Tag: TMC Politics

May 04 2012

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”.

Paul Krugman: Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity

Before the Great Recession, I would sometimes give public lectures in which I would talk about rising inequality, making the point that the concentration of income at the top had reached levels not seen since 1929. Often, someone in the audience would ask whether this meant that another depression was imminent.

Well, whaddya know?

Did the rise of the 1 percent (or, better yet, the 0.01 percent) cause the Lesser Depression we’re now living through? It probably contributed. But the more important point is that inequality is a major reason the economy is still so depressed and unemployment so high. For we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion – both of which have a lot to do with the distorting effects of great wealth on our society.

Eugene Robinson: Afghanistan, For the Long Haul?

Show of hands: Does anybody really understand the U.S. policy in Afghanistan? Can anyone figure out how we’re supposed to stay the course and bring home the troops at the same time?

I’m at a loss, even after President Obama’s surprise trip to the war zone. The president’s televised address from Bagram air base raised more questions than it answered. Let’s start with the big one: Why?

According to Obama, “the United States and our allies went to war to make sure that al-Qaeda could never use this country to launch attacks against us.” I would argue that U.S. and NATO forces have already done all that is humanly possible toward that end. [..]

David Sirota: Property Rights in the Cloud

When you hear the phrase “property rights,” you probably think of farmers fighting environmental regulators and homeowners arguing with oil drillers. But in the Information Age, you should also be thinking about your computer-and asking, how much of you is really yours? It’s not a navel-gazing rumination from a college Intro to Existentialism class-it’s an increasingly pressing question in the brave new world of social networking and cloud computing.

Last week’s big technology announcement spotlighted the thorny issue. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Google’s announcement of its “Google Drive” came with the promise that users will “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.” But when you save files to Google’s new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content” as the company sees fit.

Kristen Breitweiser: Heights of Hypocrisy: The Universal Use of 9/11 in Politics

A year ago, I wrote a blog about the death of Osama bin Laden, “Today is Not a Day of Celebration for Me.”

I wrote the blog after witnessing so many Americans celebrating, fist-pumping, dancing, and reveling in the streets about the death of bin Laden.

Seeing so many Americans acting like that was too much of an uncomfortable reminder of those who celebrated in the streets during the attacks of 9/11 while men like my husband either burned alive, were crushed alive, or horrifically jumped to their deaths.

A year ago, what drove me to write was my sadness in bearing the sight of Americans celebrating the death of anyone — even the man largely responsible for the murder of my husband.

Now one year later, I am once again driven to write due to witnessing President Obama resort to the same campaign tactics as George W. Bush.

Frankly, for what it’s worth, it sickens me; and it saddens me.

New York Times Editorial: ‘Beyond Debate’

Jose Padilla, the American citizen detained as an enemy combatant after he was arrested by the Bush administration in May 2002, was denied contact with his lawyer, his family or anyone else outside the military brig for almost two years and kept in detention for almost four. His jailers made death threats, shackled him for hours, forced him into painful stress positions, subjected him to noxious fumes that hurt his eyes and nose and deafening noises at all hours, denied him care for serious illness and more.

This treatment was indisputably cruel, inhumane and shocking, in breach of the minimum standard required for anyone in American custody, especially a citizen. Some of it was torture, though Mr. Padilla should not have had to prove that to show his treatment was unconstitutional.

Robert Naiman: John Brennan Should Tell the Whole Truth About the Drone Strikes

On Monday, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan publicly addressed the U.S. use of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in countries with which the United States is not at war, like Yemen and Pakistan. The fact that Brennan publicly addressed the drone strikes is a significant improvement, long overdue. We can’t say we have meaningful democratic oversight over government policy if government officials refuse to talk about government policy in public – enabling us to challenge what they say – and it’s preposterous to claim that the drone strikes are “secret” when they are openly reported in the media.

But John Brennan didn’t tell the whole truth about the drone strikes. Brennan claimed that “the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaeda terrorists,” but Brennan didn’t admit that the U.S. has launched drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen against people who are not known to be on any list of “suspected terrorists,” without knowing who would be killed.

May 04 2012

Bring Me DeMarco’s Head

From Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report

Bring Me the Head of Ed DeMarco!

