Hi [[First_Name]],

Do you agree that the flood of money into political campaigns is corrupting our government? The money spent in this election cycle may approach $8 billion, and the corporations and billionaires donating this money aren’t doing out of kindness of their hearts. They want something in return and what they want won’t necessarily be in the best interests of average Americans. While legal, this is a corruption of the framers' intent that the Congress be dependent on the people.

Move To Amend is a grassroots movement fighting the corrosive effects of money in politics. For the last 100+ years, corporations have used their influence to establish the doctrine that money is speech and corporations are people. Move to Amend is working to eliminate that doctrine.

Please join us in Fort Atkinson!

What	Petition Campaign Kick Off Meeting
When	Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Where	Dwight Foster Public Library Community Room 209 Merchants Avenue Fort Atkinson, WI 53538

Sierra Pope and others from South Central Wisconsin Move to Amend will make a PowerPoint presentation, which will be followed by discussion and the beginnings of our petition campaign. Although the presentation is in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, we are expecting people from Whitewater, Jefferson, Lake Mills, Watertown, and other surrounding towns, and we’ll be discussing the possibility of petition campaigns in these municipalities as well.

We hope to see you there!

This Blog Has Moved

All new posts are at Get Money Out Of Politics

Income Inequality Keeps Poorer Americans Away from the Polls

Source: Bryce Covert via the Nation

It’s no secret that money and politics enjoy a nasty love affair in this country. And as Ari Berman has written here, the problem has gotten even worse this cycle after the ill-fated Citizens United decision unleashed the power of Super PACs. As he reports, campaigns are increasingly reliant on that money, yet “Super PACs on both sides of the aisle are financed by the 1 percent of the 1 percent.” That means the rich have an even more outsized impact on the outcome of the election.

At the same time, it’s been hard to miss the GOP’s relentless campaign to roll back voting rights in the name of eliminating the (mostly imaginary) threat of fraud. Many of those tactics will severely impact low-income voters and likely suppress their turnout in November, handing even more power over to the 1 percent.

There’s something else that suppresses their vote, however, even if they are legally able to do so. And that something is income inequality, as a new report from the OECD on the Better Life Index shows. Of the thirty-four countries included in the report, the U.S. ranks second to last in social inequality, bested only by South Korea. When it comes to income inequality we are at the extreme end of the scale, with levels similar to those of Cameroon, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Nepal and Uganda.

This has a huge impact on voter turnout. Across all OECD countries, individual income has an effect on whether citizens show up at the polls, with an average 7 percent jump for those who are in the top 20 percent versus those in the bottom 20 percent. Things are far, far worse here at home, though. Those whose income is in the top 20 percent experience a near 100 percent turnout rate, making full use of their right to vote. But the rate for those in the bottom group is less than three-quarters. That makes for a whopping 28 percent gap between the two on Election Day, which again seems only to be beaten by South Korea. On top of this, those with more education—also often tied to income—are more likely to vote than less educated people, likely augmenting the phenomenon.

This may be a sign that low-income voters feel disconnected from our politics. As the report notes, “Voter participation is the best existing means of measuring civic and political engagement.” In a world where mega-rich donors rule the system and at least one party is determined to make it harder to exercise this constitutional right, it makes sense that one might feel discouraged.

But this is clearly one more way in which America’s sky-high level of income inequality is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. When a Congress elected by the wealthy debates issues that affect the poor, it should be little wonder that budget cuts that disproportionately fall on the latter are passed while programs that would help them out are not. Just take a look at news out today that Congress is prematurely pulling back on benefits for the long-term unemployed, despite the fact that over five million people have been jobless for longer than six months.

While the Great Recession certainly exacerbated income inequality, it was a trend thirty years in the making. The gap between the after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of Americans and the 99 percent more than tripled over the last three decades. And there’s no sign that the trend is going to do anything but continue on. As the gulf between the rich and the poor continues to expand, expect voter turnout among those who are most affected to fall into the void.

OECD - Your Better Life Index

How’s life?

There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics – This Index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life.

Read the whole story at OECD Better Life Index

Billionaires for Wealthcare

Just how dirty are Canada’s oil sands, anyway?

Source: Brad Plumer via Washington Post

Once again, Congress is debating whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil from Alberta’s tar sands down to the Gulf Coast. Republicans want to fold it into the transportation bill. And scientists like James Hansen warn that harvesting tar sands would be “game over” for the climate.

A cup of heavy oil from Alberta. (TODD KOROL - REUTERS) So let’s get some numbers: What would the actual impact be? The Congressional Research Service just put out a new report that takes stock of various academic studies on the subject. Crude from Alberta’s oil sands is heavier, more viscous, and contains more impurities than other types of oil. So it takes more energy to extract and process. When you consider the entire life cycle — from digging the stuff out of the ground to burning it in your tank — oil from tar sands produces 14 to 20 percent more carbon emissions than other oil the U.S. imports.

Overall, the CRS report estimates, approving the Keystone XL pipeline would be the equivalent of boosting U.S. global-warming emissions by between 0.06 percent and 0.3 percent per year. (That assumes the pipeline spurs additional production in Candada.) At the high end, that’s like putting 4 million extra passenger cars on the road.

That may not, in itself, be “game over” for the climate. Though seeing as how the United States has pledged to cut its carbon emissions 17 percent by 2020, it would also be a slight step in the opposite direction.

There’s also more than just Keystone XL to consider. Canada has big plans to export its oil around the world. Catherine Mann and Stacy Feldman of InsideClimate News recently tried to tally up all the different pipeline projects in the works to transport Alberta’s tar-sands oil abroad. Some of these projects could get bogged down by protests and opposition (or shuttered by the vicissitudes of the market). But there are plans to send 3.1 million barrels per day from Alberta to export markets — essentially five times as much as Keystone XL. Here’s the map:


 
There’s something else that could throw a kink in these plans. Many countries are now considering measures to reduce the carbon content of their transportation fuels. The European Union is mulling a law to reduce emission from fuel 20 percent by 2020. It would prove tough for oil from Alberta to qualify, given all the recent studies on the crude’s carbon footprint. And granted, Europe doesn’t currently import crude from Canada, but its law could set precedents elsewhere. California has a similar low-carbon fuel law that’s wending its way through the courts, for instance.

The big challenge for Alberta’s oil industry, then, is to figure out how to reduce the carbon intensity of tar-sands oil. In this InsideClimate interview, Adam Brandt, an engineering professor at Stanford, explains a few possible options, from reducing the amount of steam injected into the oil to using natural gas instead of petroleum coke for extraction and processing. “The hope,” he says, “is that as the science improves, they can continue to reduce these emissions, and reduce this difference between the oil sands and conventional oil.”

