Tag: Opinion

From Marmet to Blair, West Virginia, hundreds of activists are marching across the Appalachian region this week to honor the historic Battle of Blair Mountain of 1921. This event, designed to mark one of the biggest civil uprisings in the United States history and the largest armed insurrection since the American Civil War, however, is not just about history. Appalachia Rising and Friends of Blair Mountain are using the five-day march to protest the controversial practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.

Dave Roberts of Grist detailed well the brutality of mountaintop removal in a 2008 guest post at TheNation.com:

“Mountain ridges and peaks are clear-cut, stripped of all trees and other flora. Explosives are buried underground, and enormous blasts dislodge millions of tons of rock, dirt, soil, and animal and plant life. That ‘overburden’ is then carted away or dumped into the stream and creek beds in the mountain hollows below, destroying or polluting thousands of miles of running water. Huge 20-story-tall draglines pull away the rock to expose coal seams. Similarly huge machines then yank the coal out and dump the remaining waste down into those streams.”From Marmet to Blair, West Virginia, hundreds of activists are marching across the Appalachian region this week to honor the historic Battle of Blair Mountain of 1921. This event, designed to mark one of the biggest civil uprisings in the United States history and the largest armed insurrection since the American Civil War, however, is not just about history. Appalachia Rising and Friends of Blair Mountain are using the five-day march to protest the controversial practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.

Dave Roberts of Grist detailed well the brutality of mountaintop removal in a 2008 guest post at TheNation.com:

“Mountain ridges and peaks are clear-cut, stripped of all trees and other flora. Explosives are buried underground, and enormous blasts dislodge millions of tons of rock, dirt, soil, and animal and plant life. That ‘overburden’ is then carted away or dumped into the stream and creek beds in the mountain hollows below, destroying or polluting thousands of miles of running water. Huge 20-story-tall draglines pull away the rock to expose coal seams. Similarly huge machines then yank the coal out and dump the remaining waste down into those streams.”

Amy Goodman: Heeding the Warnings of Environmental Reveres

ef it feels.”

These two lines were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem “Snow-Flakes,” published in a volume in 1863 alongside his epic and better-known “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Much of the news chatter this week has been about Sarah Palin’s flubbing of the history of Revere’s famous ride in April 1775. Revere was on a late-night, clandestine mission to alert American revolutionaries of an impending British attack. Palin’s incorrect version had Revere loudly ringing a bell and shooting a gun on horseback as a warning to the British to back off.

Pathetically, as well, the media has been awash with New York Congressmember Anthony Weiner’s string of electronic sexual peccadillos. Punctuating the sensationalism, and between the TV commercials from the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries, are story after story of extreme weather events. Herein lies the real scandal: Why aren’t the TV meteorologists, with each story, following the words “extreme weather” with another two, “climate change”? We need modern-day eco-Paul (or Paula) Revere to rouse the populace to this imminent threat.

Hanah Gurman: Bigger than Blackwater: Arming the UAE

The International Defense Exhibition, otherwise known as IDEX, has been held bi-annually in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) since 1993. It is the largest defense expo in the Middle East and North Africa and one of the biggest in the world. But far from being a one-off, it highlights the UAE’s growing stature as a global arms buyer.

This year’s IDEX took place in the glistening Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre. Its high ceilings and massive rooms displayed a diverse array of high-tech weaponry against the backdrop of heavily illuminated signboards like the ones you see in the showrooms of luxury car dealerships. All the big Western defense corporations were there – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Dyncorp, Northrup Grumman, European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. – as well as Chinese companies, including China North. There were also a host of local companies including Arabian Aerospace, Abu Dhabi Ship Building Company, and the state-owned Mubadala. Like all of these events, it was a heavily male enterprise. The exhibitors wore suits. The visitors wore either the military uniform of the UAE or traditional Arab dress.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has come to Washington to be honored at a state dinner at the White House tonight, will be welcomed as a loyal ally, a very competent leader and the representative of a successful nation. No doubt, President Obama has reason to envy her capacity to exploit the weaknesses of her situation to stay on top. It is not, however, the kind of thing that is decently said aloud. Commentators instead will remind Germany of its moral obligations: to accept US initiatives, large and small. Otherwise, after all, we might not defend it against Russian invasion or Iranian missiles.

In Washington the chancellor will pretend to agree with a worldview that in Berlin she ignores, since it is dismissed as preposterous by much of her citizenry as well as by intelligent bureaucrats and politicians. Once home, she will preside over the shrinkage of the German army and keep it out of disasters like the stalled NATO intervention in Libya. Before the next general election, two years hence, she will certainly recall German forces from Afghanistan. Since 1945, war has become deeply unpopular in Germany, and the Afghan war is viewed as especially senseless.

