By PAUL KRUGMAN: The New York Times: Phony Fear Factor!

We live in a golden age of economic debunkery, fallacious doctrines have been dropping like flies. No, monetary expansion needn't cause hyperinflation. No, budget deficits in a depressed economy don't cause soaring interest rates. No, slashing spending doesn't create jobs. No, economic growth doesn't collapse when debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. And now the latest myth bites the dust: No, "economic policy uncertainty" created, it goes without saying, by That Man in the White House, isn't holding back the recovery. I'll get to the doctrine and its refutation in a minute. First, however, I want to recommend a very old essay that explains a great deal about the times we live in. The Polish economist Michal Kalecki published "Political Aspects of Full Employment" 70 years ago. Keynesian ideas were riding high, a "solid majority"of economists believed that full employment could be secured by government spending. Yet Kalecki predicted that such spending would, nonetheless, face fierce opposition from business and the wealthy, even in times of depression. Why? The answer, he suggested, was the role of "confidence" as a tool of intimidation. If the government can't boost employment directly, it must promote private spending instead, and anything that might hurt the privileged, such as higher tax rates or financial regulation, can be denounced as job-killing because it undermines confidence, and hence investment. But if the government can create jobs, confidence becomes less important, and vested interests lose their veto power. Kalecki argued that "captains of industry" understand this point, and that they oppose job-creating policies precisely because such policies would undermine their political influence. "Hence budget deficits necessary to carry out government intervention must be regarded as perilous." When I first read this essay, I thought it was over the top. Kalecky was, after all, a declared Marxist, although I don't see much of Marx in his writings. But, if you haven't been radicalized by recent events, you haven't been paying attention, and policy discourse since 2008 has run exactly along the lines Kalecki predicted. First came the "pivot" the sudden switch to the view that budget deficits, not mass unemployment, were the crucial policy issue. Then came the Great Whine, the declaration by one leading business figure after another that President Obama was undermining confidence by saying mean things about business people and doing outrageous things like helping the uninsured. Finally, just as happened with the claims that slashing spending is actually expansionary and terrible things happen if government debt rises, the usual suspects found an academic research paper to adopt as mascot: in this case, a paper by economist at Stanford and Chicago purportedly showing that rising levels of "economic policy uncertainty" were holding the economy back.

 

Theodore Meyer: New Study Finds High Levels of Arsenic in Groundwater Near Fracking Sites.

Brian Fontenot and Kevin Shug, two of the authors of a new study by researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington found elevated levels of arsenic and other heavy metals in groundwater near natural gas fracking sites in Texas' Barnett Shale. While the findings are far from conclusive, the study provides further evidence tying fracking to arsenic contamination. An internal Environment Protection Agency PowerPoint presentation recently obtained by the Los Angeles Times warned that wells near Dimock, Pa., showed elevated levels of arsenic in the groundwater. The EPA also found arsenic in groundwater near fracking sites in Pavillion, Wyo., in 2009, a study the agency later abandoned. ProPublica talked with Brian Fontenot, the paper's lead author, about how his team carried out the study and why it matters. Fontenot, and another author, about how his team carried out the study and why it matters. Fontenot and another author, Laura Hunt, work for the EPA in Dallas, but they conducted the study on their own time in collaboration with several UT Arlington researchers. Here's an edited version of our interview: What led you guys to do the study? We were sort of talking around lunch one day, and came up with the idea of actually going out and testing water in the Barnett Shale. We'd heard all the things that you see in the media, all the sort of really left-wing stuff and right wing stuff, but there weren't a whole lot of answers out there in terms of an actual scientific study of water in the Barnett Shale. Our main intent was to bring an unbiased viewpoint here, to just look at the water, see if we could find anything, and report what we found. What kind of previous studies had been done in this vein? The closest analog that I could find to our type of study are the things that have been done in the Marcellus Shale, with Rob Jackson's group out at Duke University. Ours is set up very similarly to theirs in that we went out at Duke University. Ours is set up very similarly to theirs in that we went out to private landowners' wells and sampled their water wells and essayed them for various things. We decided to go with a list of chemicals thought to be included in hydraulic fracturing that was actually released in a congressional report. Our plan was to sample everyone's water that we could, and then go through that list of these potential chemical compounds within the congressional list. How did you do it? We were able to get a press release put out from UT Arlington that went into the local newspapers that essentially called for volunteers to be participants in the study. For being a participant, you would get free water testing, and we would tell them our results. We were upfront with everyone about, you know, we don't have a bias, we're not anti-industry, we're not pro-industry. We're just to finally get some scientific data on this subject. And we had a pretty overwhelming response.


