Tag: Opinion

The memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King opened on the Mall in Washington. Dr. King will take his place with Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The monument features a 30-foot figure of Dr. King, hewn from granite, looking forward and very stern. This is the look of a man of action whose work is not done.

That is its power.

Dr. King was a man of peace, but he was not a passive man. He believed that confrontation in the face of indignation preceded reconciliation. To have healing, you must pull the glass from the wound. He was, as he said, a drum major for justice. He knew that peace was the presence of justice, not the absence of noise. And it could only be achieved through struggle, through the concerted actions of engaged citizens.

Maureen Dowd: Darth Vader Vents

WHY is it not a surprise to learn that Dick Cheney’s ancestor, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea?

Scorched earth runs in the family.

Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues.

Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong.

His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune.

Nicholas D. Kristoff: Did We Drop the Ball on Unemployment?

WHEN I’m in New York or Washington, people talk passionately about debt and political battles. But in the living rooms or on the front porches here in Yamhill, Ore., where I grew up, a different specter wakes friends up in the middle of the night.

It’s unemployment.

I’ve spent a chunk of summer vacation visiting old friends here, and I can’t help feeling that national politicians and national journalists alike have dropped the ball on jobs. Some 25 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed – that’s more than 16 percent of the work force – but jobs haven’t been nearly high enough on the national agenda.

When Americans are polled about the issue they care most about, the answer by a two-to-one margin is jobs. The Boston Globe found that during President Obama’s Twitter “town hall” last month, the issue that the public most wanted to ask about was, by far, jobs. Yet during the previous two weeks of White House news briefings, reporters were far more likely to ask about political warfare with Republicans.

John Nichols: The Democrats’ Rural Rebellions

Democrats looking to Washington during the long, hot summer for signs of their party’s renewal got little in the way of relief. President Obama’s approval ratings tanked after he compromised away historic Democratic positions in the debt-ceiling fight. The party’s Congressional leaders, who in the spring had seemed prepared to fight off Republican attempts to erode Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, sent so many mixed signals that it was difficult to tell whether the party wanted to fight austerity or embrace it.

Yet beyond the Beltway, a different story has been unfolding. And it holds out promise for a party that needs not just hope but a coherent strategy for the 2012 election season. Dramatic overreach by newly elected Republican governors, who sought to curtail labor rights, undermine local democracy and slash spending for education and local services, has provoked a backlash that draws stark ideological and political lines on fundamental economic questions. And that is winning substantial Democratic victories in unexpected territory, including rural areas where the party suffered its greatest setbacks in 2010.

It took years for Arizona to recover from right-wing Governor Evan Mecham’s disgraceful act to rescind the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in 1989.

Now, on the eve of the unveiling of the national memorial to the civil rights leader in Washington, DC, Attorney General Tom Horne has joined a lone county in Alabama to make Arizona the first state to file a suit against the Obama administration to strike down parts of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 – spurred by the horrific violence encountered by King and civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama – as unconstitutional.

“President Lyndon Johnson’s high spirits were marked as he circulated among the many guests whom he had invited to witness an event he confidently felt to be historic, the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” King wrote. “The bill that lay on the polished mahogany desk was born in violence in Selma, Alabama, where a stubborn sheriff … had stumbled against the future.”

Claiming that sections of the Voting Rights Act are “either archaic, not based in fact,” Horne has indeed stumbled against his own future and Arizona’s unfinished history of voting rights violations.

George Zornick: State Department Issues Flawed Blessing of Keystone XL

The State Department released its final environmental impact assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline Friday, and it’s just as bad as some feared-perhaps worse. The report concludes, as did two prior versions, that there would be “no significant impact” on natural resources near the pipeline route, while also downplaying the potential for increased greenhouse gas emissions.

In a conference call with reporters, Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Dr. Kerri-Ann Jones stressed that “this is not the rubberstamp for this project. The permit that is required for this process has not been approved or rejected at all.”

But the environmental concerns are clearly the main objection to Keystone XL, and the report is widely seen as removing one of the final roadblocks to the project. Environmental groups were quick to blast the results. “The U.S. State Department’s final report on the Keystone XL today is an insult to anyone who expects government to work for the interests of the American people,” the Sierra Club said in a statement.

Mark Engler: Dramatizing Obama’s Climate Dilemma

President Obama now has a clear choice on climate change. Major energy corporations are seeking to build a 1700-mile oil pipeline from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas. The Keystone XL Pipeline would itself carry social and environmental costs: cutting through fragile ecosystems, creating risk of spills, and negatively affecting indigenous communities. But, most significantly, it would be a boon to efforts to exploit the tar sands.

