On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinarily in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which the President and his staff decide who will live or die. The fate of people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of Americans, elected and unelected, who don’t speak their language, don’t know their culture, don’t understand their motives or values. While purporting to represent the world’s greatest democracy, US leaders are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law.

Who is furnishing the President and his aides with this list of terrorist suspects to choose from, like baseball cards? The kind of intelligence used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of intelligence that put people in Guantanamo. Remember how the American public was assured that the prisoners locked up in Guantanamo were the “worst of the worst,” only to find out that hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the US military by bounty hunters?

Why should the public believe what the Obama administration says about the people being assassinated by drones? Especially since, as we learn in the New York Times, the administration came up with a semantic solution to keep the civilian death toll to a minimum: simply count all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants. The rationale, reminiscent of George Zimmerman’s justification for shooting Trayvon Martin, is that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.” Talk about profiling! At least when George Bush threw suspected militants into Guantanamo their ...

Wal-mart has long boasted of its "Always Low Prices," but now it has confirmed that it also has "Always low morals."

The bottom line has always been THE line for Wal-mart executives, and sinking to the ethical bottom to enhance that line has not only been tolerated, but also legitimized as a proven path to executive promotion and riches. Squeezing suppliers, crushing competitors, exploiting employees, using enslaved workers in foreign factories and resorting to other brutish tactics to pound out another dollar in profit are central components of Wal-mart's management ethos and business plan.

Now, we can add bribery to the list of accepted practices — so accepted that even getting caught at it doesn't mean you get fired.

Walmart de Mexico is now the largest retailer and employer in that country, an exalted status that it gained the old-fashioned way: by doling out millions of dollars in corporate bribes. With sluggish sales and a tarnished brand in the U.S., the retailing giant has been pushing hard to expand internationally, and in amazingly short time, its Mexican branch became huge, with one out of five Walmart stores presently located there.

All it took, we now learn from an excellent investigative report by The New York Times, was the systematic spreading of muchos, muchos pesos to government officials across the country to gain needed permits quickly, dodge environmental restrictions and generally have the company's path cleared for market domination.

Not only is this wrong, it is seriously criminal — a blatant violation of our Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And, lest you think the corruption was the work of some lower-level manager gone rogue, the knowledge of this wholesale bribery scheme goes all the way to the top, including the current and one former CEO.

David Tovar, a Wal-mart PR agent, was rushed out as the scandal was ...

Guns don't kill people, the old saw goes. People do.

By the same token, corporations don't dodge taxes. People do. The people who run corporations. And these people — America's CEOs — are reaping awesomely lavish rewards for the tax dodging they have their corporations do.

In fact, corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major U.S. corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid Uncle Sam in federal income taxes.

This year's Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report, our 18th annual, explores the intersection between CEO pay and aggressive corporate tax dodging.

We researched the 100 U.S. corporations that shelled out the most last year in CEO compensation. At 25 of these corporate giants, we found, the bill for chief executive compensation actually ran higher than the company's entire federal corporate income tax bill.

Corporate outlays for CEO compensation — despite the lingering Great Recession — are rising. Employment levels have barely rebounded from their recessionary lows. Top executive pay levels, by contrast, have rebounded nearly all the way back from their pre-recession levels.

This contrast shows up starkly in the 2010 ratio between average worker and average CEO compensation. In 2009, we calculate, major corporate CEOs took home 263 times the pay of America's average workers. Last year, this gap leaped to 325-to-1.

Among the nation's top firms, the S&P 500, CEO pay last year averaged $10,762,304, up 27.8 percent over 2009. Average worker pay in 2010? That finished up at $33,121, up just 3.3 percent over the year before.

What are America's CEOs doing to deserve their latest bountiful rewards? We have no evidence that CEOs are fashioning, with their executive leadership, more effective and efficient enterprises. On the other hand, ample evidence suggests that CEOs and their ...

A spring awash with Etch A Sketch conservatives, camera-wielding GOP con men and a bogus deficit reduction budget from House Republicans shows that for the right, wrong is justified when it achieves the desired results.

A perfect example of this political philosophy is the work of James E. O’Keefe III, a right wing, unsupervised, unaccountable, self-appointed and self-styled “investigative journalist” who has violated federal law, lied about his identity and deceitfully cut and pasted video to destroy what he perceives as liberal institutions.

