Tag: TMC Politics

Jan 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

Dean Baker: Medical Travel: If Bill Gates Wanted to Do Something Good for the World

Everyone knows Bill Gates, the man who got incredibly rich by gaining a near monopoly in the computer operating system market. In the last decade Gates has devoted much of his money to the foundation he created for the ostensible purpose of helping humanity.

Whatever the merits of his foundation’s programs, he is missing out on an enormous opportunity to do good for the United States and the world. As has been often documented, health care costs in the United States are hugely out of line with health care costs elsewhere in the world. There is a huge gap with costs in the developing world, but the ratio of costs for most items and procedures is more than two to one even in comparison with other wealthy countries.

And, this gap is not explained by better care in the United States. We actually have worse outcomes compared with most other wealthy countries.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: No, Congress, You Shouldn’t ‘Pay For’ Extending Unemployment Insurance

Despite record-high levels of unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — Republicans are refusing to permit any extension of unemployment insurance benefits unless it’s “paid for” with money taken from other government programs. They’ve never demanded that of Republican administrations. [..]

Even worse, Senate Democrats have proposed something Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik called a “flinthearted idea“: to pay for the extension by cutting Social Security benefits for the disabled. That sort of thing used to be considered too ruthless even for Republicans. Now it’s the “liberal” party’s proposal.

The Democrats’ offer perpetuates the misguided obsession with “pay-fors.” It also stigmatizes the recipients of government benefits, another preferred Republican theme, in this case by exaggerating the impact of “double dipping” between government programs.

Leo W. Gerard: Fast Track to Poverty

That giant sucking sound predicted by Ross Perot commenced 20 years ago last week. It is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) vacuuming up U.S. jobs and depositing them in Mexico.

Independent presidential candidate Perot was right. NAFTA swept U.S. industry south of the border. It made Wall Street happy. It made multi-national corporations obscenely profitable. But it destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of American workers.

NAFTA’s backers promised it would create American jobs, just as promoters of the Korean and Chinese trade arrangements said they would and advocates of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal contend it will. They were — and still are — brutally wrong. NAFTA, the Korean deal and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization killed American jobs. They lowered wages. They diminished what America cherishes: opportunity. They contributed to the very ill that President Obama is crusading against: income inequality. There is no evidence the TPP would be any different. American workers need a new trade philosophy, one that protects them and puts people first, not corporations.

Andrew Bacevich: The Misuse of American Might, and the Price It Pays

The United States no longer knows how to win wars, but it continues to start them.

The U.S. military is like the highly skilled, gadget-toting contractor who promises to give your kitchen a nifty makeover in no time whatsoever. Here’s the guy you can count on to get the job done. Just look at those references! Yet by the time he drives off months later, the kitchen’s a shambles and you’re stuck with a bill several times larger than the initial estimate. Turns out the job was more complicated than it seemed. But what say we take a crack at remodeling the master bath?

That pretty much summarizes the American experience with war since the end of the Cold War. By common consent, when it comes to skills and gadgets, U.S. forces are in a league of their own. Yet when it comes to finishing the job on schedule and on budget, their performance has been woeful. [..]

How can we explain this yawning gap between intention and outcomes? Fundamentally, a pronounced infatuation with armed might has led senior civilian officials, regardless of party, and senior military leaders, regardless of service, to misunderstand and misapply the military instrument. Force is good for some things, preeminently for defending what is already yours. Not content to defend, however, the United States in recent decades has sought to use force to extend its influence, control and values.

Ralph Nader: Medical Price Gouging and Waste Are Skyrocketing

An epidemic of sky-rocketing medical costs has afflicted our country and grown to obscene proportions. Medical bills are bloated with waste, redundancy, profiteering, fraud and outrageous over-billing. Much is wrong with the process of pricing and providing health care.

