Tag: Opinion

Hallelujah, Washington has finally heard the people’s cries for jobs! In an urgent bipartisan push, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands across the aisle to pass the JOBS Act. In this time of “The Great Hurt” – with widespread unemployment, middle-class incomes tumbling and the price of gasoline skyrocketing – we can all applaud our stalwarts in the capital city for meeting the No. 1 need of America’s hard-hit economy: deregulating Wall Street.

Huh? I thought this was a jobs bill?

We’ll get to that, but first (as always) Wall Street bankers must be served. Yes, them. The same priests of unmitigated arrogance who caused the disastrous financial crash that continues to rumble across our land. The same Wall Streeters we bailed out with trillions of public dollars. That Wall Street is now sulking and skulking around the U.S. Capitol, insisting that it is an economic victim, held back from its profiteering potential by government regulations to protect the public from finaglers and fraudsters. “Free Wall Street,” is their cry!

Simon Johnson: Volcker Rule Would Cause Irreparable Damage to The Muppets – And Much More Broadly

A major new research report – released this weekend by the renowned international consulting firm, IMS – finds conclusively that implementation of the proposed Volcker Rule would damage not just the irreplaceable Muppets but also “all children-oriented television or other media-based educational program content.”

The logic in the report is straightforward and, quite frankly, compelling.  The Volcker Rule – which aims to limit proprietary trading and excessive risk-taking by the country’s largest banks – would reduce the ability of “too big to fail” institutions to bet heavily on the price of commodities used to produce puppets (mostly cotton, but also apparently wood, aluminum, and some rare earths.)

   “In response to the changing demands of their customers, banks have expanded their role of providing financial resources and services to include risk management and intermediation services to [various kinds of puppets]” (p. ES2)

Robert Reich: The Choice in 2012: Social Darwinism or a Decent Society

The returns aren’t all in yet on today’s Republican primaries but President Obama didn’t wait. He kicked off his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney with a hard-hitting speech centered on the House Republicans’ budget plan – which Romney has enthusiastically endorsed.

That plan, by the way, is the most radical reverse-Robin Hood proposal propounded by any political party in modern America. It would save millionaires at least $150,000 a year in taxes while gutting Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, transportation, child nutrition, college aid, and almost everything else average and lower-income Americans depend on.

Tom Engelhardt: Data Mining for a New American World

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth.  On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism-about you and me, that is-for up to five years.  (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.)  This, Clapper claimed, “will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s Washington.  George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words “practically and effectively,” not to speak of “mission.”

The new GOP code word this year is “dependency,” and they’re afraid of it for a few different reasons.

Liberals have documented the existence of a bitter Republican campaign against women’s health and freedom, but I don’t think we’ve identified its cause or its full intent. It may be hurting Republicans almost as much as it’s hurting women: New Gallup poll data released Monday found that Obama leads Romney 51 percent to 42 percent among registered voters in 12 swing states. Last month he trailed the Republican by 2 points. The change is due to a sharp shift among women: Obama now leads Romney among women under the age of 50 by 30 points; that lead was 5 points in February.

Some panicked Republicans insist crafty Democrats are the ones playing the culture wars, but we’ve debunked that: Democrats didn’t make the GOP presidential field back “personhood” laws that would criminalize some forms of birth control. They didn’t force the newly elected House GOP to make defunding Planned Parenthood their first legislative goal. And they didn’t propose the Blunt Amendment that would have allowed employers to withhold health insurance coverage not only for contraception, but for any treatment they disapproved of – or make every Republican senator vote for it, except the outgoing Olympia Snowe.

Leslie Savan: GOP Code Confusion

As we get closer to the general election race, the Republican Party is descending into ever deeper confusion over its rhetorical codes and when and how to use them.

This is more than just an awkward pivot from pitching to the base to focusing on the general electorate. It’s a direct result of decades of Republicans fashioning their language to obscure what they really mean-like asserting that “cutting taxes will raise revenues” when the real idea is to shift the tax burden from the rich to the poor. The GOP is so distracted by its multiplicity of phony attack lines that it’s begun to confuse itself.

