Tag: Punting the Pundits

Voters didn’t just send President Obama back to the White House on Election Day. They also voted to raise the minimum wage in three different cities. Albuquerque, NM raised its minimum wage from $7.50 to $8.50 per hour, and it will automatically adjust to keep pace with the cost of living in future years. San Jose, California, raised its minimum wage from $8 per hour to $10, and it will also adjust automatically. Long Beach, California, went even further, not only giving hotel workers a living wage adjustment to $13 an hour, but also guaranteeing them five paid sick days per year. The first two raises alone will impact an estimated 109,000 workers.

Yet action to raise the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is completely stalled at the federal level. It’s been stuck for over three years and it still isn’t indexed to inflation. That wage adds up to a pitiful $14,500 a year, not enough to make rent in any state. It’s over $3,000 below the poverty line for a parent with two kids. Its purchasing power is 13 percent lower than in 1979. Yet the average minimum-wage worker earns about half of his or her family income.

Jessica Valente: Justice for Savita

This week, the first American study ever to look at what happens to women when they’re denied abortions was released. It’s a fascinating, but not all that surprising, read. The research shows women who seek out abortions and are unable to obtain them fare significantly worse over time than women who are able to procure the procedure. Women who are denied abortions are more likely to end up on welfare, more likely to stay in abusive relationships, and more likely to be emotionally distressed over their pregnancy outcome.

Women’s lives suffer when they are forced to carry pregnancies. I thought I was angry when I read this research. But then I heard about Savita Halappanavar in Ireland, whose tragic story reminds us of the worst thing that can happen when women are denied abortions.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The War On Women Is a Class War

Last week the voters delivered their verdict on what has come to be known as “the Republican War on Women”: They’re against it.

We’ve had decades of relentless class warfare from above, in the form of wealth distribution from the many to the few. Finally, class-related issues have helped to deliver a resounding defeat to scores of candidates who represented the interests of naked greed. (See WageClassWar.org).

Women’s issues and women voters were critical to this election. That’s not coincidental. The War On Women has many dimensions – social, cultural, psychological – but in many ways women’s issues are class issues. That makes the war on women a class war, among other things.

The upcoming “fiscal cliff” talks will open up another front in this seemingly endless struggle. Here are some reasons why: [..]

Amy Goodman: The Growing Global Movement Against Austerity

Amaia Engana didn’t wait to be evicted from her home. On Nov. 9, in the town of Barakaldo, a suburb of Bilbao in Spain’s Basque Country, officials from the local judiciary were on their way to serve her eviction papers. Amaia stood on a chair and threw herself out of her fifth-floor apartment window, dying instantly on impact on the sidewalk below. She was the second person in two weeks in Spain to commit suicide as a result of an impending foreclosure action. Her suicide has added gravity to this week’s general strike radiating from the streets of Madrid across all of Europe. As resistance to so-called austerity in Europe becomes increasingly transnational and coordinated, President Barack Obama and the House Republicans begin their debate to avert the “fiscal cliff.” The fight is over fair tax rates, budget priorities and whether we as a society will sustain the social safety net built during the past 80 years.

It was the CIA director’s relationship with JSOC-not Paula Broadwell-that should have raised concerns.

While much of the media focus on l’affaire Petraeus has centered on the CIA director’s sexual relationship with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, the scandal opens a window onto a different and more consequential relationship-that between the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command. In a behind-the-scenes turf war that has raged since 9/11, the two government bodies have fought for control of the expanding global wars waged by the United States-a turf war that JSOC has largely won. Petraeus, an instrumental player in this power struggle, leaves behind an agency that has strayed from intelligence to paramilitary-type activities. Though his legacy will be defined largely by the scandal that ended his career, to many within military and intelligence circles, Petraeus’s career trajectory, from commander of US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to the helm of the CIA, is a symbol of this evolution.

“I would not say that CIA has been taken over by the military, but I would say that the CIA has become more militarized,” Philip Giraldi, a retired career CIA case officer, told The Nation. “A considerable part of the CIA budget is now no longer spying; it’s supporting paramilitaries who work closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program.” The CIA, he added, “is a killing machine now.”

