Tag: Punting the Pundits

The Interview may be released after all, but just because a Hollywood studio got hacked doesn’t mean it can censor Twitter, the news media and sites across the web

After a pre-Christmas week full of massive backlash for caving to a vague and unsubstantiated threat by hackers supposedly from North Korea, Sony has reversed course and decided it will allow The Interview to be shown after all – thus all but ending what Senator John McCain absurdly called “the greatest blow to free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime probably”.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s unequivocally good news that North Korea (or whoever hacked Sony) won’t succeed in invoking a ludicrous heckler’s veto over a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen, but there are far greater threats to our freedom of speech here in the United States. For example, Sony itself.

Lost in the will-they-or-won’t-they controversy over Sony’s potential release of The Interview has been the outright viciousness that Sony has unleashed on some of the biggest social-media sites and news outlets in the world. For the past two weeks, the studio has been trying to bully these publishing platforms into stopping the release of newsworthy stories or outright censoring already-public information contained in the hacked emails, despite a clear First Amendment right to the contrary.

Robert Reich: The Government Problem

Some believe the central political issue of our era is the size of the government. They’re wrong. The central issue is whom the government is for.

Consider the new spending bill Congress and the President agreed to a few weeks ago.

It’s not especially large by historic standards. Under the $1.1 trillion measure, government spending doesn’t rise as a percent of the total economy. In fact, if the economy grows as expected, government spending will actually shrink over the next year.

The problem with the legislation is who gets the goodies and who’s stuck with the tab.

For example, it repeals part of the Dodd-Frank Act designed to stop Wall Street from using other peoples’ money to support its gambling addiction, as the Street did before the near-meltdown of 2008.

Tim Arnold: America Has Lost Its Soul

We Americans wave our nation’s flag and crow our national anthem, self-assured, full of pride, assuming our jingoistic clattering will continue to fool the world that we are an honorable nation. Instead, we are exposing ourselves as pretenders to the democratic values our forefathers defined for us.

“America, who are we?” asks Charles Blow in his NY Times op-ed piece: “Are we – or better yet – should we be – a nation that tortures detainees, or targets and kills American citizens with drones, or has broad discretion to spy on the American public.” [..]

Dick Cheney is a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with America today. But he’s not alone, not by far.

Are we the nation who’s “have’s” have established the widest financial gap with the “have not’s” in our country’s recent history, with no end in sight – once again enabled by our congress to make it even wider? The upper 1% now holds more dollars than the lower 42%! Is this really us?

Mike Lux: A Progressive Populism That Works

There is a lot of talk in Democratic party circles about populism (which among Democrats is generally of a more progressive nature) vs centrism. All three terms — progressive, populism, and centrism — are thrown around way too loosely by pundits who rarely know what they are talking about. For some, it all boils down to the differences (stylistically as well as substantively) between Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. For others, it is a debate about whether Democrats should talk about growth or inequality — a recent report from Benenson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker ominously warned that swing voters want the focus to be on growth rather than inequality. Some pundits talk about whether Democrats should be pro-business or more for income distribution.

Even though I happily identify myself as a proud populist progressive, I think these kinds of pundit-driven definitions don’t do much to build a winning message or agenda for either Democrats or the progressive movement. I think we need a populism that doesn’t just repeat old formulas but answers voters’ real concerns about progressive policies. Here’s what I think a winning populist progressive program entails:

Holiday shoppers can help ensure their gifts are produced under fair conditions

Yuletide lore tells us that the clothing and toys that appear under the Christmas tree are made by cheerful elves in Santa’s workshop. While they are likely to be made far away, of course we know that the gifts don’t come from the North Pole.

Wherever they are stationed, Santa’s real-life helpers deserve safe and fair working conditions. And Christmas shoppers have an opportunity to help.

