Tag: Opinion

Conservatives’ real aim in their fiscal brinkmanship is to gut Social Security and Medicare.

US politics seems stuck in an endless debate about the size of the federal deficit and federal debt. From congressional Republicans’ refusals to lift the debt ceiling, fears of the “fiscal cliff,” disputes about the “sequestration” and its automatic federal spending cuts, and upcoming debates on a new federal budget and the need for so-called entitlement reform (primarily cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid)-all hinge on the presumed need to get the U.S. budget in balance and curb deficit spending. [..]

But conservatives’ real targets are the two largest non-defense programs-Social Security, which includes not only retirement pensions, but also disability and survivors’ benefits, and Medicare, the health program for the elderly. Yet Social Security and Medicare are financed by payroll taxes and should not even be counted as part of general federal spending.

Jessica Valente: Rape Is Not Inevitable: On Zerlina Maxwell, Men and Hope

Of all the feminist ideas that draw ire, one would think that “don’t rape” is a fairly noncontroversial statement. It seems not.

Last week, Zerlina Maxwell, political commentator and writer, went on Fox News’ Hannity to talk about the myth that gun ownership can prevent rape. Maxwell made the apt point that the onus should not be on women to have to arm themselves but on men not to rape them:

   I don’t think that we should be telling women anything. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there…You’re talking about this as if it’s some faceless, nameless criminal, when a lot of times it’s someone you know and trust…If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.

And with that, the floodgates of misogyny opened. Right-wing media outlets like TheBlaze oversimplified Maxwell’s comments, writing that her call to teach men not to rape was “bizarre.” Online, Maxwell started receiving racist and misogynist threats – including, ironically enough, threats of rape.

Michelle Chen: Corporate-Approved State Bills Kick Low-Wage Workers While They’re Down

President Obama called for a modest raise in the federal minimum wage to $9 in his State of the Union Address, and several Democratic legislators have upped his bid with a proposed increase to $10.10.

But an insidious effort to lower the wage floor is already underway much closer to the ground-in the state legislatures where right-wing lobbyists have been greasing the skids for years for an onslaught of anti-worker policies.

An extensive analysis recently published by labor advocacy organization the National Employment Law Project tracks more than 100 bills introduced in 31 states since January 2011 that “aim to repeal or weaken core wage standards at the state or local level.” Each bears the fingerprint of notorious super-lobbying organization the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which acts as a forum for “private sector leaders” to advise public officials. Most of the anti-worker bills were proposed by lawmakers directly linked to ALEC and include language that echoes that of “model legislation” developed by ALEC. Among the proposals are measures to undercut minimum wages for teenage workers, restrict overtime pay and repeal or ban local laws to improve working conditions.

Vandana Shiva: Tilling the Soil with Pesticides

The ministry of agriculture had organised a conference on Doubling Food Production from February 1-3. The “eminent speakers” invited were not members of International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) or top Indian scientists. Rather they were spin masters of biotechnology industry who claimed to have founded the anti-GMO movement and openly promoted it. The old paradigm of food and agriculture is clearly broken

On April 15, 2008, the IAASTD report findings, carried out by 400 scientists over six years, were released. The report has noted that business as usual is no longer an option. Neither the Green Revolution nor the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) can guarantee food security. We need a new paradigm of working with the laws of nature and ecological sustainability. Why is our agriculture minister Sharad Pawar defending a dead paradigm and promoting PR men of biotech giants? When the fact is that the emerging scientific paradigm of ecological agriculture has shown that we can double food production while protecting the planet, human health and farmers’ livelihoods.

Somebody really needs to let Elizabeth Warren know how Washingon society works. Last week Warren and several other senators rebuked regulators for their refusal to act against felonious banks and bankers when they violate sanctions or criminally assist psychotic drug lords who cut off people’s heads.

Their outrage was triggered by the lack of indictments against bankers at HSBC. The bank’s executives earned big bonuses after their bank laundered money for Mexican drug cartels and criminally violated sanctions against Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba. As “punishment,” the banks’ shareholders will pay a $1.9 billion fine. The lawbreakers themselves will not be charged, and will be allowed to keep their own ill-gotten income.

Eugene Robinson: Paul Ryan’s make-believe budget

If Rep. Paul Ryan wants people to take his budget manifestos seriously, he should be honest about his ambition: not so much to make the federal government fiscally sustainable as to make it smaller.

