Tag: Opinion

Despite obscene profits from monopoly power, government officials ignore evidence and squash challenges

The profit margins that federal regulators set for utilities should be decreasing, given the long downward drift of interest rates and the shrinking cost of capital.

Bizarrely, the opposite is happening: Utilities are raking in stunning profits at the expense of consumers.

Now the first in a raft of cases asserting that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is letting utilities gouge customers by setting egregiously high rates of return may finally get a hearing.

Since utilities are legal monopolies with no market to discipline their pricing, only the vigilance of regulators stops them from causing irreparable economic harm by stifling growth, draining wealth from customers and distorting investment. Court rulings say FERC commissioners must “guard the consumer against excessive rates.”

The legal standard for setting utility rates is known as “just and reasonable.” Profits and prices are supposed to be balanced so both investors and customers get fair treatment.

FERC commissioners, however, disregard the just and reasonable standard, routinely ignore evidence and act more as agents of utilities than fair-minded regulators.

Robert Reich: The Increasing Irrelevance of Corporate Nationality

“You shouldn’t get to call yourself an American company only when you want a handout from the American taxpayers,” President Obama said Thursday.

He was referring to American corporations now busily acquiring foreign companies in order to become non-American, thereby reducing their U.S. tax bill.

But the president might as well have been talking about all large American multinationals.

Only about a fifth of IBM’s worldwide employees are American, for example, and only 40 percent of GE’s. Most of Caterpillar’s recent hires and investments have been made outside the U.S.

In fact, since 2000, almost every big American multinational corporation has created more jobs outside the United States than inside. If you add in their foreign sub-contractors, the foreign total is even higher.

Philip Pilkington: Fed’s targeting of asset bubbles leads to contradictions

Yellen’s comments on overvalued markets welcome, but finding the right solution is tricky

On July 15 the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, announced during a Senate hearing about the current economic outlook that certain asset markets were overvalued. The charges mark a potential revolution in how central banks across the world will conduct their affairs. In her testimony, Yellen noted that valuations for low-rated “junk bonds” or corporate debt “appear stretched,” while “issuance has been brisk.” Similarly, in its full monetary policy report released the same day, the Fed said stocks for some social media and biotech industries appear significantly overvalued.

Much of this was not surprising. For months, commentators had said these trends of high valuation in risky and overvalued markets are unsustainable. But such confirmation from the most powerful banker in the world dramatically alters how central banks see themselves. Following the 2008 financial crisis, many central banks turned their focus to managing the financial market in a far more concerted manner than they did previously. For example, the banks intervened in the market to prop up asset prices by increasing the monetary base in the banking system and thus lowering interest rates, but it seems that they will now try to stop these prices from rising to levels they consider dangerous.

Peter Shrag: Unscrambling the California omelet

Why breaking the state into six is a terrible idea

There are many arguments in support of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper’s view that California is too big, too diverse and too unwieldy to work efficiently as a state. With 38 million residents and growing; 13 TV markets; some 7,000 government entities, including cities, counties, water and mosquito abatement districts, school districts; and an ethnically and economically polyglot population, most residents feel closer to their local governments than to the distant politicians in Sacramento.

Draper’s remedy: an initiative for the 2016 ballot to divide California into six states to bring government closer to the people. One, the proposed new coastal state of Silicon Valley, which would include San Francisco and the high-tech suburbs to the south (where Draper lives), would have the highest per capita income in the nation, above Connecticut. Its neighbor to the east, the state of Central California (a region sometimes called California’s Appalachia), would be the poorest, poorer than Mississippi. That might be welcome to the rich taxpayers along the coast, but it would create monstrous problems for the have-nots. [..]

But this is a nutty idea, nuttier even than Draper’s costly school voucher initiative in 2000, which got trounced by a vote of 70-30. So perhaps this move is a very costly provocation to bring out some great new wave of disaffected rednecks with pitchforks, or to generate yet another great anti-establishment political upheaval like the tax revolt of 1978 or the recall of Gov. Gray Davis in 2003.

