Tag: Opinion

Under the pretext of parental ‘choice’, the right is using vouchers to establish religion in public education – with Romney’s blessing

“Choice” is such a nice word that everybody wants to have it on their side.

“Choice” is also a fuzzy word, which may be why Mitt Romney is willing to call himself a supporter of “school choice”. In the strange language of education politics, “choice” sometimes means advocating the partial privatization of school systems through charter schools – which Romney supports. It can also indicate support for voucher programs, which is another thing altogether – and which Romney is said also to support.

Charter schools are constrained by the same laws and policies that, for example, prohibit public schools from endorsing religion. Vouchers, on the other hand, allow parents to use public money to pay for private, mostly religious schools that are largely unaccountable to the public. So, for example, a voucher school may use your taxpayer dollars to teach its students that the earth is 6,000 years old. And a number of such schools now do just that.

Michele Chen: Labor Action and Inaction in Colombia Free Trade Deal

As the media swarmed over the scandal surrounding the Secret Service’s alleged carousing with prostitutes in Colombia, another questionable financial transaction slipped quietly through the backdoor of hemispheric diplomacy.

While officials convened at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena earlier this month, the White House put the finishing touches on another free trade agreement, aimed at liberalizing markets in Colombia and the U.S. The deal has faced vocal resistance from labor and human rights groups in both countries, who argue that the agreement would effectively condone violence against activists and economic oppression. But for the governments looking to build economic ties, the fears raised by civil society groups were just background noise. The Obama administration tried to put the lid on the opposition by tacking on labor policies to address anti-labor violence and other abuses.

Sarah Jerving: ALEC’s Vision of Pre-Empting EPA Coal Ash Regs Passes the House

The U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment on April 18 to the Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2012 (HR 4348) that would effectively pre-empt the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating coal ash, the waste from coal burning plants. About 140 million tons of coal ash are produced by power plants in the United States each year. There are about 1,000 active coal ash storage sites across the country.

According to the EPA, the ash contains concentrations of arsenic, boron, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury and other metals, but the coal industry has claimed there is less mercury in the ash than in a fluorescent light bulb. However, the EPA found in 2010 that the cancer risk from arsenic near some unlined coal ash ponds was one in 50 — 2,000 times the agency’s regulatory goal. Additionally, researchers from the Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice, and Sierra Club have documented water contamination from coal ash sites in 186 locations. The new bill would strip the EPA’s authority to regulate the ash and hand it over to the states.

Jessica Valenti: Did Conservative Sting Operatives Target Planned Parenthood-Again?

After a series of odd visits by patients asking questions about sex-selective abortions, Planned Parenthood has determined that their centers are likely the target of another undercover video “sting” operation.

In a post on RH Reality Check, Planned Parenthood’s Vice President of Education Leslie Kantor and Senior Medical Adviser Dr. Carolyn Westhoff wrote that they anticipate the group-presumably Live Action, which has targeted Planned Parenthood in the past – “likely in coordination with a broad range of anti-choice leaders, will soon launch a propaganda campaign with the goal of discrediting Planned Parenthood.”

According to the Huffington Post, Planned Parenthood clinics in at least eleven states over the last few weeks have been the target of “patients” coming in asking a series of questions about finding out the gender of their fetus, and indicating that they want to terminate the pregnancy if it’s a girl.

Cecillia Wang: Will Americans Tolerate Laws that Encourage Racial Profiling?

When the Supreme Court hears arguments on April 25 challenging Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant law, S.B. 1070, it will tackle the legal question of whether states can create a patchwork of separate immigration laws, beyond the control of the U.S. government.

But laws like S.B. 1070 pose even more fundamental questions for our nation. As Americans, will we tolerate discriminatory laws that encourage racial profiling? Or will we choose fairness and equality over discrimination and a police state that reaches into our personal lives?

We are used to saying that we live in a free country. But S.B. 1070 and its ilk threaten our cherished freedoms. Arizonans are not the only ones at risk. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah have passed similar laws. If the courts allow them to go forward, everyone in these states will always need to carry identity papers to guard against police intrusions.

One of my responsibilities when I was head of corporate communications at Cigna was to help ensure that the company’s annual meeting of shareholders ran smoothly and, if at all possible, attracted no negative publicity.