The latest in this medical cost saga comes from new data released last week by National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest nurse’s organization. In a news release, NNU revealed that fourteen hospitals in the United States are charging more than ten times their costs for treatment. Specifically, for every $100 one of these hospitals spends, the charge on the corresponding bill is nearly $1,200. [..]

Enacting a single payer, full Medicare-for-all system is the only chance the United States has of unwinding itself from the spider web of waste, harm, and bloat that currently comprise its highly flawed health insurance and health care systems. It’s time to cut out the corporate profiteers and purveyors of waste and fraud and introduce a system that works for everybody.

Norman Solomon: Why the Washington Post’s New Ties to the CIA Are So Ominous

A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos — who’s now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder.

The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million “cloud” computing deal with the CIA.

The situation is unprecedented. But in an email exchange early this month, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told me that the newspaper doesn’t need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA. He wrote that such in-story acknowledgment would be “far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.”

Jan 14 2014

Fast Track Bill for TPP Hits the Floor

SOPA Reddit Warrior photo refresh31536000resize_h150resize_w1.jpg The bill to fast track the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement was introduced last week

House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp (R) and top Senate Finance Committee members Max Baucus (D) and Orrin Hatch (R) on Thursday unveiled the Trade Priorities Act of 2014 that would require a simple up-or-down vote on major trade deals without the opportunity to offer amendments to pertinent bills. [..]

The Obama administration is seeking the heightened authority in trade deals, allowing the Executive Branch to smooth congressional negotiations on accords. The two major deals, both long in the works, that are likely to be subject to such legislation are the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the 28-nation pact with the European Union, the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA). The deals would establish the world’s largest so-called free-trade zones.

The US is also working on a services-trade accord with a group of nations that would encompass half of the global economy. [..]

The bill has been negotiated in secret and other than some leaked passages by WikiLeaks, only the negotiators and insider corporations have seen the full proposal which is nearing completion. There is push back in the House of Representatives that may scuttle the president’s plan to push this agreement without any debate or amendments

Late last year, 151 House Democrats signed a letter opposing the so-called fast track scheme, also known as trade promotion authority. Several House Republicans oppose fast track on the grounds that it excessively empowers the executive branch, but many others, including Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), support the proposal.

“Obama wants to pass it; Democrats in the House want to oppose it,” said one House Democratic aide, who was granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the Democratic position. “Republicans are split ideologically, and want to know why they should take one for Obama.”

Nevertheless, Boehner said at a Thursday press conference that he cannot pass the bill without Democratic help. [..]

Many House Democrats are flatly opposed to the TPP and efforts to ease its passage. House Democrats are often more responsive to liberal interest groups than their Senate counterparts, and many members — including some in the Democratic Party leadership — believe that opposing TPP is good for electoral politics in 2014. While supporters of the deal argue it will increase economic growth, similar recent trade deals have undercut some U.S. industries and weakened global labor protections.

“The president has failed to find someone who is willing to introduce the bill. He’s got over 200 members to cultivate from, some of whom would like to have his support in the next election. But Democratic members are extremely skeptical of this,” Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) told HuffPost.

“We’ve tried free trade, and not only has free trade not improved the U.S. economy, it’s gutted manufacturing and driven down our labor standards,” he added, citing NAFTA as a prime example. [..]

Progressive groups came out strongly against the trade promotion authority, suggesting that approving it and the underlying trade deal would undercut efforts to curtail income inequality.

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership would be an unmitigated disaster for everything from the environment to Internet freedom and working families,” said Charles Chamberlain, the executive director of Democracy For America, a grassroots progressive organization, which intends to make trade an election-year issue.

In an interview with Huffington Post, political theorist and linguist Noam Chomsky slammed the agreement as a “neo-liberal assault”

(T)he deal, which is not yet finalized, is “designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity.”

Chomsky said it was “a joke” that the deal is designated a “free trade” agreement. “It’s called free trade, but that’s just a joke,” Chomsky said. “These are extreme, highly protectionist measures designed to undermine freedom of trade. In fact, much of what’s leaked about the TPP indicates that it’s not about trade at all, it’s about investor rights.”

