The hope and hype of super delegates

By Ben Adler

Last week, Politico reported on an improbable campaign strategy being laid out by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. His campaign’s hope: that a string of forthcoming primary wins will not only reduce the delegate gap between Sanders and Hillary Clinton but convince the elected officials and party stalwarts known as superdelegates to cast votes for Sanders that will crown him the nominee. (Unlike pledged delegates, whose votes are won in primaries and caucuses, superdelegates can vote for anyone.) “Sanders campaign aides say they’ll be able to keep Clinton from reaching the 2,383 delegate magic number she’d need to clinch the nomination at the convention and, by being close enough, convince the superdelegates to switch, as some did when they changed from Clinton to Barack Obama in 2008,” writes Politico.

Dave Johnson: So MANY Op-Eds Pushing Corporate “Free Trade”

Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trump’s campaign criticisms of our country’s disastrous trade policies are resonating with voters. In response there has been a flurry – a blizzard – of op-eds from noted celebrity, “establishment” pundits, explaining that moving millions of jobs out of the country is good for us because it means lower prices for those who still have paychecks. They sell these lower prices as a “free lunch” that we will never have to pay for.

These opinion pieces present corporate-negotiated trade as an all-or-nothing proposition, as if there were no balanced, fair-trade alternative approaches we could take instead. In these op-eds, proponents of fair-trade agreements are called “anti-trade,” even “anti-commerce.” Many of them not only repeat the same arguments, they actually even use the same words.

Erik Prince in the Hot Seat

Blackwater's Founder Is Under Investigation for Money Laundering, Ties to Chinese Intel, And Brokering Mercenary Services

Matthew Cole, Jeremy Scahill

ERIK PRINCE, founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case.

What began as an investigation into Prince’s attempts to sell defense services in Libya and other countries in Africa has widened to a probe of allegations that Prince received assistance from Chinese intelligence to set up an account for his Libya operations through the Bank of China. The Justice Department, which declined to comment for this article, is also seeking to uncover the precise nature of Prince’s relationship with Chinese intelligence.

US election 2016: The 40-year hurt

The London-based American writer and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb is frequently asked on air why this year's US election has turned out to be so unusual, and whether insurgent Republican candidate Donald Trump can really win. He has to give a short answer. The long answer, he argues here, involves going back 40 years.

In late 1986, midway through Ronald Reagan's second term of office, with the twin scourges of Aids and crack racing through American cities and New Deal ideas of economic and social fairness consumed by the Bonfire of the Vanities taking place on Wall Street, Britain's Guardian newspaper ran an editorial that said, "for good or ill, [America] is becoming a much more foreign land".

I had just celebrated my first anniversary as an expat in London and wrote an essay trying to explain what America was like away from the places Guardian readers knew. I described the massive population dislocations that followed the long recession that had begun in the mid-70s. I referenced Springsteen. The piece ran under the headline "Torn in the USA".

The Panama Papers: 'Biggest Leak in History' Exposes Global Web of Corruption

'The story behind the #PanamaPapers?' tweets Edward Snowden. 'Courage is contagious.'

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

An anonymous source, an enormous cache of leaked documents, and a year-long investigative effort by around 400 journalists from more than 100 media organizations in over 80 countries have yielded the Panama Papers, an unprecedented look at how the world's rich and powerful, from political leaders to celebrities to criminals, use tax havens to hide their wealth.

The investigation went live on Sunday afternoon.

German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote:

Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world. These shell firms enable their owners to cover up their business dealings, no matter how shady.

There Were Five-Hour Lines to Vote in Arizona Because the Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act

Reducing the number of polling places in Phoenix had catastrophic consequences in the March 22 primary.

By Ari Berman

Aracely Calderon, a naturalized citizen from Guatemala, arrived just before the polls closed at 7 p.m. in downtown Phoenix to vote in Arizona’s primary last night. “When Calderon arrived, the line spanned more than 700 people and almost 4 blocks,” the Arizona Republic reported. She waited in line for five hours, becoming the last voter in the state to cast a ballot at 12:12 a.m. “I’m here to exercise my right to vote,” she said shortly before midnight, explaining why she stayed in line.

