Tag: Punting the Pundits

NSA’s mass surveillance may unfairly implicate the country’€™s courageous reporters for communicating with insurgents

Afghanistan’s journalists, whose professional risks already include kidnapping, insurgent attacks and violent reprisals from Afghan officials’ bodyguards, face a brand new peril: snooping by the U.S. National Security Agency.

On May 23, WikiLeaks revealed that Afghanistan was the previously unnamed country where the NSA conducted mass phone surveillance. The surveillance in Afghanistan goes far beyond the NSA’s controversial metadata collection program in the United States. According to WikiLeaks, since 2013 the NSA has been recording and storing almost all phone calls – including those made by Afghan journalists – in the country and to other countries. Earlier documents released by online news website the Intercept showed that the NSA has been recording all phone calls in the Bahamas as well as gathering all phone call metadata in Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines.

While specific, targeted surveillance may be warranted for national security reasons, collecting the phone calls of an entire nation cannot be justified. The bulk surveillance invades the privacy of millions of Afghans who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. And it chills the work of journalists who use phone calls to gather information for their stories.

Jill Filipovic: Global justice for rape survivors demands extraordinary efforts

In places where legal systems routinely fail, alternatives outside law needed

In the city of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a woman I’ll call Camille (all the Congolese women in this story have asked to use pseudonyms) told the story of her rape. Soldiers affiliated with Paul Salada, a militia leader, kidnapped her when she was 16. Held for months, she was raped repeatedly, some days by as many as 10 men. She became pregnant from the rapes and eventually chased out of the camp. Camille gave birth and is raising her child alone.

Two decades of war, millions of deaths and displacements, endemic poverty and perpetually weak governance mean the many Congolese women who are raped every day – one estimate from 2011 put the number at 48 women raped every hour – rarely see their attackers prosecuted. Too often, the victims are ostracized and left to recover with few medical, legal or psychological resources.

But legal systems don’t fail sexual assault survivors just in the DRC. Even nations with entrenched and functional criminal justice systems regularly drop the ball when it comes to violence against women. To be sure, if we are to get serious about helping survivors, we need to strengthen their legal rights. But we should also be looking outside the justice system to help facilitate healing in the many instances where justice is a dream or a farce.

In the city of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a woman I’ll call Camille (all the Congolese women in this story have asked to use pseudonyms) told the story of her rape. Soldiers affiliated with Paul Salada, a militia leader, kidnapped her when she was 16. Held for months, she was raped repeatedly, some days by as many as 10 men. She became pregnant from the rapes and eventually chased out of the camp. Camille gave birth and is raising her child alone.

Two decades of war, millions of deaths and displacements, endemic poverty and perpetually weak governance mean the many Congolese women who are raped every day – one estimate from 2011 put the number at 48 women raped every hour – rarely see their attackers prosecuted. Too often, the victims are ostracized and left to recover with few medical, legal or psychological resources.

But legal systems don’t fail sexual assault survivors just in the DRC. Even nations with entrenched and functional criminal justice systems regularly drop the ball when it comes to violence against women. To be sure, if we are to get serious about helping survivors, we need to strengthen their legal rights. But we should also be looking outside the justice system to help facilitate healing in the many instances where justice is a dream or a farce.

Juan Cole: As US Pressures Maliki to Resign, will Iraqi Gov’t Collapse?

A consensus is forming in Washington that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki must resign, as part of accountability for his failures with his Sunni Arab citizens. Because Washington is so good about demanding accountability.

While this analysis is correct, and I have said myself that Iraq would be better off with a different leader, it is not clear that right now is the best time to force al-Maliki out. Washington also has to be careful about trying and failing to get rid of al-Maliki. President Obama and Hillary Clinton wanted to get rid of Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan in 2009; they failed, and therefore had bad relations with Karzai ever after.

A potential departure of al-Maliki raises the question of who would take his place. Al-Maliki is the head of the Islamic Mission Party (al-Da’wa al-Islamiyah). This Shiite fundamentalist party won 92 of 328 seats in the parliamentary elections just held. The Da’wa Party was for years covert and still is secretive. We don’t know who is on its politburo. It will likely form the next government with or without al-Maliki.

