Tag: TMC Politics

May 28 2015

A Conversation with Julian Assange

It was 5 years ago that Chelsea Manning was arrested for leaking classified information to Wikileaks. A few weeks later, Wkikleaks released thousands of classified documents, the largest breach of security in military history. In an exclusive interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman discussed a number of topics from the NSA surveillance programs and the so-called free trade agreements being negotiated by the Obama administration to his life inside the Ecuadoran embassy in London.

Despite Congressional Standoff, NSA Has Secret Authority to Continue Spying Unabated



Transcript can be read here

Trans-Pacific Partnership: Secretive Deal Isn’t About Trade, But Corporate Control



Transcript can be read here

British Nuclear Sub Whistleblower William McNeilly Revealed Major Security Lapses



Transcript can be read here

“Pretrial Punishment”: Julian Assange Remains in Ecuadorean Embassy Fearing Arrest If He Leaves



Transcript can be read here

May 28 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: Republicans’ ‘plans’ for Isis would drag us into Iraq for another ground war

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the groundwork being laid for US ground troops to return to Iraq for another indefinite war with no end game.

Republican presidential candidates (of which there now seem to be more than a dozen) have spent the past month ripping President Obama for his administration’s approach to the war against Isis, in which the US military has dropped tens of thousands of bombs, sent 3,000 troops back to Iraq, and killed over 12,000 people, all without any legal authorization. Predictably, the Republicans have no problem with the war technically being illegal, or the tens of thousands killed – only that we haven’t used more of our military weaponry yet.

The New York Times detailed many of the Republican candidates’ nebulous “criticisms” of the Obama administration, most of which assume a fantasy world in which Obama is not sending the US military to fight Isis at all, even though he’s authorized thousands of airstrikes per month in both Iraq and Syria. Most of the candidates, while competing with each other over who can sound more “muscular” and “tough”, are too cowardly to overtly call for what they likely actually want: another ground war in the Middle East involving tens of thousands of US troops.

Dean Baker: Pro-TPP arguments show desperation

If trade agreement supporters are going with their best sell, there’s clearly little to be said in its favor

The push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is reaching its final stages, with the House of Representatives soon voting on granting the president fast-track trade authority, which will almost certainly determine the pact’s outcome. The proponents of the TPP are clearly feeling the pressure as they make every conceivable argument for the deal, no matter how specious.

In the last few weeks, TPP advocates have repeatedly tripped up, getting their facts wrong and their logic twisted. This hit parade of failed arguments should be sufficient to convince any fence sitters that this deal is not worth doing. After all, if you have a good product, you don’t have to make up nonsense to sell it.

Leading the list of failed arguments was a condescending editorial from USA Today directed at unions that oppose the TPP because they worry it would cost manufacturing jobs. The editorial summarily dismissed this idea. It cited Commerce Department data showing that manufacturing output has nearly doubled since 1997 and argued that the job loss was due to productivity growth, not imports.

David Cay Johnson: Free-market dogma has jacked up our electricity bills

Prices for electricity are higher in states that embraced market pricing and are likely to rise even more

A new analysis shows that people pay 35 percent more (pdf) for electricity in states that abandoned traditional regulation of monopoly utilities in the 1990s compared with states that stuck with it. That gap is almost certainly going to widen in the coming decade.

Residential customers in the 15 states that embraced wholesale markets paid on average 12.7 cents per kilowatt-hour last year versus 9.4 cents in states with traditional regulation. [..]

You might think that the higher prices in the 15 states with markets would encourage investment, creating an abundance of new power plants. That, at any rate, is what right-wing Chicago School economic theories on which the electricity markets were created say should happen. The validity of these theories, and flaws in how they were implemented, matter right now because Congress is considering a raft of energy supply bills that include some expansion of the market pricing of wholesale electricity. [..]

If unregulated markets are invariably better, as the Chicago School holds, why was 94 percent of new generating capacity built in traditionally regulated jurisdictions? Don’t owners and executives detest regulation? Why isn’t regulation hobbling investment?

One answer is that Wall Street prefers stability to volatility. Why would investors make risky bets when they could put their money into virtually guaranteed returns in those states that rely on traditional regulation of electricity prices?

