Tag: Politics

Let us not mince words: The state of Georgia just murdered Troy Davis. The state coroner will list homicide as his cause of death. But he wasn’t the first and, sadly, he won’t be the last person slaughtered in the name of U.S. law and order. There are today dozens more people scheduled to be killed by states, according to Amnesty International. Their likely deaths represent the ultimate act of perversity in a system that destroys untold thousands of primarily black and brown lives every day.

The execution came following a harrowing and wrenching night for Davis’s family and supporters all over the world. Hundreds had gathered for a vigil outside of the Jackson, Ga., prison where Davis was put to death. Literally minutes before Davis’s scheduled 7 p.m. execution, the U.S. Supreme Court delayed the killing in order to review a final appeal. A little over three hours later, news broke that the court had refused to block the execution. He was slain at 11:08 p.m. eastern.

Amy Goodman; 99 Percenters Occupy Wall Street

If 2,000 tea party activists descended on Wall Street, you would probably have an equal number of reporters there covering them. Yet 2,000 people did occupy Wall Street on Saturday. They weren’t carrying the banner of the tea party, the Gadsden flag with its coiled snake and the threat “Don’t Tread on Me.” Yet their message was clear: “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.” They were there, mostly young, protesting the virtually unregulated speculation of Wall Street that caused the global financial meltdown.

One of New York’s better-known billionaires, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, commented on the protests: “You have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs. That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here.” Riots? Is that really what the Arab Spring and the European protests are about?

Jesse Jackson: We Ignore Poverty, But It Is On the Rise

Poor people are invisible in our nation’s capital. Republicans defend the affluent, calling them “job creators,” Democrats champion the middle class and those boldest stand with “working families.” The poor go without mention.

Yet the most recent census reveals that a stunning one in six Americans lives in poverty, more than 46 million, the highest number since the government began keeping track. Poverty is rising across all races and all regions.

Gail Collins: What Would Willow the Cat Do?

Right now you’re probably asking yourself: What has Congress been up to since it raised the debt ceiling?

A lot! The House, for instance, recently passed an important resolution repudiating the raising of the debt ceiling.

These are the moments when it becomes clear why nobody wants to talk about politics anymore. In fact, as a public service, I would like to change the subject and point out that Willow, a cat who disappeared from its home in Colorado five years ago, has been found in New York City. How do you think she got here? By car? By foot? Let’s all talk about that for the next hour or two.

Richard Reeves: America the Passive

BERKELEY, Calif.-Democrats should be building statues of former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, or at least giving away copies of her new book, “A Governor’s Story.”

It’s not that her eight years in Lansing were a roaring success. After all, the state was falling apart in the center of a national disaster, manufacturing jobs disappearing or moving overseas. But now that she is a “former,” teaching at her alma mater, the University of California, she has the freedom to talk about what she learned and say a number of things that need to be heard by Americans who can’t seem to get in their heads the idea that the world has changed. And that America has to change too.

As she told Monica Davey of The New York Times last week, after years of cutting taxes and spending, alienating many of her Democratic supporters, especially union members:

“Everything that is hitting the country hit Michigan first.

The hot new book in Washington, Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, shines a bit of new light on the Obama administration’s lack of support for financial transactions taxes.

According to the book, based on 700 hours of interviews with high-level staff, President Obama supported the idea of placing a small tax on trades of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments. But, as with many other progressive policy proposals, it was blocked by Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary who was serving as Obama’s Director of the National Economic Council.

A major theme of the just-released book is how Summers dominated daily morning economic policy meetings with Obama. Former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag reportedly told Suskind that Summers would often tell the President “I’ll make my argument first; you can go after me.”

Robert Reich: A Good Fight

So the really big fight – perhaps the defining battle of 2012 – won’t be over Medicare. It won’t even be over Obama’s jobs program.

It will be over whether the rich should pay more taxes.

The President has vowed to veto any plan to tame the debt that doesn’t increase taxes on the rich. The Republicans have vowed to oppose any tax increases on the rich.

It’s a good fight to have.

