Apr 13 2014
“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:
Apr 12 2014
“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
New York Times Editorial Board: Torturing Children at School
Federal investigators have opened an inquiry into the tragic case of a high school student in Bastrop County, Tex., who suffered severe brain damage and nearly died last fall after a deputy sheriff shocked him with a Taser, a high voltage electronic weapon. [..]
Complaints about dangerous disciplinary practices involving shock weapons are cropping up all over the country. The problem has its roots in the 1990s, when school districts began ceding even routine disciplinary duties to police and security officers, who were utterly unprepared to deal with children. Many districts need to overhaul practices that criminalize far too many young people and that are applied in ways that discriminate against minority children. In the meantime, elected officials need to ban shock weapons in schools.
Naomi Klein: Why US fracking companies are licking their lips over Ukraine
From climate change to Crimea, the natural gas industry is supreme at exploiting crisis for private gain – what I call the shock doctrine
The way to beat Vladimir Putin is to flood the European market with fracked-in-the-USA natural gas, or so the industry would have us believe. As part of escalating anti-Russian hysteria, two bills have been introduced into the US Congress – one in the House of Representatives (H.R. 6), one in the Senate (S. 2083) – that attempt to fast-track liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, all in the name of helping Europe to wean itself from Putin’s fossil fuels, and enhancing US national security. [..]
For this ploy to work, it’s important not to look too closely at details. Like the fact that much of the gas probably won’t make it to Europe – because what the bills allow is for gas to be sold on the world market to any country belonging to the World Trade Organisation.
More than 2m immigrants kicked out. The vast majority of cases from minor crimes. All this for parents who want to see their American kids grow up?
Francisco Vega was just 15 years old when he got convicted for possession of a controlled substance, a minor crime – and one that has haunted this Mexican-born immigrant’s life ever since. The juvenile drug conviction was subsequently vacated, but not before costing Francisco the chance to become a permanent, legal American resident through marriage. This all-too-common incident ultimately led to his being deported in 2008. He made it back to the US, only to face deportation again five years later. Now he’s languishing in a cell in a privately run immigrant detention center in Tacoma, Washington, where his wife tells me he is not faring well: “We are not allowed contact visits, but I can see through the glass window that he is wasting away.”
If the Vegas lose their second battle and Francisco is permanently removed from this country – if they lose a husband and a father of four American-born children, one of whom served in the US Air Force – it will be just another casualty of the backward immigration enforcement policies pursued by the Obama administration that are ripping families apart.
David Sirota: In Chicago, You Have to Pay to Play With Public Money
Chicago is facing a pension shortfall for its police officers, firefighters, teachers and other municipal workers. If you’ve followed this story, you’ve probably heard that the only way Mayor Rahm Emanuel can deal with the situation is to slash those workers’ pensions and to jack up property taxes on those who aren’t politically connected enough to have secured themselves special exemptions.
This same fantastical story, portraying public employees as the primary cause of budget crises, is being told across the country. Yet, in many cases, we’re only being told half the tale. We aren’t told that the pension shortfalls in many locales were created because local governments did not make their required pension contributions over many years. And perhaps even more shocking, we aren’t told that while states and cities pretend they have no money to deal with public sector pensions, many are paying giant taxpayer subsidies to corporations-subsidies that are often far larger than the pension shortfalls.
Chicago exemplifies how corruption is often at the heart of this grand bait and switch.
Terrance Heath: The Ryan Budget Shows What Republicans Want To Do To America
Sometimes a budget is a moral document. Sometimes it’s a threat. With the passage of Rep. Paul Ryan’s latest austerian budget, the GOP is once again spelling out very clearly what they want to do to America. It’s not a threat, but a promise that Americans must make sure Republicans never have the power to fulfill. [..]
Not that they said as much during the debate over the Ryan budget. Over the last two days, Republicans resorted to a rhetorical trick unworthy of a second-rate high school debate team. “Only in Washington,” they said over and over again, “is a spending increase called a cut,” because the budget increase federal spending at a slower rate.
Only in the Republican mind is a reduction in spending not a cut. Whether you call it a $5.1 trillion spending reduction or $5.1 trillion in cuts, that’s how much less the government would spend under the Ryan budget. Most of those cuts – 69 percent – come from programs that serve low- and mid-income Americans.
Michelle Chen: Why Do Bosses Want Their Employees’ Salaries to Be Secret?
In a narrow vote this week, the Senate politely smothered the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have protected workers’ rights to compare and discuss their wages at work. Aimed at dismantling workplace “pay secrecy” policies, the legislation built on the 2009 Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which strengthens safeguards for women and other protected groups against wage discrimination. Both measures aim to fill gaps in the enforcement of longstanding civil rights laws, which, half a century on, are still failing to combat the most insidious forms of discrimination-the subtle labor violations that grease the gears of economic inequality. Wage discrimination has persisted in large part because workers are routinely discouraged or outright banned from discussing compensation levels with coworkers. [..]
