Tag: TMC Politics

Jun 14 2014

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: The Koch Cycle of Endless Cash

It’s not enough, apparently, that some of the wealthiest Americans spend millions to elect their candidates to Congress. Now they are using their fortunes to lobby Congress against any limits on their ability to buy elections.

Koch Companies Public Sector, part of the industrial group owned by a well-known pair of conservative brothers, has hired a big-name firm to lobby Congress on campaign-finance issues, according to a registration form filed a few weeks ago. The form doesn’t say what those issues are, but there are several bills in the House that would reduce the role of anonymous big money in campaigns, and restrict the kinds of super PACs and nonprofit groups that the Koch brothers and others have inflated with cash.

Richard Reeves: What Can We Do in Iraq? Nothing!

Taking a couple of shots at President Obama over the latest round of war in Iraq, House Speaker John Boehner said last week: “This has been building for weeks.”

How about centuries, Mr. Speaker? Sunni Muslims and their Shiite “brethren” have been fighting over this bloody turf since the seventh century. [..]

From the time of the Crusaders until last week, we have had occasional success in ignoring Islam or trying our best to put Muslims inside borders we have drawn, or done our best, intentionally or accidentally, to set them to fighting each other and leaving us alone. If it weren’t for oil and Israel, we could be in an ignoring phase. And we are almost always in ignorant phases. [..]

That is the way of the world. We have seen this before. In March of 1973, American troops withdrew from South Vietnam, leaving our local allies to take over that war. Two years later the North Vietnamese reached Saigon, as the ISIS has reached the suburbs of Baghdad. Do you think we should have gone back and resumed the war in Southeast Asia? That would have been nuts, and it is nuts to go back into Iraq.

Eugene Robinson: Overdosing on Tea

The Republican Party’s reliance on tea party support is like an addict’s dependence on a dangerous drug: It may feel good at first, but eventually it eats you alive.

No House majority leader had ever been ousted in a primary before Eric Cantor’s shocking defeat on Tuesday. Republicans who tell themselves it was Cantor’s own fault-he lost touch with his Virginia district, he tried to have it both ways on immigration, he came to be seen as part of the Washington establishment-are whistling past the graveyard.

Cantor didn’t just lose, he got clobbered. His opponent, college professor Dave Brat, spent just $200,000 on the race-not much more than Cantor’s $5 million campaign spent on meals at steakhouses. Yet a powerful incumbent, running in a district whose boundaries were custom-designed for his benefit, lost by an incredible 11 percentage points.

There can be no doubt that the tail is now wagging the dog. The tea party should no longer be thought of as just a faction of the GOP. It’s calling the shots.

Michelle Chen: If colleges didn’t waste your tuition, we wouldn’t need new student loan reform

Saddling students with unsustainable debts is only a symptom of the deeper erosion within higher education

But while college is prohibitively costly for many students, and student loan reform merely papers over widening economic gap, full public funding for higher education is well within the government’s financial reach. An analysis by the advocacy group Strike Debt, for example, shows that for less than $13bn in additional federal funds, the government could theoretically “make every single public two- and four-year college and university in the United States tuition free for all students”. This would involve both straightforward changes to existing federal subsidy programs (particularly cutting support for notoriously substandard for-profit colleges) and a more fundamental political challenge: getting Washington to recognize that education is an entitlement, not a loan.

The state owes students a deeper debt than they owe the state – the cost of massive educational disinvestment and an economy broken by a generation of financial recklessness.

David Sirota: Al Gore’s Warnings About Inequality and Democracy

Inequality and democracy are the kind of topics you may expect to hear about at a political convention, but not necessarily at a tech industry conference. And so former Vice President Al Gore’s discussion at Nashville’s tech-focused Southland Conference this week could be viewed in context as a jeremiad spotlighting taboo truths about tech culture and philanthropic traditions.

Discussing the economy, Gore lamented that “we have rising levels of inequality and chronic underinvestment” in public programs. He reminded the crowd that when “95 percent of all the additional national income in the U.S., since the recovery began in ’09, goes to the top one percent, that’s not an Occupy Wall Street slogan, that’s a fact.”

Gore may have been alluding to the tech economy becoming a significant driver of that inequality.

Suzanne Goldenberg: Will Hillary Clinton please stand up and break the highest glass ceiling already?

In her new book, as on the campaign trail, she avoids serious talk about the impact of a female president. It’s not a hard choice at all – it’s the easy way out

Hillary Clinton is only a few pages into her new memoir, Hard Choices, when she throws out a hint that she, as a woman running for the White House, would run differently than a man.

She says there is no way she would ever give in to the sexist impulses of Obama campaign aides and attack another candidate – Sarah Palin, in this case – just because she is a woman. [..]

So it’s fair to assume that Clinton – six years removed from her first run for the White House, and two years away from her next (assuming she is running) – has a lot she wants to say about negotiating the treacherous terrain of women and power.

Except that she doesn’t say it.

