Tag: Punting the Pundits

Private student loans reflect the very worst practices of our consumer credit culture. The same deeply system that brought down mortgages is now making personal debt too big not to fail

As President Obama takes to TV and Tumblr to stump for his program to make federal student loans more affordable, there’s another $150bn problem lurking behind the scenes: private student loans, which are built on giving students the worst possible deal.

There has been laser-like attention from Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren to the callous federal student loan system, which controls about $1tn of student debt – and rightfully so, because it is immense and it is broken. Students are taking on too much debt to absorb rising tuition (a more complex issue itself) and the high debt is endangering the economy.

Zoë Carpenter: What Won’t the GOP Do to Keep the Poor Uninsured?

When it comes to healthcare, Southwest Virginia is a desperate place. Many of the state’s poorest and sickest live in that pocket of coal country between US Route 19 and the Kentucky and Tennessee borders, where it’s so hard to see a doctor that a free mobile health clinic held each July at a county fairground draws hundreds. “Southwest Virginia is one of the worst places we go to,” said Stan Brock, the founder and president of Remote Area Medical, which runs that clinic and others throughout the country.

That corner of Virginia also encompasses the district of Phillip Puckett, who served as a Democratic state senator until Monday, when he suddenly resigned. His decision to step down appears to have been the result of a bribe offered by Republican colleagues bent on stopping the expansion of Medicaid. Puckett’s resignation gave Republicans the one seat they needed to take control of the Senate; it also put him in the running for a paid post on a state tobacco commission that is controlled by some of the very same Republicans. And it cleared the way for the chamber to appoint his daughter to a state judgeship. [..]

The question of what prompted Puckett’s mid-term resignation is tantalizing, and potentially important, but it’s also beside the point. The true scandal is that hundreds of thousands of Virginians – including more than 20,000 (pdf of Puckett’s own constituents – will be denied health insurance.

Molly Osberg: Would I like fry cooks and baristas with my $15 minimum wage? Damn right

Seattle’s breakthrough still makes me worry about off-the-books workers of the ‘informal’ economy for whom a living wage is already a fiction

This week’s announcement that Seattle will begin to roll out a minimum wage of $15 per hour – a figure that more than doubles the federal minimum, and would make it one of the highest government-set minimum wages in the world – is a long overdue course correction. And if we’re now in for a rolling battle over living wages on a “city-by-city basis”, as Kevin Roose writes at New York magazine, Bill de Blasio’s New York can’t be too far behind. When that day comes, more than robotic baristas or the high-pitched wails of franchise lawyers, I worry about those employed by the so-called informal economy, the off-the-books workers for whom the minimum wage was already a fiction.

Sadhbh Walshe: Orange is the New Black in real life is a prison epidemic of too many women in jail – and taxpayers like you in the red

The US imprisons more women than any country – and most of them for low-level crimes of poverty and addiction. But there is a better way

Spoiler alert: if the following questions intrigue you, you are caught up on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black – and you’re probably as excited as I am that season two has finally arrived. [..]

Reality alert: the United States female prison population has increased 800% in the last three decades. During that same period, the male prison population also exploded, but only at half the rate of the female one. The result is that today, the US imprisons more women than any other country in the world, two-thirds of whom are low-level, non-violent offenders guilty of crimes of poverty and addiction. They are our real-life Taystees and Pousses and Dayas – small-time offenders who rob stores, or forge checks, or use or sell drugs to feed a habit or feed their kids – and their languishing costs you hundreds of millions of dollars.

So let’s all emerge from our binge-watching and ask a different question: what, exactly, are we achieving with America’s great experiment in mass incarceration?

During a recent talk at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson indicated his support for legislation in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage. “I will tell you we will support legislation that moves forward,” he said. Later in the talk, Mr. Thompson continued, “McDonald’s will be fine. We’ll manage through whatever the additional cost implications are.” It turns out that, contrary to the stale Republican talking points, one of the largest low-wage employers in the country does not have a problem with a higher minimum wage.

We have been vigorously advocating for a raise in the federal minimum wage for several years now. Much progress has been made in that time. Unfortunately, little of this progress has come in the halls of Congress, leaving cities and states across the country to do the work that our national leaders won’t do.

