Tag: Opinion

How did Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech resonate on Wall Street? Sometimes the old saying is literally true: Silence is golden.

Here are some of the words and phrases that did not appear in President Obama’s speech: “Wall Street,” “bank,” “regulation,” “fraud,” “settlement,” “investigation,” “too big to fail,” and “Glass-Steagall.” He didn’t mention the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the Dodd/Frank financial reform bill. He didn’t discuss the cynical attempts to roll back financial reform in Congress — attempts that are supported by members of both parties — much less insist that those attempts be defeated.

Although the president discussed the economic plight of the majority of Americans, he made no mention of the financial industry’s central role in the devastating 2008 financial crisis, which made that plight so much worse. He talked of wage stagnation, but did not explore the financial industry’s role in the increasingly unjust economic redistribution of recent decades. Inequality doesn’t just happen. It’s produced by many forces, most of which either originate on Wall Street or are heavily influenced by it.

Stephan Richter: NSA and Obama: Yes, We Can

Why is President Obama so permissive with regard to excesses of US intelligence apparatus?

Few of his supporters would have ever thought that Barack Obama’s famous 2008 presidential campaign slogan would end up turning into the collective mantra of the US intelligence community during his term in office. But here we are: “Yes, We Can” is the best way to describe the arrogant attitude of the more than 50,000 spooks employed by the US government, whenever they are faced with any questions pertaining to the legitimacy of their actions.

Their arrogance is as breathtaking, as are their mostly phony protestations of operating under a carefully calibrated web of checks and balances. And Mr Obama’s timidity in tackling both phenomena is astonishing for a man who is a constitutional lawyer by training.

At this stage, the memory of the Church Committee is not just faint, but depressing. In 1975, Idaho Senator Frank Church chaired a special committee – the forerunner of the Senate Intelligence Committee – and mounted a vigorous, no-holds-barred investigation of the overreach of the spying agencies during the Nixon era.

The idea that a similarly vigorous defence of the vitality of American democracy, much needed though it is, could be mounted is simply unimaginable today. By whom? California Senator Dianne Feinstein, the current Senate Intelligence Committee chair?

Jill Filipovic: Nice try Republicans, but marriage isn’t the solution to poverty

If conservatives want to help the poor they should improve education, cut inequality, and ensure access to contraception

It’s time for marriage promotion programs to die.

The first problem is that they don’t actually convince people to get married; nor do they get fathers to spend more time with their children, make children more emotionally secure, encourage parents to stay together or make families more financially stable. The second is that, contrary to right-wing narratives, marriage doesn’t fix poverty – yet those same conservatives demand that the federal government continue to funnel money into failed marriage promotion programs, and even encourage politicians to curb reproductive rights to force couples into marrying. It’s bad policy stacked on bad policy, with women and their children being made the primary victims.

Juan Cole: Obama as Unreliable Narrator on Climate Action: From SOTU to NSA Spying at Copenhagen

When President Obama looked us in the eye and said that the US is not engaged in electronic surveillance for economic reasons, but only for the sake of security and anti-terrorism, he was lying through his teeth. He should be careful. His approval ratings have tanked in some large part because he has lost those who care about the 4th amendment and personal privacy. Reagan also became unpopular with Iran-Contra, when it became clear that he was lying to us what weapons he sold to Iran and what he did with the black money.

Lying is not fatal to a political career, but for the public to come to realize that you are systematically lying to them about something they care about- that is deadly.

Laura Poitras broke the story in a Danish newspaper and The Huffington Post also reported it, late Wednesday. The United States National Security Agency spied on delegates to the 2009 Climate Summit and used the knowledge they gained to game the negotiations in favor of the US (one of the world’s two major carbon polluters).

Republicans are dismally out of step with what matters to female voters

“Relatable” is the word that comes to mind with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. Though she holds the No. 4 position in the Republican House leadership, her image is all everywoman. Whether she’s sitting on a couch responding to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address or narrating the story of her classic American life in an upbeat video, she comes across as a warm and personable next-door neighbor who always has the coffee on and the time to listen. She was arguably the best person that Republicans could have presented to counter Obama. [..]

