All Entries in the "Featured" Category

Temperature Soars Mysteriously Inside Fukushima Nuclear Reactor

Also: Japan’s Nuclear Exclusion Zone Shows Few Signs of Life

The temperature of Reactor #2 at Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has soared overnight and remained mysteriously high Monday, despite more water being pumped through it.

On January 27th, the reactor’s internal temperature was 113º F, Monday the temperature soared to 164º F.  Japanese authorities require that the reactor temperature remain below 176º F.

* * *

Japan’s NHK TV reports:

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says the temperature in the No.2 reactor remains high despite the injection of additional water.

A thermometer at the bottom of the reactor showed 73.3 degrees Celsius on Monday morning. It was around 45 degrees on January 27th and 71.7 degrees at 4 PM on Sunday.

Tokyo Electric Power Company began injecting 10.6 tons of water per hour from around 1:30 AM on Monday. That’s one ton more per hour than before.

Full Story Here: Temperature Soars Mysteriously Inside Fukushima Nuclear Reactor | Common Dreams.

What Planned Parenthood actually does, in one chart

Judging from its unexpected jump into the most-read list, this graph showing the breakdown of care provided by Planned Parenthood’s health centers is proving useful to people. So here it is again, lifted from April. Note the light blue slice, which suggests that cancer screenings account for approximately one-sixth of Planned Parenthood’s activities.

With Planned Parenthood being either the major obstacle to a budget deal or one of the major obstacles to a budget deal, it’s worth taking a minute explaining what they do — and what they don’t do.

As you can see in the chart atop this post, abortion services account for about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities. That’s less than cancer screening and prevention (16 percent), STD testing for both men and women (35 percent), and contraception (also 35 percent). About 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s users are over age 20, and 75 percent have incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line. Planned Parenthood itself estimates it prevents more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions. It’s also worth noting that federal law already forbids Planned Parenthood from using the funds it receives from the government for abortions.

Full Story Here: Repost: What Planned Parenthood actually does, in one chart – The Washington Post.

Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Ellen Brown :-:

A foreclosure settlement between five major banks guilty of “robo-signing” and the attorneys general of the 50 states is pending for Monday, February 6th; but it is still not clear if all the AGs will sign. California was to get over half of the $25 billion in settlement money, and California AG Kamala Harris has withstood pressure to settle.

That is good.  She and the other AGs should not sign until a thorough investigation has been conducted.  The evidence to date suggests that “robo-signing” was not a mere technical default or sloppy business practice but was part and parcel of a much larger fraud, the fraud that brought down the whole economy in 2008.  It is not just distressed homeowners but the entire economy that has paid the price, resulting in massive unemployment and a shrunken tax base, throwing state and local governments into insolvency and forcing austerity measures and cutbacks in government services across the nation.

The details of the robo-signing scam were spelled out in my last article, here.  The robo-signing fraud and its implications are expanded on below.

Why All the Robo-signing?

Full Story Here: Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg | Common Dreams.

Ari Fleischer Secretly Involved in Komen Strategy on Planned Parenthood

Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush and prominent right-wing pundit, was secretly involved in the Komen Foundation’s strategy regarding Planned Parenthood. Fleischer personally interviewed candidates for the position of “Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations” at Komen last December. According to a source with first-hand knowledge, Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood.

Fleischer’s relationship with Komen and the Planned Parenthood controversy was previously undisclosed. He confirmed to ThinkProgress his recent role in filling a key communication position at Komen. Fleischer stressed, however, another communications firm (Ogilvy PR) was retained by Komen to deal with crisis communications over the last few days and he has not been involved.

In November, Komen advertised for a top level communications position in Roll Call. Promising applicants received a call from Fleischer. The advertisement is no longer posted on the Roll Call website, but a portion is accessible via Google:

Full Story Here: Ari Fleischer Secretly Involved in Komen Strategy on Planned Parenthood | Truthout.

As Jobs Go Global, U.S. Workers Pay

It’s no secret the pot is boiling a bit again with respect to America’s trade-induced economic problems. Or, more properly, free-trade induced, as neither I nor any other protectionist I know is against trade per se. Or, to be even more precise, “free”-trade induced, because free trade isn’t really free on the part of foreign nations, which block American exports by a thousand devices overt and covert.

The New York Times has an o-kay story on the problem here: As Jobs Go Global, U.S. Workers Pay.

I’m glad the NYT is running this, and glad Reuters wrote it.

But it’s mild, mild stuff. In terms of my book Free Trade Doesn’t Work, they’ve admitted to Chapter 5′s dubious assumptions #3 (domestic factor mobility) and #4: (increased inequality). No mention of the other 7. I summarized these issues in an article here.

So they’re really trying to preserve the conventional “free trade is, all things considered, best” model, by showing how observed problems do not refute that model but can be explained within it. As I noted in my book, none of my “7 deadly sins” are exotic stuff; they’re all actually well-cataloged within conventional economics, if one knows where to look.

Expect more of this: the conventional wisdom is designed for defense in depth. The establishment’s strategy is to make the smallest possible concession in the face of every new fact.

I wrote about the MIT “China Syndrome” report the article mentions when it came out, here.

In a similar vein, the Third Way think tank has a new report out on dealing with China, “China’s Trade Barrier Playbook: Why America Needs a New Game Plan,” here.

Third Way styles itself, more or less, as a post-partisan “fresh thinking” good-government group. I’m not a huge fan, as they tend towards repackaging establishment-pleasing solutions in “new” garb, but they’re sometimes worth reading.

Their report grasps the scale and nastiness of China’s trade barriers against the U.S. But I can’t take seriously any would-be trade reformer who supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which I debunked here.

Also, the report has some tediously naive stuff about how China supposedly doesn’t know what’s best for it (and how we can teach them!), to wit:

The United States should redouble its efforts to convince China’s government, business and thought leaders that playing by the rules is ultimately in China’s own interest. America might note, for example, that:

 • Increasing the value of the Yuan will help China control serious inflation,
increase domestic consumption and benefit China’s consumers.

• Protecting IP is critical if China is to develop its own new ideas and build a
real innovation-based economy.

• Fair, international technical standards will help Chinese companies sell
innovative products in foreign markets.

• Assuring fairness for U.S. investors will win China allies as it seeks to
increase its own investment in the United States.

Like China’s going to take trade pointers from the side that’s currently losing!

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

Eric Schneiderman Sues BofA, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase Over Electronic Mortgage Fraud

Three big banks were hit on Friday with yet another lawsuit related to wrongful foreclosures. Democratic New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed suit against Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo for deceptive and fraudulent use of a private database used to register mortgages, according to a Friday press release from his office.

Schneiderman has been outspoken in urging the Obama administration to hold the nation’s largest financial institutions accountable for their role in the foreclosure crisis, notably hesitating to join a larger nationwide case against the country’s five largest banks for mortgage fraud. States now have until Monday, according to the Iowa attorney general’s office, to decide to join that deal.

The New York attorney general has yet to announce whether New York will participate in the deal because of concerns that joining the settlement would make it impossible for him to file his own, state-based lawsuits against the banks, said sources close to the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The decision to bring this lawsuit on Friday indicates that the larger nationwide settlement is now more to Schneiderman’s pleasing, said a source familiar with the discussions.

Full Story Here: Eric Schneiderman Sues BofA, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase Over Electronic Mortgage Fraud.

Why Are US Health Costs So High? Follow the Bills

Ralph Nader :-:

Looking at millions of individual bills that makeup the 2.7 trillion dollars of annual health care costs opens a gigantic window on the massive waste, redundancy, profiteering, fraud and sometimes criminal over-billing.

Here is a partial example of what I mean, in the words of Philip M. Boffey, the estimable science writer for the New York Times:

“Why does an appendectomy in Germany cost roughly a quarter what it costs in the United States? ($3,285 compared to $13,123). Or an MRI scan cost less than a third as much, on average, in Canada? ($304 compared to $1,009).”

“Americans continue to spend more on health care than patients anywhere else. In 2009, we spent $7,960 per person, twice as much as France, which is known for providing very good health services. And for all that spending, we get very mixed results–some superb, some average, some inferior–compared with other advanced nations.”

Moreover, France and Germany, Italy, England, Canada, Belgium, Sweden and all other western countries plus Japan and Taiwan cover almost all their citizens, unlike the U.S. where 50,000,000 people are uninsured.

Full Story Here: Why Are US Health Costs So High? Follow the Bills | Common Dreams.

Super PAC Power: The 0.1% Buying Our Elections

FEC disclosures yesterday show wealthy donors, corporations behind Super PAC money

Super PACS, made possible following the outcomes of two court decisions in 2010 — the Citizens United v. FEC decision and the SpeechNow.org v. FEC decision, can take unlimited donations from individuals, corporations, associations and unions.

As the disclosures to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) late last night show, not only have millions been flowing to these Super PACs, the disclosures show these are clearly donations from the “0.1%” — corporations and individuals donating tens of thousands, one hundred thousand, even donations of millions of dollars.

Mitt Romney’s Super PAC Restore Our Future shows around 60 donations of $100,000 or more, with a total of around $17.9 million for the last six months of 2011.

An NBC/MSNBC report adds:

Full Story Here: Super PAC Power: The 0.1% Buying Our Elections | Common Dreams.

The siren call of austerity

David Cay Johnston :-:

The World Economic Forum opened in Davos amid choruses of central bankers and economists calling for governments to cut spending.

This message of austerity is like the call of the ancient Sirens, whose music lured sailors to shipwreck.

We should take a lesson from Odysseus, who poured wax into the ears of his crew and had himself lashed to the mast of his ship to resist the Siren call.

Austerity supporters are selling the idea that governments, like families, must cut back when income shrinks. But economically, governments are not like families.

Firing teachers, cops and government clerks will, for sure, reduce public spending. But budgets, like the song of the Sirens, are only part of the story. Listen only to the alluring lyrics and, like the many voyagers before Odysseus, we will suffer disastrous consequences – in our case falling incomes and worsening economies.

Full Story Here: David Cay Johnston.

Moyers : How power and influence helped big banks rewrite the rules of our economy

Big banks are rewriting the rules of our economy to the exclusive benefit of their own bottom line. But how did our political and financial class shift the benefits of the economy to the very top, while saddling us with greater debt and tearing new holes in the safety net? This weekend on Moyers & Company (check your local listings), Bill Moyers talks with former Citigroup Chairman John Reed and former Senator Byron Dorgan to explore a momentous instance: how the mid-90�s merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group � and a friendly Presidential pen — brought down the Glass-Steagall Act, a crucial firewall between banks and investment firms which had protected consumers from financial calamity since the aftermath of the Great Depression. In effect, says Moyers, they put the watchdog to sleep.

Full Story Here: Moyers & Company Show 103: How power and influence helped big banks rewrite the rules of our economy. on Vimeo.

Surveillance in a Wireless Age

Scott Lemieux :-:

The Supreme Court rules that installing a GPS device on a car is unconstitutional, but not for the reason one might think

The Supreme Court unanimously held Monday that the installation of a GPS device in a person’s car constitutes a “search” under the Fourth Amendment (which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures”). This unanimity is somewhat misleading, however, as the Court split with respect to what theory of the Fourth Amendment should be applied going forward and left a crucial question unanswered.

The Court has often struggled to adapt the Fourth Amendment to technologies that expand the reach of the state. As is reflected in the amendment’s language (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects”) government searches at the time of the amendment’s adoption generally involved the physical invasion of property. But various technological innovations have allowed the state to increase its surveillance authority without conducting physical searches, and the Supreme Court has sometimes been behind the curve. In the 1928 case Olmstead v. United States , most famous for Justice Louis Brandeis’s dissenting opinion that the Bill of Rights “conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men,” the Court upheld the warrantless wiretapping of a suspect’s phone. Recognizing that the focus on physical searches was inadequate, however, in Katz v. United States (1967) the Court held that warrantless eavesdropping on conversations at a public phone booth violated the Fourth Amendment. As Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in his influential concurrence in Katz, the Fourth Amendment applies wherever an individual “has a constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Full Story Here: Surveillance in a Wireless Age.

