Tag: Opinion

One anomalous feature of British journalism is its long history of scurrilous, muckraking weekly scandal-sheets, the tabloids or “gutter press,” which since the Victorian era have delighted blue-collar readers with stories of murders and sexual misconduct.

Mr. Murdoch’s achievement was to take the tabloid press from the gutter into the sewer, widening its range from coverage of celebrity scandals to the performance of criminal acts. Some of the latter, such as hacking into the phones of crime victims and their families, were appalling.

There is no redeeming feature in the scandal that has engulfed Mr. Murdoch’s British fief, News International, other than that it has now killed his biggest-selling newspaper, The News of the World. This tabloid made its money by regularly crossing the line of decency; the revelation that it also regularly crossed the line of legality surprises no one, for no one expected any better. What has horrified the British public is the nature of the illegalities. Murdoch journalists not only hacked into the phones of child murder victims and their parents, but of the families of victims of terrorist attacks and of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

David R. Row: Death Penalty, Still Racist and Arbitrary

LAST week was the 35th anniversary of the return of the American death penalty. It remains as racist and as random as ever.

Several years after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, a University of Iowa law professor, David C. Baldus (who died last month), along with two colleagues, published a study examining more than 2,000 homicides that took place in Georgia beginning in 1972. They found that black defendants were 1.7 times more likely to receive the death penalty than white defendants and that murderers of white victims were 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks.

What became known as the Baldus study was the centerpiece of the Supreme Court’s 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp. That case involved a black man, Warren McCleskey, who was sentenced to die for murdering a white Atlanta police officer. Mr. McCleskey argued that the Baldus study established that his death sentence was tainted by racial bias. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that general patterns of discrimination do not prove that racial discrimination operated in particular cases.

Joe Conason: Obama’s Raw Deal?

Suddenly Republican leaders in Congress, after months of staring down the Democrats over a potentially disastrous debt default, began blinking so fast that they might be signaling in Morse code. Although their message is muddled and illogical — with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., saying he can accept closing tax loopholes only if such measures are “revenue neutral,” thus canceling their budgetary value — the Republicans now appear to understand that they will be blamed by voters if the negotiations collapse.

And Democrats appear to understand that they have the political advantage, as they voiced support for a proposal by Senate Budget Committee chair Kent Conrad, D-N.D., to reduce future deficits by $4 trillion with an even split between increased revenues and reduced spending.

But just when the Republicans are showing fear and losing momentum, there is one important Democrat who seems to think it is time to wave the white flag — and give his enemies a historic victory on the eve of his own re-election bid.

David Sirota The Finland Education Phenomenon

When I heard the news last week that the Department of Education is aiming to subject 4-year-olds to high-stakes testing, all I could do is shake my head in disbelief and despondently mutter a slightly altered riff off “The Big Lebowski’s” Walter Sobchak.

Four-year-olds, dude.

You don’t have to be as dyspeptic as Walter to know this is madness. According to Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond, who headed President Obama’s education transition team, though we already “test students in the United States more than any other nation,” our students “perform well below those of other industrialized countries in math and science.” Yet the Obama administration, backed by corporate foundations, is nonetheless intensifying testing at all levels, as if doing the same thing and expecting different results is innovative “reform” rather than what it’s always been: insanity.

John Nichols: As Unemployment Spikes, Obama’s Got a Bigger Problem Than the Debt Ceiling

The big story out of Washington-and rightly so-is the debt ceiling fight that President Obama seems to be coming very close to losing. If the president abandons his 2008 campaign promise to be an absolute defender of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, he will have very little indeed to run on in 2012.

But that won’t be what beats him.

Because the biggest story in America is a different one from the biggest story in Washington. Americans are not that into the debt ceiling debate. Polling has suggested that less than a quarter of Americans are “closely following” the fight. Those numbers will rise a bit as the deadline gets closer and as the media hype the issue.

The issue that Americans have been following closely, and will continue to follow straight through the 2012 election cycle, the issue that tops the polls on the list of concerns, is the jobs crisis. Americans are worried about unemployment and underemployment.

And on Friday they got a lot more worried.

