Tag: Opinion

For almost 40 years Republicans have pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to convince working-class whites that the poor were their enemies.

The big news is it’s starting to backfire. [..]

It was a cunning strategy designed to split the broad Democratic coalition that had supported the New Deal and Great Society, by using the cleavers of racial prejudice and economic anxiety. It also conveniently fueled resentment of government taxes and spending.

The strategy also served to distract attention from the real cause of the working class’s shrinking paychecks — corporations that were busily busting unions, outsourcing abroad, and replacing jobs with automated equipment and, subsequently, computers and robotics.

But the divide-and-conquer strategy is no longer convincing because the dividing line between poor and middle class has all but disappeared. “They” are fast becoming “us.”

Jill Filipovic: Why is there an ambition gap between millennial men and women?

Perceiving systemic workplace and social bias, today’s women may be making logical decisions not to aim too high

Women are outpacing men in education and have been for two decades. They outnumber men on college campuses. They earn more undergraduate degrees. They earn more master’s degrees. They earn more doctoral degrees. For every 100 men who graduate with a college degree this year, 140 women will do the same.

Yet women still make less money and advance in the workplace less often. They are more likely to leave their jobs, especially after having kids. As they age, they face an increased risk of poverty and economic instability.

A new Pew study shows that millennial women (for the purposes of the study, women ages 18 to 32) now make almost as much money as their male peers – a victory insofar as the pay gap is narrower than ever before but disturbing when you consider that even higher educational attainment is not resulting in parity. Women have earned nearly 10 million more college degrees than men over the past two decades, but their average wages remain lower. The shrinking pay gap, too, is not just because women are making more money than they were two decades ago (although they are); it is also because men – and in particular, millennial men – are making less.

Matthew Harwood: How the NSA makes the nation insecure

On Dec. 18, President Barack Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies released a surprisingly critical report of the United States government’s intelligence practices since 9/11. The immediate reaction to the panel’s 300-plus-page report has rightly focused on its 46 recommendations for intelligence reform, such as ending the National Security Agency’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records that seeks to analyze the relationship networks of a minute number of counterterrorism targets. Yet it would be a mistake to pay attention only to the report’s particulars and ignore the very American civil libertarian philosophy animating the panel’s interpretation of what “security,” at its core, means.

The five-member group, comprising privacy, legal and national-security experts handpicked by the White House, does not simply conceive of security as national or homeland security. Rather, it passionately argues for a much richer, and more traditional, understanding of what security means to a free people, emphasizing the people’s Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The panel then immediately goes on to correctly equate security with freedom from governmental intrusion. “This form of security is a central component of the right to privacy,” it writes, “which Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously described as ‘the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.'”

Robert Fisk: Now it’s Middle Eastern Regimes Fighting al-Qa’ida, While the US Ties Itself Up in Knots

This is “Arab unity” as we have never seen it before. But watch out

And so, for the first time in recent history, it seems that the “war against terror” – and specifically against al-Qa’ida – is being fought by Middle East regimes rather than their foreign investors.

Sure, American drones still smash into al-Qa’ida operatives, wedding parties and innocent homes in Pakistan. But it’s General al-Sisi of Egypt, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran – even powerless President Michel Sleiman of Lebanon – who are now fighting “terrorists”.

It shows how powerful the bad guys have become that mutually antagonistic dictators and satraps can gang together against America’s enemy. This is “Arab unity” as we have never seen it before. The Ottoman Empire lives again. But watch out.

Last week, the New York Times reported that “Democratic Party leaders … have found an issue they believe can lift their fortunes both locally and nationally in 2014: an increase in the minimum wage.”

This is a good signal that millions of underpaid workers in the world’s richest country will finally get a raise. It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s worth looking at how we got to this point.

Although the fact that the majority of Americans were not sharing in the gains from economic growth had been well known and well documented for decades, it was not a significant political issue until a grassroots movement, known as Occupy Wall Street, made it one. [..]