Juan Cole: Top 3 White Terrorist Attacks in America this Week

Our capitalist class may be becoming an absolute danger to ordinary Americans.  By promoting a doctrine of absolute right to gun ownership (which rather helps gun manufacturers) and at the same time encouraging people to hate the Federal government and resent paying taxes, they are creating a whole class of alienated far right shooters.

The American far Right, with its white supremacism, fascination with guns and explosives, profound hatred for the Federal government, poses the biggest terrorism threat in the country by far.  Worse, they receive support from right wing media in the U.S. because they hate taxes just the way the ultra-conservative media moguls doe.  Although their attacks are ideological, directed at civilian victims and violent, they are seldom categorized as ‘terrorists.’  Rather what they do is “mass shootings.”  In the meantime, plots hatched by Muslims in the U.S. during the past few years appear almost always to be a form of entrapment by the FBI.

John Nichols: Getting Married ‘Where We Live’: Why Each Marriage Equality Ruling Is Historic

Marriage equality is not a new premise. The barriers are falling rapidly. Since the US Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman, it has, in fact, become inevitable. Following on the Supreme Court ruling of last summer, the group Freedom to Marry says twenty consecutive rulings by state and federal judges have found state marriage bans unconstitutional-and more will do so.

Yet each state’s embrace of freedom and fairness matters. That was so very obvious on Friday night in Madison, a city that has for decades embraced and celebrated LGBT rights. Indeed, among the many jurists performing marriages Friday night was Dane County Judge Shelley Gaylord, who was first elected two decades ago to a municipal judgeship as an LGBT activist and lawyer.

Wisconsin should have been the first state in the nation to embrace marriage equality.

Joe Muto: Bowe Bergdahl is Fox News’ perfect villain for the propaganda machine

As Bill O’Reilly used to tell me, the only thing that drives more viewers than a hero … is a villain. Especially if you arrange to have ‘experts’ call him that on purpose

Booking guests for cable news can be a taxing job. You’re underpaid, overworked and constantly on deadline. It’s no surprise, then, that most bookers form a symbiotic relationship with PR people, “fixers” who specialize in connecting producers with the right expert, in possession of the right point-of-view, right away. The pitfall, of course, is that when someone is desperate to go on television, it’s usually a safe bet that they have an axe to grind. Ideally, the booking producer acts as a gatekeeper, to filter out those who are pushing an agenda.

There’s no such filter at Fox News Channel, where pundits are not only allowed to push an agenda but are very much expected to do so. Guests at Fox are booked specifically to advance the latest anti-government narrative – be it Obamacare or Benghazi, the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy or now the released Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl … or on some nights, all of the above.

In what critics call its War on Journalism, the Obama administration has pursued leaks aggressively, bringing criminal charges in eight cases, compared with three under all previous administrations combined. It has also denigrated First Amendment jurisprudence by threatening journalists with criminal prosecution, including under the Espionage Act (a capital offense), for using leaked information. Raids of press offices and confiscation of reporters’ computers and notebooks have also occurred, revealing the divide between words and deeds.

The Fourth Circuit’s 2-1 ruling which the Supremes let stand, overturned the Virginia trial court verdict ruling that Risen was protected by a reporter’s privilege and could not be compelled to reveal the identity of his source for his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration which told of a bungled CIA effort in 2000 to undermine Iran’s nuclear program.

Why is it so important? The 4th Circuit has appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in Virginia and Maryland, which is where the CIA and NSA are headquartered and where many national security reporters live and work. By eviscerating the privilege there, the government has made national security reporting that much harder at a time when other tactics such as mass surveillance are being used to scare off journalists’ sources. In fact, the Risen subpoena may be one of the last seen, as Big Brother will no longer even need to ask the reporter – as it will already know the source of the leak via its own snooping.

Owen Jones: The CIA’s cute first tweet can’t cover its bloody tracks

As the agency strives to craft a cuddly new image, we mustn’t allow it to whitewash its history of torture and murder

In the latest CIA coup, America’s leading spooks have sent the Twittersphere into a frenzy with their chucklesome debut on social media: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.” How droll! More than a quarter of a million people have retweeted what has been described as “the best first tweet possible”. No wonder: it’s one of the world’s most secretive organisations being self-deprecating, light-hearted, even – dare I say it? – cute. [..]

