Tag: Opinion

Self-delusion is a sad spectacle. Watching Republicans convince themselves that killing immigration reform actually helps the GOP is excruciating, and I wish somebody would make it stop.

House Speaker John Boehner’s unruly caucus has been busy convincing itself not to accept or even modify the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate. Rather, it wants to annihilate it. It’s not that these Republicans want a different kind of comprehensive reform, it’s that they don’t want comprehensive reform at all.

Benjamin Todd Jealous: America’s Yawning Racial Wealth Gap

This August marks the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Best remembered for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the march served as a catalyst for national action on poverty and economic injustice. Though we have seen progress since 1963, the economic component of King’s civil rights agenda remains very much unfinished. Today, the gaping economic disparities between the rich and the rest in the United States are even more pronounced for African-Americans.

Since the 1980s, as inequality has increased dramatically in the United States, there has been a steady increase in the racial wealth divide. Before the Great Recession, middle- and high-income African-Americans saw their levels of wealth stagnate or decrease, while middle- and high-income whites their wealth increase over the last 30 years. Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, the gap has only widened. On average, white families have more than $113,000 in wealth, whereas African-Americans have an average of less than $5,700.

David Sirota: How Cash Secretly Rules Surveillance Policy

Have you noticed anything missing in the political discourse about the National Security Agency’s unprecedented mass surveillance? There’s certainly been a robust discussion about the balance between security and liberty, and there’s at least been some conversation about the intelligence community’s potential criminality and constitutional violations. But there have only been veiled, indirect references to how cash undoubtedly tilts the debate against those who challenge the national security state.

Those indirect references have come in stories about Booz Allen Hamilton, the security contractor that employed Edward Snowden. CNN/Money notes that 99 percent of the firm’s multibillion-dollar annual revenues now come from the federal government. Those revenues are part of a larger and growing economic sector within the military-industrial complex – a sector that, according to author Tim Shorrock, is “a $56 billion-a-year industry.”

Ralph Nader: Shame on Walmart!

When one considers Walmart’s company slogan — “Save money. Live better.” — it almost seems as if they are referring to their corporation’s big shareholders — the super-rich Walton family — rather than their employees or the communities they squeeze. After all, Walmart is the same company that has recently made headlines for firing workers for verbally protesting against unfair wages and lack of health care benefits. This situation forces Walmart employees to work second jobs or rely on government assistance to make ends meet.

According to a recent report from the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, the low wages provided by a single Walmart store costs taxpayers upwards of $1 million in governmental support for those workers and their dependents. “The report finds that a single 300-employee Wal-Mart Supercenter in Wisconsin may cost taxpayers anywhere from $904,542 to nearly $1.75 million per year, or about $5,815 per employee. Wisconsin has 100 Wal-Mart stores, 75 that are Wal-Mart Supercenters.”

Permit me an impertinent question (or three).

Suppose a small group of extremely wealthy people sought to systematically destroy the U.S. government by (1) finding and bankrolling new candidates pledged to shrinking and dismembering it; (2) intimidating or bribing many current senators and representatives to block all proposed legislation, prevent the appointment of presidential nominees, eliminate funds to implement and enforce laws, and threaten to default on the nation’s debt; (3) taking over state governments in order to redistrict, gerrymander, require voter IDs, purge voter rolls, and otherwise suppress the votes of the majority in federal elections; (4) running a vast PR campaign designed to convince the American public of certain big lies, such as climate change is a hoax, and (5) buying up the media so the public cannot know the truth.

Would you call this treason?

If not, what would you call it?

And what would you do about it?

Jim Hightower: The Mean Team Piles on Jobless Americans

“Come on, team, let’s get mean!”

This is not the chant of rabid football fans, egging on their favorite team to crush the opponents. Rather, it’s the raucous war cry of far-out right-wing ideologues all across the country who’re pumping up Team GOP to pound the bejeezus out of America’s millions of unemployed workers. Far from a game, this is real, and it’s a moral abomination.