Until that happens, Alberta’s vast tar sands are likely to remain the center of controversy. As the CRS report suggests, Keystone itself won’t make the difference between the world making or missing its climate goals. And the United States could still have plenty of other reasons to want Canada’s oil — boosting supplies, for one. Yet the overall carbon impact of tar sands appears to be noticeable enough that it’ll likely remain a part of any debate about tackling global warming.
 
Update: Sabrina Fang, an analyst with the American Petroleum Institute (which represents the oil industry) takes issue with the CRS report. She stresses some of the uncertainties involved in such analyses, though her most forceful point is that Alberta’s oil sands production is likely to boom in the coming decades regardless of whether the Keystone XL pipeline is approved. For those concerned with the climate aspects of oil sands, that’s probably not the most comforting thought.

Lost in the 0.1% Bubble

Source: Paul Krugman

So the Heartland Institute seems to have blown itself up with its billboard equating climate change researchers to the Unabomber. Of course, anyone who believed that the right-wing”think” tank was objective in the least was a fool; but now even the fools have been put on notice.

But how could they make such a stupid mistake? I think there’s a process going on here, in which wealth and power creates a bubble in which people are so eager to please the paymasters that they lose any sense of what it sounds like to those not already answering to the same paymasters.

You can see the same thing with Grover Norquist’s comparison of anyone trying to stop wealthy Americans from using abandonment of citizenship as a tax dodge to Nazis — hey, remember Steve Schwartzmann comparing attempts to close the carried interest loophole to the Nazi invasion of Poland?

And my guess is that the Cory Booker thing is ultimately related; I didn’t know this, but apparently Booker is so close to his Wall Street donors that it never occurred to him that echoing their over-the-top reactions to Obama’s very mild populism would destroy his own political future (which I believe it has).

And no, the same thing doesn’t happen on the left, at least not that part of the left that is remotely serious about actual results. Right-wing apparatchiks, living in their billionaire-funded bubble, can forget that not everyone shares their extremism; progressives don’t have that luxury.

Anyway, let’s be glad that we’re getting a better look at how the other 0.1% and its clients think.

The end of fish, in one chart

Source: Brad Plumer via Washington Post

Want to see how severely we humans are scouring the oceans for fish? Check out this striking map from the World Wildlife Fund’s 2012 “Living Planet Report.” The red areas are the most intensively fished (and, in many cases, overfished) parts of the ocean — and they’ve expanded dramatically since 1950:

 
To measure how intensively these areas are fished, Swartz et al., (2010) used the fish landed in each country to calculate the primary production rate (PPR) of each region of the ocean. PPR is a value that describes the total amount of food a fish needs to grow within a certain region. (WWF)

Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted.

Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, has dubbed this situation “The End of Fish.” He points out that in the past 50 years, the populations of many large commercial fish such as bluefin tuna and cod have utterly collapsed, in some cases shrinking more than 90 percent (see the chart to the right).


 
(WWF, Living Planet Report 2012) Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich.

The full WWF report (PDF), meanwhile, is chock full of brightly colored graphs charting the decline of wildlife across the globe. All told, global vertebrate populations have declined by some 30 percent since 1970. But that number masks a lot of variation. Wildlife actually appears to be recovering in the temperate areas, while it’s utterly collapsing in the tropics. (It seems there have been some modest conservation successes in the wealthier temperate regions — the European otter is staging an impressive comeback, for instance.)

The big thing the WWF paper emphasizes, however, is that human consumption patterns are currently unsustainable. We’re essentially consuming the equivalent of one and a half Earths each year. This is possible because we borrow from the future, as is the case with fish — one day the world’s fish population may collapse, but there’s plenty for us now. WWF doesn’t quite call it a Ponzi scheme, but that’s the first metaphor that comes to mind.

So is there any way to stop this slide? After all, it’s not like people can just stop eating fish altogether. Pauly, surprisingly, is fairly optimistic. He argues that strict government quotas on catches can help stop the slide. “There is no need for an end to fish,” he writes, “or to fishing for that matter.” (He’s not sold on aquaculture, or fish farming, since it often requires huge harvests of smaller fish to feed the big carnivorous ones in farms.)

The hitch is that when governments have tried to institute such quotas in the past — as they’ve recently attempted with Atlantic bluefin tuna — the rules tend to get, uh, watered down under intense lobbying. Or else shadowy black sushi markets emerge to flout the rules. But no one said it was easy, halting the end of fish.

Party Polarization: Republican Extremism

Indeed, we find that contemporary polarization is not only real — the ideological distance between the parties has grown dramatically since the 1970s — but also that it is asymmetric — congressional Republicans have moved farther away from the center than Democrats during this period. In two figures below, we plot the mean first dimension DW-NOMINATE scores of the two parties in the House and Senate from 1879 to the present. Since the mid-1970s, Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. This rightward shift is especially dramatic among House Republicans, from a mean of 0.22 in 1975 to 0.67 in 2012.




To be sure, political polarization is not entirely asymmetric. Congressional Democrats have moved slightly to the left during this period, but most of this is a product of the disappearance of conservative Southern “Blue Dog” Democrats. But the northern Democrats of the 1970s are ideologically indistinguishable from their present-day counterparts, with average scores around -0.4.

Read the whole story at VoteView.com

Income Inequality and the "Job Creator" myth

Kochs help Republicans catch up on technology

Republican political operatives, some with deep financial backing from the billionaire Koch brothers and others, are unleashing about a half dozen major projects that take advantage of advanced database technologies to manage campaigns and target voters with personalized messages.

Read the whole story at Reuters

Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years

Some critics continue to assert that President George W. Bush’s policies bear little responsibility for the deficits the nation faces over the coming decade — that, instead, the new policies of President Barack Obama and the 111^th Congress are to blame. Most recently, a Heritage Foundation paper downplayed the role of Bush-era policies (for more on that paper, see p. 4). Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years (see Figure 1).

The deficit for fiscal year 2009 was $1.4 trillion and, at nearly 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was the largest deficit relative to the size of the economy since the end of World War II. If current policies are continued without changes, deficits will likely approach those figures in 2010 and remain near $1 trillion a year for the next decade.

The events and policies that have pushed deficits to these high levels in the near term, however, were largely outside the new Administration’s control. If not for the tax cuts enacted during the presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were initiated during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.

While President Obama inherited a dismal fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them.
Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s long-term deficit problem. But we should not mistake the causes of our predicament.