The struggle for fair pay isn’t captured in wage statistics; it’s part of a struggle against the asymmetry of knowledge that divides management and labor-and fundamentally, a struggle for a democratic workplace. In the economic superstructure, the real depths of of the wealth gap are not between coworkers but between workers and the CEOs on top. Yet those stunning inequalities are not contemplated in any legal concept of “paycheck fairness.” Workers are, of course, trained to view such inequalities as central pillars of the corporate edifice, just as society has normalized the interlocking inequalities in race and gender that are plainly on display in our communities and workplaces every day.
Apr 11 2014
We have gone down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.
Full transcript can be read here
Joining us now is Michael Ratner. Michael is the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, the attorney for Julian Assange, and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. He’s also a board member for The Real News. [..]
Michael Ratner: [..] In a chilling ruling this federal judge in this federal district court dismissed the case. And the key language from that opinion is: the government must be trusted. I want to repeat that: the judge said the government must be trusted. And here’s the exact quote: “Defendants must be trusted and expected to act in accordance with the U.S. Constitution when they intentionally target a U.S. citizen abroad at the direction of the president and with the concurrence of Congress. It’s a really outrageous ruling. The president kills whom he pleases, just so Congress is given broad authority for the president to determine who the enemy is.
It’s an utter abdication by the court. It gives up on the so-called checks and balances we all learned as schoolchildren. It ends, actually, a key principle of the Magna Carta, which is the American and British charter of liberties, which was actually ratified or signed by King John in the year 1215. We’re coming up to the 800th anniversary. So what this court ruling does, what the president’s action does do is overturn 800 years of constitutional history.
Courts are supposed to be a buffer between what was the absolute power of kings and the people. We no longer have the rule of law; we have the rule of the king. In other words, we have the syndrome of “off with his head”.
Drone killings case thrown out in US
Judge dismisses lawsuit over death of Anwar al-Awlaki and two others in Yemen, saying it is a matter for Congress
The families of the three – including Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born militant Muslim cleric who had joined al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate, as well as his teenage son – sued over their 2011 deaths in US drone strikes, arguing that the killings were illegal.
Judge Rosemary Collyer of the US district court in Washington threw out the case, which had named as defendants the former defence secretary and CIA chief Leon Panetta, the former senior military commander and CIA chief David Petraeus and two other top military commanders.
“The question presented is whether federal officials can be held personally liable for their roles in drone strikes abroad that target and kill U.S. citizens,” Collyer said in her opinion. “The question raises fundamental issues regarding constitutional principles and it is not easy to answer.”
But the judge said she would grant the government’s motion to dismiss the case.
Apr 11 2014
“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
New York Times Editorial Board: Mr. Cuomo’s Gift to the Cynics
Nine months ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo looked New Yorkers in the eye and said, “Trust is everything to me.” Don’t believe it.
Mr. Cuomo uttered those words in a campaign-style TV ad announcing that he was creating an independent Moreland commission of “top law enforcement officials” to “investigate and prosecute wrongdoing” in New York State politics. “The politicians in Albany won’t like it,” Mr. Cuomo said, “but I work for the people, and I won’t stop fighting until we all have a government that we can trust.”
Well, Mr. Cuomo stopped fighting. He has pulled the plug on the commission. Its website still promises the delivery of a report or reports by next January, but that’s not going to happen. Whatever records, files and leads it has accumulated over nine months have been taken away in trucks sent by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. [..]
Mr. Cuomo calls this a victory, but it only proves cynics right: Albany will never clean itself up. The commission should have been given the time it needed to complete its daunting task, wherever it led. It should have been allowed to put cases before prosecutors and a spotlight on the many rotten and entirely legal practices used by Albany politicians and lobbyists for their own gain.
That job was abandoned. We’re still waiting for a government we can trust, but Mr. Cuomo has moved on.
Paul Krugman: Health Care Nightmares
When it comes to health reform, Republicans suffer from delusions of disaster. They know, just know, that the Affordable Care Act is doomed to utter failure, so failure is what they see, never mind the facts on the ground.
Thus, on Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, dismissed the push for pay equity as an attempt to “change the subject from the nightmare of Obamacare”; on the same day, the nonpartisan RAND Corporation released a study estimating “a net gain of 9.3 million in the number of American adults with health insurance coverage from September 2013 to mid-March 2014.” Some nightmare. And the overall gain, including children and those who signed up during the late-March enrollment surge, must be considerably larger.
But while Obamacare is looking like anything but a nightmare, there are indeed some nightmarish things happening on the health care front. For it turns out that there’s a startling ugliness of spirit abroad in modern America – and health reform has brought that ugliness out into the open.
