Tag: Politics

Tomorrow’s 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s declaration of the War on Drugs comes amid growing recognition that the policy, and all that it wrought, is a complete disaster.

Shifting priorities toward a more sensible approach that offers treatment rather than punishment for addicts may seem like a daunting task but public opinion is increasingly opposed to the war on drugs, and many states facing tight budgets are de-emphasizing expensive criminalization in favor of strategies that decrease the penal population.

As Sasha Abramsky explained in an extensively reported and still-timely 2009 piece, “out of economic necessity and because of shifting mores, the country will likely get more selective, and smarter, about how it uses incarceration and whom it targets for long spells behind bars.”

Johann Hari: Cheap Meat, MRSA and Deadly Greed

If they aren’t stopped soon, the WHO warns we are facing a ‘doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics’

Here is a news story that could determine whether you live or die. Many of the world’s scientists are warning that one of the mightiest weapons doctors have against sickness is being rendered useless – so a few people can get richer, for a while. If they aren’t stopped soon, the World Health Organization warns we are facing “a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics”. It will be a world where transplant surgery is impossible. It will be a world where a simple appendix operation will be as routinely lethal as it was in 1927, before the discovery of penicillin. It will be a world where pneumonia and TB and gonorrhea are far harder to deal with, and claim many more of us. But it’s a world that you and I don’t have to see – if we act on this warning now.

As the scientists I’ve interviewed explain it, antibiotics do something simple. They kill, slow down or stall the growth of bacteria. They were one of the great advances of the 20th century, and they have saved millions of us. But they inherently contain a problem – one that was known about from very early on. They start an arms race. Use an antibiotic against bacteria, and it kills most of it – but it can also prompt the bacteria to evolve a tougher, stronger, meaner strain that can fight back. The bacteria is constantly mutating and dividing. The stronger the antibiotic, the stronger some bacteria will become to survive. It’s Darwin dancing at super-speed.

Joe Conason: Washington’s Deeper Immorality Washington’s Deeper Immorality

While the well-deserved departure of Anthony Weiner draws rapt attention in our tabloid nation, the depredations of less colorful but more powerful politicians go unnoticed, so long as no genitalia are involved.

At the moment, for instance, Republican leaders in the House and the Senate are mounting yet another series of assaults on some of the most vulnerable Americans-the poor single mothers who cannot feed their children, and the long-term unemployed who still have no prospect of work nearly two years after the recession supposedly ended.

Hardly anyone other than a lobbyist would normally pay much attention to the machinations of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, but that is where truly indecent behavior is running rampant these days. Members of that subcommittee, who oversee the Women, Infants and Children (or WIC) federal nutrition support program for the poor, recently decreed reductions in its annual funding, just as food prices are rising more rapidly than in many years.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court tried to bolster public trust in the nation’s justice system by disqualifying a state judge in West Virginia from a case that involved a coal company executive who had spent more than $3 million to help get the judge elected.

At a time when torrents of special interest campaign spending is threatening the appearance and reality of judicial impartiality, the ruling in Caperton v. Massey drove home the need for states to adopt more rigorous rules for recusal. The message has largely gone unheeded.

Richard Reeves: Here We Go Again: Reform in California

Forget the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Callista Gingrich’s jewelry collection and Anthony Weiner’s … well, you know. The most important political people right now are 14 Californians you don’t know. They are the members of the Citizens Redistricting Commission of this great state.

American elections are rarely decided by debates in New Hampshire or even hundreds of millions of dollars in television advertising. By and large, American elections are determined by who comes out to vote, the fine print of election laws and squiggly lines on state maps. Except for presidential elections, which can surprise you, more than 90 percent of congressional and legislative elections are decided before ballots are even printed.

Robert Scheer: Seven Republican Dwarfs

They assumed the stance of the Seven Dwarfs, not as a matter of physical but rather intellectual stature. Not one of the candidates for the GOP presidential nomination who debated Monday night rose to a point of seriousness in addressing the nation’s grievous problems. Instead, they ever so playfully thumbed their collective noses at any possible meaningful government reaction to the mess that we are in. It was Herbert Hoover warmed over, leaving Barack Obama secure in the mantle of FDR whether he deserves that tribute or not.

