15 Steps the Democratic Party Must Take to Reverse Wage Stagnation Across America

The party's platform committee gets an earful.

By Steven Rosenfeld

The causes and remedies for the economic stagnation facing most American households are no mystery and should be clearly stated in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform. That was the message from Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute's Policy Center, as he testified this month at hearings in Washington and said the nation’s key economic challenge was generating “robust wage growth for the vast majority.”

Mishel’s comments, which listed trends and solutions Democrats should call out and embrace, run counter to the oft-cited resignation that economic trends are larger than government can address. The 2016 campaign has brought inequality center stage, he said, underscoring that federal and state government have big roles to play in rebalancing the economy.

Neonicotinoid pesticides cause harm to honeybees

Mainz researchers discover new mechanism associated with the worldwide decline of bee populations

Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz

One possible cause of the alarming bee mortality we are witnessing is the use of the very active systemic insecticides called neonicotinoids. A previously unknown and harmful effect of neonicotinoids has been identified by researchers at the Mainz University Medical Center and Goethe University Frankfurt. They discovered that neonicotinoids in low and field-relevant concentrations reduce the concentration of acetylcholine in the royal jelly/larval food secreted by nurse bees. This signaling molecule is relevant for the development of the honeybee larvae. At higher doses, neonicotinoids also damage the so-called microchannels of the royal jelly gland in which acetylcholine is produced. The results of this research have been recently published in the eminent scientific journal PloS ONE.

A ‘Brexit’ Blow to the Establishment

Exclusive: British voters turned a deaf ear to scary warnings about leaving the E.U. and struck a blow against an out-of-touch, self-interested and incompetent Western Establishment, a message to the U.S., too, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The United Kingdom’s “Brexit” vote may cause short-term economic pain and present long-term geopolitical risks, but it is a splash of ice water in the face of the West’s Establishment, which has grown more and more insular, elitist and unaccountable over recent decades.

The West’s powers-that-be, in both the United States and the European Union, too often display contempt for real democracy, maintaining only the façade of respecting the popular will, manipulating voters at election time with red-meat politics and empty promises – before getting back to the business of comforting the comfortable and letting the comfortable afflict the afflicted.

The Most Important Agency You’ve Never Heard Of

The Office of Financial Research is meant to be the early-warning system for the next financial crisis. Is it doing its job?

by Victoria Finkle

Among the many lessons learned from the 2008 financial crisis, one thing stands out: ignorance—willful or otherwise—drove the system to the brink of collapse. While banks were busily writing mortgages destined to default, there was a blithe, system-wide failure to recognize what those toxic mortgages could do to the economy. Not only were regulators asleep at the wheel, they didn’t even know the car was moving.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed in 2010, took a number of steps aimed at righting the wrongs of the financial crisis. One was the creation of a new agency, the Office of Financial Research (OFR), tasked with ensuring that Washington would never get caught so flat-footed ever again. Headquartered in a nondescript office building in downtown D.C., the 225-person bureau collects data and produces reports aimed at identifying potential threats to the financial system. Although technically part of the Treasury Department, the body is by law independent. Its budget, $99 million in fiscal year 2016, is funded through fees paid by the country’s largest banks. To help the OFR carry out its mission, Congress granted it sweeping powers, including the right to demand certain data from banking regulators and financial institutions, either voluntarily or with a subpoena, as well as from banking regulators.

Friends In High Places: Who Endorses America’s Troubled For-Profit Colleges?

by David Halperin

Today Republic Report is releasing a brand-new investigative report: Friends In High Places: Who Endorses America’s Troubled For-Profit Colleges?

Our report describes in detail the network of prominent Americans — lawyers, lobbyists, board members, university presidents, politicians, celebrities, and others — who continue to lend their credibility and talents to defending or promoting seven of America’s biggest for-profit college companies, amid growing indications, including law enforcement investigations, that these companies have engaged in predatory practices that harm students and taxpayers.

How neoliberalism’s moral order feeds fraud and corruption

Jörg Wiegratz, David Whyte

Corporate fraud is not just present, but is widespread in many neoliberalised economies of both income-rich and income-poor countries. Volkswagen’s emissions cheating scandal is perhaps the most recent and most startling example, but the automobile industry is only one of many sectors, including banking and the arms industry, where scandals have become commonplace. Certain practices and norms that many people in the global North considered shocking only a while ago have become routine in public life.