President Obama must fire Federal Housing Finance Agency acting director Ed DeMarco because he “has flatly refused to do any kind of principal reduction for the millions of ‘underwater’ homeowners that are suffering, that are drowning in debt because of how the banks crashed the economy,” said Tracy Van Slyke, co-director of New Bottom Line. The coalition of faith-based and community organizations demand a “minimum of $300 billion in principal reduction.” Van Slyke claims New Bottom Line and other Occupy Wall Street-related efforts have “moved the administration far along from where they were. We have moved the dial.”

Why Obama Won’t Help Foreclosure Victims

The Obama administration has repeatedly refused to spend moneys a set aside for distressed homeowners and communities. Why? Because banks have refused to cooperate with such programs, fearing that intervention in the housing market “would threaten to upset the bankers’ carefully calibrated market manipulations.” They would rather continue rigging the game. “The banks have been carefully dribbling out houses for sale, attempting to artificially stabilize prices with the goal of pumping up another bubble.”

The Obama administration’s failure to spend almost any of the $7.6 billion in TARP housing money set aside for the neediest regions of the country seems counterintuitive [..]

The Hardest Hit Fund was specifically targeted to homeowners in areas most seriously impacted by unemployment and falling home values – a formula tailor made for Black and Latino communities devastated by massive foreclosures and layoffs. [..]

The problem was, Obama’s people resisted putting the program into effect. [..]

The problem begins at the top. Obama has consistently protected bankers’ rights to deal with homeowners as they please.

AS reported in the Washington Post: Fannie Mae had seen benefits to lowering some home loans, documents indicate:

Officials at government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae concluded years ago that the company could “reduce its losses substantially” by lowering loan amounts for some troubled borrowers, according to internal documents cited Tuesday by the top Democrat on the House oversight committee.

The new insights into Fannie Mae’s analyses about the potential benefits of so-called principal reduction surfaced in a letter from Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) to Edward J. DeMarco, the acting director of the independent agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Since being appointed head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in 2009, DeMarco has refused to allow Fannie and Freddie to write down loan balances, in part because he worries that some homeowners would stop paying their mortgages to get relief, ultimately costing taxpayers more money. He has been steadfast in his disapproval in recent months despite growing pressure from Obama administration officials and House Democrats to allow principal reductions.

Those “internal documents” led to accusations that DeMarco, a Republican career public servant appointed by Obama to head the FHFA, withheld information from Congress about the findings:

“This just adds to the pile of evidence that calls into question how sincere DeMarco is about treating this issue seriously,” said Ian Kim, director of campaigns for Rebuild the Dream, a progressive advocacy group that has been urging a principal reduction program.

Supporters of principal reduction argue that it would reduce foreclosures by lowering the monthly payments for underwater homeowners and giving them hope they would one day have more equity in their homes.

Opponents counter that reducing the principal on mortgages owned or backed by Fannie and Freddie could increase their losses and encourage homeowners who are making payments to fall behind in order to lower their debt.

The new documents contradict DeMarco’s congressional testimony in November that analyses by Fannie and Freddie concluded that other forms of homeowner assistance were less costly to taxpayers, the lawmakers said. [..]

The failure to launch a principal reduction program “was not merely a missed opportunity, but a conscious choice that appears to have been based on ideology rather than Fannie Mae’s own data and analyses,” the lawmakers said.

It’s time for DeMarco to go and the Obama administration to stop protecting the bankers who won’t support him ever.

May 03 2012

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”.

Dennis Kucinich: We Are Not Exiting Afghanistan — We Are Staying

Yesterday, the president announced that the U.S. signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan, committing the United States to the country for a long time to come. The agreement addressed the transition to Afghan-led security forces by 2014. Human and monetary costs to the U.S. will continue to skyrocket.  [..]

America has been lulled to sleep by the mind-boggling elongation of a war seven thousand miles away. The plain fact is we are not exiting Afghanistan, despite the appearances that the White House is trying to create. We are staying. Have we learned nothing from 10 years of quagmire? It is time to bring our troops home safely and responsibly.