Larry Goldsmith: Bradley Manning: Rich Man’s War, Poor (Gay) Man’s Fight

A poor, young gay man from the rural South joins the U.S. Army under pressure from his father, and because it’s the only way left to pay for a college education. He is sent to Iraq, where he is tormented by fellow soldiers who entertain themselves watching “war porn” videos of drone and helicopter attacks on civilians. He is accused of leaking documents to Wikileaks and placed in solitary confinement, where he has been held for more than a year awaiting a military trial.  The President of the United States, a former Constitutional law professor lately suffering amnesia about the presumption of innocence, declares publicly that “he broke the law.”  The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union express grave concern about the conditions of his imprisonment, and the spokesman for the U.S. State Department is forced to resign after calling it “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” A letter signed by 295 noted legal scholars charges that his imprisonment violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment guarantee against punishment without trial, and that procedures used on Manning “calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality” amount to torture.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Human Rights Campaign, having invested millions lobbying for “gays in the military,” have no comment.  Of course not.  Bradley Manning is not that butch patriotic homosexual, so central to the gays-in-the-military campaign, who Defends Democracy and Fights Terrorism with a virility indistinguishable from that of his straight buddies. He is not that pillar of social and economic stability, only incidentally homosexual, who returns home from the front to a respectable profession and a faithful spouse and children.

Robert Reich: Make Companies’ Political Spending Transparent

President Obama is mulling an executive order to force big government contractors to disclose their political spending. He should issue it immediately. But he should go further – banning all political activity by companies receiving more than half their revenues from the federal government.

Consider Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest contractor. It has received more than $19 billion in federal contracts so far this year. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Lockheed has already spent more than $3 million lobbying Congress this year.

Lockheed supports a platoon of Washington lawyers and lobbyists dedicated to getting more federal contracts. Sixty-four of Lockheed’s lobbyists are former congressional staffers, Pentagon officials and White House aides. Two are former members of Congress. As such, they used to be on the public payroll, representing us. Now we continue to pay them, indirectly, through the government contracts Lockheed gets. But their job is to improve Lockheed’s bottom line.

John Nichols: Russ Feingold’s March With Workers Stirs Talk of a Political Comeback

Russ Feingold leapt into the center of the fight for worker rights and people-first budgeting in Wisconsin this week, stirring excitement about the prospect that the popular former US senator might soon be reentering the political fray-as a candidate for an open Senate seat in 2012 or perhaps as the champion of the forces seeking to remove right-wing Governor Scott Walker in a recall election.

Russ Feingold leapt into the center of the fight for worker rights and people-first budgeting in Wisconsin this week, stirring excitement about the prospect that the popular former US senator might soon be reentering the political fray-as a candidate for an open Senate seat in 2012 or perhaps as the champion of the forces seeking to remove right-wing Governor Scott Walker in a recall election.

Eugene Robinson: The Revisionist Ride of Paul Revere

Sarah Palin is a fraud with charisma-and enough political support to effectively hold the Republican Party hostage. She is ridiculous and dangerous in equal measure.

Palin is certain about everything and knows about nothing. The only true facts are those she recognizes; other facts, when cited to contradict her private truth, are deemed politically motivated. History books are nothing more than weapons used by her enemies in their incessant attacks, their pitiful attempts to play “gotcha.”

snip

This is a small, unimportant matter. But Palin demands to be seen as a big, important person in the nation’s political life. Her party is so afraid of her that the putative front-runner for the presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, won’t even call her out for stealing thunder from his campaign kickoff by just happening to be in the neighborhood, complete with the attendant media circus.

The woman, like Lord Byron, is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” I’d shout it throughout the land, if I could find my horse and my bells.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a political careerist who has never taken one elected office without beginning to position himself to run for the next, made a wild play for the national stage just weeks after being sworn in last winter as a Republican governor with Republican majorities in both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature.

Using a supposedly minor “budget repair bill” as his vehicle, Walker proposed to scrap most collective bargaining rights for state, county and municipal employees and teachers, to radically restructure state government to concentrate power in the governor’s office and to use that power to limit access to healthcare for working families and seniors while bartering off public assets in no-bid deals with favored corporations.

Mike Lux: Our Economy’s Best Chance

The terrible wrongness of the Ryan budget plan combined with the strangest, craziest Republican presidential candidate field ever makes it rather obvious how important it is to get President Obama re-elected. To have extreme right Republicans (that seems to be pretty much all of them these days) control every branch of government would do even more damage now, as weakened economically as we are, than the 2003-2006 run they had with Bush and Congressional Republicans running everything — and think how ugly that was for the country. The good news is that Republicans are doing a very good job right now showing how bad they are, with this weak field of presidential hopefuls in all-out pander mode to the far right of their party, and the lockstep support for the Ryan budget showing how extreme they are — not just on Medicare but on a wide range of other major issues. And I feel good about many of the Obama team’s moves so far this cycle, especially creating Democratic unity around opposition to Ryan’s budget.

However, as is obvious to pretty much everyone who follows politics at all (and probably a fair share of people who don’t), the continued problems with our economic trajectory is going to remain a serious problem dragging down the president’s re-election chances. Conventional economists and D.C. politicos, who generally focus on fiscal policy to the exclusion of just about everything else, feel stymied because they feel like the economy needs another fiscal stimulus package, and they know that is the exact opposite direction that House Republicans want to go. As a result, most people in Washington have pretty much given up on improving the economy between now and the 2012 election, and are devising strategies for Obama around running without the background of an improving economy.

Ray McGovern: Gen. Keane Keen on Attacking Iran

Celebrating a golden anniversary reunion with classmates from Fordham College (class of 1961) on a perfect June day in New York should be a time of pure Gaudeamus Igitur and little or no stress.

I should have known better that to attend a long lecture by Jack Keane, a retired four-star general of Fordham Business School’s class of 1966. Actually, I did know better; but I went anyway. I felt I could risk going to hear Keane’s slant on the world because, prior to my upcoming Mediterranean cruise to Gaza, my cardiologist had pronounced my blood pressure under control. I felt as good, and energized, as 50 years ago.