The MIT professor also slammed the veil of secrecy that has surrounded TPP negotiations. [..]

As Chomsky noted:

“It’s very hard to make anything of the TPP because it’s been kept very secret. A half-secret, I should say. It’s not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing the legislation. To them, it’s perfectly public. They’re, in fact, writing it. It’s being kept secret from the population. Which of course raises obvious questions.”

If you haven’t done it need to tell our representatives to stop the “fast track” of the TPP. Even if you have do it again. Don’t Let Congress Fast-Track TPP.

Jan 14 2014

Will the NSA Be “Reformed”?

In the run up to President Barack Obama’s promised decision on reforms the National Security Agency and its surveillance programs, there has been an  unsubstantiated press release, by House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers and his Democratic counterpart Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, that the material taken by whistleblower Edward Snowden gravely impacted America’s national security, put the lives of US military personnel at risk and aided terrorists. There are no specifics about these allegations that Snowden had downloaded 1.7 million files or had considerable information on current U.S. military operations because the Pentagon report is, of course, classified.

Meanwhile top NSA officials and their allies are making their public appeals to retain their surveillance powers

In a lengthy interview that aired on Friday on National Public Radio (NPR), the NSA’s top civilian official, the outgoing deputy director John C Inglis, said that the agency would cautiously welcome a public advocate to argue for privacy interests before the secret court which oversees surveillance. Such a measure is being promoted by some of the agency’s strongest legislative critics. [..]

But security officials are arguing strongly against curtailing the substance of domestic surveillance activities.

While Inglis conceded in his NPR interview that at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled by NSA’s bulk collection of all American phone data – a case in San Diego that involved a money transfer from four men to al-Shabaab in Somalia – he described it as an “insurance policy” against future acts of terrorism. [..]

Inglis was bolstered on Thursday by the new FBI director James Comey, who said he opposed curbing the bureau’s power to collect information from businesses through a non-judicial subpoena called a national security letter. The use of national security letters, which occurs in secret, came under sharp criticism from Obama’s surveillance review panel, which advocated judicial approval over them.

Comey told reporters that would make it harder for his agency to investigate national security issues than conduct bank fraud investigations.

What we have learned is that the massive data collection has not led to the prevention of one terrorist attack and that conventional methods using court orders were more effective (pdf).

Activist and journalist Chris Hedges, along with former NSA technical director and NSA whistle-blower William Binney, tell Real News Network‘s Paul Jay that there should be accountability, including the President himself, for the criminal practices used by the NSA against the American people.

This Friday the president will publicly announce the results of his review of National Security Agency surveillance programs at the Department of Justice, not the White House.

Jan 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: Enemies of the Poor

Suddenly it’s O.K., even mandatory, for politicians with national ambitions to talk about helping the poor. This is easy for Democrats, who can go back to being the party of F.D.R. and L.B.J. It’s much more difficult for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it’s justified. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor, and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election. Moreover, G.O.P. harshness toward the less fortunate isn’t just a matter of spite (although that’s part of it); it’s deeply rooted in the party’s ideology, which is why recent speeches by leading Republicans declaring that they do too care about the poor have been almost completely devoid of policy specifics.

Let’s start with the recent Republican track record.

John Nichols: A ‘Fast Track’ to Less Democracy and More Economic Dislocation

The framers of the Constitution were wise to include Congress in the process of framing and approving trade agreements made by presidents. That authority to provide advice and consent should, the wisest legislators have always argued, be zealously guarded.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, Congress has frequently surrendered its authority when it comes to the shaping of trade agreements. By granting so-called “fast-track authority” to the White House, Congress opts itself out of the process at the critical stage when an agreement is being struck and retains only the ability to say “yes” or “no” to a done deal.