We’ve all seen how, during the primary debates, the Republican candidates were forced to acquiesce to the notion that, say, booing a soldier on duty in Iraq or shouting down the Golden Rule are, respectively, the patriotic and Christian things to do. But when Perry and Gingrich started attacking Romney from the left as a job-destroying vulture capitalist, they started to seriously step on their own neckties.

Jill Richardson: Forget the Farm Bill: Where We Should Set Our Sights This Year For Real Change

I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but I don’t care about the 2012 farm bill. Here’s why.

The sustainable food and agriculture movement has a lot of momentum and a lot of opportunities right now, but only limited resources in terms of lobbying power. The movement has a large amount of people who care, but a relatively small amount of money compared to entrenched agriculture interests. It has a few strategically placed sympathetic appointees and elected representatives in the government. But, unfortunately, Dennis Kucinich alone cannot pass the vastly revamped farm bill we need.

But outside of Washington, the ranks of those who care about localizing our food supply and making agriculture more sustainable are growing every day. After all, delicious food is a powerful recruiting tool. The sustainable food movement is not powerless. Not nearly. But the movement can make far more progress if it focuses its energy on more winnable issues. Focusing on the farm bill for the whole of 2012 will use up endless resources and result in relatively little gain.

Lisa Margonelli: A New Green Agenda for Commuters

As gasoline prices passed $3.50 a gallon nationally, the politicking predictably kicked into overdrive. “There’s no reason we can’t get gasoline down to $2 and $2.50 a gallon,” said Newt Gingrich, who in February promised he would accomplish this via an agenda he called “Drill here, drill now, pay less.” Two days later three prominent Democrats, including Representative Ed Markey, called for President Obama to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices.

The huge difference between the thinking of Republicans and Democrats disappears when it comes to gas prices. Both subscribe to the same dubious premise: we can lower prices by increasing supply. But over the past decade, such policies have had little effect on the global oil market. It’s time to change our approach: rather than trying to increase supply in a vain attempt to cut prices, progressives should be embracing policies that will reduce the amount of gasoline we use, thus reducing the impact of prices on household budgets and the national economy

A federal judge took an important step toward ending secret donations to big-spending political groups, striking down regulations that permitted some groups to hide their donors. Unfortunately, the ruling probably came too late to flush this corrupting practice from this year’s elections – though there is still time for Congress to do so.

The secret-donor problem began in 2007 when the Supreme Court, in the Wisconsin Right to Life case, ended restrictions on corporate and union political spending by advocacy groups in the weeks prior to an election. A few weeks later, the Federal Election Commission, naïvely suggesting that some corporate donors to those groups might not have intended to give for political purposes, said that only those donations explicitly earmarked for political purposes had to be disclosed. The loophole was obvious: Just don’t declare any donation to be political, and they can all be secret.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Lemmings

Europe’s in crisis. Unemployment is at a fifteen-year high after climbing for ten straight months, thanks to the austerity measures imposed on it by conservative leaders in France, Germany, and the international financial community.

But if you think things are bad over there, imagine what they’ll be like if Republican budget measures are imposed here. The GOP budget makes European austerity look like summer camp.

Ever wonder why lemmings jump off cliffs?

Robert Reich: Turning America Into a Giant Casino

Anyone who says you can get rich through gambling is a fool or a knave. Multiply the size of the prize by your chance of winning it and you’ll always get a number far larger than what you put into the pot. The only sure winners are the organizers — casino owners, state lotteries, and con artists of all kinds.

Organized gambling is a scam. And it particularly preys upon people with lower incomes — who assume they can’t make it big any other way, who often find it hardest to assess the odds, and whose families can least afford to lose the money.

Yet America is now opening the floodgates.

Henry Aaron: Why Health Care Isn’t Broccoli — Some Basic Economics

It isn’t often that the course of history turns on principles taught in freshman economics. But the fate of the health reform legislation is now in jeopardy in part because some Supreme Court justices have so far failed to grasp such principles.

The government defended the mandate that nearly everyone carry insurance by arguing that almost everyone is in the market for health care at one time or another during their lives. People who are not insured may at any time become seriously ill or suffer major injury. The health care they will need is often costly and many people will not be able to pay for it. Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 hospitals must treat everyone who needs emergency care regardless of ability to pay. As a result, hospitals and other providers get stuck with bad debts. To make up their losses on the uninsured, they must charge those who have insurance more than the cost of their care in order. In the jargon of economics, those with insurance are forced to ‘cross subsidize’ those without it. And that, in turn, boosts the cost of insurance, which is already high enough, reduces its affordability, and thereby increases the ranks of the uninsured.

