America's business leaders have not exactly shied away from offering political views. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg has accused President Obama of creating a hostile environment for investment and job-creation, while General Electric's Jeff Immelt says the administration is out of sync with entrepreneurs.

All of which makes particularly curious the deafening silence of business leaders about the tea party that's now taking over the GOP and about to take over a chunk of Congress. Maybe business leaders see it as a relatively harmless fringe group advocating the fiscally responsible small-government positions most CEOs agree with. Business leaders should take a closer look.

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Next Tuesday Americans will be deciding whether to hand over even more of our government to corporations that have been plundering America - such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wellpoint insurance, Massey Energy, and Halliburton, the giant oil services company.

Not every large corporation is irresponsible, of course, but plunderers that get away with it gain a competitive advantage over the more responsible, and thereby lead a race to the bottom.

Case in point: The staff of the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill has just revealed that Halliburton executives knew the cement it was using to seal BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well was likely to be unstable but didn't tell BP or act on the information.

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This, from the Washington Post's conservative pundit George Will:

Total spending by parties, campaigns and issue-advocacy groups concerning every office from county clerks to U.S. senators may reach a record $4.2 billion in this two-year cycle. That is about what Americans spend in one year on yogurt, but less than they spend on candy in two Halloween seasons. Proctor & Gamble spent $8.6 billion on advertising in its last fiscal year.

Those who are determined to reduce the quantity of political speech to what they consider the proper amount are the sort of people who know exactly how much water should come through our shower heads -- no more than 2.5 gallons per minute, as stipulated by a 1992 law. Is it, however, worrisome that Americans spend on political advocacy -- determining who should make and administer the laws -- much less than they spend on potato chips, $7.1 billion a year?

In a word, Mr. Will, yes.

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I'm glad to see that Bernard Avishai decided to respond to my criticism of his attack on Paul Krugman. For my rejoinder, I will stick to defending points that I made, since Krugman is a smart guy who can defend himself if he chooses. Avishai makes a number of different points; I will deal with the ones I consider most important.

First, it is easy to dispel the issue on which Avishai and Krugman agree, that we risked another Great Depression. The faulty logic on this can be easily demonstrated.

The vast majority of economists agree that it was the massive deficits associated with World War II (@ $4.0 trillion annually relative to the current economy) that got us out of the first Great Depression.

Suppose Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor in 1931 instead of 1941.

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Tucked away in Dean Baker's rejoinder to my post on Krugman's column is this (remarkable) aside: "He [Krugman] even has repeated the nonsense about preventing a second Great Depression." Baker meant to seal the point that Krugman has been fair, even generous, to Obama at times. Presumably, my posts have been wrong (half-again-more-than-completely wrong) to question whether Krugman, and Baker for that matter, have been reckless in depicting Obama as "deserving much of the blame" for the state of the economy. The stimulus was too small, says Baker. Case closed. And that's Obama's fault.

But was Krugman's conclusion that Obama prevented a Great Depression really "nonsense"? (It was not.) And, if not, isn't Krugman's complaint about the size of stimulus (and a week before the election, to boot) disproportionate, if not irresponsible? What urgent considerations, other than the size of the stimulus, did Obama have to navigate during those tight-rope months of Winter, 2009?

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Glad though I was last summer (and am now) to see ex- war hawk Peter Beinart indict much of American Jewish leadership for corrupting the American republic and Israeli democracy out of misplaced enthusiasm for bad Israeli government coalitions and strategies, I've always found Beinart's conversion a bit less than convincing.

In Bookforum and right here, I argued in May that Beinart's The Icarus Syndrome, which surveys U.S. foreign-policy hubris across a century, and his criticisms in the New York Review of Books of American-Jewish Israel lobbying, sounded like testimonies in a conversion that's a little too opportune. It felt to me as if Beinart were trying to escape Beltway liberals' disapproval more than undertaking any deep reckoning with himself or the foreign-policy history he schematically surveyed.

