From: The Center for Media and Democracy, PR Watch

February 7, 2012
CONTACT: Sara Jerving at (608) 260-9713 or sara@prwatch.org

CMD Unveils Documents Detailing Insidious PR Campaign to “Greenwash” Weed-Killer Polluting Drinking Water Across the Country

Syngenta’s PR Team Investigated the Press and Paid “Experts” to Shape the News and Counter Scientific Claims of Potential Endocrine Disruption

Madison – Today, the Center for Media and Democracy posted more than 200 emails, invoices and other documents unsealed as part of a major lawsuit against Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc., the primary manufacturer of the weed-killer “atrazine.”

“These documents reveal a multi-million dollar effort by Syngenta and its PR flaks to influence the public’s perception of atrazine in an effort to stave off regulatory and legal action against the weed-killer, which has been found in drinking water across the nation. As part of this greenwashing effort, Syngenta’s PR team investigated the press and paid scientists, economists and other ‘experts’ to spin the media and the public on the ‘benefits’ of atrazine,” said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy.

The Holiday Shores Sanitary District vs. Syngenta and Growmark Inc. lawsuit was filed in 2006 and is still in the pre-trial stage. Holiday Shores is a small, lakeside community located in Madison County, Illinois, surrounded by farm fields. When the community’s water was found to be contaminated with atrazine, officials were worried about new scientific evidence linking atrazine to endocrine disruptive effects. They sought to upgrade their drinking water filtration system to extract the weed-killer only to find the upgrade prohibitively expensive. In this groundbreaking lawsuit, the community seeks financial help from the multi-billion dollar Swiss manufacturer to upgrade their filtration system to protect the public’s health.

Atrazine is primarily used by corn, sorghum, and sugarcane farmers, but it is also used on some tree farms and golf courses. The weed-killer can easily run off into rivers, streams, and lakes, and it has been found in 94 percent of U.S. drinking water. Recent investigations show that the levels of the weed-killer can spike during the year, but that the company and the EPA did not alert the public. An increasing number of studies link the chemical to hormonal disruption and gender changes in laboratory animals.

The documents reveal a coordinated strategy to “rattle cages” at the EPA and influence the media, potential jurors, farmers and politicians. Tactics used by the PR team include investigating critics, such as Danielle Ivory of the Huffington Post, creating a “Benefits Panel” made up of supposedly independent experts to counter-spin negative press, and paying a Fox media pundit, scientists, economists, and other third party actors to carry their message on atrazine without disclosing that financial relationship to the public in their broadcast interviews. Invoices show that one ‘expert,’ Richard Fawcett, the president of Fawcett Consulting and member of Syngenta’s Benefits Panel, received at least $30 million over 15 years.

Where Is the Fourth Estate When You Need Them?

Barbra Streisand, Reader Supported News

04 February 12

It seems these days that the Republican debates have become a forum in which candidates can assert just about anything. With the right amount of aggression, they are able to avoid answering tough questions by bullying the moderator into submission (i.e. not asking strong follow up questions in order to correct the record). We know there is a certain level of theatrics in politics. The electorate assumes that candidates will embellish, evade, and even sidestep at times when asked tough questions. But the line should be drawn when candidates rewrite history in order to protect or enhance their own self-image, which isn’t based on the truth.

Americans are busy, working hard to support and provide for their families. They don’t have time to parcel out fact from fiction. They depend on the Fourth Estate to guide them and to hold individuals running for office, especially the highest office in our country, accountable. Journalists like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow knew it was their duty to know the facts and disseminate them to the public. That responsibility in today’s media world seems to be diminishing.

As I’ve watched the Republican presidential primary unfold, I’ve seen the candidates successfully deflecting answers to tough questions or misleading the public, without forceful and timely push back from the mainstream media. And we all know, the longer a lie or a half truth is allowed to simmer in the public consciousness without being refuted, the harder it is to correct misconceptions down the line.

Newt Gingrich has done this the best. He has claimed in debates and interviews that while serving as Speaker of the House, his leadership helped create 11 million new jobs, which ultimately led to the economic boom of the 1990s. He always leaves out one very important fact, however. The economic boom of the 90s would not have been possible without President Clinton. Clinton pushed for the passage of the 1993 Deficit Reduction Act, which proposed increasing taxes on the wealthiest income earners, cutting programs that weren’t working, taxing corporations at 35%, and extending the earned income tax credit. Gingrich vehemently opposed the bill and he and every one of his Republican colleagues voted against it. The deadlock was broken by then Vice President Al Gore and the bill was signed into law by President Clinton. Three years later, the economy was surging, and by the end of Clinton’s second term, when Gingrich was forced out of office by his own party, the Administration recorded a net budget surplus. It was the first time the US budget had been balanced since 1968. Given these historical facts, how does any pundit or media outlet allow Gingrich to get away with taking credit for something he worked so hard to destroy?

