Tag: Opinion

It is time to stop giving Herman Cain’s unapologetic bigotry a free pass. The man and his poison need to be seen clearly and taken seriously.

Imagine the reaction if a major-party presidential candidate-one who, like Cain, shows actual support in the polls-said he “wouldn’t be comfortable” appointing a Jew to a Cabinet position. Imagine the outrage if this same candidate loudly supported a community’s efforts to block Mormons from building a house of worship.

But Cain’s prejudice isn’t against Mormons or Jews, it’s against Muslims. Open religious prejudice is usually enough to disqualify a candidate for national office-but not, apparently, when the religion in question is Islam.

Joe Nocera: The Tables Are Turned on Murdoch

You have to love the fact that when John Yates resigned on Monday as the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London – a k a Scotland Yard – he complained about the “huge amount of inaccurate, ill-informed and, on occasion, downright malicious gossip” that had finally forced his hand.

My first thought was: He didn’t really say that, did he? My second thought was: Can any human being truly be that unaware?

New York Times Editorial: Signing Away the Right to Govern

It used to be that a sworn oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution was the only promise required to become president. But that no longer seems to be enough for a growing number of Republican interest groups, who are demanding that presidential candidates sign pledges shackling them to the corners of conservative ideology. Many candidates are going along, and each pledge they sign undermines the basic principle of democratic government built on compromise and negotiation.

Both parties have long had litmus tests on issues – abortion, taxation, the environment, the social safety net. The hope was that the candidates would keep their promises, and, when they didn’t, voters who cared deeply about those issues could always pick someone else next time. Human beings, after all, do not come with warranties.

Roger Cohen: The Cameron Collapse

Peter Oborne, writing in the conservative Daily Telegraph, recently suggested that the Conservative British prime minister, David Cameron, was not merely in a mess, he “is in a sewer.”

That seems about right. Cameron lost it over Rupert Murdoch. He showed staggering lack of judgment in hiring Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor, as his first director of communications at Downing Street, a hubristic decision made against the best advice and apparently with a dual aim: to show he was not an old Etonian “toff” and to get favorable treatment from the 37 percent of the British print media owned by Murdoch.

He then spent a fair chunk of time during his first year in office in 26 meetings with various News Corp. honchos, including Rebekah Brooks, who was arrested by the British police Sunday.

John Nichols: Elizabeth Warren Says She’ll Consider Massachusetts Senate Run

On Sunday, when President Obama let it be known that he would not appoint Elizabeth Warren as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it was pretty clear that the Harvard law professor who has become a hero to progressives was going to need a new approach to Washington. It was equally clear that the logical approach was to consider making a run for Ted Kennedy’s old US Senate seat representing Massachusetts.

Warren agreed.

Asked Monday whether she would consider making a run for the seat now occupied by US Senator Scott Brown, R-Wall Street, Warren replied: “I’ve been working 14 hours a day on trying to stand this… agency up, really for more than a year now…. It’s time for a little vacation for me. When I go home, I’ll do more thinking then. But I need to do that thinking not from Washington.”

George Zornich: Who Is Richard Cordray?

When Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a liberal member of the House Financial Services Committee, heard over the weekend that President Obama had nominated Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he wasn’t sure what to think. Not because he was unsure about Cordray’s record- Gutierrez just didn’t know who he was.

“I am not familiar with Attorney General Richard Cordray, but a quick Google search was very reassuring,” Gutierrez said in a statement Monday. “He is the type of strong, experienced leader we need to get the agency fully up and running.”

Cordray may have a very low national profile, but in Ohio-where he’s been active in Democratic politics since the early 90s, and served as state attorney general for two years beginning in 2009-he’s much more of a known commodity.

Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline into a widespread form of preventive detention. The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.” Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under “cruel and unusual punishment,” the reasoning goes.

As early as 1995, a federal judge, Thelton E. Henderson, conceded that so-called “supermax” confinement “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable,” though he ruled that it remained acceptable for most inmates. But a psychiatrist and Harvard professor, Stuart Grassian, had found that the environment was “strikingly toxic,” resulting in hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty.