The good news in Paul Ryan’s newly released anti-poverty proposal is that, for the first time in as long as anyone can remember, Ryan is not advocating the wholesale destruction of the social safety net. His past budgets – including the most recent – have envisioned catastrophic cuts to social programs all in the service of boosting military spending and alleviating the tax burden on the wealthy. At least for now, he’s transitioned from “destroy the safety net” to “grudgingly accept its continued existence.” So hooray for progress!

The bad news is that Paul Ryan’s view of that safety net is still largely detached from reality. Also, his approach to curing poverty seems to be to treat the poor in as paternalistic and insulting a way as possible by proposing that they sign “contracts” to remain eligible for public assistance.

For real. “Contracts.” Under Ryan’s proposal, all the funding for a dozen or so federal poverty programs, like SNAP and housing assistance, would be consolidated into a single grant for the states – an “opportunity grant,” as Ryan calls it, in a fairly obvious message-tested attempt to move away from the term “block grant.” The organizations within the states tasked with dispensing benefits would “work with families to design a customized life plan to provide a structured roadmap out of poverty.” One of the requirements under this scenario is “a contract outlining specific and measurable benchmarks for success,” complete with “sanctions for breaking the terms of the contract.”

Sanctions! Under the Paul Ryan poverty plan, the poor = Iran.

Heather Digby Parton: Texas gun nuts’ scary ritual: How hatred of a president turned profane

Three weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a concerned citizen from Dallas named Mrs. Nelle M. Doyle wrote a letter to White House press secretary Pierre Salinger. She was worried about the president’s visit. [..]

Unfortunately, her prediction wasn’t alarmist enough as it turned out. [..]

So why bring this up today? That was a long time ago and we’ve moved on from those days, right?  The John Birch Society is a relic of another time.  Anti-communism is still a rallying cry on the right, but without the Soviet threat, it’s lost much of its power.

Unfortunately, the venom, the incoherent conspiracy-mongering, the visceral loathing still exist.  In fact, in one of the most obliviously obtuse acts of sacrilege imaginable, Dealey Plaza is now the regular site of open-carry demonstrations.  That’s right, a group of looney gun proliferation activists meet regularly on the site of one of the most notorious acts of gun violence in the nation’s history to spout right-wing conspiracy theories about the president while ostentatiously waving around deadly weapons.

Micheal Winship: Deep in the Tell-Tale Heart of the Texas GOP

Imagine the official presentation of a worldview concocted by conspiracy theorists and an assortment of cranks and grumpy people. Conjure a document written by scribes possessed of poison pens soaked in the inkpots of Ayn Rand and the Brothers Grimm, caught in the grip of a dark dystopian fantasy of dragons and specters, in which everyone’s wrong but thee and me and we’re not sure of thee.

No, this is not some Game of Thrones spinoff. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the official 2014 platform of the Republican Party of Texas, 40 pages of unrestrained, right-wing bluster against you name it — women, minorities, immigrants, Muslims, gays, Obamacare, the Internal Revenue Service, red light cameras, the EPA, the World Bank, vaccinations — well, you get the picture. In the spirit of the Alamo, this is a work straight out of the 19th century with no option for surrender.

David Sirota: Comcast’s worst nightmare: How Tennessee could save America’s Internet

Chattanooga’s public electric utility offers residents lightning-quick connections — much to big telecoms’ dismay

The business lobby often demands that government get out of the way of private corporations, so that competition can flourish and high-quality services can be efficiently delivered to as many consumers as possible. Yet, in an epic fight over telecommunications policy, the paradigm is now being flipped on its head, with corporate forces demanding the government squelch competition and halt the expansion of those high-quality services. Whether and how federal officials act may ultimately shape the future of America’s information economy.

The front line in this fight is Chattanooga, Tennessee, where officials at the city’s public electric utility, EPB, realized that smart-grid energy infrastructure could also provide consumers super-fast Internet speeds at competitive prices. [..]

For EPB, the good news is that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has repeatedly pledged that in the name of competition and broadband access, he will support preempting state laws like Tennessee’s. However, in a capital run by money, EPB may still be politically overpowered. After all, as a community-owned utility in a midsized city, EPB does not have the lobbyists and campaign cash to match those of behemoths like Comcast and AT&T. What the utility does have is a solid track record and a pro-consumer, pro-competition argument.

