Tag: Politics

Mar 13 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: Supreme Court Likely to Endorse Obama’s War on Whistle-Blowers

Totalitarian systems disempower an unsuspecting population by gradually making legal what was once illegal. They incrementally corrupt and distort law to exclusively serve the goals of the inner sanctums of power and strip protection from the citizen. Law soon becomes the primary tool to advance the crimes of the elite and punish those who tell the truth. The state saturates the airwaves with official propaganda to replace news. Fear, and finally terror, creates an intellectual and moral void.

We have very little space left to maneuver. The iron doors of the corporate state are slamming shut. And a conviction of Bradley Manning, or any of the five others charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917 with passing on government secrets to the press, would effectively terminate public knowledge of the internal workings of the corporate state. What we live under cannot be called democracy. What we will live under if the Supreme Court upholds the use of the Espionage Act to punish those who expose war crimes and state lies will be a species of corporate fascism. And this closed society is, perhaps, only a few weeks or months away.

Eugene Robinson: End the Afghan mission now

It was clear before Sunday’s horrific massacre of civilians that it’s past time for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan to end. Now the only question should be how quickly we can get our troops onto transport planes to fly them home.

What are we accomplishing, aside from enraging the Afghan population we’re allegedly trying to protect? How are we supposed to convince them that a civilian massacre carried out by a U.S. soldier is somehow preferable to a civilian massacre carried out by the Taliban? How does it make any of us safer to have the United States military known for burning Korans and killing innocent Muslim children in their beds? [..]

This is supposed to be a period of transition from U.S. occupation to Afghan government control. But what do we expect to accomplish between now and 2014, when our troops are supposed to come home? We can be confident that the Afghan government will still be feckless and corrupt. We can anticipate that the Afghan military will still lack personnel, equipment and training. We can be absolutely certain that the Taliban insurgents will still constitute a threat, because – and this is what gung-ho advocates of the war fail to grasp – they live there. To them, Afghanistan is not a battlefield but a home.

It’s their country, not ours. In increasingly clear language, Afghans are telling us to leave. We should listen and oblige.

George Zornick: Progressives Mount Major Campaign to Intimidate Corporate Election Donors

Short of an outright ban of corporate money from elections, disclosure is perhaps the best antidote to the political influence of big business. Notably, since Super PACs disclose donor information, only one-half of one percent of all contributions to the most active Super PACs this campaign season came from publicly traded corporations, which are naturally sensitive to coming under attack for political activities.

Business interests instead prefer the type of electioneering practiced by nonprofits like the US Chamber of Commerce, which is planning a $50 million campaign to influence House and Senate races coast to coast this fall-and they won’t have to disclose where a single dollar came from.

With that in mind, a coalition of public interest, labor and progressive groups announced today a major, fifty-state campaign to force disclosure by any means possible. It’s called “Our Democracy is Not For Sale.”

Ben Adler: Will the Courts Protect Voting Rights?

Last week brought two rare pieces of good news for voting rights advocates. In Wisconsin, Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan granted a temporary injunction, requested by the NAACP’s Milwaukee branch and immigration rights group Voces de la Frontera, preventing implementation of the state’s photo identification requirement for voting. Meanwhile, the Third Circuit of the US Court of Appeals reaffirmed a 1982 consent decree preventing the Republican National Committee from intimidating minority voters.

Unfortunately, voter intimidation and disenfranchisement will still occur, in Wisconsin and throughout the country.

The Wisconsin law, passed last spring, is facing four suits. The first, which is before Judge Flanagan with a trial set to start April 16, argues that a photo identification requirement violates the right of every citizen to vote guaranteed by the Wisconsin state constitution. The League of Women Voters has filed a similar suit, and argued their case last week in front of Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess.

John Kinsman: “Free Trade” is Not Free – Why We All Need to Oppose the TPP

There are always winners and losers in free trade. The winners are the 1% – the wealthy at the top. The losers are the 99% – that means the rest of us.

The latest free trade deal which is now being rushed by President Obama through Congress is known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Thirty years ago, the first free trade deals were enacted under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO), including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Australia/US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA), and many more. During this time, the global economic crisis accelerated at an alarming rate with only the 1% reaping the profits. This ongoing crisis will not end until these destructive free trade agreements are repealed and fair trade becomes the norm.

Mark Ames: Slovakia Defies the Kochs and Cato

On Saturday, the tiny EU nation Slovakia held parliamentary elections, and the results surprised the “experts”: The center-left party Smer, derisively described as “populist” in the American media, won in a record landslide, the first time a single party will control the majority in parliament in Slovakia’s post-Communist history.

The “populist” Smer won on an unexpectedly large turnout of 60 percent the socalled experts had been assuring readers there’d be a low turnout of 40 percent.