Jun 14 2014

Killing with Impunity

Last year, the FBI shot and killed a Chechen man in Orlando, FL, who was a friend of the 2011 Boston Marathon suspects. According to accounts, Ibragim Todashev, had been speaking for two hours in his apartment to officials from the Massachusetts State Police and the F.B.I when he suddenly grab an object and tried to attack an agent. Todashev was shot seven times and died at the scene.

While claiming to investigate these shootings thoroughly, an New York Times investigation found that between 1995 and 2011 no FBI agent has been found at fault in 150 shootings. So it came as no surprise that the FBI agent who shot Tdashev was cleared of any wrong doing by Florida prosecutors

The FBI isn’t the only agency that has a suspicious habit of clearing its agents in shootings. It seems that the US Customs and Border Protection (CPB) is another agency with little or no outside scrutiny or accountability with complaints of abuse mostly ignored and failed to adequately investigate 28 fatal shootings since 2010. In a scathing report in the LA TImes, independent law enforcement experts heavily criticized the agency for a “lack of diligence” in investigating U.S. agents who had fired their weapons.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which had commissioned the review, has tried to prevent the scathing 21-page report from coming to light.

House and Senate oversight committees requested copies last fall but received only a summary that omitted the most controversial findings – that some border agents stood in front of moving vehicles as a pretext to open fire and that agents could have moved away from rock throwers instead of shooting at them.

The Times obtained the full report and the agency’s internal response, which runs 23 pages. The response rejects the two major recommendations: barring border agents from shooting at vehicles unless its occupants are trying to kill them, and barring agents from shooting people who throw things that can’t cause serious physical injury.

The response, marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” states that a ban on shooting at rock throwers “could create a more dangerous environment” because many agents operate “in rural or desolate areas, often alone, where concealment, cover and egress is not an option.”

If drug smugglers knew border agents were not allowed to shoot at their vehicles, it argues, more drivers would try to run over agents.

This week the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson removed James F. Tomsheck as head of internal affairs for the CPB. Tomsheck’s defenders say he is being scapegoated for bigger problems.

For years, Tomsheck wrestled with larger, more established watchdog agencies at the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — all with jurisdiction over Border Patrol misconduct.

As a result, Tomsheck’s hands often were tied because of interference from these other agencies and even senior Customs and Border Protection officials, especially when it came to disciplinary action, said James Wong, who retired as Tomsheck’s deputy in late 2011. [..]

In some cases, Tomsheck’s office was kept in the dark about investigations or shielded from information. Wong said the office often was told that the FBI and homeland security inspector general were handling investigations and had minimal access to those cases. It would be months or years before internal affairs could conduct its own reviews of alleged misconduct or shootings to learn whether agents had followed policy.

In particular, Wong pointed to the June 2010 shooting death of Sergio Hernandez Guereca, a 15-year-old Mexican citizen who was gunned down near El Paso, Texas. The inspector general, senior Customs and Border Protection officials and others blocked the internal affairs office from significant information about the shooting, Wong said.

The Justice Department eventually declined to prosecute the agent involved. [..]

Ronald T. Hosko, who recently retired as the head of the FBI’s criminal investigative division, agreed that Tomsheck’s office was undermined by turf battles, and he never knew Tomsheck to back away from an investigation.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and John Stanton, Washington bureau chief for Buzzfeed discussed the “opacity” of the CBP and Tomsheck’s dismissal just as he was due to testify before Congress,

Jun 13 2014

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 Fix Isn’t In

Eric Cantor and the Death of a Movement

How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama – and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year – is unraveling before our eyes. [..]

So whither movement conservatism? Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.

In the long run – which probably begins in 2016 – this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.

New York Times Editorial Board: Iraq in Peril

Prime Minister Maliki Panics as Insurgents Gain

What’s happening in Iraq is a disaster and it is astonishing that the Iraqis and the Americans, who have been sharing intelligence, seem to have been caught flat-footed by the speed of the insurgent victories and the army defections. [..]

Last month, Mr. Maliki also asked for airstrikes. The United States has a strategic interest in Iraq’s stability and Mr. Obama on Thursday said America was ready to do more, without going into detail. But military action seems like a bad idea right now. The United States simply cannot be sucked into another round of war in Iraq. In any case, airstrikes and new weapons would be pointless if the Iraqi Army is incapable of defending the country.

Why would the United States want to bail out a dangerous leader like Mr. Maliki, who is attempting to remain in power for a third term as prime minister? It is up to Iraq’s leaders to show leadership and name a new prime minister who will share power, make needed reforms and include all sectarian and ethnic groups, especially disenfranchised Sunnis, in the country’s political and economic life – if, indeed, it is not too late.

Dean Baker: Tall tales about Texas

Lone Star State’s ‘economic miracle’ belied by low wages

Many American conservatives look to Texas as their bright shining light. They hold it up as a model of limited government, where low taxes and business-friendly regulation have led to job growth and economic growth surpassing the national average over the last three decades. If the rest of the country followed the Texas model, the tale goes, our economic woes would be behind us and we would all share in a more prosperous future.

