The U.S. Military Budget Is the Work of True Scam Artists

Slush funds, smoke and mirrors, and funny money equal weapons systems galore.

By William Hartung

Now you see it, now you don’t. Think of it as the Department of Defense’s version of the street con game, three-card monte, or maybe simply as the Pentagon shuffle. In any case, the Pentagon’s budget is as close to a work of art as you’re likely to find in the U.S. government—if, that is, by work of art you mean scam.

The United States is on track to spend more than $600 billion on the military this year—more, that is, than was spent at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military buildup, and more than the military budgets of at least the next seven nations in the world combined. And keep in mind that that’s just a partial total. As an analysis by the Straus Military Reform Project has shown, if we count related activities like homeland security, veterans' affairs, nuclear warhead production at the Department of Energy, military aid to other countries, and interest on the military-related national debt, that figure reaches a cool $1 trillion.

National Media Retracts Its Claim That There Was Violence at the Nevada State Democratic Convention

Seth Abramson

It was reported by the Associated Press, CBS, and MSNBC. It was reported by CNN and National Public Radio and even Comedy Central. It was reported by — okay, long story short, it was reported by everyone.

Sanders supporters in Nevada committed on-site acts of violence at the state’s Democratic convention.

And that violence was used as proof — by the AP, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and all the others — that Sanders supporters are no different from Trump supporters and therefore Sanders should exit the Democratic race immediately.

The 7 Biggest Myths and Lies About Social Security

Social Security is not going broke, not by a long shot.

By Steven Hill / Beacon Press

Social Security is bankrupting us. It’s outdated. It’s a Ponzi scheme. It’s socialism. It’s stealing from young people. The opponents and pundits determined to roll back the United States to the “good old days” before the New Deal regularly trot out a number of bogeymen and bigfoots to scare Americans into not supporting their own retirement well-being. That hasn’t worked too well. Americans of all political stripes remain strongly supportive of Social Security and other so-called “entitlements” like Medicare. But the other reason for plastering the media waves with a chorus of myths and lies is to stir up a political climate that causes politicians of both parties to cease looking for better alternatives other than to cut, cut, cut, or even to maintain the inadequate status quo. Below are rebuttals to some of the biggest whoppers regularly told about one of the most popular and successful federal programs in our nation’s history.

Senators demand US halt inquiries into climate denial by oil companies

Five hardline conservatives tell Department of Justice to stop any investigations into whether companies lied to the public about climate change

Alan Yuhas

Five hardline conservative senators, including former presidential candidate Ted Cruz, have demanded the US justice department stop all investigations into whether oil and gas companies lied to the public and shareholders about climate change.

“We write today to demand that the Department of Justice (DoJ) immediately cease its ongoing use of law enforcement resources to stifle private debate on one of the most controversial public issues of our time,” the senators wrote in a letter dated 25 May.

Paul Krugman: Trump’s Delusions of Competence

In general, you shouldn’t pay much attention to polls at this point, especially with Republicans unifying around Donald Trump while Bernie Sanders hasn’t conceded the inevitable. Still, I was struck by several recent polls showing Mr. Trump favored over Hillary Clinton on the question of who can best manage the economy.

This is pretty remarkable given the incoherence and wild irresponsibility of Mr. Trump’s policy pronouncements. Granted, most voters probably don’t know anything about that, in part thanks to substance-free news coverage. But if voters don’t know anything about Mr. Trump’s policies, why their favorable impression of his economic management skills?

The Koch Brothers Are Using This State as Their Right-Wing Laboratory

The Kochs' plan to mold America into a libertarian land free from taxes and regulation begins with funding free-market academic programs.

By Alex Kotch

The state of Arizona will shell out at least $5 million per year to free-market academic centers established with funding from billionaire industrialist and Republican political donor Charles Koch at two of its public universities. Part of a series of budget bills that passed the Republican-dominated state House and Senate, the funding decision met the ire of professors and students concerned that the state had earmarked funds for ideological centers tied to big business and a partisan political figure. Still, GOP Gov. Doug Ducey signed the budget on May 10.

