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Technically, the federal government has now reached the limit of its capacity to borrow money. Raising the debt ceiling used to be a technical adjustment, made almost automatically. Now it's a political football. Democrats should never have agreed to linking it to an agreement on the long-term budget deficit. But now that the debt ceiling is in play, there's no end to what the radical right will demand. John Boehner is already using the classic "they're making me" move, seemingly helpless in the face of Tea Party storm troopers who refuse to raise the ceiling unless they get their way. Their way is reactionary and regressive - eviscerating Medicare, cutting Medicaid and programs for the poor, slashing education and infrastructure, and using most of the savings to reduce taxes on the rich. If the only issue were cutting the federal deficit by four or five trillion dollars over the next ten years, the President and Democrats wouldn't have to cave in to this extortion. That goal can be achieved by doing exactly the opposite of what radical Republicans are demanding. We can reduce the long-term budget deficit, keep everything Americans truly depend on, and also increase spending on education and infrastructure - by cutting unnecessary military expenditures, ending corporate welfare, and raising taxes on the rich. I commend to you the "People's Budget," a detailed plan for doing exactly this - while reducing the long-term budget deficit more than either the Republican's or the President's plan does. When I read through the People's Budget my first thought was how modest and reasonable it is. It was produced by the House Progressive Caucus but could easily have been generated by Washington centrists - forty years ago.

Ac­cord­ing to the Wall Street Journ­al: In a speech Wed­nesday, Mr. Obama will pro­pose cuts to en­tit­le­ment pro­grams, in­clud­ing Medicare and Medicaid, and chan­ges to Soci­al Secur­ity, a dis­cuss­ion he has lar­ge­ly left to De­moc­rats and Re­pub­licans in Con­gress. He also will call for tax in­creases for peo­ple mak­ing over $250,000 a year, a pro­pos­al con­tained in his 2012 bud­get, and chang­ing parts of the tax code he thinks be­nefit the wealthy. Until now, Mr. Obama has been lar­ge­ly ab­sent from the rag­ing de­bate over the long-term de­ficit. The White House has done lit­tle with the re­com­menda­tions of its own bi­par­tisan de­ficit com­miss­ion. And Mr. Obama's 2012 bud­get didn't offer many new ideas for tackl­ing en­tit­le­ment spend­ing, among the bi­ggest long-term drains on the feder­al bud­get. The White House move caught De­moc­rats in Con­gress off guard, ac­cord­ing to aides, and de­tails of the pre­sident's pro­pos­als were sketchy. Mr. Plouf­fe said the pre­sident will name a dol­lar amount for de­ficit re­duc­tion, al­though the White House would­n't pro­vide specifics. In­troduc­ing taxes into the dis­cuss­ion has the poten­ti­al to com­plicate the re­solu­tion of com­ing bud­get fights, specifical­ly the need to raise the debt ceil­ing, a move needed to pre­vent the U.S. de­fault­ing on its debt.

As President Obama begins the second half of his term with a campaign for "jobs and competitiveness," we would do well to consider how he might achieve these worthy goals. It is jobs that matter most to the vast majority of Americans, and unemployment remains at 9.4 percent - about double its pre-recession level. This is a terrible punishment to inflict on millions of Americans who did nothing to deserve it. It will cause long-term and even permanent damage to many of the unemployed and their children.

Businesses have had at least 25 to 30 years near complete certainty -- certainty that they will pay lower and lower taxes, that they' will face less and less regulation, that they can outsource to their hearts' content (which when it does produce savings, comes at a loss of control, increased business system rigidity, and loss of critical know how). They have also been certain that unions will be weak to powerless, that states and municipalities will give them huge subsidies to relocate, that boards of directors will put top executives on the up escalator for more and more compensation because director pay benefits from this cozy collusion, that the financial markets will always look to short term earnings no matter how dodgy the accounting, that the accounting firms will provide plenty of cover, that the SEC will never investigate anything more serious than insider trading (Enron being the exception that proved the rule). So this haranguing about certainty simply reveals how warped big commerce has become in the US. Top management of supposedly capitalist enterprises want a high degree of certainty in their own profits and pay. Rather than earn their returns the old fashioned way, by serving customers well, by innovating, by expanding into new markets, their 'certainty' amounts to being paid handsomely for doing things that carry no risk. But since risk and uncertainty are inherent to the human condition, what they instead have engaged in is a massive scheme of risk transfer, of increasing rewards to themselves to the long term detriment of their enterprises and ultimately society as a whole.

