Tag: TMC Politics

The President’s speech yesterday on inequality avoided the “R” word. No politician wants to mention “redistribution” because it conjures up images of worthy “makers” forced to hand over hard-earned income to undeserving “takers.”

But as low-wage work proliferates in America, so-called takers are working as hard if not harder than anyone else, and often at more than one job.

Yet they’re still not making it because the twin forces of globalization and technological change have reduced their bargaining power and undermined their economic standing — while bestowing ever greater benefits on a comparative few with the right education and connections (and whose parents are often best able to secure these advantages for them).

Better education and training for those on the losing end is critically important, as will several of the other proposals the President listed. But they will only go so far.

David Cay Johnston: A Hard Lesson from Motown: They Will Steal Your Pension

Anyone in a public-sector job looking forward to retiring in comfort should look carefully at what is going on in Detroit and Springfield, Ill. Sherlock Holmes would call it the case of the missing pension money.

News leaking out this week from the Motor City tells how the enormous gap between the pensions workers earned and the money set aside to pay for them will be closed. By stealing from the workers.

Courts, legislatures, and corporations are all working in concert not to pay the full benefits owed. For decades, political and business leaders failed to set aside the right amount of money each payday to cover the pensions workers earned and, in some cases, covered up the mismanagement of pension fund investments.

This is nothing short of theft, as pensions are simply deferred wages, that is, money that workers could have taken as cash in their regular paychecks had they not opted to set it aside.

Norman Solomon: Under the Global Shadow of Big Brother, Journalism Must Light Up the Political Sky

Every new revelation about the global reach of the National Security Agency underscores that the extremism of the surveillance state has reached gargantuan proportions. The Washington Post just reported that the NSA “is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world.” Documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden have forced top officials in Washington to admit the indefensible while defending it. One of the main obstacles to further expansion of their Orwellian empire is real journalism.

Real journalism is “subversive” of deception that can’t stand the light of day. This is a huge problem for the Obama administration and the many surveillance-state flunkies of both parties in Congress. What they want is fake journalism, deferring to government storylines and respectful of authority even when it is illegitimate.

In motion now, on both sides of the Atlantic, are top-down efforts to quash real journalism when and how it matters most. In the two English-speaking countries that have done the most preaching to the world about “Western values” like freedom of the press, the governments led by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron are overseeing assaults on real journalism

John Nichols: Detroit Bankruptcy Bankrupts Democracy

Detroit elected a new mayor November 5 and he will take office in less than a month. But the future of this great American city and its citizens isn’t being defined by decisions made by voters on Election Day. It is being defined in federal bankruptcy court-and by an “emergency manager” who has no democratic legitimacy.

With a ruling Tuesday by US Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes, Detroit officially becomes the largest US city ever to enter Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Despite a determination that negotiations with creditors outside of bankruptcy court had not satisfied good-faith requirements, the judge cleared the way for the emergency manager and his law firm to advance a “plan of adjustment” that is likely to include deep cuts in pension guarantees for retired city employees and a “fire sale” of city assets that could result in public utilities and the Detroit Institute of Arts collection being bartered off to private bidders.

The spin-masters are already at work putting all of the sugar coating on it, but the reality is shocking and revealing. The world as a whole didn’t come up with a measly $5 billion a year for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. $5 billion was a bare minimum needed to maintain momentum in the fight against these diseases. Yet the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, Japan, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, China, Singapore, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, John Paulson, Barack Obama, Stephen Harper, 1,600 billionaires (with combined net worth of at least $5.5 trillion), and the rest of humanity couldn’t find the money. They came up with $4 billion instead, $1 billion short.

The world has told the poor and dying to drop dead.

Dave Johnson: Want to Cut Food Stamp Spending? Raise the Minimum Wage

Wednesday President Obama will give a speech on his plan to grow the economy and the middle class. Thursday fast-food workers will strike in 100 cities and stage protests in 100 others to demand $15 an hour and the right to form a union without interference from employers. Here’s something to consider: raising the minimum wage cuts government spending on food stamps and other programs. [..]

If minimum wage workers receives a raise, and that increase ripples up through the ever-growing low-wage end of our economy, the need for government assistance will decrease and therefore so will the spending on the programs. The right way to cut spending on assistance for Americans is to decrease the need for that assistance, not decrease assistance for those in need.

Don’t cut programs for the people who need them, cut those people’s need for the programs. It’s the right thing to do and it also makes money sense.

Chris Arnade: Looking for fraud? Don’t look at food stamp recipients, look at Wall Street

Food stamps keep 47 million people from going hungry, so cuts hurt. Congress should focus on where the real abuse happens

Hunger will drive kids to do crazy things. Like stay at school.

A few weeks ago South Bronx public schools had a half-day, with dismissal at noon. Yet almost all the kids stayed an extra hour, waiting in the cafeteria to eat the schools’ free lunch.

Teachers even got calls from parents of children who hadn’t stayed, asking them why they let their children leave without a meal. The teachers explained that this had never been an issue before. Kids had always left when they could. The parents responded, “That was before the cut in food stamps. We get $45 less a month now”.

