Tag: TMC Politics

The No vote to austerity by a margin of 62 to 38 is a stunning vindication of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s tactical gamble and political savvy. However, the Greeks and the austerity-mongers, most notably in Germany, remain as far apart as ever.

The press and the European financial elite played Tsipras’s surprise referendum as reckless and suicidal. Much of the E.U. establishment was savoring a Yes vote, a Tsipras resignation, and a new center-right unity government as enablers of austerity. But Tsipras demonstrated that he has a far surer grasp of his own people than the Berlin-Brussels echo chamber.

The elite press has tended to play this tragedy as a case of Greek self-destruction. The larger story, in truth, is the self-destruction of the European Union.

Robert Reich: Will We Allow a Private Health Insurance Monopoly or Implement Single Payer at Last?

The Supreme Court’s recent blessing of Obamacare has precipitated a rush among the nation’s biggest health insurers to consolidate into two or three behemoths.

The result will be good for their shareholders and executives, but bad for the rest of us – who will pay through the nose for the health insurance we need. [..]

There’s abundant evidence that when health insurers merge, premiums rise. For example, Leemore Dafny, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and his two co-authors, found that after Aetna merged with Prudential HealthCare in 1999, premiums rose 7 percent higher than had the merger not occurred.

The problem isn’t Obamacare. The real problem is the current patchwork of state insurance regulations, insurance commissioners, and federal regulators can’t stop the tidal wave of mergers, or limit the economic and political power of the emerging giants.  

Which is why, ultimately, American will have to make a choice.

James House: Healthcare heals the sick. Better pay keeps them healthy in the first place

Despite decades of efforts to make doctors and hospitals more accessible and cost-effective, Americans’ health has only worsened relative to other wealthy nations – and even to some developing ones, I found researching my new book. At the same time, US health spending has grown to almost 20% of GDP, 50 to 100% more than any other nation. While Obamacare has expanded access to insurance (and thus to care), available estimates and evidence indicate that increasing the numbers of insured Americans will only marginally impact either health or health spending.

The answers actually lie in socioeconomic and environmental policies that affect how people live and work, the real drivers of individual and collective well-being. These issues, generally outside the purview of “health policy”, must become central to it, and their impacts on health and healthcare spending should be routinely evaluated.

Social, economic, psychological, behavioral and environmental risk factors for health are quite unequally distributed in America. Disadvantaged socioeconomic groups and racial and ethnic minorities have greater exposure to and experience of almost all risk factors. And these disparities are generally getting larger. For some disadvantaged areas and people, life expectancy is actually declining, something largely without precedent in our – or any – wealthy nation. The greatest opportunity for making Americans healthier lies in improving access to education, income and better occupational and residential conditions.

Appearing late last week on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri insisted that Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont “is too liberal to gather enough votes in this country to become president.” Indeed, responding to the fact that candidate Sanders is not only drawing big, enthusiastic crowds to campaign events in Iowa and New Hampshire, but also pulling within 10 points of frontrunner and party favorite Hillary Clinton in certain state polls, McCaskill said: “It’s not unusual for someone who has an extreme message to have a following.” [..]

Clearly, McCaskill’s attack – which, to me, smacked of red baiting – was intended as a dismissal of Bernie Sanders’s candidacy based on the fact that Sanders, who has repeatedly won elections in Vermont as an independent and then caucused with the Senate Democrats, is a self-described “democratic socialist” or “social democrat.” And of course, we all know that social democracy is not just unpopular in the United States, it is un-American.

Well, think again. Social democracy is 100 percent American. We may be latecomers to recognizing a universal right to health care (indeed, we are not quite there yet). But we were first in creating a universal right to public education, in endowing ourselves with ownership of national parks, and, for that matter, in conferring voting rights on males without property and abolishing religious tests for holding national office.

David Dayen: The end of Europe as we know it: Why Greece is poised to change everything this weekend

Greece will cast its most important vote in a generation on Sunday: Euro or Drachma. In or out.

Every campaign season, self-interested politicians tell Americans that we face “the most important election of our lifetimes.” Only rarely is that literally true, but Sunday’s snap referendum in Greece certainly qualifies. The question before voters, whether to accept a deal that creditors have already taken off the table, is less about text than subtext: This is a vote on the future of the European monetary union, and whether elites will be allowed to continue their reign of bullying and immiseration. In this sense, the Greek people are taking a proxy vote for the rest of the continent. [..]

A No vote, therefore, reveals to European citizens an escape hatch, a way out of a terribly misbegotten currency union. The euro would no longer be irreversible. Maybe elites will try to make the aftermath so painful for Greece that nobody else would follow their path. But they seemingly don’t want to risk the possibility. When one Eurozone member, no matter how small, ends the stranglehold the institutional leadership has in setting their absurdly misguided policies, it sends a beacon to the rest of the continent, indeed the rest of the world, that a consensus which doesn’t work for ordinary people can be abandoned.

