Tag: Politics

Jul 14 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Dean Baker: Hard Work With Jeb Bush

In describing his economic agenda last week, Republican president candidate Jeb Bush said that “people need to work longer hours.” While he quickly tried to walk this one back, there can be little doubt that Mr. Bush meant what he said. It came in the context of describing his plans to get to his absurd target of 4.0 percent annual GDP growth.

This isn’t the first time Bush had said that he wanted to get more work out of people. Back in April he called for raising the normal retirement age for Social Security benefits. (It’s not clear he realized that the retirement age has already been raised to 66 and will soon be increasing to 67.)

Certainly Bush is not alone. There are people in both parties who argue that people need to work more. This comes up in a variety of contexts, like reducing the number of workers getting disability benefits or weakening requirements for overtime pay. While Bush’s comments may have been poorly chosen for a presidential candidate, they represent a commonly held view in policy debates.

Kirk Douglas: An Open Letter to All Those Who Would Be President

If you want my vote in November of 2016, I am asking you to do something right now.

America has never formally acknowledged and apologized for the unspeakable evil of slavery. So I am asking Republicans and Democrats alike to apologize to the American people. Our continued refusal to apologize for slavery still shames and divides our nation. It is past the time to heal.

I have lived a long time — 98 years — and I have seen many incredible things. [..]

I hope to live long enough to see one of the candidates promise an apology for slavery. We cannot erase our history, but we can pledge that hatred will be banished from our great land.

Norman Soloman: Perpetual war creates endless consequences

Democrats who once spoke out against Bush’s militarism have enabled Obama’s

When the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, began this month by issuing a farewell report on U.S. military strategy, the gist was hardly big news. “Dempsey to Pentagon: Prepare for the Never-Ending War” read the headline on the cover page of the National Journal.

The “war on terror” now looks so endless that no one speculates anymore about when it might conclude. “This war, like all wars, must end,” President Barack Obama declared in a major speech more than two years ago. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” But midway through 2015, this war seems as interminable as ever. [..]

It does not have to be this way. America need not propagate what Martin Luther King Jr. aptly called “the madness of militarism.” But to turn away from perpetual war, many people will first need to overcome party loyalties and summon the kind of resolve that King showed in challenging the tragic folly of war policies coming from a Democrat in the White House.

Bill Blum: Is Antonin Scalia Off His Rocker or Just a Sore Loser?

Has Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia completely lost his mind? Or is he better understood as the court’s biggest sore loser, who just can’t accept the fact that his colleagues roundly rejected his blustery constitutional and statutory interpretation when they ruled last month in favor of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges and Obamacare in King v. Burwell.

Although I favor sore-loser explanation over the Mad-Hatter analysis there are good reasons to answer both questions in the affirmative. They are not, after all, mutually exclusive. [..]

With his churlish response to Kennedy, the long arc of Scalia’s tenure is now clearly bending toward travesty and, even more importantly, isolation. He’s become the judicial equivalent of the proverbial old man screaming at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. He may be crazy or angry or a little of both. What matters most is that he’s on his way to becoming irrelevant.

Jul 13 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: The Laziness Dogma

Americans work longer hours than their counterparts in just about every other wealthy country; we are known, among those who study such things, as the “no-vacation nation.” According to a 2009 study, full-time U.S. workers put in almost 30 percent more hours over the course of a year than their German counterparts, largely because they had only half as many weeks of paid leave. Not surprisingly, work-life balance is a big problem for many people.

But Jeb Bush – who is still attempting to justify his ludicrous claim that he can double our rate of economic growth – says that Americans “need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.”

Mr. Bush’s aides have tried to spin away his remark, claiming that he was only referring to workers trying to find full-time jobs who remain stuck in part-time employment. It’s obvious from the context, however, that this wasn’t what he was talking about. The real source of his remark was the “nation of takers” dogma that has taken over conservative circles in recent years – the insistence that a large number of Americans, white as well as black, are choosing not to work, because they can live lives of leisure thanks to government programs.

Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan: Cybersecurity, Encryption and The Golden Age of Surveillance

The Internet, the electronic nervous system of the planet, has changed human society, profoundly altering the way we conduct our lives. It has been a great leveler, allowing people to connect, publish and share on a global scale. You can write, shop and bank online, or organize a demonstration that could overthrow a dictatorship. But the Internet also opens us to intense monitoring, exposing our most personal, private communications to the prying eyes of corporations and government spies, not to mention criminals. One way we can protect ourselves is with encryption, which provides security for our data, allowing us to send and store digital information safely, essentially scrambling the information. In order to unscramble it, you need a key, a password. The ability of regular people to access encryption tools has prompted the governments of both the United States and the United Kingdom to propose special access to all communications. They want a master key to everyone’s digital life.

