All Entries in the "Featured" Category

What will Congress do about the Bush tax cuts?

Howard Gleckman on the likely end game for the Bush tax cuts:

Unlike most recent congressional debates, the Democrats may have the procedural upper hand this time. With health care, for instance, Republicans would have “won” by blocking congressional action. Gridlock would have preserved the status quo, an outcome favored by about half of voters — and overwhelmingly supported by the GOP base.

But this time, stalemate means the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone. For most households, that will feel like a tax increase — an outcome favored by a handful of budget wonks but very few real people. Democrats believe this will give them the leverage they need to force the GOP to deal. Republicans, by contrast, feel they’d be able to blame the ruling Democrats for failing to tackle the pending tax hike.

Full Story: Ezra Klein – What will Congress do about the Bush tax cuts?.

Deflation, Not Deficit, Is the Real Threat

|William Greider – The Nation|:

The economic specter stalking Barack Obama is not the nonsense debate that captivates deficit hawks and witless political reporters. It is the threat of a full-blown monetary deflation that would truly put the US economy in ruin. In a general deflation, everything falls—prices, output, wages, profits. Unchecked, this can lead to another Big D—the Depression Obama claims he has avoided.

Depression was the fate that befell Herbert Hoover after 1929 and the outlines of this larger catastrophe are present again. It is easy to dismiss deflation warnings from curbstone critics, including from me. But it is more significant—and truly scary—when senior policy makers of the Federal Reserve begin to express the same fear, as the New York Times reported today. The Fed has done quite a lot in the last two years to prevent this disaster from unfolding, but some officials are now worried the Fed hasn’t done enough.

The central bank understands this danger far better than the over-confident technicians of the Obama administration because deflation led to the Federal Reserve’s historic disgrace after 1929. Fed officials then did not understand their wrong-headed policy moves were directly driving the economy into the Great Depression of the 1930s. Today’s central bankers do not wish to experience the same shame again.

The Times story reveals a rump group of decision makers within the Fed who are focused on the threat and urging their colleagues to consider more dramatic measures to reverse the deflationary pressures.

Full Story: Deflation, Not Deficit, Is the Real Threat | The Nation.

Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution, and Profit

New report shows how today’s oil and gas industry threatens Americans in countless ways.

Introduction

The BP catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, with its tragic loss of life and devastating impact on the Gulf Coast economy, has brought the risk and high cost of oil development to the public’s attention. Predictably a round of oil industry executives have testified before Congress offering countless apologies and empty assurances that such an incident will never happen again. But this is the fourth major oil spill in 33 years on North America.

Full Story: Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution, and Profit – National Wildlife Federation.

Met Office report: global warming evidence is ‘unmistakable’

A new climate change report from the Met Office and its US equivalent has provided the “greatest evidence we have ever had” that the world is warming.

Full Story: Met Office report: global warming evidence is ‘unmistakable’ – Telegraph.

Republicans Block Measure to Ban Foreign Meddling in U.S. Elections

Previously, foreign corporations could legally spending on American elections only through their political action committees. Now, however, U.S. subsidiaries of multinational corporations can spend directly on advertising for and against candidates and issues, although foreign individuals are barred from being involved in the spending decisions.

Despite the near certainty of its defeat because of unanimous Republican opposition, Senate Democrats forged ahead yesterday with a piece of legislation that would enact spending limits on the U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations in American elections.

The Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections, or DISCLOSE Act, is a response to the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year in Citizens United V. Federal Election Commission. In that case the door was opened for foreign corporations to engage in electioneering through independent expenditures funneled through U.S. subsidiaries.

Previously, foreign corporations could legally spend money on American elections only through their political action committees. Now, however, U.S. subsidiaries of multinational corporations can spend directly on advertising for and against candidates and issues, although foreign individuals are barred from being involved in the spending decisions.

Full Story: Republicans Block Measure to Ban Foreign Meddling in U.S. Elections | Economy In Crisis.

The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits from Jobs

Robert Reich:

Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they’re making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.

So with all this money and profit, they’ll start hiring again, right? Wrong – for three reasons.

First, lots of their profits are coming from their overseas operations. So that’s where they’re investing and expanding production.

GM now sells more cars in China than it does in the US, but makes most of them there. The company now employs 32,000 hourly workers in China. But only 52,000 GM hourly workers remain in the United States – down from 468,000 in 1970.

Full Story: Robert Reich (The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits from Jobs).

Afghan War Leaks Expose Costly Folly

WikiLeaks Bombshell Docs Paint Afghan War as Utter Disaster — Will We Finally Stop Throwing Money and Lives at This Catastrophe?

By Ray McGovern:

The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan have been laid bare in an undisputable way just days before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly needed at home.

On Sunday, the Web site Wikileaks released some 92,000 documents written mostly by U.S. forces in Afghanistan during a six-year period from January 2004 to December 2009. The authenticity of the material – published under the title “Afghan War Diaries” – is not in doubt.

The New York Times, which received an embargoed version of the documents from Wikileaks, devoted six pages of its Monday editions to several articles on the disclosures, which reveal how the Afghan War slid into its current morass while the Bush administration concentrated U.S. military efforts on Iraq.

Wikileaks also gave advanced copies to the British newspaper, The Guardian, and the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, thus guaranteeing that the U.S. Fawning Corporate Media could not ignore these classified cables the way it did five years ago with the “Downing Street Memo,” a leaked British document which described how intelligence was “fixed” around President George W. Bush’s determination to invade Iraq.

Full Story: Consortiumnews.com.

Multinationals Costing U.S. Billions

Large American multinational corporations are evading their domestic tax obligations through a variety of schemes costing the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars each year, according to a report released last week by the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Companies are shifting profits to nations with lower tax rates, sometimes cutting their tax U.S. tax obligations in half each year, the report found.

“I always find it impossible to explain why a pharmacist in Bastrop, Texas, or a small retail store in San Marcos is having to pay higher rates on the income that their hard-working small business owners are earning than some multinational that can duck and dodge taxes in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) said, according to The Kansas City Star.

Full Story: Multinationals Costing U.S. Billions | Economy In Crisis.

Polls: Americans Are Progressive On Most Issues

Note: Sources for the polling data include Pew Research Center, Gallup, and several other respected groups.

PDF: Non-Partisan Polling Data 1

PDF: Non-Partisan Polling Data 2

WikiLeaks and the War

The New Yorker:

Among the ninety-one thousand or so documents from the Afghan war released by WikiLeaks Sunday is an incident report dated November 22, 2009, submitted by a unit called Task Force Pegasus. It describes how a convoy was stopped on a road in southern Afghanistan at an illegal checkpoint manned by what appeared to be a hundred insurgents, “middle-age males with approx 75 x AK-47’s and 15 x PKM’s.” What could be scarier than that?

Maybe what the soldiers found out next: these weren’t “insurgents” at all, at least not in the die-hard jihadi sense that the American public might understand the term. The gunmen were quite willing to let the convoy through, if the soldiers just forked over a two- or three-thousand-dollar bribe per truck; and they were in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public. According to a Times report this June (six months after the incident with Task Force Pegasus), Matiullah earns millions of dollars from NATO, supposedly to keep that road clear for convoys and help with American special-forces missions. Matiullah is also suspected of (and has denied) earning money “facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway.”

That is good to know. The Obama Administration has already expressed dismay that WikiLeaks publicized the documents, but a leak informing us that our tax dollars may be being used as seed money for a protection racket associated with a narcotics-trafficking enterprise is a good leak to have. And the checkpoint incident is, again, only one report, from one day. It will take some time to go through everything WikiLeaks has to offer—the documents cover the period from January, 2004, to December, 2009—but it is well worth it, especially since the war in Afghanistan is not winding down, but ramping up. (Also very helpful: Raffi Khatchadourian’s piece for The New Yorker on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.)

Full Story: Close Read: WikiLeaks and the War : The New Yorker.

No to Oligarchy

Senator Bernie Sanders:

The American people are hurting. As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, millions of Americans have lost their jobs, homes, life savings and their ability to get a higher education. Today, some 22 percent of our children live in poverty, and millions more have become dependent on food stamps for their food.

And while the Great Wall Street Recession has devastated the middle class, the truth is that working families have been experiencing a decline for decades. During the Bush years alone, from 2000-2008, median family income dropped by nearly $2,200 and millions lost their health insurance. Today, because of stagnating wages and higher costs for basic necessities, the average two-wage-earner family has less disposable income than a one-wage-earner family did a generation ago. The average American today is underpaid, overworked and stressed out as to what the future will bring for his or her children. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

But, not everybody is hurting. While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.

Full Story: No to Oligarchy | CommonDreams.org.

The Fight to Protect Social Security

The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which was created by President Barack Obama earlier this year, is using exaggerated rhetoric to heighten deficit fears at a time when many economists say more government spending is needed to spur hiring and avert a second dip in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The commission – co-chaired by former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles – is talking about cuts to Social Security, Medicare and middle-class benefits like the home mortgage deduction rather than focusing on three key causes of the deficit: massive war and weapons spending, giant tax cuts for the wealthy, and the faltering economy.

By contrast, 40 leading economists, including Nobel Prize winners, issued a statement calling for more government action in the short-term while treating the federal debt as a longer-range problem.

“We recognize the necessity of a program to cut the mid- and long-term federal deficit but the imperative requirement now, and the surest course to balance the budget over time, is to restore a full measure of economic activity,” the signers wrote.

Full Story: Consortiumnews.com.

U.S. Commiting Economic Suicide

What if the economy had always operated as it does today with companies being sold abroad whereby they divert wealth, jobs and production to other countries? Imagine the consequences if any international and global strife were to commence. We would be unable to manufacture any significant amount of our own weapons or products

America’s ability to competitively manufacture on a global scale is waning fast. Over the past 20 years, America has lost millions of manufacturing jobs, 3 million of them since 1998. Our manufacturing trade deficit contributed to almost 60 percent, or 1.78 million, of those manufacturing jobs lost.

It didn’t happen because we were less qualified manufacturers, or because the world would have no use for our goods. It happened simply because we made it happen. We gave businesses the go-ahead to move jobs overseas, (i.e. to China where hourly pay rates barely make it over 50 cents, and in some cases are as low as 33 cents) and we flatly abandoned capital and knowledge intensive industries.

Due to these low wages offered in China, and many other places, American businesses have left the domestic arena to save money. This is supposed to be mutually beneficial, because Americans theoretically would see reduced prices for goods produced overseas, and therefore enjoy a better standard of living, but as we know in the real world savings are rarely passed onto the consumer, and certainly not to the extent that will allow it to make up for losing our manufacturing infrastructure.

Full Story: U.S. Commiting Economic Suicide | Economy In Crisis.

The Silent Killing of America’s Workforce

An Interview with Patrice Woeppel on the Deadly Inadequacies of the Workers’ Compensation System

Frank Joseph Smecker: You begin your book “Depraved Indifference: the Workers’ Compensation System” with a staggering fact: “Every eight minutes in the US, someone dies from an occupational illness or injury.” That’s incredible, in a really disconcerting sense — that’s more than 60,000 deaths per year … Can you explain how this nightmare has become a reality for so many?

Patrice Woeppel: Worker deaths from toxic exposures and other work illnesses are conservatively estimated by NIOSH, Markowitz, Steenland and other researchers to be 50,000 to 60,000 deaths each year, or 10 times the number of fatalities recorded by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics).1 It is a disaster of monumental proportions that goes largely unrecorded and unnoticed. The United States has no comprehensive occupational health data collection system.

Occupational illness and injury deaths are now considered the eighth leading cause of death in the US.

It’s important to understand how these figures came about; BLS reported that 5,214 worker deaths occurred in 2008. OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and the Bureau of Labor only log deaths that occur at the work site or promptly thereafter. Diseases such as cancers and asbestosis may not show up until decades after exposure. The long latency period, combined with the lack of sufficient disease data is a continuing problem. That number, 5,214, is not correct for workplace-related deaths because OSHA’s and the Bureau of Labor’s worker fatality data is not likely to include those who died from disease, primarily as a result of chemical exposure at the workplace.

Full Story: t r u t h o u t | Frank Joseph Smecker | The Silent Killing of America’s Workforce.

