Tag: Punting the Pundits

Until the 1980s, corporate CEOs were paid, on average, 30 times what their typical worker was paid. Since then, CEO pay has skyrocketed to 280 times the pay of a typical worker; in big companies, to 354 times. [..]

This growing divergence between CEO pay and that of the typical American worker isn’t just wildly unfair. It’s also bad for the economy. It means most workers these days lack the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing — contributing to the slowest recovery on record. Meanwhile, CEOs and other top executives use their fortunes to fuel speculative booms followed by busts.

Anyone who believes CEOs deserve this astronomical pay hasn’t been paying attention. The entire stock market has risen to record highs. Most CEOs have done little more than ride the wave.

Tom Engelhardt: Wrap Your Mind Around ‘the Border’… Before It Wraps Itself Around You

Sometimes you really do need a map if you want to know where you are. In 2008, the ACLU issued just such a map of this country and it’s like nothing ever seen before. Titled “the Constitution-Free Zone of the United States,” it traces our country’s borders. Maybe you’re already tuning out. After all, you probably don’t think you live on or near such a border. Well, think again. As it happens, in our brave, new, post-9/11 world, as long as we’re talking “homeland security” or “war on terror,” anything can be redefined. So why not a border?

Our borders have, conveniently enough, long been Constitution-free zones where more or less anything goes, including warrantless searches of various sorts. In the twenty-first century, however, the border itself, north as well as south, has not only been increasingly up-armored, but redefined as a 100-mile-wide strip around the United States (and Alaska). In other words — check that map again — our “borders” now cover an expanse in which nearly 200 million Americans, or two-thirds of the U.S. population, live. Included are nine of the 10 largest metropolitan areas. If you live in Florida, Maine, or Michigan, for example, no matter how far inland you may be, you are “on the border.”

Joe Nocera: The Real Port Authority Scandal

This is a column about the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, but you won’t read a word in here about the lane-closing scandal in Fort Lee, N.J. This is about another scandal, one that has been going for on so long that people don’t even think of it as scandalous. Indeed, it involves no illegality whatsoever. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a scandal.

The Port Authority is supposed to manage – and improve – important parts of the transportation infrastructure of New York and New Jersey: airports like John F. Kennedy Airport, bridges like the George Washington Bridge, and terminals like the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

And, in fact, all of these need improving, especially the bus terminal, which is 64 years old and thoroughly outmoded. The steep $13 toll that drivers pay to cross the George Washington Bridge, for instance, is supposed to help pay for infrastructure improvements.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Bill de Blasio, Unbowed

To say that Mayor Bill de Blasio is unbowed after some difficult moments in his first few months in office is not entirely true. The 6-foot-5 progressive bows regularly so he won’t overwhelm interlocutors who don’t meet NBA specs.

But de Blasio offers no apologies for waging war on economic inequality, for taking his time in making key appointments, or for riling advocates of charter schools. He’ll concede errors of presentation, pointing out that he renewed a substantial majority of charter school arrangements even as his opponents grabbed national attention by casting him as an enemy to them all. His biggest mistake, he said, was in underestimating the “extraordinary level of opposition to change.” [..]

De Blasio ascribes some of his early trials to a need to go with “a really rigorous no-huddle offense in the first hundred days.” Now, there will be more huddles. De Blasio is running plays that will affect politics far outside his city, and he knows the cost of fumbles.

With the latest warnings delivered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over the past few weeks, no world leader will ever be able to claim that they were caught off-guard by climate change.

As former heads of state ourselves, we’ve experienced global crises from within the corridors of power. Some may take the world by surprise, but sometimes the warning signals are such that there is no excuse not to act. The IPCC report is such a signal. [..]

For this reason, it is a compelling call to action for governments. We hope it can trigger decisive action — notably on greenhouse gas emission reduction and financing for climate adaptation — on the road to December 2015, when world leaders will meet at a major conference in Paris to agree a new climate deal.

