Tag: Opinion

Whether it’s in your employment contract or the paperwork for a cell phone, it’s odds on that the small print says you can’t sue

Worried about the influence of money in American politics, the huge cash payouts that the US supreme court waved through by its Citizens United decision – the decision that lifted most limits on election campaign spending? Corporations are having their way with American elections just as they’ve already had their way with our media.

But at least we have the courts, right?

Wrong. The third branch of government’s in trouble, too. In fact, access to justice – like access to elected office, let alone a pundit’s perch – is becoming a perk just for the rich and powerful.

Take the young woman now testifying in court in Texas. Jamie Leigh Jones claims she was drugged and gang-raped while working for military contractor KBR in Iraq (at the time, a division of Halliburton). Jones, now 26, was on her fourth day in post in Baghdad in 2005 when she says she was assaulted by seven contractors and held captive, under armed guard by two KBR police, in a shipping container.

Beverly Bell: Monsanto in Haiti

HINCHE, Haiti, June 27 – Last week, thousands of farmers and supporters of Haitian peasant agriculture marched for hours under the hot Caribbean sun to call for more government support for locally grown seeds and agriculture.

The demonstration was organized by the Peasant Movement of Papay and other farmer associations, human rights and women’s groups, and the Haitian Platform for Alternative Development (PAPDA), the Haitian online agency AlterPresse reported from the march. The official theme of the peaceful demonstration was “Land Grabbing is Endangering Agricultural Sovereignty.”

Singing slogans like “Long Live Haitian Agriculture!” and “Long live local seeds!” the crowd – wearing straw hats and red T-shirts – wound its way on foot, donkeys, and bikes through this dusty provincial capital. The demonstration ended at a square named for farmer Charlemagne Péralte, who lead the “Caco” peasant revolt against the U.S. army occupation from 1916 until 1919, when U.S. Marines assassinated him.

Kay Tillow: One Montana County’s Medicare-for-All Coverage

As the Ryan Republicans try to destroy Medicare, here’s a prescription to clean up the whole mess.

Back when he presided over the Senate’s health care reform debate, Max Baucus, chairman of the all-powerful Senate Finance Committee, had said everything was on the table – except for single-payer universal health care. When doctors, nurses, and others rose in his hearing to insist that single payer be included in the debate, the Montana Democrat had them arrested. As more stood up, Baucus could be heard on his open microphone saying, “We need more police.”

Yet when Baucus needed a solution to a catastrophic health disaster in Libby, Montana and surrounding Lincoln County, he turned to the nation’s single-payer healthcare system, Medicare, to solve the problem.

George Zornick: Debt Ceiling Theatrics Get More Dangerous by the Day

Republicans have been playing a double game with the debt limit debate. On one hand, it’s hard to imagine GOP members of Congress actually blocking a measure that would raise the debt ceiling, because that would lead to sudden, dramatic reductions in government functions: there might not be money for Social Security payments, Medicare checks, military salaries and more. Worse, confidence in US Treasury bills would be seriously wounded if the debt ceiling isn’t raised by August 2, meaning economic catastrophe. Voters would blame Republicans for this economic catastrophe, polls show, and House Speaker John Boehner was warned by Wall Street executives in no uncertain terms that he could not allow this situation to occur.

Ari Melber: Cuomo’s Big Problem in 2016: Democrats

After New York’s historic gay marriage vote last week, the national political media has begun speculating about the presidential prospects for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.  Right now, in fact, Cuomo is drawing more national media attention and more Google searches than at any other point in his governorship.

So reporters and regular people are zeroing in on Cuomo. But put aside the historical significance of the gay marriage vote, and anyone who follows New York politics knows the prospect of Cuomo as a popular Democratic primary candidate in 2016 is a joke.

Robert Dreyfuss: Memo to Obama: Talk to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

The Obama administration ought to resist calls from neoconservatives and hawks, including the ever-hawkish Washington Post, and opt for dialogue with Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria.

It’s a difficult problem, but the fact remains that there’s little or nothing that President Obama can do to force regime change in Syria. (In other countries, too, it’s not so easy. In Libya, three months of a US- and NATO-led war have failed to topple Muammar Qaddafi. In Bahrain, where the United States has lots more leverage and contacts, the royal family there is resisting change.)

