Tag: TMC Politics

Labor Day is a time for honoring the working people of this country. It is also a time to celebrate the accomplishments of the activists and organizers who fought for the 40-hour work week, occupational safety, minimum wage law, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and affordable housing. These working people, and their unions, resisted the oligarchs of their day, fought for a more responsive democracy, and built the middle class.

Today we can – and we must – follow their example. It’s time to rebuild the crumbling middle class of our country and make certain that every working person in the United States of America has a chance at a decent life.

Against overwhelming odds, the men and women of the labor movement changed society for the better. If you’ve ever enjoyed a paid vacation, a sick day, or a pension, they are the people to thank. And if you don’t have those benefits on your job today, they are the people who can help you get them.

The economic reality is that while our economy today is much stronger than when President George W. Bush left office 7 years ago, the middle class is continuing its 40-year decline.

Jared Bernstein: Jobs Report: Yes, the Unemployment Rate Is 5.1%. No, We Are Not At Full Employment

Job growth came in below expectations, as August’s payrolls grew 173,000, according to this morning’s jobs report from BLS. Private sector job growth was particularly weak, at 140,000, its weakest month since March. Wage growth remains tame — remarkably so, given the low unemployment rate, which fell to 5.1% last month — and the labor force remains historically low, suggesting significant numbers of potential workers remain on the sidelines, creating downward pressure on wages and a downward bias on the jobless rate.

The unemployment rate, as noted, fell from 5.3% to 5.1%, the lowest rate since April 2008 and the rate that the Federal Reserve believes consistent with full employment in the job market. The labor force remained flat in August, meaning the participation rate is still stuck at a low 62.6%, more than three points off of its peak prior to the downturn. Some of that decline can be assigned to retiring boomers, but some remains due to persistently weak demand.

The number of involuntary part-timers — those working part-time who want full-time hours — remains highly elevated at 6.5 million, though that trend too is moving in the right direction, down 700,000 over the past year.

Ralph Nader: Why Labor Day Matters

Here’s an experiment to try this holiday weekend. Quiz your friends, family and acquaintances on the meaning of Labor Day. You might be surprised by the answers you hear. To many, the true meaning of Labor Day has been unfortunately lost―it’s merely a three-day vacation weekend, unless you work in retail, in which case it is, ironically, a day of work and “special” sales.

Commercialists have transformed Labor Day into a reason for shopping. The fact that Labor Day was conceived as an occasion dedicated to America’s workers and what they have endured is sadly under-acknowledged and unappreciated. (In many other countries, the event is known as “International Workers’ Day” and is celebrated on May 1st.)

Labor Day is a time to celebrate America’s tradespeople―the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, tailors, retail clerks and home health assistants. Celebrate the meat and poultry inspectors, building code inspectors, OSHA and Customs inspectors, sanitation inspectors of supermarkets and restaurants, nuclear, chemical and aircraft inspectors, inspectors of laboratories, hospitals and clinics. Celebrate the bus drivers, miners, and nurses. Celebrate the janitors who often thanklessly clean our office buildings, schools, airports, and more. The list goes on.

To protect the Iran deal from being undermined by the US Congress, getting to 34 supporters in the Senate was crucial. Once that was achieved (and indeed surpassed – now at 37) this past week, the goal shifted to reaching 41. With that number, a filibuster would prevent the “disapprove the deal” resolution from passing, there would be no need for an Obama veto, no need for a Senate vote to uphold the veto, and Congress would be unable to stop the trajectory of diplomacy instead of war.

In the next two weeks, we must focus first on continuing the powerful mobilizations that insured the initial victory over AIPAC, war manufacturers, neo-conservatives and those who led the US to war in Iraq and now want to repeat their crimes in Iran – with the goal of reaching 41 Senators supporting the deal. Once that has been achieved, we then must turn to insuring real implementation of U.S. obligations in the deal, including lifting sanctions, and crucially, looking ahead to what this nuclear deal may make possible in the future: remaking diplomatic relations across the region, new negotiations to end the wars in Syria and Iraq, moving from non- proliferation to real nuclear disarmament by creating a Middle East Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone, and more.

David Zirin: Why, at Least Today, We Should Cheer Tom Brady

Even if the New England Patriots and Tom Brady turn your stomach, anyone who believes in the labor movement should applaud the team’s victory over Roger Goodell.

