Tag: Opinion

It’s time to stop making excuses for Barack Obama. With so much at stake in this election, his performance at the debate on Wednesday night was indefensible.

Ever since he was elected, there have been reasons offered, either publicly or privately, for why Obama has been unable to fully engage some of the nation’s most important challenges. Despite the rampant increase in poverty in the worst downturn since the Depression, Obama supporters whispered that he couldn’t do more for the poor and couldn’t speak out more forcefully on their behalf because that would not be politically advantageous. So nearly all of his economic initiatives had to be couched in language that referred to the middle class, even though the poor were being hurt far worse. LBJ could launch a war on poverty but not Barack Obama.

Robert Kuttner: GOP in Florida: Crying Fraud, Then Creating It

They have been obsessively claiming that voter-suppression measures are necessary because of widespread “ballot fraud.” However extensive investigations by the mainstream media have shown that ballot-fraud is a convenient myth.

Even the Bush administration, in an extensive five-year search, turned up no evidence of the kind of voting fraud-fake IDs, voting in the name of dead people, folks being bribed to vote-that the Republicans routinely allege. Republicans, evoking the tactics of the pre-civil rights segregationist South, simply want to make it more difficult for people who might support Democrats to exercise their right to vote. Some five million people, mostly minorities and the poor, are at risk of being denied their right to vote in 19 states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures, according to a report from the Brennan Center. Happily, the courts have struck down the most extreme of these measures, in Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and most recently Pennsylvania.

Now, however, Republicans can claim some vindication. Serious voter fraud has emerged in Florida. But the ballot fraud is being perpetrated by Republicans!

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Winning Card: Obama and Democrats Need Social Security and Medicare

There’s a lot of post-debate analysis going on — some would say too much — but not enough is being said about the ace in the Democrats’ deck: defending Social Security and Medicare. That’s not just a winning card for the candidates who play it. Seniors, young people, the disabled, the jobless: Everybody at the table wins.

Everybody, that is, except the Republican in the race.

So why aren’t they more concerned this time around? Why didn’t the president play this winning card last night? Why aren’t more Democrats using it? It’s as if they’ve all signed a secret pledge to appear fair and reasonable — by not admitting they hold a better hand. [..]

You can’t beat the other guy, even with the best hand in the house, unless you play it. Word to the Democrats: It’s time to lay your cards on the table. It’s time to fight for Social Security and Medicare — no cuts, at no time, no how.

Michael T. Klare: Extreme Energy Means an Extreme Planet

The new “Golden Age of Oil” that wasn’t as forecasts of abundance collide with planetary realities

Last winter, fossil-fuel enthusiasts began trumpeting the dawn of a new “golden age of oil” that would kick-start the American economy, generate millions of new jobs, and free this country from its dependence on imported petroleum.  Ed Morse, head commodities analyst at Citibank, was typical.  In the Wall Street Journal he crowed, “The United States has become the fastest-growing oil and gas producer in the world, and is likely to remain so for the rest of this decade and into the 2020s.” [..]

It turns out, however, that the future may prove far more recalcitrant than these prophets of an American energy cornucopia imagine.  To reach their ambitious targets, energy firms will have to overcome severe geological and environmental barriers — and recent developments suggest that they are going to have a tough time doing so.

I’ll be watching the debates. Not on CNN or ABC, but online at Occupy the Debates or at Democracy Now or Free Speech TV, where the third party candidates and others have a chance to answer questions and comment in real time.

I can’t say I’m not mad at anybody. If being ripped off and lied to, and having murders committed in your name around the world don’t make you mad, there’s something wrong with you, and whatever is wrong with me, it’s not that. I’ll be watching tonight’s presidential debates, but like most people, I already know what I’ll do on November 6. [..]

So yes, I’ll watch. And I’ll vote. But not for a Republican and not for a Democrat, not again. I’ll vote like my voice means something. I won’t be coerced into voting for a 100% evil Democrat just because the Republicans are 120% evil. I’m voting Green this year, and helping build a Green Party, right here in Georgia where I live.

Robert Reich: The First Presidential Debate

In Wednesday night’s debate, Romney won on style while Obama won on substance. Romney sounded as if he had conviction, which means he’s either convinced himself that the lies he tells are true or he’s a fabulous actor. [..]

