Tag: Punting the Pundits

It was a strange speech, in which the real news was left for last, popping out like a Jack-in-the-Box after 11 minutes of growls and snarls and Obama’s bizarre whining about how unfair it is to be restrained from making war on people who have done you no harm. The president abruptly switched from absurd, lie-based justifications for war to his surprise announcement that, no, Syria’s turn to endure Shock and Awe had been postponed. The reader suddenly realizes that the diplomatic developments had been hastily cut and pasted into the speech, probably only hours before. Obama had intended to build the case for smashing Assad to an imperial peroration – a laying down of the law from on high. But his handlers threw in the towel, for reasons both foreign and domestic. Temporarily defeated, Obama will be back on the Syria warpath as soon as the proper false flag operations can be arranged.

Gail Collins: Back to Boehner

Back to Congressional gridlock. Back to watching John Boehner provide exciting updates like “we’re continuing to work with our members.” Maybe, if the stalemate goes on long enough, he will once again tell reporters: “If ands and buts were candy and nuts, every day would be Christmas.” I always enjoy that part.

Tra-la-la.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been awash in worries about profound problems in foreign affairs, but now we’re going domestic again. We’re back in budget crisis territory. Compared with Syria, it seems like a walk in the park. Good old fiscal cliffs.

It’s possible you’ve lost track of this over the summer, so I have prepared a calendar of upcoming events. Feel free to put it on the refrigerator: [..]

Sarah van Gelder: Peace Pushes Back: How the People Won Out (For Now)

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other cases, the people protested and got war anyway. Why-at least, so far-has the story played out differently with Syria?

Just two weeks ago, the United States stood at the brink of yet another war. President Obama was announcing plans to order U.S. military strikes on Syria, with consequences that no one could predict.

Then things shifted. In an extraordinarily short time, the people petitioned, called their representatives in Congress, held rallies, and used social media to demand a nonviolent approach to the crisis. The march toward war slowed. [..]

If these diplomatic efforts to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles are successful, historians may look back at this as a moment when the people finally got the peace they demanded.

David Sirota: he Lessons of Colorado’s Gun Debate

The day after this week’s elections, the National Rifle Association got exactly what it wanted: a front-page New York Times story about Colorado results that supposedly sent “lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws.” That article, and many others like it, came after the gun lobby mounted successful recall campaigns against two state legislators who, in the wake of mass shootings, voted for universal background checks, limits on the capacity of bullet magazines and restrictions on domestic abusers owning firearms.

Despite the recalls being anomalously low-turnout affairs, the national media helped the gun lobby deliver a frightening message to politicians: Vote for modest gun control and face political death.

Two years after thousands of Egyptian protesters risked their lives to bring down the dictator Hosni Mubarak, the military-controlled government in Cairo is expanding a repressive system that may ultimately be worse than the one Mr. Mubarak built and managed.

On Thursday, with much of the world distracted by Syria, the Egyptian generals and the civilian officials they have appointed extended a countrywide state of emergency for two months. And after overthrowing Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, two months ago and trying to crush his Muslim Brotherhood allies, security forces have also begun to round up other dissenters, a chilling warning that no Egyptians should feel safe if they dare to challenge authority.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Old Extreme GOP vs. the New Extreme GOP: Whoever Wins, We Lose.

They’re back – and they’re more extreme than ever. GOP House leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor are still pushing economic ideas disproved a century ago, peddling deep spending cuts that would inflict more misery on the already-beleaguered majority. But that’s not enough for the even more extreme right, for the politicians named Cruz and Paul and Lee, for the groups with names like “FreedomWorks” and “Club for Growth,” and for the moneyed interests who fund them all.

The new Republican right is a tangled nest of snakes. Legislators and observers reach into it at their own risk.

But however beyond the pale these new forces may seem, remember: The fact that their enemies are extreme doesn’t mean that Boehner and Cantor aren’t.

