Tag: Punting the Pundits

It’s no secret I consider income inequality the greatest challenge of our time. And whether you’re my age or my teenage son Dante’s, it’s clear: the Internet has become fundamental to solving it. Like electricity in the 1800s, the Internet is now an essential building block of economic opportunity.

It doesn’t just connect us to our friends and family through Skype or Facebook. It links us to job opportunities, critical services, and troves of information. It allows us to check whether our children have homework, take advantage of new education tools, or build a business. More and more each day, the Internet — like electricity — is turning into a basic utility. And this critical resource should be treated as such.

All this points to one conclusion: we must have affordable broadband.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: A New Rule, and a Brave Official, Gain Allies Against Wall Street

A lone bureaucrat has been fighting the financial industry for years, on an issue that stands at the intersection of two national challenges: investment regulation and retirement security. Along the way she’s collected some new and interesting allies. Is that a sign of things to come?

Phyllis Borzi is Assistant Labor Secretary for Employee Benefits Security. By background she is an attorney, a professor and an expert on retirement issues and employee benefits. When she was the pension and employee benefits counsel for a House subcommittee, Borzi became known as the “mother of COBRA.” That’s the provision that promotes the continuation of employer-based health care coverage when employment ends.

Borzi has been fighting to extend something called the “fiduciary rule” to every financial advisor who handles retirement accounts, requiring them to act in the best interests of their clients. That’s a change from the current regulatory situation. As Robert Hiltonsmith of Demos told The Huffington Post, advisors currently “work in their firms’ best interest, which is not yours.”

John Mueller and Mark Stewart: Terrorism poses no existential threat to America. We must stop pretending otherwise

One of the most unchallenged, zany assertions during the war on terror has been that terrorists present an existential threat to the United States, the modern state and civilization itself. This is important because the overwrought expression, if accepted as valid, could close off evaluation of security efforts. For example, no defense of civil liberties is likely to be terribly effective if people believe the threat from terrorism to be existential.

At long last, President Barack Obama and other top officials are beginning to back away from this absurd position. This much overdue development may not last, however. Extravagant alarmism about the pathological but self-destructive Islamic State (Isis) in areas of Syria and Iraq may cause us to backslide. [..]

It is astounding that these utterances – “blindingly obvious” as security specialist Bruce Schneier puts it – appear to mark the first time any officials in the United States have had the notion and the courage to say so in public.

Jessica Valenti: Women’s bodies can’t perform magic. Someone please tell Republicans

Do Republican men think women are mythical creatures, like unicorns or fairies? It’s the only explanation I can come up with to make sense of the party’s continued insistence that women’s bodies can perform feats of absolute magic.

On Monday, during testimony on a state bill that would ban doctors from using telemedicine to prescribe abortion pills, Idaho Republican Rep Vito Barbieri asked a testifying physician if pregnant women could swallow small cameras so that doctors could “determine what the situation is“.

Dr Julie Madsen – who I imagine must have been suppressing the eyeroll of a lifetime – responded that it couldn’t be done because “when you swallow a pill it would not end up in the vagina.”

Barbieri now says the question was a rhetorical one (that’s the ticket!) but his gaffe reminds us all about just how little Republicans understand about women’s bodies. Though, again, I’m honored that they think we hold such awesome abilities. After all, who could forget then-Rep Todd Akin’s assertion that women who were “legitimately” raped would not get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Like a superpower! Or Rush Limbaugh’s belief that women’s bodies are so all-powerful that we actually require a birth control pill every time we have sex to keep from getting pregnant. But it doesn’t stop there.

It appears that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin believes he can shrug his way into being the Republican nominee for president. Journalists are quickly learning that if you ask Walker to comment on any of the issues that are riling up the fundamentalists, birthers or other right wingnuts these days, Walker will be respond with his impression of a popular emoticon: ¯(ツ)/¯. [..]

