Tag: Opinion

This week we had a huge political fight about breast cancer. Clearly, we have now hit the point where there’s nothing that can’t be divided into red-state-blue-state.

Nothing. The other day I saw a blog called “I Dig My Garden” that had a forum on whether Republicans could truly love gardening. And there was a little dust-up in Albany over politicization of a local pet blog, which had featured a discussion on Mitt Romney’s driving to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

But breast cancer would seem like the last thing to go. Everybody hates cancer and everybody likes breasts – infants, adults, women, men. Really, it’s America’s most popular body part.

Russ Baker: Close Reading: The Saudis, a Twitter Investment, and the End of Arab Spring?

Is Twitter (a) a leading vehicle for freedom movements, or (b) primed to control and shut down open discourse throughout the world?

This question emerged recently when we learned that the global messaging service was planning to abide by the rules of each country in terms of content it carries. Here’s New York Times:

   This week, in a sort of coming-of-age moment, Twitter announced that upon request, it would block certain messages in countries where they were deemed illegal. The move immediately prompted outcry, argument and even calls for a boycott from some users.

Twitter said it would also “give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country – while keeping it available in the rest of the world.””

Now, you may be one of those people who very proudly have not incorporated Twitter into your life, but this development is still of enormous relevance to you and your world. Why? Simply because Twitter, with its declared 175 million registered users (many of whom, it must be said, are inactive) has become one of the most powerful forces in communication today, arguably more relevant to more people than even traditional heavyweights like The New York Times, CNN, and the BBC.

Laura Flanders: The Deal That Saved Detroit (and Banned Strikes)

President Obama is, as AP puts it, “wearing his decision to rescue General Motors and Chrysler three years ago as a badge of honor” on his re-election campaign. It saved jobs and working communities, brought the US auto industry back from the brink. In January, US auto sales were up 11 percent over a year ago, and a proud president was cooing to the college students of Ann Arbor, Michigan:

“The American auto industry was on the verge of collapse and some politicians were willing to let it just die. We said no…. We believe in the workers of this state.”

You’re going to be hearing a lot about the deal that saved Detroit in the next few months, not least because likely opponent Mitt Romney was against it. Then Governor Romney wrote in the fall of 2008 that if the big three auto companies received a bailout, “we can kiss the American auto industry goodbye.” Romney bad; Obama good; Big Three back. The Deal with Detroit is gold dust for Democrats. Reality is a bit more complicated.

For one thing, it was Republican President Bush, not the Democrats’ Barack Obama, who originally decided not to stand by as the auto makers died. The deal saved an industry-US cars are still being made in the US-but it came at such a high price that in many ways it’s a whole new industry. The American auto industry that built middle-class lives as well as cars-that one we kissed good-bye, and it may be a while before we see it back again.

Jeff Biggers: If We Can Stop the Keystone Pipeline, We Can Stop Mountaintop Removal. Right?

One of the most heartening moments of solidarity in the Tar Sands Action movement took place last summer: A contingent of Appalachian coalfield residents, whose homes are literally under siege from daily blasting and stripmining fallout, took their place at a White House sit-in and went to jail in an appeal to President Obama to deny the TransCanada Keystone pipeline permit.

For the Appalachian residents, like many citizens on the dirty energy frontlines, the pipeline decision served as a litmus test for the Obama administration’s commitment to dealing with climate change and a clean energy future.

Eastern Kentucky activist Teri Blanton, who lost her brother to a coal mining accident and has witnessed the destruction of her native Harlan County from stripmining over the past decades, invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

  Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

President Obama’s plan for homeowner relief, announced yesterday, would allow homeowners who are current on their mortgages refinance at today’s low rates-even if they’re underwater. It could provide thousands of dollars of relief to millions of homeowners, which would also provide a boost to the economy.

However, as I mentioned yesterday, the plan falls short when it comes to principal write-downs by GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The plan provides all kinds of incentives for these principal write-downs to occur, when it’s clearly in the authority of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to simply force Fannie and Freddie to write them down immediately.

