Tag: TMC Politics

Apr 23 2015

Framing the Innocent and Vulnerable

The Federal Bureaus of Investigation has been in the news lately for a couple of reasons and none of it very good. The FBI sting operations, which on a whole dubious since it most often involves entrapment, have not actually infiltrated criminal enterprises or terrorist plots. In other words, the vast majority of the victims of FBI stings are the vulnerable who are disenfranchised or mentally unstable who have neither the means or mental capability to even hatch a plot or be a real threat.

The FBI Informant Who Mounted a Sting Operation Against the FBI

By Trevor Aaronson, The Intercept

When you’re introduced to Saeed Torres in the new documentary (T)ERROR, you hear him bickering with the filmmaker, Lyric Cabral. The screen is black. [..]

The blackness lifts. Torres is dressed in a chef’s apron and a white headscarf, making hot dogs at an amateur basketball game, as if he were an all-American guy. [..]

Torres isn’t an all-American guy. He’s an FBI informant, one of more than 15,000 domestic spies who make up the largest surveillance network ever created in the United States. During J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations, the bureau had just 1,500 informants. The drug war brought that number up to about 6,000. After 9/11, the bureau recruited so many new informants – many of them crooks and convicts, desperate for money or leniency on previous crimes – that the government had to develop software to help agents track their spies. [..]

Informants represent the manpower behind the FBI’s controversial stings, which are intended to find would-be terrorists before they attack. In the decade after 9/11, 158 defendants were prosecuted following these undercover operations, which are usually led by an informant and provide the means and opportunity for someone to attempt to commit an act of terrorism. A Human Rights Watch report in 2014 criticized the FBI for targeting “particularly vulnerable people, including those with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent.” Late last week, for example, the FBI arrested a mentally troubled 20-year-old in Topeka, Kansas, after he allegedly attempted to bomb Fort Riley with the help of two undercover FBI informants.

While there are more than 15,000 FBI informants, most are low-level operatives who provide scraps of information or tips about people in their community. Only a few of them at any time are high-level operators like Torres – professional liars who travel the country as agents provocateur in elaborate stings. [..]

There’s no shortage of embarrassing moments for the FBI in its dozens of counterterrorism stings since 9/11. In Boston, an FBI informant who was working a counterterrorism case was caught on an FBI camera purchasing heroin, which wasn’t part of his assignment. In case after case, the FBI experiences so-called “recorder malfunctions” – usually at the most unfortunate time for the defendant, such as at the very beginning of the sting or, as in an operation involving a Baltimore teenager, when the target was attempting to back out of the plot. More recently, FBI agents accidentally recorded themselves calling the subject of their undercover investigation a “retarded fool” whose terrorist ambitions were “wishy-washy.”

Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman interviews the independent documentary filmmakers, Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, who co-directed the documentary film (T)Error. Along with Steve Downs, executive director of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, Khalifah al-Akili, a Muslim-American victim of an FBI sting from Pittsburgh, and Marlene, mother of Tarik Shah, who was arrested in 2005 after a joint FBI-NYPD sting operation, they discuss these oprations.

FBI Informant Exposes Sting Operation Targeting Innocent Americans in New “(T)ERROR” Documentary



Transcript can be read here.

Apr 23 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

Dean Baker: Obama is failing us all by ignoring the need for currency rules in TPP

The Obama administration is doing its full court press, pulling out all the stops to get Congress to approve the fast-track authority that is almost certainly necessary to get the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through Congress. One of the biggest remaining stumbling blocks is that the deal will almost certainly not include provisions on currency. This means that parties to the agreement will still be able to depress the value of their currency against the dollar in order to gain a competitive advantage. This is a really big deal, which everyone thinking about the merits of the TPP should understand.

The value of the dollar relative to other currencies is by far the main determinant of our balance of trade. We can talk about better education and training for our workforce, improving our infrastructure and better research, all of which are important for the economy.

But anyone who claims that improvements in these areas can offset the impact of a dollar that is overvalued against another currency by 15-20% is out of touch with reality. If the dollar is overvalued by 20% against another country’s currency, it has the same effect as imposing a 20% tariff on US exports and giving a government subsidy of 20% to imports.

Anthony D. Romero: The Sun Must Go Down on the Patriot Act

Not long after the Patriot Act was passed in 2001, I had dinner with the late Senator Paul Wellstone in Washington, who was a stalwart defender of civil liberties throughout his career. I asked him how he could have possibly voted for a law that so vastly expanded the government’s spying powers. He told me that he was facing a tough election, but as soon as it was over he’d invite my organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, to testify before Congress about the Patriot Act’s flaws and the threats it presented to privacy and civil liberties. “We’ll work together to get this repealed,” he promised. Unfortunately, that day never came, as the senator tragically died in a plane crash in October of 2002.

Almost 13 years later, the most egregious part of the Patriot Act, Section 215 — which underlies the National Security Agency’s call-records program — is scheduled to expire on June 1. Some legislators want Congress to reauthorize it in its current form — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has just introduced a bill that would do exactly that, extending it for another five years. Others want to make relatively minor changes. Congress shouldn’t do either of these things. Unless Congress can coalesce around far-reaching reform, it should simply let the provision expire.