The agency’s first tweet provoked the New York Review of Books to launch a Twitter war, exposing the CIA’s recent record. The CIA had interfered with a recent Senate investigation into torture, the magazine pointed out, in CIA secret prisons established by President Bush. CIA operatives were given clearance to deprive suspects of sleep, slam them against walls, and use waterboarding and other forms of torture.

It’s in the CIA’s interests to craft a cuddly new image: as a team of glamorous, James Bond-style spooks who can take a joke. Given the abject failure of much of the western media to scrutinise its actions – at least until it’s too late – it may believe it can get away with it. But its record of torture, murder and subverting democratic governments speaks for itself. However savvy its Twitter campaign, that must not be forgotten.

Chase Madar: For US foreign policy, ‘left’ and ‘right’ have little meaning

Both political parties seek hawkish reputation

We all know our left from our right, don’t we? This skill, difficult enough in salsa dancing, turns out to be even trickier when applied to American foreign policy, where the difference between left and right is anything but simple.

Remember how in 2008, the candidate promising to expand the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan was Barack Obama, to the horror of GOP candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney? How come the most popular anti-war politician of the past 10 years isn’t a Democrat or even Ralph Nader but Ron Paul, a paleoconservative Texas Republican? How does it happen that Pvt. Chelsea Manning, a WikiLeaks source, gets far better treatment in the pages of The American Conservative, founded by Pat Buchanan, than in liberal Salon? Not even highbrow intellectuals are immune to this disorientation: The late ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, sympathetic biographer of left reformer Jane Addams, thought the Iraq War was swell and proceeded to muse about “just war” rationales for strikes against Iran. Historian and retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, an uncompromising anti-war public intellectual, identifies himself as a Catholic conservative.

What’s going on here? The difference between war lover and anti-interventionist, hawk and dove, is clearly more complicated than a simple left-right divide. We need a better map for this quirky landscape. Here are three things that scramble the tidy left-right spectrum in U.S. foreign policy.

Ray McGovern: Leaving the USS Liberty Crew Behind

Justifying the swap of Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bergdahl, President Obama cited a principle of never leaving U.S. soldiers behind, but that rule was violated in the shabby treatment of the USS Liberty crew, attacked 47 years ago by Israeli warplanes

On June 8, 1967, Israeli leaders learned they could deliberately attack a U.S. Navy ship and try to send it, together with its entire crew, to the bottom of the Mediterranean – with impunity. Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, a state-of-the-art intelligence collection platform sailing in international waters off the Sinai, killing 34 of the 294 crew members and wounding more than 170.

On the 47th anniversary of that unprovoked attack let’s be clear about what happened: Israeli messages intercepted on June 8, 1967, leave no doubt that sinking the USS Liberty was the mission assigned to the attacking Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats as the Six-Day War raged in the Middle East. Let me repeat: there is no doubt – none – that the mission of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was to destroy the USS Liberty and kill its entire crew.

Referring last week to the controversy of the swap of five Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bode Bergdahl, President Barack Obama claimed, “The U.S. has always had a pretty sacred rule: We don’t leave our men or women in uniform behind.” The only exception, he might have added, is when Israeli forces shoot them up; then mum’s the word.

Mr. President, try explaining that “pretty sacred rule” to the USS Liberty survivors. I know them well enough to sense the hollow echo that Obama’s claim will leave in their ears – and in the ears of the families of those who did not survive.

MOST people associate FIFA, the organization that oversees international soccer, with the quadrennial joy of the World Cup. But as the 2014 tournament begins next week in Brazil, FIFA is plagued by levels of corruption, graft and excess that would shame Silvio Berlusconi. [..]

Under the iron-fisted leadership of Sepp Blatter, FIFA has been steeped in rotating scandals for so long, it’s difficult even to imagine its not being immersed in one public relations crisis or another. Mr. Blatter succeeded his mentor, the similarly scandal-plagued João Havelange in 1998. Under his stewardship, FIFA officials have been accused of financial mismanagement, taking bribes and projecting a level of sexism and homophobia that seems to come from another century.