McMorris Rodgers asserted Tuesday night that Republicans stand for “an America that is every bit as compassionate as it is exceptional.” She invoked a party “that dreams big for everyone and turns its back on no one.” But until the GOP lives up to that kind of rhetoric with actual policies, even a messenger as appealing – and, yes, relatable -­ as a three-time mom who raised sheep, sold fruit and cleaned motel rooms as a kid can’t do much to end the gender gap that’s holding back her party.

Stephen Kinzer: Are Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Ambitions Clouding Her Morals?

Whether or not Clinton has formally announced her candidacy, her silence on Iran speaks louder than words

Asked in an interview this week about her presidential ambitions, Hillary Clinton gave an answer that qualified as a howler even by Clinton standards: “I’m not thinking about it.” [..]

One of the surest signs that Clinton is running for the presidency is her refusal to take a position on the greatest geopolitical question now facing the United States. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are engaged in a high-stakes effort to end 35 years of hostility between the United States and Iran. Debate about this initiative is intense in Washington. No one, however, knows the opinion of the woman who was Kerry’s immediate predecessor and is evidently seeking to govern the United States beginning in 2017. [..]

Clinton’s choice is clear. If she opposes détente with Iran, she will look like a warmonger who prefers confrontation to diplomacy. If she supports it, she will alienate a vital part of the base she is relying on to finance her presidential campaign. With this in mind, she has chosen to remain silent on the central foreign policy issue of the age. It is a classic act of political cowardice – the kind that often leads to victory at the polls.

Ray McGovern: No Tears for the Real Robert Gates

n the early 1970s, I was chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch in which Robert M. Gates worked as a young CIA analyst. While it may be true that I was too inexperienced at the time to handle all the management challenges of such a high-powered office, one of the things I did get right was my assessment of Gates in his Efficiency Report.

I wrote that if his overweening ambition were not reined in, young Bobby was sure to become an even more dangerous problem. Who could have known, then, how huge a problem? As it turned out, I was not nearly as skilled as Gates at schmoozing senior managers who thus paid no heed to my warning. Gates was a master at ingratiating himself to his superiors

The supreme irony came a short decade later when we – ALL of us, managers, analysts, senior and junior alike – ended up working under Gates. Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey had found in Gates just the person to do his bidding, someone who earned the title “windsock Bobby” because he was clever enough to position himself in whatever direction the powerful winds were blowing.

Norman Solomon: The State of Phony Populism

Barack Obama put on a deft performance Tuesday night. With trills of empathy, the president’s voice soared to hit the high notes. He easily carried a tune of economic populism. But after five years of Obama in the White House, Americans should know by now that he was lip-syncing the words.

The latest State of the Union speech offered a faint echo of a call for the bold public investment that would be necessary to reduce economic inequity in the United States. The rhetoric went out to a country that in recent years has grown even more accustomed to yesterday’s floor becoming today’s ceiling.

The speech offered nothing that could plausibly reverse the trend of widening income gaps. Despite Obama’s major drumroll about his executive order to increase the minimum wage for some federal contract employees, few workers would be affected. The thumping was loud, but the action was small.

The Promise Zones comes with no actual funding, only vows to help cities apply for grants. They are PR stunts, not solutions

On 8 January, the Obama administration announced the selection of five Promise Zones – high-poverty communities chosen to receive special federal attention. They are San Antonio, Texas; Choctaw Nation, Oklahoma; South-eastern Kentucky; Los Angeles, California and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I used to live in West Philly, one of the administration’s new promised lands, so I was curious about what my old neighbourhood stands to gain from its new status.

Not much, it turns out.

Comb through the White House announcement and beneath the flurry of bureaucrat chat (pdf) about “addressing multiple community revitalization challenges” and “increased access to proven tools” the stark fact emerges that the program does not allocate a single new dollar in aid:

Heather Long: Why is the US a decade behind Europe on ‘chip and pin’ cards?

