Tag: Politics

Washington’s notorious revolving door was in full swing again last week as the health insurance industry snagged another top federal official to help it get what it wants out of lawmakers and regulators. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s biggest lobbying and PR group, announced Wednesday that its new president, starting next month, will be none other than Marilyn Tavenner, who served as the chief administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services from 2013 until she stepped down in February.

Tavenner’s appointment comes just a few months after the industry recruitedformer Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz, a Pennsylvania Democrat, to head its newest front group, the Better Medicare Alliance.

These two hires tell us all we need to know about where insurance companies see their pot of gold in the not-too-distant future. Some insurers, in fact, have already discovered that taxpayer-supplied pot of gold and want to make doubly sure that nobody in Washington dares take it away.

Nathan J. Robinson: A frightening proposal to intern Muslim citizens

In the wake of the Chattanooga shooting, a dangerous suggestion appears from right and left

Terrorist violence can make the previously unthinkable suddenly seem acceptable. The levels of surveillance introduced after 9/11 could have been considered reasonable only in the climate of collective panic that the attacks induced. But this week’s reaction to the fatal shooting of four Marines and a Navy petty officer in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by a 24-year-old Muslim has to win the prize for the worst proposed civil liberties infringement to come out of a violent disruption. No matter how high tensions may have run after the Boston Marathon bombing or 9/11, few dared to propose what figures of both left and right have now suggested: the segregation and internment of Muslim citizens. [..]

One might point out, in the first place, that the idea of detaining people for “the duration of the conflict” means, in practice, imprisoning them forever. Since the “war on terrorism” is a fight without end, it will never have some ticker-tape-strewn V-Day, and Clark’s suggestion is for the government to deem particular Muslims too radical to live freely and isolate them permanently in camps.

But more generally, one might inform him that the United States’ heinous civil liberties abuses during World War II are often considered a particularly dark patch in the nation’s history. The rounding up of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans – and their placement in squalid camps – was a racist disgrace that the country apologized for in 1988 and left traumatic scars that last to this day. The lesson supposedly learned was that the humiliation and segregation of an entire ethnic group is an indefensible assault on principles of dignity and equality. Clark, however, appears to have taken this cautionary tale as a useful suggestion.

Lawrence Lessig: The Only Realistic Way to Fix Campaign Finance

FOR the first time in modern history, the leading issue concerning voters in the upcoming presidential election, according to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, is that “wealthy individuals and corporations will have too much influence over who wins.” Five years after the Supreme Court gave corporations and unions the right to spend unlimited amounts in political campaigns, voters have had enough.

Republican candidates, including Chris Christie, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, and the main Democratic candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, all acknowledge the problem, with some tying it to the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which unleashed virtually unlimited “independent” political spending.

The solution proposed by some, notably Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Graham and Mr. Sanders, is amending the Constitution.

It sounds appealing, but anyone who’s serious about reform should not buy it. For a presidential candidate, constitutional reform is fake reform. And no candidate who talks exclusively about amending the Constitution can be considered a credible reformer.

Scott Ritter: On Military Service and Politics

The chattering class is abuzz over erstwhile Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s recent attack of Arizona Senator (and fellow Republican) John McCain’s record of military service. In front of an enthusiastic audience, Trump snidely remarked that he “liked people who weren’t captured,” noting that Senator McCain was a “war hero because he was captured.”

Many pundits have declared that Trump’s attack on Senator McCain has dealt a fatal blow to his bid for the presidency, but such analysis is disingenuous — Donald Trump has never been a serious candidate for president. His presence among the ranks of Republican presidential hopefuls is more a reflection of a certain segment of America’s infatuation with the baser aspects of reality television than any viability as a contender for office. Donald Trump is the Kim Kardashian/Kaitlyn Jenner of American politics — all self-promotion, no substance and, among serious company, downright embarrassing.