Robert Kuttner: Can Democrats Go Long?

For more than 30 years, the right has been throwing long passes. The Democrats, with some fine individual exceptions in the Senate and House, have been playing an incremental game, eking out gains of a few yards at a time and often being thrown for big losses.

Guess which side has been winning.

Four decades ago, supply side economics was a joke. The idea that cutting taxes on the very rich was the key to prosperity had been laughed out of the debate as “trickle down economics.” Now low taxes on the rich — even the dead rich — are national policy. [..]

So why not take a leaf from the right’s playbook. Why not say what we’re really for, and have a long-term plan to lead public opinion there?

Leo W. Gerard: The Terrible Fear of Paying the Poor Too Much

Republicans in America suffer a crippling anxiety. It’s the terrible fear of corporations paying poor workers too much.

The GOP is so afraid that the nation’s lowest wage earners will get a raise that Republican politicians across the country are working overtime to outlaw wages above $7.25 an hour for these workers. [..]

Republicans’ fear of paying too much is terrible. Not because of GOP angst. No, because it causes underpaid workers to suffer. Because it means Republicans are so enthralled with the 1 percent who write supersized campaign checks that they devalue the contributions of everyday workers to the welfare of America.  Because it means Republicans will continue to blockade efforts to resolve the growing income inequality that is rupturing the economy and the social cohesion of this nation.  

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: Don’t Forget the Other IRS Scandal

Washington, DC and the right wing outrage machine are all abuzz that the IRS allegedly targeted groups based on their presumed political affiliation. Obviously, that was wrong to do, but let’s not forget that there are two IRS scandals. The other is allowing big shadowy forces to meddle in elections anonymously through front groups that file false IRS statements.

Let’s go through this. It’s pretty clear that Americans have a strong interest in knowing who’s trying to influence their vote in elections. Even the Supreme Court agreed 8-1, in the otherwise loathsome Citizens United decision, that “effective disclosure” provides “shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.”

Although the law in America requires lots of disclosure, and the Supreme Court has emphasized the importance of disclosure, a company or a billionaire trying to hide their political influence-seeking can use a front organization to hide behind. Not many organizations can hide their donors that way; one is called a 501(c)(4), a tax-exempt non-profit form of corporation regulated by the IRS.

The world’s predicament on climate change reminds me of an old saying: “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”

Despite mounting evidence that global warming is an urgent crisis, emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases grew faster between 2000 and 2010 than over the previous three decades, according to an authoritative new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Some governments have instituted policies to try to hold down emissions of carbon dioxide-by far the biggest contributor to climate change-but these measures do not go nearly far enough. We’re doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk, appearing to move ahead while actually sliding backward-toward what scientists fear is an abyss.

David Sirota: Will Government Use Its New Leverage Over the Financial Industry?

If you read one business book this year, make it “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis. The journalist famous for “Moneyball” and “The Big Short” takes readers inside the parasitic world of high-frequency trading that is harming the broader economy.

The technical architecture of high-frequency trading is right out of a sci-fi movie-the schemes rely on algorithms that seem artificially intelligent, and the velocity of transaction signals approach light speed. As Lewis recounts, all that technological wizardry is marshaled to let insiders know information before everyone else, which consequently lets those insiders extract wealth from the market.

The good news is that a financial transaction tax can at once raise public resources and disincentivize the most predatory schemes. The even better news is that structural changes in the industry have made such a tax more economically viable than ever.

Greg Palast: Lap Dancers, the CIA, Payoffs and BP’s Deepwater Horizon

“There was CIA involvement through a company called Mega Oil. They were shipping in arms under the cover of oil tools.”

The BP executive was explaining to me how the CIA, MI6 and British Petroleum engineered a coup d’état, overthrowing a nation’s elected president who was “not favorable to BP.” The corporation’s former vice president, Leslie Abrahams, is pictured above, holding an AK-47 in front of BP’s offices in Baku, Azerbaijan. Like most of the other BP executives I spoke with, he proudly added that although he was working for BP, he was also an operative for MI6, British intelligence.

