Archive for August, 2011

The Dangerous Reagan Cult

Ronald Reagan’s anti-government philosophy inspires Tea Party extremists to oppose any revenue increase, even from closing loopholes on corporate jets. Democrats try the spin that “even Reagan” showed flexibility on debt and taxes. But Robert Parry says it is the “Reagan cult” that is at the heart of America’s crisis.

By Robert Parry

In the debt-ceiling debate, both Republicans and Democrats wanted Ronald Reagan on their side. Republicans embraced the 40th president’s disdain for government and fondness for tax cuts, while Democrats noted that “even Reagan” raised the debt limit many times and accepted some tax increases.

But Reagan – possibly more than any political leader – deserves the blame for the economic/political mess that the United States now finds itself in. He was the patriarch for virtually every major miscalculation that the country has made over the past three decades.

Full Story Here: The Dangerous Reagan Cult | Consortiumnews.

Did Tenet Hide Key 9/11 Info?

With few exceptions – like some salacious rumor about the Kennedy family – the mainstream U.S. news media has little interest in historical stories. Such was the case when an ex-White House terrorism official accused a former CIA director of withholding information that might have prevented a 9/11 attack, Ray McGovern reports.

By Ray McGovern

Bulletin for those of you who get your information only from the New York Times, the Washington Post and other outlets of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM): Former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has accused ex-CIA Director George Tenet of denying him and others access to intelligence that could have thwarted the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11.

Deliberately withholding critical intelligence from those who need it, and can act on it, is — at the least — gross dereliction of duty.

The more so if keeping the White House promptly and fully informed is at the top of your job jar, as it was for Director of Central Intelligence Tenet. And yet that is precisely the charge Clarke has leveled at the former DCI.

In an interview aired on Aug. 11 on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado, Clarke charges that Tenet and two other senior CIA officials, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, deliberately withheld information about two of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 — al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The two had entered the United States more than a year before the 9/11 attacks.

Full Story Here: Did Tenet Hide Key 9/11 Info? | Consortiumnews.

Why the Mainstream Media Are Clueless About the Religious Right | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet

Though it has shaped American politics for the last 40 years, the religious right still baffles reporters.

Every four years, just as a presidential campaign kicks up, legions of media types who make their living outside the right-wing echo chamber emerge as a militia of Margaret Meads, descending on flyover country, trying to make sense of that exotic phenomenon, the religious right. In the end, those who actually get it are few.

From the attitudes shown by media toward the religious right, you’d never know that more than one-quarter of the U.S. population identify as evangelicals, according to a 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and among white self-identified evangelicals, 62 percent told Pew in 2006 that they believe the Bible to be the literal word of God.

These, by and large, are the people who determine the outcome of the Republican presidential primary, thanks to the early stacking of states heavily populated by evangelicals, and the propensity of most evangelicals to align with the Republican Party. And yet, we who cover these races often know very little about the voters whose person-on-the-street interviews they’re recording, except to know that these people are very different from us in their view of the world. So as everyday doctrines come to light in one or another campaign incident, the media either find themselves aghast at the implications, or simply choose to ignore them.

Full Story Here: Why the Mainstream Media Are Clueless About the Religious Right | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet.

The President’s Bold Jobs Bill (Maybe)

Robert Reich :-:

The President is sounding like a fighter these days. He even says he’ll be proposing a jobs bill in September – and if Republicans don’t go along he’ll fight for it through Election Day (or beyond).

That’s a start. But read the small print and all he’s talked about so far is extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits (good, but small potatoes), ratifying the Columbia and South Korea free trade agreements (not necessarily a job-creating move), and creating an infrastructure bank.

An infrastructure bank might be helpful, depending on its size.

Which is the real question hovering over the entire putative jobs bill – its size.

Some of the President’s political advisors have been pushing for small-bore initiatives that they believe might have a chance of getting through the Republican just-say-no House. They also figure policy miniatures won’t give aspiring GOP candidates more ammunition to tar Obama as a big-government liberal.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (The President’s Bold Jobs Bill (Maybe)).

REPORT: Texas Ranks Dead Last In Total Job Creation, Accounting For Labor Force Growth

Data for this post was compiled by Matt Separa, Research Assistant with the Economic Policy Team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), since he launched his presidential campaign on Saturday, has paraded around the stat that “since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America.” “Now think about that. We’re home to less than 10 percent of the population in America, but 40 percent of all the new jobs were created in that state,” Perry says.

This stat leaves out a lot of the story. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has promoted the number, but “it acknowledges that the number comes out different depending on whether one compares Texas to all states or just to states that are adding jobs.” Between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace in Massachusetts than in Texas.

In fact, “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” The unemployment rate in Texas has been steadily increasing throughout the recession, and went from 7.7 to 8.2 percent while the state was supposedly creating 40 percent of all the new jobs in the U.S.

Full Story Here: REPORT: Texas Ranks Dead Last In Total Job Creation, Accounting For Labor Force Growth | ThinkProgress.

Don’t buy the “Democrats are powerless” myth – Democratic Party – Salon.com

By David Sirota :-:

Obama and his party cling to the familiar narrative that their hands are tied. They’re wrong

“Obama’s aides say the president has a responsibility to explore policies that have a chance of passage, rather than merely making a political statement.” — Washington Post, 8/10/11

One of the most persistent memes in modern politics, perfectly embodied by the above quote, is what I’ve long called the Innocent Bystander Fable. It goes something like this: Democrats really want to do X, but they can’t because it’s “politically impossible” not “where the country is” and/or doesn’t “have a chance of passing.”

The idea is that even though Democratic politicians occupy the most powerful offices in the world, and even though X usually represents a policy 80 percent of rank-and-file voters support, Democrats are nonetheless powerless bystanders before political events rather than shapers of such happenings. In response, we are expected to nod our heads in agreement (as so many blind partisans do), somehow forgetting that these politicians are paid hefty taxpayer-funded salaries not to be bystanders, but to actually use the authority they have to make — or at least seriously advocate — change.

Full Story Here: Don’t buy the “Democrats are powerless” myth – Democratic Party – Salon.com.

Child Poverty Rate Climbs in 38 States

Over the last decade, child poverty surged in 38 states and erased many of the gains in child well-being made in the last 20 years, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

In most states, the federal government considers a family of four living on less than $22,350 a year “poor.” According to the report, child poverty increased 18 percent between 2000 and 2009 and today shapes the lives of nearly 15 million children.

The findings are the latest in a series of studies that reveal the real impact of the recession on family-level finances in the country, including stagnating and declining wages during the 2000s. These sharp changes in individual financial security may ultimately influence the nation’s future.

Full Story Here: Child Poverty Rate Climbs in 38 States.

Do You Realize That The Government Is Still Paying Banks Not To Lend…?

One of the most outrageous “open secrets” of U.S. government policy these days is that the Federal Reserve is still paying big banks not to lend money.

And it’s doing that while screwing average Americans who have been responsible and lived within their means.

Huh?

Seriously:

The Federal Reserve is quietly continuing with one of the many outrageous bank-bailout programs it initiated during the financial crisis–the one in which it pays big banks interest on their “excess reserves.”

Full Story Here: OUTRAGE OF THE DAY: Do You Realize That The Government Is Still Paying Banks Not To Lend…?.

Bachmann Staffer Arrested for Terrorism in Uganda in 2006 –

The charges were dropped after he spent more than a month in prison. Now he’s rallying Bachmann’s faith-based support and prepping for a movie about his ordeal.

The evangelical organizer who helped Michele Bachmann win the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa Saturday was previously charged with terrorism in Uganda after being arrested for possession of assault rifles and ammunition in February 2006, just days before Uganda’s first multi-party elections in 20 years.

Peter E. Waldron spent 37 days in the Luriza Prison outside Kampala, where he says he was tortured, after being arrested along with six Congolese and Ugandan nationals for the weapons, which were described variously in news reports as having been found in his bedroom or a closet in his home. The charges, which could have led to life in prison, were dropped in March 2006 after a pressure campaign by Waldron’s friends and colleagues and what Waldron says was the intervention of the Bush administration. He was released and deported from the east African nation, along with the Congolese. On Saturday, Waldron told The Atlantic in Ames that he was a staffer for Bachmann and responsible for her faith-based organizing both in Iowa and South Carolina. But he also declined repeatedly to give his name.

Asked about Waldron’s role and background, Alice Stewart, the press secretary for the Bachmann for President campaign, replied in an email: “Michele’s faith is an important part of her life and Peter did a tremendous job with our faith outreach in Iowa. We are fortunate to have him on our team and look forward to having him expanding his efforts in several states.”

Full Story Here: Bachmann Staffer Arrested for Terrorism in Uganda in 2006 – Garance Franke-Ruta – Politics – The Atlantic.

OBAMA APPOINTS MONSANTO’S VICE PRESIDENT AS SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE COMMISSIONER AT THE FDA

Folks, it just keeps getting more insane.

Michael Taylor was just appointed senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA. This is the same man that was in charge of FDA policy when GMO’s were allowed into the US food supply without undergoing a single test to determine their safety. He “had been Monsanto’s attorney before becoming policy chief at the FDA [and then] he became Monsanto’s Vice President and chief lobbyist. This month [he] became the senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA. He is now America’s food safety czar. This is no joke.”

Here’s the full story:
You’re Appointing Who? Please Obama, Say It’s Not So!
http://www.responsibletechnology.org/blog/858

The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history has just been made the US food safety czar. This is no joke.

The Pentagon’s Spending Spree

China just launched a refitted Ukrainian aircraft carrier from the 1990s on its first test run — and that’s what the only projected “great power” enemy of the U.S. has to offer for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier task forces to cruise the seven seas and plans to keep that many through 2045. Like so much else, when it comes to the American military, all comparisons are ludicrous. In any normal sense, the United States stands alone in military terms. Its expenditures make up almost 50% of global military spending; it dominates the global arms market; and it has countless more bases, pilotless drones, military bands, and almost anything else military you’d care to mention than does any other power.

In other words, comparisons can’t be made. The minute you try, you’re off the charts. And yet, in purely practical terms, when you take a shot at measuring what the overwhelming investment of American treasure in the military, the U.S. intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security, and the rest of our national security establishment has actually bought us, you come up with a series of wars and conflicts headed nowhere and a series of post-9/11 terror attacks generally so inept it hardly mattered whether they were foiled or not.

Full Story Here: Tomgram: Chris Hellman, The Pentagon’s Spending Spree | TomDispatch.

How Austerity Is Ushering in a Global Recession

Robert Reich :-:

Not only is the United States slouching toward a double dip, but so is Europe. New data out today show even Europe’s strongest core economies – Germany, France, and the Netherlands – slowing to a crawl.

We’re on the cusp of a global recession.

Policy makers be warned: Austerity is the wrong medicine.

We all know about the weaknesses in Europe’s “periphery” – Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. But the drop in Europe’s core is dizzying.

Germany grew at an annualized rate of just half a percent last quarter, down from 5.5 percent in the first quarter of the year. France didn’t grow at all.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (How Austerity Is Ushering in a Global Recession).

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

  Rolling Stone :-:

A whistleblower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals.

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – “Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?” No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – “18,000 … including Madoff,” as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Full Story Here: Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? | Rolling Stone Politics.