Jon Stoltz: Why Troops Are Against Syria Strikes

One of the common misnomers in the media, regarding Syria, is that it is dual pressure from the far right and far left, that has pushed Congress to seemingly reject any Use of Force resolution before it even came to a vote. When polling shows that 60 percent of people are opposed to the Congressional resolution, it’s tough to say that’s just made up of peaceniks and Tea Partiers.

But, add one more non-fringe group to that list — those who are and have served in America’s military. According to a survey of Active Duty troops from the Military Times, 80 percent of them oppose authorizing military action in Syria. That closely mirrors our own survey at VoteVets.org, where 75 percent of veterans and military family members also oppose action (overall, nearly 80 percent of our full list of supporters, both veteran and non-veteran, oppose action).

Peter Van Buren: What If Congress Says No on Syria?

At every significant moment in those years, our presidents opted for more, not less, violence, and our Congress agreed-or simply sat on its hands-as ever more moral isolation took the place of ever less diplomacy. Now, those same questions loom over Syria. Facing a likely defeat in Congress, Obama appears to be grasping-without any sense of irony-at the straw Russian President Vladimir Putin (backed by China and Iran) has held out in the wake of Secretary of State John Kerry’s off-the-cuff proposal that put the White House into a corner. After claiming days ago that the U.N. was not an option, the White House now seems to be throwing its problem to that body to resolve. Gone, literally in the course of an afternoon, were the administration demands for immediate action, the shots across the Syrian bow, and all that. Congress, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, seems to be breathing a collective sigh of relief that it may not be forced to take a stand. The Senate has put off voting; perhaps a vote in the House will be delayed indefinitely, or maybe this will all blow over somehow and Congress can return to its usual partisan differences over health care and debt ceilings.

And yet a non-vote by Congress would be as wrong as the yes vote that seems no longer in the cards. What happens, in fact, if Congress doesn’t say no?

A fresh trove of previously classified documents released on Tuesday provides further evidence – as if any more were needed – that the National Security Agency has frequently been unable to comprehend, let alone manage, its vast and continuing collection of Americans’ telephone and Internet records. The documents, made available by the agency in response to lawsuits by two advocacy groups, revealed that in 2009 a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court severely reprimanded the agency for violating its own procedures for gathering and analyzing phone records, and then misrepresented those violations to the court. [..]

Senator Leahy is right, particularly given that the intelligence court has no adversarial process and is at the mercy of the government’s competence at ferreting out its own incompetence. As Judge Walton told The Washington Post in August, the court “is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided” to it. President Obama has said he welcomes an open debate on the balance between protecting national security and preserving civil liberties, but how can that debate ever be truly open when the government insists on policing itself and hiding the results?

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Recovery for the Rich, Recession for the Rest

Five years after the financial crisis, it’s become increasingly apparent that the government didn’t rescue “the economy.” It rescued the wealthy, while doing far too little for everyone else.

That didn’t happen by accident. Our government’s response was largely designed by — and for — the wealthiest among us, and it shows. Here’s one highlight from a new analysis: The highest-earning Americans saw their income rise by nearly one-third in a single year, while the needle barely moved for 99 percent of us.

This post-crisis inequality is amplifying an ongoing wealth grab which was already decimating middle-class and lower-income Americans.

Leslie Harris: Ignoring Democracy in the Name of Security

Last week’s revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) is building vulnerabilities and backdoors into the Internet’s core infrastructure is beyond alarming. Ultimately, the NSA has made our country’s critical infrastructure less secure in the name of security, while showing blatant disregard for the democratic process. While the fact that the NSA decrypts encrypted data should not itself be cause for outrage by the American public – cracking codes is the core job of the NSA – its approach is what’s outrageous. [..]

Perhaps we need to have the public debate again about the balance between a secure network and surveillance capacities in light of 9-11 and the new Internet landscape, however the NSA’s actions show they have very little respect for an open, transparent democratic discussion. Congress and President Obama have much work to do to restore the trust of its citizens and the world.