The question now is whether Team Obama understands that our President must be more aggressive and commanding in the next two debates – and be unafraid to respectfully pin Romney to the floor.

Richard Kim: Jim Lehrer Gets Pwned

I’ll leave it to the horserace pundits to decide who won tonight’s debate and to the voters to decide who will win the election. I know who lost: Jim Lehrer, PBS, old media and the myth of the “sensible center.” Tonight’s moderator, Jim Lehrer, got utterly, totally, savagely pwned. The Lehrer/PBS-school of moderation is fundamentally unequipped to deal with the era of post-truth, asymmetric polarization politics-and it should be retired. The gulf between political reality and mainstream media mores has never seemed so wide and unbridgeable. Frankly, I came away with one new opinion, and that was to agree with Mitt Romney that PBS should go. (Big Bird, I’ll rethink this in the AM.)

But beyond the utter boredom and bewilderment that tonight’s debate format and moderation caused, there are real costs. Not necessarily to the candidates–the media has called the debate for Romney, but I don’t think it will move the needle enough for Romney to win-but to democracy.

George Zornick: There Is No Debate: Mitt Romney Would Raise Taxes

The mainstream media, to their credit, have latched onto the fact that Mitt Romney won’t describe roughly half of his tax plan-something sure to come up in tonight’s debate. Romney pledges to reduce taxes by $5 trillion through well-detailed cuts, but since Republicans are deeply concerned about the deficit (ahem, cough) Romney claims he would also eliminate or reduce tax breaks to make up for the lost revenue and make the plan deficit-neutral. He just won’t say which ones.

There’s a reason for that-independent analyses show Romney would have to cut popular deductions used by the middle class in order to truly offset the lost revenue. He denies this, of course, but it’s hard to believe Romney if he won’t actually explain the details. (This week his campaign floated a plan to cap deductions at $17,000, which still won’t make the math work).

Each character in the new film, about Pittsburgh parents and teachers who band together to take over a struggling school, is crafted less as a believable human being than as a talking point. First there are the students of F-rated Adams Elementary, a tapestry of white, black, Latino and Asian children. But racial diversity is not typical of failing schools; of the seven shut down in Pittsburgh this year because of low performance, two are more than 95 percent African-American, and the rest more than two-thirds black. [..]

Should parents and teachers have the right to take over schools? In Britain, parents can launch charterlike “free schools,” but even supporters worry that only the most involved and educated parents will go through the arduous process, which could further exacerbate educational inequality. I support many different pathways to school reform, including parent management-as long as it is closely monitored by proven educators, states and cities. Yet I’m not hopeful that this latest school choice trend will take off in any truly systemic way. Most single moms don’t have time for a third job, which is one good reason we must insist on understanding that quality education is not just a choice but a right the state must provide for all children.

Stephanie Coontz; The Myth of Male Decline

SCROLL through the titles and subtitles of recent books, and you will read that women have become “The Richer Sex,” that “The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” and that we may even be seeing “The End of Men.” Several of the authors of these books posit that we are on the verge of a “new majority of female breadwinners,” where middle-class wives lord over their husbands while demoralized single men take refuge in perpetual adolescence.

How is it, then, that men still control the most important industries, especially technology, occupy most of the positions on the lists of the richest Americans, and continue to make more money than women who have similar skills and education? And why do women make up only 17 percent of Congress?

Bryce Covert; Dear Hanna Rosin: I’m Doing Fine! Love, the Patriarchy

Hanna Rosin’s new neon-covered book, The End of Men, just hit bookshelves and has already led to a slew of interviews and excerpt placements. The title may sound familiar: the book grew out of her Atlantic article of the same name. That piece came out at the height of the recession, when men were suffering historic levels of unemployment. Rosin’s thesis is that the recession exaggerated a broader trend already well underway, in which American men are ceding economic dominance to women, who are better suited to a new economy that values communication, collaboration and service work. Her story’s moment may have faded: since the recession officially ended, women have gotten less than 20 percent of the jobs added to the economy, regaining just a quarter of the jobs they lost during the crisis. Men have recovered 42 percent of lost jobs.

But perhaps the biggest challenge in grappling with Rosin’s book is her tendency to use key concepts over and over without stopping to consider what they actually mean. “Matriarchy,” “success,” even “feminism” all play major roles in the End of Men, but they’re sketchily defined at best. Women have what it takes to be successful in the economy, she tells us, and calls this a matriarchy, suggesting that thousands of years of ruling patriarchy are coming to an end.

