Tag: Opinion

Our country has been shaken by the events coming out of Boston in the past week. First, of course, there was the tragedy and loss of life and injuries from the Marathon bombing, and the fear of not knowing what would happen next. Then the alleged perpetrators were found, and we now face a debate about whether the surviving suspect, a naturalized American citizen, will be read his Miranda rights or afforded the full protections guaranteed by the Constitution. [..]

In our democracy — a nation of immigrants — the thing that binds us together is not a common language or race or religion, but our commitment to certain inalienable rights. The right to remain silent. The right to confront your accuser in a court of law. The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Self-evident truths. It all began in Boston — when a group of brave colonists resisted the yoke of a despotic king and sought freedom. Protecting Tsarnaev’s constitutional rights is the best tribute we could give to the storied legacy of that great city where our freedoms and rights first took hold.

Les Leopold: America’s New Math: 1 Wall Street Hour = 21 Years of Hard Work For the Rest of Us

The new Rich List is out — yet another example of financial pornography. While nearly 15 million Americans still can’t find jobs due to the 2008 Wall Street-created crash, the top hedge manager, David Tepper, earned $1,057,692 an HOUR in 2012 — that’s as much as the average American family makes in 21 years!

America’s new math: one Wall Street hour = 21 years of hard work for the rest of us. [..]

It’s not just that these financial gurus are filthy rich. It’s that they are the richest of the rich and we don’t even know what they do. Overall, hedge fund managers make 50 to 100 times more than our top athletes, movie stars, CEOs, lawyers, writers, doctors and celebrities. Yet, their activities are treated like state secrets.

Lee Fang: How the Climate Reform Effort Was Poisoned From the Inside

On this Earth Day, we are three years out from the last window of opportunity to pass a climate bill in America. Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol has done the best job so far in diagnosing why, at the outset of the Obama administration with large Democratic majorities in Congress, progressives failed to enact a law regulating or pricing carbon pollution. Her conclusion is that reformers spent too much resources on an “inside game” of lobbyists and dealmakers and not enough on grassroots campaigning, and that reformers failed to make the case about the dangers of global warming.

She’s right, but here’s another reason: The guys who managed the campaign were also secretly working alongside the opposition.

John Nichols: What ‘The Boston Globe’ Got Right and Why It Should Change How Papers Think

When editors at The Boston Globe recognized that their city had been bombed by suspected terrorists who were still at large, they immediately mustered a substantial and experienced newsgathering team to cover one of the most tragic, frightening and unsettling moments in the long history of a great American city.

They got the story, from the epic photos of the heroism of emergency workers last Monday to the remarkable announcement on Friday night of the apprehension of the second suspect in the bombing attack. [..]

And the Globe’s coverage was something else: Free. [..]

The readers came. On the day the paywall came down, the paper attracted 1.2 million unique visitors-six times the normal amount. Of course, dramatic events drew readers; of course, many of the new readers were from outside the Boston area. But the numbers were way, way higher-locally, nationally and even internationally-because readers did not have to jump through digital hoops and type in credit card numbers.

So dropping the paywall made sense from a standpoint of civic responsibility and from the classic journalistic standpoint of wanting to get new information and ideas to the broadest possible audience.

Corporate interests and their elected representatives have created a world of illusion in order to resist paying a decent wage to working Americans. They’d have us believe that minimum-wage workers are teens from ’50s TV sitcoms working down at the local malt shoppe.

It’s a retro-fantasy where corporate stinginess creates minority jobs, working parents can’t possibly be impoverished, and nobody gets hurt except kids who drive dad’s convertible and top up their allowances with a minimum-wage job slinging burgers. [..]

Here’s the truth: Most minimum-wage workers are adults, the majority of them are women, and many are parents who are trying to raise their children on poverty wages.

New York Times Editorial Board: How to Handle a Terrorism Case

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina apparently has a thermal-imaging device for detecting the motivation of the man arrested on suspicion of bombing the Boston Marathon. He and three other Republican lawmakers declared – without the benefit of evidence – that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be considered an enemy combatant, not a criminal, and should be held by the military without access to a lawyer or the fundamental rights that distinguish this country from authoritarian regimes.

Mr. Graham’s reckless statement makes a mockery of the superb civilian police work that led to the suspect’s capture, starting with a skillful analysis of video recordings of the marathon. The law enforcement system solved the case swiftly and efficiently, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police, and as shocking as the attack was, there is no reason civilian prosecutors, defense lawyers and courts cannot continue to do their work – especially since they have proved themselves far better at it than the military.