The cuts to food stamps had come two weeks earlier, on the first of November, a result of Congress failing to renew the increase to the program in the 2009 stimulus package. That increase was included as a small attempt to blunt the pain of a recession that was disproportionally affecting the poor.

Christopher M. Barnes: Should We Blame the Engineer for Falling Asleep at the Train Controls?

Preliminary indications are that the Metro-North train derailment was caused by the train operator falling asleep at the controls, and waking up too late to stop the speeding train from derailing. This is similar to other events in the transportation industry, including air traffic controllers sleeping on the job, truck drivers and boat captains falling asleep at the wheel, and pilots sleeping while at the stick.

Our first inclination is often to blame the transportation employees for falling asleep while they were supposed to be conducting important tasks. We express outrage at their indolence, question their professionalism, and consider them to be weak for not toughing it out through their drowsiness. After all, many of us have experienced sleepiness, and we didn’t fall asleep on the job, right? How dare these transportation employees do so!

Thanks to a loophole that subsidizes CEO pay, McDonald’s, Yum Brands, Wendy’s, Burger King, Domino’s, and Dunkin’ Brands trimmed $64 million from their tax bills in 2011 and 2012.

The fast food industry is notorious for handing out lean paychecks to their burger flippers and fat ones to their CEOs. What’s less well-known is that taxpayers are actually subsidizing fast food incomes at both the bottom – and top – of the industry.

Take, for example, Yum Brands, which operates the Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut chains. Wages for the corporation’s nearly 380,000 U.S. workers are so low that many of them have to turn to taxpayer-funded anti-poverty programs just to get by. The National Employment Law Project estimates that Yum Brands’ workers draw nearly $650 million in Medicaid and other public assistance annually.

Meanwhile, at the top end of the company’s pay ladder, Yum Brands’ CEO David Novak pocketed $94 million over the years 2011 and 2012 in stock options gains, bonuses and other so-called “performance pay.” That was a nice windfall for him, but a big burden for the rest of us taxpayers.

Zoë Carpenter: The End of Dark Money?

Last spring, news that the Internal Revenue Service used keywords like “Tea Party” and “Occupy” to select groups applying for nonprofit status for extra scrutiny prompted media outrage, resignations, internal investigations and a series of congressional hearings. There was comparatively little fury about the fact that many of these “social welfare” organizations were getting tax breaks in exchange for flooding elections with anonymous cash.

The power these dark money groups wield in future elections could be undercut by a new proposal from the IRS, which would put clearer boundaries around the political activities of 501(c)(4) nonprofits. Released just before Thanksgiving, the guidelines lay out some specific definitions of “political activity,” that social welfare groups would have to limit in order to retain their tax-exempt status, such as expressing an opinion about a particular candidate.

Watchdogs are encouraged that the Obama administration has affirmed the need for clarity on the laws governing social welfare groups and their influence in elections. But the rules as written are broad, limiting activities like voter registration drives, get out the vote campaigns and candidate debates. Many groups see these as critical civic engagement programs, and essentially nonpartisan.

Rose Ann DeMoro; The Real Fix for Obamacare’s Flaws: Medicare for All

There’s no reason to rollback the progress the ACA has made. But we should go all the way and dump the for-profit system

Lost amidst the well-chronicled travails of the Affordable Care Act rollout are the long term effects of people struggling to get the health coverage they need without going bankrupt.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s been the main story line of the US healthcare system for several decades. Sadly, little has changed.

Still, with all the ACA’s highly publicized snafus, and less discussed systemic flaws, there’s no reason to welcome the cynical efforts to repeal or defund the law by politicians whose only alternative is more of the same callous, existing market-based healthcare system.

US nurses oppose the rollback and appreciate that several million Americans who are now uninsured may finally get coverage, principally through the expansion of Medicaid, or access to private insurance they’ve been denied because of their prior health status.

At the same time, nurses will never stop campaigning for a fundamental transformation to a more humane single-payer, expanded Medicare for all system not based on ability to pay and obeisance to the policy confines of insurance claims adjustors.

Jesica Weisberg: [The US and Canada Are Failing Asylum Seekers www.thenation.com/blog/177427/us-and-canada-are-failing-asylum-seekers]

We may think of Canada as our kinder, more generous neighbor, but a new study by the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic indicates that the country’s has adapted a decidedly un-Canadian approach to refugees. The authors of the study write that Canada is “systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers and avoiding its refugee protection obligations under domestic and international law.” Canada’s policies are driving migrants and refugees to the United States, where they may encounter a detention system that “falls far below international law requirements.” According to UN standards, asylum seekers should not be detained at all, but the authors write that the United States repeatedly holds refugee applicants in custody for months, and even years, at a time.