This entire situation is so comical that it’s hard to imagine it’s doing anything but hurting Walker’s chances. Yet there is actually a method to his madness. While Democratic-leaning voters can be driven to distraction by politicians who refuse to take a side on contentious issues like this, the dodge-and-weave actually plays right into the hands of Republican voters, both of the Tea Party variety and the people who don’t care for all that culture war nonsense and just want lower taxes on rich people.

Amy Davidson: Why ‘Citizenfour’ Deserved Its Oscar

“Thank you to Edward Snowden for his courage,” Laura Poitras, the director of “Citizenfour,” said as she accepted the Oscar for best documentary. Neil Patrick Harris, the award show’s host, noted that Snowden couldn’t be there “for some treason.” Treason isn’t one of the crimes Snowden has been charged with-the government wants to prosecute him under the Espionage Act-but both the praise and the joke point to why this Snowden Oscar mattered. What he did was useful, and dangerous. [..]

What the country still has to work out is whether the Snowden documents were simply revealing or actually transformative. That’s the question about a good movie, too, though one shouldn’t underestimate the value of revelation, or truth, alone. Snowden has his silent moments. There is a scene, when he is getting ready to sneak out of the hotel in Hong Kong, after he has revealed himself, in which he stands in front of a mirror. Wearing a black shirt, he has put in contact lenses, shaved (after debating the amount of stubble that will make him look least like the pictures now playing on television), and, with a handful of foam, tries to slick back his hair. Watching it again on Oscar weekend, one thinks of Poitras and her team, and all the other filmmakers and actors, getting ready to step out. Snowden tries, and expects, to look different. When he sees that he doesn’t-his hair won’t stay down-he crumples a little, and looks as scared as anyone. There is no magic mantle of power. But outside the hotel room, things really did change.

Michelle Chen: What Happens if You Refuse to Pay Off Your Student Debt?

Every day, people who struggled to finance their educational advancement slip deeper into a financial mudslide on a mountain of student debt. For borrowers who collectively hold this burden of about $1 trillion nationwide, the student loan has become a ball and chain that restrains them from starting their careers, or even paying rent, as their wages are sucked into a financial vortex. But what if you just decided to not write that check this month? A small group of people have chosen to do just that, hoping to start a movement to break out of the debt cycle-or at least to bang against the walls of student-debtor’s prison.

The debt strike, which launched Monday as part of the Debt Collective campaign, is led by the Corinthian Fifteen, former students of Everest College-part of the scandal – ridden for – profit Corinthian college chain. They’re undertaking financial civil disobedience against the private lending industry, demanding cancellation of federal student debts and voicing dissatisfaction with piecemeal debt relief programs. The actual financial impact of their campaign is negligible, but for the former students, this collective action is a way for them to reassert their economic sovereignty:

We could go on about the inherent contradiction of “Downton Abbey” as the biggest hit on public television – that a series about a fading, genteel (and Gentile) British aristocracy and its servants dominates the schedule of a broadcasting service mandated to promote diversity and give a voice to the underrepresented. And sometime soon, we will talk about precisely that and more. [..]

But for now, let’s talk instead about Congressman Aaron Schock, Republican from Illinois. You’ve heard about how his interior decorator pal, proprietor of a company called Euro Trash, redecorated Schock’s new Capitol Hill office in high “Downton Abbey” style – which is more than somewhat ironic because, as Josh Israel at ThinkProgress pointed out, “Schock has repeatedly voted against federal funding for public broadcasting, voting to defund National Public Radio and for a Paul Ryan budget that zeroed out all funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” But even more important, Schock’s expensive tastes and how he spends money to make money for his party tells a sad story of the state of Congress and campaign fundraising.

