Tag: Punting the Pundits

The USA’s implacable pursuit of Edward Snowden demonstrates the sole superpower’s reach and suppression of information.

It’s hard even to know how to take it in. I mean, what’s really happening? An employee of a private contractor working for the National Security Agency makes off with unknown numbers of files about America’s developing global security state on a thumb drive and four laptop computers, and jumps the next plane to Hong Kong. [..]

The result has been a global spectacle, as well as a worldwide debate about the spying practices of the US (and its allies). In these weeks, Washington has proven determined, vengeful, implacable. It has strong-armed, threatened, and elbowed powers large and small. And yet, to mention the obvious, the greatest power on Earth has, as yet, failed to get its man and is losing the public opinion battle globally.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: A Larry Summers Bait-and-Switch?

Whoever said, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” doesn’t know much about economics. That goes double for the nomination of Lawrence Summers to head the Federal Reserve. For all the ink that’s been spilled on the topic, there’s at least one surprise ending people don’t seem to be considering.

Remember the last time Summers was strapped to a trial balloon and exposed to this kind of a public dart-throwing contest? It was back when Obama was searching for his first Treasury Secretary. There was a public outcry against Summers then, too, and guess what happened:

We got Tim Geithner instead.

I’m against the Summers nomination too, but as they say: Be careful what you wish for.

Eugene Robinson: Obstruction as the New Normal

The bad news is that approval ratings for both the president and Congress are sinking, with voters increasingly frustrated at the bitter, partisan impasse in Washington. The worse news is that in terms of admiration for our national leaders, these may come to be seen as the good old days.

I’m an optimist by nature, a glass-half-full kind of guy. But try as I might, I can’t convince myself that Republicans in Congress are likely to respond any better to President Obama’s latest proposals on the economy than to the previous umpteen. I’m also pretty gloomy at the moment about the prospects for meaningful immigration reform-unless House Speaker John Boehner decides that passing a bill is more important than keeping his job.

David Sirota: A Case That Challenges Government Immunity

Court cases are often cures for insomnia, but every so often a lawsuit is an eye-opening journey through the looking glass. One of those is suddenly upon us – and we should be thankful because it finally provides an unfiltered look at our government.

You may not know about this case, but you should. Called Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, it illustrates the extremism driving the policies being made in the public’s name.

The first thing you should know about this case is that it is simply about a man who wants to know why his grandson is dead. That’s right – in this age of endless war, a grandfather named Nasser Al-Aulaqi is having to go to court to try to compel the U.S. government to explain why it killed his grandson in a drone strike despite never charging the 16-year-old American citizen with a crime.

The realm of the Federal Reserve is arcane to most people, but suffice it to say that it is in something like a control tower overseeing a busy major airport: It is supposed to recognize dangers early enough to do something about them. The Fed tightens the flow of money when investment bubbles begin to emerge. It eases the credit taps when the economy is slowing. It is the ultimate overseer of the financial system, the institution that is supposed to be looking out for signs of dangerous speculation and inadequate transparency. [..]

Summers is temperamentally ill-suited for this all-important job. His life can be summed up in a simple equation: Brilliance plus arrogance yields perilous foolishness. His absolute faith in the soundness of his views coupled with his demonstrable tendency to disdain people who disagree have put him on the wrong side of history. We can do far better than hand him the keys to the Fed.

Paul Krugman: Republican Health Care Panic

Leading Republicans appear to be nerving themselves up for another round of attempted fiscal blackmail. With the end of the fiscal year looming, they aren’t offering the kinds of compromises that might produce a deal and avoid a government shutdown; instead, they’re drafting extremist legislation – bills that would, for example, cut clean-water grants by 83 percent – that has no chance of becoming law. Furthermore, they’re threatening, once again, to block any rise in the debt ceiling, a move that would damage the U.S. economy and possibly provoke a world financial crisis.  

Yet even as Republican politicians seem ready to go on the offensive, there’s a palpable sense of anxiety, even despair, among conservative pundits and analysts. Better-informed people on the right seem, finally, to be facing up to a horrible truth: Health care reform, President Obama’s signature policy achievement, is probably going to work.

