Tag: Opinion

Under the direction of Andrew Cuomo, the party has spent a small fortune supporting my opponent’s campaign.

I’m a Democrat, and this year I decided to run in the primary for lieutenant governor. My opponent, former Representative Kathy Hochul, is also a Democrat, but we differ on policy, particularly in areas like immigration policy, environmental protection and gun rights.

So far so good, but here’s the crazy part. The state Democratic Party that is running the primary (ostensibly to select the best candidate) is spending money-millions, by our estimates-to try to ensure that my opponent wins. Under the admitted direction of Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democratic Party has spent a small fortune supporting my opponent’s campaign, including spending on literature for voters, phonebanking, television ads and, most recently, robocalls performed by Hillary Clinton.

It is an obvious conflict of interest for the party to both run a primary and then provide aid to one side. That’s why, back in 1911, the New York legislature made it illegal for political parties to spend money to influence the outcomes of their own primaries. Yet despite the illegality and ethical question, the Democratic Party in New York State keeps at it.

Rick Perlstein: Watergate’s most lasting sin: Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and the pardon that made us all cynics

Ford let Nixon off 40 years ago today. That launched Iran-Contra, “too big to fail” — and proved power trumps law

When you’ve published a book about Watergate, your phone rings off the hook in the days leading up to Aug. 9, 2014, the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation. But my phone’s been quiet this week – even though the event that took place almost exactly one month later, on Sept. 8, 1974, is the one that really changed the world. It’s still changing the world 40 years later. [..]

It was an enormously unpopular act. Ford’s approval rating declined from 71 to 49 percent, the most precipitous in history. This pardon was proof, the people said, that the system didn’t work – America was still crooked. Suspicions were widespread that it was the fruit of a dirty deal between Nixon and Ford: the presidency in exchange for the pardon. “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch,” was how Carl Bernstein broke the news Bob Woodward on the phone.

Since then, judgment on the pardon has reversed 180 degrees. First Woodward, then Bernstein, came to conclude there had been no deal, and that this was instead an extraordinarily noble act: Ford “realized intuitively that the country had to get beyond Nixon.” After Ford died in 2006, Peggy Noonan went even further. She said Ford “threw himself on a grenade to protect the country from shame.”

They’re wrong. For political elites took away a dangerous lesson from the Ford pardon – our true shame: All it takes is the incantation of magic words like “stability” and “confidence” and “consensus” in order to inure yourself from accountability for just about any malfeasance.

Thomas Frank: Finally, Wall Street gets put on trial: We can still hold the 0.1 percent responsible for tanking the economy

Too Big To Fail bailouts let them get away with it. The amazing result of California fraud trial could change that

The Tea Party regards Barack Obama as a kind of devil figure, but when it comes to hunting down the fraudsters responsible for the economic disaster of the last six years, his administration has stuck pretty close to the Tea Party script. The initial conservative reaction to the disaster, you will recall, was to blame the crisis on the people at the bottom, on minorities and proletarians lost in an orgy of financial misbehavior. Sure enough, when taking on ordinary people who got loans during the real-estate bubble, the president’s Department of Justice has shown admirable devotion to duty, filing hundreds of mortgage-fraud cases against small-timers. [..]

“Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent,” reported a now-famous 2010 story in the Huffington Post. “But convincing a jury that executives intended to make fraudulent loans, and thus should be held criminally responsible, may be too difficult of a hurdle for prosecutors. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,’ Wagner said.”

So forget those thousands of hours of Congressional investigation and those thousands of pages of journalism on the crisis. It doesn’t make any sense to the man in charge. No jury would be convinced. Case closed.

As it happens, a trial just ended in Sacramento in which a jury was convinced that “executives intended to make fraudulent loans.” Here’s the thing, though: It wasn’t the government that made the case against the financiers; it was the defendants.

They are one of many reasons that U.S. health care has the world’s highest overhead costs

American hospitals spend a huge and growing share of their revenue on overhead, a study published today in Health Affairs shows. Getting those costs down should be a national priority.