Unfortunately the White House-supported increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 over two years — important as it is — will not reverse that much of the damage of the past four decades. Now imagine a movement for labor law reform, of the kind that President Obama promised to support in his 2008 presidential campaign: in particular, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would restore the rights of U.S. workers — vastly degraded since 1980 — to form unions and bargain collectively. Of course the big business lobbies would fight it much harder than a minimum wage increase. But in 2009, when the Democrats had the Congress as well as the presidency, there was at least a possibility.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Marijuana Injustices

I have no desire to smoke marijuana, partly because doing so might drive me back to the cigarette habit I broke two decades ago. I don’t want to be one of those “cool parents” who pretend to be as culturally advanced as their kids. In my case, that’s a ridiculous aspiration anyway.

And I agree with those who call attention to the dangers of excessive indulgence in marijuana and want to encourage people to resist it. Nobody wants us to become a nation of stoners.

Nonetheless, I have come to believe that we should legalize or at least decriminalize marijuana use. The way we enforce marijuana laws is unconscionable. The arrest rates for possession are astoundingly and shamefully different for whites and African-Americans. The incongruence between what our statutes require and what Americans actually do cannot be sustained.

Dean Baker: Obamacare and Those Invincible Youngsters

There is an ongoing media obsession with the number of young people who sign up for health care insurance through Obamacare. We have been repeatedly told that the success of the program depends on large numbers of healthy young people — the “young invincibles” — signing up for the program. [..]

The key issue about the success of the exchanges has always been their ability to attract healthy people of all ages. The subsidy from healthy to less healthy already exists in the employer provided insurance market where employers effectively deduct the same amount from workers’ wages for insurance regardless of their health condition. So this re-distributional aspect of Obamacare already exists in the market that provides most people with their insurance.

The other reason why the focus on the young invincibles is harmful is that it distracts the public from looking at ways to improve Obamacare. These focus on reducing or eliminating the role for private insurers in the system as well as other sources of waste.

Fifty years after President Lyndon Johnson announced a “War on Poverty,” a majority of Americans believe that persistent economic hardship is the result of a broken economy, not of personal or government failures. They broadly agree that the government has a responsibility to use its resources to fight poverty, and should pursue a target of reducing it by half over the next decade.

Those are the conclusions of a public opinion survey published Tuesday by the Center for American Progress. The report assessed perceptions of poverty in general, as well as opinions of the War on Poverty in retrospect and of policy proposals on the table now. As lawmakers move to cut benefits and refuse to consider serious investments in the economy, in education and in healthcare, the survey is another reminder that those are precisely the investments people want the government to make.

Michelle Goldberg: This Is David Brooks on Drugs

he fact that David Brooks’s wistful, self-satisfied moralism cloaks a serious moral obtuseness is usually hardly worth noting. It’s simply to be expected, as predictable as Tom Friedman bumping into a taxi driver with pithy insights about globalization or Ross Douthat disapproving of his coevals’ sex lives. Still, Brooks’s lament about marijuana legalization is astonishing in its blindness to ruined lives and the human stakes of a serious policy debate. Somehow, he’s written a whole column about the drug war that doesn’t once contain the words “arrest” or “prison.” It’s evidence not just of his own writerly weakness but of the way double standards in the war on drugs shield elites from reckoning with its consequences. [..]

What’s missing here, of course, is any reckoning with the social costs of that discouragement. According to Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, a 2012 book by scholars at the Rand Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center, there are currently 40,000 prison inmates with marijuana convictions, and “perhaps half of them are in prison for offenses related to marijuana alone.” A recent ACLU report tells us that between 2001 and 2010, there were over 8 million marijuana arrests in the United States, 88 percent of them just for possession.

Jessica Weisberg: [Undocumented Lawyers and Rogue States ]

In the first week of 2014, thirteen states increased their minimum wage, Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use and California restricted gun registration and granted more rights to transgender students. There are always new laws each January: Illinois banned anyone under 18 from using a tanning salon, Oregon now permits new mothers to keep their placentas, and Wisconsin has legitimized “pedal pubs”-which, for the uninitiated, refers to a dozen or so bicycles hitched together with a keg mounted on top. But the ideological aggressiveness of some of the 2014 laws have inspired many to proclaim 2014 as a “liberal moment.” Another example supporting the liberal moment thesis: the California Supreme Court ruled last week that an undocumented immigrant who passed the state bar should be able to practice law. [..]

