Paul Krugman: When Fallacies Collide

The formal debates among the Republicans who would be president have exceeded all expectations. Even the most hardened cynics couldn’t have imagined that the candidates would sink so low, and stay so focused on personal insults. Yet last week, offstage, there was in effect a real debate about economic policy between Donald Trump and Mitt Romney, who is trying to block his nomination.

Unfortunately, both men are talking nonsense. Are you surprised?

Read This Before You Sign Any Contract

 Buried in the legal language of the contracts we all sign for jobs, credit cards, and more are clauses that effectively curtail our constitutional rights.

By Michelle Chen

The hardest won rights are often the easiest to lose, and in the thickets of fine print surrounding every labor contract or credit card bill, all it takes is one careless signature to get roped into a deal with the devil—before you know it, you’ve already compromised your right to a fair trial or to speak out against an abusive boss.

Despite American society’s reputation for litigiousness, there are as many things to sue over as there are ways to escape a lawsuit. In February, a coalition of lawmakers led by Senators Patrick Leahy and Al Franken introduced legislation to strengthen worker and consumer protections against binding arbitration—the obscure legal mechanism through which countless people have accidentally compromised their rights, by ensuring that a prospective future dispute with a company gets tracked into a separate legal system rigged with corporate impunity.

Watch: John Oliver Reveals an Insidious Kind of Corruption Most People Have Never Heard Of

They are called special districts, and they are a special way of picking taxpayers' pockets.

By Alexandra Rosenmann / AlterNet

Special districts are special because they can receive little oversight and can be very easy to create. Sometimes the only people voting for them are two people in the middle of nowhere.

"One of the most interesting ways how special districts are different from any form of government is that they can be created seemingly out of thin air," said "Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver. "For instance, in Conroe, Texas, a company was looking to create a new neighborhood on undeveloped land. They wanted to form a special district which could issue bonds. Now to do this, the law required a vote, but remember, no one lived there yet. So what did they do? So guess what they did?"

 Democrats and Republicans Are Quietly Planning a Corporate Giveaway—to the Tune of $400 Billion

 Why isn’t anyone talking about it?

By William Greider

 Young people are the good news of 2016. They see the stressful realities of American life more clearly than their elders and are rallying around the straight talk of Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, the big hitters back in Washington politics are working on an ugly surprise not just for the kids but for all of us—another monster tax break for US multinational corporations.

 The bad news is that key leaders of the Democratic Party—including the president—are getting on board with Republicans, despite some talk about confronting income inequality. Influential Democrats intend to negotiate with Republican counterparts on the size and terms of post-facto tax “forgiveness” for America’s globalized companies. This is real money they’re talking about—a giveaway of hundreds of billions.

How the FBI Polices Dissent and Why It Matters in the Encryption Debate

By Chip Gibbons, Truthout | News Analysis

With the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attempting to gain access to the San Bernardino shooter's phone, and in the process create a backdoor into encrypted devices across the world - many in the media have framed the issue as being one of privacy versus security. While there is undoubtedly a compelling privacy issue at stake, many advocates have also pointed to another fundamental right at stake - the right of free expression. The Supreme Court has long noted that privacy is fundamental to free expression. More recently, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression released a report concluding that strong encryption was essential to protect free expression.

When tackling encryption from a free expression standpoint, many advocates have rightfully expressed fear that "authoritarian" governments could use backdoors into encrypted devices to go after journalists, human rights defenders and dissidents. Yet, by placing the threat to free expression mainly on foreign bad actors, the FBI is being let off the hook. It isn't just encryption in the hands of other governments that threatens free expression: The FBI should not be trusted either, as it has a long history of policing dissent.

How Workers Lose in Negotiations

by Carl Finamore

Unlike the ninety percent of American workers who have only their own personal voice to influence their wages, benefits and working conditions, union employees use their collective organization to establish guarantees.

And, union workers come to negotiations very well prepared with lots of economic data, with each contract proposal “costed out,” and with the whole team backed up by a professional staff of legal and industry analysts. So, then, how is it that we still get hammered?

This is how the GOP imploded: The real story behind the conservative crack-up, and the creation of Donald Trump

Donald Trump used right-wing rhetoric to steal the conservative base. But this crack-up has been a long time coming

Heather Cox Richardson

Today’s civil war in the GOP has observers scrambling to make sense of the struggle among the current Republican presidential candidates. Pundits are trying to find the roots of the chaos in President Obama’s 2008 election or in the rise of the Tea Party in 2010. But the current fights are only the fallout from a split that started in the 1930s, cracked open in the 1960s, and was complete in the 1990s.