American hospitals on average spend 25.3 cents out of each dollar of revenue on overhead, with for-profit hospitals spending 27 percent and nonprofits a bit below the average.

By contrast, the Netherlands and England, which have the next highest overhead costs, spend 19.8 percent and 15.5 percent, respectively. Both are moving toward market-based financial models, so as with the U.S. overhead costs are likely to rise.

Compare Canada and Scotland, which have single-payer health care systems. Their hospital administrative costs are half those in America.

The new study helps explain why for each $1 the 33 other countries with advanced economies spend per person on universal health care, the United States spends $2.64 – and yet more than one-fifth of Americans have no or poor health insurance.  A significant reason America’s health care system is so expensive and inefficient turns out to be those annoying co-pays.

Robert Kuttner: Free Scotland, Free New England!

Until recently, few people took seriously the possibility that Scotland might actually secede from the United Kingdom. However, with a referendum scheduled for September 18, the latest polls show secession in the lead for the first time, and gaining dramatic momentum.

The British government is frantically scrambling to offer the Scots a much more autonomous form of federalism, to head off the drive for full independence. Meanwhile, the specter of a diminished Britain has led to speculative attack against the British pound.

What’s going on here? [..]

The Scottish Nationalist Party and its leader Alex Salmond, the first minister of the Scottish Parliament, are highly popular with local voters. Salmond pushed hard for this referendum, and in 2012 won the consent of the British government (what was London thinking?) The Tory government campaign urging Scottish voters to vote to stay in the UK has been spectacularly inept.

It’s anybody’s guess what will happen if independence wins. At the very least, it would put pressure on London to convert the United Kingdom into a far more federalist country. Even so, full independence for Scotland is not out of the question.

Robert Reich: The Bankruptcy of Detroit and the Division of America

Detroit is the largest city ever to seek bankruptcy protection, so its bankruptcy is seen as a potential model for other American cities now teetering on the edge.

But Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they’d otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.

Judge Steven W. Rhodes of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan is now weighing Detroit’s plan to shed $7 billion of its debts and restore some $1.5 billion of city services by requiring various groups of creditors to make sacrifices.

Among those being asked to sacrifice are Detroit’s former city employees, now dependent on pensions and health care benefits the city years before agreed to pay. Also investors who bought $1.4 billion worth of bonds the city issued in 2005. [..]

No one knows whether Judge Rhodes will accept or reject the plan. But one thing is for certain. A very large and prosperous group close by won’t sacrifice a cent: They’re the mostly-white citizens of neighboring Oakland County.

Oakland County is the fourth wealthiest county in the United States, of counties with a million or more residents.

Reporting, prosecution and incarceration haven’t eliminated intimate partner violence. Some new solutions offer women hope

Despite decades of work, activism and policy around intimate partner violence, too many women are still beaten by the men they love.

The feminist response to high-profile public cases of domestic violence – like those of Chris Brown, who was convicted for brutally beating his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009, or the NFL players Ray Rice, arrested on domestic violence charges in February, and Ray McDonald, who was just arrested on felony domestic violence charges for assaulting his fiancée – is largely one of frustration. It’s aggravating to watch as the media props up abusers as “good guys”, the victim-blaming that almost always follows, and the attendant lack of punishment for those who perpetrate violence.

Steven W. Thrasher: The long walk to gay equality is the great civil-rights stumble of our time

It’s been a stop-and-start kind of year. But equality is not all court cases and headlines, because a judge doesn’t change hearts and minds. Queer people do

Between 2011 and 2013, theater educator and activist Alan Bounville walked 6,000 miles across the United States with the modest goal “to end gender and sexual orientation discrimination”. Along the way, he went through 21 pairs of shoes, but not a single state he walked through offered equality – not the marriage kind, or much of any other variety.

By the time Bounville reached New York City, however, a lot had changed. Marriage was legal in many more states than when he’d departed. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell had been repealed for gay, lesbian and bisexual service members. President Obama came out more forcefully for certain gay rights.