Best of all, the people can strike this blow with their ballots. The days of technocrats inserting their judgment for diverse groups of citizens can end. But only if Greece, standing in for their global compatriots, chooses hope over fear.

Eugene Robinson: Trump: A Farce to Be Reckoned With

Anxiety-ridden GOP masterminds will eventually find a way to solve the Trump Problem. Until they do, however, the Republican Party threatens to become as much of a laughingstock as what David Letterman used to call “that thing on Donald Trump’s head.”

Suddenly, according to recent polls, the iconically coiffed mogul has to be taken … how, exactly? Obviously it’s not possible to take Trump seriously, since there’s nothing remotely serious about him or his “campaign,” which is nothing more than a reality-show version of an actual campaign. But if his poll numbers are going to place him in the top tier of Republican candidates, he can’t be ignored.

Let’s call him a farce to be reckoned with.

On a desolate dirt road about an hour south of San Antonio, some 2,500 women and children will experience the Fourth of July in America for the first time this weekend. For them, there will be no celebration: no barbecue in the backyard or fireworks in the night sky. We proclaim to the world that those facing credible harm in their homelands can find refuge in America, and they followed our promise of sanctuary for hundreds of miles to reach our southern border. They risked life and limb to escape poverty, violence and sexual predators in their native lands to find safety in America.

And then we threw them in jail.

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas – known simply as Dilley – is one of two detention facilities outside of San Antonio that I toured on a Congressional delegation last week. I went to see for myself the conditions that the women and children incarcerated there face firsthand – and what I saw was nothing short of heartbreaking.

Jostein Solheim: I scream, you scream, we all scream – for higher fuel emission standards

We all know how good a cold ice cream tastes on a hot day, and climate scientists are telling us to expect more hot days – and extended heat waves – in the years ahead. As the planet gets warmer, we at Ben & Jerry’s want to be sure that our ice cream is produced with as few greenhouse gas emissions as possible, to keep our fans supplied with Cherry Garcia without making climate change even worse.

We’ve done our homework and know that 17% of our carbon footprint comes from transportation, from shipping our ice cream from the factory to our distribution centers. That’s a big bite out of our carbon budget, and we’re not alone. [..]

To tackle this carbon pollution and costs, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed federal regulations for the fuel economy of freight trucks. These proposed regulations are a step in the right direction, but they don’t lower emissions far enough or fast enough.

Seumas Milne: Syriza can’t just cave in. Europe’s elites want regime change in Greece

It’s now clear that Germany and Europe’s powers that be don’t just want the Greek government to bend the knee. They want regime change. Not by military force, of course – this operation is being directed from Berlin and Brussels, rather than Washington.

But that the German chancellor Angela Merkel and the troika of Greece’s European and International Monetary Fund creditors are out to remove the elected government in Athens now seems beyond serious doubt. Everything they have done in recent weeks in relation to the leftist Syriza administraton, elected to turn the tide of austerity, appears designed to divide or discredit Alexis Tsipras’s government. [..]

The real risk across Europe is that if Syriza caves in or collapses, that failure will be used to turn back the rising tide of support for anti-austerity movements such as Podemos in Spain, or Sinn Féin in Ireland, leaving the field to populists of the right.

Either way, any Greek euro deal that fails to write off unrepayable debt or end the austerity squeeze will only postpone the crisis. If the Syriza government survives, it will have to change direction. Its fate, and its chaotic confrontation with the eurozone’s overlords, is going to shape all of Europe’s future.

Barbara Kingsolver: A view from the south: let the Confederate flag go

My little town is proud to have reared citizens like Carolee, an honour student and star athlete who offers a helping hand to anyone she meets. She wears her blonde hair in a ponytail and a delicate tattoo on her wrist. It’s the Confederate battle flag.

That flag has come crashing into the global conversation after an avowed white supremacist massacred nine parishioners in an African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina. He tore up hearts and families, left a state without its senator and a nation bereft. A crime so senseless leaves us grappling for something we can blame, or fix. We’re sickened by Dylann Roof’s self-portrait with a semi-automatic pistol and Confederate flag. In the wider world where it’s seldom seen, people must wonder how that emblem waved by a racist vigilante could ever have held appeal for local historians or thoughtful honour students. [..]

My southern home is not that nation. This month the Confederate flag finally came down from several southern state houses, and my neighbour’s barn. Our governor banned it from licence plates. The stock car drivers of Nascar, that bastion of good-ol-boys, expelled it from the racetracks. We’re honouring heritage by tapping our well of kindness, knowing that for too many people those colours evoke terror and despair. No more. Now is the moment in history when we send that flag to the graveyard.