The question is: Will that be enough to prevent Wheeler from backing down or being blocked by Congress? The future of the Internet may be at stake in the answer.

The deeper the US slips into economic decline, the higher it ratchets up the pace and stakes of armed conflict.

The United States has set the world on fire. It is nonsense to talk of a “new” Cold War, when what the world is witnessing is multiple conflagrations as intense and horrifically destructive as at any period since World War Two. Virtually every one of these armed conflicts has been methodically set in motion by the only power capable of perpetrating such massive, simultaneous mayhem: the United States, along with its underlings in London, Paris and Tel Aviv – the true Axis of Evil.

Washington is embarked on a mad, scorched earth policy to terrorize the planet into submission through relentless escalation into a global state of war. Unable to maintain its dominance through trade and competition, the U.S. goes beyond the brink to plunge the whole planet into a cauldron of death. As Russia is learning, it is extremely difficult to avoid war when a great power insists on imposing it. That was a lesson inflicted on the world 75 years ago, by Nazi Germany.

Whoever coined the phrase “No Drama Obama” should be sentenced to a lifetime of silence. The First Black U.S. President systematically brought swastika-wearing fascists to power in Ukraine to start a war on Russia’s borders. The passengers of the Malaysian airliner are victims of Obama’s carefully crafted apocalypse, a pre-fabricated conflict that could consume us all. Obama methodically and without provocation laid waste to Libya and Syria, and now the jihadists unleashed by the United States and its allies are destroying Iraq all over again and threatening to erase Lebanon and Jordan and even the oil kingdoms of the Gulf. Obama has signed yet another blank check for Israel’s ghastly war of ethnic annihilation in Gaza – a crime against humanity for which the U.S. is fully as culpable as the apartheid Jewish State, which could not exist if it were not part of the U.S. superpower’s global war machine.

Robert Parry: Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment

Secretary of State John Kerry boasts that as a former prosecutor he knows he has a strong case against the eastern Ukrainian rebels and their backers in Russia in pinning last Thursday’s shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on them, even without the benefit of a formal investigation.

During his five rounds of appearances on Sunday talk shows, Kerry did what a judge might condemn as “prejudicing the case” or “poisoning the jury pool.” In effect, Kerry made a fair “trial” almost impossible, what a bar association might cite in beginning debarment proceedings against prosecutor Kerry.

If you were, say, a U.S. intelligence analyst sifting through the evidence and finding that some leads went off in a different direction, toward the Ukrainian army, for instance, you might hold back on your conclusions knowing that crossing senior officials who had already pronounced the verdict could be devastating to your career. It would make a lot more sense to just deep-six any contrary evidence.

Indeed, one of the lessons from the disastrous Iraq War was the danger of enforced “group think” inside Official Washington. Once senior officials have made clear how they want an assessment to come out, mid-level officials scramble to make the bosses happy.

Daniel Denvir: How to dismantle a school system

Racked by budget cuts, Pennsylvania’s schools are coming apart at the seams

Graduating seniors last month celebrated the end of a difficult year at Philadelphia’s Bartram High School, one prominent example of Pennsylvania’s deepening public education crisis.

Michael Miller, the father of one college-bound graduate, complained that the state keeps “taking money and taking money, and it’s a scary thought where we’ll be in five years.” He returned from military service in Afghanistan just as Republican Gov. Tom Corbett’s education budget cuts began to hit the state’s poorest districts.

For years Pennsylvania has served as a testing ground for the conservative theory of small government – more specifically, since 2010, when Corbett signed a no-new-taxes pledge crafted by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and rode a Tea Party wave into office. The effects have proved deleterious. Corbett’s cuts to public education have been particularly painful, with poor districts like Philadelphia bearing the brunt.

On July 10, 2014, in New York State, Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne Grady Flores to a year in prison and fined her $1,000 for photographing a peaceful demonstration at the U.S. Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field  (near Syracuse) where weaponized Reaper drones are remotely piloted in lethal flights over Afghanistan.  Dozens have been sentenced, previously, for peaceful protest there. But uniquely, the court convicted her under laws meant to punish stalkers, deciding that by taking pictures outside the heavily guarded base she violated a previous order of protection not to stalk or harass the commanding officer.

