Ryan Budget is Robin Hood in Reverse, On Steroids - Bob Greenstein

House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan's budget is a remarkable document — one that, for most of the past  half-century, would have been outside the bounds of mainstream discussion due to its extreme nature. In essence, this budget is Robin Hood in reverse — on steroids.  It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history).

Specifically, the Ryan budget would impose extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, and over time would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance or become underinsured. It would also impose severe cuts in non-defense discretionary programs—much deeper than the across-the-board cuts ("sequestration") that are scheduled to take place starting in January — thereby putting core government functions at still greater risk.

Yet alongside these extraordinary budget cuts, with their dismantling of key parts of the safety net, the budget features stunning new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

The full article is available here

Gas Price Rhetoric Pumps Up The Hype - Bob King

The debate about rising gasoline prices is generating a lot of fuzzy math. Hence the cloud of murky, misleading or downright inaccurate rhetoric flying around.  Here’s POLITICO’s guide to some of the season’s most bewildering rhetoric:

1) Oil and gasoline prices are the highest they’ve been since 1918. Or the past 150 years:
The reality: Gasoline prices are still below the peaks they reached under Bush in June 2008, when the inflation-adjusted monthly average price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $4.26, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And even at $107 a barrel, crude oil is still well below that summer’s high price of $145 a barrel.

2) Gasoline prices have doubled under Obama:
This statement is true, though it’s incomplete — which hasn’t stopped it from becoming part of the standard GOP stump speech on energy policy.  The pre-Obama era was no low-gas-price utopia either, and prices more than doubled under Bush before the financial crash. The summer 2008 peak was 127 percent higher than the inflation-adjusted price of $1.88 a gallon when Bush was inaugurated.

3) U.S. oil and gas production is way down under Obama. Or way up:
Here, the two parties sound like they live in separate universes.  On federal lands and federal offshore waters, oil production fell sharply last year, partly because of the after-effects of the BP spill — but was still 12 percent higher than before Obama became president.

Natural gas production, meanwhile has soared to the highest levels ever, mainly because of the industry’s success in extracting previously unimagined quantities from shale reserves on private and state-owned lands.

The production numbers, drops in fuel demand and improvements in energy efficiency have caused U.S. reliance on petroleum imports to shrink to their lowest levels since the late 1990s

4) Watergate-gate:
D.C.-area residents are familiar with the insanely high prices of the Exxon station at the Watergate complex, which routinely charges as much as $1 a gallon more than other stations less than a mile away — including a Sunoco across the street. So that makes it a magnet for news organizations or other groups shopping for a shocking price, especially one within walking distance of the White House.

The full article is available here

Conservative Christianity and Its Discontents - Religion Dispatches

Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in American evangelicalism, reaching into the classrooms of popular schools, like Cedarville University and Liberty University. Millions of evangelical youth grow up hearing that there is a real debate when it comes to human origins, that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice, and that secular historians are suppressing the vision of the Founding Fathers that America was supposed to be a Christian nation.

Controversies that should have died decades and even centuries ago are kept alive by organizations invested in the answers of yesteryear, often because those old answers, say stalwarts, came from the Bible and are believed to have been laid down by God. These answers informed the thinking of a long-gone society that, through the rose-tinted glasses of those nostalgic for a better time, looks moral, family-oriented, and respectful of God’s laws in ways that the present age is not.

Many evangelicals, skeptical that a PhD after a name gives any reasonable authority, have come to sympathize with and even celebrate Fox News’ and its most well-known anti-intellectual, Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly, who pits his understanding against that of experts in their fields of study, is fond of scoffing, “sorry, professor, not buying it,” suggesting that expertise is really just opinion.

There are many academic historians, geneticists, psychologists, and other intellectuals within the Christian tradition who do not deny the knowledge claims of their respective fields. Such believers, however, are viewed with suspicion if they do not speak the language of biblical inerrancy, anti-evolution, and conservative politics embraced by other Christians.  The intellectual trajectory of American evangelicalism is not encouraging.

The full article is available here

Lessons To Be Learned From Greece - Nicholas Kristof

In the United States, Republicans lambaste President Obama's stimulus package as a failure and insist on bone-crunching budget-cutting. If you want to know how well that works, come visit Europe — especially Greece.

Yes, Greece needed a wake-up whack and economic reform, but Republican-style austerity knocked the patient unconscious. Contrast the still-shrinking economies of Europe with the stirrings of recovery in the United States, and you feel lucky to be an American and a beneficiary of President Obama's stimulus.

No doubt Greece had been living recklessly and needed structural reforms. While much of Europe was fundamentally healthy until the crisis hit, Greece truly was a mess. But the problem was not a welfare state — Greece has much less of a safety net than northern Europe. Rather, it was corruption, inefficiency and a system in which laws are optional.

Yet instead of structural reforms or improved tax collection, what has changed in Greece, so far, has mostly been slashed budgets. And austerity in the middle of recession has made matters worse — just as John Maynard Keynes predicted.

One of the earliest recorded economic crises in the Western world came in Athens in the fifth century B.C. Fortunately, Athens was then led by the great Pericles, an early Keynesian who did not respond by slashing budgets.

Instead, he ordered a public-works initiative and built the Parthenon.

The full article is available here

Walmart is no savior: More small businesses = healthier people - Tom Laskway

Reforming our food system is a Herculean task; one that might intimidate Hercules himself.  Of the 40,000 food items in a typical U.S. grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations.  And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.

A new report from Food and Water Watch argues that, not only is Walmart’s dominance problematic in general, but the company’s recent projection of itself as a food system savior is misleading.

Walmart’s model is based on practices that drive consolidation; take money away from farmers, workers, and processors; and drive agriculture to get more industrialized. Walmart’s model is part of the problem, which means the company is not going to be a meaningful part of the solution to shortcomings in the modern-day food supply.

A recent study published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society suggests that communities that invite Walmart in may be making a devil’s bargain. The study found strong evidence that communities that rely on big box retailers — and large corporate employers in general — are less healthy and have higher rates of obesity and diabetes than those that don’t.

The researchers found that, despite the advantages that employees of large companies have in income and benefits, communities as a whole who relied on small businesses were more healthy otherwise. As they put it, “The concentration of small businesses is associated with lower rates of mortality, obesity and diabetes.”

The full article is available here

Challenging the Self-Made Myth - Katrina vanden Heuvel

Over the last thirty years, anti-government arguments by conservative pundits and politicians have gained prominence, and the rhetoric this 2012 campaign season seems more toxic than ever.  Republicans are relentlessly pushing the notion that lower taxes, less regulation and small government (except for Defense) will magically end the recession, create a better country, and “job creators” will lift all boats.

