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Our Refrigerator Door
Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago. ByJoseph E. Stiglitz It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.
11/18/2011 @ 11:26AM “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes In an interesting talk at the Gartner Symposium ITExpo 2011 on October 16-20, 2011, Clayton Christensen explains why the basic thinking taught in business schools and promulgated by consultants is killing innovation and the US economy. The talk is available here. How whole sectors of the economy are dying
By Kim Geiger Speaking at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the Republican presidential candidate and former speaker of the House challenged laws that prevent children from working certain jobs before their mid-teens. Gingrich blames “the core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization" for “crippling” children. “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, in child laws, which are truly stupid,” he said. The Supreme Court Cannot Have Its Own Conflict of Interest -- Justices Thomas and Scalia Must Recuse Themselves The Supreme Court's recent decision to listen and eventually rule on the President's health care bill cannot and should not be viewed in a vacuum. After conflicting rulings in lower courts over whether or not the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, the highest legal body in the nation will now hear oral arguments next March on the issue, and is expected to reach a decision sometime in June. Though the Supreme Court may have the ultimate say-so in our legal processes, it's important to remember that it too must adhere to certain principles. And when SCOTUS Judge Clarence Thomas' wife is directly connected to an anti-health care lobbying group, and both he and Judge Antonin Scalia attend conservative fundraisers, they have no option but to recuse themselves. Last week, Scalia and Thomas were invited guests to the Federalist Society's 2011 Annual Dinner. A highly conservative organization whose sole purpose appears to be to regress our nation, the Federalist Society not only asked the two Supreme Court judges to attend, but placed their names on publicity materials and gave them speaking opportunities as well. Sitting at different tables, Scalia and Thomas were only separated by the table of Paul Clement - the attorney who will likely argue the case against the health care bill in front of the Supreme Court, and the man who got his start clerking for Scalia himself. If this isn't the most outrageous conflict of interest, then I don't know what is.
Why Iran's Top Leaders Believe That the End of Days Has Come What’s more, they believe the way to hasten the coming of the Twelfth Imam is to annihilate Israel (which they call the “Little Satan”), and the United States (which they call the “Great Satan”). We should not, therefore, be surprised that Iran is probing for weaknesses in American intelligence and homeland security. By NBC's Andrew Rafferty Clinton said the challenges the current administration is dealing with are the same he faced when he moved into the White House. But the economic climate now is worse than at any time he was president. "Now the big challenge to our perfect union once again is a terrible economic crisis, more different, and deeper and more difficult than the one I faced," Clinton said. "Another young president is facing similar challenges ... underlying those challenges is the same old debate about whether government is the problem or we need smart government and a changing economy working together to create the opportunities of tomorrow." Whatever Happened to the American Left?
By MICHAEL KAZIN And yet, except for the demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin this year, unionists and other stern critics of corporate power and government cutbacks have failed to organize a serious movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession. Instead, the Tea Party rebellion — led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires — has compelled politicians from both parties to slash federal spending and defeat proposals to tax the rich and hold financiers accountable for their misdeeds. Partly as a consequence, Barack Obama’s tenure is starting to look less like the second coming of F.D.R. and more like a re-run of Jimmy Carter — although last week the president did sound a bit Rooseveltian when he proposed that millionaires should “pay their fair share in taxes, or we’re going to have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare.” How do we account for the relative silence of the left? Perhaps what really matters about a movement’s strength is the years of building that came before it. In the 1930s, the growth of unions and the popularity of demands to share the wealth and establish “industrial democracy” were not simply responses to the economic debacle. In fact, unions bloomed only in the middle of the decade, when a modest recovery was under way. The liberal triumph of the 1930s was in fact rooted in decades of eloquent oratory and patient organizing by a variety of reformers and radicals against the evils of “monopoly” and “big money.”
