Tag: Politics

Mar 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”.

New York Times Editorial: A Broader Right to Counsel

The right to a jury trial is extolled as a fixture of American justice, but a vast majority of people charged with crimes never see a trial. Plea bargaining defines the criminal justice system: 97 percent of federal convictions and 94 percent of state convictions come through guilty pleas negotiated between prosecutors and offenders.

The Supreme Court has previously ruled that the Sixth Amendment gives a criminal defendant a right to an effective lawyer during plea-bargain negotiations and when the defendant gives up the right to a trial and accepts a plea offer. In two related 5-to-4 decisions this week, the court extended that constitutional guarantee to cases in which the defendant rejects a favorable plea offer – and goes to trial – because of ineffective counsel.

Paul Krugman: Paranoia Strikes Deeper

Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Actually, it’s the noise a great political party makes when it loses what’s left of its mind. And it happened – where else? – on Fox News on Sunday, when Mitt Romney bought fully into the claim that gas prices are high thanks to an Obama administration plot.

This claim isn’t just nuts; it’s a sort of craziness triple play – a lie wrapped in an absurdity swaddled in paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you used to hear only from people who also believed that fluoridated water was a Communist plot. But now the gas-price conspiracy theory has been formally endorsed by the likely Republican presidential nominee.

Before we get to the larger implications of this endorsement, let’s get the facts on gas prices straight.

Timothy Egan: The Church Lady State

When people complain about liberal overreach they always bring up the nanny state. You know, sorting your garbage to see if a banana peel slipped in with a cellophane wrapper; energy-efficient light bulbs; neutered language in the public square to make sure no one is ever offended.

But all of the above is a mere teardrop in the Amazon compared to what your freedom-hating Republican Party has been doing across the land to restrict individual liberty.

They want the state to follow you into the bedroom, the bathroom and beyond. They think you’re too stupid to know what to do with your own body, too ignorant to understand what your doctors tell you and too lazy to be trusted in a job without being subject to random drug testing. Your body is the government’s business.

Joan Walsh: GOP Rides Paul Ryan’s Road to Ruin (But Will Dems Blow Opportunity?)

His snake oil-castor oil budget is a gift to Dems, but only if they give up on “grand bargains” with extremists

Most Democrats rejoiced when the newly elected House Tea Party extremists got behind Paul Ryan’s tax-slashing and program-cutting budget plan almost a year ago. The budget had no chance of passing the Senate, but it committed Republicans to unpopular spending cuts, including to Social Security and Medicare, and continued the party’s slavish devotion to tax protection for the top 1 percent. That’s why many liberals were horrified by reports that the White House was entertaining comparable budget-cutting proposals to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis last summer. Not only was it bad policy, it was terrible politics, sacrificing the huge advantage Republicans had conceded when they backed Ryan’s plan, especially his assault on Medicare.

Ellen Brown: The Shadow Bailout: How Big Banks Bilk US Towns and Taxpayers

Wall Street Confidence Trick: The Interest Rate Swaps that Are Bankrupting Local Governments

The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times.  In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates-the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps-were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.

Interest rate swaps are less often in the news than credit default swaps, but they are far more important in terms of revenue, composing fully 82% of the derivatives trade.  In February, JP Morgan Chase revealed that it had cleared $1.4 billion in revenue on trading interest rate swaps in 2011, making them one of the bank’s biggest sources of profit.

Robert Borosage: The Ryan Budget vs. A ‘Budget for All’

Who pays the bill for Wall Street’s mess?

On Tuesday, House Republicans rolled out their budget plan in the Washington version of a Hollywood movie opening. There was a star turn for Budget Chair Paul Ryan at a conservative think tank. Gaseous rhetoric — “liberties endangered, time to choose” — fouled the air. There were dueling videos, and furious salvos of partisan messaging. And a backup document — the “Path to Prosperity” (pdf) — festooned with tables for wonks to wallow in.

And yesterday, with fewer trumpets and less fanfare, the Congressional Progressive Caucus release its budget plan — A Budget for All.

Each of the two documents is designed to define a message. Their contrasts help clarify the real choices the country faces. Federal deficits exploded after Wall Street’s excesses blew up the economy. The questions now are who gets the bill and when does the payment start? Ryan’s Republican budget and the CPC’s offer starkly different answers that would take the country in starkly different directions.

Brendan Fischer: ALEC and NRA Behind Law That May Protect Trayvon Martin’s Killer

A Florida law that may protect the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February is the template for an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “model bill” that has been pushed in other states. The bill was brought to ALEC by the National Rifle Association (NRA), and fits into a pattern of ALEC bills that disproportionately impact communities of color.

Florida’s “stand your ground,” or “castle doctrine,” law could prevent the prosecution of George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old “neighborhood watch” vigilante who shot the unarmed Martin as the teen returned from a trip to 7-11 with an iced tea and a pack of Skittles. The law, also pushed by its supporters under the name the “Castle Doctrine,” changes state criminal justice and civil law codes by giving legal immunity to a person who uses “deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.” It also bars the deceased’s family from bringing a civil suit.