Christian Zionist Agenda Exposed by NAR Apostle Don Finto at Rick Perry Event, and Few Noticed

Apostle Don Finto, joined by Messianic Rabbi Marty Waldman, delivered the Israel prayer at Rick Perry’s August 6 prayer rally; not John Hagee. Finto is a leading figure in an international effort to encourage evangelicals to support Messianics and their ministries to evangelize Jews. (Messianic is the term for Jews who convert to Christianity but retain their Jewish identity.) Finto did not change his message for Perry’s religio-political event, but prayed for Jews of Israel and the world to convert. The belief that the conversion of Jews is the trigger that will bring about the return of Jesus is part of the end times narrative being popularized by the apostles of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).

Finto’s message at Rick Perry’s prayer rally was unambiguous, particularly if viewed in the context of his work over the last decade. Below is a video of part of his appearance at The Response.

Full Story Here: | Christian Zionist Agenda Exposed by NAR Apostle Don Finto at Rick Perry Event, and Few Noticed.

As Economy Tanks, “New Normal” Police State Takes Shape

Forget your rights.

As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.

After all, with world share prices gyrating wildly, employment and wages in a death spiral, and retirement funds and publicly-owned assets swallowed whole by speculators and rentier scum, the state better dust-off contingency plans lest the Greek, Spanish or British “contagion” spread beyond the fabled shores of “old Europe” and infect God-fearin’ folk here in the heimat.

Full Story Here: Antifascist Calling…: As Economy Tanks, “New Normal” Police State Takes Shape.

Attorneys Question Rental Proposal: Why Isn’t Administration More Interested In Preventing Foreclosure In 1st Place?

While the Obama administration has begun looking at ways to transform government-owned foreclosed homes around the country into rental properties, a group of lawyers wants the administration to do more to help keep embattled homeowners in their homes in the first place.

The administration last week announced plans to convert some of the 250,000 foreclosed homes that the government owns through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration in an effort to improve the nation’s housing market. The government would look for investors to turn foreclosed homes into rental units.

However, the head of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) wants to see the government offer more help to those Americans facing mortgage trouble so as prevent more foreclosures.

Full Story Here: The Washington Current: Attorneys Question Rental Proposal: Why Isn’t Administration More Interested In Preventing Foreclosure In 1st Place?.

Meet the Christian Dominionist ‘Prayer Warriors’ Who Have Chosen Rick Perry as Their Vehicle to Power

The New Apostolic Reformation seeks dominion over society and government — and it looks like Perry is their chosen candidate.

Since he announced his candidacy on Saturday, Texas Governor Rick Perry has been hailed as the great GOP hope of 2012. Perry’s entry into the chaotic Republican primary race has excited the establishment in part because he does not have Michele Bachmann’s reputation for religious zealotry, yet can likely count on the support of the Religious Right.

Another advantage for Perry is support from an extensive 50-state “prayer warrior” network, organized by the New Apostolic Reformation. A religious-political movement whose leaders call themselves apostles and prophets, NAR shares its agenda for control of society and government with other “dominionists,” but has a distinctly different theology than other groups in the Religious Right. They have their roots in Pentecostalism (though their theology has been denounced as a heresy by Pentecostal denominations in the past). The movement is controversial, even inside conservative evangelical circles. Nevertheless, Perry took the gamble that NAR could help him win the primaries, a testament to the power of the apostles’ 50-state prayer warrior network.

While it may not have been obvious to those outside the movement, Perry was publicly anointed as the apostles’ candidate for president in his massive prayer rally a few weeks ago, an event filled with symbolism and coded messages. This was live-streamed to churches across the nation and on God TV, a Jerusalem-based evangelical network.

Full Story Here: Meet the Christian Dominionist ‘Prayer Warriors’ Who Have Chosen Rick Perry as Their Vehicle to Power | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet.

Democrats must push back

Norman Solomon :-:

THE NEGATIVE TRENDS in the Nation’s Capital are mostly due to extreme GOP ideologues in Congress. But they’ve been enabled by too many Democrats who keep giving ground while Republican leaders refuse to give an inch.

Many a political truth can be spoken in jest, and that was the case with a mock news item that appeared in The Onion last week.

“A day after signing legislation that raised the government debt ceiling and authorized steep budget cuts,” the satirical magazine reported, “President Obama thanked Democrats as well as Democrats for their willingness to make tough, but necessary, concessions during negotiations.”

The Onion went on: “Obama added that while it may look ugly at times, politics is about Democrats giving up what they want, as well as Democrats giving up what they want, until an agreement can ultimately be reached.”

Full Story Here: Marin Voice: Democrats must push back – Marin Independent Journal.

President Obama Joins the Cult of Economics Deniers

Dean Baker   :-:

President Obama has abandoned evidence-based economics to return the US to growth in favour of the politics of deficit-cutting

A front page story in Sunday’s New York Times gave the country the bad news. President Obama is no longer paying attention to economists and economics in designing economic policy. Instead, he will do what his campaign people tell him will get him re-elected, presumably by getting lots of money from Wall Street.

The article said that President Obama intends to focus on reducing government spending and cutting programmes like social security and Medicare. This is in spite of the fact that: “A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to create jobs and promote growth.”

In other words, President Obama intends to ignore the path for getting the economy back to full employment that most economists advocate. Instead, he is going to cut government spending – because his chief of staff and former JP Morgan vice president Bill Daley and his top campaign adviser David Plouffe both say this is a good idea.

Full Story Here: President Obama’s re-election economic policy | Dean Baker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Study finds mean people earn more money

he phrase “Nice guys finish last” appears to be the case in who gets paid the most.

According to a study by several researches, “agreeable” workers make significantly lower than their less agreeable counterparts, with the gap being wider among men.

The study, titled “Do Nice Guys—and Gals—Really Finish Last?”, used survey data to examine “agreeableness” and found that men who disagreed far greater make 18%- or $9,772 annually- more in salary than those who agree. The salary disparity is far less among women, with disagreeable females making 5% or $1,828 than those who agree more.

Full Story Here: Study finds mean people earn more money | The Raw Story.

Economists: Threat of recession rising

The threat of a new recession is rising in the United States, economists say, as they slash their growth forecasts for the second half of the year.

Slowing global expansion, the plunge in US stock markets after Standard & Poor’s cut the country’s credit rating, and political pressure on the government to cut spending rather than stimulate growth are all putting the brakes on the world’s largest economy, they say.

Mostly negative data — though with a few bright spots — has reinforced feelings that the recovery from the 2008-2009 recession is in trouble.

And the Federal Reserve’s own warning last week of increased “downside risks” to growth in the second half has added to the gloomy picture.

Full Story Here: Economists: Threat of recession rising | The Raw Story.

Deadbeat Dad Joe Walsh: Children Should Be Raised In A Household With A Father And A Mother

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) — who has been embroiled in a personal scandal surrounding late child support payments — suggested that gay people don’t make for good parents during a recent town hall in Crystal Lake, Illinois. The Tea Party congressman said he believes in “traditional marriage” and that children do best when raised in a home with a mother and a father:

Roberts’ wife, Dayle, brought up the topic of gay marriage and the rights for those involved in those unions.

Walsh is a supporter of traditional marriage between a man and a woman for economic reasons. He also stated that studies have shown it is more beneficial for a child to be raised in a home where a mother and father are present rather than in same-sex households. The congressman, however, said he was open to further information and research that might disprove that.

Full Story Here: Deadbeat Dad Joe Walsh: Children Should Be Raised In A Household With A Father And A Mother | ThinkProgress.

Perry Reveals Plan For Total U.S. Anarchy: ‘Put A Moratorium On All Regulations’

Today, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) issued the first policy position of his presidential campaign by asking the White House to issue a “moratorium on regulations across this country”:

We’re calling today on the president of the United States to put a moratorium on regulations across this country, because his regulations, his EPA regulations are killing jobs all across America.

Watch it:

Full Story Here: Perry Reveals Plan For Total U.S. Anarchy: ‘Put A Moratorium On All Regulations’ | ThinkProgress.

The Ten Weirdest Ideas In Rick Perry’s ‘Fed Up’

Rick Perry’s November 2010 book Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington is not a typical “campaign book” from a political candidate. For starters, its forward is written by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, nominally one of Perry’s rivals for the nomination. For another thing, it’s overall tone much more closely resembles that of a B-list conservative radio host looking to stir up controversy and sell books than of a cautious politician trying out poll-tested lines. Consequently, while the book is by no means a good one, its certainly a lot more interesting than most comparable works. I read it over the weekend, and thus am proud to produce the following list of the Top Ten Weirdest Ideas in Rick Perry’s Fed Up:

— 10. Social Security Is Evil: According to Perry Social Security is “by far the best example” of a program “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.” (page 48)

— 9. Private Enterprise Blossomed Under Conscription and Wartime Price Controls: Not only does he argue that the New Deal failed to end the Great Depression, but he asserts “recovery did not come until World War II, when FDR was finally persuaded to unleash private enterprise.” (page 48)

Full Story Here: The Ten Weirdest Ideas In Rick Perry’s ‘Fed Up’ | ThinkProgress.

Prediction from Texas: American Democracy Will End in 2012 — After the Election of Perry-Palin

James Moore, co-author of Bush’s Brain, a profile of Karl Rove, has an explanation for why America has a very good chance of electing Perry-Palin in 2012. And why doing so will be the end of democracy as we know it.

He starts by revealing what “The Response,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s recent prayer meeting, was actually about.

The big brains gathered east of the Hudson and Potomac Rivers believe that Mitt Romney is the candidate to beat. But they are unable to hear what Rick Perry is saying. The Christian prayer rally in Houston was a very loud proclamation to fundamentalists and Teavangelicals, which said, “I am not a Mormon…”

Full Story Here: Prediction from Texas: American Democracy Will End in 2012 — After the Election of Perry-Palin.

The Texas Unmiracle

Paul Krugman :-:

As expected, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, has announced that he is running for president. And we already know what his campaign will be about: faith in miracles.

Some of these miracles will involve things that you’re liable to read in the Bible. But if he wins the Republican nomination, his campaign will probably center on a more secular theme: the alleged economic miracle in Texas, which, it’s often asserted, sailed through the Great Recession almost unscathed thanks to conservative economic policies. And Mr. Perry will claim that he can restore prosperity to America by applying the same policies at a national level.

So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.

It’s true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state’s still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending.

Full Story Here: The Texas Unmiracle – NYTimes.com.

Republican Responsibility Is Now Undeniable

I have received some criticism for partisanship and have even been accused of fomenting hatred toward Republicans. This does not surprise me, because I take pride in my partisanship, but unlike Republican politicians and pundits, I recognize that I am not entitled to my own facts. My commentary is honest in that I document the factual data upon which I base it. I do not shy away from criticism of my own side of the aisle, when the situation warrants it, and it often does. Telling the truth is not hateful. Intolerance of hatred, bigotry, lies, racism and greed is not hateful. And assigning responsibility is not hateful, because unless we understand how and why something is broken, it is difficult, if not impossible to fix it. The S&P debacle is a perfect example.

This should be highlighted again and again, because it is very simple, very logical and very, very damning:

A Standard & Poor’s director said for the first time Thursday that one reason the United States lost its triple-A credit rating was that several lawmakers expressed skepticism about the serious consequences of a credit default — a position put forth by some Republicans.