Athens-When he was elected prime minister in 2009 at the head of Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PaSoK), George Papandreou was going to wipe out corruption, open up politics, rejuvenate the country’s sclerotic economy. “There is money,” he said then, although he must have known there wasn’t any in the public coffers. Less than two years later, he has allowed the “troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund to bind him on the horns of an impossible dilemma: either the Greek government implements a second round of austerity measures more savage than any yet endured by a developed country, with deeper cuts and tax hikes and a wholesale, cut-price sell-off of its public assets, or Greece faces default on its sovereign debt, imminent bankruptcy.

Cyril Mychalejko: Private Contractors Making a Killing Off the Drug War

As tens of thousands of corpses continue to pile up as a result of the US-led “War on Drugs” in Latin America, private contractors are benefiting from lucrative federal counternarcotics contracts amounting to billions of dollars, without worry of oversight or accountability.

US contractors in Latin America are paid by the Defense and State Departments to supply countries with services that include intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, training, and equipment.

John Nochols: Supreme Court Removes Another Barrier to Corporate Ownership of Elections

The US Supreme Court’s conservative majority continued its project of bartering off American democracy to the highest bidder with a decision Monday that will make it dramatically harder to counter free-spending attack campaigns funded by billionaire donors and corporate spin machines.

With a 5-4 vote, the Court has struck down a matching-funds mechanism in Arizona’s Clean Elections Law that allowed candidates who accepted public funding to match the spending of privately funded candidates and independent groups that might attack them. Under the Arizona law-which has long been considered a national model for using public funds to pay for campaigns-candidates who accept public funding are limited in what they can spend.

Robert Drefuss: Reality Check: Budget Cuts Inevitable at the Department of Defense

There’s an inevitability to the coming decline of US power and influence worldwide, as the American economy shrinks relative to the economic power of other countries, as America’s allies in places like Egypt strike out on their own, and as the size of the US military declines because the United States can no longer afford to spend upwards of $700 billion on defense.

Still, there are those who believe that the United States must maintain, and even increase its spending at the Pentagon, even as more and more Republicans are prepared to throw the military under the bus to save money. Take, for instance, Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, who pens an op-ed in today’s paper titled: “What’s happened to America’s leadership role?” Hiatt, a reliable hawk who’s helped steer the Post into indefensibly pro-defense positions, including support for the wars in Afghanistan and Libya, accuses President Obama of surrendering the US leadership role by refusing to take the lead in battling Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and by backing a modest drawdown in Afghanistan:

Bernie Sanders went to the floor of the Senate last December to deliver the most important congressional address of 2010, a nine-hour long, filibuster-style condemnation of economic policies that favored the rich while burdening working Americans. The independent senator from Vermont electrified the nation with a call for economic justice that challenged Obama administration compromises with Republicans on issues of tax policy and declared: “There is a war going on in this country, and I am not referring to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. I am talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country against the working families of the United States of America, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country.”

Now, as Republicans pressure the president to embrace an approach to deficit reduction that will further widen the gap between rich and working Americans-with tax breaks for the wealthy and the slashing of benefits for the what remains of the middle class-Sanders is preparing to return to the Senate floor Monday for another epic challenge to the failed economic policies of Wall Street and its political amen corner.

Geoffrey R. Stone:Our Untransparent President

AS a longtime supporter and colleague of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago, as well as an informal adviser to his 2008 campaign, I had high hopes that he would restore the balance between government secrecy and government transparency that had been lost under George W. Bush, and that he would follow through on his promise, as a candidate, to promote openness and public accountability in government policy making.

It has not quite worked out that way. While Mr. Obama has taken certain steps, notably early in his administration, to scale back some of the Bush-era excesses, in other respects he has shown a disappointing willingness to continue in his predecessor’s footsteps.

New York Times Editorial: Gay Marriage: A Milestone

New York State has made a powerful and principled choice by giving all couples the right to wed and enjoy the legal rights of marriage. It is a proud moment for New Yorkers, thousands of whom took to the streets on Sunday to celebrate this step forward. But this moment does not erase the bigotry against gays and lesbians enshrined in the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition of same-sex marriages and allows any state to refuse to recognize another state’s unions.

Though there was unnecessary secrecy in the negotiations, Gov. Andrew Cuomo made a determined effort to achieve marriage equality in New York. He shares credit with the four Republican state senators who bucked their party and threats from conservatives to do what they knew was right. State Senators James Alesi, Roy McDonald, Mark Grisanti and Stephen Saland, all from upstate districts, deserve the support of their communities. They showed the kind of strength that is extremely hard to find in today’s politics.

