Tag: Politics

In the state where workers sat down in Flint General Motors plants 75 years ago and emboldened the industrial labor movement that would give birth to the American middle class, Republican legislators on Thursday voted to gut basic labor rights.

And union leaders warned that, if labor can be so battered in Michigan, it can — and may — be attacked anywhere. [..]

Employing slick messaging and a timeline developed to thwart opposition, Snyder and his legislative allies claimed that they were enacting anti-labor legislation to create “Freedom to Choose” in the workplace. But the Orwellian turn of phrase did not fool the working people of Michigan, thousands of whom surrounded and occupied the Capitol during a day of emotional protest. “Right to work would set all Michigan workers back in terms of wages, benefits and safety on the job,” declared Mike Polkki, a mine worker from Ishpeming who joined furious last-minute efforts to lobby members of the Republican-controlled legislative chambers. “Instead of attacking the middle class, our lawmakers should work to build it back up.”

Michael Winship and Bill Moyers: FCC May Give Murdoch a Very Merry Christmas

Until now, this hasn’t been the best year for media mogul Rupert Murdoch. For one, none of the Republicans who’d been on the payroll of his Fox News Channel – not Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin – became this year’s GOP nominee for president. [..]

But Murdoch’s luck may be changing. Despite Fox News’ moonlighting as the propaganda ministry of the Republican Party, President Obama’s team may be making it possible for Sir Rupert to increase his power, perversely rewarding the man who did his best to make sure Barack Obama didn’t have a second term. The Federal Communications Commission could be preparing him one big Christmas present, the kind of gift that keeps on giving – unless we all get together and do something about it.

Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks: One Party Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The Republican Party’s descent into complete madness reached a new depth this week. Whipped up by paranoid delusions of a one-world autocratic UN government, Senate Republicans on Tuesday killed an international treaty designed to help people with disabilities all across the planet. [..]

Thirty-eight Republican Senators walked right passed Bob Dole – former Republican candidate for President – to cast a “no” vote. Why? Because they want to continue to pander to a paranoid minority of the Republican base that believes the UN is secretly assembling a global government to destroy American sovereignty, throw mothers in The Hague, and condemn their disabled children to death. [..]

Back in the 1960s, the Firesign Theatre created a candidate named Papoon who ran for President on the campaign slogan: “Not Insane!”  It was funny then.  It’s not funny anymore.  

So, a heartfelt plea to the few intelligent and thoughtful Republicans left: it’s up to you to inject sanity back into your Party. Please do it quickly!

Christopher Ryan: Walmart Rejected Safety Upgrades at Asia Factory Where 100 Died in Fire

It seems a little too easy for Walmart to brush off safety upgrades at their supplier factories. Their reasoning is that the cost is too high. The dead factory workers in Bangladesh, and their families, might have viewed the safety issues differently.

Whether it’s the appalling work conditions at Apple supplier factories in China where workers are available 24×7 and given a cup of tea and a biscuit, the Chinese factories that previously produced lead-tainted children’s toys for the US market or the garment factories throughout Asia, there’s a distinct lack of accountability by too many Western companies. Walmart is only the latest.

Deficit hawks rely on media allies to report budget doom to advance their agenda of cutting Medicare and social security

Many of the nation’s most important news outlets openly embrace the agenda of the rich and powerful that colors its coverage of major economic issues. This is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than during the current budget standoff between President Obama and Congress, which the media routinely describes as the “fiscal cliff“. This terminology seriously misrepresents the nature of the budget dispute, as everyone in the debate has acknowledged. There is no “cliff” currently facing the budget or the economy.

If no deal is reached this year, then on 1 January, daily tax withholdings will rise by an average of about $4 per person. Any money actually deducted from pay checks will be refunded if a deal is subsequently reached that returns tax rates to 2012 levels. Government spending probably won’t change at the start of the new year, since President Obama has considerable discretion over the flow of spending. No one can think that this modest increase in tax withholdings would plunge the economy into a recession, but the Wall Street types seeking to dismantle social security and Medicare have used their enormous wealth and allies in the media to generate this kind of fear-mongering across the country.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: GOP Offers to Throw Middle Class, Elderly Over the ‘Fiscal Cliff’

The Republican Party has a message for the American people: Meet the new deal, same as the old deal. The GOP “counter-offer” to the president’s fiscal-cliff proposal isn’t really an offer at all: It’s a rehash of the tired and extremist right-wing economic warfare which the American people soundly rejected last month.