Such laws have made the quality of life for undocumented immigrants vastly different from state to state: immigrants can get a driver’s license in New Mexico, and they pay the same tuition as their high-school classmates at any state university, but next door, in Arizona, they’ll never be eligible for a license and will pay three times as much for college as their peers. California has become, arguably, the most immigrant-friendly state in the country, having just implemented the Trust Act, a law that limits ICE’s power to hold and deport nonviolent immigrants.

Laura Wright Treadway: The Benefits of Digging in the Dirt

Nature schools are helping make outdoor play a priority for a generation of kids suffering from nature-deficit disorder.

In his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, which introduced the world to the term “nature-deficit disorder,” journalist Richard Louv argued that children need to unplug from computers and smartphones and reconnect with the original way of learning about the world: by wandering around outside. Louv’s book, naturally, was a big hit with environmentalists (the National Audubon Society and Wilderness Education Association were among those who gave him awards). But now that I have a child of my own and read as much about parenting and child development as I do about the environment, I’m increasingly aware that it’s not just the eco-minded who are calling for more mud pies and fewer LeapFrog computers for preschoolers. It seems that everywhere I turn, there’s another reminder that our children need less time in front of screens and more time figuring things out for themselves. [..]

Parents are clearly willing to pay to get their kids outside more, and with good reason. Forty percent of U.S. school districts cut recess or physical education programs after Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, partly in response to pressure to improve test scores. But the benefits of getting outside to play are manifold, particularly in natural settings. Studies show that exposure to nature can help reduce ADHD symptoms; in schools with an environmental education component, students score higher on standardized tests in math, reading, writing, and listening than their non-nature-exposed counterparts. Other positive effects include improved critical thinking, problem solving, and cooperation. And there are health benefits, too: kids who play outside more often are less likely to develop nearsightedness, obesity, diabetes, and vitamin D deficiencies.

De Blasio is to the left of America’s Democratic party, but he’s no Marxist. Instead, he’ll likely usher in progressive policies

Reporting on the significance of Bill de Blasio becoming mayor of New York may have led some to fear that the Soviet Union was being reincarnated in the country’s largest city. While De Blasio is certainly to the left of many leaders of the America’s Democratic party, he is certainly no radical seeking to overthrow capitalism. Furthermore, even if he did plan to seize the means of production, his ability to do so as the mayor of a major city would be quite limited.

Nonetheless, there are many areas where the mayor of New York can have a substantial impact. The top of this list would be education policy. De Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, was a vocal and visible supporter of the education reform movement. While this movement has produced big profits for corporations in the testing business and made some policy entrepreneurs rich and famous, it has not done much to improve education for inner city kids. [.]]

There are certainly limits to what a big city mayor can do, but Mayor de Blasio can make a difference for both the people of New York and the country, if he is willing to try.

Nicolaus Mills: The US declared war on poverty 50 years ago. You would never know it

Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty for reasons both economic and moral. They are still relevant today

This 8 January marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of “unconditional war on poverty”. The statement came in a state of the union address that, because of its often drab prose, has rarely drawn much praise. But a half century later, it’s time to re-examine the case Johnson made in 1964 for remedying poverty in America.

In an era such as our own, when – despite a poverty rate the Census Bureau puts at 16% – Congress is preparing to cut the food stamp program and has refused to extend unemployment insurance, Johnson’s compassion stands out, along with his nuanced sense of who the poor are and what can be done to make their lives better.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: On Unemployment, Today’s Congress Is Meaner Than George W. Bush

Why are we arguing about issues that were settled decades ago? Why, for example, is it so hard to extend unemployment insurance at a time when the jobless rate nationally is still at 7 percent, and higher than that in 21 states?

As the Senate votes this week on help for the unemployed, Democrats will be scrambling to win support from the handful of Republicans they’ll need to get the required 60 votes. The GOP-led House, in the meantime, shows no signs of moving on the matter. [..]

Similarly, raising the minimum wage wasn’t always so complicated. The parties had their differences on the concept, but a solid block of Republicans always saw regular increases as a just way of spreading the benefits of economic growth.