Mar 23 2012

The JOBS Act, Only It Doesn’t

The Senate passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, JOBS Act, with a bipartisan vote of 73-26, with all the “no” votes coming from Democrats. The legislation will make it easier for small businesses to use the Internet to raise small investments from lots of people, a technique known as “crowdfunding.” :

The legislation combines six smaller bills that change Securities and Exchange Commission rules so small businesses can attract investors and go public with less red tape and cost. It eases rules on advertising and permits startups to use the Internet and other social media to solicit a large number of small-scale investors.

So why is this not such a good bill? Basically, as Mark Gongloff of Huffington Post explains, because it rolls back “investor-protection regulations, some of which date back to the 1930s, and some of which have been passed as recently as 2002 in the wake of Wall Street shenanigans from the 1990s tech bubble to Enron.”

The bill purports to make it much easier for small firms to raise money, either through private “crowdfunding,” essentially raising money online, or by going public. At its heart is the persistent myth, relentlessly propounded by Wall Street, that there are a million Facebooks out there waiting to thrive and create jobs if only the government would just get the heck out of the way. [..]

Investment banks can now issue research reports on the companies they take public — meaning we’ll be back to the days when analysts can pump up “POS” stocks they then dump on unwitting customers — removing a prohibition set by Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002.

Web sites can pitch new companies directly to investors, raising the specter of “boiler rooms” preying on your grandmother to pry away her retirement money.

To give Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) some credit, he did manage to get one amendment passed that would provide some investor protections:

required companies that use crowdfunding to provide financial statements to investors. Companies seeking between $100,000 and $500,000 in capital would have to get independent accountants to review these statements. Audited financial statements would be required for companies seeking more than $500,000 in capital.

The amendment also limits the total amount that a company can raise through crowdfunding to $1 million. The House bill would allow companies to raise up to $2 million, if they provide audited financial statements.

In addition, the amendment requires Internet intermediaries — the web sites that will offer crowdfunding investment opportunities to the public — to register with the SEC.

An amendment that would have tightened certain shareholder definitions, and prevented public companies from “going dark” if their shareholder number falls below a certain threshold, failed to pass a straight majority vote.

Dan Primack at CNN’s Fortune best describes what does and doesn’t matter about the bill and states his the reason for his opposition:

Emerging growth companies: Okay, this is where I move from ambivalence to opposition. The idea here is to make it easier for small private companies to go public, by reducing the costs associated with such an action. It does so by reducing certain existing investor protections, including one that prevents investment banking analysts from offering pre-IPO research on their firm’s own clients. Here is what I wrote on the subject, back in January:

   Going public is not supposed to be a cakewalk. We’ve already been through an IPO environment where all you needed was a clever URL and a fuzzy mascot, and the results weren’t pretty. I’m not suggesting that last year’s issuers are all future members of the Fortune 500, but shouldn’t a successful listing signal to retail investors that experienced institutions took a hard look at the issuer and considered it worthy of consideration? How can that still be true if those institutions get to see only two years of audited financial statements instead of three? Or if analysts working for a company’s underwriting bank can publish pre-IPO research (albeit with a disclaimer)?

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gives his scathing criticism of the bill, calling it the “Con Job Bill”:

“The so-called ‘JOBS Act’ is an extremely anti-consumer, anti-investor, and anti-jobs bill.  As currently drafted, the bill is opposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman (as well as past SEC chairmen appointed by both political parties); AARP; the AFL-CIO; the Consumer Federation of America; Consumers Union; and the Council of Institutional Investors, among many others.  There is good reason for the opposition.

“At best, this bill could make it easier for con artists to defraud seniors out of their entire life savings by convincing them to invest in worthless companies.  At worst, this bill has the potential to create the next Enron or Arthur Andersen scandal or an even worse financial crisis.

“Have we learned nothing?  Deregulating Wall Street led to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.  Now the same people who caused this horrible recession are telling us that more Wall Street deregulation will create jobs.  Give me a break.  I strongly support providing small businesses with the tools they need to create jobs.  Sadly, that’s not at all what this bill will do.”

Calling this the “JOBS” Act is a misnomer because, as Yves Smith notes at naked capitalism, “In reality, the only jobs it is likely to create will be due to the resulting explosion in stock scamsters and bucket shop operators.”

And there is no worry that this bill will pass in the House. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has schedule a vote for early next week.

Here come the “Penny Stocks.” Good job, Barack

Mar 22 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”.

New York Times Editorial: Pushing Back Against Austerity

Political leaders across Europe have begun to push back against the campaign of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to put the Continent’s economies into a straitjacket of unrelenting fiscal austerity. It is about time. Two years of insisting that weak economies carry out tax increases and spending cuts have brought nothing but recession and deepening indebtedness.

The German-inspired fiscal compact that 25 heads of government agreed to in December will become binding in January provided at least 12 of the 17 countries using the euro ratify it this year. That process has barely begun. Before it goes any further, euro-zone members need to amend its inflexible, one-size-fits-all deficit ceilings. Failure to do so guarantees a longer, deeper European recession and would likely hurt America’s nascent recovery.

Gail Collins: Pity the Poor Gun Lobby

There is nothing so dangerous as a lobbying organization that’s running out of stuff to lobby about.

I am thinking in particular of the National Rifle Association. These people are really in desperate straits. The state legislatures are almost all in session, but some of them have already pushed the gun-owner-rights issue about as far as it can go. You can only legalize carrying a concealed weapon in church once.