Trevor Timm: Sony should not be able to tell journalists what to print Sony should not be able to tell journalists what to print

Sony, which spent weeks holding itself out as a free speech martyr after North Korea allegedly hacked its emails, is now trying to do more damage to the spirit of the First Amendment than North Korea ever did. The corporation is using high-powered lawyers and lobbyists in an attempt to stifle the rights of media organizations to publish newsworthy information already in the public domain. Ironically, some of those emails include Sony and the MPAA’s attempts to censor the Internet on a much larger scale.

Sony’s lawyer, David Boies, has spent the week sending out a hyperbolic letter to various news organizations, pressuring them to avert their eyes from the hacked email trove that WikiLeaks published on its site last week. Boies, while misleadingly claiming that journalists could be breaking US law by even looking at the emails, also said if media organizations refused to write stories about them, they would somehow be “protecting the First Amendment.”

The head of the MPAA and former Democratic Senator Chis Dodd went a step further yesterday, outrageously suggesting the US government should go after WikiLeaks in some fashion for re-publishing the emails.

Jon Stotz: The New Sponsor of Terrorism: Climate Change

For years, we have been warned that climate change would lead to a less stable world, with some very serious implications for the United States, its military, and its security. Beginning in 2010, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon warned that while climate change “alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”

This was followed up in 2014, when the Pentagon once again warned that the effects of climate change are “threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.”

Finally, this year, a groundbreaking study concluded that the Zero Hour had come. Climate change, indeed, contributed to conditions that hastened the rise of extremism, in the form of ISIS, in Syria.

Mark Weisbrot: European officials may be pushing regime change in Greece

Destabilization efforts are causing economic damage

There are various narratives for what is happening to Greece as another deadline looms – the April 24 gathering of eurozone finance ministers in Riga, Latvia – and European officials show no sign of compromise. The most common tale is that this is a game of brinkmanship, with the Germans and their allies pushing for “reforms” that the Syriza government in Greece doesn’t want to adopt. Most of the media seems more partial to the European officials than to Greece. But even among those who are more neutral or sympathetic to Greece, it is still a story about hardline European officials threatening to use their control over funding to the Greek government and banking system in order to bring Greece to its knees.

But this narrative misses the elephant in the middle of the negotiating table: While the Greek government cannot do anything to replace its negotiating partners with people more to their liking, the European officials on the other side seem to believe they can do exactly that. And it is becoming increasingly clear that this is their current strategy.

Apr 22 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: Today’s GOP is out of sync with Cuban Americans

“I probably have six Cuban grandmothers, and ten Cuban mothers,” joked then-Florida governor Jeb Bush at the Cuban Liberty Council’s annual dinner 10 years ago, where he was the guest of honor. “You can always count on me to do what I can to make sure that the cause of a free Cuba is front and center in Washington.”

This was in 2004, not long after the first millennials became eligible to vote. Back then, the “cause of a free Cuba,” as Bush described it, was clear to the Cuban American community: No lifting of the embargo. No normalizing of relations. No reconciliation.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that after stepping back onto the political stage so many years later, Bush’s position on Cuba has changed not at all. “We’re not a step closer to freedom in Cuba because of the steps the president is taking,” he said last week. Nor should it be of note that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a Cuban American who grew up in the Florida Republican establishment during the 2000s, would declare soon after announcing his own campaign that he planned to “reverse every single one of the decisions [the president] has made” with regard to Cuba.

Nothing has changed, except for one thing: the Cuban American community itself. The political ground has shifted radically in the past decade, something neither Bush nor Rubio seem to have noticed.

Zoë Carpenter: In 1970, Environmentalism Was Poised to ‘Bring Us All Together.’ What Happened?

Louisiana is not a place that usually inspires hope for the environment. Nearly a century of oil and gas activity has cut the state’s swamps and bayous into vanishing ribbons. Hundreds of millions of gallons of oil have been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. Underground caverns hollowed out by petrochemical companies are collapsing and creating sinkholes, some swallowing entire communities. Industry has fouled state politics, too, such that elected leaders reward corporations with $1.8 billion a year in subsidies and tax breaks, while starving healthcare, education, and other public services.

Several months ago I had a surprising conversation with a Louisianan named Mike Schaff. He identifies himself as a Tea Party Republican, and won’t call himself an environmentalist, but he’s angry enough about what petrochemical companies have done to the land he loves that he joined a coalition called the Green Army, which is mounting localized challenges to the dominance of the industry in the state. “Our state is kind of looking the other way, saying that’s the cost of doing business in Louisiana,” he told me. “We say ‘bullshit’ to that. It doesn’t need to happen.”

he American people, the journalist Gene Marine argued in The Nation in 1970 (pdf), “are waiting for someone to notice that ecology is an issue that brings us all together.”