William Pfaff: While Russia Offers Peace, U.S. Grasps at Credibility

President Obama’s speech on Syria on Tuesday evening was a curious affair, a call to go to war that ended by saying: yes, but not now. He might as well have said, “But as for the future, if ignored, I shall do such things as to make the world tremble!” A perfect example of how to say yes and no in the same speech.

Barack Obama should be thanking Vladimir Putin for getting him out of a dilemma that would have ruined his presidency. His attack on Syria, as it was (and is) programmed, and if Congress had voted (or does yet vote) in favor of it, would have been or will be no “shot across the bow.” The plan is to “degrade” Syria’s entire military and supporting infrastructure, so as to tip the civil war’s balance-as Baghdad was “degraded” in 2003. It would make the civil war far worse, with thousands more dead, by triggering a rebel offensive, covertly supported by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to take Damascus (or its ruins).

“Inequality for All,” directed by Jacob Kornbluth and set to be released nationwide on Sept. 27, comes at a critical moment for America. Sept. 15 marks the five-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers – fueled by a toxic combination of deregulation, subprime lending and credit-default swaps – that precipitated the 2008 global economic crisis and laid bare the rot at the heart of our economic system. It was largely this orgy of greed that led the first Occupy Wall Street protesters to Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17, two years ago next week.

In the half-decade since Wall Street’s self-induced crash, the country has hovered between outrage (that the perpetrators walked off scot-free and bonus-laden) and apathy (that anything will ever break the iron bond between Congress and the financial industry). [..]

Democracy is not a spectator sport, this film reminds us. And in this case, neither is movie-going.

Allison Kilkenny: The Hidden Rot: We Don’t Fully Understand the Consequences of Budget Cuts

Back in June, when the effects of the sequestration were first starting to settle in, certain media outlets like The Washington Post printed that the Obama administration had exaggerated their budget cut predictions.

“[Sequestration] has not produced what the Obama administration predicted: widespread breakdowns in crucial government services,” David Fahrenthold and Lisa Rein wrote in The Washington Post.

The general consensus appeared to be that since planes were still taking off from the major airports and poor people weren’t starving to death in the streets, the budgets cuts simply weren’t that bad.

But as the months continue to roll by, we’re now beginning to see that the consequences of austerity are very real, and only getting worse.

Nationwide, states are making severe cuts to their social safety net programs.

Frances Beinecke: New NOAA Report Confirms Climate Change Is Intensifying Extreme Heat and Storms

When an extreme heat wave blasted the country last summer, I grew concerned about my father’s health.  Medical experts say hot weather takes the heaviest toll on senior citizens, and I knew my father would have a hard time managing the spike in temperature. He wasn’t alone. Young children and people with heart and lung illnesses are also vulnerable during heat waves. Diabetics, the obese, and people using common medications also face a greater risk when the heat rises. In other words, tens of millions of Americans are vulnerable to extreme heat.

That’s troubling news in the age of climate change.

According to a new report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, extreme heat waves like we saw in 2012 now happen four times as often because of global warming pollution.

Wenonah Hauter: For the USDA, Chicken is Just Politics

When you purchase chicken at the grocery store, you might have the perfectly reasonable expectation that the poultry you are buying was raised on an American farm, and that it was inspected by a government official. Well, lower your expectations: if the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gets its way, poultry inspections will be left to the very same people that process the poultry-corporations-in a privatized poultry inspection scheme that is bad for workers and food safety. Furthermore, the agency appears to be paving the way for processed poultry imports from none other than China, the birthplace of several egregious food safety scandals. [..]

It has been no secret that China has wanted to export chicken to the U.S. in exchange for reopening its market for beef from the U.S. (which has been closed since 2003 due to the diagnosis of a cow in Washington State with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease.) Once again, trade trumps food safety.

But some things are more important that profits. The safety of the food we feed our families is one of them. These two actions by the USDA serve industry interests-not the public interest. President Obama should assure that the USDA reverses course and serves consumers, not corporations. Take action today to send this message to the President and the USDA, and ask them not to privatize chicken inspections.

