Tag: TMC Politics

The death of Osama bin Laden last week is prompting the Obama Administration, members of Congress and the American public to re-think the war in Afghanistan, and to wonder how the demise of the world’s most famous terrorist might hasten its end.

That’s as it should be. But for now, there are still 100,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan, and some 1700 prisoners that the U.S. is detaining there indefinitely without charge or trial. That’s ten times the number of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and almost triple the number imprisoned in Afghanistan when President Obama took office. As I wrote in a new report released today by Human Rights First, based on research in Afghanistan and observation of U.S. military practices there, the United States is not providing its prisoners there even the minimum level of due process required by international law. And that’s ultimately undermining the United States’ ability to put an end to the war there quickly and responsibly.

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s Good for You

A federal appeals court hears arguments about Obama’s health care law-and broccoli.

This lawsuit is not about broccoli. Yes, there were multiple forced servings of broccoli talk at the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals this morning, at the first appellate arguments over the Affordable Care Act. But Judge James A. Wynn Jr. was clear on this one metaphysical matter: “Of course, we are not dealing with broccoli here.”

The appeal doesn’t all come down to judicial politics, either, although everyone is already atwitter about the fact that the random, computer-selected, three-judge panel was comprised of three judges appointed by Democratic presidents: Diana Gribbon Motz, nominated by Bill Clinton in 1994, and Andre M. Davis and Wynn, both nominated by Obama in 2009. (Davis and Wynn were also nominated by Clinton in 2000 and 1999, but neither was confirmed.*) The case basically comes down to a search for limiting principles on congressional power and an attempt to understand whether something can be unconstitutional simply because it is unprecedented. The panel struggled for more than two hours about whether the so-called “individual mandate”-requiring people to purchase health insurance by 2014, or pay a penalty-lies far beyond the edges of congressional regulatory authority, or dead at the heart of it.

Bernie Sanders: Single Payer Health: It’s Only Fair

US healthcare is grossly distorted by waste and profit, while millions go uninsured. Americans deserve full universal coverage

The United States is the only major nation in the industrialised world that does not guarantee healthcare as a right to its people. Meanwhile, we spend about twice as much per capita on healthcare and, in a wide number of instances, our outcomes are not as good as others that spend far less.

It is time that we bring about a fundamental transformation of the American healthcare system. It is time for us to end private, for-profit participation in delivering basic coverage. It is time for the United States to provide a Medicare-for-all, single payer health coverage programme.

David Dayen: Man Picked to Make Changes to Social Security Doesn’t Understand Basic Concepts of Social

I mentioned yesterday, and Michael Whitney reinforced, that Alan Simpson denigrated some data on Social Security because he decided the figures came from “the Catfood Commission people.” And that’s a feather in someone’s cap, I guess.

But it’s worth jumping into what that actual data was that Ryan Grim confronted him with. Because it reveals Simpson, as if this needed revealing, to be utterly clueless about the Social Security system and basic demographic realities. So here’s what prompted Ryan’s question:

   Simpson argued that Social Security was originally intended more as a welfare program.

   “It was never intended as a retirement program. It was set up in ’37 and ’38 to take care of people who were in distress – ditch diggers, wage earners – it was to give them 43 percent of the replacement rate of their wages. The [life expectancy] was 63. That’s why they set retirement age at 65” for Social Security, he said.

This is something Simpson has said for some time, and it is based on total ignorance. So Ryan called him on it.

Bill McKibben: Great Floods Aren’t a Fluke — They’re a Taste of a Changing Climate

Last week, at a place called Bird’s Point, just below the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers, the Army Corps of Engineers was busy mining a huge levee with explosives. The work was made dangerous by outbreaks of lightning, but eventually the charges were in place and corps Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh gave the order: A 2-mile-wide hole was blasted in the earthen levee, and a wall of water greater than the flow over Niagara Falls inundated 130,000 acres of prime Missouri farmland.

The corps breached the levee to ease pressure on other floodwalls; if it hadn’t, the town of Cairo, Ill., might well have been inundated. But it’s not as if the problem has been solved. That water will reenter the Mississippi a little farther downstream as it surges toward the sea. “We’re just at the beginning of the beginning,” Walsh said. Col. Vernie Reichling Jr. of the Memphis District of the corps said: “We’ll have to fight this river all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t see it letting up.”