The Washington-Wall Street Revolving Door Just Keeps Spinning Along

We’ve already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far:

“Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff.”

When we saw it on the website Gawker.com we had to smile — but the smile didn’t last long. There’s simply too much truth in that headline; it says a lot about how Wall Street and Washington have colluded to create the winner-take-all economy that rewards the very few at the expense of everyone else.

The story behind it is that Jack Lew is President Obama’s new chief of staff — arguably the most powerful office in the White House that isn’t shaped like an oval. He used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup. His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House.

Daley replaced Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein & Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported eighteen and a half million dollars.

Full Story Here: The Washington-Wall Street Revolving Door Just Keeps Spinning Along | Common Dreams.

The Shadow Banking System: A Web of Financial Fraud

Ellen Brown :-:

The Wall Street Journal reported on January 19th that the Obama Administration was pushing heavily to get the 50 state attorneys general to agree to a settlement with five major banks in the “robo-signing” scandal. The scandal involves employees signing names not their own, under titles they did not really have, attesting to the veracity of documents they had not really reviewed. Evidence reveals that it was an industry-wide practice, dating back to the late 1990s; and it may have clouded the titles of millions of homes. If the settlement is agreed to, it will let Wall Street bankers off the hook for crimes that would land the rest of us in jail – fraud, forgery, securities violations and tax evasion.

To the President’s credit, however, he seems to have shifted his position on the settlement, in response to protests before his State of the Union address.  In his speech on January 24th, he did not mention the settlement but announced instead that he would be creating a mortgage crisis unit to investigate wrongdoing related to real estate lending. Of course, only the future will reveal if this investigative unit will be given the necessary authority or mandate when it comes to criminal prosecutions.

The Deeper Question Is Why 

Investigation is needed into not just whether massive robo-signing occurred but why it was being done.  The alleged justification—that the bankers were so busy that they cut corners—hardly seems credible given the extent of the practice.

Full Story Here: The Shadow Banking System: A Web of Financial Fraud | Common Dreams.

Stress Testing Tim Geithner – breaking up B of A

Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, in the State of the Union this week President Obama struck some of his most populist themes yet. He wants to tax millionaires, bring back manufacturing and prosecute the big banks. He touted his Wall Street reforms saying the big banks are “no longer allowed to make risky bets with customers deposits” and “the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again.”

But are we safe from the next big bank bailout? Many experts are dubious and Wednesday the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen decided to test the theory in the most direct way possible. They used the administrative law process to formally petition the nation’s top bank regulators to move swiftly to break up Bank of America (BofA) asserting in their petition: “The bank poses a grave threat to U.S. financial stability by any reasonable definition of that phrase.”

“A Ticking Time Bomb”

BofA is not just big, its behemoth. With assets of $2.1 trillion, equal to more than 14 percent of U.S. GDP, it is bigger than many small countries. Yet, its stock is trading at $7.

What does Wall Street know that we don’t?

Full Story Here: Stress Testing Tim Geithner | Center for Media and Democracy.

How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’ / Waging Nonviolence

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbro will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small

Full Story Here: How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’ / Waging Nonviolence – People-Powered News and Analysis.

In Obama’s State of the Union, Troublesome Passages for Progressives

Matthew Rothschild,:-:

Excuse me for not yelling myself hoarse for Obama’s warmed over State of the Union address.

While I agree with his call for economic fairness, there was not much in his speech that was new or all that promising. And there were several troublesome passages for progressives.

First, mentioning John Boehner, Obama said he was still open to a grand compromise on Social Security and Medicare, which would make Americans have to work longer and get less benefits from Medicare and Medicaid. We don’t need a Democrat to hack away at these crucial social programs.

Full Story Here: In Obama’s State of the Union, Troublesome Passages for Progressives | The Progressive.

Critics of Mortgage Deal Press Obama, State AGs to Reject Big Bank Proposal

Progressives “Furious” at Emerging Details of Mortgage Deal

A long anticipated draft settlement between the nation’s largest private mortgage lenders and US states has been announced, but it doesn’t look good for industry critics who hoped the banking giants — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Ally Financial —would suffer full investigations and payouts equal to the damage they caused to homeowners and the overall economy.  The deal would still have to be accepted by the states.

UPDATE: George Zornick writes at The Nation:

Obama Is on the Brink of a Settlement With the Big Banks—and Progressives Are Furious

For months, a massive federal settlement with big Wall Street banks over their role in the mortgage crisis has been in the offing. The rumored details have always given progressives heartburn: civil immunity, no investigations, inadequate help for homeowners and a small penalty for the banks. Now, on the eve President Obama’s State of the Union address—in which he plans to further advance a populist message against big money and income inequality—the deal may be here, and it’s every bit as ugly as progressives feared.

Full Story Here: Critics of Mortgage Deal Press Obama, State AGs to Reject Big Bank Proposal | Common Dreams.

We must stop this corporate takeover of American democracy

   Bernie Sanders :-:

Unless we can reverse the supreme court’s dreadful Citizens United decision, US politics will become a plutocrats’ plaything

The corporate barbarians are through the gate of American democracy. Not satisfied with their all-pervasive influence on our culture, economy and legislative processes, they want more. They want it all.

Two years ago, the United States supreme court betrayed our Constitution and those who fought to ensure that its protections are enjoyed equally by all persons regardless of religion, race or gender by engaging in an unabashed power-grab on behalf of corporate America. In its now infamous decision in the Citizens United case, five justices declared that corporations must be treated as if they are actual people under the Constitution when it comes to spending money to influence our elections, allowing them for the first time to draw on the corporate checkbook – in any amount and at any time – to run ads explicitly for or against specific candidates.

What’s next … a corporate right to vote?

Don’t laugh. Just this month, the Republican National Committee filed an amicus brief in a US appeals court contending that the natural extension of the Citizens United rationale is that the century-old ban on corporate contributions directly to candidates and political parties is similarly unconstitutional. They want corporations to be able to sponsor candidates and parties directly while claiming with a straight face this would not result in any sort of corruption. And while, this month, they take no issue with corporations being subject to the existing contribution limits, anyone paying attention knows that eliminating such caps will be corporate America’s next prize in its brazen ambition for absolute control over our elections.

Full Story Here: We must stop this corporate takeover of American democracy | Bernie Sanders | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

The Age of the Super PAC

Two years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling has seen the rise of the “super PAC,” which can take unlimited donations from people or corporations in support of a candidate.

Many believe that the ability to donate anonymously in this way to candidates is giving the super-rich too much influence.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Through organizations with names like Winning Our Future, wealthy interests can furtively fund the type of nasty TV ads that torpedoed then-surging Newt Gingrich before the Iowa caucuses and later carpet-bombed South Carolinians with commercials calling Mitt Romney a job-killing “corporate raider” when he led the Bain Capital private equity firm.

At the same time, presidential aspirants can claim that they had nothing to do with the attacks because the presidential campaigns can’t legally communicate with the super PACs doing the dirty work.

Canada’s Globe and Mail notes that the super PACs can outspend the campaigns themselves:

Full Story Here: The Age of the Super PAC | Common Dreams.

Homeless Rate Ready To Rise As Stimulus Cash Runs Out: Study

Although the recession has officially been over for two years, the worst may be to come for many people.

Job losses rose during the last few years. So did wages — barely. Foreclosures went up, as did the number of poor people for whom rent eats up at least half the paycheck. And a federal program believed to have made a major difference in keeping homeowners off the streets is due to expire in a few months.

All in all, the conditions are right for national homeless rates to start rising soon, according to a new report that examines many of the large-scale economic factors that force people out of their homes. The report, published Tuesday by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, suggests that a delayed wave of pain may be coming for low-earning renters and homeowners.

“It takes a while for people to become homeless,” said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. “They don’t enter the shelter right away.”

Full Story Here: Homeless Rate Ready To Rise As Stimulus Cash Runs Out: Study.

Michigan Democrats Unveil Plan To Finance Free College Tuition By Eliminating Corporate Tax Credits

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) spent his first year in office trading in the welfare of thousands of vulnerable Michiganders in order to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Hoping to refocus priorities in 2012, the state’s Senate Democrats have released a new plan that puts Michigan students ahead of wealthy corporations.

Under the Michigan 2020 Plan, Michigan’s high school graduates will be eligible for free tuition at one of Michigan’s community colleges or universities, where the median tuition level is currently around $9,575 per year. The program will be funded entirely by eliminating $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes and putting that money towards students:

“Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century,” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.

Full Story Here: Michigan Democrats Unveil Plan To Finance Free College Tuition By Eliminating Corporate Tax Credits | ThinkProgress.

America Wakes Up to the Reality: Inequality Matters

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship:-:

If you’re part of the one percent, even getting fired comes with a cushion made of eiderdown. GMI, a research company that gets paid to keep an eye on such things, just issued a study headlined, “Twenty-One U.S. CEOs with Golden Parachutes of More than $100 Million.” That’s each

Full Story Here: America Wakes Up to the Reality: Inequality Matters | Common Dreams.

The Middle Class: The Engine of Economic Growth

The Center for American Progress has launched a 2012 series of events and publications on the importance of the middle class to our economy. Our series is based on the bedrock progressive principle that a strong middle class is essential for both economic growth and economic stability.

The middle class is our nation’s indispensable workforce. The middle-class consumer creates the incentive to conceive, manufacture, and sell what our economy produces. That demand drives business opportunities and spurs investment. Entrepreneurship and invention also are rooted in the middle class, and the rise in middle-class worker productivity generates much of our nation’s wealth.

The conservative position is less concerned about the middle class. Their counternarrative is that rising inequality is just fine for America since the gains for those in the top 1 percent will eventually “trickle down” to the 99 percent. But that’s not what’s happened over the past few decades. In fact, just the reverse occurred. The economic recovery of 2000 to 2007 didn’t benefit middle-class America. Over that time period gross domestic product grew by nearly 18 percent, yet median household income fell by 0.6 percent.

Full Story Here: Middle Class, Inequality, and Growth Series.

Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale

Matt Taibbi:-:

If there was ever a news story that crystalized the moral dementia of modern Wall Street in one little vignette, this is it.

Newspapers in Colorado today are reporting that the elegant Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, will be closed to the public from today through Monday at noon.

Why? Because a local squire has apparently decided to rent out all 94 rooms of the hotel for three-plus days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.

The hotel’s general manager, Tony DiLucia, would say only that the party was being thrown by a “nice family,” but newspapers are now reporting that the Daddy of the lucky little gal is one Jeffrey Verschleiser, currently an executive with Goldman, Sachs.

Full Story Here: Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.

Bill Moyers: Occupy a Cause

What’s the common cause behind Occupy protesters?

The Moyers & Company team visited the Occupy Wall Street site several times between October and December in 2011 — visits that reveal real faces, real people, and a true common cause. In this premiere Bill Moyers Essay, Bill talks about their anger — not at the concept of wealth itself, but at the crony capitalists who resort to tricks, loopholes, and hard, cold cash for politicians to make sure insiders prosper… and then pull up the ladder behind them.

BILL MOYERS: By coincidence I first met with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on the very day Occupy Wall Street had sprung up in lower Manhattan. And I wondered, as so many others did, were we seeing the advance guard of a movement by organized people to challenge the power of organized money? Well, it’s still too soon to know. But in the weeks that followed, every time we went down to the encampment, there was no mistaking the message.

LINNEA PALMER PATON: I don’t have thousands of dollars to go buy myself a lobbyist to lobby for my views, but corporations do.