Shefali Sharma: Big Meat Lobby to Attack New Dietary Guidelines

The North American Meat Institute, national beef and pork associations and other corporate lobbies of the powerful meat industry are seething at the historic new scientific report by the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. Why historic? Because the committee takes on the meat industry head to head in a scientific report intended to help set five year national guidelines on nutrition and because for the first time, the recommendations take into account the environmental footprint of our food (production) choices. If these recommendations are accepted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the report will not only help set national nutrition policy but will also likely impact the $16 billion school lunch program. The USDA and HHS will jointly release the National Dietary Guidelines later this year.

Based on their research, the Committee came to the conclusion that, “a healthy dietary pattern is higher in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low- or non-fat dairy, seafood, legumes, and nuts; moderate in alcohol (among adults); lower in red and processed meat; and low in sugar sweetened foods and drinks and refined grains.” [..]

Now, the powerful lobby is planning an all-out offensive in Congress to prevent USDA and HHS from adopting these recommendations as the national guidelines. Citizens can comment on the report until April 8th-the meat lobby hopes to extend this period to 120 days rather than the 45 typically allotted.

Jared Bernstein: Tax Cuts Are Palliatives, Not Cures

I don’t think you need a crystal ball to predict that whoever runs for president in 2016 will have some sort of tax cut at the heart of their platform, probably targeted at the middle class, and I’m talking both Democrats and Republicans. It will likely be pitched as a response to middle-class wage and income stagnation, and as such, I certainly understand the motivation. The disconnect between growth and middle-class prosperity is the motivation for my own tax cut proposal new book, The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity, hopefully out within the next few months.

But I actually say little about tax cuts as a solution to the fundamental disconnect, for reasons Larry Mishel articulated effectively in an NYT op-ed yesterday: “What has hurt workers’ paychecks is not what the government takes out, but what their employers no longer put in — a dynamic that tax cuts cannot eliminate.”

Thor Benson: Raising the Alarm Over Devices That Let Police Snoop Into Our Homes

Dozens of law enforcement agencies in the United States have been outfitted with Doppler radar devices that allow officers to observe people through the walls of their own homes-raising concerns that the devices can be used to violate Fourth Amendment protections.

One popular handheld version of the technology is called the Range-R, produced by New York-based defense contractor L-3 Communications. L-3’s marketing materials promise that the Range-R is sensitive enough to detect a breathing (but otherwise motionless) person on the other side of a 12-inch-thick brick or concrete wall 50 feet away. [..]

Some privacy advocates believe the police use of a Range-R or similar device without a warrant amounts to “unreasonable searches and seizures,” a violation that the Fourth Amendment is meant to protect against. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001, in Kyllo v. United States, that when the government “uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment ‘search,’ and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.” Later, in the 2013 case Florida v. Jardines, the generally right-wing Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that at the Fourth Amendment’s “very core” is “the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.”

Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, told Truthdig that “there are circumstances when [the device] could be used consistent with the Fourth Amendment. But, he added, “it is absolutely crucial that law enforcement has a proper warrant and limits its use to only gathering information permitted by that warrant. It’s not that hard [to obtain the warrant] if police have probable cause and have a good reason to conduct the search.”

Last week the nation was treated to the sad and embarrassing spectacle of Jeb Bush, mollycoddled scion to an empire of failure, proclaiming that “‘m my own man.” Here’s a simple rule of thumb: Anyone who has to say he’s his own man, or woman, isn’t. The 62-year-old Mr. Bush has been coasting on his family’s power and privilege since he was a weed-smoking, Steppenwolf-listening prep school student in the sixties.

From prep school slacker to presidential frontrunner: Now that’s a “Magic Carpet Ride.”

Sadder still was the list of Jeb’s advisors published this week, a list which included – and was tarnished by – the genuinely execrable Paul Wolfowitz. [..]

When it comes to the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz was – in the words of another Steppenwolf song – “The Pusher.” His promotion of that conflict was the defining act of his career, and it leaves him a failure in every conceivable intellectual or moral application of that word.