The conservatives do have at least the beginnings of a case. Texas has outstripped the rest of the country in job creation. Since the business cycle peak in 1981, the number of jobs in Texas has increased by more than 78 percent. That compares with less than 52 percent for the country as a whole. [..]

Of course lower pay for those at the middle and bottom of the wage ladder can translate into better living for those at the top. To put it simply, low pay makes it easier to find good help in Texas. That’s good news if you’re among the group looking to hire people to clean your house or mow your lawn. It’s also good news for businesses looking for low-cost labor. It’s not very good news for the people who have to work at these jobs at low pay. And that’s the real story of the Texas economic miracle.

Zoë Carpenter: Bowe Bergdahl and the Pathologizing of Dissent

“[W]e are nothing but camping boy [scouts],” Bowe Bergdahl wrote sometime in the year before he wandered away from a remote Army post in eastern Afghanistan with a knife, a camera and a diary, and was captured by the Taliban. “Hiding from children behind our heavy armored trucks and our c-wire and sand bagged operating post, we tell our selves that we are not cowards.”  [..]

To the right, this sort of clear-eyed critique of America’s military hubris is more damning than the idea that Bergdahl was psychologically unfit. Bergdahl may have struggled with mental illness, and if that’s the case, then certainly the issues of his recruitment and whether he had access to proper care become pertinent. But there is something uncomfortable about the impulse to defend Bergdahl with suggestions of mental unsoundness; in it are echoes of America’s striking eagerness to pathologize dissent. There could be a valid debate about whether leaving one’s post is an acceptable form of expressing it, or if there were really other options. But as President Obama pushes to prolong military engagement in Afghanistan, it may be more useful to stop asking what went wrong with Bergdahl, and instead consider what went wrong with the war.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: 8 Lessons the Left Can Learn From Cantor’s Loss

Twenty-four hours have now passed since House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s surprise primary defeat. Oceans of pixelated ink have already been spilled interpreting its meaning. Cantor’s defeat has certainly put an end to the conventional wisdom that “establishment Republicans” were beating back the tea party this year (although only in today’s Bizarro World political universe could Eric Cantor have been considered an “establishment Republican”).

There are things we will miss about Eric Cantor: his walk, that funny way he had of tilting his head when he laughed…

We’re kidding, of course. There is nothing we will miss about Eric Cantor. Americans do owe him a debt of gratitude, however, for preventing a ghastly Grand Bargain between President Obama and the more sober-minded (at least in this context) and deal-ready John Boehner. Without Cantor’s intransigence, Americans would’ve gotten a lousy deal — and Democrats would probably have been blamed for Social Security and Medicare cuts that would have haunted them for a generation to come.

So thanks, Mr. Cantor. Now don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Wendall Potter: Skyrocketing Salaries for Health Insurance CEOs

If health insurance companies announce big premium increases on policies for 2015, I hope regulators, lawmakers and the media will look closely at whether they are justified, especially in light of recent disclosures of better-than-expected profits in 2013, rosy outlooks for the rest of this year and soaring CEO compensation.

Almost all of the publicly traded health insurers reported big increases in revenue and profits last year. The big winners have been the top executives of those companies, led by Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, the nation’s third largest health insurer. Bertolini’s total compensation of $30.7 million in 2013 was 131 percent higher than in 2012.

If the stock prices of these firms keep growing at the current pace, Bertolini and his peers can expect to be rewarded even more handsomely this year, especially if they can hike premiums high enough to satisfy shareholders.

Jun 12 2014

Militants March on Baghdad

This week an Al Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, seized the Sunni dominated cities of Mosul, Iraq’a second largest city, and Tirkut, Sadaam Hussein’s ancestral home. The militants are now marching on Baghdad and have been reported to be about 100 miles north of Baghdad and have vowed to take the city to “settle accounts.”

Iraq Insurgency: Militants Plan To March On Baghdad After Seizing 2 Key Sunni Cities

The Islamic State aims to create an Islamic emirate spanning both sides of the Iraq-Syria border. It has been able to push deep into parts of the Iraqi Sunni heartland once controlled by U.S. forces because police and military forces melted away after relatively brief clashes.

Two senior intelligence officials told The Associated Press that an armed group led by al-Douri, the Naqshabandi Army, and other Saddam-era military figures joined the Islamic State in the fight. In Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit that was overrun by militants Wednesday, witnesses said fighters raised posters of Saddam and al-Douri. The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press.

The involvement of Saddam-era figures raises the potential to escalate the militants’ campaign to establish an al-Qaida-like enclave into a wider Sunni uprising. That could only further the momentum toward turning Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic divisions in to a geographical fragmentation.

The Islamic State issued a triumphalist statement declaring that it would start implementing its strict version of Shariah law in Mosul and other regions it had overrun. It said women should stay in their homes for modesty reasons, warned it would cut off the hands of thieves and told residents to attend daily prayers. It told Sunnis in the military and police to abandon their posts and “repent” or else “face only death.”

In the north, Kurdish security forces took over the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk after government troops fled.