FBI Director James Comey appeared before a Senate Committee on Wednesday, July 8, along with U.S Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates. As the meeting convened, the frailty of our networks was on display for the world: The New York Stock Exchange was shut down for half a day, supposedly due to a computer “glitch”; United Airlines grounded flights when it lost access to its computer systems; and The Wall Street Journal website was down due to “technical difficulties.” The Senate panel was called “Going Dark: Encryption, Technology, and the Balance Between Public Safety and Privacy.” “Going Dark” is a term used when people encrypt their communications. A joint statement from the duo, delivered by Yates, acknowledged “citizens have the right to communicate with one another in private without unauthorized government surveillance – not simply because the Constitution demands it, but because the free flow of information is vital to a thriving democracy.”

Despite the lofty pledge, Comey and others in the so-called intelligence community want unlimited access to all communications, all the time. They want what digital security experts call “extraordinary access mandates.”

George Zornick: Obama Won’t Let Some Mass Graves Stop the TPP

 When Congress finally passed fast-track trade authority last month, there was a major problem for President Obama and his trade negotiators: a provision of the bill forbid any fast-tracked trade deal from including countries on Tier 3 of the State Department’s human trafficking list.

 That’s the worst classification the United States gives to countries in its Trafficking In Persons annual report, a status earned by countries like Zimbabwe, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and North Korea. Also on the list: Malaysia, one of the 12 potential signatories to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that is in the final round of negotiations this month.

Malaysia is home to many “outsourcing companies” that are, in reality, professional slaving operations: foreign workers, often refugees fleeing desperate situations in nearby countries like Burma, are recruited to the country with the promise of legitimate work but then subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking. The State Department and international human rights groups have routinely concluded the Malaysian government does very little to inhibit the traffickers’ operation.

Robert Kuttner: Delusion in the Desert

I’m here at Planet Hollywood as the token liberal to participate in two debates — one on what is killing the American Dream; the other a mock trial of the Federal Reserve. Paul Krugman is also here, debating the cause and cure of inequality. We’re outnumbered about a thousand to one.

The annual FreedomFest convention of some 2,000 libertarian conservatives is doubly surreal. What better setting for libertarian dreams than fantastical Las Vegas — the free market as casino, made flesh.

Like casino operators, these libertarians live on fantasies. They inhabit an imagined universe where markets never do anything wrong and government never does anything right. This is comforting because it is true by definition and thus resists any evidence to the contrary. Mostly they are very nice, idealistic people, if sweetly delusional about economics.

Patrick Cockburn: We Can All Get by Quite Well Without Banks – Ireland Managed to Survive Without Them

A 1970 strike in Ireland provoked an admirable outbreak of ingenuity – Greece should take note

Television reporters stand in front of the shut doors of banks in Athens and speak as if a few days more of bank closure brings the Greeks that much closer to catastrophe. Media coverage dwells obsessively on the theme that for Greece it is five minutes to midnight, but somehow midnight never comes. Shuttered banks are a striking physical symbol of economic disaster, but even they are not proof that the final dénouement is at hand.

I recall a six-and-a-half month strike that closed all banks in Ireland in 1970 which was meant to have similarly calamitous results as predicted for Greece today, but in fact had very little destructive impact. Contrary to expectations, Irish people rapidly found other ways of carrying out the functions previously performed by the banking industry. The economist Michael Fogarty, who wrote the official report on the bank dispute, was quoted by the Irish Independent as saying that “the services of the clearing banks proved by no means as indispensable as would have been expected before the dispute”. Others take the example of the Irish bank strike as evidence that much of what banks do is a “socially useless activity”.

A 1970 strike in Ireland provoked an admirable outbreak of ingenuity – Greece should take note

John Nichols: What Is Scott Walker Trying to Hide?

As the Wisconsin governor prepares to announce his candidacy for president, his office admits involvement in an attempt to gut open-records laws.

As he prepares to launch his 2016 presidential bid, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is caught up in a hometown controversy that is going from bad to worse.

The governor-whom former White House counsel John Dean refers to as “more Nixonian than Nixon”-has never been much for transparency. But a botched attempt by his legislative allies to gut the state’s open-records law has blown up on Walker in a big way. [..]

 But Walker danced around questions about whether he or his aides were involved in the ham-handed attempt to make it dramatically harder for citizens and journalists to review his official actions at a point when he is stepping onto the national stage.

That’s understandable, as getting caught out on an attempt to undermine open government is not usually considered the right move on the eve of announcing one’s presidential candidacy.

Jul 12 2015

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on this Sunday’s “This Week” are: 2016 GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina; and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ).

The roundtable guests are: Republican strategist and pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson; Democratic strategist and CNN political commentator Van Jones; ABC News’ Cokie Roberts; and Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren.

Face the Nation: Mr. Dickerson’s guests are: Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (D-OH); Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT); and Sen. Tom Cotton (R- AR).

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: The guests on this Sunday’s “MTP” are: Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC); and Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN).

The roundtable guests are: Matt Bai, Yahoo! News; Arthur Brooks, President, American Enterprise Institute; Doris Kearns Goodwin, American Biographer; and Maria Hinojosa, host, NPR’s “Latino USA.”