BILL MOYERS: Linnea Palmer Paton is 23 and an Occupy Wall Street Volunteer.

Full Story Here: Bill Moyers: Occupy a Cause | Truthout.

The Perils of 2012

 Joseph E. Stiglitz  :-:

The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F. Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see not only that those with taller masts had been lifted far higher, but also that many of the smaller boats had been dashed to pieces in their wake.

In that brief moment when the rising tide was indeed rising, millions of people believed that they might have a fair chance of realizing the “American Dream.” Now those dreams, too, are receding. By 2011, the savings of those who had lost their jobs in 2008 or 2009 had been spent. Unemployment checks had run out. Headlines announcing new hiring – still not enough to keep pace with the number of those who would normally have entered the labor force – meant little to the 50 year olds with little hope of ever holding a job again.

Indeed, middle-aged people who thought that they would be unemployed for a few months have now realized that they were, in fact, forcibly retired. Young people who graduated from college with tens of thousands of dollars of education debt cannot find any jobs at all. People who moved in with friends and relatives have become homeless. Houses bought during the property boom are still on the market or have been sold at a loss. More than seven million American families have lost their homes.

Full Story Here: The Perils of 2012 – Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate.

Report: Massive Movement Needed to Fix ‘Perverse Concentration of Wealth’

Honoring Martin Luther King Jr. while perpetuating the racial divide

Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality is far from reality.

Census Bureau figures show the U.S. on track to be a majority minority nation by 2042. But if the trends of the last 30 years continue, according to a new report, the economic racial divide is set to increase.

The non-partisan group United for a Fair Economy’s (UFE) ninth annual MLK Day report, State of the Dream 2012: The Emerging Majority finds that racial economic divide will remain “disastrously large and will threaten the stability of the entire economy.”

While the numbers of people of color in the nation surge, this fact alone is not enough to change the economic reality. From the report:

In the age of mass media and Citizens United, money buys influence, and the national income and wealth will remain over-whelmingly in the hands of Whites – a small group of Whites at that.

Full Story Here: Report: Massive Movement Needed to Fix ‘Perverse Concentration of Wealth’ | Common Dreams.

Is This Land Made for You and Me?

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship:-:

Welcome to BillMoyers.com. Over the next few weeks, on the air and on this website, we’ll be talking a lot about “winner-take-all” politics and how economic inequality – the vast gap between the rich and everyone else– isn’t the result of market forces and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” It has been deliberately, politically engineered.

But first, as they used to say on radio, a musical interlude. The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina. Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year.

Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand; his own family came unraveled in the worst hard times. And he wrote tough yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep. He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich. What professional success he had during his own lifetime, singing in concerts and on the radio, was often undone by politics and the restless urge to keep moving on. “So long, it’s been good to know you,” he sang, and off he would go.

Full Story Here: Is This Land Made for You and Me? | On Democracy | BillMoyers.com.

Have the Super-Rich Seceded From the United States?

It was in 1993 during Congressional deliberation over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican members of Congress who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. I distinctly remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris and Tokyo than with their own fellow American citizens.”

That was just the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

At the end of the cold war, many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, former Czechoslovakia and Sudan. Others, like Chuck Spinney, predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of fourth-generation warfare and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been hundreds of books about globalization and how it would break down borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

Full Story Here: Have the Super-Rich Seceded From the United States? | Truthout.

Cynicism Is for Suckers: How We Can Fight the Greedy Elites That Run Our Lives

2011′s successful protests show how hope can change the system.

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for.  It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings.  We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation.  Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

Full Story Here: Cynicism Is for Suckers: How We Can Fight the Greedy Elites That Run Our Lives | Activism & Vision | AlterNet.

Keynes’ Predictions Proven Spectacularly Accurate

Paul Krugman :-:

The economist Dean Baker is once again justifiably mad at Robert Samuelson at The Washington Post who, in a column titled “Bye-Bye Keynes?” published on Dec. 18, writes: “Were [John Maynard] Keynes alive now, he would almost certainly acknowledge the limits of Keynesian policies. High debt complicates the analysis and subverts the solutions. What might have worked in the 1930s offers no panacea today.”

Mr. Baker, in a blog post for the Center for Economic Policy and Research, pointed out the next day that “Samuelson actually wants to say goodbye to Keynes, but he would have had a better case if he was talking about Darwin and the theory of evolution. After all, when we have seen nothing but confirming evidence for years, why should we still accept the theory?”

It is indeed frustrating that after three years in which Keynesian predictions have been spectacularly correct, pundits insist on reading the evidence as a rejection of his work.

What do I mean by saying that predictions were correct? Three things:

Full Story Here: Keynes’ Predictions Proven Spectacularly Accurate | Truthout.

Teachers Decide To Work For Free After Budget Cuts Leave Pennsylvania School District Without Funds For Salaries

The Chester Upland School District in Delaware County, Pennsylvania suffered a serious setback when Gov. Tom Corbett (R) slashed $900 million in education funds from the state budget. The cuts landed hardest on poorer districts, and Chester Upland, which predominantly serves African-American children and relies on state aid for nearly 70 percent of its funding, expects to fall short this school year by $19 million.

Faced with such a shortage of funds, the school district informed its staff that it will not be able to pay their salaries come Wednesday. So the teachers decided to work for free. As one teacher put it, students “need to be educated, so we intend to be on the job”:

At a union meeting at Chester High School on Tuesday night, the employees passed a resolution saying they would stay on “as long as we are individually able.”

Columbus Elementary School math and literacy teacher Sara Ferguson, who has taught in Chester Upland for 21 years, said after the meeting, “It’s alarming. It’s disturbing. But we are adults; we will make a way. The students don’t have any contingency plan. They need to be educated, so we intend to be on the job.”

Full Story Here: Teachers Decide To Work For Free After Budget Cuts Leave Pennsylvania School District Without Funds For Salaries | ThinkProgress.

House Democrats Rush Floor Demanding Republicans Come Back To Work, GOP Cuts Off C-SPAN

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and a group of Democratic lawmakers took to an empty House floor today to demonstrate that they were willing to work while Republicans lawmakers are at home. “Where are the Republicans?” demanded Assistant to the Minority Leader James Clyburn (R-SC). Joining Pelosi and Clyburn were five other House Democrats who are assigned to the payroll-tax extension conference committee.

Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA), representing House Republicans, quickly banged his gavel over the Democrats’ voices, and instructed the clerk to stop taking notes of the proceedings. Moments later, the microphones were silenced and C-SPAN’s video feed was cut. (The House leadership controls the cameras and has previously cut video of Democrats on the floor.) Watch it:

Full Story Here: House Democrats Rush Floor Demanding Republicans Come Back To Work, GOP Cuts Off C-SPAN | ThinkProgress.

Bain, Barack and Jobs

Paul Krugman :-:

America’s recovery from recession has been so slow that it mostly doesn’t seem like a recovery at all, especially on the jobs front. So, in a better world, President Obama would face a challenger offering a serious critique of his job-creation policies, and proposing a serious alternative.

Instead, he’ll almost surely face Mitt Romney.

Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border.

Full Story Here: Bain, Barack and Jobs – NYTimes.com.

Climate change – our real bequest to future generations

Dean Baker :-:

Deficit hawks try to scare us about the debt we’re leaving. That’s economic nonsense – unlike the costs of global warming

It is remarkable how efforts to reduce the government deficit/debt are often portrayed as a generational issue, while efforts to reduce global warming are almost never framed in this way. This contrast is striking because the issues involved in reducing the deficit or debt have little direct relevance to distribution between generations, whereas global warming is almost entirely a question of distribution between generations.

Seeing the debt as an issue between generations is wrong in almost every dimension. The idea that future generations will somehow be stuck with some huge tab in the form of the national debt suffers from the simple logical problem that we are all going to die. At some point, everyone who owns the debt being issued today, or over the next two decades, will be dead. They will have to pass the ownership of the debt to someone else – in other words, their children or grandchildren. This means that the debt is not money that our children and grandchildren will be paying to someone else. It is money that they will be paying to themselves.

There are certainly issues of intra-generational distribution. If Bill Gates’s grandkids own all the debt, then there will be a serious issue of income inequality 50 or 60 years out – but that is not an intra-generational issue

Full Story Here: Climate change – our real bequest to future generations | Dean Baker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

The Delusional Assumptions of Capitalism

One of the more delusional aspects of capitalism is the idea that if one pursues the acquisition of private wealth with abandon, that this is somehow automatically “good” for human society.

The laissez-faire advocate and novelist Ayn Rand wrote that if one does not support this notion that greed is good and pursuing “enlightened self-interest,” (as Adam Smith characterized it), is the highest virtue, then one defaults to supporting a centralized oppressive regime that allows no personal freedom and no private wealth whatsoever. One supports living in darkness and despair or, in a word, Hell. This Manichean thinking is in keeping with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition dating back to the Indus Valley divide between the Vedic traditions and the Zoroastrian belief system of ancient Persia. The notion that the world is characterized by an ongoing “war” between the forces of light and the forces of darkness is at the base of much of so-called western thought.

In The Three Metamorphoses, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that humans are saddled with a heavy burden as children. Using the metaphor of a camel, he describes how we then venture into the wilderness with this burden, whereupon we are attacked by a great dragon. The dragon is covered with hundreds of scales, each scale bearing the words “Thou Shalt.” The human is then transformed into a lion in order to do battle with the dragon. If the lion is victorious in the battle – slaying the dragon “Thou Shalt” – the metaphor then turns to that of a child. The human then becomes what he or she was born to be – “a wheel rolling out of its own center.” One of the scales on the dragon for most of us growing up in the “developed world” is that “thou shalt believe in the war between light and darkness.” And, the societal assumption is that one aspect of this war is the capitalist notion of “enlightened self-interest” versus the evil “socialist” notions of public ownership and oppressive altruism that punishes the productive and rewards the unproductive. This has become conflated with the Judeo-Christian religious structure of “good versus evil” to the point where in some quarters there is no distinction between the secular and religious versions of the myth. To complete the Nietzschean metaphor in this context, most people do not slay the dragon. The result is a societal discourse that is largely delusional and controlled by mythic thinking, catch-phrases, and unquestioned assumptions.

Full Story Here: The Delusional Assumptions of Capitalism | Common Dreams.

Montana High Court Says ‘Citizens United’ Does Not Apply In Big Sky State

State Supreme Court Issues Remarkable Ruling Against Corporate Speech

Montana’s Supreme Court has issued a stunning rebuke to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 that infamously decreed corporations had constitutional rights to directly spend money on ‘independent expenditures’ in campaigns.

The Montana Court vigorously upheld the state’s right to regulate how corporations can raise and spend money after a secretive Colorado corporation, Western Tradition Partnership, and a Montana sportsman’s group and local businessman sued to overturn a 1912 state law banning direct corporate spending on electoral campaigns.

“Organizations like WTP that act as a conduit for anonymously spending by others represent a threat to the political marketplace,” wrote Mike McGrath, Chief Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, for the majority. “Clearly the impact of unlimited corporate donations creates a dominating impact on the political process and inevitably minimizes the impact of individual citizens.”

Full Story Here: Montana High Court Says ‘Citizens United’ Does Not Apply In Big Sky State | | AlterNet.

Vampire Squid Watch: 4 Scary Economic Trends for 2012

Top economic thinkers explain why 2012 will be a year of continued – and escalating – predation by financiers.

Having been seen to twitch – ever so slightly – in 2011 as global protests erupted, the vampire squid is stirring in its evil lair. Reports of sucking noises and new tentacles sprouting in every direction tell us that the global financial monster is poised to steal yet more wealth and resources from the public in the coming year. Top economic thinkers have shared their forecasts with AlterNet, and the focus is clear: 2012 will be a year of continued – and escalating – predation by financiers. Their influence over political, financial, and economic activity is likely to grow – along with potential for harm.