The result has been a framing of US trade agreements that is great for multinational corporations but lousy for workers, communities and the environment. Instead of benefitting the great mass of people in the United States and countries with which it trades, deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the permanent normalization of trade relations agreement with China de-emphasize worker rights, human rights, environmental and democracy concerns and clear the way for a race to the bottom.

Jonathan Turley: Big money behind war: the military-industrial complex

More than 50 years after President Eisenhower’s warning, Americans find themselves in perpetual war.

In January 1961, US President Dwight D Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn the nation of what he viewed as one of its greatest threats: the military-industrial complex composed of military contractors and lobbyists perpetuating war. [..]

Even with polls showing that the majority of Americans are opposed to continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new military-industrial complex continues to easily muster the necessary support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. It is a testament to the influence of this alliance that hundreds of billions are being spent in Afghanistan and Iraq while Congress is planning to cut billions from core social programmes, including a possible rollback on Medicare due to lack of money. None of that matters. It doesn’t even matter that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called the US the enemy and said he wishes that he had joined the Taliban. Even the documented billions stolen by government officials in Iraq and Afghanistan are treated as a mere cost of doing business.

It is what Eisenhower described as the “misplaced power” of the military-industrial complex – power that makes public opposition and even thousands of dead soldiers immaterial. War may be hell for some but it is heaven for others in a war-dependent economy.

Robert Kuttner: A Sick Job Market — and How to Cure It

Something is horribly wrong with both America’s employment situation and with the way we measure it. In case you missed the news, the economy generated just 74,000 payroll jobs in December, but the unemployment rate dropped by three tenths of a percentage point, from 7.0 percent to 6.7 percent.

How can that be? Simple: more and more people have just given up looking for work. The percentage of prime age people in the active work force is now just 62.8 percent, the lowest since 1978, a time when far fewer women worked. And the proportion of long term unemployed remains stuck at historic highs.

It’s a scandal that Republicans in the House keep blocking an extension of normal and customary unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. But unemployment compensation is a poor substitute for a job.

There are there convenient myths going around to explain what is occurring.

William K. Black: Rejoice! Chris Christie Will Never Be President

Christie’s aides should have read the Mitt Romney memo from 2012.

This week, Governor Chris Christie’s campaign for the presidential nomination blew itself up.  The suicide bomb was delivered by Christie’s staff and it was a variant on the same bomb that Mitt Romney triggered to destroy his campaign for the presidency.  Putting aside Romney’s vile dismissal of 47% of Americans as supposed freeloaders who take no personal responsibility, his most shameful and revealing phrase was “my job is not to worry about those people.”  The job of an elected official, of course, is to worry about all the people regardless of whom they voted for in an election or were even old enough to vote in the election.  An official who cannot get that most basic aspect of their job statement correct without hesitation is unfit for any position.  He is profoundly anti-American and he cannot honor any oath of office he takes.  Romney made clear that he flunked this most basic test.

Christie’s staff has made clear that it flunked the same test.  His entire group of aides flunked it after they had seen the disastrous results of Romney’s failure.  Recall the remedial humaneness training that the Republican “autopsies” of the 2012 election-cycle recommended?  Christie and his team missed the memo, missed the class on empathy, and channeled their inner Mittnasty to lash out at the people of their own state through an act of domestic terrorism.  They did not set out to kill and maim, but they did deliberately try to make the lives of tens of thousands of people miserable and they succeeded in doing so.  They did so in a manner so reckless that they put lives at risk and may have killed people.

Jan 12 2014

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: Guest this Sunday are New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; and crisis management expert Judy Smith.

The roundtable guests are Democratic strategist and ABC News contributor Donna Brazile; ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd; Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.; and former Obama White House senior adviser and ABC News contributor David Plouffe.

Guests for a special panel on women in the workplace are former Hewlett-Packard Chair and CEO Carly Fiorina; U.S. Air Force Col. Jeannie Leavitt, the first female fighter pilot and first female active duty fighter wing commander; Atlantic contributor and New America Foundation program director Liza Mundy; and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr, Schieffer’s guests are Sen.Marco Rubio (R-FL); Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD); and  Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.