David Dayen: Grijalva: If You Want to Reduce the Deficit, How About the People’s Budget

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has responded to President Barack Obama, who said progressives would have to be “sold” on deficit reduction. Specifically, he claimed that “if you are a progressive, you should be concerned about debt and deficit just as much as if you’re a conservative.”

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Importantly, the The Progressive Caucus Budget, known as the People’s Budget, accomplishes this without doing any harm in the near term. Quite the opposite. It includes a stimulus package of public works and infrastructure funding to get people working immediately. It brings taxes back to the Clinton level and makes them more progressive. It ends military overspending and is content with spending a little less than the rest of the world combined on the military, rather than more than it. It taxes financial speculation and includes a public option in health care, too.

In other words, the People’s Budget addresses every single root cause that President Obama said drove the deficit to the heights we see now.

Jon Nichols: Rupert Murdoch Has Gamed American Politics Every Bit as Thoroughly as Britain’s

Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch has manipulated not just the news but the news landscape of the United States for decades. He has done so by pressuring the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to alter the laws of the land and regulatory standards in order to give his media conglomerate an unfair advantage in “competition” with more locally focused, more engaged and more responsible media.

It’s an old story: while Murdoch’s Fox News hosts prattle on and on about their enthusiasm for the free market, they work for a firm that seeks to game the system so Murdoch’s “properties” are best positioned to monopolize the discourse.

Robert Kuttner: The End Game: Saving Obama From Himself

As the debt doomsday of August 2 draws closer, what sort of end-game can we imagine?

The worst scenario would be for an outbreak of common sense and self-interest to overtake the extremism of the House Republican caucus. If the Republicans were to accept Obama’s proffered deal, they would weaken Social Security and Medicare — and put the Democrats’ fingerprints on the deed — depriving Democrats of their traditional defense of America’s best loved social programs. They would also get a ten-year deficit-reduction agreement that is mostly program cuts. And they would get an austerity package that guarantees high unemployment as Obama heads into a difficult re-election. And a Democratic president is offering this deal!

The Republicans would also get to savor the spectacle of a badly divided Democratic Party, as the White House twists arms of unwilling House and Senate Democrats to vote for a right-wing package.

Donna Smith: ‘Let ‘Em Eat Peas’: An Elitist Mantra for Our Age

It has been a challenging week for many people.  While our elected officials have been broadly reported to be at odds about exactly how to raise the debt ceiling or not, millions of Americans have no work, are running out of ways to keep their homes – rented or owned, and struggle even to keep the basic necessities for themselves and their families.

Nurses served soup to hungry folks in Lansing, Michigan. There was a stampede of people hoping to secure low-cost housing in Dallas.

Yet in a glaring display of the inability of this nation’s elected leaders to publicly recognize and address the suffering happening across the country – in every Congressional District and in every state – those who have the power to alleviate some of that suffering have decided it’s time to cut the social safety nets of Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security rather than protect and enhance it.  How that will help the economy is unclear to me.  No one has yet explained to me how allowing more people to go belly up helps us now or in the longer term.

It’s official. The Wall Street Journal has been Fox-ified.

It took Rupert Murdoch only three and a half years to get there, starting with the moment he acquired the paper from the dysfunctional Bancroft family in December 2007, a purchase that was completed after he vowed to protect The Journal’s editorial integrity and agreed to a (toothless) board that was supposed to make sure he kept that promise.

Fat chance of that. Within five months, Murdoch had fired the editor and installed his close friend Robert Thomson, fresh from a stint Fox-ifying The Times of London. The new publisher was Leslie Hinton, former boss of the division that published Murdoch’s British newspapers, including The News of the World. (He resigned on Friday.) Soon came the changes, swift and sure: shorter articles, less depth, an increased emphasis on politics and, weirdly, sometimes surprisingly unsophisticated coverage of business.

New York Times Editorial: Blundering Toward Recession: Beyond the Debt Stalemate

“Catastrophic.” “Calamitous.” “Major crisis.” “Self-inflicted wound.” Those are some of the ways Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has described the fallout if Congress fails to raise the debt limit by the Aug. 2 deadline.

