Tag: Opinion

Contrary to what Barack Obama says about the U.S. being built on the rule of law, the country routinely resorts to official violence and illegality.

Barack Obama looked at his most clueless, responding to the riots and rage in Ferguson, Missouri. He hasn’t seemed so callow since the BP oil spill. Like he just wished it was over and could get on to the delights of his post-presidency. Or back to immigration reform and stalling that damn pipeline.

Using his slow voice, as if he’s explaining something so basic that it’s hard to understand, he declared that the U.S. is a “nation built on the rule of law” and added next day, he has “no sympathy” for those who go violent. The problem with this, at least for those in the streets, is the U.S. is not a nation of laws and resorts to official violence and/or illegality routinely.[..]

Obama and others like pointing to Martin Luther King Jr. as the model for peaceful protest. But King wasn’t a law-abider, he was a lawbreaker. He just did it non-violently, a preferable term to peaceful. His reasons were both pragmatic and principled. There was no way for protesters to match the firepower of the protestees — then or now. But more tellingly: you turn into them if you mirror their methods and then nothing’s been gained. In these protests I heard cries I hadn’t heard in a long time — Revolution! … By any means necessary! That’s not nostalgia, it’s despair, and loss of hope for change by normal, lawful means.

Robert Kuttner: The Cheap Oil Curse

Remember “Peak Oil?” The world was running out of oil, prices would soon skyrocket, and we had better find other fuels.

Well, that argument didn’t work out so well for environmentalists, did it? As oil reserves and those of other carbon fuels became scarce and prices rose, the law of supply and demand kicked in. The industry invested the profits from those higher prices in new technologies, and the oil barons found even more destructive ways to extract oil and gas — by exploiting the muck from tar sands, inventing hydro-fracking, and despoiling Third World sources.

So now, oil is cheaper than it’s been in years, about $66 a barrel. Regular unleaded gasoline can be had for well under $3 a gallon. [..]

Cheap oil, of course, is a curse. It promotes increased use of carbon fuels at a time when we should be investing massively in substitutes. And the apparent plenty of oil and gas takes the spine out of most politicians.

Robert Reich: Patrolling the Boundaries Inside America

America is embroiled in an immigration debate that goes far beyond President Obama’s executive order on undocumented immigrants.

It goes to the heart of who “we” are. And it’s roiling communities across the nation.

In early November, school officials in Orinda, California, hired a private detective to determine whether a seven-year-old Latina named Vivian — whose single mother works as a live-in nanny for a family in Orinda — “resides” in the district and should therefore be allowed to attend the elementary school she’s already been attending there. [..]

The nation’s attention is focused on the border separating the United States from Mexico, and on people who have crossed that border and taken up residence here illegally.

But the boundary separating white Anglo upscale school districts from the burgeoning non-white and non-Anglo populations in downscale communities is fast becoming a flashpoint inside America.

In both cases, the central question is who are “we.”

Now is the time of year when poverty and homelessness are most prominent on the minds of many Americans. As families gather to eat together and give thanks for their lives, many of us also take time to think about the struggles of people who are less fortunate.

Less often do we think or even know about the extreme measures that are used by local lawmakers and police to criminalize the existence of people who are homeless and to target, harass, and drive people living in extreme poverty out of their communities. [..]

Aggressive policing, enforcement, and jailing for these offenses also cost money. That money would be better spent addressing the causes of homelessness, whether through adequately paying work, affordable housing, unemployment benefits, healthcare coverage, or better resources for substance abuse and mental health care, including for veterans with PTSD. At the very least, public spaces should remain public, civil liberties should be upheld even for those without a home, and people who are homeless should have access to basic services instead of being criminalized by restrictive ordinances designed to make them go somewhere else — anywhere else — wherever that might be.

Thor Benson: The Disenfranchisement of American Felons: Caught Once and Left Behind for Good

In many states in America, convicted felons who have done their time do not return to society with a clean slate, as they are barred from participating in the voting process. That’s true even in cases of nonviolent crime or those in which the accused were sentenced only to probation.

