Tag: Opinion

As if immigration and health-care reform aren’t sufficiently daunting in their own rights, the two issues are now joined.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would give the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. a chance to become citizens. Immigrants who meet a series of conditions would be granted provisional legal status, allowing them to work in the country legally.

The legislation would prevent those immigrants from receiving federal benefits for at least 10 years. The prohibition includes qualifying for Medicaid and getting federal subsidies to purchase health insurance.

Excluding such immigrants from government health assistance has its appeal. Although the cost of extending such benefits is hard to estimate — the Congressional Budget Office hasn’t analyzed the issue — it’s likely to be expensive. In addition, some critics view subsidies for immigrants as a perverse reward for breaking immigration laws.

Eugene Robinson: Too Juvenile to Govern

Washington – With budgetary tantrums in the Senate and investigative play-acting in the House, the Republican Party is proving once again that it simply cannot be taken seriously.

This is a shame. I don’t share the GOP’s philosophy, but I do believe that competition makes both of our major parties smarter. I also believe that a big, complicated country facing economic and geopolitical challenges needs a government able to govern.

What we don’t need is the steady diet of obstruction, diversion and gamesmanship that Republicans are trying to ram down the nation’s throat. It’s not as if President Obama and the Democrats are doing everything right. It’s just that the GOP shrinks from doing anything meaningful at all.

Mark Vorpahl: Quantitative Crisis: Bernanke’s “Stimulus” for the 1%

When I heard that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress last week that it was too soon for the Fed to end its extraordinary stimulus programs, I did a double take.

“What stimulus programs?” I thought. Where are the jobs programs? Where are the “extraordinary” social services that will enable those still suffering from the effects of the Great Recession to buy more and stimulate the economy?

What escaped my attention for a moment was the fact that these words were uttered by an official steeped in the jargon of high finance and political policy – where words like “stimulus” are treated to Orwellian twists, their meaning transformed into something very different from what most people understand them to mean.

Christopher Flavelle: The Real Reason We Pay So Much for Health Care

A lengthy New York Times report yesterday detailed just how much more Americans pay for medical services than people in other countries. Often a lot more: almost twice what the Swiss pay for a colonoscopy, three and a half times more than the Dutch for an MRI and five times more than Spaniards for a hip replacement, according to the International Federation of Health Plans.

The high per-unit price of medical services in this country is an open secret, well documented in the health-policy world but largely ignored in the political debate. Rather than rail against high prices, Americans should rail against this: The fixes for those higher prices are clear enough, yet they get almost no consideration from policymakers.

In his commencement address at the United States Military Academy late last month, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urged the newest graduates of the two-centuries-old academy to help stamp out the “scourge” of sexual assaults in the military. His call had special resonance. It had been revealed just days before that a sergeant responsible for advising cadets had been charged with secretly videotaping female cadets in the shower – just one of an alarming cascade of incidents in recent weeks evidencing the depth, frequency and sheer brazenness of the military’s sexual misconduct problem. [..]

The issue will get an airing Tuesday at a hearing convened by Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, to consider possible changes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, using the annual defense authorization bill as a vehicle. The question, however, is whether Congress will undertake the broad reforms necessary to encourage more victims to come forward and to show that legislators take seriously the pledge of zero tolerance for such crimes that military leaders and successive administrations have been making for decades.

Kumi Naidoo: In Turkey, The Last Tree or the Final Straw?

Our office in Istanbul has been under siege. It is in the heart Taksim, an area in which a brutal police clampdown has been trying to end the peaceful protest over the planned destruction of the small, and historic, Gezi Park by Taksim Square. The protest has grown to involve tens of thousands of people and drawn the support of people from all over the world.

People are travelling from all over Turkey to Taksim, people are gathering elsewhere in the country and around the world in solidarity to say “I am in Gezi” and to say “we are watching and we are horrified by the brutality”.