The contention over unemployment insurance and the minimum wage reflects the larger problem in American politics. Rather than discussing what we need to do to secure our future, we are spending most of our energy re-litigating the past.

Michael Wolff: Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald and the odd rise of personal brand journalism

Journalists are increasingly branching out on their own, but it’s a risky business that has yet to really show profitability

There is a new vision of journalism – call it the auteur school – in which the business shifts from being organized by institutions to being organized around individual journalists with discrete followings.

The latest development is the announcement by Ezra Klein that he will likely leave the Washington Post and is looking for investors to back him – with a reported eight figure investment (ie more than $10m!) – in an independent enterprise.

Last week Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who ran the Wall Street Journal tech conference AllThingsD, announced that, following the WSJ ending its relationship with them, they were setting up in business backed by NBC and other investors.

Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA-Edward Snowden story for the Guardian, is the headliner in a new left-oriented journalism venture backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. [..]

And that leads to my cautionary question: is this all journalistic vanity and hubris, ending in certain tears, or is there plausible economic logic to individual journalistic fiefdoms?

This will be a vital year in the fight for privacy and an open internet. All Americans should join the cause before it’s too late

Our New Year’s resolutions tend to be well-meaning and hard to keep. That’s because we resolve to change our lives in fundamental ways – get fit, etc. But inertia and habit are the enemy of change, and we usually fall back into old patterns. It’s human nature.

Despite all that, I’ve made a resolution for 2014. It is to do whatever I can to reverse my country’s trajectory toward being a surveillance state, and to push as hard as possible for a truly open internet.

I realize I can’t do much on my own, and hope many others, especially journalists, will join in. This year may be pivotal; if we don’t make progress, or worse, lose ground, it may be too late.

Robert Reich: The Year of the Great Redistribution

One of the worst epithets that can be leveled at a politician these days is to call him a “redistributionist.” Yet 2013 marked one of the biggest redistributions in recent American history. It was a redistribution upward, from average working people to the owners of America. [..]

For years, the bargaining power of American workers has also been eroding due to ever-more efficient means of outsourcing abroad, new computer software that can replace almost any routine job, and an ongoing shift of full-time to part-time and contract work. And unions have been decimated. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers were members of labor unions. Now, fewer than 7 percent are unionized.

All this helps explain why corporate profits have been increasing throughout this recovery (they grew over 18 percent in 2013 alone) while wages have been dropping. Corporate earnings now represent the largest share of the gross domestic product – and wages the smallest share of GDP – than at any time since records have been kept.

Hence, the Great Redistribution.

Mark Weisbrot: NAFTA: 20 Years of Regret for Mexico

Mexico’s economic growth stalled since the ‘free trade’ deal was signed with the US, and its poverty rate is about the same

It was 20 years ago that the North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico was implemented. In Washington, the date coincided with an outbreak of the bacteria cryptosporidium in the city’s water supply, with residents having to boil their water before drinking it. The joke in town was, “See what happens, NAFTA takes effect and you can’t drink the water here.”

Our neglected infrastructure aside, it is easy to see that NAFTA was a bad deal for most Americans. The promised trade surpluses with Mexico turned out to be deficits, some hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost, and there was downward pressure on US wages – which was, after all, the purpose of the agreement. This was not like the European Union’s (pre-Eurozone) economic integration, which allocated hundreds of billions of dollars of development aid to the poorer countries of Europe so as to pull their living standards up toward the average. The idea was to push US wages downward, toward Mexico’s, and to create new rights for corporations within the trade area: these lucky multinational enterprises could now sue governments directly before a corporate-friendly international tribunal, unaccountable to any national judicial system, for regulations (eg environmental) that infringed upon their profit-making potential.

Robert Kuttner: Obamacare: Republican Obstruction or Needless Blunders?

Two words that strike fear into the hearts of insurers are Adverse Selection. That’s insurance-speak for the tendency of the sickest people to gravitate to the most generous insurance policies. The flipside is that young and healthy people, whose premiums are needed to subsidize the care of the sick, tend to avoid insurance that they think they can’t afford or won’t need. An insurance pool that includes only the sick will be astronomically expensive. [..]