I always dreaded the annual meeting because you really never knew if one or more disgruntled shareholders might show up and ask rude questions of the CEO. But during all of my years of helping plan those meetings, we had an unblemished string of non-events. We considered the meetings marathons if they lasted more than 15 minutes. Most of them were over-long before then. Over the course of 10 years, I only recall two reporters who felt compelled to attend, and one of them got stuck in traffic and missed the whole thing.

Some of my peers at other health insurers were not that lucky, but relatively few of the big-profit insurers have had to cope with contentious shareholder meetings.

It is clear those days are over.

Dean Baker: Killing the Messenger: The Downsizing and Death of the Postal Service

It is fashionable to think of the postal service as an antiquated relic of a different era in the same way that all right-thinking people regarded standard 30-year fixed rate mortgages as old-fashioned at the peak of the housing bubble. Many of the same people who assured us that we could effectively manage risk through mortgage securitization are now anxious to hand the postal service a death sentence.

Death, or at least a near death experience, is the likely outcome of S.1789, the bill to downsize the Postal Service that the Senate is scheduled to vote on Tuesday night. The bill would end Saturday delivery and also raise the target delivery time from 1-2 days to 2-3 days.  

The idea is that people won’t generally care if a letter takes 3 days rather than 2 to reach its destination. While that is probably true, this will certainly increase the frequency with which a letter takes a week or more to reach its destination, and people do care about and remember these instances. This additional delay is likely to seriously reduce the standing of the Postal Service in most people’s eyes, leading to a further erosion of business.

Ari Melber: Media Favored Horserace Over Issues in Presidential Primary

For all the griping about media bias in politics, good data is in short supply. Every four years,    however, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center releases exhaustive, quantitative reports on how the press covers the presidential campaign. Their new report, out Monday, shows that the largest bias this year did not favor an ideology or candidate-though Santorum never got much love-but favored the coverage of the horserace and personal issues over public policy.

The press covered the horserace seven times more than domestic issues in the GOP primary. [..]

While it’s hard to see what voters are supposed to base their decisions on if most coverage is about tactics, not the actual issues in the race, Pew notes that 2012 was actually better on this score than last cycle. Then, strategy made up a whopping 80 percent of press coverage about the GOP field, and 78 percent for the Democrats. That may have been because the 2008 race had even more drama between the candidates.

Paul Buchheit: The Middle Class Hasn’t Disappeared. It’s Just Sliding Toward the Bottom

It used to be that the average American resided halfway between two extremes:

   Steven Schwarzman’s home was being partially replicated in a Park Avenue hall for his gala $5 million 60th birthday party. The guest of honor’s full-length portrait greeted the invitees as they proceeded past rows of orchids and palm trees to the dining area, where they feasted on lobster, filet mignon, baked Alaska, and the finest of wines. Martin Short provided the laughs, and the music came compliments of Marvin Hamlisch, Patti LaBelle, and Rod Stewart.

   Eloise Pittman’s home had been purchased in the 1950s by her mother, who washed dishes to pay off the mortgage. In 1985 the younger Ms. Pittman, a schoolteacher, went to Chase Bank and took out a loan on the house. It was a predatory loan with balloon payments, and Ms. Pittman was forced to borrow more and more money to keep from defaulting. When she died in November 2011, she was $400,000 in debt. A week after her death her family received an eviction notice.

There’s no ‘average’ anymore, in the sense of a normal curve with most of the people and most of the money in the middle.

Today, 400 individuals have as much wealth as an entire HALF of America.

The first observance of Earth Day was March 21, 1970. I was 17, and along with other students at Broad Run High School, went out with garbage bags to clean up the side of the road leading to the school. Even then, of course, the world faced much more serious pollution issues than roadside litter. But that problem was one we students could do something about.

Given the magnitude of the challenges the earth now faces, provoked by man-made global climate change as a result of our spewing massive amounts of carbon dioxide and soot into the atmosphere, the problems that were on our minds in 1970 seem in retrospect miniscule. Moreover, the idea that individuals could resolve this problem by taking individual action is a non-starter. It is a collective and infrastructural problem and we have to band together and do something about it through the instrumentality of the government. Unfortunately, our government has mostly been bought by Big Oil, so that the crisis of the environment is also the crisis of American democracy.