Without specifically mentioning Republicans, S&P senior director Joydeep Mukherji said the stability and effectiveness of American political institutions were undermined by the fact that “people in the political arena were even talking about a potential default,” Mukherji said.

“That a country even has such voices, albeit a minority, is something notable,” he added. “This kind of rhetoric is not common amongst AAA sovereigns.”

These statements have caused tea party Republicans to bleat, but, notably, it apparently hasn’t caused any of them to reflect on their positions. What the S&P director is saying here makes perfect sense. If the government of a nation publicly questions whether its debts should be paid, then it stands to reason that investors should be more cautious about presuming those debts should be paid. If politicians begin to mutter that perhaps those debts should be “ransomed” for political favors, then by definition those debts are less safe than they were before… [emphasis added]

Full Story Here: Republican Responsibility Is Now Undeniable » Politics Plus.

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

WARREN E. BUFFETT

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Full Story Here: Stop Coddling the Super-Rich – NYTimes.com.

FBI widens its US inquiry into News Corp beyond 9/11 hacking

The American authorities have widened their investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to look into allegations of wrongdoing at the company beyond the claim that News of the World journalists attempted to hack the phones of 9/11 victims.

It was reported this weekend that FBI investigators, who are checking damaging claims that reporters at the now-defunct Sunday tabloid asked a New York-based private detective to access the voicemails of those killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks, have so far found no evidence that attempts were made to eavesdrop on the messages.

The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp, said US agencies were now examining whether there were further claims of misconduct at the company’s American subsidiaries that merit further investigation. The move comes as MPs in Westminster prepare to consider tomorrow the release of new documents related to hacking, which one former minister described as “dynamite”.

Full Story Here: FBI widens its US inquiry into News Corp beyond 9/11 hacking – Americas, World – The Independent.

Why the New Healthcare Law Should Have Been Based on Medicare (And What Democrats Should Have Learned By Now

Robert Reich :-:

Last week, two appellate judges in Atlanta — one appointed by President Bill Clinton and one by George H.W. Bush – held the Constitution doesn’t allow the federal government to require individuals to buy health insurance.

Yet the so-called “individual mandate” is a cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s 2010 health care reform law, scheduled to go into effect in 2014.

The whole idea of the law is to pool heath risks. Only if everyone buys insurance can insurers afford to cover people with preexisting conditions, or pay the costs of catastrophic diseases.

The issue is now destined for the Supreme Court (another appellate court has upheld the law’s constitutionality) where the prognosis isn’t good. The Court’s Republican-appointed majority has not exactly distinguished itself by its progressive views.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (Why the New Healthcare Law Should Have Been Based on Medicare (And What Democrats Should Have Learned By Now)).

The Best Paying Jobs You Can Get With A High School Degree

Going to college used to be a nearly sure way of getting a steady job. But as many recent graduates will attest, this is no longer the case. However, there are hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs that don’t require a degree. 24/7 Wall St. has identified the ten highest-paying jobs that only require a high school education.

In order to identify the kinds of positions high school graduates without college degrees may want to consider, 24/7 Wall St. examined the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupation Employment Statistics database. The government report, which provides the salaries and number of workers in every major job category in the United States, also provides information on salary and those job positions that do not necessarily require a bachelor’s degree. The results where then sorted by wage, in order to identify the ten jobs that have the highest median annual salary. Along with salary, we also show how much these jobs are expected to grow over the next 10-15 years, and which states have the highest concentration of these positions.

Full Story Here: The Best Paying Jobs You Can Get With A High School Degree – 24/7 Wall St..

Tainted Beef Leads To Grocery Recalls

At least three major grocery store chains are recalling certain packages of ground beef due to possible E. coli contamination

At least three major grocery store chains are recalling certain packages of ground beef due to possible E. coli contamination.

The recalls at Winn-Dixie Stores Inc., Publix Super Markets Inc. and Kroger Co. mainly in the southeastern U.S. stem from meat from National Beef Packaging Co. of Dodge City, Kan.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Friday that National Beef was recalling more than 60,000 pounds of beef after the Ohio Department of Agriculture found the bacteria.

The recalls affect products sold mainly in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee, but the meat could have been distributed nationwide.

The agriculture department says there have been no reports of illnesses. The company says it’s investigating.

E. coli can be deadly and can cause bloody diarrhea and other problems.

Full Story Here: Tainted Beef Leads To Grocery Recalls.

Why do the Koch brothers want to end public education?

This film and investigation connects the dots and reveals why the Koch brothers are trying to end public education and how their wealth winds up in the hands of Jim Crow. Watch the video, then call David Koch and tell him to stop funding school resegregation now. His number is 212-319-1100

It’s the Free Trade, Stupid

Ian Fletcher :-: 

One point that seems largely to have been missed in recent weeks, amid all the excitement over the Federal budget and the sovereign-debt crises in Europe, is how free trade is largely the root cause of all these problems. Let’s trace the causation for a minute.

Start with the Federal budget. Federal revenues are derived from the underlying economy, and therefore, if the underlying economy were larger, revenues would be, too—even without any tax increases. As a result, anything that causes the U.S. economy to be smaller, tends to widen any gap between taxes and revenues.

Enter free trade.

For it is thanks to America’s embrace of free trade (whether genuinely free or not; that’s another issue) that we have been running giant trade deficits for years. And these have been costing us economic growth.

The Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington think tank, estimated in 2001 that the trade deficit was shaving at least one percent per year off our economic growth. (See the report “China’s Financial System and Monetary Policies: The Impact on U.S. Exchange Rates, Capital Markets, and Interest Rates,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, August 22, 2006, for the gory details.) This may not sound like much, but because GDP growth is cumulative, it compounds over time.  Economist William Bahr has thus estimated that America’s trade deficits since 1991 alone—they stretch back unbroken to 1976—have caused our economy to be 13 percent smaller than it otherwise would be.

That’s an economic hole larger than the entire Canadian economy.

Other economists have reached similar conclusions. William A. Lovett estimated in 2004 that, “With stronger, reciprocity-based trade policy, U.S. GDP could have been 10 to 20 percent higher.” Another estimate, by Charles McMillion, notes that in the 25 years up to 1980, our real GDP grew at an average of 3.8 per year. But in the 25 years afterwards, as our trade deficit ballooned, it averaged only 3.1 percent.

This is why we’re being forced into budget cuts and/or tax increases. We just don’t have a big enough economy to pay for the spending we’ve voted for at the tax rates we’ve voted for.

The above is usually treated as a conservative insight, because the implication is that economic growth is the real answer to our problem, not higher taxes. The Wall Street Journal crowd loves this stuff.  Unfortunately, that school of opinion also loves free trade, which is driving our growth down, not up.  So the free-marketeers have painted themselves into a corner here, and it’s no accident they don’t have a solution.

Now for the debt part of the equation.  As I have noted before, a nation’s accumulation of debt is closely linked to its running of trade deficits, because when we import more than we export, we must pay for it by either selling off existing assets or accumulating debt. (This is a simple matter of accounting, not even economics, so it shouldn’t be that controversial, no matter how controversial other aspect of the issue are.)

Over the past 35 years or so that we have been running trade deficits, we have mostly paid for this by assuming debt, and especially in recent years, a huge part of that debt has been public debt. One consequence has been that in order to manipulate the dollar price of its currency downward and boost exports, China has been buying huge amounts of U.S. Treasury securities. Thus the same mechanism that caused our trade deficits also increased our governmental debt.

If the United States had enforced balanced trade (i.e. no trade deficit) during this period, China would not have bothered manipulating its currency, as it would not thereby have been able to obtain a trade surplus with the U.S.  Therefore, it would not have accumulated its present huge holdings of U.S. debt and we would not be so indebted today.

It was, indeed, this artificially-induced flood of cheap foreign cash that enabled us to borrow so much money in the first place.  So much money, at such low interest rates, would not have been available if we had confined ourselves to domestic sources of funds, and the upwards pressure on domestic interest rates would have choked off government borrowing at some point.

The decision to raise  so large a part of the government’s budget from foreign borrowing dates back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, most explicitly to the 1984 decision by Treasury Secretary Donald Regan to effectively exempt foreign holders of our bonds from taxation. All subsequent administrations (with the limited exception of the latter part of Bill Clinton’s presidency, when the U.S. was running budget surpluses) have welcomed the resulting availability of cheap foreign capital.

In the short run, it was a great deal, holding down interest rates and taxes alike. In the long run…

The above analysis holds, in slightly different form, in Europe.  Nations like Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain have also run chronic trade deficits for years. As in our own case, their deficits were bridged by foreign credit—largely from Greater Germany (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Holland.)

As in our own case, the willingness of foreigners to lend them money was politically inflated—in their case by the replacement of national currencies by the euro, which enabled un-creditworthy governments like Greece to borrow on terms similar to those of creditworthy governments like Germany.

Because these European nations have smaller and weaker economies than the U.S., and because they borrowed in a currency which (unlike our own situation with the dollar) they cannot print, the inevitable long-term consequences hit them first. But we’re not going to be exempt forever.

The underlying lesson is the same in our case and theirs: free trade causes trade deficits and therefore debt.  The free market, on its own, will neither limit the accumulation of excessive debt nor redress the excess once it has been created. Government is eventually forced to step in, to solve a crisis it could have largely avoided if it had not embraced free trade in the first place.

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, 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.

Atlas Shrugged: Silicon Valley billionaire reveals plan to launch floating ‘start up country’ off coast of San Francisco

PayPal-founder Peter Thiel was so inspired by Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand’s novel about free-market capitalism – that he’s trying to make its title a reality.

The Silicon Valley billionaire has funnelled $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute, an organization that aspires to launch a floating colony into international waters, freeing them and like-minded thinkers to live by Libertarian ideals.

Mr Thiel recently told Details magazine that: ‘The United States Constitution had things you could do at the beginning that you couldn’t do later. So the question is, can you go back to the beginning of things? How do you start over?’

Full Story Here: Atlas Shrugged: Silicon Valley billionaire reveals plan to launch floating ‘start up country’ off coast of San Francisco | Mail Online.

Bachmann Pushes Corn Dog Envelope

So I took a fair amount of heat for suggesting that Michele Bachmann might not want to wear a plunging neckline that exposes lots of her chestal area while working crowds. You know, all that leaning forward to shake hands, pinch baby cheeks, and squeeze the shoulders of wheelchair users and what-not.

But we are now entering unimagined territory. A FOOT-LONG CORN DOG? Really, Michele Bachmann? And we are supposed to gaze at this action shot and simply say, “Huh. Looks like a good corn dog. That’s all I see.”

O.K., I’ll try to only see a corn dog and not see a person with a serious lack of imagination about how a foot-long corn dog being inserted into a woman’s open mouth while she reaches to grasp it with two hands might look. I will also try not to see a person who should never, ever, ever be president.

Full Story Here: Bachmann Pushes Corn Dog Envelope.

A Philosopher of Religion Calls it Quits

Keith Parsons announces that the “case for theism” is a fraud, and sparks a firestorm.

When philosophy professor Keith Parsons posted an announcement on his blog, The Secular Outpost, explaining why he had decided to abandon philosophy of religion, he expected only his handful of regular readers to take notice. After a decade teaching philosophy of religion at the University of Houston, during which time he founded the philosophy of religion journal Philo and published over twenty books and articles in the field, Parsons hung up his hat on September 1:

I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost painfully earnest and honest… I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it.