David Goldblatt: The Fifa fiasco proves it’s time to dismantle football’s edifice of corruption

In comedy, football and politics, timing is everything and today’s events in Zurich have brought all three together with quite exceptional synchronicity. Just two days before Fifa’s annual congress and a fiercely contested presidential election, the Swiss attorney general’s office and their American equivalent in the Eastern District of New York have done what much of the football world has been longing for and launched separate criminal investigations into bribery, corruption and money laundering in world football in general and into the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar in particular.

This is going to be good. There are going to be a lot of questions asked about who did what, who knew what and who got what. But important, tantalising and outrageous as the answers will no doubt be, it is worth taking a moment to ask two other questions. First, how did we get into the mess? Why is it that Fifa, as an organisation, has been so profoundly dysfunctional and incapable of reform? Second, what kind of Fifa are we going to replace this with, how we are going to make it happen and who, if anyone, is going to lead this? [..]

Reform should not be confined to chucking out the bad apples – it’s too late for that. Instead, Fifa’s constitution should be rewritten, specifying and intensifying the democratic and social obligations of its constituent members, and transforming its mode and rationale for awarding World Cups. This is the bare minimum that the situation demands. That neither candidate for the presidential election is running on anything close to this agenda is testament to how badly political reform is needed and how hard it is going to be to achieve.

Jeb Lund: Bernie Sanders doesn’t have to win the Democratic primary to do a lot of good

Bernie Sanders is running for president, settling your bet over what sticker you’re most likely to see on the back of a vintage Volkswagen for the next several years.

Ordinarily, we could stop here at the natural terminus for the proudly left-wing presidential contender – the joke. But at the risk of indulging that last bit of “hope” that wasn’t stamped out by watching the spiritual uplift of electing a black president in America be followed by obdurate meathead American racism and six years of global drone whack-a-Muslim, let us say this: there are reasons to feel good about Bernie Sanders, for all the many things he is not. [..]

This is probably overly optimistic, but this is a good time for democratic and grassroots activism. So maybe having millions of Americans – who might have dipped a toe in the Fight for 15 or in #BlackLivesMatter or in signing petitions for Dreamers or women’s rights – meet a candidate who speaks directly to them, is beholden to them and energizes them and then watch him inevitably lose because he lost the pre-primary of donor collecting will provide that other kick in the pants. Perhaps it’ll be the kick in the pants that tells Democrats that they can’t just vote every four years and hope for a candidate who gives telegenic speeches about some new branded synonym for change, then elect him or her to the top job in the land and find themselves stunned that, as it turns out, trickle-down politics doesn’t work any better than trickle-down economics.

Norman Solomon: Jeffrey Sterling vs. the CIA: An Untold Story of Race and Retribution

A dozen years before his recent sentencing to a 42-month prison term based on a jury’s conclusion that he gave classified information to a New York Times journalist, former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was in the midst of a protracted and fruitless effort to find someone in Congress willing to look into his accusations about racial discrimination at the agency.

ExposeFacts.org has obtained letters from Sterling to prominent members of Congress, beseeching them in 2003 and 2006 to hear him out about racial bias at the CIA. Sterling, who is expected to enter prison soon, provided the letters last week. They indicate that he believed the CIA was retaliating against him for daring to become the first-ever black case officer to sue the agency for racial discrimination. [..]

At the CIA and the Justice Department, authorities routinely depicted Jeffrey Sterling as a “disgruntled” employee. During interviews for “The Invisible Man,” he addressed how that depiction has played out for him: “I think the label ‘disgruntled’ came from the moment that I complained, in any aspect. I was not being part of the team. … People say that individuals play the race card. What about the other side of that? The race card was certainly being played with me. And you can say it was the white race card because I wasn’t white. They had all those cards. … And if there isn’t going to be a true, real, honest investigation with any veracity, the natural conclusion is going be ‘disgruntled.’ It’s a very easy label to place.”

May 27 2015

DOJ Soccer Corruption Arrests. Why Not the Bankers?

On Wednesday in the early morning hours in Zurich, Switzerland, at a five star hotel, there were six phone calls made by the concierge to six rooms telling the occupants: “Sir,” the concierge said in English, “I’m just calling you to say that we’re going to need you to come to your door and open it for us or we’re going to have to kick it in.” How polite.

