The defining political issue of 2012 won't be the government's size. It will be who government is for.

Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government.

But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn't about government's size. It's the growing perception that government isn't working for average people. It's for big business, Wall Street, and the very rich instead.

In a recent Pew Foundation poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.

That's understandable. To take a few examples:

-- Wall Street got bailed out but homeowners caught in the fierce downdraft caused by the Street's excesses have got almost nothing.

-- Big agribusiness continues to rake in hundreds of billions in price supports and ethanol subsidies. Big pharma gets extended patent protection that drives up everyone's drug prices. Big oil gets its own federal subsidy. But small businesses on the Main Streets of America are barely making it.

-- American Airlines uses bankruptcy to ward off debtors and renegotiate labor contracts. Donald Trump's businesses go bankrupt without impinging on Trump's own personal fortune. But the law won't allow you to use personal bankruptcy to renegotiate your home mortgage.

-- If you run a giant bank that defrauds millions of small investors of their life savings, the bank might pay a small fine but you won't go to prison. Not a single top Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for Wall Street's mega-fraud. But if you sell an ounce of marijuana you could be put away for a long time.

Not a day goes by without Republicans decrying the budget deficit. But the biggest single reason for the yawning deficit is big money's corruption of Washington. And it's not just corporate welfare.

One of the deficit's biggest drivers -- Medicare -- would be lower if Medicare could use its bargaining leverage to get drug companies to reduce their prices. Why hasn't it happened? Big Pharma won't allow it.

Medicare's administrative costs are only 3 percent, far below the 10 percent average administrative costs of private insurers. So why not tame rising healthcare costs for all Americans by allowing any family to opt in? That was the idea behind the "public option." Health insurers stopped it in its tracks.

The other big budgetary expense is national defense. America spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany combined. The basic defense budget (the portion unrelated to the costs of fighting wars) keeps growing, now about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.




[...]

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has proposed a Wikipedia blackout to protest an anti-piracy bill in the US.On his personal space on the user-edited encyclopedia, Wales has raised the possibility of shutting down the English-speaking sections of Wikipedia, to try to prevent the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) from becoming US law.

SOPA is a bill that would allow rights holders to seek court orders against websites they accuse of copyright infringement, potentially having sites barred from search engines or forcing ISPs to block them.

The bill is predictably unpopular in online communities, who feel it would negatively impact the Internet as a whole, or introduce unhelpful levels of censorship. Google is one notable opponent of SOPA -- Yahoo, Facebook, eBay and Twitter are others.

Wales reckons powering down Wikipedia could put the willies up proponents of the bill, saying, "A global strike of at least the English Wikipedia would put the maximum pressure on the US government." He's asked fellow Wikipedia users whether there is interest in the idea.

Why Is the American Left So Ineffective in Economics?

Anyone who's still in a state of denial about the thesis implied by the title of this article can stop reading right here. I'll just assume it's obvious enough that we can take it as a given. My intention here is neither to bemoan nor to gloat; my job doesn't allow for partisanship and I regularly work with people on both sides who support serious economic reform, starting with trade issues. Our democracy has two parties for a reason, and if one side has become impotent on an issue as important as economics, we're in trouble, because neither party, on its own, seems to be capable of producing sound economic policy. I think there are basically four reasons why the American left has, since the late 1970s, lost almost all of its traction on economic issues, despite successfully imposing on the country for the previous 40 years a basically New Deal economic ideology.

The first reason is the gentrification of the left. If you compare who runs the Democratic party on a day-to-day basis with who ran it in 1932, or even 1962, there's been nearly a clean sweep of old-school ethnics and working-class people and their replacement with yuppies. Even if the bosses who ran the Democratic party in 1932 were of middle-class or above incomes as a personal matter, their social origins usually were not. This fact usually gets ignored, not least because almost everyone with the wherewithal to comment on it (including yours truly) is themselves a yuppie.

A major part of the problem here is that 100 percent of the political power in the United States is monopolized by the top 10 percent of the population. I know this sounds odd, but the hard fact is that one can't exert political power without organization, and all major organizations are run by people in the top 10 percent. So the top 10 percent exercise a veto power over political action by everyone else. At an absolute minimum, anything any group does will be filtered through the media, and all media types are 10 percenters.

So if yuppies don't like something, it won't happen. It's no accident that the American left has tilted since the 1960s away from the boring working-class economic concerns that animated it in the 1930s towards things like environmentalism, feminism, and gay rights--which are all things yuppies genuinely care about on a personal basis. Factory workers and Wal-Mart clerks are not.