  

Mark Rumold: What It Means to Be An NSA "Target":

New Information Shows Why We Need Immediate FISA Amendment Act Reform: An important New York Times investigation from today reporting that the NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country," coupled with leaked documents published by the Guardian, seriously calls into question the accuracy of crucial statements made by government officials about NSA surveillance. The government has previously tried to reassure the public about its use of FISA Amendments Section 702 surveillance practices, emphasizing that, under Section 702, the government may not "intentionally target any U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States." Indeed, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senator Feinstein, in a letter to constituents who wrote to her expressing concern about the NSA's spying program, said this: "The government cannot listen to an American's telephone calls or read their emails without a court warrant issued upon showing of probable cause." We've written before about the word games the government plays in describing its surveillance practices: "acquire," "collect," and "content" are all old government favorites. The New York Times report proves Feinstein statement is false, and it's clear it's time to add "target" to the list of word games as well. When "Target" Means Searching a Specific Person's Communications. First, at least this much is clear: a "target" under the FAA must be a non-US person and (b) not physically located within the United States. A "person," for purposes of the FAA, includes individuals as well as "any group, entity, association, corporation, or foreign power." Under the FAA, the government can thus "target" a single individual e.g., Vladimir Putin, a small group of people e.g., Pussy Riot, or a formal corporation or entity e.g., Gazprom. So, when the NSA decides to "target" someone or something, it turns its specific surveillance vacuum at them. The NSA then believes it can intercept and analyze all electronic communications of the target, telephone conversations, email conversations, chat, web browsing, etc so long as the "target" is overseas and remains overseas. As others have noted, this includes conversations the "target" has with Americans, which would then be "incidentally" collected. Keep in mind this does not require a warrant or even the approval of a court, which is only one way Senator Feinstein's reassurance was demonstrably false. But there's still more. When "Target" Means Searching Everyone's Communications. Once a target is established, the NSA believes it can expand the sweep of its interception far more broadly than the communications of the particular, identified target. Notably, the NSA's procedures state: In those cases where the NSA believes it can expand the sweep of its interception far more broadly than the communications of the particular, identified target.   

     

AlterNet: By Gloria Flora: Fracking the Commons: Why Your Public Lands Are Under Assault -

by Oil and Gas Drilling: As a Forest Supervisor with the U.S. Forest Service in the late 1990s, I put a 15-year moratorium on oil and gas leasing in Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. I made this controversial decision because the ecosystems on the Front are irreplaceably rich and diverse and diverse, because I'd witnessed first-hand the cultural connections in spirit, mind, and body that countless connections in spirit, mind, and body, that countless people both near and far had to this extraordinary place. The towering limestone cliffs, the wealth of wildlife, and the sheer wildness resonate deeply with the human psyche, and have done so for countless generations for over ten thousand years. I thought I'd seen the worst of the oil and gas industry during that battle: its death-grip on public agencies, its demand for ever more leases, and its running roughshod over drilling regulations with impunity. But some years later I learned about an insidious new threat from the fossil fuel industry, hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." In fracking, fluid is injected into underground shale formations to break them apart and release trapped natural gas and increasingly, oil. Unfortunately, fracking fluid contaminates our water, fracked gas escapes into the atmosphere, and the breakneck pace of drilling for these low-quality wells wreak havoc on wildlife habitat and human communities alike. In the early 2000s, fracking was mostly confined to the Southwest and seemed little more tan a crazy, expensive, last-ditch effort to squeeze the last bits of gas out of old fields. But as the easy-to-get fossil fuels have been depleted, and as government subsidies for fossil fuels have increased, such last-ditch efforts have become the industry standard. Today, the battle I fought over the Rocky Mountain Front seems small in comparison to what the fossil fuel industry aims  to do across the entire country with fracking, including on public lands. Public lands, private profit. In recent years, fracking has spread from the rugged and remote public lands in the American West to the well-populated, bucolic landscapes of Pennsylvania. After decades of the oil and gas industry quietly cracking apart the crust of the earth, well, "quietly" if you aren't in the vicinity people are finally sitting up and taking notice. Communities across the US are attempting to ban fracking to protect their citizens, and so far over 250 have succeeded. Vermont has a ban, and Maryland and New York have moratoriums in place. The fight is far from over: Pennsylvania, for example, has passed a draconian piece of legislation that strips communities of the ability to regulate, where, when and how fracking should occur. But local and state-level lawmaking, while important, addressed only part of the picture. A significant amount of fracked wells are currently drilled on federal lands, that is, public, and our national commons.    

The Washington Post. By Anne Gearan and Philip Rucker. Obama cancels summit meeting with Putin over Snowden case.

President Obama canceled an upcoming summit with Russian President Putin on Wednesday, a rare, deliberate snub that reflects the fresh damage done by the Edward Snowden case to an important relationship already in decline. Obama had planned to visit Moscow for a symbolic one-on one meeting at the Kremlin with Putin ahead of next month's Group of 20 economic summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. In unusually blunt terms, the White House announced Wednesday that Obama will skip the Moscow stop because there is too little hope of a productive meeting. "Following a careful review begun in July, we have reached the conclusion that there is not enough recent progress in our bilateral agenda with Russia to hold a U.S. Russia summit in early September." White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement. With that announcement, Obama effectively wrote off more than a year of effort to build cooperation with Putin, a shrewd but famously irascible politician with deep suspicion of U.S. motives. Gone, too, are most of the administration's first term hopes of a remade U.S. Russian partnership, so-called reset, that emphasized common approaches to global problems despite acknowledged policy differences. On Tuesday, Obama told Jay Leno of "The Tonight Show" that he is frustrated by Russia's protection of Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who is wanted on espionage charges after leaking to the media highly classified documents about U.S. surveillance programs. Snowden last week was granted temporary asylum in Russia for up to a year. "There are times when they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality," Obama said. "What I continually say to them, and to President Putin: That's the past." Carney cited "lack of progress" with Russia on a broad range of issues including missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, and human rights issues. "We have informed the Russian government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda," he said. Although Putin clearly wanted the prestige of an at-home summit with his U.S. counterpart, he apparently was unwilling to offer much in exchange for it. Russia holds a veto at the U.N. Security Council, where differences with the United States over international problems are often on display. Russia is also a member of every major international diplomatic, political or economic forum, wielding outside influence compared with its true military or economic heft in the post-Cold War era. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John F. Kerry will still hold a planned meeting Friday with Russia's defense and foreign ministers. The deepening civil war in Syria, where Russia and the United States are backing opposing sides, will be a central topic. A proposed peace conference sponsored jointly by Russia and the Unit States has been shelved indefinitely, and Russia has long opposed stronger punishment for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the United Nations.