But it was one thing for me to say it; it's quite another for The New York Review of Books itself, where Beinart made his criticisms of the American Israel lobby, to publish a review saying pretty much the same things I had. The NYRB has a clubby reputation as "The New York Review of Each Others' Books." But not this time, and that's telling.

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The economy is a goddamn disaster and President Obama deserves much of the blame. Sorry, I am not on the Dems' payroll so I couldn't contain myself when I read Bernard Avishai's trashing of Paul Krugman.

Avishai's basic narrative is about 150 percent wrong. He describes the differences between Krugman and the Obama administration as "small." Right, and it depends on what your definition of "is" is.

Let's pick just a few of these differences.

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Sam Stein in the Huffington Post reports today that the Republican Study Committtee is "strongly" encouraging applicants for jobs in GOP offices to first pass a litmus test devised by the Heritage Foundation.

In an email passed to the Huffington Post by a congressional Democratic aide, Jonathan Day, a senior adviser to Congressman Tom Price (R-Ga.) and the RSC, asks recipients interested in a host of jobs to send their resumes through the RSC website. At the bottom of the email, however, Day writes that the office "also strongly encourage[s]" applicants "to submit your résumé and complete the ideological questionnaires at the following two websites."

The questionnaires ask applicants their views on a host of issues like labor unions, national health care, the United Nations and privatizing social security (the "correct" answers are obvious.

It also asks applicants to indicate whether they agree or disagree with George W. Bush, Al Gore, Clarence Thomas, Bill Bennett, James Dobson, and Dianne Feinstein. (Again, the "correct" answers are obvious).

Similarly, the questionnaire offers a list of organizations about which the applicant is to indicate either approval or disapproval. The "approved" organizations for aspiring rightwingers are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), CATO, and the National Rifle Association. The "disapproved" organizations are Planned Parenthood, the National Educational Organization, the Sierra Club, and the National Organization of Women.

And we thought the GOP opposed the use of litmus tests! That must have been before they started prematurely staffing up for the new (GOP?) House.

Former US Senator Chuck Hagel -- now teaching students chosen by lottery for his classes over at Georgetown University and of course Co-Chairman of President Obama's Presidential Intelligence Advisory Board as well as Chairman of the Atlantic Council -- has written an elegant reminder of what elected public service ought to look like.

The political atmosphere of late is too toxic, too spoiled and defined by gotcha antics, than by serious and thoughtful leaders putting smart ideas for the country on the table.

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When Congress returns to work after the November 2nd elections, it is imperative that it consider and ratify the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). To do otherwise would jeopardize the possibility of progress on a wide range of issues, from global nuclear arms reductions to U.S.-Russian relations to efforts to curb the nuclear weapons programs of Iran and North Korea.

Why now? For starters, because once the new Congress is seated in January, there will be a smaller Democratic majority in the Senate, and thus a higher hill to climb to get New START ratified. This could lead to further delay in ratifying the agreement at a time when it is urgently necessary to keep up the momentum towards substantial nuclear weapons cuts worldwide.

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Academic fights are so vicious, they say, because the stakes are so small. The narcissism of small differences, Freud said. But at times the stakes can be big, and the fighters can think they are still in the faculty club. It is a week before the congressional elections, Barack Obama is talking himself hoarse trying to rouse the Democratic base--especially impressionable young people, the un"likely" voters who made all the difference 2008--and Paul Krugman has decided this is a good time to stick it to Larry Summers just once more for good luck.

The real story of this election, then, is that of an economic policy that failed to deliver. Why? Because it was greatly inadequate to the task... If you look back now at the economic forecast originally used to justify the Obama economic plan, what's striking is that forecast's optimism about the economy's ability to heal itself... Even without their plan, Obama economists predicted, the unemployment rate would peak at 9 percent, then fall rapidly. Fiscal stimulus was needed only to mitigate the worst -- as an "insurance package against catastrophic failure," as Lawrence Summers, later the administration's top economist, reportedly said in a memo to the president-elect... Could the administration have gotten a bigger stimulus through Congress? Even if it couldn't, would it have been better off making the case for a bigger plan, rather than pretending that what it got was just right? We'll never know.