Over the last two years, anti-sweatshop campaigners have focused on the plight of garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia. In the wake of the horrific collapse of Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2012, which killed 1,100 employees of several garment factories, labor advocates have been pushing for safeguards that would avoid similar tragedies. Similarly, after a series of national strikes by garment workers in Cambodia, European manufacturers have pledged to raise wages. Activists are now calling on U.S. brands to do the same.

In the past two decades, labor rights advocates have helped enact reforms to curtail child labor and improve working conditions in the garment industry. However, there is still a long way to go.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Change in Cuba policy is a nod to reality

President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with Cuba is a decision to recognize reality. For 50 years, the United States has pursued a policy that has failed. The embargo hurt the Cuban people it claimed to help and bolstered the regime that it intended to undermine. The effort to isolate Cuba has been increasingly isolating the United States both in the hemisphere and across the world. And as the president concluded, “I do not believe we can keep doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result.” To believe that would be, as Albert Einstein taught us, the very definition of insanity.

The best evidence that this change was long overdue was provided by the hysterical and incoherent reactions of its opponents. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a potential presidential contender, embraced the initiative, making an indisputable comment about the embargo: “If the goal is regime change, it sure doesn’t seem to be working.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) replied that Paul “has no idea what he’s talking about.” [..]

In April, Obama will attend the Summit of the Americas in Panama along with other presidents, including Cuba’s Raúl Castro. There, we might listen more and bluster less. The end of the embargo – if it is lifted – may mark the beginning of a new good-neighbor policy, not just toward Cuba but toward other countries in the hemisphere. We would all profit from that.

Michelle Chen: Is Your Favorite Chocolate the Product of Child Labor?

A good chunk of that deliciousness on our holiday dessert trays is sourced from lush farmlands of West Africa, where cocoa beans are tenderly grown and processed to meet the scrutiny of international quality controls. The end product is a painstakingly nurtured commodity valued like no other in the world. The same cannot be said of the children working the land.

That’s because the global agriculture industry continues to yield one particularly bitter crop: child labor. The big companies who run the massively profitable chocolate trade have done little to prevent trafficked and forced labor, and even less to address the poverty that pushes poor children into the fields. According to the field research just published by the International Labor Rights Forum, the problems that lead to child labor are more complex than the sad images we occasionally see of gaunt, cutlass-wielding kids in the fields. The global agricultural trade is structured to ensure that the most savage forms of resource extraction are linked into the most sophisticated commodities markets. Under this system, farmers are denied control over their production process and cannot negotiate fair prices or wages in the global marketplace.

The millions of farmers working in this decentralized production system have virtually no financial power over what happens to their crop en route to Western candy stores

Lynn Stuart Parramore: Shame is good, shame is right, and shame works

Society needs to motivate CEO Scrooges to change their ways

Does trumpeting scoundrels’ misdeeds set them straight? [..]

History shows that in cases when the law or public consensus has rendered an act reprehensible, society has contrived an impressive array of shaming devices – the dunce cap, the pillory, ducking chairs to plunge the guilty into rivers and ponds and tarring and feathering. The idea, of course, is to not only punish the culprits but also to deter other potential wrongdoers from following suit.

What would be appropriate for CEOs who pinch the wages of their employees while earning hundreds of times more than the lowest paid among them? A scarlet G for “greed” sewn to their lapels? Don’t laugh: Some judges have been known to get creative with sentencing when the ordinary route of punishment doesn’t seem to work. A Los Angeles Times op-ed noted that a judge in La Habra, California, ordered a slumlord to live in his own rundown building under house arrest for two months, and a Cleveland judge sentenced a man who had bullied a neighbor and her handicapped children to stand on the side of the highway carrying a sign describing his crimes. Perhaps a judge equipped with the latest CEO pay disclosures could sentence some corporate titan found guilty of stealing wages to live on the salary of his lowest-paid employee for a time. There is something rather satisfying about ideas like that.