Read the whole story Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

What Caused The Deficit?

One of the most effective Republican themes of the last two years has been blaming President Obama for the explosive growth in the budget deficit since 2009. The accusation that "Obama's spending binge" has blown up the deficit has discredited any further fiscal stimulus, and helped encourage Republicans to use the debt ceiling as a hostage. The White House fought back with a chart showing that its policy changes contributed only a small fraction to the worsening deficit picture:














Read the whole story by Jonathan Chait in the New Republic

What causes deficits?

Source: Ezra Klein

James Fallows posts a table created by Chuck Spinney that shows -- or attempts to show -- the change in debt under different types of administrations. The basic takeaway is that it's not just that Democrats tend to reduce the deficit or Republicans increase it, but that it's specifically Republican presidents who arise out of the post-Goldwater conservative movement who increase it:

There's important information in there -- notably that tax cuts do, indeed, increase the deficit. But to understand why deficits happen, I'd direct people to this mega-chart that The Post's Alicia Parlapiano made: It compares GDP growth, deficits and control of both the Congress and the White House, and gives you a more comprehensive idea of what's going on:


Basically, deficits happen when recessions happen. Anytime GDP shrinks, deficits explode. Sustained growth, by contrast, tends to bring the budget into balance. That's not to say policy doesn't matter. If you put $4 trillion of tax cuts on the deficit, you need a whole lot of growth to make that back up. But policy -- and even control of the White House -- matters a lot less than the economy does.

Spending and Growth

Source: Paul Krugman

First-quarter growth results are now in for the major advanced economies; they look like this:

Wait, what? Japan as star performer? What’s that about?

Actually, no mystery. From Bloomberg:

Japan’s economy expanded faster than estimated in the first quarter, boosted by reconstruction spending that’s poised to fade just as a worsening in Europe’s crisis threatens to curtail export demand.

So Japan, which is spending heavily for post-tsunami reconstruction, is growing quite fast, while Italy, which is imposing austerity measures, is shrinking almost equally fast.

There seems to be some kind of lesson here about macroeconomics, but I can’t quite put my finger on it …

Half the Super PAC money came from just 20 donors

Supreme Court rulings gave birth to new special interest campaign committees at the federal level that have exploded on the scene in the 2012 presidential campaign. These groups known as "Super PACs" already have spent close to $100 million influencing the presidential race, and half of the money raised by the five major presidential Super PACs came from just 20 donors.

Source: Mike McCabe, WI Democracy Campaign

Robert Reich Explains How Mitt Romney Got Obscenely Rich

Republican strategy is same as Bain's

Gut the middle class and give it to the rich...

Spending, Taxes, And Deficits Are All Lower Today Than When Obama Took Office

Source: Think Progress

Federal spending is lower now than it was when President Obama took office. I’ll pause to let you absorb the news.

In January 2009, before President Obama had even taken the oath of office, annual spending was set to total 24.9 percent of gross domestic product. Total spending this year, fiscal year 2012, is expected to top out at 23.4 percent of GDP.

Here’s another interesting fact. Taxes today are lower than they were on inauguration day 2009. Back in January 2009, the CBO projected that total federal tax revenue that year would amount to 16.5 percent of GDP. This year? 15.8 percent.

One last nugget. The deficit this year is going to be lower than what it was on the day President Obama took office. Back then, the CBO said the 2009 deficit would be 8.3 percent of GDP. This year’s deficit is expected to come in at 7.6 percent.


The fact is that Obama inherited a disaster of a federal budget. Eight years prior, when President George W. Bush took the oath of office, there was a $281 billion surplus. By the time Obama was sworn in, he was facing a $1.2 trillion deficit. Inconvenient though it may be for conservatives (especially those who are running for president), the truth is that spending, taxes and the deficit are all lower today than when President Obama took office.

For $24.95, George W. Bush Will Share His ‘Strategies For Economic Growth’

That Bush believes the country needs his thoughts on how to create economic growth is laughable. After all, under his watch, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” As the Economic Policy Institute found, “between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.”

As this chart shows, the only economic indicator on which Bush exceeded the average is corporate profits:


As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted, “the competition for slowest growth is not even close, either. Growth from 2001 to 2007 averaged 2.39 percent a year (and growth from 2001 through the third quarter of 2010 averaged 1.66 percent). The decade with the second-worst showing for growth was 1971 to 1980 — the dreaded 1970s — but it still had 3.21 percent average growth.” Bush also presided over the formulation of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

And its not just under Bush that the nation saw lackluster economic growth. Over the last 50 years, in fact, two-thirds of the private sector jobs created in the country have come under Democratic administrations.


Read the whole story at Think Progress

Paper Ballot Op-Scan Systems in FL, WI, NY, OH Confirmed to Overheat, Mistally 70% of Votes

Similar systems used by millions of voters in majority of states also found to have failed as 2012 Presidential election looms...

New paper ballot optical-scan computer tabulator systems used to tally millions of votes in New York --- as well as "swing states" such as Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin --- do not tally votes correctly. That stunning admission comes courtesy of a new report released by the private company which manufactures, sells, services and programs the systems which are now believed to have mistallied tens of thousands of ballots in New York in 2010.

The votes of more than ten million voters could be affected by a newly revealed failure in the voting systems set for use in those four states in this year's Presidential election, and in more than 50 different jurisdictions in Wisconsin during next month's historic recall elections.

Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), the largest e-voting machine company in the U.S. and the maker of the paper ballot op-scan tally systems in question, have confirmed that their systems may overheat when used over several hours (for example, during an election!), and that they then may mistally and/or incorrectly discard anywhere from 30% to 70% of votes scanned by the machines.

Read the whole story in Brad Blog

German voters must break the Merkel mindset that got them into this

Source: The Guardian

Greece's euro membership was as much the German elite's fault as anyone's. Can it find the leadership to resolve the crisis?

Sometimes, just sometimes, economics and politics are like physics – one can recognize immutable forces. One of those times is now, as Greece is inexorably pushed out of the euro. It took no particular talent to have seen this coming, just the recognition that it has always been a fantasy to believe that the Greeks would democratically choose to destroy their economy for the better part of a decade in order to pay foreign creditors.

The fact is that Greece never was a suitable member of the eurozone. That the Greek economy was extremely inefficient, that corruption was rife, that the government budgets were perpetually out of control, and that the official statistics were not to be believed were widely known. But, as in many marriages, Greece's entry into the euro was a triumph of sentimentality and wilful blindness over realism.