Iowa, Kentucky and Florida are three states in which convicted felons lose their voting rights, although Iowa does offer a long and complicated application process they can endure in an attempt to reclaim those rights. Nine other states (pdf) have similarly strict laws that either require a five-year waiting period before voting rights are restored after a completed sentence or deny future participation outright according to a list of specific felonies. An additional 19 states prevent people from voting during their prison term, parole or probation. According to The Sentencing Project, 5.85 million otherwise eligible voters have been disenfranchised by such laws. The history of voter disenfranchisement in America is long, complicated and deeply impacted by racism.

John Nichols: An Inconvenient Political Truth: That St. Louis Prosecutor Is a Democrat

What has not been much discussed is the fact that McCulloch is a Democrat-a member of the same party as President Obama, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon and Congressional Black Caucus chair Marcia Fudge, the Ohioan who on Monday evening referred to the failure to bring charges against Wilson as “a slap in the face to Americans nationwide who continue to hope and believe that justice will prevail.” [..]

As the elected prosecutor in suburban St. Louis County since 1991, McCulloch is a powerful player in Missouri Democratic politics. He has delivered sought-after endorsements to prominent figures such as Claire McCaskill, who had the prosecutor’s support when she challenged a sitting Democratic governor in 2004 and who is now Missouri’s senior senator. In August of this year, McCulloch helped a white challenger mount a successful Democratic primary challenge to St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley, the first African-American to hold the position. On the same day, McCulloch, who is white, easily saw off a Democratic primary challenge from Leslie Broadnax, an African-American attorney and municipal judge. [..]

There was no real chance to defeat McCulloch at the polls in the fall, as he ran without Republican opposition. But thousands of St. Louis County voters refused to vote for the incumbent. [..]

It is important to take primary elections seriously. And it is important to recognize the value of independent and third-party challenges to the two-party status quo.

There is a good argument to be made for electing prosecutors on a nonpartisan bais. But there is an even better argument to be made that elections for prosecutor positions- be they partisan or nonpartisan, be their primaries or general elections-must be recognized as some of the most vital contests on our ballots.

Media and political elites tend to focus on top-of-the-ballot races for president and governor and senator. But, if the experience of Ferguson and St. Louis County teach us anything, it is that at the bottom of the ballot, in races for local law-enforcement posts, the most fundamental choices are made.

George Zornick: Why Chuck Hagel’s Departure Really Matters

The New York Times reported that the United States will expand its mission in Afghanistan in 2015, with US troops participating in direct combat with the Taliban while American airpower backs Afghan forces from above. The shift, leaked anonymously to reporters ahead of a holiday week, is a big “oh, nevermind” to Obama’s very public announcement six months ago in the Rose Garden that US troops in Afghanistan would be shifting into a training and advisory role next year.

The president didn’t even make a glancing reference to the Afghanistan reversal in his remarks announcing Hagel’s departure. The administration would clearly prefer a limited public debate, and based on the media coverage so far, it is getting its wish.

But it is against this new hawkish posture that Hagel’s departure should be understood and discussed. It is possible that it was the subtext to his resignation: Hagel came aboard to help manage a withdrawal from Afghanistan and shrink the Pentagon budget, and an anonymous US official told the Times Monday that “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus.”

It is only when you encounter other people’s holiday mythologies that the arbitrary and gross nature of your own become apparent. For a foreigner, Thanksgiving offers a particularly rich array of incomprehensible traditions – all those combinations of sweet and savoury, the 70s provenance of many of the dishes and the fetishisation of the turkey itself. What with that and the root vegetables, by 4pm on Thanksgiving afternoon, to the outsider it can all start to feel a bit Wicker Man – the creepy 1973 original, not the loveably camp Nic Cage remake.