Iraqi Kurdish forces take Kirkuk as Isis sets its sights on Baghdad

In Kirkuk, truckloads of peshmerga fighters patrolled the streets, but sporadic clashes continued between Kurdish forces and Isis gunmen on the outskirts of the city. A Kurdish minister responsible for regional security forces survived a bomb blast as he drove to the city after visiting peshmerga units in the surrounding region, AFP reported. [..]

About 500,000 people have fled Mosul, home to 2 million, and the surrounding province, many seeking safety in autonomous Kurdistan.

Isis’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, said on Thursday that the group’s fighters intended to take the southern cities of Kerbala and Najaf, which hold two of the holiest shrines for Shia Muslims. [..]

Reports from Iraq have painted a confused picture of a rapidly developing situation with fighting reported in a number of key locations on Wednesday night and on Thursday, including on the outskirts of the city of Samarra, where government officials said Isis fighters had been driven back.

According to Army Staff Lieutenant General Sabah al-Fatlawi, quoted by Agence France-Presse, “elite forces” backed by air strikes pushed back a “fierce attack by Isis fighters who then bypassed the city heading towards Baghdad”.

Complicating the picture of the past few days were emerging suggestions that other Sunni insurgent groups, including Ba’ath nationalists, supporters of the executed Saddam, had played a role in the series of stunning setbacks for the Iraqi military.

The sudden collapse of the Iraqi army has raised international concerns about a rapidly widening regional crisis that has implications for Iraq’s powerful neighbours, Iran and Turkey.

This afternoon President Barack Obama said that he is watching this situation closely and is concerned

Speaking in the Oval Office after meeting with Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia, Mr. Obama said: “Iraq’s going to need more help. It’s going to need more help from us, and it’s going to need more help from the international community.”

The president said his national security team was working “around the clock” to determine the most effective aid. The United States, he noted, has given the Iraqi government military equipment and shared intelligence with it. [..]

“I don’t rule out anything,” Mr. Obama said, “because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria, for that matter.”

The reality: there is very little that Obama can do. This was dumped on his desk when he was elected. The Iraqi government insisted that all American troops leave.

The real shame of it is that the people who created this crisis, George W. Bush and Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, are war criminals Obama refused to hold accountable. The current crisis lies squarely at their feet and the members of Congress who voted to allow the illegal invasion in 2003.

The Fall of Mosul and the False Promises of Modern History

by Juan Cole

It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. There was none. Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time. They put nothing in place of the system they tore down. They destroyed the socialist economy without succeeding in building private firms or commerce. They put in place an electoral system that emphasizes religious and ethnic divisions. They helped provoke a civil war in 2006-2007, and took credit for its subsiding in 2007-2008, attributing it to a troop escalation of 30,000 men (not very plausible). In fact, the Shiite militias won the civil war on the ground, turning Baghdad into a largely Shiite city and expelling many Sunnis to places like Mosul. There are resentments. [..]

I hasten to say that the difficulty Baghdad is having with keeping Mosul is also an indictment of the Saddam Hussein regime (1979-2003), which pioneered the tactic of sectarian rule, basing itself on a Sunni-heavy Baath Party in the center-north and largely neglecting or excluding the Shiite South. Now the Shiites have reversed that strategy, creating a Baghdad-Najaf-Basra power base.

Mosul’s changed circumstances are also an indictment of the irresponsible use to which Sunni fundamentalists in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Oil Gulf are putting their riches. The high petroleum prices, usually over $100 a barrel, of the past few years in a row, have injected trillions of dollars into the Gulf. Some of that money has sloshed into the hands of people who rather admired Usama Bin Laden and who are perfectly willing to fund his clones to take over major cities like Aleppo and Mosul. The vaunted US Treasury Department ability to stop money transfers by people whom Washington does not like has faltered in this case. Is it because Washington is de facto allied with the billionaire Salafis of Kuwait City in Syria, where both want to see the Bashar al-Assad government overthrown and Iran weakened? The descent of the US into deep debt, and the emergence of Gulf states and sovereign wealth funds is a tremendous shift of geopolitical power to Riyadh, Kuwait City and Abu Dhabi, who can now simply buy Egyptian domestic and foreign policy away from Washington. They are also trying to buy a Salafi State of Syria and a Salafi state of northern and western Iraq. [..]

PM Nouri al-Maliki can only get Iraq back by allying with nationalist Sunnis in the north. Otherwise, for him simply brutally to occupy the city with Shiite troops and artillery and aerial bombing will make him look like his neighbor, Bashar al-Assad.

Jun 12 2014

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

Ana Marie Cox: Don’t fear the Koch brothers. Fear an election that caters only to billionaires

Forget right or left. Dark money in politics means you’ll never know which ‘independent’ candidate’s views were on the market

Popular sentiment may tie the GOP and the infamous Koch brothers to unregulated campaign financing – while Democrats rail against it – but the post-Citizens United world can’t be understood within the framework of party politics. Citizens United isn’t good for one party and bad for another; it’s good for rich people and bad for everyone else.