But many other Arizonans left the polls in disgust. The lines were so long because election officials in Phoenix’s Maricopa County, the largest in the state, reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent from 2012 to 2016, from 200 to just 60 — one polling place per every 21,000 voters.

Paul Krugman: Crazy About Money

In this year of Trump, the land is loud with the wails of political commentators, rending their garments and crying out, “How can this be happening?” But a few brave souls are willing to whisper the awful truth: Many voters support Donald Trump because they actually agree with his ideas.

This is not, however, a column about Mr. Trump. It is, instead, about Ted Cruz, who has emerged as the favored candidate of the G.O.P. elite now that less disagreeable alternatives have imploded.

After Brussels, Calls to Ditch Europe's Freedoms for Security

Officials claim that open borders and encryption 'are putting the lives of European citizens at risk.'

by Lauren McCauley, staff writer

Just one day after the coordinated attacks in Brussels, the resounding cry from governments, media, and national security experts is that we need less freedoms and more security.

As they did in the wake of the Paris attacks, countries across the continent rushed to tighten border security in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's bombings, which killed at least 34 people, striking the airport and a metro station.

A message to the elite

Richard Murphy on tax and economics

The FT has reported that:

Donald Trump’s anti-trade stance has been blasted by a pillar of the corporate establishment in an attack reflecting growing alarm in business over the property mogul’s dominance in the Republican presidential race.

Jim McNerney, a former top executive at Boeing, 3M and General Electric, said on Tuesday that Mr Trump’s hostility to international trade posed a serious threat to US prosperity.

In another article the FT has suggested that three commissioned surveys by economic forecasters all showed that it was likely that Brexit would impose considerable costs on the UK.

Common plastics chemical BPA linked to preterm birth

niversity of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

Higher concentrations of the common plastics chemical and environmental pollutant Bisphenol A, or BPA, in a pregnant mother's blood may be a contributing factor in preterm births, according to a new study from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

The new study, led by Ramkumar Menon, assistant professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UTMB, in collaboration with Winthrop University Hospital and Kaiser Permanente Southern California, found that pregnant women with higher levels of BPA in their blood were more likely to deliver their babies early compared with women with lower levels of BPA.

Robert Reich: Why Either Trump’s or Cruz’s Tax Plans Would Be the Largest Redistributions to the Rich in American History

The tax cuts for the rich proposed by the two leading Republican candidates for the presidency—Donald Trump and Ted Cruz—are larger, as a proportion of the government budget and the total economy, than any tax cuts ever before proposed in history.

Trump and Cruz pretend to be opposed to the Republican establishment, but when it comes to taxes they’re seeking exactly what that Republican establishment wants.

Here are 5 things you need to know about their tax plans:

How a Democrat-Led, Education-Focused PAC Channels Out-of-State Dark Money

By Lisa Graves, PR Watch

At first glance, "Democrats for Education Reform" (DFER) may sound like a generic advocacy group, but a closer review of its financial filings and activities shows how it uses local branding to help throw the voice of huge Wall Street players and other corporate interests from out-of-state.

What Is DFER, Really? Hedge Funders for "Education Reform"

DFER is a PAC, a Political Action Committee, which means it can (and does) play a direct role in state and local elections. Public school advocates like Diane Ravitch have been spotlighting concerns about DFER since its beginning.

Because DFER is not a charity, money given to it does not result in a tax write-off but -- if successful in changing laws -- that money could get the hedge funders who back it a return on investment through politicians and policies that redirect tax dollars from truly public schools to "education reforms."

Why we should fear a cashless world

Poor people and small businesses rely on cash. A contactless system will likely entrench poverty and pave the way for terrifying levels of surveillance

Dominic Frisby

The health food chain Tossed has just opened the UK’s first cashless cafe. It’s another step towards the death of cash.