It’s BS. As Congressman Barney Frank recently said, “I’ve never seen a tax cut put out a fire. I’ve never seen a tax cut build a bridge.”  Americans benefit every day from government—from consumer protection to roads and bridges to food and safety regulation.

A central myth that underlies today’s anti-government rhetoric: that an individual’s success is the result of gumption and hard work alone.  In reality, personal success is closely tied to the supports society provides.  In fact, the greater an individual’s success, the greater his or her dependence on public infrastructure, public investment in research and innovation, and regulations and fair rules.

No one has honed in on the need to reset the narrative on government more effectively than Elizabeth Warren who laid out her cogent argument simply and powerfully in a gritty video clip that went viral: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. You built a factory? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

The full article is available here

As Santorum and Romney Battle for Loony Right, The Rest of Us Shouldn't Gloat - Robert Reich

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat.  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, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.  Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they’re still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That’s a problem for the nation.

The GOP’s drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years.  They were not pleased to have a Democrat back in the White House in 2008, let alone a black one. They rose up in the 2010 election cycle as “tea partiers” and have by now pushed the GOP further right than it has been in more than eighty years.

The full article is available here

Wall Street Oil Speculation Driving Surge in Gas Prices - CommonDreams.org

Despite rising prices at US gas pumps, demand in the US was so low it has become a net exporter of gasoline, unable to consume all that it generates. This fact contradicts the familiar refrain from GOP politicians and operatives who claim that a 'Drill Everywhere' agenda would solve US energy woes or lead to lower prices for consumers.

That speculators have a huge impact on oil and gasoline prices is not news to anyone paying attention to the subject over the years, but it is an aspect that most media outlets rarely mention -- even when spiking gasoline prices dominate the news cycle. And legislatively, efforts to bring damaging speculative practices under control have continually stalled in Congress.

The full article is available here

What Bible is Santorum Reading? -- Mike Lux

When you claim to fervently believe in the holy words of the Judeo-Christian Bible, and your political philosophy is diametrically opposed to most of what is actually in that Bible, I have to call you out on that.

Rick Santorum's recently commented that President Obama's agenda is "Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology." I am now beginning to wonder if Santorum and other conservatives are just reading a different Bible entirely than the one I read.

While you can -- if you really work hard to do it -- find verses here and there supporting a more conservative political point of view on certain specific issues, there is simply no way to read the Bible I read and not come to the conclusion that it is overwhelmingly supportive of helping the poor, showing mercy to the weak, refraining from judging, treating others as you would treat yourself, calling on the wealthy to give their money to the poor.

Jesus talks about mercy to those in trouble in 24 verses of the Gospels, tells people not to judge in 34 verses, tells people to love and forgive even their enemies in 53 verses, tells people to love their neighbors as themselves and treat others as they would want to be treated in 19 verses, and specifically tells people to help the poor and/or spurn riches and the wealthy in 128 verses.

If you want to believe in a God who doesn't care about the poor, loves the wealthy more than anyone else, and wants you to be selfish, feel free. But when you claim to fervently believe in the holy words of the Judeo-Christian Bible, and your political philosophy is diametrically opposed to most of what is actually in that Bible, I have to call you out on that. When Rick Santorum says that Obama follows a theology not based on the Bible, I have to say this: either he is not reading the same Bible I do, or he is not reading the Bible at all, because Rick Santorum's political views are in direct, fundamental opposition to the Bible he claims to follow.

Modern conservatives argue that everyone should take what they want and devil take the hindmost, that we are all on our own, and that if you are rich it means that a Darwinian selection process allowed you to succeed, and that you owe nothing to anyone else. Modern conservatives are far more faithful to Ayn Rand, who openly rejected Christianity because of its values of helping the poor and caring for others. Give her credit for one thing: at least she was honest.

The full article is available here

2 Years After Haiti's Quake, Women Still Shattered by Sexual Exploitation -- Michelle Chen

It’s been two years since hell paid Haiti a visit, but for countless women, terror still stalks the ruins. The scars of the January 2010 earthquake are etched on their bodies, in an ever-widening pattern of sexual exploitation. 

A crisis of gender-based violence and exploitation is festering--and foreign aid efforts are still failing to protect survivor communities from harm, or to make the criminal justice system more accountable.

“Survival sex” (referring to the trading of sex for basic resources) has become a common way to get by in an economy that traffics in desperation. Last November and December a research team found that many women and girls had “exchanged sex for food, education or other necessities for themselves and their families.”

Unable to secure decent work or housing, women and girls often turn to selling sex for precious resources like “coupons for aid distributions, access to direct aid distributions, cash for work programs, money, or even a single meal,” according to the study. Though many women surveyed said they used survival sex to meet individual needs, some women bartered sex to support their children or pay for schooling.

The full article is available here

Larry Summers & Bill Clinton: Democrats Who, Acting Like Republicans, Unleashed Wall St. - Robert Scheer

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason. 

Summers, like Clinton, still defends the reversal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a 1999 repeal that destroyed the wall between investment and commercial banking put into place by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.  He tries to obscure the obvious truth—that the too-big-to-fail banks, made legal by Clinton-era deregulation, required taxpayer bailouts.  Citigroup—where Robert Rubin, who preceded Summers as Clinton’s treasury secretary, played leading roles during a critical time—specialized in precisely the mortgage and other debt packages and insurance scams that were the source of America’s economic crisis.

In the current edition of Esquire magazine, Clinton, in a rare moment of honest appraisal of his record, conceded that his signing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), legalizing those credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, was based on bad advice. That advice would have had to come from Summers, his point man pushing the CFMA legislation, which Clinton signed into law during his lame-duck days.

That new law exempted derivatives trading from all existing regulations and regulatory agencies. Summers argued in his congressional testimony that there was no reason for any government regulation of what turned out to be tens of trillions of dollars in toxic assets.

The full article is available here

Adding to the deficit: Bush vs. Obama - Ezra Klein

Since President Obama became chief executive, the national debt has risen almost $5 trillion. But how much of that was because of policies passed by Obama, and how much was caused by the financial crisis, the continuation of past policies and other effects? For this analysis, we worked with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to attach a price tag to the legislation passed by Obama and his predecessor.

George W. Bush’s major policies increased the debt by more than $5 trillion during his presidency. Obama has increased the debt by less than $1 trillion.

Read the related article here

Apple Makes Good Products, Flawed Arguments -- Reagen-era Trade Negotiator Clyde Prestowitz

Several points in the recent New York Times story on Apple and why the iPhone jobs are mostly not in America caught my attention, but none more so than the statement by a top Apple executive that " We [Apple] don't have an obligation to solve America's problems."

