Tag: TMC Politics

The first time I did something about America’s epidemic of mass shootings was not when I looked up and saw on TV that a child had shot up a school full of children – although that’s happened a lot of times here. [..]

The blasé acceptance that, yes, you might well get shot some day is as much of a facet of American life in 2015 as it was in 2002. We are as desensitized now as we were were in 1993, when Colin Ferguson shot up a Long Island Railroad train car of commuters and in 1984, when James Huberty shot up a McDonalds in San Ysidro, California. The shooting at the University of Albany, in upstate New York (1994) didn’t change anything. Columbine (1999) didn’t change anything. The Lancaster, Pennsylvania Amish schoolhouse shooting (2006) didn’t change anything.

Nothing changed for Americans because our political leaders didn’t change anything. Instead, a nation ducked.

John Nichols: Since When Are Democrats Afraid of Debates?

The Democratic National Committee needs to adapt to the new politics of 2016. Instead of constraining debate, as it has so far, the DNC should change course and encourage an open and freewheeling discourse. This is not just the right choice; it’s the politically practical thing to do.

Like it or not, the 2016 campaign is in full swing, and Americans are engaging with it. A record-breaking 24 million viewers tuned in to watch the August 6 GOP debate-more Americans than voted in all of the Republican primaries and caucuses of 2012 combined. It’s easy to dismiss these debates as “clown car” spectacles, considering the atrocious statements coming from Donald Trump and his apprentices. Yet since that first debate, Trump and other Republicans have seen their numbers spike in polls pairing them against anticipated Democratic opponents in 2016.

Democrats are making a serious mistake if they imagine that they’ll somehow benefit by letting the Republicans claim center stage as summer gives way to fall.

Mary Turck: Bias against black jurors must end

Prosecutors’ challenges against black jurors reinforce distrust of the criminal justice system as a whole<

The racism permeating the U.S. justice system is blatantly obvious in jury selection. On Aug. 17, Reprieve Australia, an anti-capital-punishment advocacy group, released a study showing that prosecutors in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, excluded black people from juries three times as often as white people over 10 years. A similar study in 2010 by Alabama-based nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, conducted in eight Southern states, found significant racially discriminatory practices in jury selection.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case this fall, Foster v. Humphrey, regarding a prosecutor’s use of challenges to eliminate black jurors. Such tactics result in fewer acquittals as well as deny a basic right and duty of citizenship. While court decisions are important, they are not enough. Community-based actions such as public campaigns and protests are needed to demand the enforcement of existing legal prohibitions of discrimination against black jurors.

We are seeing the usual hysteria over the sharp drop in the markets in Asia, Europe, and perhaps the US. (Wall Street seems to be rallying as I write.) There are a few items worth noting as we enjoy the panic.

First and most importantly, the stock market is not the economy. The stock market has fluctuations all the time that have nothing to do with the real economy. The most famous was the 1987 crash, which did not correspond to any real-world bad event that anyone could identify.

Even over longer periods, there is no direct correlation between the stock market and GDP. In the decade of the 1970s, the stock market lost more than 40 percent of its value in real terms; in the decade of the 1980s it more than doubled. GDP growth averaged 3.3 percent from 1980 to 1990, compared to 3.2 percent from 1970 to 1980.

Amanda Marcotte: Why Fox News’ Defense Of Megyn Kelly Is Going To Backfire

Donald Trump has reignited his sexist harassment campaign against Megyn Kelly, and the folks at Fox News are, in seemingly coordinated fashion, striking back. Fellow Fox News hosts and pundits are asking Trump to cool it, and even Roger Ailes has released a statement calling Trump’s abuse “unacceptable” and “disturbing.” It’s almost touching, watching all these conservative media people who usually profit at peddling sexism choose, this time at least, to join together in an effort to stop this one particular instance of it.

It’s also going to backfire.

Conservative media and Fox News in particular have spent years – decades, if you count talk radio – training their audiences to believe that exhortations against sexism and racism are nothing but the “political correctness” police trying to kill your good time. Indeed, one reason that Trump was able to get so much attention for his presidential run in the first place is that Fox has spent years building him up, knowing that their audience enjoys vicariously needling imagined liberals and feminists with his loud-mouthed insult comic act.