FIFA’s corruption has been such an open secret for so many years that when new reports emerge, they tend to provoke more eye-rolls than outrage.

George Zorrnick: Will the EPA’s Climate Plan Lead to a Counterproductive Fracking Boom?

There’s little doubt the Obama administration’s big push to cut carbon pollution, announced this week, will lead to much less coal-fired power in the United States. That’s a good thing.

But what if states instead turn to natural gas-powered electricity instead? That’s certainly what the administration would like them to do-it’s explicitly laid out as an alternative in the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule, and Obama echoed that suggestion when he spoke on a conference call the day the rule was unveiled. For years, his administration has pushed natural gas as a fundamental part of America’s long-term energy strategy.

If that happens, it could be a disaster for the environment, according to some leading climate experts. Federal regulations on the extraction and transport of natural gas range from insufficient to nonexistent, and the resultant methane emissions from a bigger natural gas boom could neutralize the gains made by the EPA’s rule, and possibly even accelerate climate change in the short-term.

Richard Reeves: Welcome Home, Sergeant

If today’s Republican Party had been around during the Civil War, it would have tried to stop its own president, a fellow named Lincoln, from appointing Gen. Ulysses S. Grant commander of the Union Army because he drank on duty-quite a lot, apparently. And if the president was a Democrat, say Thomas Jefferson, the Republicans would be calling for hearings to find out the “real” reason he was sending Lewis and Clark into the wilderness to learn what was out there between the Mississippi and the Pacific.

So now it is President Obama and Sgt. Bergdahl. It could be Obama and anyone or anything. In fact, the Republicans and other conservatives have been bad-mouthing the president for years for not doing enough to get the wandering sergeant back from the Taliban.

Davis Sirota: Private Equity Is Becoming a Public Problem

A few weeks ago, a top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission reported on what he called a “remarkable” amount of potentially illegal behavior in the private equity industry-aka the industry that buys up, changes and sells off smaller companies.

In its evaluation of private equity firms, the SEC official declared that half of all the reviews discovered “violations of law or material weaknesses in controls.” The announcement followed an earlier Bloomberg News report on how the agency now believes “a majority of private equity firms inflate fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes.”

At first glance, many probably dismiss this news as just an example of plutocrats bilking plutocrats. But that interpretation ignores how such malfeasance affects the wider economy.

Maybe it’s me, but the predictable right-wing cries of outrage over the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules on carbon seem oddly muted and unfocused. I mean, these are the people who managed to create national outrage over nonexistent death panels. Now the Obama administration is doing something that really will impose at least some pain on some people. Where are the eye-catching fake horror stories?

For what it’s worth, however, the attacks on the new rules mainly involve the three C’s: conspiracy, cost and China. That is, right-wingers claim that there isn’t any global warming, that it’s all a hoax promulgated by thousands of scientists around the world; that taking action to limit greenhouse gas emissions would devastate the economy; and that, anyway, U.S. policy can’t accomplish anything because China will just go on spewing stuff into the atmosphere.

I don’t want to say much about the conspiracy theorizing, except to point out that any attempt to make sense of current American politics must take into account this particular indicator of the Republican Party’s descent into madness. There is, however, a lot to say about both the cost and China issues.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Obama Could Appoint a ‘People’s Fed’ Board — and Transform the Economy

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve was created to represent the economic sectors and portions of our population most directly affected by the central bank’s actions. Instead it’s comprised almost entirely of economists and lawyers who are associated with Northeastern institutions and the Washington, D.C., political class.

With the current vacancies on the Board, President Obama has a chance to change that. He has an opportunity to shift the Fed’s direction in a way that would be both economically transformative and politically popular. He has an opportunity to make the central bank an institution which reflects and serves the people who created it.

It’s also what the law requires.

Mary Bottari and Jay Riestenberg: Who Is Behind the National Right to Work Committee and Its Anti-Union Crusade?

As the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 session comes to a close, one of the major cases left for a decision is Harris vs. Quinn, which could affect millions of public sector workers in the United States.

