Tag: TMC Politics

Jan 30 2013

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”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Can the Rising Progressive Tide Lift All Ships?

The growing progressive coalition that helped elect President Obama has emerged at the end of a failed and exhausted conservative era. The media now chronicle the flailings of Republican leaders slowly awakening to the weaknesses of a stale, pale and predominantly male party in today’s America.

But the central challenge to this progressive coalition is not dispatching the old but rather defining what comes next. Will it be able to address the central challenge facing America at this time and reclaim the American Dream from an extreme and corrosive economic inequality?

Renee Parsons: Failed Filibuster Reform Threatens Legislative Agenda

Despite Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (Nev) repeated pronouncements that the Republican stranglehold on the Senate’s filibuster could no longer be tolerated, that is exactly the final outcome of recent reform efforts. With the success of important Obama legislative initiatives like depending on a Democratic Senate for enactment, what was Harry Reid thinking? Reid’s stunning flip in favor of retaining the most egregious elements of the Republican filibuster clearly jeopardizes the President’s legislative agenda. [..]

Even as Republicans remain mired in a disconnect from political reality and despite reports of a bi-partisan agreement on an immigration reform ‘blueprint’, there is little reason to expect that the party of Lincoln will not continue to effectively stonewall every reasonable legislative initiative addressing the country’s most critical problems. And as Senate Democrats continue to stumble into an era of lost principles, there will be no one to blame but themselves.

Amy Dean: Immigration Reform Must Include Workers’ Rights

At this moment, various plans to reform America’s broken immigration system are working their way through Congressional debate. On Monday, a bipartisan group of eight lawmakers unveiled a plan that includes what they call a “tough but fair” path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Last Friday, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met with President Obama to discuss the issue, and this caucus’ input will be influential in shaping any final legislation. [..]

For the Democrats, the challenge will be to avoid simply jumping at the first deal offered by newly converted conservatives. Instead, for the first time in decades, promoters of reform have the opportunity to hold America to its promise of being a land of liberty and justice for all.

Jessica Valenti: Why Ending the Ban on Women in Combat Is Good for All Women

Responding to the news that the Pentagon will lift the ban on women in combat, lawyer and former Marine Ryan Smith made an impassioned argument in The Wall Street Journal for why this new policy is such a bad idea: “It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex.” And here I thought those in combat would have bigger concerns than who will see you go number two.

However silly, Smith’s argument epitomizes why lifting the ban on women in combat is so important-and about so much more than military policy. The arguments against women on the frontlines have always been more about about reinforcing traditional gender norms and holding onto an outdated and sexist model of what a woman should be like, rather than military protocol.

Jody Williams: Keep Dirty Oil Out of New England

From north to south and east to west, people across the United States and Canada are increasingly coming together to fight against the expansion of the Alberta tar sands and efforts to move the highly toxic bitumen – tar sands “oil” – through pipelines to the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico. From US ports the bitumen would be shipped primarily to China. [..]

Global warming and the obvious changes to our weather patterns cannot sustain more exploitation of fossil fuels. And tar sands expansion is among the worst threats. After the oil fields of Saudia Arabia, the full development of Alberta tar sands will create the world’s second largest potential source of global warming gases. I saw for myself the impact of the tar sands on the environment and people of Western Canada.

Mairead Maguire: Stand Up for Julian Assange

Last month, on December 13th, 2012, I visited Julian Assange, Australian founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, in the Ecuadorian embassy, in Knightsbridge, London.

It’s been seven months now since Julian Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy and was given political asylum. He entered the embassy after the British Courts shamefully refused his appeal against extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning about sexual molestation (no criminal charges have been made against him). Julian Assange has said he is willing to answer questions in the U.K. relating to accusations against him, or alternatively, to go to Sweden, provided that the Swedish government guarantee he will not be extradited to the U.S. where plans are being made to try him for conspiracy to commit espionage. The Swedish Government refuses to give such assurances. [..]

Unlike most political prisoners, he has no idea how long his virtual imprisonment in the embassy will last–6 more months or 6 years. The diplomatic standoff continues. This is indeed cruel, inhumane and mental torture. His only crime was to tell the truth and bring transparency to the illegal acts of the U.S. Government and its allies around the world.

Jan 29 2013

GOP Is Still the Party of Stupid

In his speech to Republican Party official in Charlotte, NC, Gov. Bobby Jindal said that

“the GOP must stop being the party of stupid.” The problem there is that actions, including Gov. Jindal’s, just reinforce how stupid the GOP is, especially when it comes to the economy.