Seamus Milne: China can ride out this crisis. But we’re on course for another crash

It may not yet be the moment to get in supplies of tinned food. That was what Gordon Brown’s former adviser during the 2008 crash, Damian McBride, suggested on Monday as stock markets crashed from Shanghai to New York and $1tn was wiped off the value of shares in one day. But seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers brought down the global financial system and plunged half the world into a slump, it’s scarcely alarmist to see the financial panic as the harbinger of a new crisis in a still crippled world economy.

The market gyrations that followed “Black Monday” this week and the 40% drop in the value of Chinese stocks since June have only underlined the fragility of what is supposed to be an international recovery. For all the finger-wagging hubris of western commentators over the fact that the latest mayhem has erupted in China, this is a global firestorm. And after three decades of deregulation punctuated by financial crises and a systemic meltdown, there is every reason to fear more fallout from casino capitalism.

Scott Lemieux: Gun control is political. So is refusing to address the politics of gun violence

After the 24-year-old television reporter Alison Parker and her 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward were killed while on camera from a lake outside of Roanoke, Virginia on Wednesday morning, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, somewhat predictably tweeted that “[w]e must act to stop gun violence, and we cannot wait any longer” and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe called for new gun control measures in the form of background checks .

The conservative response to Democrats’ anodyne reactions is even more predictable:  it’s wrong, they say, to “politicize” individual acts of firearm violence. But gun violence in the United States has everything to do with politics – and we should be talking more, not less, about the impact of America’s failed gun policies on victims and their families and communities.

Even supporters should realize that corruption is tarnishing charter schools’ reputations and wasting public money

Charter schools enroll more than 2.5 million students in the U.S. But as these publicly funded, privately run schools have spread across the country, so have reports of corruption and waste bred by a lack of accountability.

A recent study published by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy, entitled “The Tip of the Iceberg,” found $203 million lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in charter schools, with a projected $1.4 billion in losses in 2015 alone. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned as well: It has investigated schools in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Connecticut, Arizona, Ohio, Massachusetts, Indiana and Illinois. [..]

Whether or not one thinks that charter schools are a good thing, we should be able to agree that greater accountability strengthens our school system. However, many charter advocates have stood in the way of reform.

Lauren Pagel: Forget fracking. We need clean energy now

New EPA rule on methane takes step in right direction, but we must expedite the transition to renewable energy

One year ago, Earthworks, the environmental advocacy organization I work for, launched the Citizens Empowerment Project to document the effects of fracking on air quality in across the country. With the help of a special thermal camera that detects and visualizes the presence of harmful gases, people near fracking sites across the country can now confirm what they have known for years to be true: Oil and gas development is polluting their air.

This pollution includes Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, a known carcinogen. These pollutants contribute to smog, which can trigger a variety of health problems such as asthma. Air pollution is a problem at almost every point along the development chain, from the well pad to the pipeline and beyond. But until now,  state rules to protect families living near such sites have been spotty and largely unenforced. And there are few national protections that safeguard our air from fracking and related development.

It’s been a chaotic few days for the world’s markets. Recent events do not paint the picture of a stable economy guided by rational minds. Instead, the world of global finance looks more like a playground in need of adult supervision.

Like other nations, we have a central bank. What should the Federal Reserve do in troubled times? For that matter, what is the Fed’s role in preventing them from occurring in the first place? [..]

The Federal Reserve was created by the American people through an act of Congress. Its governors and its policies are there to protect and serve the public. The Fed should use its oversight capabilities to ensure that banks don’t behave in a reckless manner or help private funds and other unsupervised institutions to behave recklessly.

We are still paying the price for allowing big-money interests to dominate both lawmaking on Capitol Hill and monetary policy at the Federal Reserve. That must change. Congress and the Fed, acting together, should ensure that our nation’s policies benefit the many who are in need of help, not the few who already have more than they need.

Robert Reich: The Upsurge in Uncertain Work

As Labor Day looms, more Americans than ever don’t know how much they’ll be earning next week or even tomorrow.