In Congressional testimony this week, Mr. Bernanke also warned that the Fed would not be able to fully counter the damage from a default, including the possibility that spiking interest rates would roil borrowers worldwide and worsen the federal budget deficit by making it costlier to finance the nation’s debt.

That’s not all of it. Brinkmanship over the debt limit is only one of many epic economic policy blunders now in the making. Even if lawmakers raise the debt limit on time, the economy is weak and getting weaker, as evidenced by slowing growth and rising unemployment.

Dennis Kucinich: Debt Political Theater Diverts Attention While Americans’ Wealth Is Stolen

The rancorous debate over the debt belies a fundamental truth of our economy — that it is run for the few at the expense of the many, that our entire government has been turned into a machine which takes the wealth of a mass of Americans and accelerates it into the hands of the few. Let me give you some examples.

Take war. War takes the money from the American people and puts it into the hands of arms manufacturers, war profiteers, and private armies. The war in Iraq, based on lies: $3 trillion will be the cost of that war. The war in Afghanistan; based on a misreading of history; half a trillion dollars in expenses already. The war against Libya will be $1 billion by September.

Fifty percent of our discretionary spending goes for the Pentagon. A massive transfer of wealth into the hands of a few while the American people lack sufficient jobs, health care, housing, retirement security.

David Sirota: Toward a New Politics of Food

The easiest way to explain Gallup’s discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being “Whole Paycheck.” Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times.

It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point’s carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile-if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blowhard-that’s because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.

As negotiators in the debt-ceiling talks sputtered and raged, the chill reality of an imminent government default crept up Wednesday and made a mockery of their gamesmanship. Two major rating agencies warned that a once-unthinkable downgrade of the nation’s credit rating would be at hand if this crisis was not immediately defused.

That finally punctured the careless notion, popularized by Tea Party lawmakers like Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert, that default would be a minor inconvenience. Standard & Poor’s said a downgrade could occur if any required payments were missed, even if bondholders were paid first. Moody’s said a new process for dealing with the debt ceiling was needed. Although the bond markets have yet to be roiled, there are fresh indications that China and other investors are beginning to get nervous.

The alarms could not be much louder, but myth-making is still impeding the desperately needed deal.

Matt Taibbi: Greed, Excess and America’s Gaping Class Divide

Courtesy of good friend and Supreme Court of Assholedom justice David Sirota comes this revolting list of Marie Antoinettoid moments from recent years, in an article called “The New ‘Let Them Eat Cake!'”

Some of the moments on the list are easily recalled – Berkshire Hathaway gazillionaire Charlie Munger’s famous “suck it up and cope” quote, coming from a guy whose company was heavily invested in bailed-out banks, was an obvious inclusion – but others are quite shocking.

For instance, I was completely floored by the New York Times‘ pseudo-ironic take on the government’s response to the financial crisis, a piece entitled “You Try to Live on $500K in This Town.”

This came at a time when President Obama was considering curtailing compensation for bailed-out bankers at $500,000. The piece was sort of meant to be taken half as a joke, but it is not hard to detect an element of demented earnestness in the fashion section article, an honest argument that with mortgages and private school tuition and co-op fees and taxes, it really was very hard for a certain kind of New Yorker to get by on half a million a year.

Laura Carlsen: The Audacity of “Free Trade” Agreements

Congress could vote any day now to strike a new blow against already-battered U.S. workers and the unemployed

Committees in the House and Senate recently marked up the Colombia, Panama, and South Korea Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The Obama administration is urging passage of all three relics of the Bush administration before the summer recess.

The full-court press on the FTAs represents a reversal for a president elected on a trade reform platform. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama proclaimed his opposition to the NAFTA-style FTAs and boasted of his stance against the devastating North American and Central American agreements. As candidate Obama, he carefully distanced himself from the open-market, pro-corporate policies of his predecessor, calling for significant changes to the NAFTA model, including enforceable labor and environmental standards, and consumer protections.

Bill Boyarsky: ‘Entitlement’ Is a Republican Word

At his news conference this week, President Barack Obama seized on a misleading Washington word-“entitlements”-to describe the badly needed aid programs that are likely to be cut because of his compromises with the Republicans.