Perhaps the Target data breach involving 100m credit and debit cards will finally wake up the US on its outdated technology

If you live in the US, you probably heard about the 100m credit and debit card numbers that were stolen from Target’s databases recently. (Target initially stated 40m cards were at risk and then revised the figure up).

While Target tries to limit the damage (they recently sent out an email offering free credit monitoring), the bigger question people are rightly asking is why is the US a decade behind Europe on issuing safer “chip and pin” credit and debit cards? How did we let it get this bad?

I remember arriving in the UK for graduate school in 2004 and being issued credit and debit cards after opening a British bank account. My American colleagues and I were fascinated by these pieces of plastic. They were black and red – we called them “Darth Maul cards” after the Star Wars character – and they had microchips embedded in them, something few of us had ever seen before. It was relatively new technology at the time, used to protect against fraud. It’s now in place across Europe (and beyond) and has greatly reduced data theft (pdf).

Bryce Covert: The Government Is a Terrible Marriage Matchmaker

First it was Senator Marco Rubio: marriage is “the greatest tool” to lift people out of poverty. Then it was Ari Fleischer: the best way to fight income inequality is by “helping the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay in school, get married and have children-in that order.” And then on Sunday it was Ross Douthat: “one of the biggest boosts to opportunity comes from having married parents.”

Conservatives are lately doing some thinking about poverty and income inequality, but the answer they seem to keep landing on is marriage. True, being married certainly is associated with financial benefits. The poverty rate is about five times higher for single parents than for married couples, which can have a significant impact on children’s well-being and future prospects. But to turn that from a statistic to a solution, the next leap would be to push for the government to push people into marriages. Unfortunately for conservatives, the government is terrible at getting people together.

In seeking to push people toward marital bliss, the government uses a carrot and a stick: incentivizing some couples with spending on pro-marriage counseling programs while attempting to penalize others who don’t marry by denying them tax benefits. Neither of these attempts to rig the marriage market work.

Carol Schachet: Today’s Peasant Movement – Sophisticated, Threatened, and Our Best Hope for Survival

The term peasant often conjures up images of medieval serfs out of touch with the ways of the world around them. Such thinking is out of date. Today, peasants proudly and powerfully put forward effective strategies to feed the planet and limit the damages wrought by industrial agriculture. What’s more, they understand the connections between complex trade and economic systems, champion the rights of women, and even stand up for the rights of gay men and lesbians.

These are not your great ancestors’ peasants.

“A peasant is a scientist. The amount and quality of knowledge we have been developing and practicing for centuries is highly useful and appropriate,” said Maxwell Munetsi, a farmer from Zimbabwe and a member of the Via Campesina. [..]

The success of peasants means success for all of us, because they are leading the way in feeding the world, counteracting greenhouse gas emissions and other environmentally toxic poisons, conserving water and biodiversity and expanding social and economic justice. The peasant movement chant of “Globalize the struggle, globalize the hope” is a roadmap toward a sustainable, dignified future.

The National Security Agency depends on huge computers that guzzle electricity in the service of the surveillance state. For the NSA’s top executives, maintaining a vast flow of juice to keep Big Brother nourished is essential-and any interference with that flow is unthinkable.

But interference isn’t unthinkable. And in fact, it may be doable.

Grassroots activists have begun to realize the potential to put the NSA on the defensive in nearly a dozen states where the agency is known to be running surveillance facilities, integral to its worldwide snoop operations.

Organizers have begun to push for action by state legislatures to impede the electric, water and other services that sustain the NSA’s secretive outposts.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The President and the Post-Obama Era

President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday is about more than the final three years of his presidency. Its purpose should be to influence the next decade of American political life and begin shaping the post-Obama era.

For the first time since his early days in office, Obama has the philosophical winds at his back. He may be struggling with his approval ratings, but the matters the president hopes to move to the center of the national agenda-rising inequality and declining social mobility-are very much on the nation’s mind.

