Warren: Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch Received $6 Trillion Backdoor Bailout from Fed

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 4, 2015

Yesterday, the Senate Banking Committee held the first of its hearings on widespread demands to reform the Federal Reserve to make it more transparent and accountable.

Senator Elizabeth Warren put her finger on the pulse of the growing public outrage over how the Federal Reserve conducts much of its operations in secret and appears to frequently succumb to the desires of Wall Street to the detriment of the public interest.

“The interests of the wealthy”: How the rich control politicians — even more than you think

Esteemed political scientist Michael Jay Barber tells Salon why America is a democracy ... for fat-cat donors

Elias Isquith

The American populace, as a whole, is not always a paragon of good judgment. Yet there’s at least one issue that they’ve got a pretty good handle on — the incredible degree of what Lawrence Lessig has described as a form of legalized corruption, and the detrimental effect it has on the U.S. government overall. Polling on this question can get a little tricky, because it can be difficult to know for sure what respondents are thinking of when they answer the question). But when Americans are asked to list the nation’s most pressing concerns, it’s become quite normal to find a dissatisfaction with government, or a concern about ethics and corruption, at or near the top.

According to a new study from Brigham Young University professor Michael Jay Barber, Americans’ sense that their government doesn’t work for them but rather for the wealthy and powerful is well-placed. In his research, Barber found what many might expect and fear — that politicians are paying much more attention to their financial backers than to anyone else. Constituents included. And even in this era of Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and Wall Street supremacy, the distance between what voters want and what politicians care about is even greater than you’d think.

This Billionaire Governor Taxed the Rich and Increased the Minimum Wage -- Now, His State's Economy Is One of the Best in the Country

Carl Gibson

The next time your right-wing family member or former high school classmate posts a status update or tweet about how taxing the rich or increasing workers' wages kills jobs and makes businesses leave the state, I want you to send them this article.

When he took office in January of 2011, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton inherited a $6.2 billion budget deficit and a 7 percent unemployment rate from his predecessor, Tim Pawlenty, the soon-forgotten Republican candidate for the presidency who called himself Minnesota's first true fiscally-conservative governor in modern history. Pawlenty prided himself on never raising state taxes -- the most he ever did to generate new revenue was increase the tax on cigarettes by 75 cents a pack. Between 2003 and late 2010, when Pawlenty was at the head of Minnesota's state government, he managed to add only 6,200 more jobs.

Himalayan ice shows chemicals ban is working

A unique study of frozen ice cores from the Tibetan Himalayas has shown that international agreements on phasing out the use of toxic persistent organic pollutants are working.

The research paper in the leading American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology has been named as the journal's most read paper of 2014.

Pollution is driving force behind growth of nuisance algal scums, study finds

Potentially toxic microbes which pose a threat to our drinking water have undergone a dramatic population explosion over the last 200 years as a result of pollution, research involving experts from The University of Nottingham has found.

The study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, looked at more than 100 lakes in lowland and alpine areas of North America and Europe and found that populations of cyanobacteria -- also known as blue-green algae -- have significantly increased since the 1800s.

Lester Brown: 'Vast dust bowls threaten tens of millions with hunger'

Over his 50-year career, Lester Brown has become known for his accurate global environmental predictions. As he enters retirement, he warns the world may face the worst hunger crisis of our lifetimes

Suzanne Goldenberg

Vast tracts of Africa and of China are turning into dust bowls on a scale that dwarfs the one that devastated the US in the 1930s, one of the world’s pre-eminent environmental thinkers has warned.

Over 50 years, the writer Lester Brown has gained a reputation for anticipating global trends. Now as Brown, 80, enters retirement, he fears the world may be on the verge of a greater hunger than he has ever seen in his professional lifetime.br />

The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site'

Spencer Ackerman

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Gaius Publius: Tobacco Deaths, TPP and the “Trade” Courts

Yves here. Obama’s pending trade deals, the TransPacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, have few fans at Naked Capitalism. But we are always looking for ways for like-minded readers to to alert friends and colleagues to the dangers of the proposed pacts and hopefully take action against them. This post gives concrete, accessible examples of some of the uses made of investor-state dispute settlement panels, which Gaius calls trade courts (even though they are actually secret arbitration panels) by Big Tobacco.

This piece is about corporations as predators, as plunderers, in a literal sense. Please follow closely; I want to get past the sense that “predator” is a metaphor. I want to make the case that the word is a literal description of the way the rich harvest the world.

Richard Eskow: “His Own Man’s” Man: Jeb Bush and the Return of Wolfowitz

Last week the nation was treated to the sad and embarrassing spectacle of Jeb Bush, mollycoddled scion to an empire of failure, proclaiming that “I’m my own man.” Here’s a simple rule of thumb: Anyone who has to say he’s his own man, or woman, isn’t. The 62-year-old Mr. Bush has been coasting on his family’s power and privilege since he was a weed-smoking, Steppenwolf-listening prep school student in the sixties.