Bad news for Jindal: Florida, Texas rely heavily on property and biz taxes

by Tyler Bridges, The Lens

As he seeks to eliminate the state’s income tax, Gov. Bobby Jindal has cast a covetous eye both west and east. The tax systems in Florida and Texas should serve as a model for Louisiana’s, the governor believes.

Neither state has an income tax, he notes, and both have reputations as hospitable to business investment.

But to make Louisiana look more like Florida and Texas, Jindal’s plan would have to include two significant elements that he dislikes: taxes on business and higher property taxes. [..]

“Most states have a three-legged stool for raising revenue,” said Jim Richardson, a Louisiana State University economist who co-chaired PAR’s tax study. “Texas and Florida have two legs – sales and property – since they don’t have an income tax.” Under the Jindal plan, “Louisiana would have a one-and-a-half-legged stool – sales taxes and some local property taxes.” [..]

In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman said it would raise the taxes on every tax dollar the poor make going against “the Republican argument that high marginal tax rates discourage work“.

“In our system, the highest marginal tax rates — the biggest disincentives to work in our system — are not for the rich. They are for lower-income workers who are in that range where if you earn a little bit more you start to lose benefits, you start to lose Medicaid, you lose housing subsidies,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist said. “This is going to raise taxes precisely on the people who actually have the biggest disincentives to work. So it’s actually, even from that old supply-side incentive thing, this is going in the wrong direction.”

In his Monday New York Times column, Prof. Krugman called the Republicans “Makers, Takers, Fakers”

Like the new acknowledgment that the perception of being the party of the rich is a problem, this represents a departure for the G.O.P. – but in the opposite direction. In the past, Republicans would justify tax cuts for the rich either by claiming that they would pay for themselves or by claiming that they could make up for lost revenue by cutting wasteful spending. But what we’re seeing now is open, explicit reverse Robin Hoodism: taking from ordinary families and giving to the rich. That is, even as Republicans look for a way to sound more sympathetic and less extreme, their actual policies are taking another sharp right turn.

Despite the lessons of the 2012 election, the Republicans, in states that are not checked by Democrats, are pushing tax policies that punish the poor and the middle class and benefit the wealthy.

Jan 29 2013

Giving It All Away

While Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner was packing up his office making way for the next puppet of the banks and Wall Street, Jack Lew, the top executives of major companies that were bailed out by the tax payers were getting their pay-offs.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for the Trouble Asset Relief Program — which keeps tabs on taxpayer bailouts — singled out for blame “pay czar” Patricia Geoghegan, the Treasury official tasked with reining in excessive pay increases for executives at bailed-out companies. [..]

Executives, the report contends, got pay bumps in 2012 for leading their bailed-out companies in profitable directions. But they also got raises when their units performed poorly: An executive at Ally’s residential mortgage unit saw his paycheck rise in 2012 even though Treasury knew that division of the bank was about to file for bankruptcy. The executive, Treasury said, was deemed “critical to successful restructuring.”

Another executive, at GM, saw a $50,000 pay increase not because of good performance, Geoghegan is quoted in the report as saying, but because “GM wanted to retain the employee and ‘do a little extra for him.'”

At AIG, which had by far the best remunerated executives of the three companies in 2012, the top 25 earners made nearly $108 million combined. CEO Robert Benmosche’s pay was $10.5 million. (AIG repaid its government loans in late 2012 and is no longer under Treasury oversight.)

The SIGTARP, which keeps tabs on taxpayer bailouts, is supposed to keep a lid on excessive pay for the CEO’s.  Ms. Geoghegan relinquished her authority to the companies involved to determine the size of pay increases. The result was that all but one of the 69 companies SIGTARP oversees received an annual payout of at least $1 million, and nearly a quarter received pay packages in excess of $5 million.

And the Treasury Department has sone nothing to fix the economy because under Timothy Geithner it was too busy bailing out Wall Street and the banks:

(T)he economy has already lost more than $7 trillion in output ($20,000 per person) compared with what the Congressional Budget Office projected in January of 2008. We will probably lose at least another $4 trillion before the economy gets back to anything resembling full employment. And millions of people have seen their lives turned upside down by their inability to get jobs, being thrown out of their homes, or their parents’ inability to get a job. And this is all because of the folks in Washington’s inability to manage the economy.