What if there was a group of terrorists holding your family hostage with a gun pointed at themselves, demanding the account number to your pension fund? Would you negotiate with the terrorists by allowing them access to your savings, or would you let them shoot themselves and keep your retirement money intact?

Congressional Republicans are threatening to default on the debt unless President Obama caves to their demands to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security spending. Regardless of the market-crashing consequences of a debt default, actually doing so would be unconstitutional. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment clearly states that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions…shall not be questioned.” Republicans are violating the constitution by threatening a debt default. End of discussion.

Eugene Robinson: A little more revenue could go a long way 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.

The way to avoid this dystopian future is to bring spending and revenue more into balance. Yes, there will be some pain and sacrifice. But it is not necessary – nor is it wise – to heap a disproportionate share of the burden onto the backs of the poor, the elderly and the battered middle class.

John Nichols: With Rupert Murdoch’s Empire in Crisis, What of Fox and His American Project?

Rupert Murdoch’s global media monolith, which includes key players in America’s right-wing media echo chamber, Fox News channel, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, is in meltdown.

A headline in Britain’s Independent newspaper Thursday morning cried: “Murdoch Empire in Crisis.”

Murdoch’s News Corporation announced Thursday that it would close Britain’s 2.8 million-circulation News of the World, once the highest-circulation newspaper on the planet, in response to a scandal that has exposed the sleazy practices of Murdoch’s employees. The immediate decision to close the 168-year-old newspaper came following revelations that a private investigator employed by the newspaper had allegedly hacked the cellphones of the families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Jamelle Bouie: With Entitlements on the Table, Obama Plans to Go Big on a Budget Deal

Last night, several news outlets broke stories saying the same thing: President Obama is willing to make a deal on Social Security. Contrary to liberal hopes, this isn’t a deal to raise Social Security benefits or lower the eligibility age-a reasonable idea when unemployment is high and growth is sluggish. Instead, Obama has reportedly offered to expand the scope of spending cuts, including major changes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, in return for $1 trillion in new revenue and an increase in the debt limit.

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In light of the size of the White House proposal and its limited palpability to members of both parties, it’s hard to see it as anything but political theater; an attempt to demonstrate President Obama’s willingness to go “big” on deficit reduction. Even still, it’s extremely disheartening; it demonstrates that, as always, Obama is willing to cater to the center-right in a huge way (entitlement cuts) for the sake of a small political advantage.

An outright default by Greece on nearly a half-trillion dollars of outstanding debt obligations would be a catastrophe for Greece, for its European creditor banks and for financial institutions everywhere as credit-default swaps on Greek debt worked their way through the derivatives markets. It does not need to happen, but barring an unexpected show of European political and economic leadership, that outcome is becoming increasingly likely.

The latest chapter in the sorry saga was written over the past week. At the insistence of European political leaders, Greece’s governing Socialists voted to apply another dose of growth-killing austerity to the country’s nearly inert economy. Austerity measures in the past have done more harm than good, but threatened with a cutoff of needed European loans, the Socialists saw no other responsible course. (Opposition conservatives ignored European pressures and voted no.)

David Cay Johnston: A Cosmic Visitor’s Take on Taxes

It is a human tendency to assume the world we are born into is as it should be — a Panglossian assumption that colors our understanding of the abstract, like tax policy.

To get grounded in what is, without assuming it is natural, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you are a researcher from a distant planet, part of a team sent to stealthily observe and report your findings. Telemetry has revealed the watery and volcanic nature of our planet, so you focus on the organized activities of Earth’s top sentients. Your protocol requires you to identify the biggest common enterprises first and then work your way down.

So what would lead your report? What is the biggest human enterprise? Industry? Digital activity? Military? Healthcare? Food production? No, the biggest enterprise, by far, is tax.

Nicholas D. Kristoff: Taxes and Billionaires

The House speaker, John Boehner, suggests that the Republican threat of letting the United States default on its debts is driven by concern for jobs for ordinary Americans.

“We cannot miss this opportunity,” he told Fox News. “If we want jobs to come to America, we’ve got to give American businesspeople the confidence to invest in our economy.”