But a political tin ear is the least of the shortcomings Republicans bring to this debate. This rehash of their old, rejected budget ideas is a formula for reducing the United States of America to a crumbling and poverty-haunted land where the young have no opportunities, the middle class is struggling to survive, and the aged live in misery and fear.

Think we’re exaggerating? Take a look at the details, such as they are, and decide for yourself.

Mark Kirk: It Takes a Cabal of Willing Governments to Maintain Global Tax Havens

When corporations say what they do to shield profit from taxation is “legal” they’re often right. And this is wrong.

Everyone loves to hate a thief. And quite right, too. Google, Amazon and Starbucks – and many more like them – are certainly stealing from the UK and other countries by playing tax systems so aggressively.

But there’s a more important story here that the British MPs and world media are largely missing. In fact, the only ones who haven’t missed it are Google themselves. Matt Brittin, Google’s UK Chief, hit a very important nail on the head when he said, to Channel 4 News this week, ” [Google] plays by the rules set by politicians.”

Leaving aside his motivation to shift the blame, the man is not wrong. The rules of the international tax system do not just let this happen, they actively encourage it.

Tax theft is endemic all over the world. It is organised through an intricate system of tax havens; the PR around it is astonishingly good, as evidenced by the fact that most people have no idea of its scale and can get distracted by the misdeeds of a few bad apples rather than seeing the barrel they came in; and one of the most vibrant and important hubs – the City of London – is sitting right under the noses of the British politicians who are today decrying the corporations who use it.

Joe Conason: Arithmetic For Republicans: Why Boehner’s ‘Offer’ Just Doesn’t Add Up

If President Obama honestly wants to negotiate an agreement with Republicans before the year-end fiscal deadline, he must be deeply frustrated. And if he doesn’t really want to negotiate with them, then he should be delighted, for the same reason: Their latest “offer” laid before him by House Speaker John Boehner demonstrates again their refusal to reveal their true intentions-and their inability to do simple arithmetic. [..]

Unless and until the Republicans start talking about real numbers that can actually add up, there is nothing to be gained from pretending to negotiate. Nor should the president start negotiating with himself, as he has sometimes done in the past. Instead, he ought to make sure that the opposition understands what will happen when they fail to act responsibly. After Jan. 1, he will bring them an offer they cannot refuse to restore cuts for the 98 percent-and they will be held accountable for any consequences caused in the meantime by their stalling.

The ladies aren’t having enough babies and conservatives are sad. That was basically the gist of Ross Douthat’s column this weekend, which riffed off of new birthrate numbers from Pew showing that we’re at a record low. Douthat’s primary concern seems to be the false notion that demography is destiny-that our “demographic edge” means we can pwn all fellow nations and without it, a more fruitful nation is eating our lunch. (If this were true, Niger, which has the world’s highest birthrate, would have enslaved us all. We clock in at a meager 124.) But there is good reason for conservatives and progressives alike to be concerned about a falling birthrate. Many of our public policies, most notably the social safety net, are designed to have one generation support the older one-but that gets mighty top heavy with a declining number of people doing the supporting. As Douthat puts it, “Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs.” That’s real. Nancy Folbre even calculates that a parent who raises a child contributes $200,000 more to net taxes than a nonparent, given what that child will pay when it grows up.

So what can we do about bringing that rate up? Douthat goes off the rails when attributing the decline in births to a cultural “decadence” in which women can’t get beyond themselves to think about the future. But what’s exciting about Douthat’s column is that parts of it expose a place of common interest between liberals and conservatives that could further the feminist project of implementing real work/family policies in America.

Allison Kilkenny: Citizens Protest Looming ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Budget Cuts

For the past several weeks, clusters of citizens have been protesting the opportunistically named “fiscal cliff” budget cut talks. Even though the “fiscal cliff” is really more of a fiscal curb or fiscal slope, conservative lawmakers have seized upon the media-generated panic surrounding the doomsday January 1 cutoff date as an excuse to inflict further cuts and steer the conversation away from ending tax breaks for the one percent.