This is nothing new. Money is tech. The casting of coins made shells, whales’ teeth and other such primitive forms of money redundant. The printing press did the same for precious metals: we started using paper notes instead. Electronic banking put paid to the cheque. Contactless payment is now doing the same to cash, which is becoming less and less convenient. In the marketplace convenience usually wins.

That’s fine as long as people are making this choice freely. What concerns me is the unofficial war on cash that is going on, from the suspicion with which you are treated if you ever use large sums of cash to the campaign in Europe to decommission the €500 note. I’m not sure the consequences have been properly considered.

Dean Baker: Magical Thinking: Sanders, Clinton, and the Federal Reserve Board

Arthur Brooks, the President of the American Enterprise Institute and a regular New York Times columnist told readers that he doesn't have access to the Internet. This admission came in the context of a published exchange with Gail Collins, another New York Times columnist.

This fact was revealed in the context of a discussion of the Republican presidential candidates' proposals to have large tax cuts and then make up the lost revenue from waste, fraud, and abuse. Brooks acknowledged this was ridiculous, but then commented:

"The cognitive dissonance isn’t just on the Republican side, however. Sanders proposes showering cash out of helicopters, and as far as I can tell, he is really only proposing higher taxes on the much-regretted billionaires. The truth is that middle-class taxes would have to rise under his spending scenarios."

How the Democratic Party Establishment Suffocates Progressive Change

Thomas Palley

The Democratic Party establishment has recently found itself discomforted by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign to return the party to its modern roots of New Deal social democracy. The establishment’s response has included a complex coupling of elite media and elite economics opinion aimed at promoting an image of Sanders as an unelectable extremist with unrealistic economic policies.

The response provides a case study showing how the party suffocates progressive change. Every progressive knows about the opposition and tactics of the Republican Party. Less understood are the opposition and tactics of the Democratic Party establishment. Speaking metaphorically, that establishment is a far lesser evil, but it may also be a far greater obstacle to progressive change.

Indiana's Anti-Abortion Bill: A Blueprint for Attacks on Rights Nationwide

By Katie Klabusich, Truthout

Indiana residents are calling on their governor to veto a sweeping anti-abortion bill passed earlier this month by the state legislature. Led by the group Indy Feminists, dozens of Indianans delivered a petition addressed to Gov. Mike Pence with over 2,700 signatures (now over 5,500) opposing House Enrolled Act 1337, which would make the Hoosier State just the second to ban abortion for genetic abnormalities and the latest entity to attempt further restrictions on fetal tissue research.

"Indiana has become one of the most dangerous states in which to be pregnant, now more than ever for those who would like to give birth," said Jennifer Kotting, communications director at the National Network of Abortion Funds and a South Bend, Indiana, resident. "In Indiana, you can be jailed for 20 years for having a miscarriage, and now [should Governor Pence sign the bill], if you experience difficulties in your pregnancy, you could also be risking prison, trauma or death."

Elias Esquith: Why Paul Krugman's Attacks on Bernie Sanders Miss the Mark

The NYT pundit can sound like critics of the original progressive movement.

Now that the outcome of the primary seems considerably less up in the air than it did a month ago, the fight Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign inspired between the Democratic Party’s self-styled populists and its wonks — Paul Krugman chief among them — has lost much of its urgency.

But that’s something of a mirage. Regardless of who wins this year’s primary (or the whole presidential campaign itself, for that matter) the fault lines within the Democratic coalition that were exposed during the back-and-forth are not going anywhere. And there’s little reason to suspect that when 2020 (or 2024) rolls around, the same disagreements over tactics and philosophy won’t rise up again.

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: Why We Support Bernie Sanders Over Hillary Clinton for President

Wall Street On Parade’s strong preference for a President Bernie Sanders over a President Hillary Clinton is based on a well-formed belief that the United States will experience another financial crisis on Wall Street within the next few years. That crisis will, in hindsight, be viewed as the direct failure of President Obama to enact meaningful financial reform legislation after the 2008 crash, when he had the will of the people behind him, rather than pandering to his overlords on Wall Street who financed his campaign.