On Friday, government officials anonymously claimed that “a rushed examination” of the “trove” of documents and computer files taken from the bin Laden home prove — contrary to the widely held view that he “had been relegated to an inspirational figure with little role in current and future Qaeda operations” — that in fact “the chief of Al Qaeda played a direct role for years in plotting terror attacks.”  Specifically, the Government possesses “a handwritten notebook from February 2010 that discusses tampering with tracks to derail a train on a bridge,” and that led “Obama administration officials on Thursday to issue a warning that Al Qaeda last year had considered attacks on American railroads.”  That, in turn, led to headlines around the country like this one, from The Chicago Sun-Times:

Click on image to enlarge

The reality, as The New York Times noted deep in its article, was that “the information was both dated and vague,” and the official called it merely “aspirational,” acknowledging that “there was no evidence the discussion of rail attacks had moved beyond the conceptual stage”  In other words, these documents contain little more than a vague expression on the part of Al Qaeda to target railroads in major American cities (“focused on striking Washington, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago,” said the Sun-Times):  hardly a surprise and — despite the scary headlines — hardly constituting any sort of substantial, tangible threat.

But no matter.  Even in death, bin Laden continues to serve the valuable role of justifying always-increasing curtailments of liberty and expansions of government power.  From Reuters (h/t Atrios):

Sen. Schumer proposes “no-ride list” for Amtrak trains

Dean Baker: The Big Retailers Versus the Big Banks: It Makes a Big Difference

The battle of the “swipe fees” has been hard to miss the last few weeks. The big banks are spending millions of dollars on TV, radio and Internet ads telling us that the government should not limit the fees that they charge on debit cards transactions. On the other side, a coalition of major retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Target, has been funding a comparable campaign to stop the bank gouging.

It may seem as though the public has little at stake in this battle between big banks and big retailers, but that is not true. In this case, Wal-Mart is on the side of the angels; small businesses and consumers will win if they prevail. This is an important battle in its own right, but even more important as a lesson in effective politics.

The basic story here should be a policy no-brainer. There are two major debit card networks, Mastercard and Visa, who essentially are the market. Together, they control more than 90 percent of the debit card market.

Robert Weissman: The US Chamber of Commerce in Wonderland

It’s a good rule of thumb: If the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the trade association for large corporations — is whipped up about something, there’s probably good reason for the public to strongly back whatever has sent the Chamber into fits.

Well, the Chamber is apoplectic over a modest Obama administration proposed executive order that would require government contractors to reveal all of their campaign-related spending.

This is a case where the rule of thumb works. The proposed executive order would provide important information about campaign spending by large corporations, and work to reduce the likelihood that contracts are provided as payback for campaign expenditures. You can urge the administration to stand up to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by signing the petition here.

The U.S. Chamber is of course no stranger to using exaggerated rhetoric to advance its positions. But its opposition to the Executive Order is astounding even by the standards of the Chamber.

Peter Dreier: How Do Wrong Economic Ideas Become Conventional Wisdom?

The ideas of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) are making a comeback, in large part due to Glenn Beck, who has touted the libertarian economist and philosopher’s views on his TV show. The essence of Hayek’s views — spelled out in his most well-known book, The Road to Serfdom — is that government stifles freedom and liberty. With a few exceptions, he viewed almost any governmental intervention in economic affairs as a slippery slope toward totalitarian socialism. No wonder that Beck has been hawking Hayek.

Now comes Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative political scientist, who uses the pages of the New York Times Book Review to hawk his own version of government-bashing. Unfortunately, Fukuyama, who claims to be something of a student of Hayek’s ideas, hasn’t done his homework.