So take a look at one of the tax loopholes that Congressional Republicans are refusing to close – even if the cost is that America’s credit rating blows up. This loophole has nothing to do with creating jobs and everything to do with protecting some of America’s wealthiest financiers.

David Sirota: Progressives Were Right: Obama’s Health Plan Not Solving Crisis

New Data Show Why Simply Having Insurance Isn’t Enough

 While the contest for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination is already revolving around conservative-themed attacks on “Obamacare,” back when the healthcare bill was being legislated, the most important debate was within the Democratic Party, which held large majorities in both houses of Congress. On one side were the drug companies, the insurance companies and President Obama — the latter who had not only disowned his prior support of single-payer healthcare but had also worked with his corporate allies to actively undermine a modest public insurance option. On the other side were progressives who opposed any bill which further cemented the private insurance industry as the primary mediator between doctors and patients.

Ultimately, Obama and his corporate-backed allies organized enough conservative Democrats in Congress to win, effectively turning healthcare “reform” into a blank-check TARP-style bailout for the health industry. But, of course, to even whisper that last truism is to now run the risk of being labeled a blasphemer in a conversation that can only tolerate misleading red-versus-blue analyses. In today’s national political debate, there are Republicans who insist “Obamacare” is a Canadian-style “takeover” of America’s healthcare system, and there are Democrats who insist that the health bill is a major Medicare-like achievement — any other argument, no matter how valid, has been vaporized by election-season pressure to fall in ideological line

Jim Hightower: Massey Energy’s Manmade Hellhole

In March of last year, Massey Energy Corp.’s official record book for recording unsafe conditions in its Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia said flatly: “none observed.” It turns out that this was a flat-out lie. Just one month later, Upper Big Branch exploded, killing 29 miners and devastating their families.

Massey’s in-house “observers” had indeed found safety problems – as they often did in this shoddily run, notoriously dangerous mine. But the corporation kept a dual set of books in order to mislead state and federal safety regulators.

The official record book, which Massey and all other coal giants are required to keep for review by government inspectors, is filled with such rosy reports as “none observed.” But the true dangers at Upper Big Branch and other Massey mines have been secretly recorded in a set of internal books that executives kept sealed in the corporate closet.

On its current course, the United States is four weeks away from defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history. If that happens, businesses will fail. Financial institutions will fail. Home values will decline. Mortgage rates will skyrocket. Spending and investment will all but disappear. Social Security checks will stop being mailed. Everything from military pay to food inspection will be compromised, if not fully cut off. The millions upon millions of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed will be joined by millions more.

Across the world, America’s second financial collapse in three years will drag down already fragile economies in Europe, Latin America and Asia, potentially creating a “worldwide depression,” as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described it. In short, we would be thrown back deep into economic turmoil – only this time with even fewer tools to crawl our way out.

Joan Walsh: Standing up to hostage-takers

The president has already compromised too much over a debt ceiling that was raised seven times under President Bush

Over the weekend Massachussetts Gov. Deval Patrick had a fascinating op-ed in the Washington Post, describing a 2003 Harvard reunion with GOP anti-tax fanatic Grover Norquist (they were classmates). Norquist was bragging about creating a permanent Republican majority in America, and when some dreamer suggested there might be a Democrat in the White House again someday, Norquist made this promise: “We’ll make it impossible for him to govern like a Democrat.”

Norquist and his anti-tax jihadists made good on their word. President Obama is backing a debt ceiling “compromise” that is a fundamentally Republican, proposing $6 in spending cuts for every dollar in “revenue enhancement,” and even the little bit it does in the tax code only closes loopholes; it doesn’t touch tax rates, even on top earners. (But former Joe Biden economic advisor Jared Bernstein laid out a way to raise $1 trillion in revenue without even touching tax rates, and [it’s worth a look http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/… The GOP insists that closing tax loopholes must be paid for with a cut in tax rates, so the plan can stay “revenue neutral” – which is central to the “No Taxes Pledge” Norquist makes Republicans sign in blood. The wealthy in this country, along with corporations, now pay the lowest effective tax rates than they have for 50 years – and some still want more.