Joe Conason: The Ruinous Rant of John McCain

The decline of the Grand Old Party into an angry mob is gaining momentum, with crackpot rage displacing common sense on every major issue from public finance to marriage rights.

An ominous signal of this transformation emanated last week from John McCain, who has been a sometime voice of rationality on such sensitive partisan matters as torture, climate change and immigration. Now he, too, has descended into demagoguery by falsely claiming that illegal immigrants are behind the spread of destructive wildfires in Arizona.

HE was born this way.

Bi.

Not bisexual. Not even bipartisan. Just binary.

Our president likes to be on both sides at once.

In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surging and withdrawing simultaneously. He’s leaving fewer troops than are needed for a counterinsurgency strategy and more troops than are needed for a counterterrorism strategy – and he seems to want both strategies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.

On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.

Mark Weisbrot: European Authorities Risking Financial Contagion in Greek Showdown; Where Is the U.S. Government?

The US had better be ready for the economic shock

The European authorities are playing a dangerous game of “chicken” with Greece right now. It is overdue for US members of Congress to exercise some oversight as to what our government’s role is in this process, and how we might be preparing for a Greek debt default. Depending on how it happens, this default could have serious repercussions for the international financial system, the US economy and, indeed, the world economy.

New York Times Editorial: Whose Stimulus?

Big businesses are telling Washington that they are willing to do their bit for the economy – if the price is right. Multinational companies say they could repatriate hundreds of billions in foreign profits and pump them into domestic investment and hiring, but only if Congress and the White House agree to cut the tax rate on those profits to 5.25 percent from 35 percent. They call their plan “the next stimulus.” Sounds more like extortion.

In the last five years American businesses have kept abroad more than $1 trillion worth of foreign earnings, according to government data. An article by David Kocieniewski in The Times last week noted that Microsoft has $29 billion offshore, Google has $17 billion and Apple has $12 billion.

Robert Naiman: Kucinich: Ensure Safety of U.S. Citizens on The Audacity of Hope

In many arenas of human endeavor, there is no plausible way to convince someone through abstract argument that an endeavor that appears to be incredibly difficult is nonetheless not impossible. There’s nothing for it but to create an example.

Efforts to get Members of Congress to do anything related in any way to the basic human rights of Palestinians that is not slavishly pro-Likud is a prime example of this phenomenon. Many are convinced – not without evidence that makes their position seductive – that it is an immutable law of the universe that all Members of Congress must always express fealty to right-wing views on this topic.

Frank Bruni: To Know Us Is to Let Us Love

IN the mid-1980s, when I was in college, what concerned and frustrated my peers and me was how few states had basic statutes forbidding discrimination against gay men and lesbians: laws that merely prevented someone from being denied a job or apartment on the basis of whom he or she loved. At that point only Wisconsin and the District of Columbia provided such protection. The decade would end with just one addition, Massachusetts, to that meager list.

Same-sex marriage? I don’t recall our talking – or dreaming – much about that. We considered ourselves realists. Sometimes idealists. But never fantasists.

John Nichols: Wisconsin Governor Walker’s Chief Judicial Ally Accused of Physically Attacking Jurist Who Defended Rule of Law

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, who mentored controversial Governor Scott Walker when both served as Republican legislators, has positioned himself as the primary defender of Walker’s radical anti-labor and anti-local democracy agenda on the court.

And it appears that the justice, whose unstable behavior and violent language has been highlighted in media reports, is willing to go to any length to protect Walker from legal accountability.

Justice Prosser, who retained his seat on the court only after the recount of results from an April statewide election that saw charges of fraud and political abuse aimed at the justice’s campaign, now stands accused of physically attacking a justice who disagreed with his push to make the high court an amen corner for the governor.

House Speaker John Boehner, whose incoherent approach to the constitutional mandate that Congress check and balance presidential war-making has so served the interests of the Obama administration’s Libya project, steered the House into conflict with itself Friday.

Boehner advanced two proposals (under the sponsorship of the speaker’s close allies) relating to the president’s decision to involve US forces in an ongoing, if largely dysfunctional, NATO led assault on Libya.

One proposal would have authorized the president’s war of whim.