In his review of the new edition of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, published in the Review on Sunday (May 8), Fukuyama off-handedly comments that three of Hayek’s ideas “have become broadly accepted by economists.” But it so happens that economists don’t agree on these three ideas. Moreover, the policy conclusions that Fukuyama draws happen to be untrue.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Economic Security President: Four Ways to Be “Bold” and “Gutsy” on the Home Front

The post-bin Laden afterglow is fading. Those video clips of his home movies seem like scenes from a reality show, not glimpses of an Existential Threat. It’s the master terrorist as an addled Ozzy Osbourne, minus the Beverly Hills couturiers and groomers. And while a few people might wait for bin Laden to sing Ozzy’s “Iron Man” — “Nobody wants him/He just stares at the world, planning his vengeance” — our attention-deficit nation is getting ready to move on.

Significantly, while the President’s overall approval rating jumped 11 percent after the killing, his economic approval fell and reached a new low: Only 34 percent approved of his handling of the economy, while 55 percent disapproved.

Jonathan Capehart: Jonathan Capehart

Oh, so you thought we were done with all this birther craziness? Ha! Not a chance. On Friday, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) released his birth certificate in a fit of pique and silliness over a newspaper getting his middle name wrong. Well, it was a little bit more involved than that.

Jindal threw his support behind a birther bill currently making its way through the state legislature that would require those who want to run for national office to show proof of U.S. birth in order to be on the Louisiana ballot. Last month, Baton Rouge newspaper the Advocate ran an editorial saying, “Piyush Amrit Jindal is the last man in America who should give his blessing to a birther bill.” Amen to that, since Jindal is the son of two immigrant parents whose journey from India to the United States was chronicled by the Times-Picayune.

But “Amrit” isn’t the governor’s middle name. Ticked off, Jindal released his long-form birth certificate to prove it.

Paul Ryan claims the protests heard so very loud and clear during the House Budget Committee chair’s town hall meetings in April had no influence on his thinking about Medicare.

Perhaps Ryan really does have a tin ear.

But the outcry over his plan to mess with Medicare, heard in Wisconsin communities from Milton to Kenosha, and at spring recess sessions in the districts of Republican freshmen from Pennsylvania to Florida, obviously influenced other Republicans.

Images from Kenosha – a historic factory town in Ryan’s district, where hundreds of people showed up to criticize his scheming to cut benefits for working Americans while giving billionaires and multinational corporations new tax breaks – were featured nationally on broadcast network news shows.

Cable news programs focused intense attention on the story. MSNBC’s Ed Schultz devoted much of a program last week to the outcry. (In addition to a blistering analysis of the congressman’s proposal by the host, this writer provided some on the ground reporting from Kenosha, including details of a brief interview with Ryan, who was typically dismissive of the popular discomfort with his plan.) But other networks — even Fox — at least touched on the congressman’s troubles.

The reporting was noticed in Washington where, last week, GOP leaders began almost immediately to distance themselves from Ryan’s plan to use Medicare funds to enrich the private insurance firms that have donated so generously to his campaigns.

Stephen L. Goldstein: “Shock Doctrine” Economics Ruining America

WARNING: Reading Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” will disturb your sleep and haunt your waking hours. If you’re a real American, it will make you want to scream – and do something to put “the bad guys” in their place. Everyone – especially Milton-Friedman, free-market lovers like Kingsley Guy – should read “Shock.” If enough people do so, it could save the country. If they don’t, our democratic/representative government and capitalism will be permanently replaced by the un-American, corporate-socialist state that has already taken hold – and it will be our own fault.

For 50 years, laissez-faire economist Friedman and his apostles at the University of Chicago have spread a doctrine based upon “the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending,” according to Klein. Even worse is how they do it: For Friedman and his minions, widespread disasters (natural and man-made) are opportunities to make money. While victims are really or figuratively bleeding, too shocked to realize what’s happening, in cahoots with lapdog governments, they impose “deregulation, privatization, and cutbacks” on economies as the formula for recovery. Promising prosperity for all, they deliver widespread poverty and oppression.

Brent Blackwelder Obama Should Back Off Risky Nuclear Loan Guarantees

Well before the catastrophe at Fukushima began unfolding, a familiar word was heard in discussions about plans to build a new generation of reactors in this country. That word: risk.

With President Barack Obama and Congress pushing ahead with efforts to offer up federal construction loan guarantees totaling $54.5 billion, what was the risk of taxpayers getting stuck holding the bag in the event these nuclear projects defaulted? And, why should taxpayers even be expected to assume such a risk?