The financial industry, whether in the US, UK, or Germany, has become characterised for years now by extensive and escalating fraud. Arguably, bankers have never been as unpopular as they are right now. It is not difficult to see why. The most vulnerable in society have suffered the most as a result of public sector cuts in western Europe. You can draw a straight line between these cuts and the post-2008 bank bailouts and market-saving interventionism of governments.

The Fraudulent Case for a Syrian Escalation

Exclusive: Washington’s armchair warriors are pounding the drums for a major U.S. military escalation in Syria but a new report shows there’s little reason to think that would help, writes Jonathan Marshall.

By Jonathan Marshall

The recent call by 51 dissenting State Department officials for U.S. military escalation in Syria is merely one of dozens of similar demands by neoconservatives and anguished liberals who accuse President Obama of moral failure for not dictating peace in Syria at the end of a gun.

At almost the same time as the dissent went public, in fact, the hawkish Center for New American Security issued similar recommendations under the auspices of Michele Flournoy, Hillary Clinton’s likely pick for Secretary of Defense. Its report called for more “arming and training” of anti-government rebels, launching of “limited military strikes” against the Assad regime, and eliminating “artificial manpower limitations” on military missions in the country.

The 13 Democrats Who Just Did Wall Street’s Dirty Work

Richard Eskow

A “D” beside a politician’s name doesn’t necessarily mean they’re fighting for the public’s interests. In fact, 13 Democratic members of Congress recently joined Republicans in voting to protect private equity and hedge funds. This vote demonstrates the corrupting force of money in politics. If the media were doing a better job, it would be a national scandal.

Democrats like these need to be encouraged to find new jobs. But don’t expect the party establishment to do it. In fact, one of these 13 representatives is running in the Florida Senate primary as the Democratic National Committee’s hand-picked candidate.

Oklahoma Lawmaker Shares Article Arguing Islam Isn’t A Religion, Calls For ‘Final Solution’

by Jack Jenkins

An Oklahoma lawmaker personally propagated an article over the weekend calling for a “final solution” regarding “radical Islam,” arguing that the 1,400-year-old faith is not a religion and should not be protected under the first amendment of the Constitution.

On Sunday, Oklahoma State Rep. Pat Ownbey re-published an article to his Facebook page entitled “Radical Islam – The Final Solution.” The article was originally published on the personal blog of Paul R. Hollrah, an Oklahoman who touts himself as a “retired government relations executive,” but Ownbey appears to have copy-pasted the piece and reposted it in its entirety, citing Hollrah.

Jewel v. NSA Moves Forward—Time For NSA To Answer Basic Questions About Mass Surveillance

By Jamie Williams

It’s time to lift the cloak of secrecy that has until now shielded the NSA from judicial scrutiny. EFF served the agency with information requests late last week in Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s signature case challenging government surveillance. Since we filed the case in 2008, leaks about government spying—much of which have been confirmed by intelligence agencies—have vindicated our claims that the U.S. government is and was illegally spying on millions of innocent Americans. Now, we are seeking answers to basic questions about the nuts and bolts of the government’s Internet and telephone mass surveillance programs.

Not only does this mark the first opportunity to obtain evidence since the case was filed nearly eight years ago, but it’s also the first time any party has been allowed to gather facts about the programs’ inner workings from the NSA in a case involving the agency’s warrantless surveillance.

WPost’s ‘Agit-Prop’ for the New Cold War

Exclusive: The Washington Post, the neocons’ media flagship, has fired a broadside at a new documentary after it blasted a hole in the side of the anti-Russian Magnitsky narrative, which helped launch the new Cold War, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

A danger in today’s Western journalism is that the people in charge of the mainstream media are either neocon ideologues or craven careerists who will accept any official attack on geopolitical “enemies” without checking out the facts, such as with the Iraq War’s WMD myth or the curious case of Sergei Magnitsky.

Magnitsky’s 2009 death in a Russian jail became a Western cause célèbre with the accountant for hedge-fund executive William Browder hailed as a martyr in the cause of whistleblowing against a profoundly corrupt Russian government. After Magnitsky’s death from a heart attack, Browder claimed his “lawyer” had been tortured and murdered to cover up official complicity in a $230 million tax-fraud scheme involving companies ostensibly under Browder’s control.

