Tag: Opinion

Wall Street analysts, corporate lobbyists, and front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce form an exuberant cheering squad for maintaining the status quo of America’s do-nothing jobs policy. [..]

Well, yes, the official jobless rate has edged down to 7.2 percent, but don’t get giddy, for that’s not the total score. In December 2007, when Wall Street’s reckless greed crashed our economy, the unemployment rate stood at only 5 percent (pdf), the average length of being unemployed was half of today’s, and far fewer people were forced into part-time work or had to find multiple jobs to make ends meet. [..]

But there’s an even more telling statistic that we rarely hear about: the employment/population ratio. This indicator tells us the number of working-age adults actually in the workforce, meaning they’re employed at least part-time or are looking for jobs.

This important number has plummeted by five million people since the crash. They’re not working, and they’re not counted as unemployed.

Robert Kuttner: Time to Thank Edward Snowden

When Edward Snowden first leaked massive NSA files to the Guardian newspaper, public reaction was mixed. To some, he had arrogated to himself a decision to make public some of the most sensitive national security secrets, damaging America’s ability to track terrorists, a decision that he had no right to make. People questioned his mental stability and his motives. To others, he had forced a submerged national debate and slowed down a secret and inexorable slide to a police state that protects security by routinely monitoring everybody. [..]

What Snowden has done is to force a long repressed debate about how much liberty, if any, we need to sacrifice in order to protect our security. Before his leaks, that urgent conversation was a non-debate because the violations of liberty were being done entirely in secret, beyond the reach of democratic deliberation. Even Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, a key author of the Patriot Act, was appalled. He wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder: “I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation … Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

Dean Baker: Robert Rubin Wants to Redistribute More Income Upward

Along with Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin is the person most responsible for the country’s economic downturn. He helped steer the country on a path of bubble-driven growth and massive trade deficits. The latter was the result of the IMF engineered bailout from the East Asian financial crisis. The outcome of this bailout was a rush by developing countries to accumulate dollar reserves in order never to have to be in the situation that the East Asian countries faced in dealing with the IMF. This sent the dollar soaring, making U.S. goods and services uncompetitive internationally, causing the trade deficit to explode.

The lost demand from the trade deficit was offset in the 1990s by the stock bubble. The wealth created by the bubble led to a boom in consumption. Also, the ability for hare-brained Internet start-ups to raise billions by issuing stock led to an investment boom in hare-brained Internet start-ups. The bursting of the stock bubble gave us the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression. However the economy did eventually recover on the back of the housing bubble. The collapse of that bubble has given us an even longer stretch without job growth, ruined millions of lives, and will likely cost us tens of trillions of dollars in lost output.

Robert Reich: Pragmatists, Ideologues, and Inequality in America

How will the 2016 election be framed? What will be America’s choice?

If the coverage of last week’s two big winners offers a guide, the choice will be between “pragmatism” and “ideology.” [..]

But these appellations ignore what’s happening to an America in which almost all the economic gains are going to the richest 1 percent, median household incomes continues to drop, and the number of Americans in poverty continues to rise.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: What’s the matter with motherhood?

If you’re a conservative strongly opposed to abortion, shouldn’t you want to give all the help you can to women who want to bring their children into the world? In particular, wouldn’t you hope they’d get the proper medical attention during and after their pregnancy?

This would seem a safe assumption, which is why it ought to be astonishing that conservatives are positively obsessed with trashing the Affordable Care Act’s regulation requiring insurance policies to include maternity coverage.

Never mind that we who are lucky enough to have health insurance end up paying to cover conditions we may never suffer ourselves. We all want to avoid cancer, but we don’t begrudge those who do get it when the premiums we pay into our shared insurance pools help them receive care.

When Wendy Davis proclaimed that she is “pro-life”-a description long since appropriated by conservatives opposed to abortion rights-the right-wing media practically exploded with indignation. How could she dare to say that? But having won national fame when she filibustered nearly 12 hours against a law designed to shutter Lone Star State abortion clinics, the Texas state senator with the pink shoes doesn’t hesitate to provoke outrage among the righteous.

Speaking to a crowd at the University of Texas in Brownsville last Tuesday, Davis, now running for governor as a Democrat, made a deceptively simple but profound declaration: “I am pro-life. I care about the life of every child: every child that goes to bed hungry, every child that goes to bed without a proper education, every child that goes to bed without being able to be a part of the Texas dream, every woman and man who worry their children’s future and their ability to provide for that.”

