Tag: Opinion

I never liked the term “The Great Recession,” because this is not an ordinary recession, not even a great one. It is a period of protracted deflation, where weak demand, declining incomes, and falling asset prices keep dragging the economy downward into a self-deepening sinkhole.

With the latest unemployment numbers, the evidence keeps accumulating that this will be a prolonged economic stagnation. The unemployment rate — stuck around 9 percent — is not as bad as that of the Great Depression, but in some respects the prognosis is equally grim.

Hadley Freeman: The Republican presidential candidates are farcically unelectable

Obama must have made a pact with the devil – how else to explain his good fortune?

When blues musician Robert Johnson famously if possibly not factually flogged his soul, he got in return superior guitar skills; when aged Joe Boyd did the same in the Faustian musical Damn Yankees, he was reborn as a dashing baseball player. As for Obama, just a few months ago he was being widely dismissed as a “one-term president”; now, while I can’t guarantee Obama will win the election next year (OK, I am partial to a Saturn-splattered turban, but my crystal ball recently cracked), I can say that his Republican rivals are fast becoming farcically unelectable. Some might argue that this is the inevitable result of a Republican party that has painted itself into a corner by focusing so much on social values and twisting its economic ones into such a knot that it claims to be a party for lower earners (it is, but only in the sense that it wants lower earners to pay high taxes so the rich don’t have to). But I say that only something truly satanic could conjure up what the GOP has vomited out this time round and, to prove it, I bring you the York Notes guide to the Republican candidates.

E. J. Dionne, Jr: The Politics of the Heavenly and Unheavenly

We have embarked on yet another presidential campaign in which religion will play an important role without any agreement over what the ground rules for that engagement should be.

If you think we’re talking past each other on jobs and budgets, consider the religious divide. One side says “separation of church and state” while the other speaks of “religion’s legitimate role in the public square.” Each camp then sees the question as closed and can get quite self-righteous in avoiding the other’s claims.

Anyone who enters this terrain should thus do so with fear and trembling. But a few things ought to be clear, and let’s start with this: The Mormon faith of Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman should not be an issue in this campaign. Period.

Joe Conason: Bloomberg vs. Occupy Wall Street

Americans listen when Michael Bloomberg speaks, not only because he is the mayor of New York City, but because he is a self-made billionaire and a smart guy. People think Bloomberg knows a lot about business and investment, which he surely does. But he nevertheless sounds terribly misinformed sometimes, as he did the other day-when he complained that Occupy Wall Street is unfairly blaming the nation’s big bankers for the crash and recession, when the real culprits are Congress and the government-sponsored housing lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” said the mayor. “It was, plain and simple, Congress, who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. … But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody.”

This week was a sharp reminder that the ancient ideal of democracy is just as threatened — and to some, just as threatening — as it’s ever been. In government offices in Athens, G20 meeting rooms in Cannes, and “Super Committee” chambers in Washington, we learned that there are still places where the will of the people can be overruled by the whims of the powerful.

From the Parthenon to the Potomac, it was the same story: Elites still hold veto power over the democratic process, and they’re not afraid to use it.

Fred Wison: The XL Pipeline Is a Dog That Can’t Hunt

As thousands get ready for a big last push on President Obama against the XL Pipeline in Washington DC this weekend, decision makers should remember Elvis Presley’s sage advice: “When things go wrong, don’t go with them.” If, or when, XL goes down, how many politicians, businessmen and labour leaders will get pulled under with it?

By any measure, TransCanada Pipeline’s Keystone XL project has gone horribly wrong. This $7 Billion project was supposed to have been under construction seven months ago. It has yet to receive critical US state approvals, and the once expected pro-forma approval from the White House is now very much in question.

Paul Krugman: A Brave New World Wide Web of Economics

Ryan Avent, the economics writer at The Economist, and I have been corresponding about the role of the economics blogosphere, for the Christmas issue of the magazine.

I don’t know what parts of our conversation will actually show up there, but having assembled my thoughts I might as well put some of them here.