The FHFA director, Edward DeMarco, has so far refused to do so, and has frequently been a target of some House Democrats for that reason. Yesterday, Representative John Conyers Jr., a powerful voice in the House Democratic caucus, praised Obama’s plan but called for immediate action on GSE write-downs

Bill Boyarsky: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Campaign 2012

Pity the poor mainstream news media, confronted with many debates, demands for instantaneous coverage, competition for website traffic and the specter of ever-multiplying Super PACs.

All these factors have changed the dynamics of the presidential campaign, putting election coverage beyond the capabilities of the news media, which has been hit hard by heavy newsroom budget cutbacks.

The loss has been severe for the nation, resulting in harried coverage too often divorced from our national struggles, including the effort to recover from the Great Recession.

David Sirota: When It Comes to Education Technology, Trust-but Verify

The release of Apple’s computer-based textbooks last month had the usual technology triumphalists buzzing. “Apple and the Coming Education Revolution,” blared the headline at Fast Company magazine. “Apple puts iPad at head of the class,” screamed MacWorld. And Time magazine declared the announcement the “debut [of] the holy grail of textbooks.” It sounds exciting-a rise of the machines that promises educational utopia rather than “Terminator”-style cataclysm.

Or does it?

Though it may be too soon to definitively answer that question, it’s not too soon to ask it. Because despite the celebratory hype, there’s no guarantee that a hyper-technologized education system is synonymous with genuine progress.

Eugen Robinson: Romney’s Indifference to the Poor

I wish Mitt Romney’s cavalier dismissal of poverty in America could be chalked up as just another gaffe, but it’s much worse than that. The Republican front-runner seems dangerously clueless about the nation he seeks to lead.

When I first heard the now-famous quote-“I’m not concerned about the very poor”-I thought it might be fodder for a snarky column about the wee little Mr. Monopoly who lives inside Romney’s head and blurts out things like “Corporations are people, my friend,” or “I like being able to fire people.” But I realized that being “very poor” is no laughing matter to millions of Americans.

Putting Romney’s words in their full context makes them worse. Here is what he said on CNN:

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

For my part, I’m concerned about what sounds like shocking ignorance about the extent of poverty in this country and an utter lack of urgency about finding solutions.

Ben Adler: Sheldon Adelson Against Disenfranchisement in Nevada Caucus

Caucuses are offensively anti-democratic affairs. They require participation in a specific time and place, preventing anyone who may be unavailable from exercising their rights as a citizen. (Typically there is no absentee voting in caucuses.) People with disabilities, college students, single parents and people who work unusual shifts are among the most common victims. In Nevada’s caucus, we’ve discovered another: observant Jews. The Nevada caucus is on Saturday.

Nevada’s Republican Party, to its credit, has created an absentee voting mechanism in the caucuses for members of the military. As I’ve previously reported, there is a movement within the Republican Party to encourage or require state parties to allow absentee voting in caucuses for military personnel who are stationed out of state. Iowa chose not to do so, but Nevada did.

This raises the question of why anyone else who cannot be at a caucus site at 9 am on Saturday is not simply allowed to vote absentee the way military service members can. Apparently, Nevada Republicans think democracy is only a necessity for the military. Call it another Republican military exception, like the notion that government-provided health insurance is a moral obligation for veterans and an unpleasant burden for anyone else.

John Nichols: How Scott Walker and ALEC Plotted the Attack on Arizona’s Unions

Two days after Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected Governor John Kasich’s anti-labor agenda by a sixty-one to thirty-nine margin in a statewide referendum, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker jetted to Arizona to launch the next front in the national campaign to attack union rights. [..]

“We need to make big, fundamental, permanent structural changes. It’s why we did what we did in Wisconsin,” declared Walker, who at the annual dinner of the right-wing Goldwater Institute said that compromising with unions was “bogus. [..]

This week, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer-fresh from pointing her finger in the face of President Obama-and her allies in the Republican-controlled state legislature announced that they would try to outdo the anti-labor initiatives of Walker and Wisconsin’s Republican legislators.