But the Wall Street banks are bigger and fatter than ever. As a result of the crisis, many mergers were rushed through that might have otherwise been subject to serious regulatory scrutiny. For example, J.P. Morgan was allowed to take over Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, two huge banks that both faced collapse in the crisis. Bank of America took over Merrill Lynch and Countrywide. By contrast, there can be little doubt that without the helping hand of Timothy Geithner, most or all of the Wall Street banks would have been sunk by their own recklessness.

There is one other hoary myth that needs to be put to rest as Timothy Geithner heads off to greener pastures. The claim that we made money on the bailout is one of those lines that should immediately discredit the teller. We made money on the loans in the same way that if the government issued mortgages at 1 percent interest it would make money, since the vast majority of the mortgages would be repaid.

The TARP money and other bailout loans were given to banks at way below market interest rates at a time when liquidity carried an enormous premium. Serious people know this, and the people who don’t are not worth listening to. It was a massive giveaway, as the Congressional Oversight Panel determined at the time.

Meanwhile, states are refusing to raise minimum wages to keep the many workers from falling deeper into poverty.

Jan 29 2013

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: Now We’re Talking

The thousand-mile journey to comprehensive immigration reform has begun, as you might expect for Washington, with a single memo. Eight senators, four from each party, released it on Monday: a statement of principles behind a deal to overhaul the system in one big bill. It calls for more border and workplace enforcement, more visas for needed workers and legalization – with a path to citizenship – for 11 million undocumented immigrants.

The statement lacks specifics and leaves a lot of room for disappointment and retreat. But what’s encouraging is that it exists at all. No longer does the immigration debate consist of two groups yelling across a void. No longer is the discussion hopelessly immobilized by Republicans who have categorically rejected any deal that includes any hint of “amnesty.”

Richard (RJ) Eskow: As Federal Prosecutors Cash In, Big Bankers Go Unpunished

We needed heroes after the financial crisis. Instead we got bureaucrats, compromisers, and perhaps something much worse. Federal law enforcement officials, our “thin gray line” against banker crime, were charged with restoring the balance of justice and reducing the threat of future crises. Seems they had other things on their minds.

Now the Administration’s first-term posse is riding off into the sunset. The most visible departure is Deputy Attorney General Lanny Breuer. Remember those submissive or avaricious sheriffs in the old Westerns, the ones who were always letting the bad guys run wild ?  “Sorry, Ma’am, I’d like to help you and the boy but there ain’t nothin’ I can do.”  That’s Breuer, whose shattered credibility and extreme reluctance to prosecute has become the stuff of legend.  

But he’s not the only one. Meet the senior partners in a firm that be more aptly named “Covington, Burling, and Justice.”

William K. Black: By Their Responses, Ye Shall Know Them

You often cannot evaluate a person’s character until they are under pressure. Their response to substantive criticism reveals an important aspect of character. While we learn the most from substantive criticism, the process is almost always painful. For people in positions of power, the substantive criticism is particularly vital and useful because far too often people fail to “speak truth to power.” They fear being excluded from the debate and marginalized should they criticize the false statements that the powerful make in order to maintain and extend their power. [..]

Journalists constantly face the ethical issue of whether to speak truth to power. They need access to the powerful to do their jobs. Journalists also want to be viewed as “serious” and the powerful often define as “unserious” any journalist who criticizes the powerful and the myths that the powerful spread in order to maintain and exploit their power. Far too often, journalists decide against speaking truth to power. This self-censorship is particularly damaging because it is invisible to the public and because it inherently degrades the journalist’s integrity.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Urgency of Growth

If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a committed capitalist and hope to make more money, you should want our economy to grow faster.

The moment’s highest priority should be speeding economic growth and ending the waste, human and economic, left by the Great Recession. But you would never know this because the conversation in our nation’s capital is being held hostage by a ludicrous cycle of phony fiscal deadlines driven by a misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit.

John Nichols: Priebus Is What Happens When a Party Loses Its Self-Respect

The Republican National Committee has retained Reince Priebus as party chairman, keeping the failed leader in a position previously occupied by Mark Hanna, Lee Atwater and Haley Barbour.

Even as he accepted his new term, Priebus acknowledged that he and his minions have led their party far from the American mainstream. “We have to build better relationships in minority communities, urban centers and college towns,” he admitted in his acceptence speech. [..]

