Tag: Opinion

The president must close the loophole left in the Fair Labor Standards Act for home care workers.

Eighty years ago Frances Perkins broke a glass ceiling in government when President Franklin D. Roosevelt named her Secretary of Labor, the first female cabinet member in U.S. history. But her legacy extends far beyond the appointment itself. In her twelve years at the helm of the Department of Labor, Perkins played a key role in helping Roosevelt enact the critical legislation that comprised the New Deal.

One of Perkins’s signature accomplishments, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), turns 75 this year. It established the 40-hour work week, placed restrictions on child labor, set the first-ever federal minimum wage, and required overtime pay for hours worked over 40 in a given work week. By any measure, the FLSA improved working life for most Americans.

But not for all Americans.

Jeff Cohen: The Elephant in the Room: Militarism

I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV — at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated. Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to exist.

Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem — a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).

That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.

William Greider: Will Voters Forgive Obama for Cutting Social Security? (No. And They Shouldn’t.)

President Obama has riled loyal Democrats by tossing Social Security onto the table in his poker game with Republicans. Not to worry. I think I know how this story ends. A year from now, when the 2014 congressional campaigns are hot underway, Republicans will be running against Obama-the-slasher and promising to protect Social Security from the bloodthirsty Democrats.

By then, having lost on his too-cute strategy, the president will be reduced to lamely reassuring old folks. Really, he didn’t actually intend to cut their benefits, really he didn’t. It was just a ploy to get tightwad conservatives to give in a little on tax increases. Republicans can pull out the videotapes in which Obama and team explain their high-minded purpose-sacrificing the Democratic party’s sacred honor in order to get Republicans to play nice.

Dylan Ratigan: Ending Our Incarceration Nation

Friends,

In life there are some clear paths that we can walk down today to reach a better place, while others are less clear, dangerous even, yet no less important for us to travel.

When it comes to creating jobs for veterans, it’s clear we can act now to feed people using the modern technology of hydroponic, organic farming. As you know, an increasingly large group of us are acting to do just that by taking Archi’s Acres to the national level.

Other problems are more intractable, seemingly insurmountable. Beyond jobs, food and our vets, few things keep me up more than the disastrous functionality of our prison system.

Democrats keep telling their growing coalition to wait and the economic policies they’ve been hoping for will come. Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s agenda can’t back up that promise.

The Democratic Party’s long-term prospects have dramatically improved since the November election. They will control the White House for another four years. The Republicans, who lost the total vote for the House of Representatives, remain captive of an unpopular reactionary right wing. The “Obama Coalition” of minorities and single women is growing faster than the GOP’s white male base. If demography is destiny, Democrats-and the progressive interests that they are supposed represent in the two-party system-are the wave of the future.

But the American dream is about upward mobility. Ultimately, “The economy, Stupid” trumps identity politics. If the Democrats are not the champions of expanding jobs and incomes for the majority of voters who work for a living-whatever their gender, color, or sexual orientation-their claim to being the natural majority party will amount to little.

Bruce A. Dixon: Is This Barack Obama’s 2nd Term? Is it Bill Clinton’s 3rd? Or Is It Ronald Reagan’s 9th?

The answer is yes to all three. Ronald Reagan hasn’t darkened the White House door in decades. But his policy objectives have been what every president, Democrat and Republican have pursued relentlessly ever since. Barack Obama is only the latest and most successful of Reagan’s disciples.

Like the present era, the Reagan presidency marked a series of decisive rightward turns for US empire at home and abroad. [..]

One could also argue, since we are in the grips of the greatest depression, although we don’t call them that any more, since the 1930s, and Obama’s economic policies bear more in common to Herbert Hoover than to Franklin Roosevelt, that we’re living through Herbert Hoover’s third term as well. But we’ll save that for another day.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: 9 ‘Chained CPI’ Facts They Don’t Want You to Know

The “chained CPI” proposal in President Obama’s budget continues to draw much-deserved fire, which is only likely to increase as more information about it becomes known.

Here are nine embarrassing facts about the chained CPI which the White House and its defenders would prefer to see overlooked: [..]

The bottom line? The chained CPI is the wrong answer to the wrong problem at the wrong time. It’s time for the White House to recognize that and move on. In the meantime Democrats need to walk away from it fast, before they pay a high price for it at the polls.

Jim Hightower: Fracking Free Speech

Welcome to Sanford, New York. It’s a pleasant place of 2,800 citizens on the New York-Pennsylvania border. Unfortunately, the pleasantness has been interrupted by a major squabble over whether or not to allow big companies to extract natural gas by fracturing the huge Marcellus Shale formation that underlies the region.[..]