CBO: Public option could save $68 billion by 2020

When people think of deficit reduction, they tend to think about spending cuts and tax increases. They don’t think as much about saving money by putting more effective policies into place. But as the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of a new public option proposal from Pete Stark suggests, maybe they should.

Stark wants to add a public option to the exchanges that would start by paying doctors the rates Medicare pays plus 5 percent, and then grow with the cost of physicians’ services. According to the CBO, this plan’s premiums “would be 5 percent to 7 percent lower, on average, than the premiums of private plans offered in the exchanges.” But that’s not all!

“The proposal would reduce federal budget deficits through 2019 by about $53 billion,” CBO says. And because the public plan is saving more money as time goes on, if you extend that out to 2020, the savings to the government are $68 billion. That implies a savings of $200 billion or so in the second decade. That’s a lot of money, and it’s in addition to the savings for consumers.

Full Story: Ezra Klein – CBO: Public option could save $68 billion by 2020.

America, There Is a Better Way: It’s Called Germany

What anemic America can learn from Europe’s export-happy engine and largest social democracy.

Nearly two years after the financial crisis brought the U.S. economy to its knees, more than 20 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed and Congress can barely extend jobless benefits. Republicans propose the same old nostrums–tax cuts–while President Barack Obama burnishes his deficit hawk credentials. Nearly everyone in power appears content to return to the status quo, circa 2007, with a few tweaks in place.

Even worse, alternatives to U.S.-style capitalism — and its attendant inequality, poverty and instability — are harder than ever to glimpse, as the sovereign debt crisis across the Atlantic distracts U.S media and politicians, once again, from the impressive achievements of European social democracies. That’s a shame, because if we can’t imagine a better world, our political and economic status quo appears inevitable and uncontestable, much to the benefit of those in power.

Thankfully, we have Thomas Geoghegan’s new book Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life (The New Press, 2010) to remind us that things like tax cuts for the wealthy, a healthcare system controlled by corporations and privatized retirement schemes are not inevitable.

Full Story: America, There Is a Better Way: It’s Called Germany | Vision | AlterNet.

Why Does Fox News Have More Power Than Any Progressive in the Country?

Cenk Uygur:

As we can all see now, when Fox says jump, the Obama administration asks how high? (Then jumps one inch less and considers it a progressive victory). Is there anyone Obama won’t fire or throw under the bus if Fox asks him to? What if they ask Obama to fire himself? Would he do it? Or would he just fire Biden and say he met them halfway?

If the firing of Shirley Sherrod was the first time they had done this, then all of the criticism they have received might be a bit much. But as we have learned from this incident (which the rest of us already knew, with the apparent exception of Fox News and Andrew Breitbart), context matters. We’ve seen the rest of the tape on the Obama administration and it isn’t pretty.

Van Jones, ACORN, Dawn Johnsen, Shirley Sherrod. First sign of trouble, throw someone overboard. When they fired Van Jones, I said they were only encouraging Fox. But that wasn’t some genius prediction; it was only the most obvious thing in the world. Do you think the bully won’t take your lunch money tomorrow if you give it to him today?

Full Story: Cenk Uygur: Why Does Fox News Have More Power Than Any Progressive in the Country?.

Keith Olbermann Special Comment On Shirley Sherrod Controversy

Keith Olbermann Special Comment On Shirley Sherrod Controversy (Part 1) – 07/21/10

Part 2

Why the US Is So Badly Equipped to Deal with Unemployment

By Dean Baker

15 million are unemployed, but unfortunately none of the people responsible for the recession are in that category.

It has been two-and-a-half years since the recession officially began in the United States. While the economy has been growing for more than a year, unemployment remains near the 10.1 percent peak of October 2009. Few economists predict a rapid decline from its June level of 9.5 percent and, with stimulus being phased down over the next year, it is very plausible that the rate will edge higher in coming months.

The US, unlike most western European countries, is not set up to sustain long periods of high unemployment. Its system of social welfare is very much centered on work. This is most evident with health care. The vast majority of non-elderly people get their health care through employer provided health insurance. Individual policies tend to be very expensive, especially for people with any history of medical problems. When people lose their jobs, they generally lose their health care coverage as well. While there is a public program for low-income families, it doesn’t cover most of the unemployed, and the quality is often quite poor.

The same is true of other forms of public support. The US was never very generous to people who are not working, and it has become less so in the last three decades. That is why the prospect of a prolonged period of high unemployment in the US is likely to mean serious hardship for large numbers of people.

Full Story: Why the US Is So Badly Equipped to Deal with Unemployment | Economy | AlterNet.

Unless You’re a Shill for Banks and Big Business, The Washington Elites Will Call You Controversial

Tim Geithner and Chris Dodd’s opposition to Elizabeth Warren stems from the fact that she wasn’t a puppet for big banks.

Over the last few days, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have made the case that Harvard professor and Congressional Oversight Panel chairwoman Elizabeth Warren is too controversial a figure to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. This, then, raises the revealing question of how Washington defines “controversial”?

Recall that the charge of “too controversial” was not made by Senate Democrats (or at least not at the volume they are being made against Warren) against Gary Gensler, the former Goldman Sachs executive appointed by President Obama to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It was not made by most Senate Democrats against Larry Summers, a hedge fund executive subsequently appointed to a top economic position in the administration. It was not made against Citigroup executive Jack Lew when last week he was appointed to head the Office of Management and Budget. And it wasn’t made against Tim Geithner, who orchestrated massive taxpayer giveaways to major banks during his time at the New York Fed.

Full Story: Unless You’re a Shill for Banks and Big Business, The Washington Elites Will Call You Controversial | Economy | AlterNet.

The Senators Who Gave Us 15 Million Unemployed Want to Deny Them Benefits

Dean Baker:

It is amazing how people in Washington are so forgiving — of each other. We have close to 15 million people unemployed and more than 8 million people under-employed because the folks managing our economy were incompetent.

In spite of the efforts of economists and policy types to portray the cause of the economic collapse as being complicated, it wasn’t. It was really really simple. Prior to the downturn the economy was being driven by an $8 trillion housing bubble. This led to a boom in residential construction. (A separate bubble in commercial real estate led to a boom in non-residential construction.) The equity generated by the housing bubble also led to a surge in consumption, with the saving rate falling to almost zero at the peak of the bubble.

It was inevitable that the bubble burst. Bubbles do that. They lead to an over-supply and eventually we run out of suckers willing or able to pay bubble-inflated prices for houses. The collapse caused the economy to lose $1.2 trillion in annual demand from the private sector. Annual construction spending fell back by close to $600 billion and consumption fell by roughly the same amount as a result of the loss of housing wealth.

Full Story: Dean Baker: The Senators Who Gave Us 15 Million Unemployed Want to Deny Them Benefits.

“Top Secret America”: A hidden world, growing beyond control

A Washington Post Investigation: :

“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks

National Security Inc.

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest — and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns.

Full Story: National Security Inc. | washingtonpost.com.

Wealth And Inequality In America

15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America…..

The gap between the top 0.01% and everyone else hasn’t been this bad since the Roaring Twenties

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it’s also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.

While politicians gloat about our “recovery,” our poor are getting poorer, our average wages are still falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.

But, yes, if you’re in that top 1%, life in America is grand.

Full Story: Wealth And Inequality In America.

Stop the Madness! People Should be SHOCKED

Ernest F. Hollings:

Our only hope is for President Obama to enforce our trade laws to protect the economy and make it profitable for Corporate America to produce in the United States in the trade war.

People are shocked to learn:

1. That almost a year before the recession, in February 2007, the Princeton economist, Alan Blinder, estimated that in ten years we would be losing 30 to 40 million jobs to offshoring. That’s about 300,000 jobs a month lost to offshoring.

2. President Obama has stimulated to save or create jobs lost from the recession, but totally ignores the 300,000 jobs lost to offshoring.

3. President Bush and the Federal Reserve stimulated the economy $7.5 trillion during his eight year term, and household debt during the same time stimulated the economy another $7 trillion for a total of a $14.5 trillion stimulation. President Obama stimulated the economy his first year over $1 trillion, and we have already stimulated the economy this year $1.142 trillion (6/9/10) with four months to go. So we have borrowed and stimulated the economy over the past nine and a half years $16.6 trillion, and the private sector is only creating 41,000 new jobs a month.

Full Story: Stop the Madness! People Should be SHOCKED | Economy In Crisis.

Newsweek — We’re Not Winning. It’s Not Worth It.

Time to Get Out of Afghanistan —-

Here’s how to draw down in Afghanistan.

Full Story: Haass: Time to Get Out of Afghanistan – Newsweek.

The Gulf Region as a New “Sacrifice Zone”

Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo:……………

It is possible that the day will come when vast areas of the Gulf and its coastal regions will be declared sacrifice zones.”

The Obama administration has a double BP problem: the oil giant and the other BP: Black People. “It appears that BP and the Obama administration find it easier to stanch the flow of information than they do the deepwater gusher,” which at some point may cause great stretches of the Gulf to be written off as “sacrifice zones,” like atomic testing sites in the 50s and inner cities in the 70s. The author knows something about the inner workings of the Environmental Protection Agency, having won the largest award ever against the EPA for sexual and racial discrimination.

By now, if asked to describe the BP problem facing Carol M. Browner, the Special Advisor to the President for Energy and the Environment, there is little doubt that most people could likely site some details about the April 20th explosion that killed eleven people and triggered the worst environmental disaster in US history. With tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil blasting daily into the Gulf of Mexico at pressure equivalent to a power washer—it is possible that the day will come when vast areas of the Gulf and its coastal regions will be declared sacrifice zones. That is, areas that are so contaminated that the cost and feasibility of cleaning and restoring them to there prior state will exceed their total economic worth

There are already examples of official sacrifice zones in the United States today. The Yucca salt flats in Nevada, for example—the staging area for hundreds of nuclear tests—were declared a sacrifice zone in 1997 by the US Geological Survey. Before discussing the catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, however, there is a perfect example of widespread sacrifice zones occurring in cities all across America, so obvious it needs pointing out—gentrification. City neighborhoods were abandoned by white America after World War II with the great northern migration of African Americans filling those abandoned cities. It wouldn’t be until increasing awareness of sustainable environments, increase commuting costs and the need to break oil addiction began to argue for a return by whites to the cities that banking institutions started pouring serious resources back into American inner cities. For decades these same areas had been sacrifice zones where poverty and its poor cousins despair, and hopelessness flourished. In many instances, even the sacrifice zones were sacrificed when toxic waste, brown fields, and landfills were commonly the neighbors of poor and largely communities of color.

Full Story: The Gulf Region as a New “Sacrifice Zone” | Black Agenda Report.

Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a world-killing event

Thank God the devastating 2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill has finally been capped. While the media focuses our attention on cleanup of 219 million gallons of crude oil [1], the real doomsday trigger was that unleashed with the oil goes largely unnoticed. A catastrophic legacy that we leave behind for future generations, with far greater long term danger to life on Earth than the leaked oil, is the impacts of the leaked methane from the failed 2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill.

Not to diminish in anyway the tragedy of the Exxon Valdez, but we learned from the Exxon Valdez that it takes about 20 years for an environment to largely recover from the oil damage, admittedly with some heartbreaking consequences [2]. Sadly, some animals did not recover and local economies based upon fishing and tourism needed to change.

The media has reported that vast amounts of methane in Gulf spill pose a threat to life in the ocean [3], but they missed the most important point, methane’s role as the doomsday trigger. Even at great ocean pressures oil cannot be compressed [4], the amount of oil that exited the pipe at the sea floor is roughly equal to the oil that pollutes the environment at sea level.   However that oil was mixed with 40% methane [5] and the situation with methane is dreadful.  As methane exited the pipe it expanded many times its volume as it moved up from the ocean depths and pressure on it was reduced.  This explains why scientists are measuring as much as one million times the normal level of methane near the ocean surface water [6].

Normally, the high pressure and cold temperature keep methane gas stable beneath the ocean floor, locked up with water in a form called methane hydrate [7], but the oil spill has released vast amounts of that trapped methane into our environment. Then the methane hydrates at the bottom of the ocean expands approximately 3,000 times its volume when they are eventually released into the atmosphere as methane [8]. And to make matters even worse, Methane is ten times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide [9].