Ralph Nader: Preserve Benefits: Cut Gouging and Inequities

Congress is still talking about a “Grand Bargain” that “balances” far more spending cuts than tax increases. That is another way of saying that you – the consumer of Medicare and Medicaid services, the recipient of Social Security, and the average taxpayer-will take the brunt of the spending cuts, while the wealthy get their income taxes restored, not raised, to their pre-Bush modest levels. Don’t buy it!

There are two ways to cut Medicare and Medicaid. The right wingers want to cut benefits. Consumers want to cut vendor fraud, the overcharging and the immense over-diagnosis, over-treatment and erroneous or unnecessary procedures and prescriptions documented so often by, among others, the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (http://tdi.dartmouth.edu/), Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dennis Kucinich: The Real Scandal Surrounding the Petraeus Resignation

The National Security Agency routinely collects 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and communications every single day. Any kind of digital communication can be recorded and stored. Where you were when you wrote an email, where the recipient was when it was read, the text of the message can all be stored in enormous facilities like the $2 billion dollar Utah Data Center which contains four 25,000 foot facilities containing rows of data servers. They have to pump 1.7 million gallons of fluid through the facility every day just to keep it from overheating.

The NSA doesn’t need a warrant to record your most private conversations. They have managed to circumvent our privacy laws because they define an “intercept” as a piece of information read by an agent. That means they don’t need authorization to record and save your information until someone decides they’d like to read it.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The “Fiscal Cliff” Is a Hoax … and a Mel Brooks Routine

They’re dashing through the corridors of power in Washington with appropriately grim expressions this week. Congressional leaders are talking about the upcoming ‘fiscal cliff,’ which journalists are dutifully describing as a “looming crisis.”

In fact, if you do a Google News search for articles containing the words “fiscal cliff” and “looming” you’ll get 72,000 hits (as of Wednesday evening). We know because we tried it.

72,000 hits.

But nothing’s “looming.” Nothing. There’s just some language in a law Congress passed last year. If they don’t want it to happen they can un-pass that law. It’s a simple as that.

And do you want to know something? They don’t want it to happen.

Worse than the Petraeus affair? How a cyber-harassment complaint triggered a dragnet that toppled a CIA director

It’s hard to stay focused on what really matters in the unfolding David Petraeus story, but there’s one issue that every juicy new tidbit only underscores: the way a strange complaint to a lone FBI agent led to an electronic dragnet that toppled the CIA director and may yet bring down the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen.

I’ll admit to rubbernecking at each crazy new detail that emerges – the unnamed FBI agent who trigged the Petraeus probe had earlier sent shirtless photos of himself to Jill Kelley, the woman who asked for his help with anonymous harassing emails? Petraeus and Allen intervened in a child custody case on behalf of Kelley’s sister? Kelley, who is of Lebanese Catholic descent, is “a self-appointed go between” with Lebanese and other Mideastern officials? She once cooked alligator on the Food Network?

But the real scandal is the way a complaint about cyber-stalking from a Tampa socialite unleashed the power of the modern surveillance state on Petraeus’ biographer and paramour, Paula Broadwell – and ultimately, ironically or not, on the top spook himself.

Rebecca Solnit: The fourth horseman of the apocalypse: Hurricane Sandy rides in

Hurricane Sandy did what no activist could have done adequately: Put climate change back on the agenda.

The first horseman was named al-Qaeda in Manhattan, and it came as a message on September 11, 2001: Our meddling in the Middle East had sown rage and funded madness. We had meddled because of imperial ambition and because of oil, the black gold that fuelled most of our machines and our largest corporations and too many of our politicians.

The second horseman came not quite four years later. It was named Katrina, and this one too delivered a warning. Katrina’s message was that we needed to face the dangers we had turned our back on when the country became obsessed with terrorism: Failing infrastructure, institutional rot, racial divides and poverty. And larger than any of these was the climate – the heating oceans breeding stronger storms, melting the ice and raising the sea level, breaking the patterns of the weather we had always had into sharp shards: Burning and dying forests, floods, droughts, heat waves in January, freak blizzards, sudden oscillations, acidifying oceans.

