Tag: TMC Politics

Yesterday, an outspoken white atheist murdered three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We don’t yet know for sure whether this was a hate crime or whether the killer, Craig Stephen Hicks, had some other motivation; police have said the crime may have grown out of a dispute over parking. We do know that had Hicks been a Muslim and his victims atheists, few would be waiting for all the facts to come in before declaring him a terrorist. We know that there would be the usual calls for other Muslims to condemn the killings, coupled with the usual failure to take note of the many Muslims who did. And we know that demands for Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins to distance themselves from Hicks are largely facetious, because no one really blames them. Violence perpetrated by Muslims is almost always seen as part of a global conspiracy, whereas white men like Hicks are usually seen as isolated psychopaths.

There is, of course, some truth there. An organized jihadist movement exists; an organized cadre of terroristic atheists does not. Yet in the United States, Islamophobia has been a consistent motivator of violence. Hicks’s killing of Yusor Mohammad, her husband, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, should not be treated like a man-bites-dog story, a reversal of the usual pattern of terrorism. After all, Muslims in the United States are more often the victims of ideological violence than the perpetrators of it.

Maria Margaronis: The New Greek Government Refuses to Agree to Unpayable Debts

At times the conflict between Greece and the rest of the Eurozone looks like a duel to the death. Last night, a seven-hour meeting of Europe’s finance ministers about Greece’s immediate funding needs ended in tetchy silence. There was no common statement; there wasn’t even (to borrow Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’s phrase after his meeting last week with Germany’s Wolfgang Schaeuble) an agreement to disagree. On Twitter, Greece-watchers tried to come up with ways to marry Greece’s request for a bridge loan with the Eurozone’s insistence on an extension to the bailout memorandum, which the new governing party Syriza has promised to repudiate. Pier? Pontoon? Causeway? Schrödinger’s memorandum, simultaneously dead and alive?

Semantics will play an important part in any eventual solution, which will involve compromises and face-saving wording for both sides. But semantics can’t be all of it-something the Eurozone ministers may not yet have understood. The Syriza government is not just pushing for a better deal-they’re refusing to keep on playing the same self-destructive game, piling debt on unpayable debt tied to impossible conditions. The aim is to reclaim democracy and political possibility-and with them, human lives-from the failed and fatal dogmas of austerity. In this they are backed by 70 percent of the Greek people, twice the proportion that voted for them. Eighty percent also want to stay in the eurozone. The desire-perhaps quixotic, perhaps grandiose, but born of suffering and necessity-is not to abandon Europe but to change it.

Leslie Savan: Finally, Someone Pays for Iraq War Lies – Brian Williams

Everybody’s been asking whether Brian Williams can return as anchor of NBC Nightly News after his six-month suspension for exaggerating an attack on a helicopter ferrying him and an NBC camera crew to a military bridge site in Iraq back in 2003. It’s the big celebrity question of the week, totally replacing our collective wonderment over that weird hat Pharrell Williams (no relation) wore during his Grammys performance last weekend.

But just peaking above the surface in the past couple days is a far more important question: Will the media, prodded by what they’ve judged to be Williams’s “lies,” finally begin to question their own role in boosting the far more serious lies that led to hundreds of thousands of actual deaths in the Iraq war?

Jon Stewart, as usual, saw the ironies. After cracking some gentle jokes at his friend’s expense, Stewart allowed that he’s happy the media is piling on Bri Wi because ” finally someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq war.”

Nine out of 10 Americans have fallen behind financially as the well-to-do — especially the ultra-wealthy — capture an ever-increasing chunk of our national income. This inequality threatens the entire economy’s future growth and stability. But whenever someone offers a solution to this growing problem, someone else on the right is likely to accuse them of “class war.”

Class war is precisely what we’ve been seeing for decades now — but it’s been waged for, not against, the wealthy. And Republicans have been its dutiful servants from the start.

It might make a good hashtag, come to think of it: #RepublicanClassWar.