Shaming may not bring America’s corporate Scrooges immediately around to a Dickensian redemption, but it can play a key role in creating a societal consensus that certain behaviors are indeed disgraceful – and that’s a start. No shame, no blame, you might say.

Two weeks before New York Senator Charles Schumer once again delivered for Wall Street with the omnibus budget deal, he gave a major speech in which he sounded like a progressive champion. Schumer offered a stirring defense of government as the only force that can stand up to the private sector’s attack on the middle class, and argued that for Democrats to “roll to victory in 2016… First, we must convince Americans that government can be on their side and is not just a tool of special interests.” [..]

Unfortunately, Schumer embodies the contradictions that will tear the Democratic Party apart over the next two years. He understands the need to embrace a populist, progressive narrative and program, but his ties to Wall Street and big money lead him to blunt any real moves by Democrats to take a bold stand for working people against corporate power.

The budget proposal to allow more government bailouts of banks that gamble with their depositors’ money was a huge lost opportunity for Democrats to paint Republicans as being on the side of the big banks that wrecked the economy. That opportunity was negated by President Obama’s pushing for the budget and Senator Schumer’s stealth maneuvers (widely known in Congress) to keep the Wall Street deal intact. As a result, the leaders of both parties demonstrated, as they’ve done before, that government is in fact on the side of the rich and powerful.

Jeff Biggers: Dear media: Stop using the phrase ‘clean coal’

Journalists are enabling a deadly industry

You’d think the filing of a class action lawsuit last month by the families of the 78 coal miners killed in the 1968 Farmington, West Virginia, mine explosion – a disaster that led to the establishment of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act – would serve as a painful reminder that coal isn’t clean.

But familiar headlines about “clean coal” endeavors – the coal industry’s still experimental carbon capture and storage operations – continue to roll off the newswires. [..]

“Clean coal” is an industry marketing term. Failing to enclose it in quotes, which the AP Stylebook does not require, and instead presenting it as a demonstrable fact is inaccurate and lazy – and offensive. It also makes a mockery of the miners and journalists who employ the term.

Coal is dirty, costly and deadly. It’s time all media venues stop using the phrase “clean coal” as though it were truthful reporting – because by touting the PR-speak of energy companies, the media are enabling a deadly and outlaw industry.

Joe Nocera: Shale and the Falling Price of Oil

Six years ago, the price of oil went on an incredible roller-coaster ride. In January 2008, oil hovered around $90 a barrel. By July, it had reached $147 a barrel. By the end of the year, it had plunged to under $35 a barrel. [..]

We tend to think of OPEC as a cartel whose goal is to set the price of oil – and set it high. But stability is also an important goal. Without a cartel controlling supply, oil can be the most volatile of commodities. [..]

And then, of course, there is the effect of the shale revolution in the United States, where oil production has nearly doubled, to nine million barrels a day from five million a day, in the space of six years. The conventional wisdom holds that the Saudis “fear” the influx of shale oil onto the market – as The Wall Street Journal put it on Monday – and that they want to see the price go down in order to drive out some of that shale production.

But the Saudis don’t really fear shale oil. “I’ve heard officials in Saudi Arabia call shale a blessing,” said Robert McNally, the founder and president of The Rapidan Group, who is also affiliated with the Center on Global Energy Policy. “Shale oil is light,” he added. “Saudi oil is medium and heavy, and their real competitors are the Iraqis and the Iranians.” The Saudis can adjust to shale oil more easily than many other countries.

Jacob Heilbrunn: The Real Threat to Hillary Clinton: Jim Webb

THE conventional wisdom is that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be almost impossible to dislodge from the Democratic presidential nomination and that even if she does encounter some hiccups, they will come from her left flank on economic policy. But if Mrs. Clinton runs, she may face a serious and very different threat: her own foreign policy record. While she can pretty much split the difference with any primary opponents on economic policy, the divisions over foreign affairs could be a lot harder to paper over for Mrs. Clinton, who has been tacking to the right on Iran, Syria and Russia in anticipation of Republican assaults during the general election.