Lucy Siegle: The cold truth about our thirst for bottled water

The exploitation of a precious natural resource by multinational companies is degrading the environment. Consumers shouldn’t fall for it

Thanks to consumer culture it’s entirely possible to give the Earth a surreptitious kicking on a daily basis. So using face scrubs full of plastic microbeads or disposable wipes just make you look like you’re time efficient and keen to exfoliate (no mention that you’re irreversibly polluting the ocean).

Perhaps the most egregious of all these behaviours is our ongoing commitment to bottled water.

There’s an obvious idiocy here. In the UK our hydration needs can be met from a source that is rigorously tested by the Drinking Water Inspectorate and operates in a supremely low-carbon way (the common carriage of water mains is comparatively efficient and uses little energy). You call it a tap, or a faucet, and it’s one of those shiny things that augments the kitchen sink. Try it. You might like it.

I fear I’m fighting a losing battle. The multinationals invested in bottled water represent some of the biggest companies on earth. We’re sitting ducks. When the market for sugar-sweetened carbonated soft drinks began to decline in the late 1990s giants such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo knew their future lay in flogging water.

Katie McDonough: Women lose out – again: Why the Senate’s human trafficking compromise is nothing to celebrate

Senate leadership announced a deal to advance the anti-trafficking bill. Once again, women became bargaining chips

Senate leadership announced Tuesday that a deal had been reached over the anti-abortion language in an otherwise bipartisan anti-human trafficking bill. The agreement means that the measure will advance, and clears the way for a long delayed confirmation vote on attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the vote on Lynch in order to force action on the Justice for Victims of Human Trafficking Act after a dispute over a provision that would have expanded the Hyde Amendment stalled the process. Minority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday that the compromise “rejects the expansion of the Hyde language… where it didn’t apply before,” according to a report from U.S. News & World Report. [..]

While disagreement over the Hyde language – an amendment would have prohibited a victims compensation fund from being used for abortions, the first time Hyde would have applied to non-taxpayer revenue – clouded the bill’s prospects, many victims’ advocates had other issues with the bill and urged Congress to do better.

Kate D’Adamo, national policy advocate at the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project, told Emily Crockett at RH Reality Check that while she supports the provisions of the measure establishing a federal advisory council made up of trafficking survivors and expanding a federal victims support initiative, these positive elements are stuck in a “rotten apple” of a bill.

Amanda Marcotte: [10 egregious myths the religious perpetuate about atheists, debunked ]

Nonbelievers do not lack a basic moral code — despite what the likes of David Brooks might have you believe

In a regular poll conducted by political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell on American political attitudes, atheists recently lost their spot as as the most disliked group in America to the Tea Party. Still, number two is simply way too high in the unpopularity rankings for a group of people who just happen to spend Sunday mornings in bed instead of in church. Polling data shows that nearly half of Americans would disapprove if their child married an atheist and nearly 40 percent of Americans don’t see atheists as sharing their vision of American society, numbers that outstripped similar prejudices toward Muslims and African Americans.

Of course, the real reason atheists are so hated has little to do with jealousy for all their free time, but largely because most Americans are better acquainted with myths than with the realities of atheists’ lives. Unfortunately, atheists often have these myths tossed in their faces, usually by believers who would rather talk about what they heard atheists are like rather than uncomfortable subjects such as the lack of proof for any gods.

These myths do more than hurt atheists. They also harm the basic religious freedoms of all Americans, regardless of their beliefs. Religious freedom and tolerance don’t mean much if they can’t be expanded to include those without religion. With that in mind, here’s 10 of the ugliest myths about atheists, debunked:

Jessica Valenti: Republicans who limit what medical students can learn doom us to stupid doctors

Some legislators want to keep women from having abortions by prohibiting anyone from teaching doctors how to perform one

Most people expect their physicians to be smart – skillful, schooled and, perhaps above all else, knowledgable. So it’s somewhat baffling (and entirely infuriating) that some Republicans want to keep important medical knowledge from soon-to-be doctors.

A North Carolina bill introduced this month would prevent state medical school departments from allowing employees to perform abortions or to “supervise the performance of an abortion”. Essentially, the bill’s sponsors and supporters wants to make teaching how to perform an abortion – a safe, legal and necessary medical procedure – illegal. As The New Republic’s Jamil Smith wrote, if passed, the bill would “produce less intelligent doctors.”

But the more a doctor knows and learns, the more people they can help throughout her career – and no one would choose a doctor who bragged about skipping class. Bills like this must be defeated – and every medical student in the country with a obstetrical and gynecological (OBGYN) focus should be taught how to perform abortions.

Apr 21 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

New York Times Editorial: The Violent Legacy of Chicago’s Police

Rahm Emanuel inherited a Police Department with a history of serious misconduct when he became mayor of Chicago four years ago. Mr. Emanuel tried to break with the past on Wednesday when he co-sponsored a proposal in City Council that would provide reparations to scores of people who were systematically tortured by the police during the 1970s and ’80s under the infamous police commander Jon Burge.