The days leading up to Obama’s best chance to redirect the country’s conversation brought two important signals that the tectonic plates beneath our politics are shifting. One was a striking Pew Research Center poll showing that on issues related to economic and social justice, Democrats and independents are on the same page while Republicans find themselves isolated.

Gary Younge: If Darrin Manning were a high school dropout, he’d still have the right to walk the streets unmolested

An obsession with deserving victims means the horror of the injustice is calibrated against the honour of the individual

On Tuesday 7 January Darrin Manning, 16, emerged from the Philadelphia subway with his high school basketball team-mates on their way to a game. With the region in the grip of the polar vortex it was viciously cold – so harsh their principal had given them hats, gloves and scarves to wear. The youngsters say they saw a police officer “staring them down” and Manning says one of them “may have said something smart”. The police say they saw a dozen young men running in “ski masks”. The police gave chase; the young men ran. Manning stopped running thinking it implied guilt. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” He was first tackled to the ground by several police and then frisked by a female officer with such ferocity that he ended up in hospital with a ruptured testicle. [..]

This is less of an esoteric point than it might first appear. A study last week revealed that almost 50% of black men in the US under the age of 23 have been arrested; that’s roughly the same percentage as black boys who fail to graduate with their appropriate year group. Meanwhile, almost one in 10 young black men are behind bars. Born in the poorest areas, herded into the worst schools, policed, judged and sentenced in the most discriminatory fashion, by the time African American men reach manhood the odds have been heavily stacked against them. Many have less than stellar credentials. That does not give the state the right to strip them of their manhood or deprive them of their human rights and dignity

Jarrett Murphy: Can de Blasio Make the Rent Less Damn High?

Mayor Bill de Blasio cannot be accused of haste in filling out his administration. Three weeks into his term, we still have Bloomberg commissioners running housing, social services, fire, sanitation, finance, and on and on. None of those high-profile gaps on the de Blasio depth chart will matter, of course, if in six months’ time the city seems well run, and de Blasio achieves big items on his agenda. In fact, it’s some of the lower-profile posts, which almost no one is talking about, that will make the biggest difference for those living through the worst of times in de Blasio’s “tale of two cities.” [..]

The de Blasio appointments to the RGB will be a test of how he squares his commitment to progressive action with his political need to keep the real-estate/development community-who donate a lot to campaigns-reasonably happy.

Last year, de Blasio attended an event called the People’s RGB and, according to attendees, called for a rent freeze. “We believe the data on the housing market provided by the RGB’s statistical staff consistently supports tenants’ calls for a rent freeze,” writes Katie Goldstein, the director of organizing at Tenants & Neighbors, in an e-mail. She notes that some members of the RGB in recent years “have been unfamiliar with rent-regulated housing” and says advocates are pushing to tighten the qualifications for RGB membership.

For now, she adds, “There is no shortage of smart, experienced, dedicated people who could sit on the RGB and represent the real needs of the majority of New Yorkers.”

President Obama’s State of the Union Address, according to briefings and leaks, will emphasize the president’s use of executive power to get the public’s business done despite a divided and severely deadlocked Congress.

That’s a good, overdue idea.

But the leaks do not mention one of the most important executive powers a president has to deal with a 30-year crisis of steadily declining living standards for most Americans. That is the president’s right to issue executive orders setting standards for federal contractors. As the union federation Change to Win has pointed out, government contractors create more low wage jobs than Walmart and McDonalds combined. [..]

President Obama has the power to make a practical difference in the lives of millions of workers and their families. He should declare bluntly that he aims to use that power, and dare Republicans to say that these workers are overpaid.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: They’re Fast-Tracking the Future, TPP Style – But We Can Stop Them

The “TPP,” or Trans-Pacific Partnership, is our nation’s newest proposed trade deal. It was negotiated without democratic input, and they’re trying to ram it through Congress the same way. Like NAFTA before it, the TPP would kill jobs. It would also cause lasting harm to democracy, here in the United States and around the world.

