The movie is soon getting its major national release in theaters and on Netflix. Viewers will be made to recall the unsettling images of oil slicks, fouled fowl, suddenly unemployed fisher folk, and empty assurances by BP and the Feds.

The partially U.S.-owned British oil company has its origins in geopolitical skullduggery in Iran, explained in the film’s narration and images. The history makes more convincing the subsequent telling of of the corporation’s and the U.S. government’s going to great pains to lie that all was being done that could be done to minimize the blowout’s damage and to clean up the mess.

Full Story Here: The Big Fix: Documentary Exposes BP, US Government on Gulf Disaster.

Barbara Ehrenreich:-:

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.

Full Story Here: Preying on Poverty: How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks | Common Dreams.

Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs — both economic and, arguably even more important, political — could be huge.

This doesn’t have to happen; the euro (or at least most of it) could still be saved. But this will require that European leaders, especially in Germany and at the European Central Bank, start acting very differently from the way they’ve acted these past few years. They need to stop moralizing and deal with reality; they need to stop temporizing and, for once, get ahead of the curve.

I wish I could say that I was optimistic.

Full Story Here: Apocalypse Fairly Soon – NYTimes.com.

Matt Taibbi :-:

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.

The lawyers for Goldman and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch have been involved in a legal battle for some time – primarily with the retail giant Overstock.com, but also with Rolling Stone, the Economist, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. The banks have been fighting us to keep sealed certain documents that surfaced in the discovery process of an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit filed by Overstock against the banks.

Last week, in response to an Overstock.com motion to unseal certain documents, the banks’ lawyers, apparently accidentally, filed an unredacted version of Overstock’s motion as an exhibit in their declaration of opposition to that motion. In doing so, they inadvertently entered into the public record a sort of greatest-hits selection of the very material they’ve been fighting for years to keep sealed.

Full Story Here: Accidentally Released – and Incredibly Embarrassing – Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in ‘Naked Short Selling’ | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.

The education of our children is a core cultural and political choice that reflects the deepest differences between liberals and conservatives.

The Conservative War On Education continues apace, with charters blooming everywhere, high-stakes testing cementing its grip on classrooms, and legislators and pundits wondering what we need those stupid liberal arts colleges for anyway. (Isn’t college about job prep? Who needs to know anything about art history, anthropology or ancient Greek?)

Amid the din, there’s a worrisome trend: liberals keep affirming right-wing talking points, usually without realizing that they’re even right wing. Or saying things like, “The education of our children is a non-partisan issue that should exist outside of any ideological debate.”

The hell it is. People who say stuff like this have no idea what they’re talking about. The education of our children is a core cultural and political choice that reflects the deepest differences between liberals and conservatives — because every educational conversation must start with the fundamental philosophical question: What is an education for?

Our answers to that question could not be more diametrically opposed.

Full Story Here: How the Conservative Worldview Quashes Critical Thinking — and What That Means For Our Kids’ Future | Education | AlterNet.

The highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima-Daiichi power plants present a clear threat to the people of Japan and the world. Reactor 4 and the nearby common spent fuel pool contain over 11,000 highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies, many of which are exposed to the open air. The cesium-137, the radioactive component contained in these assemblies, present at the site is 85 times larger than the amount released during the Chernobyl accident. Another magnitude 7.0 earthquake would jar them from their pool or stop the cooling water, which would lead to a nuclear fire and meltdown. The nuclear disaster that would result is beyond anything science has ever seen. Calling it a global catastrophe is no exaggeration.

If political leaders understand the situation and the potential catastrophe, I find it difficult to understand why they remain silent.

The following leaves little to question:

Many scientists believe that it will be impossible to remove the 1,535 fuel assemblies in the pool of Reactor 4 within two or three years.

Japanese scientists give a greater than 90 percent probability that an earthquake of at least 7.0 magnitude will occur in the next three years in the close vicinity of Fukushia-Daiichi.

The crippled building of Reactor 4 will not stand through another strong earthquake.

Japan and the TEPCO do not have adequate nuclear technology and experience to handle a disaster of such proportions alone.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote a letter to Japan’s Ambassador to the United States, Mr. Ichiro Fujisaki, on April 16, 2012, discussing his fact-finding trip to the Fukushima Daiichi site.

Full Story Here: Fukushima Daiichi: It May Be Too Late Unless the Military Steps In.

Noam Chomsky:-:

On the History of the US Economy in Decline

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s — although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today — nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

Full Story Here: A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age? | Common Dreams.

Should the enormous US military budget—which is more than double the combined levels of military spending by China, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and Germany—be cut? This question is finally on the table, thanks to the winding down of combat activities in Iraq and Afghanistan and to Washington’s obsession with tamping down the federal deficits that have arisen from the Great Recession. Many who would like to protect the military from the budget knife raise economic arguments to make their case: Won’t cutting military spending be bad for jobs, just when we need to maintain focus on reducing unemployment? Won’t it threaten the country’s long-term technological capabilities?

The matter assumed increased urgency in November after the Congressional supercommittee failed to agree on a deficit-reduction plan. This failure set in motion an agenda for automatic cuts—or “sequestration” of funds—from military and nonmilitary budgets beginning in January 2013. According to the sequestration scenario, absent the adoption of a large-scale deficit-cutting plan, military and nonmilitary spending would face $55 billion per year in automatic cuts over a decade, relative to previously established spending levels. If Congress and the White House devise a way to exempt the Pentagon from the automatic cuts—as seems increasingly likely—the cuts will instead be taken from healthcare, education, social spending, infrastructure and the environment.

Of course, framing the deficit issue in terms of military versus social spending cuts ignores other options, such as raising taxes on the wealthy. It also erroneously assumes that reducing the federal deficit is necessary now, before the economy has settled onto a sustainable recovery path out of the recession. Even more fundamental, today’s debate largely skirts the question of what the military budget needs to be after Iraq and Afghanistan, and fails to grapple honestly with the impact that major military spending reductions would have on the economy, especially in terms of job opportunities and technology.

Full Story Here: Don’t Buy the Spin: How Cutting the Pentagon’s Budget Could Boost the Economy | The Nation.

 Matt Taibbi :-:

It’s bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it – with a big assist from Congress and the White House.

Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he’d dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. “These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history,” the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. “In history.”

This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street. It was going to put an end to predatory lending in the mortgage markets, crack down on hidden fees and penalties in credit contracts, and create a powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard ordinary consumers. Big banks would be banned from gambling with taxpayer money, and a new set of rules would limit speculators from making the kind of crazy-ass bets that cause wild spikes in the price of food and energy. There would be no more AIGs, and the world would never again face a financial apocalypse when a bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.

Most importantly, even if any of that fiendish crap ever did happen again, Dodd-Frank guaranteed we wouldn’t be expected to pay for it. “The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes,” Obama promised. “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.”

Full Story Here: How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform | Politics News | Rolling Stone.

Before the Great Recession, I would sometimes give public lectures in which I would talk about rising inequality, making the point that the concentration of income at the top had reached levels not seen since 1929. Often, someone in the audience would ask whether this meant that another depression was imminent.

Well, whaddya know?

Did the rise of the 1 percent (or, better yet, the 0.01 percent) cause the Lesser Depression we’re now living through? It probably contributed. But the more important point is that inequality is a major reason the economy is still so depressed and unemployment so high. For we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion — both of which have a lot to do with the distorting effects of great wealth on our society.

Put it this way: If something like the financial crisis of 2008 had occurred in, say, 1971 — the year Richard Nixon declared that “I am now a Keynesian in economic policy” — Washington would probably have responded fairly effectively. There would have been a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of strong action, and there would also have been wide agreement about what kind of action was needed.

Full Story Here: Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity – NYTimes.com.

David Cay Johnston :-:

Which federal program took in more than it spent last year, added $95 billion to its surplus and lifted 20 million Americans of all ages out of poverty?

Why, Social Security, of course, which ended 2011 with a $2.7 trillion surplus.

That surplus is almost twice the $1.4 trillion collected in personal and corporate income taxes last year. And it is projected to go on growing until 2021, the year the youngest Baby Boomers turn 67 and qualify for full old-age benefits.

So why all the talk about Social Security “going broke?” That theme filled the news after release of the latest annual report of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds, as Social Security is formally called.

Full Story Here: Social security is not going broke | David Cay Johnston.

Consumers, not the wealthy, are the key to an economic rebound, and GOP austerity is shackling them

By Joan Walsh :-:

Republicans have made it official: “The wealthy” must be called “the job creators” in any debate about tax policy. Democrats are playing their own word games: Centrists insist the 2012 campaign shouldn’t focus on “income inequality,” or whether the worst concentration of riches since the Great Depression might have to do with what Paul Krugman has taken to calling the Lesser Depression. “Income inequality” is a downer, the centrists say; better to talk about “growth” and “prosperity.”

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that growth and prosperity are threatened by the declining share of income going to the non-wealthy over the last 35 years.

