Tag: Politics

Apr 30 2014

The Torturer of Beverly Hills

The legacy of torture that the United States has left in Iraq and Afghanistan is appalling. Not only has the US failed to investigate or prosecute any of its own torturers, it is now giving safe haven to Afghanistan’s torturer in chief.

In Afghanistan, his presence was enough to cause prisoners to tremble. Hundreds in his organization’s custody were beaten, shocked with electrical currents or subjected to other abuses documented in human rights reports. Some allegedly disappeared.

And then Haji Gulalai disappeared as well.

Today, Gulalai lives in a pink two-story house in Southern California, on a street of stucco homes on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

How he managed to land in the United States remains murky. Afghan officials and former Gulalai colleagues said that his U.S. connections – and mounting concern about his safety – account for his extraordinary accommodation.

But CIA officials said the agency played no role in bringing Gulalai into the country. Officials at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security would not comment on his relocation or immigration status, citing privacy restrictions. Gulalai and members of his family declined repeated inquiries from The Washington Post. [..]

Applicants are screened against databases for criminal convictions or terrorist ties. But experts said those records are unlikely to reveal allegations of human rights abuses, particularly when the alleged abuser was operating under government authority and was not arrested or publicly accused. Prospects of detection may have been further complicated by the fact that Gulalai used only his (Kamal) Achakzai name once in the United States.

There is at least one indication, however, that U.S. authorities were able to connect the asylum seeker to his NDS résumé.

At a hearing before an immigration judge in Los Angeles several years ago, Gulalai defended his asylum claim by presenting photos of the Kabul bombing and other evidence of the danger he faced in Afghanistan, said (Bashir) Wasifi, who accompanied his friend to help interpret.

A U.S. attorney challenging the claim asked repeatedly whether the man now calling himself Achakzai was ever known by another name. After getting only looks of bewilderment, Wasifi said, the attorney changed his question: “Then who is Gulalai?”

Gulalai chuckled and replied that it was just a nickname bestowed by his family, and apologized for the slip, Wasifi said. He emerged from the hearing with his immigration status intact. [..]

Wasifi said Gulalai secured permanent resident status in the United States last year and is moving toward citizenship. The allegations against him, Wasifi said, should not stand in his way.

“I blame the U.S. for this,” Wasifi said. “If he was doing wrong to society, it is a shame for you. You appointed him to this position. NDS (National Directorate of Security) did not exist before. You created it. If you occupy a country, you are responsible.”

He was just doing what the US paid him to do, being a good soldier.

As Marcy Wheeler says, torture for the US and retire with impunity just don’t try to expose the war crimes:

Torturing on behalf of the United States appears to be a career move that results in a comfortable lifestyle after moving on from government service. Jose Rodriguez, who both ordered up torture and then personally destroyed video evidence of it, now profits from those events through book sales. James Mitchell, who was integral to the design of the torture program, now lives quietly in Land O’Lakes, Florida and until very recently didn’t even have to bother talking with reporters, let alone crime investigators. Of course, if you choose to expose US torture, it’s prison for you, as John Kiriakou has demonstrated.

But the disgusting free status of Rogdriguez and Mitchell pales in comparison to the level of depravity in the known history of personal involvement in torture for Haji Gulalai and how it was revealed yesterday that Gulalai is now living a quiet, comfortable life just outside Los Angeles. [Just as a bit of life advice, never piss off Julie Tate, as her work in finding Gulalai is perhaps the best bit of investigative journalism in the US in decades.] [..]

Standing out especially among the disgusting aspects of Gulalai’s case is the mystery surrounding how he was able to enter the US and then be granted asylum. Rank and file interpreters who worked for the US military in Afghanistan (and Iraq) face incredible difficulty getting into the US, even when they can present evidence that they face extreme danger staying behind: [..]

But here is an even bigger outrage in the process surrounding Gulalai, again from the excellent report from Greg Miller, Julie Tate and Joshua Partlow:

   Gulalai has made several return trips to Afghanistan in recent months to sell property there, family members and associates said. If true, the visits could undermine the argument that Afghanistan had become too dangerous for him, potentially complicating his asylum claim.

And what Charles Pierce said:

(O)f course, if there is any attempt to haul this sociopath off to The Hague, there will be several earnest columns written about how unfair it is because of what “we” asked him to do, and about abandoning allies, and so on. We are all complicit accessories before and after the fact. C-Plus Augustus made us that way.

And thank you, Barack Obama.

Apr 30 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Heidi Moore: Thomas Piketty is a rock-star economist – can he re-write the American dream?

The unlikely bestseller has roiled pundits and crystallized a conversation about inequality we should have had long ago. Now he has to win over normal people

When the movie is made about the fall of Western capitalism, Thomas Piketty will be played by Colin Firth. Piketty, whom the Financial Times called a “rock-star economist”, isn’t a household name – but he should be, and he has a better shot than any other economist. He is the author and researcher behind a 700-page economic manifesto, titled Capital in the 21st Century, that details the path of income inequality over several hundred years.

This sublime nerdishness is, somehow, a huge hit. It is now No 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list and sold out in many bookstores. When Piketty spoke on a panel this month at New York’s CUNY with three other economists – two of them Nobel-prize winners, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman – the Frenchman was the headliner. The event was so packed that the organizers had to create three overflow rooms. Weeks after the release of Capital, intellectuals are still salivating, even calling Piketty the new de Tocqueville.

