“Jobs Spring Back,” exclaimed a typical headline on recent reports that 165,000 private-sector jobs were added in April. [...]]]> By Jim Hightower | Otherwords.org

The recent good news about job creation obscures the bad news facing the nation’s middle class.

“Jobs Spring Back,” exclaimed a typical headline on recent reports that 165,000 private-sector jobs were added in April. Wow — the thunderous, three-year boom of prosperity that has rained riches on Wall Street is finally beginning to shower on our streets, right?

Well, as dry-land farmers can tell you: Thunder ain’t rain. Read beneath the joyful headlines and you’ll see the parched truth.

Lynn Friedman/Flickr

Especially problematic was the continued rise in underemployment — people wanting full-time work, but having to take part-time and temporary jobs. Underemployment is also pounding college graduates. While they’ve been more successful than non-grads at landing jobs, they’re not getting jobs that fit their career goals or even require the degrees they spent money and time to obtain.

Indeed, many of those rental agents and restaurant employees you encounter hold four-year degrees, forcing everyone else to scramble for the few, even lower-paid jobs farther down the skill ladder. Meanwhile, the next graduating class is about to flood into the labor market with nowhere to go.

America’s middle class is in a crisis, while our pathetic political leaders pretend Wall Street’s prosperity covers us all — and the corporate media puts little happy-face stickers over the dark reality faced by the workaday majority.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org

Almost every medical school student takes an oath upon graduation based on the classic 4th [...]]]> By Hans Hogrefe | Open Society Foundations

As many as 130 prisoners of Guantanomo are on a hunger strike. And what is the US government’s response to this ongoing crisis? Force feeding, a procedure that amounts to torture.

Almost every medical school student takes an oath upon graduation based on the classic 4th century BC text named after the “father of medicine,” Hippocrates. It is worth recalling the ancient commitment to the central tenet of the classic oath regarding the sick: “I will keep them from harm and injustice.” This commitment is echoed in the contemporary international medical principle of beneficence, which mandates that the modern physician be an advocate for the patient’s interests, from the perspective of both immediate medical services and the necessary protective environment in which those services are provided.

Flcikr by Steve Rhodes

In a recently released bipartisan and comprehensive report on detainee treatment at the detention facility in Guantánamo Bay (GTMO), Cuba, the Constitution Project’s Expert Task Force devotes a whole chapter to the spectacular failure of medical professionals in GTMO to protect detainees from harm or injustice. Beginning with the troubling reflections of US Navy Capt. Albert Shimkus, the former detention center’s chief medical officer, the report demonstrates in great detail the willingness of medical personnel at GTMO to participate in a deliberate attempt to misrepresent the cruel realities in the detention facility by proffering a false reality. Capt. Shimkus’ official claim was that prisoners at GTMO “never had it so good,” with first-rate medical care and balanced nutritious meals.

Although the regular medical services provided no doubt did meet appropriate professional standards, psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians were also actively engaged in a much darker aspect of GTMO: the often brutal interrogations of detainees. Medical professionals were complicit in torture by helping to refine practices euphemistically called ”Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,“ by monitoring medical ”redlines” during the interrogations, and by providing interrogators and their superiors with the moral fig leaf that a doctor was monitoring the situation. Officials in charge of interrogation policy could rely on the involvement of doctors to claim that any abuses were not really all that bad. This dichotomy of conflicting responsibilities of Department of Defense medical professionals ensured a ”Jekyll and Hyde” reality for detainees, which negated any real therapeutic relationship as demanded by the Hippocratic Oath and by medical ethics. The same medical professionals who monitored interrogation of detainees were also responsible for regular health care of those same people. By accepting these detrimentally opposing roles, healers could inevitably no longer be healers.