The high turnout reflects real suffering for the people of Slovakia that goes well beyond mere cynicism – they’re suffering from real, mass impoverishment, brought on by a decade of brutal free-market reforms, which hit the privatized pensions especially hard. That’s where we Americans come in, specifically the Cato Institute – but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Mar 13 2012

More Bailouts for the “Too Big To Fail”

Besides the $700 billion from TARP and $17.7 trillion from the Federal Reserve the “Too Big To Fail” financial entities are still getting bailouts with tax payer dollars via tax breaks on losses. 90% of the insurance giant, American International Group Inc.’s (AIG), fourth quarter profits from 2011 were “because of an inappropriate tax break the government-owned insurance company continues to receive, according to four former members of the watchdog panel that oversaw the financial crisis bailouts“:

The break allows AIG to count its past net operating losses against future taxes. That amounts to a “stealth bailout” of a company that received about $125 billion in taxpayer money, said the former appointees to the Congressional Oversight Panel for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

“It’s been more than three years since AIG lost its reckless bet on mortgage-backed securities, yet today AIG continues to get special tax breaks that last quarter accounted for 90% of its profits,” the panel’s former chairwoman, Elizabeth Warren, told reporters Monday on a conference call. “We think it’s time for Congress to end the special tax break.”

Warren, who is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, was joined by former panel members Damon Silvers, Mark McWatters and Kenneth Troske in saying the tax break gives the illusion of significant profitability at the company.

The profits benefit AIG’s private stockholders and allow the company to pay higher executive compensation, the TARP panel members said.

“By doing it this way….billions of dollars leak out to the benefits of private parties, who really should not be benefiting from public policy in this way,” Silvers said.

The special tax exemption that AIG and other struggling companies received allows it to deduct its past losses against future tax bills thus showing a net profit. It allowed for AIG to hand out generous executive compensation and benefit private shareholders.

Just last week, Matt Stoller at naked capitalism reported that almost half the banks that had paid back TARP did so with funds from other government programs:

The Government Accountability Office continues its subtle war on the talking point used by Treasury that “TARP made money”. Here’s the GAO, with a report out today.

   As of January 31, 2012, 341 institutions had exited CPP, almost half by repaying CPP with funds from other federal programs. Institutions continue to exit CPP, but the number of institutions missing scheduled dividend or interest payments has increased.

Much of the government-supplied TARP funding (to small banks) was replaced by the Small Business Lending Fund passed in 2010, which Republicans called “TARP 2.0″.  The larger banks, however, where much of the bank-based credit creation in the economy takes place, didn’t use this program.  Instead, they got an implicit subsidy of between $6B (pdf) and $300B a year from the widespread belief that the government will not let their bondholders lose money…

You can take a stand with Ms. Warren and sign her petition:

Call on AIG to play by the rules

Mar 12 2012

Afghan Massacre: Not So Lone Gunman

The claim by the US government that the latest massacre of Afghan civilians by a “lone gunman” may have some credibility gaps. The current version is:

An American soldier walked off his base in a remote southern Afghan village shortly before dawn Sunday and opened fire on civilians inside their homes, killing at least 16, including nine children, Afghan officials said. [..]

Officials shed no light on the motive or state of mind of the staff sergeant who was taken into custody shortly after the alleged massacre.

“It appears he walked off post and later returned and turned himself in,” said Lt. Cmdr. James Williams, a military spokesman.

U.S. military officials stressed that the shooting was carried out by a lone, rogue soldier, differentiating it from past instances of civilians killed accidentally during military operations.

Witnesses told Reuters that they observed a group of laughing, drunk American soldiers in the village around 2 AM:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, March 11 (Reuters) – Western forces shot dead 16 civilians including nine children in southern Kandahar province on Sunday, Afghan officials said, in a rampage that witnesses said was carried out by American soldiers who were laughing and appeared drunk.

One Afghan father who said his children were killed in the shooting spree accused soldiers of later burning the bodies.

Witnesses told Reuters they saw a group of U.S. soldiers arrive at their village in Kandahar’s Panjwayi district at around 2 am, enter homes and open fire. [..]

Haji Samad said 11 of his relatives were killed in one house, including his children. Pictures showed blood-splattered walls where the children were killed.

“They (Americans) poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them,” a weeping Samad told Reuters at the scene.

“I saw that all 11 of my relatives were killed, including my children and grandchildren,” said Samad, who had left the home a day earlier.

Neighbours said they awoke to crackling gunfire from American soldiers, whom they described as laughing and drunk.

“They were all drunk and shooting all over the place,” said neighbour Agha Lala, who visited one of the homes where the incident took place. “Their bodies were riddled with bullets.”

The BBC has a similar account:

   Most villagers expressed scepticism that this was simply the work of a soldier who had lost control. One woman described how she was woken at 02:00 by the sound of helicopters. Others spoke of seeing computerised equipment in the area.

   Whatever the true chronology of events, this incident is being seen as yet another black mark in the catalogue of deadly Nato operations.

