Tag: Opinion

Two years ago, Washington’s influential neoconservatives – both inside and outside government – shot down a possible resolution to the Iranian nuclear dispute because they wanted a confrontation with Tehran that some hoped would lead to their long-held dream of “regime change.”

In the ensuing two years, the cost of that confrontation has been high not just for Iranians, who have faced harsh sanctions, but for the world’s economy. For instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent escalation of bomb-Iran rhetoric contributed to the spike in gasoline prices that seems to be choking off the U.S. recovery, just as job growth was starting to accelerate.

But the Israelis and their neocon allies have yet to back away from the path toward war. They appear ready to take President Barack Obama to task if he makes any meaningful concessions to Iran in international negotiations that are set to resume in Istanbul, Turkey, on Friday.

Bernie Sanders and Ryan Alexander: Stop the Nuclear Industry Welfare Program

After 60 years, the taxpayer should not continue to subsidize multibillion-dollar corporations in the nuclear energy sector

The US is facing a $15 trillion national debt, and there is no shortage of opinions about how to move toward deficit reduction in the federal budget. One topic you will not hear discussed very often on Capitol Hill is the idea of ending one of the oldest American welfare programmes – the extraordinary amount of corporate welfare going to the nuclear energy industry.

Many in Congress talk of getting “big government off the back of private industry”. Here’s an industry we’d like to get off the backs of the taxpayers.

As, respectively, a senator who is the longest-serving independent in Congress and the president of an independent and non-partisan budget watchdog organisation, we do not necessarily agree on everything when it comes to energy and budget policy in the US. But one thing we strongly agree on is the need to end wasteful subsidies that prop up the nuclear industry. After 60 years, this industry should not require continued and massive corporate welfare. It is time for the nuclear power industry to stand on its own two feet.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: The Rich Are Different from You and Me – They Pay Less Taxes

Benjamin Franklin, who used his many talents to become a wealthy man, famously said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes.  But if you’re a corporate CEO in America today, even they can be put on the back burner – death held at bay by the best medical care money can buy and the latest in surgical and life extension techniques, taxes conveniently shunted aside courtesy of loopholes, overseas investment and governments that conveniently look the other way.

In a story headlined, “For Big Companies, Life Is Good,” The Wall Street Journal reports that big American companies have emerged from the deepest recession since World War II more profitable than ever: flush with cash, less burdened by debt, and with a greater share of the country’s income. But, the paper notes, “Many of the 1.1 million jobs the big companies added since 2007 were outside the U.S. So, too, was much of the $1.2 trillion added to corporate treasuries.”  

David Sirota: The End of ‘Shut Up and Play’

As high-profile events periodically prove, politics and athletics have long had a love-hate relationship, the affinity ebbing and flowing with the cultural tides. In the tumultuous 1960s, for instance, stars like Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe and John Carlos used their notoriety to embolden the major social movements of the time. Then came the 1980s and 1990s, which saw the sports world depoliticized in an age of “Just Do It” and “greed is good.” For every Charles Barkley using Nike commercials to forward social messages about role models, there were far more Michael Jordans who avoided any political statements whatsoever.

Skip forward to 2012-a superheated moment primed by seething protest campaigns and a divisive presidential election. Not surprisingly, the sports world has again shifted, becoming just as politically fraught as the society it entertains-and whether or not you agree with a particular sports icon’s opinion, the larger change is a welcome development for participatory democracy.

Richard Reeves: The Quiet Campaign: Voter Suppression

The 2012 presidential election is not only about who votes for Barack Obama and who votes for Mitt Romney. It is also about who votes.

In a national campaign that does not get much national publicity, at least 41 states have passed laws or are considering new laws making it more difficult to vote in November, or legislation designed to discourage people from even trying to cast ballots, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

The center reports on a quiet wave of new state legislation sweeping the country that focuses on voting eligibility and estimates that these laws could reduce presidential voting by as many as 5 million votes. To put that number in perspective, in 2008, Obama won the presidency by 9 million votes.

