Tag: Opinion

This is the week of the third annual Deficit Fest, the event sponsored by Wall Street billionaire Peter G. Peterson. At this event, many of the people most responsible for the current downturn come together to tell us why we should be worried about the deficit at a time when 25 million people are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work altogether and millions face the prospect of losing their homes.

Past deficit fests included exchanges where Peter Peterson and former Treasury Secretary and Citigroup honcho Robert Rubin mused about their comparative net worth. We also got to witness President Clinton bemoan the fact that the Democratic and Republican leadership in Congress teamed up to prevent him from cutting Social Security. Had Clinton gotten his way, millions of seniors would be getting by on Social Security checks that are more than 10 percent smaller than what they now receive.

Peter Rothberg: Stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a proposed free trade agreement under secret negotiation between Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam.

Branded as a “trade deal” by its corporate proponents, the TPP would actually establish new corporate rights to undermine environmental and health laws, offshore millions of American jobs, flood the US with untested food products, and extend the duration of medical patents. Its expansive non-trade provisions would impose constraints on government regulation of financial firms and food safety. As the Huffington Post‘s Zach Carter reported, the TPP would even ban the widely popular “Buy America” procurement policy.

George Zornick: The Chamber’s Dishonest Ad Campaign is Underway

The US Chamber of Commerce has promised to mount “the most significant political effort in its 100-year history” to influence this fall’s Congressional races-and, not surprisingly, it’s looking to be a daring exercise in dishonesty as well.

The Chamber rolled out a national television ad last week hitting Democrats who voted for healthcare reform, and now Senator Bill Nelson, who is facing a tough re-election campaign in Florida, is marshaling his lawyers to have the ad pulled from the air waves because of dishonest claims.

The spot contains a particularly explosive charge, particularly in Florida-and one that Republicans have often repeated: “Seniors will see $500 billion in Medicare cuts to fund Obamacare.” See the ad here, as tailored for Nelson . . .

Alan Grayson: A Not-Dumb War

Last week, I wrote about President Obama’s announcement that he had signed an agreement to extend the US military occupation of Afghanistan for twelve more years. I said that, at this point, the war in Afghanistan very much resembles what, in October 2002, State Sen. Barack Obama called a “dumb war.”

Which begs this question: what is not a “dumb war”? Well, we just saw a good example of a not-dumb war, at least if you happen to be French.

Student loan debt slavery is even worse than you probably thought. The Grey Lady tonight has a long, informative story, “A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College“, that early on presents the stunning tidbit that 94% of the recipients of bachelor’s degrees borrowed in order to pay for it. The Times doesn’t report what average debt levels are in this cohort, but the average across all borrowers, per the New York Fed, is $23,000. Remember, this total includes graduates who have have been paying down debt, meaning they’ve amortized principal and almost certainly had borrowed less on average to complete school.

Contrast this “certain to be higher on average than $23,000″ for new graduates with their earning power, or more accurately, lack thereof. The Times article also mentions a Rutgers survey which seems to have some sample bias or underreporting of borrowing (of 2006-2011 graduates, only 55% of the respondents said they had borrowed to help fund college, and the median reported debt level was $20,000). The 2009-2011 graduates’ income averaged $27,000. In addition, only half said that their job required a college degree.

Robert Kuttner: Fiscal Futility

On Wednesday, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation will hold its third annual fiscal summit. We need this event like we need a mass outbreak of sado-masochism. [..]

At Tuesday’s summit, Bill Clinton will offer his version of a deficit reduction plan. Tim Geithner will offer his. Likewise Rep. Paul Ryan, and Democratic Congressmen Chris van Hollen and even Xavier Becerra of the House progressive caucus, and, inevitably, Alan Simpson of the late Bowles-Simpson Commission. Clinton, who will be interviewed by Tom Brokaw, has partnered with the Peterson Foundation on other initiatives. Another speaker is economist Carmen Reinhart, an expert on debt crises, who works at yet another institute named for Peterson. Also speaking will be Foundation’s president and CEO, Michael Peterson, son of the benefactor. (The entire board of directors is Pete Peterson, his wife, and son.) [..]