I am genetically unable to feel anything but antipathy for all Boston-related sports teams. Growing up in New York, the Celtics broke my heart every season with their Larry Bird-era greatness, and the sad-sack Red Sox were like that relative who overstays their welcome, sits on your couch, loses the remote, and never shuts the hell up. The New England Patriots were a merciful afterthought. Not only did they spend the 1980s and early 1990s ranging from middling to awful-save one Super Bowl appearance when they were blown out by the Bears-but they were easily the fourth-most-popular team in their own town (Maybe even fifth, after Harvard crew). That is why the ascension of the dynastic Belichick-Brady Patriots over the last-Jesus-13 years and counting has been like a spreading rash. Boston sports fans have discovered football, and now they have something else to yip about other than Sox spring training or that magical night they played darts with Matt Damon (half of Boston seems to have played darts with Matt Damon). [..]

 This preamble is all to say that, as someone who cosigns every criticism of Brady, his team, and the sports fandom in the region they call home, I think today we should all rejoice. Judge Richard Berman’s decision spanked not only Roger Goodell but the very idea that being a boss somehow exempts you from the established norms of industrial-labor law. In the words of The Washington Post‘s Sally Jenkins, Judge Berman “turned Roger Goodell’s desk over and spilled its embarrassingly sparse contents onto the floor. Goodell’s imperious conduct, faulty reasoning and vanity-driven clutching at authority in the Tom Brady case were all exposed in a 40-page decision of measured legal language. Lesson to first-year law students: Collective bargaining agreements don’t give an NFL commissioner the right to act like a petty prince.”

Sonali KolhatkarSonali Kolhatkar; Yes, People Hate Cops-but Aren’t Stooping to Their Level

A manhunt is underway for suspects in the shooting death of a police officer in Chicago. Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz was found shot after chasing three suspects: two white men and one black man.

The news comes just days after a Houston officer named Darren Goforth was killed, apparently in an execution-style shooting. A black man named Shannon Miles has been arrested and charged with capital murder.

Referring to Goforth’s death, Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman wildly speculated that the officer had been killed because of his uniform and blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for his death, saying, “We’ve heard black lives matter; all lives matter. Well, cops’ lives matter too. At any point where the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated, cold-blooded assassination of police officers happen(s), this rhetoric has gotten out of control.” [..]

But actions speak louder than words, and police have made clear just how fast they can turn any encounter into a deadly one, whether it is shooting an unarmed man in the back while he is trying to run away, as in the case of Walter Scott in South Carolina, or the gunning down of a 12-year-old child named Tamir Rice in Cleveland, who was shot “within two seconds of the police arriving.”

NOT long after it was formed last year, members of the Select Committee on Benghazi gathered to meet privately with family members of the four Americans killed on that dreadful night in Libya in 2012. The meetings were emotional, and the chairman assured those present that the committee would be scrupulously nonpartisan and devoted to finding out the truth of what had happened.

Instead, the Select Committee became little more than a partisan tool to influence the presidential race, a dangerous precedent that will haunt Congress for decades. This is all the more painful when you consider how grievously the committee has let down those families, along with the rest of the American people. [..]

A committee that cannot tell the American people what it is looking for after 16 months should be shut down. Otherwise, Benghazi will come to be remembered not for the tragedy that claimed four American lives, but for the terrible abuse of process that now bears its name.

Paul Brandeis Raushenbush: No, Kim Davis Is Not Martin Luther King, Jr.

Kim Davis is going to jail, which is a good thing for everyone. It’s good for Davis, because she was caught between her “sincerely held belief” that same-gender couples could not be married and her job in Kentucky where she was required to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples on account of the recent change in the nation’s laws. It’s also good for gay couples who wish to be married and yet had to endure immense humiliation by someone whose salary they help to pay. [..]Now, I have a certain amount of empathy for Ms. Davis. I understand the desire to go against the law of the land when you feel it violates your faith and your God. For example, I was glad when Bree Newsome broke the law and lowered the Confederate flag while quoting the Bible, saying: “The Lord is my light – Whom shall I fear?”

Many people engage in civil disobedience in the name of religion. Most famously, Martin Luther King, Jr. went to jail for his non-violent resistance in Birmingham, where he wrote his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

However, Kim Davis is no Martin Luther King, Jr.