Keane, now a member of Fordham’s Board of Trustees, has been the go-to general for the neoconservatives in recent years. He indicated that he was about to catch a flight to Europe where he would lobby leaders of the 41 NATO countries who, except for three, have been “unwilling to ask their people to sacrifice” in places like Afghanistan. (It seems never to have crossed his mind that most Europeans have long since concluded that the war in Afghanistan – aka Vietnamistan – is a fool’s errand, and that they are less susceptible to misleading rhetoric about the so-called War on Terror.)

Thomas Gallagher: Part of the Way With the WSJ

“America can be a superpower or a welfare state, but not both.”  So says the Wall Street Journal in its editorial on “The Gates Farewell Warning.”  Although you probably won’t have to read the article to know which side the paper came down on, we shouldn’t miss the significance of the newspaper of record of the world of capital acknowledging that a choice has to be made.  After all, many people on the other side of the fence have been arguing that point for some time and largely been ignored.

As the lone Cabinet holdover from the Bush Administration, Defense Secretary Robert Gates already embodies the continuity that has caused some to speak of the “Bush-Obama War on Terror.”  His current pre-retirement tour, where he warns of the hazards of reduced military spending, represents one final effort to solidify this legacy.

WSJ’s general aversion to government spending is well known, that is, its aversion to government spending that doesn’t disproportionately benefit its clientele.   So far as spending on “new capabilities, from an air refueling tanker fleet to ballistic missile submarines” goes, however – well, if the government doesn’t buy this stuff, of course, no one will.  And that would wreak havoc on our “free market economy,” wouldn’t it?

Richard (RJ) Eskow: It’s Not Just the Sex: Why John Edwards Matters

There’s a natural temptation to look the other way as the John Edwards story plays out. Don’t. This story matters. To use a time-honored phrase, “it’s not just about the sex.” The preternaturally pretty and youthful Edwards is the Dorian Gray of American politics. His story has a lot to teach us about our culture and the way we choose our leaders.

And like so many tales of power, it eventually leads back to Wall Street.

I’m a Celebrity Politician… Get Me Out of Here!

Want to know what’s wrong with our politics? He-e-e-re’s Johnny! Edwards is a political Charlie Sheen, a media superstar fueled by his own addictions and ego. Why didn’t we see it before? His story indicts the Usual Suspects, celebrity-driven campaigning and the media’s herd mentality. But it also shines an unflattering light on progressives, the Democratic Party, and many of us who take pleasure in thinking that we’re “better than” our broken political system.

The silence is deafening. While the rest of the nation is heading back toward a double dip, Washington continues to obsess about future budget deficits. Why?

Republicans don’t want to do anything about jobs and wages. They’re so intent on unseating Obama they’d like the economy to remain in the dumps through Election Day. They also see the lousy economy as an opportunity to sell Americans their big lie that government spending is the culprit – and jobs will return if spending is cut and government shrinks.

Democrats, meanwhile, don’t want to admit the recovery has stalled.  They worry such talk will further undermine consumer confidence or spook the bond market. They don’t want to head into the election year sounding downbeat. And they don’t think they have the votes for anything that will have much effect before Election Day anyway.

Max Eternity: Dr. Cornel West: Greetings From a 21st-Century Prophet

“There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.”

-Dr. Cornel West

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Can America’s collective economics inform who we are as a people, whereby, through obsessive bean-counting, we sculpt our destiny, tacitly sanctioning the stripping of basic dignity from fellow citizens, the erosion of civil liberties, the evisceration of public education policies, of the arts and humanities, bankrupting entire communities, tarnishing longstanding values of the populace and its self-image, thus ultimately destroying all that was once valuable to society?

For even after the world swooned from the megahype of England’s latest royal wedding and the hip, hip, hurrah of President Obama’s ordered assassination of Osama bin Laden, a cornucopia of catastrophic socioeconomic horrors – in addition to America’s continued unpreparedness for natural disaster – still face this nation: endless war, long-term unemployment, swelling prison populations and multiple years of record-breaking home foreclosures.

Joe Conason: Playing With Default

The current puppet play in Congress, where Republicans sponsored a bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling only because they wanted to vote it down, would be funny, if only they weren’t risking economic disaster. Unfortunately they’re not joking, as they push the country closer and closer to a potentially ruinous default.

If the showdown over debt and spending between the House majority and the White House isn’t resolved before the first week of August, the federal government will no longer be able to send out Social Security checks, run Veterans Administration hospitals, pay Medicare costs or operate the national park system, to mention just a few significant items. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed without pay, and millions of seniors would stop spending money, slamming an economy that already seems stalled.

But the consequences of that unprecedented situation would reverberate around the world, as nearly every expert, from the top bond trader, Mohamed El-Rian, to former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, has warned.

Dana Milbank: Hubris and humility: Sarah Palin and Robert Gates on tour

“It’s not about me,” Sarah Palin said as she rode a bus emblazoned with her name in three-foot letters. “It’s not a publicity-seeking tour,” she told her Fox News interviewer, as the cameras rolled.

It was, rather, “about highlighting the great things about America.” Such as: Donald Trump’s digs at Trump Tower and Fox News headquarters in New York, both stops on her “One Nation” bus tour.