AFTER the financial crisis of 2008, there was one thing that almost everyone agreed on. The government-sponsored mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had to go. While shareholders and executives reaped the profits from Fannie and Freddie in good times, taxpayers were stuck with the bill in a crisis. President Obama described their dysfunctional business model as “Heads we win, tails you lose.” But here we are, seven years after the crisis, and nothing has changed.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were meant to make it easier for Americans to buy their own homes. By buying up mortgages issued by other lenders, they enabled the lenders to make more loans. Fannie and Freddie could then package the payments that Americans made on their home mortgages into securities to sell to investors, from big bond funds to foreign central banks. In this way, a saver in China financed the purchase of a home in Kansas.

Charles M. Blow: Sandra and Kindra: Suicides or Something Sinister?

Although the mantra “Black Lives Matter” was developed by black women, I often worry that in the collective consciousness it carries with it an implicit masculine association, one that renders subordinate or even invisible the very real and concurrent subjugation and suffering of black women, one that assigns to these women a role of supporter and soother and without enough space or liberty to express and advocate for their own.

Last week, the prism shifted a bit, as America and the social justice movement focused on the mysterious cases of two black women who died in police custody. [..]

The deaths seem odd: young women killing themselves after only being jailed only a few days or a less than a couple hours, before a trial or conviction, for relatively minor crimes.

And the official explanations that they were suicides run counter to prevailing patterns of behavior as documented by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which has found that, on the whole, men are more likely to commit suicide in local jails than women, young people are less likely to do so than older people, and black people are the least likely to do so than any other racial or ethnic group.

That doesn’t mean that these women didn’t commit suicide, but it does help to explain why their coinciding deaths might be hard for people to accept.

Indeed, because state violence echoes through the African-American experience in this country, it is even understandable if black people might occasionally experience a sort of Phantom Lynching Syndrome, having grown so accustomed to the reality of a history of ritualized barbarism that they would sense its presence even in its absence.

Eric T. Schneiderman: Ending the Crisis of Confidence in Our Criminal Justice System

When President Obama visited a federal prison in Oklahoma last week, he highlighted one of our nation’s most urgent moral issues — the inequitable and ineffective state of our criminal justice system.

In a system that disproportionately harms poor people and people of color, too many Americans have lost faith in the essential American principle of equal justice under law.

Last December, when I called for my office to be appointed as temporary special prosecutor in cases where unarmed civilians die during encounters with police in New York State, I did so in large part to help restore confidence in our justice system.

On July 8, Gov. Andrew Cuomo granted my office that power, an important step towards a renewed public confidence.

However, the crisis of confidence is rooted in far more than those rare, tragic cases in which a civilian dies during an encounter with the police.

Mark Klein: The dismantling of higher education

While researching a recent column for Al Jazeera America on the “killing of tenure” and what it means for the future of higher education, it became clear that the attempts by conservatives to dismantle the institution of tenure, highlighted by the Wisconsin legislature’s removal of previously statutory tenure protections, are only one component of a much wider array of threats to the profession of teaching and research.

For academics lucky enough to have tenure at an “R-1 research university” – one with “extensive” doctoral level graduate programs and support for faculty research as well as teaching – the erosion of traditional tenure protections is damaging because it threatens not only academic freedom but research and teaching that contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to U.S. GDP. The continued downtrend in funding for university research has paralleled and is tied to the erosion of tenure, academic freedom and shared governance more broadly. All these trends are tied to the corporatization of the university; that is, the increasingly privatized model of higher education which does away with shared governance and tenure in favor of centralized administration and contingent labor, puts profits and the bottom line ahead of the public good, and efficiency and “customer service” ahead of a well-rounded education that encourages critical inquiry and independent thought.

Warren urges the candidates (read: Hillary Clinton) to push for legislation that would curb Wall Street’s influence in politics.

 When Senator Elizabeth Warren took the stage at Netroots Nation in Phoenix on Friday, many of the assembled activists hoped she would be coming to them as a presidential candidate-in fact, more than a few of them operated campaigns to convince her to run.