The Consumer Hourglass Theory has been coined by Citibank to describe the new corporate strategy of marketing to high- and low-income earners but ignoring the squeezed middle. Image: Corbis But missing from the debate – and, in fact, much current discussion of America's politics – is the single biggest issue facing the country: the destruction of the American middle class. For stories on how America is bifurcating into haves and have-nots, with precious little in between, you have to dive behind the headlines of the latest Washington political bun-fight and find the devil in the details. Take a story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Monday. The tale is nominally one about marketing strategy and it looks at how giant firm Procter & Gamble sells its household goods to its customers. But the picture that emerges is terrifying. P&G, it transpires, is cutting back on marketing to the disappearing middle classes, instead selling more and more to either high-income or low-income customers and abandoning the middle. Other big firms, like Heinz, are following suit. The piece reveals there is even a word for this strategy, helpfully coined by Citibank: the Consumer Hourglass Theory – because it denotes a society that bulges at the top and bottom and is squeezed in the middle. The story contains some scary figures, such as the fact that the net worth of the middle fifth of American households has plunged by 26% in the last two years. Or that the income of the median American family, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than in 1998. Saturday 3 September 2011 Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!" Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944) Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma. But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP. If Obama Likes Lincoln So Much, John B. Judis July 30, 2011 12:00 am This speech, Obama said, was the basis of his candidacy: “And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States,” Obama said. But Obama had Lincoln’s speech exactly backwards. Lincoln wasn’t calling for a divided house to stay together. He was arguing against compromise with the slave South.
When the U.S. filed suit against Swiss bank UBS in July for allegedly misrepresenting the soundness of mortgage-backed securities bought by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, analysts speculated it was just the opening act in what promised to be a drawn-out courtroom drama. The next act in the drama happened Friday after the stock markets closed. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, filed a lawsuit against 17 major banks over losses on more than $41 billion in subprime mortgage bonds. The lawsuit came ahead of a deadline next week to file claims against banks in the matter. The lawsuit filed Friday in federal courts in New York and Connecticut included most of the industry's heavyweights, including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. Story: US sues 17 major banks over mortgage losses "Having it come to this point is clearly going to make the uncertainty worse, but how much worse is hard to judge," said Doug Elliott, fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some of this uncertainty is already baked into banks' stock prices and reflected in their shift to conservative lending practices over the past few years. But a protracted legal battle could create additional pressure. "We're dealing with very large sums of money, and when you put it into legal proceeding, there's a very wide range of possible results," Elliott said. Union ranks shrink despite vigorous organizing efforts From his downtown Atlanta office, Georgia's top labor leader has seen the flock of construction cranes that once filled the city's skyline go nearly extinct amid the city's worst building slump in decades. "The cranes we saw everywhere five years ago are gone and, when you are not building, that affects all of the construction trades," Georgia AFL-CIO President Richard Ray said. "We haven't lost hope, but our numbers certainly have been hurt by this recession." As Americans pause on Labor Day to celebrate the value of work, Ray and other union leaders are struggling to maintain their hold on the construction, manufacturing and other industries where unions once represented most workers. With the decline of such industries and the rise of nonunion service and professional jobs, the share of workers belonging to labor unions in Tennessee and Georgia fell by nearly half in the past decade. Union members now comprise less than 5 percent of the area's workforce. Tennessee and Georgia were among only eight U.S. states with under 5 percent of their workforces in some type of labor union, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. by Jeffrey Toobin As the Justice has assumed an influential role on the Roberts Court, his wife has helped lead the public war against the Administration. It has been, in certain respects, a difficult year for Clarence Thomas. In January, he was compelled to amend several years of the financial-disclosure forms that Supreme Court Justices must file each year. The document requires the Justices to disclose the source of all income earned by their spouses, and Thomas had failed to note that his wife, Virginia, who is known as Ginni, worked as a representative for a Michigan college and at the Heritage Foundation. The following month, seventy-four members of Congress called on Thomas to recuse himself from any legal challenges to President Obama’s health-care reform, because his wife has been an outspoken opponent of the law. At around the same time, Court observers noted the fifth anniversary of the last time that Thomas had asked a question during an oral argument. The confluence of these events produced the kind of public criticism, and even mockery, that Thomas had largely managed to avoid since his tumultuous arrival on the Court, twenty years ago this fall.