Full Story: Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a world-killing event – by Dave Nocera – Helium.

America: hooked on war and getting poorer

With record foreclosures and child poverty at a shameful level, can we really afford to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq for 10 years?

There’s plenty of good money to be made /
Supplyin’ the army with tools of the trade
– Country Joe and the Fish

I hallucinate easily, a hangover from time spent in an acid-rock commune in London in the fevered 60s. Most evenings when I switch on the television 6.30 news with its now cliched pictures of deep sea oil spurting from BP’s pipe rupture, I see not bleeding sludge but human blood surging up into the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve learned to trust my visions as metaphors for reality. The same news programmes, often as a dutiful throwaway item, will show a jerky fragment of Afghan combat accompanied by the usual pulse-pounding handheld shots of snipers amid roadside bomb explosions, preferably in fiery balls. My delusional mind converts this footage into a phantasmagoria where our M60 machine guns are shooting ammunition belts full of $1,000 bills.

Blood, oil, bullets … and cash.

Why is nobody talking about the Afghanistan adventure as a cause of our plunging recession? Or at least citing the 30-year-old endless war as a major contributory factor in wasting our money to “nation-build” in the Hindu Kush while our own country falls to pieces on food stamps, foreclosures and child poverty – one in five kids – that would put the world’s poorest nations to shame?

Full Story: America: hooked on war and getting poorer | Clancy Sigal | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Free Trade is a Failure

No other country loses so many jobs, so much productive, and so much investment capital to international trade. No country can even come close to losing so much money.

Universities in the United States produce some of the best economists, engineers, historians, scientists, and political theorists in the world. The quality of education up the high school level has fallen off precipitously in the past few decades, but for those who strive for higher education there is virtually no better place to do it than here in the U.S.

Unfortunately, while the brain trust of academia has largely been unable to breech the ivory tower that is Washington politics. Our politicians have to deal with issues on a daily basis that affect every sector of the economy, and ever sector of everyday life in America. Yet the vast majority of them are attorneys. Their professional training is in litigation; not civil engineering, economics, or hard sciences.

After sprinkling in a few medical doctors and former military service members, and a growing number of former corporate executives, you have accounted for nearly every elected official in our nation’s capital.

Full Story: Free Trade is a Failure | Economy In Crisis.

Conservatism’s Death Gusher

George Lakoff:

Conservatism is an ideology of death. It was conservative laissez-faire free market ideology – that maximizing profit comes first – that led to:………………………………………….

The issue is death – death gushing at ten thousand pounds per square inch from a mile below the sea, tens of thousands of barrels of death a day. Not just death to eleven human beings. Death to sea birds, sea turtles, dolphins, fish, oyster beds, shrimp, beaches; death to the fishing industry, tourism, jobs; and death to a way of life based on the beauty and bounty of the Gulf.

Many, perhaps a majority, of the Gulf residents affected are conservatives, strong right-wing Republicans, following extremist Governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour. What those conservatives are not saying, and may be incapable of seeing, is that conservatism itself is largely responsible for what happened, and that conservatism is a continuing disaster for conservatives who live along the Gulf.

Conservatism is an ideology of death. It was conservative laissez-faire free market ideology – that maximizing profit comes first – that led to:

Full Story: Conservatism’s Death Gusher | CommonDreams.org.

22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America

The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

See proof of the Middle Class extermination –>

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and “free trade” that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn’t tell us that the “global economy” would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

Full Story: 22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America.

The Root Of Economic Fragility And Political Anger

Robert Reich – -

Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.

Missing from almost all discussion of America’s dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June’s decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.

In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.

Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans’ earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. As hiring has picked up on the Street, fat salaries are reappearing. Richard Stein, president of Global Sage, an executive search firm, tells the New York Times corporate clients have offered compensation packages of more than $1 million annually to a dozen candidates in just the last few weeks.

We’re back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground.

Full Story: The Root Of Economic Fragility And Political Anger | TPMCafe.

America Builds an Aristocracy

AMERICANS have always assumed that wealth comes and goes. A poor person can work hard, become rich and pass his money on to his children and grandchildren. But then, if those descendants do not manage it wisely, they may lose it. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” the saying goes, and it conforms to our preference for meritocracy over aristocracy.

This assumption is now being undermined, however, through the increasing use of so-called dynasty trusts. These estate-planning instruments enable affluent people to provide their heirs with money and property largely free from taxes and immune to the claims of creditors. And rather than benefit only children and grandchildren, dynasty trusts provide for generations in perpetuity — truly creating an American aristocracy.

Congress is feeling pressure to deal with taxes on inherited wealth, which have fallen to zero this year thanks to lawmakers’ inaction. In the process, it should address the more pernicious problem of dynasty trusts.

This type of trust is new because until very recently most states had a “rule against perpetuities,” which limited the term of any family trust to about 90 years, after which time the family members would own the property outright. This rule derived from the idea that property is best controlled by the living.

Full Story: Op-Ed Contributor – America Builds an Aristocracy – NYTimes.com.

Len Hart: Let Them Eat the “Higher Pie”

The U.S. right wing consistently mistakes bigger slices of a smaller pie for growth!

In fact, wealth is the product of labor. Therefore, real growth creates larger pies, larger slices. Real growth is, by definition, egalitarian or not at all! America’s ruling elite amounts to just one percent of the total population and they own more than the rest of us combined. When I am charitable, I suspect that their perspective is myopic in the extreme. More realistically, I suspect that they just don’t care.

Since 1900 the U.S. has ‘experimented’ with ‘robber baron economics’, ‘supply-side economics’, ‘trickle down theory’ and assorted ‘stimuli’ that also put the fat cats and so-called ‘investor’ class at the top of the pecking order with often tragic results –the Panic of the late 1800s, Hoover’s Great Depression, Ike’s ‘Recession’, Reagan’s ‘Tent City’ Depression of over 2 years! Anyone not seeing the pattern is just not paying attention.

My thoughts along these lines are inspired by the following article by my good friend, Communications expert, Doug Drenkow.

Full Story: The Existentialist Cowboy: Let Them Eat the “Higher Pie”.

What Eisenhower Could Teach Obama

No president since Eisenhower has fully understood the Pentagon’s dominant position in military and security policy.

Fifty years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told his senior advisers in the Oval Office of the White House, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” Several months later, he issued his famous warning about the military-industrial complex.

Now the United States finds itself in a cul-de-sac, with no way out of increased military deployments and expenditures, and no evidence that President Obama has a firm hand on the national security tiller.

A central problem for the nation is the increased power and influence of the Pentagon over the foreign and national security policies of the United States.

No president since Eisenhower has fully understood the Pentagon’s dominant position in military and security policy.  Armed with his knowledge and experience as World War II’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Eisenhower made sure that he could not be outmaneuvered by his military advisers, particularly on such key issues as the Vietnam War and tensions with the Soviet Union.

Full Story: Consortiumnews.com.

Are Low Taxes Exacerbating the Recession?

by David Sirota  :

the Reagan zeitgeist created the illusion that taxes stunt economic growth, the numbers prove that higher marginal tax rates generate more resources for the job-creating,………

As the planet’s economy keeps stumbling, the phrase “worst recession since the Great Depression” has become the new “global war on terror” — a term whose overuse has rendered it both meaningless and acronym-worthy. And just like that previously ubiquitous phrase, references to the WRSTGD are almost always followed by flimsy and contradictory explanations.

Republicans who ran up massive deficits say the recession comes from overspending. Democrats who gutted the job market with free trade policies nonetheless insist it’s all George W. Bush’s fault. Meanwhile, pundits who cheered both sides now offer non-sequiturs, blaming excessive partisanship for our problems.

But as history (and Freakonomics) teaches, such oversimplified memes tend to obscure the counterintuitive notions that often hold the most profound truths. And in the case of the WRSTGD, the most important of these is the idea that we are in economic dire straits because tax rates are too low.

Full Story: Are Low Taxes Exacerbating the Recession? by David Sirota on Creators.com – A Syndicate Of Talent.

Wealthy Reap Rewards While Those Who Work Lose

Times are tough for workers in the U.S. where a recession has a stranglehold on much of the economy, but life is perfectly rosy for those at the top.

The riches of the wealthiest North Americans grew by double digits in 2009, primarily from interest their money earned when it was invested in the stock market and elsewhere, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group.

Millionaires in the U.S. and Canada saw their wealth increase 15 percent in 2009, to a total of 4.6 trillion dollars, the report found.

Worldwide, 11 million – or less than 1 percent of all households – were millionaires in 2009. They owned about 38 percent of the world’s wealth or 111 trillion dollars, up from about 36 percent in 2008, according to Boston Consulting Group.

Full Story: Wealthy Reap Rewards While Those Who Work Lose | CommonDreams.org.

The Vanishing American Consumer and the Coming Trade War

Robert Reich:

It’s clear American consumers can’t get the economy going on their own. They can’t restart the jobs machine. They’ve run out of money and credit.

President Obama has vowed to double U.S. exports within the next five years. That’s because exports are critical for rebooting the American economy. It’s clear American consumers can’t get the economy going on their own. They can’t restart the jobs machine. They’ve run out of money and credit.

It’s not just that one out of four Americans is unemployed or underemployed (working part-time, overqualified, or at a lower wage than before). More significantly, the Great Recession burst the housing bubble that had let American consumers turn their homes into ATMs. Now the cash machines are closed.

So the administration figures foreign consumers will have to fill the gap.

Problem is, most other economies also relied on American consumers. Remember the trade gap? Americans used to be the world’s biggest and most reliable customers — sucking in high-tech gadgets assembled in China, car parts from Japan, shirts and shoes from Southeast Asia, and precision instruments from Germany.

Full Story: Robert Reich: The Vanishing American Consumer and the Coming Trade War.

The Case Against Kissinger Deepens, Continued

Scott Horton — Harper’s Magazine : -

The Case Against Kissinger,” built a strong though circumstantial case connecting Henry Kissinger to a series of assassinations in Chile….

As I noted earlier, Christopher Hitchens’s two-part 2001 article, “The Case Against Kissinger,” built a strong though circumstantial case connecting Henry Kissinger to a series of assassinations in Chile around the time of the overthrow and killing of President Salvador Allende. The evidence has continued to grow since Hitchens’s arguments appeared. On Friday, the release of a taped conversation between Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon added more. Jeff Stein reports in the Washington Post’s Spytalk blog:

President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, joked that an “incompetent” CIA had struggled to successfully carry out an assassination in Chile, newly available Oval Office tapes reveal. At the time, in 1971, Nixon and Kissinger were working to undermine the socialist administration of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who would die during a U.S.-backed military coup two years later. One of the key figures to stand in the way of Chilean generals plotting to overthrow Allende was the Chilean army commander-in-chief, Rene Schneider, who was killed during a botched kidnapping attempt by military right-wingers in 1970.

The new tapes won’t end the argument, but they add persuasive evidence that the CIA was at least trying to eliminate Schneider, and perhaps with the connivance of Nixon and Kissinger. The key exchange between the president and his national security adviser occurred on June 11, 1971. They were discussing another assassination in Chile, this time of one of Allende’s political adversaries, former Christian Democratic party interior minister Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, who was murdered on June 8, 1971, by an extreme leftist group.

Here’s a transcript of the tape:

Full Story: The Case Against Kissinger Deepens, Continued—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine).

The real oil spill exposed.

Thom Hartmann talks with John Wathen

..”no one has ever tried to stop a flow like this once it’s started…”

Republicans: a party of unemployment

Dean Baker:

It may seem bad taste to accuse Republicans of wanting a rise in unemployment but their actions leave no other explanation

From now until 2 November, the Republican party will be the party of unemployment. The logic is straightforward: the more people who are unemployed on election day, the better the prospects for Republicans in the fall election. They expect, with good cause, that voters will hold the Democrats responsible for the state of the economy. Therefore, anything that the Republicans can do to make the economy worse between now and then will help their election prospects.