Now, a year after his walk and the supposedly breakthrough Doma and Prop 8 decisions at the US supreme court, Bounville isn’t especially optimistic about the state of queer rights, despite all the progress. “We aren’t changing much. We are, but we’re not,” he told me this week, the day a Louisiana judge broke a streak of same-sex marriage equality rulings – and the day before an appeals court struck down gay marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana. He emphasized violence, transphobia and economic injustice. He’s appalled schools that “still don’t have the resources, even here in New York City”, to deal with anti-gay bullying.

Dennis J. Kucinich: ISIS, Libya, NATO, and Preventing the Next 9/11

Those who call for immediate military action rarely have a long-term strategy. That is why America’s march of folly from Iraq to Libya has been a recruiting tool for jihadist forces, including ISIS.

As a member of Congress before and after 9/11, I took (and continue to take) the threat of terrorism seriously, and therefore I vociferously warned against military actions in Iraq and Libya; military actions which ultimately undermined our national security.

The West launched an attack against Libya, amid false claims about an impending massacre in Benghazi, to justify regime change. However, it was obvious to me, and a vocal minority at the time, that military strikes and the arming of unknown rebels (i.e. non-state actors: terrorists) would the result in instability, hurt innocent civilians, and create regional chaos, empowering extremists.

Lindsay Ambrams: The EPA is (finally) taking on air travel

After years of pressure, the agency took a first step toward regulating a major source of emissions

It looks like it might finally be time to start talking about the big flying elephant in the fight against climate change. Air travel, its many benefits aside, is our most carbon-intensive mode of transportation. Right now, it accounts for about 4 percent of total U.S. emissions. Globally, aircraft-related emissions are projected to rise at an alarming rate: about 3 to 4 percent annually, meaning they could quadruple by midcentury. And Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency took the first step in a process that could end in the decision to regulate those emissions, announcing its intention to study the health dangers they pose.

This is a long, long time coming. A coalition of environmental groups have been pushing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from domestic and foreign aircraft that land at U.S. airports since 2007, and have been struggling, since then, to compel the agency to take action. The EPA continued to drag its feet even after a judge found, in 2011, that it was mandated to study the effects of aircraft emissions; at the beginning of August, two groups, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth, notified the agency of their intention to sue for a second time over its “unreasonable delay.”

Talk about America’s decline is usually wrong. But how else would you describe a country that, in a world of exploding tensions, is unable to confirm dozens of ambassadors to foreign posts because of partisan squabbling?

Even by Washington standards, the Senate Republicans have hit a new low for hypocrisy. They denounce President Obama’s inaction on foreign policy – and simultaneously refuse to confirm his nominees for U.S. ambassadors to such hot spots as Turkey, on the front lines against the Islamic State, and Sierra Leone, epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.

Let’s say it plainly: This is how nations lose their power and influence, when they are unable to agree even on basic matters such as diplomatic representation. The decision-making system breaks down, and the public is too bored or disunited to take action. Sadly, that’s a snapshot of the United States in 2014.

Melissa Cronin: First They Silenced Activists, Now Big Dairy Is Silencing Farmers

In Idaho, where a controversial “ag-gag” bill was signed into law in February, things are only getting more secretive at factory farms. Earlier this week, AP obtained a copy of a confidential letter sent by a dairy industry group in the state to its member farmers. The letter urged farmers to deny interview requests from members of the media, and not to offer press tours on their farms.  