Emily Douglas: DHS Throws a Lifeline to LGBT Immigrant Families

Today, the Department of Homeland Security threw a lifeline to undocumented immigrants who are in same-sex relationships with US citizens. New federal guidelines will allow ICE officers to take into account a same-sex relationship with an American partner when determining whether to pursue a removal proceeding. This doesn’t offer immigrants a path to permanent legal status, but it does provide “a way to mitigate the harshest consequences of the lack of immigration equality and prevent some couples from being physically separated,” said Victoria Neilson, an attorney with Immigration Equality.

These guidelines build on DHS’s 2011 directive to concentrate enforcement priorities on immigrants with criminal records and stall the deportation proceedings of those who have not committed crimes. A same-sex relationship can now help qualify an immigrant as “low-priority” for deportation.

I have explained how Governor Romney and Representative Ryan have self-destructed because they have followed Charles Murray’s demands that the wealthy denounce working class Americans’ supposed refusal to take personal responsibility for their lives by refusing to work. Murray is the far right’s leading intellectual. Murray’s Myth is that the wealthy are rich because they are morally superior to the lazy poor and that the poor are not employed because they are lazy. Murray’s explanation for his support for Governor Romney says it all: “Who better to be president of the greatest of all capitalist nations than a man who got rich by being a brilliant capitalist?” [..]

I predict that the Republicans will fight ferociously to prevent us from testing the truth of their abuse of the poor. They cannot allow a test because they know they are slandering many millions of Americans. Their first nightmare is a job guarantee program that leads to television images of millions of Americans eagerly signing up to jobs. Murray’s Myth would be destroyed in full public view. Their second nightmare is that the job guarantee would speed the recovery and provide useful projects and services that Americans would love. The slander is despicable, but the fact that they will do anything to prevent a test of Murray’s Myth compounds the slander with a toxic mix of cowardice and hypocrisy.

Robert Reich: Why the Election Will Turn Less on Wednesday’s Presidential Debate Than on Friday’s Jobs Report

The biggest election news this week won’t be who wins the presidential debate Wednesday night. It will be how many new jobs were created in September, announced Friday morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Rarely in the history has the monthly employment carried so much political significance. If the payroll survey is significantly more than 96,000 — the number of new jobs created in August — President Obama can credibly claim the job situation is improving. If significantly fewer than 96,000, Mitt Romney has the more credible claim that the economy isn’t improving.

Roger Cohen: The Foreign Policy Divide

LONDON – China is a status quo power. It preaches dialogue, noninterference and the sanctity of national sovereignty because it does not want major global disruptions to its pursuit of the economic growth essential to political stability and full development by midcentury.

Russia is also a status quo power – the status quo of 30 years ago, that is. Under President Vladimir Putin, it wants to turn back the clock and restore the world to a place dominated by two superpowers going mano a mano. It has been prepared to watch thousands of Syrians die in order to demonstrate it still wields a big stick.

Melvin A. Goodman: [Time for Major Cuts in Defense Spending truth-out.org/opinion/item/11870-time-for-major-cuts-in-defense-spending]

Over the past decade, the United States has engaged in the most significant increase in defense spending since the Korean War. Trillions of dollars have been allocated for the Pentagon, with little congressional monitoring or internal oversight. The defense budget for 2012 exceeds $600 billion, nearly equaling the combined defense spending of the rest of world. Every U.S. taxpayer spends twice as much for the cost of national defense as each British citizen; five times as much as each German; and six times as much as each Japanese. Recent U.S. military expenditures include more than $2.5 trillion to wage unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have failed to enhance American security.

The current economic crisis and tepid economic recovery during President Barack Obama’s first term have created the imperative to reduce defense spending and the size of the U.S. military. More than 46 million Americans live in poverty; unemployment rates have remained at unacceptably high levels; and the economic concerns of the middle class have not abated. The income gap between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of the country continues to grow sharply. Millions of American have learned that their primary assets – their homes – have become a liability.

Andrew Simms: 50 Months to Avoid Climate Disaster – and a Change Is in the Air

“One or other of us will have to go,” Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said on his deathbed to the hated wallpaper in his room. The perilous acceleration of Arctic ice loss, and the imminent threat of irreversible climate change poses a similar ultimatum to the economic system that is pushing us over the brink. For society’s sake I hope this time we redecorate.