Priebus was not reelected to build a multiracial, multiethnic party that embraces diversity and seeks to deliver a message of opportunity for all. The whole point of his chairmanship has been to combat the politics of inclusion that Republicans decry Barack Obama for practicing.

That has placed the once honorable Republican Party on the wrong side of history, and of American progress.

Harold Meyerson: Employees? Consumers? Feh!

The Republican war on the NLRB and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Should the Supreme Court uphold it, last Friday’s decision by three Reagan-appointees to the D.C. Circuit Appellate Court appears at first glance to rejigger the balance of power between Congress and the president. The appellate justices struck down three recess appointments that President Obama had made to the five-member National Labor Relations Board during the break between the 2011 and 2012 sessions of Congress partly on the grounds that Congress wasn’t formally in recess, since one and sometimes two Republicans showed up to nominally keep it in session for the sole reason of denying Obama the right to recess appointments. Two of the three justices went further, ruling that the president can’t really make recess appointments at all. [..]

The real issue here is who Obama appointed, and to what agencies. The recess appointments he made in the 2011-2012 break were to the NLRB (two Democrats, one Republican) and the directorship of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray). Obama had sent these nominations to the Hill, but invoking the 60-vote supermajority rule, Republicans refused to consider them. They made clear that their problem with Cordray wasn’t Cordray; it was that they opposed the very existence of the Bureau, which had been created as part of Dodd-Frank in 2010. The idea of an agency that represented financial consumers solely-as opposed to other agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Controller of the Currency-struck them as a terrible idea. They proposed to amend the act by reconstituting the bureau as an agency, with multiple board members, that represented banks’ interests as well as their consumers. In short, they proposed a house divided against itself.

Jan 28 2013

New SEC Head is a Fox

Pres. Barack Obama nominated former US Attorney of the Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White, to head the troubled Securities and Exchange Commission. The announcement comes a day after the damning PBS Fraontline expose of the Department of Justice’s failure to prosecute bank fraud and the resignation of Lanny Breuer, the head of the DOJ criminal division. Ms. White certainly has a fine reputation of being a tough prosecutor during her tenure as US Attorney, she managed something Rudi Guiliani failed to do, finally putting notorious mobster John “The Teflon Don” Gotti behind bars. However, in the 10 years since she left that office, Ms. White has worked diligently to protect the heads of the “Too Big To Fail” banks. In his Salon article, David Sirota called her a “Wall Street enabler” and goes on to enumerate the evidence:

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone contributing editor, in his article “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail,” recounts how during her tenure as head of litigation at the New York law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, Ms. White defended some very high profile bankers and played a key role in the “squelching of then-SEC investigator Gary Aguirre’s investigation into an insider trading incident involving future Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack”

   The deal looked like a classic case of insider trading. But in the summer of 2005, when Aguirre told his boss he planned to interview Mack, things started getting weird. His boss told him the case wasn’t likely to fly, explaining that Mack had “powerful political connections.”…

   Aguirre also started to feel pressure from Morgan Stanley, which was in the process of trying to rehire Mack as CEO … It didn’t take long for Morgan Stanley to work its way up the SEC chain of command. Within three days, another of the firm’s lawyers, Mary Jo White, was on the phone with the SEC’s director of enforcement…

   Pause for a minute to take this in. Aguirre, an SEC foot soldier, is trying to interview a major Wall Street executive – not handcuff the guy or impound his yacht, mind you, just talk to him. In the course of doing so, he finds out that his target’s firm is being represented…by the former U.S. attorney overseeing Wall Street, who is going four levels over his head to speak directly to the chief of the SEC’s enforcement division…

   Aguirre didn’t stand a chance. A month after he complained to his supervisors that he was being blocked from interviewing Mack, he was summarily fired, without notice. The case against Mack was immediately dropped: all depositions canceled, no further subpoenas issued.

In February of 2012 on a panel at a New York University School of Law even, Ms White expressed her doubts about whether banks had committed crimes ahead of the financial crisis stating that care should be taken to “distinguish what is actually criminal and what is just mistaken behavior, what is even reckless risk-taking, and not bow to the frenzy.”

Another point of conflict is Ms. White’s husband. Yves Smith at naked capitalism notes that “John White, who headed the SEC’s corporate finance section under Chris Cox and was heavily involved in detailed Sarbanes Oxley rulemaking, and now that he is back at Cravath, has been lobbying against regulation.”