However, as OnEarth magazine reports, Sanford’s town board is eager to allow oil and gas outfits to frack away. The board even leased land to one corporation that wants to drill inside the town. Last fall, Sanford officials went further, imperiously imposing a gag order on their own citizens. It seems that opponents of the profiteering frack rush were using the board’s public comment session to…well, to comment publicly.

Irritated, the board decreed that any topic could be discussed at its meetings – except fracking.

Today, the president releases his budget for fiscal year 2014, the year that begins this October. Commentators and advocates will pour over its disparate parts,  although the White House has already leaked its major contours.

This document is less a budget for government than a purpose statement of the administration.  In this divided government, it is already “dead on arrival.”  That’s particularly true this year since the Senate and House have each passed its own budget outline.  For all of its volumes and detail, the president’s budget is at best a statement of his priorities.  And there it is distinctively disappointing.

The president’s major purpose is not to address mass unemployment, not to build a new foundation for the economy, not to revive the middle class or redress Gilded Age inequality.  The president’s overriding priority is to cut a deal – and a deal that continues to impose austerity on an already faltering recovery.

Robert Naiman: Cut Social Security & Veterans’ Benefits? Cut the Pentagon Instead

The boss organizes the workers, union organizers like to say.

Say what you want about President Obama’s proposal to cut Social Security and veterans’ benefits with the “chained CPI.” He did accomplish one thing for liberals that they often have a hard time doing on their own.

He united them — in opposition to his proposal. [..]

But that’s not all we have to celebrate. If, like most Americans, you prefer to cut what Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has called the “bloated” Pentagon budget instead of cutting Social Security and veterans’ benefits, you have even more reason to rejoice.

Because at this political juncture, everyone in America who says “no cuts to Social Security or veterans’ benefits” is effectively saying “cut the bloated Pentagon budget,” whether they do so explicitly or not. If the “grand bargain” is killed and Social Security and veterans’ benefits are spared — apparently these are all the same political event — then the Pentagon budget will be cut instead.

Richard Reeves: Permanent Unemployment for Everyone, Brought to You by Vulture Capitalism

When ATMs, the cash machines, began to appear on the outside walls of banks in the 1970s, I refused to go near them. My mother was a teller at the Trust Company of New Jersey on Journal Square in Jersey City, and I knew the machines were designed to eliminate her job.

When I was at The New York Times, I went one day to what we called the “morgue,” the library of old clippings. The guy behind the counter, whom I remember as “Bob,” kept pointing down until I lifted myself up and peeked under the counter. There was a man under there with a clipboard and a stopwatch, an efficiency expert from one of the new consultant firms, McKinsey and Co. or Booz Allen Hamilton. I can’t remember which. They were after Bob’s job-and maybe mine in the future.

Bordering an interstate highway in Arkansas, a giant billboard with a photo of a stoic-looking farmer watches over the speeding traffic. He’s staring into the distance against the backdrop of a glowing wheat field, with the caption “America’s Farmers Grow America.” It’s an image to melt all our pastoral hearts.

Until we read the small print in the corner: “Monsanto.”

The maker of Agent Orange, Monsanto’s former motto used to be, “Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible.” Today its tag line is “Committed to Sustainable Agriculture, Committed to Farmers.” Its website claims the company helps farmers “be successful [and] produce healthier foods… while also reducing agriculture’s impact on our environment.” It even boasts of the corporation’s dedication to human rights.

Col. Ann Wright: Families of Flotilla Dead Want More Than an Apology

Representatives of the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), the Turkish nongovernmental organization that coordinated the passengers on the ship Mavi Marmara that was part of the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, say that families of the nine passengers killed by Israeli commandos have rejected the country’s recent apology.

The eight Turkish citizens and one American were killed during a nonviolent mission to challenge the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, and the families do not consider either an Israeli government apology or the offer of compensation for the death of their loved ones a fulfillment of their mission.

Abby Quillen: Why the Most Powerful Thing in the World is a Seed

“The Seed Underground” is a love letter to the quiet revolutionaries who are saving our food heritage.

Janisse Ray celebrates the local, organic food movement but fears we’re forgetting something elemental: the seeds. According to Ray, what is happening with our seeds is not pretty. Ninety-four percent of vintage open-pollinated fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished over the last century. [..]

But, according to Ray, when the dwindling number of farmers who stayed on the land gave up on saving seeds and embraced hybridization, genetically modified organisms, and seed patents in order to make money, we became slaves to multinational corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, which now control our food supply.

Jill Richardson: A Recipe for a Sounder Diet

There are ways to make healthy food affordable that don’t require abusing farmworkers.