We cannot understand the present without understanding that earlier rift.

The Republican Party split in two in response to the New Deal. In the 1920s, Republicans had embraced the idea that “the business of America is business,” as President Calvin Coolidge put it. But when the bottom fell out of the American economy, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted that the government must stop the abuses that had created the crisis. During his administration, Democrats passed laws to regulate business and finance, as well as to protect labor and provide a basic safety net for Americans. But Republicans loathed these policies. They thought that the taxes necessary to support an active government would tie up capital that wealthy men would otherwise use to invest in the economy. They howled that the New Deal threatened freedom, made people dependent on government, ushered in socialism, and launched a class war that would destroy the nation. And voters reelected FDR in 1936 with more than 60% of the vote.

Why the FBI's Spying and Attempt to Subvert the Civil Rights Movement Is a Vital History Lesson for All Activists Today

Young people should understand how COINTELPRO's abuses impact police and race relations today.

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

This month marks the 45th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971—while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold—a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.

Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:

I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.

The Toxic Factors that Give Rise to Right-Wing Populists Like Trump, Berlusconi and Hitler

There's a difference between right-wing populists and conservatives.

By Robert Kuttner

Right-wing populists ascend when three toxic forces converge. First, the economy needs to be really lousy for most citizens. Check.

Second, the political system ceases to be able to solve problems and loses legitimacy with regular people. Check.

Third, some foreign menace causes people to seek shelter in a strongman. Check.

A Chemical Shell Game

How DuPont Concealed the Dangers of the New Teflon Toxin

Sharon Lerner

Mark Strynar and Andrew Lindstrom walked down the muddy bank of the Cape Fear River toward the water, sampling equipment in hand. It was the summer of 2012, and the scientists, who both work for the Environmental Protection Agency, were taking the first steps in what would be more than two years of detective work. The Cape Fear winds its way for over 200 miles through North Carolina before flowing into the Atlantic, but Strynar and Lindstrom were focused on a 20-mile stretch that runs from a boat dock outside Fayetteville south to the little town of Tar Heel. About halfway between the two points, on the western bank of the river, sits a large plant built by DuPont.

Fayetteville Works, as the sprawling site is called, previously manufactured C8, a chemical that DuPont used for more than 50 years to make Teflon and other products. After a massive class-action lawsuit revealed evidence of C8’s links to cancer and other diseases, DuPont agreed in a deal with the EPA to phase out its use of the chemical. But Strynar and Lindstrom were among many scientists who feared that DuPont and the other companies that used C8 might have swapped it out for similar compounds with similar problems. To see if they were right — and whether any of these replacements might have ended up in the river — they took water samples from the Cape Fear, some upstream the plant, others from points below its outflow.

Why Noam Chomsky and Education Activists Are Warning That Obama's Pick for Education Secretary Could Be Disastrous

Prominent defenders of public schools are warning the Senate not to confirm John King.

By Ben Norton

Leading progressive voices are warning that President Obama’s choice for education secretary could be a disaster.

An open letter to the U.S. Senate, published in the Washington Post on Thursday, asks lawmakers to reject the confirmation of John King as the new secretary of education.

King, the acting secretary of education, has a long history of supporting corporate-friendly education reforms, and has pushed for unpopular policies like more standardized testing and Common Core, which critics say are ineffective.

Wall Street’s political shakedown: We’ll stop funding Dems if Elizabeth Warren won’t sit down and shut up

Top banks consider cutting off Dems if the party won't rein in party progressives

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If ever you doubted that our obscene campaign finance regime constitutes a form of legalized bribery, consider this: Reuters reports today that officials at top Wall Street banks recently convened to discuss how they could convince Democrats “to soften their party’s tone” toward the financial industry, and among the options now under consideration is halting campaign donations to Senate Democrats unless they rein in progressive populists like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

The banks represented at the Washington meeting included Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, according to the report, and though the idea of withholding campaign contributions did not arise at that gathering, it has since been floated in conversations among representatives from the banks.

