New NAFTA lawsuits reveal disturbing, dangerous trend

If corporate interests keep suing Canada and other countries under trade agreements like NAFTA, state sovereignty might soon be a thing of the past.

By: Marilyn Reid

Abitibi Bowater is at it again.

In 2010 the company squeezed $130 million out of Canadian taxpayers after the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador expropriated Abitibi’s hydroelectric assets in Grand Falls-Windsor and took back water and timber rights.

The company threatened to sue Canada under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting the Harper administration to settle out of court.

The Internet of Things that Talk About You Behind Your Back

Bruce Schneier

SilverPush is an Indian startup that's trying to figure out all the different computing devices you own. It embeds inaudible sounds into the webpages you read and the television commercials you watch. Software secretly embedded in your computers, tablets, and smartphones picks up the signals, and then uses cookies to transmit that information back to SilverPush. The result is that the company can track you across your different devices. It can correlate the television commercials you watch with the web searches you make. It can link the things you do on your tablet with the things you do on your work computer.

Gaius Publius: Wall Street Reviews What Sanders Plans for Wall Street

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This post provides a solid overview of the Sanders Big Finance reforms, and as important, some of the ways it has been caricatured or flat-out misrepresented.

wanted to add a couple of points.

Disingenuous critics treat the less-than-well-thought out details of the Sanders plan as if it were cast in stone. For example, the idea of a usury ceiling is sound. Classical economists like Adam Smith called for them because they could see in their day that lending with no interest rate curbs led creditors to target borrowers who were desperate or reckless but still had some ability to pay, which then was wealthy gamblers, not productive enterprise. The defect of the Sanders proposal is it sets one rate that is fixed across all products. It should instead be set in relationship to prevailing interests rates and (at a minimum) vary with the maturity of the obligation.

Paul Krugman: Is Vast Inequality Necessary?

How rich do we need the rich to be?

That’s not an idle question. It is, arguably, what U.S. politics are substantively about. Liberals want to raise taxes on high incomes and use the proceeds to strengthen the social safety net; conservatives want to do the reverse, claiming that tax-the-rich policies hurt everyone by reducing the incentives to create wealth.

Now, recent experience has not been kind to the conservative position. President Obama pushed through a substantial rise in top tax rates, and his health care reform was the biggest expansion of the welfare state since L.B.J. Conservatives confidently predicted disaster, just as they did when Bill Clinton raised taxes on the top 1 percent. Instead, Mr. Obama has ended up presiding over the best job growth since the 1990s. Is there, however, a longer-term case in favor of vast inequality?

Planned Parenthood Sues “Complex Criminal Enterprise” Behind Deceptive Videos

—By Nina Liss-Schultz

Planned Parenthood officials announced Thursday that the organization is suing the Center for Medical Progress, the group behind last summer's series of misleading and heavily edited videos that created a firestorm over whether the Planned Parenthood's fetal tissue donation program broke the law. The federal lawsuit, filed in San Francisco, also named David Daleiden, the face of the Center for Medical Progress, Troy Neumann, the CMP's secretary and a well-known anti-abortion activist, and several other CMP members as defendants.

The series of videos, released this summer by the secretive CMP, purported to show Planned Parenthood staff and other abortion care professionals discussing how to traffic fetal tissue for profit. Donating fetal tissue for medical research is legal in the United States, as is receiving reimbursement for the costs associated with the donation. Only two states have fetal tissue donation programs, and Planned Parenthood has categorically denied that it has profited from them. Both state and federal investigations into the health care group's donation programs have found no evidence of wrongdoing. In the fall, Planned Parenthood announced that it would no longer accept reimbursement for the tissue donations but would pay for them.

Toxic “Reform” Law Will Gut State Rules on Dangerous Chemicals

Sharon Lerner

A NEW SET OF BILLS that aims to update the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act may nullify the efforts of states such as Maine and California to regulate dangerous chemicals. The Senate’s bill, passed last month, just before the holidays, is particularly restrictive. The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act — named, ironically, for the New Jersey senator who supported strong environmental protections — would make it much harder for states to regulate chemicals after the EPA has evaluated them, and would even prohibit states from acting while the federal agency is in the process of investigating certain chemicals.t

How Debt Conquered America

Special Report: America presents itself to the world as “the land of the free” but – for the vast majority – it is a place of enslaving indebtedness, a reality for much of “the 99%” that has deep historical roots hidden or “lost” from our history, as Jada Thacker explains.

By Jada Thacker

Since its center-stage debut during the Occupy Wall Street movement, “the 99%” – a term emblematic of extreme economic inequality confronting the vast majority – has become common place. The term was coined by sociology professor David Graeber, an Occupy leader and author of the encyclopedic Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published just as the Occupy movement captured headlines.

What Graeber’s monumental work did not emphasize specifically, and what most Americans still do not appreciate, is how debt was wielded as the weapon of choice to subjugate the 99% in the centuries before the Occupy protesters popularized the term. Like so many aspects of our Lost History, the legacy of debt has been airbrushed from our history texts, but not from our lives.

Just in Time for the Political Revolution: A Revolution Newspaper

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is stumping across America urging citizens to help him create a meaningful political revolution to take back the country from the death grip of the one percent. His message is resonating. Sanders is attracting crowds of tens of thousands of disillusioned Americans.

Political revolution is also in the air in the state of New York where a group called “Fed Up New Yorkers” has just launched a newspaper whose stated purpose “is to lessen Big Money’s grip on our political system and on our society.” The newspaper founders say their project is both “a publishing project and a political plan.”

A New Look at a Forgotten Egalitarian

Sam Pizzigati

Back in America’s original Gilded Age, in the decades right after the Civil War, no American spoke and wrote more compellingly against the nation’s growing inequality than Henry George, a Philadelphia-born journalist whose writing career initially took off in San Francisco.

George’s immensely popular 1879 book, Progress and Poverty, sold millions of copies, and the reform plan he championed — what become known as the “single tax,” a levy to prevent landowners from deriving any profit from mere ownership — captivated a significant chunk of his generation.

Paul Krugman: The Obama Boom

Do you remember the “Bush boom”? Probably not. Anyway, the administration of George W. Bush began its tenure with a recession, followed by an extended “jobless recovery.” By the summer of 2003, however, the economy began adding jobs again. The pace of job creation wasn’t anything special by historical standards, but conservatives insisted that the job gains after that trough represented a huge triumph, a vindication of the Bush tax cuts.

So what should we say about the Obama job record? Private-sector employment — the relevant number, as I’ll explain in a minute — hit its low point in February 2010. Since then we’ve gained 14 million jobs, a figure that startled even me, roughly double the number of jobs added during the supposed Bush boom before it turned into the Great Recession. If that was a boom, this expansion, capped by last month’s really good report, outbooms it by a wide margin.