Here’s a story that resonates with so many layers of bitter irony that it’s hard to know where to begin. So we’ll start with the headline: “Citi Foundation to Help Teens Find ‘Pathways to Progress.’”
Two other recent stories at a certain piquancy to this noble-sounding venture. One involved a settlement in which Citi agreed to pay more than $1 billion for charges that it defrauded investors in its mortgage-backed securities. In the other, Citi was the only one of 25 banks to fail a “stress test” for sound fiscal planning and capital management. (The test has been criticized by independent observers — for being too easy.)
Incompetent and morally compromised: who better to help our young people build their future careers?
Bob Burnett: The War on Democracy: SCOTUS Weighs In
Americans are worried about the economy and economic inequality. Most of us feel the government should do something to reduce inequality. Now the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has weighed in with its April 2 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC making it more difficult for the 99 percent to influence government to remedy inequality.
The most recent Gallup Poll found that economic concerns continue to dominate American consciousness. A key element is economic inequality, now at its highest point since 1928. [..]
Because a strong majority of potential voters are now either Democrat or Independent, one would think the 99 percent should be able to get their government to take action to reduce inequality. After all, Republicans are experiencing a historic low in party identification; the latest Gallup Poll showed that only 25 percent of respondents declared as Republican. [..]
So the minority U.S. political party, whose policies are rejected by most Americans, is poised to take control of Congress. Blame big money and the Supreme Court.
Ophira Eisenberg: Stephen Colbert is another middle-aged man on late night. Wait – Stephen who?
CBS never considered a woman to replace Letterman. Hell, even CBS doesn’t even know which Colbert we’re getting. And that’s exciting!
As a child, I would have told you that by 2014 we’d definitely have jet boots, pills for food and a woman hosting a late-night talk show. Instead we have selfies, Xanax and a bunch of white guys.
When it was announced Thursday that Stephen Colbert was set to replace David Letterman, my first reaction was, well, that’s a safe choice. I would have thrown a parade if CBS had cast – or even considered – a woman.
I read so many articles and lists all about different hilarious woman who should be up for a late-night TV job – myself being on one of them, I’m happy to say, in a story that I posted to Twitter, of course, to which a follower responded, “Not gonna happen“. Can you please unfollow me? I don’t need that kind of reality check from someone who volunteered to be my fan. [..]
Why, exactly, is all of late night still geared only to satisfy the tastes of my Uncle Jack?
Peter Dreier: Why Is Public Television Against Public Schools?
You’d think that that public television would support public education, but you’d be wrong. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has gotten in bed with the billionaires and conservatives who want to privatize our public schools. PBS has nary a word to say about the big money — from folks like the Walton family (Walmart), Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Eli Broad, business titan and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Joel Klein (former NYC schools chancellor and now a Murdoch employee), and their ilk — that has been funding the attack on public schools and teachers unions. They’ve donated big bucks to advocacy groups, think tanks, and candidates for school boards who echo the their party line.
PBS and its local stations have fallen all over themselves to promote “Waiting for Superman,” a documentary film that could easily been mistaken for a commercial on behalf of charter schools. In contrast, missing from the lineups on most PBS affiliates is a remarkable new documentary film, “Go Public,” about the day in the life of a public school system in California. The film celebrates public schools without ignoring their troubles. Americans who care about public schools should contact their local PBS affiliates and urge them to broadcast “Go Public.”
Apr 10 2014
Laura Gottesdiener is a a journalist and the author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home, who lived and worked in the People’s Kitchen during the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Last Novemeber she wrote about how hedge funds and private equity firms were building a “rental empire” by buying up foreclosed properties by the thousands, renting them back to working people, and bundling up those properties to sell to Wall Street. If this sounds familiar, it should. It the same scheme that brought down the housing market with subprime mortgages and has the potential to do it again.
You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation’s impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is brewing.
Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown.
Wall Street’s foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution: It’s going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, it’s devised a new form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow up — again. [..]
This inundation has some concerned that the private equity giant, perhaps in conjunction with other institutional investors, will exercise undue influence over regional markets, pushing up rental prices because of a lack of competition. The biggest concern among many ordinary Americans, however, should be that, not too many years from now, this whole rental empire and its hot new class of securities might fail, sending the economy into an all-too-familiar tailspin.
“You’re allowing Wall Street to control a significant sector of single-family housing,” said Michael Donley, a resident of Chicago who has been investigating Blackstone’s rapidly expanding presence in his neighborhood. “But is it sustainable?” he wondered. “It could all collapse in 2016, and you’ll be worse off than in 2008.”
In her current article she focuses on how this is now happening in New York City.