Paul Buchheit: The Corporate Debt to Society: $10,000 Per Household, Per Year

That estimate is based on facts, not the conservative-style emotion that might deny the responsibility for any debt to the American people. Wealth redistribution to big business has occurred in a variety of ways to be explained below. And there’s some precedent for paying Americans for the use of their commonly-held resources. The Alaska Permanent Fund has been in effect, and widely popular, for over thirty years.

Over half (57 percent) of basic research is paid for by our tax dollars. Corporations don’t want to pay for this. It’s easier for them to allow public money to do the startup work, and then, when profit potential is evident, to take over with applied R&D, often with patents that take the rights away from the rest of us.

All the technology in our phones and computers started this way, and continues to the present day. Pharmaceutical companies have depended on the National Institute of Health. The quadrillion-dollar trading capacity of the financial industry was made possible by government-funded Internet technology, and the big banks survived because of a $7 trillion public bailout.

A particularly outrageous example of a company turning public research into a patent-protected private monopoly is the sordid tale (here) of the drug company Gilead Sciences.

Zoë Carpenter: One Thing Republicans and Democrats Are Starting to Work Together On (and It’s Not War)

Could this be the year that lawmakers really begin to dismantle the system of mass incarceration that they have been building for decades? It seems conceivable, thanks to a surge in interest from elected officials at the state and federal level, as well as an “unlikely” coalition of left- and right-wing groups that announced its formation on Thursday. The Coalition for Public Safety, as the group is called, includes organizations like the Center for American Progress and the American Civil Liberties Union along with Tea Party-aligned FreedomWorks and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. It’s backed, in part, by Koch Industries. [..]

Where, exactly, is that wind blowing? The transpartisan alliances springing up around criminal justice reform agree on the problem: the United States locks up too many people for too long. But the allies have varying explanations for why that’s a problem, and what its origins are. For groups like Americans for Tax Reform and libertarians like Rand Paul, lowering prison populations is a means of shrinking government; they have obvious differences with those on the left who believe significant investment in social services and gun safety laws would make communities safer. So to what extent do they agree on solutions, and where is the greatest potential for progress?

The second-to-last witness in the government’s case against Jeffrey Sterling, FBI Special Agent Ashley Hunt, introduced a number of things she had collected over the course of her 7.5 year investigation into James Risen’s chapter on Operation Merlin. That included a few things – most notably two lines from Risen’s credit card records from 2004 – that in no conceivable way incriminated Sterling. [..]

But don’t worry, Eric Holder generously decided not to call Risen to testify against Sterling after having hounded him – in this and the warrantless wiretap investigation – for 6 years already, both Jack Goldsmith and Ben Wittes insist.

Both men seem to vastly underestimate how DOJ’s actions in the last decade impact journalism. And both men seem to misunderstand what just happened in the Jeffrey Sterling trial, where DOJ succeeded in exposing a man to 40 years in prison, based largely on metadata, without even having the key pieces of evidence at issue in the case (almost certainly because of CIA’s doing, not Sterling’s).

Joe Conason: Why Jeb Bush Can’t Escape Dubya’s Dubious Legacy

Being singled out as “the smart brother” in an American political and financial dynasty like the Bush family must be a heavy load. But Jeb Bush went far to dispel that burdensome description with his debut address on foreign policy. With its melange of mispronunciations, mistakes and casually ignorant utterances, Bush’s speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs instantly reminded listeners of the not-so-smart brother-the one who already became the second Bush president.

Such moments of recognition and remembrance are not auspicious for brother Jeb, whose burgeoning presidential ambition depends on persuading voters that he is emphatically not his brother George W.-or as he put it in an ad-libbed line: “I am my own man.” But his Chicago outing offered little to reassure Americans wary of the ruinous foreign policy record of the Bush-Cheney administration (an electoral subset that includes almost everyone).

David Sirota: Tax Fairness Could Mean More Resources

Roads are crumbling, bridges require repairs, schools need upgrades and public pension systems remain underfunded. How can states and cities find the money to address any of these problems? One way could be through their tax codes.