It didn’t work, but the various Draft Warren campaigns, in concert with the Massachusetts senator’s rapid rise in the party, leave her in a unique position to influence the direction of the presidential primary debate. Warren cashed in some of those chips during her speech Friday, issuing a direct challenge to presidential candidates (read: Hillary Clinton) to support specific legislation that would curb some of the financial sector’s influence at federal regulatory agencies.

Amy Goodman: Torture, Impunity and the American Psychological Association

It has been almost a year since President Barack Obama admitted, “in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong. … we tortured some folks.” The administration of Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, carefully crafted a legal rationale enabling what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which is no more than a euphemism for torture. From the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay to the dungeons of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram air base in Afghanistan, countless hundreds, if not thousands, of people were subjected to torture, all in the name of the “Global War on Terror.” With the exception of a few low-level soldiers at Abu Ghraib, not one person has been held accountable. The only high-level person sent to prison over torture was John Kiriakou-not for conducting torture, but for exposing it, as a whistleblower.

The legal facade behind which these heinous acts were conducted relied heavily on the cooperation of professional psychologists, who trained and advised the interrogators and supervised the progress of the “breaking” of prisoners. This cooperation, in turn, was dependent on an official seal of approval from the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization of psychologists in the world. In 2006, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association both barred their members from taking part in military interrogations.

Eugene Robinson: The Iran Deal May Not Be Perfect, but It’s Better Than the Alternative

To understand why the Iran nuclear deal is such a triumph, consider the most likely alternative: war.

Imagine a U.S.-led military strike-not a pinprick but an extended bombing campaign robust enough to eliminate 98 percent of Iran’s enriched uranium, put two-thirds of the Islamic republic’s centrifuges out of action and erase any capability of producing plutonium. Imagine that the attack did so much damage that for the next 10 or 15 years it would be utterly impossible for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Such an outcome would be hailed as a great success-achieved, however, at a terrible cost. [..]

The historic agreement announced Tuesday in Vienna accomplishes what an attack might, but without the toll in blood and treasure that war inevitably exacts. After the agreement expires, critics note, Iran could decide to race for a bomb. But the military option would still be available-and, after years of intrusive inspections, allied war planners would have a much better idea of where the nuclear facilities are and how best to destroy them.

Laura Flanders: Anti-Social Giving to Harvard and Yale

Not so long ago, Yale University received a $150 million gift. That looked like a lot until Harvard scooped up $400 million a few weeks later. Both gifts came from Wall Street speculators – Blackstone Group Founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman and hedge fund executive John S Paulson. Paulson’s donation alone was more money than 98 percent of US colleges have in their endowments, critics pointed out. It shows just how far-reaching inequality has become they said. It also reveals a thing or two about what’s become of our democracy.

As economist Richard Wolff’s pointed out, with their charitable contributions Paulson and Schwarzman gave – in the first case to endow an engineering school and in the second to build an arts center (Yale’s third.) But the multi billionaires also took – from us – the general public, because under the law the two can use their gifts to their alma maters to pay less to Uncle Sam.

Despite Syriza’s surrender, the new bailout agreement makes Grexit more likely in the future

The battle over the future of Europe – currently centered in Greece – is far from over. But this week, it entered a new phase. [..]

Some economists have correctly noted that a default and devaluation that involves creating a new currency presents additional challenges, as compared with Argentina’s abandonment of the peso/dollar peg. But that doesn’t change the basic story. A developed economy does not transform itself overnight into a failed state simply because it leaves a currency union. We can look at the worst financial crises over the past 25 years, and none of them resulted in the kind of economic damage that Greece has already suffered.

