Tag: Politics

With too much fanfare, the contours of a “grand bargain” on the budget have emerged with a proposal offered by the Senate’s Gang of Six.  It’s a deal that looks a helluva lot more like a Raw Deal than a New Deal or a Fair Deal.

It’s good to get a grip and some perspective at times like these.  That’s why I appreciated Congressman Raúl Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), reminding us that a “Gang of 70” Democrats in the House has already vowed to oppose any deal which cuts benefits in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

“Our Gang of 70-plus has the Gang of Six completely outnumbered,” says Grijalva.  “And with Republicans not voting for any package, period, because of their opposition to a functional economy, House Democrats hold the key to whatever plan can pass Congress.”

Robert Scheer: Sorry Elizabeth, Wall Street Said No

So much for the meritocracy. Despite an elite education, effusive charm and brilliant wit, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has ended up betraying his humble origins by abjectly serving the most rapacious variant of Wall Street greed. They both talk a good progressive game, but when push comes to shove-meaning when the banking lobby weighs in-big money talks and the best and the brightest fold.

The defining moment of Clinton’s capitulation was his destruction of Brooksley Born, the one member of his administration with the courage and prescience to warn him about the unregulated derivatives trading that ultimately led to the housing collapse. For Obama, it is his decision not to nominate Elizabeth Warren to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she fought so hard to create.

Obama’s refusal to take the fight to Senate Republicans by nominating Warren should be taken as the vital measure of the man. This gutless decision comes after the president populated his administration with the very people who created the financial meltdown.

Richard (RJ) EsKow: Could Wall Street Ever Face a “Murdoch Moment”?

History books record an empire’s fall as a series of dates and events. Battles are fought, people resist, elections are called, arrest warrants are issued. But those are just details. An empire really falls in that moment when people stop believing that it’s invulnerable. Whenever the spell is broken, whether it’s by anger or just by awareness, the end becomes inevitable. It doesn’t matter what happens to Rupert or James Murdoch now. They may return to positions of relative wealth and privilege or their lives may take unpleasant turns. Either way, the Murdoch empire has already fallen.

There’s a lesson here for anyone who thinks the safest and surest path to success is by serving the seemingly invincible. Sure, it may lead to riches and power, at least for a while. But you may also wind up like those powerful people in Great Britain who now find themselves struggling with scandal, hiding in fear, or facing terrible legal consequences – all because they believed in Murdoch’s invincibility and served him accordingly. As Martin Luther King often said (and we’ve often quoted), “The moral arc of the Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

John Nichols: Bernie Sanders on’Gang of Six’ Plan: ‘Not So Fast’

With a blessing from President Obama and support even from some deficit-hawk Republicans, momentum is building for the ten-year deficit reduction plan announced Tuesday by the “Gang of Six” Democratic and Republican senators. “Can’t We All Just Get Along” commentators like the proposal, while headlines declare: “Bipartisan Support Builds for Gang of Six $3.7 Trillion Deficit-Reduction Plan.”

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, is typically grumbly, and Senate Democrats are complaining that they may not have enough time to pull everything together before the August 2 debt ceiling deadline. But the cheerleading for the “Gang of Six” plan is considerable and enthusiastic.

“This is a serious, bipartisan proposal that will help stop Washington from spending money that we don’t have, and I support it,” Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander says of the proposal to reduce the deficit by $3.7 trillion over the next ten years with deep spending cuts while increasing revenues by closing tax loopholes.

Greg Sargent: Dear House GOP Member: Raise the Debt Ceiling. Love, Ronald Reagan

Dana Milbank had a provocative column this morning arguing that on the debt ceiling, Dems have become the new party of Ronald Reagan, and that Republicans only honor their alleged hero Reagan in the breach and not the observance. After all, Reagan presided over 18 debt ceiling hikes as President. But for a large swath of today’s House conservatives, the drive to prevent the debt ceiling from being hiked has replaced the now-forgotten push to repeal Obamacare as their number one ideological cause celebre.