When Predatory Equity Hit the Big Apple
How Private Equity Came to New York’s Rental Market — and What That Tells Us About the Future
Things are heating up inside Wall Street’s new rental empire.
Over the last few years, giant private equity firms have bet big on the housing market, buying up more than 200,000 cheap homes across the country. Their plan is to rent the houses back to families — sometimes the very same people who were displaced during the foreclosure crisis — while waiting for the home values to rise. But it wouldn’t be Wall Street not to have a short-term trick up its sleeve, so the private equity firms are partnering with big banks to bundle the mortgages on these rental homes into a new financial product known as “rental-backed securities.” (Remember that toxic “mortgage-backed securities” are widely blamed for crashing the global economy in 2007-2008.)
All this got me thinking: Have private equity firms gambled with rental housing somewhere else before? If so, what happened?
It turns out that the real estate market in my New York City backyard has been a private equity playground for the last decade, and the result, unsurprisingly, has been a disaster for tenants and the market alike.
In the Bronx, Benjamin Warren fears that he and other residents could burn to death in a fire because management has blocked both sides of the passageways between buildings designed to offer ways out of the massive apartment complex. (Warren has called the city and management multiple times to complain, but the routes remain shut.) Nearby, Liza Ash found herself intimidated by nearly a dozen hired men when she and other residents of her building, which had heat or hot water only sporadically this past winter, attempted to organize a tenants’ meeting in the lobby. A little farther south, Khamoni Cooper and her neighbors receive a constant stream of fake eviction notices ordering them to vacate their apartments within five days, even though all of them have paid their rent.
These three tenants — and nearly 1,600 more families in 42 buildings — are living through one of the largest single foreclosures to hit New York City since the financial crisis began seven years ago. But here’s the twist. The owner of these buildings is far from a traditional landlord. It’s actually a conglomerate of private equity firms that bet it would be able to squeeze more money out of these buildings than it ultimately could — and ended up unable to pay back the $133 million mortgage.
The problem is that, when things go bust, the tenants, far more than these private equity owners, end up shouldering the costs.
The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, is now the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the country. In one day alone, Blackstone bought up 1,400 houses in Atlanta. And as private equity firms gobble up huge swaths of the housing market, they are partnering with big banks to bundle the mortgages on these rental homes into a new financial product known as “rental-backed securities,” reminiscent of the “mortgage-backed securities” that helped cause the last financial crisis. Could this new private equity rental empire help spark the next housing crisis? We are joined by Laura Gottesdiener, author of “A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home,” who calls this wave of purchases “a land grab.” Gottesdiener’s latest article focuses on New York City’s rental market, a case study in what critics call “predatory equity.” Large firms have used abusive tactics to oust tenants in a bid to hike up rents – and tenants have been resisting. We are also joined by Benjamin Warren, who, along with nearly 1,600 families in 42 buildings, is a victim of one of the largest single foreclosures in the city’s recent history.
Apr 10 2014
“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
New York Times Editorial Board: The Truth About the Pay Gap
Women are the primary or co-breadwinner in 6 out of 10 American families. That makes the economic imperative of addressing the wage gap between women and men important, as is every step President Obama can take in that direction.
On Tuesday, Mr. Obama recognized “Equal Pay Day,” the date that symbolizes how far into this year a woman must work on average to catch up with what an average man earned for the previous year, by signing two executive orders to help reduce the persistent pay disparities. [..]
On Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked consideration of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would apply the changes ordered by Mr. Obama for federal contractors to the entire American work force as well as make some other important updates to the federal Equal Pay Act. The outcome was entirely predictable. Republicans also stopped the bill in 2010 and 2012. But wage injustice matters to all Americans, regardless of party, and those who stand in the way of fairness do so at their political peril.
Charles M. Blow: We Should Be in a Rage
Voter apathy is a civic abdication. There is no other way to describe it.
If more Americans – particularly young people and less-wealthy people – went to the polls, we would have a better functioning government that actually reflected the will of the citizenry.
But, that’s not the way it works. Voting in general skews older and wealthier, and in midterm elections that skew is even more severe. [..]
Now we hear murmuring that Republicans hold a slight advantage going into 2014, not strictly because that’s the will of the American people, but because that may well be the will of the people willing to show up at the polls.
There is an astounding paradox in it: too many of those with the least economic and cultural power don’t fully avail themselves of their political power. A vote is the great equalizer, but only when it is cast.
The unseen hand of antigovernment ideology can be found everywhere nowadays — even in your mailbox. The proof is in what you won’t find there, like your annual statement of earned Social Security benefits.
The government stopped mailing those out in 2011.
It’s also getting a lot harder to find Social Security field offices, or even to find someone to pick up the phone, as the Social Security Administration enters into yet more rounds of steep budget cuts.
Social Security customer service: Now you see it, now you don’t.