The absence of a trusting relationship between detainees and health professionals was further exacerbated by another Kafkaesque reality that GTMO detainees find themselves in – a regime of indefinite detention. Dozens of people remain in GTMO without criminal charge and with no hope of ever leaving the facility. The US government has cleared for release some 86 of the 166 prisoners currently in Guantánamo, many of whom have been awaiting their freedom for many years. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has documented the severely detrimental health impacts this complete uncertainty and inability to determine one’s own fate has on detainees. The US government knows full well that many detainees have never had any hostile intentions toward the United States, and that they should have never been held at GTMO in the first place. The only reason they are still there is the inconvenient fact that no acceptable third country is available to take them off our hands. This result is hardly surprising, given that the United States brought the detainees to GTMO despite international criticism, and US lawmakers ensured that not a single one of them could be released into the United States. In recognition of the futility of a diplomatic ”Mission Impossible” along the lines of, “Please take some GTMO detainees off our hands, while we in the US will take none, thank you very much,” the office charged with the closure of GTMO was closed itself.

Imagine the combined impact of all of these factors on the detainees at GTMO. The utter desperation of being at the complete mercy of a seemingly unaccountable authority that declares one thing and does another has had deadly consequences. In acts of complete desperation, detainees have resorted to harming themselves, as is evidenced by the seven suicides and several waves of hunger strikes at GTMO.

As media reports indicate, as many as 130 prisoners could now be on a hunger strike. And what is the US government’s response to this ongoing crisis? Force feeding. As experts at PHR have clearly demonstrated, force feeding can amount to torture. The international medical community has authoritatively addressed the issue of treatment of hunger strikers in the Declaration of Malta by the World Medical Association, and the US government should strictly follow those guidelines and procedures. The Declaration of Malta has one important recurring theme and precondition, though, which the current system in GTMO simply cannot meet – a trusting and respectful relationship between the hunger striker and his doctor.

If the past is not to be prologue for more abuses, the current administration must do three things immediately to act responsibly during this crisis:

• 1)Independent medical professionals need to have full and unfettered access to the hunger strikers, so that they can credibly implement the Malta Declaration without the practice of force feeding.
• 2)The administration must immediately address the issue of indefinite detention in GTMO and elsewhere. The administration should actively find ways to repatriate or relocate those individuals cleared for release and should charge all those who are not cleared.
• 3)For this purpose, the administration must immediately appoint a high-ranking government official of international stature to the currently vacant position of Special Envoy for the Closure of Guantanamo, and widely publicize this appointment at the detention facility and abroad.

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With Syria’s strife, the NRA’s annual meeting, and Kim Kardashian’s prenatal woes to report, Central America doesn’t exactly dominate U.S. headlines these days. So we [...]]]> By Emily Schwartz Greco and William A. Collins | Otherwords.org

Thirty years after Ríos Montt’s atrocities, U.S. military policy in Latin America remains a human rights disaster.

With Syria’s strife, the NRA’s annual meeting, and Kim Kardashian’s prenatal woes to report, Central America doesn’t exactly dominate U.S. headlines these days. So we understand that the octogenarian former dictator standing trial in Guatemala for unspeakable acts of horror committed three decades ago may not have come to your attention.

Image courtesy of Mary Jo McConahay

Yet you should care about the conviction of General José Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide — because U.S. foreign policy was on trial too.

Why? Most importantly, Ríos Montt was a graduate of the School of the Americas, a U.S. Army training academy for Latin American military personnel. And the U.S. government went out of its way in those early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency to arm this butcher — under whose command soldiers slaughtered babies and the elderly alike.

As journalist Robert Parry has explained in detail, the Gipper rolled back Jimmy Carter’s arms embargo on Guatemala, leading Washington to sell Ríos Montt’s government military hardware worth millions of dollars.

Plus, the trial got way more interesting when it turned out that Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, was implicated in those 1980s massacres.

This isn’t just a question of setting the record straight. There aren’t many dictatorships to prop up around the region any more but the U.S. government is still making its neglect of Latin American democracy clear by refusing to disclose who attends the genocidal general’s alma mater. That policy began in 2004 during the Bush administration and has remained intact until now at the institution that the military rebranded years ago with an unmemorable name: the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

The Obama administration may finally have to fix this disclosure problem. In late April, a federal judge in California ruled that there’s no legal basis for the Pentagon’s refusal to name the Latin Americans who participate in this program.

And while the U.S. military may not be as busy as it was at the height of the Cold War teaching Latin American military leaders to torture their own people, it does still maintain 22 bases in the region. We’d have one more if Ecuador hadn’t thrown us out.