According to a new report, if the rich paid the same state and local tax rate as the middle class, states and cities would have hundreds of billions of dollars more a year in public revenue.  [..]

That preceded the new report from the left-leaning groups Good Jobs First and the Keystone Research Center which finds that if tax laws were changed to compel the highest income earners to pay the same rate as everyone else, states and localities would rake in up to $128 billion a year in new revenue. If just the top 1 percent of earners were compelled to pay the typical middle-class tax rate, the report says the change would raise more than $68 billion in new annual revenues.

Sophia Cope and Jeremy Gillula: AT&T is putting a price on privacy. That is outrageous

Poor customers should not have to choose between being spied on and forking over money

Imagine if the postal service started offering discount shipping in exchange for permission to scan every letter you receive and then target you with junk mail based on the contents of your personal mail.

One of the largest telecommunications companies in America, AT&T, is doing just that for customers of its super-fast gigabit broadband service, which is rolling out in select cities. Though a few months ago, it dropped the use of an undeletable “supercookie” that tracked subscribers’ web browsing activity, AT&T reportedly plans to track and monetize its broadband customers’ internet activity – “webpages you visit, the time you spend on each, the links or ads you see and follow, and the search terms you enter” – to deliver targeted “ads online, via email or through direct mail“. [..]

What if customers do not want to be spied on by their internet service providers? AT&T allows gigabit service subscribers to opt out – for a $29 fee per month.

But charging extra for privacy has significant social justice implications: broadband access is hard to come by for many communities, and subscribers on the lower rungs of the income ladder may not be able to afford an additional fee to protect their privacy. Privacy should not be reserved for the rich, and the poor should not be forced to choose between broadband, an essential tool in modern life, and their privacy.

Recently, Greece’s radical leftist party Syriza claimed victory in their national election. The party vowed to break ties with the European Central bank and roll back the EU’s neoliberal economic agenda. True to their word, they are already implementing some of those changes. From the birthplace of democracy, excitement is spreading across Europe and revitalizing the hope that real change may still be possible through the electoral arena.

The news from Greece also energized progressive circles in America. For many, the question arises: Can this rebirth of democracy happen in the U.S.? After Obama’s absolute betrayal of his promised “hope and change”, the Occupy Movement began in lower Manhattan as a response to the rigged system that has been creating economic inequality approaching the level of feudalism.

This was an awakening to a broken system of checks and balances and it pushed people outside of the electoral arena to find solutions to these problems. Yet, by 2012, with massive coordinated police brutality around the nation, the demise of Occupy became apparent and the movement lost momentum. Now it seems that the Greeks are doing what it appears Occupy intended to do and failed. What about Americans?

Lawrence Lessig: Something Is Going Right: Net Neutrality and the FCC

Imagine that when you plugged something into an electrical outlet, the outlet queried the device and demanded identification. Was it a Sony TV or Panasonic? Was it a Dell or an Apple? And then based on that identification, different levels of quality or reliability of electricity were served at different prices. No doubt such a regime would benefit utility companies. I’ve not yet met anyone who thinks it would benefit innovation. Thus, it would be something possibly good for network providers, but plainly bad for the market generally.  [..]

Defenders of the status quo are now frantically filling the tubes with FUD about the FCC’s decision. But as you work through this FUD, keep one basic fact clear. Relative to practically every other comparable nation, America’s broadband sucks. Seriously, sucks. Even France beats us in cost and quality. And as the genius Yochai Benkler established in the monumental report by the Berkman Center commissioned by the FCC after Obama was elected, the single most important reason our broadband sucks is the sell-out regulatory strategy of the prior decade at least. Nations that imposed neutrality-like rules beat us, in cost and quality. They have more competition, faster growth, and better access. So for anyone remotely connected to reality-based policy making, it has been clear forever that America made a wrong turn in its regulatory strategy, and that we needed an about face.

