Tag: Politics

Jan 03 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

Bob Garfield: Who needs facts? We appear to be in the Post-Information Age now

Evidence? Ha. That’s for humanists, scientists and who knows what other dangerous-ists. It’s all about how we feel now

Remember the Information Age? That was such an interesting period, when digital technology and the thirst for understanding converged to give the human race unprecedented access to heaps of revealing data, contemporaneous and historical. All you had to do was analyze the information without prejudice and the secrets of the world unfolded before you – from the human genome to weekend crime in your town, from the value of the two-out stolen base to the origin of the universe.

But nothing lasts forever. Objective analysis is just so 2013. Facts are over, replaced by feelings and free-floating certainty. Sure, so-called Big Data will get bigger still, but only in service of targeted diaper advertising and spying on citizens. For everything that matters, as of now, we are smack in the Post-Information Age.

Amy Goodman: Congress to the Unemployed: Eat Confetti

Is this really how we want to start the new year, by denying unemployment benefits to more than a million Americans who have lost their jobs? The bipartisan budget agreement passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama protects military spending, but promises to throw the most desperate in our economy into increased financial hardship, thrusting hundreds of thousands of families beneath the poverty line. The long-term unemployment rate is at the highest it has been since World War II, while the percentage of those receiving the benefits is at its historic low. Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers are popping the corks, celebrating a banner year for the stock market. As brokers await their bonuses, many more of the unemployed will head for the breadlines.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: “Jobs or Inequality”? That’s No Choice at All

What’s the economic issue we should focus on – jobs, or inequality? An increasing number of people, including the President and New York’s new mayor, have suggested that inequality of wealth and opportunity is the defining issue of our time.

But some of the folks at the Washington Post’s “WonkBlog” are having none of it. First editor Ezra Klein declared that unemployment, not inequality, should be the left’s defining issue. That drew responses from the likes of Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein (and yours truly, here). [..]

But why are we arguing about hypothetical futures and ignoring the very real present? We’re still in a situation where the “multiplier effect” – the amount of growth which can be achieved through government spending – is very high. The situation cries out for higher taxation on the wealthy and corporations, coupled with investment in jobs and growth. In other words, it calls out for the very same policies which would reduce inequality.

In the end it’s one challenge, not two or three.

Jill Filipovic: The nuns’ Obamacare contraception lawsuit isn’t about religious freedom

Catholic groups claim that filling out a form violates their beliefs. But they really want to mandate that we share the same values

Does religious liberty extend to the right to not have to fill out paperwork? That’s the latest position religious organizations are taking against the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It’s crazy, yes. But, welcome to the future of “religious freedom” litigation.

On New Years Eve, supreme court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an injunction blocking the Obama administration from implementing the aspect of the ACA known as the “contraception mandate”, which requires employee insurance plans to cover a range of preventative women’s health needs. The government has until today to respond. The injunction itself is standard legal procedure, and says little about how Sotomayor or the rest of the court will rule on the merits of the case. But the lawsuit itself, and the related suits challenging the contraception mandate, offer an increasingly troubling look at just how far peddlers of far-right ideology will go not just to claim their own right to live according to their beliefs, but to mandate that you and I do the same.

Dirk van Zyl Smit: Even life prisoners should have hope and a chance to change

Considering someone for release is not the same as releasing them. David Cameron’s proposed 100-year sentence would be much like a death penalty

Why would one consider releasing someone who committed a heinous murder and was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment? This is not a question that troubles everyone. The prime minister, for example, was quoted on Thursday as saying: “There are some people who commit such dreadful crimes that they should be sent to prison and life should mean life.” He clearly supports the current system where, in particularly serious cases, a court may add a whole life order to a sentence of life imprisonment and thus prevent release ever being considered.

The question is not so easily dismissed, however. A commitment that we will never consider the release of some offenders serving life sentences, except perhaps when they are at death’s door, means that we write them off permanently. It means that we deny that with the passage of time they may change for the better; or that we may change our assessment of their crimes.

Worse still, we are denying some fellow humans all hope. In that sense we are putting them in the same position as those awaiting execution on death row.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Resurgent Progressives

The re-emergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014. Moderates, don’t be alarmed. The return of a viable, vocal left will actually be good news for the political center.

For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted by the existence of an active, uncompromising political right unbalanced by a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged more and more in a conservative direction, meaning that the center is pushed that way too.

