Tag: Punting the Pundits

A president who came into office pledging to take the ‘war on terror’ out of the shadows plunged it deeper into those shadows

When future historians look back on the presidency of Barack Obama, they will conclude that counterterrorism was the policy area with the biggest gap between the hopes of his supporters and reality of his actions in office. [..]

While Obama has had some important accomplishments, he has failed to deliver on a comprehensive counterterrorism policy that does not undermine American ideals. Although he ended the use of torture by US personnel, his administration has refused to seek accountability for those in the Bush administration that instituted this practice. Rendition of terrorist suspects to foreign countries has continued, with the US now only receiving unverifiable “assurances” that torture will not be used. Guantánamo Bay will remain a national disgrace for the foreseeable future. In the last few months, the US has even resorted to the grotesque spectacle of force-feeding its detainees to keep them alive during Ramadan.

John Nichols: Big Media Story Isn’t Bezos and the Post, It’s the RNC Threatening CNN, NBCn

So if the sale of the Post is not as dramatic a development as might initially seem to be the case, what is?

The big deal in media this week has to do with the relationship of broadcast and cable news networks to the two major political parties. And it matters-more-because it gets to question that is at the heart of all of our discussions about the future of print, broadcast and digital media: Will we have a sufficient journalism, and a sufficiently independent journalism, to sustain democracy?

Ever since the Democratic and Republican parties took over the nation’s presidential debates in 1987, with the creation of a corporate-funded “Commission on Presidential Debates” run by the former chairs of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, the dialogue in presidential election years has been the ultimate insiders’ game.

Dean Baker: The Economy Is Awful and Larry Summers Should Not Be Fed Chair

In his recent defense of Larry Summers, President Obama appeared to be badly confused about the state of the economy. This apparently leads him to believe that the country should be grateful to Larry Summers for his successes, as opposed to furious at him for his failures.

Obama’s story is that the economy was in a free fall when he took office and the program that was in large part designed by Summers helped turn it around. While it is true that the economy was in free fall, there was no reason to expect that to continue regardless of what policies were pursued. Note that in every single wealthy country the sharp drop in output at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was stopped and reversed by the end of the year. Other countries were not able to rely on the genius of Larry Summers in setting their policies.

Robert Reich: The Three Biggest Lies About Why Corporate Taxes Should Be Lowered

nstead of spending August on the beach, corporate lobbyists are readying arguments for when Congress returns in September about why corporate taxes should be lowered.

But they’re lies. You need to know why so you can spread the truth. [..]

Corporations want corporate tax reduction to be the centerpiece of “tax reform” come the fall. The president has already signaled a willingness to sign on in return for more infrastructure investment. But the arguments for corporate tax reduction are specious.

Job-growth is sputtering. So why, exactly, do regressive Republicans continue to say “no” to every idea for boosting it — even last week’s almost absurdly modest proposal by President Obama to combine corporate tax cuts with increased spending on roads and other public works?

It can’t be because Republicans don’t know what’s happening. The data are indisputable. July’s job growth of 162,000 jobs was the weakest in four months. The average workweek was the shortest in six months. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has also lowered its estimates of hiring during May and June.  [..]

The real answer, I think, is they and their patrons want unemployment to remain high and job-growth to sputter.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Fighting the GOP’s Hateful Agenda – Without Hate

When is it fair to say that some political battles aren’t just disagreements over policy, but actually represent a struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ points of view? And when, if ever, is it helpful to say so?

There are those on the Right who debase the currency of that four-letter word – “evil” – by using it against anyone who disagrees with them. But what word do you apply to people who deny food to hungry families, voting rights to minorities, or a chance for self-advancement to hard-working students from lower-income homes?

How do you fight the hateful without succumbing to hate?

David A. Love: The US civil war is playing out again – this time over voter rights

White southern Republicans enact voter ID laws because they don’t want Democrats to vote, particularly people of color

Nearly 150 years after the end of the US civil war, the South and the federal government are poised for a rematch over the voting rights of black Americans, and ultimately over the fundamental rights of all Americans. Once again, the former Confederate states are determined to defend their traditions and way of life, while the Union forces in the North – the federal government – are positioning themselves to defend justice and equality.

But this time, in an ironic twist, two black men – President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder – are leading the charge.