The case originates in Illinois, where home health care workers have been successfully organized by public sector unions. Now, a small group of these workers, represented by lawyers from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, have sued and their lawyers contend that the agency fees, or the fair share dues that even non-union members of a bargaining unit are required to pay to unions that bargain for higher wages on their behalf, violate the First Amendment. Agency fees are barred in so-called “right to work” states, which have much less unionization and lower wages and benefits.

Robert Reich: Seattle is Right

By raising its minimum wage to $15, Seattle is leading a long-overdue movement toward a living wage. Most minimum wage workers aren’t teenagers these days. They’re major breadwinners who need a higher minimum wage in order to keep their families out of poverty.

Across America, the ranks of the working poor are growing. While low-paying industries such as retail and food preparation accounted for 22 percent of the jobs lost in the Great Recession, they’ve generated 44 percent of the jobs added since then, according to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project. Last February, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that raising the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 would lift 900,000 people out of poverty.

Seattle estimates almost a fourth of its workers now earn below $15 an hour. That translates into about $31,000 a year for a full-time worker. In a high-cost city like Seattle, that’s barely enough to support a family.

In his May 28 foreign policy address to the graduating Army cadets at West Point, President Barack Obama said the U.S. “must be more transparent about both the basis of our counterterrorism actions and the manner in which they are carried out.” He further promised to “turn to our military to take the lead and provide information to the public about our efforts.”

There is, in fact, an easy way for the Department of Defense to fulfill the president’s wishes. It could release redacted investigations of incidents in which civilians were killed during combat engagements involving the U.S. military. Although this is not well known, the DoD has conducted thousands of these investigations, generally in a thorough and professional manner. More important, most of them are already releasable by request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Releasing the investigations promises several benefits. It would contradict the claims that the U.S. isn’t concerned about civilian casualties or holding its service members accountable. It would also counter terrorist propaganda. In the wake of a drone strike, if the military fails to provide its version of events – an accurate and thorough version that it takes great pains to obtain – those hostile to U.S. interests inevitably will. It’s past time for the U.S. to regain the reputation for accountability and transparency that it need not have lost in the first place.

Robert Reich: The Way to Stop Corporate Lawbreaking Is to Prosecute the People Who Break the Law

Today (Thursday, June 5) GM releases the results of its internal investigation about why it failed to respond to an ignition switch defect in millions of cars that has been linked to at least 13 deaths.

But who’s really to blame when a big corporation breaks the law? The government thinks it’s the corporation itself.

Wrong.

“What GM did was break the law … They failed to meet their public safety obligations,” scolded Sec. of Transportation Anthony Foxx a few weeks ago after imposing the largest possible penalty on the giant automaker.

Attorney General Eric Holder was even more adamant recently when he announced the guilty plea of giant bank Credit Suisse to criminal charges for aiding rich Americans avoid paying taxes. “This case shows that no financial institution, no matter its size or global reach, is above the law.”

Tough words. But they rest on a bizarre premise. GM didn’t break the law, and Credit Suisse never acted above it. Corporations don’t do things. People do.

Anne Johnson: Guess Who Is Hurt the Most by Student Debt and Higher College Costs

s Americans continue to struggle with the exploding costs of higher education and crippling levels of student debt, one constituency is getting hit hardest: low-income individuals.

While student debt is an issue that impacts Americans from all income brackets, races, ages, and from every part of the country, low-income Americans face unique challenges. [..]

What’s more, for-profit colleges often target and take advantage of low-income individuals and people of color, leaving them with high levels of debt that they are later unable to pay off. Investigations into these corporate education giants have found deceptive and misleading practices to recruit students and more than half of students at for-profit colleges drop out within a few years.

Despite numerous investigations highlighting the deceptive nature of the for-profit college industry, this issue has ballooned. More students are enrolling in for-profit institutions, more students are dropping out before receiving a degree, and CEOs of these education corporations continue to make millions.

There are two Republicans who can take down Hillary Clinton, and Rand Paul isn’t much of a Republican. If the GOP wants to survive, it might be to time to ride the libertarian wave

Ted Cruz is riding high right now. Over the weekend, he gave a rousing anti-establishment speech at the activist-oriented Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, and won the event’s straw poll. He also appeared on ABC’s This Week to give a cathartic Hillary Clinton smack-down: “The sad thing with Secretary Clinton, is it seems to be all politics, all the time.” Most significantly, the Texas GOP primaries gave the Tea Party and Cruz an important series of victories at a time when the insurgent movement’s electoral future seems otherwise uncertain – even and especially in this week’s Super Tuesday primaries in Mississippi and elsewhere.