Actually, there is a tour underway that highlights the great things about America, but it isn’t Palin’s. It’s the farewell tour of Robert Gates, defense secretary to presidents George W. Bush and Obama, whose work over the past 41 / 2 years has dramatically improved the state of the U.S. military. While Palin played cat-and-mouse with the press corps on Interstate 95, Gates set off on a tour of Asia and Europe, where he is receiving the gratitude of soldiers and the acclaim of allies.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. Romney’s flawed view of freedom

The bales of hay were stacked strategically in the hope that they’d make it into the television screen. The sturdy white barn nearby provided an image worthy of a Christmas card, the symbol of a solid, calm, industrious and confident country. The slogan behind the candidate, “Believe in America,” did not invite debate.

Whatever the punditocracy may have made of Mitt Romney’s formal announcement of his presidential candidacy last week, we could all give the guy credit for trying to reassure us that not everything in politics has changed.

In an age of media flying circuses where you never know who is running for president and who is just trying to boost book sales and speaking fees, Romney did it the old-fashioned way. He really, really wants to be president, and he offered pretty pictures to encourage us to watch him saying so. It was the venerable liturgy of our civil religion.

The Washington Post Editors work in a city and live in a nation in which huge numbers of poor and minority residents are consigned to cages for petty and trivial transgressions of the criminal law — typically involving drugs — and pursuant to processes that are extremely tilted toward the State.  Post Editors virtually never speak out against that, if they ever have.  But that all changes — that indifference disappears — when political elites are targeted for prosecution, even for serious crimes . . .

In some of these cases (Libby, Mubarak), the Post couches its defense of political elites in terms of concerns about the process while claiming they’re receptive to the possibility of punishment.  In others (Edwards), the concerns they raise are not invalid.  But whatever else is true, Post Editors are deeply and almost invariably disturbed when political elites are subjected to criminal accountability for their wrongful acts, but wholly indifferent — if not supportive — when ordinary Americans are mercilessly prosecuted for far less serious wrongdoing.

And it’s not just Post Editors, but their stable of Op-Ed columnists, who reflexively defend political elites when they break the law.  The late Dean of the Washington Press Corps, David Broder, was one of the first and most vocal advocates of one of the earliest expressions of elite immunity:  Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, and Broder repeated that defense in 2006 upon Ford’s death (“I thought and wrote at the time that he was well justified to spare the country further struggling with the Nixon legacy”).  The Post‘s Broder also vigorously defended President Obama’s decision to oppose prosecution of Bush officials:  “he was just as right to declare that there should be no prosecution of those who carried out what had been the policy of the United States government.  And he was right when he sent out his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to declare that the same amnesty should apply to the lawyers and bureaucrats who devised and justified the Bush administration practices.”

Maureen Dowd: An Archbishop Burns While Rome Fiddles

The archbishop of Dublin was beginning to sniffle.

He could not get through a story about “a really nasty man” – an Irish priest who sexually abused, physically tortured and emotionally threatened vulnerable boys – without pulling out his handkerchief and wiping his nose.

“He built a swimming pool in his own garden, to which only boys of a certain age, of a certain appearance were allowed into it,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin told me recently. “There were eight other priests in that parish, and not one of them seemed to think there was something strange about it.”

Two years after learning the extent of the depraved and Dickensian treatment of children in the care of the Irish Catholic Church – a fifth circle of hell hidden for decades by church and police officials – the Irish are still angry and appalled.

César Chelala: UN Sharply Critical of US on Women’s Rights

The United Nations Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, has issued a very critical report of the U.S. on its policies on women’s rights. The report is based on a trip of the Special Rapporteur to the US from 24 January to 7 February 2011. During that trip, Ms. Rashida Manjoo broadly examined issues of violence against women in different settings. Her recommendations should provide fruitful material for the U.S. to improve its policies towards women.

As indicated in the report, “Violence against women occurs along a continuum in which the various forms of violence are often both causes and consequences of violence.” Domestic violence or Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is one of the most critical expressions of violence. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) 552,000 violent crimes by an intimate partner were committed against women in the U.S. in 2008.

Their husbands or intimate acquaintances are responsible for the majority of crimes against women. The Violence Policy Center states that the number of women shot and killed by their husbands or intimate acquaintances was four times higher than the total number of women murdered by male strangers using all weapons combined, according to an analysis of 2008 data.

James Hansen: Silence Is Deadly: I’m Speaking Out Against Canada-U.S. Tar Sands Pipeline

The U.S. Department of State seems likely to approve a huge pipeline, known as Keystone XL to carry tar sands oil (about 830,000 barrels per day) to Texas refineries unless sufficient objections are raised. The scientific community needs to get involved in this fray now. If this project gains approval, it will become exceedingly difficult to control the tar sands monster. The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities. Although there are multiple objections to tar sands development and the pipeline, including destruction of the environment in Canada, and the likelihood of spills along the pipeline’s pathway, such objections, by themselves, are very unlikely to stop the project.

An overwhelming objection is that exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts. The tar sands are estimated (e.g., see IPCC Fourth Assessment Report) to contain at least 400 GtC (equivalent to about 200 ppm CO2). Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 well above 400 ppm, which is unsafe for life on earth. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades and if unconventional fossil fuels including tar sands are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize earth’s climate.