The wreckage of this war can be seen all around us. Incomes for the top 1 percent of households have more than doubled since the 1980s. The top 0.1 percent has increased its share of this nation’s total wealth from 7 percent in 1978 to 22 percent in 2012, a level not seen since before the Great Depression. Ninety percent of American households saw no increase in their wealth after 1986.

There’s a war on — but the middle class didn’t start it.

Alexa Van Brunt: Prosecutors shouldn’t have immunity from their unethical – or unlawful – acts

It’s a tough thing to keep prosecutors accountable to the public, but some people are trying very hard to do just that in the aftermath of Ferguson. One of the grand jurors who failed to indict former police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, for example, wants to make public what happened in the grand jury room. But grand jury proceedings are secret, under both federal and state law, including in Missouri. So last month that juror took legal action seeking to break his silence. Meanwhile, an advocacy group filed a bar complaint against St Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch for alleged misconduct committed in that same process.

These attempts expose just how difficult it can be to hold prosecutors to any standard of conduct. Most misbehaving prosecutors are never brought to justice, thanks in large part to the law of prosecutorial immunity, which holds that prosecutors cannot be sued for violating citizens’ rights in the courtroom. Until we change that law, courts need to open grand jury records at the request of people like the Ferguson juror “John Doe”.

Bartlett Naylor: Loretta Lynch fumbled on HSBC years ago. Now she can prove no bank is too big to jail

As US senators move towards confirming Loretta Lynch as the new attorney general, the big question is what she will do about HSBC, which is embroiled in a massive tax evasion scandal. The world’s second-largest bank allegedly enabled thousands of Americans and other nationals to escape taxes by concealing their assets in HSBC’s Swiss affiliate, a business HSBC acquired when it purchased the Republic National Bank of New York.

Lynch has investigated the bank in the past, but there are many questions about her record on taking Wall Street offenders to task. She became the chief attorney for an ongoing probe into HSBC’s money laundering crimes in 2010, during her assignment as the US attorney for the eastern district of New York. At roughly the same time, the US government received a damning trove of evidence from French officials against HSBC regarding tax evasion.

Yet it is not clear whether she investigated the tax fraud. The key questions senators must ask is: What did Lynch know about the tax fraud? If she wasn’t aware, why not?

Michael T. Klare: Keystone XL, Cold War 2.0, and the GOP Vision for 2016

It’s a ritual long familiar to observers of American politics: presidential hopefuls with limited international experience travel to foreign lands and deliver speeches designed to showcase their grasp of foreign affairs. Typically, such escapades involve trips to major European capitals or active war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, however, has broken this mold. Before his recent jaunt to London and into the thickets of American vaccination politics, he chose two surprising destinations for his first trips abroad as a potential Republican candidate.  No, not Kabul or Baghdad or even Paris, but Mexico City and Alberta, Canada.  And rather than launch into discussions of immigration, terrorism, or the other usual Republican foreign policy topics, he focused on his own top priority: integrating Canada and Mexico into a U.S.-led “North American energy renaissance.”

By accelerating the exploitation of fossil fuels across the continent, reducing governmental oversight of drilling operations in all three countries, and building more cross-border pipelines like the Keystone XL, Christie explained, all three countries would be guaranteed dramatic economic growth.  “In North America, we have resources waiting to be tapped,” he assured business leaders in Mexico City.  “What is required is the vision to maximize our growth, the political will to unlock our potential, and the understanding that working together on strategic priorities… is the path to a better life.”

Why was it again that, as President Obama said, “we tortured some folks” after the 9/11 attacks? Oh, right, because we were terrified. Because everyone knows that being afraid gives you moral license to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe. That’s why we don’t shame or punish those who were too scared to imagine doing anything else. We honor and revere them. [..]

Though you’d never know it here, no level of fear in public officials makes acts of torture (or the support of such acts) any less criminal or more defensible before the law. It’s remarkably uncomplicated, actually. Torture violates U.S. and international law, and those responsible deserve to be prosecuted both for what they did and to prevent the same thing from happening the next time people in power are afraid.