Her argument directly pierced to the contradiction within the right’s “pro-life” sloganeering. So far the feeble answer from the right is that Davis must be “lying” because nobody who supports a woman’s right to choose is pro-life.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: What’s the Matter With Motherhood?

If you’re a conservative strongly opposed to abortion, shouldn’t you want to give all the help you can to women who want to bring their children into the world? In particular, wouldn’t you hope they’d get the proper medical attention during and after their pregnancy?

This would seem a safe assumption, which is why it ought to be astonishing that conservatives are positively obsessed with trashing the Affordable Care Act’s regulation requiring insurance policies to include maternity coverage.

Never mind that all of us lucky enough to have health insurance end up paying to cover conditions we may never suffer from ourselves. We all want to avoid cancer, but don’t begrudge those who do get it when the premiums we pay into our shared insurance pools help them receive care.

David Sirota: The Connection Between Poverty and Education

Google the phrase “education crisis” and you’ll be hit with a glut of articles, blog posts and think tank reports claiming the entire American school system is facing an emergency. Much of this agitprop additionally asserts that teachers unions are the primary cause of the alleged problem. Not surprisingly, the fabulists pushing these narratives are often backed by anti-public school conservatives and anti-union plutocrats. But a little-noticed study released last week provides yet more confirmation that neither the “education crisis” meme or the “evil teachers union” narrative is accurate.

Before looking at that study, consider some of the ways we already know that the dominant storyline about education is, indeed, baseless propaganda.

Jacob Swenson and Jamie Merchant: Shooting Ourselves: Mass Killings, Austerity, and the Breakdown of American Society

Sandy Hook. Columbine. Aurora. Tucson. Fort Hood. These names ring out in popular memory as the sites of seemingly random, horrific atrocities.

Mass violence and how we can address it has become a hot-button issue and for good reason. Last week, between October 26thand November 1st, there were five mass killings in the United States. And Monday, a gunman opened fire in a New Jersey shopping mall, firing several shots, but killing only himself.

Our nation leads wealthy democracies in allowing the market to disseminate, nearly unchecked, huge numbers of guns into the hands of a society riddled by extreme economic inequality, widening social polarization, and deep racism. In this context, advocating gun control is the only sane thing to do. Yet, to jump from mass violence to the conclusion that there are just too many guns – and that the solution is simply to reduce them – is to fatally misdiagnose the problem.

ASK most people in this city what the most important step is to increasing economic growth and job creation, and they’ll reply, “Reduce the budget deficit!”

They’re wrong. So-called austerity measures – lowering budget deficits while the economy is still weak – have been shown both here and in Europe to be precisely the wrong medicine. But they could be on to something important if they popped the word “trade” into that sentence.

Simply put, lowering the budget deficit right now leads to slower growth. But reducing the trade deficit would have the opposite effect. Not only that, but by increasing growth and getting more people back to work in higher-than-average value-added jobs, a lower trade deficit would itself help to reduce the budget deficit.

Robert Kuttner: Fruits of Republican Folly

The Republicans badly damaged themselves with their contrived government shutdown and debt crisis, but it remains for the Democrats to drive home their advantage. Will they?

Based on the cost to the Republican brand and the pressure from corporate elites not to harm the economy, the days of shutdowns and games with the debt are probably over for the foreseeable future. If the Tea Party faction tries to repeat these maneuvers, House Speaker John Boehner would likely permit a free vote again, and enough Republicans would vote with Democrats to keep the government open.

The Republicans seem hopelessly split between a Tea Party faction that relishes governing crises and a more mannered corporate faction that kills government softly. But the GOP is still one party when it comes to destroying government as a constructive force in the economy and society.

Tom Hayden: Bill de Blasio: Harbinger of a New Populist Left in America

Strong stances on inequality and policing underpin the New York mayor’s win. If he holds true, he can shift the national debate

The overwhelming support of New York City voters for Bill de Blasio is the latest sign of the shift towards a new populist left in America. De Blasio owes his unexpected tailwind to campaigning on issues considered by insiders to be too polarizing for winning politics.

One is De Blasio’s promise to redress the “tale of two cities” inequalities among New Yorkers, an issue forced into mainstream discourse by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement – not by New York Democrats aligned with Wall Street. The other is De Blasio’s pledge to sharply curb police stop-and-frisk policies directed against young people of color – aggressive tactics favored by a majority of white voters and overwhelmingly criticized by African Americans, Latinos and Asian-American voters.