The unemployment rate edged up again in May, reaching 9.1 percent, as the rate of private-sector job growth slowed to just 83,000. There were also downward revisions to the prior two months data, which lowered the average for the last three months to 160,000, approximately 70,000 more than what is needed to keep pace with the growth of the labor force. Some of the weakness in May probably stemmed from quirks that exaggerated April job growth. For example, the retail sector reportedly added 64,000 jobs in April. It lost 8,500 in May. Health added 36,700 jobs in April, compared with an increase of just 17,400 in May. Food manufacturing added 6,300 jobs in April, it lost 7,000 in May. These are most likely quirks of seasonal adjustments, not sharp shifts in the economy itself.

Taking a longer, three-month snapshot, there is not much that is very encouraging. A loss of 5,000 jobs in manufacturing brings the average gain over the last three months to 13,000. Construction added 2,000 jobs in May, bringing its average gain to 4,000. Job growth in retail has averaged 16,700 over the last three months. Health care has added an average of 28,000 jobs since February. The rate in restaurants has been 23,000.

Johann Hari: It’s Not Just Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The IMF Itself Should Be On Trial

Imagine a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a hotel maid, but with starving her, and her family, to death

Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.

So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.

To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few honorable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured the money and resources of the planet were forever hoovered towards them. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: No Need to Demagogue the Ryan Plan

It always gets back to health care.

That’s why 2009 and 2010 were so consumed by President Barack Obama’s push for health care reform, and why Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals are at the center of politics in 2011. Our long-term budget problem is primarily about two things: a shortage of revenue and rising health care costs.

The revenue and health cost issues are intertwined. The whole debate comes down to whether we want government to absorb a significant part of the risk of insuring us against illness, which means we’ll have to pay somewhat higher taxes, or whether we want to throw more and more of that risk onto individuals.

So let’s welcome Ryan’s call for considering his proposals on their merits. Yes, Republicans who invented “death panels” out of whole cloth and insisted, falsely, that Obama’s health proposal was nothing but a “government takeover” have a lot of nerve complaining about the “demagoguery” against Ryan.

David Sirota: Cutting Kids’ Health Care Will Make Deficits Bigger

In the name of curtailing deficits, politicians across the country are hacking away at programs that aim to make children healthier. In Congress, for example, House Republicans are spearheading a budget that eviscerates funding for food assistance and effectively defunds the wildly successful Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Similarly, from Texas to California, state lawmakers are chopping children’s health programs in the face of budget shortfalls. In all these initiatives, the rhetorical leitmotif is “fiscal responsibility.”

Like clockwork, this has set off the now-standard ideological debate over values, with liberals arguing that it’s immoral to deny health care to today’s kids and conservatives countering that it’s even more immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. But as highlighted by a new National Bureau of Economic Research report, both sides are ignoring the most important non-ideological fact: Any so-called “deficit reduction” plan that cuts child health programs is almost certain to increase deficits.

Medea Benjamin: Come Dance with Me (and Thomas Jefferson)

Dancing can be dangerous. In Ceausescu’s Romania I was arrested for dancing without a partner. In newly independent Guinea Bissau, my dancing partner was thrown in jail for boogying before the President and his wife had the first dance. In Cuba I was awoken at 4am to bail out a friend who had been locked up for “lesbian dancing.” And in Afghanistan I narrowly escaped arrest for dancing on a “men-only” dance floor. On each occasion I was shocked by the misuse of government power and disrespect for personal freedom.

So I naturally felt the same sense of outrage when I heard about the case of Mary Brooke Oberwetter, who was arrested for dancing quietly (with a headset on) at the Jefferson Memorial back in 2008. She sued the Park Police, lost and then appealed. On May 17, 2011 the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against her, saying that that dancing at memorials is forbidden “because it stands out as a type of performance, creating its own center of attention and distracting from the atmosphere of solemn commemoration.” Never mind that Oberwetter was arrested at midnight, when there was nobody but her and her friends around. Never mind that tourists at these memorials are always talking loudly, posing for photos and making all kinds of “distractions.” Never mind that dance can be a way to express joy at the freedoms espoused by our founding fathers.

To protest this absurd ruling, some folks put out a call on Facebook to gather on Saturday, May 28, to dance at the Memorial. I heard about it from my friend Adam Kokesh, an Iraq war vet and producer of the show Adam vs. the Man on the network Russia Today. A committed libertarian, Adam decided to help spread the word and join the protest.

Big Brother got even bigger under the first “Brotha” president, Barack Obama. Government also became even more secretive. “The Obama Justice Department says that only the executive branch has the power to determine what information courts ought to have” – a novel doctrine that wreaks havoc with the rights of people accused of crimes, especially whistleblowers. The death of Osama bin Laden, says Obama’s Attorney General, makes the Patriot Act even more vital to national security. “Perhaps we were better off when bin Laden was still alive.”

The state security apparatus which came into being during the Bush administration is now supported just as strongly, if not more so, under president Barack Obama. There has been no let up, no change in course for a system which becomes stronger with each passing day and which faces almost no political opposition.

John Nichols: Pro-Choice, Anti-Choice, Mitt Romney Cannot Be Serious

The New Hampshire Democratic Party has got the number of the newly-announced candidate who will not be the Republican nominee for president.

The party is distributing t-shirts that feature “The Two Sides of Mitt Romney.”