In the 1860s, the fight between the North and the South was about slavery and the right of the Confederate states to maintain a dreaded institution that kept people of African descent in bondage. Unprecedented carnage resulted.

Ralph Nader: Love, Corporate-Style

Mitt Romney famously said during his most recent bid for the presidency: “Corporations are people, my friend.” Perhaps nothing else better surmises the state of our country — even the state of our culture — than a prominent politician running for the presidency openly advancing such a flawed opinion. It is no secret that corporations now wield immense power in our elections, in our economy, and even in how we spend time with our friends and families. Corporate entities, in their massive, billion dollar efforts to advertise and “brand” themselves, not only want consumers to think of them as people, but even as “friends.” If a corporation could hit the campaign trail itself, one could imagine it uttering the phrase: “Corporations are friends, my people.”

I recently came across a full-page ad in the New York Times. The ad, which shows a tiny baby’s hand clutching the fingers of an adult hand, is captioned with the words: “Love is the most powerful thing on the planet.” It goes on to read: “For all the things in your life that make life worth living — Johnson and Johnson, for all you love.” Notably, this is Johnson and Johnson’s first “corporate branding” campaign in over a decade.

This poses an interesting question. What exactly is corporate love? Love is a very human emotion — but, coming from a business conglomerate whose over-riding goal is bigger profits — this message rings hollow.

Now that the Suffolk cops have revealed they investigated Michele Catalano’s family because of a tip from her husband’s former employer about his Google searches and not FBI or NSA analysis of Google data themselves, a lot of people are suggesting it would be crazy to imagine that the Feds might have found Catalano via online searches.

Which is funny. Because just a day before this story broke, this exchange happened in the Senate between Senate Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy and Deputy Attorney General James Cole. (after 1:45, though just before this exchange Leahy asks whether DOJ could use Section 215 to obtain URLs and bookmarks, among other records, which Cole didn’t deny)

   Leahy: But if our phone records are relevant, why wouldn’t our credit card records? Wouldn’t you like to know if somebody’s buying, um, what is the fertilizer used in bombs?

   Cole: I may not need to collect everybody’s credit card records in order to do that.

   [snip]

   If somebody’s buying things that could be used to make bombs of course we would like to know that but we may not need to do it in this fashion.

John Nichols: Bankrupting Democracy in Detroit

The citizens of one of our largest cities are being shut out of the decisions that will affect their future.

After decades of deindustrialization compounded by state and federal neglect, Detroit has been placed on a crash course that could see it in bankruptcy before year’s end. Yet instead of running away from this challenge, legislators, a former police chief and a former county prosecutor are all competing in an August 6 primary and a November 5 general election to choose a new mayor. The timing couldn’t be better for voters to weigh in on the city’s tough choices and set priorities-and to choose leaders to implement them. There is just one problem: the winner of the election will not have the authority to govern.

Michael German: Let’s Be Very Clear, Edward Snowden is a Whistleblower

My American Civil Liberties Union colleagues and I have been extremely busy since the Guardian and the Washington Post published leaked classified documents exposing the scope of the government’s secret interpretations of the Patriot Act and the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allow the FBI and NSA to spy on hundreds of millions of innocent Americans. We haven’t written much about the alleged leaker of this information, Edward Snowden, however, mainly because we took his advice to focus on what the NSA and FBI were doing, rather than on what he did or didn’t do. (See exceptions here and here).

But I did want to clear up a question that seems to keep coming up: whether Snowden is a whistleblower. It is actually not a hard question to answer. The Whistleblower Protection Act protects “any disclosure” that a covered employee reasonably believes evidences “any violation of any law, rule, or regulation,” or “gross mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, and abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.”

Amy Traub; Fast Food Shouldn’t Mean Low Wages

The idea is simple: people who get up and go to work every day in one of the world’s richest countries should not have to live in poverty.

That’s why, across the country and throughout the week, low-wage fast food and retail employees walked out on strike, calling for $15 an hour and respect for their right to organize a union.  Claudette Wilson and her co-workers walked out from a Burger King in Detroit, joined by other fast food workers. Andrew Little and his fellow employees went on strike from Victoria’s Secret and other stores and restaurants in Chicago. In St. Louis, members of the United Mine Workers joined employees of Jack in the Box and Hardee’s among other fast food franchises in solidarity. And Terrance Wise hit the picket lines in Kansas City on strike from his part-time jobs at Pizza Hut and Burger King. Workers were striking in Flint and Milwaukee as well. Here in New York, I and some Demos colleagues had a chance to join a rally in support of workers at the McDonalds in Union Square.