Oddly for the party that claims conservative Christians as key constituents, O’Keefe’s misbehavior is celebrated by GOP talking heads — the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. That encourages copycats. The New York Times last week told the tale of one. John M. Howting, a bungling video scam man, sees himself as an O’Keefe apostle.

Honorable journalists abide by an ethics code forbidding lying to secure a story. For them, the end does not justify the means. By contrast, for O’Keefe and today’s Etch A Sketch conservatives, the end they want vindicates any scheme to secure it. Deliberate lying, cynical deceit, cut-and-paste deception – all of that is rationalized by conservatives to get their way. It’s a lovely escape clause they’ve written for themselves from that annoying Judeo-Christian thou-shalt-not-lie commandment.

O’Keefe wanna-be John M. Howting tried clumsily to trod in his disgraced mentor’s footsteps, lying about his name, who he represented and his intentions in a failed effort to discredit a couple of what he perceived to be liberal New York community groups.

O’Keefe had better luck. This right wing ...

People across the country are angry about the flood of money into politics made possible by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision and other recent court rulings. This is true in New York, where a broad and influential group of individuals and organizations is working to pass a public financing system for state elections.

The New York Times reports that the group, called New York Leadership for Accountable Government, includes Barry Diller, Chris Hughes (a founder of Facebook), former Mayor Ed Koch, investment bankers, unions, MoveOn.org, restauranteur Danny Meyer, and David Rockefeller Sr. The coalition proposed a system modeled after the one adopted by New York City in 1988: “in return for abiding by limits on their spending, city candidates can receive $6 in public funds for each of the first $175 city residents donate,” the Times writes.

New York currently has one of the “least restrictive” campaign finance systems in the nation — individuals can donated up to $60,800 to candidates running for statewide office. This coalition wants to change that:

They say New York, which they call a symbol of institutionalized corruption, could become a national model for the effort to free elections from the grip of big money…

Leaders of the coalition say the Citizens United ruling and the role of “super PACs” in the presidential race have made campaign finance a more broadly understood and urgent issue.

“Right now people are feeling a little bit helpless about super PACs and how to get money out of the system at the federal level,” said Sean ...

As two high-profile U.S. restaurants close and food critics take a step back, is this the end an era?

This has been a bad year for grand restaurants in the three- to four-star range, and the clang of their closing doors raises the question — is the whole gastro frenzy that stirred into life in the mid-1970s finally lurching towards closure? Goodbye Iron Chefs, sayonara, and "molecular gastronomy" in the style of Ferran Adria. Farewell to those overcooked paragraphs of fine restaurant writing that became the hottest reading in The New York Times.

On March 7, the high society eatery La Cote Basque (actually used as a chapter heading in Truman Capote's "Answered Prayers") closed its doors. This last Wednesday, The New York Times mourned at length the Chicago restaurant Charlie Trotter's, slated for extinction in August. According to the Times, Trotter's "had a huge and lasting impact on Chicago's culinary landscape, if not the nation's."

OK, a couple of big-time restaurants bite the dust in the Great Recession. So??For several years, one of The New York Times' most avidly read writers was Sam Sifton. Sifton approached his job con amore, not from him any cavils about price. His prose had the confident lilt of a man writing for Wall Streeters for whom a couple of thousand dollars dropped on a dinner for four was absolutely no problem and indeed, almost an emblem of parsimony.

In early October last year, he published an emotional eulogy to Per Se, "the best restaurant in New York City."

"Per Se's signature starter course is Oysters and Pearls," wrote Sifton. "It combines a sabayon of pearl tapioca with Island Creek oysters (small, marble-shaped, from Duxbury, south of Boston, fantastic) and a ...

Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.

California is also a battleground. The Los Angeles Times reports on another chapter in the campaign to destroy what had been the greatest public higher education system in the world: “California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment next spring at most campuses and to wait-list all applicants the following fall pending the outcome of a proposed tax initiative on the November ballot.”

Similar defunding is under way nationwide. “In most states,” The New York Times reports, “it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that cover most of the budget,” so that “the era of affordable four-year public universities, heavily subsidized by the state, may be over.”

Community colleges increasingly face similar prospects – and the shortfalls extend to grades K-12.