   “I saw one person come to our home, I told my son: ‘You have to be quiet and calm because maybe this is a night raid’,” said one woman.

   An hour after gunfire erupted, she went to her brother’s home and saw that corpses from his family had been set ablaze. She screamed for help.

Lambert Strether writing at naked capitalism asks:

What do we know now that we didn’t know in 2011, 2010, or 2009? And remind me who was President in 2011, 2010, and 2009? Was it that same guy who courageously opposed “dumb wars” back in 2008?

Of course, the military is rejecting these accounts and sticking with their story. The whole issue will be “handled” by the military in the same way they “handled” the 2006 Haitha massacre in Iraq, six years from now everyone involved, including those who covered up the real story, will walk off free and without any serious penalty. Not exactly the way to “win the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people.

Mar 12 2012

Iran, Israel and “The Bomb”

President Obama assured influential leaders attending American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) last week that the Unites States has Israel’s back fighting efforts made  to delegitimize the state. But how will America be positioned against Iran’s potential nuclear threat to Israel? The Up with Chris Hayes panel Rula Jebreal (@rulajebreal), contributing writer at Newsweek; Jeremy Ben-Ami (@jeremybenami), founder & president of J Street; Leila Hilal, Middle East analyst at the New America Foundation; and Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder & president of The Israel Project discuss the contentious relationship between Israel and Iran.

The discussion that took place on Up with Chris went a long way to dispelling some myths about Iran’s nuclear energy program and the rhetoric of its alleged quest for a nuclear weapon. Chris Hayes pointed out early that “the big contest” was over whether President Obama would say “nuclear Iran” or “the capability for a nuclear weapon” in his speech to AIPAC, he went with the later. That did not stop the panelists continued false equation with a “nuclear Iran” and an Iran with a nuclear weapon. There is gaping difference between the two. “Capability” has become the code word for “the bomb”. The reality is that capability can also mean peaceful uses for nuclear energy that includes electricity and medical research.

No one, not even Hayes, mentioned that the ruling Ayatollahs have condemned nuclear weapons, as well as, chemical/biological weapons, based on religious and moral grounds. Nor did anyone mention that Iran has signed the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has not nor has Israel ever allowed inspection of its nuclear facilities by the IAEA and no one has dared demand it.

It was, however, good that Rula Jebreal the misstatements by Jennifer Mizrahi, founder of The Israel Project about Iran’s cooperation with inspections. Middle East analyst Leila Hilal and Mr. Hayes joined Ms. Jebeal had to correct her hyperbolic statements that the Iranians are “different” and not “rational actors” and stop her racist generalization of the Iranians. Ms. Hilal rightfully noted that there is conflation of Islamists saying that Hamas and the Iranians, because they’re Muslims, are going to act to attack Israel. In fact, it’s not Hamas or Iran but the Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Resistance that has been calling for Israel’s destruction and, however lightly, it was mentioned that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has become isolated from the ruling Ayatollahs and increasingly unpopular with Iranians.

It was Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder & president of J Street who made the best observation that the premise of Iran dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, then be wiped out itself, is ridiculous on its face. Yet, here we are with the President of the United States saying that while he wants diplomacy to work but still saying that he has “Israel’s back” and talking about “nuclear capabilty” while Benjamin Netanyahu continues to threaten bombing Iran and right wing US politicians demand it.

The discussion held by Chis Hayes was a step in the right direction to dispel myths and blatant lies and put the facts and reality on the table. The conversation still has a long way to go.

Mar 12 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”.

Paul Krugman: What Greece Means

So Greece has officially defaulted on its debt to private lenders. It was an “orderly” default, negotiated rather than simply announced, which I guess is a good thing. Still, the story is far from over. Even with this debt relief, Greece – like other European nations forced to impose austerity in a depressed economy – seems doomed to many more years of suffering.

And that’s a tale that needs telling. For the past two years, the Greek story has, as one recent paper on economic policy put it, been “interpreted as a parable of the risks of fiscal profligacy.” Not a day goes by without some politician or pundit intoning, with the air of a man conveying great wisdom, that we must slash government spending right away or find ourselves turning into Greece, Greece I tell you.

Robert Reich: The Precarious Jobs Recovery

February’s  227,000 net new jobs – the third month in a row of job gains well in excess of 200,000 – is good news for President Obama and bad news for Mitt Romney.

Jobs are coming back fast enough to blunt Republican attacks against Obama on the economy and to rob Romney of the issue he’d prefer to be talking about in his primary battle against social conservatives in the GOP.

But jobs aren’t coming back fast enough to significantly reduce the nation’s backlog of 10 million jobs. That backlog consists of 5.3 million lost during the recession and another 4.7 million that needed to have been added just to keep up with the growth of the working-age population since the recession began.