This is why it isn’t really the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren who should worry the Clinton camp. It’s the former Virginia senator Jim Webb, a Vietnam War hero, former secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, novelist and opponent of endless wars in the Middle East. Late last month, Mr. Webb formed an exploratory committee. “He’s a very long shot,” Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “He has to become a serious candidate. At that point she would find him much more complex than dealing with liberals. He’s not a liberal, but a lot of what he says might appeal to liberals. He does not get carried away by humanitarian intervention.”

A cop pointing a gun at me as a “joke” and a cop getting a bullet in his head are no parallel, to be sure, but no one – cops included – should have to live even under the threat of violence, which is a form of violence itself.

So we must not let these brutal cop killings stop an honest movement built on affirming justice and peace.

We must not allow more police departments to adopt a ‘wartime’ mentality, just when we thought we were getting somewhere after the War on Terror military reenactments in Ferguson this summer.

We must not let protesters become labeled “domestic enemy combatants”, and we must not allow episodes where the script gets flipped to become an excuse to surveil black man even more.

And we must not give in to our most base anxieties, especially by indulging the fears of those who have guns and who are still, even after everything this year, expected to “serve and protect” us.

All of this violence is connected. We owe it to those taken from us too early – from the woman in Baltimore, to young black men in Ferguson and Ohio and beyond, and certainly to those two NYPD cops in their squad car in Brooklyn and their families – to break the American cycle of violence, even when it starts spinning in reverse.

Paul Brandeis Raushenbush: The False Choice of Protesting for Justice and Supporting Our Police

I’m one of the millions of New Yorkers who woke up heartbroken today thinking of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos who were shot dead yesterday while sitting in their car in Brooklyn by Ismaaiyl Brinsley. [..]

Instead of having the deaths of Liu and Ramos further tear us apart, could this serve as a moment of bringing us together? Liu and Ramos are reminders to any who would demonize the police, that our law enforcement is made up of people of all races and backgrounds, who have families and who feel called to this duty to protect and serve.

The families of Eric Garner and Michael Brown were among the first to condemn the killing of Ramos and Liu last night. The protests around the #BlackLivesMatter movement was never against the police, but it was a call to acknowledge that we can do better as a society that continues to bear the scars of racism.

That effort must continue; we can and must do better as a nation. But it will only be successful if everyone comes together and recognizes one another as human beings, deserving of respect, dignity and life.

Instead of pitting the deaths of Liu and Ramos against Garner and Brown, we can join them together, understanding them as martyrs whose inspire us on both sides of the blue line to work for a more just, safe and united America.

Michael Brenner:

Some political events mark their importance less by their content than by their timing, circumstances and presentation. That is the case for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture. It contains little new to the attentive observer and none of that is of major consequence. It does, though, bear the imprimatur of the Senate — albeit with the abstention of Republicans. It appears at the culmination of a fierce White House campaign to prevent it from seeing the light of day. President Obama’s last minute “sky-is-falling” warnings that issuing the report would endanger the nation’s security was the exclamation point for a series of progressively more drastic measures that included the unconstitutional hacking of the Committee’s computers by the President and CIA Director John Brennan. [..]

The complicity of the White House in perpetuating the CIA mythology is the most troubling part of the story. President Obama went all the way down the line to prevent its exposure. Even now that the lie has been established between any reasonable doubt, he personally has thrown Brennan et al a life preserver in pronouncing himself neutral on the issue. In his official reaction to the Feinstein release the next day, Obama declared that that he will not take sides in the debate on whether torture worked. This is a striking example of Presidential irrationality — as well as irresponsibility. He is reacting as if a friend had asked him whether the Chicago Cubs should shell out $100 million+ for Jon Lester. That is a policy preference. Whether torture helped capture and kill OBL is a matter of fact — of truth or falsity. Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that he happens to be President of the United States, that that he already conspired with the CIA to block the report’s release and to prevent the ensuing embarrassment of the revelation that the torture program did not work (thereby already taking a position on the issue), one cannot logically abstain on a question of whether the sun rises in the East or the West.