Bryce Covert: The Recovery Is Really Good at Creating Bad Jobs

Indicators of the economic recovery weren’t stellar this quarter: consumer and business spending seem to have slowed down, making analysts nervous. Not to mention news out of Europe that the UK and Spain have slid back into recession. Yet it was just last month that a rosy jobs report from the Labor Department touting the addition of 227,000 jobs made some optimistic that we were finally about to experience a real recovery.

But that glow of returning job security isn’t necessarily going to shine on everyone, even if the recovery really does take hold. A report out on Monday from the International Labor Organization took a look at not just how many jobs are being created but perhaps an even more crucial question: What kinds of jobs are being created in the aftermath of the recession? And the answer isn’t heartening.

Howard Fineman: Mission Accomplished?

WASHINGTON – Where is the “Mission Accomplished” banner?

There was no aircraft carrier in Kabul and President Barack Obama wasn’t wearing a jumpsuit when he landed there in secret. But his drop-in on the one year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden was the most dramatically political photo-op by a president in a commander-in-chief role since President George W. Bush landed in a jet on the S.S. Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. [..]

We may have signed a new deal with Karzai, and the American troops are on their way out, though perhaps 20,000 will stay for a decade or more.

What exactly have we accomplished there? That’s a deeper question, but it’ll have to wait until after Osama Week.

Henry A. Giroux: Violence, USA: The Warfare State and the Brutalizing of Everyday Life

Since 9/11, the war on terror and the campaign for homeland security have increasingly mimicked the tactics of the enemies they sought to crush. Violence and punishment as both a media spectacle and a bone-crushing reality have become prominent and influential forces shaping American society. As the boundaries between “the realms of war and civil life have collapsed,” social relations and the public services needed to make them viable have been increasingly privatized and militarized.(1) The logic of profitability works its magic in channeling the public funding of warfare and organized violence into universities, market-based service providers and deregulated contractors. The metaphysics of war and associated forms of violence now creep into every aspect of American society.

Bill Boyarsky: Organizers, Not Occupiers: The Young People Working in the Shadows of a National Movement

By chance, the revelation of how Apple evades millions of dollars in taxes broke three days before May Day, when workers of the world traditionally protest such injustice.

Although the Apple practices aren’t illegal, the dodging of taxes on revenue generated, to a large extent, by low-wage Chinese workers, was a perfect introduction to this year’s May 1 observance, highlighted by the Occupy movement’s call for strikes and demonstrations around the country. The goal: Protest corporate domination of an economy being pulled downward by growing income inequality and intractable unemployment.

May 02 2012

The War on Terror Escalates

One would have thought that with Osama bin Laden gone forever from the scene that the Obama administration and Congress would have stepped back from the continued use of fear of a terrorist attack to whittle away at our freedoms. Apparently, Osama’s demise has actually led to an even greater increase the assault on American’s Constitutional freedoms. Glenn Greenwald enumerates the increased assaults on civil liberties that have been taken since bin Laden’s “summary execution one year ago”:

   *With large bipartisan majorities, Congress renewed the once-controversial Patriot Act without a single reform, and it was signed into law by President Obama; Harry Reid accused those urging reforms of putting the country at risk of a Terrorist attack.

   * For the first time, perhaps ever, a U.S. citizen was assassinated by the CIA, on orders from the President, without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield; two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by his own government; the U.S. Attorney General then gave a speech claiming the President has the power to target U.S. citizens for death based on unproven, secret accusations of Terrorism.

   * With large bipartisan majorities, Congress enacted, and the President signed, a new law codifying presidential powers of worldwide indefinite detention and an expanded statutory defintion of the War on Terror.

   * Construction neared completion for a sprawling new site in Utah for the National Security Agency to enable massive domestic surveillance and to achieve “the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration.”

   * President Obama authorized the use of “signature” drone strikes in Yemen, whereby the CIA can target people for death “even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known.”

   * The U.S. formally expanded its drone attacks in Somalia, “reopening a base for the unmanned aircraft on the island nation of Seychelles.”

   * A U.S. drone killed 16-year-old Pakistani Tariq Aziz, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed, three days after the older boy attended a meeting to protest civilian deaths from U.S. drones (another of Tariq’s cousins had been killed in 2010).

   * NATO airstrikes continued to extinguish the lives of Afghan children; in just the last 24 hours, 5 more Afghan children were killed by the ongoing war.

