By Martin Hart-Landsberg
November 14, 2014 • 2:00 PM

Iceland continues to experiment with new ways to promote majority living standards. According to the Icelandic Grapevine, a bill has been submitted to the Icelandic parliament that would shorten the work week. More specifically, it would change the definition of a full-time work week to 35 hours instead of the current 40 and the full workday to seven hours rather than the current eight.

As the Grapevine reports:

The bill points out that other countries which have shorter full time work weeks, such as Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Holland and Norway, actually experience higher levels of productivity. At the same time, Iceland ranked poorly in a recent OECD report on the balance between work and rest, with Iceland coming out in 27th place out of 36 countries.

Bill Moyers Puts the Spotlight on the Bare Knuckle Fight to Buy and Control Our Democracy

Moyers interviews reformers Lawrence Lessig and Zephyr Teachout on how money dominates our political system.

By Bill Moyers

November 14, 2014 | In this turbulent midterm election year, two academics -- Zephyr Teachout and Larry Lessig --decided to practice what they preached. They left the classroom, confronted the reality of down-and-dirty politics, and tried to replace moneyed interests with the public interest. Neither was successful – this year, at least – but on this week’s show, Bill Moyers talks with them about their experiences and the hard-fought lessons learned about the state of American democracy.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. What happens when two college professors leave the theories of the classroom behind for the real world of bare-knuckle politics? Well, they learn a lesson the hard way. Just ask Zephyr Teachout and Larry Lessig. Each is an outstanding scholar. She teaches constitutional and property law at Fordham Law School here in New York, and recently published this highly acclaimed book, “Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.” Larry Lessig teaches law at Harvard and directs that university’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Both champion free and fair competition in our economy and our elections. Zephyr Teachout ran for governor of New York in the Democratic primary against incumbent and friend of Wall Street, Andrew Cuomo.

America’s Pseudo-Democracy

U.S. pundits mock countries, like Iran or China, where candidates are screened before they go on the ballot, but America has a similar approach, with candidates needing approval from plutocrats and special interests. But that’s just one problem of U.S. democracy, says Lawrence Davidson.

November 15, 2014
By Lawrence Davidson

Given the dangerous results of the recent election in the United States – one that saw the Republicans, a right-wing party increasingly populated with neocon warmongers, reactionaries and plutocrats take control of both houses of Congress – it might be time to take a look at a sober look at U.S. democracy.

We can begin be taking note of the generic observation made by Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worse form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.” The implication here is that democracy is really not the God-blessed system so many of Americans take it to be.

Charles P. Pierce: John Doar, 1921-2014

Anyone who followed the Watergate saga knows that Richard Nixon, history's yard waste and a criminal president, was done in by the monotones. First, there was John Dean before the committee chaired by Sam Ervin, his voice never rising or falling, almost unnaturally without affect, a scapegoat turned lethal, explaining at length why the people in the White House needed a scapegoat in the first place. There was no anger in his presentation. Just one damning fact after another after another, over and over again. The second monotone appeared in July of 1974. It belonged to a lawyer named John Doar. It cut out Richard Nixon's heart and ate it in the marketplace.

For several weeks, the Republicans in the House of Representatives, who were seeking to pull Nixon's chestnuts out of his own self-immolating fire, were leaning on Doar, the counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, to produce his case so they could consider articles of impeachment against the president. Even Democratic members of the House were leaning on Majority Leader Tip O'Neill, who in turn was leaning on committee chairman Peter Rodino, who in turn was leaning on Doar and his staff. Knowing that, ultimately, Rodino had his back just as O'Neill had Rodino's, Doar sent word back up the chain of command to tell the Republican water-haulers and the impatient and nervous Democrats to pound sand. Doar would deliver his report when it was ready, and not before. He was not a nervous fellow, this John Doar. Long before he ever came to Congress, he had been threatened by experts.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Reveals Why Robots Really Are Coming For Your Job

Tomas Hirst

Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz has a new NBER paper out that comes to a worrying conclusion — the robots really are coming for your job.

In economic theory innovation should make workers more efficient — they can produce more for less — but it comes at the cost of lower skilled jobs as fewer people are required to produce the same amount of output.

Exclusive: Controversial U.S. energy loan program has wiped out losses

By Nichola Groom

(Reuters) - The controversial government program that funded failed solar company Solyndra, and became a lighting rod in the 2012 presidential election, is officially in the black.