In recent months, the need to build progressive strength in cities, towns, counties and states across the country has become crystal clear. Conservative coordination across state lines has led to assaults on workers rights, voting rights and women’s rights, and only an energetic, well-coordinated progressive response has prevented far more extensive damage to our democracy.

Mississippi soundly defeated a ballot initiative to legalize “fetus personhood.” Maine saved same-day voter registration at the ballot box. As The Nation’s John Nichols has so brilliantly laid out in his new book Uprising, the people of Wisconsin employed an inside/outside strategy to fight back against a right-wing attack on workers’ rights. Dozens of towns and states have passed resolutions calling for the repeal of Citizens United.

Increasingly, citizens and progressive politicians have begun to win sensible reforms. There have been key wins on paid sick leave and the minimum wage-common sense reforms that benefit the 99 percent. Gay and lesbian equality has advanced at the state and local levels.

Amy Goodman: The Long, Hot March of Climate Change

The Pentagon knows it. The world’s largest insurers know it. Now, governments may be overthrown because of it. It is climate change, and it is real. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last month was the hottest March on record for the United States since 1895, when records were first kept, with average temperatures of 8.6 degrees F above average. More than 15,000 March high-temperature records were broken nationally. Drought, wildfires, tornadoes and other extreme weather events are already plaguing the country.

Across the world in the Maldives, rising sea levels continue to threaten this Indian Ocean archipelago. It is the world’s lowest-lying nation, on average only 1.3 meters above sea level. The plight of the Maldives gained global prominence when its young president, the first-ever democratically elected there, Mohamed Nasheed, became one of the world’s leading voices against climate change, especially in the lead-up to the 2009 U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Nasheed held a ministerial meeting underwater, with his cabinet in scuba gear, to illustrate the potential disaster.

Joe Conason: What’s in a Name? George W. Regrets Dubbing Those ‘Bush Tax Cuts’

When George W. Bush made his first public appearance in many months to discuss economic policy in New York on Tuesday, his utterances may have revealed more than he intended. “I wish they weren’t called the ‘Bush tax cuts,'” he said of the decade-old rate reductions that bear his name. But does he really believe, as he seemed to suggest, that Americans want to let those cuts expire from a desire to spite him? Or is there a deeper Bush somewhere within who would prefer not to be associated with fiscal profligacy and ideological overreach?

Whatever his motives, Bush’s curious remark draws a sharp contrast with his predecessor Bill Clinton-who often speaks proudly of the tax increase that was so central to his first budget as president two decades ago. Clinton, who talks publicly far more often than Bush, often notes that the 1993 tax increase, supported only by Democrats, was the first step toward balance and growth after a dozen years of Republican irresponsibility and stagnation.

Rebecca Leisher: Watch Us Move Our Millions

Cities, churches, and colleges take steps to move their money home.

Since the big corporate banks crashed the economy in 2008, they’ve been rewarded with bailouts, tax breaks, and bonuses, while American workers lose jobs and homes. Little wonder that many Americans-and now, institutions and local governments-have been closing their accounts at big corporate banks and transferring their money to community banks and credit unions. The idea is to send a strong message about responsibility to government and Wall Street, while supporting institutions that genuinely stimulate local economies.

Bank Transfer Day was publicized over five weeks, largely through social networks. In that period, credit unions received an estimated $4.5 billion in new deposits transferred from banks, according to the Credit Union National Association.

Alec MacGillis, a senior editor at The New Republic, has a fantastic piece in the latest edition about how hedge fund managers’ love for President Obama has turned into blind, spitting hatred.

His main argument is that it’s all about feeling disrespected [..]

And now Mr. Obama says what anyone paying attention would: that these big-money people were, to some extent, making their money in socially destructive ways – and so they go insane, precisely because in their hearts they know that he’s right.

And because money talks in politics, this pettiness, this display of ego and hurt vanity, may have disastrous consequences.