A federal boost for the jobs market The government could agree to provide for 50% of a new employee's salary if an employer adds a job and gives it to someone who's been out of work six months or more. By Tom Campbell When the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, they passed a stimulus bill that directed huge resources toward the preservation of public employee jobs. At least one dollar in four in the stimulus bill went to states or cities to directly preserve government jobs, to create new public sector jobs (via "shovel-ready projects") or to protect those jobs by paying the burgeoning Medicaid bills that might otherwise have required states to reduce their workforces to pay for healthcare. This may have pleased the Democrats' political base, but it didn't address the real employment problems. When the Republicans had blocking strength over the debt ceiling, they failed to use that power to address unemployment. Instead, they were focused on scaling back growth in government spending and resisting tax increases. That played to the Republican political base, but it did nothing immediate to help the millions of unemployed Americans. If each side would stop focusing on pleasing its base and ask instead what can be done about unemployment, we might be able to agree on a couple of basic principles. First, for the recovery to succeed, the private sector (not the public sector) needs to hire more people. And second, the private sector can be incentivized to do so with government spending.
Did George W. Bush cause this crisis? Nouriel Roubini, a New York University professor nicknamed "Dr. Doom" for his dour views on the economy, says in this video that when President Obama came to power, he inherited a budget deficit of $1.2 trillion. When Bush came to power, the country had a surplus of $300 billion. How did we get a $1.5 trillion change in our fiscal condition during Bush's time in office? Roubini lists five factors: Read More,,, IT was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him. The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write. Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out “the facts of the case.” When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
Origins of the debt showdown Published: August 6 This article was reported by Lori Montgomery, Paul Kane, Brady Dennis, Alec MacGillis, David Fahrenthold, Rosalind Helderman, Felicia Sonmez and Dan Balz. It was written by Dennis, MacGillis and Montgomery. In mid-January, newly installed as the GOP House majority leader, Virginia’s Eric Cantor rose to the podium inside a spacious hotel ballroom to deliver a message to his troops, including the 87 newcomers who had given the party control of the House. “I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us,” said Cantor, one of several new House leaders who detailed the game plan for the coming months. “Either we stick together and demonstrate that we’re a team that will fight for and stand by our principles, or we will lose that leverage.” The frantic showdown that followed, bringing the nation to the brink of default, looked like the haphazard escalation of a typical partisan standoff. It wasn’t.
Op-Ed Columnist The President Surrenders A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong. For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status. Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond. The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record. Read More,,, Why Voters Tune Out Democrats By STANLEY B. GREENBERG BARACK OBAMA can’t catch a break from the American public on the economy, even though he prevented a depression and saved global capitalism. Perhaps the president finds solace in knowing he’s not alone. During this period of economic crisis and uncertainty, voters are generally turning to conservative and right-wing political parties, most notably in Europe and in Canada. It’s perplexing. When unemployment is high, and the rich are getting richer, you would think that voters of average means would flock to progressives, who are supposed to have their interests in mind — and who historically have delivered for them. During the last half-century or so, when a Democratic president has led the country, people have tended to experience lower unemployment, less inequality and rising income compared with periods of Republican governance. There is a reason, however, that many voters in the developed world are turning away from Democrats, Socialists, liberals and progressives. Read More,,,
A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.
Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry. They can’t join the Boy Scouts. Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently “spiritual” in military psychological evaluations. Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; in other words, nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests. Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently — and uncivilly — declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering nonbelievers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens. Is this knee-jerk dislike of atheists warranted? Not even close.
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries By DAVE EGGERS and NÍNIVE CLEMENTS CALEGARI WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition. And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.