Nothing more clearly demonstrates who has been calling the shots in the Obama administration than the President’s nominees to oversee Wall Street at the U.S. Justice Department, U.S. Treasury Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and his outrageous refusal for more than five years to even follow his own Dodd-Frank financial reform law and appoint a Vice Chairman for Supervision at the Federal Reserve.

The System Is Rigged Against Regular People

By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company

Few are as qualified to tackle the massive topic of money in politics as Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman. Their new book, Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy (read an excerpt), is a comprehensive and important examination of the many ways our lives are affected by the stranglehold corporations have on our government and society. And it's a look at how we can fight back.

Wendell Potter is senior analyst at the Center for Public Integrity, an ex-newspaperman and a former executive with the health insurance industry who dared to come in from the cold and become one of our most knowledgeable and forthright champions of health care reform. Regulars here at BillMoyers.com will remember his 2009 appearance on Bill Moyers Journal, when he first told his remarkable story.>

David Dayen: Mysterious, Powerful Lobbying Group Won’t Even Say Who It’s Lobbying For

The Commercial Energy Working Group is one of the many lobbying organizations in Washington. It makes recommendations to federal agencies and tries to sway lawmakers on policies. It engages in the basic political work of making the government friendlier to business.

There’s only one problem: Whom the Commercial Energy Working Group actually represents is a secret.

This violates federal lobbying and ethics laws, according to Public Citizen’s Tyson Slocum, who has urged the House and Senate to investigate the matter. “The Commercial Energy Working Group is one of the most active – and secret – organizations seeking to undermine energy market regulations,” Slocum told The Intercept. “The purpose of my complaint is to force the group to start identifying its membership.”

Frank Rich: There Was no Republican Establishment After All

Can we please retire the notion that Donald Trump is hijacking someone else’s party?

In mid-July of 2015, a month after Donald Trump announced his presidential run, I joined a gaggle of political junkies in a clubby bar four blocks from the White House to hear a legendary campaign strategist expound on the race ahead. Our guest’s long résumé included service to Mitt Romney and two generations of Bushes. Not speaking for attribution, and not having signed on to any 2016 campaign, he could talk freely. The nomination was Jeb Bush’s to lose, he said. Scott Walker, the union-busting Wisconsin governor then considered something of a favorite, had no chance because he was just “too stupid.” And Trump? Please! Trump represented every ugly element that was dragging down the GOP in presidential elections. But our guy wasn’t fazed. The good thing about Trump, he said, is that he would finally “gather together all the people we want to lose” and march them off the Republican reservation — though to what location remained undisclosed.

Paul Krugman: On Invincible Ignorance

Remember Paul Ryan? The speaker of the House used to be a media darling, lionized as the epitome of the Serious, Honest Conservative — never mind those of us who actually looked at the numbers in his budgets and concluded that he was a con man. These days, of course, he is overshadowed by the looming Trumpocalypse.

But while Donald Trump could win the White House — or lose so badly that even our rotten-borough system of congressional districts, which heavily favors the G.O.P., delivers the House to the Democrats — the odds are that come January, Hillary Clinton will be president, and Mr. Ryan still speaker. So I was interested to read what Mr. Ryan said in a recent interview with John Harwood. What has he learned from recent events?

Corporate America Is Just 6 States Short of a Constitutional Convention

If ALEC succeeds in rewriting the constitution to mandate a balanced budget, we’ll be stuck with supply-side economics for at least a generation.

BY Simon Davis-Cohen

In February, Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) signed on to a call for a constitutional convention to help defeat “the Washington cartel [that] has put special interest spending ahead of the American people.”

Cruz, along with fellow Republican presidential aspirants Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Gov. John Kasich (Ohio), has endorsed an old conservative goal of a Constitutional amendment to mandate a balanced federal budget. The idea sounds fanciful, but free-market ideologues associated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a secretive group of right-wing legislators and their corporate allies, are close to pulling off a coup that could devastate the economy, which is just emerging from a recession. Their scheme could leave Americans reeling for generations. A balanced budget amendment would prevent the federal government from following the Keynesian strategy of stimulating the economy during an economic depression by increasing the national debt. (Since 1970, the United States has had a balanced budget in only four years: 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001.)