On the front the shirts read:

   “Mitt Romney:  

   Pro-Individual Mandate    

   Pro-Recovery Act

   Pro-Immigration Reform  

   Pro-Cap and Trade

   Pro-Gay Rights”

On the back they read:

   “Mitt Romney:

   Anti-Individual Mandate

   Anti-Recovery Act

   Anti-Immigration Reform

   Anti-Cap and Trade

   Anti-Gay Rights”

All true.

But Romney’s biggest flip-flop is not mentioned.

In 1994, when he was mounting a serious challenge to Democratic incumbent Edward Kennedy in a Massachusetts U.S. Senate contest, Romney tried on a number of issues to position himself as a reasonably liberal alternative to the veteran senator. This was especially true on the question of abortion rights, where Romney did not merely offer a soft pro-choice line like “Roe v. Wade is settled law” or “I support the current law.”

Bill McKibben: Three Strikes and You’re Hot: Time for Obama to Say No to the Fossil Fuel Wish List

In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades — those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying.

But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.

There’s a pickaxe in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, one of the world’s richest deposits of coal. If we’re going to have any hope of slowing climate change, that coal — and so all that future carbon dioxide — needs to stay in the ground.  In precisely the way we hope Brazil guards the Amazon rainforest, that massive sponge for carbon dioxide absorption, we need to stand sentinel over all that coal.

Vincent Iacopino: A Memo on Torture to John Yoo

The former Bush administration official continues to defend the indefensible: his authorization of a disastrous policy of abuse

Whether torture helped lead to the killing of Osama bin Laden or not, the beating of John Yoo’s tell-tale heart has compelled him to speak. His preemptive rush, in a recent op-ed article for the Wall Street Journal, to vindicate the Bush administration’s torture policies that he and Jay Bybee created betrays his guilt for approving one of the most reprehensible policies in US history – a policy of systematic torture that not only failed to provide actionable intelligence, but undermined the security of the United States.

In the infamous torture memos of 2002, Yoo and Bybee, authorized “enhanced interrogation” techniques (EITs), acts previously recognized by the US as torture – and the same torture methods used on US soldiers to obtain false confessions during the Korean war. In 131 pages of memos, the two justice department legal counsels redefined torture in a manner that required medical monitoring of all EITs, but failed to provide any meaningful provisions to detect medical evidence of torture as defined by them. Moreover, their “good faith” defence against criminal liability for torture rested on two presumptions, that interrogators would not exceed the severe physical and severe and prolonged mental pain thresholds for torture as defined by Yoo and Bybee, and, even if they did, that it would not constitute torture unless these physical and psychological harms were the precise objectives of the interrogators.

Peter Custers: Fears of Depleted Uranium Use in Libya

EIDEN, The Netherlands – The pattern of deception to gain legitimacy for war in the eyes of the public by now is familiar. In the middle of March, Western powers led by the U.S., Britain and France initiated actions of war against Muammar Gaddafi’s government of Libya. The start of war was preceded by a publicity offensive in which the Libyan leader was depicted as a madman.

The war was defended on the grounds that the Libyan people needed to be protected against their dictator via a ‘no-fly’ zone, and the public was made to believe the West exclusively aimed at defending the humanitarian interest of Libya’s population. Now, concerns among the Western public over Libyan events have thinned. The need to camouflage war aims has concomitantly decreased.

Time to highlight some of the long-term implications of the Western intervention. A sound, but difficult test case is the West’s use of depleted uranium weapons. Though U.S. and British officials have so far denied their employment over Libya, from the very start of the intervention to overthrow Gaddafi speculation has been rife that ammunitions used by the U.S. and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) contain ‘depleted’ uranium. What to make of these stories?

The current disconnect between Washington’s obsession with long-term budget deficits, on the one hand, and the frailty of the nation’s economy right now, is scary.

The question is whether today’s stock market wipe-out, coupled with the plunge in housing prices, discouraging news about economic growth, and what’s likely to be a paltry jobs report Friday, will be enough to force Washington to give up – or at least postpone – its games over the budget and debt ceiling, and take immediate action.

Maybe – especially now that Wall Street and big business have to face reality.

The stock market is beginning to feel the effect of an American middle class at the end of its rope.

New York Times Editorial: Playing With Matches on the Debt

Just ignore Tuesday’s vote against raising the debt ceiling, House Republican leaders whispered to Wall Street. We didn’t really vote against it, members suggested; we just sent another of our endless symbolic messages, pretending to take the nation’s credit to the brink of collapse in order to extract the maximum concessions from President Obama.

Once he caves, members said, the debt limit will be raised and the credit scare will end. And the business world apparently got the message. It’s just a “joke,” said a leader of the United States Chamber of Commerce, and Wall Street is in on it. Not everyone found it funny.

No matter how they tried to spin it, 318 House members actually voted against paying the country’s bills and keeping the promise made to federal bondholders. That’s an incredibly dangerous message to send in a softening global economy. Among the jokesters were 236 Republicans playing the politics of extortion, and 82 feckless Democrats who fret that Republicans could transform a courageous vote into a foul-smelling advertisement.