“There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it’s the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill,” concludes Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a trustee of the State University system of New York and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.

A more accurate description, I think, is “Failure by Design,” the title of a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has long been a major source of reliable information and analysis on the state of the economy.

The EPI study reviews the consequences of the transformation of the economy a generation ago from domestic production to financialization and offshoring. By design; there have always been alternatives.

One primary justification for the design is what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz called the “religion” that ...

After months of rumors,  Current announced abruptly this afternoon that it had replaced Keith Olbermann with Eliot Spitzer in the 8 p.m. weeknight time slot.  Read their statement here.  A source told Politico that Current was claiming that the former MSNBC host had "sabotaged" the network, and was absent from the show far too often,  and so was in breach of contract.  An update at The New York Times here.

UPDATE at 9 p.m.: David Letterman's Twitter feed for his "Late Show" reveals that Olbermann "will join Dave on the @Late_Show on Tuesday, April 3rd to talk about his departure from Current TV."  Also, Olberamann on Twitter tonight is tweeting baseball.

Olbermann, who left MSNBC just 14 months ago,  responded with a note to viewers, promising a lawsuit, blasting his bosses (including Al Gore), apologizing to viewers and admitting he had made a "foolish" mistake in taking on this challenge with the little-seen network to start with.  He had an equity stake in the network but long complained about technical problems on the set, including lights going out on several occasions.  Last fall he provided some of the strongest, and most frequent, coverage of the early weeks of Occupy Wall Street.

Here is his note (which he sent out in a series of tweets) in its entirety:

* I'd like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV.

Editorially, Countdown had never been better. But for more than a year ...

At an antiwar conference with predominantly left/progressive activists, I began a talk on the failures of contemporary news media by asking how the group felt about teachers. There was a resounding cheer and calls to support teachers. Then I asked how they felt about journalists-- and the reaction was mixed. Some people booed, others laughed, and one person shouted out, "I like real journalists!"

Those responses weren't surprising, given the role of an uncritical corporate news media in building support for the United States' imperial wars of the past decade. Journalism routinely has failed to hold power accountable, especially in foreign policy and war, sometimes in ways so irresponsible as to be complicit in warmongering, as in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But such legitimate frustration with and anger toward the news media shouldn't undermine thoughtful analysis. We on the left need to think more carefully about our critique of corporate news media, and a comparison of journalists with teachers can be helpful.

Those of us who believe in importance of quality public education are quick to reject the demonization of teachers, recognizing it as part of a right-wing strategy to privatize the education system. But in offering that support, we need not pretend there aren’t bad teachers in our educational institutions.

I have logged 20 years as a student in public education--12 years in schools and eight in universities. In that time, I had teachers who were burned out, teachers who likely were never competent to begin with, teachers whose main interest was coaching. I had a couple of teachers who, for lack of a more graceful term, had about as much sense as a bag of hammers. Those substandard teachers were the minority; most of my teachers ranged from hard-working and decent to gifted and brilliant. But those teachers' great work ...

Today US Army Private Bradley Manning is to be formally charged with numerous crimes at Fort Meade, Maryland.   Manning, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament, is charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents exposing secrets of the US government to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. These documents exposed lies, corruption and crimes by the US and other countries.  The Bradley Manning defense team points out accurately that much of what was published by Wikileaks was either not actually secret or should not have been secret.

The Manning prosecution is a tragic miscarriage of justice.  US officials are highly embarrassed by what Manning exposed and are shooting the messenger.  As Glen Greenwald, the terrific Salon writer, has observed, President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all other presidents combined.

One of the most outrageous parts of the treatment of Bradley Manning is that the US kept him in illegal and torturous solitary confinement conditions for months at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia.  Keeping Manning in solitary confinement sparked challenges from many groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU and the New York Times. 

Human rights’ advocates rightly point out that solitary confinement is designed to break down people mentally.  Because of that, prolonged solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a form of torture.  The conditions and practices of isolation are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention against Torture, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination.

Medical experts say that after 60 days in solidary peoples’ mental state begins to break down.  That means a person will start to experience panic, anxiety, confusion, ...

The New York Times front-page article Sunday showing how extensively Americans—including Tea Party supporters—rely on government programs successfully shatters some myths about who accesses the safety net. But despite its fine on-the-ground reporting, the article’s poor framing on policy solutions seems to perpetuate other myths about Medicare and Social Security.