The pity – in addition to the actual damage already inflicted on millions of Greeks – of this debacle is that it was never clear, and still isn't clear, that other countries, like Spain, will also be inexorably forced out. For the adjustment that Spain needs to make in order to stay in the euro was never as drastic as it was for Greece. While undoubtedly painful, it is probably still do-able.

But what has become unavoidably clear is that Germany, the linchpin of the eurozone, has been hopelessly stuck in an attitude that makes the break-up of the eurozone almost unavoidable. If Germany cannot pull itself together to keep Spain in the euro, then the markets can no longer ignore the fact that the lack of leadership and governance is a fatal flaw in the system.

What accounts for this? I would argue that the heart of the problem lies in the political culture of Germany and the mindset of its political and economic elites, which have never been willing to admit to their own voters the sacrifices that must be undertaken in order to be the leader of Europe. Instead, they have led Germans to believe that they can have it both ways: enjoying the fruits of the eurozone while times were good, and lobbing the burden of adjustment onto others when times got bad.

By doing this, the German elites set a trap for themselves with their own voters from which they cannot easily escape. Greece has been the perfect storm for the flaws of the eurozone and the vacuum of German leadership. Early in the crisis, the best course of action – the one I believe most likely to have preserved the core of the eurozone – would have been to admit the mistake of admitting Greece into the euro. From that recognition, Greece should have been eased out of the euro, while the German and French banks that were on the hook for losses could have been recapitalized. Finally, a massive firewall of monetary and fiscal support for Spain would have been announced.

But to achieve all this would have required a huge loss of face to the German voters – and a willingness to assume the burdens of leadership.

Instead, in the German mindset, Greece became a convenient but bogus template for assigning blame to other periphery countries – particularly, Ireland and Spain. Rather than acknowledging that these countries suffered from the bursting of a property bubble, greatly inflated by German and French lending, German elites pilloried them alike for having out-of-control budgets and inefficient workers. In the end, it was easier to blame and to moralize than to admit the truth.

Now that the elections in Greece, France and the Netherlands have smashed any illusion that all of the adjustment necessary to make the eurozone work can be foisted on other countries, will Germany step up to the plate? Will it advocate for a higher inflation rate, for a common fund for bank recapitalization, and a policy of direct government bond-purchases by the ECB? In other words, will it finally be truthful with its voters about what must be done in order to save the euro?

Sunday's regional German elections offer a small ray of hope. Merkel's party received a thrashing in North Rhine-Westphalia, home to nearly one in five Germans. Rejecting the conservatives' hard-line platform of more austerity and finger-pointing, German voters instead voted for the Social Democrats, for a platform of more spending and, shockingly, for more debt. This caps a series of defeats in state elections for Merkel and makes it increasingly clear that her government is in serious jeopardy.

Perhaps, just perhaps, German voters are waking up. And therein lies the possibility that the euro can be saved.

But it's a race against time at this point. Precious time, credibility and resources have been lost. Lives have been up-ended and shattered, voters are angry and restive, markets are in a hostile and unforgiving mood. It is said that leaders are born of great crises. It is now or never for Germany.

New Documents Confirm Koch Was on ALEC Crime Task Force Led by NRA

Source: PRWatch

PART ONE: New documents show that Koch Industries had a seat on the controversial “Public Safety and Elections Task Force” of the American Legislative Exchange Council as of at least 2011.
ALEC announced it was dropping that task force in the wake of the controversy over the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin and so-called “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) laws. However, the co-leader of that task force, Rep. Jerry Madden (R-TX), revealed ALEC's announcement to be a PR maneuver when he reassured The Christian Post that his task force's work would continue through other ALEC task forces.
Koch Industries has vigorously defended ALEC, and has assailed reporting that noted that the company, led by billionaire brothers Charles and David, is a long-time funder and leader of ALEC and that ALEC has long advanced the NRA agenda through "model" gun bills, including Florida's controversial SYG law that was ratified by ALEC in 2005.
It turns out that Koch was a member of that ALEC task force in recent years, and that it was on the task force when the NRA was the private sector co-chair.  Moreover, Koch Industries had not one but two employees who were listed as “members” present for ALEC's "Public Safety and Elections" Task Force at the last annual task force summit.
Koch has said it had no involvement in the SYG law passed in Florida and then ratified by the ALEC criminal justice task force in 2005. The company, however, was a leader of ALEC in 2005, just as today, and its funding helps underwrite ALEC's operations and agenda. The various task forces Koch has served on over the past nearly two decades is not known, but now it has come to light that in at least 2010 and 2011 Koch was a member of ALEC's crime task force. 

Two Koch Staffers at the Last ALEC Crime Task Force Summit Meeting

Site of ALEC's 2011 SummitOn April 29, 2011, at Cincinnati’s Hilton Netherland Plaza Hotel, an historic building gilded just before the Great Depression, Jenny Kim and Jessie Rager--employees of Koch's lobbying arm--sat as two of the 16 “Private Sector Members” in attendance at the ALEC crime task force’s day-long meeting. As such, Koch constituted 1/8th of the private sector members considering model legislation and business that day.

Kim is the Associate General Counsel for “Political Law” at Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC, (KCPS) which employs over three dozen attorneys in Wichita, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. She’s worked for Koch for almost four years, following stints at two law firms and in the White House Counsel’s Office in President George W. Bush's first term.

She’s been the point of contact for Koch’s lobby disclosure filings regarding the $2 to $3 million it has spent on other Koch employees directly lobbying Congress each year recently. Koch has lobbied on issues such whether companies should have to disclose their true owners, a permanent tax deferral for certain income from investment in foreign controlled companies, exemptions from the regulations of credit swaps in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms, legislation to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, and numerous bills affecting the pollution of Americans’ water. Rager is a paralegal for KCPS, but it’s not clear if Rager works for Kim or another lawyer.

The Task Force's Recent Focus: Redistricting and Opposing Bans on "Pay to Play"

The first order of business the day Kim and Rager were listed as attending ALEC’s crime task force last year was the approval of minutes describing the task force's agenda in DC after the 2010 mid-term elections.
At that meeting in the nation’s capitol a few months earlier, Mark Braden of the law firm Baker Hostedler kicked off the task force with his presentation on redistricting, that is, how to revise electoral maps after the census, a top priority for the new ALEC majorities in several states. As the Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD’s) PRWatch has documented, Braden—the former Chief Counsel to the Republican National Committee—also advised ALEC’s Republican members in Wisconsin on remapping legislative districts in the spring of 2011.