The hotel, which overlooks Lake Zurich, provided an unlikely setting for the apprehension of six global soccer executives who were arrested on corruption charges and now face extradition to the United States. The operation took less than two hours and was strikingly peaceful – no handcuffs, no guns drawn. It also involved an unusual use of a bedsheet.

Raids in the United States are typically led by armed SWAT team members wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, but the Swiss took a more subtle approach. Rather than storming into the executives’ rooms and hauling them out in their pajamas, the officers waited for the men to come to the door and then gave them a chance to get dressed and pack their bags.

The officers appeared to lead the officials out one by one, through several exits, including a side door, the hotel’s garage and, in one case, the main entrance.

Thus started the arrests of six global soccer executives on corruption charges. The indictments were brought by the US Justice Department stemming from an FBI and IRS investigation into the business practices of FIFA, the world governing body of the world’s most popular sport. soccer.

The Justice Department, F.B.I. and I.R.S. described soccer’s governing body in terms normally reserved for Mafia families and drug cartels, saying that top officials treated FIFA business decisions as chits to be traded for personal wealth. One soccer official took in more than $10 million in bribes, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said.

The schemes involving the fraud included the selection of South Africa as the host of the 2010 World Cup; the 2011 FIFA presidential elections; and several sports-marketing deals. [..]

The Department of Justice indictment names 14 people on charges including racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. In addition to senior soccer officials, the indictment also named sports-marketing executives from the United States and South America who are accused of paying more than $150 million in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for media deals associated with major soccer tournaments. [..]

The promise that the investigation would continue raised the specter of more arrests, but officials would not comment on whether they were investigating Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president and the man widely regarded as the most powerful person in sports. One federal law enforcement official said Mr. Blatter’s fate would “depend on where the investigation goes from here.” [..]

United States law gives the Justice Department wide authority to bring cases against foreign nationals living abroad, an authority that prosecutors have used repeatedly in international terrorism cases. Those cases can hinge on the slightest connection to the United States, like the use of an American bank or Internet service provider.

Switzerland’s treaty with the United States is unusual in that it gives Swiss authorities the power to refuse extradition for tax crimes, but on matters of general criminal law, the Swiss have agreed to turn people over for prosecution in American courts.

What Esquire’s Charlie Pierce said:

Here and overseas, the entire corporate universe is shot through with metastatic corruption and crime. It is an essential part of the business model almost everywhere, from Wall Street offices to the pitch at Wembley. FIFA’s corruption is more than an endemic phenomenon. FIFA was simply one corrupt enterprise working with and through hundreds of other corrupt enterprises. There are governments, and there are communications empires, and there are all manner of companies advertising their wares — the “corporate partners” of a claque of brigands. If you did business with the crooks of FIFA, you’re a crook, too. There’s no way to avoid it. All of them are guilty. All of them are responsible. All of them are complicit in the corruption in the spotlight today, and in the death of anonymous workers in Qatar whose names they don’t even know. The whole goddamn corporate universe is begging for a gigantice RICO indictment.

It seems the Justice Department is capable of investigating and obtaining indictments against officials of an organization whose business practices have been described as “byzantine and impenetrable,” why can’t the DOJ do the same for the bankers of JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Citibank, Bank of America, et al? It apparently is not that hard, Loretta.

May 27 2015

A Question of Justice in Cleveland

In the wake of the acquittal, in a non-jury trial, of white Cleveland police officer of Michael Brelo in the murder of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, Cleveland once again has come under the scrutiny of the Department of Justice.

Federal officials will review the trial testimony and evidence, and a city panel is investigating Mr. Brelo’s actions and police conduct in the episode. Five supervisors face misdemeanor charges for their oversight of the case.

There are also two ongoing investigations of police shootings in November. One is looking into the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy who was holding a replica gun when a white Cleveland police officer shot him. That shooting, captured on video, has also garnered national attention and resulted in protests.

In the other, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office is investigating the death of Tanisha Anderson. Ms. Anderson, a 37-year-old black woman whose family said she suffered from bipolar disorder, lost consciousness and died in police custody after being placed face down on the pavement. The medical examiner ruled her death a homicide

In an attempt to ease the tensions, the Cleveland Police Department reached a settlement with the Justice Department accepting tougher standards and oversight to insure that the rules are followed.