Robert Reich: Why the Minimum Wage Should Really Be Raised to $15 an Hour
Momentum is building to raise the minimum wage. Several states have already taken action — Connecticut has boosted it to $10.10 by 2017, the Maryland legislature just approved a similar measure, Minnesota lawmakers just reached a deal to hike it to $9.50. A few cities have been more ambitious — Washington, D.C. and its surrounding counties raised it to $11.50, Seattle is considering $15.00
Senate Democrats will soon introduce legislation raising it nationally to $10.10, from the current $7.25 an hour.
All this is fine as far as it goes. But we need to be more ambitious. We should be raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour.
Marge Baker: Rigging the Electoral System for the Rich
Either through electoral channels or a constitutional amendment, the American people must fight back against Supreme Court rulings like Citizens United and McCutcheon.
A poll conducted late last year found that more than seven in ten voters (pdf) think our election system is “biased in favor of the candidate with the most money.”
While nothing about this number is surprising – except, perhaps, that it’s not even higher – it does reveal the depth of cynicism characterizing Americans’ perceptions of our political system. We believe, correctly, that the system is rigged for the rich.
Especially in the wake of this month’s McCutcheon v. FEC Supreme Court decision that allowed our country’s wealthiest to dump even more money directly into our elections, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of America’s money in politics problem.
But as always, the biggest dangers create the biggest opportunities for change. With the McCutcheon ruling, the Supreme Court added fuel to an already awakened giant – a nationwide movement to reclaim our democracy that’s gaining steam like never before.
Robert L. Borosage: This Is Who They Are: The Republican Budget Vote
This week, the House of Representatives will vote on the Republican budget, presented by Republican Budget Chair Paul Ryan (as well as alternatives from the Democratic leadership, the Congressional Progressive Caucus “Better Off Budget,” the right-wing Republican Study Group budget and Congressional Black Caucus). Republicans are reportedly lined up to vote for the Ryan budget, with the exception of a handful that think it is not extreme enough. [..]
This “identifies who we are.” So who are they. In brief summation, the Ryan budget is a remarkably disingenuous document. Its authors claim to be putting the “tough choices” before voters. But it identifies the taxes that Republicans would cut, but not the loopholes they would close or the taxes they would raise to pay for the cuts as promised. It identifies the savings that they would create, but not the programs that they would cut in achieve them.
Even with that, the Republican budget does identify “who we are,” what they value, what their priorities are. These are unsurprising but remarkably unconscionable.
Apr 09 2014
“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
Katrina vanden Heuvel: It’s Time the CIA Gets Some Serious Oversight
Every once in a while, the CIA’s “Because I said so” club lets loose with a bit of preposterous condescension that reminds us why, along with extraordinary rendition and drone strikes, we’re also a nation of transparency and checks and balances. In this case, the crowing comes from Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., former head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and the administrator of that agency’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation (i.e., torture) program. We shouldn’t believe the “shocking” results of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation, Rodriguez says, especially those that lay bare the lies and exaggerations promulgated by the CIA and the ineffectiveness of the program itself. [..]
If we ever want to know the truth about what atrocities were committed by our government in our name under the umbrella of the “Global War on Terror,” then we need to not only conduct investigations into them but also release the results-however sickening they might be-with as little redaction as possible. We need to re-establish the precedent (exemplified by the Church Committee of the 1970s) that accountability matters. Not only will we as a nation not abide torture, but we won’t stomach erstwhile torturers, either.
Zoë Carpenter : What’s the GOP’s Excuse for Opposing Equal Pay This Time?
When Congress considered the Equal Pay Act in the spring of 1963, few objected to the values motivating the legislation. “The principle of equal pay for equal work is one which almost any citizen would strongly support,” wrote the National Retail Merchant Association in prepared testimony for the US Senate that April. Nevertheless, the NRMA opposed the bill “on the grounds that Federal legislation is not needed, that the added cost to administer such a law is unnecessary, and that an equitable law would be complex, confusing and difficult to enforce.”
Fifty-one years later, the conservative, anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum has this to say about the Paycheck Fairness Act, which expands on the 1963 legislation and will likely succumb this week to a Republican filibuster in the Senate: “Clearly, sex-based wage discrimination is wrong. Furthermore, it’s already illegal…This latest legislation-the Paycheck Fairness Act-won’t lead to more fairness or better pay. It will lead to more lawsuits, more red tape and fewer job opportunities for women and men.”
Executive actions are great. But not when they exclude millions. And especially when they don’t live up to promises
President Obama just announced a couple executive actions intended to close the wage gap between men and women. “Our job’s not finished yet,” he said at the White House, before signing into law new measures that will make federal contractors enforce limited pay equity rules and that will end certain differences in compensation based on race and gender.