Economics: I'm going to discuss trillions of dollars in a moment. As an economics teacher, I understand numbers this large are extremely difficult to imagine. If you are among the majority with this difficulty, I recommend that you follow the expert testimony that paints the picture, and know that success in this area of public education transformation that unleashes trillions of our dollars for human creative capacity in unimaginable power is sufficient to end the current economic crisis. This is the longest section of my briefing. If you tire in reading, please consider that at trillions of dollars of annual public benefits, you literally have nothing more valuable to do than understand the following facts and ideas. Harvard's Linda Bilmes co-authored a paper with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz estimating the long-term costs of current US wars at now $3 to $5 trillion ($30-$50,000 per US household of $50,000/year income), with total debt increase since 2001 of over $10 trillion. Remember, as demonstrated by the evidence disclosed by our own government, all the reasons Americans were told to go to war were known to be lies as they were told and applicable law proves these wars Orwellian unlawful. Just down the Charles River from Harvard, MIT's Simon Johnson (and former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund) describes our economy being lead by gambling oligarchs who have captured government as in banana republics (his words), and might plunge the US into an economy worse than the Great Depression. From his article under the telling title, The Quiet Coup: "Elite business interests-financiers, in the case of the U.S.-played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The govern

No serious person denies that Reagan's 1981 tax cuts and military increases threw the country into a pattern of borrowing and borrowing that we have not escaped. When Reagan took office the national debt was $995 billion. When Reagan left office it was $2.87 trillion and climbing fast. No serious person denies that Bush's 2001 tax cuts and continued military increases dramatically worsened the problem. Bush's last budget year ended with a record single-year deficit of $1.4 trillion. As the country discusses what to do about the borrowing the elephant in the room is that everyone understands that restoring top tax rates to pre-Reagan levels and cutting the military budget in half would solve the problem completely. But we can't do that. We can't even discuss it. And we all know why. And we all know why. It is because the Reagan Revolution transformed the country from a democracy to a plutocracy -- a country run by and for the wealthy. Such sensible and simple ideas are considered off-limits. To even bring up the idea of restoring tax rates to pre-Reagan levels and cutting military spending invites terrible consequences. The speaker risks becoming the target of the money's noise machine: Limbaugh, Hannity, Drudge, Fox. Smears. Humiliation. Banishment. Or the noise machine cranks up a campaign of misinformation, convincing people --especially DC people -- that what they see in front of their eyes just isn't so. Repeat it enough and it becomes solid knowledge. We all know this is the way it is. So don't tell me that "we don't have the money" to keep 300,000 teachers from being laid off, or to help the long-term, mostly older unemployed workers get something to live on and keep their health care. The money is right there in front of us, but the Congress is bought and paid for. What do we do? We have to demand representatives who represent us, not make excuses for representing the wealthy. The unfortunate, poor and disadvantaged must count every bit as much as the

This is my last post here at Washington Babylon and I'll be leaving my positions as Harper's Washington Editor (I will remain as a contributing editor to the magazine). I've received a fellowship at the Open Society Institute and will also be leading special investigations at Global Witness, which has offices in London and in Washington. My work for both will focus on long-term international investigations.

More than 6,000 different species living on the sea-floor have been identified so far and more than half of these are unique to the icy continent. A combination of long-term monitoring studies, newly gathered information on the marine life distribution and global ocean warming models, enable the scientists to identify Antarctica's marine "biodiversity hotspots". Researcher Griffiths describes how krill populations (the shrimp-like invertebrates eaten by penguins, whales and seals) are reducing as a result of a decrease in sea-ice cover. A much smaller crustacean (copepods) is dominating the area once occupied by them. This shifts the balance of the food web to favour predators, like jellyfish, that are not eaten by penguins and other Southern Ocean higher predators. Sea-ice reduction is also affecting penguins that breed on the ice.