Fortunately, many people are queuing up to propose better designs, rather than just cursing the interiors, as you can read about here.

Monday 1 October marks the halfway point in a 100-month countdown to a game of climate roulette.

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., along with retired military officers Col. Lawrence Wilkerson and Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer as well as former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein denounced President Barack Obama at a news conference Sept. 21 for overstepping his authority in wartime and warned that unless war powers are restored to Congress, the country could soon be involved in a battle with Iran.

The resolution comes at a time when tensions among Iran, the United States and Israel have intensified and could lead to what Col. Wilkerson described as an eruption of catastrophic violence in the Middle East.

Resolution HRC107, written by Jones and supported by 13 House members, is the latest attempt to restore one of the fundamental constitutional powers to Congress.

Patrick Cockburn: American Influence on the Middle East Is Past Its Peak – Someone Should Tell Them

Are the days of American predominance in the Middle East coming to an end or is US influence simply taking a new shape? How far is Washington, after refusing to try to keep Hosni Mubarak in power in Egypt, facing the same situation as the Soviet Union in 1989, when the police states it had sustained in Eastern Europe were allowed to collapse?

The US is obviously weaker than it was between 1979, when the then Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, signed the Camp David agreement and allied Egypt with the US, and 2004/05, when it became obvious to the outside world that the Iraq war was a disaster for America. At the time, General William Odom, a former head of the National Security Agency, the biggest US intelligence agency, rightly called it “the greatest strategic disaster in American history”. Since then, the verdict of the Iraq war has been confirmed in Afghanistan, where another vastly expensive US expeditionary force has failed to crush an insurgency. In the last few weeks alone, Taliban fighters have succeeded in storming Camp Bastion in Helmand province and destroying $200m worth of aircraft. So many American and allied soldiers have now been shot by Afghan soldiers and police that US advisers are under orders to wear full body armour when having tea with their local allies.

Simon Johnson: Scott Brown: ATM for the Big Banks

During the Dodd-Frank financial reform debate in early 2010, newly elected Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts was referred to as an ATM for the bankers — meaning that whenever they needed some more cash, they would stop by his office. It was not paper money he was handing out, of course, it was something much more valuable — rule changes that conferred a greater ability to take on reckless risk, damage consumers, and impose higher future costs on the taxpayer.

Mr. Brown had this ability because he represented the final vote needed to pass Dodd-Frank through the Senate. He could have asked for many things — including greater consumer protection, a more thorough investigation into mortgage practices, and reforms that would have cleaned up unscrupulous lenders. He asked for none of those changes — or anything else that would have made the financial system safer and fairer.

Instead, Senator Brown’s requests were designed to undermine the Volcker Rule — i.e., he was opposing sensible attempts to limit the ability of big banks to place highly dangerous bets (and to blow themselves up at great cost to the rest of us). Mr. Brown seems to have been particularly keen to allow big banks to invest in hedge funds of various kinds — and the Boston Globe reported recently that he has continued to push in this direction behind the scenes.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Mitt’s ‘Harvest’ Comments: Typical MBA-Speak … or an Omen of Alien Invasion?

David Corn at Mother Jones has released another Romney video. This one’s from a Bain Capital meeting in 1985 in which Romney says Bain’s business model is to acquire companies and then “harvest them at a significant profit” in five to eight years.

The word “harvest” has a creepy, sci-fi ring to it, which inspired me to make the image you see below. (My more serious policy-minded colleagues were clearly unimpressed.) And it brought back a horrifying scene in a white and sterile laboratory, one I’d seen many years ago and have never been able to forget.

But is this new video important?

On the one hand, that’s how business people talk all the time, which suggests it’s not much of a revelation. On the other hand, that’s how business people talk all the time.

I was driving home listening to NPR when the top-of-the-hour headlines came on. First item: Just moments earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the UN General Assembly, “warned that by next summer Iran could have weapons-grade nuclear material.” Then a clip of Netanyahu, trying to sound chilling: “At stake is the future of the world. Nothing could imperil our common future more than the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons.”

Nothing?, I wondered. Not even the melting of the polar ice caps, or a huge spike in global food prices, or an accidental launch of one of the many nukes that the U.S. and Russia still keep on hair-trigger alert?

