Tag: Open Thread

As you may have heard, Democratic turnout dropped off a cliff again last year, just like it did in 2010. I was wondering why, so I asked. I polled Florida non-voters. I found that the main reason why they didn’t vote last year was simple: They couldn’t see any difference between the candidates. When there is no difference between the candidates, Democrats don’t vote, and Democrats lose.  [..]

As Gov. Howard Dean has said, if you offer people a choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they will choose the real Republican every time. And they did. Getting back to our poll, we focused on people who actually could have voted, not permanent residents, convicted felons whose rights had not been restored or children. We offered the non-voters 12 different reasons to explain why they hadn’t voted. Reason #1, the most “popular,” was that “people did not like either choice for Governor.” Forty-one percent of the Democratic non-voters said that this was the main reason why people didn’t vote. [..]

The voters deserve a choice. In fact, they insist on it. Or they simply won’t vote.

Dave Johnson: Enormous, Humongous May Trade Deficit Slows Economy

The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the May goods and services trade deficit was an enormous, humongous $40.9 billion, up a bit from an enormous, humongous $40.7 billion in April.

Our enormous, humongous trade deficit is a measure of how many jobs, factories, companies and industries we are losing to our pro-Wall Street trade policies. A trade deficit drains our economy of wealth, jobs and future economic opportunity. [..]

When you close a factory in the U.S., move the jobs and production to a low-wage, low-democracy country, and bring the same goods back to the U.S. to sell in the same stores this “increases cross-border trade.” But since this trade is going in one direction, it also increases our trade deficit, which hurts our economy. Moving the jobs to places where the workers are exploited means that a few investors and executives can pocket the difference in what is paid in wages and environmental protection costs, while impoverishing the workers and communities on all sides of the trade borders.

And to top it off, the U.S. doesn’t even make these companies pay their taxes, so we literally get nothing back for the lost jobs and wages.

Isaiah J. Polle: Schumer Takes the Low Road to Fund a Transportation Bill

Key Democrats in the Senate on Thursday worked to ratchet up the pressure on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, calling for him in a letter to move forward with a long-term transportation bill before federal authorization for the program expires at the end of the month.

But one of the signatories to the letter to McConnell, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), has poisoned the effort by adding to the debate a corporate tax giveaway plan that would leave behind crumbs for these desperately needed transportation investments. He is winning the applause of conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and is looking to move a sweeping plan to slash corporate taxes through Congress. From the progressive movement, it should be receiving loud expressions of scorn and an uprising to block it. [..]

The problem is that, as the Schumer-Portman framework makes explicit, that tax would be “a one-time transition toll charge at a rate significantly lower than the statutory corporate rate” of 35 percent. It is, in effect, a reward to multinational corporations for using schemes to shunt the profits from U.S. sales through overseas subsidiaries that are often little more than a post-office box in a low-tax country. Plus, the “transition toll” is a transition to a more permanent lowering of corporate tax rates – at a time when the federal taxes corporations pay as a share of the national economy is already at a historic low.

Musa al-Gharbi: America’s biggest terror threat is from the far right

The US should use its monitoring tools on extremists of all stripes

According to a New America Foundation report, right-wing extremists have killed nearly twice as many Americans through domestic terrorism as “jihadists” have since 9/11. However, the same database shows that Muslims constitute a much higher percentage of those indicted on terrorism charges or killed when confronted by authorities. Despite being responsible for only 35 percent of the terrorism casualties, they account for 60 percent of terrorism indictments. The reason for the discrepancy is that right-wing extremists tend not to be monitored or investigated as heavily.

Shortly after President Barack Obama’s election – particularly after a groundbreaking 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on the threat of right-wing extremism – Republican lawmakers, along with conservative media and lobbying groups, argued that the White House was politicizing the term “extremism” in order to deploy law enforcement against otherwise lawful dissidents, such as those affiliated with the tea party. [..]

There was no discussion of the threat posed by these ideologues at the recent White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism. In fact, law enforcement and national security agencies are generally hesitant to refer to acts committed by right-wing ideologues as terrorism.

This is a short essay on voter anger — its origin, its attributes, its meaning and its cure. Hint: Most Americans are worse off than they were a long time ago.