Consider what this means in practice. Obamacare is not a left-wing program, no matter how often conservatives might say it is. Its structure is based on conservative ideas. The individual mandate was the conservatives’ alternative to a mandate on employers. The health care exchanges are an alternative to government-provided medicine on the Medicare model.

Jan 02 2014

The Inauguration of NYC’s New Mayor Bill De Blasio

As of 12:01 on January 1, New York City saw a “regime change” and Wall Street’s mayor Michael Bloomberg departed stage right. As DSWright at FDL News Desk pointed out the former mayor was looking peeved during yesterday’s public swearing in of the the new mayor, Bill De Blasio, whose election was a slap in the face to Bloomberg and his policies. It was hard for “Mayor Mike” to put on a happy face while he was being chastised by activist Harry Bellafonte.

The inauguration opened with a speech by one of de Blasio’s biggest supporters, long time activist Harry Belafonte who condemned Bloomberg’s New York as “Dickensian.” Belafonte then went on to discuss changing the Stop and Frisk law to push back against a racist justice system. De Blasio made ending Stop and Frisk one of his key campaign pledges .

A speech was also given by President Bill Clinton who noted that de Blasio had served in his administration in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and as a campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. Clinton was one of the few speakers to celebrate Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor before pivoting to say that inequality was a problem that “bedeviled the country.” He then swore de Blasio in as mayor.



Full transcript of Mayor De Blasio can be read here.

Welcome To The People’s Republic Of The Big Apple

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Politics Blog

Well, New York inaugurated a new mayor and that was the cue for a lot of people to lose their shit almost entirely. It’s a rare day in January when you hear the plaintive wailing of conservatives, “Help us, Bill Clinton. You’re our only hope.” [..]

It hardly needs be said that Bill de Blasio was elected to do certain things and that, as mayor, he intends to do them. Some of them will get done. Some of them won’t. Long ago, I sat with a guy named Frank P. Zeidler, who once was mayor of Milwaukee and was an actual Socialist, the last of his party to be elected mayor of a major American city. He explained that, in his day, and as a practical matter,  being a “Socialist” mayor meant you were in favor of things like filling potholes everywhere in the city, and that you believed in the concept of a municipal fire department. Within my lifetime, what de Blasio proposed in his inaugural address was little more than what most mayors were expected to provide for the citizens of their cities. That this is seen as revolutionary is nothing more than a measure of where the country’s politics have gone adrift.  But if he does represent a renewed vigor in what Howard Dean liked to call the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, then what de Blasio represents has the potential to wrong-foot the Clintons in a very interesting way. He is connected to them — and to Cuomo, another ambitious trimmer — by his resume, but no longer by his politics. That matters less than whether or not de Blasio actually can wrench the city over which he presides in the direction he would like it to go. The Scary Liberal is still a formidable bogeyman to people terrified of their own best interests.

We wish the “scary liberal, socialist” Mayor De Blasio the best of luck, he’s going to need a lot of it to achieve his goals.

Jan 02 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

Michael Moore: The Obamacare We Deserve

Today marks the beginning of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges, for which two million Americans have signed up. Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.

That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies, at a time when the ideal of universal health care needed all the support it could get. Unfortunately, this meant that instead of blaming companies like Novartis, which charges leukemia patients $90,000 annually for the drug Gleevec, or health insurance chief executives like Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group, who made nearly $102 million in 2009, for the sky-high price of American health care, the president’s Democratic supporters bought into the myth that it was all those people going to get free colonoscopies and chemotherapy for the fun of it.

Trevor Timm: President Obama Claims the NSA Has Never Abused Its Authority. That’s False

The facts that we know so far – from Fisa court documents to LOVEINT – show that the NSA has overstepped its powers

Time and again since the world learned the extent of what the NSA was doing, government officials have defended the controversial mass surveillance programs by falling back on one talking point: the NSA programs may be all-powerful, but they have never been abused.

President Obama continually evokes the phase when defending the NSA in public. In his end-of-year press conference, he reiterated, “There continues not to be evidence that the [metadata surveillance] program had been abused”. Former NSA chief Michael Hayden says this almost weekly, and former CIA deputy director and NSA review panel member Mike Morrell said it again just before Christmas. This mantra is likely to be repeated often in 2014 as Obama is set to address the nation on government surveillance, and Congress and the president debate whether any reforms are necessary.