The third horseman came in October of 2008: It was named Wall Street, and when that horseman stumbled and collapsed, we were reminded that it had always been a predator, and all that had changed was the scale – of deregulation, of greed, of recklessness, of amorality about homes and lives being casually trashed to profit the already wealthy. And the fourth horseman has arrived on schedule.

We called it Sandy, and it came to tell us we should have listened harder when the first, second and third disasters showed up. [..]

Mary F. Mulcahy: Planning for the inevitable: Taking time for end-of-life decisions

Advance care planning is crucial for preparing for the inevitable.

Americans are embedded in a death-defying culture. Extreme sports earn accolades in real life and on video screens as cosmetics promise age-defying results. But in reality, death is inevitable.  

Hurricane Sandy hitting the Northeastern United States recently claimed the lives of 110 people unexpectedly and within a very short time. About 600,000 people die of heart disease and 570,000 people die of cancer in the United States every year.

Everyone who is born will ultimately die. Who are these people? They are the family breadwinners, parents, caregivers, children, community leaders, schoolteachers and activists. They are young, old, ill, well, they are you and me.

Whether it comes about suddenly without warning as in the recent hurricane or after a chronic, progressive illness, every day, families are struck by the loss of a loved one and as a result, their lives change directions.  

Yet, while we may prepare for financial security for our family, we often fail to prepare for medical treatment choices – leaving our loved ones to make decisions that they may be ill-equipped to make.  

Mitt Romney said he wasn’t concerned about the very poor, because they have a safety net. This is typical of the widespread ignorance about inequality in our country. Struggling Americans want jobs, not handouts, and for the most part they’ve paid for their “safety net.” The real problem is at the other end of the wealth gap.

How many people know that out of 150 countries, we have the 4th-highest wealth disparity (pdf)? Only Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Switzerland are worse.

It’s not just economic inequality that’s plaguing our country. It’s lack of opportunity. It’s a dismissal of poor people as lazy, or as threats to society. More than any other issue over the next four years, we need to address the growing divide in our nation, to tone down our winner-take-all philosophy, to provide job opportunities for people who want to contribute to society.

Here are some of the common misconception [..]

Cenk Uygur: Why the Grand Bargain Is One-Sided and Totally Unfair

First of all, let’s establish that no one in Washington actually cares about balancing the budget. If they did, they would love this so-called Fiscal Cliff. It raises taxes and cuts spending, so it would massively reduce the deficit. Isn’t that what all of Washington has been pretending to care about all of this time?

Second, understand that this so-called compromise they are talking about in order to avoid this supposed calamity is a trick. In fact, it’ll be the greatest robbery in American history. Think about it — they say they are worried about all those tax increases and spending cuts. But that’s not true. The Grand Bargain would dramatically increase spending cuts, not alleviate them. So, in fact, the only thing they care about is paying less taxes, as always. [..]

The Grand Bargain is a Grand Lie. Anyone who argues for it is either a fool or a charlatan. If President Obama was anything but the establishment hack that he is, he would never consider it. There is nothing wrong with compromise, but this isn’t compromise. This is a robbery.

John Nichols: Ron Johnson’s Pompous Assumptions: Voters are Ignorant, Colleagues Need Tutoring

Ron Johnson is not a familiar name to most Americans who are pondering the politics of the “fiscal cliff.” But Johnson’s reaction to the 2012 election results will tell folks everything they need to know about the challenge rational Democrats will face when it comes to negotiations with not-so-rational Republicans.

A senator from Wisconsin who announced his candidacy at a Tea Party rally and was elected-with help from a family fortune, Karl Rove and the US Chamber of Commerce’s political operations-Johnson has been a congressional absolutist when it comes to budget issues. He embraces House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, perhaps even more than Ryan does himself. And he swears, against all economic evidence to the contrary, and against all political evidence of opposition on the part of the American people, that there is only one way to address the challenges facing America: tax cuts for rich people like him and benefit cuts for everyone else.

