Archive for February, 2011

Avoiding the Coming Wave of Economic Collapse

The labor force is being quietly redeployed into lower-paying service, retail, hospitality, assembly, or distribution jobs that are transient, do not support communities, careers, or provide benefits.

America is sailing into dangerous economic waters, chiefly due to our massive debts and inability to manufacture competitively. The months ahead could determine the success or failure of the nation’s economic course; will we right the ship- or sink into the history books as another former superpower.

Vanishing Industrial Base

Opportunities to produce goods in America have all but vanished; nearly all manufactured goods now come from overseas. The labor force is being quietly redeployed into lower-paying service, retail, hospitality, assembly, or distribution jobs that are transient, do not support communities, careers, or provide benefits.

Even vaunted finance, high-tech, medical, and academia jobs are being pressured by the surfeit of talented college graduates who are dumping their elected disciplines to “follow the money” into these few remaining propitious fields.

Full Story Here: Avoiding the Coming Wave of Economic Collapse | Economy In Crisis.

No Other Way Out

Chris Hedges

I have watched mothers and fathers keening in grief over the frail corpses of their children in hospitals in Gaza and rural villages in El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. The faces of these dead children, their bodies ripped apart by iron fragments or bullets tumbling end over end through their small, delicate frames, appear to me almost daily like faint and sadly familiar ghosts. The frailty and innocence of my own children make these images difficult to bear.

A child a day dies in war-related violence in Afghanistan. Children die in roadside explosions. They die in airstrikes. They die after militants lure them to carry suicide bombs, usually without their knowledge. They die in firefights. They are executed by the Taliban after being accused, sometimes correctly, of spying for the Afghan National Army. They are tiny pawns in a futile and endless war. They are robbed of their childhood. They live in fear and surrounded by the terror of indiscriminate violence. The United Nations, whose most recent report on children in Afghanistan covered a two-year period from Sept. 1, 2008, to Aug. 30, 2010, estimates that in the first half of last year at least 176 children were killed and 389 more w

Full Story Here: Chris Hedges: No Other Way Out – Chris Hedges’ Columns – Truthdig.

Pay Up, Corporate Tax Dodgers

We’re chumps unless we force Congress to stop tax haven abuse.

Instead of cutting state and federal budgets, the United States should crack down on the corporate tax dodgers thumbing their noses at us.

Across the nation, states are making deep cuts that will wreck the quality of life for everyone to close budget gaps that total more than $100 billion.

But there’s a more sensible option. Overseas tax havens enable companies to pretend their profits are earned in other countries like the Cayman Islands. Simply making that ruse illegal would bring home an estimated $100 billion a year.

Full Story Here: Pay Up, Corporate Tax Dodgers – OtherWords.

That Iraq Feeling

Paul Krugman: :

I don’t watch cable news, or actually any kind of TV news. But I gather that there’s a virtual blackout on the huge demonstrations in Wisconsin, except on Fox, which portrays them as thuggish and violent.

Full Story Here: That Iraq Feeling – NYTimes.com.

Joule Unlimited Claims It Can Make Diesel Fuel With Sun, Water & CO2

A Massachusetts biotechnology company says it can produce the fuel that runs Jaguars and jet engines using the same ingredients that make grass grow.

Joule Unlimited has invented a genetically-engineered organism that it says simply secretes diesel fuel or ethanol wherever it finds sunlight, water and carbon dioxide.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company says it can manipulate the organism to produce the renewable fuels on demand at unprecedented rates, and can do it in facilities large and small at costs comparable to the cheapest fossil fuels.

What can it mean? No less than “energy independence,” Joule’s web site tells the world, even if the world’s not quite convinced.

“We make some lofty claims, all of which we believe, all which we’ve validated, all of which we’ve shown to investors,” said Joule chief executive Bill Sims.

Full Story Here: Joule Unlimited Claims It Can Make Diesel Fuel With Sun, Water & CO2.

Trade Solutions That Won’t Work

Ian Fletcher: :

Americans in recent decades have not, of course, been entirely unaware that America has a trade problem. This has drawn into public debate a long list of proposed solutions. Unfortunately, many will not work, some are based on analytical confusions, and a few are outright nonsense. If we are to understand the true scope of our problem and frame solutions that will work, these false hopes must be debunked forthwith.

For example, since the early 1990s it has been repeatedly suggested that the U.S. is on the verge of an export boom that will erase our trade deficit and produce a surge of high-paying jobs. Bill Clinton was fond of this idea, and Barack Obama proposed in 2010 that America double its exports in five years.

The possibility looks tantalizing when we observe that America’s exports have indeed been growing rapidly—just not as rapidly as our imports. (Between 1992 and 2008, our exports more than doubled, from $806 billion to $1,827 billion.) This seems to imply that we are not uncompetitive in world markets after all, and that if only our export growth would climb just a few points higher, the whole problem would go away.

Unfortunately, our deficit is now so large that our exports would have to outgrow our imports by two percent a year for over a decade just to eliminate the deficit—let alone run the surplus we need to start digging ourselves out from under our now-massive foreign debt. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is, in fact, a very strong export performance for a developed country, and unlikely in the present international economic environment, where every other nation is also trying to expand its exports.

Much of our recent export growth has been hollow anyway, consisting largely in raw materials and intermediate goods destined to be manufactured into articles imported back into the U.S. For example, our gross (i.e., not net of imports) exports to Mexico have been booming, to feed the maquiladora plants of American companies along the border. But this is obviously a losing race, as the value of a product’s inputs can never exceed the value of a finished product sold at a profit.

Not only is America’s trade deficit the world’s largest, but our ratio between imports and exports (1.28 to 1 in 2010) is one of the world’s most unbalanced. Given that our imports are now 17 percent of GDP and our entire manufacturing sector only 11.5 percent, we could quite literally export our entire manufacturing output and still not balance our trade. Import-driven deindustrialization has so badly warped the structure of our economy that we no longer have the productive capacity to balance our trade by exporting more goods, even if foreign nations wanted and allowed this (which they don’t, anyway). Therefore, the solution will have to come from import contraction one way or another.

Exporting services won’t balance our trade either, as our surplus in services isn’t remotely big enough, compared to our deficit in goods (in 2010, $148 billion vs. $652 billion).

Neither will agricultural exports balance our trade (a prima facie bizarre idea for a developed nation). Our 2010 surplus in agriculture was only $28 billion—about one eighteenth the size of our overall deficit. 2010 was also an exceptionally good year for agricultural exports; our average annual agricultural surplus from 2000 to 2010 was a mere $15 billion.

It is sometimes suggested that to solve our trade mess, America merely needs to regain export competitiveness through productivity growth. Comforting statistics, showing our productivity still comfortably above the nations we compete with, are often paraded in support of this idea. Unfortunately, those figures on the productivity of Chinese, Mexican, and Indian workers concern average productivity in these nations. They do not concern productivity in their export industries, the only industries which compete with our own. These nations are held to low overall productivity by the fact that hundreds of millions of their workers are still peasant farmers. But American electronics workers compete with Chinese electronics workers, not Chinese peasants.

It is narrowly true that if foreign productivity is as low as foreign wages—an easy claim to make with aggressively free-market theory and cherry-picked statistics—then low foreign wages won’t threaten American workers. But a problem emerges when low foreign wages are not balanced by low productivity. It is the combination of Third World wages with First World productivity, thanks largely to the ability of multinational corporations to spread their technology around, that has considerably weakened the traditional correlation of low wages with low productivity. For ex-ample, it takes an average of 3.3 man-hours to produce a ton of steel in the U.S. and 11.8 man-hours in China—a ratio of nearly four to one. But the wage gap between the U.S. and China is considerably more than that.

In any case, productivity is not in itself a guarantee of high wages. U.S. manufacturing productivity actually doubled in the two decades from 1987 to 2008, but inflation-adjusted manufacturing wages rose only 11 percent. From roughly 1947 to 1973, productivity and wage growth were fairly closely coupled in the U.S., but since then, American workers have been running ever faster simply to stay in place. Wage-productivity decoupling has been even starker in some foreign countries: in Mexico, for example, productivity rose 40 percent from 1980 to 1994, but following the peso devaluation of 1994, real wages were down 40 percent.

As I’ve been saying for a while now, a tariff is the real solution.

Ian Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank founded in 1933 and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.

GOP budget cuts would kill 700,000 jobs: report

The Republican budget proposal to sharply cut federal spending would cost 700,000 jobs through 2012, according to the independent analyst Moody’s.

In a new report obtained Monday by the Washington Post, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi analyzes the House Republican budget proposal cutting spending by $61 billion this year and projects that it will curtail job growth.

“The House Republicans’ proposal would reduce 2011 real GDP growth by 0.5% and 2012 growth by 0.2%. This would mean some 400,000 fewer jobs created by the end of 2011 and 700,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2012,” Zandi concluded.

Full Story Here: GOP budget cuts would kill 700,000 jobs: report | The Raw Story.

Former Reagan official: If law fails, CIA will assassinate Assange | Raw Replay

On Russia Today, former Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts said there is “a concerted effort to nail him–to shut Assange up… If the legal attempt fails, he’ll simply be assassinated by a CIA assassination team. It’s common practice for the CIA to do that.”

This video is from Russia Today, broadcast February 25, 2011.

video at link

Full Story Here: Former Reagan official: If law fails, CIA will assassinate Assange | Raw Replay.

OPS: If they “Wellstone” him friends of Assange will drop the doomsday code.

Wisconsin is making the battle lines clear in America’s hidden class war

The brazen choices of the Republican governor shows the real ideology behind attacks on unions – in the US and beyond

You can tell a great deal about a nation’s anxieties and aspirations by the discrepancy between reality and popular perception. Polls last year showed that in the US 61% think the country spends too much on foreign aid. This makes sense once you understand that the average American is under the illusion that 25% of the federal budget goes on foreign aid (the real figure is 1%).

Similarly, a Mori poll in Britain in 2002 revealed that more than a third of the country thought there were too many immigrants. Little wonder. The mean estimate was that immigrants comprise 23% of the country; the actual number was about 4%.

Broadly speaking, these inconsistencies do not reflect malice or wilful ignorance but people’s attempts to make sense of the world they experience through the distorting filters of media representation, popular prejudice and national myths. “The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe,” wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing. “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

Full Story Here: Wisconsin is making the battle lines clear in America’s hidden class war | Gary Younge | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Legislators Are Going to Unbelievable Lengths to Gouge Clean Water Laws and Cozy Up to Big Coal

Big Coal’s backlash over the EPA crackdown on future mountaintop removal operations went from denial and anger to the outright absurd last week, as state legislatures conjured their own versions of a sagebrush rebellion and the new Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed a sheath of regulatory gutting amendments to its budget bill.

On the heels of its Tea Party-backed coal rallies last fall, the dirty coal lobby couldn’t have paid for a better show. As millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosives continued to detonate daily in their ailing districts and affected residents held dramatic sit-ins to raise awareness of the growing health crisis in the central Appalachian coalfields, Big Coal-bankrolled sycophants fell over themselves from Virginia to Kentucky to West Virginia, and in the halls of Congress, to see who could introduce the most ridiculous and dangerous bills to shield the coal industry.

Their breathless message: “The EPA don’t understand mining,” as Kentucky’s House Natural Resources and Environment Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, declared to his colleagues.

Full Story Here: Legislators Are Going to Unbelievable Lengths to Gouge Clean Water Laws and Cozy Up to Big Coal | Common Dreams.

Argentine dictators go on trial for baby thefts

A long-awaited trial has begun for two former Argentine dictators who allegedly oversaw a systematic plan to steal babies born to political prisoners three decades ago.

Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone are accused in 34 cases of infants who were taken from mothers held in Argentina’s largest clandestine torture and detention centres, the Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires and the Campo de Mayo army base northwest of the city.

Also on trial are five military figures and a doctor who attended to the detainees.

The case was opened 14 years ago at the request of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a leading human rights group. It may take up to a year to hear testimony from about 370 witnesses.

Full Story Here: Argentine dictators go on trial for baby thefts | Stuff.co.nz.

Labor Fight Contains a Power Plant Grab in Wisconsin

The Koch Brothers and their energy company, Koch Industries, have emerged as public enemy number one to many in the renewable energy and environmental communities. The two brothers have put financial and organizational muscle behind efforts to discredit climate change science and renewable power standards.

Now it appears they are trying to profit from Wisconsin’s woes — or pave the way for others to profit.

Governor Scott Walker has been trying to pass a bill that would strip many public employees of their right to collective bargaining. But buried in the 144-page bill is a provision that would allow the state to sell off its power plants and/or outsource the management of its power plants under no-bid contracts that would not be subject to review by the state’s public utilities commission.

Sort of sounds like those contracts issued at the start of the Iraq war, doesn’t it? The Milwaukee, Wisconsin Journal Sentinel writes:

Full Story Here: Labor Fight Contains a Power Plant Grab in Wisconsin : Greentech Media.

Mexico rejects Monsanto’s GMO corn

Mexican officials seem to have more common sense than American officials, with their continued denouncement of Monsanto’s genetically-modified (GM) corn. Mexico has kept in effect a moratorium on Monsanto’s GM corn since 2005, citing a lack of safety studies and evidence showing the “Frankencorn” is safe, and that it will not cross-contaminate non-GM crops. The Mexican government recently denied Monsanto’s request to expand a pilot program for its crops in Northern Mexico as well.