Timothy Egan: The Wrath of Grapes

We know from a rare personal admission that Mitt Romney experienced a faint whiff of alcohol, a long, long time ago. “I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once as a wayward teenager,” he said last November, “and never tried it again.”

No doubt, Romney has friends who own multinational breweries. But he would fail the presidential beer test – that is, whom would you most like to sip suds with – simply because his Mormon faith prohibits drinking alcohol. But then, he would also fail the presidential cookie test, as he showed in another awkward appearance with real people last week.

I’ve always thought the beer buddy threshold was nonsense. Still, it’s worth considering what a White House without a tippling tenant would be like. Sobriety, laudable in many respects, does imply rigidity of thought. The best presidents were open-minded, and generally open to a drink. The nondrinkers, at least over the last century or so, were terrible presidents.

Robert Kuttner: How Europe Could Sink Obama

Forget the potential for an unpleasant October surprise emanating in Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, Pakistan or North Korea. The biggest threat to Barack Obama’s re-election is the economic folly of our good friends in the European Union, who seem determined to snuff our their economic recovery — and ours.

America’s own recovery is making very fragile progress. We don’t know whether the economy will keep generating jobs well in excess of 200,000 a month, as in January and February, or only a bit more than 100,000 a month as in March. But we do know that exports have been one of our economy’s surprising sources of strength, and that Europe is one of America’s biggest customers.

But Europe is even more committed to austerity economics than the United States, and as a result Europe is right on the edge of a double-dip recession.

E. J. Dionne: How to beat Citizens United

We are about to have the worst presidential campaign money can buy. The Supreme Court’s dreadful Citizens United decision (pdf) and a somnolent Federal Election Commission will allow hundreds of millions of dollars from a small number of very wealthy people and interests to inundate our airwaves with often vicious advertisements for which no candidate will be accountable.

One would like to think that the court will eventually admit the folly of its 2010 ruling and reverse it. But we can’t wait that long. And out of this dreary landscape, hope is blossoming in the state of New York. There’s irony here, since New York is where a lot of the big national money is coming from. No matter. The state is considering a campaign finance law that would repair some of the Citizens United damage, and in a way the Supreme Court wouldn’t be able to touch.

Felix Salmon: Let’s not worry about fake online drugs

Roger Bate has a curious op-ed in the NYT today. He’s the lead author on a study which bought 370 drug samples from 41 online pharmacies around the world, and then tested their authenticity. The results? With the exception of Viagra bought from non-verified websites, every single drug was 100% authentic. [..]

Realistically, the US simply doesn’t have a “fake drug menace”. Yes, fake drugs exist, and they’re not all that hard to find if you’re based in, say, Ethiopia. An earlier study by Roger Bate found that 7 of 36 drugs bought by secret shoppers in Ethiopia failed a stringent authenticity test. (On the other hand, 100% of the drugs bought in Turkey were legitimate, and Brazil, Russia, and China all performed very well in the test.) [..]

What we’re faced with here is a tradeoff. On the one hand, there are clear financial benefits to letting Americans and American insurers buy their authentic drugs wherever those drugs are cheapest. On the other hand, there are extremely vague worries that were that to happen, some hypothetical new future drug might fail to make its way to market. Given the massive economic and fiscal costs of healthcare price inflation, it’s surely a no-brainer to go for the option which unambiguously saves money. Especially since, as Bate himself has demonstrated, the drug-safety risks of going down that road are essentially nonexistent.

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign launched its first Spanish-language ads this week, just after he returned from the Summit of the Americas. He spent three days in Colombia, longer than any president in U.S. history. The trip was marred, however, by a prostitution scandal involving the U.S. military and Secret Service. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We let the boss down, because nobody’s talking about what went on in Colombia other than this incident.” Dempsey is right. It also served as a metaphor for the U.S. government’s ongoing treatment of Latin America.

The scandal reportedly involves 11 members of the U.S. Secret Service and five members of the U.S. Army Special Forces, who allegedly met prostitutes at one or more bars in Cartagena and took up to 20 of the women back to their hotel, some of whom may have been minors. This all deserves thorough investig

Eugene Robinson: The Right-Wing Bully Machine

Not all overheated political rhetoric is alike. Delusional right-wing crazy talk-the kind of ranting we’ve heard recently from washed-up rock star Ted Nugent and tea party-backed Rep. Allen West-is a special kind of poison that cannot be safely ignored.