But, unless everything breaks just right, the odds are that more voters will feel grumpy than grateful, due to dislocations, price hikes, and plain frustrations with healthcare.gov. Yes, much of this is the result of Republicans blocking cleaner and simpler legislation and the Supreme Court blocking mandatory expansion of Medicaid. Yet some of the blind spots were plainly the administration’s own.

There are many good features in President Obama’s health reform. Political prescience wasn’t one.

In my days of doing the blog, I have pondered, often, the teleological conundrum of whether an omnipotent god could make a stick big enough to shove up his own ass. When this speculation becomes too difficult, I make myself a lesser case — is it possible for anyone to have a bigger stick up their ass than the one currently residing in the nether quarters of David Brooks? Today, at least, I have the answer to the latter question.

Yes, it is.

Come on down, Ruth Marcus, famous NSA apologist, weeper for misunderstood torturers, recent Glenn Greenwald heavy-bag workout, and scourge of teenage potty-mouths everywhere, and a woman who makes the late Erma Bombeck read like Rosa Luxembourg and who makes David Brooks sound like Richard Brautigan.

The two of them wrote essentially the same column today. The legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado is a bad thing because of every failed argument for the stupid “war” on drugs you ever heard. As you might expect, Brooks is far more full of himself than Marcus is — There is more of David Brooks in David Brooks than there is anywhere else in the world. This is a good thing. — and Marcus is far more folksy in her account of her misspent youth.

Dave Johnson: A Moral and Economic Imperative to Extend Unemployment Benefits

Federal unemployment assistance for 1.3 million people who have been unemployed longer than 26 weeks expired last Saturday, after Republicans blocked efforts to extend them. 3.6 million more people will lose these benefits over this year. Restoring these benefits is a moral, economic and political imperative. [..]

So there is a political imperative to push for this because hope and change drives votes. Democrats have to offer hope and change or people won’t see a reason to bother to vote. And “the base” needs to see their elected officials fighting for those things that they feel are important, or they won’t do the things that drive campaigns like giving money, volunteering, going door to door, and otherwise fighting to elect Democrats.

Democrats need to draw clear contrasts for democracy to function and voters to know who to hold accountable.

Joan Walsh: The right’s Benghazi insanity reaches new depths

No amount of facts can convince the right of reality. Here’s how politics, racism and sexism guide their lunacy

Hands down the biggest news story of the 2013 holiday season was the New York Times opus on the 2012 Benghazi attack. The Dec. 28 story debunked every single right-wing conspiracy peddled by Fox News (and also promulgated briefly by CBS News’ “60 Minutes”): the attack was, in fact, heavily motivated by an anti-Islam movie, as the Obama administration claimed; its militia ringleaders were independent of al-Qaida, and there was nothing the administration or Hillary Clinton’s State Department could do to protect the four men who died at the underdefended Benghazi compound. [..]

The truth is, the Times piece was not without criticism of the administration’s efforts in Benghazi. It found that the attack’s leaders had benefited from American weaponry and support while fighting Moammar Gadhafi, and suggests that while the strike on the compound “does not appear to have been meticulously planned, neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.”

The Benghazi tragedy, David Kirkpatrick wrote, “shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment.”

Robert Naiman: Make the 1 Percent Pay for the Iran War

Chuck Schumer, Robert Menendez, and their Senate friends have introduced a bill to blow up President’s Obama’s diplomacy with Iran. If these senators blow up diplomacy, the only thing left on the menu in the restaurant will be war. So now is the perfect time to ask these senators who is going to pay for the war that Senator Schumer, Senator Menendez and their friends are trying to engineer.

Let us urge our economic populist friends in the Senate — people like Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown and Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders — to call the question by introducing a simple resolution: it is the sense of Congress that if the U.S. goes to war with Iran, the 1 percent should pay the financial cost of the war.

If we could establish the principle that the 1 percent should pay for the war, this would be a win-win for justice. We know well that the 1 percent aren’t paying their fair share of taxes. So, even if making the 1 percent pay the financial cost of wars had no deterrent effect, it would be a win for justice by increasing taxes on the 1 percent.