You will recall that the Ryan Budget was a big Republican selling point in last year’s election. Most famously, Ryan proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program. He offered the usual GOP recipe of tax cuts – to be offset by closing certain loopholes, which he would not specify – along with drastic reductions in non-defense “discretionary” spending. [..]

Now Ryan, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, is coming back with an ostensibly new and improved version of the framework that voters rejected in November. Judging by the preview he offered Sunday, the new plan is even less grounded in reality than was the old one.

Robert L. Borosage: Mary Jo White: Wall Street Watch Dog or Lap Dog? The CEO Pay Test

On Tuesday, March 12, the Senate Banking Committee will begin review of the nomination of Mary Jo White to be chair of the Securities and Exchange Committee. The Committee should probe deeply on whether she will be a watchdog or a lap dog for Wall Street. One clear test is her position on the rules for publishing CEO compensation and CEO to worker pay ratios which the SEC has been sitting on for the nearly three years since the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation.

White is touted as a former tough prosecutor with the ability to police Wall Street. She is at the top of her profession, with extraordinary experience both as a prosecutor and as a leading corporate defense attorney in a white shoe Wall Street defense firm. And it is this very experience that raises questions as to whether she can and will do the job.

Paul Buchheit: Five Poisons of Privatization

It gets more maddening every day. Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn’t be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.

he free-market capitalism that drives our economy is a doctrine of individuals pursuing profit. Nothing else matters. An executive for Roche, a healthcare company, said “We are not in the business to save lives, but to make money.”

With privatization of the common good we risk losing both our heritage and our humanness.

Mary Jo White, President Obama’s nominee for chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is expected to win Senate approval after her confirmation hearing on Tuesday. But unless Ms. White is aggressively questioned, neither the senators nor the public will have a clear idea of the kind of chairwoman she will be.

Those who want a get-tough approach with the financial industry will focus on her years as a top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, from 1993 to 2002. Those who want a Wall Street ally at the S.E.C. will focus on her work in the past 10 years as a corporate attorney, representing big banks and other major corporations.The public deserves more from the hearing than a foregone conclusion. Senators should press Ms. White to give specifics on how she would handle potential conflicts as well as her approach to the job: [..]

Ralph Nader: Why Are Democrats So Defeatist?

The Republicans are openly introspective about why they failed to regain the presidency and the Senate. It is time for the same kind of rigorous self-analysis by the Democrats, who floated through their failure to regain control of the House without apparent dismay. Their failure to dislodge Speaker John Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor assures that President Obama and congressional Democrats will get very little done for the next two years. [..]

There is no effort by the Democratic leadership to question the failed strategies of 2010 and 2012. For 2014, it is likely to be more of the same: raising the money and taking care not to offend business interests by talking vaguely about the middle class and ignoring the growing poorer classes that are the Democratic Party’s natural constituency. What all this presages is another loss in 2014-unless the Republican Party takes an even more extremist stand for the rich and powerful and saves the Democrats from their own unprecedented stagnation.

Robert Kuttner: When Public Is Better

The problem is not too much government, but too passive a government

Long before we thought of founding The American Prospect in 1989, I came to know Paul Starr through a prescient article titled “Passive Intervention.” The piece was published in 1979, in a now-defunct journal, Working Papers for a New Society.

As Paul and his co-author, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, observed, the American welfare state is built on terrible, even disabling compromises. Progressives often lack the votes to pass legislation to deliver public benefits directly. So they either create tax incentives or bribe the private sector to do the job, thus inflating a bloated system. “The problem is not too much government activism,” they wrote, “but too much passivity.”

Their two emblematic examples were housing and health care. In housing, tax advantages became an inflation hedge for the affluent and drove up prices. Low-income homeownership programs, run through the private sector, had huge default rates. In health care, the political compromises necessary to enact Medicare excluded serious cost containment. When they wrote this, health care consumed 9 percent of GDP compared to 17 percent today. The subprime mortgage scandal was decades in the future.

Michelle Chen: Day Laborers Defend Their Right to Public Space in Court

Looking to hire someone for a little landscaping work or a construction job? There might be a local agency that can offer free security services to ensure that workers will work as hard as possible for as little as you’re willing to pay: the local police department.

Across the country, the undocumented day laborers who build, paint and pave many communities are locked into a low-wage regime that is de facto enforced by state power, which can threaten to round them up just for trying to work–in the name of protecting “public safety.”