Friday’s disappointing jobs report confirms that “the job creators” should be fired, since they only created 115,000 new jobs in April, which isn’t even enough to employ new entrants to the workforce. And while the unemployment rate ticked down from 8.2 to 8.1 percent, that’s only because more unemployed people gave up and left the labor market entirely. Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom (Mr. Etch-A-Sketch) blames President Obama, and he even pretends his candidate cares that “people are so discouraged they are dropping out of the workforce all together.”

Full Story Here: The real job creators – 2012 Elections – Salon.com.

Experts say acknowledging the threat would call into question the safety of dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants in the U.S.

 More than a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) present similar assurances of the site’s current state: challenges remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.

But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite, especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel — 10 times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S., which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.

Reactor 4: The Most Imminent Threat

Full Story Here: The Worst Yet to Come? Why Nuclear Experts Are Calling Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb | Environment | AlterNet.

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US. A new publication from the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn. From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact. We are a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility – in worker co-operatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a different way of living. We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24.

More GRITtv

Full Story Here: GRITtv » Blog Archive » Chatting With Chomsky.

A few days after US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a “senior intelligence official” briefing reporters on the materials seized from bin Laden’s compound said the materials revealed that bin Laden had, “continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management.” Bin Laden was, “not just a strategic thinker for the group,” said the official. “He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions.” The official called the bin Laden compound, “an active command and control center.”

The senior intelligence official triumphantly called the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout, “the greatest intelligence success perhaps of a generation,” and administration officials could not resist leaking to reporters that a key element in that success was that the CIA interrogators had gotten the name of bin Laden’s trusted courier from al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo. CIA Director Leon Panetta was quite willing to leave the implication that some of the information had been obtained from detainees by “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Such was the official line at the time. But none of it was true. It is now clear that CIA officials were blatantly misrepresenting both bin Laden’s role in al-Qaeda when he was killed and how the agency came to focus on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Full Story Here: Exclusive Investigation: The Truth Behind the Official Story of Finding Bin Laden.

It’s no secret American manufacturing is in crisis, and that its problems form a significant component of our present economic mess. I’ve written before about how the Obama administration may (may!) be starting to get serious about the problem.

Another small but significant data point on the question of whether the administration is serious took place this last week: the government’s new National Network for Manufacturing Innovation held its first conference, designed to elicit public input on how this program will be designed and run.

The event was held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a good engineering school in Troy, NY, and while I was not there myself, the head of my organization was, and he debriefed me on what went on.  (The NNMI website is here.  RPI’s page on the conference is here. Click here for a pdf of the conference schedule.)

Now the details of NNMI haven’t yet been settled, so I can’t comment on them.  But it is possible to know, even at this early juncture, that if it is to succeed, its policies must rest upon understanding and implementing a correct vision of its economic rationale. Absent this, it is likely to either fail to generate economic benefits to the nation, or collapse outright in a flurry of Solyndra-style scandals.  There is a huge temptation to just declare manufacturing “holy,” as environmental technology was previously declared holy, and throw public money at it.

So what should NNMI do instead?

The first rule of industrial policy is that “create jobs” is not a valid strategy, despite the political appeal of this concept.  Anyone can spend $1.00 to create $.75 worth of jobs. The problem is that the $1.00 has to come from somewhere—it has to be taxed, borrowed, or cut from other spending.  And $1.00 in the public’s pockets will, other things being equal, create $1.00 worth of jobs, not $.75.  As a result, while benefits may be apparent, they will not be real.

Effective industrial policy depends upon finding uses for $1.00 that will somehow create more jobs than would have been created if the money had just been left with the public.  This can be done: the idea that it is impossible is ultimately identical with the proposition that markets are perfectly efficient: a known falsehood in other areas of economics and ultimately an ideological dogma.

Government has a number of legitimate roles to play here, and many of them are quite complex.  But most of what is fundamental boils down to solving two key problems that the private sector cannot solve on its own:

1. Appropriability, or the fact that many useful innovations are difficult for the innovator to capture the full economic value of.

2. Time horizons, or the fact that the private sector won’t invest in projects whose profits, although appropriable, are too far in the future.

So-called infratechnologies fall into the first category. These are technologies, like the Internet, which enable a huge number of profitable innovations but which are themselves, for various reasons, hard to make a direct profit off of. As a result, the free market tends to under-supply them, and there is a strong prima facie case for the government to fund their development.

To take one example, commercial nanotechnology companies depend, according to Greg Tassey of the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, upon the following key infra-technologies:

• Techniques for measuring the shapes, dimensions, and electrical characteristics of the various molecules making up nanoscale devices.

• Techniques for manipulating and measuring the spin of individual electrons.

• Scientific and engineering data for characterizing the fundamental physical behavior and long-term reliability of new nanoelectronic materials.

Mainstream neoclassical economics assumes (often tacitly and without even realizing the issue exists) that new technologies grow automatically from advances in pure science. It also assumes that new technologies automatically commercialize themselves. But both these assumptions are observably untrue, largely due to appropriability and time-horizons problems.

Historically, the U.S. solved the problems of appropriability and time horizons by indirect means.  We privileged certain oligopolistic sectors of corporate America to reap exceptionally high profits in exchange for developing technologies that would otherwise probably not have been developed.

Some of this was done by way of defense contractors, some by way of very large companies with monopoly or quasi-monopoly power over their ultimate product markets. Thus the old AT&T with its Bell Labs, the old IBM with its Watson Laboratory, the old RCA with its Sarnoff Research Center, the old Xerox with its Palo Alto Research Center, or GM in its glory days.

Because of these companies’ oligopolistic power, they were assured of a) capturing the value of whatever they discovered or invented, rather than having it swiped by a competitor, and b) bringing in enough money, over a long-enough time frame, to pay for expensive laboratories that could take many years to produce results.

Unfortunately, these companies are largely gone, or so internationalized that they confer no especial benefit upon the U.S. economy, as opposed to any of the other nations where they do business.

Worse, because the U.S. solved the problems of appropriability and time horizons indirectly, there never crystallized an explicit ideological consensus in this country about these being the key rationales for active industrial policy.  Indeed, to a huge extent, we fooled ourselves into thinking that our national economic success was caused by our (fictional) embrace of extreme laissez-faire.

Contemporary venture capitalists almost never operate beyond a seven-year time horizon.  (Thus we observe that the technology underlying Google was developed from research funded by the National Science Foundation on digital libraries.) For all its very real achievements, the venture capital system is largely a system for harvesting fundamental innovation, not creating it.

It follows that the key question that will need to be asked, whenever NNMI considers funding some project, is whether it is being asked to fund something that the private sector should be funding on its own.  (Solyndra clearly fell into this category, as there were no appropriability or time-horizons issues presented in their business model.)  Instead, NNMI should seek out projects that have the following characteristics:

1. They involve developing technologies where much of the benefit will “leak” to parties not compelled, by patent or other regulation, to help defray the cost of developing them.

2. They involve developing technologies whose payoff, though substantial, will occur beyond an approximately seven-year time horizon.

These two key issues are a highly abstract description of the problems involved, and they ramify enormously and interact with other issues—giving rise, for example, to the notorious “valley of death” problem in innovation. So they should not be misunderstood as exhausting the concerns here.  But getting these issues right will be fundamental to any successful active industrial policy.

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.

Chris Christie may be fat, but he ain’t Santa Claus. In fact, he seems unable to decide if he is New Jersey’s governor or its caporegime, and it may be a comment on the coarsening of American discourse that his brash rudeness is often taken for charm. In February, while discussing New Jersey’s newly amended income-tax law, which allows the rich to pay less (proportionally) than the middle class, Christie was asked about Warren Buffett’s observation that he paid less federal income taxes than his personal secretary, and that wasn’t fair. “He should just write a check and shut up,” Christie responded, with his typical verve. “I’m tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check—go ahead and write it.”

Heard it all before. At a rally in Florida (to support collective bargaining and to express the socialist view that firing teachers with experience was sort of a bad idea), I pointed out that I was paying taxes of roughly 28 percent on my income. My question was, “How come I’m not paying 50?” The governor of New Jersey did not respond to this radical idea, possibly being too busy at the all-you-can-eat cheese buffet at Applebee’s in Jersey City, but plenty of other people of the Christie persuasion did.

Full Story Here: Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake! – The Daily Beast.

Declaring Tuesday, International Workers’ Day, “a holiday for the 99%,” Occupy is calling for a general strike – no work, no school, no shopping – to “unite against a system which does not work for us (and) begin to build the world we want to see.” Many activities here, here and here; Pete Seeger sings L’Internationale to fire you up.

Full Story Here: May Day For the 99%: Resistance Is Fertile | Common Dreams.

1. The Rich Pay Almost All the Taxes

That’s simply not true. The percentage of total taxes paid by the very rich (the top 1%) is approximately the same as the percentage paid by middle class Americans (the 4th quintile, average income $68,700). Here are the details:

Internal Revenue Service figures show that the very rich paid 23% of their incomes in federal income taxes in 2006. The middle class paid about 8% of their incomes in federal income taxes. Based on U.S. Congressional Budget Office figures, the very rich pay just under 2% of their incomes toward social security, while the middle class pays just under 10%. According to a study by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the very rich pay about 7% of their incomes in state and sales and property and excise taxes, while the middle class pays approximately 10%. Another year of Bush tax cuts will reduce the taxes of the very rich by at least 3% more than the middle class.