Ari Berman: Why We Still Need Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

In 2006, Congress voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act for another twenty-five years. The vote was 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. Every top Republican supported the bill. “The Voting Rights Act must continue to exist,” said House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, “and exist in its current form.” Civil rights leaders, including Julian Bond and Jesse Jackson, flanked George W. Bush at the signing ceremony.

Yet three days after the 2012 election, in which voter suppression played a starring role, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a conservative challenge to the constitutionality of Section 5, which compels parts or all of sixteen states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to clear election-related changes with the federal government. The challenge originates in Shelby County, Alabama, and is being supported by Republican attorneys general in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. Ed Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, which is funding the lawsuit, told The New York Times that Section 5 “is stuck in a Jim Crow-era time warp.”

The reverence for the former CIA Director is part of a wider religious-like worship of the national security state.

A prime rule of US political culture is that nothing rivets, animates or delights the political media like a sex scandal. From Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, and Eliot Spitzer to John Edwards, Larry Craig and David Vitter, their titillation and joy is palpable as they revel in every last arousing detail. This giddy package is delivered draped in a sanctimonious wrapping: their excitement at reporting on these scandals is matched only by their self-righteous condemnations of the moral failings of the responsible person.

All of these behaviors have long been constant, inevitable features of every political sex scandal – until yesterday. Now, none of these sentiments is permitted because the newest salacious scandal features at its center Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned yesterday as CIA Director, citing an extramarital affair.

Dana Milbank: Republican leader Boehner may be ready to bargain

After Mitt Romney’s defeat on Tuesday, John Boehner is the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.

Pity him. [..]

Boehner’s first instinct on Tuesday night was to side with his House firebrands. “While others chose inaction,” he said at a Republican National Committee event, “we offered solutions.” Americans, he said, “responded by renewing our House Republican majority. With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there’s no mandate for raising tax rates.”

After sleeping on it, Boehner appeared at the Capitol on Wednesday and offered a dramatically different message: He proposed, albeit in a noncommittal way, putting tax increases on the table. [..]

Boehner chose to make his post-election speech in the Capitol’s Rayburn room, named for Sam Rayburn, the late House speaker who is credited with saying: “Any jackass can kick down a barn. It takes a carpenter to build one.”

Boehner sounds as though he’s ready to pick up hammer and nail. But will his fellow Republicans stop kicking?

Robert Kuttner: Let’s Not Make a Deal

President Obama gave a pretty good speech on Friday about the economy and the budget. In his most quoted line, the president said, “I am not going to ask students and seniors and middle-class families to pay down the entire deficit while people like me, making over $250,000, aren’t asked to pay a dime more in taxes.” [..]

Obama, evidently, is willing to play hardball to compel the Republicans to allow tax rates on the top two percent to revert to something like the Clinton era top rate of 39.5 percent but spare the bottom 98 percent any tax increases. As Obama put it, “On Tuesday night, we found out that the majority of Americans agree with my approach.”

But that was about the only good thing in Obama’s speech, or his posture towards the Republicans and the budget. Obama still believes that the economy needs budget cuts of $4 trillion over the next decade.

It doesn’t. If anything, it needs spending increases.

Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks: Harry Reid: Fix the Filibuster Now!

President Obama won and the Democrats increased their majority in the Senate – and moved it in a far more progressive direction. For now, the Supreme Court is safe from radical right-wing ideology.

But to guarantee its safety for future generations, Harry Reid must take decisive and historic action on day one of the new Senate term. He must end or radically reform the filibuster.

The filibuster is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution – it’s something, in its modern form, the Founders knew nothing about. It requires 60 votes in a 100-vote Senate to end debate and move on to a vote – and Republicans have used it over 370 times during Harry Reid’s tenure. For comparison, Lyndon Johnson was Senate majority leader for the same period of time as Reid, in an incredibly turbulent time, and only had to deal with one, single Republican filibuster.

With the election behind us I had hoped we’d get beyond games of chicken. No such luck.

But first you need to understand that the game of chicken isn’t about how much or when we cut the budget deficit. Or even whether the upcoming “fiscal cliff” poses a danger to the economy. [..]