Much of the contemporary turmoil in the Middle East owes its origins to foreign powers drawing lines in the sand that were both arbitrary and consequential and guided more by their imperial standing than the interests of the region. The “red line” that president Barack Obama has set out as the trigger for US military intervention in Syria is no different. [..]

On 21 August there was a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus believed to have been carried out by the Syrian government. That changed both Obama’s calculus and his memory. “I didn’t set a red line,” he claimed last week. I didn’t draw it, he insisted, everybody did. “The world set a red line”.

This was news to the world, which, over the weekend, sought to distance itself from his line, as the US president doubled-down on his double-speak.

Roger Cohen: Rouhani’s New Year

Is Hassan Rouhani, the new Iranian president, a game-changer? Initial indications leave open that possibility. Ignoring it would be foolish. [..]

There is every reason to be skeptical of Rouhani given past Iranian deception, the depth of mutual mistrust in U.S.-Iranian relations, and the decades-long investment in anti-American policy of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. But Rouhani’s opening should be tested rather than prejudiced through threats or the further sanctions Netanyahu is urging. Congress must hit “pause” on its restless urge to punish Iran.

Dean Baker: The Financial Crisis and the Second Great Depression Myth

All knowledgeable D.C. types know that the TARP and Fed bailout of Wall Street banks five years ago saved us from a second Great Depression. Like most things known by knowledgeable Washington types, this is not true. [..]

So the long and short is that we only need to have worried about a Second Great Depression if the bad guys got their way. And most of the people who warn about a Second Great Depression were on the list of bad guys. The prospect of a second Great Depression was not a warning, it was a threat.

Dennis J. Kucinich: How the White House and the CIA Are Marketing a War in the YouTube Era

Governments have always used fear and manipulation of emotion to get the public to support wars. The Bush administration did it in 2002 in Iraq and it is happening again in Obama’s push for war in Syria. [..]

Why are these videos suddenly news when they have been publicly circulating the web for weeks? Here’s why: The videos are meant to market the war, not to “prove” who committed the atrocities. (CBS News and others have reported that the White House case for war has been described as “largely circumstantial.”)

For decades, you could always count on the Federal Reserve to pull the plug on prosperity too soon, seeing ghosts of inflation everywhere. The Fed, responsive as it was to creditors, preferred a dose of recession to any sort of price pressures, especially wage increases.

That changed with the regimes of Fed chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. [..]

Which brings us to the final act of the drama of Larry Summers versus Janet Yellen, soon to be resolved by President Obama (or perhaps, if Obama appoints Summers to chair the Fed, it could be resolved by the US Senate.)

Summers is more the inflation hawk of the two. He is also more of a light regulation man. If he gets the job, the Fed is likely to pull back from its low interest rate policy, with little improvement in the regulatory process.

Yellen, by contrast, has spoken out on the need for the Fed to keep doing what’s necessary to stimulate a stronger recovery, and to offset the easy money with tough regulation. Wall Street, not surprisingly, prefers Summers. If Summers does get the job, it will be proof positive that the Fed as servant of the bond market is reverting to type.

Robert Reich: Syria and the Reality at Home in America

While all eyes are on Syria and America’s response, the real economy in which most Americans live is sputtering.

More than four years after the recession officially ended, 11.5 million Americans are unemployed, many of them for years. Nearly 4 million have given up looking for work altogether. If they were actively looking, today’s unemployment rate would be 9.5 percent instead of 7.3 percent.

The share of the population working or seeking a job is the lowest in 35 years. The unemployment rate among high-school dropouts is 11 percent; for blacks, 12.6 percent. More than one in five American children face hunger, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Larry Summers Confirmation Hearing Would Be a Political Nightmare

The selection of the next Federal Reserve chair is no longer just a matter of policy or personnel. It has also become a test of the Administration’s ability to respond pragmatically when confronted with evidence that its preferred course of action would be costly, damaging and potentially futile.