In 2009, Mexico decided to allow Monsanto to plant small GM corn test sites on the condition that the company could both prove that its crops were resistant to pests and pesticides, and that they could provide economic benefits to Mexico. Monsanto has yet to show that the crops actually benefit people rather than its own pocketbook, and of course the multinational biotechnology company has yet to submit a single legitimate safety study for its crops.

Full Story Here: Mexico rejects Monsanto’s GMO corn.

The trouble with Monsanto and GMO

We’re experimenting on… us

In effect, by feeding this stuff to the American population without any long-term studies, we’ve made the US one giant petri dish. Europeans – who have banned GMOs (which ought to make you wonder about safety) get to be the control group of this planet-wide experiment.

Anyone that says, “oh, we know that this is perfectly safe.” I say is either unbelievably stupid, or deliberately lying. The reality is, we don’t know. The experiments simply haven’t been done, and now we have become the guinea pigs.

…A review of the science conducted under the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development in 2008 concluded that “there are a limited number of properly designed and independently peer-reviewed studies on human health” and that this and other observations “create concern about the adequacy of testing methodologies for commercial GM plants.”

Full Story Here: The trouble with Monsanto and GMO – Dr David Suzuki spells it out – Red, Green, and Blue.

Emergency! Pathogen New to Science Found in Roundup Ready GM Crops?

USDA senior scientist sends “emergency” warning to US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on a new plant pathogen in Roundup Ready GM soybean and corn that may be responsible for high rates of infertility and spontaneous abortions in livestock

Please distribute widely and forward to your elected representatives

An open letter appeared on the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance founded and run by Judith McGeary to save family farms in the US. The letter, written by Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue University, to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, warns of a pathogen “new to science” discovered by “a team of senior plant and animal scientists”. Huber says it should be treated as an “emergency’’, as it could result in “a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies.”

The letter appeared to have been written before Vilsack announced his decision to authorize unrestricted commercial planting of GM alfalfa on 1 February, in the hope of convincing the Secretary of Agriculture to impose a moratorium instead on deregulation of Roundup Ready (RR) crops.

Full Story Here: New Pathogen Found « Say No To GMOs! – 2011 Updates.

Arizona Bill Would Void Foreclosures Without Full Title History

Arizona may become the first state to require lenders to prove they have the right to foreclose by providing a complete list of any previous owners of the mortgage, under a bill passed yesterday by its Senate.

The legislation, which is headed to the House after being approved 28-2 in the Republican-dominated Senate, would allow foreclosure sales to be voided if lenders that didn’t originate the loan can’t produce the full chain of title. Arizona permits nonjudicial foreclosures, meaning property can be seized from the homeowner without a court order.

Lawmakers in states including New York, Oregon and Virginia also have proposed legislation to address concerns among consumer advocates that lenders or mortgage servicers are using incomplete or false paperwork to repossess properties in default. The attorneys general of all 50 states are jointly investigating how the mortgage-servicing industry operates.

Full Story Here: Arizona Bill Would Void Foreclosures Without Full Title History.

Arizona Bill Would Void Foreclosures Without Full Title History

Arizona may become the first state to require lenders to prove they have the right to foreclose by providing a complete list of any previous owners of the mortgage, under a bill passed yesterday by its Senate.

The legislation, which is headed to the House after being approved 28-2 in the Republican-dominated Senate, would allow foreclosure sales to be voided if lenders that didn’t originate the loan can’t produce the full chain of title. Arizona permits nonjudicial foreclosures, meaning property can be seized from the homeowner without a court order.

Lawmakers in states including New York, Oregon and Virginia also have proposed legislation to address concerns among consumer advocates that lenders or mortgage servicers are using incomplete or false paperwork to repossess properties in default. The attorneys general of all 50 states are jointly investigating how the mortgage-servicing industry operates.

Full Story Here: Arizona Bill Would Void Foreclosures Without Full Title History.

Roger Ailes to Be Indicted?!?

Whoo boy. Think back to how loudly the mighty wurlitzer argued that Scooter Libby should not be indicted for lying. And imagine how much louder it will be if Roger Ailes–a cornerstone of Republican success–were indicted for telling Judith Regan to do the same?

That’s what Barry Ritholtz claims is about to happen.

Someone I spoke with claimed that Ailes was scheduled to speak at their event in March, but canceled. It appears that Roger’s people, ostensibly using a clause in his contract, said he “cannot appear for legal reasons.”I asked “What, precisely, does that mean?”

The response: “Roger Ailes will be indicted — probably this week, maybe even Monday.”

The NYT broke the underlying story on Thursday:

Full Story Here: Roger Ailes to Be Indicted?!? | Emptywheel.

Thousands Crowd The Wisconsin State Capitol As Walker Tries To Close Building–UPDATED

Continuing His Power Grab, Walker to Expel Wisconsinites from State Capitol Hundreds To Risk Peaceful Arrest to Defend Rights

Continuing his unprecedented power grab Governor Walker ordered the State Capitol cleared on Sunday, closing the building to Wisconsinites protesting his plan to gut civil rights for tens of thousands of Wisconsin’s citizens. Dozens of ministers, rabbis, and priests joined workers and students from across the state, risking arrest to protest the closing of the State Capitol to the public.

“First Governor Walker tried to take away workers’ rights, now he is trying to take away our Constitutional right as Americans to peacefully assemble,” said Steelworker Roy Vandenberg. “I have a message for Governor Walker, your plan to silence us won’t work. We are not going away, and we will not be silenced.”

“This is a critical moment for Wisconsin and for so many states,” said Rev. Leah Lonsbury of Memorial United Church of Christ. “Clearly, this is about far more than a budget. It’s a moral issue, and the rights at stake here are so basic to our common good and our common humanity, to the very idea of justice, that we are willing to risk arrest to protect them and have our voices be heard. Our faith calls us to stand with the vulnerable and speak truth to power. This is what we are called to do.”

Full Story Here: Thousands Crowd The Wisconsin State Capitol As Walker Tries To Close Building–UPDATED | Crooks and Liars.

Impact of Green Economy Investments in the Recovery Act

I did a spit take yesterday when I heard MSNBC commentator Mika Brzezinski tell another TV personality that to reduce the federal deficit we all “need to live within our means.” I wasn’t surprised by the remark so much as angered that yet another wealthy media pundit was lecturing us about being economical.

Usually, the “living within our means” comment refers to “shared sacrifice” of both working families and the rich in order to solve the government’s perceived fiscal problems. In real life it means working families and low-income retirees yet again will be the one’s to carry most of the burden.

See for example the Republican budget outline announced this month, which cuts tens of billions from education and other programs that benefit working families – with no sign of them budging on the tax cuts for the rich they fought tooth and nail to extend last year. See also their willingness to close down the government and stall Social Security payments to retirees in order to make their political point, further risking economic recovery.

Full Story Here: Impact of Green Economy Investments in the Recovery Act » pa.

Could a general strike happen here? Experts say maybe

The confrontation between labor and politics at the Wisconsin Capitol was just starting as workers in Egypt who left their jobs and took to the streets toppled a government, and it wasn’t long before activists in Madison began invoking the spirit of that uprising. “Fight like an Egyptian” emerged one cry as picket signs cheering the people’s revolt half a world away were raised in protests on the Capitol Square.

Thousands have thronged the Capitol daily since large scale demonstrations began Feb. 14. Madison school teachers called in sick for several days to protest and on Feb. 21, the Madison-based South Central Federation of Labor took the unprecedented step of endorsing a general strike among its 45,000 members if Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial budget repair bill is made law.

Could such a radical action get off the ground here?

Full Story Here: Could a general strike happen here? Experts say maybe.

Gov. Dayton: Tax rich to fix deficit

Gov. Mark Dayton looked to the wealthy to erase about half of a $6.2 billion budget deficit on Tuesday, proposing a new top tax bracket and an income surtax that together would give Minnesota the nation’s highest income tax rate.

The Democratic governor’s plan would raise nearly $2.9 billion from the top 5 percent of taxpayers, including a new property tax on homes valued at more than $1 million.

It would also increase taxes on health care providers and corporations with foreign operations, while cutting almost $1 billion in spending for programs including MinnesotaCare health care and nursing homes.

The tax increases and spending cuts are contained in Dayton’s proposal for a two-year, $37 billion budget that guides more money into education but could also cost about 800 state workers their jobs.

“This is a very tough budget for very hard economic times,” Dayton said.

Full Story Here: Dayton: Tax rich to fix deficit.

For Wayne Barrett, the Digging for Dirt Hasn’t Stopped

WAYNE BARRETT wants to say nice things about people. He wants to, but he finds it so hard.

“We haven’t had bad mayors,” ventured Mr. Barrett, the muck-raking investigative reporter who has made a career of hounding New York City’s chief executives. “They’ve all done some really good things,” he added, “though you probably wouldn’t know it to read my copy.”

To review: “Bloomberg’s first term was, I think, the best I’ve ever covered, but since then he’s treading water. I think the job bores him.

“I was very enamored of Rudy Giuliani when he was U.S. attorney, but as mayor, he poisoned the atmosphere, and he doesn’t get better over time.”

Full Story Here: For Wayne Barrett, the Digging for Dirt Hasn’t Stopped – NYTimes.com.

On the Chopping Block: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

Social Security and Medicare are dinner. Yet both are insurance, not welfare, programs funded by (worker-employer) payroll tax deductions. They’re contractual federal obligations to eligible recipients who qualify.

Planned is death by a thousand cuts – aka “creeping normalcy,” defined as a way to make major changes seem normal if happen slowly, incrementally like boiling a frog unaware it’s dinner until cooked.

Social Security and Medicare are dinner. Yet both are insurance, not welfare, programs funded by (worker-employer) payroll tax deductions. They’re contractual federal obligations to eligible recipients who qualify. You’d never know it the way both programs are publicly discussed, explaining everything but the truth. More on that below.

On August 14, 1935, the Social Security Act became law, known as the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program (OASDI). It provides retirement, disability, survivorship, and death benefits. It’s still America’s most effective poverty reduction program that’s worked remarkably well since inception. It exists to provide secure inflation-adjusted retirement or disability income, unlike risking personal savings to create private wealth that may end up losing it.

Full Story Here: OpEdNews – Article: On the Chopping Block: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The Anti-NAFTA Party Launches in Michigan

The political party, the idea of mechanic James Bogely Jr., will focus on stopping the trade pact thrust upon the American people in 1994.

Fed up with America’s failed trade policies that he believes are destroying the middle class, a Michigan resident is in the process of forming an anti-NAFTA party, according to the Macomb Daily.

The political party, the idea of mechanic James Bogely Jr., will focus on stopping the trade pact thrust upon the American people in 1994.

“NAFTA is one of many vehicles used, knowingly and unknowingly, to damage the middle class in Michigan,” he told the Macomb Daily.

The group will hold its first meeting Sunday, Feb. 27 at 4 p.m. in the basement of Tracy’s Corner Café in Warren, Mich.

He also plans to launch a website, antinaftaparty.org, on the same day as the inaugural meeting.

Full Story Here: The Anti-NAFTA Party Launches in Michigan | Economy In Crisis.

In Praise of Mercantilism, or Why Economic History Isn’t Boring

Ian Fletcher:  :

Does economic history hold a giant clue for getting America out of its present trade mess? Yes, because it debunks the idea that free trade is how nations become prosperous. Instead, it shows that nations win at international trade by playing a 400-year-old game called mercantilism.

Let’s look at England, for example.

The great Adam Smith, founder of modern economics, published his epoch-making free-trade tract The Wealth of Nations, the origin of endless subsequent delusions, in 1776. But he was a hypocrite, for Britain in 1776 was not a blank slate upon which free markets and free trade could work their magic. It was instead the beneficiary of several prior centuries of protectionism and industrial policy. In the words of British economist William Cunningham:

For a period of two hundred years [c. 1600-1800], the English nation knew very clearly what it wanted. Under all changes of dynasty and circumstances the object of building up national power was kept in view; and economics, though not yet admitted to the circle of the sciences, proved an excellent servant, and gave admirable suggestions as to the manner in which this aim might be accomplished.

England in this era was, in fact, a classic authoritarian (this is long before English democracy) developmentalist state: a Renaissance South Korea, with kings rather than the military dictators who ruled South Korea for most of the Cold War period. English industrialization must actually be traced 300 years prior to Adam Smith, to events like Henry VII’s imposition of a tariff on woolen goods in 1489. King Henry’s aim was to wrest the wool weaving trade, then the most technologically advanced major industry in Europe, away from Flanders (the Dutch half of present-day Belgium), where it had been thriving upon exports of English wool. Flemish producers were entrenched behind huge capital investments, which gave them economies of scale sufficient to outcompete fledgling entrants into the industry. So only government action could get England a toehold.