It could be argued that the costs to the United States of providing such services for the rest of the world are modest, but that is ultimately a judgment call. To be sure, the dollar costs will not bankrupt us as a nation, but Americans spend $2,700 per person on our military, while the average European spends less than $700. The bottom line is that Europeans have little incentive to spend more because they don't feel particularly threatened, and they aren't anxious to take on responsibilities that are ably handled by the United States. The advocates of hegemonic stability theory would declare that a feature, not a bug. Mission accomplished. And that might be true, if the greatest threat to global security were a resurgence of conflict in Europe, and if it is truly in the U.S. interest to forever have allies with few capabilities and many liabilities. But that seems extremely shortsighted. The sweeping political and economic integration in Europe has dramatically reduced the likelihood of another European war. In the meantime, the fact that we have many allies with little to offer by way of military assets, and even less political will to actually use them, is forcing the U.S. military to bear the disproportionate share of the burdens of policing the planet. And in the medium- to long-term, while I doubt that we will be facing "a militarily superior, post-Soviet Russia," allies with usable military power might ultimately serve a purpose if Moscow proves as aggressive (and capable) as the hawks claim.

Looks at services being devised/piloted to assist the long-term homeless (approximately 1/3 of all homeless folks). Individuals in this population tend to have physical and/or mental disabilities. These issues demonstrate the inextricability of disability issues from broader socioeconomic concerns like urban poverty and homelessness.

'Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work, and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the President has discussed. But deficits are not what really matters to conservatives. Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, 

The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe's single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?

When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake."  This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued -- regime change through the use of military force.  We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West.  That's not even a debatable proposition at this point. What I suppose is debatable, in the most generous sense of that term, is our motive in doing this.  Why -- at a time when American political leaders feel compelled to advocate politically radioactive budget cuts to reduce the deficit and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war -- would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war?  Why is President Obama willing to endure self-evidently valid accusations -- even from his own Party -- that he's fighting an illegal war by brazenly flouting the requirements for Congressional approval?  Why would Defense Secretary Gates risk fissures by so angrily and publicly chiding NATO allies for failing to build more Freedom Bombs to devote to the war?  And why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?

Beijing (CNN) -- Although the United States narrowly avoided an unprecedented default following congressional approval of a last-minute compromise plan to raise the debt ceiling, China's leading credit rating agency Wednesday downgraded U.S. sovereign debt after putting it on negative watch last month. The Dagong Global Credit Rating Company, which lowered the United States to A+ last November after the U.S. Federal Reserve decided to continue loosening its monetary policy, announced a further downgrade to A, indicating heightened doubts over Washington's long-term ability to repay its debts.

AS Election Day approaches, serious discussion about economic policies is hamstrung by the devotion of both parties to reducing taxes. The big reason, of course, is that President Bush emphasizes tax cuts, including elimination of the estate tax, to the exclusion of almost everything else. The Democrats, in turn, hesitate to propose an economic plan that does not include long-term reductions for middle-income workers, and most refuse to talk about rescinding the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. But the degree of misleading information emanating from both Washington and the media about how taxes affect the economy is disturbing. As I listen to the radio, watch TV news and read a variety of newspapers, it seems that quite a few Americans, including economics writers and media hosts, think that low-tax countries unquestionably grow faster than high-tax economies. Right and left, they seem to attribute more rapid growth in America to lower taxes. What may surprise them is that there is no evidence for that. ''You can make a theoretical case that high taxes impede economic growth, but it is just not supported by the evidence in the U.S. or across countries,'' said William Easterly, a former World Bank economist soon to join the faculty of New York University.

During this time of economic uncertainty and record federal deficits, many question why America should invest aggressively in infrastructure. The answer is simple: Whether it involves highways, railways, ports, aviation or any other sector, infrastructure is an economic driver that is essential for the long-term creation of quality American jobs.

Although there are 2 sides to this story, someone with a long term illness is unlikely to have much disposable income to spend on parking.

The good news is that those who would have been working on dealing with this problem are mostly now off flipping hamburgers, if they're lucky. Outsourcing in an economy where applicants are refused employment on the basis of long term unemployment - an idea that just keeps on getting better. Link posted to Digg by user Ironeus.