The Koch brothers’ place in American politics as the big-spending bogeymen changing electoral outcomes with gobs of cash will find some help this week with the release of the documentary Citizen Koch and the book Big Money (by Politico reporter Ken Vogel), a good portion of which narrates the battle between the Koch brothers and Karl Rove for the soul of the Republican Party, such as it is.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Washington’s Cold Shoulder for Defrauded Students and Soldiers

President Obama signed an executive order Monday limiting student debt payments to 10 percent of their income, telling an audience in the East Room of the White House that he and his wife only paid off their law school loans about 10 years ago.  “This is why I feel so strongly about this,” the president said. “This is why I’m passionate about it.”

We’ll take him at his word, although it means disregarding the principle that says that those who truly feel passionately about something rarely feel the need to declare it. We’re glad he feels so strongly about an issue that is both an economic crisis and a moral challenge.

Diane Ravitch: Vergara Decision Is Latest Attempt to Blame Teachers and Weaken Public Education

Judge Rolf M. Treu, who decided the Vergara case, declared that he was shocked — shocked! — to learn from Professor Raj Chetty and Professor Thomas Kane of Harvard about the enormous harm that one “grossly ineffective” teacher can do to a child’s lifetime earnings or to their academic gains.

How did he define “grossly ineffective” teacher? He didn’t. How did these dreadful teachers get tenure? Clearly, some grossly incompetent principal must have granted it to them. What was the basis — factual or theoretical — that the students would have had high scores if their teachers did not have the right to due process? He didn’t say.

 

John Nichols: Eric Cantor Loses to a Conservative Who Rips Crony Capitalism

The DC-insider storyline about this being a great year for the Republican establishment might need to be rewritten. And the rewrite might even require pundits, Republican chieftains and Democrats who are trying to figure out the politics of 2014 to consider complexities they had not previously entertained.

House majority leader Eric Cantor, the face of the GOP establishment and one of its most prodigious fundraisers, lost his Virginia Republican primary Tuesday to a challenger who promised, “I will fight to end crony capitalist programs that benefit the rich and powerful.”

Dave Brat, who defeated the number-two Republican in the House by a 56-44 margin, ripped big business almost as frequently as he did the incumbent. “I am running against Cantor because he does not represent the citizens of the 7th District, but rather large corporations seeking insider deals, crony bailouts and a constant supply of low-wage workers,” declared the challenger.

Cantor dismissed Brat as a “liberal college professor.”

That was false-at least the liberal part.

Wenonah Hauter: Trans-Atlantic Trade Deal a Field Day for Fracking

U.S. and EU negotiators recently began a new round of negotiations on the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement. Because the talks are happening behind closed doors, the public is left largely in the dark about the nature of the discussions over a deal also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

So what, exactly, do we know?

Officially, not much. But an EU negotiation position “on raw materials and energy” was leaked to the Huffington Post in May. The text amounts to a wish list of demands from Big Oil and Gas that would lock in any of their investments in fossil fuels in general, and shale gas and fracking in particular.

Article C of the document states that no restrictions should apply to the “exports of energy goods” between the transatlantic trade partners. Any request, for example, for an export license to ship natural gas from the United States to the EU would be approved “automatically.”

That means no questions asked, even if this arrangement could lead to environmental damage from widespread use of fracking, increased gas prices for U.S. consumers, increased import dependency, and other problems.

Ben Wolcott: Austerity and the Employment Rate

In 2010, after an initial round of coordinated stimulus from both wealthy and developing countries, deficit hawks around the world regrouped. Pointing to growing deficits and debt, they demanded that countries reverse course and begin moving toward balanced budgets. The deficit hawks argued that deficit reduction could be accomplished without impairing growth because of the effect it would have in boosting confidence among businesses and consumers.

Many economists argued against this drive towards austerity at the time. They noted and rigorously explained the fallacious logic in the idea that deficit reduction could be expansionary. They also pointed out how fiscal policy had already saved the economy from a second depression and that more stimulus would likely be necessary. However, now we have more than three years of data, so we no longer have to speculate. A simple picture can be worth a thousand words (or in this case, billions).

Jun 11 2014

NOW Calls For WaPo to Fire George Will

The president of the National Organization for Women, Terry O’Neill told Media Matters that The Washington Post needs to dump George Will for his column downplaying the prevalence of campus sexual assault and suggesting some college efforts to curb it “make victimhood a coveted status.”

The column has drawn complaints from numerous women’s rights groups and prompted National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill to call for Will’s ouster Tuesday.

“George Will needs to take a break from his column and The Washington Post needs to take a break from his column, they need to dump him,” O’Neill told Media Matters in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon. “It is actively harmful for the victims of sexual assault when that kind of man writes a piece that says to assault victims, ‘it didn’t happen and if it did happen you deserve it.’ That re-traumatizes victims. I can’t believe that Mr. Will has had this experience if he would put out such a hateful message.”

“We want him to back off and we want The Washington Post to stop carrying his column.”

O’Neill later added, “That is absolutely the kind of further attack on victims that just does such extraordinary harm … The media blaming women for the horrific rape of violence against women and sexual assault it is really shameful.”