Despite its Democratic voter majority, New York in recent decades has been the political stronghold of the plutocratic Mayor Michael Bloomberg and, before him, the abrasive law-and-order Mayor Rudolph Giuliani – both Republicans with national, even global, reach. Democrats have lacked a progressive voice on the national stage of American politics often provided by the New York mayor’s office – until now.

Bob Dreyfuss: Losing Friends, Influencing No One, and Alienating the Middle East

Put in context, the simultaneous raids in Libya and Somalia last month, targeting an alleged al-Qaeda fugitive and an alleged kingpin of the al-Shabab Islamist movement, were less a sign of America’s awesome might than two minor exceptions that proved an emerging rule: namely, that the power, prestige, and influence of the United States in the broader Middle East and its ability to shape events there is in a death spiral.

Twelve years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and a decade after the misguided invasion of Iraq-both designed to consolidate and expand America’s regional clout by removing adversaries-Washington’s actual standing in country after country, including its chief allies in the region, has never been weaker. Though President Obama can order raids virtually anywhere using Special Operations forces, and though he can strike willy-nilly in targeted killing actions by calling in the Predator and Reaper drones, he has become the Rodney Dangerfield of the Middle East. Not only does no one there respect the United States, but no one really fears it, either-and increasingly, no one pays it any mind at all.

Folks who think that (at the very least) we should be allowed to experience a few years of peace before launching the next military adventure are on the cusp of a major victory in Washington. All we have to do to win this historic victory is maintain the “sequester” cuts to the Pentagon budget that are already planned in existing law. And if we win the next round — if we avoid any kind of “grand bargain” one more time — we will likely win forever, because the Pentagon cuts will be an accomplished fact, and when everyone sees that the Earth is still spinning on its axis, we’ll all realize that cutting the Pentagon budget is no big deal. The Pentagon will be smaller, the sun will come up in the morning, and life will go on.

Norman Solomon: Big Brother’s Loyal Sister: How Dianne Feinstein Is Betraying Civil Liberties

Ever since the first big revelations about the National Security Agency five months ago, Dianne Feinstein has been in overdrive to defend the surveillance state. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she generates an abundance of fog, weasel words, anti-whistleblower slander and bogus notions of reform — while methodically stabbing civil liberties in the back.

Feinstein’s powerful service to Big Brother, reaching new heights in recent months, is just getting started. She’s hard at work to muddy all the waters of public discourse she can — striving to protect the NSA from real legislative remedies while serving as a key political enabler for President Obama’s shameless abuse of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Amy Goodman: Election 2013: A Grass-Roots Resurgence

The cable news channels wasted no time before crowing over the landslide re-election victory of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. According to exit polls, Christie won a majority of both women and Latino voters, traditional Democratic voting blocs. The political chattering class is abuzz with Christie as the GOP’s great hope to retake the White House in 2016. But they miss a vital and growing undercurrent in U.S. politics: grass-roots movements at the local and state level that are challenging the establishment, and winning.

Robert Sheer: Pay No Attention to That Imperialist Behind the Curtain

What John Kerry did this week in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is nothing short of despicable. He, and the president who appointed him, managed to honor both a vicious military dictatorship and a totalitarian medieval monarchy as examples of progress toward a more democratic Middle East, as if neither stood in contradiction to professed U.S. objectives for the region.

“Egyptians Following Right Path, Kerry Says,” read the New York Times headline Sunday trumpeting the secretary of state’s homage to ruthless military dictators who the very next day were scheduled to stage a show trial of Egypt’s first democratically elected president.

This was all part of a “road map” to democracy “being carried out to the best of our perception,” Kerry intoned, apparently embracing the calumny that the destruction of representative government in Egypt was always the American plan.

Let government borrow for crisis bailouts, then insist cuts pay for them. Guess who loses.

Center-right governments in Britain and Germany do it. So do the center-left governments in France and Italy. Obama and the Republicans do it, too. They all impose “austerity” programs on their economies as necessary to exit the crisis afflicting them all since 2007. Politicians and economists impose austerity now much as doctors once stuck mustard plasters on the skins of the sick.

Austerity policies presume that the chief economic problems today are government budget deficits that increase national debts. Austerity policies solve those problems mainly by cutting government spending, and secondarily, by limited tax increases. Reducing expenditures while raising revenues does cut governments’ deficits and their needs to borrow.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Hooray for Taxes

Joshua Holland of BillMoyers.com  offers an important counterpoint to today’s slanted political dialogue with his new essay on “the high cost of low taxes.” This hidden cost needs to become the center of our public debate. Washington’s obsession with tax cuts and deficit reduction is distracting the American people from the slow dismantling of the social contract, and its devastating impact — financial and otherwise — on all but the wealthiest among us.