Also, recently in a debate moderated by Fox News analyst, Juan Williams, Gingrich was questioned about controversial remarks he had made about poverty and African Americans. Gingrich had previously said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. Juan Williams attempted to coax Gingrich into acknowledging that he was playing racial politics. To which Gingrich responded untruthfully that, “more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.” And there ended that portion of the debate with Gingrich receiving deafening applause from the audience, looking strong and principled. What Juan Williams failed to point out in that moment is that Barack Obama has not put anyone on food stamps. The grossly irresponsible and greedy practices of those on Wall Street, which led to the subsequent crash of the housing market, created the most severe recession our country has experienced since the Great Depression (which Obama inherited from George W. Bush when he entered office). These events, along with the continuous deregulation of our financial sector, conspired to make a record number of people eligible for government food assistance. Juan Williams completely missed this important opportunity to reveal the real truth behind Gingrich’s racist assertions.

These kinds of tactics are used frequently by candidates running for office. Journalists need to stand strong and do their job, which is to challenge candidates immediately when they are purposefully misleading the public. They should not be polite or fearful of offending someone when the truth is in question. As we continue through the primary and head toward the general election, this is crucial. Without the mainstream media’s commitment to holding candidates accountable, we have little chance of having a well-informed electorate on Election Day. And let’s look at the facts. The truth is, President Obama’s leadership on the stimulus, bringing the auto industry back from the brink of collapse, adding nearly 3.7 million private sector jobs in 23 consecutive months of job growth proves that our country is moving in the right direction. Because of the President’s policies, our economy is on the road to recovery and it’s time we start celebrating the truth.

P.S. Hooray to everyone who supported Planned Parenthood and spoke out against Susan G. Komen for the Cure, who wrongfully politicized the issue of women’s health. This week we saw how the power of grass roots activism can lead to positive change. Bravo!

The Party People of Wall Street

Monday 30 January 2012

by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Truthout | Op-Ed

A week or so ago, we read in The New York Times about what in the Gilded Age of the Roman Empire was known as a bacchanal – a big blowout at which the imperial swells got together and whooped it up.

This one occurred here in Manhattan at the annual black-tie dinner and induction ceremony for Kappa Beta Phi. That’s the very exclusive Wall Street fraternity of billionaire bankers, and private equity and hedge fund predators.  People like Wilbur Ross, the  vulture capitalist; Robert Benmosche, the CEO of AIG, the insurance giant that received tens of billions in bailout money; and Alan “Ace” Greenberg, former chairman of Bear Stearns, the failed investment bank bought by JPMorgan Chase.

They got together at the St. Regis Hotel off Fifth Avenue to eat rack of lamb, drink and haze their newest members, who are made to dress in drag, sing and perform skits while braving the insults, wine-soaked napkins and petit fours – those fancy little frosted cakes — hurled at them by the old guard. In other words, a gilt-edged Animal House, food fight and all.

This year, the butt of many a joke were the protesters of Occupy Wall Street. In one of the sketches, the bond specialist James Lebenthal scolded a demonstrator with a face tattoo, “Go home, wash that off your face and get back to work.” And in another, a member — dressed like a protester – was told, “You’re pathetic, you liberal. You need a bath!”

Pretty hilarious stuff. The whole affair’s reminiscent of the wingdings the robber barons used to throw during America’s own Gilded Age a century and a half ago, when great wealth amassed at the top, far from the squalor and misery of working stiffs. Guests would arrive in the glittering mansions for costume balls that rivaled Versailles, reinforcing the sense of superiority and the virtue of a ruling class that depended on the toil and sweat of working people.

That’s consistent  with the attitude expressed by several of these types after Occupy Wall Street sprung up; bankers told the Times on the record that they could understand the anger of the protesters camped on their doorstep;  but privately, a  hedge manager said, “Most… view [it] as ragtag group looking for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.”

So sayeth the winners in our winner-take all economy.  The very guys who were celebrating at the St. Regis because they were too big to fail. Even when they fell flat on their faces, the government was there to dust them off, bail them out and send them back to fight the class war with nary a harsh word or punishment. Talk about a nanny welfare state.