Mary Anne is a 58 year-old grandmother of three, from Ithaca, New York, where she is part of the Upstate Drone Action. [..]

The problem is not that Mary Anne lacks appreciation for the law of the land. She’s exercising her First Amendment right to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance. The problem is that Judge Gideon refuses to challenge military elites, some of whom never, ever want people of compassion and conscience to interfere with their use of threat, force, and even assassination to control people in other lands.

Mary Anne has appealed her case, and a NY judge has released her from prison until the appeal is resolved.  Another activist, Jack Gilroy, awaits sentencing, and in coming days and weeks, more activists will be tried on similar charges in the De Witt Town court. Judge Gideon and his fellow DeWitt Court Judge Robert Jokl have many more opportunities to think about these critical issues.  I hope they’ll be influenced by having encountered some of the finest people in the world as they hear the cases of peace activists in upstate New York.

Donna Smith: With New Obamacare Rulings, One Thing Is Certain: We Need Medicare for All for Life

It makes me crazy to see the latest news about a Federal Court striking down the tax credits (subsidies) offered on the Federal Affordable Care Act health exchanges because I know the media commentators will go crazy analyzing the politics of it all. The Republicans are celebrating; the Democrats are scrambling. And the people who hate the ACA/Obamacare as well as those who are pushing to achieve a longer term solution through single-payer reform will claim victory. The camp that will once again be completely ignored in this whirl of political analyzing will be the patients and the caregivers whose lives and security are threatened once again.

We won’t hear the patient and caregiver stories unless and until some of the politicians decide it would benefit them to prop us up in front of a camera in support of their particular position on health reform. While there are some very limited efforts going on to record stories, it has been since before the ACA/Obamacare was passed since anyone really cared to hear what happens to average people about their struggles with the profit-driven, dysfunctional US health system. No, Michael Moore will not be making another updated version of SiCKO and gathering stories for it as some have suggested to me — the original version still holds up well, sadly. [..]

What I really first thought when I saw the latest hit to people who need and want those tax credits/subsidies was too colorful to write here, but it wasn’t because I would lose anything as a result. I was so angry that more months and years of political manipulation would damage so many people when the solution that could heal us is so readily available and has been for almost half a century now. Medicare turns 49 on July 30th. We would do well to celebrate the program’s successes, acknowledge improvements we need to make, and share with our neighbors and friends how badly this nation needs to extend Medicare to all for life.

Laila Atawa: Muslims aren’t shocked to discover we are watched. But we won’t be scared

Can revelations about ‘sting’ operations move the government beyond 9/11-era discrimination? Because you can’t stop terrorism by alienating a generation of people

We know that we’re often discriminated against by our government and our fellow Americans, but studies still show that Muslim Americans feel more loyalty to the US than ever. Every year, more and more individuals from my faith commit themselves to civic engagement, seeking to educate themselves and their neighbors, and better the country in which they live – often because of the conviction that nobody else should have to face what they went through growing up after 9/11.

Though many Muslims Americans like me kept quiet in the years after 9/11 for fear of arousing illegitimate government suspicion, we’ve since learned that it is not silence that will keep the government from overstepping its bounds. We need to be visible, to be active, and to speak up when the government uses our religion as the basis for persecution. Revelations like even those in this latest, extensive report won’t scare us any more – they’ll only serve to push more Muslim Americans into public service.

Katrina vanden Huevel: The Downing of Flight 17 Should Trigger Talks, Not More Violence

The violence in eastern Ukraine has now claimed more innocent victims, with 298 dead in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Children, scientists headed to an AIDS conference, families on vacation-their deaths add to the hundreds of civilian casualties and tens of thousands of refugees victimized by the spreading conflict, which the Kiev government is now escalating.

The shooting of a civilian airliner is clearly a tragic mistake that no one wants to own, but that comes all too often in war zones. Currently, the Dutch government – 193 of its citizens perished in the crash – said it “would hold off assigning blame as it pursues its top priorities of recovering the victims’ bodies and conducting an independent investigation of the crash site in eastern Ukraine.”

However, in the United States, the tragedy has triggered a ferocious chorus of media and political condemnation of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Putin is called the “puppet master” or worse, with commentators asserting that he can end the war at will. The separatist militias in the east are scorned as Moscow’s pawns. The Kiev government’s bombing of its own cities and people is treated as a necessary response to Russian provocation.