“Entitlement” is a misleading word because it masks the ugly reality of reducing medical aid for the poor, the disabled and anyone over 65 as well as cutting Social Security. Calling such programs entitlements is much more comfortable than describing them as what they are-Medicare, Social Security and money for good schools, unemployment insurance, medical research and public works construction that would put many thousands to work.

It’s also a Republican word. It implies that those receiving government aid have a sense of entitlement, that they’re getting something for nothing. And now it’s an Obama word as he moves toward the center and away from the progressives who powered his 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination over centrist Hillary Clinton.

Barack Obama is salivating at the prospect of concluding his Big Deal with the Republicans, the one that will move the center robustly – even transformatively – to the Right, where this president really lives. The debt-limit deadline is Obama’s big chance to panic a significant part of the Democratic Party into joining in the rape of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “When the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to Republican extortion.”

President Obama says he’s determined to make the “big deal” with the Republicans – not like the little, piddling deals he has been cutting all along to benefit the corporate classes, but the BIG deal, the grand consensus he believes he was born to forge with the GOP. Although it’s true that it will take a whopper of a deal to outclass the bipartisan joint venture that transferred $14 trillion to Wall Street, the vast bulk of it on Obama’s watch, the First Black President is nothing if not ambitious. Obama’s Big Deal is actually the coup de grace for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society – relics, like Black activism, standing in the way of a post-everything world.

Nicholas D. Kristof: The Opposing Party

Confused about the position of Congressional Republicans on the economy? Good. You should be.

Senator Mitch McConnell has a clever plan to resolve the federal debt impasse. Congressional Republicans would invite President Obama to raise the debt ceiling on his own, and then they would excoriate him for doing so.

Hm. Just a bit contradictory?

Meanwhile, the impasse arose because Congressional Republicans thunder against government red ink, yet refuse to raise revenue by ending tax breaks that help Warren Buffett pay a lower tax rate than his receptionist (which he agrees is preposterous).

Another contradiction? Of course.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Obama Can’t Celebrate Yet

The wounded are especially dangerous fighters. President Barack Obama now occupies the high ground in the debt ceiling debate, having called the Republicans’ bluff on the debt. He showed that deficit reduction is not now, and never has been, the GOP’s priority. He dare not get overconfident.

After thwarting the deal that House Speaker John Boehner was cooking up with Obama, Rep. Eric Cantor, the majority leader and Boehner’s rival, needs to show he knew what he was doing and recoup political ground. Cantor is likely to present Obama with spending cuts that the president once seemed to endorse as part of a large deal but will have to reject now that the big agreement is dead. There is still a lot of danger out there.

Michelle Chen: Violence Against Migrant Women Won’t End After DSK Case

The media circus surrounding the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case dishes out more drama each day, with a side of lurid fascination. But we basically know how the story ends. The narrative of the immigrant housekeeper assaulted by a European official perfectly illustrates an axiom of violence and power: the wider the gap between genders and races, the greater the latitude of injustice.

Yet the same story plays out every day on an endless loop around the globe: a retaliatory rape against a young girl sends a warning to the enemy militia; a wife is pummeled into bloody silence, her bedroom beyond the purview of traditional local courts; a daughter is married off to pay down a farm debt. The stories weave into a pattern that a media-fatigued public has come to normalize.

Robert C. Koehler: Panetta’s Iraq Invasion Gaffe

Leon Panetta, on his first visit to Iraq as secretary of defense last weekend, reached for a Bush moment ten years too late

“The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” he said to the assembled troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad, according to the Washington Post. “And 3,000 Americans – 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings – got killed because of al-Qaida. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.”

Yeah, oops, gaffe, Mr. Secretary, right? That Iraq-al-Qaida connection thingy isn’t in the spin anymore, and Panetta’s assistant had to mop up afterwards, making sure no one misinterpreted the boss’s remarks as reopening an old “debate” by reiterating a long-abandoned lie.

Political gain, not economic sense or sound policy, has always been at the core of Republican strategy on the debt-ceiling talks – a cynical ploy to appear serious about cutting spending while actually holding hostage the nation’s strong credit rating. Now that the real risks to their strategy are becoming apparent, including the possibility of cutting off Social Security checks, the more experienced members of the party are beginning to rethink their plans.

On Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, proposed a convoluted fallback solution that would at least defuse the crisis his party created a few weeks ago by threatening to force the country into default on its national debts.

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All Mr. McConnell wants is the ability to yoke the debt increase to Mr. Obama, and his offer gives him two extra chances to do so. He hopes the maneuver will help his party win back the Senate and the White House, which remains a long shot. But at least he is no longer holding the economy hostage to his goals. It is now time for the House to reach a similar conclusion.

Amy Goodman: Soldier Suicides and the Politics of Presidential Condolences

President Barack Obama just announced a reversal of a long-standing policy that denied presidential condolence letters to the family members of soldiers who commit suicide. Relatives of soldiers killed in action receive letters from the president. Official silence, however, has long stigmatized those who die of self-inflicted wounds. The change marks a long-overdue shift in the recognition of the epidemic of soldier and veteran suicides in this country and the toll of the hidden wounds of war.

The denial of condolence letters was brought to national prominence when Gregg and Jannett Keesling spoke about the suicide of their son, Chancellor Keesling. Chance Keesling joined the Army in 2003. After active duty in Iraq, he moved to the Army Reserves, and was called back for a second deployment in April 2009. The years of war had taken a toll on the 25-year-old. As his father, Gregg, told me: “He was trained for the rebuilding of Iraq. He was a combat engineer. He operated big equipment and loved to run the big equipment. Finally, he was retrained as a tactical gunner sitting on top of a Humvee. Because there was really very little rebuilding going on.”

Jim Hightower: Tracking US Recession with the RPI (Regular People’s Index)

Economists and politicians keep their fingers on the pulse of the Dow Jones Average, following every tick of this narrow measure of Wall Street wealth.

But the truer indicator of America’s economic health is in the Doug Jones Average – how are workaday folks like Doug and Doreen doing? After all, the experts tell us that we’re now entering the third year of a glorious economic recovery from the Great Recession, so surely the bluebirds of happiness are chirping again in Dougland. But, listen: silence.

What killed off the bluebirds is the same greed of moneyed elites that caused the crash. Since the recession ended in July 2009, CEO pay is back in the stratosphere, corporate profits are up by nearly half, corporations are sitting on a record $2 trillion in cash, and the perky Dow Jones Average has soared by a delirious 90 percent, with nearly all of that gain being pocketed by the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans who own more that 80 percent of all stocks and bonds. The sounds you hear up there are the pop-pop-pop of Champagne corks.

Tom Engelhardt: Is the Obama National Security Team a Pilotless Drone?

George W. who?  I mean, the guy is so over.  He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a footnote in the news.  And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick.  Condoleezza Rice?  She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it’s as if she’s been wiped from history, too?  As for Donald Rumsfeld, he published his memoir in February and it hit the bestseller lists, but a few months later, where is he?

And can anyone be surprised?  They were wrong about Afghanistan.  They were wrong about Iraq.  They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.  They were wrong about what the US military was capable of doing.  The country imploded economically while they were at the helm.  Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff.  In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren’t they wrong about?

Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies.  (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.)  Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you’re being honest, you’ll have to admit that one thing didn’t happen: they didn’t turn the page on us.

Christine Hines: Lawsuit Abuse, Indeed

A product malfunctions causing severe injury to your eight year old son. A corporation lays off your neighbor without reason after thirty years of service and age discrimination is suspected. The scenarios in which you or someone you know and care about may need to go to court are limitless, as are the potential consequences if HR 966 gets passed.

The House Judiciary Committee just approved the “Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act,” HR 966 AKA “LARA.”

   Unfortunately, for anyone who cares about justice or about wise uses of their taxpayer dollars, HR 966 is yet another example of bills to add to the long list of “Clear Skies” and other let’s-call-this-bill-the-exact-opposite-of-what-it-actually-is-bills.

If the title wasn’t bad enough, the bill by Rep. Lamar Smith and Senator Charles Grassley, who sponsored the Senate version, S. 533, is deceptively cloaked in technical terms. What better way for Congressional lawmakers to slip this past ordinary citizens (the ones who will be at an even greater disadvantage if LARA moves forward as feared).