Zoë Carpenter: There Is No Such Thing As a ‘Typical’ Low-Wage Worker

Spotted among a few hundred people rallying outside the Capitol on Monday for a higher minimum wage: A bearded man in a jean jacket, with a bandana on his head. A woman with close-cut gray curls and a gap where her top front teeth should be. A young man in a suit. Dreadlocks, ponytails, and mullets; baseball caps and cowboy hats and a lime green headscarf. Teenagers in hoodies, and one in a fishnet top with a leopard print bra underneath. Middle-aged women in pink hats.

With the Senate preparing to hold a procedural vote as early as Wednesday on a proposal to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour, it’s worth considering what’s at stake in the debate-or rather, who. As the rally illustrated, it’s hard to point to a “typical” low-wage worker. Many are in the fast-food industry, the most unequal sector of the American economy. Others are in domestic work, or retail, or are bank tellers. Some are highly educated while others have not graduated from high school. One sure thing is that most aren’t kids making date money.

Jessica Valenti: The White House wants to end campus rape. Great. Now what about colleges?

Obama and Biden have taken a sudden feminist turn on sexual assault. Shouldn’t someone still make some rules for punishing school rapists?

American colleges are not known for taking rape very seriously: activists at Brown University are currently protesting the measly one-semester suspension of a man who sexually assaulted and choked another student; 23 students currently allege that Columbia University violated federal law by discouraging victims of sexual assault from reporting and allowing rapists to stay on campus; the University of Chicago is facing a federal investigation over its handling of sexual assault; and Tufts University revoked its agreement with the US Department of Education to remedy a poor track record of dealing with sexual assault on campus in violation of Title IX. And that’s just this week.

But thanks to the work of grassroots and student-led organizations, a new initiative from the White House to curb sexual assault on campus is using explicitly feminist ideas to frame their recommendations. Color this feminist pleasantly surprised, if not entirely satisfied.

Emma Brockes: The truth about Airbnb: not a racket, nor brothel, just sparing a dime on rent

Questions we should be asking about the startup: isn’t it just a course correction for a real-estate system stacked against us? Also: is someone having sex in my bed?

Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, has lots of questions for the residents of the “digital Wild West” who rent out their apartments on Airbnb. Roughly: who are you, where do live and you’re making how much from your spare room, five flights up and with an unrestricted view of your neighbor’s air vent?

All of which misses the exact point of the ingenius pad-crashing service, and the more pressing issue facing users, not lawyers. As those of us with friends who hand over their keys for the weekend know well, there is only one question for occasional landlords on Airbnb, to be asked in a squealy voice and with a face like you just sucked an extra large lemon: how can you let strangers have sex in your bed?!

Ana Marie Cox: The NRA has declared war on America

Wayne LaPierre and Co are not out merely to defend the Second Amendment or Newtown or gun laws anymore. They want you to pay the price for freedom and they want their money now

As the annual meeting of National Rifle Association members started here this weekend, the gentleman seated next to me said to settle in: “It’s mostly administrative stuff. We vote on things.” He paused for emphasis: “It’s the law.”

He’s somewhat mistaken, of course. The NRA doesn’t have any state-mandated obligation to hold an annual meeting. What’s more, the NRA has very little respect for the law. A half an hour later, at that very meeting, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre exhorted the crowd to a morally obligated vigilantism. He drew a vivid picture of a United States in utter decay and fragmented beyond repair, Mad Max-meets-Hunger Games, divided by Soylent Green:

Katrina vanden Heuvel: What Cliven Bundy Learned From the Koch Brothers

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s fifteen minutes of fame are up. He was a Fox News poster boy when he refused to pay fees for grazing his cows on federal land and greeted federal rangers with the threat of armed resistance. But when he voiced his views on the joys of slavery for “the Negro,” his conservative champions fled from his side.

What is interesting about Bundy, however, is not his tired racism but rather his remarkable sense of entitlement. His cattle have fed off public lands for two decades while he refused to pay grazing fees that are much lower than those he would have to pay for private land (and lower even than the government’s costs). “I’ll be damned if this is the property of the United States,” he says, claiming he won’t do business with the federal government because the Constitution doesn’t prohibit Americans from using federal lands.

Apr 29 2014

Reversal of Fortune and Mind by a Climate Denier

After over a two year investigation in campaign finance corruption, Representative Michael Grimm (R-NY11) was indicted on Monday, with charges including mail, wire, and healthcare fraud, filing false tax returns, perjury, and employing undocumented immigrants. Grimm, with a history of bad behavior made headlines most recently when he threatened to throw a NY1 reporter, Michael Scotto, off the balcony of the Capitol rotunda when he lost his temper over Scotto’s commentary.

The district that Grimm represents, Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, was hard hit by super storm Sandy in October 2011 and is still has not fully recovered due much to the lax distribution of funds by New York City, a problem that newly elected Mayor Bill De Blasio is working quickly to remedy. Grimm is also, or was, a climate change denier. In episode 3 of the Showtime series on climate change, “Years of Living Dangerously,” Grimm sat down with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to discuss the devastation, recovery and climate change. In that segment which was taped in August 2012, Grimm revealed that he had changed his mind about climate change and said that the storm was a major factor in his decision. However, he also said that there is nothing that he could do to change the conversation in the House.