In the 1981-86 period I was one of the U.S. government's top trade negotiators, especially with Japan. At that time, Apple was trying to crack the Japanese market for personal computers and getting nowhere. Steve Jobs and other Apple executives had the funny notion that the U.S. government had an obligation to help them and asked me and other negotiators at the Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to help them get on the shelf in Japan.

Apple's products still have a large U.S. government R&D content and I'll bet that the guy who says Apple has no obligation to help Uncle Sam does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple's intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use supply chains that stretch through a number of countries such as China and Japan between which there are long standing and bitter animosities.

And those supply chains. Are they the natural product of good old free market capitalism or does that scalability and flexibility and capacity to mobilize large numbers of workers on a moment's notice have something to do with government subsidies and the interventionist industrial policies and of most Asian economies? It's the latter, of course. Apple is not the pinnacle of capitalism. It's the pinnacle of the marriage of Silicon Valley innovation with strategic Asian mercantilism.

I'm amazed at the one way thinking of many U.S. corporate types as revealed in the article.  In several places, it states that America no longer produces the kind of workers with the kind of skills necessary to run the kinds of factories and supply chains that operate now in Asia.  But the truth is more nearly the opposite. It's because the companies are moving the jobs overseas that no Americans are learning the necessary skills. This is true for two reasons. One is that Americans are generally not stupid and recognize that because of off-shoring there won't be any those kinds of jobs and thus there is no sense in learning the skills necessary to do them. The second is that most of this kind of job or skill training occurs on the job, and if there are no jobs then there will be no skills.

The full article is available here

The Human Cost Of An iPhone - Charles Duhigg and David Barboza

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk.

Underage workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

The full article is available here

Catholic Leaders Call On Gingrich And Santorum To ‘Stop Perpetuating Ugly Racial Stereotypes’ About Poverty - Marie Diamond

Faith in Public Life reports that more than 40 Catholic leaders and theologians across the country are calling on two of their “fellow Catholics,” GOP contenders Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, to stop using divisive rhetoric about race and poverty on the campaign trail.

Noting that Catholics consider racism an “intrinsic evil,” the open letter confronts the two candidates about their comments singling out minorities who receive welfare.

Despite the fact that 39 percent of Americans on welfare are white, Gingrich and Santorum have directed their vitriol toward minorities in speeches before mostly-white audiences. Instead of acknowledging that millions of American families are looking for help in difficult times, the candidates have played up stereotypes of “lazy blacks” who prefer a government handout to hard work.

The full article is available here

Movie Review: Contraband - The AV Club

No one will confuse it with Maria, Full Of Grace, but like that more accomplished film about moving illegal material across borders, the little-hyped Mark Wahlberg smuggling drama Contraband benefits from elegant simplicity. (Even its brown-paper-bag of a title gets right to the point).

Wahlberg is always better as a character actor than an action star, but Contraband plays to his strengths by casting him as a fundamentally decent working-class man forced by circumstances into a desperate situation. Contraband’s modest goals keep it from ever soaring too high: It’s pretty much exactly as good as it needs to be. It’s little more than an effective genre film, but in this era of bloated, convoluted epics, that’s cause for minor celebration.

The full article is available here

Fact-Checking Newt Gingrich's "Food Stamps " Southern Strategy

Gingrich Rides Racially Coded Rhetoric to Surge in South Carolina - Ben Adler
Gingrich’s rhetoric -- calling President Obama “the best food stamp president in history” and so forth -- is a dog whistle designed to appeal to South Carolina’s white Republican voters. Gingrich boldly promised to "continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job," as if the majority of poor people were not, in fact, employed and as if the unemployed lack knowledge rather than opportunity.

Gingrich knows the secret to his success among Republicans is his penchant for mocking and excoriating liberals. In South Carolina that approach has taken on a racially inflammatory element, and it seems to be working.  This was the first state to secede from the Union. Surrounding the state capitol building there is a street named for slavery defender John Calhoun, a statue of segregation defender Strom Thurmond and a Confederate flag flying.  When he says black parents will take him up on his offer of jobs instead of food stamps some listeners might hear “get blacks off of food stamps,” particularly when it comes after his boast of having passed welfare reform.

Cynically, the rhetoric was a brilliant piece of jiu jitsu: Gingrich plays to racial animosity while claiming credit for trying to empower poor minorities.


Myths about Food Stamps - The Cost of Hunger Blog
MYTH 1: Most food stamp recipients wouldn’t need this benefit if they would just get a job.
50 percent of food stamp participants are children and 8 percent are elderly citizens. In fiscal year 2005, of all food stamp households, 84% contained either an elderly or disabled person or a child, and these households received 89% of all food stamp benefits. Commonly referred to as the “working poor,” many food stamp users who are employed full-time still earn poverty level wages, making it difficult to afford food.

MYTH 2: The Food Stamp Program uses tax dollars that never benefit my community.
every dollar in food stamp benefits generates two dollars in household spending. Food stamp benefits not only support grocery purchases, but also free up cash for other necessities, such as medical care, children’s clothing, house repairs, and child care. As more money is spent, more jobs are created, ultimately promoting a more robust local economy.

MYTH 3: Only people who are on welfare get food stamps.
As of 2005 less than 15 percent were receiving welfare and over 29 percent were gainfully employed. Participants need not be receiving welfare to receive food stamps.

MYTH 4: Food stamp recipients are all the same
Currently, food stamp beneficiaries are a diverse group. USDA statistics show that:

59 percent of food stamp recipients are female,
43 percent are Caucasian,
33 percent are African American,
19 percent are Hispanic,
2 percent are Asian, and
2 percent are Native American.


Fact-Checking Newt Gingrich's Food Stamps Claims - Huma Khan
It is true that the number of Americans who rely on food stamps is at a record high. Nearly 46 million Americans received benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — better known as food stamps — this year, the highest number in recorded history. But experts attribute that mainly to the weak economy and high unemployment. Additionally, George W. Bush’s administration expanded eligibility for food stamps to get more Americans to apply, which also contributed to an increase in recipients.

The idea that administrators are not working to cut fraud can also be challenged.  The Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, contracts with a computer firm to analyze food stamp purchases to root out fraud, for which it has received kudos from the Government Accountability Office.

While fraud remains a problem, it is not just a federal government issue. The problem also lies within states, each of which has a different requirement for who receives such benefits. In 35 states, people can get food stamps even if they don’t partake in any other assistance programs.  States are also responsible for targeting fraud by recipients, while the federal government monitors such misdemeanors on the retail side.

Walmart Trims Its Local Taxes - Worcester Telegram

A tax break for Walmart means higher taxes for residents, according to assessors in several area communities.