Ralph Nader: He Is Comfortable with Bush’s Inferno

George W. Bush is riding high. A megamillionaire, from the taxpayer-subsidized Texas Rangers company, he makes $150,000 to $200,000 per speech, receives a large presidential pension and support facilities and is about to dedicate the $500 million George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on April 25.

President Obama will be at the dedication, continuing to legitimize Mr. Bush, as he did from the outset by announcing in 2009 there would be no investigations or prosecutions of the Bush officials for their crimes.

In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Bush continued to say he has no regrets about his Presidency. “I’m comfortable with what I did,” he said, “I’m comfortable with who I am.” He added, “Much of my presidency was defined by things that you didn’t necessarily want to have happen.”

If you feel like that recovery we keep hearing about hasn’t quite trickled down to your block, there’s a good reason. A huge swath of the country’s workers are out of sync with the economic cycle, continually falling further behind the rich. And, now Obama’s proposed budget may hinder them even more.

According to a new multi-year study by Pew’s Economic Mobility Project, many families are priced out of “recovery” for reasons that long predated the recession and will persist indefinitely even as the economy “bounces back.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel: How to Beat the Gun Lobby

The Senate’s defeat of common sense gun reforms made Wednesday a dark day-for sensible legislation, and for American democracy. The failure of an already-watered down background check compromise (55 senators backed reform; 45 sided with the NRA) revealed stunning political cowardice. And it illuminated once again the ugly fault lines of our corroded democracy-from the power of special and moneyed interests, to the stranglehold of small state bias (consider North Dakota, whose Democratic and Republican senators both sided with the NRA: the state gets one-fiftieth of our senators, despite having just over one five-hundredth of our population).

If the nation’s laws fail to represent the views of the overwhelming majority of its people, representative democracy becomes an unsustainable exercise. Yesterday’s vote-which too many media outlets casually and uncritically reported would “require sixty votes to pass”-showed how badly Democratic leaders miscalculated by not standing strong for true filibuster reform, and how urgent it is to take up that cause again. The 111th Congress saw more filibusters than the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s combined.

Robert Reich: The Dis-Uniting of America (2): Social Issues and the Demographic Split

My first reaction on hearing of the Senate’s failure to get 60 votes for even modest measures to regulate the flow of guns into the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, such as background checks supported by 90 percent of Americans, was to be furious at the spinelessness of the four Senate Democrats who voted against the measure (Mark Begich, Max Baucus, Mark Pryor, and Heidi Heitkamp), as well as the Republicans. And also with Harry Reid, who wouldn’t lead the fight on changing the filibuster rule when he had the chance.

The deeper message here is that rural, older, white America occupies one land; younger, urban, increasingly non-white America lives in another. And the dividing line on social issues (not just guns, but also abortion, equal marriage rights, and immigration reform) runs between the two.

Ana Marie Cox: It’s Not NRA Dollars That Are Blocking Gun Control. It’s the NRA’s Narrative

Of all the senators who attempted Wednesday to rally support for the doomed Manchin-Toomey background check amendment, Connecticut’s Democratic freshman representative, Chris Murphy, probably faced the greatest temptation to borrow the moral authority of the Newtown families. They are his constituents and many were present in the chamber.

He’s young – the youngest sitting senator, actually – and an early Obama supporter, given to occasional bouts of (understandably) overwrought emotional rhetoric. During his very first floor speech as a senator last week, which itself took on gun legislation, he read the names of the Newtown victims – and some of the 3,000 other victims of gun violence since 14 December – into the congressional record.

Did an Excel error cost you your job? This is what people around the world should be asking after researchers at the University of Massachusetts uncovered a serious calculation mistake. The mistake was in an enormously influential paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, two prominent economists, which purports to show that high levels of government debt lead to slow economic growth.

