New Report Reveals Electric Utility Industry's Influence at Universities

By Matthew Kasper, Republic Report | Report

In 1971, Lewis Powell, before becoming a Supreme Court Justice, authored a memo, now known as the Powell Memo, and sent it to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Powell called on corporate America to take an increased role in shaping politics, law, and education. Business leaders, Powell instructed, must marshal their resources to influence institutions that influence public opinion and wield political power – especially at universities. Four decades later, the public can see examples of Powell's instructions taking hold.

Energy and Policy Institute (EPI) has released a report detailing how several universities and professors, funded by fossil fuel and electric utility companies are increasingly producing academic reports, supporting advocacy efforts, and amplifying policies important to utility companies and their trade association, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI). This amplification lends credibility to what the industry seeks to achieve in the legislative and regulatory arenas.

Fables of the Reconstruction: Why Clinton's comments about Southern history matter

By Chris Kromm

At a CNN town hall for the Democratic presidential hopefuls this week, Hillary Clinton was asked a seemingly softball question: Who is your favorite president of all time?

Clinton's answer: Abraham Lincoln, a safe bet given Lincoln's consistent ranking among scholars as the country's best leader. But Clinton's response took an odd turn — and generated national controversy, at least among historians and pundits — when she appeared to suggest Lincoln's death was tragic not only because of the South's descent into Jim Crow and white terror, but equally disastrous because of the experiment in postwar democracy known as Reconstruction:

You know, [Lincoln] was willing to reconcile and forgive. And I don't know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancorous, a little more forgiving and tolerant, that might possibly have brought people back together more quickly.

Dave Johnson: Ford Leaves Japan and Indonesia, Blames the TPP

Ford Motor Company announced this week that it will close all operations in Japan and Indonesia this year, because it sees “no reasonable path to profitability.” Last year GM pulled out of Indonesia. What does it say that they are doing this with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on the horizon?

Ford is giving up on trying to crack the Japanese and Indonesian automobile markets, saying that the upcoming TPP does not address such problems as currency manipulation and other non-tariff barriers.

Minority And Low-Income Communities Are Targeted For Hazardous Waste Sites, Research Confirms

By Mike Gaworecki

Decades of research show a clear pattern of racial and socioeconomic discrimination when it comes to siting facilities for hazardous waste disposal, polluting industrial plants and other land uses that are disproportionately located in minority and low-income communities.

But what’s been less clear is whether the placement of these facilities was deliberate on the part of the facilities’ owners and public policymakers, or if the noxious facilities came first, leading to disproportionately higher concentrations of low-income residents and minorities moving into the surrounding community.

A Troubling Op-Ed Portends GOP Agenda Absorbing the Worst Ideals of Silicon Valley

Uh Oh -- are we going to see right-wingers merge their agenda with Silicon Valley greed?

By Adam Johnson

The Washington insider publication Politico has a habit of publishing revealing op-eds by right-wingers in Washington that show their ideology in an unvarnished way. It's a place you can see their true feelings about the poor and the American entitlement system—which is to say runaway contempt for both. One so-bad-it-borders-on-self-parody op-ed dropped January 27, and it wants to massively overhaul several entitlements by subjecting those most in need to the Dickensian nightmare of the “gig economy”: "Uber for welfare: A bold proposal to use the 'gig economy' to reboot the safety net."

Charles P. Pierce: What The Washington Post (and Nearly Everyone) Gets Wrong About Bernie Sanders

Every presidential campaign is necessary aspirational.

It seems that, over at The Washington Post, a once-great newspaper now doing business as an adjunct to the home delivery industry, Fred Hiatt's Workshop For Ghastly Writing is getting a little run for this editorial in which Bernie Sanders is posed as the Lord Mayor Of Munchkinland. There's nothing like the scorn of the Church Of The Savvy. To borrow a comparison from the late Molly Ivins, it's like being gummed by a newt. Folks, leave the snark to the professionals, OK? Anyway, it seems that Fred and his minions find Sanders' proposals to be unrealistic, an insight now shared by almost every putatively liberal pundit, as well as every gas station attendant between Des Moines and Ottumwa. Let's look at the argument, shall we?

Dean Baker: Washington Post Doubles Down with Name Calling on Sanders

The Washington Post again went after Senator Bernie Sanders in its lead editorial, telling readers that the Senator's proposals were "facile." It might be advisable for a paper that described President Bush's case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as "irrefutable" to be cautious about going ad hominem, but this is the Washington Post.

Getting to the substance, the Post is unhappy with Sanders proposal for single payer health insurance which it argues will cost far more or deliver much less than promised. While the Post is correct that Sanders has put forward a campaign proposal rather than a fully worked out health reform bill, it is not unreasonable to think that we can get considerably more coverage at a lower cost than we pay now. After all, there is nothing in our national psyche that should condemn us to forever pay twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries. (I have written more about this issue here.)

Is Ted Cruz Right About the Federal Reserve and the Great Recession?

By Mike Konczal

Is Ted Cruz right about the Great Recession and the Federal Reserve? From a November debate, Cruz argued that “in the third quarter of 2008, the Fed tightened the money and crashed those asset prices, which caused a cascading collapse.”

Fleshing that argument out in the New York Times is David Beckworth and Ramesh Ponnuru, backing and expanding Cruz’s theory that “the Federal Reserve caused the crisis by tightening monetary policy in 2008.”

But wait, didn’t the Federal Reserve lower rates during that time? Their argument is that the Federal Reserve didn’t lower them fast enough.