Some of those who rejected torture, like CIA official John Kiriakou and an as-yet-unnamed Navy nurse, directly refused to practice it. Some risked reputations and careers to let the people of this country know what their government was doing. Sometimes an entire agency, like the FBI, refused to be involved in torture.

Eleanor Smeal: Trade Must Not Trump Women’s Human Rights

Any deal that forces women and human rights to take a backseat to profit and trade should be a non-starter. But right now, the United States is negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement with 11 nations including Brunei, a country that recently adopted a vicious new penal code threatening the rights and lives of women, lesbians, and gay men.

Just recently in his State of the Union, President Barack Obama reiterated one of our core American values: respect for human dignity. It is our commitment to this principle, said the President, which has led the U.S. to “condemn the persecution of women” as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals.

So, why are we conducting business as usual with Brunei?

Daphne Eviatar: 9/11 Defendants Claim Military Commission Translator Assisted CIA Torture

It didn’t take long for the Guantanamo military commission in the 9/11 case to stumble again — this time when two of the accused co-conspirators said they recognized a translator in the courtroom from their time in a CIA black site.

This is the first time since August that the commission at Guantanamo has met in this case of the five accused masterminds of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The case has repeatedly stalled over concerns that the government is spying on defense counsel, most recently by trying to turn a defense team member into an FBI informant. Previously, defense lawyers claimed their computers were being monitored and they discovered that the supposedly private rooms where they meet with their clients were all wired for audio and video surveillance.

Now, unbeknownst to their own lawyers, two defendants — Ramzi bin al Shibh and Walid bin Attash — claim they recognize a new translator assigned to the commissions as someone who was also a translator at a CIA black site where they were tortured. They say they can’t trust him.

Ellen Brown: Why Public Banks Outperform Private Banks: Unfair Competition or a Better Mousetrap?

In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned bank, “is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003.” The article credited the shale oil boom; but as discussed earlier here, North Dakota was already reporting record profits in the spring of 2009, when every other state was in the red and the oil boom had not yet hit. The later increase in state deposits cannot explain the bank’s stellar record either.

Then what does explain it? The BND turns a tidy profit year after year because it has substantially lower costs and risks then private commercial banks. It has no exorbitantly-paid executives; pays no bonuses, fees, or commissions; has no private shareholders; and has low borrowing costs. It does not need to advertise for depositors (it has a captive deposit base in the state itself) or for borrowers (it is a wholesome wholesale bank that partners with local banks that have located borrowers). The BND also has no losses from derivative trades gone wrong. It engages in old-fashioned conservative banking and does not speculate in derivatives.

Ditching the Keystone XL pipeline should be a no-brainer. The 1,179-mile pipeline extension would carry some of the world’s dirtiest oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast of Texas. And it shouldn’t be necessary to repeat this, but since we have a Congress controlled by a party that denies the reality of climate change, it is:  97 percent of climate scientists agree that human activity has warmed the Earth. The evidence of climate disruption is all around us, from warming ocean surface and land temperatures, melting Antarctic ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, and increasing heat waves and other changes in extreme weather events. [..]

This is important because it is estimated that if we are to have even a 50 percent chance of avoiding the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming that scientists have set as an upper limit, at least two-thirds of the world’s proven reserves of oil must remain unexploited. Keeping this oil in the ground will be one of the great struggles of future years, since oil companies could lose hundreds of billions of dollars of assets, and they are politically powerful.  But the longer any oil stays undeveloped, the less likely it is to be used: exploitation delayed is exploitation denied. And since the oil from Canada’s tar sands brings much higher carbon emissions than the average oil produced today, it is a prime candidate for staying in the ground.

Bill Boyarsky: Playing Politics With Measles-That’s Pretty Sick

Observing the Republican Party tangle itself up in the politics of measles is rare good news for Democrats who feared they were mired in a losing streak after the GOP gained control of Congress.