Peter van Buren: War Porn

In the age of the all-volunteer military and an endless stream of war zone losses and ties, it can be hard to keep Homeland enthusiasm up for perpetual war. After all, you don’t get a 9/11 every year to refresh those images of the barbarians at the airport departure gates. In the meantime, Americans are clearly finding it difficult to remain emotionally roiled up about our confusing wars in Syria and Iraq, the sputtering one in Afghanistan, and various raids, drone attacks, and minor conflicts elsewhere.

Fortunately, we have just the ticket, one that has been punched again and again for close to a century: Hollywood war movies (to which the Pentagon is always eager to lend a helping hand).American Sniper, which started out with the celebratory tagline “the most lethal sniper in U.S. history” and now has the tagline “the most successful war movie of all time,” is just the latest in a long line of films that have kept Americans on their war game. Think of them as war porn, meant to leave us perpetually hyped up. Now, grab some popcorn and settle back to enjoy the show.

Norman Lear: Don’t You Just Love People Who Love America?

I mean, how rare is that! Can we ever thank enough the red, white and blue patriots — the true America-lovers — like Rudy Giuliani for pointing the finger at those, like our president, who so clearly don’t love it. [..]

Anyway, the president may use the English language better, but it’s clear he wasn’t brought up as well as Giuliani was brought up, through love of America. And I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but I guess Rudy was brought up better than me, too. See, I can’t really tell when someone doesn’t love America. Unless I catch them stomping on a flag pin. Or on another American because he doesn’t love America enough.

Going after history classes that don’t teach “American Exceptionalism” is anything but patriotic

Oklahoma House Republicans on the Common Education Committee voted on Tuesday to ban advanced placement US history courses, because they think it shows “what is bad about America”. If I were Oklahoma, I’d want to forget about “what is bad about” American history, too, especially in my corner of it! [..]

Just last month, Education Week gave the state a D- on education and ranked it 48th in the nation. Clearly, Oklahoma could move up from being third dumbest, fourth most incarcerated, and sixth fattest state if it just ignored its unpleasant history, right?

Nationally, if history teachers were to banish everything “bad” about America from our classrooms [..] and to instead only teach about what was truly exceptional about America, what would be left to give lessons on?

Neil Armstrong, Toni Morrison, and the snuggie? [..]

This latest anti-education effort, which will only punish really smart kids (who are the ones who want to earn college history credits while in a high school AP course) came about because Republicans think the coursework doesn’t shill for “American exceptionalism” enough. But why would Oklahoma Republicans – who embrace education “options” – want to rob all of their brightest high school seniors of the choice to inexpensively earn college history credits just because their history lessons may be critical and not necessarily full of pro-American propaganda?

Ted Rall: Obama Destroyed Libya

Barack Obama destroyed Libya.

What he did to Libya is as bad as what Bush did to Iraq and Afghanistan. He doesn’t deserve a historical pass.

When Obama took office in 2009, Libya was under the clutches of longtime dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. But things were looking up.

Bush and Gaddafi had cut a deal to lift Western trade sanctions in exchange for Libya acknowledging and paying restitution for its role in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In a rare triumph for Bush, Libya also agreed to give up its nuclear weapons research program. Libyan and Western analysts anticipated that Gaddafi’s dictatorship would be forced to accept liberal reforms, perhaps even free elections and rival political parties, in order to attract Western investment.

Libya in 2009 was prosperous. As citizens of a major oil – and natural gas-exporting nation, Libyans enjoyed high salaries, low living expenses, generous social benefits, not to mention law and order. It seems like a mirage today.

Cenk Uygur: You Know You’re a Bigot When…

You know you’re a bigot when you can’t take out the word “Muslim” from a sentence you stated and replace it with “Jew” and still have it be socially acceptable. Let’s start out nice and easy. A sentence I get with great regularity:

“You’re a Muslim apologist.”