This is not so, or at least not in the categorical way Krugman is presenting things. Summers argued often during the winter of 2009 that in matters of stimulus one never knew just how much was enough, but "the risk of doing too little is greater than doing too much." As for the Congress, Henry Waxman--one of the House's most progressive representatives, and no wimp--told NPR just last week that Rahm Emmanuel was right to propose what he did, that he had carefully counted the votes in the Senate and the package passed was the best the president could get.

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They're ba-a-ack! Now that America's wealth "is more concentrated in fewer hands than it's been in 80 years" and "the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans... earn as much as the bottom 120 million" (as Bob Reich put it here below) conservative opinionators are doing just what they did about it twenty years ago.

They're giving Americans a "new elite" of Ivy League liberals to resent and to blame.

The tactic is evergreen, and not just because Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray enjoys recycling Bobos in Paradise author David Brooks' two-decade-long obsession with the Ivy League. (Murray did it again yesterday in the Washington Post, citing Brooks right alongside Glenn Beck.)

"What sets the Tea Party apart from other observers of the New Elite," Murray announces, "is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America.... Let me propose that those allegations have merit."

Let me propose that what sets the Tea Party's hostility apart is its funding by an elite Murray doesn't mention, the one that's cannibalizing "mainstream America." And let me point out that with even as conservative a writer as David Frum making a similar observation, the Post's judgment in publishing Murray on this is more than a little suspect here -- indeed, "embarrassing," as Frum puts it.

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If Republicans succeed in taking over the House and come even close to gaining a majority in the Senate, expect calls for the President to "move to the center." These will come not only from Republicans but also from conservative Democrats, other prominent Dems who have been defeated, Fox Republican News, mainstream pundits, and White House political advisers.

After the 1994 midterm, when Dems lost the House and Senate, Bill Clinton was told to "move to the center." He obliged by hiring the pollster Dick Morris, declaring the "era of big government is over," abandoning much of his original agenda, and making the 1996 general election about nothing more than V-chips in televisions and school uniforms.

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I've long suspected that the anti-Muslim crusade in this country is a racket - a device for raking in bagfuls of cash, usually by scaring vulnerable people into thinking that without the work of these self-professed anti-jihad activists, the overthrow of America is inevitable. Hate has always been a lucrative industry and these days, the industry works non-stop attacking Muslims and denigrating their faith.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't receive direct mail solicitations from this-or-that organization telling me that my check is needed to save Israel or the United States from the existential threat of radical Islam.

Many of these solicitations have focused heavily on how radical religious zealots have taken over Europe. They warn that without vigilance, America is surely next. A chain e-mail being sent around warns that "in 20 years there will be enough Muslim voters in the U.S. to elect the president by themselves."

I don't like this scare mongering but the fact is that it's not limited to any one issue. Hundreds of tax-exempt groups of every kind raise money by offering scary descriptions of what will happen if the other side prevails. Both major political parties are famous for employing fear in their message.

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In 1973, Motorola demonstrated the world's first cell phone, weighing in at close to four and a half pounds[1]. It was not introduced into the U.S. until 1983, and after slow growth at first, over the course of just ten years from 1997 to 2007 the total number of mobile phone subscriptions jumped from reaching 8% of global population to serving nearly half of all the world's inhabitants. By the close of 2009, the number of cellular phone users had grown still further to 4.6 billion in a world of 6.8 billion people[2]. Today, universal access to information through cellular technology is transforming service delivery in areas as diverse as health care, agriculture and banking. Mobile phones are allowing developing countries to leapfrog a generation of infrastructure, while unleashing innovation, new markets, and economic development the world over.

A similar technological revolution is taking place in the clean energy industry today. Driven by pressures from rising global demand for finite energy supplies, national security pressures from oil dependence, the increasing threat of economic disruptions due to climate change, and the need to create a more efficient, productive and globally competitive economy, many countries are making massive investment in clean energy technologies.

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