So total taxes for the very rich are 29% of their incomes (23% + 2% + 7% – 3%). Total taxes for the middle class are 28% of their incomes (8% + 10% + 10%). These figures agree with CTJ’s 2011 estimate of total taxes paid.

2. Tax Rates Are Too High

Full Story Here: Five Tax Fallacies Invented by the 1% | Common Dreams.

Moyers & Company :-:

How big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy. Plus, a Bill Moyers Essay on Rep. Allen West (R-FL) and McCarthyism.

Video and full transcript at link

BILL MOYERS: This week on Moyers & Company.

MARTY KAPLAN: It’s all about combat. If every political issue is the combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other. And you have an audience that hasn’t a clue, at the end of the story, which is why you’ll hear, “Well, we’ll have to leave it there.” Well, thank you very much. Leave it there.

BILL MOYERS: And how the ghost of Joe McCarthy is back to haunt America.

SENATOR JOSEPH McCARTHY: They shouldn’t be called Democrats, they should be referred to properly as the Commiecrat Party.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. How about this: enterprising and intrepid journalism students at Kent State University in Ohio took up our challenge to go to nearby television stations, collect data on the political ads they run and post that information on the Internet. It’s supposed to be public information in the first place.

Full Story Here: Full Show: Big Money, Big Media, Big Trouble | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com.

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

Full Story Here: Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. – The Washington Post.

Laws are being made that encourage foreign corporations to set up shop in the U.S. They receive huge tax benefits and various subsidies for bringing their jobs to our country. This sounds like good business on the surface, but further inspection reveals some long-term problems.

• American owned factories are going out of business in record numbers because they can’t compete.
• Thousands of other businesses are selling out to foreign ownership or moving entirely overseas to keep costs down.

Full Story Here: Our Government Has No Economic Plan | Economy In Crisis.

Congress is on the cusp of passing a new bill that could threaten any internet user’s civil liberties. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a digital equivalent of allowing the government to fight perceived threats by monitoring which books citizens check out from the library, passed the House yesterday and will now be taken up by the Senate.

Online advocates, fresh off their victory against the Stop Online Piracy Act, are now gearing up to oppose CISPA because of the disastrous effect the bill could have for private information on the internet. The bill’s opponents argue that it goes too far in the name of cybersecurity, endangering citizens’ personal online information by giving the government access to anything from users’ private emails to their browsing history.

As the fight in the Senate begins, here is everything you need to know about CISPA:

Full Story Here: What Everyone Who Uses The Internet Needs To Know About CISPA.

A ginormous number of brands are controlled by just 10 multinationals, according to this amazing infographic from French blog Convergence Alimentaire. Now we can see just how many products are owned by Kraft, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, P&G and Nestlé.

(Disclaimer: We are not sure how up-to-date the graphic is. For example, it has not been updated to reflect P&G’s sale of Pringles to Kellogg’s in February.)

Full Story Here: These 10 Companies Control Enormous Number Of Consumer Brands [GRAPHIC].

Since direct-to-consumer drug advertising debuted in the late 1990s, the number of people on prescription drugs for life has ballooned.

Why has Big Pharma failed to produce new antibiotics for deadly infections like MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), VRE (vancomycin-resistant enterococci), C. Difficile and Acinetobacter baumannii even as they leap from hospital to community settings? Because there is no money in it.

Pharma executives “have shown less interest in medicines like antibiotics that actually cure disease than in those that only treat symptoms,” writes Melody Petersen, author of Our Daily Meds. “Most blockbusters are pills for conditions such as anxiety, high cholesterol or constipation that must be taken daily, often for months or years. They are designed for rich Americans who can afford to buy them.” Nor are medicines for tropical diseases like malaria, which kills a child every 30 seconds, a priority, notes Petersen. They also lack ka-ching.

Full Story Here: 6 Kinds of Pills Big Pharma Tries to Get You Hooked on for Life | Personal Health | AlterNet.

Robert Reich :-:

With the US economy still vulnerable to shocks, Obama’s re-election prospects are fragile. He must offer a bold alternative

So far, President Obama’s election strategy can best be summed up as: “We’re on the right track, my economic policies are working, we still have a long way to go, but stick with me and you’ll be fine.”

This won’t be enough to win him the election. The US recovery is too anaemic, and the chance of an economic stall between now and election day far too high.

Even now, Mitt Romney‘s empty “I’ll do it better” refrain is attracting as many voters as Obama’s “we’re on the right track.” Each is gathering 46% of voter support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Only 33% of the American public thinks the economy is improving, while 39% say they’re still falling behind financially – an 11-point increase from 2008. Nearly two thirds are concerned about paying for housing, and 23% of Americans with mortgages say they’re underwater.

Full Story Here: The lesson for Obama of Europe’s failed austerity | Robert Reich | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

The Social Security trust fund is in strong financial standing and the overall program could be further strengthened, say experts and lawmakers, with a simple increase of the current payroll tax cap which is currently set at $110,000. The trustee’s annual financial report was released on Monday.

Most mainstream news and media outlets reported the trustee’s report as a ‘doomsday’ scenario for the benefit program, which was created in 1935 and today supports 55 million Americans, including 38 million retired workers, 6 million widows, widowers and orphans, and 11 million disabled workers. But those reports belie a simple solution to improve the longevity and solvency of the program, and speak to a trend of poor-quality reporting when it comes to the issue of Social Security.

Full Story Here: Experts: Contrary to Mainstream Myth, ‘Social Security is Strong’ and Could Be Made Stronger | Common Dreams.

Ian Fletcher :-:

 America has been waiting a long time for the Obama administration to get serious about the problems of our manufacturing sector.

Finally, there has been a small sign that the corner may – may – be turning.  Let’s take a look at a speech recently given by Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council.

I’ve edited it a bit for length.  But it’s still a good metric of whether the administration “gets it” on manufacturing, and gives a fairly clear picture of the evolution of its thinking.

Ignoring the introductory material, here’s where Sperling cuts to the chase, i.e. the fact that mainstream economists generally believe that it’s a waste to time to pay any special attention to manufacturing—a sector they see as in inevitable and well-deserved decline as America’s economy shifts to better things:

Many economists raise the concern that any focus on manufacturing is distortionary industrial policy or misguided because they believe that manufacturing is in an inevitable and irreversible decline due to decades-long productivity and technology gains that will mean a continual loss of jobs.

This is precisely the myth Americans concerned about manufacturing are fighting, whenever they try to persuade Washington that something needs to be done to help the sector.

But it is a myth, as the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs was actually fairly stable from 1965 to about 2000, and productivity was growing all that time.  Productivity on its own doesn’t kill jobs, because while it may reduce the number of workers needed to make any one product, it also makes it possible to produce more products at a saleable price. Which makes it more profitable to employ manufacturing workers, so jobs are (as they were for decades) created to replace those that are lost.

So no, it’s not productivity that’s been killing American manufacturing jobs.  It’s something else, some factor that suddenly got a lot stronger after about 2000.  The right answer here is “a $500 billion a year trade deficit and unfair international competition, due to currency manipulation, foreign trade barriers, intellectual property theft, and related factors.”

Sperling continues…

Yet, we do believe that even if today only 12 percent of the U.S. private-sector workforce is employed in manufacturing, it is a sector that punches above its weight.   When you take into account the outsized role that manufacturing plays in innovation through:

• R&D investment and patents

• The tight linkage between innovation and manufacturing production

• The higher-wage jobs it produces

• Its importance for exports

• The spillover benefits that manufacturing facilities have on firms and communities around them

• The deeper economic harm that comes from allowing our manufacturing production capacity to be hollowed out

Aha!  This is what we need to be hearing from the White House.  Yes, manufacturing really is a uniquely important sector.  It is false that, from a economic point of view, “Computer chips, potato chips, what’s the difference?” in the words of Michael Boskin, one of George H.W. Bush’s economists.

Sperling goes on to successfully hit all the key points of this problem. Manufacturing, contrary to its image as an outdated sector, is responsible for 70 percent of America’s R&D, despite being only 12 percent of our economy.  And it’s very hard to innovate, or learn to make things better, when you don’t know how to make them in the first place. Manufacturing jobs average about 25 percent higher pay than non-manufacturing jobs.  Manufacturing is also the key to America’s trade deficit, as we can’t balance our trade by exporting more soybeans or movies: the numbers just don’t add up.

The economic evidence is increasingly clear that a strong manufacturing sector creates spillover benefits to the broader economy, making manufacturing an essential component of a competitive and innovative economy.

Correct. America can’t be a serious country – let alone a superpower – without a world-class manufacturing sector.

When an economic activity has positive spillover effects that an individual firm cannot capture, there is a risk we as a nation under-invest in areas that can be beneficial to the economy at large.

Correct.  The free market—which doesn’t exist in foreign trade, anyway—won’t solve all our problems. Contrary to laissez-faire mythology which would have appalled Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, there is a public-sector component of economic growth. This is not a liberal or a conservative idea, it is just true, though liberals and conservatives can (and should) argue about the right way to implement it.