Nor does Ms. White have a background in finance or the “inner workings of the trading system:”

Although she has represented many executives accused of financial crimes, White is not an expert on the inner workings of trading systems, a lack of knowledge that may not serve her well as the SEC struggles to keep up with rapid changes in increasingly complex financial markets.

“The problem with the SEC is that they don’t seem to have a grip on” high-frequency trading and other major issues affecting modern financial markets, said Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at independent brokerage Themis Trading and a frequent critic of high-speed trading. “We’re concerned about cleaning up the market, and we need the SEC to take the lead here.”

Her background puts to question how aggressively White might prosecute financial fraud and enforce new rules under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law — most of which have not yet been adopted by the SEC.

Matt Taibbi recounts a conversation he had with a head fund manager regarding Ms. White’s:

His point about White is simple and it makes a lot of sense. She may very well at one time have been a tough prosecutor. But she dropped out and made the move a lot of regulators make – leaving government to make bucketloads of money working for the people she used to police. “That move, being a tough prosecutor, then going to work defending scumbags, you can only make that move once,” was his point. “You can’t go back again, you know what I mean?”

Think about it: how do you go back and sit in S.E.C.’s top spot after all of those years earning millions as a partner for a firm that represented Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Deutsche, Chase, and AIG, among others? Think that fact that his firm has retained her firm has anything to do with Jamie Dimon coming out and saying that White is the “perfect choice” to run the S.E.C.? Think of all the things she knows but can’t act upon. Could she really turn around and target Morgan Stanley after being their lawyer for all those years?

Ms. White is not only another example of the government’s revolving door from public service to private practice back to public service but of Pres. Obama’s signal to Wall Street that they are safe to continue with business as usual. Mary Jo White is the fox in the hen house.  

Jan 28 2013

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: Makers, Takers, Fakers

Republicans have a problem. For years they could shout down any attempt to point out the extent to which their policies favored the elite over the poor and the middle class; all they had to do was yell “Class warfare!” and Democrats scurried away. In the 2012 election, however, that didn’t work: the picture of the G.O.P. as the party of sneering plutocrats stuck, even as Democrats became more openly populist than they have been in decades.

As a result, prominent Republicans have begun acknowledging that their party needs to improve its image. But here’s the thing: Their proposals for a makeover all involve changing the sales pitch rather than the product. When it comes to substance, the G.O.P. is more committed than ever to policies that take from most Americans and give to a wealthy handful.

Glenn Greenwald: Kiriakou and Stuxnet: the danger of the still-escalating Obama whistleblower war

The only official punished for the illegal NSA program was the one who discussed it. The same is now true of torture

This Obama whistleblower war has nothing to do with national security. It has nothing to do with punishing those who harm the country with espionage or treason.

It has everything to do with destroying those who expose high-level government wrongdoing. It is particularly devoted to preserving the government’s ability to abuse its power in secret by intimidating and deterring future acts of whistleblowing and impeding investigative journalism. This Obama whistleblower war continues to escalate because it triggers no objections from Republicans (who always adore government secrecy) or Democrats (who always adore what Obama does), but most of all because it triggers so few objections from media outlets, which – at least in theory – suffer the most from what is being done.

Nancy Goldstein: Obama, Civil Rights is About Legislation, Not Alliteration

Please Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a charismatic speaker, a gay marching band and a nice bit of alliteration as much as the next lesbian. But by the time President Obama invoked “Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall” in his inauguration speech, I was ready to flog him with an It Gets Better DVD. If words were action, this president would be a progressive’s dream. But the LGBT community has been to this rodeo before: the one where Obama at his best – which is to say, in campaign mode – suckers us with platitudes about his commitment to fairness and change, civil rights and constitutional values, and then sits on his butt until we force him to seek an actual political solution.

Cynical, me? No indeed. The Obama who boomed on Monday that “our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well” sent out his press secretary the very next day to assure us that the president won’t be expending any political capital to make his rhetoric a reality. When it comes to audacity, Obama’s real legacy is not one of hope, but of feigned helplessness. There’s plenty he could do about LGBT inequality in America if he wanted to, Congress be damned.

Robert Kuttner: Obama’s Heaviest Lift

President Obama is off to a good start in his second term. “We, the people,” he pledged in his second inaugural, “still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity.” Amen to that.

But as the economy continues its agonizingly slow recovery, his greatest challenge will be to reverse the economy’s widening inequality. Ordinary working families are falling further and further behind the cost of living.

The picture is especially brutal for young adults, who are likely to find themselves saddled with college debt, facing jobs that offer neither benefits nor career security.