Healthy food is expensive and telling people to eat organic, local food is elitist. Have you heard that argument before?

It’s true. Healthy, organic, local food is expensive. Calorie for calorie, you get more for your money at a fast food drive-thru than at a farmer’s market. And the fast food will be cooked and ready to eat, whereas you might need to take your fresh, organic produce home to cook it.

Now, you might say, that’s only a short-term calculation. Today, a $5 burger, fries, and large soda looks like a better deal than a few ounces of spinach, a handful of dried beans, and a bunch of carrots for the same price. But that overlooks the health consequences of either meal. One of these meals, if eaten regularly, will land you in the hospital someday. The other won’t

Last week India’s Supreme Court rejected the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis’ patent on the cancer drug Gleevec. While the immediate issue was the ability of Novartis to charge its patent-protected price for the drug in India, the decision will have an enormous impact on the future of public health not only in India, but around the world.

The key issue is whether we will follow a pattern in which patent monopolies are continually lengthened and strengthened. This has been the goal of the U.S. government in trade negotiations led by both Democratic and Republican presidents. The TRIPs provisions of the Uruguay Round of the WTO negotiations were the clearest manifestation of this drive. These provisions, which were added at the request of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, require countries throughout the world to adopt U.S.-type patent laws. In addition, the United States has sought to further strengthen patent protections in all the bilateral and multilateral trade agreements that it has negotiated over the last two decades.

Ira Chernus; Social Security Cuts: More Than Money At Stake

I’m old enough to remember when Social Security was the “third rail” of American politics — too dangerous for even the most conservative politician to touch. You’re probably old enough to remember that, too. It wasn’t very long ago. As recently as the 2012 Republican primaries, Mitt Romney defended Social Security against attacks from other candidates (notably Rick Perry), and Romney emerged the GOP standard-bearer.

How things have changed in just a year. It’s not merely that a Democratic president is offering, very publicly, to cut Social Security benefits. There’s something much more important: In the mainstream of American political conversation, this revelation was not treated as very big news.

Jared Berstein: Underemployment Is Also the Right Target (Not Just Unemployment)

If we wanted to target the persistent slack in the labor market, though I can’t see any signs that we do, we shouldn’t just target the unemployment rate; we should also go after the underemployment rate. Since it captures the important dimension of not just do you have a job, but are you getting the hours of work you want, it’s a more comprehensive measure of the extent to which workers are underutilized — i.e., slack — in the labor market.

The difference is pretty well known by now: the underemployment rate includes various groups of underutilized workers or job seekers who are left out of the official rate. The largest difference is the inclusion of part-time workers who would rather have full-time jobs. Most recently, there were about eight million such folks, elevating this measure of underutilization to around 14 percent compared to about 8 percent for unemployment (2013Q1). Other components of this rate include discouraged workers who’ve recently looked for work but given up, and some other smaller groups that are neither working nor looking for work but remain marginally attached to the job market.

David Sirota: Suddenly, NYPD Doesn’t Love Surveillance Anymore

Law enforcement agencies monitor our most basic acts. But try assigning them a watchdog and they resist with fury.

The Big Brother theory of surveillance goes something like this: pervasive snooping and monitoring shouldn’t frighten innocent people, it should only make lawbreakers nervous because they are the only ones with something to hide. Those who subscribe to this theory additionally argue that the widespread awareness of such surveillance creates a permanent preemptive deterrent to such lawbreaking ever happening in the first place.

I don’t personally agree that this logic is a convincing justification for the American Police State, and when I hear such arguments, I inevitably find myself confused by the contradiction of police-state proponents proposing to curtail freedom in order to protect it. But whether or not you subscribe to the police-state tautology, you have to admit there is more than a bit of hypocrisy at work when those who forward the Big Brother logic simultaneously insist such logic shouldn’t apply to them or the governmental agencies they oversee.

This contradiction is now taking center stage in New York City, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly wage a scorched-earth campaign to prevent the public from being able to monitor its own police force. And in that crusade comes the frightening assumption about how the terms “safety” and “security” are now defined.

No jobs. No growth. Falling income. Unaffordable colleges. A dying middle class. Young people without hope. The greatest economic inequality in modern history.

And yet, in the midst of the Long Depression, we’re told that the president intends to cuts Social Security.

According to reports, the new presidential budget proposal will also include job-killing spending cuts and a Medicare cost hike that will increasingly affect the middle class with every passing year.

The president says this isn’t his “ideal plan,” but he doesn’t say what his ideal plan would look like — and he certainly isn’t fighting for a better one. He also claims his budget offers “tough reforms,” which rings of self-satisfaction rather than sorrow.

He’s decided on his next move. What’s yours?