First, the good news: In “Even Critics of Safety Net Depend on It Increasingly,” Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff examine recessionary life in Chisago County, Minnesota, northeast of the Twin Cities and somewhat farther north of Anoka, the real Lake Woebegone where Garrison Keillor grew up.

In 2010 voters there tossed out Democratic stalwart James L. Oberstar, who served in the House of Representatives for 36 years. They replaced him with Tea Party Republican Chip Cravaack—after Oberstar refused to meet with Cravaack and others to discuss the then-pending health care reform legislation. Last week, Rick Santorum, who won the Minnesota GOP caucus, took 57 percent of the Republican vote in Chisago County with his warnings against “the narcotic of government dependency.”

Recession Hit Middle Class Hard

The Times reporters show that although Chisago County has little outright poverty (under the outdated Federal Poverty Line), middle-class residents there have increasingly relied on government programs to get by. That reflects the national picture, they report: “The government now provides almost $1 in benefits for every $4 in other income.”

Yet while the Times article provides striking human context for understanding the deeply troubling effects of the economic crisis, it stumbles in its discussion of Medicare and, to a lesser extent, Social Security.

The Times survey revealed ...

The Onward State tweet that erroneously reported Joe Paterno's death Saturday night and led to an avalanche of false reports in other outlets was based on the work of two student reporters: One was snookered by a false email, and one overstated his knowledge of the events, according to the site's co-founder.

A third student, Managing Editor Devon Edwards, decided to pull the trigger on the tweet. Edwards resigned Saturday night.

The independent, online-only, student-run site is an agile and highly collaborative organization with a staff of 30-50, including eight editors. Each story is run through two editors, and major decisions are hashed out among editors and reporters through Yammer, an internal messaging system.

The fateful tweet was no snap decision. The site has a complex editorial process that's designed for the Web and has earned praise for its vision — but like any editorial process, it can easily be disrupted by bad reporting and pressure-packed situations.

"I'd have to say that this event … taught me how ego can be a very toxic thing for a news organization,” said Davis Shaver, who co-founded the site as a Penn State freshman in 2008. "Ego to act like you know something you don't, ego to want to be the first person to break it.”

The Breakdown

The two reporters appeared to be offering what the editor believed was independent confirmation of the same fact: that a high-ranking athletic ...

It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration, according to a New York Times editorial; “Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the federal budget and all foreign aid and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

That last item, along with the decade-old racist comments in the newsletters Paul published, is certainly worthy of criticism. But not as an alternative to seriously engaging the substance of Paul’s current campaign—his devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.

Paul is being denigrated as a presidential contender even though on the vital issues of the economy, war and peace, and civil liberties, he has made the most sense of the Republican candidates. And by what standard of logic is it “claptrap” for Paul to attempt to hold the Fed accountable for its destructive policies? That’s the giveaway reference to the raw nerve that his favorable prospects in the Iowa caucuses have exposed. Too much anti-Wall Street populism in the heartland can be a truly scary thing to the intellectual parasites residing in the belly of the beast that controls American capitalism.

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A little after 7 last Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters marched from Zuccotti Park, the scene of a massive police eviction two days earlier, into the warren of streets that surround the New York Stock Exchange.  It was the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, which has introduced a new language of political confrontation—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, Occupy!, “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”—to the national conversation. An entire “Day of Action” was in the works. For the early morning event, marchers hoped to reach Wall Street itself, or as near to Wall Street as they could get given the metal barricades, police vans, motorcycles, and riot police that have effectively privatized that narrow strip of once-public land. It was perhaps the movement’s most carefully-orchestrated action—though you might not have known it by watching the news that day.

Occupy Wall Street’s unorthodox approach to direct action was on full display Thursday morning as multiple columns of marchers encircled Wall Street. The flood of protesters stopped to chant or quickly moved on, depending on the density of police personnel arrayed to corral and disperse the crowd. Others sat down in front of barricades when the police refused further access to the public. This seemingly chaotic rhythm of the protest was, in fact, intentional.