Michelle Chen: Public schools’ disturbing conflation of race and disability

Too often, inequality in special education programs follows socioeconomic and racial divides

Special education is the last bastion of separate but equal in our public schools. But unlike the painful legacy of Jim Crow, some form of separation – whether specialized facilities or more accommodating treatment in an otherwise mainstream classroom – is generally considered necessary to provide an equitable education for children with special needs. But drawing the line between inclusion and exclusion in school is an ethically fraught process, and the division between different and inferior often cuts unnervingly close to the color line.

In July the Justice Department issued a scathing report condemning Georgia public schools for segregating students with disabilities in a way that systematically violated the rights of youths diagnosed with behavioral problems. They were subjected to not only substandard facilities but also inhumane treatment that made children and families feel stigmatized and inferior, as if in a prison, they recalled.

Steve Horn: There’s more to Obama’s Arctic trip than just hypocrisy

Critics of the president’s Alaska visit should examine the National Petroleum Council’s role in pushing drilling

President Barack Obama just completed what in many ways was a historic trip: the first sitting President to visit Alaska’s Arctic. He was there to bear witness to climate change’s impacts.

Understandably, critics have taken issue with the inherent hypocrisy and “greenwashing” of the entire endeavor. Just weeks earlier, on August 17, he handed Shell Oil the final green-light necessary to tap into Arctic oil. Although such criticism has a point, it misses the force behind the decision to approve Arctic drilling to begin with: the National Petroleum Council (NPC) Obama’s administration oversees.

In 1928, famed British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would advance so far in a hundred years — by 2028 — that it will replace all work, and no one will need to worry about making money.

“For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

We still have thirteen years to go before we reach Keynes’ prophetic year, but we’re not exactly on the way to it. Americans are working harder than ever.

Brian Root: The ‘anchor baby’ myth

Having children who are US citizens is rarely a factor in immigration decisions

On Aug. 19, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush called for greater border enforcement, ostensibly to prevent pregnant mothers from coming to the United States to deliver “anchor babies,” an offensive term for children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants. The comment has drawn sharp criticism from Latinos, Asians and immigrant rights advocates. Bush has fumbled his response to the controversy.

Beyond its dehumanizing consequences, the myth of the “anchor baby” perpetuates the mistaken notion that having a U.S. citizen child is an effective means for unauthorized parents to stay in the United States. The fact is, having children who are U.S. citizens is rarely a factor in immigration decisions and the U.S. routinely rips families apart.

Separating a family through deportation can inflict severe trauma on children. But during his first six years in office, President Barack Obama’s administration deported more than 2 million immigrants under a legal framework that makes little to no consideration for family ties.

David Cay Johnston: New York’s electricity market is a scam

State operators rig prices not to fall, thanks to lax regulators

If you agree with legislators in about half the states that the most efficient way to provide electricity is through wholesale auctions, take a leap down the rabbit hole into world of the New York Public Service Commission.

Electricity should be cheap in New York because the state’s capacity to generate power far outstrips demand. Its surplus is huge, as much as 63 percent in May, and never less than 4.6 percent, New England Power Coordinating Council reliability reports show.

Prices should fall when demand is below capacity. But when capacity falls short of demand by even 1 percent, electricity market prices soar. Demand in New York is falling, primarily because of “a decrease in upstate industrial” electricity use, the Northeast Power Coordinating Council’s latest report shows.

Yet instead of enjoying cheaper power, New Yorkers pay 40 percent more than the average for the 48 contiguous states, federal pricing data show. Adjusted for inflation, electricity in New York costs almost 17 percent more than a decade ago (though it is down a bit from last year).

And already, people are figuring out successful ways of pushing back against privatization.

Water is an essential natural element, but around the world, it’s also an artificially endangered resource.

That would explain why the nations represented at a recent international conference on water rights in Lagos ranged from remote desert towns with hand-pumped wells to modern public utilities in European cities. Precisely because water is universally in demand, it faces boundless threats of exploitation, in countries rich and poor.

As we reported previously, Lagos has become ground zero for the global water-justice movement, as the city’s residents battle against a pending so-called Public-Private Partnership (PPP). This “development” model, promoted globally by neoliberal policymakers, lets governments contract with private companies to finance investment in water infrastructure, and then funnel them proceeds from future operating revenues.

Elizabeth Renzetti: No Time for Women’s Health in an Age of Austerity

The war waged by political reactionaries and pro-life advocates against Planned Parenthood in the United States is widely known. I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, and the undercover videos attempting to show the organization in a bad light are only the latest in a longstanding campaign. Planned Parenthood, which provides health care to millions of American women, has been under threat for years. It has always fought back.