This conversation, which took place in 2010, was far from the weirdest I had in my four-continent investigation of the real story of the Deepwater Horizon. [..]

To understand what really happened in the Gulf of Mexico, and how BP became a corporate creature beyond the reach of the law, British television network Channel 4 sent me on an investigation through a labyrinthine fun house of bribery, lap dancing, beatings, WikiLeaks, a coup d’état, arrests and oil-state terror.

I found the cause of the tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon 7,000 miles from the Gulf in the ancient city of Baku, the Central Asian caravan stop on the Silk Road.

Joe Conason: Congratulations! A New Conspiracy Is Born

With the happy news that Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky expect their first child later this year, the Clinton family can anticipate warm good wishes from most Americans-and a less uplifting response from all of the usual suspects.

The inane, but mostly harmless, speculation from the pundit class already has begun. How will Hillary Rodham Clinton’s prospective future as a grandmother, they ask, affect her potential candidacy for the presidency? (Not at all, except in the minds of the political geniuses who have never noticed that most presidents and many candidates were grandfathers.) Even more inanely, a prominent columnist suggested on television that her daughter’s announcement might actually be a scheme to “soften” Hillary’s image and improve voters’ opinions of her.

Why a run by the undeclared frontrunner demands upending the corporate wing of the Democratic Party

Recently, Hillary Clinton allowed as how she’s been “thinking” about running for President in 2016.

“Thinking” about it?  Even a six year old didn’t buy that.

When a politician says she (or he) is thinking about running, for an office, it’s like an addict saying they are “thinking,” about taking their next fix.  They want it with a lust that is all-consuming. [..]

So before we proceed with her coronation, maybe it’s time to think back to the 2004 campaign, and the early days of Barack Obama’s candidacy and Presidency.

Remember “hope and change?”  At the time, few thought to ask what exactly we were hoping for and what exactly we were changing to.

And of course, what we got was a great slogan, better speeches, very little change and even less hope.

Timothy Egan: Deadbeat on the Range

Imagine a vendor on the National Mall, selling burgers and dogs, who hasn’t paid his rent in 20 years. He refuses to recognize his landlord, the National Park Service, as a legitimate authority. Every court has ruled against him, and fines have piled up. What’s more, the effluents from his food cart are having a detrimental effect on the spring grass in the capital.

Would an armed posse come to his defense, aiming their guns at the park police? Would the lawbreaker get prime airtime on Fox News, breathless updates in the Drudge Report, a sympathetic ear from Tea Party Republicans? No, of course not.

So what’s the difference between the fictional loser and Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada who owes the government about $1 million and has been grazing his cattle on public land for more than 20 years? Near as I can tell, one wears a cowboy hat. Easterners, especially clueless ones in politics and the press, have always had a soft spot for a defiant white dude in a Stetson.

Amy Goodman: The Grand American Tradition of Violent White Supremacy

Another U.S. shooting spree has left bullet-riddled bodies in its wake, and refocused attention on violent, right-wing extremists. Frazier Glenn Miller, a former leader of a wing of the Ku Klux Klan, is accused of killing three people outside two Jewish community centers outside Kansas City, Kan. As he was hauled away in a police car, he shouted “Heil Hitler!” Unlike Islamic groups that U.S. agencies spend tens of billions of dollars targeting, domestic white supremacist groups enjoy relative freedom to spew their hatred and promote racist ideology. Too often, their murderous rampages are viewed as acts of deranged “lone wolf” attackers. These seemingly fringe groups are actually well-organized, interconnected and are enjoying renewed popularity. [..]

Mark Potok is a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been tracking right-wing hate groups and Frazier Glenn Miller for years. Potok said, about that report, “a real problem with the Department of Homeland Security … ever since a particular report on the right wing was leaked to the press in April of 2009, DHS has sort of cowered. They essentially gutted their non-Islamic domestic terrorism unit.” [..]