Ted Rall: Get Over It: Mass Shootings are the New Normal in America

What is wrong with Americans?

Okay, that’s a very open-ended question with many potential answers.

What I’d like to talk about this time is: why is it that Americans only begin to get serious about a problem after it’s too late to solve it?

Currently, I’m thinking about the latest, depressingly predictable response to the Orlando massacre.

Bernie Sanders: Here’s what we want

My supporters and I want real change in this country.

As we head toward the Democratic National Convention, I often hear the question, “What does Bernie want?” Wrong question. The right question is what the 12 million Americans who voted for a political revolution want.

And the answer is: They want real change in this country, they want it now and they are prepared to take on the political cowardice and powerful special interests which have prevented that change from happening.

What’s Really Behind the Washington Post’s Efforts to Marginalize Bernie Sanders?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

An article in the Washington Post yesterday continued the paper’s unrelenting efforts to marginalize Senator Bernie Sanders and his effort to press forward on his call for a political revolution in America. The Post article brandished its most preposterous cudgel yet: the cost of Senator Sanders’ continuing protection by the Secret Service, which it suggested was a drain on taxpayers. Calling Sanders the “now-vanquished Democratic presidential candidate,” the Post’s John Wagoner laments that even though “Hillary Clinton has clinched the party’s nomination,” Sanders is still receiving Secret Service protection which could be costing taxpayers more than $38,000 a day.

In fact, Clinton hasn’t clinched anything until there is an official vote taken at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 25-28, no matter how much corporate media might wish otherwise. And since there has never been a Presidential candidate like Clinton, who is under an active criminal FBI investigation for violating State Department policy and transmitting classified material over a private server in her home, anything is possible before the July convention — or thereafter.

Why it’s so hard for students to have their debts forgiven

Neal H. Hutchens, Richard Fossey

Outstanding student loan debt in the United States reached a record US$1.35 trillion in March, up six percent from a year earlier.

About 10 million people who borrowed from the government’s main student loan program – 43 percent – are currently behind or no longer making payments, with more than a third of them in default. Some students are especially at risk, such as those who attended for-profit institutions.

Meanwhile, the loan default rates widely reported by the U.S. Department of Education fail to account for borrowers who default more than three years after repayment begins. These rates also fail to account for the millions of borrowers who are struggling or unable to repay their loans but aren’t included in the numbers because they’ve claimed an economic hardship deferment.

Researchers link childhood hunger, violence later in life

University of Texas at Dallas

Children who often go hungry have a greater risk of developing impulse control problems and engaging in violence, according to new UT Dallas research.

The study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that people who experienced frequent hunger as kids were more than twice as likely to exhibit impulsivity and injure others intentionally as adolescents and adults.

How the European Union Turned Into a Neoliberal Nightmare

Workers across Europe are rallying against a union which has used its undemocratic structures to force neoliberalism on a continent.

By Enrico Tortolano

Voting to leave the EU is a no-brainer for the Left. The European Union is remote, racist, imperialist, anti-worker and anti-democratic: It is run by, of, and for the super-rich and their corporations. A future outside austerity and other economic blunders rests on winning the struggle to exit the EU, removing us from its neoliberal politics and institutions. Corporate bureaucrats in Brussels working as agents of the big banks and transnationals’ now exert control over every aspect of our lives. Neoliberal policies and practices dominate the European Commission, European Parliament, European Central Bank, European Court of Justice and a compliant media legitimises the whole conquest. This has left the EU constitution as the only one in the world that enshrines neoliberal economics into its text. Therefore the EU is not—and never can be—either socialist or a democracy.

Against the left’s strategic case for exit is relentless blither and blather from the elitist liberal commentariat: the EU is a social-democratic haven that protects us from the nasty Tories is their litany and verse. This is an absurd fantasy: by design the EU is a corporatist, pro-capitalist establishment. Therefore, it strains credulity that the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party and a rump of the trade union movement believe in the myth of Social Europe. The late Bob Crow was bang on the money when he said: “social EU legislation, which supposedly leads to better working conditions, has not saved one job and is riddled with opt-outs for employers to largely ignore any perceived benefits they may bring to workers. But it is making zero-hour contracts and agency-working the norm while undermining collective bargaining and full-time, secure employment.”