According to a report by the Department of Energy, interest payments to the government from projects funded by the Loan Programs Office were $810 million as of September - higher than the $780 million in losses from loans it sustained from startups including Fisker Automotive, Abound Solar and Solyndra, which went bankrupt after receiving large government loans intended to help them bring their advanced green technologies to market.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Accepted Campaign Contributions From Financial Firms Managing City Pension Money

By David Sirota

Executives at investment firms that manage Chicago pension funds have since 2011 poured more than $600,000 in contributions into Mayor Rahm Emanuel's campaign operation and political action committees (PACs) that support him, according to documents reviewed by International Business Times. These contributions appear to flout federal rules banning companies that manage pension funds from financing the campaigns of officials with authority over pension systems, say legal experts.

The contributions also potentially conflict with an executive order Emanuel himself signed in 2011 prohibiting city contractors and subcontractors from making campaign donations to city officials.

Mission Creep-y

Google Is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation’s Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collection Empire

Nov. 13, 2014 — Google is so rapidly expanding both its information-collecting capabilities and its political clout that it could become too powerful to be held accountable, a new Public Citizen report finds.

Paul Krugman: China, Coal, Climate

It’s easy to be cynical about summit meetings. Often they’re just photo ops, and the photos from the latest Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, which had world leaders looking remarkably like the cast of “Star Trek,” were especially cringe-worthy. At best — almost always — they’re just occasions to formally announce agreements already worked out by lower-level officials.

Once in a while, however, something really important emerges. And this is one of those times: The agreement between China and the United States on carbon emissions is, in fact, a big deal.

Wall Street Takes Over More Statehouses

By David Sirota

No runoff will be needed to declare one unambiguous winner in this month’s gubernatorial elections: the financial services industry. From Illinois to Massachusetts, voters effectively placed more than $100 billion worth of public pension investments under the control of executives-turned-politicians whose firms profit by managing state pension money.

The elections played out as states and cities across the country debate the merits of shifting public pension money—the retirement savings for police, firefighters, teachers and other public employees—from plain vanilla investments such as index funds into higher-risk alternatives like hedge funds and private equity funds.

Revealed: US Agency Using Spy Planes to Fool Cell Phones, Capture Data

Newly revealed mass surveillance program by the US government is "inexcusable," says ACLU

by Jon Queally, staff writer

According to new reporting by the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Marshals Service—an arm of the Department of Justice—has been using small aircraft equipped with technology that can mimic the functions of cell towers in order to capture the data contained on phones and mobile devices of people across large areas on the ground below.

Citing those familiar with the program, the Journal report (subscription) reveals how the program's use of so-called "dirtbox" technology is part of "a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans" in a dragnet approach that will remind some of similar techniques known to be used by the National Security Agency and other federal agencies.

Leaked TTIP Documents Reveal Powerful Chemical Industry Wins

The European Commission may be conceding to corporate interests in controversial trade negotiations

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer

Corporate interests may be winning in U.S.-EU trade negotiations, endangering public health and the environment, a new cache of documents (pdf) leaked on Tuesday show.

Backed by powerful industry advisers and bolstered by U.S. allies who have already made significant concessions to move negotiations along, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal is poised to derail European regulations around the use and transport of chemicals—regulations which are significantly stronger than those in the U.S. The deal would also limit public access to information on toxic and hazardous substances.

After Gutting the Voting Rights Act, Alabama Cites It As an Excuse for Racial Gerrymandering

The state uses a measure it helped destroy to justify redistricting that ghettoized minority voters.

—By Stephanie Mencimer | Wed Nov. 12, 2014 6:30 AM EST

You have to give Alabama credit for its cheek. Last year, the state's Shelby County persuaded the US Supreme Court to find unconstitutional part of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states with histories of discriminatory election laws to get permission from the federal government before changing their voting practices. On Wednesday, Alabama will argue before the court that the same provision it helped decimate compelled lawmakers to racially gerrymander the entire state.

This convoluted case got its start after the GOP took control of both houses of the Alabama state Legislature in 2010. The Republicans then redrew the state legislative voting districts in 2012 as part of the regular redistricting process. The new plan preserved most of the state's majority-minority districts, where black residents had political power and tended to elect Democrats—often African American ones. But state legislators also redrew the lines in a way that minimized the influence of African American voters in districts where they did not make up a majority of voters.