Vice President Joe Biden was right. Let’s begin with that.

Biden, back in 2006, was the leading proponent (together with Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations) of a scheme to divide Iraq into three largely autonomous states: a “Kurdistan” in the north, and a region each for the Sunnis and Shi’ites. This plan was, needless to say, not adopted. Instead, America bet on the political prowess of prime minister Nouri Al Maliki, who was going to form a “reconciliation” government which would give all three groups a share of governmental responsibility in a power-sharing coalition government. This, as it turns out, was a bad bet. If America had forced the Biden plan on Iraq back then, we might be in a radically different place than we find ourselves now.

Or maybe not. It is absolutely impossible to predict the future, especially in the Middle East. Nobody can really say what will happen (or what would have happened) with any degree of certainty. But it’s pretty easy to see now that what may be next for Iraq is a de facto implementation of Biden’s original plan. The violence which is happening now might have been largely avoided, if the division of Iraq had happened when America still had an overwhelming military presence in the country (say, back in 2006). The Sunni section might have had the time to build up its own governmental and security services, which might have precluded the militant takeover which is happening now. I realize that’s a lot of “mights” and “maybes,” but that’s about as good as you can get in making Middle East predictions, as I mentioned. All you can definitively say is that the chances for a much better outcome would have been higher. Which is, in and of itself, enough to now say that Biden was right.

Amy Goodman: Heed the Voices For Peace Amid the Tragedy of Iraq

It didn’t take long this week for the architects of the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq to apply their makeup and jump before the cable news television cameras. The militia group known as ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has swept across Iraq, conquering city after city and stopping short of Baghdad in what has been described as a “lightning advance,” summarily executing people in its wake. ISIS emerged from the festering civil war in Syria, and has exploited the instability in that country, along with the weak and famously corrupt central Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. With just several thousand armed troops, ISIS has managed to rout the Iraqi army with its hundreds of thousands of soldiers trained and equipped by the U.S. occupying forces at U.S. taxpayer expense.

Cronies of George W. Bush, like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and Paul Bremer, have been given airtime on the networks and space in the opinion pages to lambast President Barack Obama for the current crisis in Iraq. These pundits and politicians are no less wrong today than they were when selling the Iraq War back in 2003.

Noel Ortega: What Piketty Forgot: The Crisis of Capitalism Isn’t Just about Inequality

It’s not just about the distance between rich and poor, but about the gap between what’s demanded by our planet and what’s demanded by our economy.

By now, it’s no secret that French economist Thomas Piketty is one of the world’s leading experts on inequality. His exhaustive, improbably popular opus of economic history-the 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century-sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. Some have called it the most important study of inequality in over 50 years.

Piketty is hardly the first scholar to tackle the linkage of capitalism with inequality. What sets him apart is his relentlessly empirical approach to the subject and his access to never before used data-tax and estate records-that elegantly demonstrates the growing trends of income and wealth inequality. The database he has compiled spans 300 years in 20 different countries.

Exactingly empirical and deeply multidisciplinary, Capital is an extremely important contribution to the study of economics and inequality over the last few centuries. But because it fails to address the real limits on growth-namely our ecological crisis-it can’t be a roadmap for the next.

Robert Reich: How America’s Real Business Leaders Want to Save Capitalism

A few weeks ago I was visited in my office by the chairman of one of the country’s biggest high-tech firms who wanted to talk about the causes and consequences of widening inequality and the shrinking middle class, and what to do about it.

I asked him why he was concerned. “Because the American middle class is the core of our customer base,” he said. “If they can’t afford our products in the years ahead, we’re in deep trouble.”

I’m hearing the same refrain from a growing number of business leaders.

They see an economic recovery that’s bypassing most Americans. Median hourly and weekly pay dropped over the past year, adjusted for inflation. [..]

These business leaders know the U.S. economy can’t get out of first gear as long as wages are declining. And their own businesses can’t succeed over the long term without a buoyant and growing middle class.

They also recognize a second danger.