Even in the 15th century, there was an awareness that being an exporter of agricultural raw materials was a dead end–a problem impoverished African and Latin American nations wrestle with to this day. And there was an awareness that free trade will not lift a nation out of this predicament: you need some well-chosen protectionism. Henry VII created, in fact, the first national industrial policy of the modern era, long before the Industrial Revolution introduced artificial energy sources like steam power. A whole interlocking series of now-forgotten policy moves underlay the rise of English industry; what all these measures had in common was that protectionism was essential to making them work. In the words of economist John Culbertson of the University of Wisconsin and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors:

Step after step in the cumulative economic rise of England was directly caused by government action or depended upon supportive government action: the prohibition of importation of Spanish wool by Henry I, the revision of land-tenure arrangements to permit the development of large-scale sheep raising, Edward III’s attracting of Flemish weavers to England and then prohibiting of the wearing of foreign cloth, the termination of the privileges in London of the Hanseatic League under Edward VI, the near-war between England under Elizabeth I and the Hanseatic League, which supported the rise of English shipping. And then there was the prohibition of export of English wool (which damaged the Flemish textile industry and stimulated that of England), the encouragement of production of dyed and finished cloth in England, the use of England’s dominance in textile manufacture to push the Hanseatic League out of foreign markets for other products…

The aim of English policy was what would today be called “climbing the value chain”: deliberately leveraging existing economic activity to break into more-sophisticated related activities. Henry VII’s advisors got their economic ideas ultimately from the city-states of Renaissance Italy, where economics had been born as a component of Civic Humanism, their now-forgotten governing ideology.

The name for this forgotten developmentalist wisdom of early modern Europe that has stuck is “mercantilism.” One of the great myths of contemporary economics is that mercantilism was an analytically vacuous bundle of gold-hoarding prejudices. It was, in fact, a remarkably sophisticated attempt, given the limited conceptual apparatus of the time, to advance national economic development by means that would be familiar and congenial to the technocrats of 21st-century Tokyo, Beijing, or Seoul. (And believe me, they’re still using these techniques against us.) For 400 years, this is how former Third-World nations have become former Third World nations.

Mercantilists invented many economic concepts still in use today, such as the balance of payments, value added, and the embodied labor content of imports and exports. They championed the economic interests of the nation as a whole at a time when special interests (notably royal monopolies) were an even bigger problem than today. They began with obvious ideas like taxing foreign luxury goods. They progressed to the idea that exporting raw materials for foreigners to process was bad if the nation could process them itself. They understood that nations rose economically by imitating the industries of already rich nations (first the more primitive industries, then the more sophisticated) and that low relative wages were the key advantage of underdeveloped nations in this game. How little has changed!

Mercantilists saw free markets as a useful tool in economics, but not the sum total of economic wisdom. Even their much-mocked obsession with the accumulation of bullion was not as irrational as it is usually depicted as being, given that under a monetary system based on gold, accumulating it is the only way to expand the money supply and drive down interest rates, a boon to investment then as now. Mercantilism, in fact, created the modern European economy and thus made possible the colonial power that economically shaped much of the rest of the world. It is thus the foundation of modern capitalism itself.

Anyhow: Britain functioned on a mercantilist basis for centuries before its much misunderstood experiment with free trade began. Even as late as the beginning of the 19th century, Britain’s average tariff on manufactured goods was roughly 50 percent–the highest of any major nation in Europe. And even after Britain embraced free trade in most goods, it continued to tightly regulate trade in strategic capital goods, such as the machinery for the mass production of textiles, in order to forestall its rivals. This was rational, as the win-win logic of free trade starts to break down if productive capital is mobile between nations or if free trade induces productivity growth abroad.

After Britain embraced free trade in the mid-19th century, its long economic decline, of course, began. Today, the United States is making the same mistake, having mistaken the temporary tactical advantages of free trade for a nation at the peak of its economic power for a fundamental strategic truth. Meanwhile, our rivals, especially but not only in the Far East, hold firm to the mercantilist principles that we ourselves employed for 150 years.

Mercantilism has somewhat different application in developed, rather than developing, nations, but its fundamentals still hold good. At the very least, we need to defend ourselves against mercantilist aggression against us, something we are not doing.

Ian Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank founded in 1933 and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.

Obama’s Puzzling Silence

NGOs Have Been Left Out in the Cold

By RALPH NADER : :

President Obama uses his bully pulpit to tout profit-seeking corporations, but he rarely uses it to promote nonprofits that deliver social justice at home and abroad.

When Mr. Obama went to India in November, for example, he was accompanied by corporate CEO’s, and unabashedly promoted U.S. exports and companies like Boeing and Harley-Davidson.

The president says he will go anywhere in the world to promote trade, presumably for the jobs that exports create. Fair enough, assuming fair-trade agreements.

But so far, he has rarely gone anywhere, even to places near the White House, to highlight the good works done by national advocacy and charitable groups seeking a fairer society. It is puzzling why Mr. Obama, who knows how to attract the news media to his cause, has left in the shadows the all-important “independent sector” (to use the language of President Johnson’s health and education secretary John Gardner).

Full Story Here: Ralph Nader: Obama’s Puzzling Silence.

How Timidity in Washington Wrecked the Economy

The Latest Evidence

By DEAN BAKER:  :

We now have even more evidence that inept policies from Washington are causing enormous suffering across the country. It is not quite the line that the right-wingers are pushing. The new evidence is that the stimulus worked and was in fact more effective than had been predicted.

The new evidence comes in the form of a study by two Dartmouth professors, James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote. Past estimates of the impact of the stimulus on jobs and the economy relied on simply plugging the tax breaks and spending into standard macro models and reporting the predicted effect. In this sense, the impact of the stimulus was actually built into the model. However this new study directly measures the impact of stimulus spending on employment across states, comparing the number of jobs created to the amount of spending.

The study consistently finds significant results over a wide range of specifications. This means that states that got more stimulus money had more jobs. The multipliers varied across specifications and types of spending but the range was 0.5 to 2.0. (The multiplier is the ratio of the change in GDP to the amount of stimulus spending. If the multiplier is 1.5 this means that $1 billion in stimulus increases GDP by $1.5 billion.) While the authors view their multiplier estimates as being somewhat below those predicted by the standard macro models, given the nature of their study their estimates are almost certainly higher than would be expected.

Full Story Here: Dean Baker: How Timidity in Washington Wrecked the Economy.

Why Did Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Participate in Discussions About Disrupting Peaceful Rallies?

John Nichols – The Nation: :

Embattled Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has now acknowledged in a press conference and in a nationally television interview—with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren—that he engaged in discussions with political allies about hiring “troublemakers” to disrupt peaceful demonstrations against his budget repair bill.

“You said you thought about it?” asked Van Susteren.

“We did,” replied Walker. “We had people contacting [us]. I even had lawmakers and others suggesting riling things up.”

Lester Pines, one of the most prominent lawyers in Madison, the Wisconsin capital city where the largest demonstrations have taken place, referred to that comment as “a scandal.”

“If , in fact, they took any steps toward implementing that [plan to disrupt rallies], that’s a crime,” explained Pines. “If they took steps to implement that, they engaged in a conspiracy to deny people their civil rights.”

Full Story Here: Why Did Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Participate in Discussions About Disrupting Peaceful Rallies? | The Nation.

The “Deficit Problem” Isn’t Financial. It’s Political.

Robert Freeman: :

The federal budget deficit and its cumulative cousin, the national debt, are much more political and media phenomena than they are financial. Which isn’t to say that they don’t exist. Obviously, they do. But they have been invested with apocalyptic significance mainly for political purposes: to scare people and to coerce them into reducing the size and the scope of government.

The truth is that massive deficits are almost exclusively a Republican creation. But Republicans were conspicuously silent in the decades of their big run-up, when the deficits were providing the hollow illusion of easy prosperity. The other truth is that it is only deficits that can get the economy out of the ditch that Republicans left it in when Bush slunk out of office.

But as Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has said, “Our first priority is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.” That is the real reason Republicans are born-again fiscal fundamentalists: deficits are the only thing that might actually turn the economy around and that is exactly what the Republicans are so intent on avoiding.

Full Story Here: The “Deficit Problem” Isn’t Financial. It’s Political. | Common Dreams.

Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers

The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas.

The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.

So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare support from their usual sparring partners. Environmentalists say using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly than coal and oil. Lawmakers hail the gas as a source of jobs. They also see it as a way to wean the United States from its dependency on other countries for oil.

But the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.

Full Story Here: Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers – NYTimes.com.

Fox Reverses Results Of Gallup Poll To Claim Americans Oppose Union Collective Bargaining Rights

Yesterday, USA Today and Gallup released a new poll that found that a whopping 61 percent of Americans oppose efforts like those of Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) to strip public sector unions of collective bargaining rights. The poll also found that only a third of Americans support such a policy, indicating that Walker is pandering to the far-right of the American electorate and is hardly representative of mainstream political thought in this country.

This morning, during a debate about the situation in Wisconsin and collective bargaining rights in general, the Fox News show Fox & Friends referenced the USA Today/Gallup poll. With incredible brazenness, the Fox hosts actually reversed the results of the poll in order to claim that two-thirds of Americans supported Wisconsin-style laws rather than opposed them.

During the discussion, Fox host Brian Kilmeade asked pro-labor guest Robert Zimmerman if President Obama was taking a “big risk” by opposing Walker’s law. Zimmerman responded by saying that Obama was speaking “for the mainstream of our country, and the mainstream of Republican governors who are not siding with Governor Walker.” Kilmeade responded by saying, “I think Gallup, a relatively mainstream poll, has a differing view. And here’s the question that was posed. Do you favor or disfavor of taking away collective bargaining when it comes to salaries for government workers. 66 percent in favor, 33 percent opposed, 9 percent up in the air.” Watch it:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » Fox Reverses Results Of Gallup Poll To Claim Americans Oppose Union Collective Bargaining Rights.

OPS: If you’re watching Fox, you are being lied to – every day

Anatomy of a protest: From a simple march to a national fight

On Feb. 7, with Wisconsin united in the afterglow of a Green Bay Packers victory in the Super Bowl, brand-new Gov. Scott Walker convened a dinner meeting of his Cabinet at the Governor’s Mansion.

Walker held up a photo of President Ronald Reagan, who had famously fired striking air-traffic controllers, and said his plan to sweep away decades of protections for state public employees in a stop-gap budget bill represented “our time to change the course of history.”

“It was kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb,” he said.

The budget-repair bill, which would strip most collective-bargaining rights from 175,000 public-sector workers while imposing immediate benefits concessions, went public four days later. Walker, a Republican, called for passage in the GOP-controlled Legislature within a week.

Full Story Here: Anatomy of a protest: From a simple march to a national fight.

In Heavy Snow: 100,000 Strong In Madison

Executives Behind Financial Crisis at Little Risk of Jail Time

So much for Angelo Mozilo taking the fall for the financial crisis.

Late last week, word leaked out that Mr. Mozilo, who had co-founded Countrywide Financial in 1969 — and, for nearly 40 years, presided over its astonishing rise and its equally astonishing fall — would not be prosecuted by the Justice Department. Not for insider trading. Not for failing to disclose to investors his private worries about subprime loans. Not for helping to create a culture at Countrywide in which mortgage originators were rewarded for pushing fraudulent loans on borrowers.

In its article about the Justice Department’s decision, The Los Angeles Times said prosecutors had concluded that Mr. Mozilo’s actions “did not amount to criminal wrongdoing.”

Just months earlier, the Justice Department concluded that Joe Cassano shouldn’t take the fall for the financial crisis either. Mr. Cassano, you’ll recall, is the former head of the financial products unit of the American International Group, a man whose enthusiasm for credit-default swaps led, pretty directly, to the need for a huge government bailout of A.I.G. There was a time when it appeared that there was no way the government would let Mr. Cassano walk. But it did.

Full Story Here: Executives Behind Financial Crisis at Little Risk of Jail Time – NYTimes.com.

Illinois Appeals Court Revives $10 Billion Suit Against Philip Morris

A lawsuit that led to a $10.1 billion verdict against cigarette-making Philip Morris USA before it was tossed out by the Illinois Supreme Court has been revived by a lower court, sending the case back to the county once tagged as among the nation’s most lawsuit-friendly turfs.

The unanimous ruling Thursday by the three-judge panel of the Mount Vernon-based 5th District Appellate Court cleared the way for the plaintiffs to argue that a favorable 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision in an unrelated case may be applied to reinstate the questioned Madison County one involving Philip Morris’ marketing of “light” cigarettes.

In 2003, now-retired Madison County Circuit Judge Nicholas Byron found that Philip Morris misled customers about “light” and “low tar” cigarettes and broke state law by marketing them as safer, ending a trial that both sides at the time said was the nation’s first over a lawsuit accusing a tobacco company of consumer fraud.

Full Story Here: Illinois Appeals Court Revives $10 Billion Suit Against Philip Morris.

North Korea Threatens To Attack South Korea, U.S.

North Korea threatened Sunday to enlarge its nuclear arsenal and mercilessly attack South Korea and the United States, as the allies prepared to start annual joint military drills which the North says are a rehearsal for an invasion.

North Korea routinely issues similar threats against South Korea and the U.S. over any joint military drills. The latest warning, however, could rekindle tensions on the Korean peninsula which sharply rose last year after two deadly incidents blamed on the North.

