Paul Krugman: Springtime for Grifters

At one point during Wednesday’s Republican debate, Ben Carson was asked about his involvement with Mannatech, a nutritional supplements company that makes outlandish claims about its products and has been forced to pay $7 million to settle a deceptive-practices lawsuit. The audience booed, and Mr. Carson denied being involved with the company. Both reactions tell you a lot about the driving forces behind modern American politics.

As it happens, Mr. Carson lied. He has indeed been deeply involved with Mannatech, and has done a lot to help promote its merchandise. PolitiFact quickly rated his claim false, without qualification. But the Republican base doesn’t want to hear about it, and the candidate apparently believes, probably correctly, that he can simply brazen it out. These days, in his party, being an obvious grifter isn’t a liability, and may even be an asset.

Resurrecting Glass-Steagall

Simon Johnson

WASHINGTON, DC – A major shift in American politics has taken place. All three of the remaining mainstream Democratic presidential candidates now agree that the existing state of the financial sector is not satisfactory and that more change is needed. President Barack Obama has long regarded the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation as bringing about sufficient change. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders, and former Governor Martin O’Malley want to do even more.

The three leading Democratic candidates disagree, however, on whether there should be legislation to re-erect a wall between the rather dull business of ordinary commercial banking and other kinds of finance (such as issuing and trading securities, commonly known as investment banking).

Elizabeth Warren eviscerates Paul Ryan’s breathtakingly bad budgets, nails roots of GOP’s dysfunction

Paul Ryan is the new Speaker of the House and Elizabeth Warren is none too impressed

Sophia Tesfaye

Paul Ryan was just elected the 62nd Speaker of the House to succeed John Boehner and attempt the impossible task of herding cats, beginning with his House GOP conference. Ryan, who for years has been lauded as the smartest man in Washington, D.C. by a fawning beltway press, was deemed palatable enough for the hardcore right-wing extremist in his caucus to save House Republicans from themselves, but Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is not impressed.

Speaking at a Politico event on Wednesday, Warren admitted that she has had limited interactions with Ryan on the Hill but said that she’s learned all she needs to know about his leadership abilities and priorities as the next Speaker by reading his budget proposals, which Warren called “truly breathtaking.”

Buckraking on the Food Beat: When Is It a Conflict of Interest?

By Stacy Malkan

In an age of shrinking newspaper budgets, it’s common for editors to rely on freelance writers–and for freelancers to add to their incomes with side projects. But is it a conflict of interest for a columnist who covers food and agriculture to take money from agrichemical industry interest groups?

Paul Krugman: Free Mitt Romney!

Sometimes I find myself feeling sorry for Mitt Romney. No, seriously. In another time and place, he might have been respected as an effective technocrat — a smart guy valued (although probably not loved) for his ability to get things done. In fact, that’s kind of how it worked when he was governor of Massachusetts, a decade ago.

But now it’s 2015 in America, and Mr. Romney’s party doesn’t want people who get things done. On the contrary, it actively hates government programs that improve American lives, especially if they help Those People. And this means that Mr. Romney can’t celebrate his signature achievement in public life, the Massachusetts health reform that served as a template for Obamacare.

Unelectable and Unafraid

We have a rare opportunity to redefine socialism for a new generation. That’s more important than who wins the 2016 election.

by Danny Katch

The other week in Las Vegas, Democratic presidential candidates showed up for a series of soundbites, and an honest to goodness political debate broke out — for a few minutes at least.

Don’t blame Anderson Cooper. The CNN moderator was merely trying to redbait Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders when he asked if “any kind of socialist could win a general election in the United States.” But rather than shrinking at the dreaded “s” word, Sanders gave an unapologetic defense of Scandinavian health care and maternity leave policies.

Elizabeth Warren Hits Wall Street To Defend Obama Retirement Rule

The senator is fighting back against special perks that can encourage financial advisers to push clients into bad investments.

Zach Carter

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took a swipe at Wall Street Tuesday, detailing a host of vacations, cruises and other perks that retirement professionals commonly receive for steering clients into particular investments. The rewards provide investment experts with plush incentives to shortchange retirees for their own personal benefit.

Warren's description of the perks, outlined in a report issued by her office, serves as a fresh defense of a retirement security rule proposed by the Obama administration, which would prohibit such activity. Americans collectively lose about $17 billion dollars a year to conflicted retirement account advice, according to the administration.

New Report Reveals the Staggering Economic Chasm in Retirement

A just-released study on the enormous gap between retirement assets and benefits for the wealthy as compared to the rest of Americans - "A Tale of Two Retirements" - blames the divide on "a shift in the rules to favor corporate executives over other working people."

This declassified US intelligence report from 1990 is one of the most terrifying things you'll ever read

By Armin Rosen

The 1983 US-Soviet "war scare" is one of the most controversial episodes of the Cold War.

Now we finally know it was also one of the most dangerous, thanks to a February 1990 report published by the National Security Archive at George Washington University this week after a 12-year Freedom of Information Act battle.