Other ALEC business in the minutes referenced included opposition to “Pay to Play Legislation,” meaning opposing bills that would ban government contractors from donating to political campaigns. The “model” resolution opposing such a ban was spearheaded by right-winger Bradley Smith’s special interest outfit, the “Center for Competitive Politics” (CCP), through its then-president Sean Parnell (who is also an “expert” for the Heartland Institute, which been funded by Koch money). CCP does not reveal which corporations, CEOs, or family foundations fund its operations, which focus on advancing the notions that money is speech and that corporations and CEOs should be able to spend unlimited money influencing elections. CCP even opposed new disclosure rules after Citizens United in the DISCLOSE Act, just as ALEC opposed new disclosure in response to that U.S. Supreme Court decision.

CCP’s 2010 “model” resolution against state legislatures enacting Pay to Play bans passed with unanimous support of the public and private sector members.

At the April 2011 meeting with two Koch reps sitting as members, the minutes of that meeting were “unanimously” adopted by “voice vote” of public and private sector members.

Surprise? Task Force Approves Corporate Payday, Rejects Transparency

In Cincinnati, with the Koch employees on deck, the first piece of model legislation on the agenda was a bill promoted by TASER. That's the leading stun-gun manufacturer whose profits jumped to $3.8 million in the first quarter of this year.  Its then-Vice President of Government and Public Affairs, Peter Holran, made the pitch to the Task Force's legislators and "private sector" members. That bill is designed to create an “assessment,” or tax, on taxpayer fines for traffic violations and then split the proceeds between the agency issuing the citation and a fund to buy stun guns and other equipment.
TASER's model bill “passed the private sector unanimously,” according to newly revealed documents, and was also unanimously approved by the legislators voting.

This model bill basically creates a special pool of money, aside from other budgetary constraints plaguing cities and states, for the purchase of the kind of weapons sold by the company advancing the bill, which dubs this arrangement a safety equipment fund.

This is where ALEC’s “free market” mantra meets “crony capitalism”--your traffic cops at work, getting a slice of the pie from every ticket for their budgets with some dough for Tasers and other purchases.

The bill was adopted unanimously. There’s no indication that Koch’s Kim or Rager or other corporate reps expressed any reservations about this potentially great deal for part of the weapons industry. There is no record that there were any abstentions or objections; the approval was “unanimous.”

Several other crime bills passed unanimously, but a model bill to require “state legislatures to provide adequate notice before public hearings or votes so that citizens are able to participate in the legislative process in a meaningful way” failed.  It did not get the support of ALEC politicians on the task force co-chaired by Wisconsin Rep. Scott Suder, who is now ALEC’s co-chair for the state.

There is no indication in the records publicly available that Kim or Rager or others spoke up for the public’s opportunity to comment on proposed changes to state law as the “Legislative Transparency Act” went down in flames at the Cincinnati task force meeting last spring.

There is no indication that Koch’s reps voted against any crime or democracy bills last April.

A "Model" Proposal to Bar Police from Destroying Crime Guns?

Why and when did Koch Industries buy a seat and a vote on ALEC’s crime and elections task force? After the spotlight began to intensify on ALEC with the launch of CMD’s ALECexposed last summer, ALEC mostly stopped distributing the list of task force members in attendance at its meetings.
However, Koch was still listed on the Public Safety and Elections Task Force roster last summer. Kim and Rager were both listed as members representing Koch in the task force packet distributed for the summer meeting in New Orleans.

At the August meeting, the NRA, the immediate past co-chair of that task force, proposed more gun bills.  One of those bills distributed to members was a bill to bar law enforcement from destroying crime guns.
According to the minutes from the New Orleans meeting, a model bill introduced by the NRA’s Tara Mica received the “unanimous” approval of all the public and private sector members present but did not list the members.  There is no public record indicating that Koch objected to that bill, if it was present or in any other way.

And, although the bill to make new legislative transparency provisions legally binding on legislatures had failed in the spring, in the midst of increasing public awareness and concern about ALEC, ALEC's task force approved a statement of principles generally favoring transparency in August.  That resolution was not binding, unlike the bill that was blocked.

The resolution passed at a task force meeting that was anything but transparent, with the press and public excluded from observing its votes and discussion, as with other ALEC task force meetings.

Blocking Cities from Barring "Machine Guns" and Cop-Killer Bullets?

Similarly, when the Public Safety and Elections Task Force met at the Kierland Resort in Arizona, the NRA proposed new amendments to an older ALEC “Consistency in Firearms Regulation” model bill. That bill bars lawsuits by cities against gun manufacturers, sellers, and trade groups and also pre-empts local cities from regulating or taxing guns in other ways.

Late last year, the NRA proposed to ALEC new amendments that would expressly forbid cities from banning residents from owning extremely dangerous “machine guns,” “submachine guns,” and other guns. Its amendments would also block cities from restricting the sale of ammunition (with no exception for especially dangerous projectiles such as armor piercing ammo, known as cop-killer bullets), and from barring guns from being altered to make them more deadly.

It’s not clear why in 2011 the NRA felt so emboldened that it could make explicit what it could not in 1995 when the bill was first listed as an ALEC model or in 1999 when it was reaffirmed by ALEC’s task force and ALEC’s public sector board.

And who was the chairman of ALEC’s Private Sector Board in 1999 when ALEC re-affirmed the legislative template to block cities from suing gun manufacturers and from regulating firearms? It was Koch Industries. In 1999, Koch’s Michael K. Morgan was the chairman of the board. There is no public record indicating that he ever raised any objections to this part of the NRA’s agenda or other NRA model bills approved by ALEC.  ALEC attempts to emphasize that the private sector board does not affirmatively vote on model bills approved by private sector and public sector members on its task forces, but there is no indication that its corporate board is expected to remain silent regarding ALEC's agenda and operations.

And, last year, temporarily casting aside its long rhetorical defense of firearms for hunting and sporting, the NRA apparently wanted to ensure that machine guns were not banned in cities—guns whose rapid repeating rounds have nothing to do with hunting deer or other game and everything to do with maximizing the death toll when fired at human beings.

The NRA’s proposed amendments were approved “unanimously” by the task force’s private and public sector members in Scottsdale, Arizona, on December 2, 2011.

The minutes of that meeting distributed last month do not list which of ALEC's 2011 task force members were in Scottsdale and who unanimously approved this NRA bill and others proposed last winter.

