Tag: Opinion

Deficit hawks have tried to enlist the Fed chair in the austerity game, but he isn’t playing along.

Ben Bernanke’s announcement Thursday that the Fed would keep easing money sent the stock market soaring, but more important was his declaration that there is only so much the Federal Reserve can do.

The Fed’s latest move, approved by the policy-setting Open Market Committee, will buy a total of $85 billion in bonds every month, including $40 billion per month of mortgage-backed securities. This pumps vast sums into the economy. It is the equivalent of printing money.  Bernanke’s hope is to drive down interest rates generally, especially on home mortgages. [..]

The usual script calls for a Fed chair to demand fiscal tightening in exchange for liberal interest-rate policy. It’s what Alan Greenspan did in his 1993 deal with Bill Clinton. But Bernanke refuses to play that role. At a high-profile speech at the Fed’s Jackson Hole conference August 31, the Fed chair warned against too much fiscal tightening. He has refused to be the instrument of the party of deficit hawks.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Fat Pythons And Hungry Humans: Last Week’s Real Economic Story

Last week the Federal Reserve announced another round of qualitative easing to increase employment. That’s like stuffing rats down a python’s throat and hoping it excretes enough white meat to feed everybody else. Sure, there’ll be a little more food for a minute, but it won’t be very appealing. And all you’ll get in the end is a lot of fat pythons.  [..]

But the media and the politicians missed the point altogether. Whether they were discussing last week’s jobs numbers, this week’s census data, or the latest announcement by the Federal Reserve, nobody on the evening news seemed to be addressing the subject that is casting a shadow over 100 million dining room tables: the jobs that can’t be found, the pay raises that never come, or the bills that can’t be paid.

When you turn on the TV, what you hear isn’t nearly as important as what you don’t hear.

Henry A. Giroux: On the Significance of the Chicago Teachers Strike: Challenging Democracy’s Demise

What the world is witnessing in Chicago as thousands of teachers, staff and support personnel strike is the emergence of a revolutionary ideal.

This is an ideal rooted in the promise of democracy – one that challenges corrupt neo-liberal practices, such as giving corporations and markets the right to define the purpose and meaning of public education; opposes policies that systemically defund public education by shifting the burden of low tax rates for the rich, and the cost of bloated military expenditures, to teachers and other public servants; and refuses to support educational reforms that debase educational leadership and teaching in order to undermine public education as a bulwark of democracy.

Vandana Shiva: The Global Food System Casino

Food is our nourishment. It is the source of life. Growing food, processing, transforming and distributing it involves 70 per cent of humanity. Eating food involves all of us. Yet, it is not the culture or human rights that are shaping today’s dominant food economy. Rather speculation and profits are designing food production and distribution. Putting food on the global financial casino is a design for hunger.

After the US subprime crisis and the Wall Street crash, investors rushed to commodity markets, especially oil and agricultural commodities. While real production did not increase between 2005-2007, commodity speculation in food increased 160 per cent. Speculation pushed up prices and high prices pushed an additional 100 million to hunger. Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan are all playing on the global food casino.

A 2008 advertisement of Deutsche Bank stated, “Do you enjoy rising prices? Everybody talks about commodities – with the Agriculture Euro Fund you can benefit from the increase in the value of the seven most important agricultural commodities.”

Are you, or is someone you know, a gadget freak? If so, you doubtless know that Wednesday was iPhone 5 day, the day Apple unveiled its latest way for people to avoid actually speaking to or even looking at whoever they’re with.

So is the new phone as insanely great as Apple says? Hey, I’ll leave stuff like that to David Pogue. What I’m interested in, instead, are suggestions that the unveiling of the iPhone 5 might provide a significant boost to the U.S. economy, adding measurably to economic growth over the next quarter or two.

Do you find this plausible? If so, I have news for you: you are, whether you know it or not, a Keynesian – and you have implicitly accepted the case that the government should spend more, not less, in a depressed economy.

Before I get there, let’s talk about where the buzz is coming from.