Wal-Mart Associates Inc. is headquartered in Bentonville, Ark., but stores incorporated in Massachusetts become domestic corporations — eligible for tax breaks — and it appears that many of the state’s Walmarts have recently taken advantage of those breaks.

Bob Bliss, spokesman for the state Department of Revenue, said, “One effect is that they are exempt from most personal property taxes. On the flip side, this may result in more state excise taxes paid. This is an individual decision each entity can make.”

Bob Ellia, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Assessing Officers, said the practice of incorporation for tax savings is common.

“I don’t know if this is a trend, but I do know it is not at all uncommon. Major companies do an analysis and compare what they pay in taxes under what status and do what they can to save money.”

Wal-Mart reported $419 billion in sales last year, to earn first place in the 2011 Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest companies by revenue.

The full article is available here

Christmas Post-Mortem: Market Culture’s Attack on US Families - John Brueggemann

As I join many in my community in the annual post-feast January slim-down, it occurred to me that this is a fitting moment to reflect on how expansive market culture is damaging the health of our families.  The symbolism of the religious spirit and the commercial frenzy of the holiday season are now thoroughly intertwined.

Without much consideration of this conflation, some Christians condemn “the attack on Christmas.” They blame secularists or other faith traditions. The irony of the imperative to defend Christmas and “put Christ back in Christmas” is that this problem is mainly a struggle between the Christian Jesus and the “Christian” Santa.

It is not Jews (or atheists) hassling Christians to spend weeks scurrying around worrying about stuff (which used to jumpstart on the hideous day of shopping after Thanksgiving known as Black Friday but now seems to begin after Halloween). If anything, the cultural imperialism of Christmas seems to have enabled a sort of Christianization or really Santafication of Chanukah.

One theme that helps define modern Christmas is the rapidly changing role of media technology.  As we come to terms with the cultural transformation of the information revolution, we have not yet figured out who is going to determine the ideals, laws, and manners around technology use and media exposure. I know many families in my community who feel outgunned in this regard. This is especially important as we shift from optional use of digital technology to basic dependence.

In Longing and Belong: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Allison J. Pugh observes that what really concerns parents in this regard is the “economy of dignity.” They know their children’s desire is not just about having stuff. It is about fitting in, about literately participating in discussions of popular culture on the playground.

Pugh finds that those families who effectively negotiate the question of spoiling versus their children being left behind raise kids who are socially successful. Because this is a very difficult time to fit in without competing and shopping like everyone else, resisting market culture is a relentless struggle. At no time during the year is this struggle more intense than the holidays.

Most people want to be comfortable, informed, active and connected. And we all need to come to terms with the culture in which we live. But that does not mean we have to passively accept all the craziness that comes our way.

The full article is available here

FDA Gives Up On Antibiotic Restrictions In Livestock - Tom Laskawy

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pulled a Scrooge move just before Christmas. The agency published an entry in the Federal Register declaring that it will end its attempt at mandatory restrictions on the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture.

According to the vast majority of microbiologists and public health experts, restrictions on agricultural uses are key to preserving the effectiveness of antibiotics as well as to preventing the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria like MRSA and salmonella Heidelberg (cause of last summer's record-breaking ground turkey recall).

Consumer groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Pew Charitable Trusts have been calling for an end to the practice for years. But it's not just outsiders who are fed up with the agency's work on this issue; the administration's own watchdog group, the Government Accountability Office, recently gave the agency a failing grade in the subject.

It seems that as long as the industry opposes it, the agency can't keep antibiotics out of our meat and dairy products (nor, for that matter, can it ensure that antibiotics will remain effective). If the agency continues to favor industry's concerns over the public health, it begs the question: Who exactly is looking out for us?

On the brighter side, several organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Public Citizen have actually filed a lawsuit against the FDA demanding the agency restrict antibiotics in animals. So it may just fall to a federal judge to determine what's truly good for the public interest. Of course, it would be nice if the agency actually tasked with that responsibility would step up to the plate.

The full article is available here

2011: The Year of Resistance to Conservatism's "War of the Words" - Richard Eskow

Words are the weapons of choice in economic and political wars. Corporatists own the Republican Party, and large swathes of the Democratic Party too. Most Americans disagree with their ambitions, but they've been so good at designing and using these linguistic weapons that the public hasn't had a chance. 

From "death tax" to "job creators," the public has been saturated with prefabricated words and phrases that reshapes the thinking of millions of people in an Orwellian way.  Teachers, police, bus drivers and firefighters became "special interests" while mega-corporations became "people" who were being "deprived of their rights."

But something was different this year. This was the year that the people came up with some words of their own, outside the corporate- and billionaire-funded think tanks of conservatism. For the first time in many years, the right-wing warriors of language ran into heavy resistance. That's an important development that should be celebrated - and repeated.

The full article is available here

Obama Has Adopted Many Core Republican Beliefs. Is That Why Their 2012 Candidates Are A Disaster? - Glenn Greenwald

Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff.

The Republican presidential primaries have been a particularly base spectacle. Republicans have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny.

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger.

Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.  They render themselves inherently absurd.

The full article is available here

If It Ain't Broke, Break It - Keith Ellison

When your entire philosophy is that government is the problem, you make government the problem. 

Last week, Speaker Boehner described the Senate deal for extending middle-class tax cuts and unemployment benefits as acceptable.  No sooner did the Tea Party House Republicans begin to fear that this good faith compromise just might succeed than they stepped forward and smashed the deal.  What happened? The anti-government ideologues happened.

The Tea Partiers rejected the deal their leader blessed—knowing full well the Senate would not capitulate to their demand—and thereby risking the livelihood of 160 million Americans who depend on the extension of unemployment benefits and payroll tax cuts. These are the Grover Norquist disciples who want to “drown government in the bathtub."

When your entire philosophy is that government is the problem, you make government the problem. Even conservative economists agree that unemployment benefits create jobs by allowing consumers to spend more money. Yet this conflicts with the Republicans’ predetermined ideology that no government action can help.

The Republican philosophy goes something like this: if you take your car to the mechanic and instead of fixing it, they take out the engine and charge you an arm and a leg, you should conclude that mechanics can’t fix cars and you should probably just take yours to the junkyard and sell it for scrap metal.

But the truth is—you probably just hired a bad mechanic.

The full article is available here

“War on Christmas”: Anti-Semitic, White Supremacist Roots of Right's Annual Culture War - Max Blumenthal

The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry, providing an effective boost for conservative fundraising and a ratings bonanza for right-wing media. 

What would Christmas be without warnings of the secular crusade to destroy it? Thanks to the fulminations of cable news cranks and evangelical moralists, the War on Christmas has become an annual outrage.

