Tag: Politics

Jul 25 2012

Britain’s Second Recession Deepens

As Atrios said, not at all unexpected when “you put the put a bunch of evil skimmers and the stupidest f#%$ing man on the face of the planet in charge of your economy.”

Britain’s economic output collapsed by 0.7% in the second quarter of 2012 as the country’s double-dip recession extended into a third quarter [..]

The first double-dip recession since the mid-1970s – when the UK was beset by high inflation and rising unemployment – meant GDP in the second quarter of 2012 was 0.8% lower than in the same three months of 2011. [..]

The news will come as a fresh blow to the chancellor, George Osborne, whose deficit reduction plans have been thrown off course by the poor performance of the economy. Output has declined in five of the last seven quarters. [..]

The data shocked City analysts. Howard Archer of IHS Global Insight said the figures were “a very nasty surprise indeed”. And Labour were swift to criticise the chancellor. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, tweeted that the 0.7% contraction was a “disastrous verdict on George Osborne’s failed plan”.

The reason for Osborne’s sticking to his austerity guns is the AAA rating from the same discredited ratings agencies that rated Lehman Brothers and AIG as safe investments right before their crash in 2008. His policy has just exacerbated Britain’s “deep-rooted economic problems”

In his response to today’s terrible GDP figures (the economy shrunk by 0.7% in the second quarter), George Osborne wisely resisted blaming the eurozone, the weather or the Jubilee for the third successive quarter of contraction. Instead, he dwelt on the UK’s “deep-rooted economic problems”. Britain has many long-term problems – an economy too dependent on finance, a lack of long-term investment, and persistently high levels of youth unemployment – but the charge against Osborne is that he has made them worse, not better. [..]

At times of recession, when consumer spending is depressed and businesses are hoarding cash, the state must act as a spender of last resort and stimulate growth through temporary tax cuts and higher infrastructure spending. Yet it is precisely this option that Osborne has rejected at every turn, dismissing well-intentioned critics as “deficit deniers”. Today’s figures are his reward. [..]

While Osborne’s arbitrary targets are of little economic importance they are of immense political significance. Should he abandon his debt rule, the UK could lose its AAA credit rating. Standard & Poor’s, for instance, has previously warned that our top rating is conditional on Osborne meeting his fiscal mandate. But why should we listen to the discredited agenices that rated Lehman Brothers and AIG as “safe investments” days before the crash? The answer is simple: we shouldn’t. But this doesn’t alter the fact that Osborne did. Having adopted the UK’s credit rating as his metric of success (he once boasted that we were “the only major western country which has had its credit rating improve”) he can hardly change tact now.

The Cameron government should be fired and sent packing to a special asylum for treatment of “Austerity Insanity.”

Jul 25 2012

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

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Women for Paid Sick Days

Some policy questions are difficult. Here are a few easy ones: Should people who handle food for a living have to work while contagious? Should sick kids be stuck at school because their parents are stuck at work? Should coming down with something cost you your job?

Most Americans say: No, no and no. Politicians are catching up with them, but not fast enough.

As I noted last winter, 2011 was the biggest year yet for paid sick leave, a common sense reform requiring employers to provide a minimum number of sick days, so low-wage workers can stay home sick without losing their pay or their jobs.  After years of savvy, tenacious organizing, last year Seattle joined San Francisco and DC to become the nation’s third paid sick leave city, and Connecticut’s became the nation’s first statewide law (Milwaukee passed a bill in 2009 but Scott Walker has overridden it).

Paid sick leave is the kind of pro-family policy that we should be able to take for granted in a civilized democracy. By averting senseless firings, it reduces unemployment. By letting sick people stay home, it advances public health. In San Francisco, which in 2006 became the first city to mandate paid leave, even critics have changed their tune. In 2010, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which had decried the bill as a job killer, told Bloomberg Businessweek that it had turned out to be “the best public policy for the least cost. Do you want your server coughing over your food?”

Dahlia Lithwick and Raymond Vasvari: The GOP’s War Against Facts

The truth became dangerous for the Republican Party when it ran out of arguments.

Someday political scientists will try to date the decline of reasoned discourse in America to the moment when the left and the right began to invent their own facts. Climate change deniers, the purveyors of lies linking abortion to breast cancer, and creationists will all be blamed for the end of meaningful debate between liberals and conservatives. But that’s not quite right. The real end of civic discourse can be traced to the new conservative argument that facts themselves are dangerous.