The agreement is part of a settlement with the Justice Department over what federal officials have called a pattern of unconstitutional policing and abuse in Cleveland. The department found in a review released late last year that police officers here used stun guns inappropriately, punched and kicked unarmed people, and shot at people who posed no threat. The episodes often went unreported and uninvestigated, investigators found.

The new rules in Cleveland prohibit officers from using force against people for talking back or as punishment for running away. Pistol whipping is prohibited, and so is firing warning shots, the agreement says. The city has agreed to allow an independent monitor to track its progress. If the city does not put into effect the changes specified in the settlement, a federal judge has the authority to demand them.

Cleveland also agreed to hire a civilian to lead its internal affairs unit and to appoint an inspector general to investigate police misconduct and analyze policies and trends. The federal authorities believe that those changes, along with an internal panel assigned to review use-of-force cases, will ensure that police keep accurate records and conduct genuine investigations. The city will also form a civilian advisory panel to review policies and advocate better community relations.


This is a good start but there is a lot more within these cities that needs to be done.

More prosecutions of the police who are abusing their powers would go a long way to ease the distrust in cities like Cleveland, Ferguson and New York City. It would would be better if those cities did it themselves rather than the Justice Department. Aside from Baltimore, however, it appears quite unlikely. It’s in your court, AG Lynch.

May 27 2015

Changing Minds on Edward Snowden

Former Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the Jimmy Carter administration Hodding Carter III has changed his mind about Edward Snowden whose leaks of NSA programs to the public has sparked the debate a the renewal of the Patriot Act. In an article in Salon, he explains  his change of heart and offered an apology to The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald.

Glenn Greenwald, I’m sorry: Why I changed my mind on Edward Snowden

What follows is based on sixty years of experience in public life and journalism. It arises from deepening concern about the people’s limited appreciation of the First Amendment and disgust with media waffling behind timidity’s breastworks. It also arises from urgent unease about government overreach in the name of “homeland security,” an overreach based on post-9/11 fear, political opportunism and an all but explicit assertion that a free people do not need to know and should not demand to know how they are being protected. There is no pretense here of carefully allocated balance, that briefly treasured convention of American journalism. Instead, this is an attempt to explain the evolution of today’s media-government confrontations and to suggest answers to the hard questions that currently face the press when national security clashes with the Bill of Rights.

Unless informed consent is to be treated as a dangerous relic of more tranquil times, these questions should be answered on behalf of the American people as often as they arise. That means applying general principles to specific cases. Knowing the evolution of press freedom can be useful. Having an accurate picture of the chaotic realities of the murky present is crucial. Hard cases are inevitable; hard-and-fast rules are rarely available and too often inapplicable to current conditions. In the end, as always, it is up to each journalist and news organization to be willing to stand alone, to ask, and to answer individually:

“Whose side are you on?”

Mr. Carter and Glenn Greenwald appeared on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” to discuss the surveillance and the firght over the renewal of the Patriot Act.

Whose side are you on?

May 27 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Hold Bankers Accountable for Their Crimes

Last week, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced that five major banks were pleading guilty to criminal charges for what she described as a “brazen display of collusion” to manipulate the currency markets. The banks – Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland Group – were hit with $5.6 billion in fines and penalties.

Sensibly, the banks were forced to plead guilty, not simply pay fines in settlements where they neither admitted nor denied the changes. But the charges still were brought against banks, not bankers. No banker was held accountable. The personal fortunes of the bankers who profited were not touched. Shareholders, not bankers, will pay the fines. The Justice Department would have us believe that criminal banks ran profitable criminal conspiracies without involving any bankers.

The unwillingness to hold bankers accountable for their frauds and crimes is a great and continuing failure of our justice system, one that poses a clear danger to this country in the years ahead.

Susan Soederberg: The Student Loan Crisis and the Debtfare State

Educational debt has become a ticking time bomb. With over $1 trillion in outstanding loan balances, the student loan industry has a lot in common with the sub-prime mortgage industry, which went into a devastating crisis in 2007-8. Both rely on a financial innovation called “asset-backed securitization” (see sidebar in original) to raise capital and to hedge risk-in other words, to raise money for loans and to reduce the likelihood that investors will lose their money. Student loans asset-backed securitization-or SLABS-means student loan agencies package student debts and sell them to investors who expect to get their money back, plus interest, as students pay back their loans. In theory, selling off nicely bundled packages of debt to investors allows these institutions to turn around more quickly and make new loans. For this reason, SLABS is touted as the main channel through which the lending industry moves funds from investors to students-and so is supposed to be of mutual benefit to students, lenders, and institutional investors such as hedge funds and pension funds.