To his surprise, the announcement went viral. Posted and reposted on blogs such as Leiter Reports, The Prosblogion, and Debunking Christianity, it generated hundreds of comments in the subsequent weeks about the status of the field and whether Parsons’ criticisms were warranted. “It’s not that often philosophers renounce fields!” says Brian Leiter, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, at Leiter Reports. Parsons’ incendiary choice of words likely also bore some responsibility for the reaction. “I’m afraid what precipitated the thing going viral is that I said it was a fraud, which I shouldn’t have said, because ‘fraud’ implies an intentional attempt to fool people,” Parsons says.

Full Story Here: A Philosopher of Religion Calls it Quits | (A)theologies | Religion Dispatches.

Deluded Mitt Romney says: ‘Corporations are people’ too!

Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Here’s what Mitt recently puked up:

“Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings, my friend.”

–Mitt Romney, aka ‘The Compleat Cockroach’

Like every other GOPPER, Mitt claims privileges for corporations becuase, ‘…they are people”! But out of the other side of his mouth, he supports GOP ‘privileges’ for corporations –privileges that are denied to real people. Corporations, for example, are not taxed as much or even in the same way as are real people.

Funny thing is, Romney’s questioner wasn’t asking him about corporate personhood. He was asking why Romney wants to cut Social Security but while preserving corporate tax breaks. It seemed as if Romney had already memorized this little speech and was looking for a chance to trot it out. He probably had.

Full Story Here: The Existentialist Cowboy: Deluded Mitt Romney says: ‘Corporations are people’ too!.

Ignoring Realities : subsidized off-shoring of jobs

Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings :-:

The President and Congress want the contributions to keep flowing, so they subsidize the off-shoring of jobs and the economy.

. .The United States is so enthralled with its military and defense that we brag that we got Osama, but ignore his cause. Instead we prove Osama’s case with troops in Iraq, Kuwait, Kosovo, Bahrain, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and drone kills in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia.

There is no war of terror. If there was, we’d be drone killing every day in Saudi Arabia where Osama bin Laden learned terror, the 9/11 crew emanated, and they still teach terror — you and I are infidels. We ignore the lesson of Vietnam that you can’t change a culture militarily. Thinking we can, we are begging to stay in Iraq, where everyone agrees that the war was a mistake, and after ten years languishing in Afghanistan where General David Petraeus, just before he left, described our gains as “… ‘fragile’ and ‘reversible’ making the continued presence of American troops in the oft-violent country a continuing necessity.”

Full Story Here: Ignoring Realities | Economy In Crisis.

Solutions to Job-Killing Free Trade

The United States has a long way to go before it can balance its trade deficit and stop the outflow of American wealth and prosperity. Reintroducing, and eventually passing, the TRADE Act is the first and most crucial step.

The United States is facing ever-worsening economic conditions at home as a direct result of our listless pursuit of “free trade at all costs.” If something is not done soon to offset the negative effects of free trade in our domestic economy the market system that once created the greatest economy in the world will be lost forever.

The first solution is to enact legislation immediately that investigates all existing and proposed trade agreements. This legislation should force the Department of Commerce and Office of the United States Trade Representative to evaluate the merit of each individual trade deal based on the creation of at least mutual benefits for the United States and its partner nation. The reviews produced by the Commerce Department and the USTR should then be assigned to a special committee in Congress tasked with evaluating international commercial relations and simultaneously released for full disclosure to the public.

Legislation like this already exists in the United States. It was introduced into the 111th Congress as the TRADE Act of 2009. The Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act would fulfill all of the above prescriptions and create a robust infrastructure upon which all commercial relations can be judged in the future. It would also provide the necessary legislative muscle for the United States to renegotiate terms with the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, and all other free trade agreements already in effect.

Full Story Here: Solutions to Job-Killing Free Trade | Economy In Crisis.

OPS: The problem is that Obama has placed, and/or not removed, the hoards of  industry shills currently in the very positions that would have to perform these tasks. We may already be too far sown the rabbit hole for this to work

Our “Free Market” System Cannot Compete with Chinese State-Run Capitalism

Our Lack of planning and unregulated market free-for-all is facilitating our downfall and is placing us in China’s hands.

China now has $3 trillion (three thousand billion) of our currency reserves. They can use theses resources anytime they want to come here and buy us out. They can buy any of our companies available for sale on our open stock market.

China earned their $3 trillion through their balance of trade surplus – on the back of our balance of trade deficit. They sell us products made in factories where employees are lucky if they earn $2-$3 U.S. per hour. American workers could never afford to work for such low wages.

Free Market Capitalism cannot survive in open competition against state-run capitalism. The free market is unregulated and unprotected. State-run corporate enterprises are given virtually limitless subsidization from their home governments, as well as from American state and federal incentives, to enter the open American market and break established U.S. industrial titans.

Full Story Here: Our “Free Market” System Cannot Compete with Chinese State-Run Capitalism | Economy In Crisis.

Throwing America Overboard

By RALPH NADER :-:

Time to Cap the Tea Kettle

The Boston Tea Party in December 1773 threw the East India Company’s tea overboard. The Republican Tea Party in August 2011 threw America overboard.

Only in Congress, with its rules for minority rule, can a minority of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives impose its havoc on the American people there, then on the Senate side and on Obama’s wilting White House.

Leaving aside the psychiatric question of why a clutch of Republican Tea Partiers, many of them freshmen, terrify the veteran Republicans who outnumber them in the House, consider what they just pushed through the House against the American people.

For 150 million workers, Tea Partiers pushed through more cuts in the already starved federal programs that are aimed at diminishing the yearly 58,000 fatalities in workplace-related disease and trauma plus larger numbers injured and wounded.

Full Story Here: Ralph Nader: Throwing America Overboard.

When is a Riot a Revolt?

Is London a Harbinger for America?

Several days of unprecedented revolt by the most impoverished minority-populated neighborhoods of London has shaken the normally staid and reserved British Estblishment. Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his Italian vacation in Tuscany to return to the red-orange glare of a burning city. The prime minister was not the only one inconvenienced.

In an effort to mobilize16,000 police officers concentrated in London alone, England’s soccer-addicted fans saw their August 10 match against the Netherlands in Wembley stadium canceled.

So, this week at least, after years of ignoring glaring inequality and injustice, it is safe to say that all of England took notice of the crowded north London neighborhood of Tottenham and to similar minority communities in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol where an explosive, fiery social consciousness has been rekindled .

Tottenham itself, where events first ignited over the police killing of an unarmed black youth, is a genuinely multi-cultural mix of mostly British-born African-Caribbean along with Turkish, Portuguese, Albanian, Kurdish and Somali peoples reportedly speaking 300 different languages.

Full Story Here: Carl Finamore: When is a Riot a Revolt?.

The Failed Dogma of the ECB

Can Popular Movements Teach the European Central Bank Economics?

By DEAN BAKER

The European Central Bank (ECB) is run by people who are not very good at economics. They continue to adhere to a fundamentally wrongheaded view of the economy and the central bank’s role within it. Unfortunately there is no internal pressure for change because, like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, acceptance of the ideology is the price for admission into the clique of economists who can influence the ECB.

The central tenet of ECB dogma is that the central bank should target a low inflation rate (2.0 percent) and pretty much ignore everything else in the economy. In the last decade this meant ignoring the massive housing bubbles that were driving the economies of Ireland and Spain. The bank was happy all through the period in which the bubbles were growing to ever more dangerous levels because it was hitting its inflation targets.

More recently, the ECB has been raising interest rates even as most of the eurozone economies remain mired with high unemployment. These interest rate hikes slow growth and job creation. Higher interest rates also exacerbate the fiscal problems facing heavily indebted countries, since they make it more expensive for them to service their debt.

Full Story Here: Dean Baker: The Failed Dogma of the ECB.

The Pentagon’s Fake Jihadists

Think Blowback, Not Deterrence

Put what follows in the category of paragraphs no one noticed that should have made the nation’s hair stand on end. This particular paragraph should also have sent chills through the body politic, launched warning flares, and left the people’s representatives in Congress shouting about something other than the debt crisis.

Last weekend, two reliable New York Times reporters, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, had a piece in that paper’s Sunday Review entitled “After 9/11, an Era of Tinker, Tailor, Jihadist, Spy.” Its focus was the latest counterterrorism thinking at the Pentagon: deterrence theory. (Evidently an amalgam of the old Cold War ideas of “containment” and nuclear deterrence wackily reimagined by the boys in the five-sided building for the age of the jihadi.) Schmitt and Shanker’s article was, a note informed the reader, based on research for their forthcoming book, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda.

And here’s the paragraph, buried in the middle of their piece, that should have stopped readers in their tracks:

“Or consider what American computer specialists are doing on the Internet, perhaps terrorist leaders’ greatest safe haven, where they recruit, raise money, and plot future attacks on a global scale. American specialists have become especially proficient at forging the onscreen cyber-trademarks used by Al Qaeda to certify its Web statements, and are posting confusing and contradictory orders, some so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away.”

Full Story Here: Tom Engelhardt: The Pentagon’s Fake Jihadists.

Japan’s Silent Anger

Disenchantment With Nuclear Power

Though the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is far from resolved, life in northern Japan has mostly returned to its former tranquillity. You wouldn’t know what happened, until you go too close to the shoreline or feel an aftershock.

The aftermath of the disasters of 11 March is still with us every day, but the importance of wa, social harmony, has reasserted itself. The West knows that Japan is a society governed on the principle of consensus, but misunderstands that as meaning there must be universal agreement on every decision, and how it is implemented. Wa in this case means that dissent, when it happens, takes place within strict boundaries of social propriety. Dissent is articulated as part of a social drama with acts previously agreed on (1). This tacit agreement holds. Haruki Murakami often writes of the student demonstrations of the 1960s in Tokyo, and says their disturbance of wa was minimal, symbolic and impotent.

We can understand the muted popular response to the recent disasters. The government’s initial response was openly criticised, as it was after the Kobe earthquake in the 1990s (Japan’s last major natural disaster, though not as big as 11 March). This created resentment in northern Japan, and led to losses in recent prefectural elections. Prime minister Naoto Kan now faces anger even within his own ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), though he survived a vote of no confidence. But only for the moment: members of the Japanese Diet thought it too drastic for Kan to go now, although he had already signalled his intention to step down in favour of “a younger generation”. The crisis at Fukushima Daiichi is just his stay of execution.

Full Story Here: Rónán MacDubhghaill: Japan’s Silent Anger.

TEPCO’s Darkest Secret

The Fukushima Daiichi Reactors Were in Meltdown After the Earthquake, But Before the Tsunami Hit

It is one of the mysteries of Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis: How much damage did the March 11 earthquake do to the Fukushima Daiichi reactors before the tsunami hit? The stakes are high: If the quake structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then every other similar reactor in Japan will have to be reviewed and possibly shut down. With virtually all of Japan’s 54 reactors either offline (35) or scheduled for shutdown by next April, the issue of structural safety looms over the decision to restart every one in the months and years after.