From prep school slacker to presidential frontrunner: Now that’s a “Magic Carpet Ride.”

Dean Baker: Throw the Truth Out the Door: President Obama Has to Pass a Trade Deal

Wow, this stuff just keeps getting worse. Apparently anything goes when the big corporations want a trade deal. Otherwise serious people will just make stuff up, because hey, the big campaign contributors want a trade deal to make themselves richer. The latest effort in creative myth-making comes from Third Way, which tells us that post-NAFTA trade deals aren't job losers like NAFTA.

As Jim Tankersley and Lydia DePillis point out, this implicitly tells us that all those pro-NAFTA types weren't right in telling us that NAFTA would create jobs. (Hey, when did these folks stop telling us things about trade that were not true?)

Paul Krugman: Cranking Up for 2016

Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, is said to be a rising contender for the Republican presidential nomination. So, on Wednesday, he did what, these days, any ambitious Republican must, and pledged allegiance to charlatans and cranks.

For those unfamiliar with the phrase, “charlatans and cranks” is associated with N. Gregory Mankiw, a professor at Harvard who served for a time as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser. In the first edition of his best-selling economics textbook, Mr. Mankiw used those words to ridicule “supply-siders” who promised that tax cuts would have such magic effects on the economy that deficits would go down, not up.

Lawmakers Nationwide Launch Concerted Assault on Women's Rights

Since the start of the year, anti-choice bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country.

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

An array of anti-choice legislation is being rolled out in state houses around the country, putting women's health at risk and illustrating how Republican gains in the 2014 elections have exacerbated the fight over reproductive rights.

Already, 57 percent of American women of reproductive age live in states that are considered 'hostile' or 'extremely hostile' to abortion rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies sexual and reproductive health and rights around the world.

Failed Theory Posed by Wall Street Dems Puts Hillary Clinton in a Bind

The Hamilton Project, led by the presumed presidential candidate's adviser Robert Rubin, serves up a prescription for the middle class that won't help much—and defies the recommendations of her friends at CAP.

Lawrence Mishel

There was a time where it was plausible to argue that more education and innovation were the primary solutions to our economic problems. But that time has passed. You cannot tell that, however, to the Wall Street Democrats and their Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

They’re not ready to change just yet, even though most of the Democratic Party has. This shift was signaled by a recent report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, which is co-chaired by Lawrence H. Summers, who served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in President Barack Obama's first term. The report calls for full employment (a "high pressure economy," as Summers calls it), a more welcoming environment for collective bargaining, higher labor standards (overtime, minimum wage, earned sick and paid family leave), changes in corporate governance, and large scale public investment to address middle-class wage stagnation.

Did the GOP Just Give Away $130 Billion of Public Property?

A giant Anglo-Australian mining company is getting the rights to a huge copper reserve—and we don’t know what American taxpayers are getting in return.

Rep. Alan Grayson

In December, two Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, pushed Congress and the president into giving away what could amount to over $130 billion in public property.

That’s enough to provide every single unemployed American a minimum-wage job for an entire year. That’s enough to pay for a year of tuition at a public institution for every college student in the US.

The Christian Right Is Quite Scary, But the GOP's Economic Agenda Is America's Big Nightmare

The Republican corporate agenda is a serious threat to society.

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

Woe to the American president who says anything sensible on the subject of religion. President Obama forgot that unwritten rule recently at the National Prayer Breakfast when he pointed out what an eighth-grader could tell you: that acts of violence have been committed in the name of many faiths, not just Islam:

“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. … So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”

Cue Christian right fake freakout.

Paul Krugman: Weimar on the Aegean

Try to talk about the policies we need in a depressed world economy, and someone is sure to counter with the specter of Weimar Germany, supposedly an object lesson in the dangers of budget deficits and monetary expansion. But the history of Germany after World War I is almost always cited in a curiously selective way. We hear endlessly about the hyperinflation of 1923, when people carted around wheelbarrows full of cash, but we never hear about the much more relevant deflation of the early 1930s, as the government of Chancellor Brüning — having learned the wrong lessons — tried to defend Germany’s peg to gold with tight money and harsh austerity.

And what about what happened before the hyperinflation, when the victorious Allies tried to force Germany to pay huge reparations? That’s also a tale with a lot of modern relevance, because it has a direct bearing on the crisis now brewing over Greece.

Government wonders: What’s in your old emails?

By Lindsay Wise

WASHINGTON — If you’ve been remiss in cleaning out your email in-box, here’s some incentive: The federal government can read any emails that are more than six months old without a warrant.