The person who should be the happiest about Ted Cruz’s visibility and apparent success? Rand Paul.

The more Cruz links himself to the Tea Party and basks in national attention, the more reasonable and mature Paul looks – and the less he has to tone down his own extreme positions. Cruz and Paul are the only two possible 2016 candidates with the infrastructure and fundraising abilities that could plausibly challenge what used to be Chris Christie’s advantage, which is looking weaker by the day.

Cori Crider: Forget the ‘Taliban Five’ – Obama’s real chance is to free Gitmo’s Cleared 78

The Bowe Bergdahl-Taliban swap row obscures a new political reality: there are diplomatic solutions for prisoners who have been cleared – and maybe even for closing Guantánamo Bay

So President Obama, like many presidents before him and no doubt many to follow, has employed a routine end-of-hostilities POW swap. For five Guantánamo prisoners, he has managed to bring Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl home. Bravo. But while Republicans do their level best to Benghazi-fy this rather uncontroversial news, the real story on Gitmo is elsewhere.

Lost in the kerfuffle over the Bergdahl-Taliban swap is one simple and very positive development: we now know that, when push comes to shove, the Defense Department and the White House can work together to close Guantánamo Bay. No, shutting down the prison isn’t a matter of flipping a switch. But break the matter down into individual cases and achievable diplomatic solutions tend to present themselves.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett: Underestimate a lady hurricane at your peril

Scientists have revealed that female-named hurricanes are deadlier than male ones. Show some respect, weather watchers

In shocking news that should vindicate men’s rights activists everywhere but surprise no one who has ever angered my mother in a supermarket, it has today emerged that female hurricanes are deadlier than their male equivalents. The study has resulted in the researchers at the University of Illinois fielding calls from journalists enquiring as to whether the whole thing is a joke – presumably it is the inherent and measurable power of a storm that causes deaths, and not its perceived gender? Au contraire, sexism spotters: they found that, over and above the qualities of the storm itself, a severe hurricane with a girly name will kill more people than a storm with a masculine one. This is because, according to the Washington Post’s rather sweet phrasing, “people don’t respect them”. Sister friends, I know the feeling.

Yes, in what could be described as the Guardian reaching “peak feminism”, I am writing about the sexism that is meted out to weather events. But according to behavioural scientist Sharon Shavitt – a pleasing sitcom cockney name if ever I heard one – it appears that “gender biases apply not only to people, but also to things”. People underestimate female hurricanes because they reckon that they are not all that dangerous, perhaps assuming that the worst they can do is be really nice to your face and then embark on a chardonnay-fuelled bullet-pointed character assassination behind your back from the loos in Wetherspoons, the final coup de grace being that they thought you looked fat in your wedding dress.

Zoë Carpenter: The GOP Is Freaking Out Over the EPA’s Carbon Rules. Why Aren’t Power Companies?

Cue the howls of outrage. On Monday the Environmental Protection Agency issued a draft rule to cut carbon emissions from existing power plants by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, a move likely to be the Obama administration’s most significant in the fight against climate change. Immediately, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell called the proposal “a dagger in the heart of the American middle class, and to representative Democracy itself.” Not to be outdone, the Heartland Institute warned that “by the time EPA is finished, millions of Americans will be freezing in the dark.” [..]

If the power plant rules were indeed likely to leave the nation in the dark, one might expect the companies that supply the country’s power to be similarly alarmed. In fact, the apocalyptic rhetoric in Washington doesn’t reflect the way the rules have been received by stakeholders outside the Beltway. It’s not surprising that renewable energy and natural gas companies welcomed them. But even some of the utility companies that operate the country’s dirtiest power plants responded with what looks more like a collective shrug than mass panic. Many companies are pleased with the flexibility in the proposal, and the fact that it sets 2005 as the baseline year from which reductions will be measured. That year was the high point for US emissions, so reductions from that baseline will achieve less than if the reduction were based on current levels.