I don’t claim to fully understand this American holiday – I have only lived in the US for seven years. But from my own experience of Christmas, I know too well the hysteria that can be brought on by deviating from the way things have always been done. There was, for instance, my dad’s heroic efforts one year, to suggest that we have steak instead of turkey on Christmas day, a well-meaning but egregious subversion of the first rule of the holidays: nothing is to change, ever. That includes the hour at which one eats, table settings, dress code, TV viewing, side dishes and whether or not you can set foot outside the house during the period of holiday lockdown. (The answer is, of course, always no.)

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Prosecute Now: The Justice Department Can Still Act Against Bad Bankers

It’s been a grim period for American justice. Despite compelling evidence of widespread bank fraud in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis — and despite all those billion-dollar settlements — prosecutors have not indicted executives at any major U.S. bank. This stands in contrast to the much smaller savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, which led to the conviction of more than a thousand bankers.

And as the Justice Department’s criminal division remained idle in the aftermath of 2008, the statute of limitations passed for most of bankers’ crimes.

But there’s a ray of hope: The bankers’ own deep-seated propensity for cheating and corruption may have given prosecutors a new opportunity to indict them. With the upcoming departure of Attorney General Eric Holder, there is the chance to forge a new approach toward Wall Street lawbreaking by pursuing evidence of wrongdoing wherever it may lead.

The stakes are high. As long as the bankers’ culture of corruption goes unpunished, the safety of the global economy — and of individual families’ well-being — remains at risk.

Kwei Quartey: Ebola’s Racial Disparity

The most effective treatment for Ebola might be having white skin.

American healthcare workers Nancy Writebol,  Kent Brantly, Craig Spencer, and Rick Sacra, as well as NBC cameraman Ashoka Mupko, were all beneficiaries of the medical sophistication of the U.S. hospital system.

All of them contracted Ebola in West Africa and lived to tell the tale, emerging from the hospital Ebola-free and appearing remarkably robust. They benefited from early diagnosis, prompt evacuation to the leading U.S. special isolation centers, and in some cases, treatment with convalescent serum and the experimental drug ZMapp.

The story is quite different for some other high-profile Ebola victims.

Martin Salia, a legal and permanent Maryland resident, was the medical director of Sierra Leone’s Kissy United Methodist Hospital and its only full-time physician. As one of a shockingly small number of doctors in that country-a mere 136 for a population of 6 million-Salia was a rare breed of physician capable of treating anything from orthopedic injuries to myocardial infarction. [..]

The physicians who have cared for these patients themselves would deny that any racial bias ever consciously entered into their decisions over choice of therapy. That, however, is exactly the trouble. Most racial bias among doctors is unconscious, meaning we must carefully consider whether our medical decisions reflect a double standard in the treatment of our patients-Ebola-infected or otherwise.

David M. Perry: Playing politics with the disabled

The disabled deserve the chance to work, save and be as independent as they can

The Achieving a Better Life Act (ABLE) is one of those rare good ideas that seem to have a chance of making it through Congress and becoming law. The bill is designed to tweak the tax code so that people on Social Security disability insurance (SSDI) can earn and even save some money without threatening their benefits. [..]

The House version of the bill operates with a narrower definition of disability than the Senate’s – a sign of a deeper political debate about just whom SSDI is supposed to cover. Initially, the House Ways and Means Committee advocated cutting other disability benefits (PDF) to pay for ABLE, potentially playing one group of disabled against another. The powerful right-wing Heritage Foundation has come out against ABLE and listed it as a lame-duck bill to quash.

The pressing need for the passage of ABLE and the rhetoric employed by its detractors illuminates some of the challenges of being disabled or caring for someone who is disabled in 21st century America. For a country whose rhetoric often emphasizes self-reliance and hard work, the status quo is built around limiting the independence of disabled people. But many conservatives seem unwilling to fix the situation for all disabled Americans, preferring to use the disabled as pawns in a political effort to identify and separate the worthy from the unworthy disabled and poor.