Though the unemployment rate is coming down, the deeper trends in job markets only intensify the trend of the past three decades — the lion’s share of the gains going to the top.

Alan Grayson: An Unconstitutional Two-fer

This week, the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives did something that you wouldn’t think is even possible: they introduced (and then the House passed) a five-page bill that, despite its brevity, may violate two separate provisions of the United States Constitution. [..]

Up until now, the federal debt limit has been a number. Now it’s a concept, and an undefined one at that. I find it hard to square that vagueness with Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which states that: “The validity of the public debt … shall not be questioned.”

Not content with establishing that constitutional dilemma alone, the Republican leadership then made Congressional pay dependent on passing a budget. The bill says that if the Senate doesn’t pass a budget, then Senate pay (which is monthly) is postponed to the first week of 2015. Specifically, it changes pay from $14,500 a month to zero per month, and then something like a $300,000 lump sum on Jan. 2, 2015.

John Nichols: Three Strategies to Block the Gerrymandering of the Electoral College

As Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus promotes one of the most blatant assaults on democracy in modern times-a scheme to gerrymander the Electoral College so that the loser of the popular vote could win key states and the presidency-the number-one question from frustrated citizens is: What can we do about it?

After so many assaults on voting rights and the electoral process itself have been advanced, it is easy to imagine that Priebus, Karl Rove and their team could get away even with so audacious an initiative as the rigging of presidential elections. [..]

So can Priebus be stopped? It’s possible. But democracy advocates need to move fast, and smart.

What to do?

Jan 27 2013

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:

Up with Chris Hayes: Joining Chris Sunday will be: Ambassador Swanee Hunt, the former ambassador to Austria from 1993 to 1997, now the Elizabeth Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; Robin Wright (@wrightr), joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center; Horace Campbell, professor of African politics, African-American studies and political science at Syracuse University; Joshua Trevino (@jstrevino), vice president of external public relations at the Texas Public Policy Foundation; Vince Warren (@VinceWarren), executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies; and Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer), reporter and blogger for Mother Jones.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Sunday’s guests on “This Week” are Foreign Relations Committee members Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ).

“Zero Dark Thirty” screenwriter and producer Mark Boal and Atlantic national correspondent Mark Bowden, best-selling author of “Blackhawk Down,” discuss the controversy over the Oscar-nominated film’s depiction of so-called enhanced interrogation in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

The  roundtable debates all the week’s politics, with ABC News’ George Will; Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ); Democratic strategist and ABC News contributor Donna Brazile; NPR “Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep; and New Republic owner and publisher Chris Hughes, who interviewed President Obama for an Oval Office exclusive hitting newsstands next week.  

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA); New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly; former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) who will discuss gun control.

A panel looks at the big news this week: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s announcement lifting the ban on women in combat, the three-month debt ceiling deal which passed the House Wednesday, gun control and more with former Romney Campaign Senior Adviser Kevin Madden, Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter, The New York Times‘ David Sanger and The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius.

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Chuck Todd, NBC News Chief White House Correspondent; Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent; Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post Columnist; and Chris Frates, National Journal Congressional Correspondent.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Former Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) sits down exclusively with David Gregory for his first live interview since the election.

The roundtable guests are incoming President of the Heritage Foundation, former Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC); President and CEO of the NAACP Ben Jealous; Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward; NBC’s Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell; and NBC News Special Correspondent Ted Koppel.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are retired Gens. Stanley McChrystal and Michael Hayden; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA);  Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA), Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), Saratoga Springs, Utah Mayor Mia Love (R) and former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.

Jan 27 2013

What We Now Know

Up host Chris Hayes  discusses what we have learned this week about congressional gridlock, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) “gentleman’s agreement” handshake with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the dwindling hope for considerable change to the filibuster. He is joined by Mike Pesca (@pescami), sports correspondent for National Public Radio; Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman (@Sum_Of_Us), executive director and founder of SumofUs.org and partner of Internet activist Aaron Swartz; Susan Crawford (@scrawford), author and  professor for the Center on Intellectual Property & Information Law Program at Carodozo School of Law; and Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisi), senior editor for The Atlantic.

Real Filibuster Reform Will Not Be Coming to the Senate

What Killed Filibuster Reform?

Scott Lemieux, The American Prospect

Senators have a disincentive for getting rid of the anti-majoritarian rule: It gives them more power.