Paul Krugman: The Temptation to Spend

As I've been noting recently, there's a lot of opposition within Japan to the Bank of Japan's policy of printing more money, and there's also a lot of pressure on the government to raise taxes.And that's not very different from what has been happening throughout the rest of the advanced world: Central banks that have pursued quantitative easing have done so despite political pressure, not because of it, and fiscal austerity has been imposed almost everywhere.

The funny thing is that when you ask for justifications for pursuing hard money and tight budgets in a depressed, low-inflation economy, the answers you get often start from the presumption that money printing and deficit finance are immensely tempting to politicians, so that you shouldn't dare let them get even a slight taste of these addictive drugs.

ISPs Removing Their Customers' Email Encryption

By Jacob Hoffman-Andrews

Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer's web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers' data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls, including Cisco's PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.

Rachel Maddow trolls Arizona Tea Partiers threatening to censor biology textbooks

Arturo Garcia

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow got a step ahead of a trio of lame-duck Tea Party school board members in Arizona on Tuesday, saying biology materials they tried to censor are now available online.

“They’re lovely in their boring biology-ness,” she said of the pages, taken from an AP Biology textbook. “So if you want to brush up on how a baby’s made or how contraception works and all that stuff at a 10th grade level, be my guest.”

Americans want what 21st century politics has so far not delivered: real options for challenging concentrated wealth.

by Sam Pizzigati

What can we expect Congress to do about America’s staggeringly top-heavy concentration of income and wealth over the next two years? Absolutely nothing.

What do Americans want Congress to do about that concentration? A good bit.

Paul Krugman: Death by Typo

The Latest Frivolous Attack on Obamacare

My parents used to own a small house with a large backyard, in which my mother cultivated a beautiful garden. At some point, however — I don’t remember why — my father looked at the official deed defining their property, and received a shock. According to the text, the Krugman lot wasn’t a rough rectangle; it was a triangle more than a hundred feet long but only around a yard wide at the base.

On examination, it was clear what had happened: Whoever wrote down the lot’s description had somehow skipped a clause. And of course the town clerk fixed the language. After all, it would have been ludicrous and cruel to take away most of my parents’ property on the basis of sloppy drafting, when the drafters’ intention was perfectly clear.

The GOP’s poisonous double-speak: Thomas Frank on how Republicans hijacked the midterms

Once again, Republicans used their patented brand of fake populism to make Democrats look like chumps

Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.”

That phrase, delivered with sneering emphasis on the second word, may have been a key to the whole confusing affair. Consider the many ironies of the 2014 elections. Georgia, the state with the highest unemployment in the nation, just elected as its United States senator a businessman who is “proud” of his career of outsourcing. The voters of Illinois overwhelmingly approved a referendum calling for a higher minimum wage, but they also chose as their governor a Wall Street type who in the past has asserted that the minimum wage ought to be reduced or eliminated. And the public as a whole, driven to fury by the spectacle of Washington gridlock, just handed over the U. S. Senate to a party that has enshrined obstructionism as its most precious article of faith.

Why warnings on climate spark aggressive denials

A new book argues that death threats and abuse illustrate how climate change messengers are being demonised in a way that is without parallel in the history of science.

By: Tim Radford

LONDON, 8 November, 2014 − If you don’t like the message on climate change, it seems that the answer is to shoot the messenger.

According to a new book by veteran environmentalist George Marshall, thousands of abusive emails − including demands that he commit suicide or be “shot, quartered and fed to the pigs, along with your family” – were received by climate scientist Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre, who drew and published the “hockey stick graph” that charts a steep rise in global average temperatures.

30 Years of Conservative Nonsense, An Explainer

If those calls to close the borders over Ebola are giving you déjà vu, you might not be wrong.

By Kurt Eichenwald

Are conservatives ever right?

The question isn’t meant to suggest that liberals are never wrong. But reviewing the last few decades of conservative policy initiatives—or their objections over that timespan to policies they hate—shows a consistent pattern of failure: predictions never pan out, and intended results turn to catastrophic flops.