This was news to his constituents since since Grimm has consistently voted with his Republican colleagues to block any climate change solutions. He even told Hayes “I don’t think the science is there to tell us what’s causing it…. I don’t want to get into the political debate of what’s causing it.” Ironically, the segment aired on Sunday, the day before Grimm surrendered to authorities to face the 20 count indictment.

Monday night, Hayes revisited his interview with Rep. Grimm where the conversation turned to the environment.

After all this Grimm is not resigning his house seat and he is still the GOP nominee for that district. But even if the Staten Island GOP wanted to replace him, they are hard pressed to try and their choice to replace him is  a former congressman whose career ended with a DUI arrest that exposed an affair, Vito Fossella. If you thought the Republicans in the midwest and south were ignoramuses, you haven’t been to Staten Island, the last stronghold for the GOP in New York City.

Grimm’s constituents deserve better. They deserve someone who will stand up and fight for them.

 

Apr 29 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Dean Baker: What Problem Is Privatizing Fannie and Freddie Meant to Solve?

President Obama’s chief economist, Jason Furman, weighed in behind efforts to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last week. The main plan on the table is a bill forward by Senators Tim Johnson and Mike Crapo, the chair and ranking member, respectively, on the Senate Banking Committee.

While Furman’s column (which was co-authored with James Stock, another member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers) indicated support for the principles behind the Johnson-Crapo bill, it is not clear what problem they are hoping to solve.

At the moment, it seems Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are doing their job just fine. They are issuing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that include more than 60 percent of new mortgages. Interest rates on mortgages are low and both companies are making substantial profits that are refunded to the government. Why is there any need to overhaul this system?

Yochai Benkler: The US supreme court needs to keep up with our cellphones – and the NSA

Tuesday’s oral arguments on search and seizure make it clear: the era of incremental justice ends now, because the age of metadata is already getting out of hand

Tuesday’s US supreme court arguments involved a seemingly basic legal question about the future of the Fourth Amendment: do police officers need a warrant to search the cellphone of a person they arrest? But the two privacy cases pit against each other two very different conceptions of what it means to be a supreme court in the first place – and what it means to do constitutional law in the 21st century.

“With computers, it’s a new world,” several justices reportedly said in the chamber. Are they ready to be the kinds of justices who make sense of it?

Cellphones expose so much of our most personal data that the decision should be a 9-0 no-brainer. The basic problem that makes it a harder call is that lawyers and judges are by training and habit incrementalists, while information and communications technology moves too fast for incrementalism to keep up.

Philip Pilkington: Our fragile economy of stock bubbles and luxury goods

Income inequality is creating a new normal of high-end consumption and inflated stock prices driving anemic growth

Imagine a world in which those who work – or try to work- are given mere scraps. Imagine an economy that is driven purely by speculation by the wealthy, the gains of which are then spent in high-end stores, the source of employment for those lucky enough to have a job. Imagine economic institutions that puzzle over the slow growth experienced in this economy, uncertain as to the cause.

Imagine no more, because this is the world we live in. Thankfully, however, two economists have finally pieced together the puzzle from disparate fragments of data to explain this malaise.

In a recent study (PDF), Steven Fazzari and Barry Cynamon start with what seems to be a paradox: Keynesian economic theory, together with common sense, tells us that higher-income groups should spend less in relation to their income than lower-income groups. However, since 1980, inequality in the United States has risen enormously, yet household spending has increased to historic highs.

According to the authors, the reason this occurred is that the debt-to-income ratio for the bottom 95 percent of the population rose enormously.

Robert L. Borosage: The Big Fix: How Congress Rigs the Rules

This week, the House Ways and Means Committee is poised to demonstrate exactly how the rules get rigged. Beginning on Tuesday, the committee will mark up a series of bills on corporate tax breaks — known as “extenders” because they have been extended regularly every year or two for over a decade. Only now the Committee plans to make many of them permanent, at the cost of an estimated $300 billion over 10 years. And it does not plan to pay for them by closing other corporate loopholes or raising rates. The giveaway — almost all of which goes to corporations — will simply add to the deficit. And no doubt those who vote for them will later demand deeper cuts in programs for the vulnerable in order to bring “spending” under control.

The measures range from big to small, sensible to inane. Two centerpieces are glaring loopholes for multinational companies and banks, encouraging them to ship jobs and report profits abroad to avoid an estimated $80 billion in taxes over a decade.

Khaled Fahmy: The Egyptian state must stop killing the Egyptian people

Mass death sentence is the latest outrage by country’s corrupt judiciary

On March 24 and after only two swift sessions, one of them lasting less than an hour, a court in the southern Egyptian city of Minya issued its verdict concerning 529 defendants, reportedly all members of the now banned Muslim Brotherhood. The court referred the papers of the defendants to the mufti, one of the country’s highest officials in Islamic affairs, asking for his opinion on hanging them.

Even by the standards of the Egyptian judiciary, which many local human rights groups have recently accused of corruption and partiality, this ruling constitutes a serious affront to justice. Never before in Egypt’s modern history have so many defendants been sentenced to death in one case and with such haste. Never before has an Egyptian court been so dismissive of basic requirements of the judicial process as stipulated by Egyptian law, denying, as it did, defense lawyers the chance to present their case, preventing witnesses from testifying and ignoring complaints by the defendants about the impartiality and competence of the sitting judge.

