Tag: Punting the Pundits

The divestment movement on US college campuses against Big Carbon (coal, oil and gas) signals more than just the arrival of a new, determined and idealistic generation of students. It is a harbinger of danger for investors.

In addition to the keen competition thermal coal is facing as a source for electricity generation from fracked natural gas and from wind turbines, coal in particular faces a major public relations problem. It is the dirtiest way of producing electricity, causing lung problems and probably contributing to autism via mercury emissions, and it is the major cause of global warming.

The value of coal stocks is to outward seeming backed by trillions of dollars in coal reserves, but what if that substance is actually worthless? Coal is already being shorted by a major brokerage, which points out that even heavily coal-dependent China plans to move away from the fuel because of pollution concerns (like that coal plants are making the air thick as pea soup and giving small children lung cancer).

Robert Parry: Who Controls US Foreign Policy?

The new Saudi-Israeli alliance wants to drag the U.S. government – and military – into the region’s Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict by sabotaging negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and the Syrian civil war

In the case of Syria, the U.S. government has been under pressure from Israel and Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest Sunni Arab country, to enter the conflict on the side of the Syrian Sunni rebels and thus to strike a blow at Shiite-ruled Iran, which is backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. To push this goal of U.S. intervention, the Israelis and the Saudis have established what amounts to an anti-Shiite alliance based on their mutual hatred of Iran. [..]

But this joint Saudi-Israeli assault on what’s known as “the Shiite crescent” – an arc from Iran through Iraq and Syria to the Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon – is being fought on a variety of fronts, including on Capitol Hill and in the U.S. news media where American neoconservatives are working to deepen U.S. military involvement in Syria and to shoot down an interim agreement that would constrain but not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program.

David Sirota: Ending the Fire Zone Subsidy

In the American West, “zoning” is often viewed as a taboo term. Indeed, despite a population boom and the rise of major cities in the region, this area is still seen as the wide-open frontier. The libertarian zeal that comes with that frontier spirit naturally leads many to believe they should be able to build whatever they want wherever they want.

One obvious problem with that attitude, though, is how the inevitable costs associated with willfully irresponsible development decisions are borne not just by the individual property owner, but by all taxpayers. Such is the case with firefighting. Over the last decade, as so much suburban sprawl has reached into known wildfire zones, governments are still on the financial hook for protecting homes from blazes. That’s not frontier freedom. That’s forcing taxpayers who make responsible residential decisions to subsidize-and thus encourage-irresponsible development decisions.

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Genuine NSA reform is a Constitutional and economic necessity. Transparency and privacy are critical for citizens and tech firms

Technology companies revolutionized the global economy by creating an interconnected, high-speed international marketplace.

Internet and telecommunication companies empower businesses to conduct complex transactions and connect with customers, clients and governments across the globe, placing a premium on privacy, accountability and transparency.  These principles are the currency of their success, because as private citizens, we entrust these companies with very personal information.

The overreach by the National Security Agency (NSA) does more than infringe on American civil liberties. It poses a serious threat to our economic vitality. Reports from the business community are clear: indiscriminate collection of data by the NSA damages American companies’ growth, credibility, competitive advantage and bottom line.

John Nichols: If Congress Is Safe From the War on Drugs, Why Not Everyone Else?

Florida Congressman Trey Radel, who has wisely determined that he does not want to become an American version of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, says he will take a leave of absence from the US House of Representatives to address his penchant for cocaine. [..]

But it would be good for Radel and his colleagues to note that he has identified his challenge as a disease, not a bad habit.

That’s a very different line than was taken by the House Republicans Caucus (of which Radel has been an enthusiastic member) when the chamber this year gave voice-vote approval to an amendment that allows states to require drug-testing of food stamp recipients. Why would they seek to penalize victims of what the congressman says is a disease? Why would they go after the neediest Americans in what Congressman Jim McGovern-the House’s most ardent advocate for nutrition programs-with a “degrading and mean-spirited” approach?

Dawood Ahmed: America’s ‘army of lawyers’ is almost as deadly as its drones

The US has relentlessly argued that targeted killings are legal under international law. The third world has to push back

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Some ascribe this quote to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; others say Hitler authored the idea. In Mein Kampf he did speak of the invention of a lie so “colossal” that few would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.

Whoever coined the idea, the point is this: controlling the narrative matters immensely.