North Korea fired artillery at a front-line South Korean island in November, killing four people. The barrage came eight months after the sinking of a South Korean warship which killed 46 sailors. North Korea has denied firing a torpedo at the ship.

North Korea called the planned South Korea-U.S. drills a “dangerous military scheme.”

Full Story Here: North Korea Threatens To Attack South Korea, U.S..

Madison police chief asks Walker to explain ‘troubling’ comments

Police chief Noble Wray of Madison, Wisconsin on Thursday asked Republican Gov. Scott Walker to explain “very unsettling and troubling” comments made in what he thought was a private phone call.

Pranked by a gonzo journalist pretending to be conservative billionaire David Koch, Walker said on the 20-minute call that his administration considered planting “troublemakers” in the crowd of demonstrators opposing his budget, which curtails the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

“I spent a good deal of time overnight thinking about Governor Walker’s response, during his news conference yesterday, to the suggestion that his administration ‘thought about’ planting troublemakers among those who are peacefully protesting his bill,” Wray said in a statement.” I would like to hear more of an explanation from Governor Walker as to what exactly was being considered, and to what degree it was discussed by his cabinet members.”

Full Story Here: Madison police chief asks Walker to explain ‘troubling’ comments | The Raw Story.

REPORT: You Have More Money In Your Wallet Than Bank Of America Pays In Federal Taxes

Today, hundreds of thousands of people comprising a Main Street Movement — a coalition of students, the retired, union workers, public employees, and other middle class Americans — are in the streets, demonstrating against brutal cuts to public services and crackdowns on organized labor being pushed by conservative politicians. These lawmakers that are attacking collective bargaining and cutting necessary services like college tuition aid and health benefits for public workers claim that they have no choice but than to take these actions because both state and federal governments are in debt.

But it wasn’t teachers, fire fighters, policemen, and college students that caused the economic recession that has devastated government budgets — it was Wall Street. And as middle class workers are being asked to sacrifice, the rich continue to rig the system, dodging taxes and avoiding paying their fair share.

In an interview with In These Times, Carl Gibson, the founder of US Uncut, which is organizing some of today’s UK-inspired massive demonstrations against tax dodgers, explains that while ordinary Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. As he says, if you have “one dollar” in your wallet, you’re paying more than the “combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America“:

[Gibson] explains, “I have one dollar in my wallet. That’s more than the combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America. That means somebody is gaming the system.”

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » REPORT: You Have More Money In Your Wallet Than Bank Of America Pays In Federal Taxes.

REPORT: Top 10 Disastrous Policies From The Wisconsin GOP You Haven’t Heard About

As the standoff between the Main Street Movement and Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) continues for the twelfth day, much of the media coverage — and anger — from both sides has focused on Walker’s efforts to strip Wisconsin public workers of their right to collective bargaining. But Walker’s assault on public employees is only one part of a larger political program that aims to give corporations free reign in the state while dismantling the healthcare programs, environmental regulations, and good government laws that protect Wisconsin’s middle and working class. These lesser known proposals in the 144-page bill reveal how radical Walker’s plan actually is:

1. ELIMINATING MEDICAID: The Budget Repair Bill includes a little-known provision that would put complete control of the state’s Medicaid program, known as BadgerCare, in the hands of the state’s ultra-conservative Health and Human Services Secretary Dennis Smith. Smith would have the authority to “to override state Medicaid laws as [he] sees fit and institute sweeping changes” including reducing benefits and limiting eligibility. Ironically, during the 1990s it was Republicans, especially former Gov. and Bush HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, who helped develop BadgerCare into one of the country’s most innovative and generous Medicaid programs. A decade later, a new generation of radical Republicans is hoping to destroy one of Wisconsin’s “success stories.”

2. POWER PLANT PRIVATIZATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL NEGLECT: The same budget bill calls for a rapid no-bid “firesale” of all state-owned power plants. One progressive blogger called the proposal “a highlight reel of all of the tomahawk dunks of neo-Gilded Age corporatism: privatization, no-bid contracts, deregulation, and naked cronyism” and suggested that the provision will open the way for large, politically connected corporations to buy up the state’s power plants on the cheap. While it’s unclear whether corporations would be interested in buying the plants, a similar proposal was vetoed six years ago by Gov. Jim Doyle (D), who called the plan fiscally and environmentally irresponsible. Many of Wisconsin’s power plants are in violation of federal clean air regulations and desperately need to be upgraded and cleaned up — not dumped into the private sector.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » REPORT: Top 10 Disastrous Policies From The Wisconsin GOP You Haven’t Heard About.

Rally for the American Dream: Huge Gatherings Nationwide in Solidarity with Wisconsin Democratic Uprising

Progressives have forcefully challenged the conservative and Tea Party message in a massive showing of support for the middle class.

“Welcome Senators!” a Chicago protest sign declared, as thousands rallied in solidarity with Wisconsin workers and celebrated Democratic senators hiding out in Illinois.

Thousands rallied nation-wide on Saturday, with MoveOn putting the total at over 100,000 people in Madison and 50,000 in other state capitols and major cities. Protests at state capitols were also a warning shot to governors around the country: workers will fight major cuts to social programs and attacks on unions.

The protests in Wisconsin have now sparked a nation-wide movement. This is the first time progressives have forcefully challenged the conservative and Tea Party message over the past two years, rejecting the notion that deficits and government spending are the country’s biggest problem. (Click here to see AlterNet’s collection of photos from the rallies).

In Philadelphia, demonstrators chanted, “Tax the rich, stop the war.”

Full Story Here: Rally for the American Dream: Huge Gatherings Nationwide in Solidarity with Wisconsin Democratic Uprising | | AlterNet.

Wisconsin protest rallies spread to all 50 States

Yesterday in Madison, WI. an estimated crowd size of 70,000 to 100,000 people gathered in frigid weather to protest Governor Scott Walker and the republican controlled legislature who are trying to kill the States public unions. The protest in Madison was the largest seen in the State capitol since the Vietnam War and it was also the largest crowd since Wisconsin workers first started protesting about two weeks ago.

Early this past Friday morning the republicans in the Assembly passed Governor Walker’s union busting Bill. The State Senators still have to vote on the Bill before it can be signed by Walker, but they need the States democratic Senators to be present in order to have a three-fifths quorum which is required for the vote to take place.

Currently, the Senate democrats have not made themselves available for a vote, and they have said that they will not be available until Walker removes the portion of the Bill that takes away collective bargaining rights for unions. The unions have already agreed to wage cuts and benefit cuts.

Full Story Here: Wisconsin protest rallies spread to all 50 States – Las Vegas Democrat | Examiner.com.

Why natural gas companies fear Josh Fox, Gasland and the Oscars

The natural gas industry is afraid that Josh Fox, director of the muckraking film Gasland, might win an Oscar on Sunday. Earlier this month, an organization called Energy in Depth, backed by the oil and gas industry, sent the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a letter in which it argued that Gasland, Fox’s exposé on the natural gas industry, should be removed from consideration for best documentary feature because it contained inaccurate information.

After dealing with the industry for the past couple of years, Fox is not surprised by this tactic. “What this points to is the culture of that industry, which is bullying, which is aggressive, which is outlandish in their tactics, which will stop at nothing,” he told AlterNet.

The film is still up for consideration, and the industry should be worried about the impact its nomination, let alone a victory, could have. Even if the film doesn’t win on Sunday, millions of viewers will see a clip of the film that documents the real threat of environmental devastation that comes along with natural gas drilling and, in particular, with hydrofracking.

Full Story Here: Weekly Mulch: Why natural gas companies fear Josh Fox, Gasland and the Oscars | rabble.ca.

DOJ gets reporter’s phone, credit card records

Michael Issakoff: :

A court filing in the case of a former CIA officer accused of spilling secrets about Iran’s nuclear program provides new details about the extraordinary measures Justice Department prosecutors are using to identify government leakers.

The former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, was indicted in December on charges that he disclosed “national defense information” to New York Times reporter James Risen.

In a court filing this week, Sterling’s lawyers revealed that, as part of the investigation, prosecutors obtained Risen’s telephone, credit and bank records. They also obtained credit reports on Risen conducted by three credit agencies — Equifax, TransUnion and Experian — as well as records of his airline travel, the filing states.

Full Story Here: DOJ gets reporter’s phone, credit card records – U.S. news – Security – msnbc.com.

DNC Pressures Obama, Passes Resolution Endorsing Swift End To Afghanistan War

Members of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) gave President Obama a rare push on Saturday, adopting a resolution attempting to encourage the administration to move toward a speedier withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The DNC is currently holding its annual winter meeting, where its hundreds of members from all around the country converge in Washington, D.C. to discuss finances, debate resolutions, and of course, figure out how elect (and re-elect) Democrats — including Obama — in 2012.

The resolution adopted Saturday states that “the Democratic Party supports prioritizing job creation and a swift withdrawal of U.S. armed forces and military contractors in Afghanistan which must include a significant and sizable reduction no later than July 2011.”

Full Story Here: DNC Pressures Obama, Passes Resolution Endorsing Swift End To Afghanistan War.

Wisconsin and “The Union”

Keith Olbermann: :

When I was 21 years old I had a great boss. The problem was, he had a terrible boss.

He’d hired me, cold out of college, the year before. It was a strict union shop – United Press International, Wire Service Guild – and so it paid on seniority and I didn’t have any, so that first half-year all he had to pay me was $8,710. Six radio sportscasts a night on a network serving a thousand stations, and a two-minute commentary and I had to write breaking updates and reports and call up players for interviews, and I had to take in the “feeds” of interviews from our stringers at the ballparks and edit them by hand with a razor blade and splicing tape, and on the weekends I also had to ‘engineer’ a newscast or two, and every once in a long while I’d get back-to-back days off.

Photo is from about 8 months later

A tough job, even when my salary went up five grand when I hit my one-year anniversary. But as I said, my boss, Stan Sabik, was great. 20 years in the business and the Bureau Manager for UPI Audio and still he treated me like I wasn’t a punk kid with a really bad mustache and incredible arrogance. If I didn’t like one of his decisions he’d hear me out and once in a long while he’d say “how is this possible? You’re right” and change his mind. I could even go back at him two or three times to appeal something and he’d yell and I’d yell back and we’d never hold it against each other.

Full Story Here: Wisconsin and “The Union” | FOK News Channel.

Largest crowds since Vietnam War march in Wisconsin

A crowd estimated at more than 70,000 people on Saturday waved American flags, sang the national anthem and called for the defeat of a Wisconsin plan to curb public sector unions that has galvanized opposition from the American labor movement.

In one of the biggest rallies at the state Capitol since the Vietnam War, union members and their supporters braved frigid temperatures and a light snowfall to show their displeasure.

The mood was upbeat despite the setback their cause suffered earlier this week when the state Assembly approved the Republican-backed restrictions on union collective bargaining rights over fierce Democratic objections.

Full Story Here: Largest crowds since Vietnam War march in Wisconsin – chicagotribune.com.

The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee Pensions

Pulitzer Prize winning tax reporter, David Cay Johnston, has written a brilliant piece for tax.com exposing the truth about who really pays for the pension and benefits for public employees in Wisconsin.

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to “contribute more” to their pension and health insurance plans. Accepting Gov. Walker’ s assertions as fact, and failing to check, creates the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not. Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin’ s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

Via tax.com

How can this be possible?

Simple. The pension plan is the direct result of deferred compensation- money that employees would have been paid as cash salary but choose, instead, to have placed in the state operated pension fund where the money can be professionally invested (at a lower cost of management) for the future.

Full Story Here: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee Pensions – Rick Ungar – The Policy Page – Forbes.

Yes We Can! (Fix Our Trade Mess)

Ian Fletcher: :

The fashionable despair of America fixing its trade mess is a mistake.

For example, the standard objection to taking a stick to America’s trade imbalance by levying a tariff is that our trading partners would just shrug it off by increasing subsidies to their exporters. (They do something similar to this already: China, for example, is constantly adjusting its export subsidies to protect its positions in foreign markets.) This would, supposedly, force us into an endless game of matching these moves on a country-by-country, industry-by-industry, and even product-by-product basis.

However, retaliatory subsidies by our trading partners would be restrained by the fact that they would be very expensive in the face of an American tariff. Right now, these subsidies are relatively affordable only because they don’t have to climb an American tariff wall. But if they did, their cost would increase dramatically. Escalation is a game two can play, and no, this wouldn’t lead to a trade war.

Currency manipulation is probably the only subsidy that is affordable over prolonged periods of time (and even then problematic in the end), as it involves buying foreign assets and debt, thus accumulating wealth rather than just expenditures. But other subsidies amount to a giveaway from the exporting to the importing nation.

While this doesn’t prevent them absolutely, it does tend to set a limit. This is all we need, especially as we have no hope of eliminating or countervailing all foreign subsidies no matter what we do, tariff or no tariff.

The same goes for the objection that our trading partners would just devalue their currencies. We can end foreign currency manipulation at any time simply by restricting or taxing foreigners’ ability to lend us debt and buy our assets. We would need to raise our own savings rate if we did this (or face rising interest rates), but we need to do this anyway.

So it’s an utter mistake to think America is this big helpless giant with respect to its trade problems. The solutions are out there if we would but avail ourselves of them.