The Destruction of Economic Facts Renowned Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues that the financial crisis wasn't just about finance—it was about a staggering lack of knowledge By Hernando de Soto During the second half of the 19th century, the world's biggest economies endured a series of brutal recessions. At the time, most forms of reliable economic knowledge were organized within feudal, patrimonial, and tribal relationships. If you wanted to know who owned land or owed a debt, it was a fact recorded locally—and most likely shielded from outsiders. At the same time, the world was expanding. Travel between cities and countries became more common and global trade increased. The result was a huge rift between the old, fragmented social order and the needs of a rising, globalizing market economy. To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible—so that all players in the world's widening markets could, in the words of France's free-banking champion Charles Coquelin, "pick up the thousands of filaments that businesses are creating between themselves." The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available, whether intangible (stocks, commercial paper, deeds, ledgers, contracts, patents, companies, and promissory notes), or tangible (land, buildings, boats, machines, etc.). Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts." Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded. Governments have allowed shadow markets to develop and reach a size beyond comprehension. Mortgages have been granted and recorded with such inattention that homeowners and banks often don't know and can't prove who owns their homes. In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible. The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors—even between banks and other banks. Overall, credit (from the Latin for "trust") continues to flow steadily, but closer examination shows that nongovernment credit has contracted. Private lending has dropped 21 percent since 2007. Outstanding loans to small businesses dropped more than 6 percent over the past year, while lending to large businesses, measured in commercial loans of more than $1 million, fell nearly 9 percent.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo. A few facts: • The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China. • The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade? • The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C. • The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.
Who Killed the Disneyland Dream? By FRANK RICH OF the many notable Americans we lost in 2010, three leap out as paragons of a certain optimistic American spirit that we also seemed to lose this year. Two you know: Theodore Sorensen, the speechwriter present at the creation of J.F.K.’s clarion call to “ask what you can do for your country,” and Richard Holbrooke, the diplomat who brought peace to the killing fields of Bosnia in the 1990s. Holbrooke, who was my friend, came of age in the Kennedy years and exemplified its can-do idealism. He gave his life to the proposition that there was nothing an American couldn’t accomplish if he marshaled his energy and talents. His premature death — while heroically bearing the crushing burdens of Afghanistan and Pakistan — is tragic in more ways than many Americans yet realize. But a third representative American optimist who died this year, at age 91, is a Connecticut man who was not a player in great events and whom I’d never heard of until I read his Times obituary: Robbins Barstow, an amateur filmmaker who for decades recorded his family’s doings in home movies of such novelty and quality that one of them, the 30-minute “Disneyland Dream,” was admitted to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress two years ago. That rare honor elevates Barstow’s filmmaking to a pantheon otherwise restricted mostly to Hollywood classics, from “Citizen Kane” to “Star Wars.” “Disneyland Dream” was made in the summer of 1956, shortly before the dawn of the Kennedy era. You can watch it on line at archive.org or on YouTube. Its narrative is simple. The young Barstow family of Wethersfield, Conn. — Robbins; his wife, Meg; and their three children aged 4 to 11 — enter a nationwide contest to win a free trip to Disneyland, then just a year old. The contest was sponsored by 3M, which asked contestants to submit imaginative encomiums to the wonders of its signature product. Danny, the 4-year-old, comes up with the winning testimonial, emblazoned on poster board: “I like ‘Scotch’ brand cellophane tape because when some things tear then I can just use it.” Soon enough, the entire neighborhood is cheering the Barstows as they embark on their first visit to the golden land of Anaheim, Calif. As narrated by Robbins Barstow (he added his voiceover soundtrack to the silent Kodachrome film in 1995), every aspect of this pilgrimage is a joy, from the “giant TWA Super Constellation” propeller plane (seating 64) that crosses the country in a single day (with a refueling stop in St. Louis) to the home-made Davy Crockett jackets the family wears en route. To watch “Disneyland Dream” now as a boomer inevitably sets off pangs of longing for a vanished childhood fantasyland: not just Walt Disney’s then-novel theme park but all the sunny idylls of 1950s pop culture. As it happens, Disney’s Davy Crockett, the actor Fess Parker, also died this year. So did Barbara Billingsley, matriarch of the sitcom “Leave It to Beaver,” whose fictional family, the Cleavers, first appeared in 1957 and could have lived next door to the Barstows. But the real power of this film is more subtle and pertinent than nostalgia.  How Merrill Lynch bankers helped blowup their firm 'Million for a billion' group saw short-term advantages but long-term disaster ProPublica