Accountability for the country’s Intelligence agencies begins with the acceptance of responsibility in the White House.

Jim Popkin: Two double agents, a prison swap and the code from outer space: did this spy-v-spy duel save US-Cuban relations?

From a maximum-security prison in Texas, former United States military analyst Ana Montes has been offering up bumper-sticker justifications for why she betrayed her country and spied on behalf of the Cuban government over the course of 17 years. “I believe that the morality of espionage is relative,” Montes wrote in a private letter to a friend last year. “The activity always betrays someone, and some observers will think that it is justified and others not, in every case.”

Montes had no idea how prophetic her words would be. While the 57-year-old American citizen remains locked up as one of the most damaging spies in US history, the Cuban-born spy who led American investigators to Montes was set free to worldwide applause last week, during a landmark thaw in US-Cuban relations. Several news outlets have since identified the Cuban double-agent as Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, and multiple US officials I’ve interviewed this past week have described him as a cryptographer whose code-breaking secrets have been the gift that keeps on giving to the CIA, NSA and FBI.

By Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s reckoning, being a millionaire does not constitute living high above the ranks of ordinary people. Lew said last week that back when he was in the private sector enjoying six- and seven-figure pay packages, “My own compensation was never in the stratosphere.”

Lew made that pronouncement as he sought to defend President Barack Obama’s embattled Treasury undersecretary nominee Antonio Weiss from charges that as a financial executive, he is out of touch with the interests of regular people. Lew was seeking to cast his own lot with the ranks of ordinary Americans at a time of growing economic inequality.

But in doing so, Lew shed light on a uniquely American phenomenon-the tendency of extraordinarily rich people to cast themselves as everyday members of the middle class.

David Cay Johnson: Full speed ahead on secretive trade deal

The record of trade agreements past is that the US loses and its competitors grow rich. The TPP will be no different

Early next year, after the 114th Congress begins meeting, a new Washington coalition will move quickly to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-nation trade agreement that will destroy American jobs, restrict individual liberty and burden American taxpayers. Oh, and it will do so without any real debate.

The coalition pushing approval consists of multinational corporations eager to escape the rigors of competition, Republican lawmakers who talk free markets but act as enemies of competition and President Barack Obama, as loyal a friend as Wall Street and multinational corporations have ever had in the White House.

The broad strokes of the proposed agreement show it is not about lowering the few remaining tariffs and trade barriers, with a few exceptions such as easing Japanese protections for domestic farmers so cheap California rice can be sold in Tokyo.

Joe Conason: On Cuba, Republicans Know Only Failure

Listen carefully to the Republican leaders and presidential hopefuls roaring with outrage over President Barack Obama’s courageous decision to normalize relations with Cuba; listen very carefully, because no matter how long or how closely you listen to them, there is one thing you will surely never hear.

You will never hear a new idea-or any idea-about bringing liberty, democracy and prosperity to the suffering Cuban people.

Instead, the furious denunciations of the president’s initiative from his adversaries reveal only an intellectual void on Capitol Hill, where the imperatives remain partisan and cynical. Everyone paying attention has known for decades that the frozen relationship between the United States and Cuba has accomplished nothing-except possibly the prolongation of the Castro regime, which has long considered the embargo a plausible excuse for its own economic failures and viewed the United States as a politically convenient enemy.

Susan Greenbaum: We don’t need a third Bush presidency

Jeb Bush’s track record as governor should make us fear his possible presidential run

Jeb Bush announced on Tuesday that he will establish a leadership PAC in January to explore prospects for a 2016 presidential run. Daily news items about him and strategic appearances in states with early caucuses and primaries signal that his intentions are serious. Described as a favorite of the Republican establishment, Bush has been touted as the best hope for a moderate and electable candidate.