What is less well known is that Canadian sexual health clinics, which offer many of the same vital services as their U.S. counterpart (but not abortions), are under similar threat. Earlier this month a group of Canadian sexual health clinics got together to talk about the increasingly difficult obstacles they face, from cuts in funding to harassment by anti-choice opponents to donors who are suddenly spooked by the Planned Parenthood controversy south of the border.

Ghita Schwarz: Growing Momentum to End For-Profit Immigration Detention

Each year, 400,000 immigrants enter the immigration detention system, charged not with crimes but with civil violations of immigration law. Few have lawyers. The Obama Administration has deported more than 2 million immigrants, more than any president in history.  At an annual cost of $2.2 billion per year, immigration detention is the fastest-growing component of the U.S. system of mass incarceration, due in no small part to the increasing influence of private prison contractors, who control 62% of the immigrant detention beds. Private contractors are the exclusive operators of the family detention centers that the Obama Administration has used to jail mothers and children fleeing violence in Central America. The millions they spend each year in lobbying and political contributions shape public policy toward refugees and long-time immigrants alike.

Michele Goldberg: Feminism Does Not Depend on Whether You Take Your Husband’s Name

Changing your name is not a feminist act. At the same time, you have not betrayed feminism if you change your name.

It is true, as the old feminist rallying cry goes, that the personal is political. From the beginning, sexism shapes the most intimate spheres of our lives. It affects the toys we’re given, the behaviors we’re rewarded for, the interests we’re encouraged to pursue. It determines the way we feel in our own skin and present ourselves to the world. If we’re heterosexual, it affects how we relate to our lovers; if we have kids, it can’t help but influence how we raise them.

Because sexism is so interwoven with how we live our lives, it sometimes feels like the transformation of our personal lives is demanded by feminism. This is extremely exhausting, leading to a neurotic level of analysis and justification of our own preferences, motives and interpersonal relationships. Two kinds of personal essays, repeated with nearly infinite variations, manifest this neurosis. One is confessional: I’m a feminist, but I enjoy X, in which X is some traditionally female thing like not working, wearing makeup, being submissive in bed, or doing all the housework. The other is tautological: don’t judge me for doing this traditionally female thing, because it makes me, a feminist, feel good, and thus must be more feminist than it appears.

If you alone are not strong enough to vanquish your opponent, you must find someone who is – and then find a way to set them against each other. Neither, probably, will ever be your friend. However, once they have occupied each other’s attentions, one is generally once again at liberty to roam the school halls unmolested while dressed like Siouxsie Sioux’s sparkly kid brother.

This tactic works beyond the cafeteria – and it’s how we as Americans should finally fight back against the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the other pro-gun lobbies keeping our country armed to the teeth and unwilling to hear any sense regarding gun safety laws, even as gun violence in the US remains disproportionately high: we must find something big, ugly and ruthless enough to take on the NRA. [..]

I believe the insurance industry may be our only hope.

Let everyone in this country keep their guns, but force them to insure those guns. It seems so obvious when you think about it. We insure our cars, our houses, our boats and bodies, even our plane tickets and rental cars. And some of those policies are legally mandated. We should absolutely require gun owners to pay against the indemnity they might incur when their gun does what it is statistically most likely to do – kills or injures them, or someone else.

John Atcheson: The Paris Climate Conference: Playing Craps With Our Planet’s Future

The climate change talks to be held in Paris this December (COP 21 in UN lingo) are all about how much risk to the livability of our planet we’re willing to accept.

And the dirty little secret is, we’re accepting a hell of a lot right now, and we’re imposing even more on our children and future generations. [..]

It’s the physics, stupid:  If we want a reasonable margin of safety for the world, we have to get off fossil fuels as soon as possible, preferably within the next five or six years.

Impractical? No more impractical than pretending it makes sense to adopt a carbon budget that risks global catastrophe simply because we failed take the action we needed to take in the past.

The amount of GHG we can emit without ushering in Armageddon is determined by physics, not politics.  And as I said back in July, the approach we’re adopting in COP 21, poses an existential threat to humanity and the global ecosystem because “… in a clash between physics and politics, physics always wins.”

C. Robert Gibson: Cutting Pentagon pork could fund free childcare in the US

The cost of childcare is bankrupting America’s parents. But providing free, universal childcare for all parents is easily affordable by simply cutting a small handful of military programs whose absence almost nobody would notice. [..]