Lawrence Davidson: America Gets Stupid, Again, on Iran

It is estimated that up to a million people died as a function of George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, which Bush later said was based on “faulty intelligence,” the ex-president’s way of passing the blame. The reality was that Bush insisted that accurate intelligence he was getting from traditional sources was false and that lies he was being told by other parties were true.

Now, there is Iran. Over and again the intelligence community has told the powers that be that Iran is not engaged in a nuclear weapons program. And over and again the men and women in Congress and the White House have insisted that these traditional sources of information are wrong and that the stories that are coming from other sources (in this case the Israeli government and its special interest agents in Washington) know better.

As in 2003, so it is in 2012. The politicians appear to be out for blood. One wonders how many dead and maimed bodies will satisfy them? Perhaps it will be a million dead Iranians.

Glenn Greenwald: Dennis Kucinich and ‘Wackiness’

Last week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich was defeated in a Democratic primary by Rep. Marcy Kaptur after re-districting pitted the two long-term incumbents against each other. Kucinich’s fate was basically sealed when the new district contained far more of Kaptur’s district than his. His 18-year stint in the House will come to an end when the next Congress is installed at the beginning of 2013.

Establishment Democrats have long viewed Dennis Kucinich with a mixture of scorn, mockery and condescension. True to form, the establishment liberal journal American Prospect gave Kucinich a little kick on the way out, comparing his political views to the 1960s musical “Hair” (the Ohio loser talked about “Harmony and understanding”!), deriding him as “a favorite among lefty college kids and Birkenstock-wearers around the country,” and pronouncing him “among the wackiest members of Congress.” Yes, I said The American Prospect, not The Weekly Standard.

The Prospect article also praises as “great” a snide, derisive Washington Post piece which purports to “highlight some of the particularly bizarre facts about” Kucinich. Among those is the fact that “he introduced impeachment articles against former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Cheney for their roles in the Iraq war” and “proposed a Cabinet-level agency devoted to peace.” What a weirdo and a loser. Even more predictably, a team of four interns at The New Republic – the magazine that spent years crusading for the attack on Iraq, smearing Israel critics as anti-Semites, and defining its editorial mission as re-making the Democratic Party in the image of Joe Lieberman – denounced the anti-war Kucinich as “ludicrous,” citing most of the same accusations as the Prospect and the Post. […]

Masahiro Matsumura: After the Earthquake: Changing Japan

One year on, Japanese people are having to adapt to survive and thrive in a country prone to devastating natural disasters

On the first anniversary of the huge earthquake that hit Japan’s northeastern Pacific coast, its people are still coming to terms with their grief and trying to work out what the disaster meant for the nation.

Although 3/11, as it’s become known, was a bolt from the blue, the country – located in one of the world’s largest and most active volcanic zones – had long expected a great earthquake and tsunami to occur sooner or later. It was well prepared for the type of disaster that would happen once every 100 years, but not for a far greater one-in-a-1000-years one. No wonder the catastrophe overwhelmed Japan’s well-laid plans for protecting people, buildings and infrastructure.

Fail-safe measures to cope with a super-disaster are practically beyond the nation’s wealth: the worst-case scenario is sequential or even simultaneous occurrence in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, the central Pacific coast and the southwestern Pacific coast.

Alongside national and local government efforts to improve disaster preparations, individuals now have to consider the topographic, geological and social features of their homes and workplaces, and have less choice over where to live than in the past.

Dr. Megan Evans : A Doctor Speaks: “Horrific” Arizona Law Would Allow Doctors to Practice Bad Medicine Without Accountability

Imagine carrying a baby to term.  You’ve waited nine long months for this moment.  You’ve planned for her arrival, you’ve had the baby shower, and you’ve gone to all your prenatal appointments. All along you are told that you are progressing normally and your baby is healthy. Your delivery day comes and, at delivery, your doctor tells you your baby has a devastating abnormality.  A cardiac defect or a severe structural abnormality or chromosomal abnormality… something that was likely already detected early in your pregnancy.

You then discover your doctor withheld this information from you for fear you would seek an abortion.  What a nightmare.

Unfortunately, the Arizona legislation is working to make this nightmare a reality. On Tuesday, the Senate passed a bill that would prohibit any medical malpractice lawsuits against physicians who chose to withhold valuable information regarding their patient’s pregnancy that could lead her and her family to seek termination.  Much to my chagrin, this type of legislation is already law in Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Utah, Idaho, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, South Dakota, and is being discussed in Kansas.

Mar 11 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”.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

Up with Chris Hayes: Sunday’s guests Rula Jebreal (@rulajebreal), contributing writer at Newsweek; Jeremy Ben-Ami (@jeremybenami), founder & president of J Street; Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees and co-founder of Grassroots International Protection for the Palestinian People and Palestinian National Initiative, joining us from Ramallah, Palestine; Leila Hilal, Middle East analyst at the New America Foundation; Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder & president of The Israel Project; and Zev Chafets, founding managing editor at The Jerusalem Report and contributor at New York Times Magazine.

