Paul Krugman: The M.I.T. Gang

Goodbye, Chicago boys. Hello, M.I.T. gang.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the term “Chicago boys” was originally used to refer to Latin American economists, trained at the University of Chicago, who took radical free-market ideology back to their home countries. The influence of these economists was part of a broader phenomenon: The 1970s and 1980s were an era of ascendancy for laissez-faire economic ideas and the Chicago school, which promoted those ideas.

How the NSA Is a Servant of Corporate Power

By Bill Blunden

For years public figures have condemned cyber espionage committed against the United States by intruders launching their attacks out of China. These same officials then turn around and justify the United States' far-reaching surveillance apparatus in terms of preventing terrorist attacks. Yet classified documents published by WikiLeaks reveal just how empty these talking points are. Specifically, top-secret intercepts prove that economic spying by the United States is pervasive, that not even allies are safe and that it's wielded to benefit powerful corporate interests.

At a recent campaign event in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton accused [3] China of "trying to hack into everything that doesn't move in America." Clinton's hyperbole is redolent of similar claims from the US deep state. For example, who could forget the statement made by former NSA director Keith Alexander that Chinese cyber espionage represents the greatest transfer of wealth [4] in history? Alexander has obviously never heard of quantitative easing [5] (QE) or the self-perpetuating "global war on terror," which has likewise eaten through trillions of dollars [6]. Losses due to cyber espionage are a rounding error compared to the tidal wave of money channeled through QE and the war on terror.

ALEC Admits School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia

Submitted by Jonas Persson

School vouchers were never about helping poor, at-risk or minority students. But selling them as social mobility tickets was a useful fiction that for some twenty-five years helped rightwing ideologues and corporate backers gain bipartisan support for an ideological scheme designed to privatize public schools.

But the times they are a-changin'. Wisconsin is well on its way towards limitless voucher schools, and last month, Nevada signed into law a universal "education savings account" allowing parents to send their kids to private or religious schools, or even to homeschool them—all on the taxpayers' dime. On the federal level, a proposed amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that would have created a multi-billion-dollar-a-year voucher program was only narrowly defeated in the U.S. Senate.

The Vast, Hidden Community Of Racial Hatred In America

by Sacha Feinman

After Dylann Roof allegedly opened fire on worshippers gathered inside the historically black Emanuel A.M.E Church in Charleston, South Carolina last month, killing nine congregants and claiming that they “rape our women” and “are taking over our country,” a disturbing image circulated online. A Facebook picture of Roof sitting on top of his car and straddling a license plate celebrating the “Confederate States of America” went viral, stoking an outrage that prompted the South Carolina government to permanently lower the Confederate flag that had long flown over the State House.

For some, however, the debate isn’t over. The Ku Klux Klan successfully petitioned to hold a pro-Confederate flag rally in Charleston last week, resulting in five arrests as white racialist groups clashed with counter-protesters such as the New Black Panther Party. Video footage from the scene shows African Americans angrily tearing up a Confederate flag, while Nazis inveighed against the government’s decision to “delete your history.”

Social Security Has Enough Money to Expand Benefits Now, Trustee's Report Shows

Billions are available now and in the near-future.

By Nancy Altman / Huffington Post

The Social Security Board of Trustees has just released its annual report to Congress. The most important takeaways are that Social Security has a large and growing surplus, and its future cost is fully affordable.

It is sometimes reported that Social Security's current costs exceed its revenue, but if that happened, we wouldn't need a report to tell us. The whole country would know, because 59 million beneficiaries would not get their earned benefits as they now do every month. By law, Social Security can only pay benefits if it has sufficient revenue to cover every penny of costs - administrative as well as benefit costs. The claim that Social Security is running a deficit counts only Social Security's income from its premiums, often called payroll contributions or taxes, and disregards one or both of its other two dedicated sources of income: investment income and dedicated income tax revenue. When income from all of Social Security's revenue sources is counted, Social Security ran a $25 billion surplus in 2014.

Elizabeth Warren’s Glass-Steagall Legislation Has Two Fatal Flaws

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 20, 2015

When it comes to sleuthing out how Wall Street has gamed the laws, conned the regulators and colluded to corrupt the whole financial system, there is no one in Congress sharper-eyed or more outspoken than Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is also exceptionally well-qualified to lead this Wall Street posse.

Warren was a commercial law professor at Harvard for more than 20 years. She is widely credited with facilitating the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to protect consumers from the insidious rip-offs in mortgages, credit cards, student loans and other financial products.

Goldman Sachs: Masters of the Eurozone

by Gaius Publius

Interesting headline, yes? I have a two-point intro and then the piece.

First, when a "private" group's chief individuals flow back and forth constantly between government and that group, the group can be said to be "part" of government, or to have "infiltrated" government, or to have been "folded into" government. (Your phrasing will be determined by who you think is the instigator.)

For example, a network of private "security consulting" firms does standing business with the (Pentagon's) NSA, and by some accounts performs 70% of their work. Are those firms part of the NSA or not? Most would say yes, to a great degree. It's certain that the NSA would collapse without them, and many of these firms would collapse without the NSA (though many have other ... ahem, international ... clients, which starts an entirely different discussion).