This varied group includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes.

On demand and on call — in the “share” economy, the “gig” economy, or, more prosaically, the “irregular” economy — the result is the same: no predictable earnings or hours.

It’s the biggest change in the American workforce in over a century, and it’s happening at lightening speed. It’s estimated that in five years over 40 percent of the American labor force will have uncertain work; in a decade, most of us.

Mark Weisbrot: US and Europe face common political problems

Resistance to economic insecurity and inequality is growing on both sides of the Atlantic

As the ever-lengthening U.S. election season begins to heat up, it is interesting to compare the U.S. and Europe regarding the evolution of their politics since the world financial crisis and recession (2008-09). In Europe, there has been quite a bit of political upheaval, with center-left parties often losing a large part of their voters. In Greece, to take the most dramatic example, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) is now polling just 3 percent of the electorate, after decades of wining around 40 percent or more of the vote. There have been significant losses of popularity for similar center-left parties in Spain, Italy, France and other countries – although some have yet to materialize in elections. In Greece, the leftist Syriza party has gotten most of the disaffected voters and took power this year; in Spain, the newly created leftist Podemos party shot up to the top quickly, although it has fallen some in polls recently. In France it has been the extreme right National Front that gained most, and in Italy, the new populist Five Star Movement.

The U.S. is an oasis of political stability by comparison, partly because of our different political system. But the main reason for Europe’s political turmoil, to mangle political strategist James Carville’s over-used slogan for the 1992 election: It’s the stupid economy.

Jeb “I’m my own man” Bush sounds more and more like his know-nothing ex-president brother every day. This time, in between defending the Iraq War and saying he might bring back torture if elected president, he’s demanding that tech companies stop letting billions of the world’s citizens use encryption online to protect their information because of “evildoers.”

Bush’s comments echo the dangerous sentiments of FBI director Jim Comey, who has publicly campaigned against Apple and Google for attempting to make our cell phones and communications safer by incorporating strong encryption in iPhones and Android devices. [..]Unfortunately, Bush’s comments seem to be part of a pattern with the 2016 presidential candidates, none of whom seem to understand the basic precepts of technology, and the critical role encryption plays in all of our cybersecurity.

Robert Kuttner: 2016: The Coming Train Wreck

Six months ago, the 2016 election looked to be predictable and boring: Clinton II vs. Bush III. Advantage: Clinton.

Well, forget about that.

The Republican demolition derby has been getting most of the publicity lately, but one should worry more about the Democrats. Consider:

Hillary Clinton is sinking like a stone. She’s falling in the polls. Conversations with her longtime friends and admirers indicate grave worry. She is not generating the excitement that the first prospective woman president should; the email mess is not going away; even the money advantage is not what was anticipated. [..]

To sum up: The 2016 Republican field is more of a Mutually-Assured-Destruction mess than any in my long lifetime. It’s not only much too big, but far to the right of American public opinion. The exceptions are a surprisingly strong John Kasich, who is probably too moderate to be nominated, and Jeb Bush who may well be too clumsy. And then there is Trump.

In general, that’s all good news for the Dems. But never, never, discount the Democrats’ talent for doing themselves in. If this were an HBO series, it would be one hell of a show, albeit a little far-fetched. Unfortunately, it’s our life.

Char Millier: When firefighters speak out on climate change, we ought to listen up

Climate change is worsening the fires that ravage many parts of America each year. Grime-streaked firefighters battling one of the 167 active wildfires currently scorching portions of the US west will tell you as much. What they have encountered on the firelines in the past few years is evidence that everything has changed as a result of global warming.

In mid-August, the day after a quick-moving fire first exploded southwest of Boise, Idaho, the blaze more than doubled in size to nearly 79,000 acres in one four hour stretch. Along the way, it sparked a “firenado” that rained hot ash and dirt on firefighters.

Or consider the disturbing talk surrounding the still-smoldering fire named Rocky that this month scorched 70,000 acres near Napa, California: “This fire wants to do whatever it wants,” Jason Shanley, a Cal Fire spokesman, observed, adding “It’s defying all odds. 30 year, 40 year veterans have never seen this before.”