Our political discourse focuses far too much on the cost of taxation, while all but ignoring its benefits. Journalists and politicians rarely discuss the direct or indirect costs Americans often encounter when forced to rely on the private sector for services which might be more efficiently provided through government.

Michael Cohen: The TSA shootings at LAX highlight America’s real terror threat

Arguably, the $8bn a year spent on the TSA prevents rare acts of terrorism. Yet we do nothing to stop thousands of US gun deaths

In 2012, 15 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks.

The previous year, more than 32,000 Americans died from gun violence (including homicides, suicides and accidents). That total represents an almost 2,600 person increase in gun deaths since 2001.

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the first Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent to be killed in the line of duty was not slain by an al-Qaida terrorist, but rather by an American with a gun.

Gerardo Hernandez, who was shot and killed at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Friday, was tasked with protecting Americans from a threat that barely exists. Instead, he died from a threat that we as a nation tacitly accept as a “price of freedom”: practically unfettered access to firearms.

Harvey Wasserman: Dear Climate Scientists, Please Note the Global Terror at Fukushima Four

Four climate scientists have made a public statement claiming nuclear power is an answer to global warming.

Before they proceed, they should visit Fukushima, where the Tokyo Electric Power Company has moved definitively toward bringing down the some 1300 hot fuel rods from a pool at Unit Four.  

Which makes this a time of global terror.  

Since March 11, 2011, fuel assemblies weighing some 400 tons, containing more than 1500 extremely radioactive fuel rods, have been suspended 100 feet in the air above Fukushima Daiichi’s Unit Four.  “If you calculate the amount of cesium 137 in the pool, the amount is equivalent to 14,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs,” says Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute.  Former US Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, an expert on fuel pool fires, calculates potential fallout from Unit Four at ten times greater than what came from Chernobyl.  

The more complex a system is, the more it is at risk of failing in complex ways that were not anticipated by its architects. It would be hard to imagine a more complicated way of expanding health coverage than the Affordable Care Act.

I say that, appreciating that Obamacare will eventually bring health coverage to tens of millions of uninsured people, that it will end the cruelty of denials of coverage based on “pre-existing conditions” (we all have the pre-existing condition of mortality); that it will allow young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance to age 26; and that it will require free preventive care under all insurance plans.

But there was a much simpler way of achieving this. We could have extended Medicare to everyone. Or if that was politically unthinkable, we could have extended Medicare a few years at a time — first to 60 year olds, then to 55 year olds, then to the young, and so on until everyone was covered.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: The Lies That Will Kill America

Here in Manhattan the other day, you couldn’t miss it — the big bold headline across the front page of the tabloid New York Post, screaming one of those sick, slick lies that are a trademark of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire. There was Uncle Sam, brandishing a revolver and wearing a burglar’s mask. “UNCLE SCAM,” the headline shouted. “US robs bank of $13 billion.”

Say what? Pure whitewash, and Murdoch’s minions know it. That $13 billion dollars is the settlement JPMorgan Chase, the country’s biggest bank, is negotiating with the government to settle its own rip-off of American homeowners and investors — those shady practices that five years ago helped trigger the financial meltdown, including manipulating mortgages and sending millions of Americans into bankruptcy or foreclosure. If anybody’s been robbed it’s not JPMorgan Chase, which can absorb the loss and probably take a tax write-off for at least part of it. No, it’s the American public. In addition to financial heartache we still have been denied the satisfaction of seeing jail time for any of the banksters who put our feet in cement and pushed us off the cliff.

Robert Reich: Why Washington Is Cutting Safety Nets When Most Americans Are Still in the Great Recession

As of November 1 more than 47 million Americans have lost some or all of their food stamp benefits. House Republicans are pushing for further cuts. If the sequester isn’t stopped everything else poor and working-class Americans depend on will be further squeezed.

We’re not talking about a small sliver of America here. Half of all children get food stamps at some point during their childhood. Half of all adults get them sometime between ages 18 and 65. Many employers — including the nation’s largest, Walmart — now pay so little that food stamps are necessary in order to keep food on the family table, and other forms of assistance are required to keep a roof overhead.

The larger reality is that most Americans are still living in the Great Recession. Median household income continues to drop. In last week’s Washington Post-ABC poll, 75 percent rated the state of the economy as “negative” or “poor.”

Ralph Nader: Why the Silence from the Sponsors of the Superior Full Medicare for All?