Joining him at the roundtable are Rana Foroohar of Time, Michael Gerson of The Washington Post, John Harris of Politico, and Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: MTP guests are Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Maria Shriver.

Guests at the roundtable are Democratic Mayor of Baltimore Stephanie Rawlings-Blake; Wall Street Journal Columnist Kim Strassel; former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs; NBC News Chief White House Correspondent and Political Director, Chuck Todd; and TIME Magazine’s Mark Halperin.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and  Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Joining her on her panel are RNC Communications Director Sean Spicer, DNC Communications Director Mo Elleithee, and Karen Tumulty, National Political Reporter for the Washington Post.

Jan 12 2014

What We Learned This Week

Steve Kornacki’s guests share the news tidbits that they learned this week.

Share with us what you have learned this week.

Jan 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.

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Dave Johnson: New Fast-Track Bill Means Higher Trade Deficits and Lost Jobs

Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Representative Dave Camp (R-Mich.) have officially introduced fast-track trade authority legislation in Congress. Fast track is a process that bypasses Congress’ constitutional role in the treaty process. Fast track prohibits amendments to a trade treaty, limits Congress’ right to debate and requires an up-or-down vote (even though Senate Republicans have filibustered more than 400 other times since President Obama took office) within 90 days of the treaty coming before the Congress.

A number of Democrats as well as Republicans in the House have already stated objections to the fast-track process, so the bill faces an uphill battle. But the giant multinational corporations will push very hard to get this. [..]

Note that fast track is not necessary to pass trade agreements. Even without fast track, President Clinton was able to implement more than 130 trade agreements, including granting most-favored-nation status to China. This is all about setting up a process that enables the giant multinational corporations to push through the coming Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

Joe Conason: Fighting Poverty the Republican Way, With Fresh (and Not-So-Fresh) Ideas

Listening to Republican politicians these days as they talk (and talk and talk) about poverty and inequality can be a poignant experience. They want us to know they’re worried about the diminishing economic prospects confronted by so many Americans. They hope we will admire their shiny new solutions. And they are so eager for us to believe they care.

But however concerned these Republican worthies may be, they still insist on promoting the same exhausted and useless ideas favored by their party for decades. The sad result is that almost nobody believes that they care at all-and their “anti-poverty initiatives” tend to be dismissed, with a snicker, as public relations rather than public policy.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Chris Christie Is the True Face of the Republican Party

Some Republicans are claiming Chris Christie isn’t really one of them. Some pundits are claiming, even as scandal erupts around him, that he’s a “different kind of Republican.” He’s more than that: He is the archetypal Republican, the incarnation of its arrogant, corporatist soul. [..]

It’s true that Republicans are hypocritical in word and deed. But while they may be false to an ideology, they’re always true to their mission: to promote and serve the interests of big corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals. And when it comes to that agenda, all of them — the Chris Christies as well as the Paul Ryans — are as extremist as the political climate will permit. Whether the subject is taxation, “corporate personhood,” or the future of the planet, there’s no room for either moderation or ideology in the service of corporate goals.

Eugene Robinson: Hard to See the Victim Here

You know a politician is having a bad day when he has to stand before a news conference and plead, “I am who I am, but I am not a bully.”

Frankly, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was unconvincing on that score Thursday as he attempted to contain a widening abuse-of-power scandal. Moreover, Christie displayed a degree of egocentrism that can only be described as stunning. His apologies would have sounded more sincere if he hadn’t portrayed himself as the real victim. [..]

That was the central message of Christie’s two-hour performance before reporters: I was betrayed by people I trusted. I’m the victim here. [..]

If voters see Christie’s pugnacious, in-your-face political persona as refreshing, he has a big future. If they see it as thuggish, he doesn’t. In that sense, you’re right, Governor. This is all about you.