Like the sub-prime housing industry, however, SLABS ultimately depends on the ability of borrowers to meet their debt obligations. Herein lies the rub. Since as far back as the recession of 2001, the majority of student debtors have not been able to get decent paying jobs upon leaving college.

Rafia Zacaria: The militarization of development aid

How war makes USAID a dirty word

On April 30, 2015, President Barack Obama nominated Gayle Smith, a senior director of the National Security Council, as the new head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Critics saw her nomination as yet another example of the deepening of links between U.S. military interventions and development aid.

Most of the initial criticism focused on Smith’s close relationships with various African despots and her belief that aid is the vehicle for obtaining foreign policy concessions. If confirmed, Smith will no doubt solidify the idea that development is subservient to American security interests. Over the last decade, USAID has emerged as Washington’s key instrument within which it couches counterterrorism efforts and military interventions. Her national security background ensures that she will continue this legacy.

The American public should be concerned about this mixing of war strategy with development aid, not least because U.S. misadventures are funded by taxpayer dollars. The cover of aid hampers the public from critically evaluating the wars waged in its name. As those on the receiving end, the intertwining of military intervention and development assistance has meant a de-legitimization of the premises of development. Education and healthcare are universal rights that should not depend on U.S. national security interests.

Sarah Krasley: Climbing down from our mountain of e-waste

Smart electronics should be adaptable, collaborative, rentable and easier to repair

Nowadays, electronic devices are doing more than just sensing and displaying data. They also listen, speak, measure, illuminate and collaborate with other electronics, making up a class of products called the Internet of Things, connected devices or sometimes wearables.

Connected devices show huge potential for resource efficiency and better quality of life. A smart window-shade and air-conditioning system in communication with each other can heat and cool a building using less energy while increasing the comfort of its occupants. But this new frontier has a big consequence: The more everyday products contain electronics, the more e-waste will be produced.

E-waste refers to electronic devices that have reached the end of their useful lives. With more of our products becoming e-waste, we must rethink the life cycles of our smart electronics and the materials we use to build them.

Maira Sutton: The Senate Has Passed the TPP Fast Track Bill-We Now Take Our Fight to the House

The Senate passed a bill Friday night to put the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on the Fast Track to approval. Its passage followed a series of stops and starts-an indication that this legislation was nearly too rife with controversy to pass. But after a series of deals and calls from corporate executives, senators ultimately swallowed their criticism and accepted the measure. If this bill ends up passing both chambers of Congress, that means the White House can rush the TPP through to congressional ratification, with lawmakers unable to fully debate or even amend agreements that have been negotiated entirely in secret. On the plus side, all of these delays in the Senate has led other TPP partners to delay any further negotiations on the trade agreement until Fast Track is approved by Congress.

So the fight now starts in the House, where proponents of secret trade deals still lack the votes to pass the bill. But the White House and other TPP proponents are fiercely determined to garner enough support among representatives to pass the bill, in order to give themselves almost unilateral power to enact extreme digital regulations in secret. We cannot let that happen.

Michelle Chen: Why the Philippines’ Deadly Factory Fire Will Not Be the Last

The deaths of 72 workers at a sandals factory in the Philippines earlier this month is sadly not shocking news; risk of mass death is practically considered a regular cost of doing business in the regional factories. But the blaze coincides with two grim anniversaries for Global South labor: the death of more than 1,100 workers in the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, and the subsequent launch of a landmark safety program for Bangladesh factories. Today, it all adds up to a tragically uneven record of reform in Asia’s low-wage, high fashion manufacturing system. [..]

This crisis is playing out in export industries throughout the Asia Pacific region, despite growing public pressure in the West to promote more ethical production processes. The Bangladesh Accord-a voluntary safety program established by international brands and unions in the wake of Rana Plaza, recently issued its second-anniversary progress report, showing hundreds of factories have undergone inspection. But out of some 54,432 safety hazards identified, only 2,579 issues had been fully corrected. The grassroots advocacy that pushed through the Accord was seemingly eclipsed by countervailing market forces: global retail fashion sales are nearing $2 trillion annually.