This points to the second problem with the contemporary American left: it has exchanged equality as its primary goal for diversity. Now one can argue this either way, and I don't do culture-war issues, but the hard fact is that one can't prefer diversity to equality and expect equality to be the outcome. They are simply not the same thing. One can claim to be in favor of both, but strategic choices have to be made, and either one or the other must come out on top. The real problem with diversity, from a leftist point of view, is not that it's a bad thing per se. The real problem is that diversity intrinsically tends to reduce human solidarity. Solidarity is the emotion people feel towards others that makes them care about the fate of people who would otherwise be strangers. It is thus an essential basis of any political tendency that would impose policies designed to reduce economic inequality. (It's no accident this is a word unions talk about all the time.)

Without solidarity, people don't hate each other. They just don't care. Not really, whatever they may say. Solidarity comes from having something in common with other people, and the less people have in common with each other, the more American society devolves to a model of pure individual self-interest. Which may be a leftist model in cultural or social questions, but it's a rightist model in economics.

I live in San Francisco, where there are an extraordinary number of people about who consider themselves liberal on economic issues. And so they are, when they write checks to liberal causes or participate in local political clubs and other organizations. But the other 29 days of the month or 5 days of the week, they go back to work downtown for the same corporate economy they claim to oppose on their days off. And they work hard to become rich, i.e. to acquire a nice juicy piece of inequality for themselves.

One can't blame a person for having a day job or for working for a living, but one also can't help wondering why they expect a certain economic outcome when they spend five days pushing one direction and only one pushing the other.

The big problem here isn't that this contradicts these individuals' nominal leftism. The big problem is that it doesn't. Contemporary leftism is easy to decorate into a high-income lifestyle, with all the approved cultural gestures. The fake-decrepit home in a funky neighborhood (Noe Valley here in San Francisco, Venice in LA, Greenwich Village in NY), the expensive vacations to ecologically impressive and multiculturally exotic destinations, a dash of New Age religion and you're good to go. When leftism has been elevated to a lifestyle, the actual underlying politics becomes almost unnecessary. (People are, of course, cultural animals, so they respond emotionally far more strongly to cultural theater than they do to hard politics, which is boring.)

None of this is to imply that the American right is somehow culturally authentic. They're engaged in their own posturing with that famous venture capitalist Jesus of Nazareth.

This brings us to the third big problem with the American left. Since the Democrats decided in 1981, under Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Tony Coelho, that they could seek (and get) corporate money on the same scale as the Republicans, there has been a yawning gap between the interests of those who finance the party and its nominal ideological commitments. This gap doesn't exist for the Republicans, who genuinely believe in the pro-corporate policies they impose, and this is a big part of why that party is more effective. It isn't condemned to talk out of both sides of its mouth at once.

The fourth reason for the economic ineffectiveness of the left is the simplest: most leftists find economics boring. They tell me this all the time when I try to talk to them about things like the trade deficit. There are very few leftist organizations (the Union for Radical Political Economics and Economic Policy Institute are about the only big exceptions) that really do economics in any technically substantial sense. As a result, there's very little serious intellectual energy invested in the subject.

Two of the holy grails of medicine - stem cell technology and precision gene therapy - have been united for the first time in humans, say scientists.

It means patients with a genetic disease could, one day, be treated with their own cells.

[...]
Prof Lomas said if this could be developed into a therapy it would be preferable to liver transplant as the patient would not need to take immunosuppressant drugs.

He told the BBC that the technique was "ridiculously hard," yet "the potential is enormous, but only time will tell".

Further animal studies and human clinical trials would be needed before any treatment as "the key thing is safety".

For example, concerns have been raised about "induced" stem cells being prone to expressing cancer causing genes.

Prof Robin Ali, from University College London and the Medical Research Council's stem cell translational research committee, said: "It's very interesting.

"Most gene therapy is not correcting the gene, it's introducing a new copy of the gene, what's exciting is that this corrects.

party/total votes/percentage/difference since last election/ seats
A (labour) 2158 57.9 +13.3 16 (+4)
SV(socialistic left) 173 4.6 -2.2 1 (-1)
SP(central party/(farmers party)) 289 7.8 -12.3 2 (-3)
KRF(christian people's party) 163 4.4 +0.9 1 (+0)
V(liberal ) 136 3.7 -1.0 1 (+0)
H(right/conservative party) 382 10.3 +4.5 3 (+1)
FRP(progress party/ populist-rightwing phobia-fiddle party) 425 11.4 -3.4 3 (-1)