How an East Coast Think Tank Is Fueling the Land Transfer Movement

By Lyndsey Gilpin, High Country Newse

Recently, Idaho senators met to vote on a new bill that would let county sheriffs, commissioners, and mayors decide if an area of federal land is at risk of wildfire, and demand that the federal government fix it. If the feds - usually Bureau of Land Management or US Forest Service - don't respond, local officials could coordinate with the state to take legal action.

ut the bill didn't come to a vote - it was met with contention from the Idaho Senate largely because it was aligned with the effort to transfer federal lands to state control. The law is also an example of a larger trend of legislation in Western states being derived from model bills created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC - not to be confused with the Utah-based American Lands Council (ALC) - is a nonprofit organization founded in 1973 by conservative activist Paul Weyrich that works to push principles of free-market enterprise, limited federal control, and more power for state governments. The conservative policy group based in Arlington, Virginia, whose corporate advisory board includes Exxon Mobil and tobacco giant Altria, is funded largely by the Koch family and is becoming increasingly involved in the land transfer movement by providing bill templates, research and public support to Western legislators.

Newly Released People’s Budget Doubles Down On Progressive Policies

Isaiah J. Poole

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has released its People’s Budget for fiscal 2017, featuring a $1 trillion commitment to rebuilding America’s infrastructure that includes billions of dollars to replace water lines in Flint, Mich., and elsewhere.

The budget is projected to create “3.6 million good paying jobs to push our economy back to full employment, which will provide the necessary economic conditions to spur across-the-board wage growth for hardworking Americans.” It would also increase spending in virtually every major domestic program category, including education, housing and antipoverty programs. It would also direct the country to make major strides toward a green energy-based economy to fulfill the commitments the United States made at last year’s Paris climate change accords.

Paul Krugman: Clash of Republican Con Artists

So Republicans are going to nominate a candidate who talks complete nonsense on domestic policy; who believes that foreign policy can be conducted via bullying and belligerence; who cynically exploits racial and ethnic hatred for political gain.

But that was always going to happen, however the primary season turned out. The only news is that the candidate in question is probably going to be Donald Trump. Establishment Republicans denounce Mr. Trump as a fraud, which he is. But is he more fraudulent than the establishment trying to stop him? Not really.

The Retirement Revolution That Failed: Why the 401(k) Isn’t Working

By David Dayen

Across the political spectrum, people warn of a coming time bomb in our retirement system. Many analysts believe the growing population of retirees will overwhelm the Social Security program, and that something must be done to shore up its finances.

However, there’s another slow-moving time bomb out there, and that’s the gradual retirement of workers in an era where 401(k)-style defined-contribution plans have become dominant, replacing defined-benefit pensions. A new study of the state of U.S. retirement shows that this change leaves Americans woefully unprepared for their non-working years, with resources too meager to uphold their standard of living.

‘Generation Screwed’ Gets a Political Organizing Primer, Just in the Nick of Time

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Landing in the midst of the most critical election season since the New Deal era of the 30s, comes a masterpiece of labor history and political strategy from the prolific author, Robert W. McChesney, and John Nichols, the popular national affairs correspondent at The Nation. Both McChesney and Nichols are co-founders of Free Press, a national media reform organization.

Charles P. Pierce: The Poison in Tennessee

It was someone else's problem, as it always is, the way the faceless forces endlessly convince us that it should be, lest we all discover how badly we've been played.

KINGSTON, TENNESSEE—It was a decade or so ago that I stood on this same windy point above the Emory River basin. At the time, the view from this vantage looked very much as though a big chunk of the moon had fallen into the river–a huge gray mountain running toward sheer cliffs on all sides, earth-moving machines strewn like a child's Tonka trucks at all angles along its face. And a guy who was preparing to move away told me about the night he looked out his front window and saw trees marching by his front door.

On the night of December 22, 2008, a Tennessee Valley Authority dike holding back a virtual reservoir of coal ash—what they call "slurry" here—gave way and sent 5.4 million cubic yards of the slurry pouring down into the Emery and Clinch Rivers. On land, the great wave of toxic sludge—mercury, selenium, arsenic and Christ alone knows what else—gouged the landscape, sending trees walking down into the valley and wrecking homes all along the waterfront. Thomas Hendrickson was driving home from working the night shift that night when the police shortstopped him at the bottom of Swan Pond Road. (Swan Pond was, at this point, buried under a gigantic chemistry set.) "I had to take the long way around to get home," Hendrickson said. "That was the way it was for a long time."