That’s good news. The president should sign orders like these, especially on Equal Pay Day – especially in a country where women working full-time make 77 cents for every dollar men do. “In 2014, that’s an embarrassment,” Obama said. “It’s wrong.”
You know what else is wrong? That it’s not Equal Pay Day for a lot of us, no matter what the White House hype machine says about these measures “expanding opportunity for all” or “ensuring equal pay for women“. Not unless you’re comfortable with a definition of “all” that means “LGBT need not apply”.
Rebecca Solnit: Call climate change what it is: violence
Social unrest and famine, superstorms and droughts. Places, species and human beings – none will be spared. Welcome to Occupy Earth
If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.
But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.
Ana Marie Cox: The Pelosi porn, the panel & Ted Cruz’s tattoo: this is the GOP women problem
Republicans sifting through their ideological wreckage for a demographic advantage have aligned themseves with a new favorite artist – and it’s not Miley Cyrus
Republicans have finally found an edgy and provocative voice in an outsider artist who goes by the name Sabo. His art is also unrepentantly racist, misogynistic and homophobic. On Monday, the hugely influential Breitbart.com smugly promoted Sabo’s freelance advertising campaign for its site. It included, among other startling images, Nancy Pelosi in this explicitly pornographic pose of Miley Cyrus, complete with lascivious action and prominent ass:
I’m speechless with rage. This is just unacceptable. http://t.co/rEvW0YOn2S pic.twitter.com/l8KGrYvkTl
— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) April 7, 2014
We talk about a Republican “war on women”, and the GOP has floundered in its response.
Michelle Chen: Why Are Teachers and Students Opting Out of Standardized Testing?
After years of drilling, assessing and scoring youth to exhaustion, more than 25,000 kids in New York have defied the educational establishment in a test of wills. The “opt out” movement has exploded in schools across the state and other regions of the country, as students, parents and teachers resist the standardized testing regime that has fueled a free-market assault on public education.
Some New York teachers have placed themselves at the vanguard of test resisters, alongside student and parent activists, and are now using their professional leverage to deepen the battle lines in the ideological conflict over education reform.
The rebellion stirring in city classrooms was presented recently to New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña in an open letter from a group of “Teachers of Conscience” at the Earth School, an elementary school in Manhattan. Accompanied by a philosophical position paper detailing principles of a progressive education, the teachers declared their opposition to English language exams for third-to-eight graders
Apr 08 2014
“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
E. J. Dionnne, Jr.: Party Loyalty: Why the Supreme Court Is Wrecking Our Democracy
An oligarchy, Webster’s dictionary tells us, is “a form of government in which the ruling power belongs to a few persons.” It’s a shame that the Republican majority on the Supreme Court doesn’t know the difference between an oligarchy and a democratic republic.
Yes, I said “the Republican majority,” violating a nicety based on the pretense that when people reach the high court, they forget their party allegiance. We need to stop peddling this fiction.
On cases involving the right of Americans to vote and the ability of a very small number of very rich people to exercise unlimited influence on the political process, Chief Justice John Roberts and his four allies always side with the wealthy, the powerful and the forces that would advance the political party that put them on the court. The ideological overreach that is wrecking our politics is now also wrecking our jurisprudence.
Gary Younge: Thought Money Could Buy an American Alection? You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet
The supreme court’s relaxing of donation rules just made US elections even more undemocratic and corruptible
The finance chairman of the Republican national committee, Ray Washburne, travelled to Chicago last Wednesday to solicit money from two big funders who had reached their donation limit for this election cycle. While he was on the plane, the supreme court ruled that there would no longer be any limits. Washburne told the New York Times that when he landed and heard the news, he said: “Eureka”. He came back with promises of more cash.
It’s the American Way. Just as the constitution ostensibly requires that AK47s be available on demand, it was also apparently designed to open the sluicegates to money in politics, until the entire landscape is flooded with cash and cynicism and the border between what is unethical and what is legal is washed away. It’s what the funding fathers intended.
This is not another shooting-fish-in-a-barrel commentary about the antediluvian swinishness of Boomer Esiason and Mike Francesa. This is not another swipe at their comments criticizing the efforts of Mets second basemen Daniel Murphy for missing opening day to be with his wife for the birth of their child. For those who missed it, Esiason opined, “I would have said, ‘C-section before the season starts. I need to be at Opening Day. I’m sorry, this is what makes our money. This is how we’re going to live our life. This is going to give my child every opportunity to be a success in life. I’ll be able to afford any college I want to send my kid to, because I’m a baseball player.'”
Fellow troglodytic troll of the NYC sports radio airwaves Mike Francesa commented, “You’re a major league baseball player. You can hire a nurse.” Francesa also called the paternity leave at his own company “a scam-and-a-half.” [..]