Specious slogans dominate key midterm Senate battles in Appalachia, burying West Virginia coal chemical disaster

On Monday, President Barack Obama is expected to announce a new Environmental Protection Agency regulation to cut CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants by 30 percent, setting a cap that will require states to trade or shift toward clean energy alternatives. U.S. Senate candidates in pivotal coal-producing Appalachian states, however, have already fired the opening salvo in the next battle over dirty coal. [..]

Four years ago, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., issued his clarion call for Appalachia and the coal industry to “embrace the future,” adding later that people, not coal, “are West Virginia’s most valuable resource. We must demand to be treated as such.”

Byrd’s call found scant reception in the campaign war rooms, but its sentiment has continued to spread across Appalachia. Kentuckians electrified such hopes for change in 2010 when a regional grassroots movement for “New Power” compelled the East Kentucky Power Cooperative to halt plans to build two coal-burning power plants in Clark County and explore both job-creating energy efficiency programs and renewable energy options. [..]

As long as those voices are overpowered by the relentless “war on coal” ads bankrolled by out-of-state coal industry lobby fronts, change must come from the EPA and the White House.

At least, that is, until a new era of candidates in West Virginia, Kentucky and even Illinois finally provides the leadership to speak up about a just transition to “new power” initiatives for clean energy jobs and development during elections and put the worn-out, misleading slogans of the coal wars to rest.

Paul Buchheit: Toward the Total Paralysis of an Unequal Society

The severing of our society into a plutocracy and a peasantry is so far along that statistics almost cease to have meaning. But the facts have to be told, to help explain the sickening sense that we’re becoming a nation without a middle class, paralyzed by the inequality deniers and excuse makers who refuse to admit there’s something wrong with their free-market capitalist system. The extremes are becoming almost intolerable. [..]

Thomas Piketty recommends a global wealth tax to help reverse inequality. But a financial transaction tax (also called speculation tax or Robin Hood tax) would be easier to implement, more efficiently regulated, and a source of massive revenues at little cost to financial traders.

Whatever method we choose, progressive thinkers in the U.S. and around the world will need to unite on a single cause, much as the Tea Party did in its crusade against government. We can’t afford to disagree among ourselves as paralysis sets in.

David Sirota: Big Money Behind a Big Merger

There are plenty of reasons to worry about the proposal to combine Comcast, America’s largest cable and broadband company, with Time Warner Cable, the second-largest cable firm and third-largest broadband provider.

For one, there’s ever more consolidated control over content. There’s also the possibility of certain types of content being given special (or worse) treatment based on the provider’s relationship with Comcast and Time Warner Cable. And there’s the prospect of even higher prices. Indeed a Comcast executive recently admitted that the company will not promise bills “are going to go down or even that they’re going to increase less rapidly.”

In the capital of a properly functioning democracy, all of these concerns would prompt the federal government to block the deal. But Washington is an occupied city-occupied by Comcast’s vast army. As Time magazine recently reported, “The company has registered at least 76 lobbyists across 24 firms.” Those figures include neither telecom lobbyist turned FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler nor Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s chief of staff, who was a Comcast vice president and raked in $1.2 million in Comcast payments since taking his government job.There are plenty of reasons to worry about the proposal to combine Comcast, America’s largest cable and broadband company, with Time Warner Cable, the second-largest cable firm and third-largest broadband provider.

For one, there’s ever more consolidated control over content. There’s also the possibility of certain types of content being given special (or worse) treatment based on the provider’s relationship with Comcast and Time Warner Cable. And there’s the prospect of even higher prices. Indeed a Comcast executive recently admitted that the company will not promise bills “are going to go down or even that they’re going to increase less rapidly.”

In the capital of a properly functioning democracy, all of these concerns would prompt the federal government to block the deal. But Washington is an occupied city-occupied by Comcast’s vast army. As Time magazine recently reported, “The company has registered at least 76 lobbyists across 24 firms.” Those figures include neither telecom lobbyist turned FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler nor Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s chief of staff, who was a Comcast vice president and raked in $1.2 million in Comcast payments since taking his government job.

Jarett Murphy: The Working Families Party Plays it Safe by Endorsing Andrew Cuomo for Governor

Both the governor and the WFP went into the weekend needing something from the other. The governor walked away with what he wanted. The party got an IOU.