The failure to reform the filibuster is a very bad thing. The question is why so many Democratic senators-including some blue-state representatives like Vermont’s Patrick Leahy and California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer-showed so little inclination to act in the interests of progressive values.

One issue is that some senators may not accurately perceive the damage that the filibuster does to Democratic interests. [..]

The larger problem, however, is that even for senators who understand the history of the filibuster and its inherently reactionary effects, the filibuster represents a disjuncture between the interests of progressives as a whole and the individual interests of Democratic senators. Collectively, the filibuster makes it harder to advance policy goals. But on an individual level, the filibuster and the Senate’s other arcane minority-empowering procedures give senators far more power than ordinary members of a typical Democratic legislature (including the House of Representatives). This helps to explain why even relatively liberal senior members tend to be more reluctant to abandon the filibuster than newer Democratic senators; once you get used to power, it’s hard to give it up.

Jan 26 2013

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

Robert Reich: The Myth of Living Beyond Our Means

Brace yourself. In coming weeks you’ll hear there’s no serious alternative to cutting Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on middle class, and decimating what’s left of the federal government’s discretionary spending on everything from education and job training to highways and basic research.

“We” must make these sacrifices, it will be said, in order to deal with our mushrooming budget deficit and cumulative debt.

But most of the people who are making this argument are very wealthy or are sponsored by the very wealthy: Wall Street moguls like Pete Peterson and his “Fix the Debt” brigade, the Business Roundtable, well-appointed think tanks and policy centers along the Potomac, members of the Simpson-Bowles commission.

Seth Korman: Democrats: Even When They Win, They Don’t Win

There is something both honorable and maddeningly infuriating with the current incarnation of the Democratic Party. Even as it seems to represent the policy preferences a growing majority of Americans, it remains unable to translate this authority into real, political power.

How is it that the increasingly popular Democrats refuse to wield the political cudgel that the voters have placed in their hand, while the increasingly unpopular Republicans have no qualms about pushing radical reforms to maintain a toehold on power?

Margaret Flowers: Top CEOs plan to loot US social programmes

A top CEO plan to curb social programmes will be bad for everyone – except them.

The new recommendations for Social Security and Medicare released by the Business Round Table are beyond belief. It’s as if the people who wrote them never gaze outside of the tinted windows in their limousines.

As I wrote earlier in “Stop Obama’s Grand Charade“, the newest tactic to impose more austerity measures in the US comes from a group of over 80 CEOs who are starting with $60 million to spend on a campaign called “Fix the Debt “. They plan to convince people in the US that not only are cuts to vital programmes necessary, but that such cuts will strengthen them when exactly the opposite is true.

These CEOs are members of the Business Round Table, an elite corporate club that claims to create 7.3 trillion in annual revenues. That gives them a lot of political clout. The real reason for their push to cut spending on important programmes like Social Security and Medicare is so corporate tax rates can be cut further. Of course, they don’t say that. They say things like Social Security and Medicare are running out of money and we must preserve and strengthen them (preserve and strengthen sound eerily like the language we used in 2010 when we were fighting cuts by the Deficit Commission). This push for corporate tax cuts comes although corporate profits have grown by 171 percent during the Obama presidency alone, the highest growth in profits since 1900.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Senator’s Denial of News Story Reflects Deep Resistance to ‘Chained-CPI’ Social Security Cut

Here’s an “Washington insider” story that could affect every family in the country. Congressional newspaper The Hill reported today that Sen. Chuck Schumer was considering using a special parliamentary maneuver to pass a budget deal.  

But this wasn’t just another “inside baseball”story, the kind that fascinates policy wonks and bores all other living beings. This story included an explosive paragraph which seemed to suggest that Schumer, the Senate’s #3 Democrat, was interested in a deal that included the “chained-CPI” cut to Social Security benefits. It also included cryptic language about “Medicare reform,” words that are often used as Beltway code for raising the eligibility age or other drastic benefit reductions to that program. [..]

This is partly the story of a poorly-worded paragraph on a volatile topic. But it’s primarily an economic and political story, not a media one. The fiery response from House progressives and outside groups demonstrates that there is growing and organized resistance to the chained-CPI.The prompt clarification from Schumer’s office, as reported in The Hill, shows that an increasing awareness among leading Democrats that the idea is politically toxic.

David Sirota: The President of Perpetual War

Four years into his presidency, Barack Obama’s political formula should be obvious. He gives fabulous speeches teeming with popular liberal ideas, often refuses to take the actions necessary to realize those ideas and then banks on most voters, activists, reporters and pundits never bothering to notice-or care about-his sleight of hand.