There’s only one problem: it’s not true.

Jeff Faux: NAFTA, Twenty Years After: A Disaster

New Year’s Day, 2014, marks the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Agreement created a common market for goods, services and investment capital with Canada and Mexico. And it opened the door through which American workers were shoved, unprepared, into a brutal global competition for jobs that has cut their living standards and is destroying their future. [..]

By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth that Barack Obama bemoans in his speeches. Yet today — channeling Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton — the president proposes two more such trade deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with Europe.

Richard Klass: The Road to Wars

Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has introduced legislation that sets the United States on the road to war with Iran and the road to an internal war within the Democratic Party.

If the first-step deal collapses, there will be no problem in quickly instituting new sanctions. And there will certainly be calls for military action, no matter how short-term the results would be. But if the collapse is triggered by a U.S. unilateral action, the coalition now enforcing those sanctions could well collapse. This undermining of the president’s negotiating authority and international cooperation is as unprecedented as it is dangerous.

The second danger in this bill is that it encourages an Israeli attack on Iran.

Robert Sheer: NSA, Benghazi and the Monsters of Our Own Creation

If we are so smart why are we so dumb? I am referring to the “intelligence” that our spy agencies have gathered at great cost in both massive secret black box budgets and, much more important, the surrender of our personal freedom to the snooping eyes of our modern surveillance state. [..]

Take the revelations in The New York Times’ exhaustive six-part investigation published Saturday demonstrating that the devastating 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was an intelligence disaster. The Times “turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault” that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Instead, a local militia leader on the side of the U.S.-supported insurrection in Libya with no known affiliation with al-Qaida is a prime suspect, and he and others allegedly responsible were not on the radar screen of the 20-person CIA station in Benghazi because they were part of the insurgency the U.S. supported. [..]

The excuse is that this sacrifice of our freedom will make us more secure, as in the misnamed “National Security Agency,” by knowing more about our “enemies.” But the record is unmistakably the opposite, that this relinquishing of privacy and transparency has stifled genuine public debate about the goals of our policy and left us both stupid and weak.

Jan 01 2014

The Return of Irrational Exuberance

Wall Street had a boomer of a year, everyone else not so much.

Stock Market Has Great Year, You… Not So Much

By Mark Gongloff, Huffington Post

This has been the best year for the U.S. stock market in at least 16 years. But that great news is meaningless for many Americans. [..]

But only about half of Americans own stocks, including those in retirement accounts. Meanwhile, corporate profits are soaring largely because companies have been squeezing costs — especially labor costs. In the chart below, tracking the change in average hourly wages for private-sector workers against corporate profits and stock prices since the stock market bottomed in March 2009, you’ll notice one line is badly lagging.

Aver Hourly Earning v Corp Profits photo original_zps5f9f65e3.jpg

Click on image to enlargew

You guessed it: The lagging line is your sad hourly earnings. They have barely budged since the market bottomed in 2009, while the Dow has skyrocketed 153 percent. Between November 2012 and November 2013, the latest data available, hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers rose just 2.1 percent, just barely ahead of inflation.

Gongloff concludes that Wall Streeters are “bullish on 2014,” others not so much. Our friend David Cay Johnston looks at tech stocks, like FaceBook and Twitter, that essentially have no profits, yet, through speculators and the Federal Reserve policy of nearly zero interest rates, these stock have greatly exaggerated value.

The coming stock market collapse

By David Cay Johnston, Al Jazeera America

Tech stocks have returned to bubble levels, thanks to PR, weak financial journalism and cheap credit

Markets can benefit from speculators, who take risks that prudent people and institutions should avoid, but speculators should represent the edges, not the core of the market.

It’s bad enough that the financial press allows the inflated commentary of tech companies to go unchallenged. But why in the world should Americans tolerate hedge funds and other speculators being subsidized with cheap and easy credit, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policy of near-zero interest rates?

Only speculators would buy companies with no profits. And only subsidized speculators would bid up prices on companies with a PR in three digits, like Twitter.

Back in 1995, Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, asked a rhetorical question about stock prices, “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions, as they have in Japan over the past decade?”

We now suffer through a prolonged period with high unemployment, flat to falling wages for most workers and unrealized potential for economic growth. But the speculators are making out like bandits, thanks to government suppression of interest rates, allowing massive borrowing by offshore hedge funds, and to lax rules for both accounting and trading.