In recent days, the press has reported that President Obama signed an order (or on second thought, maybe it’s just an unsigned decision that can’t be FOIAed, so don’t start anything, Jason Leopold) basically halting and partly reversing his plans for withdrawal. [..]

Virtually simultaneously with the decision to permit American forces to be more involved with the Afghan government, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has reversed Hamid Karzai’s ban on night raids – and also renamed them “night operations.” [..]

And now that Obama has made it clear he will spend his Lame Duck continuing – escalating, even – both forever wars he got elected to end, he has fired forced the resignation of the Secretary of Defense he hired to make peace. [..]

Some great reporting from the NYT, getting all three scoops about Obama’s pivot to war.

I’m just hoping someone is reporting out the really important questions: who will be paying for the resumption of the forever war, and how it will be any more successful than the last 13 years?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Rethinking the Cost of Western Intervention in Ukraine

Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, recently cautioned Americans against intervention fatigue: “I think there is too much of ‘Oh, look, this is what intervention has wrought’…. one has to be careful about overdrawing lessons.” Say what? Given the calamities wrought in Iraq, Libya and now Ukraine, one would think that a fundamental rethinking and learning of lessons is long overdue. The United States needs a sober look at the actual costs of supposed good intentions divorced from realism.

Power’s comments come as Ukraine marks the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Maidan Square demonstrations in Kiev, surely an occasion for rethinking and changing course. One year after the United States and Europe celebrated the February coup that ousted the corrupt but constitutionally elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, liberal and neoconservative interventionists have much to answer for. Crimea has been annexed by Russia. More than 4,000 people have lost their lives in the civil war in Ukraine, with more than 9,000 wounded and nearly a million displaced. This month, the Kiev government acknowledged the de facto partition of Ukraine by announcing it was ending all funding for government services and social benefits including pensions and freezing all bank accounts in the eastern districts that are in revolt. The Ukrainian economy is near collapse with nowhere near the billions needed to rebuild it at hand. How Kiev or the cut-off eastern regions will provide heating and electricity to their beleaguered people as winter approaches remains to be seen.

Zoë Carpenter: This Is the Next Big Fight Between Progressives and the Wall Street Dems

If Burger King has its way, the company will soon leave its Miami headquarters for Canada and enter the coffee-and-donut business. When the fast-food giant announced its intention to buy the Canadian company Tim Hortons in August, it stressed the coffee-and-donuts part of the deal-or, rather, the opportunities for “growth” and “expansion.” But the chance to move to a country with lower corporate tax rates was undoubtedly part of the appeal. Since 2003, more than thirty-five American companies have dodged taxes through similar deals, which are known as “corporate inversions.”

Now the Burger King move is implicated in a fight brewing between some Senate Democrats and President Obama, a clash that throws into relief the split between the party’s Wall Street wing and its progressives. One of the people involved in the deal was Antonio Weiss, a major Democratic fundraiser, the publisher of The Paris Review, and the global head of investment banking at Lazard Ltd, a firm that has put together several major inversion deals. As of November 12, he’s also President Obama’s pick to oversee the domestic financial system-including the implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act, and consumer protection-at the Treasury.

Andrea Palframan: Can a First Nations-led Movement Stop Big Oil?

Can a First Nations-led, people-driven movement really have the power to stop Big Oil?

The folks behind the Pull Together campaign think so. The Pull Together initiative supports First Nations in B.C. who are taking to the courts to stop Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project.

Led by the Gitxaala, Heiltsuk, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Nadleh Whut’en, Nak’azdli and Haida — nations united in their fierce opposition to tar sands oil endangering their traditional territories — Pull Together’s involvement synchronized with a very active movement against tar sands pipelines in B.C. and community-based opposition Enbridge in particular. The campaign is using a new model of online fundraising that, combined with real-world, grassroots organizing, is delivering solid results.

If you want to understand what makes Elizabeth Warren so special in American politics, consider her nervy leadership of the campaign to block President Obama’s foolish nomination of one Antonio Weiss to be the top Treasury official in charge of the domestic financial system, including enforcement of the Dodd-Frank Act.