This year, in search of new worlds to conquer – or at least to arm – a couple of states are giving serious attention to bills that would allow gun owners to carry their concealed weapons in places like day-care centers and school buses.

People, do you think there is a loud public outcry for more guns on school buses? I truly believe that this is all the product of a desperate N.R.A., trying to show its base that there are still lots of new battles to be won.

Amy Goodman: Walking While Black: The Killing of Trayvon Martin

On the rainy night of Sunday, Feb. 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked to a convenience store in Sanford, Fla. On his way home, with his Skittles and iced tea, the African-American teenager was shot and killed. The gunman, George Zimmerman, didn’t run. He claimed that he killed the young man in self-defense. The Sanford Police agreed and let him go. Since then, witnesses have come forward, 911 emergency calls have been released, and outrage over the killing has gone global. [..]

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has called for the removal of Sanford Police Chief Lee. NAACP President Ben Jealous, recounting a mass meeting in a Sanford-area church Tuesday night, quoted a local resident who stood up and said, “‘If you kill a dog in this town, you’d be in jail the next day.’ Trayvon Martin was killed four weeks ago, and his killer is still walking the streets.”

With his gun.

Robert Sheer; Voters Have Two Candidates, No Choice

With Mitt Romney’s super-PAC limo now on cruise control to victory at the GOP convention, voters are left with only two reasons to vote against Barack Obama: Either they are desperate to return a white man to the White House or they feel strongly that it is time to break the glass ceiling denying Mormons the presidency.

Out of a sense of tolerance I could cotton to the latter-heck, why should the bizarre beliefs of Romney’s church be a deal breaker? I’m hoping for a strong Jewish contender someday and wouldn’t like her burdened with defending Old Testament claptrap.

The problem in this mind-numbing Republican primary season is that the campaign has exposed Romney as not just another white male Mormon like some of the fairly reasonable senators who have represented Utah. Or like Romney’s own father, George, at one time the governor of Michigan. No, this Romney is now widely regarded as the vulture capitalist he is, a politician who is a say-and-do-anything opportunist with no moral limits on his outsized ambitions.

Joe Conason: Paul Ryan’s Plan for American Decline

If the foreign adversaries and competitors of the United States imagined a future that would fulfill their most ambitious objectives, it might begin with a government crippled by the House Republican leadership’s “Ryan budget” released on Tuesday. Followed to its absurd conclusion, this document would lead America toward a withered state, approaching the point where Marxian dreams and Randian dogma converge.

Or at least that’s the view suggested by the sober analysts at the Congressional Budget Office, whose report on the Ryan budget shows debilitating cuts to nearly every department of government today, from law enforcement and border patrols to scientific research, food safety, environmental protection, federal highways, national parks, weather monitoring, education and all the other essential functions of a great country. There would not be much left for Medicare and Medicaid, either. Social Security would continue in some form, and defense-of course-would increase.

But in a nation stripped of science and infrastructure, with a people demoralized by insecurity, unemployment and inequity, exactly what would be left to defend?

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The GOP’s Religious Head Count

The Republican presidential primaries this year have turned into a religious census. There is little precedent in modern politics for the extent to which a state’s choice for a nominee has coincided so closely with how many of its ballots were cast by white evangelical voters.

Where evangelicals cast a minority of the ballots, Mitt Romney has won. Where evangelical voters predominated, Romney has lost, in most cases to Rick Santorum.

Romney’s victory Tuesday in Illinois fit snugly within this pattern. The result pointed to a continuing problem for Santorum: He has yet to break through in places where evangelicals were not the principal force.

While the exit polls did not question voters directly about their attitudes toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is indirect evidence that Romney’s faith may be holding down his vote among non-Mormons for whom a candidate’s religion matters.

Robert Reich: Why Mitt Won’t Be Able to Hide From His Primary Self (We’re No Longer In An Etch-A-Sketch World)

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom couldn’t have said it better – or worse. When asked by CNN Wednesday morning whether Mitt was being pushed so far to the right by Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich that he’d be handicapped in the general election, Fehrnstrom said “you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

An Etch-A-Sketch, for those of you under twenty, is a thick flat gray screen that comes in a plastic frame with two knobs on the front in the lower corners – one left, one right. Twisting the knobs changes the aluminum powder on the back of the screen, creating completely new images. If you twist the left knob, you alter the powder horizontially; twist the right nob, and you alter it vertically.

Remind you of anyone?

Mar 22 2012

Democrats Are Trying To Scare Women?

At least, that’s the party line according Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA) who appeared along with Democratic Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon (IL) on “Hardball with Chis Matthews.”  That was her rote answer to Matthews questions about the recent legislation that has been passed through Republican state legislatures, radically restricting a woman’s legal right to seek an abortion and health care. I’m no fan of Chris Matthews but no matter how hard he tried to get her to answer his question, she evaded him repeatedly saying that it wasn’t the main issue for women. There was feint praise in Matthew’s words at the end when he thanked her from coming on his show and said she was “brilliant”. She sure was, at evading the issue.