Robert Sheer: Geithner and Goldman, Thick as Thieves

What was Timothy Geithner thinking back in 2008 when, as president of the New York Fed, he decided to give Goldman Sachs a $30 billion interest-free loan as part of an $80 billion secret float to favored banks? The sordid details of that program were finally made public this week in response to a court order for a Freedom of Information Act release, thanks to a Bloomberg News lawsuit. Sorry, my bad: It wasn’t an interest-free loan; make that .01 percent that Goldman paid to borrow taxpayer money when ordinary folks who missed a few credit card payments in order to finance their mortgages were being slapped with interest rates of more than 25 percent.

One wonders if Barack Obama was fully aware of Geithner’s deceitful performance at the New York Fed when he appointed him treasury secretary in the incoming administration. The president was probably ignorant of this particular giveaway, as were key members of Congress. “I wasn’t aware of this program until now,” Barney Frank, D-Mass., who at the time chaired the House Financial Services Committee, admitted in referring to Geithner’s “single-tranche open-market operations” program. And there was no language in the Dodd-Frank law supposedly reining in the banks that compelled the Fed to reveal the existence of this program.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. Why Paul Ryan is losing the Medicare argument

It always gets back to health care.

That’s why 2009 and 2010 were so consumed by President Obama’s push for health-care reform and why Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals are at the center of politics in 2011. Our long-term budget problem is primarily about two things: a shortage of revenue and rising health-care costs.

The revenue and health-cost issues are intertwined. The whole debate comes down to whether we want government to absorb a significant part of the risk of insuring us against illness, which means we’ll have to pay somewhat higher taxes, or whether we want to throw more and more of that risk onto individuals.

So let’s welcome Ryan’s call for considering his proposals on their merits. Yes, Republicans who invented “death panels” out of whole cloth and insisted, falsely, that Obama’s health proposal was nothing but a “government takeover” have a lot of nerve complaining about the “demagoguery”

William Pfaff: Budget Problems, America? Try Ending Your Many Wars

To the wayfaring American citizen, the view of Washington, D.C., from abroad is as bizarre as that of Oz. One cannot believe what is happening. How can Republican leaders have convinced themselves that the way to be re-elected is by doing away with Medicare and Social Security-about all the security that America’s old people have to hang on to these days. (Not the rich ones. There are not very many rich, old people in the United States-look around you.) When the Republicans lose a “sure” Republican congressional seat to a Democrat on these issues, as they did in May in New York state, they display genuine bewilderment.

They think that voters are all single-mindedly obsessed with the national debt and the present fight over the forthcoming budget. I mentioned Oz, but of course the Wizard proved to be a warm-hearted mountebank who knew how Dorothy could get back to Kansas. Mountebanks are aplenty in Washington but they have nothing to offer Dorothy, who was just a poor farm girl from the Great Plains (where, incidentally, the American Populist movement of the late 19th century started, nearly electing president the great orator William Jennings Bryan on a “free silver” ticket).

Ten years ago, Congress adopted the No Child Left Behind legislation, mandating that all students must be proficient in reading or mathematics by 2014 or their school would be punished.

Teachers and principals have been fired and schools that were once fixtures in their community have been closed and replaced. In time, many of the new schools will close, too, unless they avoid enrolling low-performing students, like those who don’t read English or are homeless or have profound disabilities.

Educators know that 100 percent proficiency is impossible, given the enormous variation among students and the impact of family income on academic performance. Nevertheless, some politicians believe that the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement. Anyone who objects to this utopian mandate, they maintain, is just making an excuse for low expectations and bad teachers.

Amy Goodman: Hope and Resistance in Honduras

While most in the United States were recognizing Memorial Day with a three-day weekend, the people of Honduras were engaged in a historic event: the return of President Manuel Zelaya, 23 months after being forced into exile at gunpoint in the first coup in Central America in a quarter-century. While he is no longer president, his peaceful return marks a resounding success for the opponents of the coup. Despite this, the post-coup government in Honduras, under President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, is becoming increasingly repressive, and is the subject this week of a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signed by 87 members of the U.S. Congress, calling for suspension of aid to the Honduran military and police.

As the only U.S. journalist on Zelaya’s flight home, I asked him how he felt about his imminent return. “Full of hope and optimism,” he said. “Political action is possible instead of armaments. No to violence. No to military coups. Coups never more.”

Ruth Marcus: ‘Paul’ and ‘Barack’ talk Medicare

When it comes to Medicare, the one thing everyone agrees on is that it’s time for an “adult conversation.” So let’s listen in on two imaginary participants – “Paul” and “Barack.”

Disclaimer: This conversation is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual political figures is, unfortunately, purely coincidental.

Paul: Okay, you guys won the first round. Congratulations on that New York House seat. But “Medicare as we know it” can’t continue. Seniors now have little incentive to control costs, and providers, paid by the procedure, have every reason to ramp them up. Medicare costs were 8.5 percent of the federal budget in 1990 – they’ll be 17.4 percent by 2020.

Barack: The current system can’t go on. I wouldn’t say this publicly, but my party’s wrong to pretend it can. Still, your approach goes way too far. Seniors would get help to buy private insurance but would pay a lot more than they do now.

Maureen Dowd: Non Means Non

In Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” an American writer clambers into a yellow vintage Peugeot every night and is transported back to hobnob with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gertrude Stein in the shimmering movable feast. The star-struck aspiring novelist from Pasadena, played by Owen Wilson, gets to escape his tiresome fiancée and instead talk war and sex with Papa Hemingway, who barks “Have you ever shot a charging lion?” “Who wants to fight?” and “You box?”