Given the history of stock markets since 1995 and today’s blinking red indicators, no one can rationally claim they were not warned when the next collapse comes, as surely it will.

Price Earning Ratio photo src_zpsbe35908b.jpg

Click on image to enlarge.

So what will happen to the market when the Fed starts to raise interest rates? 2014 may not be the “boom” that Wall Street expects.

Jan 01 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”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial Board: Saying ‘I Do’ Amid the Roses

By all accounts, the standout entry in Wednesday’s Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif., will surely be the marriage of two men, Danny Leclair and Aubrey Loots, beaming amid the array of lavishly flowered floats to be viewed on national television and beyond. [..]

Opponents of the single-gender nuptial display in the hallowed parade have dished heavy umbrage in petitions and blogs, calling it “unbiblical” and urging a boycott by onlookers. But the tournament executives have said they are pleased that love will triumph on a day when the tournament theme is “Dreams Come True.” [..]

And now, Danny and Aubrey saying I do. The new couple’s float is titled, “Living the Dream: Love Is the Best Protection.” It is hard to disagree as the new year parades forward.

Robin Hardman: What Really Matters

What is essential to a great culture, as I’ve said before and will say again, is according people respect and allowing them to have control over their time and their work.

Oh, yes, and a couple more things: a living wage and — for all but the very smallest companies — access to decent healthcare. In fact, both Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and plain old common sense would suggest that being able to afford to eat, pay rent and see a doctor are surely the most important building blocks of a great company culture.

Yet, the year that’s just ended was rich with news about employers that would seem to have put a lot of energy into denying their employees these basic rights. While it can be tough to sort out facts from “truthiness” when news is filtered through politics on both the left and the right — especially news related to the Affordable Care Act — a few things can be said: [..]

Heather Linebaugh: I Worked on the US Drone Program. The Public Should Know What Really Goes On

Few of the politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue how it actually works (and doesn’t)

The US and British militaries insist that this is such an expert program, but it’s curious that they feel the need to deliver faulty information, few or no statistics about civilian deaths and twisted technology reports on the capabilities of our UAVs. These specific incidents are not isolated, and the civilian casualty rate has not changed, despite what our defense representatives might like to tell us.

What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is a far cry from clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited clouds and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: “The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon?” I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.

Madeline Ostrander: Can the Stuck-in-Place Economy Help Us Face Climate Change?

New studies show that people with deep roots in the place where they live are better equipped to handle upheavals of the type that come with climate change.

After I finished high school in the flat, square corn country of central Illinois, I fled-along with many of my fellow classmates. We chased jobs or graduate school in places like San Francisco, New York, or Washington, D.C. I settled in Seattle. It wasn’t until I hit my 30s that I became aware of the social costs of this mobility. [..]

According to recent environmental research, this could also mean that I am less equipped to cope-if, say, an emergency strikes-than someone who’s better connected to Seattle. Sense of place, community, and rootedness aren’t just poetic ideas. They are survival mechanisms. [..]

The most foreboding trends now and in the decades ahead may stem from climate change-disasters like drought and flooding that devastate some places and force people to move. As we face this kind of world, some communities might endure precisely because people have dug in, rooted themselves, and developed the kinds of generosity, adaptiveness, and foresight that come from knowing where they are.

Joyde Walker: The Choice is Ours: Austerity or Shared Bounty

For all I have gained as the result of my financial struggles, I consider myself blessed. You might wonder how I can say that, when, at the end of December, I’m still working with my winterizing kit, consisting of staple gun, duct tape, and cardboard, trying to insulate against the air leaks that drive my heating bill up. But because of my hardships, I have become more sensitive to the hard times many around me are facing, and feel compelled to share what little I have.

Because of incessant increases in the cost of living, I sometimes have a hard time meeting my expenses. Still, I am more fortunate than some lacking adequate food or shelter because the people setting standards don’t consider them deserving or needy enough to receive help. But thanks partly to the fidelity of family and friends, I am able to keep food enough to share with a few others also struggling to make ends meet.

Nell Minow: Before Academics Complain About Conflicts of Interest, They Should Disclose Their Own

Academics who study business love to talk about the power of incentives and the importance of full information to enable the most effective and efficient decisions. Unless it applies to them.