I’ve been unemployed before, and I can tell you it’s a misery – all the more so today, when there are far more people out of work than there are job openings. This leaves millions of our fellow Americans mired in the debilitating misery of long-term unemployment.

Harry J. Enten: Can the Democrats really win back the House in the 2014 midterms?

According to one reputable pollster, they can. But the data don’t support it: without a big boost for Obama, it’s wishful thinking

The president’s party rarely picks up seats during midterm elections. It has occurred only three times since the American civil war: 1934, 1998, and 2002. All three featured presidents who were very popular. President Clinton in 1998 and President Bush in 2002 had approval ratings into the 60s in most surveys. Despite that high approval, their parties picked up only five and eight seats respectively. The Democrats need to pick up 17 to gain control of the House in 2014. The president’s party has not picked up more than nine seats in a midterm since 1865.

In order for that to occur, we would almost certainly need to see an extremely popular president. We don’t.

Ana Marie Cox: The real problem with a Rick Perry 2016 presidential run: abortion

If the Texas governor contests the GOP nomination, it will be as a firm pro-life candidate – provoking a bitter referendum on choice

With Rick Perry announcing that he will not seek a fourth term as the governor of Texas, talk has immediately turned to whether he will consider another run for president. Tradition has it that it’s almost inevitable:

  Once a sufficient number of people have convinced an egomaniac that he would be a very good president, it’s hard for that egomaniac to let go of that dream.

Perry’s re-introduction on the national stage arrives just as Texas has become a symbol for extreme anti-abortion legislation. So, is there any way that a Perry candidacy could escape becoming a referendum on reproductive rights?

I think not. Both pro-life and pro-choice advocates would welcome it (even as the leaders in each party would probably cringe). Each would be convinced that the debate would end in their favor, each with polling data to support that conclusion.

New rules allowing hedge funds to advertise encourage baby-boomers to bet their pensions. What could possibly go wrong?

For most people in the US, Wall Street is not an everyday concept. It’s more like a haunted Victorian mansion on the edge of town where your 401(k) retirement plan lives: it takes a long time to understand how to get there and you’re pretty sure something’s not right about it, but you’re too scared to get close enough to check. [..]

Wall Street is in your bank account, charging you fees on your checking account; it’s in your driveway, where your car sleeps as you pay off your auto loan – a debt that has already been sliced and diced and sold to a trader at a bank somewhere. Wall Street is in your house – which it probably owns a part of – and because the interest rate on your mortgage bill was likely set by 18 traders in London one day a few years back.

As a result, Wall Street is not so much like a haunted Victorian mansion as a quiet, creeping fungus right where you live: it grows fast and takes root everywhere, silently.

Mona Eltahaway: Egypt needs a revolution against sexual violence

New reports of sexual assault against female protesters in Tahrir mirror my traumatic experience in 2011. Women deserve justice

This isn’t an essay on how Egyptian regimes like Mubarak’s targeted female activists and journalists as a political ploy. Nor is it about how regimes like Morsi’s largely ignored sexual violence, and even when it did acknowledge it, blamed women for bringing assaults upon themselves. Nor is it an article about how such assaults and such refusal to hold anyone accountable have given a green light to our abusers that women’s bodies are fair game. Nor will I tell you that – were it not for the silence and denial surrounding sexual assault in Egypt – such assaults would not be enacted so frequently on women’s bodies on the Egyptian streets.

I don’t know who is behind those mob assaults in Tahrir, but I do know that they would not attack women if they didn’t know they would get away with it and that the women would always be asked “why didn’t you resist?”

From the ground up, we need a national campaign against sexual violence in Egypt. It must push whoever we elect to govern Egypt next, as well as our legislators, to take sexual assaults more seriously.

Robert Reich: Where Are the Voices of Republican Senators Who Still Care About Democratic Institutions?

Before January 2009, the filibuster was used only for measures and nominations on which the minority party in the Senate had their strongest objections. Since then, Senate Republicans have filibustered almost everything, betting that voters will blame Democrats for the dysfunction in Congress as much as they blame the GOP.