Austerity is a false cure for a prolonged recession. The Peterson Foundation is peddling fiscal snake oil. It is using a genuine crisis as an excuse to bash social insurance, at a time when we should be expanding social insurance. It’s appalling that so many people are gulled by this propaganda.

Robert Reich: How J.P. Morgan Chase Has Made the Case for Breaking Up the Big Banks and Resurrecting Glass-Steagall

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street’s war against regulation, announced Thursday it had lost $2 billion in trades over the past six weeks and could face an additional $1 billion of losses, due to excessively risky bets.

The bets were “poorly executed” and “poorly monitored,” said Dimon, a result of “many errors, “sloppiness,” and “bad judgment.” But not to worry. “We will admit it, we will fix it and move on.”

Move on? Word on the Street is that J.P. Morgan’s exposure is so large that it can’t dump these bad bets without affecting the market and losing even more money. And given its mammoth size and interlinked connections with every other financial institution, anything that shakes J.P. Morgan is likely to rock the rest of the Street.

Bill McKibben: The Koch-Stone XL Pipeline

Two pieces of crucial evidence emerged in the tar sands fight yesterday. One, happily, got all kinds of notice — Jim Hansen’s op-ed in the New York Times was the “most emailed” item of the day, which is appropriate since he explained new calculations showing that those Canadian deposits contain “twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history.” If we burn them on top of all the coal and oil and gas we’re already using, “concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era,” the government’s leading climate scientist explained, which you think would be enough to end the debate — even in our weird political culture, there aren’t many leaders clamoring to return us to the Pliocene.

David Sirota: Our Guns and Butter Economy

Obama: Pitchman for Exporting US-Made Weapons

With the economy still struggling and the debates over how to fix the problem more intense than ever, one word still evokes bipartisan consensus: exports. “I want us to sell stuff,” said President Obama, summing up the bipartisan sentiment.

That nebulous word “stuff” is significant. It asks us to see all exports as the same and to refrain from making nuanced value judgments about what exactly we’re shipping overseas. In this cold-blooded view, a job-creating export is a job-creating export, and that’s as far as any conversation should go.

At first glance, such reductionism seems logical, rational, even boringly uncontroversial. But two recent news items highlight how in a globalized economy, there are troubling consequences that come from the particular kind of export economy we’re building.

“It plays right into the hands of a bunch of pundits out there,” sighed Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, on Thursday. [..]

In his conference call, Dimon claimed that the disastrous hedging strategy had not violated the Volcker Rule. Rather, he said, it violated the “Dimon principle.” By which he meant, I think, that it was an example of the kind of dumb risk-taking that JPMorgan usually avoids.

But that’s just the point, isn’t it? Even at a bank as ostensibly well-run as JPMorgan, the incentives still exist for giant, risky bets to be made that can go very wrong. JPMorgan can withstand a $2 billion hit, but not every bank can – and who’s to say that the next derivatives debacle won’t be $5 billion or $10 billion? Jamie Dimon is undoubtedly a very good bank chieftain, but he’s only one man in a large institution; he can’t oversee every trade. The only way to change incentives industrywide – and get bank risk-taking under better control – is through a combination of tougher rules and more transparency. Which is precisely what Dodd-Frank aims to do.

Owen Jones: Shock Doctrine Opponents Revolt: The Austerity Backlash Across Europe

The truth is that the real world has paid the high priests of austerity an unwelcome visit

When I first read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine a few years ago, I had no idea how prescient the book was. It was a polemic about “disaster capitalism”, arguing that sudden crises are intentionally manipulated to push through extreme free market policies that were otherwise not politically possible. But early 2008 was a completely different era: although Northern Rock had just suffered the first bank run for 150 years, it seemed like a bizarre blip. The US sub-prime crisis was rumbling away, but it was like sheet lightning from a distant storm. “The deficit” was not an everyday term of political debate. It was not at all clear that the world was about to be utterly transformed.