For most of his Wall Street career, Weiss has epitomized everything that reeks about financial abuses. As chief of international mergers and acquisitions for Lazard, Weiss orchestrated what are delicately known as “corporate inversions,” in which a domestic corporation moves its nominal headquarters offshore, to avoid its U.S. taxes. It’s hard to improve on Sen. Warren’s description of this play, in her Huffington Post blog of last Wednesday: [..]

And that’s only the beginning. Many of the other deals orchestrated by Weiss resulted in operating companies being bought and sold by giant conglomerates, where the “savings” and “increased efficiency” came mainly from tax breaks and reduced worker compensation.

Weiss, who was paid $15.4 million by Lazard over the past 23 months, will receive another $21.2 million as an early retirement payment if he is confirmed for the Treasury job.

Robert Reich: Why College Is Necessary But Gets You Nowhere

This is the time of year when high school seniors apply to college, and when I get lots of mail about whether college is worth the cost.

The answer is unequivocally yes, but with one big qualification. I’ll come to the qualification in a moment but first the financial case for why it’s worth going to college.

Put simply, people with college degrees continue to earn far more than people without them. And that college “premium” keeps rising.

Last year, Americans with four-year college degrees earned on average 98 percent more per hour than people without college degrees. [..]

But here’s the qualification, and it’s a big one.

A college degree no longer guarantees a good job. The main reason it pays better than the job of someone without a degree is the latter’s wages are dropping.

In fact, it’s likely that new college graduates will spend some years in jobs for which they’re overqualified.

Michael W. Twitty: Americans love the Thanksgiving myth. But food folklore masks a painful reality

None of our culinary traditions were really just shared or contributed – and they certainly were not ‘gifted to us’

Americans love our origin myths – like the comforting one that, before the conflicts, wars and slavery started, there was an idyllic moment in which the “Pilgrims” and their indigenous welcoming committee sat down in a peaceful potluck of multicultural exchange, each contributing something old to the new.

But Thanksgiving is hardly the only celebration of the idea of culinary “contribution” – there’s a similar narrative about the plantation South, where African foods appear in the culinary narrative, as though they were proffered to white Americans through an altruistic cultural exchange program.

The superstar Southern chef, Sean Brock, even recently described the presence of the West African rice in lowcountry Carolina foods as “gifted to us”, without ever asking who “us” is. [..]

But let’s be clear: none of our culinary traditions were ever really just shared or contributed – and they certainly weren’t “gifted”. That latter term is especially galling, since my ancestors in the Carolina lowcountry were coerced through forced labor and with the threat of physical punishment to provide every iota of value from their expertise in rice culture and cuisine to their white owners; it was hardly a gift.

Darren Wilson will probably get let off.

It’s an outcome that will appall many Americans, sparking outrage not only in Ferguson but throughout the country. And despite all of that, it’s an outcome that will not surprise any black person, including yours truly. [..]

This isn’t knee-jerk pessimism at work here. To the black community, a non-indictment for Brown would be predictable. It would be as predictable as the verdict in the trial over the shooting death of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a verdict that acquitted defendant George Zimmerman, allowing him to continue doing stupid things. Or as predictable as the involuntary manslaughter verdict handed down in the shooting death of restrained, unarmed, 23-year-old Oscar Grant in Oakland. Or as predictable as the acquittal of police officers charged with killing unarmed Sean Bell in Queens, New York by firing 50 shots into his vehicle. As predictable as the acquittal of the police officers who fatally shot unarmed Amadou Diallo 19 times, killing him. As predictable as the acquittals in the infamous police beating of Rodney King. And so on, back to Emmett Till and before.

David Cay Johnston: Top incomes soared as tax rates fell

New IRS data show that just 400 households captured 6 percent of the entire nation’s income growth in 2010

For those at the very top 2010 will be remembered as a very good year. While most Americans struggled to recover from the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, top incomes soared while tax burdens for those incomes fell.