Some of the Republican presidential hopefuls are so desperate to win votes from the hard right-wingers who will dominate the phony media show known as the 2016 Iowa caucuses that they are pandering to those who believe that children are harmed by vaccinations against measles. The Iowa caucus-goers constitute a thin but influential slice of the electorate that will determine the 2016 Republican presidential nominee. Since Iowa is first and political writers are enamored with the place, the caucuses have a disproportionate influence on debate around the country on issues such as the measles epidemic.

At the heart of this particular debate is the question of whether parents should be required to have their children vaccinated. [..]

For them, It’s a race toward the right, inflaming and politicizing an issue that scientific evidence-and a majority of Americans-say is not an issue at all.

Ralph Nader: Large Foundations: Rethink Your Priorities

The number of large foundations has been consistently increasing. Some of these foundations are bulging with billions of dollars in assets that could be contributed to nonprofit “good works.” It is potentially the golden age of philanthropy, but unfortunately many areas of recognized need are too often ignored by foundation boards and their executives. Organizations with track records of effective advocacy and accomplishment stand ready to take on neglected problems of our society. Unfortunately, these groups lack adequate foundation support.

When foundations do donate to important areas, such as energy policy, they often award grants to the same organizations that are not original, motivating or making necessary waves. Year after year, these bland organizations are seen as the “safe choice” for donors who are timid about new ideas and groundbreaking approaches. Cushy relationships, as has been demonstrated in the energy/environmental field, often amount to an annuity of contributions for lackluster studies and reports from the same old recipients futilely running over the same old ground.

Robert Creamer: Meet IL Governor Bruce Rauner — Poster Boy for War on Middle Class

Last fall, Illinois GOP candidate Bruce Rauner spent $63.9 million — $27.3 million of his own money — to buy the right to occupy the Illinois Governor’s mansion.

Now that he’s in office his first moves have confirmed that he is the poster boy for the War on the Middle Class.

Rauner is a hybrid of the worst traits of Mitt Romney and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. In fact, you could say he personally embodies the reason why — even though our economy has grown 77% in the last 35 years — the wages of ordinary Americans have been stagnant or actually declined. [..]

Rauner’s first major assault on the middle class was an executive order giving state workers who are covered by labor contracts the choice to benefit from those contracts without paying a “fair share” contribution to support the union that negotiates and administers them.

We have become a profoundly unequal society. That reality is explored in new detail in a recent study from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Even more importantly, the INET study shows that it will take a dramatic shift in policy to restore the equilibrium. Unless we can build momentum for a new political agenda, we’ll be divided into a small minority with fabulous wealth and a permanent underclass with few hopes or prospects.

Unfortunately, our mainstream political dialogue shows no sign of adapting to these realities. As the INET study confirms, mainstream Democratic ideas won’t protect us from this dismal future.

Republican policies? Don’t ask.

Robert Kuttner: Will the Recovery Finally Translate into Better Wages?

The good news about the economy’s improved job creation dominated the weekend’s headlines. Many commentators concluded that the economy is finally shaking off the effects of the financial collapse of 2008 and the long period of stagnation that followed. [..]

In this recovery, the economy has been creating more low-wage jobs than high-wage ones. The shift from standard payroll jobs to temp and contract work continues.

The uptick in the measured unemployment rate, from 5.6 percent to 5.7 percent, suggests that discouraged workers are only just coming back into the labor force and we are a long way from full employment. Even at the present rate of improved job creation, it will be 2017 before we get back to the pre-recession level of unemployment.

The beginning of a process where job creation actually translates into improved living standards is long overdue, but there are several dangers ahead.

Gary Younge: Deluded and dysfunctional, the Republicans have lost the plot

Recently, in an effort to embarrass Republicans pandering to their scientifically challenged base, Senate Democrats proposed a series of votes on climate change. While most Americans and the overwhelming majority of scientists believe climate change is real and people are the primary cause of it, Republican voters are evenly divided on whether it exists at all, and reject the idea that we are responsible. [..]