I started noticing voter anger around 2009. Initially, its locus was the Tea Party. They’re the ones who would form a circle around a political event, holding hands, and start chanting expletives. I attributed this to the Tea Party’s deep dissatisfaction with living in the 21st century. To them, basically, everything went south when Jane Wyatt stopped playing Robert Young’s Stepford wife on Father Knows Best, and started playing Spock’s mother, Amanda … Grayson, on Star Trek. (Does that mean that Spock and I are future relatives? I don’t know.) For them, things have never been the same since.

Generally speaking, the problem for Team Blue is not anger; it’s apathy. However, by roughly the year 2012, Team Blue had caught up in the Anger Games, and the score was tied. [..]

But here is the deeper explanation for all of that anger: For most Americans, life simply is getting harder. This was painfully obvious from a Sage Foundation study last year, following up on an article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The study looked at changes in the wealth of American households over a decade, from 2003 to 2013. The study found that median net worth had dropped by 36 percent, from $87,992 to $56,335.

Let me repeat that: The net worth of the average American household dropped by more than one-third in ten years. The decline from the 2007 peak was almost 50 percent, in just six years. (Most of that loss was in the value of one’s home — home is where the heartache is.)

That’s why everyone is so angry.

Dean Baker: Sluggish economy? Blame the weather

Ignore economics writers who make grand conclusions about short-term data

Economists and economic reporters tend to get carried away about short-term movements in the economy. They often assess data without considering the larger context, which can lead them to exaggerate the good or bad news. And since most economists and economic reporters move in herds, we get dramatic tales of booms and busts in the business section that don’t necessarily correspond to anything in the real world. [..]

There is a banal explanation for this rapid switch from boom to bust, as well as for the original boom itself: the weather. The weather was unusually bad throughout the Northeast and Midwest this year, and snowfall in major metropolitan areas such as Boston hit new records. When it’s cold, when there’s a lot of snow on the ground and when the streets are blocked, people are less likely to go out to dinner or shop for clothes. They are also likely to put off buying a car or looking for a new house. As a result, consumption is likely to be much weaker than would otherwise be the case.

Of course, Boston and dozens of other cities get snow almost every winter; this routinely disrupts peoples’ regular consumption patterns. That’s why our data are seasonally adjusted; it doesn’t matter that we get six inches or a foot of snow in the Northeast if that’s what was expected. It only skews the numbers when we get six feetof snow, which was the case in Boston this year. So when winter is worse than usual, the economy – in real life, and particularly in the papers – suffers.

Diane Ravitch: Arne Duncan’s Legacy

When Obama was elected, many educators and parents thought that Obama would bring a new vision of the federal role in education, one that freed schools from the test-and-punish mindset of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. But Arne Duncan and Barack Obama had a vision no different from George W. Bush and doubled down on the importance of testing, while encouraging privatization and undermining the teaching profession with a $50 million grant to Teach for America to place more novice teachers in high-needs schools. Duncan never said a bad word about charters, no matter how many scandals and frauds were revealed. [..]

It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education. He exceeded the authority of his office to promote a failed agenda, one that had no evidence behind it. The next president and the next Secretary of Education will have an enormous job to do to restore our nation’s public education system from the damage done by Race to the Top. We need leadership that believes in the joy of learning and in equality of educational opportunity. We have not had either for 15 years.

George Monbiot: Greece is the latest battleground in the financial elite’s war on democracy

Greece may be financially bankrupt, but the troika is politically bankrupt. Those who persecute this nation wield illegitimate, undemocratic powers, powers of the kind now afflicting us all. Consider the International Monetary Fund. The distribution of power here was perfectly stitched up: IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes.

The IMF is controlled by the rich, and governs the poor on their behalf. It’s now doing to Greece what it has done to one poor nation after another, from Argentina to Zambia. Its structural adjustment programmes have forced scores of elected governments to dismantle public spending, destroying health, education and all the means by which the wretched of the earth might improve their lives. [..]

The crushing of political choice is not a side-effect of this utopian belief system but a necessary component. Neoliberalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, as people will always rebel against the austerity and fiscal tyranny it prescribes. Something has to give, and it must be the people. This is the true road to serfdom: disinventing democracy on behalf of the elite.

Pope Francis this week embarked on a seven-day “homecoming” tour of Latin America on his unstoppable quest to defend the planet and the poor.