Mar 22 2012

Anne Hutchinson, Religious Freedom, Activist

Recently, I was driving along the Hutchinson River Parkway to pick up a friend who was in town and meet up with another friend for dinner in the area. It was a lovely warm evening and during the the drive we talked about the historic significance of the region. Dinner was fun and after dropping my friend at his hotel, I followed my usual route back to NYC that closely hugs the Hutchison River as it winds through the Bronx. As I was preparing my daily open thread, On This Day In History, I came across this Wikipedia entry for Anne Hutchinson for whom the river and parkway are named:

1638 – Anne Hutchinson is expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent.

Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) was one of the most prominent women in colonial America, noted for her strong religious convictions, and for her stand against the staunch religious orthodoxy of 17th century Massachusetts. She was a Puritan whose religious ideas were at odds with the established Puritan clergy in the Boston area, and her popularity and charisma created a schism in the Boston church which threatened to destroy the Puritans’ religious experiment in New England. Creating the most challenging situation for the ruling magistrates and ministers during her first three years in Boston, she was eventually tried and convicted, then banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony with many of her followers. [..]

In 1634, after the birth of her 14th child, Hutchinson followed (John) Cotton to New England with her husband and 11 living children, and soon became well established in the growing settlement of Boston, in the English colonies. She was a midwife, and very helpful to those needing her assistance, as well as being very forthcoming with her personal religious opinions and understandings. Soon she was hosting women at her house once a week, providing commentary on recent sermons, and sharing her religious views, including criticism of many local ministers. These meetings became so popular, that she soon began offering meetings to men as well, to include the young governor of the colony, Harry Vane, and over 60 people a week were visiting her house to learn from her interpretations and views of religious matters. As a follower of Cotton, she espoused a “covenant of grace,” while accusing all of the local ministers (except for Cotton and her husband’s brother-in-law, John Wheelwright) of preaching a “covenant of works.” Several ministers complained about Hutchinson to John Winthrop, who served several terms as governor of the colony, and eventually the situation erupted into what is known as the Antinomian Controversy, resulting in Hutchinson’s 1637 trial, conviction, and banishment from the colony.

She was quite the activist for her day and stood trial for heresy, literally standing throughout the proceedings while, in what was believed, to be an advanced stage of pregnancy. She faced two trials, civil and church, and was expelled from Massachusetts by Gov. John Winthrop after being convicted by the church on March 22, 1638.

After her conviction, Anne. along with her husband, children and some of her followers, with the encouragement of Roger Williams, established the colony of Portsmouth “in what would become the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations:”

During Hutchinson’s imprisonment, several of her supporters prepared to leave the colony and settle elsewhere. A group of her followers, including her husband Will, met on 7 March 1638, at the home of the wealthy Boston merchant William Coddington. Ultimately 23 men signed what is known as the Portsmouth Compact, forming themselves into a “Bodie Politick” and electing Coddington as their governor, but giving him the Biblical title of “judge.” Of the signers, 19 of them initially planned to move to New Jersey or Long Island, but Roger Williams convinced them to settle in the area of his Providence Plantations settlement. Coddington purchased Aquidneck Island, in the Narragansett Bay, from the Narragansetts and the settlement of Pocasset (soon renamed Portsmouth) was founded. Anne Hutchinson followed in April, after the conclusion of her church trial.

Hutchinson, her children, and others accompanying her traveled for more than six days by foot in the April snow to get from Boston to Roger Williams’ settlement at Providence. They then took boats to get to Aquidneck Island, where many men had gone ahead of them to begin constructing houses. In the second week of April, she reunited with her husband, from whom she had been separated for nearly six months. [..]

She lived there for a few years, but after her husband’s death, threats of Massachusetts taking over Rhode Island compelled her to move totally outside the reach of Boston, into the lands of the Dutch. Sometime in 1642 she settled with her younger children in New Netherland near an ancient landmark called Split Rock in what would later become Bronx, New York City. Here she had a home built, but tensions with the native Siwanoy were high, and following inhumane treatment by the Dutch, the natives went on a series of rampages known as Kieft’s War, and in August 1643, all but one of the 16 members of Hutchinson’s household were massacred during an attack. The lone survivor, nine-year old Susanna Hutchinson, was taken captive, and held for several years before being returned to family members in Boston.

Hutchinson is a key figure in the study of the development of religious freedom in England’s American colonies and the history of women in ministry. She challenged the authority of the ministers, exposing the subordination of women in the culture of colonial Massachusetts. Although her religious ideas remain controversial, her implicit rejection of state authority to prescribe specific religious rites and interpretations, was later enshrined in the American Constitution. Massachusetts honors her with a State House monument calling her a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.”

The inscription on the base of the statue in front of the State House in Boston, Massachusetts that honors Anne and her daughter, Suzanna reads:



IN MEMORY OF

ANNE MARBURY HUTCHINSON

BAPTIZED AT ALFORD

LINCOLNSHIRE ENGLAND

20 JULY 1595 [sic]

KILLED BY THE INDIANS

AT EAST CHESTER NEW YORK 1643

COURAGEOUS EXPONENT

OF CIVIL LIBERTY

AND RELIGIOUS TOLERATION

Click on image to enlarge

Beside being one of the few women who have a river named for them, Anne Hutchinson is thought to be the basis for the character of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s The Scarlet Letter. The parallel being “that Hutchinson is the heretic who metaphorically seduces the Puritan community, while in Hawthorne’s novel Hester Pyrnne literally seduces the minister of her community.”