Obama, who has been inconsistent and weak in reining in the Wall Street greed that got us into this deep economic morass, is now under no pressure from the opposition to improve his performance. The Republican knee-jerk reaction-government bad, big business great, and don’t dare say that the Wall Street scoundrels who created this crisis need a timeout-gets Obama off the hook from legitimate criticism he needs to hear. As The Wall Street Journal headlined the non-debate: “Candidates Run Against Regulation.”

Glen Ford: How the Corporate Right Divided Blacks from Teachers Unions and Each Other

Back in the mid-Nineties, devious right-wing activists at the Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee, hit upon a “wedge” issue designed to wreck the alliance at the core of the Democratic Party’s urban base. Blacks and public employee unions – particularly teachers – were the foundations of Democratic power in the cities. Aware that African Americans revered education but were often in conflict with largely white teachers unions over issues of racism and community control, the Bradley gang, under president Michael Joyce, created out of whole cloth a “movement” for publicly-funded vouchers for private schools. No such Black community “demand” had ever existed, but well-aimed infusions of millions of dollars among opportunistic politicians like Cory Booker, a first term city councilman who aspired to become mayor of Newark, New Jersey, grafted Black faces onto a Hard Right corporate scheme to divide key progressive constituencies: Blacks and unions.

Ever wonder what happens to the premiums you pay for your health insurance?

You might be surprised to learn that more and more of the dollars you pay for coverage are being sucked into a kind of black hole.

It doesn’t really disappear, of course. It just doesn’t do you a bit of good — unless, of course, you believe it is to your advantage that it ultimately winds up in the bank accounts of a few investors and insurance company executives, including those who have to power to deny coverage for potentially life-saving care.

If you’ve been paying attention to what health insurance company CEOs have been saying to Wall Street over the past several months, you will know that they are spending more and more of their firms’ cash — which comes from you, of course — to “repurchase” their firms’ stock. And Wall Street absolutely loves that.

Glenn Greenwald: Yet Another Illegal War – Now in Yemen

Both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post report today that the Obama administration is planning to exploit the disorder from the civil war in Yemen by dramatically escalating a CIA-led drone bombing campaign.  In one sense, this is nothing new.  Contrary to false denials, the U.S., under the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been bombing Yemen for the last two years, including one attack using cluster bombs that killed dozens of civilians.  But what’s new is that this will be a CIA drone attack program that is a massive escalation over prior bombing campaigns; as the Post put it: “The new tasking for the agency marks a major escalation of the clandestine American war in Yemen, as well as a substantial expansion of the CIA’s drone war.”

Leaving aside the standard issue — that continuously slaughtering civilians in the Muslim world is going to exacerbate every problem which ostensibly justifies the bombing, beginning with Terrorism — Kevin Drum asks the obvious question:

   Exactly what theory of military action allows President Obama to do this without congressional approval? In Afghanistan and Nicaragua in the 80s, you could argue that we were merely funding allies, not fighting a war ourselves. In Grenada and Panama, you could argue that we were merely pursuing small-scale police actions.

In an astonishing observation, Rep. Paul Ryan recently declared: “Washington has not been honest with you.”

Gosh, Paul, that possibility never occurred to us!

What makes the Wisconsin lawmaker’s observation astonishing is the fact that he is Washington – a seven-term Republican insider, House budget chairman, and author of the GOP’s ideologically contrived budget-whacking plan that kills America’s enormously popular Medicare program.

But Ryan didn’t mean to point his finger at himself. No, no. He meant those dastardly Democrats who’ve dared to tell the public about his proposal to replace Medicare with a privatized voucher scheme. Understandably, the public is now angry with Ryan and his Republican cohorts. Hence, he is scurrying around in a shamefully dishonest PR campaign to accuse the Democrats of – what else? – dishonesty. Ryan’s plan, he asserts, would give seniors “the same kind of (health insurance) system members of Congress enjoy today.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Gridlocking the Lives of the Jobless

Welcome to the miserable world of no-way-out politics.

The economy needs another jolt, but Congress is in gridlock. Democrats, or most of them, realize that their political futures and the well-being of millions of households hang on whether unemployment can be brought down. Yet Republicans have the capacity to block even the smallest steps forward.

Here’s what the Democrats’ agony looks like from the inside. Last Thursday, Senate Democrats devoted their weekly policy lunch to a simple question: What proposals to spur job creation have any chance of passing Congress, given Republican control of the House and the effective veto power the GOP has in a Senate where a simple majority no longer rules?