Then I asked myself, Why is this big news? Everyone knew what Netanyahu was going to say. Everyone knows that he’s been beating the war drum for years to build his political base at home. Meanwhile, as everyone knows, he’s alienating the rest of the world. Top U.S. political and military leaders, and many of Israel’s top leaders, want him to cut it out before he stumbles us into a war that no serious person (very possible not even Netanyahu) really wants. There’s nothing new here, though there is something really dangerous in giving these bellicose words top billing when they hardly deserve it.

Frida Berrigan: Sister Act-ivists

Nuns. If the picture that jumps to your mind is from “The Sound of Music” or “Lilies of the Field” or even “Sister Act” (one or two or on Broadway), it is time to take another look at sisterhood. On the picket line, the police line-up, the convention dais, women religious are living their faith out loud.

I started thinking about nuns on the way home from Chicago, where I helped the Eighth Day Center for Justice celebrate 38 years of fighting the good fight. Made up of congregations of nuns, Eighth Day works to end torture (throughout the world, but also right in Chicago, where the police and correctional departments have committed grievous crimes against inmates), organizes to end the war in Afghanistan (they were on the streets every day NATO deployed to Chicago) and supports local union organizing efforts. Back in the day, each congregation sent a nun to participate in Eighth Day organizing, but with so many fewer nuns now, the group is now a hybrid of older women religious (nuns) and young people hired to represent many of the orders. The younger generation brings new energy, flair and ideas to the group, enriching it in many ways. In turn, these young people enter into a real and rich relationship with wise and feisty women. The event was an awesome display of intergenerational cooperation – hip and diverse and never a minute behind on schedule.

Eugene Robinson: Deluded by ‘Skewed’ Polls

Conservative activist circles are abuzz with a new conspiracy theory: Polls showing President Obama with a growing lead over Mitt Romney are deliberately being skewed by the Liberal Mainstream Media so that Republicans will be disheartened and stay home on Election Day.

This is denial and self-delusion, but not of the harmless kind. It’s a false narrative that encourages the Republican Party to take the wrong lessons from this election, no matter the outcome.

The whole atmosphere surrounding the presidential race is different since the party conventions. The Obama campaign has begun warning supporters about the perils of overconfidence. Romney, meanwhile, wages a daily battle to keep the words “beleaguered” and “embattled” from latching onto his candidacy.

David Sirota: The Choice Between Automatons and Leaders

Ask corporate executives what they really want in a legislator, and they probably won’t use words like “principled” or “well-informed.” If the cocktails are appropriately strong and inhibitions are consequently reduced, executives will likely tell you in a moment of candor that the best politician, from their perspective, is the one who is incurious and who possesses very little policy expertise. They don’t want people with inconvenient morals, ethics or brains getting in their way. They want the equivalent of T-1000s from the “Terminator” films: unthinking, fully programmable cyborgs willing and able to shape-shift in order to carry out a mission.

Alas, it is rare to get such an admission in public, and it is even more rare to get said admission in the pages of a major publication. That’s why Businessweek’s recent examination of the country’s marquee U.S. Senate race is so significant. In looking at the Massachusetts matchup between Republican incumbent Scott Brown and Democratic nominee Elizabeth Warren, the magazine quotes Brown fundraiser Lawrence McDonald, a former Lehman trader, acknowledging that he and his Wall Street friends hate the idea of an independently informed legislator who might bring her own wisdom to Washington.

While House members are back home campaigning straight to Election Day, voters might want to alert them that the United States Postal Service is about to default on a $5.6 billion loan obligation – mainly because the House took off without allowing the service to modernize its archaic business practices.

This was one of the simpler, cost-free tasks before Congress, and the Democratic Senate did its job in April in passing a Postal Service reform bill. But the Republicans in the House, who never stop calling for government to be run like a business, failed to act, thereby denying the Postal Service innovations that would allow it to be run like, yes, a modern delivery business.

Mike Edwards and Danny Oppenheimer: Eliminate the Electoral College

The Electoral College is one of the most dangerous institutions in American politics today.