Critics of a foreign policy of ‘neglect’ are still living in George W Bush’s fever dream of rage and fear. The public is fickle, but we’re willing to be patient about war again

Conservative critics of Barack Obama’s foreign policy are right: it’s vague when articulated and contradictory when enacted. He refuses to act decisively and tunes out the rhetorical bravado of foreign leaders. And if the United States is to avoid another round of pointless bloodshed in the Middle East, that’s the kind of foreign policy our country needs right now. Indeed, it’s the one we want. [..]

The terror that has gripped Iraq over the past week is, no doubt, horrific. When militants claim they’ve massacred 1,700 soldiers, it would be foolish not to give yourself options by moving an aircraft carrier here and toughening up an embassy there – which Obama has done, actively, not through “neglect” or “a nap”, as still more critics claimed over the weekend.

But let’s remember the way we got in too deep: it wasn’t by underestimating the threat Iraq posed to US interests, it was by overestimating it.The terror that has gripped Iraq over the past week is, no doubt, horrific. When militants claim they’ve massacred 1,700 soldiers, it would be foolish not to give yourself options by moving an aircraft carrier here and toughening up an embassy there – which Obama has done, actively, not through “neglect” or “a nap”, as still more critics claimed over the weekend.

But let’s remember the way we got in too deep: it wasn’t by underestimating the threat Iraq posed to US interests, it was by overestimating it.

Jessica Valenti: Free speech is a bad excuse for online creeps to threaten rape and murder

Everybody knows about ‘cyberbullying’ and ‘slut-shaming’ by now, but we need modern laws for social-media harassment

Last weekend, a friend of mine was sitting on a park bench when she felt a presence sneaking up from behind – and noticed an older man taking pictures of her exposed back. When she told him to stop, he yelled back at her that it was his “First Amendment right to be a creep”. Little did either of them know that he was articulating the foundation of new legal battle about the internet and, well, the right to be a creep.

The US supreme court announced on Monday that it will hear arguments in a case – Elonis v United States – about whether threats made on social media are protected by free speech. It is a watershed moment for anyone like me who believes that online harassment is often scarier than in-life harassment. When someone catcalls you on the street or says something threatening, you can use your best judgment to ascertain how dangerous he is. When you’re threatened online, you have no way of knowing – and that lack of context is terrifying.Last weekend, a friend of mine was sitting on a park bench when she felt a presence sneaking up from behind – and noticed an older man taking pictures of her exposed back. When she told him to stop, he yelled back at her that it was his “First Amendment right to be a creep”. Little did either of them know that he was articulating the foundation of new legal battle about the internet and, well, the right to be a creep.

The US supreme court announced on Monday that it will hear arguments in a case – Elonis v United States – about whether threats made on social media are protected by free speech. It is a watershed moment for anyone like me who believes that online harassment is often scarier than in-life harassment. When someone catcalls you on the street or says something threatening, you can use your best judgment to ascertain how dangerous he is. When you’re threatened online, you have no way of knowing – and that lack of context is terrifying.

Asta Taylor: Google and Yahoo want to ‘reset the net’. But can it work?

Tech giants are joining forces to attack NSA snooping, but what of the vast data collection that underpins their business model?

Earlier this month non-profit organisations and companies including Google, Mozilla, Yahoo, and Reddit united to organise a day of action called Reset the Net. The event marked the first anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Administration’s extensive and illegal dragnet surveillance apparatus.

“Today, we can begin the work of effectively shutting down the collection of our online communications, even if the US Congress fails to do the same,” Snowden wrote in a statement endorsing the campaign. The NSA is not going to stop snooping, but adopting encryption can make the mass collection of personal data more difficult and expensive. Why not put a little sand in the gears of their massive spying machine?

Thought the NSA was bad? Local police and the Obama administration are hoovering cellphone location data from inside your house, and a crackdown could lead to surveillance reform

All across America, from Florida to Colorado and back again, the country’s increasingly militarized local police forces are using a secretive technology to vacuum up cellphone data from entire neighborhoods – including from people inside their own homes – almost always without a warrant. This week, numerous investigations by major news agencies revealed the US government is now taking unbelievable measures to make sure you never find out about it. But a landmark court ruling for privacy could soon force the cops to stop, even as the Obama administration fights to keep its latest tool for mass surveillance a secret.