Charles and David Kochs' political influence is no secret to many Americans after the brothers led a massive, $407 million political fundraising effort in 2012. Less well known is the huge investment Charles Koch has made in higher education, giving nearly $108 million to 366 colleges and universities from 2005 to 2014, often funding free-market focused programs. The Kochs’ “Structure of Social Change,” a three-step plan devised in the 1970s to mold America into a libertarian land free from taxes and regulation, begins with funding free-market academic programs. Next, think tanks financed with Koch money take the laissez-faire academic work and package it into easily digestible policy proposals, which, in step three, “citizen activist” groups (Koch-funded “social welfare” nonprofits such as Americans for Prosperity) pressure lawmakers and the public to support.

Thomas Frank: Why Hillary Clinton's 90s nostalgia is so dangerous

Times were good in the last years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But to put the arch-deregulator in charge of an economy wrecked by financial bubbles is sheer folly

Donald Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” is one big, flatulent exercise in delusional nostalgia, as so many have noted. Given the likely outcome of the American presidential contest, however, it is Hillary Clinton’s delusional nostalgia that may ultimately prove more harmful for the country.

Campaigning in Kentucky recently, she promised that, should she be elected, she would task former president Bill Clinton with “revitalizing the economy, because he knows how to do it”. A few minutes before, she had recited her husband’s qualifications for this job: “In the 90s, everybody’s income went up, not just people at the top. We lifted more people out of poverty than at any time in our recent history.” And so on.

Ah, the 90s. It seems that Hillary, too, longs to make America great again, and she reminded the audience in Kentucky of the specific elements of our lost golden age. First among those gauzy memories: “A budget that is balanced and in surplus” – like the budget Bill Clinton built in the good old days before the spendthrift George W Bush administration came in. There were other ways in which the GOP had diverged from Clinton orthodoxy as well, like their desire to “Cut taxes on the wealthy [and] get out of the way of regulation of all kinds,” sins that, Hillary said, contributed directly to the financial crisis of 2008.

“This will stop only when the American people get fed up”: American exceptionalism, the New York Times, and our foreign policy after Barack Obama

Our smartest modern military historian explains to Salon what's wrong about our adventures in the Middle East

Patrick L. Smith

Part one of my interview with Andrew Bacevich, the soldier-turned-scholar who has just published “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History,” was posted last week. It focused on aspects of what Bacevich, originally, considers one long war now in its 37th year. We looked at the chronology since Jimmy Carter fatefully set the adventure in motion in his 1980 “doctrine” speech, at the American strategy and how it has developed—and at all that is wrong with it.

Somewhere around the halfway mark in our lengthy exchange, which Salon is publishing with only the very lightest edit, the conversation turned. We dilated the lens, let’s say, and found our way into all manner of subjects. He was interesting in his take on the Cold War 1950s as a prelude to the war that is the topic of his book, and on his pilgrim’s progress from West Point cadet to commissioned officer to his retirement and his scholarly work since. He collects old editions of Life Magazine, it turns out. His capacity for critical thought, the honed tool with which he earns his crust, did not develop until after he retired as a colonel, it also turns out. No need to ask about causality on this point: Bacevich is clear as to the dearth of thought in this man’s army.

Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob?

I've spent years investigating, and here's what's known.

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In his signature book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump boasted that when he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City, he persuaded the state attorney general to limit the investigation of his background to six months. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a year. Trump argued that he was “clean as a whistle”—young enough that he hadn’t had time to get into any sort of trouble. He got the sped-up background check, and eventually got the casino license.

But Trump was not clean as a whistle. Beginning three years earlier, he’d hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano. That story eventually came out in a federal investigation, which also concluded that in a construction industry saturated with mob influence, the Trump Plaza apartment building most likely benefited from connections to racketeering. Trump also failed to disclose that he was under investigation by a grand jury directed by the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, who wanted to learn how Trump obtained an option to buy the Penn Central railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan.

AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian

Smarter artificial intelligence is one of 21st century’s most dire threats, writes Yuval Noah Harari in follow-up to Sapiens

Ian Sample

It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we’ll build silicon assassins.

The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.

Paul Krugman: Remembrance of Booms Past

If Hillary Clinton wins in November, Bill Clinton will occupy a doubly unique role in U.S. political history — not just as the first First Husband, but also as the first First Spouse who used to be president. Obviously he won’t spend his time baking cookies. So what will he do?

Last week Mrs. Clinton stirred up a flurry of comments by suggesting that Mr. Clinton would be “in charge of revitalizing the economy.” You can see why she might want to say that, since people still remember the good times that prevailed when he was in office. How his role might be defined in practice is much less clear.