While it may be bad taste to accuse a major national political party of deliberately wanting to throw people out of jobs, there is no other plausible explanation for the Republicans’ behaviour. They have balked at supporting nearly every bill that had any serious hope of creating or keeping jobs, most recently filibustering on bills that provided aid to state and local governments and extending unemployment benefits. The result of the Republicans’ actions, unless they are reversed quickly, is that hundreds of thousands more workers will be thrown out of work by the mid-terms.

The story is straightforward. Nearly every state and local government across the country is looking at large budget shortfalls for their 2011 fiscal years, most of which begin on 1 July 2010. Since they are generally required by state constitutions or local charters to balance their budgets, they will have no choice except to raise taxes and/or make large cutbacks and lay off workers to bring spending and revenue into line

Full Story: Republicans: a party of unemployment | Dean Baker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Against counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“…. you could put Mother Teresa in charge of Afghanistan and, with flows of resources of that magnitude, she would be unable to prevent the kind of corruption we see in Afghanistan today.”

It says something about American politics that Gen. Stanley McChrystal was not fired because U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are running at record levels, because the much vaunted Marja initiative has failed, or because the Kandahar offensive is already in trouble during its preliminary rollout. No, he was fired because he and his team embarrassed the White House with carelessly frank talk to a journalist. “This is a change in personnel, but not a change in policy,” said President Barack Obama in announcing General McChrystal’s dismissal. Or, in the words of Rep. James McGovern, we have the “same menu, different waiter.”

However, the real story should not be the change in personnel but the continuation of a failed policy, and there is abundant evidence that the policy is failing–both in the Rolling Stone article that got General McChrystal fired and in other recent media reports. Coalition casualties are steadily rising, and this month is the deadliest yet with over 46 U.S. and 95 coalition troops killed already. Over the past year, IED attacks have doubled. The Marja campaign, intended to model the power of the new counterinsurgency strategy, is failing: The Taliban are more popular in Marja than the corrupt official government with which the U.S. is allied and, having melted away during the front-page U.S. military offensive, Taliban fighters are now back in force. General McChrystal himself referred to Marja as “a bleeding ulcer” (a much more significant quote than what his aides might have called Vice President Joe Biden). The Kandahar campaign, for which Marja was supposed to be a glorious dress rehearsal, is months behind schedule in the face of opposition from local elders and second thoughts from an ill-prepared Afghan government. So tenuous is U.S. control of the countryside that coalition forces cannot move essential supplies along major transport routes without paying warlords hundreds of dollars per truck in protection money, some of which gets passed on to the Taliban fighters sworn to kill U.S. soldiers. Most devastating of all (and the least reported in secondary media accounts), the Rolling Stone article quotes American grunts on the frontlines saying they have lost faith in the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. And the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, has become like Robert McNamara in Vietnam, telling his government in private that counterinsurgency is not working, only to fall in line behind the policy in public. Finally, the U.S. is losing the war on the home front too, with the Christian Science Monitor reporting that only 41 percent of Americans now believe that the war in Afghanistan can be won, while 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Obama is managing it.

Full Story: Against counterinsurgency in Afghanistan | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Thomas Jefferson Feared an Aristocracy of Corporations

John Nichols:

Thomas Jefferson’s name gets thrown around quite a bit these days by the Tea Partisans, which is a good thing.

A populist movement of the right or the left that neglected Jefferson, the most radical of the first presidents, would be a sorry affair indeed.

Jefferson’s distrust of concentrated and consolidated power was such that he left a legacy for any and every dissenter against the state.

But Jefferson did not stop there.

He was, as well, a relentless critic of the monopolizing of economic power by banks, corporations and those who put their faith in what the third president referred to as “the selfish spirit of commerce (that) knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

Full Story: Thomas Jefferson Feared an Aristocracy of Corporations | The Nation.

How Goldman gambled on starvation

Johann Hari:

Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You’re wrong. There’s more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here’s the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.”

Full Story: Johann Hari: How Goldman gambled on starvation – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent.

Sober Up

Ernest F. Hollings:

Few people realize that for the past fifty years the policy of the United States government has been to get rid of jobs.

Beginning with the Marshall Plan after World War II the government sent money, equipment and expertise to revive the economies of Europe and the Pacific Rim. In doing so, the U. S. called for open markets and “free trade.” Europe responded, but Japan never opened its market. Instead, Japan started a trade war for market share by closing its domestic market, subsidizing and selling its exports at cost, and making up the profit in the closed market. It worked. Today, Toyota is #1, while Ford, GM and Chrysler struggle. We have yet to force Japan to open its market. We in Congress tried, but numerous attempts to open Japan’s market and enforce our trade agreements were thwarted by the White House or vetoed by the president. Our attempts were all led by Corporate America to protect their investment and jobs in country. With the advent of NAFTA with Mexico and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, Corporate America gave up and joined production in China, India and Mexico. Jobs hemorrhaged. Two years ago Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist, estimated that the nation would lose thirty to forty million jobs in ten years to offshoring. The economy boat has sprung leaks from derivatives and credit default swaps. With stimulus, we bail as fast as we can to stop the leaks, but do nothing to plug the hole in the hull ripped by offshoring. Stimulation can be a total success and we’ll still loss more jobs than are created.

Full Story: Sober Up | Economy In Crisis.

Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010

Frank Rich:

ALL men may be created equal, but slavery, America’s original sin of inequality, was left unaddressed in the Declaration of Independence signed 234 years ago today. Of all the countless attempts to dispel that shadow over the nation’s birth, few were more ambitious than the hard-fought bill Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law just in time for another Fourth of July, 46 summers ago.

With the holiday weekend approaching, Johnson summoned the television networks for the signing ceremony on Thursday evening, July 2. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, first proposed more than a year earlier by John F. Kennedy, banished the Jim Crow laws that denied black Americans access to voting booths, public schools and public accommodations. Johnson told the nation we could “eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country” with the help of a newly formed “Community Relations Service” and its “advisory committee of distinguished Americans.” Talk about an age of innocence!

Still, there were some heartening reports of America’s first full day under the new law. A front-page photo in The Times on July 4 showed 13-year-old Gene Young of Kansas City being shorn by a white barber at the Muehlebach Hotel shop “formerly closed to Negroes.” But that Norman Rockwell-like tableau was paired with the image of a white businessman, Lester Maddox, and a teenage accomplice respectively wielding a pistol and an ax handle as they turned away blacks from Maddox’s restaurant in Atlanta. The summer of 1964, which had begun with the lynching of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., would soon erupt in a bloody wave of terrorism, marked by dozens of bombings of black churches, homes and businesses.

Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010 – NYTimes.com.

John McCain’s Former Economist: We Need To Spend On Jobs Or Face Another Recession

Mark Zandi: Congress Should Quit Its Deficit Dithering Unless It Wants Another Recession

Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s Economy.com and a former adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said Friday that Congress needs to hurry up and reauthorize expired jobless aid or risk derailing the nascent economic recovery.

“The odds that the economy will slip back into the recession are still well below even,” Zandi said during a conference call with reporters. “But if Congress is unable to provide this help, those odds will rise and become uncomfortably high.”

Extended unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed lapsed at the beginning of June as a domestic aid bill containing the benefits stalled in the Senate. Since then, nearly 1.7 million people who’ve been out of work for longer than six months have missed benefit checks they would have received had they been laid off closer to the beginning of the recession. President Obama’s stimulus bill and subsequent acts of Congress had given the unemployed up to 99 weeks of benefits in some states.

Full Story: Mark Zandi: Congress Should Quit Its Deficit Dithering Unless It Wants Another Recession.

DEAN BAKER: Cut Social Security to Fund the War?

In a remarkable interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, House Republican Leader John Boehner explicitly called for cutting Social Security in order to pay for the war in Afghanistan. The article reports:

“Ensuring there’s enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country’s entitlement system, Boehner said. He said he’d favor increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people who have at least 20 years until retirement, tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than wage inflation and limiting payments to those who need them.”

In principle Boehner gave the Democrats as much ammunition as a serious political party could want. After all raising the retirement age and cutting Social Security benefits to pay for the war in Afghanistan is an idea that consistently polls in the high single decimals. We should expect every Democratic politician in the country to be jumping up and down demanding to know whether the Republican leader speaks for all Republicans.

That would be the case, unless of course the Democrats actually hold similar views. After all, several prominent Democrats have been saying in public recently that we will have to cut Social Security benefits (benefits workers have already paid for). These prominent Democrats also support the war in Afghanistan.

Full Story: Dean Baker: Cut Social Security to Fund the War?.

“Deficit Terrorism” and Economic Warfare

Ellen Brown:

All the Perks are going to Wall Street, while Main Street slips into Debt Slavery

Wall Street banks have been saved from bankruptcy by governments that are now going bankrupt themselves; but the banks are not returning the favor. Instead, they are engaged in a class war, insisting that the squeezed middle class be even further squeezed to balance over-stressed government budgets. All the perks are going to Wall Street, while Main Street slips into debt slavery. Wall Street needs to be made to pay its fair share, but how?

The financial reform bill agreed to on June 25 may have carved out some protections for consumers, but for Goldman Sachs and the derivatives lobby, the bill was a clear win, leaving the Wall Street gambling business intact. In a June 25 Newsweek article titled “Financial Reform Makes Biggest Banks Stronger,” Michael Hirsh wrote that the bill “effectively anoints the existing banking elite. The bill makes it likely that they will be the future giants of banking as well.”

The federal government and Federal Reserve have advanced literally trillions of dollars to save the big Wall Street players, to the point where the government’s own credit rating is in jeopardy; but Wall Street has not had to pay for the cleanup. Instead, the states and the citizens have been left to pick up the tab. On June 17, Time featured an article by David von Drehle titled “Inside the Dire Financial State of the States,” reporting that most states are now facing persistent budget shortfalls of a sort not seen since the 1930s. Unlike the Wall Street banks, which can borrow at the phenomenally low fed funds rate of .2% and plow that money back into speculation, states don’t have ready access to credit lines. They have to borrow through bond issues, and many states are so close to bankruptcy that their municipal bond ratings are collapsing. Worse, states are not legally allowed to default. Unlike the federal government, which can go into debt indefinitely, states must balance their budgets; and they cannot issue their own currencies. That puts them in the same position as Greece and other debt-strapped European Union countries, which are forbidden under EU rules either to issue their own currencies or to borrow from their own central banks. 

Full Story: “Deficit Terrorism” and Economic Warfare.

Rethinking Iran-Contra

By Robert Parry:

there appears to have been a single Iran-Contra narrative spanning the entire 12 years of the Reagan and Bush-41 administration, and representing a much darker story.

The conventional view of the Iran-Contra scandal is that it covered the period 1985-86, when President Ronald Reagan became concerned about the fate of American hostages in Lebanon and agreed to secretly sell weapons to Iran’s Islamist government to gain its help in freeing the captives.

Supposedly, the scheme went awry when White House aide Oliver North and other participants got carried away, including North’s decision to divert profits from the arms sales to another one of Reagan’s priorities, the Nicaraguan contra rebels whose CIA assistance had been cut off by Congress.

The Iran-Contra scandal was exposed in fall of 1986 after the shooting down of a North supply plane over Nicaragua and revelations in Lebanon of Reagan’s arms sales to Iran. A White House staff shake-up, including North’s firing, and some wrist-slaps from Congress for Reagan’s alleged inattention to details resolved the scandal, at least that was how Official Washington saw it.

The few dissenters who wouldn’t accept that tidy conclusion – such as Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh – were mocked and marginalized by the news media, including the Washington Post (which ran an article concluding that Walsh’s consistency in pursuing the scandal was “so un-Washington” and that he would depart as “a perceived loser”

Full Story: Consortiumnews.com.

How bad is the oil spill? Flight sheds light on magnitude of disaster

Author David Helvarg takes a flight from the shores of Alabama to the site of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion. What he finds is disturbing

Full Story: BP Slick.

Is Advice From the IMF Better Than Advice From a Drunk on the Street?

DEAN BAKER :-

That is the question that people around the world should be asking as the International Monetary Fund dishes out its prescription for austerity. The IMF program calls for cutbacks in government support for health care, pensions and a wide range of other public services. It also calls for weakening labor market regulations that provide workers with job security.