The other would have cut funding for Obama’s latest war, thus bringing the initiative to a swift conclusion.

New York Times Editorial: An Unfair Burden

For all of the economic hardship of the last several years, there was reason to hope that the nation could avoid a crushing increase in the number of Americans living in poverty. That hope is fading fast.

In 2008, amid a deepening recession, a Census Bureau measure showed that the number of poor Americans rose by 1.7 million to nearly 47.5 million. In 2009, thanks in large part to the Obama stimulus, the rise in poverty was halted – a significant accomplishment at a time of worsening unemployment. When data for 2010 are released in the fall, poverty is expected to have stayed in check because the stimulus, including aid to states and bolstered unemployment benefits, was still in effect last year.

Charles M. Blow: Them That’s Not Shall Lose

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

James Baldwin penned that line more than 50 years ago, but it seems particularly prescient today, if in a different manner than its original intent.

Baldwin was referring to the poor being consistently overcharged for inferior goods. But I’ve always considered that sentence in the context of the extreme psychological toll of poverty, for it is in that way that I, too, know well how expensive it is to be poor.

Steve Rattner: The Great Corn Con

FEELING the need for an example of government policy run amok? Look no further than the box of cornflakes on your kitchen shelf. In its myriad corn-related interventions, Washington has managed simultaneously to help drive up food prices and add tens of billions of dollars to the deficit, while arguably increasing energy use and harming the environment.

Even in a crowd of rising food and commodity costs, corn stands out, its price having doubled in less than a year to a record $7.87 per bushel in early June. Booming global demand has overtaken stagnant supply.

Ari Melber: Van Jones Returns, Launches Liberal Alternative to The Tea Partyn

Over one thousand liberal activists gathered in Manhattan on Thursday night, in a bid to counter the Tea Party and elevate a progressive who can tangle with the Becks and Bachmanns that dominate today’s outraged populism.  The event launched “Rebuild the Dream,” a MoveOn-backed effort to organize around economic issues.

The crowd that filed into Town Hall in midtown Manhattan was a mix of progressives old and young, in work clothes and casual attire. While they mingled and waited for music by The Roots, a second event was staged in a nearby press room. There reporters and bloggers heard from the would-be leader of a liberal Tea Party — the attorney, author and former Obama official Van Jones.  Bowing to the lexicon of today’s Left, however, it was clear that Jones was not announcing a “campaign,” (despite the flashy website, social media strategy and PR campaign). He was not launching a lobbying “coalition,” either, (even though the effort was backed by MoveOn, labor unions, USAction, TrueMajority and “many others to be announced”).   The event promised the beginning of a movement.

Nobel laureate Peter Diamond had a depressing Op-Ed in The New York Times on June 5, withdrawing himself from contention as a member of the Federal Reserve board in the face of Republican opposition.

snip

What you need to know about Mr. Diamond is not just that he’s a very great economist, but that he’s an economist’s economist – someone who is a deeply respected theorist, not at all someone who made his way as an ideologue. His work is basically apolitical.

Except that these days everything is political.

Willaim Rivers Pitt: Clarence Thomas Must Go

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

– Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart

For the sake of full disclosure, I will tell you that I do not like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In my opinion, he has no business sitting on the high court after the reprehensible treatment he forced Anita Hill to endure, and has been a disgrace to the bench lo these last twenty years. Anthony Weiner, one of Clarence Thomas’ most ardent critics, was just run out of Washington DC on a rail for behavior far less offensive; Mr. Thomas is lucky there was no such thing as Twitter when he was sexually harassing Hill, or he’d be chasing ambulances outside of muni court like the hack he is. He sits up there like a lump, never speaking or offering questions to petitioners, and has not had an original thought since his shameful Senate approval.

But his vapid intellectual presence on the bench is only a small part of the story. Mr. Thomas has, by all appearances, turned his position on the court into a license to print money for himself, his family, and a few choice friends.

Eugene Robinson: Why does the Afghanistan war go on?

Some heard a declaration of victory, others an admission of defeat. The many contradictions in President Obama’s speech about Afghanistan Wednesday night were perhaps intended to obscure the bottom line: Tens of thousands of American troops will remain for at least three more years, some of them will be maimed or killed, and Obama offered no good reason why.

The only debate within the administration, it appears, was whether to bring home the troops far too slowly or not at all. Obama decided on the too-slowly option.