The President and his team have been pushing economist Lawrence Summers for the post all summer long. That’s led to an extraordinary level of pushback – from Senators, members of the party base, the New York Times, and Summers’ fellow economists. (There have been some Summers defenders as well – although, as Dean Baker notes. they’ve received a disproportionate level of press coverage.)

Norman Solomon: The Repetition Compulsion for War — and How It Might Fail This Time

No matter how many times we’ve seen it before, the frenzy for launching a military attack on another country is — to the extent we’re not numb — profoundly upsetting. Tanked up with talking points in Washington, top officials drive policy while intoxicated with what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism,” and most media coverage becomes similarly unhinged. That’s where we are now.

But new variables have opened up possibilities for disrupting the repetitive plunge to war. Syria is in the crosshairs of U.S. firepower, but cracks in the political machinery of the warfare state are widening here at home. For advocates of militarism and empire by any other name, the specter of democratic constraint looms as an ominous threat.

Doug Bandow: Stay Out of Syria’s Inferno: Americans Want Peace, Not Another War

President Barack Obama surprised most everyone in America by making the right decision and asking Congress for authority to go to war in Syria. Now Congress should make the right decision and vote no.

One of the impacts of being a superpower is that America has interests everywhere. However, most of those interests are modest, even peripheral. Conflicts and crises abound around the globe, but few significantly impact U.S. security. So it is with Syria.

The bitter civil war obviously is a human tragedy. However, the conflict is beyond repair by Washington.

The real lesson of the Snowden leaks is not the threat to privacy. It is the NSA’s losing battle against the new agents of openness

It has been said that privacy is dead. Not so. It’s secrecy that is dying. Openness will kill it.

American and British spies undermined the secrecy and security of everyone using the internet with their efforts to foil encryption. Then, Edward Snowden foiled them by revealing what is perhaps – though we may never know – their greatest secret. [..]

Openness is the more powerful weapon. Openness is the principle that guides, for example, Guardian journalism. Openness is all that can restore trust in government and technology companies. And openness – in standards, governance, and ethics – must be the basis of technologists’ efforts to take back the the net.

Dean Baker: The media’s disgraceful acquiescence to Larry Summers’ White House boosters

Summers’ record should bar him from the Fed chair. Why is the press letting anonymous administration officials promote him?

Selling Larry Summers as the successor to Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve Board is a tough job. The basic problem is that Summers has a dismal track record to overcome, while his main competitor, Janet Yellen, the current vice-chair, has an outstanding record.

Summers was a big supporter of financial deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s. He pooh-poohed concerns over the stock and housing bubbles. He thought the over-valued dollar and resulting trade deficit (and loss of millions of jobs) was great. He was a protector of the Wall Street banks when they were flat on their backs, and he thought the economy could get back to full employment without additional stimulus. And he has the distinction of being effectively fired as president of Harvard.

David Sirota: What Happened to the Anti-War Movement?

A mere 72 hours after President Obama delivered an encomium honoring the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, he announced his intention to pound yet another country with bombs. The oxymoron last week was noteworthy for how little attention it received. Yes, a president memorialized an anti-war activist who derided the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” Then that same president quickly proposed yet more violence-this time in Syria.

Among a political press corps that rarely challenges the Washington principle of “kill foreigners first, ask questions later,” almost nobody mentioned the contradiction. Even worse, as Congress now debates whether to launch yet another military campaign in the Middle East, the anti-war movement that Dr. King represented-and that so vigorously opposed the last war-is largely silent. Sure, there have been a few perfunctory emails from liberal groups, but there seems to be little prospect for mass protest, raising questions about whether an anti-war movement even exists anymore.

So what happened to that movement? The shorter answer is: It was a victim of partisanship.