Arizona was once a model for this form of anti-worker bullying. But a federal court has just struck down one of the harshest provisions of the infamous anti-immigrant law known as SB 1070, which enabled police to arrest people for soliciting work in public.

The February employment report shows some notable improvements that, if sustained, would herald a real recovery. Partly boosted by increased employment in the construction industry, the number of new jobs jumped to 236,000 last month, continuing a gradual upward trend.

Unfortunately, there are many reasons to believe that the improvements will not be sustained. If Congressional Republicans have their way – insisting that all deficit reduction be achieved by spending less without any tax increases – the automatic cuts that began on March 1 will continue. That will cost the economy an estimated 750,000 jobs by the end of this year and reduce economic growth by about half a percentage point. [..]

Without adequate demand, there will be no upsurge in business investment. The Fed cannot turn things around on its own. And the automatic budget cuts, on top of it all, will only make things worse.

Michael Winship: Jack Lew, Citigroup and the Ugland Truth

Along with its sandy beaches and quality snorkeling, the Cayman Islands’ reputation as an offshore tax haven for corporations, banks and hedge funds has become so well-known its financial institutions now are featured in travel brochures as yet another tourist attraction.

So as we traveled across the Caribbean this week – including a stretch paralleling the south coast of Cuba past Guantanamo Bay and the Sierra Maestra mountains, where Castro and his revolutionaries once hid out – we made a stop in George Town on Grand Cayman Island. A short walk along the shore took us to 335 South Church Street, a location made famous by Barack Obama a few years ago and more recently, Jack Lew, during his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of the Treasury.

Gail Collins: Senators Bearing Arms

Whenever talk turns to gun control in Congress, lawmakers feel compelled to mention their love of weaponry. [..]

People, do you think Congress is actually going to do anything about gun violence in the wake of the Newtown shootings? Judiciary is going to vote on two big proposals next week: a ban on assault weapons and an expansion of gun purchase background checks. If the Democrats stick together, the bills can pass on a party-line vote. But to go any further, they need Republican support, and there wasn’t a whole lot of it in evidence this week.

Ryan Goodman: The Drone Question Obama Hasn’t Answered

THE Senate confirmed John O. Brennan as director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday after a nearly 13-hour filibuster by the libertarian senator Rand Paul, who before the vote received a somewhat odd letter from the attorney general. [..]

The senator, whose filibuster had become a social-media sensation, elating Tea Party members, human-rights groups and pacifists alike, said he was “quite happy with the answer.” But Mr. Holder’s letter raises more questions than it answers – and, indeed, more important and more serious questions than the senator posed. [..]

But is it well past time for the United States government to specify, precisely, its views on whom it thinks it can kill in the struggle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist forces? The answer is yes.

The Obama administration’s continued refusal to do so should alarm any American concerned about the constitutional right of our citizens – no matter what evil they may or may not be engaged in – to due process under the law. For those Americans, Mr. Holder’s seemingly simple but maddeningly vague letter offers no reassurance.

The applicant, U.S. Pentagon, seeks to purchase a wide variety of firearms in vast quantities. This background check has determined that the applicant has a long history of assisting individuals, organizations and governments prone to gun violence.

Pentagon has often served as an active accomplice or direct perpetrator of killings on a mass scale. During the last 50 years, the applicant has directly inflicted large-scale death and injuries in numerous countries, among them the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Kosovo, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan (partial list). Resulting fatalities are estimated to have been more than 5 million people.

For purposes of this background check, special attention has been necessarily focused on the scope of firearms currently sought by Pentagon. They include numerous types of semi-automatic and fully automatic rifles as well as many other assault weapons. Continuing purchases by the applicant include drones and cruise missiles along with the latest models of compatible projectiles and matching explosives.

Robert L. Borsage: It’s Official: Too Big to Fail Banks Are Too Big to Jail

For years, the Obama administration has been pummeled for failing to bring criminal charges against a single major Wall Street bank or a single leading Wall Street banker for what the FBI termed an “epidemic of fraud” that blew up the entire economy. Investigations revealed the banks committed routine fraud in peddling mortgage securities they knew were garbage, trampled basic property laws, laundered money from Iran, Libya and Mexican drug lords, conspired to game the basic measure of interest rates and more. Yet, time after time, the Justice Department and regulatory agencies settled for sweetheart deals, with no admission of guilt, no banker held accountable, and institutional fines that were the equivalent in earnings of a speeding ticket to the average family.

Yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder stated openly what was already apparent: The Justice Department believes that Too Big to Fail Banks are Too Big to Jail. Criminal indictments against banks or leading bankers might endanger the economy and thus were too big a risk.

Cenk Uygur: The 3 Real Problems With Drone Strikes

It’s frustrating to see how muddled the debate over drones has become. Some people are wondering why we’re all so concerned over a new vehicle that delivers bombs, as opposed to planes. No, no, that’s not it at all. Drones don’t kill people, the U.S. government kills people. It’s just a tool. The problem isn’t the tool; the problem is how we are using it.

So, in order to clear up the confusion let me just state the three biggest problems with how we are using the drone program. [..]

Of course, there is one other thing, which is that most Democrats cannot get themselves to believe that the beloved Barack Obama would authorize things like this, so they just turn a deaf ear to it or try to make some sort of comical excuse for it. The reality is that he does do these things and that’s why progressives who are paying attention have been so disgruntled with him. It’s not like we didn’t like the guy or vote for the guy; we’re not like the conservatives who have Obama Derangement Syndrome and think he’s a Muslim from another planet and oppose everything he does. No, we oppose him on this because it is clearly and unequivocally wrong.

Bertha Lewis: Burwell as Obama’s Budget Director: Walmart Wins, Working Families Lose

As head of Walmart Foundation lobbying, Sylvia Mathews Burwell spent millions to open stores that pay poverty wages

f President Barack Obama goes forward with his nomination of Walmart Foundation head Sylvia Mathews Burwell for director of the Office of Management and Budget, it will be a coup for Walmart and its foundation, where Burwell has used its massive budget to expand Walmart’s influence at all levels of government and pave the way for its expansion into towns and cities across America. Unfortunately, it will also be a disaster for America’s working families.

The Walmart Foundation is hardly your traditional charity. It exists to advance the company’s agenda – silencing dissenters in their rapid urban expansion. It has donated to groups that have gone on the record to support Walmart during its most contentious political disputes, including the ongoing effort to open stores in New York City. And it has even donated directly to municipalities and to groups tied to powerful elected officials.

Don’t tell the Tea Party, but the tag team of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are currently mopping the floor with Barack Obama.

The president convincingly won a second term in November, but since that time, the congressional Republican leadership has outfoxed, outmaneuvered and plain out-strategized him on just about every issue.

Don’t tell the Tea Party, but the tag team of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are currently mopping the floor with Barack Obama.

The president convincingly won a second term in November, but since that time, the congressional Republican leadership has outfoxed, outmaneuvered and plain out-strategized him on just about every issue.

Robert Reich: Why There’s a Bull Market for Stocks and a Bear Market for Workers

Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose above 14,270 — completely erasing its 54 percent loss between 2007 and 2009.

The stock market is basically back to where it was in 2000, while corporate earnings have doubled since then.

Yet the real median wage is now 8 percent below what it was in 2000, and unemployment remains sky-high.

Why is the stock market doing so well, while most Americans are doing so poorly? Four reasons: [..]

Rarely before in American history have public policies so radically helped the most fortunate among us, so cruelly harmed the least fortunate, and exposed so many average working Americans to such widespread insecurity.

Joe Conason: Hungry Children Will Be Among First to Suffer From Sequestration

The difference between a natural disaster and a disaster caused by politicians is that the latter will almost always hit the poor and the obscure most heavily, while a hurricane or a flood will at least sometimes spread the suffering more evenly.

As the “sequester” unfolds in Washington, we see this same old pattern holding firm: Republican leaders, now hustling to shirk responsibility for the catastrophe they predicted, insist those automated budget axes won’t do any damage at all.

Has anyone felt any pain yet?

Not during the first few days, of course, but when the cuts begin to bite a month or so from now, the first to feel it will be the unemployed and the destitute for whom a few dollars of government support mean so much in their daily survival calculation. A decent policy would seek to spare them the brunt of political mistakes made by other, far more comfortable people, but this process permits no such choices-and the most vulnerable will by definition be hurt most.

George Zornick: Beware Obama’s Dealmaking

As sequestration churns on, President Obama is reaching out to moderate Republican members of the Senate to see if he can still put a deal together. He is coming to the Hill next week for a Republican luncheon, and hosting other members for dinner tonight. The president is also picking up the phone. “He just called me,” Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters yesterday. “What I see from the president is probably the most encouraging engagement on a big issue that I’ve seen since the early years of his presidency. He wants to do the big deal.”