If we care about the location of the innovation, we should also care about the location of the manufacturing production… The ecosystems that grow up around these intersections of innovation and production tend to be complex.  They are the result of evolutions that occur over periods of years and decades. Once the virtuous, reinforcing cycles are broken they are difficult to recreate, and they can turn to a vicious cycle… That’s why losing pieces of our manufacturing base should be such a serious concern.

A strong manufacturing sector is not the work of a day, or of any one single government policy.  It is something that takes decades to build up.  It is therefore something that we should not allow to be torn down by the mercantilism of foreign nations.  We can’t afford to wait until all the damage is done, as then it will be too late.

Without these capabilities, companies do not create the process technologies that allow firms to create and scale new products.  So when we remain indifferent to the decision to compete for the manufacturing products of the present, we have to understand that if it leads to a more serious loss of our manufacturing capacity, it can trigger the loss by our nation of the ability to compete for and create the next generation of technologies.  It’s a story we’re already all too familiar with in the United States. In consumer electronics. In metal castings. In machine tools and others. In each industry, firms shifted production out of the U.S., sometimes as products became commoditized.  The subsequent loss of manufacturing capabilities led to leadership in other industries being developed elsewhere.

All sadly true. Losing manufacturing abilities doesn’t just cost us today; it shuts us out of the industries of the future.  GM was forced to import the batteries for the Chevy Volt from South Korea because nobody in the U.S. had the know-how to make them anymore. China is systematically targeting and killing off America’s solar-cell industry.

Now we get to the administration’s proposed solutions, and things start to sour.

The President’s plan for business tax reform is focused on eliminating loopholes and simplifying tax rates to make the U.S. a more attractive location for firms to invest to spur growth.  Recognizing the intense international competition for manufacturing and the benefits manufacturers provide to the rest of the economy, our plan would lower rates for manufacturers to 25% and even lower for advanced manufacturing.

Uh oh.  This proposal falls squarely into the category of “favors the recipient never asked for.” I don’t ever recall any major organization in this field ever suggesting that manufacturers deserve a special favor on taxes. That would be the kind of naked special pleading that our opponents seem to assume, as a matter of course, that we do. I’m not aware of any. (My apologies if I am mistaken; feel free to write me if you know otherwise.)

American manufacturers don’t need special favors from the government.  They do need to be not especially harmed by unfair foreign competition. The aggressive, cheating economic strategies of foreign nations—starting with China but not ending there—hit the manufacturing sector much harder than the service sectors which make up 75 percent of our economy.  The manufacturing sector is structurally vulnerable to trade problems because most manufactured goods, as opposed to most services, are tradable.

That’s why the Administration is investing in innovation to support manufacturing, increasing our support for advanced manufacturing technologies by 19% to $2.2 billion in FY13.  We recognize investing in basic research isn’t enough to make sure that a new technology crosses the bridge from invention to product development to manufacturing at scale, The President proposed a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, the creation of up to fifteen manufacturing institutes to fill this gap in our innovation infrastructure by letting companies collaborate and access the capabilities of our research universities to support scaling up manufacturing production.

Now this bit is actually good.  One of the few special favors the manufacturing sector may legitimately lay claim to is government support of technological research. Why? Because scientific discovery, and its cousin infratechnology, tends to benefit everyone who eventually commercializes it—not just whoever paid for it.  So the profit motive isn’t enough, and there’s a legitimate public-sector role.

America used to understand all this. (Funny how we used to be the world’s unquestioned number one economy.)

Unfortunately, the specifics mentioned here stuff are mostly in the proposal stage.  We’ll have to see if they really mean it.  The past  three years of this administration don’t exactly fill one with hope here.

And finally, that’s why the President has built on a strong record of trade enforcement with new measures to enhance our ability to go after unfair trade practices, including those of China. In September 2009, President Obama ordered safeguards applied to tire imports from China, a move that addressed a surge of tires from China, adding over 1,000 workers in the process. In so doing, the President applied the “Section 421” safeguard law for the first time since China joined the WTO in 2001 – an action that President Bush never took. In fact, the President has nearly doubled the rate of WTO cases against China from the previous Administration.

Now we’re getting downright disingenuous.  Anyone who deals with these issues knows three things, none of which is reflected in the above paragraph:

1) The U.S. already has all the bureaucratic institutions in place to enforce our trade laws, with China as with every other country.  We just don’t use them.  Until the political decision is made to offend the multinational corporations and get serious about trade enforcement, new laws and new institutions will mean nothing.  It’s just posturing to convince people the administration is “doing something.”

2) China’s currency manipulation is the elephant in the room here.  Any administration that wants to “help” American victims of unfair foreign trade practices, but isn’t doing anything about currency manipulation, simply isn’t serious. It’s a 30-40 percent subsidy to Chinese exports plus an equivalent tariff on American imports. And it drags along third countries whose own currencies are affected by the dollar-renminbi exchange rate.

3) The “rate” of bringing WTO cases is irrelevant, because the dollar amounts of different cases vary so widely that one big case may make more difference to the American economy than ten small ones.

Just two weeks ago, the Administration brought a new trade case against China on rare earth materials¸ which are key ingredients making many high-tech products like advanced batteries and high-tech magnets.  And in February, the President launched an Interagency Trade Enforcement Center (ITEC) which will enhance our capacity even further, representing a “whole-of-government” approach to addressing unfair trade practices.  The President’s fiscal year 2013 Budget includes $26 million in funding and 50-60 dedicated staff.

More nice little bits of posturing.  Which on their own aren’t bad, but do rather smell of panic in the West Wing of the White House over losing manufacturing states in the next election, rather than a serious policy change.

So where is Obama now on trade and manufacturing?  I can’t really tell.

Ironically, this is also how I feel about presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.  As I’ve written before, his policy on these issues, though he promises to designate China a currency manipulator on day one in office, leaves one in a state of uncertainty as to whether he really means it.  Attacking Obama on China seems to be an emerging element of his strategy to win, but he has a lot of rich friends who’ll be seriously offended if he ever does fix the currency problem.

Somebody is going to have to fix America’s trade mess—the key but not sole requirement for restoring American manufacturing to health.  But whether it will be a Democrat or a Republican is still up for grabs at this moment.

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.

Education is the new Republican enemy. No more free thinking and empirical evidence, just the Bible, rumour and Fox News

Not content with merely waging war on women, Republicans are targeting another enemy of conservatism: education. New Hampshire state Republican Jerry Bergevin recently railed against science and the atheist eggheads who call themselves teachers: “I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a world view and it’s godless.”

While New Hampshire didn’t end up passing Bergevin’s anti-evolution law, Tennessee did. Its new statute allows – even encourages – teachers to express scepticism toward, as the bill says, “scientific subjects, including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, and global warming”. The American Institute of Biological Sciences, the National Earth Science Teachers Association, the National Centre for Science Education and all eight of Tennessee’s members of the National Academy of Sciences oppose the new law, calling it “miseducation”. But what do these no ‘count heathen elitist PhD Darwinites know? The government of Tennessee wants you to know they ain’t kin to no monkey

Full Story Here: The Republicans who want ignorance to get equal time in schools | Diane Roberts | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

by Scientific America :-:

As riches grow, empathy for others seems to decline

Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.

Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner ran several studies looking at whether social class (as measured by wealth, occupational prestige, and education) influences how much we care about the feelings of others. In one study, Piff and his colleagues discreetly observed the behavior of drivers at a busy four-way intersection. They found that luxury car drivers were more likely to cut off other motorists instead of waiting for their turn at the intersection. This was true for both men and women upper-class drivers, regardless of the time of day or the amount of traffic at the intersection. In a different study they found that luxury car drivers were also more likely to speed past a pedestrian trying to use a crosswalk, even after making eye contact with the pedestrian.

Full Story Here: How Wealth Reduces Compassion | Common Dreams.

Greg Palast :-:

Two years before the Deepwater Horizon blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP off-shore rig suffered a nearly identical blow-out, but BP concealed the first one from the U.S. regulators and Congress.

This week, EcoWatch.org located an eyewitness with devastating new information about the Caspian Sea oil-rig blow-out which BP had concealed from government and the industry.

The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were evacuated from BP’s Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of Mexico workers “could have had a chance” of survival. But BP’s insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their fate.

Full Story Here: BP Covered Up Blow-out Two Years Prior to Deadly Deepwater Horizon Spill | NationofChange.

Between June 2011 and February of this year, 70 percent of all one-on-one interviewees on the four biggest political talk shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday — were Republicans. The numbers were even more lopsided in favor of men and white guests:

Full Story Here: If It’s Sunday, It’s Meet The Republican White Men | ThinkProgress.

Though BP has agreed to pay billions of dollars in damages, most believe that accountability has been slim compared to the still untold damage that was caused — much of which may not be fully realized for years to come. “BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences,” says Abrahm Lustgarten, the Polk Award-winning environmental reporter for Pro Publica, “and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.”