These recommendations are being given in a context where the world economy is suffering from a massive shortfall of demand. In other words, tens of millions of people are unemployed right now because there is not enough spending to keep them employed. The IMF’s program is almost certain to reduce spending further leading to even larger shortfalls in demand and more unemployment.

But, the IMF says that we should trust them. The question we should all be asking is “why?”

Where was the IMF when the housing bubble in the United States and elsewhere was inflating to ever more dangerous levels? Was it frantically yelling at governments to rein in the bubbles before they burst with disastrous consequences? After all, what could possibly have been more important than warning of the dangers of these bubbles?

Full Story: Dean Baker Is Advice From the IMF Better Than Advice From a Drunk on the Street?.

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.

How should we characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.

The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.

Full Story: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America – Magazine – The Atlantic.

Marine Toxicologist Susan Shaw Dives Into Gulf Spill, Talks Dispersants and Food Web Damage

When marine toxicologist Susan Shaw set out to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, she didn’t do it from behind a desk.

Late in May, a few miles offshore of Louisiana’s Pass a Loutre marshlands, Shaw donned a wetsuit, coated her exposed skin with a protective coat of petroleum jelly, and dove into the oil slick. “What I witnessed was a surreal, sickening scene beyond anything I could have imagined,” Shaw wrote a few days later in The New York Times:

There were patches of oil on the gulf’s surface. In some places, the oil has mixed with an orange-brown pudding-like material, some of the 700,000 gallons of a chemical dispersant called Corexit 9500 that BP has sprayed on the spreading oil…

[O]nly a few meters down, the nutrient-rich water became murky, but it was possible to make out tiny wisps of phytoplankton, zooplankton and shrimp enveloped in dark oily droplets. These are essential food sources for fish like the herring I could see feeding with gaping mouths on the oil and dispersant.

Full Story: Marine Toxicologist Susan Shaw Dives Into Gulf Spill, Talks Dispersants and Food Web Damage – OnEarth Magazine.

The Third Depression

Paul Krugman:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression.

Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Third Depression – NYTimes.com.

The Powers-That-Be Are Terrified of the Mass Awakening Taking Place Worldwide

Our situation is admittedly dire.

Oligarchs are seizing more overt control in most countries in the world, the worldwide economy is on course for another – even bigger – train wreck, countries are cracking down on freedom and becoming more tyrannical, we are in a permanent state of war (and see this), and companies like BP are destroying our natural resources without any checks and balances.

But as Andrew Gavin Marshall points out, the elites are actually terrified of the mass political awakening which is occurring worldwide.

Marshall collects quotes from flexian Zbigniew Brzezinski – Obama’s former foreign affairs adviser, National Security Adviser to President Carter, creator of America’s strategy to lure Russia into Afghanistan, and creator of America’s plans for Eurasia in general - to make his point.

Listen to Brzezinski’s own words (consolidated from various writings and speeches, and edited as if they were a single passage):

For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.

Washington’s Blog.

Bubble Bath

CHRYSTIA FREELAND:

People didn’t drown the markets; a bad system did.

The temptation is to see the 2008 Wall Street implosion that helped trigger the broader economic crisis as the consequence of individual idiocy and avarice. That thesis is emotionally appealing — nowadays everyone loves to hate and, better still, feel superior to wealthy Masters of the Universe. It is intellectually appealing, too. Blaming the crisis on human error is a lot easier than trying to work out the systemic problems it laid bare.

But just because something is easy doesn’t make it accurate. Call it the Michael Lewis fallacy. His book The Big Short deserves its place on the best-seller lists; it offers the best insight yet into the lunacy of subprime borrowing and the intricate world of structured financial products used to bet on those dreadful home loans. But the fabulous human stories of greed and stupidity Lewis tells are a seductively dangerous basis for understanding the global economic meltdown

Start with the hedge-fund crowd Lewis introduces us to. It is easy to cheer for the smart outsiders who bet against those risky subprime mortgages, and to think that if only everyone else had been as sharp and as contrarian, the system wouldn’t have imploded. But both academic research and real-life market experience show that buying into a bubble — rather than betting against it — is often the wiser, safer, and more lucrative approach.

via Bubble Bath – By Chrystia Freeland | Foreign Policy.

Hands off Social Security: There are better ways to cut the national debt.

The Social Security Trustees’ Annual Report on the program’s finances comes out Wednesday, delayed from March by the health bill. It will be turned into a marketing tool by advocates of cutting Social Security to reduce the national debt.

Among those, the president’s newly appointed National Commission on Fiscal Reform (the “debt commission”) is threatening to strangle the economic lifeblood of seniors by denying the solvency of Social Security and then using the solvent funds for other purposes.

It’s an illusion that cutting Social Security would reduce the deficit. If the new report does not point out that the money seniors have given to Social Security keeps it solvent through 2043, and after that 80 percent funded, it’s a propaganda fraud for defunders.

Full Story: Commentary: Hands off Social Security: There are better ways to cut the national debt..

The speech JFK [delivered] that got him murdered – video

JFK telling of the corrupt organization controlling our government (FED) whose intentions are to deceive, lie and manipulate our liberties away from us.

This of course is only a fraction of the bigger scheme to prepare regions of the world and the minds of the masses to a one world government.

“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” – David Rockefeller, Memoirs , 2002

How many Americans are targeted for assassination?

Glenn Greenwald

When The Washington Post’s Dana Priest first revealed (in passing) back in January that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens targeted for assassination, she wrote that “as of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens.” In April, both the Post and the NYT confirmed that the administration had specifically authorized the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Today, The Washington Times’ Eli Lake has an interview with Obama’s top Terrorism adviser John Brennan in which Brennan strongly suggests that the number of U.S. citizens targeted for assassination could actually be “dozens”:

Dozens of Americans have joined terrorist groups and are posing a threat to the United States and its interests abroad, the president’s most senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security said Thursday. . . . “There are, in my mind, dozens of U.S. persons who are in different parts of the world, and they are very concerning to us,” said John O. Brennan, deputy White House national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism. . . .

“If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response,” Mr. Brennan said. “If an American person or citizen is in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place, and they are trying to carry out attacks against U.S. interests, they also will face the full brunt of a U.S. response. And it can take many forms.”

Full Story: How many Americans are targeted for assassination? – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

Biologist: Ocean pollution ‘threatening the human food supply’

Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth’s oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.

A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.

“These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean,” said biologist Roger Payne, founder and president of Ocean Alliance, the research and conservation group that produced the report.

Full Story: Biologist: Ocean pollution ‘threatening the human food supply’ | Raw Story.

Gulf Coast Attorneys File RICO Class Action Lawsuits Against BP

Gulf Coast law firms Levin Papantonio, Eastland Law and others have begun filing a series of civil RICO actions in Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama to hold BP accountable for the false assurances it gave the American people that it could handle a worst-case scenario deepwater oil spill. The suits allege that BP committed mail fraud, wire fraud and potentially other RICO predicate act violations when the company sought permits from the federal government for deepwater offshore drilling, knowing that it did not possess the technical expertise or equipment necessary to respond to an emergency such as the ongoing Deepwater disaster.

This is the only RICO claim out of the more than 200 lawsuits filed so far against BP – and that doesn’t even count claims against Transocean, Halliburton and other associated defendants. All the other legal cases filed so far against BP are based on negligence associated with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, violations of various environmental statutes, and other legal angles.

By choosing the RICO approach, the Gulf Coast attorneys hope to provide an avenue for all Americans impacted by the disaster to stand up to the oil companies and prosecute them in civil court for their unlawful conduct.

Full Story: Brendan DeMelle: Gulf Coast Attorneys File RICO Class Action Lawsuits Against BP.

Economic Crises Rooted in Fraud

James K Galbraith:

If fraud or even the perception of fraud comes to dominate the system, then there is no foundation for a market in the securities. They become trash. And more deeply, so do the institutions responsible for creating, rating and selling them.

Chairman Specter, Ranking Member Graham, Members of the Subcommittee, as a former member of the congressional staff it is a pleasure to submit this statement for your record.

I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis. Concepts including “rational expectations,” “market discipline,” and the “efficient markets hypothesis” led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur. Not all economists believed this but most did.

Thus the study of financial fraud received little attention. Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are few specialists and very few students. Economists have soft- pedaled the role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble. They continue to do so now. At a conference sponsored by the Levy Economics Institute in New York on April 17, the closest a former Under Secretary of the Treasury, Peter Fisher, got to this question was to use the word “naughtiness.” This was on the day that the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with fraud.

Full Story: Economic Crises Rooted in Fraud | Economy In Crisis.

Conservative Feminism: The Idea That Women Are Too Stupid To Know the Difference

the most irritating meme of 2010—we’re looking at new kind of feminism, a “conservative feminism”.

The slightly higher-than-usual numbers of female candidates this election season’s crop of increasingly right-wing challenger candidates has created possibly the most irritating meme of 2010—that we’re looking at new kind of feminism, a “conservative feminism”. Never mind that this crop of politicians doesn’t actually have any feminist positions outside of the narrow belief that they personally should have power despite being female. Never mind that there’s nothing new about women using anti-feminism to advance their own interests. Never mind that actual feminists find the whole thing incredibly tedious. The idea that electing a few female conservatives to office should be the apex of feminism has evenmade its way into the editorial pages of the New York Times.

To be fair, there’s more to these conservative women’s arguments that they’re a new breed of feminist than simply pointing to their own briefcases and saying, “So there.” The whole strategy of declaring obviously anti-feminist women to be “feminist” was started by anti-choice groups like the Susan B. Anthony List and Feminists for Life, and it was popularized by Sarah Palin. The argument is that there could be such a thing as “pro-life feminism,” i.e. a feminism grounded in the idea that women should be forced to bear children against their will.

Common sense would demand that one not agree that there could be a kind of feminism that would declare the entire female sex incapable of handling the right to bodily autonomy. But the anti-choice feminists swear they have an argument! The argument is that Abortion Is Bad For Women, because it thwarts women from their true desires—so deep and true that many women don’t even realize they have them—to bring every pregnancy to term, no matter how much they think they don’t want it. They marshal all sorts of made-up evidence to support this argument, claiming incorrectly that abortion causes depression and breast cancer and probably ingrown toenails. The conclusion is that women have to be forced to bear children against their will for their own good. They hope that if you squint at it sideways, this argument looks kind of like feminism. After all, real feminists talk about real things that hurt women, so fake feminists pretending that things that don’t hurt women do could fool someone.

Full Story: Conservative Feminism: The Idea That Women Are Too Stupid To Know the Difference | RHRealityCheck.org.

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is

Discusses research paper by Cornell psychology professor David Dunning examining human incompetence: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.” Dunning argues in his paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden:Wow, this explains a lot, including the Tea Party movement and why people continue to vote Republican.

1. The Juice

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco:

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,

SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.

At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington. Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12.[1]

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

Full Story: The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

A Colossal Fracking Mess

The dirty truth behind the new natural gas. Related: A V.F. video look at a town transformed by fracking.

Early on a spring morning in the town of Damascus, in northeastern Pennsylvania, the fog on the Delaware River rises to form a mist that hangs above the tree-covered hills on either side. A buzzard swoops in from the northern hills to join a flock ensconced in an evergreen on the river’s southern bank.

Stretching some 400 miles, the Delaware is one of the cleanest free-flowing rivers in the United States, home to some of the best fly-fishing in the country. More than 15 million people, including residents of New York City and Philadelphia, get their water from its pristine watershed. To regard its unspoiled beauty on a spring morning, you might be led to believe that the river is safely off limits from the destructive effects of industrialization. Unfortunately, you’d be mistaken. The Delaware is now the most endangered river in the country, according to the conservation group American Rivers.

Full Story: A Colossal Fracking Mess | Business | Vanity Fair.

Toxic Oil Spill Rains Could Destroy North America

A  report prepared  by Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources is warning that the BP oil and gas leak is about to become the worst environmental catastrophe in human history threatening the entire eastern half of the North American

A dire report prepared for President Medvedev by Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources is warning today that the British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico is about to become the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with “total destruction”.