Social Security Privatizer Larry Fink of Giant Asset Manager BlackRock is a Clinton Treasury Secretary in Waiting

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Yves Smith

David Dayen at The Intercept has ferreted out that Larry Fink, CEO of the giant asset manager BlackRock, is keen to become Treasury Secretary, and has positioned himself accordingly. He’salready has such a strong influence on Hillary’s Clinton’s thinking to the degree that even Andrew Ross Sorkin has taken note of how she closely she echoes on financial service industry matters: “…“could have been channeling Laurence D. Fink.” This might seem to be a happy coincidence were not it not for the way Fink has curried favor with as having strong ties to Treasury by virtue of having hired former staffers. Per Dayen:

Fink’s most telling hire, however, is Cheryl Mills, arguably Clinton’s most trusted confidante. Mills was Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, was deputy White House counsel in the Bill Clinton administration, and is on the board of directors of the Clinton Foundation. Fink hired Mills for the BlackRock board of directors in October 2013, in what observers mused was a ploy to insinuate himself into the Clinton inner circle.

Stiglitz: Anger Over 'Failed Economy' is Shaping US Election

"Americans have seen lots of injustices. I think that has really motivated the anger across the spectrum."

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer

Inequality is shaping the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as voters disillusioned by the financial crisis and Wall Street greed increasingly turn to populist candidates like Bernie Sanders, who has made economic inequality a central platform of his campaign, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said on Wednesday.

"There are a lot of people that are described as angry and they finally figured out that they’re not doing very well," Bloomberg reports Stiglitz as saying during an event at the Resolution Foundation, a London-based research group. "They’re not doing as well as their parents; some Americans aren’t doing as well as their grandparents."

Agricultural fertilizer could pose risk to human fertility, sheep study finds

University of Nottingham

Eating meat from animals grazed on land treated with commonly-used agricultural fertilisers might have serious implications for pregnant women and the future reproductive health of their unborn children, according to a new study involving sheep.

The study by British and French scientists from the universities of Nottingham, Aberdeen (UK) and Paris-Saclay (France), The James Hutton Institute (Aberdeen) and UMR BDR, INRA, Jouy en Josas (Paris, France) published in the journal Scientific Reports, has shown striking effects of exposure of pregnant ewes - and their female lambs in the womb - to a cocktail of chemical contaminants present in pastures fertilised with human sewage sludge-derived fertiliser.

The FBI Has a New Plan to Spy on High School Students Across the Country

Under new guidelines, Muslim students will be disproportionately targeted – but all young people will be suspect.

By Sarah Lazare

Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence.

Based on the widely unpopular British “anti-terror” mass surveillance program, the FBI’s "Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools" guidelines, released in January, are almost certainly designed to single out and target Muslim-American communities. However, in its caution to avoid the appearance of discrimination, the agency identifies risk factors that are so broad and vague that virtually any young person could be deemed dangerous and worthy of surveillance, especially if she is socio-economically marginalized or politically outspoken.

Nearly half of American children living near poverty line

National Center for Children in Poverty's Basic Facts about Low-Income Children Report illustrates severity of economic instability and disparity in the US

Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

March 2, 2016 (NEW YORK CITY) -- Nearly half of children in the United States live dangerously close to the poverty line, according to new research from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Basic Facts about Low-Income Children, the center's annual series of profiles on child poverty in America, illustrates the severity of economic instability and poverty conditions faced by more than 31 million children throughout the United States. Using the latest data from the American Community Survey, NCCP researchers found that while the total number of children in the U.S. has remained about the same since 2008, more children today are likely to live in families barely able to afford their most basic needs.

Richard Eskow: New Study Confirms: Private “Trade” Courts Serve the Ultra-Wealthy

A new study confirms what many activists have suspected for a long time: The private courts set up by international “trade” deals heavily favor billionaires and giant corporations, and they do so at the expense of governments and people.

Smaller companies and less-wealthy individuals don’t benefit nearly as much from these private courts as the extremely rich and powerful do. Other interested parties – whether they’re governments, children, working people, or the planet itself – are unable to benefit from these private courts at all.

Remember When Scott Walker's Reforms Were Going to Deliver a Booming Economy?

Submitted by Mary Bottari

A story in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Poverty across Wisconsin reaches highest level in 30 years, caught our eye. It details a new study showing that poverty is growing rapidly in almost half the counties in the state.