On the same day, in a separate case that is still fresh in the public’s mind, the Council awarded $5 million to the family of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager who was shot 16 times by a police officer in October. The shooting spawned a federal investigation, rattled public trust and raised troubling accusations of a police cover-up. The Council’s decision to pay was made before a lawsuit was filed, but this cannot be the end of the case. The city needs to release a police dash-cam video of the shooting that it has withheld on grounds that releasing it might interfere with the federal investigation. [..]

The city has declined to release the police video because of the continuing investigation. But that’s a flimsy excuse. The public deserves to see this evidence, and the longer the delay the greater the suspicion against a department that has a history of violating the public’s trust.

Dean Baker: The Simple Progressive Economic Agenda for Hillary Clinton (or Anyone Else)

While many policies will be needed to improve the situation of the poor and middle class, there are three simple ones that could make a big difference: a more competitive dollar, a Federal Reserve Board committed to full employment and a financial transactions tax to rein in Wall Street. If Clinton or any other presidential candidate wants to level the playing field, these policies would be a great place to start.

The competitive dollar is an issue that is actually quite simple, but obscured by bad reporting in the media. The value of the dollar relative to other currencies is by far the main determinant of the country’s deficit. We currently have a trade deficit of more than $500 billion a year (at three percent of GDP).

This trade deficit is money that is creating demand elsewhere rather than in the United States. This $500 billion trade deficit has the same impact on the economy as if households or businesses took $500 billion from their income each year and stuffed it under their mattress rather than spend it. This is a main reason that the economy remains well below full employment seven years after the collapse of the housing bubble.

Robert Creamer: House GOP Votes to Take Food From the Mouths of Hungry Children to Give Huge Tax Break to Children of Multi-Millionaires — Really?

Last week the House Republicans took an amazing vote. They literally voted to take food from the mouths of hungry children in order to give a huge tax break to children who were born with a silver spoon in theirs — the sons and daughters of multi-millionaires.

I am not exaggerating. The GOP voted to eliminate the estate tax. But the estate tax only applies to estates larger than $5.4 million for an individual and $10.9 million for couples. Eliminating the estate tax would benefit only 5,500 families in America (.02 percent of the population). And 75 percent of the benefits would flow to children who inherit estates of $20 million or more.

And some of those are huge fortunes. Eight Americans earned $10 billion in income in 2013 alone. That’s enough income to pay 200,000 average American workers.

                           

Jeff Biggers: There would be more regulation of coal mining if it didn’t just affect ‘hillbillies’

For many in central Appalachia, the fight against reckless strip mining operations recalls a popular t-shirt in West Virginia: “Save the Endangered Hillbilly.” It’s not really a joke; decades of contempt and disregard for rural mountaineers underscore an existence no less threatened than local wildlife.

Appalachia has become a code word for our nation’s sacrifice zones. “Coal mining has been destroying human and wildlife communities in Appalachia for more than 100 years”, according to Tierra Curry, a southeastern Kentucky native and a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. The Center’s lawsuit against the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2012 resulted in a recent proposal to list two species of fish impacted by mining under the Endangered Species Act. [..]

This disregard for the inhabitants of the region is a big reason why – despite a mounting health and humanitarian crisis – there has still not been federal intervention to put an end to the public health disaster wreaked by mountaintop removal mining.

GAry Younge: The Cornel West-Michael Eric Dyson feud is petty. Black people are dying in the streets

Shortly before the last presidential election, Columbia political science professor, Fred Harris, bemoaned in an essay: “Were Harold Cruse, the author of the unsparing 1967 book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, still alive, he would despair at the state of black intellectual life.” [..]

As if on cue, Michael Eric Dyson, of Georgetown University, published a searing take-down of Cornel West, formerly of Harvard and Princeton and now at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, in The New Republic on Sunday bemoaning West’s “dramatic plummet from his perch as a world-class intellectual”. [..]

At the best of times this would be an internal dispute between two well-paid tenured professors that barely resonated beyond the academe and made precious little impact within it. But these are not the best of times. Black people are being shot dead in the street almost daily by trigger-happy cops and two ostensibly smart men, who have both produced excellent work and who pride themselves on being engaged academics responsive to the needs of the black community, are firing broadsides at each other.

Apr 21 2015

Gilmore for President 2016

Jim Gilmore is running for President. Maybe

If you’re thinking of the father in the TV series “The Gilmore Girls,” you’re way off, that was “Richard Gilmore” played so well by the late Edward Herman.

photo 220px-Jim_Gilmore_by_Gage_Skidmore_.jpg
This Gilmore is James Stuart “Jim” Gilmore III, the  governor of Virginia from  January 17, 1998 to January 12, 2002. Gov. Gilmore is a Republican and threw his hat onto the GOP clown car back in 2006 for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination for president. That didn’t work out so well, mostly because of name recognition and funding, so he withdrew his name and shortly after announced he would run for the Senate.

The seat was, and still is held, by Sen. Mark Warner (D), who was up  for re-election and had initially decided not to seek reelection, then changes his mind. Sen. Warner, a right leaning Democrat, roundly defeated Gov. Gilmore by a wide margin. The governor only garnered 34% of the vote and even lost in normally strong Republican districts. But then, it was the presidential election that brought Barack Husein Obama to the White House.  