David Graeber: Despair Fatigue

How hopelessness grew boring

Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?

There is reason to believe something like that is beginning to happen in Great Britain. Call it despair fatigue.

For nearly half a century, British culture, particularly on the left, has made an art out of despair. This is the land where “No Future for You” became the motto of a generation, and then another generation, and then another. From the crumbling of its empire, to the crumbling of its industrial cities, to the current crumbling of its welfare state, the country seemed to be exploring every possible permutation of despair: despair as rage, despair as resignation, despair as humor, despair as pride or secret pleasure. It’s almost as if it’s finally run out.

Dean Baker: The Year of the Angry Economists

The economists are really angry this year. They have cause. Leading presidential candidates in both political parties are trashing the trade agreements that many have devoted their careers to promoting. This is not supposed to happen in the United States they know.

Donald Trump has catapulted to the top of the Republican field at least in part on a commitment to renege on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade agreements the United States has signed over the last quarter century. Sen. Bernie Sanders remains a real contender to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in large part because of his consistent record opposing these trade deals.

Dean Baker: How to Fight Poverty Through Full Employment

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One of the most effective ways to combat poverty among current and future generations is to maintain a full employment economy. The point should be straightforward: when the labor market is strong, or “tight,” it offers increased employment opportunities for those at the bottom. Disadvantaged workers are not only more likely to find employment in a tight labor market, they are also in a better position to secure higher wages as employers are forced to compete for labor. This can allow millions of workers the opportunity to raise themselves and their families out of poverty.

We got a chance to see this story in practice in the boom of the late 1990s, when the unemployment rate fell to its lowest levels in almost three decades, settling at a year-round average of four percent in 2000, the peak year of the boom. In this period, wages rose rapidly at all points along the income distribution, with workers at the bottom of the ladder actually achieving the largest gains.

It's Not About Trump — Our Political Culture Is Corrupt

The Southern strategy created an us-against-them politics with a perverse idea of morality.

By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

Trumpism was created in the crucible of the “Southern strategy.” We have sown to the wind, reaping the whirlwind.

We can’t isolate Donald Trump and his supporters, because that is a simplification. When you unpack the policies of all of his competitors, most of their disagreement is in tone, not substance. It is not as though they are moderate and he is extreme. Trump is not the problem; it’s all of the xenophobia and racist innuendo and othering of immigrants that is the problem. It is all of the coded language about people who want free stuff, from the Southern-strategy lexicon of Wallace, Nixon, Reagan, and Atwater that has been spewed for years. That is the problem. Add to it the more recent rhetoric that says President Obama is unfit. Long before Trump, all of this rhetoric created a kind of us-against-them mob mentality, which after it is loosed can manifest in the violence that we now see.

Redaction error reveals FBI did target Lavabit to spy on Edward Snowden

Court-ordered release of Lavabit case files finally reveals Snowden was target of action that shuttered secure and private email service

Samuel Gibbs

A redaction oversight by the US government has finally confirmed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s targeting of secure email service Lavabit was used specifically to spy on Edward Snowden.

Ladar Levison, creator of the email service, which was founded on a basis of private communications secured by encryption and had 410,000 users, was served a sealed order in 2013 forcing him to aid the FBI in its surveillance of Snowden.

A Little-Known Way Our Political System Is Rigged to Favor the Establishment

SYou might not have heard of this ridiculous advantage to incumbency.

By Eric Zuesse

Did you know that if a given political party already has an incumbent in a particular political post, it’s standard practice in the United States for a political party to prohibit its voter-list to be purchased by anyone who’s not an incumbent office-holder in that party — including by someone who wishes to challenge or contest within that party the incumbent, in a primary election?

Only incumbents have access to that crucial list — crucial for any candidate in a primary election (unless there is no incumbent who is of that party).

