Tag: Politics

We now live in parallel universes.

One universe is the one in which most Americans live. In it, almost 15 million people are unemployed, wages are declining (adjusted for inflation), and home values are still falling. The unsurprising result is consumers aren’t buying – which is causing employers to slow down their hiring and in many cases lay off more of their workers. In this universe, we’re locked in a vicious economic cycle that’s getting worse.

The other universe is the one in which Washington politicians live. They are now engaged in a bitter partisan battle over how, and by how much, to reduce the federal budget deficit in order to buy enough votes to lift the debt ceiling.

John Nichols: ‘Right-Wing Nutters’ Threaten Global Economy, as IMF Warns of “Disastrous Consequences”

Global markets are slumping, and the dollar is rapidly losing ground in international trading (hitting a record low against the Swiss franc Monday) amid fears that the determination of John Boehner, Paul Ryan and their henchmen to hold the US economy hostage for political purposes could create an international crisis.

Concerns about the Republican refusal to allow the debt ceiling to rise are now being voiced far from Washington. And some of the loudest objections are coming from long-time US allies and governments that led by conservatives.

Britian’s Secretary of State for Business Vince Cable, an economist who serves as a member of Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government, has been particularly blunt in his criticism of the economic madness that is being imposed on the United States-and now the world-by a band of career politicians whose only knowledge of how finance works comes from collecting campaign-contribution checks.

Joe Nocera: This Is Considered Punishment?

Last Wednesday, nearly lost in the furor over Rupert-gate and the debt ceiling crisis, came the surprising news that the Federal Reserve has issued a cease-and-desist order against a Too-Big-to-Fail bank. The bank was Wells Fargo, which was also fined $85 million and ordered to compensate customers it had unfairly – indeed, illegally – taken advantage of during the subprime bubble.

What made the news surprising, of course, was that the Federal Reserve has rarely, if ever, taken action against a bank for making predatory loans. Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, didn’t believe in regulation and turned a blind eye to subprime abuses. His successor, Ben Bernanke, is not the ideologue that Greenspan is, but, as an institution, the Fed prefers to coddle banks rather than punish them. That the Fed would crack down on Wells Fargo would seem to suggest a long-overdue awakening.

Eugene Robinson: The Influence Industry of Rage

The monster who slaughtered at least 76 innocent victims in Norway was animated by the same blend of paranoia, xenophobia and alienation that fuels anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. Yes, it could happen here.

One could argue that it already did, in Oklahoma City. The difference is that Timothy McVeigh’s apocalyptic anger was diffuse and nonspecific. Anders Behring Breivik-who has acknowledged detonating a powerful fertilizer bomb in central Oslo and then killing scores of teenagers and young adults on a nearby resort island-was focused like a laser beam on what he saw as the “threat” posed by Islam.

The judge who presided over Breivik’s arraignment Monday said the accused mass murderer “believes that he needed to carry out these acts to save Norway (from) cultural Marxism and Muslim domination.”

E. J. Dionne: After the Debt Ceiling Fiasco

Hours before the negotiations on the debt limit between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner collapsed, political reporters received a missive from Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign that served as a reminder of how irrelevant this kerfuffle might feel next year.

The headline read, “Romney for President Launches New Web Video: Obama Isn’t Working: Where are the Jobs?”

The video spoke to the difficulties that new college graduates are having finding work in a brutal job market. This bit of campaign propaganda went straight at the core of Obama’s political base-young Americans who volunteered for him by the tens of thousands in 2008 and powered him to victory in state after state. If joblessness disillusions enough of them, the president will be in trouble.

Romney’s exercise was a passing bit of politics unlikely to make many waves in an environment obsessed with debt and fears of default. But it was hugely instructive.

At the time of writing, President Obama’s hoped-for “Grand Bargain” with Republicans is apparently dead. And I say good riddance. I’m no more eager than other rational people (a category that fails to include many Congressional Republicans) to see what happens if the debt limit isn’t raised. But what the president was offering to the G.O.P., especially on Medicare, was a very bad deal for America.

Specifically, according to many reports, the president offered both means-testing of Medicare benefits and a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. The first would be bad policy; the second would be terrible policy. And it would almost surely be terrible politics, too

Ari Melber: On the Compromiser-in-Chief and Elizabeth Drew’s Article

“I’ve never won a tough election,” concedes Paul Krugman, “but neither has Obama!”