The concern, or maybe just issue, is whether the rise of econoblogs is undermining the gatekeepers – whether any old Joe can now weigh in on economic debate, whereas in the good old days you had to publish in the journals, which meant getting through the refereeing process.

My take is that the system never worked like that – or at least not in my professional lifetime. And when you consider how economic discussion actually used to work, you see the blogs in a different and more favorable light.

Alejandro Reuss: The 99%, the 1%, and Class Struggle

Between 1979 and 2007, the income share of the top 1% of U.S. households (by income rank) more than doubled, to over 17% of total U.S. income. Meanwhile, the income share of the bottom 80% dropped from 57% to 48% of total income. “We are the 99%,” the rallying cry of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, does a good job at calling attention to the dramatic increase of incomes for those at the very top-and the stagnation of incomes for the majority.

This way of looking at income distribution, however, does not explicitly focus on the different sources of people’s incomes. Most people get nearly all of their incomes-wages and salaries, as well as employment benefits-by working for someone else. A few people, on the other hand, get much of their income not from work but from ownership of property-profits from a business, dividends from stock, interest income from bonds, rents on land or structures, and so on. People with large property incomes may also draw large salaries or bonuses, especially from managerial jobs. Executive pay, though treated in official government statistics as labor income, derives from control over business firms and really should be counted as property income.

The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy.

The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent.

The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

John Nichols: Occupy the Ballot: Colorado Voters Reject Corporate Power

Citizen anger with corporate control of our politics isn’t playing out only at Occupy Wall Street rallies. In Colorado, voters occupied their polling places and urged Congress to clarify that constitutional rights belong to people, not corporations.

They also voted to fire their private power company and set up a municipal utility-as sixteen communities across the country have over the past decade.

Voters in Boulder backed an anti-“corporate personhood” referendum by a 3-1 margin, putting the Colorado college town on record in favor of a constitutional amendment that declares that corporate campaign spending is not protected as a free-speech right.

Ari Berman: War Against Government Workers Is Prolonging the Recession

The US economy gained 104,000 private sector jobs last month, but lost 24,000 public sector jobs, resulting in a net total of 80,000 new jobs-fewer than expected and well below what the country needs to get out of the Great Recession.

This is by now a depressingly familiar story. In the past year, 1.6 million private sector jobs have been created. But since the recession began in December 2007, more than 500,000 public sector jobs have been lost. Half of those jobs have disappeared since January 2011, after Republicans (who ran on improving the economy in 2010) took control of the House of Representatives. States have cut 49,000 jobs and localities have cut 210,000 jobs since the beginning of the year. Contrary to what Republicans might tell you, these are “real” jobs lost by real people, who pay taxes, spend money, provide for their families and perform vital public services. When they suffer, the economy suffers too.

Mary Bottari: Robin Hood Tax Gains Ground at the G-20

The G-20 meeting in Cannes got underway this week. The sunny beach resort, playground to movie stars and media moguls was an odd choice for a somber G-20 meeting. As President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner touched down in Air Force One, the Greek government was on the verge of collapse, austerity was sweeping Europe and the future of the Eurozone in doubt.

But the first day of talks offered a ray of hope for the entire global economy. For the first time, the 20 most powerful countries in the world sat down to discuss taxing the financial service industry. And for the first time, the U.S. blinked.

President Sarkozy of France has long championed a small sales tax on the financial services industry. “At a time when states are making remarkable efforts to restore their public finances… how can the financial sector triumphantly continue to march, indifferent to the world around it, carelessly and without a care for the disorder it has more than its share in causing,” Sarkozy said. Angela Merkel of German agrees.

The Republican Party’s inevitable decision to nominate Mitt Romney for president is starting to look evitable after all.

That’s certainly not a consensus view among the Washington cognoscenti, who tend to see the yet-to-come primaries and caucuses as mere formalities. Romney, they say, is the GOP’s obvious choice-a poised and experienced candidate with presidential bearing, world-class hair and the ability to speak in complete sentences, even about the economy. Sooner or later, the party will come to its senses and see that he has the best chance of beating President Obama.

