Tag: Punting the Pundits

Forgive us if we begin our discussion of the Senate Subcommittee for Investigation’s JPMorgan Chase hearing with a small victory lap, but as they say down South, “It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.” We’ve been saying for years that JPMorgan Chase is fundamentally a criminal enterprise, that “Obama’s favorite banker” Jamie Dimon is a fraud, and that “America’s best bank” is a nest of venality and criminality. Although we value civility as much as the next guy, we’ve been forced to suggest that this bank is the “Scandal of Our Time,” a leading contender for “Worst Corporate Outlaw of the Year.”

We were also forced, civility or no, to suggest that JPM’s relationship with Syracuse University is corrupting our young people, and that the most generous interpretation of Dimon’s own tenure is that he is so profoundly incompetent as an executive that “Jamie Didn’t Know.” We also noted that Jamie did know that the London Whale scheme had cost his bank billions, even as he told investors on a phone call that it was just a “tempest in a teapot.”

Kevin Gosztola: Obama’s I’m-No-Dick-Cheney Standard for Government Secrecy

Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, upset about not being provided with memos containing the legal justification for targeted killing operations, such as drone strikes, was apparently told by President Barack Obama not to worry because he is not Vice President Dick Cheney. [..]

This is the “Trust Us” defense for secrecy. It is in line with what Attorney General Eric Holder said to Republican Representative Ted Cruz when he was asked about whether it would be legal to target American citizens on United States soil. Holder said it would be inappropriate. But, the trustworthiness of an administration should never justify keeping official interpretations of the law secret.

Jared Berstein: Why Does Rep. Paul Ryan Get So Much Attention?

So, I’m doing a radio interview last night, and moderately impressed with myself for being able to speak coherently about four different budgets: Ryan’s, Senate’s, POTUS (not out yet, but we can guess at the mix), and the CPC. Then I got asked a question which threw me a bit: why is Paul Ryan and his budget taken so seriously?

It wasn’t a snarky question. It’s just that I’d been discussing the absolute non-reality of his proposal — how the numbers don’t begin to add up, the unrealistic budget cuts, the plethora of magic asterisks in the absence of actual proposals (the most egregious of which is: I’ll cuts taxes by $6-7 trillion over the next decade and offset the revenue losses with… um… sorry, gotta run). And the interviewer was like, “OK… but if you’re right, why is his budget front page news such that he’s driving the debate?”

David Macaray: From the Folks Who Brought You NAFTA

Although there hasn’t been much mainstream news coverage, the U.S. is currently in negotiations with nine APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) countries on what could become the biggest, most ambitious, most comprehensive FTA (free trade agreement) in history.  The proposed agreement is called TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership).  Basically, if approved in its present form, it would resemble NAFTA on steroids.  And we all know how well.

NAFTA turned out.

The nine countries involved in TPP negotiations are: the U.S., Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Mexico, Malaysia, Peru, Chile, New Zealand and Australia.  Trade analysts have noted that should TPP be approved in its present, open-ended form, it would allow additional countries to sign onto it whenever they liked (without having to negotiate) which would mean, in effect, that TPP could be the last trade agreement the U.S. ever signed.  In other words, it’s a critically important agreement.

In the richest country in the world, it’s downright insane to even consider cutting back on benefits necessary to provide a dignified retirement for hard-working Americans.

Rhonda Straw is one of millions of Americans who do important work every day but still have a hard time saving for retirement. As a home health aide, Straw administers medication, changes bandages, and performs other vital services to the elderly and disabled. With an hourly wage of only $9, Straw, 51, expects to rely almost entirely on Social Security when she retires.