Vartan Oskanian: Iran nuclear talks: The ‘trust but verify’ dictate

We can only understand Iran’s real intentions by engaging Iranians – not cornering them.

Although the Iran nuclear talks are officially between Iran and the five UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany, at the core, this tug-of-war is between Iran and the United States. I can even picture the US and Iranian diplomats, alone, behind closed doors, working on drafts of the final document.

The signs and posturing from all sides indicate that the US and Iran are serious, genuine and committed to reaching an agreement. The negotiations are being conducted quietly, and between rounds, the sides are displaying restraint and expressing cautious optimism. When the US, for domestic reasons, refused a visa to Iran’s UN representative, Iran’s response was measured. In the recent UN vote condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Iran did not come in on Russia’s side, as it usually does. All this points to a very real opportunity for a positive outcome by the July deadline they have set for themselves.

How is it that what was unthinkable only a year ago suddenly seems plausible?

Apr 28 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The New York Times Editorial Board: Smartphones and the 4th Amendment

More than 90 percent of American adults own a mobile phone, and more than half of the devices are smartphones. But “smartphone” is a misnomer. They are personal computers that happen to include a phone function, and like any computer they can store or wirelessly retrieve enormous amounts of personal information: emails, photos and videos; document files; financial and medical records; and virtually everywhere a person has been.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will consider whether law enforcement officers during an arrest may search the contents of a person’s mobile phone without a warrant. The court should recognize that new technologies do not alter basic Fourth Amendment principles, and should require a judicial warrant in such circumstances. [..]

The Supreme Court has recognized the need to adapt to new technologies, as when it ruled that the government attaching a GPS tracking device to a private car was a Fourth Amendment search. For better or worse, mobile phones have become repositories of our daily lives, and will become only more powerful over time. As a rule, the police should have to get a warrant to search them.

Paul Krugman: High Plains Moochers

It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy – the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance – has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken.

For at the heart of the standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right has come to mean the freedom of the wealthy to do whatever they want, without regard to the consequences for others. [..]

It’s true that some of the people profiting from implicit taxpayer subsidies manage, all the same, to convince themselves and others that they are rugged individualists. But they’re actually welfare queens of the purple sage.

Robert Kuttner: Share Economy or Bare Economy?

The digital economy has given us new ways to be both part time entrepreneurs and consumers, in what enthusiasts call the Share Economy. Have a spare room? You can rent it out to strangers via Airbnb.com — or use Airbnb to find cheap lodging. You’ll meet fascinating new friends, and most likely nothing bad will happen.

Do you need a taxi? Use Uber or Lyft to hail a passing driver and catch a ride for less than the cost of a cab. Or supplement your income by becoming that driver.

Want your car to bring in some income while it sits idle in your driveway? Rent it out via RelayRide.com.

Have some spare time to run errands? You can sign up to be as TaskRabbit, maybe for what works out to less than minimum wage. Or you can hire a TaskRabbit to clean your garage.

As they say over at CNN, is all of this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it’s both.

Dave Johnson: Democrats Who Move Right Lose Elections — There Is No “Center”

Mainstream Democratic campaign consultants and pollsters typically tell candidates they should “move to the right” and campaign to the “center” with positions that are “between” the “left” and the “right.” This is the way, they say, to “attract swing voters” who would be “scared off” by a candidate who takes populist positions that favor the interests of the 99 percent over the interests of the 1 percent.

Polling and experience show that exactly the opposite might be true. [..]

Here is what is very important to understand about the “swing” vote: Few voters “switch.” That is the wrong lesson. There are not voters who “swing,” there are left voters and right voters who either show up and vote or do not show up and vote.

The lesson to learn: You have to deliver for and campaign to YOUR “base” voters or they don’t show up and vote for you. If Democrats don’t give regular, working people — the Democratic base — a reason to vote, then many of them won’t.

Malcolm Harris: The real reason Michael Bloomberg cares about guns

During Michael Bloomberg’s three terms as mayor of New York, he loved nothing more than to lord over the nation’s largest city. Now he’s just a normal civilian multibillionaire, sitting right below the prime minister of India on the Forbes list of the world’s most powerful people – a lowly position that is no doubt a source of immense personal disappointment. Short of patrolling New York’s parks in a spandex bodysuit to inflict vigilante justice on cigarette smokers and super-sized Slurpee drinkers, what’s a rich ex-mayor to do?

Luckily for Bloomberg, in American politics, controlling sublime amounts of capital is its own qualification, and lavishing it on pet issues counts as philanthropy. And this time, without an elected office to use for a pulpit, he’s going to need that money: After attacking tobacco and soda, Bloomberg is coming for guns. [..]

There’s no doubt America needs to curb gun use and possession. The question is, whose guns? There are 34,500 members of the NYPD, and in 2012 they fatally shot 16 people (pdf). That gives Bloomberg’s army a rate of over 46 shooting deaths per 100,000, killing people at a clip that dwarfs any civilian level in the country. To put it in perspective, Chicago – an American city known for gun violence – hit its peak murder rate of 34 per 100,000 in 1992. American law enforcement is increasingly militarized – as Radley Balko reports in his book “Rise of the Warrior Cop”: “Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment – from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers – American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield.” And this army takes a lot of prisoners: While gun violence has markedly declined following heightened crime in the ’90s, incarceration rates haven’t returned to earth, nearly quintupling since the early ’70s, making Americans the most imprisoned people in the world.

