Tag: Punting the Pundits

Can 147 people perpetuate economic injustice – and make it even worse? Can they subvert the workings of democracy, both abroad and here in the United States? Can 147 people hijack the global economy, plunder the environment, build a world for themselves that serves the few and deprives the many?

There must be some explanation for last week’s economic madness. Take a look: [..]

And when the next crisis comes, “147 people” will react to it exactly the same way they reacted to the last one. You can almost hear them now, can’t you? You can’t blame us, they’ll say.Nobody could’ve seen this coming. How do we know that?

Because we asked everybody we know.

Daniel Wagner and Alexis Giannoulis: The Cyprus Deal Signals a Rise in the Far Right in Europe

News of the 10-billion-euro bailout for Cyprus should not be cause for celebration. An ambiguous plan has been put forward to restructure the country’s banking system and the effective expropriation of depositor funds will continue. Yet global stock markets have, as usual, risen on the news that the ECB has once again bailed out a bankrupt country from within its ranks. So the well-worn mold that has been created by the ECB and global markets continues. Europeans are rightly insecure about what comes next, as they should be given the precedent that has been set, and psychological ‘stress fractures’ are becoming even more pronounced throughout Europe. [..]

In all likelihood, the net result of the latest chapter in the European saga is that average Europeans will have less confidence in their collective future and governments. The Cyprus deal only serves to underscore how fragile Europe remains and how vulnerable it is to reverting to nationalism and the far right political movements that go along with it. That is hardly cause for celebration. On the contrary, the continuation of ‘business as usual’ should be ringing the alarm bells. Loudly.

Paul Buccheit: America Split in Two: Five Ugly Extremes of Inequality

The first step is to learn the facts, and then to get angry and to ask ourselves, as progressives and caring human beings, what we can do about the relentless transfer of wealth to a small group of well-positioned Americans. [..]

What to do?

End the capital gains giveaway, which benefits the wealthy almost exclusively.

Institute a Financial Speculation Tax, both to raise needed funds from a currently untaxed subsidy on stock purchases, and to reduce the risk of the irresponsible trading that nearly brought down the economy.

Perhaps above all, we progressives have to choose one strategy and pursue it in a cohesive, unrelenting attack on greed. Only this will heal the ugly gash of inequality that has split our country in two.

Wendell Potter: Don’t Let State Lawmakers Game Obamacare to Benefit the Few

We’re just a bit more than six months away from when Americans will have to begin making decisions about purchasing health insurance, but, according to a survey released last week, more than two-thirds of people who are currently uninsured don’t have much of a clue how Obamacare will affect them, including the fact that coverage will soon be mandatory. [..]

Making sure Americans become aware of that mandate and sign up for coverage before the end of the year will be an enormous undertaking, which is why Obamacare also includes a provision authorizing a broad range of organizations to serve as “navigators” to educate people about the law’s requirements and help them find plans that meet their needs. [..]

As you can imagine, agents and brokers are not happy that all those other organizations will be able to help folks “navigate” the health insurance world. And so they are trying to get laws passed at the state level that for all practical purposes would make it difficult, time-consuming and expensive for any of those other groups to qualify as navigators.

It’s apparently hard to find out about the state of the U.S. economy in the nation’s capital. That is the only way to explain the fact that in their articles on the budget passed by the Senate last night neither the NYT or Washington Post said one word about how the budget would affect the economy over the next decade. [..]

However, neither the NYT or Post could be bothered mentioning the millions who are suffering unemployment as the direct result of government policy. Instead the NYT told us in the first sentence that the budget will:

“trim spending gingerly and leave the government still deeply in the debt a decade from now.”