In a Rose Garden ceremony yesterday, Obama proposed new taxes on the wealthy – including a special new tax for millionaires, the closing of loopholes and deductions for people making more than $250,000 a year, and an end to the portion of the Bush tax cut going to higher incomes.

Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz: America’s Costly War Machine

Fighting the war on terror compromises the economy now and threatens it in the future.

Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.

Richard Wolff: The Truth about ‘Class War’ in America

Republicans claim, in Orwellian fashion, that Obama’s millionaire tax is ‘class war’. The reality is that the super-rich won the war

Republicans and conservatives always fight back against proposals to raise taxes on corporations and rich individuals by making two basic claims. First, such proposals amount to un-American “class warfare”, pitting the working class against corporations and the rich. Second, such proposals would take money for the government that would otherwise have been invested in production and thus created jobs.

Neither logic nor evidence supports either claim. The charge of class war is particularly obtuse. Consider simply these two facts. First, at the end of the second world war, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. Today, that ratio is very different: for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it takes 25 cents in taxes on business. In short, the last half century has seen a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation off business and onto individuals.

Maureen Dowd; The Re-election Tango

Whether Bill Clinton is being mischievous or helpful is never entirely clear. But the former president often manages to show the current president just how the game should be played.

When Barack Obama was languishing by the phone in July, yearning to hear from John Boehner on the elusive Grand Bargain, the Big Dog advised blowing off the obstructionists in Congress and invoking the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling.

Clinton will often forcefully – and feelingly – frame the argument for Obama policies that would help the working class in a way that Obama himself, once hailed as a master communicator, can’t seem to muster.

“Class warfare!” scream the Republicans, in a voice usually reserved for phrases such as “Run for your lives!”

Spare us the histrionics. The GOP and its upper-crust patrons have been waging an undeclared but devastating war against middle-class, working-class and poor Americans for decades. Now they scream bloody murder at the notion that long-suffering victims might finally hit back.

President Barack Obama’s proposal to boost taxes for the wealthy by $1.5 trillion over the next decade is a good first step toward reforming a system in which billionaire hedge-fund executives are taxed at a lower rate than their chauffeurs and private chefs.

Paul Krugman: The Bleeding Cure

Austerity is inflicting vast pain now, and killing our future, too.

Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient’s blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb.

Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects.

Joe Nocera: No Extra Credit

What if everything that is happening in Washington right now is just meaningless noise?

What if the Obama jobs plan, the coming deliberations of the supercommittee, the debate over taxing millionaires – what if none of it is likely to make a whit of positive difference for the economy? What if the only thing that matters is something Congress and the president rarely mention, and can do nothing about?

I’ve come to believe this is the case. What is killing the economy is lack of credit. In the aftermath of an asset bubble, invariably the result of too-loose credit, banks don’t just tighten their standards; they practically shut down.

Nick Turse: Obama’s Arc of Instability

Destabilizing the World One Region at a Time

It’s a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called “the arc of instability.”  It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet.  A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them — from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia — Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace.

Garrisoning the planet is just part of it.  The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services are also running covert special forces and spy operations, launching drone attacks, building bases and secret prisons, training, arming, and funding local security forces, and engaging in a host of other militarized activities right up to full-scale war.  But while you consider this, keep one fact in mind: the odds are that there is no longer a single nation in the arc of instability in which the United States is in no way militarily involved.

President Obama will propose a millionaires’ tax as part of the deficit-reduction package to be unveiled Monday. This is a great idea, which has already been branded “class warfare” by the Republicans.

The problem is the rest of the expected speech, which entirely mixes Obama’s message to voters. Obama is widely expected to propose cutting $300 billion from Medicare over a decade, including a widely-leaked increase in the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.

That really is a kind of class warfare, directed against the vast majority of older Americans who cannot afford to buy decent health insurance in the private marketplace.

By contrast, the proposed tax on people who make over a million dollars a year is sensible, and smokes out Republicans as defenders of wrongheaded economics and the very rich.