While Bloomberg is squaring up to spread fears about armed Mormon cattle ranchers gone wild, we should be more worried about guns in the hands of the police. To further his agenda, Bloomberg is counting on the public’s unwillingness to look beyond the flashiest proximate cause of surprise violence, as well as liberal stereotypes about rural Americans who own guns. But the biggest, most violently irresponsible gun owner in the country isn’t some left-wing caricature redneck or a deranged teen plotting a massacre from his basement. It’s the state.

Norman Solomon: Jerry Brown’s service to the gilded state

Forty months after returning to the governor’s office that he left in 1983, Jerry Brown is a media favorite and a hero to much of the California establishment. The present-day governor wins accolades as a highly skilled politician who has put the Golden State’s fiscal house in order while reviving its can-do spirit.

Brown deserves the gratitude of powerful economic elites. But for others, especially the powerless and vulnerable, it’s a very different story.

The governor insists on frugality in spending for social programs, while many millions of Californians continue to live in economic distress worsened by cutbacks in social services. Now instead of boosting aid, Brown wants to sock money away. Years of rising tax revenues have turned the state’s huge budget deficit into a surplus, and this week the legislature is in special session to answer Brown’s call for expansion of the state’s rainy-day fund. [..]

Now, from his lofty perch as governor of the nation’s most populous state, Brown is launching a re-election campaign that seems almost certain to succeed. He continues to operate with a high-octane blend of pragmatism and cynicism. The gist is a bottom-line assumption that principles should be malleable – and power from the grass roots must defer to power imposed from the top.

Brown is California’s leading prodigal son. He has returned to power redeemed by his worth to corporate forces dominating the state. The less fortunate will have to endure the grim consequences.

Apr 27 2014

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guest on this Sunday’s “This Week” are Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson; Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA); and  GMA anchor Robin Robert.

At the roundtable are ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd, ABC News contributor and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol; Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman; and Fusion’s “AM Tonight” host Alicia Menendez.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN); Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO); and former presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

His panel guests are Bobby Ghosh and Joe Klein of Time; Peter Baker of The New York Times; and Nia-Malika Henderson of The Washington Post.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: The guests on this week’s MTP are former British Prime Minister Tony Blair; and White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken.

At the roundtable are Mallory Factor, best-selling author and Professor at The Citadel; Jeffrey Goldberg, Correspondent for The Atlantic and Bloomberg View Columnist; Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress; Rich Lowry, Editor of National Review.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu;  Senators John Barrasso (R-WY) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Her panel guests are  Matt Bai, S.E. Cupp, and L.Z. Granderson.

Apr 26 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: [DC thinks it can silence a new Snowden, but the anti-leak hypocrisy is backfiring

The Obama administration’s latest secrecy guidelines would make Deep Throat spin in his grave. Good thing the floodgates are about to open on drones

After Edward Snowden caught the US government with its pants down, you would think the keepers of this country’s secrets might stand up for a little more transparency, not bend over backwards trying to control the message.

Instead, this week we found out the Most Transparent Administration in American History™ has implemented a new anti-press policy that would make Richard Nixon blush. National intelligence director James Clapper, the man caught lying to Congress from an “unauthorized” leak by Snowden, issued a directive to the employees of all 17 intelligence agencies barring all employees from any “unauthorized” contact with the press. [..]

The truth-about-drones opinion has the potential to force the administration to come clean on a variety of policies, but don’t expect them to do any of that anytime soon. This week, the OLC released a list of 2013 unclassified legal opinions to the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly in response to his own FOIA request. The subjects of all but one were blacked out:

Ruth Coniff: Scathing Report Finds School Privatization Hurt Poor Kids

Gordon Lafer, a political economist and University of Oregon professor who has advised Congress, state legislatures, and the New York City mayor’s office, landed at the airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this week bringing with him a briefing paper on school privatization and how it hurts poor kids.

Lafer’s report, “Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower-Quality Education Than Rich Kids? Evaluating School Privatization Proposals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” released today by the Economic Policy Institute, documents the effects of both for-profit and non-profit charter schools that are taking over struggling public schools in Milwaukee.

“I hope people connect the dots,” Lafer said by phone from the Milwaukee airport.

Lafer’s research, commissioned by the Economic Policy Institute to evaluate the school-privatization push in Milwaukee, is a sweeping indictment of the growing private charter school industry — and other schemes backed by rightwing groups and big business — that siphon public funds out of public schools and enrich corporate investors at the expense of quality education for poor children.

Maira Sutton: TPP Is Right Where We Want It: Going Nowhere

President Obama is on a diplomatic tour of Asia this week and one of his top priorities is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that includes restrictive copyright enforcement measures that pose a huge threat to users’ rights and a free and open Internet. In particular, he’s seeking to resolve some major policy disagreements with Japan and Malaysia-the two countries that have maintained resistance against some provisions in the TPP involving agriculture and other commodities. Despite some reports of movement on some of the most controversial topics during meetings between Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Abe, it seems that the TPP is still effectively at a standstill. [..]

This pushback is great news, and it comes thanks in large part to users around the world contacting their lawmakers and asking them to question and oppose TPP’s secretive corporate-driven agenda. A new campaign this week called Stop the Secrecy collected users’ petition signatures and messages about the TPP from various public interest groups; the final tally came out to over 2.8 million actions that have been taken over the last two years. The campaigners are projecting their message to “stop the secrecy” on U.S. capitol buildings. The aim is to get lawmakers and trade delegates to realize that if the agreement progresses, thousands of these users will be ready to stop it again in its tracks.