Michael Prysner: Obama’s speech means nothing to us and our families

President Barack Obama said in his speech on June 22, “This has been a difficult decade for our country.”

But it has not been difficult for everyone in the United States. It has not been difficult for the defense contractors, with their billion-dollar contracts churning out an endless supply of missiles to be fired and armored vehicles to be blown up. It has not been difficult for the oil giants, making record profits and getting access to new, untapped corners of the most resource-rich region of the world. It has not been difficult for the politicians, most of them millionaires themselves, getting fatter with lobbying money, whose sons and daughters do not die in combat, who smile and say they “support the troops” while they limit funding for veterans to mere scraps from the table.

Gareth Porter: Obama Leaves Door Open to Long-Term U.S. Afghan Combat

President Barack Obama’s speech announcing that the 33,000 “surge” troops in Afghanistan will be withdrawn by “summer” 2012 indicates that he has given priority to the interests of the military and the Pentagon over concerns by key officials in his administration over the impact of the war’s costs on domestic socioeconomic needs.

And in a section of the speech that must be interpreted in the context of his past policy decisions on Iraq, Obama appeared to support the desire of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus to keep a substantial number of combat troops in Afghanistan beyond the publicly announced “transition” in 2014.

Americans are impatient – and increasingly despairing – about the war in Afghanistan. After 10 years of fighting, more than 1,500 American lives lost and $450 billion spent, they need to know there is a clear way out.

On Wednesday night, President Obama announced that American troops will soon begin to withdraw, but at a size and pace unlikely to satisfy many Americans.

He said that 10,000 of the 33,000 troops from the “surge” would come home before the end of this year, with the rest out by next summer. He vowed that reductions would continue “at a steady pace” after that, and that “the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security” by sometime in 2014.

David K. Shipler: Free to Search and Seize

THIS spring was a rough season for the Fourth Amendment. The Obama administration petitioned the Supreme Court to allow GPS tracking of vehicles without judicial permission. The Supreme Court ruled that the police could break into a house without a search warrant if, after knocking and announcing themselves, they heard what sounded like evidence being destroyed. Then it refused to see a Fourth Amendment violation where a citizen was jailed for 16 days on the false pretext that he was being held as a material witness to a crime.

In addition, Congress renewed Patriot Act provisions on enhanced surveillance powers until 2015, and the F.B.I. expanded agents’ authority to comb databases, follow people and rummage through their trash even if they are not suspected of a crime.

Dean Baker: Blognote in Honor of Thomas Friedman: Spending on the Commerce Department Is Going to Bankrupt the Country

The United States has to cut back spending on the Commerce Department or it will bankrupt the country. Okay, I have no evidence for this and it really doesn’t make any sense. The Commerce Department’s budget is about $10 billion a year, less than 0.3 percent of total spending, but this note is written in the spirit of Thomas Friedman.

Just as Thomas Friedman can tell readers that Social Security and Medicare are bankrupting the country with no evidence, in my blognote I get to blame the Commerce Department. The reality of course is that Social Security is fully funded by its own dedicated tax revenue through the year 2036, meaning the program on net imposes no burden on the government.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. Is Jon Huntsman too moderate for the GOP?

Here are the key questions about Jon Huntsman’s presidential candidacy: Is he the American version of David Cameron? And is the Republican Party ready for a Cameron moment?

What does a British prime minister have to do with the 2012 Republican primaries? If Huntsman is lucky, quite a lot. The British Conservative Party chose Cameron as its leader in 2005 because it was sick of losing elections and realized it could no longer present itself as an old, cranky, right-wing party. Cameron was Mr. Nice, Mr. Modern, Mr. Moderate and Mr. New. And now he’s in power.

Jeff Biggers: FOX and Republicans Rerun Mexicans, Lies and Videotape, As Arizona Becomes Grand Canyon State Again

As Interior Secretary Ken Salazar joined Havasupai tribal elders and Congressman Raul Grijalva for a historic announcement at the Grand Canyon National Park on Monday, Republicans across Arizona scurried to create their own roadside attraction.

And relying on information from a widely denounced anti-immigrant extremist, FOX News and other media outlets have been right behind them to fan the flames of Arizona’s right-wing discontent this summer.

Massive spending cuts will make the future bleaker for millions of Americans.