The push back from citizens began when activists from ACT UP protested the possible inclusion of cuts to AIDS funding during the negotiations. Activists arranged a table and chairs outside Senator John Kerry’s home in Boston as part of a mock Thanksgiving meal during which they put pill bottles on plates instead of food, saying they want Kerry to fight to fully fund AIDS programs during the negotiations.

Michelle Chen: Foodies Get Wobbly

Food supply chain workers adopt the IWW’s radical actions to fight abusive employers.

Once upon a time in the labor movement, a rebellious vanguard emerged at the margins of American industry, braiding together workers on society’s fringes-immigrants, African Americans, women, unskilled laborers-under a broad banner of class struggle.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, raised hell in the early 20th century with unapologetically militant protests and strikes.

Their vision of a locally rooted, globally oriented anti-capitalist movement was eclipsed by mainstream unions, which had more political muscle. But grassroots direct action is today undergoing a resurgence in the corners of the workforce that have remained isolated from union structures.

Princess Lucaj : Celebration, Sacredness, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

It is the holiday season and in Alaska we have much to be grateful for and much to celebrate. On December 6th we will be celebrating the birthday of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It was on this date in 1960 that President Eisenhower established the Arctic National Wildlife Range (later named Refuge) “to preserve its unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreational values”. In 1980, Congress expanded the refuge to encompass more winter habitat of the Porcupine Caribou Herd and the refuge purpose to provide for continued subsistence uses was specified.

But the longer history of this special place belongs to the indigenous people of Alaska. The term nan kat in Gwich’in Athabascan translates into ‘on the land’.

It is this land, today referred to as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that is the home to hundreds of species of birds and animals and it is the coastal plain of the Refuge that is the birthplace and nursery grounds of the Porcupine Caribou Herd. Each spring, between 40-50,000 calves are born there. It is because of the vadzaih – the caribou – that we as Gwich’in people have been able to maintain our way of life. For thousands of years we depended upon this herd for our sustenance, for clothing, shelter, tools and even games. To this day, the Porcupine Caribou now 170,000 strong continues to feed thousands of Gwich’in men, women, and children living in the remote Arctic villages scattered along the migratory route of the herd in both Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada.

Fans of arithmetic everywhere know that the large deficits of the last five years are the result of the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. But those taking part in deficit discussions in Washington won’t allow such numbers into the discussion.

The Serious People in Washington, such as the Washington Post (both the opinion and news sections), the Wall Street Campaign to Fix the Debt, and the Republican congressional leadership are in a full budget-cutting frenzy. They demand cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and everything else that benefits middle-income and poor people because, well, because the market demands it.

And we know, the market demands these cuts because the Serious People told us the market demands these cuts. The fact that the cuts have the effect of redistributing income from the rest of us to the Serious People and their friends is just a coincidence.

Glenn Greenwald: Progressive Media Claims They’ll Be ‘Tougher’ on Obama Now

Given the rationale they have embraced, is there any reason to believe this will happen, or that it will matter if it does?

Last week, the Huffington Post‘s media reporter, Michael Calderone, wrote a long article on the widespread perception that MSNBC isn’t so much a progressive network as it is “simply pro-Obama”. Citing a new Pew study that found that MSNBC was actually more negative toward Romney than even Fox News was against Obama “and offered mostly positive coverage about Obama” – most remarkably, during the last week of the campaign, MSNBC did not air a single story critical of Obama: not one – Calderone wrote: “post-election, the question is whether MSNBC continues cheering Obama on – or takes him on.”

I want to focus on this claim that media progressives will now be “tougher” on Obama, but first, an aside: Hendrik Hertzberg proclaims that they will now be even “more respectful” of Obama than they have been. Short of formally beatifying him, or perhaps transferring all their worldly possessions to him, is that even physically possible? Is there a reverence ritual that has been left unperformed, [swooning praise left to be lavished upon him, heinous acts by him that have not yet been acquiesced to if not affirmatively sanctioned in the name of keeping him empowered? That media progressives will try to find ways to be even “more respectful” to the president is nothing short of scary.]