None of this was by accident. The last three decades have witnessed a carefully calculated heist worthy of Robert Redford and Paul Newman in “The Sting” — but on a massive scale. It was an inside job, politically engineered by Wall Street and Washington working hand-in-hand, sticky fingers with sticky fingers, to turn the legend of Robin Hood on its head – giving to the rich and taking from everybody else. Don’t take our word for it – it’s all on the record.

The biggest of the big boys was Citigroup, at one time the world’s largest financial institution. When the meltdown hit in 2008, the bank cut more than 50,000 jobs and you and other taxpayers shelled out more than $45 billion to save it. And how are Citigroup executives doing? Nicely, thank you. Last year, its CEO, Vikram Pandit, took home $1.75 million in base salary, and was awarded $3.7 million in deferred stock.

According to the Times, “Citigroup is expected to disclose the rest of his pay, cash, be it upfront or deferred, in March. In addition, while not necessarily for work performed in 2011, Mr. Pandit last year was awarded a $16.7 million retention bonus, plus stock options that could add $6.5 million to the package’s overall value.” Makes you want to cry out, “Retain me! Retain me!”

To be fair, Vikram Pandit was at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland last week, where he told Bloomberg News, “It’s important for the financial system to acknowledge that there’s a great deal of anger directed at it… Trust has been broken. Banks have to serve clients, not serve themselves.” What’s more, he has said that the “sentiments” expressed by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were “completely understandable.”

This, in contrast to the financial industry official who told a reporter that the protesters’ issues were “a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Or, as they used to say while partying down at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, let them eat petits fours.

Republican Myth: Obama’s “Entitlement Society”

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich’s Blog

02 February 12

One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into “European-style welfare culture.”

In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society.”

Gingrich calls Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history.”

What’s their evidence? Both rely on federal budget data showing direct payments to individuals shot up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase, since the start of 2009.

They also point to Census data showing that 49 percent of Americans now live in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit - Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or subsidized housing. That’s up from 44 percent in 2008.

Finally, they trumpet Social Security Administration figures showing that the number of people on Social Security disability jumped 10 percent in Obama’s first two years in office.

They argue our economic problems stem from this sharp rise in “dependency.” Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

But they have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other safety-net programs is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed whatever helping hands they could get.

If anything, America’s safety nets have been too small and shot through with holes. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically over the past three years. According to a study by Northeastern University, a third of families with young children are now in poverty.

This is the real scandal. For example, only 40 percent of the unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits because they weren’t working full time or long enough on a single job before they were canned. The unemployment system doesn’t take account of the fact that a large portion of the workforce typically works part time on several jobs, and moves from job to job.

Republicans also object to Obama’s health care law, which covers 30 million more Americans than were covered before. That law still leaves over 20 million without health insurance. They’ll get emergency care when they’re in dire straights - hospitals won’t refuse them - but we all end up paying indirectly.

Regressive Republicans pretend they’re about opportunity. In reality they’re back at what they’ve been doing for years - promoting Social Darwinism.

Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including “The Work of Nations,” “Locked in the Cabinet,” “Supercapitalism” and his latest book, “AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America’s Future.” His ‘Marketplace’ commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.

Romney Isn’t Concerned

By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times Op-Ed

February 2, 2012

If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.

First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”

This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?

Also, given this whopper about how safety-net programs actually work, how credible was Mr. Romney’s assertion, after expressing his lack of concern about the poor, that if the safety net needs a repair, “I’ll fix it”?

Now, the truth is that the safety net does need repair. It provides a lot of help to the poor, but not enough. Medicaid, for example, provides essential health care to millions of unlucky citizens, children especially, but many people still fall through the cracks: among Americans with annual incomes under $25,000, more than a quarter — 28.7 percent — don’t have any kind of health insurance. And, no, they can’t make up for that lack of coverage by going to emergency rooms.

Similarly, food aid programs help a lot, but one in six Americans living below the poverty line suffers from “low food security.” This is officially defined as involving situations in which “food intake was reduced at times during the year because [households] had insufficient money or other resources for food” — in other words, hunger.

So we do need to strengthen our safety net. Mr. Romney, however, wants to make the safety net weaker instead.

Specifically, the candidate has endorsed Representative Paul Ryan’s plan for drastic cuts in federal spending — with almost two-thirds of the proposed spending cuts coming at the expense of low-income Americans. To the extent that Mr. Romney has differentiated his position from the Ryan plan, it is in the direction of even harsher cuts for the poor; his Medicaid proposal appears to involve a 40 percent reduction in financing compared with current law.

So Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.

Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor. What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about the rich, who are “doing fine.” After all, if that’s what he really feels, why does he propose showering them with money?

And we’re talking about a lot of money. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Romney’s tax plan would actually raise taxes on many lower-income Americans, while sharply cutting taxes at the top end. More than 80 percent of the tax cuts would go to people making more than $200,000 a year, almost half to those making more than $1 million a year, with the average member of the million-plus club getting a $145,000 tax break.

And these big tax breaks would create a big budget hole, increasing the deficit by $180 billion a year — and making those draconian cuts in safety-net programs necessary.

Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.

At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.

S.C. Considers Second ALEC Voting Bill

Brendan Fischer on January 30, 2012

From Center for Media and Democracy PR Watch

South Carolina is again considering a bill from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to limit access to the ballot box. A nearly identical version of an ALEC voting bill is moving through the state Senate and comes on the heels of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) blocking South Carolina’s ALEC-inspired voter ID law as discriminatory against people of color.

S.C. Sen. Chip Campsen State Senator Chip Campsen (R), an ALEC member, introduced SB 304, which is almost a mirror-image of the ALEC Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (pdf). The bill requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and has opened up a new round of debate over voting rights.

DOJ Blocked S.C. Voter ID in December

In May 2011, South Carolina was part of a wave of states to pass restrictive voting measures using the ALEC model Voter ID Act as a template (Sen. Campsen also co-sponsored the voter ID bill). According to the ACLU, the law would disenfranchise 180,000 voters in the state, primarily people of color, students, and the elderly.

In December, the DOJ rejected South Carolina’s voter ID law, noting that the state’s registered population of minority voters was 20 percent more likely than whites to not have the required identification. Based on its history of discriminating against African-American voters, South Carolina is one of several states that under Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act needs federal pre-approval for changes to voting qualifications or procedures.

Critics say the voter ID laws are a politically-motivated effort to limit voting by people of color and college students — populations that typically vote for Democrats. According to a report issued by the NAACP, across the country 25 percent of African Americans (over 6.2 million African-American voters) and 16 percent of Latinos (over 2.96 million Latino voters) do not possess state-issued photo IDs.

Supporters of the laws allege that an ID requirement is necessary to combat voter fraud, despite almost no evidence that it exists (pdf). The DOJ acknowledged this reality when it blocked South Carolina’s law, writing that the state “did not include any evidence or instance of either in-person voter impersonation or any other type of fraud that is not already addressed by the state’s existing voter identification requirement and that arguably could be deterred by requiring voters to present only photo identification at the polls.”

ALEC Round Two

With South Carolina’s voter ID law blocked, GOP legislators turned to another ALEC model that would limit access to the ballot box. On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee South Carolina passed SB 304, which was introduced by Sen. Campsen and is nearly identical to the ALEC Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (pdf). See the side-by-side here. The bill now heads to the full Judiciary Committee.

Campsen insists that the bill is not an effort to rehash voter ID. “This bill is about determining someone’s citizenship,” he said, “to make sure that people who are not U.S. citizens do not vote.”

Where the voter ID law required voters to show a passport, military ID, or state-issued ID to vote, SB 304 would require “proof of citizenship” in order to register to vote — meaning voters must show a passport, military ID, state-issued ID, a birth certificate, or naturalization documents.

With both SB 304 and voter ID placing very similar burdens on voters, they’ll have the same functional impact, says Sen. John Scott (D), the only member of the three-person subcommittee to vote against the bill. “They’re just another way of prohibiting people from voting,” he said.

Little Doubt that ALEC Served as Voter ID Model

SB 304 is almost a mirror-image of the ALEC model, greatly strengthening the inference that ALEC served as the source for the outbreak of voter ID bills that swept the country in 2011.

The 2011 voter ID bills clearly had ALEC DNA but spotting it required dissecting the proposals. In most states, the voter ID bills amended sections in an election statute rather than creating new ones. This meant that provisions from the ALEC model had to be shoehorned into an existing piece of legislation, which involved changing language and reordering the ALEC provisions. Finding the ALEC roots required taking the bill apart and putting it back together.

SB 304, though, creates entirely new sections in South Carolina’s elections statutes, and no alteration is necessary. This makes the ALEC influence immediately apparent. See the side-by-side of the ALEC model and SB 304 here.

“Illegals” and “Zombie” Voters

In voting against SB 304 / the Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, Sen. Scott said there is no evidence that non-citizens are voting in South Carolina. The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles and Election Commission is reportedly looking into whether any non-citizens have voted.