State of the Union with Jake Tapper: Mr. Tapper’s guests are: 2016 Democratic presidential candidate former senator and Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton; 2016 GOP presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC); and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s two sons, Alex Walker and Scott Walker, Jr.

Jul 11 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial Board: Psychologists Who Greenlighted Torture

The first detailed accounts of the brutal interrogation program the Central Intelligence Agency established after the Sept. 11 attacks noted that psychologists and other medical professionals played key roles in abetting the torture of terrorism suspects. However, much about their role and their degree of responsibility in one of the most macabre and shameful chapters of American history has remained shrouded in secrecy. [..]

On Friday, Physicians for Human Rights justifiably called on the Department of Justice to begin a criminal investigation into the psychologists association’s role in the Bush administration’s torture program.

“As mental health professionals, our first obligation must be to our patients,” said Dr. Kerry Sulkowicz, a psychiatrist and the vice chairman of the board of Physicians for Human Rights, in a statement. “The A.P.A.’s collusion with the government’s national security apparatus is one of the greatest scandals in U.S. medical history.”

The Obama administration has so far refused to prosecute the torturers. As more evidence about this program comes to light, that position becomes increasingly indefensible.

Yanis Varoufakis: Germany won’t spare Greek pain – it has an interest in breaking us

Greece’s financial drama has dominated the headlines for five years for one reason: the stubborn refusal of our creditors to offer essential debt relief. Why, against common sense, against the IMF’s verdict and against the everyday practices of bankers facing stressed debtors, do they resist a debt restructure? The answer cannot be found in economics because it resides deep in Europe’s labyrinthine politics.

In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent.

Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks.

Eugene Robinson: South Carolina’s Confederate Flag: Bringing Down a Twisted Fantasy

For most of my life, a flag representing white supremacist violence against black people flew at the capitol of my native state. It is a very big deal that this emblem of hatred and oppression is finally coming down.

Gov. Nikki Haley was expansive after the state Legislature finished action early Thursday on a bill consigning the Confederate battle flag to the museum displays where it belongs: “It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of.” I have to entertain the notion that she may be right.

In the South, William Faulkner wrote, the past isn’t even past. The flag represented, for some white South Carolinians, a past that was invented out of whole cloth-a past in which something other than slavery was the cause of a conflict Southerners called the “War Between the States.”

Joe Conason: Benghazi! Why Trey Gowdy Is Concealing Blumenthal Deposition

The strange saga of the House Select Committee on Benghazi continues as its chair, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., fends off renewed questions about the committee’s purpose, as well as demands to release the sworn deposition of Sidney Blumenthal, taken behind closed doors on June 16.

In a CNN interview, Hillary Clinton-the actual target of Gowdy’s investigation-recently brushed off accusations about her use of a private email server and mocked his partisan probe. [..]

Gowdy answered by reiterating previous claims that only his committee’s intrepid work had revealed Clinton’s email practices. [..]

Evidently, Gowdy prefers his staffers to leak the Blumenthal testimony, in order to smear both Clinton and the witness he claims to be protecting. For weeks, snippets of Blumenthal’s testimony and of his emails to and from Clinton have turned up in the media, to advance negative, highly distorted perceptions of both the former secretary of state and her longtime friend.

Meanwhile the Gowdy-led committee has learned little of real significance, despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars. But they have keenly pursued matters of partisan interest, such as Blumenthal’s work for Correct The Record, a political committee that publicly defends Clinton and other Democrats, and Media Matters for America, the watch dog against right-wing misinformation in the media. David Brock, the founder of both groups, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland lieutenant governor who chairs Correct The Record’s board sent a sharply worded letter with a simple demand.

Jul 10 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Greece’s Economy Is a Lesson for Republicans in the U.S.

Greece is a faraway country with an economy roughly the size of greater Miami, so America has very little direct stake in its ongoing disaster. To the extent that Greece matters to us, it’s mainly about geopolitics: By poisoning relations among Europe’s democracies, the Greek crisis risks depriving the United States of crucial allies.

But Greece has nonetheless played an outsized role in U.S. political debate, as a symbol of the terrible things that will supposedly happen – any day now – unless we stop helping the less fortunate and printing money to fight unemployment. And Greece does indeed offer important lessons to the rest of us. But they’re not the lessons you think, and the people most likely to deliver a Greek-style economic disaster here in America are the very people who love to use Greece as a boogeyman. {..]

The point is that if you really worry that the U.S. might turn into Greece, you should focus your concern on America’s right. Because if the right gets its way on economic policy – slashing spending while blocking any offsetting monetary easing – it will, in effect, bring the policies behind the Greek disaster to America.

Dean Baker: Jeb Bush wants us to work more for the collective good. Who’s the socialist now?

Former governor Jeb Bush’s announcement this week that he thinks people should work more hours puts him in direct opposition to the two leading contenders on the Democratic side – both of whom are pushing proposals that will allow people to work less. This could mean that 2016 will be an election in which work hours play a central role.