The continent-the most unequal region in the world, and the Argentine pontiff’s home turf-will likely provide fertile ground for more of his legendary sermons on poverty and inequality. After addressing a crowd of a million in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on Monday, Francis is scheduled to attend a meeting of grass-roots political activists and visit one of the continent’s largest prisons, in Bolivia, as well as a slum and a children’s hospital in Paraguay.

While he advocates for South America’s impoverished and disenfranchised, its prisoners, its indigenous peoples and its children, one group is unlikely to feature in Francis’ apparently radical agenda: its women.

Despite his efforts to champion his constituency-the world’s poor, of which the vast majority are women-the pope tends to overlook the feminized nature of poverty and inequality.

Amy B. Dean: Wisconsin swindled by Scott Walker’s jobs scam

When corporations fail to deliver on promises to create jobs, taxpayers deserve real accountability

Over the course of the last month, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been scrambling to do damage control in the wake of revelations about one of his signature economic programs.

In the name of creating jobs, this trademark initiative of the potential Republican presidential candidate handed hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to businesses across the state. But Walker’s administration apparently neglected to check if these companies actually hired any new employees as a result.

Wisconsinites have been understandably roiled – but this is not a problem that’s confined to their state.

Across the country, “economic development” programs in states such as Texas, Florida, Michigan and New York are handing out public resources to private hands in the name of spurring “job creators.” Astoundingly, they often fail to uphold even the most minimal level of accountability and oversight over how this public money is used.

The solution to this problem is simple: When corporations fail to deliver on job creation promises, they should be forced to pay back the money.

Jessica Zimmerman: Rightwingers think capitalism’s great – if you’re selling something they like

Part of the reason crowdfunding draws so much ire is that it necessarily happens before the product is a reality. It’s the old-as-the-hills technique of the “presale” – small manufacturers take money to reserve a product before it’s made, so they know what demand is and avoid overproducing (It’s also related to the even more venerable Proper Capitalist approach that you might know as “looking for investors”.) There’s nothing new or weird about it, presuming that your belief in the free market economy is sincere. The atheist shoes, the inflatable Lionel Richie head, the TARDIS launch – these pass without comment, or at least without outrage. It’s their money, right? One born every minute.

And yet, when a woman entrepreneur like Ijeoma Oluo or Anita Sarkeesian asks for investments or gauges interest pre-production, it’s taken as begging at best, a con at worst. How dare they just ask for money? That’s not what leaning in means! Well OK, it is what it means, but you’re not supposed to actually do it!

Is the problem that women are not supposed to take part in this economy – not supposed to be creators or entrepreneurs? Or is it just that they’re hawking a product that makes men mad – so mad their commitment to personal freedom suddenly transforms into a sacred duty to protect vulnerable wallets from rapacious feminists?

Jessica Evans: World Bank’s silence ignores repression

The bank should develop a strategy to end attacks on community members and activists and provide remedies to victims

In countries around the world, people who suffer harm because of development projects financed by the World Bank Group take grave risks to speak out and often face severe consequences. Yet the bank has taken few concrete steps to protect community members from harassment and ensure that people can speak freely without putting themselves or their family members at risk.

In Cambodia security forces have jailed Nget Khun, a 75-year-old community activist on several occasions for protesting evictions stemming from projects financed by the World Bank (PDF). Grandma Mommy, as Khun is known locally, and her fellow community members have been in and out of jail for years. During a May 2012 arrest, she said, four or five security personnel carried her “like they were carrying a pig” and threw her in a car.

After a summary trial in which her defense lawyer was given no time to prepare his case or call defense witnesses, she and 12 other activists were convicted of illegal occupancy of public property and obstructing public officials. An appeals court later suspended their sentences after public pressure, but they spent a month in jail. In November 2014 she and six other women were convicted of obstructing traffic and spent five months in jail before being pardoned in April. The government has also violently cracked down on protesters and threatened community activists.

The bank has strongly opposed the government’s plan to evict people from their homes in Khun’s community, but it has been silent about the attacks on outspoken community members.

Megan Condis: #RedditRevolt is harassment dressed up as free speech

Users’ protest pushes back against inclusive democratic participation in virtual spaces

It is growing difficult to keep track of the so-called scandals continuously erupting in geek culture. First there was #GamerGate, the opening salvo in the fight against feminist criticism of games and gaming’s male-dominated culture. Then there was #GamesSoWhite, which, depending on who you ask, is either an attempt to call attention to the lack of racial diversity in video games or a demand that game developers abandon their artistic vision to please a mob of PC police.