The White House certainly seems to buy into this scenario. For months now, virtually every conversation I’ve had with one of those increasingly chatty “senior administration officials,” on any subject, has included at least a swipe or two at Romney. It’s clear that he’s the opponent the Obama machine is gearing up to face.

But I’m less and less convinced. It’s hard for me to see how any of the other candidates can win the nomination-but it’s hard for me to see how Romney wins it, either.

John Nichols: Union Pressure, OWS Protests Tear Down a Barrier to Taxing Speculators

Does protesting and pressuring powerful players in political and economic life matter?

Can the White House and Congress really be moved on questions so central as taxing financial speculation?

Yes.

And here’s the evidence of how of it works.

For months, the AFL-CIO has been been pressuring the Obama administration to ease off rigid opposition to international efforts to tax financial speculators. And that pressure has been highlighted on Capitol Hill and on the streets by an allied union, National Nurses United.

The White House stance has been one of the chief barriers to the efforts of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to reach an agreement within the Group of 20 economic superpowers to develop a small financial transactions tax (FTT) that would target speculators.

Patricia J. Williams: Culture of Death: Who Gets to Be a Person in Mississippi?

On November 8, Mississippi is set to vote on Measure 26, a ballot initiative that would redefine the state’s Bill of Rights to extend the protections of personhood to include “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” It is striking that the measure, which is largely motivated by religious concerns about the sanctity of human existence, crops up in a state that has one of the lowest indices for overall quality of life-whenever it might begin-in the entire country: the infant mortality rate over the last decade is about 10 per 1,000 live births, with black babies dying at twice the rate of white babies. Mississippi leads the country in obesity and ranks forty-sixth in the number of state residents who have health insurance. It suffers from high death rates from cancer and heart disease. Twenty-three percent of the population lives below the poverty level, giving Mississippi the unenviable distinction of ranking dead last in the nation.

With the odds of survival so relatively skewed, it is no wonder that there might be some anxiety over preserving the very idea of life. Then, too, the legal category of “personhood” seems particularly capacious since Citizens United; if such a label protects corporations, banks and homeowners’ associations-and don’t they seem to be thriving!-what blessings might it extend to a zygote, that abstracted conception of future stock, human capital, mortal enterprise?

William Greider: Smearing Social Security

The Washington Post published a sensational story last Sunday that claimed that Social Security is already broke. “Adding billions to US budget woes,” the headline read. Instead of piling up surpluses, as the Social Security trust fund has done for nearly thirty years, this year the system became “cash negative.” Social Security, the Post warned, “is sucking money out of the Treasury.”

This is alarming news, if true. Fortunately, it is not true. The Post committed what I call fact-filled mendacity-a pejorative mash of scary buzz words and opaque statistics that encourages readers to reach false conclusions. The newspaper’s obvious objective is goosing the so-called supercommittee whose Congressional members seem to be reluctant about whacking Social Security benefits. The formerly liberal Washington Post has long urged that as a solution to federal debt and deficits. Its ideological posture influences its reporting and also what “informed observers” think. Last night, I heard a TV anchor remark in passing, “We just read that Social Security is in the red.”

Baloney. The truth-if truth is still relevant to Washington politics-is that Social Security has never contributed a dime to the federal budget deficits. Therefore, cutting Social Security for the elderly will do nothing to relieve the deficit problem. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has made this point, so has President Obama. Not true, the Post story flatly declares.

George Zornick: America’s Top Corporations Pay Half of Taxes They Owe

Particularly in recent months, Republicans have gotten a lot of mileage out of the claim that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes. “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax,” Rick Perry said in his presidential announcement speech. “A majority of American households paid no income tax in 2009. Zero. Zip. Nada,” declared Senator John Cornyn of Texas this summer.

The truth behind the truth, of course, is that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes because they don’t earn enough money. For example, a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 isn’t required to pay any income taxes, because they are presumably stretched thin enough already. The elderly, poor and young receive various tax credits that exempt them from having to pay already meager incomes to the federal government.

If Republicans really wanted to go after tax freeloaders, they ought to start talking about big corporations. Today, Citizens for Tax Justice released a damning report detailing how many large corporations paid ridiculously low tax rates on billions in profit-and in some cases, actually got money from the government.