Bush’s comment came during a speech in which he listed the things that Americans need to do to reach his target of 4.0% annual GDP growth “as far as the eye can see”: increase labor force participation, work longer hours, and increase productivity. (It was not the first time that Bush said that he thought people should work more – he previously argued for raising the normal retirement age for Social Security.)

The sight of someone who was raised in privilege and relied on family connections to make his careers in business and politics telling the rest of the American public that they have to work more will make good fodder for Bush’s political opponents. But this position is actually held by many people in policy circles in both political parties.

Rep. Alan Grayson: Why Don’t Democrats Vote? I’ll Tell You Why.

As you may have heard, Democratic turnout dropped off a cliff again last year, just like it did in 2010. I was wondering why, so I asked. I polled Florida non-voters. I found that the main reason why they didn’t vote last year was simple: They couldn’t see any difference between the candidates. When there is no difference between the candidates, Democrats don’t vote, and Democrats lose.  [..]

As Gov. Howard Dean has said, if you offer people a choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they will choose the real Republican every time. And they did. Getting back to our poll, we focused on people who actually could have voted, not permanent residents, convicted felons whose rights had not been restored or children. We offered the non-voters 12 different reasons to explain why they hadn’t voted. Reason #1, the most “popular,” was that “people did not like either choice for Governor.” Forty-one percent of the Democratic non-voters said that this was the main reason why people didn’t vote. [..]

The voters deserve a choice. In fact, they insist on it. Or they simply won’t vote.

Dave Johnson: Enormous, Humongous May Trade Deficit Slows Economy

The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the May goods and services trade deficit was an enormous, humongous $40.9 billion, up a bit from an enormous, humongous $40.7 billion in April.

Our enormous, humongous trade deficit is a measure of how many jobs, factories, companies and industries we are losing to our pro-Wall Street trade policies. A trade deficit drains our economy of wealth, jobs and future economic opportunity. [..]

When you close a factory in the U.S., move the jobs and production to a low-wage, low-democracy country, and bring the same goods back to the U.S. to sell in the same stores this “increases cross-border trade.” But since this trade is going in one direction, it also increases our trade deficit, which hurts our economy. Moving the jobs to places where the workers are exploited means that a few investors and executives can pocket the difference in what is paid in wages and environmental protection costs, while impoverishing the workers and communities on all sides of the trade borders.

And to top it off, the U.S. doesn’t even make these companies pay their taxes, so we literally get nothing back for the lost jobs and wages.

Isaiah J. Polle: Schumer Takes the Low Road to Fund a Transportation Bill

Key Democrats in the Senate on Thursday worked to ratchet up the pressure on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, calling for him in a letter to move forward with a long-term transportation bill before federal authorization for the program expires at the end of the month.

But one of the signatories to the letter to McConnell, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), has poisoned the effort by adding to the debate a corporate tax giveaway plan that would leave behind crumbs for these desperately needed transportation investments. He is winning the applause of conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and is looking to move a sweeping plan to slash corporate taxes through Congress. From the progressive movement, it should be receiving loud expressions of scorn and an uprising to block it. [..]

The problem is that, as the Schumer-Portman framework makes explicit, that tax would be “a one-time transition toll charge at a rate significantly lower than the statutory corporate rate” of 35 percent. It is, in effect, a reward to multinational corporations for using schemes to shunt the profits from U.S. sales through overseas subsidiaries that are often little more than a post-office box in a low-tax country. Plus, the “transition toll” is a transition to a more permanent lowering of corporate tax rates – at a time when the federal taxes corporations pay as a share of the national economy is already at a historic low.

Musa al-Gharbi: America’s biggest terror threat is from the far right

The US should use its monitoring tools on extremists of all stripes

According to a New America Foundation report, right-wing extremists have killed nearly twice as many Americans through domestic terrorism as “jihadists” have since 9/11. However, the same database shows that Muslims constitute a much higher percentage of those indicted on terrorism charges or killed when confronted by authorities. Despite being responsible for only 35 percent of the terrorism casualties, they account for 60 percent of terrorism indictments. The reason for the discrepancy is that right-wing extremists tend not to be monitored or investigated as heavily.

Shortly after President Barack Obama’s election – particularly after a groundbreaking 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on the threat of right-wing extremism – Republican lawmakers, along with conservative media and lobbying groups, argued that the White House was politicizing the term “extremism” in order to deploy law enforcement against otherwise lawful dissidents, such as those affiliated with the tea party. [..]

There was no discussion of the threat posed by these ideologues at the recent White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism. In fact, law enforcement and national security agencies are generally hesitant to refer to acts committed by right-wing ideologues as terrorism.

Jul 09 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: The FBI doesn’t want to have to force tech companies to weaken encryptio

The director just wants every device and software manufacturer to volunteer to create backdoors for the government to snoop on Americans

It’s never a good sign when you have to declare during a debate that “I really am not a maniac.”

But that’s what FBI director Jim Comey found himself saying in advance of his testimony to the senate on Wednesday where he once again argued that tech companies need to figure out a way to install backdoors in all their communications tools so that there’s never an email, text or phone call that the US government can’t get its hands on. [..]