Gabrielle Giffords: Join the fight for safer U.S.

We must make pols hear our nation’s cry: Pass tougher laws for guns purchases NOW!

We’re all used to hearing people say that patience is a virtue.

I think about patience every day as I continue to regain my speech and the mobility I lost after I was shot in the head two years ago, while meeting with my constituents in the parking lot of grocery store in my district.

I think about patience and determination, because I still wake up every day wanting to make the world a better place.

But lately I’m not feeling too patient toward senators and representatives who are listening to the misinformation that’s out there about universal background checks instead of to their constituents, and saying they may not support common sense solutions to ending gun violence.

John Nichols; Progressives Push Back Against Obama’s Social Security, Medicare Austerity

President Obama’s plan to include Social Security cuts in his budget plan is well summed up by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as a “bitter disappointment.”

Obama closed his 2012 campaign with a populist flourish that seemed to suggest he was finally coming to believe his own rhetoric about the need for growth, as opposed to austerity. The strength of his message earned the president a mandate: a popular vote margin of almost 5 million, a landslide win in the Electoral College and significant gains in Senate and House races.

But, now, he proposes to squander that mandate in pursuit of a “grand bargain” with House Republicans – a bargain that would replace the current approach to calculating cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients with a “Chained-CPI” scheme. The change will harm not just seniors, children and people with disabilities but a fragile economic recovery.

Ralph Nader: The Regulatory Nullification and the Cruelty of Big Business

It’s time to start paying close attention to the mechanisms of the deregulation machine. For the past 30 years, the business lobbies have pushed Congress and the executive branch to disassemble the regulatory system that has protected us from the worst excesses of Wall Street and Big Business. The catastrophic effects of this dismantling are well known — the misbehavior of Wall Street brought us the financial collapse, the global recession, and the dominance of the largest banks being both “Too Big to Fail” and their culpable executives “Too Big to Jail”.

Despite negative public sentiment and the rise of the Occupy movement, the avarice on Wall Street arrogantly continues on. The big banks are now even bigger and more powerful than they were in 2008 when they were bailed out by the U.S. taxpayers.

Bad news on the economy. It added only 88,000 jobs in March — the slowest pace of job growth in nine months.

While the jobless rate fell to 7.6 percent, much of the drop was due to the labor force shrinking by almost a half million people. If you’re not looking for work, you’re not counted as unemployed.

That means the percentage of working-age Americans either with a job or looking for one dropped to 63.3 percent — its lowest level since 1979.

The direction isn’t encouraging. The pace of job growth this year is slower than its pace last year.

What’s going on? The simple fact is companies won’t hire if consumers aren’t buying enough to justify the new hires. And consumers don’t have enough money, or credit, or confidence to buy enough.

David Sirota: A Victory Against the Language of Bigotry

As one of the world’s largest news outlets, The Associated Press’ linguistic mandates significantly shape the broader vernacular. So when the organization this week decided to stop using the term “illegal immigrant,” it was a big victory for objectivity and against the propagandistic language of bigotry. [..]

“Illegal,” of course, has been used as more than a mere label-it has for years been used as an outright epithet by xenophobes. They abhor the notion of America becoming more diverse-and specifically, more non-white-and so they have tried to convert “illegal” into a word that specifically dehumanizes Latinos. Thus, as any honest person can admit, when Republican politicians and media blowhards decry “illegals,” they are pretending to be for a race-blind enforcement of immigration laws, but they are really signaling their hatred of Latino culture.

How much sicker does the patient have to get before the doctors stop prescribing poison? [..]

Paul Krugman’s right: This isn’t a recession. It’s Europe’s Second Depression, and it’s on track to last even longer than the first one. Austerity economics has been imposed across most of the Eurozone, to a greater or lesser degree, with devastating economic results:  This is Europe’s sixth consecutive quarter of economic contraction.

Europe’s Austerity Recession (or Depression) has now lasted longer than the one brought on by the financial crisis of 2008.

Dean Baker: Nevermind: Headline of Correction for NYT Piece on Projected Cost of Dementia

The New York Times ran a front page piece warning readers that the cost of treating dementia is “soaring.” The piece tells readers of the findings of a new study by the Rand Corporation that shows the cost of dementia doubling by 2040 from its 2010 level.

Are you scared? Are you shaking in your boots? Thinking about pulling the plug on these costly old-timers?

Well our friend, Mr. Arithmetic, reminds us that the Congressional Budget Office projects (pdf) that the size of the economy is projected to roughly double over this period. This means that the Rand study’s finding implies that dementia will impose pretty much the same burden on the economy in 2040 as it does today.