Important News You May Have Missed Dept.: While you and I have been spending the fall worrying about the secret talks of the Congressional supercommittee or trying to determine whether it would be a fun idea to dress as Rick Santorum for Halloween, other even more fascinating news events have been occurring.

I am thinking in particular of a recent story out of Dallas: “Man Allegedly Beat Woman With Frozen Armadillo.”

Here’s a test. Would you rather hear some details about the Congressional supercommittee or more about the armadillo? I thought so.

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Sexual harassment is a serious subject. But Herman Cain isn’t. Honestly, I tried. I read his book. I watched the debate. Had many interesting conversations. But I can’t go there anymore. I do not believe that under any circumstances the Republicans are going to vote for a motivational speaker who seems to regard running for president of the United States as an expanded book tour.

A Herman Cain presidency is much less likely than the chances you’ll be thunked by an armor-plated piece of chili meat while shopping for dinner. So, really, I think I’m done.

Robert Sheer: Too Big to Jail

Can we all agree that a $1 billion swindle represents a lot of money, and the fact that Citigroup agreed last week to pay a $285 million fine to settle SEC charges for “misleading investors” demonstrates a damning admission of culpability?

So why has Robert Rubin, the onetime treasury secretary who went on to become Citigroup chairman during the time of the corporation’s financial shenanigans, never been held accountable for this and other deep damage done to the U.S. economy on his watch?

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Romney and the South Carolina Conundrum

COLUMBIA, S.C.-Can Mitt Romney be dislodged as the fragile but disciplined front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination? If he can, South Carolina is the best bet for the role of spoiler.

Republican primary voters here have historically ratified establishment choices, but the old establishment has been displaced by new forms of conservative political activism, the tea party being only the latest band of rebels.

South Carolina conservatives also seem representative of their peers around the country in being uncertain and more than a trifle confused about the choices they have been handed. They are skeptical of Romney, disappointed by Rick Perry’s early performance, were enchanted by Herman Cain-a spell that may soon be broken-and are not sure what to make of the rest of the field.

George Zornick: Progressives on Supercommittee Marginalized Amidst Deficit Theater

For the austerity class in Washington, yesterday was high theater. The Congressional supercommittee on deficit reduction heard hours of testimony from people who served on other deficit commissions about how best to cut the government’s budget. Both Alan Simpson and Erksine Bowles, of the Bowles-Simpson Commission, testified, as did Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici, who have their own deficit reduction plan.

A morality play about the evils of national debt unfolded: the scene, as set by Domenici, was a fiscal house in disarray-“We have rats, holes in the roof and grass growing window high,” he said. Bowles-a board member at Wall Street megafirm Morgan Stanley-invoked his grandchildren and told the supercommittee not to “fail the country” by not agreeing on a major deficit reduction plan. Rivlin, who helped Representative Paul Ryan craft his Medicare privatization plan, proclaimed that “this committee can change the course of economic history for the better.”

William Rivers Pitt: Republicans Crack Me Up

Upon cracking open the Washington Post home page early Tuesday morning, I counted no less than eleven stories about GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain’s not good very bad day on Monday. That bad day started with a Politico article detailing two separate incidents of accused sexual harassment leveled at Cain in the 1990s. Before anyone had a chance to decide whether or not the charges had merit, Mr. Cain and his people took the report and transmogrified it into the one thing the Washington press corps loves above all else: a juicy cover-up story.

To wit: Mr. Cain and his people changed their minds about how to respond to the Politico report, quite literally, every fifteen minutes or so. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo succinctly summed up the run of the Cain crew’s reaction throughout the day: “1. Politico allegations are false. Story is crap; 2. Yes, there were allegations. But they were false; 3. Yes there were allegations that were false and I don’t know what money was paid; 4. I don’t know whether money was paid. And it would be wrong for me to find out whether money was paid because it’s confidential; 5. There was a in-depth investigation. And I was cleared. But I don’t know anything about it; 6. Here’s the gesture that led to my getting accused of harassment; 7. Okay, I remember some discussion of a settlement number.”