   * The FBI increased its aggressive attempts to recruit young Muslim-American males into Terror plots which the FBI concocts, funds, encourages, directs and enables, while prosecuting more and more Muslims in the U.S. for crimes grounded in their political views and speech.

President Obama now has power that Bush never had, earning the damning praise of war criminal in retirement, Dick Cheney, “He’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate.” The United States is rapidly becoming a surveillance state with no protections for its citizens, thanks to a Democratic administration. Who would have dreamed?

May 02 2012

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

Katrina vanden Huevel: Free college? We can afford it.

Student loans set off the latest Washington spitball fight. The House Republican budget called for letting interest rates double on government-subsidized student loans (and for deep cuts in Pell Grants and other student support). Students who borrow the maximum in subsidized loans would end up paying as much as $1,000 a year in added interest. Last week, President Obama sensibly called for extending the lower rate and starting stumping through colleges and talk shows to enlist students in the cause.

Republican leaders quickly calculated the perils of angering young voters. Mitt Romney flipped over to support extending the lower rates. House Republicans passed an extension, taunting the president by paying for it using a preventive health fund in the Affordable Care Act. Senate Democrats propose to pay for the extension by closing a tax dodge that doctors, lawyers and small businesses use to avoid payroll taxes. The standoff allows for what has now become the routine exchange of insults, slurs and posturing before a deal is worked out at the last possible moment.

Ignored in this is the stark reality that even with the lower rates, more and more students can’t afford the college education or advanced training that everyone except for Rick Santorum believes they need.

Joan Walsh: What Rachel Maddow said

Women still face pay bias, no matter how much (or how disrespectfully) GOP flacks want to deny it

I’m thrilled that Rachel Maddow has her own show, but I still sometimes miss her as a news-show guest. Maddow the guest always brings the facts, usually with charm, and sometimes with an edge of outrage at the behavior of her conservative sparring partners. As the host, she has to stick to charm (while still well-armed with facts) on the rare occasion she gets Republican guests on her show.

Her “Meet the Press” debate with Alex Castellanos Sunday was one for the ages. The Republican who defended calling Hillary Clinton a “white bitch” in 2008 (“Some women, by the way, are named that, and it’s accurate,” he told CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin) tried to confound Maddow with divergent claims about whether women are paid less than men – “actually no,” he insisted; then he admitted they are, but there are reasons for it. And when he couldn’t confound Maddow, he condescended.

Alexis Goldstein: Why I Had to Get Out: Confessions of a Wall Street Insider

The culture of Wall Street is pervasive and contagious. I drank the Kool Aid. I’m out of it now. But I’d like to tell you what it was like.

When some people think about Wall Street, they conjure up images of traders shouting on the stock exchange, of bankers dining at five-star restaurants, of CEOs whispering in the ears of captured Congress members.

When I think about Wall Street, I think about its stunted rainbow of pale pastel shirts. I think about the vaulting, highly secured, and very cold lobbies. And I think about the art passed daily by the harried workers, virtually unseen.

Before I occupied Wall Street, Wall Street occupied me. What started as a summer internship led to a seven-year career. During my time on Wall Street, I changed from a curious college student full of hope for my future into a cynical, bitter, depressed, and exhausted “knowledge worker” who felt that everyone was out to screw me over.

The culture of Wall Street is pervasive and contagious. While there are Wall Street employees who are able to ignore or block it out, I was not one of them. I drank the Kool Aid. I’m out of it now. But I’d like to tell you what it was like.

Maureen Dowd: Libertine on the Loose

It’s the most chilling warning you can hear in France: Dominique Strauss-Kahn is out on the town, looking for a good time.

When Julien Dray, a prominent Socialist Party deputy, had a birthday party for himself Sunday night at a cocktail lounge, he didn’t bother to tell his V.I.P. guests that he had invited the most notorious man in France.

The randy economist – once considered the leading prospect to beat Nicolas Sarkozy before a swan dive from grace – could not resist popping up as a Socialist Party pooper on the eve of the election.

Rebecca Solnit: American Dystopia: Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into the Arena

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s — which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment. [..]