He sat out the 2012 fray but has decided that he’s the guy with the experience to be the president in 2017.  Thus he has become one of the nineteen Republicans vying to face off with who ever the Democrats nominate (like we all don’t know who that very well maybe).

Welcome to the circus, Jim

Apr 20 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

Mohammad Jared Zaraf: Mohammad Javad Zarif: A Message From Iran

WE made important progress in Switzerland earlier this month. With the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany, we agreed on parameters to remove any doubt about the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program and to lift international sanctions against Iran.

But to seal the anticipated nuclear deal, more political will is required. The Iranian people have shown their resolve by choosing to engage with dignity. It is time for the United States and its Western allies to make the choice between cooperation and confrontation, between negotiations and grandstanding, and between agreement and coercion.

With courageous leadership and the audacity to make the right decisions, we can and should put this manufactured crisis to rest and move on to much more important work. The wider Persian Gulf region is in turmoil. It is not a question of governments rising and falling: the social, cultural and religious fabrics of entire countries are being torn to shreds.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Social Security Trust — Or, Never Lend Money to a Conservative

Never lend money to a conservative. That’s one conclusion to be drawn from recent attacks on Social Security by Bloomberg View columnists Megan McArdle and Ramesh Ponnuru. Apparently promises, even legally executed ones, don’t mean much to their crowd.

McArdle recently expended 1249 words attempting to evade the government’s debt to the Social Security Trust Fund, never really getting much beyond the five-word assertion that “the trust fund isn’t real.” Ponnuru tried to argue that a cut isn’t really a cut.

It’s an odd spectacle to watch rightwingers, with their avowed hostility toward “big government,” arguing that the federal government should break its commitments and stiff middle-class retirees. Luckily they’re not very good at it.

Paul Krugman: Greece on the Brink

“Don’t you think they want us to fail?” That’s the question I kept hearing during a brief but intense visit to Athens. My answer was that there is no “they” – that Greece does not, in fact, face a solid bloc of implacable creditors who would rather see default and exit from the euro than let a leftist government succeed, that there’s more good will on the other side of the table than many Greeks suppose.

But you can understand why Greeks see things that way. And I came away from the visit fearing that Greece and Europe may suffer a terrible accident, an unnecessary rupture that will cast long shadows over the future.

The story so far: At the end of 2009 Greece faced a crisis driven by two factors: High debt, and inflated costs and prices that left the country uncompetitive.

Dave Johnson: A Look at the Fast-Track Bill Shows It’s the Wrong Thing to Do

The “fast-track” trade-promotion-authority bill has been introduced in the Senate. Though Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution says, “The Congress shall have power to … regulate commerce with foreign nations,” under fast track Congress relinquishes that power and agrees to pass trade bills brought to them by the executive branch in a very short time frame with little debate and without making any changes should any problems present themselves.

Though it was announced that this year’s fast-track bill was the result of a “deal” between Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the 2015 bill is nearly identical to the 2014 bill that died in Congress without support for a vote. See this side-by-side comparison from Rep. Sander Levin (D-Michigan) of the House Ways and Means Committee. It is unclear from this comparison why the “negotiations” between Hatch and Wyden took so long, or what Wyden got that enabled him to put his name on it, enabling the bill to be sold as “bipartisan.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Can Republicans Learn From California?

Jim Brulte, California’s Republican chairman, has sobering but useful words for his party’s leaders and 2016 candidates: If they don’t learn from what happened to the GOP here, they may doom themselves to repeating its decidedly unpleasant experience.

“California is the leading edge of the country’s demographic changes,” Brulte said in an interview. “Frankly, Republicans in California did not react quickly enough to them, and we have paid a horrible price.”

One measure of the cost: In the three presidential elections of the 1980s, California voted twice for Ronald Reagan and once for George H. W. Bush. The state has not gone Republican since, and it won’t get any easier in 2016.

Bill Curry: My party fears a debate: This same nervous centrism created the Tea Party

Another Wall Street Democrat is running for president. Once again we must choose between acquiescence and rebellion

The race for president is on. And imagine this: The Democrats may not have any debates.

What awful timing for a runaway front-runner. The last time the Democrats were in such dire need of a debate was in 1968, when the Vietnam War drove Lyndon Johnson from office and drew the caliber of Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey into the fray. But if the party doesn’t want to have a real airing of issues, those who do have to figure out how to force one.

By ‘Democrats,’ I mean Hillary Clinton, with no others having joined the race. Clinton doesn’t want a real debate. Right now she’s trying not to repeat her 2008 campaign. She’d like to replicate Obama’s 2008 campaign. His secret sauce in both 2008 and 2012 was money, top-notch consultants, cutting-edge technology and a willingness to put ‘message’ before policy.