Dave Zirin: Players Getting Played: Why a Look at the NCAA’s Past Makes Me Weep for Its Future

A very common narrative, as we approach the men’s NCAA basketball finals between Kentucky and Kansas, is that after this year’s round of March Madness, change will truly be on the march. The argument goes that scandal is so widespread, the NCAA will have to enact common sense reforms or risk collapsing under the weight of its own hypocrisy. As the great Charles Pierce wrote for Grantland, “The paradigm is shifting under their feet, and the people running the NCAA know it….It’s taken longer than it did for golf and tennis, and even longer than it took for the Olympics, but the amateur burlesque in American college sports is on its way to crashing and the only remaining question is how hard it will fall. The farce is becoming unsupportable.”

As much as I’d like to believe that shame and scandal would cause the NCAA to change in a positive fashion, the past tells us a different story. It’s worth remembering the NCAA’s post-war scandals and the change they wrought. This shows in stark terms that when it comes to the NCAA, change doesn’t always mean progress.

Luxury retailers are smiling. So are the owners of high-end restaurants, sellers of upscale cars, vacation planners, financial advisors, and personal coaches. For them and their customers and clients the recession is over. The recovery is now full speed.

But the rest of America isn’t enjoying an economic recovery. It’s still sick. Many Americans remain in critical condition.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the economy grew at a 3 percent annual rate last quarter (far better than the measly 1.8 percent third quarter growth). Personal income also jumped. Americans raked in over $13 trillion, $3.3 billion more than previously thought.

Chris Hedges: Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You

The security and surveillance state does not deal in nuance or ambiguity. Its millions of agents, intelligence gatherers, spies, clandestine operatives, analysts and armed paramilitary units live in a binary world of opposites, of good and evil, black and white, opponent and ally. There is nothing between. You are for us or against us. You are a patriot or an enemy of freedom. You either embrace the crusade to physically eradicate evildoers from the face of the Earth or you are an Islamic terrorist, a collaborator or an unwitting tool of terrorists. And now that we have created this monster it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to free ourselves from it. Our 16 national intelligence agencies and army of private contractors feed on paranoia, rumor, rampant careerism, demonization of critical free speech and often invented narratives. They justify their existence, and their consuming of vast governmental resources, by turning even the banal and the mundane into a potential threat. And by the time they finish, the nation will be a gulag.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Right’s Stealthy Coup

Right before our eyes, American conservatism is becoming something very different from what it once was. Yet this transformation is happening by stealth because moderates are too afraid to acknowledge what all their senses tell them.

Last week’s Supreme Court oral arguments on health care were the most dramatic example of how radical tea partyism has displaced mainstream conservative thinking. It’s not just that the law’s individual mandate was, until very recently, a conservative idea. Even conservative legal analysts were insisting it was impossible to imagine the court declaring the health care mandate unconstitutional, given its past decisions.

Sam Parry: If the Supreme Court Goes Rogue

What happens to a Republic under a written Constitution if a majority of the Supreme Court, which is empowered to interpret that Constitution, goes rogue? What if the court’s majority simply ignores the wording of the founding document and makes up the law to serve some partisan end? Does that, in effect, turn the country into a lawless state where raw power can muscle aside the democratic process?

Something very much like that could be happening if the Supreme Court’s five Republicans continue on their apparent path to strike down the individual mandate at the heart of the Affordable Care Act. In doing so, they will be rewriting the Constitution’s key Commerce Clause and thus reshaping America’s system of government by fiat, rather than by the prescribed method of making such changes through the amendment process.

Michael T. Klare: Welcome to the New Third World of Energy, the United States

How Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State

The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.  Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” — deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas.  But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere?  Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

Brian Moench: Autism and Disappearing Bees: A Common Denominator?