1. Back-door Bailout of the Eurozone

Full Story Here: Vampire Squid Watch: 4 Scary Economic Trends for 2012 | | AlterNet.

Baby Boomers Take Note: Medicare Is Headed For Big Changes

2012 Medicare Debate: Baby Boomers At Center Of Issue

Baby boomers take note: Medicare as your parents have known it is headed for big changes no matter who wins the White House in 2012. You may not like it, but you might have to accept it.

Dial down the partisan rhetoric and surprising similarities emerge from competing policy prescriptions by President Barack Obama and leading Republicans such as Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.

Limit the overall growth of Medicare spending? It’s in both approaches.

Squeeze more money from upper-income retirees and some in the middle-class? Ditto.

Raise the eligibility age? That too, if the deal is right.

Full Story Here: 2012 Medicare Debate: Baby Boomers At Center Of Issue.

Before Midnight, Occupy Wall Street Activists Retake Zuccotti Park

“All week! All year! We’ll still be here!”

“Whose park? Our park!”

The chants went up 10, 20, maybe 100 deep shortly before midnight at Zuccotti Park as Occupy Wall Street activists surprised the New York Police Department and retook the space that was once the homebase for their movement. The barricades surrounding the park went down. They have since been removed. Protesters were allowed to come and go through the park.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST OCCUPY UPDATES)

Earlier, activists danced on the piles of barricades. Some climbed the lattice of metal and hoisted American flags. Others waved signs and banners. The Zuccotti Park Christmas tree was wrapped in an Occupy Wall Street banner. Of course, there were the drums.

Full Story Here: Before Midnight, Occupy Wall Street Activists Retake Zuccotti Park.

The 12 Most Hopeful Trends to Build On in 2012

2011 was full of surprises, many of them the good kind. But which ones will matter in the coming year? Here’s our pick of trends to watch.

Who would have thought that some young people camped out in lower Manhattan with cardboard signs, a few sharpies, some donated pizza, and a bunch of smart phones could change so much?

The viral spread of the Occupy Movement took everyone by surprise. Last summer, politicians and the media were fixated on the debt ceiling, and everyone seemed to forget that we were in the midst of an economic meltdown—everyone except the 99 percent who were experiencing it.

Today, people ranging from Ben Bernake, chair of the
Federal Reserve, to filmmaker Michael Moore are expressing sympathy for the Occupy Movement and concern for those losing homes, retirement savings, access to health care, and hope of ever finding a job.

This uprising is the biggest reason for hope in 2012. The following are 12 ways the Occupy Movement and other major trends of 2011 offer a foundation for a transformative 2012.

Full Story Here: The 12 Most Hopeful Trends to Build On in 2012 by Sarah van Gelder — YES! Magazine.

Obama Signs Bill Allowing Indefinite Detention Of Americans

President Barack Obama signed a wide-ranging defense bill into law Saturday despite having “serious reservations” about provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.

The bill also applies penalties against Iran’s central bank in an effort to hamper Tehran’s ability to fund its nuclear enrichment program. The Obama administration is looking to soften the impact of those penalties because of concerns that they could lead to a spike in global oil prices or cause economic hardship on U.S. allies that import petroleum from Iran.

In a statement accompanying his signature, the president chastised some lawmakers for what he contended was their attempts to use the bill to restrict the ability of counterterrorism officials to protect the country.

Full Story Here: Obama Signs Defense Bill Despite ‘Serious Reservations’.

OPS: Talk is and has been cheap for Obama. Think of Clinton signing NAFTA and allowing Glass-Stegal to go down. Do their heart felt ‘reservations’ matter once it’s signed?

Wall Street Has Destroyed the Wonder That Was America

Imagine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.

A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers’ club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the ’11 is ready to drink and who’ll see to tipping the servants. The notion that there might be someone or some force out there getting ready to slouch toward the buttonwood tree to exact retribution scarcely ruffles the celebrants’ joy.

Full Story Here: The Big Lie: Wall Street has Destroyed the Wonder That Was America | Common Dreams.

Has America’s Stolen Election Process Finally Hit Prime Time?

It took two stolen US Presidential elections and the prospect of another one coming up in 2012.

For years the Democratic Party and even much of the left press has reacted with scorn for those who’ve reported on it.

But the imperial fraud that has utterly corrupted our electoral process seems finally to be dawning on a broadening core of the American electorate—if it can still be called that.

The shift is highlighted by three major developments:

1. The NAACP goes to the United Nations

In early December, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the largest civil rights organization in America, announced that it was petitioning the United Nations over the orchestrated GOP attack on black and Latino voters.

In its landmark report entitled Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, the NAACP directly takes on the new Jim Crow tactics passed in fourteen states that are designed to keep minorities from voting in 2012.

Full Story Here: Has America’s Stolen Election Process Finally Hit Prime Time? | Common Dreams.

Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president

 Glenn Greenwald :-:

Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles

American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation’s airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America’s tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.

The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

Full Story Here: Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Heathcare: The Best of Times and the Worst of Times

Roger Bybee

With a raft of new Charles Dickens biographies hitting bookstores this fall, it is difficult not to quote the classic chronicler of the Victorian era’s polarities when describing the state of America’s healthcare system: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

The good times are concentrated among corporate executives. Healthcare, insurance and drug company CEOs have actually managed to displace bankers as the best-rewarded bosses in America. The Guardian archly reported recenty: “Pity Wall Street’s bankers. Once the highest-paid bosses in the land, they are now also-rans. The real money is in healthcare and drugs, according to the latest survey of executive pay.”

Among the big winners in healthcare listed by the UK-based newspaper:

John Hammergren, chief executive of McKesson Corporation, a pharmaceutical distribution corporation, took home a breathtaking $145,266,971 in 2010.

Joel Gemunder, outgoing president of Omnicare, a pharmacy company that dispenses drugs in nursing homes, benefited handsomely from s 2010 total pay package worth $98,283,242.

“CVS Caremark, which operates 7,000 pharmacies across the US, awarded chief executive Thomas Ryan $68,079,823 in 2010.

Ronald Williams, boss of health insurance giant Aetna, made $57,787,786 in 2010.

But for America’s healthcare consumers, the bad times got worse.

Full Story Here: The Best of Times and the Worst of Times, When It Comes to Heathcare – Working In These Times.

‘Anonymous’ Stratfor Hack Reportedly Start Of Weeklong Assault

Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen 200 GB of e-mails and credit card data from United States security think tank Stratfor, promising a weeklong Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.

Members of the loose hacking movement known as “Anonymous” posted a link on Twitter to what it said was Stratfor’s secret client list – including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Goldman Sachs and MF Global.

“Not so private and secret anymore?,” the group taunted in a message on the microblogging site.

Anonymous said it was able to get credit details, in part, because Stratfor didn’t bother encrypting them – an easy-to-avoid blunder which – if true – would be a major embarrassment for any security company.

Full Story Here: ‘Anonymous’ Stratfor Hack Reportedly Start Of Weeklong Assault.

The Big Lie: : How Ideologues Smeared Fannie Mae

So this is how the Big Lie works.

You begin with a hypothesis that has a certain surface plausibility. You find an ally whose background suggests that he’s an “expert”; out of thin air, he devises “data.” You write articles in sympathetic publications, repeating the data endlessly; in time, some of these publications make your cause their own. Like-minded congressmen pick up your mantra and invite you to testify at hearings.

You’re chosen for an investigative panel related to your topic. When other panel members, after inspecting your evidence, reject your thesis, you claim that they did so for ideological reasons. This, too, is repeated by your allies. Soon, the echo chamber you created drowns out dissenting views; even presidential candidates begin repeating the Big Lie.

Thus has Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis. His partner in crime is another A.E.I. scholar, Edward Pinto, who a very long time ago was Fannie’s chief credit officer. Pinto claims that as of June 2008, 27 million “risky” mortgages had been issued — “and a lion’s share was on Fannie and Freddie’s books,” as Wallison wrote recently. Never mind that his definition of “risky” is so all-encompassing that it includes mortgages with extremely low default rates as well as those with default rates nearing 30 percent. These latter mortgages were the ones created by the unholy alliance between subprime lenders and Wall Street. Pinto’s numbers are the Big Lie’s primary data point.

Full Story Here: The Big Lie – NYTimes.com.

A Christmas Message From America’s Rich

Matt Taibbi

It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.

True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.

Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

Full Story Here: A Christmas Message From America’s Rich | | Rolling Stone.

Uncle Sam is making the wrong choices

NORMAN SOLOMON :-:

On a recent day in Petaluma, two very different events spotlighted grim results of upside-down priorities from the federal government.

Upwards of 600 people gathered for an early breakfast at the Veterans Memorial Hall to raise money for the Committee on the Shelterless (COTS), a nonprofit organization that last year sheltered nearly 2,000 individuals, served more than 127,000 hearty meals and distributed 800,000 pounds of food to the needy.

We heard moving stories about — and from — people whose lives have been transformed by active compassion, generosity and their own hard work. But, as speakers lamented, COTS must turn away many who need help.

Charities and other nonprofits are struggling to cope with deep economic wounds that have been festering for years. The dire consequences are far more widespread than private agencies can possibly heal.

Only government has the capacity to provide economic remedies for social distress of this magnitude. But government is failing.

Full Story Here: GUEST OPINION: Uncle Sam is making the wrong choices | PressDemocrat.com.

The Wall Street System is Destroying Not Serving Society

Joseph Stiglitz :-:

A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around

Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.

t has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.

We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. And we thought we knew who the “bad guys” were—the nation’s big banks, which through cynical lending and reckless gambling had brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin. The Bush and Obama administrations justified a bailout on the grounds that only if the banks were handed money without limit—and without conditions—could the economy recover. We did this not because we loved the banks but because (we were told) we couldn’t do without the lending that they made possible. Many, especially in the financial sector, argued that strong, resolute, and generous action to save not just the banks but the bankers, their shareholders, and their creditors would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis. In the meantime, a short-term stimulus, moderate in size, would suffice to tide the economy over until the banks could be restored to health.

Full Story Here: Joseph Stiglitz: “A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around” | Politics | Vanity Fair.

Eliot Spitzer: Our Rallying Cry Should Be, “We Own Wall Street and We Can Stop Corporate America’s Worst Behavior.”

If the public exercised its ownership capacity by influencing board member selection, compensation, and political donations, then these companies would be fundamentally altered.

As the year ends, American politics remains mired in the agenda of the right. The House is, at least momentarily, refusing to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits—two policies genuinely beneficial to the middle class. And the presidential campaign heading into the Iowa primaries is dominated by the libertarianism of Ron Paul and the astonishing, appalling ideas—eliminate child labor laws, for instance—of Newt Gingrich.

Yes, Occupy Wall Street changed the debate for a brief spell, and, yes, President Obama harkened back to the glory days of progressivism with his Kansas speech. But in general American politics has lost sight of the most important crisis of our generation: the shrinking middle class.

So let me offer some advice to Democrats and progressives seeking to capture the attention of the American people. It has long been my belief that ownership trumps regulation. What I mean by that is while laws and regulations can create boundaries to behavior, the reality, as we have seen after passing much legislation—Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank—is that even good laws leave room for bad decision making that results in cataclysm. Even though prosecutors should have charged many more bad actors on Wall Street, much of what led to the crisis was not blatant illegality: It was horrific judgment exercised by senior executives and regulators.

Full Story Here: Eliot Spitzer: Our Rallying Cry Should Be, “We Own Wall Street and We Can Stop Corporate America’s Worst Behavior.” | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.

MF Global Collapse Spotlights Practice That Heightens Systemic Financial Risk

No one’s money is Safe

The swift implosion of MF Global highlights a common practice used by aggressive speculators, one that experts say makes the broader financial system vulnerable to another crisis. It’s called rehypothecation, and it allows a firm to essentially pledge the same limited collateral to arrange fresh loans.