And they did so in conjunction with the very people Walker has consulted with, spoken to and urged on in November: The Goldwater Institute.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few days ago, said the “critical risks” facing the American economy this year were a worsening of Europe’s chronic sovereign debt crisis and a rise in tensions with Iran that could stoke global oil prices.

What about jobs and wages here at home?

As the Commerce Department reported Friday, the U.S. economy grew 2.8 percent between October and December – the fastest pace in 18 months and the first time growth exceeded 2 percent all year. Many bigger American companies have been reporting strong profits in recent months. GE and Lockheed Martin closed the year with record order backlogs.

Yet the percent of working-age Americans in jobs isn’t much different than what it was three years ago. Yes, America now produces more than it did when the recession began. But it does so with 6 million fewer workers.

Robert Sheer: The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.

Yet, there they go again. Clinton is presented, in a fawning cover story in the current edition of Esquire magazine, as “Someone we can all agree on. … Even his staunchest enemies now regard his presidency as the good old days.” In a softball interview, Clinton is once again allowed to pass himself off as a job creator without noting the subsequent loss of jobs resulting from the collapse of the housing derivatives bubble that his financial deregulatory policies promoted.

Amy Goodman: Romney’s 1 Percent Nation Under God

Although Mitt Romney has yet to win a majority in a Republican primary, he won big in Florida. After he and the pro-Romney super PACs flooded the airwaves with millions of dollars’ worth of ads in a state where nearly half the homeowners are underwater, he talked about whom he wants to represent. “We will hear from the Democrat Party the plight of the poor, and there’s no question, it’s not good being poor,” he told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “You could choose where to focus, you could focus on the rich, that’s not my focus. You could focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans.” Of the very rich, Romney assures us, “They’re doing just fine.” With an estimated personal wealth of $250 million, Romney should know.

Jin Hightower: Newt Gingrich: The Spawn of Citizens United

Wow, January’s gone already — time really flies when you’re having Republican presidential primaries! And what better time than Groundhog Day to poke into that warren of feral Republican ideologues and see what the heck is going on.

Already, four of the GOP contenders have had to drop out — Michele Bachmann because she was just too wacky, Jon Huntsman because he was too sane, Herman Cain because he was too exposed and Rick Perry because he was too dimwitted.

But the greatest surprise is the sudden surge of the Adelson campaign. Little-known until now, Adelson was the big winner in South Carolina, came from nowhere to a second-place finish in the Florida primary, and looks to have the political kick needed to go the distance.

Never heard of Adelson? It consists of the married duo of Sheldon and Miriam, neither of whom are actually on any ballot. Rather, they are running on the Money Ticket.

Joe Conason: What Happened in Florida Won’t Stay in Florida

Mitt Romney’s convincing victory in the Florida primary erased his earlier defeats and perhaps any serious obstacle to his nomination. The question that still troubles party leaders, however, is the damage he will sustain before returning to Tampa in September for their convention.

Triumph could cost Romney much more than the million dollars or so that bought each point of his 46-32 margin over Newt Gingrich. Already the former speaker has shaped the plutocratic image of Romney now visible in national polls. A furious, wounded Gingrich could go still further-demanding, for instance, that Romney release many more years of tax returns.

But the electorate can also learn much about Romney from Ron Paul, if the Texan ever summons the courage to articulate their profound differences on war, national security and defense spending.

“Nein! Nein! Nein!” roars today’s headline on Ta Nea, Greece’s largest circulation daily, over a caricature of Angela Merkel controlling a map of Greece with puppet strings. This is not just the usual Greek rage against the EU’s austerity measures: Last Friday the Financial Times made public a German proposal to take over Greece’s finances so extreme as to look like parody. In order to receive the next tranche of its bailout, the document explains, Greece would have to agree a “transfer of national budgetary sovereignty” to a European commissar, “preferably through constitutional amendment,” making an absolute commitment to service its debt before spending public funds on anything else

Merkel has since backed off from the document, but whoever leaked it obviously wasn’t aiming at a warm, candle-lit atmostphere between Greece and Germany at the ongoing negotiations for a write-down of Greece’s private sector debt, or at today’s European summit in Brussels (where there’s also a general strike in progress against austerity measures). Once again, the Greek crisis is at the heart of the talks, though it’s not on the published agenda. The official business on the table includes the new European fiscal compact, due to be signed in March, which would punish states that exceed fixed deficit and debt levels and has been described by one official as a plan to outlaw Keynesianism; and measures to promote growth and create jobs, especially for the young, who are now being tagged as a “lost generation.”