The letter (see a copy here), sent by United Dairymen of Idaho chairs Tom Dorsey and Tony Vanderhulst, was received by 500 dairy farmers in the state. It noted an increase in media requests to film on farms after the passing of Idaho’s ag-gag bill, which banned journalists and whistleblowers from filming at factory farms and slaughterhouses. It recommended that farmers defer media requests to the organization instead of dealing with them on their own:

   For protection of your farm and the Idaho dairy industry, we recommend that you coordinate any requests for television, print or radio interviews with the Idaho Dairymen’s Association or the Idaho Dairy Products Commission/United Dairymen of Idaho …”

It also provided four sample responses to deny journalists when asked for an interview or farm tour.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Politicians Show Their Gratitude Where It Count$

There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart, a poet wrote, and as this year’s summer winds toward its end and elections approach, gratitude is indeed what our politicians have flowing from that space where their hearts should be.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is grateful to his friend Rick Anderson, the CEO of Delta Airlines. In late July, a week after McConnell treated him to breakfast in the Senate Dining Room, checks for McConnell’s super PAC came winging their way from Anderson and his wife, as well as Delta’s political action committee.

“This is the kind of rare access that most of us will never experience.” That’s Sheila Krumholz, executive director the Center for Responsive Politics, the campaign finance watchdog. She was talking to National Journal about Delta’s boss dining in first class with McConnell: “Who makes a good enough breakfast companion for a sitting senator in a highly competitive reelection campaign to take time out of their busy day? It never hurts if the person can follow up with a donation, and all the better if it can be a sizable one.”

Michael T. Klare: Oil Is Back!

A Global Warming President Presides Over a Drill-Baby-Drill America

Considering all the talk about global warming, peak oil, carbon divestment, and renewable energy, you’d think that oil consumption in the United States would be on a downward path.  By now, we should certainly be witnessing real progress toward a post-petroleum economy.  As it happens, the opposite is occurring.  U.S. oil consumption is on an upward trajectory, climbing by 400,000 barrels per day in 2013 alone — and, if current trends persist, it should rise again both this year and next. [..]

Accompanying all this is a little noticed but crucial shift in White House rhetoric.  While President Obama once spoke of the necessity of eliminating our reliance on petroleum as a major source of energy, he now brags about rising U.S. oil output and touts his efforts to further boost production.

Just five years ago, few would have foreseen such a dramatic oil rebound.  Many energy experts were then predicting an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline in output.  With supplies constantly shrinking, it was said, oil prices would skyrocket and consumers would turn to hybrid vehicles, electric cars, biofuels, and various transportation alternatives.  New government policies would be devised to facilitate this shift, providing tax breaks and other incentives for making the switch to renewables.

Starving, spiking and smoothing are short-term fixes that guarantee long-term problems

From coast to coast, Democrats and Republicans appear united in devastating what remains of traditional pensions in America.

Through three basic strategies – smoothing, spiking and starving – politicians can burnish their images as public benefactors today, but only by inflating future costs and risks that will slam society after their careers are over.

Voters, workers and taxpayers whose time horizon is more than the next election cycle need to police their politicians now, or they and their progeny will bear a terrible burden later.

Juan Cole: What Hackers Did to Celebs? The NSA’s Been Doing That to All of the U.S. Instead of Predicting ISIL

There has been a lot of justifiable outrage about the invasion of privacy of celebrities and the posting of their private, nude photos at 4Chan by hackers who apparently got into their cloud accounts.

It seems odd to me that the discussion of this issue has been completely unconnected to the Snowden revelations that the U.S. government has been assiduously spying on everyone’s cloud.  It has been massively recording who we call, when we called them, and where we were when we called them on on our smart phones.  You can tell a lot from that information (it could be used for insider trading where it came from financiers like Warren Buffett). The NSA has been sweeping up terabytes of data and storing them (some of this in conjunction with British intelligence).  Barack Obama’s glib assurances that they haven’t been recording our emails notwithstanding, they’ve been recording our emails (they can actually read them in real time), as well as sweeping up the content of phone calls as data files. NSA personnel routinely passed around nude photos of people captured from the internet, Snowden has revealed, calling it a perk of the job.  Some NSA personnel misused their position to spy on ex-girlfriends.  There has been a lot of justifiable outrage about the invasion of privacy of celebrities and the posting of their private, nude photos at 4Chan by hackers who apparently got into their cloud accounts.