Military prowess is not enough in this age. And the United States knows it. America’s “other army” – its less visible but equally potent cadre of skillful lawyers (in government and even in private institutions) – dutifully got busy crafting appropriate international law narratives for the War on Terror. They realized that winning the battle for defining “legality” on the world stage was critical.

Patrick Toomey & Brett Max Kaufman: How did we let the NSA spying get this bad?

A secret court’s backwards logic opened the floodgates for the NSA to gather metadata. We’re still feeling the repercussions

After yet another avalanche of documents showing how the NSA has spied on our communications for years, Americans should be asking, how did we get here?

The answer is simple: secrecy poisoned our system of checks and balances. Both our courts and Congress failed to put meaningful limits on the NSA’s surveillance, trading away our privacy in the process. The American people never consented to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) effort to “collect it all” by tracking and inspecting every digital footprint we leave behind. Instead, the secret opinions of a secret court retroactively blessed a vast NSA surveillance program years after it began.

The more we learn, the clearer it is that our surveillance laws and oversight rules are in dramatic need of reform, like the USA Freedom Act, that provide both transparency and real protections for privacy.

“What could possibly justify terrorizing a community of 250,000 just for the purpose of killing one person?”

Can anyone imagine the demoralization and powerlessness that could consume a person living in a village where militant thugs from al Qaeda take over the village and are driven out by the community without any support from a government that is supposed to be allied with the US government in a fight against al Qaeda? Can anyone imagine thinking you have driven out all of these people when suddenly the skies erupt and a drone fires a Hellfire missile at someone in your village? Can anyone imagine those victims then being people who may not be al Qaeda members? And then, finally, can anyone imagine witnessing the return of militant thugs from al Qaeda, who wish to come back and take advantage of the drone strike by recruiting people to join their fight against the Yemeni government and America?

It is a circle of terror that no community should ever have to experience, and it is one of the many glaring examples of the bankruptcy of America’s drone policy.

Mike Lux: Elizabeth Warren Nails It: We Shouldn’t Be Fighting Each Other for a Handful of Crumbs

Elizabeth Warren showed again yesterday how she has become our country’s leading fighter for the middle class and those in poverty. In a passionate speech about Social Security, she tore apart the phony argument that greedy seniors were taking money away from our kids, and she showed why we should be increasing Social Security benefits right now, not cutting them. Warren laid out the facts about a pension system in tatters, that those retiring have less savings and wealth in their homes, and how the necessities of life — food, groceries, energy costs, health care — are running higher than the general inflation number, not lower. She took on the chained CPI cut that the president has proposed directly and took it apart point by point. [..]

Those of who have worked with lower and even middle income seniors know how much every dollar matters to them. These retirees are not greedy, and they are not living in luxury. In the years to come, most will not have pensions, many will have little to nothing in savings, and if they have homes they may not be worth nearly as much as they once were. What the facts, common sense, and compassion all call for is expanding Social Security benefits, not cutting them. This should be a core issue for all Democrats, not just the progressives like Elizabeth Warren. This is a fundamental values issue, not something to be traded away.

Chris Weigant: Launch the ‘Nuke,’ Harry

There’s an old adage in politics that the way to win political struggles is to “bring a gun to a knife fight.” If this imagery isn’t violent enough for you, the subject on the table now is whether Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is considering what is called the “nuclear option.” If bringing a gun wins a knife fight, then I guess dropping a “nuke” would pretty much obliterate the opposition. Which is why the term “nuclear option” was coined in the first place — to show what a radical move it would be. [..]

So far, it hasn’t happened. Instead, what might be called “nuclear deterrence” has worked. Merely threatening to “go nuclear” has been sufficient to make the opposition party back down, usually after some “Gang Of (insert number)” group hashes out a détente of sorts. This time, however, this doesn’t appear to be a viable route.

Robert Sheer: Be Thankful for the People Struggling to Limit NSA Spying

On Monday the Supreme Court, ruling on an emergency petition, declined to do the right thing and hear a case challenging the massive government surveillance of Americans, revealed by the leaks from Edward Snowden. For the time being, the court acceded to the Obama administration’s argument that it has the legal right to continue its unprecedented bulk collection of American phone records without any restraint. That throws the ball back to Congress, where a historic battle, crossing party lines, is already underway.

On one starkly polarizing side is the dark figure of Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat and reigning chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. One of the first to denounce Snowden for treason for letting the public know the ugly truths about government spying she had long concealed, Feinstein already has pushed a bill though her committee that provides the NSA’s spying with additional legal cover.  