The Canadian tar sands are a particularly dirty source of fossil fuels that could produce egregious carbon emissions. As Elizabeth Kolbert reported at the New Yorker:

   [B]ecause tar-sands oil is so heavy, it has to be very heavily processed, which requires tremendous amounts of energy, usually in the form of natural gas. It’s been estimated that, on what’s known as a well-to-tank basis, tar-sands oil is responsible for eighty percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than ordinary crude.

Prominent climate scientist James Hansen has argued (in a now oft-quoted statement) that “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over” for the climate.

Medea Benjamin: No Way to Honor Dr. King

The ceremonies for the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington DC were kicked off on August 24 at an event billed as Honoring Global Leaders for Peace. But some of those honored are a far cry from King’s beloved community of the poor and oppressed. The tribute to peacemakers, organized by the MLK National Memorial Foundation, was mostly a night applauding warmakers, corporate profiteers and co-opted musicians.

The night started out with great promise when MC Andrea Mitchell mentioned Dr. King’s brilliant anti-war speech Beyond Vietnam as a key to understanding the real Dr. King. And sure, there were a few wonderful moments-a song by Stevie Wonder, a speech about nonviolence by the South African Ambassador and a quick appearance by Jesse Jackson in which he managed to spit out a call to “study war no more.”

But most of the evening’s speakers and guests of honor had little to do with peacemaking. One of the dignitaries thanked at the start of the program was Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, representing a country that uses $3 billion a year in precious U.S. tax dollars to commit war crimes against Palestinians.

Michelle Chen: To Stop Corruption, Fight the Power, Not the People

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and in a world where the gap between the powerful and powerless grows wider each day, corruption in political and economic institutions spreads much faster than shame.

Political power is abused wherever it exists-with scandals ranging from political graft in India to white collar crime on Wall Street to bribery of government regulators in China. Nonetheless, some communities seem especially vulnerable to the cycle of corruption, repression and impunity. And lately, we’ve seen many of them getting fed up with living under regimes that have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Corruption has been one of the major issues driving the unrest across the Middle East and North Africa, and it has catalyzed a Gandhi-esque movement in the streets of New Delhi.

Indian activist Anna Hazare has inspired huge demonstrations in support of his hunger strike to promote a strict, controversial anti-corruption measure known as the Jan Lokpal bill. The government’s recent crackdown on Hazare only steeled protesters’ resolve under the slogan “India is Anna, Anna is India.”

A pair of vitally important news reports were lost recently amid a blizzard of stories about the gyrating stock market and a rogue East Coast earthquake. The first came from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who announced that a deal had been struck to keep US forces in Iraq beyond the oft-publicized December 31st withdrawal deadline and into 2012, contrary to Mr. Obama’s promises. Not long after, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki came forward to say hold on, wait a minute, nothing along these lines has been agreed upon as yet, and negotiations are still ongoing.

snip

A few days after this announcement came a report from the UK Telegraph that is nothing short of staggering:

   America and Afghanistan are close to signing a strategic pact which would allow thousands of United States troops to remain in the country until at least 2024, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

   The agreement would allow not only military trainers to stay to build up the Afghan army and police, but also American special forces soldiers and air power to remain.

   Both Afghan and American officials said that they hoped to sign the pact before the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan in December. Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai agreed last week to escalate the negotiations and their national security advisers will meet in Washington in September.

2024.

More than twelve years from now.

(emphasis mine)

Daphne Wysham: Obama, Earthquake Is a Wakeup Call on Dirty Energy Standards

A 5.9 earthquake – the strongest in over 100 years to strike the East Coast – forced the evacuation of personnel from the White House and U.S. Treasury. Some protesters outside the White House joked that Mother Nature was just trying to jolt President Obama awake to take action on climate change and stop relying on dirty energy. Too bad Obama was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard and couldn’t have heard the joke first-hand.

The protestors’ comments said in jest may not be too far from the truth. In his State of the Union speech this year, President Obama declared support for a so-called “clean energy standard” which he said would include natural gas, nuclear power, and so-called “clean coal.” And the energy options being pursued under the “clean energy standard” endorsed by President Obama may have synergistic and potentially catastrophic consequences that we narrowly escaped in this quake.

Eugene Robinson: MLK’s Vision of Justice

As the nation honors the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with a stirring new memorial on the National Mall, let’s not obscure one of his most important messages in a fog of sentiment. Justice, he told us, is not just a legal or moral question but a matter of economics as well.

In this sense, we’re not advancing toward the fulfillment of King’s dream. We’re heading in the opposite direction.

Having just been recently rolled by tea party Republicans in the debt-ceiling circus, Barack Obama now says that his priority is job creation. Wow, what took him so long?