As David Kocieniewski reported in the New York Times on December 27, 2013, “academic experts” who testify and make filings in favor of business-friendly regulations and rulings often fail to disclose the corporate sources of funding for their research. While they appear to represent the ivory tower virtues of scholarly integrity, with fidelity to nothing but the truth, they are in fact advocates who are paid to take the positions they promote. [..]

Inside Job, the superb documentary about the financial meltdown, has a devastating scene with Glenn Hubbard, the Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Business, refusing to discuss the payments he receives from the financial services industry. As one commenter on the Times article noted, “Nothing is funnier than watching people who study economics declare that money can’t possibly have any influence on their work.”

Dec 31 2013

Every Stroke You Make

Yes, quite literally the NSA will be watching every keystroke you make on you computer, cell phone, or i-pad. How you say? Quite simply collusion with the the telecommunications industry along with companies like Microsoft and through its special unit of hackers within the agency’s department for Tailored Access Operations (TAO). In an article in Der Spiegel, these specialists are described as as “master carpenters” who step in when the usual hacking and data-skimming methods fail. These hackers at ANT, which may stand for Advanced or Access Network Technology, step in with their special tools to get the job done.

These NSA agents, who specialize in secret back doors, are able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives — from computing centers to individual computers, and from laptops to mobile phones. For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox. And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA’s specialists seem already to have gotten past them.

This, at least, is the impression gained from flipping through the 50-page document. The list reads like a mail-order catalog, one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets’ data. The catalog even lists the prices for these electronic break-in tools, with costs ranging from free to $250,000. [..]

Some of the equipment available is quite inexpensive. A rigged monitor cable that allows “TAO personnel to see what is displayed on the targeted monitor,” for example, is available for just $30. But an “active GSM base station” — a tool that makes it possible to mimic a mobile phone tower and thus monitor cell phones — costs a full $40,000. Computer bugging devices disguised as normal USB plugs, capable of sending and receiving data via radio undetected, are available in packs of 50 for over $1 million. [..]

The ANT division doesn’t just manufacture surveillance hardware. It also develops software for special tasks. The ANT developers have a clear preference for planting their malicious code in so-called BIOS, software located on a computer’s motherboard that is the first thing to load when a computer is turned on.

In another article at FDL‘s Dissenter, Peter Van Buren notes that private enterprise have also become the “tools of the national security state”

Once the NSA identifies a “target” (whom we’ll refer here to as “You”), the NSA needs to know when You order a new laptop they want to intercept. That means the NSA has to spy on Your credit card, Your online activities and/or probe into the ordering systems of places like Amazon, Dell and the like. Perhaps there is a sort of “no fly” list distributed to manufacturers that requires notification to the NSA when someone like You on it buys something. Or all of the above.

The NSA then must know when and how Your laptop will be sent to you. That means they need to have been accessing the computer systems of Amazon, Dell and the like, and/or UPS, Fedex and other shippers. Or all of the above.

The NSA then has to have physical access to the warehouse of the shipping company. Or, the shipping company has to agree to mark your package, and deliver it instead to an NSA location. That all means the shipping companies are in on the NSA plot, or the NSA has to be hacking into the shipping companies’ data systems and substituting their address for Yours.

Once in NSA hands, Your package has to be opened, and Your laptop must be altered in some undetectable way. They can’t steam open a box like a letter in the old movies; someone has to open it physically and then get it all buttoned up again without a trace. Does the NSA have a way to unstick packing tape and reseal internal bags, or do they have a ready supply from Dell and Apple of packing materials?

Lastly, the NSA has to return the package into the shipping stream. That means the box, with say Amazon’s return address and Your home address, has to reenter say Fedex’s system from a third location without too many people knowing it happened. It would not do for the low-level UPS guy to pick up a ton of boxes everyday from a nondescript warehouse, all with third-party address labels. This strongly suggests cooperation by the shipping companies.

You then open Your new laptop on Christmas morning. Yeah, be sure to select a secure password. [..]

What we have here is an example of the depths into which You have fallen. The government has recruited private industry into its national security state, down to the level of the Fedex guy delivering packages to Your door in time for Christmas. For those of You who still foolishly insist that such spying is OK because they “have nothing to hide,” I sure as hell hope You are right, because whatever You do have now belongs to Them.

It is fairly certain that whether or not the NSA will be allowed to continues its bulk collection of data will be argued before the Supreme Court after two conflicting ruling from lower courts on the constitutionality of the program. Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director and director of its Center for Democracy; and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks joined Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! to discuss the court rulings and how the NSA can literally watch every keystroke you make.