 Two years before the financial crisis hit, Merrill Lynch confronted a serious problem. No one, not even the bank's own traders, wanted to buy the supposedly safe portions of the mortgage-backed securities Merrill was creating. Bank executives came up with a fix that had short-term benefits and long-term consequences. They formed a new group within Merrill, which took on the bank's money-losing securities. But how to get the group to accept deals that were otherwise unprofitable? They paid them. The division creating the securities passed portions of their bonuses to the new group, according to two former Merrill executives with detailed knowledge of the arrangement. The executives said this group, which earned millions in bonuses, played a crucial role in keeping the money machine moving long after it should have ground to a halt. Read More,,,And the rich get richer By Tim Rutten Today's Republicans might want to remember that the estate tax's modern champion was a president they used to regard as among the greatest the party has produced Theodore Roosevelt. Of the several objectionable provisions included in the tax compromise that congressional Republicans extorted from the Obama administration, none is more noxious than the one that all but guts the estate tax. Even the needless and unfair continuation of tax reductions for families making more than a quarter of a million dollars a year merely extends a benefit already enjoyed by affluent households. Estate tax cuts, by contrast, create a whole new windfall for those who already enjoy privileges and security undreamed of by the vast majority of Americans. The provision is the work of Arizona's John Kyl, the Senate's second-ranking Republican and a longtime advocate of abolishing the estate tax. To most eyes, the former estate levy didn't look like much of a burden; it allowed couples to leave their heirs $7 million tax free and taxed any additional inheritance at 45%. Kyl's plan, which he has crowed is as good as abolition, increases the exemption to $10 million for couples and reduces the tax rate on the rest to just 35%. The average windfall for the approximately 6,600 wealthy taxpayers annually affected by the estate duty will topƒo $1.5 million. Read More,,,
Freezing Out Hope By PAUL KRUGMAN After the Democratic ¡§shellacking¡¨ in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity? On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking ¡X successfully, it seems ¡X to destroy him. Read More,,, The Big Economic Story, Robert Reich Quiz: What's responsible for the lousy economy most Americans continue to wallow in? A. Big government, bureaucrats, and the cultural and intellectual elites who back them. B. Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them. These are the two competing stories Americans are telling one another. Yes, I know: It's more complicated than this. In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand -- the result of the nation's almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top. The very rich don't spend as much of their income as the middle. And since the housing bubble burst, the middle class hasn't had the buying power to keep the economy going. That concentration of income, in turn, is due to globalization and technological change -- along with unprecedented campaign contributions and lobbying designed to make the rich even richer and do nothing to help average Americans, insider trading, and political bribery. Special Edition of the Idaho Democratic Party Newsfeed The following is an op ed by Idaho Democratic Party chair Keith Roark in response to an editorial that appeared in the Times-News last week. Keith's op ed is scheduled to be printed later this week (Times-News editorial link) Op Ed: Idaho Democrats stand for American values While many local Democrats took umbrage at the recent Times-News editorial suggesting Idaho Democrats change our name, I congratulate your newspaper on what I personally thought to be an insightful, if somewhat tongue in cheek commentary. Indeed, every Idahoan should read and consider your words.
POSTED: 8:27 pm MDT October 25, 2010 IDAHO FALLS, Idaho -- The campaign season brings in highly contested issues, controversial candidate debates and large amounts of money. Just in the Idaho gubernatorial race alone, the three candidates, Gov. ¡§Butch¡¨ Otter, Keith Allred and Jana Kemp, have reported a total of $2,277,787 in contributions. But of that more than $2.25 million, they have reported expenditures totaling $1,963,129, money going directly back into the state. How to Measure the Wisdom of a Crowd By Jessica Marshall THE GIST The "intelligence" of a group can be measured, according to a new study, and it has little to do with the brain power of its individual members. What makes a team more intelligent has more to do with the group's interactions. More equal participation and greater social sensitivity on the part of its members are the key factors in predicting a group's intelligence, according to the study, published online today by the journal Science. The findings could eventually be useful in screening teams before choosing one to charge with an important task, the authors propose, or in testing strategies for improving groups' performance. If 17th Amendment is repealed, expect more Weldon Heyburns READER COMMENT: Bought and paid for Do Idaho Republicans think we, the citizens of Idaho, are stupid? Or have they been in power so long that they think they can get away with taking away a century-old right of our citizens to vote for our U.S. senators? These are legitimate questions that every Republican candidate should be asked! At the GOP¡¦s convention this year, they included in their party platform a plank calling for repeal of the 17th Amendment. Prior to the 17th Amendment, U.S. senators were selected by state legislatures, not by the voters. The American public, including Idahoans, fought long and hard to change that so we, the people, directly elect those who will represent us in the U.S. Senate. Why would Republican leaders want to strip Idahoans of this important right? Obviously, they think we are not smart enough and that a majority of legislators know better. Republicans have been in control of Idaho¡¦s Legislature for 50 years and have controlled the governor¡¦s office for 16 years. When a party is in power for too long they have a tendency to become arrogant and this is a classic example of the arrogance of power. There is also a more disturbing reason. If the people are not allowed to participate in selecting their U.S. senators then money going into Senate campaigns would instead flow into state legislators¡¦ campaigns and pockets. Legislators will pad their campaign war chests even more, making their races even less competitive and helping those in power stay in power. So How Did the Bush Tax Cuts Work Out for the Economy? David Cay Johnston | Sep. 24, 2010 08:02 PM EDT Just as they did in 2000, the Republicans are running this year on an economic platform of tax cuts, especially making the tax cuts permanent for the richest among us. So how did the tax cuts work out? My analysis of the new data, with all figures in 2008 dollars: Total income was $2.74 trillion less during the eight Bush years than if incomes had stayed at 2000 levels