This paper has been widely cited by political figures around the world who have been pushing the case for cutting back government spending and raising taxes. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan famously cited Reinhart and Rogoff when he laid out his budget earlier this year. So have many of the politicians now pushing for cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Tony Bennett: A Battle for the American People

After Sandy Hook I called my son Danny and we both said, “Enough is enough.” And those three words say a lot about the need for common sense gun laws but there are three words that I feel are even more important… We The People. It always serves to remind ourselves that the government works for us — they should be doing what we tell them to do — not the other way around. What happened in the Senate with the vote for stricter gun laws ignored the voice of the American people. It also defied common sense. Over 200 years ago Thomas Paine, an American patriot, ignited the American Revolution when he wrote his pamphlet called “Common Sense.” Somehow along the way we have lost our common sense. When it is harder to obtain a library card than it is to buy a gun in this country, something is terribly wrong. I mean, would you let your neighbor drive 100 miles an hour in their car through your children’s school zone? I hope you wouldn’t, but regardless everyone has the right to own a care but the safety or our community comes first and foremost. It’s just common sense. We must always balance our rights and responsibilities as responsible citizens. This is the same common sense gun legislation that was proposed to the Senate. It is clear that this is a public safety issue and it’s about keeping guns out of the wrong hands. And when I say the wrong hands, I include our children. It’s simply common sense.

Ralph Nader: Time for a Sales Tax on Wall Street Financial Transactions

Here are some questions to consider: What do the Wall Street firms do that is so vital for the national interest? How does speculation contribute to our society? It’s time for Wall Street to step up and provide some answers.

The reckless actions of Wall Street institutions led to the collapse of the the U.S. economy and the deep recession of 2008-09. The Wall Street firms looted and gambled trillions in worker pensions and mutual fund savings. The Wall Street traders made billions of dollars in speculative money — bets on bets — holding hostage the real economy where money is made by providing goods and services. And the actions of Wall Street resulted in the loss of more than 8 million jobs.

New York Times Editorial Board: The Constitution and Blood Testing

Drunken driving kills someone every 53 minutes – 9,878 times in the United States in 2011. But the problem, however grave, should not be solved by policies that violate constitutional rights. The Supreme Court was correct when it ruled Wednesday that a Missouri policy requiring a blood test, even without a search warrant, of anyone arrested on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol violated the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches – unless circumstances demand immediate action and justify a warrantless test. [..]

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in an opinion joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and, for the most part, Anthony Kennedy, said that drawing blood to test its alcohol concentration is “an invasion of bodily integrity” that involves an individual’s “most personal and deep-rooted expectations of privacy.”

If some pundits have their way, the new blueprint for the Democratic Party will pit generation against generation and ethnicity against ethnicity, fragmenting us into ever-smaller social groups competing for slices of an ever-shrinking economic pie.

Call it “Divide and Lose.”  To observers like Ronald Brownstein and Charlie Cook, it’s shrewd strategy, especially when it comes to the “chained CPI” set of tax hikes and Social Security benefit cuts.

They couldn’t be more wrong. If Democrats try to “divide and conquer,” everyone will lose.

Seamus Milne: It’s Time To Bury Not Just Thatcher – But Thatcherism

She didn’t save Britain or turn the economy round. We need to break with her failed model to escape its baleful consequences

They have only themselves to blame. Protests were always likely at any official sendoff for the most socially destructive prime minister in modern British history. But by turning Margaret Thatcher’s funeral into a state-funded Tory jamboree, puffed up with pomp and bombast, David Cameron and his acolytes made them a certainty – and fuelled a political backlash into the bargain.

As the bishop of Grantham, Thatcher’s home town, put it, spending £10m of public money to “glorify” her legacy in the month benefits are slashed and tax cuts handed to the rich is “asking for trouble”. What’s planned today isn’t a national commemoration, but a military-backed party spectacle.

Dean Baker: Corporate Governance and CEO Pay: The Cesspool at the Top

Top corporate executives have always been well-paid for obvious reasons. Running a major corporation is a demanding job; you would expect to pay a high salary to get and retain talented hardworking people.

But in the last three decades, the pay of CEOs has gone from just being high — say 30 or 40 times the pay of typical workers — to being in the stratosphere. The pay of CEOs at major corporations now averages several hundred times the pay of ordinary workers. Annual compensation packages routinely run into the tens of millions of dollars and can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. [..]

But reining in CEO pay has to be an important part of the story. One way to do this is to pressure corporate directors to actually do their jobs. Rather than being paid off to look the other way as top management pilfers the company, corporate directors should constantly be asking whether they could pay top management less or get comparable managers at lower cost.