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Paula Crossfeild Pink Slime and Mad Cow Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Following on the heels of pink slime, mad cow disease (AKA bovine spongiform encephalopathy-or BSE) is back this week after a California dairy cow destined for a rendering plant that makes pet food was found to have the disease. So far, it looks like the beef industry is playing down the finding, hoping to dodge a loss in sales at home and abroad. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was quick to tell Americans that our food supply is entirely safe. But the re-emergence of mad cow and the conversation around pink slime has re-opened questions about our food system. It has exposed how food safety falls inevitably through the cracks in a country where over 9 billion animals are being slaughtered per year and budgets for the departments that oversee these processes are being slashed. The incredible media coverage of both issues reflects a growing consumer interest in more transparency in what we’re eating and how it’s being produced.

May 02 2012

Drones: Attack of the Killer Drones

President Barack Obama has resumed drone attacks into Pakistan and sends one of is lackeys to defend it as legal, blithely dismissing civilian casualties:

Fresh off of an interview yesterday in which he shrugged off civilian killings in the US drone war, top White House adviser John O. Brennan was ordered to provide more “openness” on the program at a speech today in Washington.

Fresh off of an interview yesterday in which he shrugged off civilian killings in the US drone war, top White House adviser John O. Brennan was ordered to provide more “openness” on the program at a speech today in Washington.

White House Admission of Drone Strikes Does Nothing to Justify Program’s Legality, ACLU Says

ACLU National Security Experts Warn Program is Unlawful and Dangerous

NEW YORK – April 30 – President Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser today publicly confirmed that the United States conducts targeted killings of suspected terrorists using drones.

In a speech this afternoon at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, John Brennan insisted the targeted strikes are a “wise choice” and “legal” and within the boundaries of international law. However, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said Brennan’s statement did not go far in explaining how the program passed constitutional muster.

“This is an important statement – first because it includes an unambiguous acknowledgement of the targeted killing program and second because it includes the administration’s clearest explanation thus far of the program’s purported legal basis.” Jaffer said.

“But Mr. Brennan supplies legal conclusions, not legal analysis. We continue to believe that the administration should release the Justice Department memos underlying the program – particularly the memo that authorizes the extrajudicial killing of American terrorism suspects. And the administration should release the evidence it relied on to conclude that an American citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, could be killed without charge, trial, or judicial process of any kind.”

Brennan maintained the Obama administration was committed to transparency when it came to deciding who would be subject to lethal drone strikes. But Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said the program is both unconstitutional and overly broad.

“We continue to believe, based on the information available, that the program itself is not just unlawful but dangerous. This statement makes clear that the administration is treating legal restrictions on the use of force as questions of preference. Moreover, it is dangerous to characterize the entire planet as a battlefield,” Shamsi said.

“It is dangerous to give the President the authority to order the extrajudicial killing of any person – including any American – he believes to be a terrorist. The administration insists that the program is closely supervised, but to propose that a secret deliberation that takes place entirely within the executive branch constitutes ‘due process’ is to strip the Fifth Amendment of its essential meaning.”

Rights groups hit Brennan’s defense of ‘legal’ drone strikes

Representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA said they welcomed the unprecedented public acknowledgement of the drone campaign by John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism.

But they said there are still serious questions about whether drone attacks on suspected millitants are legal under international law.

“Where there’s a war, for example in Afghanistan, [drone strikes] are a legitimate weapon of war,” said Tom Parker, a former British government security official who is now head of Amnesty International’s counter-terrorism program. “The problem comes when you make the unprecedented claim that you are in a world-wide conflict with a non-state actor.”

“We don’t believe that the justification [offered by Mr. Brennan] stands up under international humanitarian law,” he added.

Here is a report from Kevin Gosztola at FDL on Obama’s Death Panels and the videos of the speech given by Jeremy Scahill of The Nation:

Activists, lawyers, human rights advocates, civil liberties defenders and others came together for a major international summit on drone warfare and the issues created by drone use yesterday. The summit was co-organized by CODEPINK, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Reprieve. An exceptional lineup of speakers addressed participants detailing salient and significant aspects around the Obama administration’s expansion of the covert drone wars in countries like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. [..]