It seems odd to me that the discussion of this issue has been completely unconnected to the Snowden revelations that the U.S. government has been assiduously spying on everyone’s cloud.  It has been massively recording who we call, when we called them, and where we were when we called them on on our smart phones.  You can tell a lot from that information (it could be used for insider trading where it came from financiers like Warren Buffett). The NSA has been sweeping up terabytes of data and storing them (some of this in conjunction with British intelligence).  Barack Obama’s glib assurances that they haven’t been recording our emails notwithstanding, they’ve been recording our emails (they can actually read them in real time), as well as sweeping up the content of phone calls as data files. NSA personnel routinely passed around nude photos of people captured from the internet, Snowden has revealed, calling it a perk of the job.  Some NSA personnel misused their position to spy on ex-girlfriends.  

Oliver Burkeman: To recline your seat or not? Stop arguing. Capitalism already won this stupid war

Airlines, Apple and more corporations are pitting us against each other. It’s time to start changing the terms of debate

The Great Airplane Seat Recliner Wars of 2014 have now caused at least three flights to be diverted, following passenger altercations, while providing much-needed ammunition for professional opinion-havers on the internet. Is it acceptable to use a Knee Defender to prevent the person in front of you from reclining, or monstrous? Should you pay me if you don’t want me to recline, or is it “simple decency towards your fellow humans” to refrain to spread out? Is reclining a right or a privilege?

To this professional opinion-haver, though, the debate has become immensely frustrating, because the answer is that we shouldn’t need to be having the debate at all. There is no right answer because there simply isn’t enough space on airplanes; it’s perfectly reasonable to want to claim a bit more room by reclining, and perfectly reasonable to object to someone else reducing yours. What’s not reasonable is the number of seats crammed into the plane.

Hong Kong is a sideshow in Beijing’s main act: securing its status as a rising superpower.

Hong Kongers are used to being a pawn in the game of superpowers. In 1997, Britain handed the city over to China under the “one country two systems” principle leaving it “Special Administrative Region” status. The principle was enshrined in the Basic Law, the legal framework for how Hong Kong would be governed from that point on.

The recent ruling by the National People’s Congress (NPC) on the fate of Hong Kong is just a staging post in China’s advance to consolidate its status as rising superpower. The decision is best viewed through this lens. Hong Kong is a sideshow in the main act: President Xi Jinping’s ambition to cement China’s economic and geopolitical stature as a superpower.

Dean Baker: Public should speak up before Fed clamps down on jobs

With the bank’s policy taking cues from the financial industry, a vocal citizenry must push back to sustain growth

The media often cover debates over Federal Reserve Board policy as though it is arcane and technical subject matter beyond the understanding of ordinary people. In this context we are supposed to take the statements of Fed officials as though they are pronouncements from Dr. Science, who “knows more than you do.”

In reality, the basics of Fed policymaking are fairly straightforward. The main question the Fed is considering right now is whether it should have its foot on the accelerator to try to promote growth and jobs, or alternatively whether it should have its foot on the brake to try to stop inflation. In the latter case, the economy will grow less rapidly and we will have fewer jobs and higher unemployment.

Richard Brodsky: Cuomo Wins!/Loses!

Conventional political wisdom has New York Governor Andrew Cuomo winning the Democratic primary and the November general election handily. The same wisdom has him badly damaged in New York and nationally. What gives?

The objective measures of political success show Cuomo on a roll. He’s raised over $35 million. His opponents are starving. His poll numbers are good. Most voters don’t know the opposition. He’s dominated the political news as a candidate in the same manner that he dominated the government.

That may be the rub. His political operation was never satisfied with winning. Opposition was to be crushed and the methodologies were simple and punishing. It worked. Republicans voted for gay marriage and gun control. Democrats folded to an austerity economic agenda that cut taxes for the rich, cut spending, and gave billions to corporations as “economic development.”

Paul Waldman: The Stupidity of Hating Your Senator for Living Where You’ve Sent Her to Work

Should we really get mad if our representatives spend too much time in Washington, where they’re supposed to be doing their jobs?