When, five years ago, Greece’s crisis began, Europe extended a helping hand. But it was far different from the kind of help that one would have wanted, far different from what one might have expected if there was even a bit of humanity, of European solidarity.

The initial proposals had Germany and other “rescuers” actually making a profit out of Greece’s distress, charging a far, far higher interest rate than their cost of capital. Worse, they imposed conditions on Greece — changes in its macro- and micro-policies — that would have to be made in return for the money. [..]

The situation has some important similarities with Argentina’s 2001 default — and some differences as well. In both countries, recessions turned into depressions as a consequence of austerity policies — making the debt even more unsustainable. In both cases, the policies were demanded as a condition for assistance. Both countries had rigid currency arrangements that gave them no possibility for running expansionary monetary policies during the recession. In both countries, the IMF got it wrong, providing alarmingly flawed forecasts of the consequences of the imposed policies. Unemployment and poverty soared, and GDP plummeted. Indeed, there is even a striking similarity in the magnitude of the fall in GDP and the increase in the unemployment rate.

Ralph Nader: Where Are the Presidential Candidates on the Minimum Wage?

As the 2016 campaign season gets underway, working families across the country will be very interested in where presidential candidates stand on raising the minimum wage. [..]

Democratic primary candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders have come out in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15.00 over the next several years, a living wage that would lift tens of millions of individuals out of poverty. Others have remained mum on the subject, including former Virginia Senator Jim Webb and former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chaffee.

Perhaps most glaringly silent is the front-runner, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She has spoken many times about making sure that individuals will make enough money to survive, including most recently at the Fight for $15 conference in June where she said, “It is wrong that so many people stand against you thinking that they can steal your wages with no consequences. That even stacks the deck higher for those at the top.” However, Clinton has declined to comment on whether or not she would support a $15 an hour minimum wage, or when she would like to see a wage hike implemented. In 2007, as a Senator, she supported raising the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour and in May, 2014 she finally came out in favor of raising it to $10.10 an hour.

Mark Weisbrot: Are European Authorities Trying to Force Regime Change in Greece?

It’s ironic but not surprising that the European Central Bank decided Sunday to limit its credit to Greece by enough to force the Greek banking system to close.

This has pushed Greece closer to a more serious financial crisis than the country has had in the past five years of austerity-induced depression. Why did the ECB decide to take this harsh, unnecessary and dangerous measure now?

It seems clear that the move is in response to the Greek government’s decision to hold a referendum on whether to accept the last offer from the European authorities outlining conditions for continuing official lending to Greece. The financial problems and inconveniences of this week, caused by the bank holiday, are the European authorities’ way of saying, “Vote as we’ll tell you to, or we can make your lives even more miserable than we have been making them.”

New report sheds light on the covert tactics used to shape public opinion about what we eat

At the turn of the last century, the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, launched the Celiac Project, whose medical professionals recommended bananas to benefit celiac disease sufferers. Those pitched on the sweet fruit’s miraculous properties didn’t know the project was actually created for the United Fruit Co., the largest trader of bananas in the world.

The creation of front groups – independent-sounding but industry-backed organizations – as a public relations strategy dates at least as far back as Bernays’ day. But a new report by Kari Hamerschlag, a senior program manager at the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth; Stacy Malkan, a co-founder of the food industry watchdog U.S. Right to Know; and me shows that such tactics are continuing with ever more scope and scale today.

Zoë Carpenter: The Next Tactic in the Right’s Fight Against Gay Marriage? ‘Religious Liberty’

As a jubilant crowd at the Supreme Court celebrated Friday’s 5-4 ruling that same-sex couples have a right to marry, moans of impotent fury emanated from conservatives in and out of the Court. “The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” Justice Antonin Scalia fumed in his dissenting opinion. In his own dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the Court should not worry about human dignity: “Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved,” he wrote. Justice Samuel Alito, also dissenting, fretted that homophobes now “will risk being labeled as bigots.”

Among the field of Republican presidential candidates, the responses ranged from outrage to resignation; none embraced the ruling. Some were quick to throw red meat to the conservative base, ignoring yet another thing the GOP supposedly learned after getting crushed in 2012. But a few of the more serious candidates, who have read the polls and know that aggressive opposition to gay marriage spells trouble in a general election, tried to shift the focus to one of the next issues in the marriage debate, which Nan Hunter explores in detail here-the attempt to frame discrimination as the exercise of “religious liberty.”

Michelle Chen: Shouldn’t Home Care Workers Earn a Living Wage?