David Sirota: Reefer Sanity Takes Hold in Colorado

Seven years before legal marijuana went on sale this month in my home state of Colorado, the drug warriors in President George W. Bush’s administration released an advertisement that is now worth revisiting. [..]

Why is this spot worth revisiting? Because in light of what’s happening here in Colorado, the ad looks less like a scary warning than a reassuringly accurate prophecy. Indeed, to paraphrase the ad, for all the sky-will-fall rhetoric about legalization, there haven’t been piles of dead bodies and overdoses. Nothing like that has happened since we started regulating and taxing marijuana like alcohol.

Jan 11 2014

A Walk Across New Hampshire For Aaron

Aaron Swartz photo imagesqtbnANd9GcSri_QsacSc5jhQFcunN_zps1a2d5300.jpg Today marks the one year anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz, the computer coder and Internet freedom activist, who committed suicide while facing prosecution on federal hacking charges. So, today, in Aaron’s memory and for the causes he believed in, Harvard University Professor Lawrence Lessig is walking across New Hampshire

He is trying to build a coalition called New Hampshire Rebellion to fight the corrupting influence of money in politics ahead of the crucial 2016 presidential primary in the state. [..]

Lessig said it was a conversation with Swartz that propelled him to shift the focus of his work from Internet freedom to political corruption in 2007.

“He said to me, ‘Why are you wasting your time working on these Internet issues or these copyright issues, when you know that none of the ideas you’re pushing would ever be addressed because of the political system?'” Lessig recalled.

Lessig is asking supporters to join him as he walks across New Hampshire in segments — 10 miles on Saturday, 20 miles on Sunday, more down the road — to reach out to voters. His walk also will honor the work of Doris Haddock, more commonly known as Granny D, the New Hampshire political activist who advocated campaign finance reform until her death in 2010 at age 100.

Aaron’s Walk: The New Hampshire Rebellion

By Lawrence Lessig, Huffington Post

A year ago tomorrow, Aaron Swartz left. He had wound us all up, pointed us in a million directions, we were all working as hard as we could, moving things forward. And then he was gone. [..]

I wanted to find a way to mark this day. I wanted to feel it, as physically painful as it was emotionally painful one year ago, and every moment since. So I am marking it with the cause that he convinced me to take up seven years ago and which I am certain he wanted to make his legacy too.

On Saturday, we begin a walk across the state of New Hampshire, to launch a campaign to bring about an end to the system of corruption that we believe infects DC. This is the New Hampshire Rebellion.

Fifteen years after New Hampshire’s Doris Haddock (aka, “Granny D”), at 88, began her famous walk from LA to DC with the sign “CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM” on her chest, a dozen or so of us will start to walk in Dixville Notch, NH, the place the first 2016 presidential ballots will be cast. For two weeks, with more than 100 joining us along the way, we will walk south across New Hampshire, ending up in Nashua, NH, on the day Granny D was born.

Along the way, we will recruit everyone we can to do one thing: We want them to ask every presidential candidate at every event between now and January 2016, this one question: “How will YOU end the system of corruption in DC?” [..]

You can help. Please help. You can still join the walk. You can spread the word of the walk (tweet #NHRWalk linked to nhrebellion.org). You can sign a petition from wherever you are to push the candidates to answer this one question. Or, with just a few clicks, you can send support that will help this movement grow.

For Aaron

Jan 10 2014

Jobs Stink

The number of jobs created in the month of December fell far short of the expected 200,000 and unemployment (U-3) fell to 6.7% the lowest it has been since November 2008. I think the word “disappointing” is an understatement:

Stock futures fell after the report was released.

The slowdown in hiring could cause the Federal Reserve to rethink its plans to slow its stimulus efforts. The Fed decided last month to cut back on its monthly bond purchases by $10 billion. It could delay further reductions until it sees evidence that December’s weak numbers were temporary.

Cold weather may have slowed hiring. Construction firms cut 16,000 jobs, the biggest drop in 20 months.