Unfortunately, workers like Straw aren’t big players in the Social Security debate. The Business Roundtable, the club for America’s most powerful corporate CEOs, is using its muscle to push for an increase in the retirement age to 70 and to recalculate inflation in a way that would further reduce benefits. Fix the Debt is another CEO-driven outfit that’s throwing around tens of millions of dollars in a campaign to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Robert Borosage: A Tale of Two Futures: Ryan Against the Congressional Progressive Caucus

Budgets are pure EGO — eyes glaze over. But this week revealed two budgets — Rep. Paul Ryan’s Republican “Path to Prosperity” 2014 budget and the Congressional Progressive Caucus “Back to Work Budget” — that in stark terms lay out two visions and two futures for America. Next week the Congress will vote on each one of them. Neither will become law, but Ryan’s budget is expected to pass with the support of virtually the entire Republican majority. The CPC budget will struggle to win a majority of the Democratic caucus. For those who take a look, the contrast will open your eyes.

Both parties agree that we suffer from mass unemployment, declining wages, and growing inequality. Both agree that rising future deficits should be addressed. But they offer completely different responses to these realities.

Les Leopold: Paul Ryan’s Budget, Ayn Rand’s Dream

The inspiration for Paul Ryan’s budget comes directly from Ayn Rand. In fact, far too much of the current budget debate is shaped by her philosophy that so viciously divides the world into “creators” against the “moochers” — the “makers” against the “takers.” How else it is possible to propose a budget that so favors the wealthy and so cruelly punishes the less fortunate? How else to explain why both parties are engaged in a foolish deficit reduction dance that will undermine social programs and exacerbate the real problem — the lack of decent, sustainable employment?

Ryan wants to cut taxes on the rich by 14 percent, wipe out Obamacare, trim the Food Stamp program, and turn Medicare into a voucher system — all the name of fiscal responsibility, economic growth and balancing the budget. But any references by Ryan and other Randian acolytes to protecting and enhancing the common good are nothing but spin. Unlike Ayn Rand, they are fearful to say what they really mean. Instead, they hide their belief in utter selfishness by trying to sound like they care about society as a whole. In reality, their Randian philosophy maintains that that the rich should be rewarded and the poor should fend for themselves.

Ralph Nader: Walmart Bosses: Time for a Decision

Last weekend on a bright, sunny day a dozen of us demonstrated at shopping malls where Walmart has three of its giant stores, supplied heavily by products from China and other serf-wage countries. But outsourcing the jobs of its American suppliers to China was not the focus last Saturday. We were drawing attention to the plight of one million Walmart workers who are making far less than what Walmart workers made in 1968 when the minimum wage was the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $10.50 an hour today. [..]

The clenched-jawed CEO opposition to catching the minimum wage up with 1968 for their workers continues to manifest itself today. CEOs seem to have little concern for the budget-squeezed daily lives of their employees.

Joe Weisenthal is wrong. The reporter at Business Insider recently wrote that everyone predicted the unfolding economic disaster in Europe. Not so. It’s what he predicted, it’s what I predicted, but it’s not at all what many people were predicting.

And the people who got it completely wrong happen to be the people still running European economic policy.

As the economist Jonathan Portes pointed out in his blog, it is now more than two years since Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, declared that “Europe’s recovery in the real economy has taken hold and is becoming self-sustaining.”

Mr. Rehn is still in place at the European Commission, and he’s still telling us that austerity will work any day now. And he’s not alone. The economics team at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that told us in May 2010 not just that Europe needed fiscal austerity, but that the Federal Reserve needed to raise rates by the end of the year to head off inflation, is still issuing reports. And then there’s Britain’s David Cameron and George Osborne.

Richard Reeve: Get the Hell Out of Afghanistan

If you Google “Afghanistan,” you get your choice of occupiers. There’s “Occupation of Afghanistan by British,” “Occupation of Afghanistan by Russians” and “Occupation of Afghanistan by United States.”

The British occupation began in arrogance in 1878 and ended in 1880 in massacre. The occupation by the Soviet Union ended in defeat and humiliation. The American occupation, officially an operation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, goes on and on toward another bad ending.