What’s the economic issue we should focus on – jobs, or inequality? An increasing number of people, including the President and New York’s new mayor, have suggested that inequality of wealth and opportunity is the defining issue of our time.

But some of the folks at the Washington Post’s “WonkBlog” are having none of it. First editor Ezra Klein declared that unemployment, not inequality, should be the left’s defining issue. That drew responses from the likes of Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein (and yours truly, here). [..]

But why are we arguing about hypothetical futures and ignoring the very real present? We’re still in a situation where the “multiplier effect” – the amount of growth which can be achieved through government spending – is very high. The situation cries out for higher taxation on the wealthy and corporations, coupled with investment in jobs and growth. In other words, it calls out for the very same policies which would reduce inequality.

In the end it’s one challenge, not two or three.

Jill Filipovic: The nuns’ Obamacare contraception lawsuit isn’t about religious freedom

Catholic groups claim that filling out a form violates their beliefs. But they really want to mandate that we share the same values

Does religious liberty extend to the right to not have to fill out paperwork? That’s the latest position religious organizations are taking against the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It’s crazy, yes. But, welcome to the future of “religious freedom” litigation.

On New Years Eve, supreme court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an injunction blocking the Obama administration from implementing the aspect of the ACA known as the “contraception mandate”, which requires employee insurance plans to cover a range of preventative women’s health needs. The government has until today to respond. The injunction itself is standard legal procedure, and says little about how Sotomayor or the rest of the court will rule on the merits of the case. But the lawsuit itself, and the related suits challenging the contraception mandate, offer an increasingly troubling look at just how far peddlers of far-right ideology will go not just to claim their own right to live according to their beliefs, but to mandate that you and I do the same.

Dirk van Zyl Smit: Even life prisoners should have hope and a chance to change

Considering someone for release is not the same as releasing them. David Cameron’s proposed 100-year sentence would be much like a death penalty

Why would one consider releasing someone who committed a heinous murder and was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment? This is not a question that troubles everyone. The prime minister, for example, was quoted on Thursday as saying: “There are some people who commit such dreadful crimes that they should be sent to prison and life should mean life.” He clearly supports the current system where, in particularly serious cases, a court may add a whole life order to a sentence of life imprisonment and thus prevent release ever being considered.

The question is not so easily dismissed, however. A commitment that we will never consider the release of some offenders serving life sentences, except perhaps when they are at death’s door, means that we write them off permanently. It means that we deny that with the passage of time they may change for the better; or that we may change our assessment of their crimes.

Worse still, we are denying some fellow humans all hope. In that sense we are putting them in the same position as those awaiting execution on death row.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Resurgent Progressives

The re-emergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014. Moderates, don’t be alarmed. The return of a viable, vocal left will actually be good news for the political center.

For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted by the existence of an active, uncompromising political right unbalanced by a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged more and more in a conservative direction, meaning that the center is pushed that way too.

Consider what this means in practice. Obamacare is not a left-wing program, no matter how often conservatives might say it is. Its structure is based on conservative ideas. The individual mandate was the conservatives’ alternative to a mandate on employers. The health care exchanges are an alternative to government-provided medicine on the Medicare model.

New Year’s Day, 2014, marks the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Agreement created a common market for goods, services and investment capital with Canada and Mexico. And it opened the door through which American workers were shoved, unprepared, into a brutal global competition for jobs that has cut their living standards and is destroying their future. [..]

By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth that Barack Obama bemoans in his speeches. Yet today — channeling Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton — the president proposes two more such trade deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with Europe.

Richard Klass: The Road to Wars

Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has introduced legislation that sets the United States on the road to war with Iran and the road to an internal war within the Democratic Party.

If the first-step deal collapses, there will be no problem in quickly instituting new sanctions. And there will certainly be calls for military action, no matter how short-term the results would be. But if the collapse is triggered by a U.S. unilateral action, the coalition now enforcing those sanctions could well collapse. This undermining of the president’s negotiating authority and international cooperation is as unprecedented as it is dangerous.