John Nichols: Thousands Cheer Bernie Sanders’ Appeal to Obama, Super Committee: Make the Rich Pay for Deficits

Declaring that “Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation’s history,” and decrying threats to Medicare and Medicaid that would punish Americans who did not cause the current economic crisis,  Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders brought thousands of progressives from across the Midwest to the feet Saturday, as they cheered his message to President Obama and the congressional “Super Committee”:”We can deal with deficit reduction in a way that is fair and responsible.”

“Instead of balancing the budget on the backs of working families, the elderly, the children, the sick and the most vulnerable,” Sanders said, “it is time to ask the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in this country to pay their fair share.”

Joshua Spivak: The Old Electoral College Switcheroo: The Devastating Consequences of Pennsylvania’s Proposal to Game the Electoral College

With a close 2012 presidential race approaching, Republican-dominated legislature is now looking to deliver a big blow to President Obama’s electoral strategy. The state is debating whether to switch its allocation of its Electoral College votes from the winner-take-all system used by nearly every other state to the congressional district-based system of dividing votes.

The result of such a switch could seriously damage Obama’s chances of reelection. He won 21 electoral votes in Pennsylvania in 2008. Under the district-based system, he would have only won 11. But the effect on 2012 is not the real problem with such a switch — instead it could cause a quadrennial havoc and serve as another body blow to any public confidence in the electoral system.

Eugene Robinson: Where Are All of the Compassionate Conservatives?

Washington – We heard plenty of contradictions, distortions and untruths at the Republican candidates’ tea party debate, but we heard shockingly little compassion — and almost no acknowledgement that political and economic policy choices have a moral dimension.

The lowest point of the evening — and perhaps of the political season — came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about a young man who elects not to purchase health insurance. The man has a medical crisis, goes into a coma and needs expensive care. “Who pays?” Blitzer asked.

“That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul answered. “This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody … ”

Blitzer interrupted: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

As the economy faces the risk of another recession, and the 2012 campaign looms, President Obama has been groping for a response to the biggest crisis of his career. All he has to do is listen to the voters.

The Times and CBS News released a new poll on Friday, and once again we were impressed that Americans are a lot smarter than Republican leaders think, more willing to sacrifice for the national good than Democratic leaders give them credit for, and more eager to see the president get tough than Mr. Obama and his conflict-averse team realize.

So long as the politicians keep reinforcing their misconceptions – and listening only to themselves – the country has little chance of getting what the voters want most: jobs and a growing economy.

Gail Collins: Rick Perry, Uber Texan

YOU think of Rick Perry, you think of Texas. And more Texas. Perry the cowboy coyote-killer, the lord of the Texas job-creation machine, the g-dropping glad-hander with a “howdy” for every stranger in the room. He barely exists in the national mind outside of the Texas connection.

A continuation of the TV series “Dallas” is due in 2012. How long will it take before we fixate on the fact that James Richard Perry is another J. R.?

Some of this is natural – the man is the governor, after all. But we didn’t obsess about the state this way when Governor Bush was the presidential candidate. (We obsessed about the Bushes.) We didn’t talk endlessly about Arkansas when we were evaluating Governor Clinton. (We obsessed about the Clintons.)

The difference is that Perry obsesses about Texas, too. On the campaign trail, he’s the ambassador from the Lone Star State, promoter of the Texas Miracle, filtering almost everything through a Texas prism. On his maiden voyage through the Iowa State Fair, some hecklers were giving him a hard time, the typical hazing for a new face on the national scene, and Perry’s response was instinctive.

Michelle Chen: [In Anti-Government Politics, “Time-Out” on Regulation versus Shortened Lives ]

Seizing upon a reliable “job creation” talking point, conservatives have stoked their war against “big government” by trying to freeze federal actions to protect the public.

The proposed “Regulatory Time-Out Act,” which would impose a one-year moratorium on “significant” new regulations, takes aim at regulations that keep industry from dumping poison in rivers or accidentally blowing up factory workers-in other words, policies that capitalists call “job killers.”