But if his track record as governor in Florida is any indication, a Jeb Bush presidency is the last thing America needs.

The details shocked. Shackled prisoners were treated like cattle, watched by their CIA interrogators. Testimony from one observer stated that men blindfolded and tied “were made to run down a steep hill, at the bottom of which were three throws of concertina barbed wire. The first row would hit them across the knees and they would plunge head first into the second and third rows of wire”.

This wasn’t CIA torture after the September 11 attacks, exposed in detail in a recent Senate report, but the Phoenix programme, instituted by the CIA and US, Australian and South Vietnamese militaries in Vietnam between 1965 and 1972 to “neutralise” the Vietcong. The result was more than 60,000 people tortured and killed. No senior politicians, generals or decision-makers were prosecuted for these crimes. A culture of immunity, despite occasional media and public outrage, thrived across the US. [..]

The ability of the state to retroactively justify illegal behavior when caught is a feature of every nation on earth, not just the US. But demanding other countries abide by international law, when western nations so blatantly ignore it, is the height of hypocrisy. The shocking details in the US Senate report demand accountability but there’s little public appetite for it.

Retired Navy JAG John Hutson warned in 2008 against trials for post 9/11 crimes because “people would lawyer up”, a tacit admission that the legal system is gamed by the wealthy and powerful to escape justice. There’s hardly a more illustrative example of the modern state’s failure.

Marcy Wheeler: Sony hackers’ real crime: Why it’s not an assault on speech – but something worse

“The Interview” could still be released online. What’s really under attack is not speech, but property. Here’s why

Yesterday, Sony Pictures pulled its movie “The Interview” from release on Christmas Day. The movie, which depicts two journalists attempting to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, has been identified as the motive behind a devastating hack of Sony Pictures. That’s partly because, in July, North Korea complained to the U.N., calling the film an “undisguised sponsoring of terrorism as well as an act of war.” Then, hackers threatened “the world will be full of fear” if the movie premiered on Dec. 25, which led first the movie chains and then Sony itself to pull the release. [..]

If the issue is airing the views in the film – and defying the threats of the hackers – such a release would accomplish the goal.

But there’s another issue that seems far more central to this hack than speech: property.

Even before Sony mentioned its filmmakers’ free speech rights, for example, it mentioned the assault on its property rights. “Those who attacked us stole our intellectual property, private emails, and sensitive and proprietary material.” And while free release of its movie would assert its right to free speech, it would result in further financial losses, on top of the other movies (such as “Annie” and “Fury”) released on piracy sites after the hack.

Joe Conason: The right’s absurd Cuba outrage: Why Obama’s critics are on the wrong side of history

Listen carefully to the Republican leaders and presidential hopefuls roaring with outrage over President Barack Obama’s courageous decision to normalize relations with Cuba; listen very carefully, because no matter how long or how closely you listen to them, there is one thing you will surely never hear.

You will never hear a new idea – or any idea – about bringing liberty, democracy and prosperity to the suffering Cuban people.

Instead, the furious denunciations of the president’s initiative from his adversaries reveal only an intellectual void on Capitol Hill, where the imperatives remain partisan and cynical. Everyone paying attention has known for decades that the frozen relationship between the United States and Cuba has accomplished nothing – except possibly the prolongation of the Castro regime, which has long considered the embargo a plausible excuse for its own economic failures and viewed the United States as a politically convenient enemy.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Hillary’s Choice: ‘Anti-Gridlock’ or ‘Anti-Wall Street’?

We’re told that Hillary Clinton is spurning something her advisors call the “anti-Wall Street” movement and will run instead on a platform of “working across the aisle” with Republicans. Her camp is suggesting, without much evidence and against the lessons of recent history, that she will be more effective at this endeavor than her predecessor. And now they’re using that claim to fight against the Democratic Party’s rising populist wing.

Is Hillary Clinton about to repeat Barack Obama’s biggest mistake?