Transcript can gbe read here.



Transcript can be read here

Thank you, Edward Snowden.

Dec 31 2013

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: The corruption of the economics profession

The public needs expert guidance on economic issues, but moneyed interests have gotten in the way

It is remarkable that the public has been convinced that the earth revolves around the sun. This is remarkable because we can all look up in the sky and see the sun revolving around the earth.

Most of us are willing to believe the direct opposite of what we can see with our own eyes because we accept the analysis of the solar system developed by astronomers through many centuries of careful observation. The overwhelming majority of people will never go through the measurements and reproduce the calculations. Rather, our belief that the earth revolves around the sun depends on our confidence in the competence and integrity of astronomers. If they all tell us that the earth in fact orbits the sun, we are prepared to accept this view.

Unfortunately the economics profession cannot claim to have a similar stature. This is both good and bad. It is good because it doesn’t deserve that stature. Economists too often work as hired guns for those with money and power. It is bad because the public needs expertise in economics, just as it needs expertise in medicine and other areas.

Sen. Bernie Sanders: 2014: Seize the Moment

The Congress has just ended one of the worst and least productive sessions in the history of our country. At a time when the problems facing us are monumental, Congress is dysfunctional and more and more people (especially the young) are, understandably, giving up on the political process. The people are hurting. They look to Washington for help. Nothing is happening.

In my view, the main cause of congressional dysfunction is an extreme right-wing Republican party whose main goal is to protect the wealthy and powerful. There is no tax break for the rich or large corporations that they don’t like. There is no program which protects working families — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, affordable housing, etc. — that they don’t want to cut.

But the Democrats (with whom I caucus as an Independent) are most certainly not without fault. In the Senate, they have tolerated Republican obstructionism for much too long and allowed major legislation to fail for lack of 60 votes. They have failed to bring forth a strong and consistent agenda which addresses the economic crises facing the vast majority of our struggling population, and have not rallied the people in support of that agenda.

Chris Hedges: Overthrow the Speculators

Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law-ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful-to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged.

We can wrest back control of our economy, and finally our political system, from corporate speculators only by building local movements that decentralize economic power through the creation of hundreds of publicly owned state, county and city banks.

The establishment of city, regional and state banks, such as the state public bank in North Dakota, permits localities to invest money in community projects rather than hand it to speculators. It keeps property and sales taxes, along with payrolls for public employees and pension funds, from lining the pockets of speculators such as Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. Money, instead of engorging the bank accounts of the few, is leveraged to fund schools, restore infrastructure, sustain systems of mass transit and develop energy self-reliance.

Jeff Jarvis: The primary NSA issue isn’t privacy, it’s authority

At heart, the NSA debate is about what the government is allowed to do with what it knows and who is overseeing it

I celebrate Judge Richard J Leon’s opinion that the government’s mass collection of communications metadata is “almost Orwellian”, and I decry Judge William H Pauley III’s decision that the NSA’s collection is both effective and legally perfectly peachy.

But I worry that the judges, as well as many commentators and Edward Snowden himself, may be debating on the wrong plane. I see some danger in arguing the case as a matter of privacy because I fear that could have serious impact on our concept of knowledge, of what is allowed to be known and thus of freedom of speech. Instead, I think this is an argument about authority – not so much what government (or anyone else) is allowed to know but what government, holding unique powers, is allowed to do with what it knows. [..]

In the search for a legally protected right to privacy in the United States, begun with Brandeis and Warren in 1890, the Fourth Amendment has been interpreted as affording privacy protection as have the First Amendment (freedom of belief) and the Fifth (freedom against self-incrimination). In each case, though, the right is not so much for something – privacy – as against something – namely, government abuse.

Paul Buchheit: The Shocking Redistribution of Wealth in the Past Five Years

Anyone reviewing the data is likely to conclude that there must be some mistake. It doesn’t seem possible that one out of twenty American families could each have made a million dollars since Obama became President, while the average American family’s net worth has barely recovered. But the evidence comes from numerous reputable sources.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main – perhaps only – beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years. [..]

President Obama recently proclaimed that inequality “drives everything I do in this office.” Indeed it may, but in the wrong direction.