As a means, bipartisanship is, of course, an admirable goal: the more politicians are able to work together, put the interests of their constituents first and get things done, the better. The grandstanding, bickering and procedural one-upmanship that characterises so much of what passes for politics is one of the things that makes electorates cynical and drives down voter turnout.

But as an end in itself, bipartisanship is at best shallow and at worst corrosive. For it entirely depends what parties are joining together to do. This is particularly true in America, where constituencies are openly gerrymandered, both parties are funded by big money, and legislation is often written by corporate lobbyists.

Michael Smerconish: Mr. President, Release the 28 Pages

Zacarias Moussaoui has just upped the ante on the White House to release 28 top-secret pages from a congressional report pertinent to a possible Saudi role in the events of 9/11. [..]

Moussaoui’s account of being a liaison between Osama bin Laden and members of the Saudi royal family was told to Philadelphia lawyer Sean Carter over the course of two days of questioning in October at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., and has only now been cleared for public release by the U.S. government.

Carter has been defending against a Saudi motion to dismiss his case, facing the unenviable burden of producing evidence of a Saudi link to al-Qaeda without the benefit of taking discovery. Moussaoui’s testimony was unforeseen. The man who once took flight lessons in Oklahoma and Minnesota in preparation for a terror strike contacted the federal judge presiding over the case and offered to provide information.

Rep. Paul Ryan values his reputation as a serious policy analyst and a genial soul. But he’s not above name-calling, and he insists that President Obama’s budget is the product of “envy economics.”

Ryan’s label invites a comparable description of his own approach, which would slash taxes on the rich while cutting programs for the poor and many middle-income Americans. If Ryan wants to play the branding game, is it unfair to ask him why “greed economics” isn’t an appropriate tag for his own approach?

Ryan’s opening rhetorical bid is unfortunate because there are signs that at least some conservatives (including, sometimes, Ryan himself) seem open to policies that would redistribute income to Americans who have too little of it.

Jared Bernstein: The Policy Goal Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken

Back in my White House daze, while helping out with an economics speech to be given by a top senior official, I suggested a sentence that had the word “distribution” in it in the context of income or tax policy or something. Not even “redistribution.” Needless to say, editors went ballistic–they didn’t just cross it out, but that warned me to go through and make sure no such socialistic language was anywhere to seen.

I totally saw and see their point, by the way. The word’s a dog whistle that releases the hounds, if not the Foxes. And yet, one of my rules of thumb in this work is that when policy does a lot of something and that something cannot be spoken of, we’re courting dysfunction and distortion.

Tom Steyer: A Bad Deal: TransCanada Can’t Change the Facts About Keystone XL

Someone at TransCanada must be getting nervous.

As approval of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline appears to be resting on extremely thin ice, TransCanada on Wednesday announced they would be entering the oil-by-rail business to help further their tar sands investments.

What about the pipeline? Well, in a transparent attempt to freshen up the company’s tired talking points, TransCanada’s CEO is using this announcement to continue to push flawed arguments on why America should forsake our national interest and allow the Keystone XL pipeline to be built. Give us the pipeline, TransCanada argues, or we’ll start using trains — but we’re taking the tar sands out of the ground no matter what.

I beg to differ.

Andrew Reinbach: The Honor of Senator Joni Ernst

When most people hear “combat veteran,” they think firefights with the enemy. But the military defines combat veteran differently — as soldiers who served in a combat area.

Which brings us to Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), one of the GOP’s most recent stars. It was Sen. Ernst who was selected to give the Republican response to President Obama’s recent State of the Union message this year.

Senator Ernst calls herself a combat veteran at every turn — on her Senate web page, in campaign debates, and in her stump speeches. She can say this because she served in a combat zone. [..]

Real combat veterans I spoke to don’t think much of how the Senator talks up her combat duty. Larry Hanft, for instance, who earned the Combat Infantryman’s Badge fighting in Vietnam, says, “By her definition, everybody who stepped off the plan in Kuwait is a combat veteran. Joni Ernst is using her military experience to gain a political edge and pull the wool over the eyes of the American people. She’s a fraud…” Mr. Hanft is one of Sen. Ernst’s constituents.