Amanda Marcotte: Because of The Implication

There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that I published this article about how the atheist movement dovetails with other social justice movements this particular week.  I was actually feeling pretty good about the whole thing, because I was writing it while traveling to CONvergence to speak at the invitation of Skepchick about the feminist depths of this issue, on a panel called “Women vs. God”, where we discussed fighting the religious right.  Talking about my commitment to feminism through an atheist angle always pleases me, since the two are firmly intertwined in my mind—religion and patriarchy are so intertwined as to be functionally the same thing in most ways, especially in the context of history.  Pulilng down one means pulling down the other, and I think it’s naive when anyone denies that and instead claims that there’s a way to preserve religion without patriarchy or vice versa.  I’m thinking long term here; obviously in the short term there are religious feminists and sexist atheists.

In fact, what makes all this ironic is I did get an eyeful this weekend of how serious the problem of sexism in the atheist/skeptical movement really is, and how much hard work needs to be done to get a male-dominated movement to take the problem of sexual harassment and female alienation seriously.

Theresa de Langis: Why Women Need to Be Part of the Peace Process

What is wrong with this picture?

After all, it looks like a typical photo of world leaders making decisions for their countries. That is precisely the problem. What’s wrong is the total absence of women-at the table, in the room, and, as a result, from the agenda at this meeting and too many meetings like it.

I worked with the United Nations in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2010 with women human rights defenders. Since coming back to the US, I am aware of the urgency in public calls to end our military involvement in Afghanistan, which means increasing pressure to negotiate with the Taliban for a political power sharing deal. Yet, I also hear in the back of my head the voices of Afghan women, who have warned all along, Don’t wager human rights, especially the fragile ones of women, for the sake of political expediency in striking a peace deal.

The photo portrays a three-way summit on June 24 hosted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and his Afghan counterpart, President Hamid Karzai. The goal of the meeting was to discuss “concern over a rising lack of security, extremism and terrorism,” and the need for “cooperation to combat these phenomena.” The day following the photo, Presidents Zardari and Karzai attended an international anti-terrorism conference, again hosted by Ahmadinejad. Also present was Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Darfur, where rape was used rampantly as a weapon of war.

Linda McQuaig: Canada: Pomp, Pageantry and Unions

We surely seem to be living in conservative times – with the NDP trying to distance itself from all things socialist and the public apparently unable to sate its appetite for all things royal.

Certainly it’s easy to get the impression from the media that Canadians, content with their capitalist bounty, are primarily focused on the activities and outfits of the Royal Family.

So perhaps it’s out-of-sync with the times to suggest that we’re actually in the middle of a class war, and that it’s been heating up lately.

Of course, the genius of the architects of today’s conservative revolution has been to obscure the class war they’ve been quietly waging, keeping us distracted with foreign military ventures, royals and other celebrity sightings.

Behind all these diversions, the class war has been relentlessly proceeding. While incomes at the top have steadily climbed, incomes of ordinary Canadians have steadily eroded. The real median Canadian family income hasn’t risen since the late 1970s – even though today’s typical family now has two earners, compared to just one earner 30 years ago. In other words, Canadian families are working about twice as hard to keep up to where they were a generation ago.

This is the age of corporatized politics. That means we may admire our leaders, but we can’t depend on them. We’re paying the price for Thomas Jefferson’s unfulfilled desire to “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

This July 4th, politics is too important to be left to the politicians. The stakes are too high and the system is too broken. Citizen action is everyone’s job now, and it will be as long as our political debate focuses on misplaced austerity and ignores the majority’s yearning for jobs, growth, and those things that government does best.

But the problem isn’t just with politicians, or even the system. The problem is dependence itself.

Jose Antonio Vargas: The America in Me

“You’ve been trying to write yourself into America,” my dear friend Teresa Moore said after she read an early draft of the essay I ended up submitting to the New York Times Magazine.