Meanwhile, despite the unconditional surrender of the Syriza government and the parliament’s approval of the hated austerity measures that the European authorities demanded, the ECB did not increase its Emergency Liquidity Assistance to Greek banks so that they could open. The banks stayed closed, and the ECB to this day appears to be in no hurry to let up on the accelerated economic damage that it has been deliberately inflicting on the Greek economy over the past few weeks.v

Jessica Valenti: Ellen Pao isn’t harassed because she’s female. It’s because she’s a feminist

You’d be hard-pressed to find a female boss in Silicon Valley who hasn’t faced some sort of harassment, but it’s difficult to imagine that anyone has gotten more hate than former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. From racist “Chairman Pao” memes to hate mail and death threats, Pao has been on the receiving end of some of the worst the internet has to offer. Indeed, in her resignation note on the site, Pao wrote that some of what she’s seen on Reddit “made me doubt humanity,” and she urged users to “remember the human,” noting, “I have a family, and I have feelings.”

It’s clear, though, that what made Pao a target wasn’t solely her gender; She wasn’t just being attacked for being female, but for being a feminist. As Kaliya Young, founder of She’s Geeky, told the Guardian recently, “Ellen was at the center of a high-profile sexual discrimination suit versus a major VC firm and she was put in charge of the teenage boy section of the internet. What did you expect was going to happen? It was inevitable that they would turn on her.”

William C. Anderson: Big business built the prison state. Why should we trust them to tear it down?

This week President Obama launched a major push to fix the country’s criminal justice system and end mass incarceration. The reform talk is coming from both sides of the aisle and unlikely partnerships are being forged between big business interests like the Koch brothers and vocal liberals. But big business is tied to the carceral state, so how can they be part of the solution to end it?

Van Jones, the liberal political commentator, and a Koch representative named Mark Holden recently appeared on Democracy Now where they harmoniously backed Obama’s reform plans. Holden stated that “Charles Koch and David Koch are classical liberals who believe in expansive individual liberties in the Bill of Rights and limited government.” [..]

This language reinforces the idea that the prison system in the United States is a business. The Koch Brothers have been connected to the conservative, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, for some time.

Nathan Newman: Uber: When Big Data Threatens Local Democracy

Big data is threatening to crush local democracy across the country–and if it succeeds, it may distort local transit and infrastructure development for decades to come.

As Uber has sought to dominate the local taxi industry from Delhi to New York City, the company has deployed its multi-billion dollar venture capital war chest to fight politicians across the country and world, often ignoring local laws as it introduced its app and drivers into the heavily regulated taxi industry.  In New York City, a bill has been introduced to limit the growth of the company locally while the City Council studies the implications for the local taxi industry.

Yesterday, Uber added an attack ad against the City’s mayor Bill De Blasio on the front page of its hailing app, melding its attempt to control local taxi service with seeking control of local politics.  In doing so, it highlights the danger of letting multi-billion dollar global corporations control any part of local transit or other infrastructure, since it gives them a stake in distorting local politics as well.

epublican lawmakers never pass up the opportunity to preempt access to abortion, even if that means hurting breast cancer sufferers. Thus, a vote on a bipartisan House bill that would have greenlit commemorative coins for breast cancer research – through donations to Susan G Komen for the Cure and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation – was shelved Tuesday and amended on Wednesday to exclude Komen entirely, because GOP members opposed the fact that Komen donates money to Planned Parenthood.

Let’s go over that again: a potential $8m fundraiser for the nation’s second-most fatal cancer in women was sidelined and then completely altered because one of the two proposed beneficiaries has given relatively small grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings, and Planned Parenthood spends about 3% of its resources on abortions. Apparently, some lawmakers aren’t above also penalizing breasts in the anti-abortion movement’s ongoing attempt to control the nation’s uteruses.

Jason Nichols: Latinos and black Americans have an enemy – and it is not each other

The need for political unity between African-Americans and Latinos is compelling, not least because the futures of African-Americas and Latinos are inextricably linked. We often live in close proximity to one another and both struggle with issues like mass incarceration, racial profiling, police brutality, educational achievement gaps, health disparities, poverty, food deserts and housing discrimination.

There are examples of where political unity between the two groups has yielded desired results, from the election of Harold Washington in Chicago, Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, and most recently, Barack Obama. Dr King knew and supported the work of Cesar Chavez, and met with many other leaders in the Chicano Movement. We cannot afford to allow trumped up (pun intended) scare tactics to divide us.