Considering the recent debate over women’s access to health care and our First Amendment rights, remembering the early history of religion and the role that women played is a reminder that this conversation has been going on for a lont time.

Mar 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”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Maureen Dowd: Heart of Darkness

When the gentleman from North Carolina mentioned “Uncle Chang,” it hit with an awkward clang.

“We are spending $10 billion a month that we can’t even pay for,” said Congressman Walter Jones, that rarest of birds, a Southern Republican dove. “The Chinese – Uncle Chang is lending us the money to pay that we are spending in Afghanistan.”

On Tuesday morning, members of the House Armed Services Committee tried to grill Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, the commander in Afghanistan who succeeded David Petraeus, about the state of the mission.

The impossible has happened in the past few weeks. A war that long ago reached its breaking point has gone mad, with violent episodes that seemed emblematic of the searing, mind-bending frustration on both sides after 10 years of fighting in a place where battle has been an occupation, and preoccupation, for centuries.

Katrina vanden Heuvel; The man blocking America’s recovery

He is the most powerful federal employee you’ve never heard of. Edward DeMarco has slowed the economic recovery with the stroke of a pen. His actions are costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, forcing millions of homeowners to lose their homes, and contributing to the falling housing prices that are a brake on the recovery.

Not bad for an obscure “acting director” who should have departed his position long ago.

Edward DeMarcoheads the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). He’s a temp, in office only because – no surprise – Senate Republicans, led by Richard Shelby (Ala.), refused even to allow a vote on the man President Obama nominated for the post.

And DeMarco is philosophically opposed to the common-sense solutions needed to deal with the housing crisis.

When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – holders or guarantors of about 60 percent of housing mortgages – were bailed out, the FHFA was tasked with supervising their activities, with a mandate to minimize taxpayer losses. That gives DeMarco extraordinary power.

Daphne Eviatar: Latest Afghan Torture Report Casts Shadow on U.S. Transfer Plans

Over the weekend, independent human rights advocates in Afghanistan released yet another report documenting systematic torture by Afghan police and security services. The report from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and Open Society Foundations reveals evidence that U.S. forces in Afghanistan have continued to transfer suspected insurgents to Afghan authorities despite previous warnings of torture from the United Nations, which issued its own report on systematic torture by Afghan authorities last October. And, the report continues, although NATO forces created a remediation plan and inspection regime for monitoring detainees it transfers to the Afghan government, U.S. forces that operate under their own non-NATO command do not adhere to that monitoring plan. In fact, the U.S. government, for all we know, does not monitor the detainees it transfers to the Afghans at all.

To those in the U.S. government eager to withdraw from Afghanistan and get this whole war over with, the treatment of Afghans suspected of participating in the insurgency may seem unimportant. But it’s quite important under international law. The United States is legally obligated not to transfer captives to the government if they face a risk of torture. According to this latest report, that risk is very real.

Michelle Chen; Makers, Takers and $2-a-Dayers

One official measure of poverty around the world is surviving on $2 per day or less. It’s a condition many Americans could barely imagine living in. And yet the official data suggests that while politicians insist the U.S. is insulated from such deprivation, a large share of the country is feeling a cold draft from the “Third World.”

A set of new analyses from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), drawing from a study of income data (pdf) by the University of Michigan’s National Poverty Center, shows that for well over a million households, many of them with children, are besieged by hardship of an epic magnitude:

   The number of U.S. households living on less than $2 per person per day — which the study terms “extreme poverty” — more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million, the study finds… The number of children in extremely poor households also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

The World Bank’s $2-per-day metric derives from a perennial cliché in humanitarian circles, generally used to describe poor countries in the Global South. But while some question the usefulness of such simplistic measures, the phrase has a unique application in a country that’s historically represented the top of the human development scale. And one reason why the U.S. has so many people stuck at the bottom is because in many communities, this inequality is practically written into the law, with public assistance programs virtually enforcing the extreme poverty line.

Liliana Segura: Will the Supreme Court Toss Life Without Parole for Juveniles?

“A throwaway person.” That’s how Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg characterized the societal status of a 14-year-old who is sentenced to life without parole, as oral arguments in Jackson v. Hobbs wound down on Tuesday. She was responding to the claim by Little Rock Assistant Attorney General Kent Holt, representing the Arkansas Department of Corrections, that condemning a teenager to die in prison for murder “reinforces the sanctity of human life.”

“You say the sanctity of human life,” Ginsburg pushed back, “but you’re dealing with a 14-year-old being sentenced to life in prison, so he will die in prison without any hope.” In other words, aren’t kids’ lives still worth something even when they’ve committed a grievous wrong?

This was the fundamental question before the Court as it heard arguments in Jackson v. Hobbs and Miller v. Alabama, which were argued back-to-back. Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson believes they are; representing defendants in both cases, he stressed that teenagers are works in progress, and cannot possibly be judged in the same way as adults. Not only does science back this up-teenagers’ brains are still developing, particularly the parts that affect judgement and impulse-the Court itself has concluded the same thing in such cases as Roper v. Simmons, which struck down the death penalty for children under eighteen on Eighth Amendment grounds. “What this Court has said is that children are uniquely more than their worst act,” Stevenson argued.