Chase Madar: The Sky Darkens for American Journalism

The future of the American media is being decided in a military court

Bradley Manning released hundreds of thousands of government documents and files to Wikileaks, most famous among them the unclassified video Wikileaks dubbed, “Collateral Murder”, a harrowing gun-sight view of an Apache helicopter slaughtering a couple of armed men and a much larger group of civilians on a Baghdad street in July, 2007.

The court-martial of Pfc. Manning, finally underway over three years after his arrest, is likely to cause a great deal of collateral destruction in its own right. In this case the victim will be American journalism.

John Nichols: Potemkin Checks & Balances: Boehner Blocks Real Action to Limit Syria Entanglement

President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner are agreed on one thing: they both want to get the United States more actively engaged in the fighting in Syria.

Obama announced last month that he hopes to ship arms to the Syrian opposition forces that are fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad. Boehner said this week that the president’s Syrian gambit “is in our nation’s best interest.” [..]

But, make no mistake, an “in our nation’s best interest” quote from Boehner and an Intelligence Committee “consensus” ought not be read as congressional approval for a project that threatens to involve the United States in another war in another Middle Eastern country.

If Thomas Friedman didn’t exist, America’s high-tech entrepreneurs would have had to invent him.  Come to think of it, maybe they did. The dark science-fiction vision he celebrates serves them well, at pretty much everyone else’s expense.

Friedman’s vision is worth studying, if only because it reflects the distorted perspective of some very wealthy and influential people. In their world the problems of the many are as easily fixed as a line of code, with no sacrifice required of them or their fellow billionaires.

Case in point: 15 or 20 million Americans seeking full-time employment? To Thomas Friedman, that’s a branding problem.

Mark Gongloff: The Many Reasons Larry Summers Would Be A Terrible Fed Chairman

It’s official: Pretty much everybody thinks Larry Summers would make a terrible Federal Reserve chairman.

Everybody, that is, except for the one guy whose vote matters*: President Obama, who has apparently decided that Summers is now the front-runner for the Fed job, according to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. MSNBC’s Christopher Hayes reported that the White House has “all but decided” to pick Summers. And CNBC’s John Harwood also reported on Monday that, when asked if Summers was the top candidate for the post, Obama said he “should be.”

No! No, President Obama, he should not be. Let us all hope that this is simply some kind of very frightening trial balloon and not reality. Because Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, Harvard president, Obama economic adviser, toxic-waste-dump-finder, woman-disser and Winklevoss dream-crusher, would be wrong for the job in so many ways. I could write you several hundred words about that, as I did last year when Summers’ name was on the list of potential presidents of the World Bank.

But I don’t have to do that, because the Internet did it for me yesterday, almost immediately after Klein’s story was published.

Philip Giraldi: Edward Snowden is no ‘traitor’

Far from aiding our enemies, the NSA whistleblower has exposed our own government’s subversion of Americans’ rights

There are a number of narratives being floated by the usual suspects to attempt to demonstrate that Edward Snowden is a traitor who has betrayed secrets vital to the security of the United States. All the arguments being made are essentially without merit. Snowden has undeniably violated his agreement to protect classified information, which is a crime. But in reality, he has revealed only one actual secret that matters, which is the United States government’s serial violation of the fourth amendment to the constitution through its collection of personal information on millions of innocent American citizens without any probable cause or search warrant.

That makes Snowden a whistleblower, as he is exposing illegal activity on the part of the federal government. The damage he has inflicted is not against US national security, but rather on the politicians and senior bureaucrats who ordered, managed, condoned, and concealed the illegal activity.

Robert Reich: Why Republicans Are Disciplined and Democrats Aren’t

Republican discipline and Democratic lack of discipline isn’t a new phenomenon. As Will Rogers once said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

The difference has to do with the kind of personalities the two parties attract. People who respect authority, follow orders, want clear answers, obey commands, and prefer precise organization and control, tend to gravitate toward Republicans.

On the other hand, people who don’t much like authority, recoil from orders, don’t believe in clear answers, often disobey commands, and prefer things a bit undefined, tend to gravitate to the Democrats.

In short, the Republican Party is the party of the authoritarian personality; the Democratic Party is the party of the anti-authoritarian personality.