Amanda Marcotte: In Bad Faith: New Study Further Underscores Lack of Truth in Anti-Choice Claims

One of the most frustrating parts of dealing with the modern conservative movement is their incredibly practiced disingenuousness. From a bunch of white people denying racism while pushing racist policies to a bunch of straight people claiming that they want to ban gay marriage not because they hate gays, but because they love “traditional marriage,” the constant pose of the modern right winger is one of bad faith.

Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the anti-choice movement. Despite arsons, vandalism and occasional assassinations, anti-choice activists demand the right to label their movement “non-violent.” And despite the fact that the movement is organized by religious people whose religion teaches that women should be constrained to traditional gender roles and that sex outside of marriage (or for pleasure instead of procreation) is wrong, anti-choicers cry foul if you suggest that their activism against women’s liberation or sexual freedom somehow is rooted in opposition to women’s liberation or hostility to sex.

Renee Parsons: What Happened to the War Powers Act?

On Sunday night’s 60 Minutes program, Scott Pelley opened an interview with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta with the question, “How many countries are we currently engaged in a shooting war?” Surprised by the question, Panetta, who laughed heartily as if Pelley had just told him a really humorous knock-knock joke that tickled his funny bone, responded ‘that’s a good question. I have to stop and think about that.” Panetta proceeded to answer “we’re going after al Qaeda wherever they’re at…. Clearly, we’re confronting al Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa….” In case you’re wondering, yes, Panetta confirmed that US troops are in Pakistan.

Pelley’s question could not have been more clear just as Panetta’s answer was unequivocal. What neither Pelley nor Panetta, who received a law degree from Santa Clara University Law School, mentioned was that for the US to be ‘engaged in a shooting war,’ not to mention more shooting wars than he could recount, without congressional approval is not only unconstitutional but is a clear violation of the War Powers Act of 1973.

Michelle Chen: Amid ‘Turnaround Agenda,’ Teachers, Communities Overshadowed by Corporate Reforms

The conversation about school reform in Washington is replete with big ideas–glossy proposals for “accountability,” putting the “students first,” fixing “broken” schools, all in hopes of making America “competitive” again.

Yet our schools are poorer than ever, and in many communities, the child poverty has deepened while test scores have stagnated. The experts leading the education reform debate have failed to draw a simple equation: a system with adequate resources does better than one without.

The gap in the logic has widened as state governments press school districts to conform to new standards–or else. States are gunning for a competitive grant fund known as “Race to the Top,” which the White House dangles as an incentive to restructure school systems. This hyped-up free-market reform rhetoric seeped into President Obama’s suggestion to “offer schools a deal” in his State of the Union address.

In his State of the Union Address last week, President Obama announced a renewed commitment to manufacturing in the United States. While the commitment to rebuilding the country’s manufacturing base is welcome – manufacturing has historically been a source of good-paying jobs for workers without college degrees – he unfortunately left the most important item on the list off the agenda.

President Obama failed to commit himself to restoring the competitiveness of the dollar as part of his agenda for bringing back manufacturing jobs. The value of the dollar really has to be front and central in any effort to restore US competitiveness since it is by far the most important factor determining the relative cost of US goods compared with goods produced elsewhere.

Gary Younge: US Elections: No Matter Who You Vote For, Money Always Wins

Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions

Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum warned of the “threat of radical Islam growing” in Central and South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s. Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented people, they will “self-deport”.

Given the general state of the Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention. Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party’s base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: The Party People of Wall Street

A week or so ago, we read in The New York Times about what in the Gilded Age of the Roman Empire was known as a bacchanal – a big blowout at which the imperial swells got together and whooped it up. [..]