There has been an understandable sense of outrage over the Obama administration’s attempt to ram the most extreme trade deal yet through Congress with a “fast-track” provision that forbids amendments or filibustering. Representatives who have had very little chance to review the bill will be expected to vote on it without the chance to change it. [..]

Although these negotiators were appointed by Democrats, their positions don’t seem to differ from those taken by Republican Administrations. That reflects a political system which is increasingly being corrupted by campaign cash, and by the post-political work opportunities which American-run multinationals can offer sitting politicians.

It’s not unfair to say that the flaws in this treaty reflect the flaws in our democracy.

Harold Meyerson: Raising the Minimum is the Bare Minimum

In 1995, when John Sweeney ran the first and as-yet-only insurgent campaign for the presidency of the AFL-CIO, his platform took the form of a book entitled America Needs a Raise. If that title rang true in 1995, it clangs with deafening authority today.

Which leads us to the only problem with the current campaigns to raise the minimum wage: It’s not just workers at the low end of the wage scale who need a raise. It’s not just the work of the bottom 9 percent of labor force that is undervalued. It’s the work of the bottom 90 percent.

Conservatives who oppose raising the minimum wage argue that we need to address the decline of the family and the failure of the schools if we are to arrest the income decline at the bottom of the economic ladder. But how then to explain the income stagnation of those who are, say, on the 85th rung of a 100-rung ladder? How does the decline of the family explain why all gains in productivity now go to the richest 10 percent of Americans only? And are teachers unions really to blame for the fact that wages now constitute the lowest share of Gross Domestic Product since the government started measuring shares, and that corporate profits now constitute the highest share?

Frank Bruni: Fashion, Fairness and the Olympics

The February issue of Vogue, which will begin to show up on newsstands this week, includes details and a photo of something new from the celebrated fashion designer Alexander Wang, but it’s not quite like anything he’s done before, and it’s more than a piece of apparel. It’s a statement of solidarity, a cry of protest and a sign of just how many people from just how many walks of life are determined not to let the Olympics come and go without shining a light on Russia’s discrimination against, and persecution of, L.G.B.T. people.

It’s a winter hat, to be exact. A beanie, he calls it. Black. Warm. But the most important detail is this: It spells out P6, a shorthand for Principle 6 of the Olympic charter, and it speaks to a strategy by gay rights advocates-specifically, by the groups Athlete Ally and All Out-to get spectators and athletes in Sochi to register their opposition to outrageously repressive, regressive anti-gay laws in Russia without running afoul of one of them, which bans what it vaguely calls gay “propaganda,” or of the International Olympic Committee’s own restrictions against political statements.

What do you give a Wall Street CEO who has presided over a decade of fraud and criminality, who directly supervised a unit that lost $6 billion through incompetent and illegal trading, and whose reign of crime and mismanagement has cost his institution $20 billion in the last year alone — a figure that undoubtedly would’ve been much larger in a less morally compromised regulatory environment?

If you are the Board of Directors of JPMorgan Chase, you give him a raise.

Let’s not mince words: Jamie Dimon’s bank is, as we said last May, the scandal of our time. The crimes committed during Dimon’s time in senior management include bribery, mortgage fraud, investor fraud, consumer fraud, credit card fraud, forgery, perjury, violation of sanctions against Iran and Syria, violation of laws prohibiting the bilking of active-duty service members … shall we continue?

The Captain and Tennile are getting divorced. But when it comes to the Board and Jamie, love will keep them together.

Robert Naiman: Vermont’s Senator Sanders Is Right: Use War Money to Take Care of Veterans

Sometimes Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders does something that reminds us that it does actually matter that he’s an Independent in the best sense of the word: thinking for himself, not accepting the DC “conventional wisdom” that often defines the limits of reform.

Now, Bernie’s done it again, proposing to use war funding to pay for veterans’ benefits, with the most politically salient feature of his proposal being its reversal of the military pension cuts included in the Ryan-Murray budget deal. [..]

Economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have long argued that we fundamentally undercount the cost of war if we exclude the cost of caring for veterans afterwards. The future cost of caring for veterans is a fundamental cost of war, and honest budgeting would include it in accounting for war cost.