Still, December’s hiring is far below the average gain of 214,000 jobs a month in the preceding four months. But monthly gains averaged 182,000 last year, nearly matching the previous two years.

The proportion of people working or looking for work fell to 62.8 percent, matching a nearly 36-year low.

As Huffington Post‘s Mark Gongloff writes “unemployment is falling for al the wrong reasons”

One reason for the big drop in unemployment in December was that many, many people dropped out of the labor force — 347,000, to be exact. They stopped looking for work, which made them no longer “unemployed” in the eyes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Labor Force Participation Rate photo original_zps097bbb5d.jpg

Click on image to enlarge.

Some of this is due to the fact that Baby Boomers retiring — but only some. Most of it has to do with the fact that the economy is still too weak to create enough jobs to draw people into the market. This is most clearly evident in the fact that younger people are leaving the labor force, too — or never even entering it — because they can’t find jobs.

Meanwhile, Charles Pierce reports that the Republicans keep finding new ways for “screwing the unemployed”

Rob Portman of Ohio, who might have been the 2012 Republican vice-presidential nominee had the Romney people not been terrified that, if they put Romney and Portman on the same stage together, the earth would spin into a dark region of the galaxy made up only of the primeval tedium whence the cosmos came, and we’d all come out named Tagg or something. Now, though, he’s back in the Senate being “reasonable,” which means that Portman felt free to allow an extension of unemployment benefits to come to a vote in the Senate, so Portman then could devise a way to sabotage those benefits because that is reasonable and bipartisan and centrist, and nobody will yell at him on the radio too loudly back in Columbus or Elyria.

   It depends, he said, on whether lawmakers find a way to pay for the $6.4 billion cost. Wednesday, Portman said he has just such a way. He said that people drawing two other kinds of government aid — Social Security disability insurance payments (SSDI) and trade adjustment assistance (TAA) — can simultaneously get unemployment benefits, which he thinks is wrong.It depends, he said, on whether lawmakers find a way to pay for the $6.4 billion cost. Wednesday, Portman said he has just such a way. He said that people drawing two other kinds of government aid — Social Security disability insurance payments (SSDI) and trade adjustment assistance (TAA) — can simultaneously get unemployment benefits, which he thinks is wrong.

The “compromise” on offer is to help the unemployed while stoking the usua; anger at a vague claque of disabled freeloaders elsewhere. Where ever did Portman get the idea that the country’s economy is beset by double-dipping cripples?

The Labor Department reported Friday that in December, the average unemployed person had been out of work for more than 37 weeks.

Meanwhile, “Christiegate.”

Jan 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”.

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Paul Krugman: The War Over Poverty

Fifty years have passed since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. And a funny thing happened on the way to this anniversary. Suddenly, or so it seems, progressives have stopped apologizing for their efforts on behalf of the poor, and have started trumpeting them instead. And conservatives find themselves on the defensive.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For a long time, everyone knew – or, more accurately, “knew” – that the war on poverty had been an abject failure. And they knew why: It was the fault of the poor themselves. But what everyone knew wasn’t true, and the public seems to have caught on. [..]

You can see the new political dynamics at work in the fight over aid to the unemployed. Republicans are still opposed to extended benefits, despite high long-term unemployment. But they have, revealingly, changed their arguments. Suddenly, it’s not about forcing those lazy bums to find jobs; it’s about fiscal responsibility. And nobody believes a word of it.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Chris Christie Is the True Face of the Republican Party

Some Republicans are claiming Chris Christie isn’t really one of them. Some pundits are claiming, even as scandal erupts around him, that he’s a “different kind of Republican.” He’s more than that: He is the archetypal Republican, the incarnation of its bullying, corporatist soul.

It’s like we said a while back: Christie is “the heartless, smug, bullying embodiment” of his party. He and his staff reflect a world in which other people are nothing more than rubes to be manipulated and exploited, whether they’re trying to escape the trap of long-term unemployment or Fort Lee during the morning rush hour.