The second danger in this bill is that it encourages an Israeli attack on Iran.

Robert Sheer: NSA, Benghazi and the Monsters of Our Own Creation

If we are so smart why are we so dumb? I am referring to the “intelligence” that our spy agencies have gathered at great cost in both massive secret black box budgets and, much more important, the surrender of our personal freedom to the snooping eyes of our modern surveillance state. [..]

Take the revelations in The New York Times’ exhaustive six-part investigation published Saturday demonstrating that the devastating 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was an intelligence disaster. The Times “turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault” that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Instead, a local militia leader on the side of the U.S.-supported insurrection in Libya with no known affiliation with al-Qaida is a prime suspect, and he and others allegedly responsible were not on the radar screen of the 20-person CIA station in Benghazi because they were part of the insurgency the U.S. supported. [..]

The excuse is that this sacrifice of our freedom will make us more secure, as in the misnamed “National Security Agency,” by knowing more about our “enemies.” But the record is unmistakably the opposite, that this relinquishing of privacy and transparency has stifled genuine public debate about the goals of our policy and left us both stupid and weak.

Few of the politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue how it actually works (and doesn’t)

The US and British militaries insist that this is such an expert program, but it’s curious that they feel the need to deliver faulty information, few or no statistics about civilian deaths and twisted technology reports on the capabilities of our UAVs. These specific incidents are not isolated, and the civilian casualty rate has not changed, despite what our defense representatives might like to tell us.

What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is a far cry from clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited clouds and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: “The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon?” I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.

Madeline Ostrander: Can the Stuck-in-Place Economy Help Us Face Climate Change?

New studies show that people with deep roots in the place where they live are better equipped to handle upheavals of the type that come with climate change.

After I finished high school in the flat, square corn country of central Illinois, I fled-along with many of my fellow classmates. We chased jobs or graduate school in places like San Francisco, New York, or Washington, D.C. I settled in Seattle. It wasn’t until I hit my 30s that I became aware of the social costs of this mobility. [..]

According to recent environmental research, this could also mean that I am less equipped to cope-if, say, an emergency strikes-than someone who’s better connected to Seattle. Sense of place, community, and rootedness aren’t just poetic ideas. They are survival mechanisms. [..]

The most foreboding trends now and in the decades ahead may stem from climate change-disasters like drought and flooding that devastate some places and force people to move. As we face this kind of world, some communities might endure precisely because people have dug in, rooted themselves, and developed the kinds of generosity, adaptiveness, and foresight that come from knowing where they are.

Joyde Walker: The Choice is Ours: Austerity or Shared Bounty

For all I have gained as the result of my financial struggles, I consider myself blessed. You might wonder how I can say that, when, at the end of December, I’m still working with my winterizing kit, consisting of staple gun, duct tape, and cardboard, trying to insulate against the air leaks that drive my heating bill up. But because of my hardships, I have become more sensitive to the hard times many around me are facing, and feel compelled to share what little I have.

Because of incessant increases in the cost of living, I sometimes have a hard time meeting my expenses. Still, I am more fortunate than some lacking adequate food or shelter because the people setting standards don’t consider them deserving or needy enough to receive help. But thanks partly to the fidelity of family and friends, I am able to keep food enough to share with a few others also struggling to make ends meet.

Nell Minow: Before Academics Complain About Conflicts of Interest, They Should Disclose Their Own

Academics who study business love to talk about the power of incentives and the importance of full information to enable the most effective and efficient decisions. Unless it applies to them.

As David Kocieniewski reported in the New York Times on December 27, 2013, “academic experts” who testify and make filings in favor of business-friendly regulations and rulings often fail to disclose the corporate sources of funding for their research. While they appear to represent the ivory tower virtues of scholarly integrity, with fidelity to nothing but the truth, they are in fact advocates who are paid to take the positions they promote. [..]

Inside Job, the superb documentary about the financial meltdown, has a devastating scene with Glenn Hubbard, the Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Business, refusing to discuss the payments he receives from the financial services industry. As one commenter on the Times article noted, “Nothing is funnier than watching people who study economics declare that money can’t possibly have any influence on their work.”