And yet the past four years have proved a total vindication of Klein’s argument. A crisis of the market was cleverly transformed by free market ideologues into a crisis of public spending. Across Europe, the biggest slump since the 1930s has been used to push through policies straight out of some right-wing wet dream: the slashing of taxes on the rich and major corporations; the selling off of public services; and a bonfire of workers’ rights. It is disaster capitalism on speed.

But, this week, the great revolt against the Shock Doctrine began. That is exactly how we must understand the sudden sea change in European politics: not least, the election of Socialist François Hollande in France, and the stunning breakthrough of anti-austerity leftists in the Greek elections.

Greg Kaufman: Republicans Define ‘Heartlessness’ with Latest Budget Proposals

‘Lower-Priority Spending’ takes on new meaning as Paul Ryan and John Boehner dominate budget debate

When Republican Congressman Paul Ryan released his budget, he charged six House committees with finding $309 billion in spending cuts over ten years in order to avert $55 billion in military cuts scheduled for January 2013 under a bipartisan agreement. He wrote that these cuts would be found in “lower-priority spending.” (pdf)

On Thursday, House Republicans approved the cuts along a party-line vote, revealing exactly what they consider to be “lower-priority spending.” [..]

But for House Republicans, their preferred alternative of cutting lower-priority spending means… a $36 billion cut in food stamps (SNAP), which largely helps the elderly, disabled people, children and the working poor. Two million people would lose their benefits entirely and 44 million would have their benefits reduced-the current average benefit is $4 per person per day. Two hundred and eighty thousand low-income children would also lose automatic access to free school breakfast and lunch. The bill also cuts the SNAP employment and training program by 72 percent, making it more difficult for jobless recipients to find work. It’s important to note that SNAP kept 5 million people from poverty in 2010 and reduced poverty rates by 8 percent in 2009.

James Hansen: Game Over for the Climate

The science of the situation is clear – it’s time for the politics to follow

Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

Phyllis Bennis: We’re Fighting in a War We Lost Before the War Began

New poll shows support for Afghanistan war lower than ever, and for good reason.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone, but support for the longest U.S. war is dropping further and faster than ever. The latest national U.S. poll, released on May 9, shows 66 percent of Americans are against the war in Afghanistan – with 40 percent “strongly opposed.”

We can expect to hear the usual spin, claims that it’s a hard slog but Afghans are still better off and we have to finish what we started. That only the presence of our brave troops is giving the Afghan government and military the chance to consolidate their rule. That only our troops provide the possibility for stability and security in Afghanistan. That we have to stay to protect Afghan women.

But the reality is people have watched – and paid for – this war for more than eleven years now, and some facts just can’t be spun anymore. Half of the 66 percent who oppose the war say that the presence of U.S. troops is actually hurting the people of Afghanistan more than they are helping. They’re the ones who got it right.

Shareholder meetings can be routine, unless you are Bank of America, in which case it may be declared an “extraordinary event.” That is what the city of Charlotte, N.C., called the bank’s shareholder meeting this week. Bank of America is currently the second-largest bank in the U.S. (after JPMorgan Chase), claiming more than $2 trillion in assets. It also is the “too big to fail” poster child of Occupy Wall Street, a speculative banking monstrosity that profits from, among other things, the ongoing foreclosure crisis and the exploitation of dirty coal.  [..]

Those gathered inside and outside the Bank of America shareholder meeting this week-homeowners fighting foreclosure, environmentalists, Occupy Wall Street activists-will take note of the president’s change. They are sure to continue their struggles, right through the Democratic National Convention, making it truly an “extraordinary event.”