Greg Sargent: The case Obama needs to make

Obama’s case for reeection may hinge on whether he can convincingly make the case that his push to combat inequality and tax unfairness isn’t just about basic morality, but also about promoting economic growth and broader prosperity. Republicans are laying the groundwork to paint Obama’s push on taxes as an effort to distract from his failed economic record by diverting public anger about the economy towards the rich. That is to say, they are looking to separate the debate over taxes (where Obama seems to have the upper hand) from the debate over the economy (where they hope to put Obama on the defensive). When Romney argues that government shouldn’t try to address inequality by redistributing wealth, but by freeing up the private sector to promote opportunity and social mobility, he’s also trying to achieve this separation.

Obama’s challenge is to argue that combatting inequality and tax fairness are all about promoting opportunity and mobility – that the two are connected, and that the Republican argument is premised on a false choice between the two. He will argue that addressing those inequities is the only way to ensure that government can continue investing in the country’s economic future and in shoring up the middle class.

David Swanson Liberals Cry Out: Tax the Rich! Fund More Wars!

The shout of the Occupy movement, at least in D.C., has been “End the Wars, Tax the Rich!” in that order and in combination.  Over half of federal discretionary spending goes to the war machine.  We ought to fix that problem first, and then fix the problem that our overlords aren’t actually paying their fair share of the taxes.  My friend Leah Bolger is about to face a possible sentence of months in prison for having taken this message to the Super Committee.  Remember them?

But the big, well-funded liberal/progressive groups that are borrowing the language of Occupy and organizing 99% Spring nonviolence trainings are talking about taxing the rich, never mind what the taxes are spent on.  I just spoke with someone organizing a bunch of “patriotic millionaires” to come to Washington, D.C., and talk about how they’d like to be taxed more.  I suggested that they might also comment on what their money should go to, and I was told that saying more than one simple thing was bad messaging policy.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: How Santorum boxed in Romney

Rick Santorum’s departure from the presidential race could not come soon enough for Mitt Romney. In proving himself more tenacious than anyone predicted, Santorum dramatized one of Romney’s major problems, created another and forced the now-inevitable Republican nominee into a strategic dilemma.

Republicans may condemn class warfare, but their primaries turned into a class struggle. Romney performed best among voters with high incomes, and he was consistently weaker with the white working class, even in the late primaries where he put Santorum away. And Romney cannot win without rolling up very large margins among less well-off whites.

It used to embarrass my children and now merely amuses them that as their birthdays approach, I find myself reviewing their births in remarkable detail through small hour-by-hour glimpses. I relive my apprehensions as birth approached, the intense hours of labor, the superb nursing staff, my brilliant husband and advocate, and the joy at holding our babies. [..]

This year, these ruminations were augmented by the screaming debates about “personhood” bills, giving embryos and fetuses “all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents.” In past anti-abortion debates, I’ve resisted descriptions like “a war on women”; I have friends who oppose abortion and are strong pacifists. But the new personhood agenda is fundamentally dangerous to women, while destabilizing legal and medical precedents.

Sarah van Gelder: How to Fix Health Care Without the Mandate

Why truly affordable care means single-payer.

What happens if the Supreme Court strikes down the “individual mandate” in the health care reform law?

Commentators ranging from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich to Forbes Magazine columnist Rick Ungar agree: Such a decision could open the door to single-payer health care-perhaps even make it inevitable.

This may be the best news about health care in years. Because ever since Republicans convinced the Obama administration to drop the “public option” in the Affordable Care Act, health reform has been in trouble. True, most Americans favor many of the provisions of Affordable Care Act. But the overall plan rests on forcing you and me to buy insurance from the same companies that have been driving up the costs of health care all along-the same companies that have been finding creative ways to avoid covering needed care, shifting costs on to patients, and endlessly increasing premiums and out-of-pocket expenses for all of us.

Maureen Dowd: State of Cool

Hillary is not going to President Obama’s Democratic convention in Charlotte. Evidently, she’s going to wait for her own.