Now we have #RedditRevolt, a hashtag that originated as an attempt to oust Reddit Interim CEO Ellen Pao over the decision to ban several of the site’s controversial message boards dedicated to specific topics, called subreddits. (Reddit is both a social networking site and an online bulletin board; users determine what content is featured on the front page by voting posts up or down. Currently the tenth most visited website in the United States, it has received more than 7 billion page views in the last month.)

The hashtag was most recently revived over the weekend in response to the firing of a popular Reddit staffer, with volunteer moderators shutting down a huge number of subreddits in protest and making entire sections of the site temporarily go dark. In a second piece to follow, I’ll discuss how this most recent use of the hashtag provides so-called “consumer revolt” cover for what is essentially an anti-progressive agenda. But to understand the most recent turn of events, let’s first consider the original #RedditRevolt.

For decades the idea of a financial transactions tax (FTT), in effect a modest sales tax on stock, bonds, derivatives and other financial assets, has been a fringe idea pursued by a small group of progressive politicians. While the concept had drawn the interest of many of the world’s most prominent economists, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Nobel laureates Joe Stiglitz, James Tobin, and Paul Krugman, few political figures in the United States were willing to go near an FTT. That situation is changing.

The latest news in this area is the release of a report last week on financial transactions taxes from the Tax Policy Center (TPC), a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. The report assessed the potential revenue and the burden by income group from a FTT. This report, while not providing an endorsement of FTT, provides further support to an FTT as a serious policy.

This is an important development because the TPC has developed a strong reputation in policy circles as a reliable source for non-partisan analysis. For this reason, a report from the TPC can be seen as comparable to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. The center exists to analyze policy, not to advocate for it.

Wendell Potter: Coming Health Insurer Mergers Will Costs Consumers — and Jobs

The number of health insurers competing for your business almost certainly will decrease in coming months as the big for-profit firms merge or acquire each other. The companies insist that the results will enable them to operate more efficiently through the elimination of redundancies. But don’t expect your premiums to go down when the dust settles. In fact, if the past is prologue, premiums will go up.

The biggest beneficiaries will be the shareholders and a handful of top executives; they’ll make tens of millions of dollars on the day the transactions become final. Among the losers–in addition to the people enrolled in the insurers’ health plans–will be many of the employees of the acquired companies, and taxpayers in the cities that come out on the short end of the stick when the combined companies decide where the corporate headquarters will be. [..]

We’ve seen this movie before, and the ending can be predicted with some certainty. In almost every case, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

David Cay Johnston: Atlantic City’s downfall provides lessons for the nation

Nearly four decades ago, herds of buses began thundering down the highway to Atlantic City, where in windowless factories built next to the sea, paper and plastic were extracted from leather wallets. [..]

Atlantic City gambled away its future by failing to develop its natural advantages, failing to think long term and failing to invest its windfall strategically. This should be a lesson for the rest of America.

Across the country, thousands of so-called economic development agencies are throwing tens of billions of dollars each year at corporations, often without evidence they created or even saved a single job.

Every taxpayer should be asking, What is the strategy? Unless taxpayers demand a disciplined and strategic vision, their results will follow the tragedy of Atlantic City. When the inevitable economic storms come, the sandy foundations of their local economies will wash away.

Paul Buchheit: Growing Evidence that Charter Schools Are Failing

In early 2015 Stanford University’s updated CREDO Report concluded that “urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS peers.”

This single claim of success has a lot of people believing that charter schools really work. But there are good reasons to be skeptical. First of all, CREDO is funded and managed by reform advocates. It’s part of the Hoover Institution, aconservative and pro-business think tank funded in part by the Walton Foundation, and in partnership with Pearson, a leading developer of standardized testing materials. CREDO director Margaret Raymond is pro-charter and a free-market advocate. [..]

The inadequacies of charter schools have been confirmed by other recent studies, one of them by CREDO itself, which found that in comparison to traditional public schools “students in Ohio charter schools perform worse in both reading and mathematics.” Another recent CREDO study of California schools reached mixed results, with charters showing higher scores in reading but lower scores in math.