 

Ian Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank founded in 1933 and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.

WTO Destroying American Sovereignty

The bylaws of the WTO supersede our own Constitution, which is a contradiction to the stated premise of the Constitution to be the “supreme law of the land.”

The World Trade Organization (WTO) came into existence in 1995 to “deal with the global rules of trade between nations.” The WTO is supposed to provide a forum for governments to negotiate trade agreements and settle trade disputes with one another.

The bylaws of the WTO supersede our own Constitution, which is a contradiction to the stated premise of the Constitution to be the “supreme law of the land.” Member nations must adhere to WTO policies without any legislative process in their own countries. Local policies aimed at rewarding companies who hire local residents, use domestic materials, or adopt environmentally sound practices are essentially illegal under the WTO.

Full Story Here: WTO Destroying American Sovereignty | Economy In Crisis.

Our Unfunded Wars are Destroying the Country

We are destroying our country in four wars that we cannot afford and we are losing – badly.

1. The Iraq War – We have no exit strategy and there is no way to emerge victorious. Why are our troops still there?

2. The Afghanistan War – The citizens of Afghanistan were fighting a civil war before our troops entered their country, and the civil war will continue after we leave.

3. Phantom Terror War – We are at a standstill. At home, we are fighting more homegrown terrorists, abroad we continue to fight more emerging terrorists.

4. The Economic War – Our leaders seem unaware that we are even in an economic war. We are losing badly, and may have already lost.

We are spending $1 trillion in borrowed money to fight wars in countries in which we have no exit strategies or goals.

Full Story Here: Our Unfunded Wars are Destroying the Country | Economy In Crisis.

Outsourcing Is the Problem, Protectionism Is the Solution

Solving America’s economic problems lies not in finding the proper level of government spending, which in a best case scenario is only bailing water out of a boat with a hole in the bottom, but plugging the hole and ending trade policy that encourages businesses to leave this country.

‘Free’ trade policy has been the bane of this country for decades now. Thanks to government policy, it is no longer profitable for businesses to employ Americans, so they do not. Removing tariffs while letting other nations subsidize or otherwise undercut domestic products has created a massive trade deficit, and left us with fewer people employed today than in the year 2000.

Long-term economic strength depends on a resurgence of our manufacturing base. Based on figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over three million manufacturing jobs have been lost over the last ten years. The loss of manufacturing jobs started in the late 1970s, continued in the 1980s, accelerated in the 1990s after the signing of NAFTA, and accelerated further when China was given most favored nation trading status in 2003. This has not only increased unemployment in the U.S., but has transformed the country into a service economy that offers relatively low-paying jobs.

Full Story Here: Outsourcing Is the Problem, Protectionism Is the Solution | Economy In Crisis.

The Real Issues: A Wisconsin Update

George Lakoff: :

The Wisconsin protests are about much more than budgets and unions. As I observed in What Conservatives Really Want, the conservative story about budget deficits is a ruse to turn the country conservative in every area. Karl Rove and Shep Smith have made it clear on Fox: If the Wisconsin plan to kill the public employees’ unions succeeds, then there will be little union money in the future to support democratic candidates. Conservatives will be effectively unopposed in raising campaign funding in most elections, including the presidential elections. This will mean a thoroughly conservative America in every issue area.

The media, with few exceptions, is failing to get at the deeper issues.

Let’s start with the case of the Lincoln legislators. As is well known about Lincoln, and as the Political Wire reports,

Full Story Here: The Real Issues: A Wisconsin Update | Common Dreams.

Shoppers Wary of GM Foods Find They’re Everywhere

You may not want to eat genetically engineered foods. Chances are, you are eating them anyway.

Genetically modified plants grown from seeds engineered in labs now provide much of the food we eat. Most corn, soybean and cotton crops grown in the United States have been genetically modified to resist pesticides or insects, and corn and soy are common food ingredients.

The Agriculture Department has approved three more genetically engineered crops in the past month, and the Food and Drug Administration could approve fast-growing genetically modified salmon for human consumption this year.

Full Story Here: Shoppers Wary of GM Foods Find They’re Everywhere | Common Dreams.

Something GOP doesn’t want to cut: Funding for NASCAR

The Minnesota Democrat who’s out to get rid of the Pentagon’s sponsorships for NASCAR teams says she won’t back away from her efforts and, despite GOP resistance, will broaden her fight to repeal tax breaks for track owners, too.

Rep. Betty McCollum says her work could save American taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. But Defense Department officials and lawmakers from NASCAR country say the sponsorships help military recruitment, and that the tax breaks could save jobs in the struggling economy.

In an interview Friday, McCollum said it doesn’t make sense to keep the benefits for NASCAR teams and track owners when other cuts are being made to community health care, programs for homeless veterans and Head Start.

Full Story Here: Something GOP doesn’t want to cut: Funding for NASCAR | McClatchy.

Rupert Murdoch and David Koch Collude Against Wisconsin Workers

While Fox News feeds its rabble the anti-union line, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal columnists front for Koch’s Americans for Prosperity and coddle elite investors.

In the week-long battle taking place in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip state workers of their collective bargaining rights, you’d expect Fox News to be doing what it’s done: misreporting the story, mistakenly characterizing a poll supporting public workers to mean its opposite, featuring Glenn Beck painting the protests of union workers as something cooked up by Stalinists. And you might be tempted to think, well, that’s just Fox playing to its base of frightened Tea Partiers who prefer a fact-free zone to the more challenging territory of actual news, where the answers are never pat, and the world is a bit more complicated than it seems in the realm of Fox Nation.

You might think it’s all about what brings in the advertising dollars for Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox’s parent company, News Corporation. But it runs much deeper than that, involving key players at the Wall Street Journal, News Corp.’s crown jewel. The informal partnership between billionaire David Koch, whose campaign dollars and astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity, have fomented the Wisconsin crisis, and billionaire Rupert Murdoch, is profoundly ideological — the ideology being the exponential enrichment of the two men’s heirs, all dressed up in the language of libertarianism and free enterprise. Together with his brother, Charles — also a big donor to right-wing causes –David Koch runs Koch Industries, the conglomerate that sprang from the oil and gas company founded by his father.

Full Story Here: Rupert Murdoch and David Koch Collude Against Wisconsin Workers | News & Politics | AlterNet.

BREAKING: Wisconsin Police Have Joined Protest Inside State Capitol

Video:

From inside the Wisconsin State Capitol, RAN ally Ryan Harvey reports:

“Hundreds of cops have just marched into the Wisconsin state capitol building to protest the anti-Union bill, to massive applause. They now join up to 600 people who are inside.”

Ryan reported on his Facebook page earlier today:

“Police have just announced to the crowds inside the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin: ‘We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!’ Unreal.”

Ryan HarveyYou can find more updates from Ryan Harvey on Twitter @ryanharveysongs and his blog Even If Your Voice Shakes.

UPDATE: This video says it all. It makes me proud of my neighbors. “Let me tell you Mr. Walker, this is not your house, this is all our house.”

Full Story Here: The Understory » BREAKING: Wisconsin Police Have Joined Protest Inside State Capitol.

OPS:  The Police are smart enough to understand that they would be next

When the Nazis came for the communists
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

A U.S. Recovery Built on Low-Paying Jobs

Before she lost her job last November as a full-time health department caseworker in Aurora, Ill., Amy Valle was making $23 an hour. Now she’s paid $10 an hour as a part-time assistant coordinator in an after-school program. “From here on out, it will be a struggle,” says Valle, 32, whose husband lost his $50,000 government job and still is out of work after a year. “I don’t feel like there’s any place we can go to get what we were getting paid.”

While the unemployment rate dropped to 9 percent in January, from a two-decade peak of 10.1 percent in October 2009, many of the jobs people are now taking don’t match the pay, the hours, or the benefits of the 8.75 million positions that vanished in the recession, according to Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics in Toronto.

This may restrain wage and salary growth, limiting gains in consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy. The good jobs that would trigger a solid boost in spending just don’t seem to be there. “In the last recovery we were adding management jobs at this point, and this time it’s disappointing,” says Ashworth, who published a report on Jan. 27 about pre- and post-slump employment based on U.S. Labor Dept. data. “The very best jobs, we’re still losing those.”

Full Story Here: A U.S. Recovery Built on Low-Paying Jobs – Yahoo! Finance.

OPS:

40 years ago GM was the largest US employer – heavily unionized jobs, paying well enough for a one income family to pay for a house, take a vacation, send kids to college and retire. And the Country prospered.

Today Wal-Mart is the largest US employer……..

The Fascists have one the race to the bottom and the Democrats have been the silent partners in the cabal

The Anatomy of the Divorced Couple’s Disconnect:

Women Want to Talk About Things and Men Want to Have Sex

Peter and Melinda were divorced in 2000. Because they had two children together, and had to co-parent, they were in contact on a daily basis. Their relationship dynamic transformed from a somewhat contentious snippy interchange to one in which they were actually great friends.

From a place of friendship, the couple was actually able to go back in time and review past hurts and dashed expectations. They were able to heal many of the wounds they had each inflicted on the other, but most importantly, they were able to find a way to resolve their present day problems quickly.

Why hadn’t they been able to do that in their first marriage together?

Full Story Here: Susan Pease Gadoua: The Anatomy of the Divorced Couple’s Disconnect: Women Want to Talk About Things and Men Want to Have Sex.

Providence School Board Votes To Send Termination Letter To EVERY Teacher

The mayor insisted Friday that the vast majority of Providence teachers wouldn’t lose their jobs even though the school district has warned them all they could, but the prospect of a mass teacher firing in New England’s second-largest city sent another ripple of uncertainty through public sector unions that feel under attack in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

The school board of Rhode Island’s financially troubled capital city voted Thursday to notify every one of its nearly 2,000 teachers that they were subject to being terminated at the end of the school year.

City officials said the action would give them the ability to make budget cuts. A recent audit showed Providence, which has about 175,000 residents, had nearly depleted its rainy-day fund and overspent its nearly $620 million city budget last year by more than $57 million. Next year’s $308 million school budget is projected to have a gap of $40 million or more.

Full Story Here: Providence School Board Votes To Send Termination Letter To EVERY Teacher.

weGrow, ‘Wal-Mart Of Weed,’ Set To Open In Sacramento

A retail store billing itself as “the Wal-Mart of weed” will open its doors in Sacramento tomorrow, the Sacramento Bee reports.

The 10,000-square-foot weGrow outlet, advertised as a one-stop shop for legal growers seeking supplies and training, claims the honor of being the industry’s first-ever national franchise. Look for outposts of the self-proclaimed “first honest hydro store,” which started as a solo warehouse operation in Oakland last year, to sprout up in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and even New Jersey in the coming months.

The Ganja Galleria doesn’t sell any actual pot–it just sells supplies, provides classes, and offers an on-site doctor to help customers choose their favorite strain.

Full Story Here: weGrow, ‘Wal-Mart Of Weed,’ Set To Open In Sacramento.

Koch Front Group Americans For Prosperity: ‘Take The Unions Out At The Knees’

In a speech earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual conference, Americans For Prosperity-Michigan Executive Director Scott Hagerstrom revealed the true goal of his group and its allies like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) efforts. Speaking at CPAC’s “Panel for Labor Policy,” Hagerstrom said that AFP really wants to do is to “take the unions out at the knees”:

HAGERSTROM: It’s easy to go out there and fight taxes and increased regulation, you know we send out an action alert on taxes to AFP and we get thousands of people to respond. You send out one on a more complicated issue and it just doesn’t quite resonate…We fight these battles on taxes and regulation but really what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.

Watch it:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » Koch Front Group Americans For Prosperity: ‘Take The Unions Out At The Knees’.

BP Paying ‘Independent’ Disaster Claim Administrator $10 Million A Year

BP is paying the man in charge of overseeing its $20 billion victim compensation fund for its devastation of the Gulf of Mexico over $10 million a year. The choice of Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg to manage the fund in June 2010 was widely lauded at the time, as he had dealt with the challenging tasks of managing the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and serving as Obama’s special master for TARP executive compensation. “I’m running an independent claims facility,” Feinberg told the world.

Since then, however, Feinberg has battled with the victims of BP’s toxic crime, trying to compel them to accept small checks in return for signing away any further right to challenge BP. He claimed that “the Gulf of Mexico should largely recover from BP’s oil spill by the end of next year,” in flat contradiction to all scientific evidence.

A federal judge rebuked Feinberg for claiming to be “independent” when he is in fact a paid contractor of BP, and now even the oil-friendly Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is outraged by the size of Feinberg’s take from the disgraced oil giant:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » BP Paying ‘Independent’ Disaster Claim Administrator $10 Million A Year.

Imperial Sunset: Wave of Awakening Hits American Satrapy

Muammar Gaddafi is not the only Arab tyrant using deadly violence against his people when they speak out against the destitution, repression and corruption that plague their country. In Iraq, the sectarian thugs put into power by American invaders are gunning down citizens in the streets.

The BBC reports that at least five people have shot and killed by security forces so far today, as the corrupt elite tries to keep the Arab Awakening from spilling into the war-ravaged land. But protests against the atrocious living conditions inflicted on most Iraqis by the client lords of the American occupation have broken out across the country.

