Tag: Opinion

When it comes to the economy, the White House is talking tough to the Republicans … about the debt ceiling. It’s true that the threat to shut down the government by refusing to honor its debt obligations is downright un-American. The Administration’s right to call them out for that. But there’s a larger question: Who’s going to give the American people some straight talk about the GOP’s economic ideas?

Forget the debt ceiling for a moment, if you can. Forget the GOP’s attempt to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act. Who is going to explain to the American people how profoundly misguided, and even immoral, the Republicans’ entire economic agenda has become?

Willie Nelson: It’s Time to Stand Up With Family Farmers

Every year, come harvest season, we gather for the annual Farm Aid concert. Artists, farmers, activists and eaters, we come together to recognize the crucial importance of family farmers. We take account of how far we’ve come and we renew our spirits for the fights ahead.

We stand with family farmers.

This strength is what’s grown the Good Food Movement. Today, we’re at our strongest. More people than ever are seeking out family farm food. Businesses sourcing from family farmers are searching for new farmers because demand exceeds supply. Entrepreneurs are making new connections between eaters and farmers. Community organizations and passionate volunteers are bringing good food to neighborhoods that need it most. Together, all of these people are building communities centered on a family farm economy. They’re linking eaters with farmers, building relationships and nourishing bodies and souls. Their actions are transforming food and agriculture, from the ground up.

But even still, a handful of corporations dominate our food system.

Ralph Nader: Five Years Later: Wall Street Is Still At It

It has been five years since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The aftermath is well known: the Too Big To Fail bailouts, the Too Big To Jail avoidance of guilt by culpable executives, the loss of millions of jobs, the loss of hard-earned life savings, and severe damage to the world economy. One would hope that, five years later, our country would be on the road to economic recovery. Yet many of the worse excesses of Wall Street remain. Regulators make many of the same mistakes they made in the past and the same warning signs are routinely overlooked. Wall Street and the big banks are even bigger, richer and more powerful than they were in 2008 when U.S. taxpayers bailed them out of their self-inflicted crisis. Little of substance has changed — Wall Street remains largely unshackled, fueled by the same old unrelenting greed and weak government oversight. And Wall Street’s continued reckless risk-taking with other peoples money has been setting off alarm bells — see Gretchen Morgenson’s recent column in the New York Times on the disturbingly vulnerable “repo market.”

Les Leopold: How Wall Street Devoured the Recovery

We are entering a disastrous new era in which all the economic gains go to the top one percent, according to data from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. They report that “Top 1% incomes grew by 31.4% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4% from 2009 to 2012. Hence, the top 1% captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery…. In sum, top 1% incomes are close to full recovery while bottom 99% incomes have hardly started to recover.” (In 2012, $394,000 is the cutoff to make it into the top 1 percent.)

The odds are that we in the bottom 99 percent will never recover. That’s because our nation has evolved into something entirely new: a billionaire bailout society. When I first used that phrase in 2009 at a presentation in Los Angeles I could feel the audience squirm. Surely I was exaggerating. Surely, I was just using a rhetorical flourish to stress income inequality. Surely cooler heads would prevail rather than my hot one. Oh, do I wish it were so.

In what can be seen only as an act of supreme indifference, House Republicans passed a bill on Thursday that would drastically cut federal food stamps and throw 3.8 million Americans out of the program in 2014.

The vote came two weeks after the Agriculture Department reported that 17.6 million households did not have enough to eat at some point in 2012 because they lacked the resources to put food on the table. It came two days after the Census Bureau reported that 15 percent of Americans, or 46.5 million people, live in poverty.

Glen Ford: Black America More Pro-War Than Ever

Barack Obama has proven to be a warmongering thug for global capital, many times over. The question is: Have African Americans, his most loyal supporters, joined the bi-partisan War Party, rejecting the historical Black consensus on social justice and peace (or, at least, the “peace” part)?

Ever since national pollsters began tracking African American public opinion, surveys have shown Blacks to be consistently clustered at the left side of the national political spectrum. More than any other ethnicity, African Americans have opposed U.S. military adventures abroad, by wide margins. Indeed, the sheer size of the “blood lust” gap between the races indicates that the Black international worldview differs quite radically from white Americans and, to a lesser but marked degree, from Hispanics.

That is, until the advent of Obama.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The House’s Un-American Activities

The Constitution does an admirable job of describing the way our government is supposed to operate, and nowhere does it say the House of Representatives has the power to shut it down in order to revoke a law that displeases it. In fact, it makes it clear that this is not how our system works.