You’d think we would have Googled the place before we invaded after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. We did not use the word “invasion” then, of course. We said it was a “mission” to find and punish al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden, and the brutal Taliban, which had given him refuge in the hard mountain territory of western Afghanistan.

Robert Reich: Ryan the Redistributionist

“Who is going to end up making all the money in the end if Obamacare continues to be in place?” Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus growled Monday on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. “It’s going to be the big corporations, right? And who gets screwed? The middle class.”

The Republican Party makeover is breathtaking. Now, suddenly, instead of accusing Democrats of being “redistributionists,” the GOP is posing as defender of the middle class against corporate America-and it’s doing so by proposing to do away with the most progressive piece of legislation in well over a decade.

Paul Ryan’s new budget purportedly gets about 40 percent of its $4.6 trillion in spending cuts over ten years by repealing Obamacare, but Ryan’s budget document doesn’t mention that such a repeal would also lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy that foot Obamacare’s bill.

Joe Conason: Ryan’s Blurred Vision: What the ‘New’ Republican Budget Reveals (and Conceals)

Someone needs to tell Paul Ryan that his party-and the economic platform of austerity and plutocracy he crafted for it-lost a national election last year. Someone also needs to tell the Wisconsin Republican that he still chairs the House Budget Committee mainly thanks to gerrymandered redistricting.

Someone clearly needs to remind him of those realities because the “vision document” he proposed on Tuesday as the Republican federal budget is only a still more extreme version of the same notions (and the same evasions) that he and Mitt Romney tried to sell without success last fall.

Conservatives’ real aim in their fiscal brinkmanship is to gut Social Security and Medicare.

US politics seems stuck in an endless debate about the size of the federal deficit and federal debt. From congressional Republicans’ refusals to lift the debt ceiling, fears of the “fiscal cliff,” disputes about the “sequestration” and its automatic federal spending cuts, and upcoming debates on a new federal budget and the need for so-called entitlement reform (primarily cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid)-all hinge on the presumed need to get the U.S. budget in balance and curb deficit spending. [..]

But conservatives’ real targets are the two largest non-defense programs-Social Security, which includes not only retirement pensions, but also disability and survivors’ benefits, and Medicare, the health program for the elderly. Yet Social Security and Medicare are financed by payroll taxes and should not even be counted as part of general federal spending.

Jessica Valente: Rape Is Not Inevitable: On Zerlina Maxwell, Men and Hope

Of all the feminist ideas that draw ire, one would think that “don’t rape” is a fairly noncontroversial statement. It seems not.

Last week, Zerlina Maxwell, political commentator and writer, went on Fox News’ Hannity to talk about the myth that gun ownership can prevent rape. Maxwell made the apt point that the onus should not be on women to have to arm themselves but on men not to rape them:

   I don’t think that we should be telling women anything. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there…You’re talking about this as if it’s some faceless, nameless criminal, when a lot of times it’s someone you know and trust…If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.

And with that, the floodgates of misogyny opened. Right-wing media outlets like TheBlaze oversimplified Maxwell’s comments, writing that her call to teach men not to rape was “bizarre.” Online, Maxwell started receiving racist and misogynist threats – including, ironically enough, threats of rape.

Michelle Chen: Corporate-Approved State Bills Kick Low-Wage Workers While They’re Down

President Obama called for a modest raise in the federal minimum wage to $9 in his State of the Union Address, and several Democratic legislators have upped his bid with a proposed increase to $10.10.

But an insidious effort to lower the wage floor is already underway much closer to the ground-in the state legislatures where right-wing lobbyists have been greasing the skids for years for an onslaught of anti-worker policies.

An extensive analysis recently published by labor advocacy organization the National Employment Law Project tracks more than 100 bills introduced in 31 states since January 2011 that “aim to repeal or weaken core wage standards at the state or local level.” Each bears the fingerprint of notorious super-lobbying organization the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which acts as a forum for “private sector leaders” to advise public officials. Most of the anti-worker bills were proposed by lawmakers directly linked to ALEC and include language that echoes that of “model legislation” developed by ALEC. Among the proposals are measures to undercut minimum wages for teenage workers, restrict overtime pay and repeal or ban local laws to improve working conditions.