The big election race of 2013 is for the position of Federal Reserve chairman.

The United States is not an economy democracy, however. So there will be no popular vote on who will make the most critical decisions on jobs, investments, interest rates and a host of other defining issues for working families, communities, states and the nation.

But there is a campaign going on. In order to influence the selection of a new chair by President Obama and the Senate confirmation process: contenders are positioning. Camps and caucuses are organizing. Endorsements are being made. Issues are being placed on the table.

So let’s invite the American people into the process.

Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan: Manning, Snowden and Assange Were the Ones who Took Risks to Expose Crime

But those who planned the wars, those who committed war crimes, those who conduct illegal spying, for now, walk free

“What a dangerous edifice War is, how easily it may fall to pieces and bury us in its ruins,” wrote Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian general and military theorist, in his seminal text “On War,” close to 200 years ago.

These lines came from the chapter “Information in War,” a topic that resonates today, from Fort Meade, Md., where Pfc. Bradley Manning has just been convicted of espionage in a military court, to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lived for more than a year, having been granted political asylum to avoid political persecution by the United States, to Russia, where National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum.

George Zornick: Obama’s “Insane” New Bargain and Our Perverse Politics

President Obama introduced yet another plan to create jobs and pump the sagging economy yesterday, pitched as a “grand bargain” between Republicans and Democrats (or more accurately, Democrats and the business community). It’s perhaps not a terrible plan considering the current political atmosphere. But taking one step back, Obama’s offer is a deeply revealing snapshot of a dynamic that’s become deeply skewed and perhaps hopelessly corrupted.

Margaret Kimberly: Freedom Rider: Obama Fights to Keep Black People in Jail

The Obama administration is fighting a federal court ruling that would free the remainder of the mostly Black prison inmates convicted under now-defunct, viciously racially disparate crack cocaine laws. The First Black President and his Black attorney general are determined to keep “5,000 people in jail who have no reason to be there.”

If Barack Obama’s ascendance to the oval office was worth a fraction of the importance which has been claimed, the president would do something to stop the human catastrophe of mass incarceration and the destruction it has wrought on black Americans. Instead he has officially given it his blessing. In a stunning decision, the Obama administration has made it quite clear where it stands. It stands with making certain that the president spends his two terms in office pleasing white people at the expense of black people.

WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning has been acquitted of the most serious charge against him, that of aiding the enemy. But the 20-something other charges, including espionage, have stuck and could land him a sentence of more than 100 years in prison.

In the media world, even national security hawks like The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake concede that Manning’s leaks had “a lot of public benefit.” But very few have argued Manning should go free.

Did Manning break the law? According to the letter, yes he did. But since when did we presume to hold people in government accountable to the law?

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Bankers: The Real House Thieves of New Jersey

Write a cookbook, go to jail?

David Dayen points out the absurdity and hypocrisy behind the Obama/Holder Justice Department’s decision to indict two stars of The Real Housewives of New Jersey on charges of mortgage fraud while Wall Street’s crooked bankers still go unpunished.

Dayen points out that Wall Street bankers illegally foreclosed on 244,000 customers, for a total he estimates at $48 billion, and provides more detail on the scope of bankers’ foreclosures crimes.

But that’s barely scratching the surface. Bankers also defrauded mortgage investors, manipulated energy prices, and fraudulently tampered with lending rates, at a total cost that may well run into the trillions.

Robert Sheer: Gag Me With Lawrence Summers

The idea that Barack Obama would still consider appointing Lawrence Summers to head the Federal Reserve rather than order an investigation into this former White House official’s Wall Street payments, reported Friday by the Wall Street Journal, mocks the president’s claimed concern for the disappearing middle class. Summers is in large measure responsible for that dismal outcome, and twice now, after top level economic postings in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, he has returned to gorge himself at the Wall Street trough.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Can Gays Help Save Marriage?

The rapid evolution of attitudes toward gay marriage is a wonder to behold. On few issues has public opinion moved as quickly or decisively. Many who are against the formal recognition of homosexual unions are now resigned to the reality they will eventually become commonplace.