While law-abiding Muslims are forced to hide in their homes, and animal-rights activists are labeled as terrorists for undercover filming of abusive treatment at factory farms, right-wing hate groups are free to organize, parade, arm themselves to the hilt and murder with chilling regularity. It’s time for our society to confront this very real threat.

Robert Barkley: The Hollow Center of Common Core

The hullabaloo over the Common Core State Standards might lead you to think that poor standards have been the central problem in education. Consider the possibility that those peddling that idea don’t have a clue.  And consider the possibility that, sadly, many educators have bought what the peddlers are selling.

I say such is the case.  In education, the single most important issue has long been and remains unaddressed: The lack of an agreed-upon overarching aim. If the institution doesn’t know where it’s going or what it’s trying to do, whatever standards are adopted will be indefensible and largely inconsequential. Putting in place a clear aim is the education establishment’s first order of business.

Seven years after the crash, corporate and political leaders haven’t made much of a dent in unemployment. Maybe they’re listening to the wrong people

“I promise you there’s not a job out there that will pay you a lot without some kind of training,” President Obama said to a group of students and workers at a Pittsburgh community college Wednesday afternoon.

Yet many American companies are not training new workers or re-training existing ones, and Congress isn’t even close to passing any major jobs-related legislation – and hasn’t since 2011. [..]

t’s a shame, because it’s not as if there aren’t good ideas about how to fix the unemployment crisis. They’re just going ignored.

So Obama stood before a mostly working-class audience at a local community college and tried to make two well-meaning but musty job-training programs look like a glittery spectacle of unicorns and rainbows. The event, designed to showcase the White House’s commitment to jobs and education and show up an ineffectual Congress, will just end up highlighting how small a dent all of our corporate and political leaders have made in reducing unemployment.

Gail Collins: There’s a Moon Out Tonight

Let’s talk about something cheerful. I nominate the apocalypse.

You may not have noticed, but we survived an end-of-the-world moment again this week when a lunar eclipse made the moon look sort of reddish. This is known as a Blood Moon, and, in certain circles, it was seen as the Start of Something Big.

“The heavens are God’s billboard,” said televangelist John Hagee, the author of the best-selling “Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change.” This is the same John Hagee who once theorized that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment to New Orleans for scheduling a gay pride parade. He later apologized. And moved on. To the moon. [..]

Our moral today is that things often turn out better than we might have imagined. Look on the bright side. Even when it’s dark and the moon appears to be a rather unusual color.

Robert Reich: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

We’re in a new gilded age of wealth and power similar to the first gilded age when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. Those laws should prevent or bust up concentrations of economic power that not only harm consumers but also undermine our democracy — such as the pending Comcast acquisition of Time-Warner.

In 1890, when Republican Senator John Sherman of Ohio urged his congressional colleagues to act against the centralized industrial powers that threatened America, he did not distinguish between economic and political power because they were one and the same. The field of economics was then called “political economy,” and inordinate power could undermine both. “If we will not endure a king as a political power,” Sherman thundered, “we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.”

Shortly thereafter, the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed by the Senate 52 to 1, and moved quickly through the House without dissent. President Harrison signed it into law July 2, 1890.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Restoring Louisiana’s Coast Will Require Restoring Its Democracy — Governor Jindal Is Trying to Undermine Both

The Mississippi’s River southernmost delta is home to a rich ecosystem, robust, culture and booming economy. Wetlands provide critical storm protection for the Louisiana’s coast. A recent poll by America’s Wetland Foundation found that 74 percent of Louisiana residents “consider saving the coast to be the most important issue [in the state] of our lifetime.” For Delta citizens, flood protection is a matter of survival. Louisiana wetlands are disappearing at a rate of approximately 1 football field every hour and coastal communities are already washing into the Gulf of Mexico. To date, roughly 2,000 square miles of land have disappeared under water and the erosion is accelerating. The disappearing land once buffered communities including New Orleans from catastrophic storm surges. [..]