11-11-11 is not a variant of Herman Cain’s much-touted 9-9-9 tax plan, but rather the date of this year’s Veterans Day. This is especially relevant, as the U.S. has now entered its second decade of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in the nation’s history. U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are appearing more and more on the front lines-the front lines of the Occupy Wall Street protests, that is.

Video from the Occupy Oakland march on Tuesday, Oct. 25, looks and sounds like a war zone. The sound of gunfire is nearly constant in the video. Tear-gas projectiles were being fired into the crowd when the cry of “Medic!” rang out. Civilians raced toward a fallen protester lying on his back on the pavement, mere steps from a throng of black-clad police in full riot gear, pointing guns as the civilians attempted to administer first aid.

Diane Roberts: The Republican ‘Voter Fraud’ Fraud

All over the US, GOP lawmakers have engineered schemes to make voting more difficult. Well, if you can’t win elections fairly…

Presidential candidate and angry white man Newt Gingrich seems nostalgic for the good old Jim Crow poll tax days: he has called for people to have to pass an American historical literacy test before they can vote. His colleagues on the anti-democratic right have not gone quite so far, but 38 states, most of them controlled by Republicans, are concocting all kinds of ingenious ways to suppress the vote. A new report from New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice says that more than five million people – enough to swing the 2012 presidential election – could find themselves disenfranchised, especially if they’re poor or old or students or black or Latino.

Ruth Marcus: Campaign 2012: Welcome to the slugfest

Forget hope and change. President Obama’s reelection campaign is going to be based on fear and loathing: fear of what a Republican takeover would mean, and loathing of whomever the Republican nominee turns out to be.

Of course the Obama campaign will attempt to present the affirmative case for his reelection, citing legislative achievements, foreign policy successes and the current flurry of executive actions. But his strategists have clearly concluded that selling the president will not be enough, and the contours of the ugly months ahead are becoming increasingly apparent.

All campaigns are about drawing contrasts. Even when running for reelection with the benefit of a healthy economy in 1996, Bill Clinton campaigned against the imaginary Dole-Gingrich ticket with an early and intense barrage of ads tying the eventual Republican nominee to the unpopular House speaker.

Phyllis Bennis: Occupy Wall Street: A Postcard from Amazing Times

The Occupy Wall Street movement claimed a little scrap of earth in Zuccotti Park on behalf of all of us, and created a live-in soapbox from which to challenge inequality.

This is an extraordinary time. The astonishing Occupy Wall Street movement emerged as the heart of our 99%, claimed the little scrap of earth in Zuccotti Park on behalf of all of us, and created a live-in soapbox from which to challenge inequality – how the 1% controls our economy, buys off our government, imposes their wars, and avoids paying their taxes. It both reflects and marks an end to the popular desperation that had taken over so much of our political life – instead, it applied the lessons of the Arab Spring, unexpectedly shaping a connection reaching far beyond the activist core, quickly moving from Wall Street to Main Street to the small parks, the steps of government buildings, the public squares from Oakland, California to Ames, Iowa, from Chicago to DC, to cities and towns across the country.

The challenges facing this new and different movement are legion, but joining its pop-up iterations is an incredible gift to those of us fighting that same outraged despair that first brought this vast disparity of folks to occupy what is now the people’s squares. In New York City, I huddled with GritTV’s Laura Flanders and Peace Action’s Judith LeBlanc, in the driving rain at the smaller-than-usual general assembly at Occupation Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park the other night. It was hard to see over the sea of umbrellas, and the meeting was pretty short. But the people’s mic functioned fine in the rain, as folks discussed a variety of ways to act in solidarity with our Oakland contingent, who had faced a particularly brutal police assault, critically injuring a young Iraq War veteran from Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace.

Without drawing much attention to it yet, one of the leading groups promoting same-sex marriage has taken an interesting tack, one that implicitly acknowledges the complicated relationship between gay Americans and another minority group not firmly on their side.

Two weeks ago the Human Rights Campaign inaugurated a new effort to move public opinion nationwide by unveiling a video testimonial, being distributed on the Internet for now, in which Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, speaks up for same-sex marriage, not yet legal in New Jersey.