It is no longer about a handful of trees in a tiny park or the plans to cover it with a shopping mall. But, make no mistake, the fundamental human need for natural spaces over the inexorable march of shopping malls remains an important factor.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Truman Show Economy (With a Nod to Philip K. Dick)

A Northern Ireland county made news this week when it literally created a false front of prosperity for dignitaries in town for the G8 conference. The Irish Times reports that County Fermanagh spent roughly £300,000 ($456,000 at today’s exchange rates) to conceal the shuttered storefronts and empty buildings left behind by economy-killing austerity cuts. [..]

It would certainly embarrass British Prime Minister (and austerity extremist) David Cameron to let his peers see the fruits of his economic philosophy in a region which, while largely self-governing, is still part of Great Britain. [..]

The deceptions go on anyway. It’s been a “false-front” economy for nearly five years.  Ireland’s deception was ours, in physical form.

Welcome to The Truman Show economy.

Janet Cotter and Eric Darier: When Will Governments Learn That GE Crops Are Uncontrollable?

Shockwaves are being felt across the world’s wheat markets following the first-ever discovery of unauthorised genetically engineered wheat growing on a US farm – a development that gives further proof that GE crops cannot be controlled.

The discovery of Monsanto’s GE wheat, confirmed by US authorities, sparked alarm among Washington’s trading nations, pushed wheat prices lower and is threatening US exports. It should not be seen, however, as totally unexpected.

The GE wheat is a herbicide tolerant wheat (probably MON 71800) that Monsanto tested in fields across 16 states between 1998 and 2005. The wheat was never authorised and never commercialised because Monsanto withdrew its application in May 2004 following massive global opposition from farmers, consumers and environmentalists.

Barack Obama is a master trickster, a shape-shifter, and a methodical liar. The man who has arrogated to himself the right to kill at will, anywhere on the globe, accountable only to himself, based on secret information and classified legal rationales, now says he is determined that Washington’s “perpetual war” must one day end – sometime in the misty future after he is long gone from office. He informed his global audience of potential victims that he had signed a secret agreement (with himself?) that would limit drone strikes to targets that pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and cannot be captured – a policy that his White House has always claimed (falsely) to be operative. He promises to be more merciful than before, “haunted” as he is by all the nameless deaths, although he admits to having done no wrong. [..]

Such conflicts, we must understand, are necessitated by the “imminence” of threats posed to U.S. security, as weighed and measured by secret means. His Eminence is the sole judge of imminence. He is also the arbiter of who is to be detained in perpetuity, without trial or (public) charge, for “association” with “terrorists” as defined by himself. He has no apologies for that.

Marcy Wheeler: American Drone War: Murder and Democracy

In his post on the drone killing of Waliur Rehman Mehsud earlier this week, Jim noted that CIA has sworn revenge for the 2009 Pakistani Taliban supported suicide attack on CIA’s base in Khost.

Sure enough, one of the things Press Secretary Jay Carney mentioned when asked about the strike yesterday was Rehman’s role in the “murder” of 7 CIA officers in Khost in 2009. [..]

Now, I’m sorry that 7 CIA officers died, but let’s consider what it means that the US continues to call the attack murder. [..]

And it’s not just with this drone killing.

Both in Pakistan and Yemen (not coincidentally, the places where we use what we call signature strikes but might just be side payment strikes), we have taken out more than a few people who – like Rehman – were either amenable to negotiations or had served as mediators between the government and extremist forces in the past.

John Stolz: McCain Poses With Alleged Terrorists — Proof That Involvement in Syria Is a Bad Idea

The photo of John McCain posing with terrorists and kidnappers in Syria encapsulates, perfectly, everything wrong with the position of McCain and others that the U.S. ought to insert itself into Syria’s civil war. [..]

It was revealed this morning that McCain, during his personal mission to Syria to meet with rebels, appeared in photos with Mohammed Nour and Abu Ibrahim, two members of the Sunni “Northern Storm” brigade, which kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shia pilgrims, who were on their way back to Lebanon, from Iran. The group is still holding nine of the hostages.

This should give everyone pause when it comes to ramping up support for the rebels by arming them.