The entire premise of the debate that the FBI is “going dark” and can no longer read the communications of criminals – which they have been claiming for 20 years, by the way – is false, as the law professor Peter Swire later told the same senate panel. We are living in “the golden age of surveillance,” Swire argued, and we can look no further than the countless stories about NSA mass surveillance that have come out in the past two years, which by the way, could not be done without the FBI’s close assistance.

Comey says all he wants is a “debate” about the issue. Well, we’ve had the debate. We had it for 20 years. The debate is over – embrace encryption to protect our security. Don’t outlaw it for marginal gains at the expense of everyone.

David Cay Kohnston: How private equity cheats pensions at workers’ expense

Spoiler: It’s all about public policy

It’s time for American workers to understand the game of private equity, because it’s being played at their expense, thanks to rules put in place by Congress.

Here’s how the game currently works: Workers sell their jobs, pensions and futures, for little to nothing in return. The buyers are those masters of unproductive capital acquisition, private-equity funds.

Their game is short term. Companies are acquired with lots of borrowed money. (Congress incentivizes this by making interest a tax-deductible business expense.) Some of the borrowed money is almost immediately used to repay the general partner and some other investors so they end up with a cost-free stake. If your equity stake costs less than zero, your returns are infinite.

The remaining equity in such deals comes primarily from pension funds – that is, from workers.

Rep. Alan Grayson: Why Is Everyone Angry? I’ll Tell You Why

This is a short essay on voter anger — its origin, its attributes, its meaning and its cure. Hint: Most Americans are worse off than they were a long time ago.

I started noticing voter anger around 2009. Initially, its locus was the Tea Party. They’re the ones who would form a circle around a political event, holding hands, and start chanting expletives. I attributed this to the Tea Party’s deep dissatisfaction with living in the 21st century. To them, basically, everything went south when Jane Wyatt stopped playing Robert Young’s Stepford wife on Father Knows Best, and started playing Spock’s mother, Amanda … Grayson, on Star Trek. (Does that mean that Spock and I are future relatives? I don’t know.) For them, things have never been the same since.

Generally speaking, the problem for Team Blue is not anger; it’s apathy. However, by roughly the year 2012, Team Blue had caught up in the Anger Games, and the score was tied. [..]

But here is the deeper explanation for all of that anger: For most Americans, life simply is getting harder. This was painfully obvious from a Sage Foundation study last year, following up on an article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The study looked at changes in the wealth of American households over a decade, from 2003 to 2013. The study found that median net worth had dropped by 36 percent, from $87,992 to $56,335.

Let me repeat that: The net worth of the average American household dropped by more than one-third in ten years. The decline from the 2007 peak was almost 50 percent, in just six years. (Most of that loss was in the value of one’s home — home is where the heartache is.)

That’s why everyone is so angry.

Dean Baker: Sluggish economy? Blame the weather

Ignore economics writers who make grand conclusions about short-term data

Economists and economic reporters tend to get carried away about short-term movements in the economy. They often assess data without considering the larger context, which can lead them to exaggerate the good or bad news. And since most economists and economic reporters move in herds, we get dramatic tales of booms and busts in the business section that don’t necessarily correspond to anything in the real world. [..]

There is a banal explanation for this rapid switch from boom to bust, as well as for the original boom itself: the weather. The weather was unusually bad throughout the Northeast and Midwest this year, and snowfall in major metropolitan areas such as Boston hit new records. When it’s cold, when there’s a lot of snow on the ground and when the streets are blocked, people are less likely to go out to dinner or shop for clothes. They are also likely to put off buying a car or looking for a new house. As a result, consumption is likely to be much weaker than would otherwise be the case.

Of course, Boston and dozens of other cities get snow almost every winter; this routinely disrupts peoples’ regular consumption patterns. That’s why our data are seasonally adjusted; it doesn’t matter that we get six inches or a foot of snow in the Northeast if that’s what was expected. It only skews the numbers when we get six feetof snow, which was the case in Boston this year. So when winter is worse than usual, the economy – in real life, and particularly in the papers – suffers.

Diane Ravitch: Arne Duncan’s Legacy

When Obama was elected, many educators and parents thought that Obama would bring a new vision of the federal role in education, one that freed schools from the test-and-punish mindset of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. But Arne Duncan and Barack Obama had a vision no different from George W. Bush and doubled down on the importance of testing, while encouraging privatization and undermining the teaching profession with a $50 million grant to Teach for America to place more novice teachers in high-needs schools. Duncan never said a bad word about charters, no matter how many scandals and frauds were revealed. [..]

It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education. He exceeded the authority of his office to promote a failed agenda, one that had no evidence behind it. The next president and the next Secretary of Education will have an enormous job to do to restore our nation’s public education system from the damage done by Race to the Top. We need leadership that believes in the joy of learning and in equality of educational opportunity. We have not had either for 15 years.