This year, not one, but two, incumbent senators up for re-election have been dogged by the “issue” of the precise location where they rest their heads at the end of a weary day of lawmaking. First it was Republican Pat Roberts, who, we learned in February, lists the home of some friends as his official residence in Kansas; apparently he crashes there when he’s in the state. And now it’s Democrat Mary Landrieu, whose heretofore unimpeachable Louisiana roots (her father Moon was the mayor of New Orleans in the 1970s, and her brother Mitch holds that office today) are now being questioned. It seems that although Landrieu owns a home in Washington, she’s registered to vote in the New Orleans house she grew up in, where her parents still reside (even though it’s technically owned by Mary and her eight siblings, all of whose names begin with “M”-make of that what you will).

The opposition researchers have certainly been earning their keep. But should the rest of us care? The easy answer is, of course not; this is the kind of inane faux-controversy that consumes campaigns, where one side pretends to take umbrage at something with no importance, then the press pretends it means something because a candidate is “on the defensive.” But as far as phony issues go, this one is actually revealing-not because of anything it says about the senators, but because of what it says about the often absurd and contradictory expectations we have of our representatives. We berate them for being lazy and not getting enough done, but at the same time, we get mad if they spend too much time in the place where they’re supposed to be working

Details of homeowner relief stay opaque while tax deductions and accounting loopholes lower cost to banks

Last week Bank of America reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to the tune of $16.65 billion for its role in selling faulty mortgages in the financial crisis. Such big-dollar settlements with large banks – including, in the past year, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase – sound like harsh punishments but in actuality amount only to slaps on the wrist.

For one, those colossal dollar figures are rarely the actual prices the banks will pay. The real costs to these companies is muddled by tax deductions, unclear directives and accounting loopholes. The secretive negotiation process for settlements is also inconsistent with the civil and criminal process the average American faces.

It’s no wonder, then, that the nation has settlement fatigue; the feeling among consumer advocates and the public is that these agreements have negligible impact on the lives of homeowners affected by the financial crisis.

Julia Zulver: Are reproductive rights human rights?

Women’s lives continue to be endangered by anti-abortion policies.

Hashmat Moslih recently wrote an opinion piece noting that the concept of human rights faces huge challenges in a culturally diverse global setting. He states: “It is impossible to develop a harmonised human rights philosophy that is not circular. At the heart of the issue of human rights runs the issue of justice and at the heart of justice runs the issue of happiness and it is argued that happiness is attained through acquiring a good life and a good life is one that insures everyone’s well-being. But how do we define well-being?”

There are many definitions of well-being, grounded in various cultural, religious, and historical contexts. Furthermore, as Moslih notes, there are contested views about what constitute fundamental rights, and whether we can ever consider these non-ideological. For example, there is by no means an international consensus about whether sexual and reproductive rights can be considered universal.

Despite this, the words of Morena Herrera, the leader of the Agrupacion Ciudadana por la Despanalizacion del Aborto (Citizens Group for the Depenalisation of Abortion), during a personal interview, will always ring clearly in my mind: “by ruling against an abortion [in the case of Beatriz], El Salvador is ruling against the life of a woman.”

Emma Brockes: Are you a summer person? Because the autumn people are already winning

Good riddance to the sunny, lazy season. You know exactly what you’re going to get with a rainy, productive day

Summer officially ends on Monday and, with it, the wearing of white and that feeling of being on vacation all the time. So, too, the ascendence of summer people over winter people. The calendar year runs January to January, but for many, that sinking, new-school-year feeling that comes around the first of September is the real start of the new year. How depressed the new season makes you – well, that depends largely on which season you think of as “yours”.

I used to be a summer person. I used to think winter people were creepy, pale-skinned, slow-moving creatures who lived in long sleeves and probably cut up their burgers with a knife and fork. In England at least, where the sun comes out for approximately two weeks a year, there was, I thought, a deliberate perversity to those who complained about it.

And then I moved to New York, where the summer is as bald and unrelenting as an English winter. Heat of 90°F with humidity isn’t cheering, it’s sedating – and keeps you inside as effectively as snow.