With budget negotiations on the horizon, a buzz is building around Social Security, from Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats calling for an expansion of benefits to The Washington Post arguing that seniors must be sacrificed for the good of the “poor young.”

Two of the biggest players in the debate are largely behind the scenes: Business Roundtable and Fix the Debt, corporate lobbies that use deficit fear-mongering to sell benefit cuts. These groups are made up of CEOs of America’s largest corporations-people with retirement accounts that are more than 1,000 times as large as those of the average Social Security beneficiary. [..]

Saving more is an increasingly unworkable solution for the millions of workers whose wages and benefits are being undercut by some of the same CEOs directing them to do so. As the report lays out, many of the most effective ways to strengthen Social Security involve asking more of executives, not employees. Eliminating the cap on wages subject to Social Security taxes (currently set at $113,700) would eliminate 95 percent of the projected shortfall for seventy-five years, according to the Congressional Research Service. That’s three times the deficit reduction achieved by raising the retirement age to 70. Subjecting stock-based compensation to Social Security taxes would raise billions more.

Michelle Chen: Chinatown: the next front in the gentrification war

Chinatowns across the US are being replaced by ‘development’. For those fighting back, it’s about civil rights not just culture

There will always be a little corner of the American public imagination reserved for Chinatown. Whether the word evokes for you the stereotypical mystique of opium dens and gambling halls, or the gritty restaurants and garment factories that fueled generations of working-class immigrant families, Chinatown, as a cultural idea, seems to endure through the generations as a place of wonder, chaos, and cultural hybridity. But the real, brick-and-mortar Chinatown is vanishing rapidly, as its people, traditions and cultural life are swept away by what some call “development”. [..]

While gentrification has invaded many low-income areas in New York, its impacts are perhaps most starkly apparent in this neighborhood, which began over a century ago as a ghetto for mostly male migrant laborers, and has over the past generation morphed into one of the city’s hottest real estate markets. That transformation has come at the expense of the people and institutions who have anchored generations of Chinese American heritage. As immigrant families are expelled through mass evictions and spiking rents, in their wake comes an onslaught of white young professionals, forming a hyper-commercialized cityscape that billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has championed. Big property values, little character.

A recent study of three Chinatowns in Boston, New York City and Philadelphia starkly maps out gentrification’s effects in crowding out once tight-knit ethnic communities.

Ana Marie Cox: On healthcare, Obama is starting to sound like a misbehaving boyfriend

The GOP has popular opinion trending on on its side for the first time in years, and they will run this issue into the ground

Yesterday’s press conference saw Obama at his least compelling: the burdened genius mode, in which he shows clear frustration with others’ inability to follow his logic and shows little sympathy for those who don’t share his faith in his own vision.

In general, Obama’s personal reactions to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) rollout have resembled those of misbehaving boyfriend. “I’m sorry you feel that way” instead of a real apology and “I meant it when I said it” instead of an explanation.

Along those lines, the press conference was in many ways a master class in mansplaining. His arrogance peeled off another layer of cool, and he seemed genuinely surprised that the American people could seriously accused him of intentionally misleading the country:

Catherine Deveny: Sorry, but being a mother is not the most important job in the world

It’s time to drop the slogan. It encourages mothers to stay socially and financially hobbled, it alienates fathers and discourages other significant relationships between children and adults

Being a mother is not the most important job in the world. There, I said it. Nor is it the toughest job, despite what the 92% of people polled in Parents Magazine reckon.

For any woman who uses that line, consider this: if this is meant to exalt motherhood, then why is the line always used to sell toilet cleaner? And if being a mother is that important, why aren’t all the highly paid men with stellar careers not devoting their lives to raising children? After all, I never hear “being a father is the most important job in the world”.

The deification of mothers not only delegitimises the relationship fathers, neighbours, friends, grandparents, teachers and carers have with children, it also diminishes the immense worth and value of these relationships. How do gay dads feel about this line, I wonder? Or the single dads, stepdads or granddads? No matter how devoted and hard working you are, fellas, you’ll always be second best.

This week Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gave an important speech on the floor of the United State Senate. Said Sen. Warren, “the conversation about retirement and Social Security benefits is not just a conversation about math. At its core, this is a conversation about our values.” Sen. Warren knows her values.