In these belt-tightening times, Latin America offers Uncle Sam great opportunities to make some smart budget cuts. Thanks to the militarization of our failed War on Drugs, Washington has funneled $20 billion into its Latin American military operations over the past decade, the Associated Press found. Our yearly sales of guns, tear gas, radar equipment, and satellites to the region have quadrupled to nearly $3 billion.

In Honduras, horrific human rights violations are current events — rather than the subject of a long-overdue trial. In the bloody aftermath of its 2009 coup, which Washington tacitly approved, all the Obama administration has done is vastly increase military support for that country’s anti-democratic leaders.

At least 25 Honduran journalists have perished since that coup and death squads are on the rise there. Will Hondurans have to wait three decades until those responsible are finally held accountable as we’re seeing today in Guatemala? And which ruthless Latin American regimes will Washington be arming at that point?

Emily Schwartz Greco, the managing editor of OtherWords, covered Latin American finance and U.S. foreign policy toward the region for the Dow Jones and Bloomberg news services. Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut. otherwords.org

It was strange, coming out of the blue like that, but [...]]]> By Gardner | Blog

Whether we are Tea Party believers or Occupy Wall Streeters, we know that our politicians are not working for us, and even seem very comfortable with the erosion of the middle class and the fall in everyone else’s standard-of-living.

Vivek Wadhwa by Frank Gruber/Flickr

It was strange, coming out of the blue like that, but there he was, Vivek Wadhwa, global genius and recipient of the United States Government’s “Outstanding American by Choice Award,” testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Immigration on February 5, 2013. Yes, there he was, testifying about the benefits of H-1B visas. After submitting his prepared remarks, he repeated that advances in robotics, AI (Artificial Intelligence), computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nano materials “have made it possible for small teams to do what only governments and large corporations could do, namely, solving grand problems in education, water, food, shelter, health, and security.”

He then went on to stress that these things (robotics, AI, et al) were still beneficiaries of Moore’s Law; in that, these technologies were doubling their efficiencies every year or two. It is this doubling of efficiencies, he said, that will allow solar power and other advances to provide “unlimited (cheap and clean) energy and unlimited (clean) water” within the next “two to six years.” Furthermore, as robotics and Artificial Intelligence and everything else will produce “huge surpluses of goods” with “much less labor,” Vivek Wadhwa said that the challenge we soon will face is how to distribute these huge surpluses to the people. Translation: huge surpluses of goods will need to be distributed to the people who no longer will need to work long hours, because automation and unlimited cheap energy will diminish the need for a forty-hour work week while still producing huge surpluses of goods.

So, how many people think that our elected officials will endorse this kind of “distribution?” It may have been my imagination, but I thought I saw some of the House Judiciary Committee members taken aback by Vivek Wadhwa. I even thought I saw one member turn and say something like, “Who invited this guy?” And, then it was over, never to be spoken of, again. Until now.

Clearly, the people who own oil, natural gas, and coal reserves do not want “unlimited cheap and clean energy,” because that would reduce the value of those reserves by trillions of dollars. And, the people who own automated factories do not see the need to “distribute huge surpluses of goods” to the workers who no longer are needed, because these owners can distribute that surplus to themselves in the form of bigger yachts, more mansions, more cars, more jet airplanes, more servants, and more of everything else. Few would argue against the assertion that the people who own the energy reserves and the factories also “own” our politicians, so what are the chances that we will see unlimited cheap and clean energy along with huge surpluses of goods in the next “two to six years?” That would be zero chances.

In politics, as in business, the key to controlling others is controlling the conversation, and the key to controlling the conversation is controlling the lexicon. With the approach of the 2014 midterm elections, the lexicon of politics has not changed. Just as it is the fear of conservatives that drives progressives to accept the same old promises and the same old wishy-washy candidates, so, too, it is the fear of the progressives that drives the conservatives ever deeper into the cold, empty arms of the me-me-my-my-mine candidates. By now, with the destruction of middle class equity and any hope we might have had for a safe and secure future, pretty much everyone knows that, whether we are Tea Party believers or Occupy Wall Streeters, our politicians are not working for us. Whoever we are, we know that our politicians are snugly wrapped in their wealth from their insider trades, their special IPO investments, and the promises of more goodies waiting for them just the other side of that revolving door. It is no wonder that our politicians are very comfortable with the erosion of the middle class and the fall in everyone else’s standard-of-living.