MF Global is believed to have used client funds as collateral to borrow money to make bets on the risky sovereign debt of Portugal, Spain and Italy, leading to a daisy chain of securitization, Thomson Reuters Business Law Currents reported. It’s akin to using a single home as collateral for several loans and then investing that money to earn dividends before payments are due on the loans.

In recent weeks amid the turmoil of the debt crisis, European banks appear to be taking measures to restrict their exposure via these collateralized loans made through rehypothecation and have shortened the daisy chains of loaned securities. Clamping down on lending, they have instead deposited assets at the European Central Bank where the assets cannot be recommitted, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. They kept an average of $356 billion at the central bank over the last 20 days, nearing the record high from July 2010.

Full Story Here: MF Global Collapse Spotlights Practice That Heightens Systemic Financial Risk.

The Poor Rich and the Scrooginess of Congress

Jim Hightower :-:

It’s at this time of the year that generous, big-hearted Americans reach out to aid the less fortunate among us — like those who’ve recently been knocked down by the recession and seen their incomes plummet. I speak, of course, about our nation’s severely squeezed millionaires.

Yes, many in the infamous 1 percent class are no longer feeling like a million bucks. According to a new federal report, the income of these high-living swells averaged a robust $1.4 million in 2007, but after Wall Street crashed in a heap of greed late that year, their average income took a tumble. In 2009, it fell below the millionaire threshold, leaving these poor rich folks struggling to make it on an average income of only $957,000.

Also, talk about getting a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking, the share of our nation’s total income taken by the 1-percenters fell from a whopping 23 percent in 2007 (the highest since the Roaring Twenties) to a mere 17 percent in 2009. How sad for them, huh?

Full Story Here: The Poor Rich and the Scrooginess of Congress | Common Dreams.

Propagandizing for Perpetual War

Are Our Rulers Stupid, or Do They Think We’re Stupid?

According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has appropriated $806 billion for the direct cost of invading and occupying Iraq. Including debt service since 2003, that sum rises to approximately $1 trillion. The White House estimates the number of U.S. military wounded at 30,000; the web site icasualties.org states that U.S. military fatalities from the Iraq war now stand at 4484. It is impossible to estimate precisely the numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths, but they are frequently cited as being in excess of 100,000. There are now around two million internally displaced Iraqis in a country of 30 million inhabitants. As United States armed forces (but not up to 17,000 State Department employees, contractors and mercenaries) leave the country, Iraq is plunging into a sectarian and ethnically-fueled political crisis. Even if it survives that crisis and remains a unitary state, it will almost certainly be pulled closer to the orbit of Iran, our bogeyman du jour.

In view of the crippling costs both human and financial as well as the strategic and moral disaster the invasion of Iraq precipitated, what sort of verdict do you think our leaders – leaders representing a presidential administration ostensibly opposed to the invasion and promising hope and change – bother to offer us? While junketing in Turkey on December 17, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the press the following:

As difficult as [the Iraq war] was, I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.

Full Story Here: Propagandizing for Perpetual War » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

The Corporations That Occupy Congress

David Cay Johnston :-:

Some of the biggest companies in the United States have been firing workers and in some cases lobbying for rules that depress wages at the very time that jobs are needed, pay is low, and the federal budget suffers from a lack of revenue.

Last month Citizens for Tax Justice and an affiliate issued “Corporate Taxpayers and Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10″. It showed that 30 brand-name companies paid a federal income tax rate of minus 6.7 percent on $160 billion of profit from 2008 through 2010 compared to a going corporate tax rate of 35 percent. All but one of those 30 companies reported lobbying expenses in Washington.

Another report, by Public Campaign, shows that 29 of those companies spent nearly half a billion dollars over those three years lobbying in Washington for laws and rules that favor their interests. Only Atmos Energy, the 30th company, reported no lobbying.

Full Story Here: The Corporations That Occupy Congress | Common Dreams.

Max Keiser: MF Global bankruptcy

In this edition of the show Max interviews Gerald Celente from trendsjournal.com.

Gerald Celente is a trends forecaster who was recently defrauded by MF Global run by former New Jersey governor, Jon Corzine, who was also former head of Goldman Sachs.

When MF Global collapsed, client cash was taken and apparently transferred to creditors, like JP Morgan.

This commingling of funds has violated the very foundation of the futures market and we talk to Celente about whether he will ever invest money with a brokerage again?

Full Story Here: MF Global bankruptcy-On the Edge with Max Keiser-12-16-2011 – YouTube.

Why Free-Market Economics is a Fraud

Ian Fletcher :-:

If there’s one thing everyone in America knows, it’s that free-market economics is true and free markets are best.

After all, we’re not communists, are we? They starved and lost the Cold War because they believed otherwise. And their watered-down European cousins the socialists? More of the same, only less so. Even liberals get this nowadays. All hail the free market!

Trouble is, things “everyone” knows are often wrong. And this is no exception.

It’s time to start getting honest about a very simple fact: Nobody, but nobody, really believes in free markets. That’s right. Not the Republican Party, not the libertarians, not the Wall Street Journal, nobody.

Here’s why: a truly free market is a perfectly competitive market. Which means that whatever you have to sell in that market, so does your competition. Which means price war. Which means your price gets driven down. Which means little or no profit for you.

Oops!

Naturally, businesses flee perfectly competitive markets like the plague. In fact, the fine art of doing so is a big part of what they teach in business schools.

That’s why businesses use strategies like product differentiation, so their competition is no longer selling the exact same product they are. That’s why they use strategies like branding, so their buyers don’t think the products are the same.

Businesses will, in fact, do almost anything to get out of the hell of pure head-to-head competition.

They don’t do it because they’re crooked; they do it because they have an intrinsic economic incentive to. Always.

This is part of the innate essence of capitalism. It is not a flaw or a defect.  It is part of what makes the whole system go. It is part of what makes capitalism capitalism.

People are the same way. Consider your own career. Why do you get paid more than the minimum wage? (I’m hoping you do.) Probably because you have some skill that everybody else doesn’t have. So you don’t have to bid against every unemployed person in your area to hold your job. Just a few of them. Which pushes your wage above the legal minimum.

That skill of yours is what economists call a “barrier to entry”—entry into the market for your job, that is. And if you’re anything other than a damn fool, you’ll cherish it like your very life.

I sure do.

Now let’s consider the other side of the equation. We’ve looked at free markets in things you sell. Now let’s consider free markets in things you buy.

Here everything gets turned around. If I’m buying something, I want the freest possible market in that product.

I don’t, to take an example recently on my mind, want there to be only one market for live Christmas trees in my town. I want there to be two (or more), and right next to each other so I can easily comparison shop. And I want to shop for more-easily shippable goods on the Internet, if possible, where I can potentially find the lowest price in the entire world.

I want, in other words, every seller’s nightmare. Which every smart seller will use every legal trick in the book to avoid.

As a result, nobody with any wits about them really believes in free markets. People believe in them when it’s in their interest, but not when it’s the other way around.

This is a systemic, structural condition, so anyone who tells you they believe in “free markets” is either lying, stupid, or hasn’t thought the whole concept through properly.

The latter category is quite common. Many people do their thinking about political ideology in an entirely different—and dreamily disconnected—mental space than they use for managing real life.

Frankly, everyone I’ve ever met gets the truth well enough in practice, in their own personal life or in how they run their business, so I just don’t believe anymore that anyone does believe in free markets.

Like any rational person, I’m open to counter-examples if anyone can show me any. But I’ve been asking around for a while on this, and haven’t come up with much.

This is not just an esoteric point, still less yet one more example of the familiar fact that people are hypocrites in politics.

Here’s why it matters. The political players in America today who claim to support free markets don’t. They support free markets in the things their backers buy, but maximum barriers to entry in the things their backers sell.

For example, one of the great unnoticed achievements of the Republicans (and their Democrat collaborators) from Reagan onward has been to gut U.S. antitrust law. Having a monopoly, or a cozy oligopoly with friendly rivals, is one of the best barriers to entry around.

As recently documented in Barry Lynn’s fine book Cornered: the New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, American industry is now concentrated as it hasn’t been since before the era of Teddy Roosevelt and his trustbusters. (There’s a different kind of Republican for you, by the way. These truths are not liberal or conservative.)

Most Americans don’t realize this has happened because, unlike in the old days of Standard Oil, oligopolies today are cunning about masking their existence.

To take just one example, America’s eyeglass frame industry is now dominated by the conglomerate Luxottica. That’s why frames are so expensive. And any company, like Oakley the sunglass maker, that tries to break into the market? They find themselves shut out of a Luxottica-controlled distribution system. And retailers are now afraid to receive distribution from anyone else, lest they be cut off.

It’s a remarkably well-oiled scheme, and it has its parallels in many other industries. But the average consumer has no idea about this, because the range of brands, if not suppliers, in optical shops remains diverse.

We’re fat, dumb and happy.  We’ve been fooled.  But behind the smiling mask of a hundred labels smirks a single monopolist.

But aren’t there laws against this sort of thing?

Well, there sure used to be, enforced by unsung lawyers and bureaucrats (horrors!) at the Justice and Commerce Departments. Whom nobody considered very glamorous, but who were doing the rest of us a big favor. Talk about forgotten wisdom!

Consider some other examples:

• Tyson in chicken
• Smithfield in ham
• Menu Foods in pet food
• Frito-Lay in chips
• InBev and MillerCoors in beer
• PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé in bottled water
• Dickinson in medical devices
• Microsoft in operating systems
• Iron ore (three companies)
• Aluminum
• Cement
• Railroads
• Banking

The number of problems caused by letting monopoly power—whose key consequence is known as “pricing power”—is astonishing.

For one thing, this is a huge part of what ails American farmers. Family farmers are caught between the agribusiness monopolies who push up the price of their inputs (feed, seed, fertilizer etc.) and the agribusiness monopolies who push down the price of their outputs. (The economists’ term for the latter is “monopsony,” with an “s,” but it works the same way as monopoly.)

It’s the perfect racket.

And it’s no surprise that on the other side of the equation, “free” market politicians are very diligent in imposing genuinely free markets where this suits the interests of the multinational “American” corporations that fatten their campaign coffers.

This is done, of course, as a matter of high principle and sophisticated economic rationality.  It’s remarkably easy to make wonderful after-dinner speeches about free markets.

Let’s start with labor. Post-Nixon Republicans have genuinely supported just about every policy designed to weaken the pricing power of labor. This starts with weakening unions and letting the inflation-adjusted minimum wage fall, but it doesn’t end there.

You think Ronald Reagan got in 1986, and George W. Bush wanted in 2007, amnesties for illegal immigrants because they were nice, compassionate people? To ask the question is to answer it. Whatever the ultimate merits of amnesty as policy, for them it was about cheap labor, plain and simple.

The reality is that the past prosperity of America has never been based on pure free markets—starting with the fact that we had the highest average income in the world in 1776 because the colonies had structurally tight labor markets due to the open frontier. (Europeans and other Old World peoples were trapped by the iron law of wages because they had nowhere to go.)

Free, or nearly free, markets do have their rightful place in many parts of the economy, and it would be foolish to sabotage them. But in other areas—above all, in labor markets—our prosperity was based on pricing power.

A number of areas other than labor also worked better thanks to a healthy dose of pricing power. Try advanced technology, for a start. The patent system, which is not natural, is a fairly recent invention, and does not de facto exist even today in much of the world, is one. Innovation doesn’t come cheap, and without pricing power for innovators, few companies could afford it.

Even the existence of scale economies, which are intrinsic to modern, large-scale, capital-intensive industry, implies markets that are less than free. Why? Because scale economies intrinsically imply a small  number of large producers and thus give rise to oligopoly, with the consequences mentioned earlier.