Has the American left lost sight of the big picture? While liberals have been fighting line-item battles against the Republican right, government itself has been changing — and slowly disappearing.

Are we winning some battles (not so many, come to think of it) but losing the war?

Discretionary spending has fallen dramatically — too dramatically — in recent decades, primarily as the result of lower, post-Cold War military budgets. But the promised post-Cold War “peace dividend” has failed to materialize. We’ve seen neither better public services nor wider prosperity. The military budget is still bloated, and only the wealthy and corporations are better off than they were four or five decades ago.

We need an active, independent left willing to challenge the push for smaller government. A well-managed government can revitalize the economy even as it makes our world a better place to live. Many Americans seem to understand

Ed Kilgore: Our Economic Problems Keep Changing, But The GOP’s Answers Stay The Same

The legend of Gertrude Stein’s final words is that her partner Alice B. Toklas despairingly asked her on her deathbed: “What is the answer?” And Gertrude responded: “What is the question?”

Ironic as it may seem that an expat Jewish lesbian avant-garde writer famous in the 1920s could articulate the operating principle of the Republican Party nearly a century later, it sort of does sum it all up. For today’s ideologically rigid GOP, the “answers” to national challenges are clear; the trick is to adapt them to different “questions.” [..]

What’s fascinating, though, is how these policies are offered again and again as an agenda for all seasons and all circumstances-good times (like the late 1990s), bad times (like the last few years), budget surpluses (in 2001, when George W. Bush marketed his huge package of tax cuts as a “rebate”), budget deficits (the 1980s through the early 1990s, and again since 2009), and just about every climate in between the extremes.

Lately we’re getting a slightly remixed version of the same old, same old as the “answer” to wage stagnation and income equality-essential topics for a number of reasons, notably the growth and unemployment indices making it tougher to attack Obama for a slow or nonexistent recovery from the Great Recession.

Jessica Valenti: Your feelings about vaccines don’t trump another child’s medical reality

This weekend, I heard a noise in the hallway in the middle of the night and I just knew something was wrong. Before the terrible idea in my head had time to completely form – before even checking my daughter’s small bed beside my own – I ran into the hallway and snatched up Layla, who was sleepily stumbling near the top of the second floor staircase in my parents’ house. I was terrified, but grateful that I had listened to my gut. Like every mother, I can list a dozen other moments like this with my daughter – when a doctor missed something, or when I realized her safety was at risk and no one else did.

There are things we know about our children that no one else ever will, and there is no doctor or nurse who will be closer to our children than we are. So when I hear parents who don’t vaccinate their children claiming that they “just know” that it’s the right decision, or when some say it was a mother’s instinct that told them their child was “vaccine injured”, I almost want to sympathize. The intensity of parental love combined with the medical establishment’s poor history of listening to and trusting women’s voices can make it easy to believe that we are the ones who know best. But quite simply: we’re not.

William Pfaff: It’s Time for U.S. and European Allies to Step Back From Ukrainian Conflict

President Obama is being very cautious, so far refraining from supplying the Ukrainians with offensive weapons (despite insistent demands in Congress and among Washington right-wing commentators).

The Russians seem to have no such scruples. They seem to feel themselves under assault by the West, and indeed there are many in Washington who want to see Putin and his government overthrown, convinced that Americanizing the world is the next step in the nation’s destiny.

Nuclear war is considered a possibility by both sides, for the first time since 1990. But why? The U.S. and its European allies have been the aggressors in this whole unnecessary confrontation. They are the ones who can call it off. There is zero gain in it.

Certainly, the Germans and other Europeans are aware of this. As in the old days of the Cold War, the calculations of deterrence and first-strike advantage are relevant. The U.S. seems motivated by the determination to stay Top Dog. The Russians may be motivated by fear.