This should, and does, worry progressives inside and outside of Congress. The default position among center-left pundits is that if Obama gets Republicans to agree on a grand deficit reduction package that includes new revenue, he’s “won.” But that assumption really needs to be interrogated, and each concession examined.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a new high today, but don’t trust the Dow – it doesn’t have your best interests at heart

There is only one thing you need to know about finance: the stock market is not the economy. [..]

Most Americans know that the Dow is composed of a basket of 30 industrial stocks that are largely impervious to the struggles of ordinary Americans. If you separated these stocks, their rise would not be exciting. It’s hard to picture a family driving back from the food bank – poverty is also at all-time highs in America, by the way – chanting “three cheers for Alcoa! Let’s hear it for Caterpillar!” Americans, no matter how patriotic, don’t pull out the pom-poms when it’s a good quarter for Cisco. We just wait quietly for the riches to trickle down, for the companies to start hiring and for the rest of us to feel rich.

Karen Finney: Expand Section 5

Across the country, newly gerrymandered districts and redistricting schemes – such as the Shelby County proposal that would have cut the proportion of African-American voters from more than two-thirds to just one-third – threaten to dilute the electoral impact of increases in minority voter registration and turnout. In 2012, the Voting Rights Act not only helped to protect the rights of minority voters from Texas to Pennsylvania, from Florida to Alabama, from Mississippi to Wisconsin, but also contributed to record minority turnout in the presidential election. All of which suggests that the question Roberts and others should be asking is: Why Section 5 shouldn’t be extended to all 50 states going forward?

Nan Hunter: Will the Supreme Court Be Left Behind on Gay Marriage?

In case you haven’t noticed, the biggest question facing the Supreme Court when it decides the gay marriage cases this spring has become whether it can rise to the level of LGBT rights ferocity already achieved by American business leaders, moderate Republicans and the Obama administration. By the end of last week, when all the amicus briefs in support of striking down California’s Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) had been filed, support for marriage equality seemed to have been transformed into the new normal-at least outside the confines of the Court.

In fact, judging from the press coverage of the briefs, if the justices don’t rule in favor of gay marriage, it is the Court that will look bad. This perception is an incredible achievement, a brilliant exercise in political framing by the lawyers and legal organizations behind the two cases, who mobilized the amicus show of force. The business brief and the Republican brief, especially, are clearly designed to provide political cover for the Court’s five conservative Justices.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Clean Air, Safe Communities, and Good Jobs? It’s Ours If We Want It.

Throughout history, nearly all of the progress we’ve made toward a more just and peaceful world has started with seeds of discomfort with the status quo, and the growing sense that a better way is possible.  That feeling is what gave birth to bold, audacious visions that have fueled our greatest gains over the past century-from child labor laws to the Civil Rights Movement.

Today, there is a growing dissatisfaction in America-and concerns about our economy and our health and safety are among the biggest sources. More and more of us find ourselves sharing the same fears-even when our daily lives couldn’t be more different. The out-of-work veteran coal miner in Pennsylvania knows the anxiety of the 22-year-old debt-laden college grad who can’t find a decent job. Just as the Hurricane Katrina survivor knows the agony and loss of the super storm Sandy victim.

Steven Brill’s article in Time Magazine about the cost of private health care is likely to make most of his readers very angry. Angry about the prices we pay, about the lives that are devastated, and about the fact that we’re one of the few developed countries without adequate health care for its citizens.

Economists have told us that the profit motive of privatization comes with an “invisible hand” that automatically corrects inequities in the market. It hasn’t worked that way for health care. The personal stories recounted below, and some additional facts to complement them, make it clear that an essential human need has been turned into a product that benefits a few people at the expense of many others. [..]

By treating the essential human need of health care as a product, the hospitals and doctors and drug companies and insurance companies and equipment suppliers are lured toward a pot of money, with little regard for the effects of their profit-making on average Americans.

The solution, of course, is Medicare for all. If, that is, the invisible hand of the market ever reaches out to average Americans.

Desmond Tutu: Nuclear Weapons Must Be Eradicated for all Our Sakes

No nation should own nuclear arms – not Iran, not North Korea, and not their critics who take the moral high ground

We cannot intimidate others into behaving well when we ourselves are misbehaving. Yet that is precisely what nations armed with nuclear weapons hope to do by censuring North Korea for its nuclear tests and sounding alarm bells over Iran’s pursuit of enriched uranium. According to their logic, a select few nations can ensure the security of all by having the capacity to destroy all.