Kimi Naidoo: Message to World Elites: Don’t Bet on Coal and Oil Growth

A mind-boggling sum of about US$ 800 for each person on the planet is invested into fossil fuel companies through the global capital markets alone. That’s roughly 10% of the total capital invested in listed companies. The amount of money invested into the 200 biggest fossil fuel companies through financial markets is estimated at US$ 5.5 trillion.

By keeping their money in coal and oil companies, investors are betting a vast amount of wealth, including the pensions and savings of millions of people, on high future demand for dirty fuels. The investment has enabled fossil fuel companies to massively raise their spending on expanding extractable reserves, with oil and gas companies alone (state-owned ones included) spending the combined GDP of Netherlands and Belgium a year, in belief that there will be ongoing demand for dirty fuel.

Michelle Chen: Capitalists for a Higher Minimum Wage

A Silicon Valley multimillionaire and conservative pundit wants to give his state’s poorest workers a raise. Huh?

Entrepreneur Ron Unz, known for his reactionary views on immigration (along with controversial commentary on race, crime, IQ and social policy), is campaigning for a state ballot measure to lift California’s minimum wage to $12-well above the $10 minimum currently set to take effect in 2016 (and a giant step above the federal wage floor of $7.25).

Some progressives might be puzzled that Unz, who in the late 1990s famously pushed a ballot measure to scrap bilingual education programs in California, has taken on this populist fight, albeit with an odd neo-Fordist air.

Of course, the Right’s resistance to this has never been realistic; empirical research shows that lifting the federal minimum wage could boost earnings for a third of the country’s workforce and drive broad economic growth. The opposition is mostly ideological, based on overblown charges that high labor costs will harm employers, along with the business community’s general antipathy toward state regulation of wages.

President Obama’s second inaugural address touched on the reality that the United States has a dysfunctional election system. Describing the nation’s progress, as well as the ways in which the nation needs to progress, the president declared, “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.”

Obama drew knowing applause when he spoke that truth in January 2013, as he did in November 2012, when just hours after his re-election the president noted that millions of Americans had “waited in line for a very long time” to vote. Then, in an ad lib that got more attention that his prepared remark, the president added: “By the way we have to fix that.”

On Wednesday, the process of fixing the problem-and of moving America a few more steps toward democracy-accelerated. A little.

Ralph Nader: America’s Invisible and Costly Human Rights Crisis

When the news broke years ago that U.S. forces were using torture on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, many politicians and the public expressed appropriate horror. There was shock and disappointment that our country would resort to such inhumane, abusive actions against our fellow human beings, most of whom then were innocent victims of bounty hunters in Afghanistan.

With this frame of reverence in mind, it is unfortunate that many Americans do not contemplate-or are simply unaware of-blatant torture occurring in prisons every day right here in the United States. This form of physical and psychological violence is called many things: “isolation”, “administrative segregation”, “control units”, “secure housing” and by its most well-known designation, solitary confinement. This practice of imprisonment is widely used across our nation with disturbingly little oversight and restriction. The full extent of the use of solitary confinement is truly alarming-it is most certainly a human rights abuse and a blight on our national character.

Tim White: Finding a Needle in a Digital Haystack

LAST year the private sector spent $67.2 billion on cybersecurity services. Nevertheless, according to a recent investigation by Verizon, 60 percent of successful hacks were not detected until months after the attacks began. In the wake of recent high-profile hacker attacks against Target, Neiman Marcus and other retailers, the obvious question is: Why hasn’t all that money done any good?

It’s not for lack of trying. Much of the money is well spent, paying for armies of technical engineers and state-of-the-art security applications.

The problem is not the resources, or the personnel, or the data. It’s that many organizations simply don’t know how to arrange the data to identify suspicious patterns and weaknesses, at least not fast enough. There’s too much data, and not enough perspective.