So far the bet is paying off because the press has failed to call out the GOP — which is now preventing votes on the president’s choices for three D.C. Circuit Court nominees, the Labor Department and the EPA, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and the National Labor Relations Board. (The GOP has blocked all labor board nominees, some to whom the president gave recess appointments, but he’s now asking approval for all.) [..]

Harry Reid may now be able to summon 51 votes to abolish the filibuster, at least for cabinet officials and other high-level policy makers. But that shouldn’t be considered a victory. It’s a sad commentary on where we’ve come to.

Norman Solomon: Denouncing NSA Surveillance Isn’t Enough-We Need the Power to Stop It

For more than a month, outrage has been profuse in response to news about NSA surveillance and other evidence that all three branches of the U.S. government are turning Uncle Sam into Big Brother.

Now what?

Continuing to expose and denounce the assaults on civil liberties is essential. So is supporting Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers-past, present and future. But those vital efforts are far from sufficient. [..]

At the core of the surveillance state is the hollowness of its democratic pretenses. Only with authentic democracy can we save ourselves from devastating evisceration of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

The enormous corporate leverage over government policies doesn’t change the fact that the nexus of the surveillance state-and the only organization with enough potential torque to reverse its anti-democratic trajectory-is government itself.

Comey is lionised in DC for one challenge over liberties. Yet he backed waterboarding, wire-tapping and indefinite detention

It had the air of Hollywood. On the night of 10 March 2004, James Comey, the nominee to lead the FBI for the next ten years, rushed to the hospital bedside of his terribly ill boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft. [..]

There’s one very big problem with describing Comey as some sort of civil libertarian: some facts suggest otherwise. While Comey deserves credit for stopping an illegal spying program in dramatic fashion, he also approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration during his time as deputy attorney general. Those included torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention.

Zoë Carpenter : Disaster in Quebec Reveals Regulatory Lapse

A debate about the relative merits of transporting crude oil by pipeline or by rail reignited over the weekend, after a runaway freight train carrying seventy-two cars of oil exploded and leveled Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.

The disaster exposed a significant lack of regulation governing the shipment of crude oil via rail, and raised questions about the continued use of old tanker cars known to be unsafe.

The volume of crude carried via trains has grown exponentially in recent years, as the amount of oil flowing from the Bakken formation in North Dakota and the oil sands in western Canada outstripped existing pipeline capacity. With new pipelines like Keystone XL caught up in the permitting process, freight rail infrastructure expanded to accommodate the glut of new oil with little oversight.

Bryce Covert: Men Want Work-Family Balance, and Policy Should Help Them Achieve It

Women don’t all yearn for the boardroom; some are instead focused on the rec room, Catherine Rampell reported in a front-page and much-discussed New York Times article yesterday. She paints a picture of harried women dying to get a little extra time away from the office to spend with their kids, focusing mostly on the story of Sara Uttech, a working mother in Fall River, Wisconsin. In Rampell’s piece, Uttech’s husband, and all husbands, appear just off frame. As Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote, “They are but a parenthetical, maybe an em dash.” Quite literally-men are mentioned as an aside, background noise in their children’s lives. When Uttech’s husband’s caregiving duties are mentioned, it is to say that the working mother “gets a lot of help: from her husband, Michael,” among other family members who pitch in. Fathers might as well be hired hands.

Rampell is not alone in assuming that mothers parent and dads baby-sit. The Census Bureau has made the same assumptions, calling mothers “designated parents” and counting the time fathers care for their kids as merely stepping in for said designated parent.

Auro Bogado: The Less-Than-Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill

Senator Chuck Schumer’s gamble that his fellow lawmakers would pass an immigration bill out of their chamber by the Fourth of July proved fruitful. The bill is now headed to the House-although it might not be, because that chamber isn’t entirely sure it even wants to debate it. But in the frenzy surrounding what’s been called a historic move, a lot has been lost around what the bill has actually become, and why so few voices on the left have accepted the bargain.