Whether railing on financial crime and then refusing to prosecute Wall Street executives or berating health insurance companies and then passing a health care bill bailing out those same companies, Obama embodies a cynical ploy-one that relies on a celebrity-entranced electorate focusing more on TV-packaged rhetoric than on legislative reality.

Jessica Valenti: Why Ending the Ban on Women in Combat Is Good for All Women

Responding to the news that the Pentagon will lift the ban on women in combat, lawyer and former Marine Ryan Smith made an impassioned argument in The Wall Street Journal for why this new policy is such a bad idea: “It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex.” And here I thought those in combat would have bigger concerns than who will see you go number two. [..]

The truth is that women are already dying in service to their country and are already on the frontlines, despite the existing policy.

What lifting the ban on women in combat will really mean is more opportunity for career advancement. The ACLU points out that women will now be eligible for tens of thousands of jobs that were once only available to men.

But perhaps even more importantly, it will start to chip away at the benevolent sexism that clouds our culture and suggests that inequality is just another form of chivalry.

Jan 26 2013

ROTFLMAO: Tax the Banks to Punish Obama

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

Dave Camp Bank Tax Bill Would Punish Obama-Friendly CEOs

by Zach Carter and Ryan Grim, The Huffington Poat

WASHINGTON — House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) is considering legislation that would significantly increase taxes for the nation’s largest banks while providing tax breaks to struggling homeowners. [..]

The bill would significantly strengthen the Volcker Rule, which bans banks from speculating in securities markets with taxpayer money. The Volcker Rule’s implementation has been delayed as bank lobbyists have flooded regulatory agencies in Washington, pillorying the ban with loopholes. Hefty tax burdens for proprietary trading would reduce bank incentives to engage in the risky activity.

Camp’s legislation also would permanently establish a homeowner aid plan advocated by former Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who retired this month. When banks grant homeowners mortgage relief, the IRS considers the debt-reduction taxable income. As a result, struggling homeowners can face an unmanageable tax burden. A $50,000 debt reduction can spark an $18,000 tax bill — money that borrowers struggling to avoid foreclosure simply do not have. Miller successfully lobbied to include a one-year fix on the tax policy in the fiscal cliff deal. Camp’s legislation would permanently end the tax policy.

Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog aptly notes that “hell hath no fury like a House Ways and Means committee chairman scorned” but points out Camp’s “big deal” won’t impress the bank lobby:

Camp sent an angry letter to the Business Roundtable a month ago, and now Republicans are saying if there must be new revenue, it should be “on their backs.”

How big a deal is Camp’s bill? I think it’s safe to say the bank lobby won’t be impressed.

   Camp’s new bill would harvest government revenues from complex financial transactions involving derivatives, some of which figured prominently in the 2008 banking collapse. Although the 2010 financial reform legislation would curb some excesses in the derivatives market, the legislation isn’t yet fully implemented, and leaves much of the market unregulated. Financial reform advocates have urged new taxes on derivatives to deter excessive risk-taking by big banks. […]

   Camp’s bill would establish a new tax regime for derivatives, requiring banks to declare the fair market value of the products at the end of each year. Any increase in value would be considered corporate income, subject to taxation. It’s a more aggressive tax treatment than Wall Street enjoys for either derivatives or for trading in more traditional securities. […]

   The bill would significantly strengthen the Volcker Rule, which bans banks from speculating in securities markets with taxpayer money. The Volcker Rule’s implementation has been delayed as bank lobbyists have flooded regulatory agencies in Washington, pillorying the ban with loopholes. Hefty tax burdens for proprietary trading would reduce bank incentives to engage in the risky activity.

How serious is Camp about this? It’s hard to say at this point, though I suspect it’s mostly about posturing and political chest-thumping. Camp wants to send a message that he’s displeased and see this as a vehicle. Even if the committee chair got serious about this, I imagine other Republicans would intervene to stop its progress.

Benen thinks that in the aftermath of Pres. Obama’s reelection the business community see him as “a leader who is going nowhere” but “is reaching out to them.” At the same time they view the Republicans as untrustworthy and increasingly reckless.

But seriously, folks, the Republicans are threatening to tax the banks and help stressed homeowners as a “payback” for supporting Pres. Obama. Oh, please, let them.

ROTFLMAO

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