I think there is something else going on as well. The comments from Boomer and Francesa smack of a kind of existential fear from an older generation of sports radio jockeys about the ways in which definitions of masculinity and sports have been rapidly changing. There have been two dominant kinds of masculine archetypes for the last thirty years in sports. Either you could be heterosexual, misogynist, talking loudly but saying nothing with a goal of trying to become a commercial brand; or you could be a heterosexual evangelical Christian, talking humbly with a goal of trying to become a commercial brand. Those who strayed outside of these norms have only done so with considerable risk to their standing in the media or even their job.
John Nichols: Wall Street Targets GOP Critic of Big Money and Big Banks for Primary Defeat
Three years ago, Congressman Walter Jones, R-North Carolina, signed on as a co-sponsor of one of several proposals to amend the constitution in order to renew the power of the people and their elected representatives to regulate money in politics. More recently, he co-sponsored a proposal by Congressman Jim Yarmuth, D-Kentucky, to develop public financing for congressional elections. Jones is on board with Government By the People Act of 2014, a “matching-funds” plan offered by Congressman John Sarbanes, D-Maryland. And he is the only Republican co-sponsor of the Empowering Citizens Act, a plan by Congressman David Price, D-North Carolina, to renew the public financing system for presidential elections. [..]
Now, however, Jones faces a Republican primary challenge from a classic Washington power player, Taylor Griffin, a former aide to the campaigns of George W. Bush and John McCain who has been a consultant for big banks and trade groups and who put in a stint as the senior vice president for the Financial Services Forum, the DC voice of some of the biggest Wall Street banks. “[No] matter how he casts himself,” writes Politico, “Griffin is an insider.”
George Zornick: How the Unemployment Relief Bill Might Weaken Your Pension
After months of haggling-and months of suffering by the long-term unemployed-the Senate is finally set to pass a bill Thursday afternoon that will reauthorize benefits for Americans who have been out of work for longer than six months.
Republicans have demanded the cost of the extension be offset, and legislators have devised a pay-for known as “pension-smoothing,” which tweaks the formula employers use to fund their pension plans. But some analysts have raised concerns that this seemingly benign formula change could also endanger the solvency of single-employer pensions, particularly those that are already on shaky ground.
In short, the provision will allow companies to contribute less to their pension plans in the short- and medium-term. This raises federal tax revenue in the near-term because employer pension contributions are tax-deductible. While there are some convincing reasons to do this, it’s possible Congress is assuming too much about the health of corporate pensions and allowing some underfunding that could come back to bite both workers and taxpayers in the years ahead.
Apr 07 2014
“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
Paul Krugman: Oligarchs and Money
Econonerds eagerly await each new edition of the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook. Never mind the forecasts, what we’re waiting for are the analytical chapters, which are always interesting and even provocative. This latest report is no exception. In particular, Chapter 3 – although billed as an analysis of trends in real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates – in effect makes a compelling case for raising inflation targets above 2 percent, the current norm in advanced countries. [..]
But the I.M.F. evidently doesn’t feel able to say outright what its analysis clearly implies. Instead, the report resorts to euphemisms that preserve deniability: the analysis “could have implications for the appropriate monetary policy framework.”
So what makes the obvious unsayable? In a direct sense, what we’re seeing is the power of conventional wisdom. But conventional wisdom doesn’t come from nowhere, and I’m increasingly convinced that our failure to deal with high unemployment has a lot to do with class interests.
Robert Reich: McCutcheon took us back in time, but it might just birth the next Occupy
The conservative supreme court thinks it can build a gilded age for the era of income inequality. They won’t know what hit ’em
The supreme court is composed of five justices appointed by Republican presidents, and four appointed by Democratic ones. In the McCutcheon v FEC case decided on Wednesday, the five Republican appointees interpreted the first amendment to protect the right of individuals to pour as much as $3.6m into a political party or $800,000 into a political campaign.
The decision by those justices allows individual donors to buy – and federal officeholders to solicit – unparalleled personal influence in Washington. McCutcheon drowns out the voices of ordinary citizens. [..]
The decision rests on the court’s dubious finding that such spending does not give rise to corruption. That’s baloney, as anyone who has the faintest familiarity with contemporary American politics well knows. As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his dissenting opinion: “where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard”.
Unless, of course, you think spies redacting 6,300 pages of their own sins is transparency. Look how much leaks told us this week
In a seemingly rare win for transparency, headlines blared on Thursday that the Senate Intelligence Committee had voted to declassify key findings of its massive report on CIA torture. Unfortunately, most news articles waited until the final two paragraphs to mention the real news: the public won’t see any of the document for months at minimum, and more than 90% of the investigation – characterized as “the Pentagon Papers of the CIA torture program” – will remain secret indefinitely.