It’s a dangerous contention not just for what it hides, but also for what it reveals: a lack of any other arguments.

It’s tough times for facts in America. First Mitt Romney-interviewing for the position of president-declined to release his tax returns because, as he explained, the Obama team’s opposition research will “pick over it” and “distort and lie about them.” He isn’t actually claiming that his opponents will lie. He’s claiming he’s entitled to hide the truth because it could be used against him. As Jon Stewart put it, “You can’t release your returns, because if you do, the Democrats will be mean to you.” These are tax returns.  Factual documents. No different than, say, a birth certificate. But the GOP’s argument that inconvenient facts can be withheld from public scrutiny simply because they can be used for mean purposes is a radical idea in a democracy. It has something of a legal pedigree as well.

Amanda Marcotte: The History of the NRA Is Really Interesting

I’m getting screeched at by a bunch of wingnuts on Twitter, god only knows who sent them, who have it in their heads that I was just making shit up when I attributed modern day gun nuttery to the reactionary movement-that they all belong to, natch-that grew up in response to desegregation. I’m being told that this is bad history, mostly with strawman attacks claiming I said there were no guns prior to the 60s. Of course, I didn’t say that. I simply pointed out that gun hysteria and the belief that gun control is a direct attack on the right of white Americans to protect themselves from nebulous “crime” emerged in response to the civil rights movement.

Really, the connection between gun nuttery and racism doesn’t really need an elaborate proof from me, since I grew up around gun nuts and can tell you that in my long experience, the number of guns in your closet directly correlated with your fondness for the N-word. Like one handgun dudes? Not dropping the N-bomb much, if at all. Fifty guns in the closet guys? Dropping it all the time.

But hey, I love an educational opportunity, so here’s some fun historical information: [..]

Jessica Valenti: How to Out a Rapist

In one of my favorite feminist movies-the 1996 flick Girls Town-a group of fed-up young women write the names of the men who raped them on their high school’s bathroom wall. Other students join in, listing their attackers from schoolmates to teachers-warning other women and reclaiming public space.

Today, a Kentucky teen is facing jail time for doing much the same thing: naming her rapists on Twitter. Seventeen-year-old Savannah Dietrich was sexually assaulted by two acquaintances while unconscious-her attackers took pictures and sent them to friends. After the young men pleaded guilty to the attack and agreed to a plea of felony sexual abuse and misdemeanor voyeurism, the judge ordered that no one speak about the court proceedings or the attack itself.

“I was crying as she was reading that,” Dietrich told a local paper. “They got off very easy…and they tell me to be quiet, just silencing me at the end.”

Dietrich ignored the order and tweeted their names. “There you go, lock me up,” she wrote. “I’m not protecting anyone that made my life a living Hell.” Deitrich now says she ready to go to jail to stand up for the right to speak out. As Amanda Hess at Slate writes, “The criminal justice process can also rob the victim of control over her own narrative.”

Nancy Goldstein: Congress Is Still in the Dark About the Extent of Electronic Snooping

Here’s the only marginally good news about Congressman Edward Markey’s bombshell revelationsThe truly bad news, however, is that Congress still has no idea of the scope of law enforcement surveillance. Congress is the body designated to provide oversight of the ways that government peers into our most private affairs. Yet the information that the proactive Markey was able to extract from the telecom providers represents just a fraction of the possible surveillance requests made by law enforcement, a blurry and partial accounting of a field that remains sprawling, unmapped and without rigorous oversight. last week about government prying into personal cellphone use: the American public and the US Congress now have our very first inkling of the scope of cellphone surveillance requests by law enforcement to telecommunication providers-1.3 million requests for personal data in 2011, according to the telecoms.

Bryce Covert: Low-Income Older Women Will Be Worst Hit if States Don’t Expand Medicaid

A report from The LDI Health Economist site out of the University of Pennsylvania says that under the ACA’s original form when it was passed, “uninsured low-income 55- to 64-year old women were among those who would benefit most from the expansion of Medicaid to cover people with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty level.” As it reports, there are 27 million women who fall into this category, i.e., women who are “near-elderly” and making little income, and about 14 percent of them are uninsured. A third would have been covered by the Medicaid expansion in all fifty states, or more than 1.2 million. (Another 1.8 million are eligible for the insurance exchange subsidies.) If the Medicaid expansion were to go full steam ahead across the country, the overall rate of uninsured women in this group would be reduced to two percent from the current 11.7 rate.