The key question for operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) and its regulators to answer is this: How much damage was inflicted on the Daiichi plant before the first tsunami reached the plant roughly 40 minutes after the earthquake? TEPCO and the Japanese government are hardly reliable adjudicators in this controversy. “There has been no meltdown,” top government spokesman Edano Yukio famously repeated in the days after March 11. “It was an unforeseeable disaster,” Tepco’s then President Shimizu Masataka improbably said later. As we now know, meltdown was already occurring even as Edano spoke. And far from being unforeseeable, the disaster had been repeatedly forewarned.

Full Story Here: David McNeill / Jake Adelstein: TEPCO’s Darkest Secret.

U.S. Chamber Of Commerce Battles Anti-Bribery Statute

More than three decades after the United States Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — striking a major blow against international corruption by criminalizing bribes to foreign officials — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is trying to carve out some major exceptions in the law to prevent prosecutors from enforcing it too aggressively.

The move by the increasingly activist Chamber has led critics to fear there may be no checks left on the corporate lobby’s ambition — or its influence.

Not only is the Chamber taking on something as seemingly unassailable as an anti-bribery law, but it’s doing so just as the movement the FCPA launched is finally taking hold across the globe, corruption fighters say.

Full Story Here: U.S. Chamber Of Commerce Battles Anti-Bribery Statute.

Can We Have Health Reform Without an Individual Mandate? Yes, It’s Called ‘Medicare for All’

John Nichols : -:

The essential vote on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel that ruled that the individual-coverage mandate in President Obama’s healthcare reform is unconstitutional did not come from a reactionary Republican appointed by Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.

Rather, it came from respected jurist whose two appointments to the federal bench—first as a judge for the Northern District of Georgia in 1994 and then to the 11th Circuit in 1997—were made by then-President Bill Clinton. No, Judge Frank Mays Hull is not a raging lefty, but nor is she a right-wing judicial activist. A former law clerk for Judge Elbert Parr Tuttle, who as the chief justice of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1960 to 1967 led the court in issuing a series of epic decisions on behalf of civil rights, Judge Hull has a reputation as a moderate defender of the rule of law who has earned reasonable marks for her pragmatic and decidely mainstream interpretations of the Constitution.

So why did Hull join with another member of the appeals court panel (Chief Judge Joel Dubina, an appointee of George H.W. Bush) to form the 2-1 majority that rejected the individual mandate while affirming the rest of the law? Perhaps it was because one can favor sweeping healthcare reforms—including an expansion of Medicare—while still believing that it is wrong to require Americans to buy insurance from for-profit insurance companies.

Hull telegraphed her thinking with repeated questions during June oral arguments in Atlanta regarding the case. Noting that “the panel spent a significant amount of time discussing whether the mandate is ‘severable’ from the rest of the law,” Politico pointed out that: “Hull in particular asked the federal government three times where the line should be.”

Full Story Here: Can We Have Health Reform Without an Individual Mandate? Yes, It’s Called ‘Medicare for All’ | The Nation.

Silver Oaks and the Power of Predatory Capitalism

Last month eviction notices to residents of Silver Oaks Place on the east side of Kent destroyed, in one swift blow, a 30-year old community of 250 senior citizens in their late 50s to early 90s. Though residents were given two months to get out, and offered some limited help with relocating, the evictions have wiped out trust, hope and peace of mind for the residents, their families, their neighbors and the community at large.

The apartment complex is being acquired by Capstone Development, a corporation headquartered in Birmingham AL, who plan to convert it into student housing. Capstone is gambling that they will prevail in a market already glutted with student housing after Kent State University, under president Lester Lefton (paid $520,000 a year, plus bonus, benefits, housing, automobile, deferred annuity) adopted a policy of phasing out on-campus dormitories for junior & senior students, and opened the door to private sector off-campus housing.

Some residents think a legal challenge may persuade the developer to back off, and have hired a civil rights attorney from Cleveland to explore age discrimination issues. After the management locked residents out of their large, accessible community room evenings and weekends, residents have started filing complaints of retaliation with the Ohio Attorney General. Either action might work to delay the evictions, but the damage is already done — some residents are already moving out, most are seeking individual resolutions to their problems, and the community and its conviviality is severely damaged.

Full Story Here: Silver Oaks and the Power of Predatory Capitalism | Common Dreams.

Sanders says he doesn’t know who would step up to primary Obama

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said this weekend he still expects President Obama to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2012, and doesn’t know of anyone who might step forward to challenge Obama.

Sanders said he still supports the concept of a primary challenge for Obama, because, Sanders said, even Republicans have done a better job of keeping their campaign promises than Obama.

“I don’t know of anybody in mind, but I am sure there are serious and smart people out there who can do it,” Sanders said of the prospect of a primary challenge during C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program, airing on the network this weekend.

Full Story Here: Sanders says he doesn’t know who would step up to primary Obama – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room.

Palestinians to Seek UN Statehood Vote Next Month: Foreign Minister

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will submit an application for full U.N. membership at the General Assembly next month, his foreign minister said on Saturday, without specifying exactly when the request would be made.

“I think that the president, when he gets to the United Nations and meets the secretary general, will present the application,” Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki said in a briefing in Ramallah.

Malki’s statement narrowed down the timing of the application to September during Abbas’ visit to New York, but when asked give a specific date, Palestinian officials said it would still have to be determined.

Full Story Here: Palestinians to Seek UN Statehood Vote Next Month: Foreign Minister | Common Dreams.

Quinnipiac Poll: Obama Approval Crash Dive

Obama Approval In New York Crash Dive, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; But Voters Back Pres Over Unnamed Gop Challenger

New York State voters disapprove 49 – 45 percent of the job President Obama is doing, a huge drop from his 57 – 38 percent approval June 29 and the first time the president ever has had a negative score in New York, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Democrats approve 75 – 19 percent, down from 82 – 12 percent in June. Disapproval is 86 – 10 percent among Republicans, compared to a 74 – 23 percent disapproval in June, and 58 – 36 percent among independent voters, compared to a slightly positive 49 – 45 percent in June, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds.

Voters split 48 – 46 percent on whether President Obama deserves reelection and say 49 – 34 percent they would vote for him over an unnamed Republican.

Full Story Here: New York State (NY) Poll * August 12, 2011 * Obama Approval In New York Cra – Quinnipiac University – Hamden, Connecticut.

Rick Perry’s Ruthless Drive to Win

Paul Begala :-:

Rick Perry has called Social Security unconstitutional and presided over the execution of a man who was probably innocent. But as Paul Begala argues, that’s just the beginning.

I first met Rick Perry in 1985. He was a Democratic freshman state rep, straight off the ranch in Haskell, Texas. He wore his jeans so tight, and, umm, adjusted himself so often that my fellow young legislative aides and I used to call him Crotch. Even among state representatives, even among Texas Aggies (graduates of this cute remedial school we have in Texas), Perry stood out for his modest intellectual gifts. Hell, he got a C in animal breeding. I have goats who got an A in that subject. But lack of brains has never been a hindrance in politics.

Full Story Here: Rick Perry: A Candidate Who Will Do Anything to Beat Romney and Obama – The Daily Beast.

We’ve Entered the Age of Mass Extinction: Goodbye Fish and a Whole Lot More

Paleontologist Peter Ward talks about the threats from global warming, rising population and our own plain stupidity

Mass extinction is finally fighting its way back into the news cycle, thanks to recent scary reports on climate change from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, the United Nations Environment Program and the July issue of Science. But University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward has been there, done that, and he’s still depressed as hell.

“I wrote a book in 1994 called The End of Evolution: A Journey in Search of Clues to the Third Mass Extinction Facing Earth that said, within in a decade or two, we’d be seeing these monumental destructions, and people laughed at it,” Ward explained by phone from Seattle. “I wrote a book just last year about sea-level rise called The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps, saying that things look pretty desperate for the next 60 to 80 years and got almost no reviews. Luckily, I’m not going to be alive to see the worst of it. But the sad thing is that it’s horrible to be right, just horrible. Somebody gave me the foresight to see what’s coming, and I don’t like it.”

Full Story Here: We’ve Entered the Age of Mass Extinction: Goodbye Fish and a Whole Lot More | Environment | AlterNet.

Roubini: Marx Was Right. Capitalism May Be Destroying Itself | AlterNet

Nouriel Roubini is a mainstream economist who teaches at New York University and may be best known as one of the early predictors of the ’08 crash.

He is no Marxist.

But today, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Roubini admitted that Marx was right about Capitalism and raised the possibility that Capitalism is destroying itself in the way Marx outlined more than a century and a half ago.

I’ve produced a rough transcript (Roubini’s accent gives me some trouble) of the critical portion of this very interesting interview. I urge you to read each word carefully at least once, if not twice.

Full Story Here: Mainstream Economist: Marx Was Right. Capitalism May Be Destroying Itself | AlterNet.

Meet the Global Financial Elites Controlling $46 Trillion In Wealth

The economic elite have at least $46 trillion in wealth – but who are they? We look at the people and the industries picking the pockets of the working class.

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class,

the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

– Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway

How Much Wealth Do The Economic Elite Have?

While 68.3 million Americans struggle to get enough food to eat and wages are declining for 90 percent of the population, US millionaire household wealth has reached an unprecedented level. According to an extensive study by auditing and financial advisory firm Deloitte, US millionaire households now have $38.6 trillion in wealth. On top of the $38.6 trillion this study reveals, they have an estimated $6.3 trillion hidden in offshore accounts.

In total, US millionaire households have at least $45.9 trillion in wealth, the majority of this wealth is held within the upper one-tenth of one percent of the population.

Full Story Here: Meet the Global Financial Elites Controlling $46 Trillion In Wealth | | AlterNet.

VIDEO: Do Iowans Agree With Mitt Romney That Corporations Are People?

At the Iowa State Fair Wednesday, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) took to the presidential soapbox and told Iowa voters that “corporations are people.” The next day, Romney doubled-down on his gaffe at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. Other prominent Republicans also professed their agreement that corporations are people, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R).

ThinkProgress asked a number of state fair attendees if they agreed with Romney. Watch their responses here:

Full Story Here: VIDEO: Do Iowans Agree With Mitt Romney That Corporations Are People? | ThinkProgress.

Top 10 Things Texas Gov. Rick Perry Doesn’t Want You To Know About Him

With widespread discontent on the right over their current presidential field, all eyes are trained on a likely new entrant: Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).

Perry, who has been elected governor three times and served for more than 10 years, enjoys bona fides from social conservatives and Tea Party-types alike. Glenn Beck even described Perry as a man he was so enamored with that he wanted to “French kiss.”

However, as conservatives fawn over their newest presidential hopeful, it’s worth taking a closer examination at his record as governor. On issues across the board, from Perry’s support for dropping out of Social Security and Medicaid to his state’s abysmal pollution levels and his proposal that Texas secede from the United States, the Republican governor has amassed a record of far-right extremism.

ThinkProgress has assembled the top ten hits from Perry’s tenure as governor:

Full Story Here: Top 10 Things Texas Gov. Rick Perry Doesn’t Want You To Know About Him | ThinkProgress.

The Verizon Strike as the Next Wisconsin

The picket lines are up. This past weekend 45,000 Verizon workers on the East Coast, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), went on strike. The cause of the strike was the company’s attempts to win massive concessions from the unions. Verizon argued that the employees should give up gains they had won over many years of struggle and negotiation in previous contract fights.