It will be politics “as usual” as we approach the 2014 midterm election. Our politicians and their media hacks even now are driving us into our usual irrational frenzy as they raise the perpetual specters of guns, birth control, welfare, religion, social security, medical care, unemployment, terrorism, and the ever imminent day of reckoning for our national debt. It is shaping up to be that same old dogfight as we continue to squabble over who gets this little scrap left over from this banquet, and who gets that little scrap left over from that banquet. It seems clear that this little game is going to work, again, in 2014.

Fork in the road by Brandon Carpenter on Flickr

So, as we continue into our political future, we will arrive each day at little forks in the road, and our politicians will continue to choose those forks in the road that provide more to them and theirs, and less to us and ours. This is our political past. This is our political present. And, no one seems to have any idea how or why we should change it in our political future. No one, that is, except Vivek Wadhwa and me.

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A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in [...]]]> By Eric Michael Johnson | YES! Magazine

A new theory of human origins says cooperation—not competition—is instinctive.

Photo by Harlan Harris.

A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man argued that the human species had succeeded because of traits like sharing and compassion. “Those communities,” he wrote, “which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.” Darwin was no economist, but wealth-sharing and cooperation have always looked more consistent with his observations about human survival than the elitism and hierarchy that dominates contemporary corporate life.

Nearly 150 years later, modern science has verified Darwin’s early insights with direct implications for how we do business in our society. New peer-reviewed research by Michael Tomasello, an American psychologist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has synthesized three decades of research to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory of human cooperation. What can we learn about sharing as a result?

Tomasello holds that there were two key steps that led to humans’ unique form of interdependence. The first was all about who was coming to dinner. Approximately two million years ago, a fledgling species known as Homo habilis emerged on the great plains of Africa. At the same time that these four-foot-tall, bipedal apes appeared, a period of global cooling produced vast, open environments. This climate change event ultimately forced our hominid ancestors to adapt to a new way of life or perish entirely. Since they lacked the ability to take down large game, like the ferocious carnivores of the early Pleistocene, the solution they hit upon was scavenging the carcasses of recently killed large mammals. The analysis of fossil bones from this period has revealed evidence of stone-tool cut marks overlaid on top of carnivore teeth marks. The precursors of modern humans had a habit of arriving late to the feast.

However, this survival strategy brought an entirely new set of challenges: Individuals now had to coordinate their behaviors, work together, and learn how to share. For apes living in the dense rainforest, the search for ripe fruit and nuts was largely an individual activity. But on the plains, our ancestors needed to travel in groups to survive, and the act of scavenging from a single animal carcass forced proto-humans to learn to tolerate each other and allow each other a fair share. This resulted in a form of social selection that favored cooperation: “Individuals who attempted to hog all of the food at a scavenged carcass would be actively repelled by others,” writes Tomasello, “and perhaps shunned in other ways as well.”

This evolutionary legacy can be seen in our behavior today, particularly among children who are too young to have been taught such notions of fairness. For example, in a 2011 study published in the journal Nature, anthropologist Katharina Hamann and her colleagues found that 3-year-old children share food more equitably if they gain it through cooperative effort rather than via individual labor or no work at all. In contrast, chimpanzees showed no difference in how they shared food under these different scenarios; they wouldn’t necessarily hoard the food individually, but they placed no value on cooperative efforts either. The implication, according to Tomasello, is that human evolution has predisposed us to work collaboratively and given us an intuitive sense that cooperation deserves equal rewards.

The second step in Tomasello’s theory leads directly into what kinds of businesses and economies are more in line with human evolution. Humans have, of course, uniquely large population sizes—much larger than those of other primates. It was the human penchant for cooperation that allowed groups to grow in number and eventually become tribal societies.