I first met Teresa in 1999, when I was a high school senior and wanted to freelance for YO!, short for Youth Outlook, the monthly magazine she edited. She was my very first editor, the one who can most attest to how much I struggled with writing, with finding just the right words, phrases and punctuation (should I use a comma or a dash or a semi-colon?) with trusting the texture and timbre of my own voice. Then and now, Teresa was always exacting, always insightful.

“You’re still trying to write yourself into America.”

Indeed, I am, perhaps now more than ever.

Holly Sklar and Scott Klinger: Real Patriots Pay Taxes

Some of our nation’s biggest corporations are planning a tax holiday and they want you to pick up the tab.

Actually, you already pay for their routine tax avoidance through the use of tax havens in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. These accounting acrobatics cost the U.S. Treasury $100 billion a year. Now they want Congress to pass a special tax holiday for money they “repatriate” back to the United States.

There’s nothing patriotic about this repatriation being pushed by Google, Cisco, Pfizer and other companies in the Win America campaign. To sell the tax holiday, they claim it will produce a burst of jobs and investment. In fact, Congress passed a “one-time-only” tax holiday in 2004 with similar promises. Instead, it produced a burst of shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, which goosed the pay of CEOs.

New anti-immigration laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are cruel, racist and counterproductive.

If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following – and in some ways outdoing – Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.

The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.

Eugene Robinson: Assassination by robot: Are we justified?

The skies over at least six countries are patrolled by robotic aircraft, operated by the U.S. military or the CIA, that fire missiles to carry out targeted assassinations. I am convinced that this method of waging war is cost-effective but not that it is moral.

There has been virtually no public debate about the expanding use of unmanned drone aircraft as killing machines – not domestically, at least. In the places where drone attacks are taking place, there has understandably been great uproar. And in the rest of the world, questions are being raised about the legal and ethical basis for these antiseptic missile strikes.

David Swanson: Memoirs of Torturers

On September 18, 2009, seven former heads of the CIA publicly told President Barack Obama not to prosecute CIA torturers. On April 16, 2009, Obama had already publicly told Attorney General Eric Holder not to prosecute CIA torturers. On September 18th, Holder publicly reassured the CIA.

The coast was clear. The books started flowing. George W. Bush and John Yoo put their books out in 2010, Donald Rumsfeld in 2011, and Dick Cheney’s also later this summer.

Just as the torture techniques drifted down the chain of command from these dealers in death to the rank and file, so too the book contracts. The cogs in the machine are now documenting their bit parts in the past decade’s torture epidemic with pride and publishing deals.

Dave Johnson: The Not-So-Loyal Opposition

In the debt-ceiling debate Republicans are holding the country hostage again, demanding that the country shift to a radical pro-big-corporate/big-wealth agenda as the ransom. At the same time the Tea Partiers say don’t raise the debt limit, period, and let the country default, hoping that out of the resulting chaos and desperation they can rebuild the economy in an Ayn Randian, rule-by-the-rich vision.

Either way, this is a radical, unprecedented attempt to redefine our form of government, largely privatizing for a few the wealth of We, the People while stifling our voice. If we give in to this extremist vision of cut and gut, America will lose the engine that made us prosperous.

Last month, with almost no fanfare, the federal government did a very decent thing: It canceled the deportation of a Venezuelan man after he married an American man in Connecticut and claimed legal residency as a spouse. But the government did not say that it was formally recognizing their marriage, because it cannot. The Defense of Marriage Act, which ranks with the most overtly discriminatory laws in the nation’s history, remains on the books, prohibiting federal recognition of legal same-sex marriages.

The deportation dismissal was an isolated act of kindness by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It is heavily outweighed by the continuing inequality imposed on thousands of same-sex couples who have been legally married in the five states – plus the District of Columbia – where it is already allowed. Likewise, the many couples who will take advantage of New York’s new marriage equality law will not be married in the eyes of Washington.

Maureen Dowd: When a Predator Collides With a Fabricator

SO what’s the moral of this Manhattan immorality tale?

That the French are always right, even when their hauteur is irritating?

They were right about Iraq and America’s rush to war. And they may be right about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and America’s rush to judgment.

In both cases, French credibility was undermined, so we resisted seeing things from their point of view.