David Sirota: Wall Street’s Secret Swindle

In the national debate over what to do about public pension shortfalls, here’s something you may not know: The texts of the agreements signed between those pension funds and financial firms are almost always secret. Yes, that’s right. Although they are public pensions that taxpayers contribute to and that public officials oversee, the exact terms of the financial deals being engineered in the public’s name and with public money are typically not available to you, the taxpayer.

To understand why that should be cause for concern, ponder some possibilities as they relate to pension deals with hedge funds, private equity partnerships and other so-called “alternative investments.” For example, it is possible that the secret terms of such agreements could allow other private individuals in the same investments to negotiate preferential terms for themselves, meaning public employees’ pension money enriches those private investors. It is also possible that the secret terms of the agreements create the heads-Wall-Street-wins, tails-pensions-lose effect-the one whereby retirees’ money is subjected to huge risks, yet financial firms’ profits are guaranteed regardless of returns.

Eugene Robinson: The Court Stacks the Deck

Affirmative action has opened doors for disadvantaged minorities and made this a fairer, more equal society. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts apparently wants no more of that.

This week’s big ruling-upholding a Michigan state constitutional amendment that bans public universities from considering race in admissions-claims to leave affirmative action alive, if on life support. But the court’s opinion, ignoring precedent and denying reality, can only be read as an invitation for other states to follow suit.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s thundering dissent should be required reading. She sees what the court is doing and isn’t afraid to call out her colleagues on the disingenuous claim that the ruling in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is limited in scope. It has implications that go beyond college admissions to other areas, such as voting rights, where majorities seek to trample minority rights.

Joe Conason: Now We Know: Economic Inequality Is a Malady-and Not a Cure

It has been a long, long time since Americans accepted the advice of a French intellectual about anything important, let alone the future of democracy and the economy. But the furor over Thomas Piketty’s stunning best-seller, “Capital in the 21st Century”-and especially the outraged reaction from the Republican right-suggests that this fresh import from la belle France has struck an exposed nerve.

What Piketty proves, with his massive data set and complex analytical tools, is something that many of us-including Pope Francis-have understood both intuitively and intellectually: namely, that human society, both here and globally, has long been grossly inequitable and is steadily becoming more so, to our moral detriment.

What Piketty strongly suggests is that the structures of capitalism not only regenerate worsening inequality, but now drive us toward a system of economic peonage and political autocracy.

Apr 25 2014

The End of the Internet As We Know It

In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dealt a blow to net neutrality when it struck down the government’s latest effort to require internet providers to treat all traffic the same and give consumers equal access to lawful content. The Federal Communication Commission new proposal would allow Internet providers like Verizon or Comcast to charge media companies like Netflix or Amazon extra fees in order to receive preferential treatment, such as faster speeds for their content. This will translate not only to higher fees from you internet service provider (ISP) but from Netflix, Amazon, etc. According the FCC chairman Thomas Wheeler, former venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry, is insisting nothing will change.

According to Mike Massick at Techdirt that’s just flat out not true

The problem is that this is absolutely misleading — and either the FCC doesn’t realize this or it’s not being honest. And, I’m not sure which one is more bizarre. Wheeler is, indeed, correct in saying that under the court ruling from earlier this year, in order to be able to do anything under Section 706 of the Telecom Act, they had to shift from talking about “unreasonable discrimination” (which they can’t regulate under 706) to “commercially reasonable” activities (which they can regulate). So, in effect, Wheeler is trying to argue that by basically shifting the basis for the rules and substituting in the “commercially reasonable” standard as opposed to blocking “unreasonable discrimination” (which can be done under common carrier rules, but since the FCC reclassified broadband service as not being a telco service, that’s not available), they’re now back in proper legal territory under the law.

Perhaps Wheeler and his friends at the FCC think that this subtle shift in phrases to abide by the blueprint the court set out really does leave the existing rules in place. But, it’s not that simple. As Stacy Higginbotham points out, even if the FCC doesn’t want to destroy net neutrality, this subtle shift will do so anyway. To understand why, the best article to read is the one by Marvin Ammori, who has been fighting this fight for years. He argues that, unlike the CNET article above that says to “calm down,” we should actually be even more worried. Because even if the FCC thinks it can stop net neutrality violations, companies are still going to get screwed. Basically, the FCC can only act after the fact, and then it’s going to come down to a fight between a big telcos’ lawyers… and a tiny startups’ lawyers. Guess who wins?

Retired FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, told Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman and Juan González that this “transformation of the Internet where the 1 percent get the fast lanes, and the 99 percent get the slow lanes,” and “If we let that happen, we have really undercut the potential of this transformative technology. This has to be stopped.”

They were joined by Astra Taylor, author of the new book, “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.”

The transcript can be read here

We need to stop the FCC from ending the internet as we know it and preserve net neutrality.

People everywhere understand that the Internet is a crucial driver of free speech, innovation, education, economic growth, creativity and so much more. They demand real Net Neutrality rules that protect Internet users from corporate abuse.

But the Federal Communications Commission is proposing rules that would kill – rather than protect – Net Neutrality and allow rampant discrimination online.