Mark Weisbrot: Moody’s Threat to Downgrade US Debt is Political, Not Fiscal

Moody’s threat this week to downgrade the US government’s credit rating says a whole lot more about the credit rating agency than it does about the US debt situation. It is really a way of telling the world that Moody’s is making a political statement, rather than an assessment of risk for investors who want actual information about US Treasury securities. This is really an embarrassment for Moody’s – since they are supposed to be evaluating risk – although most of the media didn’t seem to notice.

If you had to pick any sovereign bond in the world that has the least risk of default, it would have to be a US Treasury bond. Anyone who is holding bonds issued by the US government can be pretty sure that they will get their full interest payments and principal, if they hold it to maturity, unless there is some calamity as gigantic as a nuclear war. One reason is that the US has its own central bank and can simply create the money to pay bondholders, if necessary.

Dean Baker: Canada Proves the Decline of Unions is Not Inevitable

In polite circles in Washington it is common to view unions as a quaint anachronism. They may have made sense back when most workers had little education and worked in factories, but there really is no place for them in a 21st century economy. From this perspective, the sharp decline in union membership that we have seen in the last three decades is simply a natural process, sort of like the development of more powerful computers.

There is evidence that suggests otherwise, most notably that many other wealthy countries still have very high rates of unionisation. The share of the workforce represented by unions is 80 per cent or higher in many European countries. While some may want to attribute the eurozone crisis to factors like high unionisation rates (as opposed to inept central bankers) they face the problem that non-eurozone countries like Denmark and Sweden seem to be doing just fine.

If a recent report is true the Justice Department will need a new name — and some of us will have to step up and admit we were wrong.

It was clear that the foreclosure fraud settlement which the Administration and most states reached with major US banks was a great deal for the big banks — and a lousy deal for the public. But some of us found reason to hope against hope that the settlement would be accompanied by real investigation of crooked bankers, after years of flim-flammery and disgraceful inaction by the Justice Department.

Not that we were entirely naïve. The Administration’s track record was poor. and even had a slight resonance of bad faith. when it came to prosecuting Wall Street criminality. So, speaking only for myself, that cautious support came with renewed pressure on the Administration to back its words with action.

Some of us knew that, pace Pete Townshend, we very well might get fooled again.

Margaret Kimberly: Freedom Rider: Black America Stands Down for the Obamas

The Democrats definitely won the propaganda war between the two conventions but that doesn’t mean that black people won anything.” How could they, since African Americans have asked for nothing but that a Black family get to live in the White House? “For the first time in their history, black Americans have consciously and directly advocated being ignored.”

The recent Democratic National Convention was a demonstration of marketing at its worst, that is to say, at its greatest level of effectiveness. It was also an awful celebration of white washed history, dubious assertions and Orwellian levels of propaganda.

The best example of foolishness masquerading as substance was the overwrought reaction to first lady Michelle Obama’s speech. She gave what has become a traditional address asking voters to support the candidate because his wife tells funny stories about him which will make voters determined to vote for the good husband/dad/one time poor student who loves his country. The only difference between Michelle Obama and Ann Romney’s speeches was in the quality of delivery and fashion sense. Apparently there is still nothing like a beautiful woman in the right dress to make otherwise intelligent people lose their common sense.

Robert Reich: Moody’s in a Mood

The rating agencies are at it again. Moody’s Investors Services says it’s likely to downgrade U.S. government bonds if Congress and the White House don’t reach a budget deal before we go over the so-called “fiscal cliff” on January 2, when $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and tax increases automatically go into effect.

Apparently the credit rating agencies can’t decide which is more dangerous to the U.S. economy — cutting the U.S. budget deficit too quickly, or not having a plan to cut it at all. [..]

The fiscal cliff is a real worry. And it’s a worry precisely because the budget deficit isn’t — at least not now. When unemployment is high and growth is anemic, we need as much fiscal stimulus as we can manage.

As long as the rest of the world is willing to lend us their savings so cheaply, we’d be wise to use it to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and our schools and parks — and thereby put more Americans back to work — rather try to cut the deficit too much and too soon.