The number of poor children had already grown by 2.1 million in 2009 over pre-recession levels, with continuing high joblessness among parents raising concerns that poverty will continue to worsen for some time. Since kids who spend more than half their childhood in poverty earn on average 39 percent less than median income as adults, we can expect lasting costs that will hurt the nation’s future economic growth.

And yet, a majority of House lawmakers want to narrow the deficit by making things worse for today’s kids.

Sarah Azaransky: Wal-Mart Ruling Erodes Rights of Women of Color

The Supreme Court’s ruling to throw out the sex discrimination class action lawsuit against Wal-mart undermines employment rights of women of color.

First to the ruling. The Court ruled that women did not show that Wal-Mart had a policy of discrimination. Since each Wal-Mart supervisor has discretion over pay and promotion, Justice Scalia concluded there was no “glue holding the alleged reasons for all those decisions together.”

Justice Ginsburg, joined by the Court’s three liberal justices, dissented on this point.  Citing evidence that “gender bias suffused Wal-mart company culture,” Ginsburg affirmed, “managers, like all humankind, may be prey to biases of which they are unaware.”

While all the plaintiffs in the case were women, thirty five percent were women of color and Betty Dukes, the case’s namesake and employee of the Pittsburg, CA store, is African American.

Laura Flanders: Walmart: Too Big to Sue?

The Roberts court decision to block the class action lawsuit for sex discrimination effectively defines Walmart as ‘too big to sue’

Let’s get this right: the world’s biggest boss, supported by companies as diverse as Altria, Bank of America, Microsoft and General Electric and backed up by the godfather of big business (the US Chamber of Commerce) has persuaded the US supreme court that thousands of women workers can’t possibly share enough of an interest to constitute a class?

It’s hard to know which part of the court’s decision in Dukes v Walmart hurts equity most: the assault on class-action jurisprudence generally, at a time of shrinking tools for workers seeking redress, or the defeat of history’s biggest gender-based claim before a court that, for the first time, includes two women, one of whom (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) made her reputation in sex discrimination law.

Maryam Al-Zoubi: Source of Missing Jobs in America Found: Forced Laborers

With unemployment at a near historic high in the United States, could you imagine any American company bringing in foreign workers to work for them below the minimum wage and with no benefits? Most people would say no. But can you imagine those same Americans forcing foreign workers to stay here, with no pay, and constant abuse? That is actually happening in this country today.

Forced labor is a real phenomenon in the United States agriculture business. Without awareness and investigation into where our supplies come from and who businesses are hiring, the American people become unwitting complicit supporters of labor trafficking.

When Pendleton, South Carolina, Mayor Randy Hayes rose to address the question of whether the US Conference of Mayors should back an antiwar resolution urging the president and Congress to “speed up the ending” of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the assumption might have been that he would speak in opposition. Instead, the self-described mayor of a “military town” argued that the resolution was very restrained-in that it didn’t call for immediate withdrawal-and suggested that most mayors would recognize the merit of the argument for redirecting money for military adventures abroad to meeting needs at home.

Hayes was right. The mayors voted overwhelmingly Monday for the resolution, which urges President Obama and Congress to “bring these war dollars home to meet vital human needs, promote job creation, rebuild our infrastructure, aid municipal and state governments, and develop a new economy based upon renewable, sustainable energy, and reduce the national debt.”

Bruce Ackerman: Legal Acrobatics, Illegal War

IT has now been over three months since the first NATO bombs fell on Libya, yet President Obama has failed to request Congressional approval for military action, as required by the War Powers Act of 1973. The legal machinations Mr. Obama has used to justify war without Congressional consent set a troubling precedent that could allow future administrations to wage war at their convenience – free of legislative checks and balances.

When Mr. Obama first announced American military involvement in Libya, he notified Congress within 48 hours, as prescribed by the War Powers Act. This initiated a 60-day period, during which he was required to obtain approval from Congress; if he failed to do so, the act gave him at most 30 days to halt all “hostilities.”

Joe Nocera: Banking’s Moment of Truth

Capital matters. Let me put that another way. The current fight over additional capital requirements for the banking industry, eye-glazing though it is, also happens to be the most important reform moment since the financial crisis broke out three years ago. More important than the wrangling over Dodd-Frank. More important than the ongoing effort to regulate derivatives. More important even than the jousting over the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If investment banks like Merrill Lynch had had adequate capital requirements, they would not have been able to pile on so much disastrous debt. If A.I.G. had been required to put up enough capital against its credit default swaps, it’s quite likely that the government would not have had to take over the company. If the big banks had not been able to so easily game their capital requirements, they might not have needed taxpayer bailouts. A real capital cushion would have allowed the banks to absorb the losses instead of the taxpayers. That’s the role capital serves.