So-called International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catchers – more often called their popular brand name, “Stingray” – have long been the talk of the civil liberties crowd, for the indiscriminate and invasive way these roving devices conduct surveillance. Essentially, Stingrays act as fake cellphone towers (usually mounted in a mobile police truck) that police can point toward any given area and force every phone in the area to connect to it. So even if you’re not making a call, police can find out who you’ve been calling, and for how long, as well as your precise location. As Nathan Freed Wessler of the ACLU explained on Thursday, “In one Florida case, a police officer explained in court that he ‘quite literally stood in front of every door and window’ with his stingray to track the phones inside a large apartment complex.”

Yet these mass surveillance devices have largely stayed out of the public eye, thanks to the federal government and local police refusing to disclose they’re using them in the first place – sometimes, shockingly, even to judges.

Peter van Buren: What We’ve Lost Since 9/11

Taking down the First Amendment in post-constitutional America

America has entered its third great era: the post-constitutional one. In the first, in the colonial years, a unitary executive, the King of England, ruled without checks and balances, allowing no freedom of speech, due process, or privacy when it came to protecting his power.

In the second, the principles of the Enlightenment and an armed rebellion were used to push back the king’s abuses. The result was a new country and a new constitution with a Bill of Rights expressly meant to check the government’s power. Now, we are wading into the shallow waters of a third era, a time when that government is abandoning the basic ideas that saw our nation through centuries of challenges far more daunting than terrorism. Those ideas — enshrined in the Bill of Rights — are disarmingly concise. Think of them as the haiku of a genuine people’s government.

Deeper, darker waters lie ahead and we seem drawn down into them. For here there be monsters.

Robert Fisk: The Western-Imposed Partition of the Middle East Is Dead

“Sykes-Picot is dead,” Walid Jumblatt roared at me last night – and he may well be right.

The Lebanese Druze leader – who fought in a 15-year civil war that redrew the map of Lebanon – believes that the new battles for Sunni Muslim jihadi control of northern and eastern Syria and western Iraq have finally destroyed the post-World War Anglo-French conspiracy, hatched by Mark Sykes and François Picot, which divided up the old Ottoman Middle East into Arab statelets controlled by the West.

The Islamic Caliphate of Iraq and Syria has been fought into existence – however temporarily – by al-Qa’ida-affiliated Sunni fighters who pay no attention to the artificial borders of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon or Jordan, or even mandate Palestine, created by the British and French. Their capture of the city of Mosul only emphasises the collapse of the secret partition plan which the Allies drew up in the First World War – for Mosul was sought after for its oil wealth by both Britain and France.

The entire Middle East has been haunted by the Sykes-Picot agreement, which also allowed Britain to implement Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s 1917 promise to give British support to the creation of a Jewish “homeland” in Palestine. Perhaps only today’s Arabs (and Israelis) fully understand the profound historical changes – and deep political significance – that the extraordinary battles of this past week have wrought on the old colonial map of the Middle East.

George Zornick: Hillary Still Doesn’t Get It on Iraq

The unfortunate re-eruption of warfare in Iraq will lead to many more questions for Hillary Clinton about her past support for the war-a rather unfortunate thing from her point of view, given the issue was a key reason for her 2008 Democratic presidential primary loss.

Her answer to one such question at a forum in Toronto reveals Clinton still has serious trouble talking about the war in a language recognized by those who opposed it-and there are a great many.

According to Alex Seitz-Wald of National Journal, this is what Clinton said at an event sponsored by the Toronto Region Board of Trade:According to Alex Seitz-Wald of National Journal, this is what Clinton said at an event sponsored by the Toronto Region Board of Trade:

Clinton says “smart political move” would have been to recant on iraq vote earlier, but “I couldn’t break faith with” service members.

That statement echoes some of the worst impulses of the Bush administration, which were to frame supporting the war publicly as a matter of “supporting the troops.”

One of the central animating concerns of the anti-war movement – from the Cindy Sheehan encampment to a young Senator named Barack Obama’s describing soldiers from Illinois who had been badly maimed by battle-was for the thousands of US troops dying, and the thousands more being injured, in what was ultimately a needless war. When George W. Bush would bash war opponents as people who didn’t “support the troops,” the anti-war refrain was: that’s exactly what we’re doing. Hillary perhaps does not accept that argument-or if she does, it’s hard to tell.