Under these rules, telecom giants like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon would be able to pick winners and losers online and discriminate against online content and applications. And no one would be able to do anything about it.

We must stop the FCC from moving forward with these rules, which would give the green light to ISPs eager to crush Net Neutrality.

The agency can preserve Net Neutrality only by designating broadband as a telecommunications service under the law. Anything else is an attack on our rights to connect and communicate.

Tell FCC Chairman Wheeler to throw out his proposed rules. Demand nothing less than real Net Neutrality.

Please sigh The Free Press petition Stop the FCC from Breaking the Internet

Apr 25 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The New York Times Editorial Board: Creating a Two-Speed Internet

Dividing traffic on the Internet into fast and slow lanes is exactly what the Federal Communications Commission would do with its proposed regulations, unveiled this week. And no amount of reassurances about keeping competition alive will change that fact.

Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the commission, is proposing that broadband providers – phone and cable companies – be allowed to charge fees for faster delivery of video and other data to consumers. [..]

In this new world, smaller content providers and start-ups that could not pay for preferential treatment might not be able to compete because their delivery speeds would be much slower. And consumers would have to pay more because any company that agrees to strike deals with phone and cable companies would undoubtedly pass on those costs to their users.

Paul Krugman: The Piketty Panic

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,”the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piketty’s contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers aren’t. And conservatives are terrified. Thus James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute warns in National Review that Mr. Piketty’s work must be refuted, because otherwise it “will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged.”

Well, good luck with that. The really striking thing about the debate so far is that the right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling – in particular, claims that Mr. Piketty is a Marxist, and so is anyone who considers inequality of income and wealth an important issue.

Trevor Timm: The mentality of J Edgar Hoover’s FBI undergirds today’s surveillance state

People forget that the FBI is the NSA’s primary partner in domestic spying, which allows them to work in secret

The new documentary 1971, about the formerly anonymous FBI burglars who exposed the crimes of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, debuted to a rapt audience at the Tribeca film festival last night. As the filmmakers noted in an interview with the AP, the parallels between Nixon-era FBI whistleblowers and Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations are almost eerie in their similarity.

But while the NSA connection seems obvious, the movie will actually shed light on the domestic intelligence agency with far more power over ordinary Americans: the modern FBI.

Everyone seems to forget that the FBI is the NSA’s primary partner in the latter’s domestic spying operations and that, in fact, the NSA’s job would be impossible without them. Whenever you see a company deny giving any data to the NSA remember: It’s because it’s not the NSA asking (or demanding) the information of them, it’s the FBI. They use the same Patriot Act authorities that the NSA does, and yet we have almost no idea what they do with it.

Sadhbh Walshe: The NCAA’s war on student-athletes ends now: time to unionize, eat and win

Northwestern football’s vote is a landmark for an $11bn industry that can no longer trade on the kind of education that can longer be called ‘free’

Moments after winning the NCAA Division I men’s basketball national championship this month, University of Connecticut star Shabazz Napier shocked the world when the projected NBA lottery pick – a future millionaire – said that “there are hungry nights that I go to bed and I’m starving”.

From the NCAA’s point of view, Napier’s timing could not have been worse. Here was a 22-year-old black kid, speaking of the hunger games buried within college athletics, from the depths of the Dallas Cowboys stadium, where he had just conquered the Final Four in front of 22m people. And all this in the span of the same month when a judge had – gasp! – let another group of used-up jocks decide for themselves whether they want to unionize. [..]

Already, thanks to Napier’s accidental hunger strike, lawmakers in Connecticut are paving the way for athletes to unionize in that state. If jocks across the country believe they deserve more from the NCAA than an extra helping at dinner, they ought to be voting the Husky way, too.

Eric Zeusse: The Rightwing Supreme Court Is Wrong: The Original Intent of the Constitution Was Progressive

The original intent of the U.S. Constitution can most accurately be determined upon the basis of the debates that occurred at the Constitutional Convention that (after preliminaries during the Convention’s opening days of 25-28 May 1787) started on 29 May 1787, and ended nearly four months later, on September 17th of 1787. James Madison transcribed those epoch-making, nation-forming, debates.

These debates began with some members of the Convention, especially Misters Randolph of Virginia, Gerry of Massachusetts, Butler of South Carolina, and Dickenson of Delaware, simply assuming that the existing Articles of Confederation would be improved, not replaced; i.e., that no new and single nation of the United States of America would result from their collective deliberations.

The American Revolutionary war of 1775-83 was at that time a mere four years past, and this Convention had been called together for the purpose of replacing the failed existing Articles of Confederation, by some Constitution that would improve upon that existing governing document.

Peter van Buren: I’m a Whistleblower: Want Fries with That?

An Apartheid of Dollars: Life in the New American Minimum-Wage Economy

There are many sides to whistleblowing. The one that most people don’t know about is the very personal cost, prison aside, including the high cost of lawyers and the strain on family relations, that follows the decision to risk it all in an act of conscience. Here’s a part of my own story I’ve not talked about much before.

At age 53, everything changed. Following my whistleblowing first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, I was run out of the good job I had held for more than 20 years with the U.S. Department of State. As one of its threats, State also took aim at the pension and benefits I’d earned, even as it forced me into retirement. Would my family and I lose everything I’d worked for as part of the retaliation campaign State was waging? I was worried. That pension was the thing I’d counted on to provide for us and it remained in jeopardy for many months. I was scared.