Common chemicals may act together to increase cancer risk, study finds

Oregon State University

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Common environmental chemicals assumed to be safe at low doses may act separately or together to disrupt human tissues in ways that eventually lead to cancer, according to a task force of nearly 200 scientists from 28 countries, including one from Oregon State University.

In a nearly three-year investigation of the state of knowledge about environmentally influenced cancers, the scientists studied low-dose effects of 85 common chemicals not considered to be carcinogenic to humans.

Economic slump, not natural gas boom, responsible for drop in CO2 emissions

University of California - Irvine

Irvine, Calif., July 21, 2015 - The 11 percent decrease in climate change-causing carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. between 2007 and 2013 was caused by the global financial recession - not the reduced use of coal, research from the University of California Irvine, the University of Maryland, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis shows.

Experts have assumed that the drop in emissions reflected a shift toward natural gas, which produces roughly half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as coal and was made cheap by the hydraulic fracturing boom. Instead, most of the credit should be given to changing consumer demand and slumping industrial output during the period, according to findings published today in the journal Nature Communications. The results are based on economic analysis of energy use, manufacturing, emissions and consumer demand between 1997 and 2013.

World's Oceans Could Rise Higher, Sooner, Faster Than Most Thought Possible

New research shows that consensus estimates of sea level increases may be underestimating threat; new predictions would see major coastal cities left uninhabitable by next century

by Jon Queally, staff writer

If a new scientific paper is proven accurate, the international target of limiting global temperatures to a 2°C rise this century will not be nearly enough to prevent catastrophic melting of ice sheets that would raise sea levels much higher and much faster than previously thought possible.

According to the new study—which has not yet been peer-reviewed, but was written by former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 other prominent climate researchers—current predictions about the catastrophic impacts of global warming, the melting of vast ice sheets, and sea level rise do not take into account the feedback loop implications of what will occur if large sections of Greenland and the Antarctic are consumed by the world's oceans.

Swamp power: how the world's wetlands can help stop climate change

From Asia’s peat swamp forests to Europe’s wetlands, swamp farming can provide valuable low-carbon energy, wildlife habitat and a means of depolluting waterways – and help reduce carbon emissions in the process

Arthur Neslen

On a boat drifting through a swampy reed plantation in the Polish Baltic, Szymon Smolczyński surveys his blanket of green crops destined to heat northern European homes.

“Many animals have their homes in our reed fields,” he says. “There are thousands of wild boar in this area and plenty of roe deer too.”

Rich, white & in total control: The clearest evidence yet that our democracy is broken

GOP politicians like Scott Walker work hard to suppress the vote. New data gives us a good idea why

Sean McElwee

This week the Census Bureau released their data on voter turnout in the 2014 election, and the numbers are abysmal. In 2014, only 41.9 percent of the voting age citizen population turned out, the lowest number census has recorded since they began collecting data in 1978. But these broad numbers obscure an even more important reality: that the decline in turnout between the 2012 Presidential election and the 2014 midterm was strongest among low-income people (see chart) and people of color.

As it happens this is also the first election since the Supreme Court struck down a key provision in the Voting Rights Act and conservatives rushed to pass discriminatory laws aimed at suppressing voter turnout. There is a large body of evidence suggesting that when voting is easier, more people vote, and that voter suppression laws disproportionately impact the poor and people of color. The turnout numbers from 2014 are dramatic: At the lowest income bracket, less than 1 in 4 citizens of voting age turned out, and only half were registered to vote, a drop of 48 percent from the presidential election. At the highest bracket the Census records data for ($150,000 and above), 80 percent were registered and 57 percent voted, a drop-off of 29 percent from the presidential election. However, another data source that surveys the wealthiest 1 percent found that in 2008, 99 percent voted, suggesting bias at the very top might be even higher.

How the American South Drives the Low-Wage Economy

Just as in the 1850s (with the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act), the Southern labor system (with low pay and no unions) is wending its way north.

By Harold Meyerson

Santayana had it wrong: Even if we remember the past, we may be condemned to repeat it. Indeed, the more we learn about the conflict between the North and South that led to the Civil War, the more it becomes apparent that we are reliving that conflict today. The South’s current drive to impose on the rest of the nation its opposition to worker and minority rights—through the vehicle of a Southernized Republican Party—resembles nothing so much as the efforts of antebellum Southern political leaders to blunt the North’s opposition to the slave labor system. Correspondingly, in the recent actions of West Coast and Northeastern cities and states to raise labor standards and protect minority rights, there are echoes of the pre–Civil War frustrations that many Northerners felt at the failure of the federal government to defend and promote a free labor system, frustrations that—ironically—led them to found the Republican Party.