This year, the butt of many a joke were the protesters of Occupy Wall Street. In one of the sketches, the bond specialist James Lebenthal scolded a demonstrator with a face tattoo, “Go home, wash that off your face and get back to work.” And in another, a member — dressed like a protester – was told, “You’re pathetic, you liberal. You need a bath!”

Pretty hilarious stuff. The whole affair’s reminiscent of the wingdings the robber barons used to throw during America’s own Gilded Age a century and a half ago, when great wealth amassed at the top, far from the squalor and misery of working stiffs. Guests would arrive in the glittering mansions for costume balls that rivaled Versailles, reinforcing the sense of superiority and the virtue of a ruling class that depended on the toil and sweat of working people.

Eugene Robinson: The GOP’s Anti-Gingrich Campaign

MIAMI-When the empire strikes back, it hits hard. The Republican establishment is deploying every weapon and every soldier-even Bob Dole-in an increasingly desperate attempt to pulverize the Newt Gingrich rebellion. Eventually, the shock-and-awe campaign may work.

But then what? In the establishment’s best-case scenario, the party is left with Mitt Romney, a candidate whose core message, as far as I can tell, seems to be: “Yes, I made a ton of money. You got a problem with that?” really believe in him.

The World Economic Forum opened in Davos amid choruses of central bankers and economists calling for governments to cut spending.

This message of austerity is like the call of the ancient Sirens, whose music lured sailors to shipwreck.

We should take a lesson from Odysseus, who poured wax into the ears of his crew and had himself lashed to the mast of his ship to resist the Siren call.

Austerity supporters are selling the idea that governments, like families, must cut back when income shrinks. But economically, governments are not like families.

Firing teachers, cops and government clerks will, for sure, reduce public spending. But budgets, like the song of the Sirens, are only part of the story. Listen only to the alluring lyrics and, like the many voyagers before Odysseus, we will suffer disastrous consequences – in our case falling incomes and worsening economies.

Danny Schechter: Remember Rousseau: Property Rights and Human Rights Are Still At War

The conflict between property rights and human rights has entered a new chapter. It is a debate that goes back to the challenge by landowners and merchants behind the American Revolution’s war on British control over the colonial economy.

Only today, as those speaking in the name of the 99% challenge the super wealthy of the 1% (actually the .001 %) there is a new battleground in what’s known as the housing market with as many as 14 million Americans in or facing foreclosure. [..]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau who postulated the “social contract” that gives property rights a moral claim would be turning in his grave if he knew of the many abuses that homeowners in the US face daily.

Chris Hedges: Corporations Have No Use for Borders

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

L. Alan Sroufe: Ritalin Gone Wrong

Three million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.

But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?

In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.

As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.

Bill Boyarsky: Winning Our Future, Gambling With Democracy

With financial and political interests ranging from Las Vegas to Israel to China, Sheldon Adelson, who is bankrolling the super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, is a powerful illustration of the dangers of unlimited campaign contributions.

Casino magnate Adelson donated $5 million to the super PAC Winning Our Future, which helped Gingrich defeat Mitt Romney in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Then Adelson’s wife, Miriam, gave the pro-Gingrich PAC $5 million more for the Florida primary. These gifts provide sweet revenge for Gingrich, beaten in Iowa and New Hampshire with the help of ad campaigns funded by the pro-Romney super PAC, which is now operating in Florida.

January 18, 2012 could prove to be an incredibly important day, and not just for copyright policy or the Internet. On that day, two critically important things happened: First, with its 6-2 decision in Golan v. Holder, the Supreme Court shut the door, finally and firmly, on any opportunity to meaningfully challenge a copyright statute constitutionally. Second, millions from the Internet opened the door, powerfully if briefly, on the powers that dominatepolicymaking in Washington, and effectively stopped Hollywood’s latest outrage to address “piracy”-aka, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

The constitutional battle began over a decade ago. Conservatives on the Supreme Court had long rumbled about the need to respect the “original intent” of the “framers” of our Constitution by enforcing the affirmative limits of the Constitution. In 1995, a 5-4 Court decision shocked conventional wisdom by striking a law regulating commerce because, as the Court found, it exceeded those original limits. Three years later, the Court did the same, this time with a law regulating violence against women. The Court seemed eager to read the Constitution the way the framers wrote it, regardless of how the current Congress read it.