The Philippines, where factory worker wages are typically more than double those of Bangladesh, supposedly represents a higher standard of “development.” But the pressures of the market nevertheless led to the deaths of dozens of workers, trapped behind barred windows.

May 26 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Robert Reich: What Ever Happened to Antitrust?

Last week’s settlement between the Justice Department and five giant banks reveals the appalling weakness of modern antitrust.

The banks had engaged in the biggest price-fixing conspiracy in modern history. Their self-described “cartel” used an exclusive electronic chat room and coded language to manipulate the $5.3 trillion-a-day currency exchange market. It was a “brazen display of collusion” that went on for years, said Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

But there will be no trial, no executive will go to jail, the banks can continue to gamble in the same currency markets, and the fines – although large – are a fraction of the banks’ potential gains and will be treated by the banks as costs of doing business.

America used to have antitrust laws that permanently stopped corporations from monopolizing markets, and often broke up the biggest culprits.

No longer. Now, giant corporations are taking over the economy – and they’re busily weakening antitrust enforcement.

Dean Baker: Bernie Sanders Takes It to Wall Street With Financial Transactions Tax

Last week, Bernie Sanders, the Senator from Vermont and only announced challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, took a strong stand for everyday people. He proposed a financial transactions tax (FTT), effectively a Wall Street sales tax, and to use the revenue to make public colleges tuition free.

While making college affordable to low and middle income families is important, the proposal for an FTT is a real game changer. There is no single policy that would have anywhere near as much impact in reforming the financial sector. A FTT would effectively impose a sales tax on stocks and other financial assets, so that speculators have to pay a tax on their trades, just like people who buy shoes or clothes. [..]

In short, a FTT is a great way to raise large amounts of money to meet important public needs. It will come almost entirely at the expense of the financial industry and should strengthen the economy. We now have one presidential candidate who is prepared to support a strong FTT. Are there others?

New York TImes: A Foolish Attempt to Weaken Truck Safety

The trucking industry is again pushing Congress to allow bigger and heavier trucks with overworked drivers behind the wheel onto the country’s roads.

Republican lawmakers have attached a long industry wish list to an appropriations bill that will be voted on by the House in the coming weeks. It includes provisions that would allow trucks to carry longer trailers across the country, make it harder for the Department of Transportation to require drivers get more rest before they hit the road and forbid the department from raising the minimum insurance it requires trucks and buses to carry. The insurance levels have been in effect since 1985. [..]

Public interest groups such as Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety; the Teamsters, which represents truck drivers; and the Obama administration have objected to the trucking provisions in the House bill. And with good reason. In 2013, the latest year for which data is available, 3,964 people died in accidents involving large trucks, most of whom were riding in another vehicle or were pedestrians. That is up 17 percent from 2009. Over the same period, traffic fatalities overall have fallen 3 percent, to 32,719.

It is hard to know for sure why the number of fatal accidents increased. It could be that there were more trucks on the road in 2013 than during the recession. But this data should give lawmakers serious pause before they make major changes to trucking regulations in an appropriations bill.

John Nichols: Ireland Embraces Marriage Equality and Shows the US What Democracy Looks Like

Ireland is not a perfect land, as the Irish are generally quite willing to acknowledge.

But Ireland did a perfect thing on Friday.

By a 62-38 margin, the Irish people amended their constitution to provide for marriage equality.

Other countries have permitted lesbians and gays to marry-and subsections of countries have done so, as is the case in the Unites States. But this have tended to happen via legislative and judicial action. Ireland has done so by a vote of the people-an overwhelming vote-and it is the first country in the world to have made the choice by popular referendum.

Headlines in The Irish Times recognized more than an election result. It was, they suggested “a national boat-rocking” that might well have “changed the republic forever.”

Eugene Robinson: Stop Logging Our Phone Calls

Once in a great while, House Republicans get it right. So let me praise them for leading a bipartisan effort to curtail the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of data on the phone calls of innocent Americans.

The USA Freedom Act, which the House passed earlier this month by an overwhelming 338-88 vote, would end the NSA’s vast effort to compile phone call “metadata.” We only learned that the government was keeping a comprehensive record of our calls when fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden spilled the beans; our elected officials, including President Obama, hadn’t bothered to tell us.