A woman, married three times, walked into a bridal shop one day and told the sales clerk that she was looking for a wedding gown for her fourth wedding. "Of course, madam," replied the sales clerk, "exactly what type and color are you looking for?" The bride to be said: "A long frilly white dress with a veil." The sales clerk hesitated a bit, then said, "Please don't take this the wrong way, but gowns of that nature are considered more appropriate for brides who are being married the first time - for those who are a bit more innocent, if you know what I mean? Perhaps ivory or sky blue would be nice?" "Well," replied the customer, a little peeved at the clerk's directness, "I can assure you that a white gown would be quite appropriate. Believe it or not, despite all my marriages, I remain as innocent as a first time bride. You see, my first husband was so excited about our wedding, he died as we were checking into our hotel. My second husband and I got into such a terrible fight in the limo on our way to our honeymoon that we had that wedding annulled immediately and never spoke to each other again." "What about your third husband?" asked the sales clerk. "That one was a Republican," said the woman, "and every night for four years, he just sat on the edge of the bed and told me how good it was going to be, but nothing ever happened." Three Trillion Dollar War Stiglitz-Bilmes cite ¡§opportunity cost¡¨ of the Iraq war Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration¡¦s 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war. But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war¡¦s broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected. Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict¡¦s most sobering expenses: those in the category of ¡§might have beens,¡¨ or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only ¡§what if¡¨ worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe? The answer to all four of these questions is probably no.
By ROBERT B. REICH THIS promises to be the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor ¡X most of the rest of us ¡X are unemployed, underemployed or underwater. The Labor Department reported on Friday that just 67,000 new private-sector jobs were created in August, while at least 125,000 are needed to keep up with the growth of the potential work force. The national economy isn¡¦t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working: near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package and tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough. That¡¦s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven¡¦t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them. How the Stimulus Is Changing America By Michael Grunwald It's an interesting debate. Politically, it's awkward to argue that things would have been even worse without the stimulus, even though that's what most nonpartisan economists believe. But the battle over the Recovery Act's short-term rescue has obscured its more enduring mission: a long-term push to change the country. It was about jobs, sure, but also about fighting oil addiction and global warming, transforming health care and education, and building a competitive 21st century economy. Some Republicans have called it an under-the-radar scramble to advance Obama's agenda ¡X and they've got a point. (See TIME's special report "The Green Design 100.") Yes, the stimulus has cut taxes for 95% of working Americans, bailed out every state, hustled record amounts of unemployment benefits and other aid to struggling families and funded more than 100,000 projects to upgrade roads, subways, schools, airports, military bases and much more. But in the words of Vice President Joe Biden, Obama's effusive Recovery Act point man, "Now the fun stuff starts!" The "fun stuff," about one-sixth of the total cost, is an all-out effort to exploit the crisis to make green energy, green building and green transportation real; launch green manufacturing industries; computerize a pen-and-paper health system; promote data-driven school reforms; and ramp up the research of the future. "This is a chance to do something big, man!" Biden said during a 90-minute interview with TIME. Rev. James Martin, S.J.Catholic priest and author of 'The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything' After his colossal "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington, D.C., Glenn Beck took aim at one of his favorite targets, Barack Obama, but in a novel way. Beck regrets saying a few months ago that President Obama was a "racist." What he should have said, he now realizes, was that he didn't agree with Obama's "theology." And what is Obama's theology, according to Beck? Liberation theology. Here's Beck's definition of the arcane area of study known as liberation theology: I think that it is much more of a theological question that he is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor and victim....That is a direct opposite of what the gospel is talking about...It's Marxism disguised as religion Why Some Republicans Want to ¡¥Restore¡¦ Joseph Sohm / Visions of America-Corbis Idaho ranks among the worst states - Idaho Statesman Published: 07/21/10 Idaho was No. 6 among the worst markets in the Gallup Job Creation Index from January to June of this year. More than half of the 10 best job markets in 2010 are energy- and commodity-producing states, Gallup reported.
