David Warsh, generally a respected journalist, has just published in the Providence Journal an attack on Michael Porter of Harvard Business School for consulting with Qaddafi about change in Libya. In the period after Gaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program and his overt support for terrorism. Porter, a founder of the Monitor Consulting Group, developed a plan to promote change in Libya. He hired a number of Western intellectuals to help by going to Libya to promote new ideas.

Porter can reply for himself about Warsh's attack, but in his piece Warsh repeated a false account of my role based on a now discredited story by David Corn of Mother Jones. It is an interesting example of how misinformation on the internet can get legs when reporters do not live up to their professional standards.

Here is what Warsh wrote:

Among those enlisted were Sir Anthony Giddens, former director of the LSE; Francis Fukuyama, of Stanford University; Benjamin Barber, of Rutgers University (emeritus); Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab; Robert Putnam and Joseph Nye, both former deans of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Nye received a fee and wrote a broadly sympathetic account of his three-hour visit with Gadhafi for The New Republic. He also told The Globe's Stockman he had commented on a chapter of Saif's doctoral dissertation. (When The New Republic scolded Nye earlier this month, after Mother Jones magazine disclosed the fee, Nye replied that his original manuscript implied that he had been employed as a consultant by Monitor, but that the phrase had been edited out).

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The Federal Reserve accepted more defaulted debt than U.S. Treasuries as collateral to back $155.7 billion on the largest day of borrowing from the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, according to documents released today.

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WASHINGTON — House Republicans want to limit tax breaks for insurance policies that cover abortions as lawmakers try to chip away at President Barack Obama's health overhaul.

The House Ways and Means Committee scheduled a vote Thursday on legislation that would prevent people from deducting the cost of an abortion from their taxable income. The bill also would prevent small businesses and taxpayers from using tax credits in the new health care law to provide or pay for insurance policies that cover the procedure.

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The latest rage in Washington policy discussions these days (that's relevant to climate change) is renewed interest in renewable electricity standards, this time in the form of so-called "clean energy standards." I've written about this policy approach recently at this blog (Renewable Energy Standards: Less Effective, More Costly, but Politically Preferred to Cap-and-Trade?, January 11, 2011), and will do so again in the near future, but for today I want to turn to an important issue - for the long term - on the related topic of the international dimensions of climate change policy.

The Current State of Affairs

Despite the death in the U.S. Senate last year of serious consideration of an economy-wide cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions - and the apparent political hiatus of such consideration at least until after the November 2012 elections - a major cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is in place in the European Union; similar systems are in place or under development in New Zealand, California, and several Canadian provinces; systems are being considered at the national level in Australia, Canada, and Japan; and a global emission reduction credit scheme - the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) - has an enthusiastic and important constituency of supporters in the form of the world's developing countries.

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photo credit: Mike Ragogna

A Conversation with Kids Of 88's Sam McCarthy

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IRS.gov describes Topic 556 -- Alternative Minimum Tax -- as follows: The tax laws provide tax benefits for certain kinds of income and allow special deductions and credits for certain kinds of expenses. The alternative minimum tax (AMT) attempts to ensure that anyone who benefits from these tax advantages pays at least a minimum amount of tax.

The AMT is a separately figured tax that eliminates many deductions and credits, thus increasing tax liability for an individual who would otherwise pay less tax. The tentative minimum tax rates on ordinary income are percentages set by law. For capital gains and certain dividends, the rates in effect for the regular tax are used.

The recent report of the General Electric Company's failure to pay any tax to the United States government, indeed to be owed a tax refund, may not have surprised the beltway cognoscenti and business cynics, but it sure stunned the folks around here. If there were ever a simple fact to infuriate a population already damaged and embittered by corporate actions on the employment and political front, this was it.

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By Richard Yeakley
Religion News Service

(RNS) Almost all U.S. churches witnessed a change in the financial giving they received in 2010 compared to 2009, with smaller churches feeling the squeeze but larger churches faring relatively better, according to a new report.

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If it had been revealed that Jeffrey Immelt once hired an undocumented nanny, or defaulted on his mortgage, he would be forced to resign as head of President Barack Obama's "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness." But the fact that General Electric, where Immelt is CEO, didn't pay taxes on its $14.5 billion profit last year--and indeed is asking for a $3.2 billion tax rebate--has not produced a word of criticism from the president, who in January praised Immelt as a business leader who "understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy."

What it takes, evidently, is shifting profit and jobs abroad: Only one out of three GE workers is now based in the U.S., and almost two-thirds of the company's profit is sheltered in its foreign operations. Thanks to changes in the tax law engineered when another avowedly pro-business Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president, U.S. multinational financial companies can avoid taxes on their international scams. And financial scams are what GE excelled in for decades, when GE Capital, its financial unit, which specialized in credit card, consumer loan and housing mortgage debt, accounted for most of GE's profits.

That's right, GE, along with General Motors with its toxic GMAC financial unit, came to look more like an investment bank than a traditional industrial manufacturing giant that once propelled this economy and ultimately it ran into the same sort of difficulties as the Wall Street hustlers. As The New York Times' David Kocieniewski, who broke the GE profit story, put it: "Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company's profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines."

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I'm not paranoid, but isn't the proposed Google-backed system for having a credit card on your phone a little Big-Brother-creepy?
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The mayor of Cudahy said the City Council ousted longtime City Manager George Perez because of the "general direction" of the city, adding he was reviewing the small community's financial records.