Maliki, just like Gaddafi, has ordered troops into the streets to shut down the nation’s capital city and stifle popular discontent against his rule. And just like Gaddafi, he has blamed “al Qaeda” for organizing protests against his benevolent rule — without offering any proof at all for his wild assertions. He has, so far, refrained from actually bombing the populace like his Libyan counterpart, but the situation presents a curious contrast in reactions from the poobahs on the Potomac.

Full Story Here: Imperial Sunset: Wave of Awakening Hits American Satrapy.

Federally Funded ‘Missionaries’ Now Teach in Florida Public Schools

Government-funded missionaries in public schools? Project SOS has received over six and a half million dollars in federal funding, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) since 2002, to teach abstinence education in Florida public schools. The funding continues into the present – in September SOS received over $450,000 from HHS.

To begin with, should federal funding still be flowing to a sex ed approach proven to be largely or wholly ineffective, according to a 2007 federally commissioned large scale study by Mathematica Research?

Full Story Here: Federally Funded ‘Missionaries’ Now Teach in Florida Public Schools (Religious Right Watch).

Health Concerns From Fracking Prompts Texas Mayor to Leave Town

Hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), the process of pumping a toxic cocktail of chemicals and water underground to release natural gas, has gained a lot of attention in the East in the last year with actor Mark Ruffalo speaking out against it and bands of residents in New York and Pennsylvania demanding an end to the practice. This week we ran an interview with the director of Oscar-nominated Gasland, a film which helped to put the issue on the map for most people.

Despite industry claims that fracking is totally safe, people who live in gaslands feel a lot differently — even the mayor of one town. Calvin Tillman has been at the helm of Dish, Texas (population 200, gas wells 60) since 2007. He’s worked hard to regulate gas drilling in the area, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. Concerned for the health of his family, Tillman decided he had to move — a pretty tough decision when you’re the one running the town.

Full Story Here: Health Concerns From Fracking Prompts Texas Mayor to Leave Town | AlterNet.

Rep. Waters: $20 Billion Settlement Would Be Too Low

A top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee signaled that the broad outlines of a settlement to resolve mortgage-servicer abuses should push for penalties higher than the reported $20 billion figure.

On Thursday, the Journal reported that the Obama administration, federal regulators, and state attorneys general were ironing out broad outlines of a settlement to resolve abuses that first surfaced when foreclosure processes broke down last fall. The settlement could push for banks to write down loan balances for troubled borrowers, and several stakeholders in the talks have pushed for a settlement of more than $20 billion.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) issued a statement on Friday implying that such a figure would be too low.

Full Story Here: Rep. Waters: $20 Billion Settlement Would Be Too Low – Developments – WSJ.

MSNBC Anchor Bashes Obama For Not Supporting Wisconsin Unions

President Barack Obama’s response to labor protests in Wisconsin hasn’t been forceful enough for many political leaders in his party, but what’s likely the most scathing critique the president’s received for his actions (or lack thereof) came earlier today via

MSNBC’s Cenk Uygur. Uygur lambasted Obama for not showing more solidarity with the workers – even though back when he was running for president, he vowed he would.

Indeed, for Obama the most damning segment was a clip Uygur played of him campaigning in 2007, in which Obama said the following:

“If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain, when I’m in the White House I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself – I’ll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.”

Full Story Here: Barack Obama | Cenk Uygur Wisconsin Protests | Mediaite.

OPS: Talk is cheap, isn’t it Mr President.

Koch executives vow to ‘continue to fight’ in Wisconsin

In their first published remarks since a prank caller tricked Gov. Scott Walker into thinking he was speaking with big-bucks backer David Koch himself, Koch executives said that that hoax and nearly two weeks of Madison protests have only strengthened the Koch brothers’ determination to continue to use their billions to promote a national agenda that includes gutting the power of unions and deregulating industry.

Their statements in a Thursday night story by Robert Costa of the National Review Online, itself a bastion of conservatism, were defiant.

“With the Left trying to intimidate the Koch brothers to back off of their support for freedom and signaling to others that this is what happens if you oppose the administration and its allies, we have no choice but to continue to fight,” says Richard Fink, the executive vice president of Koch Industries. “We will not step back at all.”

Full Story Here: Koch executives vow to ‘continue to fight’ in Wisconsin.

The need to protect the internet from ‘astroturfing’ grows ever more urgent

George Monbiot

The tobacco industry does it, the US Air Force clearly wants to … astroturfing – the use of sophisticated software to drown out real people on web forums – is on the rise. How do we stop it?

Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren’t what they seem.

The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there’s a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them.

After I wrote about online astroturfing in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them.

Full Story Here: The need to protect the internet from ‘astroturfing’ grows ever more urgent | George Monbiot | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

Former president of MADD chapter busted for DUI

Officers in Gainesville, Florida recently arrested a former president of a Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) group, and charged her with driving under the influence of alcohol.

Police said Debra Oberlin, 48, failed a field sobriety test, registering .234 and .239 blood-alcohol level. The legal limit for driving in Florida is .08.

An officer pulled over Oberlin on Feb. 18 at 1:10 am, after she was seen “driving erratically on Northwest 19th Street, swerving and crossing lanes,” The Gainesville Sun reported.

Full Story Here: Former president of MADD chapter busted for DUI | The Raw Story.

Wisconsin vote sets up showdown with unions, budget

The Wisconsin state Assembly early on Friday passed a Republican plan to curb public sector union power, setting up a showdown with Senate Democrats who fled the state last week to prevent a vote.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators, from inside and outside the state, have converged on Madison in the past two weeks to fight the proposal, which they fear could encourage similar measures in other states and cripple the American labor movement. Another big protest is scheduled for Saturday.

After debating the proposal into a third consecutive night, the Republican-dominated Assembly abruptly ended all debate before dawn on Friday morning and approved the bill by a vote of 51 to 17.

Full Story Here: Wisconsin vote sets up showdown with unions, budget | The Raw Story.

FLASHBACK: Ronald Reagan Called Union Membership ‘One Of The Most Elemental Human Rights’

As the Main Street Movement of students, workers, and other middle class Americans erupts across America, many conservatives have invoked the legacy of former president Ronald Reagan to demand that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) not back down from his push to end collective bargaining for his state’s public employees. In a prank call with the Buffalo Beast’s Ian Murphy, where Murphy pretended to be right-wing billionare David Koch, Walker himself even fantasized about being just like Reagan.

Yet conservatives may be shocked to learn that their idol Reagan was once a union boss himself. Reagan was the only president in American history to have belonged to a union, the AFL-CIO affiliated Screen Actors Guild. And he even served six terms as president of the organized labor group. Additionally, Reagan was a staunch advocate for the collective bargaining rights of one of the world’s most famous and most influential trade unions, Poland’s Solidarity movement.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » FLASHBACK: Ronald Reagan Called Union Membership ‘One Of The Most Elemental Human Rights’.

After Philadelphia’s Budget Cuts Force Closure Of Nearest Fire Station, Two Children Die In Fire

All over the country, conservatives are complaining about the need to “cut government spending” at any cost, demonizing the government and its role in defending the public interest in the process. While truly taking aim at waste in government is an admirable goal, a recent story of out of Philadelphia provides a cautionary tale about why we must protect funding for certain social necessities.

As a part of Philadelphia’s cost-cutting measures, the city has been closing down certain fire stations on a rotating basis in a process of “rolling brownouts.” Since these brownouts began, city firefighters have protested the policy, saying that they would harm public safety. Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Loyd Ayers dismissed these warnings and defended the city’s austerity plans, saying that the city “will continue to respond to your call and tend to any and every emergency that may arise in an urgent and timely manner.”

Yet the firefighters were proven right when a tragedy struck earlier this week. On Tuesday, a fire broke out in a row home in the Olney section of the city. The closest fire station, which operates Engine 61, was closed that day due to the brownouts. Thus Engine 51, which was stationed further away from the site of the disaster, was dispatched to handle the situation. By the time two children were pulled from the ruins of the row home, it was too late, as both had tragically passed away.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » After Philadelphia’s Budget Cuts Force Closure Of Nearest Fire Station, Two Children Die In Fire.

After Leading Bush Admin Charge To Kill FOIA, Issa Issues First Subpoena On Obama FOIA

Yesterday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) issued his first subpoena of the Obama administration with a request that Department of Homeland Security employees “testify about the department’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) policies and practices.” The subpoena has already caused a controversy due to Issa’s partisan approach. According to the Washington Post, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking member on the committee, penned a letter demanding to know why Issa’s staff deliberately circumvented the Democrats on the committee. Homeland Security staffers had been willing to comply voluntarily, and Cummings charged, “all three subpoenas appear unnecessary at this time and could have been avoided if you had adequately consulted with me and other Members of the Committee.”

In January, Issa made clear that he intends to scrutinize logs of FOIA information, possibly revealing the identities of various journalists and citizens who have issued requests to the government. As the New York Times has noted, Issa’s “extraordinary” demand “worries some civil libertarians” and could have a chilling effect to journalists. While Issa’s spokesmen have brushed aside criticism and claimed that the chairman’s purpose is aimed at improving government responses to the FOIA process, Issa’s personal record on FOIA undercuts his credibility. During the Bush administration, Issa was a loyal partisan who repeatedly tried to crush attempts at expanding FOIA and greater government transparency, even at the DHS, his current subpoena target:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » After Leading Bush Admin Charge To Kill FOIA, Issa Issues First Subpoena On Obama FOIA.

Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.

Paul Krugman: :

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.

As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

Full Story Here: Shock Doctrine, U.S.A. – NYTimes.com.

Americans Oppose GOP Effort To Handcuff EPA, Polls Show

A strong majority of registered voters across the United States – including those in all 19 key congressional districts polled – oppose the U.S. House votes last week to block the Environmental Protection Agency from updating clean air safeguards and regulating the emissions that cause global climate change, according to major new Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey results released Wednesday by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

The survey results show that all 19 of the House members –- including Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and Tea Party leader Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) -– who supported blocking the EPA are out of step with their constituents.

Nationwide, about six out of 10 Americans (58 percent) -– including 55 percent of independents and roughly half (48 percent) of Republicans -– oppose the U.S. House vote to “block the EPA from limiting carbon dioxide pollution,” according to the survey of 784 registered voters conducted February 18-20, by PPP for NRDC, a prominent Washington environmental advocacy group. Additionally, more than two thirds of Americans (68 percent) –- including 54 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of independents –- say that the EPA should move ahead to “reduce carbon pollution without delay.”

Full Story Here: The Washington Current: Americans Oppose GOP Effort To Handcuff EPA, Polls Show.

Americans Oppose GOP Effort To Handcuff EPA, Polls Show

A strong majority of registered voters across the United States – including those in all 19 key congressional districts polled – oppose the U.S. House votes last week to block the Environmental Protection Agency from updating clean air safeguards and regulating the emissions that cause global climate change, according to major new Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey results released Wednesday by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

The survey results show that all 19 of the House members –- including Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and Tea Party leader Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) -– who supported blocking the EPA are out of step with their constituents.

Nationwide, about six out of 10 Americans (58 percent) -– including 55 percent of independents and roughly half (48 percent) of Republicans -– oppose the U.S. House vote to “block the EPA from limiting carbon dioxide pollution,” according to the survey of 784 registered voters conducted February 18-20, by PPP for NRDC, a prominent Washington environmental advocacy group. Additionally, more than two thirds of Americans (68 percent) –- including 54 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of independents –- say that the EPA should move ahead to “reduce carbon pollution without delay.”

Full Story Here: The Washington Current: Americans Oppose GOP Effort To Handcuff EPA, Polls Show.

Why Have Nations at All? The Case for Economic Borders

Ian Fletcher

Why have nations at all, economically speaking?

This question is provoked by the fact that every few months, without fail, somebody writes to me and asks why, if the protectionism I advocate between the U.S. and the rest of the world is rational, why isn’t it rational to have tariffs between the various states of the U.S.? And since it clearly doesn’t make any sense to have tariffs on trade between, say, California and Oregon, it follows that nations shouldn’t practice economic protectionism either.

Sounds good. In fact, some people proffer this argument as if it, on its own, settled all questions in the complex field of trade economics.

The first thing to understand is that valuing nations as economic units doesn’t entail the idea that every nation is necessarily an appropriate economic unit. We are lucky enough, here in the United States, to live in one that is, but many are not. This is why many of the great protectionist thinkers of the past were also advocates of policies that created larger economic units than were then existing. For example, the great German protectionist economist Friedrich List, whose ideas still influence policy from Berlin to Beijing today, was also an advocate of the German Zollverein or customs union. This helped solder the German principalities of his day (Prussia, etc.) into a single German economy. And Alexander Hamilton, the intellectual father of American capitalism (and protectionism) was also a strong advocate of national union upheld by a strong (if small) central government.

So far, so good. But sometimes, the above argument is presented more radically. People argue that it’s irrational (or even evil) to care about national economic well-being at all, because globalization has rendered nations economically irrelevant (or outdated constructs that do nothing useful and just start wars).