Jessica Pieklo: How Conservatives Use Campaign Finance Law to Promote Anti-Choice Agenda

By now it should come as no surprise that anti-choice activists are engaged in a targeted and specific legal strategy to roll-back abortion rights. After all, it has proven to be more successful to slowly and steadily chip away at access to abortion care via judicial opinion than through any attempts at outright bans in state legislatures.

But what might come as more of a surprise is the fact that a key part of that legal strategy involves attacking campaign finance law. In fact the pro-corporate personhood movement and the anti-woman, anti-choice movement share the same attorney: conservative campaign-finance crusader and abortion-rights foe James Bopp Jr.

Bopp is most famous as the legal architect behind the Citizens United decision but his ties to the anti-choice world run deep. Bopp’s clients include the National Organization for Marriage, National Right to Life Committee, Susan B. Anthony List, and Focus on the Family, just to name a few. And it’s worth remembering that the Citizens United crusade started as an anti-Hilary Clinton smear campaign dressed up as a free speech movement. Bopp is, by all accounts, the principle litigator for conservative causes.

Mar 21 2012

Afghanistan: 11 Years, 5 Months and Counting

As per the military command, War Is Actually Going Fine

Never mind the riots, the fratricides, the burned holy books and the bloody slaughter of civilians. The commander of the Afghanistan war believes the decade-long conflict is “on track.”

That’s Gen. John Allen’s message to Congress at perhaps the most politically precarious moment in the decade-long war. Allen, in Washington for his first round of congressional testimony since taking command in July, told the House Armed Services Committee, “our troops know the difference they are making and the enemy feels it every day.”

Since Allen took charge of the war, the following has happened in Afghanistan: A U.S. special operations Chinook helicopter crashed, killing 27 troops, possibly after an insurgent attack. A different U.S. helicopter killed 24 Pakistani troops during a chaotic exchange of fire that lasted hours. Photos of Marines urinating on Afghan corpses emerged. U.S. troops burned the Koran at a giant wartime prison, prompting nationwide riots. In apparent retaliation, an Afghan employee of the Interior Ministry murdered two U.S. officers. A U.S. staff sergeant in Panjwei allegedly murdered 16 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children. The Taliban has suspended peace talks with the U.S. and Afghan President Hamid Karzai has proclaimed himself “at the end of the rope” with Washington.

“To be sure,” Allen testified, “the last couple months have been trying.”

MSNBC Political Analyst Ezra Klein sits in for Chris Hayes, and is joined by Elise Jordan, former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, CBS contributor Nancy Giles, The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor, and Wired.com’s Spencer Ackerman, for an in-depth discussion on the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan that has spanned over a decade.

Mar 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”.

New York Times Editorial: You Scratch My Back. …

With their eye on campaign cash, President Obama and lawmakers from both parties have decided they can all get more from corporate constituents if they cooperate to enact legislation that big donors want.

The legislation is the JOBS Act, or Jump-Start Our Business Start-Ups Act, which passed the House with White House support this month and will be voted on this week in the Senate. JOBS, named in Orwellian fashion, is not about jobs. It is about undoing investor safeguards in federal law, including parts of the Sarbanes-Oxley law and other landmark protections, so that companies can raise money without having to follow rules on disclosure, accounting, auditing and other regulatory mainstays.

Simon Johnson: Fiscal Affairs: A Colossal Mistake of Historic Proportions: The “JOBS” Bill

From the 1970s until recently, Congress allowed and encouraged a great deal of financial market deregulation — allowing big banks to become larger, to expand their scope, and to take on more risks. This legislative agenda was largely bipartisan, up to and including the effective repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act at the end of the 1990s. After due legislative consideration, the way was cleared for megabanks to combine commercial and investment banking on a complex global scale. The scene was set for the 2008 financial crisis — and the awful recession from which we are only now beginning to emerge.

With the so-called JOBS bill, on which the Senate is due to vote Tuesday, Congress is about to make the same kind of mistake again — this time abandoning much of the 1930s-era securities legislation that both served investors well and helped make the US one of the best places in the world to raise capital. We find ourselves again on a bipartisan route to disaster.

Dean Baker: Medicare Costs Too Much and They Better Not Cut It

There is an old story about two men in a retirement home. The first declares, “the food in this place is poison.” His friend agrees and adds, “and the portions are so small.” This exchange perfectly captures the Republican approach to Medicare.

The Republicans, led by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, have argued that Medicare threatens to bankrupt the country. They have pointed to cost projections showing the program more than doubling relative to the size of the economy over the next three decades. The Republicans say that the country cannot afford this expense and scream about huge debt burdens for our children.

The Republicans’ concern might lead people to believe that they would support measures to contain Medicare costs. But if you thought that was the case, you would be wrong.

Richard H. Carmona, M.D.: Arizona Effort to Block Contraception Simply Bad Health Policy

A recent push to block women from getting access to contraception shows the Arizona legislature is not operating from an evidence-based or reality-based point of view.

The legislature’s recent actions actively create problems rather than trying to solve them. And, at best, they are wasting our time.