The conventional wisdom says that Christie’s not like other Republicans. Pundits say he’s a “moderate,” a “pragmatist,” a counterbalance to the far-right ideology of the Tea Party Republicans. But no leading Republican is really moderate, including Christie. And at the end of the day they’re all pragmatists, ready to do whatever it takes to serve their paymasters’ agenda.

Robert Reich: Why the Republicans’ Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy — Setting Working Class Against the Poor — Is Backfiring

For almost 40 years Republicans have pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to convince working-class whites that the poor were their enemies.

The big news is it’s starting to backfire. [..]

It was a cunning strategy designed to split the broad Democratic coalition that had supported the New Deal and Great Society, by using the cleavers of racial prejudice and economic anxiety. It also conveniently fueled resentment of government taxes and spending.

The strategy also served to distract attention from the real cause of the working class’s shrinking paychecks — corporations that were busily busting unions, outsourcing abroad, and replacing jobs with automated equipment and, subsequently, computers and robotics.

But the divide-and-conquer strategy is no longer convincing because the dividing line between poor and middle class has all but disappeared. “They” are fast becoming “us.”

Jill Filipovic: Why is there an ambition gap between millennial men and women?

Perceiving systemic workplace and social bias, today’s women may be making logical decisions not to aim too high

Women are outpacing men in education and have been for two decades. They outnumber men on college campuses. They earn more undergraduate degrees. They earn more master’s degrees. They earn more doctoral degrees. For every 100 men who graduate with a college degree this year, 140 women will do the same.

Yet women still make less money and advance in the workplace less often. They are more likely to leave their jobs, especially after having kids. As they age, they face an increased risk of poverty and economic instability.

A new Pew study shows that millennial women (for the purposes of the study, women ages 18 to 32) now make almost as much money as their male peers – a victory insofar as the pay gap is narrower than ever before but disturbing when you consider that even higher educational attainment is not resulting in parity. Women have earned nearly 10 million more college degrees than men over the past two decades, but their average wages remain lower. The shrinking pay gap, too, is not just because women are making more money than they were two decades ago (although they are); it is also because men – and in particular, millennial men – are making less.

Matthew Harwood: How the NSA makes the nation insecure

On Dec. 18, President Barack Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies released a surprisingly critical report of the United States government’s intelligence practices since 9/11. The immediate reaction to the panel’s 300-plus-page report has rightly focused on its 46 recommendations for intelligence reform, such as ending the National Security Agency’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records that seeks to analyze the relationship networks of a minute number of counterterrorism targets. Yet it would be a mistake to pay attention only to the report’s particulars and ignore the very American civil libertarian philosophy animating the panel’s interpretation of what “security,” at its core, means.

The five-member group, comprising privacy, legal and national-security experts handpicked by the White House, does not simply conceive of security as national or homeland security. Rather, it passionately argues for a much richer, and more traditional, understanding of what security means to a free people, emphasizing the people’s Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The panel then immediately goes on to correctly equate security with freedom from governmental intrusion. “This form of security is a central component of the right to privacy,” it writes, “which Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously described as ‘the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.'”

Robert Fisk: Now it’s Middle Eastern Regimes Fighting al-Qa’ida, While the US Ties Itself Up in Knots

This is “Arab unity” as we have never seen it before. But watch out

And so, for the first time in recent history, it seems that the “war against terror” – and specifically against al-Qa’ida – is being fought by Middle East regimes rather than their foreign investors.

Sure, American drones still smash into al-Qa’ida operatives, wedding parties and innocent homes in Pakistan. But it’s General al-Sisi of Egypt, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran – even powerless President Michel Sleiman of Lebanon – who are now fighting “terrorists”.

It shows how powerful the bad guys have become that mutually antagonistic dictators and satraps can gang together against America’s enemy. This is “Arab unity” as we have never seen it before. The Ottoman Empire lives again. But watch out.

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