George Monbiot: Greece is the latest battleground in the financial elite’s war on democracy

Greece may be financially bankrupt, but the troika is politically bankrupt. Those who persecute this nation wield illegitimate, undemocratic powers, powers of the kind now afflicting us all. Consider the International Monetary Fund. The distribution of power here was perfectly stitched up: IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes.

The IMF is controlled by the rich, and governs the poor on their behalf. It’s now doing to Greece what it has done to one poor nation after another, from Argentina to Zambia. Its structural adjustment programmes have forced scores of elected governments to dismantle public spending, destroying health, education and all the means by which the wretched of the earth might improve their lives. [..]

The crushing of political choice is not a side-effect of this utopian belief system but a necessary component. Neoliberalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, as people will always rebel against the austerity and fiscal tyranny it prescribes. Something has to give, and it must be the people. This is the true road to serfdom: disinventing democracy on behalf of the elite.

Jul 09 2015

Eric Holder Returns to His Roots

After six years of protecting them, former Attorney General Eric Holder triumphantly returned to his roots, the law firm where he defended Wall Street and the banking industry before his appointment as AG. As though this was ever in doubt.

Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Barack Obama’s former top cop cashes in after six years of letting banks run wild

Eric Holder has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling. The former attorney general decided against going for a judgeship, saying he’s not ready for the ivory tower yet. “I want to be a player,” told the National Law Journal, one would have to say ominously.

Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.

The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history’s great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.

Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street’s favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses. [..]

In this light, telling reporters that you’re going back to Covington & Burling to be “engaged in the civic life of this country” seems like a joke for us all to suck on, like announcing that he’s going back to get a doctorate at the University of Blow Me.

Holder doesn’t look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world’s richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.



The transcript can be read here

Eric Holder Returns as Hero to Law Firm That Lobbies for Big Banks

By Lee Fang, The Intercept

After failing to criminally prosecute any of the financial firms responsible for the market collapse in 2008, former Attorney General Eric Holder is returning to Covington & Burling, a corporate law firm known for serving Wall Street clients.

The move completes one of the more troubling trips through the revolving door for a cabinet secretary. Holder worked at Covington from 2001 right up to being sworn in as attorney general in Feburary 2009. And Covington literally kept an office empty for him, awaiting his return.

The Covington & Burling client list has included four of the largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Lobbying records show that Wells Fargo is still a client of Covington. Covington recently represented Citigroup over a civil lawsuit relating to the bank’s role in Libor manipulation.

Covington was also deeply involved with a company known as MERS, which was later responsible for falsifying mortgage documents on an industrial scale. “Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and several other large banks,” according to an investigation by Reuters.

The Department of Justice under Holder not only failed to pursue criminal prosecutions of the banks responsible for the mortage meltdown, but in fact de-prioritized investigations of mortgage fraud, making it the “lowest-ranked criminal threat,” according to an inspector general report.

Jul 08 2015

CVS Ditches US Chamber of Commerce

Last week the New York Tines reported that the US Chamber of Commerce was working to fight anti-tobacco measures in foreign countries:

The U.S. Chamber’s work in support of the tobacco industry in recent years has emerged as a priority at the same time the industry has faced one of the most serious threats in its history. A global treaty, negotiated through the World Health Organization, mandates anti-smoking measures and also seeks to curb the influence of the tobacco industry in policy making. The treaty, which took effect in 2005, has been ratified by 179 countries; holdouts include Cuba, Haiti and the United States.

Facing a wave of new legislation around the world, the tobacco lobby has turned for help to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with the weight of American business behind it. While the chamber’s global tobacco lobbying has been largely hidden from public view, its influence has been widely felt.

Letters, emails and other documents from foreign governments, the chamber’s affiliates and antismoking groups, which were reviewed by The New York Times, show how the chamber has embraced the challenge, undertaking a three-pronged strategy in its global campaign to advance the interests of the tobacco industry.

In the capitals of far-flung nations, the chamber lobbies alongside its foreign affiliates to beat back antismoking laws.

Last year the drug store chain CVS stopped selling tobacco products. Now, in light of the Chamber’s activity on behalf og the tobacco lobby, CVS has announced that it is resigning its membership.

“We were surprised to read recent press reports concerning the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s position on tobacco products outside the United States,” David R. Palombi, a senior vice president at the company, said in a statement. “CVS Health’s purpose is to help people on their path to better health, and we fundamentally believe tobacco use is in direct conflict with this purpose.” [..]

The campaign runs counter to efforts by some of the chamber’s members. Four health care companies that serve on its board – Anthem, the Health Care Service Corporation, the Steward Health Care System of Boston and the Indiana University Health system – all support antismoking programs. [..]

For CVS, which has 7,800 locations nationwide, the move is the latest step in rebranding itself as a health care destination, rather than a convenience store with a pharmacy. The company now operates nearly 1,000 walk-in clinics staffed by nurse practitioners.

Its executives have said that selling cigarettes is not consistent with its new strategy. The company has begun offering smoke cessation programs and recently helped conduct a smoke cessation study involving its employees and their relatives and friends.