To impose this sort of check on CEO pay, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, together with the Huffington Post, will be starting Director Watch. Director Watch is designed to highlight the abuses of corporate directors like Erskine Bowles. Bowles has pocketed millions as a board member of companies like Morgan Stanley, that would have collapsed without a government bailout and General Motors, which did collapse.

Robert Reich: The Disuniting of America

We come together as Americans when confronting common disasters and common threats, such as occurred in Boston on Monday, but we continue to split apart economically.

Anyone who wants to understand the disuniting of America needs to see how dramatically we’re segregating geographically by income and wealth. Today [Wednesday] I’m giving a Town Hall talk in Fresno, in the center of California’s Central Valley, where the official unemployment rate is 15.4 percent and median family earns under $40,000. The so-called “recovery” is barely in evidence. [..]

Many of America’s wealthy don’t see why they should pay more taxes to support the less advantaged because they have no idea what it means to be less advantaged, while many in America’s middle class can’t afford to pay more because their real wages continue to decline.

Over the winter, I heard military commanders and White House officials murmur in hushed tones about how they would have to figure out a legal and moral framework for the flying killer robots executing targets around the globe.

They were starting to realize that, while the American public approves of remotely killing terrorists, it is a drain on the democratic soul to zap people with no due process and little regard for the loss of innocents.

But they never got around to it, leaving Rand Paul to take the moral high ground. [..]

digby: Chris Hayes passes an important test

I always watch a lot of cable news (or have it on in the background) but when a major story hits, I watch it more intently and tend to move around between the stations all day to see how they are covering it.  Yesterday, everyone was on pretty good behavior even Fox which one could tell was having to bite its collective tongue not to use the occasion to criticize the president and push the Islamic terrorist scenario. Considering how tough that obviously was for them, they did an admirable job. [..]

Mostly what I hate about this coverage is the maudlin and somewhat unctuous posing (at least it feels like posing) among the pundits and anchors. It makes me yearn for the days of Walter Cronkite. (I know, that makes me old — so shoot me.)

There were exceptions. I thought Scott Pelley on CBS was remarkably professional in reporting the minute to minute during the day yesterday. And among the evening anchors, I though Chris Hayes hit just the right notes. As an analyst as well as a reporter he asked probing questions with an appropriately serious mien, but he didn’t seem to be giving a performance like so many of the rest of them did.

Valerie Strauss: Study: School Reform in 3 Major Cities Didn’t Pass the Test

Many people paying attention to corporate-based school reform in recent years will not be surprised by this, but a new study on the effects of this movement in Washington, D.C., New York City and Chicago concludes that little has been accomplished and some harm has been done to students, especially the underprivileged.

The report looks at the impact of reforms that have been championed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other well-known reformers, including Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, and, in New York City, Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City Public Schools and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It says:

   The reforms deliver few benefits and in some cases harm the students they purport to help, while drawing attention and resources away from policies with real promise to address poverty-related barriers to school success…

Deborah Weinstein: In Obama’s Budget, Poverty Initiatives Face an Uphill Battle

There are certain facts of life reflected by the FY 2014 Obama budget proposal: first, anything really worth having is going to be hard to get; and, the regrettable corollary – some things you don’t want are a lot closer to reality.

There are new and even historic anti-poverty proposals in this budget. But the better they are, the more they fall into the “hard to get” category. On the other hand, Social Security cuts in the form of smaller cost-of-living adjustments could far more easily become real. [..]

While the job creation and economic development proposals are well designed, the scope is not adequate to meet the needs of the current weak economy. The president stated that his budget shows it is possible to reduce the deficit and invest in economic growth at the same time. But the Senate budget, with more revenue and more Pentagon savings, demonstrates this possibility more clearly.

Last week President Obama announced a budget that includes something called “Chained CPI” as a way to reduce Social Security benefits. I will not support it. And will not vote for any plan that includes cuts to benefits Americans have earned. The proposal has already sparked large protests by groups ranging from organized labor to nonpartisan veterans’ organization. But what exactly is Chained CPI? And what makes cutting Social Security benefits so harmful right now?

To understand, here’s some context. American families have traditionally depended on three legs of a stool to support them during their retirement: retirement plans from their employers, private savings, and Social Security. But over the past 30 years, two of those legs — personal savings and retirement plans — have been rotting away for the American middle class.

Michael Cohen: How payroll taxes expose Republicans’ fundamental anti-tax hypocrisy

The GOP loves to cut income tax but stays shtum about payroll taxes – because only the former gives dollars back to the rich [..]