In the first two years of his presidency Obama spoke of compromise, protected Wall Street, and resisted the populist wing of his own party. Democrats lost the House of Representatives, but Obama kept offering “Grand Bargains.” The GOP rejected most of his overtures, even the Social Security benefit cuts they had long championed, and didn’t hesitate to use them against Democrats on the campaign trail.

By selling himself as someone who could get things done with Republicans, Obama gave them the power to make him a success or failure. Unsurprisingly, they chose the latter option. Is Hillary Clinton about to make the same mistake — and will voters buy it if she does?

Jeb Bush yesterday strongly suggested he was running for President in 2016. If he wins the GOP nomination, it is highly likely that his opponent for the presidency would be Hillary Clinton.

Having someone who is the brother of one former president and the son of another run against the wife of still another former president would be sweetly illustrative of all sorts of degraded and illusory aspects of American life, from meritocracy to class mobility. That one of those two families exploited its vast wealth to obtain political power, while the other exploited its political power to obtain vast wealth, makes it more illustrative still: of the virtually complete merger between political and economic power, of the fundamentally oligarchical framework that drives American political life. [..]

If this happens, the 2016 election would vividly underscore how the American political class functions: by dynasty, plutocracy, fundamental alignment of interests masquerading as deep ideological divisions, and political power translating into vast private wealth and back again. The educative value would be undeniable: somewhat like how the torture report did, it would rub everyone’s noses in exactly those truths they are most eager to avoid acknowledging.

Dave Johnson: How “Citibank Budget” Push Foreshadows “Fast Track” For Trade Deals

It is worth examining how the process was rigged to push that budget deal through Congress over the weekend that contained Citibank-written derivative deregulation and all kinds of other goodies for the rich and powerful. That’s because the “cromnibus” formula will be formalized in the next big deal, in a process called “fast track.”

Congress passed the “cromnibus” (continuing resolution for omnibus budget) right at the deadline for another government shutdown. (After they extended the deadline, actually.) The budget contained a Citibank-written provision that undoes some Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations. It authorizes a cut in many people’s pensions by up to 60 percent, severely cuts the IRS budget and its ability to collect taxes, dramatically expanded the ability of big money to influence elections, reduced the EPA’s authority, and included many other provisions that could not have passed in the light of day. This budget “deal” was pushed through Congress using a rigged process that kept representative democracy from stopping it.

What lessons can we learn from the way the “Citibank” provisions in the budget deal were pushed through? How do these lessons apply to the next big fight?

Robert Reich: The Coin of the Realm: How Inside Traders Are Rigging America

A few years ago, hedge fund Level Global Investors made $54 million selling Dell Computer stock based on insider information from a Dell employee. When charged with illegal insider trading, Global Investors’ co-founder Anthony Chiasson claimed he didn’t know where the tip came from.

Chiasson argued that few traders on Wall Street ever know where the inside tips they use come from because confidential information is, in his words, the “coin of the realm in securities markets.”

Last week the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which oversees federal prosecutions of Wall Street, agreed. It overturned Chiasson’s conviction, citing lack of evidence Chiasson received the tip directly, or knew insiders were leaking confidential information in exchange for some personal benefit.

The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 banned insider trading but left it up to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the courts to define it. Which they have – in recent decades so broadly that confidential information is indeed the coin of the realm.

Ralph Nader: Unsafe and Unnecessary Oil Trains Threaten 25 Million Americans

Back in 1991 the National Transportation Safety Board first identified oil trains as unsafe — the tank cars, specifically ones called DOT-111s, were too thin and punctured too easily, making transport of flammable liquids like oil unreasonably dangerous. As bad as this might sound, at the very least there was not a lot of oil being carried on the rails in 1991.