Robert Reich: Economic Storm Clouds Ahead

Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good. But the recent jubilance is enough to make even weather forecasters blush. “Just look at the bull market! Look at home prices! Look at consumer confidence!”

Please.

I can understand the jubilation in the narrow sense that we’ve been down so long everything looks up. Plus, professional economists tend to cheerlead because they believe that if consumers and businesses think the future will be great, they’ll buy and invest more — leading to a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But prophesies can’t be self-fulfilling if they’re based on wishful thinking.

The reality is we’re still in the doldrums, and the most recent data gives cause for serious worry

Is our country losing the vision and values which gave rise to Social Security?

Social Security benefits lag far behind those of other developed countries. A new analysis of census data shows that elder poverty is much higher than we first realized. And yet the discussion in Washington is of cutting, not expanding, it. The number of impoverished seniors would rise sharply if that happened, or if the Medicare cuts currently under discussion became law.

The numbers say that Social Security should be increased, not cut, and most Americans agree.

But the Social Security cutters, financed by billions and aided by their network of powerful friends in government and the media, are appealing to the human heart. That’s a bitter irony for a policy prescription that even their own consciences must recognize is heartless.

Robert Sheer: Congress Still Puts Out for Wall Street

What does it take to make a Wall Street banker squirm with shame? Not content with having swindled tens of millions of Americans out of their homes and life savings, the very bankers who caused the biggest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression are now subverting government regulations designed to prevent comparable disasters in the future.

Top of the list of those responsible are the hustlers at Citigroup, once the world’s largest financial conglomerate, and a leading practitioner of the sordid behavior that caused the housing meltdown. Indeed, Citigroup was allowed to form as a merger of the investment banking of Travelers and the federal insured commercial banking of Citicorp only because lobbyists for those institutions successfully engineered the reversal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law that had banned such combinations.

Dave Murphy: The March to Stop Monsanto: Taking Back Our Food, Our Farms, Our Democracy and Our Planet

The march to stop Monsanto is one of the most pressing issues of our time. As a single company, Monsanto is the tip of the iceberg representing the threat that unchecked corporate power has in corrupting our democratic institutions, driving family farmers off the land, threatening human health and contaminating our environment.

The problem with Monsanto is not just their corrosive lobbying practices, but the fact that the products they produce, genetically engineered foods and chemical weed killers, are in more than 70% of the processed foods that we eat and feed our families everyday. [..]

Monsanto’s unchecked power is corrosive to the health of our democracy, our well-being and our planet and it must be stopped. As free citizens, it is our right and our duty to protest their unlawful encroachment into the most basic and fundamental aspect of our lives, the food that we eat and the laws that govern our lives.

Sadhbh Walshe: We Can’t Let Monsanto Win on Genetically Modified Food

Monsanto has been victorious in court, Congress and the White House. Protests will need to grow to stop them.

Last weekend, 2 million people around the world took to the streets to protest genetically modified food, drawing attention to its dangers and the environmental harm caused by its production. Two million people is a pretty good showing by any standard, but especially so when event organizers said they would have considered 3,000 a success. According to Andrew Kimbrell, the executive director of the Center for Food Safety, the turnout was a welcome sign of a growing safe food movement:

   A decade ago we would have been happy if 10 people showed up at a march about food safety, now if we get less than a million people signing a petition we are disappointed.

Sadly for Kimbrell and other food safety activists, a million signatures on a petition or majority support for food labeling does not guarantee the government will submit to the public will.

President Obama’s recent speech on national security fell short when it came to addressing drones.

Obama sounded like the president his supporters had hoped for: the constitutional law scholar, the solemn decision-maker and the former community activist who, at heart, would always be more interested in connecting with the world’s hopes than its fears. It is unclear whether the reality of America’s drone wars will catch up with the best of Obama’s rhetoric, and if tighter legal constraints will lead to fewer drone strikes against a shorter list of enemies.

On the secrecy count, however, it is all too apparent that the Administration is not prepared to go far enough in the direction of reform. Though the President has repeatedly pledged transparency, in his speech he failed to signal that basic facts – including how many people have been killed by drone strikes and who they are – will become public. Nor did the President commit to independent investigations of the dozens of credible reports of civilian deaths from past drone strikes.