Koch Fronted Regulatory Hit Woman Edges Closer to Seat on SEC

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Democrats sitting on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing to take testimony from President Obama’s two nominees for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must have felt like they were having an out of body experience — listening to the human personification of billionaire Charles Koch’s money aping his Ayn Rand, anti-regulatory double-talk from a witness seat. What had to be particularly nauseating to them was that this nominee was sent to them by President Obama who ran as a Democrat on a platform of hope and change. While the political makeup of the SEC is prescribed by law, so that one of these two nominees had to be a Republican, why pick this particular Republican?

On October 20, 2015, President Obama announced that his nominee to fill a Republican seat on the SEC would be Hester Peirce, a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Financial Markets Working Group at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. According to SourceWatch, the Mercatus Center “was founded and is funded by the Koch Family Foundations.”

How Parents May Be Signing Their Children's Rights Away by Enrolling Them in Charter Schools

By Jennifer Berkshire

Here's a question for you: If you dramatically scale up schools in which students have fewer rights than students who attend traditional public schools, with what do you end up? If you answered "more students with fewer rights," congratulations -- you have won the opportunity to learn more on this important, yet little discussed topic.

Dr. Preston Green [3] is a professor of law and educational leadership who has been monitoring a series of court rulings regarding the rights of students in charter schools. Or make that the lack of rights. Dr. Green warns that both state and federal courts have issued rulings stating that students in charters do not have the same due process rights as public-school students. So what does this mean for cities like Los Angeles where a dramatic expansion of charter schools is on the table? "Half of the publicly-funded schools in Los Angeles might be legally permitted to ‘dismiss’ students without due process." says Dr. Green. "We have to ask ourselves if such a scenario is acceptable."

Paul Krugman: Republican Elite’s Reign of Disdain

“Sire, the peasants are revolting!”

“Yes, they are, aren’t they?”

It’s an old joke, but it seems highly relevant to the current situation within the Republican Party. As an angry base rejects establishment candidates in favor of you-know-who, a significant part of the party’s elite blames not itself, but the moral and character failings of the voters.

There has been a lot of buzz over the past few days about an article by Kevin Williamson in National Review, vigorously defended by other members of the magazine’s staff, denying that the white working class — “the heart of Trump’s support” — is in any sense a victim of external forces. A lot has gone wrong in these Americans’ lives — “the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy” — but “nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.”

Charles P. Pierce: Wall Street Goons Are Coming for Senator Professor Warren

But hopefully she can laugh this off.

Somebody's punching very far above his weight class these days.

Senior House Financial Services Committee member, Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) told a conference of bankers Wednesday morning that they needed to "find a way to neuter" Sen. Elizabeth Warren, according to Politico. Luetkemeyer was at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington when he made the remark, also calling Warren "the Darth Vader of the financial services world."

Besides having a lovely way with a phrase, the Congresscritter is also a big old 'ho for the financial services industry. It's pronounced "LOOT-ke-meyer," emphasis on the "loot."

What Really Made the Right Nuts

By Martin Longman

It seems like a lot of people are observing the psychiatric wreckage of the American right and wondering out loud if the president bears any special responsibility for this emotional crackup. It got to the point last week that Obama actually had to answer a question about this. He said the theory was “novel,” and then he dismissed it.

There are a lot of theories going around, actually, and none of them seem to have a complete explanation. That the president is a biracial black man certainly has caused a reaction, but it’s a pretty incomplete theory, and one that by its own terms precludes the president from bearing any possible responsibility. No one chooses their parents.

At the Washington Monthly, we just ran a piece on the startling fact that middle age white men are now more likely to commit crimes than young adults. Kevin Drum thinks the current generation of young adults are less violent because they weren’t exposed to as much lead as children. Either way, the hollowing out of the manufacturing base and loss of good-paying blue collar jobs should be a pretty important component of any theory about why older whites without high school diplomas are flocking to a charlatan like Donald Trump.