Dean Baker: France’s Hollande is completely out of touch with modern economics

There’s no economic reason for France to cut social spending at a point when its economy has enormous excess capacity

French President François Hollande startled many of his supporters last week, along with fans of evidence-based economics everywhere, when he rejected modern economics in favor of the sayings of an early 19th-century French economist. After winning the election on a platform that the government needed to fill the gap in demand created by the collapse of asset bubbles, Hollande repeated the old line from Jean-Baptiste Say that “supply creates its own demand.”

While the appeal to French national pride may be touching, it is completely out of touch with modern economics. His plan to cut spending will have serious consequences. We should have known at least since Keynes that economies can be subject to prolonged periods of high unemployment due to inadequate demand. The problem is that the private sector does not necessarily generate enough demand to buy back everything it produces, leaving large numbers of workers unemployed and vast amounts of productive capacity sitting idle.

Have you heard? Goldman Sachs is “a shell of its former self.”

Fortunately for its executives, this “shell” earned $8.91 billion in 2013, just a few short years after its leaders mismanaged it into the ground as its bankers committed serial fraud. [..]

Politico chief economic correspondent Ben White concludes that “Washington won in a blowout.”

In this version of recent history, populist and reform-minded political leaders turned the “swashbuckling” wolves of Wall Street (there are other, more apt adjectives) into whimpering puppies … and may soon make them an endangered species. [..]

White’s right about one thing. There was a war — but Wall Street won it. What’s more, it’s not satisfied with the billions it’s already looted from our ransacked economy. It’s counting on narratives like White’s to help it get even more.

Robert Sheer: We’re All Suspects In Barack Obama’s America

Barack Obama’s speech Friday on surveillance was his worst performance, not as a matter of theatrical skill, though he clearly did not embrace his lines, but in its stark betrayal of his oft proclaimed respect for constitutional safeguards and civil liberty.

His unbridled defense of the surveillance state opened the door to the new McCarthyism of Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who on Sunday talk shows were branding Edward Snowden as a possible Russian spy.

Instead of crediting Snowden for forcing what the president concedes is a much-needed debate, Obama bizarrely cited the example of Paul Revere and the other early American rebels in the Sons of Liberty to denounce their modern equivalent. But the “secret surveillance committee” Obama referenced that Revere and his fellow underground conspirators established was intended to subvert rather than celebrate the crimes of the British controlled government in power.

Samuel R. Bagenstos: A Supreme Court Case Threatens the Independence of Americans with Disabilities

ver the past three decades, disability rights activists and state governments have developed a program that enables people with disabilities to live independently in their own homes, one that avoids costly and stultifying institutionalization. But a case to be argued in the Supreme Court this Tuesday threatens to undo the great progress they have made.

The case is Harris v. Quinn. The program it threatens is called consumer-controlled personal assistance services. That program responds to a basic problem: Many people with disabilities are fully capable of making choices about how to live their lives, but they lack the physical ability to perform the necessary tasks themselves.

Too often, our society has responded to this problem by placing people with disabilities in nursing homes or other institutions. But those institutions segregate people with disabilities from the broader community and deprive their residents of an array of choices regarding how to live their lives.

Michael Cohen: Richard Sherman’s immature gloating shows he’s not ready for sport stardom

Sherman wasn’t just trash-talking his opponents, he kicked them while they were down and rubbed salt in their wounds

There’s a lot of things that you can say about Richard Sherman, the powerhouse cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks (many of which he has said himself). He’s one of the best defensive players in all of American football. He comes from a disadvantaged background, went to Stanford University and got straight As. He is a brash, bold trash-talker on the football field. But for all his glory, he still has a lot to learn about sportsmanship.

In case you missed it, Sherman went on the tirade heard round the world on Sunday night after he led his team to the NFC championship victory. Reactions have ranged from those who think he’s “classless” to those who defend him as a stand-up guy who was merely showed some well-earned emotion after making the crucial game winning play.

There’s just one problem: Sherman’s actions were classless and, what’s worse, violated one of the few basic norms that exist in sports, namely to treat your opponents with a modicum of respect.