There were intriguing developments on the presidential trail Tuesday, and I don’t mean Rick Santorum dropping out.

Hillary Clinton cemented her newly cool image and set off fresh chatter about her future when she met at the State Department with two young men who created {a popular Internet meme http://textsfromhillaryclinton… showing photos of the secretary of state on a military plane, wearing big sunglasses, checking her BlackBerry and looking as if she’s ready to ice somebody.

Ilyse Hogue: In Search of the Missing Task Force

As someone lucky enough not to have an underwater home, I have had the luxury of not needing to learn the all the gory details of our broken housing finance system-full of undecipherable acronyms and the minutiae of regulation and arcane policy. So, I admit that I have only loosely been following the situation since the $25 billion fraud settlement between the big banks and the state attorney generals was announced.

But my curiosity was piqued again this week when I got an e-mail from CREDO Action protesting new information that the task force established to investigate what went wrong [never received file:///CREDO%20campaign%20http/::news.firedoglake.com:2012:04:09:credo-calls-out-securitization-fraud-task-force-investigators-not-even-deployed:] the staff that it was promised. And while the source of the hold up is unclear as is exactly how many staffers have been assigned, what is becoming clear is that even the promised fifty-five investigators would be ill-equipped to achieve the task at hand. The news got me wondering where things stand with task force, lauded by progressives and homeowners alike when it was announced back in January.

Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.

They spread money like manure on the campaign trails of key members of Congress. They unleash hordes of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, cozy up to columnists and editorial writers, spend millions on lawyers who relentlessly pick at the law, trying to rewrite or water down the regulations required for enforcement. Before you know it, what once was an attempt at genuine reform creeps back toward business as usual.

Dave Johnson: New Super-PAC Threatens to Destroy Candidates Who Side With the People Over Wall Street

Banks are pioneering a more cost-effective method of dealing with legislators who stand in their way.

A new super-PAC with the purpose of destroying elected officials who oppose the interests of the super-PAC’s founders rather than focusing on electing candidates who favor their interests demonstrates how the movement conservatives on the Supreme Court have fundamentally altered our system. A super – PAC is a political action committee with no limits on personal or corporate contributions and no limits on the amounts it spends. This system of unlimited corporate – and billionaire – spending for and against candidates was enabled by the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that said corporations are “people” and the use of corporate money to influence elections is “speech.”

Felix Salmon: The Europe debate

Remember the Krugman vs Summers debate last year? That was fun, in its own way. But this year’s Munk Debate looks set to be simply depressing. The invitation has the details: the motion is “be it resolved that the European experiment has failed”. And I’m reasonably confident that the “pro” side – Niall Ferguson and Josef Joffe – is going to win.

That’s partly because Ferguson has the public-speaking chops to dismantle his meeker opponents, Peter Mandelson and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Ferguson is likely to go strongly for the jugular, while Mandelson and Cohn-Bendit will noodle around ineffectually, hedging their conclusions and sacrificing rhetorical dominance for the sake of intellectual honesty.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Real War on Youth: Esquire’s Dubious Achievements

In 2010 the men’s magazine Esquire enlisted Lawrence O’Donnell, along with a panel of Republicans and economically centrist Democrats, to duplicate the anti-Social Security efforts of the Simpson/Bowles Deficit Commission. Now the magazine is at it again, with an economically illiterate and deceptive piece about “generational conflict” called “The War on Youth.” Meanwhile the real war on youth is an assault on their employment prospects, education costs, and, yes, their future Social Security benefits. On two of those three fronts, Esquire is distracting its presumably youthful male readers from the real threats to their economic security. And on the third front, it’s fighting for the wrong army.

ELON, N.C.-Conservatives are not accustomed to being on the defensive.

They have long experience with attacking the evils of the left and the abuses of activist judges. They love to assail “tax-and-spend liberals” without ever discussing who should be taxed or what government money is actually spent on. They expect their progressive opponents to be wimpy and apologetic.