Let me be clear: I’m saying that the extreme language we hear from the far right is qualitatively different from the extreme language we hear from the far left-and far more damaging to the ties that bind us as a nation. Tut-tutting that both sides should tone it down is meaningless. For all intents and purposes, one side is the problem.

David Sirota: Contradiction Where Religion and American Politics Meet

Here’s a newspaper headline that might induce a disbelieving double take: “Christians ‘More Likely to Be Leftwing’ And Have Liberal Views on Immigration and Equality.” Sounds too hard to believe, right? Well, it’s true-only not here in America, but in the United Kingdom.

That headline, from London’s Daily Mail, summed up the two-tiered conclusion of a new report from the British think tank Demos, which found that in England 1) “religious people are more active citizens (who) volunteer more, donate more to charity and are more likely to campaign on political issues” and 2) “religious people are more likely to be politically progressive (people who) put a greater value on equality than the non-religious, are more likely to be welcoming of immigrants as neighbours (and) more likely to put themselves on the left of the political spectrum.”

Joe Conason: What Mitt Romney Seems to Believe (and Why He’s So Disliked)

With the Republican primary contest over and the general election under way, Mitt Romney faces a voting public whose disdain for him has reached levels that pollsters describe as “historic.” From his embittered opponents as well as from Romney and his campaign, Americans have learned that the former Massachusetts governor simply won’t uphold any political position, issue or achievement he thinks might cost him votes. He doesn’t seem to understand that his inconstancy forfeits more respect than any disagreeable opinion would.

No matter how carefully the former Massachusetts governor parses and prevaricates, many voters, including more than a few conservatives, evidently feel they’ve detected the inner Mitt: a man with utmost regard for himself and people like him-and a profound disregard for people like most of them. They’ve observed him straining to express concern for the unemployed, the poor and the powerless, while sounding sincerely resentful whenever the privileged are held accountable. They’ve perceived an attitude of entitlement, whether he is withholding tax returns, defending tax breaks for billionaires or spending vast amounts to defame opponents. And they don’t like it, no matter what they may feel about Barack Obama.

After Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to pass the so-called “Ryan Budget,” Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proclaimed that he was “happy to say we have taken another step on the path to prosperity.” But given that this budget makes across-the-board slashes to social safety net programs that all but the richest Americans rely on at some point in their lives, we have to ask, “Prosperity for whom?”

Finding an answer to this question requires an examination of the Ryan Budget and its stark contrast with the budget proposed by President Barack Obama. Both budgets aim to reduce America’s growing deficit. But how do they pay for it?

Robert Sheer: For He’s a Jolly Good Scoundrel

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.” George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.

Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman: Locking Down an American Workforce

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world.   Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work.  The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate.  The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

Sophie Meunier: The French Presidency Is a Bargain

Ten candidates — that’s the field of presidential hopefuls competing for votes in the first round of the French presidential election on Sunday, April 22. Some of them are household names, like incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy and his main challenger, the socialist Francois Hollande. Others are still relatively unknown, even to French voters, such as the candidate representing the Trotskyist party, Lutte Ouvrière, or the head of the LaRouche movement in France (both currently polling at 0 percent).

The multitude of candidates stems in part from a two-round electoral system, whereby everyone competes in the first round but only the two candidates with the highest number of votes face off in the second round (on May 6). What also enables so many candidates to run is that French electoral campaigns are cheap. As long as you can gather 500 signatures of support from about 47,000 elected representatives throughout France, you can stand for election to the presidency.

In taking back oil and gas company YPF, Argentina’s state is reversing past mistakes. Europe is in no position to be outraged

The Argentinian government’s decision to renationalize the oil and gas company YPF has been greeted with howls of outrage, threats, forecasts of rage and ruin, and a rude bit of name-calling in the international press. We have heard all this before.

When the government defaulted on its debt at the end of 2001 and then devalued its currency a few weeks later, it was all doom-mongering in the media. The devaluation would cause inflation to spin out of control, the country would face balance of payments crises from not being able to borrow, the economy would spiral downward into deeper recession. Then, between 2002 and 2011, Argentina’s real GDP grew by about 90%, the fastest in the hemisphere. Employment is now at record levels, and both poverty and extreme poverty have been reduced by two-thirds. Social spending, adjusted for inflation, has nearly tripled – which is probably why Cristina Kirchner was re-elected last October in a landslide victory.