Robert Sheer: Hope and Hesitation in Obama’s Sudden Conversion

Once again President Barack Obama has come tantalizingly close to being terrific. But his failure of courage on the gay marriage issue, in the end, undermined the point he hoped to make Wednesday. As with his prior rhetorical flashes of principle in denouncing torture, commiserating with the victims of Wall Street fraud and resolving to end unjustifiable wars, he quickly waffled and the result was a continuation of that which is fundamentally wrong.

There is only one essential point to be made about gay marriage: To acknowledge one’s own sexual being and to define the relationships that follow is a basic human right. How dare anyone intrude on a life choice that is not his to make for others? Whether the president’s family knows gay couples who are monogamous and nice to their children has no more to do with the issue than the old argument of enlightened racists in the American South that there were many fine Negroes who were not at all uppity.

Amanda Marcotte: The Real Reason Romney is Struggling with Women Voters

Back in February, things started to look dire for the Romney campaign’s ability to attract female voters. Every day brought another story about Republican attacks on reproductive rights: attacks on insurance coverage for contraception, transvaginal probes, all-male panels called in Congress to discuss contraception, attacks on Planned Parenthood’s funding, and the candidate himself increasingly afraid to say a positive word about contraception when asked directly in the debates. A gender gap opened up between the candidates in the polls, with Obama outpacing Romney with women by 19 points. The Romney campaign responded by trying to change the subject, to jobs and the economy. But if Romney wants to close the gender gap, he should rethink that strategy. After all, the polling data suggests that his stance on economic issues – specifically the size of the safety net and amount of economic support the government provides to citizens – is what’s really hurting him with female voters.

The real war between the sexes may not be over feminism or sex so much as whether or not our tax dollars should go to social spending. Research conducted by Pew in October 2011 showed women support a strong, activist government in much larger numbers than men. On the question of whether the government should offer more services, women said yes by 9 more percentage points than men. The gender gap on social spending remained when pollsters asked about specific interest groups. Women wanted more spending on the elderly than did men by 11 percentage points, more spending on children by 10 percentage points and more spending on the poor by 9 percentage points.

Michael T. Klare: The Energy Wars Heat Up

Conflict and intrigue over valuable energy supplies have been features of the international landscape for a long time.  Major wars over oil have been fought every decade or so since World War I, and smaller engagements have erupted every few years; a flare-up or two in 2012, then, would be part of the normal scheme of things.  Instead, what we are now seeing is a whole cluster of oil-related clashes stretching across the globe, involving a dozen or so countries, with more popping up all the time.  Consider these flash-points as signals that we are entering an era of intensified conflict over energy.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Argentina to the Philippines, here are the six areas of conflict-all tied to energy supplies-that have made news in just the first few months of 2012 [. .    .]

When most people hear the word ‘war,’ they instinctively think of conflict, the battlefield, mayhem and other adjectives used to describe the concept of fighting over land, resources etc. But there’s another kind of warfare that exists, one that is ideological rather than physical. And perhaps nobody knows the concept of waging these sorts of wars better than Republicans. As a collective, they have waged virtual wars against women, immigrants and progressive groups. Now, in their latest move to reward the rich while punishing hard-working Americans, they have blocked a bill that would have prevented student loan interest rates from doubling. The latest victims in Republican warfare are the most defenseless among us — our children.

Mike Lux: The Only Way to Fix the World Economy

Europe is a mess, and not because voters there are rejecting the austerity policies that are driving the European Union straight into recession. The USA’s economy is picking up in some ways, but is still stalled out in others. And looming over everything are all these toxic assets the world’s biggest banks created for themselves, and the mountains of debt piling up everywhere — not only or even most importantly government debt, but trade deficits, underwater mortgage debt, student debt, consumer debt as well.

As Paul Krugman and so many other economists, and history itself point out, the austerity solution when facing a recessionary economy is a vicious cycle: you make cuts to lower the government’s deficit spending, which puts more people out of work, which erases the savings you make from cut and then some. It’s also not politically sustainable, as elections all over Europe are making clear.