Many Frenchmen – not to mention foundering neighbor, the crepuscular Casanova Silvio Berlusconi – may be longing to see that Peugeot time machine come around a cobblestone corner.

Some may yearn to return to a time when manly aggression was celebrated rather than suspected, especially after waking up Tuesday to see the remarkable front page of Libération – photos of six prominent French women in politics with the headline “Marre des machos,” or “Sick of machos.”

Minutes before midnight on May 26, President Obama, in Paris, by a species of teleportable pen signed into law a four-year extension of the Patriot Act: the central domestic support of the security apparatus devised by the Bush administration, after the bombings of 11 September 2001 and the ‘anthrax letters’ a week later. The first Patriot Act passed the senate on 25 October 2001, by a vote of 98-1 — the opposing vote coming from Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. In the years that followed, a minority view developed, which said that the Patriot Act ‘went too far’; but its steadiest opponents have come from outside the mainstream media: the American Civil Liberties Union, the Cato Institute, and libertarian columnists, such as Glenn Greenwald and Nat Hentoff.

In the last few days, two senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, took up the mantle of Senator Feingold (who lost his bid for re-election in the anti-Obama midterm disaster of 2010). Both spoke against a government interpretation of the new Patriot Act, which has not yet been shared with the American people.

The senate as a whole voted (this time 72-23) to renew a law that citizens have had no opportunity to understand, as Wyden and Udall present it, and that few members of Congress have looked into, even to the limited extent allowed. The Patriot Act controls secret investigations. The government, however, according to Wyden, has a private understanding of the law. This interpretation has been classified. So the meaning of a law about secrets is hidden because the government’s view of the law is itself a secret.

Anthony Gregory : Obama’s War Policy More and More Like Bush’s

After more than two years, President Obama’s national security policy looks all too familiar: like President Bush’s policy. You remember the Bush doctrine? Its most prominent tenet was the policy of preventive war — using the U.S. military to eliminate potentially dangerous enemies, rather than using military force only when the United States is clearly threatened.

Generally speaking, the Bush administration argued that deposing unfriendly regimes and promoting democracy both militarily and diplomatically were in America’s long-term best interests. President Obama not only has embraced this approach, stressing it again in his May 19 speech on the Middle East, he’s gone further: increasing military spending, expanding the war in Afghanistan, handing off more of the mission to contractors and mercenaries, and bombing Libya without anything resembling a threat to the United States or even a nod from Congress — in violation of the War Powers Act.

Glen Ford: The Corporate Dream: Teachers as Temps

As Democrats hustle to shovel a billion dollars into President Obama’s campaign coffers – making promises to rich people and their corporations every step of the way – America’s billionaires are spending even more money to seize control of the nation’s public schools. Although super-wealthy capitalists like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, fellow computer mogul Michael Dell, real estate magnate Eli Broad, and the rapacious owners of Wal-Mart, the Walton Family, would like people to think of them as philanthropists, they are nothing more than down-and-dirty investors who hope to reap much more than they sow. This mega-buck mafia’s goal is to gain access to the $600 billion per year that taxpayers pump into public schools, and then to profit in perpetuity by shaping the nation’s educational system to their corporate needs. The corporate education project has nothing to do with growing new generations of smarter, socially aware, independent-thinking citizens, but is designed to raid public treasuries through wholesale contracting-out of public schooling.

Teachers are the biggest obstacle in the way of the corporate educational coup, which is why the billionaires, eagerly assisted by their servants in the Obama administration, have made demonization and eventual destruction of teachers unions their top priority. Corporations hate collective bargaining, or working people’s power of any kind, but their vision goes way beyond simply neutralizing teachers unions. The billionaires, and the politicians they have purchased, want nothing less than to destroy teaching as a profession. Plutocrats like Bill Gates and politicians like Barack Obama may make noises about respecting teachers’ life-long commitment to learning, but their actions prove the opposite. At every opportunity, whenever a real or manufactured educational crisis presents itself, the corporate gang champions charter schools and imports platoons of young, mostly white, inexperienced rookies from programs like Teach for America. Most of these neophytes have no intention of making teaching a career, so they accept low wages, turnover is high, and they have no long term interest in any particular school, or school system, or the profession in general. They are temporary teachers – which is precisely the point.

Chris  Hedges: The Sky Really Is Falling

The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with equal parts of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation-the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry-is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted Pied Pipers and fools.

Those who concede that the planet is warming but insist we can learn to live with it are perhaps more dangerous than the buffoons who decide to shut their eyes. It is horrifying enough that the House of Representatives voted 240-184 this spring to defeat a resolution that said that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” But it is not much of an alternative to trust those who insist we can cope with the effects while continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Eugene Robinson: The GOP’s self-destruction derby

My advice to Sarah Palin, not that she would take it, is that she’d better be careful. If she keeps pretending to run for the presidential nomination, people might take her seriously.

The former half-term Alaska governor’s “One Nation” bus tour has made the Republican establishment nervous. If her aim is just to get back in the news, reinflate the Palin brand and boost her speaking fees, then party leaders have every reason to be pleased. In the unlikely event that she’s actually running, they have every reason to order another Scotch.What the GOP should worry about is the intoxication that adoring crowds often induce in politicians. Palin might board the bus intending to pull a Trump and disembark convinced that now, more than ever, the nation requires her service. The hosannas ringing in her ears might deafen her to voices of reason.