The primary impact of the Electoral College is to give the citizens of some states more influence over the presidential election than citizens of other states. If you live in a Battleground State you are showered with attention. Your issues gain traction at the national level. You have political power. But if you happen to live in a Red State or a Blue State — as do roughly 79% of Americans according to Nate Silver’s electoral map — then you are pretty much out of luck. Your vote doesn’t matter. And when we say “your vote doesn’t matter,” we can actually quantify this. According to the Princeton Election Consortium a vote in Nevada this year (a small battleground state) is over one million times more likely to have an impact on this election than a vote in New Jersey (a large Blue state).

This is horribly unjust. It makes a mockery of the principal of “one man, one vote”; it doesn’t matter if we all get one vote when some votes are worth more than others.

Robert Reich: Romney’s Goal for the Companies Bain Acquired: “Harvest Them at Significant Profit”

Here’s a video of Romney in his early years at Bain, explaining his purpose in acquiring companies was to “harvest them at significant profit.”

No one should be surprised. After all, Bain Capital wasn’t in the business of creating jobs. It was in the business of creating profits.

The two goals aren’t at all the same — as Americans whose jobs have been eliminated or whose wages and benefits have been cut know all too well.

For years, higher corporate profits have come at the expense of fewer jobs and lower wages. Business leaders and financiers have been “harvesting” like mad, leaving most Americans behind in the dirt.

Romney’s main selling point to voters is his so-called “business experience.” Yet America can’t afford this sort of “business experience” in the White House.

To the contrary, we need someone who doesn’t see the economy as profits to be harvested, but as people who need more and better jobs.

Andrew Rosenthal: Will Waterboarding Make a Comeback?

Last September, Mitt Romney’s advisers were so determined to attack President Obama from every direction and to revive long-discredited neo-con theories about interrogation that they actually encouraged the candidate to come out strongly pro-torture in his presidential campaign.

In what The Times’ Charlie Savage describes as a “near-final draft” of a memo, Romney advisers denounced Mr. Obama’s executive order on interrogation (which instructed interrogators to hew to the Army Field Manual, i.e. to legal techniques). They also urged Mr. Romney to pledge that, upon taking office, he would rescind that order.

“My heart aches for the people I’ve seen,” Mitt Romney says, on the second day of his Ohio bus tour. He’s now telling stories of economic hardship among the people he’s met.

Up until now, Romney’s stories on the campaign trail have been about business successes — people who started businesses in garages and grew their companies into global giants, entrepreneurs who succeeded because of grit and determination, millionaires who began poor. Horatio Alger updated.

Curiously absent from these narratives have been the stories of ordinary Americans caught in an economy over which they have no control. That is, most of us. [..]

What we’re seeing in Ohio isn’t a new Mitt Romney. It’s a newly-packaged Mitt Romney. The real Mitt Romney is the one we saw on the videotape last week. And no amount of re-taping can disguise the package’s true contents.

Amy Goodman: Romney Has a Jobs Plan … for China

Freeport, Ill., is the site of one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. On Aug. 27, 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated there in their campaign for Illinois’ seat in the U.S. Senate. Lincoln lost that race, but the Freeport debate set the stage for his eventual defeat of Douglas in the presidential election of 1860, and thus the Civil War. Today, as the African-American president of the United States prepares to debate the candidate from the party of Lincoln, workers in Freeport are staging a protest, hoping to put their plight into the center of the national debate this election season.

A group of workers from Sensata Technologies have set up their tents in a protest encampment across the road from the plant where many of them have spent their adult lives working. Sensata makes high-tech sensors for automobiles, including the sensors that help automatic transmissions run safely. Sensata Technologies recently bought the plant from Honeywell, and promptly told the more than 170 workers there that their jobs and all the plant’s equipment would be shipped to China.

John Nichols: Romney on Teachers and Their Unions: Silence Them!

Mitt Romney has absolutely no problem with billionaires buying elections. In fact, had it not been for billionaires’ buying elections, he would not be the Republican nominee for president.

But Romney has a big, big problem with working people’s participating in the political process. Especially teachers.

America’s primary proponent of big money in politics now says that he wants to silence K-12 teachers who pool their resources in order to defend public education for kids whose parents might not be wealthy enough to pay the $39,000 a year it costs to send them to the elite Cranbrook Schools attended by young Willard Mitt.