Just a few days before the bill’s passage, a coalition of immigrants rights and environmental advocacy groups made a big announcement in Tucson, Arizona, in opposition. Their reasons? The so-called comprehensive immigration bill is less comprehensive than it is punitive-doubling border agents to nearly 40,000, while adding more than 300 extra miles of fencing on the southern border, all in addition to billions of dollars for drones.

It is widely recognized that economists are not very good at economics. That is why we are looking at a decade of economic stagnation with tens of millions of people being unemployed or underemployed in Europe and the United States.

If economists were better at economics, central banks in the United States and Europe would have recognized the housing bubbles that were driving economies in the last decade. They would have taken steps to rein them in before they grew so large that their inevitable collapse would sink the world economy.

We recently had the opportunity to see that economists are no better at moral philosophy than economics. In a recent paper, Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw, the former chief economist to President Bush and one of the country’s most prominent conservative economists, compared progressive taxation with forcefully removing a person’s kidney for a transplant.

That is probably not how most people would view imposing a high tax rate on rich people. However the analogy is an interesting one, it just needs a bit more context.

Paul Buchheit: Four Contemptible Examples of Corporate Tax Avoidance

CEOs are legendary for defending their tax paying records, and eager to imply that government is responsible for any of their tax delinquencies. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced, “We pay all the taxes we owe – every single dollar.” Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey supported the iPhone maker, saying “It’s not Apple’s fault that they’re seeking to avoid paying taxes. They’re not lying, cheating or stealing. They’re following the rules that were created by governments. If the government doesn’t like the rules, they can change them.”

Mackey didn’t mention that changing the tax rules is a specialty of big business. As is flouting the tax rules. The following four tales of corporate malfeasance are particularly disturbing.

Ray McGovern: Obama Needs to Take Charge on NSA Spying Scandal

There is a way out for President Barack Obama as he attempts to cope with Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency’s overreaching eavesdropping, the turbulent world reaction, and the lack of truthfulness shown by National Intelligence Director James Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander. The President should seize the initiative by suggesting to both that they “spend more time with their families.”

Not since President George W. Bush attacked Iraq has there been so much discontent among our closest allies with U.S. behavior. This has been somewhat obscured, as U.S. media have chosen to focus mostly on the sins, whereabouts and future of Mr. Snowden, the new Julian Assange-type bête noir.

Most media treatment has diverted attention from obvious violations of our Fourth Amendment rights. But eavesdropped-upon Europeans and others have deep views, born of sad history, that they too must have a right to privacy. And – allowing for some posturing by politicians – most countries clearly had little idea of the breathtaking breadth and deep intrusiveness of NSA snooping.

George Zornick: How the Sequester Savages the Long-Term Unemployed

Once you become long-term unemployed, you start drawing from the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation fund, which was signed into law by George W. Bush in 2008 as the economy cratered. The idea was to throw a lifeline to people who exhausted the standard twenty-six weeks of state unemployment benefits, in a recession that, even today amidst a so-called recovery, has an average unemployment length of almost thirty-seven weeks.

But the EUC, like most federal programs, is subject to the automatic sequester cuts, and will lose $2.4 billion this fiscal year. (That represents 8 percent of the $30 billion in domestic non-Medicare budget sequester cuts.) It’s a big chunk of money-and it’s being taken away from the people who have already suffered the most during the downturn. The average resulting benefit reduction is $43 per week, out of an average EUC benefit of $289.

So is Edward Snowden a hero or a creepy betrayer? The fact that he is huddled in a Moscow airport waiting for some country to take him in lends credence to the betrayer view.

Since September 11, 2001, a lot of queasy liberals have cut the U.S. government a fair amount of slack when it comes to surveillance of potential terrorist plots. The attacks happened, after all. And more plots followed. Al-Qaeda is no paranoid fantasy. We can’t have people with top-secret information making national policy, as free-lances.

But as one detail after another has emerged in the wake of Snowden’s initial disclosures, the weight of evidence keeps shifting to the hero side of the scale.