John Nichols: If Switzerland Can Crack Down on CEOs, Why Not the US?

Does anyone seriously doubt that, if America had the same national referendum system that Switzerland does, voters in the United States would vote just as aggressively as the Swiss have to curb CEO abuses?

Actually, the 68 percent support for Sunday’s Swiss referendum that gives shareholders broad new powers to curb excessive pay for bankers and corporate executives might well be shy of the mark that the US could hit.

Polls of American voters have regularly shown that over 70 percent favor restrictions on executive compensation, with even self-identified conservatives registering majority support for clamping down on CEOs.

Tom Engelhardt: Climate Change as History’s Deal-Breaker

(or Where Is Everybody?) Why It’s So Tough to Get Your Head Around Climate Change

Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation’s capital to attend what was billed as “the largest climate rally in history” and I haven’t been able to get the experience — or a question that haunted me — out of my mind.  Where was everybody? [..]

Sixty environmental and other organizations were backing the demonstration, including the Sierra Club with its hundreds of thousands of members.  Given what was potentially at stake, it never crossed my mind that the turnout wouldn’t be substantial.  In fact, on that frigid day, lots of demonstrators did turn up.  Evidently, they knew the dirty little secret of such events: that much talk would precede a modest amount of walking and inventive slogan shouting.  So they arrived — poured in actually — late, and in real numbers.

With the sequester now beginning, I find myself thinking about Robert F. Kennedy — and 46 years ago when I was an intern in his Senate office.

1967 was a difficult time for the nation. America was deeply split over civil rights and the Vietnam War. Many of our cities were burning. The war was escalating.

But RFK was upbeat. He was also busy and intense — drafting legislation, lining up votes, speaking to the poor, inspiring the young. I was awed by his energy and optimism, and his overriding passion for social justice and the public good. (Within a few months he’d declare his intention to run for president. Within a year he’d be dead.)

The nation is once again polarized, but I don’t hear our politicians talking about social justice or the public good. They’re talking instead about the budget deficit and sequestration.

At bottom, though, the issue is still social justice.

David Woolner: FDR Put Humanity First; the Sequester Puts It Last

Eighty years ago this month, at the height of the worst economic crisis in our nation’s history, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered on his promise to launch a New Deal for the American people. Not wedded to any one program, idea, or ideology, the New Deal was founded on the very simple premise that when the free market failed to provide basic economic security for the average American, government had a responsibility to provide that security. [..]

As it turns out, FDR’s decision to put “humanity first” was not only the right moral decision, it was also the right economic decision. For the deficit spending that he finally unleashed in World War II, coupled with the social and economic reforms put in place during the New Deal, led to one of the longest periods of economic prosperity in America’s history and the birth of the modern American middle class.

Sadly, all of the evidence to date suggests that our leaders in Washington are quite happy “to pass by on the other side” and let the sequester proceed without so much as a fight. With roughly 16 million people across the country still unemployed, this is surely “a crime against the American people.”

Margaret Kimberly: Hollywood’s Propaganda

“Movies have become a happy arm of the United States government as they advocate for violence and war crimes.”

There isn’t any part of popular culture which allows the citizens of this country to escape the glorification of American imperialism. One can’t watch a football game without seeing an honor guard present the colors, or soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, or in the worst case scenario a flyover of military jets. Commercials advertising everything from cars to dog food present endless images of soldiers returning home from the battlefield.

The movie industry has embraced the glorification of militarism and American violence practiced abroad as eagerly as professional sports or advertising. There is scarcely a big budget action movie whose plot doesn’t include a scene on an aircraft carrier and even children’s cartoons and games are brought back to life with story lines made in cooperation with the Department of Defense.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky: The Logic of Legalization

The political calculus behind immigration reform was supposed to have changed after the elections of 2012. The outcome of the elections, along with some basic economics, were supposed to have made the logic of legalization all but inevitable, setting the stage for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform early this year.

And yet, we remain mired in the same tired debates we were having back in 2007. [..]

The logic of legalization implies three simple steps. The first step is one the President could take tomorrow:  a national moratorium on deportations. The second is one that Congress could take the very next day:  universal adjustment of status, from “illegal alien” to legal permanent resident, for all 11 million. The third step is one that follows directly from the second:  a clear path to citizenship for legalized immigrants, including the Dreamers, along with a path to empowerment for excluded workers, equal access to education for immigrant students, and reunification for mixed-status families.