Robert Dreyfuss: NATO in Libya: Is Syria Next?

Now that NATO is closing up shop in Libya, will it turn to Syria?

Right now, the answer is no. But if the fragmented Syrian opposition-bolstered by Turkey, a member of NATO, which is turning increasingly against Syrian President Assad-manages to set up a Benghazi-like enclave either inside Syria or across the border in Turkey, anything goes.

To be sure, there are lots of differences between Libya and Syria. In Libya, an armed opposition backed by wholesale defections from the armed forces, turned a rebellion into a civil war, but so far in Syria the armed forces have mostly stayed loyal to Assad. Libya, a desert with oil wells, was a much easier target than complex, urban Syria, which occupies a vastly more strategic piece of real estate. And, though Russia, China and the Arab League abandoned Muammar Qaddafi, so far it seems unlikely that they’ll do so in Syria.

That hasn’t stopped hawks from suggesting that it’s time to intervene in Syria, too. And some, though not all, of the Syrian opposition is clamoring for military help from the United States and NATO.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous: Egyptian Military Targets Pro-Democracy Bloggers

Egypt: Press Crackdown, Continued

One of Egypt’s most prominent bloggers and revolutionary activists is behind bars

Alaa Abdel Fattah, 29, was summoned before a military prosecutor on Sunday to face charges of inciting violence, stealing military weaponry and assaulting military personnel during an Oct. 9 military crackdown on a protest of mostly Coptic demonstrators that left at least 27 people dead and hundreds more wounded. The military court ordered Abdel Fattah to be detained for 15 days, pending further investigation, after he declined to answer any questions as a matter of principle.

The case, which has sparked widespread outrage, delineates a struggle that has been steadily growing against the ruling military council in post-Mubarak Egypt.

César Chelala: Executing the Mentally-Ill is a Crime

Christopher Johnson’s execution by the State of Alabama creates serious doubts about the justice of a measure that is widely criticized by human rights advocates throughout the world. According to the group Equal Justice Initiative, the Alabama Supreme Court planned the execution without even engaging in a meaningful review of the case.

Christopher Johnson was convicted of killing his son in 2005. Johnson’s attorneys claimed that he wasn’t guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. However, during the trial, Johnson asked the trial judge for permission to represent himself. Despite ample evidence that Johnson had a long history of mental illness, the judge allowed him to do so. Although during his detention Johnson showed destructive behavior associated with mental illness, the trial judge sentenced Mr. Johnson to death. He was executed on October 21, 2011.

We may be reaching an inflection point, the moment when the terms of the political argument change decisively. Three indicators: An important speech by Rep. Paul Ryan, the increasingly sharp tone of President Obama’s rhetoric, and the success of Occupy Wall Street in resisting attempts to marginalize the movement.

The most telling was Ryan’s address at the Heritage Foundation last week. House Republicans regard Ryan as their prophet, their intellectual and their resident wonk. Usually, he carefully lays out the numbers and issues visionary promises of how cutting government (and taxes on the wealthy) will lead us down a blissful path to prosperity. He’s sunny when everyone else is grumpy.

John Nichols: ‘Idolizer of the Market’: Paul Ryan Can’t Quite Hear the Catholic Church’s Call for Economic Justice

Paul Ryan accuses President Obama of engaging in “sowing social unrest and class resentment.” The House Budget Committee chairman says the president is “preying on the emotions of fear, envy and resentment.”

Paul Ryan accuses Elizabeth Warren of engaging in class warfare. The House Budget Committee chairman the Massachusetts US Senate candidate is guilty of engaging in the “fatal conceit of liberalism.”

But what about the Catholic Church, which has taken a far more radical position on economic issues than Obama or Warren? What does the House Budget Committee chairman, a self-described “good Catholic,” do then?

If you’re Paul Ryan, you don’t decry the church for engaging in class warfare. Instead, you spin an interpretation of the church’s latest pronouncements that bears scant resemblance to what’s been written-but that just happens to favor your political interests.

Leslie Savan: The ‘War on Halloween’: A Trick or a Treat for Conservatives?