Little known to most Americans, ambiguous language in a communications law passed in 1986 extends Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure only to electronic communications sent or received fewer than 180 days ago.

How Insurers Can Hit You With $10,000 Health Care Bills—Even When You're Covered

Insurance companies are finding new ways to screw customers—undermining promises made by Obamacare boosters that the law would protect against medical bankruptcy.

By Julie Appleby

After Pam Durocher was diagnosed with breast cancer, she searched her insurer’s website for a participating surgeon to do the reconstructive surgery.

Having done her homework, she was stunned to get a $10,000 bill from the surgeon.

The U.S. just barely cracks the top 20 countries when it comes to retirement security

By Jonnelle Marte

Want more retirement security? It might be time to move to Switzerland.

The United States ranked 19th in the world for retirement security, according to an annual ranking of 150 countries by Natixis Global Asset Management. It’s held that spot for three years.

Paul Krugman: Money Makes Crazy

Monetary policy probably won’t be a major issue in the 2016 campaign, but it should be. It is, after all, extremely important, and the Republican base and many leading politicians have strong views about the Federal Reserve and its conduct. And the eventual presidential nominee will surely have to endorse the party line.

So it matters that the emerging G.O.P. consensus on money is crazy — full-on conspiracy-theory crazy.

Why Don’t Americans Know What Really Happened in Vietnam?

Instead of confronting the truth, we scrubbed the record clean—and we’re still paying for it in Afghanistan and Iraq today.

Christian Appy

The 1960s—that extraordinary decade—is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965! How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era’s signature catastrophe? After all, our government prosecuted its brutal and indiscriminate war under false pretexts, long after most citizens objected, and failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. More than 58,000 Americans were killed along with more than 4 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

So what exactly do we write on the jubilee party invitation? You probably know the answer. We’ve been rehearsing it for decades. You leave out every troubling memory of the war and simply say: “Let’s honor all our military veterans for their service and sacrifice.”

It Wasn’t About Oil, and It Wasn’t About the Free Market: Why We Invaded Iraq

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s new book not only interrogates the motivations behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but also reveals a cautionary tale for the present.

BY Danny Postel

I was reluctant to review Muhammad Idrees Ahmad's The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War. With all the dramatic developments in the Middle East today—the ISIS crisis, the siege of Kobanê, the deepening nightmare in Syria, the escalating repression in Egypt, the fate of Tunisia’s democratic transition, the sectarianization of regional conflicts driven by the Saudi-Iranian rivalry—delving back into the 2003 invasion of Iraq seemed rather less than urgent. It’s hard enough just to keep up with the events unfolding day-to-day in the region. Reading—let alone reviewing—a detailed study of the internal processes that led to the United States toppling Saddam Hussein over a decade ago seemed remote, if not indeed a distraction.

How growing income inequality is hurting Social Security

By Michael A. Fletcher

Here’s another reason to be concerned about income inequality: it poses a direct threat to the already shaky fiscal health of Social Security, according to a report released Tuesday by the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

The nation’s old-age pension and disability insurance program is funded by a payroll tax that this year applies to wages of $118,500 and below. But the amount of revenue coming in is not as large as it could be, now that an increasing share of wage growth is going to people who make more than that, and the wages of many Americans are stagnant, or even in decline. That is adding fiscal stress to a program already struggling with the demands of an aging population.

Six ways your tech is spying on you – and how to turn it off

Compared with what’s already happening, Samsung’s warning not to discuss sensitive issues in front of its TVs seems pretty tame. But you can fight back

Alex Hern

So, your TV might be spying on you. It probably just wanted to join in with the rest of the technology in your life, because let’s face it: if you live in the 21st century you’re probably monitored by half a dozen companies from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. (And if you wear a sleep tracker, it doesn’t even stop then.)

Compared with some of the technology that keeps a beady eye fixed on you, the news that Samsung’s privacy policy warns customers not to discuss sensitive information in front of their smart TVs is actually fairly tame. The warning relates to a voice-recognition feature that has to be explicitly invoked, and which only begins transmitting data when you say the activation phrase “hi, TV”.

Greenwald: Shedding Light on the Exercise of Power in the Dark

SUBHEADINGGOESHERE

By Todd Krainin

Glenn Greenwald might be the single most polarizing figure in American journalism.

In the 12 months between May 2013 and May 2014, the self-made blogger, civil libertarian and investigative journalist was called "treasonous" by Republican Representative Peter King of New York, given a prestigious Polk Award for national security reporting, accused of "paranoid libertarianism" by The New Republic and awarded a Pulitzer Prize for public service.

The Ideas and Institutions Holding Up Society Are Disintegrating

By Terrence McNally

Economic meltdown ... environmental crises ... seemingly endless warfare. The world is in critical condition. Bad news? Good news? Or both?