I agree with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., that the bill passed by the House doesn’t go far enough to restore our privacy. But it is light-years better than what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., wants, which is to allow the blanket surveillance to continue pretty much as is.

This is an issue on which progressives and libertarian-minded conservatives find common ground-and shared passion. Following the 9/11 attacks, our elected officials exchanged a measure of our liberty for the promise, or the illusion, of greater security. It was a hasty and foolish bargain.

Gary  Young: Far from facing the truth, the US is telling new lies about Iraq

A couple of weeks ago, the Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush was asked in an interview with Fox News whether, knowing what he knows now, he would have invaded Iraq. It’s the kind of predictable question for which most people assumed he would have a coherent answer. They were wrong. Jeb blew it. “I would have [authorised the invasion],” he said. “And so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.” [..]

The trouble with this is that we did know then. The world knew, which is why majorities in almost every other country opposed it. The United Nations was trying to acquire proof one way or another but was not allowed to finish the job. Politicians were not, in fact, led to war by faulty intelligence; they deliberately commissioned the intelligence that would enable them to go to war.

According to notes taken by Steve Cambone, aide to the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, just hours after the 9/11 attack Rumsfeld demanded: the “best info fast … judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time – not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].” The Pentagon’s top lawyer was told “to talk w/ PW [Paul Wolfowitz] for additional support [for the] connection w/ UBL.” “Need to move swiftly,” Cambone noted. “Go massive – sweep it all up things related and not.”

America got the war it wanted; it just wasn’t the war it expected.

May 25 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: McConnell can’t save the NSA’s surveillance program

Dysfunction in Congress has gotten so bad it might end up actually doing some good: the NSA’s mass surveillance powers under the Patriot Act are now on the verge of expiring after a dramatic 1am vote in the Senate on Saturday morning. [..]

So while Republicans managed to kill a bill that is supposed to stop the NSA’s bulk collection program, their ineptitude put the law underpinning it one step closer to extinction.

McConnell announced after the post-midnight vote that he would call the Senate back into session next Sunday evening, 31 May, to vote on both bills again – literally hours before the bulk collection authorization will expire. After his pronouncement, McConnell then hilariously reminded members that it was their duty with this vote to “act responsibly”, seemingly unaware that it’s his fault that the rest of the members were in the Senate chambers at 1am making panicked decisions in the first place. [..]

The thing is that, no matter what Mitch McConnell and his intelligence community friends try to pull in the next week, the bulk collection of Americans’ records authorized by Section 215 is coming to an end – at least temporarily. So as soon as the clock strikes midnight next Sunday, even if the Senate fails to pass the USA Freedom Act again, the status quo will still change. The question the Senate must answer with legislation will no longer be whether to continue a mass surveillance program that already exists: it will be whether to create a new mass spying program.

Paul Krugman: The Big Meh

Remember Douglas Adams’s 1979 novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”? It began with some technology snark, dismissing Earth as a planet whose life-forms (pdf) “are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” But that was then, in the early stages of the information technology revolution.

Since then we’ve moved on to much more significant things, so much so that the big technology idea of 2015, so far, is a digital watch. But this one tells you to stand up if you’ve been sitting too long!

O.K., I’m snarking, too. But there is a real question here. Everyone knows that we live in an era of incredibly rapid technological change, which is changing everything. But what if what everyone knows is wrong? And I’m not being wildly contrarian here. A growing number of economists, looking at the data on productivity and incomes, are wondering if the technological revolution has been greatly overhyped – and some technologists share their concern.

Jedediah Purdy: The TPP Is a Test of Democracy

Democracy is the problem with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiation. It’s the problem for TPP supporters because the trade deal has been secret so far — known to the public only through leaks and rumors — and because the Fast Track authorization that the Obama Administration wants would box Congress out of meaningful input on the treaty.

As Yale Law School international trade scholar David Grewal has pointed out, the TPP is about national regulation of domestic economies, issues like environmental, labor, and consumer safety law that are at the core of self-government. It’s outlandish that this sovereign power is being bargained away in secret, with the final deal dropped before Congress in a take-it-or-kill-it package. So TPP critics have found that democracy is by far their easiest argument. In fact, given how much of the negotiations remain secret, just about the only informed argument they can make is that the [secrecy itself is a problem. And it is a terrible problem. It should make the whole backroom arrangement illegitimate, at least until we all know what is in it. [..]