John Nichols: Priebus Posturing: RNC Chair Crosses the Last Line of Political Propriety

Mitt Romney’s response to the attacks on US diplomatic sites in Egypt and Libya-which left a US ambassador and other diplomats dead-was one of the more ignorant and irresponsible statements ever issued by a major party presidential nominee in such a circumstance. Early Wednesday, the Romney camp released a statement that read: “It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” [..]

Yet, even after the administration response in general and Obama’s own response had been made clear to all, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus continued to feature a Tweet on his official Twitter account that read: “Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.”

Priebus made no effort to apologize, no effort to clarify, no show of even the most minimal sense of duty or responsibility. Political campaigns frequently go to extremes. People say and do things that are inappropriate. But what Priebus has done crosses whatever line of political propriety still exists. He is intentionally creating a false impression with regard to the response of the president of the United States to a violent international incident that could have long-term repercussions.

In stops all around the country, the Caravan for Peace has found that convincing people that the war on drugs is destructive and wasteful is not the problem. The polls show the public came to this conclusion long ago and now close to a majority favor what used to be considered “radical” solutions like legalizing and regulating marijuana. Although most people weren’t aware of the impact of the violence in Mexico, it’s immediately obvious to them that the drug war-trying to block supply in places like Mexico and stop consumption by criminalizing drugs in the U.S.- is not working. Anywhere.

The question then is: If a public consensus on the failure of the drug war, why hasn’t anything changed?

Why does the U.S. government continue to send millions of tax dollars to cities to fight the drug war, as they close down schools for lack of funds? Why does it waste more millions financing a bloody war in Mexico? Why does the Mexican government continue to pay the economic and political cost of a disastrous and destabilizing war? The U.S. has spent 2 billion dollars on the Mexican drug war in the past five years, mostly through the Merida Initiative and the Mexican government has spent at least four times that much.

To answer these questions, we have to look behind the scenes of the drug war. There we find that this disastrous policy has some powerful promoters.

Nisha Swinton: A Crooked Proposition: Toxic Tar Sands Oil May Find its Way to New England

This past year saw the highly visible airing of concerns surrounding the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline project. A broad group of citizens opposed KXL, citing the climate change impacts of extracting and transporting Canadian tar sands oil and the (not unlikely) possibility of a toxic tar sands oil spill over the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region of Nebraska or above the Ogallala aquifer, a critical source of drinking water for the Great Plains.

In at least a temporary victory for this broad group of concerned citizens, President Obama punted Keystone’s approval. Yet, tar sands oil remains a threat to communities and essential resources, not just along the proposed path of KXL, but in other parts of the country as well. There is reason to believe that New England is especially at risk.

Valerie Strauss: The Real Problem with Rahm’s School Reforms in Chicago

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been pushing a school reform agenda backed by the Obama administration that is at the center of the strike that the Chicago Teachers Union is now waging in the third largest school district in the country.

This is not about whether or not you think the union should have called a strike as it did on Monday, but rather about the central problem with the reforms that Emanuel has been advocating: There’s no real proof that they systemically work, and in some cases, there is strong evidence that they may be harmful.

The reforms championed by Emanuel, a former chief of staff to President Obama, have been pushed by Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, and implemented in a number of states.

Here are some things you should know about some of the major issues [..]

The President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, sent stock markets soaring on Thursday with his announcement that the ECB was prepared to buy unlimited quantities of government bonds of member nations if necessary to halt the crisis. [..]

But what Draghi gave with one hand, he took away with the other. To qualify for ECB purchases of their bonds, nations like Spain and Italy, whose securities are under speculative attack, must submit to the austerity police. [..]