“The scope of our failure”: The real story of our decades-long foreign policy disaster that set the Middle East on fire

The brilliant Andrew Bacevich tells Salon why our massive march to folly in Middle East has to be seen as one war

Patrick L. Smith

I first interviewed Andrew Bacevich, the soldier turned scholar, after he spoke at the Hope Club, an old-line gents’ establishment in Providence, Rhode Island. That evening he outlined a dozen or so “theses,” as he called them in honor of the 95 Luther is said to have nailed to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517. He was in essence reading a rough outline of the manuscript then on his desk. It was a powerful presentation, and we met again in a Boston restaurant to talk shortly thereafter. This was roughly a year ago.

The book Bacevich was drafting, “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History,” is now out. And as impressive as his synopsis of its themes was last year, the “dissident colonel,” as I like to call him, did not do this account anything close to justice. It is the first book to explain the Middle Eastern wars we have lived with for 36 years now as one unbroken conflict with many theaters. And it is scholarship of the best kind—carefully researched and referenced, but written with unscholarly grace—to put the point bluntly—and perfectly accessible to the intelligent general reader. You put it down thinking, “I understand a great deal more than I did when I started reading this.”

Is TSCA Rewrite Better than Current Law?

For months we've watched to see if the chemical safety bills moving through Congress would be better than current law. It’s a low bar, because the Toxic Substance Control Act of 1976, or TSCA, is widely considered the least effective environmental law on the books.

The bills that passed the House and Senate last year didn't clear the bar, but we hoped Congressional negotiators would cobble together the good parts of both bills to craft better legislation. The compromise that has now emerged – without the support of key House Democrats – has a few improvements, but still falls short in some key respects.

First, the compromise would continue to tie the hands of the states by suspending state action while the Environmental Protection Agency studies a chemical’s safety—a process that could take three years or longer. The compromise would grandfather existing state laws and allow states to quickly act to regulate a chemical that EPA might deem a “high priority” chemical. But if a state fails to act quickly, state action would be suspended for up to three years while EPA completes its review. States have been the only cops on the chemical safety beat, regulating scores of chemicals and driving marketplace innovation. Any legislation that claims to be better than current law would permit state action until an EPA rule is final.

Inside The Looming Disaster Of The Salton Sea

by Alejandro Davila Fragoso

BOMBAY BEACH, CALIFORNIA — The lake is drying up, uncounted dead fish line the shore, and the desert town is losing people.

It could be the plot of a post-apocalyptic movie set in the future, but this is actually happening here and it has been going on for years. It wasn’t always like this, of course. There was a time when this town was booming. There was a time when the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, was the “French Riviera” of the state, and the pride and joy of Imperial County. But that was decades ago, during the Sea’s heydays of the 1950s and 1960s. Back when this area had luxury resorts, piers, yachts, and thousands of visitors, including stars like Frank Sinatra — who owned a house in nearby Palm Springs and would come down to see Guy Lombardo sail his speedboat.

Millions Now Understand That Capitalism Needs Socialism to Work—Which Is Why Bernie Is So Popular

Sanders' vision of democratic socialism is just capitalism with a safety net.

By Alex Henderson

Three short years ago, the idea of a major candidate in a presidential election openly describing himself as a socialist would have seemed unthinkable. President Barack Obama had entered his second term and the Democratic Party had won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections not by running to the left, but by campaigning mostly from the center. In 2013, “socialism” was still a dirty word in American politics. But that was before Bernie Sanders ran for president and before polls showed the word socialist taking on an increasingly positive connotation among millennials in the United States. The word is still rejected by most strategists in the Democratic Party, but in 2016, it at least gets a seat at the table in the marketplace of ideas.

When Sanders officially entered the Democratic presidential primary in April 2015, his campaign was considered a longshot. Sanders, who had been serving in the U.S. Senate as an independent, proudly and openly described himself as a “socialist”—and conventional wisdom in the Democratic National Committee was that running for president as a centrist was essential unless one wanted to suffer a landslide defeat like George McGovern in 1972 or Walter Mondale in 1984. But Sanders has run a disciplined, aggressive campaign that, as of May 15, 2016, had won him 1,473 Democratic delegates and 40 superdelegates. Hillary Clinton, with 2,240 delegates and 524 superdelegates, remains the frontrunner and the likely nominee. But the fact that Sanders has made this much progress in a 21st-century Democratic presidential primary by describing himself as a democratic socialist and campaigning so aggressively on single-payer health care and free higher education is downright historic.