Marine life in the gulf and the communities which dot its coast are rife with problems. As Phil Radford, Executive Director of Greenpeace USA and Aaron Viles, Deputy Director of Gulf Restoration Network write today: “Throughout the foodchain, warning signs are accumulating. Dolphins are sick and dying. Important forage fish are plagued with gill and developmental damage. Deepwater species like snapper have been stricken with lesions, and their reefs are losing biodiversity. Coastal communities are struggling with changes to the fisheries they rely upon. Hard-hit oyster reefs aren’t coming back and sport fish like speckled trout have disappeared from some of their traditional haunts. BP’s oily fingerprints continue to mar the landscape and destroy habitats.”

“People should be aware that the oil is still there,”

Full Story Here: Chorus of Anger says Little Learned from BP’s Gulf Disaster | Common Dreams.

But the truth of the matter is that “foreign investment” in the United States today consists of Asian central banks, mainly from Japan and China. These banks use earnings from massive trade surpluses to prop up the U.S. dollar by purchasing U.S. government bonds.

By doing so, Asia keeps its goods and services cheap, thus worsening the U.S. trade deficit. Washington allows this because these countries use their export surpluses to finance the U.S. budget deficit.

Full Story Here: The Truth about the American Condition | Economy In Crisis.

Is Obama Kowtowing to the Right? Or Is He One of Them?

The President’s progressive critics blame him for continuing and expanding upon his Republican predecessor’s policies. His supporters point to the obstructionist, Republican-controlled Congress. What can Obama do? He’s being stymied at every turn.

The first problem with the it’s-the-GOP’s-fault defense is that it asks voters to suffer short-term memory loss. In 2009, you probably recall, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. By a sizeable majority. They even had a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. His approval ratings were through the roof; even many Republicans who had voted against him took a liking to him. The media, in his pocket, wondered aloud whether the Republican Party could ever recover. “Rarely, if ever, has a President entered office with so much political wind at his back,” Tim Carney wrote for the Evans-Novak Political Report shortly after the inauguration.

If Obama had wanted to pursue a progressive agenda—banning foreclosures, jailing bankers, closing Guantánamo, stopping the wars, pushing for the public option he promised in his healthcare plan—he could have. He had ample political capital, yet chose not to spend it.

Full Story Here: A President Who Doesn’t Even Try | Common Dreams.

OPS: BO has been and is, a moderate republican.

Ellen Brown :-:

The Goldman Sachs coup that failed in America has nearly succeeded in Europe—a permanent, irrevocable, unchallengeable bailout for the banks underwritten by the taxpayers.

In September 2008, Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, managed to extort a $700 billion bank bailout from Congress.  But to pull it off, he had to fall on his knees and threaten the collapse of the entire global financial system and the imposition of martial law; and the bailout was a one-time affair.  Paulson’s plea for a permanent bailout fund—the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP—was opposed by Congress and ultimately rejected.

By December 2011, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, former vice president of Goldman Sachs Europe, was able to approve a 500 billion Euro bailout for European banks without asking anyone’s permission.  And in January 2012, a permanent rescue funding program called the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was passed in the dead of night with barely even a mention in the press.  The ESM imposes an open-ended debt on EU member governments, putting taxpayers on the hook for whatever the ESM’s Eurocrat overseers demand.

Full Story Here: How the Goldman Vampire Squid Captured Europe | Common Dreams.

One of the biggest con games going on at the moment is the sustained attack on the U.S. public school system. It’s being perpetrated by predatory entrepreneurs (disguised as “concerned citizens” and “education reformers”) hoping to persuade the parents of school-age children that the only way their kids are going to get a decent education is by paying for something that they can already get for free. You might say it’s the same marketing campaign that launched bottled water.

The profit impulse fueling this drive is understandable.  All it takes is a cursory look at the economic landscape to see why these speculators are drooling at the prospect of privatizing education.  Millions of students pulling up stakes, bailing out of the public school system, and enrolling in private or charter schools?  Are you kidding?  Just think of the money that would generate.

Mind you, these “education reformers” are the same people who want to privatize the world—the same people who want more toll roads, who want hikers to pay trail fees, who want city parks and public beaches to charge admission. Indeed, they’re the same tribe who convinced a thirsty nation to voluntarily pay for drinking water that it could otherwise get for free.

Full Story Here: The Campaign to Privatize the World | Common Dreams.

Washington is lost in a snarl of confusion, cowardice and wrongheaded ideological assumptions that threaten to keep the economy in a ditch for a long time. That prospect is not much discussed in the halls of Congress or the White House. It’s as though the crisis has been put on hold until after the presidential election.

As almost everyone understands, nothing substantial will be accomplished this year. President Obama is campaigning on warmed-over optimism and paper-thin policy proposals. Republicans propose to make things worse by drastically shrinking government spending, when the opposite is needed to foster a real recovery. The president, like the GOP, embraces large-scale deficit reduction. In these circumstances, it’s just as well that the two parties cannot reach agreement. After the election they may make a deal that splits the difference between bad and worse. In the worst case, they might inadvertently tip the economy back into recession.

In this sorry situation, there is really only one governing institution with the courage to dissent from the conventional wisdom—the Federal Reserve. The central bank declines to participate in the happy talk about recovery or in the righteous sermons attacking the deficit. In its muted manner, the Fed keeps explaining why the house is still on fire, why more aggressive action is needed, and is gently nudging the politicians who decide fiscal policy to step up. But its message is ignored by Congress and the president and viciously attacked by right-wing Republicans who say, Butt out.

Full Story Here: The Federal Reserve Turns Left | The Nation.

So, can we talk about the Paul Ryan phenomenon?

And yes, I mean the phenomenon, not the man. Mr. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the principal author of the last two Congressional Republican budget proposals, isn’t especially interesting. He’s a garden-variety modern G.O.P. extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class.

No, what’s interesting is the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan — and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can’t seem to let go of their fantasy.

The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”

Full Story Here: The Gullible Center – NYTimes.com.

The left never had a secret plan or much discipline. But the Mormons really do have secrets and a lot of discipline.

Mitt Romney will be the Republican to face President Obama in the fall. Tuesday night was the clincher, as the Mormon zealot won in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington DC. He may stumble on, but the Catholic zealot Rick Santorum is finished.

It’s hard to detect any alluring feature in Romney’s psychic or political make-up, and I’m none too sure about Ann Romney, who at this stage of the game is filling the role played by the late Elizabeth Edwards in the Edwards campaign on its upward trajectory back in early 2008.

The last Republican challenger to an incumbent Democratic president was Bob Dole in 1996. I always had a soft spot for the guy for his crack, which backfired on him, when he was Ford’s veep nominee in 1976, running against the Carter/Mondale ticket: “I figured it up the other day: If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans — enough to fill the city of Detroit.” There was a lot of howling because Dole said “Democrat,” thus diverting attention from the substantive charge which was probably true.

Full Story Here: Romney: Why It’s OK to Stick It to Him for Being a Mormon » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

Here’s the truth: high gas prices have nothing to do with lack of available gas in America.

That’s because for the first time in 62 years, the United States became a net exporter of oil products. In 2011, our nation sent 439,000 more barrels of oil overseas than we imported. That means we’re awash in oil and gasoline — it’s just in the hands of oil barons who are making more money shipping it overseas than selling it to U.S. customers.

Drilling in Alaska or in the Gulf won’t cut gas prices. Our status as a net exporter of oil also means we’re now part of the world’s dirt pit, where the dirty work like refining and processing crude is done, because oil barons don’t have to worry about the costs of pollution.

Full Story Here: With Estimates That Gas Might Hit $5 a Gallon This Summer, Americans Are Screwed at the Pump | Economy In Crisis.

 Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the President signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.

They spread money like manure on the campaign trails of key members of Congress. They unleash hordes of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, cozy up to columnists and editorial writers, spend millions on lawyers who relentlessly pick at the law, trying to rewrite or water down the regulations required for enforcement. Before you know it, what once was an attempt at genuine reform creeps back toward business as usual.

It’s happening right now with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act — passed two years ago in the wake of our disastrous financial meltdown. Just last week, for example, both parties in the House overwhelmingly approved two bills that already would change Dodd-Frank’s rules on derivatives — those convoluted trading deals recently described by the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as “the largest dark pool in our financial markets.”

Full Story Here: The Best Congress the Banks’ Money Can Buy | Common Dreams.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is facing a June 5 recall election, privately signed a slew of legislation on Thursday that some Democrats see as evidence of an ongoing “war on women.”

“Instead of a jobs and economic priority from the state legislature, we’ve had a series of bills introduced, passed and now signed into law, that really turn back the clock on women’s health, safety, wellness and economic security,” said Sara Finger with the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health.

Among the dozens of bills signed by Walker is a repeal of the state’s Equal Pay law, a bill barring abortion coverage through health insurance exchanges, and a repeal of the Healthy Youth Act so that now sex education teachers do not have to teach contraception.

Full Story Here: Recall-Facing Wis. Gov. Walker Continues ‘War on Women’ With Flurry of Bills | Common Dreams.

The ending is your choice

Imagine a country in which the very richest people get all the economic gains. They eventually accumulate so much of the nation’s total income and wealth that the middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going full speed. Most of the middle class’s wages keep falling and their major asset – their home – keeps shrinking in value.