Europe’s economies are prisoners of Merkel’s austerity demands on one side, and the speculative attacks of the bond market on the other. In principle, the ECB could extend unlimited support to government bonds, and take the profit out of speculation. Draghi’s latest announcement seems to offer just that, but the austerity conditions render it next to useless.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Deficit Rorschach Test: The Presidents, the Editors, and the Truth

Both political parties have “an aversion to telling the truth,” says The Washington Post. The truth? That newspaper’s editors are part of a small but powerful billionaire-funded circle that seems to believe that any facts that don’t support their distorted and unpopular ideas are deviations from the “truth.”

With a few selected phrases, President Obama and former President Clinton appeared to endorse this tiny faction’s recovery-crushing austerity approach last week in Charlotte. But the rest of their speeches, along with others given at the convention, were a strong rejection of the privately authored set of policy proposals known as Simpson-Bowles. That’s good, since Simpson-Bowles so closely resembles the Republican Party Platform that the Democrats could wind up running against themselves.

Voters should embrace the Democrats’ stirring anti-austerity rhetoric. They should also encourage Democratic leaders to embrace their own rhetoric, to stop “triangulating” themselves into invisibility, and speak plainly and directly to the American people. In other words, Democrats should say they oppose any cuts to Medicare or Social Security benefits. They should say they’ll use government resources to create and protect the jobs we need — for teachers, firefighters, and police officers, among others. And that they’ll face facts and address the real cause of the government’s long-term budget deficit.

Robert Sheer: The Great Deregulator

Bill Clinton bears as much responsibility as any politician for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the wild applause for his disingenuous speech at the Democratic National Convention last week is a sure sign of the poverty of what passes for progressive politics.

Do those convention delegates, and the fawning media that were wowed by the former president’s rhetorical seductions, not recall that just before he left office Clinton signed off on the game-changing legislation that ended the sensible rules imposed on Wall Street during the Great Depression? It was Clinton who cooperated with the Republicans in reversing the legacy of FDR’s New Deal, opening the floodgates of unfettered avarice that almost drowned the world’s economy during the reign of George W. Bush.

Together Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have put human faces on how the super-rich game the tax system to pay less, pay later and sometimes not pay at all. Both want to expand tax favors for the already rich, like themselves.

Their approach favors dynastic wealth with largely tax-free (Romney) or completely tax-free (Ryan) lifestyles, encouraging future generations of shiftless inheritors. What we need instead is a tax system that encourages strivers in competitive markets, not a perpetual oligarchy.

Romney and Ryan say that lowering tax rates and reducing or eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends, while letting huge fortunes pass untaxed to heirs, will boost economic growth and mean prosperity for all.

We already tried parts of that, starting with Ronald Reagan in 1981 and doubling down with George W. Bush in 2001. Empirical result: Flat to falling incomes for the vast majority, weak job growth, but skyrocketing incomes for the top one percent of the top one percent, including Romney.

Mark Weibrot: Assange Case: Sweden’s Shame in Violating Human Rights

It was like a scene from a Hollywood movie, where the kidnapper walks up from behind, with a gun protruding from his trench coat pocket. “Keep walking, and don’t say anything,” he warns.

Such was the U.K. government’s threat three weeks ago to Ecuador, that British police could invade the Ecuadorian embassy if necessary to arrest WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange. But Ecuador’s foreign minister didn’t keep walking, and said something, to the great embarrassment of the U.K. Foreign Office. The Foreign Office tried to say it wasn’t a threat-although it was now available to the world in writing – and then took it back.

But the unprecedented threat to violate the Vienna convention that protects diplomatic missions brought serious criticism from the Union of South American Nations, and then – despite being watered down by Washington – another rebuke from the Organization of American States.

Gary Younge: This Is Shaping Up To Be the Most Racially Polarised US Election Ever

As their once core demographic diminishes, Republicans are going to any lengths to capture and keep the white vote

As Republicans were promoting themselves as a multiracial party from the platform in Tampa two weeks ago, an ugly incident on the convention floor suggested not everyone had got the memo. From the podium a range of speakers of Haitian, Mexican, Cuban and Indian descent spoke of how their parents had overcome huge barriers so they could succeed in the US. In the audience, a successful black woman who works for CNN was being [pelted with peanuts v] by a convention-goer, who said: “This is how we feed the animals.”