As US politicians romanticize doomed manufacturing jobs, the new working class is suffering

Tamara Draut

My dad was a machinist at a steel factory in Middletown, Ohio. He worked there for 29 years before accepting early retirement, leaving the job with a nice gold table-top clock and a generous pension. He was the fifth generation of Draut’s to work at the plant, and the last. Operating today with a fraction of the workforce, the steel factory no longer dominates my hometown economy the way it did when I was growing up.

Today, politicians of both parties promise to bring back manufacturing jobs. But as much as it pains me to say it, these efforts are misplaced. Instead, we desperately need to direct our attention towards improving the jobs of the new working class—the legions of fast food, retail, health care, and janitorial jobs who now form the backbone of our economy. These are jobs that can’t be outsourced to China, Vietnam, or India. While America’s public intellectuals wax eloquently, and even idolize, the innovation and ideation done by tech workers, the reality that most Americans actually work in a bargain-basement economy remains on the margins of contemporary political discourse.

Richard Eskow: What’s Killing the American Middle Class?

A new study by the Pew Research Center spurred a rash of headlines last week about “the dying middle class.” But the word “dying” might be more appropriate if we were watching the regrettable but inevitable effects of natural forces at work. We’re not. We’re seeing the fruits of deliberate action – and sometimes of deliberate inaction – at the highest levels of power.

The great American middle was never large enough, even at its height. It always excluded too many people – sometimes, shamefully, merely for their skin color. And now, instead of growing and becoming more inclusive, it’s fading away instead.

Recipients of Koch Machine Largess in 2016, So Far

By Lisa Graves and David Armiak, PR Watch | News Analysis

Recent articles in the national media, such as the piece in the National Review, suggest that Charles and David Koch are less interested and less involved in national politics in the 2016 election cycle than in previous years.

This latest PR effort comes despite the fact that $400 million of the $889 pledge by the Kochs through their "Freedom Partners" network has already been invested in the outcome of the 2016 elections, with more money to be spent.

Recipients of Koch Machine Largess in 2016, So Far

By Lisa Graves and David Armiak, PR Watch | News Analysis

Recent articles in the national media, such as the piece in the National Review, suggest that Charles and David Koch are less interested and less involved in national politics in the 2016 election cycle than in previous years.

This latest PR effort comes despite the fact that $400 million of the $889 pledge by the Kochs through their "Freedom Partners" network has already been invested in the outcome of the 2016 elections, with more money to be spent.

Robert Parry: US Media as Conduits of Propaganda

Exclusive: The “group think” about the Syrian government crossing President Obama’s “red line” in a 2013 sarin attack has collapsed, but The New York Times still reports it as flat fact, an industry-wide problem, writes Robert Parry.

Nothing disturbs me more about the modern mainstream U.S. news media than its failure to test what the U.S. government says against what can be determined through serious and impartial investigation to be true. And this is not just some question of my professional vanity; it can be a matter of life or death.

For instance, did Syrian President Bashar al-Assad cross President Barack Obama’s supposed “red line” against using chemical weapons, specifically in the sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, or not?

Upon this question rests the possibility that a future President Hillary Clinton will invade Syria under the guise of establishing a “safe zone,” a project that would surely expand into another bloody “regime change,” as occurred in Iraq and Libya amid similar U.S. claims about protecting “human rights.”

Fighting for an Alternative to Big Banks

Activists are demanding accessible, affordable financial services through the postal system as part of a broader agenda to rein in Wall Street.

By Katherine Isaac / Institute for Policy Studies

We’ve heard a lot about Wall Street reform in this presidential primary season. Most of the attention has been on the need to break up the “too big to fail” banks, curbing short-term speculation, and reining in executive bonuses.

But we also need to create a financial system that serves the everyday need for accessible, affordable financial services. Nearly 28 percent of U.S. households are at least partially outside the financial mainstream, or underserved by traditional banks. A shocking 54 percent of African-American and 47 percent of Latino households are underserved.

Democratic Senator Issued Shocking Statements About 1%ers Protecting Their Wealth at Oligarch Confab

VA Senator Mark Warner thinks the business class is lacking the political power to influence change in Washington. Wait, what?

By Elizabeth Preza

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) earlier this month urged the business class to band together and influence politics because their collective success means they “have an outsized ability to affect what happens in Washington.”