Imagine that the richest people in this country use some of their vast wealth to routinely bribe politicians. They get the politicians to cut their taxes so low there’s no money to finance important public investments that the middle class depends on – such as schools and roads, or safety nets such as health care for the elderly and poor.

Imagine further that among the richest of these rich are financiers. These financiers have so much power over the rest of the economy they get average taxpayers to bail them out when their bets in the casino called the stock market go bad. They have so much power they even shred regulations intended to limit their power.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (The Fable of the Century).

The big bad event of last week was, of course, the Supreme Court hearing on health reform. In the course of that hearing it became clear that several of the justices, and possibly a majority, are political creatures pure and simple, willing to embrace any argument, no matter how absurd, that serves the interests of Team Republican.

But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.

And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

Full Story Here: Pink Slime Economics – NYTimes.com.

With the mainstream media in the hands of the mostly conservative wealthy, it’s difficult for average Americans to learn the truth about critical issues. The following five conservative claims are examples of mythical beliefs that fall apart in the presence of inconvenient facts:

1. Entitlements are the Problem

Beyond the fact that we’re ‘entitled’ to Social Security and Medicare because we pay for them, these two government-run programs have been largely self-sustaining while supporting the needs of millions of Americans.

Medicare is much less costly than private health care. Social Security, which functions with a surplus, would not be in danger of a long-term shortfall if the richest 10% (those making over the $106,800 cutoff) paid their full share.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently reported that 91% of entitlements go to the elderly or disabled, or to members of working households needing supplemental assistance. Only 9% of entitlement dollars go to non-working but employable individuals, and most of that is for medical care, unemployment, and survivor benefits.

Full Story Here: Five Preposterous, Persistent Conservative Myths | Common Dreams.

Matt Taibbi :-:

Wall Street is buzzing about the annual report just put out by the Dallas Federal Reserve. In the paper, Harvey Rosenblum, the head of the Dallas Fed’s research department, bluntly calls for the breakup of Too-Big-To-Fail banks like Bank of America, Chase, and Citigroup.

The government’s bottomless sponsorship of these TBTF institutions, Rosenblum writes, has created a “residue of distrust for government, the banking system, the Fed and capitalism itself.”

The report (PDF), entitled, “Choosing the Road to Prosperity: Why We Must End Too-Big-To-Fail Now,” is written in a surprisingly readable style and is illustrated with reader-friendly cartoons and pictographs. It uses rhetoric that, for the Fed, is extremely candid and colorful, going beyond an arcane analysis of monetary policy to focus on the cultural damage of Too-Big-To-Fail.

Full Story Here: Push to End Too-Big-To-Fail Goes Mainstream | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.

‘FDA should remove “responsible for protecting the public health” from its mission statement’

Today the Food and Drug Administration has announced that it will not take steps to bar bisphenol-A, or BPA, a known toxic chemical, from canned food and liquid infant formula containers.

  Studies show that BPA leaches from epoxy linings of cans into food and drink, and resurfaces in breast milk, saliva, urine, amniotic fluid and umbilical cord blood; the contamination is linked to many health problems including birth defects.

Jane Houlihan, Senior Vice President for Research of the Environmental Working Group today stated, “The next decision the FDA should make is to remove ‘responsible for protecting the public health’ from its mission statement. It’s false advertising. Allowing a chemical as toxic as BPA, and linked to so many serious health problems, to remain in food means the agency has veered dangerously off course.”

Full Story Here: FDA Keeps BPA in Food, Fails Public Health Again | Common Dreams.

Radiation levels inside Fukushima’s reactor 2 have reached fatally high levels, and levels of water are far lower than previously thought, experts say today.

The current radiation levels are so high that even robots cannot enter. Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) says that new robots and equipment will need to be developed to deal with the lethal levels of radiation.

TEPCO spokesperson Junichi Matsumoto told the Associated Press, “We have to develop equipment that can tolerate high radiation” when locating and removing melted fuel during the decommissioning.

At ten times the lethal dose, the radiation levels are at their highest point yet.

Full Story Here: Experts: Radiation at Fukushima Plant Far Worse Than Thought | Common Dreams.

During the first century of American independence, the United States was financed through protectionism. After just 100 years, the national net worth was twenty-five billion dollars more than the world’s next wealthiest country, Great Britain. U.S. gross national product was more than twice that of Germany and Russia. The United States was so rich in goods and services that it was more self-sustaining than any industrial power in history. In fact, there wasn’t even a need for a federal income tax until 1913. Up until then, the government was supported almost entirely through tariffs and protectionism.

In those days, more than half of the world’s cotton, corn, copper and oil flowed from America, and at least one-third of all steel, iron, silver and gold. Even though the U.S. was not flush with raw materials, excellent manufacturing guaranteed dominance of world markets. Wall Street was overflowing with foreign capital. It was estimated that America could afford to buy the entire United Kingdom, along with all of their national debt. Even the world-leading Bank of England began to borrow money on Wall Street. In short order, New York City was destined to replace London as the world’s financial center.

Full Story Here: The Importance of Protecting Our Economy | Economy In Crisis.

Latest Proposal Released Today Offers Pain for Everyone but the Rich

The latest House Republican budget plan asks low-income and middle-class Americans to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while simultaneously delivering massive tax breaks to the richest 1 percent and preserving huge giveaways to Big Oil. It’s a recipe for repeating the mistakes of the Bush administration, during which middle-class incomes stagnated and only the privileged few enjoyed enormous gains.

Each component of the new House Republican budget threatens the middle class while doing nothing to add jobs or grow our economy. It ends the guarantee of decent insurance for senior citizens, breaking Medicare’s bedrock promise. It slashes investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research, all of which are key drivers of economic growth and mobility. And it cuts taxes for those at the top, asking the middle class to pick up the tab. It’s a budget designed to benefit the top 1 percent at everyone else’s expense.

The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives today unveiled their latest budget proposal. Though there are many questions yet to be answered, one thing is clear—they have learned nothing from the damaging budget battles of last year. This latest budget blueprint not only mirrors last year’s disastrous effort but also manages to reject what little bipartisan budget agreement was forged in 2011.

Full Story Here: The 6 Key Failures of the House Republican Budget Plan.

There are nearly 450 nuclear reactors in the world, with hundreds more being planned or under construction. There are 104 of these reactors in the United States and 195 in Europe. Imagine what havoc it would wreak on our civilization and the planet’s ecosystems if we were to suddenly witness not just one or two nuclear meltdowns, but 400 or more! How likely is it that our world might experience an event that could ultimately cause hundreds of reactors to fail and melt down at approximately the same time? I venture to say that, unless we take significant protective measures, this apocalyptic scenario is not only possible, but probable.

Consider the ongoing problems caused by three reactor core meltdowns, explosions and breached containment vessels at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi facility and the subsequent health and environmental issues. Consider the millions of innocent victims who have already died or continue to suffer from horrific radiation-related health problems (“Chernobyl AIDS,” epidemic cancers, chronic fatigue, etcetera) resulting from the Chernobyl reactor explosions, fires and fallout. If just two serious nuclear disasters, spaced 25 years apart, could cause such horrendous environmental catastrophes, it is hard to imagine how we could ever hope to recover from hundreds of similar nuclear incidents occurring simultaneously across the planet. Since more than one-third of all Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, this is a serious issue that should be given top priority.[1]

Full Story Here: 400 Chernobyls: Solar Flares, Electromagnetic Pulses and Nuclear Armageddon.

Robert Reich :-:

Conservatives love to rail against “big government.” But the surge of cynicism engulfing the nation isn’t about government’s size. It flows from a growing perception that government doesn’t work for average people but for big business, Wall Street and the very rich—who, in effect, have bought it. In a recent Pew poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.

That view is understandable. Wall Street got bailed out by taxpayers, but one out of every three homeowners with a mortgage is underwater, caught in the tsunami caused by the Street’s excesses. The bailout wasn’t conditioned on the banks helping these homeowners, and subsequent help has been meager. The recent settlement of claims against the banks is tiny compared with how much homeowners have lost. Millions of people are losing their homes or simply walking away from mortgage payments they can no longer afford.

Homeowners can’t use bankruptcy to reorganize their mortgage loans because the banks have engineered laws to prohibit this. Banks have also made it extremely difficult for young people to use bankruptcy to reorganize their student loans. Yet corporations routinely use bankruptcy to renege on contracts. American Airlines, which is in bankruptcy, plans to fire 13,000 people—
16 percent of its workforce—while cutting back health benefits for current employees. It also intended to terminate its underfunded pension plans, until the government agency charged with picking up the tab screamed so loudly that American backed off and proposed to freeze the plans.

Full Story Here: ‘Big Government’ Isn’t the Problem, Big Money Is | The Nation.

Brazilian prosecutors say they will bring criminal charges against 17 executives from the US oil company Chevron and drilling contractor Transocean after a new leak of crude.

The executives have been barred from leaving the country until the investigation concludes.

Chevron halted production in Brazil after the new oil leak was found on the seabed off Brazil earlier this week.