The main drivers of this transformation are obvious. Most Americans now know that people they care about are gay or lesbian, and empathy can do wonderful things. Partly because of this, younger Americans overwhelmingly favor same-sex marriage. They will dominate the electorates of the future.  

Christie can criticize Paul all he wants, but Republicans would much rather see a true conservative like Paul in the White House

New Jersey Republican Mayor Chris Christie took a harsh swipe at Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky last week, declaring Paul’s criticism of the National Security Administration as “dangerous”. [..]

Attacking the libertarians in the GOP as Christie has done will not help the Republican party or Christie’s election chances. The Reagan revolution came about because Reagan was able, with the help of the late William F Buckley Jr and his National Review magazine, to bring together a coalition of libertarians, religious conservatives and fiscal conservatives. Paul, who is outspoken about his Christian faith, is one of a few Republicans who could rebuild that coalition.

Jessica Valenti: The GOP’s Twenty-Week Mistake

According to The New York Times, GOP leaders-all men-are strategizing on how to push through a Senate bill that would ban abortions after twenty weeks. Senator Marco Rubio is quoted as saying, “Irrespective of how people may feel about the issue, we’re talking about five months into a pregnancy. People certainly feel there should be significant restrictions on that.” [..]

The Republican leadership may see polls on what Americans think of later abortion and think they have a winning issue here. But they’d be wrong. The GOP is so out-of-touch with what pregnancy actually looks like-how complex and nuanced women’s lives really are-that they don’t see the stories behind the numbers. They’re going to make the same miscalculation they did last year by underestimating women and the way their experiences shape their vote. Our reproductive stories are not black and white, and they’re certainly not something that can be mandated or restricted by policy. Not at two weeks, not at twenty weeks, not ever.

Salamishah Tillet : Sexual Harassment Is Not a Disease, But It Surely Is an Epidemic

The storyline has become all too familiar: a well-known politician is accused of sexual harassment by several women; he first plays defense (a public denial), then goes on the offensive (a public apology), and finally, admits to past behavior and pledges to get “help.” [..]

It would be nice to believe that Filner, after his two weeks of therapy, would come back to work and lead the charge to end sexual harassment-in the schools, the streets and the City Hall of San Diego. But he probably won’t. And this is not just because 60 percent of San Diegans surveyed over the weekend believe he should be recalled if he does not resign. He seems to be unaware that to sexually harass women is far more dangerous than a pathology or breach of public trust. It is part of the larger epidemic of violence against women that preserves our system and social practice of male dominance and gender inequity.

And let’s be clear, that’s something that can be controlled and cured.

Michelle Chen: ‘Bargain’ on Immigration Would Feed Prison Profits

The private prison industry stands to gain millions from the Senate’s reform plan.

The supposed grand bargain of the immigration reform bill is shaping up to be a lucrative deal for prisons. As a compromise between “border security” and “amnesty,” the comprehensive reform plan emerging in Congress ties the “legalization” of millions of migrants to the prospective criminalization of millions more.

The Senate’s reform bill, now being debated in the House, would boost immigration enforcement by beefing up border patrols, militarized barriers, border surveillance, immigration prosecutions and privately run detention facilities. According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, the original bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee “would increase the prison population by about 14,000 inmates annually by 2018.” (The number of “immigration offenders” in federal prison has risen over the past decade to about 22,100 in 2011.) Just before passage, the bill was saddled with the draconian “Hoeven-Corker border security amendment,” which contains harsher, more costly enforcement provisions, including a doubling of border agents to roughly 40,000.

Last week President Obama gave a speech at Knox College in Illinois in which he announced plans to return his focus to the economy. The agenda he outlined centered on policies to rebuild the middle class leading to growth from the middle out as he put it.

The basic idea sounds good. There are few who would take issue with the focus of his policies: improving the nation’s infrastructure, better school-to-work transitions, high quality pre-school for everyone. These ideas all score very high in opinion polls and focus groups, although there might be serious differences on what they mean concretely.

But even if we can agree on the best way to rebuild our infrastructure, better our schools, and guarantee high quality pre-school education, we will still face serious economic problems well into the future for the simple reason that the economy lacks demand. Generating demand has to be issue one, two, and three on the economic agenda right now, and unfortunately President Obama’s speech came up seriously short on it.