Before those critical questions were satisfactorily addressed, we were sadly reminded of the other definition of risk when it comes to nuclear energy. The toll of Fukushima won’t be known for years, but assuredly the cost, both human and financial, will be huge.

As public debate over nuclear safety once again flares up – with industry’s familiar assurances that “it can’t happen here” – let’s not allow the financial risks inherent in this energy choice to be overlooked.

Michelle Chen; Watchdogs Probe Labor Abuses in China’s Tech Industry

Never underestimate the power of a good public shaming. Western electronics firms were mortified in 2010 by reports of gruesome suicides of young workers in China, employed by the multinational tech giant Foxconn. Since the company runs a network of plants that churn out glistening gadgets for Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard, the suicides scandalized tech brands that often market themselves as hip and progressive.

The months of damage control that followed led to promises to reform wages and working hours and to establish less Dickensian, more worker-friendly factory conditions. But has all that bad publicity (encapsulated most recently in a sensational theatrical production) paid off for workers?

This week watchdog groups have released a report to kickstart a global campaign to call attention to ongoing labor issues. The “Time to Bite Into a Fair Apple” campaign hopes to keep the pressure on both Chinese authorities and multinational firms to fulfill promises to make the manufacturing system more humane for hundreds of thousands of young Chinese workers.

Allison Kilkenny: NY Teachers Vow ‘Wisconsin-Style’ Protest

New York teachers are vowing to protest in the wake of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to layoff thousands of educators.

“Mr. Mayor, it’s not going to happen, and enough is enough!” shouted Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, as he whipped up a roaring crowd at the UFT’s spring conference in midtown New York.

A ballroom-full of educators rose to their feet, clapping and chanting, “Enough is Enough.”

A surprise guest, Wisconsin State Sen. Jon Erpenbach, the man who led 13 fellow lawmakers out-of-state in order to block Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation, received a standing ovation from the crowd.

The UFT, along with many other unions, plan to draw tens of thousands of supports for the May 12 march from City Hall and other sites to Wall Street to oppose Bloomberg’s cuts and demand the big banks start paying their fair share.

When I first wrote about the bin Laden killing on Monday, I suggested that the intense (and understandable) emotional response to his being dead would almost certainly drown out any discussions of the legality, ethics, or precedents created by this event. That, I think, has largely been borne out, at least in the U.S. (one poll shows 86% of Americans favor the killing, though that’s hardly universal: a poll in Germany finds 64% view this as “no reason to rejoice,” while 52% believe an attempt should have been made to arrest him; many European newspapers have harshly criticized U.S. actions; and German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s declaration of happiness over bin Laden’s death provoked widespread criticism even in her own party). I expected — and fully understand — that many people’s view of the bin Laden killing is shaped first and foremost by happiness over his death.

But what has surprised me somewhat is how little interest there seems to be in finding out what actually happened here. We know very little about the circumstances of bin Laden’s killing, because the U.S. government has issued so many contradictory claims, which in turn contradict the reported claims of those at the scene. When I wrote about this on Monday, I said that the use of force would be justified if, as the U.S. Government claimed, he was violently resisting his capture. But that turned out to be totally false. It’s now beyond dispute that bin Laden was unarmed when killed and there was virtually no violent resistence in the house. Still, the range of possibilities for what actually happened is vast — everything from he was lunging for his AK-47 to he was already captured when shot (in front of his family) to the order from the start was to kill, not capture, him — and I personally don’t see how it’s possible to assess the justifiability (or legality) of what took place without knowing which of those are true.

David Sirota: The High Cost of Cheap War

It seems only fitting that in the very month the Terminator sci-fi franchise predicted the rise of militarized artificial intelligence, the Guardian of London reported on a British Ministry of Defence analysis warning that drone warfare may be creating an “incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality.”

The report’s life-imitating-Skynet idea of robots ultimately making combat decisions is certainly scary-but still a bit fantastical. The more frightening part of the analysis was its look at how roboticized war may already be prompting governments to “resort to war as a policy option far sooner than previously.”