The seepage is near a well where there was a major oil spill last November.

A Chevron spokeswoman said the company had no comment on the latest legal moves because it had not been notified of the decision.

The oil company is already facing a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit over November’s spill.

Federal prosecutors’ spokesman Marcelo del Negri told AP news agency that prosecutors would file charges including “environmental crimes” in a federal court next week.

Full Story Here: BBC News – Brazil to charge Chevron executives over fresh oil leak.

There have been virtually no criminal prosecutions for Wall Street wrongdoing related to the crash, and precious few civil actions. Criminal charges are likely to be filed against BP, but the company already has been granted new permits to drill for oil in the Gulf. Massey Energy—now owned by Alpha Natural Resources—was forced to pay $200 million in penalties but avoided any criminal prosecution.

This history notwithstanding, We the People, and our government representatives, do have the power to hold companies accountable for the wrongs they commit. The challenge is to mobilize sufficient political pressure to demand that available tools be used and new mechanisms of accountability be created.

Full Story Here: Nine Strategies to End Corporate Rule | Truthout.

The Washington Post has a long narrative report about the negotiations between Obama and the House Republicans. The narrative frame of the Post’s account is that Obama blew the potential deal at the last minute. That’s a story that people close to Obama’s fired chief of staff, Bill Daley, have been peddling for a long time. But that conclusion is utterly belied by the facts in the Post’s own account. But let’s put that aside for now, because the facts in the Post’s account support a different and far more disturbing conclusion: Obama was even more desperate to cut a deal than previously believed — dangerously desperate, in fact.

It has previously been reported that Obama had offered to John Boehner to make a series of cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and the domestic budget, to reduce top-end tax rates, and to prevent the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, in return for increasing tax revenue (over current tax levels) by about $800 billion over ten years. That is a pitiful sum of new revenue, less than half as much as recommended by deficit proposals by Bowles-Simpson, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and other bipartisan worthies. The blockbuster fact in the Post’s report, which the story does not in any way grapple with, is that even the $800 billion in tax revenue offered by Boehner was not, in fact, $800 billion in tax revenue:

Full Story Here: How Obama Tried to Sell Out Liberalism in 2011 — Daily Intel.

What the story actually shows is that Obama’s disastrous weakness in the summer of 2011 went further toward undermining liberalism than anybody previously knew.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

Full Story Here: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs – NYTimes.com.

David Stockman explains how the cozy relationship between Washington and Wall Street has perverted capitalism and subverted democracy.

BILL MOYERS: This week on Moyers and Company.

DAVID STOCKMAN: Money dominates politics. And as a result we have neither capitalism or democracy. We have some kind of — we have crony capitalism.

BILL MOYERS: And…

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: The big powered, moneyed institutions are in control in Washington, there’s no doubt about it. You and I don’t have a lobbyist and so we are not represented.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. This is the time of year when we keep reminding public television viewers, viewers like you, that you can’t find the kinds of programs you see right here anywhere else. Programs like this one: the second of our broadcasts investigating Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.

Full Story Here: Encore Broadcast: Crony Capitalism | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com.

Encore Broadcast: On Crony Capitalism from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama‘s healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.

Brown “doesn’t have insurance. She doesn’t want to pay for it. And she doesn’t want the government to tell her she has to have it,” said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation’s case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.

But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address.

Full Story Here: Plaintiff in healthcare law challenge went bankrupt – with unpaid medical bills – latimes.com.

As the first anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster arrives, the cover-up involving nuclear power is more extensive than ever.

The Big Lie was integral to the nuclear push from its start.

Promoters of nuclear power discounted the seriousness of nuclear plant accidents, although government documents acknowledged the vast scale of catastrophe. As the Atomic Energy Commission’s “WASH-740 update,” done at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1960s, repeatedly states about a major nuclear plant accident: “The possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”

They pushed the “peaceful atom” although knowing that any nation with a nuclear plant would have the materiel from it (the plutonium produced as a byproduct) and trained personnel to make atomic weapons.

They downplayed the effects of radioactivity claiming it needed to reach a “threshold” to cause harm even as it became clear that any amount of radioactivity can injure and kill.
And nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter,” they insisted.

And on and on…

Full Story Here: The Big Lie: One Year After Fukushima, Nuclear Cover Up Revealed | Common Dreams.

Elizabeth Holtzman knows something about struggles for justice in the U.S. government. She was a member of Congress and of the House Judiciary Committee that voted for articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon in 1973. She proposed the bill that in 1973 required that “state secrets” claims be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. She co-authored the special prosecutor law that was allowed to lapse, just in time for the George W. Bush crime wave, after Kenneth Starr made such a mockery of it during the Whitewater-cum-Lewinsky scandals. She was there for the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. She has served on the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, bringing long-escaped war criminals to justice. And she was an outspoken advocate for impeaching George W. Bush.

Holtzman’s new book, coauthored with Cynthia Cooper, is called “Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law and Plotted to Avoid Prosecution — and What We Can Do About It.” Holtzman begins by recalling how widespread and mainstream was the speculation at the end of the Bush nightmare that Bush would pardon himself and his underlings. The debate was over exactly how he would do it. And then he didn’t do it at all.

Full Story Here: Un-Cheating Justice: Two Years Left to Prosecute Bush | Truthout.

America is running on imports. Meeting the basic needs of the average American on only American-made products is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Living on imports is not sustainable in the long-term, and the United States needs to find a way to pry itself out of this increasingly desperate situation if it wishes to maintain any quality of life for its citizens.

America’s trade deficit is staggeringly high; in October alone, it totaled $43 billion. This number is so high because our policies have allowed it to grow out of control. Our government has pursued free trade policies under the guise of increasing exports. The theory is that we will open up new markets for American made goods and services by reciprocally opening our borders to other countries. But if the goal is to expand American manufacturing, it has been a massive failure.

According to Representative Betty Sutton (D-OH), the United States has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities per day for the past 10 years. This is the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen from expanding our free trade agreements. Not only are we not increasing our exports to other countries, but facilities that could supply goods to Americans are going out of business due to competition with cheap foreign labor. With those factories out of business, Americans are forced to buy imports.

Full Story Here: America Can No Longer Support Its Own Needs | Economy In Crisis.

Here’s the good news. The economic pie is growing again. Growth in the 4th quarter last year hit 3 percent on an annualized rate. That’s respectable – although still way too slow to get us back on track given how far we plunged.

Here’s the bad news. The share of that growth going to American workers is at a record low.

That’s largely because far fewer Americans are working. Although the nation is now producing more goods and services than it did before the slump began in 2007, we’re doing it with six million fewer people.

Why? Credit technology. Computers, software applications, and the Internet are letting us produce more with fewer people.

In theory, this is a huge plus. We can live better and have more time off.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich.

Losing ground to constitutional competition

Among Americans there remains strong pride about the US Constitution, even though there is widespread support for creating reform amendments to it.  Globally, however, what should surprise Americans is a significant loss of respect for it.  Other nations, especially those creating new democracies, see better constitutions elsewhere.  This is not opinion.  It is fact.  And it is important to understand this historic shift.

A new university study sends a disturbing message to all Americans that want to hang on to the fiction that the US constitution is not only the world’s best one, but does not need to be improved.  Do not mentally block this finding: “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to the study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.

What exists today is far different than what was proudly proclaimed in 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, by Time magazine  which calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”

Why has the US Constitution lost standing abroad even though Americans cling to their belief that it is sacred and the world’s best constitution?

Full Story Here: The Declining Influence of the US Constitution | Common Dreams.

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.

But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (As Santorum and Romney Battle for the Loony Right, the Rest of Us Should Not Gloat).

Ellen Brown :-:

Seventeen states have now introduced bills for state-owned banks, and others are in the works. Hawaii’s innovative state bank bill addresses the foreclosure mess. County-owned banks are being proposed that would tackle the housing crisis by exercising the right of eminent domain on abandoned and foreclosed properties. Arizona has a bill that would do this for homeowners who are current in their payments but underwater, allowing them to refinance at fair market value.

The long-awaited settlement between 49 state Attorneys General and the big five robo-signing banks is proving to be a monumental disappointment before it has even been signed, sealed and court approved. It appears that the bankers who took your home and your job will again be buying their way out of jail, and the curtain will again drop on the scene of the crime.

Full Story Here: Move Our Money: New State Bank Bills Address Credit and Housing Crises | Common Dreams.

Americans need to speak out against free trade, and let our leaders know that entering into more of these disastrous agreements is exactly the kind of mistake that will keep them out of office

Many politicians and the media make it sound as if the majority of America is in favor of free trade, and support pacts like NAFTA. But the truth is that most Americans do not want any more new, disastrous free trade agreements. The majority of Americans believe that free trade has cost jobs in the United States and that trade agreements have hurt the country overall. So why do our politicians continue to push these disastrous agreements?

Gordon Lafer, former senior adviser to the U.S. House’s Labor Committee, makes the case that our lawmakers have chosen to serve their donors rather than the voters on the trade issue. He uses the case of the pending Colombian agreement as illustration, saying that our lawmakers are ignoring the workers rights issues that matter to their constituents in favor of bigger profits for their donors.