And yet that’s exactly what House Republicans under John Boehner and Eric Cantor are attempting to do, through a series of arcane procedural maneuvers which involve a Continuing Resolution this Friday and an upcoming fight over the government’s debt ceiling. The Republicans are attempting to use these administrative processes to revoke or neutralize duly enacted legislation, and perhaps to hijack the governance process in other ways as well.

The Constitution doesn’t give the House that kind of unilateral power. It does, however, include these words: “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned … and all executive and judicial Officers … shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.“

Norman Solomon: Next Step for Peace in Syria – Stop the “Lethal Aid”

Now that public pressure has foiled U.S. plans to bomb Syria, the next urgent step is to build public pressure for stopping the deluge of weapons into that country.

Top officials in Washington are happy that American “lethal aid” has begun to flow into Syria, and they act as though such arms shipments are unstoppable. In a similar way, just a few short weeks ago, they — and the conventional wisdom — insisted that U.S. missile strikes on Syria were imminent and inevitable.

But public opinion, when activated, can screw up the best-laid plans of war-makers. And political conditions are now ripe for cutting off the flow of weaponry to Syria — again giving new meaning to the adage that “when the people lead, the leaders will follow.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin provoked widespread scorn among America’s chattering class for employing The New York Times’ editorial pages as a megaphone to scold the United States for hubris, i.e., a belief in its saintliness and destiny to lead the planet, a.k.a. American Exceptionalism. The pretentious pundits rebuked the messenger as ill-suited to deliver the message. True enough. President Putin’s Russia exhibits more warts than the United States.

But Putin’s detractors have been unable to answer his message. It echoed the admonition against British messianism voiced more than two centuries ago by Edmund Burke, British statesman and champion of the American Revolution in a futile attempt to forestall the self- ruination of the British Empire:

“I dread our own power and our own ambition. I dread our being too much dreaded. It is ridiculous to say we are not men, and that, as men, we shall never wish to aggrandize ourselves.“

Amy Goodman: Americans Say No to Another Middle East War

The likelihood of peace in Syria remains distant, as the civil war there rages on. But the grim prospect of a U.S. strike has been forestalled, if only temporarily, preventing a catastrophic deepening of the crisis there. The American people stood up for peace, and for once, the politicians listened. Across the political spectrum, citizens in the U.S. weighed in against the planned military strike. Members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, were inundated with calls and emails demanding they vote “no” on any military authorization.

The media credits Russian President Vladimir Putin with extending a lifeline to President Barack Obama, allowing him a diplomatic way to delay his planned attack. But without the mass domestic public outcry against a military strike, Obama would not have needed, nor would he likely have heeded, an alternative to war.

Robert Creamer; Want to Cut Food Stamp Costs? Raise the Minimum Wage

This week the Tea Party House Republicans plan to bring a bill to the floor that would slash funding for food assistance to poor families. The program used to be known as “food stamps.” Now it is called the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). [..]

But the real dirty secret of food stamps is that the primary beneficiaries are often giant corporations who pay their employees poverty wages, counting on food stamps, Medicaid and other forms of government assistance as indirect subsidies to their wealthy stock holders.

In fact, the quickest way to cut food assistance spending would be to raise the minimum wage to assure that no one who worked full-time would live in poverty.

Ana Marie Cox: What not to say after a mass shooting

To talk gun control just after a trauma like the navy yard shooting would be ‘politicising’. No, we need to debate it every day

Mass shootings are still, statistically, quite rare in the United States (though not as rare as they are in rest of the world). Still, there are enough of them that our reactions, especially on social media, are ritualized: an outpouring of shock and panic is followed by a flurry of misinformation; Monday’s navy yard shooting saw two news outlets confidently reporting the name of the shooter only to retract it within minutes. [..]

Understandably, only the optimists get a pass from the hyper-vigilant emotional etiquette police of Twitter. In fact, the call to “not politicize” the event is as much a part of the formal exercise as wreath-layings and lapel ribbons.

Recently, though, more commenters have come to recognize that refusing to contextualize a tragedy is also a political act – a tacit form of approving the status quo.

Exactly five years since the onset of the financial crisis, income data released this morning by the Census Bureau indicates that the spike in poverty triggered by the recession has become the status quo. Middle-class incomes are stagnant, too.  

The numbers come as House Republicans move to kick as many as 4 million Americans off food stamps by cutting $40 billion from the program. In their budget proposals, conservatives are also proposing to maintain the deep sequestration reductions that have cut tens of thousands of young children out of Head Start, as well as childcare assistance, Meals On Wheels for seniors, unemployment benefits, and housing assistance.