Dave Maass and Trevor Timm: Are You a Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the Justice Department, You May Be a Criminal

During his first term, President Barack Obama declared October 2009 to be “National Information Literacy Awareness Month,” emphasizing that, for students, learning to navigate the online world is as important a skill as reading, writing and arithmetic. It was a move that echoed his predecessor’s strong support of global literacy — such as reading newspapers — most notably through First Lady Laura Bush’s advocacy.

Yet, disturbingly, the Departments of Justice (DOJ) of both the Bush and Obama Administrations have embraced an expansive interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that would literally make it a crime for many kids to read the news online. And it’s the main reason why the law must be reformed.

Obama’s new budget will reportedly include GOP’s beloved entitlement cuts. Why he’s overlooking the real solution

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the budget will likely include the chained CPI for Social Security. “We and all of the groups engaged on this are starting to feel it may well be in the budget,” AARP vice president Nancy LeaMond told the WSJ. The same day the New York Times revealed that Obama and House Republicans are getting close to agreement on a package of Medicare cuts that would restructure Medicare parts A and B – one covers hospitalization, the other doctors’ visits – to raise deductibles for the 80 percent of seniors who see doctors but don’t require hospitalization in any given year. The Times reports that some version of the proposal might also find its way into the 2014 budget.

Including entitlement curbs would be notable, the WSJ’s Damien Parella notes, “as Republicans often have criticized the White House for offering such steps in private negotiations but never fully embracing them as part of an official budget plan.”

But if he’s now embracing them publicly, doesn’t that remove them as something to bargain over?

Allison Kilkenny: Thousands Protest the UK Government’s Brutal Austerity

Britain’s government has introduced sweeping changes to the country’s welfare, justice, health and tax systems, including a “bedroom tax” that will reduce housing subsidies that primarily benefit poor people. The levy ostensibly aims to “tackle overcrowding and encourage a more efficient use of social housing,” resulting in an estimated million “social housing” households losing 14-25 percent of their housing benefits.

The Guardian:

   Critics say it is an inefficient policy as in the north of England, families with a spare rooms outnumber overcrowded families by three to one, so thousands will be hit with the tax when there is no local need for them to move. Two-thirds of the people hit by the bedroom tax are disabled

.

Thousands of trade unions, advocates for the disabled, leading churches, and anti-poverty protesters held marches against the changes over the weekend, calling the cuts “unjust.” In a joint report released over the weekend, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church and the Church of Scotland criticized the government of perpetuating myths about poverty in an attempt to justify the cuts.

Tory Field and Beverly Bell: From Growing Profit to Growing Food: Challenging Corporate Rule

Just outside of the small town of Maumelle, Arkansas sits your run-of-the-mill American strip mall. And as in so many other box store hubs, a Walmart dominates the landscape. [..]

We are bombarded and manipulated by corporate name brands every day. A Coca-Cola annual report some years back stated, “All of us in the Coca-Cola family wake up each morning knowing that every single one of the world’s 5.6 billion people will get thirsty that day… If we make it impossible for these 5.6 billion people to escape Coca-Cola…, then we assure our future success for many years to come. Doing anything else is not an option.”

“Impossible” to “escape” sounds daunting, downright creepy. Yet people are escaping, in droves, a food system that is more obsessed with money than with sustenance.

Abby Rapoport: The People’s Bank: Deep-Red North Dakota’s Populist Bright Spot

When the financial crisis struck in 2008, nearly every state legislature was left contending with massive revenue shortfalls. Every state legislature, that is, except North Dakota’s. In 2009, while other states were slashing budgets, North Dakota enjoyed its largest surplus. All through the Great Recession, as credit dried up and middle-class Americans lost their homes, the conservative, rural state chugged along with a low foreclosure rate and abundant credit for entrepreneurs looking for loans.

Normally one of the overlooked states in flyover country, North Dakota now had the country’s attention. So did an unlikely institution partly responsible for its fiscal health: the Bank of North Dakota. Founded in 1919 by populist farmers who’d gotten tired of big banks and grain companies shortchanging them, the only state-owned bank in America has long supported community banks and helped keep credit flowing. The bank’s $5 billion deposit base comes mostly from state taxes and funds. The money is leveraged so the bank can offer loans for local small businesses and infrastructure projects; the interest, rather than going to Wall Street banks, stays in the state. The Bank of North Dakota rarely makes direct loans; instead, when a community bank wants to give a sizable loan but lacks the capital, the state bank will partner on the loan and provide a backstop. Such partnerships help ensure that small-business owners, farmers, and ranchers can access lines of credit-and they strengthen community banks, which is why North Dakota has more local banks per capita than any other state.