The Euro is crashing today to record lows against the Swiss Franc, and interest rates on Italian and Spanish bonds have hit record highs. This latest episode in the Eurozone crisis is a result of fears that the contagion is now hitting Italy. With a two-trillion dollar economy and $2.45 trillion in debt, Italy is too big to fail and the European authorities are worried. Although there is currently little basis for the concern that Italy’s interest rates could rise high enough to put its solvency in jeopardy, financial markets are acting irrationally and elevating both the fear and the prospects of a self-fulfilling prophesy. The fact that the European authorities cannot even agree on how to handle the debt of Greece – an economy less than one-sixth the size of Italy – does not inspire confidence in their capacity to manage a bigger crisis.

The weaker Eurozone economies – Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain – are already facing the prospect of years of economic punishment, including extremely high levels of unemployment (16, 12, 14 and 21 percent, respectively).  Since the point of all this self-inflicted misery is to save the Euro, it is worth asking whether the Euro is worth saving. And it is worth asking this question from the point of view of the majority of Europeans who work for a living, i.e., from a progressive point of view.

James M Cypher: Nearly $2 Trillion Purloined from US Workers in 2009

In 2009, stock owners, bankers, brokers, hedge-fund wizards, highly paid corporate executives, corporations, and mid-ranking managers pocketed-as either income, benefits, or perks such as corporate jets-an estimated $1.91 trillion that 40 years ago would have collectively gone to non-supervisory and production workers in the form of higher wages and benefits. These are the 88 million workers in the private sector who are closely tied to production processes and/or are not responsible for the supervision, planning, or direction of other workers.

From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the benefits of economic growth were broadly shared by those in all income categories: workers received increases in compensation (wages plus benefits) that essentially matched the rise in their productivity. Neoclassical economist John Bates Clark (1847-1938) first formulated what he termed the “natural law” of income distribution which “assigns to everyone what he has specifically created.” That is, if markets are not “obstructed,” pay levels should be “equal [to] that part of the product of industry which is traceable to labor itself.” As productivity increased, Clark argued, wages would rise at an equal rate.

George Zornick: Will Eric Cantor’s Financial Backers Allow Him to Kill a Debt Ceiling Increase?

House Democrats are circulating a resolution accusing majority leader Eric Cantor of a salacious conflict of interest: he owns shares in a fund that takes a short position on long-dated government bonds, which in layman’s terms means Cantor stands to profit if the government defaults on its debt, and so probably shouldn’t be such a prominent negotiator in the ongoing debt ceiling talks.

It’s a juicy bit of meat, but the attack is actually pretty silly. According the resolution, which was obtained by the Huffington Post, Cantor’s shares in that fund total $3,300, and it’s quite a stretch to imagine that someone who is worth as much as $7.7 million would tank the US economy in order to profit on such a paltry investment. (As Cantor’s spokesman also pointed out, his $263,000 government pension means he would lose more than he would gain if the government defaulted anyhow).

Cantor is a good target for Democrats, as he is now back in the driver’s seat of his party’s debt limit talks after House Speaker John Boehner was unable to win a large-scale deal. However, if one is to examine Cantor’s finances in search of a motive-and the finances that really matter, his campaign account and leadership PAC-a different story emerges. Cantor, much like the GOP as a whole, is so thoroughly beholden to Wall Street firms it’s hard to imagine he won’t agree to a deal by August 2.

Robert Weiner and John Horton,: End Trickle Down Economics to Pay Off Debt

President Obama has given speech after speech calling on Congress to reduce tax breaks for the wealthy to balance the budget. When President Clinton left office, the budget had been balanced for four consecutive years with surpluses projected through 2011. The tax rate for the wealthiest 2 percent of wage earners was 39.6 percent. President George W. Bush, however, chose to pursue the system of so-called “trickle-down” economics through tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.