Laura Flanders: Not A Peep About President’s Praise for War

The grades for the president’s State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it’s chilling to see just how few hits the president takes for couching his entire address in unqualified celebration of the US military.

Speaking of the troops, President Obama began: “At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations.”

Post-show pundits on cable news praised the president’s comfort with his commander-in-chief role but none saw fit to mention recent news — of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, say, or Staff Sgt Wuterich walking free after participating in the killing of 24 unarmed men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq. Accompanying Obama’s next phrase, “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example,” no one thus far has played vile viral video. The critics have been kind.

Brian Moench: Physicians in Congress Committing Malpractice on Millions

What would you think if your physician told you, “Keep smoking because quitting would kill tobacco and health care jobs.” Or, “Don’t take your high blood pressure medicine, you can’t afford it.” And, “Don’t lose weight, no one has proven obesity is bad for you.”

That’s exactly the quality of medical advice we are getting from the 18 Republican physicians currently serving in Congress. Some of the most well known are the father and son team of Rep. Ron and Sen. Rand Paul and Sen.Tom Coburn. Almost all of these physician/Congressmen have been key soldiers in the Republican war on the EPA; calling it a “job killer,” pronouncing relevant health science “unproven,” claiming we “can’t afford” their regulations.

George Lakey: How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

The deal to block outside ads in the Senate race is admirable, but futile: Citizens United has embedded big bucks in politics

Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown and his Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren, are attempting some creative political jujitsu to end massive outside spending on advertising in their 2012 US Senate race. I applaud them and you should, too. But, their experiment, however laudable, is unlikely to work. [..]

Unfortunately, the candidates do not control this outside spending. The candidates would like the media to turn down such outside advertising. But the dirty secret every campaign year is that commercial broadcasters love – and, in fact, have come to depend upon – the money thrown at them in election years.

New York Times Editorial: So Who’s a Lobbyist?

Under the federal lobbying law, Newt Gingrich can legitimately claim that he is not a lobbyist. That alone demonstrates how much the law needs to be changed. [..]

The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 has three tests: 1) Do you make more than $3,000 over three months from lobbying? 2) Have you had more than one lobbying contact? 3) Have you spent more than 20 percent of your time lobbying for a single client over three months?

Only a person who has met all three tests must register as a lobbyist. So a former lawmaker who has many lobbying contacts and makes $1 million a year lobbying but has no single client who takes up more than 20 percent of his time would not be considered a lobbyist.

Congress has shown little interest in tightening these requirements, in part because lawmakers don’t want to close off a lucrative career in lobbying after they leave office. More than 400 former lawmakers have become lobbyists or consultants in the last decade.

George Zornick: Enforce Dodd-Frank: Break Up Bank of America

Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill provides a pretty clear mandate: if the federal government determines that a financial institution poses a “grave” risk to the financial system, the government is entitled to take action to mitigate that risk.

Specifically, if the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System makes that assessment, it can take action with the approval of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is part of the Treasury Department. The potential actions can range from limiting mergers and acquisitions, imposing conditions on how the institution does business or ordering it to liquidate. [..]

To that end, Public Citizen filed a petition (pdf) this week to the Federal Reserve and FSOC to break up Bank of America-a bank that’s clearly too big to fail, since it holds assets equal to one-seventh of the United States’ gross domestic product. It’s got the second-biggest holdings of any US bank and is interconnected with so many other institutions that few people-if any, even inside the bank-truly understand the complexity of those arrangements and dependencies.

Jennifer Abel: The bigger picture of Rand Paul’s brush with the TSA

Go Rand Paul, for refusing a patdown! But ordinary Americans will still be daily deprived of their constitutional rights by the TSA

The brouhaha over Senator Rand Paul’s refusal to submit to a full-body groping by blue-gloved minions of the Transportation Security Administration shows, again, how the more things change, the more they stay the same. [..]