A few days ago the Salt Lake Tribune’s front page headline declared, “Highest rate in the nation, 1 in 32 Utah boys has autism.”  This is a national public health emergency, whose epicenter is Utah, Gov. Herbert.  A more obscure story on the same day read: “New pesticides linked to bee population collapse.”  If you eat food, and hope to do so in the future, this is another national emergency, Pres. Obama.  A common  denominator may underlie both headlines. [..]

How does this relate to vanishing bees and our food supply?  Two new studies, published simultaneously in the journal Science,  show that the rapid rise in use of insecticides is likely responsible for the mass disappearance of bee populations.   The world’s food chain hangs in the balance because 90% of native plants require pollinators to survive.

On March 31 the current funding for the nation’s authority to spend money on our transportation needs will run out. This means major roadway and transit improvement projects will be stalled for the foreseeable future and billions of dollars in potential job-creation will be jeopardized, according to transportation officials. Republicans, obsessed with their anti-government ideology, can’t even agree among themselves, and it is costing everyone else. Sadly, it ain’t the first time.

The Republican leadership could have decided to take up Senate legislation which would extend transportation funding for two years. Instead, the House had planned to consider a three-month extension that transportation advocates say could endanger capital improvement programs because transportation agencies won’t be able to plan lo ng-term budgets. As of Wednesday morning they were no closer to a solution.

Andrew Rosenthal: Liberty and Justice for Non-Muslims

Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, genuine concerns about national security as well as politicking and fear have led to a shift in the balance between civil liberties and law enforcement. That much is indisputable, and widely discussed. Yet it’s rarely acknowledged that the attacks have also led to what’s essentially a separate justice system for Muslims.

In this system, the principle of due process is twisted and selectively applied, if it is applied at all.

Examples of the Muslims-only legal system abound, even though politicians and the press shy away from calling it that: Special detention centers for Muslims (Guantanamo Bay and the network of secret C.I.A. lockups, now said to be closed, where prisoners were almost routinely tortured); special trial procedures for Muslim prisoners (military tribunals); special allowances for agents dealing with Muslim suspects (extraordinary rendition, i.e. officially sanctioned kidnapping of foreigners).

John Nichols: Renewed Civil Rights Coalition Targets ‘Ghostwriters’ of ‘License to Kill’ Laws

The killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin has raised old concerns about everything from racial profiling to gun violence. That’s frustrating, as so many Americans had hoped that their country might have bent the arc of history a bit more toward progress.

But the shooting in Sanford, Florida, has done something else. It has focused new attention on the structural supports for legislating on behalf of special-interest, and on the way in which the American Legislative Exchange Council turns bad ideas into bad law.

That has created a new clarity with regard to the need for a pushback against ALEC and its corporate sponsors. And that clarity has renewed a civil rights coalition that will be needed if there is to be any hope for breaking the grip of one-size-fits-all lawmaking and renewing small “d” democracy and sound governance in the states.

Eugene Robison: Health Care: Conservatives Are Their Own Worst Enemies

In arguments before the Supreme Court this week, the Obama administration might have done just enough to keep the Affordable Care Act from being ruled unconstitutional. Those who believe in limited government had better hope so, at least.

If Obamacare is struck down, the short-term implications are uncertain. Conservatives may be buoyed by an election-year victory; progressives may be energized by a ruling that looks more political than substantive. The long-term consequences, however, are obvious: Sooner or later, a much more far-reaching overhaul of the health care system will be inevitable.

The parents of Trayvon Martin attended a somber, angry forum on Capitol Hill yesterday about racial profiling and discriminatory stand-your-ground laws. Much of that terrain has been well-covered in recent weeks, but an interesting portion of the hearing focused directly on gun control-and how Florida’s loose gun restrictions helped facilitate George Zimmerman’s vigilantism.

Despite having an arrest record and a history of violence, Zimmerman was allowed to purchase a gun and obtain a concealed carry permit. And even if he were to be arrested tomorrow and charged with murder, he would still likely be able to obtain a gun permit the day he eventually walked out of prison.

In Florida, gun permits are issued by the Department of Agriculture. All one has to do is visit their website-FreshFromFlorida.com-and apply. Providing your Social Security number is optional, and they’ll just mail you a permit-no need to actually see anyone or provide identification. The state does not have the right to take away your concealed carry permit if you commit a crime-1,400 convicted felons, at least, are said to have concealed carry permits in Florida today, though it’s hard to know for sure since the state doesn’t make the permit list public.