The odd thing about this idea is that it tends to come from two otherwise-opposite ideological quarters: from the libertarian far right, for whom individuals are the only thing that matters, and from the universalist far left, for whom Humanity as a whole is the only thing that matters. For purely ideological reasons, neither of these groups have much use for nations, so they assume that the modern economy hasn’t, either.

Therefore, it’s well-worth reviewing why it’s a normal and reasonable thing for nations to exist as economic units, and for us to care about their well-being. We should neither expect nor want them to go away. And this is a matter of economics, not politics–let alone nationalist ideology, though you can believe in that (or not) if you want to.

The recent debt crisis in Europe illuminated in stark fashion some of the key facts that make national economies still relevant and economic borders still valuable.

In case the reader isn’t familiar with the story, what basically happened was that, when the euro currency was created in 1999, this gave all the governments of Europe roughly the same ability to borrow money. Granted, there were still some minor differences, but nothing like the differences (measured by the different interest rates on the bonds issued by different nations) that prevailed before. Previously, when the government of Greece, for example, wanted to borrow money, it either had to borrow in drachmas (and was thus limited by its own national savings rate) or borrow in a foreign currency like dollars or deutschemarks and take the risk that exchange rates would move against it. So borrowing was constrained (imperfectly) along the lines of ability to repay.

Then came the euro, which erased all those squiggly lines that used to divide up the European currency map and gave American tourists such a fascinating variety of pictures of dead politicians to bring home at the end of their vacations. And what happened? The result was a borrowing binge in the less-creditworthy nations, which had suddenly been granted access to money on (close to) the same terms as financially-prudent export powerhouses like Germany.

Uh oh.

In some countries, like Greece, this resulted in excessive government borrowing. In others, like Spain, it resulted in a real-estate bubble as cheap mortgage credit (whose price was calibrated off of the rate the government can borrow at) flooded the country.

Then, of course, there was a bust in all these countries. Like our own 2008 financial crisis, it generated a lot of secondary turbulence (and considerably more street riots) and exposed a lot of the previous decade’s apparent prosperity for a sham built on a house of cards called debt.

The lesson? Europe would probably have been better off keeping a lot of its old national currencies. These don’t stop international flows of money, of course, but they do impose a cost, in the form of exchange rates, when you move wealth from one country to another. They are a meaningful but not prohibitive barrier.

The lesson here is that treating all national economies like they are the same–by dropping the currency barrier–doesn’t work when they are not the same. An absence of economic barriers presumes economic similarity on both sides of the barrier. The barrier doesn’t have to (indeed shouldn’t) be absolute–you can exchange one currency for another at a bank–but it is still a meaningful constraint. It makes things you shouldn’t do expensive.

The currencies of different nations should have different values, to reflect the fact that the economies whose output makes these currencies worth something are meaningfully different. Different economies have different productivity levels, different levels of accumulated wealth, different propensities to save rather than consume, different labor laws and thus personal behavior, and so on. Treating these different national economies like they are the same just invites economically irrational behavior–like borrowing money you can’t afford to repay.

Removing the currency barrier between disparate national economies also deprives them of the ability to fix certain problems by adjusting their currency value so that it accurately reflects their economic condition. Having different currencies functions something like a universal joint in engineering: it transmits torque, but it’s also flexible. As economist Paul Krugman recently explained it,

Imagine that you’re a country that, like Spain today, recently saw wages and prices driven up by a housing boom, which then went bust. Now you need to get those costs back down. But getting wages and prices to fall is tough: nobody wants to be the first to take a pay cut, especially without some assurance that prices will come down, too. Two years of intense suffering have brought Irish wages down to some extent, although Spain and Greece have barely begun the process. It’s a nasty affair, and as we’ll see later, cutting wages when you’re awash in debt creates new problems. If you still have your own currency, however, you wouldn’t have to go through the protracted pain of cutting wages: you could just devalue your currency — reduce its value in terms of other currencies — and you would effect a de facto wage cut… In the current crisis, it took Ireland two years of severe unemployment to achieve about a 5 percent reduction in average wages. But in 1993 a devaluation of the Irish punt brought an instant 10 percent reduction in Irish wages measured in German currency.

But you need the currency barrier between nations for it all to work. At bottom, this means accepting the fact that national economies are different, and function best when this differentness is recognized, not denied.

The creation of the euro was predicated on the idea that having a common currency would of itself cause these nations’ economies to become similar. On paper, this is, of course, perfectly logical, in the sense that if the European economies had converged to similarity, these problems would not have occurred. But they didn’t. National economies are not paper abstractions that can be manipulated at will. The fact that Germany, for example, has the economy it has, and Greece the economy it has, is rooted in decades (if not centuries) of economic history, different political systems, different cultures, and other things that just don’t go away at the stroke of a pen. Even if you leave out all the political and cultural factors, national economies are still very different simply qua economies: they have different skills, tend to specialize and excel in different industries, have billions of dollars committed to different industries, have their particular drawbacks and flaws, etc. For example, as Michael Porter of Harvard Business School explains it,

Competitive advantage is created and sustained through a highly localized process. Differences in national economic structures, values, cultures, institutions, and histories contribute profoundly to competitive success. The role of the home nation seems to be as strong as or stronger than ever. While globalization of competition might appear to make the nation less important, instead it seems to make it more so.

So contrary to the endlessly-repeated myth of a world converging on one big economic sameness, economic diversity (a concept that is poorly understood compared to, say, ethnic or cultural diversity) is a fact of life — and almost certain to remain so. Economic policies that assume a homogeneous world, whether they take the shape of a pan-European currency or global free trade, are an attempt to defy this basic fact. And the cost of failure runs into the trillions.

What’s the connection to trade? It is that free trade is like having a shared currency: it makes it impossible to draw the distinctions that sometimes need to be drawn between different economies. This isn’t a matter of cutting off all trade, any more than having separate currencies means you can’t exchange one currency for another. But it does mean there should be trade barriers that reflect the real (and quite legitimate) differences between national economies.

Let’s start with an example that’s easy to understand, one quite familiar from complaints by the unions and the environmental movement: what if environmental or worker-safety standards are higher in one nation than in another? Then having free trade is obviously an open temptation to just move production from the former to the latter. It may not literally be a race to the bottom, i.e. fast and reaching the absolute worst standard, but it sure produces pressure in that direction.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to economic differences. What if nations differ not in their environmental standards, but in, say, their propensity to save vs. consume their income? For example, the fact that the U.S. currently practices free trade means that, because we have a high preference for immediate consumption as opposed to savings, we are gradually selling off our country and going into debt, thanks to the trade deficit. This is the well-nigh inevitable result of having free trade between a country with a very low savings rate and one with a very high one (like China). If we were just trading with ourselves, we’d be going into debt to ourselves, so our overall net worth wouldn’t change. But because foreign debt is involved, our national net worth can be reduced this way.

It’s important to understand that the above problems are not defects in the functioning of the free market. They represent the free market doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. But this doesn’t mean these problems are not problems.

What are the implications?

In the first case above (the environment), the implication is to tax imports from nations with lower environmental standards.

In the second case (consumption vs. saving), the implication is to tax U.S. imports sufficiently to bring our trade into balance.

In technical economic terms, the way to say all this is that the whole world is not an optimal free-trade area. Optimal free-trade areas haven’t had a lot of attention lately from economists (most of whom believe in free trade simpliciter as the best option), but optimal currency areas are a reasonably well-developed concept, the key thinker here being Robert Mundell of Columbia University. What economists need to take more seriously is the similarities in the underlying reasoning between the two.

The ideal free-trade area may be quite large. And the ideal tariff between many nations may not be that high. But the ideal free-trade area isn’t the entire world, and the ideal tariff isn’t always zero.

There are plenty of other reasons to maintain national economic borders. One of them, which is increasing in importance in our increasingly high-tech world, is that there is an unavoidable publicly-financed component to innovation. Despite the Silicon Valley myth of rugged individualism (which I hear all the time here in San Francisco), the reality is that government inputs to major high-tech industries from semiconductors to aircraft have been huge. And it’s hard to justify spending money on supporting, say, basic scientific research if that research is just going to be commercialized abroad. Worse, without capturing its value here, we won’t have the tax base to pay for the next round of research.

All of the above is very complex and, of course, endlessly debatable. But what drives me up the wall is when people try to smuggle “one world” economic assumptions into the debate while pretending they’re doing nothing at all. Economics should never be used to “prove” the inappropriateness of caring about national economic well-being–something it does not do. People who reject the national economy (or the national economic interest) should do so openly, not hide behind theoretical constructs that do this on the sly. (By the way, these theoretical constructs are the same “efficient market” thinking that conned us into the policies that led to the 2008 financial crisis, if that helps the reader evaluate them.)

Globally, for good or ill, the nation-state is still where the buck of political legitimacy stops. Higher and lower political entities, from Kansas to the United Nations, enjoy legitimacy only because nation-states have given it to them. So even if other instruments for controlling the world economy can be developed over time, the nation-state will be the bottleneck for developing them. A blanket rejection of even the mildest economic nationalism simply hands a blank check to multinational corporations, foreign powers, and (distorted) market forces to do as they please. It doesn’t result in the world all holding hands and creating some free-market utopia.

Economist Herman Daly of the University of Maryland, best known for his work on ecological economics, once pointed out that with regard to all these problems,

Free trade makes it very hard to deal with the root causes at a national level, which is the only level at which effective social controls over the economy exist.

Because we have a national government, because Americans care about what happens to their economy, and because it is the national debate on the question that will bring changes or fail to, our trade problems will be fixed in Washington–or not at all.

Ian Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank founded in 1933 and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.

Food prices: Food costs will increase 4% in 2011, USDA says in raising its projection

The agency just last month had forecast an increase of 2% to 3%, then the prices for farm goods jumped.

Food costs will rise as much as 4% this year, more than the 2% to 3% estimated last month, after a surge in prices for farm goods, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday.

Forecasts were raised for meat, eggs, cooking oils, fruits and vegetables, sweets and cereals and baked goods as food inflation accelerated at the fastest pace since reaching a 28-year high in 2008, the USDA said in a report. Higher costs for corn, the primary feed for pigs and chickens, may boost pork prices as much as 6.5% and eggs 4.5%.

“Higher prices for crops and livestock will again pressure food prices,” as increased commodity costs work their way through the food-supply chain toward consumers, chief economist Joe Glauber said.

Full Story Here: Food prices: Food costs will increase 4% in 2011, USDA says in raising its projection – latimes.com.

Unions: Sunday Shows Are Shutting Us Out

Though thousands of Americans have turned out this week to show solidarity with Wisconsin’s public employees and oppose a threat to their collective bargaining rights, union officials say they have not been able to place a labor voice on this Sunday’s editions of the weekly public-affairs TV shows. The shows’ producers, they complain, are shutting out the workers’ perspective.

A union official told The Huffington Post that when none of the Sunday shows’ producers reached out to them to book a labor representative this week, several unions started to pitch the shows with affected workers and local and national leaders who they felt could discuss the protests. The official said the response from the shows was essentially “thanks, but no thanks.”

“If you’re a Sunday show and there are labor fights going on for two weeks, if you can just book … Chris Christie, why would you actually go out and get somebody who is actually involved in this? That would be work!” snarked the official, adding, “Everybody’s been pushing, and everybody’s been shut down.”

Full Story Here: Unions: Sunday Shows Are Shutting Us Out.

Study: US wasted billions in Iraq, Afghanistan

Corruption and waste has cost the US government billions of reconstruction dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an official study on wartime contracting released on Thursday.

The report found that “criminal behavior and blatant corruption” were responsible for much of the waste related to the nearly $200 billion spent since 2002 on US reconstruction and other projects in the two countries.

It did not give exact figures, but cited the Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report to Congress in January that found efforts were at clear risk because of poor planning and insufficient oversight.

Full Story Here: Study: US wasted billions in Iraq, Afghanistan | The Raw Story.

Court agrees to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julain Assange to Sweden

A British court agreed on Thursday to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning over sex crimes, dismissing claims the move would breach his human rights.

Swedish prosecutors want to question Assange about allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denies, made by two WikiLeaks volunteers during his time in Sweden last August.

“I have specifically considered whether the physical or mental condition of the defendant is such that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him,” Judge Howard Riddle told London’s top-security Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court.

“I am satisfied that extradition is compatible with the defendant’s (European) Convention rights, I must order Mr Assange be extradited to Sweden.”

Full Story Here: Court agrees to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julain Assange to Sweden over sex allegations | The Raw Story.

US Uncut.

US Uncut is a new movement inspired by UK Uncut, the anti-austerity movement that has swept the UK

US Uncut is about taking action against unnecessary and unfair cuts to public services across the US. Washington’s proposed budget for the coming year sends a clear message: The wrath of budget cuts will fall upon the shoulders of hard-working Americans.

Obama seeks to trim $1.1 trillion from the budget in the next ten years by cutting or eliminating over 200 federal programs, many dedicated to social services and education. For instance, it cuts in half funding to subsidize heating for low-income Americans; limits an expansion of the Pell grant program for students; and decreases Environmental Protection Agency funding by over 12%.

Meanwhile, Republicans are using their new House majority to slash spending even more brutally. The GOP has made it clear that they are bent on raiding funds for Social Security, Medicare, education; determined to kill health care reform; and gut needed investments in infrastructure, climate change and job creation, at a time when America needs it most.