For all that Rand Paul was right in refusing the TSA patdown, though, his proposed solution is little better than the status quo. Paul supports the creation of a “trusted traveler” program for frequent flyers who would be exempt from TSA procedures. That would surely be an improvement for frequent flyers like Senator Paul, but it still does not address the odious idea that the TSA’s routine treatment of passengers is acceptable.

Fourth amendment rights should not be special privileges, doled out only to those the government deems “trustworthy”. Or did 9/11 really change all that?

Ari Berman: Mitt’s Money Problem

“Romney, sinking in polls, says ‘banks aren’t bad people.’ ” That headline from the LA Times encapsulates, in a nutshell, why Mitt Romney is in trouble, both in the Republican primary against Newt Gingrich and in a possible general election campaign against President Obama. [..]

The key problem for Romney is that at a time when Americans are increasingly concerned about income inequality and the political voicelessness of the 99 percent, Romney is an unabashed proponent of Wall Street and the 1 percent. The fact that he paid only 13.9 percent in taxes on $21.6 million in income in 2010, that he had investments in offshore tax havens, that he profited at Bain Capital from bankrupt companies and shuttered steel mills, and that he believes corporations are people all reinforce this central weakness of his candidacy.

In the State of the Union address, President Obama promised a fresh investigation into mortgage abuses that led to the financial meltdown. The goal, he said, is to “hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.” Could this be it, finally? An investigation that results in clarity, big fines and maybe even jail time?

There is good reason to be skeptical. To date, federal civil suits over mortgage wrongdoing have been narrowly focused and, at best, ended with settlements and fines that are a fraction of the profits made during the bubble. There have been no criminal prosecutions against major players. Justice Department officials say that it reflects the difficulty of proving fraud – and not a lack of prosecutorial zeal. That is hard to swallow, given the scale of the crisis and the evidence of wrongdoing from private litigation, academic research and other sources.

Robert Sheer: Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans … until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Joe Conason; Mitch Daniels: Bombast From the Past

Why the Republicans chose Mitch Daniels-the Indiana governor who once thrilled right-wing pundits as a 2012 hopeful-to deliver a rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address is puzzling. His uninspiring remarks surely killed the Daniels fad, revived lately as Republicans fret over the unappetizing choices available in their primaries.

By shining the spotlight on Daniels, the Republicans risked losing much more than a political rescue fantasy. He isn’t merely a politician who looks like an accountant; he actually was an accountant-or at least he played one during the Bush years, when he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Listening to him drone on about fiscal rectitude just might have reminded voters of the true source of our national problems.

William Rivers Pitt: Staring at Empty Pages

The Occupy Wall Street movement should spend today doing a nice little victory lap, because it seemed for all the world like its members were ghost-writers on President Obama’s State of the Union speechwriting staff. Though he never directly mentioned the movement itself, Mr. Obama spent a great deal of time on Tuesday night underscoring many of Occupy’s most central themes: income inequality, tax fairness, and the need to rein in the illegal and immoral behavior of the nation’s largest financial institutions.

Talk is cheap, of course; despite all of Mr. Obama’s high-flown rhetoric, his administration is reportedly prepared to cut a disgracefully easy deal with the five banks most directly responsible for the financial meltdown, giving his so-pretty words a hollow ring [..]

Dan Kaufman: A Judge in the Dock

IN October 1998, British police officers arrested the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet while he was recuperating from back surgery at a London hospital. They were acting on an international warrant issued by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón seeking General Pinochet’s extradition to stand trial in Spain on charges of torture and murder. After a 17-month legal battle, General Pinochet was released on medical grounds, but Judge Garzón’s warrant paved the way for stripping the former dictator of immunity and prosecuting him in Chile. [..]

Yet Judge Garzón is now himself under legal attack for confronting Spain’s own dark history. He is on trial this week before the Spanish Supreme Court for daring to investigate crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War and the nearly four-decade dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco. The case against him is fueled by domestic political vendettas rather than substantive legal arguments and it could dramatically set back international efforts to hold human-rights violators accountable for their crimes.