The Commission’s examination comes soon after the head of the Department of Motor Vehicles claimed that more than 950 dead people had voted in South Carolina over the past six years. The claim was repeated on Fox News and other outlets as proof of “voter fraud” (and an example of why the blocked voter ID law was necessary), but fell apart after the Election Commission examined the data. Of the names the department was allowed to examine, all were alive and eligible to vote.

Selling the ‘Supply-Side’ Myth

January 27, 2012

Exclusive: Any rational assessment of America’s economic troubles would identify Ronald Reagan’s reckless “supply-side” economics as a chief culprit, but that hasn’t stopped Republican presidential hopefuls, led by Newt Gingrich, from selling this discredited theory to a gullible GOP base, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Consortium News (http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/27/selling-the-supply-side-myth/)

Despite Newt Gingrich’s claim that “supply-side” economic theories have “worked,” the truth is that America’s three-decade experiment with low tax rates on the rich, lax regulation of corporations and “free trade” has been a catastrophic failure, creating massive federal debt, devastating the middle class and off-shoring millions of American jobs.

It has ”worked” almost exclusively for the very rich, yet the former House speaker and the three other Republican presidential hopefuls are urging the country to double-down on this losing gamble, often to the cheers of their audiences — like one Florida woman who said she had lost her job and medical insurance but still applauded the idea of more “free-market” solutions.

Gingrich even boasts of his role in pioneering these theories of massive tax cuts favoring the rich, combined with sharp reductions in the role of government. That approach, once famously mocked by George H.W. Bush as “voodoo economics,” was supposed to spur businesses to expand production (the “supply side”), thus creating jobs and boosting revenues from all the commercial activity.

“I worked with Ronald Reagan to develop supply-side economics in the late ’70s, along with Jack Kemp and Art Laffer and Jude Wanniski and others,” Gingrich declared at a recent town hall event. “We ended up passing it into law in ’81. At the time it was very bold. People called it ‘voodoo economics.’ It had one great virtue: it worked.”

But that is not what the historical record really shows.

In 1980, I was working as an Associated Press correspondent covering budget and economic issues on Capitol Hill – and at the time, the “supply-siders” had two key arguments in their favor: first, the economy had stagnated in the 1970s largely due to oil price shocks, inflation and an aging industrial base.

Their second key advantage was that nobody could say for sure what the results of the “supply-side” experiment would be. There was little empirical data to assess how radical tax cuts would play out in the modern economy. One could make common-sense judgments, as George H.W. Bush had done with his “voodoo” remark, but you couldn’t see the future.

No More Mystery

Now, however, with three decades of experience with the experiment, the fallacies of “supply-side” economics are no longer a mystery. For instance, a major obstacle to today’s economic recovery has been the absence of “demand-side” consumers, not the availability of money to build more productive capacity.

And the reason that there are fewer consumers is that the Great American Middle Class, which the federal government helped build and nourish from the New Deal through the GI Bill to investments in infrastructure and technology in the Sixties and Seventies, has been savaged over the past three decades.

Though many Americans were able to cover up for their declining economic prospects with excessive borrowing for a while, the Wall Street crash of 2008 exposed the hollowing out of the middle class. So today, businesses are sitting on vast sums of cash – some estimates put the amount at about $2 trillion.

And the reasons for this dilemma are now well-known: first, when companies have expanded in recent years, the modern factories have relied on robotics with few humans required; second, the companies put many manufacturing sites offshore so they can exploit cheap labor; and third, the shrinking middle class has meant fewer customers, leaving corporations little motivation to build more factories.

For Americans, this has represented a downward spiral with no end in sight. American workers, whether blue- or white-collar, know that computers and other technological advancements have made many of their old jobs obsolete. And modern communications have allowed even expert service jobs, like computer tech advice, to go to places like India.

While painful to millions of Americans who find their talents treated as surplus, these developments do not by themselves have to be negative. After all, humans have dreamed for centuries about technology freeing them from the grind of tedious work and freeing up society to invest in a higher quality of life, for today’s citizens and for posterity.

The problem is that the only practical way for a democratic society to achieve that goal is to have a vibrant government using the tax structure to divert a significant amount of the super-profits from the rich into the public coffers for investments in everything from infrastructure to education to arts and sciences, including research and development for future generations, even possibly Gingrich’s “big idea” of a colony on the moon.

In fact, that kind of virtuous cycle was the experience of the United States from the 1930s through the 1970s, with the federal government taxing the top tranches of wealth at up to 90 percent and using those funds to build major electrification projects like the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority, to educate World War II veterans through the GI Bill, to connect the nation through the Interstate Highway system, to launch the Space Program, and to create today’s Internet.