Jobs should have been Priority No. 1 when he first took office. But instead, the Obamacans put Wall Street banksters first, dumping trillions of dollars from our public funds into saving the butts of greedheads who crashed our economy. They bailed out Wall Streeters without even requiring that the bankers invest in job-creating, grassroots enterprises. The jobs will come later, they said. Wrong.

A fragile recovery did sprout in 2009, but, oxymoronically, it was called a “jobless recovery,” and workers keep getting pink slips. Obama himself explained that jobs are “a lagging economic indicator.” Later, he told us.

Ralph Nader: Verizon Goes From Wireless to Shameless

It was only a matter of time before the “pull down” NAFTA and WTO trade agreements on U.S. wages and jobs would be followed by “pull down” contract demands by U.S. corporations on their unionized workers toward levels of non-unionized laborers.

The most recent illustration of this three-decade reversal of nearly a century of American economic advances for employees is the numerous demands by Verizon

Here are just a few of the concessions the new Verizon CEO, Lowell McAdam, is insisting upon:

   -More power to contract out and offshore jobs to add to the 25,000 already in that category; thereby undermining job security.

   -a freeze on pensions;

   -elimination of the sickness and death benefit program;

   -reduction in sick days; and

   -a major increase in employee contributions to and deductibles under their health insurance coverage.

Mr. Lowell McAdam would surely have trouble feeling the pain of his workers who brave the elements storm or shine to afford him a salary of over 1.5 million dollars PER MONTH plus perks and benefits.

Phil Radford: Koch Industries Lobbying Puts Over 4 Million Americans in Danger

Recent Greenpeace analysis of lobbying disclosure records reveals that since 2005, Koch Industries has hired more lobbyists than Dow and Dupont to fight legislation that could protect over 100 million Americans from what national security experts say is a catastrophic risk from the bulk storage of poison gasses at dangerous chemical facilities such as oil refineries, chemical manufacturing facilities, and water treatment plants. Koch lobbyists even outnumber those at trade associations including the Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute. Only the American Chemistry Council deployed more.

In 2010 Koch Industries and the billionaire brothers who run it were first exposed as a major funder of front groups spreading denial of global warming in a Greenpeace report, which sparked an expose in the New Yorker. Since then, the brothers have been further exposed as a key backer of efforts to roll back environmental, labor, and health protections at the state and federal levels. Through enormous campaign contributions, an army of lobbyists, and funding of think tanks and front groups, David and Charles Koch push their agenda of a world in which their company can operate without regard for the risks they pose to communities, workers, or our environment.

John Feffer: Governments Kill

We make a bargain with our governments. We pay taxes and expect a set of government services in return. And in return for a guarantee of some measure of security, we grant the government a monopoly on legitimate violence. In theory, then, we forswear mob rule and paramilitary organizations, we occasionally accept the death penalty as an appropriate punishment, we delegate the responsibility to declare and prosecute war to our legislative and executive branches, and we put guns into the hands of the army and the police.

Governments, in other words, kill on our behalf. This arrangement is a form of social contract, which means that governments are basically contract killers. Some states, like Nazi Germany, use the tremendous power of arms and bureaucracy to transform their territories into slaughterhouses. Regimes that are merely authoritarian can be equally brutal but display a greater selectivity in their tyranny. In our more decorous democracies, meanwhile, we perfume our conversations with words like “justice” and “national security” to mask the odor of death.

Sally Kohn: Profit on Wall Street, Recession on Main Street

In America’s deeply dysfunctional economy, unemployment is stuck at a ‘new normal’ of 9%, while corporate profits race ahead

n the past few weeks alone, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Cisco Systems and Borders have all announced massive layoffs. Borders is closing its retail stores, auctioning off its holdings and letting go 10,000 employees as, due to online competition, the company is no longer profitable and filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. In contrast, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Cisco Systems have all posted profits in the last few quarters – in some cases, record highs. Alhough according to the latest data, 9.1% of Americans are unemployed, major US corporations are slashing jobs not out of necessity but out of greed. The revived focus in Washington on creating jobs may be pointless if corporate America no longer needs workers.

A new report by Northeastern University’s centre for labour market studies shows (pdf) that corporate downsizing, work hour reductions and the correlated growth of corporate profits directly led to the recession. Big business in America shed jobs and squeezed increased productivity from their remaining workers, but report authors Andrew Sum and Joseph McLachlan write: “None of these productivity gains was shared by wage and salary workers in the form of higher real weekly earnings.” Instead, corporations increased their profits “at a higher relative rate than in any other post second world war recession.”