Michael Brenner: The Iran Big Deal

For more than a decade, Iran’s nuclear program has been near the top of the United States’ Middle East agenda. To be more accurate, Iran has been near the top of the United States’ Middle East agenda. That is to say, the nuclear issue has been vastly inflated — in part as a logical extension of the prevailing view of the IRI as a rogue state driven by demonic impulse; in part, because it was crucial to an all-out campaign to crimp Iran, to deny it the normal prerogatives of a sovereign state, and ideally to topple the current regime. This view prevails to this day — indeed, the representation of Tehran by Washington as the source of disorder in the region has intensified over time. The nuclear accord has changed nothing in the rhetoric of President Obama and his senior officials. In fact, he has taken several steps to align the United States with the Sunni cause against a purportedly Iranian-organized and directed Shi’ite bloc in Islam’s incipient sectarian war. The most extreme, and logically unsupportable, example is participation in the Saudi-led air campaign against the Houthis (and civilians) in Yemen.

John Oliver, comedic anchorman of HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” made feathers fly when he took on the poultry industry in a May 2015 episode. Last week, it became clear that his gripe with Big Chicken had echoed all the way to the Capitol.

Oliver used his HBO show to attack the giant poultry processors – Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Sanderson Farms – for punishing chicken farmers who speak out against terms dictated by the processors (according to a 2001 study, 71 percent of the farmers live below the poverty line) and pitting them against one another through contract farming.

Their efforts, however, may have been in vain this time. Last week, the House Appropriations Committee approved the fiscal year 2016 Agriculture bill and, for the first time in years, the bill did not include a GIPSA defunding rider. The Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee is expected to release and debate its version of the 2016 Agriculture Appropriations bill this week; historically, the Senate has not attached the defunding rider to its legislation.

As it turns out, Oliver’s beef with the chicken giants may have made a difference.

Kristen Steele: Education: The Next Corporate Frontier

Over the last thirty years or so, private corporations have been steadily taking over school systems all around the world. Going hand in hand with “free” trade and development, the privatization of education is simply another step towards corporate control of the entire economy. If you’re tuned in to education news in the US, you may be familiar with the public school closures in Chicago, the so-called Recovery School District in New Orleans, and the proposed budget cuts in Milwaukee that have brought parents, students and teachers into the streets. But few of us hear about how students in Chile have been protesting for nearly a decade against rampant privatization that has increased economic inequality. Or how the UK government recently passed an education act allowing the conversion of all state schools into privately run “academies”. Or how Structural Adjustment Programs and development aid have paved the way for privatization of schools across Africa, which has resulted in reduced enrollment of girls and exclusion of the poorest children. Or how similar takeovers are happening in Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, India, and many other countries.

Privatization exists in different forms, including vouchers, public private partnerships, low-fee private schools, and charter schools. Whatever it’s called, it amounts to the same thing: private corporations gaining control of and profiting from an essential public function. In every country, the identical argument is used: public schools are failing, reform is needed and big business will do it best, providing choice and efficiency. If the statistics don’t match the argument, they are concealed or doctored to fit.

Katherine Paul: House Ag Committee Says ‘No’ to GMO Labeling, What’s Next?

With no debate and only a voice vote, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture today (July 14, 2015) passed out of committee H.R. 1599, a bill to preempt states’ rights to label GMOs. Within hours, it was announced that the bill will go straight to the House floor, as early as next week, with no vote in the Energy and Commerce Committee. [..]

Time and again, independent experts have stated that the cost of labeling GMO foods and ingredients, to manufacturers, retailers and consumers, would be negligible here in the U.S., just as it has been in the more than 60 countries that already require labeling. GMO labels are costless, as pointed out in this Washington Post article. Companies regularly update their food packaging as they come up with new designs or marketing strategies.

And then there was the ultimate lie about GMOs, that they have been “proven safe:”