Out of those efforts emerged robust economic growth as private corporations took advantage of the nation’s modern infrastructure and the technological advancements. Millions of good-paying jobs were created for the world’s best-trained work force, giving rise to the Great American Middle Class. The obvious answer was to keep this up, with the government investing in new productive areas, like renewable energy.

Demonizing ‘Guv-mint’

Instead, facing economic headwinds in the 1970s, caused in part by rising energy costs, Americans grew anxious about their futures, making them ripe for a new right-wing propaganda campaign demonizing “guv-mint” and telling white men, in particular, that the “free market” was their friend.

Blessed with a talented pitch man named Ronald Reagan, “supply-side” became the new product to sell. After taking office, Reagan pressed for a sharp reduction in the marginal tax rates, slashing the top rates for the wealthy from around 70 percent to 28 percent. Along with the tax cuts, Reagan also initiated an aggressive military buildup.

The results were devastating to the U.S. fiscal position. The federal debt soared, quadrupling during the 12 years of Reagan and Bush Sr. As a percentage of the gross domestic product, federal debt was actually declining in the 1970s, dropping to 26 percent of GDP, before exploding under Reagan, rising to 41 percent by the end of the 1980s. The shared wealth of the country also diverged, with the rich claiming a bigger and bigger piece of the national economic pie.

The nation’s debt crisis only began to subside after tax increases were enacted under President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, with Clinton’s tax hike pushing the top marginal rate back up to 39.6 percent. At the time, Gingrich warned that the Clinton tax hike would lead to an economic catastrophe.

The actual result was a booming economy, spurred strongly by the federal government’s new “information super-highway,” the Internet. The Clinton years also saw low unemployment and a balanced budget by the late 1990s. The debt-to-GDP measure declined from about 43 percent to 33 percent and was on course toward zero within a decade.

Ironically Gingrich also claims credit for that because – as House speaker – he worked with Clinton on some cost-cutting measures, but Clinton credits the 1993 tax increase, which passed without a single Republican vote, as the key factor in the budget turnaround.

After George W. Bush claimed the White House in 2001, “supply-side” dogma was back in vogue. Bush pushed through more tax cuts mostly for the rich, reducing the top marginal rate to 35 percent and creating an even bigger tax break for investors, cutting the capital gains rate to 15 percent. Combined with Bush’s two wars and other policies, the surplus soon disappeared and was replaced by another yawning deficit.

Even as most Americans struggled to hold a job and pay their bills, America’s super-rich lived a life of unparalleled luxury. With this concentration of money also had come a concentration of power, as right-wing operatives were hired to build a sophisticated media apparatus and think tanks to push – often with populist rhetoric – the policies that were dividing the country along the lines of a pampered one percent and a pressured 99 percent.

Many Americans, especially white men, heard their personal grievances echoed in the angry voices of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck – all well-compensated propagandists for “the one percent.”

Lesson Unlearned

Now, looking back over the economic and fiscal history of the past three decades, you might think that few Americans would be fooled again by this sucker bet on “supply-side.” But the Tea Partiers and many rank-and-file Republicans seem ready to put what’s left of their money back down on the gambling table.

All four remaining Republican hopefuls – Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Gingrich – have proposed lower tax rates especially on the rich with the same enduring but fanciful faith in “supply-side” economics.

Gingrich has gone so far as to advocate eliminating the capital gains tax entirely. It’s already down to 15 percent, meaning that many super-rich, from financier Warren Buffett to Mitt Romney, can live off their investments and pay a lower tax rate than what many middle-class Americans pay on their wages and salaries. In a recent Florida debate, Romney noted he would pay virtually no federal income tax under Gingrich’s plan.

The Republicans seem to be counting on the parallel propaganda campaign of demonizing “guv-mint.” They’re pinning their hopes on an ill-informed electorate (especially white men) siding with “the one percent” over their own working- and middle-class interests.

The GOP hopes also may hinge significantly on how determined some whites are to get the country’s first black president out of the White House. Historically, demagogic U.S. politicians have had great success in exploiting racial resentments, although these days often with coded language like Gingrich calling Barack Obama “the food-stamp president.”

The Right also has worked diligently to create false narratives to convince many Americans that their hatred of a strong federal government links them to the Founders. Many Tea Partiers have bought into the historical lie that the Founders wrote the Constitution to limit the power of the federal government and to promote “states’ rights” – the near opposite of what the framers actually were doing.