So imagine the shock when President Obama decided last week to speak plainly about what a Supreme Court decision throwing out the health care law would mean, and then landed straight shots against the Mitt Romney-supported Paul Ryan budget as “a Trojan Horse,” “an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country,” and “thinly veiled social Darwinism.”

Robert Kuttner: What Bipartisanship Looks Like

A couplet keeps running through my head, a sinister variation on the chants from the Madison sit-ins and Zuccotti Park:

Tell me what Bipartisanship looks like

This is what Bipartisanship looks like

This past week, it looked like the JOBS Act. That’s the legislation that sailed through Congress making it easier for investment bankers and start-ups to sell shares of stock to a gullible public without making the usual SEC disclosures, much less following the anti-fraud requirements of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Shamus Cooke: Why Campaigning for Democrats Cripples Labor Unions

As labor leaders across the U.S. shift resources away from defending workers and into Obama’s re-election campaign, millions of organized and non-organized workers remain unemployed and hopeless. Contrary to the “optimistic” government jobs numbers, the jobs crisis grinds onward. Some labor leaders will argue that getting Obama elected is the first step towards addressing the jobs crisis, but they know better.

The recent so-called JOBS Act that passed with strong Democrat and Republican support will create zero jobs – the law’s intent is to lower regulations for banks and corporations, in an attempt to boost their profits. The JOBS wording was used for popularity’s sake, requiring heavy doses of deceit.

New York Times Editorial: Do You Need That Test?

If health care costs are ever to be brought under control, the nation’s doctors will have to play a leading role in eliminating unnecessary treatments. By some estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted this way every year. So it is highly encouraging that nine major physicians’ groups have identified 45 tests and procedures (five for each specialty) that are commonly used but have no proven benefit for many patients and sometimes cause more harm than good.

Many patients will be surprised at the tests and treatments that these expert groups now question. They include, for example, annual electrocardiograms for low-risk patients and routine chest X-rays for ambulatory patients in advance of surgery.

The economy added only 120,000 jobs in March — down from the rate of more than 200,000 in each of the preceding three months. The rate of unemployment dropped from 8.3 to 8.2 percent mainly because fewer people were searching for jobs — and that rate depends on how many people are actively looking.

It’s way too early to conclude the jobs recovery is stalling, but there’s reason for concern.

Remember: Consumer spending is 70 percent of the economy. Employers won’t hire without enough sales to justify the additional hires. It’s up to consumers to make it worth their while.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Want Jobs? Rescue Homeowners — and Spend, Baby, Spend

Now we know: The jobs situation is bleak, and it will continue to be bleak until we face up to the fact that we need more stimulus spending — lots more — and we have to relieve millions of homeowners from their indentured servitude to Wall Street so that they can help restore the economy, too.

In other words spend, spend, spend — and provide some principal reduction for underwater homeowners.

Bad News

We won’t recap all the employment figures in today’s jobs report, since they’re available elsewhere. We’ll stick to the highlights:

A key figure is essentially unchanged: There are 12.7 million unemployed people in this country.

Eugene Robinson: Handicapping the Veep Stakes

Washingotn – Playing second fiddle to Mitt Romney won’t be easy, but somebody has to be his running mate. Let’s handicap the field:

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio: The choice who offers the biggest potential reward — for the biggest risk.

The telegenic young Cuban-American could potentially shore up three of the Romney campaign’s weaknesses: He is an unambiguous conservative, elected with tea party backing, who would temper Romney’s “Massachusetts moderate” image among the disgruntled GOP base. Rubio’s groundbreaking candidacy could lure back some of the Hispanic voters driven away by Republican policies. And he happens to come from a huge swing state that Romney has to win in order to have a chance at the White House.

Gail Collins: Godfathers, Caterpillars and Golf

Republican to-do checklist:

1) Pooh-pooh all the talk about a war on women. [..]

2) Seek out news about the mood of the womenfolk. [..]

3) Make Rick Santorum get out of the race. [..]