So who blinks first? Democrats who don’t mind going over the cliff because they’ll get a better final deal — and the deal will be retroactive to January 1st so it’s not really a cliff at all but more like a little hill? Or Republicans who want to extend the Bush tax cuts beyond January 1st, until we get sufficiently close to the debt ceiling that they can once again threaten the full faith and credit of America?

As I said before, I had naively assumed the election would put an end to these games, but obviously not. Yet Obama and the Democrats are holding most of the cards now. Let’s hope they use them.

Bruce A. Dixon: California NAACP Sells Out to Big Ag on Genetically Modified Foods

We at Black Agenda Report have been pointing out a long time now that what used to be black and Latino civil rights and civic advocacy organizations have turned a corner and become mouthpieces for their corporate funders.  [..]

It’s not a subject discussed much in media and not a place where Big Agriculture wants to go. So what do the swells at places like Monsanto do? The same as the nuclear industry, the telecom industry and the people who want to privatize education. They dropped a big check on the California NAACP, and sure enough that august body took a stand against California’s Proposition 37.

Never mind that black children are more likely than anyone else to suffer from juvenile onset diabetes, and that studies in other countries have shown clear links between GMO foods and diabetes in children. The so-called leadership model of the modern civil rights organization in this post civil rights era is to front itself as the representative of and obtain its moral legitimacy from the oppressed, but take its funding and its orders from the oppressors. That’s why we call them the black misleadership class.

Robert Sheer: Yes We Can, We Did, and Now Obama’s Second Term Is Our Responsibility

Yes, election night was a heck of a party and it’s great that the really bad guys lost. Karl Rove and his reactionary ilk were defeated by a new American majority that is younger, more tolerant, rainbow colored and multilingual and one in which women now trump the depressing ignorance of so many older white men. But morning in America already feels too much like a hangover. The house is still a wreck, the family is dysfunctional and there are enormous bills to pay that are not about to go away.

All of us suddenly sobered folks, who voted for Barack Obama because the alternative was so horridly wrong, have got to accept the moral implications of that choice. We won but at what cost? Fool me once, shame on Obama, but fool me twice and I’m the one responsible. That goes for his promises to right the economy by leveling the playing field as well as to end what Obama termed in his victory speech “a decade of war.”

Karl Grossman: Fracking and a Radioactive Silvery-White Monster: Radium Must be Left in the Earth

Fracking for gas not only uses toxic chemicals that can contaminate drinking and groundwater — it also releases substantial quantities of radioactive poison from the ground that will remain hot and deadly for thousands of years.

Issuing a report yesterday exposing major radioactive impacts of hydraulic fracturing known as fracking — was Grassroots Environmental Education, an organization in New York, where extensive fracking is proposed. [..]

But also released, notes the report, is radioactive material in the shale including Radium-226 with a half-life of 1,600 years. A half-life is how long it takes for a radioactive substance to lose half its radiation. It is multiplied by between 10 and 20 to determine the “hazardous lifetime” of a radioactive material, how long it takes for it to lose its radioactivity. Thus Radium-226 remains radioactive for between 16,000 and 32,000 years.

Striking a deal with Republicans to cut entitlements would be a disastrous start to the president’s second term.

The day after Barack Obama was re-elected, the Dow Jones lost 312.96 points. It wasn’t just that investors were hoping for the lower taxes and further deregulation that would come with a Romney win. The news from Europe was bad, and pundits were obsessively focused on the “fiscal cliff” of mandatory budget cuts that will drive the economy into a new recession unless Congress jumps off its own budgetary cliff first.

For once, the markets are right. But the news from Europe entirely contradicts conventional assumptions about the fiscal cliff.

Greece, which has dutifully cut its budget as demanded by the leaders of the European Union and the European Central bank, is deeper in depression than ever. The latest reports show its economy has shrunk by more than 20 percent over four years, and that the more that it cuts its deficit, the more its national debt grows.