Led by Virginians Gen. George Washington and James Madison, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 threw out the Articles of Confederation, which had made the states supreme and the federal government a supplicant.

The Constitution reversed that situation, eliminating state “independence” and bestowing national sovereignty onto the federal Republic representing “we the people of the United States.” Contrary to the Tea Party’s false narrative, the Constitution represented the single biggest assertion of federal power in U.S. history.

When the Tea Partiers dress up in Revolutionary War costumes, they apparently don’t know that their notion of a weak central government and state “sovereignty” was anathema to the key framers of the Constitution, especially to Washington who had watched his soldiers suffer under the ineffectual Articles of Confederation.

And, when the Tea Partiers wave their “Don’t Tread on Me” flags of a coiled snake, they don’t seem to know that the warning was directed at the British Empire and that the banner aimed at fellow Americans was Benjamin Franklin’s image of a snake severed into various pieces representing the colonies/states with the admonishment “Join, or Die.”

Nevertheless, false narratives and false arguments can be as effective as real ones to a thoroughly misinformed population. Thus, many middle- and working-class Americans still cheer when Newt Gingrich references Ronald Reagan and his “supply-side” economics.

But the failure of Reagan’s economic strategy should be obvious to anyone who is not fully deluded by right-wing propaganda. Not only has the national debt skyrocketed over the past three decades, but whatever economic benefits that have been produced have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthy – while the nation as a whole has suffered.

[For more on related topics, see Robert Parry’s Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

January 29, 2012

The Austerity Debacle

By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times Op-Ed

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

O.K., about those caveats: On one side, British unemployment was much higher in the 1930s than it is now, because the British economy was depressed — mainly thanks to an ill-advised return to the gold standard — even before the Depression struck. On the other side, Britain had a notably mild Depression compared with the United States.

Even so, surpassing the track record of the 1930s shouldn’t be a tough challenge. Haven’t we learned a lot about economic management over the last 80 years? Yes, we have — but in Britain and elsewhere, the policy elite decided to throw that hard-won knowledge out the window, and rely on ideologically convenient wishful thinking instead.

Britain, in particular, was supposed to be a showcase for “expansionary austerity,” the notion that instead of increasing government spending to fight recessions, you should slash spending instead — and that this would lead to faster economic growth. “Those who argue that dealing with our deficit and promoting growth are somehow alternatives are wrong,” declared David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister. “You cannot put off the first in order to promote the second.”

How could the economy thrive when unemployment was already high, and government policies were directly reducing employment even further? Confidence! “I firmly believe,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet — at the time the president of the European Central Bank, and a strong advocate of the doctrine of expansionary austerity — “that in the current circumstances confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery, because confidence is the key factor today.”

Such invocations of the confidence fairy were never plausible; researchers at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere quickly debunked the supposed evidence that spending cuts create jobs. Yet influential people on both sides of the Atlantic heaped praise on the prophets of austerity, Mr. Cameron in particular, because the doctrine of expansionary austerity dovetailed with their ideological agendas.

Thus in October 2010 David Broder, who virtually embodied conventional wisdom, praised Mr. Cameron for his boldness, and in particular for “brushing aside the warnings of economists that the sudden, severe medicine could cut short Britain’s economic recovery and throw the nation back into recession.” He then called on President Obama to “do a Cameron” and pursue “a radical rollback of the welfare state now.”

Strange to say, however, those warnings from economists proved all too accurate. And we’re quite fortunate that Mr. Obama did not, in fact, do a Cameron.

Which is not to say that all is well with U.S. policy. True, the federal government has avoided all-out austerity. But state and local governments, which must run more or less balanced budgets, have slashed spending and employment as federal aid runs out — and this has been a major drag on the overall economy. Without those spending cuts, we might already have been on the road to self-sustaining growth; as it is, recovery still hangs in the balance.

And we may get tipped in the wrong direction by Continental Europe, where austerity policies are having the same effect as in Britain, with many signs pointing to recession this year.

The infuriating thing about this tragedy is that it was completely unnecessary. Half a century ago, any economist — or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook “Economics” — could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea. But policy makers, pundits and, I’m sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to forget what they used to know. And millions of workers are paying the price for their willful amnesia.

This is the chart to which Mr. Krugman referred. Take a close look. It is very instructive!

· National Institute of Economic and Social Research (http://www.niesr.ac.uk/)

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

By Stephanie Pappas | LiveScience.com – Thu, Jan 26, 2012

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.