All this ignores the context of this crisis and worse seems designed to fan the flames of the conflict. Already the United States has pimposed new sanctions http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/16/… on Russia and is pushing its reluctant European allies to join. The Russians have responded with sanctions of their own. The Ukrainian government’s attacks in the eastern regions continue, with US aid and involvement certain to increase.

Court decision is likely to undermine faith in the integrity of US judicial and financial system

In the flurry of rulings ending the Supreme Court’s latest term, an item that got relatively little notice was its decision not to review a case on Argentina’s government debt. This refusal let stand a lower court decision that makes the United States an extreme outlier in dealing with Argentina and potentially other troubled debtor nations.

The dispute has its origins in the decision of the Argentine government to default on its debt in December 2001. At the time, the government was struggling under an International Monetary Fund austerity program. Argentina’s economy had already shrunk 10 percent from its 1998 level – a much sharper falloff than the United States experienced after the 2008 financial crisis. Argentina’s unemployment rate was at 20 percent and rising. Still, the IMF was demanding further budget cuts as a condition for lending the money needed to keep paying its debt. [..]

In a world where the United States’ economy is no longer the largest or even close to it, we are not going to be able to write the rules for our own convenience. If countries like Argentina cannot count on being treated fairly in U.S. courts, they will simply take their business elsewhere. The loss will be ours, not theirs. The U.S. will again pay a high price for allowing well-connected people in the financial sector to set policy.

Robert Parry: Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment

Secretary of State John Kerry boasts that as a former prosecutor he knows he has a strong case against the eastern Ukrainian rebels and their backers in Russia in pinning last Thursday’s shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on them, even without the benefit of a formal investigation. [..]

If you were, say, a U.S. intelligence analyst sifting through the evidence and finding that some leads went off in a different direction, toward the Ukrainian army, for instance, you might hold back on your conclusions knowing that crossing senior officials who had already pronounced the verdict could be devastating to your career. It would make a lot more sense to just deep-six any contrary evidence.

Indeed, one of the lessons from the disastrous Iraq War was the danger of enforced “group think” inside Official Washington. Once senior officials have made clear how they want an assessment to come out, mid-level officials scramble to make the bosses happy.

If Kerry had cared about finding the truth about this tragedy that claimed the lives of 298 people, he would have simply noted that the investigation was just beginning and that it would be wrong to speculate based on the few scraps of information available. Instead he couldn’t resist establishing a narrative that has – in the eyes of the world – made Russian President Vladimir Putin the guilty party.

Eugene RobinsonL The Downside of Giving Weapons

The bodies and debris that rained from the Ukrainian sky offer a cautionary lesson about the danger of giving heavy weapons to non-state actors. I hope the hawks who wanted President Obama to ship anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian rebels are paying attention.

By now there is little doubt that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, with 298 people on board, was blasted out of the sky Thursday by a Russian-made SA-11 missile fired from eastern Ukraine. U.S. officials say they have solid evidence that Russia supplied such arms to the separatist rebels who control that part of the country.

It is unclear whether the missile was fired by rebels who had been trained to operate the complex SA-11 system or by Russian military advisers. This seems to me a distinction without a difference. Whoever pulled the trigger, Russia must bear responsibility-and be held accountable.The bodies and debris that rained from the Ukrainian sky offer a cautionary lesson about the danger of giving heavy weapons to non-state actors. I hope the hawks who wanted President Obama to ship anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian rebels are paying attention.

By now there is little doubt that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, with 298 people on board, was blasted out of the sky Thursday by a Russian-made SA-11 missile fired from eastern Ukraine. U.S. officials say they have solid evidence that Russia supplied such arms to the separatist rebels who control that part of the country.

It is unclear whether the missile was fired by rebels who had been trained to operate the complex SA-11 system or by Russian military advisers. This seems to me a distinction without a difference. Whoever pulled the trigger, Russia must bear responsibility-and be held accountable.