Have you heard? The War on Halloween is on! But, unlike other culture wars, this one could become very confusing for conservatives to decide which side they’re on.

The “War on Halloween” is not as simple as the “War on Christmas,” that package of phony fury O’Reilly and Limbaugh give to the nation annually. The politics of that holiday are clear-cut: Christmas=America. Those who don’t obey the equation are essentially crucifying Christ, nailing Him to the cross with the dozens of flag pins they ripped from the lapels of His tunic.

But Halloween is a trickier matter. Many on the religious right have long shunned the holiday as a force of evil. As a Christian website puts it, “Halloween is based upon modern Wiccan interpretations of pre-Christian paganism and involve occultic rites and practices that Christians should have no dealings with.”

Francis Beinecke: One More Reason to Oppose Keystone XL Pipeline: Questions about State Department Handling of Review

On Friday, I joined several environmental leaders in calling for the State Department to conduct an investigation into the department’s handling of the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. More than a dozen members of Congress also requested an inquiry into potential conflicts of interest.

Our colleagues at Friends of the Earth examined relevant documents and found that TransCanada, the company behind Keystone XL, was allowed to screen the companies bidding to do the project’s environmental impact study; the company that was chosen listed TransCanada as a “major client.” It also does business for many of the same oil companies that stand to benefit from the pipeline.

Meanwhile, State Department officials coached TransCanada on messaging-and seemed to be in cahoots with them on skirting safety protections.  From the start, they have shown a disposition towards the pipeline proponents at the expense of public – exemplified by the Secretary’s comments a year ago that she was “inclined” to approve it.

Danny Schetcher: The Question OWS Hears Most: ‘What’s Your Agenda?’

One of the most frequently repeated, recycled and dismissive questions about Occupy Wall Street is its supposed lack of an “agenda.”

The “what do you people want” question has featured in media interviews almost to the exclusion of all others.

It’s as if the movement won’t be taken seriously by some, unless and until, it enunciates list of “demands” and defines itself in a way that can allow others, especially a cynical media, to label and pigeonhole it.

Many are just frothing at the mouth for some political positions they can expose as shallow or absurd. Teams of pundits are being primed to go on the attack once they have some bullet points to refute.

The Occupy movements, in addition to being some of the most important activist movements to come along in the United States in several decades, have helped underscore several societal crises. For example, the failure of the establishment media and the rise of the beltway pundit class, the disappearance of public space, and also vanishing civil liberties, to name only a few.

Occupy has also served as a reminder of the ever-present police state, which rather than acting to “serve and protect,” oftentimes crushes and suppresses freedom of expression.  We’ve witnessed this in obvious, overt, batshit crazy behavior like police using horses to stampede into a Times Square crowd, and when Oakland police turned their city into a war zone. But there are subtler, far sneakier ways so-called public servants such as firefighters and the police, and by extension city officials, use the law as a weapon, or a convenient scapegoat, to control a rebellious faction of the population.

Michael Weisbrot: Obama Administration Escalates Confrontation With Iran: Why?

The Obama administration announced two weeks ago that a bumbling Iranian-American used car salesman had conspired with a U.S. government agent posing as a representative of Mexican drug cartels, to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. This brought highly skeptical reactions from experts here across the political spectrum.  

But even if some of this tale turns out to be true, the handling of such accusations is inherently political. For example, the U.S.  government’s 9/11 commission investigated the links between the attackers and the Saudi ruling family, but refused to make public the results of that investigation. The reason is obvious: there is dirt there and Washington doesn’t want to create friction with a key ally. And keep in mind that this is about complicity with an attack on American soil that killed 3000 people.

Robert Fisk: What the Killing of Gaddafi Means to Syria

Two days before Gaddafi was murdered, I was reading the morning newspapers in Beirut and discovered a remarkable story on most front pages.

At the time, the mad ex-emperor of Libya was still hiding in Sirte, but there was this quotation by the US Secretary of State, La Clinton, speaking in Tripoli itself. “We hope he can be captured or killed soon,” she said, “so that you don’t have to fear him any longer.” This was so extraordinary that I underlined La Clinton’s words and clipped the article from one of the front pages. (My archives are on paper.) “We hope he can be captured or killed soon.” Then bingo. Nato bombs his runaway convoy and the old boy is hauled wounded from a sewage pipe and done away with.