Eugene Robinson: Boehner Plays a Weak Hand

How dare he? President Obama, I mean: How dare he do what he promised during the campaign? How dare he insist on a “balanced approach” to fiscal policy that includes an teensy-weensy tax increase for the rich? Oh, the humanity. [..]

“The president’s idea of a negotiation is, roll over and do what I ask,” Boehner groused.

Hmmm. Where do you imagine the president might have learned this particular bargaining technique? Might his instructors have been Boehner’s own House Republicans, who went so far as to hold the debt ceiling for ransom-and with it, the nation’s full faith and credit-in order to get their way?

George Lakoff: Why It’s Hard to Replace the “Fiscal Cliff” Metaphor

Writers on economics have been talking since the election about why the “fiscal cliff” metaphor is misleading. Alternative metaphors have been offered like the fiscal hill, fiscal curb, and fiscal showdown, as if one metaphor could easily be replaced by another that makes more sense of the real situation. But none of the alternatives has stuck, nor has the fiscal cliff metaphor been abandoned. Why? Why do some metaphors have far more staying power than others, even when they give a misleading picture of a crucial national issue?

The reason has to do with the way that metaphorical thought and language work in the brain. From a cognitive linguistics perspective, “fiscal cliff” is not a simple metaphor bringing “fiscal” together with “cliff.” It is instead a linguistic metaphor that is understood via a highly integrated cascade of other deeper and more general conceptual metaphors.

A cascade is a neural circuit containing and coordinating neural circuits in various parts of the brain.

The folks running around yelling about deficits are confident that their serious demeanor, powerful positions, and financial backing will prevent anyone from scrutinizing the substance of their claims. Thus far their confidence has been warranted, as nearly all the voices in major news outlets have accepted their assertions at face value.

However any careful look at their claims quickly reveals that they do not hold water. The basic story in their deficit story is that we have not been saving enough to afford the retirement of the baby boom cohort. The story is that by increasing saving, we would be able to make ourselves rich enough to afford the retirement of the baby boomers. (We’ll ignore the impact of the downturn for the moment – just like the deficit hawks.)

Robert Kuttner: Better Late Than Never

President Obama has belatedly grasped that holding firm on tax increases for the top 2 percent, and defending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid against needless cuts, is good politics and good policy. As his Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner put it on Fox News Sunday, “Why does it make sense for the country to force tax increases on all Americans, because a small group of Republicans want to extend tax rates for 2 percent of Americans, why does that make any sense? There’s no reason why it should happen.” [..]

The risk is that when the negotiations finally get to the end game, and Republicans are forced accept the tax deal, Obama may succumb to pressure to cut Social Security and Medicare, so that he can say that he, too, gave ground on issues that were difficult for his party. The risk is that he will listen to his inner bipartisan.

That would be a huge mistake. The Republicans have been unmasked for who they are. The best thing Obama can do is to continue to hold the high ground of this debate. The Republican position is entirely at odds with the vast majority of voters. If Obama doesn’t fold a winning hand, eventually the Republicans will have to come to him.

Eugene Robinson: Is this the planet we want to leave behind?

You might not have noticed that another round of U.N. climate talks is under way, this time in Doha, Qatar. You also might not have noticed that we’re barreling toward a “world . . . of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods in many regions.” Here in Washington, we’re too busy to pay attention to such trifles.

We’re too busy arguing about who gets credit or blame for teeny-weeny changes in the tax code. Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the legacy we pass along to future generations will be a parboiled planet.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: In Fiscal Cliff Talks, Republicans Have Nowhere to Run

Right-wingers are in an uproar over the White House’s budget offer, which John Boehner says left him “flabbergasted.” Outraged pundits like Joe Scarborough, Charles Krauthammer, and Newt Gingrich are saying that Republicans should “walk away” from negotiations.  Boehner has come close to that position himself, saying of the talks: “We’re nowhere.”

With all due respect, Sir: Speak for yourself.

Democrats are somewhere – somewhere very specific. They’re where the voters are, with a program that includes short-term stimulus spending and relatively modest tax increases for higher levels of income.  And yet the Republicans are threatening to run from the will of the electorate, a will that was expressed very clearly this November.

But where, in the words of the old song, are they gonna run to?