Moira Herbst: The Bank Bailout Cost US Taxpayers Nothing? Think Again

Don’t buy the line that the 2008 bailout gamble paid off. The banks have politicians and taxpayers firmly in their pockets

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report (pdf) with what seemed like good news: the bailout of 2008 – which fronted $700bn in taxpayer funds to prop up the financial institutions that brought the economy to the brink – ended up cheaper than expected. The price tag was revised down to $21bn from $24bn.

The picture was even rosier once you looked past how much it cost to bailout General Motors and insurance giant AIG. The cost of the bank bailout alone is, in fact, projected to be “almost nothing”, as Politico’s Morning Money blog put it. So insignificant was the harm done to taxpayers that Politico put “bailout” in quotation marks. [..]

This is the line the banks and the US Treasury would like us to swallow. It is, of course, totally false. The bailout cost us plenty, and continues to do so. Sadly, it is the gift that keeps on giving to the very banks that drove our economy over a cliff – and took trillions in housing wealth, retirement funds and millions of jobs with it.

Sheila Bapat: Student Debt Is a Women’s Issue

Because student debt affects a large swath of Americans who struggle to build wealth over the course of their careers, it is primarily discussed as a class and an economic stimulus issue. But student debt is also an issue of particular importance for women. According to earnings statistics, women get far less bang for their buck out of higher education. Recent proposals to reduce student debt could benefit women over the course of their lives-but they may not go far enough.

Women make up the majority of higher education students, yet they earn far less than men with the same degrees. For the past several years women have outnumbered men in undergraduate and master’s programs, and as of 2010 women outnumber men in PhD programs as well. With respect to the two most expensive degrees, law and medicine, in 2009-10 women comprised 45 percent of law school classes, and as of 2011 they made up 48 percent of medical school graduates. This NPR piece from 2010 discusses how even though women are earning more engineering, math, and science PhDs than they were in previous years, women still experience wage disparities in these fields after graduation. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) found in a study last year that the student loan repayment burden is higher for women than for men for a variety of reasons, including the gender pay gap, which begins right after college graduation.

Rachel Smolker: Genetically Engineered Trees and Glowing Synthetic Plants? No Thanks

his week in Asheville, N.C., the IUFRO “Tree Biotechnology” conference will meet. And the attendees will be met: by protests. Public opinion is unequivocally opposed to genetically engineered trees. When the South Carolina-based tree engineering company, ArborGen recently applied for deregulation of their freeze tolerant eucalyptus, APHIS responded by filing a “notice of intent” to conduct an environmental impact statement, and opened up for public comments on ArborGen’s petition. The comments the received were overwhelmingly negative by a vast majority.

Similarly, when ArborGen filed for permission to field test their frankeneucalyptus back in 2010, more than 17,500 comments opposing the tests were submitted, while only 39 were favorable. In spite of the abysmal approval ratings, USDA granted permission to field test the trees and then again granted permission to allow some plots to go to flower. A lawsuit was filed against USDA by a coalition of groups (Global Justice Ecology Project, Dogwood Alliance, Center for Food Safety, Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity). In an article published in Biomass Magazine, spokesperson for the Biotechnology Industry Organization credited the suit as “… a hindrance to biomass development, as they discourage investment… It is creating a huge barrier.”

There is a striking contrast between how the eurozone and the United States are handling their financial crises

The eurozone recession is now the longest on record for the single currency area, according to official statistics released last week, as the economy shrank again in the first quarter of this year. A comparison with the US economy may shed some light on how such a profound economic failure can occur in high-income, highly-educated countries in the 21st century. [..]

The contrast between the US and Europe is all the more striking because Europe has much stronger labour unions, social democratic parties, and a more developed welfare state. Yet the eurozone has implemented policies far to the right of the US government, causing needless suffering for millions more people. How does this happen? The answers have little to do with a “debt crisis” but everything to do with macroeconomic policy, ideology, and – perhaps most importantly – democracy. As such these questions are relevant not only to the populations of both of these economic superpowers, but to most of the world.