Scahill opens his speech by saying, “The real death panels that we have in this country were unleashed on our own citizens. Republicans like to talk about death panels having to do with health care. President Obama is the one that is operating secret death panels” that include United States citizens and often include non-US citizens. The vast majority of the victims of this policy around the world are not US citizens.

May 01 2012

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”.

Tom Engelhardt: The Obama Contradiction

He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized).  No one can stop him or countermand his orders.  He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions.  And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth.

He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel.  You know,  the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then leaves him behind to gum up the works.

As it happens, though, he’s the president of the United States, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids.

How could this be?

Eugene Robinson: Witch Hunt for the Zombie Voter

Republicans are waging the most concerted campaign to prevent or discourage citizens from exercising their legitimate voting rights since the Jim Crow days of poll taxes and literacy tests.

Four years ago, Democrats expanded American democracy by registering millions of new voters-mostly young people and minorities-and convincing them to show up at the polls. Apparently, the GOP is determined not to let any such thing happen again.

According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which keeps track of changes in voting laws, 22 statutes and two executive actions aimed at restricting the franchise have been approved in 17 states since the beginning of 2011. By the center’s count, an additional 74 such bills are pending.

Mike David: Why Are We Striking? Or to Put it Another Way – What’s Wrong with the World?

Of course, most of us know what’s wrong with the world. We know about the poverty, war, violence and disease. We’re conscious of the injustice, but not fully conscious of it, because frankly, we have enough to worry about in our own lives. As such, we’ve come to accept these injustices as simple facts of life – prepackaged side effects of the human condition, as natural and intertwined with our existence as water to a stream, beyond our capacity to effect in any significant way. This collective sense of powerlessness and default apathy is why we’re striking.

Our growing sense of isolation and disconnection, whether from ourselves, from those next door to us, or from those producing our food and products halfway across the globe, is why we’re striking. Our forced support of perpetual war waged for and by the 1% – whether explicitly with speech, or implicitly with inaction and tax dollars – without ever paying mind to the true causes and motives behind it, is why we’re striking. Our failure uptil now to connect the dots and realize that the benefits of a cheap iPod, lovely as it may be, would be far outweighed by the benefits of a truly just world free of exploitation, is why we’re striking.

Michelle Chen: Freeing the University: Education Occupation on May Day

Pop quiz: what’s the value of an American education? To some, it’s a booming industry that preys on debt-crippled students. But to the educators, youth and workers who keep the system running, school increasingly seems like it’s just not worth the struggle. This May Day, masses of working people-and students who are working to build a future for themselves-are converging in New York City to rethink education and test those ideas in the real world.

Everyone understands that merit and hard work should pay off somehow in the economy. But the narrowing and commercialization of education at every level, from preschool to postdoc, has drained people’s academic aspirations and bank accounts.

On May 1, following the massive 1T Day rally against the “student debt bubble,” the Free University of New York City will bring together various Occupy-inspired grassroots education experiments. Combined with other May Day-related Occupy demonstrations, the program of workshops and talks aims to put theories of “horizontal pedagogy” into practice by inviting regular folks to learn about and question the systems surrounding them: the economy, politics, and school itself.

Glenn Greenwald: Dog-Training the Press Corps

Journalists who heap the most lavish praise on the White House are rewarded with the most valuable treats

This weekend, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was held, and it is – as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan explained in the best analysis ever of that event – the purest expression of the total blending of political power, media subservience, and vapid celebrity in one toxic, repulsive, and destructive package. It’s imperial rot – the Versailles virus – in its most virulent form. Of course, Stephen Colbert, in the best political speech of the last decade, used his appearance at that banquet in 2006 to clearly set forth the rules by which they function:

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

Chris Hedges: Welcome to the Asylum

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression-which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.

Apr 30 2012

#OWS May Day 2012

It’s May, the season changes and Occupy Wall St is back with a call for a national general strike on May 1.

On May 1st,

We will celebrate a holiday for the 99%. We will come together across lines of race, class, gender, and religion and challenge the systems that create these divisions. New Yorkers will join with millions throughout the world – workers, students, immigrants, professionals, houseworkers. We will take to the streets to unite in a General Strike against a system which does not work for us. With our collective power we will begin to build the world we want to see. Another world is possible!

We call on everyone to join us: No work! No school! No shopping! Take the streets!