The 400 tax returns for those with the highest reported incomes showed 31 percent more income in 2010 than in 2009, when the recession officially ended at midyear. Soaring stock prices fueled the increase at the top.

On average incomes of $265.1 million the top 400 paid 18 percent in federal income taxes, down from 19.9 percent in 2009. The lowest tax on the top 400 was 16.6 percent in 2007.

Each of the top 400 paid tax at the same rate as a single worker making $80,000 in 2010. Assuming a 40-hour workweek, it took each of the top 400 about 40 minutes to earn that much.

These figures from an IRS report released Friday show how much government policy has helped those at the top amass even larger fortunes thanks to lower tax rates. It also shows how far the United States has moved away from the ancient principle of progressive taxation, born in Athens nearly 2,500 years ago and endorsed by political thinkers and economists from Aristotle and Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall and Milton Friedman

Ray McGovern: CIA’s Torturous Maneuvers on Torture

“CIA may revamp how it is organized” announced a front-page Washington Post headline leading into an article based on remarks by unnamed “U.S intelligence officials” to the Post’s Greg Miller. The anonymous officials were authorized to share some of the contents of a Sept. 24 letter from CIA Director John Brennan to CIA staff, in which Brennan says, “The time has come to take a fresh look at how we are organized as an agency.”

On Brennan’s orders, senior agency officials were put to work on what Miller reported would be “among the most ambitious [reorganizations] in CIA history.” But Miller’s sources emphasized that the activity was in its preliminary stages and that no final decisions had been made; the proposed changes might be scaled back or even discarded.

But the reorganization story on Thursday – with its suggestion of CIA “reform” – came at an opportune time to possibly distract attention from another behind-the-scenes battle that is raging over how – and indeed whether – to release the findings of a five-year Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the CIA’s use of torture during George W. Bush’s administration and how the agency lied to Congress about the efficacy of torture techniques – and their humaneness.

Deborah Orr: Mike Nichols made films about women – sadly a rarity in Hollywood

If you count success in Oscar nominations, then Mike Nichols certainly didn’t fulfil his early promise. His 1966 debut film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, got 13 nominations and won five. His second, The Graduate, got a mere seven nominations and one win. The 20 other films he went on to make managed 22 nominations and one Oscar between them, for best song.

Nichols died this week, at 83, and the obituaries have been full of praise. But an Observer piece 10 years ago summed up, I think, the general feeling about his career as a film director: “Nichols is now regarded as a safe pair of hands in Hollywood, a mainstream, middle-brow director who is wonderful with stars.”

“Wonderful with stars.” Talk about being damned with faint praise. Nichols, actually, was wonderful at making films that offered realistic portrayals of women. Perhaps this went unnoticed because it has not, historically, been a Hollywood priority. But it was the outstanding feature of those two early films, and of many of his films since.

Quite a few of his movies have been about women or written by women. Silkwood starred Meryl Steep as a nuclear power whistleblower, and was written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen. Postcards from the Edge starred Streep again, as a drug-addicted actress, and was based on Carrie Fisher’s screenplay. Gilda Live was a film of Gilda Radner’s one-woman Broadway show. Two of his films, Primary Colors and 1996’s The Birdcage, were written by his former comedy partner of several decades earlier, Elaine May. Even the fact that the guy had a female comedy partner in the 1950s suggests that his view of women was notably progressive for its time.

When TransCanada CEO Russ Girling touted Keystone as an engine of employment on ABC News’ “This Week” last Sunday, he insisted that its construction would create 42,000 jobs. Not only would his venture create those 42,000 “direct and indirect” jobs, boasted Girling, but also those positions would be “ongoing and enduring” rather than temporary like most construction jobs; he cited a State Department study that drew no such conclusions. A company spokesman later tempered Girling’s pronouncements, more or less acknowledging that they had been grossly exaggerated. The number of permanent jobs after the construction would top out at about 50. With or without Keystone, the national economy already produces about 42,000 jobs every week, so it just wouldn’t matter much.