With the Tea Partiers relentless attacks on each of the troubles besetting Obamacare since its complicated, computer glitch-ridden startup on October 1, 2013, the compelling question is: Why aren’t the Congressional sponsors of H.R. 676 – full Medicare for all with free choice of physician and hospital – speaking out as strongly on behalf of this far superior universal health care coverage?

There are fifty-one members of the House who openly favor the single-payer solution for many good reasons. Legislators behind H.R. 676, such as Reps. Robert Brady (D-PA), Michael Capuano (D-MA), Donna Christensen (D-VI), Judy Chu (D-CA), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Wm. Lacy Clay (D-MO), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Danny Davis (D-IL) know that single-payer insurance with private delivery is by far more efficient, saving $400 billion a year just on administrative simplification.

Fast food workers are often on government assistance. The best solution, despite GOP resistance, is to raise the minimum wage

You’ve got to feel for McDonald’s. Every time the misunderstood corporation tries to offer its’ low-wage employees a hand, it backfires. First the fast food giant was ridiculed this past summer for dispensing helpful budgetary advice to its struggling workers (in a nutshell: get another job). Now the company is in hot water again after a recorded call to its’ McResource helpline, in which an employee who reported not being able to make ends meet was advised to sign up for food stamps and other government assistance programs, went viral online. Strangely though, the very people who ought to be most upset about this state of affairs – small government loving republicans who don’t want anyone relying on federal assistance for anything – have raised little or no objection. [..]

So for now we are stuck with a situation where one set of American workers has to subsidize the wages and benefits of another set of workers just so that certain corporations can keep their low end labor costs down and their profits way up. Fast food workers have actually come up with the most feasible way out of this unsustainable situation. They are asking their employers to raise their wages to $15 an hour, up from the average of $8 an hour. Needless to say McDonald’s and their fast food counterparts will happily stick to the cozy arrangement they have going as long as their enablers in congress allow them to. They may soon find, however, that the American taxpayer is not quite so easily played.

Heidi Moore: Little surprise here: women expected to do more at home – and at work

A new study illuminates how ‘favors’ are expected of women at work, but they often go unacknowledged, keeping women down

No matter what profession a woman works in, she’s actually in the service profession.

That’s the upshot of an illuminating (and to many, enraging) new Columbia Business School study highlighted this week, showing that co-workers and bosses feel entitled to favors from women – or, in fact, that almost everything a woman does at work is considered “a favor” that is off the clock. To put it another way, when a woman takes on a project no one else will, or does something helpful or thoughtful, it’s seen as something she does for fun. When a man does it, it seen as real work.

The revelation of this structural ingratitude explains a lot. It’s a pivotal point in understanding a key issue in workplaces: why can’t women form lasting alliances, even though they spend more time contributing to their organizations by mentoring?

Ana Marie Cox: Political games: why Democratic senators keep their Hillary support secret

There’s no point to making support for something political private. Hillary should leave the game playing to Bill

The childish behavior of men in Congress has always made “boys’ club” seem less like an epithet and more like something to strive for. Female politicians on the Hill, held to a higher standard in many ways, have had fewer scandals (financial or sexual) than their male counterparts and have a reputation for level-headedness that was thrown into high relief during the shutdown. As Senator John McCain said when the episode wound to a close:

   Leadership, I must fully admit, was provided primarily by women in the Senate.

So male representatives are boys and women are the grown-ups, which is why the revelation that the US Senate’s 17 female Democratic members sent a secret mash note to Hillary Clinton is so puzzling. The letter’s existence came to light on Monday, when Senator Kay Hagan (North Carolina Democrat) made a reference to it during a talk at a political fundraiser; that it was a secret letter – “Ixney on Illaryhay orfay residentpay!” – became clear on Tuesday, when reporters followed up on the remark and there was “a round of apologetic e-mails from [Hagan’s] Senate office to other offices on Capitol Hill”.

John Nichols: Chris Christie’s No Moderate, and Barack Obama Ought to Say That

President Obama will make a campaign swing into the battleground state of Virginia this weekend, on behalf of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.

McAuliffe has been consistently ahead in the polls and his chances of winning look reasonably good-as do those of other Virginia Democrats in high-profile races. The Virginia Democrats have two advantages: Republican foes who have gone to extremes on social issues and a broad revulsion in a state with high levels of federal employment at Republican tactics during the government shutdown.

So Obama’s trip to Virginia comes with few risks.

The thing is that, at this point in his tenure, Obama could afford to take some political risks.

For instance, he could travel to the other state that is holding a gubernatorial election this fall: New Jersey.