The Nobel Prize-winning economist is fuming about the White House’s “ludicrous” view of what independents want — a President, apparently, who embraces anti-spending conservatism.

That’s the core thesis in a new article by Elizabeth Drew, which Krugman flagged Sunday and is now roiling the liberal blogosphere. Drew, 76, is one of the good ones – she spent 19 years as the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, authored 13 books, and has an intimate yet relentlessly independent outlook on Washington. In the New York Review of Books, her political essays are originally reported and exhaustive; this one runs 4,800 words and features some telling anonymous quotes from Democrats in high places.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Why Are Discredited “Agencies” Like S&P Dictating Our Economic Future?

“Who does Standard & Poor’s think it is?” asks Matt Miller, the reasonable and congenial host who represents the “center” on NPR’s “Left, Right, and Center.” Miller’s understandably outraged that this discredited organization still has so much power and influence. But he’s asking the wrong question.

S&P knows exactly what it is, and so should everyone else. It’s the for-profit company which, while masquerading as a credit rating “agency,” bartered its coveted AAA ratings for increased profits. The real question is why? Why does S&P still have the power to cost the government billions of dollars in added interest payments, which is what would happen if they downgraded our credit rating?

The pronouncements of these for-profit “agencies” have no more credibility than the murmured compliments of an overpriced escort in a candlelit hotel room. So why do they still have the power to endanger the financial security of millions of Americans?

Jeffrey Sachs: Budgetary Deceit and America’s Decline

Every part of the budget debate in the U.S. is built on a tissue of willful deceit. Consider the Republican Party’s double-mantra that the deficit results from “runaway spending” and that more tax cuts are the key to economic growth. Republicans claim that the budget deficit, around 10 percent of GDP, has been caused only by a rise in outlays. This is blatantly untrue. The deficit results roughly equally from a fall of tax revenues as a share of GDP and a rise of spending as a share of GDP.

On both sides of the ledger — spending and taxes — part of the shift results from the weak economy (“cyclical factors”) and part from long-term trends. Spending, for example, is higher in part because of unemployment compensation, food stamps, and other federal spending to help the downtrodden in a weak economy. That’s the “cyclical” component. Part of the higher spending reflects long-term patterns, such as rising health care costs and an aging population, as well as America’s chronic addiction to wrongheaded wars and military occupations in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Matthew Rothschild: No Wonder Obama Is Losing Support from the Left

CNN has just come out with a poll that shows Obama losing support from his left flank.

“Roughly one in four Americans who disapprove of the president say they feel that way because he’s not been liberal enough,” the poll said. “Obama’s approval rating among liberals has dropped to 71 percent, the lowest point in his presidency.”

Overall, the poll had Obama with an approval-disapproval rating at 45%-54%.

For anyone within shouting distance of most progressive communities, this is not a surprise.

The dissatisfaction with Obama has been building steadily over the past three years, and it has grown more audible by the month.

While he spoke progressive on the campaign trail, Obama has, for the most part, governed from the corporate center right.

IF China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage.

Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists.

We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength – and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.

Dana Milbank: Dangerous dealings with the Default Caucus

Twenty Republican lawmakers crowded the Senate TV studio last week to issue a threat: Meet their demands, or they will force the United States to default.

The only way to prevent the catastrophe, these Tea Party faithful said, was for the Senate to pass, and the president to sign, their plan to permanently cap spending at levels last seen in 1966, before Medicare made the nation soft.

“We want to make very clear: This is not just the best plan on the table for addressing the debt limit – this is the only plan,” first-term Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) said, vowing that “we’re otherwise going to be blowing past the debt-limit deadline.”

“We have a solution,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.). “It’s the only one that can be passed before the August 2nd deadline.”

This is the language of gangster films: Do as we say – or the girl gets it.

Mark Bittman: Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables

WHAT will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits? The need is indisputable, since heart disease, diabetes and cancer are all in large part caused by the Standard American Diet. (Yes, it’s SAD.)

Though experts increasingly recommend a diet high in plants and low in animal products and processed foods, ours is quite the opposite, and there’s little disagreement that changing it could improve our health and save tens of millions of lives.