The White House was rocked Tuesday, not only by a 5.9-magnitude earthquake, but by the protests mounting outside its gates. More than 2,100 people say they’ll risk arrest there during the next two weeks. They oppose the Keystone XL pipeline project, designed to carry heavy crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

A “keystone” in architecture is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the arch together; without it, the structure collapses. By putting their bodies on the line-as more than 200 have already at the time of this writing-these practitioners of the proud tradition of civil disobedience hope to collapse not only the pipeline, but the fossil-fuel dependence that is accelerating disruptive global climate change.

Phyllis Bennis: Too Soon to Declare Victory

The origins of the Libyan transition emerged very much in the context of the Arab Spring – a popular uprising against a brutal dictatorship. But unlike others in the neighborhood – Egypt and Tunisia especially, but also Bahrain, and even Syria – Libyans quickly took up arms on a large scale to challenge the regime’s assault. That initial decision soon led to calls for a Western no-fly zone, and quickly to the welcoming of direct US/NATO/Qatari military intervention based on the UN resolution’s “all necessary measures” language.

Despite the resolution’s focus on protecting civilians, it was U.S., European, and NATO officials who made the actual decisions about the use of force – and quickly the NATO planes soon began what one Al Jazeera reporter described as “openly functioning as the air force of the opposition army.” Particularly in these last few days of fast-moving gains by the opposition, air power played a disproportionately important role. That means that the ability of opposition forces to move into Tripoli, take control of at least parts of the capital so quickly, and potentially accede to power, was dependent on NATO.

Donna Smith: Nurses Say: Come Join Us on September 1 on Main Street, Don’t Return to DC

Main Street, USA –  Nurses call their neighbors and  their elected officials  to come to Main Street on September 1, even as many of the elected officials continue chiding one another about returning to DC.

Main Street is where the damage has been done and is being felt most deeply; DC is where deals are cut to protect Wall Street with breath-taking regularity.  This is not a time when political posturing for some distant election cycle by those largely insulated from the harsh financial realties they helped create ought to take precedence over the real-time, real-life needs of millions.

Rebecca Smith and Jill Shenker: Domestic Workers Struggle Now Like Women in ‘The Help’

The movie “The Help” has attracted throngs of movie-goers, swept up in the story of domestic workers struggling for dignity and respect in Civil Rights-era Mississippi. Viewers might be surprised to learn that in the current era, domestic workers continue to live out those same struggles across America and throughout the world.

Back in the 1930s, under the New Deal, most workers won the rights to organize and bargain collectively, and secured minimum wage and overtime protections. But that wasn’t true for domestic workers.

At a time when housekeepers and nannies were overwhelmingly African American women, these workers were shut out partly because Southern senators refused to vote for laws that covered them. Some of these exclusions from our most basic workplace rights still remain in place.

Today, domestic workers in the United States and around the world are still largely women of color, and primarily immigrant women of color. They struggle to support their own families while they labor every day in support of others. Very few are afforded health care, so their families go without.

It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt.

Admittedly, corruption among our elites generally and in Washington in particular has become so widespread and blatant as to fall into the “dog bites man” category. But the nauseating gap between the Administration’s propaganda and the many and varied ways it sells out average Americans on behalf of its favored backers, in this case the too big to fail banks, has become so noisome that it has become impossible to ignore the fetid smell.

The Administration has now taken to pressuring parties that are not part of the machinery reporting to the President to fall in and do his bidding. We’ve gotten so used to the US attorney general being conveniently missing in action that we have forgotten that regulators and the AG are supposed to be independent. As one correspondent noted by e-mail, “When officials allegiances are to El Supremo rather than the Constitution, you walk the path to fascism.”

Ben Adler: Cognitive Dissonance: Conservative Media Respond to Libya’s Liberation

The success of the Libyan revolution and toppling of Muammar Qaddafi has put conservative commentators in an awfully tough position. President Reagan had unsuccessfully bombed Libya in order to kill Qaddaffi, and had failed at exacting any revenge for Libya’s murder of hundreds of American civilians on Pan Am flight 103. President Bush had worked to normalize relations with Libya and claimed Qaddafi’s willingness to give up weapons programs as evidence of the Iraq invasion’s success at scaring the bad guys straight.

But Qaddafi remained a dictator and a routine violator of human rights. Conservatives say the United States has an obligation to intervene militarily to depose hostile regimes such as Qaddafi’s. But it’s awfully embarrassing for them when it turns out that it is a Democrat who does so, and at considerably lower cost than we paid in Iraq. So how did the conservative media respond on Monday?