Ok, let’s try our simple test here:

“You’re a Jew apologist.”

Wow, that sounded ugly, didn’t it? Wait, let’s be fair and phrase it slightly differently and see if it gets any better:

“You’re an apologist for the Jews.”

Nope, that wasn’t any better.

So, why are you obviously bigoted when you say it about Jewish people and not equally bigoted when you say it about Muslims? It’s partly because there are very few people in America ready to stick up for Muslims. That’s, ironically, because they will be called Muslim apologists.

Robert L, Borosage: The Case for a Populist Challenger in the Democratic Primaries

A raft of reasons are floated for why someone should challenge the prohibitive favorite, Hillary Clinton, in the Democratic primaries, most of them spurious. Yes, polls show Democrats want a contest, not a coronation for their presidential nomination. The press and talking heads also yearn for a contest, if only to have something to cover. But this doesn’t justify a run.

Contrary to many pundits, Hillary (first name used as shorthand to distinguish her from her husband) doesn’t need a primary contest to get her campaign in shape. She’s already been central to three presidential campaigns, as underdog, incumbent and, disastrously, overwhelming favorite. She has every high-priced operative in the party. If she doesn’t know how to put together a campaign by now, an upstart challenger won’t help. [..]

There are two compelling reasons for a populist challenger to get in the Democratic primaries: a fundamental debate about the direction of the country has only just begun and must be expanded, and a growing populist movement would benefit from a populist challenge to Hillary.

The global newswire Associated Press announced this January that it will no longer refer to the app-based cab-hail service Uber as “ride-sharing.”

The move follows criticism that services like Uber and Lyft are very far from sharing; to the contrary, they are taking more than they’re giving.

That’s certainly the view of Bhairavi Desai co-founder and director of the National Taxi Worker’s Alliance. Desai told GRITtv this week that while it characterizes itself as an innovative disruption, Uber’s more like Walmart on wheels. They’re not democratizing the workplace, she said, they’re de-regulating it or rather, re-regulating it, to the benefit of app-owning bosses and the detriment of drivers.

Jessica Valenti: Why is bearing children seen as more important than surviving pregnancy?

There is nothing selfish about wanting to live – it’s the most simple, instinctive, human desire there is. Still, most of us – men and women – feel we would lay down our lives for our children; there’s an instinct in that, too.

But there is something about the spectacle of anti-abortion advocates celebrating women who die trying to save their unborn babies that feels a bit too gleeful – they’re shockingly unabashed in their pushing the idea that the lives of adult women aren’t nearly as important as their ability to bring children into the world. [..]

Why must the best mothers be dead mothers?

I am scared for women who have been taught to believe that the most important, beautiful thing they can do is perish. There are already so many ways in which women jump through hoops in order not to exist: we silence ourselves, making sure we’re quiet and unobtrusive; some of us starve ourselves, getting smaller and smaller as to not take up too much space. And this noble disappearing act has become so commonplace that there mere act of being alive – making our voices heard, taking up space, choosing to live – is seen as a disruption of natural order.

Lindy West: Could we please not forgive Sarah Palin? She is an unrepentant nightmare

Conservative pundit Sarah Palin made a cute, sporting little cameo on Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary show this weekend – winking at her own disastrous 2008 vice-presidential run, which was memorably skewered at the time by SNL’s Tina Fey. In the bit on Sunday night, Palin piped up during a Q&A with Jerry Seinfeld to ask, “Just curious, Jerry, how much do you think [SNL producer] Lorne Michaels would pay me if I were to run in 2016 with Donald Trump as my running mate?”

“I don’t think there’s a number too big,” Seinfeld replied.

Har har. Cute! See, Fey’s Palin impression was a big hit for the show back in 2008, got marvellous ratings, and will long be remembered as a seminal SNL moment – but not, as one might think, because Sarah Palin was some wacky, harmless goofball destined to be a delightful footnote in the annals of election history. No. Nope.