John Nichols: What Michele Bachmann and Her Teapot ‘Patriots’ Do Not Know About America

The unsettling thing about Michele Bachmann’s failed discussion of the founders and slavery is not that the Tea Party “Patriot” knew so little about the birth of the American experiment that she made John Quincy Adams-the son of a somewhat disappointing founder (John) and the cousin of one of the true revolutionaries (Sam)-into something he was not.

Bachmann has for some time peddled the notion that the nation’s founding fathers worked “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” She is simply wrong about this. The last of the revolutionaries generally recognized by historians as the founders-signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and their chief political and military comrades-passed in 1836, with the death of James Madison. That was twenty-seven years before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and twenty-nine years before the finish of the Civil War.

But Bachmann has never bothered by the facts. Until now.

Robert Parry: Neocons Want War and More War

The neoconservatives remain powerful in Washington in large part because of their continued influence inside leading opinion-setting journals like the New York Times and the Washington Post, two prestige newspapers that have pressed ahead with the neocon agenda despite serious blows to their credibility in recent years

Sometimes the New York Times and the Washington Post behave like two vintage ocean-liners competing to see which will edge out the other in a competition to become the flagship for American neoconservatism. Think of a cross-Atlantic race between the Titanic and the Lusitania.

The Times was pouring on the coal in Friday’s editions, pushing the Obama administration and NATO to finish off the war in Libya. The Times editors seemed most concerned at the prospect of negotiations to resolve the conflict without a clear-cut military victory over Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

Mike Lux: Back to Where We Started

Two hundred thirty-five years ago, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted to declare independence from Britain. From our very earliest days, this country has been involved in a heated debate about our collective soul, a foundational debate about what we stand for and what kind of people we want to be. Our founding fathers had a dream, but there were people who were afraid to change and wanted to rely on the traditions and rulers that were in place. Then as now, the debate raged over equality and democracy and the nature of tyranny, over whether we were indeed one people with equal opportunities and rights or whether the elites should be able to do whatever they want.

From those terribly risky early days, when the odds were so steeped against us winning the revolution and then forming a new kind of democratic government that would last, we have had a hell of a run. We’ve survived and prospered as a country through some very shaky early days, through a horrendous civil war just barely won, through a Great Depression, through the terrible threat of Hitler and Japan in WWII, to become the most wealthy and powerful country in the world over the last seven decades. But we have come to a juncture serious enough to raise those old foundational questions again.

Forty-five years ago this week, the first Medicare checks were delivered, and the United States made a great leap forward.

Before Medicare was implemented – as a social-welfare program designed not just to deliver care but to poverty — one in five Americans lived below the poverty line.

After the program was implemented, and after related “War on Poverty” initiatives were developed, that number was cut almost in half. Poverty among seniors dropped by two thirds.

Why? Before Medicare, millions of elderly Americans could not afford to buy health care. They did not have access even to basic care. When they needed treatment for the inevitable ailments that are associated with aging, they and their families spent down what meager savings that retained and a stumble into poverty soon followed.

Allison Kilkenney: Budget Nightmares: Government Shutdowns, Slashed Tax Credits

Protesters flooded Minnesota’s Capitol grounds yesterday on the eve of a government shutdown in response to tense budget negotiations. The governor and Republicans must close a $5 billion gap for the next two-year budget cycle, but legislators are torn over how to accomplish that goal.

Though government officials and Governor Mark Dayton have kept the details of the negotiations largely secret, Minnesotans were quite vocal in their demands. Activists stated that they’re open to compromise, but don’t think the burden of the state’s budget woes should be dumped exclusively upon the shoulders of the poor.

Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap : Movement to Abolish Corporate Personhood Gaining Traction

In the year and a half since the Citizens United decision, Americans from all walks of life have become concerned about corporate dominance of our government and our society as a whole. In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court (in an act of outrageous “judicial activism) gutted existing campaign finance laws by ruling that corporations, wealthy individuals, and other entities can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns.

Throughout the country people have responded by organizing against “corporate personhood,” a court-created precedent that illegitimately gives corporations rights that were intended for human beings.