Humans, more than any other primate, developed psychological adaptations that allowed them to quickly recognize members of their own group (through unique behaviors, traditions, or forms of language) and develop a shared cultural identity in the pursuit of a common goal.
“The result,” says Tomasello, “was a new kind of interdependence and group-mindedness that went well beyond the joint intentionality of small-scale cooperation to a kind of collective intentionality at the level of the entire society.”

What does this mean for the different forms of business today? Corporate workplaces probably aren’t in sync with our evolutionary roots and may not be good for our long-term success as humans. Corporate culture imposes uniformity, mandated from the top down, throughout the organization. But the cooperative—the financial model in which a group of members owns a business and makes the rules about how to run it—is a modern institution that has much in common with the collective tribal heritage of our species. Worker-owned cooperatives are regionally distinct and organized around their constituent members. As a result, worker co-ops develop unique cultures that, following Tomasello’s theory, would be expected to better promote a shared identity among all members of the group. This shared identity would give rise to greater trust and collaboration without the need for centralized control.

Moreover, the structure of corporations is a recipe for worker alienation and dissatisfaction. Humans have evolved the ability to quickly form collective intentionality that motivates group members to pursue a shared goal. “Once they have formed a joint goal,” Tomasello says, “humans are committed to it.” Corporations, by law, are required to maximize profits for their investors. The shared goal among corporate employees is not to benefit their own community but rather a distant population of financiers who have no personal connection to their lives or labor.

However, because worker-owned cooperatives focus on maximizing value for their members, the cooperative is operated by and for the local community—a goal much more consistent with our evolutionary heritage. As Darwin concluded in The Descent of Man, “The more enduring social instincts conquer the less persistent instincts.” As worker-owned cooperatives continue to gain prominence around the world, we may ultimately witness the downfall of Carnegie’s “law of competition” and a return to the collaborative environments that the human species has long called home.

Eric Michael Johnson wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Eric is a doctoral student in the history of science at the University of British Columbia. His research examines the interplay between evolutionary biology and politics.

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Abortion, condoms,
Things that vex,
Those who would
Prohibit sex.

Fewer American teens are getting pregnant and the national abortion rate is falling. Time to break out [...]]]> By William A. Collins | Otherwords.org

Despite declines in teen pregnancy and abortion rates, some conservatives aren’t ready to celebrate.

Abortion, condoms,
Things that vex,
Those who would
Prohibit sex.

Fewer American teens are getting pregnant and the national abortion rate is falling. Time to break out the champagne and the bananas flambé, right?

But many religious zealots aren’t celebrating these numbers, which reflect a reduction in the number of traumatized young women and impoverished moms. According to these fervent religionists, no one, especially not the young, should have sex at all — unless they are trying to make babies.

To this end, some states are doing their best to outlaw abortion again. There are now criminal penalties for simply aiding a desperate woman to cross a state line to seek an abortion elsewhere. Anti-choice lawmakers are trying to shut the very last remaining abortion clinics in North Dakota and Mississippi. Republicans are fighting against funding for sex ed, government efforts to make birth control more affordable, and even symbolic measures that would scrub state law books of archaic language that used to make gay sex between consenting adults a crime.

The French have always been world leaders in sex.

Things are moving in a different direction in other countries. In France, where the majority is Roman Catholic, the lower house of Parliament has just voted to make abortion and contraception free to all girls from age 15 to 18. These services are already covered for the poor under national health insurance, and everyone else gets reimbursed for most of the cost. The French have always been world leaders in sex.

j-No/Flickr

But even the Philippines, a country far more Catholic than France, is trying at last to make birth control readily available to the poor at government expense. Its Supreme Court has delayed things for a few months. But way to go, Manila!

Uruguay is making headway too. Abortions there are available for any reason during the first trimester, which puts that country in the lead of reform in Latin America, and somewhat ahead of Arkansas. Uruguay’s lawmakers have backed marriage equality too.

For what it’s worth, the United Nations looks upon contraception as a universal human right.

So while the public battle rages over access to abortion, the real goal of our local fanatics appears to be much broader: to punish women for enjoying sex. Sounds like a losing platform to me.