Since Will’s column, the newspaper published an article titled “One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married.”

The women’s rights group UltraViolet has started a petition telling The Washington Post to fire George Will

The Washington Post actually just published an opinion piece mocking sexual assault survivors and saying that women want to be raped.

The author, conservative columnist George Will, goes so far as to write that colleges are making “victimhood a coveted status” by taking public steps to curb sexual assaults on campus.

He even implies that non-consensual sex is not rape, when in fact it’s the very definition of rape!

George Will makes his living writing columns that many people disagree with. But his latest column has gone too far. Rape is a serious crime–accusing women of making it up and arguing schools shouldn’t be addressing sexual assault puts both women and men at risk. By publishing George Will’s piece, The Washington Post is amplifying some of the most insidious lies that perpetuate rape culture. It’s not just wrong–it’s dangerous.

Tell The Washington Post:

“Rape is real. No one wants to be a victim. Fire George Will.”

Jun 11 2014

It’s About the Constitution, Stupid.

During an hour “fireside” chat at this week’s Southland Conference on technology, entrepreneurship and southern culture, former Vice President Al Gore was asked about Eric Snowden by Sarah Lacey. His answer, when asked if Snowden was a hero or traitor, was quite clear:

   I hear this question all the time…I’m like most people, I don’t put (Snowden) in either one of those categories. But I will be candid – if you set up a spectrum, I would push it more away from the traitor side. He clearly violated the law (so) you can’t say OK what he did is alright. It is not.

   But what he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the Constitution that were way more serious than the crimes he committed. In the course of violating important laws he also provided an important service because we did need to know how far this has gone.

He then added his concerns about the mass surveillance by the NSA:

This is a threat to the heart of democracy. Democracy is among other things a state of mind. If any of us are put in a position where we have to self censor, and think twice about what we write in an email, or what we click on for fear that somebody reading a record of this may misunderstand why we looked up some disease or something, some young people who might otherwise get help with a medical condition, might think oh my gosh if I put down a search for bipolar illness I will be stigmatized if my online file is hacked or accessed by my employer. That kills democracy.

Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks ‘an important service’, says Al Gore

By Ewan MacAskill, The Guardian

Former vice-president argues whistleblower exposed ‘violations of US constitution far more serious than crimes he committed’

Asked if he regarded Snowden as a traitor or whistleblower, Gore veered away from the “traitor” label. He refused to go as far as labelling him a whistleblower but signalled he viewed him as being closer to that category than a traitor, saying: “What he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the US constitution that were way more serious than the crimes he committed.” [..]

Gore called on the internet companies to work with the public to help draw up a “digital Magna Carta” that provides protection of freedoms. “They need to pay attention to correcting some of these gross abuses of individual privacy that are ongoing in the business sphere,” he said.

Snowden’s hope of a return to the US is dependent on a change in a major shift in opinion that would allow him to escape a lengthy prison sentence. His supporters will seize on Gore’s comments to help make the case that he is a whistleblower and should be allowed to return to the US as a free man. Ben Wizner, Snowden’s US-based lawyer, said: “Al Gore is quite obviously right. Regrettably, the laws under which Snowden is being charged make no allowance for the value of the information he disclosed. Whether the NSA’s activities violated the law or the constitution would be irrelevant in a trial under the Espionage Act.”

This conversation about our privacy and the government disregard of the Constitution in the name of security is not over by a long shot.

Jun 11 2014

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

Ana Marie Cox: Congratulations, David Brat: your win over Eric Cantor is totally meaningless

Beating a House majority leader for the first time in 115 years doesn’t mean Washington needs to hail the conquering Tea Party hero … even if it already has

David Brat ran against Eric Cantor as the epitome of everything that’s wrong with Washington. It wasn’t a bad synecdoche; like the city, Cantor exuded southern efficiency and northern charm. By the standards of the Tea Party, however, Cantor simply wasn’t inefficient enough. They would like less done, please. [..]

So on the morning after, Brat is either the Tea Party’s white knight or its motley fool – at centerstage if also at the edge of the political spectrum.

But come the fall, Brat may be an historical footnote, having beaten the first sitting majority leader since the position was created in 1899, only to have gone on to lose the general election. . . .

Or Brat will be one of dozens of incoming freshmen Congressmen … which is to say, an historical footnote in the making.

Jessica Valenti: The only ‘privilege’ afforded to campus rape victims is actually surviving

Hey, at least we live in a world where victim-blaming misogynist dinosaurs masquerading as important newspaper columnists get the earful they deserve

Rape victims get called a lot of things. Sometimes it’s “slut”. For the 11-year-old gang rape victim in Texas, it was that she was a “spider” luring men into her web. It’s not all bad, though – thanks to anti-violence activists, those who have been attacked also get called “survivors” and “brave”. The last word I ever expected to hear to describe a rape victim is “privileged”.

Yet in the Washington Post late last week, columnist George Will wrote about campus rape, claiming that being a victim in college has become “a coveted status that confers privileges”, and that “victims proliferate” because of all these so-called benefits.