She knows her math, too. As co-author of The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, Warren helped document a phenomenon which most Americans had observed but few had fully recognized: Typical two-earner middle-class families today can’t maintain the standard of living which single-earner middle-class households enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Why? Because real wages have fallen, mortgages are more expensive, education costs have skyrocketed, and out-of-pocket health care costs have risen dramatically for families with employer-based insurance.

Paul Rieckhoff: Who Will Stand With Military Sexual Assault Survivors When It Counts This Week

Serving in the U.S. military requires courage. Coming forward to describe surviving military sexual assault takes even more.

That is what thousands of survivors like those shown in the Academy Award-nominated film, The Invisible War have done. And for every survivor who is able to come forward, thousands are suffering in silence.

When the Department of Defense reported that there were an estimated 26,000 cases of unwanted sexual contact in the military in 2012, it was a massive wake-up call. It showed our military is being weakened from the inside. And this week, the issue has finally reached a tipping point. After 20 years of broken promises to end sexual assault in the military, one vote will determine whether or not Congress has the courage to strengthen the military justice system.

Wendall Potter: The Real Reasons Insurers Are Canceling Policies

Before Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies already were making rapid progress in implementing their business plans of “migrating” their customers from traditional managed care plans to so-called “consumer-directed” plans, the industry euphemism for high-deductible policies. At the same time they’ve been requiring us to pay more out of our own pockets for care, they’ve also been implementing a strategy of reducing benefits. Investors and Wall Street financial analysts refer to these common industry practices as “benefit buydowns.” That’s another euphemism, by the way.

I myself — and thousands of my fellow Cigna employees — were notified several years ago, long before I left my job, that our HMOs and PPOs were being discontinued. Yep, we got notices in the mail. If we wanted to stay in a Cigna-subsidized health plan, we would have to switch to a high-deductible plan. The same thing has happened to tens of millions of other Americans in recent years.

Yet if you relied on the Washington media for your news and information about health care, you’d think that insurance companies would never have considered sending policy discontinuation notices to their policyholders until forced to do so by Obamacare.

The truth: they have always done this when profits were at stake.

Norman Solomon: The Obamacare Disaster and the Poison of Party Loyalty

Four years ago, countless Democratic leaders and allies pushed for passage of Barack Obama’s complex healthcare act while arguing that his entire presidency was at stake. The party hierarchy whipped the Congressional Progressive Caucus into line, while MoveOn and other loyal groups stayed in step along with many liberal pundits. [..]

It should now be painfully obvious that Obamacare’s little helpers, dutifully reciting White House talking points in 2009 and early 2010, were helping right-wing bogus populism to gather steam. Claiming that the Obama presidency would sink without signing into law its “landmark” healthcare bill, many a progressive worked to throw the president a rope; while ostensibly attached to a political life preserver, the rope was actually fastened to a huge deadweight anvil. [..]

With such disingenuous sales pitches four years ago, President Obama and his Democratic acolytes did a lot to create the current political mess engulfing Obamacare-exaggerating its virtues while pulling out the stops to normalize denial about its real drawbacks. That was a bad approach in 2009. It remains a bad approach today.

Even as Americans struggle with the changes required by health care reform, an international survey released last week by the Commonwealth Fund, a research organization, shows why change is so necessary.

The report found that by virtually all measures of cost, access to care and ease of dealing with insurance problems, Americans fared poorly compared with people in other advanced countries. The survey covered 20,000 adults in the United States and 10 other industrial nations – Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain, all of which put in place universal or near-universal health coverage decades ago. The United States spends far more than any of these countries on a per capita basis and as a percent of the national economy.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: For Democrats, a Tax-the-Rich Road to Victory

As we enter into yet another round of budget discussions, the Democratic Party is confronted with an opportunity – and a challenge. There’s an opportunity to shift the budget debate to an area where they hold the high ground. But it will be a challenge for some Democrats to take the initiative on a subject they seem reluctant to discuss.

The subject is taxes.

Tax increases are a subject people seem reluctant to mention in the nation’s capital. Republicans have convinced everyone inside the Beltway that new tax revenues are politically impossible. The talk on the Hill is that the White House is urging Senate and House Dems to accept a cuts-only budget deal for the next go-round. It seems that the conventional wisdom says tax increases are best left unmentioned.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Robert Kuttner: Obama’s Gift to the Republicans

The ancient Greeks liked to say that character is fate.