The story typically goes as follows: secular elements have intimidated stores into replacing the phrase “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays;” nativity scenes have been removed from public spaces under threat of ACLU lawsuits; a decadent culture is moving ever closer to eradicating Christian morality; and America slouches towards Gomorrah.

The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry, providing an effective boost for conservative fundraising and a ratings bonanza for right-wing media.  So who was the genius that created it? To find the answer, a visit with the ghost of conservatism’s past is in order.

In his 1995 book, Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow argued that the influx of “weird aliens with dubious habits” from developing nations was eroding America’s white Christian “ethnic core,” and in turn, sullying its cultural underpinnings. The War on Christmas was, in his view, a particularly pernicious iteration of the multicultural “struggle to abolish America.”

In 1999, Brimelow founded what would become the internet’s leading anti-immigration web journal, VDare.com, named for the first British child born in the Americas. Brimelow’s new venture provided a forum to allies like Jared Taylor, a white supremacist publisher, and Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychology professor who has argued that Jews are genetically equipped to out-compete Gentiles for resources and power.

VDare became the staging ground for the War on the War on Christmas. Unlike their more respectable counterparts, Brimelow’s writers dared to name the true anti-Christian Grinch: Jews.

VDare’s 2005 War on Christmas winner, Steve Sailer, a Eugenics enthusiast, wrote, “those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas.”

By 2005, Fox News personalities Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson were dedicating entire shows to the War on Christmas. While their rants were directed at “secular progressives,” they echoed the arguments of Brimelow’s allies. “It’s all part of the secular progressive agenda,” O’Reilly grumbled. “If you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs, like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage.” National Review’s website jumped back on the bandwagon, beginning with editor Kathryn Jean Lopez’s promotion of Gibson’s bestselling 2005 polemic, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.

The full article is available here

The Nastiness of Newt Gingrich - The Nation

Early in this years Presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich emerge as the cruelest and most unusual contender.

It figured that a Republican presidential primary race defined by nothing so much as a taste for cruel and unusual politics would eventually see Newt Gingrich emerge as the cruelest and most unusual contender.  And so he has, emerging as the default choice of a new breed of Republican so extreme it would scare the bejeezus out of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan.

Last week, he stepped up with a proposal to fire school janitors and replace them with child laborers. Blaming “the core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization” for “crippling” children, Gingrich told a Harvard audience, “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, in child laws, which are truly stupid.”

Even in a party where shamelessness is now considered a virtue, it’s unsettling that a man who collected $30,000 a month for an hour of counsel to Freddie Mac administrators would attack school janitors, who according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics earn a mean wage of $13.74 an hour, or $28,570 a year.

In response to Gingrich, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said, “The people you want to fire and replace with kids? A lot of them are parents. That job puts a roof over kids’ heads, food on the table, and provides them with healthcare and the chance to get an education. That job is the only thing between a kid and poverty.” But Gingrich has never been bothered by the human costs of right-wing social experimentation.

Should GOP disdain for Romney be so overarching that Gingrich prevails, he will then be the beneficiary of the largesse that Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and others are accumulating to pay for an anyone-but-Obama campaign in the fall.

The full article is available here

Dead Afghan Kids Still Not Newsworthy - Peter Hart

We've been conditioned simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning.

On November 25, the New York Times reported--on page 12--that six children were killed in one attack in southern Afghanistan on November 23. This news was, as best I can tell, not reported on ABC, CBS, NBC or the PBS NewsHour.

There were, on the other hand, several pieces about U.S. soldiers eating Thanksgiving dinners.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald was one of the few commentators to write about the latest killings. As he observed:

We're trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: We're just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting. Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It's just like background noise: Two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don't target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to). It's acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they're costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious--pacifists!--point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.

The full article is available here

Fox News Spins Pepper Spraying Cops: ‘It’s a Food Product, Essentially’ - Gawker

Fox News hosts Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly got to talking about a UC Davis police officer's appalling use of pepper spray on nonviolent protesters. Guess what direction the conversation took!

If you guessed "needlessly deferential to authority and dismissive to the suffering of protesters," you guessed correctly!  (What pepper spray does to your body)

"I don't think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police," O'Reilly says, "particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus."

God forbid! We'd never want to question Lt. John Pike's decision to generously and indifferently dust peacefully sitting protesters with pepper spray from only a few feet away. Especially given that Davis is, you know, a liberal campus!

And, gosh, even if we were going to Monday-morning quarterback the police, shouldn't we remember, as Megyn Kelly tells O'Reilly, that pepper spray is "a food product, essentially"?

The full article is available here

Memo Reveals How Seriously Powerful Interests Take Occupy Wall Street - George Zornick

Television show Up With Chris Hayes unveiled a major scoop: the show obtained a written pitch to the American Bankers Association from a prominent Washington lobbying firm, proposing a $850,000 smear campaign against Occupy Wall Street.

The memo, issued by Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford, described the danger presented by the burgeoning movement, saying that if Democrats embraced Occupy, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street.… It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.” Furthermore, it notes that “the bigger concern…should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies.”

We’ve seen similar efforts already. Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS has blanketed Massachusetts airwaves with commercials depicting Occupy protestors as crazed radicals, and hitting Elizabeth Warren for embracing them.

These episodes belie any conservative claims that Occupy Wall Street (1) doesn’t have a clear purpose, or (2) won’t be effective. Rove has wondered in the past “what are these people for? To the degree that they’re for anything it’s left wing nuttiness.” Grover Norquist tweeted the other day that he hopes Occupy DC “keep(s) this up” because “Hippies elected Nixon. OWS will beat Obama.” Fox News is full of similar dismissals of Occupiers as dangerous, confused folks.

But if Rove thinks Occupy doesn’t present a clear message, why is he spending millions of dollars to attack them? Similarly, CLGC staffers are political professionals with many Wall Street clients, and the memo shows how seriously they consider the threat presented to powerful financial firms by the Occupy protests.

The full article is available here

Fox Falsely Dubs Alleged White House Attacker As "'Occupy' Shooter" - Media Matters

An official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said the motive for the gunfire might have been simple anger. 

During the November 17 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson asked Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin: "It looks like this White House shooting suspect may have tried to blend in with the Occupy protesters in D.C. when he came from out West. So I pose this question to you this morning: What would have happened if a tea party person had tried to do that?"

Malkin responded that "there is now conflicting testimony or evidence of whether he was in the Occupy D.C. camp, but apparently, reportedly, allegedly there is somebody within that movement who has confirmed that he was there at the camps."

Malkin later noted that "the guy was just completely off his rocker and had nothing to do with any coherent sense of political ideology." But during the segment, onscreen text continued to tie Ortega-Hernandez to the Occupy D.C. movement.