In a lawsuit that some say could bankrupt the Orleans Parish public school system, an appeals court has decided that the School Board wrongly terminated more than 7,000 teachers after Hurricane Katrina. Those teachers were not given due process, and many teachers had the right to be rehired as jobs opened up in the first years after the storm, the court said in a unanimous opinion. [..]

The decision validates the anger felt by former teachers who lost their jobs. It says they should have been given top consideration for jobs in the new education system that emerged in New Orleans in the years after the storm.

Beyond the individual employees who were put out, the mass layoff has been a lingering source of pain for those who say school system jobs were an important component in maintaining the city’s black middle class. New Orleans’ teaching force has changed noticeably since then. More young, white teachers have come from outside through groups such as Teach for America. And charter school operators often offer private retirement plans instead of the state pension fund, which can discourage veteran teachers who have years invested in the state plan.

Ana Marie Cox: Who should we fear more with our data: the government or companies?

The masters of modern spycraft have learned the science of predicting human behavior from the masters of marketing

If civil libertarians who are disappointed with the [proposals Obama outlined last week v] had to write a wish list for what kind of restraints they’d like to see on National Security Agency data-gathering, what might that include? Here’s an educated guess:

Individual Control: The right to exercise control over what personal data organizations collect from them and how they use it.

Transparency: The right to easily understandable information about privacy and security practices.

Focused Collection: The right to reasonable limits on the personal data that organizations collect and retain.

Accountability: The right to have personal data handled by organizations with appropriate measures in place to assure they adhere to the Bill of Rights.

Nevermind that the Obama administration has endorsed all of those rights. Almost two years ago, actually. What’s more, they got Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL to agree to observe them. The bad news: these rights apply only to web-browsing data gathered by companies that deploy “behavior-based marketing”. You know, the kind of tracking that means a search for “white wedding” will serve of ads for The Knot (even if you were looking for Billy Idol).

Katrina vanden Heuvel: ‘We can’t wait’ for Congress

“I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” President Obama told his Cabinet, announcing that he wouldn’t just be “waiting for legislation” from the obstructionist Congress to push his agenda. The announcement buoyed progressives, who have long urged the president to act boldly on his own authority, and provided new fuel for right-wing fulminations about “dictatorship” and “tyranny.”

Obama’s pledge echoes his “We Can’t Wait” campaign leading into the 2012 elections, in which the president similarly announced a range of executive initiatives. That effort mostly demonstrated how difficult it is for any executive action to gain public attention. [..]

Presidents often have no choice but to act on their authority. Too often, secret and aggressive bureaucracies, such as the National Security Agency, drive their actions. Obama’s pledge to use his pen and his phone could help the president to lead more forcefully in areas vital to the country and popular with the people.

Kathy Kelly: For Whom the Bell Tolls

This month, from Atlanta, GA, the King Center announced its “Choose Nonviolence” campaign, a call on people to incorporate the symbolism of bell-ringing into their Martin Luther King Holiday observance, as a means of showing their commitment to Dr. King’s value of nonviolence in resolving terrible issues of inequality, discrimination and poverty here at home.  The call was heard in Kabul, Afghanistan.   [..]

My young friends, ever inspired by Dr. King’s message, prepared a Dr. King Day observance as they shared bread and tea for breakfast. They talked about the futility of war and the predictable cycles of revenge that are caused every time someone is killed.  Then they made a poster listing each of the killings they had learned of in the previous seven days.

They didn’t have a bell, and they didn’t have the money to buy one. So Zekerullah set to work with a bucket, a spoon and a rope, and made something approximating a bell.  In the APV courtyard, an enlarged vinyl poster of Dr. King covers half of one wall, opposite another poster of Gandhi and Khan Abdul Gaffir Khan, the “Muslim Gandhi” who led Pathan tribes in the nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgar colonial independence movement to resist the British Empire. Zekerullah’s makeshift “bell’ was suspended next to King’s poster.  Several dozen friends joined the APVs as we listened to rattles rather than pealing bells. The poster listing the week’s death toll was held aloft and read aloud.