“We believe the chamber has advocated for many important causes over the years, and we thank them for their leadership on these issues,” Mr. Palombi said. “Given the leadership position we took last year in removing tobacco products from our stores, however, we have decided to withdraw our membership in the chamber.”

Jul 08 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Will Europe’s Leaders Come to their Senses About Greece?

The Greeks have made their choice. Faced with two painful alternatives, they chose to stand with their elected leaders and to reject overwhelmingly the harsh, unending austerity that their creditors demanded. Now Europe’s leaders must make their choice. Will they come to their senses and open new negotiations with the Syriza government? Or will they remain unbending, force Greece into official bankruptcy and inexorably out of the euro?

Too much of what has been reported in the U.S. media in these last, fraught weeks has echoed fulminations of the creditors that distort reality. Syriza has been painted as a party of the extreme left, with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government depicted as irresponsible and irreverent. This scorn comes from troika functionaries committed to enforcing utterly ruinous policies and whose behavior towards a democratically elected government has been insulting in the extreme.

Polly Jones: TTIP in the EU: Rejecting Democracy at Every Turn

After many twists and turns, MEPs decide today what sort of Transatlantic Trade and Investment deal (known as TTIP) they want the European Commission to negotiate on their behalf with the USA.

Negotiations were launched with many grand statements at the G8 Summit in Lough Erne in July 2013. TTIP was to be Europe’s saviour from austerity and to be the blueprint for all future world trade, wherever it takes place in the world. [..]

Trade deals have traditionally been about lowering particular tariffs for imports and exports of goods from one country to another. Trade is not as simple as that any more and for TTIP tariffs are a tiny part of the negotiations because tariffs between the EU and US are virtually non-existent these days. Trade in TTIP is about issues that are relevant and important to us all: from which services are publicly provided, to the safety of the food on our plates; from the regulations which keep us safe at work, to the very decisions governments can make in the best interests of us all. TTIP is so broad, we have every reason to be bothered about its contents.

But trade deals are not negotiated with any real democratic accountability. On TTIP we have seen democracy thwarted at every turn.

Roisin Davis: Something’s Missing From Pope Francis’ ‘Radical’ Vision of Equality: Women

Pope Francis this week embarked on a seven-day “homecoming” tour of Latin America on his unstoppable quest to defend the planet and the poor.

The continent-the most unequal region in the world, and the Argentine pontiff’s home turf-will likely provide fertile ground for more of his legendary sermons on poverty and inequality. After addressing a crowd of a million in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on Monday, Francis is scheduled to attend a meeting of grass-roots political activists and visit one of the continent’s largest prisons, in Bolivia, as well as a slum and a children’s hospital in Paraguay.

While he advocates for South America’s impoverished and disenfranchised, its prisoners, its indigenous peoples and its children, one group is unlikely to feature in Francis’ apparently radical agenda: its women.

Despite his efforts to champion his constituency-the world’s poor, of which the vast majority are women-the pope tends to overlook the feminized nature of poverty and inequality.

Amy B. Dean: Wisconsin swindled by Scott Walker’s jobs scam

When corporations fail to deliver on promises to create jobs, taxpayers deserve real accountability

Over the course of the last month, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been scrambling to do damage control in the wake of revelations about one of his signature economic programs.

In the name of creating jobs, this trademark initiative of the potential Republican presidential candidate handed hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to businesses across the state. But Walker’s administration apparently neglected to check if these companies actually hired any new employees as a result.

Wisconsinites have been understandably roiled – but this is not a problem that’s confined to their state.

Across the country, “economic development” programs in states such as Texas, Florida, Michigan and New York are handing out public resources to private hands in the name of spurring “job creators.” Astoundingly, they often fail to uphold even the most minimal level of accountability and oversight over how this public money is used.

The solution to this problem is simple: When corporations fail to deliver on job creation promises, they should be forced to pay back the money.

Jessica Zimmerman: Rightwingers think capitalism’s great – if you’re selling something they like

Part of the reason crowdfunding draws so much ire is that it necessarily happens before the product is a reality. It’s the old-as-the-hills technique of the “presale” – small manufacturers take money to reserve a product before it’s made, so they know what demand is and avoid overproducing (It’s also related to the even more venerable Proper Capitalist approach that you might know as “looking for investors”.) There’s nothing new or weird about it, presuming that your belief in the free market economy is sincere. The atheist shoes, the inflatable Lionel Richie head, the TARDIS launch – these pass without comment, or at least without outrage. It’s their money, right? One born every minute.

And yet, when a woman entrepreneur like Ijeoma Oluo or Anita Sarkeesian asks for investments or gauges interest pre-production, it’s taken as begging at best, a con at worst. How dare they just ask for money? That’s not what leaning in means! Well OK, it is what it means, but you’re not supposed to actually do it!

Is the problem that women are not supposed to take part in this economy – not supposed to be creators or entrepreneurs? Or is it just that they’re hawking a product that makes men mad – so mad their commitment to personal freedom suddenly transforms into a sacred duty to protect vulnerable wallets from rapacious feminists?