Now in an age when America routinely assassinates its enemies, La Clinton’s words were remarkable because they at last acknowledged the truth. Normally, the State Department or the White House churned out the usual nonsense about how Gaddafi or Bin Laden or whoever must be “brought to justice” – and we all know what that means. But this week, the whole business turned much darker. Asked about his personal reaction, Obama the Good said that no one wanted to meet such an end, but that Gaddafi’s death should be a lesson “to all dictators around the world”. And we all knew what that meant. Principally, the message was to Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Maybe, ran the subtext, they would meet the same sticky end.

Amy Dean: Occupy Wall Street and America’s Democratic Tradition

I was recently talking with some friends who work at the Chicago Board of Trade. Hearing the opinions voiced by Occupy Wall Street protesters, the traders agreed that they’d seen disturbing changes within their industry. While they might have written off criticisms 15 years ago, they’ve since watched the financial sector become more and more based on speculative gambling-with people trying to make profits by moving money around rather than by supporting real economic activity. To a surprising degree, my friends were willing to consent that the system has grown bankrupt. Yet, while they share some of the activists’ criticisms, they don’t like the street protests and are doubtful that the occupations will help our democracy.

I have been sympathetic to their concerns, but I ultimately disagree with their assessment of the protests’ importance. Occupy Wall Street is rooted in a deep tension in American life. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville illuminated how the conflict between equality and liberty is at the center of the American political drama. That we are now having an open and spirited debate about the optimal balance between these two values is a crucial, and welcome, development.

Just as the president gets his political footing, his arrogant chief of staff trips him up

Politico’s Roger Simon has an “exclusive” interview with White House chief of staff Bill Daley, and you really have to read it to believe it. It’s a portrait of arrogant self-promotion. The piece is headlined, “Bill Daley, Unplugged.” I hope that President Obama reads it, and decides to unplug Daley, for good. Yes, I know he has announced he’s leaving after the 2012 election. That’s not nearly soon enough.

Former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was no slouch when it came to arrogant self-promotion, either. Remember when he was the obvious unnamed source behind two Washington Post puff pieces, “Why Obama Needs Rahm at the Top” and “Hotheaded Emanuel May Be White House Voice of Reason,” at the height of the administration’s early 2010 disarray? (If you don’t have time to click the links, it’s OK, the headlines say it all.)

Cenk Uygur: Why Republican Voters Can’t Make Up Their Mind

It seems like every couple of weeks we have a new leader in the Republican field. Michele Bachmann has been there, so have Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, and now Herman Cain sits atop the field. Why can’t Republican voters make up their minds?

Here’s why — they don’t even believe their own positions. They want someone who is massively conservative and at the same time agrees with them on policy. The problem is the voters aren’t nearly as conservative as they think they are. So they love the tough talking governor from Texas until they find out he wants to get rid of Social Security. They like that Michele Bachmann doesn’t believe in global warming until they realize that she doesn’t believe in it because she’s bat-shit crazy.

If you choose ignorance as your party ideology why should it surprise you that you have completely ignorant party leaders? But it does, every single time. Watch, it’ll happen again. This time with Herman Cain.

Ruth Coniff: Elizabeth Warren Is Scary!

The Republicans are trying to sink Elizabeth Warren by linking her to the Occupy Wall Street protests. But the nation’s top financial reformer is not backing down.

The furor started when Warren told the Daily Beast, “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do. I support what they do.”

The Republicans jumped all over what they view as an exciting new weapon in the contentious Massachusetts Senate race.

Check out “”Matriarch of Mayhem,” the Massachusetts Republican Party’s ad, which uses protest images and quotes taken out of context to imply that Elizabeth Warren advocates actual, physical violence.

Even among negative campaign ads, this is a new low.

You knew Wall Street and the Republicans were afraid of Warren and her idea for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. But you haven’t seen the depths of their nightmarish fears until you’ve listened to the scary music and seen the video.