Russian scientists are basing their apocalyptic destruction assessment due to BP’s use of millions of gallons of the chemical dispersal agent known as Corexit 9500 which is being pumped directly into the leak of this wellhead over a mile under the Gulf of Mexico waters and designed, this report says, to keep hidden from the American public the full, and tragic, extent of this leak that is now estimated to be over 2.9 million gallons a day.

The dispersal agent Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco Holding Company of Naperville, Illinois that is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm). In a report written by Anita George-Ares and James R. Clark for Exxon Biomedical Sciences, Inc. titled “Acute Aquatic Toxicity of Three Corexit Products: An Overview” Corexit 9500 was found to be one of the most toxic dispersal agents ever developed. Even worse, according to this report, with higher water temperatures, like those now occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, its toxicity grows.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in discovering BP’s use of this dangerous dispersal agent ordered BP to stop using it, but BP refused stating that their only alternative to Corexit 9500 was an even more dangerous dispersal agent known as Sea Brat 4.

Full Story: Toxic Oil Spill Rains Warned Could Destroy North America | EUTimes.net.

Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock

Frank Rich:  The president must come clean and clean house not just because it’s right. He must rebuild confidence in his government for that inevitable day when the next crisis hits the fan.

PRESIDENT Obama is not known for wild pronouncements, so it was startling to hear him liken the gulf oil spill to 9/11. Alas, this bold analogy, made in an interview with Roger Simon of Politico, proved a misleading trailer for the main event. In the president’s prime-time address a few days later, there was still talk of war, but the ammunition was sanded down to bullet points: “a clean energy future,” “a long-term gulf coast restoration plan” and, that most dreaded of perennials, “a national commission.” Such generic placeholders, unanimated by details or deadlines, are Washingtonese for “The buck stops elsewhere.”

The speech’s pans were inevitable, but in truth it was doomed no matter what the words or how cool or faux angry the performance. The president had it right the first time — this is a 9/11 crisis — and only action will do. The sole sentence that really counted on Tuesday night was his prediction that “in the coming weeks and days, these efforts should capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well.” He will be judged on whether that’s true. The sole event that mattered last week was his jawboning of BP for a $20 billion down payment of blood money — to be overseen, appropriately enough, by Kenneth Feinberg of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

That action could be a turning point for Obama if he builds on it. And he must. In this 9/11, it’s not just the future of the gulf coast, energy policy or his presidency that’s in jeopardy. What’s also being tarred daily by the gushing oil is the very notion that government can accomplish anything. The current crisis in that faith predates this disaster. In the short history of the Obama White House, two of its most urgent projects, reducing unemployment and pacifying Afghanistan, have yet to yield persuasive results. The dividends on the third, health care reform, won’t be in the mail for years.

Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock – NYTimes.com.

DEFICIT TERRORISTS STRIKE IN THE UK – USA NEXT?

Ellen Brown:

Last week, England’s new government said it would abandon the previous government’s stimulus program and introduce the austerity measures required to pay down its estimated $1 trillion in debts. That means cutting public spending, laying off workers, reducing consumption, and increasing unemployment and bankruptcies. It also means shrinking the money supply, since virtually all “money” today originates as loans or debt. Reducing the outstanding debt will reduce the amount of money available to pay workers and buy goods, precipitating depression and further economic pain.

The financial sector has sometimes been accused of shrinking the money supply intentionally, in order to increase the demand for its own products. Bankers are in the debt business, and if governments are allowed to create enough money to keep themselves and their constituents out of debt, lenders will be out of business. The central banks charged with maintaining the banking business therefore insist on a “stable currency” at all costs, even if it means slashing services, laying off workers, and soaring debt and interest burdens. For the financial business to continue to boom, governments must not be allowed to create money themselves, either by printing it outright or by borrowing it into existence from their own government-owned banks.

Today this financial goal has largely been achieved. In most countries, 95% or more of the money supply is created by banks as loans (or “credit”). The small portion issued by the government is usually created just to replace lost or worn out bills or coins, not to fund new government programs. Early in the twentieth century, about 30% of the British currency was issued by the government as pounds sterling or coins, versus only about 3% today. In the U.S., only coins are now issued by the government. Dollar bills (Federal Reserve Notes) are issued by the Federal Reserve, which is privately owned by a consortium of banks.

Full Story: DEFICIT TERRORISTS STRIKE IN THE UK – USA NEXT?.

Tea Party Confessional Runs In Playboy

The new Playboy magazine has an anonymous confessional from a K Street consultant who lifts the curtain on many of the politically crafty, somewhat seedy underpinnings of the Tea Party movement.

The article has not received much attention. But its contents, if true, are illustrative and fascinating. The consultant, who doesn’t identify for whom he actually works, paints a picture of a movement that has strength in its legions of followers outside the Beltway but harnesses its power from the “black arts” of politicking.

Among the author’s various claims are the following:

* Tea Party strategists have “quietly acquired Service Employees International Union shirts to wear at Tea Party rallies,” which he or she describes as the equivalent of “handing out TSA uniforms in Kabul.”

* Sarah Palin isn’t the leader of the movement. Big Government’s Andrew Breitbart is. “Breitbart is one of them, except smarter, better connected and angrier; compared with him, Palin is Las Vegas dinner theater. That’s why he is loved by Tea Partyers in a way Palin can never hope to be loved.”

* Actual elected officials are bowing down to the Tea Party throng in

Full Story: Tea Party Confessional Runs In Playboy.

That ’30s Feeling

Paul Krugman:

Suddenly, creating jobs is out, inflicting pain is in. Condemning deficits and refusing to help a still-struggling economy has become the new fashion everywhere, including the United States, where 52 senators voted against extending aid to the unemployed despite the highest rate of long-term joblessness since the 1930s.

Many economists, myself included, regard this turn to austerity as a huge mistake. It raises memories of 1937, when F.D.R.’s premature attempt to balance the budget helped plunge a recovering economy back into severe recession. And here in Germany, a few scholars see parallels to the policies of Heinrich Brüning, the chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose devotion to financial orthodoxy ended up sealing the doom of the Weimar Republic.

But despite these warnings, the deficit hawks are prevailing in most places — and nowhere more than here, where the government has pledged 80 billion euros, almost $100 billion, in tax increases and spending cuts even though the economy continues to operate far below capacity.

Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – That ’30s Feeling – NYTimes.com.

Is Using Dispersants on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Fighting Pollution with Pollution?

Scientific American:  “…massive, uncontrolled experiment being run in the Gulf of Mexico…”

It remains unclear what impact chemical dispersants will have on sea life–and only the massive, uncontrolled experiment being run in the Gulf of Mexico will tell

Roughly five million liters of dispersants have now been used to break up the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, making this the largest use of such chemicals in U.S. history. If it continues for 10 months, as long as Mexico’s Ixtoc 1 blowout in 1979 in the same region, the Macondo well disaster has a good chance of achieving the largest global use of these chemicals, surpassing 10 million liters.

And there is no doubt that dispersants are toxic: Both types of the dispersal compound COREXIT used in the Gulf so far are capable of killing or depressing the growth of a wide range of aquatic species, ranging from phytoplankton to fish. “It’s a trade-off decision to lessen the overall environmental impact,” explained marine biologist Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), at a press conference on May 12. “When an oil spill occurs, there are no good outcomes.”

The trade-off in this case is the addition of toxic chemicals in a bid to protect the marshes of Louisiana and the beaches of Florida. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for one, has become concerned about the toxicity of the most-used dispersant at the Gulf of Mexico spill—COREXIT 9500—and ordered BP to look at alternatives. (COREXIT 9527 was used earlier during the spill, but it was discontinued because it was considered too toxic.)

Full Story: Is Using Dispersants on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Fighting Pollution with Pollution?: Scientific American.

Al Franken Slams Supreme Court For Dismantling Legal Protections (VIDEO)

Franken:  it’s the conservatives who have become activist judges.

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) railed against the Supreme Court in a speech to progressive legal scholars Thursday night, declaring that “the Roberts Court has systematically dismantled the legal protections that help ordinary people find justice when wronged by the economically powerful.”

Franken in particular decried the way conservative legal scholars have changed the popular perception of what Supreme Court justices do — and what justice is.

They’ve distorted our constitutional discourse to make it sound like the Court’s rulings don’t matter to ordinary people, but only to the undeserving riff-raff at the margins of society.

So unless you want to get a late-term abortion, burn a flag in the town square, or get federal funding for your pornographic artwork, you really don’t need to worry about what the Supreme Court is up to.

The ACLU has a long and proud history of defending the First Amendment, and while I haven’t seen polling on this, I’d bet that most Americans are fairly pro-First Amendment. But, thanks to a generation of conservative activism, the ACLU is now best known as “those guys who hate Christmas.”

By defining the terms of constitutional debate such that it doesn’t involve the lives of ordinary people, conservatives have disconnected Americans from their legal system. And that leaves room for lots of shenanigans.

Full Story: Al Franken Slams Supreme Court For Dismantling Legal Protections (VIDEO).

Capitalism, the Absurd System

Monthly Review:

What is society actually like when the veil of money is removed, and the real face of power is seen?

A few years ago, in a class one of us taught, a discussion arose about how capitalism works as a system in which the need for the few to maximize profit drives the entire political-economic structure. The students appeared to grasp how the capital accumulation process has a strong effect, often negative, on the course of a society’s development. The discussion then turned to Salvador Allende’s Chile of the early 1970s, where the goal was to develop a socialist political economy. “Knowing what you do about how capitalism functions,” the students were asked, “what would a socialist system look like?” They were unusually quiet. Finally, one of them blurted out: “I don’t know how it could work. I guess the government would have to kill everybody.”

The question of how a socialist society would operate raised a horrible, dystopian image in this student’s mind. Such libertarian fears of a totalitarian state imposing socialism by force, even to the point of annihilation, on an unwilling people, who are presumed to be capitalist by nature, are all too common. This brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s comment: “Someone once said that it is easier [for most people in today’s society] to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”2

Perhaps nothing points so clearly to the alienated nature of politics in the present day United States as the fact that capitalism, the economic system that drives the society, is effectively off-limits to critical review or discussion. To the extent that capitalism is mentioned by politicians or pundits, it is regarded in hushed tones of reverence for the genius of the market, its unquestioned efficiency, and its providential authority. One might quibble with a corrupt and greedy CEO or a regrettable loss of jobs, but the superiority and necessity of capitalism—or, more likely, its euphemism, the so-called “free market system”—is simply beyond debate or even consideration. There are, of course, those who believe that the system needs more regulation and that there is room for all sorts of fine-tuning. Nevertheless, there is no questioning of the basics.

Full Story: Capitalism, the Absurd System – Monthly Review.

How the ultimate BP Gulf disaster could kill millions

Warnings were raised  a year ago that the area of seabed chosen by the BP geologists might be unstable, or worse, inherently dangerous.

—–

Disturbing evidence is mounting that something frightening is happening deep under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico—something far worse than the BP oil gusher.

Warnings were raised as long as a year before the Deepwater Horizon disaster that the area of seabed chosen by the BP geologists might be unstable, or worse, inherently dangerous.

What makes the location that Transocean chose potentially far riskier than other potential oil deposits located at other regions of the Gulf? It can be summed up with two words: methane gas.

Full Story: How the ultimate BP Gulf disaster could kill millions – by Terrence Aym – Helium.

OPS:  Additional Info: History Channel Mega Disasters – Methane Explosion (6 min video)

President’s speech – How’s that hopey changey thing going for us?

Thom Hartmann

Video

BP Is a Corporate Criminal

Jim Hightower:

Gosh, how quickly things turn. One day, you’re a strutting peacock — the next day, you’re just another gasping, oil-covered bird.

In early April, BP was strutting about in full corporate splendor, showing off the $9 billion in profits that it had soaked up in just the first three months of this year. It was also basking in a corporate re-imaging campaign, depicting itself as a clean-energy pioneer and declaring that BP now stood for “Beyond Petroleum.”

Since its Gulf of Mexico well blew out on April 20, however, BP has proven to be beyond belief. The wider and deeper that this catastrophe spreads, the more we discover just how oily this giant is.