Accordingly, there is no contemporaneously prepared and publicly distributed record of whether Koch representatives voted on the NRA’s machine gun protection amendments or not or whether Koch objected in any way to this part of the agenda for ALEC. Other bills on the agenda in Arizona included a failed effort to change ALEC’s position that favors the undemocratic Electoral College and opposes “national popular vote” (meaning the president who wins the popular vote wins the presidency), and Koch’s view of them, if any, is unknown.

Secrecy Cloaks Koch Role, But It Was on the Task Force the NRA Led

Unlike for the Cincinnati task force meeting a year ago, for the May 2012 meeting in Charlotte, ALEC members were not sent a list of the names and contact information for their fellow members in preparation for the task force meeting.

That is, there is no verifiable public record of whether or not Koch Industries continued its membership on this task force beyond 2011, although Koch (through Morgan) remains on ALEC’s board, according to the new materials Common Cause obtained in support of its complaint to the IRS that ALEC is a corporate lobbying group masquerading as a charity.

Since ALEC operates in the shadows and records are incomplete, it is not clear how many years prior to 2012 Koch previously paid to play on this task force. After all, Koch’s KCPS, represented by Kim, was listed on ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force roster not only in 2011 but also in 2010.

Illustration by Mark FioreWho was the private sector co-chair of that task force when Koch was listed on its 2010 roster? None other than the NRA.  It was represented as the Public Safety and Elections Task Force co-chair through its government relations rep Tara Mica.

Yet, Koch Industries has been on the offensive against those connecting the dots between the NRA, ALEC, and Koch. It has pointed to a single bill it opposed in Florida that would have resulted in the arming of its employees on the job against its will. Apparently, in that instance, the corporation didn’t think doing so was a good idea. Many employers probably think it’s not a good idea to have employees carrying guns around the workplace. That particular gun bill, however, was not ratified or adopted as an ALEC model, either.

There is no indication Koch Industries or its representatives ever objected to sitting on a Public Safety and Elections Task Force co-chaired by the NRA or its agenda.

In fact, there is no publicly available evidence that Koch, as a long-time ALEC board member and funder, objected to the NRA co-chairing that task force for a number of years.

There is no evidence Koch ever objected to any NRA initiative in 2010 and 2011 when it irrefutably was listed as a member of that task force.

And, there is no public record that Koch ever used its seat on that task force to move to repeal or revoke NRA bills previously endorsed as the model bills of that task force, such as the SYG/Castle Doctrine bill, the bill barring city lawsuits against gun manufacturers, or ALEC’s opposition to the federal assault weapons ban, for example.

It is simply not known how many years beyond 2010 and 2011, if any, Koch had a seat on ALEC’s crime task force during the nearly two decades Koch has had a seat on ALEC's corporate board, but cost was certainly not an impediment.

After all, the going rate for an ALEC corporate member to buy a seat and a vote on that task force last year was a mere $2500. With Koch’s reported revenue of $100 billion per year, the annual fee for this task force is a little less than the company makes in, literally, the stroke of a single second on the hands of a clock.

Why We Regulate

Source: Paul Krugman via New York Times

One of the characters in the classic 1939 film “Stagecoach” is a banker named Gatewood who lectures his captive audience on the evils of big government, especially bank regulation — “As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks!” he exclaims. As the film progresses, we learn that Gatewood is in fact skipping town with a satchel full of embezzled cash.

As far as we know, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, isn’t planning anything similar. He has, however, been fond of giving Gatewood-like speeches about how he and his colleagues know what they’re doing, and don’t need the government looking over their shoulders. So there’s a large heap of poetic justice — and a major policy lesson — in JPMorgan’s shock announcement that it somehow managed to lose $2 billion in a failed bit of financial wheeling-dealing.

Just to be clear, businessmen are human — although the lords of finance have a tendency to forget that — and they make money-losing mistakes all the time. That in itself is no reason for the government to get involved. But banks are special, because the risks they take are borne, in large part, by taxpayers and the economy as a whole. And what JPMorgan has just demonstrated is that even supposedly smart bankers must be sharply limited in the kinds of risk they’re allowed to take on.

Why, exactly, are banks special? Because history tells us that banking is and always has been subject to occasional destructive “panics,” which can wreak havoc with the economy as a whole. 

Current right-wing mythology has it that bad banking is always the result of government intervention, whether from the Federal Reserve or meddling liberals in Congress. In fact, however, Gilded Age America — a land with minimal government and no Fed — was subject to panics roughly once every six years. And some of these panics inflicted major economic losses.

So what can be done? In the 1930s, after the mother of all banking panics, we arrived at a workable solution, involving both guarantees and oversight. On one side, the scope for panic was limited via government-backed deposit insurance; on the other, banks were subject to regulations intended to keep them from abusing the privileged status they derived from deposit insurance, which is in effect a government guarantee of their debts. Most notably, banks with government-guaranteed deposits weren’t allowed to engage in the often risky speculation characteristic of investment banks like Lehman Brothers.

This system gave us half a century of relative financial stability. Eventually, however, the lessons of history were forgotten. New forms of banking without government guarantees proliferated, while both conventional and newfangled banks were allowed to take on ever-greater risks. Sure enough, we eventually suffered the 21st-century version of a Gilded Age banking panic, with terrible consequences.

It’s clear, then, that we need to restore the sorts of safeguards that gave us a couple of generations without major banking panics. It’s clear, that is, to everyone except bankers and the politicians they bankroll — for now that they have been bailed out, the bankers would of course like to go back to business as usual. Did I mention that Wall Street is giving vast sums to Mitt Romney, who has promised to repeal recent financial reforms?

Enter Mr. Dimon. JPMorgan, to its — and his — credit, managed to avoid many of the bad investments that brought other banks to their knees. This apparent demonstration of prudence has made Mr. Dimon the point man in Wall Street’s fight to delay, water down and/or repeal financial reform. He has been particularly vocal in his opposition to the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks with government-guaranteed deposits from engaging in “proprietary trading,” basically speculating with depositors’ money. Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything’s under control.

Apparently not.

What did JPMorgan actually do? As far as we can tell, it used the market for derivatives — complex financial instruments — to make a huge bet on the safety of corporate debt, something like the bets that the insurer A.I.G. made on housing debt a few years ago. The key point is not that the bet went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees.

For the moment Mr. Dimon seems chastened, even admitting that maybe the proponents of stronger regulation have a point. It probably won’t last; I expect Wall Street to be back to its usual arrogance within weeks if not days.

But the truth is that we’ve just seen an object demonstration of why Wall Street does, in fact, need to be regulated. Thank you, Mr. Dimon.

Krugman: Euro mess to play out in less than a year

Source: Paul Krugman

Some of us have been talking it over, and here’s what we think the end game looks like:

1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month.