As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Verizon Communications Inc. is seeking some of the biggest concessions in years from its unions.” Demands include the weakening of health-care benefits, cuts in pensions, reduced job security, and elimination of paid holidays such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This despite the fact that the company reported billions in profit last year, and that, in the words of New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse, “Verizon’s top five executives received a total of $258 million in compensation, including stock options, over the last four years.” The unions argue that Verizon has made some $20 billion in profit in the same time period, and Citizens for Tax Justice has pointed out that the company has done so while paying little to nothing in corporate income taxes.

Without a doubt, this is a conflict of national significance. As Bob Master, CWA District 1 legislative and political director, explained Wednesday in a conference call with supporters,

Full Story Here: Dissent Magazine – Arguing The World – The Verizon Strike as the Next Wisconsin -.

Even as the Costs Become Apparent, Big Business Pushes to Legalize Bribery

Last night, Jefferson County, AL delayed their decision for a month whether to declare bankruptcy or accept a settlement with their creditors and the state. At issue is $3.2 billion in debt, much of it for a sewer upgrade, that got dragged into the financial crash. The current deal would have creditors forgo a third of the debt in exchange for rate increases and the creation of an independent authotiry to run the sewer. County commissioners balked, though, arguing the deal relied on too many contingencies from the state–none of which are guaranteed–and took away any control at the county level. In short, it’s a mess, one that is costing the people of Jefferson County in increased rates and diminished services as the county struggled to find funding mechanisms to pay for the debt.

Yesterday, Reuters did a report summarizing all the bribery that went into the original sewer deal–and noting that JP Morgan hasn’t paid any reputational damage or loss of business for it, largely because it has blamed the deal on corrupt local officials.

Full Story Here: Even as the Costs Become Apparent, Big Business Pushes to Legalize Bribery | emptywheel.

Colorado authorities are already tracking social media

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post about UK Prime Minster David Cameron’s thoughts on shutting down social media in times of unrest, we hear this from Erik Sass at MediaPost:

Colorado’s Department of Public Safety is employing analysts at the Colorado Information Analysis Center to monitor sites like Twitter and Facebook with an eye to gleaning information about potentially disruptive events before they happen. By monitoring social media conversations in real time, the CDPS analysts hope to be able to identify emerging threats within minutes of the first discussion by online plotters — which should hopefully allow law enforcement to preempt, for example, apparently spontaneous outbursts of civil disorder.

Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Safety, told Colorado journalists: “Because we know people organize this way, we’re listening,” adding, “People will describe online, or in some of the chatter that they send back and forth, indicating what they will do.” The CDPS program actually dates back to 2008, with online monitoring in the lead-up to Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Hmmm. Well, is this the same thing as Cameron’s notion that shutting down the Facebooks and Twitters is a good idea in times of civil unrest?

Full Story Here: And now this: Colorado authorities are already tracking social media | Scholars and Rogues.

Outrage Erupts After Energy Committee Evaluating Dangerous Gas Drilling Practice Is Stacked With ‘Experts’ on Industry Payroll

All but one member of the group has financial ties to the oil and gas industry.

After mounting concern about the public health and environmental risks of the controversial shale gas drilling practice of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), last May Obama charged Energy Secretary Steven Chu with the task of setting up an advisory board to look into the practice. Thanks to Dick Cheney and something known as the “Halliburton loophole,” fracking is exempt from major environmental laws that protect our water and our health even though fracking can pose serious risks. The process involves injecting water, sand and a toxic cocktail of chemicals deep underground at high pressure to break up rock formations and capture natural gas that may be released.

Fracking has resulted in over 1,000 documented cases of water contamination, yet companies are allowed to keep the chemicals they use a secret. Rural communities from Pennsylvania to Wyoming have been impacted by the industrialization of their towns by drilling operations and residents have complained of poisoned well water, health problems and even explosions from leaking methane. Calvin Tillman, the mayor of Dish, Texas left his town after his family became ill from nearby drilling operations

Full Story Here: Outrage Erupts After Energy Committee Evaluating Dangerous Gas Drilling Practice Is Stacked With ‘Experts’ on Industry Payroll | Water | AlterNet.

San Jose cops unveil plan to cut services to businesses and residents

Don’t expect San Jose cops to go after that lady selling fruit on the street corner without a license. Or the guy pilfering Budweiser cans from the recycling bins on your cul-de-sac.

Illegally parked car? Noisy neighbor? Nah. Probably not for those, either.

Burglar alarm going off? Nope. Only if someone says there was a break-in.

In the department’s first detailed assessment of how it will make do after budget cuts pared 165 officer positions from the force in June, San Jose police say those are some of the changes residents should expect.

“We just have to really prioritize what we can and can’t do,” Deputy Chief David Cavallaro said. “We’re trying to find a balance between the community’s needs and the officers we have left.”

Full Story Here: San Jose cops unveil plan to cut services to businesses and residents – San Jose Mercury News.

MI6, under pressure from Blair and Campbell, produced bogus Iraq war evidence

The exhausted secret intelligence officer was heading home after a heavy session analysing reports from Iraq. As he stepped out through the high-security air-lock exit from MI6’s grand headquarters beside the Thames in London, a newspaper-seller’s placard caught his eye — ‘45 minutes from attack,’ it proclaimed.

Alarm bells rang in his head. It was September 2002, and Prime Minister Tony Blair had that day unveiled with great fanfare the government’s dossier detailing Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as a justification for going to war.

He knew, in a way the public did not, the precise background to that headline. His first thought was that this was not what the original intelligence report had said. ‘If this goes wrong, we’re all screwed,’ he muttered to himself.

Full Story Here: MI6, under pressure from Blair and Campbell, produced bogus Iraq war evidence | Mail Online.

BART cuts cell phone service to stop protest

A planned protest of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) fizzled Thursday after officials reportedly cut cell phone services at some stations.

BART spokesman Linton Johnson told a KTVU reporter, who had noticed the disruption, that the public relations department had suggested that phone service be shut down.

Another BART spokesman, Jim Allison, reportedly admitted that the tactic had been “part of a larger strategy.”

But Allison later claimed that he had been mistaken and phone service was not blocked.

“I haven’t been able to find another incident in which this has happened,” criminologist Casey Jordan told CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux Friday. “I think perhaps it is unprecedented, and yet that’s how these legal issues come to light and get debated. Whether it’s legal or not it hasn’t been tested in the courts. Public safety exceptions to or encroachments on our personal freedoms do happen.”

Full Story Here: BART cuts cell phone service to stop protest | Raw Replay.

Appeals Court Finds Individual Mandate Unconstitutional

Moments ago, in a 2-1 decision, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, ruling that Congress cannot “mandate that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die.” The court kept the rest of the law enact. Some highlights from the decision:

– It is immaterial whether we perceive Congress to be regulating inactivity or a financial decision to forego insurance. Under any framing, the regulated conduct is defined by the absence of both commerce or even the “the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities”—the broad definition of economics in Raich… To connect this conduct to interstate commerce would require a “but-for causal chain” that the Supreme Court has rejected, as it would allow Congress to regulate anything.

– In sum, the individual mandate is breathtaking in its expansive scope. It regulates those who have not entered the health care market at all. It regulates those who have entered the health care market, but have not entered the insurance market (and have no intention of doing so). It is over inclusive in when it regulates:it conflates those who presently consume health care with those who will not consume health care for many years into the future. The government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual’s existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life.

Full Story Here: Appeals Court Finds Individual Mandate Unconstitutional | ThinkProgress.

Perry Doesn’t ‘Buy Into The Premise’ That Rescuing America’s Auto Companies Saved Jobs

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) is set to jump into the presidential race today, bringing with him his beliefs that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are unconstitutional “Ponzi schemes.” While Perry likes to brag about Texas’ economic strength, his story is largely a mirage.

One of Perry’s favorite topics is Texas’ job creation, even though, between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace in Massachusetts than in Texas, and “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” In an interview with The Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Perry actually showed callous disregard for American workers, saying that he doesn’t believe that any jobs were saved by the government’s rescue of the American auto industry:

Q: But the counterargument is that if GM collapsed, there would have been tons of jobs lost—and now it’s profitable again. Without TARP, the banking system would’ve imploded—and now the money’s been paid back.

A: I don’t necessarily buy into the premise that somehow or another those measures saved these jobs. There are companies that get restructured on a regular basis and the workers don’t lose their jobs. They get new management, they put a pay-out plan in place and we go on about our business rather than getting these huge amounts of debt piled on future generations.

Full Story Here: Perry Doesn’t ‘Buy Into The Premise’ That Rescuing America’s Auto Companies Saved Jobs | ThinkProgress.

Grassley Calls S&P Downgrade A ‘Wake-Up Call’ To ‘Reduce Deficit Spending,’ Then Admits He Hasn’t Read The Report

After one of the three credit ratings agencies, S&P, downgraded the United States’ creditworthiness from AAA to AA+ in large part because of extreme GOP intransigence on raising revenue, Republicans were quick to try to deflect blame onto the Democrats. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney singled out the White House, saying “Standard & Poor’s rating downgrade is a deeply troubling indicator of our country’s decline under President Obama.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) piled on the following day, calling S&P’s move a “wake-up call for Congress and the President to take meaningful action to reduce deficit spending and the resulting debt.”

ThinkProgress spoke with Grassley at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday to get his further thoughts on S&P’s criticism of Republican stubbornness. However, before we were able to ask the Iowa senator about S&P’s recommendations regarding our nation’s fiscal dilemma, Grassley made a startling revelation: he has not even read the report.

Full Story Here: Grassley Calls S&P Downgrade A ‘Wake-Up Call’ To ‘Reduce Deficit Spending,’ Then Admits He Hasn’t Read The Report | ThinkProgress.

“This Video Is For Rich People Only”

In today’s Moment of Clarity I tell people making over $1 Million per year how they can stay rich forever. It’s very simple. Just follow these tried-and-true instructions.

Texas raids fund for poor to keep taxes low 

Texas utility customers pay a little extra on their bills that is supposed to go into a fund to help the poor cover their own utility payments. But in a year of record heat, less than half the fund is being paid out, forcing people to do without air conditioning in triple-digit temperatures.

CBS reports that the Texas legislature has repeatedly approved raiding the fund in order to balance its budget without raising taxes. By 2013, there will be $900 million sitting unspent, with no plans to ever pay it out.

And not only are the poor being shortchanged, but members of the middle class who pay utility bills are being charged that extra fee which does nothing but subsidize keeping taxes low on the wealthy.

This video is from CBS News, posted August 12, 2011.

Full Story Here: Texas raids fund for poor to keep taxes low | Raw Replay.

VIDEO: Romney Angrily Confronted Over His Desire To Cut Entitlements While Protecting The Rich

GOP 2012 presidential contender Mitt Romney today spoke at the Iowa state fair, before a key Republican debate tonight and an upcoming Iowa straw poll. At the end of his speech, a Q&A session quickly devolved into a shouting match.

The first questioner asked Romney if he would raise the cap on payroll taxes, so that the rich pay more into the system. Romney — who has a net worth of more than $200 million — said that raising the payroll tax cap for Social Security was tantamount to “attacking people because of their success”:

You know, there was a time in this country when we didn’t celebrate attacking people based on their success and when we didn’t go after people because they were successful.