Jon Nichols: Yuck! The Senate Won’t Clear the Way for States to Label Genetically Modified Food

Simple concept: people who consume food should have information about what’s in their food.

And if foods contain genetically modified organisms, consumers surely have a right to know.

Who could disagree? Most senators, that’s who.

While sixty-four countries around the world require labeling of foods with genetically engineered ingredients, while the American Public Health Association and the American Nurses Association have passed resolutions supporting this sort of labeling in the United States, the Senate voted 71-27 to keep Americans in the dark.

Norman Solomon: Our Twisted Politics of Grief

In the “endless war,” some kinds of grief are more useful than others

Darwin observed that conscience is what most distinguishes humans from other animals. If so, grief isn’t far behind. Realms of anguish are deeply personal-yet prone to expropriation for public use, especially in this era of media hyper-spin. Narratives often thresh personal sorrow into political hay. More than ever, with grief marketed as a civic commodity, the personal is the politicized.

The politicizing of grief exploded in the wake of 9/11. When so much pain, rage and fear set the U.S. cauldron to boil, national leaders promised their alchemy would bring unalloyed security. The fool’s gold standard included degrading civil liberties and pursuing a global war effort that promised to be ceaseless. From the political outset, some of the dead and bereaved were vastly important, others insignificant. Such routine assumptions have remained implicit and intact.

Justin Doolittle: Pakistanis: We Want the US Out; New York Times: No, You Don’t.

The A1 story in Sunday’s New York Times, written by Declan Walsh, is titled “U.S. Shift Poses Risk to Pakistan.” The story argues that, with the United States gradually dwindling down its political and military engagement with Pakistan, the latter faces a highly uncertain future. Walsh tells us that the disengagement will “diminish” the “prestige” and “political importance” Pakistan held as a (Photo: Al Jazeera)”crucial player in global counterterrorism efforts” and could very well “upset its internal stability.”

It’s a piece that is revealing because one voice is noticeably left out of the analysis: that of the Pakistani people. Arguably the most salient fact about the U.S.-Pakistan dynamic is that Pakistanis – you know, the actual human beings who live in that country – despise the U.S. government and think the interaction between the two countries does more harm than good. Gallup conducted polling on these matters in Pakistan last year. An amazing 92% of Pakistanis expressed disapproval of U.S. leadership (i.e. Obama), while 4% approved. In a separate poll, 55% of Pakistanis reported that interaction with the West constitutes “more of a threat”; just 39% thought it was “more of a benefit.”

Just as markets over-built housing, mispriced mortgages and bid up prices beyond the real financial capacity of homebuyers, America’s colleges and universities have over-expanded and over-priced their product. We are getting an education bubble with dynamics similar to the late housing bubble.

As more and more students find themselves with debts that exceed the salaries offered by the current job market, colleges have expanded beyond the capacity of their markets. Some kind of shakeout is coming. The question is: what kind.

Chris Hayes: London Terror

Terror does something particularly horrible to a populace. It is designed to incite a reaction, one in which people are put in their worst places as citizens. It’s a place where they are acting out of fear. Psychologists have found that: “When people feel safe and secure, they become more liberal; when they feel threatened, they become more conservative.” [..]

And what it seeks to snuff out is empathy and reason and fidelity to principles of liberty, and calmness. But what made this crazy story so remarkable was a woman, Ingrid Loyau-Kennet, who confronted one of the alleged attackers. She was staring this man in the face and engaged him in a conversation before police arrived. She didn’t cower and she didn’t run and she didn’t even succumb to rage. She just looked terror in the eyes and essentially said, calmly, you will lose. That is how we should respond to terrorism.

Jim Hightower: The New Crime of Eating While Homeless

By outlawing dumpster diving, Houston is making life impossible for the most vulnerable.

Whenever one of our cities gets a star turn as host of some super-sparkly event, such as a national political gathering or the Super Bowl, its first move is to tidy up – by having the police sweep homeless people into jail, out of town, or under some rug.