William Cohen: As NSA Spy Debate Heats Up in 2014 Don’t Believe the Security Hype

A new year of media noise begins, and with it an avalanche of propaganda. With the public growing wary of privacy intrusions, the NSA debate is heating up and the message from power centers will focus on the effectiveness of the spy program in stopping terror attacks, the effective controls in place to prevent abuse, and the danger to the public posed by traitorous leakers of secret operations. These claims are all false.

Yet these are the claims endorsed in the December 27 ruling upholding the legality of the NSA spy program by U.S. federal judge William Pauley III in ACLU v. Clapper. Judge Pauley’s ruling is full of deference to government and its need for secrecy. However, a December 16 ruling by federal judge Richard Leon in Klayman v. Obama exposes that the claims made by the government are wrong. Judge Leon characterizes the NSA spy program as Orwellian and violating fundamental constitutional safeguards. [..]

With a conflict between federal judges, the legality of the NSA spy program will likely be resolved by the Supreme Court in 2014, after the appeals courts in Pauley and Leon’s districts have their say. It is an open question how the Court will rule. Consider that Judge Leon was appointed by Bush 43, and Judge Pauley by Clinton. Politics and ideology are not at all predictable when it comes to views on the NSA spy program.

The Court is a powerful and conservative institution. Yet the Court is swayed by public sentiment. The best way for people to influence the law is to raise their voices against the clear violations by the national security state and the bogus arguments now being used to defend itself from further scrutiny.

Dec 30 2013

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

Paul Krugman: Fiscal Fever Breaks

In 2012 President Obama, ever hopeful that reason would prevail, predicted that his re-election would finally break the G.O.P.’s “fever.” It didn’t.

But the intransigence of the right wasn’t the only disease troubling America’s body politic in 2012. We were also suffering from fiscal fever: the insistence by virtually the entire political and media establishment that budget deficits were our most important and urgent economic problem, even though the federal government could borrow at incredibly low interest rates. Instead of talking about mass unemployment and soaring inequality, Washington was almost exclusively focused on the alleged need to slash spending (which would worsen the jobs crisis) and hack away at the social safety net (which would worsen inequality).

So the good news is that this fever, unlike the fever of the Tea Party, has finally broken. [..]

Still, does any of this matter? You could argue that it doesn’t – that fiscal scolds may have lost control of the conversation, but that we’re still doing terrible things like cutting off benefits to the long-term unemployed. But while policy remains terrible, we’re finally starting to talk about real issues like inequality, not a fake fiscal crisis. And that has to be a move in the right direction.

New York Times Editorial Board: The Slow Demise of Capital Punishment

More states are coming to recognize that the death penalty is arbitrary, racially biased and prone to catastrophic error. Even those that have not abolished capital punishment are no longer carrying it out in practice. [,,]

As it becomes less frequent, the death penalty also becomes more limited to an extremely small slice of the country, and therefore all the more arbitrary in its application. All 80 death sentences in 2013 came from only about 2 percent of counties in the entire country, and all 39 executions – more than half occurred in Texas and Florida – took place in about 1 percent of all counties, according to a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center. Eighty-five percent of all counties have not had a single execution in more than 45 years.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Was This the Social Contract’s Comeback Year?

What a difference a year makes. Last year at this time, a president and a party who had just won an election with progressive rhetoric were quickly pivoting toward a “Grand Bargain” which would cut Social Security and Medicare. Leaders in both parties were obsessed with deficits, and there was “bipartisan” consensus that these “entitlements” needed to be cut. The only questions left to debate were when they would be cut, and by how much. To resist these moves was to be dismissed as “unserious” and “extreme” — in Washington, in newsprint, and on the airwaves.

Today the forces of corporate consensus are on the defensive. It’s considered politically reckless to get too far out front on the subject of benefit cuts. Some of the think tanks who advocated Austerity Lite one year ago are focused now on inequality. And, as the leaders of Third Way learned recently, the same rhetoric which earned nods of approval all across Washington this time last year can get you slapped down today.

Social Security is a vital program, but the implications of this shifting debate run even deeper, to the future of the social contract itself.

Andy Fitzgerald: Why won’t the west call out Saudi Arabia for persecution of democratic activists?

A Saudi activist was sentenced to four years and 300 lashes. He is the fourth to be imprisoned from one organization this year

At the memorial for Nelson Mandela, President Barack Obama eulogized the fallen leader:

   Like Gandhi, he would lead a resistance movement – a movement that at its start held little prospect of success. Like [Martin Luther] King, he would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed.