The Melissa Harris-Perry Show: No guests have been announced for Sunday’s program

.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: This week’s guests Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). will debate jobs and the economy.

The roundtable with senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper, former Obama economic adviser and ABC News consultant Austan Goolsbee, Republican strategist Mary Matalin, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, and Nicolle Wallace, Republican strategist and senior adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, Robert Gibbs, senior adviser to Obama’s reelection campaign and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) are guests. Also, CBS News Political Director John Dickerson and CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Norah O’Donnell examine the state of the presidential race and what to look for over the next week in politics

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post Columnist; Bob Woodward, The Washington Post Associate Editor; Major Garrett, National Journal Congressional Correspondent; and Becky Quick, CNBC Co-Anchor, Squawk Box.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Guests are GOP candidate Rick Santorum; Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association,  Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-MD) and Chairman of the Republican Governors association as well as Mitt Romney supporter, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA).

Roundtable guests are MSNBC’s Al Sharpton,  Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Washington Post‘s EJ Dionne, and the Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Sunday’s guests are Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), the Washington Post‘s Dan Balz, The Wall Street Journal‘s Stephen Moore, and Former Office of Management and Budget Director Alice Rivlin. Also tewo former presidential candidates Dick Gephardt and Steve Forbes offer their assessment of the 2012 presidential field.

Mar 10 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 Breach of Trust

The hard-fought deal that settled last year’s debt-ceiling fight made painfully deep cuts in spending, but it promised one thing: a year’s peace from the destructive Congressional battles that led to threats of government shutdowns and defaults. By signing the pact, Republican and Democratic leaders set spending levels for 2013, putting off further budget wars until after the election.

But now a coalition of extreme conservatives in the House wants to break the budget agreement and cut spending below the agreed level, and the House Budget Committee seems willing to go along.

Reneging on the agreement would not only endanger vital programs like Head Start, but it would erase the thin residue of trust left in Congress. It would clearly demonstrate that the current House cannot be trusted to live up to its own pledges.

Paul Krugman: In the US, Futile Hopes for Another Presidential ContenderIn the US, Futile Hopes for Another Presidential Contender

I haven’t written much lately about the spate of articles either calling for, or at least wistfully speculating about, a “centrist” third-party presidential candidacy in the United States. It’s nonsense, of course, on multiple levels.

For one thing, if you look at what pundits calling for such a candidacy want, it’s all already in President Obama’s proposals. For another, it’s not going to happen. For a third, the favorite imaginary candidate, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, turns out to be totally ignorant about the economic crisis.

“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a panel discussion last November. “It was, plain and simple, Congress, who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.”

Eugen Robinson:

Unless Ron Paul somehow wins the nomination, it looks as if a vote for the Republican presidential candidate this fall will be a vote for war with Iran.

No other conclusion can be drawn from parsing the candidates’ public remarks. Paul, of course, is basically an isolationist who believes it is none of our business if Iran wants to build nuclear weapons. He questions even the use of sanctions, such as those now in force. But Paul has about as much chance of winning the GOP nomination as I do.

Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have all sought to portray President Obama as weak on national security-a traditional Republican line of attack. Specifically, they have tried to accuse Obama of being insufficiently committed to Israel’s defense. In the process, they’ve made bellicose pledges about Iran that almost surely would lead straight to conflict.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Ilya Sheyman’s Progressive Run

The fight to win back the House-just like the fights to hold the White House and Senate-will not be easy. In order to not only win but to move any kind of agenda that addresses tax equity, environmental policy, immigration reform, housing, you name it, simply reinforcing the current Democratic narrative while being pulled further to the right by the Blue Dogs just isn’t enough. We need a more democratic-note small “d”-House.

We need to elect progressives.

Former Senator Russ Feingold recognizes that need and was moved to make his first endorsement in a Democratic primary since leaving the Senate. On Tuesday, Feingold pledged his support and that of Progressives United-his recently formed group focused on opposing corporate power-to Ilya Sheyman, a 25-year-old community organizer running in Illinois 10th District for a shot at the incumbent, Republican Representative Robert Dold.

George Zornick: February Jobs Report: Beware Austerity

The jobs numbers released this morning contain good news almost across the board: nonfarm payroll employment rose by 227,000 jobs, above the 210,000 predicted by economists. Recent jobs numbers were also revised upwards: the Bureau of Labor Statistics says 284,000 jobs were added in January, not the initial estimate of 244,000. December actually saw 223,000 jobs added, not 203,000. This makes the three best months of hiring since the recession began. [..]

One needs only to look towards Europe to see how steep austerity measures can hamper economic recovery-and progressives are already keying up to prevent that from happening here. “The US economy is finally producing jobs again, but our weak recovery-which has been aided by good public policy-could easily be choked off by stupid budget policies which would condemn a new generation of Americans to joblessness and a bleak future,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. “Americans should be wary of politicians telling us that the economy is recovering enough to turn immediately to cutting public spending.”

Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto: The White House’s Broadening Latino Agenda

Latinos have been stuck between a rock and a hard place. In 2010, Republican state legislatures began an aggressive anti-immigrant campaign. At the same time, Latinos witnessed the administration fail to follow through on its promise for comprehensive immigration reform. Considering how both parties did or didn’t deal with the issue of immigration, it would not be surprising to see Latinos turn away from both parties. However, the issue of immigration alone does not define Latino interests-and moving beyond this single-issue focus will position the Democratic Party as the choice, not just the default option, for Latinos.

The concerns of Latinos are the same concerns of any other folks in the United States. In fact, issues related to the economy, education or healthcare are of even greater concern to Latinos than to non-Latinos. Latinos suffered the greatest decline in wealth during the recession, have the highest high school dropout rates and have the fastest growing rate of childhood obesity. There is no single box in which to fit Latino issues. But the temptation to do so has not prevented Latinos and non-Latinos alike from using the immigration box.

John Nochols: Strange Things Are Happening to Mitt Romney

“I realize it’s a bit of an away game,” Mitt Romney says of campaigning in the Southern states of Alabama and Mississippi-both of which hold primaries Tuesday.

That’s an intriguing choice of words from a GOP front-runner when he talking about meeting and greeting the voters of two heavily Republican states.

But anyone who has paid attention to Mitt Romney’s campaign knows that the entire endeavor is something of an away game.

He barely won his sort-of “home state” of Michigan, and then he even more barely won the neighboring state of Ohio by less than 1 percent of the vote, after failing to connect with blue-collar voters.

In state after state, Romney has prevailed not because he is a popular favorite but because his opposition has been divided. That has allowed the candidate of the one-tenth of the one percent to remain viable. But it has not made him credible.

Mar 09 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”.

Paul Krugman: Ignorance Is Strength

One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the “high school movement” made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education. And after World War II, public support, including the G.I. Bill and a huge expansion of public universities, helped large numbers of Americans to get college degrees.

But now one of our two major political parties has taken a hard right turn against education, or at least against education that working Americans can afford. Remarkably, this new hostility to education is shared by the social conservative and economic conservative wings of the Republican coalition, now embodied in the persons of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney.

And this comes at a time when American education is already in deep trouble.

Joe Conason: Can Obama Muzzle the Dogs of War?

When President Obama disparaged “loose talk about war” against the theocratic regime in Tehran, he wasn’t minimizing the consequences of atomic weapons in the hands of the mullahs. The danger of terrorists acquiring a bomb would be multiplied by a regional arms race. The international nonproliferation regime would be crippled if not destroyed. The prestige of the United States would suffer fresh damage, and yes, Israel would be gravely threatened.

Yet it is hard to understand why anyone-in Washington, Jerusalem or anywhere else-would argue with his view that sanctions, covert action and diplomatic engagement should be exhausted before anybody resorts to bombs and missiles. Unlike his irresponsible critics on the right, Obama cannot ignore the potential costs of another Mideast war, which could wreck fragile economies both here and abroad, increase the peril to U.S. troops in Afghanistan as well as throughout the region, and perhaps escalate into a global conflict of unpredictable scope.

Amy Goodman: The Bipartisan Nuclear Bailout

Super Tuesday demonstrated the rancor rife in Republican ranks, as the four remaining major candidates slug it out to see how far to the right of President Barack Obama they can go. While attacking him daily for the high cost of gasoline, both sides are traveling down the same perilous road in their support of nuclear power. This is mind-boggling, on the first anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, with the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission warning that lessons from Fukushima have not been implemented in this country. Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: They’re going to force nuclear power on the public, despite the astronomically high risks, both financial and environmental.

One year ago, on March 11, 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit the northeast coast of Japan, causing more than 15,000 deaths, with 3,000 more missing and thousands of injuries. Japan is still reeling from the devastation-environmentally, economically, socially and politically. Naoto Kan, Japan’s prime minister at the time, said last July, “We will aim to bring about a society that can exist without nuclear power.” He resigned in August after shutting down production at several power plants. He said that another catastrophe could force the mass evacuation of Tokyo, and even threaten “Japan’s very existence.” Only two of the 54 Japanese power plants that were online at the time of the Fukushima disaster are currently producing power. Kan’s successor, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, supports nuclear power, but faces growing public opposition to it.

New York Times Editorial: Sexual Violence and the Military

The rate of sexual assaults on American women serving in the military remains intolerably high. While an estimated 17 percent of women in the general population become victims at some point in their lives, a 2006 study of female veterans financed by the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that between 23 percent and 33 percent of uniformed women had been assaulted. Those estimates are borne out in other surveys, and a recent Pentagon report on sexual assaults at the service academies found that in the 2010-11 academic year, cadets and midshipmen were involved in 65 reported assaults.