Whenever I’ve had to make a major decision as a doctor, cop or for a company I’ve worked for, I ask myself: What is the value proposition here? Will my decision bring added value to the population I have the privilege to serve?

These questions are clearly not being considered by the folks I like to call the “chronic politicians” at our state capitol and in Washington.

Robert Naiman: With Larry Summers’ World Bank Bid in Trouble, Mexico Insists on Open Process

Early last week the New York Times reported that despite all the previous fine rhetoric about the G20 and consultation and open process, the U.S. Treasury Department had decided to rule by decree and impose its own candidate for the next president of the World Bank, the G20 be damned. U.S. officials informed G20 officials that the U.S. intended to “retain control of the bank,” as the Times put it. According to the Times, the G20 countries grumbled but showed no sign of being willing to fight Treasury. The U.S. candidate would be a “lock,” the Times said, “since Europe will almost certainly support whomever Washington picks.”

Since the International Monetary and the World Bank were created, the U.S. and Europe — which control around half of the voting shares of these institutions — have colluded behind closed doors to determine the institutions’ top leaders, with Europe selecting the head of the IMF with U.S. support and the U.S. selecting the head of the World Bank with European support. In recent years, developing countries have complained loudly about this practice — a practice which would be illegal if the World Bank were subject to the Illinois Open Meetings Act — and under pressure the World Bank has adopted governance reforms that are supposed to guarantee an “open, merit-based process” in selecting the president. But Treasury was claiming that there wasn’t going to be any open process, it was going to be Treasury diktat.

Robert Kuttner: Our Muddled China Policy

Last week, speaking at the White House, President Obama announced that he was joining the European Union in filing a major trade complaint against China, for its export controls on so-called “rare earth” minerals. These are used in everything from micro-electronic devices like smartphones to flat-screen televisions, hybrid car batteries, energy-efficient lighting and wind turbines. China dominates world production of rare earths and refuses to allow their export and sale to follow normal commercial principles.

Despite this get-tough stance, however, the administration’s main trade initiative towards Asia is a little known pending agreement, the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. This deal, which the White House hopes to conclude by year’s end, would sidestep the mercantilism of China and other Asian nations that is displacing U.S. manufacturing; it would do nothing to raise labor or social standards, and would make the outsourcing problem worse.

John Nichols: Instead of a CEO, How About Electing a Labor Leader?

When you think about it, the whole idea of running local, state or national government “like a business” makes a lot less sense than running things like a labor union. Unions are democratic institutions that have a responsibility to watch out for their members and to the broader community. They are invested in the cities and states where they work because they can’t pull up stakes and relocate overseas. And they have a dramatically better record of evolving with the country-toward an embrace of women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights-than the robber barons and their monopolies.

Union leaders manage major organizations and deal with negotiations, contracts, budgets and the challenges of balancing economic and human demands. The difference is that they tip the balance toward humanity, as opposed to the false construct that says “corporations are people, my friends.”

Once upon a time, the idea of electing a union leader as a legislator, a member of Congress, even a president, was commonplace. Both Eugene Victor Debs and Ronald Reagan learned their leadership skills as union leaders. Unfortunately, as the years passed, the political and pundit classes embrace of MBA presidents (George Bush) and CEO contenders (Mitt Romney). It has not worked well for the republic or its component states.

Mar 19 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”.

Chris Hedges;Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War

The war in Afghanistan-where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal-feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns.

Military attacks like these in civilian areas make discussions of human rights an absurdity. Robert Bales, a U.S. Army staff sergeant who allegedly killed 16 civilians in two Afghan villages, including nine children, is not an anomaly. To decry the butchery of this case and to defend the wars of occupation we wage is to know nothing about combat. We kill children nearly every day in Afghanistan. We do not usually kill them outside the structure of a military unit. If an American soldier had killed or wounded scores of civilians after the ignition of an improvised explosive device against his convoy, it would not have made the news. Units do not stick around to count their “collateral damage.” But the Afghans know. They hate us for the murderous rampages. They hate us for our hypocrisy.

Glen Ford: The U.S. Empire’s Achilles Heel: Its Barbaric Racism

The latest atrocities in Afghanistan are just par for the course.

The American atrocities in Afghanistan roll on like a drumbeat from hell. With every affront to the human and national dignity of the Afghan people, the corporate media feign shock and quickly conclude that a few bad apples are responsible for U.S. crimes, that it’s all a mistake and misunderstanding, rather than the logical result of a larger crime: America’s attempt to dominate the world by force. But even so, with the highest paid and best trained military in the world – a force equipped with the weapons and communications gear to exercise the highest standards of control known to any military in history – one would think that commanders could keep their troops from making videos of urinating on dead men, or burning holy books, or letting loose homicidal maniacs on helpless villagers.

These three latest atrocities have brought the U.S. occupation the point of crisis – hopefully, a terminal one. But the whole war has been one atrocity after another, from the very beginning, when the high-tech superpower demonstrated the uncanny ability to track down and incinerate whole Afghan wedding parties – not just once, but repeatedly. Quite clearly, to the Americans, these people have never been more than ants on the ground, to be exterminated at will.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Can Europe’s Left Rebound?

A crisis of capitalism is supposed to create an opening for the political left. But in Europe, the place where the concept of left and right was born, political conservatives have won the bulk of the elections held since economic catastrophe struck in 2008.