Eugene Robinson: Perry’s Big Mouth Is Giving Republicans Headaches

In theory, Democrats should be nervous about Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s decision to enter the presidential race. In practice, though, it’s Republicans who have zoomed up the anxiety ladder into freak-out mode.

To clarify, not all Republicans are reaching for the Xanax, just those who believe the party has to appeal to centrist independents if it hopes to defeat President Obama next year. Also, those who believe that calling Social Security “an illegal Ponzi scheme” and suggesting that Medicare is unconstitutional might not be the best way to win the votes of senior citizens.

Richard Wolff: Austerity: Why Capitalism Is Choosing Plan B

Across US states, governors are forcing through Greek-style austerity measures. Corporations wouldn’t have it any other wayLast week, Democratic governors in New York and Connecticut repeated the austerity politics of Greece’s Prime Minister Pappandreou and Portugal’s former Prime Minister Socrates. In doing so, they likewise imitated the austerity politics of their Republican and Democratic counterparts across virtually all 50 states.

Austerity for labor and the public is everywhere capitalism’s Plan B. Even capitalists now see that capitalism’s Plan A failed.

Zachary Newkirk: Rewrite, Sugarcoat, Ignore: 8 Ways Conservatives Misremember American History-for Partisan Gain

The mortgage crisis began in 2006 and it’s all President Obama’s fault-at least according to Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity recently blamed Obama-“his policies, his economic plan, his fault”-for the mortgage crisis, ignoring who was actually president (that would be George W. Bush) as the housing market slipped.

Hannity’s is just one example of the selective memory and historical revision frequently on display in the conservative movement. Right-wing pundits, politicians and pseudo-historians are nibbling away at objective historical truths to rewrite history for present-day purposes, and hardly any topic is off-limits: glorifying the “Reagan Revolution” to children, sugarcoating the Jim Crow South and revising textbooks to offer a favorable view on Phyllis Schlafly-among many others.

Below, read about eight ways in which conservatives try to rewrite, sugarcoat or ignore aspects of American history.

Mark Weibrot: No Tarp Relief for Haiti’s Homeless

Individual Americans donated a total of $1.4bn after the 2010 earthquake, yet 600,000 Haitians are still living in tents. Why?

Nineteen months after the earthquake, almost 600,000 Haitian people are still living in camps, mostly under tents and tarps. Despite the billions of dollars of aid pledged by governments and donors since the earthquake, there are probably less than 50,000 that have been resettled. And for the 600,000 homeless, the strategy seems to be moving in the direction of evictions – without regard as to where they might end up.

“The government, in collaboration with international donors and some NGOs, is trying to pretend that there is no land,” says Etant Dupain, an activist with the group Bri Kouri Novel Gaye (Noise Travels, News Spreads). His group is organising to stop the evictions, and he was present in the confrontation in Barbancourt on Saturday, where he tried to defuse the confrontation by talking to the landlord, whom he happened to know. “But there is land,” Dupain said to the landlord. “They gave a big piece of land to Minustah, and this was cultivated land.”

Indeed, this seems to be the heart of the problem: the international donors, led by the US, do not seem to care enough to resolve the problem by “building back better”, as President Clinton promised after the earthquake. Or building much of anything, really. (Clinton heads up the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission – which, until recently, was called the Haiti Interim Reconstruction Commission; he is also the UN’s special envoy to Haiti.)

Jim Hightower: Dim Bulbs in Congress

Our problem in Washington is this: we have too many 5-watt bulbs sitting in 100-watt sockets.

Any doubt about this was erased in July when House tea partiers joined old-school right-wing ranters to pass a light bulb bill. This was the culmination of a loopy crusade by the billionaire Koch brothers to stop the spread of energy-efficient light bulbs.

Say what? Yes, Koch front groups drummed up a non-issue by howling that Big Government is “telling us what kind of light bulbs we can buy.”

Libya, a tiny country of deserts with some oil wells, was never a particularly important country, strategically, unless you’re an historian of the Roman Empire, when Libya was the empire’s breadbasket, or of Italian imperialism. In 1969, when Muammar Qaddafi and Abdul Salam Jalloud-who, it seems, recently defected in advance of the deluge-seized power, they were less-than-well-schooled copies of the then-fading Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, who was Qaddafi’s inspiration. Unfortunately, Qaddafi took power as an Arab nationalist at the end of nationalism’s heyday, and never quite figured out to reinvent himself. For a time, he tried to portray himself as the harbinger of the Third Way, halfway between capitalism and communism, but if that inspired anyone at all, it was Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who then tried to invent their own version of the Third Way.

And now Qaddafi is gone. A leader who was probably mentally deranged during most or all of his reign, given to mood swings and paranoid outbursts, is no more. That can’t be bad, as far as the long-suffering population of Libya is concerned.