No. People loved those Tina Fey/Sarah Palin sketches because Sarah Palin is a terrifying, anti-intellectual, anti-choice, gun-toting ideologue who came within a hair’s breadth of one of the most powerful political offices in the world, a dystopian potentiality that could have tangibly affected the lives of literally billions of people. Watching her being flawlessly lampooned – her hypocrisy and pomposity laid bare with a clarity that only comedy can achieve – felt like a gossamer lifeline of hope and sanity to which we could all cling.

In short: Fey’s Palin impression wasn’t important because Palin is trivial and amusing. It was important because Palin is anything but. And we need to remember that.

Jess Zimmerman: Everything you need to know about the social media you’re too old to use

I’m going to assume that you already know how to use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram: I’m sure you laughed at the commercial with the old lady and her “Facebook wall”; television has made the existence of Twitter unavoidable; and Instagram’s no-nipple-or-pubes policy is designed to be friendly for the elderly, like us. But people my age (including me; what the hell’s Yik Yak?) have a habit of dealing with new social networking options by gleefully, defensively declaring our ignorance. We don’t need to do that. Keeping up isn’t that hard – for now.

Suppose that by enacting a particular law we’d increase the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. But almost all that growth would go to the richest 1 percent.

The rest of us could buy some products cheaper than before. But those gains would be offset by losses of jobs and wages.

This is pretty much what “free trade” has brought us over the last two decades.

I used to believe in trade agreements. That was before the wages of most Americans stagnated and a relative few at the top captured just about all the economic gains.

Recent trade agreements have been wins for big corporations and Wall Street, along with their executives and major shareholders. They get better access to foreign markets and billions of consumers.

They also get better protection for their intellectual property — patents, trademarks, and copyrights. And for their overseas factories, equipment, and financial assets.

But those deals haven’t been wins for most Americans.

H. A. Goodman: How Jon Stewart Turned Conservative Lies Into Groundbreaking Comedy and Enlightened a Generation

Jon Stewart is a brilliant comedian, but like all entertainers, he needs material in order to create satire and comedy. The Daily Show isn’t a standup routine, it’s a natural consequence of America’s political culture. After all, when Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly represent patriotism and American exceptionalism, the fodder for laughs is endless.

Stewart’s brand of humor and political analyses has always been based on an amusing look at conservative media’s attempt to shape a national narrative. Insane quotes and odd viewpoints on everything from health care to where Obama was born can be found from conservatives today, and the GOP seems to know exactly what God is thinking and even why the good Lord thinks rape is a “gift.” [..]

If conservatives view Jon Stewart as an irresponsible political satirist, it could be because conservative ideology is often times bizarre. The notion of a Muslim president born in Africa, advocating Shariah law and the destruction of our capitalist system, isn’t just a perfect storyline for a comedian like Stewart. People around the country take this mentality seriously, which makes it even funnier. The Daily Show pounces upon this irrationality in our political system.

Gary Hart: Welcome to the Money Primary

The first presidential primary is underway, not simply because the political press cannot wait but because he or she who signs up the most megabucks wins that primary and is well on the way to a nomination. Step right up and participate–that is if you can write a very large check.

This is the saddest commentary on the state of American “democracy” a concerned citizen can think of. Campaigns cost money, a lot of money. Somewhere between 75% and 90% of that money goes to media advertising, even as media commentators (whose salaries it pays) deplore how mercantile campaigns have become. What’s left over goes to compensate increasingly highly paid “strategists”, consultants, media advisors, time buyers, professional organizers, and so forth.

This is fundamental corruption recognized as such by theorists of the republic since Athens. That corruption is not bribery; it is placing narrow, personal, or special interests ahead of the common good. By that definition, the 21st century American Republic is massively corrupt. The money contributed in the Money Primary buys access and access produces results.