“If you don’t think the frustration of Americans with our overall system—not just our political system, but our business system, our tax code—is at the boiling point, then Katie, bar the door!” Warner said. “The walls that are gonna have to be built, may not be at borders, they may be around neighborhoods the way they are in many Third World countries around the world.”

The Secret History of Superdelegates

712 Democratic Officials Will Decide Whether Clinton or Sanders Wins the Nomination. Newly published documents show that's what the party planned all along.

By Branko Marcetic

Since its launch, a specter has haunted Bernie Sanders’ run for the Democratic nomination. It’s not his age, though at 74 he would be the oldest president in American history. And it’s not that he’s an avowed socialist, the label that a mere eight years ago was used to smear Barack Obama as a sinister, alien threat to the American way of life. Rather, it has been the so-called superdelegates—the 712 Democratic Party insiders who are free to vote at the nominating convention for the candidate of their choosing.

The corporate media’s early inclusion of the superdelegates in the delegate count created the impression of an inevitable Clinton nomination. Seventy-three percent of superdelegates—520 of the 712—have pledged their support to the former secretary of state, but superdelegates are free to change their minds any time before the Democratic National Convention in July.

Kochs' Grassroots Leadership Academy Training Astroturf Army

By Mary Bottari and David Armiak

With no clear favorite in the 2016 U.S. presidential primary race--following Gov. Scott Walker's early exit and Trump's march toward the nomination--the Koch brothers have turned their attention (and opened their wallets) to races for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and state governorships.

But with the Kochs having already spent at least $400 million of $889 million committed to the 2016 election cycle, according to news reports, where is that money being spent?

An under-covered arm of the Koch political operations is a likely recipient of some of that cash and it's called Americans for Prosperity's "Grassroots Leadership Academy."

We May Be About to Witness One of the Great Privatizations of America's Public Lands

How the raid on Malheur screened a future raid on real estate.

By William deBuys / TomDispatch

It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts.

Away out West, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the trouble is deep, widespread, and won’t soon go away. Last winter’s armed take-over and 41-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if they hadn’t been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called “terrorists” and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownership—or at least that of their leaders, since they weren’t exactly a band of intellectuals—was only loosely linked to reality.

The Most Powerful Man in the GOP (And You’ve Never Heard Of Him)

Ever wonder where congressmen come from? No? Well, that’s great news for Rex Elsass, who’s built nearly 50 of them from scratch while turning himself into the most powerful Republican operative you’ve never heard of. Jason Zengerle gets a rare look inside the wildest political-strategy shop in America—and discovers the secrets to manufacturing a Tea Party rock star.

By Jason Zengerle

One morning last summer, Jim Banks—an Indiana state senator who dreams of becoming a congressman—woke before dawn and set off on the three-hour drive from Fort Wayne to Columbus, Ohio. He was going to see the wizard. He was going to see Rex Elsass.

Elsass is the founder and CEO of the benignly named Strategy Group for Media, a political consulting firm with a knack for launching a certain sort of politician—and a track record of recent success that has turned Elsass into one of the richest, not to mention most controversial, operatives in Republican politics.

While you've likely never heard of him, chances are good you know his clients. Name a conservative firebrand and Elsass has likely been on his or her payroll. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich—he's worked with all of them, as well as a slew of Republican agitators who aren't yet household names but are doing everything in their power to change that. Elsass now counts more than 60 members of Congress on his client roster, many of whom belong to the rebellious Freedom Caucus that last fall hounded the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, into early retirement. This year, while most eyes are fixed on the presidential race, he's quietly obsessing over the Republicans' control of Congress, guiding the fortunes of 15 first-time candidates whom he hopes will join his small army already wreaking havoc in Washington.

Rick Perlstein: The Chicago School

How Chicago elites imported charters, closed neighborhood schools, and snuffed out creativity.

This past September, an award-winning Chicago Public Schools principal named Troy LaRaviere published a post on his blog that began, “Whenever I try to take a break from writing about CPS to focus on other aspects of my professional and personal life, CPS officials do something so profoundly unethical, incompetent and/or corrupt that my conscience calls me to pick up the pen once more.”

What had Principal LaRaviere going this time? We’ll get there eventually. But first we have to back up and survey what brought the Chicago Public Schools to this calamitous pass in the first place. It’s hard to know where to begin. Though when it comes to the failings of America’s institutions you can rarely go wrong by looking to the plutocrats.