Many of the ideas and institutions that define our culture are breaking down -- and that's a good thing, say Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman. In their 2010 book, Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There from Here [3], they write that today's crises are part of a natural process: clearing out what no longer serves us to make room for a new way of being. Are they cockeyed optimists or do they see things others miss?

Right-to-work laws are every Republican union-hater's weapon of choice

Anti-union laws don’t help the economy, don’t create jobs and don’t end ‘compulsory union membership’. They can only kill off unions

Michael Paarlberg

There are few crusades in American politics more quixotic than bashing unions. They are a threat that exists mostly in the imaginations of their opponents: an all-powerful, resurgent labor movement that scares investors and imperils the economy, despite representing just 11% of the US workforce. Right-to-work laws are their weapon of choice.

Last week, the Supreme Court announced it would hear a case that could very well finish off American unions in the last bastion where they have any significant presence at all, the public sector. The case, Friedrichs v California Teachers Association, will decide if right-to-work laws (designed to bankrupt unions by encouraging employees who benefit from collective bargaining agreements to not pay for them) will extend to all public employees nationwide – an outcome Justice Samuel Alito has all but promised to deliver.

Exposing the Republican Party's Sleazy Playbook to Destroy Social Security

By Thom Hartmann

In one of its first actions, the Republican House of Representatives of the 114th Congress, changed its rules to manufacture a Social Security crisis.

GOP Representatives Tom Reed and Sam Johnson introduced a procedural rule change, which was buried on page 30 of 32 in House Resolution 5. It forbids the House from transferring money between the Social Security Retirement Fund and the Social Security Disability Fund, a move that Congress has made 11 times in the past, irrespective of which party was in control. The result is that the Disability Fund, which is expected to run out of reserves next year, cannot be helped using money from the Retirement Fund. Without this “easy fix”—as the New York Times called it—recipients of Social Security Disability will see a 19% cut in benefits.

Edward Snowden revelations: GCHQ ‘using online viruses and honey traps to discredit targets’

Documents released by the American former CIA employee claim that the agency is at the forefront of efforts to develop “offensive” online techniques

Cahal Milmo

Britain’s GCHQ has a covert unit which uses dirty tricks from “honey trap” sexual liaisons to texting anonymous messages to friends and neighbours to discredit targets from hackers to governments, according to the latest leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Documents released by the American former CIA employee claim that the Cheltenham-based intelligence agency is at the forefront of efforts to develop “offensive” online techniques for use against criminals, and individuals and regimes considered to pose a threat to national security.

The Tax Loophole (Almost) Everyone Should Want to Close

Step-up in basis for capital gains explained

James Kwak

In his latest round of tax proposals, President Obama finally called for what is probably the single most obvious change that should be made to the tax code: an end to the step-up in basis at death for capital gains taxes. (The other candidate for “single most obvious change” is eliminating the “carried interest” exemption that allows fund managers to pay capital gains tax rates on their labor income — managing people’s money.)

What is step-up in basis, you may ask? Ordinarily, if you buy something for $100 and sell it for $200 — say, a share of stock — your $100 in profit is a capital gain, which counts as a form of income, and you pay tax on it. The capital gain is calculated as your sale price of $200 minus your “cost basis” of $100. You pay tax at a lower rate than on ordinary “earned” income, like your wages, for reasons that not everyone agrees on. In addition, you also benefit from the fact that you can decide when to sell the stock, so you can defer paying capital gains tax for as long as you want, without interest — so the longer your holding period, the lower the effective annual tax rate.

Richard Eskow: More Evidence "Centrist" Solutions Can't Save Us

We have become a profoundly unequal society. That reality is explored in new detail in a recent study from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Even more importantly, the INET study shows that it will take a dramatic shift in policy to restore the equilibrium. Unless we can build momentum for a new political agenda, we’ll be divided into a small minority with fabulous wealth and a permanent underclass with few hopes or prospects.

Unfortunately, our mainstream political dialogue shows no sign of adapting to these realities. As the INET study confirms, mainstream Democratic ideas won’t protect us from this dismal future.

Paul Krugman: A Game of Chicken

On Wednesday, the European Central Bank announced that it would no longer accept Greek government debt as collateral for loans. This move, it turns out, was more symbolic than substantive. Still, the moment of truth is clearly approaching.

And it’s a moment of truth not just for Greece, but for the whole of Europe — and, in particular, for the central bank, which may soon have to decide whom it really works for.

How American Oligarchs Are Pushing America to the Brink of Fascism

It used to be more difficult for the ultra wealthy to buy American democracy.

By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet

As the American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is, "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Well, it may well be on our doorstep. And the oligarchs are plotting their final takeover by using their economic dominance to capture governmental power; specifically, the governmental power which sets the rules for the very marketplace that provides the oligarchs with such massive wealth.