Healthcare workers in Massachusetts got good news twice this past week. First, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and its insurance exchange rules-a system expected to add some 360,000 Massachusetts residents to the healthcare rolls. On Friday, about 35,000 workers who are providing disability and senior care through state programs got a major pay raise. Their new wage of $15 an hour puts Massachusetts personal-care assistants at the helm of the low-wage workers’ movement known as the Fight for 15.

George Gresham, president of the home care workers’ union, 1199 SEIU, said in the announcement of the deal, ‘”It is a moral imperative that all home care and healthcare workers receive $15 per hour, and Massachusetts is now a leader in this effort.”

The wage agreement was brokered over several months of talks between the union and Governor Charlie Baker’s administration, for a contract covering one of the country’s largest unionized home care workforces. The raise in the hourly base pay, set to increase from the current $13.38 to $15 by 2018, will cover a majority of the state’s home care workforce, who provide an array of household services, such as daily social support and medical assistance, to seniors and people with disabilities, and now heads for a union ratification vote.

Leslie Savan: In the Wake of Charleston, Fox News Is Perplexed on Just What the Confederate Flag and the N-Word Mean

It’s been quite a week for racist symbols. It took the murder of nine black churchgoers at the hands of a killer steeped in Confederate and apartheid logos and logic, but politicians have started removing rebel flags and other symbols of Dixie from places we’d thought they were nailed to (like Alabama’s capitol grounds, and South Carolina’s, where the Stars and Bars will need a two-thirds majority vote of both houses to come down).

There is even an “Et tu?” quality to the defenestration, since it has often been Republican politicians and corporations like Walmart who have suddenly realized that these symbols can be hurtful “to some.”

And the Charleston murders have galvanized a US president to publicly say the n-word to explain why not ever saying it in public does not magically end racism-anymore, he might have added, than electing a black president does.

The fall of the Confederate flag is the latest step in a progressive wave of reforms

Bigotry is suddenly on the run in America.

It is as if a giant dam thrown up to block human progress has begun to spill over the top, the outpouring growing until the dam collapses, a flood of decency, fairness and respect washing the stains of discrimination, exploitation and oppression.

Before June 17, many Americans were already feeling revulsion towards our country’s legacy of white supremacy after seeing numerous cellphone videos of police attacking innocent blacks. Then Dylann Roof massacred nine worshippers at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly and unexpectedly the vile nature of the Confederate battle flag, waved with pride by Roof in several photos released after the shooting, became obvious to so many people that within a week Southern politicians scurried away from that symbol of racist hatred.

This is just the beginning. We will see more positive change in the near future as those who solicit votes through fear and denunciation watch America move toward its founding ideals: that all people are created equal with inalienable rights and that America does best when our government follows the six noble purposes of our Constitution, especially promoting the general welfare.

Joseph Stiglitz: Europe’s Attack on Greek Democracy

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics. [..]

It is startling that the troika has refused to accept responsibility for any of this or admit how bad its forecasts and models have been. But what is even more surprising is that Europe’s leaders have not even learned. The troika is still demanding that Greece achieve a primary budget surplus (excluding interest payments) of 3.5% of GDP by 2018.

Economists around the world have condemned that target as punitive, because aiming for it will inevitably result in a deeper downturn. Indeed, even if Greece’s debt is restructured beyond anything imaginable, the country will remain in depression if voters there commit to the troika’s target in the snap referendum to be held this weekend.

Alexis Goldstein and Luke Herrine:  Higher education reform should start with for-profit schools

Presidential candidates should recognize that the government’s education policy is rife with conflicts of interest

As the presidential campaign season heats up, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are talking about debt-free or tuition-free college. Using student debt as an issue to damage Republicans and to energize young voters is a smart strategy. But to make the case for why higher education should be free in the United States, 2016 candidates need look no further than the current crisis in the for-profit college industry. The government’s deep conflicts of interest as both the regulator meant to protect students and the banker profiting off student debt has led to an unmitigated disaster – one that, so far, has stuck students with the bill.

For decades, for-profit colleges have run an outrageously profitable scam: They have devoured more than a quarter of all federal student loan money and used it to lure first-generation college students into career training programs that lead to few, if any, real prospects. These schools often spend more money on marketing (pdf) than on instruction. As a result, employers laugh at for-profit college degrees. [..]

For-profit colleges perfectly illustrate why the privatization of public goods doesn’t work. It turns public servants into the guardians of private interests, and students are left behind as collateral damage. Politicians on both sides of the aisle proclaim education as the civil rights issue of our time. If that’s the case, it’s time to move past the model of individual indebtedness, which falls most heavily on poor and minority students, and show we value education for more than just talking points.