The financial crisis in America isn't over. It's ongoing, it remains unresolved, and it stands in the way of full economic recovery. The cause, at the deepest level, was a breakdown in the rule of law. And it follows that the first step toward prosperity is to restore the rule of law in the financial sector. First, there was a stand-down of the financial police. The legal framework for this was laid with the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Meanwhile the Basel II process relaxed international bank supervision, especially permitting the use of proprietary models to value complex assets-an open invitation to biased valuations and accounting frauds. Key acts of de-supervision came under Bush. After 9/11 500 FBI agents assigned to financial fraud were reassigned to counter-terrorism and (what is not understandable) they were never replaced. The Director of the Office of Thrift Supervision appeared at a press conference with a stack of copies of the Code of Federal Regulations and a chainsaw-the message was not subtle. The SEC relaxed limits on leverage for investment banks and abolished the uptick rule limiting short sales to moments following a rise in price. The new order was clear: anything goes. Second, the response to desupervision was a criminal takeover of the home mortgage industry. Millions of subprime mortgages were made to borrowers with undocumented incomes and bad or non-existent credit records. Appraisers were selected who were willing to inflate the value of the home being sold. This last element was not incidental: surveys showed that practically all appraisers came under pressure to inflate valuations in order to make deals happen. There is no honest reason why a lender would deliberately seek to make an inflated loan. Read More,,,
Robert Creamer
The Republicans have a set of dirty little (actually not so little) secrets they don't what you to know -- and certainly don't want you to think about when you go to the polls in November. And the fact is that some of those secrets could provide Democrats with silver bullets this fall. But first let's recall the context. Over the course of eight short years -- between 2000 and 2008 -- the Republicans methodically executed their plan to transform American society. They systematically transferred wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest two percent of Americans -- slashing taxes for the wealthy. They eviscerated the rules that held Wall Street, Big Oil and private insurance companies accountable to the public. They allowed and encouraged the recklessness of the big Wall Street banks that ultimately collapsed the economy and cost eight million Americans their jobs. They ignored exploding health care costs, tried to privatize Social Security, gave the drug companies open season to gouge American consumers and presided over a decline in real incomes averaging $2,000 per family. They entangled America in an enormously costly, unnecessary war in Iraq, pursued a directionless policy that left Afghanistan to fester, and sullied America's good name throughout the world. The Creativity Crisis
Companies pile up cash By Jia Lynn Yang Corporate America is hoarding a massive pile of cash. It just doesn't want to spend it hiring anyone. Nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, roughly one-quarter more than at the beginning of the recession. And as several major firms report impressive earnings this week, the money continues to flow into firms' coffers. Yet all the good news from big business hasn't translated into much promise for jobless Americans, leading many to wonder: If corporations are sitting on so much money, why aren't they hiring more workers? Obesity in America 2010 By Maia Szalavitz for MSN Health & Fitness |
President's Message |
The Book of Jobs 
Bill Clinton: Obama faces 'same old debate' about government's role
Paul Harris guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 September 2011
Partners
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The Mother of All No-Brainers
How to End the Great Recession
Tremble, Banks, Tremble
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