Tag: Punting the Pundits

Jeb signals openness to another of his brother’s failed policies: torturing detainees. And he’s not alone!

Half a year ago, while speaking at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Jeb Bush made a show of distancing himself from the Bush family foreign policy legacy. “I am my own man,” he said, “and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences.” It was transparent nonsense at the time he said it – Jeb was a fervent Iraq war supporter and his foreign policy team is built from the same neoconservative chuckleheads who shepherded George W. Bush into the Iraq catastrophe. But the Bush Doctrine still retains its well-earned political toxicity, and Jeb had to say something to at least give the impression that he wouldn’t be a replica of his brother on the world stage.

In the months since making that declaration, though, Jeb has shown no indication that his foreign policy preferences are substantively different from those of George W. Bush – he’s still defending the Iraq war, he wants American combat troops to fight in Iraq, he’s pushing regime change in another Middle Eastern country (Syria), and he favors a hardline posture on Iran that eschews diplomacy in favor of isolation and tough talk.

And now we can add torture to the list of Bush-era policies that Jeb might bring back.

Eugene Robinson: Jeb Bush: The Republican to Vote For (If You Wish His Brother Were Still in Office)

Jeb Bush has firmly established himself as the Republican to vote for if you wish his brother were still president. Best of luck with that.

In what was billed as a major foreign policy speech Tuesday, Bush proposed inching back into Iraq, wading into the Syrian civil war and engaging in much the same kind of geopolitical engineering and nation-building that George W. Bush attempted. So much for the whole “I am my own man” routine.

He finally understands that to have any credibility, even amid a field of uber-hawks (minus Rand Paul), he has to say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. But judging from his actions, that’s not what he seems to believe. Why would someone who thinks the war was wrong include Paul Wolfowitz, one of its architects, among his top foreign policy advisers? Why would someone who sees the Middle East as an unholy mess reveal that he consults his brother, the chief mess-maker, on what to do next?

Social Security was signed into law eighty years ago, on August 14, 1935. In those eight decades, it has taught us a number of important lessons.

Social Security has demonstrated that there are some undertakings that government does better than the private sector. Social Security is more efficient, universal, secure, and fair than any counterpart private sector arrangement is or could be.

Social Security has also taught us that some people hate government no matter how effective it is, and will say just about anything to prevent its good work. Indeed, these opponents of government fight hardest when a government program works well, because it undermines their bias that government is the problem, when government is, in truth, often the best or even the only solution. And so they really hate Social Security. It works so extraordinarily well that it is a shining example of government at its best.

David Cay Johnston: Enforcement for white-collar crime hits 20-year low

The donor class doesn’t want to be policed by Congress

Congress is starving federal white-collar law enforcement – a subtle and lucrative favor to the crooks and connivers among the political donor class. The move is costing honest people everywhere, damaging economic growth and perverting government.

This year the number of federal white-collar crime prosecutions will be about 37 percent below 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton was in the White House.

The decline grows from our corrupt campaign finance system, which by its nature shifts the focus of elected leaders away from crimes in the C-suites to harsh enforcement of laws on the streets.

The reduction in prosecutions for white-collar crimes was revealed in Department of Justice data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

Daphne Aviatar: Stalled 9/11 Case Is Another Reason to Close Guantanamo

The military commissions have once again cancelled two weeks’ worth of hearings scheduled in the case of the five alleged plotters of the September 11 attacks. Although the attacks themselves took place nearly 14 years ago, the five men accused of masterminding the deadliest terror attack to ever take place on U.S. soil are still nowhere near trial. As President Obama wrangles with his own defense department over how to keep his promise to close the prison, the stalled 9/11 case stands as one of the many glaring reasons he should be sure to get it done.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants have been described as an obstacle to Obama’s closing Guantanamo, because Congress has blocked the administration’s ability to transfer them to the United States for trial. But their case is actually one of the strongest reasons, as a matter of justice for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, for the U.S. government to shutter the prison and its flailing justice system once and for all.