Shea Howell: Thinking for Ourselves: On Disaster Capitalism in Detroit

The appointment of Kevyn Orr as the Emergency Manager of Detroit is a sad day for democracy. There is a growing understanding that the financial crisis justifying this move was manufactured by the withholding of state funds, the drive to protect the $474 millions paid to banks, and the desire to wrest control of the city away from its people and put it into the hands of the corporate elite. Further, we know that nowhere in the state have emergency managers solved any structural problems. Nor have they improved services. They have sold off city assets, shifted common responsibilities for public health, safety, and the general good into private hands for windfall profits. They have set aside contracts for immediate services and compacts made across generations. [..]

The anguish of this moment is beyond words. It forces us to look deeply into our own history to find ways to remind one another of the kind of future we wish for ourselves and our children.

Bill McKibben: Confronting a Senate Beholden to ‘Big Oil’

An update on the battle to stop the Keystone XL pipeline

After a very chaotic week on Capitol Hill, I wanted to write you with an update on what happened in the Senate on Friday.

First and foremost: the oil industry’s Senators did not manage to pass legislation that would force President Obama to build Keystone XL.

Because you – people all across the country – jumped into action this week, they backtracked and instead held a vote on a nonbinding resolution that says it would be nice to build the pipeline, but doesn’t actually do much about it. For that vote, they got the stomach-churning number of 62 Senators to vote with them. As usual, the ones who had taken the most money from the fossil fuel industry lined up to cast their votes-the cosponsors of the bill, on average, had taken $807,000 in dirty energy money.

Jared Bernstein: Got Any Spare Change (Theory)?

As I’ve written many times, my experiences on the road and in the media often leave listeners and viewers saying “wow, those are really convincing, cogent, and well-documented arguments… but what should we do with them?” To which I do not have satisfactory answers.

To the contrary, I suspect the Koch brothers are perfectly happy to have folks like me running around arguing about the correct deflator to use or the percent of the Ryan budget’s spending cuts affecting low-income programs, while they continue to buy “research” that says otherwise and policies that exacerbate inequality.

That doesn’t mean we give up on factual analysis. It’s what we do best and I will not be convinced that facts are irrelevant.

From Nicosia, Cyprus, to Detroit, Michigan, the global financial octopus is squeezing the life out of society, stripping away public and individual assets in a vain attempt to fend off its own, inevitable collapse. The bankers “troika” that effectively rules Europe prepares to reach into the individual accounts of ordinary depositors on the island nation of Cyprus to fund the bailout of their local banking brethren. Across the Atlantic, a corporate henchman makes arrangements to seize the assets and abolish the political rights of a Black metropolis. The local colorations may vary, but the crisis is the same: massed capital is devouring its social and natural environment. Either we liquidate the banksters, or Wall Street will liquidate us. [..]

Detroit and the people of Cyprus share the same enemy, a class that is beyond the reach of simple civil rights suits. The Lords of Capital on Wall Street and the City of London and the Federal Reserve in Washington and in the “troika” at Brussels confront their own existential crisis, which compels them to liquidate the public sector so that it can eventually be transferred to their own balance sheets. There are many ways to accomplish this, through privatization of existing public institutions, or by simply blowing a hole in public services and allowing privateers to fill the void, subsidized by public funds. However, nothing can save the banksters from inevitable, and increasingly imminent, collapse. Ever-increasing profit margins must be achieved, somehow, or the system implodes. Hundreds of trillions of notional dollars in derivatives must be serviced and fed by a class that makes nothing and can only survive by chicanery and coercion by governments under their control.

Rep. Keith Ellison and Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva: Ryan Blueprint Would Wipe Out Decades of Progress

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other Republican Party leaders have staked their party’s future on a false premise. They say the wealthy are already providing for everyone else, and middle class families need to sacrifice for a change while millionaires reap the benefits.

This year’s Ryan budget is a product of this assumption. It treats the government to which Rep. Ryan has been elected as something between a nuisance and a menace, with no role in helping the economy except to transfer more wealth upward.

Plenty of people have pointed out that these ideas lost in November. What they often forget is that a more positive vision also won that election: a vision of an America that helps us all achieve more than we could individually, a government that acts when the moment calls for it.