Yet even if Keystone would actually result in tens of thousands of permanent jobs, its expected impact on the environment, health and safety raised grave questions about whether it should be permitted to proceed. But there are pipeline projects of unquestioned value that could create far more jobs for many more years than any of Keystone’s promoters ever contemplated.

Amy Goodman: Keystone, Climate Change and the Cold

It was a dramatic scene in the Senate this week. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren, presiding, announced the defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline, a Crow Creek Sioux man from South Dakota sang out in the Senate gallery. A massive people’s climate movement against extracting some of the dirtiest oil on the planet had prevailed … at least for now.  [..]

President Obama signaled before the Senate vote that he has grown skeptical of the Keystone XL, and its proponents’ claims that it will create jobs and lower domestic gasoline prices: “Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.”

Meanwhile, another president, Cyril Scott of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, said in a statement: “We will close our reservation borders to Keystone XL. Authorizing Keystone XL is an act of war against our people.”

With record-breaking cold gripping the nation this week, and a year’s worth of snow dumping on Buffalo, N.Y., in a single day, we have to ask: What will it take to listen to the science, and to aggressively address the global threat of catastrophic climate change?

Zoë Carpenter: After Fearmongering Kills the NSA Reform Bill, What’s Next?

For a few hours on Tuesday, the Islamic State looked like the best thing that ever happened to the National Security Agency. The USA Freedom Act, a modest bill seen as the best chance for reforming one of the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs, failed to clear a procedural hurdle in the Senate by two votes after Republicans insisted that it would precipitate a terrorist attack. [..]

Off the Hill, the government’s surveillance tactics are being confronted in a number of ways. Fearful for their bottom line, tech companies are taking a serious interest in encryption, and foreign governments are searching for ways to circumvent the United States when it comes to the Internet. Multiple challenges to the telephone-records dragnet are pending in federal courts. One judge, who called the NSA’s activities “almost Orwellian,” has already ruled that bulk collection likely violates the Fourth Amendment. But whether the pending cases will lead to meaningful constraints on the NSA isn’t clear. Greenwald, for one, has as little faith in the judiciary as he has in Congress, writing that it’s the institution “most consistently subservient to the National Security State” in the post-9/11 era. But absent the emergence of a spine in Congress with regards to the incessant fearmongering that serves as a shield for government spying, a patchwork of court rulings and the power of consumer choice looks increasingly like the only viable defense.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Mexicans Have Had Enough of U.S.-Backed Violence and Exploitation

Mexico’s nationwide general strike on Thursday, Nov. 20 is a unified rallying cry to end the corruption, crime and violence that have plagued the country for decades and are symbolized most recently by the apparent slaying of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. But, lest we Americans consider ourselves outsiders, observing another nation’s mayhem with detachment, it is important to clarify that Mexico’s problems are in large part our doing.

Communities in Guerrero, Chiapas and other states in Mexico have seen their lands stripped of resources to appease the lure of foreign investment via the North American Free Trade Agreement, championed by the U.S. under various presidents starting with Clinton. Concurrent with the rise of poverty caused by free trade has been a steady increase in organized crime and narco-trafficking. The U.S. funding of a “war on drugs,” which was supposed to take aim at the traffickers, has instead largely fueled collusion between law enforcement, politicians and criminal syndicates.

Republicans like to talk about impeaching President Obama, but there is a far more deserving candidate for impeachment-Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court. While the Republicans in Congress have blocked Democrats from enacting much of substance, the GOP majority in control of the Court has been effectively legislating on its own, following an agenda neatly aligned with their conservative party. Step by step, the five right-wing justices are transforming the terms of the American political system-including the Constitution.

They empowered “dark money” in politics and produced the $4 billion by-election of 2014. They assigned spiritual values to soulless corporations who thus gained First Amendment protection of free speech and religion. The justices effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, even as they allowed state governments to create new obstacles for minority voting. The High Court made it okay to take guns to church and more difficult to keep guns from dangerous people. It rendered a series of decisions that collectively shifted political power from the many to the few.