Payroll taxes, which are used to fund social security and Medicare, are the taxes that every American pays out of his or her salary. These levies account for approximately 35% of all federal revenues; they consume close to 17% of worker salaries; and for three out of every four households, they represent a larger portion of their tax responsibility than dreaded, hated income taxes.

Funny, you don’t hear Republicans complain much about those taxes.

There’s a good reason for that – working-class and middle-class Americans bear the greatest burden from payroll taxes. Income taxes, on the other hand, because they are progressive and thus increase the more money you make, take a bigger hit out of wealthy Americans.

Which goes to prove, as if we didn’t know already, that Republicans don’t really care about taxes … they care about rich people paying taxes.

Paul Buchheit: Looking for Cheats in Corporate Tax Filings: A Descent into the Circles of Hell

When Dante descended into the Inferno, guided by Virgil, he passed through Circles of Gluttony and Greed, and of Heresy and Fraud and Treachery.

The modern-day version is the corporate tax filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Navigation through the hellish form is fraught with anguish and pain and bewilderment, causing the visitor to beg for release from its devilish grasp, to shudder when recalling the sign at the entrance: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

The Circle of Betrayal: Big Profits Overseas, Big Losses in the U.S.

Bank of America, Citigroup, and Pfizer can be found here. In the last two years each one of them made much of their revenue in the U.S., but they claimed billions of dollars in foreign profits and billions of dollars in U.S. losses.

William Rivers Pitt: Obama Joins the Club

I spent the week trying to think of new and novel ways to call the president stupid for putting a Social Security benefit cut into his budget, because coughing up this Chained CPI thing raced into the Unforced Political Errors Hall Of Fame so fast it left skid marks and smoke, and is currently jostling elbows with Nixon firing Archie Cox and Clinton offering the intern a cigar for the marquee spot at the top of the list.

Think I’m exaggerating? Serving up a cut to Social Security benefits – and it is a cut, no matter what the Smart People tell you – was galactically stupid from a tactical perspective. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), the anointed mouthpiece for the GOP’s House re-election campaign, has already called the president’s budget a “shocking attack,” and accused the White House of “trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors.”

Get ready for a lot more of that.

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

I could have been home years ago – no one seriously thinks I am a threat – but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Upside of Taxes

April 15 has never been considered a day for celebration, and it’s especially tough to pay taxes when so many of us are struggling financially.

But the real problem isn’t taxation. Ourreal problem is the new “bipartisan” drive toward austerity, a mad obsession which runs against the 75-year political consensus of both political parties. Once our leaders understood government’s vital role in a healthy economy.

No more, apparently. Today’s new corporate-sponsored cost-cutting craze is merely the latest policy designed to enrich a powerful few at the expense of the many, and today’s anti-tax agenda is being used to make sure it succeeds.

Les Leopold: The Southern State Fast Becoming Ayn Rand’s Vision of Paradise

If you’re worried about where America is heading, look no further than Tennessee. It’s lush mountains and verdant rolling countryside belie a mean-spirited public policy that only makes sense if you deeply believe in the anti-collectivist, anti-altruist philosophy of Ayn Rand. It’s what you get when you combine hatred for government with disgust for poor people.

Tennessee starves what little government it has. It ranks dead last in per capita tax revenue. To fund its minimalist public sector, it makes sure that low-income residents pay as much as possible through heavily regressive sales taxes, which rank 10th highest among all states as a percent of total tax revenues.

John Nichols: Obama’s Chained-CPI Social Security Cut is Smart Politics… For the GOP

The most misread — perhaps the proper word is “miscovered” — story of the current budget wrangling in Washington is that of Republican Congressman Greg Walden’s savage condemnation of President Obama’s proposal of the “Chained-CPI” Social Security cut.

“When you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taken $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare and now coming back at seniors again,” declared the congressman from Oregon, “I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here in terms of denying access to seniors for health care in districts like mine certainly and around the country.”  [..]

Greg Walden, who was a prominent Oregon legislator and potential gubernatorial candidate in 1994, and who was an essential player in the House Republican leadership in 2010, knows the history.

That’s why Walden is saying what he is saying.

Anyone who is interested in the politics of 2014 knows that Greg Walden is not pontificating about policy. He is laying political traps that will spring on the Democrats if they put their party on the side of “Chained-CPI” and the austerity agenda.