Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) asked Thursday whether the U.S. was evolving into an oligarchy during a speech on the Senate floor.

The senator said recent Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance law would further tip the economic and political balance toward the very wealthiest Americans.

‘We are moving toward a situation where people such as the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson have so much money it would hardly matter to them to write a check for more than both Obama and Romney spent in the last presidential election,” Sanders said. ‘They could write out a check for $2 billion, and it would be insignificant – a fraction of their increase in wealth over a one-year period.”

The Koch brothers, who fund a variety of conservative political operations, saw their wealth increase from $68 billion to $80 billion in just one year, Sanders said.

He said the loosening of restrictions on campaign spending favored by conservatives had imperiled representative government.

‘I do not believe democracy is about a handful of billionaires, such as the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, being in a position in which they can spend as much money as they want on any political race in this country,” Sanders said. ‘It is very […]

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ack during the not-so-distant glory days of New Jersey’s Star-Ledger reign as a regional newspaper powerhouse, the Newark, N.J., newsroom in the 2000s was bursting with 350 journalists who covered the entire state and pocketed Pulitzers for their coverage of local politicians. Back when Tony Soprano made Jersey mob cool, each week during the show’s opening the fictional wise guy paid homage to the daily by sauntering down his driveway to retrieve the Star-Ledger.

That’s now all a memory. Last week, the Star-Ledger’s owner announced massive layoffs at the newspaper as part of a larger effort at consolidation. Today, entire sections of the Newark newsroom sit empty; a newsroom that has shed an astonishing 240 jobs since 2008, or two-thirds of its former staff.

All this, at a time when the Star-Ledger’s detailed, hometown coverage of the unraveling scandals involving Gov. Chris Christie had become must-reads for journalists and news junkies alike.

Philadelphia columnist Will Bunch called last week’s Star-Ledger pink slips for reporters the “best news” of Christie’s career. Why? “With fewer of them on the beat, Christie — and all the other corrupt politicians of the Garden State — will be able to keep more of their secrets from the public […]

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The highest beef prices in almost three decades are causing sticker shock for both consumers and restaurant owners – and relief isn’t likely anytime soon.

A dwindling number of cattle and growing export demand from countries such as China and Japan have caused the average retail cost of fresh beef to climb to $5.28 a pound in February, up almost a quarter from January and the highest price since 1987.

Everything that’s produced is being consumed, said Kevin Good, an analyst at CattleFax, a Colorado-based information group. And prices likely will stay high for a couple of years as cattle producers start to rebuild their herds amid big questions about whether the Southwest and parts of the Midwest will see enough rain to replenish pastures.

The high prices are welcome news for at least one group: ranchers, especially those in Texas who for years have struggled amid drought and high feed prices. Despite the most recent numbers that show the fewest head of cattle in the U.S. since 1951, prices for beef haven’t declined along with the herd size as demand has remained strong.

“I’ve noticed a huge increase in price in all ages and grades of cattle,” said Ray Law, owner of the […]

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China’s rejection of shipments of US corn containing traces of unapproved genetically modified maize has caused a significant drop in exports. According to a new report, US traders have lost $427 million in sales.

Overall, China has barred nearly 1.45 million tons of corn shipments since last year, the National Grain and Feed Association (NGFA), an American industry association, said Friday.

The tally is based on data from export companies and is significantly higher than the previous numbers reported by the media, which said roughly 900,000 tons were affected. US corn exports to China since January are down 85 percent from the same period last year, the report says.

China has been blocking shipments of American corn from its market since November. This was caused by the presence of the MIR162 genetically modified corn strain in the shipments. It was developed by the company Syngenta and has not been approved by the Chinese government since an application was submitted in March 2010.

China has sharply increased corn imports since the late 2000s, with purchases increasing from 47,000 tons in 2008 to an estimated 5 million tons last year. It was the third-largest importer of American corn before the imports of Syngenta’s GMO strain were […]

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Two new studies confirm that warming-driven climate change is already drying the U.S. Southwest and other parts of the globe. More worrisome, nearly a third of the world’s land faces drying from rising greenhouse gases – including two of the world’s greatest agricultural centers, ‘the U.S. Great Plains and a swath of southeastern China.”

These studies add fuel to the growing bonfire of concerns about climate change and food security. As I wrote in the article on Dust-Bowlification I did for the journal Nature in 2011, ‘Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

The fact that global warming is already drying out large parts of the planet – and that it is on track to get much, much worse – is well understood by climate scientists. Because this drying may be the single most consequential climate impact, confusionists try to blow smoke on it.

The first study is ‘Atmosphere and Ocean Origins of North American Droughts,” by Columbia’s Richard Seager and NOAA’s Martin Hoerling, in the Journal of Climate (subs. required, full text here). It concludes:

Long-term changes caused by […]

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