New York Times Editorial: Homeowners Need Help

Neither Congress, nor federal regulators, nor state or federal prosecutors have yet to conduct a thorough investigation into the mortgage bubble and financial bust. We welcomed the news that the Justice Department is investigating allegations that Standard & Poor’s purposely overrated toxic mortgage securities in the years before the bust. We hope the investigative circle will widen.

But a lot more needs to be done to address the continuing damage from the mortgage debacle.

Tens of millions of Americans are being crushed by the overhang of mortgage debt. And Congress and the White House have yet to figure out that the economy will not recover until housing recovers – and that won’t happen without a robust effort to curb foreclosures by modifying troubled mortgage loans.

Mazher Ali: Let’s ‘Make Them’ End the Great Recession

We can no longer allow a hopelessly unreasonable minority in a severely corrupted system to dictate the terms of our economy.

Did you breathe a sigh of relief when President Barack Obama signed the debt deal into law earlier this month? If not, you weren’t the only one.

Raising the national debt ceiling may have forestalled an immediate U.S. default and credit collapse, but the deal will do absolutely nothing to address the real problems of our time: stubbornly high unemployment and a suffocating economy. Recovering from this Great Recession and achieving longer-term stability require a broad, informed, and unified movement to battle the corporate-backed powers that are waging economic war on working Americans.

Karen Greenberg: Crisis of Confidence: How Washington Lost Faith in America’s Courts

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus.  The event that “changed everything” did turn out to change Washington in ways more startling than most people realize.  On terrorism and national security, to take an obvious (if seldom commented upon) example, the confidence of the U.S. government seems to have been severely, perhaps irreparably, shaken when it comes to that basic and essential American institution: the courts.

If, in fact, we are a “nation of laws,” you wouldn’t know it from Washington’s actions over the past few years. Nothing spoke more strikingly to that loss of faith, to our country’s increasing incapacity for meeting violence with the law, than the widely hailed decision to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden.

Beth Wellington: The Myth of Mountaintop Removal Mining

Big Coal says it’s a tough choice: we can have prosperity and jobs or a pristine environment, but not both. That’s a Big Lie

CNN correspondent Soledad O’Brien’s recent piece on mountaintop removal (MTR) in the Appalachian mountains has the troubling title, “Steady job or healthy environment: what [sic] would you choose?”

How about we choose both?

In any case, MTR does not, despite industry claims, deliver employment to offset its environmental damage. It’s simply a win-win for Big Coal and its political supporters, and a lose-lose for ordinary people who live in mining areas. Whatever the industry would have you believe, basing an economy on coal is not a sustainable development plan. A study by the Appalachian Regional Commission noted the effects of mining on employment in Central Appalachia:

“As employment in Central Appalachia’s mining sector has declined over time…many counties that were already typically experiencing relatively poor and tenuous economic circumstances…have been unable to successfully adapt to changing economic conditions.”

Washington – It’s hard to argue with President Obama’s call for Bashar al-Assad, the bloodthirsty Syrian dictator, to step down. But it’s also hard to discern any logic or consistency in the administration’s handling of the ongoing tumult in the Arab world.

It is obvious that Assad, like Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi, has no intention of surrendering power voluntarily. It is also clear that Assad’s savagery is a match for Gaddafi’s. Both used armored columns to put down peaceful protests. Both ordered assassinations and arrests. Both used naval vessels to shell cities that had become hotbeds of unrest.

So do we give Assad the Gaddafi treatment? Does Obama follow up his statement with a barrage of cruise missiles? Do we involve ourselves in yet another Middle Eastern war?

William Rivers Pitt: The Unacceptables

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure. ~ Mark Twain

And so begins again the Herculean task of wrapping my poor, abused mind around yet another crop of Faustian caricatures lined up to scrap and scrape for the Republican presidential nomination. They seem to get worse every year, but this time around, there are definitely a lot more bananas in the bunch.

Let’s see. We have Newt Gingrich, who pointedly continues to declare that he remains a viable candidate, despite having blown four tires and an engine immediately after leaving the starting line. We have Rick Santorum, whose name, when Googled, is given a whole new definition that appears at the top of the search engine list (presumably despite the best efforts of Mr. Santorum’s campaign and supporters). There is Ron Paul, whose much-ballyhooed libertarianism fails to encompass his desire to give the Federal government whole and complete control of a woman’s reproductive process.  There is Jon Huntsman, who seems like a fairly balanced guy (he has openly declared his belief in evolution and global warming), which means he is utterly doomed in the GOP primary chase. There’s Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, Thaddeus McCotter, and Buddy Roemer, too…and if you said “Who?” to any or all of those names, you’re far from alone.