One solution for funding free childcare for all parents could be found by simply cutting out Pentagon waste that nobody would notice.

To find out how much free, universal childcare would cost for all American children under age 5, I calculated the median cost of childcare in all 50 states using data published by The Boston Globe in 2014. The Globe’s research showed the estimated cost of full-time childcare for one child in all 50 states in 2012 dollars. The cheapest was Mississippi ($4,863 per year for an infant), while the most expensive was Washington, D.C. ($21,948 per year for an infant). The median figure was $9,230 – the halfway point between 26th-most expensive (Wyoming, $9,100 per year for an infant) and 25th-most expensive (Maine, $9,360 per year for an infant). By multiplying that figure by the estimated 21,005,852 children in the U.S. under age 5, I estimated the total cost for providing childcare to all of these children to be $193.8 billion.

Jeff Bryant: People Don’t Like Current Education Policies, So Why Do Policy Leaders?

The big annual poll on how Americans view public schools and education policy is out, and people who are eager to don the mantle of “education reform” might want to rethink their wardrobe.

As education journalist Valerie Strauss reports the news from her blog at The Washington Post, “The 47th annual PDK-Gallup poll, the longest continuously running survey of American attitudes toward public education … finds that a majority of Americans, as well as a majority of American public school parents, object to some of the key tenets of modern school reform.”

What is particularly jarring about the findings of this year’s PDK-Gallup poll is how much those results contrast to the pronouncements of current policy leaders from the Democratic Party and Republicans who are vying for their party’s presidential nomination.

Of all the electronic devices in American homes, the cable box is one of the hardest to use and probably one of the most expensive. A recent survey by two Democratic senators found that consumers spend on average about $231 a year to rent them.

People should be able to buy cable boxes from any manufacturer and connect them to their cable line or satellite dish as long as they meet basic technical standards. That could save Americans hundreds of dollars; it’s a one-time outlay, and the cost of the technology in set-top boxes, as with other electronics, is falling. Some companies sell them for less than $200.

The virtual monopoly that cable companies have over set-top boxes is reminiscent of the way AT&T used to require customers to rent phones from the company and prohibited them from using other devices. That ended after the Federal Communications Commission forced the company to let people connect telephones, radios and other equipment that were not made by AT&T in a 1968 decision known as Carterfone.

Robert Kuttner: We Are Asking Too Much of the Federal Reserve

There has been obsessive chatter about whether the Federal Reserve will, or should, raise interest rates this fall. At the Fed’s annual end-of-summer gabfest at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the issue was topic A. [..]

The Fed is famous for raising rates prematurely, seeing ghosts of inflation. But there is no inflation on the horizon — the bigger worry is deflation. In fact, the inflation rate is well below the Fed’s own target of two percent. And the Fed is the only game in town.

On balance, I think the opponents of a rate hike have the better argument. But consider for a moment that last assumption — that the Fed is the only game in town.

The larger issue, which is getting submerged in the great debate about raising rates, is that the Fed should not be the only game in town.

Hillary Clinton and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI): To Restore Trust in Government, Slow Wall Street’s Revolving Door

One of our nation’s greatest strengths is that we are governed by each other — what President Lincoln celebrated as “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

But increasingly, Americans’ trust in government is eroding. And a big reason for that is the so-called revolving door between government and the private sector.

Inviting outside voices into government is often a good thing. When public servants have experience beyond Washington, they bring new ideas, new perspectives, and new knowledge to the work of governing this huge, complicated country of ours. Some of America’s most dedicated public servants got their start in technology, business, academia, or other fields. Most of the time, that private-sector experience is an asset, not a liability.

But in some cases, it can affect the public trust — for example, if a public servant’s past and future are tied to the financial industry. That’s when people start worrying that the foxes are guarding the hen house.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): High Drug Prices Are Killing Americans

All across the country, Americans are finding that the prices of the prescription drugs they need are soaring. Tragically, doctors tell us that many of their patients can no longer afford their medicine. As a result, some get sicker. Others die.

A new Kaiser Health poll shows that most Americans think prescription drug costs in this country are unreasonable, and that drug companies put profits before people. Want to know something? They’re right. [..]