Aside from the thoughtful and humane analysis by Glenn Beck and Hugh Hewitt of the recent border crisis, conservatives have utilized this immigration issue to further the need for a “secure border.” Whereas Jeb Bush earlier this year labeled the desperate steps taken by illegal immigrants as “an act of love,” many in the Tea Party view the plight of refugee children at our border as an “invasion.” It is this sentiment that has fueled much of the latest GOP rhetoric. Ironically, wasting billions on a fence to protect us from people we employ in not only ludicrous, it makes a mockery of economic data. [..]

To put things into perspective, the 2015 VA budget is $163.9 billion. Instead of bemoaning the tens of millions used to help desperate children at the border, why not utilize the billions for a fence and give this money to veterans? Of course, budgets represent value systems and the GOP has pandered to Tea Party xenophobia and nativism in order to appease its voting base. The prospect of spending over $46-$49 billion to protect Americans from people they hire is pure folly; a policy that adheres to nativist rhetoric rather than CBO, Department of Labor, or Pew Research data. While the Tea Party and other conservatives would bemoan money spent on food stamps for hungry Americans, the $46-$49 billion to protect us from people that make up 9 percent of the Texas workforce and over 5 percent of the U.S. labor force is a wasteful expenditure. Ted Cruz is wrong; illegal immigrants don’t come for amnesty, they come because Americans utilize their labor.

Devin Fergus: Are auto insurance companies red-lining poor, urban drivers?

If you want to save 15% or more on car insurance, you may have to move – to a white, suburban neighborhood

It has long been government policy to root out overt discrimination based on race, sex, age, religious and, increasingly, sexual orientation. But in America, it remains politically correct and (in most states) legally permissible to profile based on postal code. They are routinely used by local governments to apportion tax dollars for public education – and by banks to deny or charge extra for loans to households in lower-income or working-class neighborhoods.

Nowhere is zip code profiling more obvious, and in no area does it more obviously violate basic notions of merit, than in auto insurance rating pricing. Where one lives – rather than how one drives – is in fact the primary determinant for how much you can save (or will be legally forced to spend) on auto insurance.

Robert Bullard and Richard Moore: How industrial disasters discriminate

The socioeconomic dimensions of chemical explosions

It is tempting to think that the horrific fertilizer explosion in West, Texas, that killed 15 people and injured almost 200 others last year couldn’t happen in your hometown.

Unfortunately, too many communities across the country have had similar disasters. A 2012 fire at the Chevron plant in Richmond, California, sent 15,000 people to the hospital. In January of this year, a chemical spill contaminated the drinking water of 300,000 people in Charleston, West Virginia. Numerous smaller incidents have forced communities across the U.S. to evacuate or shelter in place. And despite these incidents, there has been a steady increase in the number of these dangerous chemical facilities. In 2012 the Congressional Research Service reported that there were 12,440 facilities; in 2014, an interagency working group report released to the White House reported 12,700.

It takes only one chemical disaster to change a community for a lifetime. Vulnerable populations, especially low-income, black and Latino communities, are already disproportionately threatened daily by air pollution and the health risks associated with routine exposures. Many of these same chemical facilities also put communities at risk of a catastrophic disaster that could kill or injure thousands in minutes simply because the facilities refuse to use safer available chemicals or processes that could eliminate these hazards.

Last Monday, a chartered flight took 38 mothers and children, who had been held in a detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, to San Pedro Sula in Honduras. That’s a tough town of drug dealers, violence and children soldiers, sometimes called “The Murder Capital of the World.”

The deported Hondurans are among the flood of women and children, including 57,000 unaccompanied children, from Central America who have been entering the United States illegally. They are all classified as “illegal immigrants,” meaning they are seeking family and better lives in our country. If they were called “refugees,” that is people fleeing violence or war, they would be kept in refugee camps, like more than 16 million unfortunates in 125 countries around the world, from Pakistan with 1.6 million to Madagascar with just nine. If internally displaced persons, such as Syrians on the run from war and Palestinians in camps in the Occupied West Bank, are included, that number of displaced people rises to more than 50 million.

Faiza Patel: Post-9/11 overreach of secret federal court must end

Greenwald scoop on surveillance of Muslims brings Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into question

After weeks of hints and previews, National Security Agency muckraker Glenn Greenwald reported on the agency’s surveillance of five American Muslim men who seem more like political activists than terrorists. The story raises new questions about whether the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) can be trusted to serve as a bulwark against government overreach.