Given the G.O.P.’s midterm victories this week, the question is of particular import. Come January, conservatives will have control of both houses of Congress, and hold a considerable legislative advantage in the last two years of the Obama presidency. Yet not a week ago, conservative politicians and commentators were screaming out batty ideas as they demanded that President Obama close the borders over Ebola, ignoring the advice of infectious disease specialists who know that shutting borders against a disease leads people to make travel by means that aren’t easily tracked, escalates danger, and harms the ability to stop the infection at its source. Conservative know-nothings dismiss the professionals as know-nothings themselves, despite their training and expertise.

This Democratic Party Is Going Nowhere. Can Progressives Take it Over and Change the World?

By Alan Minsky

Tuesday’s crushing defeat of the centrist Clinton/Obama Democratic Party provides an opening for the American left. The next few years are not going to be pretty, but they could be the beginning of something beautiful.

In 2009, shortly after its most crushing national electoral defeat in 44 years, the GOP was sparked back to life by the tea party insurgency. America’s right wing revived its moribund conservative party with a stark challenge to the Republican establishment. The GOP gained 63 House seats in 2010.

“The president is basically in hiding”: Thomas Frank unloads on Dems, Kansas and crushing midterm losses

The Salon columnist dissects Tuesday's GOP rout and a tumultuous Kansas cycle -- and slams the Democrats' response

Luke Brinker

In an election that witnessed crushing Democratic losses in the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and in key gubernatorial races, the victories of Kansas Republicans Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts have been among the most painful for many Democrats to absorb.

Gov. Brownback, after all, trailed Democratic challenger Paul Davis in the polls for most of the 2014 cycle, owing to the destructive fiscal consequences of his large tax cuts. While Democrats expected to sustain tough losses elsewhere, the prospect of knocking off a right-wing governor in Kansas in an otherwise good year for the GOP provided at least some solace. Likewise, the perception that Sen. Roberts had lost touch with the Sunflower State after 34 years in Congress and the vigorous campaign waged by independent Greg Orman presented a rare opportunity to defeat a GOP Senate incumbent.

Midterms 2014: Paying the Gold Price, and the Iron Price

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

In Game of Thrones, “the iron price” is a concept in the culture of the Ironborn. Paying the iron price means taking by the sword, rather than paying with coin. Thus, it is a primary aspect of the “Old Way”, the traditional lifestyle of the Ironborn. The opposite of the iron price is “the gold price,” which is considered shameful for a man to pay. And it is true that in some ways it’s more honorable to risk your life, sword to sword, than risk your hoard, moneybags to moneybags, and that the midterms were more about gold than iron.

But I’d like to connect “the iron price” to the well-known “Iron Law of Institutions,” explained here by A Tiny Revolution:

Democrats operate according to the Iron Law of Institutions. The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

This is true for all human institutions, from elementary schools up to the United States of America. If history shows anything, it’s that this cannot be changed. What can be done, sometimes, is to force the people running institutions to align their own interests with those of the institution itself and its members.

ALEC Corporate Board Chair Quits Over Climate Change, Renewables and Voting Rights

Nick Surgey

The corporate board chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the software company SAP America, has quit the group, telling CMD that it has made the decision to "immediately disassociate itself from ALEC" because of the group's position on climate change, opposition to renewable energy, its position on gun safety and its attacks on voter rights.

Facing increased criticism of its role opposing action to tackle climate change and for teaching climate change denial, ALEC has lost numerous major corporate funders in recent months, with tech firms Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Yelp all leaving. Most high profile was Google, with Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt telling the Diane Rehm show on NPR that it made a mistake in funding ALEC. "We should not be aligned with such people. They are just literally lying," Schmidt said in reference to ALEC's teaching climate change denial. "The company has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on fact," said Schmidt.

Q&A: James K. Galbraith on the Myth of Perpetual Growth, How Language Shapes Economic Thought, and More

Lauren Kirchner

In Issue 19 of The Baffler, James K. Galbraith debunked the notion that the world’s economists were caught unawares by the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, in a piece that was appropriately titled “We Told You So.” Now, in his new book, The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (Simon & Schuster, 291 pages, $26), he widens his scope, laying out an economic theory that begins in the years following World War II and extends to the future.

One central argument of his book explains why we would be mistaken to expect perpetual growth in the American economy. The post-war decades have raised our expectations, Galbraith says, but for the economy to continue to grow at the same pace would be unsustainable. So we need to adjust our idea of “normal” growth—and even change how we measure overall economic success.