#OWS is calling for us to do two things to commemorate the day:

 

  • Don’t like what you do? Don’t do it. Take one day to do something you love instead.

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  • Love what you do? Do it for free. Take it to the next level and bring it to the public.

    • If you’re in New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, Boston, Chicago, #OWS will be there with art, entertainment, education and peaceful occupation for closed and abandoned homes and the occupation of our country. No action in your city or town? Start one. All it takes is a few people in a park with a couple of homemade signs.

    Here are some of the May Day 2012 events in some of the major US cities:

    New York:  

  • 8 AM: Bryant Park will be the site of a “Pop-up Occupation” featuring free food, a free market, free services, skillshares, workshops, teach-ins, speak-outs, public art, performances, discussions and direct-action trainings.

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  • Noon: Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello leads a guitar workshop and rehearsal for the Occupy Guitarmy.

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  • 2 PM: March to Union Square led by Tony Morello and the Occupy Guitarmy where they will hold a concert.

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  • 5:30: March to Wall Street with a coalition of organized labor, immigrant rights groups and faith-based activists.

    • Oakland:  

  • Occupy Oakland is planning to occupy the Golden Gate Bridge at 6 am followed by a series of direct actions facilitated at three announced strike stations: the anti-capitalist station at Snow Park, the anti-patriarchy station at 1st & Broadway and the anti-gentrification at 22nd & Telegraph.

    • Los Angeles:  

  • Occupy LA is organizing a “4 Winds” People’s Power Car and Bike Caravan through sprawling of Los Angeles that will culminate with Direct Action in and around the downtown Financial District. Here’s a map to find a “wind” near you.

    • Boston:  

  • Noon: Major groups will assemble at City Hall Park.

     

  • 7 PM: Groups with gather at Copley Square Park to put on costumes, puppets and face-paint and receive instructions on their respective roles in the “funeral procession” that will proceed through areas of wealth and commerce.

    • Chicago:  

  • Noon: Groups will gather at Union Park for a march to Federal Plaza.

    • Portland, OR:  

  • 7:30 AM Student activists are planning on massing at the headquarters of the Portland Public Schools to protest budget cuts and the falling quality of our schools and to attempt to nonviolently shut down work for the day.

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  • 3 PM: A family friendly event at South Park with a march at 4:30.

    • Tuscon, AZ:  

  • 9 AM: A march for immigrant rights in Tucson will move from Greyhound Park parking lot to Armory Park for a noon rally with speakers, music, entertainment and info booths.

    • If you can’t strike, there are other things you can do:  

  • Don’t shop.

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  • Wear a button, a hat or a tee shirt.

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  • Donate to May Day 2012

    • Apr 30 2012

    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”.

    Paul Krugman: Wasting Our Minds

    In Spain, the unemployment rate among workers under 25 is more than 50 percent. In Ireland almost a third of the young are unemployed. Here in America, youth unemployment is “only” 16.5 percent, which is still terrible – but things could be worse.

    And sure enough, many politicians are doing all they can to guarantee that things will, in fact, get worse. We’ve been hearing a lot about the war on women, which is real enough. But there’s also a war on the young, which is just as real even if it’s better disguised. And it’s doing immense harm, not just to the young, but to the nation’s future.

    New York Times Editorial: The Economy Downshifts

    The slow start for the economy in 2012 – an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the first three months of the year – is evidence that the recovery is too weak to push joblessness much lower than its current 8.2 percent, and too fragile to withstand the kinds of budget cuts Congressional Republicans are proposing.

    First-quarter growth was not far off the recent average pace and conditions are certainly worse elsewhere, with many European nations in recession. But that’s false comfort. To make up the damage the Great Recession did to jobs, income, wealth and confidence, the economy needs consistent above-average growth. Europe’s problems will only exacerbate America’s own, by shaving growth from exports or, in a worst case, by destabilizing banks that are linked to the European financial system.

    Robert Kuttner: Europe’s Banks Versus European Democracy

    PARIS — There is a celebrated observation of the 1920s Italian radical, Antonio Gramsci, that perfectly fits the economic paralysis of today’s Europe: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

    A week before the final round of the French presidential election, which is very likely to propel the Socialist, Francois Hollande, to the Elysee Palace, it is hard to see how even a left government in a single European nation can defy the austerity consensus.