George Lakoff: Obama Reframes Syria: Metaphor and War Revisitednm

President Obama has reframed his position on Syria, adjusting the Red Line metaphor: It wasn’t his Red Line, not his responsibility for drawing it. It was the Red Line drawn by the world, by the international community – both legally by international treaty, and morally by universal revulsion against the use of poison gas by Assad. It was also America’s Red Line, imposed by America’s commitment to live up to such treaties. [..]

The new version of the metaphorical policy has broad consequences, what I have called systemic causation (that goes beyond the immediate local situation) as opposed to direct causation (in this case applying just to the immediate case of Assad’s use of sarin).

Some will call the reframing cynical, a way to avoid responsibility for his first use of the Red Line metaphor. But President Obama’s reframing makes excellent sense from the perspective of his consistent policy of treaties and international norms, which he has said was the basis for the Red Line metaphor in the first place.

Jim Goodman: Passage of Trans Pacific Partnership Would Be Win for Corporations, Loss for the 99%

In the early years of the United States we had, and enforced, strong trade tariffs, it was necessary to protect farmers and businesses from unfair foreign competition.

Now, that we are an Empire, we demand free access to foreign markets for our small businesses and farmers. No, we demand market access for our corporations. Trade agreements are written with the financial interests of corporations in mind.

This is not new, trade policy, when imposed by an Empire, is not for the benefit of the people, but rather the Empire or those who control it.

In a few days, we’ll reach the fifth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers – the moment when a recession, which was bad enough, turned into something much scarier. Suddenly, we were looking at the real possibility of economic catastrophe.

And the catastrophe came.

Wait, you say, what catastrophe? Weren’t people warning about a second Great Depression? And that didn’t happen, did it? Yes, they were, and no, it didn’t – although the Greeks, the Spaniards, and others might not agree about that second point. The important thing, however, is to realize that there are degrees of disaster, that you can have an immense failure of economic policy that falls short of producing total collapse. And the failure of policy these past five years has, in fact, been immense.

Medea Benjamin: John Kerry Sells a War That Americans Aren’t Buying

If Congress approves military action in Syria, they will fail to represent the people who elected them.

We are also telling our elected officials that if they are truly concerned about the violence that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians, they should pressure the administration to invest its considerable influence and energies in brokering a ceasefire and seeking a political settlement. This is obviously no easy task. Neither Syrian President Bashar al-Assad nor the divided rebel forces (including the growing al-Qaeda elements) are eager to sit down for talks, as both sides think they can win through force. Yet in the end, this civil war will end with a political settlement, and the sooner it happens, the more lives saved.

The clock is ticking, with President Obama and Secretary Kerry frantically selling a war that the American people don’t want to buy. If Congress goes ahead and approves military action, they – unlike their British counterparts – will fail to represent the people who elected them.

Robert Reich: Obama’s Political Capital and the Slippery Slope of Syria

Even if the president musters enough votes to strike Syria, at what political cost? Any president has a limited amount of political capital to mobilize support for his agenda, in Congress and, more fundamentally, with the American people. This is especially true of a president in his second term of office. Which makes President Obama’s campaign to strike Syria all the more mystifying.

President Obama’s domestic agenda is already precarious: implementing the Affordable Care Act, ensuring the Dodd-Frank Act adequately constrains Wall Street, raising the minimum wage, saving Social Security and Medicare from the Republican right as well as deficit hawks in the Democratic Party, ending the sequester and reviving programs critical to America’s poor, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, and, above all, crafting a strong recovery.

Dennis J. Kucinich: Top 10 Unproven Claims for War Against Syria

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, I researched, wrote and circulated a document to members of Congress which explored unanswered questions and refuted President Bush’s claim for a cause for war. The document detailed how there was no proof Iraq was connected to 9/11 or tied to al Qaeda’s role in 9/11, that Iraq neither had WMDs nor was it a threat to the U.S., lacking intention and capability to attack. Unfortunately, not enough members of Congress performed due diligence before they approved the war.

Here are some key questions which President Obama has yet to answer in the call for congressional approval for war against Syria. This article is a call for independent thinking and congressional oversight, which rises above partisan considerations.