The US and Soviets were dangerously close to going to war in November 1983, the bombshell report found, and the Cold War-era US national-security apparatus missed many warning signs.

2 political scientists have found the secret to partisanship, and it’s deeply depressing

Updated by Ezra Klein on October 27, 2015, 7:44 a.m. ET

Politics isn't about who you love. It's about who you fear.

That's the upshot of a paper by political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster that attempts to untangle a mystery about modern American politics: how can there be record levels of party loyalty and straight-ticket voting at the same time that fewer Americans than ever before are identifying as Republicans and Democrats?

CISA Overwhelmingly Passes, 74-21

Published October 27, 2015 | By emptywheel

Just now, the Senate voted to pass the Cyber Information Sharing Act by a vote of 74 to 21. While 7 more people voted against the bill than had voted against cloture last week (Update: the new votes were Cardin and Tester, Crapo, Daines, Heller, Lee, Risch, and Sullivan, with Paul not voting), this is still a resounding vote for a bill that will authorize domestic spying with no court review in this country.

The amendment voting process was interesting of its own accord. Most appallingly, just after Patrick Leahy cast his 15,000th vote on another amendment — which led to a break to talk about what a wonderful person he is, as well as a speech from him about how the Senate is the conscience of the country — Leahy’s colleagues voted 57 to 39 against his amendment that would have stopped the creation of a new FOIA exemption for CISA. So right after honoring Leahy, his colleagues kicked one of his key issues, FOIA, in the ass.

The House science committee is worse than the Benghazi committee

Updated by David Roberts on October 26, 2015, 1:19 p.m. ET

Last Thursday, the nation watched with a mix of amusement and horror as the House Benghazi committee spent 11 hours grilling Hillary Clinton on a bizarre farrago of issues, many of which bore only tangential connection to the Benghazi attack.

[...]

The thing is: The Benghazi committee is not even the worst committee in the House. I'd argue that the House science committee, under the chairmanship of Lamar Smith (R-TX), deserves that superlative for its open-ended, Orwellian attempts to intimidate some of the nation's leading scientists and scientific institutions.

Language, immigrant status tied to toxic exposure

Latinos hardest hit

Washington State University

PULLMAN, Wash. - New research finds that economically disadvantaged immigrant neighborhoods of non-English speaking Latinos are more likely to be exposed to cancer-causing air toxics than comparable communities of any other racial group in the United States.

The work, to be published in the November edition of Social Science Research, was done by Washington State University assistant professor of sociology Raoul Liévanos, who married maps of toxic air pollution hotspots with demographic clusters across the United States.

Exclusive: Elevated CO2 Levels Directly Affect Human Cognition, New Harvard Study Shows

by Joe Romm Oct 26, 2015 10:05am

In a landmark public health finding, a new study from the Harvard School of Public Health finds that carbon dioxide (CO2) has a direct and negative impact on human cognition and decision-making. These impacts have been observed at CO2 levels that most Americans — and their children — are routinely exposed to today inside classrooms, offices, homes, planes, and cars.

Carbon dioxide levels are inevitably higher indoors than the baseline set by the outdoor air used for ventilation, a baseline that is rising at an accelerating rate thanks to human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels. So this seminal research has equally great importance for climate policy, providing an entirely new public health impetus for keeping global CO2 levels as low as possible.

The 1965 Immigration Act: Its Legacy and Lessons

By Richard Baldoz, Truthout

October marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law at a public ceremony held at the base of the Statute of Liberty. The act is rightly celebrated for dismantling the infamous "national origins" quota system that gave special preference to immigrants from Western Europe while effectively barring newcomers from Asia and severely curtailing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. While the egalitarian ethos of the 1965 law is often hailed as a civil rights victory, its legacy is far more complex.

text

Whether intentional or not, the law spurred a major shift in the demographic character of the immigrant population over the past half-century. The sweeping changes ushered forth by the law were set into motion by shifting Cold War geopolitical configurations. The United States emerged from World War II as the uncontested leader of the "free world" and locked in a global rivalry with the Soviet Union and China for the hearts and minds of the world's population.

Money Flooding State Court Elections Threatens the Promise of Equal Justice

by Alicia Bannon, Scott Greytak

Special interest money is flooding into our state Supreme Court elections, gravely threatening the impartial justice that our Constitution promises -- and raising troubling questions about whether courtroom decisions are for sale.

This fast-growing trend in American politics, spurred in part by the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling in 2010, puts our system of justice at risk. When judges are pressured to answer to deep-pocketed special interests, disillusioned citizens may perceive them as little more than politicians in robes.

This is not a democracy: Behind the Deep State that Obama, Hillary or Trump couldn’t control

Foreign policy never really changes regardless of who holds the White House. This is why exceptionalism always wins

Patrick L. Smith

There are two ways to consider the White House’s announcement last week that, no, American troops will no longer withdraw from Afghanistan as previously planned. You can look back over President Obama’s record in such matters or you can face forward and think about what this decision means, or implies, or suggests —or maybe all three—about the next president’s conduct of foreign policy.