In trying to determine why he recently traveled to the nation's capital from the western part of the country, investigators searched the Occupy D.C. campground near the White House but have found no connection between him and the Occupy protesters, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the case.

One of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said the motive for the gunfire might have been simple anger: Ortega-Hernandez "hates the president, he hates Washington, he hates society," the official said.

The full article is available here

Surprise! Right Wing Anti-Solyndra/Anti-Obama Ad Is ‘Mostly False’ - Chris Mims

An anti-Solyndra ad put out by Americans For Prosperity has been viewed 1 million times on YouTube alone, not to mention millions more on television.  Which just goes to show you that if you give the people what they want, they will eat it up like delicious candied bacon, because who doesn't like having their completely ridiculous prejudices reinforced at the expense of truth and our country's future economic prosperity?

One problem though; it is wrong.  Here are just a few of its by-now-canonical-on-Fox-News lies:

• The ad says that "friends of Obama" benefited from the loan, but it references a Daily Caller article about George Kaiser, who, according to Politifact, "is neither a shareholder nor an executive of Solyndra."
  
• Accusations that internal administration emails point to a special relationship with Solyndra are also false -- it’s sort of the opposite. An email from Steve Mitchell, who did get a meeting at the White House and who was connected to Solyndra, said, "I think the company is hoping that we have some unnatural relationship [with administration officials] that can open bigger doors -- I've cautioned them that no one really has those relationships anymore."
  
• Solyndra's loan guarantee was commenced under Bush Jr., not Obama. In the words of Politifact, " … the money wasn't Obama's to give. Solyndra's request predated his administration, and career Energy Department officials handled the deal."

The full article is available here

Dining out with Thomas and Scalia - Laura Conaway

The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to health reform this spring.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is married to a paid advocate against the health reform law, which raises the question of whether he'll recuse himself now that the Supreme Court says it will hear the case.

The day the Supreme Court gathered behind closed doors to consider the politically divisive question of whether it would hear a challenge to President Obama’s healthcare law, two of its justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, were feted at a dinner sponsored by the law firm that will argue the case before the high court.

All of this might be slightly less disconcerting were it not for the even larger context, including Scalia and Thomas having attended a conservative strategy session hosted by Koch Industries last year.

Can anyone have confidence in the objectivity of Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas, knowing their connections to electoral politics?

The full article is available here

Obama’s Offshore Oil-Drilling Expansion Doesn’t Wash - Tyson Slocum

It's clear that the Obama administration is willing to override the serious safety concerns raised by its own oil spill commission.

The Department of the Interior's new five-year offshore oil-drilling plan is bad news for the environment, oil workers and taxpayers.

Environmentalists and workplace safety advocates who reasonably anticipated regulatory reform of the oil industry in advance of any new offshore oil-drilling policy are deeply disappointed.

This plan was made in the absence of new safety rules designed to protect workers and the environment. We haven’t updated offshore drilling laws since 1978 – well before we had a deepwater or robust arctic drilling industry. We already know what happens when the oil industry is inadequately regulated.

With DOI’s announcement, it is clear that the administration is willing to override the serious safety concerns raised by its own oil spill commission formed in response to the BP oil disaster. It is unconscionable that new offshore oil drilling will be undertaken without any congressional reform of drilling rules and safety regulation.

The full article is available here

Time To Disband The Supercommittee - The Nation

The economy is in serious trouble. There are 25 million people in need of full-time work, wages are declining and one in four mortgages is underwater. People want Congress to focus on jobs and the economy. So how is it that after a few weeks of inching toward talk about unemployment, Congress has turned its attention back to austerity measures guaranteed to destroy jobs, not create them?

We’re approaching the deadline of the supercommittee, the despicable offspring of last summer’s debt-ceiling deal, in which a “gang of twelve” legislators was given extraordinary powers to meet in secret and decide the economic fate of the nation—a terrible precedent for our democracy. It must forge a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion by Thanksgiving, and if nothing is passed by Christmas, deep cuts in discretionary spending begin automatically in 2013.

In a foolish concession to GOP extremism, the majority of Democrats on the supercommittee suggested $3 trillion in deficit reduction, with the ratio of spending cuts to tax hikes at a regressive six to one. A large chunk of those cuts would come from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. These Democrats have thus given up on the core legacy of their party—and a core obligation of the nation. Even so, House Speaker John Boehner scorned their pre-emptive concessions while supercommittee Republicans suggested even harsher measures that would fall most heavily on the neediest.

The full article is available here

Meet Your 7 Billion Neighbors - Lisa Hymas

Yeah, yeah, you know -- the world population is hitting 7 billion this year. Here are some facts about the world's people that you might not already be familiar with.

• 60 -- percentage of key ecosystem services (freshwater, air and water purification, etc.) degraded or used unsustainably by humans over the last 50 years
• 215 million -- number of women in the world who want to prevent or delay pregnancy but don't have access to modern contraception
• $16.9 billion -- estimated annual cost of providing family-planning services to all women in developing countries
• $20.8 billion -- amount Wall Street firms paid out in bonuses in 2010

The full article is available here

Stark Divide Between Who Caused Climate Change and Who's Being Hit - Damian Carrington

While rich, industrialized nations caused climate change through past carbon emissions, it is the developing world that is bearing the brunt.  The point is starkly illustrated in a new map of climate vulnerability: the rich global north has low vulnerability, the poor global south has high vulnerability.

Large areas of north America and northern Europe are not so exposed to actual climate risk, and are very well placed to deal with it. 

The map is produced by risk analysts Maplecroft by combining measures of the risk of climate change impacts, such as storms, floods, and droughts, with the social and financial ability of both communities and governments to cope. The top three most vulnerable nations reflect all these factors: Haiti, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe.

It is not until you go all the way down 103 on the list, out of 193 nations, that you encounter the first major developed nation: Greece. The first 102 nations are all developing ones. Italy is next, at 124, and like Greece ranks relatively highly due to the risk of drought.

The full article is available here

Saving Capitalism From Crony Capitalists - Nicholas D. Kristof

Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked communists aiming to bring down the U.S. economic system when they're not doing drugs or having sex in public.

The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a "mob" trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.

To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.

Financial institutions boost leverage in search of super-size profits and bonuses. Banks pretend that risk is eliminated because it's securitized. Rating agencies accept money to issue an imprimatur that turns out to be meaningless. The system teeters, and then the taxpayer rushes in to bail bankers out. Where's the accountability?

Yes, we face a threat to our capitalist system. But it's not coming from those manning the barricades at Occupy Wall Street protests. Rather, it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives.

The full article is available here

Immunity & Impunity in Elite America: How The 1% Subvert Rule of Law - Glenn Greenwald

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. 