In June President Obama laid out a plan for the U.S. to tackle climate change including a climate test for the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. A new economic and environmental analysis from NRDC makes it clear that the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline fails the President’s climate test. Industry analysts agree that Keystone XL is a critical piece of the puzzle for the tar sands industry to build new extraction projects. Tar sands oil production causes the release of huge amounts of carbon pollution from its energy-intensive extraction methods and refining processes.  The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would add 935 million to 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon pollution to our atmosphere-a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions-over the 50-year life span of the project. Expansion of the very energy-intensive and costly tar sands are not in our national interest and the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline should be rejected.

Mary Bottari and Rebekah Wilce: ALEC in 2013: Rightwing Legislative Group Fuels Race to the Bottom in Wages and Worker Rights

Just How Low Can Your Salary Go?

At least 117 bills introduced in 2013 fuel a “race to the bottom” in wages, benefits, and worker rights and resemble “model” bills from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), according to a new analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), publishers of ALECexposed.org.

As working Americans speak out for higher wages, better benefits, and respect in the workplace, a coordinated, nationwide campaign to silence them is mounting — and ALEC is at the heart of it. ALEC corporations, right-wing think tanks, and monied interests like the Koch brothers are pushing legislation throughout the country designed to drive down wages; limit health care, pensions, and other benefits; and cripple working families’ participation in the political and legislative process.

Emily Masters: As the NSA Follows You, We Follow the Money

Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has witnessed the rapid growth of an intelligence-industrial complex that fuses government and corporate power. According to the Project on Government Oversight, $300 billion a year is now spent on a “shadow government of private contractors.” At the center of this arrangement is an interlocking web of current and former high-level government officials, major corporations, D.C. think tanks and other inside-the-Beltway operators who have benefitted from the rise of the surveillance state. Here are a few of the most notable: [..]

Bryce Covert: Is This the Big Moment for Better Work/Family Balance Policies?

Those of us who have been pushing for better work/family policies know the story of how we almost had universal childcare all too well. In 1971, Congress passed the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Act on a bipartisan vote. It would have meant the first step toward a universal childcare system, offering all parents a free, high-quality place to send their kids while they worked. As Nancy L. Cohen reports, Congress authorized five times what it currently spends on Head Start to finance the program.

Then, before President Nixon signed the bill, the evangelical right staged an intense backlash as part of the brand new culture wars, which wormed its way into Nixon’s ear through special assistant Pat Buchanan. Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill, saying it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Thus the “family values” crowd was born and the bipartisan idea that the government should support working women by taking some of the parenting burden off their shoulders died.

Zoë Carpenter: Senate Poised to Raise Interest Rates on Future Student Loans

The Senate will vote this week on a proposal to change the way the government sets federal student loan rates, in the hopes of ending weeks of stalemate.

Don’t be fooled by any triumphant rhetoric. The plan the Senate is voting on-to peg interest rates on federal student loans to the financial market-promises low rates in the short term, and nearly guarantees that they will rise above current levels in a matter of years. [..]

The fix on the table now is permanent, and it allows both parties to dodge blame for the sudden rate hike that occurred July 1, when subsidized Stafford rates jumped from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. The plan does bring rates back below 4 percent for Stafford loans in the coming year, benefitting new undergraduates quite a bit.

But it won’t keep the rates below that threshold for long; instead, the Senate plan puts rates on track to exceed 6.8 percent in only four years.

Does anyone seriously doubt that, if Detroit were a “too big to fail” bank, it would have been bailed out long ago? Or that its pensioners, rather than facing the threat of cruel cuts as part of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s scheme to steer the city into brutal bankruptcy proceedings, would instead have pocketed hefty bonuses?

To ask the question is to answer it.

If the 2008 bailout of the biggest players in the financial sector-and policy-making over the ensuing years-tells us anything, it is that Congress and the Federal Reserve take care of Wall Street.

America’s great cities? Not so much.

Norman Solomon: Obama’s Escalating War on Freedom of the Press

The part of the First Amendment that prohibits “abridging the freedom … of the press” is now up against the wall, as the Obama administration continues to assault the kind of journalism that can expose government secrets.

Last Friday the administration got what it wanted-an ice-cold chilling effect-from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled on the case of New York Times reporter James Risen. The court “delivered a blow to investigative journalism in America by ruling that reporters have no First Amendment protection that would safeguard the confidentiality of their sources in the event of a criminal trial,” the Guardian reported. [..]

At the Freedom of the Press Foundation, co-founder Trevor Timm calls the court ruling “the most significant reporter’s privilege decision in decades” and asserts that the court “eviscerated that privilege.” He’s not exaggerating. Press freedom is at stake.