The tension between the projection of a modern, inclusive, tolerant party and the reality of a sizeable racially intolerant element within its base pining for the restoration of white privilege is neither new nor accidental. Indeed, it in no small part explains the trajectory of the Republican party for almost the last half century. In his diary, Richard Nixon’s chief-of-staff, Bob Haldeman, described how his boss spelled out the racial contours of a new electoral game-plan to win southern and suburban whites over to the Republican party in the wake of the civil rights era. “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Nixon told him. “The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to.”

Bill McKibben: A Summer of Extremes Signifies the New Normal

Just as the baseball season now stretches nearly into November, and the National Football League keeps adding games, so the summer season is in danger of extending on both ends, a kind of megalomaniac power grab fueled by the carbon pouring into the atmosphere.

In fact, you could argue that the North American summer actually started two days before the official end of winter this year, when the town of Winner, South Dakota turned in a 94-degree temperature reading. It was part of that wild July-in-March heat wave that stretched across two-thirds of the country, a stretch of weather so bizarre that historian Christopher Burt called it “probably the most extraordinary anomalous heat event” that the nation has ever seen. International Falls, “the icebox of the nation,” broke its heat records 10 straight days, and Chicago nine. In Traverse City, Michigan, on March 21, the record high was 87 degrees. But the low was 62 degrees, which was 4 degrees higher than the previous record high. The technical word for that is, insane.

And it wasn’t just the U.S. – new March records were set everywhere from Perth to Reykjavik, not to mention (this is the gun on the wall in Act One) Summit Station at the top of the Greenland Ice Cap.

Coming two months before Election Day, the employment report for August is a problem for President Obama. The economy added 96,000 jobs last month, a slow pace that lowered the monthly average this year to 139,000, versus 153,000 in 2011. Even the decline in the jobless rate, to 8.1 percent from 8.3 percent in July, was a disappointment, because it indicated a shrinking labor force as people gave up looking for work.

But properly understood, the report should not encourage voters to support Mitt Romney. That’s because boosting tepid job growth requires stimulative fiscal policy – including spending to rehire teachers and to rebuild schools, roads and other infrastructure, as well as loan modifications for underwater homeowners. Mr. Obama has proposed all of that, while Republicans have blocked such measures and the Republican agenda rejects them.

Glenn Greenwald: Democrats parade Osama bin Laden’s corpse as their proudest achievement

It’s one thing for Democrats to fete Obama’s tougher-than-thou national security credentials, but this ghoulish jingoism is warped

One of the formative events shaping my views of the last decade’s American political landscape was watching the 2004 Republican national convention. An expertly staged, supremely manipulative ritual of jingoism and leader-worship, I regarded it with an equal measure of awe and horror.

America’s militarism was continuously exploited by speaker after speaker to glorify the commander-in-chief, George W Bush, as a brave and noble warrior for American Greatness. Each mention of war and killing prompted his delirious followers to erupt in the same boisterous crowd-chant: “USA, USA.” Bush’s opponent (and his supporters), by contrast, were vilified as soft-on-the-terrorists, troop-hating, America-despising weaklings who lacked the stomach to Keep Us Safe.

[..]I thought, or at least hoped, that such vulgar crowd celebrations of leader-reverence, jingoism and militarism would not soon be replicated. But on Thursday night, the final night of the Democratic party convention, it was.

It is hard to count how many times a Democratic party speaker stood up proudly to proclaim:

   “Osama. Bin. Laden. Is. Dead!”

Chris Woods: Who Is Held to Account for Civilian Deaths by Drone in Yemen?

There is a history of Yemeni officials lying to protect the US, and the Pentagon and CIA greeting queries with obfuscation

When news flashed of an air strike on a vehicle in the Yemeni city of Radaa on Sunday afternoon, early claims that al-Qaida militants had died soon gave way to a more grisly reality.