For decades now, the National Rifle Association has used Florida as a petri dish for extreme measures that make getting firearms easy-and the state has some of the loosest laws in the country.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Activist Judges on Trial

Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health care law demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as if they were members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Senator, excuse me, Justice Samuel Alito quoted Congressional Budget Office figures on Tuesday to talk about the insurance costs of the young. On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts sounded like the House whip in discussing whether parts of the law could stand if other parts fell. He noted that without various provisions, Congress “wouldn’t have been able to put together, cobble together, the votes to get it through.” Tell me again, was this a courtroom or a lobbyist’s office?

It fell to the court’s liberals-the so-called “judicial activists,” remember?-to remind their conservative brethren that legislative power is supposed to rest in our government’s elected branches.

Gail Collins: More Guns, Fewer Hoodies

The debate over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin seems to be devolving into an argument about the right to wear hoodies, but it really does not appear to be a promising development.

Congress, which never draws any serious conclusions from terrible tragedies involving gunplay, did have time on Wednesday to fight about whether Representative Bobby Rush of Chicago violated the House dress code when he took off his suit jacket, revealing a gray sweater he was wearing underneath, and pulled the hood up over his head.

You may remember that Geraldo Rivera took measure of the Martin case and determined that the moral was: young men, throw out your hoodies. Even Rivera’s son said he was embarrassed. But, hey, we’re talking about it. Mission accomplished.

Joe Conanson: If Obamacare Goes, Will America ‘Let Him Die’?

Despite significant negative signals, the final outcome of this week’s arguments over the Affordable Care Act will remain unknown until the Supreme Court issues a ruling in June. What is painfully obvious today, however, should have been clear enough long before any of the lawyers opened their mouths. The five Republican justices represent an ideological bloc as adamantly hostile to universal health care-no matter the cost in lost lives or squandered trillions-as in 1965, when Medicare passed.

If the high court voids the law’s insurance mandate (once promoted by the same politicians and policymakers who now scorn it), we know how tea party Republicans would cope with the financial problem posed by ill and injured people who show up at hospitals without coverage. They told us last fall during the presidential debate in Tampa, Fla., when they cheered for, “Let him die!”

Amy Goodman: Forget Fear of Flying, Fear Airport Screening

There was terror in the skies this week over Texas, caused not by a terrorist but by a pilot-a Flight Standards captain, no less. JetBlue Airways Capt. Clay Osbon, flying Flight 191 from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Las Vegas, began moving up and down the aisle after the jet was airborne, ranting, according to several passengers, about Iraq, Israel, al-Qaida and bombs, calling on passengers to recite the Lord’s Prayer, saying that they were “all going down.” An off-duty pilot in the cabin went to the cockpit to help the co-pilot with the emergency landing, while passengers and crew subdued Osbon. Osbon, who’d been with JetBlue almost since its founding, was taken to the hospital, suspended with pay, then criminally charged with interfering with a flight crew.

That’s enough to inspire a fear of flying in anyone. But just getting to your airplane these days may present a greater risk to your health than the actual flight.

It may not be the revolution’s dawn, but it’s certainly a glint in the darkness. On Monday, this country’s largest industrial labor union teamed up with the world’s largest worker-cooperative to present a plan that would put people to work in labor-driven enterprises that build worker power and communities, too.

Titled “Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model,” the organizational proposal released at a press conference on March 26 in Pittsburgh, draws on the fifty-five year experience of the Basque-based Mondragon worker cooperatives. To quote the document:

“In contrast to a Machiavellian economic system in which the ends justify any means, the union co-op model embraces the idea that both the ends and means are equally important, meaning that treating workers well and with dignity and sustaining communities are just as important as business growth and profitability.”

Bryce Covert: The Fast Pace of Change for Women Workers Can’t Distract From the Work Left to Do

“You’ve come a long way, baby.” That was Virginia Slims’ opening salvo to the professional woman when it launched a brand aimed solely at her less than a half century ago. That half-century has seen radical changes in the American workforce, women’s roles and the shape of our families.