In reality, only the executive summary and its conclusions – 480 out of some 6,300 pages – were even included in the vote, and they’re nowhere close to being published: it now heads to the White House for “declassification review”, an arduous process that will involve multiple government agencies taking a black marker to the documents, including the CIA, the same agency accused in the report of systematically torturing prisoners and lying about it for years. The spy report’s subjects and suspects will now become its censors.
It’s possible the only way the public will ever get to see the entire landmark report is the same way we’ve learned everything we know about it: if someone leaks it.
Kevin Gosztola: The CIA and the ‘Cult of Intelligence’ Will Manage to Keep Vast Majority of Senate Torture Report Secret
Why is it that the public will likely never get to read much of a major investigative report the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence produced on the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program-a program that included torture?
Thursday, the Senate intelligence committee voted to declassify portions of the 6,300-page report-the executive summary, findings and conclusions. It was not long after the vote that it was confirmed that the White House would have the CIA conduct a declassification review of these parts of the report before they were released.
This conflict of interest was addressed by Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News, who told The Guardian the CIA functionally will control “the declassification process, and they have an interest in how they as an agency are portrayed in the final product.” He added, “They’re not an impartial party, and that’s a flaw in the process.”
Yet, what if it is not a flaw? What if it is a feature? The CIA has made it this far in history without facing any accountability whatsoever for torturing and even causing the deaths of captives it confined in a network of secret prisons the agency maintained.
Richard (RJ) EskowL Is Charles Koch Un-American? Let Thomas Jefferson Decide
In a surprisingly self-pitying Wall Street Journal editorial, billionaire Charles Koch has put forward the proposition that the nation’s “collectivists” have unfairly characterized him as “un-American.”
What Koch calls “character assassination,” however, others would describe as a simple recounting of the facts. Koch and his brother David are known for injecting massive amounts of their (partially inherited) wealth into the political process, academia, and propaganda in order to promote their right-wing (and self-serving) point of view.
But now that he’s brought it up: Is Charles Koch really un-American?
I’m not comfortable answering that question myself. It promises to judge the person, rather than the deeds, and is all too reminiscent of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. (It’s worth noting that, for a guy who resents being labeled, Koch is certainly quick to label his enemies “collectivists” — a term which is strikingly reminiscent of McCarthyism.)
So let’s turn the question over to an unimpeachable authority: Thomas Jefferson. He seems like an arbitrator all parties can agree upon. Koch even cites Jefferson in his own defense. Unfortunately, all that citation accomplishes is to make it painfully clear that Koch is no Jefferson scholar.
César Chelala: The Case for Donald Rumsfeld’s Prosecution
I have just finished watching the film “The Unknown Known” by Errol Morris, which is a long interview with Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense during the Iraq war, and cannot stop thinking about Rumsfeld’s role in the use of torture, for which he was widely condemned.
In 2009, Manfred Nowak, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, stated that there was already enough evidence to try former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes. Nowak’s statement confirmed what human rights and legal organizations have been saying for several years, and spotlights one of the Bush administration’s most controversial decisions regarding the use of torture. [..]
Decades ago, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how “normal people”, given the circumstances, could commit atrocious crimes.
The documentary “The Unknown Known,” draws its title from one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s most famous rhetorical pronouncements. In the film, Morris interviews Rumsfeld at length, and allows him to give his version of the facts that led to the Iraq war and subsequent events. Looking at Rumsfeld, totally oblivious and uncaring about the devastation that he and his accomplices unleashed in Iraq, I am tempted to call the process “the impunity of evil.”
Apr 06 2014
“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 guests on thus Sunday’s “This Week” are: Rep. John Carter (R-TX); former Army Vice Chief of Staff Ret. Gen. Peter Chiarelli and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D_MO).
At the roundtable: ABC News contributor and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile; former House Speaker and CNN “Crossfire” co-host Newt Gingrich; ABC News contributor and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol;, and Fusion’s “AM Tonight” host Alicia Menendez.
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX); White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer; Thomas Friedman of The New York Times; and Heidi Cullen of Climate Central.
His panel guests are Politico‘s Todd Purdum; CBS News Political Director John Dickerson and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report.
Meet the Press with David Gregory: The guests on MTP are Admiral Michael Mullen, Fmr. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; author of Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, Michael Lewis; the man who brought the case to the court, Shaun McCutcheon; and president of Public Citizen Robert Weissman.
At the roundtable are: Kathleen Parker, Washington Post; former Sen. John E. Sununu (R-NH); John E. Sununu, Fmr. New Hampshire Senator (R); former Rep. Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN); and Steve Case, former Chairman & CEO of America Online.
State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are: House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA); House Intelligence Committee Republican Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI); Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD); Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA).
Her panel guests are Penny Lee, Corey Dade and Ross Douthat.
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