Veterans Today By Rebecca Ruiz: Is the Army Improperly Discharging Wounded, Ill Soldiers For Misconduct?

In May, the Colorado Springs Gazette published an exhaustive account of how wounded and mentally ill soldiers are being kicked out of the Army for minor offenses and misconduct related to their wartime injuries. Since then, the revelations have prompted new legislation that would assess whether or not the Department of Defense is improperly discharging soldiers, a charge that the government denies. "There is not a deliberate effort to remove soldiers from the Army without proper medical evaluation and consideration of their war-related conditions," an Army spokesman at the Pentagon told me. "All soldiers are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, this includes soldiers in the medical review board process. Our leaders appreciate the honorable service of our soldiers. However, it is the soldier's responsibility to ensure they adhere to the Army Values while going through their individual separation processes." For a soldier on the opposite end of this experience, however, trying to mount a defense against accusations of misconduct, especially those linked to wartime injuries, can be a byzantine process that ultimately ends in heartbreak. The Gazette series, reported by Dave Philipps, looked at three separate incidents, each involving a combat veteran in which units at Fort Carson in Colorado appeared to willfully ignore mental and physical health conditions that played a role in misconduct, such as traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain. Kash Alvaro, for example, was diagnosed with PTSD and TBI after enduring multiple bomb blasts in Afghanistan in 2009. When he returned to Fort Carson, he was cited and punished for violating code by missing appointments, missing work, arriving late to formation and getting in an argument. As Philipps points out, these behaviors, while disruptive, can be symptoms of both TBI and PTSD. Alvaro, 24, should have been given additional consideration or dispensation due to his injuries, or admitted to a warrior transition unit where convalescing would be a priority. Instead, Alvaro said that his unit harassed him, and the situation escalated to the point where he went AWOL temporarily. He expected a harsh punishment when he returned to Fort Carson two weeks later to apologize, but was thrown in county jail without his anti-seizure medication. Alvaro was then asked to sign paperwork for an other-than honorable discharge known as a Chapter 10, which allows a soldier facing a court-martial to resign instead. The designation can bar a veteran from getting long-term medical and disability benefits. "They said if I signed this paperwork everything would be alright and I would get out," Alvarado told the Gazette.   

By Robert Sheer: A Statement of Peace, or an Epitaph?

August 6 marks 68 years since the United States committed what is arguable the single gravest act of terrorism that the world has ever known. Terrorism means the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians, and targeted they were, with the cutely named "Little Boy" atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at a location and time of day when, as the Strategic Bombing Survey commissioned by President Harry Truman conceded, "nearly all the school children were at work in the open," a perfect opportunity for mass incineration. "That fateful summer, 8:15," the mayor of Hiroshima recalled at a memorial service in 2007, "the roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast, silence - hell on earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails. Others died when their eyeballs and internal organs burst from their bodies. Hirochima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead. Within the year, 1400,000 had died." It was followed three days later by the "Fat Man" bomb leveling Nagasaki, with a comparable disastrous impact on a largely civilian population that had no effective control over the decisions of the emperor who initiated the war. Nagasaki was a last-minute substitute for Kyoto, which Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson ordered spared because he had fond memories of his honeymoon in that city a couple of decades earlier. The devastation of those two cities was so gruesome that our government banned the showing of film footage depicting the carnage we has caused. We have never been very good at challenging our nation's own reprehensible behavior, but if we don't take proper measures of the immense extermination wrought by two small and primitive nuclear weapons as compared with today's arsenals, we lose the point as to why they must be banned. We are the country that designed and exploded these weapons that are inherently implements of terrorism in that, as the nuking of Japan amply demonstrated, they cannot distinguish between civilian and combatant. For those who believe that honorable ends absolve a nation of evil means, there is the argument that the bombings shortened the war, although the preponderance of more recent evidence would hold that the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan two days after Hiroshima was a more decisive factor. But the basic assumption of universal opposition to terrorism is a rejection of the notion that even noble ends justify ignoble means, and a consistent opposition to the proliferation, let alone use of nuclear weapons, must insist that they are inherently anti-civilian and therefore immoral.