This power grab by the unelected-and supposedly non-partisan-justices has already produced a historic rewrite of America democracy. But it was done by blatantly usurping the decision-making authority that belongs to the elected government in Congress and the executive branch. The Republican justices are not finished with their undeclared revolution. They will continue unless and until people rise up and stop them.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Guess Who Doesn’t Want Social Security’s Offices Closed — and Who Does

Some surprising new polling results underscore the unpopularity — and long-term destructiveness — of Congress’ ongoing attacks on the Social Security system.

The new Republican Congress is expected to force additional office closures and impose additional cuts on the Social Security Administration’s budget, even as a poll released this week by Social Security Works shows that the public overwhelmingly opposes the flimsy rationale for those cuts.

We’re told that automation can pick up the slack as more offices are shuttered and more workers are laid off. But the polling shows that Americans overwhelmingly prefer human assistance to the Internet or email, which means they won’t be happy with the change. [..]

The survey also shows that most people prefer to talk to a human being, either by phone or in person, when interacting with the Social Security system. Only 11 percent want to use the Internet or email to request a new Social Security card, for example. Unfortunately, an unpublicized Social Security Administration plan would force them to do exactly that — and upcoming GOP cuts could accelerate that effort.

In an exclusive look at some of the raw polling data, a surprising fact came to light: Voters under 30 dislike the idea of using web-based services much more than older voters do. Only 3 percent would prefer to order new Social Security cards via Internet or email, far less than the 11 percent figure for voters overall. Only 4 percent want to apply for retirement benefits via the Internet or email, as opposed to 13 percent overall.

Vi Waln: The Keystone XL’s Senate failure isn’t the end of the pipeline as an act of war

My Lakota people are still prepared to protect our clean water. This remains a death project

My Lakota people have a phrase – Mni Wiconi – which means “water of life”. Water is also Pejuta – our primary medicine. It is an extremely sacred element without which we cannot live, yet many people take it for granted. They do not realize: when our drinking-water sources are gone or contaminated, humanity will perish.

Water is also present in every single Lakota ceremony at which I pray – it is essential to our ceremonial way of life. Like our ancestors who sacrificed their very lives for our survival, many of us pray for the descendants who will soon stand in our place, and one of our most important prayers is for our descendants to always have an abundance of clean drinking water.

But TransCanada’s Keystone XL oil pipeline (KXL), which the company has proposed building directly over the Ogallala Aquifer, is still an immediate threat to all of us who drink water from that underground reservoir.

Kaci Hickox: Stop calling me ‘the Ebola nurse’

I never had Ebola, and politicians who lie do nothing to protect your health

I never had Ebola, so please stop calling me “the Ebola Nurse” – now!

This is what did happen: I was quarantined against my will by overzealous politicians after I volunteered to go and treat people affected by Ebola in west Africa. My liberty, my interests and consequently my civil rights were ignored because some ambitious governors saw an opportunity to use an age-old political tactic: fear. Christie and my governor in Maine, Paul LePage, decided to disregard medical science and the constitution in hopes of advancing their careers. They bet that, by multiplying the existing fear and misinformation about Ebola – a disease most Americans know little about – they could ultimately manipulate everyone and proclaim themselves the protectors of the people by “protecting” the public from a disease that hasn’t killed a single American. Politicians who tell lies such as “she is obviously ill” and mistreat citizens by telling them to “sit down and shut up” will hopefully never make it to the White House. [..]

want to live in a country that understands Ebola. I want to live in a world that cares about those dying from this terrible disease in West Africa. Nobody should’ve had to watch me ride my bicycle out in the open as politicians fed the public false fears and misinformation. I want to live in an America that reaches out to aid workers as they return from West Africa and says, “We loved and stood by you when you were fighting this disease. We will love and stand by you now.”

We can define compassion, instead of being ruled by fear and fear-mongers.