Thomas Hedges: Reports of My WMD Are Greatly Exaggerated

Ten years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the American war machine might be revving up for another strike, this time in Syria. The push has accelerated in the last few days after rebels and government forces accused each other of using chemical weapons in a rocket attack Tuesday outside of Aleppo, though reports now suggest such weapons were not fired.

Republicans, latching on to President Obama’s assertion that government use of chemical weapons would be a “game changer,” are trying to convince the public that the allegations about President Bashar Assad’s stockpiling of and willingness to use such weapons are true, despite the lack of evidence. GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, along with Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, have all been pressing for the use of force in Syria for more than a year. Recently, they have used the prospect of chemical warfare in an effort to shape public opinion.

Joe Nocera: Saving Children From Guns

For nearly two months, my assistant, Jennifer Mascia, and I have been publishing a daily blog in which we aggregate articles about shootings from the previous day. Of all the stories we link to, the ones I find hardest to read are those about young children who accidentally shoot themselves or another child. They just break my heart. Yet Jennifer and I find new examples almost every day.

Partly, I react by thinking, “How can anyone be so stupid as to leave a loaded gun within reach of a small child?” But I also have another reaction. In 1970, Congress passed a law that resulted in childproofing medicine bottles. The Consumer Product Safety Commission regulates the paint used in children’s toys. State laws mandate that young children be required to use car seats.

So why can’t we childproof guns?

The Cyprus banking crisis presents, in microcosm, everything that is perverse about the European leaders’ response to the continuing financial collapse. And bravo to the Cypriot Parliament for rejecting the EU’s insane demand to condition a bank bailout on a large tax on small depositors.

If this crisis threatens to spread to other nations, it’s a good object lesson. Here is the punch line of this column: Its time for Europe’s small nations, who are getting slammed into permanent depression by the arrogance of Berlin and Brussels, to think about abandoning the euro. At least the threat would strengthen their bargaining position, and if they actually quit the euro, the result could hardly be worse than their permanent sentence to debtors’ prison.

Elizabeth Holtzman: Statutes of Limitations Are Expiring on Some Bush Crimes

Americans have been facing a number of momentous deadlines, including the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the “sequester” of $1 trillion from federal programs. But another critical deadline is fast approaching without attracting much notice. Statutes of limitations applicable to possible crimes committed by former President George W. Bush and his top aides, with respect to wiretapping of Americans without court approval and to fraud in launching and continuing the Iraq War, may expire in early 2014, less than a year from now.

President Bush has publicly admitted to authorizing wiretaps of Americans on more than thirty separate occasions without a court order, an apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In justification, Bush claimed legal advice exempted him as commander-in-chief from obeying FISA. Normally, a lawyer’s advice is not a defense to prosecution, particularly when the client shapes the advice. Here, the White House worked closely with Justice Department lawyer John Yoo on the legal opinion and blocked standard Justice Department review, even though the opinion was seriously flawed according to Yoo’s successors. The opinion bears the hallmarks of a handy stay-out-of-jail card, instead of a serious independent analysis prepared and relied upon in good faith.

Robert Reich: Selling the Store: Why Democrats Shouldn’t Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table

Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.

This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans — who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.

It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.

John Buell: Combating US Capitalism’s Moral Blinders

US capitalism is not merely a set of institutions that include large corporate ownership of the means of production, concentrated product markets, unregulated finance, and “flexible” labor markets, and corporate-advertiser-financed media. It is also an ethic, a set of moral sensibilities regarding profits and wealth. Whereas both were once regarded as signs of one’s social contributions, they have become ends in themselves.

Anything that maximizes profits-and often even for the CEO alone-is regarded as fair game. And except in cases where the wealthy have swindled other wealthy citizens, the megarich are treated with deference or at least kid gloves. Thus Bernie Madoff does go to jail, but authors and abettors of other ponzi schemes like Jamie Dimon remain honored guests on CNBC.

$16 billion.