The colossal mess that Obamacare has become reflects both the character of the legislation and that of the president who sponsored it.

The Affordable Care Act, as a government mandate for people to purchase private insurance with an array of possible subsidies, had too many moving parts. It was an accident waiting to happen.

As many of us wrote at the time, Medicare for All would be simpler to execute, easier to understand, and harder for Republicans to oppose. If doing Medicare for All in a single stroke was too heavy a lift, start with 60-year-olds, then 55-year-olds, then young people under 25, and fill in the qualifying age brackets over a decade.

In the meantime, if we wanted to expand coverage for the working poor, Medicaid was a proven vehicle. Indeed, the one part of the Affordable Care Act that is not coming off the rails is the expansion of Medicaid, because it is a public program.

Robert Reich: What Walmart Could Learn from Henry Ford

Walmart just reported shrinking sales for a third straight quarter. What’s going on? Explained William S. Simon, the CEO of Walmart, referring to the company’s customers, “their income is going down while food costs are not. Gas and energy prices, while they’re abating, I think they’re still eating up a big piece of the customer’s budget.”

Walmart’s CEO gets it. Most of Walmart’s customers are still in the Great Recession, grappling with stagnant or declining pay. So, naturally, Walmart’s sales are dropping. [..]

Walmart isn’t your average mom-and-pop operation. It’s the largest employer in America. As such, it’s the trendsetter for millions of other employers of low-wage workers. As long as Walmart keeps its wages at or near the bottom, other low-wage employers keep wages there, too. All they need do is offer $8.85 an hour to have their pick.

On the other hand, if Walmart were to boost its wages, other employers of low-wage workers would have to follow suit in order to attract the employees they need.

Get it? Walmart is so huge that a wage boost at Walmart would ripple through the entire economy, putting more money in the pockets of low-wage workers. This would help boost the entire economy — including Walmart’s own sales. (This is also an argument for a substantial hike in the minimum wage.)

Janet Yellen went to Capitol Hill Thursday to be interrogated by some senators about the kind of job she plans to do once she’s confirmed as Chair of the Federal Reserve.

Many politicians expect little from the Fed because they think it has less power and flexibility than it does. For its part, the right thinks it has exercised more power than it has. Yellen won’t transform anybody’s view of the Fed, but at least she has a sense of the gravity of our ongoing economic situation. [..]

The Federal Reserve was created by the American people. It should serve their interests, not those of the bankers it regulates. Yellen, a mainstream economist, isn’t likely to transform it into the central bank our nation needs. That may take a political mandate — one we’re not likely to see soon in our corporate-dominated political process.

The Fed has become far too deeply embedded with the banking industry. This can be seen in its board structure, as well as in its policies. Of the likely candidates to lead it, Janet Yellen was almost certainly the best of them. But that list was overly restricted by limitations — in both economic imagination and political courage.

Janet Yellen will be a good Chair for today’s Federal Reserve. But the Federal Reserve needs to change.

Robert Naiman: WikiLeaks and the Drone Strike Transparency Bill

The Senate Intelligence Committee recently took an important step by passing an intelligence authorization which would require for the first time — if it became law — that the administration publicly report on civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes.

Sarah Knuckey, Director of the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at New York University School of Law and a Special Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, calls this provision “an important step toward improving transparency,” and notes that “Various U.N. officials, foreign governments, a broad range of civil society, and many others, including former U.S. Department of State Legal Advisor Harold Koh … have called for the publication of such basic information.” [..]

Forcing the administration to publish information is crucial, because in the court of poorly informed public opinion, the administration has gotten away with two key claims that the record of independent reporting strongly indicates are not true: 1) U.S. drone strikes are “narrowly targeted” on “top-level terrorist leaders,” and 2) civilian casualties have been “extremely rare.” Poll data shows that majority public support of the drone strike policy is significantly based on belief in these two false claims; if the public knew that either of these claims were not true, public support for the policy would fall below 50%. By keeping key information secret, the administration has been able to avoid having its two key claims in defense of the policy refuted in media that reach the broad public.

Ralph Nader: California Voters Acted to Save $100 Billion

A report just out from the Consumer Federation of America found that, over the past 25 years, auto insurance expenditures in the United States have increased by a sharp 43 percent — despite all the advancements in auto safety and new players entering the auto insurance market.