These cuts will come on top of very painful austerity measures made at the state-level across our nation–-worth hundreds of billions–since the recession began.

In short, budget cuts demonstrate that Washington has abandoned ordinary Americans.

But there is an alternative: Make corporate tax avoiders pay.

Full Story Here: US Uncut.

After Progressive Pressure, Sunday Show Will Feature Labor Leader

Today, ThinkProgress and others noted that the Sunday morning news shows did not feature any labor movement leaders or members last week — and none had been booked for this weekend — despite the ongoing protests in a host of states. A Main Street Movement of workers, students, and lawmakers has come together to push back on conservatives attempting to strip collective bargaining rights from public employees, yet the Sunday shows hadn’t see fit to include any of their voices, instead opting for a slew of conservative commentators and Republican governors. However, ThinkProgress has learned that NBC’s Meet the Press today booked AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka for Sunday. We applaud NBC’s decision and encourage the other networks (ABC, CBS, Fox News, and CNN) to also give a voice to working people.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » After Progressive Pressure, Sunday Show Will Feature Labor Leader.

A World Going Hungry

In an era of mass consumption in the West, the developing world is entering its second major hunger crisis in three years, with new figures from the World Bank showing food price hikes have forced 44 million people into economic hardship since last June.

More than one billion people, a sixth of the world’s population, now face chronic hunger and the situation is likely to worsen this year, with experts such as David Nabarro, coordinator of the U.N. Secretary-General’s High- Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, warning food prices are on an “upward trend”.

“Somewhere in the region of two billion households are earning less than two dollars per day and spending somewhere around three quarters of their income on food,” Geneva-based Nabarro told reporters in New York via video-link on Friday.

Full Story Here: A World Going Hungry – IPS ipsnews.net.

Our Economic Pain Is Coming from Big Industry CEOs, Not Public Employees’ Unions

Pay in the private sector has been stagnant or falling for decades, health insurance coverage has been dropping, and traditional pensions have all but disappeared.

Conservative think-tanks and politicians like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have been leading an attack on public-sector workers. The crux of their argument is that the economy is a mess and a large part of the reason is that public employees are overpaid.

On closer inspection, the evidence suggests a different culprit: private-sector employers. The problem is not that public-sector pay and benefits are out of control. The problem is that pay in the private sector has been stagnant or falling, health insurance coverage has been dropping, and traditional pensions have all but disappeared.

Back in the late 1970s, public- and private-sector jobs were not that different. About 70 percent of private-sector workers had health insurance through their jobs. Public-sector workers were a bit more likely to have coverage than private-sector workers –about 75 percent at the local level, 80 percent at the state level, and 85 percent at the federal level. Then, as now, this largely reflected that, on average, public employees were older and more likely to be college-educated than private-sector workers.

Full Story Here: Our Economic Pain Is Coming from Big Industry CEOs, Not Public Employees’ Unions | Economy | AlterNet.

Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators

The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.

The Runaway General: The Rolling Stone Profile of Stanley McChrystal That Changed History

The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as “information operations” at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation.

Full Story Here: Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators | Rolling Stone Politics.

White House meets lobbyists off campus

Caught between their boss’ anti-lobbyist rhetoric and the reality of governing, President Barack Obama’s aides often steer meetings with lobbyists to a complex just off the White House grounds — and several of the lobbyists involved say they believe the choice of venue is no accident.

It allows the Obama administration to keep these lobbyist meetings shielded from public view — and out of Secret Service logs kept on visitors to the White House and later released to the public.

“They’re doing it on the side. It’s better than nothing,” said immigration reform lobbyist Tamar Jacoby, who has attended meetings at the nearby Jackson Place complex and believes the undisclosed gatherings are better than none.

Full Story Here: White House meets lobbyists off campus – Chris Frates – POLITICO.com.

Conyers Reintroduces “Expanded & Improved Medicare For All” Bill (HR 676)

Washington DC- Representative John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), a long-time national leader for non-profit publicly-financed universal health care, today introduced H.R. 676, “The Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act.” The single-payer universal health care bill, which has been introduced since 2003, has 25 original cosponsors, and has sparked a growing national movement in support of the bill. The bill had 85 cosponsors in the 111th Congress, and has the support of over 17,000 doctors, nurses, organized labor, and many activists across the country.

“I am so pleased to announce that we have reintroduced H.R. 676, ‘The Improved and Expanded Medicare For All Act’ in the 112th Congress with 25 original cosponsors,” said Conyers. “The bill is almost identical to the single payer universal health care bill we introduced in the 111th Congress, but we have expanded the benefits package to include coverage of medically necessary oral surgery, nutritional, and dietary health care services, said Conyers.

“President Obama and the Democratic Congress passed historic health reform last year. To his credit, President Obama stated in his 2011 State of the Union Address that he is open to making changes to the law, so that it can be improved and strengthened. This presents a unique opportunity for supporters of improved Medicare For All to come together and work in a constructive way towards transitioning our for-profit and costly health care system to a high-quality, simple, and cost-effective improved Medicare For All program.

Full Story Here: Conyers Reintroduces “Expanded & Improved Medicare For All” Bill (HR 676) – Healthcare-NOW!.

America’s Trade Policy Is Insanity

Insanity is said to be defined as repeating the same actions and expecting different results. Now that NAFTA is a proven failure, the decision-making by the Obama administration to push the South Korean Free Trade Agreement can only be defined as insane.

This trade deal is rife with provisions that will harm the American economy. Non-tariff barriers, such as the value-added tax and the promise of a government audit for any Korean citizen who buys an American vehicle are not addressed by this agreement. This agreement will do little to help America sell more cars to Korea, which currently sells us 615,000 each year compared to the paltry 7,000 we export to that nation.

Ian Fletcher, author of the book ‘Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why’, wrote in a recent article, “The Obama administration doesn’t seem to grasp this. Apparently, it’s just fine for America to sell Korea beef and they can sell us cars. Like a well-behaved colony, it’s our job to be a captive market and supplier of raw materials.”

Full Story Here: America’s Trade Policy Is Insanity | Economy In Crisis.

Budget Cuts Will Force Hundreds of Thousands of Layoffs

With state budgets under extreme duress, many governments are expected to layoff hundreds of thousands of workers, with remaining state workers facing pay cuts and benefit reductions, all a result of failed taxation and trade policies.

‘Free’ trade has allowed goods to enter the country with no regulation, and has made it extremely difficult for domestic sellers to stay in business, depriving local governments of tax revenue generated by this production. This has led to the prospect of mass layoffs and pay cuts.

Many schools are funded by property taxes, and as home values continue to plummet, that funding is expected to be hit hard. The end result: hundreds of thousands of people will be out of work in a job market that more than one million people gave up on in December and January. Students will be forced to endure larger class sizes, less qualified teachers and the elimination of elective programs such as art, music and physical education.

Full Story Here: Budget Cuts Will Force Hundreds of Thousands of Layoffs | Economy In Crisis.

Republicans Push Back Against Consumer Safety Law

The legislation would implement a searchable database that would allow consumers to search products and the injuries that they have caused. It would also require third-party testing on children’s toys to determine the amount of lead they contain.

Republicans and manufacturers of children’s toys are trying to stifle new consumer product safety regulations, according to a report in The New York Times.

After a rash of consumer products were found to be contaminated with toxic chemicals in 2008, lawmakers passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

The legislation would implement a searchable database that would allow consumers to search products and the injuries that they have caused. It would also require third-party testing on children’s toys to determine the amount of lead they contain.

Full Story Here: Republicans Push Back Against Consumer Safety Law | Economy In Crisis.

Matt Taibbi: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”

Nobody goes to jail,” “writes Matt Taibbi in his the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine. “This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth.” Here is the complete interview from which we played an excerpt on our Feb. 22 show. Taibbi explains how the American people have been defrauded by Wall Street investors and how the financial crisis is connected to the situations in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Matt Taibbi. But before I do, let me read a sentence from a recent paper by Dean Baker, who concludes, “Most of the pension shortfall using the current methodology is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today.”

And this—he quotes David Cay Johnston of tax.com: “The average Wisconsin pension is $24,500 a year, which is hardly lavish. But what is stunning is that 15% of the money contributed to the fund each year is going to Wall Street in fees,” which is why we now ask the question, “Why isn’t Wall Street in jail?”

Full Story Here: Matt Taibbi: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” (Complete Interview).

Americans favor union bargaining rights by 2-1 margin: poll

Americans decisively support laws ensuring the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions by a nearly two-to-one margin, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll.

Sixty-one percent said they oppose legislation stripping those rights in their states, as compared to only 33 percent who said they favor such laws, a striking discrepancy that shows public opinion firmly on one side of a growing national fight. Six percent had no opinion.

The wide margin could influence the outcome of a now high-profile skirmish over Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s new budget measure curtailing the ability of public employee unions to collectively bargain for salaries and benefits.

Full Story Here: Americans favor union bargaining rights by 2-1 margin: poll | The Raw Story.

DEA to legalize marijuana only for ‘Big Pharma,’ NORML claims

A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proposal to reclassify the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana as a Schedule III substance would allow pharmaceutical companies to market the drug while still penalizing common recreational use, according to marijuana law reform advocates.

The main psychoactive chemical in marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), is currently a Schedule I substance within the US Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive schedule with the greatest criminal penalties.

In November 2010, the DEA proposed reclassifying dronabinol, a synthetic THC, as a Schedule III substance, which would place it among substances such as hydrocodone and allow it to be dispensed with a written or oral prescription.

Full Story Here: DEA to legalize marijuana only for ‘Big Pharma,’ NORML claims | The Raw Story.

GA GOP Rep. Would Force Women To Prove Miscarriage Happened Naturally Or Face Felony Charges

Georgia state Rep. Bobby Franklin (R) has made a name for himself by introducing far-right extremist bills. He has introduced legislation barring the state from requiring vaccinations, eliminating income taxes and replacing them with nothing, and requiring state taxpayers to only pay in gold or silver.

Now, he has introduced what may be his most offensive and extreme bill yet. Last week he unveiled HB 1, which would, as the parenting blog Babble explains, “require proof that a miscarriage occured naturally.” If proof could not be provided, the mother could face “felony charges”:

State Rep. Bobby Franklin of Georgia introduced a bill in his state last week that, if enacted, would require proof that a miscarriage occurred naturally. If a woman can’t prove that her miscarriage–or spontaneous abortion–occurred without intervention, she could face felony charges.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » GA GOP Rep. Would Force Women To Prove Miscarriage Happened Naturally Or Face Felony Charges.

GOP Govs. Daniels And Kasich Defend Dem Lawmakers’ Walkout As ‘Perfectly Legitimate’

All week, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and national Republicans have been attacking Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators for leaving the state in order to block passage of Walker’s union-busting bill. Walker has sent the state police after the lawmakers, and today even said the senators may be committing “an ethics code violation” or even “a felony.” There is also an effort to repeal the decamped Wisconsin senators. Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers in Indiana have fled their state to stop a different union-busting measure there.

As ThinkProgress noted, this tactic has a long history in American politics — Republican Abraham Lincoln even once jumped out a window while employing it. But the departed Democrats of Wisconsin and Indiana have more contemporary GOP defenders — two of Walker’s closest allies. Yesterday, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) defended his state’s vanished senators, saying their fleeing is “perfectly legitimate“:

Daniels, a Republican, said earlier Tuesday he supported the Democrats’ right to deny Republicans a quorum to do business and the rights of labor unions to protest at the Statehouse.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » GOP Govs. Daniels And Kasich Defend Dem Lawmakers’ Walkout As ‘Perfectly Legitimate’.

Wisconsin protests: Indiana deputy AG fired for urging police to ‘use live ammunition’

A deputy attorney general in Indiana has been sacked after calling for the use of live ammunition against union protesters in Wisconsin .

Jeffrey Cox made the inflammatory statement via his Twitter account.

He was responding to a posting by liberal magazine Mother Jones that said riot police could sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin Capitol building where they were protesting labour legislation.

Full Story Here: Wisconsin protests: Indiana deputy AG fired for urging police to ‘use live ammunition’ | Mail Online.

Fake “Koch brother” calls up Wisconsin governor

Video: :

Scott Walker chats with a liberal prankster pretending to be a billionaire Koch brother, reveals union-busting plan

Ian Murphy, editor of the Buffalo Beast, just did something wonderful. Murphy, pretending to be billionaire industrialist and secretive conservative political activist David Koch, called Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, currently in the midst of attempting to crush the public employees’ unions. “Koch” got through to Walker (who hasn’t been taking calls from the Democratic state Senate minority leader). He taped the call and put it online.

So Walker will happily take a call from a Koch brother. He says that he considered “planting some troublemakers” among the protesters. He is convinced that everyone is on his side. Like most people who only watch Fox, he has a skewed impression of the popularity of his union-crushing proposals. (His plan is, nationally, roundly unpopular. Except on Fox.)

When “Koch” calls Mika Brzezinski “a real piece of ass,” Walker does not respond by saying something awful, which is a bit of a disappointment.

Full Story Here: Fake “Koch brother” calls up Wisconsin governor – War Room – Salon.com.