The movement is flowering not in the halls of Congress, but at the local level, where all real social movements start. Every day Americans experience the devastation caused by unaccountable corporations. Thanks to the hard work of local organizers, Boulder, CO could become the next community to officially join this growing effort. Councilmember Macon Cowles is proposing to place a measure on the November ballot, giving Boulder voters the opportunity to support an amendment to the U. S. Constitution abolishing corporate personhood and declaring that money is not speech.

Michelle Chen: Pesticides and Farm Labor Yield a Bitter Harvest

Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown’s veto of card check legislation underscores the priorities of the powerful

Shortly after the group of Mexican “guestworkers” arrived at a Tennessee tomato farm, they realized that their job was killing them, literally. In addition to being crowded into filthy trailers with no source of clean water, they and their living quarters were regularly showered with poison. Despite requirements for protective equipment, they had to go into the fields while exposed to pesticides. Risking abuse and retaliation for challenging their boss, some tried to use cellphones to record the spraying. In the end, they got their evidence, but then got fired.

The workers’ struggle, which led to a lawsuit filed earlier this year, illustrates all the paradoxes of America’s natural bounty. No form of labor is more ingrained in humanity than farm work, but the people who grow our food are being eaten alive every day by the toxins of modern industrial farming. Though consumers are more anxious than ever these days about the effects of pesticides on the food we eat, they seldom consider the health hazards facing the workers who feed our consumption. Yet the further you get up the production chain, the greater the danger.

Maura Stephens: Gov. Cuomo: Do Not Lift Fracking Moratorium

Urgent Open Letter to New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo: Do Not Lift Fracking Moratorium

Dear Governor Cuomo,

We just got word that you’re about to lift the fracking moratorium in the New York City and Syracuse watersheds. I’m almost apoplectic from shock, anger, grief, and terror.

A former farmer and trained environmentalist, researcher, and independent journalist, I have spent much of the last three years learning and writing about fracking. I am a cofounder of the Coalition to Protect New York, among other actively engaged organizations working to ban fracking in our state and elsewhere.

We do not trust the Department of Environmental Conservation to get things right on fracking. Even if it were a reliable and trustworthy agency, the DEC’s budget has been cut so drastically and its workforce decimated to the point that it’s virtually hamstrung.

The ethical judgments of the Supreme Court justices became an important issue in the just completed term. The court cannot maintain its legitimacy as guardian of the rule of law when justices behave like politicians. Yet, in several instances, justices acted in ways that weakened the court’s reputation for being independent and impartial.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr., for example, appeared at political events. That kind of activity makes it less likely that the court’s decisions will be accepted as nonpartisan judgments. Part of the problem is that the justices are not bound by an ethics code. At the very least, the court should make itself subject to the code of conduct that applies to the rest of the federal judiciary.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Defending the Supremely Powerful

The United States Supreme Court now sees its central task as comforting the already comfortable and afflicting those already afflicted.

If you are a large corporation or a political candidate backed by lots of private money, be assured that the court’s conservative majority will be there for you, solicitous of your needs and ready to swat away those pesky little people who dare to contest your power.

This court has created rules that will have the effect of declaring some corporations too big to be challenged through class actions, as AT&T consumers and female employees at Wal-Mart discovered.

David Sirota: Shining the Spotlight on the Corporate Pay Gap

We’ve long known that executive pay has skyrocketed during the last 40 years-and especially during the last 20. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the average CEO makes roughly 300 times the average worker-up from 100 times the average in the early 1990s and 40 times the average in the 1970s. In this new Gilded Age, we are inundated with stories about how executives-even in taxpayer-subsidized industries like banking-are paying themselves record salaries. This is nothing new-in fact, it’s lately been a bragging point for firms in their efforts to attract talent.

So, then, why is Corporate America suddenly so shy about compensation rates?

Joe Conason: Four Trillion for War-and Rising

Anyone paying attention to the costs of U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan must have known that the president badly underestimated those numbers on June 22, when he told the nation that we have spent “a trillion dollars” waging war over the past decade. For well over two years, we have known that the total monetary cost of those wars will eventually amount to well over $2 trillion, and might well rise higher, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and his associate Linda Bilmes.