Jessica Evans: World Bank’s silence ignores repression

The bank should develop a strategy to end attacks on community members and activists and provide remedies to victims

In countries around the world, people who suffer harm because of development projects financed by the World Bank Group take grave risks to speak out and often face severe consequences. Yet the bank has taken few concrete steps to protect community members from harassment and ensure that people can speak freely without putting themselves or their family members at risk.

In Cambodia security forces have jailed Nget Khun, a 75-year-old community activist on several occasions for protesting evictions stemming from projects financed by the World Bank (PDF). Grandma Mommy, as Khun is known locally, and her fellow community members have been in and out of jail for years. During a May 2012 arrest, she said, four or five security personnel carried her “like they were carrying a pig” and threw her in a car.

After a summary trial in which her defense lawyer was given no time to prepare his case or call defense witnesses, she and 12 other activists were convicted of illegal occupancy of public property and obstructing public officials. An appeals court later suspended their sentences after public pressure, but they spent a month in jail. In November 2014 she and six other women were convicted of obstructing traffic and spent five months in jail before being pardoned in April. The government has also violently cracked down on protesters and threatened community activists.

The bank has strongly opposed the government’s plan to evict people from their homes in Khun’s community, but it has been silent about the attacks on outspoken community members.

Megan Condis: #RedditRevolt is harassment dressed up as free speech

Users’ protest pushes back against inclusive democratic participation in virtual spaces

It is growing difficult to keep track of the so-called scandals continuously erupting in geek culture. First there was #GamerGate, the opening salvo in the fight against feminist criticism of games and gaming’s male-dominated culture. Then there was #GamesSoWhite, which, depending on who you ask, is either an attempt to call attention to the lack of racial diversity in video games or a demand that game developers abandon their artistic vision to please a mob of PC police.

Now we have #RedditRevolt, a hashtag that originated as an attempt to oust Reddit Interim CEO Ellen Pao over the decision to ban several of the site’s controversial message boards dedicated to specific topics, called subreddits. (Reddit is both a social networking site and an online bulletin board; users determine what content is featured on the front page by voting posts up or down. Currently the tenth most visited website in the United States, it has received more than 7 billion page views in the last month.)

The hashtag was most recently revived over the weekend in response to the firing of a popular Reddit staffer, with volunteer moderators shutting down a huge number of subreddits in protest and making entire sections of the site temporarily go dark. In a second piece to follow, I’ll discuss how this most recent use of the hashtag provides so-called “consumer revolt” cover for what is essentially an anti-progressive agenda. But to understand the most recent turn of events, let’s first consider the original #RedditRevolt.

Jul 07 2015

FBI’s Lastest Ploy to Spy on Everyone: ISIS

Torture authorizer and current FBI director, James Comey trotted out the latest “bogeyman” to justify unlocking encryption of private digital messages: ISIS. Apparently trying to scare people with kidnappers and child abusers failed.

(In) a preview of his appearance Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey is playing the ISIS card, saying that it is becoming impossible for the FBI to stop their recruitment and planned attacks. (He uses an alternate acronym, ISIL, for the Islamic State.)

“The current ISIL threat… involves ISIL operators in Syria recruiting and tasking dozens of troubled Americans to kill people, a process that increasingly takes part through mobile messaging apps that are end-to-end encrypted, communications that may not be intercepted, despite judicial orders under the Fourth Amendment,” Comey wrote on Monday in a blog post on the pro-surveillance website Lawfare.

While providing no specific, independently confirmable examples, Comey has claimed that FBI agents are currently encountering problems because of encrypted communications as they track potential ISIS sympathizers and radicals.

Comey has long argued that sophisticated encryption technology being implemented by tech giants, including Google and Apple, will make it harder and harder for the FBI to track its targets. Encryption scrambles the contents of digital communications, making it impossible for users without the “key” to read messages in plain language.

The major problem with Comey’s argument, giving law enforcement a backdoor key to private encrypted communications, would be an open door for hackers and criminals.

On Tuesday, the group – 13 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists – released the paper (pdf), which concludes there is no viable technical solution that would allow the American and British governments to gain “exceptional access” to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger. [..]

The authors of the report said such fears did not justify putting the world’s digital communications at risk. Given the inherent vulnerabilities of the Internet, they argued, reducing encryption is not an option. Handing governments a key to encrypted communications would also require an extraordinary degree of trust. With government agency breaches now the norm – most recently at the United States Office of Personnel Management, the State Department and the White House – the security specialists said authorities cannot be trusted to keep such keys safe from hackers and criminals. They added that if the United States and Britain mandated backdoor keys to communications, it would spur China and other governments in foreign markets to do the same.

Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications

Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement channels going dark, these attempts to regulate the emerging Internet were abandoned. In the intervening years, innovation on the Internet flourished, and law enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger quantities of data. Today we are again hearing calls for regulation to mandate the provision of exceptional access mechanisms. In this report, a group of computer scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary access mandates. We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse forward secrecy design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.

This was a bad idea in 1997 and still a bad idea today.

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