Chris Hedges: No Justice in Kafka’s America

In Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law” a tireless supplicant spends his life praying for admittance into the courts of justice. He sits outside the law court for days, months and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted. He sacrifices everything he owns to sway or bribe the stern doorkeeper. He ages, grows feeble and finally childish. He is told as he nears death that the entrance was constructed solely for him and it will now be closed.

Justice has become as unattainable for Muslim activists in the United States as it was for Kafka’s frustrated petitioner. The draconian legal mechanisms that condemn Muslim Americans who speak out publicly about the outrages we commit in the Middle East have left many, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, wasting away in supermax prisons. These citizens posed no security threat. But they dared to speak a truth about the sordid conduct of our nation that the state found unpalatable. And in the bipartisan war on terror, waged by Republicans and Democrats, this ugly truth in America is branded seditious.

Amanda Marcotte: “Shoot the Slut:” The 21st Century Backlash Is All About Sex

As Susan Faludi demonstrated in “Backlash,” attitudes about gender and sexuality tend to be cyclical.  Women’s success in the workplace, especially, has a tendency to create anti-feminist backlashes.  As Faludi documented, the 80s backlash in response to the normalization of professional work for women took shape in demands that women embrace more feminine-submissive behaviors and fashions, the idolizing of housewives as perfect women, and attacks on reproductive rights.

Despite the previous anti-feminist administration, the past couple of decades have been good for women: education levels rose to meet and exceed men’s, women’s leadership became more normalized from Condie Rice to Hillary Clinton, and the public debate over sexual harassment in the 90s was won by feminists (though social disapproval of it remains no more than an inch deep).  Even the existence of the feminist blogosphere can be counted as a major triumph.  The tendency of news magazines to periodically declare feminism “dead” can’t withstand the overwhelming online evidence that feminism is very much alive.

Peter Rothberg: Barbie’s Rainforest Destruction Habit Revealed

In less than three days, close to one million people have viewed an online spoof video featuring the moment Ken discovers, to his horror, that Barbie is involved in rainforest destruction, and almost 200,000 e-mailers have swamped Mattel’s offices complaining about the company’s use of packaging products from Indonesian rain forests.

Indonesia has one of the fastest rates of forest destruction in the world. The Indonesian government estimates that more than one million hectares of rainforests are being cleared every year, so time is not on our side.

The campaign is being led by Greenpeace International after the organization’s investigators used forensic testing, “in country” investigation, mapping data and the tracing of company certificates to reveal that Barbie’s packaging is being produced by Asia Pulp and Paper, Indonesia’s most notorious rainforest destroyer.

One of the great contributions that the progressive reformers of a century ago made to the politics of Wisconsin and the nation was the open primary.

Before Robert M. La Follette and the Wisconsin progressive movement placed the issue of how candidates were nominated for partisan offices at the forefront of the national agenda, the designation process was controlled by political bosses who took money from the robber barons of the Gilded Age and then nominated Republican and Democratic candidates who owed their allegiance to the bosses and the political paymasters rather than the people.

La Follette decried “the menace of the political machine” and detailed the corruption of the American political system by corporations, wealthy individuals and their stooges.

Shanus Cooke: The Rich Are Destroying the Economy

Ever since the Great Recession shook the foundations of the U.S. economy, President Obama has been promising recovery. Evidence of this recovery, we were told, was manifested in the massive post-bailout profits corporations made. Soon enough, the President assured us, these corporations would tire of hoarding mountains of cash and start a hiring bonanza, followed by raising wages and benefits. It was either wishful thinking or conscious deception. The recent stock market meltdown has squashed any hope of a corporate-led recovery.

The Democrats fought the recession by the same methods the Republicans used to create it: allowing the super rich to recklessly dominate the economy while giving them massive handouts. This strategy, commonly referred to as Reaganomics or Trickle Down Economics, is now religion to both Democrats and Republicans; never mind the staged in-fighting for the gullible or complicit media.

Farzaneh Milani: Saudi Arabia’s Freedom Riders

THE Arab Spring is inching its way into Saudi Arabia – in the cars of fully veiled drivers.

On the surface, when a group of Saudi women used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to organize a mass mobile protest defying the kingdom’s ban on women driving, it may have seemed less dramatic than demonstrators facing bullets and batons while demanding regime change in nearby countries. But underneath, the same core principles – self-determination and freedom of movement – have motivated both groups. The Saudi regime understands the gravity of the situation, and it is moving decisively to contain it by stopping the protest scheduled for June 17.