A second questioner asked Romney “what are you going to do to strengthen Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare without cutting benefits.” Romney’s response, after briefly shouting at the questioner, was “I’m not going to raise taxes. That’s my answer.” The rowdy crowd at the Iowa State Fair interrupted his answers to chant “Wall Street greed.” Watch it:

Full Story Here: VIDEO: Romney Angrily Confronted Over His Desire To Cut Entitlements While Protecting The Rich | ThinkProgress.

Richard Clarke’s Explosive CIA Cover-up Charge

In a new documentary, former national-security aide Richard Clarke suggests the CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers—then covered it up. Philip Shenon on George Tenet’s denial.

Full Story Here: September 11th Anniversary: Richard Clarke’s Explosive CIA Cover-up Charge – The Daily Beast.

Rick Scott Pays $360 a Year for State Health Insurance | Mother Jones

Florida’s anti-Obamacare governor and his tea party allies in the Legislature pay less for state-funded health insurance than janitors, cops, or teachers.

Last year, political neophyte Rick Scott spent $73 million of his own money to bring the tea party’s anti-government, pro-privatization agenda to the Florida governor’s office. Today, the former executive pays just $30 a month for health care—and lets taxpayers cover the rest.

The governor, a proud bearer of the Republican Party’s deregulation standard, has spent his first half-year in office decrying government waste: He’s laid off thousands of Sunshine State employees, slashed their benefits, turned down (most of) the federal government’s health care dollars, and put extra financial pressure on Florida retirees and Medicaid recipients. But Scott and his dependents pay one-fifth what a janitor in the state Capitol pays for health insurance…and less than 3 percent of what a retired state trooper pays for life-saving coverage.

When asked about the double standard, a spokesman for Scott declined to comment, calling his family’s cheap state coverage “private matters.”

Full Story Here: Rick Scott Pays $360 a Year for State Health Insurance | Mother Jones.

London Calling: Will U.S. Riots Follow?

In an editorial published Wednesday, the Washington Post seeks to sketch out the underlying causes behind the riots which burned London for days.

While the Post’s editorial board clearly goes to lengths to separate the the largely peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations of the Middle East with the current violent and criminal unrest which has engulfed London and other British cities, they clearly see commonalities, too.

“The common factors include high unemployment, resentment toward a prosperous and seemingly impenetrable upper class, and hatred of the police,” the editorial says. “In Britain’s case, as in some Arab countries, the trouble is further fueled by racial and ethnic tensions.”

Sound familar? It should.

Full Story Here: The Washington Current: London Calling: Will U.S. Riots Follow?.

Could Unspent Stimulus Money Be Used to Fend Off a New Recession?

The nation’s top economists are already giving odds on a double-dip recession. The Federal Reserve has only a few bullets left in its gun. And Congress seems politically paralyzed to come up with any new infrastructure or tax-cut plan that would fire up the economy.

So, it seems all the more surprising that the federal government still has $100 billion to $150 billion in stimulus money left to spend. That’s about as much as the Making Work Pay tax credit that gave $800 apiece to middle-class families in 2009 and 2010. And it’s twice as much as Congress gave to states to stabilize budgets and save education jobs.

So, could the money be better used to counteract the fallout from the European debt crisis and Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating?

Full Story Here: The Washington Current: Could Unspent Stimulus Money Be Used to Fend Off a New Recession?.

EPA Study from 1980s Linked Fracking to Fouled Drinking Water |

“There’s never been a documented case of contaminated water supply,” Ed Ireland, executive director of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, an industry group, told me in 2010. It’s a line that has been repeated by various people in the energy industry—and quoted by reporters like me—as the practice of fracking (or using pressurized water to fracture shale and release the natural gas within) has come under increased scrutiny. It’s been almost a mantra among key players in energy policy, including, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson.

“I’m not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water, although there are investigations ongoing,” she told Congress earlier this year, a line repeated by other Obama administration officials and demanded by proponents of fracking, such as Senator James Inhofe.

It also now turns out to be false. A 1987 study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency documented at least one case where some of the gel used in fracking, also known as hydraulic fracturing, had contaminated well water in West Virginia.

Full Story Here: EPA Study from 1980s Linked Fracking to Fouled Drinking Water | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network.

Republicans put their ‘No Tax Pledge’ ahead of their Constitutional oath

Before Republicans ever get to Washington D.C. and before they get the backing of the GOP establishment to fund their campaigns, they are asked to sign various pledge’s for various special interest groups. And one such pledge is a “No Tax Pledge” for a special interest group called Americans for Tax Reform, based in Washington D.C. and headed by Grover Norquist.

Nearly every republican in Congress has signed this pledge which is at clear odds with their Constitutional oath.

As I mentioned, nearly all Republicans have signed this pledge, but one Republican, Senator Tom Coburn (OK), recently said on Meet the Press:

“Which pledge is most important … the pledge to uphold your oath to the Constitution of the United States or a pledge from a special interest group who claims to speak for all American conservatives when, in fact, they really don’t?”

Full Story Here: Republicans put their ‘No Tax Pledge’ ahead of their Constitutional oath – Las Vegas Democrat | Examiner.com.

Austeridiocy: Budget Cuts Take Money Out Of The Economy

“The patient is sicker so we have to apply more leeches.” Countries that are trying to fix deficits with spending cuts are finding out that taking money out of their economies by cutting government is slowing their economies. Duh! Imagine that! So instead of cutting deficits the resulting slowdowns are making their deficits worse as tax revenues drop and joblessness goes up. So what are they proposing? More “austerity” spending cuts. I call them “austeridiots.”

It Didn’t Work So Do It More

See if you can find the logical flaw in this AP news report: French growth sputters to a halt in 2nd quarter,

Full Story Here: Austeridiocy: Budget Cuts Take Money Out Of The Economy | OurFuture.org.

Study: CIA drones strikes have killed 168 children

The Obama administration says a year of drone strikes in Pakistan killed zero civilians; outside experts disagree

Based on international and Pakistani news reports and research on the ground, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has issued a new study on civilians killed by American drones, concluding that at least 385 civilians have been killed in the past seven years, including at least 168 children.

Here’s a taste of the report, which can be read in full here (warning: graphic images):

Pakistani father Din Mohammad had the misfortune to live next door to militants in Danda Darpakhel, North Waziristan. His neighbours were reportedly part of the Haqqani Network, a group fighting US forces in nearby Afghanistan.

On September 8 2010, the CIA’s Reaper drones paid a visit. Hellfire missiles tore into the compound killing six alleged militants.

Full Story Here: Study: CIA drones strikes have killed 168 children – War Room – Salon.com.

Former judge sentenced to prison for kids for cash scheme

A former Pennsylvania juvenile court judge was sentenced on Thursday to 28 years in prison for accepting payment to send juveniles to a for-profit detention facility in a scandal dubbed “kids for cash,”.

Former Luzerne County Juvenile Court Judge Mark Ciavarella, 61, accepted nearly $1 million from a developer who built the detention facility, prosecutors said.

Under the “kids for cash” scheme, thousands of juveniles were shipped to the private center on minor or questionable charges by Ciavarella and another former judge, Michael Conahan, according to juvenile advocates.

“Mr. Ciavarella abused his position of trust and inflicted a deep and lasting wound on the community he vowed to service,” U.S. Attorney Peter Smith said following the sentencing.

Full Story Here: Former judge sentenced to prison for kids for cash scheme | Reuters.

Barney Frank Questions the Questions at NPR

It’s an article of faith in mainstream media discussions of the budget: Social Security and Medicare are the “entitlements” driving our debt problems. That’s not really true, but that’s overwhelmingly the starting point for these discussions. Occasionally, perhaps by accident, someone questions that assumption.

That’s what happened on NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday (8/8/11), when Rep. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.) was interviewed by Steve Inskeep about, among other things, the entitlement burden.

Read what happened–or listen to the excerpt below:

INSKEEP: Congressman, if I can, we’ve just got a few seconds. You have mentioned defense spending. You’ve mentioned tax increases. Those are two areas of disagreement. The biggest part of the federal budget is entitlements…

FRANK: No, wrong. I’m sorry. The Defense budget is bigger than Medicare, and Social Security is, in fact, self-financing, still is.

INSKEEP: Let’s stipulate for this conversation: a very, very, very, very, very big part of the budget is entitlements. Democrats are seen as resisting cuts. Is your side–in a couple of seconds–going to appoint people to the special committee who are ready to make a deal?

Full Story Here: FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » Barney Frank Questions the Questions at NPR.

Recession signals are flashing red again.

Recession signals in the world’s largest economy are flashing red again.

Growth in the second quarter slowed to a pace that has typically been followed by a contraction within a year. Household spending fell in June for the third straight month; never in the past five decades has this happened outside of a slump. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index plunged 16.8 percent in 11 days, performance that’s occurred only twice since at least 1970 without indicating a downturn.

“With so many red flags, the chances of a recession are rising,” said Jonathan Basile, a senior economist at Credit Suisse in New York. “A lot of the economic indicators are teetering. We’ve gone very quickly from a slowdown scare to a recession scare.”

Signs that the flagging U.S. recovery may fizzle haven’t been lost on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues, who pledged this week to hold interest rates at a record low through at least mid-2013. Officials said they “discussed the range of policy tools” to strengthen growth and are “prepared to employ these tools as appropriate.

Full Story Here: Recession Threatening U.S. After Household Spending’s Consecutive Declines – Bloomberg.

Most Americans can’t afford a $1,000 emergency expense

When the unexpected strikes, most Americans aren’t prepared to pay for it.

A majority, or 64%, of Americans don’t have enough cash on hand to handle a $1,000 emergency expense, according to a survey by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, or NFCC, released on Wednesday.

Only 36% said they would tap their rainy day funds for an emergency. The rest of the 2,700 people polled said that they would have to go to other extremes to cover an unexpected expense, such as borrowing money or taking out a cash advance on a credit card.

“It’s alarming,” said Gail Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the Washington, DC-based non-profit. “For consumers who live paycheck to paycheck — having spent tomorrow’s money — an unplanned expense can truly put them in financial distress,” she noted.

Full Story Here: Most Americans can’t afford a $1,000 emergency expense – Aug. 10, 2011.

Recession Threatening U.S. After Household Spending’s Consecutive Declines

Recession signals in the world’s largest economy are flashing red again.

Growth in the second quarter slowed to a pace that has typically been followed by a contraction within a year. Household spending fell in June for the third straight month; never in the past five decades has this happened outside of a slump. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index plunged 16.8 percent in 11 days, performance that’s occurred only twice since at least 1970 without indicating a downturn.

“With so many red flags, the chances of a recession are rising,” said Jonathan Basile, a senior economist at Credit Suisse in New York. “A lot of the economic indicators are teetering. We’ve gone very quickly from a slowdown scare to a recession scare.”

Signs that the flagging U.S. recovery may fizzle haven’t been lost on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues, who pledged this week to hold interest rates at a record low through at least mid-2013. Officials said they “discussed the range of policy tools” to strengthen growth and are “prepared to employ these tools as appropriate.”

Full Story Here: Recession Threatening U.S. After Household Spending’s Consecutive Declines – Bloomberg.

Pay Television Faces ‘Toxic Mix’ as Subscribers Cancel in Record Numbers

The six largest publicly traded U.S. cable and satellite-TV providers combined to lose about 580,000 customers in the second quarter, the biggest such decline in history, according to company and Bloomberg data.