Clive Stafford Smith: The military ignores Obama’s order to release Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

Recent history demonstrates that if President Barack Obama, arguably the most powerful person on planet Earth, wants to prioritize almost anything – from pardoning 46 convicted drug felons to bombing a foreign country without the consent of Congress – little can stand in his way. Why, then, is Shaker Aamer not home in London with his wife and four children? [..]

On Thursday, we came a little closer to understanding the reason that Aamer’s youngest child, Faris – who was born on Valentine’s Day 2002, the day that Aamer was rendered to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay – has never even met his father. The Guardian revealed that “the Pentagon [is] blocking Guantánamo deals to return Shaker Aamer and other cleared detainees.” President Obama, it seems, has personally ordered Aamer’s release, and his subordinates have ignored and thwarted his order.

However, Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution provides that the “President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States”. Under Article 90 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to disobey an order in peacetime is punishable by life in prison. If we believe the Pentagon theory that we are involved in a “Global War on Terror”, then there is an ongoing war, and the punishment for disobeying orders is death.

The CIA’s torture-era leadership won’t repent. Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report saying in no uncertain terms that the CIA had tortured its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that torture never elicited any actionable intelligence that saved American lives, Bush-era CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and several of their underlings announced plans to release a book justifying torture.

They intend to repeat a lie over and over again in this book: that torture worked. They hope that the American people are either so gullible or so stupid that they’ll believe it. It’s up to the rest of us to ensure that our government swears off committing this crime against humanity.

I know that these former intelligence leaders are lying because I worked with them at the CIA. When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.

Isaiah J. Poole: Those Republican Spending Caps Are Costing Us Jobs

The case for ending the federal budget spending caps known as the “sequester” has just gotten a whole lot stronger. It’s all about jobs.

At the request of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is currently running as a Democratic presidential candidate, the Congressional Budget Office this week released a letter that said that if these spending caps were eliminated, the economy would be able to add as many as 1.4 million additional jobs in 2016 and 2017. [..]

What would having up to 1.4 million additional jobs mean to the economy? Some insight into the answer came Wednesday from the Labor Department’s latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey – the “JOLTS” report in Washington-speak that many economic experts say Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen considers more valuable than the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report. That report said that in June there were 5.2 million job openings, while June’s unemployment report indicated there were 8.3 million people looking for work. That’s roughly two jobs for every three job seekers.

Robert Greenwald: Is Schumer Setting Us on Another Path to War?

The framework agreement that the U.S. and its international partners reached with Iran that blocks Tehran’s pathways to building a nuclear bomb is barely a week old, yet the usual suspects have already denounced it as a “bad deal.”

To the opposition of the Iran deal, President Obama recently stated, “Let’s not mince words: The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy and some form of war — maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon.” And now as the President is trying to broker the historic deal, Sen. Charles Schumer – who also voted for the Iraq war – is sabotaging the Iran deal, claiming the United States should call for a “better deal.”

Schumer was wrong about Iraq and is wrong about the Iran deal.

The reality is that those calling for “a better deal” have never offered a viable plan on how to get one. Opposing this deal and offering no alternative is putting us on the path to war, which we all know will come at a tremendous cost.

Austerity measures will hurt the vulnerable to protect the wealthy

On Aug. 1, Puerto Rico defaulted on a bond payment, setting the stage for a protracted fiscal battle between the U.S. territory and its creditors. San Juan paid only $628,000 toward the $58 million on its Public Finance Corp. bonds, though it managed to pay nearly $500 million in other debt payments due on Aug. 3. The selective default may be a gambit because Puerto Rican residents, who are owed much of the overdue payment via credit unions, are unlikely to pursue the legal remedies that litigious hedge funds would be expected to aggressively undertake.

The island’s economy is buckling under a staggering $72 billion debt. In June, Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla urged investors to renegotiate the terms of repayment, calling the debt “unpayable.” But hedge fund investors, who bought up Puerto Rico’s distressed debt, are demanding austerity measures that would exact a toll on the public. And they have rejected proposals to restructure the debt, which would reduce their returns on investment but enable the economy to recover.

Megan Carppentier: Republicans have breathed political life into their very own Trump-enstein

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is little more than a walking, talking conservative blog comment section: he is the seething, narcissistic id of a political class which decries any legitimate claims of unequal or discriminatory treatment by non-white heterosexual men (including rape victims, African Americans and LGBT people) while claiming to be the true victims of, well, everything.