Revealed: Rick Snyder gave state workers in Flint clean water a year before providing it to residents

Paul Egan, Detroit Free Press

LANSING, Mich. — In January 2015, when state officials were telling worried Flint residents their water was safe to drink, they also were arranging for coolers of purified water in Flint's State Office Building so employees wouldn't have to drink from the taps, according to state government emails released Thursday by the liberal group Progress Michigan.

A Jan. 7, 2015, notice from the state Department of Technology, Management and Budget, which oversees state office buildings, references a notice about a violation of drinking water standards that had recently been sent out by the city of Flint.

Paul Krugman: Plutocrats and Prejudice

Every time you think that our political discourse can’t get any worse, it does. The Republican primary fight has devolved into a race to the bottom, achieving something you might have thought impossible: making George W. Bush look like a beacon of tolerance and statesmanship. But where is all the nastiness coming from?

Well, there’s debate about that — and it’s a debate that is at the heart of the Democratic contest.

Corporate Crime Runs Rampant Thanks to 'Rigged' System: Elizabeth Warren

Report suggests 'some giant corporations—and their executives—have decided that following the law is merely optional'

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

"Corporate criminals routinely escape meaningful prosecution for their misconduct."

This is the damning verdict of Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) report released Friday, Rigged Justice: How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy (pdf).

Described as "the first in an annual series on enforcement," the 12-page booklet "highlights 20 of the most egregious civil and criminal cases during the past year in which federal settlements failed to require meaningful accountability to deter future wrongdoing and to protect taxpayers and families," according to a press statement from Warren's office.

“Black Americans for a Better Future” Super PAC 100% Funded by Rich White Guys

New FEC filings show that all of the $417,250 in monetary donations to a Super PAC called “Black Americans for a Better Future” comes from conservative white businessmen — including $400,000, or 96 percent of the total, from white billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer.

Jon Schwarz

Mercer, co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies on Long Island, is best-known politically for donating $11,000,000 to Keep the Promise I, a Super PAC backing Ted Cruz’s presidential run.

Beyond Mercer’s support of Black Americans for a Better Future and Ted Cruz, Mercer has a long and peculiar history of donations to political and philanthropic causes.

How to feed 11 billion people: Addressing the 21st century's biggest challenge

By Terri Cook

In April 2008, violent protests erupted across the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti. Enraged by soaring food prices and all-too-frequent hunger pangs, protesters smashed windows, looted shops, barricaded streets with blazing cars and stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Port-au-Prince. The week of violence, during which five people were killed, flared after the cost of staples like beans and cooking oil spiked dramatically and the price of rice nearly doubled in four months, increasing hardships in a nation where 80 percent of the population survives on less than $2 per day.

So-called “food riots” aren’t restricted to the Caribbean. Between 2006 and 2008, as the cost of food, fuel oil and other commodities surged to levels not experienced in almost three decades, disturbances erupted around the planet. Large — and frequently violent — protests broke out in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Did Wall Street Banks Create the Oil Crash?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

From June 2008 to the depth of the Wall Street financial crash in early 2009, U.S. domestic crude oil lost 70 percent of its value, falling from over $140 to the low $40s. But then a strange thing happened. Despite weak global economic growth, oil went back to over $100 by 2011 and traded between the $80s and a little over $100 until June 2014. Since then, it has plunged by 72 percent – a bigger crash than when Wall Street was collapsing.

The chart of crude oil has the distinct feel of a pump and dump scheme, a technique that Wall Street has turned into an art form in the past. Think limited partnerships priced at par on client statements as they disintegrated in price in the real world; rigged research leading to the dot.com bust and a $4 trillion stock wipeout; and the securitization of AAA-rated toxic waste creating the subprime mortgage meltdown that cratered the U.S. housing market along with century-old firms on Wall Street.

How Two-Party Political Systems Bolster Capitalism

By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis

Mainstream economics has always privileged one debate above all others as its most central. Should production and distribution of goods and services be private or public, done by individuals or the state? Mainstream economists likewise keep aggressively projecting this question as the central debate for politics and politicians. Such arrogant self-confidence is the other side of the insular self-absorption that characterizes so much of the mainstream economics "discipline."

On one side of the debate are devotees of (1) private ownership of productive resources and (2) market exchanges to connect the private owners with one another and everyone else. They believe that private property and markets best serve every society's economic interests - growth, efficiency, fairness and rising mass consumption. On the other side are devotees of government economic intervention to correct, moderate or offset the many flaws and weaknesses they find in private property and markets. They believe that society's best economic interests can only be served through such an intervention. Most people interested in economics and politics have long accepted (been trapped within?) these mainstream positions as the boundaries of economic thought, research and policy.

Paul Krugman: Michigan’s Great Stink

In the 1850s, London, the world’s largest city, still didn’t have a sewer system. Waste simply flowed into the Thames, which was as disgusting as you might imagine. But conservatives, including the magazine The Economist and the prime minister, opposed any effort to remedy the situation. After all, such an effort would involve increased government spending and, they insisted, infringe on personal liberty and local control.

It took the Great Stink of 1858, when the stench made the Houses of Parliament unusable, to produce action.

Paul Krugman: How Change Happens

There are still quite a few pundits determined to pretend that America’s two great parties are symmetric — equally unwilling to face reality, equally pushed into extreme positions by special interests and rabid partisans. It’s nonsense, of course. Planned Parenthood isn’t the same thing as the Koch brothers, nor is Bernie Sanders the moral equivalent of Ted Cruz. And there’s no Democratic counterpart whatsoever to Donald Trump.

Moreover, when self-proclaimed centrist pundits get concrete about the policies they want, they have to tie themselves in knots to avoid admitting that what they’re describing are basically the positions of a guy named Barack Obama.