"Poverty in Wisconsin hit its highest level in 30 years during the five-year period ending in 2014, even as the nation's economy was recovering from the Great Recession, according to a trend analysis of U.S. census data just released by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers. The number of Wisconsin residents living in poverty averaged 13% across that post-recession time frame--the highest since 1984, according to the analysis by UW-Madison's Applied Population Laboratory. In 1984, the poverty rate peaked at 15.5% as the nation was recovering from a double-dip recession," writes Karen Herzog for the state's largest newspaper.

How Billionaires Use Non-Profits to Bypass Governments and Force Their Agendas on Humanity

As wealth becomes concentrated in fewer hands, so does political and social power via foundations and non-profits.

By Sarah Lazare

As wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the billionaire class is increasingly turning to foundations and non-profits to enact the change they would like to see in the world. Amid the rise of philanthrocapitalism, growing numbers of critics are raising serious questions about whether this outsized influence is doing more harm than good.

In the January issue of the New York Review of Books, veteran journalist Michael Massing noted that, in the past 15 years alone, “the number of foundations with a billion dollars or more in assets has doubled, to more than eighty.” The philanthropic sector in the United States is far more significant than in Europe, fueled in part by generous tax write-offs, which the U.S. public subsidizes to the tune of $40 billion a year.

Study identifies racial bias in US court sentencing decisions

University of Sheffield

Petty criminals who are black are more likely to be jailed than their white counterparts and serve longer sentences for low severity crimes, according to new research.

Dr Todd Hartman, from the University of Sheffield's Methods Institute, and Rhys Hester, of the University of Minnesota, explored if, how and when race factors in criminal sentencing by analysing more than 17,000 decisions from South Carolina in the USA.

Why do conservatives keep saying Seattle's minimum wage hike has failed -- without data?

By Michael Hiltzik

Ever since Seattle enacted a measure to raise its minimum wage to a nation-leading $15 an hour, conservatives have been sharpening their pencils to show the raise is a job-killer.

Mike Patton of Forbes broke out of the box early, with a piece on Sept. 28 asserting that "thus far the data doesn’t bode well for supporters of this law." His evidence was an apparent spike in Seattle's unemployment rate after April 1, when the first increase to $11 from the Washington state minimum of $9.47 was implemented.

Dean Baker: We Poisoned Kids in Flint to Keep Their Parents From Having Jobs

We all understand the concept of trade-offs. If we spend more of our paycheck on restaurants, then we will have less money for rent. If we spend more time watching television we will have less time to read or do sports. There will often be similar sorts of trade-offs in public policy decisions. If we spend more money on health care then we will have less money for education or child care.

But trade-offs in public policy decisions don't always work that way. At a time when the economy has large amounts of unemployed workers and idle productive capacity, spending more in one area doesn't have to mean spending less in another. In other words, we can spend more on both health care and education.

Injustice can spread

Researchers at the University of Bonn discover how the chain of unfair behavior can be stopped

University of Bonn

People who feel treated unfairly usually do not direct their anger only towards the perpetrator. They frequently unload their aggressions onto uninvolved outsiders who then in turn behave similarly. How can this chain of unfair behavior be disrupted? A team of researchers under the direction of the University of Bonn discovered that writing a message to the perpetrator is one way to regulate emotions and thereby reassess the situation. The results of the study are now published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Paul Krugman: Planet on the Ballot

We now have a pretty good idea who will be on the ballot in November: Hillary Clinton, almost surely (after the South Carolina blowout, prediction markets give her a 96 percent probability of securing her party’s nomination), and Donald Trump, with high likelihood (currently 80 percent probability on the markets). But even if there’s a stunning upset in what’s left of the primaries, we already know very well what will be at stake — namely, the fate of the planet.

Why do I say this?

The conservative case against expanding Social Security? It was based on a math erro

By Michael Hiltzik

The conservative argument that the retirement crisis is a myth has been based on the notion that Americans actually will have far more in retirement resources than they recognize — particularly that Social Security benefits will amount to a much larger percentage of workers' lifetime income than has been assumed. Ergo, there's no need to expand Social Security to give retirees more.

Now it turns out that this assumption is based on an arithmetic error. On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office, whose extremely generous estimates of the so-called replacement rate from Social Security fueled the conservative position, fessed up. The CBO says it miscalculated the replacement rates in its long-term projection for the program issued in mid-December. It has now reissued the report with corrected figures, showing a "substantially lower" replacement rate for retirees.