4) Keep Mitt on script. [..]

5) Watch the Masters golf tournament. [..]

6) Prepare for the next big primaries. [..]

7) Prepare for the convention. [..]

8) Try to figure out what to do for the four months in between. That’s enough time to run an entire season of a TV series.

Alexander Cockburn: Mitt Romney Flip-Flops His Way to the Top

Mitt Romney will be the Republican to face President Obama in the fall. Tuesday night was the clincher, as the former Massachusetts governor won in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington D.C. He may stumble on, but the Catholic zealot Rick Santorum is finished, wiped out by Romney’s vast financial resources.

Eight years ago, Romney began his bid to win the Republican nomination, only to be crushed by John McCain. In that campaign, he was tagged as a crypto-liberal former governor of Massachusetts and author of a health plan derided by Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Imagine a country in which the very richest people get all the economic gains. They eventually accumulate so much of the nation’s total income and wealth that the middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going full speed. Most of the middle class’s wages keep falling and their major asset — their home — keeps shrinking in value.

Imagine that the richest people in this country use some of their vast wealth to routinely bribe politicians. They get the politicians to cut their taxes so low there’s no money to finance important public investments that the middle class depends on — such as schools and roads, or safety nets such as health care for the elderly and poor.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: While Jamie Dimon Gently Weeps, Another “Big Stick” Bank Attack on Democracy

He’s at again — and we’re glad. A lot of smart people are dedicating their lives to fighting the corrosive effect of Wall Street on our economy and our democracy, but the best spokesman for that cause comes from Wall Street itself.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is still the poster child for today’s morally degraded, self-entitled banker mentality. I don’t know why he keeps talking, but he’s the gift that keeps on giving.

At every major junction in the post-crisis debate about banking, Dimon has stepped in with a perfectly tactless remark that illustrates both the vacuity and the moral corruption of his industry. This week was no exception.

Joe Conason: The High Court’s Supremely Unethical Activists

How the Supreme Court majority will rule on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act may well have been foretold months or perhaps years ago-not so much by their questions during argument this week, as by their flagrant displays of bias outside the court, where certain justices regularly behave as dubiously as any sleazy officeholder.

While the public awaits the high court’s judgment on the constitutionality of health care reform, it is worth remembering how cheaply Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in particular have sullied the integrity of their lifetime appointments, and how casually Chief Justice John Roberts and their other colleagues tolerate such outrages.

Glen Ford: Strip-Searches: Obama Wants You to Bend Over (Or Squat) and Spread ‘Em

Humiliation is the law of the land. When you fall into the clutches of the police, for any reason, or no good reason at all, you can be compelled to bare your private parts before being placed in the general jail population. Five of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled that Constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable searches end at the jailhouse door, even if there is no reason to suspect that the person under arrest is in possession of anything that could be called contraband.

The decision throws out laws against unreasonable strip searches in at least ten states, and overrides federal law enforcement regulations against intrusive searches. The High Court decision also flies in the face of international human rights treaties to which the United States is a signatory. In effect, the Supreme Court majority ruled that the whim of the local jailer trumps any standard of reasonableness. The American Correctional Association, which represents jail guards, is pleased that its members now have the “flexibility” to look into virtually every human orifice that enters their domain, even though the association’s own standards currently discourage blanket policies of strip-searching everyone.

Bl McKibben: Payola for the Most Profitable Corporations in History

And Why Taxpayers Shouldn’t Stand for It Any More

Along with “fivedollaragallongas,” the energy watchword for the next few months is: “subsidies.” Last week, for instance, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez proposed ending some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry with a “Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act.”  It was, in truth, nothing to write home about — a curiously skimpy bill that only targeted oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas, and you won’t be surprised to learn that even then it didn’t pass.

Still, President Obama is now calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz — even at those stops where he’s also promising to “drill everywhere.” And later this month Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a much more comprehensive bill that tackles all fossil fuels and their purveyors (and has no chance whatsoever of passing this Congress).