But that number is in danger if Republican governors like Rick Scott and Rick Perry wriggle out of the expansion. Texas, Florida and Virginia combined have more than 468,000 uninsured women in this category, nearly 160,000 of whom would be eligible for Medicaid. And as the report notes, “A ‘disproportional number’ of these women are reported to be African American and Latino.”

Jul 24 2012

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

New York Times:6,000 Bullets

With the ease of downloading a song, anyone with a computer and a credit card can order thousands of bullets and shotgun shells on the Internet, along with tear-gas canisters and speed loaders. They can get the same high-capacity ammunition clips that infantry soldiers use. They can even get bulletproof vests and SWAT helmets. All without fear of a single background check.

No one is paying attention to whether buyers have criminal histories or mental-health records. No one is monitoring bulk sales of ammunition to see who might be building an arsenal. Even after a young man in Colorado buys 6,000 rounds by mail order and uses them to commit mass murder, it is the rare politician who proposes to make the tools of terror slightly harder to obtain.

Michael E. Webber: Will Drought Cause the Next Blackout?

WE’RE now in the midst of the nation’s most widespread drought in 60 years, stretching across 29 states and threatening farmers, their crops and livestock. But there is another risk as water becomes more scarce. Power plants may be forced to shut down, and oil and gas production may be threatened.

Our energy system depends on water. About half of the nation’s water withdrawals every day are just for cooling power plants. In addition, the oil and gas industries use tens of millions of gallons a day, injecting water into aging oil fields to improve production, and to free natural gas in shale formations through hydraulic fracturing. Those numbers are not large from a national perspective, but they can be significant locally.

Noam Chomsky: Destroying the Commons: How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta

Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.

That should be a matter of serious immediate concern. What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event. It is not an attractive prospect if present tendencies persist — not least, because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.

The first scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone. It was not an easy task. There was no good text available. As he wrote, “the body of the charter has been unfortunately gnawn by rats” — a comment that carries grim symbolism today, as we take up the task the rats left unfinished.

Dean Baker: Raising the Minimum Wage Is Cheap and Easy

There are some policies that are pretty much no-brainers. We all agree that the Food and Drug Administration should keep dangerous drugs off the market. We all agree that the government should provide police and fire protection. And, we pretty much all agree that workers should be able to count on at least some minimal pay for a day’s work.

The minimum wage is non-controversial. The vast majority of people across the political spectrum support the minimum wage. In fact, one of the big accomplishments of the Gingrich Congress in 1996 was a 22 percent increase in the minimum wage. The only real issue is how high it should be. There are good reasons for believing that the minimum wage should be considerably higher than it is today.

Chris Hedges: The Greatest Crimes Against Humanity Are Perpetrated by People Just Doing Their Jobs

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

Jul 24 2012

Austerity Insanity

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

~Albert Einstein~

Europe losing battle against debt crisis

Europe is fighting losing battles on two fronts. The debt crisis which began in Greece almost three years ago has spread to other countries. The recovery from the global financial crisis is ending, and the region will be in recession during the rest of the year. To combat the debt crisis, Greece, Ireland and Portugal have received bailout funds from the EU, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (the “troika”), but are required to reduce borrowing through cuts in spending and higher taxes. To offset the recessionary impact of the fiscal tightening, the ECB has repeatedly eased monetary policy to encourage lending to the private sector.

Neither measure has worked as intended. The eurozone’s latest unemployment figure of 11.1 per cent in May is the highest in the euro era. Spain, the country recording the region’s highest unemployment rate of 24.6 per cent, announced a €65bn fiscal tightening programme this month. The new austerity measures will result in a deeper recession and even higher unemployment.

On the monetary front, the ECB implemented two repurchase agreements totalling €1tn with the region’s banks. While the aim was to ease the liquidity crisis that the banks experienced in November, the ECB move had the perverse impact of making those banks the principal purchasers of their own governments’ debt as foreign investors exited. This raises the risk for banks in case their governments default on their debt, or restructure payments. After a cut in the deposit rate the ECB pays the banks to zero on July 5, the central bank expected the banks to increase loans. Instead, they appear to be sitting on the funds.

The austerity measures that Germany has insisted on imposing on financially strapped countries as a requirement for bailing out the banks that caused it all, is coming back to bite the hand that fed it.

Germany Under Cloud From Euro Zone Woes

FRANKFURT – Germany’s stellar credit rating has been thrown into doubt because of the cost of holding together the euro zone, potentially making it more difficult for Chancellor Angela Merkel to muster political support to aid Greece and Spain.