That’s how much JPMorgan Chase has paid in fines, settlements and other litigation expenses in the last four years alone. [..]

Life is still good for Dimon and some of the other senior executives at JPMorgan Chase: Shareholders can’t — or won’t — fire them. The government won’t prosecute them. Taxpayers are helping them get rich. And every day their institution becomes bigger and more powerful. Sure, all that power doesn’t come cheap, but they’ve found other peoplewilling to pay the price …

$16 billion and counting.

The price of evil may be high at JPMorgan Chase, but the malefactors who actually committed the wrongdoing aren’t paying it. Wrongdoing and incompetence may be expensive. But for executives at JPMorgan Chase and our other too-big-to fail banks, it’s also surprisingly affordable.

John Cavanagh: Inequality Is Hurting Us All

If the levels of greater income equality of 1968 still prevailed today, the poorest fifth of Marylanders would be earning twice what they take home now.

Inequality hurts us all.

Imagine if you could go back 45 years to 1968. That year, after three decades of creative policy from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal through President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the United States was one of the world’s most equal nations.Now imagine that instead of falling into the extreme inequality of today, the United States had stayed at the levels of greater equality of that era. What would be the benefits?

Col. Ann Wright: 10 Years Later and I’m Still Protesting War

A decade after I stepped down as the deputy ambassador in the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia, the war in Iraq is over for Americans, but continues for Iraqis. The whirlwind of sectarian violence brought on by the U.S. invasion and occupation continues to blow there.

The war on Afghanistan is now in its 13th year and as the anniversary of my resignation day approaches, I find myself outside the gates of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, protesting war and, in particular, President Obama’s killer drone programs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Although Obama’s kill list, the CIA drone attacks in the undeclared war on Pakistan and the assassination of three American citizens by drone in Yemen receive most of the media and congressional attention, the incredibly large number of drone strikes in Afghanistan has gotten scant coverage-and that is why I am at Creech.

Robert Sheer: Dumb Wars, Now and Forever

It is a staple of our widely trumpeted Judeo-Christian heritage that the acknowledgment of sin is a prelude to redemption. So how is it that there is no palpable sense of soul searching associated with the 10th anniversary of a war based on officially concocted lies and a policy of torture? It is because the presumption of a unique American claim to an original and enduring innocence perseveres, no matter the death and destruction.

Indeed, some of our most celebrated publicists defined moral deceit as virtue in justifying the Iraq War. “As far as I am concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in April 2003, when U.N. inspectors had clearly established that the proclaimed basis for invading Iraq was a lie. “Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue).”

Harry Reid drops her assault weapons ban from the Democratic gun-control package as the NRA cheers

Everyone knew that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban was going to be the toughest gun-control reform to achieve in the wake of the Newtown massacre. Although it passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week on a party line vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Feinstein last night that it won’t be part of the still-undefined gun control package he’ll bring to the Senate floor. Feinstein is free to introduce her bill, which bans 157 models of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines, as an amendment to the package, but it will almost certainly fail. [..]

Still, dumping the ban from the Democrats’ official package is a sign that the NRA still holds sway over Democrats. Clearly Reid cares more about red-state Democrats beholden to the gun lobby than he does about gun safety. Remember, this is the same NRA-backed Reid who put an amendment in the Affordable Care Act declaring that wellness and prevention efforts should not collect or disseminate information about whether patients had guns in their home.

Jessica Stern: Iraq: Where Terrorists Go to School

IRAQ, President George W. Bush said in 2003, was a “central front” in the war on terrorism. He was wrong, but prescient. Iraq has become a front for militant extremism – a front the United States created. [..]

Leaving aside everything else – the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the toll in blood and fortune, the immense loss of life – the 10th anniversary of the invasion, is a moment to reflect on this huge setback in the so-called war on terror.

The Qaeda affiliate that emerged in Iraq over the last decade did not disappear when Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 or when the last American troops withdrew in December. On the contrary, the group is resurgent in Iraq and now its neighbors, even while other Qaeda offshoots continue to be active on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa.