At least 10 civilians had been killed, among them women and children. It was the worst loss of civilian life in Yemen’s brutal internal war since May 2012. Somebody had messed up badly. But was the United States or Yemen responsible?

Local officials and eyewitnesses were clear enough. The Radaa attack was the work of a US drone – a common enough event. Since May 2011, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recorded up to 116 US drone strikes in Yemen, part of a broader covert war aimed at crushing Islamist militants. But of those attacks, only 39 have been confirmed by officials as the work of the US.

The attribution of dozens of further possible drone attacks – and others reportedly involving US ships and conventional aircraft – remains unclear. Both the CIA and Pentagon are fighting dirty wars in Yemen, each with a separate arsenal and kill list. Little wonder that hundreds of deaths remain in a limbo of accountability.

David Sirota: Big Brother in Your Car

Your chipper TV friend Flo, otherwise known as Progressive Insurance’s ubiquitous shill, wants you to be excited-very excited. As you’ve probably learned from her effervescent commercials, she and her Big Brothers in the insurance biz want you to see their new tracking devices for your car not as a privacy-destroying step to justify raising your government-mandated car insurance premiums. Instead, they want you to see the gizmos, which record your vehicle’s every move, as a great innovation to get you premium discounts for safe driving.

Yet, despite the happy TV ads, questions are nonetheless swirling around this so-called “telematics-based insurance”-questions that Flo doesn’t want you to ask, because the tracking system is so frighteningly invasive and arbitrary.

Stanford’s research showing that organic produce probably isn’t any more nutritious than the conventional variety is mostly remarkable for what it omitted.

So a new study from Stanford University shows that organic produce probably isn’t any more nutritious than the conventional variety. We doubt the folks at Whole Foods are trembling in their Birkenstocks. We’re not aware of too many people who thought otherwise – it doesn’t make a lot of sense to assume the application of pesticides would have much impact on a fruit’s vitamin content. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t safer to eat.Perhaps the most valuable thing about the study of available research undertaken by Stanford’s Center for Health Policy is that it points up how little is yet known about the benefits of organics and the harms done by widespread pesticide use. The review, which looked at 240 studies from around the world on the health effects of eating organic and the comparative levels of nutrients and contaminants, made headlines because it supposedly struck a blow against the perception that cheaper, conventionally grown produce – which usually involves both pesticides and chemical fertilizers – is bad for you. “There isn’t much difference between organic and conventional foods, if you’re an adult and making a decision based solely on your health,” concluded senior study author Dena Bravata.

Not only is that debatable, but it fails to get to the heart of the reason most people spend extra for organics.

Mijin Cha: Fracking Water Hogs

As summer comes to an end, much of the country is still suffering from drought conditions. While rain brought relief to areas in the East, the Plains and Western parts of the country are still experiencing above normal temperatures and below normal precipitation levels. The impacted areas also happen to be where a lot of our food is grown and we’ve highlighted how we can expect higher food prices due to the reduced crop production.

Looking ahead, there seems to be little relief for farmers and ranchers in the short-term. The National Weather Service predicts that drought conditions will continue for the Plains and much of the West through the Fall with little indication that precipitation levels will return to normal, let alone to the level needed to alleviate drought conditions. Compounding this, the oil and gas fracking boom, especially in the Rockies, is starting to become a competitor for water resources. Fracking requires a significant amount of water. A recent report (pdf) highlighted that the amount of water currently needed for fracking operations in Colorado is up to 13 billion gallons per year, enough to serve nearly 300,000 people.

David W. Blight: Voter Suppression, Then and Now

SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.

In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now Frederick Douglass, walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local tax of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to New York City, and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838.

By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name. [..]

Should this fugitive, who had committed the crime of stealing his own freedom and living under false identities, have been allowed to vote? Voting reforms in recent decades had broadened the franchise to include men who did not hold property but certainly not to anyone who was property.

Leslie Savan: Clinton Tries to Teach Obama a Lesson in Humility

Why did Bill Clinton bow so deeply before Barack Obama after his amazing barn-burner of a speech Wednesday night?