Listening in the crowd sat Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s second deputy prime minister. Apparently the words were lost on the government His Royal Highness was representing (though it’s questionable he even relayed the message), because within the next week, a Saudi judge sentenced democratic activist Omar al-Saeed to 4 years in prison and 300 lashes. His crime: calling for a constitutional monarchy (a government that would likely outlaw such cruel and unusual punishment). [..]

Supporters of democracy should not be afraid to name, shame, and directly confront tyranny wherever it is seen. Whether it is in Russia or China, or perpetrated under the guise of “national security” by the United States or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Those that deem oppression a strategic necessity or its elimination an impossibility almost always end up on the “wrong side of history”.

David Dennis: Politico’s 2014 ‘journalists to watch’ list doesn’t have a single person of color

American media is still struggling to find diverse voices. Part of the problem goes back to unpaid internships

A few months ago, I wrote a commentary for the Guardian about how unpaid internships create an unfair funnel system to media outlets. They create a homogenous voice that excludes those who don’t have the money or privilege to work for free. This, to me, is the biggest challenge facing the media. Cities like New Orleans, Chicago’s South Side or Gary, Indiana are underrepresented or misrepresented in the media because there aren’t enough journalists who come from those or similar areas to tell the stories.

The proof of the “blacking out” of the media has shown its face again in a Politico list of US journalists to watch in 2014. The list doesn’t have a single person of color on it. Politico’s list spans almost every major publication or media outlet in the country from ESPN to CNN and beyond. The Politico article mentions these reporters’ great work in the areas of politics, sports, and more, but where is the diversity? Do we honestly not have any journalists of color in the upper tier?

John Nichols: Holiday in Austerity Land: 1.3 Million Americans Lose Jobless Benefits

When it was initially discussed as a rude repercussion of a bungled budget deal, the prospect that 1.3 million Americans would lose long-term unemployment benefits just days after Christmas was bad enough.

Now, that the day has come, however, it stands as a stark reminder of the extent to which the United States has regressed from the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt greeted the Holiday Season with a celebration of the fact that: “Today neighborliness no longer can be confined to one’s little neighborhood. Life has become too complex for that. In our country neighborliness has gradually spread its boundaries-from town, to county, to State and now at last to the whole Nation.”

Imagine a country that, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, abandons those hit hardest by economic turbulence, and you have a sense of what the United States has become under the cruel hand not just of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan – who refused to agree to any budget deal that included an extension of benefits – and those members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, who compromised with the failed Republican vice presidential candidate’s austerity agenda.

Dec 29 2013

US and British MSM Gets an “F”

At a computer conference in Hamburg, Germany, journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald delivered the keynote address that chastised the US and British mainstream media for their failures to challenge erroneous remarks routinely made by government officials around the globe

Thousands of attendees at the thirtieth annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg packed into a room to watch the 46-year-old lawyer-turned-columnist present a keynote address delivered less than seven months after he started working with former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Revelations contained in leaked documents supplied by Snowden to Greenwald and other journalists have sparked international outrage and efforts to reform the far-reaching surveillance operations waged by the NSA and intelligence officials in allied nations. But speaking remotely from Brazil this week, Greenwald argued that the media establishment at large is guilty of failing significantly with respect to accomplishing its most crucial role: keeping governments in check.

When Greenwald and his colleagues began working with Snowden, he said they realized that they’d have to act in a way that wasn’t on par with how the mainstream media has acted up until now.

Dec 29 2013

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: On a special edition of “This Week,” a look back at the “game changers” of 2013.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer will axamine the “Year of Surveillance with guests Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, one of the reporters that first wrote about Snowden; Jesselyn Radack, a legal adviser to Snowden; and Thomas Drake, a former NSA whistleblower; and General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA.

Joining him for a panel discussion of the future of surveillance and technology are Jeffrey Kluger of TIME; James Fallows of The Atlantic; Laura Sydell of NPR and Seth Fletcher of Scientific American.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Guests on this Sunday’s MTP are Edward Snowden’s lead legal advisor, Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union; House Oversight Committee Chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX).

The roundtable guests are  Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson; NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell; Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Elliott Abrams; Woodrow Wilson Center Senior Fellow Robin Wright; Provost and Professor of History, Dr. Peter Starns.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley looks at 10 top political talking points from 2013 with a SE Cupp, Donna Brazile, Ana Navarro, and Neera Tanden.

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