In that time the birth control pill became widely available, helping to triple the number of working women from the 50s to the aughts. The latest generation of women workers has the most positive outlook on their careers and the labor force than any in history. Almost 40 percent of today’s working wives outearn their husbands. And women who have children are much more likely to stay in the workforce when their kids are young than they were in the past.

Yet for all these steps forward, there are some steps we’ve yet to take-and ones that have taken us backward. Women still make only eighty-one cents for every dollar men earn, which ends up costing them $431,000 in pay over a forty-year career. That’s on top of all of the other expenses they have to shell out money for that men don’t have to worry about. That wage gap also leads some women to drop out of the labor force later in life when they see their husbands making so much more money, and while the youngest generation of women are optimistic about their career prospects, they still feel more slowed down by parenting than men. And we may have made up ground in the office, but we are still faltering on Capitol Hill: women make up half of the country’s population but only 16 percent of Congressional seats.

Patricia J. Williams: Eggs Are People Too!

It’s an interesting time to ponder the meaning of life and death in the eyes of the law. On one hand, Christian conservatives increasingly seek to sacralize embryos from the moment of conception. On the other, the Supreme Court just heard a case that, among other things, considers the extent to which the corporeal death of a parent is really the “end of the line” with regard to “survivor” benefits for children conceived by artificial insemination from the frozen sperm of a deceased father. On one hand, Citizens United granted First Amendment rights to corporations that are identical to-and some would say exceed-those of natural persons; on the other, the Second Circuit recently ruled that individuals, but not corporations, can be sued for human rights abuses.

It’s interesting to consider the larger social anxieties at play when it comes to the “right to life” debates. Rick Santorum recently made a great show for personhood amendments, declaring, “Personhood is defined as an entity that is genetically human and alive.” But unfertilized eggs are “genetically human.” And sperm swim, so technically they’re “alive.” (Or, as an irreverent friend suggested: fellatio must therefore be a form of cannibalism.) If egg and sperm are sacralized even before they meet, it goes a long way to explaining why the evils of contraception are back on the table.

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.”  Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality.  There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you.  If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you.  Trust us.  Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars.  You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand.  Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Sue Sturgis: Fracking’s Air Pollution Threat

North Carolina regulators will hold the second of two planned public hearings in Chapel Hill today to gather comments on a recently released draft report that calls for lifting the state’s ban on the controversial gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.”

The first hearing, held last week in Sanford, N.C., brought out many opponents of fracking who focused on the documented threat such drilling presents to local water quality. Fracking opponents who attend tonight’s hearing plan to wear blue to show support for clean water.

But a growing body of science also raises concerns about fracking’s public-health impacts from air pollution.

A recent study by scientists with the Colorado School of Public Health found that air pollution from gas-drilling operations may cause acute and chronic health problems for nearby residents, with the greatest risk for people living closest to the wells. The study will be published in an upcoming edition of Science of the Total Environment.

Not surprisingly, today’s debut Supreme Court argument over the so-called “individual mandate” requiring everyone to buy health insurance revolved around epistemological niceties such as the meaning of a “tax,” and the question of whether the issue is ripe for review.

Behind this judicial foreplay is the brute political fact that if the Court decides the individual mandate is an unconstitutional extension of federal authority, the entire law starts unraveling.

But with a bit of political jujitsu, the president could turn any such defeat into a victory for a single-payer healthcare system — Medicare for all.

Here’s how.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: The Right’s Etch A Sketch Imperative

Clarifying moments are rare in politics. They are the times when previously muddled issues are suddenly cast into sharp relief and citizens are given a look behind the curtains of spin and obfuscation.

Over the last week, Americans were blessed with three separate clarifying moments.

Rep. Paul Ryan made absolutely clear that he is not now and never was interested in deficit reduction. After a couple of years of being lauded by deficit hawks as the man prepared to make hard choices, he proposed a budget that would not end deficits until 2040, but would cut taxes by $4.6 trillion over a decade while also extending all of the Bush tax cuts, adding another $5.4 trillion to the deficit. Ryan would increase military expenditures, and then eviscerate the rest of the federal government.