From the time it was known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and set out to grab and control the rich petroleum reserves owned by what is now Iran, BP has been a recidivist global criminal. In the past three decades, it grew huge by swallowing such competitors as Standard Oil of Ohio, Amoco and Arco. Along the way, it has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety and environmental records in an industry that is notoriously reckless on both counts.

Full Story: BP Is a Corporate Criminal by Jim Hightower on Creators.com – A Syndicate Of Talent.

Stewart: Obama, like Frodo, won’t give up Bush powers | VIDEO

John Stewart Nails it!

President Barack Obama promised to end the “fever of fear” created by the Bush administration and relinquish unreasonable executive powers. But after becoming president, Obama didn’t end many of the practices he campaigned against.

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart likened the president Tuesday to a character in “The Lord of the Rings” who falls under the sway of Sauron’s Ring of Power and is unable to complete his mission to destroy it.

Stewart took a step back from the current BP oil spill catastrophe to look at the bigger picture of Obama’s presidency. “The Gulf crisis was an unforeseen catastrophe. Barack Obama’s real mission when running for president was to restore some of America’s moral high standing that we had lost in the turmoil of the war on terror,” said Stewart.

Full Story: Stewart: Obama, like Frodo, won’t give up Bush powers | Raw Story.

Surprises in store for economists

Dean Baker : Some analysts are shocked that US retail sales have declined. Have they lost their grasp of basic economic concepts?

The commerce department reported that retail sales in May were down by 1.2% from April. This surprised most economists who had expected a modest increase. The media were filled with accounts of economists trying to explain why consumers were still reluctant to open up their wallets and spend in a big way. It would have been much more interesting to hear accounts of why economists were surprised.

There is always a large random element in month-to-month movements in retail sales or any other economic variable. Therefore no one is ever going to be able to explain these changes with any precision. (The data are also subject to large revisions, so it is entirely possible that revised data will look very different from the report released last week (pdf).)

Nonetheless, there is little basis for the surprise shown by so many economic analysts. With few exceptions these analysts failed to see the $8tn housing bubble, the collapse of which sank the economy. Remarkably, even now they apparently cannot understand its importance.

Full Story: Surprises in store for economists | Dean Baker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Closing BP’s Escape Routes

Robert Weissman:

BP generates enough cash to absorb its liabilities from the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico.

But that doesn’t mean it will.

One of the benefits of the corporate form is that it gives giant corporations the ability to escape liability. BP may or may not choose to capitalize on such escapes, but it would be foolish to presume that it won’t. That’s why President Obama’s call for the company to establish a $20 billion escrow account is such a positive and needed — if still inadequate — step.

Consider first the liabilities that BP may face. No one really knows what the damage from the oil gusher or the overall costs to BP may ultimately be. Some analysts are now throwing around numbers of $70 billion on the upper end — but it’s not hard to see how the ultimate cost to BP could rise even higher.

Full Story: Closing BP’s Escape Routes | CommonDreams.org.

Obama Warns Of ‘Massive Layoffs Of Teachers, Police, And Firefighters’

If Chuck Lacasse had gotten his pink slip four days earlier, Uncle Sam would have covered most of his family’s health insurance while he looked for a new job.

But Congress allowed emergency health care assistance for unemployed workers to expire May 31, and seems unwilling to renew it despite pleas from President Barack Obama.

On Saturday night, the White House released a letter Obama sent to congressional leaders of both parties asking for nearly $50 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments to fend off “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters” and to prevent a possible double-dip recession.

Full Story: Obama Warns Of ‘Massive Layoffs Of Teachers, Police, And Firefighters’.

OPS: Trading Teachers, Firefighter and Police for 737 US Military bases around the world, two wars and a Military Budget that equals or exceeds the Military budgets of ALL OF THE OTHER nations on the planet COMBINED, is FASCIST INSANITY.

10 Things That Terrify Right-Wingers

These are some of the things that keep American conservatives awake at night.

Modern American conservatism is based on an almost endless series of grievances. Author Thomas Frank coined a term for it: the conservative “plenty-plaint” — a long and ever-evolving list of personal and cultural gripes dressed up as an ideology.

But there’s also fear! And while it spans the breadth of the movement, this is the year of the Tea Party revolt, when the grassroots right, disgusted with the idea of semi-affordable health-care and tepid financial reforms is rebelling against even its own establishment. And the divide between the grassroots base and its leadership extends to the very fears that animate them. As we’ll see, the conservative movement’s business-attired hacks and the hard-right Tea Party types waving misspelled signs out in the streets have some very different causes for alarm.

So, here are ten of the most interesting things that absolutely terrify Wingnuttia. First, a few terrors of the real hard-core Right. For the Tea Partier, the midterm GOP primary voter, it’s not just the anxiety over social change that typifies more traditional conservatism. A broad chunk of the GOP base today is animated by wildly unrealistic terrors — monsters stalking them as the sun sets, perhaps hovering just beyond their peripheral vision.

1. Government Concentration Camps

Full Story: 10 Things That Terrify Right-Wingers | News & Politics | AlterNet.

Why We Are Moving Toward a Recessionary Era, and Why Keynes is Being Exhumed

Robert Reich:

Double-dip watch: Retail sales in May took their biggest nose-dive in eight months, according to today’s report from the Commerce Department. Remember: Consumers account for 70 percent of the nation’s economic activity.

American Corporations are sitting on huge piles of cash but they’re not investing, and they’re creating only a measly number of new jobs. And they won’t invest and create jobs until they know there are customers out there to buy what they sell.

For three decades, starting in the late 1970s, the biggest economic problem America faced on an ongoing basis was inflation. Demand always seemed to be on the verge of outrunning the productive capacity of the nation. The Fed had to be ready to raise interest rates to stop the party, as it did on several occasions.

Full Story: Robert Reich (Why We Are Moving Toward a Recessionary Era, and Why Keynes is Being Exhumed).

Strangulation Economics

By MIKE WHITNEY:

Europe Chooses Depression

Forget about a smooth recovery. Finance ministers and central bank governors of the G-20, met this weekend in Busan, South Korea and decided to substitute “tried and true” expansionary fiscal policies for their own strange brew of belt-tightening and austerity measures. The EU members are eager to restore the illusory “confidence of the markets”, something that will surely be lost when the eurozone slides back into recession and the hobbled banking sector begins hemorrhaging red ink. Trimming deficits while the economy is still on the mend will weaken demand and force businesses to lay off more workers. That will decrease economic activity and slow growth. It’s a prescription for disaster.

Here’s the final paragraph from the G 20 communique:

“The recent events highlight the importance of sustainable public finances and the need for our countries to put in place credible, growth-friendly measures, to deliver fiscal sustainability, differentiated for and tailored to national circumstances. Those countries with serious fiscal challenges need to accelerate the pace of consolidation. We welcome the recent announcements by some countries to reduce their deficits in 2010 and strengthen their fiscal frameworks and institutions. Within their capacity, countries will expand domestic sources of growth, while maintaining macroeconomic stability.”

EU finance ministers show that they still do not understand the origins of the credit bubble that triggered the financial crisis and subsequent recession. Greek bonds are no more to blame than subprime loans. When banks issue loans or purchase bonds it is incumbent on the lender to do due diligence and to check the creditworthiness of the borrower. Traditionally, banks have been very good at getting their money back because they have followed standardized procedures. The rise of shadow banking changed all that. Securitization and repo market transactions create powerful incentives for repackaging dodgy loans so banks can heap huge amounts of leverage atop bad paper. The quality of the loan no longer matters. EU leaders believe the problem can be solved by gutting social programs and strangling the unions, but this misses the point entirely. The shadow system has to be strictly regulated so the threat of credit bubbles is minimized.

U.C. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong explains what the EU should be doing in his article “We Need Bigger Deficits Now”:

Full Story: Mike Whitney: Strangulation Economics.

The Spill, The Scandal and the President

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder

On May 27th, more than a month into the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, Barack Obama strode to the podium in the East Room of the White House. For weeks, the administration had been insisting that BP alone was to blame for the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf – and the ongoing failure to stop the massive leak. “They have the technical expertise to plug the hole,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had said only six days earlier. “It is their responsibility.” The president, Gibbs added, lacked the authority to play anything more than a supervisory role – a curious line of argument from an administration that has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens abroad and has nationalized much of the auto industry. “If BP is not accomplishing the task, can you just federalize it?” a reporter asked. “No,” Gibbs replied.

Now, however, the president was suddenly standing up to take command of the cleanup effort. “In case you were wondering who’s responsible,” Obama told the nation, “I take responsibility.” Sounding chastened, he acknowledged that his administration had failed to adequately reform the Minerals Management Service, the scandal-ridden federal agency that for years had essentially allowed the oil industry to self-regulate. “There wasn’t sufficient urgency,” the president said. “Absolutely I take responsibility for that.” He also admitted that he had been too credulous of the oil giants: “I was wrong in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.” He unveiled a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, discussed the resignation of the head of MMS, and extended a moratorium on new deepwater drilling. “The buck,” he reiterated the next day on the sullied Louisiana coastline, “stops with me.”

Full Story: The Spill, The Scandal and the President | Rolling Stone Politics.

The Danger of Invisible Corporate Power

John Steel:

It may take several election cycles to scrub corporate influence and control from our political system.

Let’s face it: Large corporations have our country, and us, in a death grip. Some of their bad behavior makes big headlines: the BP oil disaster, Goldman Sachs’ financial shenanigans, Enron’s book-cooking. However, equally dangerous corporate activity happens every day, far from public view.

Corporations have seeped almost invisibly into nearly every government agency and too many congressional offices. And they’re as poisonous as carbon monoxide. In the last 20 years, protective legislation and regulation, carefully constructed from the days of President Coolidge and vastly strengthened due to the Depression, have seriously deteriorated.

There’s nothing inherently evil, or even bad, about corporations. Indeed, the combination of capital and management under one roof is efficient and essential in a global, competitive world. So much of our standard of living and our worldwide leadership are directly traceable to our corporate and entrepreneurial culture. But even good things, when they get out of control, turn destructive. Cancer, after all, is just growth gone wild.

Full Story: OtherWords: The Danger of Invisible Corporate Power.

Daniel Ellsberg: ‘Obama Deceives the Public’

Daniel Ellsberg, legendary leaker of the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971, still has a bone to pick with the White House. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, the 79-year-old peace activist accuses President Obama of betraying his election promises — in Iraq, in Afghanistan and on civil liberties.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Ellsberg, you're a hero and an icon of the left. But we hear you're not too happy with President Obama anymore.

Daniel Ellsberg: I voted for him and I will probably vote for him again, as opposed to the Republicans. But I believe his administration in some key aspects is nothing other than the third term of the Bush administration.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How so?

Ellsberg: I think Obama is continuing the worst of the Bush administration in terms of civil liberties, violations of the constitution and the wars in the Middle East.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: For example?

Full Story: Left-Wing Icon Daniel Ellsberg: ‘Obama Deceives the Public’ – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

Present Free Trade Aggreements are Destroying Us and 16 Senators are Pushing for More

Proposed free trade agreements  contributed to the near-collapse of the economy.

Proposed NAFTA-style free trade agreements with Columbia, South Korea and Panama have stalled in Congress for several years now as lawmakers increasingly oppose the policies that some believe contributed to the near-collapse of the economy.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to “free trade” agreements like NAFTA and the WTO, the United States is facing economic disaster on a scale few nations have ever experienced. The idea that any of our leaders would continue on this reckless path of economic destruction should make us question who these people are working for. It is clear that America is losing a major economic war by relinquishing management and control of the economy through the effects of our failed “free trade” agreements. Now we have no choice but to conform our laws, regulation and administrative procedures to the will of countries we signed these agreements with, instead of to our own Constitution. Why would we want to keep shooting ourselves in the foot? This must stop now!

A group of 16 Republican Senators, led by Sen. Orrin Hatch (UT), sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to move forward with a trio of stalled free trade agreements leftover from the Bush administration.

Proposed NAFTA-style free trade agreements with Columbia, South Korea and Panama have stalled in Congress for several years now as lawmakers increasingly oppose the policies that some believe contributed to the near-collapse of the economy. Critics of free trade had hoped that inaction on the trade pacts signaled their defeat. But, Hatch and his 15 cohorts are trying to revive the once-dead trade pacts.