According to the champion of the bill, Sen. Susan Collins, “significant” rules are those “costing more than $100 million per year,” and those projected to “have an adverse impact on jobs, the economy, or our international competitiveness.” The guiding principle of this proposed regulatory kill-switch is a cold cost-benefit analysis that weighs profitability against people’s health and safety.

Jim Hightower: DuPont’s Herbicide Goes Rogue

The company’s landscaping weed-killer turned out to be a tree-killer.

In the corporate world’s tortured language, workers are no longer fired. They just experience an “employment adjustment.” But the most twisted euphemism I’ve heard in a long time comes from DuPont: “We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms,” the pesticide maker recently stated.

How unfavorable? Finito, flat-lined, the tree is dead. Not just one tree, but hundreds of thousands all across the country are suffering the final “symptom.”

The culprit turns out to be Imprelis, a DuPont weed-killer widely applied to lawns, golf courses, and – ironically – cemeteries.

Rather than just poisoning dandelions and other weeds, the herbicide also seems to be causing spruces, pines, willows, poplars, and other unintended victims to croak.

“It’s been devastating,” says a Michigan landscaper who applied Imprelis to about a thousand properties this spring and has already had more than a third of them suffer outbreaks of tree deaths. “It looks like someone took a flamethrower to them,” he says.

The United States is home to 11 million illegal immigrants. The undocumented hold jobs, have children, pay taxes, use government services – and too often live in fear. What is to be done about them? It’s a difficult question, and one the Republican presidential candidates in the last two debates spent a great deal of effort avoiding.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, none of these Republicans favor “amnesty,” and President George W. Bush’s comprehensive solution – tougher enforcement and legalization, with penalties – has gone nowhere. Comprehensive reform is President Obama’s answer, too, which means no Republican today dares support it.

John Nichols: US Supreme Court Blocks Rick Perry From Executing Man ‘Based on the Color of His Skin’

Texas Governor Rick Perry uses his state’s reputation for killing without question to gain applause for his presidential bid from Tea Party audiences that cannot contain their bloodlust. Perry, the frontrunner for the Republican party’s 2012 nomination claims he “never struggled” with questions of justice and injustice, right and wrong, when it comes to approving the executions of Texans.

That’s because, Perry says, “the state of Texas has a very thoughtful, very clear process in place.”

On Thursday night, that “very thoughtful, very clear process” was due to execute the 236th inmate to die on Perry’s watch.

But the latest victim, Duane Edward Buck, had been sentenced to death after an “expert witness” told jurors in Houston that Buck posed a greater threat to public safety because he was African-American.”

David Sirota: University of Hypocrisy

In the firmament of celebrated Americana, there is Mom, apple pie, football and beer-but there most certainly is not marijuana. As it relates to drugs, this bizarre culture has us implicitly accepting that people will inevitably use mind-altering substances. But through our statutes, we allow law-abiding citizens to use only one recreational substance-alcohol-that just happens to be way more hazardous than pot.

Such idiocy is the product of many variables. There’s been interest-group maneuvering and temperance-movement hypocrisy. There’s been hippie-hating rage and reefer-madness paranoia. And, most invisibly, there’s been college.

Though little noticed for its role in America’s selective War on Drugs, the university system has now become a key player shotgunning the oxymoronic “alcohol is acceptable but pot is evil” mentality down the beer-bong-primed throats of America’s youth. To see how it all works, consider the University of Colorado (CU).

Eugene Robinson: Where Are the Compassionate Conservatives?

We heard plenty of contradictions, distortions and untruths at the Republican candidates’ tea party debate, but we heard shockingly little compassion-and almost no acknowledgment that political and economic policy choices have a moral dimension.

The lowest point of the evening-and perhaps of the political season-came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about a young man who elects not to purchase health insurance. The man has a medical crisis, goes into a coma and needs expensive care. “Who pays?” Blitzer asked.

“That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul answered. “This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody … ”

Blitzer interrupted: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

There were enthusiastic shouts of “Yeah!” from the crowd. You’d think one of the other candidates might jump in with a word about Christian kindness. Not a peep.