Oh yes, Ryan claims he’d make up for the losses from his new tax cuts with “tax reform,” but offered not a single detail. A “plan” with a hole this big is not a plan at all. Ryan’s main interest is in cutting the top income tax rate to 25 percent from the current 35 percent. His message: Solving the deficit problem isn’t nearly as important as (1) continuing and expanding benefits for the wealthy, and (2) disabling the federal government.

John Nichols: How ALEC Is Creating Florida-Style Messes in Other States

Wisconsin is a rod-and-gun state, with a hunting history that has fostered traditions of broad gun ownership and respect for the right to bear arms.

So how did Wisconsin get saddled with a “Castle Doctrine” law that mirrors some of the worst aspects of the Florida legislation that’s now at the center of the controversy over the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Not because sportsmen and women, law enforcement officers, legal scholars or grassroots citizens decided Wisconsin should borrow bad ideas from distant states.

Wisconsin has a “Castle Doctrine” law because the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate-funded group that aligns special-interest organizations and corporate donors with pliable legislators, made the Florida law “model legislation.” Then ALEC-aligned political insiders such as Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder, a national ALEC task-force member, and Governor Scott Walker, an ALEC alumnus, introduced, passed and signed “Castle Doctrine” legislation-despite warnings from Wisconsin law enforcement leaders and responsible gun owners that it was a poor fit for the state.

Ari Berman: Minnesota’s War on Voting

Last year, Republicans introduced legislation in thirty-four states to mandate government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot. Nine GOP states have passed voter ID laws since the 2010 election, including Pennsylvania earlier last month. Minnesota, another important battleground state, could be next.

Last year, Minnesota Democratic Governor Mark Dayton vetoed a bill from the GOP legislature that would have given the state the strictest voter ID law in the nation, prohibiting passports, military IDs and student IDs as valid documentation. Now the legislature is bypassing the governor by approving a constitutional amendment for voter ID that will go on the November ballot. The House and Senate have each passed their own versions of the legislation; once agreed upon, the measure will go on the 2012 ballot. If approved by voters, the 2013 legislature will implement the particulars of the law.

NEW statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else – and the desperate need to address this wrenching problem. Even in a country that sometimes seems inured to income inequality, these takeaways are truly stunning. [..]

The only way to redress the income imbalance is by implementing policies that are oriented toward reversing the forces that caused it. That means letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy and adding money to some of the programs that House Republicans seek to cut. Allowing this disparity to continue is both bad economic policy and bad social policy. We owe those at the bottom a fairer shot at moving up.

Robert Kuttner: Health Reform’s Day in Court: Don’t Bet the Farm on the Mandate

The constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the subject of three days of oral argument before the Supreme Court beginning Monday, could well turn on whether the Court concludes that Congress can compel a citizen to buy a commercial product, in this case health insurance.

At the heart of the Act is the “individual mandate” which President Obama campaigned against as a candidate, and then turned around and supported as president. The mandate was part of a deal with the health insurance industry, which stopped ferociously opposing the Administration’s bill once it became a source of additional business.

The Administration and its supporters contend that requiring people to purchase health insurance is a natural extension of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. If government can regulate health insurance at all, they say, it can legitimately use a mandate as a policy instrument.

Jeff Goodell: Lessons from Obama’s Keystone Cave-In

Last week, President Obama stood in front of a pile of big green pipes – yes, green pipes – in Cushing, Oklahoma, and promised to expedite approval of federal permits for the southern leg of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.  It was a crushing defeat for enviros and clean energy activists, many of whom have waged a long and pitched political battle over the fate of the pipeline [..]

In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon.  But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations.  Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil.  But if he doesn’t show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.

Elizabeth Grossman: Scientists Warn of Low-Dose Risks of Chemical Exposure

A new study finds that even low doses of hormone-disrupting chemicals – used in everything from plastics to pesticides – can have serious effects on human health. These findings, the researchers say, point to the need for basic changes in how chemical safety testing is conducted.

Since before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring 50 years ago, scientists have known that certain synthetic chemicals can interfere with the hormones that regulate the body’s most vital systems. Evidence of the health impacts of so-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals grew from the 1960s to the 1990s. With the 1996 publication of Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and J. Peterson Myers, many people heard for the first time how such exposures – from industrial pollution, pesticides, and contact with finished consumer products, such as plastics – were affecting people and wildlife. Since then public concern about these impacts has grown.