Kathy Kelly: War without End

Ten years ago today, Iraqis braced themselves for the anticipated “Shock and Awe” attacks that the United States was planning to launch against them. The media buildup for the attack assured Iraqis that barbarous assaults were looming. I was living in Baghdad at the time, along with other Voices in the Wilderness activists determined to remain in Iraq, come what may. We didn’t want U.S.-led military and economic war to sever bonds that had grown between ourselves and Iraqis who had befriended us over the past seven years. Since 1996, we had traveled to Iraq numerous times, carrying medicines for children and families there, in open violation of the economic sanctions which directly targeted the most vulnerable people in Iraqi society – the poor, the elderly and the children. [..]

The war had just ended for those killed during the “Shock and Awe” bombing and invasion, and it was to abruptly end for many thousands killed in the ensuing years of military occupation and civil war. But it won’t end for the survivors.

Effects go on immeasurably and indefensibly.

Bryce Covert: Obama’s Nominee for Labor Department Head Has Championed Domestic Workers’ Rights

Word is out that President Obama will nominate Thomas Perez to head the Department of Labor today, the current assistant attorney general for civil rights. Perez has some bona fide progressive credentials, having cracked down on voting restrictions, police brutality, harassment against LGBT students and other issues at the Department of Justice, plus bringing a history of promoting immigration reform and labor rights. But one part of his history should give domestic workers heart and may take on even more meaning if he assumes this new role. [..]

Meanwhile, home health aides are on the brink of getting good news from the Department of Labor that they will finally be protected by national labor laws. They’ve been excluded from minimum wage and overtime laws, but a department rule change could finally grant them these protections enjoyed by almost all other workers.

There was panic in Cyprus today as ordinary citizens learned that the government was about to take nearly seven percent (6.75 percent) of the money in their bank accounts as part of a package to bail out reckless banks.

The outrage was justified, predictable, and immediate. Then, in a move reminiscent of the Great Depression, banks were closed in a government-mandated ‘holiday’ while lawmakers and financial authorities scrambled and tried to figure out what to do next.

Putin’s mad. Observers like Paul Krugman are predicting bank runs in other troubled European countries. There’s only one saving grace for American observers:

It Can’t Happen Here

… Or can it?

William K. Black: The SEC Embraces Irony — its Enforcement “Inflection” “Point”

Many readers doubtless shared my doubt that the SEC was capable of exercising the critical self-examination and sense of humor about itself as a flawed institution that would make it capable of deliberate irony. When I accessed the Wall Street Journal‘s home page I found the most delicious example of SEC (and WSJ) irony. The WSJ synopsis of its article on the SEC reads: “The SEC is filing significantly fewer civil fraud cases this year, as its efforts to punish misconduct related to the financial crisis start to ebb.” [..]

Actually, at full tide there were zero prosecutions of elite bankers for the accounting control frauds that drove the financial crisis. And there were zero civil or enforcement cases by the SEC against the elite officers who grew wealthy through the frauds that drove the financial crisis that actually left the officers suffering a net loss from their frauds and required them to admit their frauds. The last time the SEC “tide” of enforcement actions against elites resembled even a pale imitation of the Bay of Fundy was a decade ago in response to the Enron-era frauds. Even then, Eliot Spitzer, then the Attorney General of New York, put the SEC to shame with his far greater success with far fewer resources.

Josh Barro: The Supreme Court Can Save Republicans From Gay-Marriage Mess

In his pro-gay marriage op-ed last week, Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio repeated a common argument against the idea that the Supreme Court should find a constitutional right to gay marriage: “An expansive court ruling would run the risk of deepening divisions rather than resolving them.”

This is exactly wrong. An expansive court ruling would settle the gay-marriage issue for good, eliminating the need for 20 years of state legislative fights that will be painful for gays and hugely politically damaging to the Republican Party. [..]