Roxanne Gay: Reading the Stakes in Syria

The world is a fragile and often incomprehensible place. Syria has been embroiled in a civil conflict since March 2011. According to United Nations estimates, more than 60,000 are dead. There are 1.5 million Syrian refugees who have sought safety in neighboring countries. The Assad regime offers no indication it will cede power and the rebel opposition may not provide a viable alternative if they defeat Assad.

The Syrian conflict is complicated by so much circumstance. World leaders don’t want a repeat of the Iraq war but they also don’t want to sit idly by, bearing silent and impotent witness so that another genocide on the scale of what happened in Bosnia occurs. Syria is, unfortunately, not so much a country in the minds of many. It is a political problem or opportunity and most of the proposed solutions to the Syria problem serve the interests of everyone but the Syrian people.

Ana Marie Cox: All the news that Syria made unfit to print

When one story dominates the news cycle for days on end, it’s not just tedious; we’re also less well-informed on crucial issues

In the past few weeks, the western world has received a crash course about Syria, its sectarian conflicts, and the world’s skittish alignment around those issues. Last week, the Pew Center for People and the Press found that 68% of those polled were following news about Syria either “very closely” or “fairly closely”. (Perhaps we will get better at finding it on a map!”) [..]

And, of course, the newfound interest in this years-old cataclysm has meant that loud but flawed coverage of Syria pushed out of the spotlight other, compelling, and just as important stories. This is perhaps a glass-teat-half-empty point of view. Lord knows, it’s better that people know more about humanitarian crises than less. But it’s also important to know what’s slipped through the cracks, as Americans have been staring into the abyss.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: GOP madness on display

Five years after the onset of the worst financial collapse in our history, we still have not recovered. President Obama used the fifth anniversary of the financial collapse to remind Americans of the “perfect storm” he inherited, and of the steps he took to save the economy from free fall, rescue the auto industry and save the financial system. [..]

Obama used this backdrop to set the terms of the coming debate on the budget. The Republican right is once more gearing up to hold America hostage, threatening to shut down the government or default on our debts to get its way.

The House and Senate Republican leaders want more deep cuts in spending that will cost jobs, and cut investments vital to our future in everything from education to R&D. For the tea-party right led by Texas freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, that’s not sufficient. Backed by deep-pocket outside groups like the Club for Growth, they are calling for shutting down the government unless Obamacare is defunded.

The intoxication of war, fueled by the euphoric nationalism that swept through the country like a plague following the attacks of 9/11, is a spent force in the United States. The high-blown rhetoric of patriotism and national destiny, of the sacred duty to reshape the world through violence, to liberate the enslaved and implant democracy in the Middle East, has finally been exposed as empty and meaningless. The war machine has tried all the old tricks. It trotted out the requisite footage of atrocities. It issued the histrionic warnings that the evil dictator will turn his weapons of mass destruction against us if we do not bomb and “degrade” his military. It appealed to the nation’s noble sacrifice in World War II, with the Secretary of State John Kerry calling the present situation a “Munich moment.” But none of it worked. It was only an offhand remark by Kerry that opened the door to a Russian initiative, providing the Obama administration a swift exit from its mindless bellicosity and what would have been a humiliating domestic defeat. Twelve long years of fruitless war in Afghanistan and another 10 in Iraq have left the public wary of the lies of politicians, sick of the endless violence of empire and unwilling to continue to pump trillions of dollars into a war machine that has made a small cabal of defense contractors and arms manufacturers such as Raytheon and Halliburton huge profits while we are economically and politically hollowed out from the inside. The party is over.

Chris Weigant: Summers Out

This isn’t a changing-of-the-seasons article, it is in fact an article marking the withdrawal of Larry Summers for nomination to the head job at the Federal Reserve. I suppose I could have made it both, but then I would have had to title it “Summer’s Out: Summers Out” which somehow just seems even more confusing. All kidding aside, though; liberals, lefties, progressives, and populists alike are heaving a giant sigh of relief at this news. Larry Summers has now realized he very well could lose a Senate confirmation vote and so he decided instead to take his name out of consideration for the appointment.

Two recent “anniversary” news stories seem particularly relevant here. The first is the five-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a giant trigger for the financial meltdown on Wall Street and all that followed. The second is the two-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.

Robert McChesney and John Nichols: Dollarocracy: How Big Money Undermines Our Democracy

And how we can take it back

We’ve found through our experience that timid supplications for justice will not solve the problem,” declared the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 as he announced the civil rights movement’s pivot toward the economic justice message of the Poor People’s Campaign. “We’ve got to massively confront the power structure.” [..]