Controversy ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

“The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this,” Nosek said, referring to the new study. “It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”

Brains and bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured. [Life's Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,” and “Schools should teach children to obey authority.” Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races.” (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson’s work can’t speak to this “underground” racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A study of averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren’t implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

“There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals,” Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

“We can say definitively men are taller than women on average,” he said. “But you can’t say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There’s plenty of overlap.”

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

“Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order,” Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. “Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice.”

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]

Simple viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri’s explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn’t conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you’d have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren’t possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like “every kid is a genius in his or her own way,” might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

“My speculation is that it’s not as simple as their model presents it,” Nosek said. “I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where ‘People I don’t know are threats’ and ‘The world is a dangerous place‘. … Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful.”

Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group’s point of view. That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

“There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners,” Hodson said. “Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups,” rather than thoughts.

January 25, 2012

The True Cost of High School Dropouts

By HENRY M. LEVIN and CECILIA E. ROUSE

New York Times

ONLY 21 states require students to attend high school until they graduate or turn 18. The proposal President Obama announced on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address — to make such attendance compulsory in every state — is a step in the right direction, but it would not go far enough to reduce a dropout rate that imposes a heavy cost on the entire economy, not just on those who fail to obtain a diploma.

In 1970, the United States had the world’s highest rate of high school and college graduation. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we’ve slipped to No. 21 in high school completion and No. 15 in college completion, as other countries surpassed us in the quality of their primary and secondary education.

Only 7 of 10 ninth graders today will get high school diplomas. A decade after the No Child Left Behind law mandated efforts to reduce the racial gap, about 80 percent of white and Asian students graduate from high school, compared with only 55 percent of blacks and Hispanics.

Like President Obama, many reformers focus their dropout prevention efforts on high schoolers; replacing large high schools with smaller learning communities where poor students can get individualized instruction from dedicated teachers has been shown to be effective. Rigorous evidence gathered over decades suggests that some of the most promising approaches need to start even earlier: preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, who are fed and taught in small groups, followed up with home visits by teachers and with group meetings of parents; reducing class size in the early grades; and increasing teacher salaries from kindergarten through 12th grade.

These programs sound expensive — some Americans probably think that preventing 1.3 million students from dropping out of high school each year can’t be done — but in fact the costs of inaction are far greater.

High school completion is, of course, the most significant requirement for entering college. While our economic competitors are rapidly increasing graduation rates at both levels, we continue to fall behind. Educated workers are the basis of economic growth — they are especially critical as sources of innovation and productivity given the pace and nature of technological progress.

If we could reduce the current number of dropouts by just half, we would yield almost 700,000 new graduates a year, and it would more than pay for itself. Studies show that the typical high school graduate will obtain higher employment and earnings — an astonishing 50 percent to 100 percent increase in lifetime income — and will be less likely to draw on public money for health care and welfare and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. Further, because of the increased income, the typical graduate will contribute more in tax revenues over his lifetime than if he’d dropped out.

When the costs of investment to produce a new graduate are taken into account, there is a return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar of investment, depending upon the educational intervention strategy. Under this estimate, each new graduate confers a net benefit to taxpayers of about $127,000 over the graduate’s lifetime. This is a benefit to the public of nearly $90 billion for each year of success in reducing the number of high school dropouts by 700,000 — or something close to $1 trillion after 11 years. That’s real money — and a reason both liberals and conservatives should rally behind dropout prevention as an element of economic recovery, leaving aside the ethical dimensions of educating our young people.

Some might argue that these estimates are too large, that the relationships among the time-tested interventions, high school graduation rates and adult outcomes have not been proved yet on a large scale. Those are important considerations, but the evidence cannot be denied: increased education does, indeed, improve skill levels and help individuals to lead healthier and more productive lives. And despite the high unemployment rate today, we have every reason to believe that many of these new graduates would find work — our history is filled with sustained periods of economic growth when increasing numbers of young people obtained more schooling and received large economic benefits as a result.

Of course, there are other strategies for improving educational attainment — researchers learn more every day about which are effective and which are not. But even with what we know, a failure to substantially reduce the numbers of high school dropouts is demonstrably penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Proven educational strategies to increase high school completion, like high-quality preschool, provide returns to the taxpayer that are as much as three and a half times their cost. Investing our public dollars wisely to reduce the number of high school dropouts must be a central part of any strategy to raise long-run economic growth, reduce inequality and return fiscal health to our federal, state and local governments.

Henry M. Levin is a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Cecilia E. Rouse, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, was a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011.