The economy is forcing the industry to face the reality of cord-cutting — pay-TV customers canceling their subscriptions in favor of online options such as Netflix Inc. (NFLX) and Hulu LLC. While cable executives dismiss the idea that subscribers are switching to “over the top” Internet competitors, the reason isn’t as important as the decision to stop paying for TV, said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York.

“Rising prices for pay TV, coupled with growing availability of lower-cost alternatives, add to a toxic mix at a time when disposable income isn’t growing,” Moffett said. “For younger demographics, where in many cohorts unemployment is north of 30 percent, and especially for those with limited or no interest in sports, the pay-TV equation is almost inarguably getting less attractive.”

Full Story Here: Pay Television Faces ‘Toxic Mix’ as Subscribers Cancel in Record Numbers – Bloomberg.

‪THE EMPEROR WEARS NO CLOTHES! Ratigan Spells-It-Out! PAY ATTENTION OBAMA!!!‬‏ –

Dylan Ratagan spells it out!

Video

‪London Riots. (The BBC will never replay this. Send it out)‬‏ – YouTube

Darcus Howe, a West Indian Writer and Broadcaster with a voice about the riots. Speaking about the mistreatment of youths by police leading to an up-roar and the ignorance of both police and the governement. Intelligent black male.

Panama Trade Deal Would Undercut Efforts To Get Rich Americans To Pay Taxes (VIDEO)

During a Monday press conference addressing Standard & Poor’s downgrade of U.S. debt, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his commitment to raising taxes on the wealthy. But as he pushes to get the rich to pay more into federal coffers, Obama is also urging Congress to approve a trade agreement that would cement a key tax avoidance tactic deployed by some of the richest Americans.

“What we need to do now is combine those spending cuts with two additional steps: tax reform that will ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share and modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare,” Obama said during the address, referring to steps the U.S. should take in addition the cuts agreed to to raise the federal debt ceiling.

Just two days before, during his Saturday radio address, Obama urged Congress approve three trade deals, including one with Panama that would permit Americans to easily stash assets in the Central American country, a notorious tax haven for the wealthy and American corporations.

Full Story Here: Panama Trade Deal Would Undercut Efforts To Get Rich Americans To Pay Taxes (VIDEO).

Upper-class people less empathetic than lower-class people: study

People from different economic classes have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world, according to research recently published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

The authors of the study said the findings have important, but overlooked, implications for public policy.

“Americans, although this is shifting a bit, kind of think class is irrelevant,” said Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley, who cowrote the article with Michael W. Kraus of UC-San Francisco and Paul K. Piff of UC-Berkeley.

“I think our studies are saying the opposite: This is a profound part of who we are.”

Full Story Here: Upper-class people less empathetic than lower-class people: study | The Raw Story.

S&P Director: GOP’s Balanced Budget Amendment Would Hurt America’s Creditworthiness

After the first round of the contentious debt limit fight, congressional Republicans are redoubling their efforts to push through a so-called Balanced Budget Amendment as a solution to the country’s financial woes. Last week, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told GOP House members that the best thing they could do during the August recess was to sell the BBA to their constituents. Republicans have even suggested that Standard & Poor’s recent downgrade of U.S. debt from its sterling AAA rating would not have happened, or could be reversed, if a Balanced Budget Amendment were passed.

This weekend the head of S&P, John Chambers, publicly dismissed that idea as foolhardy when he said passage of a BBA would hurt, not help, America’s creditworthiness. Chambers, S&P’s managing director, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that a balanced budget measure “would just reduce your flexibility in a crisis”:

BLITZER: Would it be important or not that important for Congress to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution?

Full Story Here: S&P Director: GOP’s Balanced Budget Amendment Would Hurt America’s Creditworthiness | ThinkProgress.

Home ownership falls to lowest level since 1965

As the foreclosure crisis continues to wreak havoc on the housing market, a source of national pride has taken a sour turn. Home ownership is on the decline and, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report, the United States is fast becoming a nation of renters.

Last Friday, the Census Bureau reported that the percentage of people who owned a home had dropped to 65.9% during the second quarter — its lowest level since the first quarter of 1998 and a far cry from the high of 69.2% reached in late 2004.

Yet, in a research paper issued a week earlier, Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) analysts Oliver Chang, Vishwanath Tirupattur and James Egan argued that the home ownership rate is even lower than the Census Bureau statistics say.

Full Story Here: Home ownership falls to lowest level since 1965 – Aug. 5, 2011.

The Truth About al Qaeda

New information discovered in Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan suggests that the United States has been vastly overstating al Qaeda’s power for a full decade. The group appears to have spent more time dodging drone strikes and complaining about money than trying to get an atomic bomb.

The chief lesson of 9/11 should have been that small bands of terrorists, using simple methods, can exploit loopholes in existing security systems. But instead, many preferred to engage in massive extrapolation: If 19 men could hijack four airplanes simultaneously, the thinking went, then surely al Qaeda would soon make an atomic bomb.

As a misguided Turkish proverb holds, “If your enemy be an ant, imagine him to be an elephant.” The new information unearthed in Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, suggests that the United States has been doing so for a full decade. Whatever al Qaeda’s threatening rhetoric and occasional nuclear fantasies, its potential as a menace, particularly as an atomic one, has been much inflated.

The public has now endured a decade of dire warnings about the imminence of a terrorist atomic attack. In 2004, the former CIA spook Michael Scheuer proclaimed on television’s 60 Minutes that it was “probably a near thing,” and in 2007, the physicist Richard Garwin assessed the likelihood of a nuclear explosion in an American or a European city by terrorism or other means in the next ten years to be 87 percent. By 2008, Defense Secretary Robert Gates mused that what keeps every senior government leader awake at night is “the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear.” Few, it seems, found much solace in the fact that an al Qaeda computer seized in Afghanistan in 2001 indicated that the group’s budget for research on weapons of mass destruction (almost all of it focused on primitive chemical weapons work) was some $2,000 to $4,000.

Full Story Here: The Truth About al Qaeda | Foreign Affairs.

Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt

Paul Krugman:

To understand the furor over the decision by Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, to downgrade U.S. government debt, you have to hold in your mind two seemingly (but not actually) contradictory ideas. The first is that America is indeed no longer the stable, reliable country it once was. The second is that S.& P. itself has even lower credibility; it’s the last place anyone should turn for judgments about our nation’s prospects.

Let’s start with S.& P.’s lack of credibility. If there’s a single word that best describes the rating agency’s decision to downgrade America, it’s chutzpah — traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

America’s large budget deficit is, after all, primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis. And S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a major role in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets that have since turned into toxic waste.

Full Story Here: Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com.

Five Points About Rick Perry’s Prayer Rally Not Yet in Mainstream Press

Texas Governor Rick Perry closed his prayer rally on Saturday stating, “This is a day that people are going to discuss for years to come.” Perry may have been talking about his own political aspirations, but I think his words may be prophetic in this case. We may have just seen the national debut of a new phase of political activism by the Religious Right that is the culmination of decades of planning. Following are five significant points about the rally that have not yet made it into mainstream press.

1. Significance of the 50-State “Prayer Warrior” Communication Networks

An analysis in the Washington Post read, “… organizing a prayer gathering in your home state isn’t the same thing as winning votes in places like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.” This article does not take into account the NAR’s 50-state network of “prayer warriors.” At the moment there are three different national networks under the authority of Dutch Sheets, Cindy Jacobs, and John Benefiel. Both of the last two endorsed Perry’s event.

Full Story Here: | Five Points About Rick Perry’s Prayer Rally Not Yet in Mainstream Press.

Santorum’s Message To People Who Can’t Afford Health Care Costs: Lower Your Cell Phone Bill

During a meeting with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register on Friday, Rick Santorum said that people who can’t afford health care should stop whining about the high costs of medical treatments and medications and spend less on non essentials. Answering a question about the uninsured, Santorum explained that health care, like a car, is a luxury resource that is rationed by society and recalled the story of a woman who said she was spending $200 a month on life-saving prescriptions. Santorum told her to stop complaining and instead lower her cable and cell phone bills:

SANTORUM: All the other necessities of life, we allow people to have varying degrees of creature comforts, if you will. Why? Because we are people who ration our resources based upon what’s important to us and health care has to be one of those things, which is in the mix of things we make decisions about as to what type of, what kind of money we want to allocate to that.

Full Story Here: Santorum’s Message To People Who Can’t Afford Health Care Costs: Lower Your Cell Phone Bill | ThinkProgress.

Our Troops do NOT Protect Our Freedom and We Should Stop Thanking Them for Doing So

Let’s make one thing crystal clear, no member of the US military contributes in any way whatsoever to protecting the freedoms of the American people. As a matter of fact, they are more likely to turn their weapons on you than they are to defend your Constitutional rights.

The only people on this planet Earth who can affect your freedom are members of Congress, local legislators and the members of enforcement institutions who will blindly follow the rulers who sign their paychecks. And, while your beloved troops are murdering people around the globe, yes, I said murdering, your Congress and local legislators are eliminating your freedoms, en masse, without any intervention by our so-called protectors in the armed forces.

There is no honor in volunteering to go anywhere in the world and kill anybody you are told to, without question, without historical background and without verifying the stated reasons for doing so. In this modern age of information we now know that time and time again our military have been deployed into battle, to kill and be killed, for reasons that in no way shape or form resemble the reasons for which they, or we were told at the time. This is no secret, although many Americans refuse to take off the flag that is wrapped around their eyes and see American history as it really happened. They blindly believe what was told to them by the people who have a vested interest in maintaining myths and misconceptions.

Full Story Here: Our Troops do NOT Protect Our Freedom and We Should Stop Thanking Them for Doing So.

OPS; Interesting perspective

IRS: 1,470 millionaires paid no income tax in ’09

Not the best day to report this, but the IRS says 1,470 millionaires paid no federal income taxes in 2009.

Where did the money go? Tax “expenditures” (otherwise known as deductions, write-offs, subsidies or loopholes), charities, municipal bonds and tax payments to foreign governments, according to a recent IRS report (pdf) that ABC News noticed over the weekend and that the Los Angeles Times picked up today.

More than 235,000 taxpayers earned $1 million or more in ’09, with 8,274 making more than $10 million, the Internal Revenue Service said. All told, there were 140 million taxpayers.

Full Story Here: IRS: 1,470 millionaires paid no income tax in ’09 – On Deadline – USATODAY.com.

The Republicans’ Double-Dip, and What Must Be Done

Robert Reich :-:

John Boehner said Tuesday the Republicans got “90 percent of what we wanted” from the budget deal. So presumably he and his colleagues are willing to take responsibility for some 450 points of today’s mammoth 513-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I’m being a bit facetious – but only a bit. It’s always dangerous to read too much into one day’s move in the stock market.

Yet the stock sell-off – not just today’s, but that of the last days – cannot be easily dismissed. It marks Wall Street’s largest losing streak since 2008.

Republicans repeatedly assured the nation that once the debt-limit deal was done – capping spending, cutting the budget deficit, and getting “90 percent” of what they wanted — the economy would bounce back.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (The Republicans’ Double-Dip, and What Must Be Done).

What Happened to Obama?

IT was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.

The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.

Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out “the facts of the case.

Full Story Here: What Happened to Obama’s Passion? – NYTimes.com.