Genuflecting to Big Oil’s pressure, the industry’s chief indentured servant, Governor Bobby Jindal, is leading an attempt to kill the suit by orchestrating the replacement of several members of the levee authority. Jindal’s caper violates state laws that guarantee that body’s political independence. Urged on by the Governor, crooked Legislators are currently advancing bills to undermine the levee board and retroactively kill the lawsuit. Louisiana is a classic corporate kleptocracy. There is no sunshine in Baton Rouge ; Like so many cockroaches Big Oil’s state house sock puppets are working their mischief in the darkness with no accountability or public participation.

Pro-lifers can’t reverse Roe v Wade. So they’re shutting down clinics with red tape and a smile. Don’t believe the lie

Last November, a new law went into effect in Texas: abortion clinics would now be required to have an agreement with a local hospital so that patients needing treatment could be transferred.

Now that sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

Perhaps, until you consider the fact that it caused one-third of health centers to stop providing abortions. Women in the Rio Grande Valley now have to travel hundreds of miles (if they’re lucky enough to have the transportation and resources) to get access to a safe, legal abortion. [..]

But this law, like so many others in the works, also imposes all kinds of obstacles to providers and clinics actually gaining these privileges. The end result: abortion clinics are shutting down all across the country. And because the (often Evangelical) bill-crafting language is so deceptively reasonable and so effective at defusing public outrage, we might not even have noticed that our constitutional right to safe and legal abortions is being steadily eroded

Zoë Carpenter: The Tax Breaks That Are Killing the Planet

ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, hauled in a $32.6 billion profit last year. Chief executive Rex Tillerson got a 3 percent bump in his pay package, sending it above $28 million. And today the company gets its annual boost from the federal government: an estimated $600 million in tax breaks.

All told, the government gifts as much as $4.8 billion to the oil industry each year, more than any other country. Much of that comes not as direct handouts but instead via loopholes in the tax code; deductions for depleting oil reserves, for example, and write-offs for the expense of drilling a new well. These reflect a long-past era in which oil exploration was financially risky, and prices were low. Now oil prices and profits are high, and the government is losing revenue while promoting the continued exploitation of carbon-intensive fuels. In the face of a changing climate and a constrained domestic budget, the lunacy of such preferential treatment is hard to overstate.

Bryce Covert: Why We Can’t Strip Race Out of the Gender Wage Gap Conversation

April 8 was Equal Pay Day, the day by which women will have theoretically worked enough to catch up to what men made the year before. In honor of that, the Senate voted on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill aimed at giving women a little more power to fight wage discrimination, which Republicans unanimously blocked. While some Republicans claim they care about the wage gap and just object to what they see as burdensome regulation, other conservatives have been calling the idea of the gender wage gap itself into question. [..]

In trying to figure out how much of the wage gap is discrimination and how much can be explained by other factors, nearly every statistician conducts regression studies that take measurable factors into consideration by holding them constant and seeing what’s left over. From government agencies like the Office of Personnel Management (pdf) and the Government Accountability Office (pdf) to women’s advocacy groups like AAUW to economists like Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn (pdf), a similar group of factors are held constant to find the “unexplained” gap, or the murk where bias would rear its head if it does exist. One of those constant factors is race.

Michelle Chen: What the French E-mail Meme Reveals About America’s Runaway Culture of Work

Last week, a dazzling meme captured the viral hive-mind of an overstressed generation: French workers had adopted a new labor policy to ban work-related e-mail after 6 pm. [..]

n a half-jeering, half-envious tone, commentators trumpeted France’s hardline defense of living well and “life after 6 p.m.” You could almost hear the champagne glasses clinking at the strike of six as Vuitton-clad employees powered down their mobiles in lockstep and promptly flipped off the supervisor.