The U.S. had no business invading Iraq. We toppled a dictatorship on a false 9/11 rationale, which plunged Iraq into a sectarian civil war inside a war with the United States. We left behind a vengeance-driven Shiite regime aligned with Iran. Now the sectarian war in Syria is enlarging into a regional one. The primary blame for this disaster is on the Bush administration, but also on all those who succumbed to a Superpower Syndrome, which said we could redesign the Middle East. There is no reason whatsoever to justify further loss of American lives or tax dollars on a conflict that we do not understand and that started before the United States was born.

John Nichols: Bernie Sanders Is Beating the Austerity Hawks

Bernie Sanders does not believe that government always gets things right.

But the independent senator from Vermont does believe that where government has the capacity to act on behalf of those in need, it should do so.

In a capital where an awful lot of folks still buy into Ronald Reagan’s “government is the problem” calculus, Sanders knows that government can be the solution. Indeed, he recognizes that for those most neglected by an economy that almost always takes care of CEOs and celebrities but often fails clerks and construction workers, government is able to provide answers that the private sector cannot or will not produce. [..]

Sanders cannot always get the Senate to consider the alternative. But as the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, he has the authority and the bully pulpit to focus the nation’s attention not just on the neglect of military veterans-an issue that has long been his focus-but on the solutions government can provide for them.

Paul Honkenos: The West doesn’t need nuclear for energy independence

The future for Europe and the US lies in renewables

Some of the most confounding problems of our day – global warming and the West’s energy dependence on Russia and the Middle East – appear to President Barack Obama and some of Europe’s leaders to have an obvious answer: more nuclear power. A May 2014 EU Commission study on Europe’s energy security after the Ukraine crisis insists it’s going to be a big part of the solution. Nuclear is also a central component of Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy. After all, nuclear power plants are supposedly inexpensive to run, emit no CO2 and could lessen dependence on oil and gas imports from volatile regions of the world. A no-brainer, right?

Not by a long shot. Nuclear power is a nasty red herring that advocates will pay for dearly, should it figure into their response to the current challenges on the table.

In the past, critics of nuclear power went to great lengths to point out nuclear energy’s inherent danger. Consider the meltdowns at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, they said, on top of the untold number of smaller mishaps that never make the headlines. And then there’s the unsolvable dilemma of radioactive nuclear waste, which nobody wants anywhere near their backyards.

The Republican Party’s reliance on tea party support is like an addict’s dependence on a dangerous drug: It may feel good at first, but eventually it eats you alive.

No House majority leader had ever been ousted in a primary before Eric Cantor’s shocking defeat on Tuesday. Republicans who tell themselves it was Cantor’s own fault-he lost touch with his Virginia district, he tried to have it both ways on immigration, he came to be seen as part of the Washington establishment-are whistling past the graveyard.

Cantor didn’t just lose, he got clobbered. His opponent, college professor Dave Brat, spent just $200,000 on the race-not much more than Cantor’s $5 million campaign spent on meals at steakhouses. Yet a powerful incumbent, running in a district whose boundaries were custom-designed for his benefit, lost by an incredible 11 percentage points.

There can be no doubt that the tail is now wagging the dog. The tea party should no longer be thought of as just a faction of the GOP. It’s calling the shots.

Michelle Chen: If colleges didn’t waste your tuition, we wouldn’t need new student loan reform

Saddling students with unsustainable debts is only a symptom of the deeper erosion within higher education

But while college is prohibitively costly for many students, and student loan reform merely papers over widening economic gap, full public funding for higher education is well within the government’s financial reach. An analysis by the advocacy group Strike Debt, for example, shows that for less than $13bn in additional federal funds, the government could theoretically “make every single public two- and four-year college and university in the United States tuition free for all students”. This would involve both straightforward changes to existing federal subsidy programs (particularly cutting support for notoriously substandard for-profit colleges) and a more fundamental political challenge: getting Washington to recognize that education is an entitlement, not a loan.

The state owes students a deeper debt than they owe the state – the cost of massive educational disinvestment and an economy broken by a generation of financial recklessness.