Is this about to change?

The conservative victory most noted in the U.S. was the rise to power of David Cameron, the British prime minister feted at the White House last week. The Conservatives won only a plurality of parliamentary seats against the Labor Party in the 2010 elections. But they drove Labor to its worst showing since 1983 and were able to put together a coalition government with the center-left Liberal Democrats. Cameron has gotten good press in the U.S., even from liberals who wish the American right would follow Cameron’s moderate and modernizing ways.

Laura Flanders: Jeffrey Sachs: Population Controller?

In a March 1 op-ed in the Washington Post Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs made his pitch to be the next president of the World Bank promising to “lead the bank into a new era of problem-solving.” John Cavanaugh and Robin Broad have laid out a raft of righteous concerns about Sachs’s candidacy. The “solutions” Sachs proposes to poverty, they point out, can be summed up in the not very-new words: “aid” and “trade.”  As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s Sachs’s other favorite problem solver: population control. That’s taking us to a new era, alright: right back to the nineteenth century of Thomas Malthus. [..]

Given the options, Sachs’s same-old pro-privatization development policies will be greeted as enlightened, none so more than his position on “reducing fertility.” He’s not promoting mandatory sterilization, after all, and he’s in tune with a growing crowd that’s recycling old population myths for the new save-the-planet context. But smart people have been working for decades to delink poverty from population. At the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development world leaders pressed by women’s groups agreed. As Radhika Balakrishnan, feminist economist, director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers puts it, “how population behaves is more important than how it grows.”

Barbara Ehrenreich: Rediscovering Poverty

It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America. If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so “hidden” and “invisible” that it took a crusading left-wing journalist to ferret them out.

Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty-inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.

Diane Ravitch: In Defense of Facing Educational Reality

I recently wrote two review articles for the New York Review of Books about the teaching profession. The first was a review of Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons, about the exceptional school system of Finland, which owes much to the high professionalism of its teachers.

The second of the two articles was a review of Wendy Kopp’s A Chance to Make History, and it focused on her organization, Teach for America.

I expressed my admiration for the young people who agree to teach for two years, with only five weeks of training. But I worried that TFA was now seen — and promoting itself — as the answer to the serious problems of American education. Even by naming her book A Chance to Make History, Wendy Kopp reinforced the idea that TFA was the very mechanism that American society could rely upon to lift up the children of poverty and close the achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups.

Mar 18 2012

Foreclosure Settlement: More Reasons To Hate It

The more the experts and analysts look into the Foreclosure Agreement the more reasons are found to hate it and why, to Yves Smith‘s descriptive word, it “sucks”:

Not only are the banks getting away with fraud they are still going to be allowed to systemically overcharge homeowners and wrongly take their homes.

Remember that the Administration also trumpeted that enforcement would be tough, even as Abigail Field has shown that idea to be a joke. For instance, the servicing standards allow for the astonishing concept of an acceptable error rate. Banks aren’t permitted to make errors with your checking account and ding you an accidental $10,000 and get away with it. But with people’s most important asset, their homes, servicers are allowed a certain level of reportable errors, and many of them can be serious as far as borrowers are concerned.[..]

She also points out that wrongful foreclosures at a 1% rate are acceptable. Procedures around real estate are deliberate because any error of this magnitude has devastating consequences. But this new provision means that 1%, or over 33,000 erroneous foreclosures since 2008 would be perfectly OK as far as the authorities are concerned.

Field also points out in a separate post that this deal is in no way done. Key points remain to be resolved, in particular, how the Monitor will supervise the pact. That’s a huge item, and leaving it unresolved shifts the power to the banks (if you don’t believe me, I refer you to what is happening to Dodd Frank).

Field also wonders “how did all our meaningful law enforcers do this deal?:

I hate the term Too Big To Fail because it’s a loaded premise presented as fact. But looking at the weasel parentheticals, maybe we should start asking if the banks as too big to be competent. I mean, why do the banks need a ‘hey, we tried but didn’t have enough time to stop the sale’ exemption? If the B.O.Bs (bailed out bankers) want their lawyer or trustee to call off a foreclosure sale, all they need is two things: a) to contact their agent and b) have a competent agent.

What does “took appropriate steps to stop the sale” mean, anyway? Does it mean that someone at the bank left a message or two with foreclosure counsel? If the B.O.B.s made a real effort to stop the sale but their agents did it anyway, why isn’t that the B.O.B’s fault for having incompetent agents? Doesn’t giving the B.O.B. a pass remove any incentive to have competent (and thus more expensive) agents?

Wrongfully selling someone’s home should be a strict liability issue. Strict liability is, well, strict: no one cares what you were trying to do, what your intentions were, what you did or didn’t do. Did the harm happen? Then you’re responsible.

Before you give me any, hey, let’s be reasonable here, a business needs to operate and we’re so big some mistakes will happen, remember what we are talking about: homes; property rights; land records; fundamental fairness. How can the B.O.Bs be held to any standard other than strict liability when it comes to wrongfully selling a home?

Neil Barofsky, the former Special US Treasury Department Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and Matthew Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute give a good overview of why this settlement really “sucks”

There is no accountability, no punishment for what has to be the largest fraud ever perpetrated in this country.  

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