Vandana Shiva: Tilling the Soil with Pesticides

The ministry of agriculture had organised a conference on Doubling Food Production from February 1-3. The “eminent speakers” invited were not members of International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) or top Indian scientists. Rather they were spin masters of biotechnology industry who claimed to have founded the anti-GMO movement and openly promoted it. The old paradigm of food and agriculture is clearly broken

On April 15, 2008, the IAASTD report findings, carried out by 400 scientists over six years, were released. The report has noted that business as usual is no longer an option. Neither the Green Revolution nor the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) can guarantee food security. We need a new paradigm of working with the laws of nature and ecological sustainability. Why is our agriculture minister Sharad Pawar defending a dead paradigm and promoting PR men of biotech giants? When the fact is that the emerging scientific paradigm of ecological agriculture has shown that we can double food production while protecting the planet, human health and farmers’ livelihoods.

Somebody really needs to let Elizabeth Warren know how Washingon society works. Last week Warren and several other senators rebuked regulators for their refusal to act against felonious banks and bankers when they violate sanctions or criminally assist psychotic drug lords who cut off people’s heads.

Their outrage was triggered by the lack of indictments against bankers at HSBC. The bank’s executives earned big bonuses after their bank laundered money for Mexican drug cartels and criminally violated sanctions against Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba. As “punishment,” the banks’ shareholders will pay a $1.9 billion fine. The lawbreakers themselves will not be charged, and will be allowed to keep their own ill-gotten income.

Eugene Robinson: Paul Ryan’s make-believe budget

If Rep. Paul Ryan wants people to take his budget manifestos seriously, he should be honest about his ambition: not so much to make the federal government fiscally sustainable as to make it smaller.

You will recall that the Ryan Budget was a big Republican selling point in last year’s election. Most famously, Ryan proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program. He offered the usual GOP recipe of tax cuts – to be offset by closing certain loopholes, which he would not specify – along with drastic reductions in non-defense “discretionary” spending. [..]

Now Ryan, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, is coming back with an ostensibly new and improved version of the framework that voters rejected in November. Judging by the preview he offered Sunday, the new plan is even less grounded in reality than was the old one.

Robert L. Borosage: Mary Jo White: Wall Street Watch Dog or Lap Dog? The CEO Pay Test

On Tuesday, March 12, the Senate Banking Committee will begin review of the nomination of Mary Jo White to be chair of the Securities and Exchange Committee. The Committee should probe deeply on whether she will be a watchdog or a lap dog for Wall Street. One clear test is her position on the rules for publishing CEO compensation and CEO to worker pay ratios which the SEC has been sitting on for the nearly three years since the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation.

White is touted as a former tough prosecutor with the ability to police Wall Street. She is at the top of her profession, with extraordinary experience both as a prosecutor and as a leading corporate defense attorney in a white shoe Wall Street defense firm. And it is this very experience that raises questions as to whether she can and will do the job.

Paul Buchheit: Five Poisons of Privatization

It gets more maddening every day. Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn’t be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.

he free-market capitalism that drives our economy is a doctrine of individuals pursuing profit. Nothing else matters. An executive for Roche, a healthcare company, said “We are not in the business to save lives, but to make money.”

With privatization of the common good we risk losing both our heritage and our humanness.

Mary Jo White, President Obama’s nominee for chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is expected to win Senate approval after her confirmation hearing on Tuesday. But unless Ms. White is aggressively questioned, neither the senators nor the public will have a clear idea of the kind of chairwoman she will be.