I mean, his bow wasn’t a bob of the head; it wasn’t a slight slump of the shoulders or a passing nod. It was practically a salaam. He bent double at the waist, taking the kind of bow a courtier might make before a king. Did Clinton-right after defending Obama’s policies better than Obama ever has-feel he still had to overcome any lingering doubts about his loyalty?

Probably. But I think in that moment Clinton was also schooling Obama in humility.

The reason politicians find themselves transfixed by Clinton-whether they’re old opponents like George H.W. Bush or longtime allies like Rahm Emmanuel-has to do with the way he understands power as a source of personal struggle. Clinton subscribes to the ancient belief that every leader must give up something, usually something he or she loves, for power-as Odin gave his eye and MacBeth his honor. There’s a great scene in the HBO movie A Special Relationship in which Clinton takes the measure of Tony Blair’s character by asking him what he’d be willing to do to stay close to power under incoming President George Bush. That, as it turned out, was the right question to ask about Blair

.

The meticulously scripted spectacles of the two corporate party conventions are very poor backdrops for clear thinking – but luckily, the ordeals are almost over. What remains after the tents are folded, are the crimes of this administration and its predecessor: both horrifically evil in their own ways. History will mark Obama as the more effective evil, mainly because of the lack of opposition. [..]

It is as useless to anchor a serious political discussion to this year’s Democratic and Republican convention speeches, as to plan the liberation of humanity during Mardi Gras. Truth is no more welcome at the former than sobriety is at the latter. So, forget the conventions and their multi-layered lies. Here are a few highlights of what Barack Obama has inflicted on the nation and the world . . .

Robert Reich: The Most Important Political News This Week

The biggest political news this week won’t be the Democratic convention. It will be Friday’s unemployment report.

If the trend is good — if the rate of unemployment drops and the number of payroll jobs is as good if not better than it was in July — President Obama’s claim we’re on the right track gains crucial credibility. But if these numbers are moving in the wrong direction, Romney’s claim the nation needs a new start may appear more credible.  

Gail Collins; Bill, Barack and Us

On Wednesday, the Democrats got to the point.

That was thanks to Bill Clinton, Beloved Democrat, a man who got negative ratings from only 27 percent of Americans in one recent national poll. There are pictures of kittens that get worse grades. [..]

So, we’re almost done, convention-wise. We’ve learned that both parties like God and moms, particularly moms with humble roots. They both have faith that people who work hard and play by the rules can overcome exposure to secondhand furniture while they’re in college. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of whether you want to raise taxes and balance the budget like Clinton, or cut taxes and plunge us into a hopeless sea of debt, like Bush. Let the fight begin.

Robert Kuttner: Party Animals

“I’m not a member of any organized political party,” Will Rogers famously declared,  “I’m a Democrat.”

Rogers would not recognize the 2012 Democrats.

I’ve been attending conventions since 1964, when as a student I smuggled floor passes to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party insurgents in Atlantic City. And I’ve never seen anything as well choreographed and unified as night one of the 2012 convention. [..]

After decades and decades of being internally divided, the Democrats are stunningly unified and almost shockingly professional, yet without sacrificing genuine passion. Though an incumbent’s convention with no real business to transact can be criticized as just another stage show, there are good shows and bad ones. This one is off to a great start.

Robert Blum: Is John Roberts Coming for Your Vote?

Watching the almost uniform sea of white faces in attendance at the 2012 Republican National Convention called to mind one of the defining hallmarks of all reactionary movements of the modern era: Whatever their particular social and historical contexts, they seek not a new future free of past injustices but a return to mythologized past glories. [..]

Contrary to the right’s mythology touting the virtues of our lost democracy, voting was never a truly public pastime during the nation’s formative period. As political scientist Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, has noted, only 4 to 6 percent of the eligible electorate (which did not include women, black slaves and in many states white men without property) turned out to vote in the country’s first five presidential elections. And although voter turnout grew markedly after 1824, Jim Crow policies implemented after the Civil War caused turnout rates to nosedive again.