 

Apr 20 2015

The Case for Overturning Citizens United

One of the major things that the exposure of the Sony e-mails by Wikileaks revealed was the shift in campaign donations  to influence elections

Former Dem Senator Chris Dodd Advised Execs to Give to GOP: “Fundraising Does Have An Impact”

By Lee Fang, The Intercept

Chris Dodd’s first career was as the liberal U.S. Senator from Connecticut, a self-professed champion for working families and a Democratic presidential contender in 2008. But hacked emails from Sony offer new insight into how he operates in his second career, as the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, a lobby group for the movie industry.

On January 28, 2014, Dodd emailed executives from major motion picture studios to share two news articles. One revealed that Google had shifted its campaign donation strategy, giving more to Republican lawmakers, and another projected that the GOP would likely perform well in the midterm elections that year.

or to raise money by currying favor with corporations and their executives:

Hacked Sony emails reveal Cuomo fund-raising details

By Conor Skelding, Laura Nahmias and Bill Mahoney, Capital New York

Emails between Sony executives and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaign staff leaked as part of the Sony Pictures hack and published in full by WikiLeaks Thursday appear to show Sony executives believed donating to Cuomo was a good idea because he is a “strong protector” of New York’s film tax credit. [..]

The emails also appear to show Cuomo’s campaign pressing Sony to deliver $50,000 worth of donations before a July 15, 2014 campaign filing deadline as he ramped up his re-election campaign last summer.

The first email dates from Jan. 7, 2014, from Keith Weaver, ‎executive vice president of Worldwide Government Affairs at Sony, to Sony C.E.O. Michael Lynton, concerning a fund-raiser with $25,000 per person ticket prices for Cuomo held on January 23, 2014 at the home of Jim Gianopulos, chairman and C.E.O. of Fox Filmed Entertainment. That fund-raiser yielded $300,000 for Cuomo’s re-election campaign.

Citizens must be made aware of the massive influx of money from billionaires via super PACS to back candidates, and influence congressional and state legislative agendas in order to keep the Republic from further sliding into an oligarchy.

Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) told Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman that if nothing is done to get money out of politics “we can kiss this country goodbye.”

I said on MSNBC that night five years ago that if we do nothing, you can kiss this country goodbye. Well, pucker up, because right now the millionaires and the billionaires and the multinational corporations are calling the shots with whatever they want in TPP, whatever they want in fast track-more generally, whatever they want. They get the bailouts. They get the tax breaks. They get the so-called deregulation. They get what they want here because they get what they pay for.

Bob Menendez Corruption Case Reads Like An Indictment Of Citizens United Ruling, Too

By Paul Blumenthal, Huffington Post

A prime example of the corruption is the indictment of Sen. Robert Menendezl (D-NJ).The indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) on public corruption charges is the first bribery case involving the use of corporate political spending to support a candidate since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision allowed corporations to do just that.

Justice Anthony Kennedy declared in the 5-4 majority opinion that corporations should be free to spend unlimited sums on independent political activities since “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Those making independent expenditures “may have influence over or access to elected officials,” but that “does not mean those officials are corrupt,” Kennedy wrote.

The Department of Justice begs to differ. Menendez’s indictment on Wednesday specifically ties two $300,000 contributions from Dr. Salomon Melgen’s Vitreo-Retinal Consultants to an officially independent super PAC — donations that were earmarked for Menendez’s 2012 re-election effort — to actions that the senator took on behalf of Melgen’s business interests.

This is exactly the kind of behavior that Kennedy could not fathom happening.

Justice Kennedy needed to get oout more.

There are now calls for a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United. Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT-I) has reintroduced an amendment that would do just that

Sen. Sanders had to propose a new amendment because legislation that isn’t acted on by the previous Congress expires at the end of the session. Since Congress didn’t act on the amendment the last time Sanders filed it, he is bringing it back in the new Congress.

The key section of the amendment is Section 2. The second section would halt the Supreme Court’s money is free speech interpretation of the Constitution. The first section of the amendment deals directly with the idea that corporations are people, but the second section overturns the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court decision that money is speech. The second section of the amendment would throw out the entire basis for the Supreme Court’s rulings in campaign finance cases.

However, the chances of getting the 2/3rds majority in both houses of congress and 38 states are somewhere around zero to none. Passage was not Sen. Sanders’ point:

The point is to bring attention to the issue of what Citizens United continues to do to our electoral process. The most likely path to overturning Citizens United remains a Democratic presidential victory in the 2016 election. Two of the conservatives Justices who made up the majority in the Citizens United decision are 78 years old. The odds of one or both justices serving the last two years of President Obama’s term and another eight years under another potential Democratic president are slim. (It also wouldn’t be surprising to see the 81 year old Ruth Bader Ginsburg retire before President Obama leaves office.) The Supreme Court is due for a generational change, and if Democrats control the White House, that change could result in a 5-4 liberal leaning court.

In the meantime, Sen. Sanders is leading the fight to inform the American people about the toxic nature of unlimited money in their electoral process. The movement to overturn Citizens United needs and educated population, because outside of the Supreme Court, public pressure is the best way to get the billionaire dollars out of our elections is to have tens of millions of voices demand it.