Dean Baker: Climate Change, Not the National Debt, Is the Legacy We Should Care About

Worry about the grandchildren? Then stop global warming, but don’t pretend deficit reduction by slashing pensions is for them

The political leadership, including the Washington press corps and punditry, were already intently ignoring the economic downturn that is still wreaking havoc on the lives of tens of millions of people across the country. Now, in the wake of the destruction from Hurricane Sandy, they will intensify their efforts to ignore global warming. After all, they want the country to focus on the debt – an issue that no one other than the elites views as a problem.

The reality, of course, is straightforward. The large deficits of recent years are due to the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. If the economy were back near its pre-recession level of unemployment, then the deficits would be close to 1% of GDP, a level that could be sustained indefinitely.

Alfred W. McCoy: Beyond Bayonets and Battleships

It’s 2025 and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere.  A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances.  Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity,  it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century.  It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it. [..]

Amid all the post-debate media chatter, however, not a single commentator seemed to have a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the president’s sparse words. Yet for the past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has presided over a technological revolution in defense planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the full-scale weaponization of space. In the face of waning economic influence, this bold new breakthrough in what’s called “information warfare” may prove significantly responsible should U.S. global dominion somehow continue far into the twenty-first century.

Ben Adler: Conservatives Understand the GOP’s Problem but Not Its Solution

In the wake of President Obama’s decisive re-election victory on Tuesday, the more intellectually serious members of the conservative commentariat are in post-mortem mode. They are asking what went wrong and how they can avoid a third consecutive loss in 2016. Unfortunately for them, they display only a limited understanding of the Republican Party’s problem, and virtually no understanding of its underlying cause or its solution. [..]

The primary impulse among conservative pundits seems to be blaming the poor quality of their candidates. For those who are on the insurgent right, such as Red State’s Erick Erickson, that means complaining about Mitt Romney but not the extremist ideologues who lost winnable Senate races, such as Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. For Beltway insiders, such as The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes and the Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson, that means complaining about Senate candidates and Romney’s clownish opponents in the Republican primaries.

This was one that the Republicans really should have won.

Given the weak economy, American voters were open to firing President Obama. In Europe, in similar circumstances, one government after another lost re-election. And, at the beginning of this year, it looked as if the Republicans might win control of the United States Senate as well.

Yet it wasn’t the Democrats who won so much as the Republicans who lost – at a most basic level, because of demography. A coalition of aging white men is a recipe for failure in a nation that increasingly looks like a rainbow.

Gail Collins: Happy Days, Even With the Cliff

La Di Dah Di Dah …

We have been through a lot, people. But now the presidential race is settled. Barack Obama won. People on both sides worked heroically, and, on Tuesday, their candidates behaved well. This should be a happy time.

Oh, my God! There’s a fiscal cliff! We’re all going to fall over and go bankrupt! [..]

And since it looks as if we’re not getting any downtime, we’ll have to get cracking on this latest Congressional crisis. Root for a bipartisan solution that does not involve the White House being hijacked by a guy who keeps babbling about going halfway over a cliff.

In the past, when these things came up, the president’s big failing was his inability to hide his contempt for many of the people who occupy Capitol Hill. Now it’s a new day, and he needs to be so perpetually and visibly available that the negotiators beg to be left alone.

If all else fails, strap John Boehner to the roof of a car.

Amy Goodman: Now the Work of Movements Begins

The election is over, and President Barack Obama will continue as the 44th president of the United States. There will be much attention paid by the pundit class to the mechanics of the campaigns, to the techniques of microtargeting potential voters, the effectiveness of get-out-the-vote efforts. The media analysts will fill the hours on the cable news networks, proffering post-election chestnuts about the accuracy of polls, or about either candidate’s success with one demographic or another. Missed by the mainstream media, but churning at the heart of our democracy, are social movements, movements without which President Obama would not have been re-elected.

President Obama is a former community organizer himself. What happens when the community organizer in chief becomes the commander in chief? Who does the community organizing then? Interestingly, he offered a suggestion when speaking at a small New Jersey campaign event when he was first running for president. Someone asked him what he would do about the Middle East. He answered with a story about the legendary 20th-century organizer A. Philip Randolph meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Randolph described to FDR the condition of black people in America, the condition of working people. Reportedly, FDR listened intently, then replied: “I agree with everything you have said. Now, make me do it.” That was the message Obama repeated.