2. Huge withdrawals from Spanish and Italian banks, as depositors try to move their money to Germany.

3a. Maybe, just possibly, de facto controls, with banks forbidden to transfer deposits out of country and limits on cash withdrawals.

3b. Alternatively, or maybe in tandem, huge draws on ECB credit to keep the banks from collapsing.

4a. Germany has a choice. Accept huge indirect public claims on Italy and Spain, plus a drastic revision of strategy — basically, to give Spain in particular any hope you need both guarantees on its debt to hold borrowing costs down and a higher eurozone inflation target to make relative price adjustment possible; or:

4b. End of the euro.

And we’re talking about months, not years, for this to play out.

JPMorgan Sought Loophole on Risky Trading

WASHINGTON — Soon after lawmakers finished work on the nation’s new financial regulatory law, a team of JPMorgan Chase lobbyists descended on Washington. Their goal was to obtain special breaks that would allow banks to make big bets in their portfolios, including some of the types of trading that led to the $2 billion loss now rocking the bank.

Even after the official draft of the Volcker Rule regulations was released last October, JPMorgan and other banks continued their full-court press to avoid limits.

That was not the intent of the law, said Phil Angelides, who headed the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. “I think the regulators need to go back and sharpen their pencils,” Mr. Angelides said. “The intent of the law was to stop insured depositories from doing propriety trading with this kind of risk profile.” And whatever JPMorgan calls it, “it sure looks like proprietary trading, which Dodd-Frank was designed to stop insured depositories from engaging in.”

Read the whole story in the NYTimes

Reid: Supporters of Filibuster Reform Were ‘Right,’ ‘The Rest Of Us Were Wrong’

Every two years, when the Senate’s newly-elected members take office, the Constitution opens up a brief window when the Senate’s rules can be changed with just 51 votes — the rules typically require a two-thirds majority to make any changes. Last year, several senators proposed taking advantage of this window to reform the filibuster rule and prevent Senate Republicans from continuing their unprecedented campaign of obstruction of bills and nominees. Ultimately, however, these reforms failed because too many Senate Democrats were unwilling to move forward with them.

Yesterday, in a floor speech, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) admitted that the reformers were correct, and that the senators who kept the filibuster intact were wrong:

If there ever were a time when Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley were prophetic, it’s tonight. These two young, fine senators said it was time we changed the rules in the Senate, and we didn’t. They were right. The rest of us were wrong — or most of us now anyway. What a shame. So here we are, wasting time because of the Republicans. … And then, to top it off, one of the finest members of the Senate we’ve had, ever, was defeated yesterday by a man, listen to this, Mr. President, who campaigned on the platform that there’s too much compromise in the Senate. And he’s going to come back here and not compromise with anybody on anything. Now that’s what we need in the Senate, more people who are willing to do nothing but fight.

Despite their unwillingness to do so last year, however, they will have another opportunity to do so very soon — provided they have at least 51 votes in favor of reform. Next January, when the 113th Congress convenes, another window opens enabling the Senate’s rules to be changed by a simple majority vote.

Read the whole story at Think Progress

What austerity looks like, in three graphs

Source: Ezra Klein

This is what austerity looks like:

 
(Data: IMF) What you’re seeing there is the unemployment rate and the structural budget deficit across all of Europe. “Structural budget deficit” is a technical term: It means the deficit that’s been created by what the government is doing rather than what the economy is doing. If policy were “expansionary” —which is the opposite of austere — the structural deficit would rise when unemployment rises, because the government would be spending more to support the economy.

Instead, it’s falling even as unemployment rises.

Zoom into the country level and you can see this even more clearly. Here is unemployment in Spain, Italy, France, Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. As you can see, it’s skyrocketing:

(Data: IMF)
And here are the structural budget deficits for the same set of countries. As you can see, they’re falling:

 
(Data: IMF) That’s austerity. It comes both from spending cuts and tax increases. And it can be expected to reduce economic growth. According to the IMF, which analyzed 173 episodes of austerity, cutting the deficit by 1 percent of GDP can be expected to reduce real incomes by 0.6 percent and raise unemployment by 0.5 percentage points.

All the numbers in this post, by the way, come from the International Monetary Fund’s latest data (pdf). Values for 2012 and 2013 are the Fund’s estimates.

Greed is Good

Ronald Reagan's introduced the "Greed is Good" paradigm in 1980. By slashing top tax rates he incentivized greed among the richest Americans. An article by Robert Parry sums it up well:

The idea – once famously sketched out by right-wing economist Arthur Laffer on a napkin – was to slash the tax rates on the rich to spur a “supply side” bonanza of economic growth and higher tax revenues for the government.

Before becoming Reagan’s vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush labeled this tax strategy “voodoo economics,” and Reagan’s first budget director David Stockman warned that, without severe spending cuts, it could create a sea of red ink as far as the eye could see.

 

Of Bedrooms and Boardrooms

The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms.

Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters will be considering a similar amendment in November. Republicans in Maryland and Washington State are seeking to overturn legislative approval of same-sex marriage there.

Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting womens’ reproductive rights – banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.

The Republican bedroom crowd doesn’t want to talk about the nation’s boardrooms because that’s where most of their campaign money comes from. And their candidate for president has made a fortune playing board rooms like checkers.

Yet America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.

Read the whole story by Robert Reich

Unemployment: structural or lack of demand?

Source: Paul Krugman

More on the structural unemployment thing. As Mike Konczal points out, there’s something clearly obsessive about the desire to tell a structural story. It’s not just that people keep coming up with new arguments after each successive argument is shot down by the data; it’s the fact that it’s the same people who keep coming up with new arguments, strongly suggesting that they really want to believe it’s structural, and won’t take no for an answer.

Anyway, some readers responded to this post by asking what it looks like if you consider occupations rather than industries . Mike has one version:

Before I saw his post, I did a slightly different version, looking at the percentage change in unemployment rates from 2007-2010 by a more detailed list of occupations; loooong chart after the jump:

Source.

So, which are the occupations in which unemployment has fallen, the skills in high demand? There aren’t any.

This looks like a general fall in demand.

Federal Debt by President

Source: Wikipedia

Those Revolting Europeans

The French are revolting. The Greeks, too. And it’s about time.

Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing.

What’s wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe’s ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn’t exist — that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper. 

One answer — an answer that makes more sense than almost anyone in Europe is willing to admit — would be to break up the euro, Europe’s common currency. Europe wouldn’t be in this fix if Greece still had its drachma, Spain its peseta, Ireland its punt, and so on, because Greece and Spain would have what they now lack: a quick way to restore cost-competitiveness and boost exports, namely devaluation.