What we didn’t know until this week is that the expense in constant dollars-leaving aside the horrific price paid by the dead, wounded, displaced and ruined in every country-will likely reach well over $4.4 trillion.

This American life of ours has long been pro-violence and anti-sex, unless the two can be merged so that violence is the dominant theme. The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that historical record on Monday in declaring California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to minors unconstitutional while continuing to deny constitutional protection to purely prurient sexual material for either minors or adults.

The California law that the court struck down prohibited the sale or rental of violent games to minors “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being,” unless the work, taken as a whole, possessed redeeming literary, artistic or social value-qualities that limit censorship of sexually “obscene” material.

Maria Margaronis: Greece in Crisis: Protest, Violence and Necessity

The Greek parliament has just passed the package of savage austerity measures and privatizations required to get the last tranche of a 110 billion euro loan from the EU and IMF; without it, the country would have been broke by mid-July. Outside in Syntagma Square, protesters in cycling masks are running from clouds of teargas. Since yesterday, the square has been filled with surging crowds pushed back by riot police; Greek TV reports that 500 people aged between 15 and 65 have been treated in the metro station for respiratory problems and injuries.

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The tragic flaw is in Greece’s own responsibility for its problems, which has allowed Northern European pundits and politicians to demonize its people as incorrigibly lazy, feckless, criminal and corrupt: There simply wasn’t enough solidarity from outside the country to support a heroic last stand against austerity, the banks and the IMF. Perhaps political and economic pressure will soften the measures and ease the terms of Greece’s loans; perhaps, when default eventually comes, Greece will be better prepared to weather it. Perhaps the sight of a European country being forced to its knees might prompt a belated rethinking of the European project and the relationship between democracy and the markets. Perhaps. Otherwise, as one tweet coming out of Athens put it, “You are all in Syntagma Square. You just don’t know it yet.”

Amy Goodman: ‘Food Terrorism’ Next Door to the Magic Kingdom

Think of “food terrorism” and what do you see? Diabolical plots to taint items on grocery-store shelves? If you are Buddy Dyer, the mayor of Orlando, Fla., you might be thinking of a group feeding the homeless and hungry in one of your city parks. That is what Dyer is widely quoted as calling the activists with the Orlando chapter of Food Not Bombs-“food terrorists.” In the past few weeks, no less than 21 people have been arrested in Orlando, the home of Disney World, for handing out free food in a park.

Food Not Bombs is an international, grass-roots organization that fights hunger. As the name implies, it is against war. Its website home page reads: “Food Not Bombs shares free vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities around the world to protest war, poverty and the destruction of the environment. With over a billion people going hungry each day how can we spend another dollar on war?” The Orlando chapter sets up a meal distribution table every Monday morning and Wednesday evening in the city’s Lake Eola Park.

Adam Sanchez: Taking on Big Coal’s Curriculum

For years dirty energy corporations have created education materials marketed to young children in an attempt to shape the discussion around environmental issues. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Exxon created a lesson plan “about the healthy, flourishing wildlife in Prince William Sound, Alaska, which showed beautiful eagles, frolicking sea otters, and sea birds in their habitat.” Last year, oil giant BP was exposed for helping to write California state’s environmental curriculum for over six million children. So it should come as no surprise that Scholastic recently partnered with the American Coal Foundation to produce “The United States of Energy,” a 4th grade curriculum designed to boost the “clean” image of dirty coal.

Scholastic, a $2 billion corporation whose educational materials are in 9 out of 10 classrooms in the United States, is no stranger to partnering with the corporate world to market products and brands to children. Last year Scholastic teamed up with SunnyD, the juice company whose product has been labeled by consumer groups as “junk juice” because of its high sugar and very low fruit juice content despite being marketed as a “real fruit beverage.” Marketing the campaign through their Parent & Child magazine, Scholastic agreed to donate 20 books to any class that sent in 20 UPC labels of SunnyD drinks. The ten schools that collected the most labels (ranging from 13,000 to 30,000 SunnyD labels per school!) were awarded hundreds of books.