Apr 24 2014

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Charles M. Blow: Lions to the Ballot Box

It’s important to vote in presidential election years, to make sure that the leader of the free world is truly representative of the country. But presidential politics is only part of the political apparatus – the part furthest from most individuals. Much of the rest of the political power has a much lower center of gravity, playing itself out on the state and local level. In fact, the more local an election or ballot measure, the more powerful the individual votes, because the universe of all voters shrinks.

This is what more voters must be made to understand: It’s negligent at best, and derelict at worst, to elect a president but stay home when the legislatures with which a president must work are being elected. Apathy insures enmity, as the president and the legislative branch both rightly proclaim that they have been sent to Washington at the behest of diametrically opposed voting populaces – the president by a broader, more diverse (in terms of race, age, income and ideology) demographic group, and many members of Congress by a more narrowly drawn one.

Jessica Valenti: When you call a rape anything but rape, you are just making excuses for rapists

From college campuses to Game of Thrones, why the sudden urge to re-name sexual assault?

If you kill a person, you’re a murderer. If you steal, no one would hesitate to call you a thief. But in America, when you force yourself on someone sexually, some people will jump through flaming hoops not to call you a rapist.

As reported by Al Jazeera America, colleges across the country are replacing the word “rape” in their sexual assault policies with “non-consensual sex” because schools don’t want label students “rapists”.

Brett Sokolow of the National Center for Higher Education Risk – the consultant and lawyer behind this reprehensible shift – says that hearing boards are “squeamish” about hearing or using the word, even for students actually found guilty of raping their classmates.

They’re not alone. Artist and Vice co-host David Choe described sexually assaulting a massage therapist but would only go so far as calling it “rape-y” and eventually denied it happened at all. Game of Thrones director Alex Graves gave an interview just this week in which he described a what was clearly a rape scene on Sunday night’s episode as “consensual.”

How can we stop rape if we’re not even willing to call it what it is?

Richard (RJ) Eskow: So You’ve Read (or Read About) Piketty. Now What?

When a product sells phenomenally well, as Thomas Piketty’s new book is currently doing, popular economic theory says that means one of two things: either it’s filling a substantial unmet demand, or the product is exceptionally well executed. In the case of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” both statements are true.

We are told that “Capital” is now at the top of the Amazon sales charts, outselling even mass-market novels with movie tie-ins like “Divergent.” That kind of meritocratic success story is, as Piketty’s work demonstrates, increasingly rare.

Piketty has given us a superior product. He has brilliantly and eloquently analyzed the crisis of inequality which threatens the global economy. The question now is, What do we do about it?

Daniel Denver: Welcome to Comcast Country

COMCAST’S executive vice president, David L. Cohen, did not seem fazed when Senator Al Franken warned at a recent Judiciary Committee hearing that the company’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable would “result in fewer choices, higher prices and even worse service for my constituents.” Comcast argues that the merger will not decrease competition among cable television or broadband Internet providers because the two companies do not directly compete – though the reason for that is that they already maintain virtual monopolies in many of their service areas.

In Comcast’s case, that monopoly is predicated upon exerting overwhelming political control. Just ask anyone who lives in Philadelphia, where the shiny 975-foot Comcast Center looms over the skyline. As buttons at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia proclaimed: “Welcome to Comcast Country.”

Clara Long: Obama’s red line on ‘good deportations’ is inhumane – and he has crossed it

He has tried to go both ways on immigration. But ask immigrants up close, and you’ll see that ‘border removals’ destroy lives

When it comes to immigration, President Obama wants to be seen two ways by two different audiences. For Americans resistant to immigration reform, he presents himself as a stalwart enforcer of the law. For those in favor of reform, he casts himself as a humane administrator of an inhumane system.

In an attempt to keep everyone happy, the Obama administration offers “tough on the outside, soft on the inside” rhetoric: secure the border to “finally stem the tide of illegal immigrants” while targeting serious criminals, not “folks who are here just because they’re trying to figure out how to feed their families“. It’s an appealing formula – but it’s not what Obama’s administration is actually doing. [..]

President Obama has tried to convince us that there are good deportations and bad deportations, and that the more than 2m deportations carried out by his administration are mostly the good kind. But there are good reasons for thinking that many of those removed are settled residents who have been torn from their families and communities – and their deportation is inhumane and unnecessary.

Jillain C. York: The fight to protect digital rights is an uphill battle, but not a silent one

As awareness of censorship increases, so might attempts to create a sense of global solidarity against censorship

As more and more governments attempt to crack down on online speech, there are several possible outcomes. While this generation has become accustomed to watching sites disappear from their view, the next may take for granted the version of the Internet that lay before them, never questioning what may be beyond their view. On the other hand, as awareness of censorship increases, so might attempts to create a sense of global solidarity against censorship.

While views on speech often differ from culture to culture, the reaction to the NSA’s online surveillance project has been swift and global. A set of principles demanding an end to mass surveillance (full disclosure: these were developed in part by my organisation) has attracted signatories from hundreds of countries, united in their opposition to dragnet surveillance everywhere. At the same time, engineers and developers are working together across national lines to build software and tools that will help users everywhere protect themselves against spying.

The fight to protect digital rights is most certainly an uphill battle, but a new generation of activists is ensuring that it’s not a silent one.

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