Paul Buccheit: The Insanity of Not Having a Financial Transaction Tax

The logic for the tax is indisputable:

1. Financial industry speculation devastated middle-class homeowner wealth.

2. U.S. investors pay zero tax on their speculative transactions.

3. The tax is easy to implement, and is very successful in other countries.

The emotional appeal reaches most of America:

Why should the rest of us pay up to 10% on the necessities of life while risky derivative purchases aren’t taxed at all?

Why should kids around the country lose their arts programs while trillions of dollars flow, untaxed, to Wall Street?

Ted Kaufman: Happy Birthday to Dodd-Frank, a Law That Isn’t Working

Today marks the third anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. Sadly, except for a recent promising development that might increase capital requirements for megabanks, the act has not delivered on its promise to fix the problems that caused the financial meltdown of 2008-09.

Failure was built into Dodd-Frank from the beginning. Instead of writing laws that addressed the abuses that led to the crisis, it nearly always kicked the can down to agencies, instructing them to write new regulations. By and large, those regulatory agencies have been overwhelmed by a combination of congressional underfunding and a massive lobbying effort by the megabanks that increasingly seem to control Washington. The Davis Polk law firm’s latest count says that only 155 of the 398 rule makings required by Dodd-Frank have been finalized

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Glass-Steagall prevented a classic conflict of interest that we know frequently arises in the real world. Commercial banks are subsidized through federal deposit insurance. Most economists support providing deposit insurance to commercial banks for relatively smaller depositors. I am not aware of any economists who support federal “deposit” insurance for the customers of investment banks or the creditors of non-financial businesses.

It violates core principles of conservatism and libertarianism to extend the federal subsidy provided to commercial banks via deposit insurance to allow that subsidy to extend to non-banking operations. Absent Glass-Steagall, banks could purchase anything from an aluminum company to a fast food franchise and (indirectly) fund its acquisitions and operations with federally-subsidized deposits. If you run an independent aluminum company or fast food franchise do you want to have to compete with a federally-subsidized rival?

Robert Kuttner: Breaking the Glass Ceiling at the Federal Reserve

Larry Summers is running hard to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. This is a terrible idea, on several grounds (which I’ll discuss in a moment.) Even so, I’d place the odds of President Obama giving Summers the job at 50-50 or better, unless progressive Democrats get mobilized, and fast. [..]

The prime alternative to Summers is Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen, who is very much like Bernanke, only better. She has gone even further in expressing concern for the economy’s persistent unemployment and in criticizing the bipartisan obsession with deficit reduction. I wrote about Yellen’s stellar performance for the Huffington Post back in February.

Yellen deserves to be Fed chair purely on the merits. It pains me to write that if she gets the job, one other major contrast with Summers will weigh in her favor. She is female.

Robert Reich: Detroit, and the Bankruptcy of America’s Social Contract

One way to view Detroit’s bankruptcy — the largest bankruptcy of any American city — is as a failure of political negotiations over how financial sacrifices should be divided among the city’s creditors, city workers, and municipal retirees — requiring a court to decide instead. It could also be seen as the inevitable culmination of decades of union agreements offering unaffordable pension and health benefits to city workers.

But there’s a more basic story here, and it’s being replicated across America: Americans are segregating by income more than ever before. Forty years ago, most cities (including Detroit) had a mixture of wealthy, middle-class, and poor residents. Now, each income group tends to lives separately, in its own city — with its own tax bases and philanthropies that support, at one extreme, excellent schools, resplendent parks, rapid-response security, efficient transportation, and other first-rate services; or, at the opposite extreme, terrible schools, dilapidated parks, high crime, and third-rate services.

William Greider: Stop Larry Summers Before He Messes Up Again

Washington insiders are spreading an alarming news alert. Barack Obama, I am told, is on the brink of making a terrible mistake by appointing Lawrence Summers as the new chairman of the Federal Reserve. That sounds improbable, since Summers is a toxic retread from the old boys’ network and a nettlesome egotist who offended just about everyone during his previous tours in government. More to the point, Summers was a central player in the grave governing errors that led to the financial collapse and a ruined economy.