Moody’s Investors Service said late Monday that it was changing the outlook on Germany, as well as on the Netherlands and Luxembourg, to “negative,” citing what it said was an increased risk that those countries will have to bear the cost of propping up Spain and Italy.

That helped push up borrowing costs Tuesday for both Germany and Spain ahead of talks late in the day between the finance ministers of both countries in Berlin.

While Germany’s bond yields remain near record lows, Spain’s have reached levels that are considered unsustainable for long, raising fears that it will have to ask for aid that its European partners cannot afford.

Austerity’s Big Winners Prove To Be Wall Street And The Wealthy

Governments in Europe, most notably the United Kingdom, have also pursued tax cuts for the rich while imposing austerity measures on the working classes. And the European financier class has benefited even more directly than their American counterparts from these budgets.

Every time the European Union has reached a crisis point on the debt carried by Greece or Spain, EU leaders, especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have come to the rescue with bailout funds. That money goes to the banks that own Greek and Spanish debt, whose holdings would take a hit if either country were unable to repay. But the bailout comes with harsh austerity requirements intended to encourage budgetary discipline, so it’s ordinary citizens who end up taking the hit. The most vulnerable populations are harmed by the bailouts, while the well-paid financial professionals who made the deals to finance Greek and Spanish deficits in the first place continue profiting handsomely.

“Imposing pain on Greeks is … a blood price for the ever-repeated bailouts whose actual beneficiaries are said to be Greeks, but are in fact French and German bankers,” said (James) Galbraith.

Eventually it will all come to an end. Then what?

Jul 24 2012

Climate Change Is a Hot Commodity

Amidst the worst drought in 50 years, Up host Chris Hayes discusses climate change on the price of food. Joining Chris are:

Bryn Bird, second-generation farmer in Granville, Ohio at Bird’s Haven Farms.  She is also a field outreach coordinator for Rural Coalition;

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” and syndicated columnist for King Features;

Josh Barro (@jbarro), contributor to Forbes.com with “The Barrometer;”

Stacy-Marie Ishmael (@s_m_i), adjunct professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, former editor of “FT Tilt;”

Gary Gensler (@cftc), chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission since May 2009. Gensler previously served as the under-secretary of domestic finance at the Treasury Department.

Jul 23 2012

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: Loading the Climate Dice

A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a severe heat wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New Jersey, considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.

And this banal observation may be what dooms us to climate catastrophe, in two ways. On one side, the variability of temperatures from day to day and year to year makes it easy to miss, ignore or obscure the longer-term upward trend. On the other, even a fairly modest rise in average temperatures translates into a much higher frequency of extreme events – like the devastating drought now gripping America’s heartland – that do vast damage.

New York Times Editorial: A Spiteful New Policy at Guantánamo Bay

The Obama administration’s latest overuse of executive authority at Guantánamo Bay is a decision not to let lawyers visit clients in detention under terms that have been in place since 2004. Because these meetings pose little risk and would send a message about America’s adherence to the rule of law, the administration looks as if it is imperiously punishing detainees for their temerity in bringing legal challenges to their detention and losing.

In one case, the administration is saying that the Yemeni national Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail no longer has the right to meet with his counsel, David Remes, because his plea to be released was “terminated.” The Justice Department will only let them meet, it said in an e-mail to Mr. Remes, if he signs a new memorandum giving the government what Mr. Remes calls “absolute authority over access to counsel.”

Robert Kuttner: The Fiscal Cliff and the Political Chasm

For more than a decade, deficit hawks and their allies in the media have been promoting a grand bargain whereby Republicans agree to tax hikes and Democrats agree to cut social programs like Social Security and Medicare. That, in turn, will put the deficit on a downward path and presumably restore economic growth.

The trouble with this premise is that the current deficit is mainly the result of the recession itself plus the Bush tax cuts and military spending increases. It has nothing to do with Social Security; the projected increases in Medicare spending are only the result of failure to tackle deeper health care reform.

The idea that smaller deficits will somehow increase growth (Paul Krugman’s “confidence fairy”) has the economics backwards. Deficits will fall when growth is restored, not vice versa; and fiscal contraction will reduce growth.

Jim Hightower: Let’s Consider the GOP’s Health Care Plan

Here’s some useful advice from an old country saying: Never try to teach table manners to a pig – it doesn’t work, it’ll wear you out, and it just annoys the pig.