Jim Hightower: Monsanto, Dow and Genetically Modified Trouble

Thanks to the blessings of nature and good farmers, you and I can enjoy such scrumptious delights as fresh corn-on-the-cob, popcorn and many other variations of this truly great grain. And now, thanks to Dow Chemical and federal regulators, we can look forward to “Agent Orange Corn.” The chemical giant is in line to gain approval for putting a genetically altered corn seed on the market that will produce corn plants that won’t die when doused with high levels of 2,4-D.

This potent pesticide was an ingredient in Dow’s notorious Agent Orange defoliant, which did such extensive and horrific damage to soldiers and civilians in the Vietnam War. However, the corporation and the feds claim that 2,4-D was not the deadliest ingredient of the killer defoliant and has not yet been proven to cause cancer in humans, so they’re pressing ahead to let this corporate-constructed seed be planted across America.

Hugh Gustertson: The Drone Summit, the Lunchbox and the Invisibility of Charred Children

I kept finding myself thinking about the lunchbox.

I was at the all-day Drone Summit in Washington DC organized by Codepink, the antiwar group whose mostly female members are famous for putting on theatrical protests while wearing bold pink. I spent the day listening to human rights activists talking about civilians killed by US drone strikes, lawyers who complained that the strikes violated international law, and scientists worried that the United States is on the brink of automating the use of lethal force by drones and killer robots.

And I kept thinking about the lunchbox.

The lunchbox belonged to a schoolgirl in Hiroshima. Her body was never found, but the rice and peas in her lunchbox were carbonized by the atomic bomb. The lunchbox, turned into an exhibition piece, became, in the words of historian Peter Stearns, “an intensely human atomic bomb icon.” The Smithsonian museum’s plans to exhibit the lunchbox as part of its 1995 exhibit for the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II enraged military veterans and conservative pundits, who eventually forced the exhibit’s cancellation.

The Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C., is the official residence of the commandant of the Marine Corps. It is the home of the Marines who are the ceremonial guard for the president during official U.S. government functions and the security force for the White House and Camp David. The Marine Band, also located at the Barracks, is known as “The President’s Own.” The Barracks is the showplace of the Marine Corps with its Silent Drill Platoon giving weekly military precision performances for the public during the busy summer tourist season.

But the Marine Barracks has its dark and ugly side. It is also the home of officers and enlisted men of the Marine Corps who have been accused of sexually harassing, assaulting and raping female Marine officers and enlisted and civilian women who work there.

Linda McQuaig: Quebec Students Send a Message Against Austerity

No wonder those Quebec student protestors have been spooking the English Canadian establishment. If they get their way, the same ideas could catch on here, leaving the best-laid plans for austerity in tatters.

What seems to particularly gall some English Canadian commentators is the fact that the Quebec students – who reached a tentative deal with the province on the weekend after a three-month strike – have been protesting tuition hikes that would still leave them with the lowest tuition in the country. Why can’t these spoiled brats be grateful, and go back to watching video games and keeping up with the Kardashians like normal, well-adjusted North American youth?

It’s that old problem about Quebec. Somehow people there manage to shake a bit loose from the rigid corporate-imposed mindset that has gripped North America in recent decades, convincing us that we as a society must cut back on things – like university education and old age pensions – that were somehow affordable in days when our society was a lot less rich.

The Quebec students, more attuned to the outside world, have figured out that this self-denial has more to do with dogma than with some new reality allegedly necessitated by the global economy.

Allison Kilkenny: Occupy Our Homes Fights On as Media Ignores Foreclosure Plight

Georgia County Sheriff Evicts Four-Generation Family In Raid Resembling ‘Drug Bust’

One of Occupy Wall Street’s enduring legacies is the Occupy Our Homes movement that successfully managed to protect families from evictions at a time when not even the government of the United States seemed overly concerned with an epidemic of foreclosures. [..]