Surely not, I thought, when I heard the gossip. But my source heard it from the White House. Obama’s senior economic advisers-still dominated by Clintonistas and aging acolytes of Robert Rubin-are pushing the president to choose Summers as the successor to Ben Bernanke, whose term ends in January. And they are urging Obama to make the announcement right now, before the opposition can get organized.

The decision by the City of Detroit to declare bankruptcy came as a shock to many. Detroit, which was once the nation’s fifth-biggest city, is by far the largest government in the United States ever to declare bankruptcy. While Detroit has been seeing a falling population and worsening finances for five decades, bankruptcy is still a dramatic step.

One part of this story that is striking is the discussion in the media of how workers’ pensions will fare in bankruptcy. Most articles seem to take it for granted that pensions will face large cuts, with some implying that retired workers may be in the same situation as unsecured creditors, getting just a few cents for each dollar owed.

This is striking because Michigan’s state constitution seems to say as clearly as possible that pension payments are a contractual obligation of the state.

Ryan Budish: Tech firms should be allowed to publish more data on US surveillance

The ‘deal’ the government offered tech firms to publish limited data is a joke. We need real transparency

Following the leaks about NSA surveillance, people demanded information about the scope and scale of the US government’s data collection. In response, the administration offered internet companies a deal: they could publish the number of secret national security requests, but only if it was aggregated with data about non-secret, criminal requests.

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo! immediately accepted and published aggregate data. But Google rejected the offer, stating that “lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users”.

Google is right. Americans are understandably concerned that their digital privacy may be eroded through the government’s ham-handed approach to foreign surveillance. But fixating on the accidental collection of domestic communications during foreign surveillance risks ignoring the ways that the US government legally and intentionally surveils the digital communications of its citizens. We must be careful that, in our rush to answer questions about Prism, we don’t endanger the gains we have made over the past few years in understanding our domestic surveillance apparatus.

Steve Martinot: Whose Ground Is It, Anyway?

Zimmerman as Role Model for US Government

The Travesty goes like this.

The grounds for Zimmerman’s acquittal were that he shot someone, and killed him. Pure and simple.

The grounds for Trayvon Martin’s having been killed is that he decided to defend himself against someone stalking him.

Does it make sense? No. Is it true? Yes.

There’s nothing to understand. That’s just the way it is. But if we do want to understand it, we have to look at the “role model.” Or rather, at The Role Model.

The Role Model is the US, the War Making Power.

Mark LeVine: Clear and present dangers of Janet Napolitano’s appointment as UC President

With no experience in higher education, the appoint of Napolitano raises concerns about the future of the UC system.

The now confirmed appointment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano as President of the University of California should raise loud alarms for anyone concerned about the present state and future development of UC, for three reasons. [..]

As one of the world’s premier public university systems, UC’s highest priority must be the production of knowledge and the protection of the free exchange of ideas without which no university can fulfill its public mandate to educate future generations and help sustain a healthy and robust economy. Since the Regents and Secretary Napolitano were unwilling or unable to offer a vigorous defence of her experience, qualifications, and views before the Regents’ vote, and allow the university community a meaningful role in determining the wisdom and viability of her nomination, UC faculty should consider ourselves served notice that the UC to which so many of us have devoted our professional lives has finally been put out to pasture, and that a very different institution, administered by people with increasingly little experience, understanding or even concern for the core purposes and ethics of higher education, is emerging in its place. The question is, What are we going to do about it?

In his congressional testimony yesterday, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke called out the Congress. He warned them to stop the reckless and mindless spending cuts that are killing jobs and growth. Their stupidity, he suggested, poses the biggest threat to Americans going back to work.

Of course, he didn’t phrase it quite like that. His testimony was purposefully vanilla, designed not to cause indigestion on Wall Street. But that didn’t stop him from indicting the Congress. In his first sentence he stated:

“The economic recovery has continued at a moderate pace in recent quarters despite the strong headwinds created by federal fiscal policy.”

Translated: If you idiots abandon your destructive austerity fetish, we might be able to put people back to work.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: McDonald’s Accidentally Served Up a Minimum Wage ‘McManifesto’

Marie Antoinette, meet Ronald McDonald.

A lot of people are angry about McDonald’s new financial advice website for employees, an ill-conceived project which drips with “let them eat cake” insouciance. “Every dollar makes a difference,” McDonald’s lectures its struggling and often impoverished workers.