It’s no secret that, in the last decade, law enforcement agencies such as the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have targeted American Muslims for surveillance in the places where they gather, such as mosques and student groups. But to target an individual for electronic surveillance, law enforcement must typically convince a magistrate that there is probable cause to believe that she has engaged or is about to engage in criminal activity. We trust that our courts will not issue a warrant for our private communications without reason. As a lawyer working on surveillance issues, I am careful about where I conduct sensitive conversations. But I have never seriously believed that a judge would sign off on a warrant to monitor my emails or phone calls.

This story changes my calculus. It appears that the FISC authorized the surveillance of most of the men Greenwald named. The standard for such an order is more malleable than the familiar probable-cause yardstick. For an American citizen or legal permanent resident, the government must demonstrate probable cause to believe that he or she is an “agent of a foreign power.”

Aaron Cantú: The growing criminalization of homelessness

How developers and politicians create urban ‘social hygiene campaigns’

As the number of homeless people in America’s major cities has increased, so have ordinances criminalizing homelessness and pushing homeless families and individuals into the criminal justice system. Criminalization has become a tactic with which politicians have reconfigured cities to serve wealthier citizens and tourists, at the considerable expense of the poor. These politicians are rarely challenged, and developers, businesses and city officials have partnered with police and private security forces to “cleanse” urban spaces by any means necessary.

A new report from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty found the number of cities imposing penalties for camping, begging, sleeping, sitting or eating in public has risen sharply in the last two years. There are now laws against feeding the homeless in over 50 cities. Ordinances prohibiting sleeping in cars – specifically targeted at the destitute – have more than doubled nationwide since 2011. In Denver the City Council passed a controversial “urban camping ban” in 2012 to clear space for the continued development of its downtown into a “millennial playground,” complete with nightclubs, restaurants and a miniature-golf course. Honolulu’s mayor told The New York Times he had renewed a crackdown on the homeless because tourists “want to see their paradise … [not] homeless people sleeping.” And Phoenix announced the creation of “a new organization focused on downtown’s revitalization,” while at the same time launching an initiative to arrest street people with misdemeanor warrants.

This crackdown is happening without equally forceful measures to develop the nation’s supply of affordable housing, which has fallen by 12.8 percent since 2001 because of fewer subsidies for federal housing. The U.N. Human Rights Committee even condemned the trend as “cruel, inhuman, [and] degrading” in a recent report on the United States.

Philip Pilkington: The fight to reform Econ 101

Economics is a dismal nonscience, but it need not remain that way

During the last weekend of June, hundreds of students, university lecturers, professors and interested members of the public descended on the halls of University College London to attend the Rethinking Economics conference. They all shared a similar belief: that economics education in most universities had become narrow, insular and detached from the real world.

For a brief period after the financial crisis of 2008, the shortcomings of the economics profession and the way it is taught were recognized. Many economists offered up mea culpas of various kinds and conceded that since they did not foresee the biggest economic event since the Great Depression, there was probably something seriously wrong with the discipline. But as time passed and many economies began to experience gradual, somewhat muted recoveries, the profession regained its confidence.

Joe Conason: [Border Crisis Tests Religious Faith-and Some Fail Badly Border Crisis Tests Religious Faith-and Some Fail Badly]

Flamboyant piety has long been fashionable on the political right, where activists, commentators and elected officials never hesitate to hector us about their great moral and theological rectitude. Wielding the Scriptures like a weapon, these righteous right-wingers are always eager to condemn the alleged sins of others but reluctant to examine their own. They seem to spend far more time in posturing and preening than spiritual reflection. Rarely does anyone call them out on their failures to fulfill their proclaimed devotion, because, in this country, that is considered rude.

But occasionally something happens that separates the people of faith from the sanctimonious fakers. With thousands of defenseless children now gathered on America’s southern border, seeking asylum from deprivation and deadly violence, something like that is happening right now.