Now, in the midst of a North American oil boom, oil companies are using fracking and tar sands mining to produce crude in remote areas of the U.S. and Canada. To get the crude to refineries on the coasts the oil industry is ramping up transport by oil trains. In 2008, 9,500 crude oil tank cars moved on US rails. In 2013 the number was more than 400,000! With this rapid growth comes a looming threat to public safety and the environment. No one — not federal regulators or local firefighters — are prepared for oil train derailments, spills and explosions.

Unfortunately, the rapid increase in oil trains has already meant many more oil train disasters. Railroads spilled more oil in 2013 than in the previous 40 years combined.

He’s the horrible face of American torture. Here’s why Cheney’s defense of his war crimes was important to record

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s time is about up, in many senses. For a Republican Party trying to look forward, he shouldn’t be a go-to voice for the media on national security policy. His sneering attacks on President Obama aren’t news anymore. The man who famously said, “It’s my new heart, not someone else’s old heart,” about the donor to his taxpayer-funded heart transplant should have lost the power to shock us by now. Unless he has a sudden attack of conscience, and apologizes for his career, he has nothing to say worth hearing. [..]

Except on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report. There’s been some anger on the leftthat Cheney took his seat yet again on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, but I think he belonged there, one last time. Let the American people hear from the man who claims that interrogation methods we prosecuted after World War II, as well as others even more depraved, aren’t actually torture.

Cheney is such a monster that he couldn’t even keep himself from defending “rectal feeding.” While he acknowledged that it “was not one of the techniques that was approved,” he sanctioned it nonetheless. “I believe it was done for medical reasons. … It wasn’t torture in terms of it wasn’t part of the program.”

That would seem to imply that anything that was “part of the program” was torture, which of course Cheney denies.

Alice Slater: Time to Ban the Bomb

Global Momentum is building for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. While the world has banned chemical and biological weapons, there is no explicit legal prohibition of nuclear weapons, although the International Court of Justice ruled unanimously that there is an obligation to bring to a conclusion negotiations for their total elimination.   The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), negotiated in 1970 required the five existing nuclear weapons states, the US, Russia, UK, France and China (P-5) to make “good faith efforts” to eliminate their nuclear weapons, while the rest of the world promised not to acquire them (except for India, Pakistan, Israel, who never signed the NPT).  North Korea relied on the NPT Faustian bargain for “peaceful” nuclear power to build its own bomb, and then walked out of the treaty. [..]

One way to slow down this process to negotiate a legal ban on nuclear weapons would be for the NPT nuclear weapons states to promise at this five year NPT review conference to set a reasonable date to bring to a conclusion time-bound negotiations and effective and verifiable measures to implement the total elimination of nuclear weapons.   Otherwise the rest of the world will start without them to create an explicit legal prohibition of nuclear weapons which will be a powerful taboo to be used for pressuring the countries cowering under the nuclear umbrella of the nuclear weapons states, in NATO and in the Pacific, to take a stand for Mother Earth, and urge that negotiations begin for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.

Suzanne Goldenberg: Jeb Bush may be ‘the smart brother’ – but he’s as much of a climate denier as any conservative

The first Republican presidential candidate for 2016 is ‘not a scientist’ – and you can bet Democrats won’t back off the environment

In Bush family lore, Jeb was always supposed to be the smarter, more level-headed one.

As with many media constructs, of course, that’s just not true. When it comes to climate change, Jeb Bush is a lot more radical than his brother.

Jeb doesn’t just want to keep burning fossil fuels while the planet burns. He’s an out-and-out flat-earther – just like the other Republicans seen as leading contenders in the 2016 presidential race – and he’s been on the record denying climate science for years.

“I think global warming may be real,” Jeb Bush said in 2011, in what seemed like a promising start to the subject in a Fox interview. But he followed it up with the false statement that there is some kind of dispute among scientists about the causes of climate change – which there is not [..]

Those comments put Jeb Bush in lock-step with the other climate deniers in the Republican party – and now that has become the party’s first (almost) declared candidate, they should help set early battle lines for climate change as a major campaign issue.