But Houston’s tidy-uppers aren’t waiting for a world-class event to rationalize going after homeless down-and-outers. They’ve preemptively outlawed the “crime” of dumpster diving in the Texan city. [..]

Such laws are part of an effort throughout the country to criminalize what some call “homeless behavior.” And, sure enough, when hungry, the behavioral tendency of a homeless human is to seek a bite of nourishment, often in such dining spots as dumpsters. The homeless behavior that Houston has outlawed, then, is eating.

John Miller: The Chained CPI Is Bad for Seniors and for Accuracy

That AARP television ad sure raised the hackles of the Washington Post editors back in 2011. The editors called AARP’s threat-to vote out any politician who supported a reduction in the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for Social Security benefits-“thuggish,” “self-centered,” in denial about the crisis of Social Security, and as “wrongheaded” as conservative power-broker Grover Norquist. That last one had to hurt.

Back then, the proposal to reduce the Social Security COLA by switching to the “chained” Consumer Price Index (CPI) didn’t come to pass. But now it’s back, this time as part of the 2014 Obama budget proposal and going by its technical economic name-the “superlative CPI.” Make no mistake, though. It’s the same idea now as then, and would reduce the COLAs for Social Security and veterans’ benefits, as well as the inflation adjustment for income-tax brackets.

On why Obama’s policies themselves, not those who speak out against them, are rude

Having worked for years on the issues of drones and Guantanamo, I was delighted to get a pass (the source will remain anonymous) to attend President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University. I had read many press reports anticipating what the President might say. There was much talk about major policy shifts that would include transparency with the public, new guidelines for the use of drones, taking lethal drones out of the purview of the CIA, and in the case of Guantanamo, invoking the “waiver system” to begin the transfer of prisoners already cleared for release.

Sitting at the back of the auditorium, I hung on every word the President said. I kept waiting to hear an announcement about changes that would represent a significant shift in policy. Unfortunately, I heard nice words, not the resetting of failed policies.

Gail Collins: The Women Versus the Ted

The Senate seems a bit less polarized and more productive this session. Is that because there are more women in power or is it thanks to Ted Cruz?

Let’s discuss how much better Congress would work if most of the members were women.

The Senate seems to be a tad less polarized since the female population rose from 17 to 20 this year. It’s also possible that there’s been more productivity since women got more power. For instance, the Budget Committee has a new chair, Patty Murray of Washington, and it has produced a budget for the first time in four years.

Bill Blum: Three Questions Left Unanswered by Obama’s Counterterrorism Speech

In the midst of his carefully scripted counterterrorism address Thursday at National Defense University in Washington, D.C., President Obama encountered an unexpected speed bump in the form of Medea Benjamin, the highly animated 60-year-old co-founder of anti-war group Code Pink whose track record for crashing high-profile political events and heckling speakers has earned her the reputation of being the country’s most disruptive protester.  [..]

Although the major media thus far have treated Benjamin’s antics as an amusing sideshow, the questions she raised about the legal basis for the administration’s policies are anything but funny or anywhere close to being resolved. Indeed, far from succeeding as a reassuring second-term milestone, the president’s speech left at least three core issues in the war on terror entirely unsettled: [..]

Robert Reich: Why Democrats Can’t Be Trusted to Control Wall Street

Who needs Republicans when Wall Street has the Democrats? With the help of congressional Democrats, the Street is rolling back financial reforms enacted after its near meltdown.

According to the New York Times, a bill that’s already moved through the House Financial Services Committee, allowing more of the very kind of derivatives trading (bets on bets) that got the Street into trouble, was drafted by Citigroup — whose recommended language was copied nearly word for word in 70 lines of the 85-line bill.

Where were House Democrats? Right behind it. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a major recipient of the Street’s political largesse, co-sponsored it. Most of the Democrats on the Committee, also receiving generous donations from the big banks, voted for it. Rep. Jim Himes, another proponent of the bill and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, now leads the Democrat’s fund-raising effort in the House.