Now House liberals have hit on a fun new way of emphasizing this point: They are sending a letter today to every House Republican asking them to raise the debt limit. Only the letter wasn’t written by House liberals. It was written by Reagan himself.

The torture of prisoners in U.S. custody isn’t confined to foreign countries. For more than two weeks, inmates at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison have been on a hunger strike to protest torturous conditions in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) there. Prisoners have been held for years in solitary confinement, which can amount to torture. Thousands of inmates throughout California’s prison system have refused food in solidarity with the Pelican Bay prisoners, bringing the total of hunger strikers to more than 1,700.

Inmates in the SHU are confined to their cells for 22 ½ hours a day, mostly for administrative convenience. They are released for only one hour to walk in a small area with high walls. The cells in the SHU are eight feet by 10 feet with no windows. Flourescent lights are often kept on 24 hours per day.

Solitary confinement can lead to hallucinations, catatonia and even suicide, particularly in mentally ill prisoners. It is considered torture, as journalist Lance Tapley explains in his chapter on American Supermax prisons in The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse.

Amy Goodman: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Eat Humble Pie

“People say that Australia has given two people to the world,” Julian Assange told me in London recently, “Rupert Murdoch and me.” Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, was humbly dismissing my introduction of him, to a crowd of 1,800 at East London’s Troxy theater, in which I suggested he had published perhaps more than anyone in the world. He said Murdoch took that publishing prize.

Two days later, the Milly Dowler phone hacking story exploded, and Murdoch would close one of the largest newspapers in the world, his News of the World, within a week.

On Tuesday, Murdoch claimed before the British House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport that it was his “most humble day.” But what does it mean for a man with no humility to suffer his most humble day? The principal takeaway from the committee hearing must be, simply, that Rupert Murdoch is not responsible for the criminal activities under investigation, from police bribery to phone hacking. When asked if he was ultimately responsible, his answer was simple: “No.” Who was? “The people I trusted to run it and maybe the people they trusted.”

Dean Baker: President Obama’s Big Deal: Cuts for Social Security, But No Taxes for Wall Street

The ability of Washington to turn everything on its head has no limits. We are in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Even though the recession officially ended two years ago, there are still more than 25 million people who are unemployed, can only find part-time work or who have given up looking for work altogether. This is an outrage and a tragedy. These people’s lives are being ruined due to the mismanagement of the economy.

And we know the cause of this mismanagement. The folks who get paid to manage and regulate the economy were unable to see an $8 trillion housing bubble. They weren’t bothered by the doubling of house prices in many areas, nor the dodgy mortgages that were sold to finance these purchases. Somehow, people like former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and his sidekick and successor Ben Bernanke thought everything was fine as the Wall Street financers made billions selling junk mortgage and derivative instruments around the world.

Jon Walker: Catfood Commission II: A Cowardly Attempt to Dodge Democratic Accountability

It currently appears that the most likely resolution to the debt ceiling situation will be the use of the Mitch McConnell-Harry Reid back up plan. This plan will probably include some form of the Catfood Commission II. A bipartisan commission that would work in secret to come up with package that would be fast tracked through Congress. This means the bill wouldn’t go through the proper committees and couldn’t be amended or filibustered.

Fast tracked bipartisan commissions are very popular with some elected officials because they are purposely designed to destroy basic democratic accountability. They are meant to provide cover for politicians who are too cowardly to admit their desire is to pass legislation the electorate doesn’t want.

Jim Hightower: Prison Labor: A Right-wing Jobs Program for America

Here’s the core economic problem we’re facing today: Unemployment and underemployment are rampant and entrenched throughout America, stifling any hope for real recovery and threatening the very survival of the essential middle class that holds our society together.

The solution? Our ideologically pure, laissez-fairyland leaders in Washington and various state capitals, along with corporate funded think tank geniuses and Wall Street gurus, are pushing a massive jobs program across America. Great, just what we need! Uh … no. Unfortunately, theirs is not a program to create jobs, but a coordinated effort to add to America’s jobless hordes by eliminating hundreds of thousands of public-service jobs. If ignorance is bliss, they must be ecstatic!