In reality, France’s off-clock life remains essentially unchanged. The image of legions of French office grunts downing smartphones en masse was, alas, slightly hyperbolic. As Buzzfeed and others pointed out, this was not a law, but something known as a “labor agreement.” On behalf of a group of organized professional employees, the CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail) union engaged employer’s associations via collective bargaining and agreed to an “obligation to disconnect from remote communications tools” outside of normal working hours, which professionals measure by days worked annually (no set hours, much less a post-6 pm ban). The measure, aimed at preserving workers’ health and wellness, now awaits approval by the Labor Ministry.

The Washington Post and the Guardian won the Pulitzer Prize for public service today. There’s no prize for the network of individuals and institutions that brought the surveillance story forward.

As the New York Times reported:

   Though the citation did not name specific reporters, the work was led by Barton Gellman at the Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill at the Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker and journalist who worked with both newspapers.

And people will debate that- not naming the reporters. Just as they debate the handling of the Snowden documents by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to First Look Media.)

Here I share some thoughts about the Snowden story – or story system – that go beyond what the prizes can recognize.

Juan Cole: Top 6 Pulitzer Prize ‘Traitors’ in American Journalism

The Pulitzer Prize committee’s opinion that Edward Snowden is a public servant rather than a traitor or criminal, as evidenced in its award to The Guardian and The Washington Post for their reporting from his trove of government documents, is a scandal on the American Right.  But it is not a new scandal.  Journalism is about the public’s right to know what our government is up to.  The National Security State is about preventing us from knowing what it is up to.  The potential for black cells to operate within the secret government, beyond oversight of any elected official, should be obvious.  Those who value order and authority and obedience over critical public debate abhor investigative journalism.  Always have, always will.  Voltaire had to flee several courts and several cities over the course of his lifetime, because of his writings, under threat of arbitrary royal decrees. [..]

Eve Berliner reminded us that the Pulitzer has gone in the past to persons viewed by the Right as traitors.  She quotes the odious Bill Bennett, who served in the Reagan and Bush senior administrations, regarding Dana Priest, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who won Pulitzers in 2006 for reporting that revealed W. Bush’s resort to torture and warrantless surveillance: [..]

And we who actually believe in the US constitution, Mr. Bennett, view them as heroes and view you as a miserable toady.  So here is a review of some of these remarkable individuals who have done what they could to stanch the blood of our perhaps mortally wounded liberties:

Chuck Collins: Close the Billionaire Tax Loophole

Billionaires are exploiting a tax break to pass their fortunes along to their heirs and laying the groundwork for dynasties.

Estate taxes have historically raised substantial revenue from Americans with the greatest capacity to pay. A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt – who inherited and squandered a fortune of his own – joined with steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie – one of the richest men in the world at the time – to support establishing the modern version of the estate tax.

TR and Carnegie shared a goal of slowing the build-up of wealth dynasties, which they believed would corrode our democracy.

Although they succeeded, their goal remains elusive. We’re living in a new period of increasingly extreme wealth inequality.

The wealthiest 1 percent of households now own over 38 percent of all private wealth and almost half of all financial wealth, such as stocks and bonds. And our political system is being corrupted by billionaire political contributions facilitated by a string of Supreme Court rulings that toppled key campaign finance limits.

Gary Blasi: The 1% wants to ban sleeping in cars – because it hurts their ‘quality of life’

Depriving the homeless of their last shelter is Silicon Valley at its worst – especially when rich cities aren’t doing anything to end homelessness

Across the United States, many local governments are responding to skyrocketing levels of inequality and the now decades-long crisis of homelessness among the very poor … by passing laws making it a crime to sleep in a parked car.