Those who want a get-tough approach with the financial industry will focus on her years as a top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, from 1993 to 2002. Those who want a Wall Street ally at the S.E.C. will focus on her work in the past 10 years as a corporate attorney, representing big banks and other major corporations.The public deserves more from the hearing than a foregone conclusion. Senators should press Ms. White to give specifics on how she would handle potential conflicts as well as her approach to the job: [..]

Ralph Nader: Why Are Democrats So Defeatist?

The Republicans are openly introspective about why they failed to regain the presidency and the Senate. It is time for the same kind of rigorous self-analysis by the Democrats, who floated through their failure to regain control of the House without apparent dismay. Their failure to dislodge Speaker John Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor assures that President Obama and congressional Democrats will get very little done for the next two years. [..]

There is no effort by the Democratic leadership to question the failed strategies of 2010 and 2012. For 2014, it is likely to be more of the same: raising the money and taking care not to offend business interests by talking vaguely about the middle class and ignoring the growing poorer classes that are the Democratic Party’s natural constituency. What all this presages is another loss in 2014-unless the Republican Party takes an even more extremist stand for the rich and powerful and saves the Democrats from their own unprecedented stagnation.

Robert Kuttner: When Public Is Better

The problem is not too much government, but too passive a government

Long before we thought of founding The American Prospect in 1989, I came to know Paul Starr through a prescient article titled “Passive Intervention.” The piece was published in 1979, in a now-defunct journal, Working Papers for a New Society.

As Paul and his co-author, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, observed, the American welfare state is built on terrible, even disabling compromises. Progressives often lack the votes to pass legislation to deliver public benefits directly. So they either create tax incentives or bribe the private sector to do the job, thus inflating a bloated system. “The problem is not too much government activism,” they wrote, “but too much passivity.”

Their two emblematic examples were housing and health care. In housing, tax advantages became an inflation hedge for the affluent and drove up prices. Low-income homeownership programs, run through the private sector, had huge default rates. In health care, the political compromises necessary to enact Medicare excluded serious cost containment. When they wrote this, health care consumed 9 percent of GDP compared to 17 percent today. The subprime mortgage scandal was decades in the future.

Michelle Chen: Day Laborers Defend Their Right to Public Space in Court

Looking to hire someone for a little landscaping work or a construction job? There might be a local agency that can offer free security services to ensure that workers will work as hard as possible for as little as you’re willing to pay: the local police department.

Across the country, the undocumented day laborers who build, paint and pave many communities are locked into a low-wage regime that is de facto enforced by state power, which can threaten to round them up just for trying to work–in the name of protecting “public safety.”

Arizona was once a model for this form of anti-worker bullying. But a federal court has just struck down one of the harshest provisions of the infamous anti-immigrant law known as SB 1070, which enabled police to arrest people for soliciting work in public.

The February employment report shows some notable improvements that, if sustained, would herald a real recovery. Partly boosted by increased employment in the construction industry, the number of new jobs jumped to 236,000 last month, continuing a gradual upward trend.

Unfortunately, there are many reasons to believe that the improvements will not be sustained. If Congressional Republicans have their way – insisting that all deficit reduction be achieved by spending less without any tax increases – the automatic cuts that began on March 1 will continue. That will cost the economy an estimated 750,000 jobs by the end of this year and reduce economic growth by about half a percentage point. [..]

Without adequate demand, there will be no upsurge in business investment. The Fed cannot turn things around on its own. And the automatic budget cuts, on top of it all, will only make things worse.

Michael Winship: Jack Lew, Citigroup and the Ugland Truth

Along with its sandy beaches and quality snorkeling, the Cayman Islands’ reputation as an offshore tax haven for corporations, banks and hedge funds has become so well-known its financial institutions now are featured in travel brochures as yet another tourist attraction.

So as we traveled across the Caribbean this week – including a stretch paralleling the south coast of Cuba past Guantanamo Bay and the Sierra Maestra mountains, where Castro and his revolutionaries once hid out – we made a stop in George Town on Grand Cayman Island. A short walk along the shore took us to 335 South Church Street, a location made famous by Barack Obama a few years ago and more recently, Jack Lew, during his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of the Treasury.