Of course this success story is rarely told, mostly because it involved reversing many of the failed neoliberal policies – that were backed by Washington and its International Monetary Fund – that brought the country to ruin in its worst recession of 1998-2002. Now the government is reversing another failed neoliberal policy of the 1990s: the privatisation of its oil and gas industry, which should never have happened in the first place.

Dilip Hiro; Taking Uncle Sam for a Ride

The following ingredients should go a long way to produce a political thriller. Mr. M, a jihadist in an Asian state, has emerged as the mastermind of a terrorist attack in a neighboring country, which killed six Americans. After sifting through a vast cache of intelligence and obtaining a legal clearance, the State Department announces a $10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest and conviction.  Mr. M promptly appears at a press conference and says, “I am here. America should give that reward money to me.”

A State Department spokesperson explains lamely that the reward is meant for incriminating evidence against Mr. M that would stand up in court. The prime minister of M’s home state condemns foreign interference in his country’s internal affairs. In the midst of this imbroglio, the United States decides to release $1.18 billion in aid to the cash-strapped government of the defiant prime minister to persuade him to reopen supply lines for U.S. and NATO forces bogged down in the hapless neighboring Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Alarmingly, this is anything but fiction or a plot for an upcoming international sitcom. It is a brief summary of the latest development in the fraught relations between the United States and Pakistan, two countries locked into an uneasy embrace since September 12, 2001.

Ellen Brown: How the Goldman Vampire Squid Captured Europe

The Goldman Sachs coup that failed in America has nearly succeeded in Europe-a permanent, irrevocable, unchallengeable bailout for the banks underwritten by the taxpayers.

In September 2008, Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, managed to extort a $700 billion bank bailout from Congress.  But to pull it off, he had to fall on his knees and threaten the collapse of the entire global financial system and the imposition of martial law; and the bailout was a one-time affair.  Paulson’s plea for a permanent bailout fund-the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP-was opposed by Congress and ultimately rejected.

By December 2011, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, former vice president of Goldman Sachs Europe, was able to approve a 500 billion Euro bailout for European banks without asking anyone’s permission.  And in January 2012, a permanent rescue funding program called the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was passed in the dead of night with barely even a mention in the press.  The ESM imposes an open-ended debt on EU member governments, putting taxpayers on the hook for whatever the ESM’s Eurocrat overseers demand. [..]

Today the issuance of money and credit has become the private right of vampire rentiers, who are using it to squeeze the lifeblood out of economies.  This right needs to be returned to sovereign governments.  Credit should be a public utility, dispensed and managed for the benefit of the people.

Jim Hightower; The Citizens United Gang Executes a Corporate Coup D’etat

The Lone Ranger was a masked man who was out to bring bad guys to justice. Ed Conard is a masked man who is out to bring bad guys to power.

A multimillionaire financier who was a top henchman in Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old outfit of corporate plunderers, Conard is currently riding with the small but fearsome Citizens United Gang, which has taken over presidential politics in our country.

Unlike the James Gang, the Dalton Boys and other robbers of yore who stole from banks and railroads, these thieves are bankers and high-rolling railroaders. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s edict in the infamous Citizens United case, they are now able to use unlimited amounts of their corporate wealth to create Super PACs, which are proving to be devastating weapons against democracy.

Diane Ravitch: I Don’t Understand Michelle Rhee

I am trying to understand Michelle Rhee. She has allied herself with the most right-wing governors in the nation, yet she claims to be a Democrat. She has worked with Republican Rick Scott in Florida, Republican John Kasich in Ohio, Republican Chris Christie in New Jersey, Republican Rick Snyder in Michigan, among others. Any governor who wants to cut teachers’ rights and benefits can call on her to stand with him. Wherever there is a governor eager to dismantle and privatize public education, she is there at his side. [..]

I try to see the good in other people. I have my failings. But, honestly, I don’t know how Michelle Rhee can take satisfaction in fomenting so much antagonism toward teachers. Does she really think that students will learn more if their teachers live in fear? How can she feel good about leading a campaign to turn public education into a for-profit enterprise and reduce teaching to a job, not a profession. I don’t see the good in any of this. And I don’t understand why she does.