Edward B. Barbier: Economics is Always the First Casualty of Politics

Both the past wild week of debt negotiations in Congress as well as the debt downgrade of the US by Standard & Poor represents once again the Barbier dictum: Economics is always the first casualty of politics.

In my opinion, the Obama Administration made a fundamental mistake earlier this year in not endorsing the Bowles-Simpson plan on deficit reduction that called for a combination of revenue increases, spending cuts and entitlement and tax reforms as the basis of a plan for deficit reduction over the medium term, while at the same time arguing that there is the need for continued government spending on selected infrastructure and investment opportunities in the short term while continuing to be in recession.  From the beginning of the 2008-9 recession, such short-term government spending needed to be supported by a number of economic incentives and policies to stimulate private sector investment, too.  However, as long as the US economy remains in a recession with lack of consumer or private investment spending, public sector spending in the short term is necessary.  But by adopting the Bowles-Simpson plan immediately, the Obama Administration would have signaled to the markets and the rating agencies that tackling US deficits and debt in the medium and long term, once economic recovery had started in earnest, would be the main priority.

We have a tendency to elect presidents who seem like the antitheses of their immediate predecessors – randy young Kennedy the un-Eisenhower, earnest truth-telling Carter the un-Nixon, charismatic Reagan the un-Carter, randy young Clinton the un-H.W. Bush, cool and cerebral Obama the un-W.

So Rick Perry fits right into that winning contrapuntal pattern. He’s the very opposite of careful and sober and understated, in his first days as an official candidate suggesting President Obama maybe doesn’t love America (“Go ask him”) and that loose monetary policy is “treasonous.” (“Look, I’m just passionate about the issue,” he explained later about his anti-Federal Reserve outburst, before switching midsentence to first-person plural, “and we stand by what we said.”)

Yet the most troubling thing about Perry (and Michele Bachmann and so many more), what’s new and strange and epidemic in mainstream politics, is the degree to which people inhabit their own Manichaean make-believe worlds. They totally believe their vivid fictions.

Charles M Blow: Obama in the Valley

I have often thought that there must be an uncanny valley of politics, a point at which particular politicians rouse our discomfort because there’s something about them that people connect with, but there’s something else about them – intangible, unbelievable and not relatable – that produces a sense of unease.

It can be found in the “Artificial Intelligence” of Michele Bachmann and her pull-the-string-in-the-middle-of-my-back compulsion to repeat the same red-meat responses no matter the question. It’s the Buzz Lightyear-come-to-life bravado of Rick Perry, complete with delusions of grandeur and accomplishment. And it’s pretty much everything about the mechanical “I, Republican” Mitt Romney.

But one person I never thought would fall into this valley was Barack Obama, the charismatic candidate who electrified the electorate in 2008 and whom many saw as the fulfillment of the dream of the even-more-electrifying Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet here Obama is, down in the valley, struggling to connect with the American people and failing, increasingly coming across as dispassionate to some and outright revolting to others.

John Nichols: Mitt Romney, Dark Prince of Oligarchy, Battles the Demons of Democracy

The gaffe-prone candidacies of Michele “Elvis” Bachmann and Rick “C’mon, Men, Let’s String Us Up Some Bernanke” Perry, and the slapstick non-candidacy of Sarah “Two If By Sea” Palin, are merely the cheap theater of an ill-defined Republican presidential race. The real drama of the 2012 race continues to come from the CEO party’s CEO candidate: Willard Mitt Romney.

It is Romney, the button-down professional who was born to the corporate class and remains its truest exemplar in the current contest, who framed the 2012 debate as starkly it ever will be with his sincere declaration that: “corporations are people.”

Romney gets it.

There’s a class war going on in America.

And the dark prince of oligarchy has taken a stand.

Tom Engelhardt: An Obituary for Change in Washington

hose first acts of that first shining full day in the Oval Office are now so forgotten, but on January 21, 2009, among other things, Barack Obama promised to return America to “the high moral ground,” and then signed a straightforward executive order “requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.”  It was an open-and-shut case, so to speak, part of what CNN called “a clean break from the Bush administration.”  On that same day, as part of that same break, the president signed an executive order and two presidential memoranda hailing a “new era of openness,” of sunshine and transparency in government.  As the president put it, “Every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.”

Of course, nothing could have been more Bushian, if you were thinking about “clean breaks,” than America’s wars in the Greater Middle East. When it came to the Iraq War, at least, President Obama arrived in office with another goal and another promise that couldn’t have been more open and shut (or so his supporters thought), not just drawing down Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq, but “ending” it “responsibly.”  (Admittedly, he was also muttering quietly about “residual forces” there, but who noticed?)