The Inside Story of the Crony Court that Deep-Sixed the Scott Walker Probe

By Brian Murphy

Yesterday, Scott Walker caught a break when the Wisconsin Supreme Court, on a party line vote, shut down a criminal investigation of his 2012 recall election campaign. The inquiry, called “John Doe” investigation, was led by a Republican special prosecutor on behalf of five Wisconsin county district attorneys who were probing whether Walker had broken state campaign finance laws when he and his aides steered donors to give to the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a state-level chapter of the national organization that was then led by one of Walker’s top campaign staffers.

Prosecutors alleged and documents confirmed that Walker and his staff used the Wisconsin Club for Growth to gather recall campaign funds from a variety of in-state and out-of-state corporate and institutional sources, including the Republican Governors Association and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. “We own C.F.G.,” said R.J. Johnson, a Walker campaign official and paid staffer at the Club for Growth who was at the center of the case. In emails obtained as evidence, a Walker fundraiser wrote that “As the Governor discussed … he wants all the issue advocacy efforts run thru one group to ensure correct messaging,” adding that “Wisconsin Club for Growth can accept corporate and personal donations without limitations and no donors disclosure.” In all, Wisconsin Club for Growth spent $9.1 million during the 2012 recall election after having dropped more than $800,000 to air misleading ads backing Walker’s 2011 attack on public sector workers and organizing public events, co-sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, on Walker’s behalf. The group also funneled money, some $3 million, to another conservative political organization called Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce that went on to spend $4 million supporting Walker’s 2012 campaign.

Judge Kozinski: There's Very Little Justice In Our So-Called 'Justice System'

from the overrun-by-perverts-and-their-incentives dept

by Tim Cushing

Judge Alex Kozinski has long been one of the few judges willing to speak up against our nation's thoroughly corrupted justice system. It's not the normal form of corruption, where juries and judges are openly bought and sold. It's corrupted, as in bastardized. Or debased. What was set up to provide citizens with a fighting chance against accusations brought by those with vastly more power has instead become exactly the sort of system these checks and balances were meant to prevent. In many cases, prosecutions more resemble railroading than actual due process.

A few years back, Kozinski pointed out one of these contributing factors to this corruption: the deliberate withholding of exonerating evidence from defense lawyers.

Physicians testified for tobacco companies against plaintiffs with cancer, Stanford study finds

Stanford University Medical Center

Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, a small group of otolaryngologists have repeatedly testified, on behalf of the tobacco industry, that heavy smoking did not cause the cancer in cases of dying patients suing for damages, according to a study by a Stanford University School of Medicine researcher.

"I was shocked by the degree to which these physicians were willing to testify, in my opinion in an unscientific way, to deny a dying plaintiff -- suffering the aftermath of a lifetime of smoking -- of a fair trial," said Robert Jackler, MD, professor and chair of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery, referring to the physicians cited in the study as a "pool of experts willing to say over and over again that smoking didn't cause cancer."

Paul Krugman: Liberals and Wages

Hillary Clinton gave her first big economic speech on Monday, and progressives were by and large gratified. For Mrs. Clinton's core message was that the federal government can and should use its influence to push for higher wages.

Conservatives, however -- at least those who could stop chanting "Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!" long enough too pay attention -- seemed bemused. They believe that Ronald Reagan proved that government is the problem, not the solution. So wasn't Mrs. Clinton just reviving defunct "paleoliberalism"? And don't we know that government intervention in markets produces terrible side effects?

ExxonMobil gave millions to climate-denying lawmakers despite pledge

Under pressure from shareholders, company promised eight years ago to stop funding climate denial – but financial and tax records tell a different story

Suzanne Goldenberg

ExxonMobil gave more than $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that deny climate change and block efforts to fight climate change – eight years after pledging to stop its funding of climate denial, the Guardian has learned.

Climate denial – from Republicans in Congress and lobby groups operating at the state level – is seen as a major obstacle to US and global efforts to fight climate change, closing off the possibility of federal and state regulations cutting greenhouse gas emissions and the ability to plan for a future of sea-level rise and extreme weather.

The Augean Stables – How Corruption Has Amended the Constitution

by Gaius Publius

Not something you don't already know if you're a regular reader of these pages, but it's becoming more and more mainstream to deliver a radical* analysis of government in the U.S. That's why I found the following so interesting — the source is former U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate Gary Hart. And believe me, this is a radical analysis.

But first, two definitions. The Augean Stables is a reference to the Fifth Labor of Hercules, one of the Twelve (click to read the context). The task was to clean the king's stables, which housed 1,000 cattle and which hadn't been cleaned in 30 years, the life of the man who owned it. Cleaned of what?

Soulless Economics

'An allegedly impersonal economic structure, which quietly benefits the infinitesimally few who have far more than they need, is no foundation for our future,' the author writes.

by Robert C. Koehler

Austerity, the tool of neoliberal capitalism, stands up to Greek democracy and stares it down. Oh well.

We’re remarkably comfortable with soulless economics.

But we have yielded to this economic model, in thought, word and deed:

“At issue,” USA Today informs us, “is whether Greece has taken adequate steps to cut spending and raise taxes to deserve the new three-year, $59 billion infusion of funds it has requested, and whether it can be trusted to follow through on the austerity program it has proposed as the price for new loans.”