Trump is every profane Facebook commenter who calls women “cunts” while denying the existence of sexism; he’s that guy on Twitter who replies to strangers using #BlackLivesMatter to demand they discuss black-on-black crime.

But, Republicans, Donald Trump is not a witch – he’s you.

Marion Nestle: Coca-Cola says its drinks don’t cause obesity. Science says otherwise

These days, you almost have to feel sorry for soda companies. Sales of sugar-sweetened and diet drinks have been falling for a decade in the United States, and a new Gallup Poll says 60% of Americans are trying to avoid drinking soda. In attempts to reverse these trends and deflect concerns about the health effects of sugary drinks, the soda industry invokes elements of the tobacco industry’s classic playbook: cast doubt on the science, discredit critics, invoke nanny statism and attribute obesity to personal irresponsibility.

Casting doubt on the science is especially important to soda makers. Overwhelming evidence links habitual consumption of sugary drinks to poor health. So many studies have identified sodas as key contributors to chronic health conditions – most notably obesity, type-2 diabetes and coronary artery disease – that the first thing anyone trying to stay healthy should do is to stop drinking them.

Soda companies know this. For at least the last 10 years, Coca-Cola’s annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission have listed obesity and its health consequences as the single greatest threat to the company profits. The industry counters this threat with intensive marketing, lobbying and millions of dollars poured into fighting campaigns to tax or cap the size of sugary drinks.

But it is also pours millions into convincing researchers and health professionals to view sodas as benign.

More than five years after the passage of Dodd-Frank the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finally issued rules on disclosure of CEO pay last week. The financial reform law required that corporations make public the ratio of CEO pay to the pay of a typical worker at the company. Corporate lobbyists have spent the last five years complaining that this disclosure would impose an enormous burden. After much delay, the SEC finally decided to carry through with the requirements of the law and issued specific rules for the disclosure.

This is likely to provide useful information for people interested in trends in inequality, but it does not directly address the issue. At most it will serve to provide some degree of embarrassment to the companies where this ratio is most out of line. It’s worth thinking more carefully about why CEO pay got so ridiculous and how it can be reined it.

The most obvious story is that there is no effective check on CEO pay. While most workers have bosses who don’t want to pay them a nickel more than they have to, CEOs don’t live in that world. The pay of CEOs is determined by corporate directors who decide their compensation package.

Mark Morford: Coca-Cola Asks: How Stupid Are You, Really?

It’s a pertinent question, sadly: Just how dumb are you, average American? How gullible, how blindly trusting of corporate double-speak, of murky science, the idea that companies famous for making drinks that burn rust off your car really care about your health?

If you’re the Coca-Cola company (or the NRA, or Monsanto, or RJ Reynolds, or Taco Bell, et al), the answer is: Very. You are very stupid. Still. Now and forever. They are counting on it.

Here’s a big story from the NYT not long back, re-confirming a whole raft of studies that point to one rather significant truth, one known to nutritionists and educated fitness gurus for years: While exercise – regular, vigorous, addictive, sweaty, heart-racing, OMG take an Instagram of me exercise – is wildly essential for a whole range of human happy, it’s not actually the key to weight loss.

For that, it’s all about the food. Portion control, better choices, minimal processing, real ingredients. It’s about dramatically reducing the garbage, the chemicals, the excess sugar, the oversized portions, the eating until you’re “stuffed.”

Tom Englehardt: Where Did the Antiwar Movement Go?

(Or What It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One Notices)

Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I’m not likely to forget even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy.  It involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only seemed to come closer as time passed.

My best guess: it was the summer of 1969. I had dropped out of graduate school where I had been studying to become a China scholar and was then working as a “movement” printer — that is, in a print shop that produced radical literature, strike posters, and other materials for activists.  It was, of course, “the Sixties,” though I didn’t know it then.  Still, I had somehow been swept into a new world remarkably unrelated to my expected life trajectory — and a large part of the reason for that was the Vietnam War. [..]