Full Story Here: The Truth About America’s Opinion of Free Trade | Economy In Crisis.

In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,’” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15th:

Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end “too big to fail” but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled “systemically important” that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.

That may be, but there is one bit of bad behavior that Uncle Sam himself does not have the funds to underwrite: the $32 trillion market in credit default swaps (CDS). Thirty-two trillion dollars is more than twice the U.S. GDP and more than twice the national debt.

CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95% of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs. The CDS market is unregulated, and there is no requirement that the “insurer” actually have the funds to pay up. CDS are more like bets, and a massive loss at the casino could bring the house down.

Full Story Here: How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street | Common Dreams.

As President Obama’s re-election campaign heats up, there are several new accounts of his track record finding their way into print. One item for which he is undeservedly given credit is saving the country from a second Great Depression.

The political elites believe in the salvation from the second Great Depression myth with the same fervency as little kids believe in Santa Claus. And, it has just as much grounding in reality.

While the Obama Administration, working alongside Ben Bernanke at the Fed, deserves credit for preventing a financial meltdown, a second Great Depression was never in the cards. The first Great Depression was brought about not only from misguided policies at the onset of the financial crisis, but also from an inadequate policy response.

Full Story Here: Revisiting the Second Great Depression » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

Republicans have become born-again champions of American manufacturing. This may have something to do with crucial primaries occurring next week in Michigan and the following week in Ohio, both of them former arsenals of American manufacturing.

Mitt Romney says he’ll “work to bring manufacturing back” to America by being tough on China, which he describes as “stealing jobs” by keeping value of its currency artificially low and thereby making its exports cheaper.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (Manufacturing Illusions).

This is the second in a two-part series by Chomsky on the US empire and its decline. Part one, Hegemony and Its Dilemmas, appeared yesterday.

In the years of conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, “losses” continued to mount elsewhere. In the past decade, for the first time in 500 years, South America has taken successful steps to free itself from western domination, another serious loss. The region has moved towards integration, and has begun to address some of the terrible internal problems of societies ruled by mostly Europeanized elites, tiny islands of extreme wealth in a sea of misery. They have also rid themselves of all U.S. military bases and of IMF controls. A newly formed organization, CELAC, includes all countries of the hemisphere apart from the U.S. and Canada. If it actually functions, that would be another step in American decline, in this case in what has always been regarded as “the backyard.”

Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries — Middle East/North Africa — which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Control of MENA energy reserves would yield “substantial control of the world,” in the words of the influential Roosevelt advisor A.A. Berle.

Full Story Here: The Imperial Way: American Decline in Perspective | Common Dreams.

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.

The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out — “anything that flies on anything that moves” — a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.

Full Story Here: “Losing” the World: American Decline in Perspective | Truthout.

Watching what’s happening to our democracy is like watching the cruise ship Costa Concordia founder and sink slowly into the sea off the coast of Italy, as the passengers, shorn of life vests, scramble for safety as best they can, while the captain trips and falls conveniently into a waiting life boat.

We are drowning here, with gaping holes torn into the hull of the ship of state from charges detonated by the owners and manipulators of capital. Their wealth has become a demonic force in politics. Nothing can stop them. Not the law, which has been written to accommodate them. Not scrutiny — they have no shame. Not a decent respect for the welfare of others — the people without means, their safety net shredded, left helpless before events beyond their control.

The obstacles facing the millennial generation didn’t just happen. Take an economy skewed to the top, low wages and missing jobs, predatory interest rates on college loans: these are politically engineered consequences of government of, by, and for the one percent. So, too, is our tax code the product of money and politics, influence and favoritism, lobbyists and the laws they draft for rented politicians to enact.

Full Story Here: Money Throws Democracy Overboard | Common Dreams.

Senators will not get a pass from anti-tar sands activists

Beginning at noon today, a coalition of over a dozen environmental groups, progressive organizations, and socially minded businesses — including 350.org, NRDC, Sierra Club, MoveOn.org and companies like Patagonia and Northface — are launching a 24 hour “signature bomb” with the goal of sending the Senate over 500,000 messages opposing Keystone XL and urging Senators to block any amendments that reverse the President’s pipeline rejection.

UPDATE: (4:35 PM EST) According to reports:

Senate Republicans officially filed an amendment Monday afternoon to the transportation bill that would authorize the Keystone XL pipeline. The amendment is sponsored by Sens. John Hoeven, Mitch McConnell, Richard Lugar, David Vitter, Mike Johanns and Orrin Hatch.

And 350.org reports:

Click here to add your name to our growing movement wide petition to stop Keystone XL — there are over 300,000 signatures and counting: 350.org/kxl

Full Story Here: Groups Galvanize Against US Senate with 24 Hour ‘Signature Bomb’ | Common Dreams.

New data indicates warming of 2C now planet’s “most optimistic” scenario

New climate information from French scientists indicate that global warming of 2 C is the “most optimistic” scenario. Yet this is the amount of warming James Hansen has referred to as a “prescription for disaster.”

Agence France-Presse reports on the new climate scenarios:

 

French scientists unveiling new estimates for global warming said on Thursday the 2 C (3.6 F) goal enshrined by the United Nations was “the most optimistic” scenario left for greenhouse-gas emissions.

 

The estimates, compiled by five scientific institutes, will be handed to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

James Hansen: “Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient.  It would be a prescription for disaster.”

(IPCC) for consideration in its next big overview on global warming and its impacts. [...]

The French team said that by 2100, warming over pre-industrial times would range from two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) to 5.0 C (9.0 F

Full Story Here: Is ‘Prescription for Disaster’ Our ‘Most Optimistic’ Climate Future? | Common Dreams.

The right’s stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left

Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today’s progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly “different” others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

Full Story Here: The right’s stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Today we take the idea of a minimum wage for granted. Who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Social decency, most Americans today would agree, demands a minimum wage, a floor that keeps working people out of dire privation. Does social decency also demand a “maximum wage,” an income ceiling that discourages wealth from dangerously concentrating?

Philosopher Felix Adler certainly thought so. We remember Adler today as the tireless reformer who led the national effort to end child labor in the early 1900s. Adler also founded the Ethical Culture movement and introduced the kindergarten concept into American education. Much less well known: Adler advanced America’s first serious maximum wage proposal.

The exploitation of workers young and old, Adler believed, generated grand private fortunes that exerted a “corrupting influence” on American politics. To curb that corruption, he proposed a steeply graduated income tax — with a 100 percent top rate at the point “when a certain high and abundant sum has been reached, amply sufficient for all the comforts and true refinements of life.”

Full Story Here: Runaway Greed Is Destroying America: Should There Be a Lid on How Much Someone Can Make? | Economy | AlterNet.

Mother Jones readers have seen this one:

Full Story Here: Mind-Blowing Charts From the Senate’s Income Inequality Hearing | Mother Jones.

First, it is striking how America’s all-male Catholic hierarchy has seemingly colluded with Republicans in miraculously conceiving this issue as a potential “wedge” issue to mobilize blue-collar Catholics against President Obama and the Democrats.

Second, it is almost amusing to see bishops, now pretending to launch a last-ditch effort to prevent a sudden and unique incursion by the Obama administration against the freedom to practice their religion. The Catholic hierarchy has decisively “lost the war at home “ already, as Gail Collins notes, but is choosing to pick a political fight. The majority of Catholic women use birth control. Fe

Full Story Here: Obama/Catholic Contraception Controversy Boils Down to Workers’ Rights – Working In These Times.

Republican leaders in Congress are talking about dismembering the US Postal Service by cutting the number of delivery days, shuttering processing centers so that it will take longer for letters to arrive, closing thousands of rural and inner-city post offices and taking additional steps that would dramatically downsize one of the few national programs ordained by the original draft of the US Constitution. At the same time, supposedly “centrist” US Senators Tom Carper (D-DE), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Scott Brown (R-MA) are trying to build a “bipartisan consensus” for a death by slower cuts.

Their “21st Century Postal Service Act,” a supposed compromise now being weighed by the Senate, would still force the postal service to close hundreds of mail processing centers, shut thousands of post offices, cause massive delays in mail delivery and push consumers toward most expensive private-sector services. It is, says National Association of Letter Carriers President Fredric Rolando, “a classic case of ‘killing the Post-Office in order to save it.’ ”

Their rationale for making the bloodletting, much discussed in the media, holds that radical surgery is necessary because the postal service is in financial crisis.

The postal service, we are told, is broke.

There’s only one problem with this diagnosis.

It’s wrong.

The postal service is not broke.

Full Story Here: The Post Office Is Not Broke | The Nation.

Late last month, President Obama issued a new rule requiring health insurance companies to cover contraception with no co-pay. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said he will do everything and anything to overturn this decision. Almost all women — including 89% of Catholics — want to make their own decisions regarding contraception. Nevertheless, you can count on the fact that your member of Congress will be hearing from a vocal minority. This is just too important to sit on the sidelines.

Full Story Here: TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress not to block affordable access to contraception for all women | ThinkProgress.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

   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.

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.