As you file your taxes this week, before complaining about how much you’re forking over to Uncle Sam, bear in mind that the tax man might not be the only one you’re writing a check to: Your boss might be getting a big cut, too.

Thanks to arcane state tax subsidies, thousands of companies have fattened their profit margins by poaching from workers’ paychecks. According to a report by the watchdog group Good Jobs First, nearly $700 million in taxpayer money is being siphoned off by corporations annually through clever deals with state governments that are supposedly aimed at “job creation.”

According to the report, the tax breaks allow companies to effectively skim money from workers’ state income tax withholdings “to provide lavish subsidies to corporations rather than paying for vital public services.” The beneficiaries include “more than 2,700 companies, including major firms such as Sears, Goldman Sachs and General Electric.”

Diane Roberts: The Republicans Who Want Ignorance to Get Equal Time in Schools

Education is the new Republican enemy. No more free thinking and empirical evidence, just the Bible, rumour and Fox News

Not content with merely waging war on women, Republicans are targeting another enemy of conservatism: education. New Hampshire state Republican Jerry Bergevin recently railed against science and the atheist eggheads who call themselves teachers: “I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a world view and it’s godless.”

While New Hampshire didn’t end up passing Bergevin’s anti-evolution law, Tennessee did. Its new statute allows – even encourages – teachers to express scepticism toward, as the bill says, “scientific subjects, including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, and global warming”. The American Institute of Biological Sciences, the National Earth Science Teachers Association, the National Centre for Science Education and all eight of Tennessee’s members of the National Academy of Sciences oppose the new law, calling it “miseducation”. But what do these no ‘count heathen elitist PhD Darwinites know? The government of Tennessee wants you to know they ain’t kin to no monkey.

Donna Smith: Fool’s Gold: US Healthcare System Cheats Patients

In case any one of us needs reminding, the profit-driven healthcare system in America is broken. Driven by its primary motivation to make money, there is little that compels those currently in control to care about patients like you and me. We are most assuredly a necessary component of the healthcare market – they cannot make any money without us – but we are treated like children to be seen and not heard.

The vast majority of us cannot access or pay for the care we need without health insurance coverage through either a private, for-profit health insurance company or through a government program for which we qualify. A small minority of people can afford to pay for care outright with cash or credit.

Allison Kilkenny: Occupy Unveils ‘Spring Awakening’

During the long winter months, Occupy protesters kept reassuring those of us in the media still covering their actions that the spring would prove to be a time of resurgence for Occupy Wall Street. If the “Spring Awakening” meet-up at Central Park this past weekend is any indication of future turnouts, OWS organizers may be correct in their predictions.

Hundreds of protesters gathered at New York City’s most famous park, an inspired location that placed Occupy in the heart of tourist alley, guaranteeing the group’s activities attracted the attention of curious passersby.

Deborah James: Rewriting the Rules of the Global Economy

To start understanding what’s wrong with the international financial institutions (IFIs), we need to look at why we actually need economies to function. The most important economic issues to most people are whether they are able to get decent jobs and whether they are able to lift themselves out of poverty.

In writing the rules for economies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and WTO (World Trade Organization) are major proponents of neoliberal ideology. That ideology is based on the theory that slashing government spending, reducing tariffs, privatizing public resources, and promoting corporate investment will result in higher economic growth, and that this will eventually result in a reduction in poverty because a rising tide lifts all boats. This contrasts with more progressive viewpoints that focus on reducing inequality by investing in health care, education, and opportunities for the poor.

Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced Thursday in Worcester, Mass., to 17½ years in prison. It was another of the tawdry show trials held against Muslim activists since 9/11 as a result of the government’s criminalization of what people say and believe. These trials, where secrecy rules permit federal lawyers to prosecute people on “evidence” the defendants are not allowed to examine, are the harbinger of a corporate totalitarian state in which any form of dissent can be declared illegal. What the government did to Mehanna, and what it has done to hundreds of other innocent Muslims in this country over the last decade, it will eventually do to the rest of us.

Eugene Robinson: Which Mitt will we get?

It’s all over but the shouting – or, in this case, the polite applause: Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican presidential nominee. But which Mitt Romney? Will it be Mitt One or Mitt Two?