Read Paul Krugman's story in the New York Times

Game Over for the Climate

Source: James Hansen via New York Times

GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.

The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.

We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.

But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.

President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.

The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.

James Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is the author of “Storms of My Grandchildren.”

Liberals Steer Outside Money to Grass-Roots Organizing

After months on the sidelines, major liberal donors including the financier George Soros are preparing to inject up to $100 million into independent groups to aid Democrats’ chances this fall. But instead of going head to head with the conservative “super PACs” and outside groups that have flooded the presidential and Congressional campaigns with negative advertising, the donors are focusing on grass-roots organizing, voter registration and Democratic turnout.

Read the whole story in the New York Times

Democratic Donors' 2012 Campaign Strategy Is Heavy On Ground, Light On Air

WASHINGTON -- Key players in the progressive universe have reached the conclusion that the 2012 elections can be won only with a gamble. Rather than match conservative groups dollar-for-dollar in television ad campaigns, they will invest their more limited resources in building up a grassroots infrastructure designed to get out the vote.

The latest commitment to the idea that Democrats must do more with less came Monday night, when one of the progressive community's foremost donors made his first foray into the 2012 race.

Billionaire financier George Soros announced that he would be making two separate $1 million donations to outside government groups. While the sum hardly constitutes chump change, the underlying purpose of the giving was more newsworthy. After having sat patiently on the campaign sideline, Soros finally decided to invest. But not with the Obama campaign itself or the president's allied super PAC. Rather, he gave to America Votes and American Bridge 21st Century, organizations that do on-the-ground coordination and opposition research respectively.

Explaining the donations, longtime Soros adviser Michael Vachon said they were driven by Soros' belief that Democrats had two comparative advantages over the GOP: organizing acumen and long-term infrastructure.

"Culturally, the left doesn't do Swift Boat," Vachon said, in reference to the trickster, ultimately effective ad campaign run against Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in the 2004 presidential campaign. "It's not what we do well. If we did do it well, George W. Bush would not have been re-elected because he was a supremely swift-boat-able candidate. We don't do it well. We do humor well."
While it would be unwise to simply leave the president's super PAC's unfunded, Vachon added, there also needed to be a recognition that progressive money would be drowned out by conservative. Karl Rove's American Crossroads is expected to spend $300 million alone. Mitt Romney's allied super PAC, Restore Our Future, has spent $44 million already. Faced with those figures, Soros concluded a wiser investment strategy was needed.

"If you look at 2010 Senate races, in close races where progressive outside groups spent nothing, such as Pennsylvania and Illinois, we lost; where we spent but didn’t come close to matching, Colorado and Washington, we won," Vachon said. "We don't have to match dollar for dollar, but we do need to be competitive."

Read the whole article on Huffington Post

Yes, there’s been austerity in Europe

Source: Brad Plumer via the Washington Post

 

The latest salvo in the debate over austerity in Europe is to… imply there hasn’t been much austerity at all. At National Review, Veronique de Rugy posts a chart suggesting that if you don’t adjust for inflation and don’t count tax increases, there’s only been a bit of budget-cutting.

Why so unpopular? (Michael Probst — Associated Press) But this seems to misunderstand what austerity is. It’s not all about spending cuts. So let’s back up for a second. The standard Keynesian prescription for countries that are stuck in a deep economic slump — and this seems to describe much of Europe — is to actively increase deficits through more spending or tax cuts.

Instead, most countries in the euro zone have done the opposite. They’ve been cutting spending and hiking taxes while the economy’s still weak. This is austerity. The typical criticism is that pursuing austerity during a downturn hurts economic growth — and, as such, makes it even harder to get debt burdens under control.

And austerity really is happening in Europe. The best way to see this is to look at the change in the “structural budget deficit” for each euro zone country — that’s the amount of deficit countries have once you factor out economic conditions. In other words, this is the part of the deficit that governments have direct control over. And, according to data from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (see table B-7), most euro zone countries have been sharply cutting their structural deficits since 2009.

There’s been a lot of austerity. And there’s a lot more austerity planned. Here’s a chart we made showing this:

Some countries have carried out a huge amount of austerity since 2009, trimming spending, hiking taxes, and shrinking their structural deficits considerably: Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain are the leaders in this regard. Others have engaged in just a tiny bit of austerity, like Germany and the Netherlands. And Finland stands out as an outlier, having actually engaged in a bit of fiscal stimulus between 2009 and 2011.

Now, one question to ask is whether austerity is actually hurting economic growth in Europe. There are some signs that it is. The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf created the chart below — using similar IMF data — showing that there’s a very sharp correlation between the amount of belt-tightening carried out between 2008 and 2012 and the amount of economic growth each country enjoys:


There are a few countries that (slightly) buck the trend. Both Germany and France carried out small amounts of austerity, and they still managed to grow a tiny bit. Likewise, Netherlands and Finland engaged in a bit of stimulus, but their economies still contracted a little bit. On the whole, though, the relationship holds: More austerity was correlated with weaker economic growth.

And if that’s the case, it’s a problem. Because if a country’s economy is shrinking, then its debt troubles are likely to grow. (It’s tough to rein in your debt-to-GDP ratio when GDP is falling faster than your debts.)

And Wolf has another graph here showing that very few euro zone countries have actually managed to reduce their overall deficits in the past three years by engaging in austerity. The effects of weaker growth are swamping the savings from budget-cutting. The only real exceptions are Greece — which has engaged in so much belt-tightening that its actual deficits have fallen — and Italy, which has seen a very modest improvement over the past two years. The rest of Europe seems to be in even worse budget shape than before, despite carrying out austerity measures.

So that’s the basic shape of what’s going on. Countries in the euro zone have been pushing forward with austerity, through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Even those countries that could potentially afford to engage in more stimulus, like Germany, are instead putting on the brakes. And, as Wolf argues, there’s a case to be made that austerity is causing a lot of economic pain without actually solving Europe’s debt woes. That might be one reason why it’s so unpopular.

(The Economist’s Ryan Avent has more charts and commentary on this topic.)
Update: Veronique de Rugy replies to say she never denied that Europe was engaged in austerity. Her point was that European-style austerity has involved spending cuts and large tax hikes. Fair enough. On that we’re in agreement, and apologies if I misread her. (Whether austerity might have worked better if it had been more heavily tilted toward spending cuts, as she suggests, is a separate and more complicated question.)