The same advice goes for anyone who thinks they can teach even a bit of common sense to the preening political ideologues who’ve taken over the Republican Party and the U.S. House of Representatives. As we’ve seen in their incessant, pigheaded attacks on the health care reform law, their minds are not merely fogged up with extremist anti-government theories, they’re impervious to rational thought. [..]

Their greatest failure, however, is that they offer no alternative to Obamacare. During the debate on their latest attempt to repeal the law, a Democratic lawmaker asked for a copy of the GOP’s health care plan so he could read it aloud to other members. Silence in the chamber.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: The NRA Has America Living under the Gun

You might think Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of and spokesman for the mighty American gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, has an almost cosmic sense of timing. In 2007, at the NRA’s annual convention in St. Louis, he warned the crowd that, “Today, there is not one firearm owner whose freedom is secure.” Two days later, a young man opened fire on the campus of Virginia Tech, killing 32 students, staff and teachers. [..]

Maybe you remember a video you can still see on YouTube. In it, Adam Gadahn, an American born member of al Qaeda, the first US citizen charged with treason since 1952, urges terrorists to carry out attacks on the United States.  Right before your eyes he says, “America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle without a background check, and most likely, without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?”

The gunman in Colorado waited only for his opportunity. So there you have it – the arsenal of democracy has been transformed into the arsenal of death. And the NRA? The NRA is the enabler of death — paranoid, delusional and as venomous as a scorpion. With the weak-kneed acquiescence of our politicians, the National Rifle Association has turned the Second Amendment of the Constitution into a cruel and deadly hoax.

Gar Alperovitz: Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate

THE Barclays interest-rate scandal, HSBC’s openness to money laundering by Mexican drug traffickers, the epic blunders at JPMorgan Chase – at this point, four years after Wall Street wrecked the global economy, does anyone really believe we can regulate the big banks? And if we broke them up, would they really stay broken up?

Most liberals in Washington – President Obama included – keep hoping the banks can be more tightly controlled but otherwise left as is. That’s the theory behind the two-year-old Dodd-Frank law, which Republicans and Wall Street are still working to eviscerate.

Some economists in and around the University of Chicago, who founded the modern conservative tradition, had a surprisingly different take: When it comes to the really big fish in the economic pond, some felt, the only way to preserve competition was to nationalize the largest ones, which defied regulation.

Jul 22 2012

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:

Up with Chris Hayes: Joining Chris at the table will be: Gary Gensler (@cftc), chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission since May 2009. Gensler previously served as the under-secretary of domestic finance at the Treasury Department; Bryn Bird, second-generation farmer in Granville, Ohio at Bird’s Haven Farms.  She is also a field outreach coordinator for Rural Coalition; Akil Hashem (@AkilHashem), retired brigadier general who served in the Syrian army for 27 years (1962-1989); Col. Jack Jacobs (@ColJackJacobs), Medal of Honor recipient, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and military analyst for MSNBC; Stacy-Marie Ishmael (@s_m_i), adjunct professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, former editor of “FT Tilt;” Josh Barro (@jbarro), contributor to Forbes.com with “The Barrometer;” Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” and syndicated columnist for King Features; and Sarab Al-Jijakli, member of the Syrian Expatriates Organization and co-founder of the National Alliance for Syria.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper joins George Stephanopoulos to discuss the latest information on the shooting, and how his state and the Aurora community are coping with the tragedy.

The roundtable examines the violence in Aurora, with former Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, author of the new book “A Nation of Wusses,” ABC News’ George Will, ABC News’ Cokie Roberts, TIME Magazine political columnist Joe Klein, and The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper; Aurora mayor Steve Hogan; Rep. Earl Perlmutter; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Dan Rather, HDNet Global Correspondent; David Ignatius, The Washington Post Columnist; Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst; and Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post Columnist.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: This Sunday’s MTP guests are Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D); former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former chief of police for the Los Angeles Police Department William Bratton, and gun-control advocate Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY).

The roundtable guests are New York Times columnist David Brooks, former DC public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, former senior adviser to the 2004 Kerry presidential campaign, Bob Shrum, and former senior strategist to the 2008 McCain presidential campaign, Steve Schmidt.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D);  Senator John McCain (R-AZ); Virginia Senate Candidates Republican George Allen and Democrat Tim Kaine.

Jul 21 2012

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

Fred Guterl: Searching for Clues to Calamity

SO far 2012 is on pace to be the hottest year on record. But does this mean that we’ve reached a threshold – a tipping point that signals a climate disaster?