Heidi Moore: Wall Street’s virus has infected your college debt, and Obama’s doing zero

Private student loans reflect the very worst practices of our consumer credit culture. The same deeply system that brought down mortgages is now making personal debt too big not to fail

As President Obama takes to TV and Tumblr to stump for his program to make federal student loans more affordable, there’s another $150bn problem lurking behind the scenes: private student loans, which are built on giving students the worst possible deal.

There has been laser-like attention from Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren to the callous federal student loan system, which controls about $1tn of student debt – and rightfully so, because it is immense and it is broken. Students are taking on too much debt to absorb rising tuition (a more complex issue itself) and the high debt is endangering the economy.

Zoë Carpenter: What Won’t the GOP Do to Keep the Poor Uninsured?

When it comes to healthcare, Southwest Virginia is a desperate place. Many of the state’s poorest and sickest live in that pocket of coal country between US Route 19 and the Kentucky and Tennessee borders, where it’s so hard to see a doctor that a free mobile health clinic held each July at a county fairground draws hundreds. “Southwest Virginia is one of the worst places we go to,” said Stan Brock, the founder and president of Remote Area Medical, which runs that clinic and others throughout the country.

That corner of Virginia also encompasses the district of Phillip Puckett, who served as a Democratic state senator until Monday, when he suddenly resigned. His decision to step down appears to have been the result of a bribe offered by Republican colleagues bent on stopping the expansion of Medicaid. Puckett’s resignation gave Republicans the one seat they needed to take control of the Senate; it also put him in the running for a paid post on a state tobacco commission that is controlled by some of the very same Republicans. And it cleared the way for the chamber to appoint his daughter to a state judgeship. [..]

The question of what prompted Puckett’s mid-term resignation is tantalizing, and potentially important, but it’s also beside the point. The true scandal is that hundreds of thousands of Virginians – including more than 20,000 (pdf of Puckett’s own constituents – will be denied health insurance.

Molly Osberg: Would I like fry cooks and baristas with my $15 minimum wage? Damn right

Seattle’s breakthrough still makes me worry about off-the-books workers of the ‘informal’ economy for whom a living wage is already a fiction

This week’s announcement that Seattle will begin to roll out a minimum wage of $15 per hour – a figure that more than doubles the federal minimum, and would make it one of the highest government-set minimum wages in the world – is a long overdue course correction. And if we’re now in for a rolling battle over living wages on a “city-by-city basis”, as Kevin Roose writes at New York magazine, Bill de Blasio’s New York can’t be too far behind. When that day comes, more than robotic baristas or the high-pitched wails of franchise lawyers, I worry about those employed by the so-called informal economy, the off-the-books workers for whom the minimum wage was already a fiction.

Sadhbh Walshe: Orange is the New Black in real life is a prison epidemic of too many women in jail – and taxpayers like you in the red

The US imprisons more women than any country – and most of them for low-level crimes of poverty and addiction. But there is a better way

Spoiler alert: if the following questions intrigue you, you are caught up on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black – and you’re probably as excited as I am that season two has finally arrived. [..]

Reality alert: the United States female prison population has increased 800% in the last three decades. During that same period, the male prison population also exploded, but only at half the rate of the female one. The result is that today, the US imprisons more women than any other country in the world, two-thirds of whom are low-level, non-violent offenders guilty of crimes of poverty and addiction. They are our real-life Taystees and Pousses and Dayas – small-time offenders who rob stores, or forge checks, or use or sell drugs to feed a habit or feed their kids – and their languishing costs you hundreds of millions of dollars.

So let’s all emerge from our binge-watching and ask a different question: what, exactly, are we achieving with America’s great experiment in mass incarceration?

Jun 11 2014

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Loses to Tea Party Challenger

The Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary in Virginia’s 7th District tonight to Tea Party Challenger Dave Brat.

The conservative challenger’s victory halts one of the most meteoric rises in national politics, and illustrates the strong anti-incumbent fever that has taken over Cantor’s Richmond-area district. Cantor is the second House incumbent to lose this primary season – Texas GOP incumbent Ralph Hall was defeated by a tea-party backed challenger at the end of May.

And the idiot Democrats didn’t field a challenger because they thought the seat was not winnable. Stupid.

Correction: According to David Nir at Daily Los, there is a Democratic challenger Democrat, Jack Trammel, who, like Brat, is a professor at Randolph-Macon College.

This also throws Republican leadership into question.

Up Date:

HuffPo has piece that there was a crazy plan by former congressman Ben Jones (D-Ga.), better known as “Cooter” from Dukes of Hazzard, who ran against Cantor in 200:

Crossing party lines to vote in an open primary has a long tradition in the solidly one-party South, Cooter argues in his letter. “[B]y voting for David Brat in the Seventh District Republican primary, we Democrats, independents, and Libertarians can make a big difference in American politics,” he argues. “It is your right to cast that vote. It is an ‘open’ primary and it doesn’t preclude anyone from voting anyway they wish in November. It may be the only way to empower those who want to make a statement about the dysfunctional Congress and ‘politics as usual.'”