But it’s time to ditch the resentment and offer McDonald’s a word of thanks. It has just performed an invaluable service for campaigns like Raise the Minimum Wage and petitions like this one by serving up a timely and exhaustively researched brief on their behalf. This new website provides invaluable data for a living-wage “McManifesto.”

You want fries with that?

Eugene Robinson: Obama is the wrong person to lead discussion about race

We should talk honestly about unresolved racial issues, such as those exposed by the Trayvon Martin case, but President Obama is not the best person to lead the discussion. Through no fault of his own, he might be the worst. [..]

The designation “first black (fill in the blank)” always brings with it unfair burdens, and one of Obama’s – he bears many – is that almost anything he says about race will be seen by some as favoring the interests of black Americans over white Americans.

At this point in his presidency, Obama could ignore this absurd reality and say whatever he wants. He must be sorely tempted. But the unfortunate fact is that if his aim is to promote dialogue about race, speaking his mind is demonstrably counterproductive.

Dale Weihoff: Fruits of NAFTA

Drug cartels existed long before the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, but not drug cartels as we know them today. As we approach the 20th anniversary of NAFTA, we can no longer ignore its contribution to building a powerful and violent criminal enterprise that has brought Mexico close to being labeled a failed state and made the Mexican-U.S. border into a war zone.

Most often when we analyze trade agreements, the focus is on trade volumes, jobs and manufacturing statistics, poverty levels and immigration–all extremely important ways to understand the impact of neoliberal policies bequeathed to us from Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. But to fully appreciate how devastating free trade has been, we need to look more closely at the aftermath of free trade on the bonds that hold communities together. It starts out small, a single thread that eventually leads to unraveling the whole cloth.

A deal over the “filibuster” was tentatively reached in the Senate today, but forget all the insider talk about “nuclear options” and “recess appointments.” This isn’t a story about process. It’s a story about ideology – specifically, the radical-right extremism of today’s Republican Party.

It’s also a story about paralysis, the corrupting power of money in politics, and the real reasons why Washington is increasingly failing to serve the people.

The wasn’t a filibuster fight. It was a fight over fundamental principles of democracy and the role of government in society.

And it’s not over.

Jessica Berstein: Whatever Happened to MoveOn.Org? Progressives and NSA Spying

Ever since the Edward Snowden story about the NSA spying program erupted, there has been a disturbingly eerie silence from progressives. Yes, perfunctory articles have been written, the usual pundits have spoken, and the ACLU has filed a much needed lawsuit, but progressive action groups have scarcely eked out a handful of petitions. As we are facing what is arguably one of the greatest historic struggles of our time, there is barely a ripple in the progressive universe.

Many progressives believe they do not have much to worry about because they ‘haven’t done anything wrong,’ and ‘have nothing to hide.’ However, knowledge of the vast surveillance program should raise critical questions about what is actually being done with this information. Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyer’s Guild, explains that one of the first things the government does is target the individuals who are challenging either its policies or the corporate power structure. Evidence of such targets is mounting. Environmental activists and animal rights activists were labeled the top domestic terrorism threat in 2005. The brutal tactics used to suppress the Occupy movement should have given serious pause to activists on all fronts.

Robert Reich: Why We Should Stop Subsidizing Sky-High CEO Pay

Almost everyone knows CEO pay is out of control. It surged 16 percent at big companies last year, and the typical CEO raked in $15.1 million, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, the median wage continued to drop, adjusted for inflation.

What’s less well-known is that you and I and other taxpayers are subsidizing this sky-high executive compensation. That’s because corporations deduct it from their income taxes, causing the rest of us to pay more in taxes to make up the difference.

This tax subsidy to corporate executives from the rest of us ought to be one of the first tax expenditures to go, when and if congress turns to reforming the tax code.

Jim Hightower: Exceptionally Mediocre on a Global Scale

America became great through deliberate and determined public investments in the common good, not hocus-pocus exceptionalism.

America the Beautiful! America the Greatest! We’re No. 1, right?

Absolutely, naturally, and indisputably. At least that’s the theocratic pronouncement of far-right-wing nativists who preach the dogma of American “exceptionalism.” They use the concept as a not-to-be-questioned litmus test of our patriotism.

Never mind that on many crucial measures of national achievements, our Good Ol’ U.S. of A has slipped in recent years. A simple-minded assertion that we’re No. 1 doesn’t make it so.