For those warning of global warming, it would be tempting to say so. The problem is, no one knows if there is a point at which a climate system shifts abruptly. But some scientists are now bringing mathematical rigor to the tipping-point argument. Their findings give us fresh cause to worry that sudden changes are in our future.

One of them is Marten Scheffer, a biologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who grew up swimming in clear lowland ponds. In the 1980s, many of these ponds turned turbid. The plants would die, algae would cover the surface, and only bottom-feeding fish remained. The cause – fertilizer runoff from nearby farms – was well known, but even after you stopped the runoff, replanted the lilies and restocked the trout, the ponds would stay dark and scummy. [..]

Mr. Scheffer and other scientists are now trying to identify the early-warning signals for climate that precede abrupt transitions. Tim Lenton, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter in England, has identified a handful of climate systems that could reach tipping points in the not-too-distant future. These are not so much related to global average temperatures – the main metric for climate-change arguments – as they are to patterns of climate that repeat themselves each year.

Paul Krugman: Why Iceland Is a Success Story

I was recently alerted to a remarkably stupid attack (and I use that term advisedly) directed at me from the Council on Foreign Relations on the subject of Iceland.

The C.F.R. people take me to task in a blog post titled ” ‘Iceland’s Post-Crisis Miracle’ Revisited” for measuring economic performance in Iceland and the Baltics relative to the pre-crisis peak, which they suggest is some kind of scam. Why not measure relative to the post-crisis trough, under which the Baltics look better?

Oh, boy. Economists have been studying business cycles for something like 90 years, and done comparisons to previous peaks all that time; apparently these guys don’t know about any of that. So let’s try this slowly.

George Zorick: Colorado Shooter Likely Got Guns With Ease

Gun-rights groups have progressively weakened gun laws in Colorado and beyond, and the White House appears uninterested in fighting back.

This morning, as the country digested the terrible events that unfolded in Aurora, Colorado, overnight-where a gunman killed twelve people and wounded 59 others in a packed movie theater-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg immediately called for a renewed conversation on gun control. “You know, soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country,” he said. “There are so many murders with guns every day, it’s just got to stop.”

The usual suspects raked Bloomberg over the coals for “politicizing” the shootings, which is nonsense. When there are plane crashes, we talk about flight safety. When there are wildfires, we talk about fire prevention. Terrorist attacks beget huge (often over-reactive) conversations about security measures.

So when one person is able to shoot seventy-one people in rapid succession before police arrive, it’s sensible to talk about whether it should be so easy. Guns aren’t exclusively to blame for the tragedy, but they sure did help make it possible, and multiply the destruction.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Solyndra and the Republican Outrage Machine

It would be easy to miss. Midway through an otherwise worthy report on debates over manufacturing within the White House, a brief but troubling blemish: unexamined, un-rebutted spin. “Romney and Republicans,” wrote the Washington Post, “say there is already an example of Obama’s manufacturing program at work-the ‘green jobs’ program that benefited political donors and lobbyists, such as the backers of the failed solar energy company Solyndra.” A Martian reading the article would come away imagining that Solyndra was a Grade A scandal, and “green jobs” itself was a discredited hoax. Unfortunately, by now the average US news consumer may have that impression too. And Republicans are counting on it.

Reeling from the controversy over his “retroactive” Bain resignation, this week Mitt Romney is mounting a counter-attack. Rather than his own vulture capitalist credentials, Romney wants to talk about the supposed “crony capitalism” of the president, with Solyndra as Exhibit A. Yesterday, the campaign debuted a new ad warning that, “Obama is giving taxpayer dollars to big donors and then watching them lose it.” GOP Senator Ron Johnson went further, comparing green energy investment to Soviet communism, “the lessons of the Soviet Union.” In December, the conservative writer Conn Carroll posited that this election will be about “Bain vs Solyndra.” Wishful thinking? Too soon to tell.

Richard Kim: ‘We Can’t Afford It’: The Big Lie About Medicaid Expansion

Citing deficit woes, at least six Republican governors say they won’t expand Medicaid. But closing tax breaks and loopholes for the wealthy would more than pay for the expansion.

In his letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rejecting the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, Texas Governor Rick Perry tells a whopper. Expanding Medicaid, he writes, would “threaten even Texas with financial ruin.”