Only one state saw insurance prices fall — California. For that, we can thank the consumer advocates who pushed for the 1988 passage of Proposition 103, which enabled voters to enact the strongest pro-consumer insurance regulations in the nation.

Proposition 103 was a response to a 1984 law that required California drivers to have auto insurance. The insurance companies jumped on this by drastically raising their rates to squeeze as much profit from motorists as possible. Consumers were obviously not pleased. Prop 103 advocates fought back by drafting an initiative proposal requiring insurers to roll back their rates by 20 percent as well as provide an additional 20 percent discount for drivers with good safety records, as well as other vital regulations to keep the insurance industry in check and eliminate ways in which insurers took advantage of policyholders. [..]

Let the success of Proposition 103 serve as the ultimate counterpoint to big industry lobbyists who regularly bad-mouth regulation as an undue burden on profitable business. When the system works and the companies become more efficient and less capricious — it benefits everyone.

David Sirota: New Republican Icon, Same Old Policies

From the moment he was declared the winner in his reelection campaign, Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) has been billed as a new kind of Republican. Is it a fair characterization? Yes and no.

Yes, this likely presidential candidate has done a few things other GOP politicians don’t usually do. Yes, he has won re-election in a traditionally Democratic state. And yes, for a few weeks he was actually cordial to President Obama. Even considering the context-he only won against an underfunded opponent and he was only nice to the president when asking for hurricane relief funds-these are, indeed, rare accomplishments for a Republican.

That said, these atypical parts of Christie’s record have little to do with the concrete policies that he has touted and that he would probably champion if he were elected president. On that score, Christie isn’t new at all. He is the opposite-a Bush/Cheney-esque neoconservative promoting the old politics of division and ignorance.

Britain has a long tradition of a free, inquisitive press. That freedom, so essential to democratic accountability, is being challenged by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron.

Unlike the United States, Britain has no constitutional guarantee of press freedom. Parliamentary committees and the police are now exploiting that lack of protection to harass, intimidate and possibly prosecute [The Guardian newspaper for its publication of information based on National Security Agency documents that were leaked by Edward Snowden. The New York Times has published similar material, believing that the public has a clear interest in learning about and debating the N.S.A.’s out-of-control spying on private communications. That interest is shared by the British public as well.

Robert Creamer: It’s Economic Inequality Stupid — What to Do About the Biggest Crisis Facing America

In 1992, the Clinton for President campaign is said to have had a poster on the wall of its war room that read: It’s the Economy Stupid. The object of the slogan was to keep the campaign on task.

Its goal was to make sure that every campaign message ultimately returned to the question of the economy. The campaign was convinced that no matter what else diverted their attention, the ultimate outcome of the election would hinge on who the voters thought would fix that broken economy.

Today, we would do well to have a poster that reminds us: It’s Economic Inequality Stupid. That’s because a good case can be made that to deal with any of our most pressing economic, social and economic problems, we must end the massive — still growing — disparity in distribution and control of the fruits of our economy.

Robert Reich: Having the Backbone to Set Minimum Standards for Health Insurance

Democrats are showing once again they have the backbones of banana slugs.

The Affordable Care Act was meant to hold insurers to a higher standards. So it stands to reason that some insurers will have to cancel their lousy sub-standard policies.

But spineless Democrats (including my old boss Bill Clinton) are caving in to the Republican-fueled outrage that the President “misled” Americans into thinking they could keep their old lousy policies — and are now urging the White House to forget the new standards and let people keep what they had before.

And some congressional Republicans are all too eager to join them, and allow insurers to offer whatever crap they were offering before — exposing families to more than $12,700 in out-of-pocket expenses, canceling policies of people who get seriously sick, failing to cover prescription drugs, and so on.

Dave Johnson: Imagine Democracy

“We the People.” How many of us have really thought through the implications of these three words? Can people today even imagine a government that is on the side of We the People, instead of being rigged to benefit the already-wealthy and crush the hopes and efforts of the rest of us?

Since the early 1970s corporate/conservative-funded interests have pounded the public 24/7/365 with unceasing propaganda promoting the idea that government can’t do anything right, business always does everything better and more “efficiently,” market solutions (one-dollar-one-vote) are better than public (one-person-one-vote) solutions, and so on.

Meanwhile democracy does not have a marketing budget, and for so long now so many people have not even heard that there can be another side, another approach to solving our problems and making our lives better. People just hear over and over that “government is bad, efforts to do things for each other are bad, but private business for profit is good.”