This is not a partisan issue. Most Americans — Republicans, Democrats, and independents — want Congress to do something about drug prices. 86 percent of those polled, including 82 percent of Republicans, think drug companies should be required to release information to the public on how they set their prices. Large majorities support other solutions to the drug cost problem as well.

Peter Georgescu has a message he wants America’s corporate and political elites to hear: “I’m scared,” he said in a recent New York Times opinion piece.

He adds that Paul Tudor Jones is scared, too, as is Ken Langone. And they are trying to get the Powers That Be to pay attention to their urgent concerns. But wait-these three are Powers That Be. Georgescu is former head of Young & Rubicam, one of the world’s largest PR and advertising firms; Jones is a quadruple-billionaire and hedge fund operator; and Langone is a founder of Home Depot.

What is scaring the pants off these powerful peers of the corporate plutocracy? Inequality. Yes, amazingly, these actual occupiers of Wall Street say they share Occupy Wall Street’s critical analysis of America’s widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us. “We are creating a caste system from which it’s almost impossible to escape,” Georgescu wrote, not only trapping the poor, but also “those on the higher end of the middle class.” He issued a clarion call for his corporate peers to reverse the dangerous and ever-widening gulf of income inequality in our country by increasing the paychecks of America’s workaday majority. “We business leaders know what to do. But do we have the will to do it? Are we willing to control the excessive greed so prevalent in our culture today and divert resources to better education and the creation of more opportunity?”

Iain Overton: Europe has questions to answer over America’s gun crime

And so it goes; another week of bloody headlines about American gun shootings.

It’s something we have long come to expect. According to FBI data , in 2013 8,454 people were shot and murdered in the United States – just under 70% of all homicides. The same year the CDC reported that 21,175 people shot and killed themselves.

These figures, though, seem to have lost their power to surprise. In a country where guns are ubiquitous, and the right to bear arms is firmly enshrined in its constitution – there are 310 million guns in circulation – American gun violence seems inevitable.

It is a situation that causes many to resign themselves to the thought that nothing meaningful can ever be done. And when any European dares to raise the idea of US gun control, they are told to go take a hike. [..]

The truth is that some of the biggest gun companies in Europe – Beretta, Heckler & Koch, FN Herstal – all rely heavily on the US as a core market. Austria’s leading handgun manufacturer, Glock, boasts that about 65% of America’s police departments put one of their pistols “between them and a problem”.

Knowing this, the question we should perhaps be asking ourselves is, should European gun companies be exporting to the US?

Caroline Conrad: Canada’s prime minister wants to make it harder for people to vote against him

Acclaimed Canadian author Margaret Atwood faced censorship in the national press late last week for her satirical take on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hair. It might have been a rather amusing episode if it wasn’t symptomatic of darker, Orwellian trends that have marked Harper’s nine years in office.

Stephen Marche’s article in the New York Times mid-month does an excellent job of summarizing how Harper has pulled tight the reins of power, stifled criticism and eroded the freedoms of Canadians. But it is in the prime minister’s assaults on the most fundamental of democratic acts, a citizen’s right to vote, that Harper’s lust for control finds its most disturbing outlet.

Not confident of winning re-election on merit in October, he’s pushed through a series of legal changes spearheaded by the perversely named Fair Elections Act. Harper’s front man for the task, the aptly titled democratic reform minister, Pierre Poilievre, brushed off critics, claiming the changes are “common sense“. But it’s more likely that, after winning by an uncomfortably small margin in the last election and, after nine years, having the distinct honor of the lowest job creation numbers since World War II and least economic growth since the 1960s, Harper is making sure potential naysayers have a harder time accessing the polls.

Lawrence Lessig: On ‘Dumbing Down’ the Democratic Debate

There are two stories about why Washington doesn’t work. One blames a corrupted process. The other blames Republicans.

Corrupted process sorts point to the grotesque inequality that has developed within our political system — an inequality that makes Congress ripe for capture by special interests, by giving the funders of campaigns unprecedented power. Four hundred families, the New York Times reports, have given half the money that has been raised in this election cycle so far. That extraordinary concentration makes it trivially easy to block reform of every sort, as candidates for every office bend over backwards to please their funders.

Anti-Republicans have a simpler story. The problem with our democracy, these sorts have it, is that we have badly behaving Republicans. Nothing can happen because Republicans block everything. Nothing can happen sensibly because Republicans have become so incredibly extreme. If only we could ban the party, or at least defeat enough of them, government just might work. But until we do — or until they grow up — nothing sane can happen.