Has New York state’s Working Families Party come up with the formula for forcing centrist Democrats to the left and delivering bread-and-butter progressive policy? That was the hope on Saturday night outside Albany, where the party gathered to make its endorsements for state races later this year. Faced with losing the ballot line to a challenger who tapped into resentment over his estate tax cuts, charter-school championing and failure to deliver campaign finance reform, Governor Andrew Cuomo won the party’s designation only after promising to fight for Democratic control of the state Senate and deliver a progressive policy wish list. [..]

The sales pitch worked: Cuomo won a solid (if not commanding) 59 percent of the vote to Teachout’s 41 percent.

But the endorsement vote and the deal that secured it don’t represent success. The real test of the WFP approach-honed since its founding in 1998 and facilitated by hard work in hundreds of contests for local and state office-will be whether Cuomo delivers, which won’t really be clear until his second term is under way.

Both the governor and the WFP went into the weekend needing something from the other. The governor walked away with what he wanted. The party got an IOU.

At a meeting with journalists last week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. was questioned about the prolonged quest to compel James Risen, a reporter for The Times, to testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency official. Prosecutors say Mr. Sterling was a source for restricted information in Mr. Risen’s 2006 book on the C.I.A. “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” Mr. Holder said.

The statement went an intriguing step further than his previous pledge not to prosecute reporters for their news-gathering activities and was taken as a hint that the Justice Department might choose not to jail Mr. Risen for defying a subpoena ordering him to disclose his sources. [..]

Still, there are reasons to be wary. Mr. Holder did not, for example, rule out imposing steep fines, or otherwise inflicting harm on Mr. Risen and press freedom.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Real Piketty Scandal (Is Right-Wing Deception)

Conservatives in all corners of the globe must have felt their hearts sing, if only for a moment, when the Financial Times ran a piece entitled “Piketty findings undercut by errors.” Sadly for them, the FT’s claims proved untrue. But if you think that put an end to the accusations against the French economist and his findings on inequality, you don’t know today’s conservatives. [..]

Conservatives aren’t obligated to accept the defenses of Piketty, either, however persuasive many of us find them. But to ignore them altogether, to hype the FT’s attack and omit such exhaustively researched and data-rich rebuttals, is to conduct an indefensible cherry-picking of both facts and arguments.

And that, ironically, is what the Financial Times wrongly accused Piketty of doing.

Conservatives can claim that the progressive solutions which worked so well in the past won’t work today. They can argue, as libertarian Garrett Jones does, that “the best way to defuse the situation is to teach tolerance for inequality. ” They can even continue to promote the disproven solutions of the past, as a new book from Arthur Laffer et al. does. (It won laudatory blurbs from Dick Cheney and Phil Gramm, if that tells you anything.)

That’s how honest debate works — or should. We should all be willing to hawk our wares in the marketplace of ideas.  But to distort the facts or make false accusations is to poison that marketplace with tainted goods. When conservatives do it as a matter of routine — on economics, climate change and so many other issues — it also sends the subliminal message that they don’t believe they can win an argument on its merits.Conservatives aren’t obligated to accept the defenses of Piketty, either, however persuasive many of us find them. But to ignore them altogether, to hype the FT’s attack and omit such exhaustively researched and data-rich rebuttals, is to conduct an indefensible cherry-picking of both facts and arguments.

And that, ironically, is what the Financial Times wrongly accused Piketty of doing.

Robert Reich: Freedom Summer II

I spent several days in New York last week with students from around the country who were preparing to head into the heartland to help organize Walmart workers for better jobs and wages. (Full familial disclosure: My son Adam is one of the leaders.)

Almost exactly fifty years ago a similar group headed to Mississippi to register African-Americans to vote, in what came to be known as Freedom Summer.

Call this Freedom Summer II.

The current struggle of low-wage workers across America echoes the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.

Today, as then, a group of Americans is denied the dignity of decent wages and working conditions. Today, just as then, powerful forces are threatening and intimidating vulnerable people for exercising their legal rights. Today, just like fifty years ago, people who have been treated as voiceless and disposable are standing up and demanding change.

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