I do not like what I see in either direction. What anyone who looks carefully and consciously can discern in Obama’s seven years in office are limits. These are imposed in part by inherited circumstances, but let us set these aside for now, appalling as they are. My concern is with the limits imposed by the entrenched power of our permanent government, otherwise known as the “deep state.”

Bank Regulator’s Speech Shows the Extent of Financial Reform Failure

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

One of the common complaints heard about the U.S. financial regulatory system is that it’s so fragmented that one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. For example, both the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (Fed) regulate the largest banks – including the biggest banks on Wall Street. But neither of these regulators has any clarity on the securities trading risks that these banks holding trillions in insured deposits are taking. Neither does the FDIC that insures the deposits with backstopping from the taxpayer. That’s the Securities and Exchange Commission’s job. The same banks are also taking big risks in commodities and futures trading – but that’s left to the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). And on and on it goes.

Texas Officials Raid Several Planned Parenthood Offices, Demand Addresses of Employees

Some of the information they were seeking is both bizarre and possibly dangerous for Planned Parenthood employees.

By Jen Hayden / Daily Kos

The unbelievable harassment of the largest healthcare provider for American women has been taken to a new low in Texas:

Texas sent agents to Planned Parenthood facilities on Thursday seeking documents, the group said, calling it a "politically motivated" move that comes on the heels of the state's Republican leaders barring it from receiving Medicaid money.

Members of the Texas Office of the Inspector General made unannounced visits at Planned Parenthood health centers in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, staying in some cases for several hours and giving Planned Parenthood 24 hours to deliver thousands of pages of documents stored at its facilities across the state, the organization said.

Elizabeth Warren And Bernie Sanders Embarrass Hapless Vulture Fund Investors

"When you make a risky investment you should not expect to get 100 percent back on your dollar."

Zach Carter

WASHINGTON -- Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called on the federal government Thursday to curb the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico by cracking down on vulture fund investors.

"Wall Street should not be believing that they can get blood from a stone," Sanders said. "When people are suffering and hurting, you cannot continue to squeeze them."

The Unseen Threat of Capital Mobility

Marshall Steinbaum

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens
By Gabriel Zucman
University of Chicago Press, $20 (cloth)

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens
By Gabriel Zucman
University of Chicago Press, $20 (cloth)

Two new books link rising inequality to unseen forces: tax havens in economist Gabriel Zucman’s case, and overseas labor and environmental exploitation in historian Erik Loomis’s. The adverse consequences of the free movement of capital suffuse both narratives. Loomis recognizes that the threat of offshored jobs and outsourced supply chains is wielded to discipline the domestic workforce in the United States, and Zucman points out that tax havens have effectively allowed the wealthy to choose their own tax system and regulatory regime. They each question received wisdom and ideologically charged models in which “globalization” is an inexorable force innocent of politics or power, which operates to either universal benefit or at worst whose ill effects can be compensated. In fact, thanks to globalization, the economic body—what its ideological affiliates call “The Market”—is able to transcend the national body politic, to the benefit of multinational corporations and the wealthy individuals who own them.

Sanders Hires Cesar Vargas, High-Profile DREAMer Activist, For Latino Outreach - See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/10/cesar-vargas-in-2012-immigrant-from.html

by Gaius Publius

In another smart move, Bernie Sanders has hired Cesar Vargas, one of the highest-profile and best-respected DREAM activists, to engage with him in Latino outreach.

It's clear that whoever the Democratic nominee is, that person will have to win the Latino vote. It's also clear that the way the Republican party is performing on immigration, the Democratic nominee will do quite well in the general election.

Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald Calls Out Media For Enabling The Benghazi Committee's Partisan "Political Theater"

Alex Kaplan

Newsweek senior writer Kurt Eichenwald called out the media for promoting the misleading and "deceitful information" released by the House Select Committee on Benghazi in an ongoing effort to hurt Hillary Clinton's poll numbers, as it is becoming "increasingly clear they are enablers of an obscene attempt to undermine the electoral process."

In his October 21 "Benghazi Biopsy," Eichenwald describes the Benghazi Committee as a "taxpayer-funded political research of the opposing party's leading candidate for president." He goes on to criticize the media for parroting the committee's numerous false claims, from misleading characterizations of Susan Rice's supposedly deceptive Sunday morning show talking points, to the persistent "stand down" order myth, to the incorrect assertion that Clinton personally signed off on a cable weakening the security at the U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi.

The Eternal Return of the Christian Nation

Richard White

John Adams once wrote, “It was never pretended that any persons employed in [drafting the founding documents] had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven.” Ours was a government “founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery.”

That Adams had to disavow divine inspiration always surprised me before I taught in Utah in the 1980s. Evangelical Christians and Mormons are often at odds, but at some point they united in the belief that the Founders had acted as scribes for divine revelation. Some of my students thought angels bearing the word of God had been at the Constitutional Convention. I began inserting into my lectures reasons why this probably was not true. Why the disputes over what passages meant? Why the amendments? Had God—or the angels—forgotten stuff?