Congressmen Adam Schiff and Todd Rokita: Republicans and Democrats agree: Fisa oversight of NSA spying doesn’t work

‘Secret law’ is anathema to our democratic traditions and the rule of law. We have introduced legislation to change this

The recent leaks of NSA programs to the Guardian and Washington Post have awakened a strong desire among many Americans to know more about how the intelligence community conducts its business.

Americans expect their government to do the utmost to protect our country, but that cannot mean trading our Fourth Amendment right to privacy for the promise of security. Most Americans understand the need to “connect the dots” to avoid another 9/11, as long as the intelligence community has a legitimate need for the information it seeks and is no more intrusive than absolutely necessary.

Oversight is essential, and to the maximum degree possible, so is transparency.

Joe Conason: Measuring GOP Extremism: What Carville and Greenberg’s Latest Polling Reveals

It is becoming increasingly plain that the most formidable obstacle to national progress and global security is the Republican Party — and specifically the extremist factions that currently dominate the GOP.

Now Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and political strategist James Carville have announced what they plan to do about that pressing problem: namely, “The Republican Party Project,” which will provide extensive survey research devoted to “exposing, monitoring, and confronting” the Republicans while helping Democrats and progressives to regain the political offensive.

To begin advancing these ambitious goals, Carville and Greenberg released the first in a series of polls on Wednesday that showcased several of their target’s most divisive and dysfunctional features —  and revealed some surprising weaknesses that could eventually prove disabling if not fatal.

David Zirin: On Vultures and Red Wings: Billionaire Gets New Sports Arena in Bankrupt Detroit

The headline juxtaposition boggles the mind. You have, on one day, “Detroit Files Largest Municipal Bankruptcy in History.” Then on the next, you have “Detroit Plans to Pay For New Red Wings Hockey Arena Despite Bankruptcy.”

Yes, the very week Michigan Governor Rick Snyder granted a state-appointed emergency manager’s request to declare the Motor City bankrupt, the Tea Party governor gave a big thumbs-up to a plan for a new $650 million Detroit Red Wings hockey arena. Almost half of that $650 million will be paid with public funds.

This is actually happening. City services are being cut to the bone. Fighting fires, emergency medical care and trash collection are now precarious operations. Retired municipal workers will have their $19,000 in annual pensions dramatically slashed. Even the artwork in the city art museum will be sold off piece by piece. This will include a mural by the great radical artist Diego Rivera that’s a celebration of what the auto industry would look like in a socialist future. As Stephen Colbert said, the leading bidder will be “the museum of irony.”

The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network and that US firms’ cloud services cannot be trusted

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn’t matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.

Robert Kuttner: The Bungled Coronation of Larry Summers

What a difference a week makes. A week ago, a carefully orchestrated series of leaks signaled that President Obama was on the verge of naming Larry Summers to succeed Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve. Those leaks came from senior administration officials, including Obama himself. Now, a massive backlash from Senate Democrats makes Summers’ appointment something of a long shot.

A lot of the news coverage has suggested that this controversy was mainly about gender — Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen, the previous front runner, being shoved aside by the upstart Summers, preferred candidate of the old boys and a man famously insensitive to women. But though gender was key in triggering the backlash by offended Yellen supporters, it is not the core part of the story.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Banknado!

It’s a real-life disaster movie, one that’s left neighborhoods in ruins all across the country, killed thousands of people, and ruined millions of lives. You might call it a “Banknado.”

Yes, we know the Sharknado craze ended about ten days ago. The sci-fi movie’s premise of tornadoes filled with deadly sharks has probably passed its cultural sell-by date. But we’ll use the metaphor anyway, because it’s just so apt: Wall Street’s a whirlwind filled with predators descending on a hapless population.

And while our leaders stand idly by, the teeth-filled twisters keep falling from the sky. Look out below!

Ray McGovern: Puttin’ the Pressure on Putin

The main question now on the fate of truth-teller Edward Snowden is whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will see any benefit in helping stop the United States from further embarrassing itself as it prances around the globe acting like a “pitiful, helpless giant.” That image was coined by President Richard Nixon, who insisted that the giant of America would merit those adjectives if it did not prevail in South Vietnam.

It is no secret that Putin is chuckling as Attorney General Eric Holder and other empty-shirts-cum-corporate-law-office-silk-ties – assisted ably by White House spokesperson Jay Carney – proceed willy-nilly to transform the Snowden case from a red-faced diplomatic embarrassment for the United States into a huge geopolitical black eye before the rest of the world.