How is a concealed-carry gun permit OK to get in the voting booth, but an elderly woman’s Medicare card is not? Liberals have argued. Now it’s time for a verdict

This week, the US Department of Justice and the state of Texas started arguments in the first of what will be a summer-long dance between the two authorities over voting rights. There are three suits being tried in two districts over gerrymandering and Texas’s voter identification law – both of which are said to be racially motivated. In its filing, the DoJ describes the law as “exceed[ing] the requirements imposed by any other state” at the time that it passed. If the DoJ can prove the arguments in its filing, it won’t just defeat an unjust law: it could put the fiction of “voter fraud” to rest once and for all. [..]

But meeting that higher standard of explicit exclusionary intent comes with the opportunity to show some of the many skeptical Americans the ugly racism behind Republican appeals to “fairness” and warnings about fraud. Progressives have tried, and mostly failed, to show the institutional racism underpinning the sordid history behind voter ID laws; that may have been too subtle. In courts in Texas and North Carolina, the DoJ will make the jump from accusations that laws have a racial impact to straight-up calling voter ID laws racist.

This ought to be interesting.

David Cay Johnston: Stop the tax inversions of free-riding corporations

Walgreens, Pfizer, Medtronic and some other big American companies are working on a tax trick known as inversion. By acquiring or merging with a foreign company – the inversion – big companies can reduce or eliminate federal and state taxes on profits in the U.S.

The latest inversions have drawn a lot of criticism, even from sources usually considered cheerleaders for big business. “Positively Un-American,” declared Fortune magazine’s latest cover, while its story inside expressed revulsion at these moves.

Inversions, if not stopped, will spread. When Congress last enacted laws to thwart these moves in 2002, in part because of my reporting on an earlier round of inversions, I warned that the new laws included loopholes. As predicted, the inversion problem is back and could cause serious damage to both our economy and the rule of law.

Inversions are just part of a larger problem – one of the most important issues in economics and public policy, in fact. It’s the very same problem addressed by the Affordable Care Act, mandatory auto insurance requirements and motorcycle helmet laws.

It’s known as the free-rider problem. A free rider is someone who gets benefits that others pay for.

Tom Engelhardt: The Strangest Disaster on the Planet Right Now

Who even knows what to call it? The Iraq War or the Iraq-Syrian War would be far too orderly for what’s happening, so it remains a no-name conflict that couldn’t be deadlier or more destabilizing — and it’s in the process of internationalizing in unsettling ways. Think of it as the strangest disaster on the planet right now. After all, when was the last time that the U.S. and Russia ended up on the same side in a conflict? You would have to go back almost three-quarters of a century to World War II to answer that one. And how about the U.S. and Iran? Now, it seems that all three of those countries are sending in military hardware and, in the case of the U.S. and Iran, drones, advisers, pilots, and possibly other personnel.

Since World War I, the region that became Iraq and Syria has been a magnet for the meddling of outside powers of every sort, each of which, including France and Britain, the Clinton administration with its brutal sanctions, and the Bush administration with its disastrous invasion and occupation, helped set the stage for the full-scale destabilization and sectarian disintegration of both countries. And now the outsiders are at it again.

Cori Crider: A nurse at Gitmo refuses to force feed any more prisoners. Others should too

What the US military does to detainees at Guantánamo is shocking. Perhaps change can come from within

Last week, I was on the phone with my client, Abu Wa’el Dhiab – a detainee of the US government at Guantánamo Bay who has been cleared of any involvement in terrorism – discussing our litigation and whether he had reason to believe he might one day be released. He has been on a hunger strike for over a year and is fighting in court to stop the government from abusively force-feeding him, so he was listless, as is typical. But then he perked up. “I have great news”, he said. “Someone at Guantánamo has made a historic stand.”

One Navy nurse at Guantánamo had refused to force-feed detainees anymore and declared the practice unethical: I have come to the decision that I refuse to participate in this criminal act, Dhiab told me the nurse said. [..]

Since it isn’t technically a disciplinary matter – and frankly, even if it were – the rest of the doctors and nurses at Gitmo ought to join their colleague’s boycott. They should return to first principle of medicine, which is patient autonomy. They should insist on using force-feeding only when absolutely necessary and in ways that minimize, not maximize, the suffering it causes – a compromise my client would accept. In so doing, they would have the support of the American medical community, which has already condemned force-feeding and urged health professionals not to participate.