Travel back with me, then, to July of 2003, when the Education Committee of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago — comprised of the chairman of the board of McDonald’s, the CEOs of Exelon Energy and the Chicago Board Options Exchange, two top executives of the same Fortune 500 manufacturing firm, two partners at top international corporate law firms, one founder of an investment bank, one of a mutual fund, and the CEO of a $220.1 billion asset-management fund: twelve men, all but one of them white — published “Left Behind: Student Achievement in Chicago’s Public Schools.”

Burying the White Working Class

Liberal condescension towards white workers is code for a broader anti-working class agenda.

by Connor Kilpatrick

The white working class is a zombie that doesn’t know it’s dead.

Or if it’s not fully zombified yet, its members are all too busy cleaning their AR-15s and posting racist comments on YouTube to vote for a progressive. That is, if they’re not already on the Trump bandwagon, which they probably are.

At least that’s what the Democratic Party wants you to believe.

Last Tuesday, Bernie Sanders won the 93.7 percent white state of West Virginia with ease, beating Clinton among men and women, young and old. The week prior, he cruised to victory in Indiana, despite no longer apparently being a serious contender for the nomination.

Thomas Frank: Bill Clinton's Five Major Achievements Were Longstanding GOP Objectives

By Mark Karlin, Truthout

Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal, discusses the Hillary Doctrine's basis in neoliberalism, how the Democratic Party stopped governing on behalf of the working class and how President Bill Clinton's major achievements actually enacted conservative goals, and ultimately hurt working people.

Mark Karlin: The innovation class, the creative class, the wealthy class, the professional class with Ivy League degrees: How did President Obama become the avatar for believing these groups should be the decision makers in government?

Thomas Frank: Obama thinks such people should be in charge because they came up through the same system as him. "Because he himself was a product of the great American postwar meritocracy," his biographer Jonathan Alter writes, "he could never fully escape seeing the world from the status ladder he had ascended."

Most of our other Democratic leaders (the Clintons, for example) came up the same way and believe the same thing. Indeed, what Alter describes is standard-issue stuff for Democrats these days. The Democrats are a class party in the fullest sense of the phrase, and the class whose perspective they reflect and whose interests they serve is the highly educated, white-collar professional class. Theirs is a liberalism of the rich.

Noam Chomsky: The Two Biggest Threats Facing the Survival of Humanity

Multiple crises come as voters in the United States prepare to elect a new president.

By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now!

As war spreads across the globe, a record 60 million people were driven from their homes last year. Experts warn the refugee crisis may also worsen due to the impacts of global warming.

Over the weekend, NASA released data showing 2016 is on pace to be by far the hottest year ever, breaking the 2015 record. Meanwhile, many fear a new nuclear arms race has quietly begun, as the United States, Russia and China race to build arsenals of smaller nuclear weapons. These multiple crises come as voters in the United States prepare to elect a new president. We speak with one of the world’s preeminent intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught for more than 50 years. His latest book is titled "Who Rules the World?"

The House science committee hates science and should be disbanded

The House science committee has become a national embarrassment, and does more harm than good. Let's get rid of it

J.D. Trout

As if named by a Congressional Office of Dark Irony, The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology really seems to hate science.

Its current chair, Lamar Smith, R – Tex., is a climate change denier, seeing a conspiracy in the overwhelming scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, where the vast majority of experts in the world see only good science. In the last four or five Congressional sessions, the attacks on science made by the majority membership of HCSST have become increasingly unhinged and prolonged. Rather than acting on House Resolutions that advanced the aims of science, Lamar Smith assumed the role of small-government gadfly, irritating and exhausting scientific administrators like NSF Director France Córdova, over whose agencies HCSST had some purview.

Charles Koch's Disturbing High School Economics Project Teaches 'Sacrificing Lives for Profits'

Is Koch Industries behind your university or grade school's economics curriculum?

By Alex Kotch / AlterNet

Charles Koch is known for being CEO of industrial giant Koch Industries and a chief financier of the massive conservative political operation he runs with his brother David. In recent years, student activists and investigative journalists have exposed another of Koch’s hats: mega-donor to hundreds of colleges and universities, often funding free-market-focused academic centers housed at public and private schools alike. One Koch-funded program is advocating cutthroat economics to grade school students, even sacrificing lives for profits.