The Dow ended the week below 12,000 for the first time since March. This is the sixth straight week of downs for the Dow. It’s almost as bad over at the Nasdaq. All the gains racked up in 2011 have now been erased.

What’s going on?

The real economy is catching up with the financial economy, as it always does eventually. Wall Street is built on smoke and mirrors, while the real economy is based on jobs and wages. Smoke and mirrors can only take you so far – as we learned so painfully three years ago.

Jobs and wages stink, if you haven’t noticed. They’ve been bad for months, even before this week’s data made it fairly clear the recovery has stalled.

Eileen Appelbaum: No Tax Holiday for Multinational Corporations

If you think that “double Irish” and “Dutch sandwich” are schoolyard jump rope games girls play, think again. These are the nefarious, but legal, games that hundreds of multinationals play to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. According to a report by Bloomberg, Google used these techniques to cut its tax rate to 2.4 percent and its taxes by $3.1 billion over the three years from 2007 through 2009. The company’s top two markets by revenue are the US, with a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, and the UK, with a 28 percent rate, yet Google – using practices widely employed by global companies – dramatically reduced its tax rate.

At the heart of this strategy is the transfer of rights to intellectual property developed in the US – often, as in Google’s case, with early research funded by US taxpayers through the National Science Foundation – to a subsidiary in a low-tax country. Foreign earnings based on the technology are then attributed to the subsidiary. Google transferred its search and advertising technology for much of the world to its Irish subsidiary at a price sanctioned in 2006 by the IRS. But even the much-vaunted low Irish taxes were not low enough for Google. That’s where the “double Irish” and the “Dutch sandwich” come in.

Michelle Alexander: Think Outside the Bars: Real Justice Means Fewer Prisons

A white woman with gray hair pulled neatly into a bun raises her hand. She keeps it up, unwavering and rigid, as she waits patiently for her turn to speak. Finally, the microphone is passed to the back of the room, and she leaps to her feet. With an air of desperation she blurts out, “You know white people suffer in this system, too, don’t you? It’s not just black and brown people destroyed by this drug war. My son, he’s been in the system. He’s an addict. He needs help. He needs treatment, but we don’t have money. He needs his family. But they keep givin’ him prison time. White people are hurting, too.” She is trembling and sits down.

There is an uncomfortable silence in the room, but I am in no hurry to respond. I let her question hang in the air. I want people to feel this discomfort, the tension created by her suffering. The audience is overwhelmingly African American, and a few of them are visibly agitated or annoyed by her question. I’ve spent the last forty minutes discussing my book, The New Jim Crow. The book argues that today, in the so-called era of colorblindness, and, yes-even in the age of Obama-racial caste is alive and well in America. The mass incarceration of poor people of color through a racially biased drug war has birthed a new caste system. It is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow.

Michael Winship: The Perils of Ignoring Science

A local NPR reporter was talking with Joseph Nicholson, CEO of Red Jacket Orchards in Geneva, New York, up in the neck of the upstate woods where I was born and raised. There’s been a lot more rain than usual, he said. Produce hasn’t been exposed to sufficient “heat units” — in other words, the sun.

“We’re going to be at least two weeks behind in harvest or ripening,” he said, and if the skies don’t brighten up soon, yields could be down 30 to 35 percent. That’s a lot of lost apples — and cherries, peaches and plums (although the rhubarb is doing just fine, thanks for asking).

As upstate kids we were told — apocryphally — that the only part of the world more overcast than us was Poland, so the idea that all these years later it’s cloudier than ever is startling. Is this part of manmade climate change?

Nicholas D. Kristof: When Food Kills

The deaths of 31 people in Europe from a little-known strain of E. coli have raised alarms worldwide, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Our food often betrays us.

Just a few days ago, a 2-year-old girl in Dryden, Va., died in a hospital after suffering bloody diarrhea linked to another strain of E. coli. Her brother was also hospitalized but survived.

Every year in the United States, 325,000 people are hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s right: food kills one person every two hours.

Yet while the terrorist attacks of 2001 led us to transform the way we approach national security, the deaths of almost twice as many people annually have still not generated basic food-safety initiatives. We have an industrial farming system that is a marvel for producing cheap food, but its lobbyists block initiatives to make food safer.