It’s one of the famous clichés of American life that Benjamin Franklin, asked what the Constitutional Convention had created, replied “A republic — if you can keep it.” Anyone asked what the TPP’s opponents are fighting for should reply, “A democracy — if we can build it.” Defeating the TPP would keep open the space for that building. Of course, then we would still have to build it.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson: The ‘Taliban’ in Our Midst

Military officers who wear their religion on their sleeve are a danger to our country at any time, but especially after the terrorists attacks of September 11, 2001.

Whether it’s US Army Lieutenant General William G. Boykin telling his audience that “My God is bigger than his” in the close aftermath of that tragedy, or the more recent example of US Air Force Major General Craig Olson saying in uniform and in public — and speaking in tones far more like a preacher than a military officer — “I am a redeemed believer in Christ,” these are dangerous men, making dangerous displays of religion.

Moreover, such displays occur in an environment where they are strictly prohibited by secular rules. These rules — and in the case of the US Air Force, written regulations — are in place for a reason. [..]

So, if the Air Force were to punish Olson it might have to pay the piper with regard to any angst it might generate in the Congress, the provider of its funds. Of course, another way to say this is that the leadership of the US Air Force has no guts. It writes rules and its officers disobey them with impunity.

In any event, if no action is taken it’s a dangerous game, playing with fire this way. A game that will get Americans killed in future. A game that undermines the very law we fight to protect. A game that destroys our truest values.

Robert Kuttner: The Robots Are Coming! The Robots Are Coming!

Are robots destined to wipe out most human jobs? Is this round of automation somehow different from all previous ones?

There has been a lot of commentary lately to that effect, including several books.

Is there nothing to be done?

Robots have indeed eliminated a great deal of factory work and are rapidly moving on to product design, medical diagnostics, research, teaching, accounting, translating, copy editing, and a great deal more. Once-secure professions are no longer safe. From that, many economists conclude that we may just have to adjust to a high plateau of unemployment.

In the past, the story goes, as technology displaced some forms of work, the innovation eventually created new, mostly better jobs: fewer buggy-whip makers, more automobile assemblers; fewer telephone operators, more people designing iPhones and working in Apple genius bars. Technology made society richer on average, and employment took care of itself.

But no longer, according to a spate of commentators. Why? Because the pace of displacement has accelerated, and it is reaching well into sectors once thought safe. And automation will only breed more automation.

May 24 2015

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on Sunday’s “This Week” is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate.

The roundtable guests are:  Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MI); Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol; ABC News contributor Donna Brazile; and New York Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp.

NB: “This Week” may be preempted in some markets because of the Indianapolis 500.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr Schieffer’s guests are: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ); Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA); David Rohde, Reuters; and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, former Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad.

His panel guests are; author Peter Arnett; photographer David Hume Kennerly; author Laura Palmer; and journalist Bill Plante.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: We have been spared Chuck & Company today for the English Premier Soccer League. Thank you, England.

State of the Union with Jake Tapper: The CNN “SOTU” web site is even worse than NBC’s “MTP.”

Since it’s a holiday weekend, go do what you enjoy most. Have a happy and safe holiday.

May 24 2015

Fifty Years of Music and Activism with Buffy Sainte-Marie

Back in 1964 musician, songwriter, pacifist, and activist Buffy Saint-Marie wrote the song “Universal Soldier,” one of the best known songs of the anti-war movement of the 60’s. Last week she spent an hour with Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman and Juan González to talk about her music and her activism.

Democracy Now! Special: An Hour of Music and Conversation with Legendary Native American Singer-Songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie



The transcript can be found here

In a Democracy Now! special, an hour of conversation and music with Cree Indian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. In the turbulent 1960s, she was just out of college but already famous for her beautiful voice and moving lyrics in songs like “Universal Soldier” and “Now that the Buffalo’s Gone.” Over the years, Buffy Sainte-Marie has worked with the American Indian Movement, but also with Sesame Street, and even Hollywood, winning an Academy Award for the song “Up Where We Belong” in 1982. She’s won international recognition for her music, has a PhD in fine arts, and began a foundation for American Indian Education that she remains closely involved with. We speak with the folk icon about her life, her music, censorship, and her singing and speaking out about the struggles of Native American peoples for the past four decades. She also performs live in the firehouse studio.

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