These kinds of Occupy victories used to receive a fair amount of news coverage, though never at the same level as the more dramatic aspects of the movement, such as violent camp evictions and mass arrests. However, as of late, the work done by Occupy Our Homes has almost entirely dropped off the media radar. [..]

Not only have Occupy’s successfully thwarted evictions gone unreported, but the establishment media has more or less completely lost interest in the ongoing epidemic of foreclosures. Just as Occupy is no longer shiny and new and exciting, so too have the images of families being ousted from their homes of decades grown tiresome and repetitive and, like, totally depressing.

Jessica Valenti: MCA’s Feminist Legacy

The news of Adam Yauch’s death felt like a punch to the stomach. It wasn’t just because I was a fan. (Though it should tell you something about the level of my love for this band that on the day of Yauch’s death I got an e-mail from an ex I had parted ways with ten years ago checking in on me.) It wasn’t just because-like a lot of people who grew up during a certain time in New York City-the Beastie Boys felt like a cultural touchstone.

For a female hip hop fan-for this female hip hop fan, at least-the Beastie Boys meant so much more.

Much has been made of Yauch’s Buddhism and dedication to philanthropy. Pieces have even acknowledged the Beastie Boys’ explicit move towards feminism by noting, in passing, MCA’s famous line from “Sure Shot”:

I want to say a little something that’s long overdue / The disrespect to women has to got to be through / To all the mothers and sisters and the wives and friends / I want to offer my love and respect till the end

Which federal program took in more than it spent last year, added $95 billion to its surplus and lifted 20 million Americans of all ages out of poverty?

Why, Social Security, of course, which ended 2011 with a $2.7 trillion surplus.

That surplus is almost twice the $1.4 trillion collected in personal and corporate income taxes last year. And it is projected to go on growing until 2021, the year the youngest Baby Boomers turn 67 and qualify for full old-age benefits.

So why all the talk about Social Security “going broke?” That theme filled the news after release of the latest annual report of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds, as Social Security is formally called.

The reason is that the people who want to kill Social Security have for years worked hard to persuade the young that the Social Security taxes they pay to support today’s gray hairs will do nothing for them when their own hair turns gray.

Eugene Robinson: Death to Austerity

Economic austerity is a dangerous, self-defeating intellectual fad. Perhaps I should say that’s what it was, given Sunday’s election results in Europe. Perhaps I should also say good riddance.

Voters in France, Greece and even Germany-a hotbed of the austerity cult-told their political leaders, in no uncertain terms, that boosting economic growth is more important than cutting government spending. Here in the United States, I hope that Democrats, at least, were paying attention; I fear that the addled ideologues who control the Republican Party will never get the message.

On Sunday, French voters elected Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande as president, ousting center-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in what amounted to a referendum on Sarkozy’s embrace of austerity.

Michelangelo Signorile: Joe Biden Was for Marriage Equality Before He Was Against It

President Obama previously had the dubious distinction among politicians of being for marriage equality before he was against it. But now he’s not alone: his own vice president shares the honor!

Of course, in the case of Obama, he was for it for perhaps 8 years, depending on when he started saying he was against it (after having said he was for it in a questionaire in 1996, which his aides have spun themselves into a frenzy trying to explain). For Joe Biden it was just about 8 minutes.

Seriously, before Obama could even spend a few days basking in the glory of the Romney campaign’s hideous gay meltdown last week, another idiotic gay panic has gripped his own campaign. And it really makes you wonder, what are these guys thinking?

Who’s an economy for? Voters in France and Greece have made it clear it’s not for the bond traders.

Referring to his own electoral woes, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote Monday in an article in the conservative Daily Telegraph: “When people think about the economy they don’t see it through the dry numbers of the deficit figures, trade balances or inflation forecasts – but instead the things that make the difference between a life that’s worth living and a daily grind that drags them down.” [..]