Jeff Cohen: How Do You Know When President Obama is Lying? MSNBC Won’t Tell You

I was a young person when I first heard the quip: “How do you know when the President is lying? His lips are moving.” At the time, President Nixon was expanding the war in Vietnam to other countries and deploying the White House “plumbers” to commit crimes against antiwar leakers.

Forty years have passed. Sadly, these days, often when I see President Obama moving his lips, I assume he’s lying. [..]

When it comes to issues of U.S. militarism and spying, the allegedly “progressive” MSNBC often seems closer to the “official network of the Obama White House” than anything resembling an independent channel.  With a few exceptions (especially Chris Hayes), MSNBC has usually reacted to expanded militarism and surveillance by downplaying the abuses or defending them.

Had McCain or Romney defeated Obama and implemented the exact same policies, treating whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden as foreign espionage agents, one would expect MSNBC hosts to be loudly denouncing the Republican abuses of authority.    

Robert Reich: Why Republicans Want to Tax Students and Not Polluters

A basic economic principle is government ought to tax what we want to discourage, and not tax what we want to encourage.

For example, if we want less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we should tax carbon polluters. On the other hand, if we want more students from lower-income families to be able to afford college, we shouldn’t put a tax on student loans.

Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, congressional Republicans are intent on doing exactly the opposite.

John Nichols: America’s Most Dynamic (Yet Under-Covered) Movement: Overturning ‘Citizens United’

The most under-covered political movement in the United States-and there are a lot of under-covered political movements in the United States-is the broad-based national campaign to enact a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court rulings that ushered in a new era of big-money politics. [..]

Support for an amendment now stretches from coast to coast, with backing (in the form of legislative resolutions or statewide referendum results) from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and West Virginia. The District of Columbia is also supportive of the move to amend, as are roughly 500 municipalities, from Liberty, Maine, to Los Angeles, California-where 77 percent of voters backed a May referendum instructing elected representatives to seek an amendment establishing that “there should be limits on political campaign spending and that corporations should not have the constitutional rights of human beings.”

Denying the Bolivian president air space was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world

Imagine the aircraft of the president of France being forced down in Latin America on “suspicion” that it was carrying a political refugee to safety – and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale.

Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the “international community”, as the governments of the west call themselves. To a chorus of baying indignation from Whitehall to Washington, Brussels to Madrid, heroic special forces would be dispatched to rescue their leader and, as sport, smash up the source of such flagrant international gangsterism. Editorials would cheer them on, perhaps reminding readers that this kind of piracy was exhibited by the German Reich in the 1930s.

The forcing down of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane – denied airspace by France, Spain and Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement while Austrian officials demanded to “inspect” his aircraft for the “fugitive” Edward Snowden – was an act of air piracy and state terrorism. It was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world and the cowardice and hypocrisy of bystanders who dare not speak its name.

Joan Walsh: Red-state women will transform America

Forget what cynical pundits say. Democrats need to win states like Texas and Kentucky, and fed-up women are the key

Public Policy Polling is out with a new survey showing that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has actually increased his lead over state Sen. Wendy Davis in the wake of her nationally heralded filibuster against SB 5, the draconian antiabortion legislation Perry’s trying to pass in a second special section. It should be noted that Davis isn’t even a candidate for governor at this point, so this is a theoretical matchup absent any kind of campaign.

Still, the poll numbers are likely to bolster the already strong cynicism of Texas political observers about the chance that Davis could beat Perry if she fulfilled the dream of many liberal women nationwide and ran against him next year. Similarly, most journalists dismiss the chance that Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lunderman Grimes can knock off Sen. Mitch McConnell. But the rise of these red-state women is good news for Democrats, even if pundits say they can’t beat right-wing veterans (and national villains among liberals) like McConnell and Perry next year (and I’m not conceding that here). In most red states, the best hope for Democrats is a rising coalition of Latinos, black people, Asians, young voters and white women. Davis and Grimes could accelerate the future.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Forgotten Americans

Yesterday was the Fourth of July. That’s the day we celebrate the vision and courage shown by our nation’s founders. July 4th is the day they published a document which said it was “self-evident” that everyone has “certain unalienable rights,” including the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

How quickly we forget.