There you have it. Make him do it. You’ve got an invitation from the president himself.

William Pfaff: America’s Increasingly Diverse Electorate Is Heard

Abroad, the widely noted aspect of Barack Obama’s reelection victory was its social and class character. The president was reelected by a majority of American minorities. He won 93 percent of the African-American vote, which is hardly surprising, but also 71 percent of the Hispanic electorate, while his part of the white active electorate diminished about 10 percent from the share he carried four years ago.

This is an inevitable result of the steady ethnic diversification of the American population and the increasing incidence of inter-ethnic or interracial marriage, with a consequent diminishment of the originally dominant Caucasian component in the make-up of the population of the United States, and of the historical culture that the founders possessed.

The re-election of Barack Obama, as well as the wins in states wherever gay marriage was on ballot — in Maine, Minnesota, Maryland and Washington — is a massive watershed for LGBT rights. No longer will politicians — or anyone — be able to credibly claim to be supportive of gays, and to love and honor their supposed gay friends and family, while still being opposed to basic and fundamental rights like marriage.

The very ads pushed by  the enemies of gay rights, like the mastermind behind the antigay ballot measures, Frank Schubert, which claim you can support gay equality but be against gay marriage, no longer hold water. From now on, you’re no friend to gays if you don’t support full equality, and you’re a bigot if you try to defend that position, as Mitt Romney did.

Bryce Covert: Thank You, Republican Misogynists, for Handing Democrats Crucial Victories Last Night

Liberals had a lot to celebrate last night. President Obama was handed a second term while Democrats held the Senate-both feats that seemed far from certain earlier this year. When we look for people to thank for these victories, we have to give blatant Republican misogyny a big round of applause.

Two Senate seats that were at one time safe bets for the GOP rested in Democratic hands at the end of the night thanks in large part to Republicans trying to define rape. Claire McCaskill defeated her challenger Todd Akin-women voters had a way of shutting that whole thing down after he made some outrageous comments about birth from rape. Richard Mourdock, who also brought up rape in a bizarre fashion, had to concede last night, another race the GOP expected to win. While Joe Donnelly, who defeated Mourdock, is no pro-choice treasure-he signed onto the GOP House bill that made reference to “forcible” rape, for instance-women at least sent Mourdock packing.

Rebecca Solnit: The Name of the Hurricane Is Climate Change

The first horseman was named Al Qaeda in Manhattan, and it came as a message on September 11, 2001: that our meddling in the Middle East had sown rage and funded madness. We had meddled because of imperial ambition and because of oil, the black gold that fueled most of our machines and our largest corporations and too many of our politicians. The second horseman came not quite four years later. It was named Katrina, and this one too delivered a warning. [..]

The third horseman came in October of 2008: it was named Wall Street, and when that horseman stumbled and collapsed, we were reminded that it had always been a predator, and all that had changed was the scale-of deregulation, of greed, of recklessness, of amorality about homes and lives being casually trashed to profit the already wealthy. And the fourth horseman has arrived on schedule.

We called it Sandy, and it came to tell us we should have listened harder when the first, second, and third disasters showed up. This storm’s name shouldn’t be Sandy-though that means we’ve run through the alphabet all the way up to S this hurricane season, way past brutal Isaac in August-it should be Climate Change.  If each catastrophe came with a message, then this one’s was that global warming’s here, that the old rules don’t apply, and that not doing anything about it for the past 30 years is going to prove far, far more expensive than doing something would have been.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: FDR and the Fight to Defend Our Freedom

On January 6, 1941, as Nazi Germany tightened its cruel grip on Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his annual State of the Union address. He acknowledged the terrible costs of war and argued that the sacrifice would be accepted by future generations only if it led to a newer, better world for all people everywhere, a world based on the four human freedoms central to democracy-freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

They were, in his view, fundamental American values, and an antidote to the poison of growing tyranny. Three years later, in his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt translated those values into what became known as the “Economic Bill of Rights”- an uncompromising articulation of economic security as a condition of individual freedom.