Michael Winship: How Washington Could Create Jobs Right Now

The president will make a major speech on jobs shortly after Labor Day. According to the Associated Press, “It is likely to include tax cuts to help the middle class, a build-up-America construction program that goes beyond any infrastructure proposal Obama has had already, and targeted help for the particularly worrisome group of people who have remained unemployed for many months in a row.”

All good, but unfortunately, if the past is any indication, what President Obama proposes will not be as bold or far-reaching as many of the ideas presented above. It certainly won’t include my personal favorite, as suggested by Steve Benen at Washington Monthly’s “Political Animal” blog: “Have the White House take the several hundred letters GOP lawmakers have sent to the executive branch since 2009, asking for public investments, and let President Obama announce he’ll gladly fund all of the Republicans’ requests that have not yet been filled. This is especially important when it comes to infrastructure, a sector in which GOP members have pleaded for more investment in their areas…

“If these Republican lawmakers have identified worthwhile projects in need of government spending, which they themselves insist will boost the economy, why not start spending the money GOP officials want to see spent?”

Why not indeed? Alas, such an idea runs smack into more deficits: a deficit of irony among Republicans, certainly, but worse, a deficit of commitment and vision from a White House which until now at least, has been more focused on the pragmatic middle, despite a gainsaying opposition that yields nothing. Still, as Benen writes, “When Republicans say ‘no jobs, no way,’ at least the nation will be able to see where both parties stand, and then choose accordingly next year.” Amen.

Stocks on Wall Street dropped sharply on Thursday, with investors spooked, again, about the euro-zone debt crisis and the sputtering United States economy.

Stocks on Wall Street dropped sharply on Thursday, with investors spooked, again, about the euro-zone debt crisis and the sputtering United States economy.

Yet, even at this hour, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic seem determined to handcuff fiscal policies – the main tools that can increase jobs, consumer demand and economic growth – with an unquestioning devotion to rigid austerity.

Europe’s post-2008 economic problems have differed from America’s in many important ways. Washington has mercifully never had to cope with the problem of a dollar torn apart by the separate taxing and spending policies of 17 sovereign governments.

Joe Conason: What Obama Should Learn From Wisconsin What Obama Should Learn From Wisconsin

With Wisconsin’s epic state Senate recall battle now over, the results carry a clear message that ought to resonate all the way to Washington-and especially the Obama White House. The essence of politics in America today, for Democrats at least, is to understand and communicate the political nature of the opposition.

Having suffered a bad beating last November, the Wisconsin Democrats and their allies have succeeded in building a strong movement that fights back explicitly against the right-wing policies of Gov. Scott Walker’s Republican Party.

Last week, they won two out of six recall campaigns mounted against GOP state senators, which was widely interpreted as a defeat or at best a draw. But on Tuesday, they won all three recall efforts against Democrats, giving them an overall series victory, and cutting deeply into perceived support for the Walker agenda.

Kristina Kallas and Akila Radhakrishnan: Why is the US Waging War on Women Raped in War?

Mandatory sonograms, forced lectures by doctors, humiliating permission slips from abusive husbands, paternalistic opinions from Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, uneducated and patently stupid soundbites from Tea Partiers. That’s not the worst. In this newest wave of the war on women, let’s not forget the U.S. government’s abortion policies toward women in war.

Rape is systematically being used as a weapon of war in conflicts worldwide. During the Rwandan genocide it is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped in 100 days and that approximately 20,000 children were born as a result of rape. Recent reports from Burma indicate that Burmese soldiers have orders to rape women. 387 civilians were raped in Walikale, North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in a 4 day period last year. In 2008 alone, the U.N. Population Fund recorded 16,000 cases of rape in DRC, two-thirds of them adolescent girls and other children, in an area where rape is vastly underreported. Imagine what the real numbers are.

Daniel Greenwood: Cutting Out the Social Safety Net Is No Sign of Bravery

In today’s New York Times, Helene Cooper wrote a news analysis advocating that President Obama slash Medicare and Social Security even though it might cost him reelection. The reporter, however, offers no reason to think that reneging on the basic commitment citizens must have to one another would make anything better. In reality, damaging our basic contract might be highly profitable to Wall Street financiers (who hope to charge commissions for managing retirement funds that Social Security now manages for far less), hedge-fund managers (who can profit as easily by betting against the American economy as by betting for it), and insurance companies (which will profit from increasingly bloated medical costs until the cost of care gets so high that no one can afford it). But cutting back on the basic guarantees we offer citizens, like cutting back on the other essential governmental services that make successful economies possible, will only make our jobs crisis worse.