For many days prior to the November 17 day of action, Occupiers met to map out the multiple stages of the action, noting the various intersections where police would try to bottleneck marchers, and devising routes of retreat that would allow them to re-group when faced with overwhelming police force.  In order to spread out the police presence, the march was staggered; different strands would leave minutes apart and aim for different access points to Wall Street. Although these general contours of the action were planned en masse, over a dozen affinity ...

Two new reports suggest that the President and Congressional Democrats are about to betray everything Democrats once stood for. Under pressure from Barack Obama, Democrats on the "Super Committee" have sketched out an appalling "compromise" proposal that would almost certainly doom both their 2012 electoral chances and his own.

They'd have it coming. Their draft plan that literally takes crutches away from poor people to protect tax breaks for the wealthy.

Unfortunately, middle class and impoverished Americans would suffer much more than they would. Career politicians can always look forward to comfortable sinecures from the wealthy interests who will benefit from their proposal. But the rest of us would once again be punished for the excesses of the rich, then left to the untender mercies of our new Republican leaders.

That, and not the fate of a President or a party, would be the real tragedy.

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Funny, he doesn’t look like Marie Antoinette. But when former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller asks his readers if they are “bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street,” it displays the arrogance of disoriented royal privilege. 

Perhaps his contempt for anti-corporate protesters was honed by the example of his father, once the chairman of Chevron. In any case, it is revealing, given the cheerleading support that the Times gave to the radical deregulation of Wall Street that occurred when Keller was the managing editor of the newspaper.

As the Times reported on its news pages in 1998, heralding the merger that created Citigroup as the world’s largest financial conglomerate: “In a single day, with a bold merger, pending legislation in Congress to sweep away Depression-era restrictions on the financial services industry has been given a sudden, and unexpected, new chance of passage.”

The report all too breathlessly continued, “Indeed, within 24 hours of the deal’s announcement, lobbyists for insurers, banks and Wall Street firms were huddling with Congressional banking committee staff members to fine-tune a measure that would update the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from Wall Street and insurance. …”

The “fine-tuned” law, combined with another one similarly drafted by congressional Republicans and also signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, exempted trading in collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps from government regulation. That was the very action that enabled the banking crisis that has brought ...

The New York Times is one of many major news outlets blowing the story of the century (see “Silence of the Lambs: Media herd’s coverage of climate change “fell off the map” in 2010“).

The one-time “paper of record” cut coverage sharply since its peak in 2006 and 2007 and failed to connect the dots — heck, a headline this week even blamed the recent record-setting Thailand floods on Thai “officials” not “an unusually heavy monsoon season”!

Yet the paper never mentions the collapsing media coverage in the Elisabeth Rosenthal article that takes up nearly the entire front page of the Sunday Review asking (subhed in print edition):

“Where Did Global Warming Go?”

Even as other countries take action, the issue is fading from the American agenda

The piece reminded me of the classic Onion article, “Report:  Global warming issue from 2 or 3 years ago may still be problem. Look at the above chart of coverage and then consider this line from the story:

Across the nation, too, belief in man-made global warming, and passion about doing something to arrest climate change, is not what it was five years or so ago, when Al Gore’s movie had buzz and Elizabeth Kolbert’s book about climate change, “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” ...

The Occupy Wall Street protests have grown every day since they began two weeks ago. In the past 24 hours, they have expanded to Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and other major cities as thousands have gathered to demand economic justice and an end to big bank dominated politics. But according to a top Wall Street reporter at the New York Times, the protests don’t appear to really exist — and if they do exist, perhaps only 80 people have shown up.

Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box program yesterday, Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial columnist and editor of the New York Times’ Dealbook blog, a special business section devoted to covering Wall Street, condescendingly dismissed the protests:

SORKIN: Do we think about the–Not to be so America-centric, but do we think that the whole Wall Street protest is overdone, real, not real? Were there really a lot of people down there? Were there a lot? I could never tell.

COHOST: Well uh they arrested 80 people. Right?

SORKIN: Right. But I dont know if that was like all 80 of them.

Watch it:

For the record, thousands have demonstrated against Wall Street and the numbers are growing.

A reader of the Dealbook might reach the same conclusion as Sorkin, that the protests are close to nonexistent. A search of his website reveals a single two sentence mention of them on September 20. In sharp contrast with Sorkin’s snide coverage of the protests, the regular news section of the New York Times has much more thoughtful coverage. New ...