The United States has experienced fundamental changes that are dramatically detrimental to democracy. Voters’ ability to define political discourse has been so diminished that even decisive election results like Barack Obama’s in 2012 have little impact. That’s because powerful interests-freed to, in effect, buy elections, unhindered by downsized and diffused media that must rely on revenue from campaign ads-now set the rules of engagement. Those interests so dominate politics that the squabbling of Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, is a sideshow to the great theater of plutocracy and plunder. This is not democracy. This is dollarocracy.

Robert Reich: The Myth of the ‘Free Market’ and How to Make the Economy Work for Us

One of the most deceptive ideas continuously sounded by the Right (and its fathomless think tanks and media outlets) is that the “free market” is natural and inevitable, existing outside and beyond government. So whatever inequality or insecurity it generates is beyond our control. And whatever ways we might seek to reduce inequality or insecurity — to make the economy work for us — are unwarranted constraints on the market’s freedom, and will inevitably go wrong.

By this view, if some people aren’t paid enough to live on, the market has determined they aren’t worth enough. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of Americans remain unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they work two or three part-time jobs with no idea what they’ll earn next month or next week, that’s too bad; it’s just the outcome of the market.

According to this logic, government shouldn’t intrude through minimum wages, high taxes on top earners, public spending to get people back to work, regulations on business, or anything else, because the “free market” knows best.

The United States-Russian agreement to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal is remarkably ambitious and offers a better chance of deterring this threat than the limited military strikes that President Obama was considering. [..]

President Obama deserves credit for putting a focus on upholding an international ban on chemical weapons and for setting aside military action at this time in favor of a diplomatic deal. The Syria crisis should demonstrate to Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, that Mr. Obama, who has held out the possibility of military action against Iran’s nuclear program, is serious about a negotiated solution. Mr. Obama’s disclosure that he had indirectly exchanged messages with Mr. Rouhani was encouraging.

Robert Kuttner: Summers’ End

Larry Summers is out. But who is in?

On Sunday afternoon, Administration sources leaked to the Wall Street Journal an exchange of letters between Summers and President Obama. [..]

But behind the polite exchange, a frantic politics was at work. In such circumstances, at some point the political team realizes that a nomination is a lost cause, word is passed to the prospective nominee that it’s over, and a gracious exchange of letters is drafted. It’s hard to believe Larry Summers, of all people, voluntarily falling on his sword for the greater good.

Kevin Gosztola: Would Proposed Federal Shield Law Have Protected New York Times Reporter James Risen?

A proposed federal shield law that would grant journalists covered by the legislation a level of protection has passed in the Senate Judiciary Committee and moved to the full Senate. The shield law would likely protect reporters from subpoenas intended to force them to give up confidential information about their sources, but the protection national security journalists would be able to enjoy is debatable.

Aside from the fact that the law would define “covered journalists” who are “real reporters” and deliberately exclude leaks-based media organizations like WikiLeaks, a critical question is whether the proposed shield law would have protected someone like New York Times reporter James Risen. The Justice Department has been trying to force Risen to testify in the case of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. Risen, backed by other media and press freedom organizations, has been fighting government efforts that have continued under the administration of President Barack Obama.

Robert Reich: Happy Birthday Occupy

Two years ago the “Occupy” movement roared into view, summoning the energies and attention of large numbers of people who felt the economic system had got out of whack and were determined to do something about it.

Occupy put the issue of the nation’s savage inequality on the front pages, and focused America’s attention on what that inequality was doing to our democracy. To that extent, it was a stirring success. [..]

Occupy served an important purpose, but lacking these essentials it couldn’t do more. Inequality is worse now than it was then, and our democracy in as much if not more peril. So what’s the next step?

It was a strange speech, in which the real news was left for last, popping out like a Jack-in-the-Box after 11 minutes of growls and snarls and Obama’s bizarre whining about how unfair it is to be restrained from making war on people who have done you no harm. The president abruptly switched from absurd, lie-based justifications for war to his surprise announcement that, no, Syria’s turn to endure Shock and Awe had been postponed. The reader suddenly realizes that the diplomatic developments had been hastily cut and pasted into the speech, probably only hours before. Obama had intended to build the case for smashing Assad to an imperial peroration – a laying down of the law from on high. But his handlers threw in the towel, for reasons both foreign and domestic. Temporarily defeated, Obama will be back on the Syria warpath as soon as the proper false flag operations can be arranged.

Gail Collins: Back to Boehner

Back to Congressional gridlock. Back to watching John Boehner provide exciting updates like “we’re continuing to work with our members.” Maybe, if the stalemate goes on long enough, he will once again tell reporters: “If ands and buts were candy and nuts, every day would be Christmas.” I always enjoy that part.