Gay marriage opponents are going to lose the fight; the only question is whether they will lose it in a way that is quick and painless or long and ugly. If Anthony Kennedy or John Roberts vote to strike down all the state bans on gay marriage, Republicans will be furious with them, but the justices will in fact have done the party a huge favor.

Wendell Potter: Getting Sick and Getting Purged

On Friday I was one of three witnesses to testify before a House committee hearing on whether the cost of health insurance will be higher or lower for people who cannot obtain it through their employer when important provisions of the Affordable Care Act go into effect in a few months. [..]

One of the reasons for the congressional hearing was the industry’s massive PR and lobbying campaign to try to get Congress to change Obamacare so that states can decide how much insurers can charge people based on age. That would enable them to maintain the very profitable status quo. By restricting the amount insurers can charge older Americans, however, the Affordable Care Act will foil their attempts to deny coverage to people they want to avoid by charging exorbitant premiums. People who need medical care the most. People like Leslie Elder.

This new restriction is one of the most important consumer protections in the reform law. It would be a tragedy if Congress guts it.

If you want more evidence that JP Morgan Chase is closer to a criminal enterprise than a economically useful bank, then read the report from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, JP Morgan Chase Wale Trades: A Case History of Derivatives Risks and Abuses. It shows in high definition how this mega-bank, touted as the best managed bank on Wall Street, repeatedly lied and dissembled to regulators and investigators. [..]

The stench of Wall Street arrogance wafts through the report. Executives show utter contempt for regulators and for telling the truth. How dare those lowly public servants interfere with the banks primary mission, which is making as much money as possible, anyway possible, and damn the law!

Dean Baker: Capitalism, Steven Pearlstein, and Morality

The Washington Post had a major column by Steve Pearlstein on the front page of its Outlook section headlined, “Is Capitalism Moral?” The piece notes the sharp upward redistribution of income over the last three decades and asks whether we should just being willing to accept market outcomes.

Of course this question is absurd on its face. The upward redistribution of the last three decades was the result of deliberate government policies designed to redistribute income upward; it was not the natural workings of the market. [..]

The massive upward redistribution of the last three decades has been the result of these and other deliberate policies that had the goal of redistributing income upward. It was not the result of free market capitalism. [..] The real question is whether a system that is designed around policies that redistribute from the middle and the bottom to the top is moral.

Robert Kuttner: Talking ‘Bout My Generation

I will start drawing Social Security next month. I think I’ve earned it. On the other hand, I have to admit that society has been good to my generation.

I was able to graduate from a good private college with no debt. Four years at Oberlin cost $10,000 — tuition, room, board, books, fees. Not $10,000 a year — but for four years.My employers all provided good health insurance. Though I’ve had a somewhat unorthodox career, I did not hold multiple jobs because economic circumstances forced me to but because I enjoyed being at the cusp of journalism and academia. Yeah, I’ve worked hard, but the truth is, I’ve had a nice generational tailwind.

Why am I telling you this? Not because I expect to retire any time soon. But because, if you are under 40, your generation is getting utterly screwed compared to mine, and you should be in the streets.

Joe Romm: The Dangerous Myth That Climate Change Is Reversible

The CMO (Chief Misinformation Officer) of the climate ignorati, Joe Nocera, has a new piece, “A Real Carbon Solution.” The biggest of its many errors comes in this line:

   A reduction of carbon emissions from Chinese power plants would do far more to help reverse climate change than – dare I say it? – blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Memo to Nocera: As a NOAA-led paper explained 4 years ago, climate change is “largely irreversible for 1000 years.” [..]

The fact is that, as RealClimate has explained, we would need “an immediate cut of around 60 to 70% globally and continued further cuts over time” merely to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 – and that would still leave us with a radiative imbalance that would lead to “an additional 0.3 to 0.8ºC warming over the 21st Century.” And that assumes no major carbon cycle feedbacks kick in, which seems highly unlikely.