Robert Creamer: Out of Touch Punditry Should Get a Grip — Hillary’s Email Is Non-Story

A message to the out-of-touch Washington pundit class: get a grip. What was or was not on Hillary Clinton’s email server when she was Secretary of State is not a game-changing news story.

In fact, no one outside the chattering class — and right-wing true believers — could give a rat’s rear about this story — and there is a good reason: there is no “there” there. If someone really thinks the great “email” story — or the Benghazi investigation — are going to sink her candidacy, I’ve got a bridge to sell them.

Of course, this is not the first time that the media — with an assist from right-wing political operatives — have laid into Hillary Clinton in an attempt to create a “scandal” where there was none.

We need more primary and general election debates, featuring more candidates, more issues and bolder moderators.

The humorist Will Rogers ran a mock campaign for the presidency in 1928 that got so much attention, and was so favorably received, that some Democrats proposed him as a serious contender in 1932. Rogers politely pulled himself out of the running-with an observation that “Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.”

On a more personal and professional note, Rogers warned that “A comedian can only last till he either takes himself serious or his audience takes him serious.”

That is the only argument I can think of for not asking Jon Stewart to moderate at least one of the 2016 presidential debates. And this argument fails because both comedy and politics have changed sufficiently over the past 80-plus years to justify the risk to the reputation of the recently-retired “Daily Show” host.

George Zornilk: Congress Is Sick of the Secrecy Around the TPP

And Senator Sherrod Brown is blocking a key Obama nominee to show it.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is in its final stages, though nobody seems certain when talks over the massive trade deal will actually conclude. The document is undergoing critical late-stage revisions as member nations haggle over the automobile trade with Japan, dairy prices in New Zealand, and monopoly periods for non-generic pharmaceuticals.

When the deal is completed, members of Congress will be able to see the entire text without restriction before they vote on passage. But until then, legislators are operating under hyper-strict rules when they want to review the text, which is locked in a basement room of the US Capitol. Only certain congressional aides with security clearances can see the TPP draft, and only when the member of Congress is also present. Notes taken during these sessions can’t be taken out of the room. [..]

Senator Sherrod Brown recently gave the administration a deadline to ease some of these restrictions. He wants his policy advisors to be able to evaluate the evolving text without having him present. But that access was never given, and his self-imposed deadline passed last Friday.

Brown has consequently announced he will place a hold on Obama’s nominee to be Deputy US Trade Representative.

Stephen W. Thrasher: Republicans’ deep hatred for teachers can’t be denied and they’re not trying

It’s August, the heat is miserable, kids are going back to school and that means one thing for America’s conservatives: it’s the perfect time to take a cheap shot at the nation’s teachers.

John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio – who is generally considered less extreme than Texas Senator Ted Cruz, less dynastic than former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and less crazy than professional troll Donald Trump – recently said: “If I were, not president, if I were king in America, I would abolish all teachers’ lounges where they sit together and worry about ‘woe is us’.”  [..]

Republicans love to hate teachers and imply that all the ills of US society are the result of their laziness. If only schools could be turned over to market forces and not held back by greedy teacher unions, conservative logic goes, everything would be fine – even though charter schools perform no better than traditional schools. Trying to bust unions in general (and those of teachers in particular) turns conservatives on as much as trying to deny climate change, defend the NRA, defund Planned Parenthood or battle for a check from the Koch brothers.

Zoë Carpenter:  The Racist Roots of the GOP’s Favorite New Immigration Plan

Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment, but Donald Trump and other candidates are keeping alive the idea that some Americans should not have equal rights at birth.

The year 1866 was an alarming one for xenophobes: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, declaring “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power…to be citizens of the United States.” Though explicitly intended to grant citizenship to African-Americans, who’d been denied it by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case, wouldn’t the law also “have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country?” wondered Pennsylvania Senator Edgar Cowan. “Undoubtedly,” responded Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. When President Andrew Johnson vetoed the act, he too raised the specter of the Chinese and “the people called Gypsies.”