Gail Collins: Senators Bearing Arms

Whenever talk turns to gun control in Congress, lawmakers feel compelled to mention their love of weaponry. [..]

People, do you think Congress is actually going to do anything about gun violence in the wake of the Newtown shootings? Judiciary is going to vote on two big proposals next week: a ban on assault weapons and an expansion of gun purchase background checks. If the Democrats stick together, the bills can pass on a party-line vote. But to go any further, they need Republican support, and there wasn’t a whole lot of it in evidence this week.

Ryan Goodman: The Drone Question Obama Hasn’t Answered

THE Senate confirmed John O. Brennan as director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday after a nearly 13-hour filibuster by the libertarian senator Rand Paul, who before the vote received a somewhat odd letter from the attorney general. [..]

The senator, whose filibuster had become a social-media sensation, elating Tea Party members, human-rights groups and pacifists alike, said he was “quite happy with the answer.” But Mr. Holder’s letter raises more questions than it answers – and, indeed, more important and more serious questions than the senator posed. [..]

But is it well past time for the United States government to specify, precisely, its views on whom it thinks it can kill in the struggle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist forces? The answer is yes.

The Obama administration’s continued refusal to do so should alarm any American concerned about the constitutional right of our citizens – no matter what evil they may or may not be engaged in – to due process under the law. For those Americans, Mr. Holder’s seemingly simple but maddeningly vague letter offers no reassurance.

The applicant, U.S. Pentagon, seeks to purchase a wide variety of firearms in vast quantities. This background check has determined that the applicant has a long history of assisting individuals, organizations and governments prone to gun violence.

Pentagon has often served as an active accomplice or direct perpetrator of killings on a mass scale. During the last 50 years, the applicant has directly inflicted large-scale death and injuries in numerous countries, among them the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Kosovo, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan (partial list). Resulting fatalities are estimated to have been more than 5 million people.

For purposes of this background check, special attention has been necessarily focused on the scope of firearms currently sought by Pentagon. They include numerous types of semi-automatic and fully automatic rifles as well as many other assault weapons. Continuing purchases by the applicant include drones and cruise missiles along with the latest models of compatible projectiles and matching explosives.

Robert L. Borsage: It’s Official: Too Big to Fail Banks Are Too Big to Jail

For years, the Obama administration has been pummeled for failing to bring criminal charges against a single major Wall Street bank or a single leading Wall Street banker for what the FBI termed an “epidemic of fraud” that blew up the entire economy. Investigations revealed the banks committed routine fraud in peddling mortgage securities they knew were garbage, trampled basic property laws, laundered money from Iran, Libya and Mexican drug lords, conspired to game the basic measure of interest rates and more. Yet, time after time, the Justice Department and regulatory agencies settled for sweetheart deals, with no admission of guilt, no banker held accountable, and institutional fines that were the equivalent in earnings of a speeding ticket to the average family.

Yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder stated openly what was already apparent: The Justice Department believes that Too Big to Fail Banks are Too Big to Jail. Criminal indictments against banks or leading bankers might endanger the economy and thus were too big a risk.

Cenk Uygur: The 3 Real Problems With Drone Strikes

It’s frustrating to see how muddled the debate over drones has become. Some people are wondering why we’re all so concerned over a new vehicle that delivers bombs, as opposed to planes. No, no, that’s not it at all. Drones don’t kill people, the U.S. government kills people. It’s just a tool. The problem isn’t the tool; the problem is how we are using it.

So, in order to clear up the confusion let me just state the three biggest problems with how we are using the drone program. [..]