Admittedly, American children can no longer catch the twenty-first-century equivalents of the movies of my childhood.  Such films couldn’t be made.  After all, few are the movies that are likely to end with the Marines advancing amid a pile of nonwhite bodies, the wagon train heading for the horizon, or the cowboy galloping off on his horse with his girl.  Think of this as onscreen evidence of American imperial decline.

In the badlands and backlands of the planet, however, the spectacle of slaughter never ends, even if the only Americans watching are sometimes unnerved drone video analysts.  Could there be a sadder tale of a demobilized citizenry than that?

The contrast between the Republican disarray and the continued economic growth has rekindled a celebratory sense among Democrats. President Obama heads into his last months in office having, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s formulation, “failed to fail” the way market fundamentalists predicted. He notes that Obama’s jobs record stacks up with that of Reagan’s “Morning in America” that conservatives tout as the gold standard. The jobs report also strengthened pressure on the Federal Reserve to begin raising interest rates – slowly and cautiously – around September. That too would signal that the economy has finally recovered and its time to unwind emergency measures.

But what is roiling American politics is the simple reality that most Americans are a long way from celebrating a recovery that most haven’t enjoyed. In area after area, this economy is failing Americans. [..]

The reality is that the rules have been rigged. The very structures of this economy – from its trade and tax policies to its corporate governance to the assault on workers to the starvation of public investment in everything from decent schools to modern infrastructure – are skewed to favor profits over wages, the few over the many. This won’t get changed by politics as usual. Getting the growth we need for full employment and for lifting people into the middle class will require fundamental reforms. And, as Sanders noted, that is the debate that Republicans failed to address. Their circus is drawing a big crowd, but the show appalls.

Robert Reich: The Outrageous Ascent of CEO Pay

The Securities and Exchange Commission just ruled that large publicly held corporations must disclose the ratios of the pay of their top CEOs to the pay of their median workers.

About time.

For the last thirty years almost all incentives operating on American corporations have resulted in lower pay for average workers and higher pay for CEOs and other top executives.

Consider that in 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers.

Now, the ratio is over 300 to 1.

Not only has CEO pay exploded, so has the pay of top executives just below them.

Robert Kuttner: Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, And the Power of Disruption

It was a good week for disruptive innovation. Three protestors affiliated with Black Lives Matter shut down Bernie Sanders yet again, this time at a Seattle rally Saturday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump escalated his disruptive impact on the Republican presidential field, with a post-debate remark implying that Fox reporter Megyn Kelly was menstruating when she asked him provocative questions, fittingly, about his coarse put-downs of women.

The two forms of disruption invite comparison.

BLM is disrupting the most progressive candidate in the Democratic field. Why? Because in the year since the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the issue of systemic violence against blacks has still not broken through to become a first-tier issue, even among liberals.  [..]

Trump is a caricature of things that more mannered Republicans have been getting away with for years. He smokes out what the Republicans really stand for. No wonder they are worried. “An out of control car driving through a crowd of Republicans.”

Trump isn’t nice. Neither is Black Lives Matter. The Democrats should be grateful for the form of creative disruption being visited upon them.

Do black lives matter to the Republican Party?

The answer was a resounding no if the Thursday night Republican primary debate on Fox News accurately reflected their views.

As Americans across the nation have been talking about the one-year anniversary of the killing of Mike Brown this weekend – which brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront of the national political consciousness over the past year – Fox News dedicated less than two minutes out of a two-hour political debate to questions about police violence, racism or any of the ways black America has been undeniably and uniquely under attack in modern society. [..]

No, black lives certainly didn’t matter last night. But to the Republicans and Fox News, neither did the lives of women, immigrants, homosexuals, or transgender soldiers. All Americans should be offended at how limited an idea of America came across in a major party debate, and that the frontrunner, Donald Trump, said we are a nation which “can’t do anything right.”

Megan Carpentier: Medical records must stay private – even for prospective presidents

The cyclical focus on each presidential candidate’s medical records – which has begun in earnest with Hillary Clinton this week and extended to Jeb Bush’s diet – is a political charade designed to allow their opponents to mine for political cudgels what in any other circumstance would be appropriately confidential medical records. But electing a president who later dies in office or becomes physically incapable of serving in the role is an entirely possible and provided-for (if not predictable) circumstance of the US political system, and no amount of listing candidates’ colonoscopy results will prevent it. [..]