“We simply can’t have a setting where the teachers unions are able to contribute tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of politicians and then those politicians, when elected, stand across from them at the bargaining table, supposedly to represent the interest of the kids. I think it’s a mistake,” the Republican nominee for president of 53 percent of the United States said during an appearance Tuesday with NBC’s Education Nation. “I think we’ve got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns. It’s the wrong way for us to go.”

That’s rich.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Replace This Greed

When even Scott Walker and Paul Ryan kind-of, sort-of side with labor against management, who knows what else is possible? Maybe they’ll endorse tax increases and say nice things about teachers unions.

For friends of labor, the revolt against the National Football League’s replacement refs is the most remarkable event since the organization of Henry Ford’s car company into the United Auto Workers union. And, really, could there be a better object lesson in the arrogance of the very rich and the value of the labor performed by line workers whose contributions usually go unnoticed and unappreciated? No wonder the NFL finally seems eager for a deal.

The contempt that pampered owners feel for the referees was nicely captured last month by Ray Anderson, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations. “You’ve never paid for an NFL ticket to watch somebody officiate a game,” Anderson said.

Rush Limbaugh is worried about penises. Specifically, he’s concerned that feminism (I’m sorry, ‘feminazis’) have contributed to decreasing penis size. Responding to an Italian study that reports penises are 10 percent smaller than they were fifty years ago, last week Limbaugh pointed to feminism, feminazis and “chickification” as the cause.

Ladies, the cat is out of the bag. Our cover of fighting for equal social, political and economic opportunities for women has been blown. The phallus has always been the centerpiece-and the target-of all feminist thought. The upside is that we can finally be open about our true agenda: A small dick on every man. (‘Cause who likes a big one, amirite?!)

This isn’t the first time someone has caught on to feminism’s real goal, of course. The world has a long history of outfoxing Operation Chestnut.

Anna M. Clark: America’s Miasma of Misinformation on Climate Change

With serious reporting of global warming by US media virtually nonexistent, it’s no wonder Americans are paralyzed in denial

Since 1950, humans have manufactured more goods than have ever existed in history. Our consumption of those goods – a highly inefficient use of our natural capital – has wrought a long list of environmental consequences. Staggering deforestation, check. Increasing greenhouse gas emissions, check. Rising heat, sea level, and incidence of extreme weather events – check, check and check.

To environmental experts, such evidence is the proverbial writing on the wall: we must transition to a low-carbon economy, stat, in order to avoid irrevocable damage. As President Obama affirmed, upon accepting his party’s nomination for president, no less:

   “Climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future.”

The president’s choice of words seemed a pointed response to Republican Senator James Inhofe, author of The Greatest Hoax and, it’s worth noting, recipient of $1.3m in campaign contributions from the oil and gas lobby.

Hilary Matfess: The TPP: A Quiet Coup for the Investor Class

The Obama administration’s trade negotiators are quietly selling out workers and the environment in a massive Bush-style trade agreement.

It would be a relief to report with any certainty that the negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)-a massive proposed free-trade zone spanning the Pacific Ocean and all four hemispheres-are definitely empowering corporations to the detriment of workers, the environment, and sovereignty throughout the region. Unfortunately, the secretive and opaque character of the negotiations has made it difficult to report much of anything about them.

What can be confidently reported about the TPP is that, in terms of trade flows, it would be the largest free-trade agreement yet entered into by the United States-and, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, that the ministers negotiating the agreement “have expressed an intent to comprehensively reduce barriers in goods, services, and agricultural trade as well as rules and disciplines on a wide range of topics” to unprecedented levels. Yet despite these grandiose ambitions, details of the negotiations and drafts of the text have been purposefully withheld from Congress and American citizens.

Phyllis Bennis: The Middle East in Turmoil Once Again: And It’s Not All About Us

When are we going to learn that it’s not all about us?

Certainly a lot of the current turmoil in the Middle East has something to do with the consequences of U.S. policy there. But still. The front page article in last Sunday’s New York Times led with concern that the current turmoil will test “President Obama’s ability to shape the forces of change in the Middle East.” Yikes. This is a disaster in the making.

Trying to renew U.S. control of a region finally claiming its 21st century independence from mainly U.S.-backed governments, is completely wrong-headed. After two or three generations of U.S. support for brutal military dictatorships and absolute monarchies because they were willing to toe the line on Israel, oil, and military bases, do we really want to put Washington back in charge of “shaping” the change that people across the region are fighting for?