In truth, the choice isn’t simply between budget-cutting austerity, on the one hand, and growth and jobs on the other.

It’s really a question of timing. And it’s the same issue on this side of the pond. If government slices spending too early, when unemployment is high and growth is slowing, it makes the debt situation far worse.

The Guardian Editorial: François Hollande: the change France needs

François Hollande has a rare opportunity to reshape the political landscape in a country whose default position is to the right

François Hollande won a stunning victory, not just for himself, as a man who spent much of his career in the shadow of others, nor for France, but for the left in Europe, too. With the governing parties who preached austerity under attack from a voter revolt on Sunday- in the Greek elections, where the extreme right was set to win enough votes to enter parliament; in Schleswig-Holstein, where the vote of Angela Merkel’s coalition partners, the Free Democrats, collapsed – the breakthrough of the left in France was a huge achievement and, just maybe, a turning point.

Nicolas Sarkozy is the 11th European leader to fall since the banking crisis broke and this result is more than just a shot across the bows for the former Sarkozy loyalists in Ms Merkel or David Cameron. France’s new direction is a mortal blow to the austerity compact which has been Europe’s anchor response to the crisis. Mr Hollande is no radical. Conscious of how polarised France has become between left and right, he wanted his supporters to celebrate, not demonstrate. He has set himself just one year longer to balance France’s budget than the man he defeated. But he arrives in power at that point in history where the victims of boom and bust, rather than its perennially self-satisfied authors, have become the dominant political voice.

Joan Walsh: Let Biden be Biden

The VP comes out for same sex marriage. Then his office insists he “was saying what the president has said”

For cryin’ out loud.

Sunday morning on “Meet the Press” Vice President Joe Biden went completely Joe Biden on the issue of marriage equality, telling David Gregory “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights,” and crediting “Will and Grace.” That’s the Joe Biden we know and love. [..]

It seemed an important step for an administration that can’t seem to get the president all the way there. President Obama is going to have to come out for gay marriage one of these days – can anyone honestly believe he’s against it? – but having the Catholic Biden endorse it helps, too. The group Catholic Democrats immediately Tweeted the little known fact that Catholics are the most pro-gay marriage of all Christian groups. Yet the backwards politics of the U.S. Bishops means most people don’t know that, and thus view gay marriage as a no-fly zone during an election season when the  Catholic swing vote is particularly important. So Biden’s comment mattered.

A’ex Pareene: America’s idiot rich

The 1 percent is complaining louder than ever. There can be no reasoning with people this irrational

Some unknown but alarming number of ultra-rich Americans are now basically totally delusional and completely divorced from reality. This is now an inescapable fact, confirmed by multiple media accounts of billionaire thought and an entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine. [..]

There can be no reasoning with people this irrational. Any attempt to do so will fail, as Barack Obama, whose main goal is to maintain, not upend, the system that made these people so disgustingly wealthy, is learning. It’s growing harder and harder to pretend that the fantastically wealthy have a sophisticated understanding of politics – or math, or economics, or cause-and-effect.

Dana Milbank: Taking out Dick Lugar

When Indiana Republicans go to the polls on Tuesday, they will do more than choose a candidate for the Senate. They will choose between party and country. [..]

For years Dick Lugar has been the leading Senate Republican on foreign policy, shaping post-Cold War strategy, securing sanctions to end South African apartheid and bringing democracy to the Philippines, among other things. His signature achievement, drafted with Democrat Sam Nunn, was the 1992 Nunn-Lugar Act, which has disarmed thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads once aimed at the United States.

Enter Richard Mourdock, a tea party hothead attempting to defeat Lugar in the GOP primary. A cornerstone of his effort to oust Lugar is the six-term senator’s bad habit of bipartisanship – never mind that Lugar’s bipartisanship was in the service of protecting millions of Americans from nuclear, chemical and biological terrorism.