Too often victims are afraid to come forward. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta estimated that the number of attacks in 2011 by service members on other service members – both women and men – was close to 19,000, more than six times the number of reported attacks.

Laurie Penny: That’s Enough Politeness – Women Need to Rise Up in Anger

To get into the UN Commission on the Status of Women, you have to get past several ranks of large armed men. In the foyer, you can buy UN women-themed hats and tote bags, and pick up glossy pamphlets about this year’s International Women’s Day, but what you can’t pick up is the slightest sense of urgency. In the 101 years since the first International Women’s Day, all the passionate politics seems to have been leached out of the women’s movement. [..]Women, like everyone else, have been duped. We have been persuaded over the past 50 years to settle for a bland, neoliberal vision of what liberation should mean. Life may have become a little easier in that time for white women who can afford to hire a nanny, but the rest of us have settled for a cheap, knock-off version of gender revolution. Instead of equality at work and in the home, we settled for “choice”, “flexibility” and an exciting array of badly paid part-time work to fit around childcare and chores. Instead of sexual liberation and reproductive freedom, we settled for mitigated rights to abortion and contraception that are constantly under attack, and a deeply misogynist culture that shames us if we’re not sexually attractive, dismisses us if we are, and blames us if we are raped or assaulted, as one in five of us will be in our lifetime.

John Nichols: The Great Vermont Uprising Against Corporate Personhood

Vermonters went to their town meetings this week to settle questions about dump fees, snowplowing contracts and utility meters.

They also decided to take on the corrupt campaign system that is steering the republic toward catastrophe.

And they have done so in a voice loud enough to be heard all the way to Washington.

By Thursday morning, sixty-four towns reported they had moved to amend the US Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling-as well as the false construct that says, in the words of Mitt Romney, “corporations are people, my friend.”

“Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, Town Meeting Day voters understood that corporations are not people,” declared US Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, a champion of his state’s uprising against corporate personhood. “The resounding results will send a strong message that corporations and billionaires should not be allowed to buy candidates and elections with unlimited, undisclosed spending on political campaigns.”

Mar 09 2012

Greece Succeeds In Averting Another Crisis

The Asia markets rose this morning after the news that Greece has reached a settlement with at least 90% of its bond holders:

The finance ministry said 85.8 percent of its 177 billion euros in bonds regulated under Greek law had been tendered, adding that the rate would reach 95.7 percent with the use of collective action clauses to enforce the deal on creditors who refused to take part voluntarily.

The result should clear the way for the European Union and International Monetary Fund to release a 130 billion euro bailout package agreed with Greece last month. [..]

The biggest sovereign debt restructuring in history will see bond holders accept losses of some 74 percent on the value of their investments in a deal that will cut more than 100 billion euros from Greece’s crippling public debt.

The unknown consequence of this agreement is that it may trigger the credit default swap (CDS) insurance that some investors hold on the bonds. Some economists don’t believe that this would be a problem:

Finance ministers from the 16 other countries that use the euro are to discuss the deal’s results in a conference call later Friday. The International Swaps and Derivatives Association said it would also meet to determine whether the deal would be deemed a so-called “credit event” – a technical default – which would trigger the payment of credit default swaps, which is essentially insurance against a default.

When the debt relief plan was first announced last year, eurozone leaders and the ECB worked hard to avoid a credit event, because they feared the a payout of CDS could destabilize big financial institutions that sold them.

However, since then a CDS payout has started to look less threatening. The ISDA, a private organization that decides on credit events, said that if they are triggered, overall payouts on CDS linked to Greece will be below $3.2 billion. That amount is spread over many financial firms and likely too small to significantly hurt any one of them.

However, the outlook for economic growth anytime soon is grim. The problems that have been inflicted on the average Greek citizen by the austerity measures of this deal still exist and it’s predicted, the situation for them will not be improving for years:

   It’s stunning here in Athens to see many traffic lights not working, to see beggars pawing through garbage for food, to see blackened ruins of shops burned in rioting. I was even greeted by a homeless man who spoke impeccable British-accented English.

   That man, Michael A. Kambouroglou, 35, claims that he studied English literature at Cambridge University and worked for years in the tourism industry, most recently at a five-star hotel. He told me that he had enjoyed a good life, visiting the United States and traveling around the world, until the day nearly a year ago when the collapsing economy caught up with him, and he was laid off.

   “To be honest, I never thought it could come to me,” he recalled. “It happened in a flash.” Kambouroglou says he goes out every morning, knocking on doors and looking for work, but in this economy it seems hopeless. The overall unemployment rate here is 21 percent – 48 percent among young people – and the European Union forecasts that the Greek economy (and all of the euro zone) will shrink further this year.

Without economic growth, the deal may only be buying a little time before it all goes back to square one. There are those who believe that this is just stalling the inevitable default and that the sooner Greece defaults the faster the pain for the Greek people will be relived:

Greece has defaulted five times since 1800, most recently in 1932.