They’re wallowing in the ecstatic right-wing mythology that prosperity will magically arise if only government budgets can be gutted, mainly by eliminating public employees. Yet, by going on a firing rampage that is targeting everyone from school librarians to NASA engineers, these political and economic elites are shoving the entire U.S. economy back into the Great Recession, or worse.

It is time to stop giving Herman Cain’s unapologetic bigotry a free pass. The man and his poison need to be seen clearly and taken seriously.

Imagine the reaction if a major-party presidential candidate-one who, like Cain, shows actual support in the polls-said he “wouldn’t be comfortable” appointing a Jew to a Cabinet position. Imagine the outrage if this same candidate loudly supported a community’s efforts to block Mormons from building a house of worship.

But Cain’s prejudice isn’t against Mormons or Jews, it’s against Muslims. Open religious prejudice is usually enough to disqualify a candidate for national office-but not, apparently, when the religion in question is Islam.

Joe Nocera: The Tables Are Turned on Murdoch

You have to love the fact that when John Yates resigned on Monday as the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London – a k a Scotland Yard – he complained about the “huge amount of inaccurate, ill-informed and, on occasion, downright malicious gossip” that had finally forced his hand.

My first thought was: He didn’t really say that, did he? My second thought was: Can any human being truly be that unaware?

New York Times Editorial: Signing Away the Right to Govern

It used to be that a sworn oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution was the only promise required to become president. But that no longer seems to be enough for a growing number of Republican interest groups, who are demanding that presidential candidates sign pledges shackling them to the corners of conservative ideology. Many candidates are going along, and each pledge they sign undermines the basic principle of democratic government built on compromise and negotiation.

Both parties have long had litmus tests on issues – abortion, taxation, the environment, the social safety net. The hope was that the candidates would keep their promises, and, when they didn’t, voters who cared deeply about those issues could always pick someone else next time. Human beings, after all, do not come with warranties.

Roger Cohen: The Cameron Collapse

Peter Oborne, writing in the conservative Daily Telegraph, recently suggested that the Conservative British prime minister, David Cameron, was not merely in a mess, he “is in a sewer.”

That seems about right. Cameron lost it over Rupert Murdoch. He showed staggering lack of judgment in hiring Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor, as his first director of communications at Downing Street, a hubristic decision made against the best advice and apparently with a dual aim: to show he was not an old Etonian “toff” and to get favorable treatment from the 37 percent of the British print media owned by Murdoch.

He then spent a fair chunk of time during his first year in office in 26 meetings with various News Corp. honchos, including Rebekah Brooks, who was arrested by the British police Sunday.

John Nichols: Elizabeth Warren Says She’ll Consider Massachusetts Senate Run

On Sunday, when President Obama let it be known that he would not appoint Elizabeth Warren as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it was pretty clear that the Harvard law professor who has become a hero to progressives was going to need a new approach to Washington. It was equally clear that the logical approach was to consider making a run for Ted Kennedy’s old US Senate seat representing Massachusetts.

Warren agreed.

Asked Monday whether she would consider making a run for the seat now occupied by US Senator Scott Brown, R-Wall Street, Warren replied: “I’ve been working 14 hours a day on trying to stand this… agency up, really for more than a year now…. It’s time for a little vacation for me. When I go home, I’ll do more thinking then. But I need to do that thinking not from Washington.”

George Zornich: Who Is Richard Cordray?

When Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a liberal member of the House Financial Services Committee, heard over the weekend that President Obama had nominated Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he wasn’t sure what to think. Not because he was unsure about Cordray’s record- Gutierrez just didn’t know who he was.

“I am not familiar with Attorney General Richard Cordray, but a quick Google search was very reassuring,” Gutierrez said in a statement Monday. “He is the type of strong, experienced leader we need to get the agency fully up and running.”

Cordray may have a very low national profile, but in Ohio-where he’s been active in Democratic politics since the early 90s, and served as state attorney general for two years beginning in 2009-he’s much more of a known commodity.