Who knew this may have been the reason for Cantor’s loss.

Jun 10 2014

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: Why Do Coal-mining Jobs Matter So Much More Than Jobs Lost to Trade?

When President Obama announced plans to curtail the use of coal over the next 15 years, major news outlets like National Public Radio and the New York Times rushed to do pieces on the prospective loss of jobs in coal-mining areas. There are a bit less than 80,000 workers directly employed in the coal industry. A large percentage of these jobs will be lost in the next 15 years due to these regulations.

While it is good to see the media paying attention to this job loss and its implications for families and communities, this concern is a striking departure from normal practice. This was demonstrated clearly last week when the Commerce Department reported a large jump in the trade deficit for April. The report, and the implied job loss, received almost no attention from the media.

Jonathan Turley: Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or traitor?

Whatever he may be, Snowden remains fascinating precisely because he proved to be the malfunctioning cog in the system.

It is hard to imagine that just one year ago, Edward Snowden famously walked away. He was a low-level employee of Dell contractor at a nondescript National Security Agency site. A non-entity by design. Just one of hundreds of thousands of people working in the burgeoning national security complex in the United States – the ultimate faceless cog. Now, one year later, he is a household name but the world remains divided on who Edward Snowden is. Is he a whistleblower or a traitor? It turns out that question is often answered not by how people view Snowden but how they view their government. [..]

So there you have it: hero or traitor. Take your pick. What is clear is that Snowden pulled back the curtain on new reality of living within a fishbowl of constant surveillance. People clearly don’t like it, even if they don’t like Snowden. They are left however with the same sense of frustration and isolation when it comes to their government. Snowden stepped outside of a system that many Americans now view as impenetrable and unchanging. Whatever he may be, Snowden remains fascinating precisely because he proved to be the malfunctioning cog, the one who walked away.

Ralph Nader: Minimum Wage Support Grows

During a recent talk at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson indicated his support for legislation in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage. “I will tell you we will support legislation that moves forward,” he said. Later in the talk, Mr. Thompson continued, “McDonald’s will be fine. We’ll manage through whatever the additional cost implications are.” It turns out that, contrary to the stale Republican talking points, one of the largest low-wage employers in the country does not have a problem with a higher minimum wage.

We have been vigorously advocating for a raise in the federal minimum wage for several years now. Much progress has been made in that time. Unfortunately, little of this progress has come in the halls of Congress, leaving cities and states across the country to do the work that our national leaders won’t do.

Juan Cole: Top 3 White Terrorist Attacks in America this Week

Our capitalist class may be becoming an absolute danger to ordinary Americans.  By promoting a doctrine of absolute right to gun ownership (which rather helps gun manufacturers) and at the same time encouraging people to hate the Federal government and resent paying taxes, they are creating a whole class of alienated far right shooters.

The American far Right, with its white supremacism, fascination with guns and explosives, profound hatred for the Federal government, poses the biggest terrorism threat in the country by far.  Worse, they receive support from right wing media in the U.S. because they hate taxes just the way the ultra-conservative media moguls doe.  Although their attacks are ideological, directed at civilian victims and violent, they are seldom categorized as ‘terrorists.’  Rather what they do is “mass shootings.”  In the meantime, plots hatched by Muslims in the U.S. during the past few years appear almost always to be a form of entrapment by the FBI.

John Nichols: Getting Married ‘Where We Live’: Why Each Marriage Equality Ruling Is Historic

Marriage equality is not a new premise. The barriers are falling rapidly. Since the US Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman, it has, in fact, become inevitable. Following on the Supreme Court ruling of last summer, the group Freedom to Marry says twenty consecutive rulings by state and federal judges have found state marriage bans unconstitutional-and more will do so.

Yet each state’s embrace of freedom and fairness matters. That was so very obvious on Friday night in Madison, a city that has for decades embraced and celebrated LGBT rights. Indeed, among the many jurists performing marriages Friday night was Dane County Judge Shelley Gaylord, who was first elected two decades ago to a municipal judgeship as an LGBT activist and lawyer.

Wisconsin should have been the first state in the nation to embrace marriage equality.

Joe Muto: Bowe Bergdahl is Fox News’ perfect villain for the propaganda machine

As Bill O’Reilly used to tell me, the only thing that drives more viewers than a hero … is a villain. Especially if you arrange to have ‘experts’ call him that on purpose

Booking guests for cable news can be a taxing job. You’re underpaid, overworked and constantly on deadline. It’s no surprise, then, that most bookers form a symbiotic relationship with PR people, “fixers” who specialize in connecting producers with the right expert, in possession of the right point-of-view, right away. The pitfall, of course, is that when someone is desperate to go on television, it’s usually a safe bet that they have an axe to grind. Ideally, the booking producer acts as a gatekeeper, to filter out those who are pushing an agenda.

There’s no such filter at Fox News Channel, where pundits are not only allowed to push an agenda but are very much expected to do so. Guests at Fox are booked specifically to advance the latest anti-government narrative – be it Obamacare or Benghazi, the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy or now the released Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl … or on some nights, all of the above.

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