The dynamic is not surprising-nations will inevitably be more willing to use warfare as a foreign policy tool if they possess instruments limiting the cost of waging war. By letting kids in Las Vegas drop remote-controlled bombs on kids in Pakistan, Yemen and now Libya, drones are one of those instruments. But they are only one of many. Indeed, while President Obama preposterously claimed this week that most Americans “know well the costs of war,” it’s quite the opposite: Most Americans have been insulated from those costs-and it’s no coincidence that as we’ve become more insulated, we’ve happily waged more frequent wars.

Joe Conason: Tough Enough

It is always a happy moment when Americans are reminded of our country’s greatness, especially when we are so often warned about its imminent decline-and the elimination of Osama bin Laden, fanatical murderer of thousands of Christians, Jews and Muslims, was certainly such a moment.

Especially for those of us who were living in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as those who died and their families, justice was finally done. From now on, the heroic pantheon associated with that infamous date will include not only the police officers, firefighters and rescue workers of 9/11, but the Navy SEALs and the military and intelligence officers who avenged them.

Everyone who feels pride and satisfaction in bin Laden’s fate must also acknowledge the bold action and sound priorities of President Obama, who has coolly and cleanly fulfilled a promise he made during his campaign. Maintaining the nation’s dignity and his own, he has handled the aftermath of the mission with precise correctness and stayed focused on the policy goals that guide his administration.

I have a proposal: Let’s double US government funds devoted to promoting renewable energy. Let’s expand allocations for foreclosure prevention to help another million Americans keep their homes. Let’s launch a $10-billion infrastructure programme to repair crumbling roads and bridges. Let’s double the number of new maths and science teachers that President Obama hopes to train, bringing the total to 200,000. And let’s hire back all of those police officers fired by the city of Camden, New Jersey – already among the most dangerous places in the country before budget constraints compelled it to dismiss half of its police force in December.

While we’re at it, let’s reduce the deficit by about $40 billion.

This proposition is not voodoo economics. It is taboo economics. All of these things could be accomplished by trimming US military spending by just 10 per cent. Some of these suggestions (teacher training, Camden cops) are trifling items by the standards of Pentagon budgeting, together accounting for less than the cost of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet.

Robert Naiman: Now is the Time for a Full Afghanistan Withdrawal

After OBL: McGovern/Jones Push for Real Withdrawal Plan

Following the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the floodgates opened in Washington this week for reconsideration of U.S. plans to continue the open-ended war in Afghanistan.

Now Representatives Jim McGovern and Walter Jones have introduced the “Afghanistan Exit and Accountability Act,” bipartisan legislation that would require the President present to Congress a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and a clear end date for the war. It would require the President to submit quarterly reports to Congress on the progress of troop withdrawal, as well as the human and financial costs of continuing the war. The President would also have to report how much money U.S. taxpayers would save if the war were brought to an end in six months, instead of five, ten, or twenty years.

Andy Worthington: The Unjustifiable Defense of Torture and Guantánamo

With the reported assassination of Osama bin Laden, one of the most alarming responses has been a kind of casual and widespread acceptance that the death of America’s number one bogeyman would not have been achieved without the use of torture, and without the existence of Guantánamo.

This is wrong on both fronts, as Jane Mayer of the New Yorker explained in response to an early manifestation of the story, put out by torture apologists Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol.

Steve Rendall: Right-Wing Political Violence: More Terror, Less Coverage

On the morning of January 17 in Spokane, Washington, city workers found a backpack with a bomb that was set to go off along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. An FBI official (Spokane Spokesman Review, 1/19/11) called the bomb “a viable device that was very lethal and had the potential to inflict multiple casualties.” Another official told the Associated Press (1/19/11), “They haven’t seen anything like this in this country…. This was the worst device, and most intentional device, I’ve ever seen.”

On March 9, Kevin Harpham, a white supremacist with past links to the neo-Nazi National Alliance, was arrested and charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and possessing an improvised explosive device. The device contained shrapnel dipped in rat poison, which can enhance bleeding (Hate Watch blog, 3/10/11), and was set on a park bench where its impact would be directed toward marchers.