This is why most other industrialized nations aren’t romantics about free markets, are honest about their frequent nonexistence, and focus their policies on taming the negative effects of oligopoly while capturing the positive ones. They understand, for one thing, that big corporations are necessary but often pirates, and focus on making them share their loot with their crews.

We, on the other hand, live in a state of denial about the piracy

So the next time someone tells you to believe in “free” markets, just tell them you’ll believe as soon as they do.

When pigs fly.

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

Christopher Hitchens Dead:

Legendary Writer Dies At 62

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday in Houston. He was 62. The legendary writer was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2010.

His death was announced by Vanity Fair.

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England in 1949. His father, Ernest, a commander in the British Royal Navy, and his mother, Yvonne, a bookkeeper, scrimped and saved so that he could attend the independent Leys School in Cambridge, and later Balliol College, Oxford. They were determined that he would receive a top-notch education and join the upper class, The Guardian reported.

During his time at university, Hitchens studied philosophy, politics and economics, but the more he learned, the angrier he became. Hitchens’ disgust with racism and opposition to the Vietnam War led him to the political left. He would eventually join the International Socialists, a faction of the anti-Stalinist left, and participate in political protests against the war.

Full Story Here: Christopher Hitchens Dead: Legendary Writer Dies At 62.

A Tale of Two Deficit Charts

Dean Baker : – :

Not long after I first came to Washington 20 years ago I was at a conference dealing with Social Security privatization. One of the panelists used a number for the administrative costs of private accounts that was far lower than the numbers I had seen in the literature. After the panel, I asked one of the other panelists about her best estimate of the administrative costs of private accounts. She said that this depended on whether I was interested in advocacy or policy.

I was somewhat taken aback by her response, but after a moment I told her that I was interested in accuracy. I have always felt that this is the best approach to policy questions.

Accuracy has not featured prominently in Washington budget debates in recent decades. There is an enormous amount of misunderstanding about the deficit, much of it deliberately promoted by politicians. We hear endless tales of out-of-control government spending and chronic deficits. This is nonsense as the data clearly show, but unfortunately both parties have an interest in promoting the deceptions.

Full Story Here: A Tale of Two Deficit Charts | CEPR Blog.

Frum: Fox News creates an ‘alternative knowledge system’

Conservative columnist David Frum, who was speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, blasted Fox News on Sunday for creating an “alternative knowledge system.”

In an article published by New York Magazine in late November, Frum had argued that conservative media like Fox News and talk radio “immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.”

In an appearance on CNN Sunday, Frum cited claims made on Fox News that President Barack Obama was proposing a “new Christmas tree tax,” something that was found by both The Florida Times-Union and PolitiFact Oregon to be not true.

Full Story Here: Frum: Fox News creates an ‘alternative knowledge system’ | The Raw Story.

The Koch Brothers, ALEC and the Savage Assault on Democracy

John Nichols :-:

Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch finally got their way in 2011. After their decades of funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators, the project began finally to yield the intended result.

For the first time in decades, the United States saw a steady dismantling of the laws, regulations, programs and practices put in place to make real the promise of American democracy.

That is why, on Saturday, civil rights groups and their allies will rally outside the New York headquarters of the Koch brothers to begin a march for the renewal of voting rights in America.

For the Koch brothers and their kind, less democracy is better. They fund campaigns with millions of dollars in checks that have helped elect the likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich. And ALEC has made it clear, through its ambitious “Public Safety and Elections Task Force,” that while it wants to dismantle any barriers to corporate cash and billionaire bucks’ influencing elections, it wants very much to erect barriers to the primary tool that Americans who are not CEOs have to influence the politics and the government of the nation: voting.

Full Story Here: The Koch Brothers, ALEC and the Savage Assault on Democracy | The Nation.

The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium

The most important piece of news yesterday, this week, this month, and this year was a new set of statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project. It showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the most important pieces of data in the last, oh, three centuries, since according to the New York Times it represented “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.”

What it means, in climate terms, is that we’ve all but lost the battle to reduce the damage from global warming. The planet has already warmed about a degree Celsius; it’s clearly going to go well past two degrees. It means, in political terms, that the fossil fuel industry has delayed effective action for the 12 years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It means, in diplomatic terms, that the endless talks underway in Durban should be more important than ever–they should be the focus of a planetary population desperate to figure out how it’s going to survive the century.

But instead, almost no one is paying attention to the proceedings, at least on this continent. One of our political parties has decided that global warming is a hoax–it’s two leading candidates are busily apologizing for anything they said in the past that might possibly have been construed as backing, you know, science. President Obama hasn’t yet spoken on the Durban talks, and informed international observers like Joss Garman are beginning to despair that he ever will.

Full Story Here: The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium | Common Dreams.

Put the Fat Cats on a Diet: Stop Buying Tainted Food From Billion Dollar Corporations

It’s time for the Great Boycott of Big Food Inc.

“I have not spoken to one farmer who doesn’t understand the message of Occupy Wall Street, the message that so many people keep saying is nebulous. It’s very clear. Because of business and corporate participation in agriculture, farmers are losing their livelihoods…  And if it goes on like this, all we’re going to have to eat in this country is unregulated, imported, genetically modified produce. That’s not a healthy food system.”  Jim Gerritsen, a Maine organic farmer.

“A Farmer Speaks to Wall Street,” The New York Times, December 5, 2011

For the first time since the late-1960s, the American elite and their indentured politicians are losing legitimacy, part of a deepening global crisis that is simultaneously political, economic, and ecological. In the powerful wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, the European Summer of the Indignados (the indignant ones), and the Occupy Wall Street movement, rebellion is in the air. As protestors in New York put it “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.”

Full Story Here: Put the Fat Cats on a Diet: Stop Buying Tainted Food From Billion Dollar Corporations | Common Dreams.

Corporate America Is Sitting On The Solution To The Jobs Crisis: Report

Corporate America is sitting right on top of the solution to the nation’s employment crisis, according to a new report from a group of University of Massachusetts economists.

If America’s largest banks and non-financial companies would just loosen their death-grip on a chunk of the $3.6 trillion in cash they’re hoarding and move it into productive investments instead, the report estimates that about 19 million jobs would be created in the next three years, lowering the unemployment rate to under 5 percent.

“There is no reason that the U.S. needs to remain stuck in a long-term unemployment crisis,” Robert Pollin, lead author of the report and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute, said in a statement accompanying the report’s release Tuesday.

Full Story Here: Corporate America Is Sitting On The Solution To The Jobs Crisis: Report.

Super Rich vs. 99%: Class war will explode

Forget politics. The 99%, the Occupy Wall Street movement, is not about politics. But politicians don’t get it yet. The Dems sure don’t. And while Bill O’Reilly says the movement is already dead, insider Frank Luntz thinks OWS is not only very alive, but getting dangerously bigger. In fact, he’s very “scared” for his clients.

Warning: Will somebody please tell Luntz Occupy Wall Street is not about politics? This is class warfare, a revolution about economic inequality, not about political parties, political policies and political solutions … and it’s not going away any time soon.

Luntz is a conservative pollster so he’s making it all about politics. But he’s missing the point, and misleading his clients. Luntz is author of some great books like “Words That Matter” and “What Americans Really Want…Really.” And in my opinion, he’s one of the America’s best behavioral economists.

But his pitch at last week’s Republican Governors Association meeting in Florida suggests he not only doesn’t understand the 99%, he’s misleading 29 state governors with Words That Will Backfire when the occupiers in the encampments see through Luntz’s attempted manipulations.

Full Story Here: Super Rich vs. 99%: Class war will explode – Paul B. Farrell – MarketWatch.

Max Keiser: ‘Financial terrorists behind EU crisis’

Powerful banks such as Wall St. banks, Germany’s Deutsche Bank and the Bank of England are committing acts of ‘financial terrorism’ which have caused the Euro crisis, an analyst tells Press TV.

How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street

The Republican Governors Association met this week in Florida to give GOP state executives a chance to rejuvenate, strategize and team-build. But during a plenary session on Wednesday, one question kept coming up: How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

Luntz offered tips on how Republicans could discuss the grievances of the Occupiers, and help the governors better handle all these new questions from constituents about “income inequality” and “paying your fair share.”

Yahoo News sat in on the session, and counted 10 do’s and don’ts from Luntz covering how Republicans should fight back by changing the way they discuss the movement.

Full Story Here: How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street | The Ticket – Yahoo! News.

After Fukushima – Enough Is Enough

 The nuclear power industry has been resurrected over the past decade by a lobbying campaign that has left many people believing it to be a clean, green, emission-free alternative to fossil fuels. These beliefs pose an extraordinary threat to global public health and encourage a major financial drain on national economies and taxpayers. The commitment to nuclear power as an environmentally safe energy source has also stifled the mass development of alternative technologies that are far cheaper, safer and almost emission free — the future for global energy.

When the Fukushima Daiichi reactors suffered meltdowns in March, literally in the backyard of an unsuspecting public, the stark reality that the risks of nuclear power far outweigh any benefits should have become clear to the world. As the old quip states, “Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water.”

Instead, the nuclear industry has used the disaster to increase its already extensive lobbying efforts. A few nations vowed to phase out nuclear energy after the disaster. But many others have remained steadfast in their commitment. That has left millions of innocent people unaware that they — all of us — may face a medical catastrophe beyond all proportions in the wake of Fukushima and through the continued widespread use of nuclear energy.

Full Story Here: After Fukushima – Enough Is Enough – NYTimes.com.

A Banker Speaks, With Regret

If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.

As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.

“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.”

“If you had some old bag lady walking down the street and she had a decent credit score, she got a loan,” he added.

Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.

Full Story Here: A Banker Speaks, With Regret – NYTimes.com.

The Rebirth of Social Darwinism

Robert Reich :-:

What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich.

Drones cleared for domestic use across the US

What do you know about drones? You know drones — those robotic, unmanned planes that fire missiles for the American military across Afghanistan, Pakistan and anywhere else the United States needs to get away with murder.

Well if you don’t know too much, don’t worry, that’ll change soon. The Federal Aviation Administration is looking into rules that will bring the controversial aircraft into the country, creating an United States airspace buzzing with tiny, robot planes to look over every inch of American soil — and maybe more.

An article published Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times reveals that new drone planes could be coming domestically quite soon, as both law enforcement and the agricultural sector are seeing benefits in keeping an arsenal of unmanned planes ready to patrol the skies. For farmers, drones could bring a new method of pumping pesticides into fields of crops from above; for the cops, the aircraft could conduct surveillance over suspected criminals (think police chopper but remote controlled). The Times reports that utility companies see a benefit in drones as well, giving them a new set of eyes to monitor oil, gas and water pipelines.

Full Story Here: Drones cleared for domestic use across the US — RT.

Senators Demand the Military Lock Up of American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window

While nearly all Americans head to family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving, the Senate is gearing up for a vote on Monday or Tuesday that goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans. The Senate will be voting on a bill that will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield — even people in the United States itself.

Senators need to hear from you, on whether you think your front yard is part of a “battlefield” and if any president can send the military anywhere in the world to imprison civilians without charge or trial.

The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) raised his concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during last night’s Republican debate. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.