And – not inconsequential during the current struggle over deficits and spending – a sane diet could save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs.

Yet the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods. And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn’t matter, because the fixes are not really their problem. Their mission is not public health but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That “other force” should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas: A Doping-Free Tour de France?

SURVIVORS of this year’s Tour de France are to ride into Paris today after racing 2,131 miles over 23 days, including daunting climbs through the Pyrenees and the Alps. For the first time in years, evidence suggests that doping may not be playing the dominant role it once did.

More than any other sport, bicycling has been linked to drugs. Podium finishers in nearly every Tour over at least the last two decades have failed drug tests, admitted to doping or been linked to high-profile investigations.

Viewers have tended to regard the winners with a bit of disbelief.

But the sport appears to have turned the corner and is regaining some credibility, thanks to the antidoping efforts of a new generation of riders, managers and fans. There is, as yet, no conclusive proof of this, as one cannot prove a negative. Still, we now believe that cycling is cleaner than it has been at any time since 1990.

Michelle Alexander’s ground breaking book, The New Jim Crow, is an outstanding expose of the horrors of America’s criminal justice system that are perpetrated against black people. It is well documented proof of what many have long observed, that get tough policies on drug enforcement and “three strikes” laws are targeted towards the masses of often non-violent black Americans and are used to make money for private entities and for all levels of government.

The penitentiary manufactured license plate was long ago joined by more sophisticated methods of exploitation. Prisoners not only work in a variety of jobs without compensation, but are often fined and forced to pay for their incarceration. Obviously they end their sentences owing money and are permanent debtors, susceptible to be consumed by the system again and again.

Jim Hightower: Massey Energy’s Man-Made Hell Hole

Republicans and a few coal-state Democrats have cynically blocked passage of tougher mine safety laws that would stop the murderous greed of coal profiteers.

West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch coal mine was a disaster even before it exploded into an underground inferno last year, killing 29 miners

A new investigative report by federal safety inspectors found that this mine – owned by the enormously profitable Massey Energy Corporation – was essentially a man-made hellhole. Top executives intentionally hid dangerous safety problems from regulators, failed to maintain (and sometimes actually disabled) safety systems, and aggressively pushed a mining ethic of profit over safety, intimidating and firing those who complained about hazards.

Mark Weisbrot: Despite Rightwing Myths, US Health Care Problems Rooted in Private Sector

A recent report by McKinsey and Company was seized upon by opponents of health care reform to create a new myth: that President Obama’s health insurance reform (the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — PPACA) will cause huge numbers of employers to drop health insurance coverage that they currently provide for employees.

The McKinsey study was soon shown to be worthless, and McKinsey itself acknowledged that it “was not intended as predictive economic analysis.” But the myth seems to not be completely dead yet. For a more reasonable estimate of the impact of the health insurance reform, we can look to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. They estimated that the number of people (including family members) covered by employment-based insurance would be about 1.8 percent fewer in 2019, as a result of the PPACA legislation. Of course, this is more than counter-balanced by the fact that the percentage of the (non-elderly) population with insurance would increase from 82 to 92 percent – the main purpose of the reform.

John Nichols: Unions, MoveOn Warn Obama Not to ‘Cave’ in Secret Negotiations With House GOP

The Obama White House is reportedly in the process of negotiating a secret debt deal with House Republican leaders that could include deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The deal would not, according to media reports, significantly or immediately address the need for new revenues that can be derived from fair taxation of the wealthiest Americans.

That’s a bad deal.

Bad for American seniors and Americans who anticipate that one day they will be seniors.

Bad for the American economy.

And bad for Barack Obama politically.

So unions and progressive groups have moved to prevent any deal from moving forward.

MoveOn.org, AFL-CIO, CREDO Action, Democracy for America, PCCC, AFT, Campaign for America’s Future and Change Nation organized an Emergency Call-In Day “to demand Democrats in the House and Senate stand strong and keep their promises to reject any debt deal that slashes programs for seniors and working families while doing little or nothing to make the rich and corporations pay their share.”