David Sirota: Al Gore’s Warnings About Inequality and Democracy

Inequality and democracy are the kind of topics you may expect to hear about at a political convention, but not necessarily at a tech industry conference. And so former Vice President Al Gore’s discussion at Nashville’s tech-focused Southland Conference this week could be viewed in context as a jeremiad spotlighting taboo truths about tech culture and philanthropic traditions.

Discussing the economy, Gore lamented that “we have rising levels of inequality and chronic underinvestment” in public programs. He reminded the crowd that when “95 percent of all the additional national income in the U.S., since the recovery began in ’09, goes to the top one percent, that’s not an Occupy Wall Street slogan, that’s a fact.”

Gore may have been alluding to the tech economy becoming a significant driver of that inequality.

Suzanne Goldenberg: Will Hillary Clinton please stand up and break the highest glass ceiling already?

In her new book, as on the campaign trail, she avoids serious talk about the impact of a female president. It’s not a hard choice at all – it’s the easy way out

Hillary Clinton is only a few pages into her new memoir, Hard Choices, when she throws out a hint that she, as a woman running for the White House, would run differently than a man.

She says there is no way she would ever give in to the sexist impulses of Obama campaign aides and attack another candidate – Sarah Palin, in this case – just because she is a woman. [..]

So it’s fair to assume that Clinton – six years removed from her first run for the White House, and two years away from her next (assuming she is running) – has a lot she wants to say about negotiating the treacherous terrain of women and power.

Except that she doesn’t say it.

Lone Star State’s ‘economic miracle’ belied by low wages

Many American conservatives look to Texas as their bright shining light. They hold it up as a model of limited government, where low taxes and business-friendly regulation have led to job growth and economic growth surpassing the national average over the last three decades. If the rest of the country followed the Texas model, the tale goes, our economic woes would be behind us and we would all share in a more prosperous future.

The conservatives do have at least the beginnings of a case. Texas has outstripped the rest of the country in job creation. Since the business cycle peak in 1981, the number of jobs in Texas has increased by more than 78 percent. That compares with less than 52 percent for the country as a whole. [..]

Of course lower pay for those at the middle and bottom of the wage ladder can translate into better living for those at the top. To put it simply, low pay makes it easier to find good help in Texas. That’s good news if you’re among the group looking to hire people to clean your house or mow your lawn. It’s also good news for businesses looking for low-cost labor. It’s not very good news for the people who have to work at these jobs at low pay. And that’s the real story of the Texas economic miracle.

Zoë Carpenter: Bowe Bergdahl and the Pathologizing of Dissent

“[W]e are nothing but camping boy [scouts],” Bowe Bergdahl wrote sometime in the year before he wandered away from a remote Army post in eastern Afghanistan with a knife, a camera and a diary, and was captured by the Taliban. “Hiding from children behind our heavy armored trucks and our c-wire and sand bagged operating post, we tell our selves that we are not cowards.”  [..]

To the right, this sort of clear-eyed critique of America’s military hubris is more damning than the idea that Bergdahl was psychologically unfit. Bergdahl may have struggled with mental illness, and if that’s the case, then certainly the issues of his recruitment and whether he had access to proper care become pertinent. But there is something uncomfortable about the impulse to defend Bergdahl with suggestions of mental unsoundness; in it are echoes of America’s striking eagerness to pathologize dissent. There could be a valid debate about whether leaving one’s post is an acceptable form of expressing it, or if there were really other options. But as President Obama pushes to prolong military engagement in Afghanistan, it may be more useful to stop asking what went wrong with Bergdahl, and instead consider what went wrong with the war.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: 8 Lessons the Left Can Learn From Cantor’s Loss

Twenty-four hours have now passed since House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s surprise primary defeat. Oceans of pixelated ink have already been spilled interpreting its meaning. Cantor’s defeat has certainly put an end to the conventional wisdom that “establishment Republicans” were beating back the tea party this year (although only in today’s Bizarro World political universe could Eric Cantor have been considered an “establishment Republican”).

There are things we will miss about Eric Cantor: his walk, that funny way he had of tilting his head when he laughed…

We’re kidding, of course. There is nothing we will miss about Eric Cantor. Americans do owe him a debt of gratitude, however, for preventing a ghastly Grand Bargain between President Obama and the more sober-minded (at least in this context) and deal-ready John Boehner. Without Cantor’s intransigence, Americans would’ve gotten a lousy deal — and Democrats would probably have been blamed for Social Security and Medicare cuts that would have haunted them for a generation to come.