LONDON – Greece has long held emotional sway over Europe. All the cradle-of-Western-civilization talk earned it leniency, even indulgence. The European Union was not ready to go mano-a-mano with the birthplace of democracy.

Past glory is a wonderful thing – and a lousy guide for present policy. That’s true in the Holy Land, in Kosovo and in Athens. Greece should not have been allowed into the euro. It failed to join in 1999 because it did not meet fiscal criteria. When it did meet them in 2001, the fix came through phony budget numbers.

But Europe’s bold monetary union required an Athenian imprimatur to be fully European. So everyone turned a blind eye.

Robert Kuttner: f Only Greece Were AIG

The struggling country hasn’t been bailed out because it’s not a bank-it’s just a country with suffering people.

Here comes Financial Crisis 2.0. Like its predecessor, it was caused by the banks.

The first crisis was the result of banks inventing toxic financial products and then promoting bets on different kinds of securities with borrowed money. When the speculative bubble popped, tens of trillions of dollars in financial and housing assets vanished. At that point, governments and central banks stepped in and rescued the banks. The only thing that suffered was the rest of the economy.

On all policy fronts, banks called the shots. The supposed cure for the large public deficits caused by the financial crisis and resulting recession was belt tightening-for everyone but the banks. Yet voters were oddly passive because the issues seemed technical, elected leaders sided with bankers, and citizens were not quite sure whom to blame.

Jim Hightower: Big Coal Buys Access to 4th Graders

If some predator were stalking fourth graders in your community, there’d be a mighty uproar to make the predator get away and stay away from your schools.

But what if the stalker were the coal industry, dressed in an academic outfit in a gambit to brainwash fourth-graders? Unbeknownst to most Americans, grade school kids are being targeted by the American Coal Foundation with a propaganda package stealthily titled, “The United States of Energy.”

It’s not mentioned in the materials, but Big Coal paid big bucks to Scholastic Inc. to develop this shamelessly distorted promotion of the dirtiest fuel on Earth. The package fills little minds with the joys of having coal-fueled utilities generating electricity 24 hours a day. Not a peep is made about the toxic waste, air and water pollution, mine explosions, black lung deaths, destructive mountaintop removal mining, greenhouse gas emissions, political corruption, and other decidedly unfriendly aspects of what industry propagandists simply tout as “black gold.”

Karen J. Greenberg: Business as Usual on Steroids

In the seven weeks since the killing of Osama bin Laden, pundits and experts of many stripes have concluded that his death represents a marker of genuine significance in the story of America’s encounter with terrorism.  Peter Bergen, a bin Laden expert, was typically blunt the day after the death when he wrote, “Killing bin Laden is the end of the war on terror. We can just sort of announce that right now.”

Yet you wouldn’t know it in Washington where, if anything, the Obama administration and Congress have interpreted the killing of al-Qaeda’s leader as a virtual license to double down on every “front” in the war on terror.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was no less blunt than Bergen, but with quite a different endpoint in mind.  “Even as we mark this milestone,” she said on the day Bergen’s comments were published, “we should not forget that the battle to stop al-Qaeda and its syndicate of terror will not end with the death of bin Laden.  Indeed, we must take this opportunity to renew our resolve and redouble our efforts.”

James Kwak: “The Elderly” for Beginners

As the AARP says that it is open to modest cuts in Social Security benefits, it’s worthwhile asking a more fundamental question: are Social Security and Medicare programs that benefit the elderly?

The answer may seem obvious. After all, the bulk of Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance benefits go to people over 62, and almost all Medicare beneficiaries are over 65. So it’s often observed in passing that our long-range budget issues are the product of transfers to the elderly. For example, in “Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2005”, Alice Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill write, “These big programs, which benefit primarily the elderly, will drive increases in federal spending in the longer run” (p 36). Other commentators have occasionally argued that the problem is that the elderly have become too powerful and therefore claim too large a share of government spending, especially compared to the very young.* When you add to that the frequent complaint that, by running budget deficits, we are imposing burdens on our grandchildren, this age-based inequity seems even greater.