Tra-la-la.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been awash in worries about profound problems in foreign affairs, but now we’re going domestic again. We’re back in budget crisis territory. Compared with Syria, it seems like a walk in the park. Good old fiscal cliffs.

It’s possible you’ve lost track of this over the summer, so I have prepared a calendar of upcoming events. Feel free to put it on the refrigerator: [..]

Sarah van Gelder: Peace Pushes Back: How the People Won Out (For Now)

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other cases, the people protested and got war anyway. Why-at least, so far-has the story played out differently with Syria?

Just two weeks ago, the United States stood at the brink of yet another war. President Obama was announcing plans to order U.S. military strikes on Syria, with consequences that no one could predict.

Then things shifted. In an extraordinarily short time, the people petitioned, called their representatives in Congress, held rallies, and used social media to demand a nonviolent approach to the crisis. The march toward war slowed. [..]

If these diplomatic efforts to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles are successful, historians may look back at this as a moment when the people finally got the peace they demanded.

David Sirota: he Lessons of Colorado’s Gun Debate

The day after this week’s elections, the National Rifle Association got exactly what it wanted: a front-page New York Times story about Colorado results that supposedly sent “lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws.” That article, and many others like it, came after the gun lobby mounted successful recall campaigns against two state legislators who, in the wake of mass shootings, voted for universal background checks, limits on the capacity of bullet magazines and restrictions on domestic abusers owning firearms.

Despite the recalls being anomalously low-turnout affairs, the national media helped the gun lobby deliver a frightening message to politicians: Vote for modest gun control and face political death.

Two years after thousands of Egyptian protesters risked their lives to bring down the dictator Hosni Mubarak, the military-controlled government in Cairo is expanding a repressive system that may ultimately be worse than the one Mr. Mubarak built and managed.

On Thursday, with much of the world distracted by Syria, the Egyptian generals and the civilian officials they have appointed extended a countrywide state of emergency for two months. And after overthrowing Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, two months ago and trying to crush his Muslim Brotherhood allies, security forces have also begun to round up other dissenters, a chilling warning that no Egyptians should feel safe if they dare to challenge authority.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Old Extreme GOP vs. the New Extreme GOP: Whoever Wins, We Lose.

They’re back – and they’re more extreme than ever. GOP House leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor are still pushing economic ideas disproved a century ago, peddling deep spending cuts that would inflict more misery on the already-beleaguered majority. But that’s not enough for the even more extreme right, for the politicians named Cruz and Paul and Lee, for the groups with names like “FreedomWorks” and “Club for Growth,” and for the moneyed interests who fund them all.

The new Republican right is a tangled nest of snakes. Legislators and observers reach into it at their own risk.

But however beyond the pale these new forces may seem, remember: The fact that their enemies are extreme doesn’t mean that Boehner and Cantor aren’t.

Jon Stoltz: Why Troops Are Against Syria Strikes

One of the common misnomers in the media, regarding Syria, is that it is dual pressure from the far right and far left, that has pushed Congress to seemingly reject any Use of Force resolution before it even came to a vote. When polling shows that 60 percent of people are opposed to the Congressional resolution, it’s tough to say that’s just made up of peaceniks and Tea Partiers.

But, add one more non-fringe group to that list — those who are and have served in America’s military. According to a survey of Active Duty troops from the Military Times, 80 percent of them oppose authorizing military action in Syria. That closely mirrors our own survey at VoteVets.org, where 75 percent of veterans and military family members also oppose action (overall, nearly 80 percent of our full list of supporters, both veteran and non-veteran, oppose action).

Peter Van Buren: What If Congress Says No on Syria?

At every significant moment in those years, our presidents opted for more, not less, violence, and our Congress agreed-or simply sat on its hands-as ever more moral isolation took the place of ever less diplomacy. Now, those same questions loom over Syria. Facing a likely defeat in Congress, Obama appears to be grasping-without any sense of irony-at the straw Russian President Vladimir Putin (backed by China and Iran) has held out in the wake of Secretary of State John Kerry’s off-the-cuff proposal that put the White House into a corner. After claiming days ago that the U.N. was not an option, the White House now seems to be throwing its problem to that body to resolve. Gone, literally in the course of an afternoon, were the administration demands for immediate action, the shots across the Syrian bow, and all that. Congress, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, seems to be breathing a collective sigh of relief that it may not be forced to take a stand. The Senate has put off voting; perhaps a vote in the House will be delayed indefinitely, or maybe this will all blow over somehow and Congress can return to its usual partisan differences over health care and debt ceilings.

And yet a non-vote by Congress would be as wrong as the yes vote that seems no longer in the cards. What happens, in fact, if Congress doesn’t say no?