So thanks, Mr. Cantor. Now don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Wendall Potter: Skyrocketing Salaries for Health Insurance CEOs

If health insurance companies announce big premium increases on policies for 2015, I hope regulators, lawmakers and the media will look closely at whether they are justified, especially in light of recent disclosures of better-than-expected profits in 2013, rosy outlooks for the rest of this year and soaring CEO compensation.

Almost all of the publicly traded health insurers reported big increases in revenue and profits last year. The big winners have been the top executives of those companies, led by Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, the nation’s third largest health insurer. Bertolini’s total compensation of $30.7 million in 2013 was 131 percent higher than in 2012.

If the stock prices of these firms keep growing at the current pace, Bertolini and his peers can expect to be rewarded even more handsomely this year, especially if they can hike premiums high enough to satisfy shareholders.

Judge Rolf M. Treu, who decided the Vergara case, declared that he was shocked — shocked! — to learn from Professor Raj Chetty and Professor Thomas Kane of Harvard about the enormous harm that one “grossly ineffective” teacher can do to a child’s lifetime earnings or to their academic gains.

How did he define “grossly ineffective” teacher? He didn’t. How did these dreadful teachers get tenure? Clearly, some grossly incompetent principal must have granted it to them. What was the basis — factual or theoretical — that the students would have had high scores if their teachers did not have the right to due process? He didn’t say.

John Nichols: Eric Cantor Loses to a Conservative Who Rips Crony Capitalism

The DC-insider storyline about this being a great year for the Republican establishment might need to be rewritten. And the rewrite might even require pundits, Republican chieftains and Democrats who are trying to figure out the politics of 2014 to consider complexities they had not previously entertained.

House majority leader Eric Cantor, the face of the GOP establishment and one of its most prodigious fundraisers, lost his Virginia Republican primary Tuesday to a challenger who promised, “I will fight to end crony capitalist programs that benefit the rich and powerful.”

Dave Brat, who defeated the number-two Republican in the House by a 56-44 margin, ripped big business almost as frequently as he did the incumbent. “I am running against Cantor because he does not represent the citizens of the 7th District, but rather large corporations seeking insider deals, crony bailouts and a constant supply of low-wage workers,” declared the challenger.

Cantor dismissed Brat as a “liberal college professor.”

That was false-at least the liberal part.

Wenonah Hauter: Trans-Atlantic Trade Deal a Field Day for Fracking

U.S. and EU negotiators recently began a new round of negotiations on the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement. Because the talks are happening behind closed doors, the public is left largely in the dark about the nature of the discussions over a deal also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

So what, exactly, do we know?

Officially, not much. But an EU negotiation position “on raw materials and energy” was leaked to the Huffington Post in May. The text amounts to a wish list of demands from Big Oil and Gas that would lock in any of their investments in fossil fuels in general, and shale gas and fracking in particular.

Article C of the document states that no restrictions should apply to the “exports of energy goods” between the transatlantic trade partners. Any request, for example, for an export license to ship natural gas from the United States to the EU would be approved “automatically.”

That means no questions asked, even if this arrangement could lead to environmental damage from widespread use of fracking, increased gas prices for U.S. consumers, increased import dependency, and other problems.

Ben Wolcott: Austerity and the Employment Rate

In 2010, after an initial round of coordinated stimulus from both wealthy and developing countries, deficit hawks around the world regrouped. Pointing to growing deficits and debt, they demanded that countries reverse course and begin moving toward balanced budgets. The deficit hawks argued that deficit reduction could be accomplished without impairing growth because of the effect it would have in boosting confidence among businesses and consumers.

Many economists argued against this drive towards austerity at the time. They noted and rigorously explained the fallacious logic in the idea that deficit reduction could be expansionary. They also pointed out how fiscal policy had already saved the economy from a second depression and that more stimulus would likely be necessary. However, now we have more than three years of data, so we no longer have to speculate. A simple picture can be worth a thousand words (or in this case, billions).