Paul Krugman: A Tale of Two Parties

Do you remember what happened when the Berlin Wall fell? Until that moment, nobody realized just how decadent Communism had become. It had tanks, guns, and nukes, but nobody really believed in its ideology anymore; its officials and enforcers were mere careerists, who folded at the first shock.

It seems to me that you need to think about what happened to the G.O.P. this election cycle the same way.

The Republican establishment was easily overthrown because it was already hollow at the core. Donald Trump’s taunts about “low-energy” Jeb Bush and “little Marco” Rubio worked because they contained a large element of truth. When Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio dutifully repeated the usual conservative clichés, you could see that there was no sense of conviction behind their recitations. All it took was the huffing and puffing of a loudmouthed showman to blow their houses down.

We Buried the Disgraceful Truth

Steve Coll

Since 2001, at least 2.5 million members of the American armed services have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Among returnees, between 11 and 20 percent are estimated to suffer in any given year from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to the Department of Veteran Affairs. The PTSD label is loosely used, but under the clinical definition of the National Institute of Mental Health, an afflicted person may experience for at least one month a combination of symptoms including flashbacks, bad dreams, guilt, numbness, depression, sleeplessness, angry outbursts, and partial amnesia. The sheer size and diversity of this injured population are astounding.

Newspaper reporters including Dana Priest and Anne Hull of The Washington Post and David Phillips, now of The New York Times, have documented the military’s shabby, at times cynical response to this social and medical crisis. The subject has also given rise to memorable written accounts of personal experience. David Finkel, in his remarkable book Thank You for Your Service, chronicles returning veterans of brutal combat in Baghdad and presents nuanced accounts of dysfunction, suicide temptation, and redemption. Matthew Green, in his book Aftershock, introduced British readers to the same crisis and showed how that country’s military health system has failed to reduce the stigma of PTSD. Redeployment, a collection of short stories by Phil Klay, a former Marine officer who fought in Iraq, which won the National Book Award in 2014, is one volume among several that suggest the emergence of raw, distinctive fiction by and for America’s post–September 11 generation that sometimes touches on the PTSD crisis.

Yet Another Failed Attempt to Discredit Bernie Sanders, Courtesy of the New York Times

by Jake Johnson

Democratic Party liberals have made quite a show of their desire for Bernie Sanders to leave the presidential race so that, the story goes, Hillary Clinton can focus her energy solely on the looming threat of Donald Trump.

But, judging by their behavior, and by the writings of pundits and analysts, it is these very same liberals who cannot resist a daily whack at the Sanders campaign — and at Bernie Sanders, himself. Liberals who frequently articulate both their horror at the prospect of a Trump presidency and the role we all share in preventing him from reaching the White House still, somehow, muster the energy to take pot-shots at the democratic socialist they so breezily dismissed as a non-entity just a few months ago.

Paul Krugman: Fear, Loathing and Brexit

There are still four and a half months to go before the presidential election. But there’s a vote next week that could matter as much for the world’s future as what happens here: Britain’s referendum on whether to stay in the European Union.

Unfortunately, this vote is a choice between bad and worse — and the question is which is which.

Not to be coy: I would vote Remain. I’d do it in full awareness that the E.U. is deeply dysfunctional and shows few signs of reforming. But British exit — Brexit — would probably make things worse, not just for Britain, but for Europe as a whole.

Dean Baker: Paul Krugman, Brexit, and Unaccountable Government

Paul Krugman devoted his column on Friday to a mild critique of the drive to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. The reason the column was somewhat moderate in its criticisms of the desire to leave EU is that Krugman sympathizes with the complaints of many in the UK and elsewhere about the bureaucrats in Brussels being unaccountable to the public. This is of course right, but it is worth taking the issue here a step further.

If we expect to hold people accountable then they have to face consequences for doing their job badly. In particular, if they mess up really badly then they should be fired. There is a whole economics literature on the importance of being able to fire workers as a way of ensuring work discipline. Unfortunately this never seems to apply to the people at the top. And this is seen most clearly in the cases of those responsible for economic policy in the European Union.