While the Founders accepted outcome inequality, they emphasized -- over and over -- that its legitimacy hinged on subjecting everyone to the law’s mandates on an equal basis. Jefferson wrote that the essence of America would be that “the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.”

Today, it is glaringly obvious to a wide range of Americans that the wealth of the top 1% is the byproduct not of risk-taking entrepreneurship, but of corrupted control of our legal and political systems. It is equally obvious that they are using that power not to lift the boats of ordinary Americans but to sink them.

In lieu of the rule of law -- the equal application of rules to everyone -- what we have now is a two-tiered justice system in which the powerful are immunized while the powerless are punished with increasing mercilessness. As a guarantor of outcomes, the law has, by now, been so completely perverted that it is an incomparably potent weapon for entrenching inequality further, controlling the powerless, and ensuring corrupted outcomes.

The tide that was supposed to lift all ships has, in fact, left startling numbers of Americans underwater. In the process, we lost any sense that a common set of rules applies to everyone, and so there is no longer a legitimizing anchor for the vast income and wealth inequalities that plague the nation.

The full article is available here

New Inequality Data Likely to Boost "Occupy" Movement - Jim Lobe

A major study on income equality by a non-partisan government agency is likely to boost the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, whose standing with the general public appears on the rise, according to a new poll.

The study, released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), found that the average after-tax real income of the top one percent of the nation's households grew by 275% between 1979 and 2007 - about seven times greater than the increase in income by the remaining 99 percent over the same period.

And the income of the poorest 20% of the nation's earners grew by a mere 18% during that period, according to the report, which had been requested by the senior Democratic and Republican members on the Senator Finance Committee several years ago. That was less than one percent per year.

The report – the latest in a series of private or non-profit studies that confirm a sharp rise in income and wealth inequality over the past generation – came as a new New York Times/CBS News poll showed stronger-than-expected popular support for the "Occupy" movement, which has spread to dozens of cities across the country.

The full article is available here

Why America Must Revive Its Middle Class - Jeffrey Sachs

Economically, things began to fray, and fray badly, in the 1970s. Yet America misdiagnosed the problems. Rather than focus on the overseas challenge to U.S. competitiveness, Ronald Reagan declared in 1980 that government was not the solution to our problems--it was the problem. The key to re-establishing a sound economy, he claimed, was to slash taxes, reduce government programs like energy research and social insurance and generally adhere to a free-market course.

The Reagan diagnosis neglected the fact that the federal government had been a handmaiden of the country's inclusive growth of the 1950s and '60s. Worse, the Reagan Revolution failed to grapple with the even bigger upheaval of globalization.

The new globalization has accelerated the hollowing out of U.S. industries such as apparel, autos and textiles and in the process devastated the middle class employed in manufacturing, except in the highest-skill areas. Although American consumers have been the beneficiaries of a flood of low-cost and high-quality Chinese products, America's industrial workers have paid for it in wage cuts and higher unemployment.

The median earnings of full-time male workers reached their peak way back in 1973. Female workers have fared somewhat better, in part because they are disproportionately in areas like health care and education, which are more sheltered from global competition. The earnings of the CEOs who oversaw this loss of competitiveness, of course, soared spectacularly, especially as they grabbed stock options designed for their benefit.

The truth is that it will take more spending--not in the form of haphazard stimulus but in smart long-term public investments in education, infrastructure and human capital--to get us out of our present mess. It's time to stop arguing about spending cuts for everyone and tax cuts for the rich. Instead, Congress should be having a serious discussion about how we're going to fund our future competitiveness. In this way, we can build the skills and productivity in our society to compete effectively in the 21st century.

The full article is available here

Why Are Police Attacking Peaceful Protesters? OWS Exposes Militarization of US Law Enforcement

Now all of America is seeing the result of police militarization. Efforts to intimidate the protesters are symptoms of three decades of policies that have militarized civilian law enforcement.

Police repression in America is hardly new. Low-income neighborhoods, communities of color and political activists have always had to deal with unnecessary shows of force by some police officers. However, as the number of Occupy arrests nears 1,000, instances of police brutality continue to pile up.

The Oakland Police fired tear gas on demonstrators Tuesday night as they marched through downtown, determined to reclaim the camp that officers destroyed that morning. The use of force seriously injured an Occupy activist and Iraq War veteran. Scott Olsen, 24, remains sedated on a respirator, in stable but critical condition at Highland Hospital. Video posted to YouTube suggests that Olsen was hit at close range with a tear-gas canister. After demonstrators rush to Olsen's aid, an Oakland cop waits a few beats before lobbing a second explosive device at the crowd.

Felix Rivera-Pitre was punched in the face in New York during a march through the city’s financial district; Ryan Hadar was dragged out of the street by his thumbs at Occupy San Francisco; and at Occupy Boston, members of Veterans for Peace were shoved to the ground and dragged away for chanting and peacefully occupying a local park.

Now all of America is seeing the result of police militarization. Efforts to intimidate the protesters are symptoms of three decades of policies that have militarized civilian law enforcement.

A clear pattern has emerged in the response to occupations throughout the country, from San Francisco to Denver, involving midnight raids by heavily armed paramilitary units of riot police deployed to enforce park curfews.

This level of overwhelming police presence, along with the disproportionate and combative force directed at peaceful, unarmed protesters, alarms Americans previously unaware of the increasingly militaristic nature of American law enforcement.

The full article is available here

The Flat-Tax Fraud, and the Necessity of a Truly Progressive Tax - Robert Reich

The flat tax is a fraud. It raises taxes on the poor and lowers them on the rich.  The details of flat-tax proposals vary, of course. But all of them end up benefiting the rich more than the poor for one simple reason: Today’s tax code is still at least moderately progressive.

Flat-taxers pretend a flat tax is good public policy, for two reasons.  First, they say, it would simplify paying taxes. Baloney. Flat-tax proposals don’t eliminate popular deductions. Second, they say a flat tax is fairer than the current system.  The truth is the current tax code treats everyone the same.

The real problem is the top brackets are set too low relative to where the money is. The top-most bracket starts at $375,000 a year. People with incomes higher than that pay 35 percent – again, only on that portion of their incomes exceeding $375,000.  This is absurd. It means a professional who’s making, say, $380,000 a year pays the same income-tax rate as a plutocrat pulling in $2 billion or $20 billion.

Actually, it’s worse than that because the plutocrats get most of their income in the form of capital gains, which are taxed at only 15 percent. That’s why America’s 400 richest people – who earned an average of $300 million last year, and who have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together – now pay at a 17 percent rate (according to the IRS).

Regressives are pushing the flat tax as a smokescreen.