    Mike Lux: Banking Wars

    The banking wars are getting more and more interesting. The legal and political implications are bigger than most people understand, and the players involved need to be very careful with the loaded guns they are gesturing with or they might shoot themselves in the foot (or perhaps an even more vulnerable body part.)

    Underlying the entire drama is this fundamental subtext: the American people are fundamentally (and correctly) cynical about how the big bankers always seem to get away with whatever they want to get away with. Bailing out the bankers with no strings attached in order to save an economy that didn’t seem to most people to be very well saved, then watching the banks get record profits and bonuses the very next year while the rest of the economy was in the toilet didn’t engender much good cheer about whether justice had been done. Neither have the tons of books, news articles, and blog posts about the things these bankers were able to get away with in the course of the buildup to the crisis and the things that have happened since.

    Robert Reich: The GOP’s Death Wish: Why Republicans Can’t Stop Pissing Off Hispanics, Women, and Young People

    What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.

    It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

    Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll. [..]

    How can a political party be so dumb as to piss off Hispanics, women, and young people? Because the core of its base is middle-aged white men — and it doesn’t seem to know how to satisfy its base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, and middle-aged.

    E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Connecticut’s Death Penalty Message

    GREENWICH, Conn.-Since the 2010 elections, the activism of newly empowered conservative and Republican state legislatures has gained national attention with their wars on public employee unions, additional restrictions on abortion and new barriers to voting.

    Against this backdrop, the little state of Connecticut has loomed as a large progressive exception. Last year, it became the first state to require employers to grant paid sick leave. It also enacted a law granting in-state tuition to students whose parents brought them to the United States illegally as young children.

    And last week, Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy signed a law repealing the state’s death penalty. There are now 17 states without capital punishment, Illinois having joined the ranks last year. What happened in Connecticut brings home the flaw in seeing everything that has happened in the states since the midterm vote as embodying a steady shift rightward.

    Apr 29 2012

    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”.

    The Sunday Talking Heads:

    Up with Chris Hayes: On Sunday the Chis and his panel guests will discuss the Occupy movement’s May Day plans, the relationship between the Labor movement and Democrats, and how conservative preference for austerity is working out for the UK economy. Joining Chris will be: Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) (@repjerrynadler), represents part of Manhattan and Brooklyn, serves on the Judiciary and Transportation & Infrastructure committees; Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten), president of the American Federation of Teachers; Bill Fletcher, co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal; Marina Sitrin, member of the Occupy Wall Street Legal Working Group; and Daron Acemoglu, author of Why Nations Fail.

    The Melissa Harris-Perry Show: No information at this time.

    This Week with George Stephanopolis: this Sunday’s guest is White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan; a special “This Week” panel, in partnership with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, tackles the critical topic, “America’s Economic Recovery: Is It Built to Last?” with panelists Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and co-chair of Mitt Romney’s California campaign; Jennifer Granholm, former Michigan governor and host of Current TV’s “The War Room” ; Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist; Eric Schmidt, executive chairman and former CEO of Google; David Walker, former Comptroller General and Founder and CEO of the Comeback America Initiative; and George Will, ABC News commentator and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist.

    Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Guests are former Mississippi Governor, former Chairman of the Republican Party Haley Barbour and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; California Gov. Jerry Brown; and Time Magazine Contributors Graham Allison and Peter Bergen, author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and CBS News Senior Correspondent John Miller look at the ongoing War on Terror.

    The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Helene Cooper, The New York Times White House Correspondent; David Ignatius, The Washington Post Columnist; Rick Stengel, TIME Managing Editor; and Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent.

    Meet the Press with David Gregory: Gregory’s guest are Robert Gibbs from team Obama and Ed Gillespie from the Romney campaign; joining the roundtable: Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen is back to weigh in on the campaign along with Vice Chair of the House Republican Conference Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and Republican strategist Alex Castellanos.

    State of the Union with Candy Crowley: An exclusive sit-down interview with the Speaker of the House, John Boehner; President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan; Governors Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) and Bob McDonnell (R-VA); and Time magazine’s Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs on their new book “The Presidents Club.”

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