This happened most recently in Palo Alto, in California’s Silicon Valley, where new billionaires are seemingly minted every month – and where 92% of homeless people lack shelter of any kind. Dozens of cities have passed similar anti-homeless laws. The largest of them is Los Angeles, the longtime unofficial “homeless capital of America”, where lawyers are currently defending a similar vehicle-sleeping law before a skeptical federal appellate court. Laws against sleeping on sidewalks or in cars are called “quality of life” laws. But they certainly don’t protect the quality of life of the poor.

What the agency’s denial isn’t telling you: it didn’t even need know about the bug to vacuum your privacy and store it indefinitely

The American intelligence community is forcefully denying reports that the National Security Agency has long known about the Heartbleed bug, a catastrophic vulnerability inside one of the most widely-used encryption protocols upon which we rely every day to secure our web communications. But the denial itself serves as a reminder that NSA’s two fundamental missions – one defensive, one offensive – are fundamentally incompatible, and that they can’t both be handled credibly by the same government agency. [..]

It’s exactly the kind of bug you’d expect NSA to be on the lookout for, since documents leaked by Edward Snowden confirm that the agency has long been engaged in an “aggressive, multi-pronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies”. In fact, that effort appears to have yielded a major breakthrough against SSL/TLS way back in 2010, two years before the Heartbleed bug was introduced – a revelation that sparked a flurry of speculation among encryption experts, who wondered what hidden flaw the agency had found in the protocol so essential to the Internet’s security.

Daniel G. Newman: Campaign fundraising is bribery

The bribery allegations against California state Sen. Leland Yee expose the folly of the U.S. Supreme Court’s logic in its April 2 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, which struck down restrictions on the amount of money individuals may donate to federal campaigns in an election cycle.

The only legitimate reason to set limits on funding politicians’ campaigns, according to the court’s majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, is explicit trades of campaign dollars for action – quid pro quo corruption. The court pointedly dismissed “the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner ‘influence over or access to’ elected officials” as a reason to limit campaign donations.

The way our broken political system works, though, is that the chief place to raise money for campaigns is from industries and interest groups that want something from government. Influence is purchased all the time, whether in explicit quid pro quo trades or not, and such influence peddling just as bad for democracy as bribery. The real scandal in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., is not the occasional lawbreaking; it’s what’s legal.

Gar Alperovitz: Growth for growth’s sake will kill us all

Moral and ecological truths are challenging economic doctrines

One economic fact is held to be self-evident: that the future well-being of the United States requires economic growth – preferably, as much of it as we can muster. Despite wildly divergent policy recommendations, this basic assumption is made clear and explicit by everyone from the fiscally conservative Club for Growth to the left-leaning Center for American Progress. In the boardroom of the Federal Reserve, at the negotiating table for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and on the shale fields of North Dakota, our national economic policy is built on the unshakable conviction that the only way to grow the middle class is to grow the economy – by any means necessary.

Aside from the fact that the top 1 percent has taken most of the gains of growth, leaving the rest of society in virtual stalemate for three decades, there is a profound problem with this solution. Indeed, it’s time to face an ecological truth that makes the traditional assumption increasingly untenable, as unpopular and difficult as this conclusion might be: Growth isn’t always possible. Nor is it necessarily desirable.

Justin Elliott and Jesse Eisinger: Long After Sandy, Red Cross Post-Storm Spending Still a Black Box

Following Superstorm Sandy, donors gave $312 million to the American Red Cross. How did the aid organization spend that money?

A year and a half after the storm, it’s surprisingly difficult to get a detailed answer.

Red Cross officials told ProPublica the organization has spent or committed $291 million on Sandy through the end of February 2014. But the organization has not given a breakdown showing how, where, and when the money was spent.

“The Red Cross is too big and too important to be allowed to be this secretive,” said Doug White, a charity expert who has written extensively on nonprofit finances.

White said such a lack of transparency is common among charities. Like other non-profits, the Red Cross is required to disclose only top-line numbers on its fundraising and spending, which it publishes in an annual report and a standard tax filing.

But the Red Cross stands out both for the scale of its operations and the unique role it plays in domestic disasters.