This is not an inconsequential question. Mitt One is a fiscally conservative, socially moderate, Wall Street-style Republican who believes in compromise to get things done. Mitt Two is a far-right zealot who accuses Democrats of trying to impose godless socialism and claims that what hangs in the balance this fall is nothing less than liberty itself.

We’ve seen a lot of Mitt Two during the primary campaign. Competing against Rick Santorum, a genuine far-right zealot, and Newt Gingrich, a master of rhetorical excess, Romney strove mightily to convince the GOP’s activist base that he could be every bit as doctrinaire as his opponents.

Chase Madar: What the Laws of War Allow

Anyone who would like to witness a vivid example of modern warfare that adheres to the laws of war-that corpus of regulations developed painstakingly over centuries by jurists, humanitarians, and soldiers, a body of rules that is now an essential, institutionalized part of the U.S. armed forces and indeed all modern militaries-should simply click here and watch the video.

Wait a minute: that’s the WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video!  The gunsight view of an Apache helicopter opening fire from half a mile high on a crowd of Iraqis-a few armed men, but mostly unarmed civilians, including a couple of Reuters employees-as they unsuspectingly walked the streets of a Baghdad suburb one July day in 2007.

Frank Bruni: … And Love Handles for All

What if we have it backward? What if the 310-pound man trying to jam into the middle seat and the 225-pound woman breaking into a sweat only halfway up the stairs aren’t the undisciplined miscreants of modern American life but the very emblems of it?

What if fatness, even obesity, is less a lurking danger than a likely destiny, and the surprise isn’t how many seriously overweight people are out there but how few?

It’s understandable if unfortunate that the controversy surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin has polarized the country along both racial and ideological lines. But there is one issue that should not have any racial connotations: the urgency of repealing “Stand Your Ground” laws.

And leave it to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to speak the blunt truth about why these laws are dangerous – and why the National Rifle Association keeps pushing them anyway.

“In reality,” Bloomberg said in a speech before the National Press Club last week, “the NRA’s leaders weren’t interested in public safety. They were interested in promoting a culture where people take the law into their own hands and face no consequences for it. Let’s call that by its real name: vigilantism.”

Robert Kuttner: You’ve Come a Long Way, Ben

I heard a terrific speech last Friday by the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke.

In his address, to a Russell Sage-Century Foundation Conference on the causes and cure of the financial crisis, Chairman Bernanke said just about everything a progressive would want to hear. Read it for yourself and see if you agree.

The financial industry, he said, had been characterized by “high levels of leverage; excessive dependence on unstable short term funding; deficiencies in risk management in major financial firms; and the use of exotic and non-transparent financial instruments that obscured concentrations of risk.” In other words, Wall Street went berserk; and markets did not correct themselves. Add a little more invective about Goldman Sachs and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi could not have put it better.

John Nichols: What Allen West Does Not Know About Communists and Congress

Florida Congressman Allen West was wrong when he suggested that there were dozens of communists in the current Congress. Misled by crank websites, the out-there Republican from Florida said Tuesday, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party that are members of the Communist Party… They actually don’t hide it. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

It would be generous, indeed, to suggest that West is confused.

The Congress is not currently a haven for followers of Karl Marx.

And there are none to be found in the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has over the years included a few friends of democratic socialism-which espouses an economic and social justice vision every bit as far removed from the Stalinist excesses that West seems to be decrying as the current Republican Party’s views are from those of its radical founders.

Greg Kaufman: This Week in Poverty: Will Pennsylvania Rip Another Hole in the Safety Net?

If you’ve never heard of state-funded General Assistance (GA) programs, you’re hardly alone. A “safety net of last resort” for very poor people-often childless adults-who don’t qualify for other forms of public assistance, there aren’t too many of them still in existence. Not too long ago most states offered them, but in recent decades they have been eliminated or severely restricted. Now, only thirty states maintain GA programs, and the benefit level for most falls below one-quarter of the poverty line, or less than $2,750 per year.

In a recent report for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Liz Schott and Clare Cho call this trend “especially troubling” since “a growing number of jobless and elderly” are exhausting their unemployment benefits and continue to be unable to find work.

“Poor, childless adults are becoming even more vulnerable to severe hardship than in the past and are doing so in greater numbers,” write the authors.