House Republicans Get Secret Briefing from Koch Veterans Group

Submitted by Jessica Mason on March 10, 2016 - 1:47pm

The Koch brothers' group targeting veterans gave a secret briefing to U.S. House Republicans on "Reforming Veterans Health Care" last week, according to an invitation to the meeting provided to CMD.

The Kochs' Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) has been in the news lately for a six-figure ad campaign in Nevada supporting Rep. Joe Heck's campaign for Senate.

The politically-active nonprofit does not disclose its funding sources, but tax documents reveal that since 2011 CVA and its related organizations have received nearly $21 million from Freedom Partners, the Koch brothers' "secret bank," and almost $2 million from the Koch-linked TC4 Trust.

Robert Reich: The New Truth About Free Trade

I used to believe in trade agreements. That was before the wages of most Americans stagnated and a relative few at the top captured just about all the economic gains.

The old-style trade agreements of the 1960s and 1970s increased worldwide demand for products made by American workers, and thereby helped push up American wages.

The new-style agreements increase worldwide demand for products made by American corporations all over the world, enhancing corporate and financial profits but keeping American wages down.

Social Security: The GOP vs. the American People

by Nancy Altman

In case anyone had any doubts, the most recent Republican presidential debate made crystal clear how out of touch the Republican establishment is with the American people.

Social Security is extremely popular with the overwhelming majority of Americans - whatever their Party affiliation, age, race, ethnicity, gender, or economic status. Social Security represents the best of American values. It is responsibly funded, does not add a penny to the deficit, and only pays benefits if it has sufficient income to cover not only the cost of all benefits, but also the cost to administer those benefits.

The American people recognize that expanding Social Security is a solution to, among other challenges, a looming retirement crisis. Traditional pensions are disappearing, the 401(k) retirement savings experiment is a failure, and middle class wealth in the form of home equity vanished overnight in the Great Recession.

Humanitarian Raid

The World Bank is supposed to help the poor. So why do so many of its investments underwrite oligarchs?

By Claire Provost and Matt Kennard

A mile north of the chaotic heart of downtown Rangoon, where electrical wires dangle haphazardly overhead and street vendors hawk roasted pig intestines, sits an upscale complex of 240 luxury residences overlooking the iconic Shwedagon Pagoda and a serene man-made lake. Marketed to wealthy expatriates and foreign businesspeople on extended stays in Burma's bustling commercial capital, the newly built Shangri-La Serviced Apartments advertise "idyllic luxury in a modern metropolis" and amenities including a swimming pool, 24-hour private security, maids quarters, and a limousine service. Signs in the lobby inform guests that the complex now offers the Cartoon Network and yoga classes.

In 2011, Burma haltingly emerged from decades of oppressive rule by a military junta when a nominally civilian government came to power. The United States eased sanctions against the country the following year, and foreign investors rushed into this resource-rich frontier market. The influx of wealthy expats formed a ready-made clientele for the Shangri-La, where apartments rent for as much as $7,000 a month. In a country where about half the population lacks electricity and there are just six physicians for every 10,000 people, Shangri-La residents enjoy luxuries that are unfathomable to the surrounding populace, including an on-call private doctor and high-speed wifi.

Why Conservatives Seeking Social Revenge Have Gravitated to Trump's Campaign

“Make America Great Again” is the Trump campaign slogan, but “It’s Payback Time” is the one driving his campaign.

By Amanda Marcotte

Over the weekend, Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns published a fascinating story in the New York Times about how much of Donald Trump’s presidential bid is rooted in his desire to be taken seriously and his resentment against political elites, both on the left and right, who see him as a joke.

[...]

Trump’s personal motivations are fascinating, but what is even more so is how much his pettiness, his hurt ego, and his desire for revenge on those who think aren’t giving him his due is what compels his supporters to rally around him. A lot of his support comes from people who see themselves in him: People who believe they — white conservative Christians who shun city life — deserve to be at the center of American life and culture, but look out and see a world where the president is a black man from Chicago, the charts are ruled by Rihanna and Beyoncé, and Lena Dunham is a celebrity.