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the country (25 percent), and it stands to enroll some 1.8 million new Medicaid recipients through the expansion. These are some of the poorest people in America, making less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level (just $31,000 a year for a family of four). In the first six years of the expansion, from 2014 to 2019, the total cost of insuring these Texans would be about $55 billion-not an inconsiderable sum. But the federal government would pay more than 95 percent of that amount; Texas’s share would be just $2.6 billion. That’s not chump change-but threaten Texas with financial ruin? Not by a long shot.

John Nichols: Romney ‘Goes for the Gold’ in London’s Libor Village

London-In fairness to Mitt Romney, he did not schedule his $75,000-a-plate money grab at the altar of international finance when he heard that – via the Libor bank-rate scandal

– Londoners were practicing his kind of crony capitalism.

Even before the Bain capitalist knew that bankers in London were lying to regulators and fixing interest rates in order to run up their profits-engaging in activities that the governor of the Bank of England said “meet my definition of fraud”-Romney was excited about getting a piece of the London bankster action.

But Romney campaign has has gone to Olympian lengths to make their candidate’s British sojourn seem to be about something other than the looting of London.

The Republican presidential contender’s international fundraising operation-and, yes, he does have an international fundraising operation-scheduled two major events to coincide with the opening of the Olympic Games. As a candidate who is having trouble touting his business experience (Bain Vulture Capital) and his governing experience (RomneyCare), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee calculated that it might be a good idea to take a trip across the pond to highlight his (somewhat less controversial) management of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Jul 20 2012

Germany Flips on Spain & It’s a Flop

The economic crisis in Spain was supposed to have been resolved in an agreement reached June 29 EU Summit but clearly Germany missed the point of this part:

“We affirm that it is imperative to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns”

Instead of bailing out the banks without adding the burden of repayment on the Spanish government, Germany reversed that and place the burden for repayment entirely on the Spanish tax payers increasing the cost for Spain to borrow and causing the markets around the world to drop:

Analysts pointed to a combination of factors, including a decision by the Valencia regional government to seek a bailout from Spain’s central government as well as revised economic forecasts by Spain’s government. [..]

Strategists said market participants also registered disappointment with provisions of a bailout plan for Spanish banks approved by euro-zone ministers Friday. For now, liability for the package, which is expected to total as much as 100 billion euros ($123 billion), remains with the Spanish government.

That “will do nothing to break the ‘vicious circle between banks and sovereigns’ that EU policy makers asserted was ‘imperative to break’ in the statement that followed their June 29” summit meeting, wrote strategists at Capital Economics.

Spain’s approval of an austerity program didn’t help either:

AS David Dayen point explains Britain’s austerity measures haven’t eased their debt/deficit problem, instead has increased it:

Another austerity program in Spain, in a time of 24% unemployment, has no chance of succeeding, either in improving the economy or even reducing the debt. We have a test case of that today, in Britain:

   Chancellor George Osborne’s deficit-busting plans are struggling to keep up with full-year targets as official figures published today revealed another rise in Government borrowing.

   Public sector net borrowing, excluding financial interventions, such as bank bailouts, was £14.4 billion in June, up from a revised £13.9 billion the previous year, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

So Britain, which is two years into its austerity program, is borrowing more money than ever. It’s not reducing the deficit, it’s exacerbating it. And that’s what you should expect in Spain.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has called on the European Central Bank (ECB) to “to cut interest rates, implement a “sizeable” package of quantitative easing, and wade into bond markets to drive down borrowing costs.”

The IMF expressed concern about “reinforced negative bank-sovereign linkages” – the increasingly close connection between struggling banks, many sitting on billions of euros of government bonds; and their home states, which in many cases have been forced to offer them aid.

This vicious circle “could further weigh on confidence, growth, and public debt trajectories”, the IMF suggested.

As Spain’s borrowing costs rose, Germany was able to borrow money at a negative real yield – suggesting investors are effectively willing to pay Berlin for holding on to their cash.

In its strongly worded report, the IMF warned that ultra-low bond yields in Germany and other “core” eurozone economies were a sign of malfunctioning financial markets that are depriving other countries of funds.

“Investors are withholding funding from member states most in need, moving capital ‘north’ and abroad to perceived safer assets. This has contributed to divergences in liquidity conditions and lending rates within the euro area, adding to already-severe pressures on many bank and sovereign balance sheets and raising questions about the viability of the monetary union itself,” it said.

The only country that has benefited from this crisis is Germany and all the talk at the EU Summit to stabilize the euro and end the crisis was useless because German Chancellor Angela Merkel never meant a word she said.