The more citizens are made aware of the dark influence of billionaires emboldened by the Supreme Court, the better able to confront the candidates and elected officials on their policies and votes. This can be stopped by a truly informed electorate and taking back local and state governments.

Apr 19 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” are: House Homeland Security Committee Chair Rep. Michael McCaul(R-TX); and  Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO).

The roundtable guests are: ABC News’ Cokie Roberts; ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd;  Republican strategist Ana Navarro; and ESPN senior writer LZ Granderson.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are:  Sen. Marco Rubio R-FL); former Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-MD); and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).

His panel guests are: Dana Milbank, Washington Post; David Catanese, U.S. News & World Report; April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks; CBS News Political Director John Dickerson and CBS News Congressional Correspondent Nancy Cordes.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: The guests on Sunday’s “MTP” are: Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-VA); Gov. John Kasich (R-OH); and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).

The roundtable guests are: David Axelrod, Director of University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics; Steve Schmidt, Republican Strategist; Helene Cooper, The New York Times and Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post.

State of the Union: Jim Sciutto is the week’s host. His guests are: Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN); Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD); former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA); and Ali Rezaian, brother of American journalist Jason Rezaian who is imprisoned in Iran.

His panel guests are CNN’s Sara Murray and Peter Baker of the New York Times.

Apr 18 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: Congress cannot be taken seriously on cybersecurity

None of the members of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee have encrypted websites nor use secure emails. So how can we trust them with our privacy?

Members of Congress – most of whom can’t secure their own websites, and some of whom don’t even use email – are trying to force a dangerous “cybersecurity” bill down the public’s throat. Everyone’s privacy is in the hands of people who, by all indications, have no idea what they’re talking about.

Leaders are expected to bring its much-maligned series of “cybersecurity” bills to the floor sometime in the next couple weeks – bills that we know will do little to help cybersecurity but a lot to ]help intelligence agencies like the NSA vacuum up http://www.theguardian.com/com… even more of Americans’ personal information. The bills’ authors deny that privacy is even an issue, but why we’re trusting Congress at all on this legislation, given their lack of basic knowledge on the subject, is the question everyone should be asking.

New York Times Editorial Board: Rules to Make Retirement Investing Safer

In a giant step forward for investor protection, the Department of Labor proposed new rules this week to ensure that financial advisers act solely in their clients’ best interests when giving advice and selling products for retirement accounts. The new standard of fiduciary duty would bar stockbrokers, insurance agents and other financial professionals from increasing their pay by steering clients into high-cost products and strategies when comparable lower-cost ones are available.

For Labor Department officials, the challenge now is to see the proposal through the rest of the rule-making process. The United States Chamber of Commerce, which has opposed the fiduciary standard, has already said it plans to ask for an extension of the 75-day comment period. Other delay tactics are all but certain. [..]

Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez and his team deserve praise for a well-crafted proposal. Now they need to carefully vet the public comments and promptly issue a final rule that preserves the proposal’s strong protections for retirement savers.

John Nichols: Enshrine the Right to Vote in the Constitution

Despite the protections delineated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (which in 1964 formally banned poll taxes), headlines remind us that the right to vote is “still threatened.” The US Supreme Court has mangled the Voting Rights Act, and the Congress has failed to repair the damage done. The Brennan Center for Justice has determined that at least 83 restrictive bills were introduced in 29 states where legislatures had floor activity in 2014, including proposals to require a photo ID, make voter registration more difficult, reduce early voting opportunities, and make it harder for students to vote.

“The stark and simple truth is this-the right to vote is threatened today-in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago,” said President Obama.

The great American process of forming a more perfect union is far from complete. The events of 150 years ago were not the end of anything. They were a pivot point that took the United States in a better direction. But the was incomplete, and insufficient to establish justice. So the process continues.

That is why Congressmen Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin, and Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, have proposed to amend the Constitution to declare clearly and unequivocally that

Scott Paul: The Follies of Fast Track

Even before the ink was dry on the deal between committee leaders on fast-track trade-negotiating authority, Cabinet secretaries were already completely ignoring its milquetoast terms.

And that should tell you a lot about the direction this debate is headed.

There’s a passing reference to currency in the fast-track bill draft unveiled on Thursday, but there’s no requirement that it be deterred in any enforceable or meaningful way, inside or outside trade agreements such as the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The TPP has already largely been negotiated, even though this current debate on trade-negotiating authority pretends to inform it. And it’s abundantly apparent from the comments of President Barack Obama, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and Trade Ambassador Michael Froman that currency manipulation won’t be addressed in any enforceable way as part of the TPP.

For American workers, that’s bad news.

Mike Lux: Elizabeth Warren’s Comprehensive Wall Street Reform Agenda

Elizabeth Warren has given her fair share of great speeches, and has written some outstanding legislation on reforming Wall Street, but her speech on April 15 to the Hyman P. Minsky Conference was the best Wall Street policy speech I have ever heard her, or anyone, ever give. It was comprehensive without being a laundry list of in-the-weeds wonkiness. It laid out a strong philosophical rationale for why we need to do these reforms, and it was politically compelling as well. Her politically compelling argument laid out a strong philosophical rationale for why we need these reforms. Perhaps most importantly, she did all this while masterfully refuting the hackneyed attacks about her being anti-business, anti-growth, and anti-market forces.