Anti-tax industrialist billionaires like Charles and David Koch stand to gain a lot by financing higher education programs tailored to their ideologies. Richard Fink, the Kochs’ right-hand man for decades, laid out their “Structure of Social Change,” the plan they devised in the late 1970s to shape society with their libertarian ideals. The plan begins with funding academic programs that favor laissez-faire economics, resulting in academic papers promoting the free market and chastising regulation and taxation. Next, think tanks they fund repackage the academic work into more easily digestible policy proposals that “citizen activists” (actually Koch-funded “social welfare” groups like Americans for Prosperity) use to pressure lawmakers.

A Global Marshall Plan for Joblessness?

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Yves Smith

Yves here. As an accompaniment to this article, please read (or re-read) Michal Kalecki’s classic essay on the obstacles to achieving full employment.

By Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Associate Professor of Economics, Bard College. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

Global unemployment is expected to surpass 200 million people for the first time on record by the end of 2017, according a recent ILO study, and limitations of official statistics suggest that the problem is much larger . As conventional measures increasingly fail to produce tight labor markets and jobless recoveries become the norm, economists grapple with this new reality by calling it secular stagnation and by adjusting upwards the rates of unemployment deemed ‘natural’ — but the human, social and economic costs of this growing problem are rarely considered in economic modeling.

As Wealthy Surge, U.S. Poor and Middle Class Incomes Have Gone Backward

Poorer households saw their income drop from a median of $26,373 in 1999 to $23,811 in 2014, according to new research

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer

Middle- and low-income households in the U.S. made less money in 2014 than they did in 1999 as the middle class lost ground in almost 90 percent of the country's metropolitan areas, a new analysis by the Pew Research Center released Wednesday has found.

The report looked at 229 of the 381 federally designated "metropolitan statistical areas" in the U.S., from Seattle to Boston, which accounted for 76 percent of the nationwide population in 2014. It found that poorer households saw their income drop from a median of $26,373 in 1999 to $23,811 in 2014, while middle-class incomes fell from $77,898 to $72,919 in that same time period.

Neocons and Neolibs: How Dead Ideas Kill

Exclusive: Hillary Clinton wants the American voters to be very afraid of Donald Trump, but there is reason to fear as well what a neoconservative/neoliberal Clinton presidency would mean for the world, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

For centuries hereditary monarchy was the dominant way to select national leaders, evolving into an intricate system that sustained itself through power and propaganda even as its ideological roots shriveled amid the Age of Reason. Yet, as monarchy became a dead idea, it still killed millions in its death throes.

Today, the dangerous “dead ideas” are neoconservatism and its close ally, neoliberalism. These are concepts that have organized American foreign policy and economics, respectively, over the past several decades – and they have failed miserably, at least from the perspective of average Americans and people of the nations on the receiving end of these ideologies.

Neither approach has benefited mankind; both have led to untold death and destruction; yet the twin “neos” have built such a powerful propaganda and political apparatus, especially in Official Washington, that they will surely continue to wreak havoc for years to come. They are zombie ideas and they kill.

Michael Hudson: The Dangers of Free Trade Agreements: TTIP’s Threat to Europe’s Elderly

The most obvious approach to look at how European care for the elderly will evolve is to project technological trends and the costs of people living longer as diagnostic equipment, drug treatments and other medical science continues to improve. This kind of projection shows a rising cost to society of pensions and health care, because a rising proportion of the aging population is retiring. How will economies pay for it?

I want to point to some special problems that are looming on the political front. I assume that the reason you have invited me from America is that my country has been doing just about everything wrong in its health care. Its experience may provide an object lesson for what Europe should avoid (and indeed, has avoided up to this point).

or starters, privatization is much more expensive than European-style Single Payer public health care. Monopoly prices also are higher. And of course, fraud is a problem.

ALEC's 2016 Agenda Moving in the States: A Snapshot

Submitted by Lisa Graves

In states across the country, concerned citizens are asking state and local policymakers to raise the minimum wage, enact workplace reforms including earned sick days and the right to organize, stop the privatization of public schools, and help mitigate climate change. Opposition to these initiatives is fierce and growing and often nationally-driven and coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Working in tandem with deep-pocketed corporations, trade associations, conservative groups and mega-donors--including operatives of the Koch brothers--ALEC is driving an agenda you should know about. As legislators and lobbyists fly to Pittsburgh for ALEC's Spring Task Force Summit May 6, the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org, has the lowdown on ALEC bills moving in states this year.