The result: surplus turned into deficit. By the end of Bush’s second term, the United States was embroiled in the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Trickle-down economics has not worked since Herbert Hoover tried it. It is a myth that adding money to the wealthy through tax cuts stimulates jobs and grows the economy. Under Democratic presidents since 1930 who have emphasized people programs and resisted tax breaks for the richest, annual growth in GDP has averaged 5.4 percent, according to Commerce Department and Office of Management and Budget statistics.

Mike Farrell: Extremely Unctuous

Raised in the Catholic Church, I was a pretty confused kid. Father O’Reilly, one of the priests at St. Peter’s, the church our family attended most of the time, spoke with such a pronounced brogue that I couldn’t follow him. But I didn’t understand the Mass either, so I smiled and pretended he made sense, just accepting him on faith along with the rest of it.

But at some point it all began to itch. Ours was the “One True Faith” and everyone else was damned to hell. Really? That was tough to think about, because some non-Catholics we knew seemed like pretty nice folks-well, most of them, anyway. And what about the people in Africa and other places who maybe never even had a chance to know about Jesus and Peter, The Rock Upon Which He Built His Church?

Hell for everybody but us? It clearly made some feel special, but I couldn’t make it sit right.

Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980s until 2007, US-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world.

Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.

Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt.

I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government.

Alas, that has not been the case.

Eugen Robinson: A little more revenue could go a long way

Do progressives care about reducing the national debt? Of course they do, no matter what the White House might believe.

“We think that obviously there are some Democrats who don’t feel as strongly about deficit reduction as [President Obama] does,” senior adviser David Plouffe said Wednesday at a breakfast with reporters and columnists. But that’s not obvious at all. It isn’t even true.

There’s no dispute about where we need to go. The question is what path to take.

Clearly, the federal government cannot continue spending at a rate of 25 percent of gross domestic product while taking in revenue that equals less than 15 percent of GDP, as is the case this year. We would reach the point where debt service crowds out health care, education and other priorities dear to progressives’ hearts. Major investments the nation desperately needs to make – for infrastructure and energy research, for example – would be impossible. Decline would be inevitable.

Steven J. D’Amico: Trade Deals are No Deal for US

LONG BEFORE 2008, when Wall Street’s unchecked greed brought the world’s economy to its knees, we in the middle class could feel our future slipping away. We knew that we were working longer and harder – we could see that even with two salaries, most families had less disposable income than families did in the 1960s and ’70s when one income was the norm. We knew that good quality jobs were harder to find and hold. And we knew that a big reason we were falling behind was a flawed trade policy that shipped many of our jobs overseas.

Yet even after losing 682,000 jobs to NAFTA since it took effect in 1994, and 2.4 million to China since it joined the World Trade Organization, Washington continues in its blind faith that somehow these trade deals are good for us. This summer Congress is expected to take up three new trade deals – with Korea, Panama, and Colombia. These trade pacts are bad for American workers, bad for our domestic economy, and bad for democracy.

New York Times: An Aggressive Ruling on Clean Air

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday issued a welcome and overdue rule compelling power plants in 27 states and the District of Columbia to reduce smokestack emissions that pollute the air and poison forests, lakes and streams across the eastern United States. The regulation reflects the E.P.A.’s determination to carry out its mandates under the Clean Air Act despite fierce Congressional opposition, and bodes well for progress on a host of other regulatory challenges the agency faces.

The rule, which takes effect in 2012, would cut emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain, and nitrogen oxide, a component of smog, by more than half by 2014 compared with 2005 levels. The E.P.A. administrator, Lisa Jackson, said the rule would improve air quality for 240 million Americans in the states where the pollution is produced and in areas downwind.

Caroline Arnold: How Much Blame Do We Share for Our Leaders’ Failures?

Six years ago, in the wake of the botched management of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, a friend warned me against blaming Republicans.

I replied flippantly that as an unrepentant progressive, I quite enjoyed blaming Republicans, though I recognized that even the GOP, PNAC, and all their associated think-tanks and trained media rescue-dogs couldn’t have single-handedly created a disaster of that magnitude. I added that if the Republicans had planned Katrina, they probably would have directed it to Ohio. Of course there aren’t any hurricanes in Ohio, but heck, there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq, either.