The full article is available here

Rabbit-Hole Economics - Paul Krugman

Reading the transcript of the most recent Republican debate on the economy is, for anyone who has actually been following economic events these past few years, like falling down a rabbit hole. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantasy world where nothing looks or behaves the way it does in real life.

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying. 

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation...

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

The GOP is becoming a caricature of itself.

The full article is available here

The Self-Righteous, the Ideologically Confused… “the 53%” - Claire Snyder-Hall

Although I shouldn’t be surprised, I have to say that I do find myself angered and appalled by a reaction that has recently emerged in opposition to the Occupy Wall Street movement, a reaction by working people who claim to speak for “the 53%.” According to Slate, the 53% figure refers to the number of households that actually pay federal income tax. The other 47% do not have to pay either because they have so many deductions or they are simply too poor.

The 53% Tumblr site I discovered this week has the following ridiculous tagline: “We are the 53%: Those of us who pay for those of you who whine about all of that … or that … or whatever.” Apparently, each person posting on the site feels like he or she is personally supporting a bunch of free-loaders and that somehow all the protestors are living on hand-outs. Talk about self-aggrandizing and ignorant!

The Tumblr page shows a series of hard working people, many of whom are economically marginal by their own account. These people should be the base for progressive politics, but they clearly reject any attempt to enact policies that help regular people, like themselves, have a better life.

Instead, they would rather self-righteously defend the economic interests of those who exploit the labor of working people, who pad their own pockets by systematically trashing the commons. Some of the 53%-ers even seem offended to be considered part of the 99% that isn’t benefiting from the current system of distribution – as if recognizing their objective place in the current economic system is some kind of insult.

The full article is available here

Six Demands to Make of Wall Street - Bernie Sanders

The financial crisis and the jobs crisis have demonstrated to the American people that we now have a government that is of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent, as Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz eloquently articulated.  We now have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major, advanced country on earth.  The top one percent earn more income than the bottom 50 percent and the richest 400 Americans own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans.   

Now that Occupy Wall Street is shining a spot light against Wall Street greed and the enormous inequalities that exist in America, the question then becomes, how do we change the political, economic and financial system to work for all Americans, not just the top 1 percent?

1) If a financial institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

2) Put a cap on credit card interest rates to end usury.

3) The Federal Reserve needs to provide small businesses in America with the same low-interest loans it gave to foreign banks.

4) Stop Wall Street oil speculators from artificially increasing gasoline and heating oil prices.

5) Demand that Wall Street invest in the job-creating productive economy, instead of gambling on worthless derivatives.

6) Establish a Wall Street speculation fee on credit default swaps, derivatives, stock options and futures.

Reform will not be easy.  After all, Wall Street is clearly the most powerful lobbying force on Capitol Hill.  From 1998 through 2008, the financial sector spent over $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to deregulate Wall Street.  More recently, they spent hundreds of millions more to make the Dodd-Frank bill as weak as possible, and after its passage, hundreds of millions more to roll back or diluter the stronger provisions in that legislation.  

The full article is available here

The Seven Biggest Economic Lies - Robert Reich

The Occupiers on Wall Street and elsewhere can’t become a national movement for a more equitable society - unless more Americans know the truth about the economy. Here's an effort to rebut the seven biggest whoppers now being told by those who want to take America backwards.

1. "Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else." Baloney. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans’ wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and have dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.

2. "Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth." From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they’ve been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since.

3. "Shrinking government generates more jobs." According to Moody’s economist Mark Zandi (a campaign advisor to John McCain), the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs this year and next.

4. "Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy."  With so many Americans out of work, budget cuts now will shrink the economy. They’ll increase unemployment and reduce tax revenues. That will worsen the ratio of the debt to the total economy. The first priority must be getting jobs and growth back by boosting the economy.

5.  "Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits."  Medicare and Medicaid spending is rising quickly, to be sure. But that’s because the nation’s health-care costs are rising so fast. One of the best ways of slowing these costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to reduce costs, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system.

6.  "Social Security is a Ponzi scheme."  Social Security is solvent for the next 26 years. It could be solvent for the next century if we raised the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. That ceiling is now $106,800.

7.  "It’s unfair that lower-income Americans don’t pay income tax."  Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else.

Demagogues through history have known that big lies, repeated often enough, start being believed — unless they’re rebutted. These seven economic whoppers are just plain wrong.

The full article is available here

Solyndra and The Self-Referential Beltway Media Cycle - David Roberts

One sign of Republicans' success in hyping the Solyndra scandal is that they've got everybody calling it a scandal. Despite the turgid atmospherics, though, there still hasn't been any official wrongdoing established, or even charged. It's like an optical illusion of a scandal, a trick of the media light. Or, to mix metaphors, a hard candy shell with no nut inside.

Last Friday's Solyndra news blitz illustrates the point pretty well. In response to sweeping demands from Republicans, the White House released another huge cache of emails. Poring over them, searching desperately for scandal-ish material in the 65,000 pages of documents the White House has handed over so far, the best reporters could come up with was that Obama had appointed, as political liaison for the program, someone who had "bundled" money for his 2008 campaign.

Those of you awake earlier this century might recall that the Bush administration outdid this "scandal" roughly once a week. Remember Cheney's secret energy task force with fossil-fuel companies? Remember the illicit sex and cocaine at the Minerals Management Service? Remember "Brownie" at FEMA? Remember the manipulation of scientific reports on climate? Remember the $6.6 billion in lost reconstruction money in Iraq?

The Beltway media feedback loop has become grotesquely self-serving and self-referential. It is now for and about plutocrats. And it gives plutocrats what they demand: tidbits and titillation that embarrass Democrats and discredit challengers to the corporate status quo (22 percent of Politico's traffic comes from the Drudge Report). Solyndra-the-scandal is just too juicy too allow for any perspective on Solyndra-the-solar-company.

The full article is available here

Study: Income Inequality Kills Economic Growth - Josh Harkinson

Corporate chieftains often claim that fixing the US economy requires signing new free trade deals, lowering government debt, and attracting lots of foreign investment. But a major new study has found that those things matter less than an economic driver that CEOs hate talking about: equality.

"Countries where income was more equally distributed tended to have longer growth spells," says economist Andrew Berg, whose study appears in the current issue of Finance & Development, the quarterly magazine of the International Monetary Fund.

So how important is equality? According to the study, making an economy's income distribution 10 percent more equitable prolongs its typical growth spell by 50 percent.

The authors aren't the first economists to suggest that income inequality can torpedo the economy. Marriner Eccles, the Depression-era chairman of the Federal Reserve (and an architect of the New Deal), blamed the Great Crash on the nation's wealth gap.

The full article is available here