Sometimes the goal seems to be punishing women, even if they’ve been sexually assaulted. New Mexico state lawmaker Rep. Cathrynn N. Brown (R-Carlsbad) introduced a bill in January that would make it a crime for rape victims to get abortions. They — and their doctors — would have been charged with “tampering with the evidence” and jailed had it become law. But once word of the legislation got out, Brown backpedaled. There are, it turns out, some common-sense limits in the wars on sex and women.

OtherWords columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org

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Aging baby boomers may remember a 1960s rock band that sported an all-time great name. That band — Question Mark [...]]]> By Sam Pizzigati | Otherwords.org

Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff write learned economic papers that make champions of austerity happy — and help smash the life prospects of average working families.

Aging baby boomers may remember a 1960s rock band that sported an all-time great name. That band — Question Mark and the Mysterians — may now have a worthy rival on the name front. Make way for Reinhart-Rogoff and the Austerians.

Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff don’t make smash records. They write learned economic papers that make champions of austerity happy — and help smash the life prospects of average working families.

joeythibault/Flickr

Austerians preach the absolute necessity of whacking away at government spending. We must, they solemnly intone, discipline ourselves to reduce government deficit and debt, no matter the pain austerity may bring us.

And austerity does bring pain. People lose access to basic services. People lose jobs. People even go hungry. But some people — extremely rich people — don’t mind austerity at all.

These affluent Americans don’t send their kids to public schools. They don’t visit public parks. They never ride public transit. These wealthy folks don’t need public services and resent having to pay taxes to support them.

Austerity works for these wealthy Americans. Cutbacks in public services generally won’t inconvenience or complicate their daily lives. And if austerity should create some unanticipated discomfort, they can always get their friends in high places to intervene — as Americans saw recently when lawmakers rushed to undo air traffic controller budget cuts that had rich travelers cooling their heels in airports.

We have still another indication that inequality corrupts every corner of contemporary societies, even our ivory towers.

Austerity cutbacks, notes Center for Economic and Policy Research economist Dean Baker, promise even greater payoffs — for the rich — down the road. Any cut in programs like Social Security, he points out, “opens the door for lowering tax rates on the wealthy in the future.”

If social commitments can be chopped, Baker writes, “then the wealthy can look forward to being able to keep more of their income.”

All this may help explain why pollsters have found, as economist Paul Krugman points out, that rich Americans “by a large majority” consider budget deficits “the most important problem we face.”

America’s wealthy make their preference for austerity equally plain to the politicians who seek their favor. These politicians want to be helpful to their deep-pocketed patrons. But they also have needs of their own. They need “evidence” they can use, Dean Baker reminds us, to show the general public that “austerity serves the general good and not just the rich.”

Three years ago, Harvard’s Reinhart and Rogoff supplied that “evidence,” via an academic paper that purported to show a grave danger whenever government debt hits 90 percent of Gross Domestic Product.

This paper rushed to the “top of the charts” in elite public policy circles. Austerians worldwide cited the paper as an unassailable justification for cutting government spending quickly and deeply.

Reinhart and Rogoff made no meaningful move to discourage the austerians. They basked instead in their global celebrity — until a team of unorthodox economists at the University of Massachusetts exposed their paper as essentially a sloppy scholarly fraud.

This Massachusetts work has just gone viral. Reinhart and Rogoff’s spreadsheet snafus have even become fodder for late-night TV comics.

End of story? Not quite. We have much more here than a spectacularly failed attempt to make the case for a doctrine that suits the sensibilities of the richest among us. We have still another indication that inequality corrupts every corner of contemporary societies, even our ivory towers.

The peers of Reinhart and Rogoff, the scholars who hold the nation’s most prestigious endowed chairs in economics, never subjected the Harvard pair’s findings to any serious scrutiny. The unraveling of their bogus case for austerity started with the digging of a skeptical grad student.

The lesson in all this? In a staggeringly unequal society, as Paul Krugman sums up, “what the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.”

The rest of us, of course, don’t have to listen.

OtherWords columnist Sam Pizzigati is an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow. His latest book is The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class. OtherWords.org

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