Another friend who had volunteered in the cleanup of Katrina running a ham radio operation observed that among the agencies and organizations trying to help, the farther up the hierarchy of any institution, public or private, the worse prepared the people were, the more out of touch, the more incompetent, and the more their efforts were downright damaging.

… sounds like The Peter Principle to me. And an interesting corollary would probably be that the higher the hierarchy, the greater the level of incompetence.

It was not surprising to hear the Republican presidential candidates repeat their tiresome claim that excessive government spending and borrowing were behind Friday’s terrible unemployment report. It was depressing to hear President Obama sound as if he agreed with them.

The Labor Department report showed virtually no job growth in June, with the unemployment level edging up to 9.2 percent from 9.1 percent the month before. It seemed to confirm last month’s indication that the economy had stalled. After the report came out, the president went to the Rose Garden and said he hoped that a conclusion to the current debt-ceiling talks would give businesses “certainty” that the government had its debt and deficit under control, allowing them to start hiring again.

Certainty? That sounds like Mitt Romney, or any of the other Republicans who have concocted a phony connection between hiring and government borrowing.

Jane Hamsher: Breaking Point: Obama and the Death of the Democratic Party

According to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, Obama is proposing cuts to Social Security in exchange for GOP support for tax hikes.

Nobody ever says they want to “cut” Social Security or Medicare. They want to “save” it.  Just ask Pete Peterson, he wants to “save” it. Likewise AARP.  They don’t want reduced benefits for senior citizens, they want to “preserve” it for future generations.  If they have an enormous customer base they can market private “add-on” accounts and other retirement products to when Social Security goes bye-bye, I guess that’s just a happy coincidence.

Now if you think that this is something the President is doing because it’s the only way to get Republican cooperation you can stop reading here, because we’re going to disagree.  From the moment he took the White House, the President has wanted to cut Social Security benefits.  David Brooks reported that three administration officials called him to say Obama “is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending” in March of 2009.  You can only live in denial for so long and still lay claim to being tethered to reality.

Amy Goodman: WikiLeaks, Wimbledon and War

Last Saturday was sunny in London, and the crowds were flocking to Wimbledon and to the annual Henley Regatta. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower website Wikileaks.org, was making his way by train from house arrest in Norfolk, three hours away, to join me and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek for a public conversation about WikiLeaks, the power of information and the importance of transparency in democracies. The event was hosted by the Frontline Club, an organization started by war correspondents in part to memorialize their many colleagues killed covering war. Frontline Club co-founder Vaughan Smith looked at the rare sunny sky fretfully, saying, “Londoners never come out to an indoor event on a day like this.” Despite years of accurate reporting from Afghanistan to Kosovo, Smith was, in this case, completely wrong.

Close to 1,800 people showed up, evidence of the profound impact WikiLeaks has had, from exposing torture and corruption to toppling governments.

Assange is in England awaiting a July 12 extradition hearing, as he is wanted for questioning in Sweden related to allegations of sexual misconduct. He has not been charged. He has been under house arrest for more than six months, wears an electronic ankle bracelet and is required to check in daily at the Norfolk police station.

Johann Hari: Would You Trust a Management Consultant with the World’s Rainforests?

Our protests stopped David Cameron handing UK forests over to corporations. Now the rainforests are being handed to management consultants

The two most dreaded words in any office are the same – management consultants. Their arrival rumbles through a workplace like the approaching thwump-thwump of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, rattling our desks and making us all fear we will be picked up and gored at random. We’re right to be afraid – and scornful. According to “Rip Off”, a report on management consultants by David Craig, 170 organizations who used management consultants were studied in the 1990s by the Cranfield School of Management, and only 36 per cent of clients thought they had brought any value. We all know now that management consultants were threaded through the banksters and hedge funders who just crashed the global economy.

But now management consultancy has been taken to a whole new level, according to a startling new report by Greenpeace entitled: “Bad Influence: How McKinsey-inspired plans lead to rainforest destruction.” Management consultants have, in effect, been tasked with setting the future of the world’s rainforests – and facing accusations that they are using our money to draw up plans that will result in their more rapid destruction. Instead of stopping the loggers and miners, the report suggests they are aiding them.