Of course, there is one other thing, which is that most Democrats cannot get themselves to believe that the beloved Barack Obama would authorize things like this, so they just turn a deaf ear to it or try to make some sort of comical excuse for it. The reality is that he does do these things and that’s why progressives who are paying attention have been so disgruntled with him. It’s not like we didn’t like the guy or vote for the guy; we’re not like the conservatives who have Obama Derangement Syndrome and think he’s a Muslim from another planet and oppose everything he does. No, we oppose him on this because it is clearly and unequivocally wrong.

Bertha Lewis: Burwell as Obama’s Budget Director: Walmart Wins, Working Families Lose

As head of Walmart Foundation lobbying, Sylvia Mathews Burwell spent millions to open stores that pay poverty wages

f President Barack Obama goes forward with his nomination of Walmart Foundation head Sylvia Mathews Burwell for director of the Office of Management and Budget, it will be a coup for Walmart and its foundation, where Burwell has used its massive budget to expand Walmart’s influence at all levels of government and pave the way for its expansion into towns and cities across America. Unfortunately, it will also be a disaster for America’s working families.

The Walmart Foundation is hardly your traditional charity. It exists to advance the company’s agenda – silencing dissenters in their rapid urban expansion. It has donated to groups that have gone on the record to support Walmart during its most contentious political disputes, including the ongoing effort to open stores in New York City. And it has even donated directly to municipalities and to groups tied to powerful elected officials.

Don’t tell the Tea Party, but the tag team of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are currently mopping the floor with Barack Obama.

The president convincingly won a second term in November, but since that time, the congressional Republican leadership has outfoxed, outmaneuvered and plain out-strategized him on just about every issue.

Don’t tell the Tea Party, but the tag team of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are currently mopping the floor with Barack Obama.

The president convincingly won a second term in November, but since that time, the congressional Republican leadership has outfoxed, outmaneuvered and plain out-strategized him on just about every issue.

Robert Reich: Why There’s a Bull Market for Stocks and a Bear Market for Workers

Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose above 14,270 — completely erasing its 54 percent loss between 2007 and 2009.

The stock market is basically back to where it was in 2000, while corporate earnings have doubled since then.

Yet the real median wage is now 8 percent below what it was in 2000, and unemployment remains sky-high.

Why is the stock market doing so well, while most Americans are doing so poorly? Four reasons: [..]

Rarely before in American history have public policies so radically helped the most fortunate among us, so cruelly harmed the least fortunate, and exposed so many average working Americans to such widespread insecurity.

Joe Conason: Hungry Children Will Be Among First to Suffer From Sequestration

The difference between a natural disaster and a disaster caused by politicians is that the latter will almost always hit the poor and the obscure most heavily, while a hurricane or a flood will at least sometimes spread the suffering more evenly.

As the “sequester” unfolds in Washington, we see this same old pattern holding firm: Republican leaders, now hustling to shirk responsibility for the catastrophe they predicted, insist those automated budget axes won’t do any damage at all.

Has anyone felt any pain yet?

Not during the first few days, of course, but when the cuts begin to bite a month or so from now, the first to feel it will be the unemployed and the destitute for whom a few dollars of government support mean so much in their daily survival calculation. A decent policy would seek to spare them the brunt of political mistakes made by other, far more comfortable people, but this process permits no such choices-and the most vulnerable will by definition be hurt most.

George Zornick: Beware Obama’s Dealmaking

As sequestration churns on, President Obama is reaching out to moderate Republican members of the Senate to see if he can still put a deal together. He is coming to the Hill next week for a Republican luncheon, and hosting other members for dinner tonight. The president is also picking up the phone. “He just called me,” Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters yesterday. “What I see from the president is probably the most encouraging engagement on a big issue that I’ve seen since the early years of his presidency. He wants to do the big deal.”

This should, and does, worry progressives inside and outside of Congress. The default position among center-left pundits is that if Obama gets Republicans to agree on a grand deficit reduction package that includes new revenue, he’s “won.” But that assumption really needs to be interrogated, and each concession examined.