There are solutions to our unemployment problems, which have created nothing less than a lingering depression for wide swaths of our population. All we need is willpower… and remembering.

Ellen Brown: Think Your Money Is Safe in an Insured Bank Account? Think Again

When Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem told reporters on March 13, 2013, that the Cyprus deposit confiscation scheme would be the template for future European bank bailouts, the statement caused so much furor that he had to retract it. But the “bail in” of depositor funds is now being made official EU policy. On June 26, 2013, The New York Times reported that EU ministers have agreed on a plan that shifts the responsibility for bank losses from governments to bank investors, creditors and uninsured depositors.

Insured deposits (those under €100,000, or about $130,000) will allegedly be “fully protected.” But protected by whom? The national insurance funds designed to protect them are inadequate to cover another system-wide banking crisis, and the court of the European Free Trade Association ruled in the case of Iceland that the insurance funds were not intended to cover that sort of systemic collapse.

Shifting the burden of a major bank collapse from the blameless taxpayer to the blameless depositor is another case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, while the real perpetrators carry on with their risky, speculative banking schemes.

The surge in fracked gas is headed for export and won’t boost the nation’s energy independence.

Big Oil’s frackers are wrapping their shameless profiteering in our flag.

In shale fields across the country, you’ll see fracking rigs festooned with Old Glory, and they even paint some of their rigs red, white, and blue.

This ostentatious patriotic pose is part of the industry’s cynical PR campaign to convince you and me that its assault on our health, water, air, and economic future should be mindlessly saluted, rather than questioned. [..]

Joel Dyer, editor of the Boulder, Colorado Weekly, has peeked behind their-star spangled curtain. The investigative digger uncovered what he called “one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on America.”

H. Gilbert Welch: Diagnosis: Insufficient Outrage

RECENT revelations should lead those of us involved in America’s health care system to ask a hard question about our business: At what point does it become a crime?

I’m not talking about a violation of federal or state statutes, like Medicare or Medicaid fraud, although crime in that sense definitely exists. I’m talking instead about the violation of an ethical standard, of the very “calling” of medicine.

Medical care is intended to help people, not enrich providers. But the way prices are rising, it’s beginning to look less like help than like highway robbery. And the providers – hospitals, doctors, universities, pharmaceutical companies and device manufactures – are the ones benefiting.

Juan Cole: Egypt’s “Revocouption” and the Future of Democracy on the Nile

The argument over whether what happened in Egypt on Wednesday, July 3, was a coup or a revolution is really an argument over the legitimacy of the actions taken. If it was a revolution, it was perhaps a manifestation of the popular will, and so would have a sort of Rousseauan legitimacy. If it was merely a military coup against an elected president, then it lacks that legitimacy.

In fact, there certainly was a popular revolutionary element to the events, with literally millions of protesters coming out on Sunday and after, in the biggest demonstrations in Egyptian history. You can’t dismiss that as merely a coup d’etat from on top by a handful of officers.

But on Wednesday there was also a military coup, provoked by the officer corps’ increasing dissatisfaction with President Muhammad Morsi as well as a determination not to stand by as the country threatened to devolve into chaos, as rival street crowds confronted one another.

Tim Radford: A Warming Climate Will Alter the Soil That Feeds Us

Global warming may be about to change the ground under our feet – and perhaps not in a good way. It could be about to affect one of the most important communities on the planet: the tiny microbes that make life possible for the rest of creation, according to new research by scientists in the US and Spain.

Cyanobacteria are almost everywhere, have been around for the whole of life’s 3.5 billion-year history, and fix nitrogen from the atmosphere to fertilise plants and feed animals.

They are so common, and so numerous, that they form collectives that can be picked up by hand, and be seen even from space. As photosynthesisers, these blue-green algae also deliver the oxygen to keep the animal world on the move.