Clearly, Greek’s own experiences reveal there is, indeed, life after default. So what’s the country waiting for?

Well, if its leaders are afraid a default won’t be tolerated in modern times, they need to consider the most recent examples set by Russia and Argentina…

In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in local debt. Within two years, its economy was growing by double-digit rates. And it continued to do so for the better part of a decade under Vladimir Putin’s leadership.

In late 2001, Argentina defaulted on $95 billion in debt. Yet, by the end of 2002, its economy returned to growth. And it continued growing for eight straight years. [..]

Bottom line: As Howard Davies, a former U.K. central banker and financial regulator, says, “It’s too late for Greece [to avoid default].” So let’s pull off the Band-Aid already and get it over with.

It won’t be painless or even remotely enjoyable. But it’s necessary if Greece ever wants to get its financial house in order and its economy growing again.

Mar 08 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”.

Peter Van Buren: The Day ‘Due Process’ Died: Obama, Holder and the End of Rights

Historians of the future, if they are not imprisoned for saying so, will trace the end of America’s democratic experiment to the fearful days immediately after 9/11, what Bruce Springsteen called the days of the empty sky, when frightened, small men named Bush and Cheney made the first decisions to abandon the Constitution in the name of freedom and created a new version of the security state with the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, secret prisons and sanctioned torture by the U.S. government. They proceeded carefully, making sure that lawyers in their employ sanctioned each dark act, much as kings in old Europe used the church to justify their own actions.

Those same historians will remark from exile on the irony that such horrendous policies were not only upheld by Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and professor of Constitutional law, but added to until we came to the place we sadly occupy today: the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, publicly stating that the American Government may murder one of its own citizens when it wishes to do so, and that the requirements of due process enshrined in the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, itself drawn from the Magna Carta that was the first reflowering of basic human rights since the Greeks, can be satisfied simply by a decision by that same president.

Glen Ford: New Data Show Black Students Have Been New Jim Crowed

Newly-released data on the nation’s public schools document what every Black school kid already knows: African American students are far more likely to be suspended or expelled than whites. Most striking, is how closely school discipline data tracks with racial incarceration numbers. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection statistics for the 2009-10 school year, more than 70 percent of students arrested or referred to law enforcement for school related incidents were Black or Hispanic – an approximate match to the ethnic composition of the nation’s prisons.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a much talked about phenomenon, although volume should never be mistaken for clarity. The apparent “tracking” of Blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics, from classrooms to cellblocks, is the direct result of the behaviors of teachers and administrators who perceive and treat Black kids as if they are already criminals – just as cops act on the assumption that Black pedestrians and drivers are probably guilty of…something.

New York Times Editorial: How Good Is the Housing News?

The housing market has shown signs of life recently. Home sales have beat expectations and pending sales neared a two-year high. But prices – the crucial measure of housing-market health – are still falling, driven down by increasing levels of distressed sales of foreclosed properties. That means the market, and the broader economy, which derives much of its strength from housing, are not out of the woods – not by a long shot. [..]

Because the banks held off on foreclosure while the settlement was being negotiated, reclosure filings are set to rise in the coming year to more than two million. That means more pain for struggling homeowners – and the economy. By this point, homeowners should be inundated with relief, not still anxiously awaiting help.

John Nichols: What America Lost When Dennis Kucinich Lost

Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a two-time presidential candidate who for the past decade has been the most consistent critic of war and militarism in the U.S. House of Representatives, was defeated Tuesday in a Democratic primary that pitted him against fellow progressive Marcy Kaptur. [..]

A Congress without Dennis Kucinich will be a lesser branch. It’s not just that the loss of the former leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus will rob the House of its most consistent critic of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and one its steadiest critics of corporate power.

Nicholas D. Kristof: In Athens, Austerity’s Ugliness

Europe declared war on Keynes, and Keynes is winning.

In the United States, Republicans lambaste President Obama’s stimulus package as a failure and insist on bone-crunching budget-cutting. If you want to know how well that works, come visit Europe – especially Greece.

Yes, Greece needed a wake-up whack and economic reform, but Republican-style austerity knocked the patient unconscious. Contrast the still-shrinking economies of Europe with the stirrings of recovery in the United States, and you feel lucky to be an American and a beneficiary of President Obama’s stimulus.

Frances Beinecke: Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline Won’t Ease Gas Prices; Senate Must Reject It

This week the Senate is likely to vote on an amendment that would force approval for the Keystone XL pipeline. President Obama already rejected the dirty tar sands pipeline because it needed a more thorough safety and environmental review.

Yet instead of allowing engineers, public safety, and other experts to assess the pipeline’s sweeping impacts-on American communities, drinking water supplies, and the stability of our climate-this amendment would let the politicians in Congress decide what is safe.

It would bypass our nation’s long-standing environmental review process and give Congress the unprecedented authority to hand out permits on massive projects.

Load more