The calls for candidates to release their medical records aren’t an attempt to assure the American people that the candidate will survive a four-year term if elected – no one can guarantee that. But it is an opportunity for a would-be president’s opponents and detractors to dig through the most intimate details of his or her life in order to take advantage of existing stigmas under the guise of transparency.

George Zornick: Rand Paul’s Eye-Roll Marked the End of the 9/11 Era

The attacks of 2001 are no longer the potent GOP rallying point they once were.

 Republicans didn’t bother to hold their 2004 nominating convention in some far-flung purple state where every county was going to count that November. The Bush-Cheney campaign, which started running advertisements featuring a charred World Trade Center literally one day after the president announced his re-election bid, had a much more potent idea. The RNC happened only three miles from Ground Zero, at Madison Square Garden. Dick Cheney thundered from the stage that “if the killers of September 11 thought we had lost the will to defend our freedom, they did not know America and they did not know George W. Bush.”

Fast forward twelve years to Thursday’s Republican presidential debate, the first of the 2016 campaign. Chris Christie was eager to capitalize on his experience as a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey following the attacks, delivering a saccharine line about how “the hugs that I remember are the hugs that I gave to the families who lost their people on September 11th.”

Senator Rand Paul, at that moment engaged with Christie on a debate about mass surveillance, then gave what we’ll unilaterally dub as the most monumental eyeroll in presidential debate history

Flipping over to the Daily Show following any political event has become something like American ritual for over a decade now, especially for those of us needing some kind of antidote to the wreckage lying before us on Fox News.

On Thursday night, as the first Republican presidential debate ended and Jon Stewart’s show began – only to disappear from our screens, for ever – things were no different, ritualistically. Next time, though, Fox’s friends will be onscreen unchallenged, and they won’t even have to try.

Stewart and Co couldn’t respond to the first official Republican party debate of course – the show was taped, and is no more – but it offered a fitting commentary anyway.

David Sirota: Hillary sucks up to the middle class: What her TPP flip-flop is really about

In her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has lately promoted herself as a populist defender of the middle class. To that end, she attempted to distance herself last week from a controversial 12-nation trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would set the rules of commerce for roughly 40 percent of the world’s economy.

As with similar business-backed trade pacts, labor unions, environmental groups and public health organizations are warning that the deal could result in job losses, reduced environmental standards, higher prices for medicine and more power for corporations looking to overturn public interest laws. And so, in her quest for Democratic primary votes, Clinton is suddenly trying to cast herself as a critic of the initiative.

“I did not work on TPP,” she said after a meeting with leaders of labor unions who oppose the pact. “I advocated for a multinational trade agreement that would ‘be the gold standard.’ But that was the responsibility of the United States Trade Representative.”

The trouble, of course, is that Clinton’s declaration does not square with the facts

Heather Digby Parton: Fear & loathing at the GOP debates: Behold the the autocratic, xenophobic, war-hungry spectacle of the modern Republican Party

When I woke up yesterday morning I was excited and energized by the prospect of watching the first Republican primary debate. As I wrote here, they’re usually a fun cause for some celebration among political junkies of all stripes, particularly those who fall on the left side of the dial. These particular promised to be especially entertaining, due to the large number of debaters as well as the fact that it was going to feature a Reality TV Star in his first major appearance on the debate stage. Unfortunately, I woke up this morning with a hangover of epic proportions and the feeling that I’d been abducted by aliens and taken to a foreign planet. Let’s just say that spending three hours with Republican politicians and Fox News pundits and anchors wasn’t nearly as much fun as I thought it would be. [..]

These Republicans are running on fear and anger and nothing more. Even their various ways of saying “let’s make America great again” are demoralizing. It’s understandable. They know they are unlikely to win the presidency as long as their angry, fearful, conservative white base insists on insulting everyone who doesn’t look like them but they have no choice but to roll with it.

And the most depressing thing about that, brought home in living color tonight, is that the rest of us won’t have Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to help us through it.