Full Story Here: Senators Demand the Military Lock Up of American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Senate to Vote on Bill That Allows the US Military to Capture Civilians Anywhere in the World Without Charges or Trial, and More

Thom Hartmann :-:

You need to know this. Now more than 24 hours past their eviction deadline – Occupy L.A. is still camped outside of City Hall – and patriots are turning to the courts to keep it that way. According to the Los Angeles Times, Occupy L.A. filed a court complaint yesterday arguing that the city’s looming crackdown represents an “unconstitutional deprivation of access to [the] traditional public forum…for first amendment activity.” Occupy L.A. is also attacking “anti-camping” laws – claiming that police are selectively enforcing the law – arresting people with the Occupy movement for camping – but letting more than 500 people camp out without a permit just weeks ago while they waited for the new “Twilight” movie to open. After the NYPD raided Zuccotti Park two weeks ago – a judge ruled that camping gear is not an expression of free speech – thus allowing the city to ban people from bringing sleeping bags and tarps into public parks – effectively killing any chance of rebuilding the Occupy Wall Street community. Apparently we live in a nation where the courts have ruled that little green pieces of fabric – money – is a form of free speech, but big green pieces of fabric – tents – are not.

Full Story Here: On the News With Thom Hartmann: Senate to Vote on Bill That Allows the US Military to Capture Civilians Anywhere in the World Without Charges or Trial, and More | Truthout.

Kucinich: Federal Reserve has captured control of our government

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) called for the U.S. Federal Reserve to be reformed after Bloomberg reported the central bank secretly loaned nearly $8 trillion to financial institutions from 2007 to 2009.

Tens of thousands of documents obtained by Bloomberg under the Freedom of Information Act showed that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion in profits thanks to the low-interest loans. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley accounted for $4.8 billion of that total.

“Remember the great debate we had here over the 700 billion in TARP funds?” he said on the House floor Tuesday. “There was no debate over the 7.7 trillion the Fed gave the banks.”

Full Story Here: Kucinich: Federal Reserve has captured control of our government | The Raw Story.

States’ Health Care Hypocrisy Revealed

Federal officials announced Tuesday they are awarding more money to help states carry out President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. So what’s the surprise?

Seven states that are suing to overturn the landmark law are also on the list for funding.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said 13 states will split grants totaling nearly $220 million to help set up health insurance exchanges. Millions of uninsured Americans will be able to buy private coverage through these online supermarkets starting in 2014, with taxpayer-provided assistance to cover the cost of premiums.

“States are moving at their own pace to get their exchanges up and running,” said Sebelius. “This is a natural result of a process that gives states maximum flexibility.”

Full Story Here: Obama Health Care Law: States Suing To Overturn Law Collect Federal Funding.

Battlefield America: U.S. Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Defense Bill Before Senate

The Senate is set to vote this week on a Pentagon spending bill that could usher in a radical expansion of indefinite detention under the U.S. government. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect — anywhere in the world — without charge or trial. The measure would effectively extend the definition of what is considered the military’s “battlefield” to anywhere in the world, even within the United States. Its authors, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, have been campaigning for its passage in a bipartisan effort. But the White House has issued a veto threat, with backing from top officials including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. “This would be the first time since the McCarthy era that the United States Congress has tried to do this,” says our guest, Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First, which has gathered signatures from 26 retired military leaders urging the Senate to vote against the measure, as well as against a separate provision that would repeal the executive order banning torture. “In this case, we’ve seen the administration very eagerly hold people without trial for 10-plus years in military detention, so there’s no reason to believe they would not continue to do that here. So we’re talking about indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens, of lawful U.S. residents, as well as of people abroad.”

Full Story Here: Battlefield America: U.S. Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Defense Bill Before Senate.

Steve Keen: Another Great Depression is all but inevitable

Sarah Montague talks to Steve Keen, one of the few economists to have predicted the global financial crisis, about the possibility of another Great Depression, and how to avoid it.

‘Another Great Depression is all but inevitable’ – that’s the view of Steve Keen. He’s been called the ‘Merchant of Gloom’, but he’s one of the few economists to have predicted the global financial crisis. While he used to be a lone voice in challenging the economic consensus, more and more people are now listening to him. His way of avoiding depression? Write off the debt, bankrupt the banks, nationalise the financial system, and start all over again. He talks to Sarah Montague.

Full Story Here: Steve Keen on BBC HARDtalk [good sync] – YouTube.

Corporations Are Patenting Human Genes and Tissues — Here’s Why That’s Terrifying

A medical ethicist explains the dark implications of corporate medical patents and the nightmarish scenario of our medical-industrial complex.

Do you think that granting corporations the rights of people in the Citizens United case is disturbing? Then contemplate the fact that corporations have been patenting human genes and tissues at alarming rates — in the last 30 years, more than 40,000 patents have been granted on genes alone.

As the Occupy movement fights against the unmitigated influence of corporations on our lives, author and medical ethicist Harriet Washington’s new book, Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself–And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future, is a timely wakeup call to protect the very essence of human life from the medical-industrial complex.

In a recent phone interview with AlterNet, Washington discussed the dark implications of corporate medical patents, how we find ourselves in this nightmarish scenario and what needs to be done to stop medical research profits from trumping human health. Washington is also the author of Medical Apartheid, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been a fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University and a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Full Story Here: Corporations Are Patenting Human Genes and Tissues — Here’s Why That’s Terrifying | Personal Health | AlterNet.

Bill Moyers Journal… The Conversation Continues

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

And I suspect you’ll find it passing strange for quite such an Ancient as I am still to have heroes…to have lived so long, to have seen so many saints and sinners, to have measured the fancies and foibles of so many persons in the public eye … and still to have held steady in my admiration for one or another of them.

But I very much do, do delight in having heroes, and I’ve inveigled perhaps the liveliest one of all to join me here again for this Open Mind … and to stay with me for at least another one, as well.

Bill Moyers is still a youngster at the top of his form, to be sure — which for me preeminently means as an American “Public Intellectual” and as very much an old-time, long-time preacher and teacher, if you will.

Full Story Here: Bill Moyers Journal… The Conversation Continues | Richard Heffner’s Open Mind | THIRTEEN.

We Are the 99.9%

Paul Krugman :-:

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.\

If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.

Full Story Here: We Are the 99.9% – NYTimes.com.

Pro-Recall Group Outs Facebook Page That Boasts About Destroying Signatures

One Wisconsin Now calls on all recall supporters to be vigilant, but only one instance of actual recall destruction found.  [So Far - OPS]

Wisconsin recall supporters outed an anonymous Facebook group called Operation Burn Notice on Tuesday as a coordinated effort designed to destroy petitions signed to force Gov. Scott Walker and other Wisconsin Republicans out of office.

Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, denounced the anonymous group, in a Madison press conference.

“We cannot allow democracy to be threatened by those who would illegally destroy recall petitions with valid signatures on them,” Ross said. “We intend to keep the public informed about its rights during the signature gathering process and alert those who would engage in illegal conduct that they do so at their own peril.”

Full Story Here: Pro-Recall Group Outs Facebook Page That Boasts About Destroying Signatures – Caledonia, WI Patch.

The Average Bush Tax Cut For The 1 Percent This Year Will Be Greater Than The Average Income Of The Other 99 Percent

As Occupy Wall Street protestors continue to demonstrate across the country, congress’ fiscal super committee failed to craft a deficit reduction package due to Republican refusal to consider tax increases on the super wealthy. In fact, the only package that the GOP officially submitted to the committee included lowering the top tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, even as new research shows that the optimal top tax rate is closer to 70 percent.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who co-chaired the super committee, explained that the major sticking point during negotiations with the GOP was what to do with the Bush tax cuts. With that in mind, the National Priorities Project points out that those tax cuts this year will give the richest 1 percent of Americans a bigger tax cut than the other 99 percent will receive in average income:

Full Story Here: The Average Bush Tax Cut For The 1 Percent This Year Will Be Greater Than The Average Income Of The Other 99 Percent | ThinkProgress.

Paper Ballot Election Results Flipped After ‘Recount’ Finds New Tally ‘Extremely in Favor of Opposite Candidate’

‘We’re doing recounts of recounts of recounts,’ says candidate announced as ‘loser’ on Election Night…

After the Municipal Council elections in Provo, Utah on November 8, residents had been told that Gary Winterton had narrowly defeated Bonnie Morrow for the District 1 seat — by just 9 votes.

The margin was close enough that Morrow was allowed to ask for a recount of the paper ballots which were tallied on Election Night by the city’s optical scan systems made by Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (Following years of failure of Diebold’s voting systems, the company changed their name to Premier, only to see the assets of the failing company finally purchased last year by Dominion Voting, a Canadian firm which now services the machines.) The same optical scan systems are used all over the country, and are set once again for use in the New Hampshire’s “first in the nation” GOP Presidential primary to be held in January.

The first “recount” of Provo’s Municipal Council District 1 ballots — carried out on the same op-scan systems that tallied them in the first place — was held yesterday, only to be abruptly called off

Full Story Here: The BRAD BLOG : Paper Ballot Op-Scan Election Results in Utah Flipped After ‘Recount’ Finds New Tally ‘Extremely in Favor of Opposite Candidate’.

Thom Hartmann: Occupy Wall Street is Bringing Down the Big Banks

You need to know this. Occupy Wall Street is bringing down the big banks. The bank consulting firm “cg42” is projecting that the top 10 mega banks in America could lose $185 billion in deposits through next year as a result of people taking the advice of the 99% Movement and moving their money from banksters on Wall Street to local credit unions on Main Street. Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Well Fargo, and Citibank will account for nearly three-quarters of all the losses alone. So far – since the 99% Movement kicked off two months ago– more than 700,000 people have made the switch – depositing their money into local credit unions instead of mega banks. That’s more people making a switch than through all of last year. Time to redefine exactly what “starve the beast” means in the Occupy age.

Who’s screwed? American workers. A new report out of the Commerce Department shows that over the last decade – U.S.-based transnational corporations laid off 864,000 American workers – while hiring more than 1.5 million new Asian workers and hiring nearly 500,000 new workers in Latin America. Also during the last decade – these transnational giants reduced how much money they were investing in the U.S. economy – but increased their investment in foreign economies by 4%. Currently – American corporations pay the second lowest amount in taxes of all the developed nations in the world – and many like General Electric pay absolutely no taxes at all. Yet – they have no interest in keeping all their extra profits right here in America. There used to be a business ethic in our nation that a corporation not only focuses on making a profit – but also serves the community it belongs to. Unfortunately – thanks to thirty years of Reaganomics, Clintonomics, and Bushonomics – and all the tax cuts, deregulation, and so-called Free Trade deals – it’s all about getting as rich as you can – as fast as you can – and to hell with the nation you call home. Can you hear the giant sucking sound that Ross Perot warned us about?

Full Story Here: On the News With Thom Hartmann: Occupy Wall Street is Bringing Down the Big Banks, and More | Truthout.

The People’s Surveillance State

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

- George Orwell

In the aftermath of September 11, there was a big push to create a national surveillance system in the name of national security. Cameras were installed at traffic lights, ostensibly to catch people running red lights and stop signs, but those cameras came with a nifty side benefit: they recorded everyone within reach of the lens in their comings and goings. Cameras were installed at street corners, ostensibly to provide security against crime, but again, you were recorded wherever you went. Bank machines all come with security cameras, and those added to the ever-broadening web of national surveillance. Finally, almost every cell phone now comes with software that, so long as the thing is turned on, can track your every step by triangulating your position via GPS and the cell towers your phone signal bounces off of.

Full Story Here: The People’s Surveillance State | Truthout.

U.S. tax burden at lowest level since ’58

Americans are paying the smallest share of their income for taxes since 1958, a reflection of tax cuts and a weak economy, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

The total tax burden — for all federal, state and local taxes — dropped to 23.6% of income in the first quarter, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

By contrast, individuals spent roughly 27% of income on taxes in the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s — a rate that would mean $500 billion of extra taxes annually today, one-third of the estimated $1.5 trillion federal deficit this year.

The analysis comes as President Obama and Congress debate whether to cut federal spending, raise taxes or both.

Full Story Here: U.S. tax burden at lowest level since ’58 – USATODAY.com.

OPS: With twice the population. And you wonder why our infrastructure is crumbling and we are in debt…

Lobbying Firm’s Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine Occupy Wall Street

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.”