It’s hard to say which country comes across better-or worse-in the study. Since last year, when Canada passed a series of reforms to its refugee system, it has implemented various bulwarks to deter refugees from even arriving at the Canadian border. The Safe Third Country Agreement makes it almost impossible to enter Canada by land, as it prohibits asylum seekers who first set foot in the States to then apply for refugee claims in Canada (the agreement also applies to those who first arrive in Canada and then apply for US residency, but for geographic reasons, that scenario is far less frequent). Canadian Liaison Officers are now able enforce border laws from foreign posts-they’re stationed in forty-nine different locations-and intercept more than 4,000 people from boarding a plane or a boat to Canada each year. (As a point of comparison, US Customs and Border Patrol officers with a similar set of responsibilities can be found in just eight countries.) Canada has also been found, per the report, to outsource immigration enforcement to airlines and various private transport companies, meaning that asylum seekers don’t even have the opportunity to discuss their case with an immigration agent who may be more empathetic when, say, a passport is missing or a visa has been denied. Private companies, meanwhile, have been found to treat passengers inappropriately and to deny entry based on minor inconsistencies or gaps in identification papers. Canada’s approach is referred to as “pushing the border out”-or creating physical barriers far away from state lines, making the border more ephemeral yet more exclusive.

Barbara Garson: Spy vs. Spy: Walmart’s Corporate Surveillance on Black Friday

I took part in one of the 1500 Walmart protests this past Black Friday. It gave me a new perspective on NSA Surveillance. [..]

Employees organize because they want to improve their working conditions and their pay. It’s effective to show them that joining a union is a quick way to reduce your pay to zero. There’s no reason to be subtle about it.

Maybe that’s why it was easy for my husband to snap a picture [attached] of two Walmart people observing and photographing the demonstrators. Like the Pinkertons of earlier strike busting tradition, they have no reason to hide the fact that they have their eyes on you. But some of Walmart’s neo-Pinkerton surveillance capacities still surprised me.

At one point the woman with the camera checked a hand held “device” and told the man with her that the demonstrators across the highway were about to “moblize.”

I don’t know if she got her information through sophisticated tapping of the organizers or merely following our twitter feeds. But it reminded me that I personally have more to fear from corporate espionage then NSA spying. Unless you’re a fundamentalist terrorist, (or an American who will never need a raise,) you probably do, too.

U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries may be militarily effective, but they are killing innocent civilians in a way that is obscene and immoral. I’m afraid that ignoring this ugly fact makes Americans complicit in murder.

It is understandable why President Obama has made drone attacks his go-to weapon in the fight against terrorists and the Taliban. Armed, pilotless aircraft allow the CIA and the military to target individuals in enemy strongholds without putting U.S. lives at risk. But efficacy is not legitimacy, and I don’t see how drone strikes can be considered a wholly legitimate way to wage war.

Ewen MacAskill: The Long Arm of US Law: What Next for Edward Snowden?

The US will chase the NSA whistleblower wherever he tries to go, and if he ends up in an American court, he may not be free for decades

After an eventful six months, Edward Snowden will be hoping for a quieter time ahead – but not as quiet as life in a maximum-security American jail. In Russia since fleeing Hong Kong in June, the NSA computer specialist-turned-whistleblower is living under fairly restrictive conditions. But at least he still has access to the internet – crucial to him – although the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, made it a condition of granting Snowden temporary asylum that he do nothing to embarrass the US further. [..]

Snowden has permission to live, work and travel in Russia until 31 July next year, although he is likely to be granted further extensions beyond that. His supporters in Germany, including prominent members of the Green party, are pushing for him to be granted asylum in the country, given the service they say he has done in revealing the scale of surveillance, particularly the secret US monitoring of Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. But the German government has made it clear that this is an unlikely as it does not view him as a political refugee.

One of the worst-case scenarios for Snowden is if Russia, after a few years of exploiting his presence for propaganda purposes, decided to do a deal with the US, possibly exchanging him for a high-profile Russian in an American jail.

Robert Reich: The True Price of Great Holiday Deals

Online retailing is the future. Amazon is the main online shopping portal this holiday season but traditional retailers are moving online as fast as they can. Online sales are already up 20 percent over last year, and the pace will only accelerate.Target and many other bricks-and-mortar outlets plan to spend more on technology next year than on building and upgrading new stores.

Americans are getting great deals online, and they like the convenience. But there’s a hidden price. With the growth of online retailing, fewer Americans will have jobs in bricks-and-mortar retail stores.

Robert Sheer: Welcome Back, Jesus

Forget, for the moment, that he is the pope, and that Holy Father Francis’ apostolic exhortation last week was addressed “to the bishops, clergy, consecrated persons and the lay faithful.” Even if, like me, you don’t fall into one of those categories and also take issue with the Catholic Church’s teachings on a number of contested social issues, it is difficult to deny the inherent wisdom and clarity of the pontiff’s critique of the modern capitalist economy. No one else has put it as powerfully and succinctly.

It is an appraisal based not on “just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope,” as Rush Limbaugh sneered, but rather the words of Jesus telling the tale of the Good Samaritan found in Luke, not in “Das Kapital.” As opposed to Karl Marx’s emphasis on the growing misery of a much needed but exploited working class, Francis condemns today’s economy of “exclusion” leaving the “other” as the roadkill of modern capitalism: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”