For decades, the debate over abortion rights has centered on a single court decision, Roe v. Wade, and the possibility of its overturn. Overturning Roe has become the holy grail of the antichoice movement, and many states have “trigger laws” on the books that would ban abortion immediately should the Supreme Court overturn Roe. Unfortunately for antichoicers, the justices resist overturning precedent; more importantly, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the likely swing vote on any abortion case before the court, upheld Roe on the basis of precedent in 1992. However, the recent surge in state legislation against abortion demonstrates that antichoice activists have figured out a new strategy: eliminating legal abortion without directly overturning Roe.

The Supreme Court granting states the power to ban abortion with Roe still standing seemed outlandish even just a few years ago, but the appointment of John Roberts as chief justice shifted the equation. Roberts specializes in decisions that reverse the spirit of precedent while leaving intact the letter of it, like when he squashed large chunks of Brown v. the Board of Education while claiming to uphold it. To make it legal to ban abortion in the states, all the Court needs is a law that eliminates legal abortion while dodging the logic of Roe v. Wade.

George Zornick: [Gang of Pain: Who Suffers Under the Bipartisan Deficit Reduction Scheme]

President Obama endorsed the Senate’s Gang of Six deficit reduction plan Tuesday, saying that the proposal “is broadly consistent with the approach that I’ve urged” and “makes sure that nobody is disproportionately hurt from us making progress on the debt and deficits.”

However, an examination of the plan’s specifics reveals that corporations and wealthy Americans won’t feel much pain at all-in many cases, just the opposite. The plan slashes taxes and could bring the top personal income rate down as low as 23 percent-meaning CEOs like Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein could see their after-tax income increase by as much as $3 million, according to Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The corporate tax rate would be reduced from 35 percent to between 23 and 29 percent under the proposal. (Supposedly enough loopholes would be closed to keep total revenue from corporate taxes the same. Even in that scenario, corporations won’t pay an extra penny). Military spending also remains virtually untouched.

Eugene Robinson: The Limits of Compromise

Before we make political partisanship a felony, punishable by endless lectures from weather-vane senators and allegedly “wise” commentators, let’s remember that some choices are real, consequential and mutually exclusive.

I’m not talking about the kind of scorched-earth partisanship that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell espouses-the notion that Republicans should favor anything that’s politically harmful to Democrats, never mind what the impact on the country might be. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell said last year, displaying a candor that is all too rare in Washington.

I’m talking about partisanship based on issues, policy options and incompatible philosophies about the nature and purpose of government. Powerful forces are pulling the nation in opposite directions. The danger of too much compromise is that we end up not moving at all.

David Sirota: The Terrorist Threat We’re Ignoring

According to the U.S. government, the list of known bogeymen working to compromise American national security is long, and getting longer by the day. By my back-of-the-envelope count, we have shoe bombers, underwear bombers, dirty bombers and car bombers. Now, we are being told to fear “implant bombers” who will surgically attach explosives to their innards.

All of these threats are, indeed, scary. But the fear of individual attacks has diverted attention from a more systemic threat of terrorists or foreign governments exploiting our economy’s penchant for job-offshoring. How? By using our corresponding reliance on imports to stitch security-compromising technology into our society’s central IT nervous system.

Sounds farfetched, right? That’s what I thought, until I read a recent article in Fast Company. Covering a little-noticed congressional hearing, the magazine reported that a top Department of Homeland Security official “admitted on the record that electronics sold in the U.S. are being preloaded with spyware, malware, and security-compromising components.”

Bernie Sanders: Congrats to the Gang of Six, the Powerful, the Wealthy, and Multinational Corporations

If there was ever a time in the modern history of America that the American people should become engaged in what’s going on here in Washington, now is that time. Decisions are being made that will impact not only our generation but the lives of our children and our grandchildren for decades to come, and I fear very much that the decisions being contemplated are not good decisions, are not fair decisions.

There is increased understanding that that defaulting for the first time in our history on our debts would be a disaster for the American economy and for the world’s economy. We should not do that.

There also is increased discussion about long-term deficit reduction and how we address the crisis which we face today of a record-breaking deficit of $1.4 trillion and a $14 trillion-plus national debt.

One of the long-term deficit reduction plans came from the so-called Gang of Six. We do not know all of the details of that proposal. In fact, we never will know because a lot of the decisions are booted to committees to work out the details.