 

Jul 20 2012

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: Pathos of the Plutocrat

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald – and he didn’t just mean that they have more money. What he meant instead, at least in part, was that many of the very rich expect a level of deference that the rest of us never experience and are deeply distressed when they don’t get the special treatment they consider their birthright; their wealth “makes them soft where we are hard.”

And because money talks, this softness – call it the pathos of the plutocrats – has become a major factor in America’s political life.

It’s no secret that, at this point, many of America’s richest men – including some former Obama supporters – hate, just hate, President Obama. Why? Well, according to them, it’s because he “demonizes” business – or as Mitt Romney put it earlier this week, he “attacks success.” Listening to them, you’d think that the president was the second coming of Huey Long, preaching class hatred and the need to soak the rich.

New York Times Editorial: Democrats Gain the Upper Hand

It’s only been a year since Congressional Republicans, bent on cutting spending, manufactured a financial crisis by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling. Now, apparently thinking the public has forgotten that debacle, they’re furious that Democrats have figured out a way to turn the tables.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a member of the Democratic leadership, said Monday that her party was prepared to let all the Bush-era tax cuts expire on Jan. 1 if Republicans refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy. The same holds true, she said, for the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts that begin at the same time, which Republicans demanded in the debt crisis but now oppose after realizing that the cuts affect more than social welfare programs.

David Sirota: Obscuring a Debate Over Butlers

For all the superheated rhetoric of yet another election cycle, it’s as clear as ever that the Republican and Democratic parties in Washington pretty much support the same economic policies. Indeed, any honest perusal of congressional votes proves that the party establishments are roughly the same when it comes to financial deregulation (less of it), job-killing free trade (more of it), bailouts (more of them) and corporate taxes (less of them).

Politicians and partisan media outlets deny this obvious reality, of course. But they do so because they have a vested interest in the red-versus-blue “polarization” narrative from which they generate campaign contributions and ratings, respectively. This is why their hysterical attacks on their foes-and their refusal to acknowledge the political duopoly-has such a grating “doth protest too much” quality. It’s also why more Americans are wholly tuning out of politics-we’re less and less interested in gazing at two heads of the same economic monster.

That said, if you are still gullible enough to believe the illusion of huge differences on economics, behold the “debate” over taxes that is now roiling the presidential race.

Robert Reich: The Problem Isn’t Outsourcing. It’s That Big Business Is Disconnected From the Well-Being of Most Americans

President Obama is slamming Mitt Romney for heading companies that were “pioneers in outsourcing U.S. jobs,” while Romney is accusing Obama of being “the real outsourcer-in-chief.”

These are the dog days of summer and the silly season of presidential campaigns. But can we get real, please?

The American economy has moved way beyond outsourcing abroad or even “in-sourcing.” Most big companies headquartered in America don’t send jobs overseas and don’t bring jobs here from abroad.

That’s because most are no longer really “American” companies. They’ve become global networks that design, make, buy, and sell things wherever around the world it’s most profitable for them to do so.

Dean Baker: Technology and Inequality: The Happy Myth

The 1% likes to blame technological innovation for income redistribution but calculated policy changes are at fault

The people who have been the winners in the massive upward redistribution of income over the last three decades have a happy story that they like to tell themselves and the rest of us: technology did it. The reason why this is a happy story is that technology develops to a large extent beyond our control.

None of us can decide exactly what direction innovations in computers, automation, or medicine will take. Scientists and engineers in these areas follow their leads and innovate where they can. If the outcome of these innovations is an economy that is more unequal, that may be unfortunate, but you can’t get mad at the technology. This is why the beneficiaries of growing inequality are always happy to tell us that the problem is technology.

Bill McKibben: A Long Hot Summer

It’s turning into a hot climate summer in two ways, only one of which you can measure with a thermometer.

Amidst the deepening drought, the summer’s fourth heat wave, and the continued western fires, there’s something else breaking out: a siege of citizen uprisings at key points around the country all designed to keep coal in the hole, oil in the soil, gas… underground.

Ever since the mass arrests protesting the Keystone pipeline last summer (the largest civil disobedience action in the U.S. in 30 years) there’s been renewed interest in confronting the fossil fuel industry and its political enablers. Some have been following this path for years, of course — late next week, beginning July 25, opponents of mountain-top removal coal-mining will resume their long-standing (and increasingly successful fight), with a week-long Mountain Mobilization that will likely include civil disobedience.

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