Congress overrode the veto, and went on to enshrine the principle of birthright citizenship in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Needless to say, fears about the children of the gypsies proved unfounded. Yet the idea that people with certain types of parents should be denied citizenship-and the associated rights-persisted. Late in the nineteenth century the government tried to withhold citizenship from the children of Chinese immigrants, but was rebuffed by the Supreme Court. Native Americans weren’t considered citizens until 1924. These days the target is Latino immigrants and their children. And thanks to Donald Trump, the nativist argument against birthright citizenship has moved from a sideline item to a centerpiece in the Republican primary.

If you are running for office as a Republican today, you have to mention your reverence for the Constitution at least as much as you mention your love for Ronald Reagan.

The Second Amendment — every word should be taken literally because it was literally ordained by God! The First Amendment protects my right to discriminate against gay people! Neither the Constitution nor the Bible contains the word “Obamacare”!

But Republican politicians have a few glaring blind spots when it comes to the Constitution. One of those is the 14th Amendment, a pillar of our inclusive democracy, a key component of which Republican presidential candidates are now asking us to ignore or change.

E. J. Dionne: All Votes Matter: When Will Discrimination End at the Ballot Box?

Many find politics frustrating because problems that seemed to be solved in one generation crop up again years or decades later.  The good thing about democracy is that there are no permanent defeats. The hard part is that some victories have to be won over and over.

And so it is with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a monument to what can be achieved when grass-roots activism is harnessed to presidential and legislative leadership. Ending discrimination at the ballot box was a way of underwriting the achievements of the Civil Rights Act passed a year earlier by granting African-Americans new and real power to which they had always been constitutionally entitled.

Thomas Frank: It’s not just Fox News: How liberal apologists torpedoed change, helped make the Democrats safe for Wall Street

Center-left pundits have carried water for the president for six years. Their predictable excuses all ring hollow

As the Obama administration enters its seventh year, let us examine one of the era’s greatest peculiarities: That one of the most cherished rallying points of the president’s supporters is the idea of the president’s powerlessness.

Today, of course, the Democrats have completely lost control of Congress and it’s easy to make the case for the weakness of the White House. For example, when Frank Bruni sighed last Wednesday that presidents are merely “buoys on the tides of history,” not “mighty frigates parting the waters,” he scarcely made a ripple. [..]

It is, in other words, a classic apologetic. The pundit, a clear-thinking, reality-based fellow (and yes, they are almost always fellows), knows that if you paid attention back in 2008 you understood that Obama wasn’t promising anything great. Plus, the president has delivered all kinds of subtle but awesome stuff that his soft-headed fans overlook. Besides, there are those awful racist Republicans. Good Christ! Would we rather have one of them in the Oval Office?

This theme has been so elaborately developed over the last few years that it would be possible to write a decent history of the Obama administration entirely in terms of the various apologetics deployed on its behalf, savoring all the different grades of literary style, noting all the catch phrases and in-jokes the pundits share with one another, enumerating all the clever put-downs they use to deride the unrealistic liberal masses.

As a preface to any such future history, let me outline here the main points of the genre.

David Dayen: Presidential libraries, an all-American scam: Why these overpriced vanity projects are bad for politics, the economy & history

Barack Obama is in the early stages of raising $1B for his planned library in Chicago. What a waste!

We spend a lot of time fretting about the power of money in elections. But what about the power of money after all the elections end? The lure of cashing in once leaving politics can have as much of an impact on policy as the continual lobbying and campaign contributions while a politician is in office. Yesterday the New York Times depicted this in rather unseemly fashion, showing how President Obama has vigorously plotted his post-presidency since a week after getting elected to a second and final term.

By “plotted” I mean “flattered potential donors at late-night White House dinners.” The scene-setter for the article featured Obama and his wife in a private upstairs dining room this February, hobnobbing until 2 a.m. with venture capitalists, billionaire CEOs, actresses and hedge fund manager Marc Lasry, last seen getting $450 million in public money from Wisconsin to build a sports arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, which he co-owns. The dinner was part of a series of all-night bull sessions with “extraordinarily rich groups of people.” [..]

Which all begs the question: If a private citizen seeks private donors for a building with his name on it, and an endowment for a foundation that could potentially do good work, why should we care?