Full Story: Present Free Trade Aggreements are Destroying Us and 16 Senators are Pushing for More | Economy In Crisis.

Rig Survivors: BP Ordered Shortcut on Day of Blast

The morning the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, a BP executive and a Transocean official argued over how to proceed with the drilling, rig survivors told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview.

The survivors’ account paints perhaps the most detailed picture yet of what happened on the deepwater rig — and the possible causes of the April 20 explosion.

The BP official wanted workers to replace heavy mud, used to keep the well’s pressure down, with lighter seawater to help speed a process that was costing an estimated $750,000 a day and was already running five weeks late, rig survivors told CNN

Full Story: Rig Survivors: BP Ordered Shortcut on Day of Blast | CommonDreams.org.

US Progressives: Time to Make Obama Uncomfortable

Nineteen months after celebrating President Barack Obama’s historic election win, disappointed liberal activists promised on Monday to turn up the political heat on a White House they said is too quick to compromise.

At an annual conference of grassroots progressives, they said the euphoria and high expectations after Obama’s victory had lulled them into a false sense of security, and hopes for his success had sometimes limited their criticism.

That has changed, they said, because of what they called Obama’s go-easy approach on Wall Street, ineffectual efforts to reduce high unemployment, watered-down healthcare and financial regulation reforms and escalation of the Afghanistan war.

“It is not our job to make this president or this administration comfortable. It is our job to make him do the right thing,” said Darcy Burner, head of the Progressive Congress Action Fund.

Full Story: US Progressives: Time to Make Obama Uncomfortable | CommonDreams.org.

Source of Half Earth’s Oxygen Gets Little Credit

phytoplankton release oxygen into the water. Half of the world’s oxygen is produced via phytoplankton photosynthesis.

Fish, whales, dolphins, crabs, seabirds, and just about everything else that makes a living in or off of the oceans owe their existence to phytoplankton, one-celled plants that live at the ocean surface.

Phytoplankton are at the base of what scientists refer to as oceanic biological productivity, the ability of a water body to support life such as plants, fish, and wildlife.

“A measure of productivity is the net amount of carbon dioxide taken up by phytoplankton,” said Jorge Sarmiento, a professor of atmospheric and ocean sciences at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Full Story: Source of Half Earth’s Oxygen Gets Little Credit.

OPS:  Just  some background information to keep in the back of your head as you watch the BP oil/dispersant slick and plume traveling around the World’s oceans

How much of our Planet’s oxygen generating capacity is being destroyed before our eyes….and what will be the effects?

Real People v. Corporate “People”: The Fight Is On

Allen Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, Calif., routinely exercises his free speech, in this case by sharing his reaction to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. The well-known marquee faces the MacArthur Freeway (I-580).

The Supreme Court says corporations can spend as much money as they want on political advertising. Millions of Americans say they’ve had it.

In 2009, Riki Ott was on the road for 252 days educating people about the dangers of “corporate personhood.” That’s the legal doctrine that says corporations have constitutional rights, just like human beings. She mostly spoke in academic settings, and there was some interest in the idea, says Ott, but not much.

All that changed on January 21, 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Now interest has skyrocketed, and Ott finds people eager to volunteer, to organize, to meet, to do anything to reverse the Court’s decision.

Rallying Around Citizens United

Supreme Court cases are usually interesting to lawyers, scholars, and those directly affected. Occasionally, a decision makes the news for a few days before disappearing from the public eye. But sometimes there’s a game changer—a decision that is so clearly wrong that it becomes a rallying point. David Cobb, former Green Party presidential candidate and longtime activist on corporate personhood, points to Dred Scott v. Sandford as one such decision. Citizens United, Cobb says, is shaping up as another.

Full Story: Real People v. Corporate “People”: The Fight Is On by Doug Pibel — YES! Magazine.

Cap Placed Over Leak Collecting Only Fraction Of The Oil

The Coast Guard says a cap over the Gulf of Mexico oil leak has managed to collect about 252,000 gallons of oil in its first full 24 hours of use.

That’s still only a fraction of the oil being produced by the leak. But Adm. Thad Allen said Saturday that the goal is to gradually raise the amount being captured by the system.

The device’s capacity is 630,000 gallons a day.

The leak began after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20 and killed 11 workers. Six weeks later the government estimates the well has leaked nearly 50 million gallons of oil.

Full Story: Gulf Oil Spill: Cap Placed Over Leak Collecting Only Fraction Of The Oil.

‘The Time We Have Is Growing Short’

Paul Volker:

Some five years ago, at a conference of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, I lamented that “the growing imbalances, disequilibria, risks” were giving rise to “circumstances as dangerous and intractable” as any I could recall—intractable not just because of the combination of complicated issues, but because there seemed to be “so little willingness or capacity to do much about it.”

Part of the story is familiar. In the United States, savings practically disappeared as consumption rose far above past relationships to national production. That consumption was satisfied by rapidly growing imports from China and elsewhere in Asia at remarkably cheap prices, helping to keep inflation well subdued. The resulting seemingly inexorable increase in our current account deficit was easily financed by an equally large flow of short-term funds from abroad at exceptionally low interest rates. In fact, money was so easily available that it supported what became a bubble in housing, with rising home prices reinforcing a sense of prosperity and high consumption.

It was not so much that the imbalances were hidden or unknown. In particular, the Chinese surpluses and American deficits were widely thought to be unsustainable. But for the time being, the world economy was growing strongly. China in particular was mainly interested in developing its industry by encouraging exports, and the United States was not prepared to balance its national budget or to restrain the consumption and housing boom.

Full Story: ‘The Time We Have Is Growing Short’ | The New York Review of Books.

Gulf Oil Spill Likely to Hit U.S. Atlantic Coast This Summer

Oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico is likely to extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and into the open ocean as early as this summer, according to a detailed computer modeling study released today by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor. The results were reviewed by scientists at NCAR and elsewhere, although not yet submitted for peer-review publication.

“I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Will the oil reach Florida?’” says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock, who worked on the study. “Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood.”

Full Story: Gulf Oil Spill Likely to Hit U.S. Atlantic Coast This Summer.

For progressives, it’s time to press

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, last seen haplessly offering up conservative nostrums in response to the president’s 2009 State of the Union address, is now begging for the federal government to act. “BP is the responsible party, but we need the federal government to make sure they are held accountable and that they are indeed responsible,” Jindal said after surveying the oil spill impact on the Louisiana coastline last week.

Jindal raised eyebrows by departing from the old Republican text in this way. But actually, what’s surprising is that after the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, the worst mining disaster in 30 years, and what is now the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history, more conservatives aren’t revising the gospel about the blessings of deregulation and the horrors of government. Despite what should be obvious failings, deregulation, smaller government and privatization remain central to the dominant Republican message.

Case in point is Newt Gingrich. The former Republican House speaker seems to be pushing the notion that rather than renovate their ideas, conservatives should become more shrill. His new book, To Save America, is a screed against President Obama’s “secular socialist machine,” which poses a “mortal threat” to America as we know it. And he retreads the entire conservative mantra — smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation, strong dollar, free trade, privatization, even the ownership society — as if we hadn’t just pursued those policies over the cliff.

Full Story: For progressives, it’s time to press.

Government Impotence and Corporate Rule

Jim Hightower:

Many news reports about the Gulf oil catastrophe refer to it as a “spill.” Wrong. A spill is a minor “oops” — one accidentally spills milks, for example, and from childhood, we’re taught the old aphorism: “Don’t cry over spilt milk.” What’s in the Gulf isn’t milk and it wasn’t spilt. The explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon well was the inevitable result of deliberate decisions made by avaricious corporate executives, laissez faire politicians and obsequious regulators.

As the ruinous gulf oil blowout spreads onto land, over wildlife, across the ocean floor and into people’s lives, it raises a fundamental question for all of us Americans: Who the hell’s in charge here? What we’re witnessing is not merely a human and environmental horror, but also an appalling deterioration in our nation’s governance. Just as we saw in Wall Street’s devastating economic disaster and in Massey Energy’s murderous explosion inside its Upper Big Branch coal mine, the nastiness in the gulf is baring an ugly truth that We the People must finally face: We are living under de facto corporate rule that has rendered our government impotent.

Thirty years of laissez-faire, ideological nonsense (pushed upon us with a vengeance in the past decade) has transformed government into a subsidiary of corporate power. Wall Street, Massey, BP and its partners — all were allowed to become their own “regulators” and officially encouraged to put their short-term profit interests over the public interest.
Full Story: t r u t h o u t | Government Impotence and Corporate Rule.

A Plague Upon The World: The USA is a “Failed State”

Interview with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Question:  Dr. Roberts,  the United States is regarded as the most successful state in the world today. What is responsible for American success?

Dr. Roberts:  Propaganda. If truth be known, the US is a failed state. More about that later. The US owes its image of success to: (1) the vast lands and mineral resources that the US “liberated” with violence from the native inhabitants, (2) Europe’s, especially Great Britain’s, self-destruction in World War I and World War II, and (3) the economic destruction of Russia and most of Asia by communism or socialism.

After World War II, the US took the reserve currency role from Great Britain. This made the US dollar the world money and permitted the US to pay its import bills in its own currency. World War II’s destruction of the other industrialized countries left the US as the only country capable of supplying products to world markets. This historical happenstance created among Americans the impression that they were a favored people. Today the militarist neoconservatives speak of the United States as “the indispensable nation.”  In other words, Americans are above all others, except, of course, Israelis.

To American eyes a vague “terrorist threat,” a creation of their own government, is sufficient justification for naked aggression against Muslim peoples and for an agenda of world hegemony.

Full Story: A Plague Upon The World: The USA is a “Failed State”.

Shadow Congress:

A Guide To More Than 170 Congressmen Turned Lobbyists

I’d really encourage readers to check out this great piece from Justin Elliot and Zachary Roth over at TPM Muckraker, which documents what the authors term “the Shadow Congress.” See, in their ongoing efforts to destroy America, lobbying firms have hired “more than 170 former lawmakers” to skulk around the corridors of power, using their contacts and their intimate awareness of the legislative process to make sure that moneyed interests retain their iron grip on your lawmakers.

Members of this Shadow Congress — not all of whom are registered lobbyists — hail from 41 of 50 states (Texas has the most, with 17) and they’re almost as likely to be Democrats as Republicans. Some, like Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, were powerful congressional leaders, whose presence on K Street has drawn scrutiny in the past.

But far more are low-profile back-benchers we’d never heard of and we doubt you had either: say, George Hochbrueckner, who served five terms as a New York Democrat, stepping down in 1995, and now works at Nossaman LLP; or Bill Zeliff, a three-term New Hampshire Republican who left Congress in 1997 and is now at the Livingston Group. For these run-of-the-mill lawmakers, it’s not hard to see how a second career based on leveraging their direct knowledge of the legislative process and their cozy relationships with current lawmakers — credentials they never fail to tout on their websites — could seem more appealing than the other options likely on offer: a visiting professorship at the local college, say, or a seat on the board of a smallish company.

Full Story: Shadow Congress: TPM Offers Guide To More Than 170 Congressmen Turned Lobbyists.

Dean Baker: Why should we listen to deficit hawks?

Calls to cut social security come from economists who want to line Wall Street pockets with money from ordinary workers

When politicians demand that the public do something because of the dictates of financial markets, it is best to hold on to your wallet. Back in September of 2008, both President Bush and the Democratic leadership in Congress insisted that if we did not immediately hand over $700bn to the banks, the whole financial system would grind to a halt.

The threat worked – the banks got their $700bn from Congress and much more from the Fed – with few questions asked. As a result, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the rest are now as profitable as ever and once again paying out record bonuses to “top performers”.

If the market had been allowed to run its course Goldman, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and many other major banks would have been bankrupt, leaving their shareholders and creditors out of luck and their top executives walking the unemployment lines. There are reasons that this outcome would have been undesirable for the economy as a whole, but there is a big difference between the Tarp blank check and doing nothing. If the politicians and their accomplices in the economics profession had not overwhelmed the public with fear, we could have ensured that the bankers suffered from the crisis that they had themselves created.

Full Story: Why should we listen to deficit hawks? | Dean Baker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.