The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.

CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.

According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street. … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”

Full Story Here: Lobbying Firm’s Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine Occupy Wall Street | Common Dreams.

It’s not just our leaders who are in a crisis. Democracy itself is failing

The world’s statesmen no longer shape events but merely respond to them, in thrall to market forces

Are the following intimations of a global crisis in the legitimacy of western democracy? Ireland’s confidential budget plan, unseen by the Irish electorate, is leaked by European finance officials to the German parliament where the proposals are examined by the German finance committee.

In Italy, Mario Monti, the country’s unelected new prime minister and a former international adviser to Goldman Sachs, stands in the Giustiniani Palace as head of a cabinet of similarly unelected technocrats. Imposed in place of the corrupt, useless and seedy Silvio Berlusconi to satisfy the “markets”, Monti promises what we are told the markets want, and that is “sacrifices”.

In Greece, both left and right of the country unite against their own technocrat, the former head of Greece’s Central Bank, Lucas Papademos, brought in, too, at the behest of the markets. And in Berlin on Friday, David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative party, which could not manage to secure a mandate to govern the UK on its own, sits down with a German chancellor, Angela Merkel, whose countrymen do not trust her to handle the eurozone crisis.

Full Story Here: It’s not just our leaders who are in a crisis. Democracy itself is failing | Peter Beaumont | Comment is free | The Observer.

Finally, a Constitutional Amendment for the 99%

Today, Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL) offered the strongest constitutional amendment introduced in either House of Congress so far to rectify the imbalance of power between the corporations and the people in our democracy.

As the struggle in the streets intensifies, and Occupy Wall Street refuses to remain silent, it’s good to know there are champions in Congress who have stepped up to the challenge of amending the US Constitution. It’s called OCCUPIED: Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy, here.

The Supreme Court, in the 5-4 Citizens United decision of January 2010, declared that corporations have free speech rights like human beings and invalidated the ban on corporate election spending that Congress had enacted. Since then, a grassroots movement has emerged to generate popular support for a constitutional amendment to reverse that decision, including months of work by Move to Amend, Free Speech For People, Public Citizen, People For The American Way, Common Cause, and the Center for Media and Democracy.

Full Story Here: Finally, a Constitutional Amendment for the 99% | OurFuture.org.

Why Free Trade Isn’t Trade

Ian Fletcher

The U.S. continues to lurch down the rubble-strewn path of free-trade fantasy economics, signing yet more trade agreements (Panama, Colombia, Korea) when the ones we already have haven’t delivered as promised.

Why?

One big part of the reason, I think, is that the public has been brainwashed by decades of television and other reportage into thinking that trade and free trade are the same thing. And since everyone who’s ever eaten a banana instinctively grasps the value of trade, free trade just follows as a matter of course.

You wouldn’t want us to end up like North Korea, would you? Of course not.

That’s why I’ve made this little video pointing out the difference between trade and free trade:

Now, if the public would only begin to grasp the difference between free trade (the chalkboard fantasy) and “free” trade (which we actually have). The game is rigged, folks.

After that, we can move on to the difference between free trade and free trade agreements. These are not the same thing at all, as most of NAFTA and the other treaties concern investments and the right to override laws that interfere with their profitability.

 

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

Sanders Issues Campaign Warning for Obama on Entitlement Cuts

Sen. Bernie Sanders would not commit to supporting President Barrack Obama’s 2012 re-election bid today.

The liberal Vermont Independent, in an interview with CNN, criticized Obama’s stated desire to reform the Medicare and Social Security entitlement programs. Sanders warned that the president’s position could cost him the enthusiasm and votes of progressives.

“Absolutely,” Sanders answered, when asked if Obama has been too “wishy-washy” and willing to compromise with the Republicans.

Sanders indicated that he could see a scenario in which he does not back Obama’s re-election, saying he wants a firm commitment that entitlement programs will be protected from cuts.

Full Story Here: Sanders Issues Campaign Warning for Obama on Entitlement Cuts : Roll Call Politics.

Occupy protesters prepare for day of ‘solidarity’ across US

Series of events planned to support evicted Zuccotti Park activists by highlighting growing inequality and need for jobs

Supporters of the Occupy movement are gearing up for a national day of protest and direct action across America, taking in dozens of events from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles.

Thursday has been declared a day of “solidarity” with the Occupy Wall Street activists in New York after their camp in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park was raided and dismantled by police. But it is also aimed at highlighting several of the movement’s broader aims in terms of income inequality and a desperate need for job creation in America’s floundering economy.

The Occupy movement, which began two months ago with the occupation of Zuccotti Park, has since spread to scores of cities and towns across the country, with varying success. It has often rejuvenated left-leaning political activists but also brought down a heavy police response, frequently at the behest of city mayors.

Full Story Here: Occupy protesters prepare for day of ‘solidarity’ across US | World news | guardian.co.uk.

Keith Olbermann Condemns Michael Bloomberg, Occupy Wall Street Raid

Keith Olbermann lit into New York mayor Michael Bloomberg in a Special Comment on his Tuesday show, condemning Bloomberg for his raid on the Occupy Wall Street encampment.

Olbermann has been a devoted supporter of the Occupy movement, so it was not surprising that he took issue with Bloomberg’s decision to clear the encampment in Lower Manhattan, arresting hundreds in the process. He went further, though, placing Bloomberg in a long line of people whose “limitless stupidity,” as he put it, had only served to hand victories to protest movements. He included on this list Joseph McCarthy, former Chicago mayor Richard Daley and former Alabama governor George Wallace, and he compared the raids to the violence against civil rights protesters in Selma in 1965 and to the Kent State and Jackson State massacres. None of those officials, he said, “ever understood that suppression…always creates the opposite of the effects desired.”

But Olbermann wasn’t finished. He went on to call Bloomberg a “cliché,” an “archetype,” a “cartoon” and a “putz,” and labelled him the “most irreplaceable man” to the Occupy protesters. The mayor’s raid, he said, had taken a movement that was “beginning to grow a little stale” and made it relevant again. “No such a living and breathing embodiment of all that is wrong and all that is stupid in the establishment of this country could be ordered up from fiction,” he said.

Full Story Here: Keith Olbermann Condemns Michael Bloomberg, Occupy Wall Street Raid (VIDEO).

How Conservatives Exploit the Myth of “Wealthy Elderly” to Justify Gutting Social Security

Right-wingers somehow think that seniors with incomes under $30,000 a year must sacrifice to balance the budget.

The austerity gang seeking cuts to Social Security and Medicare has been vigorously promoting the myth that the elderly are an especially affluent and privileged group. Their argument is that because of their relative affluence, cuts to the programs upon which they depend is a simple matter of fairness. There were two reports released last week that call this view into question.

The first was a report from the Census Bureau that used a new experimental poverty index. This index differed from the official measure in several ways; most importantly it includes the value of government non-cash benefits, like food stamps. It also adjusts for differences in costs by area and takes account of differences in health spending by age.

While this new measures showed a slightly higher overall poverty rate the most striking difference between the new measure and the official measure was the rise in the poverty rate among the elderly. Using the official measure, the poverty rate for the elderly is somewhat lower than for the adult population as a whole, 9 percent for the elderly compared with 14 percent for the non-elderly adult population. However with the new measure, the poverty rate for the elderly jumps to 14 percent, compared with 13 percent for non-elderly adults.

Full Story Here: How Conservatives Exploit the Myth of “Wealthy Elderly” to Justify Gutting Social Security | | AlterNet.

6 Burning Questions About the Violent Crackdowns on Occupations Around the Country

In the aftermath of a city-by-city crackdown featuring hundreds of arrests and evictions of Occupy encampments, plenty of questions demand answers.

Occurring without provocation, the Occupy crackdown gives the appearance of an orchestrated effort to thwart an emerging protest movement. Early morning Tuesday, in New York City, hundreds of police officers, many in riot gear, swept down on Zuccotti Park, throwing away private property, restricting press and using aggressive tactics to remove protesters and supporters. Here are some things we’d really like to know.

1. Who convened the mayors call? In an interview with the BBC, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan alluded to her participation in a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities just prior to the raids on encampments across the country. Mayors’ associations do exist, but they do not typically organize police interventions or local decision-making in such detail. Given the abuses of the past, such as the notorious COINTELPRO and other intervention programs that the U.S. government organized during the Vietnam protests, the public has a right to know the details of who organized that call.

Full Story Here: 6 Burning Questions About the Violent Crackdowns on Occupations Around the Country | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.

Are Mayors Across The Country Coordinating To Uproot The Occupations?

Across the country, a number of mayors have ordered their police forces to move in and uproot 99 Percenters occupying town squares, parks, and other public spaces to call attention to income inequality and other social problems. In recent weeks, we’ve seen evictions in cities ranging from Oakland to Portland to New York City.

Now, evidence has emerged that these mayors may be coordinating their evictions of protesters. Speaking on a BBC radio show, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan says she was recently on a conference call with 18 cities dealing with 99 Percent occupations and that they were discussing how to handle the situation:

QUAN: I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities across the country who had the same situation where what had started as a political movement and political encampment ended up being an encampment of the people who started them.

The radio show The Takeaway captured the exchange in the following clip (skip to 5:30):

Full Story Here: Are Mayors Across The Country Coordinating To Uproot The Occupations? | ThinkProgress.

You Cannot Evict an Idea…

|Thom Hartmann -

There was a massive police crackdown in New York City last night. Shortly after midnight – hundreds of riot-clad NYPD officers surrounded Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan – and passed out flyers warning the occupying patriots to leave the park immediately or face arrest. Five hours later – the park was completely cleared – and as many as 200 people were arrested – and for the first time in nearly two months Zuccotti Park wasn’t home of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Everything in the park – from tents – to the makeshift kitchen – to the entire library collection of over 5,000 books was destroyed and tossed into nearby sanitation trucks. During the raid – police blocked all roads into Zuccotti Park in an effort to prevent journalists from witnessing what was happening. But according to reports from journalists who were already inside the park – police beat people with batons – sprayed tear gas – and even used sound cannons to disperse the crowd. After 5 a.m. – hundreds of people roamed the streets of New York’s financial district trying to figure out what happened and what to do next.

Eventually – the Occupy Wall Street patriots sent up camp in nearby Foley Square. There, the Occupy Press Team released a statement saying, “Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces – our spaces – and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people – all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.”

Get ready for a turbulent day in the Big Apple.

Full Story Here: You Cannot Evict an Idea… | Thom Hartmann – News & info from the #1 progressive radio show.

Occupy Wall Street Is Not a Spectator Sport: 5 Ways the 99 Percent Can Contribute to the Movement Right Now

How can the rest of the 99 percent demonstrate our outrage? Here are five things we can do, without parking a tent in the street.

Let’s take a look at where we are right now. There is battle royale underway between inhabitants of two entirely different universes over what’s wrong with our nation and what should be fixed.

On the one hand, the entire political establishment, blessed by Wall Street, wants the conversation to be all about debt and “entitlements.” We are told 24/7 that we’re living over our heads, that our social safety net is too expensive, and that we need to cut, cut, cut trillions of dollars from public budgets so we don’t become the next Greece.

In that framework the only question is how much to cut and how much we should sacrifice. The so-called liberal position is that the rich should pay a bit more while the rest of us suffer cuts in education, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (Please note that taxes on Wall Street are not on the table.) The “grand bargain” is all about how much we will have to pay for the economic collapse caused by Wall Street. It’s also a loser because the more we cut, the longer unemployment will last, and the more fiscal distress we’ll face as tax revenues stall.

Full Story Here: Occupy Wall Street Is Not a Spectator Sport: 5 Ways the 99 Percent Can Contribute to the Movement Right Now | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.

The New Progressive Movement

OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.

Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.

Full Story Here: The New Progressive Movement – NYTimes.com.