Warren’s series of proposed reforms would be a major and much needed boost to an economy still held down by the Wall Street abuses that brought on the collapse of the massive housing bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, and the hardest hitting economic slowdown since the Great Depression.

Andrew Rosenthal: Ted Cruz’s Strange Gun Argument

Americans who believe the Second Amendment gives them an individual right to own guns (as opposed to a more general right to bear arms, as our editorial board argues) often make cogent arguments for their position. I believe that allowing people to own guns is not incompatible with imposing reasonable restrictions on their ownership, but I have heard sensible people strongly argue the opposite side.

But there are ridiculous arguments against gun control, perhaps the silliest of which is that the framers of the Constitution wanted to preserve the possibility, or even encourage the idea, of armed rebellion against the government. It’s a particularly absurd argument when it comes from a member of Congress who is running for president.

Apr 17 2015

The Right’s Stealth Efforts to Privatize the Veterans Administration

Koch-backed veterans group advocates for VA privatization

During the 2014 midterm election cycle, the Koch-funded group Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) backed a bevy of extreme conservative candidates and helped send top Koch cronies (and veterans) Joni Ernst and Tom Cotton to the U.S. Senate. Scarcely a couple months into the 2016 cycle, CVA has released a report recommending that much of the U.S. Veterans Administration be privatized, an extreme policy position that would jeopardize the care received by millions of our nation’s veterans.

Last month, CVA’s Fixing Veterans Health Care Taskforce released its final report suggesting “policy reforms” for the VA, namely that the VA’s health care system be converted into an independent, nonprofit corporation and advocating for the creation of a private insurance option for veterans. Additionally, new enrollees into the proposed system would face tougher enrollment standards. According to USA Today, a whopping one-fifth of future veterans would not be eligible for care under CVA’s proposed system. It’s no wonder then that the American Legion has come out against the plan, as did Paralyzed Veterans of America, and that “most veterans service organizations skipped” the rollout of the CVA’s final report, according to Stars & Stripes Magazine.

Most veterans organizations don’t support CVA’s privatization plan, and it has the potential to negatively impact some 20 percent of future veterans. So what explains CVA’s release of what Stars & Stripes calls a “radical” plan for the VA? Consider that CVA received a whopping $5.5 million from the Koch brothers’ “secret bank” – Freedom Partners – in 2013. The Kochs have advocated for education reform by way of abolishing the federal Department of Education and campaign finance reform vis-à-vis doing away with the FEC. So it’s disappointing, but not surprising, that a Koch group’s vision of VA reform is to privatize most of the agency charged with caring for our nation’s veterans.

Koch favorite and presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio has already endorsed the extreme CVA plan. Will the rest of the Koch cronies follow suit and contradict the position of most veterans service organizations?

The idea of privatization through vouchers is also supported by two other GOP presidential contenders: former Governor Jeb Bush (R-FL) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY). The right wing would like nothing more than to dismantle the entire social safety net for everyone.

In a two part segment, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted how the right wing was quietly working to privatize segments of the Veterans Administration through vouchers for health care outside the system.

In the second segment, she speaks with Robert McDonald, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, about the importance of the VA in the American health system, how the VA is improving after recent scandals, and political challenges from conservatives interested in privatization.

Founder of VoteVets.org Eric Solz pointed out in an article for Huffington Post that the voucher system would undermine funding to the VA and shuttle veterans into a system that is not equipped to handle their special needs.

The scandal that rocked the VA over excessive wait times to get care and excessive backlogs in processing claims was terrible. It was also a problem that was, literally, years in the making. Before Secretary Eric Shinseki, not a single VA secretary, Democrat or Republican, tried to get the VA to move to a modern, computerized system. And the VA never prepared for the influx of veterans when we launched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to overstretched facilities cooking their books to avoid punishment.

There is no doubt that veterans shouldn’t have to rely on the VA for everything. But what Republican candidates, backed by the Koch-brothers-funded Concerned Veterans for America, talk about is the beginning of the end of the pact we make with our veterans to give them the care they need. What they want is the privatization of veterans’ care: Fight for your country and get a voucher.

What this would do is severely underfund the department, leaving veterans out in the cold when it comes to many of their service-connected injuries. For example, VA centers are often equipped to deal with amputations and traumatic brain injuries in a way that a local doctor or hospital might not be. But if we voucherize the system, local VA centers and hospitals would be forced to shutter their doors. For veterans in need of specialized care — both physical and mental — they may not have an able caregiver to turn to in their area.

Furthermore, the VA, despite the bad press, continues to far outpace private care in national customer satisfaction surveys. Veterans like the care they get at the VA. A lot. Closing the VA is the first step toward ending other popular programs like Medicare. In fact, that’s what this whole fight is about.

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